LILING, 66
It is not wise to swim so soon after a meal, I know, but I have never experienced anything quite like the sensation of floating in a swimming pool with a full belly, which is—and I didn’t realize this until I lay here pushing my pale legs down into the water, watching them spring back up like ice—in essence, just another pool containing smaller bits of floating flesh. And all this occurring on the deck of a cruise ship floating in the Pacific, Earth’s largest body of water? Well. I may go again tomorrow after lunch.
DAN, 37
When I get to the pool there’s still some vomit on the surface. I was planning on draining the whole thing at port tomorrow, but Yuri said the guests are complaining, so I need to have it ready by five. Complaining. On a cruise.
The lido deck is already closed for cleaning, so I throw Europe ’72 on the system while I search for the treatment protocol in the stack of loose manual sheets in the maintenance closet. When I asked the last guy how much chlorine solution to use for this kind of situation, he said to just blast it. “He’s Gone” comes on. I love this song. It reminds me of my father, the one I never knew but feel close to in this job, in any hard job, really. His image in my mind is always my age.
Excuse me, says a small voice that hits me like a big one.
A kid stands in the doorway with a bigass Shirley Temple. He’s shirtless and completely bald.
I say, What’s going on, boss?
Is the pool closed? he says. Kids do this—ask questions they already have answers to. I think it means they just want to talk. I’ve never been good with kids, but if the kid wants to talk, I can do that.
Yeah, I say, should be good in a few hours.
What’d he eat? he says.
What? I say.
The guy who ranched, he says.
Oh, I say, I don’t know.
Well, could you find out? he says.
Sure, I say.
The kid sucks down his soda as I attach the arm to the skimmer. I catch myself staring at his shiny head. In these situations, it’s best to just assume it’s cancer. “China Cat Sunflower” plays as we walk the pool’s edge to the deep end, where the juice is. I feel suddenly aware that I’m over thirty, working a summer job, listening to The Dead. I’m embarrassed. I don’t even like The Dead that much. I do, but not so much.
I use the skimmer to push the water just behind the spill, directing it closer to the edge. Take a look, I say. He hands me his cup and gives me this look like, Don’t drink my friggen Shirley Temple. He lies with his belly on the sun-warmed tile, pulls himself forward till his head is just over the water. His face is solemn as he studies these remnants of a meal: a cream-streaked swirl, oily and orange, bits of unchewed chicken skin, translucent strings of celery spinning slowly outward.
It’s beautiful, he says.
It really is, I say.
Like a galaxy, he says.
BENJI, 11
I’m taking a shower when Mom and David get back to our cabin. The bathroom door is shut, but I can hear them right on the other side, so I try to be quiet as I wash the shampoo out of my hair, drink some water from the shower head, dry off. I wish this was a tub. I asked David why they can’t have tubs instead, and he said they are too big for the bathrooms, and I said the shower is almost as long as the tub at home, and he said even a few inches longer would mean they couldn’t have as many passengers, and I asked what’s wrong with that, and he said it costs a lot of money to power a cruise ship like this one, to pay the staff, to feed everyone, and he asked if I liked the food and the entertainment and the clean facilities, and when I said I did, he said then I should be grateful that the showers are the size they are. I wish I didn’t ask. I’m quiet, but I’m mad. Well, not mad, just disappointed because David said he’d take me up to the pool after lunch, but that was two hours ago and now they’re fighting, Mom and David, so I probably won’t even get to swim on our last day. Which is today. Technically tomorrow is, but we get back to San Diego around noon, and Mom wants to go to two standup comedy shows in a row tomorrow morning. One of the comedians is a dwarf, David says, like a midget, but he’s got a big personality and he says the wildest stuff when he roasts the crowd. I can tell David wants to get roasted. I hope he does. Mom keeps saying they will be appropriate for me, the shows, but I don’t care if they’re appropriate. I just don’t want to spend my last hours at sea doing something I can do on land. I mean, I can swim on land, but not in a pool out on the open ocean. And I can’t go anywhere on the ship without one of them, not even the buffet, or the arcade, or Kidtopia, which is for five-year-olds. And Mom put our phones in the safe and said she wouldn’t tell us the combination, so we could be more in the moment, present, she kept saying, but somehow David got his phone because he said he had a work emergency, and when I asked him how he knew about the emergency before he checked his phone, he called me a smartass. I turn off the water and just sit on the hard floor of the shower waiting for them to calm down so I can come out and get dressed, but it’s a pretty bad one. The fight. I make a mohawk with my wet hair, then I shake it out, then I do it again, but it doesn’t hold for very long, so I smell all the soaps. I taste the one that smells like pineapple, but it tastes like original soap. I look under the sink for mouthwash, but I can’t find any, just some small bottles of body wash, bath salt … what do you even do with that? Like, to make it drugs … some toilet paper, and a black plastic case with a cutter inside. Like, a nice haircutter. It’s David’s, I think. I see some curly gray hairs caught in the little teeth on the blade. It’s 100% David’s. I wash the cutter in the sink till I can’t find any more of his hairs, don’t worry, I didn’t plug it in yet, I’m not stupid, then I wash the soap taste from my mouth, then I plug in the cutter to see if it works. When I turn it on it shakes my whole body, and my wiener tickles a little bit, and it feels kinda good, kinda weird. It struggles for a second like it’s choking on the water, the cutter, then it runs fast and smooth and vibrates even harder. Then I do something savage. I shave my whole head. I just go for it. My hair falls into the sink in big wet chunks. The thing sounds like it’s eating. Sometimes it stops working, but it’s not broken, you just have to clean out the hair that’s jammed in there and keep going. Mom cuts my hair in the tub at home, or she used to, and she told me that. She always said my hair was so hard to cut. She always said it’s coarse, and I always said just buzz it, and she always said I have no idea how much money people pay to get hair as blonde as mine, and it’s not right to just cut it all off. I finish a pretty good first pass on my head, but there are still a bunch of little strips of hair like when you think you’re done mowing the lawn and you look and see a bunch of little strips of uncut grass you didn’t see before. Even with the cutter buzzing in my ears and through my head, I still hear Mom crying to David. She’s hyperventilating too. David keeps saying, Seriously? Which is rude, and pisses me off, but forreal, I get it. Mom does this when she’s too lazy to make a good argument for why she’s right, or why Dad is delusional, or why David isn’t trying hard enough. It’s a lot. But I think she thinks she needs to do it. I do another pass, then I do one more until the cutter makes the same smooth sound all over my head. When I accidentally go at a different angle, it makes a different sound, because it’s cutting, and I realize that not all hair grows in the same direction, which makes sense, and which I already knew, but I guess I forgot. I turn off the cutter and run my hand over my head, and it’s giving velcro, I love it, and I sweep up all the hair I can with my hands and I throw it in the garbage can that doesn’t have a bag in it. There’s a bunch of shiny square wrappers in there, from condoms, and I wonder if David wears a condom when he sleeps. I look under the sink to see if there are any condoms to see what one would feel like on my wiener, but there’s not. I stand up and look in the mirror for a second, then I do something really savage. I go in Mom’s black zip-up bag sitting by the faucet and get her curvy razor and her mini can of shave gel. I pump some into my hands and rub them together till they’re foaming white, then I make my whole head creamy. Then I start to shave it. Only I’m very careful. I go over every part of my head very slow and I’m soft because my head is a weird shape in the back, like, it feels like there’s nothing between my skull and my hair. I cut myself when I’m curving it around my ear, and I touch where it stings with my fingers, and there’s hella blood, so I press the towel hard on it till it stops. I cut myself again where my hair meets my forehead, but no, there’s barely any blood this time. I double-check my work because it’s hard to see if you missed spots. You have to rub your fingers all over and if it’s not 100% smooth, like, if you feel any scratchy parts, you know you have to do it again, with the shaving cream and everything, just running the whole thing back from the beginning. It’s smooth, so I wash and dry the razor, then I put everything back. I look in the mirror. I look kinda weird, kinda sick. I didn’t know my ears were that big. Mom calls David an asshole really loud, then I hear the door slam, then it’s quiet, then I hear the TV turn on. I open the door. David’s on the bed choosing a show. I ask where’s my mom. He says she left. He doesn’t even look at me, so he doesn’t see my bald head. I ask if I can go swimming. He says to ask my mom and I say, Okay I will, thanks, David! but I’m lying. I put on my trunks and leave the cabin. I think I’ll stop by the bar and get a Shirley Temple before I hit the pool. Yeah, that’ll be good.