by Chris Stuck
As Zarrella and I sailed on, I didn’t say peep, knowing I’d just get myself in trouble. Thursday, in Roatán, I tried to focus on the island’s flora and fauna. We zip-lined through a botanical garden, visited an iguana farm, and birded toucans and parrots and other freaky flying creatures. The whole time I felt like a heroin addict in full withdrawal. I had to act like nothing was wrong.
“Aren’t you having fun?” she kept saying. “Don’t you just love this?”
“Sure,” I lied. “Birds, lizards, plants. It’s all just so—satisfactory!”
Her sudden attitude adjustment made a brief annoyance toward her bubble in me. Still, I tried not to obsess, about her cooling on me at least. I avoided any thoughts about our inevitable parting at the end of the cruise. Oddly, by avoiding it, I had plenty of time to review all the time we’d spent together up to that point. Like a detective, I examined every conversation, every look, with a different lens. In doing so, I tripped over something I hadn’t noticed before: She was on the run from something. The bad marriages, the ex-husbands, the domestic accidents. It took me a day or so to lock it in, but I knew I was on to something. I found a way to work it into a conversation on Friday night in Costa Maya. We’d just reboarded the ship after an uneventful day ATVing through Mahahual with Tommy and Deirdre. Zarrella and I were at the Ice Bar, our butts stuck to the frozen bar stools. Frosty daiquiris breathed cold mist in front of us. The absurdity of the entire trip was, at least for me, now becoming less comedy and more errors.
Maybe the hunch was all luck, but I’d learned that if you obsess long enough, you’ll discover a whole bunch of shit purely by accident. I even googled Cleveland and her first name—I didn’t actually know her last name—hoping I’d find solid internet evidence, but nothing came up. When I asked her about it, however, her reaction confirmed my suspicions: I’d excavated a secret. She couldn’t maintain eye contact. It was so obvious that I almost pointed at her and yelled, “Aha!”
“Who would I be running from?” She lit a cigarette and took a puff. Then the bartender said she couldn’t smoke.
“Who said anything about who?” I said.
The bartender brought over a shot glass. She stabbed her cigarette out in it. “I meant what.”
“Well, you have been married a few times to pricks. How about them?”
“So have you.”
“True,” I said. “But in my marriages, I was the prick. I know how pricks think.”
She took out another cigarette but didn’t light it. She just tapped it on the bar. “Not these pricks.”
“What about your last husband, who shall remain nameless?”
She snorted, which was starting to get on my nerves. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s probably true,” I said. “I don’t really know you, but it’s never stopped me before.” I did some more delving. “Is he after you? Are you in hiding or something?”
“Hiding?”
I touched her arm, covering one of her burns with my hand. “He’s the one who did this to you, isn’t he? Maybe he’s some psycho obsessed with you. There are a lot of crazies out there that can’t be happy unless their exes are—I don’t know—”
“Dead?”
I nodded, but the way she bit her lip made me think I’d overstepped.
“Whatever mind you previously had, I think you’ve finally lost it.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I’m on to something. My breakthroughs usually come on the verge of breakdowns anyway.”
“You’re not insane. You’re just a cynic.”
“Well, who was it that said the cynical man is the one with all the facts?”
“William Burroughs,” she said. “And it’s the paranoid man, not the cynical one.”
I asked if that was one of her crossword clues, but I hadn’t accurately gauged her annoyance level. She’d already eased off her stool and walked away by then.
I don’t know. Maybe I was paranoid. Aboard, if I wasn’t thinking about Zarrella, I was thinking about the other Black guy with vitiligo, whom I couldn’t stop running into accidentally—at the Serenity Deck as I tried to catch up on my reading, at the Wave Rider surf simulator, at the glass-canopied solarium. The guy was more than just my doppelgänger. He was my nemesis. I began to curse him whenever he came my way, all the happiness in the world somehow beaming from his pearly whites. He just seemed so good, so wholesome. His southern drawl even sounded sinister. I almost wondered if he’d been planted by someone just to torment me. Then I wondered if I was losing my mind. As I walked back to my cabin, I thought, Thanks, Neblitt. For a cruise that’s supposed to heal me, make me more harmonious with my peers, it’s sure doing a shit job.
* * *
Saturday, as the Ocean Wanderer performed a U-turn and we began our journey back to Port Everglades from Costa Maya, the crew informed everyone that a hurricane had formed in the Gulf of Mexico. Hurricane Joaquin, fittingly. It was slated to move out to the Atlantic but not before it tore tail through the Florida Straits at the exact time we’d be crossing. The Ocean Wanderer would have to spend a last night, an extra night, in Cozumel to wait it out. This would’ve bothered me normally, but I needed more time to figure things out. There was something going on with Zarrella, and me. It sounded ridiculous, since we’d just met, but I felt—I don’t know—something. I needed some certainty before the trip was over, though I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get it. When she found out we’d be in Cozumel again, her mood changed even more. Maybe all my investigating her past had a negative effect. She started avoiding me.
That day, at sea, I left my cabin and knocked on her door. When she didn’t answer, I walked around the ship aimlessly, looking for her. It took almost the whole day. Bored at one point, with no leads, I sat in a lounge chair on deck 3 and watched a man with one arm hit golf balls at the driving range. After that, I watched a little family play doubles on a tennis court. By two or three, I was barhopping around the ship—the Commodore, the Crown Lounge, the Funky Whistle. I thought if this Unseen Soul thing didn’t work out, I could try alcoholism. I was turning into a pretty good drunk.
As I continued looking for Zarrella, I happened to see the other Black guy again, before he saw me first, thank God. I had to be cautious. He was the gregarious type. There’d been a few close calls already. He seemed like he wanted to meet everyone on board. One time, he’d even spied me and headed my way, looking to make a friend. Naturally, I ran the opposite direction. I hid behind a column and let him go by this time. I headed bow-ward and saw Tommy in the RipChute, the glass-walled skydiving simulator. I stuck my head in, and he and Deirdre were whooping and hollering as giant fans kept them hovering twenty feet in the air. I shouted up, asking if they’d seen Zarrella. They said no. Tommy did a few somersaults and twirls and then he righted himself, belly down, his face distorted by the wind. He shouted, “Bro, come on in. It’s a blast.”
I looked around the tall glass silo, the vertical wind tunnel that was the RipChute, and shook my head. “None of this is real,” I shouted. “Don’t you see? It’s all a simulation. I’m not sure any of this is really happening.”
They suddenly looked concerned. They said, “Hey, are you okay?”
I looked at them suspended up there like phantasms. “No,” I said. “I’m drunk.”
They said, “Oh,” and I waved goodbye. I stumbled back to my cabin to take a nap.
* * *
My timing for getting blotto couldn’t have been worse. Though the cruise technically had another day left, the captain’s ball was that night. Before I left my cabin, a little absentminded, maybe still a little off from the barhopping, I almost didn’t touch up my makeup. I almost didn’t care. During any kind of breakup, I tended to go unhinged.
At dinner, I told Zarrella I’d been looking for her all day, and somewhat flippantly, she said she’d been at Vim and Vigor, the ship’s full-service spa.
“All day?”
“Beauty takes time.” She wa
s oddly happy for someone who was so messed up.
“What’s going on with you?” I said. “I’m not imagining this. You’re freaking me out.”
We were sitting at a table alone. It was black tie so I was in a tux. Zarrella was in a black evening gown. I looked down and realized I’d forgotten to put on socks.
She stirred her Manhattan for quite a long time. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I shouldn’t have started with you.”
Her candor stopped me. “Well, that’s a nice thing to say.” I wasn’t crazy, though I would’ve preferred that option over her not wanting me anymore. “What the hell’s that mean?”
“This was supposed to be simple,” she said. “Now, somehow, it’s complicated.”
“What’re you talking about? We can make this work. Believe me, I’m the least complicated person you’re ever going to meet.”
She didn’t believe me. Neither did I.
I said we could still see each other. Maybe I could move near her. But she didn’t seem enthused with that option. “See,” she said, “complicated.”
I’d been dropped before, but something about this was different. I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong.
“He’ll just find me, find us.”
“Your ex. So he is looking for you.”
I looked around the festooned ballroom. I told her I had money, lots of it. We could go anywhere. Stupidly, I said I could hire security.
But she didn’t bite on that either.
“Not part of the plan.”
“Well, what is the plan? Maybe I can help.”
She didn’t respond.
We sat there just looking at each other while everyone else partied. Finally, I said, “You know, maybe you’re right. This is complicated. And, for once, it’s not me.”
She seemed to concede the fact, a tear in her eye.
Feeling ornery, I broke away from her after dinner and started mingling. I got to drinking, again. I lost count of my consumption pretty quickly. I had a few bouts of conversation with a string of people I would never remember, even with their conditions. I ended enough of those conversations with “I’ll probably never see you again” that people started looking at me funny. Tommy, at one point, even came over, tugged on my coattail, and said, “Easy, killer.” I told him to mind his business.
All the while, I kept Zarrella in the corner of my eye. I checked who she was talking to, how she was acting. People were weirdly coming up to her as if she was some kind of celebrity. They congratulated her on shedding her shell. Maybe that did something to her. She appeared to be getting a little stinko herself. I saw her drunkenly kick a few chair legs as she socialized. Outside the ballroom, I saw her light the filter end of her cigarette. She even spilled a drink or two. I did as well. By the time I started wobbling, I’d had enough. I headed for my cabin. I took one of the escalators up to deck 12, hoping to get there before I had to ralph. When I looked back, Zarrella was behind me steps below.
At the top, I said, “First, you’re done with me. Now you’re following me. What other mixed messages do you got?”
“I’m just going back to my cabin, you putz,” she said. “I had to get out of there.”
“Being weird takes a lot out of a person.”
“You tell me.”
Though she obviously didn’t want me to follow her, I trailed her all the way to her cabin. She looked back at me every few steps. As she swiped her keycard and opened her door, she said, “What’re you doing?”
I didn’t know. I peeked in and saw all her stuff was packed. She couldn’t wait to be rid of me and this trip.
She said, “This was supposed to be our last day.”
I couldn’t tell if that was an explanation for her stuff being packed or if she was saying I’d ruined our last day together. “I guess you’re ready to go, then.” I looked at her and realized she was way drunker than I thought. There was an inconsolable sadness in her eyes. Her face just hung there on her skull. I realized an awful truth: I didn’t know her well enough to have a clue as to what she was feeling. I didn’t know what her past was pushing onto her present. For once, I recognized a feeling that all my exes described as selfishness. Desire had brought too many assumptions out of me. Now she hated me. The way it starts is the way it ends.
She stood in the doorway, her foot holding the spring-loaded door open. “I’m sorry,” she said, “for getting you mixed up with me.” She looked guilt ridden.
“I’m confused,” I said. “I don’t know who’s the crazy one. It’s usually me.”
“It’s both of us.” She moved her foot, and the door slowly closed. As she went out of view, she said, “Just let me go. Okay?”
* * *
Sunday, in Cozumel, that’s exactly what I did. I didn’t knock on her door in the morning, didn’t try to accidentally run into her. I sunned on a different deck just so I wouldn’t see her. I even shot some hoops, which I hadn’t done since I rode the bench at Yale. As I toweled off, an announcement came over the ship’s speakers. The hurricane had torn through the Florida Straits faster than expected. Instead of staying in port all night, we would set sail after reboarding. This gave me hope and a little concern. I thought maybe Zarrella would snap out of her mood now that we were going back earlier. Then I thought maybe that would just speed up the inevitable. This was confirmed when I came back to my cabin, and the rain stick I’d bought for her was sitting on my doormat. I picked it up and turned it over a few times, listening to the beans inside make their sound. I went to her cabin and found the door cracked. I pushed it open, expecting to see her, but it was just housekeeping cleaning the room. Zarrella’s suitcases were there, but I sensed there was stuff missing.
The housekeeper stopped and looked up at me. “I’ll be done in a moment.”
“It’s not my room,” I said. “It’s my friend’s.”
“Oh, well, it looks like they’re gone.”
“It’s a she.” I looked at the bed and imagined Zarrella sleeping on it, me next to her.
The housekeeper started changing a pillowcase. “She’s more than a friend, isn’t she?”
I said, “I don’t know.” Then I said, “I guess.”
“How’s it going?”
“Terribly.”
“It happens on these cruises. People get too close sometimes. You should see the singles’ cruises. Love and heartbreak in a matter of hours.” After a moment, she said, “Who knows? Maybe you and”—she looked at her clipboard—“Susan aren’t meant to be.”
“Hold up,” I said. “Susan?”
“That’s what it says here.” She lifted her clipboard and read it. “Susan Pasternak.”
Baffled, I said thanks and left. I disembarked, and one of the stewards said I had only an hour before the ship left. I wandered down over to Punta Norte, to the San Lazaro pier, but the boat was gone. I roamed the port area, looking around, hoping I’d spot her. The Ocean Wanderer’s horn began to blare. I boarded, but I felt as though I’d jump right off if I saw her. I made my way back up to deck 12. Before I knew it, the ship was slowly inching out to sea. I stood at the railing, watching Cozumel leave my view. I ran everything I knew about Zarrella through my head, wondering what was fact and what was fiction. Finally, I remembered: Since 1995, an average of twelve people vanish from cruise ships every year. Gone, never heard from again. I stood there, bathing in the shock, as the ship moved farther out to sea. We moved by the same tiny atolls we had our first time in Cozumel. As San Lazaro appeared on my left, I could see the cliff divers out on the turrets, jumping gracefully off, one after another. Some went headfirst, some feetfirst, but all of them were tanned men in Speedos. They pulled themselves up onto a small speedboat and made their way back to the front of the island to climb back up and do it again.
As the ship moved past the island, I walked back, sternward, by other people on deck. I thought I made out a last figure standing there in one of the turrets. The person was tall an
d pale, lissome, a woman. I didn’t know if she could even see me, but I lifted my hand anyway. It brought back something Neblitt had once mentioned, how one good gesture could build on another until the entire being was built back up brick by brick, gesture by gesture, tranquil and healed. It’d always sounded like yoga babble to me, but at that moment, I was compelled to try it. I reached the end of the deck, the end of the boat, bumping into the stern railing. I could feel the distance between us growing. I lifted my hand higher and gave a long side-to-side wave. Zarrella lifted her hand. She could see it was me. She knew I’d figured it out. Off the turret she sprang, her arms out at her sides. She sailed toward the water like a bombing bird, her arms out in front of her now. She dropped into the water like a knife. There wasn’t a splash. There wasn’t anything. She didn’t even come up for air. It was like it never happened. Zarrella, Susan, whoever she was.
* * *
The brochures don’t tell you how sobering it is to come back to your departure port. It’s been such a long trip. You’ve done so many things. You’ve met so many people. You love the sight of Port Everglades, and you hate it. Compared with the places you’ve seen, it’s ugly as hell. Yet you can’t wait to kiss the gum-dotted asphalt, and you can’t wait to leave again. It’s America. It’s Florida. It’s not your home, but you’ll take it.
As I stood in the disembarkation line with Tommy and Deirdre on Monday, I thought they’d look at me funny. They took note of me, but they didn’t stare. Tommy said, “Hey, buddy,” as I waited behind them, my bags in tow. I watched him fondle Deirdre’s leg. I watched her rub his bald spot with one of her stumps. It was as close to holding hands as they would get. When they asked where Zarrella was, I told them she had an early flight. She’d already disembarked.
“Lucky her,” they said.
No one mentioned my makeup, or lack thereof. Not Dave or Rita behind me. None of the stewards. No one mentioned my raccoon face. I was thankful. It would be bad enough back in New York. People would look at me, ridicule me. People would point and move away. I still had yet to confront many things. I turned my phone back on, and it buzzed nonstop with texts and emails. I deleted all of them. The line moved inch by inch toward customs. I thought I’d get a new phone, a new number. Start over. When I first got my disease, I’d hated how people said it could be a new beginning, that I could be a brand-new Melvin, as though the Melvin I’d been my entire life had been the wrong one all along. Now I wasn’t so sure.