I’m filling in for someone named Darla on the nautical voyage of an unmarked vessel. “Ahoy!” I say. I’m met with some ahoys in kind. I’m also met with some harrumphs and howdys and plain old hellos. I understand. Like any new company, they’re still working out the kinks. Still oiling the gears of their mission statement, garrisoning their prospectus. The prow of the ship has no mermaid, and the flag that flies has no logo.

“Not yet, but soon!” the pirate captain says. “We’re considering proposals.”

My new mates carry weaponry in varying degrees: a dagger here, a pistol there, a cannon on occasion. This is a relief. The worst kinds of offices are the ones where no one can tell who’s in charge. My new crew was once a company of internet pirates, but they rebranded. Delete a few syllables and lo, you have a new profession.

“There are only a few kinds of jobs in the world, it turns out,” says the captain, who is the type to pontificate and listicle on subjects varied and profound. “Jobs on land,” he continues, “jobs at sea, jobs in the sky, jobs of the mind, and working remotely.”

“You mean like working from home?” I ask.

“No,” the pirate captain says. “Working remotely is what we call being dead. Pirate lingo.”

“Oh sure! Like Davy Jones’s locker?”

“No, no,” he says, exasperated. “That’s where we keep the office supplies.”

“Right. Sorry.”

“You’ll get the hang of it,” he says with a slap on my back. “The world allows for periods of adjustment.”

And how grand it is to see that world! Most of the world is water, and so to my mind, I’ve now encountered the meat of the matter. Yes, my flaneur boyfriend makes his annual pilgrimage to Paris. But has he traveled the shivery narrows at the gut of the Atlantic? Excluding the part where his plane flies over the Atlantic? There’s salt in my nose and salt between my toes, and I can’t wait to send a postcard from my new, beautiful, briny life. She’s really going places, is something my boyfriends are maybe saying about me.

The predicted and dreaded seasickness aggregates somewhere at the back of my tongue. I try to hide it so as not to be caught in a resume fib. I keep a bucket close. When my stomach swings left, I lean starboard. When my stomach swings right, I lean port. In the process, I learn about starboard and port! I try to compensate for the waves roiling in my belly. I hang my head over the side of the ship, and the first mate of human resources finds me swinging there.

“I’m the first mate of human resources,” he says. He flips me across his broad shoulders, walks me down into the hull, and carries me to his office. I haven’t been carried in such a very long time.

“Sit here,” he says, placing me on his sofa, “until you’re fit to function.”

The human resources cabin is mostly bare. A large poster on the wall features a cat with a peg leg paw. “There is no Purr in Pirate!” reads the caption.

“Are you OK?” the first mate asks.

I nod, but the nodding is too much like bobbing.

“Great. Let’s assess the situation. Did the food make you ill? Or was it something one of your superiors said?”

“No, neither,” I say.

“Do you have a particularly sensitive gag reflex?”

“I don’t think so.”

“OK. Are you pregnant?”

“What?”

“If a woman is sick at work, she is probably pregnant. Those are the rules!”

“I’m not.”

“Great, great. I’m just covering all the bases. Because your resume here says you can, quote, totally handle seasickness.”

A lump rises in the back of my throat. I swallow it down, but swallowing is like swaying. I lean back into the cushions, but it’s really more like falling. The perspiration on my upper lip desperately needs attention.

“My bucket?” I ask, and he nudges it closer to me. “Thanks.”

“Not your bucket,” he says with a laugh. “Company property.”

“Right,” I say.

“By which I mean to say, treat it as such.”

“Right.”

“By which I mean to say, you probably wouldn’t want to relieve yourself on company property. Right?”

“Right.”

“Now.” He sits down in a swiveling chair across from me. The rotations of the wheels are disastrous. “About your alleged seasickness.”

“Oh no, it’s not that,” I try to explain, my face glistening with sweat. “Not seasickness.”

“No?”

“No,” I gag, and my head goes into the bucket. With a single swoop, he pulls my hair back from my face, and he doesn’t stop there. He produces a band from a drawer filled with such accoutrements and braids the length of my tangled mane. He’s done this before, I can tell, the yanking and the coaxing, the application of product. He pulls the braid forward over one shoulder and pins it around the crown of my head in a sort of, well, crown.

“This is a fresh, hot look,” he says while I wipe my mouth.

I do feel fresh, and hot. Then he puts his index finger at the base of my skull and gives my newly exposed spine a long, silent stroke. At first I think he’s picking up stray wisps at the nape of my neck, pinning them out of view. But no, it’s a different ritual, one I don’t recognize.

“In human resources,” he says, “we provide resources to make sure you’re as human as possible. I’ll leave you with some pamphlets about company property and resume accuracy. Here,” he says, and he puts the pamphlets in my lap. Somehow the literature on my legs soothes my stomach.

“Thanks.”

“For the seasickness,” he says, “there is a cure. It’s easy. Just think about how much you want the job.”

“I want the job very much!” I manage to say, wiping my mouth.

“That’s great. Because you know what happens to land legs that don’t acclimate?” He points to the peg leg kitten.

I give him a thumbs-up, which is all he needs. He smiles.

“Remember that I helped you! Remember, I’m your trusty HR mate. Helping is what mates do,” the first mate of human resources says. He extinguishes the cabin light with two damp fingers, closes the door, and lets me get some sleep.

Come morning, I’ve been terrified into excellent health. A note on the door reads, “A clean bucket is an acceptable bucket, and an acceptable bucket is the only kind of bucket worth filling.”