by Ray Bradbury
“Of what, H.G.?”
“You are afraid of the Dún Laoghaire ferry boat that travels over the Irish Sea at night in great waves and dark storms. You are afraid of that, John, and so you say I am afraid of flying, when it is you afraid of seas and boats and storms and long night travels. Yes, John?”
“If you say so, kid,” John replied, smiling stonily.
“Do you want me to help you with your problem, John?”
“Help him, help him,” said everyone.
“Consider yourself helped. Relax, John. Relax. Take it easy. Sleep, John, are you getting sleepy?” I murmured, I whispered, I announced.
“If you say so, kid,” said John, his voice not so amused but half amused, his eyes watchful, his wrists tense under my holding.
“Someone hit him over the head,” exclaimed Jake.
“No, no,” laughed John. “Let him go. Go on, kid. Put me under.”
“Are you under, John?”
“Halfway there, son.”
“Go further, John. Repeat after me. It is not H.G. who fears flying.”
“It is not H.G. who fears flying—”
“Repeat, it is I, John, who fear the damned black night sea and fog on the ferry from Dun Laoghaire to Folkestone!”
“All that, kid, all that. Agreed.”
“Are you under, John?”
“I’m sunk, kid.”
“When you wake you will remember nothing, except you will no longer fear the sea and will give up flying, John.”
“I will remember nothing.” John closed his eyes, but I could see his eyeballs twitch behind the lids.
“And like Ahab, you will go to sea with me, two nights from now.”
“Nothing like the sea,” muttered John.
“At the count of ten you will waken, John, feeling fine, feeling fresh. One, two … five, six … ten. Awake!”
John popped his pingpong eyes wide and blinked around at us. “My God,” he cried, “that was a good sleep. Where was I? What happened?”
“Cut it out, John!” said Jake.
“John, John,” everyone roared. Someone punched me happily in the arm. Someone else rumpled my hair, the hair of the idiot savant.
John ordered drinks all around.
Slugging his back, he mused on the empty glass, and then eyed me, steadily.
“You know, kid, I been thinking—”
“What?”
“Mebbe—”
“Yes?”
“Mebbe I should go on that damned ferryboat with you, ah, two nights from now …?”
“John, John!” everyone roared.
“Cut it out,” shouted Jake, falling back, splitting his face with laughs.
Cut it out.
My heart, too, while you’re at it.
How the rest of the evening went or how it ended, I cannot recall. I seem to remember more drinks, and a sense of overwhelming power that came with everyone, I imagined, loving my outrageous jokes, my skill with words, my alacrity with responses. I was a ballet dancer, comically on balance on the high-wire. I could not fall off. I was a perfection and a delight. I was a Martian love, all beauteous bright.
As usual, John had no cash on him.
Jake Vickers paid the bill for the eight of us. On the way out, in the fog-filled rainy street, Jake cocked his head to one side, closed one eye, and fixed me with the other, snorting with mirth.
“You,” he said, “are a maniac!”
That sound you hear is the long whistling slide of the guillotine blade rushing down through the night …
Toward the nape of my neck.
The next day I wandered around without a head, but no one said. Until five that afternoon. When John unexpectedly came to my room at the Royal Hibernian Hotel.
I don’t recall John’s sitting down after he came in. He was dressed in a cap and light overcoat, and he paced around the room as we discussed some minor point to be revised before I sailed off for England, two days later.
In the middle of our Arab/Whale discussion John paused and, almost as an afterthought, said, “Oh, yeah. You’ll have to change your plans.”
“What plans, John?”
“Oh, all that bullshit about your coming to England on the ferryboat. I need you quicker. Cancel your boat ticket and fly with me to London on Thursday night. It’ll only take an hour. You’ll love it.”
“I can’t do that,” I said.
“Now, don’t be difficult—”
“You don’t understand, John. I’m scared to death of airplanes.”
“You’ve told me that, kid, and it’s time you got over it.”
“Maybe sometime in the future, but, please forgive me, John, I can’t fly with you.”
“Sounds like you’re yellow, kid.”
“Yes! I admit it. You’ve always known that. It’s nothing new. I am the damnedest shade of yellow you ever saw.”
“Then get over it. Fly! You’ll save a whole day at sea.”
“God,” I moaned, falling back in my chair. “I don’t mind being at sea all night. The ferry leaves around ten p.m. It doesn’t get across to the English port until three or four a.m., an ungodly hour. I won’t sleep. I might even be seasick. Then I take the train to London, it gets in Victoria at seven thirty in the morning. By eight fifteen I’ll be in my hotel. By eight forty-five I’ll have had a quick breakfast and a shave. By nine thirty I’ll be at your hotel ready to work. No time lost. I’d be busy on the white whale as soon as you—”
“Well, screw that, son. You’re coming on the airplane with me.”
“No, no.”
“Yes, you are, you cowardly bastard. And if you don’t—”
“What, what?”
“You’ll have to stay in Dublin!”
“What?” I yelled.
“You won’t get your vacation. No final weeks in London.”
“After seven months?!”
“That’s right! No vacation.”
“You can’t do that!”
“Yes, I can. And not only that, Lorry, our secretary, she won’t get her vacation. She’ll be trapped here with you.”
“You can’t do that to Lorry. She’s worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for six months!”
“Her vacation’s canceled unless you fly with me.”
“Oh, no, John! John, no!”
“Unless you change color, kid. No more yellow.”
I was on my feet.
“You’d really do that to her? Because of me?”
“That’s the way it is.”
“Well, the answer is no.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Lorry goes to London. I go to London. And we go any damn way I please, as long as I don’t interfere with our writing, my finishing, the script. I’ll travel all night, and be on time at your room at Claridge’s Friday morning. You can’t fight that, argue that, I’ll be there. I’m going on the ferry. You can’t force me into flying on any goddamn plane.”
“What?”
“That’s it, John.”
“Your final word?”
“The ferry for me. The plane for you. That’s it.”
John whirled, flung an invisible cape or scarf about his neck, and stormed out of the room, stalking, striding, making an exit like Tosca about to leap off the castle wall. The door slammed.
I fell down in my chair in horrible despair.
“Christ!” I yelled at the wall. “You damned fool! What have you done!”
For the next day and a half John refused to talk to me. We were at a place in the script where a vacation seemed convenient if not absolutely necessary. I was about forty pages from the end, and we were taking a breather, but only breath went back and forth between us. When I entered a room, John would about face and talk only to the other people present. At lunch or dinner or traveling around Dublin in a car or cab, he laughed and joked with Jake but addressed not a word or a glance at me. I did not exist. I was the rejected lover, the forever-to-be-forgotten and never-fo
rgiven wife. The wonderful marriage had turned sour. I was to be repaid for my hypnotic magic act, though I did not immediately guess at this, with stones, rocks, and old razor blades. But not even that. He did not pick up and hurl anything at me. I had simply melted into thin air. I was not in the room. If his gaze swiveled, it sliced right through me, like an X-ray, and rushed on to some far point. I half expected to hear him speak of me in the past tense.
After a day of this, I took Jake Vickers aside in the lounge room of the Royal Hibernian.
“Jake,” I whispered, for John was heading into the dining room nearby with five or six friends. “What the hell is going on?”
“Whatta you mean?”
“Am I or am I not here? When’s John going to speak to me again!?”
Jake laughed quietly. “It’s all a joke.”
“Joke?” I cried. “Joke!”
“Pretend not to notice.”
“Pretend!” I did everything except sing soprano.
“Keep your voice down. If he hears you getting hysterical it’ll make him happy. Then you’re really in for it.”
“Christ, I’m in for it already. I can’t take this! Does he know I’m going on the ferryboat, in spite of him?”
“I think so. You’ve ruined his joke, do you see?”
“He threatened Lorry, too. Is she going to fly with him?”
“Yeah, she’s going.”
“Thank God. He said he was going to penalize her, make her stay here, cancel her vacation—”
“She’s going. Relax.”
“I would, if I could get this iron anchor out of my stomach.”
“Play it cool. Ignore him, too. Don’t look at him. He’s got to see, finally, you don’t care, you’re not riled.”
“You’re asking me to be Laurence Olivier.”
“Act it out, anyway, buster,” said Jake.
I acted. I laughed. I chatted with everyone. I even had the nerve to say out loud how great John thought my script was, so far. But John spooned his soup and buttered his bread and cut his steak, staring off at the ceiling or at his friends, while my gut settled in cement.
And then, the miracle happened that finished the script and got John to talk to me again.
Chapter 32
It was seven o’clock in the morning.
I awoke and stared at the ceiling as if it were about to plunge down at me, an immense whiteness of flesh, a madness of unblinking eye, a flounder of tail. I was in a terrible state of excitement. I imagine it was like those moments we hear about before an earthquake, when perhaps the dogs and cats fight to leave the house, or the unseen, unheard tremors shake the floor and beams, and you find yourself held ready for something to arrive but you’re damned if you know what.
I sat up quickly, put my legs down, my feet to the floor, arose, walked to the mirror over my typewriter and announced:
“I am Herman Melville!”
And sat down, still staring at myself to fix my self-portrait in place, and began to type, half the time not watching my fingers, keeping that young man old in a night in focus, in place, I did not want him to escape.
Believing that, I sat at the typewriter, and in the next seven hours wrote and rewrote the last third of the screenplay plus portions of the middle. I did not eat until late afternoon, when I had a sandwich sent up, and which I devoured while typing. I was fearful of answering the telephone, dreading the loss of focus if I did so. I had never typed so long, so hard, so fast, in all the years before that day and all the years since. If I wasn’t Herman Melville I was at least, oh God, his Ouija board, and he was moving my planchette. Or his literary force, compressed all these months, was spouting out my fingertips as if I had twisted the faucets. I mumbled and muttered and mourned and yelled through the morning, all through noon, and leaning into my usual naptime. But there was no tiredness, only the fierce, steady, joyful, and triumphant banging away at my machine with the pages littering the floor—Ahab crying destruction over my right shoulder, Melville bawling construction over the left.
At last the metaphors were falling together, meeting up, touching, and fusing. The tiny ones with the small ones, the smaller with the larger, and the larger with the immense. Episodes separated by scenes and pages were rearranging themselves like a series of Chinese cups, collapsing and then expanding to hold more water, or in this case, by God, wine from Melville’s cellar. In some cases I borrowed paragraphs or entire chapters from back of the book to move front, or scenes from the middle to the half-rear or scenes tending toward midway to be saved for finales to larger scenes.
What nailed it fast was hammering the Spanish gold ounce to the mast. If I hadn’t fastened on that for starters, the other metaphors, like pilot fish and minnows and shark followers and sharks, might not have surfaced to swim in the bleached shadow of the Whale. Capture the big metaphor first, the rest will rise to follow. Don’t bother with the sardines when Leviathan looms. He will suction them in by the billions once he is yours.
Well, the gold coin, small as it seems, is a very large symbol. It embodies all that the seamen want, along with what Ahab insanely desires above all. He wants the men’s souls, and while his soul is dedicated to the destruction of Moby Dick, he is wildly wise to know and use the gold ounce as summons and reward. Therefore, the ship’s maul and the pounded nail and the bright sun-symbol of power and reward banged to the mast with the promise that gold will pour from Moby Dick’s wounds into their outreached cupping hands. Their religious fervor for minted gold runs in the invisible traces of Ahab’s equally religious fervor for the true wounds and the true blood of the Beast.
The men do not know it, but the sound they hear of the maul striking the coin’s fastening nail is their sea-coffin lid being hammered flat shut.
When Ahab shouts that the first man up who spies the Whale will earn this ounce, a man scrambles to obey.
No sooner up than he falls into the sea.
No sooner fallen than his body is eaten by the tide, which is to say, he returns not. The sea is hungry. And the sea is owned by the White Whale. You cannot buy or beggar it.
No sooner is the man lost than the tides are becalmed, the sails fall like the loose skin of a dying elephant. The ship is fastened to the hot sea like the gold coin forever nailed to the mast.
In the calm, the men began to fade and die. Exhausted with waiting, with the gold coin on the mast beating on them like a true solar presence, the morale of the ship disintegrates.
In the long and terrible quiet of many days, Queequeg throws the bones that tell his death and goes to have a coffin built. So in the long silences of heat and waiting we hear his coffin being sawed and nailed and the whisper as the shavings fall from the proud feather that is the symbol of his tribal power on the shaven lid.
Queequeg says goodbye to his friend and spells himself into a death trance. How to save him? How to bring him out of his terrible catatonic state?
Melville offers no solution.
One moment Queequeg is frozen and lost by his own secret will, the next he is up and about.
Only one thing, I reasoned, could break the spell. Love. That banal thing: friendship. If Ishmael were threatened with death, would not Queequeg, from the depths of his own inner hiding places, spring forth, summoned by possible murder? It seemed the strong, and thus the proper, solution. Let the men then, in the first case, threaten dying Queequeg. Ishmael intervenes when he sees a sailor cutting a new tattoo in Queequeg’s stolid flesh with a knife. Thus Ishmael proves his love, his friendship. Now, when the sailor turns on Ishmael and would cut his throat, what’s more reasonable than to assume that Queequeg, having secretly seen their friendship proven by Ishmael not a minute before, would shake himself free from his self-suiciding trance and thrust between murderer and his bedmate? The answer is a resounding Yes.
And in the moment of Queequeg’s seizing the sailor to bend him across his knee and murder him, why then, would this not be a perfect time for, at last, oh, my Lord, yes, at last, the arr
ival of the White Whale!?
Again, yes.
And the whale is sighted and shouted to view. Moby Dick heaves in sight, as Ahab pounds across the deck and the men gather at the rail to stare at the great white wonder, and Queequeg, in this moment of delivery, cannot possibly return to his self-nailed coffin, as Ahab cries to the men to row, row, and row again, out of his silence, this stillness, this damned and becalmed sea.
The men row out, following Moby Dick, and they row into a wind!
Good Grief, the lovely wind.
And I had rowed there, all in a single day.
Starting with the coin on the mast and the wind at last in the high limp sails and Moby Dick leading them off across around the world.
What followed, as metaphor, seemed inevitable in that single day of writing.
Ahab dares to row out of the calm.
So? The typhoon arrives to punish him for his sin!
And with it the certain destruction of the Pequod, and Saint Elmo’s fires, which ignite the masts and Ahab’s harpoon. “It but lights our way to Moby Dick!” cries the captain.
Ahab defies the storm and thrusts his fist down along the harpoon, shouting, “Thus, I put out the fire!”
The Saint Elmo’s fires are destroyed and the storm dies.
And the stage is set for the final lowerings for Moby Dick.
So I kept hammering away with the sailor falling from the mast, the sea becalmed, the arrival of the Whale, the almost-deaths of Queequeg and Ishmael, the lowering, the pursuit, the harpooning, the roping of Ahab to the Beast, the plunge, the death, and Ahab arisen, dead, beckoning from the side of the Whale for his men to follow, follow … into the deep. And all the while hungry and bursting with the need to bound off to the bathroom and back quickly phoning for sandwiches and, at last, six, seven hours later, midafternoon, falling back in my chair with my hands over my eyes, sensing I was being watched and looking up at last to see old Herman still there but exhausted, fading to a ghost and gone and then I telephoned John and asked could I come out?
“But,” said John, “you sound funny. Doesn’t sound like you.”
“It’s not. It’s him.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. It’s over.”
“What’s over?”