The terrible ocean! Weeks and weeks of it!

It seemed impossible for the captain to get the boat under control. Large waves threatened us on all sides. The trawler was tossed appallingly. It felt like she wasn’t just rocking back and forth but wheeling and spiraling and looping, doing mad circles in space.

Below deck, the portholes were welded shut and painted over with black tar. The floors were lined with soiled cardboard, and the passengers slept on mattresses as thin as sheets. I remembered how when I first arrived in Thailand everyone told me not to point my feet at anyone’s head. Now, in this cramped space, people were crowded together so closely that you ended up putting your feet not just at the heads of strangers but right into their faces too, day in, day out. Dad and I were jammed into a tight corner, sandwiched between bulky sacks of rice and a chain-smoking family from southern China.

In that hot and sweaty cage, the only oxygen we inhaled had been exhaled by other passengers. To be below deck was to be submerged in a nightmare. The crush of limbs and skeletal torsos was oppressive, especially in the suffocating darkness, where voices- peculiar, chilling, guttural sounds- made up conversations from which we were estranged. If you had to go outside for air, you didn’t so much move among them as were pushed remorselessly from one end of the hull to the other.

Sometimes, Dad and I slept up on the hard, ridged deck, using as pillows coils of wet, heavy rope caked in mud from one sea floor or another. It wasn’t much better up there; the days were stinking hot, it rained steadily, and who’d have imagined mosquitos could make it this far out to sea? They gnawed us incessantly. We could hardly hear ourselves swear at God against the loud, throbbing engine, which was belching out clouds of black smoke relentlessly.

At night we lay staring up at the sky, where the stars swam in shapes somehow made menacing by sobs, screams, and howls of delirium, mostly from Dad.

There’s nothing pleasant about the final stages of cancer. He was confused, delirious, convulsing; he had severe throbbing headaches, giddiness, slurred speech, dizzy spells, nausea, vomiting, trembling, sweating, unbearable muscle pain, extreme weakness, and sleeps as heavy as comas. He made me feed him from a pill bottle with an unreadable label. They were opiates, he said. So Dad’s various immortality projects had given way to the more important mortality project: to die with the least pain.

No one liked having the sick man on board. They knew the journey required strength and stamina, and besides, no matter what religion you followed, a dying man was a bad omen in every one. Perhaps because of this, the Runaways were reluctant to share their provisions with us. And it wasn’t just Dad’s health that bothered them- we emanated the smell of the alien. They knew we were Australians who had paid enormous sums of money to enter our own country illegally. They couldn’t wrap their minds around it.

One night on deck I was awoken by a voice shouting, “Why you here?” I opened my eyes to see the ship’s captain standing above us, smoking a cigarette. His face was a pulp novel I didn’t have the energy to read. “I don’t think he make it,” the captain’s voice persisted as his foot nudged Dad in the stomach. “Maybe we throw him off.”

“Maybe I throw you off,” I said.

One of the Runaways stood up behind me and shouted something to the captain in a language I didn’t recognize. The captain backed off. I turned around. The Runaway was around the same age as me, with large, beautiful eyes that were much too big for his drawn face. He had long curly hair and long curly eyelashes. Everything about him was long and curly.

“They say you’re Australian,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“I would like to take an Australian name. Can you think of one for me?”

“OK. Sure. How about…Ned.”

“Ned?”

“Ned.”

“All right. I am now Ned. Will you please call me by my new name and see if I turn around?”

“OK.”

Ned faced away from me and I called out “Shane!” as a test. He didn’t fall for it. After that I tried calling him Bob, Henry, Frederick, and Hot-pants21, but he didn’t even flinch. Then I called out “Ned!” and he spun around, grinning madly.

“Thank you,” he said politely. “May I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Why are you here? We would all like to know.”

I looked behind me. Others had emerged from the cabin below to wash their filthy lungs in the night air. Dad was sweating and feverish, and Ned held out a wet rag for my inspection.

“May I?” he asked me.

“Go ahead.”

Ned pressed the wet rag against Dad’s forehead. Dad let out a long sigh. Our fellow passengers yelled out questions to Ned, and he yelled back before waving them over. They shuffled closer, crowded around us, and wet our ears with a spattering of broken English. These strange ancillary characters, called in at the last minute to make a guest appearance in the epilogue of a man’s life, wanted to understand.

“What’s your name?” Ned asked Dad.

“I’m Martin. This is Jasper.”

“So, Martin, why do you go into Australia like this?” Ned asked.

“They don’t want me there,” Dad said weakly.

“What did you do?”

“I made some bad mistakes.”

“You kill someone?”

“No.”

“You rape someone?”

“No. It was nothing like that. It was a…financial indiscretion.” He winced. If only Dad had raped and killed. Those crimes would at least have been worth his life, and possibly mine.

Ned translated the phrase “financial indiscretion” to the others, and as if on cue a thick curtain of cloud parted, allowing the moon to illuminate their blank confusion. Watching them watching us, I wondered if they had the slightest clue what to expect in Australia. I supposed they knew they’d be living an underground existence, exploited in brothels, factories, building sites, restaurant kitchens, and by the fashion industry, who would get them sewing their fingers to the bone. But I doubted they were aware of the adolescent competition among political leaders to see who had the toughest immigration policies, the kind you wouldn’t want to meet down a dark alley. Or that public opinion was already set against them, because even if you’re running for your life you still have to wait in line, or that Australia, like everywhere, excelled in making arbitrary distinctions between people seem important.

If they knew this, there was no time to dwell on it. Surviving the journey was the only priority, and that was no easy trick. Things were getting steadily worse. Supplies were dwindling. Wind and rain battered the boat. Enormous swollen waves threatened to capsize us at every moment. There were times we could not let go of the rail or we would have been thrown overboard. We felt no closer to Australia than when we started, and it became hard to believe that our country even existed anymore, or any other country, for that matter. The ocean was growing bigger. It covered the whole earth. The sky got bigger too- it was raised even higher, stretched to breaking point. Our boat was the smallest thing in creation, and we were infinitesimal. Hunger and thirst shrank us further. The heat was a full-body fat suit we all wore together. Many were trembling with fever. We spotted land once or twice, and I screamed in the captain’s eardrum, “Let’s pull in there, for Chrissakes!”

“That’s not Australia.”

“Who cares? It’s land! Dry land! We won’t drown there!”

We pushed on, cutting a foamy trail through an ocean bubbling with hostile intentions.

It’s surprising just how placid the dying human animal can be in such a circus. I never would’ve believed it. I thought we’d be tearing each other’s flesh off, drinking the blood of our brothers, but it wasn’t like that at all. Everyone was too tired. Sure, there was crying and a fair amount of bitter frustration, but it was sad and quiet bitter frustration. We were tiny, shrunken creatures, too frail for any kind of serious protest.