“It’s like in The Pirate Book of Burdens,” Pearl says. “The burden of being at sea.”
Pearl teaches me all the knots, knots I’ve never encountered before. There’s a knot that resembles a fish, but it’s called the bird. A special series of knots that when tied just right reveal a sort of written code. She shows me a knot called the evolution, named for the way it gradually tightens over time. If you leave the evolution alone for a month, it grows tighter than a gnarled root. There are evolution knots at the bottom of the ocean, buried in sunken ships, perhaps the tightest tangles you can find on the surface of the earth.
It’s getting late, the sky dumping its golden glow all over the deck. When the moon is crescent, the pirate crew does movie night. Team building. A projector fastened to steady hooks, the sails are suddenly a screen. Men and women in black and white projected four stories high, billowing and expanding with the wind. The pirate captain loves the classics, and he smiles his face off.
“This summer, we’ll do a retrospective,” he says, “of films I enjoy.”
If the actors weren’t so elegant, they could just as easily be giants standing on water, stomping us to smithereens with their high artifice and witty quips and speedy barbs, the kind of quick dialogue that lets you know everyone is ultimately in love but not in love until the last minute. The heart is a fast, thumping creature, like a metronome for repartee. In the movie, everyone talks without breathing just in case they die before they get a chance to articulate their feelings. The final frame is always a tight embrace, a resuscitation. It wouldn’t take much to get me into the crow’s nest tonight, to rest in the arms of these characters, these people pretending at other people.
Pearl sits beside me and offers handfuls of her popcorn. I remember with fondness and pity the sad kernels stuck to the sides of the Major Corp microwave. It’s not homesickness that I’m feeling. Jobsickness. Seasickness. Pearl laughs when I laugh, and I know the movie will now be a joke between us, the plot as real as a story that happened to us and only us, in our life, together.
We walk back to our sleeping quarters. I quicken my pace past human resources but not enough for Pearl to notice. Outside my door, she grabs my cracked, brittle hand, now coated with the grainy, buttery residue from my first fun night in many nights.
“Darla is my best friend,” she says.
“I know,” I say.
“If she doesn’t come back, maybe … you can be Darla.”
Permanent Darla, I think. Would that be steady enough?
“Maybe you can be my best friend,” Pearl says, and I fill up like something empty, something fierce and starving. Of course, of course, of course I take her eye patch. I even wear it. She adjusts it on my face and lets her hand linger there, resting against my cheek. We go to my bunk and practice more, this time a different kind of knot.
Temporaries measure their pregnancies in hours, not weeks. We’re employed at an hourly rate, and we gestate in the same manner. My mother was pregnant with me for 6,450 hours, most of them billable hours spent at work, filing, tabulating, eating noodles at her desk, then lying on the couch with her feet propped up on a pillow, taking walks around the city with soothing music playing in her ears, sewing elastic into the waists of her pants, going to work, eating noodles, tabulating, sewing onesies, hiding the pregnancy under loose sweaters for fear of dismissal, filling in at work, filling out in the middle, eating noodles, tabulating, swollen feet propped up on a pillow, loose sweaters stretching, walks around the city, music, more noodles.
“Be careful, or you’ll end up unemployed,” my grandmother told her. My mother had never heard her say that word out loud before.
“Not in front of the baby!” my mother said, putting a hand on her belly.
“Be cautious, or you’ll wind up working for a witch,” my grandmother said.
This wasn’t just a turn of phrase. There is nothing worse than working for a witch, nothing more shameful, the very last measure of hope for the unemployable temp, and in hour 4,016 of her pregnancy, that’s exactly where my mother landed.
My mother wasn’t particularly forthcoming with the details.
“Mostly paperwork,” she’d say when I’d ask her about it, my fingers stretched over my eyes. I was expecting strange and wonderful supernatural terrors.
“Oh sure, some cauldron scrubbing. Double-checking spells, fact-checking potions. The occasional graveyard roundup, the occasional subterranean ritual.”
My jaw would go slack, and my mother would straighten her blouse.
“Mostly errands,” she’d say.
“What about goblins?” I would ask. “What about brooms?”
But my mother would just shrug, eat her noodles.
In truth, while she was working for the witch, there were consequences to consider. She was concerned the job might leave some mysterious residue on her pregnancy, on me. When she traveled home in the evenings, with each stretch of pavement, she’d count the hours to make sure I wasn’t too early, or too late, but still arriving very much right on time, perfectly on schedule.
Around hour 6,430, the witch drove my mother to the hospital.
“She drove? Why didn’t she just fly?” I asked.
My mother laughed. “You try flying with a final-hour pregnancy strapped on your back!” she said.
Birthdays aren’t a serious affair for temporaries. Usually, one simply adopts the birthday of the employee one has replaced. No cake, no streamers, no banners, unless those banners say, “Happy Birthday, Karen,” and I’m replacing Karen on her birthday. And yet, every year I wake up at the exact hour and minute on the day I was born, and I can remember that night, emerging and landing in my mother’s arms, passing over to my grandmother’s lap in the seat by the window, and finally to the small and dainty hands of the witch.
I never mentioned it to her, but my mother was onto something, worrying about that residue. I know it was the witch who engineered this yearly birthday memory, her thumb tapping my brow, forcing me to acknowledge something about myself, even when my self is tucked away, deep in the pockets of another person.
I think about this, sleeping next to Pearl on the evening of my birth, in the guise of Darla, my head on the pillow and my palms tucked under my cheek.
A scream startles me awake first, then the splashing, then the linking of the boats.
“Pearl,” I say, shaking her with both hands. “Pearl, what’s happening?”
She snores, rolls over, and splays her body across the bed with the stretch of a starfish.
I rise from the bunks and pull myself up the stairs, slowly so as not to disturb. The scene: a smaller boat next to ours, full of passengers. The passengers are lifted onto our deck one by one, then carried below. I remember the first mate of human resources carrying my seasick body. Now he carries a different young woman in the same fashion. Adventure capital.
I duck under a tarp and watch the capture through my unpatched eye. Pearl’s patch, I learn, allows for me to shift from above deck to below, to consider various levels of light and dark without losing my vision or experiencing glare. From under the tarp, my view might be obstructed, but I can see what I need to see.
The capture isn’t violent in the traditional sense. No one is outwardly harmed, but there’s harm everywhere. There are weapons at the ready.
“Let’s make this easy on everyone!” I hear the executive assistant say, his arms open in supplication, each of his hands occupied with a dagger.
I see the captain’s face, so close to mine that I could reach out and touch it. And maybe it’s the moonlight or the wind, or the tiny bites of frosty water spraying his skeleton crew, but my affable boss from hours earlier is nowhere to be found in this strange, square visage. The corners of his eyes are vicious, and his mouth is turned down and out and small. I see, for a sharp, pinched moment, his teeth.
The remaining hostages are secured in the dungeon, and I creep back to my quarters alone, expecting to find Pearl under the blanket, her sk
in cold and clammy. The bed is empty. I will now practice barricading my door at night. All nocturnal journeys will occur within the confines of my room. I will climb the bunks until my muscles turn fantastic, until I can defend myself against whatever treachery arises.
In the morning, I expect a company meeting. All hands, as it goes. But nothing happens. One day slips by, then another. I slip knots and unslip them. I keep the desk materials clean and orderly. No one says a word about our acquisition. Our merger? Our acquisition. Normally, on land, I would consult human resources, but here I am at sea. The invaded ship is nowhere to be found. At the bottom of the ocean is my guess, which is as good a guess as any.
I follow Pearl, hoping for a talk.
“Do you have a minute to chat?” I shout after her.
“Sorry, I’m completely underwater with work!”
She quickens her pace but says over her shoulder, mid-sprint, “Not literally underwater!” She smiles, so I know we’re still best friends.
Everyone smiles. Everyone smiles over dinner, over breakfast, the smiles lingering long past the meals, and onward into the evening for the passing of ale. Everyone is happy, and now I fear I’m imagining the things I saw at night. Was any of it real, or is this one of the Chairman’s new tricks? I hesitate to share my knowledge for fear my spying and snooping make me unforgivably less of a Darla. I hold on to my new knowledge like a life preserver, and I wonder if I’m sinking anyone else by keeping this secret.
Another day goes by, and another.
Payroll arrives on my desk: the man-parrot gives me a small box, which I tear open in his presence. Nestled in tissue paper I see a studded, sparkling brooch in the shape of a nautilus shell.
“Appropriate, no?” he asks. “For our life at sea.”
“Look at my bracelet!” Pearl says, popping her head in my office and holding out her wrist. “Real pearls!”
There are silk scarves and necklaces and gold belt buckles to go around. There are coins for some and bills for others. We’re worth what we’re worth. I think of the captives below, pants falling down, wrists and necks newly bare, pockets empty, and I hold the blinding brooch in my palm. I put it away with my rubies, my paychecks, my new possessions. Maybe these jewels will be appraised for next to nothing, I think. Maybe they’re of no value, not even the sentimental kind. Maybe my brooch doesn’t belong to the captives in the truest sense of belonging, but who am I to know what it means to belong—to a person, to a place, to a time? Which is to say, maybe a captive simply stole the brooch from some other captive, who stole it from another captive, who again stole it from another, from another, provenance indeterminate. If I can separate myself from the crime by several degrees, the crime feels less criminal.
I try to feel comfort with lying every day, practicing mostly on myself.
A whole week has passed when the captain raps his knuckles on my door.
“Yes?”
“Today you will do inventory,” he says with a smile. “Follow me.”
I gather myself and trail the pirate captain to the dungeon, where we see the prisoners sitting, playing chess, taking naps. They look well rested and fed, and no one is bruised or bloodied. I’m thankful that, for a dungeon, it doesn’t really smell. Everyone looks surprisingly OK. But then again, so do I.
“Create a file for each of them,” he says, handing me a legal pad and an inky pen. “The usual details.”
I pull a chair up to the edge of the dungeon bars. I run my hands over my face in the manner of removing a mask, or putting one on, in preparation for their stories. Their ages, twenty-four to fifty-eight. Their heights, their weights. The sizes of their shirts, extra small through extra large. Blue eyes versus brown versus hazel, differences in color of hair, in length, in texture. Where do you see yourself in five years? When do you fall asleep at night? When do you wake up in the morning? What is your biggest flaw, and don’t say you’re a perfectionist. How many teeth do you have in your head? Where were you going, out on the open sea?
“We were on a work retreat!” one prisoner says.
“I rented a glass-bottomed boat. For team building,” a woman says, and I assume she’s the boss. “I’m the boss,” she whispers, curling down to the dungeon floor in a gesture that says, This is all my fault.
“We could see all the fish. Every single fish.”
“I saw a shark!” someone says.
“No you didn’t. You did not see a shark. That wasn’t a shark.”
“Joe was just using the glass bottom to look at people’s reflected bottoms.”
“Joe was not doing that!” says Joe.
“There were iridescent jellyfish as far as you could see.”
“We were all looking down,” the boss says, “when you captured us.”
“Let’s get back to inventory,” I say, uncertain of how to proceed.
Data. Education. Religious beliefs. Relevant experiences. Previous abductions. Future aspirations. Life skills. Leverage. Their children, their pets, sons, daughters, twins, older brothers, older sisters. Their spouses, some present, some absent, some absent in the final sense of the word. Their first loves. Their last meals.
“Most recent meals, you mean!” a prisoner yells for clarification.
“No last meals today, right?” Joe asks, stepping forward with a squeak.
“I’m not sure,” I say, and I’m telling the truth.
Their bad deeds. Their good deeds. An old lady carrying groceries. A dog stuck in a tree.
“Isn’t it usually a cat stuck in a tree?” I ask.
“That’s what makes my deed especially good!” says the woman who rescued the dog in the tree.
Any detail that might save their lives. Any detail that might explain their lives. Their vacations and date nights and nightmares and bad years and boring choices. The marrow of all their mistakes. Their levels of inexperience. Their jobs, their jobs, their jobs, their jobs.
Then a small voice from the back: “My job is that I used to work on this ship.”
A woman in a patchwork skirt steps forward. All the air is sucked forward and out and away.
“My name,” she says after a pause, “is Pearl.”
“Of course, she’s lying,” says my Pearl.
The entire crew is gathered in the dungeon to see her, this woman who claims to be the original Pearl.
“Why would I lie about something like this?” original Pearl asks. She isn’t panicked, nor is she calm. Her voice is like a rubber band stretched taut. The stretching involves some invisible, silent control. She’s about ten years younger than my Pearl, and they look nothing alike. There shouldn’t be a debate at all, in theory. This Pearl is tall and lanky, straight lines and long limbs. My Pearl is shorter than me, curvy in her patchwork skirt, her wrinkled blouse.
“Look at her skirt,” my Pearl says, putting a hand on my shoulder. “A dead rip-off of mine.”
“I think it might be her,” the captain says, peering at the prisoner Pearl’s face, “but I really couldn’t say. She was so very far below my pay grade. I’m not remunerated for looking down, right?” His eyes widen with a bit of recognition, and he turns to our Pearl for reassurance, or for an explanation.
“It can’t be her, not logically,” my Pearl says. “Because I’m the original Pearl.”
The pirate crew whispers and stares, murmurs with great uncertainty. I watch in disbelief as Pearl convinces every person in the room that there was no Pearl before her, and no Pearl who could possibly replace her.
“Look back through all your memories of our ship,” she says. “Brand new, stolen straight from the dock. Look back through every single moment we’ve spent together. Look into my eyes. Me, managing receipts. Me, leading plunder initiatives. Me, having affairs with you and doing lunches with you and covering for you and ratting on you and trimming your beards, cutting your hair, waxing your chests. Me, smashing a bottle of champagne against the side of the ship as a blessing. Me, scooping a net of four hundred bluefish from th
e salty depths.”
“But that was me! That was all me!” the prisoner Pearl says, her sentences getting sharper, anxious. “I told you everything when you replaced me. I told you everything.”
“Me, writing the procedures for dealing with liars and traitors and pirate deserters.”
“I wrote those procedures,” the original Pearl says with despair, or is she the original Pearl after all? I start to wonder. It’s all very convincing. It’s all very confusing. No one is ever exactly who they claim to be, but some people are closer than others. Who’s to say the prisoner Pearl is still even Pearl after all her time away? Who’s to say I’ll still be myself a year from now? Twenty years on, someone might be more my current self than I ever could have been.
Now the prisoner Pearl is crying. “My procedures,” she stutters.
“If you wrote the procedures,” our Pearl says, “then you’ll know the standard protocol. You’ll know it’s about time we commenced the severing!”
The pirate crew cheers, and my best friend Pearl stands on a stool.
“But here’s the most important bit,” she explains, her voice softening. “Let’s say this is the true Pearl, here in her cell. Let’s say she isn’t the lying, traitorous captive we know her to be. Let’s say she’s half as pretty as me, or even two-thirds as smoking hot. Even if this unimpressive patchwork sack was indeed your original hire, dear captain, sir. Even if this garbage skirt human is who she claims to be, though we know she isn’t. I challenge anyone here to name a name for me that isn’t Pearl, and I’ll switch with her bony rump in an instant, throw myself in chains. I challenge you all: If I’m not Pearl, then tell me, who am I? What is my name?”
The pirate crew is raucous with excitement, for when they see my friend, the only name they see is Pearl. They cheer again.
“Do we, the most ferocious pirates on Earth, judge things by how they start? Does it matter who stirs the pot if someone else serves the stew? Does it matter who mends the dress if someone else wears it? It’s the woman who finishes the job who gets the job done!”
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