There were a good two hundred of us on that boat; two hundred people, sailors and passengers, bound for a new life in a far off country across the sea or a paycheck and a chance at some fun in the port; two hundred people, crammed and cramped in a boat too small for us; two hundred screaming souls when the storm hit and dashed the boat against hidden rocks a few feet below the water, two hundred people nearly lost at sea.
We stood on the deck, roused by the sailors, as the boat slowly sank; I don’t think most of us knew how to swim. Below us stretched water, deep and cold, punctuated only by inhospitable and slick stones too far below the water to provide any shelter. There was a palpable feeling of terror mixed in the static feeling in the air and the faint whiffs of lightning-born ozone, and we felt as if we could do nothing but wait for the rolling waves to consume us. I could hear little over the crashing sounds of the waves and the cracks of thunder; I could see nothing except what was right in front of me in the weak half-moon light, except when the lightning broke the veil of the sky and I could see just how close we were to the rapidly approaching water. For minutes that seemed to last for days we stood wailing on the rain-slicked deck, calling for parents, calling for help, calling for God, calling for anyone who could hear. We waited, bleating like terrified sheep, till the ship gave one last mighty crack and we fell into the water. The cold was a shock, even more than the drop, and I involuntarily let out my air; the water washed over my head as I forgot what little swimming training I had. For half a second I sank, till I was pulled up by three arms and I dimly heard someone remind me to kick; I did, and I rose up, swimming again. The arms still held closely, and gripped them tightly, linking my arms with theirs as we writhed closer together; I remember a long night of struggle and kicking at the water and gasping for breath and holding on to each other for dear life, exhausting and soul-numbing and cold and burning in our arms and legs until those seemed to go dead too, but kept on moving like some alien limbs, appendages not of our own will, like perpetual motion machines driving us upward and out of the reach of the drowning that lay beneath us.
When day came, relief and pain and confusion washed over me with the light sea spray, and as I blinked sleep-sand and salt out of my eyes I knew with a mix of exhilaration and dread that we were still afloat. I could finally see what was around me, though it took a second for me to realize where I was.
I was near the center of a human raft. Around me stretched over a hundred heads, a hundred breathing floating bodies held together by arms twisted together and flailing at the water in unison, legs kicking and paddling. It was then that I noticed my own limbs moving; they were similarly linked and pumping and paddling, as they had been the whole night, and I felt a whole new wave of pain and exhaustion wash over me. It was a dull, great pain, what felt like a whole-body bruise from bumping against others and thumping against myself and treading water the whole night. I felt half-dead from exhaustion, but I kept paddling.
Nobody spoke, but the air was still filled with gasps and grunts and stifled screams; I was able to find the source of our flotation anyway, without any direction necessary. Gripped tight by some floaters on the raft were the bloated, buoyant corpses of the others we had sailed with, handed off to those simply too tired to paddle to grip on to. I realized that I was holding onto one of these corpses as well, and let go in horrified disgust before immediately grabbing it again as I felt myself sinking.
That day, as the waves beat us and the hot sun burned our skin, I skipped in and out of consciousness. Whenever I woke again, from the pain or the water briefly covering my mouth and nose, I could tell that we had drawn closer together, becoming more and more entangled. Before long, I realized that I could no longer tell where my body ended and those others in our raft began; between my numbness and the connected writhing and graspings of our arms, we seemed one giant organism, a flesh boat with a hundred beating hearts, synchronizing as we pounded against the water. Man and woman, quick and corpse, tangled into a floating island by a great twisted embrace.
As we pulled tighter and tighter together, it got harder and harder to breathe. Eventually we started pushing and pulling on each other rhythmically, pumping water and giving space for us to breathe, opening cracks and room for life and closing again for others, the pulsating beating of a massive heart.
After noon, we grew hungry. We did what starving organisms do, breaking down fats and tissues. We ate of ourselves, and kept floating on the salt sea.
After we had eaten and slept and kept beating and struggling for breath, we started to realize our thirst, and after stupidly sipping at the water we knew would be salty started to cry out in pain. It started with a baby screaming for a mother who now was held beneath the raft, floating and bloated and fat. The rest of the floating body joined in, crying out, asking and begging and pleading for water. Before long words grew into loud but mumbled chants, dumb and screaming monosyllabic prayers, before finally becoming a faint and frail bleating.
The bleak sky listened to our animal crooning, and dark clouds gathered, and what mind was in us wept in joy, but still we jabbered and babbled and prattled stupid petitions to it, a habit now as integral as breathing or drinking or the great throbbing throes of the Raft-heart. We only stopped when the rain came, and then only to hold our mouths gaping and open as thick drops of water were poured in.
Once we had water, we sang, knowing not what for, but perhaps to hold on to some remnant of our human existence, though it seemed far and distant and strange when compared to the raft-life that we now lived. It was not beautiful, though it seemed so to our ears, as we belted nonsense lyrics and screamed out prayers and profanities and simply wailed in fear, harmonizing in a weird mess of words and sounds and animal noises, a kind of together-song, the collective voice of the great Raft. We settled into, unknowingly, not able to know, the heartbeat that kept us breathing together, strengthening our swimming as we tightened our grips and grew together, entangling till we felt like a single huge body, carried by the ocean currents.
A man walked the beach in the early morning. He went beachcombing at the crack of dawn, when the seagulls called raucously and woke him up from a tired sleep. Later he would go fishing, but for now he looked for shells and flotsam on the sandy shore, looking for anything that might be of value, though mostly just spending some time alone, walking by the source of the briny sea air. Today, however, the air smelled off. Up ahead, he could see a large mass, pale in the morning sunlight, washed up onto the shore. It looked like one of those large globsters that washed up from time to time; large masses of whale flesh that floated up to the sea in large shapeless blobs. This thing, however, though similarly shapeless, had more pronounced ridges; he could see the faint suggestions of what looked like human arms and feet. With a touch of horror, he crept closer. He could make out human bodies, their arms twisted together at impossible angles, their bodies seemingly melted together by the saltwater. He could see the unblinking white-eyed stare of a corpse, and saw the faint suggestion of a ripped dress somewhere in that mess of bodies, one of the few where the pounding of the sea and the vigorous swimming hadn’t torn it off completely.
And then he heard something. He couldn’t tell what it was; it was a faint, rhythmic sound, large and slow.
The mass was breathing.