A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

by David Foster Wallace

  But it’s my experience with the cabin cleaning that’s maybe the ultimate example of stress from a pampering so extravagant that it messes with your head. Searing crush or no, the fact of the matter is I rarely even see 1009’s cabin steward, the diaphanous and epicanthically doe-eyed Petra. But I have good reason to believe she sees me. Because every time I leave 1009 for more than like half an hour, when I get back it’s totally cleaned and dusted down again and the towels replaced and the bathroom agleam. Don’t get me wrong: in a way it’s great. I am kind of a slob, and I’m in Cabin 1009 a lot, and I also come and go a lot, 55 and when I’m in here in 1009 I sit in bed and write in bed while eating fruit and generally mess up the bed. But then whenever I dart out and then come back, the bed is freshly made up and hospital-cornered and there’s another mint-centered chocolate on the pillow. 56

  I fully grant that mysterious invisible room-cleaning is in a way great, every true slob’s fantasy, somebody materializing and deslobbing your room and then dematerializing—like having a mom without the guilt. But there is also, I think, a creeping guilt here, a deep accretive uneasiness, a discomfort that presents—at least in my own case—as a weird kind of pampering-paranoia.

  Because after a couple days of this fabulous invisible room-cleaning, I start to wonder how exactly Petra knows when I’m in 1009 and when I’m not. It’s now that it occurs to me how rarely I ever see her. For a while I try experiments like all of a sudden darting out into the 10-Port hallway to see if I can see Petra hunched somewhere keeping track of who is decabining, and I scour the whole hallway-and-ceiling area for evidence of some kind of camera or monitor tracking movements outside the cabin doors—zilch on both fronts. But then I realize that the mystery’s even more complex and unsettling than I’d first thought, because my cabin gets cleaned always and only during intervals where I’m gone more than half an hour. When I go out, how can Petra or her supervisors possibly know how long I’m going to be gone? I try leaving 1009 a couple times and then dashing back after 10 or 15 minutes to see whether I can catch Petra in delicto, but she’s never there. I try making a truly unholy mess in 1009 and then leaving and hiding somewhere on a lower deck and then dashing back after exactly 29 minutes—and again when I come bursting through the door there’s no Petra and no cleaning. Then I leave the cabin with exactly the same expression and appurtenances as before and this time stay hidden for 31 minutes and then haul ass back—and this time again no sighting of Petra, but now 1009 is sterilized and gleaming and there’s a mint on the pillow’s fresh new case. Know that I carefully scrutinize every inch of every surface I pass as I circle the deck during these little experiments—no cameras or motion sensors or anything in evidence anywhere that would explain how They know. 57 So now for a while I theorize that somehow a special crewman is assigned to each passenger and follows that passenger at all times, using extremely sophisticated techniques of personal surveillance and reporting the passenger’s movements and activities and projected time of cabin-return back to Steward HQ or something, and so for about a day I try taking extreme evasive actions—whirling suddenly to check behind me, popping around corners, darting in and out of Gift Shops via different doors, etc.—never one sign of anybody engaged in surveillance. I never develop even a plausible theory about how They do it. By the time I quit trying, I’m feeling half-crazed, and my counter-surveillance measures are drawing frightened looks and even some temple-tapping from 10-Port’s other guests.

  I submit that there’s something deeply mind-fucking about the Type-A-personality service and pampering on the Nadir, and that the manic invisible cabin-cleaning provides the clearest example of what’s creepy about it. Because, deep down, it’s not really like having a mom. Pace the guilt and nagging, etc., a mom cleans up after you largely because she loves you—you are the point, the object of the cleaning somehow. On the Nadir, though, once the novelty and convenience have worn off, I begin to see that the phenomenal cleaning really has nothing to do with me. (It’s been particularly traumatic for me to realize that Petra is cleaning Cabin 1009 so phenomenally well simply because she’s under orders to do so, and thus (obviously) that she’s not doing it for me or because she likes me or thinks I’m No Problem or A Funny Thing—in fact she’d clean my cabin just as phenomenally well even if I were a dork—and maybe conceivably behind the smile does consider me a dork, in which case what if in fact I really am a dork?—I mean, if pampering and radical kindness don’t seem motivated by strong affection and thus don’t somehow affirm one or help assure one that one is not, finally, a dork, of what final and significant value is all this indulgence and cleaning?)

  The feeling’s not all that dissimilar to the experience of being a guest in the home of somebody who does things like sneak in in the A.M. and make your guest bed up for you while you’re in the shower and fold your dirty clothes or even launder them without being asked to, or who empties your ashtray after each cigarette you smoke, etc. For a while, with a host like this, it seems great, and you feel cared about and prized and affirmed and worthwhile, etc. But then after a while you begin to intuit that the host isn’t acting out of regard or affection for you so much as simply going around obeying the imperatives of some personal neurosis having to do with domestic cleanliness and order… which means that, since the ultimate point and object of the cleaning isn’t you but rather cleanliness and order, it’s going to be a relief for her when you leave. Meaning her hygienic pampering of you is actually evidence that she doesn’t want you around. The Nadir doesn’t have the Scotchguarded carpet or plastic-wrapped furniture of a true anal-type host like this, but the psychic aura’s the same, and so’s the projected relief of getting out.

  10

  I don’t know how well a claustrophobe would do, but for the agoraphobe a 7NC Luxury Megacruiser presents a whole array of attractively enclosing options. The agoraphobe can choose not to leave the ship, 58 or can restrict herself only to certain decks, or can decline to leave the particular deck her cabin is on, or can eschew the view-conducive open-air railings on either side of that certain deck and keep exclusively to the deck’s interior enclosed part. Or the agoraphobe can simply not leave her cabin at all.

  I—who am not a true, can’t-even-go-to-the-supermarket-type agoraphobe, but am what might be called a “borderline-” or “semi-agoraphobe”—come nevertheless to love very deeply Cabin 1009, Exterior Port. 59 It is made of a fawn-colored enamelish polymer and its walls are extremely thick and solid: I can drum annoyingly on the wall above my bed for up to five minutes before my aft neighbors pound (very faintly) back in annoyance. The cabin is thirteen size-11 Keds long by twelve Keds wide, with a little peninsular vestibule protruding out toward a cabin door that’s got three separate locking technologies and trilingual lifeboat instructions bolted to its inside and a whole deck of DO NOT DISTURB cards hanging from the inside knob. 60 The vestibule is one-and-one-half times as wide as I. The cabin’s bathroom is off one side of the vestibule, and off the other side is the Wondercloset, a complicated honeycomb of shelves and drawers and hangers and cubbyholes and Personal Fireproof Safe. The Wondercloset is so intricate in its utilization of every available cubic cm that all I can say is it must have been designed by a very organized person indeed.

  All the way across the cabin, there’s a deep enamel ledge running along the port wall under a window that I think is called my porthole. 61 As are the portholes in ships on TV, this porthole is indeed round, but it is not small, and in terms of its importance to the room’s mood and raison it resembles a cathedral’s rose window. It’s made of that kind of very thick glass that Drive-Up bank tellers stand behind. In the corner of the porthole’s glass is this:

  You can thump the glass with your fist w/o give or vibration. It’s really good glass. Every morning at exactly 0834h. a Filipino guy in a blue jumpsuit stands on one of the lifeboats that hang in rows between Decks 9 and 10 and sprays my porthole with a hose, to get the salt off, which is fun to watch.

  Cabin 1009’
s dimensions are just barely on the good side of the line between very very snug and cramped. Packed into its near-square are a big good bed and two bedside tables w/ lamps and an 18" TV with five At-Sea Cable® options, two of which show continuous loops of the Simpson trial. 62 There’s also a white enamel desk that doubles as a vanity, and a round glass table on which is a basket that’s alternately filled with fresh fruit and with husks and rinds of same. I don’t know whether it’s SOP or a subtle journalistic perq, but every time I leave the cabin for more than the requisite half-hour I come back to find a new basket of fruit, covered in snug blue-tinted Saran, on the glass table. It’s good fresh fruit and it’s always there. I’ve never eaten so much fruit in my life.

  Cabin 1009’s bathroom deserves extravagant praise. I’ve seen more than my share of bathrooms, and this is one bitchingly nice bathroom. It is five-and-a-half Keds to the edge of the shower’s step up and sign to Watch Your Step. The room’s done in white enamel and gleaming brushed and stainless steel. Its overhead lighting is luxury lighting, some kind of blue-intensive Eurofluorescence that’s run through a diffusion filter so it’s diagnostically acute without being brutal. 63 Right by the light switch is an Alisco Sirocco-brand hairdryer that’s brazed right onto the wall and comes on automatically when you take it out of the mount; the Sirocco’s High setting just about takes your head off. Next to the hairdryer there’s both 115v and 230v sockets, plus a grounded 110v for razors.

  The sink is huge and its bowl deep without seeming precipitous or ungentle of grade. Good C.C. Jensen plate mirror covers the whole wall over the sink. The steel soap dish is striated to let sog-water out and minimize that annoying underside-of-the-bar slime. The ingenious consideration of the anti-slime soap dish is particularly affecting.

  Keep in mind that 1009 is a mid-price single cabin. The mind positively reels at what a luxury-penthouse-type cabin’s bathroom must be like. 64

  And so but simply enter 1009’s bathroom and hit the overhead lights and on comes an automatic exhaust fan whose force and aerodynamism give steam or your more offensive-type odors just no quarter at all. 65 The fan’s suction is such that if you stand right underneath its louvered vent it makes your hair stand straight up on your head, which together with the concussive and abundantly rippling action of the Sirocco hairdryer makes for hours of fun in the lavishly lit mirror.

  The shower itself overachieves in a big way. The Hot setting’s water is exfoliatingly hot, but it takes only one preset manipulation of the shower-knob to get perfect 98.6° water. My own personal home should have such water pressure: the showerhead’s force pins you helplessly to the stall’s opposite wall, and at 98.6° the head’s MASSAGE setting makes your eyes roll up and your sphincter just about give. 66 The showerhead and its flexible steel line are also detachable, so you can hold the head and direct its punishing stream just at e.g. your particularly dirty right knee or something. 67

  Toiletry-wise, flanking the sink’s mirror are broad shallow bolted steel minibaskets with all sorts of free stuff in them. There’s Caswell-Massey Conditioning Shampoo in a convenient airplane-liquor-size bottle. There’s Caswell-Massey Almond and Aloe Hand and Body Emulsion With Silk. There’s a sturdy plastic shoehorn and a chamois mitt for either eyeglasses or light shoeshining—both these items are the navy-blue-on-searing-white that are Celebrity’s colors. 68 There’s not one but two fresh showercaps at all times. There’s good old unpretentious unswishy Safeguard soap. There’s washcloths w/o nubble or nap, and of course towels you want to propose to.

  In the vestibule’s Wondercloset are extra chamois blankets and hypoallergenic pillows and plastic CELEBRITY CRUISES—emblazoned bags of all different sizes and configurations for your laundry and optional dry cleaning, etc. 69

  But all this is still small potatoes compared to 1009’s fascinating and potentially malevolent toilet. A harmonious concordance of elegant form and vigorous function, flanked by rolls of tissue so soft as to be without the usual perforates for tearing, my toilet has above it this sign:

  THIS TOILET IS CONNECTED TO A VACUUM SEWAGE SYSTEM. PLEASE DO NOT THROW INTO THE TOILET ANYTHING THAN ORDINARY TOILET WASTE AND TOILET PAPER 70

  Yes that’s right a vacuum toilet. And, as with the exhaust fan above, not a lightweight or unambitious vacuum. The toilet’s flush produces a brief but traumatizing sound, a kind of held high-B gargle, as of some gastric disturbance on a cosmic scale. Along with this sound comes a concussive suction so awesomely powerful that it’s both scary and strangely comforting—your waste seems less removed than hurled from you, and hurled with a velocity that lets you feel as though the waste is going to end up someplace so far away from you that it will have become an abstraction… a kind of existential-level sewage treatment. 71 , 72

  11

  Traveling at sea for the first time is a chance to realize that the ocean is not one ocean. The water changes. The Atlantic that seethes off the eastern U.S. is glaucous and lightless and looks mean. Around Jamaica, though, it’s more like a milky aquamarine, and translucent. Off the Cayman Islands it’s an electric blue, and off Cozumel it’s almost purple. Same sort of deal with the beaches. You can tell right away that south Florida’s sand is descended from rocks: it hurts your bare feet and has that sort of minerally glitter to it. But Ocho Rios’s beach is more like dirty sugar, and Cozumel’s is like clean sugar, and at places along the coast of Grand Cayman the sand’s texture is more like flour, silicate, its white as dreamy and vaporous as clouds’ white. The only real constant to the nautical topography of the m.v. Nadir’s Caribbean is something about its unreal and almost retouched-looking prettiness 73 —it’s impossible to describe quite right, but the closest I can come is to say that it all looks: expensive.

  12

  Mornings in port are a special time for the semi-agoraphobe, because just about everybody else gets off the ship and goes ashore for Organized Shore Excursions or for unstructured peripatetic tourist stuff, and the m.v. Nadir’s upper decks have the eerily delicious deserted quality of your folks’ house when you’re home sick as a kid and everybody else is off at work and school, etc. Right now it’s 0930h. on 15 March (Ides Wednesday) and we’re docked off Cozumel, Mexico. I’m on Deck 12. A couple guys in software-company T-shirts jog fragrantly by every couple minutes, 74 but other than that it’s just me and the ZnO and hat and about a thousand empty and identically folded high-quality deck chairs. The 12-Aft Towel Guy has almost nobody to exercise his zeal on, and by l000h. I’m on my fifth new towel.

  Here the semi-agoraphobe can stand alone at the ship’s highest port rail and gaze pensively out to sea. The sea off Cozumel is a kind of watery indigo through which you can see the powder-white of the bottom. In the middle distance, underwater coral formations are big cloud-shapes of deep purple. You can see why people say of calm seas that they’re “glassy”: at l000h. the sun assumes a kind of Brewster’s Angle w/r/t the surface and the harbor lights up as far as the eye can see: the water moves a million little ways at once, and each move makes a sparkle. Out past the coral, the water gets progressively darker in orderly baconish stripes—I think this phenomenon has to do with perspective. It’s all extremely pretty and peaceful. Besides me and the T.G. and the orbiting joggers, there’s only a supine older lady reading Codependent No More and a man standing way up at the fore part of the starboard rail videotaping the sea. This sad and cadaverous guy, who by the second day I’d christened Captain Video, has tall hard gray hair and Birkenstocks and very thin hairless calves, and he is one of the cruise’s more prominent eccentrics. 75 Pretty much everybody on the Nadir qualifies as camera-crazy, but Captain Video camcords absolutely everything, including meals, empty hallways, endless games of geriatric bridge—even leaping onto Deck 11’s raised stage during Pool Party to get the crowd from the musicians’ angle. You can tell that the magnetic record of Captain Video’s Megacruise experience is going to be this Warholianly dull thing that is exactly as long as the Cruise itself. Captain Video’s the only passenger beside
s me who I know for a fact is cruising without a relative or companion, and certain additional similarities between C.V. and me (the semi-agoraphobic reluctance to leave the ship in port, for one thing) tend to make me uncomfortable, and I try to avoid him as much as possible.

  The semi-agoraphobe can also stand at Deck 12’s starboard rail and look way down at the army of Nadir passengers being disgorged by the Deck 3 egress. They keep pouring out the door and down the narrow gangway. As each person’s sandal hits the pier, a sociolinguistic transformation from cruiser to tourist is effected. At this very moment, 1300+ upscale tourists with currency to unload and experiences to experience and record compose a serpentine line stretching all the way down the Cozumel pier, which pier is poured cement and a good quarter-mile long and leads to the TOURISM CENTER, 76 a kind of mega-Quonset structure where Organized Shore Excursions 77 and cabs or mopeds into San Miguel are available. The word around good old Table 64 last night was that in primitive and incredibly poor Cozumel the U.S. dollar is treated like a UFO: “They worship it when it lands.”