Carnival Cruise

by Christopher Carbone

It had been a beautiful dinner, just as promised in the brochure.  Jared had enjoyed the sea bass and fresh greens, Jill had ordered the lamb chops in mint sauce washed down with a sparkling white of some vintage Jared had not recognized.  He had never been very good at tracking wines anyway; as varied and confusing to him as major league baseball teams, he had long ago decided that it was not really worth the bother to distinguish one from the other.

The ambiance had been a tableau taken straight from the glossy images in the brochure as well.  As a party of seven, they had been seated at one of the larger tables situated just next to the polished dance floor, with a clear view of the big band on the stage at the far end.  Uncle Harold and Aunt Mary had been seated with their backs to the band, and spent half the dinner disengaging from conversation every time they sensed activity on the stage behind them, twisting about in their chairs to drink in the latest introduction of a sax player or new bassist, then returning to their original position with the obligatory “What were you saying, dearie?”  It was perhaps Jared’s one regret.  It occurred to him that since Jill had spent the majority of the dinner sobbing quietly into her soggy napkin, she perhaps should have switched places with Uncle Harold, who would have appreciated the view of the band far more.

With perhaps a wisp of annoyance (quickly crushed beneath the magnanimity of the more rational portion of his brain, always the heavy hitter in Jared’s head), Jared reflected that Jill had been the only one crying.  Well, he should be glad for that.  Margaret spent the dinner snapping her gum and rolling her eyes beneath mascara-laden lashes at the embarrassment of a sobbing mother during this lame family dinner.  Jared could appreciate this cold resentment as the normal and healthy reaction of any fifteen year old dragged away from friends and phones for two of the precious summer weeks.  Brian, Jared’s brother, had maintained a distant look, his unshaven and haggard face set in a stoic gaze into realms unseen.  Jared would have liked to believe that this was because of himself, but knew better.  This was Brian’s normal expression after having reached a comfortable level of inebriation, and had the waitress allowed Brian’s finished martini glasses to remain each time she brought him a fresh drink, there would have been no room on the table for any of the food.

The band announced intermission just as Uncle Harold shoveled the final forkful of salad between his sagging jaws, and Brian swished down the last of his latest martini.  This convergence of occurrences signaled a definite end to the perfect dinner.  Jared sat back, satisfied, and waited politely for Brian to finish trying unsuccessfully to arrange a rendezvous with the bright smiled Cindy, the waitress, before ordering a round of coffee for the table.  Cindy flashed another brilliant and completely blank smile, and swept off in search of the beverages.

“Now, that was a great dinner!” Jared said unnecessarily.

“Oh, it was beautiful!” sobbed Jill, then buried her face in her napkin again.

Margaret sighed soulfully, and chomped her gum.

“You only get the fresh stuff on this boat!” said Harold forcefully, punctuating his words with stabs of his chubby and bejeweled finger into the table.  “None of that warmed up frozen shit you get on other tubs.  This is class, baby!”

Mary leaned into her husband’s polyester shoulder.  “Harold has always had the best taste in cruise ships,” she assured the family.

Jared nodded.  “Well, Uncle Harry, I certainly appreciate your help in getting us these tickets at such short notice.”  Harold grunted and turned the wave of his hand into a motion that brought the now served coffee cup to his lips.

And it had been very short notice.  It had only been this Wednesday that Dr. Molorado had told Jared “I’m afraid the blood work has only confirmed it yet again.  On odds, I would give you another 72 hours, 96 at the outside.”

Jared had stared disbelievingly at a poster detailing the intricacies of the gastrointestinal system, a system it now appeared he would not need in three days.  “And there’s nothing that can be done?”

Dr. Molorado sighed and rubbed his temples.  “Jay, we’ve been over this.  No.  Nothing.  Although uncommon, and therefore not fully studied or understood, there is one fact of this disease we are sure of:  that it ends in your being stone cold dead.”  He paused and considered Jared with a look reserved for lab mice.  “I’m still confused as to how you contracted this.  Are you sure you’ve never been to Ghana?”

“I don’t even know where that is.  I’ve never been east of Vegas in my life.”

“Never, ah, experimented, you know, in the bedroom…or wherever…with livestock?”

“I’ve never been good at science.”

Dr. Molorado shrugged and started gathering his papers.  “Well, it won’t really matter by the end of the week.  So, champ, any other questions?”

Jared felt a sudden rush of intense heat rising from his chest, threatening to strangle him.  “Wait!  What?  Can’t we even slow it down?  Give me some more time?  Maybe you can do research and stuff, find a cure!”

Dr. Molorado checked his watch.  The waiting room was filled with patients who still maintained the potentiality to be repeat customers, as long as they weren’t kept waiting too long.  “Jake, there’s nothing I can do.  If you want my advice, go home to your family, enjoy them.  Do something fun!  I would say take ‘em to see the Mariners, but you’re not going to live long enough for the next home game.  I don’t know, Jason, take them on a cruise or something.  You figure it out, they’re your family.  Now, if you’ll excuse me,” and muttering figures to himself, he swept from the room.

Jared had returned home, heart empty and head a whirling black hole that sucked everything in but let nothing out.  The cruise suggestion had in those first confusing hours been the last words from The Professional, and those words became a buoy, a guide point in a world that had suddenly become a sea of disassociated sounds, images, scents, and textures.  This world was for Jared now something temporary, and he a guest for only a few days more, and he no longer felt any part of it, as if his mind was packing up and bidding adieu a few days ahead of his mortal shell.  He remembered the injunction to enjoy his family, and unable to come up with any method of doing so on his own, the cruise suggestion had become for him a doctor’s prescription.  These were the thoughts that occupied his mind on the drive home, and somehow he found himself pulling into the driveway without having smashed into any other cars or pedestrians.

Jill received the news like a real trouper, though had her husband’s predicted expiration date been a bit farther in the future she may have had the time to question whether a doctor had really “demanded that the entire family take a cruise”.  But the time seemed so short that in her deepest heart she was grateful for any guidance and direction, as bizarre as it may seem to anyone who paused for reflection.  A flurry of phone calls followed:

• The first round was to various travel agencies and resulted in the following bad news: cruises were normally reserved months in advance, and there was no way to get on one in the next few days. 
• A sobbing phone call to Jill’s mother provided the next direction: Jill’s Uncle Harold had worked for the Seattle Port Authority for more than thirty years…perhaps he could do something?
• The next phone call: niece Jill introducing herself to Uncle Harold whom she had met once 38 years ago at a family gathering dictated by a now long-dead grandparent.  Jill had been nine months old, Harold had just the day before accepted a job at the Seattle Port Authority, but deflected any congratulatory comments by explaining that this job was only temporary for a few months, till his band signed a decent record contract.  Neither of them was overly impressed with the other in meeting, and promptly forgot each other within minutes.
• Prodded somewhat by wife Mary’s nagging, mostly by pride in being able to flex his influence, and one would like to think even a touch of pity for poor Jared’s plight, Uncle Harold makes two short phone calls, in a stern and hushed voice, behind the closed doors of his office.  When he emerges ten minutes later, he instructs his wife to make a third phone call to Jill, then to begin packing. 
• And in a tastefully stoic office in Belgium, a chief executive officer began his own round of phone calls, thus repaying a debt that allowed a certain ship to dock in Seattle despite federal sanction seventeen years ago.
• Aunt Mary’s phone call to Jill sparks a fresh round of phone calls, resulting only in the addition to the party of Jared’s brother Brian, whose celebrated winning streak in Reno had come to an abrupt and spectacular end a few weeks ago, to the party.

The doctor’s announcement and resultant phone calls had been made on a Thursday  afternoon.  Saturday morning witnessed Jared and Jill mounting the gangplank of the New Valkerie, followed by their daughter Margaret, then Harold and Mary, and finally Brian.  These may not have made up the complete set of Jared’s surviving family, but they were the totality of surviving family members who were able to take off from work/ school for a two week cruise to Puerto Vallarta.

What the rest of the family was meant to do after what Jared had come to think of as his “event” was a source of nagging guilt for him.  The Puerto Vallarta trip had been fortunately available, but had the down side of being a two week commitment for those participants not expecting to die.  After Jared’s “event”, what were the rest of the family to do to entertain themselves, trapped on this ship, headed towards a Third World cesspool?  As the dying man who was the reason for the group to board the ship in the first place, Jared felt a personal responsibility as host to entertain them throughout, and yet had no plan or (he assumed) ability to do so from beyond the earthly veil.  It was with an eye towards assuaging this guilt that Jared broke away from the rest of the family heading to the gaming deck after dinner in order to visit the concierge.

The woman behind the concierge flashed him a dazzling, impersonal smile and asked how she could help him.  Jared recognized her as their waitress Cindy; the ship’s crew was certainly versatile.  He asked her what sort of entertainment there was on board.  With smooth efficiency, Cindy soon filled his arms with brochures, fliers, event calendars, and a free key chain that was meant to advertise some formerly famous comedian’s return to the stage exclusively on the New Valkerie four days from now.  Jared would not be able to attend himself, but thought Margaret might enjoy it, as long as the jokes were clean.  Cindy assured him that they would be.  Jared thanked her and made his way back to his berth to deposit the material in an obvious position on the desk where it could be found without instructions from himself, then joined the rest of the family on the gaming deck.

That night Brian realized that his losing streak was still as strong as ever, Uncle Harold won just enough to maintain his status as a slick wise guy in Mary’s eyes (which was his only goal), Margaret climbed to the zenith and plunged into the depths of an epic love affair with a boy from Idaho Falls within three hours at the Young Adult Galley Arcade, Jill dropped a single glittering tear for every silvery nickel that dropped into the winner’s basket at the slots, and Jared savored the irony that the less mere money meant to him the more easily he was able to take it from others at the card tables.  He had officially passed the bright red flag in his mind of 72 hours since the doctor told him he had 72 to 96 hours to live. Those words that were spoken so carelessly by the doctor no doubt in an effort to communicate a general sense of a time frame had been received by the victim as a well researched and scientifically proven very exact deadline from The Professional, and the timer had started the moment the last syllable had left the doctor’s lips.  Every second that ticked past this 72 hour mark was taken in by Jared, greeted, examined, appreciated with a sardonic smile, and released back into the flow to follow its brethren.

Harold pumped Jared’s hand vigorously and long as he and Jill said their goodnights and their goodbyes for the night; Mary joined Jill in a good cry while hugging Jared, even Brian attempted a clumsy embrace for the first time in 19 years, and Margaret’s mask of teenage ennui seemed close to cracking at last.  Alone at last in their berth Jared and Jill made gentle love and then lay for more than an hour listening to each other not speak.  Somewhere during that time Jared fell asleep.  And the seconds and minutes continued to roll away from the bedside Panasonic $14.99 digital clock-radio.

Jared was surprised to be awoken by a beam of sunlight illuminating his eyelids.  He was not so much surprised by the fact that he was awakening at all, but that Jill had allowed him to sleep this late: she was a pre-dawn riser who secretly believed that everyone else should be as well and therefore made as much noise as possible in rising and performing her morning ablutions.  Jill was not within the line of sight offered from the berth’s bunk, so he swung his feet to the floor and carefully stood up, testing every joint and muscle.  All accounted for, and apparently all in good working order.  A thirty minute investigation of physical, physiological, and emotional conditions revealed no noticeable deterioration of health beyond a certain stiffness to the neck that Jared begrudgingly admitted to himself was more likely due to the small and unfamiliar pillow supplied by the cruise line than any rare disease.  There was also a significant hunger.  He showered and shaved quickly, dressed, and went in search of breakfast.

He found Jill at the breakfast buffet.  She embraced him wordlessly on sight, almost spilling her bagel from the Styrofoam plate.  They ate breakfast together.  They walked around to the rooms of the other family members, invited them all to meet together for lunch, then went to catch a magic show on the Aloha deck.  At lunch the conversation was even more stilted than it had been at dinner the night before; trying to find topics to instruct and amuse the crowd when in the company of a man who is expected to die suddenly at any moment can be a challenge to even the sharpest conversationalist…it certainly caused everyone to avoid any long jokes.  However, a not unpleasant time was had by all, and Jared visited the pool with a clear conscience.

They met again for dinner, and in Jared’s mind this second dinner surpassed even the one last night.  While last night had been his Last Meal, this was a Bonus Meal, every bite of chicken cordon bleu a gift from a benevolent deity.  The family seemed to have loosened up since lunch as well, no doubt the increased availability of cocktails at dinner assisted this.  After dinner Jared and Jill danced to ballroom classics long into the evening.

Jared awoke to the third day of the cruise to headlines being read by a morning news anchor on a television that Jill had turned on while she was in the shower.  He joined her, went through the motions of his morning toilet, though his mind was not on the current tasks.  As far as he could tell, he was feeling fine, and no nearer death this morning than he had been yesterday or yesteryear.  Jill did not speak to him, and unless he was reading her wrong, she seemed upset about something.  She accompanied him throughout the rest of the day, but the uneasy silence reigned, and seemed to extend to the rest of the family when they joined the couple for the two meals that were quickly becoming something of a tradition.  At the bowling lanes after dinner that night Jared realized that he was significantly beyond the 96 hour mark but did not want to do the morbid math to figure out how far beyond.  His health, something he had for the past few days obviously been hypersensitive in monitoring, seemed fine.

The next morning he awoke to find Jill sitting on the side of the bunk, staring at him.  A vague sense of uneasiness rose up within him, and he opened his mouth to say something, but could think of nothing. Instead, robotically, he and Jill went through the daily routine of hygiene, food, entertainment, and the icy silence between them was carefully maintained, both of them terrified that it would shatter.

On the fifth morning of the cruise, a morning Jared felt morbidly uncomfortable to be waking up to, Jill announced from the shower “You know, the ship will be docking at the port tomorrow.”  A meaningful silence was attached to the end of this statement, and Jared did not know how to fill it.

“Ah,” he said.  “That would be the half way mark of the cruise, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Jared sighed.  “I’ll try to find out what’s going on, then,” he said.  They both knew what he meant.

Jared wandered down to the reception desk to ask about his telephone options.  He found the perpetual Cindy behind the counter, and with a practiced smile she directed him to the ship-to-shore telephone booths.

Jared was able to make contact with Dr. Molorado on the third try.  The good doctor expressed surprise that Jared was still alive, and indeed in a condition to make telephone calls.

“Was there some kind of mistake with the tests?  Maybe they mixed up my batch of blood with someone elses?”  Jared offered helpfully.

Dr. Molorado scoffed at the suggestion.  “What, a mistake made four times?  Come on, Jared, you remember how many times we retested this.  There is no mistake.  You are supposed to be a dead man right now.  I don’t understand how you’re calling me right now.  Or more importantly: why.”

Jared was at the end of his rope.  “I am calling because you said I would die by Monday. I am not dead.  I want to know why, you… you… quack!”

“This conversation is over.”  And Jared was left with a dial tone.

As Jared left the phone booth, Cindy dispensed another dazzling smile.  “I hope everything is O.K., sir?”

Jared was feeling very confused, very vulnerable.  “No, Cindy, there is a small problem.”

Cindy produced the regulation pout, advocated on page 152 of the Carnival Hostess Handbook as the most appropriate response to this situation.  “Oh dear.  I am so sorry.  Is there something I can do to help?”

Why not? thought Jared.  “Well, I was supposed to die four days ago, and yet I’m still alive.  Is there someone I can see about that?”

Cindy was a master at blending the frown with the smile.  “Let me see what I can do,” she said, and picked up a telephone receiver to make a call.

******

Jared and Jill dined alone that evening, since the sense of urgency seemed to have evaporated from the family and they had returned to pursuing their own lives, loves, and losses.  Even the distance between Jill and Jared seemed to be growing each night Jared remained among the living, and after nearly a week the gulf was almost impassable.  In silence they pretended to enjoy the chicken cordon bleu with asparagus tips in garlic butter.  Their pretense was made all the more difficult by the more violent than usual rocking of the ship.  Water threatened to spill from glasses only half full, silverware was rarely to be found where expected or even where it had been two minutes ago, and a good portion of the diners had already stumbled from the dining room with a green tinge about their features.  It would take quite a storm to affect a ship this large, but the New Valkerie had found just such a storm. 

At nine o’clock that evening, Cindy’s soothing voice passed over the ship’s PA system to ask that all passengers return to their cabins; she then reminded everyone (just as a point of interest) of the locations of fire extinguishers, life vests, and life boat boarding procedures.  Her announcement was followed by a soothing selection of Enya songs: a guaranteed indicator of impending disaster.  Acidic fear boiled in already sour guts to make an unpleasant situation even worse.

Sleep was impossible, due to the rocking and bucking of the ship, so all aboard were wide awake at 2 am to hear the scream of wrenched steel and to enjoy the shudder that ran the length of the ship.  Not content to prove her ability to find unusually large storms, the New Valkerie had just been blown into one of the submerged reefs the captain had spent all night navigating around.

Almost immediately the violent bucking and rocking stabilized into one slow but inevitable sideways roll.  As the gaping slash torn in the hull gulped thousands of gallons of seawater into the belly of the ship, passengers, crew, and anything not attached to the deck found an irresistible compulsion to slide into the starboard walls, gravity all nonsense now.  Jared and Jill were sent tumbling from their sleepless bunk, followed by a cascade of books, furniture, and luggage.  At no time did they reach out to hold each other.  Grimly, they each fought their way along the wall beneath their feet to reach the door, and their efforts were independent.

They joined the surprisingly silent stream of struggling sea-tourists surging along the hallway to the portside deck.  Out in the fresh salt air, Jared and Jill encountered Cindy, her molded hair valiantly resisting the storm’s winds, her bright orange life vest a complimentary addition to her fashionable pantsuit, and her bright smile a beacon in this dark night.  With unhurried yet efficient gestures, Cindy seated them in an almost full lifeboat.  The sodium glow of the cruise ship’s emergency lights illuminated the tense faces of Jared’s fellow lifeboat inmates, and he noted without surprise that Cindy had seated them in the same boat as Uncle Harold and Aunt Mary.  As directed, Jill and Jared pulled life vests over their heads, and they were soon swinging out over the angry ocean, then down into the waves.

Had anyone asked Jared’s opinion, he would have freely told them that though he was no sailor, he did not think that a sea this stormy was the best conditions for this comparably tiny lifeboat.  He had to hold onto the belief that the people who designed this craft had done so under the assumption that it would not be used on a warm, calm day.  But after the little lifeboat had peaked its first swell, crashed awkwardly into the following trough and now labored to survive its second swell, Jake’s confidence level could not be lower.  Sharing the lifeboat with Harold and Mary, not to mention Jill, turned out to be worse than had he been alone, since each groan and yelp from a loved one ground a sharp edge to his own waves of terror.  Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how one looks at such things, the arrangement was not to last for long.

It was the sixth or seventh swell, Jared had lost count by this time, that finally did it.  After dropping into the following trough at an awkward angle, the over-loaded craft did not raise her prow gracefully to meet the next swell, and instead allowed half her length to vanish in the swirling black sea, the passengers sitting in that portion becoming for a moment disembodied screaming heads and upper torsos.  The little lifeboat returned to sight for a few moments, loaded with seawater and laboring to reach the top of the swell, but on her next descent she gave up, and slid into the trough on her gunwales.

Jared surfaced from the total blackness, the near-total silence, of the icy waters with a gasp.  Thrashing arms caused his fingers to brush white fiberglass once, twice, three times.  Slippery: he flailed at the hull of the overturned lifeboat until he was able to get a grip on the ridged seam that served as the craft’s keel.  This aided the life vest around his neck in keeping his nose and mouth just above the salty waves.

“Harold!”  Above the hiss of water and howl of wind, Jared distinctly heard Aunt Mary’s shrill shriek.

“Mary!”  And Jared not only heard Harold’s response, but was able to spot his bald pate gleaming in the distant dark waters.

Jared, draped desperately over the overturned hull of the life boat, watched with a growing glow of romanticized melancholy as the sodden grey tresses of Aunt Mary drifted to meet Harold’s shining dome in the midst of the swirling dark waters.  The two spheres met, briefly connected, then were swept beneath the inky blackness.  And to Jared, this seemed only right and proper.

He did not call out for Jill.  Moments before the lifeboat’s capsize, he had heard her cry out, but had not looked in her direction, coward that he was, he could not bear to see terror or helplessness in that face that he loved so much.  And now, barely clinging to his own life, if he were to call out to Jill and hear her reply, what then?  The storm driven waves battered him so strongly he could barely keep a grip on the lifeboat… he was in no position to provide aid to anyone else.  Were she to answer any call of his…

But he never called out, and she never appeared.  And night became rosy-fingered dawn, then blinding white day, then again night, this time a much more quiet night.  The storm had moved on, and the stars rose from their bed to wheel about his head, then sink into the horizon once more.  And exhausted, he lay his feverish cheek against the cool polished fiberglass hull, his fingertips numb from the effort of gripping, his throat parched with thirst, and his neck raw from where the sea salt had been ground into his skin by the life vest’s collar.

The next dawn brought what Jared could only assume was a miracle, if it were not an hallucination.  The sea had calmed considerably since the storm, and the swells were now nearly pleasant elevations in height for the capsized lifeboat and its remaining passenger, and at the peaks of these ascents Jared noted a splash of white separating the blue water from the blue sky, the white of a sand beach.  Jared had no way to estimate time, but the sun had not advanced much beyond the dawn before he made landfall.

Footprints in the sand leading away from a capsized lifeboat: the enduring tableau of a shipwreck survivor.  Jared felt no surprise in finding that this island boasted a freshwater spring only a few hundred meters into the tropical forest that ringed the formulaic volcanic mountain.  What did surprise him was finding Cindy on the beach a few hundred yards down from where he had washed up, though in retrospect this probably should have been expected as well.  The guest service hostess appeared to also have been the sole survivor of her life boat, and was quickly yet efficiently unpacking the emergency kit and reorganizing its contents to better suit a tropical environment.  Her hair was flawless, her uniform had somehow retained its creases.  When Jared greeted her, she offered the exact same bright, impersonal smile, and asked how she could be of service.  Jared was at first stuck for an answer, but had nothing better to do at the time, and eventually came up with an answer.  “Do you have any aloe?  Seems I picked up quite a sunburn while floating out there.”

Cindy paused for merely a heartbeat.  “This lotion is made primarily of aloe, and has been used as an effective relief for sunburn by many of our previous guests.  Let me know if this doesn’t do the trick!”  And she offered the clear plastic squeeze bottle with another patented display of teeth.

Jared accepted the bottle and frowned at it for long moments.  At last he spoke again.  “Cindy?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Do you remember that whole dying thing I asked you to help me with a few days ago?”

“Of course I do, sir.  How is that going? Is there anything I can do?”

Jared eyed her carefully.  “Well… It seems to be going along just fine.  Just fine.”  He glanced out over the ocean again, then back at the forest.  “Happen to have any architectural blueprints for an island cabin in there?”  he joked.

Cindy reached for a waterproof folder from the emergency kit.  “Let’s just see what we have here, sir,” she said brightly.

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