The Thirteenth Day

It's March 2020, and the Beryl Empress is setting sail from a harbor in Japan, carrying hundreds of passengers on a luxury cruise including a man from Wuhan. What follows is a vacation none of them will soon forget. A new Short Story for our times from an American Master.

- By T.C. Boyle. Photographs by Ben Alsop

The ship was monumental, like Atlantis risen from the depths, its own island, its own nation, a miracle of every kind of human labor and ingenuity. Even the sea was impressed. The waters calmed to make way for it and when it slashed across the horizon, the pelagic creatures appeared in their slippery legions to disport themselves in its wake. Dolphins rocketed alongside. Sea lions barked. Whales bobbed up like corks to salute its monumentality, then dove deep to escape the crushing impact of its bow. In port-and it was in port now, indefinitely-its vast hull attracted the attentions of mollusks and crustaceans and its decks the loose-boweled gulls whose excreta would have buried them knee-deep but for the unceasing attention of the ship's crew. Can you say Yokohama? I can. Yokohama. There, see?