Lee pulled the gun off his shoulder with one hand and slapped it down in his other palm.

“We could stop them,” he said, smiling. “You just have to ask.”

“We’re not asking,” the Colonel said. “You’ll hurt yourself with that thing.”

“Or somebody,” Hesse said.

“Yeah,” Lee agreed. “Or somebody. What about the fishing? I seen you got lines set up all along the starboard.”

“The fish are coming up covered in oil. We can’t eat from this ocean, at least until this oil spill breaks up and we drift on. Maybe this storm will help.”

“Or we get hungry enough,” Lee laughed.

“We still need our doors opened,” Rick said. “You were supposed to send up a power saw.”

“It’s in a flooded compartment,” Colonel Warrant said. “We can’t get it. You’ll have to keep using the doors you’ve got.”

Their first meal from Hesse’s crew was arranged for that evening. It would be a long trip for the carts.

“We have a group working on the service elevators,” Hesse said.

Rick and Lee Golding left. Colonel Warrant and Hesse watched them through the glass storefront.

“Is the power saw in a flooded compartment?” Hesse asked.

“No,” Colonel Warrant said. “That boy’s a risk. I take risk management seriously.”

“Maybe we should have had Brenda work on the satellite gear,” Hesse said.

“John, that’s a smart girl, but sometimes you have to reckon for yourself what someone is capable of. That gear is broke. And Brenda White told me herself she knows next to nothing about satellite receivers. We did the right thing. She’ll be working on it soon, if we’re still here, and if she can get it going, well, that’ll be when we need it. For now, we’ve got things running here and we can take care of ourselves. We did right.”

They drifted off into their own thoughts, looking out the storefront at the mob.

“You have any family?” Hesse said.

“Not really. Wife left me a long time ago. My son was killed in Afghanistan. You reminded me of him the first time I saw you up on that bar, you know that?”

He paused, almost happy imagining his son, getting a feeling of connection with him through Hesse.

“How bout you?” he added.

“My family’s from Chicago, they’ll all be fine. My girlfriend left in a lifeboat the first night.”

When the food came at last to the Theater, the rain had picked up and it could be heard on the thick glass of the skylight stories above. The food came, trolley after trolley. The food was in bulk and uncooked, meant to give the Italian galley three meals to work with, so that only one cross-ship delivery was needed each day.

It took more than an hour to feed everyone. Then, the rain came so heavy that it became the evening’s distraction. Four hundred or more leaned back and stared at the darkness above them from whence the noise came, never stopping, never letting up.

Rick was restless. He took his wife for a walk.

At forty-seven, Rick Dumas’ life had been successful and satisfying. He was a top seller for his company in the Dallas-Fort Worth region. He had lots of friends, and a beautiful wife. He’d always had lots of friends, and always had beautiful girlfriends. He was friendly, a good listener, but he had a secret to successfully navigating social situations, and all situations were social to him. He found the most powerful person in the context and he made them like him.

Rick and his wife made the long trip to the Atrium; he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. He wanted his wife to see him talking with John Hesse. Families and small groups squeezed past him in the hallways. There was an open door out to the lower level promenade, the wind keeping the door open despite its return spring. Rick and his wife were deafened by the sounds of the storm in the moment they passed it by.

The Atrium felt different again. There were loud voices and much movement in the dark. Rick could hear agitated families and groups passing information: the lowered rations; the Theater was out of food.

It was not like his previous visits, a crowd muted by fear and tragedy. It was a powder keg.

The power went out and it became very dark. Around the room came children bawling and men and women screaming in frustration and fear. Lightning illuminated the room in diffracted rays of crisscrossing light.

The thunder clapped and the glass pyramid above shook.

27

Travis was in the galley with Hesse, cleaning in the dim light granted by Brenda White and Colonel Warrant in their amperage rationing. There were thousands on board, but Hesse was somehow always at work. He usually took the worst jobs. Travis, like Gerry, Claude and Corrina, took shifts occasionally. They spoke little as Travis scrubbed the food prep surfaces and Hesse studied the supplies. Travis watched him.

“You’re from New York, right?” Travis asked finally.

“Yes,” Hesse said.

“Did you ever play rugby?” Travis asked.

“Yes,” Hesse said.

Travis nodded. “I thought so.”

“Yeah,” Hesse said. “I was with the Village Scottish. My God, I thought you looked familiar, all this time I thought I knew you from somewhere. Where’d you play?”

“Brooklyn, the Rebels, back, oh, ten years.”

“Oh!” Hesse smiled, slipping back to happy times. “I’ve been retired for a while, but we used to play you guys a lot. We always won.”

“Yes you did,” Travis admitted. “You had an amazing scrumhalf. Guy was near pro level.”

“Not quite, but thanks. It was me.”

“Yeah,” Travis said. “I know.”

“The Rebels,” Hesse said. “We used to beat you boys pretty good, but you had this flanker who nailed me one time, broke my arm.”

“That was me,” Travis said.

“Oh my God,” Hesse laughed. “You were dirty, man!”

“You were killing us! I had to stop you. I took you out, man. I put you down good.”

They laughed.

There was a sound of thunder, and the power went out.

Travis and Hesse said nothing. The sounds of their breathing showed that each was all right in the dark as Hesse looked around for his flashlight. When he had it turned on he spoke.

“No sense stopping,” Hesse said. “We’ll be getting food ready in the morning with or without power.”

He hung his flashlight from a rack above the counters and joined Travis in cleaning.

Their hands worked in the light as their heads were in the dark.

“On my first Red Cross mission, we were in Haiti,” Travis said. “And we had this power outage. I was in my tent, just a battery lamp on the table, and I was reading. And drinking. Drinking and reading. In comes this monkey.”

“Is this a joke?” Hesse asked.

“No, no,” Travis said. “This is true. The monkey comes in, and he’s staggering. I point my flashlight, and I notice three things. He’s got a liquor bottle in one hand, he’s dead drunk, and he’s bleeding profusely. So he’s drunk, and I’m drunk, and I stumble over and pick him up. He’s all playful. He’s so drunk he doesn’t even feel anything. But he’s been shot.”

“You’re picking up a bloody monkey in Haiti?” Hesse said. “You’re not worried about AIDS?”

“Myth. Haitian monkeys never had AIDS. Anyway. I’d been in Haiti a few weeks. And it was bad. And this poor drunk little monkey, he’s all limp in my hands, and making faces at me. I decided I had to save him.

“I got a friend, a nurse, and we turned on the lights in the operating theater, they were on the back-up generator. And of course, I’m a paramedic. I’ve never done surgery. But you know, I’d seen it all. And I’d taken courses. How hard could it be? We figured he was drunk, so we wouldn’t need to anaesthetize him. Actually, the bullet had passed right through him, didn’t hit anything. All we had to do was sew him up.  And I’m wondering, how did this monkey get the booze? And is that why he was shot? Did he steal it and get caught? Or did someone just shoot a drunk monkey for fun?