He isn’t in India now; he is in the belly of the Volunteer, and he is in paradise, and he is in hell. Slick hands rove over his naked body, thick-jointed and strong-fingered against the freezing damp — they turn him this way and that, stripping the darkness from him as a corpse is stripped of its shroud for the anatomist’s table. They are hot hands, alive with hot blood, and they press the warmth into his shivering limbs like a bear licking its newborn young into shape. He is stripped of his own death, like a newborn its caul. Greased fingers press into his mouth, salt as butter against his tongue and chattering teeth. There is a sort of carnival atmosphere going on at the very edge of Sumner’s consciousness, all the grinning and hooting of the damned, and the wardroom is dark and wet as a womb.

Great coarse Otto rubs the heat into him with his great coarse hands — murmuring in his ear tales of death deferred, holding him against his chest like a lover. Other seamen whom he does not know take their part in the great endeavor too, groping and rubbing at his naked frost-rasped legs. His prick has shrunken in tight and close from the cold, dwindling into gristle, but some shy hand cups over it and puffs blood-hot gusts of air over the pitiful puckered skin until he can feel it drawing down. He is only flesh, chilled flesh and hard glands and wet prickling hair, and he must be made into a man again.

Captain Brownlee oversees it as the foreman of his ruin. Any man may come and make his use of him — such is the salutary public role of the ship’s surgeon on a whaler. The whalers seize on him with such brutal jollity that he fears he may be torn apart — they make to open him at both ends, so that he cannot tell fingers and thumbs from pricks and balls, and his own prick spouts its mess once and twice again until he is certain his body can bear no more, as if they will flense him of his vital essences and wring him dry.

The crewmen hoist him from tub to table and back again, handling him like so much wet laundry, and the suppleness returns to him by inches. Baxter and Bain, Stevens, the blacksmith, and other men whose names he does not know, men who are anatomized down to their parts — their hands and pricks and hairy thighs, their grunts and mutterings like the sounds of livestock. Their attention chafes the warmth back into his limbs, and at first he is all prickles and pains but the friction of it turns the corner into a kind of strange ardor.

When it comes time for the carpenter McKendrick to give him a going-over, he gives his thighs such a tender and companionable frigging that it is like being used for the first time by a true and honest lover — McKendrick’s cock is so thick and stout that Patrick is grateful not to endure it in any one of holes even as he makes pathetic cries of need at each jostle of it. Sumner forces his quaking knees together, the better to catch the pressure of friction against his own prick and stones, that place that is called the perineum in pregnant women who must be cut. The slip of a foreskin catches against the fine hairs of Sumner’s thighs, and McKendrick’s heavy balls slap against him fit to keep time for a sailor’s hornpipe.

After that Sumner is not so kindly used — raw-faced Cavendish fits a prick to his hole without delay, stretching his fundament cruelly with two fingers as Drax fucks his throat. The two of them banter with one another back and forth over his bent body, teasing and calling one another by their Christian names like they must have done in knocking-shops and cunny warrens the whole world over. The joke no doubt is at Patrick’s expense but they may as well be speaking Dutch as they grind into him. Drax’s verminous body stinks of skinned meat, and some other thinner rot he cannot place except for on the battlefield. Sumner does not gag, though he knows under no other circumstance could he take such rough use — the only taste in his mouth is the rank high savor of goose-grease and the same salt water that would have drowned him, not cold now but hot as man’s blood.

Some man spills against his face, or some boy rather, for the murmur of apology is soft as a woman’s — a hot cloth is draped over his eyes, so hot that the lids of his eyes are lit up in molten red, but he may retain his sight without the salt of man’s spunk crusting his eyelashes as it does his beard. Stiff and dizzy, he writhes against the hard wood like a man under the knife, raw with pleasure.

Even without eyes he knows that it is Jones who takes his wrung-out prick in his mouth. The wet strait place there is mercifully hot, it seems to Sumner as hot as a furnace — Jones has small hands, neat and diligent around the base of his prick, and they do travel. He slinks into him with two fingers, then three, and fucks into him with his fingers until at last his whole hand is inside him, patiently thrust past the bands of muscle that are slack past all resisting. The knuckles of his good right hand are pressing into that gland whose name Sumner has forgotten now, and Sumner’s guts are stretched to bursting, the bands of him rattling apart with groaning and hard breathing. It is more than pleasure now, more even than pain that stretches him to splitting, and Sumner can feel the brush of Jones’ grease-wet shirt cuff against his jouncing balls.

The powerful urge to piss grips him, or perhaps it is only the hard ghost that is left after all climax is exhausted — with a man’s fist inside him, he cannot be ashamed. In the grip of laudanum he has soiled his person in every imaginable way, and it had been pleasant to him because it had been without interruption, because it had been easier. Sumner lets go of his bladder, pissing down his legs and drenching the table beneath him. All is one, seawater and sweat and spunk and piss and blood, the grease of men’s unwashed cheeks and heads mingled with the fat of fish, fowl, flesh.

Once Jones has stuffed him it is all easier; he is all-greedy now, all mouth and no voice. One after another, the men fill him and plaster him with their spunk, warming Sumner from the inside with the hot fluids of their use — his hollow hungry belly has begun to swell with the mass of their deposits, and his body can only receive the animal heat pouring into the guts of him, chasing the punishing cold from his bones. Cavendish rubs his greased-up swollen belly, and laughs like a dog when Sumner whimpers; the spunk is dribbling out of his much-fucked hole, but the interior of him still churns with seed. The mirth of the men is only a dull roar and he wants nothing more than to huddle in his degradation and to void himself at his leisure, and to sleep.

The fever-heat is on him now, oppressive as a wet cloth and close as the insides of some living thing: he does not see, he does not hear, but his lovers now are warmth and blackness and constriction and sinks into oblivion like a feather bed. There can be no pain.