When the visions ceased, he fell through sleep and wakefulness, as though through the floors of a skyscraper made of mist. When he awoke, the storm had passed, the engines silent. He stood, ready for his last swim, and reached upwards for the hatch, yet even when he stretched tall, his fingers discovered only air. He could tell by the way his voice bounced that the ceiling was much higher than before. The oats must’ve settled in the vibration of the storm, he concluded. He pushed some into an incline and managed a mound from which he was able to graze the hatch with his fingertips. But there was no way to open it from the inside.

Thirst had returned, and he feared it would weaken his capacity to refuse the visions, so he sat telling himself knock-knock jokes he’d shared with her—Lettuce. Lettuce Who? Lettuce in, it’s freezing!—until sleep took him.

“It was all hands last night. There was no way I could come. Then we must go ashore. This was important. But now I’m returned.” It was night, and Vadim was backlit by a needlepoint of stars. The bright smell of alcohol wafted into the hold. Vadim was drunk, and it made his accent harder to unravel.

“I thought: But Vadim, he has oats!” he said raggedly. “And then I remembered: the water! So now? I’ve come.”

He tried to speak but only croaked, dragging his tongue like a dry mop over his lips in a futile attempt to moisten them. Vadim tossed down a jar of water and it landed in the oats with a whump. He couldn’t resist throwing himself upon it but drank conservatively, trying to disguise how pressing his thirst was.

Next, Vadim took out a flashlight, and it was possible to make out some gaps in his grip. “I lose these in the winch,” Vadim said grinning, wiggling his two remaining fingers like a man giving an obscene gesture. Then Vadim directed the flashlight into the hold, stinging his vision. “Ah,” Vadim said, “there you are. Oh no no … you have bleed on your face. Is this new?”

He thought he’d washed it all off in the lake. “From before,” he said. He captured a handful of oats and scrubbed his face with them, unwilling to waste any water for this purpose.

“Well, I’ve heard you with these complex words in your sleep. No doubt you read: Bill Shakespeare?” asked Vadim, sitting.

“Who?”

“I studied Englishman’s literature in Odessa. I like him most so I call him Bill. We are familiar this way. Titus Adronic was a man who saw many bloodsheds. He was drenched in this. For his whole play, he’s bloody. It is very hard for him. His family. He kills them. Some of them. No one likes this play, this Adronicus. But I do. This is Ukrainian play. So! I call you: Titus”—he said, rhyming the word with “noose”—“because you remind me of this blood man.”

“Okay,” said Titus, after surfacing from a long pull of water. “Call me whatever the hell you want.” Anything that would toss an extra shovelful over the grave of everything he’d left behind was fine with him.

“Oh, it is too bad you cannot see the world with me, Titus. So much ports! Shanghai the girls are burning hot but expensive. Bangkok the girls are burning hot but cheap. The problem with cheap is dick remembers how much pockets pay! Do you understand this?” He laughed until it degraded into a cough.

“So, Titus,” he said, wiping his pink eyes, “if you were no grain trimmer, who then?”

“I worked. Inside the elevator,” Titus said, holding a small sip in his mouth to soak it. “Pool Six. Unloading grain cars. At night.”

“Ah,” he said. “Dangerous work this.”

“What isn’t.”

“Yes, yes. This is a yes thing. Well, we are moored here tonight. Then tomorrow we go through locks. Tonight you would like drink that is not water? This is dry boat but there is much grain alcohol. If you have money. Maybe you want girl down there in your bed of roses, Titus?”

“I’m busted,” he said, though he had a thousand dollars of the Native crew’s pay in his wallet. “But maybe you can get me a bigger container of water?” He’d had his heart set on drowning, not expiring of thirst, and jumping while still in a harbor would guarantee he’d be found. He would spare her that sight too.

“Ah! Now you’re caring about your well-being self!” Vadim declared drunkenly. Then he seemed to fatigue and rubbed the back of his neck with his palm. “But I’m sorry, Titus, I cannot. This jar is already so much. There would be people noticing. There is not much vessels to go around on this ship. It is best way.”

“Why are you doing this?” Titus said, trying to keep the hatch open a little longer, if only for the starlight.

“What?” said Vadim, momentarily affronted.

“Helping me.”

“Oh! Well, Titus my friend, there is a beautiful, beautiful Ukrainian proverb: ‘He is guilty who is not at home.’ ”

“That makes two of us.”

“Yes! This makes all sailors guilty. Which is true. And maybe everyone is guilty who lives with their matinka no longer,” Vadim said mirthfully.

“Suppose so,” said Titus, half-smiling, the other half of him dedicated to preventing a treacherous idea like home from finding purchase in his heart.

“Oh, who is this Diane?” Vadim said as an afterthought when he was about to shut the hatch, and Titus’s breath stopped, as it does whenever another man reads your mind.

“You cried name Diane in your sleep,” said Vadim. “Is it goddess? Girlfriend? Dream?”

“Yes,” said Titus, fighting to blockade her from his mind, “a dream.”

After another formless interval of sleep Titus became aware of the ship’s brush against steel, scraping its way into the locks. This continued until a rumbling began, and he knew the boat was being lowered. Titus tried to feel the descent but could not. He’d heard crews discuss these locks, a freshwater staircase that carried ships from the Great Lakes down to the Saint Lawrence as gently as a child putting a boat in a slip of rainwater.

The hold grew stale and drowsy. His thoughts mixed and wandered. After years in the elevator, he knew grain released gases, carbon dioxide, mostly, but also others over time, and he worried the oats were deranging him in some manner. He closed his eyes and looked again upon the Indian crew in their ragtag clothes, overalls and perma-pressed shirts worn alongside garments of fur and hide, most of them in steel toes—or soled boots for that matter—for the very first time in their lives. They walked tentatively, as though the cement was soggy spring ice on the lake. They’d brought them down from a remote reserve, Ojibwes—or Ahnisnabae was their word for themselves. Many couldn’t manage a proper English hello. The elevator’s regular crews had long refused to work nights, so no trouble there, but what irked the men most was how the Indians had brought their families along, how their women were camped in a lot near the railroad tracks in the harbor, babies strapped to them in beaded carriers, sage and sweet grass burning most of the time, laundry all hung up like flags of an invading army—a disgrace, some called it. In their eyes, some crucial separation was not being observed, and they revved their trucks near the camp during the day to disturb the night crew’s sleep. When one got his hand sliced by a shovel, an elder came and sewed him up with some animal gut. Titus and his best friend were relieved not to require a doctor. But overall the Indians were cautious, methodical workers, unlike the daytime regulars, drinking and fighting and carrying on. Altogether the Indian crew managed ten cars a night. Every night. “Those ones are industrious,” a grain inspector named Butler had remarked at shift change, “despite their lazy heritage.” Titus wasn’t proud of paying them so little, but they were poor, desperate for work, and his partner had convinced him they were doing them a favor.

Traversing the locks seemed to take a day, though of course he couldn’t be certain, and Vadim didn’t appear. Titus rationed the water, allowing himself a teaspoon from the jar for every five hundred breaths he took, and before long his water was down to the amount of beer a man would abandon in his glass without thinking a thing of it.