Day Four

by Sarah Lotz

  MG: Foveros’s private island. Dream Cay. We’d stopped there on the second day of the cruise. Celine – the old Celine – had got drunk at the beach bar there.

  Why there?

  MG: According to Celine, very few people lived there, so body disposal wouldn’t be too arduous. It was large enough for all of us and there were plenty of food sources. There were horses and chickens everywhere. A bar styled to look like a pirate ship on the beach. Fishing. And let’s not forget the enormous Duty Free shop. If you were going to spend eternity somewhere, that would be the place. All set up for you.

  >>Zimri, Jesse C/ Interview #4/ Page 2

  JZ: I felt kak. Worse. I couldn’t believe I’d let Bin go. I mean, the man shouldn’t have even come with us. But he kept talking about getting back to his family, although how the fuck he thought he’d manage that, I have no clue. Perhaps he just couldn’t face getting back on the ship. The whole ‘girl coming alive in the morgue’ thing had spooked him badly, and the passengers had treated us like shit while it was all going on. But I should have stopped him.

  When we got back . . . fuck it. When we got back I went back to the medical bay to see what I could take to zonk myself out. And it wasn’t just Bin. I didn’t understand how any of this could be happening. The bodies, the devastation. It was all . . . Christ. I don’t know.

  Baci caught up with me before I had a chance to dig into the Demerol. He was in a bad way. He’d stayed behind with Alfonso when the rest of the crew had abandoned ship, and he was asking if I’d seen any sign of the lifeboats. I lied to him and said I hadn’t. I told him he’d made the right decision staying on the ship. I lied about that too. He said Alfonso was much better mentally, and said ‘the dark man’ – the ghost or devil or whatever it was he kept hallucinating – had gone.

  One of the engineering guys came and found Baci and said that Celine wanted to talk to him. It sounded like they were planning on moving to another port, I heard them discussing fuel ratios and power and blah-de-blah before they left. I didn’t care where we were going. I had other plans.

  And what were they?

  JZ: [Laughs] To block everything out with the help of medical science. And I succeeded with that, alright. Next thing I knew I was being carried into a helicopter by a couple of giant marines.

  That’s it. That’s all I’ve got to say.

  And you stand by your version of events, Dr Zimri?

  JZ: I’m telling you what I experienced. Nothing more, nothing less. Whether you want to take the word of a drug addict is up to you.

  [Interview suspended]

  >>Fall, Helen/ Interview #4/ Page 2

  to the suite. I prepared Elise’s body. Washed it down. In some ways this helped.

  How long did you remain in the suite, Ms Fall?

  HF: I remained there until my door flew open and I found men in black SWAT uniforms milling around out there. I was taken to a helicopter, inside which I saw Althea and Maddie. I felt so sorry for Althea. She was hysterical, and one of your medical thugs gave her some sort of tranquilliser. Maddie didn’t speak, but she was smiling. It wasn’t a relieved smile that we were being rescued. I . . . can’t really describe it. She said she’d knocked on my door earlier, and assumed Elise and I had left the ship. And she was half right. One of us had left the ship. In spirit, anyway.

  And that is all I can tell you. And no, I won’t speculate any further on Celine del Ray. Not that whatever I say about her will matter now.

  Could you clarify what you mean, Ms Fall?

  HF: You know what I mean. You’re going to bury us. You’re not going to let us go. You’re smarter than that. We’re not terrorists. We’re not a threat. But there’s a reason why you will never let us go.

  And that reason is?

  HF: It doesn’t matter.

  What does not matter?

  HF: Any of this. This charade. Maybe you believe in heaven or hell, maybe you believe in Nirvana or Narnia, or that when you die, that’s it. That’s what concerns you. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? Maybe if the story got out, our story got out, people wouldn’t believe it. But what if they did? How do you think people will react if that’s taken away from them? If they have proof?

  Proof of what, Ms Fall?

  HF: That it’s out of our control. Life. Death. That we’re being manipulated, played. I am a rational person, but I saw things on that ship that could not – and should not – exist.

  And . . . I keep thinking . . . What if she’s right? What if it never ends? What if there is no death? If I don’t believe what I saw, why am I now so afraid to die?

  [Interview suspended]

  >>Gardner, Madeleine/ Interview #6/ Page 3

  How long did it take us to get there? Not long. Along the way we saw other signs of devastation. Half-submerged oil tankers, a couple of other cruise ships in the distance, both of which looked like they were on the verge of giving up the ghost. Baci and the crew sailing the ship couldn’t bring it right up to the island, and Celine said we would have to use the tender boat to ferry people to the shore. She told everyone to collect anything they thought they might need, and to hurry down to the loading deck.

  I tried to get Xavier to come out of his room, but he told me to ‘fuck off, this couldn’t be happening’. I had no idea Helen was still on board. I feel bad about that.

  The Friends got everyone organised in no time. And they all helped each other. Several passengers had been injured in the storm – that couple who were on Celine’s deck, for example – and Eleanor made sure they got down there first so that they could be comfortable. There were still some inflatable crew lifeboats aboard, so some of the crew dropped those into the water and were using them to travel onto the island.

  I felt a bit isolated. Almost everyone was giving me a wide berth because of what Devi and I had told them when we returned from Miami. Devi was one of the first to go to the island. He didn’t look reluctant about it. He looked . . . I never got to know him, but he seemed to be happy. He knew the truth, that the world we were in wasn’t our own, but even if he’d been offered the choice Celine gave me, I got the feeling he would have stayed.

  Celine asked Jimmy and Annabeth to carry her wheelchair. Then she asked me to help walk her down the stairs.

  And did you?

  MG: Yes. I think she wanted to be alone with me – talk to me in relative privacy. And she said that I didn’t have to come with her to the island. She said that I could choose to stay on the ship and take my chances.

  Then she said, if I wanted to, I could ‘go back’.

  What did she mean by that?

  MG: She wouldn’t say what she meant. But it was fairly obvious. She either meant back to the Miami that was destroyed, or back home. Here.

  I said yes. That I would take my chances. I didn’t even hesitate.

  The other choice – to spend an eternity with the Friends, sweet as they are, in a giant Duty Free shop – wasn’t an option.

  How did she react?

  MG: She was pleased. I don’t know if she knew for sure who else was on board or not. I was shocked when I saw Althea and Helen in the rescue helicopter. I knew Xavier was in Celine’s suite, but I thought everyone else had left the ship.

  How was your return to be achieved?

  MG: She said she would instruct Alfonso and Baci to turn the ship around. She said the rest would be up to me.

  When the last of the Friends had left, Baci got the ship started. I thought he might stay on it, but he didn’t. The tender boat chugged alongside it, and although I didn’t see him do it, he and the other crew who were needed to keep it going must have jumped onto it from the loading deck.

  You were on a ship with no one controlling its direction or speed?

  MG: Yeah. I know. It sounds like suicide.

  Did Celine say anything to you before she left for the island?

  MG: No. Not even goodbye.

  Why did she send you back?

  MG: I don’t know. Maybe she want
ed us to tell you what we saw.

  Did Celine tell you why The Beautiful Dreamer was chosen for this ‘venture’?

  MG: Yes. I asked her when she made her offer to send me back. She said it could have been anyone. A boat full of Cuban refugees. A ship of Somalian pirates. A 767 packed with commuters. But this, she said, seemed like it would be more fun. ‘This way, the vacation never ends.’

  In your opinion, who or what took over Celine?

  MG: She told me what she was. Just after the storm.

  She said that she was like us once. You don’t die, she said. You just move on. There was no death. She said the only difference between her and everyone else was that she could decide how and when she came back. She said she was us. All of us. She said they’d done this before. Countless times.

  She said they would do it again.

  They?

  Yes. They.

  [Interview suspended]

  >>Smith, Xavier L/ Interview #5/ Page 1

  We understand that you believe you were under the influence of a shared delusion, Mr Smith. We would appreciate it if you could share your opinion on what this delusion was.

  XS: Jesus. Okay. The delusion was that Celine had somehow taken the ship into another reality. A reality that was fucked.

  Hypothetically, how would she achieve this?

  XS: How the hell would I know? Even hypothetically, I don’t think she moved it with the power of her mind. Maybe the nuts are right, maybe we did just drift into the Bermuda Triangle or whatever you want to call it.

  Hypothetically, what was her intention?

  XS: Isn’t it obvious? The world she brought us to was dead. And The Beautiful Dreamer was her Noah’s Ark.

  [Subject laughs]

  [Interview suspended]

  >>Trazona, Althea/ Interview #6/ Page 3

  They came and found me in my cabin. The men. The soldiers. That’s when I found out that Mrs del Ray had left. She told me I would get what I wanted, but she lied. She used me.

  In your opinion, who or what is Celine del Ray?

  AT: I don’t know. How would I know? She was just an old woman who used people. Trining said she was the devil.

  Do you believe that?

  AT: No. She was too cruel for the devil.

  [Subject remains silent for several seconds]

  AT: If she is anything then she would be God.

  The Prisoner

  It’s too late. She’s left it too late. If only she’d made the decision yesterday, she might have had a chance to get out of here. She’s been telling herself to ‘give it just one more day’ since she arrived ten days ago. It’s not the hours, or the city, or the work, or the loneliness. It’s the kid. The bloody, buggering kid. She bites into the ragged flesh around her thumb until she draws blood, a habit she thought she’d quit years ago, and whips through the sites again.

  The Reddit and Zoop forums are going crazy, and she’s been hopping from one link to the next, hoping against hope that they’ll discover that the plane has simply run into difficulties; landed on some obscure airstrip perhaps. Or even that it’s crashed. That would be better than this. But still there are no reports of any wreckage. It happened in an instant. One minute it was on the radar; the next, gone. Blip. The second one in a month, only this one isn’t a China Airlines internal flight, it’s an Airbus ferrying passengers – mostly American and British – from Heathrow to JFK.

  She skims through the headlines, occasionally sliding to audio. It’s impossible to keep up with all the theories: terrorism, the Bermuda Triangle effect, the beginnings of the Rapture, environmentalists blasting the planes from the sky. Everyone and her dog has a theory, just like when all those people went missing from that cruise ship four years ago – and the nuts still haven’t let up about that. She had a boyfriend for a while who totally bought into that bullshit story about the survivors.

  Again, she searches for flights to London. Then Europe. Nothing. According to CNN, air traffic is being suspended ‘for the foreseeable future’. Could she get home via ship? She imagines herself hitching a ride on a trawler – a cabin girl. She googles cruises leaving from New York to Europe, but even the cheapest is way out of her price range, and there are no berths for the next month. She doesn’t have the money to find a hotel or an apartment – she’s emailed her parents, but they can only spare a few hundred quid, nowhere near what she’ll need to pay the rent or put down a deposit until she can find another job.

  For now, she’s trapped.

  She stands up, stretches. Rubs her socked feet over the polished wood floors. There’s a single photo of Joshua as a baby on the mantelpiece – the same one they sent to her when she applied for the job. He looks cute, wrapped in a baby-blue blanket, his eyes peeking through the swaddling. There are no pictures of him past the age of two. She doesn’t know where they got him from, if they adopted him from an agency or used a surrogate. They haven’t said, and she can hardly ask. Desiree and Marcus. Figjams, her mum would call them: Fuck I’m Great, Just Admire Me. Marcus, a biochemist; Desiree, a psychiatrist. They’re exactly what she expected from watching movies about New York: a brownstone apartment in Brooklyn Heights, both fit and shiny-haired and fast-talking and hardly ever here. And she isn’t the first au pair. She’d overheard them talking about it one night. The one before her – Clara, from South Africa – had lasted all of three days.

  Her alarm beeps. Almost time for his piano lesson. She breathes in, then pads up the stairs. Desiree and Marcus have made sure his days are filled with activities: Young Einstein classes, swimming lessons, French. Desiree let slip that a woman used to come in once a week to teach him Tagalog, ‘so that he wouldn’t lose touch with his culture’; she didn’t say why the lessons had stopped. The piano teacher, a brittle Eastern European woman, who Tracey finds almost as intimidating as Joshua, is the only person she’s met so far who isn’t affected by the boy’s weirdness.

  ‘Hi, Joshua! Almost time for your piano lesson.’ She hates the overly bright voice she uses when she speaks to him. ‘You ready to get going?’

  He gives her one of his, what are you, stupid? looks. He’s already dressed, sitting on the bed, waiting for her. She’s tried to articulate what it is about him she finds so repellent. It’s not just that he never smiles; there’s a weight to him, as if he’s always silently judging her. The neighbourhood kids are also wary around him. She’s tried to connect with the other au pairs and nannies, the little club that gathers every day around the benches in the park, but they won’t let her in. She knows she shouldn’t take it personally. It’s not her, it’s the fear of their charges being sucked into a playdate with Joshua. Whenever they go to the park, he always ends up playing by himself. Although he never really plays – just watches, with that slightly sardonic twist of his mouth.

  On her third day here, it had all got too much and Marcus caught her crying in the kitchen. He confided that up until he was three, Joshua had screamed almost continually. It had stopped overnight; as if a switch had been thrown inside him. Marcus laughed humourlessly, and said he didn’t know what was worse, the non-stop crying or how he was now. Tracey gets the impression that he’s been avoiding her since then.

  She ushers Joshua out of the front door, and it begins to drizzle the second they step onto the top step. ‘What a nasty day!’ she chirrups. He stands absolutely still while she puts on his gloves. ‘You warm enough, Joshua?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shall we get going then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’

  It starts spitting with more force as they reach the pavement. Autumn in New York. The sky heavy and low. She hasn’t even been across the bridge to Manhattan; the skyline taunts her. The boy’s hand is a small, repellent lump of wood in her hand. Back when she’d mistaken his reticence for shyness, she’d chattered away to him every time they left the house: ‘Look! A dog,’ or, ‘One day we must go to the museum,’ but now she doesn’t bother. They walk the five blocks to Fulton in
silence, the leaves slick and slimy under her cheap boots.

  At the crossing, they wait for the ‘walk’ signal to flash and then hurry across with the rest of the people eager to get out of the rain. They pass a boutique, the clothes costing more than a month’s salary, and a deli stocked with cheese wheels.

  ‘Nearly there!’ she sing-songs, wishing she could just fire up her music and forget about him. Tracey usually waits in the Starbucks on the main drag while he has his lesson, which is pretty much turning into the highlight of her week. They turn the corner. A woman in high black boots and an oversized knitted cap placed artfully over bobbed hair, weaves around them, giving Joshua an ‘aw, aren’t you cute’ look. And he does look cute in his Baby Gap boots and Paddington Bear overcoat. The woman moves to cross the road, raising a lofty hand to forestall the truck moving towards her. Tracey feels a twinge of envy, wishing she had the kind of confidence it takes to hold up traffic. The truck slams on its brakes to let the woman cross, but she hasn’t counted on the motorbike behind it. An engine revs as it speeds up to zip around the truck. It happens, like these things always do, in slow motion. The motorbike brakes sharply, attempts to swerve around the woman, wobbles, then tips and slides, knocking the woman’s feet from under her. For a split second the woman’s eyes lock with Tracey’s – this can’t be happening – and then: fwump.

  Tracey grips Joshua’s hand and drags him back. ‘Don’t look,’ she screams. ‘Don’t look.’

  She tries not to, but she can’t help fixating on the mess where the woman’s head should be, and . . . and . . . there’s something spattered on the pavement. She hustles Joshua over to the Starbucks and drops to her knees in front of him, the damp pavement soaking through the knees of her jeans. The coffee-shop window is filling up with rubberneckers; several are pushing their way through the door, looking through their gel-phones’ screens, filming the carnage.