by Ellen Datlow
He remembered those kisses—necks impossibly elongated, their swimming bodies in extremis as they wrapped around each other. Ann had loved them, and he had loved them more than he would say. But they promised so much—had anyone ever felt such passion in a normal marriage?
Yes, yes they had. Feelings he didn’t have words for. After Ann passed away he took the prints down and stuck them in the back of a closet so he might forget they were there. When his girls asked what happened to the prints he said he wasn’t sure. He had no idea what his life was now, but it wasn’t about that anymore.
The kiss last night had been nothing like the kisses in those prints. But it still had been surprising, although not exactly pleasant.
When Lee finally left his cabin he encountered the ship’s activities director, her fixed smile more predatory than friendly. From the beginning she’d made him feel bullied. “I’m so glad I was able to run into you. You haven’t been sick, have you?”
“Out too late,” he said, “I suppose having too much fun. You must have hundreds of people, don’t you, to be concerned about?”
“All equally important. Tell me, how can I make sure you have the time of your life?”
The very phrase the time of your life depressed him. “I’m doing fine, easing into things. Relaxing. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“Of course not! But I’m sure we can do better. I know four lovely ladies eager for some male company at lunch.”
He began his retreat. “Too much fun to do today, I’m afraid.” He turned his back and practically ran.
“You’ll leave empty-handed if you don’t make it happen!” she shouted after him. He felt dizzy and struggled not to fall as the floor appeared, briefly, to melt.
Every afternoon the decks stank of suntan oil. Every lounge chair was full of barely clothed flesh in various stages of destruction. He thought of Jonestown, the bodies darkening in the intense tropical heat.
These were not ugly people. They were just trying to enjoy their vacations. Lee believed there were no ugly people, but he himself didn’t have the courage to lie about half-naked, not with his aging carcass. He scanned the faces, looking for his mystery woman, even though she would seem out of place in a lounge chair in the sun.
“Aren’t you going to say hello?” He recognized Sylvia’s voice, but he couldn’t find her in the sea of glistening skin, oversized sunglasses, and floppy sunhats. “Over here, in the red.”
He walked over. She wore an old-fashioned-looking red two-piece suit. He thought she looked unusually sober. “You seem relaxed,” he said.
“You probably think I look fat in this.”
“I think … you look fine. Most of us aren’t that slim, not at this age. We hold onto that memory of what we used to be too firmly. If you like what you’re doing, that’s what counts, isn’t it?”
“I guess—I didn’t expect you to be so enlightened. Most men aren’t.”
“I’m not enlightened. If I were, I would be dressed in swim trunks.”
She laughed. “Will I see you at dinner later?”
“I don’t really know. But enjoy the sun.”
That hadn’t been so difficult. Perhaps he knew what to say to people after all. He continued to look at faces, struggling to remember the features of the woman from the night before. It wasn’t a good feeling. No doubt she would be appalled if she knew he was searching. But he was just making himself seen. If she wished to approach him it was up to her.
He strolled through the restaurants and stood at the back of a dance class. He looked for that yellow dress, but wouldn’t she have changed by now? He hadn’t behaved like this since high school.
He wondered what Ann would have thought of his behavior. Embarrassed for him, possibly, or sad. By sunset most of the chairs were empty. He should eat something, but he didn’t think he could. He sat down. He should be writing his daughters, letting them know how he was doing, but what in the world would he say? I’ve met someone, perhaps. Both the truth and a lie.
Both the sea and the sky appeared the rumpled gray of an unmade bed. The horizon line had been almost completely erased. Staring too long into the blurring of borders made him ill.
“You miss her—she is all you can think about.” The woman slipped into the next chair. Instead of looking at him she stared into that disorientating gray. Her dress, too, was gray this evening, or some shade of off-white.
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“You’ve lost your story, then,” she replied. Today he could see that she wasn’t a young woman. The skin of her neck was crepey, and there was loose flesh beneath her eyes. Perhaps she was his age after all.
“I just feel I should be doing something, but I don’t know what to do.” It made him feel unbearably sad to say this.
“You were in a story which worked for you for a very long time. But that story has ended, and yet you find you are still alive, and now you are in a different story you do not yet understand.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“Live your life. Enjoy your vacation. Life may look quite different when you return.”
“But I don’t seem to be very good at this.”
“Take a walk with me,” she said, standing up and grabbing his hand. “You can do that much.” It seemed he didn’t have a choice. She guided him down the deck until they reached a small door in the hull that said CREW ONLY. She opened it and dragged him inside.
They were at an intersection of corridors. She took him through another door and down some metal stairs. He felt like a child being hand-led like this. The air was steamy. Her gray dress clung like excess skin.
These interior walls lacked the polish of the public areas. No upholstery or shiny white paint—the metal was dirty yellow with brown rust around the seams and rivets and bolts. There were distant echoes of harsh male argument and laughter, the rattle of machinery, metal banging against metal.
Another trip down another set of stairs—the paint completely worn off the grungy treads. They hadn’t even bothered to mop up the dirt. Where were all those eager little uniformed men with their mops and smiles you saw on the passenger decks? The filth in the corners and along the edges had congealed into a black scum.
A muscular, shirtless man walked past them without a glance. Pressure was rising in Lee’s head, a thrumming against his ear drums. He wondered if they were below water level now.
He wanted to ask her name—it was absurd he didn’t know—but it didn’t seem like the time. He should have insisted she reveal where they were going but he couldn’t make himself speak. Her hand was delicate, yet she gripped his so firmly it hurt. Sweat made her skin appear gelatinous. Sweat was running into his eyes. He struggled with his free hand to wipe his face.
The next level down was packed with equipment. A wall of noise moved through him like a wave. His internal organs shook. Overhead were layer after layer of pipes, cables, gears, gauges, valves. The corridor shrank until it was no more than a catwalk—on either side he could see more machinery and more shirtless men far below, so distant they appeared to be miniatures, or was it possible the cramped working space required dwarves?
The walls of the ship were weeping, rivulets oozing down the seams and gathering in depthless pools below. The air smothered him in the stench of decay.
A narrow ladder dropped into an even darker place—there was no light, no reflection. She made him trade positions and when he hesitated she nipped his cheek with teeth like ice. The blood ran down his face and when he tried to wipe it off she darted forward as if to kiss or bite but licked him instead. Her tongue felt expansive. “You need to go first,” she whispered. She let go of his hand as he took the first step down, but when he hesitated—What am I doing?—she placed her bare foot on his shoulder—When did she take off her shoes?—and forced him down several more rungs. He surrendered and led the way into the jet-black mist.
At the bottom he couldn’t see his feet on the floor, if it wa
s a floor. It was something solid, but it felt less than stable. Before he could figure it out she jerked him off his feet. The blackness fragmented into hundreds of glistening bits, resembling butterflies or birds, but which might have been fish. They disappeared as suddenly as they had appeared.
Lee felt the damp on his face but it didn’t feel like sweat. Maybe he was crying. Certainly he felt barely controlled, fear and incredible sadness welling up with no words for any of it. He tried to think of his daughters and how sorry he was to leave them but their faces broke down into incoherency. He sobbed, and glistening air bubbles propelled in front of him. He was deep underwater and should have been dead, drowning in excruciatingly slow motion.
She wrapped her arms around him, arms so flexible they might have been boneless. She wrapped those long tubes of skin around his head, her moist whispers ordering him to turn, rocking his head painfully.
A translucent shape came forward out of the nothing: huge eyes and skeletal head, teeth so long and sharp it couldn’t close its mouth. Floating around it was an expanse of insubstantial rags, great sheets of peeled flesh unfolding, their bioluminescent edges pulsing slowly. They suddenly darted in Lee’s direction. He screamed with no sound. Something caught in his mouth. He reached up and felt his teeth, several inches long and razor sharp. Something blurry went into one of his eyes. He reached up and slowly pulled it out. His eyes were cavernous holes where anything could enter.
He shook his head vigorously. All the loose skin of him, the torn flesh and ragged filaments of him, floated around his face. He looked down at his body and could find neither his arms nor his legs.
He turned to her then, her mouth so wide, her lips so swollen, so dark. Saudade, she said, Saudade, until she had him completely in her mouth.
Lee was suddenly awake, lying on his bed in the cabin. Water drained off him and onto the sheets, then onto the floor. Everything was wet and everything stank. The housekeepers were always so eager for something to do—he had plenty for them to clean today.
He glanced up at that terrible, banal artwork, and thought of those Chagall prints hidden away in the back of a closet at home. He could send a letter from the ship telling his daughters where the prints were, and that they could have them. Ann would have wanted them to have them. His message would get there before the ship returned to home port.
The intercom came alive and a lovely voice announced that all passengers were welcome to go ashore and identifyed the day’s exit points. Lee hadn’t ventured off the ship at any of the ports of call so far, but he needed to, didn’t he, if only to buy souvenirs for his girls? When they were little they’d loved souvenirs from his business trips. He’d arrive home and after all the hugs and kisses they’d gather around his giant suitcase on the bed as he opened it to reveal what he’d brought them—usually a little T-shirt or a stuffed animal with the city’s name embroidered across the front. It had been this simple ritual that had always made such perfect sense and it had been wondrous.
He climbed out of the wet bed and stripped off his soggy clothing, leaving it on the floor for the staff. Brisk use of a couple of towels left him moderately dry. He found his best shirt and pants in the closet, a pair of dress shoes, clean socks and underwear. Nothing terribly fancy, but still, the best he had brought. Every bit of the carpet was damp and he had no dry place to sit. Water was even dripping off his desk chair. So he stood and balanced himself carefully against the wall, pulling on his clothes and trying not to let them touch the carpet for more than a second or two. It took a while but finally he was dressed. At the last moment he grabbed his good sports jacket off the hanger and left the room.
The water in these Caribbean ports was so clear you could see schools of fish travelling beneath the crystalline surfaces. But so far their perfection had not persuaded him. Lee felt there had to be something terribly wrong behind such movie-magical sets, and he had no interest in discovering exactly what.
But today’s excursion was for his daughters. A crewmember swiped his ID card and he walked down the gangway at a brisk clip, eager to get his errands done and then get back on board. His pace fell awkwardly into step with the cacophonous melodies of the ubiquitous steel drums. It was quite the production—the musicians wore non-identical but similar yellow and orange tropical suits. Two dark-skinned dancers performed in complementing colors. The music wasn’t exactly unpleasant, but there was too much of it and too much the same. Lee felt as if everyone was looking at him, but doubted that anyone had actually noticed at all.
The beach here was white enough to hurt the eyes. He wondered if the sand was hot to the touch, and remained on the wooden walk just in case. He felt as if he had stepped into a rich oil painting whose colors were almost too intense to bear. What was that style called? He wished he knew more of the proper names for things. Ann certainly had.
But for Lee this was like the worst kind of dreaming, the kind that came when you were running a high fever and you felt as if you were rotting from the inside out, as so many of these islands probably were, what with the fruit, the jungle, their heightened cycle of birth and death. Or had he imagined it all? He knew very little about these places. He didn’t even know what island he was on. He hadn’t bothered to check.
It didn’t take long to find the shop he wanted, one offering native wood carvings—animals mostly, but a few religious icons, and some doll-sized figures with extraordinarily ugly faces, the kind of eccentric gift both his daughters loved. The figures looked more Polynesian than Latin American but that didn’t matter. The clerk offered to box them up ready to mail—a shipping center was only a few doors away. Lee mailed them and headed back to the ship.
He chose not to tour the island. Maybe that was a mistake, but what could a casual visitor see anyway? He couldn’t imagine an excursion that wouldn’t depress him. He’d want to know what was on the other side of the barbed wire or behind the huts. He’d want to know what the tourists weren’t allowed to see. He’d want to ask them how you lived on an island in the middle of the ocean. If you wanted to go somewhere, where could you go? And none of this would answer the question of his aching.
He was tempted to find the woman again but knew he shouldn’t. Instead he returned to his cabin to write long letters to both his daughters. He wasn’t surprised to find his cabin in pristine condition. That was what they did here—they cleaned up all your messes as if they’d never been. They erased your mistakes. It was a complete escape from life. Some people welcomed that.
He wrote his long rambling letters full of memories and feelings and good wishes and everything he could think of to say to the people he cared most about in the world. Exhausted, he signed “Dad” to each and crawled into bed. In the morning he would look the letters over carefully to make sure he hadn’t said anything he shouldn’t have, and after he was done he would drop them off to be mailed at the next port.
Lee woke up sometime in the middle of the night. He was shaking. He thought at first that the ship’s horn had blown, that some disaster had occurred, but he waited there in bed and heard nothing more—no horn, no footsteps outside. He couldn’t even hear the ocean, or feel its movement.
He got up and slipped into the same clothes he’d worn that morning. He even put on his sports jacket. It was likely to be cold.
He walked out onto the empty deck. There was no one at the railing, no one in any of the deck chairs. He walked by the closed shops and stared in at the mannequins, willing them to move. The lights in the restaurants and even in the casino were out, which seemed unlikely. The casino was open all the time.
The elevator wasn’t working so he took the steps up and down. He encountered no one on any of the decks he tried. He decided he wasn’t going to get upset over this, and so he stopped looking. He could have knocked on random cabin doors, but of course he wouldn’t do that. Let them sleep—it was the least he could do.
He went back up the stairs to the top deck of the ship. There was a swimming pool, but no one was in it. It
was so dark he couldn’t even tell if there was water in the pool. He heard nothing.
Someone stood at the forward observation point by the telescopes. He walked up behind her. Of course it was her. She was peering into one of the eyepieces.
He stepped closer. “What do you see?”
She turned around slowly. “I have not been home in a very long time, and I’ve never seen it from this angle. Sometimes I believe I do not miss it, but actually I miss it very much. Saudade, of course. Saudade.”
He stepped up beside her and looked out at the ocean: boundless, dark, and moving, although he couldn’t hear the waves. But he could see no land ahead of them, or anywhere else.
“You should look through the telescope. It might satisfy your yearnings.”
He didn’t want to do that. But he rested his hand on top of the scope and gazed at her. She seemed different, but he couldn’t quite see her face, even though they were very close together. Perhaps his eyes were going bad. Perhaps even if he looked through the telescope he would be unable to see what was right in front of him.
“Perhaps you would like a kiss first,” she said, “for encouragement.”
He didn’t want to, but she came to him anyway. He closed his eyes when their lips met. She tasted of something he did not recognize. He felt his body beginning to lift, to float. Still their lips were locked together, their tongues barely touching. He could feel his neck beginning to stretch, and bend, and soon he was upside down, and floating out over and past the rail, and over the ocean.
But they were still kissing. They were still kissing. Until all his weight returned.
