Ahab In The Moonlight

By Samuel C. Hasler

May is a changeable month in Indiana. The day had been warm, and I had left the Cadillac out in the driveway, but rain was supposed to be moving in after midnight, so I had either to put up the top or move it into the garage. That meant quitting William Kennedy’s Legs Diamond and my intake of vodka gimlets. I forgot about both when I stepped outside. Whoever has never spent even one night in jail will understand how I felt alone under the full moon, feeling the slight breeze on my face, the city sounds of Jackson to my west being muffled almost to silence. And I had spent ten years in prison. I smoked a filterless Camel to celebrate my freedom.

As I finished my cigarette, a tap-tapping came from the north. I looked towards where Thorne Street intersected with Mann Street. It was not a new sound, only one I had not expected that night at that hour. Then I saw him turn the corner onto Thorne, coming my way.

Even half a block away, Ahab makes recognition easy by using his harpoon as a walking staff. The light of the full moon rendered him an impressive sight – tall, dark, and wearing what looked like a hoodie. He saw me propped up against the rear of my white Cadillac convertible, so he crossed Thorne to me. In his honor, I lit another cigarette.

 When we were close enough not to shout, we greeted one another. My neighbors made me look like a spring chicken, and their lights were out. I was not sure if he would stop. There are times when he does not.

This time he stopped, his eyes steadfast in their looking at me and not my car. I knew then he was not having a good night. The first time we met, a couple of months ago, was outside Dr. Pangloss’s office, and the cold-eyed, almost lascivious way he eyed my Caddy and how his hand gripped his harpoon troubled me. He later told me I had good reason to worry about damage to my car. For all that, I think Pangloss is a bullshit artist; he has helped Ahab with his terror of large white things, mostly by transferring to himself Ahab’s antipathy. That Ahab is under Pangloss’s care for anger management that transference says something about Pangloss’s methods. I feared he might be having a relapse. Up close, I realized the hoodie he wore had the old New England Whalers logo.

I asked how he was even though I knew his answer, but law school taught me never to ask a question to which I did not know the response. 

He gave me what I expected: “Just restless.” 

I asked him if he wanted to come in and have a drink. 

“Thank you,” he said. “I cannot bear being within doors at the moment… I want to see the sky.” 

“It’s a grand thing, isn’t it?”

“Were you out on another road trip?”

“After the hell you and Poe and Omar gave me about my first one?”

“You are still offended by our concern?”

“I’m smiling, aren’t I?”

“Yes, you are. I remain not always certain how to interpret the feelings of others and direct my behavior towards the sociable.”

I went from a smile to an outright grin.

“You mean you are still trying to learn how to interact with social norms that will lead you to understand this is the best of all possible worlds?”

His face contorted like I had kicked him in the groin. How he growled helped with that image, too.

“My mind balks at twisting itself to utter that ghastly Pangloss’s words. Poe correctly diagnoses the man as a villain for the harm he does to the English language. He cramps my spirit with his nonsense. What soul bleats such banalities as if they were the verities of the greatest sages known to mankind? He has never felt the passion of anything, let alone a madness to scale the heights of Heaven itself and burst the gates of Hell; never would he dare go where reason and good sense have no currency, where only the will and the stomach to broach the bounds of life itself matter. He will never awaken one day far from home, far from his place in this world, to find such a madness has broken like a fever, to having a solemn conscience rake over the wreckage left by a monumental rage fed by one’s vanity.  Never will he know what it is like to wander about the blasted heath. For that, he should thank his stars. You know of what I speak.”

We have spoken enough of what brought me to this place and time. I nod in agreement.

“It is a hellish thing to hate the universe itself,” I said. 

“Hellish, indeed. But he is not the sort to think of Hell being anything we carry around within our breasts, not in this world. He’s never looked into the abyss of his self and found existence intolerable.”

“If he’s looked, he’s not seen. You been looking again? Is that what brought you around tonight?”

He chuckled without much in the way of mirth.

“I can tell you the screams I still hear of the men I bent to the will of my mania, and you will not shy away from me. There are some debts that can be paid only by death, and that recompense I find denied me. Death may not be all that one hopes it will be. The question of atonement rendered me restless.”

Well, I didn’t have a quick answer to that, so I puffed at my cigarette. Ahab craned his neck skyward, looking for I know not what. Then the head came down and the eyes fastened on me, a shadowy smile on his face, and he nodded at my cigarette. 

“You know that will kill you.”

“But not quick enough,” I said, that being my part in this routine. “You know, what I did was different from you. I only meant to destroy myself.”

“Just as mad, if differing in pitch and range.”

“Which is why you and I can talk like this. Neither Poe nor Omar ever went as far as we did. But you’ve never asked what made me stop my self-destructive ways.”

Surprising Poe is a joy; he is certain of himself being the smartest person in the room, but surprising Ahab is almost sublime. He still has a sense of being the person in the room having the most control over the situation. I watch his face concentrated in thought for a long minute.

“No, you never have.”

“I decided after all my attempts at self-destruction that being alive meant the universe decided to keep me alive for a purpose. That it was punishing me for trying to stop playing its game.”

“Atonement then?”

“I’ve got the feeling it’s more than just paying a debt. It’s more like I got to fight what led me into despondency. It’s just a feeling of something more purposeful than just muttering non-stop mea culpas. Maybe it’s only me fooling myself, but either way it’ll be clear some day. I’m just waiting to see what happens.”

Ahab stood there with his jaw clenched, nodding and thinking. I finished my smoke. Pitching the butt out into the street brought him out of his thoughts.

“I clutch at your meaning without getting a firm grip upon it. I will need to think on it some more. And I should let you return to what you were doing before I interjected myself. You still want me to bring chips and dip for our poker game tomorrow night?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Bring plenty of money, I plan to make up for last week.”

“Oh, my dear Glauser, you have now given me something to look forward to – the frustration of your plans!”

Ahab turned and walked away, His laugh mixing with the sound of false leg and harpoon. The way he laughs is raucous and not a little intimidating. He did it as he walked south, and I didn’t stop hearing until after he turned east on Heller Street. That was when I put the car into the garage. My giving Ahab something to think about didn’t mean it wasn’t prudent to put the Caddy out of the way of temptation.

Samuel C. Hasler is a former lawyer, 65 years old, residing in Muncie, Indiana.  Hasler has two published stories: “Passerby” through Thin Air Magazine, and “Exemplary Employee” in the anthology Dreams of Rust and Glass, and the short play “Getting What You Asked For” in Lost Lake Folk Opera v9. Also, he blogs at Still Educating Sam Hasler  (https://samchasler.blogspot.com/).