Songs for the End of the World

by Saleema Nawaz

  When he went to the galley to make a cup of instant coffee, he saw Sarah shooting him worried glances as she prepared some broth for Noah, as though fearful of what he might be deciding not to do.

  “There are a couple of suspected cases at the big hospital in Nassau,” he said. “They’ve halted admissions and are trying to treat offsite to avoid an outbreak.”

  “Oh,” said Sarah.

  He was prepared to describe the treatment plan he’d come up with: the acetaminophen, the cold compresses, the isolation. Watch and wait aboard Buona Fortuna. It made sense, unless of course the virus progressed rapidly to Noah’s lungs. He blinked, and in that same moment the boy’s clammy face came back to him, his glazed eyes a silent appeal to Owen’s better self.

  “So we’ll take him to the small hospital here.” As soon as the words left his mouth, his racing thoughts came to a halt.

  Sarah fairly sagged with relief.

  “Thank God.”

  * * *

  They went ashore, Sarah thought, like penitents. Like people who thought they didn’t need the world but had barely lasted a minute without it. She felt like praying and wished she had some faith to turn to. In the absence of one, she was amazed at how natural her desire to abase herself, to make promises in exchange for a reprieve from tragedy. If she could get hold of a goat, she would surely burn one if it meant saving her child. If Noah got sick, she would cease to exist. She, who was built out of failure, could not survive that one.

  This was the pitch of her mad thoughts as she clutched her son to her breast and Owen rowed them ashore in the dinghy. He disembarked first and held Noah while she clambered out. But when she turned to take back her son, Owen pushed on ahead, still carrying him in his arms. She had tried to ask in a look if he knew what he was doing, the choice he was making, but it was possible her eyes betrayed only her terror. Or he was too rushed to consider the alternatives. Owen was already halfway across the beach, calling out to people to ask where he could get a taxi.

  The cabbie eyed them in the rear-view mirror and was driving as quickly as Sarah could wish, speeding either out of concern for Noah or to be rid of them as soon as possible. He delivered them to the hospital, a long, low pink building that still looked new. There was a small patrol of armed men outside, though they were not in uniform, and Sarah couldn’t tell if they were police or volunteer militia. She thought the men seemed wary, but the sight of Noah appeared to soften them. Or at least, besides a few exchanged glances, they made no move to stop them from coming in.

  * * *

  They were triaged into a makeshift waiting area for suspected cases of ARAMIS. Owen knew that the major cruise lines visiting the Bahamas were not yet enforcing medical screenings in the manner of airports. It was even possible his own journey had encouraged a few non-sailors to take to sea on luxury liners. A cruise ship from Miami could easily bring asymptomatic passengers who could sicken en route, and though the Exumas were off the beaten path, they were far from unreachable.

  In the waiting room were three other people, groaning and sweaty, who seemed like they might have it. Between them, Owen thought, the sickness was almost surely there. And yet he was overcome by a strange calm. When he realized he’d forgotten his protective gear on the boat, he’d experienced a fleeting panic, followed by a profound sense that they had surrendered themselves to fate. But having arrived at a moment of clarity in deciding to head to shore, he was not so easily going to give it up. It was the call of absolute duty that he had answered, and the fact that he had heard it, that he had done the right thing, seemed almost blessed. Owen had spent his life being pensive and equivocal, but there was peace in certainty, in giving in to an impulse beyond reason.

  Sarah was rocking Noah slightly. The boy’s silence was unnerving. She leaned over to whisper to Owen, “I’m sorry.” She was eyeing the other patients just as he was, but she looked anguished. He patted her arm.

  Through the windows of the examining room, Owen cast an eye out for their boat, but they were too far up the shore. Buona Fortuna had been a fixture in Elizabeth Harbour for a few days now. He imagined the gossip on the beach, the islanders discussing them as American ARAMIS refugees. And though the yacht was no more than a blip on the water, he wondered if some considered it a blemish on the perfect landscape, or worse, a harbinger of scores to come.

  Owen found the hospital staff reserved but gracious, which, he thought, was how people had to act when someone came to them hat in hand, or child in arms, to confess that they were wrong, that it was hubris to think they could survive on their own. Owen himself felt almost cleansed by the admission. What Buona Fortuna represented out there on the water was inhuman and unsustainable.

  The doctors and nurses who examined Noah were clad in full protective gear, more even than the intake staff at the hospitals in New York, but what they had in disposable garb, they lacked in high-tech equipment. There were no samples taken, no special tests run. They were given some acetaminophen, and when Noah’s fever responded to the medication within a few hours, they were sent home.

  “Come back if it spikes again.”

  They returned to the boat. Owen wondered if Sarah was feeling as he was: more aware with every passing moment of how exposed they’d become, to so little purpose. The ride back in the dinghy was silent apart from the rumble of the motor. Sarah was holding Noah now. Her son’s head rested on her chest as it had on Owen’s, and he remembered the weight of the boy as he’d carried him into the hospital: how heavy and yet how surprisingly manageable.

  A few hours later, Noah threw up and started feeling better. His temperature declined further, returning to normal. Owen sniffed the tin of butter they’d slathered on yesterday’s toast. Its contents smelled rancid.

  “Food poisoning,” he said, swallowing.

  “He has a sensitive stomach.” Sarah sounded queasy, too. “I should have mentioned.”

  “We did the right thing,” said Owen. He stared back at the shore, the distance they’d crossed in the dinghy. “No regrets, no matter what.”

  He felt bound to her, to them. United in their undertaking.

  * * *

  That night, while Noah slept, Sarah knew she ought to rest but couldn’t make her eyes close. Surprised to find a Wi-Fi signal when she opened the laptop, she checked her email and found a message from her brother with the extraordinary news that he had fathered forty-six children. She got up and went to tell Owen. It was the kind of revelation that required discussion, exchange, and mindless, audible repetition until the words could arrange themselves into some kind of sense.

  “Owen?”

  She expected to find him on deck, but all was dark above save the glow of their anchor light. She returned below and opened the door to his cabin. He was standing oddly, holding an upper rail.

  “You’ll never believe this,” she said. “Here’s a teaser: how many sperm donations does it take to make forty-six babies?”

  “Swimming,” said Owen, and she looked at him quizzically. He sank down onto the side of his berth. “My head.”

  * * *

  —

  Sarah radioed the Coast Guard.

  “Remain on your vessel.” The receiver crackled. “We’ll shoot if you try to come ashore.”

  Sarah thought she must have misheard. “Are you going to come and help us?”

  “If you come ashore, we will shoot.”

  She blinked. Another nearby boat radioed. “There’s an outbreak at the new local hospital. They’re blaming you for it.”

  “But there were already people with ARAMIS at the hospital. That’s how he caught it. The virus is already here.”

  “All the island hospitals are on lockdown from tourists now.”

  She watched the lights on land and wondered what they would do if she rowed him ashore anyway. Would they really fire on them? She stared at the charts, wondering where they
could go.

  “I’ll sail us someplace else,” she said aloud. “Somewhere people will help us.” But how to navigate and sail and tend to Owen and still look after Noah and keep him safe? It was an impossible proposition.

  “What’s wrong?” said a small voice. Noah. Reflexively, Sarah looked down at her shoes. When she’d made Owen comfortable in his cabin earlier, she’d covered her face, hands, and clothes, but not her shoes. She had no idea if she needed to or not.

  “Stay at the other end of the boat!” she shouted. Noah scuttled back, his eyes fearful and chastened above the mask. “Go to bed,” she added. “Bring a book. Wait for me until I come and get you.” Then, more gently, “Owen’s not feeling well. He needs me to take care of him.”

  * * *

  —

  Sarah figured out how to lock the hatch to Owen’s cabin from the outside. Noah was frantic when he discovered it wouldn’t open and called out to him.

  “Don’t worry.” Owen’s voice was faint behind the door. “I like it closed.”

  Later that night, Sarah sat with her son, a cold sweat surging over her skin, as she quizzed him about how to use the radio and the flags to summon help. She got light-headed just imagining how quickly she could succumb to the virus, the terror that would leave him with. So she spoke to him in a near-constant stream of instructions and repetitions, as though the words were an incantation that could keep the worst at bay.

  She didn’t know how to tell Owen that they were being refused by the hospitals, but he asked her very few questions. The times he was lucid, he spoke urgently, though the virus had reduced his voice to a rasp.

  “You’ve got to get me off this boat. Dump me in the ocean.”

  “Can’t,” she said. Not wouldn’t.

  She slept in a crunch of nerves and knotted muscles, and woke with bleeding cuts in her palms where she’d dug into them with her fingernails. “Noah,” she shouted.

  “I’m here, Mommy. I’m safe.” His voice across the hull bringing her back to life.

  She rose, bandaged her hands, donned her gloves. Everything depended on her not faltering, never missing a trick. They had acetaminophen and ibuprofen, bandages and disinfectant. Tourniquets, even a scalpel. She gave Owen fluids and pain relievers, everything she could look up online and administer from their supplies on board.

  She took her own temperature morning and evening for five days, but it stayed steady even as delirium took her shipmate. Owen mumbled apologies that seemed meant for the world at large. The terrible sound of his laboured breathing was both a horror and a relief. When he asked for, or about, Rachel, Sarah said, “It’s okay,” which gave him no peace; then, “She’s okay,” which was better, and finally, “She’s coming,” which seemed to loosen the fluid around his lungs just long enough to allow a deep, shuddering breath. He slept after that. Sarah checked on Noah, whom she was alternately bribing and threatening to stay in his berth. Years’ worth of birthday and holiday and just-because gifts glutted his cabin, keeping his tiny fingers occupied. His mind distracted.

  Owen stopped breathing three days before Christmas, at dawn. She locked the door to his cabin, then sat down on the other side. Burying her head in her knees, she tried to muffle her howls.

  She went above deck and sat with the sunrise and a thermos of tea. Afterwards, before Noah awoke, she emailed Elliot and asked him to tell Dory about Owen. The Shillelagh office was closed, but Dory would be able to locate the writer’s next of kin. She wrote a blog post for Owen and updated his Twitter feed, a bizarre exercise that gave her a deranged spark of hope as she finished typing. She lowered his homemade flag and hoisted the yellow one. She radioed the nearest marine authority, and a U.S. liaison to the Coast Guard sent notice that they would be boarding for health screening once the quarantine expired.

  “We can also assist with instructions for a burial at sea.”

  For days, the world had shrunk to the size of their vessel, but minutely it began to expand again, as though with the short, tight breaths of fresh sea air that Sarah gulped above deck. She felt paper-thin, one-dimensional, strained even by this effort to inhale, exhale, persist. But she kept moving forward mechanically, knowing that she couldn’t afford to do anything else. Their plan was set; it was already in motion. She plotted the course to the nearest anchorage that would take less than half a day’s sail. She couldn’t bear to stay where they were any longer, even if she was comforted by the sight of the other boats, and the strength of the Wi-Fi signals being beamed out, she guessed, from Georgetown.

  In Owen’s inbox, there was a message forwarded from Rachel Levinson’s attorneys, sent several days earlier. She clicked on it and began reading. The masts of distant boats seemed to recede towards the shore as she read the note, while Buona Fortuna rocked in the swells as though in time with the Earth’s beating pulse. Outside, the sunlight blazed the ocean into a mirror.

  Noah came up behind her, a bounce in his step, already wearing his mask and gloves without prompting. He watched her with his solemn stare, hair mussed from sleep into a tangled, golden halo. He was a human animal, a living miracle, a normal yet extraordinary boy. She realized she only feared death because it would mean leaving her son entirely on his own. And the thought of Noah being alone, of any child being alone, once again summoned a shivery clamminess beneath her clothes, acid flares of warning from her clenched stomach. Swallowing, she prayed the words she had drilled into Noah would bring him to safety if the worst happened, that some impression of her love would endure in his memory. She closed the computer.

  “What are you doing, Mommy?” he asked as she pivoted from the laptop to the chart table.

  She pulled out the ship’s log and glanced back over the record of their journey, all the dates and times, the waypoints and wind speeds, every nautical mile that had brought them with great effort and expense to exactly where they were. “We’re going to turn around,” said Sarah.

  Owen,

  I never intended to stay silent for so long. Only for as long as all the time you took from me. Or so I planned, in my blacker moods. But I may not have the time. I’m in the hospital with an elevated temperature that I fear is getting worse. My neighbour is sick with ARAMIS, and just last week I was over there for coffee.

  The worst isn’t that you betrayed me. Or even that I thought I knew you but didn’t. (Though it’s true, that hurts.) The worst was the initiation into a new kind of life, one with intimate knowledge of how easily we can betray one another. And ourselves.

  Yet that glimpse of chaos was what gave me the courage to have Henry. If everything is unknown, then doubt is a reasonable response. Sometimes waiting for certainty means you’ll be waiting forever.

  There are so many things I’ve wanted to tell you since he was born. Parenthood is a maelstrom: intense, unseemly. It cracks you open. I hope something does that for you, Owen.

  And the trust was a generous idea. Though I did laugh out loud when I heard that’s what you were giving us. Trust. I know the irony won’t be lost on you.

  But more than the trust, Henry needs a family should anything happen to me. Somehow I know, by asking, that you will make sure of this. So, perhaps not all certainty is gone, after all. Maybe not all is lost between us.

  When we loved, we were our best. We were infinite.

  Rachel

  ELLIOT

  DECEMBER 2020

  On his way back to the city, Elliot tried to think of forty-six names. John, Jane, Rebecca, Jason, Patrick, Lisa. A wet snow began to fall, perfect crystals plummeting into slush. Donovan, Gabriel, Sabrina, Martin, Amber, Corey. He tried to keep up a rhythm in time with the wipers. Francis, swish, Nick, swish, Allie, swish, swish, swish. It was impossible to think of so many names, let alone forty-six real people behind them. The scale of the thing was preposterous. Then his thoughts returned to the roll call of everyone he had lost to ARAMIS: Bryce an
d Keelan. Jejo, Cam, Lucas, Declan, Teresa, Paloma, Felix. Another incomprehensible list.

  There was a slowdown around a car being towed, and Elliot peered in the windows of the cars merging into the next lane. His children could be as old as eighteen. They could be driving. They could be anywhere, anyone.

  He turned on the radio as he approached the Triborough Bridge. The Dove Suite single followed by some boppy holiday earworm by a recent televised-contest winner. (The song: intolerably catchy. The teenaged singer: old enough to be his son?) At the tollbooth, a middle-aged Bridge and Tunnel Authority officer asked him to roll down the window. Then he slid open the wicket and pointed a temperature gun at Elliot’s neck.

  “Normal. All clear.”

  “Good idea, that,” said Elliot, nodding at the thermometer. Such instruments would have been handy screening tools at the hospitals, shelters, and the quarantine cordons he’d been stationed at. “Just hope it’s not too late.”

  “Things aren’t as bad as you think, man.” The window slid closed.

  Elliot drove down East 39th Street. Coloured lights were strung up everywhere: in front of the deli with no name, the entrance to the parkade, and the pizzeria with the ninety-nine-cent slice. Never mind the power outages. Some things were more important than prudence. Elliot could sense his mood lifting. He should have known better. How quickly he’d forgotten a fundamental truth: the closer you got to the heart of a calamity, the more resilience there was to be found.