THAT MORNING, HIGH ABOVE, the Captain stood on the bridge, looking around him. As he scanned the horizon, he noticed something. The ship did not seem to be moving. He turned to his daughter. “Why are we not moving?” he asked her.
“There are no people currently navigating the ship,” she said. “Remember when we fired everyone?”
The Captain looked at her and knew she was right. She was always right. She was so smart, he thought. She was also so gorgeous, and curvaceous, and so demure that when he thought of her, his mind went caterwauling into unsavory places.
“We do have this,” she said, and retrieved a very thick book, its cover bright orange, that read Ship’s Manual on its spine. His daughter began paging through it, oohing and even ahhing, noting the level of detail and instruction contained within and making sounds of gratitude and relief.
“Can I see that?” he said, and snatched the book from his daughter’s beautiful hands. He left the bridge and walked to the railing and threw the book overboard. Its pages briefly fanned, like a bird in spastic flight, before its covers closed again and the book hit the sea with a stentorian slap. The Captain watched the manual sink quickly in the violet sea.
But it did not, in fact, sink. It continued to float on the water. “Why isn’t that thing sinking?” the Captain asked.
“I don’t know, Dad,” his daughter said. “It’s probably designed to float.”
The Captain watched as the book got smaller as the tide took it away from the Glory, and though he would have preferred it to sink without a trace, at least it was gone, and the tightening in his chest that he’d felt in its presence was gone, too. Books like that, he felt, were for people without natural talent and without innate leadership ability, and worse, they implied that there had been captains before the Captain and that there would be captains after, and both notions made the Captain feel something approaching insignificance, and this was a kind of affront against the Captain that he could not abide. He felt sure he needed a cheeseburger made by teenagers and wrapped in paper.
After eating his cheeseburger made by teenagers and wrapped in paper, the Captain and his daughter and her doll then went about filling the roles of all the crew members they had fired. But because the Captain was suspicious of anyone who had done a job before, he chose carefully, to ensure that no one he hired to handle any part of the ship had ever seen that part of the ship before.
In the role of chief engineer, he put a man he’d met by the pool one day and who said he liked the captain’s feather. In the role of first officer, he placed one of his daughter’s friends, who had long legs and gorgeous hair and had many times allowed the Captain to stare at her while she ate salad. In the role of chief electrician, he put Eddie the Whack. In the place of chief navigator, he put Pete the Pipe. In fact, he found spots for all of his old friends. Fingers handled the money, Sweetie handled the food, Patsy the Murderer took over the infirmary, and Paul the Manafort oversaw the ship’s office of ethics and accountability. The ship’s pet shelter was replaced by an abattoir. The ship’s teachers were replaced by cops. The ship’s theater group was replaced by a television. The ship’s librarian was replaced by a television. The ship’s historian was replaced by a television. The ship’s symphony was replaced by a television playing patriotic songs, and to head up the agency that supported small businesses, the Captain appointed the wife of the guy who ran the World Wrestling Federation.
The one group of people he was not allowed to replace—it was an unbreakable rule of the ship, and thus he considered it a disgrace—were those in the engine room. Because the voice in the vent had instructed him not to talk to the engine-room people (because they were his enemies) the Captain told his daughter to tell Fingers to call the engine room and have them start the engines. It worked. They started the engines, and the boat groaned awake.
“Now what?” he asked his daughter.
Together they looked at the controls. The Captain hoped he might find a button that said FORWARD or STRAIGHT, but there was no such button.
“I think I’ve got it,” his daughter said. The Captain turned to find her reading a book; immediately his stomach tightened. “I think you can just hold the wheel straight,” she said, “and it will go straight.”
The Captain put his hands on the wheel and found that without moving it at all, the ship slowly and majestically left port and sailed into the open sea. It was clear to him, at that moment, that he was the greatest captain that had ever captained.