This Place Off the Coast of America
Matthew Joseph Misetich
November 2005
November 2005
The two of them started sinking around dawn, though neither realized their actual descent until noontime, when the sun no longer cast shadows across the deck of the vessel, and a glaring halo of white encircled the sky. Mr. Hollis first noticed a tilt in the Pacific horizon, a shift in balance between the bow and the stern, and assumed his often-times trembling legs had little to do with the fact he couldn't stand erect. Something terrible had happened.
"You see this?" he said to his assistant. "This doesn't seem right." The yacht groaned. "I'm sure this doesn't seem right. Does it?"
Mr. Hollis' personal aide peered out the cabin's window and immediately became disorientated, which passed once he confirmed their sobering state of affairs.
"No, Mr. Hollis. Seems like we got a leak."
"A leak," Mr. Hollis said, more of a frustrated statement than a question. "Well, now, you fix it."
His assistant frowned and unlocked a cabinet beneath the wine refrigerator. "Might not be that easy."
A scraping emanated against the walls, followed by the sound of splintering fiberglass. Mr. Hollis leaned on his aide's shoulder for support, and the aide pulled a lifejacket out of the compartment.
"Put this on," he said in a hushed whisper, as if not to disturb the dying craft.
"But, son, I–"The assistant stepped outside the cabin before Mr. Hollis could decline to wear the awkward contraption. Six inches of water had flooded through a gaping hole near the bow. The assistant tried to scoop out puddles with an empty decanter, but it was of no use–the boat was fading fast.
"How?" Mr. Hollis muttered. "Christ's sake, what caused it?"
Shaking his head, worried and perplexed, the aide approached the hole, stared deep into its seemingly bottomless pit, and saw a rusted metal bar poking out.
He nodded. Aware.
"Caught up on something, Mr. Hollis. Something buried under the water, maybe."
Mr. Hollis worked up the courage to exit the cabin, albeit reluctant to expose himself in the now dangerous open air.
"You think it's something underneath–?"
"Oh, hell," the assistant said. "Ain't that a bitch. Look."
He gestured above them in disappointment. At some point during their weekend jaunt, a rusted, six-inch-thick steal flagpole had snapped at the base and thrust itself through the already weak wooden floor. Mr. Hollis and his aide could credit the minor squall they encountered late the night before. The result: a five-foot-by-seven-foot crack in what was once a grand and luxurious personal cruiser–at least, it was 20 years ago when Mr. Hollis had the money to afford the flagrant, prefabricated eyesore, nicknamed The Capricornia.
"Oh," Mr. Hollis said. "That's not very good, is it?"
"No . . . I'll call in our coordinates to the coast guard–"
Mr. Hollis held him back with a frail 70-year-old arm. "That won't do you any good, boy. I left our little radio on-deck."
The assistant shut his eyes, and when he opened them, he saw Mr. Hollis peering down The Capricornia's fissure, despondent.
"I was just hoping," Mr. Hollis began, his voice marked with a sympathetic and unhappy lilt. "That we wouldn't be interrupted. That we would have a day . . . ."
They stood in silence for a few seconds, both acknowledging to themselves that they needed to take the initiative and hurry, find a lifeboat stowed away somewhere, gather up rations for a potential overnight stay in the middle of nowhere, mend the boat's tear. Anything but wait for the deep to swallow them whole. But Mr. Hollis knew just as well that he hadn't prepared for a disaster, that there were no flares or phones or form of salvation onboard, besides the outdated lifejacket he still held like a child in his arms.
"We should have heard that, Mr. Hollis. Last night when we were sleeping. Coulda mended her then and there."
Mr. Hollis turned his back to the hole (it was staring at him, he was sure of it), and focused instead on the western skyline. Another storm was headed their way, and this was no trivial cluster of rain clouds. A tempest was brewing.
"That's another one," Mr. Hollis said. "Isn't it, boy? Another storm?"
"Looks like."
"A hurricane, maybe."
". . . no, Mr. Hollis. We don't get hurricanes in California–"
"A tsunami, then!"
The aide turned to his employer and smirked in spite of their situation. "I don't think you know exactly what a tsunami is, sir, but no. Not that either. Just a mean ol' storm. From the looks of it."
"Yes, well, you go by your looks. I'll say there's more than that, all right."
"Gotta hold out on the chance the coast guard'll find us. Won't be no one else out here. Not with the weather like it is. Just us two fools."
Mr. Hollis nodded, solemn.
"So let's see if we can't get that leak plugged."
Over the course of forty minutes, Mr. Hollis and his assistant discovered the following: the engine was inoperable, the deck's puncture could not be repaired by whatever means or materials available, and, most importantly for Mr. Hollis, his entire 12-bottle inventory of syrah and malbec had shattered to pieces due to the ever-tilting Capricornia. Witnessing the damage firsthand, he attempted to compensate for this loss by shoving the remainder of his valuables–petty cash, watches, jewelry, and other things–into a safe he stored behind the yacht's sole king-sized bed. He wrapped his lifejacket around the metal case and made certain nothing would weigh it down should the boat fall under.
Regardless of his aide's contention that the 70-pound safe was too heavy to stay afloat with a half-inflated Chinese lifejacket manufactured in 1979, Mr. Hollis tried.
"Without trying," Mr. Hollis had said years ago. "One cannot know if one can succeed. If one can be."
The assistant peeled broken planks from the deck, and Mr. Hollis rambled on about the past and the burgeoning future. As a pianist, he had made millions in the 1980s and the first three years of the nineties in his home town of Crestwood Harbor. He profited from the dot-com boom, the bull market, and the sales of high-yield goods, guns and the like, to overseas clients. He was a rich man that lived richer, a man that saw light at the end of every dark tunnel.
"The year 2000," he said while the aide tied together rotting wood to form a makeshift raft that wouldn't connect properly. "It will mean big things for this country. It means the end of the working-class and the age of the elite, where everyone will be rich."
The winds had picked up significantly as the warm afternoon waned into a cool evening, and it became difficult to hear Mr. Hollis speak over the lapping waves and the caw of wayward seagulls.
"It will be a wonderful time, son. For America, you see."
They couldn't detect the bow of the boat twisting deeper into the water.
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