Work Text:
A small, quiet cabin in the belly of a nineteenth-century whaleship. A couple candles carefully perched on top of wooden crates cast light onto two figures sitting center stage: ISHMAEL, who is working scrimshaw into a whale tooth, and QUEEQUEG, who alternates between close examination of the tattooing on his bare arms and legs and carving the same patterns into the lid of his coffin—as mentioned in Chapter 110, of course. After a moment of the two silently working in parallel, ISHMAEL puts the tooth and knife down, turning towards us—the audience—while QUEEQUEG continues to work.
ISHMAEL: I fear we may never see land again. You may think me a man of unwarranted melancholy, of fits and starts, of a morbid disposition who cannot withstand a little of the…tempestuosity, perhaps, that shall naturally arise between a captain and his crew on a voyage of any significant duration. You may regard my disturbed state as a mere reflection of inexperience; I can hear you now, making a mock of my anxieties, laughing at the poor greenhorn who is simply not accustomed to the habits and customs of whaleship captains and their crews.
(Beat.) Yet I cannot hear you, naturally, so I must hypothesize. (Sighing.) Might you then forgive me for leaping so quickly to mine own defense? I should not be so hasty as to assume that you are my judge, my jury, or my executioner. Perhaps I need not persuade you at all that this… (He gestures wildly around him—at the ceiling, the walls, the coffin) is crazy. It’s mad! Our captain is quite obviously mad! And nothing is to be done about it! A captain is king of his ship, with no Parliament or Magna Carta to tame his wild impulses! Where are our checks and balances? Have we no recourse, no designs in place to protect our lives? I suppose it must not be a very common complaint in our industry—what to do when your captain is possessed by the very devil himself!
(He catches his breath.) I do not need to imagine what you might say to me; I have sufficiently taxonomized myself, in addition to our captain, as belonging to my own original species of madman. All that remains is to find if there is any method to it… (He looks over at QUEEQUEG, captivated by his work.) How fair is it—that a man such as he should die, as noble and worthy as he is, the blue blood of an island chieftain running through his mighty veins, at the incoherent ramblings of a common-born man from the other side of the globe? What a century is ours! Queequeg, what was it that compelled you so to leave your spit of paradise and condemn yourself to death amongst poor Christians such as we? Might there still be hope of deliverance, and might it live in you? (He stares at the coffin, sighing again.) Yet even you have resigned yourself to fate, and make you over now your coffin into your own flesh and blood. If even my brave Queequeg has no fight left in him to protest our surely approaching doom, what hope is left for I to vanquish death or alter the divine script? ‘Twas rehearsed by thee (looking to QUEEQUEG), and thee (looking to us) and me a billion years before this ocean rolled; yes, I’ve heard it all before.
ISHMAEL again picks up his tooth and knife and says no more. The two work in silence, as before, until QUEEQUEG pauses, still holding his knife and periodically gesturing with it as he speaks; ISHMAEL shows no sign of hearing him.
QUEEQUEG: Look, don’t tell him (pointing at ISHMAEL) that I’m telling you this, but I have an idea for getting us out of here. It’s difficult, sometimes, talking to him. Like no matter what I say, or how I say it, it gets filtered through what he expects to hear from someone who looks like me. You understand me a little better, no? Or do you, too, hear only what you want to hear, not how I really sound?
He pauses, shaking his head, glancing back at ISHMAEL once more, bent over his labor.
Anyways, that’s not what I wanted to say. I wanted to say that I have an idea. It’s so simple, it might just work. (He grins.) All we have to do is take a whaleboat and leave. We row, and row, and row, under cover of night, until we come across another ship. It may not take very long at all, in this part of the world. And then we offer our services up to them, whatever their business may be. Ishmael does the talking, and I prove my worth in any seagoing venture the same way I always do. Simple, no?
(He waits for audience approval. Not being able to hear us, he frowns.) I don’t worry about getting in trouble with the Nantucket men. Why should I? I have a home. How would they find me back in Kokovoko? It’s not hard to find. You only need to pay attention to the stars, the waves, the birds. But the Nantucket men would never find me, because I won’t be on any maps. I never wanted to go home so soon, so impure. But it’s better there than here. And Ishmael could be with me. He would learn how. But I don’t know how to convince him, and that’s the biggest problem. If I tell him, will he only hear nonsense? Pretty nonsense, sure—I don’t doubt his affection for me. He admires my body, my skill, my heart. But that is not the same as seeing me, hearing me, knowing me. (He looks at ISHMAEL.) I’m not sure I know him. I must wait, for now. Maybe there will be a moment when I can tell him and he will hear me. I just have to wait.
As for this? (He gestures towards the coffin.) Well. I can’t even tell you all I mean and intend by that. But I think it will confuse the Nantucket men. If I nail it up before I leave, they may think I have left something within, and it will take them time to pry it open; surely they won’t leave it, any part of me, as a mystery. I know their minds and their ways. It may buy us time, time to put waves between ourselves and the ship.
(He looks back at ISHMAEL once more, smiling sadly.) I know he is troubled. I know he does not want us to die. It really doesn’t need to be as hard as he makes it. He is so like the rest of them, in that way. But he is also not alike in others. He only needs to hear me.
Satisfied for now, QUEEQUEG returns to his carving, and the two continue to cut, whittle, slice, trace, and so on as the lights slowly dim…
Curtain.