chapter twenty
As the high noon sun slanted into the early afternoon, Christine found herself perched on a plush armchair in a big suite on the bridge deck, drinking warm vodka and cranberry juice from a plastic cup and looking up at a framed photo of an astonishingly young-looking Richard Nixon. He had stayed in the suite during a Mediterranean cruise back in the 1970s—before anyone in the room was born, Christine realized—and it had subsequently been decorated in his honor and nicknamed, somewhat ironically she thought, the Nixon Suite. The photograph of Nixon felt like a sly wink. His vilified face looked weary and harmless and almost avuncular now.
Currently occupied by Cynthia Perez, the Mouseketeer turned movie star, it had become the daily hangout spot for the younger passengers. The large living room felt crowded with soft, bright, sweaty faces. A pile of people had deposited themselves on the two enormous beds among many upholstered green-and-gold tasseled pillows, several more were curled into the white space-age chairs and the harvest-gold armchairs and love seats, and the rest of them sprawled on the beige and brown geometric-patterned rugs. They looked charmingly out of place to Christine amid the shabbily futuristic decor. The built-ins were scuffed teak, Danish modern. The kitchenette could have been a set in a 1970s sci-fi movie.
“Why can’t we scientifically quantify the soul?” Tye, the Yale historian, was saying, apropos of a hypothetical discussion about death that had been going on to Christine’s right. “If we can get to the level of quantum mechanics, if we can identify a quark, why can’t we figure out what the hell those twenty-one grams are?”
“They’re energy,” said Tameesha, the singer. “The soul is energy. It goes straight back into the universe when we die.”
“But what kind of energy?”
“I read a thing on Huff Po,” said Allison, the young piano prodigy. “It said the soul is like our software.”
“I read a thing about how we’re all just living in a computer simulation,” said Matt, the dreadlocked, pudgy trombonist for the Kool-Tones. His skin was thick with sweat. He held a ukulele against his large stomach. “It’s a supercool idea. I kind of buy it. A British philosopher came up with it. He says there’s a fifty percent chance it’s true.”
“Right,” said Allison. She looked excited. “I saw that too. The designers of the simulation are supposed to be, like, thirteen-year-olds in a basement playing a random virtual reality game after school in the future.”
“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 b
rief 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.”
“Word.”
Christine missed the galley, missed working. She missed Mick. The vodka was giving her a headache. She was sweating into the upholstery, and she could smell the funk of her own body.
“Hey, I have an idea,” Theodore said. “Anybody want to go for a swim?”
Christine stared at him with sharp, grateful relief. “Where?”
“We can’t use the pool,” said Allison.
Theodore stood up, all purpose now. “I’m not talking about the pool. I’m talking about the ocean! We can jump off the loading bay, the one they use for water sports and excursions and stuff. All the ships have them, they’re right at water level.”
“Oh my God,” said Valerie. “That would be so fucking amazing. I’m so hot. It’s like I’m baking internally.”
“Isn’t it dangerous?” said Cynthia.
“No,” said Theodore. “There’s no wind and no waves, and we can swim, the ship can only float, so we’re faster. Come on, everybody. Get your suits on. Let’s go down.”
Beatriz finally looked up, something awakening in her eyes. “That is a fantastic idea,” she said.
“Drinks for the road?” said Valerie, waving the vodka bottle.
“Maybe not,” said Christine as she took it out of her hand. Valerie made a face but didn’t argue.
* * *
*
Mick lugged three industrial-sized cans of kidney beans out of the storeroom, opened them, and dumped them one by one into big metal mixing bowls with all their liquid. He took two latex gloves from the open box on the counter, snapping them onto his already hot hands, and dipped his gloved fingers in, tasting one of the canned beans. He was hungry. He ate another one. They tasted savory, salty, not bad at all straight out of the can. He caught himself planning the night’s menu—a vinaigrette with mustard, some dried basil and tarragon, a hit of cumin and another of smoked paprika, sugar, some chopped Spam—as if it mattered to anyone anymore what he served.
What he needed was a cigarette. He peeled off his gloves and, leaving the beans to stew in their own juices on the counter, went out through the swinging doors to the restaurant. He headed for a table near the empty bandstand, an elevated half-moon with a canvas skirt, empty mic stands, and sat with his back to the wall, fishing his cigarette pack and lighter out of the breast pocket of his chef’s jacket. He was whipping through his last few packs, smoking eight or ten a day. Fuck it. They helped. What else was there to do in this sunstruck, watery purgatory but smoke? Besides, it wasn’t as if there was some heaven waiting for him when he got back to land. It was over with Suzanne. There was nothing for him in Budapest either. His father was an asshole. Chef Viktor had died two years before. His school friends had all married, had kids, settled down. Everything Mick had in the world was right here on this ship: his hands, his knowledge, his skills, his experience, and his dreams of doing something great someday. That was the sum total of Miklos Szabo, age thirty-four: highly specialized knowledge, vague and half-baked plans gone awry, and a knot of unarticulated, frustrated, powerful yearning. For what, though? He had never been able to act on any of it. His instincts for order and loyalty, caution and sensibility, always trumped his desires and ambitions. He wished he had known this when he was younger. He should have accepted his small fate instead of trying to be something better, bigger, more interesting. The Eszterházy, taking over for Chef Viktor, that was the life he had been slated for, suited for, the one that would have made him happiest. He’d overreached. And as always when he overreached, the gods, or whatever they were, had slapped him down. He never learned.
He took a long drag and held the smoke in his lungs for a moment before exhaling into the twilit gloom.
He’d really thought, he’d believed for years, that he’d end up somewhere cool like Amsterdam working under a famous chef like Laurens, that eventually he’d have a restaurant of his own, become a famous chef, himself. Meanwhile, Viktor had retired and sold the Eszterházy to EuroCuisine, a big European tourist chain. They had offered Mick a job, staying on, running the place, but he’d turned it down, even though Viktor had begged him to take it. Mick had probably broken Viktor’s heart in at least some small way by leaving, but he’d had to get out, he was on to bigger things. Or so he’d thought.
He had never regretted leaving before now. He’d been too busy sailing around the world, working under celebrity chefs like Laurens, wooing his glamorous intellectual French girlfriend, sleeping in cramped bunk cabins with strangers for roommates, changing ships, changing crewmates, changing bosses, changing oceans, a revolving door of loneliness.
The cigarette smoke left a bitter taste on the back of his tongue. It was useless. He was here, nothing to be done about it.
He was swamped by a powerful yearning to be back there, in the Eszterházy, under the arched beamed ceilings with the wood-burning oven and open-flame grills sizzling with dripping meat fat. He could have saved money, got a business loan and help from investors, bought the Eszterházy for himself. It would have been his inheritance and his home and his future. He could have visited Viktor every Sunday afternoon for coffee, brought him pastries and stories from the restaurant and asked his advice and kept him involved in the place he’d built. He could have married a Hungarian girl, brought his children to work with him. He pictured himself up to his elbows right now in cabbage and dumplings, covered in paprika dust, yelling at his staff in Hungarian, making mangalitsa, that special breed of Hungarian pig, a little hairy thing that was totally fucking delicious, cooked in a traditional dish called Gypsy Pork, grilled meat and vegetables on a skewer, like a gypsy might make over a campfire by a caravan.
What a stupid fucking idiot he was. A cold wave of regret hit him broadside
and almost knocked him out of his chair. He had nothing to lose anymore. Nowhere to go. He could leave Cabaret, walk off this ship when they got to land, start over. Maybe he would stay in the United States. Maybe get a job in a place in Los Angeles. Or maybe he’d head up to the Oregon coast and live near the beach and cook in a seaside tourist place, read books, take hikes, have his own apartment, find a girlfriend. Maybe he’d go back to Hungary and try to get the Eszterházy back. Whatever he did, it would be something he chose, something better than this. He was not going to fuck this up. He was going to change.
“Smoking alone in the dark,” came a deep voice. “How cinematic.”
Mick turned to see Sidney the maître d’, as tall and correct as ever, moving slowly through the restaurant, straightening the already aligned silverware on tables, adjusting tablecloths a fraction of an inch, lifting glasses to mock-inspect them. He wended his way to Mick’s table, picked up the pack of cigarettes, raised an eyebrow as if to ask permission, and shook one out without waiting for it. Mick slid the lighter across the table to him.
“I’ll tell you what isn’t very cinematic.” Sidney sat down, lighting up, his pale blue eyes rimmed with thick white lashes. “Waiting for bloody tugboats to tow us to land. If only we were well and truly lost. No one coming, we’re doomed, but we manage to survive by eating the dead while we drift all the way to Hawaii, Japan even.” He paused. “Or if the crew had murdered half of us in cold blood and was holding the rest hostage. I’d watch that movie, wouldn’t you?”
Mick laughed, out of surprise as much as anything else.
“Look at this,” said Sidney. He jangled a set of keys between his thumb and forefinger. “The keys to the kingdom.” He rested his cigarette in the glass ashtray and went behind the bar. Mick heard him opening the top-shelf liquor cabinet, and a moment later he reappeared with a bottle and two glasses and sat down again, pouring shots for them both. Mick saw the label: a single-malt Scotch that was more than ten years older than he was. They raised their glasses to each other.
The Last Cruise Page 24