Inside the Captain’s quarters, the dark wood walls are tight and wet-warm
with candleflame, and you feel an uneasy familiarity, like you’ve been here before, have lived through the scene before you. Perhaps a dream. A glow of floating candles rocks in a bowl on the Captain’s desk. The curling odor of a hidden chamber pot. On the wall behind the Captain’s desk hangs a circus flier: The Madman and the Mirror! Beneath the title, a craze-eyed man peers into a hand mirror, and the act’s tagline is Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
The stifling cabin seethes with a menagerie of nautical souvenirs. Bones of an enormous fluke nailed cross-like beneath a porthole. A veritable armament displayed on a section of pegboard, daggers of all shapes, lengths, and sharpnesses. Identical cutlasses crown the daggers, ruby- and emerald-handled. Shrunken heads the size of chicken eggs dangle from strings, fat lips stitched taut, eyeholes gaping. The nearest has an eyepatch. The little deadhead watches you, half-blind, half-seeing, swaying with the waves and the candles. As you stand here, fabric scratches against your neck and you give a quick glance behind you; there, hanging on the cabin door is an outlandish red costume, the type a dandified pirate might wear when going out for a night of genteel frivolity.
The Captain sits at desk, hands in lap. His previous manic energies are gone; he is the picture of calm. And, too, his outfit seems different; his plumed hat rests on a post behind his chair. The black top-feather grazes one of the dangling heads. Unfettered, the Captain’s hair is neatly arranged, short-cropped, bangs brushed forward, gleaming with fixative. He has removed his jacket as well, and his shirt is a light green pastel, collared, a tiny animal shape stitched onto the breast. Pack of cigarettes on the desk. He grabs it, shakes one out, lights it, and nods to a chair opposite, bolted into the floor.
“Comrade,” he says. “I am of two minds. One: you are lying. If that is so, I must kill you. And not only kill you, kill you in the old way. You know.”
His voice is solemn. He is right—you do know. The punishing ritual, the snug tying of a rogue sailor’s feet to one end of the longest rope on the ship, the other rope end to the keel. And then overboard, to be dragged through the ocean, come what may. Drowning, certainly. Sharks, giant squid—possibly. Whichever monsters of the deep might want to play with a man dangling, toy-like, beneath the seas. As you recall this ritual, a memory—someone once pressing you into water, forcing your head under until you saw red, saw black. A childhood memory, a blurred one. Who was it? Where? Even now as the Captain is speaking, you sense that this memory a key of a sort, a way to unlock the doors of your mind and your past, even of this quest:
home 