From the beginning, lives ago in Hong Kong, Kwan had understood that he was not the only member of the below-decks crew whose papers and alleged history could not bear much scrutiny. There were a number of other crewmen who also chose not to go ashore at the many ports of call, who preferred the calm of their quarters to the gauntlet of beady-eyed immigration officials.
Dat, when he arrived, immediately became one of these, and Kwan noticed him, during the layover in Southampton, reading comic books and drinking tea in the kitchen staff’s galley, but they didn’t talk then, Kwan being content with his own company and Dat apparently the same. A short slope-shouldered man of perhaps forty, with a narrow head and a full-lipped mouth and heavy bags under his eyes, Dat’s ancestors were apparently from somewhere in the Indochinese peninsula, Kwan couldn’t be sure where. He spoke Chinese with some kind of muddy accent, appeared to have a smattering of Japanese, seemed to speak no European tongue at all, and at times conversed with other Indochinese crewmen in a language Kwan didn’t know but the music of which was undeniably Asian.
It was in Bermuda, two days ago, that this man made his approach. Kwan was standing at the rail on the kitchen staff’s small oval deck at the stern of the ship, watching the containerized supplies being loaded from dockside, when Dat appeared beside him, gesturing at the outsize shiny aluminum boxes being winched through the bulwark opening below. “That’s the way to get off,” he said, in his poor accent.
Kwan frowned at him. “Get off?”
“The ship,” Dat explained. “I’m getting off this ship in New York.”
“You are?”
“My own way,” Dat said, and nodded at the containers again.
Kwan also hoped to leave the ship in New York, but hadn’t yet found that mythic American girl who would smuggle him ashore. In fact, American girls were the hardest for him to pick up on his Tuesday night excursions above; they seemed to have more tribal consciousness than other people, to be the most determined to stay with their own kind.
Intrigued, wondering if Dat had any useful ideas (but already a little distrustful, if not quite distrustful enough), Kwan said, “Use the containers, you mean? How?”
“Inside one. They come on full,” Dat explained. “Food and drink and all those shop things, T-shirts and all that, and the drugstore things, all inside those containers. And when they’re empty, they go off again. Many of them will go off in New York.”
Kwan looked down at those containers with new interest. But then he said, “Why tell me?”
“Why not?” Dat shrugged, and took a single crumpled cigarette from his T-shirt pocket, didn’t light it, and watched his fingers turn and smooth and straighten the cigarette as he said, “You don’t have any reason to betray me. And a man has to talk sometimes, has to hear his own thoughts, has to know he isn’t crazy.”
Kwan felt immediately sympathetic. It was true, isolation in the middle of hundreds of people was perhaps the worst solitude of all, as he had learned before being rescued by those metal ladder rungs on the wall behind him. Other people cluster into purposeful groups, supporting and explaining and justifying one another, moving through life in these long- or short-term alliances, their own ideas and conclusions constantly being tested in discourse. The loner has only himself to talk to, only himself to listen, only himself to judge if he’s behaving sensibly or not. If Dat were planning a dangerous move, a desperate move, the need to tell his plans to another human being, to get a response of some kind, could be overwhelming.
So Kwan gave him a response, and it was an honest one. “You’re not crazy. It’s a fine idea.”
Dat gave him a quick gratified smile, the expression battling unsuccessfully with his doleful features, those heavy lips and pronounced bags beneath the eyes. “I watched at Southampton, and I been watching here,” he said, “and nobody looks inside the empty ones. Because that whole storage section down there is locked up. Not many people can get in there.”
“That’s right,” Kwan agreed.
“You can,” Dat said, and looked at him sidewise.
Ah, so that’s what it was about. (Or what it seemed to be about at that time.) Kwan, having gained a little seniority, even in the world of kitchen slaveys, had a few weeks ago been “promoted” from the deep sink filled with filthy pots and pans. His work now was in fact somewhat easier, involving nothing more than mopping and scrubbing and carrying, which meant that on the job now he had a key ring hooked to a trouser loop, containing keys to the cleaning-supplies closet, the walk-in freezer, the uniform and linen lockers, and the large echoing storage space in which the supply containers were kept, as they were gradually emptied. At the end of each shift, Kwan had to turn in those keys to his boss, a fussy suspicious Ecuadorian named Julio; no last name ever offered.
In theory, then, Kwan could, on his last shift before New York was reached, unlock the door to the container area and permit Dat to slip through. But why should he? “That would be very dangerous for me,” he said. “If you were caught—”
“Then it would be dangerous for me,” Dat interrupted. “Not you.”
“They’d want to know who let you in there,” Kwan pointed out. “They’d promise to go easier on you if you told, because the person who let you in there would be more worrisome to them than someone just trying to jump ship.”
“I wouldn’t tell,” Dat said.
“Why not?”
Dat frowned, his whole face taking on the aspect of his baggy eyes and drooping mouth. His fingers fidgeted with that battered cigarette, turning it and turning it, until all at once the cigarette slipped from his grasp and fell, almost floating, down toward the slow-sliding shiny aluminum containers, but missing them and landing instead on the dirty asphalt. “Ah, my cigarette,” Dat said, with nearly unemotional fatalism, watching it fall, then gazing dolefully downward, like a basset hound, becoming a comic figure.
“Oh, that’s too bad,” Kwan said, finding Dat more individual and human now, but no more likable.
But then Dat gave him another of those sideways looks, and a little smile, and said, “Of course, I’d rat on you. You’d do the same for me.”
“I might,” Kwan agreed, taken by Dat’s sudden frankness.
“But what,” Dat said, “if we went together? That way, we help each other and rely on each other, and if we’re caught we’re both caught. What I mean,” he said, suddenly more animated, turning to face Kwan, one narrow elbow on the rail beside him, “you can let me in during your shift. Then you turn in your keys, and when everybody’s away you knock on the door and I let you in. Or don’t you want to get off this ship?”
That last was said with such absolute assurance, with such conviction that Dat already knew the answer, that Kwan didn’t even bother denying it. “Of course, I want to get off the ship in New York,” he said. “If I can do it and not get caught. But inside one of those boxes? We don’t know what happens to them after they get taken off.”
“Yes, we do,” Dat said, and pointed far off to the right, where dozens of the containers stood crammed together, glinting in the sunlight. “They get put out of the way,” Dat said, “until they’re gonna get used again. We go out in the box, we feel when it stops moving, then we wait until dark and climb out and we’re in America.”
“It’s that easy?” Kwan asked.