He’d stayed in his room with his wife Jessica until the ship had left the pier. Then he’d left her there to watch the ship make it out to sea, and to watch what New York looked like being left behind to die.
Lee was out on deck passing by 15th Street and Pier 57. He saw industrial freighters, top heavy with loading cranes. There were still many ships loading, and the crowd remaining did not seem to him hopelessly large. He imagined he could still hear their screams over the sound of the many ships coming and going. As he saw one ship pull away from the dock, he heard shots fired. He thought of New Orleans, how the desperate had shot at helicopters in a gambit for attention. It was more likely the police, he thought. There’s no way you could wait at the back of the crowd. There was no way people would do that peacefully, unless a cop was there with a gun.
He wondered how it would go when the cops left. It would have been so much better for the ones left behind if there’d been no warning. They’ll die just the same, but first they have to go through this. If. If anyone gets left behind. If there really is a tsunami at all.
There were small ships in the water, heading in the opposite direction, up the Hudson and inland towards Albany. The little boats bobbed in the headwind. All those little guys going one way, and this big ship splitting the herd in the other direction. Lee thought of the tsunami in Southeast Asia, the stories of animals sensing disaster and heading to safety while fishermen marched to the docks like any other day.
The Empire State Building stood out above the island’s skyline. The Festival of the Waves rounded Battery Park at the south end of town. The rough dark waters of Upper Bay opened up before her. The Statue of Liberty came closer. The few there on the deck made towards the starboard rail to watch the Statue pass. It was the reverse trip of refugees of other eras, past the statue, past Ellis Island, Brooklyn to one side, Staten Island to the other, then under the Verrazano Bridge, to leave the outpost of America behind.
“Not quite the same feeling as when we pulled out from Key West, is it?” came a voice.
Lee came out of his daydreaming and smiled as he turned to the man a few feet away along the railing.
“No,” Lee agreed. “The cruise has definitely lost some je-ne-sais-pas.” Lee’s voice was louder than necessary, deep and amiable. Not quite his stage voice, but bigger than mortal.
“I’m Rick,” the smaller man said, a Texas accent. “Rick Dumas. I saw your wife and you a couple times on the ship, I’m just down the hall from you. You’re Golding, right? The Mighty Lee Golding.”
“Yeah,” Lee replied as they shook hands. “You don’t have to say ‘The Mighty’ every time, though.”
He sized Rick Dumas up as they stood together. His ship-neighbor was small, and had a pleasant but nervous face, as if he didn’t know when anyone might turn on him.
“I was a huge fan,” Rick said. “Really, your feud with Sinbad was phenomenal. Can you do your shtick for me? Come on. Do your shtick.”
Lee smiled. His face bulged out red, his eyes popping from his head like eggs, as he laughed devilishly. His fingers went to his lips in a V and he wagged his bendy tongue through the V.
“Golding gonna getcha!” he hissed.
His face softened and he laughed, and Rick laughed, and the Alabama Assassin slapped him on the back.
“Give my regards to Broadway, huh?” Rick said. “So long 42nd Street. Take a deep breath, 40’ latitude, 74’ longitude. That’s central Manhattan. I have one of those GPSs and I try to remember important places. When did you come up and start watching?”
“Just after the pick-up, when we left,” Lee replied.
“I came out when we were coming in. Man, you should have seen the air traffic. So many helicopters.”
“All going to United Nations, I bet.”
“There’s no shortage of people in Manhattan who can afford a helicopter ride,” Rick said. “I bet there were a lot of rooftop landings. Say, could I have a smoke? I don’t usually smoke, but what the hell. How often does the East Coast get destroyed?”
Lee reached for the pack in his windbreaker pocket, contorting his girth. Rick lit his smoke with difficulty, Lee again using his hands as a wind screen, holding the lighter, too.
“You don’t seem nervous,” Lee said. “You worried about this or what?”
“No, no. These ships, they’re really the greatest feats of engineering of our time. I mean, just turn around, turn around.”
Rick spun his finger and the two turned to face the majesty of the Festival of the Waves, towers of decks, of gleaming white steel and glass above them.
“A city under its own power at sea. A 90,000-ton traveling island of amusements and indulgence for 2,400 paying guests and 930 crew. It’s our era’s Great Pyramids. But they were for kings only.”
“Yeah, but they had to be dead first.”
“Listen, this is as heavy duty as ships come,” Rick continued. “Do you ever hear of a cruise ship going down? OK, there was that one off Greece but the captain was drunk. I mean, they put hundreds of millions of dollars into these. If any company ever lost a ship, they’d be ruined. Just think of the lawsuits.”
“Ever hear of the Titanic?” Lee asked.
“Come on, that hit an iceberg. And that was over a hundred years ago! That’s not even relevant, not to me, anyway.”
“When the captain announced the plan, he said the risk was minimal,” Lee reasoned aloud. “That even if we weren’t picking up the refugees we’d be riding out the wave. So I guess it must be safe.”
“Hey, look at that dude,” Rick said. “He looks like Man Mountain McTavish!”
Lee turned and saw a man standing alone. How had he not noticed this passenger yet? The man was more mountain even than Man Mountain McTavish, who’d always been soft in the ring. The stranger stood close to seven feet tall, and was broad shouldered. He had grey hair down to the bottom of his neck, and a thick beard. His arms came out of his short sleeves like a bear’s, the hairy flesh flexed as the man held the railing.
He stared ahead and was oblivious to the two men who watched him.
“Looking for whales?” Rick called, and Lee laughed.
The man-mountain did not respond immediately. As if some unseen intervening agent passed on the message, he turned after a moment.
“Call me Ishmael,” the man-mountain shouted back.
Lee smiled. That was from Moby Dick. He’d listened to that book on the road from one stadium to the next. It was about a guy who wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. And a whale. Lee felt an instinctive connection with this other giant.
The bulk of land receding behind them became more indistinct in its details. By the time the security guards asked them to return to their rooms, the United States appeared as only a thickening of the horizon.
“Please stay in your rooms until you hear from the captain,” one of the white-uniformed guards said. “It will just be a few hours. We really need to rely on everyone’s cooperation to stay safe and get through this without any tragedies.”
The grey-haired man-mountain walked in past the Mighty Lee Golding and Rick Dumas with a friendly glance to include them, so that they could experience with him the shared thrill of this event. The two smiled back. The giant’s facial expressions were so intense Rick and Lee could not help but smile back, but he quickly lost his inclusive cast, turning to his own thoughts. The giant looked away and went on inside.
His name was Adam Melville.
He was a man who looked and planned for special moments. That’s the way he travelled; he was a moment collector. Even with his planned cruise interrupted, he couldn’t shake that habit. An event of this importance made him feel important watching it. And no one knew what was on the other side.