Corwin, Ohio: Death Ship, Part A

He imagined Atlantis as floating undiscovered within the sea of corn. Some mornings he would wade into the leaves and swim through yellow fields and dream of chancing upon an island and being welcomed as a god.

He saw eight legged monsters bearing upon him and he fought with them and killed them. He saw girls with long hair thrown back by invisible tides and arms of fish scales glinting against the sunlight.

In the evenings his Mother's face boiled red and he didn't eat. What sea monsters there are she screamed, are sent by God to raise up the boys that disobey Him from the deep and set them on His path, can you understand that? He nodded furiously and agreed.

Later, as he drifted to sleep and faced the monster sent by God, instead of allowing himself to be swallowed he struck out with his sword and killed the whale before it could open its mouth. Then he felt a rush of relief and power and saw lights from a distant island flickering above the surface of the water and he swam toward them.

Death Ship: Part -3, Melicertes' Dream

An Account of Melicertes' Forgotten Dream - Taken From Unknown Sources

Image 1:
Their cousin has been living with them for thirteen years. Melicertes and his brother take her to a beach where they each begin to collect shells. As she bends toward the sand her long hair falls from her head. The sea washes in suddenly, rising above their ankles and dragging the hair out with it as it recedes. Melicertes looks in horror to his brother but he hasn't noticed.

Image 2:
His mother pacing outside the house repeating that something has gone wrong. Melicertes asks what and she says, your brother your brother - I think your father has hidden him. Melicertes doesn't understand. He turns and sees that all of the trees that once stood in their garden have been chopped down. A pack of hunting dogs race toward the house. The lead dog has a dead rabbit in its mouth and he hears his mother say, oh no they've killed him.

Image 3:
His Mother dragging him toward her red Fiat 500. Melicertes is crying. His Mother says that he has to come with her.

Image 4:
A cauldron full of boiling water. His mother is chopping onions and dropping them into the water. Melicertes asks what she is cooking and she says that he has to go to bed a seven. He says that he doesn't want to go to bed at seven. She tells him that he must because he is seven years old, when he's eight he can go to bed at eight. This seems to make sense. And then he realises that the cauldren is his bed.

Image 5:
He is in the front seat of his mother's car. He is crying and has an overwhelming feeling that he doesn't want to be there. His mother is silent. The sea rises before them. He feels that on each side of the car is a sheer drop and that they are in danger of falling at any moment.

Image 6:
He is underwater and surrounded by bubbles. He sees his mother swimming ahead of him and he tries to follow her. He worries that he is running out of air but then takes a breath and realises he can breathe. As he swims he is overtaken by a dolphin carrying a body. He swims faster to catch up to it and recognises that the body is him. The dolphin swims away into the dark of the sea.

Death Ship: Part -2

Melicertes wakes to the sight of an unknown room.

The window had been left open the night before, the curtains undrawn so that the Sun washed in on its first tides of light echoing the seawater gathered in rockpools along Limassol's shore. The light makes everything seem fresh and awake; the large wooden wardrobe, the red floortiles, the green flaking paint of the old chair.

A gentle rumble of traffic mixes with birdsong. A line of clay-brown buildings stand close against the window, falling away softly as they follow the slope of the land toward the sea. A slow road winds between them, a haze of heat plays upon its surface.

As Melicertes slips quietly out of bed he sees two other men asleep in the room. One, a boy about his own age asleep in a bed next to his, the other, a man in his mid forties, sleeping on what seems to be a pile of coats, one of them pulled across him as a cover. Melicertes remembers the boy but not the man.

He dresses quietly and leaves the room, tip-toeing the two flights of stairs, waving a good morning to the man at the reception desk. Outside He shields his eyes against the sunlight. The morning is cool and bright and as refreshing as plunging into the sea on the first day of summer. He walks along the shadowed side of a street, making his way down toward the sea. After two or three blocks the road widens to become a square. Melicertes spots a cafe with a terrace of plastic furniture and takes a seat beneath the shade of an umberella advertising Orangina. A girl in a blue and white apron brings him water and he orders a coffee. She shrugs and drifts away to wipe the other tables with a cloth.

Melicertes sips his water and tries to piece together the events of the night before. As he allows his mind to wander, to sift through its collection of pictures, he is interupted by an image he recognises as part of a dream he had woken from that morning. In the image his mother drags him toward her car, a red Fiat 500. He is maybe six years old. He is crying and refusing to get in. In his only other memory of the dream he is sat in the front seat of the car, his mother driving silently and the sea rising in front of them like a tidal wave, a wave rushing toward them as quickly as they are toward it. He hears himself scream.

The waitress brings him coffee and refills his water glass.

He remembers meeting three other boys the night before, each about his own age. He remembers walking aimlesslessly around the town. He remembers two English men trying to convince them to take a taxi to a nightclub in a neighbouring town. At some point they were sat outside a cafe not unlike this one and were each drinking Sambuca. The waitress' boyfriend appeared wearing a police uniform and began waving a gun but he can't remember whether it was to show them the gun or whether he was trying to scare them with it. They left shortly after and must have made they way back the hotel.

He drinks the last of his coffee and the waitress brings him the check. She asks if he's Greek and he says yes. He explains that he is here for work and points to the cruise ship bobbing lazily at the dock. She asks where he's from and he says Orchomenos. After looking out accross the empty square she shrugs and turns back to the cafe and this seems to end the conversation.

Death Ship: Part -1

Letter Translated from German

April 7th, 1841: Hamburg

Dear Mother

I am in Hamburg now. I came here last Monday and have taken a room on BruderStraBe. The room is small and the street a little noisy but I don't mind so much as I will only be here another three days.

I am sure that Father has told you by now that I have signed up as a cabin boy on the Ship Dorothea. I don't want you to worry too much though. The ship is bound for Venezuela and I expect to be there only a month or two at most before returning and then, well who knows, maybe I go to sea again or maybe I'll choose to settle here.

I can't tell you how much I wish the ship were headed for Greece. Imagine how happy I would be to have two months in Athens! But nevermind, the important thing is adventure and I will certainly have that. The next letter you receive from me will be sent from Caracas!

Your loving Son

Heinrich Schliemann

Death Ship: Part 0

He remembered a time when it was just the two of them; him and his brother.

Quiet, cloudless days in Orchomenos. He would hide for hours until a voice would cry 'Melicertes...'. Softly at first, as if his name were being tested against the wind, as if its sound alone were smoke from a Djinn's lamp promising his reappearance. He would wait until the voice came closer, trailing thin footsteps behind it. He would wait until he could hear the first notes of panic beginning to chime amongst its rythms.

"MEL-IC-ER-TES!"

And then he would leap from his hiding place to yell "LEARCHUS!" Making his poor brother scream with fright and leaving them both in fits of laughter.

One lunchtime they run home to find their mother sat at the kitchen table nervously chopping potatoes for their lunch. She tells them to wash their hands and wrings her own against her apron. As they eat she explains that their cousin is coming to live with them. For ever? They ask almost in unison. She doesn't answer. Haven't you always wanted a sister? She says. They are silent. Isn't our cousin a boy? Learchus asks. They are sent to their room.

Later that evening they hear an extra pair of feet pad quietly up the stairs and understand that their cousin has arrived.

Death Ship: Part 6

Later that day the sea turns against us. In the moments after this video was taken a siren sounded, a voice urged us to return to our cabins.

For a moment I imagine the suddeness of the sea's rage is connected to the discovery of the body earlier this morning. Why should the sea care what happens onboard Le Dauphin?

Death Ship: Part 5

We had been at sea three days days when the body was found.

Having been assigned to 'clean up' duties, the lowest available, I have spent my days roaming the ship with a brush and black plastic sack. I move between the carpet layers, the carpenters, the painters. I sweep here and there. I have found two sections of the ship where I am able to hide, killing two, perhaps three hours at a time.

Spirits on board the ship are running low. The heat and sight of endless sea has made the air thick and lugubrious. It lays heavy, as another load for us workers to carry.

On a deck above the Asian men lay in the sun; smoking, sunbathing. Every so often the shrill machine gun fire of their laughter pierces through the heat and every man below imagines it to be directed at him. I miss a pile of unswept dirt, the carpet layer slices a misplaced finger against a backdrop of happiness.

For three days they have fed us nothing but rice.

We eat together; workers on one side of the canteen, non workers on the other. We sit in silence. They speak loudly in unknown voices.

They find his body half hidden behind crates in a storage room at the bottom of the ship. In his pocket they find a letter addressed to Melicertes Palaemon and so both newspaper articles had been wrong. There is a contact name and telephone number in Greece.

The discovery seals the workers into silence. Laughter still drip fed to us from the decks above. Eyes are cast up.

I overhear a Scottish carpenter say "that dead boy was one of us."

Death Ship: Part 4

His story appeared in the papers the next day but would only throw further veils of confusion upon the mystery. He was identified twice.

The first article announced that the missing boy was Johan Melicertes. No family, no fixed address. It said he was a drifter, drawn to the sea. His father locked in a mental asylum, his mother dead.

The second said he was Zeno Palaemon, a Greek fisherman from Corinth. It did not explain how he came to be in Limassol or why, if it were Palaemon, he had sought work on Le Dauphin; the ship now carrying me out into the silent Mediterranean.

Death Ship: Part 3

We have been divided into groups.

The first division came with the realisation that not all men were here to refit the ship; to scrape away old paint, to gut and and rebuild the cabins. The first cut is made straight from pole to pole. Asian men are grouped to one side, Europeans to another. A man we understand later to be the captain emerges from a cabin below deck. He stretches, reaching up as if to pluck the sun from its branch of cloud and walks toward the men stood facing us. He speaks. They nod their understanding and are taken away. We are told we are to work twelve hour days without breaks and for seven days a week until further notice. The ship will be at sea for four days before docking. Docking where? someone asks but the question is met with silence.

The last of the land sinks into the water, leaving us to a world of blue; shades running at one another, locking horns at the horizon.

Toward the end of day the Sun's death invites us to imagine pinks and deep reds spilt upon the ocean's surface.

A yellow claw is raked accross the waves as she dives down to rest upon the ocean's floor.

When she is gone, the silver scarred moon bleaches the ocean white and skims stones of light toward our ship.

I watch the moon through a gauze of cloud-smoke; smoke rising from the silhouettes of men leaning upon the ship's rails, clouds rising from the sea.

Death Ship: Part 2

And the churning silence that followed, the land falling back as a hand once sent to save but whose grip has became lost; Fingers turning on themselves and rising to become a heat haze searching amongst the buildings lining the waterfront, reconstructing the undulating hum of the ship's engine in visual form.

It was then we realised he was missing.

Sitting along the deck, basking in the sun and this moment's fleeting freedom before orders would come. Strange men who seemed as part of a mythic tribe, as if this was all somehow routine to them. Were they locked into a silence anchoring its roots in the rehearsal of old practiced friendships, or was there an unspoken language at work here that only they knew?

The heat baked upon the flaked paint of the benches along the bow of the ship. We shifted our weight against it. At intervals large black domes rose from the wood paneled deck, offering no clue as to their purpose, behaving as sudden teenage boils.

None of us had seen him that morning. No one dared remember leaving his side the night before.

The metal of the ship felt misplaced and aggressive against the gentle blue of the sky, as if climbing into bed with a gun still holstered to its waist. From within its bowels a whistle suddenly shrieked piercing the air and jolting hundreds of men to their feet. I did the same as if I understood.

Death Ship*: Part 1

By night the streets of Limassol dissolved quickly to a haze of rich purples; tones of purple interrupted only every so often by the screams of street lamps, haloed in orange and pitching their light against the darkness like so many feathers thrown in violence against the wind.

The four of us walked unspeaking and in the morning one would be dead. A death to strangle whispers of friendship that had dared to raise their voice. And If we thought of anything at all that night, our thoughts must have been echoes of one another, each a question trailing behind our mirrored footsteps and falling silently to dissolve unaswered as snow upon forgotten fields. Why have they brought us here? Where will they take us?

Did we walk along a high street or waterfront? I don't remember. Yes, there were palm trees prostituting glimpses of the exotic and painting pools of darkness at their feet. Did this darkness hide unimagined dangers or do I dream that now, peering back through the haze of events? Do I add white dashes of eyes beneath the palm leaves as if retouching an ancient canvas? Were they there watching us then? Could any one of us have known the truth as the ship pulled away from the dock the next morning, roaring its horn against the waves like a injured animal and bidding Cyprus farewell.

*Working Title borrowed from B. Traven, to be returned safely once a more fitting and original title is found.