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 brief 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.