Off the coast of somewhere

The woman was gone now, and his cigarette had been smoked. He threw it down on the deck and ground it under his foot.

“I’d prefer,” a voice said, “that you set the ship on fire after the rest of us had had the chance to depart.”

The voice was attached to a peculiarly pretty woman, with blond curly hair and a heart shaped face. She looked to be no more than twenty, and in her eyes, he could see, not horizons or vistas or oceans, or whatever the writers of the past will tell you, but a playfulness, a sense of adventure, a sparkle or twinkle, he could tell immediately that she laughed frequently, and he liked her.

“Dumbstruck?” she asked, “I’m not that pretty. Or am I?” she laughed, good naturedly and hard.

“We seem to have skipped over some of the preliminaries,” he said, extending his hand. “It’s rare that a person accuses me of planned mass murder without actually knowing my name.”

“Only rare? My God maybe I should have just kept walking,” she shook his hand warmly and smiled up at him.

“I’m tempted to make a  joke about chumming for sharks with bits of other passengers, but I fear that I’d have taken the joke too far.”

“I have somewhere to be…” she said, trailing off, and pretending to walk away.

An older couple stood at the side of the ferry next to them, and they looked off embarrassingly. “You know, the older gentleman, said to, what they presumed was his wife, “once, years ago, a whale swam all the way up the channel and stayed for two weeks in this bay.” His wife nodded sagely, seeming used to gathering in bits of errata, as if they were pieces of glass strewn upon her shore. The couple moved on, and they were silent, aware now of the distance between them that had been bridged so quickly at first, and yet, that couple, that older couple staring out into the water maybe not even listening to one another made it clear how far they would still have to go to reach the farther shore. Or something like that. It was not a D.H. Lawrence novel.

“Is that true?” she asked.

“About the whale,” he answered, looking over at her heart shaped face, at the mole on her right cheek, a small blemish, chicken pox? On her forehead, “I think so,” he answered.

“Do you know the end of it? Like, did the whale die horribly due to pollution or what?”

“Strangely, it actually developed a pair of legs, and eventually, after two weeks time, began lifting itself out of the water, very slowly mind you, evolution doesn’t always work as fast as you want it to, and, upon reaching the land, it put on a pair of spectacles and began walking the streets of the city, quoting Shakespeare and talking about the American spirit as personified in Whitman and Emerson. As it turns out everyone loves him. He’s our local mascot.”

“You’re a terrific liar,” she said. “I’m not sure that bodes well for me.”

“Most of life is about lying. We lie to ourselves when we wake up in the morning. If we didn’t, if we acknowledged just how insignificant we were in some grander scope, the world would be a tremendously depressing place. In that way we have more in common with ants than with the gods we aspire to be.”

“Yeah, but don’t you think we are important?”

“Expand.”

“We’re alive, right here and now. We’ve got a leg up on all the generations of the past and all the generations to come. We’re burning brightly and briefly, fireflies in the summer.”

 She looked mischievously at him, her eyes filled with mirth. “Will you take me to dinner?”

“So modern,” he said. “I didn’t know that ladies were asking the beaux’s these days. Strangely, I’m actually promised to that woman,” he said, pointing across the large deck to an elderly balding woman, who was standing at the rail, her hand slightly trembling, an older grandchild in tow.

“Tough break for me.”

“Yeah. I mean, you understand my predicament, right?”

“Entirely,” she said, and started walking away from him.

“Wait.”

“Yes,” she said, looking back at him with pursed lips and a barely suppressed smile.

“I’m willing to give it a shot this evening, but I want you to know what I’m giving up. That elderly woman is very rich, and I was hoping to ingratiate myself with her in an attempt to get written into her will.”

“That’s very noble of you.”

“I was going to try and get written in just below her cat but above her children. I fear that too many people make the mistake of being put above the cat, and then they wind up being sued and looking foolish. I’m thinking if I can get all the attention focused on the cat that I’ll at least have a chance at a million without too much trouble.”

“How do you know she has cats?”

“We go way back.”

“Seven?” she asked.

“Sure. Wear something pretty.”

“I was waiting for you to say something sexist.  You looked like the type.”

“Handsome, charming….”

“Not the words I’d have chosen first, but. Au revoir.”

And with that she walked back below decks, and he stood up in the brisk sea breeze and reflected on the conversation. He smiled inwardly, and it manifested itself as a slight smirk on his face. He didn’t know whether he had her or not, or whether she was worth having. These things could only be known after painful weeks or months of prosecutions and interrogations. Right now was the best time, the beginning, before things had started to go wrong. He tried to remember exactly what she looked like, but couldn’t. He had a habit of not making eye contact when he spoke. He found the gesture too intimate for his purposes. He liked to keep a distance. It was always safer that way. A pod of dolphins breeched along the side of the water and the grandmother and her grandchild ooohed in delight.