Then the whales! I drown in their sound. I seem to drown forever. My sadness is nothing in the face of that primordial sorrow. When they finally release me, it is to the clatter of the crew from the evening watch climbing the steel ladder to the wheelhouse as we prepare to lift anchor. And I find myself utterly alone, lost in a web of cigarette smoke which floats like a dream in the still, stale air.
Casey slept next to me. We had upper bunks, our noses six inches from the steam pipes and cables, our conversation hidden by the wail of an electric motor. We took an instant liking to each other, though we had little in common. He was a gunner and I was a sonarman, so we rarely worked together, and tradition dictated we be socially aloof: gunners had hard heads, hard muscles and hard pricks; sonarmen read books and were polite.
When he first joined the ship, I couldn't stop looking at him; I tried not to stare but I couldn't help myself. If our eyes met, he would flash a quick grin and a wink, leaving me flushed with confusion, hoping desperately that no-one had noticed.
He was a compulsive grinner and winker, with laugh wrinkles around his eyes even though he was barely twenty. He was a crotch-rubber, a muscle-flexer, a joint-cracker. A hair-twisting, teeth-grinding, skin-scratching bundle of energy.
But in spite of the grin, he was a loner. He wasn't shy -- far from it, he was the first to join a group -- but once established, he would stand back, tossing tidbits of jokes, jibes, salty one-liners, like bacon to puppies, amused but absent-minded, his thoughts elsewhere. This was different than lust, I told myself. I wanted to know him, to hear his secrets. I wondered if our secrets were the same.
As our ship prepared for summer training he was re-assigned to my messdeck, and suddenly he was sleeping beside me, only a foot away. Every night! Our bunks were bolted to the same steel beam; I could touch him if I dared. I hardly slept the first week. I lay gazing at him through almost-closed eyes, terrified he might awaken and discover me watching.
One night, in the midst of an impossible dream, I jerked awake at some sound to find him watching me. I was shocked: he was crying. He didn't turn away or wipe his face, he just let the tears roll unhindered.
"You okay?" I breathed into the whining semidark.
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