Titanic 2012

“Children? Me? Well no… none that I know of that is, but I almost had a daughter once… almost.”

“How do you almost have a daughter? Tell me it wasn’t a stillbirth.”

“No, no, no… .thank God. No, I was in love with her mother, and she—Gabby was her name—she adopted me, so to speak. Killed me having to leave Jane and Gabby, but staying would have only dragged them down with me.”

“I can’t imagine that,” Thomas said and then laughed.

Declan laughed, his eyes meeting Alastair’s.

Alastair could not hold it in any longer, and he burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of their situation; at the same time, he pictured his beautiful girls, the petite Dr. Jane Francis aka Dr. James Phineas Tewes when necessary, and her daughter, Gabby, a firebrand for women’s rights still, and a graduate of Northwestern Medical School, and a lovely younger version of Jane. Jane, who became James so as to deal with prejudices aimed all female surgeons. All this he missed along with his city—Ransom’s city as many called it. He silently laughed at the phrase, a kind of title bestowed on the “Bear” of Chicago. These memories made his heart a led weight in his chest. He missed the three of them—Jane, Gabby, and Chicago in that order.

The combined laughter coming from the three prisoners masked his pain and resonated about the larger room outside the cell, bouncing off crates and sacks of potatoes and boxed grandfather clocks earmarked for Macy’s and furniture crated and marked for Marshal Field’s, Chicago. “I get outta this cage… I oughta slip into that crate going to Chicago. Go straight home to my women, make it official, marry Jane, adopt Gabby. Pipe dreams… regrets, I’ve had a few.”

Then they heard a noise, something or someone approaching but making strange sounds—heavy breathing, someone struggling, knocking into things, gasping. In fact, it sounded like a man suffering from consumption—a great deal of hacking up, gut-wrenching coughing, vomiting. Echoing as it did in the chamber here, the gasping made the trio in the bars shudder when out of the darkness, a man in extreme distress banged into the cage with such force, the entire cage shook.

The distressed man’s right hand extended through the bars, eyes like blackened plums, no seeds showing in them; he reached out toward Alastair and the boys, who’d backed to the rear of the cage as far back as they could manage.

The man seemed on the verge of certain death, his skin seemingly afire—as if crawling with ants, his eyes blind, smoking, drying out before them; from his dress, he appeared a stoker—one of the small army of men aboard who shoveled coal into the furnaces. He wore a leather apron over a grimy shirt, high boots, his left hand still sporting one large leather glove. He tried desperately to walk through the bars to get at them—insanely so, rush- bang, rush-bang, rush-bang! while the inmates began shouting, screaming for someone, anyone to come to their aide.

When they realized no one could hear them except for the poor devil trying to get at them, Alastair and the boys stood transfixed, knowing what they were seeing—knowing the horrid Belfast plague was here before them!

Then as suddenly as he appeared, the victim spiraled away in a horrific, pain-fueled ballet. In fact, his body appeared saturated with pain. It was as if the poor man was attempting to run from himself.

Thomas imagined the scene played out with his uncle as victim. Declan thought of the two miners who most certainly had done this macabre dance.

Ransom imagined just how Tuttle may have gone into the water over the side of Titanic.

All three would-be heroes imagined themselves futilely running from the killer within them… imagined being the suffering stoker, blinded, in terrible pain as every cell was drained of moisture, every organ shrinking—eyes, brain, heart, lungs, pancreas, liver, skin.

All three began rattling their cage, pulling at the bars, shouting for someone to come, praying Lightoller might return soon enough to see what they had seen, but no one came and the darkness around them became darker, and the sounds emanating from the dying stoker had ceased with the suddenness of a dog put down.

“God has a sick sense of humor,” said Declan, head in his hands.

Deflated, fearful, nerves frayed to the maximum, the three inmates of this floating asylum alternately paced and pounded at the bars holding them. From down here at the bottom of Titanic, they could feel the massive ship’s equally massive engines churning. Ransom said, “Feels like Captain Smith means to make Queenstown in record time!”

“Anxious, no doubt, to put us off!” shouted Thomas, struggling with a loose shoelace and almost stumbling over.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Declan said.

Thomas echoed his words. “We’ve got to get out of here.” In the near distance, the caged dogs in a separate compartment began a frightened caterwauling as if they were now under attack by the mad stoker.

TWENTY FOUR

David nearly jumped from his bed and hit his head on the low ceiling on hearing the order to dress for dive come over the PA system. All systems were finally a go. He’d begun reading Declan Irvin’s journal again, not sure why except that the book had a compelling feel to it, one that declared it authentic, and one that declared that it had been held in the hands of this rogue lawman Ransom and the young want-to-be doctor named Declan Irvin, as well as Second Officer Lightoller.

The divers had wasted no time in getting dressed anew for the dive and were on deck and ready to enter Max again—this time with the certainty that they were on their way to dive the Titanic! Excitement was fast filling the submersible as much as body mass, and while in single file to climb into the sub, Ingles asked Bowman, “Where in hell’ve you been, man? You never came back to the cabin.”

“Keep it to yourself, heh? Gambio and me, we figured it could be our last chance at a little play before we all die.”

“What’re you talking about—all die?”

“There’s some weird shit happening around here or haven’t you noticed?”

“I’ve noticed… you bet.”

“Just watch your back, man—and mine, too while you’re at it; I’ll do the same for you.”

“We ought to be safe below.”

“I’m countin’ on that but aren’t you worried what we might come back to aboard Scorpio, man? I mean… who knows what’s gonna go on while we’re gone?”

“Scorpio a ghost ship? It’s crossed my mind, yeah, but as long as we stay in contact with the surface, we keep informed, right?”

“Sure… sure, partner, if you say so.”

Once all the divers had taken a seat inside the submersible, they began to relax somewhat, when suddenly, they could feel the crew working the heavy machinery around and above them going to work—the metallic pinging and vibrations of being connected to the crane, lifted up, swung over the side, and the gentle touchdown on the surface, the release from the crane, and now the shaking little room telling them they were bobbing in the North Atlantic close on to Scorpio’s outer hull.

Swigart, over the communications link announced, “9:32PM all systems are a go—copilot Dave Ingles, pilot Lou Swigart and the full dive team en route to Titanic.”

David was both pleased and surprised to be settling in as copilot in the twenty-four foot rectangular pressure cooker of a sub, which from all sides resembled a thing fathered by a Chinook helicopter and an elongated flying saucer. Hemmed in on all sides by instrument panels, necessary overhead pipes and conduits that threatened to crown David if not careful, he realized that sitting strapped in was the most comfortable a man might get inside MAX. After the sub leveled-off and went to stationary hovering, then a man might stand, stretch, and work out any bodily kinks, but for now any such movement was not a good idea. The trip down should not be any longer than a trolley ride from 42^nd to 52^nd Avenue, New York given Max’s propulsion system, speed, and maneuverability. Mad Max put Bob Ballard’s then amazing Alvin to shame.