Looking out at the ocean’s vast and wild void, Mick felt a deep sense of dread. They were completely alone out here.
part three
THE SONG OF THE SEA
chapter eighteen
When Miriam stepped out onto the balcony to do her morning stretches, she was assaulted by the sunlight, even though it was still early. It was their fourth morning adrift without power or propulsion. There was no breeze. The air hung like a gauze curtain, trapping the heat against the water. She tried to take a deep breath as she touched her toes, but her lungs felt compressed by the heavy air. How was this the middle of the Pacific? It felt more like the inside of a coat closet. Behind her, in their bed, Sasha was still asleep, lying on his back naked, one arm flung upward on the pillows above his head, the other hugging his stomach. She envied him, being so deeply asleep. She felt wide awake and restless. Her entire body itched from prickly heat and lack of a shower.
The day of their expected arrival in Hawaii had come and gone, and since then everything, it seemed, had worsened. News had filtered from the bridge through the ship that one of the tugboats had had to turn back because of engine trouble, and another one had been sent out to join the first one, so the pair wouldn’t arrive to tow the Isabella to land for at least two more days. The slower return journey would take five days, at least, which meant another week on board before they reached the Port of Long Beach again. Some cruise, thought Miriam.
On the plus side, Cabaret had promised an airdrop of supplies that afternoon. It was about time, because food and water were running low. The crew had rationed bottled water, two liters per person per day, but people helped themselves freely to alcohol, and no one tried to stop them. If they wanted to dehydrate themselves and stay blotto, that was apparently their business.
Meanwhile, the lower decks were fetid with the stench of overflowing toilets steeping in the heat, uncollected garbage, and rotting food, while the upper decks looked like a crowded tropical refugee camp. Almost fifty people were sick with norovirus, with more succumbing every day. The makeshift clinic on the promenade deck was crowded with stricken crew, passengers, and officers alike, all of them vomiting and feverish, racked with intestinal pain. Miriam felt terrible for them, being so miserably sick on top of everything else. Though the crew had managed to rig two of the toilets in the clinic with hoses and swimming-pool water for the sick people, everyone else was using the now-obligatory bio-bags. Miriam hated pooping into a plastic bag so much, she’d become severely constipated for the past three days in order to avoid it, and she knew she wasn’t the only one.
The crewmembers who’d walked out on their jobs, those who weren’t sick, were still camped out on the main deck. They stayed there day and night with nowhere else to go and, now that Larry had left the ship, no one to bargain with. They spent their unproductive futile protest in cruise-like activities: drinking, card games, sunbathing, playing guitars. Miriam felt a half-resentful pity for them, all those poor kids with no future and no chance of winning their jobs back. They were stuck here, just like everyone else, mired in frustration, anxiety, and helpless inaction. What good was any of it?
As for the crewmembers who’d stayed on the job, still wearing their now-rumpled and stained uniforms, they had no water or power to do laundry, wash dishes, mop, vacuum, or cook, but they tried stoically to keep things clean and orderly, serve three meals a day, presenting at least the appearance of dedication to their jobs. Since the tiny windowless crew cabins belowdecks were too airless and hot and reeking for habitation, most of them slept outside on the main deck in lounge chairs or on mattresses, side by side with the crew who had quit, and the passengers they were supposed to be serving. These various factions seemed to coexist peacefully, for now. That was the one advantage of the heat: it tamped down tempers, the tantrums and fights that never felt far from erupting, if only because it was just too hot to yell or throw things or punch anyone in the head. Also, everyone seemed united by one common purpose: to get the hell off the ship and back to land.
At least, Miriam thought with half-guilty relief, her own living conditions had improved. At Rivka’s insistence, the whole quartet had moved into the owner’s suite after Larry had left in the helicopter. Compared to their cabins far below, Rivka’s suite was a palace. It sat in the middle of the bridge deck, spanning the width of the ship so there were windows and balconies on both sides, which created a cross-breeze whenever any air moved. The rooms were decorated in striped beige-and-cream wallpaper and fluffy white rugs over cool white-plank flooring. It was all very luxurious and bright, and Miriam felt grateful to be able to stay there, never mind that it was Rivka’s fault that the Sabra was on the ship in the first place.
Jakov and Isaac had daybeds tucked into separate alcoves in the living room, and Sasha and Miriam got the smaller, unused second bedroom, with a balcony of its own and a queen-sized bed. Rivka had offered the room to Miriam and Isaac first, which required a lengthy explanation from Miriam that she and Sasha were a couple now, and forced Rivka to acknowledge, at long last, and with much disingenuous blinking and stated confusion on her part, that Isaac and Miriam had been divorced for at least twenty years. In the end, Rivka had acquiesced with a bemused skepticism that made Miriam want to slap her, but there it was.
As she crept quietly through the spacious living room out to the catwalk, Miriam heard Jakov groaning in his sleep on his daybed. He had a fever, pains in his chest, and a dry cough. It wasn’t the norovirus; he’d had worsening heart trouble for years, which wasn’t contagious, so he’d been spared the infirmary quarantine. But Miriam was worried about him. He seemed to be getting worse, like everything else around here.
She made her way down the stairs to the breakfast room, passing a few people sitting in the stairwell of the upper deck. More stood at railings, looking out at the morning sun on the ocean, while others lay sleeping in deck chairs under motionless white bedsheet ceilings. Unlike the military precision of the crew’s camp, the passengers’ cobbled-together tent city looked scruffy and ragtag, all sagging sheets and rumpled blankets. The passengers themselves looked little better, on the whole, their general mood seeming to hover between anxious waiting, festering outrage, and a collective paralysis of will, gone slack in the heat. People sprawled in underwear and T-shirts on mattresses, publicly asleep and half naked, vulnerable as homeless bums in doorways. Others wandered around aimlessly, looking wild-eyed, dazed, hair sticking up, Band-Aids stuck on various places, chests peeling, noses red from sunburn. Miriam’s heart went out to them, so far from home, normally dignified and settled people with houses, grandchildren, histories, longtime careers and jobs they’d retired from or still had.
From the breakfast buffet room, she fetched a plastic cup of the food the kitchen crew had provided: raw oats and cut-up, overripe fruit, soaked overnight in water to make a half-fermented, pasty gruel, and ladled out of a large soup pot. They were calling it “muesli” in a feeble attempt to make it more appetizing, but it looked revolting.