Кейт Кристенсен - The Last Cruise

“Who is that?” Mick shouted to Christine over the roar.

“That’s the owner!” Her upturned face glowed in the lights. Tendrils of hair flew around her head.

“The owner of the ship?”

“The owner of the ship! How do you not know that?”

“Mi a fasz!”

The Hungarian epithet sounded funny even to Mick’s ears. They grinned at each other in the wind.

“Who was the first guy?” Christine shouted.

“My fucking boss!” Mick shouted back.

The helicopter rose slowly, pivoted to put its head down in a wide banking turn, and buzzed away like a giant dragonfly, back the way it had come. In its wake, there was a vast silence, a collective feeling of depressed letdown. As the winking lights receded toward the horizon and the sound of the engine faded, people trailed back to the pool, the buffet table, the tables and chairs. The band’s instruments lay abandoned on lounge chairs. A group started to gather around the bar as before, but now the conversations were muted, the festivity dampened. Mick’s crew drifted away, probably down to the main deck to join the walkout crew’s party. Mick stayed with Christine at the grill. They worked side by side in silence, handing burgers and steaks to the few people who came up asking for them. No one seemed very hungry anymore.

Sparks from the brazier floated upward and twisted high into the darkening air with the smell of charred flesh. It was like a burnt offering to one of the ancient gods, thought Mick with a tipsy half-superstition, wishing those gods still existed. The atmosphere around the ship had been churned and disturbed by the helicopter, as if its coming and going over the horizon had made an invisible rip in the fabric of the sky that had sealed shut again behind it.

Looking out at the ocean’s vast and wild void, Mick felt a deep sense of dread. They were completely alone out here.

When Miriam stepped out onto the balcony to do her morning stretches, she was assaulted by the sunlight, even though it was still early. It was their fourth morning adrift without power or propulsion. There was no breeze. The air hung like a gauze curtain, trapping the heat against the water. She tried to take a deep breath as she touched her toes, but her lungs felt compressed by the heavy air. How was this the middle of the Pacific? It felt more like the inside of a coat closet. Behind her, in their bed, Sasha was still asleep, lying on his back naked, one arm flung upward on the pillows above his head, the other hugging his stomach. She envied him, being so deeply asleep. She felt wide awake and restless. Her entire body itched from prickly heat and lack of a shower.

The day of their expected arrival in Hawaii had come and gone, and since then everything, it seemed, had worsened. News had filtered from the bridge through the ship that one of the tugboats had had to turn back because of engine trouble, and another one had been sent out to join the first one, so the pair wouldn’t arrive to tow the Isabella to land for at least two more days. The slower return journey would take five days, at least, which meant another week on board before they reached the Port of Long Beach again. Some cruise, thought Miriam.

On the plus side, Cabaret had promised an airdrop of supplies that afternoon. It was about time, because food and water were running low. The crew had rationed bottled water, two liters per person per day, but people helped themselves freely to alcohol, and no one tried to stop them. If they wanted to dehydrate themselves and stay blotto, that was apparently their business.

Meanwhile, the lower decks were fetid with the stench of overflowing toilets steeping in the heat, uncollected garbage, and rotting food, while the upper decks looked like a crowded tropical refugee camp. Almost fifty people were sick with norovirus, with more succumbing every day. The makeshift clinic on the promenade deck was crowded with stricken crew, passengers, and officers alike, all of them vomiting and feverish, racked with intestinal pain. Miriam felt terrible for them, being so miserably sick on top of everything else. Though the crew had managed to rig two of the toilets in the clinic with hoses and swimming-pool water for the sick people, everyone else was using the now-obligatory bio-bags. Miriam hated pooping into a plastic bag so much, she’d become severely constipated for the past three days in order to avoid it, and she knew she wasn’t the only one.

The crewmembers who’d walked out on their jobs, those who weren’t sick, were still camped out on the main deck. They stayed there day and night with nowhere else to go and, now that Larry had left the ship, no one to bargain with. They spent their unproductive futile protest in cruise-like activities: drinking, card games, sunbathing, playing guitars. Miriam felt a half-resentful pity for them, all those poor kids with no future and no chance of winning their jobs back. They were stuck here, just like everyone else, mired in frustration, anxiety, and helpless inaction. What good was any of it?

As for the crewmembers who’d stayed on the job, still wearing their now-rumpled and stained uniforms, they had no water or power to do laundry, wash dishes, mop, vacuum, or cook, but they tried stoically to keep things clean and orderly, serve three meals a day, presenting at least the appearance of dedication to their jobs. Since the tiny windowless crew cabins belowdecks were too airless and hot and reeking for habitation, most of them slept outside on the main deck in lounge chairs or on mattresses, side by side with the crew who had quit, and the passengers they were supposed to be serving. These various factions seemed to coexist peacefully, for now. That was the one advantage of the heat: it tamped down tempers, the tantrums and fights that never felt far from erupting, if only because it was just too hot to yell or throw things or punch anyone in the head. Also, everyone seemed united by one common purpose: to get the hell off the ship and back to land.

At least, Miriam thought with half-guilty relief, her own living conditions had improved. At Rivka’s insistence, the whole quartet had moved into the owner’s suite after Larry had left in the helicopter. Compared to their cabins far below, Rivka’s suite was a palace. It sat in the middle of the bridge deck, spanning the width of the ship so there were windows and balconies on both sides, which created a cross-breeze whenever any air moved. The rooms were decorated in striped beige-and-cream wallpaper and fluffy white rugs over cool white-plank flooring. It was all very luxurious and bright, and Miriam felt grateful to be able to stay there, never mind that it was Rivka’s fault that the Sabra was on the ship in the first place.

Jakov and Isaac had daybeds tucked into separate alcoves in the living room, and Sasha and Miriam got the smaller, unused second bedroom, with a balcony of its own and a queen-sized bed. Rivka had offered the room to Miriam and Isaac first, which required a lengthy explanation from Miriam that she and Sasha were a couple now, and forced Rivka to acknowledge, at long last, and with much disingenuous blinking and stated confusion on her part, that Isaac and Miriam had been divorced for at least twenty years. In the end, Rivka had acquiesced with a bemused skepticism that made Miriam want to slap her, but there it was.

As she crept quietly through the spacious living room out to the catwalk, Miriam heard Jakov groaning in his sleep on his daybed. He had a fever, pains in his chest, and a dry cough. It wasn’t the norovirus; he’d had worsening heart trouble for years, which wasn’t contagious, so he’d been spared the infirmary quarantine. But Miriam was worried about him. He seemed to be getting worse, like everything else around here.