Кейт Кристенсен - The Last Cruise

“And if your character gets boring,” said Theodore, the married journalist Christine had danced with on her first night of the cruise, “they kill you off.”

“I refuse to be killed off,” said Valerie with vehemence, turning to Theodore. She’d been talking to the two Russian bartenders who were part of the walkout crew, Christine’s old friend Alexei and the bitchy, haughty Natalya, who had evidently been folded into this group.

“Maybe that’s what’s going on now,” said Theodore. “The game-designer kids have shoved us onto an old boat stranded in the middle of the ocean, and they’re going to forget about us and leave us here.”

“Then we should do something interesting to remind them,” said Allison.

“Like a revolution,” said Natalya with a languid half-smile. “Teenagers love violence. We could kill the captain. Hijack the ship.”

Everyone stared at her blankly, without a spark of interest: violence was not in anyone else’s blood, apparently, to Christine’s relief.

Natalya looked around at them, disappointed. “You’re all little pussies,” she added darkly.

Several people laughed. Matt and another Kool-Tone stared intently at each other and played what sounded like part of a song, Matt on his ukulele, the other Kool-Tone on a pair of small drums he held between his knees. Christine felt like the oldest person in the room, a Gen-X outsider in the midst of a tribal gathering of millennials. She could feel how, collectively, they were trying to construct and maintain an abstract wall of words to hold at bay the pressure of their fears about what might happen next. But the conversation did nothing for her own fears except intensify them. She had been trying not to think about Ed and the farm and her life back in Maine, and she had managed this over the past few days by slapping sandwiches together, making lists of stores, chopping limp vegetables. Now, with nothing to occupy her mind or her hands, she felt like a hostage to her own jittery nerves, sitting here among these kids, day drinking, talking aimlessly about nothing. She was in the grip of a visceral memory of planting seedlings in the dirt, the weak spring sun breaking through clouds, the green of the woods a blur beyond the field, the smell of air blowing over the lake, that mineral freshness underlain with the spicy funk of wet, wintered-over, rotting leaves. She yearned for the sensation of digging her hands into cool, rich dirt, even for the clouds of black flies and the stiff ache she got in her lower back from squatting all day.

Christine looked at Valerie, who was taking occasional pictures on her iPhone—she had brought along an extra battery, she explained when someone looked wistfully at it. The other passengers had all turned their mobile phones off right after the engine room fire to conserve power in case they magically came into range of Wi-Fi.

Valerie prowled around the room, looking parched and whip-focused in a black T-shirt dress and flip-flops. Christine couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her friend eat anything, maybe a sandwich two days before. And meanwhile she had been drinking steadily, straight vodka, and had hardly slept since the night the power had gone out, when she’d stayed in bed for twelve hours straight. She said with manic urgency, “After this cruise is done, do you know what they’re going to do with this ship? They’re going to tow it to Bangladesh to be taken apart on the beach for scraps. And the men who take her apart, the Bangladeshis, they’ll breathe the asbestos, the toxic chemicals. Ship breaking is incredibly dangerous work. They pay those men nothing, and a lot of them get hurt and die. That’s where this ship is going next.”

“Everything is about making money for them,” said Tye. “They don’t care if people live or die. I heard that too, about Bangladesh.”

“I should go there,” said Valerie. “Talk to those workers.”

“I keep wondering,” said Tye, addressing the two Russians. “If there hadn’t been a fire and the power hadn’t gone out, what would have happened after you all walked out?”

“We would have made Cabaret bargain with us,” said Alexei. “They have to please the customers, and to do that, they need us working. We would have made Larry Weiss give us our jobs back with better terms.”

“Now, of course, we are fucked,” said Natalya. “We had been planning a big thing, a manifesto, we were going to try to get media attention, to make them look bad. But now, pffft. ” She batted languidly at the air with one hand. “We might as well have just kept working.”

“Right. But what else were you supposed to do?” asked Tye. His upper lip was shiny, and his brow was wrinkled with the effort to convey his sympathy for their cause. “I mean, how are you supposed to change anything?”

“History is on your side,” said Valerie, snapping Alexei’s picture. “And so am I, with all this documentation. It’s so frustrating that I can’t get this out in real time, show the world what’s going on right now.”

“We’ll be rescued soon, we’ll be back on land,” said Theodore. He was puffing on a metallic blue tube that spewed peach-flavored vapor. “It’s just a matter of days.”

“It’s weird though, am I right?” said Tameesha. “No signal. You can get a signal even up in space. Like, aren’t there any satellites over us?”

“Not in the middle of the ocean, apparently,” said Christine.

“This cruise was supposed to give everyone a break from being online,” said Tye. “No Internet, no cell phones, a return to the pre-device era. It seemed like a cool idea, before we got stuck out here.”

There was a brief silence in the room. It seemed to Christine as if everyone was taking a moment to collectively, silently acknowledge their fear without naming it directly.

“This is totally. Effed. Up,” said the drummer finally, punctuating his words with finger-taps on the skins. “Where the hell are we, even?”

“Maybe we drifted into the Great Garbage Patch,” said Christine. Everyone looked blank. “It’s a massive gyre of trash, something like twice the size of Texas now and growing.”

“Oh right,” said Allison. “I saw a thing about that. Didn’t some Dutch kid figure out how to clean it up?”

“Not yet,” said Christine.

“Does anyone else feel weird staring at the ocean all the time?” asked Cynthia.

“It’s true, it’s like infinite flatness,” said Matt.

“Can it make you insane?”

“I read about that in, like, Salon, I think. About what happens to the brain when you stare at the ocean. It’s called Blue Mind. It’s a peaceful state where you slip into a kind of trance.”

“Blue Mind sounds like a drug,” said Cynthia.

“It’s evolutionary,” said James. “We came out of the water and we’re made of it, and we need it to sustain life. Looking at the ocean makes us calm, like a baby looking at its mother.”

“I don’t feel calm,” said Beatriz. She had been quietly, moodily squinting out the window at the ocean while everyone else chattered around her.

Christine kept her eyes on Beatriz as the voices swirled around the room, gentle, indistinguishable.

“They should study the brain when it’s staring at the ocean on a stranded cruise ship for days.”

“The water is connected to our emotions. We’re not separate from it. It’s like there’s an invisible umbilical cord connecting us to it.”

“In astrology, water signs are considered the most emotional and intuitive.”

“I’m a water sign.”

“Which one?”

“Cancer.”

“Astrology isn’t a real thing. There’s no scientific basis for it.”

“That’s your truth. It’s an ancient science.”