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The cold air hanging in this room, it feels like the North Atlantic. Not nearly so cold as that, really, but so surprisingly cold on this hot summer day that it has the same shock to it as the air on that night where the greater part of me continues to dwell, and I move to this place on the wall and the air is rushing in and I pull back away from it, it feels like a gash there, a place ripped open by ice and letting all this cold air rush in. Cold. I was so cold in the boat, and before me was this vast interruption of the sea, of the night, ablaze at a thousand places on it with spots of light and the smoke still slithered up from its stacks and for a moment the lights struck me as the lives still there on the boat and then the smoke struck me as the souls of those lives departing already, climbing to heaven from this death that was falling even at that moment upon the bodies, though in fact there was no one dead yet, probably, unless it were some poor engine room workers whom the vast jagged wall of ice sought out at once, in that first moment of the calamity, a moment I recognized instantly, perhaps even before the captain of the ship did, damn fool of an arrogant man he must have been, a man, of course, and me a scorned woman bullied in the streets of London only a few days before by men who would not let us speak, much less gain the vote. But this woman knew what had happened to this man’s ship with the first faint shudder and the distant hard cry of the hull.

Now I am in this room in a place and time as foreign to me as the planet Mars, which has canals and civilized life, if Percival Lowell the noted astronomer of the distinguished Lowell family of Massachusetts is to be believed, and I read his book as a teenager, in 1895, a book given to me by my father, who put the story on his front page—The New York World Ledger declared “Life Possible on Planet Mars”—and I did believe, so if I can believe there is life on Mars, then why am I still slow in believing in the reality of this hotel room in a year decades removed from the night when I fled a ship and then fell into a deep sleep? Perhaps the problem is the fear I have of this room, for it has this gash and the cold air pours in and I worry that the room will fill and it will sink.

I am alone. From what I understand—and “understand” is a relative word now, and surely not just for me in an era like this, though more so for me, of course—I understand that I am alone in some surpassing way, plucked out of a place in the sea that apparently is notorious for mysteries, a place far from the fatal ice field, and I have outlived by many years everyone I ever knew and I am still just turned thirty. Not that I wasn’t alone even on that night in April in 1912. It was a matter of pride to me, and would have been to any of my friends, all of them women who knew that we have a higher calling than the world had ever allowed for us, and who could travel alone as well as any man. I went to London to attend the convention of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, the English edition of our own National American Woman Suffrage Association birthed from the loins of our great Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone, all heroines in my time, all women who’d known how to be alone.

I am afraid to bathe. The place is so bright and so hard-surfaced, but the sense of utter strangeness about the design of things is starting to wear off. It’s the water. It flows so quickly, so profusely. I watch it run hard into the tub and it seems out of control and I stop the water and open the drain and I think of a man whose name I do not even know. For there was something more specific, more personal, in the scene before me as I sat in the lifeboat on that night. The lights and the smoke, I truly did feel them directly, as if they were the desperate souls on that ship, but to me they were humanity generalized, they were the masses. I have a mind. That’s something else a woman has in equal measure with a man. And I was inclined, in the use of my mind, to think and speak often of the masses. I was no Marxist, though I had read his books, and though I was occasionally accused of being one by some stupid man or other, and though my father’s newspaper might well have run a headline “All of Human History Redefined” and been close to the truth, I think. We were moving into the century that would carry humanity to a new millennium and everything was being made new. But I have been sitting on this remarkable bed that can be commanded to have a life of its own, quaking gently at the touch of a knob, and I have become conscious of the pattern of my mind, how it has always been easy for me to think of humanity as just that, a monolithic thing, or at best a bipartite thing, men and women. Yes, women too. I strove for the rights of women and how often I thought of them—of myself, too, therefore, in a way—as a large thing made up only incidentally of individuals, important only because of the concerns that were held in common, a corporate entity.

This man seemed stupid at first, in a typical way, when I met him on the promenade deck not long after we struck the iceberg. He was English and he was stiff but he had very nice eyes, which I could see only by moonlight for a long while, but they were soft really, a woman’s eyes. I sat in the lifeboat and watched the Titanic and its bow was gone and the rest was beginning to lift, though slowly, the motion not quite visible, but inexorable, clearly so. The great propellers at the rear were exposed, like a sexual part normally hidden from polite view but naked now in the throes of this powerful feeling. And he was standing up there on the boat deck, invisible to me since our boat had been lowered away, but his eyes were searching the sea for me even then, I knew. He was happy I was safe. Why had I let him persuade me to live?

I was reading in my cabin and I heard the sound and felt the faint hesitation in this great beast of a ship. I put my book down and I was instantly angry. They had appeared in the newspapers in London, an array of mustachioed men with derbies saying that this ship was the technological wonder of the age, a testament to man’s power over the elements, a vast machine, greater than any in history, and indestructible, unsinkable. I’d known even then that it was all an age-old lie. But I booked passage. I was anxious to get back to New York. The convention had led to the streets and we had marched to Trafalgar Square and the crowds had lined up and they had mostly jeered us and the bobbies had ringed us in and prodded us gently with their sticks and isolated us in small groups and then talked to us with unctuous voices as if we were children, and we drifted away. We took it. There were some angry words and there were a few latchings on to gas lamps and iron fence posts and some arrests and a few flashed fingernails drawing a little bobby blood, though not by me.

To be honest, I grew weary of it all suddenly, and I went away. I cashed in my passage back to America and I went off to Italy for a little while, to Venice. I rented a room in a pa­lazzo on the Rio San Luca and I found a small campo nearby with a fountain and a statue of the Virgin Mary without her child in hand, just her, and I sat in the sun, dressed from throat to ankle in a shirtwaist suit and I read and I spoke to no one. At night I would lie on the bed and the window would be open and I would read some more, by candlelight, still in my clothes, and one night there was a full moon and I went out and the tide was high and I think there had been storms at sea and I wandered the dark paths toward the Piazza San Marco and I came through the gallery and suddenly before me was the piazza and it was covered with water from the lagoon. Thinly, but there was not a single stone left uncovered. I drew back. The moon was shimmering out there in the water, and the stars, and I was afraid. And I was suddenly conscious of my solitariness there in that place, in that city, in that country, in the world. I had friends but we only had ideas between us and though the ideas were strong and righteous, I had not yet been naked in Venice except curled tight in a stone room with a tub of water and a sponge, wiping the scent of my body away, and quickly, never looking at myself, and then rushing back into my clothes. For all my ideas I was not comfortable in this woman’s body.

And worse, it had its own intent: I felt a stirring in me at San Marco, a thing more like a need than a desire, a thing that I did not agree with but that would hear no arguments, no matter how clear and reasonable. Still, though I could not persuade it, I could put it aside. And I left the piazza, my mind ascendant, without so much as making my feet naked and wading out into this liquid sky. Instead I went back to my room and then back to London and I hated these men who’d made this ship but I have learned to wait for justice in this life, I have learned that there is always a long and perhaps even endless wait for justice, and so when I bought my ticket I did not expect the arrogance of these men to be so quickly punished. And then the moment came and I knew what it was and I went up onto the promenade deck and he was there looking out at the sea. He was tall and dressed in tweeds and he had a mustache, but he had no hat and he was watching the icebergs out there in the calm and moonlit sea and I wanted to tell him what I knew.

So I came near him and I said, “We’re doomed now.”

Then he turned his face to me and his eyes were soft and I would be patient with him for the sake of his woman’s eyes, I thought.

He said something about the ship being all right, this unsinkable ship. I wondered if he really believed that. I said, “We’ve struck an iceberg. The deed is done.”

Then he looked back out to the ice. I realized he was, in fact, listening to me. He was changing his opinion.

“And suppose we have,” he said, a gravity in his voice now. I felt a rustle of something in me before this man who was listening, a sweet feeling, even a legitimate one, I thought. But it’s then that he played the fool. He asked me if I was traveling alone and he tried to blame my fears on that.

When the sound of hammering and the thrashing of air woke me from a deep dreamless sleep, I naturally expected to find myself in the ice field on the morning of April 15, 1912. But overhead was an astonishing thing, a great dark machine, hovering. I thought of the Martians. For a long while. Even after this machine had suddenly swung away and dashed off. Then there was another sharp sound and a ship was approaching and I realized that the air was quite warm and this ship had towers and attachments that were strange to me, like no ship I had ever seen. Some of the others in the lifeboat, women, of course—we were the ones saved with only a few male crew members to row—some of the women in the boat began to weep with fear. “Quiet!” I cried out to them. “Keep your dignity.” And I understood that my anger at them was like their tears. I was frightened into a feeling that I wanted to repudiate as not truly my own.

But when the ship eased up to us and we were finally on its deck and safe, the captain of the vessel, dressed in a white uniform, came to us where we were huddled. And it was a woman. “I am Captain O’Brien,” she said and I knew at once that we had somehow passed far into a future time. I imagined my father’s paper proclaiming “Woman Captains Ship” and soon, of course, there were more wonders. “Great Silver Airship Carries People Five Miles Above Earth,” for instance, and “Horses Disappear from Roads, Replaced Universally by Racing Cars” and “Mathematical Genius Transferred to Tiny Machine” and “Window on World in Every Home.” I have been in this hotel room in Washington, D.C., for less than an hour now and I am very weary. But I have looked through that window, and its view will change to a different part of the world with the merest touch on a small planchette in my hand. This brings a heady feeling of power and I found I could rest on no image for more than a few moments, there is too much to see, and as a result I have seen almost nothing, clearly. My head began to spin and I closed the window. I know I speak in something of a metaphor. It’s not a window but one more machine, a thing called television. And perhaps all these machines, all this technology, mean that the men in mustaches and derby hats triumphed at last. Perhaps ships no longer sink. But through this television I’ve seen enough images of women intimately involved with machines to believe that we’ve been enfranchised in the creation of technology, as well. I am happy for that, but the feeling is not unadulterated. I have to face this selfish part of me.

I am no longer needed, for one thing. I have no proof of it, but I am certain in a world like this that women have the right to vote. And I am confident, too, that politicians have become honest and responsive, as a result. And if there is a woman ship captain and if we have been enfranchised, then I can even expect that there have been women presidents of the United States. It is selfish, but this makes me sad. It would have been better to have died in my own time.

But he saved me, this nameless man. With all the wonders I’ve seen and the losses I’ve realized since I woke from my long and mysterious sleep, it is this man who will not let go of my mind. And there are clothes laid out for me on the bed, strange clothes, a skirt and shirtwaist and undergarments that are skimpy and loose and I am not used to my body, what am I to do with my body now that the focus of my mind has been rendered obsolete? But this is not simply a problem of the new age. Indeed, if in my own time I’d been more comfortable in that fleshy self, I would perhaps have a function, or at least a prospect of pleasure, before me now.

I wish I’d stayed on the ship with him. But I didn’t even know his name. Even after I saw through his foolishness. He tried to convince me that what I knew about the ship was attributable to my being a woman traveling alone, but when I challenged him, when I told him that I knew what death was about, he listened to me again. When I was a child—dear God, more than a century ago now—and my father was editor of the Mingo County Courier in West Virginia and going up even then against the coal company excesses, there was a mine collapse near where we lived and I went with my father to the place, and as soon as I entered that town, I could feel the death in the air, on my skin, all over my body. When I remember it now, it feels like what a man might feel like, stealing in on you in the night and touching you against your will, only you’re sleeping and he’s touching you very lightly so that he doesn’t wake you. And there was a smell in the air. Maybe not quite perceptible but you felt it coming in through your nose and into your lungs, filling you up.

It was that way on the Titanic. As soon as I stepped onto the deck, though almost no one knew what I knew and they were going about their lives, I could smell that same smell. To feel those things on my skin and in my lungs when I was a child, and to watch, as I did, the women of that mining town clutching each other, helpless: I don’t think the world was the same for me after that. But I didn’t speak of that to the man on the promenade deck. I just told him about the mine disaster and what I smelled and that I smelled it again. For almost any man, this would not convince him at all. He would use those very intuitions against me. But he listened, and then he said he was sorry. He actually apologized, and I knew he meant it. And he didn’t try to reassure me anymore. That struck me as wonderful.

And yet I left him. There was some other man, I think, come from the bow of the ship with ice in his drink that had fallen on the deck from the iceberg. My man—what a phrase to come to my lips now, though I mean it only to distinguish him from the other man; I knew neither of their names—my man was quietly disapproving of the other man, who was acting like a fool, it’s true, and for a moment, there was a connection between us—my man, yes mine, and me—we heard the foolishness of this outsider together, we were of one mind about this. Then the other was gone, and my stiff Englishman who respected me, clearly, was silently watching the sea, aware of me, I knew. And then something collapsed in me, as sudden and rock-heavy as the coal mine in Mingo County. It was too late for me. For this man, as well. For all of us. All these odd and sweet feelings I was having turned then into bitterness. I couldn’t bear to look at him anymore. I slipped away without a word. As quietly as the great ship going under. For the Titanic was quiet, in its last plunge.

I stand up from this bed in this cold room and I am still wearing my long skirt and my high-necked linen shirtwaist. I wouldn’t let them take these clothes from me, though I know I must yield eventually, but these things on my bed seem little more than a shadowed nakedness. I wandered the ship for a long while and I was among other people but I spoke not another word. To my shame, perhaps. I did not look at the others. I was dead already, it seemed to me. Then I found a place where I could stand and watch the sea, with no one nearby. A high place. Near the wheelhouse, I think, and, unintentionally, on a deck with lifeboats. The orchestra was still playing. As time went on, there were sounds of people rushing, crying out. I braced my mind so as not to hear. I stood looking beyond the bow, far into the slick dark sea, lit bright by the moon, and the air was cold and I began to shiver, but only from the cold, I knew, not from fear. I did not fear death.

My father had died the year before. He was a good man. I sat beside him and the bed was so neat all about him, my mother had tucked him in and folded the covers rightly across his chest, a straight, orderly fold, and there were flowers in a vase beside his bed, and his pajama shirt was starched, and she had done all that she knew to do, so she was weeping hard in another room. I sat beside my father and I touched his hand and his breathing was difficult now, but he turned his face to me.

He did not tell me to be brave. He simply said, “I’m proud of you, Margaret.”

I laid my cheek against the back of his hand and wept awhile and I knew he would not misinterpret the tears. They were from gratitude, as much as anything else. Then he slept. And I crept from his room and when I woke in the night, from the touch of the doctor’s hand, it was to find that my father had left his body.

As I stood on the boat deck of the Titanic, I thought of him. I wondered if he’d had as little use for his body as I had for mine. Of course we never spoke of this. But he seemed to understand so much about me, and he slipped quietly away in the dark, and he was always a man of the mind and the mind’s energy surely crackled on beyond the body, it never needed the body. All this fluttered about in me as I stood watching the ocean creep onto the bow, and though they were a little disorganized, these thoughts made me feel it would be all right if this night ended for me as it clearly seemed it would. I even decided to go below and lie in my bed and read. There were only a few pages left to the book I was reading about a man married to a shrewish woman and in love with the wife’s cousin and instead of touching each other, the two lovers decide to kill themselves. A woman wrote this book, Mrs. Edith Wharton, and there were things she seemed to understand, and it was sad, I thought, that I would not be able to seek her out and speak with her when I reached New York.

I was about to turn and go. But an image held me. The sea had finally crept over the bow of the ship, a thin cover now, and the moon and stars were there and I thought of Venice, and once again I was planning simply to return to my room and read and it was at that moment I heard his voice, the simplest hello.

I turned to him. His eyes were clearer in the glare of the electric light from the bridge and even the harshness of Mr. Edison’s illumination could not take away the softness there.

“I was about to go below and read,” I said.

“Nonsense,” he said. “You’ve known all the while what’s happening. You must go into a lifeboat now.”

“I don’t know why,” I said. These words came to my lips as quickly as an urge to kiss. This was an act of intimacy, I felt that right away, to tell this man I did not wish to live anymore. I didn’t fully understand the feeling myself, really. I didn’t even know how long I’d had it, perhaps only a few moments, perhaps years. And, of course, in that context, he could easily have taken it another way. Not as an independent feeling in me but as an expression of the hopelessness of the situation aboard the Titanic, for hopeless it was. But dear God, he knew what I meant. Instantly. He knew my heart. I know he knew. And there was only one answer for him to give, a wildly impertinent answer, an answer only a lover could give, and he spoke it to me. I told him I did not know why I should live and he said, “Because I ask you to.”

I wanted to say yes I will live, yes, I will receive this desire from you and perhaps in so doing I’ll even apprehend at last what that actually means, to live, for this body of mine must surely have something more to do with it than I’ve so far discerned. And I was quite acutely aware of my body at that moment, though I could not have said what part, and his eyes held me and he seemed very calm. I was intensely aware of him, the physical presence of him, and then I realized he had changed from his tweeds into a tuxedo. Regrettably, this was an easier thing to speak of.

“You’ve dressed up,” I said.

“To see you off,” he said.

I don’t think I spoke another word to him after that. Words are the language of the mind, aren’t they? Perhaps not for Mrs. Edith Wharton or some others. But for me. He had dressed up to see me off, he had adorned his body for the occasion of offering me life, and I took that life from him, accepted it as I would a kiss from him or a caress or more, and so the language of my mind failed me. And I find myself now walking around and around this room at the end of the twentieth century and I am frantic with regret, for on that night I could find no other language with which to speak. My hand moved, it’s true, my right hand rose as if by its own intent and it came out toward him and I ached to put that hand on some part of his body, to touch him—it is my ache now, too—touch his hand, at least, perhaps even his cheek, but I could not. Instead my hand found his white tie, slightly askew, and I straightened it, the gesture of a wife of many years with her husband, just before going out the front door of our town house and into a carriage and off to a play or an opera and he is always doing this, tying his tie and leaving it crooked, and it’s touching, really, for me, for his wife, because his mind, which respects me and listens to me and considers me its equal, is so often filled with ideas that he neglects his body, even in the tying of a white tie around his neck.

I straightened his tie and my hand was trembling, but its will was weak, or perhaps simply unpracticed, and it fell once more beside me, though neither it nor I wanted that, and he said, “Please hurry.”

And if I were the woman my mind had always aspired to and even believed I was, I should have taken the initiative there, should have touched him. I should have taken his face in my two hands and pulled him to me and I should have kissed him, for there was a kiss yearning on my lips even then, though at the time I did not clearly recognize it for what it was. I can recognize it only now. Nearly a century later.

I did hurry. I turned and we walked together toward a lifeboat very nearby. No more than half a dozen steps altogether, and yet I was very conscious of walking with him, a familiar act, an intimate act, our bodies moving beside each other, we’d let the carriage go and we were walking down Broadway and there were bright lights all around and we were talking about the play, about the flow of Mr. Ibsen’s ideas, and then we were before the boat and a hissing came from the sky and a pop and suddenly there was orange light all around, like the lights of Broadway. I looked at him and I wanted to take him in my arms, but I did not, I could not, I was being a lady, God forgive me, and I wanted him to take me in his arms but he did not—though I felt that he wished to, I felt it on my skin just as I’d felt the presence of death—but he was being a gentleman.

And he said something to a ship steward and it was this man’s hand who took mine and I was in the boat and I looked about me and I did not remember stepping in and I turned to look at my man but he was just then retreating into the shadows and the lifeboat began to descend and then I was on the sea in a boat full of women, our lives spared because of our sex, and I was ashamed, and all I wanted was to be on that deck beside him, and I sank down and my mind was empty of all ideas and my body was empty of any intent and after a while the bow of the Titanic disappeared and the stern lifted up and I did not let myself think where he might be and as the stern lifted, there came a great and awful noise from the ship and I realized it was from the silver and the pianos and the porcelain and the couches and the chairs and the steamer trunks and the wine bottles and the books—every loose object on the ship was crashing forward and breaking—and then all the lights suddenly blinked into darkness and a last tremendous noise rose, the ship cracking in two, and then the stern settled back for a moment as if it might sail off on its own and I thought of him once more, imagined him on this half-ship, sailing away to safety, but quickly the section began again to rise, a dark shadow against the bright night sky, and this time there was a terrible silence. No. There were voices all around, in the water, crying out. But from where I sensed him to be, there was only silence. The stern stood upright for what felt like a very long time and then it began to slide quietly downward, disappearing, faster, faster, and it was gone, and I might as well have been beside him, for I dropped at once into a sleep as dreamless as death.

And have I truly awakened, even now? I stand motionless in the center of this room. There is no sound, except the soft slip of the air. Perhaps I died in the very moment he did. Perhaps this is the purgatory I’ve been assigned to for my betrayal, a place to show me that the words must be made flesh.

I feel the weight of my clothes upon me and the burden of my breath. It is many years too late but I unfasten my dress and I slip from it and from all the layers of garments beneath, I shed them quickly, tearing at them, throwing them aside, and at last I am standing naked, and I call to him, I cast the words of my mind out to the distant sea. Look at me, I say.

I stand for a long while in the center of this room, praying that his spirit has found its way to me and is gazing on this vessel of my body, bright with lights and holding him.

I am no longer afraid. I move in my nakedness to this other room and I bend to the tub and by my own hands now I let the water rush in and soon this hard white sea is filled and I step in. The water is cold. It takes my breath away. No matter. I sit and it rises up my thighs, my hips, my sides, and it is over my breasts, and it is beneath my chin, and it ripples there, like kisses. He is nearby. I slide quietly beneath the water. I will find him and we will touch.