No one can grow, up in Qaanaaq without going to sea. No one can live as I have, as a professional student and expedition outfitter and guide in North Greenland, without being forced to go to sea. I've been on more ships and for much longer periods of time than I care to remember. If I'm not actually standing on a deck, I've usually managed to repress it.

The process of disintegration started the moment I came on board several hours ago. There's a boiling in my ears, a strange, internal displacement of fluids. I can no longer discern the points of the compass with certainty. Aajumaaq sits on my desk waiting to catch me off guard.

He waits right inside the doorway leading to sleep, and every time I hear my own breath grow deeper and know that now I'm asleep, I don't slip into that peaceful obliteration of reality that I need. Instead, I fall into a dangerous new clarity beside that guiding spirit, the floating dog with three claws on each paw, amplified by my mother's imagination; ever since I was a child, he has been grafted into my nightmares.

It's been about an hour since the engines started up, and from a great distance I sensed rather than heard the play of the anchor and the clattering of the chain, and I'm too tired to stay awake and too tense to sleep, and in the end I just wish for some kind of diversion.

It comes with the opening of my door. There's no knock, no warning footsteps. He tiptoes up to the door, jerks it open, and sticks his head inside.

"The captain wants to see you on the bridge."

He stands in the doorway, trying to make it difficult for me to get out of bed and put on my clothes, trying to make me expose myself. With the quilt around my shoulders I slide down to the foot of the bunk and give the door a kick so that he just manages to pull back his head in time.

Jakkelsen. His name is Jakkelsen. He might have a first name, too, but on the Kronos only surnames are used.

I stand there in the rain until the rubber boat with Lander's silhouette disappears. Since there's no one in sight, I try to lift my box by myself, but have to forget about getting it up the ladder. I leave it behind and climb into the darkness beyond the single light.

The steps end at an open cargo door. Inside, a dim bulb illuminates a green corridor on a level with the second deck. Sheltered from the rain, with his feet up on a cable end box, a boy sits smoking a cigarette.

He's wearing black steel-toed shoes, blue work pants, and a blue wool sweater, and he's too young and much too gaunt to be a sailor.

"I've been waiting for you. Jakkelsen. We use last names here. Captain's orders."

He scrutinizes me. "Stick with me, because I can do things for you, know what I mean?"

He has a dusting of freckles across his nose, his hair is red and curly. Above the cigarette his eyes are half-closed, lazy, inquisitive, insolent. He could be seventeen.

"You can start by getting my baggage."

He gets up reluctantly, letting his cigarette fall to the deck, where it continues to glow.

He barely manages to get up the ladder with the box. He puts it down on the deck. "I have a bad back, know what I mean?"

He walks on ahead, sauntering, with his hands behind his back. I follow with the box. A deep, continuous vibration of giant engines passes through the hull, like a reminder that departure is imminent.

A stairway brings us to the level of the upper decks. Here the smell of diesel fuel dissipates, the air tastes of rain and cold. One corridor has a white wall on the right, a long row of doors on the left. One of them is mine.

Jakkelsen opens it, steps aside so I can enter, follows me in, closes the door, and stands in front of it.

I shove the box aside and sit down on the bed. "Jaspersen. According to the crew list, your name is Jaspersen."

I open the closet.

"How about a quick fuck?"

I wonder whether I've heard right. "Women are crazy about me."

A certain eagerness and excitement has come over him. I stand up. It's important to avoid being caught by surprise.

"That's a good idea," I say. "But let's wait until your birthday. Your fiftieth birthday."

He looks disappointed. "By then you'll be ninety. So I won't be interested."

He gives me a wink and goes out the door. "I know the sea, remember. Stick with me, Jaspersen."

Then he shuts the door.

I unpack. The bathroom is down the corridor. The water from the hot-water tap is scalding. I stand under the shower for a long time. Then I rub my skin with almond oil and put on a jogging suit. I lock the door and lie down under the quilt. The world can come and get me if it needs me. I close my eyes and sink down. Through the gateway. On the desk, Aajumaaq slowly appears. In my dreams I know that it's a dream. It's possible to reach a certain age and a point in your life when even your nightmares start to have a halfway soothing and familiar sense to them. That's about the stage that I've reached.

The engine noise grows louder and they weigh anchor. Then the Kronos sets off. And Jakkelsen opens my door.

I'm positive that I locked it. I make a note that he must have a key. It's a small thing that's worth remembering. "Your uniform," he says outside the door. "We wear uniforms here."

In the closet there are blue pants that are too big, blue T-shirts that are too big, a blue smock that's too big and as shapeless- as a flour sack, and a blue wool sweater. On the floor there's `a pair of short rubber boots with plenty of room to grow into. About five or six sizes, if they're really going to fit.

Jakkelsen is waiting for me outside. He inspects me over his cigarette but doesn't say a word. His fingers drum against the bulkhead; there's a new restlessness about him. He walks on ahead.

At the end of the corridor he turns left to the stairs leading to the upper levels. But I take a right, out onto the deck, and he has to follow me.

I stand by the railing. The air is dripping with ice-cold moisture, the wind is strong and gusty. But you can see lights straight ahead.

"Helsingor-Halsingborg, the strait between Denmark and Sweden. The world's busiest channel, you know. Swedish car ferries, Danish train ferries, a giant marina, container traffic. Every three minutes a ship crosses. There's no other place like it. The Strait of Messina, for instance, I've been there lots of times, it's nothing. This is really something. And in this kind of weather there are disturbances on the radar, it's like taking a submarine through buttermilk soup."

His fingers are drumming nervously on the railing, but his eyes are staring out into the night with what looks like enthusiasm.

"We came through here when I was in the merchant marine school. On board a fullrigger. Sunshine, Kronborg Castle on the port side, and the little girls in the marina got all excited when they saw us."

I go first. We climb up three levels to reach the navigation bridge. To the right of the stairs is the chart room behind two big glass windows. It's dark, but faint red light bulbs glow above laid-out sea charts. We step inside the wheelhouse.

The room is dark. But below us, in the light of a single deck lamp, 250 feet forward in the night, lies the deck of the Kronos. Two 60-foot masts with heavy cargo booms. At each mast four cargo winches; at the entrance to the short, elevated foredeck, a control box for the winches. Between the masts, on the deck, is a rectangular shape under a tarp where several small blue figures are working to secure long, criss-crossed rubber straps. Maybe it's the LMC, the navy's surplus landing vessel. On the foredeck, a huge anchor winch and a hatch in four sections over a cargo hold. Every three feet along the sea rail there's an upright white floodlight. In addition, fire hydrants, foam fire extinguishers and rescue equipment. Nothing else. The deck is clear and shipshape.