Day 46

Feels like I’m supposed to start this with ‘Captain’s Log’ or something. But I’m not the captain. The Captain is not really the captain anymore—No one captain’s an object that simply floats with the tide—and she has long since given up on providing us with updates or reassuring words of sea-wisdom.

We just float.

And float.

The strange thing is that I don’t even know why I’m still writing this, or if anyone will ever read it, because everyone, and everything outside of the confines of this vessel, seem to have disappeared. This, of course, cannot be a thing that really happens—right?—so the hopeful part of me writes this assuming someone, somewhere, at some time will read it.

But the longer this goes on the less likely that seems to be. Comms are still down. Everything. Radar. Everything. None of it works. Mr. Van Morten, a retired science teacher who has been helping with trying to set up a desalination pump thinks it might have been caused by the sun. Or a cosmic flare. Something like that. But, I don’t know. Seems like someone would have found us by now.

Day 52

We’re running out of food. The cruise was supposed to last two weeks, not two months. Even with the reserves and what we’ve been able to catch, it’s not going to last much longer.

A few of us had to put a crew member into a holding cell. They apparently normally use it as a drunk tank, but it works either way. He was a machinist or something. He was trying to kill a passenger, rambling something about hoarding.

I fear it will get worse.

Day 58

The Council is talking about a lottery system. We’re debating ending people’s lives to try to preserve the remaining food. I don’t want to be a part of this, but if I lose my spot or speak out, it could put Brenda at risk. And the truth is, if I do the math… I don’t want to say it. I’m still holding out hope.

Creepy thing is, some people are talking about cannibalism . They’re saying like, “we can’t resort to” or “if we don’t do something,” as though they’re not the ones actually considering it.

I made a crude tomahawk for myself and a knife for Brenda out of stuff I found in the galley (since Council is still counting silverware after each meal). My daily prayer is that neither of us have to use them.

Day 67

There was a murder. Murders, I think, we haven’t found the McDonahues. We’re getting enough fish now, mostly, to supplement the last of our rice. But it’s not a food thing, anymore. Something else. Something primal has taken over. I don’t let Brenda out of my sight, but the longer we’re out here the more I wonder if it won’t be her doing the killing. Something has changed in her as well. I wonder, sometimes if

Day 80

The barto can be Ren for deep water. Land for the horiZOon, but not the thing because Gor came from ?t see And suN befause oeow is runnnin out. I dobt know how m

Day 0, NC

I don’t know what day it is. There is nothing about this, whatever this is, that I can say I know for sure at all. If I had to guess, I’d say we got close to maybe 100 days adrift, but again, just a guess.

We should be dead.

Many are. I’m working to catalogue that now, to record their names, even the ones that died bad—the killers and criminals and crazies that had to be eliminated. That I had to help eliminate.

I don’t want to forget that, to forget what we became in the face of slow death.

I will work to record, as well, how we came to survive, but I feel that story will need more space than I have available in this sketchbook (that I had originally intended to use for sketches, which seems so silly now).

I’ll stick to just the high-level details. I don’t know who first saw them. But when the voices called out, I assumed it was the latest in a malnutrition-based mental episode. To my surprise—to all of our surprise—it was people. Real people. Real, living people with real, tangible boats.

They looked up at us from their wooden vessels as though we were gods. A primitive tribe, the closest thing I can think of as comparison are the Vikings of old.

I don’t remember much, save for flashes, gauzy visions: Being carried, water, food, laughing children, warm fire, a dog.

I don’t understand their language, but they are kind. They feed us, provide us shelter, and seem infinitely interested in the smallest things: a key chain, a baseball cap, a dead iPhone. It’s as though we are some alien race from another planet the way they look at us.

Day 10, NC

Mr. Van Morten is sick. I don’t know if he will last much longer. (He is the one that told me to start recording our history again, and to start at Day0, our New Chapter he called it.) He has been rambling something about the spacetime continuum and some other Einstein stuff. Not anything I can understand, but he’s convinced we were saved by real Vikings.

I don’t know what they are, but I’m glad they found us. I hope to get home soon. I need to find Brenda’s mother, to tell her, I don’t know what I’m going to tell her. I’ll probably lie, but if I do, it will only be out of kindness.

[Excerpts from Nordic Triangle: The Missing Cruise Ship Papers, Penguin Collins, 1987]