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 whose 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.