HOW I FINALLY LEARNED SELF LOVE IN A POST NUCLEAR WORLD by Broti Gupta

up staying, seduced by the food and his own mounting hypochondria, for seven years. I felt a similar thing could happen to me on the ship. Even as the ship raced forward, it sought to erase time, to wrap the sameness of the days in pointless events (shopping, trivia nights, free podiatric tests) and luxury (lectures on why you should buy paintings from Thomas Kinkade, “The Painter of Light,” who conveniently had a shop aboard the boat). The cruise captain, a chipper young African American man, often came on the PA system to describe entertainment options and offer sinister 1984-style comments. “All those who refuse to cooperate will be thrown off the ship,” he said at one point. He concluded all his comments with a cry of “woo-hoo!” which, by the end, was being imitated and mocked by everyone, spreading in the population the way only something egregious done by a person in power can. By my fourth day on the ship, knocked out by seasickness and depressed by the meaninglessness of all the luxury, tired too by family, I was sleeping for 14 hours a day. I wanted to be thrown off.

What saves you — from the ship, the drinking oldies, the sense of being trapped in an Indian colonial club — is Alaska.

Alaska, dislocated like a shoulder from the United States, is America’s largest and least dense state. It dramatically brings together sea, pine forests, snow mountains, topaz glaciers, and waterfalls. The ship makes three stops in Alaska: Juneau, the capital, a port of 30,000 people; then Skagway, an old gold rush town, at the top of a fjord known as “Glacier Bay”; and then, on the way back down, near Vancouver, at the scenic island of Ketchikan. Each stop, when you get past its tourist trappings, is a wonder of open country, reminding you how much power the United States derives from an abundance of space.

In Juneau, we walked around the Alpine-tinged downtown, eating crab rolls and crab cakes at Tracy’s King Crab Shack. King crabs are alarming creatures — growing to the size of dogs — and native to Alaska. From downtown, we took a bus to the harbor, and for a hundred dollars a head, were taken on a boating expedition to see humpbacks, back in Alaska after feeding in Hawaii. Every few minutes, the black whales frolicked to the surface, revealing themselves with puffs of water that hung in the air like smoke and with great tails that rose up before they dove beneath the surface. You never saw these behemoths in their entirety. A calf followed our boat for 30 minutes out of curiosity and even raised its head out of the water to look at us. It ignored its mother’s puffs and entreaties to come back to her. This was my favorite part of the trip — shivering on a small boat as fish the size of school buses plunged around us.

Such a trip, where you pay a tour-operator, is known, in the parlance of the ship, as an “excursion.” It is best to book them on your own. This way, you get to escape your fellow cruise-inmates and also save money. Excursions are 15 to 20 dollars more expensive when booked through the ship, which makes sense: the economy of the ship, which subsidizes alcohol and food, is buoyed by these packages.

Our whale watching guides dropped us off at the Mendenhall Glacier, which, as it comes up to the water, depositing chunks of itself into the sea, is blue, the color of the minerals in the ice. A waterfall — Nugget Falls — pounds the beach near the mouth of the glacier. We stood in the spray, taking pictures. It was hard to admit that these things — waterfalls, the glacier moving back — were signs of global warming. In Alaska, it just made things prettier, more dynamic.

Skagway, our next stop, was more immediately digestible — a small town, with a high school class of four (“the prom is really awkward,” one of the tour guides said) and a single drag of old timber houses turned into shops and museums. It is the sort of tourist town where you are told a few foundational myths (it was hammered together during the Gold Rush, a sort of minor-league Deadwood), supplied lots of information to compensate for its boringness, shown the cemetery where a few unimportant people are buried, and are then quickly shunted off to the true highlight, which lies about 15 thousand feet above, in Canada, at the end of narrow railway tracks. A tourist toy train takes you through country in which miners climbed with backpacks, perishing by the thousands as they sought more gold. This train, outfitted with gold-colored Rexine seats, was tidy, cozy, and pleasant to ride after the other fussy forms of transport we had endured to get to Alaska. We ate sandwiches and chips and pies as the small black braid of metal coiled around a mountain before slipping into an open, cold country of glaciers, snow mountains, and aquamarine rivers. Another luxurious ride through hard country.

Toy trains can be dicey propositions — tricks to cough up money — but it was rousing to be on this one in May, the air thinning, the rail-line a carpet of pine needles, the people crowding near the front and clicking pictures at snow that exploded with sleek reflections.

Then, finally, one morning, on the ship, we were upon Glacier Bay. The ship lay wrapped in fog and rain; there was a commotion near our bedroom door as people stampeded through the hallways. The front deck of the ship had been opened! Guests walked on the wet deck, breathing white steam as the servers, now wearing coats and carrying umbrellas, served cocktails and cocoa with gloved hands. Above, hidden in the crow’s nest, the park ranger described each of the glaciers. They had split off from one mega-glacier 200 years before. Now they formed a gigantic national park that people sometimes traveled to by kayak, camping in the cold in the company of bears and foxes.

The glaciers were receding due to global warming, but like Nugget Falls, it was impossible not to feel the health and vitality of these pieces of ice, shocked into alien shapes by the winds. The Johns Hopkins Glacier was like thousands of gigantic pieces of blue chalk huddled together. Chunks came off the way they might if the chalk was held too aggressively to a blackboard — the blackboard here being the eternal white air. We stood on the railing of the ship, wet, pressing our sneakers into the prow. My cell phone came on, receiving an unwelcome torrent of text messages. The internet, my phone — these were all things that did not work on the ship and I had not missed them (the internet package was a bit too exorbitant for my menial tasks, and we had no reception). One of the last benefits of the cruise might be that it cuts you off from civilization. How long this will actually last, one can’t say. Shorter than it will take the glaciers to go.

By the time of our final stop, at Ketchikan, we were weary of tourist trappings and spent very little time in the town. By now we knew that the towns were owned by the cruise companies; they were continuations of the cruise; the shopping ambassador was like a doctor prescribing a drug from a pharma company that employs him. So we went on another self-booked excursion.

As if flying, cruising, boating, rail-riding, and busing had not been enough, we now took a floatplane over the Misty Fjords National Monument, which, as it turned out, was not misty at all. Everyone kept telling us how lucky we were. “It receives rainfall every day,” our taxi driver later said. Instead it was burning bright. Below, the reflection of the floatplane pierced the beaches and the blue water, and the brown shades beneath the water. We soared above lakes, mountains, islands, and volcanic plugs. There was not a single human dwelling around save for one US customs post Kurtz-like in the middle of a forest. The landscape was so gorgeous it was almost wasteful. Freshwater lakes pooled on tiny islands surrounded by saltwater sea. One lake on a plateau melted into a bright waterfall, like a gash on the top of a glass that never empties. The pilot made turns toward a snow mountain and then touched down in the water. He unbuckled as soon as we landed. The middle-aged British man sitting next to us was drenched beneath his sweater — though it was not hot. We got off on a jetty and looked around at the massed, hushed greenery. There was silence: no one in sight. All this land and no one to use it. It was eerie. It was the first time I was eager to be back on the ship.

But not so fast. We first had to make the return flight, which was short and not very scary — kind of like being in a bus, with the propeller coming on slowly, and the pilot carrying us with the gliding confidence of people who fly every day. Alaska has the highest number of licensed pilots in the United States; flying is the only way to get to many places in the state. On dry land, we took a tour of Ketchikan’s totem poles. Our taxi driver, a veteran, had worked as a medic in Afghanistan, assisting women whose perinea had been torn by sexual assault and rape. “I believe we should help people,” he said, justifying US intervention abroad. He had one eye. He had lost the other when a tree he was chopping fell down on him. His one good eye had cried involuntarily for a while and he had no peripheral vision, but he assured us that he had developed tricks to deal with this handicap. Of course he only mentioned it midway through the ride.

We stopped briefly to look down at a rushing stream which, later in the summer, fills with dead pink salmon. “The whole place stinks,” our driver told us, with that casual attitude toward beauty that Alaskans sometime develop.

Afterward, tired and hungry, we returned to the bosom of the ship, eager to do justice to it one last time. My father came back with many plates from the buffet. We were all content, before our time on The Magic Mountain ended, and we returned, cured, to Vancouver.

A JOKE BETWEEN SOLDIERS

Excerpt from The Spirit Artist

CARMIEL BANASKY

I asked only that my son appear in the photograph beside me and that he be wearing something other than his maddeningly blue livery. I said this to myself, my lips moving but no sound escaping, half-prayer, half-request to Mr. Mumler, the photographer. He must have thought me mad, crazed by grief. But I was not. I know my son is in a better place, and that there he is re-embodied, or if the case be that one does not need a body in heaven, in the Summerland, he is at the very least not disembodied as the young soldier at our doorstep told me that bright, cloudless day. A piece of his uniform survived, pinned with a paper notice through which he communicated from the next realm his rank and unit and home address so that I might be informed. The young soldier handed me a letter from the soldier who had fought next to my son. I read it on the doorstep — it described how my son had been found in a state of tranquil repose, and there was no sign of a frown upon his lips, which signified, the letter said, that he had accepted his fate and felt at peace with God.

I looked past the young soldier in front of me, who had chipped teeth, and I said, Won’t you sit with me for a while? Come in for tea. The young soldier peered at me and said, Your boy died defending all that is just. I said, Yes but there is still tea to be drunk. He came in and stayed three hours or more while my husband was out. I was very affected. At that time, I do admit I was insane with something more than grief, which started in my toes and my head and met at the midpoint. I tried to ignore the sensation and made him sit in silence with me for a long while. He tapped his knees with his fingertips, anxious rhythms. His knees and fingers, up and down, up and down. I could do nothing to stop the sensation. I was possessed by it. I told him I had a headache and would he please come closer to feel my forehead. He said he was not a doctor, but that if I wished, he would have a look. There was gravel in my stomach. I felt I might be sick if I did not do something to make it better. He said, Is your husband not home to tend to you? And I said, Have you been in battle with my son and where? He said, I did not know your son except in spirit and common love. He knelt down, his face quite close, and he put his palm upon my forehead. Then I put my mouth on his. I put my hand on the back of his head, and held him to me. There is a joke told by soldiers, which my son repeated to me in a letter: Why is a kiss like a rumor? Because it goes from mouth to mouth.

When the soldier pulled away from me, he looked down at me with such pity I could have spat in his face. But he was already gone.

Alone, our tea, undrunk, grown cold, I tended to myself in a way I had never tended. I felt I was chiseling out of me the old kernel that makes me a person. My son’s idle shoes rested near the chair.

I feared I would die of the shame of that kiss, that desire roused by news of death, my damnation sealed.

Of course I did not say any of this to Mr. Mumler, who was a very odd-looking man and had he been the soldier to tell me of my son, perhaps I would not have done what I had. But Mr. Mumler took me in a different way. He captured me, in the form of a photograph, and on it, too, was my son who I knew immediately by the length of his ears. My son! I could see in his likeness that he blamed me not for my transgression: his face was the image of forgiveness, and I said goodbye to that figure in the picture. I told Mr. Mumler I would give him all the money I had for this gift, more than the asking price. For it was money I would have spent to have his body embalmed and sent back home, had I not had this picture. But Mumler declined, and said the asking price would do if it was alright by me. I cried then, and could have kept weeping in that room until the day I died, had he not shuttled me out for their next customer, who I knew by the name of Mr. Stunner.