14

The first couple days "at sea" I was in a stupor, still recovering. Was it Saturday? Was it Tuesday? Was I disappointed either way? I compensated by sleeping all the time until alarms blared late one morning and I woke up, panicking, the reality that the Details piece was never going to run hitting hard, and I vaguely remembered something about a lifeboat drill-a reminder I barely noticed had been slipped under my door the night before when I came back from a crummy dinner in the Queen's Grill. Exhausted, I found the life jacket locked in some kind of coffin in my bathroom, grabbed my sunglasses and ran-walked, hungover, along dozens of empty corridors and down two flights of stairs trying to follow the directions on a badly Xeroxed map until I found a deck filled with old people who were huddled in masses and staring rudely, annoyed by my tardiness as I muttered "Oh, give me a break" and muttered and muttered. "It's backwards, son," I was told by an officer, who struggled, fumbling, to untie the life jacket I had sloppily put on. While I stood there, the officer said, "Don't worry"-patting me on the shoulder as I flinched a dozen times-"you probably won't need it." I offered him a Mentos, told him he was a dead ringer for Kurt Loder, which he wasn't.

I wandered around on what was left of my Xanax and made an appointment for a massage that I actually kept. I did a little rehearsing, nailed a couple of scenes down, but they had already been shot, someone had already commented favorably on the dailies, so that whole enterprise could be construed as kind of a waste. The elderly and Japanese were everywhere, surrounded me at miserable dinners I ate alone in the Queen's Grill while staring at an issue of last month's Interview magazine because there were new photos by Jurgin Teller of Daniela Pestova contemplating a plate of spring rolls and a Corrine Day photo essay on martini glasses and the entire issue was filled with bruises and scars and underarm hair and beautiful, shiftless-looking guys lounging improbably in front of empty 7-Elevens at dusk somewhere in the "heartland" and all I could think about, holding back tears and wincing, was: that should have been me.

Jurassic Park was the only movie playing in the ship's Dolbyequipped auditorium so I ended up in the casino a lot, uselessly gambling away the money Palakon had left me, dropping a thousand dollars' worth of chips at the 21 table in what seemed like a matter of minutes. In the Queen's Lounge old couples sat on long couches everywhere, trying to complete massive jigsaw puzzles that they were getting absolutely nowhere with, and I was always getting lost and I couldn't find anything anywhere. I'd finally locate one of the ship's many bars and sit down, knock back a Mai Tai or four and smoke a pack of cigarettes until the strength to resume looking for my cabin wandered back to me. At one of these bars I was so bored I even flirted with a young German guy who in hushed tones kept inviting me to accompany him the next day to the gym-"da voorkoot stashoon"-and I politely declined by telling him that I had just recovered from a humongous heart attack. His response: "Ja?"

The next time I saw the German guy I was floating near the rim of the huge whirlpool bath in the spa and after that I sluggishly moved to the thalassotherapy pool and when I saw him saunter over, wearing a silver thong a little too confidently, I bolted toward a private inhalation booth, where I daydreamed about what I was going to do with the $300,000 F. Fred Palakon had offered me to find Jamie Fields. I came up with so many things that I almost passed out and had to be revived with a facial and an aromatherapy session administered by someone who looked like the Crypt-Keeper, as a Muzak version of "Hooked on a Feeling" was piped through the spa's sound system.

Occasionally the crew converged and the camera would follow me at a discreet distance, shots mainly of Victor on the upper-deck starboard railing, trying to light cigarettes, some rolled with marijuana, sunglasses on, wearing an oversized Armani leather jacket. I was told to look sad, as if I missed Lauren Hynde, as if I regretted my treatment of Chloe, as if my world were falling apart. I was encouraged to try and find Lauren in Miami, where she was staying with Damien, and I was given the name of a famous hotel, but I feigned seasickness and those scenes were scrapped since they really weren't in character anyway.

The Dave Matthews Band's "Crash into Me" played over the montage, not that the lyrics had anything to do with the images the song was played over but it was "haunting," it was "moody," it was "summing things up, it gave the footage an "emotional resonance" that I guess we were incapable of capturing ourselves. At first my feelings were basically so what? But then I suggested other music: "Hurt" by Nine Inch Nails, but I was told that the rights were sky-high and that the song was "too ominous" for this sequence; Nada Surf's "Popular" had "too many minor chords," it didn't fit the "mood of the piece," it was-again-"too ominous." When I told them I seriously did not think things could get any more f**king ominous than they already were, I was told, "Things get very much more ominous, Victor," and then I was.left alone.