9781787335547

ALSO BY OTTESSA MOSHFEGH

Eileen

Homesick for Another World

My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Death in Her Hands

Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage, is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

First published by Jonathan Cape in 2024 First published by Vintage in 2017

First published in the United States by Fence Books in 2014

Extracts from this work first appeared in LIT and Electric Literature

Copyright © Ottessa Moshfegh 2014

Ottessa Moshfegh has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 penguin.co.uk/vintage

Typeset in 11.6/15.8pt Calluna by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

The authorised representative in the EEA is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D 02 YH 68

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781787335547

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“The young men were born with knives in their brain.”

ralph waldo emerson

Life and Letters in New England (1867)

Zanzibar

I wake up.

My shirtfront is stiff and bibbed brown. I take it to be dried blood and I’m a dead man. The ocean air persuades me to doubt, to reel my head in double, triple takes towards my feet. My feet are on the ground. It may be that I fell face first in mud. Anyway, I’m still too drunk to care.

“McGlue!”

A wrathful voice calls out from the direction of sunshine, ship sails hoisting, squeaks of wood and knots, tight. I feel my belly buckle. My head. Just last spring I cracked it jumping from a train of cars—this I remember. I get back down on my knees.

Again, “McGlue!”

This McGlue. It sounds familiar.

A hand grips my shirt and pokes at my back, steers me to the plank and I get on, walking somehow. The ship is leaving. I puke and hold on to the side of the stern and belch bile for a bit watching the water rush past, until land is out of sight. It’s peaceful for a small while after. Then something inside me feels like dying. I turn my head and cough. Two teeth skip from my mouth and scatter across the deck like dice.

Eventually I am put to bed down under. I fish around my pockets for a bottle and find one.

“McGlue,” says the cabin boy, the sissy, “hand that shit over here.”

I swig it back. Some spills down my neck and wets my soiled collar. I let the empty bottle fall to the floor.

“You’re bleeding,” says the fag.

“So I am,” I say, pulling my hand away from my throat. It’s dark, rummy blood, I taste it. Must be mine, I think. I think of what use it may have if I get thirsty later. Fag looks worried. I don’t mind that he unbuttons my shirt, don’t even beat his hands away as he steers my neck one way, then the other. Too tired. Inspection time. He says he finds no holes in me to speak of. “Ah ha,” I tell him. Fag’s face has a weird sneer, and he looks a little scared and hovers there over me, red hair tucked carefully into a wool cap, a dot of sweat sitting in the trivet of his upper lip just below his little nose. He looks me in the eye, I’d say, with some fear.

“No touch,” I say, ruffling the blanket back up. It’s a grey-and-red striped blanket that smells of lambs’ milk. I hold it over my face while Fag goes about. It’s good here under the blanket. My breath shows in the dark. So dark I could almost sleep.

My mind travels the cold hills of Peru where I got lost one night. A fat woman fed me milk from her tit and I rode a shaggy dog back down along a river to the coast. Johnson was there with the captain, waiting. That was trouble. Hit warm with the rum now I close my eyes.

“What have you done?” says the captain next time I open them. The blanket is stripped away like a whip. Saunders removes my shoes. I hear the boat creak. Someone walks

down the hall ringing a bell for supper. The captain stands there by the cot. “We want to hear you say it,” says the captain. I feel sick and tired. I fall asleep again.

They are moving mouths. Saunders and the fag stand by the door. Fag holds a bottle, Saunders dangles keys.

“Gimme.” My voice breaks. I can breathe, hear. He passes the bottle over.

“You killed Johnson,” says Saunders.

I get a good half the bottle down and steady my neck, fold my shoulders back. I feel my jaw let go, look down, remembering blood. My shirt is gone.

“Where’s my shirt.”

“Did you really do it?” says the fag. “Officer Pratt says he saw you. Drunk at the pub in Stone Town. Then run away to the dock just before they found him in the alley.”

“Trash, it’s cold. All possessed till takers of this antifogmatico, thank you, faggot,” I say. Drink.

“They found him stabbed in the heart dead, man,” says Saunders, gripping the keys, eyebrows smarting.

“Who has a brick in a hat, Saunders? Quit it, now. It’s keeping me all- overish. Is there food?” The fag takes the empty bottle from where I lay it on the blanket. I feel like dreaming. “Where’s your freckles, Puck? Let’s trade places.”

They aren’t talking to me anymore.

“Food, man. Shit.” I’m completely awake now. In one glance I take in the room: placards, grey- painted wood walls, wire hooks, some hung- up duck and Guernsey frocks, a grey, shield- shaped mirror. Sunlight hazes in, block-style, speckled with white dust. The shadows of men on deck pass along the walls through the small rectangular

windows up high above my cot. An empty cot on either side of me. A whine and creak of ship and ocean. I yearn for ale and a song. This is home—me down in the heart of the drifting vessel, wanting, going somewhere.

Saunders and Fag pass words and go out and I hear Saunders lock the door and I protest with, “Come back and smile, Saunders. Give me the goods, what’s up?” and nothing happens.

It’s not the first time I’ve been in the hole on this trip. Will be made to work the pump well each morning and darn sails like an old maid once I’m well again. I think of my mother as I imagine her always at the loom through the nailed-down windows of the mill, me a wee tip-toed kid, fingers hoisting my eyes barely above the horizon of the window ledge, watching my stoop-backed, prim, highnosed mom at work, and watching her again that night at the table in our little house, calling me and brother “good boys,” pushing crumbs, counting coins and coughing, my sisters in bed already, my mother’s pale, tuckered out hair splayed across her back. All the stars outside just sitting there. The cold rinse of Salem night after running hot all day. I’d throw a rock at a window if I could, if I had one. Did Saunders say Johnson was in unkeeps? I’ll get up and see about it.

I get up. My head thwarts around and I see nothing, then I see stars. Saunders called Johnson dead, I think. I greet the cot again, blind. Saunders will come back with Johnson and have a laugh. Until then I’ll ride my cogitations out through the stabbing pains in my skull, the licking waves. Most likely I’ll doze then wake up to bread and butter and hot beans and whiskey and it’ll be night

and we’ll be halfway to China and they’ll say “Hit the well, McGlue,” like after my last bout. I try to remember the port of call I got this wet in. Zanzibar.

Think of someplace you’d like to go.

I can see again. I take my lids between my fingers and hold them open, take a colt-step towards the mirror. A bit closer and I stumble. A rope is tied around my ankle and bound to the bedpost.

I call out, and my voice makes me ill to hear it. Get back down to the cot, McGlue. Yes, thank you. The stars come out. I look for the moon, but it eludes me. I can’t find or measure my way. Drift, drift. If I just close my eyes I’ll get there.

I sleep some more.

Indian Ocean

I wake with fever. I know fever because there’s a wet rag folded on my brow. The fag attends me bedside with a book in his lap, one leg swinging from a crabapple–shaped knee. My arms are tied to my thighs, ears shut up, face bandaged around and there’s water dripping through the cracks in the deck ceiling and when I breathe I taste a harsh kick of lye and shit. On the dropped-down table slat there’s an opened bottle of pickled cabbage and a cake of bread. I look up. The drops of deckwater fall in my eyes and burn. Fag wields a pale wooden tenon in his hand, arm hovering above my head motherly almost.

I open my mouth to curse.

But Fag sticks the tenon lengthwise between my teeth. I rattle around a bit.

“It’s what you got, McGlue,” Fag says, holding down my neck.

I’m thirsty so I look him in the eye as best I can.

“We can’t give you anymore, so don’t even ask,” is his answer.

He thinks he’s got something over me. I let him have it and rattle around some more. With difficulty I use my tongue to taste the roof of my mouth and get salt-air and