Franklin at rest, and then Franklin in
action. Franklin is out of bed even before the
shudder finishes running through the cabin.
Franklin has prepared for this. In the months
leading up to the cruise, in the days we spent
packing, in the days we spent on the actual
cruise, traveling to and from Nassau—
Franklin has told me all of the dangers
present on cruise ships. Most pathogens
spreads throughout the ship on the first leg
of the journey. Most falling deaths happen
on the return journey. Most ships run
aground near the port of return. And so
when the ship starts quaking in the middle of
the night and the lamp on the nightstand
falls and shatters, all I can think is, I guess
Franklin has finally gotten his wish.
          When I look at him, he is already
dressed like a little boy, all ready to go
swimming as some 70 tons of steel sinks
into the warm Caribbean water. I can tell
he’s already getting into one of his moods,
where it’s like everything except for him has
been slowed to plod along at half-pace, and
so I ask him, “Franklin, what’s happening?
What are you doing?” because otherwise
he’ll start to get breathless and angry and
sometimes when I ask him questions right
before he loses it, it’s like I can pull him out
of the spiral he’s falling into. It’s not that
I’m afraid of Franklin’s impatience or anger.
But it is an ugly thing that drags everyone
else into it. A maw consumes with no grace.
          As I’m studying him, I start to feel a
slight turn, a bit of a dip in the orientation of
the floor, and I realize that the ship is
definitely taking on water, and fast, and then
Franklin says, “Marcie, we have to go. We
have to go, the ship is sinking,” and I can
tell he’s slowed down, maybe he won’t lose
it, and maybe he’ll handle this better than so 
many other things in our lives. Watching
Franklin lose things over the years—
promotions at work before he retired, too
many of our friends to count, children we
wanted to have before I realized this thing
would consume them too—has hurt in its
own right, but now I am worried that this is
how Franklin will die. He will drown, or
maybe cause someone else to drown
without even stopping to realize. Franklin
powers through things. Things do not exist
for Franklin to enjoy or think over, but to
just get through, accomplish, finish, be
done with them. He wanted a retirement
cruise because that’s something he should
do. I agreed because I feel that should
too—I don’t want even more things taken.     
          Even so, Franklin is shifting his
weight from foot to foot, waiting for me to
get ready and it feels like I’m with a child.
Then the loudspeakers come on: “Attention
passengers, please report to your section—
this is not a drill,” and I feel this sort of
twinge I get with Franklin in one of his
moods, where I feel like even though
I shouldn’t be his guardian and even though
I shouldn’t try to pacify him, I’m obligated
to try anyway. But here on the ship, there’s
not much I can do. Franklin wants to go,
get things moving, wants to activate, and
has been waiting and preparing for this the
entire trip. I’m just a noted guest.
     When I finish getting dressed, I
look at him again and I realize how
ridiculous he looks. If the entire world
operated like Franklin operates, it would
cease to function. I image this whole ship
full of early retired men dressed just like
Franklin—belly bulging over his swim
trunks that stop just above his heavy knees,
all his precious belongings strapped to his
back in a backpack that looks like
something an elementary school child
would have, and just as I’m thinking this,
the lights go out and for an instant we’re in
pitch darkness and the emergency lights
come on and Franklin says, “Marcie, I
think it’s time to go,” and he grabs me by
the hand and we leave the room.
          We’re met in the hallway by a mass
of people. For some reason, I’m reminded
of those commercials for blood clot
medication—a bumbling group of cells just
piled against each other against the narrow
walls of the vein. Franklin and I enter the
flow and scootch along, but I can feel him
getting more and more antsy, more
panicked as things are literally slowed even
worse than half-pace around him, and I’m
thinking, Not here, not here. So many
people nearby for the maw to consume.
          Right ahead of us is this husband
and wife—ancient-looking, feeble. For all I
know, they could have been one of the
couples Franklin pointed out days earlier,
telling me that some people just travel from
cruise to cruise, waiting to die. And before
I can stop him, Franklin shoulders past the
old woman. Even over the noise in the hall,
I can hear his breathing getting ragged,
getting desperate. The old woman falls into
her husband, who also starts to fall over
into the person next to him, but Franklin
isn’t done. Franklin is never done. He still
doesn’t have a clear path past the old
woman and so he bumps past her again and
that’s when she starts yelling, “He’s
pushing me, he’s pushing me,” and then the
hallway erupts. The vein ruptures. Some
people are trying to help the old couple,
other people are trying to stop Franklin,
and soon everyone is pushing everyone
else. I see the steward trying to calm
everyone down, but his words are drowned
out by the roar of the hallway. Instead, it
looks like he’s drowning, bobbing up and
down against the deluge of bodies in the
grip of the maw and waving his arms and
screaming for help instead of calm.
          Franklin is still pulling me along,
leaving the old couple behind, and I am
now I am in the maw, too, yet again. But
on the staircase, his grip loosens and I pull
away. I lean back into the surge of bodies
and it closes around me. I get jostled until
I’m against the wall opposite the railing,
and above me I can see Franklin trying to
twist back around and find me. I duck
down as he’s pushed upward, upward with
the flow of people. Just as he’s about to
disappear from view, I can hear, “Marcie!
Marcie!” but then Franklin is gone.
Franklin is swept away by his own current.
          I make my way back down the
stairs, leaning close to the wall as more and
more people rush to the upper deck. The
amount of them is endless. The ship is
certainly leaning to its side by now, and so
I climb down the stairs at a slight angle.
When I make it to the landing, I can see the
steward from before leaning against the
wall, and as I get closer, I see he has a cut
on his forehead and a dazed look on his
face. The maw took from him and spit him
out. I wonder if I’ve always had that look.
          I ask him if he needs help, but he
waves me away, trying to push me back
towards the stairs. As I’m turning, though, I
see the old couple Franklin pushed past,
both of them leaning against the opposite
wall as the crowd mills past them. They
look exhausted. It doesn’t seem like they’ll
make it up to the top deck without help.
But they both look that way—the man isn’t
trying to pull her along.
          I leave the steward and cross the
hallway. I have to move diagonally, cutting
across the stream of sweaty, nervous faces
and Bermuda shorts while also letting
myself get carried down with the current.
When I reach the opposite wall, I have to
inch my way towards the couple.
          Against the wall, I can feel the ship
shudder and shake. It feels like if I just
waited long enough, the wall would open
up like a thin film and I would fall into the
sea. Like getting into bed alone with cool,
fresh sheets. When I reach out to touch the
woman, she jolts her arm away and says,
“Get back! Get back!” Her husband looks
at me, and I can’t tell if he recognizes me
from when I was following Franklin, but he
looks suspicious, unhappy I am there with
them. Were they unhappy before? I
wonder, or did Franklin do this to them?
Again, Franklin has managed to hurt
someone else. I think about grabbing them
and pulling them along, forcing them to
escape, but then I think that’s exactly what
Franklin would do. That’s exactly what
Franklin would do to me. I can choose
to leave a thing alone, unlike the maw. I spill
back into the flow of people leaving the
hallway, letting the current pull me up and
up and up like an enormous hand.
          When I reach the top of the stairs,
the night looms over the deck in front of
me. It’s like leaving one hand into the open
palm of another. The crowd carries me out
onto the deck, and I can see that the deck is
in total chaos—harried crew members
running passengers to any section they can,
and then I hear it: “MARCIE! MARCIE!”
and I look all over the deck, thinking, the
maw is calling and I can’t tell if I feel anger
or pity or worry or all of them, and if it is
all of them, they all feel so melded that if
they were colors, they’d be so mixed
together that they’d be as dark as the ocean
around us. Then I see him, waving his arms
in a lifeboat on the side of the ship that’s
turning upwards towards the sky, and I am
glad Franklin is not going to drown in this
deep dark ocean, one maw into another, but
there’s a part of me that wishes he would
keep rising up and up and up into the night,
the lifeboat carrying him away until the
maw, the endless, petty mouth of him, was
no longer hollow but just a point in the sky.

It’s not just that the ship was sinking, but
rather the fact that good Christ, Marcie was
still in bed and looking around the room and
I could already tell she was thinking
something just a few seconds behind the
curve, the electricity in her head on some
kind of delayed circuit or something, but
thinking something like, Oh, well gosh, I
wonder what that was and then looking at
me like I’m the one who’s nuts, like I’m the
one who’s not making the important
connections in his head, because by the time
she managed to sit up in bed and look
around, I was already out of bed, already
pulling off my pajamas and replacing them
with a pair of swim trunks and shoving my
wallet, phone, keys, laptop, all into a
waterproof bag I bought specifically in case
of something like this, along of course with
a small, sealed canteen of fresh water that I
had prepared ahead of time as well, and so
getting all of these things together while
Marcie was fumbling with her glasses and
then it comes, then the questions come and
she says, “Franklin, what’s happening?
What are you doing?” and it hits me in the
jaw—a just awful, searing pain like
someone yanking out a tooth or maybe more
like when ice cream hits that sensitive nerve
and so I’m just standing there wincing at the
pain that I can’t tell is just in my head or not
anymore, and telling myself, You will not
get angry, you will not get angry, and
meanwhile this whole thing was taking up
precious prep time as the ship shudders
again and I could feel it, I could feel the ship
beginning to list to the side and I say,
“Marcie, we have to go. We have to go, the
ship is sinking,” and it’s like I have to spit
out every single word because my jaw is so
clenched shut not in anger but in sheer
jolting pain—I am not angry with Marcie,
I told myself, I am just in pain from her in this
one particular moment in an otherwise kind
and functional and loving marriage of many,
many years, and I love her very much but
Jesus Christ can she just get the fuck out of
bed so she’s doesn’t drown by herself in this
cell of a room we’ve paid an outrageous
premium for despite the awful wallpaper and
clumpy bed and cramped floorspace and
somehow crooked porthole view of the sea
that’s about to swallow the entire cruise ship
up because I most certainly am not
drowning—that’s not to say that I wouldn’t
drown for Marcie, but I am not going to
drown because of her, especially since she
can still help herself by just picking up with
the pace—but anyway, I was still trying to
ease her out of bed as gently as I could when
the announcement comes over the ship’s
loudspeakers, “Attention passengers, please
report to your section—this is not a drill,”
and so then Marcie at last finally got a
move-on and hustled out of bed, even
though she has trouble with her knees and
the mattress was so low to the ground, and it
was then that I felt a great swell of pity, that
even though I couldn’t help but feel that
instinctual kind of jaw-focused pain when
she asked her inane and inevitable questions,
I still felt guilty for feeling it in the first
place, because the kind of husband that has
to wince away from his own wife’s voice
must be a very terrible husband indeed, and
this hit me even harder as I watched her get
dressed—not in a swimsuit or in any kind of
gear, but a pair of slacks and a blouse—and
then just stand there, looking at me, no
belongings tucked away safely into a
waterproof bag, no canteen of water, not
prepared for the precise, specific emergency
I told her to be prepared for, and this would
have been a very poignant moment if at that
exact second of valuable introspection the
lights hadn’t cut out and then bathed our
cabin in low, grimy, emergency-shaded
yellow, and so I said, “Marcie, I think it’s
time to go,” and I took her hand and we left
our cabin and entered the hallway and joined
what I can only describe as the slow march
of a panicked herd—just one mass of
quivering flesh slowly inching its way to the
staircase illuminated by the harsh glare of
emergency and exit-sign lighting—and so
Marcie and I scooted along, slowly, slowly,
following the advice of the nervous steward
telling us not to push or shove, and it was
around then that I realized we were going to
die, that we would drown right there in the
hallway surrounded by all these sheep, this
sad group of confused and helpless cattle
and I noticed that I was certainly one of the
only people prepared what with the
waterproof bag and swim trunks and canteen
and so I certainly didn’t deserve to die like
this—and neither did Marcie, by
extension—and so I may have jostled my
way forward just a bit, just past this one
slow couple ahead of us, even older than
Marcie and I, and certainly they had lived a
full and also therefore happy life, like me
and Marcie could still have, and so then I
just nudged past them, lightly shouldering
by them so that either I would be in front of
them or they would just hurry up, but
instead the old woman started hollering and
yelling and saying “He’s pushing me, he’s
pushing me,” and then everyone else around
us started pushing each other, either to give
her space at first or maybe out of panic right
away because this old bat is shrieking her
warbly old lungs out and so then the entire
hallway was a mess and the steward
completely lost control, all of the training I
bet he did in some nice coastal city out the
proverbial window and instead the last I saw
of him he was getting pinned to the wall and
then sinking below the stampede of
trampling passengers on their way to the
staircase, and meanwhile I’m tugging
Marcie along, keeping a brisk pace and
trying to keep a positive attitude for us both
and leaving behind that old couple with that
old woman still yelling and then somehow, I
lost Marcie in the staircase—one second, I
was gripping her hand, and the next, it was
gone—and I tried turning around, but the
crowd was too jam-packed in the staircase,
the momentum carrying me away from
wherever she must have slipped away, and
so—and meanwhile, I’m yelling “Marcie!
Marcie!” but of course not getting any
response, or not hearing one anyway, but I
really did try—by the time I got out onto the
upper deck, I was alone and being pushed
along outward towards the lifeboats and it
was the dead of night and the crew members
were loading passengers onto the boats
against the harsh emergency lighting, but
even then I could tell that the ship was badly
listing, not like the Titanic where it’s going
up from bow to stern, but instead leaning
sideways, from port to starboard, with the
port side rocking closer and closer to the
sea, and then crew member shoved a
life vest in my hands and started pointing me
to a lifeboat and I tried telling him that I was
waiting for my wife and the guy pointed at
the vest and yelled, “YEAH, LIFE VEST,”
and then I had to lean down and place my
lips almost against his ear and yell, “WIFE!”
and then he look around a bit and shook his
head and started pushing me towards one of
the lifeboats, now the deck on a noticeable
incline and then I start to get angry, then I
start to really push back against the guy and
yell, “WIFE! WIFE!” and also think how
dare this motherfucker get in the way and
lead me around like all the rest, all the other
passengers who haven’t prepared and who
aren’t ready to dive in and swim to shore in
case the lifeboats are too full or in case they
also sink, and so I shoved him back, I
shoved him hard and I thought, Good,
because this idiot, this dolt, doesn’t know
how Marcie is, how often I have to slow
down for her and make sure things are
alright—if he thinks he can just herd me into
a boat and then take care of my wife, he is
sorely mistaken because no one can take
care of Marcie but me, no one else has had
to live their life at this sort of dreamlike,
hazy Marcie-pace but me, and in fact this
guy is liable to get himself drowned trying
to get her to hustle into a lifeboat on his
own, and so I shoved him again and that’s
when he waved over a couple of his jackass
crewmates and together they lifted me off
my feet and in the struggle, my waterproof
bag slipped off and spilled out onto the deck
and all of it went sliding down the planking
and that got me even angrier, now I let it all
come out and I screamed, “BASTARDS”
and “MOTHERFUCKERS” but they were
younger and yes, fine, stronger and so they
hauled me towards one of the lifeboats and
just as they were about to lower me in, I saw
her—Marcie, emerging out of the stairwell
just yards away, the rest of the crowd
shooting out like floral print cannonballs,
and Marcie in the middle of them all, like
she was parting the sea on gentle whim, and
I started yelling, “MARCIE! MARCIE!”
and I was laser-focused on her, trying to get
her attention but she just wouldn’t look my
way and so I was starting to get angrier, this
time right at Marcie, and that old pain in my
jaw was starting to act up again because all
of my things were gone and they were about
to lower the lifeboat and that’s when Marcie
turned and looked right at me and it stopped
me cold. Even across the deck, I could feel
Marcie analyzing me, harshly, in a way I
hadn’t seen before. I don’t know what she
saw, but it made me stop yelling. I don’t
think I want to know what she thought.
Everything stopped inside me and I felt
horribly full, as if I had just gorged myself.
And then they started lowering the lifeboat.