“Go for it. Your first assignment.”
He went to the locker room, pissed in the little toilet, tried to flush and couldn’t, and felt a sudden sense of dread. No plumbing. He put on a clean set of chef’s whites. Back in the galley, he tossed another to Christine: she put it on without having to be told. After he’d shown her where the coffee was kept, he went into the first walk-in refrigerator to take stock of the remaining supplies, the perishables that had to be eaten immediately.
A while later, as he emerged with a hotel pan of hard-boiled eggs, he heard voices.
“Morning, Chef,” said a young man with an Aussie accent.
Mick didn’t recognize the clean-cut blond kid, but he must have been on the morning crew. Or what was left of it. Behind him was a small cluster of people—eight, he counted—all wearing clean white jackets and neckerchiefs, exactly on time for their normal shift. He recognized a few of them from the main galley, one from his own station, a prep cook named Camille, dark and serious, with glasses.
Mick felt himself relax a little. So there was order in the world after all. The remnants of his exhaustion lifted, the scrim of grime around his vision cleared.
“Good morning,” he said. “Does anyone know what’s going on with the rest of the crew?”
“Most of them are on the main deck,” said Camille. “They’ve taken it over. I think they’re planning to stay there until we get to Hawaii.”
“Some of them are in the buffet galley,” said another young woman. She had an Indian accent, and Mick remembered her, though not her name, from the first day; he had put her in charge of service aesthetics in the buffet galley, because she had seemed to have a good eye. Then he’d come over here to the main galley and hadn’t seen her since. “They’ve taken that over too,” she was saying. “They’re eating breakfast in there. I’m supposed to be working there, but they said I couldn’t stay unless I joined them. But I didn’t want to. So they threw me out.”
“What about Chef Jean-Luc?” Mick asked. “Isn’t he in charge?”
“He’s joined the walkouts,” said the Aussie.
“Okay,” said Mick, trying to hide the shock he felt at this news. “I guess it’s just us then. Until others decide to show up. So let’s get started.”
He looked into their faces: they all looked frankly relieved to have found someone to tell them what to do. He glanced over at Christine, who was stirring coffee into cold water in a soup pot. She looked back at him with the same expectant, trusting expression everyone else had.
“By the way, everybody, this is Christine. She volunteered to help us out. So please treat her as one of the crew. Right now she’s cold-brewing some coffee, which is the only way we’re going to get it since the power’s still out, so you should be extra nice to her.” A couple of weak smiles. Good. “We’ll put out breakfast for the passengers first. Simple stuff like cereal, milk, fruit, hard-cooked eggs, anything immediately perishable. You two,” he said, pointing at Camille and the Aussie, “go up to the breakfast room and see what they’ve got, what they need. The rest of us are going to make a quick inventory of our stores, starting with the perishables: meats, dairy, fish, vegetables.” He could feel himself slipping into autopilot, running through the service as he had done a thousand times for executive chefs, trying to impress them. The pitch was the same, but now that there was no one to impress, he heard himself delivering it in a warmer tone, with less of an edge. “We’ll have to use as much of that as we can today. Lunch will be simple: cheese sandwiches, fruit salad, bags of chips, that sort of thing. As you all know, we can’t use the stoves. The desalination pumps are down, so we’ll have to ration whatever we have in the tank. Service will be paper and plastic from now on. For dinner tonight, we’re going to make a shitload of ceviche to use up as much of the seafood as we can. And salad, mostly lettuce, also cucumber and anything else that might spoil. We’re going to use the outdoor grills to cook meat, since we have plenty of charcoal left. But the main thing now is to figure out what goes bad first, and that’s what we’ll serve. Okay?”
There were nods all around, a chorus of “Yes, Chef.”
“Good,” he said, and found himself clapping his hands together and rubbing them, the way Laurens did at the end of staff meetings. “Let’s get to work.”
It had been her first night alone with Sasha in their shared cabin, and Miriam had spent most of it worrying about Isaac, down the hall in the cabin with Jakov. She missed him. She always knew how to comfort him, and he her. They would have kvetched and moaned together. Instead she had tried to match Sasha’s quiet forbearance all night. He had settled himself in their double bed and lain awake for hours, brooding in silence. He was always stoic and self-contained, philosophical about discomfort. When she tried to talk to him, to caress him, he responded at first but lapsed back into worried fulmination, so she left him alone. Maybe he had been thinking of his own wife. At some point it had hit her with sheepish sadness that she was being foolish; maybe she was too old to start over, too old to have a swooning new love affair.
Dawn came as a relief to both of them, it seemed to Miriam. As soon as it was light enough to see, they dressed wordlessly and left their cabin. The hallway, lit by windows at either end, looked like a lunatic asylum that had run out of medication: old people staggered around, some still in pajamas, others in misbuttoned shirts and rumpled shorts.
“Finally it’s morning,” a woman said, clutching Miriam’s arm. Her eyes were ringed with pigmented circles. Her lips were cracked and pale. “I was sick all night. I have nothing left inside to throw up.”
“Me too,” said someone nearby. “What was in our dinner last night?”
“The toilets aren’t flushing!”
“Mine’s all stopped-up!”
A bridge officer appeared in the hallway. “Good morning.”
“Can we get some breakfast, do you think?” said someone.
“Breakfast is being served in the buffet.”
“What about the plumbing? It’s broken.”
“We’re working on that,” said the officer. He looked painfully young to Miriam, mid-twenties at the most.
“Thank you,” she said to him as she walked by. “You’re doing a good job.”
“We’re trying,” he said. “I am so sorry about this, it’s awful for you all.”
Isaac and Jakov’s room was the last door before the stairs. Miriam put her hand on Sasha’s arm for him to wait, and knocked. Jakov opened it. He wore pajamas and held a washcloth over his eye. “I knocked against something in the night,” he explained, disappearing into the small bathroom. Miriam stuck her head into the room. Isaac was sitting up in his own bed, his legs still under the blankets. “I’m glad to see you got through the night all right,” she said.
“This is not what I would call ‘all right,’ ” said Isaac.
“I know,” she said, feeling a rush of tenderness toward him. “Do you want to come with us now? We’re going to the breakfast buffet to see if there’s anything to eat.”
Isaac waved her off with a mournful expression. “Go, go,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”
She nodded at him and went, shutting the door behind her. She joined Sasha and the rest of the herd as they went hobbling to the stairs, along a hallway, and into the breakfast buffet room. It was heartening to see the sunlight streaming in with fresh air through open windows, two staff members in uniform behind the long tables, breakfast arranged: small boxes of cereal, fruit, bread and butter and jam, cheese, napkins. Even the garish patterned carpet cheered her up a little. The storage refrigerator had been opened, and its drawers were filled with small, single-portion containers of milk and juice and yogurt. Most of the service tables, draped in white linen tablecloths and holding empty electric chafing dishes, had been pushed over by the open sliding doors to the balcony, through which fresh air blew steadily off the ocean.