The Angels Will Not Care

by John Straley

  “Was that girl dead?” Rosalind piped up over my shoulder.

  The doctor winced ever so slightly. “It’s a very serious case. But actually it’s working out quite well. Everything is fine and I’ll be able to help you soon. Please just check back with us later.” And he stood silently in front of us. The conversation was clearly over.

  “Right then,” I said cheerily and taking Rosalind’s hand, turned and walked away.

  “Wow. She really looked dead to me,” Rosalind said in a stage whisper as we shuttled down the narrow hall. “I couldn’t see very clearly but it looked like—”

  “I think you’re right,” I interrupted. I started fish­ing in my jacket pocket for my wallet. “Why did you want to see the doctor, anyway? Are you okay?” I asked Ros­alind.

  Her eyes arched in sympathy and she touched my arm. “Oh, I’m fine really. I just . . . well, I just worry that I’m sick all the time actually. I mean, I just think about it a lot, you know. I mean, I’ve got my share of . . . but . . .” She held her palms up in front of her face as if fending the words off. “I don’t want to talk about it. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.” Then she hugged me quickly. “But thanks for asking, Cecil. That’s sweet.”

  Together, we walked up to Acapulco 800. My State of Alaska Organ Donors card is the perfect laminated weight and flexibility for sliding against the latches of most old ho­tel rooms. I disentangled from Rosalind and fished my card out while at the same time trying to shade my hands from her. The bolt clicked and the door swung open with a slight pressure from my shoulder. There was no top bolt and no door chain. But what there was were four legs on the bunk near the back wall with a bright light shining down on them. A shiny black torso and muscular legs thrusting. Two thin shapely white legs topped with red patent leather pumps spread wide and forming a truncated “V” above the black man’s shoulders. His company-issue coveralls were down around his ankles. Her flowered panties were on the floor between us. He was too concerned with his own motion to hear the clunk of the door. Not so with the woman beneath him. The talons of her bright red fingernails flew against the skin of his back. Her eyes, wild and hazy with sex, cleared instantly with panic. His voice groaned, with intense expec­tation. She was pushing and sucking a scream between her teeth and into her lungs.

  In two beats he opened his eyes and then followed her panicked gaze over his shoulder to me. Then he did an odd thing; instead of pulling up his pants, he dove into the bed and buried his face in the pillows at the foot of the bed.

  The woman’s face came into focus. She tugged a blue raincoat down across her rumpled dress and thrust her hand between her legs to cover herself, but as she tried she was thwarted because the young man’s exposed bottom was lying across her lap.

  “Excuse me!” she said with breathless dignity. “But is this your room?”

  “No. It’s not,” I said and bumped squarely into Rosa­lind, who was pushing hard against my back and craning against me to see. Not wanting to miss out on the details this time.

  I closed the door. Rosalind was breathing hard and balancing on the balls of her feet.

  “Wow,” she said, “I guess you know where the excite­ment is on this ship.”

  5

  Day at Sea

  The boat rocked with an uneven rhythm. Behind the closed door of Acapulco 800, I heard the shuffling of embarrassed people hurriedly dressing. Rosalind stared wide-eyed at me as we both watched the knob on the door turn slightly, then stop. The door did not open. I could hear them both breathing on the other side, or perhaps it was my own breathing, but they never came out. I tried to make conversation with the people on the other side of the door. I apologized again and told them that I just needed a few things out of the room. No one answered. No one spoke.

  My plan was to wait for them. Maybe confront them in the hall or follow them to a place where we could talk. Rosa­lind said she had to get up on deck for some air because the motion down in the warm hallway was getting to her. She promised to see me later. Then she turned and walked down the passageway with both her hands touching the sides for support. I stood by the door, prepared to wait however long it took to talk with the romantic couple, but the family from the gangplank with Carol and her young sister Alicia came rumbling down the hallway as if they were bison.

  Before I could disappear, the little girl was holding my hand.

  “Hello,” she said and down by my hip her freckled face smiled up at me. “We’re going to our room. Wanna come see it?”

  The father was blustering by me. “For heaven’s sake, Alicia. This man doesn’t want to see our room.”

  Alicia’s mother was in some definite distress. She leaned against the wall as her husband held her by the elbow.

  The father turned to me. “Seasick. I’m afraid,” he explained curtly. “She says she wants to lay down in her room. I told her I thought it would be better up on deck looking out.”

  “No.” It was all the woman could manage.

  “Hello!” Carol said very loudly in my ear. She stood hunch-shouldered and flat-footed very close to me. Her wide-set eyes stared at me without seeming to focus.

  I nodded, smiling. “Hello.”

  “I don’t feel so good,” Carol said loudly.

  “I’m going to my room,” the mother said and walked away. “Come on, girls.”

  Then, without warning, Carol leaned forward and threw up on me. She leaned back and covered her mouth. Alicia stood back and shrieked. “Eyuuuue!”

  In many circumstances I don’t mind being thrown up on. Although I am not all that proud of it, there was a time in my life when every weekend was marked by some form of either vomit, urine, or blood. I was a social drinker, and I was just part of a strange society. But this was somewhat differ­ent. First, I was working. I was trying to watch the door, and I wanted back into room 800. Second, Carol’s sickness had created an atmosphere that was intolerable for her mother. For as she came forward digging desperately in her black leather purse for a tissue to hand Carol, she was overcome and then put the contents of her own stomach into the purse. And lastly, if I was trying to remain somewhat inconspicu­ous this was not going to help, for out of seemingly thin air there were cabin stewards with damp towels all over me, as if I were a terrier being attacked by rats. The stewards must have a finely tuned sensitivity to the sound of retching for they were on us in an instant.

  The poor father was holding his wife upright. Carol was standing up straight but she started to cry. I think she was more surprised and afraid than anything. Her father looked at me beseechingly. A young steward was on the floor at my feet wiping and cleaning the short-napped carpet.

  I spoke to the father in my chipper country gentleman voice. “I’m just going to pop upstairs and get some air. I can take the girls with me. They will be fine. We’ll come back later. All right then?”

  “Good. Good,” the father said. “Alicia. You know where the room is. Watch out for Carol and remember—both your feet stay on the deck. No climbing. Understand?”

  Alicia must have had an iron stomach, for she showed no signs of seasickness. She nodded and smiled sweetly. “Come on, Carol,” she said and we three walked to the passageway up to an outer deck.

  “Thank you,” I heard their father say as the mother had another go at emptying her stomach into her purse.

  In a few minutes we stood on deck. Alicia had gone through formal introductions as we had walked up. This in­cluded the exchange of full names, eye contact, and hand shaking. Then, after asking after my home, she allowed how she and her family lived in Baltimore, Maryland. This, she said, was where she was going to begin the fifth grade next fall.

  A slight rain spattered down. Carol closed her eyes and took deep breaths. She was not feeling well and her features clamped down in unhappiness. She rocked back and forth and moaned, “Icky, Icky, Icky.”

  “She’ll be okay, Mr. Young
er,” Alicia assured me as she hooked her arm through mine in a shipboard gesture that I instantly recognized only after she had done it. “She was born that way. She doesn’t know any other way, so it doesn’t really bother her.” Then she repeated the litany of explanations I imagined she’d had to learn for strangers.

  “Carol’s eighteen years old but she doesn’t learn things the way other people do,” Alicia said, and then she added, “I know my states and capitals and, of course, I can name all the presidents.” She looked down the front of her sweatshirt with a delicate air of well-enforced modesty.

  Down off the lower deck toward the stern, I saw two stewards pushing a hospital-style gurney with a covered bun­dle through a hatchway. It was just a brief glimpse. It looked like they came out momentarily to position the gurney around a tight inside corner. Then they were gone.

  “Well, then you must have enjoyed traveling through Seattle, the capital of Washington,” I said to Alicia, staring at the closed door.

  “Please,” Alicia said rather patiently. “Seattle is not the capital of Washington. That would be Olympia.”

  We stood at the rail and looked out at the waves. The massive engine of the ship was a slight hum under our feet and the air was a gray wash of the sounds of foaming water under our bow. Nothing broke the calm surface of the un­dulating swells. Alicia stood at the rail next to me. Once she lifted her sneakered foot to the second rung of the railing and shifted her weight as if to stand on it but she didn’t.

  A young woman in a white crewneck sweater with the company logo stitched on it rushed over to us. “Well, hi there!” she almost bellowed as she leaned down to talk to Alicia. “I’m Becky. I’m the kids’ social counselor and a little birdie just told me that you might not be feeling so good. Is that right?” Everything about Becky’s voice and appear­ance suggested she had been raised among hard-of-hearing simpletons.

  “Feeling well,” Alicia said. “I think you meant ‘feeling so well.’”

  “Of course, honey. Ohhh, you are just the smartest lit­tle thing!” In the next second both Carol and Alicia were gone with the vivacious Becky amid discussion about a kids’ makeup party. I didn’t catch the details because, as they walked through the passageway, Mr. Brenner and his cigar came on deck.

  “Hey. What did you think of that cigar?” he bellowed. The cigar was down on top of my dresser near my wallet and keys.

  “Great,” I said, and cast my eyes down as I always do when I’m lying . . . a facial tic which has made it impossible for me to play poker in either Sitka or Juneau.

  Mr. Brenner’s camel hair blazer flapped back in the wind. The hair that was delicately combed across his scalp lifted to the Pacific breeze and he ran his fingers across his head, pushing everything back as if to say, “To hell with it.”

  He sucked on the cigar that was roughly as big as a young boy’s forearm. He stared out across the water. There was nothing to see, yet he kept staring with that contempla­tive railside gaze.

  “I saw you last night outside the party,” he said at last to the ocean, hoping, I suppose, I was listening. “You’re not with the tour. I thought you were when I saw you outside the clinic, but you’re not with the group, are you?”

  I stepped up to the rail with him as if we were two old drunks staring down at our reflections in the water below. “The group?” I asked the ocean.

  Mr. Brenner tipped the burning end of his cigar in a self-conscious gesture. “L’Inconnue de la Seine,” he said in a stilted French accent. “The group.” Then he said nothing.

  The sun shattered down on the webs of water streaming away from our bow. A lone gull flew down to the wake and tumbled into an eddy of wind, then lumbered away behind the stern.

  Mr. Brenner cleared his throat, then started speaking clearly and slowly. “There was a girl’s body fished out of the Seine. I don’t think it was any later than the eighteen eight­ies. Paris, France, you know?” He looked at me quickly and I nodded so he would go on. “This girl had a remarkable face. She was dead. People assumed she had killed herself. Her expression was serene and very beautiful. The authori­ties brought in an artist to take a plaster cast of her face. They used this image to try and identify her. The girl’s face was so perfect, her death mask became an object of art, almost an object of worship.”

  “Was she ever identified?”

  “Well . . .” Brenner drew out the word, considering something, but then he charged on. “No. Never was.” He shook his head slowly back and forth as smoke billowed from his mouth. “She is L’Inconnue . . . The Unknown. Her image became the object of cultlike significance all over Europe. This was in the nineteen twenties, between the wars. Almost every student in Germany and France had a copy of her death mask in their room.”

  On a deck below us, someone opened a door and mu­sic from the ship’s jazz band leaked out into the Pacific. I heard laughter and glasses clattering. Then it was quiet again.

  “You see, L’Inconnue was like sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Before there was rock and roll. This dead girl seemed to say that it was better to die peacefully and take your beauty with you. Some used her as a cult of youth. Others claimed that she was the beauty that remained in the moments after death. But finally she is inconnue. Unknown . . . unknown and beautiful, of course.”

  “So this group you are traveling with does what? Sex, drugs, and rock and roll?” Brenner was now only a profile against the gray horizon. He had a broad smile. His dark eyes were hidden under crescents of flesh. He took a long breath.

  “L’Inconnue de la Seine is a travel group based in the Netherlands. It promotes tours for people with terminal illnesses.”

  “What? Like a Hemlock Society?” I asked.

  “Naw.” He shrugged dismissively. Another door opened and the music once again took the air. “Naw. The group provides support. It makes arrangements for any special needs. Helps with shore excursions and makes arrangements with the ship’s medical staff to help with any treatments you may be undergoing. It’s a pain in the ass to travel if you are feeling bum and have to lug around a trunkload of medications. Lots of people just give up. They stay at home or in some stinking nursing home. The Inconnue gets people out to enjoy the beauty of the world.” He ges­tured toward the water. “I love it.” He sucked on his cigar. “You can tell we’re headed north, can’t you? We’re headed toward Alaska. God, I can hardly wait.”

  “So you have a terminal illness?” I asked.

  “Ah Christ . . .” He fanned the smoke in front of his face dismissively. “Prostate cancer. Who the hell knows? Doctors are such pip-squeaks, don’t you think? I mean, the only thing they tell you for certain is how much it is going to cost. Wait and see . . . Wait and see. That’s all they ever tell you. I’m sick of waiting.”

  Mr. Brenner turned to me, eyebrows raised. “What do these doctors know? They’re all so damn young. I’m con­vinced that my cysts are older than my damn doctors. You know what I’m saying?”

  I shook my head to indicate that I did, but now I was trying to shake Mr. Brenner’s prostate out of my mind.

  “Why does the group choose this ship?” I asked him.

  Brenner kept watching the sea. “Partly the destination. There’s something in the north that thins out the blood. The stone and ice. It’s dramatic and inspiring.” He drew on his cigar, then went on. “But also they’ve got good medical staff on this ship.”

  “The doctor helps the people end their lives?” I asked without a change of tone.

  Brenner turned and looked at me critically. “The doctor is supposed to help our people carry out their own wishes. He is here to serve the patients and help them in relieving whatever suffering that is in his power. He serves the patients and not . . . anyone else.”

  The prow of the ship lunged into a swell and the deck rolled down and to the left. The sea gave a great hissing sigh.

  “At least tha
t’s the theory,” Brenner spit out.

  Music came out across the water again, followed this time by the fanfare of a saxophone and trumpet. Brenner grabbed my elbow as if he was going to impart something terrifically urgent to me.

  “Have you ever heard Sonny the Cruise Director sing? I heard him down in the Caribbean. Oh my God, I tell you, he’s good. I think that’s his music. We better get down there,” he gushed and pulled me back inside.

  The Great Circle Lounge was crowded with perhaps three hundred people. There was a raised bandstand and al­most a full circle of low-backed couch seats. Most of the seats were taken. Theater lights hung on poles above the bar. A sound booth was located in the back, near the men’s room. Waiters brought drinks and took orders. Brenner abandoned me with a wave over his right shoulder as he gaily stepped over people’s laps to grab a seat near a group of people who waved and wiggled closer together to make room for him.

  Alicia, Carol, and the vivacious Becky were sitting at a round table near the bar. Alicia was sipping a clear carbon­ated drink through a straw. Becky was clicking her thumb­nail against her glass and scanning the crowds for someone else. Carol sat with her shoulders hunched around her glass. Her mouth was open. She watched the band and the light sparkling off the bell of the horns. Occasionally, she would groan loudly and snort with an overloud laugh. Alicia slipped her hand over Carol’s, as I’m sure she had learned from their mother. Carol squeezed her sister’s hand and made an effort to stay quiet.