Deering's Premonition

Please note these are fictional narratives and artistic interpretations of an imagined space.

It is 6 am on the 21st of the month; James Deering stands at the edge of his Napoleonic shaving station. His right cheek is already smooth like a baby born again, and with his silver-handled badger brush, he has just lathered his left. Gazing across the horizon, he prepares his straight razor for contact as he half-watches the crashing anger of the sea break white below. But it is a giant wave crashing, and in an instant, and with no real warning, a blast of heavy foam rushes past the stained-glass zodiac and overtakes him. Ushering in a shift in tense.

Underfoot, the marble deck yielded a sea-slick instability that took his step. Falling back and around in hurricane circles, his arms flew high, and his razor cut quickly; the back of his knees buckled against the rectangular edge of a cold stone bulwark.

“The ship is listing, and I am going overboard!” he thought as he screamed, “overboard!”

Plunging through the liquid concrete, he was falling. The surface tension of the sea gave way to his body like one piercing the membrane of a non-Newtonian fluid, fast then slow, and in that instance, Deering gasped for a breath.

A cocktail of water swirling with bitter air rushed into his trachea as he breath-drank deep past Bronchi rings… lobes… fissure, oblique. And in an instant of quiet the now-loose objects from his hands plunged past him in bubbles- his razor, his soap, his badger hairbrush.

“I am overboard; the ship is sinking”, he thought, as his blood chilled in retreat from his arms and legs to his heart and organs; he was drowning as the sea grabbed him. In what felt like a riptide, a siren tugged at his stomach, pulling his arms, grasping his neck, slapping his face. Was this a merman?
“So, this is what it’s like to die at sea?”

“I can feel my limbs slowing.”

“I can hear the close, distant splashing.”

“Why are you slapping me?”

It was Frederich Leach who was handling him. And Frederick, who now pulled him from the waters, past the tall edge of his porcelain tub with its brown marbled facade as his nurse, Faye Jones, wrapped a towel around his frail and shaking body. Together, they carried him to his bedroom, dripping from one room to the next.

Observation: To be in two places at once is jarring, but he was home again. To be outside of time is as lucid as a premonition is disorienting.

“What was this?”

James could not feel or speak but he could see in slivers the way a curious neighbor peeks through your window to glimpse at your life. Leach cleared James’ chest and laid him on the soft field of ivory within the blue and gilded framing of his single bed, and Ms. Jones’ arms firmly supported his neck and head. A puddle of bile water lay next to his bed. He cried softly as Frederick held his hand.

“Sir,” is all he said.

The warm subtropical sunlight burned like cancer softly through regal curtains of sea foam green. It was the 21st of the month. It was the 20th century. It was morning. One year later, James Deering would succumb to Pernicious Anemia while aboard the SS Paris. As if summoned again by the expanse of the cold Atlantic and in the closeness of his nurse and his secretary, he would die at sea.