Titanic: Zarry Stylik

36- peace. (the end)

His eyes go back to the screens, showing the sad ruins far below them. A view from one of the subs tracking slowly over the boat deck. Harry recognizes one of the Wellin davits, still in place. He hears ghostly waltz music. The faint and echoing sound of an officer's voice, English accented, calling "Women and children only". Screaming faces in a running crowd. Pandemonium and terror. People crying, praying, kneeling on the deck. Just impressions... flashes in the dark.
Harry Looks at another monitor. Snoop Dog moving down a rusted, debris-filled corridor. Harry watches the endless
row of doorways sliding past, like dark mouths.
A child, three years old, standing ankle deep in water in the middle of an endless corridor. The child is lost alone, crying.

Harry is shaken by the flood of memories and emotions. His eyes well up and he puts his head down, sobbing quietly.

Lizzy takes the wheelchair. "I'm taking her to rest."

"No!" His voice is surprisingly strong. The sweet little old guy is gone, replaced by a man with eyes of steel. Lovett signals everyone to stay quiet.

"Tell us, Harry."
Harry looks from screen to screen, the images of the ruined ship.

"It's been 84 years..."

"Just tell us what you can–"

Harry holds his hand up for silence. "It's been 84 years... and I can still smell the fresh paint. The china had never been used. The sheets had never been slept in."
He switches on the minirecorder and sets it near him.

"Titanic was called the Ship of Dreams. And it was. It really was..."

"It was the ship of dreams... to
everyone else. To me it was a slave ship, taking me back to America in chains." Harry continues.

He remembers Moe's hand closing possessively over Harry's arm. Him escorting him up the gangway and the
black hull of Titanic swallows them.

"Outwardly I was everything a well brought up girl or boy should be. Inside, I was screaming."

"At Cherbourg a woman came aboard
named Margaret Brown, but we all called her Molly. History would call her the Unsinkable Molly Brown. Her
husband had struck gold someplace
out west, and she was what mother called 'new money '"
Harry remembered, at 45, Molly Brown was a tough talking straightshooter who dressed in the finery of her genteel peers but will never be one of them.

"By the next afternoon we had made our final stop and we were steaming west
from the coast of Ireland, with nothing
out ahead of us but ocean..."

"I saw my whole life as if I'd already lived it... an endless parade of parties and cotillions, yachts and polo matches... always the same narrow people, the same mindless chatter. I felt like I was standing at a great precipice, with no one to pull me back, no one who cared... or even noticed."

He then remembered Mohamed's gift.

"Of course his gift was only to reflect light back onto himself, to illuminate the greatness that was Mohamed Hadid. It was a cold stone... a heart of ice."

"After all these years, feel it closing around my throat like a dog collar. I can still feel its weight. If you could have felt it, not just seen it..."

"Well, that's the general idea, my dear." Lovett responds.

"So let me get this right. You were gonna kill yourself by jumping off the Titanic? That's great!" Bodine chuckles.

"Lewis..." Lovett hushes him.
But Harry laughs with Bodine.

"All you had to do was wait two days!"
Lovett, standing out of Harry's sightline, checks his watch. Hours have passed. This process is taking too long.