by Adam Haslett
I guess the lesson is, wherever you go, life follows you there, hunts you down, and abducts you (just kidding). We’re only two days from landfall in England, where Mom can be transferred to a tertiary-care facility. And on the last night of the crossing Donna Summer is performing again!
Come visit us soon!
Yours,
Michael
September 7
Dear Aunt Penny,
I was expecting to be writing to you from England by now but it turns out our trip has been extended. Dad, as you know, is a bargain wizard, a master at traveling in style for a fraction of the going rate. But this time he’s really outdone himself. About a week ago, scanning the horizon with my binoculars for the tip of Cornwall, I saw a bunch of islands off the port side, which in due course I was able to identify as the Azores. This certainly explained the “heat wave”! For days, passengers had been complaining about sunburn and doffing their evening cruising jackets like hookers. Everything got damp and no one felt like moving. The crew was initially circumspect, saying only that we could look forward to a big surprise. But by the time we had dropped anchor somewhere in the Gulf of Guinea, people wanted an explanation. The captain came on the PA and said that every once in a while Cunard tacks on a tropical excursion as a way of thanking their loyal customers. There would be no extra charge, he said, and free champagne.
At least for those still on the ship. It turns out Alec’s brush with that syndicate down on 3 is only the tip of the iceberg. At first, it just seemed like fewer people were coming to dinner, and we figured the heat had sapped their appetite. It made sense that the oldsters would keep showing up owing to their greater sense of form. As far as the tropical excursion went, we basically just sat parked in the baking sun. So the whole marketing angle got bogus in a hurry. I’ve been going down to the rec room every morning after breakfast to play video games, and two days after we’d dropped anchor, when I swung the door open I saw something peculiar: a row of naked guys in their teens and twenties lined up against one wall, with their wrists bound. At a stretch, I suppose it could have been some kind of gay event that they hadn’t put on the public schedule. That might even have explained the two crew members wiping their bodies down with baby oil. But if this was some kind of affinity group, why were so many of them crying? I was too embarrassed to tell anyone about it, especially Dad, so I just stopped going to the rec room.
But what really set off alarms for most people was seeing that first lifeboat head for the coast loaded with naked men yoked at the neck. That, I think, was the proverbial “wake-up call.” Turns out this puppy is a full-on white slaver! And quite a cargo it has.
Being late to Southampton was one thing. But there seemed no excuse for this. And the captain’s explanation—that the shipping company had a contract with the U.S. government to deliver extradited criminals to Gabon—struck many of us as thin. Just how many people did the U.S. regularly extradite to Gabon? And even if they were criminals, didn’t they at least deserve some protection from the sun? At our table, the Milfords said they were going to ask for a complete refund (including taxes and fees) and were considering circulating a petition. Sally Milford says Cunard has gone seriously downhill. And of course Mom is disappointed, not only that she’s still in traction, but also that our experience of an Atlantic crossing has been so different from her own earlier trips, of which she has such fond memories. I’ve seen Dad get high-handed with plenty of hotel employees, but this time he really went off on the purser, who was the highest-ranking officer he could reach. He told him he knew a member of Cunard’s board of directors (not true) and that those responsible for exposing passengers to this ugly business would be held to full account.
But let’s face it—those were the salad days. We were still getting three meals and dessert. Our waiter, Lorenzo, was still putting a flower on Celia’s cake plate every evening and the whole waitstaff sang their nightly happy birthdays and anniversaries. At least until half the diners had contracted dengue fever! Mom got kicked out of the sick bay like a two-bit malingerer to make room for that afflicted horde. But what really stank, literally, is that the ship’s sewage system got backed up—something about a broken pump—which meant we couldn’t flush the toilets anymore. They said they would send crew members around to slop them out at least once a day, but like a lot of their representations, this proved false.
Those lifeboats leave every few hours now packed with butt-naked passengers slickened up like competition weight lifters, chained from neck to toe, and they come back empty. Celia thinks the larger ones are being sold for blubber, while the fitter ones are likely to enter the agrarian sector or be traded on into the interior for other goods. She said she read about it in National Geographic. I told her that was impossible, that whatever was taking place here must be part of an underground economy. But she said no, she’d definitely read about it, and that the most common fear was cannibalism but that this was a racist stereotype. At worst, people’s fat was harvested for fuel, not food. Which was probably why none of us had been taken yet because we were too thin.
The truth is, I think Mom’s really pissed. Which always makes me nervous. I want to find a way to calm her down but sometimes she just gets in a state and there’s nothing I can do to end it. It’s scary.
Of course, she’s not the only one. The Milfords are fit to be tied. If I sign that petition of theirs calling for the captain to resign one more time I’m going to be had up for fraud. It’s all they talk about at dinner. They strike me as the kind of overwrought liberals who are glad for the opportunity to finally be outraged at something actually happening to them. I guess some people just want to drag you down with their obsessions so they don’t feel so isolated with them. But is that really the adult thing to do?
We’ve certainly gotten to know couples in the neighboring cabins better than we might have otherwise, like Jim and Marsha Pottes from Harrisburg. Jim says our situation reminds him of the Battle of the Bulge, though Marsha says everything reminds him of the Battle of the Bulge, and what does that have to do with slavery anyway? I like her. She’s always got an ice bucket of Lipton tea going, and she wears these one-piece jumpsuits that she doesn’t even realize would probably get her into Studio 54 if she rode in on a gazelle. But mention the Milfords to Jim and Marsha and they just roll their eyes. Sure, lashing Sally to a bench on the sundeck yesterday and horsewhipping her until she bled from her flank and then leaving her there, exposed to the sun, was harsher than necessary. But Jim’s point was that Sally’s not about to be rowed to the coast and sold, and so maybe she ought to just butt out now and then. Rome wasn’t built in a day (he says that all the time, too).
Suffice it to say, between one thing and another, the social atmosphere on the ship has taken a hit. I see fewer people shopping in the jewelry store or getting their portraits taken, and I think some of the couples who got hitched on the crossing are wishing they’d just gone ahead with land-based weddings.
I have to run, though. Time for this new daily group-exercise thing that the captain has us doing. More soon, I promise.
Yours,
Michael
September 19
Dear Aunt Penny,
This trip bites! Now Mom’s got that Marburg virus, the same one you were obsessed with last year! She’s doing her best to stop the bleeding, but man is it a DRAG. Our situation is getting ridiculous. It seems that we’ll be parked here until virtually everyone has been auctioned off. And it’s not just the lifeboats now, either. Canoes, Boston whalers, a whole slew of small craft show up and barter with the crew, taking passengers right off the port-side service entrance. There are at least three other cruise liners anchored near us doing the same thing. Weird, right?
A few days ago a bunch of people just began to say, “Fuck it,” and started jumping off the ship. The Potteses’ tablemate Jill Sinclair jumped after her husband kicked it with the dengue (the ship doesn’t have a morgue so it’s all burial at sea, though I have to say the cer
emonies have been getting progressively less elaborate). According to her husband, Mrs. Sinclair used to be a decent swimmer. Though apparently not good enough to outrun a shark herd. It was a full-on nature special. That gave some folks pause, though not everyone. It’s gotten to the point where the captain felt it necessary to order the crew to put up nets all around the edges of the ship, to prevent people calling it quits. I suppose it’s a public-health intervention of sorts, but I have to say it doesn’t offer much comfort.
To my shock, Celia has actually stopped reading about the Brontës, so she’s more available now, but still it’s getting pretty grueling. And she’s right: cannibalism is the biggest fear, followed by what are presumably less-than-ideal labor conditions in Angolan mines. Lots of people are saying it must be one of those African famines that has made this business a runner, but that’s just ignorant because the famines are usually in Ethiopia, and I don’t see how white tourists could be cheaper than rice. Truth be told, there’s not a lot of blubber left on these cruisers. Between the dysentery and whatever slop they’re buying in off the coast to feed us, they should advertise the trip as a weight-loss clinic. Alec is back down to twenty-three pounds, which has Mom out of her mind with worry. I just try to remind her that she needs to focus on her own bleeding. Alec will fatten up in no time once we get to England.
I told you about the mandatory exercise, right? I’m guessing it’s not Donna Summer’s favorite contract clause, singing some of her finest work to the remaining five hundred passengers crammed onto the stern pool area while the crew shouts through bullhorns for all of us to dance. And yet she brings to these performances something remarkable. I’d give my front teeth for a recording of yesterday’s rendition of “On the Radio.” Its opening piano and strings have always hovered between LA session-music schmaltz and the prelude to a tragedy, only to be redeemed by the purity of her voice in that first verse. But yesterday she reached higher still, a longing as clean as elation. Someone found the letter you wrote me on the radio / And they told the world just how you felt…By the time the beat came in, I could have sworn I saw tears in her eyes. Her makeup was running, like the mascara on many of the ladies in front of her, who still put their faces on each morning even though their clothes and luggage have been confiscated. They’re not the best dancers and can be quite lethargic, but yesterday I saw many of them close their eyes and begin moving their hips in time not to the drum machine but to the rhythm of her words.
When she reached the middle verse, that pool deck might as well have been the Paradise Garage at two a.m. on a Sunday, minus the gay and black people. She had that crowd of sun-charred crackers dancing like jackrabbits. They tripped on their chains but just got right back up again.
After this morning’s session (“Dim All the Lights” and “Bad Girls” followed by a “MacArthur Park” that left even the weary crew in tears) I passed a suite on 9 whose door had been left ajar, and there Donna was, kneeling at the foot of the bed, praying. I was more ashamed than ever to be dressed in nothing but my underpants. At any moment, her bodyguard would return from his toilet break and hustle me off. Still, something about the image of her at prayer arrested me and I couldn’t help watching.
At this late date, I suppose there’s no reason not to tell you that I have in fact (forgive the confession) “pleasured” myself a number of times to “Love to Love You Baby,” and not only to the drum track, but also to visions more particular to the artist herself. Apparently, she’s always considered herself plain and been highly self-conscious concerning her physical appearance. When I read that I felt closer to her, if only because I’m the same way. As I was peering at her through the slit in the door, Giorgio Moroder opened it wide and started at the sight of me. “Buzz off,” he said in an Italian accent. I didn’t think. I just reacted. “You’re the greatest producer of our age,” I said.
This took him aback, and for a moment he didn’t seem to know how to respond. He too had been shackled in leg irons. His striped linen pants were soiled and ragged. He asked me how much of his early, solo work I knew. All of it, I told him. That’s Bubblegum, That’s Giorgio (Hansa, 1969). Not exactly a seminal bubblegum album, but that’s not the point. Somewhere in there he was hearing what would lead him to the Moog synthesizer and the revolution in the sound of modern life, to a music that mirrors to an almost frightening degree the frictionless surface of commercial culture, but reminds us that it’s still human beings who are condemned to live in it, caught in the undertow of its melancholy. And so his first work, I told him in all honesty, is interesting in the way Picasso’s early academic realism might be to an art historian. He handed me a towel to cover myself and invited me into their suite.
He shut the bedroom door to give Donna her privacy and then told me this gig was like nothing they’d ever done before. “Bullshit,” he called it. He’s been bribing an officer to send telegrams to everyone in LA he can think of to try to get them airlifted out of here, but he suspects the messages are never sent. Donna apparently has a heart condition which is acting up. She was supposed to be in the studio five days ago, and her voice is at the breaking point. We talked a bit about Munich in the mid-seventies, the dilemma about whether to sign with Geffen, and how Donna wanted to move toward more of a rock sound on her next album. I wanted to tell him that they couldn’t control what they’d started, that the beats would only get faster and the synth more gorgeous, but this seemed presumptuous. I was worried the door might open and Donna might appear and I would be ugly and dumbstruck. So eventually I excused myself, and hustled back down to our cabins on 5.
To be honest, Aunt Penny, I’m not sure what will become of us now. We thought it was bad when Dad got shackled to Jim Pottes two days ago, making sleeping awkward for everyone, and then Dad woke up with Jim’s corpse locked to his ankle and wrist, dead with the Marburg that Mom presumably gave him. We lost half the morning cleaning up all that blood and mucus (except that little fidget-creature, Alec, who said he had a headache). I’d planned to do so much reading on this trip, and have got to practically none of it. In any case, at the rate the crew’s expiring I guess they’ll need someone to sail this puppy north again, so maybe I’ll have a chance to catch up then.
In the meantime, be well, and know that while this move of ours has turned into a major bore, the five of us have our eyes fixed on one another like cement. Someday soon you’ll come visit us in England at our new house and we’ll all have a good laugh about the crazy turns life can take.
Yours,
Michael
Alec
The downstairs bathroom had a cork floor and one of those strange electric towel racks. There was a bathtub but no shower. To flush you had to pull a chain hanging from a water tank up the wall. The sink was high and tiny. But no one could see you in the bathroom, it had no window, which made it safe. And it was warm, too, unlike every other room in the house, and brightly lit.
I sat on the toilet until my legs went numb, but still nothing came out. Being there that long, my legs tingling, it was as if I had the power to see through the door, out into the front hall, and onto the driveway and the little lane that Michael called twee-to-beat-the-band, and beyond that through the other houses to the center of the village we’d been living in almost two school years already, into the weird English food stores, the butcher and the greengrocer, and the newsagent. Sundays were the only times I got to wear long pants here, because it was the only day I didn’t have to go to school, and long pants were for the upper-form boys, the ones with pubic hair.
The lined gray wool of my trousers lay crumpled around my ankles. When the numbness started to hurt, I got up from the toilet and stepped out of them. All I had on now was Michael’s silky white shirt, which felt like someone touching me. I unbuttoned it and let that slink to the floor, too. I put the footstool in front of the sink and climbed up to look at my bare self in the mirror, and then I leaned forward and flapped my penis up against the glass.
Have a good look then,
you little wanker, Linsbourne had said in the showers after games. I’d been staring at his without knowing it. Everyone looked at me, and I looked down at the gray soapy water puddling by the drain.
But here with the door locked no one could see me bobbing my penis up and down with the handle of my toothbrush, or running naked in circles around the bath mat. I touched my bare legs to the curves of the towel rack, and the radiator, which burned, and my stomach to the knob of the linen closet. Then I got bored and went over to the door.
I took the knob of the sliding-bolt lock between my thumb and finger. The lock was stiff and hard to use. Mom kept saying that. You had to press it until your fingers hurt. She kept telling Dad to fix it. I pressed hard enough to feel the little pain on the pad of my thumb. But not enough to shift it open. Which excited me again. One hard push and they could open this up and discover I was naked.
I knocked on the door. Then I stood very still, and listened, not breathing. Nothing happened. I knocked again, more loudly. I heard footsteps. Mom coming into the front hall.
“Who’s in there?”
“It’s me. The lock’s stuck. I can’t get it open.”
“Just push it a little harder.”
I pressed the knob again, enough to feel the prick of the little pain.
“It’s too tight,” I said. “It won’t move.”
“Well, then find something to push it with. The handle of the plunger or something.”
I did as I was told, crossing the room, naked, getting the plunger, and scraping the wood of it against the metal loud enough for her to hear.
“It won’t go,” I said.
“What’s the matter?” Celia asked, coming down the stairs.
“He can’t get the lock open.”
“Why, because he’s too weak?”
