by Jeff Soloway
Those long-ago familiarization cruises, while boring, had taught me a few things about cruise ships. For example, I knew that, for reasons of safety and efficiency, hallway doors are never locked. I found the little folding latch behind one of the signs, yanked at it, and slid the door open just enough for me to slip through. My mother followed. I pulled the door shut behind her.
I also knew, from studying the ship’s deck plans, that the specialty suites were farthest forward. We walked on. The hum of manual labor was all around us. In half the rooms we passed, cleaning-crew workers in blue jumpsuits were rushing to gather up buckets and brushes, like magic fairies putting the house back together before the adults woke up. Other workers were trotting through hallways, some barely missing our shins with their carts or mops. No one challenged us; no one seemed even to notice us. Important guests were expecting their rooms to be ready and important ship officials were expecting mountains more work to be done before anyone slept. The floor’s stewards, middlemen between the managers and the grunts, strode quickly by in their black polyester pants and vests, looking as intimidating as any essential mid-level tyrant, any army sergeant, factory foreman, or school vice principal. In one stateroom, a female cleaner was cowering under a steward’s comparatively hulking form. His finger was almost picking her nose. If this fairy didn’t shape up, she’d have her wings ripped off and her body tossed overboard. She glanced at us as we hurried by; the steward, luckily for everyone concerned, was too intent on his harangue to notice her distraction—or perhaps he mistook it for ordinary fear. All the workers seemed to be brown-skinned, though they could have come from any number of warm parts of the world. I wondered what they thought of the Chompians.
My mother kept her eyes fixed on the hallway ahead. If she was still thinking of Clark, she wasn’t showing it. Whenever I was disturbed or depressed, I threw myself into my work. Now she was throwing herself into my work.
At the forward end of the ship, our hallway intersected with a cross-ship passage. We rounded the corner, and there at the opposite side, a guard stood next to a half-open door. I froze. He was a white man with a gut like the underside of a wheelbarrow. He was looking sidelong down the hallway that ran to his left. I ducked back behind the corner, before he saw me but not before I heard him say, to someone inside, something like “She’s back?”
“That must be Chomp’s room,” I whispered.
“How do you know?” She somehow kept her voice low without whispering. Her usual half smile had stretched to three-quarters. She was enjoying this.
“It’s in the right place, and it’s guarded.”
“So what do we do?”
“We tell the guard we’re here to interview his boss. He’ll tell Chomp. We’ll say we had no idea it was canceled. Chomp’ll take us now that we’re here. He was just in a snit. He loves interviews.”
“But he hates writers.”
“Because he’s never met the two of us. Ready?”
“Right now?” The smile was beginning to slip.
“Sure.”
“Did you bring a notebook?”
“I’ll use my phone.”
“I’m not wearing my meet-the-POTUS clothes.”
She had put a wrap on in the Commodore’s Club lounge. Her outfit was classy yet reasonably revealing. Perfect for Chomp. “You look great.”
I stepped around the corner, prepared to be challenged by the guard—but he was just then stepping inside.
“Where’s he going?” My mother’s voice buzzed like a wasp in my ear.
“I don’t know.”
I crept closer. Why would a bodyguard leave his post? The door was left slightly ajar.
I listened at it. There was no sound within, not even the guard’s footsteps. I had a vision of Chomp lounging alone amid his trademark tchotchkes, so often described, or just namechecked, in long-form profiles: his busts of Winston Churchill and Ted Nugent, his replica Paul Revere beer mug, his crystal flask of filthy water from the Rio Grande. Underlings were said to lug these objects along in a duffel when he traveled. A photo of them, even without Chomp, would get my article an additional 50K clicks.
She’s back, the guard had said. Who was she? Instead of some kitschy icons, perhaps there was a bra dangling on the headboard, women’s shoes beside the writing desk, nail polish on the night table. Before his last marriage, Chomp had dated many gorgeous and extremely unpresidential women, several of them still legally attached to their previous lover. Hellania had by all accounts settled him down, but, at least according to the Internet, he had reverted to his horndog ways after their divorce. None of his fans seemed to mind; his supersize passions were part of his charm. Unlike the rest of us, he had the money and the guts to gratify his desires. But I remembered my mother’s more romantic theory, that Chomp had quit the presidency to protect a secret lover. Perhaps she was hidden within this room.
I put my hand to the door. It gave way slightly. I could walk right in. That would be insane. Chomp’s people were twitchy at the best of times, let alone just after their boss had incited a riot. But still, I had an appointment.
I should have had an appointment.
I could hear my mother’s faint breaths just behind me. I was a good talker, and she was even better. I had been so confident just a few moments ago. I could be so again. I could handle this.
I realized I was about to risk my life and my mother’s just to talk to this man. How do people get such power over us? The courageous thing would be to defy Chomp’s allure and walk away.
“Go back the way we came,” I whispered to my mother.
“Why?”
“I’m going in.”
I engineered an enormous smile and pushed open the door, prepared to greet with pleasure and confidence the esteemed celebrity who I was absolutely sure would be expecting me. Or the girlfriend of the esteemed celebrity. Or the bodyguard.
What I saw was the hugest room I’d ever seen in a cruise ship, a duplex not just larger than my New York City apartment (most lifeboats are larger than my apartment) but larger than my local branch library. And like the library, it too was dignified by tall stacks of picturesque but little-used books, reaching high into the suite’s second floor. The walls were polished fake timber, like the interior of a pub, but instead of soaking up the room’s quiet light and imparting a warm red-brown glow, they reflected the brilliant sunshine that blazed through floor-to-ceiling windows. The Regal Majestic Britannia’s presidential suite was a cruise ship vision of a Mayfair men’s club.
No one was inside.
A blazer was carelessly draped over a chair back, one arm hanging to the floor, like a bored kid picking at the rug. The few tchotchkes in view were British kitsch: a dart board, a ceramic bulldog, a big fake wooden tap handle jutting out from the wall like a deer antler. The only object that might have been Chomp’s—or any passenger’s—was a hulking gray hard-sided suitcase, standing upright like one of the rocks at Stonehenge.
Up a spiral staircase, I heard voices. The scent of ammonia nipped at my nostrils. Cleaners must be working on the room. They had finished downstairs and were now working on the bedrooms upstairs. Chomp had perhaps stopped by but had left so they could finish. That’s why the guard could neglect his post. Perhaps he was upstairs making sure some cleaner wasn’t planting a bomb under the bed.
Better leave now and not risk surprising him when he came back.
As I turned, my gaze swept past a mahogany (colored) desk, on which lay an open laptop and a slim stack of papers. I heard a door upstairs shut. The voices faded.
“Jacob.” My mother was still at the door, her glance shifting between me and the hallway outside.
“Go back, Mom.”
Her eyes skimmed up the staircase. “Did you hear someone?”
“Just some cleaners.”
My mother, unlike the guard, rema
ined at her post. Her presence lent me the extra courage I needed. I would have to tell her that later; I had so few opportunities to give her a sincere compliment. I went to the desk and peered at the top paper. The print was all in large type, and certain words were in boldface. It was the reading copy of a speech. My eyes scanned the first full paragraph on the page:
They tried to vote us out. They tried to shout us down. Now they want to kill us. Dream on! Today we retake what they stole. We’re here not to make a last stand but to build our best hope, and our children’s best hope, and their children’s. Who can see the future? We can. We have built a fortress in the sea. Let it be a beacon for the brave. And a big wet raspberry to all the whiny losers.
Chomp’s prepared speeches generally mixed vague proposals for half-baked policies with highly developed and specific insults aimed at individual enemies. This kind of melancholy doomsday rhetoric was new. What if it was more than just rhetoric? The “fortress in the sea” presumably referred to this ship, and the “last stand” to a kind of battle (though obviously not really a last stand, since Chomp meant to win), but whom was he planning to fight and what was he fighting for?
“Someone’s coming,” my mother whispered.
I lifted my head and listened for the voices above.
“No. From outside.”
Now I heard the footsteps outside. “Get in the bathroom.”
She humphed at the idea, but now there was a voice outside too, a man grunting, and no other place to escape to. She darted into the bathroom. Meanwhile, I plopped down on a stuffed club chair and tried to look impatient.
A man walked through the doorway. He didn’t seem to notice or mind that the door was open; he was tapping at a cellphone with one pogo-sticking index finger. He looked up, saw me, and frowned.
He was Carlton Chomp.
Many celebrities in real life seem smaller and more weathered than they do on television. You can see on their faces the lines, freckles, blemishes, and other flaws that makeup and studio lighting obscure. Not Chomp. His skin was so clear it gleamed. His body was imposing. Even his suit was imposing, partly just because he was wearing one on a cruise ship. He was thick in every body part—shoulders, gut, neck, even feet. His breaths made a kind of purring sound, like the idling of a mighty engine. His red hat was now gone, and his hair was thinner than it looked onscreen, a kind of wispy visor combed over his forehead. His small eyes were set in a permanent squint that made him look shrewd even now, when he was obviously puzzled.
This was the man who terrified and infuriated half the country and enchanted the other half. What effect should he have on me? My foreign-born friends feared him as an authoritarian xenophobe. My American-born friends scorned him as a second-rate celebrity blowhard. But so what if he was second-rate? Everyone but Shakespeare, Leonardo, and Michael Jordan was second-rate. This was a second-rater who had won the presidency. And found the position inadequate.
“Who are you?” His voice was higher pitched than I expected. He glanced down at his phone, thumped one more button—perhaps Send—and shoved it into his pocket.
“I’m Jacob Smalls. I’m reviewing the cruise. I’m here to get your statement.”
He frowned. The lines around his squinting eyes tightened into little starbursts.
“Is that in my contract?”
“Afraid so.”
“Talk to my lawyer,” Chomp said. “We’re renegotiating everything. They told us this ship was like the QE2. I call it a shithole. I’ve had better trips for free to Staten Island. Did you see Harvey? What did he tell you?”
Harvey? I tried to imagine the most advantageous thing some smarmy personal assistant might possibly have told me. It wasn’t coming. Nothing was. I envisioned my mother pressing her ear to the door to monitor my confrontation with the great ex-president and sighing at my uselessness. I had to say something. “You take the Staten Island Ferry?”
His squint, bizarrely, seemed to relax as he looked at me even more intently.
“I’ve driven the thing. You tell me something. How am I supposed to talk about the quality of the cruise, which frankly is poor to the point of shitty”—his voice dipped dangerously low, just as it did when he was about to tear apart a debate opponent, an idea I found a little flattering—“when my people have been harassed and threatened by elements of the loser counterculture outside? They’re out to kill me. You know what it’s like to be hated like that?”
“It must be glorious.”
Chomp laughed. “That’s right! Glorious. My second wife used to tell me I’m too sensitive, which is true even if she did say it to undermine my confidence at certain special moments. It failed to work, believe me! Yeah, I faced down those dead-enders outside. I even made half of them love me. Most of them do, eventually, except the animals and the psychopaths and the terrorists. Don’t write that. We’ll tell you what to write. Who’s upstairs? Is that Harvey upstairs?”
I could hear the voices once again jabbering above us.
“Just the cleaners,” I said.
“Still? I thought we took care of that. Where’s Harvey?” He leaned forward, squinting again, but now he looked less dangerous and more nearsighted.
“I don’t know. Not here.”
“But you’re here.” He skewered the air with his texting finger. As a debater, Chomp relied on zingers and rhetorical momentum, as opposed to logic. His strategy was obviously effective on television, but now I saw it was just as effective in personal conversations, where there’s no tape and no transcript, just a sense that you’re either winning or losing. Chomp could always convince himself he was winning. He would not, I vowed, convince me. “And I know why,” he added.
To kill you, I almost said, solely to get his reaction; but I realized the reaction might well be a shout that summoned a man who shot me in the face. “I’m here to talk to you,” I said. Best to avoid the loaded word interview. “Maybe we could start with—”
“That’s not why you’re here.”
He stepped closer, leading with his finger.
“Why do you think I’m here?” I asked.
“Same reason we all come. Every one of us. Say it.”
I looked down the length of his finger to his right hand. The skin there, unlike his face, exposed its age with lines and spots, the scars not of war but of time. Those flaws showed his power. He could overcome anything, even the years.
Upstairs, the voices rose again. Chomp ignored them.
“Say it,” he repeated.
But before I could think of a response, he stepped back and smirked. Self-satisfaction seemed to squirt out the sides of his mouth. “You came here to get laid.”
“In your room?”
The shouting upstairs transformed, bizarrely, into unpleasant laughter. I almost looked up.
“Not here in this room, asshole. Here on this ship. Don’t think I don’t know.”
“Ah,” I said, and added, in the sort of philosophical tone I hoped a statesman would appreciate, “People come from all over the world to get laid on a boat.”
“Are you kidding me? I’d rather get laid on a bus. A London-style double-decker, top floor, tinted windows, cruising through Times Square in the traffic-free bus lane. Which I have done, believe me! With a lady of absolutely the highest class, ninety-eighth percentile in international competition. You don’t want the winners, trust me, the arrogance there is just tremendous. You have to be careful on a bus. Some of those New York City potholes’ll put your back right out if you catch them at the wrong point in your backswing. That’s why I only hire the very finest drivers. On a bus, my friend, you don’t get seasick. Nevertheless, a cruise ship has its advantages, namely the staff. A young man like yourself cannot fail to have noticed the primo opportunities, even on a shithole like this one. Some of those cruise director gals are like Colombian supermodels but without the att
itude.”
Was he joking or an idiot? Older men in the presence of younger will often wax nostalgic about their sexual youth, but surely Chomp had no need for nostalgia. He could get laid whenever he wanted. Why not just devote his whole life to sex? Surely that would be less laborious and more rewarding than political domination. Maybe getting lucky was so easy he felt he needed another occupation to keep sharp.
I wondered what my mother was making of this turn in our conversation.
Chomp’s smirk was now expectant. Perhaps he was waiting for my reaction. I tried to collect my thoughts, but he was already fidgeting. He pulled out his phone, held it farsightedly low against his hip, where I could easily see it, and pounded home the passcode while I watched: 110816. The date of his election. What a moron.
He nodded at some text and jammed the thing back in his pocket.
“Checking the likes on the last tweet?” I asked.
“Ha! My ratios are extremely favorable, don’t worry about that. No, I am continually instructing my team, which I call the Moron Brigade. Top people, but tend to get full of themselves. Laid on a boat! You know the best place to get laid?”
“The White House?”
“Fat chance. Every room’s a gallery of dead guys. You want Abraham Lincoln gawking at your lady’s assets? You think she wants that? Believe me, though I loved having Andy Jackson winking at me while I swindled some banana republic PM in a trade deal, I also discovered that undressed women dislike getting stared at by old guys. I mean in paintings. Where the fuck is Harvey? He’d kill me for talking to you. No, he’d only joke about killing me. The guy he’d really kill is you. I take security very seriously, which I have to, because I’m in incredible danger pretty much always. What I say is, you get afraid or you get laid. Make your choice. We’ve got maybe thirty, forty years of power in this life, maybe ten or twenty more if you’re rich, like those guys in the Senate. They get action well into their eighties.”
A barked command upstairs—and then a new voice, quick and high, and soon silenced. A woman’s.
