the thirteenth day
THE SHIP WAS MONUMENTAL, like Atlantis risen from the depths, its own island, its own nation, a miracle of every kind of human labor and ingenuity. Even the sea was impressed. The waters calmed to make way for it and when it slashed across the horizon, the pelagic creatures appeared in their slippery legions to disport themselves in its wake. Dolphins rocketed alongside. Sea lions barked. Whales bobbed up like corks to salute its monumentality, then dove deep to escape the crushing impact of its bow. In port—and it was in port now, indefinitely—its vast hull attracted the attentions of mollusks and crustaceans and its decks the loose-boweled gulls whose excreta would have buried them knee-deep but for the unceasing attentions of the ship’s crew. Can you say Yokohama? I can. Yokohama. There, see?
When the passengers boarded the Beryl Empress in Yokohama Harbor, none of them—none of us—expected to be there longer than it would take for everyone to settle into their staterooms and the massive engines to crank the screws and compel the shore to fall away behind the taffrails of its fourteen decks. The itinerary, lavishly laid out in the cruise line’s brochure, had us at sea for a fortnight, with ports of call at Hong Kong, Taiwan, Phu My, and Sihanoukville, among others, locales where the 2,666 of us could absorb Asia through our five senses and browse the wares of the local artisans and trinket purveyors. Unfortunately, that wasn’t to be. And what resulted was hard on us, hard on me and Amanita, my ageless and serene bride of forty years, but so much harder for the newlyweds in the cabin across from ours, Scott and Bunny, who, despite their impressive size and the solidity of their limbs, weren’t much more than children in our eyes. As if their youth wasn’t enough of a liability, they also happened to be Americans, which further complicated things. Americans, in my experience, are unused to privation of any kind, expecting this great spinning globe we communally ride to deliver up exactly what they want, when they want. Poor Scott. Poor Bunny. Poor me.
The ship departed right on schedule, at 3:00 P.M. on a day of high ceilings and sea-glitter, banners flying, the trumpets, saxophones, and electrified guitars of one shipboard band or another crying out joyously and the ship’s horn delivering up a shattering salvo that resonated in every passenger’s solar plexus, whether he or she was confined to an inner cabin or an outer, like ours, in which you actually had room to breathe and savor the fluidity of the air and the stately creep of the water below. It was a fine celebratory moment and Amanita and I enjoyed it with a bottle of complimentary Champagne from the high-flown perch of our private balcony, which measured one hundred and seventy-five square feet and adjoined our two-hundred-square-foot cabin, numbers that would become increasingly significant as events unfolded. In all, that is, we enjoyed three hundred and seventy-five square feet of space, room in which to drift in our complimentary fleece-lined slippers from the sofa to the vanity to the bed, to stretch out, indulge ourselves, and defeat even the slightest fleeting thought of claustrophobia. Snug, that was what it was, and snugness was what the cruise line was selling, part of the charm of being at sea in your own individual stateroom. Battening down—isn’t that the term?
Clicking her glass to mine, Amanita, her lips creased with the softest of smiles, asked, “Aren’t you glad we came?”
Well, I was—in that moment anyway. The cruise had been her idea, her fixation, actually. I was considerably less inclined than she to abandon the comforts of our home in the Recoleta quarter of Buenos Aires, where my work absorbed me, every comfort was at our fingertips, and we did not have to share space—precious living space—with hordes of strangers in costumes I can only call bizarre, from the young güera who wore two bikinis, one conventionally, the other facing backward, to the man of my own age who slathered himself with coconut-reeking grease and sang continuously into his mobile in a fluid baritone as if he were trying out for a role in Pirates of Penzance.
In any case, the great ship rolled magnificently on over the waves until the shore receded from sight and the clamoring gulls along with it, and Amanita and I clicked glasses again while I wished her a felicitous fortieth wedding anniversary, even as the ship’s captain was receiving the command over the radio to return to port. And why? Because it had been discovered that one of the passengers—a man from Wuhan—had come down with a fever.
A fever, can you imagine! At first, when the news came to us that night at dinner, where Amanita and I were seated at our assigned table in the 5-Star Red Beryl Celebrity Dining Saloon with twelve other guests, including Scott and Bunny, none of us could believe it. Turning a boat around for a fever? A few to become a floating prison.