Douglas Mercer
November 29 2024
Continued from Crow (Part Four)
The great thing about being out here is that you have time to think. Now that I have made my decision and have days on end to loll and bob about I find that now that there is enough time to write, more than enough really, I need less words to express what I want to say. The other thing is in the fact of how beautiful it is you want to say things in as simple and true a way as possible. They always say that you have to learn the facts of life—that it does no good to live in a fantasy world or to ignore the world because sooner or later reality sets in. But as I always said I ranked cleverness very high in the scale of things; and there was not anything I could not think my way through and nothing I could not think my way out of. I now know that this is not really cleverness but clarity—but one leads to the other. As I sat there mulling things over I thought about the old idiom of the walls closing in; but as I looked outward at the waves I saw the scene in such crystal perfect clarity, the cold wind, the blue sea, the intermittent sun, that it seemed in itself be speaking to me and trying to tell me something, but what it was was to keep looking and don’t break the spell. I stayed that way for a long time and I could easily enumerate my mounting problems but not for once did they phase me; indeed as they kept mounting in my mind the less consequential did they seem; for what in the trivial accounting of accounts could compare with what I was seeing? That a solution would spring forth, from the gods know where, or from out the blue or out nowhere or out of the woodwork of my mind I was so sure of that I never gave it a second or a second’s thought.
Once I declared the boat hopeless a sequence of mental events occurred which were so swift that to me they seem destined. The obvious option was the one that most men would have taken, however reluctantly, on a moment’s notice. That is they would have turned tail and paid the piper. But what a price and what a piper in my case! I had done the proverbial deal with the devil (poor Mr. Best!) and the exaction would have come out in flesh. Had I limped or waddled my way back to England I would have been that most notorious and scandalous of figures: the laughing stock. Had I come home with my boat battered and bruised and leaking water every which way it surely would have been a very sheepish figure that would have come ashore, egg all over his face. They might as well have put me in the stocks and had small children hurl epithets and abuse at me and tossed eggs at my face; that such ignominy was my destiny was sure if I had chosen that path; all the huff and puff of my take off and all the brave words I had uttered I would have been forced to eat as that most sorry of things: famous last words. I would have been forced to buy back the boat with money I did not have, my business in the line of equipment for the sea would have been out of the question, I would have gone into debt and no one would hire me in any line of work above the menial. It would have been like God has stopped talking to me. No children should have such a father and no wife such a husband; and no man should be forced to look into the mirror having that ridiculous figure staring back.
On the other hand if I ventured further forth it surely would have been the death of me. Perhaps a kind of seppuku without the ritual disembowelment; the honorable thing to do one might say, don’t abandon ship but go down with it. They say that drowning is a particularly excruciating way to die; I cannot say that it is so; I only can say that I had no plan whatsoever to perform any Viking funeral pyre at sea; indeed at the time despite my failure my mind seemed to be racing and operating at picture perfect speed; flawless and without cease; it’s often said in jest that the man who is bold can do the possible but only the one who is a fool can do the impossible, that is a horse of another color. And I can say that not for a moment did I think about a shameful return of a watery grave. Even before I hatched my escape route I had no doubt that the solution would become visible to my brain. And I was not hoping against hope which is the thing one should never hope against. This way or that seemed utter ruin; but never more than on those days did I want to live and was supernally sure I would.
And so: was there a third option? There always is.
***
In a way it was quite simple, I would find a patch of sea to hide out in and create a private story and a public story; and it’s true that as the two became more and more divergent my anxiety grew, but there was always a chance that it would work; that is I would create an ostensible log, I would speak to those at home and give ostensible positions, and given my flair for precision I believed that I could make it all at the very least quite plausible. That is from that point on I became consciously fraudulent, and my story to home became unreliable. From then there would be two points on the earth related to me, one where I was, and one where everyone but myself thought I was, the position the whole world held as mine through the powers of the media egged on by my Press Agent. This discrepancy troubled me of course, and troubled me more as it grew wider and wider but fortune favors not only the brave but the bold as well; and I was convinced that I could pull it off. It was a putative route I was constructing in my brain for the world’s consideration, a shadow route, but though it was false it was certainly internally coherent, and my meticulous notes showed the value I placed on logic as paramount, for a crazy story can always make sense at least on its own terms. In fact looking back on it it was as easy as lying, though I knew the deeper I went into the deception the worse it would be if I was caught red-handed. But I bore in my that due to the fact that none of the other options were bearable or acceptable this might just be the slip I required.
After this momentous decision I spoke to Mr. Best but of course gave him no indication of what I was doing. We spoke only of technical issues and of the bailing issue. I told him that due to my ongoing crisis with the generator there might come a time when radio contact became sparse or non-existent. It was soon after this that I began on a campaign of full blown faking; on December 10 I sent out a telegram which must have given Hallsworth shivers of delight; at last his Hero was living up to the promises of breaking all the records; Lone Sailor Claims A New Record he trumpeted in the press; 243 miles it said I had gone in 24 hours, faster and farther than any man in a similar position. Had any one ever done it better? They thought not. Speed World Record another had it; from being a middling disappointment I was back in the good grace of the Press and they could not be fed enough of my successes. It is amazing how fast one can go with a pen and some transmitted words, is it not? As a piece of plausible public relations the record run had been an big success. Indeed, it brought up or re-awakened the possibility that I might win. It was this latter possibility that gave me cause for pause; my plan was to loiter in the sea and then as one by one the other contestants sailed North toward England I would slip back is as a respectable third or fourth; a victory would mean a certain fine tooth combing of my books and, though I was good, one never knew when it came to that. And to go from a triumphant triumph with hundreds of thousands of people cheering to a bitter crash would be a fall from grace indeed; but if I completed the race somewhat back in the pack then no one would be looking too hard most likely. I was the plucky everyman after all and that’s a story that everyone simply accepts with good cheer. And if they looked them over only at first blush my penchant for plausible pastiche would hold me in good stead; adding narrative to give it extra verisimilitude helps in that regard, and a dash of that satisfies most.
So I meticulously created my Logbook One (the Real) and my Logbook Two (the false). For it is one thing to confabulate a speed record at a burst; it is another to fabricate a round the world voyage. The problem I had was that faking page after page of voyage was painstaking effort, for just one narrative slip and I was, as it were, sunk, or hoist on the petard. No, the written story had to have no leaks at the seam. For what if a cross reference of weather reports were checked? How to describe a world I had never been to? What if my cobbling together of previous trips (a kind of plagiarism) were detected as too many words came to be overly familiar? And in the event of a successful return was I enough of an actor to pull it off knowing full well that every smile and brave word might even at the time be driving me deeper into despair? Will they say that the fact that I even considered it a live option proved my state of mental torture? That my grip on reality itself was beginning to give ground? For when first a man goes into the labyrinth of his imagination there is always a chance he will never be seen again; one look around though made me think that I would find my way back up.
Continued at Crow (Part Six)
