All my clothes were soaked with salty mist and my hair was slightly stiff, as though sculpted with cheap hair gel. The air was wild but warm, warm enough that my damp clothes and hair didn’t bother me at all. I like the smell and sound of the ocean. Some people are bothered by how negligible it makes them feel, but I like it. I guess how you feel about this depends on how you suppose a higher power—be it divine or earthly, depending on what you believe—would feel about you. I am slightly arrogant, so I always imagine that I would get along just fine with a higher power.
Anyway, I had been away for a long time and was on my way home. The morning sun over the ocean looked magnificent from where I stood on the cliff’s edge. Just a few paces ahead the cliff cut off like a final judgment and below it was a tremendous drop. Rock-nesting birds were circling below me and the air was full of their voices. Once in a while I heard the horns of departing ships. That sound was coming from the harbor below, which is where I needed to go. I was transfixed by the view, by the feeling that was rising in me like a wave. Here I stand in the golden glow. Tireless. Fearless. Full of energy and youth. No past. No future. Only this endless power that belongs to the perpetual present. I am the emperor of the world! Anyone can be the emperor of the world, but not for long.
I had been shunted here by the currents of my life, like a rock that an eddy had pushed out of the main flow of the river and deposited in the shallow sands of the riverbank. Here, at the Edge of the World I wandered for a while, free and unconstrained by responsibilities and the normal rules that govern life in the Center. But one can’t step out forever. It was time for me to step away from the edge, to go down the winding road that descended from this cliff and catch a ride home. I turned from the ocean and started walking down the hill and into town.
It was a port town that owed its existence to travelers like me who needed passage to and fro and congregated in droves awaiting the departures of their ships. In the meantime, they enjoyed the town’s untamed beauty, its wild air, and its magnificent eateries where, dressed in their ragged clothes and dirty boots, they happily consumed marvels of culinary creation served unassumingly on mismatched dishes. The first thing I did when I got into town was to get some food. There was a place that sold a type of spiced, fried meat pie that I just had to have before I left. I did not expect to ever taste the likes of it again. Next, I bought all sorts of snacks for the journey because everyone knows that the capacity of one’s stomach expands about twofold while traveling in restrictive environments like ships, trains, and planes.
Once the food situation was sorted out, I turned my attention to my actual purpose in being here: I had to see to it that I boarded a ship today. I didn’t have a ticket or boarding pass or any other sort of arrangement. I wasn’t on the passenger ledger anywhere. This was not how things got done around here. Elsewhere, closer to the Center of the World, I would certainly have had to arrange my travel in advance and there would be no way that I could expect to get on any ship if I just showed up at the dock with my bag on the day of departure. Here, at the Edge of the World, this is exactly how people got on ships. But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t other challenges.
You see, here the captains controlled who got on their ships and who didn’t, and the only way to get passage was to convince a captain to take you on. If you had a convincing story that you belonged where they were going, you were declared a “Homegoer” and would get to board for free. The convention was that no one could ever be denied passage home, so if you could convince a captain that you were a Homegoer you were golden. Now, if you wanted to go someplace that wasn’t your home, you were declared a “Traveler” and the captain could decide if they had space for you that day and would set a price. They could decide that they didn’t have space, or that they simply didn’t like you and didn’t want to deal with you for weeks at sea, or they could set a price that you couldn’t afford. That left you having to wait for the next ship and the next captain, whose disposition might be different. Even though the port was abuzz with ships constantly arriving and departing, Travelers were known to get stuck in town for weeks awaiting transport. Such people probably accounted for half of the town’s population.
Now, since you already know that I was planning to go home, you might be thinking that none of this should have bothered me. You might be thinking that I was basically guaranteed passage. In theory, this should have been the case, but in practice things were more complicated for me. You see, it was not enough to know that the place you were going was your home. What really mattered was your ability to convince a captain of that. Some captains were noble and kind and were on your side, or at least they were not out to get you. But you have to remember that captains only made money from transporting Travelers not Homegoers, and many captains—I would guess about half—were not in any hurry to give you the benefit of the doubt when it came to your in-group status. If in doubt, they tended to rule that you were a Traveler, which allowed them to charge you for transport. You’d think that people routinely disputed this, but that hardly ever happened. Captains got to decide who got on their ships and that was that, except that if word got out that a captain routinely and insolently denied passage to Homegoers, the convention was for Travelers to boycott their ship. Thus, a balance was maintained between good conscience and good business.
For many people who find themselves at the Edge of the World, money is a real issue. Some have no money left at all. Many of them have also not been home for decades, which is part of the reason they don’t have any money. For those people, convincing a captain of their Homegoer status is both a necessity and a real challenge, a necessity because they cannot afford to pay and a challenge because they have half forgotten who they are. I was fortunate enough to have saved up some money and I knew I would be able to afford any reasonable fare, and yet, I was growing more and more anxious as I approached the docks.
Like I said, if it were only a matter of paying for passage, I would be all right. It was not really about the money though. I desperately, passionately wanted to travel as a Homegoer because I had been a traveler all my life, and now I wanted to belong. But belonging was a little complicated. I was born in one place, raised in another, came of age in a third place, and had my first adult job in yet another place.
If I chose to travel to the place I was born, the place that holds hostage my blood, I might be able to convince a captain it was my home if he asked me about the place’s history. I knew quite a lot about how my ancestors had lived, but my knowledge of culture, music, television, and the like were frozen in the past. I knew what my parents had known. What would I do if I were asked about what had happened there in the past few decades?
I could choose to travel to the place where I spent most of my childhood. The memory of that place was aglow in my heart, and if a captain asked me what it was like being a kid there I could be very convincing. I could tell them about my schoolyard, the street where I used to play, the music everyone listened to, the shows we watched, and I could even describe which teen idol made all the girls swoon back then. But I didn’t know how taxes worked, when elections were held, what one needed to do to get a driver’s license. I figured my odds of passing as a Homegoer were not great.
I thought next about the place where I spent my teenage and early adult years. Perhaps that’s where I should go. I had a more balanced experience of that place since it touched the outside edges of both my childhood and my adulthood. But scrape the surface just a tiny bit and I would draw a blank. What childhood books did parents read their kids? How do families celebrate holidays? What songs do kids sing on school trips? I had no roots in that place. My family had no roots there.
Finally, I thought of the last place I lived before I started traveling. I came there as an adult, had my first adult job and adult responsibilities, voted in an election, purchased a home and owned a car. I paid taxes there and had had a mortgage. Surely, this had to make me a Homegoer. If I was lucky, I would happen upon a captain who wouldn’t ask me about childhood memories, holiday traditions, my high school prom, college parties. And I sure as hell had to hope that they wouldn’t think to ask me whether I had any blood relatives at all who also lived there.
“No big deal! No big deal!” – I tried convincing myself. “Just pick a place (if you can pick one), and try your luck with a captain. If he accepts you as a Homegoer, well and good. If not, just pay for the damn ticket and be done with it.” But then the thought of being weighed like King Belshazzar and found wanting—too light, too different, too strange—and then having to share quarters perhaps with another person, someone who, unlike me, was judged to belong. What would that make me? A fake? A stranger who failed at pretending? A pesky guest who doesn’t want to leave? An appropriator? And not too long after I got on that ship I would sit down to dine with that other person, whoever they may be, and they would ask me, “So, where are you REALLY from?” I would then feel an impotent desire to hurt this person, but I would know it is not their fault. They meant no harm. I would judge myself for this flash of ill will, and I would start telling the tedious story of my life and they would listen with academic curiosity and register that they were right, that I am a stranger, or at least that I am strange. Oh no! Of all the things in this world patently not for me, that experience at that point in my life topped the list.
The more I thought about it the happier I became that I had bothered to eat a good meal before coming to the docks, because this was all quite depressing and if the day was going to go south I was glad I had engineered at least that one high point. How could it be that I had gone to elementary school, high school, college, and I had had jobs just like everybody else, and yet I didn’t have a coherent story to tell about where I came from? I had complained to a friend once that I was homeless, and he had hurried to negate it: “You are not homeless! You are a citizen of the world! You have seen so many places! You know so much more than the rest of us about different cultures! You can speak so many languages!” Well, there is no goddamned ship departing this dock to “the world.” No. You have to pick an actual place, one place, and there are none, it seems, where I definitely belong.
Suddenly, I knew what I would do. Near the dock there was a coffee shop. It was run by an old, bearded guy who looked like a caricature of a sailor; he was gruff, covered in facial hair, looked old and young at the same time, and knew everything there was to know about the docks. I went in, bought a coffee and sat at the bar. When there was a natural break in customers I told him that I was a Traveler looking to get off the Edge of the World and move toward the Center, but that I didn’t much care where to go. I asked him which ships currently in dock were headed to destinations that were not so popular at the moment. This would tell me which captains might be happy to take a Traveler right away without making him wait.
“Well, ain’t nobody going to *** right now. Even Homegoers aren’t keen on it. On account of the weather. The weather there this time of year is shit.”
“Great! Thank you!” I quickly finished my coffee and went to look for the dock the man had indicated. I told the captain that I was a Traveler, that I had never been to the ship’s home port before, but that I really needed to go there for personal reasons. I was very polite, but very clear that my reasons were very personal. He looked at me like maybe I was a bit stupid, but said nothing further. He set a price that was obviously too high (why not charge a stupid person a higher price?), but not so high that I couldn’t afford it, and that was that. Two hours later I was standing on the deck watching the cliffs at the Edge of the World recede into the distance. People said that when the Edge of the World fades on the horizon, one’s memory of it fades much more quickly than normal memories. We shall see. The place I was going to was quite remote by normal standards, but it was firmly situated within the Center of the World, where normal rules applied. Ships departing from there operated in the way that you are probably familiar with: all passengers had to buy tickets in advance, regardless of whether they were going home or not. My plan was that once I got to *** I would immediately buy a ticket to go home and I wouldn’t have to pass a goddamn test and no one would make it their business to tell me whether I belonged or not. Now I had two weeks to decide where is home.
Copyright © 2023 Anna Braverman