I was off the curve once more and I turned my face to Selene.
She was gone.
I pushed away from the wall, scrambled upright.
I looked up the incline of the Boat Deck.
Bodies jumbled there, black-uniformed crewmen pulling at people in the nearest lifeboat, dragging them out — and this was why I could not let myself see too much — and therefore think too much — I was immobilized now trying to understand the incongruity of the crew unloading the unlaunched lifeboat — but they were acting on orders based on the desperate reality that the rivet heads and flanges down the side of the hull would rip the boat open in its dragging descent, even as these men no doubt proclaimed the lie — since there was no official Cunard alternative — that the ship was unsinkable.
I had to stop trying to figure things out with my head. I was losing any sense of what to do. I had to trust my body simply to act now.
And I found my body sparking with undirected energy to find Selene.
She was not visible.
And then she was.
I saw her white shirtwaist and dark skirt against the sky, emerging at the portside railing from beyond the wide, upright column of the Bridge Wing. She was moving up the deck, slowly, looking out to sea, as if she were taking some fresh air after lunch.
I knew a way.
I scrambled up the deck toward Selene. She did not move as I came near, and I stepped to the railing beside her. She seemed not even to notice.
We clung to the rail and watched the wide, bright, sun-flecked sea together for a few moments, as if the deck was deserted and I was ready to offer her a cigarette and later we might even work up to a kiss.
Then I slipped my arm around her waist.
And to my relief, she laid her head against the point of my shoulder.
I angled my head toward hers.
In spite of our appearance at the rail and my sharp focus on her, I was fully aware of the welter all around us. I bent to her, brought my mouth close to her ear so I could speak loudly enough to be heard but still sound tender, like an actor wooing an actress and projecting the performance to the back of the mezzanine. “Selene.”
She lifted her head away from my shoulder.
“I want to hold you close to me once again,” I said.
She lifted her chin just a bit.
“In this lifetime,” I said.
She nodded.
She turned her face and looked up into my eyes.
We could delay no longer.
I took her hand.
“We have to go over,” I said, flipping my head a little toward the top of the ship.
And we turned and we cut across the deck to the stairway and we were going up and the stairs were empty — groups in panic follow the obvious paths, stack up at exit doors, refuse to act against their conditioned response — and we were climbing fast and we emerged onto the rubber-matted flooring outside the wheelhouse. The windows were a few steps forward of us and I couldn’t see inside and I was glad for that, glad to miss an image of the quiet chaos in there. We turned aft.
And a junior officer stepped from the bridge doorway, directly into our path. He lifted a meatpacker’s hand, giving us his palm.
We stopped. Though I didn’t want to do it because I was afraid Selene would run again, I knew I had to let go of her hand.
I gave it a squeeze and released it.
“Forbidden,” he shouted. “Go back.”
A pistol was wedged into his belt on his right hip. He was under orders to protect the bridge with deadly force.
“We’re just going through,” I said.
His palm was coming down and it was angling toward his hip.
I took a quick step forward as his hand neared the pistol and my right fist was closed tight already and I stepped once more, planted my leading foot, my left foot, out ahead, and I stopped and he grasped the pistol and I set myself and the barrel was coming free and I drove my fist forward — an overhand right — shifting my sight to his face, seeing only his deep-clefted chin, and I was pivoting my whole body from the hips and pushing off on my back foot and driving through and I caught him square in a boxer’s sweet aiming spot, right on the point of his chin, and there was a crack that I could hear above the siren roar and there was the clean, hard yielding and the release and the flying away. He landed hard and bounced and settled, and the rube’s jaw was glass: his head lolled to the side and his eyes rolled back and closed.
I turned to find Selene.
She was standing beside me, a step behind.
She was staring at the unconscious man.
And she surprised me. On her face was a keen, narrow-eyed, steely focus.
Something had shifted in her. It let me move on to what was next. “Can you swim?” I said.
Her hands moved to her waist and she unfastened her skirt and it fell to her feet like a punched-out sailor. She stepped from it and stood there in black stockings, white drawers to the knees, and the bounteously phony bosom of her life jacket. “Yes, I can swim,” she said.
And I did not have to hold her hand.
I turned and Selene and I stepped past the unconscious junior officer, and before us was a waist-high wall, and bellied up to it just beyond was the fat body and great gaping black maw of a cowl ventilator, as tall as the bridge. No doorway through to the Hurricane Deck. But there was a passable space between the vent and the Bridge.
“Over,” I said to Selene, and I stepped aside. She went to the wall and put her hands on it and I grabbed her waist in my hands and lifted and she went over and I followed and she let me pass her as we went around the ventilator.
We crossed straight over to the starboard side and began to work our way up the incline of the deck, which made moving forward heavy-legged and hard, but we held tight to the railing, resisting the sideways incline of the ship, which would make falling down to the Boat Deck and then into the sea light-chested and easy.
I watched below as we moved, assessing the situation, seeking an opening for us. The deck seethed with passengers, and I was struck by two surpassingly sad things. One was this: hundreds of people were dithering and flustering and drifting and huddling about in faux calm, but there were dozens of different currents and directions, moving forward, moving aft, lurching to the rail’s edge, clinging to the deck wall; worse than the sadness of the few wild retreats I’d seen of men on a battlefield, where at least their direction was clear, this was a vast shifting image of hopelessness, seen from above as if by a powerless or an indifferent god. And the second sad thing was all the bare heads, all the bare heads of men and women and children whose world was a world of hats and caps and scarves, of heads covered beneath the sky, and now all these people had been lifted desperately from the bareheaded safety of belowdecks or they had already stripped themselves of their coverings as they faced a plunge into the sea.
And the sea was very near to their deck now.
I watched a lifeboat amidships, pulled out by the list to the farthest extent of its snubbing chains, the boat almost full with huddling bodies, and a woman was poised at deck’s edge — she still in fur-trimmed coat and hat and veil and without a life jacket — and men’s hands in the boat reached out beseeching her to try to jump across the six or eight feet of empty space to them. She leaned forward and then back and then shuffled her feet and wobbled and tried to work herself up to the leap, while at the running blocks at each corner of the boat gap in the railing, crewmen pulled hard at the falls, the man forward visibly quaking from the strain of keeping the bow up high in order to level the boat with the sea instead of the deck.