Poolside

—but every evening we would go down to the pool and—well you understand the pool wasn’t exactly down because the ship of course was in constant rotation, or perhaps I mean to say continual, but in any event it felt good to say “Let’s go down to the pool,” it felt like a going out on the town, as it were, a remnant of what had been—since we couldn’t actually go out anywhere, our respiratory systems not yet having adapted adequately to new, what you might call … environmental … realities—but where was I … yes, to the pool, we would get all dressed up, tinfoil and bangles and gossamer and the like, the usual fripperies and fineries, perhaps stardust on a Friday (yes yes at that point we still kept the days), all of the sections converging in the center, for ours was a spherical pool, always a trick to find the shallow end, its contents glittering darkly under and above the far-away lights of the arena, the waters shifting and lapping according to great yet self-contained waves of a certain velvety nature, and all of us finding our seats according to a strict and strictly non-discussed hierarchy—oh if you asked us it didn’t exist at all—until we were all in place yet not at all still, hats and stoles and feather dusters and falsies fanning up and out and rotating somehow (you never believe me but it’s true) counter to our direction so that one could always manage to snag something pleasing and play dress up in another section’s, er, livery, I suppose you might say, no harm no foul as long as it was returned at the end of the evening, set loose in the arena to find its way home (and yes of course by this means many a covert message was managed), and by this time the after-dinner sea leopards had wended their way all throughout the great hall, glowing and pulsing and generally making a big show of their teeth, and let me tell you no matter how many times you’d seen a sea leopard’s teeth the vision of that otherworldly maw never grew less, how shall we say, itself, and even if the beasts were completely disinterested in any grand malarkeys involving limb rending and the like, still I’d seen many an attendee twirl his mustaches in a heightened manner approaching great nervousness, the sea leopards using this consternation inevitably as an excuse to find themselves on the business end of the more eligible ladies’ skirts, such that one always felt the slightest twinge of excited apprehension upon eyeing the newborns that, errmmm, resulted from time to time after a particular skirt-sea leopard conflagration—well no of course not an actual fire, don’t be hysterical—it’s just that, well, things could get a little funny up there in the early days of The Great Travel, and certain things that you might all take with nary a second look seemed to us of the most miraculous import and happenstance, perhaps I should say happenchance, such that we were all, already, primed for what was to come each night and yet at the same time absolutely gob smacked by what we all knew to be only the usual by-ordinance entertainment, heh heh heh yes indeed the audiences, that word having a particular interstitial meaning at the time, they did ever get restless—yes yes of course I mean “we” by “they,” don’t go daft on me now—so that by the time the waters had begun swirling in that particular pre-show way we all as one leaned forward (or, at times, back) in our amphitheater seating, fans tensely at the ready, waiters making the most of their trays and tentacles, the bubbly spilling up and out and over us such that we had only to open our mouths to imbibe, and always one wanted to close one’s eyes and yet one didn’t, because there it was now just about to become a thing that one could look at, just about to come into its very own being and move from what could only be sensed—