GO Fish
He didn’t think there could be such a thing as true love. As a child, the movie Titanic taught him what it was to love, to feel something deeper than anything he’d ever felt before. That kind of love that seeps into your bones, fogs the mind, and dissolves time, all a meaningless blur. The kind where floating down to an icy grave at the bottom of the Atlantic, fish food-destined, wouldn’t be that bad of a fate if it were done for his love, his Kate Winslet. But he didn’t think that way. No. Ridiculous.
When he arrived at the port, his nose raw from the Maltese sun and sticky from the balm he picked up at a convenience store that morning, he wasn’t thinking of love. He was thinking of home and its simple pleasures, comforting and imprisoning. Soft king-sized bed, app-controlled light dimmers, fridge filled with imported Stilton cheeses and Belgian beers, humidifier set to perfection after a month of trial and error. Two weeks of vacation—expanding his horizons, as it were—and he’d reached his limit. Back to reality.
*
She’d gone through heartbreak before, but this time felt different. Was it the time investment she’d made in this relationship? Five years, the longest she’d spent sleeping with the same person after the whirlwind of her twenties and thirties. It wasn’t like she loved him, but it still hurt. Was that love, or was it a bruised ego? She’d been with too many people to tell if there even was a difference. Her heart was a coarse patch of flesh and sinew, at least with him she didn’t have to worry about that. He was a sedative, soothing and numbing. They were supposed to go on the cruise, but even on the day she booked the damn thing, she knew she’d never allow him to join her.
He had the stereotypical commitment issues, ex-girlfriends he pined over, work colleagues he lusted after. But that’s not why she ended things. She was bored—it was really that simple. A question you’re supposed to ask yourself to spark a reminder of what you should be grateful for: what’s something you’re looking forward to in the near future? Does sleeping count?
*
The cover band plays Beatles classics, the peppy ones that got girls in the ‘60s so over-excited the stench of their collective urine would waft through the concert halls. He’s sitting by the bar, swilling a mojito comprised of two parts watered down rum and one part browned mint leaves. All-inclusive drinks are no guarantee of quality. A middle-aged woman caked in makeup and desperation asks him what he does for a living. Her question is two parts vetting a prospective partner and one part not knowing any other way to drum up a conversation.
He returns to his cabin alone. He debates not crossing the door’s threshold back into the hallway for the remainder of the trip. There’s room service and an ensuite bathroom. He could watch the waves from his window, follow the line where the blues of sky and sea meet but never dare to mix. But he knows he’ll get up the next morning and try again. If he isn’t a hopeless romantic, he isn’t hopeless quite yet.
*
Humans are the most absurd beings, she tells an older man—his name is Gregory or Yegory, she couldn’t hear him over the blasting speakers at the bar. Here we are in this oversized barrel, she says, churning out fossil fuels into the air and our bodily waste into the water, hurtling from one tourist trap to another, but there’s singles mixers and all-you-can-eat buffets appealing to our baser instincts to stop us from jumping over the edge.
She believes there’s a threshold, an invisible line where people go from being alive to merely delaying death. She doesn’t tell the man this, but with his wrinkled skin and his thinning greyed hairs, she can see it in his eyes. Or maybe she put it there to find another excuse not to pursue someone yet again. She’s at the cusp herself. Easy enough to date a man half her age as it is to date one twice hers. Dating, pfft, what a word, she tells the dying man, who she now realizes is smiling because he doesn’t understand a word she’s saying. Men were never that interested in what I have to say, she thinks, priorities are priorities and sex is sex and some things are etched into our DNA. Which is what a jaded woman descended from a man’s rib would say, she muses.
*
When he was a teenager, he experienced a brief phase of paralysis that left him unable to venture out of his home. His parents didn’t understand, mainly because he didn’t explain why to them. It was unfair to say the news was to blame, because the news was being read or told to everyone, but only he was having such an adverse reaction. He was the problem. The world was fine just as it was, chugging along with or without him, which was sorta the problem. He just couldn’t understand how people could venture out into the world, what with all the bad things that could befall them.
Wherever he looked, and he looked a lot, he saw stories of cyclists trampled by oblivious truck drivers, tourists caught up in selfie-sticks plummeting down ravines that were only a moment ago a serene backdrop for an Instagrammable shot, inhabitants of entire buildings reduced to pulp and shattered bone by an earthquake. Stepping outside his bedroom door invited death and destruction, but when he thought about it, he could just as easily collapse from a heart attack at any given moment, or maybe a jumbo jet would crash into his house while he slept. There was no fortified panic room to keep safe from the hazards of life. He’d let that go, he couldn’t remember how, perhaps it was boredom that snapped him out of it.
But on this cruise, with all the vagaries of life that preoccupied him back home thousands of kilometres away, thoughts of his once-paralysis returned to him. Lots of things could go wrong in a cruise. Imagine the banal reality of drowning in a pool on a cruise ship in the middle of the Mediterranean. In the heat of summer, at least he didn’t have to worry about icebergs like Jack and Rose.
*
It’s dark and streamers twist in the breeze down the port and starboard sides. Red, white, and blue. Independence Day for all the American pleasure seekers, butchering the names of the Filipino and Indian servers shuffling the Coors and Piña Coladas back and forth. For all the time she spends watching American movies, following American news and buying American products, she doesn’t think much of Americans. Fat ignorant sheep and all that. The ones onboard are drunk to boot. There’s a certain kind of obnoxious loudness, a crass looseness, to the voices of drunk people, that makes them easily identifiable.
The night’s earlier gaiety recedes, replaced by a manic energy, filled with possibilities—none of them appealing—of being propositioned by the men leering at her at this very moment. Her own fault for wearing a low-cut dress, society would say. Couples, ones that existed before boarding and ones created after, are holding each other, straddling bodies swaying like the waves below. Drums from the live band echo through the loud speakers scattered throughout the ship. She senses a familiar anxiety, a nausea emanating from the centre of her chest. But she’s not ready to call it a night yet, settling in bed to keep reading another tedious Margaret Atwood novel about broken, unhappy women. She escapes the noise and walks along the festooned ship rail.
Perhaps the feeling in her chest isn’t a nausea, maybe it’s a yawning chasm in the core of her being, ripping through her soul. It was a distinct possibility there was more void than non-void within her. Here she was, looking for a man, another entity to fill it. An unfair responsibility to foist upon anyone. She could jam him in, move him around to cover any air pockets. She wondered if others had yawning chasms, if she could see the voids when she looked into the darks of their eyes, if she really looked.
*
He makes his way to the ship’s bow. Off in the distance, he hears the languid chords of a guitar and the tinny chimes of steel drums. Unlike the Titanic, or should he say, the Hollywood depiction of Titanic, the bow’s rails are deserted. No Rose leaning over the edge for him to save and later do a nude sketch of. No romantic lighting either, it’s just pitch black.
“You’re not doing a Rose thing, are you,” he hears a woman’s voice say.
He turns around. It’s an attractive brunette he’s seen a couple times at the bar, always unaccompanied. He recalls the first thing he noticed about her was her legs. It’s too dark to see them now, but in the brightness of day, they were tan, firm and long. He’s a sucker for a tall woman with a nice pair of stems. She’s wearing a tight dark red dress, lips pressed against each other, eyes glazed over—he’s unsure if it’s due to drunkenness or disinterest.
*
“Did you know the cruise ship goes through 20,000 eggs a day,” the man says, a sheepish but cute smile on his face.
She laughs—what a story for the grandkids: Wanna know the first thing your grandpa ever said to me? She’d heard worse. Hard to tell in the dark, but he isn’t as good-looking as her ex, and even he wasn’t that much to look at. She steps closer. His eyes are kind, maybe a bit naive. If she had to guess, he was around her age, with a job title like a user experience consultant or digital content analyst. What he definitely doesn’t seem like is the kind of guy who’ll push her up against the wall in the darkness and tear her dress off so he can kiss her naked body. For a fleeting moment, she feels tingles of arousal she hasn’t felt since she broke up with her ex. The tingle never lasts, she’s realized. It gets satiated and comes back diluted just a little bit each subsequent time, until it ceases to exist. She leans over the bow.
“Isn’t it strange how they don’t have some kind of security netting or something on these rails?” she says, looking down at the rollicking dark waves cascading against the hull below. “I mean, what’s to stop someone from just jumping off?”
“Well, people are on vacation here, they’re supposed to be happy,” the man says. “It’s an escape, after all.”
“Yeah…” her voice trails off—the waves are mesmerizing, hitting the ship with a metronomic regularity. “What if you want to escape the escape?”
“Do you think Jack and Rose would have been happy if they never hit the iceberg?”
“You mean in the movie?” she laughs, as she sidles next to him. Their arms touch.
He nods. “Or…what if the iceberg was the best thing that ever happened to them?”
Silence.
“Too dark?” he asks.
She smiles. “Not at all, it’s right up my dark alley.”
Beneath them, the cascading waves get larger and larger.
*
Unbeknownst to Jack and Rose, an undersea earthquake has just struck off the coast of Crete, 500 kilometres away. Minutes later, it sends a massive wave—virtually invisible in the darkness—towards the cruise ship. Just as the crew is alerted to its arrival, the wave tears the ship in two. Two hundred passengers and crew in the back section plunge into the depths and begin to drown as their lungs fill with water. Most perish within minutes. The wave tilts the front section down until the port side brushes against the water: Jack and Rose, with nothing to hold on to, slide across the deck until they hit the port side railing. Rose shrieks in agony—she’s dislocated her shoulder. Jack slams into the railing a few feet away. The ship then bobs back upright and settles into its original place—sans the back half, of course, which has left a gaping opening that allows the Mediterranean waters to gush in.
*
When observing the behaviour of a leopard in the jungle, or perhaps even a domesticated cat in the kitchen, humans are fond of saying that these simple creatures operate on uninhibited instinct—as if they themselves are exempt from those shackles. But in this moment that Jack finds himself in, with death surely imminent, instinct takes over. Pulling himself up and ignoring the shooting pain across his entire right side, he runs over to the woman, passed out in a heap. Summoning every ounce of energy within, he throws her over his shoulder and carries her to a door leading to a hallway. He has only one thought: I need to find a crew member, someone who can help. With each progressive step, he feels his legs weaken and shake (what he doesn’t realize is that the shaking is not all him, but also the ship’s lurching as it fills with water).
*
Rose wakes with a startle, her eyes wide in shock and her breath coming out in wild gasps. The first thing she sees is a man’s face, or to be more specific, his eyes. Kind eyes, dark brown. Her breathing slows, her body relaxes. She opens her mouth to ask what happened, but no words come out.
“It’s okay, you’re okay,” he says.
She wants to believe him, to be reassured by his eyes, his nervy smile. The two of them are on the ground in a deserted hallway, somewhere inside the ship. She tries to get up, but the moment she shifts her weight onto her dislocated arm, she screams. The man grabs her before she slides further down on her side. Tears stream down her cheeks.
She doesn’t want to die. Not like this. Not now. Have I been lying to myself my whole life? She tried drilling into herself that life was meaningless and random, but now, she acknowledges what she truly believes, that she’s meant for special, wondrous things, as if entitled to them by the universe. And this moment is the universe communicating to her just how wrong she truly is.
*
Now for the first time in his life, Jack doesn’t know what to do. He’s no DiCaprio, he doesn’t have a script to follow. He’s comforting a sobbing woman he’s just met, telling her they’re safe, that someone will save them. But fifteen minutes later and no one’s shown up. For all he knows, they’re the only survivors. Was it an errant torpedo? Did they somehow hit an iceberg in the middle of the Mediterranean?
He doesn’t have any hope for himself, all he’s got is a sinking feeling he’s going to die. But he realizes he has hope for her, this beautiful woman who just wants to survive. At that moment, he notices her dress is damp around the edges. The entire hallway carpet is soaked, for that matter. Looking at a nearby door to the deck, he sees water seeping in through its bottom edge. Jack gets her on her feet and tells her they have to go upstairs. We’re sinking, so might as well go to whatever qualifies as high ground on this ship, he explains. They find a stairwell and climb until they reach the top. He reaches for the door to exit, but the handle won’t budge.
“You need a crew pass,” the woman murmurs from the ground, where she’d collapsed to rest.
Jack’s stomach churns when he sees the security console by the door.
“Wait here,” he says. “I’m going down back to the deck to see if anyone’s out there.”
*
Rose has just met this guy, but the thought of him leaving her alone fills her with sheer terror. She begs him to stay, to wait until someone comes. Appearances don’t matter anymore, she spent her whole adulthood concerned with being stoic, tough, self-sufficient. All she wants now is someone to hold her, to keep her safe.
The man crouches by her side and folds his arms around her. She grips his back with her good arm. He kisses her cheeks, wet from tears, and presses his forehead against hers. They lock gazes. She sees fear in his eyes, and something else she can’t find the word for.
“I’ll come right back, I promise, I just have to look for help,” he says. “I have to do something.”
She moans softly and nods, lets go of him.
“I’ll come back,” he says.
And with that, he disappears down the stairwell. She hears his footsteps clang on the steel stairs. Then the sounds fade. Instead, she becomes aware of other noises: random loud bangs, deep lurching creaks, and accompanying those melodies, an unnerving low hum. A minute goes by, then another. Ten minutes and he still isn’t back. Something’s wrong.
She decides to go looking for him. She limps down the stairs, and the lower she goes, the louder a new sound becomes, the unmistakable sound of gushing water. She reaches the bottom of the stairwell and pulls open the door leading to the hallway. A torrent of water pours in, knee high. She braces herself by holding onto the doorway. She wades into the hallway and looks up and down for any sign of the man. Nowhere to be seen. With some difficulty, and panic from the realization that the water levels are rising, she makes it to the door leading out to the deck. She stands paralyzed, debating whether or not to open the door, when the door starts rattling. She pulls back, just as something large hits the door.
“Hello?” she yells.
*
When Jack stepped out to the deck to find it half under water and not a single soul around, he knew he had to get back inside. But the door wouldn’t open, no matter how hard he tried. When he hears the woman’s voice, he feels a surge of relief. At least, maybe, he won’t die alone, even if the door is separating them.
“The door’s jammed,” she says.
“It’s okay,” he hears himself say. “Just go back up, get higher. Someone might come.”
“No one’s coming, are they?” she says.
Jack sighs, sinks down onto the ground against the door, submerging his legs into the water.
“I don’t think so,” he says. “But you should go, don’t worry about me.”
He doesn’t hear a response. Is she the last voice he’ll ever hear, he wonders. He breathes in and out. A loud lurch somewhere below. Off to his left, he can see the slant of the deck, the water coming for him. It won’t be long. Most of us don’t know the last time we’re ever going to do something, the last breath, the final smile, the terminal embrace.
BANG!
BANG!
Jack slides away and raises his arms when bits of plastic and metal land on his head. He turns around. The door is ajar, its handle shattered. There she stands, wielding an ax she got from God knows where.
“Come on,” she screams, dropping the ax and reaching to him with her one good arm.
He lifts himself from the water, rising, always rising, and joins her in the hallway.
*
They clamber up the stairwell for the final time and try the security door one final time too. It still won’t budge. Down below, water flows in. They huddle together, fates accepted. The rush of fears and anxieties, dreams unfulfilled and experiences unlived, recedes from their minds. Jack and Rose close their eyes.
Those who cling to life, lose it. Those who give up life, gain it.
It’s one of those old sayings, open to several potential interpretations. One person might call it an acceptance of our inevitable morality. A second individual might throw in an addendum about the ecstasy of returning to their creator. Yet another person, a Buddhist perhaps, could see in it the freedom of relinquishing all attachments.
When the rescue crew bursts through the security door to find Jack and Rose still alive, the saying creates yet another meaning, a special one just for them.
They are taken into a helicopter, then a hospital on the mainland. Its wards overflow with victims of the catastrophe. Nurses attempt to separate them, but neither will let go of each other’s hands. They briefly relent to allow the nurses to do the necessary examinations. Jack has a broken rib. Rose’s arm is placed in a sling.
And yet, as they stare into each other’s eyes, their physical pain is faint, distant, a noise in the background.
*
Each moment before the imminent culmination is an agony. Once they’re in a hotel room, they kiss each other feverishly, salivating at the touch of each other’s mouths. He tears off her blouse—buttons scatter in the air. She pulls out her hair band, long strands fall down her bare shoulders. He grabs her breasts, kisses and squeezes them. She pushes him off, tugs on his T-shirt until it rips along the collar. He throws it off to the side. She licks his chest, his neck, as he pulls down his pants. There it is, she says.
*
They’re lying in bed, in the deep dark of night. Rose rests her head on his chest. This is what life is all about, she says out loud, her words catching her by surprise. He doesn’t say anything. He just smiles and gets the impulse to kiss her.
He understands. She understands.
*
The excitement of someone new to touch and fuck is too stimulating for Jack and Rose—they can’t fall asleep. After a long silence, they start talking. About their childhood, their parents, where they grew up. Memories. Their jobs, their lives today. Turns out they live in cities only a few hours away from each other. Of all the ways to meet, they laugh. Jack shares a story about his roommate and how he met his girlfriend.
“Roommate? Where do you live?” asks Rose.
“We split this laneway house downtown, his parents live in the main house and gave us a really good deal.”
“Oh.”
“It’s only for the time being though, to save money, you know,” he says.
“What do you do?”
“I’m a client support technician.”
“What’s that?”
“My company sells POS software, and I basically help clients figure out what to do when the software glitches,” he says. “Perk is I get to work from home!”
“That’s nice,” she says. “It must be tough to have a good work/life balance.”
“For sure,” he says. “I mean, there’s more to life than work.”
“Right.”
*
They’re lying in bed, in the bright light of morning. She lifts her head off his chest. Hours earlier, she told him she loved his eyes, that they were beautiful. His eyes are closed now, he’s still sleeping. She notices something she hasn’t noticed before. His ears, they’re kind of big. Not ridiculously big, but prominent. They remind her of a boy who had a crush on her in middle school: the other boys called him Dumbo. Super creative. And there on the top of his head, a bald spot, a slit of sunshine peers through the curtains to shimmer off of it. She stares for a few moments. In his sleep, he turns to his side. Her eyes wander from his head to his back, a hairy back. She felt it in the night, but it was hard to tell quite how hairy it was. Why couldn’t his back and head exchange hairs, she jokes to herself.
*
She’s taking a shower when he wakes up. He joins her, running his hands along her wet body as he kisses her. The kisses are different this morning. Quicker, shallower. He hasn’t noticed before, but she has loose wrinkled flabs of skin along her arms, her stomach. As if she once weighed a lot more at some point in the past. They get out of the shower. He lies in bed and watches her wrap her hair in a towel. Lifting all that hair out of the way, her nose…well…it seems bigger. As he registers that, another thing catches him off-guard: armpit hair, dark as her hair. He’s never been with a woman with armpit hair before.
*
A day later, they’re taking separate flights back to their cities. They split the cab to the airport. His favourite part of flying is watching movies to pass the time. He hopes they have the new big superhero film that came out that summer. She hasn’t heard of it.
“I don’t watch movies that much, or read to be honest,” she says. “I can’t sit down and do something for more than an hour—unless someone is paying me to do it.”
She giggles.
He looks out the window at cars going by in the opposite direction.
The airport: time to go to their gates. As they part, they exchange numbers and kiss.
“I’ll text you,” he says.
“Can’t wait,” she says.
In about ten hours, they’ll be back to their respective sanctuaries. Undisturbed, peaceful, and empty. As they wait to board their planes, a thought crosses their minds, almost at the same moment.
Life’s too short.
Jack settles down in his aisle seat. He doesn’t think there can be something like true love. Back to reality.
Rose gets stuck with a middle seat. She already knows she won’t be able to sleep caught amidst strangers, people she’ll never see again. First thing she’s going to do once she gets home is sleep, that kind of deep sleep where part of you wonders if you’ll ever wake up.
