Сара Пинскер - Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea - Stories

Everyone who wasn’t a paying guest—entertainers and staff—had been trained on how to release the lifeboats, and I found myself playing with the controls. How hard would it be to drop it into the water? We couldn’t be that far from some shore somewhere. The lifeboats were all equipped with stores of food and water, enough for a handful of people for a few days .

Whatever had been in my last drink must have been some form of liquid stupid. The boat was lowered now, whacking against the side of the enormous ship, and I had to smash the last tie just to keep from being wrecked against it. And then the ship was pulling away, ridiculous and huge, a foolish attempt to save something that had never been worth saving .

I wished I had kissed JP one more time, seeing as how I was probably going to die .

Gabby hadn’t gotten far at all. By luck, she had found the road in the dark, and by luck had walked in the right direction, but she was lying in the dirt like roadkill now. Bay checked that Deb’s guitar hadn’t been hurt, then watched for a moment to see if the woman was breathing, which she was, ragged but steady, her forehead hot enough to melt butter, some combination of sunburn and fever.

The woman stirred. “Are you real?” she asked.

“More real than you are,” Bay told her.

“I should have kissed JP.”

“Seems likely.” Bay offered a glass jar of water. “Drink this.”

Gabby drank half. “Thank you.”

Bay waved it away when the other woman tried to hand it back. “I’m not putting my lips to that again while you’re coughing your lungs out. It’s yours.”

“Thank you again.” Gabby held out the guitar. “You probably came for this?”

“You carried it this far, you can keep carrying it. Me, I would have brought the case.”

“It had a case?”

“Under the bed. I keep clothes in it.”

“I guess at least now you know I didn’t go through your things?”

Bay snorted. “Obviously. You’re a pretty terrible thief.”

“In my defense, I’m not a thief.”

“My guitar says otherwise.”

Gabby put the guitar on the ground. She struggled to her feet and stood for a wobbly moment before leaning down to pick it up. She looked one way, then the other, as if she couldn’t remember where she had come from or where she was going. Bay refrained from gesturing in the right direction. She picked the right way. Bay followed.

“Are you going to ask me why I left?” Even this sick, with all her effort going into putting one foot in front of the other, the rock star couldn’t stop talking.

“Wasn’t planning on it.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ve met you before.”

“For real? Before the ships?” Gabby looked surprised.

Bay shook her head. “No. Your type. You think you’re the first one to wash ashore? To step away from that approximation of life? You’re just the first one who made it alive.”

“If you don’t like the ships, why did you call them to come get me?” Gabby paused. “Or you didn’t. You just wanted me to leave. Why?”

“I can barely feed myself. And you aren’t the type to be satisfied with that life anyhow. Might as well leave now as later.”

“Except I’m probably going to die of this fever because I walked all night in the cold, you psychopath.”

Bay shrugged. “That was your choice.”

They walked in silence for a while. The rock star was either contemplating her choices or too sick to talk.

“Why?” Bay asked, taking pity.

Gabby whipped her head around. “Why what?”

“Why did you sign up for the ship?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Sounds like an epitaph fitting for half the people in this world.”

Gabby gave a half smile, then continued. “New York was a mess, and the Gulf states had just tried to secede. The bookers for the Hollywood Line made a persuasive argument for a glamorous life at sea. Everything was so well planned, too. They bought entire island nations to provide food and fuel.”

“I’m sure the island nations appreciated that,” said Bay.

The other woman gave a wry smile. “I know, right? Fucked up. But they offered good money, and it was obvious no bands would be touring the country for a while.

“At first it was just like any other tour. We played our own stuff. There were women to sleep with, drugs if we wanted them, restaurants and clubs and gyms. All the good parts of touring without the actual travel part. Sleeping in the same bed every night, even if it was still a bunk with my band, like on the bus. But then it didn’t stop, and then they started making us take requests, and it started closing in, you know? If there was somebody you wanted to avoid, you couldn’t. It was hard to find anyplace to be alone to write or think.

“Then the internet went off completely. We didn’t get news from land at all, even when we docked on the islands. They stopped letting us off when we docked. Management said things had gotten real bad here, that there was for real nothing to come back to anymore. The passengers all walked around like they didn’t care, like a closed system, and the world was so fucking far away. How was I supposed to write anything when the world was so far away? The entire world might’ve drowned, and we’d just float around oblivious until we ran out of something that wasn’t even important to begin with. Somebody would freak out because there was no more mascara or ecstasy or rosemary, and then all those beautiful people would turn on each other.”

“So that’s why you jumped?”

Gabby rubbed her head. “Sort of. I guess that also seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“What about now?”

“I could’ve done with a massage when I woke up today, but I’m still alive.”

Bay snorted. “You wouldn’t have lasted two seconds in a massage with that sunburn.”

Gabby looked down at her forearms and winced.

They walked. Gabby was sweating, her eyes bright. Bay slowed her own pace, in an effort to slow the other woman down.

“Where are you hurrying to, now that I’ve told you there’s nobody coming after you?”

“You said there was a city out here somewhere. I want to get there before I have to sleep another night on this road. And before I starve.”

Bay reached into a jacket pocket. She pulled out a protein bar and offered it to Gabby.

“Where’d you get that? It looks like the ones I ate in the lifeboat.”

“It is.”

Gabby groaned. “I didn’t have to starve those last two days? I could’ve sworn I looked every place.”

“You missed a stash inside the radio console.”

“Huh.”

They kept walking, footsteps punctuated by Gabby’s ragged breath.

“We used to drive out here to picnic on the cliff when my wife and I first got married,” Bay said. “There were always turtles trying to cross. We would stop and help them, because there were teenagers around who thought driving over them was a sport. Now if I saw a turtle I’d probably have to think about eating it.”

“I’ve never eaten a turtle.”

“Me neither. Haven’t seen one in years.”

Gabby stopped. “You know, I have no clue when I last saw a turtle. At a zoo? No clue at all. I wonder if they’re gone. Funny how you don’t realize the last time you see something is going to be the last time.”

Bay didn’t say anything.

The rock star held Deb’s guitar up to her chest, started picking out a repetitive tune as she walked. Same lick over and over, like it was keeping her going, driving her feet. “So when you said you traded things like aluminum foil and people, you were lying to me, right? You don’t trade anything.”

Bay shook her head. “Nobody to trade with.”