I don’t know how or why. It was storming, but the ship seemed to be handling that well enough. Around eight o’clock on the evening of the 23rd, there was an explosion somewhere belowdecks. I was in the lounge at the time, and the Callas began to list almost immediately. To the left… do they call that “port” or “starboard”?
People were screaming and running in every direction. Bottles were falling off the backbar and shattering on the floor. A man staggered up from one of the lower levels, his shirt burned off, his skin barbecued. The loudspeker started telling people to go to the lifeboat stations they had been assigned during the drill at the beginning of the cruise.
The passengers went right on running hither and yon. Very few of them had bothered to show up during the lifeboat drill. I not only showed up, I came early—I wanted to be in the front row, you see, so I would have an unobstructed view of everything. I always pay close attention when the matter concerns my own skin.
I went down to my stateroom, got the heroin bags, and put one in each of my front pockets. Then I went to Lifeboat Station 8. As I went up the stairwell to the main deck there were two more explosions and the boat began to list even more severely.
Topside, everything was confusion. I saw a screeching woman with a baby in her arms run past me, gaining speed as she sprinted down the slippery, canting deck. She hit the rail with her thighs, and flipped outward. I saw her do two midair somersaults and part of a third before I lost sight of her. There was a middle-aged man sitting in the center of the shuffleboard court and pulling his hair. Another man in cook’s whites, horribly burned about his face and hands, was stumbling from place to place and screaming,
“HELP ME! CAN’T SEE! HELP ME! CAN’T SEE!” The panic was almost total: it had run from the passengers to the crew like a disease. You must remember that the time elapsed from the first explosion to the actual sinking of the Callas was only about twenty minutes. Some of the lifeboat stations were clogged with screaming passengers, while others were absolutely empty. Mine, on the listing side of the ship, was almost deserted. There was no one there but myself and a common sailor with a pimply, pallid face.
“Let’s get this buckety-bottomed old whore in the water,” he said, his eyes rolling crazily in their seekers. “This bloody tub is going straight to the bottom.” The lifeboat gear is simple enough to operate, but in his fumbling nervousness, he got his side of the block and tackle tangled. The boat dropped six feet and then hung up, the bow two feet lower than the stem.
I was coming around to help him when he began to scream. He’d succeeded in untangling the snarl and had gotten his hand caught at the same time. The whizzing rope smoked over his open palm, flaying off skin, and he was jerked over the side.
I tossed the rope ladder overboard, hurried down it, and unclipped the lifeboat from the lowering ropes. Then I rowed, something i had occasionally done for pleasure on trips to my friends’ summer houses, something I was now doing for my life. I knew that if I didn’t get far enough away from the dying Callas before she sank, she would pull me down with her.
Just five minutes later she went. I hadn’t escaped the suction entirely; I had to row madly just to stay in the samne place. She went under very quickly. There were still people clinging to the rail of her bow and screaming. They looked like a bunch of monkeys.
The storm worsened. I lost one oar but managed to keep the other, i spent that whole night in a kind of dream, first bailing, then grabbing the oar and paddling wildly to get the boat’s prow into the next bulking wave.
Sometime before dawn on the 24th, the waves began to strengthen behind me.
The boat rushed forward. It was terrifying but at the same time exhilarating. Suddenly most of the planking was ripped out from under my feet, but before the lifeboat could sink it was dumped on this godforsaken pile of rocks. I don’t even know where I am: have no idea at all. Navigation not my strong point, ha-ha.
But I know what I have to do. This may be the last entry, but somehow I think I’ll make it. Haven’t I always’? And they are really doing marvelous things with prosthetics these days. I can get along with one foot quite nicely.
It’s time to see if I’m as good as I think I am. Luck.
February 5 Did it.
The pain was the part I was most worded about. I can stand pain, but I thought that in my weakened condition, a combination of hunger and agony might force unconsciousness before I could finish.
But the heroin solved that quite nicely.
I opened one of the bags and sniffed two healthy pinches from the surface of a flat rock, first the right nostril, then the left. it was like sniffing up some beautifully numbing ice that spread through the brain from the bottom up. I aspirated the heroin as soon as I finished writing in this diary yesterday—that was at 9:45. The next time I checked my watch the shadows had moved, leaving me partially in the sun, and the time was 12:41. I had nodded off. I had never dreamed that it could be so beautiful, and I can’t understand why I was so scornful before. The pain, the terror, the misery… they all disappear, leaving only a calm euphoria.
It was in this state that I operated.
There was, indeed, a great deal of pain, most of it in the early part of the operation. But the pain seemed disconnected from me, like somebody else’s pain. It bothered me, but it was also quite interesting. Can you understand that? If you’ve used a strong morphine-based drug yourself, perhaps you can. It does more than dull pain. It induces a state of mind. A serenity. I can understand why people get hooked on it, although “hooked” seems an awfully strong word, used most commonly, of course, by those who have never tried it.
About halfway through, the pain started to become a more personal thing. Waves of faintness washed over me. I looked longingly at the open bag of white powder, but forced myself to look away. If I went on the nod again, I’d bleed to death as surely as if I’d fainted. I counted backward from a hundred instead.
Loss of blood was the most critical factor. As a surgeon, I was vitally aware of that. Not a drop could be spilled unnecessarily. If a patient hemorrhages during an operation in a hospital, you can give him blood. I had no such supplies. What was lost—and by the time I had finished, the sand beneath my leg was dark with it—was lost until my own internal factory could resupply. I had no clamps, no hemostats, no surgical thread.
I began the operation at exactly 12:45. I finished at 1:50, and immediately dosed myself with heroin, a bigger dose than before. I nodded into a gray, painless world and remained there until nearly five o’clock. When I came out of it, the sun was nearing the western horizon, beating a track of gold across the blue Pacific toward me. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful… all the pain was paid for in that one instant. An hour later I snorted a bit more, so as to fully enjoy and appreciate the sunset.
Shortly after dark I—I—Wait. Haven’t I told you I’d had nothing to eat for four days? And that the only help I could look to in the matter of replenishing my sapped vitality was my own body?
Above all, haven’t i told you, over and over, that survival is a business of the mind? The superior mind? i won’t justify myself by saying you would have done the same thing.
First of all, you’re probably not a surgeon. Even if you knew the mechanics of amputation, you might have botched the job so badly you would have bled to death anyway. And even if you had lived through the operation and the shock-trauma, the thought might never have entered your preconditioned head. Never mind. No one has to know. My last act before leaving the island will be to destroy this book.
I was very careful.
I washed it thoroughly before I ate it.
February 7 Pain from the stump has been bad excruciating from time to time. But I think the deep-seated itch as the healing process begins has been worse. I’ve been thinking this afternoon of all the patients that have babbled to me that they couldn’t stand the horrible, unscratchable itch of mending flesh. And I would smile and tell them they would feel better tomorrow, privately thinking what whiners they were, what jellyfish, what ungrateful babies. Now I understand. Several times I’ve come close to ripping the shirt bandage off the stump and scratching at it, digging my fingers into the soft raw flesh, pulling out the rough stitches, letting the blood gout onto the sand, anything, anything, to be rid of that maddening horrible itch.