An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky

by Dan Beachy-Quick

  “I don’t know what to think about Ahab,” a girl who came to class in her jogging outfit said. “Part of me hates him. When I put down the book I hate him. I hate what he did to all those men. He seems so selfish. But when I’m reading he intrigues me. He’s—magnetic.”

  “He is magnetic. He describes himself or his soul as a ‘Leyden Jar.’ He’s magnetic, he’s electric, but is he selfish?” I asked.

  “I think so.”

  The gray-eyed boy spoke up. “Selfish isn’t the right word. His absorption in himself is deeper than that. We’re all selfish. Ahab is something different.”

  “Ahab is Ahab,” I offered, walking back to the desk. “Ahab is forever Ahab. He reads the coin he nailed to the mast and in every symbol stamped on it he sees Ahab. Everyone on the ship is to him another Ahab. Only the white whale isn’t him—” I paused, thinking—

  “But part of him is in the whale. His leg—” The gray-eyed boy said, looking through his book for a passage.

  “Ahab is over-complete and incomplete. He’s not simply ‘mad.’ As he says himself, he is ‘madness maddened.’ He is too much and not enough.”

  A young man growing a scraggly beard beneath which a palpable shyness leaked out said, “If Ahab thought everyone was Ahab, then he didn’t really kill them. He just killed himself.”

  The girl in the jogging suit: “But that ignores the horror of what he did. Dozens of men lived on that ship. And it was Ahab who led them to their deaths. They had wives and children . . .” her voice trailed off, imagining it, “and now their bodies are gone, lost at sea. No grave for anyone to visit, no—” and abruptly, she stopped speaking.

  “They become anonymous again, death being a return, perhaps, to anonymity,” I said, mindlessly turning pages of the book, looking down at none of them. “A strange correlate of that thought is that our class today, each of us being for an hour nameless, is having a deathly, deathlike conversation. Maybe we need to think of ourselves as in the water with the drowning whalers, the white whale swimming between us with our captain lashed to its giant body, and our speaking of these men, of what happened to them, of what never ceases to continue happening to them, gives them the only air left they can breathe. Maybe their lives are in our hands, and class isn’t about learning anything at all, it’s not even about reading a book—it’s about,” I waited for the word to come into my mouth, “resuscitation.” The class was quiet, not distracted. “And the book begins in anonymity. ‘Call me Ishmael.’ All we know from the first sentence is that whoever it is that says ‘I’ in this book isn’t named what he asks us to call him. He’s anonymous, a self without a name, without the fate of a name, as if he has lived through his own death and been born again, born blank, and having no parents, this orphan, he must name himself. Ishmael—”

  “Yes?” The gray-eyed boy looked up, as if out of a reverie, and then coming back to the present moment, looked abashed, and turned his eyes back to the book in front of him.

  “More and more, I think about Ishmael at novel’s end. Floating there in the ocean.” I felt a surge of emotion in me I thought I must control. “Ishmael—but let’s remember this is before he is Ishmael—floats there in the ocean, the infinite ocean, just as Pip had done before him, below the singular god above him in the sky, above the multitudinous god below him in the water, a single man, a mote, merely a mote, but not nothing. Is it hopeless or hopeful? I can’t tell. He calls himself an orphan, but it’s not only his family that’s missing. It’s everyone. It’s everything. His name. The world. Here is the nameless, worldless man (think for a second how these two conditions always go together) with his arms around his friend’s coffin. The coffin is all that keeps him alive. To stay alive, he puts his arms around death; this coffin that rose to the surface, buoyant because there is no body in it, only breath is in it, only air. That coffin—you’ll all remember—is carved with the mystic markings tattooed on Queequeg’s body, inked by the prophet on his skin, symbols Queequeg himself couldn’t read—the secrets to the universe, the meaning of life. This coffin is a library,” I felt a giddy exhaustion, “that cannot be read, self-enclosed. You cannot read what is in it, and yet it exists, and yet it is real. So many years I’ve taught students,” looking up, “just like all of you. So many of you think you come here to learn something, that in these books, this book,” holding it up in my hand, “there is some meaning you can read that will help you, that will be of use to you . . . but here is a book on your class’s last day that denies any of that is true. You don’t read a book. You don’t learn something from it that will help you. You don’t get smarter.” A wellspring of feeling flooded up in me, a feeling that I could not help but say what I had to say—the very feeling I had spent years training myself to ignore, to tamp down, to refuse. “You don’t read a book. You put your arms around it; and it saves you.” I looked up at the class again. “Or it doesn’t.” Most of the students were looking down at their desks, looking at their hands. The gray-eyed boy stared at me, scrutinizing me. I felt in an uncanny way that I’d met him before, that we knew each other, but hadn’t seen each other for years. The feeling didn’t ease my mind, the tension of my mind—it did the opposite. The sense of familiarity, of not being wholly alone in my thinking, gave me more fully over to my abandon. “Ishmael. He ties the book’s end into its beginning, a snake with its tail in its mouth. It is only his being so deeply orphan, no name, no world, no ability even to say ‘I’ as he floats on the ocean, lost to everything but the infinite fact of the world extending limitless past his poor self-shard that, years later (we don’t know how many years intervene between the last page and the first, we only know the last page impossibly comes before the first page, and that time in the novel is backwards and because backwards is a version of fate—we read toward what has already occurred) he can say, or he must say, ‘Call me Ishmael.’” I took a breath; I looked at the window as I walked over to it. “A book begins by defining ‘Who I am’; it ends by asking ‘Who am I?’ We are allergic to the world; consciousness is an allergic reaction to the fact of the world; it is our understanding that is a form of irritation, a rewarding irritation, and we think, because we think, we have accomplished something noble, something valorous, that we can say what it is something means; but it is just a symptom of the allergy, the mind trying to rid itself of itself, of what enters it by casting it back out, words for world.” The grass outside the window waved in the wind. “But this book, our book, it ends before the book it is has been written. We end at the wordless beginning, when the whole world is unspeakable, unknown, and all capacity to make use of it, to turn it into something that feels like it means something, is gone. We ourselves are survivors. Everyone we know is drowning below us, is already dead. The world is an awful, undeniable fact. But we survive—lucky us—we survive. We are the ones who remember. We must relearn our names or give ourselves new ones. We must keep our arms around the book to survive.” I leaned my forehead against the cool glass. I breathed deeply, slowly, deliberately. My heart raced. “Ahab—I think he knew this. And the young gentleman in class is right. Ahab doesn’t read books. He doesn’t want to read books because he doesn’t want to survive. Ahab wants the opposite, our awful hero. Ahab—he had a question about death that he could only ask to death itself, and if that required dying, well, then he’d die. Isn’t Ahab also Ahab in death? Isn’t that his terrible question? And if he is Ahab isn’t he captain still to all his crew? All his dead crew? Can’t he, even in death, gather them again, and put them within the mystery of his command? Ahab knew another world hid darkly behind this bright one, and in that ancient quest, as every hero must, he found a way to thrust himself into the dark world where living and dying aren’t opposites.” I closed my eyes. “A book and a whale—both of them, it seems, are more than themselves. They resemble each other, not perfectly. A white page and a white whale. Both are passageways into the wider world, where death is an end that does not end, is different than we expect, where death may be death
like, or not death at all. The book and the whale—they are the death that is an event of life, they are the death one lives through.”

  I stood with my head against the windowpane, eyes closed, and stayed silent. After a few minutes I heard the students leaving, one by one. And when I thought the room was empty, I opened my eyes, looked briefly outside at the green, green grass, and turned around. I thought I would be alone, but I wasn’t. The gray-eyed boy still sat in his desk, looking at me.

  “Thank you for this class,” he said.

  “I don’t know if I’d thank me for it.” I said.

  He looked directly at me, not affected by my own exhausted awkwardness. “No,” he said. “Thank you.” He didn’t speak for a while, only looked at me in a way few people ever looked at me. He looked at me—the thought suddenly occurred to me, the concise nature of all the acute strangeness gathering around this boy all afternoon—as I looked at myself. He had—I thought with confusion bordering on horror—my own eyes. “What are you teaching in the fall?” he asked.

  “A new class. It’s called Wonderful Investigations.”

  “Good. I’ll sign up.”

  Gathering myself, I said, “Then tell me your name. I’ll keep lookout.”

  “Call me Ishmael,” he said.

  I laughed.

  “No, really,” he said. “My name is Ishmael.”

  CHAPTER 7

  I WALKED HOME PAST THE APPLE TREES’ ABSENCE, PAST the flowers missing yearly, past the vanished scent that would step bodily out the leaves when the wind blew; I walked past the branchless, fruitless, branches and fruit. I walked past everything that was missing, thinking about the angry student stomping off through the grass, watching him disappear through the classroom window. I could still hear the sound of the novel hitting the trash can’s metal bottom, like a dull hammer’s thud when the nail is already deep in the wood; that book now sat next to mine in my bag. I had pulled it out, leafed through it. The student said he hated the book, but almost every page contained an underlined sentence, often more than one, and in a restrained and neat hand, questions filled the margins. A blue line so straight it must have been made with a ruler underscored That same infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit, invests the entire body of the whale, is not so much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender than the skin of a new-born child, after which an arrow cut from sentence’s end back through the underlined words, to a passage above, and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. In the margin he precisely wrote the monster’s skin; or the impossible magnifying glass. The page dissects the monster, and the monster magnifies the page; the monster forces us not to flee but to pay attention. I thought about the pages of my own novel, splayed around the circle of the trash can’s edge, looking as if they were forever being sucked down into a whirlpool; but the whirlpool didn’t whirl, it just collected dust; at the center of it, I thought, the monster lives. Every father is a monster.

  One cannot run away from what one thinks. It follows. From it there is no escape. The minotaur in the labyrinth lives in the center whorl of the thumb’s print, of every finger’s print that leaves its guilty stain on everything touched, its inky stain on the page; it lives in the center of guilt but is not guilty itself, the monster; no, I am always the guilty one; haunted by ghosts I ask to haunt me, hearing laughter in the wind, laughter in the wind in the trees, eating toast in the kitchen in the dark, dry burnt toast, and finding the crumbs in the morning tracing my path across the floor. My father left me. I wrote him into pages and threw the pages away so I could leave him. Pathetic. The monster says one word in a thousand voices: source. At the beginning, there is a monster. He cannot be killed by killing him, cannot die by being dead. To invoke him, say “I.” Look in the mirror and say “I” over and over again until your own face goes blurry, say “I” until your eyes fail, and say it still until “I” fails, until it means nothing, until it is a syllable as meaningless as the waterdrop dripping from the faucet. Then you’ll see him. Then the fingerprint’s whorl becomes a noose around the monster’s neck; but the same noose is around my neck. I am the other. Poets sing it, but it isn’t a song. There is no Song of Myself. There is only a hiss, I can hear it now hissing in me, as of lips straining not to let go the last taken breath. Lydia said she’d heard it, the hissing edge of the world, the hissing static of the edge. It’s every lost voice speaking at once.

  Though I never lock it, I put the key into the front door’s knob and turned it. All this useless chatter with myself, I thought, sick of myself talking to myself, of the endless repetition of the same thoughts accusing each other of impotence. I pushed hard on the door, but it didn’t budge; I pushed harder and harder, shaking the door by the knob until the glass rattled, pounding the door with my fist, knocking my knuckles against it again and again until the skin felt raw and bleeding over the bone; knocking as if inside the house there might be someone living in it to let me in, someone deeply, irretrievably asleep. I’d locked myself out. I sat down on my knees on the stoop, looking at the door all the people I’d ever loved had walked through countless times, looking at the knob their hands had clasped; I leaned my head against the wood and cried. I couldn’t help it. I’d locked myself out; and I’d locked myself in. I was a book on a shelf locked behind the glass watching people pass, watching Lydia pass, and stop, and peer in to read the titles, Lydia pregnant with my child—. I leaned my head against the door and cried, the house rising out from my forehead like some projection of my innermost thoughts, my intimate thoughts, my home thoughts in which I could live with those I love—the more-than-real house that confuses the head and heart into one pulsing room, that nervous house where the mother and sister I lost to death still live, still go about their lives, missing me without knowing what me they’re missing. That was the house whose door I locked against myself; that was the door against which I leaned my head and cried.

  I sat back and looked at the knob, the key like a knife stuck in a stone. I reached up and turned it. I stood up. I took out the key and put it in my pocket. I grasped the knob and opened the door, which swung smooth on its hinges. I walked into the cooler air. My mother’s picture hung on the wall. I put my finger to her face and touched her, and a moist fingerprint remained when I took my hand away, slowly evaporating as I watched. My mother sat in the middle of my own face—my face reflected in the picture’s glass. I couldn’t have guessed it—that I must choose, must daily make a choice. That I must pull myself off the shelf and open myself up to be read. That I was the green book filled with wonders, the forbidden book not truly forbidden, the vanished green book—that was me, and I was missing, had been missing, from my own life, for years. The thought struck me as absurdly dramatic, the sort of epiphanic moment I might come across in a novel and put the book down in jaded dismay.

  I called Olin.

  “Hello?” He answered on the fourth ring. I could hear a scraping sound in the background. “Hello?,” he added a second time, hastily.

  “It’s Daniel.” My voice sounded to my own ears strained by the emotion I had tried to calm down before calling. “I haven’t called at a bad time?”

  “Oh, Daniel, hello. I thought you were calling to offer me a deal on having my air ducts cleaned or extending my car warranty. They always call when I’m in the kitchen.”

  “Are you cooking?”

  “I’m right now stirring the chocolate as it melts. Trying to keep it from burning. A hero’s labor.”

  “Well, it’s good you’re a hero, then.” It felt hard to joke, releasing a pressure in me I did not want to ease.