by Dave Eggers
The Captain was hungry, and all these things looked delicious, so he ate his pizza and chicken nuggets while puzzling over exactly where he was, and who the many dozens of men and women were who surrounded the Man So Soft at the larger table. They were a formidable bunch. There were more than a few eye patches, many visible facial scars, one man who seemed to be eating the brains of a monkey with a tiny spoon, and a pair of fearsome men sharing a plate of human fingers. There were brigands and buccaneers, baby-slayers, thieves and malefactors—in short, a feast of go-getters who the Captain instinctively feared and admired. Periodically, the Captain thought he saw some of these impressive people at this larger, longer table look his way and laugh uproariously, but he could not be sure.
He tried again to get his daughter’s attention, but either she did not see him or she was too enamored with the Man So Soft, who was touching her hair a great deal, much in the way an infant would touch a bearskin rug. Sometime in the middle of the meal, a show began, starting with terrified-looking acrobats, followed by a hundred or so terrified-looking singers in bright-colored traditional dresses, and ending with a small puppet or doll-man, more terrified-looking than all the others, who was made to dance atop the table while the guests threw fruit, animal bones, forks and knives at him. Given the timeless appeal of audience participation, this part of the show was far and away the most popular and many encores were demanded and performed. The Captain had a sense that this doll was his daughter’s doll, but he could not be sure, for he had never paid close attention to her hobbies and companions, unless those companions were young women with luxurious hair who would let him watch them eat salad.
Speaking of salad, the Captain was gratified that the Man So Soft did not try to offer him, or any of the small children at his small table, salad. Instead, after the Captain finished his chicken nuggets and pizza and Sprite, he was given a wonderful dessert of cake pops and whipped cream, which kept him intensely occupied for a long while—so long, in fact, that when he looked up, he saw that the longer, larger table was empty and he was alone. All that was left of the great table’s great feast was a human corpse, which had been hollowed out and which had been used to hold a vast sea of guacamole. Fragments of tortilla chips, a favorite of the Man So Soft, emerged from it like sails in a viscous green sea. This was like so many things the Captain had seen that day, and so many things he’d learned from the Pale One and Bloodbeard—brilliant ways of punishing, disposing of and reusing lesser humans that, while admirable and innovative, left the Captain feeling, in his most private of hearts, a bit outclassed by the Man So Soft and by his ribald dinner guests, even by the Pale One and Bloodbeard. The Captain could passively bear the suffering of anyone, could watch numbly the deaths of dozens or hundreds, but actively conjuring such creative human destruction? He was out of his league. The human-as-hollow-chip-dip-vessel? It was on another plane entirely.
Dispirited and soul-shaken, and feeling a bit bloaty from the cake pops, the Captain wandered the great halls of the Man So Soft’s palace, sometimes hearing what he thought was the echoing laughter of Bloodbeard or the Pale One, once even hearing what he was sure was his daughter’s distinct guffaw, but the more he walked, the more alone and less oriented he became, until he found himself in a basement storage room of some kind. He stood high on the steps, and watched what seemed to be many dozens of men and women in uniform arriving in the storage room with various things that looked quite a lot like the things he’d seen on the Glory. The silverware looked familiar, as did the crystal decanters and ovens and pots and pans and tables and televisions and barrels of rum and wine and whiskey. Soon these workers were carrying in what seemed to be complex machinery, and gauges, and piping, and parts of engines, and then whole engines, and finally lifeboats, all of which bore the distinctive logo of the Glory.
One of the workers saw the Captain standing there, mouth agape, watching their work, and this worker shooed him away, and the Captain apologized and quickly departed. He continued to wander the mansion, seeing no one he knew and feeling increasingly forsaken and longing for the comfort of the voice in the vent or the people cheering him while wearing chicken costumes. He was about to leave the mansion and find his way back to the Glory when three men in uniform knocked him unconscious with a series of blows to the head and neck, dragged him back to the ship and up the gangplank, threw him hastily inside, closed the hatch, and cut the Glory loose.
XVIII
THE PASSENGERS OF the Glory awoke to the unmistakable feeling of drift. They looked out their cabin windows and saw that there was no land in sight, nothing in any direction. The familiar vibration of the ship’s engines had ceased, too, leaving the ship eerily silent.
Though all of the Glory’s passengers feared the smell of Certain People decaying in cages, and the Most Foul feared Certain People who might still be at large, all of the passengers of the Glory, one by one, left their cabins to find out what was happening and where they’d gone.
The ship had been stripped bare of anything of value. Everything that was not nailed down had been taken, and everything that had been nailed down had been freed of those nails and taken, too. The furniture was gone, the electronics were gone, the food and drink were gone, the putt-putt golf course was gone, and somehow the thieves had managed to steal the swimming pool and the waterslide, too. The ship was as bare as a cupboard.
“Anchor’s gone,” a passenger said.
“Everything on the bridge is gone, too,” said another passenger, this one still dressed as a chicken.
The passengers fanned out and found that all the ship’s navigation equipment, that which the Captain hadn’t removed himself, had been stolen. There was no radar, no computers, no charts, no maps. A woman in scuba gear and flippers appeared on the deck.
“They swiped the rudder, too,” she said.
The passengers looked everywhere, but they could not find the Captain. All the electrical fixtures and wires had been removed by the minions of the Man So Soft, so the lower levels and inner portions of the ship were utterly without light. The passengers fashioned torches from broomsticks and towels and they went deep into the Glory, looking for the Captain. Their crackling amber flames illuminated every darkened hallway, and everywhere they found the ship gutted, stripped, cleaned out.
“I bet the engines are gone,” one passenger said.
The engines had indeed been removed, piece by piece, leaving, in the engine room, only the skeletal remains of the crew murdered, weeks ago—it seemed like years—by the Pale One’s men. Then a whimpering was heard. It was coming from somewhere in the bowels of the ship, and the sound carried through the empty iron passageways and air ducts. The searchers meandered through these darkest and dankest parts of the Glory, following this most frightened and frail whining, until they came upon its source.
There was a man hiding in a vent. He was crouched down, clutching his knees, wearing a blue suit and red tie and brown loafers. He had a vast plain of sickly forehead and his black turf of hair was rapidly retreating. He looked like the kind of man who might have gone to Santa Monica High School, who might have been excluded once or twice in that large and diverse school, and who, trying one last time to win their approval, might have run for class president, and might have lost badly, and who might, thereafter, have vowed to take revenge on all those who denied him office—the liberal, the humorous, the nuanced and nonwhite—and who would assiduously plot and plan and conspire, until, finally, he would achieve his revenge by attaching himself to a cretinous sociopath who, like him, was afraid of everything and had never been able to make friends, and would not mind being the executor of this bald, friendless Santa Monican’s final redress.
But the searchers were not sure of any of this. These were only private speculations, for they had never seen a man like this, who hid in the nether regions of the ship, whose shape was bent and rigid with loathing, whose skin had never seen light and w
hose blue-ringed eyes were languorous and dull. The searchers asked who he was, what he was doing there, how long had he been hiding in this vent, but he offered no answer. His mouth moved but no words emerged. He pointed up his vent, as if to say, “Where did he go?” The searchers had no idea what he was talking about, and because he seemed too fragile to move, they left him there, planning to later send food and medical care his way.
Something about the man in the vent brought to the searchers’ minds the Captain, and made them wonder where the Captain was, so they continued through the ship, checking every last door and chamber and rounded corner. Among the passengers searching the ship were more than a few supporters of the Captain, and they walked through the black corridors feeling a new sense of dread. There was no sign of the Captain. The wipe-away board had been free of his scrawlings for days.
One of the few remaining officers, who knew the ship and had served under previous captains, had a hunch and looked near the stern of the ship, and confirmed what she and many others suspected. The last remaining lifeboat, a ceremonial sort of craft, with gold accents and built with every luxury, was gone. This last lifeboat had been hidden and never before used, and would have been difficult for the thieves to know about or remove. But it was easy for the Captain to find and use, so he found it and used it.
* * *
—
The Most Foul were surprised and crestfallen for many minutes, finding it hard to believe that a man who had baldly stated, every day of his life, that no one was more important than himself, had in the end put himself above the rest of the passengers. He had led them to great harm and great shame, had ransacked half the ship and had allowed the ransacking of the rest, and had then escaped in a golden lifeboat without a goodbye or thank you or sorry. For the Most Foul, it did not add up.
As for the Kindly Mutineers, they were deeply relieved that the Captain had left on his own, thus freeing them from the conundrum of having to do anything personally to save the Glory, themselves, their children, Certain People, and the integrity and honor of all aboard.
“Now what?” said Ava, the orphaned girl who had first warned about electing the Captain to his captaincy, and who had in the intervening months turned thirteen and was so shaken and world-weary that she could not imagine that the adults around her, who had risked so much and who had allowed the suffering of so many, would have any idea what to do now. She did not wait for them to answer.
“First, dignity,” she said.
With Ava leading the passengers, they freed those humans still rotting in cages. Some were still alive and might be saved, so they were brought to the infirmary and cared for. Those who had passed away, within sight of the thousands of passengers who did nothing for them, were given a proper burial at sea, befitting a fellow human. When all the people who had suffered under the Captain were cared for and restored to their dignity—as much as was possible after such horror—the passengers looked around and again had no clue what to do.
“Now let’s clean,” said the grandfather from the beginning of the story. He picked up a mop—the thieves had not been interested in mops—and began mopping. Others swabbed and scrubbed and swept, restoring what they could. Finally, after many days of ablution, the ship looked somewhat like the bright and cheerful place it had been before the ascendance of the Captain and his coterie.
“But we’re still adrift,” said Ava, who, despite the cleaning and the restoration, still had no faith whatsoever in the adults around her. The passengers searched the bridge and found no navigational equipment, new or old, nothing to salvage and nothing to tell them north from south, east from west. Even the antique sextants and quadrants were gone. And of course they all remembered the many nights when the manuals that explained how the ship was to be steered were ceremoniously thrown from the ship, churned in its mad white wake. And so without engines or rudders, and without the books that told the Glory how to be the Glory, the ship continued to drift, and the passengers were too tired and too paralyzed to do anything about it. They had forgotten all they knew about the Glory’s life before.
“Look!” said Ava one day. She pointed to a series of tiny vessels approaching the ship. They were the kind of pitiful rafts and junks and dinghies that the Captain and his Snowmen had blown from the water, had cannoned and sunk. But though the Glory’s passengers had forgotten just about everything of their history, a precious few of them remembered that at one point they had had compassion for people like this, those approaching by boat with nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.
And so they lowered ropes and ladders and made ready to welcome those who had drifted to them, while they, too, were drifting. But when the vessels got closer, and the people aboard became clearer, the ship’s passengers saw that they were not coming empty-handed. They had no food, and they had little water, but in each of these tiny vessels, there were the distinctive orange-covered books that had once lined the bridge of the Glory.
“We found these in the sea,” said the first of the boat people who climbed aboard the Glory. This woman was ragged and underfed and tired, but her smile was wide and she was very happy to be aboard the large and sturdy ship, about which she’d heard so much for so long.
She explained that her boat had encountered a few of the orange-clad books hundreds of miles away, and that the steady string of them had led her boat, and others, like breadcrumbs, to the Glory. She and the others in her boat knew these books, were familiar with the sober and soaring words within, and knew them to be the words of a noble people who believed in these words, these precepts, more than they believed in the despots and charlatans and strongmen who bent so many other countries to their will and whim.
“We figured you’d want these back,” the woman said, and just then a young man arrived—her son—and he had another of the books of the Glory. A girl, only seven, followed, and she too carried one of the manuals. She was lifted aboard, and dozens more came aboard from this first woeful vessel and from many more that followed, each of them carrying these books of laws and ideals, and in their presence and in their gifts, the storm-tossed humans looking for a ship in which to survive the seas provided some hope that the Glory might know again the meaning of its name.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author is indebted to Jenny Jackson, Andy Ward, John Gall, Sonny Mehta, Maris Dyer, Rita Madrigal, Nathaniel Russell, John Warner, Em-J Staples, Kitania Folk, John McMurtrie, Peter Ferry, Amanda Uhle, Mark Liebovich, SV, TS, EI and VV.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dave Eggers is the author of twelve books, including The Parade; The Monk of Mokha; The Circle; Heroes of the Frontier; A Hologram for the King, a finalist for the National Book Award; and What Is the What, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of France’s Prix Médicis Étranger and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His nonfiction and journalism have appeared in The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Best American Travel Writing, and The Best American Essays. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing company, and cofounder of Voice of Witness, a book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. He is the cofounder of 826 National, a network of youth writing and tutoring centers with locations around the country, and of ScholarMatch, which connects donors with students to make college accessible. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his work has been translated into forty-two languages. He lives in Northern California with his family.
www.daveeggers.net
www.826national.org
www.scholarmatch.org
www.voiceofwitness.org
www.valentinoachakdeng.org
www.mcsweeneys.net
www.youthwriting.org
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