And worse, it had its own intent: I felt a stirring in me at San Marco, a thing more like a need than a desire, a thing that I did not agree with but that would hear no arguments, no matter how clear and reasonable. Still, though I could not persuade it, I could put it aside. And I left the piazza, my mind ascendant, without so much as making my feet naked and wading out into this liquid sky. Instead I went back to my room and then back to London and I hated these men who’d made this ship but I have learned to wait for justice in this life, I have learned that there is always a long and perhaps even endless wait for justice, and so when I bought my ticket I did not expect the arrogance of these men to be so quickly punished. And then the moment came and I knew what it was and I went up onto the promenade deck and he was there looking out at the sea. He was tall and dressed in tweeds and he had a mustache, but he had no hat and he was watching the icebergs out there in the calm and moonlit sea and I wanted to tell him what I knew.
So I came near him and I said, “We’re doomed now.”
Then he turned his face to me and his eyes were soft and I would be patient with him for the sake of his woman’s eyes, I thought.
He said something about the ship being all right, this unsinkable ship. I wondered if he really believed that. I said, “We’ve struck an iceberg. The deed is done.”
Then he looked back out to the ice. I realized he was, in fact, listening to me. He was changing his opinion.
“And suppose we have,” he said, a gravity in his voice now. I felt a rustle of something in me before this man who was listening, a sweet feeling, even a legitimate one, I thought. But it’s then that he played the fool. He asked me if I was traveling alone and he tried to blame my fears on that.
When the sound of hammering and the thrashing of air woke me from a deep dreamless sleep, I naturally expected to find myself in the ice field on the morning of April 15, 1912. But overhead was an astonishing thing, a great dark machine, hovering. I thought of the Martians. For a long while. Even after this machine had suddenly swung away and dashed off. Then there was another sharp sound and a ship was approaching and I realized that the air was quite warm and this ship had towers and attachments that were strange to me, like no ship I had ever seen. Some of the others in the lifeboat, women, of course — we were the ones saved with only a few male crew members to row — some of the women in the boat began to weep with fear. “Quiet!” I cried out to them. “Keep your dignity.” And I understood that my anger at them was like their tears. I was frightened into a feeling that I wanted to repudiate as not truly my own.
But when the ship eased up to us and we were finally on its deck and safe, the captain of the vessel, dressed in a white uniform, came to us where we were huddled. And it was a woman. “I am Captain O’Brien,” she said and I knew at once that we had somehow passed far into a future time. I imagined my father’s paper proclaiming “Woman Captains Ship” and soon, of course, there were more wonders. “Great Silver Airship Carries People Five Miles Above Earth,” for instance, and “Horses Disappear from Roads, Replaced Universally by Racing Cars” and “Mathematical Genius Transferred to Tiny Machine” and “Window on World in Every Home.” I have been in this hotel room in Washington, D.C., for less than an hour now and I am very weary. But I have looked through that window, and its view will change to a different part of the world with the merest touch on a small planchette in my hand. This brings a heady feeling of power and I found I could rest on no image for more than a few moments, there is too much to see, and as a result I have seen almost nothing, clearly. My head began to spin and I closed the window. I know I speak in something of a metaphor. It’s not a window but one more machine, a thing called television. And perhaps all these machines, all this technology, mean that the men in mustaches and derby hats triumphed at last. Perhaps ships no longer sink. But through this television I’ve seen enough images of women intimately involved with machines to believe that we’ve been enfranchised in the creation of technology, as well. I am happy for that, but the feeling is not unadulterated. I have to face this selfish part of me.
I am no longer needed, for one thing. I have no proof of it, but I am certain in a world like this that women have the right to vote. And I am confident, too, that politicians have become honest and responsive, as a result. And if there is a woman ship captain and if we have been enfranchised, then I can even expect that there have been women presidents of the United States. It is selfish, but this makes me sad. It would have been better to have died in my own time.
But he saved me, this nameless man. With all the wonders I’ve seen and the losses I’ve realized since I woke from my long and mysterious sleep, it is this man who will not let go of my mind. And there are clothes laid out for me on the bed, strange clothes, a skirt and shirtwaist and undergarments that are skimpy and loose and I am not used to my body, what am I to do with my body now that the focus of my mind has been rendered obsolete? But this is not simply a problem of the new age. Indeed, if in my own time I’d been more comfortable in that fleshy self, I would perhaps have a function, or at least a prospect of pleasure, before me now.
I wish I’d stayed on the ship with him. But I didn’t even know his name. Even after I saw through his foolishness. He tried to convince me that what I knew about the ship was attributable to my being a woman traveling alone, but when I challenged him, when I told him that I knew what death was about, he listened to me again. When I was a child — dear God, more than a century ago now — and my father was editor of the Mingo County Courier in West Virginia and going up even then against the coal company excesses, there was a mine collapse near where we lived and I went with my father to the place, and as soon as I entered that town, I could feel the death in the air, on my skin, all over my body. When I remember it now, it feels like what a man might feel like, stealing in on you in the night and touching you against your will, only you’re sleeping and he’s touching you very lightly so that he doesn’t wake you. And there was a smell in the air. Maybe not quite perceptible but you felt it coming in through your nose and into your lungs, filling you up.
It was that way on the Titanic. As soon as I stepped onto the deck, though almost no one knew what I knew and they were going about their lives, I could smell that same smell. To feel those things on my skin and in my lungs when I was a child, and to watch, as I did, the women of that mining town clutching each other, helpless: I don’t think the world was the same for me after that. But I didn’t speak of that to the man on the promenade deck. I just told him about the mine disaster and what I smelled and that I smelled it again. For almost any man, this would not convince him at all. He would use those very intuitions against me. But he listened, and then he said he was sorry. He actually apologized, and I knew he meant it. And he didn’t try to reassure me anymore. That struck me as wonderful.