I waved farewell to my life’s work, all dead and in ruin. Then I moved my arms and legs, not knowing if their propulsion would be sufficient to enable me to reach surface. Or, if it were, what I might find there, on smooth seas under a sunlit sky, after the wave had passed and with it taken all possibility of future.
FIFTY
THE WAVE IT raised us up and took us back down. It took us far then brought us back near. Now again we were by Great Eastern. The iron ship and her chaloupe, close enough to swim. But we were not brought back the same. Chaloupe she was in ruin. Chips gone. Others gone. Ahab gone too, tossed up and down, all the way to the Great Eastern wheel. He did hate that wheel when he was captain and now that he was just Ahab he held to it. He held to it and it lifted him up. No. He did not hold. He was caught up in it. Jammed between the vanes. He could no more hold to it than he could let go. His clothes and his straps and his good left leg all caught up in it. The wheel took him up and took him down. Now the wheel took him down from air to water, pulled him down there, beneath the waves down there. I did take my breath. Then my Ahab was by the wheel brought up again. I let the air out from my lungs and commenced again to breathe. On the wheel Ahab’s arm did move and his hand did move. He had been drowned by the wheel but he was not dead. My Ahab he was not dead.
He was taken up again and at the top of the wheel I heard him cry out. I had never seen him cry out in pain. No one had. I heard him in my ears or in my mind I do not know where. But I did hear him. The Great Eastern she were half on her side, half-foundered, yet still the great wheel did turn. How did that wheel still turn? Then Ahab he was brought down again, and the wheel once more did take him down there. Down there where no air to breathe. Only water, dark and salty water.
Then lo! he was bought up again. And lo! he did still move as he was brought up. His chest it did heave. Cough and rack and heave. Still he was fixed to the wheel. Carried round and up. A prisoner of the wheel whose turning had no cease. Then he was taken low again, and plunged once more to dark cold sea down there.
I could do naught but watch the wheel turn. And it turned and turned and came round time and again but when it came up from down there Ahab was not upon it. He had been fast to the wheel and now somehow was loose. Loose beneath the waves. Nowhere to be seen by me. Nowhere to be seen. I cried out for my Johnnie Ahab and I sang for him too.
The sea so deep and blind
The club the wheel the mind
My singing did not bring him comfort. My singing did not bring him back. All my singing did not bring him back up again.
I sang loud and I sang all day, I sang all day and sang all night. The chaloupe it rode the waves as I sang but my Ahab he heard no song he heard no voice he heard no thing. He would hear no thing see no thing touch no thing no more— E’en as Great Eastern kept turning round. How did that wheel still turn? And lo! my Ahab was lost to me and lost for all time. From this moment now until the last days of the Earth.
Who’s that writing?
John the Revelator
Who’s that writing?
Take him up to the highest high.
The wave took him to heaven but heaven did not want him. (Why would heaven want Ahab?) The wave took him and tossed him and sent him back to the iron ship. Ahab despised that ship: hated her iron and hated her motive force, hated her size and hated her form, hated her screw and hated her wheels. Who says the ocean she has no wit? The ocean set John Ahab down upon the wheel he so despised. Quite rightly! The wheel he so despised.
Tell me who’s that writing, John the Revelator
Tell me who’s that writing, John the Revelator
Tell me who’s that writing, John the Revelator
Wrote the book of the seven seas.
FIFTY-ONE
AND THE WHEEL did what the wave had done, but did it small: the wheel raised him heavenward, but not to heaven, no. It raised him far as Great Eastern‘s deck, that far and no more, then it took him down. The Great Eastern was built with side-wheels to have a better draft, that she might ford the Hooghly. But there were no Hooghly here, just Ahab and the deep blue sea. Deep black sea. Beneath that sea he was taken, once and again and again. Then the wheel it spun him out.
His head face-down, his arms thrust up, his legs splayed out—left leg long, right leg short—like a man who’d been dropped from the skies. He breathed out and his breath made bubbles down there. But there was no air and when he breathed he breathed dark and salty water. Ocean blood. The bubbles went up and he went down. Slow, trembling, but down, always down. Then he saw the spool, the eighty-foot spool, Mr. Field’s dream of cable spool, as it sank down to the bottom. And he saw her wire.
And he saw the Leviathan. He could see it was no fish, no it was not. He could see it was no sea-going mammal. No narwhal, no Great White. No work of nature. A machine built by man to sail upon the seas and sail beneath them. A machine of iron. And it set his mind on fire, and in that fire were flames of a gleaming gold—not the baser gold of worn and tarnished coins, but an altogether purer hue, translucent, diaphanous, fugitive, a gold that was barely there before the eye and gold you might see clear through, a slight and light and evanescent gold, the gown of some Scheherazade—and as in his mind he saw that gold yer Ahab knew that he had been right, in the furnace-room of the Great Eastern, where the stokers they had built the flame and Ahab did the cable’s severed end thrust into that flame. He had seen a flame of gold that none other in the room had seen. The signature of iron. And there it was, the iron Leviathan, below him, and closer with every untaken breath.
Somewhere—on the chaloupe? in the air? on the wheel?—he had let go his harpoon. He held his right fist tight. In his mind he still had his lance, and in his mind his lance he did hurl. And in his mind the lance did all metal pierce, through the skin of it, and into the guts of it, and it did pierce again, through the heart of it. Until the iron submarine Leviathan bled out into the sea and would menace no ship no more and would menace no man no more. He saw it roll, belly to the side. He saw it shake, the last shake of dying beast, then it shook no more. Now all grew dark. But before the curtain to the stage did fall, Ahab did know that he had signed on to find the Leviathan and he had found it. He had signed on to kill the Leviathan and he had killed it. There was the matter of his leg, his right leg, and now that debt was paid. And in this moment now all debts were paid.
Well what’s John writing? Ask the Revelator.
What’s John writing? Ask the Revelator.
What’s John writing? Ask the Revelator.
A book of the seven seas.
The legg of the curtain did now bump the boards, and somewhere—the other side of the curtain—there was applause. And if there was applause enough, maybe someone would raise the curtain up again, and Ahab he might take a bow, a final bow, one last bow, before his lungs fill up with the water of the sea, and his body does fall down there to the bed of the sea, and he lies in the bed of the sea, and dreams the dreams of Ahab, ne’er again to wake nor to rise from the ocean floor.
The last thought to occupy his mind was of his sister who died a lifetime ago. He’d always meant to join her in Nantucket, their kingdom by the sea: the grave marked JOHN next to the one marked ANNABEL. To be with her again was his life’s work. But now he was floating in the dark wet sea as he and Annabel had floated, together—entwinned, entwined—’fore being hurled into the world. Her face which he had never seen was before him now.
In time the silt will cover him up. He lies there, a man of the sea buried at sea. He lies between a spool of cable, eighty foot wide, the dream of Mr. Field, and a sub-marine vessel, now crushed, the dream of he who was born Prince Dakkar, but now was not even Captain Nemo. In time the silt will cover them all. As all our dreams are buried, lost, with no salvage save the powers of memory, care, and human labor—which, from time to time, can resurrect the dead.
FIFTY-TWO
THOSE OF US who walk upon the land, or sail upon the surface of the sea, will never know th
e truth that lies beneath. We have at best our grand surmise. But we also have a tale to tell, and cannot be deterred by our lack of certitude. Accordingly: when science and history have done their able best and moved on, we will work with what is left behind, what cannot exactly be verified—the loamy residuum of what we know in our hearts to be true, even if we cannot with straightedge and compass offer proof.
This we do know: Ahab was cast off by the wheel, tossed down, plunged deep, buried in silt. This we do know: Nemo, in waxed-cotton diving suit and metal helmet, was cut free from crushed and solemn Nautilus with no means of return. And this we can but conjecture: that the ocean, in majesty serene, in wisdom infinite, did the two of them bring together. Not back-to-back, no, nor oblique, no: but face-à-face, that one captain he could gaze at the other, and the other, he could gaze back. Are the dead able to see? Are the dead even dead? If the currents electrical within the skull persist after the heart has given forth its final shudder, who among us can deny this as mentation? And if the two men were by the ocean placed near each other, toward each other, heads moving slow forth and back in the undulant wake of our Soliton, well then: is that not recognition? Or even: conversation?
Yer Ahab, he did not know the name our Indian prince was given at birth, nor did he know the name our prince did adopt at sea. What he saw was but brass helmet, thick glass faceplate protected by metal bar, and behind: black beard, black as the ink of India, two wide-set eyes of equal blackness. In turn our Nemo, though a man of erudition profound, was in darkness as to the identity of this American harpooneer. What he saw was long beard gone white with time and trauma, eyes the color of a cloudless sky on a Nantucket midsummer afternoon.
Both sets of eyes disclosed, full-on, the panoply within. All that had been lost. By slaughter, storm, and fire; by murder, by devastation; by beast, by man; by ambition unchecked; and by failure in the simplest duties of love.
We here posit a moment—no more than that—before the bodies were by oceanic currents parted. When the two men did see each other. Did gaze through water into the other’s eyes. Did then understand that they were not strangers, and in most ways never had been. Did they, in that stilled moment, acknowledge their twinned fates? And did they in that last moment—one above, one below—yet share a common vantage on the ways of humankind, a view most oft reserved for the moon, planets, stars, other objects in the firmament, as they look down upon us from the night-time skies? Again: we have at best our grand surmise.
They did not fear death. But we can mourn their passing. Those among us who cannot cry spend their lives in salt water.
FIFTY-THREE
LANGHORNE, WHOSE VOICE could make the toes of the ocean curl, was rescued from the sea by the crew of Great Eastern and allowed to stay aboard her as she limped to the new world. They would land in Nova Scotia. From there he caught another ship, the Athabasca. She was a whaler and she plied the seas of the South Pacific. The skies were magnificent and the seas congenial yet he did not find his contentment there. When Athabasca she stopped at Erromango Langhorne did leave ship. In Erromango Langhorne found the memories of happier times but found nothing save those memories. He exchanged his labor for passage on a freighter bound for Shanghai, then San Francisco. He left the freighter and spent a year in that fine American city. Though he took his pleasures there when the seasons turned it was time to move on. By an assortment of railroads he headed east.
And now we’re bound for New York Town
To me way-aye-aye, hurray-ah
It’s there we’ll drink, and sorrow drown
Hurrah for the Black Ball Line
In New York he found a sense of freedom that had been lacking most of his life. And so he settled there on the insular city of the Manhattoes where he let a room on Ludlow Street, losing himself contentedly among the people there. He was a man of the crowd. He belonged to no one and his time was his own. He worked for some years at 488 Broadway, his hand on the lever of a passenger elevator. He took them up and down. There was no one who could stop the floor of the elevator car more level with the floor of the building. It was often remarked upon, and it became, in its own way, a source of pride.
When some years later the noise and compression of Ludlow Street became too much for him Langhorne he set out for Brooklyn where he lived in a variety of rooming houses, the last of which was situated by Coney Island Creek, now called Sheepshead Bay. The brine of the Creek would hit his nostrils each morning in a way that was familiar, was comforting. But he grew tired of the Creek and what passed for conversation there. After a year, perhaps two, Langhorne quit his Brooklyn lodgings to seek once more a room on his adopted isle of Manhatto. He found one in Depeyster Street between Front Street and Water Street, a block or so in from the East River, and not far from those precincts in whose streets and taverns John Ahab had spent some time, awaiting the ships that would take him back to sea.
In his latter years it occurred to Langhorne that he might want to die in Tobago. But he did not want to make the journey. And although he longed for the smells and tastes of his childhood, he recalled that in Tobago he had never felt free, and that on the island of Manhatto he did most always feel free.
His death, when it came, was of consumption. It came quickly and it was only a matter of a week or two between the onset of his infection and his death, in his sleep, among his dreams. His songs and his wanderings came to their full stop.
Yet our larger story is not done. It continues, in another place, and at another time, in a city of light, among the precincts of the dead, with some dramatis personae new to us, and others more familiar.
FIFTY-FOUR
ON 23RD MAY 1871—sixty-two days after the government of Adolphe Thiers retreated to Versailles; sixty days after execution of generals Lecomte and Clément-Thomas in Montmartre lit the fuse of revolt; fifty-eight days after the proclamation of the Commune of Paris before a crowd of a 100,000 or more; two days after the Republican troops, regrouped and strengthened, attacked the Commune, penetrating Paris by the Port de Saint-Cloud— The city of Paris was in smoke, in chaos, riddled with bullets and stopped-up with barricades.
It was Tuesday of la semaine sanglante. On that day the fighting was fierce and deadly. Jaroslaw Dombrowski, a commander of the Commune’s fédérés, was killed by a fusillade of government bullets in the rue Myrha while defending the city’s northern arrondissements. The Opera and the Chausée-d’Antin, the Ministry of War, the caserne in Bellechasse, the hotel of the Legion of Honor all fell to the Republican troops. The Commune’s Committee for Public Safety, wishing to prevent the inhabitants of the great bourgeois houses from assisting in the assault upon the Communards, issued a proclamation. Article I ordered that all blinds, curtains, and shutters shall remain open. Article II ordered that any house from which emanated a single shot or aggression against the Communards shall be burned to the ground.
Many of them were. Word spread quickly—or was spread, by the government troops and their sympathizers—of “pétroleuses,” young women who were said to be torching systematically the great houses of Paris. For men to kill other men in the course of war was considered normal. For women to engage in combat was considered an act of savagery, as if the Commune were unleashing an unspeakable force of nature. For every conflagration the pétroleuses were, rightly or wrongly, consigned blame. The Republicans themselves burned down the home of the novelist Prosper Mérimée in the rue de Lille, wanting to destroy some incriminating papers which in that house resided. (Perhaps these involved Mérimée’s activities as a spy; perhaps they involved a certain Italian scandal memorialized in the letters of M. Panizzi. We may never know.)
But it was, undisputedly, the communards themselves who torched the Tuileries. The old world was dying, and the new could not yet be born. In the interim a great variety of morbid symptoms appeared.
Céline Carbonnel, who was seventeen—the same age as Arthur Rimbaud, who would arrive in Paris later that year to bedevil and enchant—lived in the 5th, which
on that Tuesday had not yet been attacked by the men from Versailles. It was the district of the University, to be sure, but also of the narrow and winding streets behind which immigrants, and men and women of the working classes, made their home. Céline was the second-oldest of five in the Carbonnels’ small apartment in the rue du Pot de Fer off the rue Mouffetard. Their street changed its name every few blocks as if trying to evade the authorities.
Céline quit her apartment that Tuesday to join her friend Sophie Grasset who lived not far in rue de l’Épée du Bois. They would, most days of the week, market together, at the bottom of rue Mouffetard where it crosses rue Jean Calvin. There was a seller of vegetables, and a fishmonger, and, their favorite, a man who in season made potato galettes, fragrant with onion and cheese.
“How is your mother doing?” asked Céline.
“Her health has not been assisted by the events,” said Sophie.
“Understood,” said Céline.
There were peas and late-season asparagus. Haricots verts were not yet in evidence.
The first sign that the world of the previous week was no longer present occurred at the fishmonger, who was turning away customers. “No paper,” he cried. “No paper.” By which he meant: no printed Francs. “Only gold,” he cried, “only gold.” And so Céline and Sophie headed for their respective homes carrying in their sacks only vegetables. And when they reached the bottom of the street the Galette Man was not there. Perhaps it was a week too early for potatoes; more likely he was engaged, elsewhere in Paris, in activities of a more pressing nature.
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