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 hillside. 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.
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.