That winter, a small cruise ship disappeared in the South Pacific. A meteorologist in New Zealand received a satellite phone call at two in the morning from an unidentified woman, who stated that the ship was in bad weather, gave their coordinates, and asked where they should navigate in order to move away from the storm. The meteorologist, who was covering the night shift, told the woman to call back in thirty minutes, by which time he would have studied the forecast and would be able to advise her.
The woman never called back. Following protocol, the meteorologist raised the alarm. Rescuers initiated a radio search, attempting to contact the boat and the mysterious woman who had placed the initial call, and whose number the meteorologist and rescuers continued to ring in the hours that followed—the phone was not dead, it simply went unanswered. Rescuers then began contacting other boats and ships in the area to ask if they had spotted a vessel in distress, or indeed any vessel at all.
A military plane was next dispatched to survey the area from which the call was believed to have originated. This took place some thirty-six hours after the initial call was made—a communication that was not necessarily a distress call, more a cautionary query, an indication of distress that might yet come—but time at sea is slower than it is elsewhere, on land and in air. The designated area was immense, working from the coordinates given in the initial call, it had a radius of over one thousand nautical miles. For many hours, the plane scanned the pocked and dappled surface of the ocean, but found nothing.
A week passed. Two hundred and thirty-two people were on board the ship, including the captain and crew. The immediate families of the missing persons were flown to Australia during this anxious week of waiting, and remained there—they were put up in an expensive hotel by the cruise company, a small ship corporation that specialized in luxury voyages through the South Pacific—as if geographical proximity might somehow lessen the strain of their anxiety. It was true that many of them were from Europe, in traveling to Australia they traveled twenty hours closer to embracing their loved ones, once they were found and returned to land.
As the search widened—several national governments were now involved, the story was getting a great deal of play in England, the cruise ship company, whose boats boasted spacious cabins and an excellent passenger-to-crew ratio, was popular with retired couples—the families began to tire of their extended stay in Cairns. Among other amenities, the five-star hotel provided bay and marina views. The sight of the water, however, was hardly soothing. Before long, the luxury served only to remind the families of the fact that they were not at home but in limbo, a state of waiting.
In reality, those weeks were merely an introduction to the months and then years that would follow, during which—even as the search tapered off, and the insurance companies began preparing enormous settlements for the families of the missing passengers and crew—there was no news of the ship, and those on board were neither dead nor alive but simply missing. In the numerous interviews that the families gave (these too petered out, at first the media could not get enough of the story, journalists hounding the families for comment, but then they suddenly lost interest, it was often the case) they spoke about the difficulty of grieving, when they did not know whether they should live in hope or, as one of them put it, move on.
One of the reasons why it was so difficult to do this moving on was because of the vastly improbable nature of the ship’s disappearance, it was small as far as cruise ships go but large as an object to go missing in this day and age, especially when it had been outfitted with the most current technology and multiple redundant safety features. There was no ready explanation, in fact there had been no actual report of bad weather—which made the phone call from the unidentified female all the more baffling—and no wreckage or debris was ever discovered. The ship had simply vanished without trace.
There were many theories regarding the disappearance of the ship, ranging from environmental disaster (the ship had literally been swallowed by the sea) to geopolitics (the ship had been hijacked by terrorists). One of the more popular theories that circulated during this time held that the passengers aboard the ship had conspired with the crew to orchestrate their own disappearances. They purchased their tickets, they bid farewell to their families, and then vanished into thin air, central to this theory was the fact that the ship’s itinerary included such remote and exotic locales as the island of Vanuatu (known for its natural beauty and its native inhabitants’ worship of Prince Philip) and the Solomon Islands.