by David Sachs
Brenda stayed another hour, and Corrina and Darren played themselves for another hour, until they rolled together, red-faced laughing on the polar ice floe.
That night in Vera’s room, they ate small deli sandwiches. Corrina and Claude played chess on his travel board in the zip-up leather pouch.
“Can you tell me an African story?” Darren asked.
Professor Claude gave Darren a quick look and a smile.
“There is a story the Ashante peoples told, of two princes and two magic spiders.”
His attention was back on the chess game, the story seeming to flow from him without his influence on it.
“The father of the princes was a wise king, much loved by the gods. When it was shown to him by the sky god that his time was coming to an end, he decided to share his kingdom between his two sons. And so he granted each prince a tribe over which to be chief. But the King was worried that his sons might grow jealous and slay each other. And so, on his death, the king gave up his place with his ancestors for a wish. His wish was for Nyame, the sky god, to come to each of his sons and promise them a paradise in the afterworld, should they remain each at peace with his brother, and his brother’s tribe. But Nyame was wise and knew that men live for today and forget what is to come. So the god came to the princes while they slept, and gave to each a magic spider, which could find its way to, and kill the other of the princes. So that each prince knew, if he were to overreach, and take that which belonged to his brother, that his brother had the spider with which to destroy him. The tribes were happy and prospered under their princes, but the princes were afraid. Each prince knew that his brother could release his spider to kill him at any time. The fear grew and grew in them, until the night of the feast of the ancestors. With ghosts in the air and the veil between life and death so thin, each prince sent their spider, and each was in turn killed.”
They all waited for the next words. Corrina looked up from the game. The Professor didn’t notice. He moved his castle, taking Corrina’s queen bishop. The story was done.
“For God’s sake, Claude,” Gerry said. “Darren has enough death already.”
“Oh,” Claude said, looking up from his meditation on the chessboard. “I’m sorry. I am so used to these stories I suppose I don’t think of them as happy or sad or scary.”
Claude returned his attention to the game. Corrina had his queen.
“Sorry, Claude,” she said. “You were distracted.”
“Don’t be sorry,” he said with a smile.
Travis was trapped in Claude’s story about the princes and the magic spiders.
“What will happen?” Darren said. “I mean, if no one finds us.”
“Someone will find us,” Gerry said. “Remember, Darren, if things get really bad, there’s always the lifeboats. Just remember that, if you ever really, really hate it here, we can always leave.”
They were quiet. When Darren went to pee off the balcony, Claude said to Gerry: “The lifeboats are suicide. But you’re right, it’s the only way off.”
25
With the coming of that second Sunday on the ship, nothing felt the same. A comet had fallen from the sky once. Then, comets had rained from the sky, and now each looked up for falling comets.
Lee had taken a backstage dressing room behind the Theater, where they slept with Jessica on the couch and Lee on the floor. They had a flashlight, but slept in total darkness.
“The whole Theater is rattled,” Jessica Golding’s voice came in the black space. “You’re the only rock for everyone. But you’re nervous because the Atrium controls the power and you can’t see what they’re doing. Imagine how they feel knowing you have the gun and they don’t know what you’re doing.”
“They got us the power,” Lee said. “They got the message I’m watching.”
“Do you think they did that out of pure kindness?” Jessica said. “Or does it suit them to keep us separate? They gave us light so they could keep us in the dark, Lee.”
He rolled onto his side and looked up at the space where she was.
Twelve years old, Lee Golding was in jail in Mobile, Alabama. He was a freakishly big kid, but only had a kid’s strength. The police treated him roughly. His cellmates treated him roughly. He’d only stolen a Coke, and only because Therese Blackburn had asked for it.
The police knew his father, and that was no help to him. He didn’t get scared overnight in jail. He got angry. He imagined someday he’d be in control, and they’d be scared of him. They could do their worst to him; he could take it. But he was just a kid. It wasn’t right to push around a kid. He wished they’d held him and charged him, so a judge would see, but they were scared, he knew that was why they’d let him go after two days. They shouldn’t have done that to a kid.
He got bigger and soon had a man’s strength, even at fourteen, starring in basketball and football as a freshman. He loved playing. He was in control. He imagined crowds that weren’t there, announcers beside themselves at this most poised and powerful force in sports. He won basketball championships and Super Bowls with his sisters and friends in his front yard.
He believed in his fantasies, and they soon came true. Still the kid, excited, unafraid, he bound down the alleys of countless stadiums and arenas. His theme song blaring; his gown trailing him. He reveled in the glorious physicality of wrestling. His body, his skills, his persona, at the heart of the game. Then there were the movies, three years in Hollywood, two hits, and best of all, the sensation of watching himself, thirty feet high on a screen. It was never strange to him to become a star. He’d imagined himself one for so long.
Being on the floor in the dark dressing room didn’t bother him. Comfort and ease had never been part of the dream.
On Tuesday, he played three-on-three basketball again and ran again into little Travis Cooke. This time they were on opposing teams. Again, Travis’s fadeaway was on. Even with Lee leaping at him, stretching his incredible arms, Travis could fall backwards and float the ball above his hands.
Twice Travis pulled that move on Lee. Lee could always get his baskets backing his way to the net and reaching up for the pass. But Travis kept coming back and evening the score. He was tiring Lee out.
A third time, Travis took Lee one-on-one, slashed at him, then stopped on a dime, pushed off his front foot and drifted backwards, the ball coming up to shoot as Lee leapt forward after him. Lee’s hands came down through the air on each side of Travis’s arms. The big hands pummeled Travis’s face, the ball flew far off target and bounced away against the fence. Travis fell down on his back, his head slamming the court.
“Sorry. Let me get you up,” Lee said.
On one of the counters in the galley of the Italian restaurant was a line-up of cell phones. Built into the stovetop was one of the few outlets on the ship to carry power. Without Colonel Warrant there to ration their amperes, Rick and Jessica and a few others had been keeping their cell phones charged. They were useless for communicating, but a few of them still found comfort in keeping their phones charged. Just in case.
On Wednesday of the second week, the Italian restaurant ran low on supplies: the endless bounty of gourmet food had been reduced to a final array of unmatchable products. The Theater, or the Italian restaurant, were feeding not just those refugees who had originally been sent to the Theater, but those whose suites had been destroyed, like Lee, Rick and Adam, or whose suites were aft of the closed compartment, which made travel between fore and aft so difficult.
At first, more of them slept outside the Royal Theater, but as days went on many returned, preferring the emergency lights of the Theater to the absolute darkness of the suites and so much of the ship.
“I’ve been in the main kitchen. It’s huge,” Rick said to Lee and Adam. “But you think our food is going fast? Man, they’re feeding five times as many as we are.”
“They were,” Lee said. “There’s a lot less of them now than there used to be. Hesse over there hasn’t been so convincing in keepi
ng people from the lifeboats. A third of that group has jumped ship.”
“Why do you suppose our group has stuck together more?” Adam asked.
“The gun,” Lee chuckled. “It has a certain charisma of its own.”
“My wife thinks so,” Rick said. “She keeps telling me how much better she feels that it’s our guy who has a gun. You know, who knows what people would do if there wasn’t a gun to answer to.”
“Just watch the Atrium and find out,” Lee said.
Rick and Lee went to see Hesse about new food arrangements to include the Theater group.
Adam Melville stayed behind. A chill had grown in his relationship with Lee Golding. From the beginning, when Lee had asserted his leadership in the Theater, he had gravitated to Adam as a partner. Adam had a certain aura about him. His eyes glowed.
He had worked with Lee on the logistics of their group, they had spent hours in discussion on the best courses of action to maintain the longest survival on the ship, and the two had acted together as ambassadors to Hesse and the bigger group. Then, Rick Dumas had somehow made them a triad. Adam disliked Rick. He didn’t trust him, and he could see in the Mighty Lee Golding certain character traits that Rick Dumas helped to bring out- it wasn’t something he could quite put his finger on.
Adam was not a religious man anymore. As a child he had grown up with Sunday school and Christian camps. He had won Bible contests; his mind retained incredible amounts of information and he had spent hours learning whole chapters by heart. In the early Seventies he had become a Christian hippie. He gave his mental efforts to his own interpretation of the text, and soon became disillusioned with the everyday flatness of organized religion. He became just a hippie, and said he was spiritual, not religious, but he always read the Gospels, even while searching for answers in the Upanishads of Hindu and Buddhist Mahayana Sutras.
He trained himself in electronics, and in the nascent field of computer science. Without formal education, he became a tinkerer and soon one of the earliest tech entrepreneurs, a living symbol in certain communities, of the link between hippie and silicon San Francisco.
He’d done well, and had started and sold off several companies during the booming Nineties. He was a groundbreaker, and he had inspired a mystical loyalty in the staff of each company he began. With his unique appearance he’d become a Silicon Valley legend. Now sixty-five, Adam had lost none of the energy and strength of youth. His great arms were still as powerful as they appeared, and the mind worked as intensely as the eyes showed.
Adam had divorced and sold off his latest company in the last six months. He’d booked this cruise to imagine what was next, and it struck him how those converging turning points in his life had freed him up for this trip to witness this turning point for the world. He was obsessed with information and digital technology and often saw things in terms of information manipulation, computer programs and logic flows. He imagined Lee and Rick going to the Atrium as an arrow in a logic diagram, and he wondered what would be in the next box.
26
Rick enjoyed the looks he always got walking into the Atrium with Lee, like a celebrity. It was a place of sadness and Rick liked smiling in the middle of it, knowing eyes were on him and his friend. This time, there was a different atmosphere. There was fear. At first Rick thought the refugees were scared of him and Lee. He was excited by it. Then he understood that it was not directed at them in particular. It was just everywhere. There was fear in the Atrium, and by the time they got to Hesse’s office, Rick had it himself.
Hesse was with the Colonel; Rick could not remember his name.
Lee shook the Colonel and Hesse’s hands as they entered the art shop.
“How are you for food?” Lee said, while Hesse’s hand was still hidden in Lee’s own paw.
“We’re managing,” Hesse said. “Are you ready to join our food plan?”
“I don’t know,” Lee said. “Maybe we should think about joining you guys down there. The Theater’s nice, it’s a comfy space, but the dining area’s getting pretty messy.”
“We can’t handle you here,” Colonel Warrant said. “It’s just too difficult to handle these crowds for food alone, let alone the sanitation and sleeping space. Do you have any idea how much work it took to wire the Theater? We’ll bring the food to you. You guys keep taking care of everything else yourself. It’s working.”
“What do you have left in Little Italy?” Hesse asked.
“Meats gone,” Lee said. “Veggies gone, eggs gone. Have a bit of cheese and pasta still. There’s crackers and nuts and lots of cooking oil. What have you got? How long can we last all on your kitchen?”
“We’ll have to lower the rations,” Hesse said. “Not by much. We have enough to last a couple more weeks, but we can lower it again in a week, and again the week after that, well… we can last over a month if we have to. That’s including the Theater, of course.”
“Food will last longer if your people keep deserting,” Rick said.
“Yeah,” Hesse said. “I’ve done what I can. I don’t really have any right to stop anyone from taking the lifeboats. That’s what they’re for, right? It doesn’t hurt us and I can’t stop it anyway, so frankly, I have more important things to worry about. I’m staying on the ship, and my concern is everyone else who stays on. Anyone who wants to leave takes their own chances.”
Lee pulled the gun off his shoulder with one hand and slapped it down in his other palm.
“We could stop them,” he said, smiling. “You just have to ask.”
“We’re not asking,” the Colonel said. “You’ll hurt yourself with that thing.”
“Or somebody,” Hesse said.
“Yeah,” Lee agreed. “Or somebody. What about the fishing? I seen you got lines set up all along the starboard.”
“The fish are coming up covered in oil. We can’t eat from this ocean, at least until this oil spill breaks up and we drift on. Maybe this storm will help.”
“Or we get hungry enough,” Lee laughed.
“We still need our doors opened,” Rick said. “You were supposed to send up a power saw.”
“It’s in a flooded compartment,” Colonel Warrant said. “We can’t get it. You’ll have to keep using the doors you’ve got.”
Their first meal from Hesse’s crew was arranged for that evening. It would be a long trip for the carts.
“We have a group working on the service elevators,” Hesse said.
Rick and Lee Golding left. Colonel Warrant and Hesse watched them through the glass storefront.
“Is the power saw in a flooded compartment?” Hesse asked.
“No,” Colonel Warrant said. “That boy’s a risk. I take risk management seriously.”
“Maybe we should have had Brenda work on the satellite gear,” Hesse said.
“John, that’s a smart girl, but sometimes you have to reckon for yourself what someone is capable of. That gear is broke. And Brenda White told me herself she knows next to nothing about satellite receivers. We did the right thing. She’ll be working on it soon, if we’re still here, and if she can get it going, well, that’ll be when we need it. For now, we’ve got things running here and we can take care of ourselves. We did right.”
They drifted off into their own thoughts, looking out the storefront at the mob.
“You have any family?” Hesse said.
“Not really. Wife left me a long time ago. My son was killed in Afghanistan. You reminded me of him the first time I saw you up on that bar, you know that?”
He paused, almost happy imagining his son, getting a feeling of connection with him through Hesse.
“How bout you?” he added.
“My family’s from Chicago, they’ll all be fine. My girlfriend left in a lifeboat the first night.”
When the food came at last to the Theater, the rain had picked up and it could be heard on the thick glass of the skylight stories above. The food came, trolley after trolley. The food was in bulk and uncooked, meant to
give the Italian galley three meals to work with, so that only one cross-ship delivery was needed each day.
It took more than an hour to feed everyone. Then, the rain came so heavy that it became the evening’s distraction. Four hundred or more leaned back and stared at the darkness above them from whence the noise came, never stopping, never letting up.
Rick was restless. He took his wife for a walk.
At forty-seven, Rick Dumas’ life had been successful and satisfying. He was a top seller for his company in the Dallas-Fort Worth region. He had lots of friends, and a beautiful wife. He’d always had lots of friends, and always had beautiful girlfriends. He was friendly, a good listener, but he had a secret to successfully navigating social situations, and all situations were social to him. He found the most powerful person in the context and he made them like him.
Rick and his wife made the long trip to the Atrium; he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. He wanted his wife to see him talking with John Hesse. Families and small groups squeezed past him in the hallways. There was an open door out to the lower level promenade, the wind keeping the door open despite its return spring. Rick and his wife were deafened by the sounds of the storm in the moment they passed it by.
The Atrium felt different again. There were loud voices and much movement in the dark. Rick could hear agitated families and groups passing information: the lowered rations; the Theater was out of food.
It was not like his previous visits, a crowd muted by fear and tragedy. It was a powder keg.
The power went out and it became very dark. Around the room came children bawling and men and women screaming in frustration and fear. Lightning illuminated the room in diffracted rays of crisscrossing light.
The thunder clapped and the glass pyramid above shook.
27
Travis was in the galley with Hesse, cleaning in the dim light granted by Brenda White and Colonel Warrant in their amperage rationing. There were thousands on board, but Hesse was somehow always at work. He usually took the worst jobs. Travis, like Gerry, Claude and Corrina, took shifts occasionally. They spoke little as Travis scrubbed the food prep surfaces and Hesse studied the supplies. Travis watched him.