Bedtime Story

The last time I read Moby-Dick was five years ago. It was 2020, late summer into fall. We all wore masks then, remember? Well, not all of us. Definitely not all of us, and at the time that felt like a crucial distinction. Where I was staying, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., most of the shops were closed. Perhaps by October some were open again, but in my memory they were mainly boarded up with plywood—memory can be like that too, and so can the heart, without any virus as an excuse. There wasn’t even any traffic. Imagine, D.C. without traffic. Already, it sounds like a dream.

Surely all this is not without meaning.

My daughter must have been eight or nine months old when we started reading it. I say we, but of course it was I who read it aloud to her each night before she went to sleep. I don’t remember or even understand how this could have worked, because her little sister is almost the same age now and before bed she prefers to wriggle and shout than sit or lie still, and to get her to sleep I have to hold her in my arms and walk in tiny laps around a darkened room while patting her diapered butt until at last she gives up on consciousness. I know the older one wasn’t much different—maybe we read it in the afternoon?—but we must have managed somehow because I remember lying propped up on pillows on the hard double bed that my partner and the baby and I shared, the covers a tangle, reading aloud as she grabbed at the pages, at my glasses, at my nose.

Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of ’em.

The streets were wild then. Remember? Demonstrations absolutely everywhere, and tear gas, the whole country on fire. Sick and on fire. My mother was ill that summer and for two more after that, which is why we were out there in the suburbs, renting my ex-brother-in-law’s place a few miles from my mom’s apartment so that I could drive over each morning and cook her breakfast and lunch and spend a few hours with her, and so that she could get to know her youngest granddaughter, who gave her more pleasure at that point than almost anything that was left to her. 

Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale’s throat, and then jump after it? Answer, quick!

I’d take her to the doctors too, on endless drives over the empty highways across the river to endless doctors’ offices with their underground parking lots and waiting rooms. Those many mornings spent circling, searching in vain for a spot not too far from the elevator, then wrestling the wheelchair out of the trunk, having to stop at least once to convince her to stay in the car until I had unfolded it fully, failing, finding her a mask, pushing her in the chair to the elevator. Usually in the lobby there was some token gesture towards bio-security in those days, bored and surely underpaid security guards pressing a digital thermometer to your forehead before they’d issue you a stick-on badge and let you pass. 

For everyone knows that this earthly air, whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it.

My mother grumbled in the waiting rooms while I grappled with clipboards and filled out the forms so that she wouldn’t have to, transporting her Medicare card and ID and supplemental insurance card up to this or that desk and back again as ordered. The magazines, so many old copies of The New Yorker, were lank, swollen and shiny with grease from other people’s fingers. Judge Judy ranted from a screen bolted high to the wall. It was always Judge Judy, punitive glee the inescapable soundtrack of American decline. The other patients were mainly in worse shape than my mom, morbidly obese or skeletal and either way in obvious decay, encumbered with various unspeakable bags and tubes. I foolishly hoped that observing this might help her mood, but it did not. Oh those windowless rooms flickering with cruel, cold bureaucratic light! Oh washable wallpaper and scowling, sour-faced Judy from on high! Oh the smell of industrial carpets off-gassing, and the sweet, rank, human scent of the sick.  

But as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote.

Of course my daughter didn’t understand any of it. Not a sentence, and probably not a word. She was a baby still, but that was the idea, I thought: to take advantage of that brief period in which she didn’t yet care what book was being read or if it had pictures or not, while she was still content to lie curled up on my chest and feel the vibrations of my voice. Runaway Bunny could wait. It might as well be something I want to read, I thought, and none of the other books on my ex-brother-in-law’s shelves were grabbing me. Maybe I hoped that something of it would seep into her eager, fast-growing brain even if she didn’t understand or remember it, not the plot or any details, but something of Melville’s hunger for the world, his unabashed love for the wide and furious rhythms of this thing, even when they stab us. 

What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?

The days were long and hot, too hot to be outdoors if fate had dumped you at the extremes of life, infant or octogenarian, and everything was closed anyhow so we mainly stayed inside, in my ex-brother-in-law’s air-conditioned living room or my mother’s, watching the baby pull herself up on the edge of one or another coffee table and lurch in slow and shaky, terrifying laps around it, stopping only to gurgle and squawk like a proud little gull. She could do that for an hour without tiring. Someone organized drive-in movie screenings in the vast and crumbling parking lot of an abandoned football stadium in southeast D.C. so my partner and I took the baby to see Coco and Minions, or maybe it was Minions II if there is such a thing. She slept through the movies but I remember picking her up and walking her outside to show her the sunset—one of those sultry, clouded-over, pink-and-gray-streaked, late-summer D.C. sunsets that for a few minutes almost redeem the place, the light a steely greyish gold—until a masked employee came over and asked me to get back in the car. 

Ah, the world! Oh, the world!

It seemed like it never would but eventually that summer ended and when the days were cool enough I would wheel my mother outside and down to the river and we would sit and stare at the water and I would look out for ospreys and eagles, or anything that could fly. It was not the worst summer of my life but it was one of them. It was High Covid and the virus was in the air but so was a desperate and melancholy revolutionary spirit that I pray we haven’t seen the last of yet. My mother was dying, America was clearly dying too and maybe the world, but my baby, she was alive and I had to read her something so I read her Moby-Dick.

But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep.

Moby Dick is a warning as much as a celebration. It is not exactly a happy story—spoiler: everyone dies at the end, everyone but Ishmael and the whale—but even the darkest of its 135 chapters shimmers with the antinomian ecstasy of Melville’s prose, “the great floodgates of the wonder-world swung open.” To my mind at least, it zips along even when it has left plot far behind, buoyed by a manic joy in the telling that often feels innocent but is simply unembarrassed, unshielded by ironic dodging. His sentences are self-propelled, tickled and gladdened by their own beauty, pushed onward by the giddy, earnest certainty that hungering for truth and life is itself divine, and hence that even playing with words about whales can be as God-licked a pursuit as anything more traditionally reckoned sacred.

Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen—Moby Dick—Moby Dick!

I guess I needed that then, and needed also a shot of the optimism that Melville at times indulges. I know, the ship sinks at the end, and he named it for a tribe that he believed had been exterminated, lending a bloody, subtextual foundation to its apparently lofty quest. But in 1850, when he published Moby Dick, it was still possible, for a white man in the North at least, to believe without cynicism in the nobility of the entire experiment, in the radical promise of democracy, its open-endedness, and the possibility that equality might be a tide powerful enough to drag the whole country, the continent, the whole world with it.

The ship? Great God, where is the ship?

A lot has happened since then. It’s easy to say that Moby-Dick foresees some of it, at least in broad, disastrous, metaphoric outline. Perhaps no other novel captures the death drive of American modernity with such empathy and care, or understands that, without any contradiction, the yearning to know can be a form of madness inseparable from a will to dominate and destroy, and that it can’t help but take the ship down with it. Or, less charitably, that the will to dominate and destroy can sometimes, from a safe distance, be mistaken for a hunger to understand and improve the world.

Oh lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho!

We didn’t finish. My partner and baby flew home in early November and I joined them a few weeks later. I would be back in D.C. within a month, and back again soon after, but we didn’t bring that copy of Moby-Dick with us and I don’t remember how far we got. At home we found other things to read. Like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and Goodnight Moon. My daughter liked those better, I’m pretty sure. 

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