Passing Time

He was staring out at the sea. The water was green, marred by bits of foam being expelled by the ship engine’s motor, propelling them across the Pacific towards some distant chain of islands, mere spots on a map.

“Wait,” he said, looking not at the woman that he is speaking to but out at the sea instead, which was, possessed of an intensely vibrant kind of aesthetic beauty that no human being would ever be capable of achieving, largely due to problems like the ephemerality of humanity etc. In short, it was not an unnatural gesture.

“You’re saying that you liked the movie?”

“You’re saying it as though it’s some grievous sin,” she answered, looking over her left shoulder at him and brushing the hair from her cheek with her left hand and pushing it back behind her ear. He was still not looking at her. A seal, or maybe a piece of driftwood was bobbing up and down within his line of sight, though she didn’t know if he was “looking” as in actually looking, or doing some sort of internal search that was being manifested outwardly as this blank stare. It was the sort of problem that always arose when two people were having a conversation. Who the hell really knew what the other person was thinking?

“That’s because it is a grievous sin to like a movie like that.”

Near blinding skeins of light were coming off the water from a largely untroubled sky. Little wisps of clouds, cirrus or something, floated above, half-heartedly making shapes that looked like clouds who had lost their imagination and just wound up looking like clouds.

“Are we talking venial or mortal?”

“I’m unfamiliar with the term, venial.”

He wasn’t sure why he was lying about not knowing venial. It was a strange thing to do, to lie for no good reason, and yet he found himself doing it all the time. Earlier in the trip he’d told an elderly gentleman that he helped to capture birds from Amazon rain forests for sale on the black market.  And he’d told a matronly looking woman with glasses, who looked like someone’s aunt, that he captained a shrimp schooner (he later regretted his choice of the word schooner and thought he should have gone with the more colloquial sounding and correct term, boat) in Louisiana. During the conversation he’d affected an accent that he thought sounded Southern, but what he later determined was actually just the strange and ubiquitous rural accent of everywhere in the U.S. He did not know if it held in other countries. He had held forth for a while, lamenting the plight of the common folk like him after the big spill, describing in some detail, the negative impact that the spill had on the economy and ecosystem, which he guessed from radio stories had to be true.

“I’ll explain it to you when you’re older,” she said.

A bird of some sort was winging its way across the vast expanse of the sky.

“Do you have a rifle?” he asked, gesturing to the bird.

“What?”

“As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean…Not a Coleridge fan?”

“Not really. However, I remember that poem. I think there was a period of time where every kid in some sort of advanced placement literature course had to read Coleridge. And now it’s one of these pieces of ephemera that get lodged in your brain, only slightly, like I remember that the Mariner shot an albatross, and that this was apparently a poor decision. And I know that Colerdige loved opium. But I’m not sure how much good that’s doing me, knowing about the albatross and the opium.”

“Probably like the fourth circle of the Inferno,” he said, finally looking at her, and then looking away at the piece of driftwood bobbing up and down trying its hardest to look like a seal.

“Were there seven levels?” she asked.

“Something like that,” he answered. (It’s actually nine but that’s a sort of forgivable offense that we allow two people who are speaking to one another off the cuff, so to speak).

“Am I above that guy who ate his children?”

“Uggulino?”

“Yeah. The guy who ate his kids? That’s literally the only thing I remember about The Inferno.”

“You’re slightly above him and somewhere below Paolo and Francesca. Though you at least have to ask, or wonder if the kids were getting whiny or not, what with the starving. There are versions of the story where the children offer themselves up to him. What’s a man supposed to do?”

“Not eat his children.”

“Fair enough.”

The ship had assigned tables that every person sat at during the evening meal. They’d met one another while eyeing a particularly pleasing set of hors d'oeveres. They had had a brief conversation about what was actually inside the small pastry shells. He’d settled on crab, and they’d had a brief debate over whether he might possibly be wrong. A possibility which he indicated he wouldn’t even consider.

“But really, if you had to eat your children…”

“This is wonderful conversation and all,” she said, edging away slightly and flirtatiously, I suppose.

“It’s a serious dilemma.”

“So we are going to keep talking about this.”

“Anyhow, do you, assuming you’ve got at least two handy, eat the one you love the most first or second? It’s a philosophical sort of dilemma. I mean, obviously you’re really scarring the child who is watching you eat his brother, but you’re also not eating him, which is kind of a nice gesture. I guess Solomon would probably solve the problem by saying you eat them both concurrently or something.”

She was wondering now if he was insane or just incredibly unaware of her. It was not like talking to a person, but a person who was acting as though they were a person. She could see how someone could interpret his meanderings as somehow authentic or endearing, but it seemed to her that it was an act, or at least she hoped it was in act or he was deeply narcissistic. A trait, all too common in men she’d been with before. It seemed interesting at first, these random disquisitions on stars or lengthy Italian literature, but it grew tiresome after a while, as all things grow tiresome. She wanted to find someone nice. But you could not ask a person if they were nice. You had to spend time with them to figure it out. If she had to guess though, right at the moment, she’d guess that he wasn’t nice in the slightest though he probably thought of himself that way.

The piece of driftwood had given up on being a seal and was just now fading into the obscurity from whence it had come. The couple who he sat with at dinner was approaching the two of the, which was probably for the best, though he felt it odd to have ended the conversation by talking about eating children, as was probably appropriate. The older couple commented on the weather, noting the pleasure of the slight breeze that was just now lifting off the water. And they all agreed that the weather was indeed nice, and chatting amicably in the way of people passing time.

He hadn’t really meant to start talking about The Inferno. What had gotten him on that subject anyway? A certain movie she’d said she liked, which was really quite terrible. That was the strange part about conversation, its unpredictability, its pleasure, though when one wound up speaking about Renaissance poetry, it was a safe bet that things had probably gone astray. He wished that he still smoked cigarettes, so he could leave the group and be by himself. Instead, he stood in the small group of four, remarking for a second time that it really was “quite a beautiful day.”