Photographs by Jason Andrew

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You could be forgiven for thinking it was Mike Johnson’s idea to host the House Republicans’ annual policy retreat at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, though in fact the conference has gathered there for several years. Step into the upper lobby, red staircase runner giving way to gleaming black-and-white tile, symmetrical furnishings, George Washington gazing east from his gilded-frame portrait above a marble fireplace, and for a moment Johnson’s fantasy of what Congress once was, what it could be—what he tries to convince himself it actually still is—seems suddenly more plausible.

When House Republicans met there in March, Johnson was in his fifth month as speaker of the House, and his victory of this past weekend, in which he secured funding for the Ukraine war, seemed completely improbable. In fact his whole tenure seemed improbable back in March, defined almost entirely by Republican infighting. But here at the Greenbrier: How could one not aspire to civility?

At the conclusion of the retreat, I met Johnson in a small, mustard-hued room in one of the more secluded corridors of the resort. At 52, he is a curiously unimposing presence—horn-rimmed glasses, ruminative expression—with little of the gravitas one might assume of the person second in line to the presidency. Really, he just looked tired. But he was pleased with these past few days, he said, the opportunity to bring much of the conference together and reinforce the central themes of his young tenure. “What I try to do, my leadership style,” Johnson explained, “is that I bring in the Freedom Caucus, and then I bring in Main Street or Problem Solvers Caucus guys—people from across the conference with disparate views—and I put them around the conference table in the speaker’s office, and we just hash it out, let them debate and talk.”

“I mean, that’s the beauty of—it’s part of the process,” he said.

[David Frum: Trump deflates]

Even before he ascended to the speakership, Johnson had oriented his nascent brand around the politics of civility, his guidepost the image of President Ronald Reagan and Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill: clashing views on policy, but a relationship governed by trust in the other’s good faith, a desire to get to yes. In January 2017, just days into his first term in Congress, Johnson drafted and invited colleagues from both parties to sign the “Commitment to Civility,” a pledge in the midst of the “increasing division in and coarsening of our culture,” to show “proper respect to one another” and “set an example of statesmanship for the younger generations.” (Twenty-nine Republicans and 21 Democrats signed.)

Yet by the time Johnson declared his interest in becoming speaker of the House, nearly seven years later, his ambitions of civility and dignified disagreement had grown only further detached from his party’s prevailing impulses, and remained entirely at odds with its undisputed leader, a man whose closest approximation of statesmanship is extending his “best wishes to all, even the haters and losers.”

When Johnson assumed the speakership in October, an all-but-accidental selection after a series of failed candidates, he had few useful models for bringing a fractious Republican conference to harmony, or even succeeding in the role more generally, at least not in this century. In the brief historical survey of Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic former speaker: “He had Kevin [McCarthy], who didn’t last. The last speaker before that, Paul Ryan—respected on both sides of the aisle, but decided to leave. John Boehner, same thing—made a decision to leave in the course of the year, just decided, ‘This is it, I’m out of here.’ And before that, the speaker went to prison, so …”

Johnson would quickly learn that not even his own hard-line brand of conservatism—a record in lockstep with the Republican base on issues from abortion to Donald Trump’s border wall—could insulate him from far-right charges of betrayal. In the past six months, he has seen his closest ideological allies become his most outspoken opponents, their belligerence manifesting in a ceaseless churn of failed procedural votes, public denunciations of his leadership, and, now, the threat of his removal.

On Saturday, the House voted to pass Johnson’s massive foreign-aid package, including $61 billion for Ukraine. The speaker relied primarily on Democrats to clear the “critically important” measure, as he deemed it, a dynamic that only reinforced the far-right resolve to cut his speakership short.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene castigated Johnson on X as a “traitor” to his conference and country, and assured reporters that she would continue gathering support for her motion to vacate him from the job; two other members are currently backing the effort. For Republicans, it was the culmination of a week marked not by high-level debate so much as new variations of schoolyard petulance: As the speaker—a “Sanctimonious Twerp,” Steve Bannon decreed him—attempted to broker consensus on the future of the global democratic order, his colleagues stood on the House floor and told one another to “kick rocks, tubby.”

This is where the beauty of the process has brought Mike Johnson.

Johnson walks through National Statuary Hall moments before the articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas headed to the Senate on April 16. (Jason Andrew for The Atlantic)

Johnson’s earliest intimations of a political philosophy were anchored in the fact of his existence. Friends of Jeanne Messina had urged her to consider an abortion; she and Pat Johnson were only in high school, both of humble circumstances in south Shreveport, Louisiana. But instead, they’d gotten married, and welcomed James Michael in January 1972; three more children followed. “Exactly one year before Roe v. Wade, my parents, who were just teenagers at the time, chose life,” Johnson said at the annual March for Life rally earlier this year. “And I am very profoundly grateful that they did.” In all things God works for the good of those who love him: This Mike Johnson was taught to trust.

And he had to trust this, because how else could he have made sense of the events of September 17, 1984? On that afternoon, his father, an assistant chief of the Shreveport Fire Department, was summoned to the Dixie Cold Storage plant on the report of an ammonia leak. In rubberized suits, he and his partner ventured into one of the vaults to locate and cap the valve, their flashlights barely cutting through the dark. Then: an explosion, screams, both men on fire, everything around them on fire, Pat Johnson’s suit and then flesh melting off his body as he squeezed through a hole in the wall later estimated to be no more than 12 inches square. His partner died two days later in the hospital; Pat, with burns covering more than 72 percent of his body, clung improbably to life. The family prayed, Jeanne playing tapes of the Psalms at her husband’s bedside. Ten days into his stay involving more than three dozen surgeries, Pat was finally able to speak. “Pat told me today that he would make it!” Jeanne recorded in her diary, according to a 1987 book about the explosion and its aftermath. “I asked him how he knew; he said, ‘The Lord.’”

“I was 12 years old, and I watched them,” Johnson told me. “Faith was not some ethereal concept—we prayed and believed, and it happened.”

In some ways his childhood ended with the fire. His mother regularly spent nights in the hospital waiting room, often returning home only at the coaxing of doctors. Mike, meanwhile, helped take care of his three siblings. His role as man of the house became necessarily more literal when his father, not long after the accident, left the family in search of purpose and drier climates, remarrying and divorcing several times. Out of this crucible emerged an uncommonly serious and diligent teenager, the class president and Key Club officer and speech trophy winner. At Louisiana State University, the Interfraternity Council president didn’t drink, one Kappa Sigma brother recalls, but he never seemed to look down on those who did, either.

He was just shy of his law degree at LSU when, in May 1998, at a friend’s wedding, he met Kelly Lary, an elementary-school teacher who wore a red dress and ordered Diet Coke at the bar. Six months later, they were engaged. In a spring ceremony at First Baptist Church of Bossier, the two entered into a “covenant marriage,” a legal distinction in Louisiana providing stricter grounds for divorce. They soon became the legal guardians of a Black teenager named Michael James, whom Johnson had met while volunteering at a Christian youth ministry in Baton Rouge. The couple would go on to have four biological children.

Johnson’s ideological worldview developed in tandem with the final triumphant stirrings of the Moral Majority. As an attorney, he worked for the Alliance Defense Fund (now the Alliance Defending Freedom) and served on the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, articulating a conservatism anchored in the SBC’s position on abortion and LGBTQ rights, an image of government actively engaged in the delineation of moral rectitude. In columns for the Shreveport Times, Johnson described same-sex marriage as “the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic,” tied his state’s population drain to the proliferation of “adult entertainment,” and heralded George W. Bush’s election in 2004 as a referendum on the “militant anti-religious” character of much of the Democratic Party. After winning election to the Louisiana state House, in 2015, he quickly burnished his political identity as a “social issues warrior,” as Baton Rouge’s The Advocate newspaper called him.

[Peter Wehner: The polite zealotry of Mike Johnson]

Yet like many of his peers in the post-Reagan sweep of movement conservatism, Johnson bracketed his grave portents of moral decline with the default assurance that America remained the shining city on a hill, its best days yet ahead. From a young age, he saw in Reagan an unreservedly conservative politics tempered by a conviction that bipartisanship was both desirable and still possible. During the 2008 Republican presidential primary, Johnson would take to Mike Huckabee’s line: “I’m a conservative, but I’m not mad at everybody over it.”

Of course, by the time Johnson won election to Congress, eight years later, Huckabee was mad; everybody in the Republican Party, it seemed, was mad. Nevertheless Johnson proceeded to Washington apparently intent on marshaling the wisdom gleaned from his leadership of his junior class at Captain Shreve High: “Our class has a history of being a diverse but well-unified group,” he’d told the yearbook. “I believe this was the reason we achieved so much and had so much fun all the while.”

Less than a year into his first term representing Louisiana’s Fourth District, Johnson was with his two younger sons at D.C.’s Reagan airport when they happened upon Democratic Representative John Lewis. And certainly this seemed fun, the boys’ gap-toothed smiles as they posed on either side of the civil-rights icon for a curbside photo, which Johnson uploaded to Facebook. “As we waited for our rides, the legendary civil rights leader told the boys about being the youngest speaker and one of the ‘Big Six’ organizers at the 1963 March on Washington—speaking to an enormous crowd after Dr. King’s celebrated ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Wow!” he captioned the post, adding: “I’m happy to show my sons that two men with different party affiliations and ideas can still get along in this town.”

A sampling of the comments in response:

“I hoped you explained to your children that John Lewis is a bigot and a racist.”

“Wouldn’t be caught dead in a photo with this fool … poor choice !!!”

“I WAS TAUGHT YOU DONT SLEEP WITH THE ENEMY .. MR JOHNSON SOUNDS TWO FACED TO ME , I MADE A MISTAKE VOTING FOR HIM ..”

There is of course some romance to the idea: Mike Johnson startling at a sudden tap on his shoulder, turning to find the speaker’s gavel being presented to him—no, urged on him—by the bleary-eyed conscripts of a leaderless tribe. Johnson himself can seem partial to it. “I was just content to be a lieutenant,” he said during our conversation. “So when it happened, I wasn’t expecting it.”

Kevin McCarthy was only eight months into his speakership when, on October 3, 2023, eight conservative hard-liners—enraged, ostensibly, by a recent bipartisan deal to avert a government shutdown—voted with Democrats to oust him from the job. In the immediate scramble to anoint McCarthy’s successor, a handful of obvious contenders emerged, among them the House majority leader and Louisiana Republican, Steve Scalise, and Jim Jordan, chair of the Judiciary Committee and a co-founder of the Freedom Caucus. Representative Matt Gaetz floated Johnson as another potential replacement, but Johnson would wait three weeks before declaring his own candidacy. He “held back,” he told me, largely out of deference to Scalise (“who’s like my brother”) and then Jordan (“who’s like my other brother, my mentor”), both of whose bids would fail. And also, Johnson went on, “because a mentor told me when I was in eighth grade, ‘Always remember that real leadership is recognized, not imposed.’”

But perhaps it could be entertained. Publicly, Johnson all but rolled his eyes at being mentioned as a possible speaker; privately, he started contacting friends right after McCarthy’s toppling, indicating interest. Woody Jenkins, a longtime acquaintance who chaired Donald Trump’s Louisiana campaign in 2016, read to me a text message he said Johnson had sent him on October 4: “My name is being mentioned for Speaker along with two of my close friends Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan,” Johnson had written. He asked Jenkins to “pray that Kelly and I will have crystal clear wisdom and discernment.” Louisiana State Senator Alan Seabaugh, a former law partner and longtime friend, recalled hearing from Johnson as well. “He told me … when it first happened, ‘I think I might be the only one who can get to 217,’” Seabaugh said. “He kept saying: ‘Everybody else has three or four people that have vendettas against them; I don’t think I do.’”

Johnson told me he “knew,” even then, “that I could get all the votes in the room.” But he didn’t want to campaign openly at first, he said, “because I wanted them to come to me and say, ‘You should be the leader.’ And ultimately that’s what happened.”

What had made Johnson, a fourth-term congressman and virtual backbencher, so serenely confident in his chances? “I’ve always been a bridge builder,” he mused at the Greenbrier. “Probably the first box that had to be checked was that you didn’t have any enemies in the room. And I didn’t have any enemies in the room.”

[Read: A speaker without enemies—for now]

In late 2020, when he sought to become vice chair of the House Republican conference, a role largely focused on messaging and day-to-day-operations, Johnson had asked his colleague Tom Cole to nominate him for the job. While Johnson is a hard-line conservative and ardent Trump supporter, Cole, the recently appointed chair of the House Appropriations Committee who has held his Oklahoma seat for more than two decades, is a totemic remnant of the party’s establishment; to step off the third-floor elevator in the Capitol nearest his (now former) office was to find oneself instantly dislocated by a dense fog of cigar smoke. Johnson’s request took him by surprise. “I kind of gave him this quizzical look, and I said, ‘Well, you know, I’ll do it, Mike, but why me? I mean, we don’t run in the same circles particularly,’” Cole recalled to me. “And he goes, ‘Well, I think you can help me reach some people that I don’t normally deal with.’”

For some colleagues, Johnson’s conviction that he was “prepared” for the speakership seemed odd; the role of vice chair had occasionally put him in the room where decisions were made, sure, but it never afforded him any real say in what those decisions were. To the extent that anyone interviewed for this story could remember the particulars of his tenure, it was for his creation of the “Patrick Henry Award,” a prize for members who gave the most floor speeches in a certain period; Johnson had “meticulously” kept track of the numbers, a former senior House GOP aide recalled, even getting little busts of the prize’s namesake to present to winners. “He takes the universe he’s given and he wants to kind of chop it up and make it methodical,” this person, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, explained. “That being said, he doesn’t then do super well with the chaos and the unexpected.”

Johnson concedes now that his concept of the speakership was perhaps tidier than the reality. During our interview, he thought back to the night of his election, October 25, when Patrick McHenry—the Republican who served as interim speaker through the post-McCarthy fracas—prepared to pass off the gavel. “And he said, ‘When I hand you this, your life’s never gonna be the same,’” Johnson recalled to me. “And I was like, Ha ha ha.’”

He emitted a strange half laugh and glanced down at his shoes. “I had no idea,” he said. “I had no idea.”

On October 26, Johnson awoke to thousands of text messages and a suddenly bubble-wrapped existence, or at least the beginnings of one. There were now plans and protocols related to his movements, his family’s, and if Johnson understood the necessity of these developments, he did not take great care to hide his disdain for them, either. “He hates having those people”—Capitol Police, sheriff’s deputies—“park outside of his house,” Royal Alexander, a Shreveport attorney and friend of Johnson’s, told me.

Sitting with Johnson for a portion of our interview at the Greenbrier was his wife, Kelly; I had wanted to know how her life, too, had changed in the months since her husband’s election. “We’re not ever really alone,” she explained. “Because—”

Johnson, looking at her, interjected: “We haven’t been alone since October 25.”

She looked back at him. “Well, but I guess sleeping at night.”

“Well, but they’re standing right outside by the door,” he noted flatly.

Kelly Johnson, 50 years old and a Louisiana native, is a distinctly southern presence, gracious and blond. On this occasion she wore a pearl necklace and white cape blazer (“I think this is almost like Jackie O., with this flowing-sleeve thing,” her husband observed). She is the sort of woman who smiles even as her eyes cloud with tears—for example when discussing her recent decision to put her Christian counseling practice “on pause.” “I didn’t want to, because I do enjoy it. But I just couldn’t do that and fulfill my new role as speaker’s wife and support him,” she said. “I had been in denial and thought I could do it all, and I was going to try, and then a couple weeks ago I went home …” Her voice trailed off. “Because I’m coming up to Washington more …”

“Because I need her all the time,” Johnson said.

“Yeah, because now he says, ‘I need you here,’” Kelly explained. “Before he was like, I want you to be here and I’d like for you to be here. Now it’s like, I need you here.”

Around-the-clock security is one of those prosaic conditions of the speakership at which Republicans like Scalise, a longtime member of House leadership, or Tom Emmer, the majority whip who also tried and failed to succeed McCarthy, would have barely blinked. But for Johnson, who had served in Congress a shorter time than any member elected speaker since 1883, it would prove as much of an adjustment as the demands of fundraising and vote counting, and the scrutiny, too: He seemed unsettled to find the various activities and remarks and posts that constituted his past suddenly of global interest, and to encounter the already-emergent consensus, as he saw it, that his evangelical faith somehow “taints” his ability to lead. By December, Johnson was venting over text to Woody Jenkins: “All of the leftist media is trying to gut me like a fish.”

To other friends he has described the speakership like this: “I feel like a triage nurse on the battlefield: They wheel a bloody body in and yell, ‘Stop the bleeding!’ And I will, and then turn around and there’s another bloody body.” There was the pace of catastrophe, yes, but also the utter unpredictability of its source. He told me he did not anticipate, for example, the moment when he was briefed on a member’s crusade to renovate their space in the Cannon House Office Building; in view of their desired positioning of a club chair, the member had petitioned to have a door remodeled to open this way instead of that; the matter made it all the way up to the speaker. “So, sir, you have to decide,” Johnson’s aides informed him. “Are you kidding me?” he replied. Given the historic status of the building, he told me, the project would have cost $36,000. It was a no for Johnson.

“This is my life every day,” he said.

Johnson with his wife, Kelly, during a GOP spouses reception at the Capitol on April 16. (Jason Andrew for The Atlantic)

It is true that after six years and 10 months in Congress Mike Johnson had no enemies. It is also true that in his six years and 10 months in Congress he had never been in a position, really, to make them. The resulting dynamic has given his speakership an almost circular quality, the amiability that allowed him to win the job now arguably the greatest threat to his ability to do it.

More pointedly, as one Republican adviser close to leadership, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, has come to conclude, “I think members can push him around a little more than they could with McCarthy and others.”

Johnson’s aversion to conflict showcased itself almost at once. Among the more cosmetic changes the new leader set forth was one concerning the weekly meetings of the conference’s Elected Leadership Committee, or ELC. As speaker, McCarthy had expanded the meetings to allow additional representatives from the “Five Families,” as he termed them—the Freedom Caucus, the Problem Solvers Caucus, and other ideological factions—to attend, and Johnson wanted to roll the number back to just one each. This meant, in the case of the Freedom Caucus, that Representative Byron Donalds, a rising GOP star and Trump favorite from Florida, was no longer invited.

When a Johnson aide called Donalds’s team with the news, however, the Floridian’s chief of staff said that Donalds would need to hear it from the speaker directly. A plainly unbothered Donalds went ahead and attended Johnson’s first ELC meeting as speaker—showing up late, even. The staffers spoke again, but according to four people familiar with the matter, Johnson himself said nothing—not that week, nor for the next few weeks as Donalds continued to show up. Instead, when Donalds raised his hand to share his thoughts, Johnson, to the dim confusion of others in the room, simply gave him the floor. (Donalds eventually stopped attending the meetings, but a spokesperson for him declined to elaborate on the reason.)

The episode presumably did not inspire confidence in Johnson’s capacity to govern on matters of global consequence, and certainly there was before him no shortage of such matters: a government yet again barreling toward a shutdown, record numbers of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, and the uncertain fate of military aid to Ukraine and Israel. In some ways it was not until the new year, as Johnson began charting the more substantive course of his speakership, that he was forced to reckon with the inherent fragility of his mandate. He had a three-seat majority (soon to be one), and remained tethered to concessions McCarthy had made to the far right in order to win the speakership himself—most notably, a reversion to a pre-2019 rule allowing a single member to initiate the process of ousting a speaker.

In January, Johnson reached an agreement with Democrats to maintain effectively the same government funding levels McCarthy had established in his bipartisan debt-ceiling deal the year prior, which had largely inspired the conservative revolt against his speakership. The agreement allowed Johnson to avoid a shutdown. But his far-right colleagues were quick to remind him of the trapdoor beneath him, as well as their willingness to pull the lever. “I don’t know why we would keep him as speaker,” Chip Roy of Texas, the Freedom Caucus policy chair, had said before the vote. As Johnson negotiated with other congressional leaders on bipartisan Senate legislation that would tie foreign aid to border-security measures, Marjorie Taylor Greene declared her red line. “We don’t have to trade $60 billion for Ukraine for our own country’s border security,” she told reporters. “I’ll fight it as much as possible. Even if I have to go so far [as] to vacate the chair.”

[From the January/February 2023 issue: Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?]

By mid-February, the House had broken the modern record for rule-vote failures in a single Congress. Before 2023, the mundane procedural vote—which governs the terms of debate on a given bill—had not failed once in two decades. In the first six months of Johnson’s speakership alone, however, dozens of members, mostly conservatives, have killed the rule four times. It has become the far right’s preferred method of obstruction, used sometimes in an effort to sabotage the underlying bill itself, other times to punish leadership for an unrelated decision. Johnson has thus been forced to kick most major legislation of his speakership to the floor under a process that requires a two-thirds majority, rather than a simple majority, for passage—forced, in other words, to rely on Democrats for votes. By thwarting the regular rhythms of the House, Johnson’s conservative critics boxed him into the very concessions they then went on to complain about.

By spring, Johnson’s more mainstream Republican colleagues were growing restless for their own reasons. Whether Johnson is “deliberative” or “indecisive” depends on which member you ask; though the speaker’s agreeable nature usually assures smooth conversations conducted in indoor voices, it can also leave members—centrists and Freedom Caucus types alike—convinced that he is on their side. In meetings, Johnson can spend more time taking notes than talking, offering only the occasional I hear you, brother as members press their cases. And there are many meetings. “He has to sort of slow down and think things through and talk to more people because he just doesn’t have that instinct yet of No, this is what we’re doing,” one senior House GOP aide, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, told me.

There can sometimes seem about Johnson a faintly dazed air, the sense that whatever has just transpired on the House floor was not deliberately orchestrated so much as realized by the sheer force of inertia. At no point did this seem clearer than on the evening of February 6, when House GOP leaders achieved a historic first in their failure to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas—and then promptly saw their stand-alone Israel aid package get voted down, too. Following the impeachment flop, Democrats erupted in whistles and applause, leaving a number of observers unsure why Johnson had still pressed ahead on Israel. “The floor really does have a pulse,” John Stipicevic, a lobbyist and former floor director for McCarthy, told me. “You have to be able to sense when the momentum has shifted.”

After the Mayorkas vote, which Johnson gaveled himself, he stepped down into the directionless hum of his conference, his demeanor oddly placid. Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican and Freedom Caucus member who’d helped manage the Mayorkas effort, was slightly taken aback when Johnson, “unshaken” and “totally confident,” approached to ask if he was okay. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, I guess.’ You know—‘What’s the plan?’” Higgins recalled. “And he immediately was very calm. He said, ‘We got this; Steve will be back next week.’” (Seven days later, with Scalise back in commission following treatment for blood cancer, the impeachment articles passed by one vote; the Senate tossed them aside.)

Higgins, who described Johnson as a “beautiful American man, with an amazing spirit,” framed the exchange in positive terms, a dose of reassurance when he’d needed it. But the story called to mind criticisms I’d heard from other conservatives on Capitol Hill, for whom Johnson’s unrelenting calm has occasionally proved more unnerving than soothing. “Their view is, ‘Can you at least act a little concerned that this is not going well?’” as one Republican consultant, who requested anonymity to disclose private conversations with clients, summarized it. “‘Because it’s not going well.’”

“Some of my closest friends are in the Freedom Caucus,” Johnson maintained during our interview. “Philosophically, there’s not an ounce of daylight between us.” It is a point that Johnson often returns to, as if to talk both his audience and himself into believing that ideas still count for something. But it has been a long time since ideas counted for something in the Republican Party, the “conservative” label now a statement not of one’s policy preferences but of one’s tactics and disposition. As speaker, Johnson has seen his most insistently “conservative” friends, men like Chip Roy—who as a freshman matched with Johnson as part of the House’s mentorship program—publicly question his future. (Roy did not respond to my interview requests.) Those who refrain from criticizing Johnson openly, meanwhile, don’t seem altogether interested in praising him, either. Jim Jordan, Johnson’s own mentor, did not respond to any of my calls and emails over the course of three months.

Remarkably, it is Democrats who have often seemed more willing to extend Johnson a measure of grace. This is not something that his aides and others close to him are all that anxious to advertise, but it is nonetheless real: this sliver of cross-aisle sympathy that his predecessor never quite inspired. “I started out as very worried and concerned and very alarmed by people in his background—almost from being panicked about him. And now 15 percent of me, like, feels sorry for the guy,” James Carville, the Democratic strategist and Louisianan, told me. “I mean, I really want to hate him more than I do.”

Johnson’s struggles with the far-right, of course, are virtually the same as those endured by McCarthy. The difference is that many Democrats on the Hill—some of whom viewed McCarthy as “dishonest” and even “destructive”—trust Johnson as a person. Nancy Pelosi told me she viewed Johnson as “a person of integrity,” if not a great deal of experience. “Personally, I respect his authenticity; I disagree with his politics, but that’s okay.” She went on: “If you’re just sitting in the back bench, and then they tap you to become the speaker, they shouldn’t complain when you don’t know how to be speaker from day one.

“I’m not here to criticize him; I just want him to do well,” Pelosi said as our call last month wound down. Then, just before hanging up: “I hope that what is said about Donald Trump being his puppeteer is not true.”

“We have a very, uh, good relationship, um …” Johnson was squinting at his phone, trying to decipher a sudden blur of messages from his team. “Oh, it’s that Netanyahu called.” His communications director chuckled anxiously. “Yeah, we should, uh …” Johnson put his phone away. “That’s okay, that’s okay,” he said.

So anyway, yes: a very good relationship.

Johnson says the first time he interacted with Donald Trump was in early 2017, when the new president called the new congressman to whip him on House Republicans’ first Obamacare-replacement offering under Trump. “And I couldn’t do it,” Johnson recalled. The bill was a “mess,” in his estimation, and he told Trump as much. “And he was—he was quite frustrated by that. But I stood my ground because I told him that if we don’t get some amendments, it’s not going to be a good piece of legislation, and I would be doing wrong by my constituents, and that would make both of us look bad.”

Johnson ultimately supported the House’s revised effort (the one the late Senator John McCain’s thumbs-down would kill), and after that he and Trump “reconnected.” Johnson reiterated to me that Trump had been frustrated. “But he said he respected the fact that I told him what I thought was right and I didn’t just yield, because I don’t do that.”

In other words, Mike Johnson is no one’s puppet: This is what he wanted to tell me. But Johnson would not earn his “MAGA Mike” appellation—bestowed by Matt Gaetz upon his election to speaker, now Trump’s preferred way of referencing him—by regularly positioning himself at odds with Trump. For Johnson, as for a number of the most conservative House members, the Obamacare episode quickly revealed itself to be the rare exception to a rule of loyal devotion to the 45th president.

[Read: Matt Gaetz is winning]

In early 2020, Johnson served on Trump’s impeachment defense team and then, later that year, promptly enlisted in efforts to challenge the validity of Joe Biden’s election victory. After urging donations to Trump’s “Election Defense Fund,” Johnson went on to spearhead an amicus brief in support of Texas’s lawsuit challenging the election results, arguing that some states Biden won had acted unconstitutionally when they changed their voting laws, partially in response to the pandemic.

I thought of this as Johnson explained to me what he sees as one of his core mandates as speaker: “trying to restore trust and faith” in American institutions.

Hadn’t he quite prominently fomented distrust in the nation’s electoral system?

No, he said; he’d done “exactly the opposite.” “I mean, anybody who’s read the brief, or understood what we were talking about, it was actually—we were the ones trying to maintain the rule of law,” he argued.

It’s true that the focus of Johnson’s argument before the Supreme Court was narrow, avoiding the more hysterical claims of fraud propounded by Trump. But Johnson was—is—smart enough to understand that very few voters would care to parse the particulars of a legal document; what mattered was the image of Mike Johnson out there fighting. This is where his protestations of independence from Trump and the coarser elements of his party ring their hollowest: whether Johnson emphasizes the nuance of his constitutional inquiry or embraces the more ambiguous profile of a fighter changes according to who’s listening. On April 12, Johnson stood alongside Trump at Mar-a-Lago to unveil forthcoming “election integrity” legislation to prevent voting by noncitizens, which is already illegal and rarely ever happens.

The popular caricature of Johnson’s speakership, however—the idea that he arises each morning with a to-do list from Trump—assumes that Trump is actually paying attention. Generally, he’s not; if anything, Johnson can at times seem to wish there were a to-do list. Unlike Kevin McCarthy, according to two Trump advisers, Johnson occasionally hesitates before calling the former president directly. Instead, he and his staff often try to divine Trump’s position on this or that from conversations with those close to him. Earlier this year, when bipartisan border legislation in the Senate appeared close to passage, Johnson was “asking a lot of people around Trump what he should do,” said one of the Trump advisers, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations. In that instance, Trump ultimately did tune in and broadcast his thinking on Truth Social (“I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions & Millions of people, many from parts unknown, into our once great, but soon to be great again, Country!”), and soon after Johnson declared the bill “dead on arrival” in the House. (It was “absurd” to suggest that he had done so to help Trump, Johnson told reporters.)

Richard Ray, Johnson’s former law partner, told me he worries “every day” about Trump “turning” on his friend. During that especially catastrophic stretch of failed rule votes, according to the two Trump advisers, the former president resolved to vent his frustrations with the speaker on Truth Social. But aides stepped in and urged him to put down the phone. “It was explained to him over and over again, you know, ‘It’s the same thing with Kevin—there’s only so much he can do with a slim majority, and these guys aren’t playing ball,’” as the other Trump adviser summarized the aides’ pitch. Trump, as it turned out, did not precisely know what they were talking about. “So, he got a little bit of a congressional education” on the “rules process,” this person went on, after which Trump apparently became more sympathetic to Johnson’s plight. There was no post. (Trump declined to be interviewed for this story.)

In the months since, as Johnson has gotten more comfortable in his role, he’s gotten savvier at managing up. It was Johnson who pitched the former president on a media appearance at Mar-a-Lago in April, just three days before the House was set to return from recess and the far-right threat to his speakership was likeliest to crest. “I think he’s doing a very good job,” Trump told reporters, calling the efforts to topple Johnson “unfortunate.” “I stand with the speaker,” he said. “We’ve had a very good relationship.”

[Joshua Benton: Where is Mike Johnson’s ironclad oath?]

Trump’s inclination to support Johnson might stem, at least in part, from the simple fact that Johnson, shortly after taking the gavel, endorsed him for president—in an appearance on CNBC, no less, the same network on which McCarthy, a few months earlier, had questioned whether Trump was the “strongest” Republican to take on President Biden.

Their alliance is nevertheless a strange one. To the extent that people close to Trump find themselves wondering about Johnson, it is often with a kind of detached fascination. Here was a man who’d named his dog Justice; whose favorite song is the hymn “Be Thou My Vision”; who embroiders even casual conversations with quotes from Reagan, Washington, John Adams. No booze, no foul language; a marriage voluntarily stripped of the easier means of leaving it. The second Trump adviser told me he always thought Johnson’s earnest demeanor was just a show—“like, he’s not really like this; no one can be like this.” Cue this person’s surprise, then, at a small private dinner following a recent Trump fundraiser in Washington, where Johnson was among guests such as Senators Tom Cotton, J. D. Vance, and Steve Daines, as well as a number of media personalities and former Trump administration officials. “Everyone’s guard is down because it’s a room full of people that everybody trusts”—which is to say there was booze, foul language—“and the man is still exactly the same.”

Privately, Johnson has used humor to signal an awareness of the gulfs that separate him from Trump—that he is not blind to the patent absurdity of the man. Over the years, he has honed his impression of Trump, and frequently deploys it when recounting their latest exchange. Friends still get a kick out of a story about how Johnson once told Trump that he was praying for him, to which the then-president responded: “Thank you, Mike. Tell God I said hi.”

Peel back the jokes, though, and all these years later, Johnson still seems quietly in search of affirmation that, behind the bluster, Donald Trump subscribes to the same basic truths about the world as he does. During our conversation, after Johnson referred to the “moral guidance” that “you would hope that everybody in power would have,” I asked if he believed that Trump has it. “I do,” he said. “You know, he talks about ”—a half beat passed—“faith. He and I’ve talked about”—a full beat this time—“faith.”

In what context?

“Well,” he said, “we had an experience …” He looked over at his communications director, a wordless request for permission.

It was last fall, the week of Thanksgiving. Johnson had gone down to Palm Beach for a fundraiser; his sons, on break from school, had gone with him. Trump, upon learning he was in town, called and invited the new speaker to Mar-a-Lago for dinner. Could the boys come? Johnson asked. No problem, Trump said. So they headed over, and what was supposed to be a 45-minute get-together stretched on for two and a half hours. A great start to the trip, Johnson recalled.

The next day, Johnson was meeting with donors at a beachside hotel, not far from Mar-a-Lago, when his security detail burst into the conference room. “Mr. Speaker, we need you right now,” they said. His sons had been swept out by a rip current.

In Johnson’s telling, Will, who was 13, was drowning; 18-year-old Jack, prepared to give up his own life, tried to push his brother back to the surface. A parasailer happened to spot Will’s head from above. He hurried back to shore and alerted the lifeguards, who went out on jet skis to bring the boys in. Johnson arrived at the beach to find medical personnel hovering over his sons, pumping their chests. They would spend four hours in the emergency room before being cleared to go home.

“President Trump heard about it somehow—miraculously, this never made the news,” Johnson recalled. The two got on the phone. “He was just so moved by the idea that we almost lost them, and we talked about it at great length. And we talked about the faith aspect of that, because he knows that I believe that, you know—that God spared the lives of my sons. That’s how I understand those events, and we talked about that.” Johnson continued: “And he said, he repeated back to me and said, ‘God—God saved your sons’ lives.’”

For Johnson, repetition was window enough. Much like a parasailer glancing down at just the right moment, a Trump victory in November would not be accidental, Johnson told him, but “providential.” A gift to be embraced soberly, for a purpose larger than oneself. “And we talked about that, and I think he has a real appreciation for that, and that’s been, you know—it’s been encouraging to me.

“So we’ll see, we’ll see,” he said, his voice a touch quieter. “We’ll see where all that goes.”

Johnson speaks during a GOP spouses reception at the Capitol on April 16. (Jason Andrew for The Atlantic)

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two years ago, Johnson declared allegiance to the MAGA position on the war, voting “no” on supplemental aid to Ukraine in 2022 and 2023 and “yes” on amendments to strip the National Defense Authorization Act of any funding for the nation. “We should not be sending another $40 billion abroad when our own border is in chaos,” he stated in May 2022. He maintained this stance for much of his speakership, refusing to put any form of assistance to a vote.

And in the end, it would have been politically painless for him to stay this course. But in his elevation to speaker, Johnson had become privy, for the first time, to high-level intelligence. By the middle of this month—following a grim private briefing from CIA Director Bill Burns—he finally decided that action on Ukraine was worth the risk of losing his job. Last Wednesday, Johnson, addressing reporters in the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall, said his turnabout had been shaped by the dire portrait shared with him by the intelligence community. “I think that Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed,” he said.

Yet it was also personal for Johnson, whose son is headed this fall to the U.S. Naval Academy. “This is a live-fire exercise for me, as it is for so many American families,” he said, adding that he’d rather send “bullets” than “American boys” to Ukraine. “We have to do the right thing, and history will judge us.”

[Anne Applebaum: The GOP’s pro-Russia caucus lost. Now Ukraine has to win.]

Three days later, Johnson brought $61 billion in aid for Ukraine—in addition to separate bills with funds for Israel and the Indo-Pacific—to the floor. The legislation passed, 311–112—with just 101 Republicans voting in favor. As Democrats waved miniature Ukrainian flags, Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna made her way to the microphone. “Put those damn flags down,” she spat.

Even in the final 72 hours before the vote, Johnson was still having conversation after conversation with his far-right colleagues, trying to wrangle a “yes” out of members for whom “yes” had never been the goal. To the frustration of his more moderate colleagues, Johnson additionally refused to include language in the rule on the foreign-aid legislation that would have raised the motion-to-vacate threshold—a way out, in the moderates’ view, of the hostage crisis that has paralyzed the House Republican conference every day for the past year and a half.

For many Republican lawmakers, now on the cusp of their party’s second attempt in six months to topple a speaker, the time for appeasement has long since passed. What they want to see now is punishment, or, more diplomatically, “accountability”—consistently obstructionist members stripped of their committee posts, even iced out altogether from the process they seek to disrupt. “They’re forcing us to become more bipartisan, and we should be thinking that way,” Representative Don Bacon, a moderate from Nebraska, told me. “We should be able to cut these 10 guys out and say, ‘Hey, if we’re gonna get something to the Senate anyway, you gotta work with Democrats, so let’s start working them up front.’”

At the Greenbrier, Johnson told me he understands the sentiment. “How do you reestablish the norm, if you’re not going to exact a punishment for violation?” he said. But changing the rules now, as he sees it, would only “create greater problems.” “Because then you have the question of, ‘Oh, well, you’re only going to punish it going forward—well, these guys broke the rule here, and you didn’t do anything to them.’” Better to hold off on any “real changes,” he said, until after November, as part of the next Congress.

Which is to say that Johnson has every intention of keeping the job. “I would assume that I would stay in the post if we win the majority,” he said. “It would make sense to have continuity of leadership at that time.” But really, he insisted, he doesn’t “spend a lot of time thinking about that.”

What Johnson knows for certain is that the speakership is “something I’m supposed to do right now,” a sense of divine calling that he says has made the past six months “tolerable, I guess, instead of regretful.”

He assured me of this five times over the course of our conversation. “I don’t regret it,” he said. “I don’t.”

Photographs by Gary Shteyngart

Day 1

MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optical nerve to try again.

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots. Vibrant, oversignifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks; the only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter. There is no imposed order, no cogent thought, and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy. This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.

“Author embarks on their first cruise-ship voyage” has been a staple of American essay writing for almost three decades, beginning with David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which was first published in 1996 under the title “Shipping Out.” Since then, many admirable writers have widened and diversified the genre. Usually the essayist commissioned to take to the sea is in their first or second flush of youth and is ready to sharpen their wit against the hull of the offending vessel. I am 51, old and tired, having seen much of the world as a former travel journalist, and mostly what I do in both life and prose is shrug while muttering to my imaginary dachshund, “This too shall pass.” But the Icon of the Seas will not countenance a shrug. The Icon of the Seas is the Linda Loman of cruise ships, exclaiming that attention must be paid. And here I am in late January with my one piece of luggage and useless gray winter jacket and passport, zipping through the Port of Miami en route to the gangway that will separate me from the bulk of North America for more than seven days, ready to pay it in full.

The aforementioned gangway opens up directly onto a thriving mall (I will soon learn it is imperiously called the “Royal Promenade”), presently filled with yapping passengers beneath a ceiling studded with balloons ready to drop. Crew members from every part of the global South, as well as a few Balkans, are shepherding us along while pressing flutes of champagne into our hands. By a humming Starbucks, I drink as many of these as I can and prepare to find my cabin. I show my blue Suite Sky SeaPass Card (more on this later, much more) to a smiling woman from the Philippines, and she tells me to go “aft.” Which is where, now? As someone who has rarely sailed on a vessel grander than the Staten Island Ferry, I am confused. It turns out that the aft is the stern of the ship, or, for those of us who don’t know what a stern or an aft are, its ass. The nose of the ship, responsible for separating the waves before it, is also called a bow, and is marked for passengers as the FWD, or forward. The part of the contemporary sailing vessel where the malls are clustered is called the midship. I trust that you have enjoyed this nautical lesson.

I ascend via elevator to my suite on Deck 11. This is where I encounter my first terrible surprise. My suite windows and balcony do not face the ocean. Instead, they look out onto another shopping mall. This mall is the one that’s called Central Park, perhaps in homage to the Olmsted-designed bit of greenery in the middle of my hometown. Although on land I would be delighted to own a suite with Central Park views, here I am deeply depressed. To sail on a ship and not wake up to a vast blue carpet of ocean? Unthinkable.

Allow me a brief preamble here. The story you are reading was commissioned at a moment when most staterooms on the Icon were sold out. In fact, so enthralled by the prospect of this voyage were hard-core mariners that the ship’s entire inventory of guest rooms (the Icon can accommodate up to 7,600 passengers, but its inaugural journey was reduced to 5,000 or so for a less crowded experience) was almost immediately sold out. Hence, this publication was faced with the shocking prospect of paying nearly $19,000 to procure for this solitary passenger an entire suite—not including drinking expenses—all for the privilege of bringing you this article. But the suite in question doesn’t even have a view of the ocean! I sit down hard on my soft bed. Nineteen thousand dollars for this.

The author tries to make friends at the world’s largest swim-up bar at sea. (Gary Shteyngart)

The viewless suite does have its pluses. In addition to all the Malin+Goetz products in my dual bathrooms, I am granted use of a dedicated Suite Deck lounge; access to Coastal Kitchen, a superior restaurant for Suites passengers; complimentary VOOMSM Surf & Stream (“the fastest Internet at Sea”) “for one device per person for the whole cruise duration”; a pair of bathrobes (one of which comes prestained with what looks like a large expectoration by the greenest lizard on Earth); and use of the Grove Suite Sun, an area on Decks 18 and 19 with food and deck chairs reserved exclusively for Suite passengers. I also get reserved seating for a performance of The Wizard of Oz, an ice-skating tribute to the periodic table, and similar provocations. The very color of my Suite Sky SeaPass Card, an oceanic blue as opposed to the cloying royal purple of the standard non-Suite passenger, will soon provoke envy and admiration. But as high as my status may be, there are those on board who have much higher status still, and I will soon learn to bow before them.

In preparation for sailing, I have “priced in,” as they say on Wall Street, the possibility that I may come from a somewhat different monde than many of the other cruisers. Without falling into stereotypes or preconceptions, I prepare myself for a friendly outspokenness on the part of my fellow seafarers that may not comply with modern DEI standards. I believe in meeting people halfway, and so the day before flying down to Miami, I visited what remains of Little Italy to purchase a popular T-shirt that reads DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL across the breast in the colors of the Italian flag. My wife recommended that I bring one of my many T-shirts featuring Snoopy and the Peanuts gang, as all Americans love the beagle and his friends. But I naively thought that my meatball T-shirt would be more suitable for conversation-starting. “Oh, and who is your ‘daddy’?” some might ask upon seeing it. “And how long have you been his ‘little meatball’?” And so on.

I put on my meatball T-shirt and head for one of the dining rooms to get a late lunch. In the elevator, I stick out my chest for all to read the funny legend upon it, but soon I realize that despite its burnished tricolor letters, no one takes note. More to the point, no one takes note of me. Despite my attempts at bridge building, the very sight of me (small, ethnic, without a cap bearing the name of a football team) elicits no reaction from other passengers. Most often, they will small-talk over me as if I don’t exist. This brings to mind the travails of David Foster Wallace, who felt so ostracized by his fellow passengers that he retreated to his cabin for much of his voyage. And Wallace was raised primarily in the Midwest and was a much larger, more American-looking meatball than I am. If he couldn’t talk to these people, how will I? What if I leave this ship without making any friends at all, despite my T-shirt? I am a social creature, and the prospect of seven days alone and apart is saddening. Wallace’s stateroom, at least, had a view of the ocean, a kind of cheap eternity.

Worse awaits me in the dining room. This is a large, multichandeliered room where I attended my safety training (I was shown how to put on a flotation vest; it is a very simple procedure). But the maître d’ politely refuses me entry in an English that seems to verge on another language. “I’m sorry, this is only for pendejos,” he seems to be saying. I push back politely and he repeats himself. Pendejos ? Piranhas? There’s some kind of P-word to which I am not attuned. Meanwhile elderly passengers stream right past, powered by their limbs, walkers, and electric wheelchairs. “It is only pendejo dining today, sir.” “But I have a suite!” I say, already starting to catch on to the ship’s class system. He examines my card again. “But you are not a pendejo,” he confirms. I am wearing a DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL T-shirt, I want to say to him. I am the essence of pendejo.

Eventually, I give up and head to the plebeian buffet on Deck 15, which has an aquatic-styled name I have now forgotten. Before gaining entry to this endless cornucopia of reheated food, one passes a washing station of many sinks and soap dispensers, and perhaps the most intriguing character on the entire ship. He is Mr. Washy Washy—or, according to his name tag, Nielbert of the Philippines—and he is dressed as a taco (on other occasions, I’ll see him dressed as a burger). Mr. Washy Washy performs an eponymous song in spirited, indeed flamboyant English: “Washy, washy, wash your hands, WASHY WASHY!” The dangers of norovirus and COVID on a cruise ship this size (a giant fellow ship was stricken with the former right after my voyage) makes Mr. Washy Washy an essential member of the crew. The problem lies with the food at the end of Washy’s rainbow. The buffet is groaning with what sounds like sophisticated dishes—marinated octopus, boiled egg with anchovy, chorizo, lobster claws—but every animal tastes tragically the same, as if there was only one creature available at the market, a “cruisipus” bred specifically for Royal Caribbean dining. The “vegetables” are no better. I pick up a tomato slice and look right through it. It tastes like cellophane. I sit alone, apart from the couples and parents with gaggles of children, as “We Are Family” echoes across the buffet space.

I may have failed to mention that all this time, the Icon of the Seas has not left port. As the fiery mango of the subtropical setting sun makes Miami’s condo skyline even more apocalyptic, the ship shoves off beneath a perfunctory display of fireworks. After the sun sets, in the far, dark distance, another circus-lit cruise ship ruptures the waves before us. We glance at it with pity, because it is by definition a smaller ship than our own. I am on Deck 15, outside the buffet and overlooking a bunch of pools (the Icon has seven of them), drinking a frilly drink that I got from one of the bars (the Icon has 15 of them), still too shy to speak to anyone, despite Sister Sledge’s assertion that all on the ship are somehow related.

[Kim Brooks: On failing the family vacation]

The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson, no sense of developing “sea legs,” as the ship is too large to register the presence of waves unless a mighty wind adds significant chop. It is time for me to register the presence of the 5,000 passengers around me, even if they refuse to register mine. My fellow travelers have prepared for this trip with personally decorated T-shirts celebrating the importance of this voyage. The simplest ones say ICON INAUGURAL ’24 on the back and the family name on the front. Others attest to an over-the-top love of cruise ships: WARNING! MAY START TALKING ABOUT CRUISING. Still others are artisanally designed and celebrate lifetimes spent married while cruising (on ships, of course). A couple possibly in their 90s are wearing shirts whose backs feature a drawing of a cruise liner, two flamingos with ostensibly male and female characteristics, and the legend “HUSBAND AND WIFE Cruising Partners FOR LIFE WE MAY NOT HAVE IT All Together BUT TOGETHER WE HAVE IT ALL.” (The words not in all caps have been written in cursive.) A real journalist or a more intrepid conversationalist would have gone up to the couple and asked them to explain the longevity of their marriage vis-à-vis their love of cruising. But instead I head to my mall suite, take off my meatball T-shirt, and allow the first tears of the cruise to roll down my cheeks slowly enough that I briefly fall asleep amid the moisture and salt.

The aquatic rides remind the author of his latest colonoscopy. (Gary Shteyngart) Day 2

I WAKE UP with a hangover. Oh God. Right. I cannot believe all of that happened last night. A name floats into my cobwebbed, nauseated brain: “Ayn Rand.” Jesus Christ.

I breakfast alone at the Coastal Kitchen. The coffee tastes fine and the eggs came out of a bird. The ship rolls slightly this morning; I can feel it in my thighs and my schlong, the parts of me that are most receptive to danger.

I had a dangerous conversation last night. After the sun set and we were at least 50 miles from shore (most modern cruise ships sail at about 23 miles an hour), I lay in bed softly hiccupping, my arms stretched out exactly like Jesus on the cross, the sound of the distant waves missing from my mall-facing suite, replaced by the hum of air-conditioning and children shouting in Spanish through the vents of my two bathrooms. I decided this passivity was unacceptable. As an immigrant, I feel duty-bound to complete the tasks I am paid for, which means reaching out and trying to understand my fellow cruisers. So I put on a normal James Perse T-shirt and headed for one of the bars on the Royal Promenade—the Schooner Bar, it was called, if memory serves correctly.

I sat at the bar for a martini and two Negronis. An old man with thick, hairy forearms drank next to me, very silent and Hemingwaylike, while a dreadlocked piano player tinkled out a series of excellent Elton John covers. To my right, a young white couple—he in floral shorts, she in a light, summery miniskirt with a fearsome diamond ring, neither of them in football regalia—chatted with an elderly couple. Do it, I commanded myself. Open your mouth. Speak! Speak without being spoken to. Initiate. A sentence fragment caught my ear from the young woman, “Cherry Hill.” This is a suburb of Philadelphia in New Jersey, and I had once been there for a reading at a synagogue. “Excuse me,” I said gently to her. “Did you just mention Cherry Hill? It’s a lovely place.”

As it turned out, the couple now lived in Fort Lauderdale (the number of Floridians on the cruise surprised me, given that Southern Florida is itself a kind of cruise ship, albeit one slowly sinking), but soon they were talking with me exclusively—the man potbellied, with a chin like a hard-boiled egg; the woman as svelte as if she were one of the many Ukrainian members of the crew—the elderly couple next to them forgotten. This felt as groundbreaking as the first time I dared to address an American in his native tongue, as a child on a bus in Queens (“On my foot you are standing, Mister”).

“I don’t want to talk politics,” the man said. “But they’re going to eighty-six Biden and put Michelle in.”

I considered the contradictions of his opening conversational gambit, but decided to play along. “People like Michelle,” I said, testing the waters. The husband sneered, but the wife charitably put forward that the former first lady was “more personable” than Joe Biden. “They’re gonna eighty-six Biden,” the husband repeated. “He can’t put a sentence together.”

After I mentioned that I was a writer—though I presented myself as a writer of teleplays instead of novels and articles such as this one—the husband told me his favorite writer was Ayn Rand. “Ayn Rand, she came here with nothing,” the husband said. “I work with a lot of Cubans, so …” I wondered if I should mention what I usually do to ingratiate myself with Republicans or libertarians: the fact that my finances improved after pass-through corporations were taxed differently under Donald Trump. Instead, I ordered another drink and the couple did the same, and I told him that Rand and I were born in the same city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad, and that my family also came here with nothing. Now the bonding and drinking began in earnest, and several more rounds appeared. Until it all fell apart.

[Read: Gary Shteyngart on watching Russian television for five days straight]

My new friend, whom I will refer to as Ayn, called out to a buddy of his across the bar, and suddenly a young couple, both covered in tattoos, appeared next to us. “He fucking punked me,” Ayn’s frat-boy-like friend called out as he put his arm around Ayn, while his sizable partner sizzled up to Mrs. Rand. Both of them had a look I have never seen on land—their eyes projecting absence and enmity in equal measure. In the ’90s, I drank with Russian soldiers fresh from Chechnya and wandered the streets of wartime Zagreb, but I have never seen such undisguised hostility toward both me and perhaps the universe at large. I was briefly introduced to this psychopathic pair, but neither of them wanted to have anything to do with me, and the tattooed woman would not even reveal her Christian name to me (she pretended to have the same first name as Mrs. Rand). To impress his tattooed friends, Ayn made fun of the fact that as a television writer, I’d worked on the series Succession (which, it would turn out, practically nobody on the ship had watched), instead of the far more palatable, in his eyes, zombie drama of last year. And then my new friends drifted away from me into an angry private conversation—“He punked me!”—as I ordered another drink for myself, scared of the dead-eyed arrivals whose gaze never registered in the dim wattage of the Schooner Bar, whose terrifying voices and hollow laughs grated like unoiled gears against the crooning of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

But today is a new day for me and my hangover. After breakfast, I explore the ship’s so-called neighborhoods. There’s the AquaDome, where one can find a food hall and an acrobatic sound-and-light aquatic show. Central Park has a premium steak house, a sushi joint, and a used Rolex that can be bought for $8,000 on land here proudly offered at $17,000. There’s the aforementioned Royal Promenade, where I had drunk with the Rands, and where a pair of dueling pianos duel well into the night. There’s Surfside, a kids’ neighborhood full of sugary garbage, which looks out onto the frothy trail that the behemoth leaves behind itself. Thrill Island refers to the collection of tubes that clutter the ass of the ship and offer passengers six waterslides and a surfing simulation. There’s the Hideaway, an adult zone that plays music from a vomit-slathered, Brit-filled Alicante nightclub circa 1996 and proves a big favorite with groups of young Latin American customers. And, most hurtfully, there’s the Suite Neighborhood.

Left: The Icon leaves a giant wake in its path. Right: Docked at Royal Caribbean’s own Bahamian island, known as the Perfect Day at CocoCay. (Gary Shteyngart)

I say hurtfully because as a Suite passenger I should be here, though my particular suite is far from the others. Whereas I am stuck amid the riffraff of Deck 11, this section is on the highborn Decks 16 and 17, and in passing, I peek into the spacious, tall-ceilinged staterooms from the hallway, dazzled by the glint of the waves and sun. For $75,000, one multifloor suite even comes with its own slide between floors, so that a family may enjoy this particular terror in private. There is a quiet splendor to the Suite Neighborhood. I see fewer stickers and signs and drawings than in my own neighborhood—for example, MIKE AND DIANA PROUDLY SERVED U.S. MARINE CORPS RETIRED. No one here needs to announce their branch of service or rank; they are simply Suites, and this is where they belong. Once again, despite my hard work and perseverance, I have been disallowed from the true American elite. Once again, I am “Not our class, dear.” I am reminded of watching The Love Boat on my grandmother’s Zenith, which either was given to her or we found in the trash (I get our many malfunctioning Zeniths confused) and whose tube got so hot, I would put little chunks of government cheese on a thin tissue atop it to give our welfare treat a pleasant, Reagan-era gooeyness. I could not understand English well enough then to catch the nuances of that seafaring program, but I knew that there were differences in the status of the passengers, and that sometimes those differences made them sad. Still, this ship, this plenty—every few steps, there are complimentary nachos or milkshakes or gyros on offer—was the fatty fuel of my childhood dreams. If only I had remained a child.

I walk around the outdoor decks looking for company. There is a middle-aged African American couple who always seem to be asleep in each other’s arms, probably exhausted from the late capitalism they regularly encounter on land. There is far more diversity on this ship than I expected. Many couples are a testament to Loving v. Virginia, and there is a large group of folks whose T-shirts read MELANIN AT SEA / IT’S THE MELANIN FOR ME. I smile when I see them, but then some young kids from the group makes Mr. Washy Washy do a cruel, caricatured “Burger Dance” (today he is in his burger getup), and I think, Well, so much for intersectionality.

At the infinity pool on Deck 17, I spot some elderly women who could be ethnic and from my part of the world, and so I jump in. I am proved correct! Many of them seem to be originally from Queens (“Corona was still great when it was all Italian”), though they are now spread across the tristate area. We bond over the way “Ron-kon-koma” sounds when announced in Penn Station.

“Everyone is here for a different reason,” one of them tells me. She and her ex-husband last sailed together four years ago to prove to themselves that their marriage was truly over. Her 15-year-old son lost his virginity to “an Irish young lady” while their ship was moored in Ravenna, Italy. The gaggle of old-timers competes to tell me their favorite cruising stories and tips. “A guy proposed in Central Park a couple of years ago”—many Royal Caribbean ships apparently have this ridiculous communal area—“and she ran away screaming!” “If you’re diamond-class, you get four drinks for free.” “A different kind of passenger sails out of Bayonne.” (This, perhaps, is racially coded.) “Sometimes, if you tip the bartender $5, your next drink will be free.”

“Everyone’s here for a different reason,” the woman whose marriage ended on a cruise tells me again. “Some people are here for bad reasons—the drinkers and the gamblers. Some people are here for medical reasons.” I have seen more than a few oxygen tanks and at least one woman clearly undergoing very serious chemo. Some T-shirts celebrate good news about a cancer diagnosis. This might be someone’s last cruise or week on Earth. For these women, who have spent months, if not years, at sea, cruising is a ritual as well as a life cycle: first love, last love, marriage, divorce, death.

[Read: The last place on Earth any tourist should go]

I have talked with these women for so long, tonight I promise myself that after a sad solitary dinner I will not try to seek out company at the bars in the mall or the adult-themed Hideaway. I have enough material to fulfill my duties to this publication. As I approach my orphaned suite, I run into the aggro young people who stole Mr. and Mrs. Rand away from me the night before. The tattooed apparitions pass me without a glance. She is singing something violent about “Stuttering Stanley” (a character in a popular horror movie, as I discover with my complimentary VOOMSM Surf & Stream Internet at Sea) and he’s loudly shouting about “all the money I’ve lost,” presumably at the casino in the bowels of the ship.

So these bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel are angrily inhabiting my deck. As I mewl myself to sleep, I envision a limited series for HBO or some other streamer, a kind of low-rent White Lotus, where several aggressive couples conspire to throw a shy intellectual interloper overboard. I type the scenario into my phone. As I fall asleep, I think of what the woman who recently divorced her husband and whose son became a man through the good offices of the Irish Republic told me while I was hoisting myself out of the infinity pool. “I’m here because I’m an explorer. I’m here because I’m trying something new.” What if I allowed myself to believe in her fantasy?

Left: Seafood pizza. Right: The author’s special T-shirt. (Gary Shteyngart) Day 3

“YOU REALLY STARTED AT THE TOP,” they tell me. I’m at the Coastal Kitchen for my eggs and corned-beef hash, and the maître d’ has slotted me in between two couples. Fueled by coffee or perhaps intrigued by my relative youth, they strike up a conversation with me. As always, people are shocked that this is my first cruise. They contrast the Icon favorably with all the preceding liners in the Royal Caribbean fleet, usually commenting on the efficiency of the elevators that hurl us from deck to deck (as in many large corporate buildings, the elevators ask you to choose a floor and then direct you to one of many lifts). The couple to my right, from Palo Alto—he refers to his “porn mustache” and calls his wife “my cougar” because she is two years older—tell me they are “Pandemic Pinnacles.”

This is the day that my eyes will be opened. Pinnacles, it is explained to me over translucent cantaloupe, have sailed with Royal Caribbean for 700 ungodly nights. Pandemic Pinnacles took advantage of the two-for-one accrual rate of Pinnacle points during the pandemic, when sailing on a cruise ship was even more ill-advised, to catapult themselves into Pinnacle status.

Because of the importance of the inaugural voyage of the world’s largest cruise liner, more than 200 Pinnacles are on this ship, a startling number, it seems. Mrs. Palo Alto takes out a golden badge that I have seen affixed over many a breast, which reads CROWN AND ANCHOR SOCIETY along with her name. This is the coveted badge of the Pinnacle. “You should hear all the whining in Guest Services,” her husband tells me. Apparently, the Pinnacles who are not also Suites like us are all trying to use their status to get into Coastal Kitchen, our elite restaurant. Even a Pinnacle needs to be a Suite to access this level of corned-beef hash.

“We’re just baby Pinnacles,” Mrs. Palo Alto tells me, describing a kind of internal class struggle among the Pinnacle elite for ever higher status.

And now I understand what the maître d’ was saying to me on the first day of my cruise. He wasn’t saying “pendejo.” He was saying “Pinnacle.” The dining room was for Pinnacles only, all those older people rolling in like the tide on their motorized scooters.

And now I understand something else: This whole thing is a cult. And like most cults, it can’t help but mirror the endless American fight for status. Like Keith Raniere’s NXIVM, where different-colored sashes were given out to connote rank among Raniere’s branded acolytes, this is an endless competition among Pinnacles, Suites, Diamond-Plusers, and facing-the-mall, no-balcony purple SeaPass Card peasants, not to mention the many distinctions within each category. The more you cruise, the higher your status. No wonder a section of the Royal Promenade is devoted to getting passengers to book their next cruise during the one they should be enjoying now. No wonder desperate Royal Caribbean offers (“FINAL HOURS”) crowded my email account weeks before I set sail. No wonder the ship’s jewelry store, the Royal Bling, is selling a $100,000 golden chalice that will entitle its owner to drink free on Royal Caribbean cruises for life. (One passenger was already gaming out whether her 28-year-old son was young enough to “just about earn out” on the chalice or if that ship had sailed.) No wonder this ship was sold out months before departure, and we had to pay $19,000 for a horrid suite away from the Suite Neighborhood. No wonder the most mythical hero of Royal Caribbean lore is someone named Super Mario, who has cruised so often, he now has his own working desk on many ships. This whole experience is part cult, part nautical pyramid scheme.

[From the June 2014 issue: Ship of wonks]

“The toilets are amazing,” the Palo Altos are telling me. “One flush and you’re done.” “They don’t understand how energy-efficient these ships are,” the husband of the other couple is telling me. “They got the LNG”—liquefied natural gas, which is supposed to make the Icon a boon to the environment (a concept widely disputed and sometimes ridiculed by environmentalists).

But I’m thinking along a different line of attack as I spear my last pallid slice of melon. For my streaming limited series, a Pinnacle would have to get killed by either an outright peasant or a Suite without an ocean view. I tell my breakfast companions my idea.

“Oh, for sure a Pinnacle would have to be killed,” Mr. Palo Alto, the Pandemic Pinnacle, says, touching his porn mustache thoughtfully as his wife nods.

“THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S your time, buddy!” Hubert, my fun-loving Panamanian cabin attendant, shouts as I step out of my suite in a robe. “Take it easy, buddy!”

I have come up with a new dressing strategy. Instead of trying to impress with my choice of T-shirts, I have decided to start wearing a robe, as one does at a resort property on land, with a proper spa and hammam. The response among my fellow cruisers has been ecstatic. “Look at you in the robe!” Mr. Rand cries out as we pass each other by the Thrill Island aqua park. “You’re living the cruise life! You know, you really drank me under the table that night.” I laugh as we part ways, but my soul cries out, Please spend more time with me, Mr. and Mrs. Rand; I so need the company.

In my white robe, I am a stately presence, a refugee from a better limited series, a one-man crossover episode. (Only Suites are granted these robes to begin with.) Today, I will try many of the activities these ships have on offer to provide their clientele with a sense of never-ceasing motion. Because I am already at Thrill Island, I decide to climb the staircase to what looks like a mast on an old-fashioned ship (terrified, because I am afraid of heights) to try a ride called “Storm Chasers,” which is part of the “Category 6” water park, named in honor of one of the storms that may someday do away with the Port of Miami entirely. Storm Chasers consists of falling from the “mast” down a long, twisting neon tube filled with water, like being the camera inside your own colonoscopy, as you hold on to the handles of a mat, hoping not to die. The tube then flops you down headfirst into a trough of water, a Royal Caribbean baptism. It both knocks my breath out and makes me sad.

In keeping with the aquatic theme, I attend a show at the AquaDome. To the sound of “Live and Let Die,” a man in a harness gyrates to and fro in the sultry air. I saw something very similar in the back rooms of the famed Berghain club in early-aughts Berlin. Soon another harnessed man is gyrating next to the first. Ja, I think to myself, I know how this ends. Now will come the fisting, natürlich. But the show soon devolves into the usual Marvel-film-grade nonsense, with too much light and sound signifying nichts. If any fisting is happening, it is probably in the Suite Neighborhood, inside a cabin marked with an upside-down pineapple, which I understand means a couple are ready to swing, and I will see none of it.

I go to the ice show, which is a kind of homage—if that’s possible—to the periodic table, done with the style and pomp and masterful precision that would please the likes of Kim Jong Un, if only he could afford Royal Caribbean talent. At one point, the dancers skate to the theme song of Succession. “See that!” I want to say to my fellow Suites—at “cultural” events, we have a special section reserved for us away from the commoners—“Succession! It’s even better than the zombie show! Open your minds!”

Finally, I visit a comedy revue in an enormous and too brightly lit version of an “intimate,” per Royal Caribbean literature, “Manhattan comedy club.” Many of the jokes are about the cruising life. “I’ve lived on ships for 20 years,” one of the middle-aged comedians says. “I can only see so many Filipino homosexuals dressed as a taco.” He pauses while the audience laughs. “I am so fired tonight,” he says. He segues into a Trump impression and then Biden falling asleep at the microphone, which gets the most laughs. “Anyone here from Fort Leonard Wood?” another comedian asks. Half the crowd seems to cheer. As I fall asleep that night, I realize another connection I have failed to make, and one that may explain some of the diversity on this vessel—many of its passengers have served in the military.

As a coddled passenger with a suite, I feel like I am starting to understand what it means to have a rank and be constantly reminded of it. There are many espresso makers, I think as I look across the expanse of my officer-grade quarters before closing my eyes, but this one is mine.

Two enormous cruise ships at the Perfect Day at CocoCay, a private island with many of the same amenities as the ship itself (Gary Shteyngart) Day 4

A shocking sight greets me beyond the pools of Deck 17 as I saunter over to the Coastal Kitchen for my morning intake of slightly sour Americanos. A tiny city beneath a series of perfectly pressed green mountains. Land! We have docked for a brief respite in Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts and Nevis. I wolf down my egg scramble to be one of the first passengers off the ship. Once past the gangway, I barely refrain from kissing the ground. I rush into the sights and sounds of this scruffy island city, sampling incredible conch curry and buckets of non-Starbucks coffee. How wonderful it is to be where God intended humans to be: on land. After all, I am neither a fish nor a mall rat. This is my natural environment. Basseterre may not be Havana, but there are signs of human ingenuity and desire everywhere you look. The Black Table Grill Has been Relocated to Soho Village, Market Street, Directly Behind of, Gary’s Fruits and Flower Shop. Signed. THE PORK MAN reads a sign stuck to a wall. Now, that is how you write a sign. A real sign, not the come-ons for overpriced Rolexes that blink across the screens of the Royal Promenade.

“Hey, tie your shoestring!” a pair of laughing ladies shout to me across the street.

“Thank you!” I shout back. Shoestring! “Thank you very much.”

A man in Independence Square Park comes by and asks if I want to play with his monkey. I haven’t heard that pickup line since the Penn Station of the 1980s. But then he pulls a real monkey out of a bag. The monkey is wearing a diaper and looks insane. Wonderful, I think, just wonderful! There is so much life here. I email my editor asking if I can remain on St. Kitts and allow the Icon to sail off into the horizon without me. I have even priced a flight home at less than $300, and I have enough material from the first four days on the cruise to write the entire story. “It would be funny …” my editor replies. “Now get on the boat.”

As I slink back to the ship after my brief jailbreak, the locals stand under umbrellas to gaze at and photograph the boat that towers over their small capital city. The limousines of the prime minister and his lackeys are parked beside the gangway. St. Kitts, I’ve been told, is one of the few islands that would allow a ship of this size to dock.

“We hear about all the waterslides,” a sweet young server in one of the cafés told me. “We wish we could go on the ship, but we have to work.”

“I want to stay on your island,” I replied. “I love it here.”

But she didn’t understand how I could possibly mean that.

Day 5

“WASHY, WASHY, so you don’t get stinky, stinky!” kids are singing outside the AquaDome, while their adult minders look on in disapproval, perhaps worried that Mr. Washy Washy is grooming them into a life of gayness. I heard a southern couple skip the buffet entirely out of fear of Mr. Washy Washy.

Meanwhile, I have found a new watering hole for myself, the Swim & Tonic, the biggest swim-up bar on any cruise ship in the world. Drinking next to full-size, nearly naked Americans takes away one’s own self-consciousness. The men have curvaceous mom bodies. The women are equally un-shy about their sprawling physiques.

Today I’ve befriended a bald man with many children who tells me that all of the little trinkets that Royal Caribbean has left us in our staterooms and suites are worth a fortune on eBay. “Eighty dollars for the water bottle, 60 for the lanyard,” the man says. “This is a cult.”

“Tell me about it,” I say. There is, however, a clientele for whom this cruise makes perfect sense. For a large middle-class family (he works in “supply chains”), seven days in a lower-tier cabin—which starts at $1,800 a person—allow the parents to drop off their children in Surfside, where I imagine many young Filipina crew members will take care of them, while the parents are free to get drunk at a swim-up bar and maybe even get intimate in their cabin. Cruise ships have become, for a certain kind of hardworking family, a form of subsidized child care.

There is another man I would like to befriend at the Swim & Tonic, a tall, bald fellow who is perpetually inebriated and who wears a necklace studded with little rubber duckies in sunglasses, which, I am told, is a sort of secret handshake for cruise aficionados. Tomorrow, I will spend more time with him, but first the ship docks at St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Charlotte Amalie, the capital, is more charming in name than in presence, but I still all but jump off the ship to score a juicy oxtail and plantains at the well-known Petite Pump Room, overlooking the harbor. From one of the highest points in the small city, the Icon of the Seas appears bigger than the surrounding hills.

I usually tan very evenly, but something about the discombobulation of life at sea makes me forget the regular application of sunscreen. As I walk down the streets of Charlotte Amalie in my fluorescent Icon of the Seas cap, an old Rastafarian stares me down. “Redneck,” he hisses.

“No,” I want to tell him, as I bring a hand up to my red neck, “that’s not who I am at all. On my island, Mannahatta, as Whitman would have it, I am an interesting person living within an engaging artistic milieu. I do not wish to use the Caribbean as a dumping ground for the cruise-ship industry. I love the work of Derek Walcott. You don’t understand. I am not a redneck. And if I am, they did this to me.” They meaning Royal Caribbean? Its passengers? The Rands?

“They did this to me!”

Back on the Icon, some older matrons are muttering about a run-in with passengers from the Celebrity cruise ship docked next to us, the Celebrity Apex. Although Celebrity Cruises is also owned by Royal Caribbean, I am made to understand that there is a deep fratricidal beef between passengers of the two lines. “We met a woman from the Apex,” one matron says, “and she says it was a small ship and there was nothing to do. Her face was as tight as a 19-year-old’s, she had so much surgery.” With those words, and beneath a cloudy sky, humidity shrouding our weathered faces and red necks, we set sail once again, hopefully in the direction of home.

Inside the AquaDome, one can find a food hall and an acrobatic sound-and-light aquatic show. (Gary Shteyngart) Day 6

THERE ARE BARELY 48 HOURS LEFT to the cruise, and the Icon of the Seas’ passengers are salty. They know how to work the elevators. They know the Washy Washy song by heart. They understand that the chicken gyro at “Feta Mediterranean,” in the AquaDome Market, is the least problematic form of chicken on the ship.

The passengers have shed their INAUGURAL CRUISE T-shirts and are now starting to evince political opinions. There are caps pledging to make America great again and T-shirts that celebrate words sometimes attributed to Patrick Henry: “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.” With their preponderance of FAMILY FLAG FAITH FRIENDS FIREARMS T-shirts, the tables by the crepe station sometimes resemble the Capitol Rotunda on January 6. The Real Anthony Fauci, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to be a popular form of literature, especially among young men with very complicated versions of the American flag on their T-shirts. Other opinions blend the personal and the political. “Someone needs to kill Washy guy, right?” a well-dressed man in the elevator tells me, his gray eyes radiating nothing. “Just beat him to death. Am I right?” I overhear the male member of a young couple whisper, “There goes that freak” as I saunter by in my white spa robe, and I decide to retire it for the rest of the cruise.

I visit the Royal Bling to see up close the $100,000 golden chalice that entitles you to free drinks on Royal Caribbean forever. The pleasant Serbian saleslady explains that the chalice is actually gold-plated and covered in white zirconia instead of diamonds, as it would otherwise cost $1 million. “If you already have everything,” she explains, “this is one more thing you can get.”

I believe that anyone who works for Royal Caribbean should be entitled to immediate American citizenship. They already speak English better than most of the passengers and, per the Serbian lady’s sales pitch above, better understand what America is as well. Crew members like my Panamanian cabin attendant seem to work 24 hours a day. A waiter from New Delhi tells me that his contract is six months and three weeks long. After a cruise ends, he says, “in a few hours, we start again for the next cruise.” At the end of the half a year at sea, he is allowed a two-to-three-month stay at home with his family. As of 2019, the median income for crew members was somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000, according to a major business publication. Royal Caribbean would not share the current median salary for its crew members, but I am certain that it amounts to a fraction of the cost of a Royal Bling gold-plated, zirconia-studded chalice.

And because most of the Icon’s hyper-sanitized spaces are just a frittata away from being a Delta lounge, one forgets that there are actual sailors on this ship, charged with the herculean task of docking it in port. “Having driven 100,000-ton aircraft carriers throughout my career,” retired Admiral James G. Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, writes to me, “I’m not sure I would even know where to begin with trying to control a sea monster like this one nearly three times the size.” (I first met Stavridis while touring Army bases in Germany more than a decade ago.)

Today, I decide to head to the hot tub near Swim & Tonic, where some of the ship’s drunkest reprobates seem to gather (the other tubs are filled with families and couples). The talk here, like everywhere else on the ship, concerns football, a sport about which I know nothing. It is apparent that four teams have recently competed in some kind of finals for the year, and that two of them will now face off in the championship. Often when people on the Icon speak, I will try to repeat the last thing they said with a laugh or a nod of disbelief. “Yes, 20-yard line! Ha!” “Oh my God, of course, scrimmage.”

Soon we are joined in the hot tub by the late-middle-age drunk guy with the duck necklace. He is wearing a bucket hat with the legend HAWKEYES, which, I soon gather, is yet another football team. “All right, who turned me in?” Duck Necklace says as he plops into the tub beside us. “I get a call in the morning,” he says. “It’s security. Can you come down to the dining room by 10 a.m.? You need to stay away from the members of this religious family.” Apparently, the gregarious Duck Necklace had photobombed the wrong people. There are several families who present as evangelical Christians or practicing Muslims on the ship. One man, evidently, was not happy that Duck Necklace had made contact with his relatives. “It’s because of religious stuff; he was offended. I put my arm around 20 people a day.”

Everyone laughs. “They asked me three times if I needed medication,” he says of the security people who apparently interrogated him in full view of others having breakfast.

Another hot-tub denizen suggests that he should have asked for fentanyl. After a few more drinks, Duck Necklace begins to muse about what it would be like to fall off the ship. “I’m 62 and I’m ready to go,” he says. “I just don’t want a shark to eat me. I’m a huge God guy. I’m a Bible guy. There’s some Mayan theory squaring science stuff with religion. There is so much more to life on Earth.” We all nod into our Red Stripes.

“I never get off the ship when we dock,” he says. He tells us he lost $6,000 in the casino the other day. Later, I look him up, and it appears that on land, he’s a financial adviser in a crisp gray suit, probably a pillar of his North Chicago community.

Despite the prevalence of ice cream, the author lost two pounds on the cruise. (Gary Shteyngart) Day 7

THE OCEAN IS TEEMING with fascinating life, but on the surface it has little to teach us. The waves come and go. The horizon remains ever far away.

I am constantly told by my fellow passengers that “everybody here has a story.” Yes, I want to reply, but everybody everywhere has a story. You, the reader of this essay, have a story, and yet you’re not inclined to jump on a cruise ship and, like Duck Necklace, tell your story to others at great pitch and volume. Maybe what they’re saying is that everybody on this ship wants to have a bigger, more coherent, more interesting story than the one they’ve been given. Maybe that’s why there’s so much signage on the doors around me attesting to marriages spent on the sea. Maybe that’s why the Royal Caribbean newsletter slipped under my door tells me that “this isn’t a vacation day spent—it’s bragging rights earned.” Maybe that’s why I’m so lonely.

Today is a big day for Icon passengers. Today the ship docks at Royal Caribbean’s own Bahamian island, the Perfect Day at CocoCay. (This appears to be the actual name of the island.) A comedian at the nightclub opined on what his perfect day at CocoCay would look like—receiving oral sex while learning that his ex-wife had been killed in a car crash (big laughter). But the reality of the island is far less humorous than that.

One of the ethnic tristate ladies in the infinity pool told me that she loved CocoCay because it had exactly the same things that could be found on the ship itself. This proves to be correct. It is like the Icon, but with sand. The same tired burgers, the same colorful tubes conveying children and water from Point A to B. The same swim-up bar at its Hideaway ($140 for admittance, no children allowed; Royal Caribbean must be printing money off its clientele). “There was almost a fight at The Wizard of Oz,” I overhear an elderly woman tell her companion on a chaise lounge. Apparently one of the passengers began recording Royal Caribbean’s intellectual property and “three guys came after him.”

I walk down a pathway to the center of the island, where a sign reads DO NOT ENTER: YOU HAVE REACHED THE BOUNDARY OF ADVENTURE. I hear an animal scampering in the bushes. A Royal Caribbean worker in an enormous golf cart soon chases me down and takes me back to the Hideaway, where I run into Mrs. Rand in a bikini. She becomes livid telling me about an altercation she had the other day with a woman over a towel and a deck chair. We Suites have special towel privileges; we do not have to hand over our SeaPass Card to score a towel. But the Rands are not Suites. “People are so entitled here,” Mrs. Rand says. “It’s like the airport with all its classes.” “You see,” I want to say, “this is where your husband’s love of Ayn Rand runs into the cruelties and arbitrary indignities of unbridled capitalism.” Instead we make plans to meet for a final drink in the Schooner Bar tonight (the Rands will stand me up).

Back on the ship, I try to do laps, but the pool (the largest on any cruise ship, naturally) is fully trashed with the detritus of American life: candy wrappers, a slowly dissolving tortilla chip, napkins. I take an extra-long shower in my suite, then walk around the perimeter of the ship on a kind of exercise track, past all the alluring lifeboats in their yellow-and-white livery. Maybe there is a dystopian angle to the HBO series that I will surely end up pitching, one with shades of WALL-E or Snowpiercer. In a collapsed world, a Royal Caribbean–like cruise liner sails from port to port, collecting new shipmates and supplies in exchange for the precious energy it has on board. (The actual Icon features a new technology that converts passengers’ poop into enough energy to power the waterslides. In the series, this shitty technology would be greatly expanded.) A very young woman (18? 19?), smart and lonely, who has only known life on the ship, walks along the same track as I do now, contemplating jumping off into the surf left by its wake. I picture reusing Duck Necklace’s words in the opening shot of the pilot. The girl is walking around the track, her eyes on the horizon; maybe she’s highborn—a Suite—and we hear the voice-over: “I’m 19 and I’m ready to go. I just don’t want a shark to eat me.”

Before the cruise is finished, I talk to Mr. Washy Washy, or Nielbert of the Philippines. He is a sweet, gentle man, and I thank him for the earworm of a song he has given me and for keeping us safe from the dreaded norovirus. “This is very important to me, getting people to wash their hands,” he tells me in his burger getup. He has dreams, as an artist and a performer, but they are limited in scope. One day he wants to dress up as a piece of bacon for the morning shift.

Epilogue

THE MAIDEN VOYAGE OF THE TITANIC (the Icon of the Seas is five times as large as that doomed vessel) at least offered its passengers an exciting ending to their cruise, but when I wake up on the eighth day, all I see are the gray ghosts that populate Miami’s condo skyline. Throughout my voyage, my writer friends wrote in to commiserate with me. Sloane Crosley, who once covered a three-day spa mini-cruise for Vogue, tells me she felt “so very alone … I found it very untethering.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in an Instagram comment: “When Gary is done I think it’s time this genre was taken out back and shot.” And he is right. To badly paraphrase Adorno: After this, no more cruise stories. It is unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship. Writers typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place. It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

A day or two before I got off the ship, I decided to make use of my balcony, which I had avoided because I thought the view would only depress me further. What I found shocked me. My suite did not look out on Central Park after all. This entire time, I had been living in the ship’s Disneyland, Surfside, the neighborhood full of screaming toddlers consuming milkshakes and candy. And as I leaned out over my balcony, I beheld a slight vista of the sea and surf that I thought I had been missing. It had been there all along. The sea was frothy and infinite and blue-green beneath the span of a seagull’s wing. And though it had been trod hard by the world’s largest cruise ship, it remained.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “A Meatball at Sea.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.