DOWN WITH THE SHIP WHILE ENJOYING THE VIEW by Chris Mansel

Down with The Ship While Enjoying the View

Silence, like the earth he thought. He had been reading Samuel Beckett the last few days on the train. The brief lines, the constant steadiness of the eyes going back and forth to the left margin was a good metaphor for travel, especially for the train. His life felt incidental. The kind of dialogue you read before those lines that merged together; where your eye grazed down the page before you realized it. A paragraph here and there and a few years are gone without you realizing it. His first marriage was a bit like Robinson Crusoe. He made his way as best he could on the island. He found isolation suited him until she found that isolation didn’t suit her at all. He was in isolation again on the train, sitting quietly. He had no one on the island unlike Crusoe but he [did] have the feeling of being washed ashore.

The train arrived at its destination and he began the six-block walk into work. This was another opportunity to think. There are so many times like this he thought. Sometimes he would count his steps but usually he counted everything else as well. The letters on signs, [the number of letters or] anything [else] as he was OCD. It wasn’t crippling but it was a major distraction. Not like crippling depression as he had heard it categorized before. He could interact with someone but he had to balance counting the syllables of what someone said with listening and paying attention and responding. It was not unlike the prisoner’s dilemma. The two sides of his existence had to come to a decision separately or together how to exist or fail. Each day was like a game of hang man.

Balancing: this was the hardest. Six years to the day he had been divorced from his wife, who had died from an infection in her arm. That day was coming up soon. As he arrived back home to the apartment he had rented not long after the divorce he noticed the room for the first time in quite a while. The chair and couch, the two prints by Hammershoi on the wall, the computer, the bookshelves that he couldn’t live without, he thought. He opened the two windows and aired out the room. As he counted the folders and icons on the computer screen then the outlying features he re-counted them to be sure. Then he tried desperately not to count other items in the room. He tried to distract himself by turning on the radio in the kitchen. A song came on from his past. It always reminded him of being free of everything around him. He went to the window and held his hands out into the air. Sometimes freedom is limited to what you can reach out to. A few moments later he brought his hands back in. He sat down in his chair and thought of his trip to Nepal with Doctors Without Borders. He had volunteered to help but really, he had hoped to disappear. He had not confided in anyone on the way there or while in the country. One day he went for a walk into the mountains where they were operating and came across a horse that had wandered away. Instead of him going up to the horse, the horse came up to him. Before he knew it, a guerrilla came up behind him and held a gun to his head. Here he was thousands of miles from home, alone with a wish to disappear and here was a man who could make him do so in an instant.

Suddenly and without notice he sat down on the ground surprising the guerrilla. The guerrilla, not knowing what to do, having only met a few westerners, suddenly sat down as well. He held out his hand to the guerrilla, in his own wordless way asking for the gun. The guerrilla studied the look on his face and looked at his gun and back to his face. The guerilla left him with the horse and walked away. He returned home a month later, opened the window in his apartment and left it that way.

Chris Mansel