The Star of Istanbul

13

And the Lusitania steamed into its last sunrise. And we all steamed with it. I slept only a little after leaving Selene. I rose and I wrote some and I packed my things and I ate lunch, with the ship orchestra playing “The Blue Danube,” and I went down to the Purser’s Bureau in the Entrance Hall on B Deck and I retrieved the constant hidden companion of every foreign excursion of my war correspondent career: my money belt, with a stash of gold coins and with reporter credentials and a passport protected inside, for hot countries and cold, for wet countries and dry, for mountain battlefields and city back alleys.

Then I returned to my cabin and I opened my shirt and I strapped the belt around me and fastened my clothes around it as if I were about to mount a horse and ride into actual danger, and I chuckled. I don’t chuckle. But I affected a tough-guy ironic chuckle, like a bad actor doing a melodrama hero. Like I was such a well-equipped tough guy who thrived on danger but here I was, trapped in a chuckle-worthy lesser world that booksellers and pamphlet writers and sons of tycoons and mothers with their toddlers inhabited. Here I was, simply about to go through customs in Queenstown, Ireland, and board a train for London, England, with a secret mission to sneak around and think about what college lecturers and film actresses might be up to, having lately been used up and kicked out the door by a beautiful woman. This latter probably was the main thing that prompted the phony chuckle.

And even while I was going through this little fit of pique, like an actor in a repertory company peeved by the no-account role he’d been given to play, a U-boat captain was watching us do fifteen substandard knots in a goddamn straight line directly toward him and wondering just how lucky he was going to get.

Pretty goddamnn lucky, as it would soon turn out.

I stepped onto the promenade and the sky was clear and the sun was high and I felt how slow we were going right away. I walked aft, and the portside was full of people crammed at the brief stretches of open railing between lifeboats. The coast of Ireland was distantly visible out there. Some people were murmuring reassuring things about that. Others, who knew ships and their speed and their bearing, were muttering about our vulnerability. And even the ones who were made hopeful by the sight of land were unsettled by the absence of Turner’s promised Royal Navy. We were alone.

I knew the muttering was right. I had a pretty refined nose for the whiff of war, but it was attuned to land forces, clashing armed men, so I was willing, in all fairness, to temper my instinctive assessment of officers out here on the ocean, even civilian ones, in spite of the fact that Captain Turner, from my two encounters with him and from this present sailing strategy, seemed to me a classic example of military hierarchy: a guy who was mediocre and competent at some lower level but who had inevitably been promoted to a rank and responsibility where he was finally stupid and incompetent. But that conclusion was more from my mind than my gut, and I liked to rely on my gut in combat zones. So I took on the enlisted man’s attitude. I put my mind off the forces I could not control. Somebody else was guiding this ship.

I had my own present jitters, but they were professional and personal, and the sight of Ireland held no appeal for me, so I turned and hustled forward, passing beneath the portside Bridge Wing, casting, as I did, a quick glance up toward where Turner was bungling along. I followed the curve of open passageway beneath the Main Bridge and arrived at the starboard side, where there weren’t so many passengers, and I slowed down and I thought to step to the rail just forward of Lifeboat 1. The vast, indigo sea lay out there with the sunlight scattered brightly upon it, and it struck me that Turner might have once been a brilliant guy, a potential genius of an officer in any self-respecting, land-based army, but he had been driven to stupidity and incompetence by staring too long at vast indigo seas with sunlight scattered brightly upon them.

So I kept walking. I’d gather a few last quotes for my sea-voyage-through-a-war-zone feature story and yes, maybe take a peek at the Irish coast to work in a few pretty landscape details. I passed Lifeboat 3 and 5 and 9 and passed Lifeboat 11, beneath the high-towering number-three funnel, and then it seemed that a great iron door slammed shut behind me and the deck beneath my feet quaked and I stopped and I knew instantly what it was. I turned and from beneath the starboard Bridge Wing a plume of water was rising and dark scraps of the hull and smoke from 350 pounds of TNT and hexanite — a U-boat had just plugged us — and I reflexively sucked in the still-pristine air around me and my breath caught and I hardly let go of the breath, I hardly began to lift my face to the rise of torpedo-spew when a second sound began. A quick-gathering massive thunder-roll of sound slammed against me and the deck bucked — and I knew — I knew it was the half dozen forward boilers ripping us open — and I staggered back and the plume that had begun from the torpedo-strike bloated instantly, rising and thrusting and scrabbling upward suddenly full of steam and coal and cinder and wood and iron and it rose above the funnels, as high as a Chicago skyscraper, and it expanded and it seemed it would cover me, and I turned and sprinted aft two strides and a third, but I wanted to see, I wanted to be able to write this moment accurately and I had to see, so I stopped now.

I turned and shoulders were bumping me, people were scrambling past, and down the way at about Lifeboat 5 the steaming rain was beginning to fall, the black metal hail of boiler and hull, and as it came down I lowered my eyes and a man in morning clothes was vanishing there and the clang and clatter of it all filled the air and yet I could also hear the heavy exhalation of human breath rushing past me and Lifeboat 5 was splintering and tumbling beneath the crashing and thudding fragments of the Lusitania. And yes. Yes, I could see now the soundless fall of body parts from belowdecks, a torso, a leg, a head. And the falling and the tumbling and the raining went on for a time, and a time more, and it seemed a long time, but it was a short time, and then there was silence.

For a breath-snagged moment, there was silence.

A seagull cried out above me.

And then more silence.

Except now the great metal groaning of the ship. The deep, vast grinding of metal.

And a distant heavy rushing of water into the gash of our forward starboard hull.

Suddenly I was light in the feet and in the leg and in the shoulders as the bow of our ship plunged to the right and the whole starboard length of the ship began to fall over with it.

My chest seized as I expected to fly beyond the railing and into the sea. I threw my arms out, danced like a boxer, to try to balance.

And the ship’s plunge ceased as abruptly as it began.

I was still on deck, still on my feet.

We listed maybe fifteen degrees starboard and downward but we were stable at that angle for the moment and we were plowing forward.

Even as the wordless cries of fear began all around and the first of the lying sons of bitches who wore Cunard uniforms called out from somewhere behind me that we were just fine, that we couldn’t sink, this much was clear to me right away: because of the deep inner engine room source of the second blast and because of the pitch of the deck and the angle of our bow into the sea, the Lusitania was going to sink, and pretty goddamn quickly.

And a thing came into me, and it was not a thought; it came from nowhere near my mind but rather from my skin, from my blood, from my bones: I was filled with Selene. I was filled with her and I was apart from her and I had to lay my hands upon her now and carry her away from this sinking ship.

I loaded and locked a battlefield focus: there were others around me, many others, and we all shared our mortality and our peril, but as with an infantryman in a company across a field of fire from a bunker and a gun, the assault on which was the single and utter purpose of his life, all the other people around me blurred into the background, became immediate only when they were directly involved in my mission.

I strode forward and already people were rushing out of the Main Staircase doors to the Boat Deck and I was thinking to enter at the point closest to Selene’s suite. But as I veered to the rail and around the bodies flowing onto the promenade I could see up ahead. All the rubble from below and the remains of Lifeboat 5 lay blocking the doorway I wished to enter. Lay, as well, outside Brauer’s windows.

I wondered for a moment about him, about what skills he might have to save himself. I knew the further trouble we were all in. From our list to starboard, the lifeboats on this side of the ship had swung out on their davits to the farthest extent of their snubbing chains and would be brutally difficult to launch, especially as our momentum would carry us for miles yet, sucking in the sea, and on the portside the lifeboats would be pinned against the hull and be even harder to launch.

I had to go in through the doors to the Main Staircase. And I had to stop thinking. There were two sets of double doors, double but narrow, fine for elegant comings and goings but this was the Boat Deck and everyone from the Lounge and the Writing Room were already jammed here, and the Main Staircase was no doubt filling with the upsurge of people from the lower decks who were mobbing up behind, and everyone was pressing hard, trying to get to the lifeboats.

I didn’t want to cross the current of that mob inside to get to the forward-leading corridor, so I danced through the dispersing flow of bodies out here on the promenade and then planted myself on the far side of the jamb on the forward set of double doors, beside the desperate outrush of bodies. I took a breath — like preparing to leap from a trench on the front — and I turned my shoulder forward and I concentrated on the seam between jamb and emerging body and I inserted my shoulder there, braced my legs, pressed forward to lever myself inside, and a man’s shoulder met mine hard and he was coming from above me by the angle of our list and he drove me back around.

And I did it again, this time with a woman emerging, all seal coat and honeysuckle scent, and she was coming out straight and I wedged at the seam and turned her sideways just enough, putting my hands onto her arms so she would not fall, and she continued on out as I slid across her and around the door frame, and I was in a tiny vestibule and the slow thick flow of bodies pressed me against the side wall and I edged inward and then to another door jamb and to a small man in a rain slicker who I turned sideways and he was all right and sidling away and I levered my way inside and the crowd surged from behind and I was slammed hard into the wall, but it was only a short few sideways-driving steps more and I curled to the right around the corner, and I was free of the mob.

The doors to the Writing Room and Library were before me. I stepped to them and through them and the list made it hard to sprint but I moved as fast as I could, skirting tipped chairs and scattered books, and now half a dozen bodies were lurching toward me, strapped into their life jackets, heading away from their blocked door onto the Boat Deck, and I jinked between and around them. I passed through the forward doors of the Writing Room and into the starboard forward-leading corridor, and as I did, I finally was struck by the brightness of the space I’d just left. The room’s portholes, which were square and large as proper windows, were filled with the afternoon sun, which meant the outside porthole covers were open. The quick sinking would escalate even faster without a chance to execute porthole discipline across the ship.

Now the false assurance of the dimness of the cabin corridor warned me of a different imminent danger. The electric lights blinked off and everything went black and they flickered back on. The crossway to the portside was just ahead and I stepped to the intersection and two more bodies bumped into me and then veered past, heading aft, ignoring our collision, a woman weeping heavily and a man murmuring “It’s all right” and “It’s all right, my darling.”

I stood at this juncture — before me was Brauer’s suite and beyond was my own stateroom — and I took a quick inventory. My money belt was strapped to me. I patted the pockets of my sack coat and felt, deep in an inside pocket, my leather-pouched set of lock picks. I gave one brief thought to the things still in my cabin. Only my Corona Portable Number 3 and the words I’d written on it these past few days gave me a twist of serious regret, but this was, in fact, a meaningless exercise. There was no time. It was impossible now to do anything except turn and press on, which I did, my legs suddenly heavy from the incline, as heavy as in a bad dream.

As if they’d been trapped belowdecks and finally found the staircase, a couple of fears scrambled up into my chest and then into my head: She’s probably already gone. And you have no plan even if you find her.

But I knew this from the wars I’d covered: thinking is how you die. You react. And either you do things right or you don’t. But nobody can think fast enough to live.

A few steps more and I turned into the portside forward-running corridor and then I was at her door and I pounded on it.

From outside, from the portside promenade, I heard men suddenly cry out together, men in some heavy, physical, coordinated task, and then a scraping and a scuffling and then shouts and a clanking and creaking and suddenly very nearby a massive clang of struck iron and a crack of wood and the corridor quaked beneath my feet and many voices were screaming, and I could picture in my head the whole quick terrible sequence: some crewmen tried to launch a lifeboat against the list of the ship, tried to push it out together and away and the men working the falls failed to let the ropes out in their split second of opportunity and the lifeboat swung back on board on its davits and crushed the crew and threw the passengers against the deck wall.

Selene could have been out there.

She might have just this moment died.

I was crazy. Why was I knocking? I tried Selene’s door and it was locked.

This was good. She wouldn’t rush out in these circumstances and then lock her door behind her. She was inside.

“Selene!” I cried. And again: “Selene!” I backed away to kick the door in. It would be up the incline and I struggled to secure my footing — the opposite corridor wall was too far away to brace myself — and I planted my foot on the floor as best I could, straining into the rubberized tiles, and I kicked hard just below the door lock.

A little give. But it was still locked. I kicked again and stumbled forward. The cries went on from the deck. The electric lights flickered and went out. And stayed out. The generator was dead. My throat clamped shut.

I couldn’t see the door. It was before me but I needed to aim well to kick this thing open. But around a corner about fifty feet aft was the door to the promenade. Its porthole spilled a little light that seeped just far enough into the corridor that it let my eyes begin to adjust.

I set myself once more and kicked, and I set and kicked again and the door popped open and instantly banged back shut. But the lock was breached. I stepped forward and pushed through into Selene’s suite.

I flinched at the light.

The door slammed behind me.

The portholes were lace-curtained but unshuttered, letting the day pour in.

Shadows flashed there at the windows. A jumble of sharp voices and moaning. Clanking of chains. I made them blur away from me.

I turned.

The sofa. The chair. The whole parlor. Empty. Selene was gone.

But there was one more room.

I stepped quickly across the floor and into the bedroom.

And I saw her.

She was lying on her back on the farther of the two foot-to-foot beds. She was dressed in shirtwaist and skirt and flat shoes. Her hands were crossed on her chest. She was very still.

I thought of goddamn Juliet and plunged forward, sat down beside her.

She stirred.

I put my hands behind her shoulders and pulled her up, pulled her against my chest. She was warm. She was moving. I put my mouth against her ear. “Selene,” I said.

And her hands fell upon my back, pressed me against her.

We held each other and we did not speak and I grew stupid once again. I figured it was me she’d been waiting for, figured she’d been lying here waiting in the midst of mortal chaos because she needed me to arrive before she could think to be saved.

But she was simply clinging to me.

“We need to go now,” I said.

She pulled away a little and looked me in the eyes, her face half in dark shadow, half in the light from the porthole, that half flickering with the shadows of the chaos outside.

“It’s too much for me,” she said.

“I’ll help you,” I said.

She shook her head faintly, and I could see her mouth make a thin, asymmetrical smile, an ironic smile, and though it was a leap, I didn’t think I was stupid about this: I felt pretty sure that what was “too much” for her was more than just finding a way to save herself from drowning; she was choosing whether or not to live, whether lying back down on this bed and dying was the only way for her to refuse to work for the Germans.

What did they have on her?

An irony was dawning on me as well: to talk her into escaping with me would be to preserve her for the Germans’ plan.

I embraced the irony. I said, “You have so much to live for.”

She put her hand on my chest. It wasn’t clear to me if it was a gesture of connection or a gentle Go away.

“Let’s do this together,” I said.

Her ironic smile again.

Voices outside the window.

She turned her face sharply in that direction.

I was locked in to Selene and I’d missed the words out there. A woman’s voice. Something about a child. I knew how little time we all had now, before the Lusitania went down. I was pretty sure the lifeboats were mostly useless. The children could not be saved.

“I can save you,” I said to Selene.

She looked back to me as sharply as if I’d cried out from beyond the porthole. The irony was gone from her face.

She believed me. I wasn’t sure I believed myself. But we’d try this together.

“Okay,” she said.

We both leapt up from the bed.

“Life jackets,” I said and I was ahead of her, striding into the parlor and to the tall wardrobe in the forward corner. I opened it and the upper shelf was jammed tight with two G. M. Boddy life jackets. They would not yield to a moderate grasp. I yanked them hard and they tumbled out.

I knew the design from a steamer in the Gulf. They were full of kapok in a strong drill casing, and if you put it on right, you’d float for days no matter what the seas. I worked quickly at the three knots to open one and Selene watched and she started on the knots on a second jacket before I’d finished. She was committed to this. Good.

We slipped them on, one big Falstaffian pad on our chest, five others around and behind us, one of them high between our shoulder blades to keep our heads above water no matter what. We tied each other in.

I took her hand and we went through the door and into the darkness of the corridor.

We turned right, toward the portal onto the Boat Deck.

It was our nearest way out. And it was worth taking a moment to see if the portside was indeed impossible: if my fear was wrong, then we’d be mad to contend with the upswell of bodies from belowdecks in the starboard exit doors.

We staggered along for a few steps, finding where to center ourselves in our bodies, balancing low in the legs, and we turned into the short portal corridor. My hand and Selene’s hand found each other without a thought driving them, without a glance from either of us. We held tight and moved to the portal.

I turned the handle and heaved the door open and we stepped out. A few yards aft, a lifeboat filled the deck, pressed against the wall. Battlefields had taught me to see and not to see splashes of blood and bodies splayed and crushed and others laid out writhing, and I looked back to Selene. She was seeing clearly what I did not. Her vast dark eyes were looking beyond me and they were wide with the carnage and with a thought I could read: it was better for her just to go back to her cabin and lie down and cross her arms on her chest.

And so she was letting go of my hand and she was recoiling backward toward the door and I knew from the rushing and crying around me and the angle of the deck beneath our feet and the lifeboats pinned against our hull that we should get away from the portside, and I reached out and grabbed her at the wrist before she could vanish and I dragged her forward and I cried “Look only at me” and I pulled her behind me for my first step forward and another — we would head for the starboard side, but not by the exit doors — and then I didn’t have to pull, and her wrist in my trailing hand twisted, but only so her own hand could grasp me in return, and she was with me, our hands holding at the wrists and I pushed hard through the narrow spaces between bodies, staggering at times as the angle to starboard tried to throw us down, but the angle forward helped us rush and we hugged the deck wall using it when we could, bracing our passage with our free hands or even at times with our feet, Selene slipping now sideways, and we got her up, clambering at each other with our hands, and we made our way forward, and in my functioning consciousness were only her hand and mine and the series of physical objectives I would set, one by one, to focus our rush. The Bridge Wing first, floating before us, and we stumble-rushed along and it neared and we swerved out from a staircase to the bridge and now we were passing beneath the wing and immediately ahead was the curving turn of the deck wall at the forward crossover passageway, and I knew we had to take that carefully, we dared not lose our footing in the turn, for there would be nothing on the other side to stop our tumble and I didn’t know the state of things down that slope, and so I pulled us up sharply, in the shadow of the Bridge Wing.

I turned us and we pressed back there against the wall. Just to my right the corner began its curve forward. Selene intertwined her fingers in mine and squeezed tight. Briefly. And then her hand went slack.

I turned my face to her. Selene Bourgani’s famous profile was before me, her head laid back as if she’d returned to her cabin bed. Her eyes were shut.

“Don’t give up,” I said. I could barely hear myself.

I realized there was a great din all around me of voices and chains and steam and footfalls and distress whistle and groaning hull metal and sobs and I blocked it all out once more and I leaned nearer to Selene and I cried out loudly, “Selene!”

Her face turned to me and her eyes opened.

“Stay with me,” I cried.

She stared at me blankly for a long moment. I was afraid she was losing her will. I thought to shake her, even to slap her across the cheek. This mood would kill her. Would kill us both.

But she stirred. She nodded to me: Yes.

“I need to check,” I cried, motioning over my shoulder to the corner of the deck wall. “Then we move.”

She nodded again.

I let go of her hand and turned and laid my chest against the wall and I worked my way left, carefully, along the curve, feeling the pull grow stronger on me, feeling it in my chest, and I pressed harder into the wall, stretched my neck to the left, waiting to see what I needed to see, hoping the sight would come before I was grabbed off my feet and thrown forward.

And then I could see, and I strained my legs to stop.

I stopped.

This is what I saw: the deck fell sharply toward the water, and beyond the foremast the water was foaming in a sharp, slashing angle across the forecastle, with starboard railing and capstans and hatches and windlass already vanished utterly beneath the sea and, with them, the far end of the passageway to the starboard side.

I pulled away, pressed my back against the deck wall, edged around the curve, thrashing in my head to visualize a way out for us, with the portside promenade a death trap and the forward passage to the starboard promenade blocked and the inside starboard portals clogged with chaos.

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.

The woman couldn’t bring herself to jump and she broke away and retreated into the paralyzed crowd and a shout grew up and three others of those waiting behind — two of them men — surged forward to make the leap and a skinny young man in shirtsleeves and suspenders lunged in front of the others and planted his foot and left the deck just as the quaking forward crewman slipped at his feet and his legs buckled and the bow of the lifeboat dipped abruptly and the skinny young man tried to stop and he twisted and he fell disappearing into the gap and a great cry rose up in the lifeboat as it dipped farther and farther down at the front and the forty or so people inside tumbled out in a great flailing of arms and legs and the aft crewman fell now too and all the ropes were loosed and the lifeboat and all its passengers vanished from view.

I’d seen enough. I turned to Selene and she let go of the railing and she began to back away, her eyes wide.

I stepped to her, put my hands on her shoulders, stopped her. I did not have to shake her. She grew calm at once beneath my hands. Her eyes relaxed and they focused on me and then narrowed once more in the resolve I’d seen on the bridge.

“We have to go into the water now,” I said. “As quickly as we can, as easily as we can.”

She nodded.

I said, “Our jackets will help us. We swim as far away from the ship as possible. After that, there will be plenty of things afloat to cling to.”

She nodded again.

All this seemed feasible to me. If it was, if we ended up safely in the water, I still worried about the ship capsizing on us. But I didn’t say so. I worried about the great sucking vortex at the ship’s last vanishing. But I didn’t say so.

I said, “Let’s go. We’ll use the rail, but try not to look down. Just follow me.”

She nodded a last time and I turned and I led us back to the railing and we headed aft, passing from the shadow of funnel number one, and I was still trying to visualize if we needed to leave the Hurricane Deck. We’d have to be patient if we stayed. We’d have to wait for the very last moment for the sea to come to us. But with the bow filling, the ship could suddenly rear up from the stern to sink.

We left the rail to go around another cowl vent, which was no longer taking in fresh air but spewing thick black smoke from belowdecks, and beyond it we cut back to the railing and I leaned out and looked ahead for a way down to the Boat Deck. About fifty yards farther on, past funnel number two, was a staircase.

Suddenly the ship began to quake beneath our feet and a great metallic groan filled the air coming from all around us and I stopped and turned and I cried “Hold on to me!” and Selene put her arms around my waist and I gripped the railing hard with both hands and the Lusitania shook and it grabbed the breath out of me as it lurched toward the sea and I braced my hips against the railing and a many-voiced human cry came from below us and Selene held me tight and we stopped, we did not capsize but we stopped, and the cry below ceased abruptly and I looked and bodies were still careening and flying against the Boat Deck railing and over and gone but we’d stopped for now and the angle toward the sea was worse but it felt as if the angle forward had abated a little — just a little — we could still move, we still could move.

“Not much farther,” I cried. “Careful placing your feet.”

Selene knew to take her arms off me and we both clutched the railing and we moved aft as quickly as we could, pulling with our arms as much as driving forward with our legs, placing our feet carefully with each step so they would not slide from under us, and we approached funnel number two and its shadow fell upon us and I heard Selene gasp and she stopped and I looked behind me and she was staring upward and I followed her gaze and the top section of the listing funnel was directly over our heads.

“Just watch me,” I cried.

She lowered her face and I turned and we moved on.

And we were at the staircase and it was opposite the Marconi shack — its wireless antennae rising from its roof to join the long, taut telegraph lines strung from foremast to mainmast — and the door was gaping open and inside an operator sat in a bolt-secured chair, hunched over his key, tapping furiously away. I wanted to step to him and grab him by the arm and pull him away. The ship was lost; whoever was going to hear us had heard us already. But this was one of those guys you find in times like this who’ll die doing what he signed up to do. As I led Selene down the stairs I thought: If I live, I’ll put this man — and what he was — in the story I’ll write.

And we were on the Boat Deck.

I looked to the left and staggered back, throwing my arm across Selene, startled as if I’d turned an alleyway corner into the chest of a hulking stranger. The sea had claimed the deck almost up to my feet.

Which was fine. We didn’t need to seek the right place to enter. It was waiting for us.

The slash of sea before us foamed at its claiming edge.

I turned us aft.

Astern, those who had no life jackets and those who had them but could not muster the nerve to use them were clambering at the last two lifeboats, which were swinging wildly at the end of their snubbing chains.

“Here,” I said.

I took Selene by the hand and we moved toward the railing a few paces aft.

A little farther along, a man in a union suit was meticulously folding his pants, with his overcoat and his coat and his shirt already carefully stacked at his feet.

Somewhere a woman was sobbing.

The bridge siren abruptly stopped.

I let go of Selene’s hand and we were at the railing.

“Up,” I said and she climbed the railing and swung her legs over and she balanced a moment there and I came up beside her and I took her hand in mine once more and I looked at the sea and it was full of bodies alive and dead and it was full of planking from wrecked lifeboats and I looked down, and the drop was less than ten feet but a deck chair spun directly below us and I felt Selene’s body as it started to move outward and I cried “Hold” and she tried, she gently braked her body, and the deck chair bumped the hull and it spun and Selene was starting to rebound backward, was starting to fall backward and I slipped my arm around her and kicked hard with my heels against the bottom rail and we flew a little away from the hull and we had only water below us and we fell and the cold grabbed me by the feet and rushed up my legs as I took my arm from around Selene’s waist and I sucked in a deep breath and the water rushed up my abdomen and my chest and I flinched my eyes closed and my face flashed sharp cold, the cold raked through me and the sea was heavy upon me and now I was no mind at all, I was only my body I was only the memories of my muscles and I was the sinking and I was the slowing and I was the stopping. And I was the gathering of arm and flattening of hand and coiling of leg and then I was the stroking upward and I could feel my chest rising ahead of me rising as if on its own — the life jacket lifting me — and the pressure of the sea fell away from the top of my head and from my forehead and my eyes and my cheeks and all my face and now my shoulders and I was in the air.

I gasped in the air and I opened my eyes, and swinging to my face as if to kiss me hello was a sweet woman’s face, her large eyes closed, the lids smooth and white, the face was very white and angled to kiss me, angled too far sideways, and I was no mind at all, I was only my body before her, and my body assumed she was Selene, and she was dead, I knew, this woman approaching me, and I clutched tight in the chest, but then I knew it was not Selene, and then bumping my face was a coldness beyond the coldness of the sea, a terrible coldness bumped a last kiss upon my cheek, a good-bye kiss sliding across my mouth and she moved away, she could not linger and she was gone and she was a stranger and she was dead, and I heard myself gasping, gasping for breath in the cold sea but gasping for the mistake my body had made and gasping to know if Selene had come up from the place where I had just been, and my arms knew to turn me, and a few yards away Selene Bourgani’s famous profile floated as if she were beheaded and I gasped again and then her shoulders appeared and her arms, and she was thrashing and turning, and her face swung around to me and we moved toward each other, this stroke, and this one, and we watched as each other’s living eyes grew nearer.

And we touched hands and we were in a dark shadow and we knew not to look above us, we knew not to consider the Lusitania about to fall upon us, and we turned side by side away from the ship.

And we swam.