The figure-eight knot he tied with his eyes closed, fingers finding the nylon line in the darkness of four in the morning the way they found it every day for two hundred days; the gesture so perfect in its repetition that the body performed it without the head commanding it. A knot he had learned at twelve on the Irrawaddy where the fish were small and the line was cotton and his father stood beside him and the river was the river of home, not this sea that did not end, this sea where the coast had disappeared weeks ago and the horizon was a line separating two voids: the void of the sky and the void of the water. The fisherman cast the line. The knot held.

The Manchester United shirt, size L, given by the broker at the port of Ranong, was the only thing they had given him without marking it on the debt; the crest with the red devil had faded from salt and sun until it became a pink oval, the shape of something that had been something. The cut between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, from the line on the third day, the salt reopened every morning. It would not close until the salt ran out. The salt never ran out.

The debt was 32000 baht: a figure the broker in Ranong had spoken in Thai and the translator had translated into Burmese rounding upward, because the difference between the Thai number and the Burmese number was the translator's margin, a margin no one verified because who verifies a number in a language he does not speak. 32000 baht that included the journey from the border to the coast, the work permit that was not a work permit but a sheet with a stamp that said temporary worker without specifying the duration; the duration was the duration of the debt and the duration of the debt was the duration of the voyage at sea and the duration of the voyage at sea was decided by the captain based on the fish. When there was enough fish they returned. When there was not enough they stayed. The contract was verbal, spoken in Thai by the captain and translated by the same translator who had translated the debt, with the same approximations, the same missing words, the same voids the fisherman had filled with what he hoped and not with what was. The captain's ledger, the black notebook with the rigid plastic cover, had a page for each fisherman: name in Thai, initial debt, penalties, payments. The penalties were written in pencil. 200 baht for each infraction. The infractions were: using the phone, refusing a shift, slowing the pace, sleeping past the shift, speaking with another trawler, asking the position. The Burmese fisherman had three penalties in two hundred days. One for asking the position on the twentieth day: the captain had answered sea. One for slowing the pace on the seventy-eighth day when the fever had risen to thirty-nine and his hands could not grip the line. One for the phone he had not yet asked for but would ask for.

He waited until the captain was alone on the bridge, until the others slept under the tarpaulin at the stern where the bodies piled during rest shifts, until the diesel engine was the only sound; he approached the captain who stood against the railing with the black notebook under his arm (the notebook where every debt was written in pencil, in pencil because pencil can be erased, the broker in Ranong had said, which was the only true thing the broker had said, because everything else had been said in a language the fisherman did not speak and translated by a man who did not translate but sold), and said the name of his wife. Khin Mar. He said it the way one says a word in a language the other does not understand; he asked for ninety seconds. Ninety seconds to say the name of the port where they would arrive in four months, Samut Sakhon, because Khin Mar did not know where Samut Sakhon was, did not know whether the fisherman was in Thailand or Malaysia or in the waters of no one where flags do not count and fish have no nationality. The captain opened the notebook. Found the page. The fisherman saw his name written in Thai characters he could not read next to a number he could read: the debt.

The phone was an old Samsung with the screen cracked in the lower right corner, a phone the captain kept in his trouser pocket alongside the keys to the padlock on the cold storage; the fisherman held it with both hands, fingers on the plastic warm from the sun on the bridge. He dialled the number he knew by heart, the number of Khin Mar's neighbour because Khin Mar did not have a phone, the number he had repeated every night for two hundred nights in the bunk where the salt settled on his lips before sleep. The neighbour answered on the fourth ring. She passed the phone to Khin Mar. Khin Mar's voice was the voice of Khin Mar. The fisherman said: Samut Sakhon. He said: four months. He said: I am well. He did not say the debt. He did not say the cut on his hand that would not close. He did not say the hours. Khin Mar said something the fisherman did not hear because the diesel engine was louder than the voice in the phone and the captain was watching the clock.

Ninety seconds. The captain took back the phone. He opened the black notebook. The pencil wrote: 200. The fisherman returned to the stern. His hands were empty. Between the empty hands and the line there was the name of the port that Khin Mar now knew, if she had heard, if the neighbour had not covered the phone, if Samut Sakhon had crossed to the other side of the sea through the cracked Samsung and the signal bouncing off a satellite that knew nothing of the debt. The fisherman did not know. He would not know for four months.