Water Memory

by Daniel Pyne

  The Tagalog stops abruptly, done; he and the others at the captain’s table look expectantly at Sentro. She hesitates, then shrugs apologetically. “Now that—honestly, I have no idea what he said.”

  Everyone chuckles and resumes eating and chatting. But from the captain’s lingering, practiced look of annoyed bemusement, it’s clear to Sentro that he doesn’t quite believe her.

  Dessert is an assortment of aromatic sorbets.

  Later, unpacking her bag, Sentro hears a knock on the cabin door and half expects Fontaine Fox, but no—

  “What was it, really?” Big Bruce fills the narrow threshold. He reeks of cod, wine, and Old Spice.

  Sentro takes a step back, frowning. “Excuse me?”

  “Your Micronesian friend, his whole confession or whatever dealio he spewed to us at dinner? I could tell you understood it. Some kind of crypto-Islamic thing?”

  “Hardly.”

  “You know what I’m talking about.” Coffee and licorice sour his heavy breath.

  Sentro angles her head, annoyed. “Bruce. Where are you getting all this?”

  “Okay. Or not. Okay, yeah.” He backs off. “Whatever floats your boat. But me, I like to know who I’m traveling with. Nobody told me I’d be sharing quiet time with ISIS, and they don’t exactly have TSA checkpoints for these junkets.”

  “Philippines is nowhere near Oceania. And almost ninety percent Christian.”

  Bruce looks like he’s been slapped. Softly: “No shit?”

  “No shit.” Sentro starts to close the door, but Bruce raises his hands in surrender.

  “I’m sorry. Sorry. I had a sambuca and some coffee after dinner and, whoa. Never mind. I’m . . .” Bruce gestures behind him, at a huge strapped leather traveler’s trunk. “I was knocking, actually, because I was wondering. Could you help me guide this sucker up the stairs?”

  The case weighs a ton, more than the fat man can manage; Sentro provides more than guidance. Awkward clunking tracks their struggle with Bruce’s trunk out onto the side deck and up the exterior stairway two levels, Bruce uphill hefting one end, Sentro downhill gripping a hand strap, shoulder to the other end.

  They stagger out onto the open deck of the bridge castle—where passengers can marvel at the vastness of the ocean under a spectacular night sky—and they put it down and slide it to the far rail. The dark containers stacked in tidy rows on the main deck stretch impossibly far both directions into the darkness, where a light on the foremast reveals the faint haze of a sea mist she can feel on her face.

  Big Bruce, last name Bologna (“And I got a lot of grief for it in grade school, believe you me”), has been confessing to her the whole journey up (“I was always large, but it wasn’t from lunch meat”), a whole different side of him exposed as if a switch got flipped. Primarily, he explains, he’s a stargazer: “At the equator, we’re perfectly positioned to look edge on into the fat of our galaxy: constellations like Ara, Norma, and Lupus. Scorpius, with all its incandescent draperies . . .”

  Stepping back as the big man crouches to loosen an array of hasps and latches, Sentro flexes her back and shoulders and considers the thin line of lights on the horizon that must be the Atlantic Seaboard of the United States. Bruce’s helter-skelter Milky Way crazes its canopy above the pale halo of civilization’s glow and wheels the stars and galaxies up into the vast vault of night.

  “. . . a central bulge of old, yellow stars, and those spiral arms of blue, younger stars . . . it’s crazy to think about. We gape at a past, like, events that happened a million, a billion years ago . . .” A crescent moon vents the darkness. Soughing waves whisper along the sides of the ship. There is magic still on earth, she thinks.

  The dull moan of the engines thrums at the edge of her perception, and Bruce’s strange soliloquy unwinds.

  “. . . a firework pinwheel. Distances so vast. And the walls of stars, and the carousel of galaxies. And gas and dust clouds.” His mouth open, he cants his head back and stares skyward. “And black holes the size of the orbit of Mercury and bigger. Everything lurking around them gets swallowed and forever trapped. Not even light can escape.”

  You can’t save anyone, not really.

  She watches Bruce sit back, prop open the case, and remove a tripod, then the parts of a huge telescope, which he begins to assemble.

  “Most of what’s out there is dark matter, though,” he says gravely. Sentro understands; her life has been largely about dealing with the dark matter, dark flow, dark energy. Nothing magical about it. The unknown that holds the known. “Stuff we can’t even see,” Bruce marvels. “Or prove or measure, or I don’t even know, but . . .”

  It separates, it binds, it forgives, it forgets. Sentro’s spent a good part of her life traveling through it.

  “I don’t like to think about that,” the big man admits to her, but she watches him aim his tools of curiosity up into the unknown anyway.

  In the dark cocoon of her Jeddah cabin, sheets unfamiliar and crisp across her, she awakens from a vivid jumble of a mission that never happened and that she won’t even remember in a moment except the feeling that everything went wrong; she awakens in a cold sweat to a banging and moaning, and she rolls and reaches down under the bed for the gun that, at home, she always keeps there.

  Her fingers find the empty floor. The knot of her half-conscious thoughts untangles, and she remembers where she is. Her pulse is racing, her head throbbing backbeat with the percussion that’s coming from the Nelsons’ room next door.

  She tries to shake her lucid dream. I saved the boy, she reminds herself.

  It never helps.

  Vocalizing bleeds through the cabin wall, growing louder. A soft, steady, easily identifiable rhythmic thumping in the adjacent berth, slowly building. Procreation seems to be going pretty well next door.

  A couple of deep breaths. Her tension unwinds. She fumbles for her smartphone, left charging on top of her unopened Conrad sea tale, taps the screen for the time: well after midnight. White banners with text messages from Jennifer. In sum: Where are you? Sentro calls, on the off chance she still has service, gets sent directly to her daughter’s voice mail, but stubbornly decides not to leave a message. She puts the phone back down on the side table. She wants to hear her daughter’s voice, not the cold counterfeit of messaging.

  In the bathroom, she squints in the sudden light. Sits and pees and tries not to stare at herself in the wall mirror opposite. There should be a rule against putting mirrors facing the toilet. Thoughts tumble, fragments of things she’s clearly not forgetting: Jenny, Jeremy, the near catastrophe on Cyprus. She hears the shrill whistle of blood in her ears, feels the tickle of a migraine.

  Sentro takes the new prescription bottle out of her overnight kit. Take as needed for headaches. She washes three pills down with water.

  BANG BANG BANG BANG. Something heavy and hard hitting the wall. Sentro freezes. A man cries out. Pleasure. Then there’s silence.

  Oh.

  “I hope that was his head, not hers,” Sentro exhales softly to herself before switching off the bathroom light and climbing back into bed.

  It won’t take long for the drug to seize her. In the meantime, she decides to try to remember the faces and count, like sheep, all the enemy combatants, malefactors, and blackguards she has personally taken off the board. No safe place to put them. They scream from the darkness until she gives them their due. Since her consultation with the brain doctor, Sentro has grown convinced that these will be the last memories to leave her, if all the rest do go.

  Even when she can’t remember her children’s names, the faces of the dead will linger.

  She’s asleep before she gets through eight of them. A dreamless peace this time that feels like heaven.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Now, best guess: Are you of the opinion that was young love last night, conjuring the two-backed beast?” Fontaine Fox sits down with her, a plate heaped with eggs and ham. “Or some unspeakable occult blood ritual we will stumble on l
ater in our journey to the earth’s edge? Sailors sacrificing an albatross to Poseidon so we won’t be eaten by the dragons. Or is it Scylla and Charybdis? Safe passage and so forth.” Airily apologetic: “My A levels got a bit pear shaped.”

  Sentro was up at dawn, running the perimeter promenade of U-deck as the sun broke over the dark water of the Atlantic. She doesn’t like boats, but she loves the size of this one. The crazy distortions, containers stacked five and six high and dwarfing her, interspersed with the bulk cargo, crated machinery, giant bags, grain bins, and then more containers, with narrow, long dark gaps at measured intervals bleeding sunrise as she ran, crevices between the towering mesas of cargo; then the ship itself, impossibly massive and football fields long and yet dwarfed by the vast sea, puny, insignificant, at the whim of the gods.

  Having alerted the bridge and obtained approval, she donned the obligatory hard hat and safety vest and began four circuits that included the elevated bow they call the forecastle, where, on each lap, she passed three crewmen fussing with something—the anchor mechanism?—chunky thick steel compartment gutted, parts strewed everywhere. The swirl of languages fell away, like her troubles, for the moment, as her feet trod the deck, steady.

  Only one of the men looked up at her, his lean body taut and restless, a deep scar through a ruined eye and the feeble makings of a mustache. On her last lap’s pass, the crewman’s good eye tracked Sentro with a jaded mien. Had Sentro been in the field working, it might have signified more, but here, on holiday, she is determined to shed her old habits and predilections, hence the running, which has always helped her to find the fine balance and disengage; on this elephantine cargo cruise to the Southern Hemisphere, the disfigured man just strikes her as a bad hire the management of the Jeddah could come to regret.

  “Sounded Nordic,” Sentro answers her new breakfast companion, sipping coffee and folding her laptop screen down on a half-finished email to Jenny.

  “Nordic?”

  “Finland, Denmark. But probably Sweden.”

  “Sex has regional distinctions?”

  Sentro shrugs. “You’re the expert. Come to think of it, couldn’t it have been you and our first mate?”

  “I told you, I don’t do crew.”

  “Mm.” Sentro enjoys the light banter. Has missed it. Dennis always kept her on her game.

  “Anyhoo, I’m English. We suffer in silence.”

  “Of course, my mistake.”

  “Swedes?” Fontaine considers this. “Swedes, you say, having a rumpy pumpy. That’s mildly arousing. I do carry a genetic predilection for getting plundered by Vikings.”

  “Why is this even a topic for breakfast?”

  “I dunno. Would you have preferred to begin with some empty waffle about weather? Or perhaps I could ask how you slept? But I’m sure you didn’t, because I didn’t, because of the howling of the mystery mating. So.”

  Sentro smiles. “Not a mystery to me.”

  “Ha. Nelsons. Brilliant. Ew. Unlikely.”

  “I’d put money on it.”

  “I’d feel awful having to take it from you so easily, love.” As the Englishwoman digs into her veggie scramble, Jack and Meg enter the dining room. They look cranky and tense. Sentro trades looks with Fontaine, who starts to say something, but as if on cue, the Swedish woman is hard on the heels of the newlyweds, and she’s come in smiling and humming.

  “Glowing, in fact,” Fontaine observes with irritation. “Quite nervy.”

  After a moment, the Swede is followed by her husband, who has a purple bruise under his eye and a red knot on his forehead and a swollen lip, as if his face has been hitting a wall.

  Sentro meets Fontaine’s stare again, deadpan.

  “Don’t gloat,” the Englishwoman says.

  “I never gloat,” Sentro insists, oddly happy, and tries to remember the last time she made a new friend.

  After breakfast is a nonoptional tour of the bridge castle—also called the accommodations tower, apparently, depending on who on the crew was talking—sold as a hospitality gesture to the passengers but clearly a necessary safety protocol required by insurers in case of emergency evacuation or lockdown. Sentro lags back, disengaged; she did her own thorough recon not long after boarding. First Mate Mulligan looks to be struggling with a nasty prosecco hangover. “Cabins you’re familiar with . . . this is the officers’ lounge, which the officers never use. Community television, board games, limited library. Donations from your pulpy beach reads strongly encouraged after you finish ’em . . . next door, we call this a reading room; you might want to stay clear in rough seas, as there’s no window . . . galley . . . weight room, please ask if you don’t know how to use a piece of equipment . . .” Blah blah blah.

  It goes on like that. Eight lettered decks after the main—U-deck, A through G—and then the bridge topping it off. Laundry. Sauna. Officer cabins. Crew quarters. A basketball half court carved from a cargo space on the second deck. Engine room. Electrical. Infirmary. Boxes linked by boxes, then stacked. Just like the cargo they carry. Down one set of stairs, through the bowels of the ship, and back up the elevator. Sentro’s tactics professor at Quantico—or was it the Point?—had a name for the difficulty of defending this kind of structure. The narrow passageways, the exposed egress in the event the elevator failed or was caused to fail. Sentro can’t remember it. An acronym, she thinks, surely. BFO: blinding flash of the obvious.

  Stop.

  Nor can she remember the name of that professor. Rheumy gray eyes, ruddy gray flattop. She woke up today with a clear head and thoughts, the dull ache gone. But the unexpected gaps and disremembering persist.

  Shit. Pickering? Almost thirty years ago. She was never good with names, but now every lapse of remembering rattles her. She hates the flush of helplessness, not being able to trust her own mind. How you think, what you remember—or forget—defines you. Doesn’t it?

  Looping finally back to where they began, they linger on the bridge for another pithy quote from the captain, this time Coleridge:

  The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,

  Merrily did we drop

  Below the kirk, below the hill,

  Below the lighthouse top.

  And he helpfully plots their course with a marker on a glass-topped horizontal map of the Atlantic: “Down to Savannah to pick up bulk paper, cotton, and tobacco, then hop over to Nassau, and then it’s about four days to Rio, rounding the shoulder of South America; we’ll be crossing the equator right about here . . .”

  “And this is our secure cabin.” A door opening and a harsh light flickering on in a windowless room on C-deck. Sentro looks with some skepticism past First Mate Mulligan as he continues, “Where we’ll tell you to go in the event of a nasty storm or other unexpected event. Watertight. Door locks from the inside. Six days’ provisions, life vests, scuba gear, and a homing device . . .” Mulligan clearly likes to hear himself talk.

  A group coffin, Sentro finds herself thinking. Watery. Grave. She glances at Fontaine, who’s not even listening; she’s trading short missives with someone on her smartphone, turned away from the group for privacy. The other passengers attend to the first mates with a sober quiet. The Gentrys are wearing matching sneakers and can’t keep their hands off each other, as newlyweds do. Jack shows early signs of a cold sore, and there’s a faint rug rash on his forehead, which has already caused Fontaine to elbow-nudge Sentro and lift her eyebrows, suggestive.

  “Any questions?”

  Even if there are, nobody wants to think about having to be trapped in this windowless cell.

  Mulligan smiles, reassuring. “Mostly, as you can see from all the crates against the back wall, we use it as a wine cellar, since the temperature stays fairly constant.”

  The wine list was a big sales pitch on the cruise-trip website. Sentro wonders if, toward the end of the journey, you get so bored you’re swilling a spunky Spanish red with the breakfast waffles.

  The ship makes odd noises as it powers through wind-ch
opped sea and flexes. Twenty-four hours in, she’s already feeling twitchy.

  “Well, it was kind of spur of the moment; I’m sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye.”

  The Jeddah makes port in Savannah to take on another several dozen containers for which it doesn’t seem possible the ship’s deck has any more room. A five-hour shore leave encourages most of the passengers to avail themselves of a chartered shuttle to the historic downtown, but Sentro’s been to Savannah—one of the road trips she did manage to take with her family—and remains aboard to answer, from the wide stairwell landing off G-deck, where the warm afternoon sun has begun to settle into the coastal cloud cover, Jenny’s phone call after leaving several irritable, deliberately unanswered texts.

  “I tried to call you before I left.”

  “You could have left a message.”

  “I like to hear your voice.”

  “It’s not an either-or.” Jenny launches into a familiar lecture on twenty-first-century phone etiquette, and Sentro finds herself hearing words but not paying attention to them. Conversation with her daughter has, for years now, been fraught. The anger, the recriminations, the frustration with what Jenny insists is her mother’s fundamental failure to understand what her daughter has endured. “You look at me, but you don’t see me.” Is she right? Sentro, a victim of her own mother’s foundering, has no real point of reference. Sad that Jenny feels a hurt she can’t seem to fix, Sentro distracts herself watching a huge rusty-red container with a black-and-white cat logo get swung aboard while, down below, on the concrete quay, five men are clustered, hands in pockets, posed like a boy band, watching. Four of them are comic-book muscular—big shoulders, shaved heads, tracksuits—day players from some low-budget Balkan crime movie.