by Dave Eggers
XI
LIFE ON THE SHIP settled into a kind of routine. In the morning, passengers would read the Captain’s messages about spiders, his penis, and the enemies in the engine room, and afterward, the passengers would try to get on with the business of their day. Sometime around lunch, the Captain would grow bored and would steer the ship hard left and hard right, sending all objects and people not battened down careening through the ship, bones and glass shattering against walls and floors. Sometimes he would make announcements over the intercom, warning that he might start a war with another ship, and then, a few hours later, tell all the passengers on the Glory that he had changed his mind, or had been joking, or had never said anything like that in the first place.
In the afternoons and evenings, the Snowmen would hunt the day’s quarry. Usually there was a loud and violent struggle as they brought their victims to the rail, but always the result was the same: the Certain Person would be tossed over the side and into the churning sea. These were mothers, fathers, teachers, nurses, carpenters, bartenders, florists, maids, scientists, and cooks. Those victims would briefly struggle before their lungs filled with seawater, whereupon they would suffocate, lose consciousness and sink to the bottom of the ocean.
Sometime after dinner, as the sun was setting most dramatically, the Captain would toss whatever orange-clad manual or textbook he’d found that day into the sea. The manuals, and the crew members that had preceded the Captain’s reign, were stubbornly persistent. Every day he would be confronted by one of these latent crew members, many of them women-not-wearing-bathing-suits, and they would tell him he was doing things that were against the rules of the ship, and with them they would have a large orange binder, full of regulations and rules—much like the one his daughter had found in the early days. Every time he would have to call the Snowmen, and the Snowmen would first have to separate the crew member from the orange manual, and then separate the crew member from the ship, therefore separating that crew member’s everlasting spirit from their corporeal form. Then the Captain would toss the orange binder overboard, too, wishing it would sink but watching as instead it stayed afloat, drifting out of view in the Glory’s white wake.
During the wee hours, the Snowmen would knock on the doors of Certain People, and the friends of Certain People, pounding furiously on their cabin doors and telling them to watch out, to beware, that they were next, and to sleep well in the meantime. Many of the Certain People did not sleep well, though, and decided to end their lives before being thrown into the sea. So they self-immolated, and self-opioded, and threw themselves overboard in the quiet hours. It was a time of terror and sadism unlike any the passengers of the Glory could recall, and it proved to the Captain and his coterie that they were really onto something.
* * *
—
And what were those opposed to the Captain doing all this time? After the Captain was first elected, they responded in sundry ways. Some simply figured that all captains had flaws—that there was a sameness to all captains, in that they stood on the bridge and steered and occasionally were subject to scandals and controversies and periodically had extramarital affairs with pornographic actresses while their wives were nursing their children, and chose not to pay taxes, and from time to time stole money from investors in failed businesses, and denigrated vast swaths of the population, and incited violence against Certain People and ended many lives in horrific ways, and threatened friendly ships and admired enemy ships, and appointed known felons and sociopaths to positions of power, and that all of it was a wash, and none of it was all that important vis-à-vis their own complicated lives that were also full of weakness and contradiction, even if not full of pornographic actresses.
Then there were others, who were so shattered by the idea that the noble ship Glory, with its august history and towering ideals and intellectual achievements, had chosen a base charlatan to lead it. These passengers, who might be called idealists, or at least optimists, usually saw the best in their fellow passengers, and were so shocked and disappointed in the Most Foul that even many weeks after the Captain’s ascendance, they were still catatonic. For them, seeing their neighbors and friends and even relatives wearing chicken costumes and cheering the Captain’s evisceration of every law and large-hearted idea ever conceived on the Glory, not to mention the Most Foul’s cheering of the ritual drowning of other humans aboard, was so soul-rupturing that they could scarcely get out of bed.
Finally, there were the passengers who chose to fight the Captain and the Upskirt Boys, and they did so whenever they could. They called themselves the Kindly Mutineers, for they were determined not to stoop to the base level of the Captain and Snowmen and the Most Foul. Instead they rebelled politely, with properly filled-out complaint forms and sternly worded memos. When these forms and memos had no effect—the Captain had the Snowmen burn them each night, upon a pyre, around which the feathered Most Foul danced—the Kindly Mutineers then filed injunctions and passed resolutions. When these injunctions and resolutions had no effect, they looked in the few remaining ship’s manuals, which contained the ship’s laws and regulations, to see if the Captain had violated any of them. Very quickly they realized that the Captain had violated many hundreds of these laws and regulations—had in fact violated all but a few of them with astonishing speed and thoroughness.
Having realized this, though, the Kindly Mutineers were unsure what step to take next. It seemed very drastic to unseat the Captain, and to be sure, trying to unseat him carried with it the risk of failure, given the fact that he had many supporters dressed as birds. The passengers dressed as birds had voted him Captain, the Kindly Mutineers reasoned, and perhaps it was not right to unseat the Captain the bird-people had elected, just because he had violated the ship’s every rule and had sanctioned the murder of upwards of 122 or so humans via drowning, many of them succumbing to the seas while the Most Foul chanted things like “Drown the Brown!” and “Dunk the Punk.”
This had become a thing. The Most Foul had found that they very much liked to chant. They liked to chant whatever the Captain suggested they chant, and they also liked to make up their own chants, one of which was “Drown the Brown,” which they created for the occasions when Certain People—whose skin color tended toward brown—were thrown overboard. When they saw the Snowmen take a Certain Person from their cabins or workplaces or the infirmary, the Most Foul would gather at the railing and watch the Snowmen swing the human to and fro, by the arms and legs, before flinging them over the ship’s edge. All the while, the Most Foul would chant “Drown the Brown!” if the Certain Person was brown, and “Dunk the Punk!” if that brown person was also a child. And when the person had dropped into the ocean and sunk to the seafloor, never again to think or see or love, the Most Foul would return to their rooms and watch television.
* * *
—
The Kindly Mutineers could not deduce what had happened to their shipmates. Either the Most Foul, with whom they peacefully had shared the Glory for years—before they began calling themselves by this new name—had always been secretly bloodthirsty, waiting for the opportunity to watch others die, or something about the Captain had created a hot crimson fever, had awoken a long-dormant contagion of ugliness and casual barbarism. The Kindly Mutineers had hope, however faint, that it was indeed a fever that had possessed their fellow passengers, and, like any fever, it would eventually break.
In the meantime, though, the Kindly Mutineers thought hard about what to do to save the lives of the remaining Certain People, and perhaps save the soul of the Glory. They decided to send a carrier pigeon across the ocean to beckon forth the one person who knew what to do in a situation like this. They sent for the Sheriff of the Seas.
The Sheriff of the Seas was a bit of a legend and something of a myth. He was an unassailable lawman who could be called upon when justice needed rendering and when the oppressed had exhausted every other option
and hope. The one catch with the Sheriff of the Seas was that he was mute, or pretended to be mute in order to increase his mystique. In any case, whenever he rendered justice, he did so in the form of many-paged summaries of wrongdoing which were researched exhaustively and worded carefully, but which required the local persons to both read these summaries and to use these summaries in their own ways in order to exact justice. It was known that all through this process of research and fact-finding, the Sheriff worked silently and provided no updates or hints, which only enhanced his aura and terrified his quarry.
A few weeks after the pigeon flew away, the Kindly Mutineers got word, via a different carrier pigeon—long story—that the Sheriff of the Seas would be coming. The Kindly Mutineers were jubilant, and they sent yet another carrier pigeon—very long story, sorry—back to the Sheriff, telling him to arrive under cover of night, for the Captain would otherwise have his Snowmen do nasty things to him, or even worse.
One night, when a gray fog had overtaken the horizon, the Kindly Mutineers found that the Sheriff was already aboard. Somehow in the fog he had managed to sail up to the Glory, board, and set up an office in a location he would not disclose even to the Mutineers. He was tall and gaunt and had a way of walking, angled forward and with his chin tucked into his chest, that implied he was forever confronting a strong wind. And true to legend, he was mute. He said nothing to them, only shook their hands, listened to their concerns, and disappeared again into the fog.
After many weeks of rigorous work, the Sheriff presented the Kindly Mutineers his findings via a thousand-page tome. The manuscript was scrupulous and detailed and impossible to refute, and though it was dense, on every other page the Sheriff had made clear, in plain language, in language all children and many inanimate objects could understand, the towering crimes the Captain had committed. These crimes were so numerous and so grievous that the Sheriff was quite sure that the Captain would not only be relieved of his duties, but would likely be sent to the brig for the remainder of his years. He handed this report to the representative of the Kindly Mutineers and turned to be on his way.
“Hold on a sec,” this representative said. The Kindly Mutineers had elected among their members a leader, who acted as spokesperson, and even a kind of shadow captain. She was known to be a master negotiator and a brilliant tactician and thus had been nicknamed the Wily Strategist.
“Before you go,” she said to the Sheriff, holding the report in her two hands, and making a frowny-face to indicate how heavy she found the book, “can you give us the gist?”
The Sheriff said nothing, for he was mute, or pretended to be mute (for it really did increase his mystique). He put his long wrinkled forefinger on the cover of the book the Strategist held, and raised his thick eyebrows in a way that strongly implied that the answers were within its pages.
“Are you saying we should read this book?” she asked the Sheriff. The Sheriff did not answer; instead he tapped the book again with his long wrinkled forefinger and again did his thing with the eyebrows.
“Are you saying the answers are inside?” she asked.
The Sheriff felt that nodding was a form of speech, and he considered himself mute, or at least mute-curious, so again he worked his eyebrows up and down, turned and left, never to be seen again.
The Kindly Mutineers gathered around the book he had left them. One of their members touched it, and then jumped back, sucking his fingers. Another member used a stick to lift its cover, but quickly grew scared and hid under a table. The Kindly Mutineers circled the intimidating text for hours, making quivery approaches and rabbity retreats. No one wanted to open it. No one did.
“I think we’re doing the right thing,” the Strategist said, and so they did nothing.
XII
FOR AVA, LIFE was perhaps more confusing than for most passengers on the Glory. Before the ascendance of the Captain, she had extolled the virtues of virtue, only to see her fellow passengers, the ostensible adults aboard, give all their earthly power to a man they all knew to be cretinous, erratic, nihilistic and dim. After the election, she had returned home to find a giant chicken in her family’s cabin. It was her own father, dressed in the garb of the Most Foul. “Honey,” he said, and held out his feathered arms. “We needed a change.”
Her mother sat next to her father, rolling her eyes.
“Your father,” she said, “is a moron for the time being. But we can agree to disagree, and we can love each other still.”
Ava fled, disbelieving, feeling betrayed and lost. She wandered the ship in a state of catatonia that lasted weeks.
When she returned, she found her father in his usual chair, though his eyes were icy and inanimate.
“They took her,” he said. “The Snowmen. She was Certain. I should have known.”
Ava screamed. She circled the ship screaming. She screamed until she could no longer scream or stand or breathe, and finally she returned to the door to her family’s cabin, knowing that her mother was gone and all she had left was her father, who at least she knew, now, would have regained his senses. When she opened the door, though, he was still sitting where she’d left him, and was still dressed as a chicken.
“Laws are laws,” he said, his voice steady and distant. He then talked at length about what he and his motherless daughter would do with the $1.50 the Captain had promised. As he mused, his eyes regained some of their life, but a thunderous knock at the door ended his reverie.
Three Snowmen burst into the room, grabbed Ava’s father roughly, and stood him atop a portable scale they had brought with them. After a few tsks containing both disappointment and glee, the Snowmen told Ava’s father that he was overweight and disgusting, and—with help from three more Snowmen—threw him over the railing.
SORRY ABOUT ORPHANS!
…the Captain wrote the following morning.
GET IN “SHAPE” AND LIVE LONGER :)
*
ME? ALL MY WEIGHT IN MY P-NUS.
The Captain smiled to himself after finishing the day’s messages, for he knew his wit brought much happiness to his supporters, who he considered filthy animals who were generally overweight and most of whom would have to be murdered via drowning. But until that time, he knew his irreverent humor would be pleasing to the Most Foul, and would stick it to the stuffed shirts who did not appreciate public discussion of his penis, or got weepy at the thought of orphaned children.
All in all, the Captain was having a wonderful time, even though every day brought new challenges. Though the Captain and the Snowmen had made it clear that there was no room for Certain People on the ship, new people of the Certain People type continued to approach the Glory via dinghy and junk and raft, and these people had to be dissuaded. The Captain thought cannon fire a practical solution, and for a time, he had the Snowmen destroy the vessels and their humans in this manner.
But soon the Captain was apprised of the great expense and scarcity of cannonballs, so the Snowmen suggested the ship’s many water cannons as an alternative. These water cannons used ocean water and then directed it, at a hundred miles an hour, at anyone below. The Captain was delighted by this device, and asked the Snowmen to demonstrate it on what seemed to be a family of five, desperate and emaciated, arriving in a tiny tin fishing boat. The Snowmen directed a plume of water, thousands of gallons of it, at the tiny tin boat, and instantly the family was drenched, made invisible by the force and volume of water. The figure that seemed to be the father—hard to see from so high up—soon fell into the ocean and then the mother, holding a baby, followed him into the sea. The two remaining figures, who appeared to be elderly and frail, held on for a few more seconds, but then their tin boat capsized—it almost spun, which the Captain thought beautiful, in a way, the way the silver took the light—flinging the humans left and right, and the boat sank, and the family sank shortly thereafter. The Captain was im
pressed. This water-cannon method was efficient, cost-effective, and, to those who enjoyed witnessing suffering from a safe distance, entertaining, too. So much so that he began charging people to watch it.
Indeed, when the Captain was elevated to the Glory’s highest office, the Upskirt Boys had seen this as not only very funny and actually hilarious and maybe surreal—certainly the craziest thing that had happened in their lifetimes or perhaps in the history of ships or democracy—they also saw it as a great opportunity to make a buck.
Using the public bathrooms on the ship had always been free, but Ed the Unwashed set up turnstiles in front of every toilet and urinal and charged the passengers on a sliding scale depending on the density, volume and mass of their discharge. Fingers took over the ship’s schools and daycare, both of which had previously been free, and charged for both, according to the children’s density, volume, mass, and the attractiveness of their mothers. Sweetie sold the children’s candy—which Fingers continued to steal—back to them at a reasonable rate, prime plus three. Patsy the Murderer and Paul the Manafort charged passengers to walk on the promenades and swim in the pool and walk through doorways and use silverware and look at the sunsets and breathe air.
The Most Foul were happy to pay all these fees, knowing that the Captain had put an extra $1.50 in their pockets. They had not seen this extra $1.50 yet, because the Captain had not given it to them and in fact had forgotten he’d promised to, but the Most Foul continued to throw him rallies at least once a week, during which they would dress in their feathers and beaks and cheer whatever he said. They would cheer the people thrown overboard, and cheer the marvel of the new water cannon that killed people, and they would cheer the fact that the Captain was their Captain, and had not changed at all since becoming captain.
