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  She drove home to her mother, who had been waiting at the house all night with a bowl of candy that remained mostly uneaten. There used to be trick-or-treaters in their neighborhood, but since a few years back they had gotten only the few stray kids who didn’t have a ride to the part of town with more expensive houses. Lyssa’s mother insisted on overbuying anyway. The two of them sat at the table and split the leftover candy, sorted it into piles, sweet things from sweet-and-sour things, while Lyssa made fun of the party, the Halloween crowd, her own lackluster costume effort.

  When she saw Travis again, back at his bar, it was almost a month later. She recognized his face but couldn’t place it.

  “How’s your pirate?” he asked, and the night came back to her.

  “Out to sea,” she said.

  Travis poured her a free beer. It was Thursday, and football season, so she had to compete for his attention with the television behind him. Lyssa had grown up without a team—her mother didn’t believe in televised sports and there was no one else in the house to put them on, so Lyssa’s one allegiance was to a college basketball team an ex had played for—but Travis’s loyalties were evident from the jersey he wore. She adopted his team for the game, shouted at the screen at the appropriate times, marveled at the magic of sports: how easy it was to become invested, how picking one team over the other was enough to make things interesting, just a matter of making a choice. When Lyssa showed up for Travis’s Super Bowl party a few months later, she was wearing a team shirt she’d ordered online toward the end of playoffs and had owned for only weeks, but both her fandom and their relationship felt true and legitimate, rich, even after their team lost, with the discovery that sometimes all it took to become something was to want it. The wanting felt like joy, but the joy was there because she’d assigned it to herself, and she didn’t fully trust it. Certainly, the trick to everything couldn’t be that cheap.

  By the time her mother was first admitted to the hospital, the joy had started to feel like effort and Lyssa was working up the nerve to break things off, but Travis showed up in the lobby with flowers and a teddy bear, so it was too late then. Closer to the end, her mother ran out of the only painkiller that worked and Lyssa had to go to work. Travis offered to pick up the medicine and bring it by the house. Lyssa picked her mother’s medicine up from the pharmacy all the time, and she never showed her mother’s ID and rarely got asked for her own, but Travis was a man and a good three shades darker than she was. The pharmacist accused him of having a fake ID and asked him to come back with two other forms of ID and the patient. The patient was recovering from surgery. The patient could not get out of bed. The pharmacist said the patient’s ID would not suffice. Travis argued, then he tried to call the doctor, then he cried. He was not a man who cried, but he had seen the condition he’d left her mother in.

  The pharmacist called security and security asked him to leave. When he didn’t, because Lyssa was still at work and her mother still needed the medicine, the two security guards pinned him to the ground, pressing him into the dirty red carpet and twisting his arm behind him hard enough that his shoulder was strained for days. It was only because just then the manager who knew who her mom was and had seen Travis with her before came back from her lunch break and asked what was going on that the cops didn’t get called. Travis didn’t tell Lyssa any of it happened. He said he’d hurt his shoulder lifting a keg. Lyssa only heard about it because the manager apologized to her the next time she went to fill a prescription. It had taken her a minute to even understand what she was being told, to gather that when the manager said, I’m so sorry, she didn’t mean about everything Lyssa already knew was happening to her.

  She called Travis from the parking lot and asked why he hadn’t said anything. He said she had enough to deal with. Lyssa asked if he was OK, which felt stupid—it had been weeks already, and she knew for herself that his shoulder was better, had watched him, limber and shirtless, play in a pickup game just that weekend, though of course that wasn’t exactly what she was asking, and anyway, he said he was fine. Later, when she told him what the doctor said, she half hoped he’d say, Well, if it has to be tomorrow, we have a baby tomorrow, but he just listened quietly and said, “If that’s what you have to do to be healthy, that’s what you have to do.”

  “That’s sweet,” her cousin said, when she tried to explain. “He wants you alive more than he wants you knocked up. Could be the other way around.”

  Lyssa was unsatisfied with these being her only options. She told Travis she was going to go through with it, then finally broke up with him. Lyssa went back to the doctor one more time to tell him no to the surgery for now, but she promised to come back and let them monitor her risk levels. So far, she had found a reason not to be at every scheduled follow-up and blood draw. Lyssa couldn’t remember walking around without suspecting that something inside of her wanted her dead. What future had there ever been but the imaginary?

  * * *

  —

  She was still not getting any younger. Maybe she wasn’t getting much older either. In the dim hotel light, Lyssa noticed a green smudge she’d missed on her arm. The director was still talking to her, more interested than she was in being awake. She rubbed at the spot on her arm while he spooned her. She asked if it was true the pop star felt like a monster when she came up with the video concept.

  “Who knows how she feels?” he said. “But she didn’t come up with the concept.”

  “You did?”

  “Her manager did. He’s also the one who told the press her ex thought she looked like a monster. He thought she needed something to spark her. I was skeptical, but she was actually fucking magnificent today. It worked.”

  “For you,” Lyssa said.

  “We’ll see.” He breathed into her neck until he fell asleep.

  In the morning, the director ordered them room service breakfast and, after eating, went off to wrap things up at the shoot. Lyssa lounged around in the bathrobe and watched the hotel cable until it was late enough that she was worried the director might be back soon. The next day, work was closed for a deep cleaning, paid for by the pop star’s people, though for months they kept finding glitter everywhere anyway. The children at birthday parties were mostly delighted, the wedding guests less so.

  * * *

  —

  The day the pop star’s video launched there was a birthday party on the top deck, and Mackenzie was upstairs corralling a dozen tiny princesses. After declining for weeks, Lyssa had gone with Mackenzie and her friends to happy hour the night before, back to Travis’s bar, where she had seen him with a new girl, felt a warmth for him as she’d watched him teach the girl how the bar’s old pinball machine worked, steadying her hands at the flippers. Now she felt tender and hungover. Mackenzie laughed from upstairs. A wayward child—one of the princesses’ brothers, wearing one of the paper captain hats they gave boys under six—wandered into the gift shop. He picked up a plastic replica of the replica and looked up at her with wide blue eyes. The hat tilted sideways on his head.

  “Do you know this boat sank?” he asked.

  “I do,” Lyssa said. “Where are your parents?”

  “If I’d been there, I would have fought that iceberg. I wish I could find that iceberg and kick its ass.”

  “Well, it turns out we’ve been fighting the ice for a long time now, and the ice is definitely losing,” Lyssa said. “If you go back in time, you can tell the iceberg Antarctica is already melting and doesn’t know it yet.”

  “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 s
hop, 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.

  Dori is simple but she is not stupid, and since arriving in town for the wedding, Rena has wanted to level with her, but Dori will not give her the chance. Dori greeted her warmly and apologized extravagantly for JT’s failure to ask her to take the wedding photos; Rena can’t tell if Dori is being passive-aggressive or really doesn’t know the difference between wedding photography and photojournalism. Dori has left aggressive-aggressive to the yellow bridesmaid, who materializes to interrupt every time Rena finds herself in private conversation with JT. Dori has negotiated her anxiety with perfect composure, but Dori has not womaned up and simply said to Rena, Did you ever fuck my fiancé, in which case Rena would have told her no.

  What had actually happened was that Rena and JT spent most of the hotel days playing a game called Worst Proverb, though they could never agree on the exact terms, and so neither of them ever won. JT believed the point of the game was to come up with the worst-case scenario for following proverbial advice. Over the course of the week, he offered a dozen different hypotheticals in which you only regret the things you don’t do and if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again came to a spectacularly bad end. Rena thought the point of the game was to identify the proverb that was the worst of all possible proverbs, and make a c
ase for its failure. She’d run through a number of contenders before deciding on In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The land of the blind would be built for the blind; there would be no expectation among its citizens that the world should be other than what it was. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man would adjust, or otherwise be deemed a lunatic or a heretic. The one-eyed man would spend his life learning to translate what experience was his alone, or else he would learn to shut up about it.

  * * *

  —

  The fourth bar on the bachelorette party tour is dim and smells of ammonia. The bridal party sits around a wobbly wooden table playing bachelorette bingo, a hot-pink mutant hybrid of bingo and truth or dare—or, the bridal party minus the bridesmaid in blue sits. The blue bridesmaid is holding the bra she has unclasped and pulled from her tank top, and is striding across the bar to deposit it atop the table of a group of strangers at a booth against the far wall. She is two squares away from winning this round of bridal bingo, and this is one of the tasks between her and victory. The prize for winning bridal bingo is that the person with the fewest bingo squares x-ed out has to buy the winner’s next drink. The winner never actually needs another drink. Rena has bought four winners drinks already tonight, but everyone is being polite about her lack of effort.

  Dori is seated across from Rena and is, in infinitesimal increments, sliding her chair closer to the wall behind her, as if she can get close enough to merge with it and become some lovely, blushing painting looking over the spectacle. Dori claims to have been drinking champagne all night, which has required that she bring her own champagne bottle into several bars that don’t serve anything but beer and well liquor, but for hours the champagne bottle has been stashed in her oversize purse, and Rena has seen her pouring ginger ale into a champagne flute. When Dori last ordered a round of drinks, Rena heard her at the bar, making sure some of the drinks were straight Coke or tonic water, for friends who were past their limits. Because Dori is the prettiest of all of her friends, Rena assumed she was the group’s ringleader, but now she can see that this is not true. Dori is the caretaker. Dori turns to Rena, keeping one eye on her friend striding across the bar with the dangling lingerie.