16. Swabby
When the sea is calm, and I don’t have to run from side to side, I sometimes hang out on deck with Carlyle. Carlyle is the ship’s swabby—a guy with bright red hair in a short peach fuzz, and a smile friendlier than anyone else’s on the ship. He’s not a kid, he’s older, like the ship’s officers, but he’s not really one of them. He seems to make his own hours and his own rules, with little interference from the captain, and is the only one on the ship who makes any sense.
“I’m a swabby by choice,” he told me once. “I do it because it’s needed. And because you’re all such slobs.”
Today I catch sight of rats scurrying away from the water of his mop, disappearing into dark corners of the deck.
“Blasted things,” Carlyle says, dipping his mop into a bucket of cloudy water and washing the deck. “We’ll never get rid of them.”
“There are always rats on old ships,” I tell him.
He raises an eyebrow. “Rats? Is that what you think they are?” Although he doesn’t offer me an alternate theory. The truth is, they scuttle so quickly, and hide so deep in shadows, I can’t be sure what they are. It makes me nervous, so I change the subject.
“Tell me something about the captain I don’t know.”
“He’s your captain. Anything worth knowing you already must know.”
But even the way he says it, I can tell he is an insider in a way that few others are. I figure if I’m going to get any answers, though, I need to be specific with my questions.
“Tell me how he lost his eye.”
Carlyle sighs, looks around to make sure we’re unobserved, and begins to whisper.
“It is my understanding that the parrot lost his eye before the captain. The way I’ve heard it told, the parrot sold his eye to a witch to make a magic potion that would turn him into an eagle. But the witch double-crossed him, drank it herself, and flew away. The parrot, who didn’t want to be the only one with an eye patch, clawed out the captain’s eye as well.”
“That’s not true,” I say with a grin.
Carlyle keeps his expression solemn as he splashes soapy water on the deck. “It’s as true as it needs to be.” The tar between the planks seems to retreat from his deluge.
17. I’d Pay to See That
The navigator says a view from the crow’s nest will bring me “comfort, clarity, charity, chastity.”
If it’s a multiple choice test, I choose both “A” and “B,” although considering the crew, I may just blacken in choice “D” with my number two pencil.
The crow’s nest is a small circular tub, high up on the mainmast. It’s only large enough to hold one, maybe two crewmen on lookout. I conclude it would be a good place to be alone with my thoughts, but I should already know that my thoughts are never alone.
It’s early evening as I climb the frayed ratlines that drape the ship like shrouds. The last hint of dusk slowly vanishes from the horizon, and in the sun’s absence, the strange stars are coaxed to shine.
The rope lattice of the ratlines narrows as I near the crow’s nest, making the climb feel increasingly treacherous. Finally I pull myself over into the small wooden tub that hugs the mast—only to find it’s not small at all. Like the crew’s quarterdeck, it may look small from the outside, but once inside, the circular space appears to be a hundred feet in diameter. There are members of the crew reclining in velvet chairs, sipping neon-bright martinis with faraway eyes, and listening to a live band that plays smooth jazz.
“Party of one? Right this way,” says a hostess, and she leads me to my own velvet chair, which looks out at moonlight shimmering on water.
“Are you a jumper?” asks a pale man sitting in the next chair, drinking something blue and possibly radioactive. “Or are you just here to watch?”
“I’m here to clear my head.”
“Have one of these,” he says, pointing to his radioactive drink. “Until you find your own cocktail you can share mine. Everyone here must find their cocktail or you’ll be whipped soundly and sent off to bed. That’s how all nursery rhymes end here. Even the ones that don’t rhyme.”
I look around at the dozen or so people enjoying themselves in vaguely psychedelic stupors. “I don’t understand how this can all fit in the crow’s nest.”
“Elasticity is a fundamental principle of perception,” my companion says. “But as rubber bands break when left too long in the sun, I suspect that the crow’s nest will, in time, realize we’ve abused its fine elastic nature and it will break, too, shrinking back down to its appropriate size. At that time, anyone caught inside will be crushed; their blood, bones, and various insides squeezed through the knotholes of the wood like so much Play-Doh.” Then he raises his glass. “I’d pay to see that!”
A few yards away, a crewman in a blue jumpsuit climbs to the lip of the crow’s nest, spreads his arms wide, and leaps toward certain death. I stand, and look over the edge, but he’s vanished. All those gathered applaud politely, and the band begins to play “Orange-Colored Sky,” although the twilight sky is bruise-purple.
“Why is everyone just sitting here?” I shout. “Didn’t you all see what just happened?”
My drinking companion shrugs. “Jumpers do what jumpers do. It’s our job to applaud their pluck and celebrate their lives.” He casually glances over the side. “It’s so far down you never see them splat, though.” Then he gulps the rest of his drink. “I’d pay to see that!”
18. Mystery Ashtray
There is no one at school who wishes me harm.
I tell myself this each morning after checking the news for Chinese earthquakes. I tell myself as I hurry between classes. I tell myself on the occasions that I pass the kid who wants to kill me, and yet doesn’t seem to know I exist.
“You’re overreacting,” my father had said. Which might be true—but that implies there was something to actually react to. In better moments I want to beat the crap out of myself for being so stupid as to think the kid had it in for me. So what does it say about me if beating the crap out of myself is one of my better moments?
“You need to be more centered,” my mother would say. She’s all into meditation and raw vegan food, I suppose as a way to cope with how much she hates cleaning meat out of people’s teeth for a living.
Centering, however, is easier said than done. This I learned from a ceramics class I once took. The teacher made throwing a pot look easy, but the thing is, it takes lots of precision and skill. You slam the ball of clay down in the absolute center of the pottery wheel, and with steady hands you push your thumb into the middle of it, spreading it wider a fraction of an inch at a time. But every single time I tried to do it, I only got so far before my pot warped out of balance, and every attempt to fix it just made it worse, until the lip shredded, the sides collapsed, and I was left with what the teacher called “a mystery ashtray,” which got hurled back into the clay bucket.
So what happens when your universe begins to get off balance, and you don’t have any experience with bringing it back to center? All you can do is fight a losing battle, waiting for those walls to collapse, and your life to become one huge mystery ashtray.
19. Deconstructing Xargon
My friends Max and Shelby and I get together after school some Fridays. We believe we’re designing a computer RPG game, but we’ve been doing it for two years and it never seems any closer to completion. Mainly because as each of us gets better and wiser in our particular areas of expertise, we have to toss everything and start over, deeming the old material to be childish and unprofessional.
Max is the driving force. He’s the one who will stay at my house long past the time my parents have patience for him because, even though he’s the computer whiz of our trio, his own computer is a piece of garbage that crashes if you whisper the word graphics within a three-foot radius.
Shelby is our concept queen. “I think I’ve figured out the story problems,” she says this particular afternoon. Like she says just about every time we�
�re working on this. “I think I need to limit the characters’ bio-integrated weaponry. Otherwise every battle is a bloodbath, and that’s boring.”
“Who says bloodbaths are boring?” Max asks. “I like bloodbaths.”
Shelby looks to me for support, but she’s looking in the wrong place.
“Actually, I like them, too,” I tell her. “I think it’s a guy thing.”
She glares at me and throws me a few pages of new character descriptions.
“Just draw up the characters and give them enough armor so not every blow is a mortal one. Especially Xargon. I’ve got big plans for him.”
I flip open my sketch pad. “Didn’t we promise to stop doing this if we ever started to sound like nerds? I think today’s conversation is the official marker of that moment.”
“Oh please! That moment came last year,” Shelby points out. “If you’re so immature that you’re afraid of being labeled by morons, then check out and we’ll find another artist.”
I’ve always liked the way Shelby tells a person exactly what she thinks. Not that there was or would ever be anything romantic between us. I think that ship sank in dry dock for both of us. We like each other too much to become awkwardly involved. Besides, our three-way friendship allows us benefits. Like the benefit of finding out from Shelby stuff about the girls Max and I like, and being able to tell Shelby whatever she needs to know about any guy she likes. It all works too well to ever mess with.
“Listen,” Shelby says, “we don’t live this stuff, it’s just a hobby. We indulge a few days a month. I, for one, do not feel socially stifled by this.”
“Yeah,” says Max. “That’s because you’ve got plenty of other things to stifle you.”
She hits him hard enough to send the wireless mouse flying from his hand across the room.
“Hey,” I yell. “If that breaks, my parents will make me pay for it. They’re big on personal responsibility.”
Shelby looks at me coolly, almost glaring. “I don’t see you drawing.”
“Maybe I’m waiting for inspiration to occur.” But inspired or not, I take a deep breath, and read her character descriptions. Then look at the blank page of my sketch pad.
It was a problem with empty space that led me to art. I see an empty box, and I have to fill it. I see a blank page, and I can’t leave it like that. Blank pages scream at me to be filled with crap from my brain.
It started with doodles. Then the doodles grew into sketches, the sketches grew into pieces, and the pieces are now “works.” Or “oeuvres,” if you’re really pretentious, like some of the kids in my art class who wear berets, like somehow their brains are so creative, they need a covering more unique than anyone else’s. My own “oeuvres” are mostly comic book art. Manga and stuff, but not always. Lately my art has been getting more and more abstract, as if the lines are pulling my hand rather than the other way around. There’s an anxiety to it now when I begin. An urgent need to see where the lines are taking me.
I work as diligently as I can on the sketches of Shelby’s characters, but am impatient about it. The moment I have one colored pencil in my hand, I’m itching to drop it and grab another one. I see the lines I’m drawing, but not the whole. I love drawing characters, but today it’s like the joy is running a few yards ahead of my thoughts and I can’t catch up.
I show her my sketch of Xargon, her new and improved bloodbath-proof battle-team leader.
“Sloppy,” she says. “If you’re not gonna take this seriously—”
“It’s the best I can do today, all right? Some days I feel it, some days I don’t.” And then I add, “Maybe it’s your sketchy character descriptions making my artwork sketchy.”
“Just try harder,” she says. “You used to be so . . . concrete.”
I shrug. “So? Everyone’s style evolves. Look at Picasso.”
“Fine. When Picasso designs a computer game, I’ll let you know.”
And while our meetings are always about butting heads, which is half the fun of it, today feels different because deep down I know Shelby is right. My artwork isn’t evolving, it’s deconstructing, and I don’t know why.
20. Parrots Always Smile
The captain calls me in for a meeting in spite of the fact that I have tried to keep a low profile.
“You’re in trouble now,” the navigator tells me as I leave our cabin. “Trouble, Hubble, hobble, gobble—he’s been known to gobble down crewmen whole.”
It makes me think of my dream in the White Plastic Kitchen—but the captain isn’t in that dream.
The captain’s “ready room” is aft, at the very back of the ship. He says it’s so he can reflect on where he’s been. Right now he’s not reflecting. He’s not in his ready room at all. Only the parrot is there, sitting on a perch between the captain’s cluttered desk and a globe that has all the landmasses wrong.
“Good of you to come, good of you to come!” says the parrot. “Sit, sit.”
I sit down and wait. The parrot sidesteps from one end of his perch to the other, and back again.
“So, why am I here?” I ask him.
“Exactly,” says the parrot. “WHY are you here? Or should I ask ‘Why are YOU here?’ Or ‘Why are you HERE?’”
I begin to lose my patience. “Is the captain coming, because if he’s not—”
“The captain didn’t call for you,” the parrot says. “I did, I did.” Then he bobs his head, to indicate a piece of paper on the desk. “Please fill out the questionnaire.”
“With what?” I ask. “There’s no pen.”
The parrot hops down to the desk, kicks around some of the mess, and when he finds no pen, he gnaws off a blue-green feather from his back. It falls to the desk like an old-fashioned quill.
“Very clever,” I tell him, “but there’s no ink.”
“Touch it to the pitch between the planks,” the parrot says. I reach to the nearest wall and touch the tip of the quill to the darkness residing between two slats of wood, and something darker than ink sucks into the hollow of the quill. The sight of it makes me shiver. As I fill out the questionnaire, I make sure not to let any of the stuff touch my skin.
“Does everyone have to do this?” I ask.
“Everyone.”
“Do I have to answer every question?”
“Every question.”
“Why does any of this matter?”
“It matters.”
When I’m done, we just look at each other. It occurs to me that parrots always appear to have a pleasant smile, kind of like dolphins, so you never truly know what they’re thinking. A dolphin might be thinking of ripping your heart out, or poking you to death with its bottlenose, the way it might do to a shark, but since it’s always smiling, you think it’s your friend. It makes me think about the dolphins I painted on my sister’s bedroom wall. Does she know they may want to kill her? Have they already?
“Getting along with the crew, the crew?” the parrot asks.
I shrug. “I guess.”
“Tell me something I can use against them.”
“Why would I do that?”
The parrot whistles out a sigh. “My, my, so uncooperative today.” When he realizes he won’t get anything out of me, he hops back onto his perch. “We’re done for the day, for the day,” he says. “Off to dinner now. Couscous and mahi mahi.”
21. Crew Member Questionnaire
Please rate the following statements from one to five using the scale below:
1 strongly agree 2 totally agree 3 agree emphatically
4 in absolute agreement 5 how did you know?
I sometimes worry that the ship might sink.
1 2 3 4 5
My fellow crewmen are hiding biological weapons.
1 2 3 4 5
Energy drinks allow me to fly.
1 2 3 4 5
I am God, and God does not fill out questionnaires.
1 2 3 4 5
I enjoy the company of brightly colored birds.
1 2 3 4 5
Death tends to leave me hungry.
1 2 3 4 5
My shoes are too tight, and my heart two sizes too small.
1 2 3 4 5
I believe all the answers lie at the bottom of the sea.
1 2 3 4 5
I often find myself surrounded by soulless zombies.
1 2 3 4 5
Sometimes I hear voices from the Home Shopping Network.
1 2 3 4 5
I can breathe underwater.
1 2 3 4 5
I have visions of parallel and/or perpendicular universes.
1 2 3 4 5
I need more caffeine. Now.
1 2 3 4 5
I smell dead people.
1 2 3 4 5
22. The Mattress Didn’t Save Him
My family and I go to Las Vegas for two days while they tent our house for termites. I draw in my sketch pad for the whole drive, and get carsick. One step short of vomiting. Which, I suppose, makes me like everyone else in Vegas.
Our hotel is a thirty-story pyramid with diagonal elevators. Las Vegans are very proud of their elevators. The glass ones, the mirrored ones, the ones with chandeliers that quiver and tinkle like each rise and fall is a tremor. The hotels are all in competition to see who can get their guests from their rooms to the casino faster. One hotel even has slot machines in the elevators for the people who can’t wait that long.
I’m nervous for no reason that I can figure. “You need to eat,” Mom tells me. I eat, and it doesn’t go away. “You need a nap,” Dad tells me, like I’m a toddler, but it’s not that either, and they both know it. “You need to get over this social anxiety, Caden,” they tell me more than once. The thing is, I never had social anxiety before—I was always pretty confident and outgoing. They don’t know—I don’t even know yet—that this is the start of something bigger. It’s just the dark tip of a much larger, much deeper, much blacker pyramid.
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