I can think of nothing to do. Nothing but sit here with a sharpened knife and stab away at my arm, in order to hack it off so I can throw it into the ocean and bid it adieu. I'd like to take both arms and give them to the sea, but I'd have quite a problem getting the other off without a third hand. A third hand would then make it a criminal act, butchery in the first degree, or something of the sordid sort. In the meantime, I'll wait to pass out from the blood spewing all over the cabin. I'll pass out and hopefully pass altogether.

I don't bathe everyday, but I'll have to after this. I think someone will notice the brown clots in my hair. This also means I'll have to change my clothes too. I knew I should have brought other shirts! The arm will be hard to explain, but it will be best to pretend it's still there. If anyone throws anything to me, I'll try to catch it with the missing hand and make a joke of it. Then I'll pick it up off the deck with the hand I'd like to cut off. I wonder if they'd understand my humor.

When I talk to them they just smile, nod their bobbly, latino heads and say "Si! Mr. Mike!" They don't speak English, none of them. Well, a couple do, but it's that pigeon English that makes me have to compromise my own sense of language. The kind where you do away with all definitive articles and conjugate words by using "more." More best, more easier, more happy! Si Mr. Mike, my friend. More, my friend, every day more, my more cock-eyed lunatic sucking away the years as a servile deckhand.

But I don't mean to sound bitter (more bitter), it just happens that way because the voices are bitter. The same ones that told me to chuck my hand overboard…to feed the fishes of the water and to laugh about it later. To laugh hysterically so as to disturb the sleeping macaws two decks above that will come out later to bark orders at me, at us, at the little people. Yes master, my name is Toby. Emerson said "most men lead lives of quiet desperation," but not I. I sing about my misery because it is an asphyxiating song to begin with, so I may as well choke on the words as I tearfully vomit them from my mouth.

This is squalor, this is misery, this world, this metallic island floating about the globe. To wake up every morning, bang away at rust with chisel hammers, to haul maggot filled barrels of trash, to wallow in the gutters of third world countries to connect hoses, to live like an animal and be treated like a flea upon that animal; this is the constant drudgery, the constant repetition. Day in, day out, under the tropic sun melting away my soul.

No misery is crueler, no isolation so bizarre and unique as this one as to have no comparison, no parallel universe in which to philander understanding. I have better days in my dreams, when the nightmares are at their worst, when the moon is winking it's wicked eye at me and smiling (mocking!). As the disquieting desolation grows, I take to the far corner of the room and sit and watch the door, and sit and tell myself that it's okay, and sit and smile and think of all the wonders I could do if I could fly.

The other day as I was banging away at the never tiring corrosion, as I was hammering away at myself, I thought, "chisel away at the Salvadorian's head, see what putrid mush will spill forth." And I did, I hit him so hard that he fell over cold, but he did not die, there was no mush. He was smart enough to wear that silly helmet of work, the symbol of labor, the hardhat. I told him his golden egg had fallen from the sky and hit him in the head, that that was his one opportunity for success but it had fallen deep into the water. He jumped, no, he leaped into the water in search of this goose egg and he died. He drowned himself in search of a fool's folly and I, I missed all the mush.

That's nothing though, merely consequence. Consequence is often stupendous, I should know. It is ill consequence that brought me to this heel in the water, that delivered me with golden promises to the devil's door where whores are as rampant as the roaches and lice. Where was I? Consequence, yes. We'll worry about the lice later. I'll show consequence, I'll defeat consequence shortly before it defeats me and it'll all be a laugh when I'm sitting in my Sunday armchair some years down the road. Some years down the road when I'm reminiscing about my time at sea to a bored audience; but that's then, worry about the now. And what is the now but a jumble of images I cannot begin to explain, that I cannot eradicate from my brain. To share, to write them, will make them real and then they will eat away at my head until I make them so.

I do have a friend, though. I do. I talk to him and he looks at me with knowing eyes, with ears perked up at attention as though my words have meaning. He is a four-legged friend, the best kind, I say, named Zorba, after the Greek. Have I mentioned the Greeks yet? We'll get to them and their gifts later. Zorba is just a German shepherd, but we have the same plights, German blood and this ship. I know he'd like to bite them, to attack with full ferocity, but he's beaten down like I am. He doesn't have the voices to comfort him so when no one is around, I go over and tell him everything is okay. He's happy to hear it too, his tail wags.

Justice would be to kill the dog, to put him out of his misery and then finish off the crew; to bludgeon each and every last one of them with a dull whistling object; to smash their heads into their cheap pillows; to see all the mush that can be produced here. Justice to one man is tyranny to another. For once I'd be the tyrant, I'd be the just, I'd be the self-righteous lawmaker with a blunt edge as my executioner. I'm the judge; my voices are the jury. What a day in court that would be! Swift fury in Lord Michael's court; do the crime, end for all time. Best not to lay the pillars out too clearly, one might usurp oneself.

I was trying to explain all this to a school of prodigious flies this very afternoon. Very attentive they are when not flying about. How is it they got their name, I wonder? Yes, these little beasts took notes, studied, began to talk amongst themselves on all the premises of the thinking man, I mean fly. I almost had them convinced that a revolution was in order, that peace could be theirs, but then a man came armed with a generic aerosol can and gassed them as though they were Jews. The damned flies then turned on me, on me godamnit!, their teacher. And do you want to know their excuse? Of all my teaching of apocalypse and death, of pesticides and zyklon B, of tyrants with whips and poisoned aerosol cans; they said I hadn't warned them well enough. Absurd flies, I tell you, just plain absurd. I had to put up with their swarming all day. I finally dispelled them all with a sincere, Happy Tuesday!

Oh yes, it's Tuesday…that means prisoner 215 gets to have a soft drink with his meal. A frosty chilled Coca-Cola to ease the American palate, to make the mind happy. They don't think so, but I'm smart enough to wipe the lip of the can they give me (I fear they'll try to get rid of me like the flies), and I never drink from an opened can. I wonder what swill, what food, they will give me today, what odd gifts will be delivered to my place at the table. When they aren't looking I switch plates with one of the others in case they've added shards of glass to my food, finely granulated pieces to cut up my stomach and cause me to bleed to death from the inside. Very slow, very painful, almost undetectable, looks like ulcers. During the day I sneak a look into the galley to see if there's any arsenic about. Just a pinch a pot everyday to kill us all off slowly. No rest for the weary here.

The reason they want to kill me is because I am a genius, I have remarkable talent, I am a promising figure of the new millennia. The reason frightens them because they know that one day it is going to be…to the chambers! All of them will be marched in a line, herded down a freshly refurbished alleyway of vines and twigs to their deaths. I would be frightened too in the face of me; which is why I keep from the mirrors and all things reflective. To kill me quickly would cause an upset of things, it would be far too suspicious and questions would have to be answered. Someone would inquire about their motives for murdering a prodigy. But to do it slowly, to make my life so miserable that it looks as though my innards had exploded, that would arise no suspicion of foul play.

I've got them beat there, too. Besides the castor oil I drink, I've dispatched letters to my brothers and countrymen, to fellow patriots and flies loyal to the cause. Be leery of the gifts, they are lethal. I accept everything though because I don't want them to think I know, I want them to continue to think that I am an ignorant monkey; though it's a ruse that both sides are aware of. Why, just last night they tried to serve me horsemeat, but I was clever, I spit it all into my napkin. The foul taste of horsemeat, I'd know it anywhere from Timbuktu to Trinidad. Lecherous fools all of them in a consortium against me, all plotting in their foreign tongues.

I know they are against me, that's why I was recruiting the flies. Their eyes dart away when I look at them when they speak, as though they knew that I know what they know. I'm a master at studying human inflection, don't they realize. Clever infidels, never having the knowledge of what a great nation is like other than what is on television. They are against me all right; that much is for sure from all I've been able to ascertain. I'll show them by waiting in the dark and when they walk alone on deck I'll throw them into the tumultuous sea one by one until I'm the only one left. And then I'll wreck the ship onto an island far away in the middle of the Caribbean and live in peaceful solitude; not at all the vicious confinement I have here in my cell.

Portholes of hell, damnable windows, fixed through the countless days to glare into my feigned privacy. Those two unrepentive eyes staring out over the main deck, letting the deck stare into my cabin. All I want is for the darkness to come so that I may shut the lights and look out at the glimmers of hope from the coast, the gold and silver sparkling of civilization that carries in its burdened streets the glory of promise. The promise of land ahoy, to walk with steady legs, to speak with natural tongue. Ah! So very near, just too damned far to swim. Even if I should try there could be sharks and they have no mercy.

I rejoice in my letters to spread the madness, to warn of the scruples (or lack thereof), of life at sea. What was it that dead guy wrote, "Beware the Jabberwocky!" Never more true than here, my fallen brother; it is an evil, shrewish beast leaden to care for demise and despair. No tonic will cure the ailments and aches of such creatures aboard this motor vessel chug, chug, chugging away across the shapeless waters. Headlong into the waves, a course in concentrics, all to infirm me, to make me ill and vomitous and unstable. The rocking of the ship to turn me green. Whosoever says that it's the motion of the ocean and not the size of the ship obviously doesn't know the difference between a raft and a bulk carrier.

I will recover, though, and regain my color, my fleshy pink color that's synonymous with the mastery of the world. I'll be able to forget about having to go to the bathroom in a ziplock bag at night because it's unsafe to leave the cabin. Waking early in the morning, when the sun is daring to peak into the eastern sky, and have the foul, stench-ridden bag thrown into the water. If they found out, they'd be shocked, they'd think me crazy, but nothing could be further. I've never been as coherent as I am now, aware of all the trifles around me and more able to battle the woes against me than at this very moment. I have awakened from a blinding sleep that has led me adrift from truth. Never shall it happen again because I try not to sleep because that's when they'll come. If I must, after a few days, I'll crawl under the desk with my knife and rest there. It's safer.

The knocking at the door comes, my obvious absence detected, and I crawl, a whipped puppy, into my corner where I spend my many lonely hours. Slowly the door opens, my damned memory forgot all about the lock, the one true reliable piece of equipment I know how to operate. Words are being spoken to me, but I'm busy shivering and crying. All I hear is a question - what happened to my hair? Bugs, I say, ravenous bugs picking away at my brain, taking away my thoughts and refusing to return them. Insidious lice never giving me a moment's rest so I had to shave off all the hair on my body and burn it in my sink with other evil items, to kill them, to kill them all, you see.

Carefully a blanket is placed over my naked, cold body and the sharpened knife by my side is slyly taken away. Won't need that anymore, my hand's already gone. What hand? Oh, my failing memory, they're both there, I'd meant to cut at least one off, to cut my workload in half. No sticky blood either. The voice keeps telling me that it's okay, that I'm safe, that there's nothing to worry about, that sometimes life at sea can do this. And I let him think I believe.