I microwave three damp cigarettes for thirty seconds and they go stiff again. Don’t know what such a procedure does to them exactly, but I’m still drunk and it all tastes fine.
Really, I’m lucky to have a microwave at all. Rooms on cruise ships are usually closer to those found in the pale-green nuthouses of Rockland, Harlem Valley, Oregon. Stark and ready to beat something in or out of you. I got the suite though. I got it all. There’s a chair facing nowhere. A lamp screwed down to a nightstand. Fresh mangos. Toothpaste. I’ve been placed in the best suite on Royal Caribbean’s finest leviathan. We’re headed for Jamaica.
Last week, my friend in Brooklyn up and disappeared. He had always taken odd jobs wherever they sprouted, so I just thought he was off again, sweeping hairy barbershop floors in Anchorage, or demo-ing apartments in the swamps of Louisiana. But then I got a call. It was him. He sounded terrified when explaining he’d been taken captive—in a way—aboard a cruise ship.
Before the phone cut out, he told me “Harmony of the Seas” would be stopping in Miami to refill guests, and that I could hop on there. He had a story for me.
As a professional journalist, it was my duty to follow such a lead. But I boarded yesterday and didn’t see him at all. OK, then. I got drunk and woke up in my suite today, my clothes soaking wet. Somehow a note had been taped to the inside of my door. Holding a crispy Marlboro between my teeth, I’m reading that note now.
dear garth,
they have taken me to the indoctrination spas. i did not clean the counter in room 702 properly so i think i desereve it—the goddess of relaxation demands piety.
tonight, after the show, meet me in the casino on deck 4. i will explain everything then.
in luxury, in recreation,
jack samso
p.s. vip ticket for the show attached to this letter.
Well, shit, I think, snubbing out my cigarette in an ashtray made to look like a little purple cartoon whale—the ash goes in the blowhole. The ticket says the show is not until 9:30 tonight, so I’ll have to find something else to do until then. I put on my bathing suit, my gas station sunglasses and sandals, and grab my shaving case with the drugs inside.
Whenever you venture into international waters, where the only laws are the laws of the jungle, you have to be prepared.
Out on Deck 3 where the main pool is, I set up shop on a rubber recliner and order two Rum Runners. If I play it right, I should be able to lounge until 9:30. I drop two crushed pills into my drink and stir.
After taking it down, I quickly come to the realization that it is no ordinary ship. The people here are the worst of us. Almost as if hand-picked. They’ve been let loose in this place, at a perfect island temperature for emerging from the soft rotten guts of their beached-lives far, far behind. They’re like thousands of twitching tapeworms.
Just what the hell have I walked into?
By the hot tub, male gun molls for creepy neurotic women are being pulled around like human wagons. This is Karen country. This is bitch nation. Lazy surgeries have given the wives leather faces. The Leatherfaces shriek, wielding chainsaws of credit cards and salad bars and designer sweat pants and bleached Chiclet teeth. Lap dogs. Chainsaws somehow made of lap dogs that bluntly chew through arm and bone.
When they notice me staring, they move fast. They don’t like people watching. Long neon claws snatch up their shriveled husbands, or ones that look close enough. It’s a meat market that yips and spits with all the fervor of Wall Street. I, for one, am terrified.
Knots of muscle come to the back of my neck. I need something to wash down all this Thai-Chinese medicine. Pure-like. Kamikaze! Kamikaze! I call out and order a kamikaze and it comes screaming with a straw that curls as would burning hair. I gulp it down but it’s no use. I see men giving glory hole proposals where they just blindly shove the ring through. Brides launch bouquets of stinking corpse lilies to ravenous young things. Cluster B disorders fill up to the brim of their throats and fizz like cola.
Just then, a tin-high Spanish accent sounds off from the dance floor. “Please, everyone! Come over! The limbo line forms here,” the dark-mustached man says over a bull horn. He’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt and the gold necklace of St. Barbara (patron saint of fireworks).
People do as he commands. People line up void of doubt, with pride. Shining polished brass pride. I can’t take much more of it. I slink out, hiccupping.
A few hours later, I have real clothes on again. I’m sitting in a fat chair spit-distance from the stage in the ship’s dim theater. How much longer can I realistically hold out until I meet Jack? I have to stay sharp. I take another pill just to be safe.
Up on stage, the fat sweaty head of a crooner there is zoomed in close. Hot lights bring hard shadows under the nose and chins. A song drips out, garbled and echoed like a centipede writhing on hot concrete. I realize now I’ve taken far, far too much.
Sinking down in my seat, I hide from the waitress.
“Nothing, nothing,” I say to her before she can ask for my order.
“Listen sir,” the waitress says. Her hand snakes out and rests on top of my forearm. “You need to quit yelling. You’re ruining the show for everyone.”
I grab a napkin and put it up to the mouth that’s betrayed me. I get low and move swiftly.
Outside, lights are a carnival of disco-bright. I’ve wandered into the onboard casino. Couples pluck shiny tokens from their bulging pockets and smash them into the hungry slits of machines. Pleasure the machines. The blinky things are like underwater animals, flickering to mesmerize prey into giving them what they want. One guy cuts his foot off and chucks it onto a roulette wheel.
It calls out in ecstasy, “Winner, winner! You give it to me so right!” It squirts out juices. People are slipping everywhere.
“How the fuck do I get to Deck 4!” I scream, clinging to the shirt of one of the blackjack dealers.
He looks down at me. I can feel my face glowing.
“Sir, place your bet please.”
The noises and lights and the machines all return to normal. Screech to a halt, normal. I’ve made it over the hump. But everyone is looking at me.
“Uh, I—yes,” I say pulling myself up and sitting at the table. “300 on black. No— “
“Garth?” A familiar voice comes form behind my ear. It’s Jack.
I turn around, tucking my shirt back in. “Where the hell have you been, man?”
“I told you. They had me workin’ the spas.” He sits down next to me. “Listen, you don’t want to gamble here. Let’s go to a real worker’s party. I have someone who wants to meet you.”
“Me? Does he know me? I thought you said you were in trouble?”
“That’s all cleared up now. I wasn’t being reasonable. Guess you get a little cabin fever when you work on a cruise ship.” He slaps me on the back. “Come on, this guy will explain everything.”
I’ve never seen Jack so cool and calm. No five o’clock shadow. No hint of mania. Just a dominating calm.
At a new table in a small lounge, me and Jack and this new guy Roberto Emilio—the same guy from before with the bull horn and St. Barbra around his neck—sit around and sip Mai Tais.
“Let me tell you, my friend,” Roberto says, “we found that if we choose the right people, people who are in the situation to be properly motivated with the money we can provide, they’ll do about anything.” He swirls his drink and takes a bit down.
“What do you want them to do?” I ask.
“We on this ship are more than just cruising. We are closer to a religion. We take relaxation to a higher plane and we need our staff to be ready to do anything and everything—no questions asked.”
“I can’t imagine someone actually signing up for that.”
“I did,” Jack says. I can see I’ve offended him. “We learn to truly appreciate relaxation here. They teach us we are chosen and that our vacation can last forever. If I work hard, this place will give me everything. The ship just needs a continual flow of guests to provide the sacrifices. The more we get them to indulge and relax, the better sacrifices they are.”
“Sacrifices? That doesn’t, uh, sound very normal. Sounds a little crazy.”
“Have you ever heard of Calhoun?” this Roberto guy asks, butts back in.
Roberto is clearly pure evil. I can see now this is all a way for him to show off the scheme Royal Caribbean’s created to force the working-poor into hellish conditions. I’ve read before that cruises often take advantage of their employees, trapping them on board, but this is far worse.
“No,” I say.
Roberto tucks his long black hair behind his ears. “Etholigist John B. Calhoun created something called the Mouse Utopia Studies,” he says. “Basically, he put a bunch of mice in a controlled city-like environment and they all went crazy and turned to eating each other. He said this sort of ‘behavioral sink’, when were forced into such close quarters with nothing to do can take us to brutal depravity. This ship is modeled after Calhoun’s Universe 25. The very same mouse utopia. Except I’ve flipped it so the instead of brutality, it causes ‘behavioral slack.’ Guests here get so relaxed they melt into a fuel-goop we can feed the ship’s engine. That is how we can vacation forever. If we all work hard enough to keep this place perfect, keep the guests melting, we’ll have enough to fuel an infinite joy ride.”
“There’s no way that is true. But if somehow it is, why are you telling me this?”
He tells me.
I go back to my suite whistling. Roberto has just explained he’s letting me report all this for the sole reason I have been blessed with a meaningless life. I’m no candidate for becoming fuel. The only reason I’m allowed to get off the ship at all, is because they don’t think the information will be believable coming from a “guy like me.” Rude, but they’ve offered me the Perfect Peace TM spa package. Sure, this article will peek the senses of similar types sitting off at the fringe—but the rest’s eyes will glaze over. They’ll forget why aunt Bess never came back from her cruise to Aruba. Maybe it was because cruises are so fun, they’ll say. Maybe we should take the kids on one this year.
I look out at the rising sun from my suite’s balcony. At the breaking point on the horizon, a small landmass emerges. Jamaica—we’ve arrived.
