Sam Averis
How to Sink and Live Simple Like a Fish
I love the arctic water, the way the cold tightens my steel skin, keeps me alert, keeps me humming. I should have been an icebreaker, or a whaler in the south seas, but I’m a cruise liner, and it’s ten o’clock at night off the coast of Norway. I’m crawling with people that I do not understand. I sit low in the water, heavy with their weight.
In the casino I see a lady with wrinkled hands and a blue-rinse perm. She sits at the slot-machine four rows back and three across, where she sat with her husband on their fiftieth anniversary, the night she hit the jackpot. The leather of the stool remembers her well.
I hear show-tunes, played by a band crammed onto a tiny stage in the cocktail lounge. Among them is a trombone player, and after his shift he’ll sit cross-legged on his cot, or on the cot of the sallow, thin-lipped flautist, or on the cot of the ticklish, long-haired cellist, and write poems to his girl at home. On shore leave in Copenhagen he buys weed in Ziploc bags, and brings it aboard to sell to the flautist, the cellist, the first mate. Almost never to the guests.
A wife in a gauzy gold dress sits at a booth in the cocktail lounge with her husband. Their kids are asleep in the cabin next to theirs while they join another couple for a drink. The woman is better-looking than the man, but he’s got confidence, and that counts for something. The wife looks past him at the band, at a young trombone player in his tux, pumping the slide back and forth. The man tells her he has a bottle of rum back in his cabin. She kisses her husband and goes with the other man to his cabin on the far side of the ship.
I can feel the tread of the first mate’s boots on the console of the bridge. He’s eating a baguette stuffed with cream cheese and crisps. Crumbs fall and settle in the folds of his uniform. His eyes are red, his lids low. There are charts
6 | Psychopomp Magazine