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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CPT馬冠宇" data-source="post: 75471" data-attributes="member: 162"><h3 style="text-align: center">Chapter 5: Number 6</h3>0400 is not a time, it is a temperature and a taste. On the Black Dragon, it is the hour of meat and nothing else. I knew this because that was when the senior crew started singing, when the stench in the hull ripened from “today’s“ to “forever,” and when Captain Magonia did his inspection circuit, looking for anyone not sweating.Me: chained to the processing room pipe, which steamed hot even on the coldest night. I don’t know what it was for. Maybe for heat, maybe just a place to anchor men like me who couldn’t be trusted to stay vertical. I had been kneeling on the same square of floor since midnight, more bone than muscle, sorting the catch one slippery slab at a time into bins by touch alone. My left eye had been swollen shut for days, the right mostly useful for keeping my nose out of the grinder. Every minute, the pipe bled a little more heat into the steel ring on my wrist, cooking a circle through the skin. At first it was pain, then it was memory, then it was just how I knew the difference between dream and waking.The rule was: don’t stop sorting. If your hand paused, the man watching would tap the back of your skull with the blunt side of a knife, and if you still hesitated, they’d flip it to the sharp side and count to ten.Magonia’s boots always arrived in pairs—the real boots and then his shadow, cast double by the sodium lamps that lined the ceiling. He walked with a heavy, amused tread, as if it delighted him to test the deck’s patience with every step. This morning, he was more restless than usual, mouth moving before his hands could find something to mock. He walked the line once, twice, then stopped behind me and coughed as if to clear his own name from the air.He leaned in, sniffed me—he always did this, for emphasis, for ownership. “Still alive, Sinclair? Maybe too dumb to die.”“Yes, Captain,” I said, or tried, but my tongue felt thick as a fish belly and the words blurred on exit.He nodded, satisfied, then made a show of taking out his phone, the case studded with gold sharks, the glass smeared with old blood and thumb grease. He scrolled with one hand, the other balancing a mug of something that stank like melted rubber bands. Without warning, he tossed the phone at my feet, and it landed face-up in a puddle of fish brine, screen bright.The volume was already maxed. I heard her before I saw her.Sun Yuxin’s voice, clean and venomous, with the same tonal arch it used to take when she said “I’m not angry, I just want you to listen.” She was streaming live, the chat racing down the right side of the frame—emojis, money gifts, the static of more than ten thousand viewers all needing her at once. She looked different: thinner, paler, maybe a touch of filter, maybe just the exhaustion of seven months without me. She wore my old T-shirt, the one with the fake NASA patch, stretched tight across her chest and the post-pregnancy belly. Her hair was in a neat, high ponytail, and her face had that smudge of shadow she never noticed under her left eye.She was scrolling through photos. Our photos. The first was us at Gatorland, Sun wearing the tourist sunhat she’d sworn she hated, her arm snaked around my waist. I was grinning stupid at the camera, skin red as a boiled crab, tongue out. The next: me asleep in the front seat of her Honda, window half-open, hair stuck to my forehead, mouth open. The third: her selfie, two seconds after I fumbled the lighter trying to light her Kool for her and dropped it in my own lap. In the background of that one, I am blurry, doubled over, probably cursing.She laughed as she swiped through them, but it was a fake laugh, the kind you give to an audience that pays more in bits than in seconds. The chat exploded in bubbles of mockery: LMAO, 666, “he look like baboon.” Some sent animated stickers of white guys with drool and big cartoon dicks. Sun paused on the last picture, and for a second, I thought she was about to say something kind. Instead, she started reading the chat aloud, translating the meanest comments, savoring each one like a flavor on her tongue.“Bait boyfriend!” she read, giggling. “He is small but very sincere. Number six, not number one.”Then she straightened, face suddenly serious. “Okay, now I do the ranking. You all ask who was hardest to trick, and who was easiest. I will tell.”She counted on her fingers, each name like a bullet: a finance guy from Miami, a Vietnamese club DJ, a former high school swim coach, a “big boss” from Hangzhou, a tattooed weed dealer who once gave her a black eye and two root canals. I listened as she walked through their greatest hits, which mostly boiled down to how quickly they handed over money, or how little they expected in return.When she got to me, she hesitated, then shrugged. “Number six, Nathan,” she said, voice softening just enough to be cruel. “He is not so smart, but he loves very much. He believes everything. He even go to sea for me! Ha ha. But he is not number one. Sorry, New.”She smiled then, the real smile, the one that used to appear after sex or during those moments where nothing at all needed to be said.The chat went feral: waves of laughing faces, tigers eating baby chicks, more numbers than I could process. I tried to look away, but Magonia had moved around to my side, arms folded, trapping the phone under the toe of his boot so the screen was locked in my gaze.“You watch, yes?” he said, voice syrupy with satisfaction. “Is very popular. You are famous!”I picked a mackerel from the wet heap and placed it in the left bin, fingers throbbing from the cold and the effort. The flesh split under my grip, scales coming off in sharp coins that stuck to my palm. I tried to focus on the work, tried to pretend that if I sorted fast enough, the video would end or the battery would die or someone would need me elsewhere.Behind me, the other men started to crowd in. They recognized her instantly; a few had probably seen the stream before I ever did. They pointed at the screen, snorted, made loud remarks in Mandarin and then repeated them in English for my benefit: “She like strong man. Not you.” “She have many boyfriend.” “Number six is not very lucky!”One guy—I knew him only as Mister Yellow Teeth—leaned in close, voice a hoarse whisper. “She is so good at this. Like movie star.” He laughed and spat a glob of phlegm into the fish bin, then wiped his mouth on my sleeve.The video cut to a new image: a highlight reel, I guess, Sun with a parade of men, all of them doing their best to look invincible, all of them not realizing they were just frames in her documentary about conquest and extinction. There was one shot of me at a BBQ place in Sanford, holding a rib in one hand and gesturing with the other, caught mid-rant. I remembered the day: we’d fought all morning, then made up in the parking lot, then she’d said, “Now I want to see you eat.” She must have taken the picture while I wasn’t looking.She explained the context to the audience—how Americans always talk with their hands, how I used to narrate my own actions like a character in a TV show. “He thinks everything is very deep,” she said. “Like every day is a movie about suffering.”The crew loved this. They started pantomiming my hand gestures, giving each fish a little soliloquy before hurling it into the bin. Mister Yellow Teeth mocked my accent, said, “I am number six! My love is so big and so stupid!” and the whole room howled.I kept sorting. I could feel the heat of the pipe burning through the raw skin on my wrist. My left eye was weeping, the right stinging from the salt and the light. My fingers kept slipping, so I started using my knuckles to push the fish along, and the pain gave me something clean to concentrate on.Magonia squatted to my level and tapped the phone, zooming in on Sun’s face. For a second, just a single second, it looked like she was looking back at me. The smile faded, and her eyes went flat, unreadable.“Look,” he said. “She do this for you.”I tried to say I understood, that it was okay, that none of this was a surprise, but the words would not come. They were blocked by the memory of her in the Honda, the way she’d bite the tip of her straw after every sip, the way she’d listen when I talked about the future. That Sun was gone, replaced by the performer on the screen, but I loved her anyway, because I had nothing left to love.The crew got bored and wandered off. The video looped once, twice, then froze on a still of Sun blowing a kiss to the camera, lips painted the same shade she used to wear when she wanted to be cruel.Magonia picked up the phone, wiped it on his coat, and tucked it away.“Back to work,” he said. “If you finish early, maybe we let you sleep tonight.”I nodded, kept sorting. My knees ached, my wrist was a ruin, my eye was blind, but my hands still knew what to do.I placed a mackerel in the left bin with my broken fingers and kept sorting, because stopping meant another beating and the beating would not change the number.Nothing would change the number.Nothing would change me.The trick is not to dream. The trick is to let your brain rot in a circle, not forward or back, until sleep and waking are one long, wet stripe of the same gray. I learned this from cosmicx16, who could close his eyes at the end of a shift, lean against the nearest pipe, and vanish for exactly seventeen minutes, then snap awake without a twitch. I never got that good, but I did learn to disappear, for a few seconds at a time, and sometimes that was enough.The morning after the livestream, I blinked and it was dawn. The sodium bulbs had gone out, replaced by the thin blue wash of day through the portholes. Everything was condensation and drip; the walls sweated, the floor puddled, even the fish bins glistened as if someone had sprayed them with a hose on the inside. My left eye was still glued shut. My right eye worked, but didn’t want to.I heard footsteps. Slow, deliberate. Magonia, on his tour of the damned.He stopped above me and tapped my shoe with the steel toe of his boot. “Up,” he said, softer than usual.I tried to stand, but my knees didn’t get the memo. He reached down, grabbed the ring on my collar, and hauled me up with one hand. The other hand held a battered gray satellite phone, the kind you see in movies where no one is ever coming to help.He pressed it to my ear. No warning, no time to prep a face. Just the phone, alive with a faint electrical hum and the hiss of distance.“New?” Her voice. Her real voice, the one I hadn’t heard in seven months and eleven days.I almost dropped the phone. Magonia caught it midair and jammed it back against my head, harder this time. “She waiting,” he said.“Yeah,” I managed. “Yeah, I’m here. Hi, Sun.”For a moment, nothing. Just breathing, then a thin, reedy wail in the background—her baby, not mine, though the urge to claim it burned in my throat anyway. She must’ve covered the mouthpiece; I heard muffled Mandarin, a soothing rhythm, then the click of her tongue as she came back on.“You sound sick,” she said. Not worried, not accusing. Just a fact. Like “the weather is humid,” or “your shoes are ugly.”“I’m fine,” I lied, because there was no other option.“It’s raining here,” she said. “Every day, all day. Florida is disgusting in July. You remember?”I did. It rained every afternoon, like clockwork. You could set a watch to the thunderheads rolling in over the highway. But what I remembered most was the heat—the way it clung to your skin, glued your shirt to your back, made the air feel like old soup.“Yeah,” I said. “It’s the same here. Worse, maybe.”She didn’t answer right away. I heard more of the baby, then a sound like her sipping from a straw.Behind me, I could feel the eyes of the crew. They’d crowded in, a full circle now, everyone with their own angle, their own phone, filming me talking to the woman who’d become their favorite show. Some of them made kissy noises. Most just watched, waiting for me to break.I said, “How are you? How’s… everything?”She exhaled, then coughed. “I have a job at the casino. Hostess, but they want me to try dealing, too. Baby is fat and lazy. Sleeps all day, cries all night.” She paused, and for a moment I thought maybe she was going to say she missed me. Instead: “You don’t need to send money. It’s over now. You don’t have to keep pretending.”I laughed, or tried to, but it caught on something in my chest. “That’s not why I called. I just wanted to hear your voice.”She didn’t reply. The silence stretched, long enough for the sweat to start dripping down my neck, long enough for me to see cosmicx16 miming a blowjob to the delight of the rest.Then she said, “You know I’m not coming back, right?”“I know,” I said. It was true, and it wasn’t. The knowing was everywhere now. It was in my bones, in the ache of my hands, in the smell of the fish and the diesel and the endless, hungry ocean.There was a wet click as she shifted the phone. “You should have run when you had the chance.”“I know,” I said again, and meant it.Another silence. I heard her baby gurgle, then whimper, then a sharp, frustrated cry. She shushed him, murmured a string of nonsense syllables, then: “He doesn’t look like you. Just so you know.”I almost thanked her. Instead, I said, “Can I tell you something?”She waited.“I think about Gatorland sometimes. You remember? The humidity was so thick you said it felt like soup, and I got heatstroke before lunch. I was trying to impress you, but you just kept calling me an idiot. And when you took that photo—remember?—the one with the alligator in the background and my face bright red? I hated that picture, but you loved it. You said it made me look like a cartoon.”“I remember,” she said, and for a second I thought I heard a smile.“I liked being your cartoon,” I said.This time, she did laugh, but it was a short, sharp bark. “You always say things like that, even now. Why?”I shrugged, forgetting she couldn’t see me. “Because I mean it. Because it’s still true.”She went quiet again, then said, “You know none of that was real, right?”“I know,” I said. But in my head, the memory ran perfect: us in the parking lot, her with a Red Bull, me squinting in the heat, her hand on my shoulder, her smile for no one but me.She said, “Okay. Goodbye, New.”“Bye, Sun,” I said.The line clicked dead. Magonia took the phone, hung up with a flourish, then tapped the back of my head, gentle for once. “Good call,” he said, almost softly.I held the phone against my chest, just for a second, feeling the last of its warmth through the cotton. The crew crowded in to get their shot—cosmicx16, Yellow Teeth, even some of the old men from the lower hold. They wanted a reaction, a meltdown, but there was nothing left to give.I stood there, rain seeping through my shirt, fish stink caked in every crack of my skin, and decided to hold the feeling. Not apologize for it, not give it up to the next joke or the next punchline. The love was mine. The hurt was mine.I kept the warmth for three heartbeats, then handed the phone back.Nobody cheered, nobody clapped. It was over, and that was enough.At night, when the work was done and the pipes finally cooled and no one cared if you slept or just lay there and waited for the ship to stop, I stretched out on the processing room floor, cheek to wet metal, the salt and the bleach burning tiny wounds into my face. The hum of the engine was different now—lower, steadier, like the sound of a man settling into his last job.That was the night we crossed into Chinese waters. I knew this not because anyone told me, but because the senior crew howled with joy when they heard it on the shortwave, and because the men who had been kindest to me spent the rest of the shift silent and blinking fast, as if they were already thinking about home.They left the hatch open for once, maybe as a joke, maybe as a test. I could smell land: not the briny, rotting edge of the Gulf, but the green, sour stink of wet dirt and plants and diesel exhaust, a thousand miles of coast I would never touch. It made my teeth ache. I pressed my face to the floor and let the chain tighten on my wrist. It was a comfort, now—a reminder that I still had mass and heat, that I existed in three dimensions.I closed my eyes and let the engine lull me. I thought about what waited for me, if anything waited at all. I pictured the trawler nosing up the river, the hull scraping silt, the men jumping the rail and running for the shore. I saw Magonia, arms folded, waiting for me at the bow, smiling as if he’d planned the whole world just to see what I would do next.I didn’t want to go to shore. I wanted to stay here, in the liminal place between countries, between the old self and whatever waited in port.Instead, I went to Orlando. Not the real Orlando—the memory.Gatorland, parking lot, late morning, the pavement shimmering with heat. Sun Yuxin, leaning against the hood of her car, Red Bull in one hand, Kool cigarette between her fingers, squinting through the humidity like a scientist observing a slow-motion chemical fire. Her hair up, but messy, always a few stray hairs sticking to her cheek. She looked at me, grinning, and blew smoke sideways so it wouldn’t hit my face. I loved her in that moment, every cell in unanimous agreement. I loved her as pure as water and as absolute as the horizon.It was a performance. She was always acting, always framing every moment for some future audience, even when it was just the two of us. I knew this, and I didn’t care. In my mind, she was real. In my mind, the sun was a white coin in a flat blue sky, the air was syrup, and I was somebody who deserved to be loved by a woman like her.Back on the ship, the lights flickered, and the sound of laughter echoed up from the lower deck. The open hatch let in the smell of earth, but not its freedom.I curled up on the floor, let the chain settle into my skin. I thought about all the ways love was a lie, a trick, a way to keep you working even when you had no reason left. I thought about the woman who’d built me up and hollowed me out, and the man I’d become to keep her safe from nothing at all.The memory burned in me like a sun in a sealed room, lighting nothing, warming no one, seen by nobody.But it was mine. It was all I had.And I meant it. I would keep meaning it, for as long as the dark would have me.</blockquote>

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