Swan Song

by Lisa Alther

  Another e-mail appeared, from Louise, Kat’s best friend, an English professor at the University of Vermont: “Are you okay, Jessie? I saw Anthony the other day at the Fresh Market, and he said you’re on a cruise in the Red Sea. WTF? We’ve all been worried about you. You left so abruptly, and no one has heard from you since. When are you coming back home?”

  Louise was also a poet. Kat and she had attended many poetry readings together. They had also met often to critique each other’s poems. Jessie had been jealous of this relationship at first, since Louise offered Kat things that Jessie couldn’t. But Kat had pointed out that Jessie had colleagues at the ER with whom she could discuss her cases. Whereas Kat worked alone all the time, having as company only her characters, who functioned for her rather like imaginary playmates for a lonesome child. But she, too, needed actual colleagues with whom to discuss her work.

  Jessie felt a stab of guilt. She had sometimes been very selfish. Kat had sat at her desk in silence all day long. At night she had wanted to talk. But Jessie had talked all day long, so at night she had wanted silence.

  Jessie hesitated and then decided not to answer Louise. She didn’t know how to explain her sudden impulse to get away from anyone and anything that could remind her of Kat. And she didn’t know how to answer the question of when she would return to Vermont because she wasn’t even sure she would. Some days she longed for a fresh start in a new place with people who had never known Kat.

  She removed Kat’s notebook from the drawer of her bedside table and started reading where she had left off. Kat was clearly planning to write another novel, but what about? To Jessie’s surprise, she came to some notes about Alexandria, Egypt, where the Amphitrite would dock in a few days. In addition to information about Alexandria’s history and landmarks, Kat had copied out several more Cavafy poems. Cavafy had evidently been born there and had lived there for most of his life.

  There were also notes about Alexander the Great, who had founded the city. About Cleopatra, whose palace had been located beside the harbor there. About E. M. Forster, who apparently experienced his first serious love affair with a man there during World War I. About Marguerite Yourcenar, who had written a novel featuring Hadrian, whose handsome young boyfriend had drowned himself in the Nile not far from Alexandria.

  Jessie hadn’t known the Amphitrite would dock at Alexandria when she signed on for this job, nor had she known that Kat had been preoccupied with the city during her final months. This was one of those serendipitous moments when the universe alerts you to the fact that life on this Earth has complex dimensions that are hidden from you—and will probably remain so.

  Jessie was mystified. What in the world did Alexandria, Egypt, have to do with Kat Justice from Mink Ridge, North Carolina? It was unnerving to realize that, although she had caressed every square inch of Kat’s body many hundreds of times, there were evidently levels on which Kat had been a stranger to her.

  Chapter 9

  Puffer Fish

  Jessie was sitting alone at a table in the officers’ dining room, eating scrambled eggs on toast. The Amphitrite was at anchor, waiting to pass through the Suez Canal. At the next table sat James Yancey, a junior officer from the bridge, earnest and clean-cut in his natty white uniform with his buzz-cut hair, like an escapee from a Mormon door-to-door proselytizing team. He and she had once compared iPhone photos of her grandchildren in Vermont and his fiancée back home in Lyme Regis. Across from him sat Major Thapa. Jessie had been listening to their conversation concerning Thapa’s childhood in Nepal. He had won one of the coveted spots as a Gurkha, out of thirty thousand applicants, by running uphill for forty minutes with a wicker basket full of seventy pounds of rocks on his back.

  “Gosh,” said James, “I could never have made Gurkha, that’s for certain!”

  “It’s an important tradition in my family. We used to belong to the warrior caste back in the bad old days. Many ancestors and relatives before me fought for Britain in India, Malaya, Burma, Borneo, Tibet, the Falklands, Kuwait, Kosovo, you name it.”

  “Where did you serve before the Amphitrite?”

  “I fought the Taliban in the mountains of Afghanistan. That’s where I learned to think like a snake. That’s the whole secret to my job—imagining the most devious and perverted things anyone never thought of, and then trying to prevent them. But we certainly fell down on the job the other day with those pirates.”

  “Sounds hair-raising.”

  “Yes, I’m a nervous wreck most of the time, pretending I can foresee the unforeseeable.” He unwrapped an antacid tablet and popped it into his mouth, as though to prove his point.

  “What worries you most right now?”

  “Where do I start? Rocket-propelled grenades or missiles launched from the banks of the canal. A fishing boat crammed with explosives ramming our hull. A bus carrying our guests on a field trip being attacked, as happened at that museum in Tunis not long ago. Terrorists disguised as crew taking over the ship, as they did the Achille Lauro when it docked at Port Said in 1985.”

  “Okay, that’s enough!” James laughed nervously.

  “The motto of the Gurkhas is ‘Better to die than to be a coward.’ What I object to most about these Islamists is that they kill unarmed civilians by stealth. That’s cowardly. Yet they think of themselves as Davids facing down the Goliath of Crusader civilization. But David was armed with nothing but a slingshot. If you want to be a hero, prevail over someone who’s at least as well armed and forewarned as you yourself are.”

  Jessie leaned over and said, “I apologize. I was eavesdropping just now. I must say I’m a bit startled. I had thought we were home free now that we’re out of the pirate zone.”

  Thapa said, “I’m afraid the Amphitrite is never home free, Doctor. Can you imagine what a coup it would be for those young thugs to sink this amazing ship?”

  “I guess you’re right. Well, thanks for watching out for us, anyhow, Major.”

  “My team and I are trying our best to keep everyone safe. Just as I know you and your medical unit are doing.”

  “Would you like to come up on the bridge and watch us navigate the canal, Doctor?” James asked.

  “Wow, I’d love to!”

  “The only requirement is that no one talk, because our officers have to concentrate very hard in order to avoid collisions, with these huge ships so close to one another. It’s like a parade of whales.”

  “I can do that,” Jessie assured him.

  * * *

  —

  Jessie stood silently in a corner on the bridge while Captain Kilgore, James, several other officers, and a local Egyptian pilot oversaw a vast dashboard of screens, dials, switches, and levers. Two of Major Thapa’s men were at the windows, gazing in every direction through huge binoculars.

  Raising her own binoculars, Jessie inspected the ships anchored near the canal entrance—another cruise ship with many decks of cabins and balconies, like a top-heavy hotel; a cargo ship, its multicolored containers of Chinese designer knockoffs stacked as tightly as a Rubik’s Cube; a commercial fishing trawler with hoists and nets; an empty car carrier, a private yacht, a petroleum tanker, two Chinese gunboats. The exposed hulls of the large ships were painted rust, turquoise, peacock blue, or jade green. The colors were vibrant against the grays and tans of the murky water and the shores of baked sand.

  Despite what James had told her about the need for silence, Captain Kilgore was talking quietly to Major Thapa, explaining that the wait time for entering the canal had recently been reduced from ten hours to three because a side channel had been excavated south of Port Said to allow ships to travel in both directions at once, rather than having to take turns through the narrow sections. A hundred ships a day could now transit the canal, as opposed to fifty before. But because the price of oil had fallen so low, some tankers were taking the longer route to Europe and the United States
around the Cape of Good Hope, rather than pay the $450,000 toll to Egypt to pass through the canal.

  “What will this do to the Egyptian economy?” asked Major Thapa.

  “I think the whole Middle East will eventually implode,” said Captain Kilgore, “as oil continues to be replaced by renewable energy. Countries that have luxuriated in their oil wealth will have to diversify. It’s ironic, but the source of their past wealth—the oil—is what’s causing the global warming that’s rendering their home countries uninhabitable, outside of air-conditioned buildings. They’re having more and more days that reach forty degrees centigrade. At that temperature, sweat won’t evaporate, so laborers can no longer work outdoors on oil rigs and construction projects. Pilgrims may not be able to go on the hajj. There’s no telling what could happen in Mecca with two million people exposed to a couple of forty-degree-centigrade days. It’s a recipe for mass heatstroke.

  “Of course, eventually Russia, Canada, and the Scandinavian nations will probably emerge as the dominant world powers because so much of their landmass is in the Arctic, which will thaw and become habitable—with the natural resources exploitable.”

  Jessie was surprised to hear Captain Kilgore sounding so sober, accustomed as she was to his breezy noontime paeans to life at sea. But what most surprised her as the ship inched into the canal was how shallow and narrow it seemed. Eighty-some feet deep and less than two football fields wide, James had told her. It was actually just a big ditch dug through the sand dunes, with no locks or quays. On the eastern side stretched the Sinai desert, whereas the western side was more verdant, thanks to water siphoned from the Nile.

  The Amphitrite floated slowly but inexorably past the city of Suez, like a Hindu juggernaut that would grind any devotee in its path beneath its implacable wheels. Beyond the Suez docks, two minarets pierced the cerulean sky, where puffs of white cloud floated lazily. On the far outskirts of the city, two young men in red-and-white-checked kaffiyehs lounged on the backs of camels to watch the huge boat drift past. After hearing Major Thapa itemize the varieties of attacks that were possible, it first occurred to Jessie to be afraid of these handsome, dark-eyed, white-teethed desert boys. But she nevertheless snapped some photos of them with her iPhone to text to her grandchildren.

  The canal appeared well protected. Staffed guard towers like giant mushrooms were planted at regular intervals on either bank. Jeeps full of armed Egyptian soldiers were parked at every ferry crossing. Partway up the canal they came to a military base with a large barracks surrounded by some covered trucks packed with soldiers.

  Near midday they reached Ismailia, where the Egyptian pilot descended from the bridge and swung off the Amphitrite onto a waiting tugboat. Another pilot grabbed the ladder and scaled the side of the ship, soon appearing on the bridge to shake hands with Captain Kilgore. Outside, the eerie call to prayer emanated from several competing minarets.

  Once the call had ended, Captain Kilgore switched on the PA system and launched into his lunchtime encomium: “I hope you’re all enjoying our little jaunt up the Suez Canal toward the Mediterranean. Just to give you some background: The Egyptians as early as 1800 B.C. dug canals from the Nile River to lakes that have been incorporated into this canal. Even then this was an important trade route from India and China, Arabia and East Africa, up the Red Sea to Egypt and the Mediterranean. But no one ever tried to join the Red Sea to the Mediterranean directly because they believed that the two bodies of water were of different heights and that one would flood the other.

  “A French engineer named Ferdinand de Lesseps established that this was not the case and began our current canal in 1859 with financial backing from the British. It took ten years and one hundred and twenty thousand Egyptian lives to dig this one-hundred-and-seventy-kilometer-long canal. European ships traveling to and from the East used to have to circle the Cape of Good Hope. This canal saved them three weeks and seventy-two hundred kilometers.

  “To acknowledge the importance of the British contribution to the construction of this canal, a British ship, the HMS Newport, led the flotilla during ceremonies on its opening day.”

  Jessie could hear passengers cheering as they leaned off their balconies, waving their Union Jacks on sticks. Some warbled “Rule, Britannia!”

  James left the banks of screens and dials to come stand beside her.

  “Thanks,” she whispered. “This is amazing.”

  He nodded.

  Up ahead a small fishing boat being rowed by a teenage boy lay directly in their path. The pilot boat escorting their twelve-story leviathan rushed forward and started nosing the craft toward the western shore. A second fisherman in the small craft, clad in only a loincloth, hurriedly gathered in tangled armloads of wet nets. As the Amphitrite passed him, he stood up on the rear seat of his rowboat and raised high what looked like a trident. On it was impaled a creature that resembled an albino basketball bristling with spikes. He shook it at the Amphitrite, his face contorted with what appeared to be rage.

  “Gosh, what’s that monstrosity?” she whispered to James.

  “It’s a puffer fish. They’re invading the Mediterranean from the Red Sea via this canal. They contain a toxin twelve hundred times more poisonous than cyanide. One fish could paralyze the respiratory systems of thirty swimmers, and there’s no antidote.”

  “What will nature dream up next?”

  “I know. It’s really grotesque.”

  “Is that gorgeous boy threatening us with his poison fish?”

  “Sure looks like it to me.”

  “Remind me not to eat any more sushi.”

  James laughed.

  “You know, I never realized that this trip would become so sinister. When I signed on, I was thinking more along the lines of the Love Boat.”

  “It’s both, Doctor. Love and death. Eros warring with Thanatos, just like Freud said.”

  Jessie looked at James speculatively. She hadn’t pegged him as someone who would be interested in the contradictions of the psyche.

  Jessie took her leave to go run the afternoon clinic. She arrived just as Ben was departing. He greeted her without enthusiasm. This seemed odd, since he was supposedly trying to resuscitate their long-dead romance. Had he figured out that she wasn’t interested? Or had he Googled Mona’s poem and discovered that it was penned by Piaf? Did he only relish the chase, losing interest once his prey had acquiesced? Or was he just in a bad mood because of the injustice of his being required to support his harem of ex-wives and their children?

  Who knew? Who cared? Certainly not she. She smiled at him, grabbed a stack of patient questionnaires, and retreated to her office. On her desk was a phone message from Mona inviting her for a drink in the Naxos Bar that evening. She left Mona a phone message accepting and then called Amy to request the next patient, who was in agony from an ingrown toenail.

  * * *

  —

  When Jessie walked into the Naxos Bar, she spotted Mona at a small table, chatting with a couple of guests. Once she reached them, she discovered they were all speaking French.

  Mona introduced her to Veronique and Pascal Vincent. “The Vincents are annoyed by Captain Kilgore’s version at lunchtime today of the construction of the canal.”

  They nodded fiercely. “The French built this canal!” exclaimed Pascal, switching to English for Jessie’s benefit. “The British refused to help finance De Lesseps. They didn’t want competition for their ports on the Cape of Good Hope route to India. Once it became apparent the canal would prove a success, the British bought up some Egyptian shares. But the French always owned the majority interest.”

  Veronique, swathed in a scarf the size of a bridge tablecloth from the Hermès boutique, joined him in his outrage: “Yes, and at the opening ceremony, the Egyptian pasha and the empress Eugénie of France were slated to go first down the canal in the imperial yacht L’Aigle, piloted
by a Frenchman. But the night before, that British ship turned off its running lights and wove among the anchored vessels until it was first in line, blocking L’Aigle and taking the lead.”

  “Encore une fois, la perfide Albion!” snarled Pascal.

  “We know all about the wiles of the British where I come from,” agreed Jessie, speculating that Veronique’s giant scarf could be pitched as a pup tent should she get lost in the desert.

  “And where is this?” asked Veronique.

  “New England. The Boston Tea Party and Paul Revere and all that.”

  “And Lafayette?” suggested Pascal.

  “Yes, we do appreciate your sending us Lafayette,” said Mona.

  “What do you mean ‘we’?” asked Jessie. “You’re Italian. I bet your family didn’t even arrive in the States until the twentieth century?”

  “That’s true,” said Mona.

  They all laughed as the Vincents stood up. “You don’t need to leave,” said Jessie.

  “We want to go out on deck to see Port Said.”

  After the Vincents had departed, Jessie said, “Boy, the British and the French have really got it in for each other, don’t they?”

  “They don’t really,” said Mona. “Despite all their wars back and forth, the British love French food and wine. And the French love British tweeds and plaids. But how have you been, Jessie?”

  “Great! I was on the bridge all morning.”

  “I missed most of the transit. I had to rehearse our new production for hours. The male lead is a real loser. His previous experience consists of playing Goofy at Disneyland.”