Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning, spinning, downward-sucking gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
Epilogue
Amniotic Sea
And I only am escaped alone to tell thee. —Job
The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth?—Because one did survive the wreck.
It so chanced, that after the Parsee’s disappearance, I was he whom the Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab’s bowsman; the same, who, when on the last day the three men were tossed from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex.
When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy breached lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side.
Buoyed up by that coffin, for three days and a night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. I soon used Little Blackie—still faithfully at my hip—to carefully burst a hole in the top of the coffin where I could extract the water and food therein, blessing Queequeg’s memory, praising his foresight while mourning him afresh.
Having faced what seemed a certain death and seen all others go down into that watery dark, and only Ishmael left living, it was as if a floodgate had been released in me, and there, floating by the grace of poor perished Queequeg, that last horrible puzzle-piece of my own past accosted me in startling detail, such that my wasted body felt not the sloshing sea, nor the hard-hammering sun, nor aught of thirst nor hunger.
That black past came roaring out from some deeper inner depth to engulf and devour me, as the Pequod’s vortex had devoured all her crew.
Zombies must still have some vestige of humanity about them, some vague memory of their past, for were it otherwise, there would not be those traits of behavior aforementioned—for what is behavior but the indelible imprint of the spirit on its flesh—traits that distinguish, say, a zomby Thoreau—preferring to wander in wilderness—to a zomby Casanova—preferring female company above all. Knowing this truth gave me some guidance as to where I might find her, my little Gennie. She was ever the Natural Philosopher, a curious and shy child; she loved the wild places over humanity’s bustle and so, choosing the least disagreeable of my duties, I first went in search of my little girl, thinking of her now as my wee Thoreau.
After long searching, circling outward from the burnt ruin of our cabin, I did finally find Gennie, alone in deep woods miles and miles away, and there in that autumn glade did I finish what I could not do before. I will not write overmuch of that horrific long moment in that clearing, standing upon the leafy autumn carpet, bright as fire against the gray day, for that deed will ever unman me. The doing of it, and the reliving of it as I floated there in vast Pacific solitude is as much as one can bear and yet retain his wits; I will not speak of it further, as there is more and worse yet to tell.
Finally, dejected and near destroyed with grief from that dastardly task, I set off for the ancient maple leaning over the stream, and under it, the moss-covered cairn of heavy river boulders and upon arriving, stood a long, long time there looking into that burbling current as a gentle rain fell. It had taken all the strength I could muster to refrain from obtaining some small dose of laudanum to numb me for this duty, but I had persevered, and allowed myself only the potent flask of moonshine gifted me by my Militia band upon my departure. Taking the cork between my teeth, I unstoppered the flask, took a long and fiery pull and then stood a while in the drizzle, staring at the rusted spade there against the rain-glistening bark of the maple where I had left it leaning.
The grave itself seemed much as before: heavy river stones mounded and mouldering there on the grave without a headstone. I was much weaker then, not having had anything like regular nourishment in the Militia; the haleness I had enjoyed prior to the Plague had come from hewing logs and large hearty meals cooked by Lilith; my former health was but a fragment of memory when I returned to that lone tree above the brook. Stones that took me but an hour to move on that day long past, now required near a full day to move. My reluctance to continue was no small hindrance to the task’s completion.
Moss had grown among the stones of Lilith’s cairn, the new life amongst the graveyard stones giving me no solace. Beyond the mounded boulders the river chuckled along, oblivious as the gods to this human woe, that woe seeming to serve as entertainment, rather than any source of pathos.
On the third day all the stones had been rolled from the hole. The grave-turned earth had settled deeper into the cavity, but was still loose, and easily removed. As I dug deeper, it was as though I began to unbury some sunken grief from my inmost heart. The sweat dripping from my face was soon joined by the tears that came springing forth, intermixing with the bitter sweat, falling as the rain upon that twice-turned earth.
Sooner than I liked, the spade rapped hollowly against the coffin lid, and where all before had been silent but for the chunk of the spade, the burble of the brook, and the patter of rain dripping from the maple, now a feeble scratching and a faint hiss could be heard from within the dirty pine box. I paused and tipped the flask up, took a long draught, feeling a trail of fire burning from lip to belly. Over the pungent smell of the liquor lingered the smell of fall rain and the sour smell of rotting leaves, and lurking below that melancholy savor, there squirmed up from the ground a pestilential stench I well knew. I steeled my resolve, tipped the flask to my lips again, emptying it, threw it aside; and then, after another long pause, pried up the coffin lid.
In that gray landscape, spattered with the fire of dead and falling foliage from the maple tree, Lilith’s own fiery hair shone forth from that pit, radiant and beautiful, or so it still seemed to me. The zomby that had once been Lil however, held no such charm. The upper torso, in its struggle to crawl from out the grave had long ago pulled free of its lower half, which lay shrunken and shriveled at the coffin’s foot; the spine jutted from the wreck of her ribs, dangling there to wriggle like some filthy worm; from two years of scrabbling at the coffin lid, its fingers were ragged stumps, pale fingerbones protruding like some rude gesture. It was too weak, and too long underground and undernourished to put up anything like a fight, and so I stood there—I know not how long—and gazed at the monster. After some time, a sensation as of numbness washed through me. This putrid thing was not my Lilith; it had become other, had now in truth become a thing, and with no more emotion than that I had held for any other zomby I had slain—or so I choose to believe—with the spade I then crushed its skull, and staggered off, drunk and reeling, soon to go a-whaling.
After some time, I was, once more, Ishmael-upon-the-sea, now in possession of those vile yet precious memories. Stranded there, floating nigh Queequeg’s coffin and with all hope now withered within my breast, I wept and screamed and raged at the world and my sorry place in it. For all that second day afloat, and all through the long night following, the tears for all my dead—and aye, for all creation—fell to vanish, absorbed and diluted, into the amniotic sea.
On the morn of the third day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.
In the weeks following, once somewhat recovered, I fully opened poor Queequeg’s carved coffin (how I missed
his tattooed face and all those companionable smokes we shared). I started in shock. My dear friend had somehow managed to insert enigmatic Yojo within. Mustering my courage to quell no small sense of trepidation, I carefully greeted the little god and put him gingerly in my pocket. Imagine my surprise and melancholy delight when, lifting Yojo from the coffin, I found that to him was tied Queequeg’s smaller tobacco wallet. Choking back a sob, I promptly loaded a pipe and, smoking in Queequeg’s honor, emptied the rest of the coffin.
You will recall, when Queequeg decided not to die, he had spent his time laboriously copying the hieroglyphics of his tattoos into the coffin, and mayhap more than was written on his skin, for the coffin’s interior was near fully covered with the strange marks. I remembered he had told me this tattooing was the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who had written out a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth. Perhaps Yojo would break his silence and help me translate it, though at that thought, a shiver ran through me, for I then remembered the dream. I hoped the little idol would maintain his silence as I nervously fingered the heavy golden coin in my trowser pocket.
Even more astonishing however, I found, wrapped tightly in oilcloth, three sharkskin bound books, each thick as a bible, with leaves as thin; these books, to my eternal astonishment, chanced to be the logbooks of the Pequod, put down in Ahab’s spidery hand! The first two, more weathered-looking, were full to bursting, jammed to the margins with close writing; the other was two thirds filled by Ahab’s hand; the words seemed possessed of a frenetic, febrile quality, as though written by one with a driven palsy. Then, several blank pages after Ahab’s last entry—dated some days before doom found him, and thereby found us all—another hand begins to write in a language I do not know nor have ever seen before. Page upon page upon page of it.
The language has a Persian look to it, with graceful loops, peppered with diacritics, seeming to move from starboard to larboard across the page; a very different, strong, confident hand from Ahab’s, one conveying a feeling of strength, and even protection, though I could read not one character; it is a queer sensation that sets my skin to tingling. It can only be Fedallah who penned this. I perused many pages of his curving loopy, backwards-running words, but despite much staring, they kept their meaning hid.
The final entry appears scribbled—by all appearances in some great haste—what looks for all the world as a chef’s recipe, though I ween ‘tis not for tabbouleh, nor some exotic curry. After the supposed recipe are more paragraphs writ backwards in that same hand, more looped than the whale line that wrapt round Ahab’s neck. Upon first opening this section of the log, a small packet of folded paper was revealed, and within was an exceedingly fine pale bluish powder, finer than the finest talcum that, at the faintest breath of breeze would have been irretrievably dispersed, as unrecoverable as ashes belched from a crematorium. I carefully re-sealed the packet and stowed it safely away.
During the long listless days of my recovery, and for many months afterward, I pored over these log books, reading again and again the mad ravings of the tortured spirit of Ahab. There was a time of unholy rage against him, a rage that threatened to devour me and, had he stood before me during that passion, zomby or still fully human, I would have struck him stone dead with no hesitation; for by his actions, however unintended, he had stript from me all I held most precious in the world; and forced upon me, and many others besides, heinous acts none should ever have need to commit.
But upon more reading and much pondering over the months, my rage began to diminish, slow as the progression of the equinox. Aye, as the tight fist of my rage relaxed somewhat, it then gave way to awe, then reverence, then—what’s this?—something akin to worship? Perhaps; for who among us has the stones to bear such a curse, and yet still dare take up arms against it as Ahab did, however hopeless the fight; however unregarded and unremembered the struggle? Who among us can take up the gauntlet thrown down by a veritable zomby god and, roaring acceptance of the duel, fling it violently back? This is more than most men could ever do; and of those that could do it, fewer still are they whom circumstances thrust unrehearsed upon that final stage.
Ahab still moves before me in all his Nantucket grimness and shagginess; I must not conceal that all his outward majestical trappings and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air! And yet! And yet what courage he showed in his darkest hour! Even in failure does Ahab’s stature loom large in thy mind! and even in death does his power thump here, here! in thine own breast, Ishmael. And so, I who bethought myself forever gone from the fight, have been sucked to deeper, more dangerously infested waters than those from which I fled. This dire knowledge acts upon me like that final self-devouring vortex the Pequod created as she plummeted silently into the crushing dark with all her crew save me; it pulls me inexorably into its mysterious, swirling maw.
Already have I begun to query ships the Rachel meets on her way back round the Cape to inquire if any can read this looping scribble; one man I did find off Madagascar, aboard The Dromedary, an old salt who spoke the Parsee’s tongue but could not read it overmuch; those words Fedallah wrote seemed to him to be written in some ancient and therefore unrecognizable form.
Also have I queried the many South Seas Islanders who so abound in the fishery regarding Queequeg’s mysterious carvings, which I have begun to copy into the blank pages remaining in the Pequod’s final log. Others there must be who can read these tongues, each from opposite sides of the globe.
I now pitied Ahab; but as to pity for Moby Dick, there was none in my breast nor any other part of my being. For all the White Whale’s old age, and his fierceness, and his horrible pestilence, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to insure the future merry-makings of men, women, and children the globe over; and also in order to validate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all; and if for nothing else, then must the White Whale die for Lilith’s sake, and for Gennie’s; and for all those Liliths and Gennies yet in the world. I will come for thee, Moby Dick, thou festering whale.
Avast, Ishmael, for this named whale requires renaming.
Henceforth will ye be known as Zomby Dick.
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