Inside the Captain’s quarters, the dark wood walls are tight and wet-warm
with candleflame, and you feel an uneasy familiarity. If somehow you’ve been here before, it was only a dream. A glow of floating candles rocks in a bowl on the Captain’s desk. The air curls with the sour odor of chamber pot. On the wall behind the Captain’s desk hangs a circus flier: The Madman and the Mirror!
The stifling cabin’s walls seethe with a menagerie of nautical souvenirs. Bones of an enormous fluke nailed cross-like beneath the porthole. An armament 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, it’s little deadhead watches you, half-blind, swaying with the waves and the candleflames.
The Captain sits at desk, hands in lap. Now the picture of calm. And, too, his outfit seems different; his plumed hat rests on a post behind his chair, and so unfettered, the Captain’s hair is neatly arranged, short-cropped, bangs brushed forward, gleaming with fixative. He has removed his jacket, 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.
You do know the punishing ritual, tying the sailor’s feet to one end of the longest rope, the other end to the keel. Then overboard, to be dragged through ocean come what may … until nothing else comes … except, oddly, a vague memory surfaces, someone once pressing you into water, forcing your head under until you saw red. Who was it? When, where?
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