by Dave Eggers
Then he had a terrible dream. He was still the captain, and still on the bridge, but the Glory was sailing through the thickest of fogs. He tried to turn the wheel, but it would not turn. Nothing he did had any effect whatsoever on the steering. It was as if the ship was being pulled inexorably toward some object by some unseen force. And indeed it was, for out of the fog came the silver sails for which the Admiral was known. The sails seemed to reach for the Captain, pulling him toward them with irresistible force.
In the dream, the Admiral’s distinctive silver sails were coming through the white mist with horrible and deliberate speed. The Captain tried to turn but nothing worked. He put all his considerable weight on the wheel but it had no effect. The silver sails came toward him until he was surrounded by them, by their blinding light. The Admiral’s small dark eyes stared into him with unnerving resolve, imploring him, without a word, to be better.
The Captain felt his teeth loosen and crumble; they fell from his gums and were like pebbles in his mouth. He spit them out but his tongue came with them. When he tried to scream, he made no sound. He reached for his throat but when he lifted his hands, his fingers broke, one by one, like dried clay, leaving stubs that dissolved, disappearing like ash in a gale. He looked in horror at his handless arms, and, thinking he could outrun the disassembly of his body, he put one foot forward, then the other, but both buckled, bent, and snapped off like cheap plastic.
Without feet, his ankles could not support him and he dropped to his knees, which turned to wet putty, sending his torso soaring forward and his face plunging toward the ground. And here time slowed. This part of the dream, when his head was speeding to the earth, and all the while he knew that when it struck the hard ground it would shatter, seemed to last for hours. And while his head was flying downward, all the while he sensed the Admiral watching him, without malice and yet without compassion.
The Captain woke with a start. He was soaked through and drooling, his hands were trembling, his nose was running. He’d been crying, too.
“Hello?” he said into the vent. “You there?”
After a pause the voice answered, “Of course I am.”
“Do you think I’m brave?” the Captain asked.
From the vent there was a brief fit of coughs and throat clearings. Finally the voice said, “The bravest!”
This buoyed the Captain somewhat, but he pressed on. “The Admiral fought in the war and everyone says he was courageous. Do you think people think I’m a coward just because I hid in the bowels of the ship, looking at pornographic magazines?”
“Listen,” the voice in the vent said. “No one really cares about who fought in that war. And just about everyone likes pornography.”
The Captain laughed through his tears, knowing that again the voice in the vent had spoken an undeniable truth that assuaged his most private doubts.
“And I know this sounds silly,” the Captain went on, “but sometimes I think I’m not doing enough.”
The voice in the vent gasped. “No! Don’t say that!”
The Captain continued, “I promised the passengers that everything would get better, but so far all I’ve done is write on the wipe-away board, throw a hundred and eighty-seven people overboard, and promise to give the rest of the people a dollar and fify cents, which I don’t think I ever did.”
“Which makes you by far the greatest captain who has ever captained,” the voice said. “No captain has ever done more for the ship than you.”
The Captain sniffled, smiling to himself and feeling very grateful for the voice in the vent, and very proud of himself for all he had done.
XVI
IN THE MORNING, the Captain showered and dressed and went to the bridge, only to find the door locked. He looked through the portal, and saw the Pale One standing at the steering wheel, surrounded by the Pale One’s own crew, who appeared to have taken over the navigation of the ship.
“Captain!”
He turned to find Bloodbeard standing behind him, wearing an even more impressive outfit than he had the day before. While yesterday’s clothes were embroidered in gold, this outfit appeared to be actually made of gold. His robe seemed very heavy, perhaps a hundred pounds or more, but Bloodbeard seemed to be wearing it lightly. He was quite a man.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said to the Captain, and, putting his arm around the Captain’s rounded, fleshy shoulder, turned him from the bridge door and down the steps to the lower deck. As they descended, the Captain sensed that the ship was indeed going in the opposite direction than it had been going before he went to bed. It was as if the Pale One had taken control of the ship and turned it around completely—which seemed like just the kind of naughty surprise the Pale One would devise.
“That’s a shame,” Bloodbeard said. He was pointing to a small group of dinghies and junks approaching the Glory.
The Captain’s face went hot with embarrassment. He’d been throwing people off the ship, in part to thwart the arrival of any newcomers to the Glory. And yet, from time to time, new boats and rafts still approached, full of desperate women and men and children. It was a disgrace.
“The problem is you’re wasting a precious resource,” Bloodbeard said. “You throw these people into the ocean and this sends a message to your passengers, yes, but it says nothing to those from far away who cannot see these people drown. They sink too quickly.”
What was needed, Bloodbeard explained, was a constant and horrifying signal to those who might arrive by boat looking for safe haven. It was essential, he said, that those approaching would be confronted by a clear visual deterrent.
“Why do you think I carry this around?” Bloodbeard said, indicating the covered birdcage he’d been holding since he came aboard.
The Captain did not see the connection between a pet bird and a deterrent to boat people, but he didn’t know how to say this without risking looking uninformed. He positioned his lips in a serious pose meant to imply contemplation.
“Did I not show you this?” Bloodbeard said, and with a flourish removed the cloth from the birdcage. Inside was not a bird but a head. It was a man’s head, severed at the neck, and appeared to have been decomposing for weeks. Seeing it, the Captain had a flicker of recognition. He’d heard something about a man who had been asking annoying questions of Bloodbeard, and then this man had disappeared. Now the Captain made the connection between the missing man and the severed head, and also made the connection between the birdcage and the visual deterrent Bloodbeard had described.
“Speaking of which,” Bloodbeard said, “I noticed that you have hundreds of cages for lobsters and crabs and such.”
The Captain had never seen any cages for lobsters or crabs, but then again, he’d never seen much of the ship, and did not know where its food came from. So he took Bloodbeard’s word for it, and listened intently as Bloodbeard laid out a plan.
* * *
—
That afternoon, the ship’s passengers, who had grown accustomed to hearing the thumping resistance of whomever the Snowmen had found and decided to throw overboard, and had become inured to the otherworldly screaming of the victims’ spouses and children, were surprised to hear nothing of the kind this day. They were so curious about the lack of thumping and wailing that they peeked out of their rooms and took furtive steps toward the promenade and railings to see what was not happening.
What they found were Certain People being kept in cages meant for lobsters and crabs. These cages were placed every thirty feet or so on the outer decks, so that no passengers had to walk far from their rooms to encounter a human in a cage meant for mollusks and crustaceans. There were enough of the cages—easily ninety, on multiple decks—that any desperate vessel approaching the ship would notice the cages, would see the humans within, and would get the clear message that the ship was an unfriendly place where compassion had died and wherein rei
gned a towering disregard for the vulnerable and dispossessed.
“Love it,” said the voice in the vent that night.
“It was Bloodbeard’s idea,” said the Captain.
“We’re lucky to have friends like this,” said the voice in the vent. “They give and they give, and they ask for nothing in return.”
* * *
—
The passengers went about their lives with minor adjustments. Because the marauding crews of Bloodbeard and the Pale One regularly robbed the passengers and plundered their rooms, most passengers preferred to stay inside with their doors locked. When the brave few did venture outside, they tried to avoid the decks where the humans-in-cages were located, because even on windy days the smell of decaying flesh was very strong, and the sight and sound of the humans-in-cages—even though evidence of the Captain’s decisiveness—was nevertheless hard to bear, especially when the humans-in-cages were children, with their dying wails high-pitched and feral.
Even the passengers’ long-standing tradition of watching the sea, or the sunsets, or being outside for any period of time, was not the same sort of beautiful as it had been, given the three dozen or so former crew members and various enemies of the Captain trailing behind in leaky rowboats, some of them already dead and being picked apart by carrion birds and the occasional shark.
Because most of the sanitation and custodial workers had been thrown overboard or were now in traps meant for crustaceans, the boat had taken on a ragged appearance and a fetid odor. The Captain’s daughter one day opened her own cabin door and noticed this smell, which seemed a hybrid of rotting flesh, despair, and stale urine, and saw an opportunity. Her forward-thinking line of push-up bras, nose-narrowers and thigh-minimizers had been a hit among the Most Foul, but—an oversight veritably insane, she realized—she had no fragrance to her name. Now the ship needed one, and she rose to the challenge, calling it Eau de Oubli and making sure, through thorough testing on Certain Children and the elderly, that it was safe for humans, and effectively masked the ship’s overwhelming stench of strife and decay. Almost immediately, the scent was very popular among the dozens who could afford it. These passengers soaked their scarves in it, covering their mouths in order to walk outside, and breathed comfortably for minutes at a time.
Otherwise leaving one’s cabin was unpleasant and was not often done. Which was just as well, given that most of the restaurants on board had been shuttered long ago, because the makers of these foods were Certain People and thus had been thrown overboard. The Thai place was closed. The Chinese places were closed. The Ecuadorian place was long shuttered, as were the Nepalese, Ethiopian, and Peruvian eateries. The Mexican restaurants had been closed so long they were now being used to assemble and store more cages. The one remaining food option was the cheeseburger outlet favored by the Captain. That establishment was run partially by machines and partially by teenagers, who thus were not in immediate danger of being thrown into the sea.
During the day, the passengers watched television news, the hosts of which enumerated the many dangers outside the passengers’ cabins, which made the passengers’ habit of staying indoors even more prudent. Because the passengers got no exercise and rarely saw the sun, they had trouble sleeping, and between their restlessness and the many fears they had of rectal-bleeding spiders and various other threats—including the remaining Certain People and of course the marauding crews of the Pale One and Bloodbeard—they, like their Captain, took to hiding under their beds, and when they did, one by one, they too discovered the voice in the vent. And like the Captain, the Most Foul found that the voice in the vent really understood them and voiced their innermost fears with great candor and insight. Between the voice in the vent, and the cheeseburgers, and staying inside paralyzed with fear, and having the Glory commandeered by its historic enemies and ransacked daily, and surrounded by the dead and decaying bodies of Certain People, and with no one talking to anyone else, and the only joy in anyone’s life being the occasional hour when the Most Foul dressed as chickens and chanted for the deaths or jailings of their enemies, there had never been a better time.
XVII
THE CAPTAIN WOKE to the unsettling sound of the ship making a shuddering stop. He scooted out from under his bed, looked out the window and saw a thousand enormous images of the same round face. He dressed and walked to the rail and found that the Glory had docked at a port he’d never seen, and all around the ship, covering the docks and the surrounding town and the hillside beyond, were gigantic banners bearing the visage of a fleshy-faced man whose name the Captain could not place. He looked down and saw that a gangplank had already been extended from the Glory, and that a welcoming ceremony was occurring, with great pomp and circumstance, on the docks below.
The Captain changed into his most impressive military-seeming uniform, reapplied his muskiest cologne, and rushed down to the lower decks, scampering down the innumerable stairs and getting lost four or five times—for besides the bridge, he had never been anywhere on the ship but the pool, the putt-putt course, and the stairs near the women’s locker room—before finally finding his way to the gangplank.
There he saw the Pale One and Bloodbeard clapping hands in their phenomenal high-five way with a man who looked very much like the man depicted in the innumerable banners all over the port and the surrounding area. These banners hung from what appeared to be human bones and, when he looked closer, the Captain was sure that the hillside was decorated with many severed heads resting on pikes. They had gone to considerable trouble to greet the Glory, that much was clear. So as not to insult his hosts, the Captain rushed toward the podium where the Pale One and Bloodbeard were handclapping and backslapping with the man who seemed to be the leader of this land. Just before he reached his friends, a platoon of men and women from this foreign land, dressed in drab uniforms, rushed past him and onto the Glory, carrying the sorts of bags commonly used for looting and pillaging. When they were gone, the Captain straightened the medals on his jacket and strode toward the gathering.
Seeing him approach, wearing his faux-military uniform, the three men—the Pale One, Bloodbeard, and the Man So Soft, for that was the name of the one who ruled this land—looked at the Captain and all burst into uproarious laughter that seemed to the Captain to last ten minutes, but in fact lasted far longer.
They said nothing to him. When a fleet of luxurious black cars arrived, the three men got into them and drove off, none of them inviting the Captain along. For a moment or two, the Captain looked around him, catching eyes with a few of the hundred or so beheaded men and women that surrounded him, staring from their pikes. There was a certain panache to the way the Man So Soft decorated his port with the heads of his enemies, the Captain thought, but there was a certain smell, too. He wondered if his daughter’s ingenious perfume would effectively disguise the odor, and wondered what kind of market there would be on this island for Eau de Oubli. He wondered, then, just where his daughter was, and thought he might go back to the Glory to find her and talk about this new market for her scent and really her whole brand, given all the proles he’d seen so far were short and ugly and surely would admire a sun-haired Valkyrie like her—when a rickshaw driver huffed toward him and offered him a ride.
“Follow the Man So Soft?” he asked the Captain.
The Captain worried that his friends had abandoned him, had in fact meant to leave him by the docks, but this seemed implausible. Still, he had to muster all of his courage, as much courage as he had mustered when he had hidden for years in the bowels of the ship looking at pornography, before finally agreeing. He stepped into the rickshaw, and the driver, trying to move the vehicle now that it bore the Captain’s considerable weight, let out a high helpless squeak. Soon, though, the driver found his pace, which was far slower than the Captain or any biped could have walked himself, and it took all day for them to make their way up the many switchbacks on the densely populated hills
ide. Along the way they got a comprehensive cultural immersion into the nation, seeing first a thousand or so peasants plowing a landfill with their fingers, looking for food remnants or tinfoil, then a prison for children, then a very intriguing operation where the bodies of journalists were ground into a kind of paste fed to cattle. Finally, just before they reached the Man So Soft’s impressive estate, there was a delightful petting zoo full of adorable goats and llamas being fed, the rickshaw driver explained, the entrails of the Man So Soft’s ex-wife and former treasury secretary.
* * *
—
When they arrived at the Palace of the Man So Soft, which bore those words in neon above its brutalist facade, the Captain argued with the rickshaw driver over the fare, and finally paid the driver half of what the man asked for. He rang the bell and a servant welcomed him inside and promptly brought him to a grand dining hall, bright with chandelier light and smelling of wine and meat and the sweat of perhaps forty revelers dining. Among them were his friends Bloodbeard and the Pale One, both of whom were seated near the Man So Soft. Next to the Man So Soft was a gorgeous woman, blond and curvy, drinking champagne out of an extraordinarily tall glass and looking very intrigued by her host, laughing and touching his forearm most flirtatiously, and once or twice feeding him from a long and dainty fork. The Captain thought this woman captivating and alluring, and he, too, wanted to be fed by her from a long and dainty fork, and only wanted these things more when he realized that this was his daughter.
“Hello!” he said and waved to her, but she did not see him. The Captain wanted to notify her, and the Man So Soft, and his friends the Pale One and Bloodbeard, that he had arrived, but he was quickly ushered to a very small table, in the corner of the room, where a number of children, or very diminutive and youthful-looking adults, sat eating pizza and chicken nuggets and drinking Sprite.
