The refugees and the paying guests mixed on the upper Sky Deck among the deck chairs, around the bar and pool, and by the railing. You could still tell them apart, somehow. The refugees had been in life and death panic just hours before. For the guests, the whole thing was still theoretical. It was too big to be real. Many had traveled from inland for the cruise, and imagined their own homes and families safe. For the refugees, it was much easier to believe that they were the lucky ones, that their friends had not escaped.
The guests were still on the ship, the refugees were still on the shore.
Around the ship, the near thousand-strong crew was made stalwart by their ship’s master. There were tasks that continued, and tasks that were stopped. The staff captain and hotel manager made these decisions, so live entertainment programs were cancelled, the casino and shops stayed closed, while babysitting stayed open, along with the basketball court and golf simulators. The library and movie theater were open, and housekeeping went on in the cabins and public areas.
The off-duty crew too were pressed into service to the refugees: supporting the galleys in their massive new responsibilities, carrying the tables and foodstuffs, the jugs of water and juice, and an improvised responsibility that many picked up: mingling on deck. The staff were there to serve, and they felt it, even if that meant bringing some better cheer.
Travis rested in a deck chair, watching his ex-wife at the railing with his son and Gerry Adamson. That threesome peered off the rear deck, at the sun setting behind them. It was a glorious sunset, flowing its spectrum over the low clouds in the distance. Travis felt their moving away from the light.
It was funny, looking around: the running track, the swimming pool and climbing wall, the tiki bar, water slides, and the basketball court in the distance. That was different from the refugee camps he’d been in. No goats. The guests seemed embarrassed by the ship’s facilities now, a little ashamed of the opulence and frivolity of their home to the poverty- and disaster-stricken guests. Still, some kids played basketball and others swam, their parents trying to maintain normalcy and smiles in their children.
While a few of the ship-guests jogged grim-faced on the track, most of the adults had no stomach to enjoy themselves.
Travis’s head was turned and he stared hypnotized at the basketball court and the three-on-three game being played by teenagers. The ball was dribbled and Travis nodded to the rhythm of it from the boy’s palm to the court. He had his boy, and he was happy. The world could be ending, but he felt lucky.
Most of those on the Festival were trying to keep away thoughts of the overwhelming whole. Travis tried to focus back on the smallest pieces of the present. To his left, he watched an attractive woman consoling a man who was sobbing silently, as though his grief had taken away his sound. His head was tucked into her breast and she stroked his hair while tears very slowly lined her cheeks.
The man looked about forty, his black hair streaked with grey. His body shuddered as regularly or irregularly as a heartbeat, and it shook her each time. She was younger, in her late twenties, and Travis saw in her face that she was a refugee too. There was something she’d left behind, her own thoughts were not on the man.
Travis got up and walked to the tiki bar. Only as he came right under the overhanging palm-leaf roof did he hear the reggae music playing shyly from the bar stereo. He sat at a bolted down bar stool and ordered a beer. Beside him, a small man smiled and nodded hello. The bartender opened a bottle and passed it to Travis with a frosted mug.
“How much?” Travis asked the bartender.
“Well, this ship is all inclusive sir, so you just enjoy and relax.”
“Welcome aboard,” the man at the next stool said, watching Travis’s face to judge his willingness to converse. “I’m Rick Dumas.”
The man was about fifty. His still-blonde hair was thinning and cut short so that his scalp showed through.
“Travis Cooke,” he answered. “You were a guest aboard?”
“Yeah. Trans-Atlantic special, they only do it once a year to get the ship from the Caribbean to Europe for the summer. Twenty-one day cruise. You know what day we’re on? Two. We were supposed to go to Boston today, then do the crossing. Christ, we left from Key West, I wonder if it even exists any more. Sorry, I don’t know if you have any people there. You from New York I guess?”
“Yes. You?”
“Dallas. Four hundred sixty three feet elevation.”
The man had distracted Travis enough that he didn’t notice he was halfway through his beer.
“Sounds like a nice place to be, right about now.”
“I’m in real estate. The market is gonna explode. Every few years when there’s a flood bad enough in the south, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, we always get a little burp in the market. This will be off the charts – the entire East coast is gonna be homeless.”
Rick saw the discomfort in Travis’s face.
“We were on the Great Cities of Northern Europe tour,” Rick said. “Boston, Dublin, Oslo, Copenhagen, Gdansk, Riga, Stockholm, Helsinki, St. Petersburg. Quite an itinerary, huh? I was in the Captain’s Club too, that gets you special cocktail parties, complimentary massages, Egyptian cotton towels, champagne, the works.”
“I’m glad Boston was on that list or you might be halfway across the ocean right now and we’d still be on the dock. Wet.”
“Hey, do you see that?” Rick said, pointing out to sea. “Is that another ship? Hey, maybe you guys can hitch a ride back with them and we can get on with our cruise.”
He paused, then smiled gently. “Just kidding, guy. Seriously though, I mean, if the damage isn’t too bad, I wonder if we’ll get back out when we drop you off. I mean, they haven’t told us that yet. We’d only be one day behind.”
Travis looked out at the other ship. At least they weren’t the only ones to follow this plan.
The sun was dipping below the horizon behind them, and the shadows were long all around them, those of the closed umbrellas looking like an array of spears.
By the railing, Corrina stood with her hand on Darren’s shoulder. In her young life she had enjoyed all the advantages of a beautiful girl, but she’d eventually begun to feel disadvantages, too. As she looked out on the open water, she wondered at the feelings she’d had as a child, when everyone was so nice to her that the world seemed a kind place, and her opportunities, the possible spread of her future life, seemed as wide as this ocean.
The world had not been always kind or open in the course of her years, but she had treasured life and discarded fears.
Now, she thought of her mom and sister, down in South Carolina. The Carolinas would have been hit sooner, with less warning than New York. She thought of her coworkers at the temp office, and all the resumes she'd filed each day and who they belonged to. She thought of her friend Sasha, who she had known since kindergarten, who had eaten a caterpillar in grade three on a dare, who she had moved to NY with, and who had introduced her to Travis, and eleven years later, to Gerry.
One in four were dead, Corrina decided, and those faces came by, with her other friends, her neighbors, the kids in Darren’s class and his teachers and the parents. One in four were dead, and the faces died in that ratio in her mind.
This was happening all over the Sky Deck, where many refugees and tourists had been drawn, and more and more conversations dried up as individuals were imagining who was dead and who spared. Each man, woman and child played God, deciding whom the flood had taken.
Corrina realized Darren was no longer next to her. She turned in a split-second panic and saw Claude Bettman sitting with Darren on a lounge chair, a little travel chess board set up between them. He was showing Darren how the pieces moved, Gerry watching.
Looking back out over the railing, Corrina felt that childhood excitement for the open space and the possibilities it contained, as a ghost of a memory passing through her. It made her shiver.