“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.”
I file the daily logs and keep the desk materials neat and orderly. I swab the deck and stack the clean company buckets. I find a corner of clutter that hasn’t been dealt with properly, and I deal with it. I study The Pirate Book of Burdens, The Pirate Book of Crimes, and The Young Pirate’s Book of Crafts. The job blooms before me at its own pace: These things can’t be rushed.
They pay me decently on this boat, just as Farren promised, though I suppose I can’t judge the fairness of my salary, having no experience with boats. Then again, I do recall a skinny canoe from childhood, settling on the side of a grassy lake.
One particular paycheck comes in the form of three red stones, clear at their centers, taped inside a windowed envelope.
The man who handles the payroll has long, twisty hair and a dimple in his chin. He wanders the ship at night, repeating conversations from earlier in the day. He reminds me of my caffeinated boyfriend, the one I date for suspense. Sometimes he perches on a post, nose to the sky, flapping his arms ever so slightly.
“He’s filling in for our parrot, Maurice,” the executive assistant explains.
I see this parrot man every evening from afar, after I finish organizing the daily logs. I’m excited to meet another temporary.
When our paths finally cross, he stops me with his hand, or wing. He puts his other hand-wing on the small of my back and walks me to a quiet corner. He breaks character, the entirety of his face softening and hardening in unexpected ways. I think I notice a rapid growth of stubble where there is none. He’s brand new. He tells me that soon I will walk the plank.
“They’ll throw you overboard, just wait,” he says calmly. He’s not like my caffeinated boyfriend at all. His hand, still pressed against my back, doesn’t shake. His hand, as steady as a wall.
“Sorry?”
“Just wait. You’ll walk the plank.”
“I don’t understand,” I say.
“I’m just saying,” he says, then he walks away, as if saying something out loud is ever a minor thing. He rearranges his body to once again replicate Maurice the parrot.
I don’t pay much attention to him. No one does. Every office has a long-haired man who doesn’t trim his sideburns, who tells his coworkers things they don’t want to hear, who does a passable impression of a bird. If he gets under my skin, I can report him to the first mate of human resources. Or I can go to my desk, the miniature porthole where I watch the waves and feel at ease. The view isn’t life changing, but it’s nice. I’ve seldom had a window at my workspace, and certainly none with an ocean lookout.
Most everyone else is friendly in an affirmative, nodding sort of way. There’s a woman in a patchwork skirt who makes conversation with me every morning, waiting in line for grub.
She says, “Good morning, Darla!”
I say, “Good morning to you!”
She looks supremely disappointed shoveling hash browns onto her plate, knowing I’m not Darla, that I have no desire to be Darla, that I’m not even in character as Darla, that I’m only humoring her. It takes an aggressive empathy to accurately replace a person. A person is a tangle of nerves and veins and relationships, and one must untangle the tangle like repairing a knotted necklace and wrap oneself at the center of the mess.
I concentrate over my scrambled eggs. I try to feel Darla’s absence as it relates to every other person, using an ancient meditation technique that temporaries sometimes find helpful. It’s not a standard brand of meditation. In fact, the average employee might call it “staring.” The woman in the patchwork skirt sits alone but stares back at me with quiet ferocity. I sense Darla is someone both loved and feared, and I try to adjust my temperament to properly fill her boots. I slap a lot of backs and laugh a lot of laughs, and other times I walk the deck with stern and hollow eyes. A little of this, a little of that.
“Not bad,” the captain says, encountering me on one of my jaunts. “Not bad at all.”
“Thanks,” I say, but then I wonder, Would Darla give thanks?
Under a sunset sky and over a dinner of fish chowder, my cowork-ers explain what Darla would never do.
“Never would Darla do to others as they would do to her,” says the pirate captain.
“She would do them one better!” says his executive assistant, who’s always stealing punch lines for himself. The captain rolls his eyes.
“Never would Darla steal a lady’s pudding,” says the woman in the patchwork skirt, “especially if the pudding was clearly labeled with the name Pearl.”
“Never would Darla brew herself some coffee,” says the executive assistant, “then retrieve the coffee and leave the old grounds sitting there for no purpose other than to prevent someone else from easily brewing a fresh pot of coffee. Never would Darla not brew a fresh pot after she had enjoyed her own coffee, and this is the most important bit, write this down: Never would she claim credit for the new, fresh coffee she brewed, for a fresh pot of coffee without credit is like a love note in your locker—it’s just magic, and if you take credit, you might as well not have made any coffee in the first place, at all, not ever, never! It’s like, What, you want a medal for making coffee? Know what I mean?”
“Would Darla ever drink some ale?” I ask.
“Darla would,” says the woman in the patchwork skirt, whose name is Pearl, and she passes me the canteen with a firm thrust of approval. I’m getting the hang of this, I think.
“Never would she ask for overtime,” says the pirate captain.
“Hear, hear!”
“Not Darla!”
“And never would she ask for severance,” adds the pirate captain.
“For she’s the one who does the severing!” exclaims the executive assistant, laughing and laughing. At this point the captain lifts the executive assistant in the air by his collar and tosses him overboard. We sit for a moment in silence.
“Darla,” says the pirate captain’s wife, using her spoon as a baton, “would never not dance,” and she conducts us across the deck, where we dance until dawn. The moon hangs high, and the boat careens from side to side against a blue horizon. We sway together and apart. We do the customary moves, the shuffles and kicks and awkward thrusts. The parrot man plays guitar, and Pearl plays drums.
“Conga!” the captain cries, and conga we must.
We situate ourselves to sleep under the fading stars, and I think of Farren’s glittered fingers twinkling in the early morning sky. The wind blows over our bodies like a cool cotton sheet.
“Never would Darla not do something asked of her,” whispers the first mate of human resources. His head is perpendicular to my body.
“Compliance is a great skill!” I reply.
“Never,” he says, his hand flat on my thigh, “would she say no. Because then she wouldn’t be Darla.” He uses all his various human resources to roll on top of me. “Darla does this all the time.”
“Really?” I ask.
“Sure,” he says, pressing down. “Sort of.”
So it is understood now that the crew requires something different from me than they require of Darla. It isn’t unheard of to provide assistance for needs not normally associated with a given position. I behave in accordance with the first mate of human resources’ insisted understanding of Darla. He isn’t the first man to miscalculate what a woman would or wouldn’t do, and with his hands under my skirt under the sails under the sky, no one hears a thing, least of all Darla.
Late that night, or early that morning, I feel my necklace burn against my chest. I wander to the edge of the plank, where I find the Chairman of the Bo
ard sitting and eating his pistachios.
“So, is the pirate life the life for you?” he asks.
“Yo-ho, I don’t know.”
“Make an effort, kid! You’re barely trying.”
“I am trying. I’m putting my best self forward.”
“Oh yes? Which self is that?” he asks.
I think of my many available selves, coagulated and discrete, compromising themselves for one another.
“Where’s the ambition?” he cries. “Where’s the cutthroat spirit?”
“That’s not really my style,” I say, toeing the edge of the plank.
“Let me tell you something about style,” he says. “Style was the name of my first poodle. I once bought an island called Style, and pronounced it stee-lay, just because I could. I basically invented style.”
I look off to the horizon in the hope of seeing the Chairman’s island. When I look back, he’s gone.
Most everyone on deck is still asleep. The first mate of human resources is snuggled against himself in a satisfied pile of person. The executive assistant climbs the rope ladder back aboard the boat, his clothes sopping wet.
“Hi,” he says, embarrassed. Then he goes downstairs to change.
I brew him the best pot of coffee he’s ever had in his life, and I clean the filter, and then I brew another, and another, and we don’t exchange a single word about it.
On my lunch break, I use the main office below deck to call the boyfriends. Specifically, I call the funny insurance salesman. He always has a joke or two, a story to spin for his girl.
When he answers his phone, he’s at my apartment. He let himself in with a spare key to pick up an old sweater, and he ran into two of the other boyfriends. They’re all sitting on the sofa watching the big game. Would I mind if they continued to watch games on the sofa, and maybe also the Oscars and the People’s Choice Awards, and perhaps some other television events? They have so much in common, my boyfriends, so much to say to each other, it turns out.
“Of course I don’t mind,” I say. “I’m a good sport!”
“Did you say you’re good at sports?” my insurance salesman asks. It’s loud in my apartment. Someone has scored something, and someone has reacted.
“Yes, that’s right,” I say.
“She’s good at everything!” I hear in the background, and I recognize the voice of my life coach boyfriend. I haven’t seen him in a while, but he assures me that time multiplied by distance equals the square root of affection and long-term achievement. He has an infographic illustrating this very point, and it hangs on the wall above his bed.
It’s truly great to hear them shout hello at the receiver. The receiver catches my voice when I feel as if my voice might break. “Static,” I say. It’s great to hear me shout hello, too, the boyfriends agree.
“Since you’re already there,” I say, “would you mind giving my jade a drink?”
“Not at all!” I hear the running of my tap, the walking across my room, the nourishment of my plant.
“And bringing in the mail?” I ask.
“It’s the least we can do,” my tallest boyfriend says.
I’ve received a total of four catalogs, three takeout menus, and two once-in-a-lifetime urgent money-back zero-interest limited offers. I’ve also received a letter from the lady who lives with her shoes.
“A former employer,” I explain. “Tell me what it says?”
My life coach boyfriend clears his throat and recites the handwritten diatribe against me, my knees, my feet, my toes—the way the middle toe, in the name of all that is blasphemous, tucks under another toe, the way the pinky toe is like the crushed, stemless strawberry at the bottom of the basket that nobody wants to eat—and yes, yes, yes, does she really have to say it? She knows I stole her boots, her babies, and why, and how, and what did she do to deserve such insolence? And when can she expect the boots to be returned? And yes, she knows that old saying about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes as a way of better understanding and loving the various people in your life, but if I’ve treaded so much as a square of tile in her precious kicks, if I’ve stretched them even an inch with my wide-footed waddle, so help her god, or so help her whatever kind of god a shoe-stealing thief like me even deems a deity, for scuff’s sake, she’ll teach me a lesson, she’ll make me pay.
The television fills the phone with crunchy half noises.
“Are you going to be away for much longer?” asks my bright-eyed insurance salesman, he who specializes in my human worth.
“Probably not,” I say, “but business is hard to predict.” I like saying business this way. As in, my business, not yours.
“We’ll take good care of each other while you’re gone,” he says. “Don’t worry a bit.”
I cheer at this with a single, stretchy yay. But it also makes me feel as hollow as a cave, and the phone cuts out before I can offer anything resembling a real good-bye.
The exact nature of the vessel’s work is unclear, but I rarely have insight into my employers’ overarching projects. Pearl explains, sitting with me in the crow’s nest, that we’re looking for investors and will steal them if we have to. Soon we’ll go hunting for venture capital.
“The captain calls it adventure capital,” she says, her feet dangling over the deck below like two birds circling each other in a miniature chase. “Treasure,” she whispers.
“Is it dangerous?”
“Of course,” she says, “but in the wrong hands, so are staplers.”
Pearl is a skilled negotiator, each mediation a literal notch in her belt. She’s carried off the grandest thefts and convinced the victims they were winners. Let’s find a solution that suits us both, she says, while her mates pillage and rummage and plunder. Her trademark tactic. She brags that if she wanted, she could convince the captain to promote her to captain instead. She could convince the sky to thunder. She could convince a fish to fly.
“You mean like a flying fish?” I ask.
“No, like a gull. Like a goddamn gull.”
It bothers her that none of her colleagues wear an eye patch. “It would make my job so much easier,” she says, and she tries to talk me into donning a vintage variety sewn of brown leather, featuring a delicate embroidered skull.
“It would really add to our overall visual brand,” she says.
“I’m good, thanks.”
“But it would look so great with your hair!”
“Really, no thanks. I don’t need it.”
“If needing it is the problem, I could make it so you need the patch forever,” Pearl offers. Would she scoop out my eye for the sake of appearances? I guess people do much worse for the sake of appearances.
“What I meant was,” I say, “wouldn’t it better suit the first mate of human resources?”
“That guy?” she asks. But maybe she sees my face tighten, and she doesn’t press or push the subject. “OK,” she says. “I like a challenge,” and she puts the patch back in her pocket.
The man with the long, twisty hair comes to perform his parrot duties in the crow’s nest, and so we climb down and leave him to his feathered work. When I glance back in his direction, he’s watching me with his true face, the face that looks harder and softer at the same time.
On our day off, Pearl and I circle the deck in the ovoid patterns that fuel good conversation. “Good walk, good talk,” my gym rat boyfriend used to say, and even my mall rat boyfriend couldn’t deny the benefits of a long department store stroll.
Pearl walks on the periphery and I march next to her. We both like popcorn. We both like peeling sunburns. We’re both bad at first impressions. I open my wallet and let the long ribbon of boyfriends fall to the ground. Pearl examines their faces with respect and interest.
“Nice chin,” she says. Nice this, nice that.
Over brandy, Pearl patiently shows me how to tie a halyard knot, a bowline, a half hitch. My fingers are raw from the roughness of the rope.
“Here,” she says, ma
ssaging them with a cool cream. It feels good to hold hands, even if the holding isn’t the purpose, just a symptom of a separate action.
“Now untie,” she says, and there’s something so persuasive about her sweet, rich voice. I dig my fingers back into the knots and detangle.
“You’re a natural,” she says, indicating my attempt at a sheepshank. “Darla would be so impressed.”
“I’m not natural at anything,” I say, rubbing my hands. “I mean, you were born for this,” I say, and a shard of jealousy lodges somewhere in my side.
Pearl frowns. “How can you say what I was born for or against?” she asks.
She has a point. What do I know about anything? Pearl sits in her chair and runs her hands over her face, like putting on a mask, or taking one off. This is the way someone looks when history lodges in their throat, and I know I’m now meant to hear a story, specifically, hers.
“I nearly wasn’t born at all,” Pearl explains. “And by no means was I born for this, or for any particular vocation. I was born to replace other births that didn’t go as well. I was born as my parents’ final attempt. I was born very small and very early. That’s why for the rest of my life I’ve always tried to be right on time.”
“Punctuality is a great skill,” I say.
“True,” she agrees. “It’s good to know where you’re meant to be, and when. I know that if I follow this rule, from time to time I’ll find myself filling the empty space left by someone who came too late or arrived too soon.”
“You could call that an advantage,” I say.
“You could. There are advantages to filling in. Here I’m just filling in for a woman named Pearl who never came back. That was two years ago. Now I’m permanent Pearl.”
“Well, you’re the only Pearl I’ve ever known, so you’re just plain Pearl to me.”
“Thanks, that’s sure nice of you to say. But I’ll never plainly be Pearl. I’ll never be anyone until I feel the steadiness. All I can do is try to convince you that I’m successfully inhabiting the current target of my approximations.”
“I understand.”
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