Land

E. L. Doctorow proves to be taller than expected, somewhat frailer, but every ounce a writer. He lives by and from his imagination, one can tell. The few remarks he makes about the hidden processes behind 'The March', his latest novel, fill me with hope. Go light on the historical research, he advises, if you want to protect your imagination. We are not portraying, as I understand him, but evoking. It's all about spirit. Thank you very much, says the ship's recreation director, hustling Doctorow offstage. And thank you, professor. Only minutes before, Doctorow had quietly explained that although he teaches creative writing at NYU, at this moment, on board ship, he is no professor. Thank you, professor. The recreation director was trying to clear the ship's cinema for the next lecture on the life and times of Ingrid Bergman, delivered by some ponce from BBC 2. There is something essentially banal about the Queen Mary experience. What the hell.

Our anxiety level goes up at night one of the nurses or maybe the social worker or someone tending Marlou in her final weeks, explained. I had never heard this before and welcomed the news. Anything to put fear in perspective. Marlou's fear soon drowned in her failing physiology. Mine remains. Night falls and the psyche rises. Sleep has never gotten back to normal. Although in the regularity and calm of shipboard life, it is coming back. The ocean races right by the windows on decks 2 and 3. It does so continuously, and the waters are so smooth I almost wonder what a rough crossing would be like to experience. The ship's environment is a naturally contemplative one. I don't know if it is the onboard program or essential human nature or the modern condition that makes it seem so frenetic and extroverted. There is a lot going on and people spend the days toing and froing. It is very hard to find an ideal reading spot. Although, it must be said, one gets spoiled.

Yesterday I nabbed one of the prime locations, a seat in the coffee bar right next to the window where I could sit on a plush bench and put my feet on the wheelchair. I virtually finished one of Doctorow's novels in that space, occasionally gazing out to sea. Today I dropped by the library, got the time and place of the ship's reading group and had a second novel half read by midafternoon. The book, about an autistic boy, seemed to be the first I have read with full concentration since I don't remember when. The process took me into another human mind, another human place and experience. The effect was utterly calming. Although I did keep dozing.

That's because of night. Anxiety stalks me. I can feel it when I enter the cabin. I turn on the television and play mindless melodramas while I undress. There's also a channel of  the ship's bow camera with the likes of Delibes playing in the background. Anything but silence. In the silence, the scary things come at me. They jump right into bed and together we stare at the ceiling. In this posture, reclining, I hang suspended between slumber and fear. The two states average out to a sort of speediness. The minutes and hours tick away. Eventually it all gives way. There is blackness. Waking to pee. More blackness. More peeing. Then waking to blackness. In my windowless cabin, the light or the dark is unchanging. I turn it back into the day's reality by gazing at the TV image, Channel 39, from the bow camera. The ocean is invariably blue, the sky mostly so. Another day.

My cabin attendant has become my butler. He dresses me at least once a day, usually for dinner. Sometimes in the morning too. If I fall, it would not be long before he entered the cabin. This is the worst situation I can imagine on ship. The worst situation I can imagine overall is a further failing of my body. More paralysis, loss of mind, leading to loss of life. The latter is much on my mind these days. I have seen it happen, know it happens and do not doubt it will happen to me. So why resist? Things will end. Nothing will be finished. Or not enough will be finished. Exit the Cripple. It will happen.

This is why one must sit by the window and see enough of the sea. It is a rare privilege to be traveling over it. I am lucky in this regard. I can do this. I am also lucky in that I appreciate it. I have nowhere to go in a hurry. My biggest pressure is to finish the book for tomorrow's reading group. Exit the Voyager.

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In today's talk, I fear his last, Doctorow says that we need more writers. In my sardonic view, we have too many. But Doctorow isn't joking. With media becoming increasingly uniform and cooked in a central kitchen, we need individual voices, he says. I feel better about my blog. I feel better full stop. I don't feel better about is my rage. It has been building, I sense, throughout the voyage. It's why physical exercise makes me feel better, I'm other reasons. It interferes with my sleep. When Benjam, my cabin attendant and virtually my butler, helps me get dressed, I recall the Marlou did this. He gets the job done with equal or greater efficiency, but everything else about the experience is wrong. He doesn't have breasts. He doesn't argue about the condition of my clothes and the best way to get my trousers on. I can't grab him in the small of the back, pull him toward me and squeeze his bottom and nuzzle his cheek. Worse, I can't take him with me to breakfast. Not that I could really take Marlou. She was not a morning person, always had breakfast delivered to the room. There are small advantages to the solo experience. I roll into the dining room in the morning, order up Wiltshire sausage, eggs, mushrooms and grilled tomatoes, not to mention assorted croissants, and knock down a pot of tea at my leisure.

Things are done with great style aboard the ship, including the printed invitation, embossed, that arrived at my statement yesterday, inviting me to the solos lunch. I would actually have attended, had I not decided on the reading group, instead. If I'd had my wits about me, I would have RSVP'd in the appropriate way. That is to say, I would have dispatched Benjam with my handwritten regrets atop a cushion, direct to the recreation department. Instead, I finished my reading. I missed Doctorow's book signing. I missed my wife.

The North Atlantic waters are calm, but I am not. I want to push someone overboard. And that someone may be myself. My social moments consist of dinner and one of the day's activities, be it book group or singles gathering. I need to yell or scream or cry, and polite society is a strain. It is also natural to me, chitchat and deportment, but these days something is even more natural. And that is my desire to kick the social director in the teeth.

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We are nearing Bishop's Rock, the Commodore has announced in his noon address, as if everyone knows what this is. Landfall. That's what it is. The westernmost part of Britain, entrance to the English Channel and the beginning of the end. Somehow at this juncture, it has finally occurred to me to just bite the Cunard bullet and pay for an Internet hour or two. It seems ludicrously expensive, and it is. But this can be said for the entire trip. So, my need for connection being what it is, why not go for the Internet variety?

Morning breakfast is a white linen expanse of sterling cutlery interrupted by a certain amount of food. In my case, it's a vast amount. I eat as though the Queen Mary is about to be torpedoed. Mushrooms, grilled tomatoes, poached eggs, Wiltshire sausage...another day, another assault on the arteries. I have taken to dining alone in the morning. It is easy enough to be seated at a table with others, which undoes the immediate sense of isolation, but such exchanges do little for the soul. People talk about the things they talk about, and it all takes time, and the 10:30 AM lectures tend to be the best, so I speed through breakfast, infused with tea and sausage and English mustard, to experience what can be experienced.

Philip Nye, late of Independent Television News, is showing footage from both Iraq wars. These are news stories, very much mainstream British journalism, and yet they hit me with force. The lecturer's thread has to do with the scoops, occasions when ITN got there first. What strikes me is that many of these stories contain interviews with Iraqis. And these are not just soundbites, clipped quotes interspersed with lots of voiceover. The ITN camera lingers long enough to hear what people have to say, and the effect is remarkable. What's remarkable is that it's so unremarkable. This should be normal news coverage, but in the US for so many years, this has been the exclusive province of documentaries. The British, whatever their own inadequacies, have been covering the news. As an American, I have gotten really used to news that is not news. In between the words and rising beneath the scenes and peeking between frames is the ghastliness and brutality of what we have done to a country and hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

I like the Commodore's account of things. How we pass the Scilly Isles, Poole and Dorset, sail south of the Isle of Wight, then hang a left. Being cut off from land has calmed me. Being in a windowless interior cabin has forced me into an interior point of view. The latter is most unwelcome, yet necessary. It is part of what I need. I do not need this all the time, and in fact I'm tired of it. But if there is a better opportunity to read, write, and focus within, I've never found it. Five days of this, six nights, and in the end you arrive in Britain with no jet lag. In fact, your last memory of the conveyance that brought you thousands of miles is not one of a floor littered with paper products and miniature bottles of Jim Beam, but of a sparkling and noble thing, the ship. I will miss it as much as I want to get off it.