Sebastien was freelancing for the local newspaper at the time, mostly shooting fundraisers and hockey tournaments. Jérôme found him peering through the viewfinder of his camera while on assignment at the local college’s graduation ceremony. The diplomas had been handed out, the mortarboards had been thrown. The young graduates now clustered together in optimistic groups.
“I hear you’re the town’s star photographer,” Jérôme said with a smile. He appeared tidy and down-to-earth. His hair was a dense sweep of chestnut. Behind the thin frames of his glasses were two penetrating grey eyes tinged with blue like pools of rainwater.
“That is definitely an overstatement,” Sebastien responded. “I’m just the only guy in town who knows what an aperture is.”
The handsome stranger laughed. He crossed his arms and scanned the gymnasium, which was filled with electric blue gowns and bright faces. “I went to this school almost a decade ago. It hasn’t changed a bit. They still haven’t fixed that.” His head nodded toward a domed lamp hanging from the ceiling that was dark, unlike the others.
“I used to go here, too. I remember you.”
Jérôme turned to him, surprised. “Aren’t you a few years younger?”
“You hosted an art show in the café to raise money for the class trip to Europe. You painted sea monsters. There was one that looked like a man with octopus tentacles instead of legs. I loved it.”
“I’m glad someone appreciated it. The genteel denizens of Petit Géant seemed more disturbed than anything else. I suppose that’s what I get for showcasing art in a cultural black hole.” He looked at the floor with a nostalgic expression before his eyes shot up to Sebastien. “No offence!”
He laughed. “None taken. I have no attachment to this place. It’s just a cage to me.”
Jérôme adjusted his wool blazer and looked at Sebastien with his rainwater eyes. “I have an offer for you.”
That afternoon, they went together to the same café that had hosted the art show so many years earlier. Jérôme laughed when he stepped through the door, amazed how little it had changed. Sebastien didn’t know what to make of this man as they settled into a corner table, but he soon understood they shared something.
Jérôme explained that it hadn’t been easy leaving Montréal. The bohemian bars filled with artists and students teemed with ideas aching to be explored and expanded. Jérôme had found a place that felt like home. When his father fell ill and his mother became distraught, he knew the occasional weekend visit to Petit Géant would no longer suffice. He told himself it would be temporary.
When it was clear his father’s condition was only going to worsen before it got better, he accepted that his stay in town would be longer than he had hoped. He was a headstrong man, not one to sit on his hands. This was an opportunity for him to leave a positive imprint on his much-maligned hometown.
He decided to open a shop. Part gallery, part portrait studio, part camera store, it would be different from anything the town had ever seen. He wanted Sebastien’s help.
Although Sebastien had no wealth to invest, Jérôme treated him like a business partner. From branding to merchandising, all decisions were made together. They decided to name the shop Camera Obscura.
By the time preparations for the grand opening were underway, they were spending nearly every morning, afternoon, and evening together. Their friendship was instantaneous. They shared a feeling of alienation — they were both outsiders in a town that enforced conformity — but Jérôme possessed an optimism that things could change.
It was late one night when they first kissed. It had been an exhausting day of painting the interior walls. Sheets of thick brown paper covered the front windows. Sebastien ran a paint roller down his friend’s back, smearing him from neck to rear with the same mint colour as the newly painted walls. Jérôme retaliated, and it wasn’t long before the two men were rolling across the newspaper-covered floor entangled in each other’s limbs. It was his first taste of a man’s lips, and he liked it. He let Jérôme do things with their bodies he had never done before.
“What got you into photography?” Jérôme asked as they lay on the floor beneath a blanket they had retrieved from the trunk of his car.
“My mother,” Sebastien said, wondering if the answer sounded childish. “We used to have a cheap thirty-five-millimetre camera when I was a kid. We took pictures of everything over the years. There must be at least five big boxes full in her closet. Even now, she insists we print every shot to add to the collection.”
“Life passes by so quickly. Photos give us a way to remember it.”
Sebastien rolled onto his side and draped his arm across Jérôme’s stomach. “I love how cameras can freeze time. The shutter opens and the moment solidifies into something that will remain long after we’re gone.”
Jérôme leaned into him until their foreheads touched. “Where did you come from, Sebastien Goh?” he said with a smile.
The grand opening of the shop was a success: people actually showed up. Ruby arrived in her favourite red cheongsam. Jérôme’s mother pushed her husband’s wheelchair. They stayed for only twenty minutes, but their son was happy to see them smile.
Half of the room was a gallery space displaying work from artists in the region, including several framed photographs by Sebastien. In the centre of one wall was Jérôme’s adolescent painting of the octopus man, which he had gifted to his new friend. Servers holding trays of delicate hors d’oeuvres circulated, while a quartet of jazz musicians performed in a corner.
“How fabulous,” Sophie said when she arrived with two friends. Sebastien kissed her on the cheek.
Sophie gushed about his new “project,” as she called it, but behind the smile was worry. Sebastien seemed different. There was something in the way he held himself that hinted at newfound contentment. It was unexpected. The weeks leading up to their latest breakup months earlier had been especially rocky. He had been aimless and unfulfilled. She was sure he’d come back to her eventually.
Now, seeing the confident way he spoke to his guests and the smart clothes he wore, she felt the creep of uncertainty. Her eyes scanned the mint-coloured room and his new charismatic friend with suspicion.
Sophie found the photographs a month later. Sebastien had been careless. They were stored loosely in a desk drawer in the back room. He had asked her to watch the shop for thirty minutes while he and Jérôme picked up a set of new shelves. She wouldn’t have found them had she not been snooping, but she sensed something was being hidden from her.
The black-and-white photographs printed on glossy paper displayed the nude bodies of two beautiful men. Sebastien was alone in some of them, a suggestive look in his eyes and hair tousled even more wildly than usual. Both men appeared in most of the images. Foreheads touched. Fingers intertwined. Mouths met skin. They looked happy and in love.
Sophie’s hands shook as she reached for her phone. She didn’t know why she felt the need to capture these images and send them to her closest friend, Chloe. She would say she wasn’t thinking, that she just needed someone’s opinion, but she must have known what Chloe would do.
By the time Sebastien and Jérôme returned to the shop, the images of their secret affair were rushing through town like the torrents of a flood.
“Offensive sexual behaviour,” Ilya said, his eyes wide and agitated. He couldn’t stop running his hands through his short sandy hair. “You know what that means, don’t you? Anything they want. I’m sure me and Cory kissing in the crew bar would be considered offensive in their eyes. They won’t spell it out, but they want us to know they have the power to get rid of us for any reason they see fit.”
One of the red posters rested on the floor of Diya’s cramped cabin. They looked at it as though it were diseased.
Sebastien rubbed his temples with his hands. All he could see was Jérôme’s face from four years before. The colour of the posters was the same shade of red as the paint scrawled across the storefront of Camera Obscu
ra.
“Hypocrisy is what this is,” Diya said. Her face was flushed with anger. “What about the deck commander who’s cheating on his wife with a younger woman? I’ll bet they wouldn’t consider that offensive. It doesn’t count because he’s one of them.”
“Don’t forget the officers who have loyalty cards at the brothels in every port,” Ilya added. He sat on the bottom bunk, his arms hanging limply between his legs.
There’s also the hotel commander who abandoned a woman and their unborn son in a foreign country like they were yesterday’s trash, Sebastien wanted to say. He bit his bottom lip and swallowed the words before they could leave his mouth.
“I just don’t get what’s going through his head.” Diya took a seat beside Ilya and hugged a pillow against her chest. “He knows this will cause more outrage than he already has. Why would he go to so much trouble to provoke us?”
“The commanders are trying to send us a message,” Ilya said. “They want us to know they control us, that they can do whatever they want. They think we’re powerless to stop them.”
“They’re testing us,” Diya added. “They want to see if and how we respond so they know how much power they really have. We need to send them a message of our own. We need to fight back.”
“They’re distracting us.” Sebastien had been quiet since they encountered the red posters in the corridor. Diya and Ilya looked at him with curiosity, waiting for him to elaborate. “When I met with Dominic the day before the protest, he told me he saw something he shouldn’t have seen. That’s why he was locked in his cabin and thrown off the ship. The fight with Giorgos was just a convenient excuse. He said Kostas and the officers are hiding something — something bad — in cabin A66.”
“You’re just telling us this now?” Ilya asked with an incredulous shake of the head.
“I’m sorry. There was just so much going on.” Sebastien paused, bracing himself for the next revelation. “There’s more. Something strange happened at the party in the crew bar, before the fight with Giorgos. I saw a young officer pour white powder into Dominic’s drink. The powder was given to him by Kostas. It looked like an order from the commander.”
Diya and Ilya stared at him from the bottom bunk. They wore identical expressions of incomprehension on their faces.
“I stopped Dominic from drinking it,” Sebastien went on. “I was going to tell you, Ilya, but I was interrupted by Giorgos. Then everything exploded from there. Dominic thought the commanders were trying to drug him as an excuse to throw him off the ship — because of what he saw.”
“What was it then?” Diya asked with impatience. “What was in cabin A66?”
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me. I sent him a message after he disembarked in Athens. I just got a response today. He keeps saying I’m better off not knowing, and that he just wants to forget it ever happened. I think he’s scared.”
The room became silent except for the sound of Diya’s bedside clock ticking away the seconds.
“You’re both right.” Sebastien reached out and took each of them by the hand. “We’ll show them how powerless we are. But if we’re not careful, they’ll throw us off the ship like they did with Dominic. We’ll send them a message. We’ll fight back. And we’ll find out what’s in cabin A66.”
The Glacier docked at the hedonistic island of Mykonos the following day. Ilya spent the entire afternoon wearing a pink tank top that flaunted his sculpted shoulders and biceps. The words on the front said Good boys go to heaven, bad boys go to Mykonos in fluorescent green letters.
The ship’s horn thundered across the bay as the Glacier set sail in the evening. Across all decks of the ship, staff and guests prepared for the festivities. They styled their hair and put on their finest clothes. The women slipped their feet into precipitous heels and sprayed perfume on their shoulders. The men tied silk bows around their necks with varying degrees of proficiency. It was black-tie night aboard the Glacier.
Their cabin felt more confined than usual. Sebastien and Ilya manoeuvred around each other as they showered and dressed. Besides the captain’s cocktail party, black-tie night was the only event when staff weren’t required to wear their evening uniform of turquoise blazers and white pants while off duty in guest areas. They were always eager to dress up for the occasion. Since crew members were permitted in the upper decks only while on duty, they couldn’t partake in the festivities.
“How do I look?” Sebastien wore the black tuxedo Ilya had lent him. The shoulders were slightly loose and the pants a touch long, but he was a dashing figure nonetheless. He glanced at the framed photograph of his mother on the desk beside his bunk. He wished she could see him dressed so finely. She would have been proud.
“Cooler than James Bond.” Ilya stepped out of the shower and dried his body with a towel. The mirror behind him revealed the scatter of circular white scars on his back.
Sebastien had been hesitant to ask Ilya about the scars, but they’d grown close enough to meet the people they were beneath the surface.
“How did you get those marks on your back?”
Ilya looked behind himself at his reflection. He had a curious look on his face, as though he’d forgotten about the scars. “They’re cigarette burns. I got them in school. A bunch of older boys held me down. They wanted to see if I would cry. I didn’t.”
Sebastien’s eyes fell to the floor. He was embarrassed for asking.
“It’s okay,” Ilya said as he adjusted Sebastien’s bow tie. “I’ve been fighting against boys like them ever since. Maybe one day I’ll win.”
The two men looked like movie stars when they emerged from their cabin. Ilya’s jacket was made of dark purple velvet.
Their patent leather shoes announced their arrival as they walked along the opulent decks of the guest quarters. They smiled at uniformed members of staff and crew as they passed. Bartenders, waiters, cleaners, casino dealers — they all smiled back with a look of solidarity.
Diya met them in the Agora lobby dressed in a form-fitting emerald gown that sparkled with reflected light. They could have passed as part of the privileged crowd that surrounded them if it weren’t for the golden name badges that identified them as staff.
“Looking sharp, boys.” She smiled, impressed, as they exchanged kisses on the cheek. “I’m the luckiest lady on board to have you two as my escorts.”
“You look like Lady Luck herself,” Sebastien said as Diya linked her arm through his.
The three of them climbed the grand staircase where Sebastien had tumbled down just one week earlier. Once again he tripped as his shoe caught the edge of a step, but this time his companions kept him from falling to his knees.
“You clumsy goat,” Ilya said, holding him firmly by the elbow.
They sauntered toward the stern of Adriatic Deck until they arrived at a rotating glass door. A bouncer dressed in a tuxedo gave them a nod as they entered the dark hall on the other side. They were immediately greeted by the sounds of overly synthesized dance music. The bass vibrated along the floor.
Sirens was the ship’s nightclub, lovingly referred to by staff as “the disco.” It was a two-level chamber of neon lights and contorting bodies. The entrance gave onto a mezzanine that overlooked the action below. The dance floor was a checkerboard of square tiles lit up with erratic colours. A hypnotic sequence of light particles undulated across the video screens that wrapped the walls.
It was a mythical place for crew members. None of them had set foot inside except for the cleaners and bartenders who worked there. The crew would talk about the exclusive room as though it were Shangri-La, while the staff took the privilege for granted.
As with most black-tie nights at Sirens, the majority of the crowd consisted of staff laughing over cocktails and exchanging provocative glances. The mood was more subdued than usual, though. There was tension in the air as people clustered around tables and lingered in corners.
Sebastien, Diya, and Ilya greeted a group of spa therapists before
making their way down the winding staircase that led to the main lounge. The risk level of these twisting steps correlated with the number of drinks consumed and the height of the heels worn. Many victims had been claimed over the years.
The dance floor was empty except for a few guests on the younger end of the spectrum. They moved to the beat of an electropop song that was a hit well over a decade ago. The commanding officers’ favourite era was the excess that led to the global financial crisis, so the DJ was instructed to reflect those simpler, happier times through his set list.
Tinted mirrors lined the walls of the lounge underneath the mezzanine. Displayed throughout the area were sculptures of human torsos. The seductive shoulders, chests, stomachs, and pelvises stood in bold fluorescent colours, heads and limbs nowhere to be seen.
The room was crowded with sharply dressed staff. A pack of officers huddled together on lounge chairs and sofas, surveying the scene with drinks in hand. Their white uniforms were a bluish hue beneath the ultraviolet light.
When a couple from the entertainment staff distracted Diya and Ilya, Nikos walked over from the officers’ corner and stood by Sebastien’s side.
“Good evening, Patroclus.” He had the slightest hint of a smile in the corners of his lips.
“Good evening to you, Achilles. Cause any destruction today?”
“Only to those who deserved it,” Nikos responded. “You look very handsome.”
“Ilya gets the credit. I’m wearing his suit.”
“I don’t care about the suit. It’s what’s underneath I want.”
“I believe that may now be classified as ‘offensive sexual behaviour.’” Sebastien turned to Nikos with darkness in his eyes.
Nikos looked away. “I know. It’s messed up.”
“What is Kostas thinking?”
“I have no idea.”
“You work for him,” Sebastien said, unconvinced. “He treats you like his favourite son.”
Nikos shrugged and shoved his hands inside the pockets of his pants. “He was humiliated by the Dominic protest. This is part of the punishment. He thinks staff and crew have too much freedom, which leads to acts of insubordination. He sees the environment below decks — the sex, the drink — as corrupting.”
The Rebellious Tide Page 10