glyph theory

I have seen fuchsia pantsuits and pink sport coats and maroon-and-purple warm-ups and white loafers worn without socks. I have seen professional blackjack dealers so lovely they make you want to clutch your chest. I have heard upscale adult U.S. citizens ask the ship’s Guest Relations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet, whether the trapshooting will be held outside, whether the crew sleeps on board, and what time the Midnight Buffet is. I now know the precise mixocological difference between a Slippery Nipple and a Fuzzy Navel. I have, in one week, been the object of over 1,500 professional smiles. I have burned and peeled twice. I have met Cruise Staff with the monikers “Mojo Mike,” “Cocopuff,” and “Dave the Bingo Boy.”
I have felt the full clothy weight of a subtropical sky. I have jumped a dozen times at the shattering, flatulence-of- the-gods-like sound of a cruise ship’s horn. I have absorbed the basics of mahjongg and learned how to secure a life jacket over a tuxedo. I have dickered over trinkets with malnourished children. I have learned what it is to become afraid of one’s own cabin toilet. I have now heard—and am powerless to describe—reggae elevator music.

…

Even in heavy seas, 7NC Megaships don’t yaw or throw you around or send bowls of soup sliding across tables. Only a certain slight unreality to your footing lets you know you’re not on land. At sea, a room’s floor feels somehow 3D, and your footing demands a slight attention that good old static land never needs. You don’t ever quite hear the ship’s big engines, but when your feet are planted you can feel them—a kind of spinal throb, oddly soothing.
Walking is a little dreamy also. There are constant slight shifts in torque from the waves’ action. When heavy waves come straight at a Megaship’s snout, the ship goes up and down along its long axis—this is called “pitching.” It produces the disorienting sensation that you’re walking on a very slight downhill grade and then level and then on a very slight uphill grade. Some evolutionarily retrograde reptile-brain part of the central nervous system is apparently reawakened, though, and manages all this so automatically that it requires a good deal of attention to notice anything more than that walking feels a little dreamy.
“Rolling,” on the other hand, is when waves hit the ship from the side and make it go up and down along its crosswise axis. When the Nadir rolls, what you feel is a very slight increase in the demands placed on the muscles of your left leg, then a strange absence of all demand, then extra demands on the right leg.
We never pitch badly, but every once in a while some really big, Poseidon Adventure–grade wave must have come and hit the Nadir’s side, because the asymmetric leg-demands sometimes won’t stop or reverse and you keep having to put more and more weight on one leg until you’re exquisitely close to tipping over. The cruise’s first night, steaming south-east for Jamaica, features some really big waves from starboard, and in the casino after supper it’s hard to tell who’s had too much of the ‘71 Richebourg and who’s just doing a roll-related stagger. Add in the fact that most of the women are wearing high heels, and you can imagine some of the vertiginous staggering-flailing-clutching that goes on. Almost everyone on the Nadir has come in couples, and when they walk during heavy seas they tend to hang on each other like freshman steadies. You can tell they like it: the women have this trick of sort of folding themselves into the men and snuggling as they walk, and the men’s postures improve and their faces firm up and they seem to feel unusually solid and protective. It’s easy to see why older couples like to cruise.

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Tibor is a pro. His commitment to personally instantiating the Nadir’s fanatical commitment to excellence is the one thing about which he shows no sense of humor. If you fuck with him in this area he will feel pain and will make no effort to conceal it. On the second night at supper, for example, Tibor was circling the table and asking each of us how our entree was, and we all regarded this as just one of those perfunctory waiter-questions and perfunctorily smiled back and said Fine, Fine—and Tibor finally stopped and looked down at us all with a pained expression and changed his timbre slightly so that it was clear he was addressing the whole table: “Please. I ask each: is excellent? Please. If excellent, you say, and I am happy. If not excellent, please: do not say excellent. Let me fix. Please.” There was no hauteur or pedantry or even anger as he addressed us. He just meant what he said. His expression was babe-naked, and we heard him, and nothing was perfunctory again.

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Off to the southeast, now, another Mega-cruiser is moving in to dock. It moves like a force of nature and resists the idea that so much mass is being steered by anything like a hand on a tiller. I can’t imagine what trying to maneuver one of these puppies into the pier is like. Parallel parking a semi into a spot the same size as the semi with a blindfold on and four tabs of LSD in you might come close. Our docking this morning at sunrise involved an ant-like frenzy of crewmen and shore personnel and an anchor that spilled from the ship’s navel and upward of a dozen ropes, which the crew insists on calling “lines,” even though each one is at least the same diameter as a tourist’s head.
I cannot convey to you the sheer and surreal scale of everything: the towering ship, the ropes, the anchor, the pier, the vast lapis lazuli dome of the sky. Looking down from a great height at your countrymen waddling into poverty-stricken ports in expensive sandals is not one of the funner moments of a 7NC Luxury Cruise, however. There is something inescapably bovine about a herd of American tourists in motion, a certain greedy placidity. I feel guilty by perceived association. I’ve barely been out of the U.S.A. before, and never as part of a high-income herd, and in port—even up here above it all on Deck 12, watching—I’m newly and unpleasantly conscious of being an American, the same way I’m always suddenly conscious of being white every time I’m around a lot of non-white people. I cannot help imagining us as we appear to them, the bored Jamaicans and Mexicans, or especially to the non-Aryan and hard-driven crew of the Nadir. All week I’ve found myself doing everything I can to distance myself in the crew’s eyes from the bovine herd I’m part of: I eschew cameras and sunglasses and pastel Caribbeanwear; I make a big deal of carrying my own luggage and my own cafeteria tray and am effusive in my thanks for the slightest service. Since so many of my shipmates shout, I make it a point of special pride to speak extra-quietly to crewmen whose English is poor. But, of course, part of the overall despair of this Luxury Cruise is that whatever I do I cannot escape my own essential and newly unpleasant Americanness. Whether up here or down there, I am an American tourist, and am thus ex officio large, fleshy, red, loud, coarse, condescending, self-absorbed, spoiled, appearance-conscious, greedy, ashamed, and despairing.

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Death and Conroy notwithstanding, we’re maybe now in a position to appreciate the falsehood at the dark heart of Celebrity’s brochure. For this—the promise to sate the part of me that always and only WANTS—is the central fantasy the brochure is selling. The thing to notice is that the real fantasy here isn’t that this promise will be kept but that such a promise is keepable at all. This is a big one, this lie. And of course I want to believe it; I want to believe that maybe this ultimate fantasy vacation will be enough pampering, that this time the luxury and pleasure will be so completely and faultlessly administered that my infantile part will be sated at last. But the infantile part of me is, by its very nature and essence, insatiable. In fact, its whole raison consists of its insatiability. In response to any environment of extraordinary gratification and pampering, the insatiable-infant part of me will simply adjust its desires upward until it once again levels out at its homeostasis of terrible dissatisfaction.

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The finale is apparently going to be four consecutive stand-up comedy routines delivered by very old men. These men totter on one after the other. One has a three-footed cane, another a necktie that looks uncannily like a Denver omelette, another an excruciating stutter. What follow are four successive interchangeable routines where the manner and humor are like exhumed time capsules of the 1950s: jokes about how impossible it is to understand women, about how very much men want to play golf and how their wives try to keep them from playing golf, etc. The routines have the same kind of flamboyant unhipness that makes my own grandparents objects of my pity, awe, and embarrassment all at the same time. One of the senescent quartet refers to his appearance tomorrow night as a “gig.”

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For me, at the end of a full day of Managed Fun, Nigel Ellery’s act is not particularly astounding or side-splitting or entertaining. What it is is weird. There’s something crucially key about Luxury Cruises in evidence here: being entertained by someone who clearly dislikes you, and feeling that you deserve that dislike at the same time you resent it.

Mona Webster, 96, a lighthouse keeper’s daughter who lived in Edinburgh, left $7.5 million to the Metropolitan Opera and a similar amount to a nature charity.

The faces in the room had become billion-faceted mosaics of rich and vibrant hues. The facial characteristics of each of the observers, surrounding the bed, were the keys to their genetic heritage. Dr. X (the psychiatrist) was a bronzed American Indian with full ceremonial paint; the Hindu monk was a deep soulful middle-easterner with eyes which were at once reflecting animal cunning and the sadness of centuries; Leary was a roguish Irishman, a sea captain with weathered skin and creases at the corners of eyes which had looked long and hard into the unseeable, an adventurous skipper of a three-masted schooner eager to chart new waters, to explore the continent just beyond, exuding a confidence that comes from a humorous cosmic awareness of his predicament — genetic and immediate. And next to me, or rather on me, or rather in me, or rather more of me — Billy. Her body was vibrating in such harmony with mine that each ripple of muscle, the very coursing of blood through her veins was a matter of absolute intimacy… body messages of a subtlety and tenderness both exotically strange and deliciously familiar. Deep within, a point of heat in my groin slowly but powerfully and inevitably radiated throughout my body until every cell became a sun emanating its own life-giving fire. My body was an energy field, a set of vibrations with each cell pulsing in phase with every other. And Billy, whose cells now danced the same tune, was no longer a discrete entity but a resonating part of the single set of vibrations. The energy was love. Exactly twenty-five minutes after administration, the psychologist smiled, sighed, sat up swinging his legs over the side of the couch and said, “It lasted for a million years and for a split-second. But now it’s over and it’s your turn.”