the end of july

At night the deck lights are off, so you only identify other passengers by the pieces of their conversations - usually in French or Italian - that break through the sound of waves and wind, and by the tiny orange circles of their cigarettes that occasionally arc down and disappear into the water.

By 3 am the bar has closed and all the hallways and lounges are littered with fallen bodies, still and silent as if the ship had been gassed. People in our society rarely sleep together in large numbers, certainly not on furniture and floors, so the scene is eerie and tragic.

In the morning the sky is white and the sea silver. On deck dozens of passengers are wrapped into every corner with their sleeping bags like oversized, multicolored coccoons. Here and there are traces of people: a shoe, a cough, blowing hair.