The Last Harpoon


After years of chasing rumors and vague reports concerning any number of eccentric local personages from around the Northeast, I found him. He lived far from salt water, where the air lay still and the earth seemed to have forgotten the sea entirely. Nonetheless, and as if in accord with some greater cosmic irony, his small cottage lay near a river that moved sluggishly and seemingly without purpose. It wound its way as if asking why it even bothered to flow at all.

I knocked and, when I spoke his name at the door, the elderly woman who opened it shrugged in resignation. Reluctantly, she motioned me inside.

“We never use that name here anymore,” she said as she took my cloak, hung it in a peg and retreated toward the kitchen.

He sat by the window with his leg braced stiffly before him, the old prosthesis brought back a flood of tortured memories. His hair had thinned and his eyes, while no longer aflame, still reminded me of embers banked rather than extinguished against the coming of a cold winter’s night. He did not look at me when I entered.

“You found me,” he said, still staring out the window.

“Indeed. It seems I have.”

“And you survived,” he declared as though he had long suspected it but had never given voice to the possibility. “Sit. If you’ve come to strike, I bid you to do it quickly. I’ve had enough waiting.”

“I’ve not come to kill you.”

That earned me his gaze at last. 

“Then, for whatever else you seek, you’re certain to leave disappointed.”

I took the chair opposite him. The room smelled of wood smoke and river damp. No charts hung on the walls. No iron was mounted above the mantel. There were no faded relics of command.

“Why did you live?” I asked without a preamble.

He laughed, not loudly or with derision but out of surprise.

“A better question than ‘how’. Still, a paltry one to carry across the miles and the years. I might as well ask why you did.”

“I did not drag others to their deaths.”

“No,” he said. “But you followed … willingly.”

The lowly adverb struck harder than any more direct accusation might have. I had rehearsed speeches for this meeting. I had envisioned moral reckonings and indictments carefully balanced. Now, however, they scattered like sparrows startled from the trees by the presence of a hawk.

“I need to understand,” I said. “The ocean took everything. Yet it spared you … and me.”

He laughed again, this time, or so it seemed, out of pity. 
“The ocean spares nothing,” he said. “At best, it merely delays.”

“That’s obfuscation, sophistry, not an answer.”

He leaned back in his chair and readjusted his leg, unaffected by my tone.

“You mistakenly assume that answers are owed, that there are answers.  That’s a habit of survivors. We mistake continued breath for entitlement.”

“Yet, you swore once to strike through the mask,” I said. “To force the universe to answer.”

“I tried,” he said without emotion.

“And failed.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “But only because, after all, there is no foot on the treadle of the loom.”

I stood. “All those men …”

“They chose,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Each one. You included. Dare not adulterate their decisions, or yours, with the false balm of innocence.”

I felt the old vertigo rise, remembered the pitching deck beneath my feet and the roar that consumed every thought.

 “Then you feel nothing?”

He considered this. “I feel,” he said. “But not what you wish me to feel.”

Outside, the river slid slowly past, indifferent. I realized then what unsettled me most: he was not the haunted one, I was.

“You don’t dream of it?” I asked. “The ship? The voyage?”

“I dream of land,” he said. “Of endless land and featureless plains with no horizon to hurl its cursed accusations.”

“You would not go back,” I said. “If you could.”

“No.”

“You no longer desire to hunt that which destroyed you?”

He shook his head. 

It was my turn to laugh. It was an ugly sound.

“You no longer demand that the universe gaze back at you.”

He paused for a moment and, instead of answering, he asked a question.

“And you?” he said softly. “What do you want?”

I hesitated. “I want it to mean something,” I said. “I want to know that it wasn’t only water, and fire, blood and screaming.”

His expression now was one of almost paternal affection.
 
“There it is,” he declared, you’ve thrown your last harpoon … at a chimera.”

“You speak as if there is no meaning.”

He shrugged. “Why debate that which to me has become axiomatic.”

We regarded one another in silence. I saw myself then as he must have seen me: thin, restless, eyes always searching for some 
elusive form gliding silently beneath the surface. I had travelled miles to compel a man to confess. He refused to oblige me with repentance. Worse yet, he would not even oblige me with spectacle.

“I had hoped you would rage,” I said, breaking the spell.

“No rage remains,” he replied. “Besides, I’ve no crew. That kind of rage demands witnesses.”

“Then what are you now?”

“A survivor,” he said. “Like you.”

As I turned toward the door, he gave a final command.

“Ishmael?”

“Yes, captain.” I used the title instinctively, more out of long-dormant habit than out of respect.

“Do not return.”

I left him there that day, diminished and, seemingly, broken. It has only been in the years since our meeting that I have come to grasp the true, naked shape of the thing: the sea had not destroyed him. It had taught him to endure without desire. But I, whose task it remains to live and tell the tale, continue to pursue an ending that the universe never promised and will perhaps never yield.