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I had never before feared the water beneath me.
Does any man fear the sky when he stands with two feet planted on solid ground? When the same earth stretches smoothly to the horizon, with no sudden valleys or cliffs to startle the unwary? It is plain to see there is no threat, no creatures swooping down to pluck us up in their distended beaks. And it is equally clear that there is no way to suddenly fall away from this solid ground, into vertiginous heights where we can hold onto nothing, where all human movement becomes infantile and futile.
We float, also. Any young ruffian playing in the harbor can tell you thus. Even in the widest ocean a man can lie back on the water and float, though waves splash over his face, though clothes weigh him down, though fear makes him lash out against the very air itself. I have had hours of quiet respite in pastoral ponds, where the water was as still as a mirror, fluttering with my breaths alone. But a man can fight and rage and have no influence on the ocean. Another man three feet away would never feel a thing different.
For three days, we floated thus. Floated, just as we once floated on the Pequod, just as the Pequod now did nothing of the sort, or at least not in any form that could rightly claim the name. A careful inventory of the area might pick together driftwood, empty barrels, an end of rope, and one Ishmael, ordinary seaman, clinging to the hem of a sturdy coffin belonging to one Queequeg, harpooneer, likewise clinging.
Oh, to float in luxury upon a wooden deck, when even in a storm, rattled around by winds, half-drowned by rain, a man could still run and dance and climb up, up… I decided very early on in our new traveling arrangement that climbing up would not do. Clinging onto a coffin while adrift thousands of miles from anywhere was one thing. Lying in it distinctly another.
The Pequod was gone, and with it Ahab and all the rest, torn out of a seascape, lost to memories. And yet, no, they were surely still close: vanished from sight, perhaps, but below us all the same. How many fathoms lay between our coffin and the permanent resting places of our former friends? And how much more? The whale had certainly departed, but I knew far too well what else lived below the surface, and not all of it friendly to poor seamen in want of a ship.
We did not speak, or if we did the words meant nothing. What plans could we make? What sense could we make of any of it? There was only the ocean and the coffin, and our grasp on one or the other.
They tell me I was mad, mad, as mad as Pip when the Rachel found us poor orphans. I refused water, shook like an epileptic, spoke of prophets and madness and lies.
Many of the crew shunned and spoke out against us, for surely we were cursed, true Jonahs plucked out of the ocean where we should have died in more ways than one. Why should two men survive what had to be the wrath of God Almighty, not the act of any dumb sea beast? We had been destined to be drowned in the depths or baked alive in the sun. What madman must Captain Gardiner have been, seeing plainly that neither of us were his own lost son or crew, to hoist two dying men aboard from their perch on a coffin? I cannot swear that I would have done the same.
Others argued that we must be an omen of good fortune, for had we not escaped drowning? We had survived through nothing but God’s grace. Our continued existence was a miracle and should be praised. Many men did pray for our souls, one way or another, but Queequeg was desolate over the loss of his Yojo and our friends, and I was raving, senseless.
They stowed me in a cot that had belonged to a man now lost, and the crew stayed away from us many nights, scared by curses or simply by my manic cries. Queequeg made me break my unwilling Ramadan, forcing me to drink sweet water, though I gagged and vomited. He bundled me up as though we were again in New Bedford, surprise bedfellows, and trapped me in his arms as I shivered and shook and tried to break free, although he must have been suffering almost as foully himself. What did the Rachel make of my comely cannibal? Did they leave him unmolested for my sake, because no one else would come near me, let alone lie next to me in my fevers? What would they have done, finding him floating alone? Little did they know that my usefulness healthy and sober was but the usefulness of Queequeg starved and crippled by thirst.
When I woke – the first time I remember waking – I found myself in darkness, but knew from the motion and the air that I was aboard ship. The Pequod, I thought, rejoicing that perhaps all my memories were nothing but a mad nightmare, a fever dream, for I was soaked in freezing sweat and had surely been gravely ill. And yet on the Pequod I had never merited a bed. I had never slept with Queequeg by me.
“Queequeg?” I said. My mouth and tongue were dry, such that I could barely move them. My limbs were wrapped up in blankets, pinned to the point of immobility. I watched him sleep for a moment and then, because it was all I could possibly do, cracked my skull against his.
He cried out before those giant white eyes of his even opened, a mighty tattooed arm raising like a club over me. I feared I would be smashed up like so many seafaring timbers before he remembered where he was, but he froze in that pose, white teeth baring, and fell upon me, taking me in his arms, and giving me to understand that he had missed me very much and was happy to see me awake and apparently myself again. I wiggled under him, endeavoring to convey that I would appreciate some water, and also to be freed from the linens’ constricting embrace.
I choked on the water, but persisted, and soon we were able to lie together as we had in months past. The words were few, once he was sure I remembered and once I was sure my memories were not dreams at all, and then we only lay there, without words needing to be spoken. On the Pequod we had spent our nights apart, our days mostly out of reach, such that at times I had assumed Queequeg was as far from me as the horizon I gazed at from the topmast. Returned to the familiarly awkward scenario of sharing a bed, we found one another again, as whalers do their wives.
Yet even with Queequeg’s strong arms flung possessively around me, I could not feel warm. The air was mild, the water as calm as any sailor likes, yet I shivered in bed and froze on deck, while knowing that just a few weeks ago I would have walked bare-chested with no complaint, suffered storms and snow and shaken them off in a day. It was never like me to be an invalid, not even as a small child watching siblings and cousins take ill and take to their graves. I was precisely aware of the glances the other seamen gave me: less pity than disdain, and that brought about through fear. That could never be me, the seaman says to his friend as they watch a man sicken from consumption, as a man falls overboard, as a man plunges to the deck and shatters himself there. I have said it to myself and to others, only half aware of the lie.
The Rachel and her crew were collectively not-so-quietly delighted that we asked to be set ashore in Liverpool when the ship pulled in for repairs and to take on stores. If we had opted to stay, I have little doubt we would have been escorted onto dry land regardless. As it was, we went with dry clothes and biscuit, and a few coins as charity from the good, grieving captain.
We tried beer at an inn, for strong drink is usually good enough to warm any man, and especially those who have been at sea on a dry ship for so long. I drank it easily and willingly enough, and then Queequeg’s pint also, because my friend sipped it and made clear his disdain. A little cheered I might have been, but warm I was not.
“I’m not at all sure what our next destination should be,” I said to Queequeg when we had secured ourselves a room for the night, stone closet though it seemed. “We can find a ship bound for New York, maybe even for Nantucket. There might be whalers here.”
Queequeg, at work in the small fireplace, made clear his ambivalence.
“We could stay, of course, but we have no coin and no means to make more, bar thievery or trading ourselves in alleys or, what’s worse, teaching.” I sat on my hands, loathe to undress. “This is all assuming you wish to continue our partnership, Queequeg. I hate to tie your fate to my miserable one.”
The look he gave me was a kindly one, as the fire burst into life, lighting the room if not instantly heating it. He stood and patted me lightly on the head, as one might a puppy. Stupid, foolish Ishmael. For we were married and our fates had been tied together, and that tie had grown ever tighter since the night we first met. I freed one of my hands and drew him down onto the lumpen mattress. “Queequeg,” I said. “This time you must choose. Yojo sent me to the Pequod, or perhaps I misunderstood his direction, or I failed to live up to the faith he put in me. I will go wherever you lead.”
He led me no further than bed that night, where, under heavy blankets, the shortcomings of the mattress were blended away by the thickness of air and heat in the room, by Queequeg’s body naked next to mine. (For his people held that warmth was better held and shared that way, without clothing, though I shivered terribly as I removed my clothes in the open air.)
We spoke of the city, where I had been once before on a childhood voyage when I was greener than I am now, yet no less full of wonder. Liverpool. A mighty dock, a meeting point between New York and London, and all points of the compass, bustling with the Irish and Spaniards and huge dark men as black as Tashtego. I wondered how they came here, all of them, as seamen and merchants and soldiers and slaves. Or as wanderers, rovers, like myself and my brave harpooneer, washed up on the shore, waiting to be given a purpose.
On my first visit to Liverpool I’d seen what became of those who never did ship out again. Every day the beggars flooded through the port, seeking pennies and bread, and every day dozens died. We were not too badly off, for all that. We had survived worse than poverty and were still two young, healthy men, bar my shivering, with enough skills to be hired on any ship. Or at least Queequeg would be happily recruited, and he would haul my sorry self along with whatever other baggage he had acquired.
“The South Pacific,” I said. “Lovely warm waters, warm people. We could find your family there, Queequeg. We could sleep on the beaches and fish in the shallow waters and not think any more about whales.”
Queequeg raised his eyebrows and snubbed my nose with his thumb. He knew me far too well.
The room might as well have been a furnace, but the cold of the whaling seas had seeped in through my skin and throat, into the heart of my bones. It was something old women said, and I had been surrounded by enough of them as a child, that the bones grew cold and ached and could never be warm. Lying there, I felt a phantom encased in flesh.
“Did we die, Queequeg?” I whispered. Every moment I took to reflect on our adventures, with the passing thought of telling it as a tale or novel one day, the more fantastical it seemed. No men were meant to sail out of that maelstrom on a coffin. The Pequod should have sucked all down with it and disappeared into myth and legend, like the ships of one or two of my cousins, lost somewhere between ports.
“No,” he said finally. That one syllable alone put me entirely at rest on the matter.
The next morning, after we rose at a late hour and took our hot breakfast, we procured tobacco and strolled along the docks, naming the ships, observing the people, speculating about their stories. Many of those people, gaping young boys mostly, stared at Queequeg’s fine tattoos as we passed, some darting in to touch his arm. He batted them away affectionately.
Ships like these are always hiring, replacing those men who have come home to stay, or who have taken to the pubs and inns like a mother’s teat, or who perhaps have been left to the ocean’s grasp. But the usual practice is for a man or two to lounge by the ship, smoking and looking carefree, until a fellow like myself approaches and fair begs to be taken on, by which the captain can chance to hire him for little more than board and lodging. That morning, however, several of these disinterested recruitment officers called and beckoned to Queequeg: useless as a scrivener, my particular friend was in every way a benefit to every ship. We humored them, discussing lays and destinations, and they humored us by pretending to be interested in my skills as well, for though an able seaman I was never much of a physical specimen, and then even less so.
Still, we continued on our way, buying pastries from a lad hawking them loudly, and not yet earnestly discussing our options. Circumstances dictated that one must be chosen, lest we sleep on cold stone the night after next, and dine on seawater. But it was pleasant to spend the day as esteemed gentlemen who might pick and choose what suited us best.
It was in this proud, pleasant state that I, dazed by noontime sunshine, let my attention wander to the horizon while Queequeg conversed with a sailor who, from the look of him, could well have been a countryman. At any rate, they spoke in a language that was not English nor French nor Latin, nor Greek to my ears except in an idiomatic sense, and I set myself a little apart from them, thinking of my many days atop the rigging, looking for whale spouts in the distance. I was not the only one paying no attention to my surroundings.
The cart hit me broad across my shoulders in its relentless roll, and although I would have but stumbled and grazed my knees on any country road, on the dock I stumbled and tripped across an unused cleat and plunged some six or ten feet into the water below. For that six or ten feet, all the thoughts that chanced to spark across my brain were of my own stupidity, and then I could not think at all. The mind cannot abide the cold, I knew from childhood days shivering until a fire could be started, and knew better from recent times. The water was deep and dark, criss-crossed with mooring ropes, and though I knew how to swim, though every part of my body and soul screamed for air and for warmth, I was stricken dumb by the frost in my bones, unable to tell where that air and warmth might be. I was lost as truly as Ahab, though with no rope around my neck but my own confusion.
The water around me fluttered and bubbled. Hands grasped my arms, wrenched on my shirt, and my fine Queequeg dragged me to the surface as he had once dragged brave Tashtego. I coughed and spat up saltwater as a small crowd bustled at the edge of the dock, letting down a rope. Somehow Queequeg scaled it, half-carrying me as he did so. I felt like a pile of wet rags when he set me down, and far less useful.
“It is fate,” I said when we spent our last money on another, even smaller room. “Neptune or some more vengeful god calls to me, claims me. You have saved me twice now from his embrace, Queequeg, but he will surely have me.”
Queequeg stoked the fire with vehemence, mine own vengeful god. “No,” he said. “Dem monkey-rope.” He pulled at my sodden shirt.
We had been bound together since our meeting, he told me, by soul and by rope, always keeping each other from the very jaws of death, and we would do so evermore. He took my wet clothes from me as I told him how I feared death would take me with chills and pneumonia, then. I did not have the force of will to hold off death the way Queequeg had renounced it. But I could hold onto him.
He rubbed me dry and fetched hot food and beer from the kitchen below while I half-scorched myself on the embers, seeking a warmth even they could not give. After I ate, I fell into a grateful sleep and woke to find him next to me, his hot skin warming mine. We lay together as men do with women, and as he filled my aching body time after time I felt the salt and cold ebbing away, my soul melting into his, becoming indivisible, with all doubt and foreboding squeezed from my body.
“We go home,” Queequeg said as we clung to each other. “We go home.”
I knew not whether he meant my home in New England or his on a distant island, or our spiritual home onboard some seagoing vessel bound for vast oceans and strange lands. I only held him and moved with him – would that we could have continued doing so forever!
“Yes,” I said finally. “Home.”