by David Sachs
Adam knew, in the end, this was all there was to prayer. Please. It was obvious what they needed. Please. However many sinners there were on board, or anywhere the flood had hit, there were innocents too. Please. In the Bible, God showed himself so that the people could look on his miracles and know He had touched the world. Please.
He asked God to let them live, or, if they were to die, that God would show them how. So that, if it were God’s plan, they could die without suffering, and in such a way that they would have a better life to come. He prayed for all those aboard the ship, he prayed for those off the ship. He prayed with such intensity that his flesh grew red behind his grey beard, and sweat came from his cheeks and his fists bruised his forehead. Show us the way to live, or the way to die.
He stopped praying and stood. He understood, not everything, but the outlines of something. He knew he was where he was for a reason. Something needed to be done that only he could do. He returned to the Theater.
Adam’s hair was wet with rain; his clothes wetly hugged his enormous frame. The man entered at the bottom of the stairs by the Royal Theater’s left aisle. He walked along the front row, making eye contact through the crowd as he walked. There were people on the stage, it had been home to a couple of dozen. Adam walked onto the stage, and even in the dark, his presence was tremendous. He found an empty spot, fell to his knees and entered into prayer.
A wave of quiet propagated from the front rows out. Soon, all eyes were on the giant on stage, on his knees, his head held up, eyes screwed up tight, his big hairy fists up in his beard. For minutes it went on, and many wondered how long they would watch this man pray.
A man and his wife on the stage came over to Adam. They knelt next to him. An old lady went up, then a man.
Several more joined Adam on the stage, others fell into prayer where they were. Rick felt himself laughing nervously in the buzz of several dozen quiet prayers.
No one stood until Adam did. The spell broke. He looked around; the sounds finally came to him. He smiled, turning to those who had knelt next to him. They shook hands smiling. More came to him and shook his hand, thanking him for bringing God onto the ship.
31
The ending of the first week on board had brought a spiritual and emotional sickness to the Festival. The ending now of the second week brought a physical epidemic. People were getting sick. There was a bad flu bug; one in four were sick with cramps and muscle pain, diarrhea and vomiting, or respiratory infections. It was the mold and bacteria from the toilet spills, Travis knew. The ventilation system had been repaired, but the ship was too filthy to air out that easily. Darren was sick, and Travis, Corrina and Gerry took turns comforting him as he vomited or lay shivering on the couch in the piano lounge.
They continued to split their time between the piano lounge, Vera’s stateroom, and the Atrium. Although Claude would leave them for periods of time, Travis found himself attached to Claude, as his son was. He was fascinated by Claude’s optimistic pessimism. Professor Claude seemed always to expect the worst, but never seemed dismayed. Sometimes Travis was attracted by the attitude, sometimes repulsed. It was as though Travis held it as an article of faith that the worst had occurred, and the Professor felt as strongly that the worst was still coming.
One night, Corrina said offhandedly, “This limbo is hell.”
“What’s that?” Claude asked.
“The not knowing,” she said. “We have no idea what our world and lives are going to be when we get off. I think it’s the worst stress right now.”
“No,” Claude said. “God, no. This boat is home now, and everybody’s starting to realize it. Pretty soon people will be asking what it means if this is all we have. Think about this. Human beings don’t change. Our DNA is no different from- pick your favorite historic savage. Nazis slaughtering Jews, Romans slaughtering Carthaginians, Portuguese slaughtering Africans, whoever you want. There’s nothing in us programmed any different. Just what we grew up with. And this isn’t where we grew up.”
“You’re a real ray of sunshine, you know that?” Travis said.
“Travis,” the Professor said, “you’ve seen people in so much worse conditions in your Sudan work, in Haiti. Why do you keep thinking we’ve hit bottom?”
Yes, Travis had seen worse. He’d seen humans so far from humanity. What had to happen to take them there, he wondered.
Travis continued to explore the ship. He felt like, if he gave Gerry time alone with his wife, Gerry would likewise give Travis time with his kid, which happily sometimes meant Corrina as well.
He sometimes fantasized that they would survive, but somehow Gerry wouldn’t, and then he’d feel guilty for imagining it and he’d punish himself with the thought that Corrina would never return to him, whatever happened to Gerry.
The electric card locks of the cabins had remained operational through it all. Each had its own battery to power it, which meant that many abandoned cabins were locked. Travis had watched now, day by day and week by week, as more and more of the bolts were smashed open, the doors splintered around them. There were no secure spots, but the ship still seemed to contain vast secret places, dead and dark areas.
The huge casino, built in an old west style, was a haunted ghost town. Then, there would be life where it wasn’t expected, a hidden pocket, like the library, where they found a number of refugees would pass much of their time quietly in the Alexandrian-inspired space, amid white columns and upright desks, leather chairs and mosaic floors. They read histories and sciences, trash and art. It passed the time.
An afternoon several days since the run on the lifeboats, came a miracle.
Travis wandered alone. He passed through the Champagne Room, which had become one of his favorite spots. Many of the crew and ship staff had camped out here after the collision and the loss of so many crew berths. Occasionally, the musicians on board gave concerts there. Travis had seen a Flamenco guitar duo on one visit.
The Champagne Bar had the best lounging booths on the ship, the softest carpet, snooker tables, and an ice bar which Travis had watched melt over the first days on the ship until a wet stain had spread over the carpet, evaporating and drying slowly in the cold wet atmosphere. Now there was a moldy smell in the room, but it still charmed Travis because the room had so little natural light, but all day through showed the pleasant glow of the battery-powered electric candles on the tables, which lit up the room like lightning bugs at night.
Travis had just entered the room when he heard a woman screaming in the dark.
“It’s alright, Cassie,” another woman’s voice said, followed by more voices and encouragement.
Travis ran over. Several flashlights illuminated the scene. A woman was in labor, lying on the floor. Her pants were off. A friend supported her from behind. Dr. Joel Conrad kneeled between her legs.
“Travis!” the doctor shouted. “Get to the clinic! No one here knows where anything is. You know what I need? We’ve got water already, need everything else.”
“On my way.”
Travis flew.
When he returned with soap, gloves, forceps, scissors, sterile pads, sutures and needles the delivery had progressed. The woman was crying, and only one of her friends continued to encourage her, as others backed away fearing tragedy. The father knelt behind her, silent.
“Push!” Conrad said.
She cried and grunted.
“I’ve got the head,” Conrad shouted.
The umbilical cord was tangled. Travis and Conrad worked together to get it clear.
“Almost there,” Travis said. “Come on!”
The woman screamed, her friends again encouraged her, hope returning, and then the baby’s cries pierced it all.
“A healthy girl!” Conrad shouted.
There was a cathartic cry from around them, and around the room, a joyful sob.
From the shadows came a long swirling and bubbly run of notes from a clarinet, and then the musician’s comrades joined in, a small jazz combo
with a joyous Dixieland tune. Travis held the baby and cleaned it, while Conrad tied and cut the umbilical cord. Travis’s eye stayed on the tiny toes, and he thought of Darren’s birth, that beautiful boy. He’d felt so much hope on that day, and on this day, he couldn’t help but feel it again.
The father took the baby, both of them crying. He collapsed to his knees and passed the girl to the mother who sobbed uncontrollably.
The sound of the clarinet, trumpet, trombone, banjo and tuba soaked them in a heavenly joy, and they all laughed and cried.
“Trying to work here!” Conrad complained with happiness in his voice as he cleaned and sutured the mother’s skin tears.
Travis too found himself on his knees laughing and crying, and the band played on. Suddenly Travis was pulled up and dancing with strangers in the dark, and soon they all danced in a circle around the mother and father and baby and doctor. They had all hungered for something to let them feel good. He thought of his baby boy, the first time he held him, and the smile stretched so far his cheeks began to hurt.
When it was over, and he’d thrown out his gloves and washed his arms, Travis felt high. He put his arm around the doctor.
“How have you been?” Travis said.
“Good now, my friend. Come, let’s celebrate. Come with me.”
The cardiac surgeon put his arm around the shoulder of the paramedic and led him down a large hallway, then down flights of stairs to a small side-hallway, where they could hear rock-and-roll music.
32
“Welcome to the Viking Sports Hall,” Conrad said, “or as I like to call it, the Bowels of the Festival.”
It was a Viking themed sports bar. There were rough wood long-tables, bulky beams overhead, and creatures of Norse mythology in sports jerseys. Eight-foot Thor, holding his hammer in the air, wore a Michael Jordan pinny. The All-Father Odin, on a throne, wore Fran Tarkenton’s purple Minnesota Vikings jersey and cradled a signed football in his lap. Big screen TVs dotted the walls between the portholes. They were here just above the water level, and it occasionally washed the window with green spray and champagne foam, so that they felt as though traveling in a Viking longboat.
Dividing the booths, extending from the outer wall were replica ship masts with carved maiden figureheads, each with famous sports jerseys painted to their torsos. There was Edmonton’s 99, Cleveland’s 32, San Francisco’s 24, and Brazil’s 10.
There were a few dozen refugees and tourists in the bar, and the sound of loud chatter. A stereo system played Bruce Springsteen, and a young man and woman, dressed in informal server’s outfits in the ship’s colors, served drinks with smiles on their faces to customers with smiles on their faces. They’d get tips occasionally.
There were young and old, two very pretty girls danced, people sat in booths and at tables, in groups freshly made or with their own. They drank pitchers and cocktails. A young couple in the corner booth smoked a joint. Travis saw the woman Conrad had been with on the deck. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
“The bartenders opened it up,” Conrad said, leading Travis over to the bar. “The captain had them lock up all the booze, but the captain – he dead. What’ll you have? It’s on me. Everything’s warm, by the way, but we got a guy working on siphoning some juice for the fridges down here. And the beer taps work. They got the stereo on batteries, can you believe it?”
“Guinness,” Travis said.
“One Guinness, one scotch and soda. Big one this time, Sue-Anne, what are we saving it for? A better class of customer?”
Sue-Anne laughed and got them their drinks.
“Yeah. The bartenders are good people,” Conrad said as they carried the drinks to their table. “They work a few hours, then let some of the others work behind the bar, and they drink, or go out, wherever the hell they go. They’ve been raiding the cabin mini-bars. They sleep here. In the back room. They just make sure the bar’s well stocked so no one bothers them. I assume they’re engaging in what we call sex, but who knows?”
Conrad’s mistress sat at a table with a tourist couple. Conrad sat next to her, and the couple made space for Travis. Conrad introduced him around. The couple were honeymooners, Travis figured. Conrad’s mistress he introduced as Marianna. She was very beautiful, and smiling. Conrad told the others how he’d worked with Travis after the pirates.
“What have you been doing?” Travis asked.
“I’m retired from medicine. I keep getting dragged back in, I admit. Yesterday I killed a guy. Well, I didn’t kill him. But I didn’t save him. Man, bullet wounds are getting old. We’ve been staying in a stateroom on the fifth deck- abandoned. Left some nice clothes though, don’t you like this shirt?”
“It’s silk,” Marianna said.
“Are you by yourself?” the man next to Travis said.
“I’m with my family, kind of,” Travis said.
“We just met,” the woman said, her arm entwined with the man’s. “I was actually on the cruise with someone else. But it’s funny, you can fake loving someone your whole life until you think you’re about to die, and then you don’t want to anymore.”
“I’m sick of talking about that stuff,” Conrad said.
“The way I see it,” Marianna said to Travis in a New York Puerto Rican accent, “we’re gonna die or we’re gonna live if we get rescued or not. Either way, we can’t do anything about it. My gramma always taught me not to worry about things one cannot affect. So… let’s party!”
She screamed a party scream, YEAAAAAH, and raised her beer, and the couple screamed and raised their drinks, and Conrad raised his. Around, a few others screamed and raised their drinks.
Travis raised his to the other four.
It was strange at first for Travis, a room full of smiling people. He hadn’t seen that since it had begun. He was disconcerted. But he felt great seeing smiling people again, it was intoxicating. He enjoyed Claude for the same reason, he seemed unaffected by what went wrong, and in his humor Travis felt an outlet for the stress inside himself. Here in the Viking Sports Hall it was an unexpected vacation from the seriousness of everything. He realized he was smiling, too, at their audacity, their exuberance in the face of everything. Their defiant exuberance.
He stayed for two more beers. In his hungry, tired state he felt drunk. In the end, he pulled his wallet out and tipped the bartenders twenty dollars. He had sixty-five left. He wondered at the idiocy of holding onto this money and thought of throwing it all on the bar. But wouldn’t he feel like an ass if a little money somehow came in handy later?
When he walked out, Conrad called, “Next time bring the ex!”
Gerry Adamson sat alone on the Penthouse Deck promenade. He had a piece of paper and a pen. He looked out over the ocean and tried to see in it monsters of the deep, mermaids and sirens, and Odysseus searching for his way home. All he saw was the ocean. He wrote.
The end of the world came
And we no longer asked, who to die by fire and who by sword
We all died by water.
Six days after the lifeboats left, the rations were cut again. They were eating stews now to stretch the meat. Still, it was enough to live, and still, somehow, everything was delicious. They occasionally included pastries; strange and fanciful deserts that seemed so out of place with everything else. The Festival’s Executive Chef began to struggle with the ingredients they had. Flour and eggs were used in more substantive recipes, but what could be done with marzipan, mascarpone, baking chocolates, berry compote, and icing sugar?
33
Corrina took Darren to the playroom every afternoon. It was supposed to be a daily play date with Brenda’s kids, but Brenda would often postpone or not show up at all as her work dictated. Occasionally, other kids were there, and Darren played with them. Corrina didn’t care; she went with Darren everyday and they played together. Some days she’d have a heavy heart crawling through lime green plastic tunnels.
She knew some would consider this, her indulgence of her boy, frivolous
or disrespectful. She didn’t care. There would be heartache enough for everyone. She didn’t need to make it worse than it had to be. If Darren could come out of all this not really understanding until he learned about it in school some day, that would be fine. Things weren’t that fine though. Here, Darren was struggling. This was her best medicine.
As she slid down, Darren in her lap, she heard familiar screams as Darren’s friends came running to take him away from boring old momma. Corrina got to her feet and walked over to Brenda. They hugged.
Holding hands, they fell back into the beanbag chairs.
“Close your eyes,” Corrina said. “I’ll watch the girls.”
Brenda closed her eyes and fell into solid sleep to the sounds of the kids’ screams.
After an hour, Brenda opened her eyes and the kids were still screaming.
“I took this cruise to relax,” she said. “I never worked so hard in my life. It’s like a Twilight Zone episode. I think my husband is behind it. All these years he begs me to slow down my work, to take a break, even a sabbatical from power and electronics and all that beautiful stuff. So I do it. A lo-o-o-ong cruise. And now I’m in this Seventh Hell of wiring and power management. And it’s constant. I close my eyes and dream about voltages and capacitors.”
Corrina had been surprised when Brenda’s work had carried on after the first week, when power and water were stabilized. But as she questioned and understood the endless succession of issues, emergencies, and new demands, she knew Brenda would be working like this until whatever end was coming.
“What are you working on now?” Corrina asked.
“The communications, always,” Brenda said. “But we’re trying to get power to the toilets. They’re wired to the emergency power system, and like everything else, we’ll have to get them back bit by bit. Like everything. With all the sickness, this is getting to be a serious priority. But we were really getting somewhere with the satellite, too. I wish we didn’t waste so much time, I wish we didn’t always have a million things to take care of… we could be talking to someone!”