The water came up through the floorboards first.

Patrick O’Shea had thought the sea would come in like a fist, breaking doors and tearing iron from iron. Instead it came quietly, a black shine creeping beneath the benches and trunks, touching the soles of boots, lifting scraps of paper, finding its way around everything men had built to keep it out.

Someone screamed in Polish. Someone else prayed in Italian. Patrick knew neither language, but he knew the shape of both.

He was nineteen years old and had never seen a staircase so crowded.

“Move on,” a steward shouted from above. “Women and children first.”

There were women there. There were children. There were also men with white faces and hard hands, men who had paid less and were now discovering what less meant.

Patrick had a cardboard suitcase under one arm. In it were two shirts, a razor, a pair of socks, and a letter from his mother folded into an envelope that had gone soft from damp. Around his wrist was his father’s rosary, wrapped twice because the beads had stretched loose over the years.

He had left Mayo five days before with a roll of bread in his coat pocket and the address of a cousin in Boston. He had imagined America as a place of wages. That was all. Wages, meat on Sundays, a dry room, maybe a woman who did not look at poverty as if it were a fever.

Now the floor leaned under him, and America was somewhere above the freezing dark.

A woman near him lifted a little girl toward the stair rail. The child’s shoe slipped from her foot and vanished into the water.

“Take her,” the woman said. “For Christ’s sake, take her.”

Patrick dropped the suitcase.

He got his hands under the child’s arms and raised her as high as he could. A man above reached down. For a moment the child hung between them, crying without sound, her mouth open and her face wet.

Then she was gone upward.

The woman tried to follow. The crowd closed. Patrick put his shoulder into the back of a man twice his size and shoved. The man turned with teeth bared, then saw the woman and looked away.

The water reached Patrick’s knees.

The ship groaned. Not metal, not wood. Something larger. Something tired.

“Again,” Patrick said to the woman. “Come on now.”

She tried. Her fingers touched the rail. A boot came down on her hand. She made a short animal sound and fell against him.

The water reached his waist.

Above them, a gate clanged shut.

That sound ended something in the crowd. Not hope. Hope had been failing in pieces. This was simpler. Men understood a locked gate.

They pressed forward. Patrick was carried with them. The woman was torn from his grip. He called out, but his voice had no room in that stairwell. He saw a sleeve, then hair, then nothing.

Cold climbed his ribs.

He found himself pinned against the wall beside a young priest with blood on his forehead. The priest was speaking Latin through chattering teeth. Patrick wanted to answer, but he could not remember the words.

The water reached his chest.

He held the rosary against his mouth.

His mother had kissed those beads before she tied them around his wrist. His father had carried them into fields, to wakes, to one bad winter when the potatoes went black in the ground and men stopped joking at the public house.

Patrick tried to think of the girl. She had gone upward. That had to count for something.

The lights flickered once.

Then went out.

In the dark the ship tilted harder. Bodies struck him. Water slapped his chin. He took one breath, then another, each one smaller than the last.

The cold closed over his face.

He kicked once. His boot struck wood. His lungs seized.

Then the cold was gone.

Not eased. Gone.

The water around him was warm.

Patrick opened his eyes to brown light.

For a moment he thought he was dead and this was the bottom of the Atlantic, changed by God into mud. Then he swallowed river water and came up coughing.

He was not free.

His arms were tied behind him. Bamboo pressed against his back, his knees, his cheek. He was in a cage, narrow as a coffin and half sunk in a slow brown river. The air was so hot it seemed to have weight. Insects worried at his eyes. Green trees crowded both banks, thick and shining, and beyond them men shouted in a language he had never heard.

Patrick gagged, spat, and tried to stand. The cage rolled. Water rushed into his mouth again.

“Easy,” a voice said. “Easy, buddy. Don’t fight it.”

Patrick twisted toward the sound.

Another cage hung a few yards away, tied to a post. Inside it was a gaunt man with a beard and sunken eyes. His shirt had once been green. One sleeve was gone. His skin was the color of old wax.

“Where am I?” Patrick said.

The man stared at him. “Jesus.”

“Where’s the ship?”

No answer.

Patrick sucked air through his teeth. “The ship. Where is she?”

Another voice came from the left. “What ship?”

Patrick turned too fast and struck his skull against bamboo. Light cracked across his sight. A second man watched him from another cage. This one was younger, with blond hair matted to his head and a face swollen from beating.

“The Titanic,” Patrick said. “Where is she?”

The young man shut his eyes.

The bearded one said, “What did they give you?”

“Who?”

“The guards.”

Patrick looked toward the bank. Men in black clothes moved between the trees. One carried a rifle. Another squatted near a fire, smoking.

Patrick had seen rifles. These were different. Shorter, darker, uglier.

“Are they Germans?” he asked.

The blond man laughed once. It was not a happy sound.

The bearded one said, “No.”

“Then who are they?”

“Viet Cong.”

The words meant nothing.

Patrick licked his cracked lips. His throat burned from salt that was no longer there. He looked down at himself and saw that his clothes were still the clothes he had drowned in: wool jacket, collarless shirt, suspenders, boots heavy with water. His cap was gone. His suitcase was gone.

The rosary was still tied around his wrist.

The bearded man saw it. His face changed.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Patrick O’Shea.”

“Rank?”

“What?”

“Rank. Unit.”

“I’m a laborer.”

The blond man opened his eyes. “Oh, this is good.”

Patrick said, “I was sailing for New York.”

The bearded man watched him a long time. “What year?”

Patrick’s teeth had begun to chatter though the air was hot enough to choke on. “Nineteen twelve.”

No one spoke.

A dragonfly landed on the bamboo in front of Patrick’s face. Its wings flashed blue, then vanished.

The blond man said, “That’s not funny.”

“I’m not laughing.”

“What year?” the bearded man asked again.

Patrick looked from cage to cage. There were four prisoners he could see. Two Americans, he thought, from the talk. A third man lay curled in his cage with his back to them. The fourth was older, thin, Asian, with gray in his hair and one eye swollen shut.

Patrick said, “Nineteen twelve.”

The blond man said, “It’s 1968.”

Patrick waited for the sense of the words to arrive. It did not.

“No,” he said.

The bearded man leaned his forehead against the bamboo. “Yeah.”

“No.”

Nobody corrected him again.

The day passed in fever and insects.

Patrick learned the cages were tied to poles driven into the river mud. They were punishment cages, the blond man said. You could not sit. You could not stand. You crouched and hung and tried to keep your face out of the water when sleep came. Leeches found your legs. Mosquitoes found everything else.

The bearded man was Captain Miller, though no one used his rank. The blond one was Harris. The man curled in silence was Pike. The older Vietnamese man was called Tran. He spoke English with care, like each word had been folded before he handed it over.

They were prisoners of a war Patrick could not understand.

America was fighting in Vietnam. The French had been there before. The Japanese had been there before that. The country had been cut and named and renamed by men who believed maps could settle hunger.

Patrick listened from his cage with his head pounding.

“You’re saying America has flying machines,” he said.

“Planes,” Harris said.

“And you fell from one?”

“Got shot down.”

“From the sky.”

“That’s usually where planes are.”

Patrick looked at the trees. “And the British?”

“What about them?”

“Are they in it?”

Miller gave a dry little smile. “Not like before.”

“Before what?”

No one answered.

Later, when the guards had gone inland and dusk made the river dull, Tran spoke to him.

“You were on the ship,” he said.

Patrick turned his head. The movement hurt his neck. “Aye.”

“The one that sank.”

“This morning.”

Tran nodded as if that were possible. “I heard of it. When I was young. Big ship. Many dead.”

Patrick closed his eyes.

Many dead.

Not people in the stairwell. Not the woman with the broken fingers. Not the priest muttering Latin in the dark. Many dead. A number in a book. A thing schoolboys knew.

“My mother,” Patrick said, then stopped.

Tran waited.

“She’ll think I drowned.”

“Yes,” Tran said.

Patrick looked at him.

Tran’s face was calm, but not soft. “Maybe you did.”

That night rain came. It fell warm and hard, ticking on leaves, dimpling the river. Patrick opened his mouth and drank. The water ran down his face and into his collar.

In the dark, Harris whispered, “Hey. Titanic.”

Patrick did not answer.

“Did the band really play?”

Patrick thought of the dark stairwell. The crush. The cold hand of the sea at his throat.

“I don’t know.”

“They say they played till the end.”

“Who says?”

“People.”

Patrick gave a short laugh. “People say a great many things when they’re not there.”

Harris was quiet.

After a while he said, “Fair enough.”

The days began to fold into one another.

Morning: guards shouting from the bank. A bowl of rice sometimes, pushed through with a stick. River water always.

Noon: heat. The sun on Patrick’s scalp. His wet clothes souring against his skin. Men breathing through pain because there was nothing else to do.

Evening: insects thick enough to enter the mouth.

Night: talk.

The prisoners talked because silence made too much room.

Miller had a wife in Ohio and two boys who liked baseball. Patrick had never heard of baseball. Harris had a girl in San Diego who sent photographs he no longer had. Pike had stopped talking after they broke two of his fingers. Tran had once taught school. He had a daughter somewhere near Saigon. He did not know if she was alive.

Patrick told them about home in pieces. The field behind his mother’s house. The priest who cheated at cards. The way men in steerage had sung the first night out, before the sea grew rough and everyone stopped pretending they were not afraid.

“Why’d you leave?” Miller asked.

Patrick shifted his bound wrists. The rosary beads dug into the skin.

“Because staying was another sort of drowning.”

No one made a joke of that.

On the fifth day, a guard came to Patrick’s cage with two others behind him. He was young, maybe Patrick’s age, with a narrow face and bad teeth. He pointed at Patrick’s clothes and said something the others found funny.

Then he pointed at the rosary.

Patrick pulled his wrist back.

The guard crouched. His rifle lay across his knees. He reached through the bars and touched the beads.

“No,” Patrick said.

The guard smiled.

Patrick kicked.

His boot struck the bamboo, not the guard. The cage rocked violently. Water surged over Patrick’s mouth. The guard laughed and shoved the cage with the rifle barrel, rolling it halfway under.

Patrick held his breath. The river filled his ears.

For one wild second he was back in the ship.

Cold. Dark. Bodies.

Then the cage rolled upright. Patrick came up choking.

The guard said something in French.

Tran answered from his cage, sharply.

The guard turned and struck Tran across the face with the rifle stock.

Patrick went still.

The guard stood and walked away, laughing no longer.

Tran spat blood into the river.

“What did he say?” Patrick asked.

Tran touched his mouth with his tongue. “He called you ghost.”

Patrick swallowed. “And what did you say?”

“I said ghosts do not kick.”

That night Harris told them he had a blade.

No one spoke at first. Even the river seemed to hold back.

“What kind?” Miller asked.

“Metal. From the roof panel in the hut. They missed it.”

“How long?”

“Long enough.”

Patrick could not see Harris clearly in the dark, only the pale blur of his face between bamboo strips.

“You can cut rope?” Miller asked.

“One cage. Maybe two.”

“Then what?”

“Then I run.”

Miller said, “They’ll kill the rest of us.”

“They’re killing us anyway.”

“Not tonight.”

Harris laughed under his breath. “You got a schedule?”

Tran said, “If one escapes from punishment cages, they move us inland. Maybe shoot one. Maybe more.”

Harris said, “You got a better plan, teacher?”

Tran said nothing.

Patrick’s wrists throbbed. He thought of the gate on the ship. Men pressing toward it, knowing there was not room, knowing and not caring, because the water was at their backs and fear had eaten the world down to the size of one body.

“I’ve seen this,” Patrick said.

Harris turned toward him. “You haven’t seen anything.”

“I have.”

“No, you saw a ship sink. That’s sad. This is war.”

Patrick’s mouth tasted of mud. “Water does not ask what name men give the dying.”

Harris went quiet, then said, “Go to hell.”

“I may have done.”

Miller spoke softly. “Harris. Don’t.”

But Patrick knew Harris would.

The storm broke after midnight.

It came out of the trees with no warning. Rain hammered the river flat. Wind bent the branches until they thrashed like arms. The cages jerked at their ropes. Somewhere on the bank a man shouted and another answered, both voices torn apart by thunder.

Patrick woke with water in his mouth and his knees locked in pain.

At first he thought the cage had come loose. Then he heard the faint scrape from Harris’s side.

Metal on wet rope.

“Harris,” Miller whispered.

No answer.

“Harris.”

Patrick twisted, forcing his shoulder against bamboo until his skin tore. Through rain and darkness he saw Harris hunched low in his cage, one arm moving. Fast. Desperate.

The rope at the front of Harris’s cage sagged.

Patrick drew breath. “Don’t.”

Harris kept cutting.

Patrick kicked against the side of his cage. It swung toward Harris’s, then back. The river slapped him in the face. He kicked again, harder. The cage lurched, the ropes groaning.

“What are you doing?” Harris hissed.

Patrick kicked a third time. Bamboo struck bamboo.

Harris reached through the gap and slashed at him.

The blade caught Patrick’s sleeve and opened the skin beneath. Heat ran down his arm, then vanished in rainwater.

Miller cursed.

Patrick jammed his shoulder against the bars and shoved his bound wrists through a split in the bamboo. He could reach only a few inches, but it was enough to catch Harris’s wrist.

Harris pulled. Patrick held.

“You stupid Mick,” Harris said. “Let go.”

“No.”

“They’ll leave us here till we rot.”

“No.”

Harris yanked again. The blade scraped Patrick’s knuckles.

Patrick leaned his forehead against the bamboo, teeth bared. “There was a woman on the stairs,” he said. “She had a child.”

“Shut up.”

“She tried to climb.”

“Shut up.”

“They shut the gate.”

Harris stopped pulling for half a second.

Patrick tightened his grip. “After that, every man thought only of his own breath. I did too. I am not making myself better than them.”

Rain ran into his eyes.

“But if you cut loose, they pay for you.”

Harris’s arm trembled.

Patrick said, “You know it.”

The blade slipped from Harris’s fingers and fell into the river without a sound anyone could hear.

Harris let out a sob that had no tears in it.

Patrick released him.

The storm did not weaken. It grew worse.

Branches tore loose upstream and came downriver, black shapes riding the flood. The first struck Pike’s cage and spun away. The second hit one of the posts with a crack like a gunshot.

The rope holding Tran’s cage snapped.

For one second the cage stayed where it was, pressed sideways by the current.

Then it broke free.

“Tran!” Miller shouted.

The cage spun into the river, turning once, twice. Tran’s hands gripped the bamboo from inside. His face vanished under the water, came up, vanished again.

Patrick did not think.

He drove his back against the split where Harris’s blade had weakened the bamboo. Once. Twice. On the third hit, the wet strip cracked. He forced his arm through, skin peeling. The rope around his wrist caught. He pulled until the world narrowed to pain.

The rosary snagged on the broken bamboo.

For a moment it held him fast.

Patrick looked at the beads. His father’s beads. His mother’s mouth on them. Home, in a circle around his wrist.

Tran’s cage struck a submerged stump and rolled.

Patrick tore his hand free.

The rosary stayed caught.

The river took him.

Warm water closed over his head. He kicked in boots heavy as stones. His bound arms dragged behind him. Rain beat the river above him into a white skin.

He surfaced beside Tran’s cage, coughing. Tran was inside, twisted sideways, his mouth barely above water.

Patrick threw himself against the bamboo. The cage rolled. Tran went under.

“No,” Patrick said, though the river took the word.

He hooked one elbow through the bars and kicked. The current tried to pull them both away. He saw the latch, a loop of rope and bamboo swollen tight with water. He reached with his bound hands but could not get his fingers around it.

The rosary chain still hung from his wrist, broken loose from most of the beads but caught around the skin. A length of it dangled free.

Patrick shoved his arm through the bars.

“Take it,” he said.

Tran’s hand found his in the dark.

Patrick looped the chain through the latch and pulled. It cut into his palm. He pulled harder. The little cross pressed into his flesh. The latch shifted.

Tran shoved from inside.

The cage opened enough for his face to clear the water.

He breathed.

Patrick laughed once, a cracked sound the storm swallowed.

Then the chain snapped.

What remained of the rosary disappeared into the river.

At dawn, the guards found them on a mud bank half a mile downstream.

Patrick was lying beside Tran, one arm still hooked through the cage. He had no memory of reaching land. His whole body shook. His cut arm had gone stiff. Tran was breathing, though each breath seemed to cost him.

The young guard with bad teeth stood over Patrick and stared.

“Ghost,” he said.

Patrick opened one eye. “No.”

The guard did not understand.

Miller did. From where he knelt in the mud with a rifle at his back, he gave a tired smile.

They beat Patrick for breaking the cage. Not badly enough to kill him. Just enough to remind him his body belonged to men on the bank now.

By afternoon the camp was moving.

The prisoners were roped together and made to walk barefoot through mud. Patrick’s boots had been taken. His clothes hung from him in strips. His wrist felt naked without the beads.

Harris walked behind him.

For a long while neither man spoke.

Then Harris said, “I would’ve run.”

Patrick kept his eyes on the ground. “I know.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

“I’m not sorry I wanted to.”

Patrick stepped over a root. “I know that too.”

Harris said nothing for several yards. Then he took a torn strip from his own shirt and pressed it into Patrick’s hand.

“For your wrist.”

Patrick looked back at him.

Harris’s face was swollen and empty with shame, but he did not look away.

Patrick wrapped the cloth around the rope burn. His fingers were clumsy. Harris reached forward and tied the knot for him.

Near the front of the line, Tran stumbled. Miller caught him by the elbow before the guard saw.

The jungle steamed after rain. Birds called from places Patrick could not see. The river was behind them now, moving on without any concern for what it had carried.

Miller fell into step beside Patrick when the path widened.

“Can I ask you something?”

Patrick nodded.

“What year do you think it is now?”

Patrick looked at the men ahead of him. Bare feet. Bound hands. Bent backs. Rifles walking behind them. He thought of steerage and the locked gate, of the child lifted upward, of his mother in Mayo hearing his name read from a list.

He thought of the sea taking him cold and the river giving him back warm.

Then he looked at Miller.

“It is the same year,” Patrick said.

Miller did not answer.

They walked on into the trees.