In the big, black Mediterranean Sea, in which a thousand breastfeeding pilot whales click their teeth and whistle and fill their cheeks with black water, and the dogfish growl and whine and beg for scraps, where the sloe-black water churns dense with a darkness as thorough as the inside of a bomb or a belly, where the sand at the bottom is black as ash and the stingrays bury their black, flat bodies deep, where the white sharks, also black, half-waking, blend their dreams with the night water, dreaming of the nursehound, the little sleepers, longnose spurdogs, velvet belly lanterns, small eyes, fried eggs, the sphinx, the cardinal, the damsel, the seabream, white, common, and silver sided, in the big, black Mediterranean Sea, Renata and Pat sit drunk and drinking in a vat of white-hot hot-tub water. It is the last night of the cruise.
They lean against the hot-tub walls and tilt their blushing, sweat-slicked faces to the night sky. Pat’s sunglasses are fogging up on a chain round his neck. Renata’s sun hat is off and upturned on the hot-tub rim. Her phone lies in it, ringing. She reaches for it with a prune-ridged, dripping-wet hand.
“It’s Bambi,” Renata says to Pat and doesn’t touch it.
“Don’t,” Pat says and sucks his straw. It is the last night of the cruise; it is the last night of the cruise.
From the side of the hot tub on which the French Canadians sit, Pat and Renata seem unbelievably old already. Some gray hair, wrinkles, fat and sixty, sweaty like jewels.
Pat and Renata have been married for thirty-three years. They look up at the night sky and forget the sea. The sky is wider and brighter, with a thousand nameless stars like flecks of powdered milk. Pat looks at Hercules without knowing it. His leg, his arm, his right elbow, his sword, his bat, his hammer, his nightstick drawn back in the act of killing Lyra, Draco, Ophiuchus.
Ophiuchus, who lays on his stomach in the grass, kicking his feet and letting his skirt ride up, took breakfast from red-and-green snakes, and stuck it in the stiff-jawed mouths of dead children until they jumped up alive and danced through the streets and wore their little sandals to ratty scraps.
The French Canadians are straddling each other on the other end of the hot tub. They are young and rich and wearing tiny bathing suits. The boy slides off and wipes his mouth. He wipes the girl’s mouth. Renata watches them without looking.
“Your phone is ringing,” the boy yells over the jets. It is again.
“Don’t, Renata,” Pat tells her. He sucks his straw, and all the ice is melted.
Renata slides closer to her husband and puts her arm around him. His back is split with shreds of curling, flaking sunburn skin. She peels a little piece up and the skin underneath is new and pink as teeth gums. She lays it back down where it was.
“Are you sad to be leaving?” the French Canadian girl asks.
“We are,” Renata calls over the water. “We love it here.”
“The five days have gone so short here, no?” the boy says, hooking the girl’s bikini straps with his fingers. “I will not like to be walking on the ground with no water moving.”
“To me,” Renata says, “it feels as though we’ve been here for a hundred years. We don’t get much time away. Pat won our tickets in the sweepstakes.” Renata laughs. Her face is sweat-shiny and red like a jewel. “I told him it was our last trip before being grandparents. Then we’ll be old! Ha ha!”
From the side of the hot tub on which the French Canadians sit, Pat and Renata seem unbelievably old already. Some gray hair, wrinkles, fat and sixty, sweaty like jewels. To them, Renata seems a witch, une sorcière. The hot tub is her chaudron, she cackles and cooks them alive.
The boy throws up his arms and they are very strong and dripping water. “Grandparents? Very good!” he shouts. “We should very celebrate! Apolline,” he nods at the girl, and she knows what it means. She reaches behind her and picks up a highly refractive, silver-studded clutch that shoots the underwater hot-tub lights in a million tiny directions, into the sky, between the stars, Ophiuchus’s cheeks and knees. She pulls out a tiny bag of baby-blue pills and smiles as she shakes it.
“No, no,” Pat finally addresses them. “No. Thank you, but no.”
“No?” The boy says, still having to shout. He opens the little bag. “It is only benzodiazepine. Like, medicine? Sleeping medicine?” The boy pretends to snore and then smiles. “For sleeping,” he says, and takes two pills out and puts them on his tongue and swallows them. Some blueness sticks on his wet fingers, but he washes it off in the hot-tub water.
Renata looks at Pat and raises her eyebrows. She turns back to the boy. “I take those,” she says. “What kind is it?”
“Rohypnol,” the girl says and takes two pills, eats them, and smiles.
Renata looks at Pat again and shrugs. “That doesn’t sound so bad,” she says.
Pat looks at his wife and shakes his head. He takes her hand and wills her to say no with his eyes, but it is the last night of the cruise, and everything around him won’t be there tomorrow.
Renata reaches across the tub to the French Canadian boy and says, “I’ll take one.” Renata takes one and swallows it.
“I’m glad!” the girl says. “You as well?” she asks Pat.
“No,” he answers. “Not me as well, no.”
Since finishing his drink, Pat feels as though the insides of his mouth have become drier than paper. You could write on it with pencil. His tongue feels like a towel.
“These pills,” the boy says after the girl takes the little bag and puts them back in her clutch. “They are very rare. None America.”
“Really?” Renata asks. She leans back and imagines the world growing louder and quieter. She imagines the water breaking at the surface is gritty and sharp.
“They are very expensive. They cost eight hundred for a bag.”
“Really?” Renata asks.
“Eight hundred for a bag,” the girl says. “Two hundred for a pill.”
“Two hundred?” Renata asks.
Pat’s paying attention again. He looks over to the boy disbelievingly and shouts, “You don’t mean you want us to pay you for the drugs?”
“Of course you pay us for the drugs!” The boy is still smiling, still laughing and smiling. “Two hundred you pay us!”
“You’re not serious,” Pat says, dry mouth.
“Oh, very, very serious.”
“Honey, it’s no big deal.” Renata looks around for her purse, but it’s in the room. Her phone is ringing again.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Pat is shouting at the boy.
“I am not got to be kidding you. I am not got to be kidding you.”
Renata, suddenly in need of a reason to change the subject, picks up her phone and turns away. She plugs her other ear with a wet finger, and the sensation is unlike any she’s felt before. Her finger feels to her like a child’s finger, her ear like a numb toy. She is sleepy and slurs her speech. “Hi, Munchkin,” she says. “Hi Bambi-doll. Wait, wait. Say it again. Hey, wait, no, no. Wait, no. No, no, no! No! No, no, no, no, no, no, no! No! No! No!” She screams, she cries. She is crying, shaking her head, grabbing her head, grabbing her hair. “Oh, no, no, no, my baby, no!”
Pat is trying to get hold of her arms. The French Canadian girl is sliding away from her, and the French Canadian boy is half-standing with an angry face.
Pat says, “What? What? What?”
Renata hands him the phone and then crawls over the edge of the hot tub. Scrambling, slipping, gagging, she runs to the side of the cruise ship and bends over the railing. She vomits into the gigantic, black ocean. Blacker than the sky, blanker than nothing. It does not begin or end. It blends with the horizon. It blends with the bottom of the ship itself. It does not reflect the stars, it deletes them. It deletes Renata’s vomit. She clutches the slippery railing and cannot remember if she really threw up or not. She cannot remember if the call was real or not until Pat comes up behind her and gives her back her phone. Renata holds it to her ear, but they’ve hung up.
Somewhere suffering deep beneath them are a thousand trillion krill, delicious with black eyes bigger than their hearts, who swim in droves into the half-parted lips of lazy fish and do not remember being born, who will not remember dying, who will remember the snakelocks and the beadlets, the inverted canopies of red and green algae and the plankton, zoo, phyto, copepods. The krill live seven years, and their language has only the words mother and cruise ship.