by A. R. Daun
“Quiet please,” the officer interrupted softly, and though he was much shorter than Steve he projected an aura of authority so strong that her husband simply stopped in mid-sentence.
“As I said, let's start from the beginning,” the Staff Captain continued, and he proceeded to meticulously take down all the details from them, including their names, room numbers, and the circumstances of the fight. Mara was impressed by the calm demeanor of the man, and the efficient way he carefully extracted the gist of their narratives without getting bogged down in too much detail or straying too far from the central storyline. Mara told him everything except for the part about the lights. It seemed the right thing to do for now, though he had very dark deep set eyes that seemed to miss nothing and Mara knew she had gaps in her story that must have aroused his suspicions. After several minutes even Steve had calmed down somewhat, though he continued to shoot hurt glances at his wife, which Mara ignored.
“Excuse me Sir,” the medic interrupted, and the Staff Captain turned. “This man,” and he pointed at Richard. “He doesn't show any injuries that I can see, although he can't seem to remember his full name, but the thing is....he's not a passenger of the ship. I checked his given name against our passenger manifest and got no one that looks like him.”
“A stowaway?” Gani asked, and when the medic shrugged, he turned to the security personnel. “Put him in the brig for now, until we can get this all sorted out.”
The men circled Richard, who remained standing silently, his eyes fixed on Mara, his lips turned up in a beatific smile. He shuffled as they pulled him away, and looked back once for one last final glance at her. He seemed so pitiful and lost, and it was all Mara could do to stop from putting herself between him and his captors.
When the moment passed, she noticed the Staff Captain eying her with slightly narrowed eyes. He had not missed the significance of their parting glances.
Steve took her elbow. “Let's go back to our room Mar,” he said sullenly.
“What will happen to him?” Mara asked, and Uwais tilted his head slightly, his eyes boring into hers. “I mean, I don't think he's a danger to anyone.”
“Mar, c'mon, let's go,” Steve repeated more insistently, his hand exerting pressure now on her elbow.
The Staff Captain lifted one hand and Steve grudgingly stopped pulling her. “Mrs. Lewis, “ he said. “Mr...Richard will be kept in the ship's brig for the duration of our voyage, or until we can ascertain who he is and whether he is a passenger who has somehow lost his memories. No harm will come to him. In fact, he'll be quite comfortable and well fed.”
He paused and smiled kindly. “Now, I'm sure you and Mr. Lewis have had a tiring night and so I'll take my leave. If you need anything at all, feel free to contact me.”
He nodded to both of them and left.
“What the hell was that all about Mar?” Steve asked when they were alone again. He turned Mara to face him, his powerful hands gripping her shoulders. “Will you please tell me? I see you being assaulted by that maniac and now you're all concerned about him?”
Mara looked back at him, a plaintive sadness flooding into her and constricting her chest. “Where have you been the last few hours Steve?” She asked, her voice barely a whisper, her large liquid brown eyes boring into his. “I was waiting for you....”
Steve stared at her for a few moments, then looked away. “I was at the casino of course Mar,” he finally said, turning back to face her. “Lost a bundle, but hey, it's all in fun right?”
Mara felt the hot salty bite of tears brimming at the corners of her eyes. She had loved him so much, and even now carried his unborn child, and yet she had never truly known this man.
“I know what you did,” she finally said in a trembling voice, as a cold gust of wind descended upon them, and in the distant horizon the first light of dawn heralded the coming of a new day.
CHAPTER 14
Day 4 (5:10 pm EST)
5 miles south-east of Liberty State Park, NJ
Gods are created one tragic event at a time.
- Ammara Lewis
Annika wondered again for the hundredth time who was going crazy here. She stared at the man across the table, who gazed back at her with a complacent and altogether infuriating expression that was a mixture of reverence and perhaps even something approaching love.
“You don't know me,” she repeated, and she found herself clenching her right hand. “I don't know you, I've never met you before in my life.”
The man said nothing to this. She had been repeating the same thing for awhile now, and he had perhaps decided there was no point in rebutting her denials. She could either take what he said at face value, or disbelieve him.
He had asked Gani specifically for her. When confronted about it he had placidly reiterated that he knew her, or at least knew about her since when he was a young boy, and that he had something of the utmost importance to tell her.
This on the face of it was nonsensical and impossible. The man was clearly old, perhaps in his 60s, and Gani at first resisted allowing Annika to meet the man, no matter how insistent he became. When she herself urged him to reconsider, the Staff Captain had erupted.
“What would this accomplish?” He had argued, and Annika could see that he was resisting the urge to raise his voice at her. Clearly, the mystery surrounding the stowaway and his strange knowledge of Annika had concerned him.
“We have much more pressing matters than some unknown stowaway, Annika,” Gani said. “Look, we're entering the Hudson River in less than an hour. We have no idea what happened and why no one is replying to our radio hails, all news feeds from the mainland and indeed everywhere else have stopped, and we don't know how the passengers are going to react when they find out we've gone back to New York and the entire world seems to have up and gone without us. For all I know, we'll have a riot in our hands.”
He had looked at her helplessly then, this man who to Annika had always seemed to be in control of his emotions; who had never raised his voice no matter the circumstances, nor been anything but calm and rational no matter the urgency of the situation. He had closed his eyes for a moment, and in that space of time Annika had realized how tired he was, and how confused. Something had come into the world that did not conform to his rational worldview, and it was slowly draining him.
“I just don't want to be worrying about you,” he finally said, almost in a whisper.
Annika smiled at him reassuringly, and briefly touched his arm.
“I'll be fine Staff Captain,” she said coolly. “And I'll give you a call immediately after I talk to the man. Ok?”
Gani had seemed to deflate at these words, and he nodded briefly then authorized her visit.
Now here she was alone with the man called Richard in the brig, a spartan room with scant furnishings save for a flat bed wrapped tightly in a mattress made of waterproof vinyl canvas. The single door had a peephole at about eye level and had no handle on the inside, although Annika did not feel in the least bit danger from the occupant.
“Mr...Richard, ”she began. “Ms. Lewis told us she had never met you before either, and that you had gone into her room and brought her up on deck to tell some unusual story. Then you get in an altercation with Ms. Lewis' husband and after ending up in the brig ask for me.”
Annika stopped, then shook her head. “We have no record of you as a passenger, and no records of you entering the ship. You have no I.D. on you, no driver's license, credit card, nothing. Who are you? And how do you know me?”
The man sighed, a long drawn out exhalation of breath that to Annika seemed to deflate his already haggard body. His eyes sought hers, held on for the briefest moment, then looked away, but not before she sensed the flash of triumph that blazed like falling stars across a bright blue sky.
She heard a whisper, which she thought at first was from this Raggedy Man, but which perhaps bubbled up from her own mind. “Activated”, the sibilant voice said, as a thousand flash bulbs burst si
multaneously behind her eyes, and the room whirled then fell away from the landscape of her consciousness, and suddenly she was everywhere.
The ship blazed with 8000 points of light. A constellation of stars that arced across the firmament of her inner vision. And with the sensation of sight, the voices came at her like the roar from a thousand waterfalls, a thunderous sonic wave that washed over her and threatened to drown her mind in the minutiae of lives.
“Carol said not to eat the shrimp. You can never tell.”
“I hate it when they spritz that goop on my hands. I mean, can you say 'skin cancer'?”
“I wanna play one more hour. I think this baby's gonna give it up to me soon.”
“George said something's going on. We should have reached San Juan by now.”
“I keep telling you we're going the wrong direction. You want to be sheep, fine. But I'm going to find out what's going on.”
“Lissie, now eat your vegetables and you'll get some ice cream after ok?”
“Hi, I couldn't help but stare at you from the other side of the pool. My name's...”
“Well fuck, you didn't tell me she was like that man.”
The voices came at her in a continuous stream, varying only in their pitch and tone and the occasional lilting accent. In the back of her mind she felt the concerned touch of the man on her bare arm, but she brushed his hand aside as animal instinct took over and all she wanted was to get away from the unending assault on her senses.
Annika stumbled and clawed at the door. She was blind to her immediate surroundings now, and deaf, the universe a melange of bright lights and thunderous chatter. She sagged against the door, then curled protectively in a fetal position. She was breathing in fast shallow gasps, and her vision tunneled into a hot pinprick of darkness, a black hole that bent the starlight around it by the weight of its presence.
She climbed up, and up towards the dark. It called to her with promises of succor and a cocoon of silence. Time passed, though not in the linear fashion that she knew, but in sporadic fits and starts, as if its gears had rusted. The clamoring voices lessened in intensity as she pulled herself up, until they finally receded into the background.
Annika opened her eyes. Her head was resting at an angle on the cold hard ground, and drool run down the prominence of her lower cheek to drip and pool on the floor. She pawed at the strays of blond hair that covered her face and glancing up saw that Richard had knelt beside her, his hand grasping her left arm and slowly helping her up. Her legs felt soft like taffy, but she clung to him and closed her eyes as a wave of vertigo passed over her. She could feel the man bend down and grab her other arm, and at first she struggled feebly against him, though he only whispered in her ear.
“It's okay,” he breathed. “You'll get used to it, and learn how to control it. Take your time.”
She looked up at him and realized with some surprise that he seemed younger somehow. The lines on his face had become shallower versions of the deep cracks that she had first seen earlier. His body seemed fuller, and more robust, and his eyes blazed with a youthful vigor that burned away the fog of confusion that still clung to her.
She stopped struggling. The only sound she heard was a faint banging from behind the door as the crewman outside tried to force it open, but she knew this was not what the man Richard meant. She wondered idly how he had managed to weld the door shut, but decided it was of little concern at this moment. She wanted to go to Gani; she wanted him to tell her everything was going to be alright. She closed her eyes and with an involuntary mental shudder fell back down into the light.
The world opened up to Annika.
CHAPTER 15
Day 4 (5:15 pm EST)
South-east of Cape Liberty Port, Bayonne, NJ
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
- Simone de Beauvoir
Fear was a familiar constant in Miriam's life.
Sometimes it sneaked up on her while she was getting ready to sleep, and she lay awake for hours thinking about festering secrets and the hidden conflicts of those who were torn between loyalty to their family and their own desires. At other times it slammed into her at the most unexpected moments, and she had to excuse herself from colleagues or friends and hurry into the nearest restroom, where she would spend up to half an hour nauseous and hunched over the toilet, her mouth tasting of bile and her head swirling with confused thoughts and emotions.
There were times when she just longed to get the whole thing out in the open. She knew how the phone call would go; she had played out the scenario in her head a million times. It had been more than six years now since she last saw her parents, a lifetime since she packed her bags and left Oklahoma for the welcoming arms of the Big Apple. But she could almost picture the way her mother would pick up the ringing phone in the kitchen, the way she would lean against the wall and eye the multicolored sticky-notes that always dotted the refrigerator doors as her mother spoke into the receiver.
“Hi Ma,” Miriam would say, and she would hear a squeal of happiness from the other end of the phone, followed by hoarse yells for her dad in a voice cracked after a lifetime of cigarettes.
“No Ma,” she would interrupt, and as always her Oklahoma twang, long buried under the layers of New York sophistication that she donned after years spent in the big city, would resurface and cause her to wince. “I gotta talk to you first ok?”
“Sure dear,” her mother would say, and listen expectantly.
And this is where the entire scenario would fall apart. She was never able to imagine how the rest of the scene would play out, nor how she could ever explain to her conservative evangelical protestant parents that their child, who had grown up Marlon Garrett, was now living as a woman.
But Miriam thought that she had always been female, even when the world thought differently. As a child she had grown up hating the shriveled little organ that marked her gender, and after relocating to New York and her new job had quickly started hormone replacement therapy, using estrogens and anti-androgens to carefully mold her body to fit her notions of who she was in reality.
She was delighted to discover that she responded well to the treatments. Although such features as her height and bone structure could not be altered by hormone therapy, other changes to her body had been readily and quickly apparent. The musculature of her hands and feet had decreased, and she was ecstatic to discover that subtle redistribution of her fatty tissues had endowed her with a feminine hour-glass figure, as well as enlarged breasts girdled by large areola and rounded protuberant nipples.
Under the warm and inviting lights of the city, Miriam had slowly grown to her full potential, and nowadays she seldom hid the fact that she was a male to female trans-sexual. She had even started dating, though she made sure that the men she dated knew that she was pre-op, and had not yet undergone sex reassignment surgery to replace her male sexual organ with a vagina. The shame and fear that she had felt about her sexuality growing up in her conservative hometown had receded, though they simmered under the surface like magma tampered under a calm outer crust, always ready to boil up and erupt at a moment's notice, incapacitating her at the whim of some disapproving god.
But this was a different kind of fear. Miriam had the first inklings that something was not right when the ship intercom suddenly squawked to life and asked everyone to standby for a special announcement from the Captain. This was followed by an ominous silence, then by static, and she realized that everyone had stopped what they were doing and were waiting.
She was sitting and reading L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy at one of the indoor side tables in the Garden Cafe. She had placed a bowlful of large round seedless red grapes on the small formica-topped table in front of her and was occasionally delighting on the sweet fruit. To her left the indifferent Atlantic waves passed in silent parade as the ship powered its way forward, separated from her only by the width of the windows and the narrow deck below. She frequently had stopped reading to simply gaze a
t the sight, because in its deep apathy to her plight and in fact to all the troubles and tribulations of humanity she found some solace, a contradiction that she never once tried to examine in depth. Why question what she felt, especially when it was happiness, or at least a good facsimile of one?
A man suddenly slid into the seat opposite hers, and Miriam smiled. James had one of his perpetually goofy smiles switched on to full capacity, and he never failed to cheer her up simply by being close. He was a law student at NYU and had been her boyfriend for close to a year, accepted her fully for what she was, and she could never remember when she had been happier.
“You have to check out the bowling room, Mir,” he enthused, the cowlick that perennially refused to be shaped along with the rest of his brown curly hair flopping up and down as he nodded his head. “They nickel and dime us to death by charging for everything, but it's kinda cool to be able to bowl out here.”
“Shhhh,” she told him. “The Captain has an announcement to make. It could be important.”
“What, we're not having lobster for dinner tonight?” he quipped as one hand made to reach over for some grape, only to be swatted aside by Miriam, who made a face at him.
“James L. Brody,” she said in mock disapproval. “Wash your hands first before eating. And keep quiet or we won't hear what the Captain has to say.”
“Yes Mom,” he said amiably, and started to stand up, only to be interrupted by another hiss of static from the intercom. He plopped back down on his seat, shrugging his shoulders at Miriam, though her attention had wandered back to the coming broadcast.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” the speakers suddenly blurted out, the voice slightly accented and clearly European. “This is Captain Brodersen and I have a very important announcement to make, so please listen carefully.”
Everyone and everything had gone silent. Even the dining crew had stopped in their tracks and were all waiting patiently at their stations. Miriam could feel the fine red hairs at the nape of her neck go rigid, and she suddenly knew this would be bad news.