Kraken in a Coffee Cup: 13
Chapter 13
Table of Contents
If you’re new to the story, I suggest beginning with the table of contents so you’ll understand the origins of the text and why I say it was co-authored by Herman Melville.
And now,
Kraken in a Coffee Cup.
Chapter Thirteen
When the steward thrusts his pale, loaf-of-bread face from the cabin-scuttle and announces dinner, Captain Charon catches hold of the mizen shrouds, swings himself to the deck, and in an even voice says, “Dinner, Mr. Eleazar,” before disappearing into the cabin. I look to the helmsman, and he, to me. If this is an awkward moment, only I seem to register it so. Until this very hour, the captain always announced the meal to the helmsman, whose name is Graveling, and then Graveling announced the meal to me. It set the official ranking, with Graveling as acting first mate and me coming up behind. Today, the captain has marked the change.
“Dinner, Mr. Graveling,” I say.
As I go in, I hear him call to the cabin boy last of all. “Dinner, John.”
Charon presides over our meal, and when we are done and the table cleared and restored, the steward calls the harpooneers. Once again, order is upended. I am with the captain at his maps when I hear the steward announce the meal to Ligeia, and she to her second. The whole ship feels at ease but me, and I realize this is my first meal since Sirene but not theirs. While I mended from the horror of my vision, work continued on as usual aboard the Shade.
Ligeia and I have not spoken since the ship’s departure, and I watch her enter; she never once looks at me. A cursory glance would have said one thing, I suppose. Perhaps, a refusal to look at all says another, but unless she speaks or lets loose her thoughts upon the water, I cannot pretend to know; and we do so often pretend. We lay claim to magical thinking and interpret the heart through the logic of the mind, guesswork, and our stirred and misplaced emotions. There exists much more magic in all the world than ever I imagined, but presumption is no potion, at least not one that does anything but poison. I will not cast my presumption upon her; when she speaks, I will know.
The captain draws his finger along the map and marks three coordinates; latitude, longitude, and time. “Today, you will take your first soul. Yours is the only boat we’ll lower; Ligeia will be your harpooneer.”
I am watching when she does not look up.
#
Captain Charon warns no crewman that a drowning lays ahead. In accordance with his secrecy, I keep my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly sway in a strange current for these well-lit waters; and I watch the under-surface for the signs of that troubled ship.
The harpooneers are still tucked away to their meal when I feel again the surging presence of god, but I say nothing; how can I? However long I’ve been to bed, and they tell me it’s been days, the ship has sailed unharassed. My first time back to face the waters, I’m bound to feel the fear of him, and even if he is to come, it may again be for my eyes only.
The captain’s map showed no seething god; only a single soul before his fate. God does not show for one, they say.
I am intent to stand my watch, but what god wills must be, and no resolution can withstand him; in that frightful, vigilant mood, my soul leaves me; though my body still sways as a pendulum will, long after the power which first moved it is withdrawn. Lifelessly, I swing from the spars, and for every swing I make there is a nod from below from Graveling, the helmsman, watching.
He calls to attention the crew. “The watch is soul-chasing; be wary;” and they peer into the wide trance of the sea.
From alongside the ship, I watch as the captain emerges from his cabin and orders men to secure my body to the mast. They bind me there and whisper thoughts into my unlistening ear. “This is the calling of the watchman, both normal and right; go to where the failing soul calls. There, we must follow.”
Bubbles burst in my soul’s eyes; like vises, my hands grasp the shrouds of the sea; some invisible, gracious agency preserves me; and with a shock of life, I flee in the direction of the current’s calling. And lo! close over our lee, not forty fathoms off, a capsized hull of a frigate rolls. Broken square-rigged masts plummet like darts, and the sails and sailor who escape them twist in the deep like ghosts.
Lazily undulating in the trough of the sea, and ever and anon tranquilly sprouting an endless arm, god, who was not to come, stretches from darkness to the man; and his arm reaches through him and on beyond the surface of the sea. In that arm, I trace a drowned man’s life.
The sailor’s broad, glossy back glistens in the sun’s dwindling rays. He’s escaped the shore and the cruelties of men and their cotton only to be plucked from the ocean’s fields, and I’m not the man to pluck him; he deserves better than this. Give me the superstition of the crew and let me believe I deliver paradise. Let this be my purpose.
I see all of him and know him as I cannot know myself; as if it were I who died and him watching. It should have been Graveling on watch, not me; should be his eyes which take him in. I am but an intruder here, in places I do not belong.
The water pulls away, and I hit the deck with a crying breath as my boat is lowered; Ligeia waits with my boat’s crew for their headsman, me. I must awaken to my duty.
The frigate looks like a portly burgher bathing on a warm afternoon, and I almost call it a miracle of god that we’re not harvesting all her crew. As if struck by some enchanter’s wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it are given into wakefulness; all but one. More than a score of voices, from all parts of that vessel, simultaneously create a whale-song to guide us to their fallen.
The sudden exclamations of the crew must have warned their god; and ere our boat arrives, majestically turning, he swims away to the leeward, but with such a steady tranquility, and making so few ripples as he swims, I suppose he might not as yet be alarmed. I give orders to withdraw the oars, and no man thinks but in whispers. Do they see him, too?
Seated on the gunwales of the boat, we advance; the current admitting the noiseless sails being set; we glide in chase after the soul, but below, god flits his many arms, and he sinks out of sight like a tower swallowed up.
Ligeia steadies the grip on her harpoon. “Grim death and grinning devils,” her thoughts cry. “Raise the buried dead out of their graves, boys!”
“Woo-hoo! Wa-hee!” the crew in thought reply, raising some old war-whoop to the sea; as every soulman in the strained boat involuntarily bounces forward with the one tremendous leading stroke.
Her harpoon pulled back, Ligeia rises up and lets loose. That same moment something goes hot and hissing along every one of our wrists; a magical current, like holding an enemy’s two-edged sword by the blade, and that enemy all the time striving to wrest it from our clutch. Ligeia snags the soul through his center and reels in her line.
I rise up out of the boat and float through the light to Ligeia and the soul she cradles; the men leave us to this silent moment, while above, the frigate casts its black shape upon the surface. No other soul will fall tonight; no other man will die.
I want to touch the light she holds, golden and pure, but I do not reach; I remember his shell which still sinks away and the life I saw played out on the arm of god. “He was a better man than I.”
“There are none better,” Ligeia says. “There are none worse.”
Yet, I know this cannot be true; we aren’t the same and don’t deserve an equal end.
“It isn’t just,” she says.
“Is there no justice?”
“Is that what you seek?”
“Mercy?” I ask. “Love?”
Then I see her again with that golden soul, and I have my answer, even if I know nothing more of creation or the sea. Near transparent, bluish white, and undulating beneath the waves, she brings love with her to those she claims.
—Thaddeus Thomas
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