Chapter 1: Prologue

“The water was so cold, little crystals of ice immediately formed atop anything and everything that crested the surface. The sensations below weren’t any better, however. It was as if a thousand tiny pins were plunged into my flesh all at the same time. Even through my leather shoes, my coat. It didn’t matter; so I took them off. The entire Atlantic Ocean was already pulling me down. I didn’t need anything else hastening my journey to the abyss.”

The man in the brown leather chair cleared his throat and adjusted his spectacles. “And then what do you remember next?”

There was a long pause of consideration as thoughts fought to both spring to the surface and hide deep in the recesses of his mind. At last, a sentence was formulated. “I didn’t have a lot of time to decide what to do. There’d been plenty of chances, mind you, to climb into one of the lifeboats. I’d declined. Even though I’d been below deck and had seen what it was like down there, had seen the water crawling up the walls, lapping up the staircase, one concrete step at a time, I suppose even then it was difficult to wrap my mind around what was actually happening. But I was determined not to take the seat of another, particularly a mother or child. And though I had given great consideration to what I might do when I inevitably found myself in the Atlantic, my plan wasn’t as developed as I would’ve liked.”

“You say you had a plan though?”

“Not really. I suppose I’d like to think I had one, that I would come up with something spectacular at the last moment to save myself. That’s what I’d reassured everyone else, all those who beckoned me aboard the lifeboats with them. In retrospect, it wouldn’t have mattered to the hundreds of women and children who ended up in the ocean if I had climbed inside a lifeboat. No one else filled those seats. Hundreds of empty seats. Did you see that? In the papers?”

He glanced up from his notes. “I did. I read it later, after the reports were filed.”

“Right. So, here I was trying to be… heroic or chivalrous, I suppose. It turned out my efforts were wasted, and I ended up dying because of it. Momentarily, anyhow.” He remembered what it had been like to slip away and then come crashing back to his own existence and pushed those thoughts aside, returning to his previous trajectory. “I believe there’s another word one might use to describe my actions in turning down a perfectly good lifeboat.”

He scratched his balding head beside a thin line of light brown hair touched with gray. “And what word might that be?”

“Foolish.”

There was a “hmmm” sound in response, which was neither an agreement nor a disagreement. “So once you were in the water, what happened then? Do you remember exactly?”

The words were having difficulty placing themselves in the correct order again. It took a moment of forced introspection. “I had intended to find something that would float. I assumed a ship with that much lumber aboard—deck chairs, tables, doors, what have you—would have enough debris to easily find something I could mount and wait. I was under the impression that the lifeboats would come back—the half-empty ones for certain. It made little sense to me to think that those people, the thousand or so who had made it safely aboard a life vessel--would sit idly by. I assumed it would only be a matter of moments before there was a rescue party, if you will. I also remembered seeing a light on the horizon before we went under. I thought this other ship would be our salvation. It turns out I was mistaken in all of my optimistic assumptions.

“In answer to your inquiry, however, there really is no order of things, no chronological account I can replicate for you. There was no time. Curious souls often ask me how long it took for the rescue boat—that’s what they like to call it, which I find quite ironic—the rescue boat to come back and begin to check to see who was still alive. I can’t answer that question, honestly. It was an eternity. It was the blink of an eye. I can’t precisely tell you what happened after I found myself completely submerged in the Atlantic. Nothing happened. Everything happened. All at the same time.”

There was a long pause as the thin man in the upright leather chair seemed to ponder how to proceed. “Can you describe how you felt?”

He pushed the palm of his hand into one eye socket, pressing hard enough to feel an ache before running his hand through his brown hair and straightening the hem of his jacket. He cleared his throat. “I felt like I was going to die. My body was both on fire and frozen solid at the same time. It’s hard to describe, but at some point, the human body becomes so cold it burns. I had the fleeting thought that there were three choices that lay before me, and I didn’t truly have any options because there was no time to weigh the potential outcomes. I only had time to react.”

“What were the choices?”

“The first one was to fight—to swim as fast as I could in any direction; it really didn’t seem to matter which. Thrash about, try to make a headway in one bearing or another. I couldn’t see any of the lifeboats, so there was no sense in attempting to reach one, but swimming would be action, and action seemed to be an option.

“The next was to do nothing. To stay perfectly still and allow the ocean to take me, as she so clearly wanted to do. As I said, I could feel her pulling me. It wasn’t the suction created by the ship or some such rubbish would-be scientists will try to explain in their overly-wordy, overly-educated statements. It was the ocean itself. She wanted me, wanted all of us, and her lapping waves were an invitation to let go of everything I’d ever known before and simply cease to exist.”

He went quiet again, and the man across the room seemed perplexed as to whether or not he should issue another prompt or simply wait. He tried the latter for a lengthy while, and then, just as his thin lips parted to probe, the story was continued.

“The third option never really existed. I just thought it might. I thought there was a chance that I could employ the same tactic I had every other time I’d been in such a precarious situation, sure of nothing but certain death. It didn’t work this time, however.”

“What tactic is that?” he asked, squinting behind his thin-rimmed glasses.

The answer came more quickly than expected. “Wake up.”

The inquisitor absorbed the answer and then gave one short nod of the head. “I see,” he said quietly, as if it had never occurred to him that a person might even think that was an option. “I suppose it makes sense one might assume, under the circumstances, they must be having a dream.”

“A nightmare,” he corrected.

“Indeed.”

“Once I realized that my preferred escape method was not a true possibility, a parade of familiar faces skirted through my mind, people I wished to see again, and I began to look around for an alternative. That’s when I saw the collapsible lifeboat.”

“About how far away do you think it was?”

“In truth, not far at all. At that point, it didn’t matter, however. Any sort of movement whatsoever was excruciating. All of my joints had frozen stiff after just a few minutes in the water. It could’ve been a hand’s breadth away and reaching it would’ve been nearly impossible. I’d say, it was less than ten yards’ distance. It may as well have been floating up next to the mocking moon which didn’t even bother to show its face.”

“And yet, you were able to reach the collapsible, eventually.”

“I was. I’m sure I don’t know how. When I started out on my journey, there was quite a commotion surrounding the upturned vessel as those nearby struggled to gain traction and buoyancy. By the time of my arrival, everyone was much more… still. Some were grasping hold with all their might. Others slipped below the surface and were not strong enough to recover from the siren call of the abyss. There was no helping them, no matter how badly the others wished they could assist. At that point, it truly was every man for himself.”