He lay himself down on what he knew were oats, from the nutty smell and tender feel. There was a deep warmth rising up from within them, and he scooped some over himself into a kind of blanket. He recalled how, at the elevator, cars would arrive on the receiving tracks from the prairies frozen shut and how they had to blowtorch them open, how the grain was always still warm at the center when they unloaded it. Oftentimes they’d find animals mixed in, like coins in a child’s cake—prairie dogs, deer, barn cats, beasts large and small swept up by threshers or trapped by bins—and human parts, too, the lopped fingers, arms, and legs of farmhands. He soon lost touch with himself and woke into another time, amid a cataclysm of engine sound. His overworked body was somewhat replenished, so it must’ve been more than a few hours later. The boat shuddered and began to move. He could catch the occasional hoarse bark from men above. A horn blasted intermittently, the sharp sound blunted by the deck, before the engines ramped up. He’d let this boat carry him out to where he’d cast himself into the deep of the lake, because he didn’t deserve to drown anywhere near his home.

He guessed they’d sailed beyond the breakwater when the boat listed and the oats drifted over themselves with a hush like driven snow. After an hour of rocking, sleep took him again, this time more delirium than rest. He yelled soundlessly at a misty replica of his own face for some duration, before he was troubled by a vision of himself as a boy, running on a hot dirt road, but only the back of his head, never turning. He followed the boy to where he came upon all the people he’d known gathered together in a green field, dead but standing, mute but singing low in broken voices. The boy went unnoticed, though he shouted for a while before he started picking up stones from the gravel and throwing them. A stone struck his own father beneath his hatband, but he remained indifferent, a lisp of blood spitting to his collar. Another struck her arm but left no mark. The boy threw stones like that for a while, shattering cups of lemonade and pinging off the eyeglasses of the pastor, until his arm tired and he lay out in the grass to count clouds.

“I thought these are ghosts” came a voice from within an eye-piercing circle of light above him. “I’m the watching on the deck at night. I heard this wailing and find this hatch open. I’m thinking grain was wailing. Or ghost in grain. I am happy because it was you and not this cargo. That would not be appropriate. But I have the best hearing. For my hearing you are lucky. And you are lucky we weren’t full steam. No hearing would hear then. Not even me. Very unlucky.”

As his corneas adjusted with dual unscrewing sensations, there resolved a man squatting over the hatch, a boot on either side, a sparse yellow fuzz clinging to his head.

“I am fifth mate, Vadim,” he said. “What is your?”

Heaving the inert clumps of sleep from his mind, he couldn’t understand how this man could be so completely unaware he was a dream.

“Never mind this,” said Vadim. “Here, you’re hurt. I will lift.” He stretched his hand down into the hold. “If this was wheat, the dust would have suffocate you by now. This oats is another luckiness.”

Still he did not move.

“Come,” Vadim said, extending his hand deeper, “except know that Visser will not turn the boat around for a clumsy trimmer. He is crazy to escape the Lakes before the freeze. But our next call is Sault Sainte Marie. There you depart.”

Fully awake now, he shook his head and made a shooing motion.

Confusion took Vadim as he retracted his arm. His face was thickly creased and featured a handful of lumpy moles, though rather than dark, they were the same color as his flesh. It was an untroubled face, a boy’s face, except for his nose, which was like a stepped-on cherry.

“You were loading boat, yes? You are grain trimmer? Thunder Bay? You fell?”

“Not exactly,” he said.

“Good! You talk! I was worried you hit this head or were too stupid. Still, you go ashore at the Sault. Otherwise, you go farther than you want.” Vadim extended his hand again into the hold.

“I’m comfortable here,” he said, patting the heaped edges of his nest. They still weren’t far enough out for him to jump.

“But this is salted,” Vadim said.

“This is what?”

“I thought you worked the Lake?”

He didn’t answer.

“I’m meaning this is ocean vessel.”

“Look, don’t fuss over me,” he said, “I’ll find my own way off soon enough.”

“In North Atlantic? Don’t you care to know your heading?”

“No.”

He laughed. “A fatalist.”

“How do you mean?”

“It means you are someone who does not worry forward. Look, I am from Ukraine, Odessa, but this is Dutch boat. This oats is a backhaul to Africa. Then our last port of call is Delfzijl. Trust me, fatalist, you do not want to make vacations there.”

“No difference to me,” he said. “Best way to help me is to forget me.”

Vadim’s face darkened. “It is no good for you to do this stowing. You do not want to be discovered by Visser.” Then Vadim lowered himself to sit on the edge of the hatch and related a story of Visser, the ship’s chief mate, a Dutchman who once found a stowaway on a saltie outbound from Singapore and kicked each of the man’s teeth out, including molars, before pitching him into the water with his clothes in shreds. “You don’t want to know what he would do to yourself. On the ocean there is no law. And Visser is worse than nothing.”

Someone called to Vadim from up on the deck, and he leapt up and answered in a language that was different still from his accent.

“Oh well,” said Vadim squatting again. “Even fatalist ghosts require water. I bring water.”

“I’m fine.”

“No, no, you’ll be murdered by thirst. Say no to refusing. This I will do for you.” He took the hatch in his hands and swung it half closed. “Sorry, it must be locked for the grain is kept dry. If not, I will become in troubled. But I won’t linger.”

“Dark suits me fine,” he said.

“And sir?” Vadim added. “Don’t sink.”

“Isn’t that your job?”

“No, no. In there. Stay flat! Like ah, how do you say … snowshoe? Don’t flip around too much,” he said and shut the hatch.

He spent that night spread-eagled on the surface of the oats, allowing himself only a thin layer to banish the chill, not because he wanted to live, but because he’d been buried in grain many times before and didn’t want to die with oats stopping his nose and throat. He was certain he deserved something much, much worse.

The storm started as a hungry wind drumming the hull. He’d heard sailors oftentimes declare November on Superior a war of wave and fog and sleet, home to a cold that could freeze eyes into cubes. Next came hail on the deck above like buckets of ball bearings dumped out to be sorted. He stuffed oats in his ears to dampen the racket.

After a few hours of pitching, nausea arrived, hot and delirious. Despite his time at the harbor, he’d never been on a boat other than weekend fishing jaunts on small, tepid lakes. When his mouth flooded with saliva he crawled away from the hatch into the deeper dark and emptied his stomach into a hole he’d dug in the oats.

He waited for the sickness to pass, his back propped against the curved wall of the hold, trying to stabilize the brain in his skull with placid thoughts, thoughts of her, but couldn’t keep the vileness in him now from touching her image, so he punched the steel hull until his mind shut off. With so much vomiting, his thirst had reached a deadliness even he could recognize. You’ll die of thirst on a mountain of food, he thought, and this set him chuckling.

An uncountable time later, his stomach settled into starvation, and he stewed up spit in his mouth for an hour in order to get some oats down, but they sat in a lump low in his sternum like he’d swallowed an apple whole. After eating, he attempted sleep. Hours in the vacuum of dark had opened his senses wide and his eyes took on another purpose. With nothing to land upon they concocted visions, like old prisoners telling stories to keep sane. Soon his eyelids flared with something near light, and amid these specters he watched himself put his own ear to that cable as though to a shell. He’d known it was weakened and tapped at it with a screwdriver, like he knew what he was listening for, while the Indian crew waited, speaking in low tones next to the half-unloaded grainer. “It’s fine,” he’d assured them, well aware the lake could freeze any minute, holding up their scheme until next year. “What are you boys afraid of anyway, a little grain?” he said to his crew, then told his best friend to fire up the car dumper, which he did because they trusted each other like brothers—and a second later the air broke open with the lung-sucking sound of the frayed cable whipping through his friend, his remaining arm clutching at his crushed chest, trying to unlock it, his face scrambled like a painter’s palette. Then his wrecked flesh dimming to white, the life lifting from the pieces of him like frost from the earth on a warm morning.