“Huh?” said the boy. Lyssa looked for something to give him, but the store didn’t focus much on the disaster part of things—all they had in the way of iceberg merchandise were DVDs about the science of the crash and a plastic mold intended to make oversize iceberg-shaped ice cubes for cocktails. She handed him the free coloring page he had probably already been given at the party, and kept her eyes on him as he wandered out of the gift shop, watching until he was scooped into the arms of his bewildered-looking father, who carried him toward the stairs. Laughter rang out again from the top deck.
Lyssa slouched over the counter and looked up the pop star’s video on her phone. It was a bad week for a breakthrough: Antarctica was, in fact, melting, perhaps irreversibly; a first-tier celebrity and her famous actor husband were having a messy breakup; the president had made a blustering threat against a country with an equally blustering leader; a kid with a gun held a fast-food restaurant hostage before killing himself, some of the video of the incident had been censored and some had not, and it was hard to know how much horror you were about to see before autoplay showed it. But the pop star was radiant, larger and greener on-screen than she had seemed when Lyssa saw her from a distance, joyful where in person she had looked morose. Lyssa was only on-screen for maybe ten seconds total. There was the underwater version of where she was standing; there she was lovely and monstrous, arranging the gift shop baubles, the snow globes and deck prisms pointing toward her, casting tiny shadows, leaving the smallest spaces on her body all lit up with danger.
Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain
Two by two the animals boarded, and then all of the rest of them in the world died, but no one ever tells the story that way. Forty days and forty nights of being locked up helpless, knowing everything you’d ever known was drowning all around you, and at the end God shows up with a whimsical promise that he will not destroy the world again with water, which seems like a hell of a caveat.
Dori must find something reassuring in the story. Dori is a preschool teacher and a pastor’s daughter, and she has found a way to carry the theme of the ark and the rainbow sign across the entire three days of her wedding, which began tonight with a welcome dinner and ends Sunday afternoon with brunch and a church service where, according to the program, her father will give a sermon titled “God’s Rainbow Sign for You.” The bridesmaids’ dresses are rainbow, not individually multicolored, but ROY G. BIV ordered, and each bridesmaid appears to have been mandated to wear her assigned color all weekend; the red bridesmaid, for example, wore a red T-shirt to the airport, a red cocktail dress to dinner, and now red stilettos and a red sash reading bridesmaid for the bachelorette party. When assembled in a group, Dori’s bridesmaids look like a team of bridal Power Rangers.
Rena is not a bridesmaid but has been dragged along for the festivities thanks to the aggressive hospitality of the bridal party. She has worn black to avoid stepping on anyone’s color-assigned toes, and Dori, of course, has worn white. All night Rena has been waiting to judge Dori for the look on her face when someone spots the two of them and the rainbow bridal party and takes them for brides-to-be, but so far they have only been to bars where the bartenders greet everyone but Rena and the green bridesmaid, the other out-of-towner, by name.
There is a groom involved in this wedding, though Rena believes his involvement must be loose; she can’t imagine JT is on board with this ark business. Rena has known JT for five years. When they met, most of what they had in common was that they were Americans, but far away from home, that could be enough. JT was on his way back to the States after a Peace Corps tour in Togo; she was on her way back from Burkina Faso. The first leg of their flight home was supposed to take them to Paris, but the plane had been diverted, and then returned to Ghana after the airline received a call claiming that an agent of biological warfare had been released on the plane. They landed to chaos; no one charged with telling them what happened next seemed sure of what information was credible or who had the authority to release it. The Ghanaian authorities had placed them under a quarantine that was strictly outlined but loosely enforced. Had the threat been legitimate, it would have gifted the planet to whatever came after humans. Instead, they’d been stuck on the grounded plane for the better part of a day, then shuttled off for a stressful week at a small hotel surrounded by armed guards, something, JT pointed out, a lot of tourists pay top dollar for.
As two of the three Americans on the flight, JT and Rena had found each other. The third American was a journalist of some renown, and so even after the immediate danger was contained, the story of their detention was covered out of proportion to its relevance. Reuters picked up none of the refugee camp photos Rena spent months arranging into a photo essay but did pick up a photo she’d taken of JT in his hotel room. His face was scruffy from several days without shaving and marked with an expression that was part fatigue, part cockiness, just a hint of his upper lip peeking from atop the loosely secured paper mask he’d been assigned to wear. It ran a few months later on the cover of the Times Magazine, with the text overlay reading it’s a small world after all: america in the age of global threat.
In that December’s deluge of instant nostalgia, the photo made more than one best-of-the-year list. Rena had not lacked for freelance jobs since its publication. Aesthetically, it was not her best work, but JT, handsome, tanned, and blond, was what the public wanted as a symbol of America in the small and shrinking world, the boy-next-door on the other side of the world. Boy-next-door, Rena knew, always meant white boy next door. When America has one natural blond family left, its members will be trotted out to play every role that calls for someone all-American, to be interviewed in every time of crisis. They will be exhausted.
Rena was present in the photo, right at the edge, a shimmery and distorted sliver of herself in the mirror. Most people didn’t notice her at all. One blogger who did misidentified her as hotel staff. In her line of work, it was sometimes helpful not to be immediately identified as an American, to be, in name and appearance, ethnically ambiguous, although her actual background—Black and Polish and Lebanese—was alchemy it had taken the country of her birth to make happen.
It was clear to Rena by the second day of their detention that nobody was dying. Dori phoned daily but stopped worrying about JT’s physical well-being somewhere around day four, at which point she took a sharp interest in Rena. JT as himself had talked at length about life as an expat, mostly his life as an expat, but JT-as-Dori’s-ventriloquist-dummy wanted to know about Rena’s childhood, her future travel plans, her dating life. In some ways, Rena has Dori to thank for the fact that she and JT became close enough to sustain a friendship once the crisis was over. Rena guessed where the questions were coming from and wished that she had something to defuse the situation, to reassure Dori, but then and now, she had nothing. She had built the kind of life that belonged to her and her alone, one she could pick up and take with her as needed, and so there she was in JT’s tiny hotel room, unattached and untethered and unbothered. To a girlfriend on a different continent, she might as well have been doing the dance of the seven red flags.