The Dark Balloon

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One dollars.

“The boat is sinking,” reported the sailor to the captain.

“Do nothing about it,” the captain said.

Five men jumped overboard, and so the sailor returned.

“The boat is still sinking, and we’ve lost five men.”

“I’ve got it under control,” the captain said. The captain sat his desk, sipped his whiskey, and rubbed his legs.

Ten more men jumped overboard, and so the sailor returned.

“The boat is almost completely underwater, and we’ve lost half our men.”

The captain jumped up, knocked over his liquor, and threw on his captain’s coat. He grabbed his fifteen life rafts, one for him and fourteen for backup.

“Good God, Jones—” the captain bellowed.

“It’s Charles, sir.”

“—why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

The captain rushed down to the leak. Floating among the water in the boat was a plank. The captain—with the greatest effort—reached down, grabbed the plank, and tried to plug the leak.

To no avail.

The captain inflated his life raft, took the other fourteen with him, and prepared to jump.

“But, captain, what about us?”

“I’ve done as much as I could, and nobody can blame me,” the captain announced. He left with the rafts and floated toward the oncoming rescue ship, which had just arrived, hours late.

“What a hero,” the sailor said, standing on the sinking ship with tears in his eyes.

§

Morning.

I made a mistake, I woke up, it’s all the same now in the shadow of the city. My friend tells me that waking up is a series of complex chemical reactions that rescued you from the unconscious state of innocence. A lot of potassium and sodium ions flow to the right places at the right times to get you to wake up. Each ion is doing the right thing with good intentions and inevitably lead to one colossal mistake. My friend also said, before we found his body, that the road to perdition was paved with good intentions. I never learned why you would want to travel to this placed called perdition, which sounded awfully close to a convention of dentists. (I’ve been to one of those, and they ramble on forever without plaques or women or plot.) And paving with good intentions, which seemed terribly abstract. I have a lot of paver friends, and I think they’d be angry to learn that somebody was paving with a material not sanctioned by the Paver Union. What, is this perdition person too good for brick? And, if so many people went to perdition each today, there’d be a bureau of transportation somewhere. And they’d see to it that there’d be a road paved with asphalt, and why wouldn’t you want to travel on that? It all comes down to trust sometimes. I figure people who travel on the intentions road must be really stubborn, and they probably deserve what they get for making such poor decisions.

The room I’m in is gently rising and gently falling. You can tell me to go outside, but I know where I am. All around me is water because I can hear it and I can hear the seagulls, white and pure and innocent. And the water isn’t the cheerful type that cheerfully sparkles its cheerful blueness every time you cheerfully look at it. The water is probably gray and sullen; somebody had told to water to go up to its bedroom and stay there until dinner, and the water was not very happy about it. I can tell. It’s that kind of day. I don’t even know where I am. The water is choppy too, but there’s no good analogy to describe choppy because I’ve tried many times and each time my brain hurts and I end up writing a romance novel instead about dentists and their perdition.