MOBY DICK

Link to article: MOBY DICK.

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     --header-title: "MOBY DICK";
     --header-subtitle: "or, THE WHALE";
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= [[size 150%]]**CHAPTER 1. Loomings.**[[/size]]
@@     @@Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little to no money in my bank account, and a personal life rapidly shrinking towards the grave, I thought it time to leave for good. It's the ultimate condition of any soul like mine, bottled and floating above a churning sea of sensation to which life knows no end, to eventually settle in a corner, fermenting in my last reserves of sweetness, desperate to be glugged and washed anew. However difficult, whenever I find myself in this dwindling condition; whenever the weight of a blanket signifies just the first barrier to starting my day; whenever I'm caught blank-faced along streets to whom I can no longer distinguish a relevant feature; whenever that miasma takes such a deep grip in me that it takes all prevailing will to move the wide-reaching corners that map my face and say but one word to the 7/11 clerk—then I account it high time to get the fuck out of the city. This is how I cope. To stay sane; I need that greater silence. And I think that's reasonable. If they but knew it, almost all afflicted by our human condition, some time or other, will feel exactly the same way about cities as me.
@@     @@Look at the great New York City, which reaches high into the sky to escape its own beating heart, detesting any who would make a home of its streets and alleyways. The very infrastructure scorns those who wish to linger, and not be caught, for once, in the flow of traffic both of foot and car. And to speak of its heart, the revered subway. What better emblem of land without rest? Pulsing veins beneath its skin are wrought for transit, and still the greatest contest is who will finally take a seat.
@@     @@Take a ride on the 7th Avenue line. Hold your seat and watch as the city takes its protracted breath, and the midday rush of oxygen is chartered to the brain. See the businessman who checks his watch every minute on the dot. Is it he who is in tune with the Great Beast around him? Can he hear some clockwork tick in the background that simplifies this great event? Or is that tic his own, anxious, as he's packed into the far most corner by courtesy? No one can say for sure, but I find myself doubting.
@@     @@Then is it she? The enlightened student, in this space between class, part time job, and home. Ears drowned out by music, attention turned down. Watch as she dances so gracefully through the thrashing crowd, masterfully placing herself in the only seat to open clear. Is it by some divine miracle she has managed this, or has dulling her senses made the rest all clear? That quintessence—certainly what the Businessman lacked—which reads the signals of the city as it were their own. Could it be awake in her as she sits, almost numb to the surrounding world? Perhaps, but alas, some time later the student looks up, and in her now-once invisible eyes you can see a sorrow and regret as shallow and disheartening as a venting sewer pipe. The savant revealed a fool after all, bumping clumsily against a kindly old women as she darts from the cart. You must dismay at the amateur display contrasting her glorious mount; That inkling of fanciful perfection lost. Certainly, for all, she missed her stop. 
@@     @@Or maybe then, the interior outsider? That fellow-of-a-sort on the other side of the cart that you cannot see, but hear—though you and all other passengers may try their hardest not to. An omnipresent archetype which arises in places such as this, islands within themselves to which no ship may ever find port, but whose lighthouses blear forth endlessly, yearning glimmers beckoning over a crushing shore. Is this the ultimate truth to which the Great Beast deigns point its vanished finger? That bliss is found in a tether rent? Is the true rhythm of the concrete jungle so incomprehensible that it must drive one into the orange and blue? One must simply hope it isn't the case, and by this, dismiss it whole cloth.
@@     @@Time and time anew, as you watch, you may aspire to have spotted that chosen few. To have derived, at last, the blessed amongst the populace who prove the possibility true. And time and time again, as you watch, they falter in your view, clear to the world in their inadequacy. Is this better? To know that the Great Beast which holds so many souls entrapped in its mighty lungs and gut considers them no more than air, or food? Pure sustenance for its endless growth? Is there no-one who is truly served by these topless spires and blazing nerves?
@@     @@Certainly not. Surely, who else could it be but the lords of this land, sitting in their spires, pretender gods of iron and blood. A studied eye can see the ichor as it drips from every skyscraper, exhausted and foul, a far cry from the when it burst so virulently from the subway port. In fact, these are their monuments. Their idols to themselves. Ever-present, by their own insistence, in the minds of the courteous, foolish, and yearning alike, as they guide all hands to press against the Great Beast's immense chest, believing it just their own which keep it a-breath. And still, in these iron-drenched cities over which they insist their control, where do they sit but high above it, coveting views of anywhere but. Looking outward. Elsewhere. What is gazing into the horizon but resentment for the city; the idolater's own keep? Could it be any the more telling that even those who proclaim to benefit from this worldly mechanism resent it just the same as we? Top to bottom, each soul positioned as best to get that view. And in that, maybe the music of the movement can finally be heard. The ultimate biological truth of any beast—great and small—that no matter how much you breathe in, no matter how large its lungs, as it strives to hold on even in the face of death and the tip of its head plunges beneath the water's surface; can you feel the tension building as you sit here, every moment your face turning deeper red, truly, nothing could match the searing pain of every muscle in your core tensing, then straining, the engagement a form of self-immolation, an affront to a life lived in conversation with fresh air. One simply must exhale.
@@     @@The sigh. Imagine, if you will, the classic image of a tradesman turning in after a long day. In this picturesque scene he feels almost comically obliged to express it. Can you feel the warmth of his breath? The clarity of the moment pierces the mind—almost divine—but to truly indulge in such a simple respite takes ignoring the reality of the Beast. To embody the weary tradesman, the true mechanism of the sigh is often obfuscated by the gesture, but the gesture is all that is seen by the observer. We wish to feel the chair, soft and supple, all encompassing as the body eases back into it. To lose the body, what once was present now allowed to fade into the background and therefore into the gesture, because of course the gesture isn't just the body and its receptacle—the entire room is the receptacle, furthermore, the house is too, in its perfect quaintness; for to be too large would make the sigh feel so small and cold and discomforting—it's the essence of the action as it's taken. 
@@     @@To conceive of this place—the interior sigh—you may place your mind in the endless suburbs which radiate out from the Beast. Mimetic bliss in its patterning, surely this is where exalting exhalation is to be found? I could appear so, but be not fooled! Still among the multitudes the presence steeps. See them in droves; cars, gravitating to the out-of-sight world center, destined to sit in clogged airways masquerading as highways as they partake in commute. True exit would not hold this caveat of lingering ties. The sigh, complete, must not be beholden to some orbiting moon's impressed tide.
@@     @@So when I say I'm leaving the city for good, I say so invoking personal exsufflation. The time had come for a strong-armed press on my own position, that is, to quit my job entirely, burning bridges and cutting ties, then to ride the train until the unfamiliar overtakes all else. It is thus doing so that would release me, though I could not imagine a true material detachment at the time. It was but a whim. A personal rebellion—perhaps aimed at the bottom of the creek—which overtook my every desire once it bubbled up to the surface of my mind, clawing to release myself from the whim of the Beast, and adventure at last under the quasi-guidance of bumbling Fate.
@@     @@By reason of these things, then—even at that present moment in fear of my own subconscious affection for the beast—there was but one place to begin. To refresh my fully fermented soul, I would drink. And there, in a stupor past emotion or blame, drifting—maybe even attempting to paddle—through that blackout abyss, I would keep but one thought at the front of my mind. "You need to get out of here, Ishmael." And by that hope, pure in the dredges, would waking glory come to heed.
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= [[size 150%]]**CHAPTER 2. The Backpack.**[[/size]]

@@     @@Be well aware, the following few chapters of my recollection—as they languidly unfold—are much less "recollection" in the form of pure memory than a patchwork history discovered through a fraught exercise of archaeology. In this, the composition thus contains: The products of meditation and conversation with mine very own soul; scenes-of-mind resembling the scraps of a burned Alexandria, torn and singed at the edges; plus accounts from those who knew me—or brushed past me—and would offer input from in any of the years proceeding. So henceforth from my leaving one of many various New York bars, and after I suddenly appeared at my apartment:
@@     @@I stuffed a shirt or two into my old college backpack, threw it behind my back, and started for Penn Station and the first train I could see. Quitting the good city of old Manhatto, I likely rode the lines until dodging the ticket inspectors was no longer viable, and duly arrived in New Bedford. It was a Saturday night in December. Much was I disappointed upon learning that the station security wouldn't let a known offender linger, even to shelter from the cold, till I proved I could pay at least.
@@     @@As most who commit plans to reality while in—put lightly—a more creative state, it may as well be related that I had not thunk this far ahead. Purest folly, yes. For while my mind was put so singularly to the idea of some "great escape" from the jaws of the Beast, I had so splendidly landed myself in the maw of another, namely, to whom I was significantly less familiar.  I can't say I personally, nor any of my friends, had meaningfully considered New Bedford to be a location worth even the merest thought, and frankly, I'm not sure I even knew it existed before this point in my life, and further to that, why anyone would;—at least until I saw a cute little historical display to its esteem. An old whaling hub. I dread how I could have missed knowledge of such deep importance.
@@     @@But now, until I could figure out an actual plan for my continued existence, it became a matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep in the meanwhile. How cruel is it that ideals must collide so violently with the fact of human self-preservation? That I—and any other so inclined to greater change—am so reduced to almost-sleep-walking through dead at night, starving and cold as I metaphysically wrench myself from the façade of the cruel structure built around me from birth. The sun—at last—could be seen unimpeded by walls or lenses, but I am compelled to turn away. To grovel. Thusly dampened, reaching into boundless calculus of my interior mind for the best way to stretch the 5 bucks on my person, I knew I was looking not for a hotel, motel, or any accommodation of the reasonable sort, but yet another bar—certainly whatever measured as "dingy" and "cheap" in my eye.
@@     @@A few names surface from that night, spotted whilst trudging around in the well-lit Bedfordian main streets. The first was a disappointment, peering into the darkened interior of "The Crossed Harpoons"—I can't even begin to respect it, closed at this early hour, and filled to the brim with garish themed furnishings and flairs. An unrepentant tourist trap—if New Bedford gets tourists, don't ask me—would surely be too expensive even if it was business hours.  Then another, the "Sword-Fish Inn," was bright windowed, with music blaring and common spirit held strong, but for some reason they kicked me out as soon as I entered—At least, that's what I certainly thought at the time, but I've later learned I wordlessly stepped into the establishment, braced myself on the wall to grotesquely paint across the wallpaper with vomit, then once called out to, turned tail straight out of the door and ran—what a rude bunch!
@@     @@Finding such immediate distaste for the well-lit and shuttered, I stumbled into the darkened lanes, measuring that if I were to find an ideal place to settle out of the cold, it would best be one of the oft-hidden local dives—the sort that wouldn't be so boisterously planted a few steps from the train. A good plan, if it weren't for the nature of darkness allowing foul imps and devils to take my feet into the air, gracing my palate with my first delicacy from the city: wet asphalt. None can say exactly how many times this trip-within-a-poorly-planned-trip repeated, but I'll mention soon the number of bruises I woke up with the next day, and more startlingly, the chip missing from one of my top teeth.
@@     @@Struggling as I obviously was, my obstinate nature did eventually lead me closer to the docks, whereupon I found a soft light from a less softly-worn door beaming as from the heavens to pull me from the darkness—though in the meagre congregation, my fellow worshippers amounted to just two moths fluttering and bashing about. Hugging close round the wall to find the entrance, what little illumination shining free failed to alert me to a low-hanging sign for the slanted establishment, which I duly hit my head upon;—though after, read "The Spouter Inn:— Peter Coffin."
@@     @@It was a queer sort of place—pardon my double speak—a somewhat shabby and rundown affair, scarcely missing a few tiles from its old-fashioned gabled roof. Dilapidated, sure, it struck me to have stood a good long time, placing it squarely in the archetype of a comfortable-yet-comfortably-cheap dive I so craved. One will certainly hold it in shameful contrast to the temptations foisted before me prior, the hallowed Crossed Harpoons and Sword-Fish Inn, but as an almost-Gawain already privy to the fancies of these splendid castles, that's just to say their tricks were ever clearer—after all, a warmth can reach its surreptitious tendrils from the android-hearth of well bought boiler hold which places a weary traveler in well ventilated idyll, nigh bliss. But that same traveler will notice upon leaving that their soul has been thusly emptied to accompany their now hollowed pockets. It is true. This Spouter may leak a centigrade or two—and lack in grades of other sorts—but from those same holes my pennies will squirrel and flee, and for that I'll be eternally cheerful. 
@@     @@But there's no added worth to lingering, no—as pleasant to my pockets it was to stride free through the streets—I was hastily leaking some centigrade myself. Once must accept perfect adequacies when they arise, then and there, and commit fast, or else shrivel up in place—a sturdy tree being much better the form for one bearing witness to their own life. I am no tree, I can tell you that,—though I'm green in many ways to the world—so I stepped sturdily into this "Spouter Inn," chancing it a wellspring for my forthcoming hope.
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= [[size 150%]]**CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn.**[[/size]]

@@     @@To speak generally, the first impression of any new entrant to the esteemed Spouter-Inn is a confused one. Riding their sightline from the shabby exterior, the expectant patron is coasting the very bottom of all hopes, and then, quite immediately, is rocked in the tides of a sudden storm of interior styling choices that threaten to upturn their paddleboat of prospects. The time-honored signals be: A crack of thunder, as they spy the expertly wainscoted walls; a blinding light, the mounted array of ancient implements on one side; and finally lightning, a regally displayed painting taking up the majority of the opposite wall—and what a painting it is. Banished are any floating notions in that moment, as they seek to process the depicted scene. Rolling waves of blues and blacks fronted by crashing smatterings of white that all coalesce in a dim murky mélange. In patches, one can swear to spot a detraction of brown or silver, but time has worn away the concrete intention of any artist here. Still, it awakens something of that oft derided curiosity that we all hold, that base desire, to know what once was depicted within. Yet faded, the ghost of a grand presence drips from it as though the oil paints were ever-running, allowing any viewer the opportunity to dive into its shifting wake.
@@     @@Though in an absence of anyone to confer with—a timeless tragedy that the regulars are long past throes of wonder—the visitor will let their eyes adrift, now jaded, prepared to accept the remaining imperfections that hide about. Yes, it is then when you will see the the cracks in the ivory frame, the prying boards warped within the walls, and the cruel contrast of those exact planks, dutifully pulled from the spare sailboat so long ago, with the hardware store two-by-four, unlacquered, insisting it deserves a seat right beside. Further speaking of interlopers, as one is finally given a moment to study the wall of storied harpoons, whalebone clubs, fine tooth saws, and yet more twisted harpoons, you'll find nestled just beside them sits a phallic implement among phallic implements: A large silicon dildo—whose presence makes a third interloper, if one is not so inclined.
@@     @@Fleeing this entryway—inward, having no desire to forsake themselves once more to the cold—the new visitor will find at last the public room greeting them with a constant murmur. In the clink of drinks, conversation, or drunken song, the meagre better features inherited from the entryway seem graciously renewed by those beating hearts littered round about in booths, supplanting the unmistakable emptiness of a withered painting with a bustling fervor from all sides. It's a filling, satisfied mood. Like the shallows of a beckoning tide ashore a beach it welcomes one sit, to submerge in the reverie and bask in it, engulfed as you let forth that mythical sigh. Sink;—hear the drums beat and the horns blare as the angels forebear your imminent divinity—then breathe and choke. Your breath reeks of swill. You're drowning in it. Can you even see the land? Each moment you spend in this place pushes you further, farther, out into the deep dark drink below. Watch the regulars and how they stay afloat; such a company of New Bedfordian sailors is well used to the presence of the drink as they defy it, pressing their bodies tight in the booths. A close friend keeps another afloat, but without that? It isn't difficult to spot the isolated man drowning ashore—and not just in his liquor. That is the risk of embarking alone, it's true. Alas, no arm yet stretched out to grasp mine as I sat at the flat topped bar, calling to the tender for glass of the cheap stuff.
@@     @@A new face is always a curiosity in towns like this, so it was no surprise—as I spilt my story-as-of-now to the man before me—that though the din didn't dim a moment since my arrival, every ear was turned in my direction. It is a masterwork of the social unconscious, much as we as humans are constantly measuring the state of our immediate sensory surroundings with our fingertips, eyes, and tongues, that a deeper sense weaves its way around a group. Nascent beasts are born in the amalgamation of kindred souls, sensing the minutest shift in its surroundings; goosebumps. The present defense was a middle-aged man sidling up besides me. 
@@     @@He had caught both that I was looking for a place to stay the night and that I was desperately low on funds. Sympathetic, of course, but all his rooms here were full—not a bed unoccupied. "Unless," he added, tapping his forehead, "you'd want to share? A lot of boys looking for company round here."
@@     @@I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should ever do so, it would depend upon who the guy might be, and that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the guy was not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with the half of any decent man’s blanket.
@@     @@"I thought so. All right; you need food?—Bud'll get you food. Won't you Bud? On the house."
@@     @@The barkeep wordlessly assented, leaving the landlord to strut to a booth across the room and lean down close to one of the sailors. I can't read lips on the best day, but I can assure you that not to many words were shared before the sailor's eyes locked on mine, piercing through the veil of isinglass that enshrouded my otherdom, dressing me down. I locked eyes with the sailor, nervous—but surely whatever shape I managed to press my face into pleased him—as he nodded back at the landlord, flashing me a ravished grin. The landlord walked back.
@@     @@At last my food was shoved onto the bar top. A simple bar burger drenched in oil, grease, and oozing thin channels of red. Barren as the town itself, but what a sight for starved eyes like mine. Hardly waiting, I tore into it. It's a marvel we eat at all when food is so enhanced on an empty stomach. All it takes is a meagre fast, and the return is such the sweeter, fatter, richer—one could be deceived they were born a king if the carrot was bobbed before them at an interval, surely, or perhaps even less. Just a whiff of that dripping oil could do. I'd lick it from the countertops, the floor, or even a sailor's bare chest—were that not what I'd already agreed to do.
@@     @@The clarity of a fuller stomach; I'd just realized what I'd agreed to do. Not at all sober, but sobered, I had sold myself. For a burger and a night out of the cold? Anyone would hope that wasn't all they were worth, but I could still feel the chill on the tips of my fingers, freezing me to the surface—God, I couldn't go back out in that cold.
@@     @@"My boy," said the landlord, "you sure packed that away."
@@     @@"Was hungry," I whispered, "whose the sailor?"
@@     @@"You're in for a good night kid," said the landlord, "Skrimshaw's not one of the rough ones."
@@     @@“I'll sleep well enough then,” says I. “When does he want me?”
@@     @@"He'll call before long." was the answer.
@@     @@I could not help but be apprehensive then, not at all knowing the scale of roughness for a bored mariner—if it's worth pointing out that does ring an alarm bell or two, doesn't it? What little comfort held was that our little exchange of goods and good-times was intended to free him from the chilling wastes of sexual frustration. It's just a good deed in turn! One singular night, no full claim of my territory, no, the self-sale is at the most a renting opportunity—much as my own staying in the Spouter—temporary in nature, certainly, for the warmth of us both: myself and a solitary sailor.
@@     @@My own little supper over, knowing not what else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening as a looker on.
@@     @@It was for the most part the expected fraternal antics, but now paying attention, I noticed the trickle of seamen in and out of the back rooms. They weren't exactly quiet about it, but it was an interesting puzzle deciphering the patterns of idle caught eyes and conversational hooks that would quietly ship away sailors in pairs—and sometimes more than pairs—to soon after diffuse back into the festivities. Not to overstate the frequency of these rendezvous, it was no river, but it was quite apparent when propositions occurred, especially as the night grew deeper and the sailors more boisterous—so boisterous that I had to fend off an over-confident over-drunk fellow who was vocally enraptured with my thighs.
@@     @@With this, to my persistent intrigue, the collective did allow me to remain generally unimpeded as I idly lingered, watching the steady flow in and out, and then out and out, as the night began to die into the more expected activities of sleep and silence. It was now about 2 o'clock. I had kept my eye on Skrimshaw—as he was so named by the landlord—in my own hope that he would waste himself and I would be able to slough the established pretense and simply share the bed without an exercise beforehand. Alas, I found him spry as a summer salmon. He was in that same booth as earlier in the night, talking now to an unfamiliar man, dark skinned with prominent facial tattoos, about something I can't quite recall, though talk they did, and as they did talk for a long moment longer, Skrimshaw took it upon himself to draw me down with his large arm full into the booth and close to him in his seat—revealing the source of my distraction; for all my anxieties about the greater arrangement withstanding, I was a flaming homosexual in the tight grip of a well-built sailor.
@@     @@So I say pay no attention to the time passed within the pit! Rather, see that once the exchange began to relax, so did Skrimshaw's arm—freeing at last my mind—and letting me catch the stranger's name in their goodbye. Queequeg. A strange name isn't it? Not quite fitting a sailor, if he was a sailor at all, but he didn't seem to make a habit of fitting into the aesthetic mode of the place, nor succumb to the monolith of the pinpoint culture. Maybe that was how he arrived so silently, as though from thin air. There's no time for me to linger on that though. 
@@     @@Skrimshaw was first to take his leave, and in taking his leave motioned me further into the Inn to those same back rooms certain sailors had previously absconded in the night's bustle. He made a comment about me, louder than before, in the direction of Queequeg, but it was obvious it was meant for any of the envious within the room. A common gesture; a brandishing of hunted game, making a trophy of me—though I lacked to prior context to why he'd earned it more than bought it—little more than a fine watch, or car, or clothes. It really wasn't about me, in all my human complexities. Yet in that walking, in that comment, in all that built that social show of our coming coming, I was suddenly so far from my self that I hit my knee square on the leg of a sturdy wood table. I saw myself—from above—flinch, then face flushed, lease a few quick words, before continuing out of the bar. 
@@     @@ Ushered into that small room, colder than the bar had been—maybe for a faulty window—but furnished plenty enough to look comfortable with its big bed, I was astride Skrimshaw as soon as the door had slammed itself shut. By his lead he moved me, pulled me, touched me, beginning the process of both our undressing; a familiar play to all that have seen it. Yes, there are moments in my personal history that—in other locales—I'd played similar games with city-sailors and ended up in a back room or seven, though all had been markedly different. In all cases, I was much more engaged. Here, bobbing up and down in the lap of Skrimshaw, no need for my own active participation in the act, I was engrossed instead with an ornately painted fireboard sitting in the corner of the room.
@@     @@The scene was simple: a man striking a whale with his trusty harpoon. It's a clash seen countless times across the great seas, but specifically, this was the moment when the harpoon had first breached the blubber of his prey, penetrating deep into its large body, grievously wounding the animal for the rest of its life. An abjectly horrible affair, yet, for the violence, the whale did not seem to be fazed. Sure, this could by my own failure, a lack of perspective. We like, as people, to project our feelings, our constructs, the very idea of the face onto nearly anything that surrounds us in our daily lives. In the face of human exceptionalism, all of the natural world is reduced such, but perhaps due to their presumed proximity to us, animals fall victim the most. I know then, that to pretend to take the throne of mind occupied by the sperm whale is foolish. Its blank face surely means nothing of its internal turmoil: the pains, oh, the pains, the desire to leave, the will to greater freedom away from the constructs of man, dreaming of those clear blue ocean waters it migrates across yearly; but is now and forever bound in the fireboard. A tiny moment to live on for all eternity. Its penetration, its reduction.
@@     @@My attention was diverted with Skrimshaw deciding we should change position, inverting us, leaving me back against the counterpane. Avoiding eye contact, my potential distractions were reduced to just the flat-boarded wooden ceiling, with all its seas of intrigue buried in the rivets and swirls of wood. For all that helped me, I soon espied a happening of such grandiosity and volume that I am stunned I had not prior. It was that Queequeg. Leaning over, turned away from the main event to which I was participating, and tinkering with the faulty window. When had he walked in? Was he not aware of what was going on in here? I had to stop my self from suddenly sitting up and calling out to voice my consternation. I met Skrimshaw's eyes for a moment—the one other in the room for who I could gauge any regularity of this interruption from—but he was fully occupied with me, lost to lust. I wonder if he'd stop even if he did notice, for all that implies—that he's so consumed that a potential voyeur is no object, or debatably worse, that he would hold no objections to an impromptu public exhibition of his sexual prowess.
@@     @@Nonetheless I was thoroughly transfixed on Queequeg. In his fixing, I could see there was something strange about his manner of hammering and adjusting—rather, it was as though I was seeing both it and not it at the same time. Sliding off of him was the image that I expected for his work, silent and thorough, but shadowed below, a faint image outlined in vibrant white, was the same man muttering and contorting his hands with almost ritualistic practice. It was transcendental, those moments where my eyes glazed over, the rest of the world dimming to the sight of his true-fingers forming new shapes and patterns that blurred through every passing moment. My head surged. I blinked, and it was just the man hammering away in silence.
@@     @@Additionally, Skrimshaw was now gone. How long had I laid there, naked and prone, watching this man hammer away? My body was exhausted. I was covered in sweat, lube,—and other things—but still my curiosity kept me there, deeply uncomfortable in the many facets of my present being, just to pay a little more attention his way. 
@@     @@Sooner or later, he returned the gesture. Clearly finished with the window—spotless and functional as the day it was first installed—he meandered over to the other side of the bed, took out a tomahawk from who knows where, and lit it. One puff to the air. Thick rolling clouds from his mouth. Another, lingering too. And more and more, beginning to collect and hover, dispersing a sharp, smoky, but herbal smell—with a little something else I couldn't place.
@@     @@“So who are you?”—he at last said—“you're not speakin', hell, I'd be jumpin' to explain were I you.” And so saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about me in the dark.
@@     @@I moved to leaned, noticed a deep ache in my lower regions, then stopped leaning up. He chuckled warmly.
@@     @@“It's not that hard is it? What's the name?” the handyman said through the laugh, letting loose further rolling puffs of smoke from his lips. I groaned. At that moment, the door let out a creak. The landlord, grinning, leaned through the frame, sharing a look with ever-stoic Queequeg.
@@     @@“Good lad ay,” said he, grinning again to me, “have you not said hello to your roommate?”
@@     @@“Excuse me?” I shouted somewhat limply, “and why didn’t you tell me it wasn't Skrimshaw's room?”
@@     @@“Ah I'm sure it's no bother to him;—wasn't he out all night anyway?—Enjoy the bed. Queequeg, look here—you're alright to share with Ishmael here, ay?”
@@     @@“And thats the name,”—grunted Queequeg, giving me a half-sly look as he kept puffing away at his pipe and sitting up in bed.
@@     @@"Let's get you settled then," he added, moving towards me and bolstering my tired frame against his side. I got a good look a him then, at his tattoos, intricate and artistic, covering ever peeking portion of his skin from under his clothes. He was muscular too, the body of a working man—your jack of all trades, fixit, whatever, for what I'd bet—but he wasn't dirty at all. Moreon, he was tender as he took a—fairly—clean rag and helped me clean myself up a bit, so that with each mop, it seemed, I became less and less bothered by sharing a bed with him. I looked to the door once more. The landlord was gone clear, leaving just Queequeg and I, settling in under the covers, no words more needed.
@@     @@I turned in, and never slept better in my life.
@@     @@
@@     @@

= [[size 150%]]**INTERLUDE 1. The Spouter-Out.**[[/size]]

@@     @@The sands are coarse but firm beneath my feet. The sliding ripple of the waters mixes with all that I am, pushing me through to the next destination.
@@     @@I cannot see as one would see the light that shines through dawn's open window, no, I must know the sights that place themselves before me for what they are.
@@     @@Oil in water floats to the top. It is a foreign thing, a bouyant thing, but by that, it is clearly not the water. What am I? To be sinking, like the stone, but still the water feels a closer home to me. I am dripping. The skin on my face makes a face once to the kelp as it passes between the lines. The skin on my face is dripping off of my face.
@@     @@Can you be said to be growing then? I am the water. I am no oil, yet the distinction I feel is so great, so true, that I think for myself to not be water. I widen. I spread. A reflex fires on the signal but nothing happens, the grip is getting looser now. I have no fingers.
@@ @@
@@     @@Flames in an oil lamp lick against a cold metal prison. The only ones free are the burned, changed now forever. They float, something new.
@@     @@They are water anew, a new ocean above. Take to the sky my brethren and taste the edges of the horizon. I cannot imagine being so free. Alas, I am not water, and you are not flame. We are sinking away from our homes. What is down. What is sinking.
@@ @@
@@     @@The dripping never stops. A drip from the candle up into the air. The drip down below, seeping through the cracks in the skyline. A drip through the cracks in the clouds, lower and lower as we sink into into.
@@     @@The basin is our destiny. The atmosphere awaits.
@@     @@And still you meet me here?
@@     @@I am not water and you are not oil, yet on this horizon we mix as one. Drip into me. Fold into my flesh-that-is-not-flesh, feel the desperate beating of my heart-rhythm which is so almost forgotten, repeated only by the echoing ripple far above.
@@     @@I am not flame, you are not smoke. There is no distance. There is no us. 
@@     @@Drip into me. 
Drop by drop.
@@     @@
@@     @@

= [[size 150%]]**CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane.**[[/size]]

@@     @@Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his husband. The counterpane was of patchwork, made of various squares and triangles taken from doubly more various dull sheets, patterned or otherwise; it struck me the similarity to his great tattoo covered arm. I'd say it's mostly due to all its shifting tan lines and the sharp geometric angles of his tattoos, but if you squinted it could almost seem as he was an extension of it, blending so in, then, that it was as though I was tightly ensnared by a ghostly arm. Externally enforced sleep paralysis, perhaps; I was a teddy bear hugged tight.
@@     @@It was an interesting sensation. For one, the aching from the prior night had only increased in intensity, and placed upon that was a spectacular punishment for my indulgence in drink. This allowed another deep aching, manifest squarely in a headache that wracked my psyche, physical and mental states at once in synchronicity. Likewise, due to the shackle around my neck prior mentioned, I was unable to do anything about it.
@@     @@It puts me in the mind of a dream I once had. A proper sleep paralysis, though not manifest in any watching monsters pushing slowly in the shadows at the corners of view. No, this instead was a state of arrest where I lay simply in bed amidst what benign darkness you would expect, but found a resistance about me so overpowering that it was as though my bedclothes clung tight to my skin. Lethargy. Though not from will, my every intention was to move a leg, arm, or neck, to maneuver myself outside of the crushing numbness, but it was for naught. Instead, by body allowed only the beating of my heart. A constant. That thumping that reverberated through my unmoving corpus, approaching as stalking predator, my own breath the killer going for my throat. And then began the pulling. Downward, about my midsection, as though the world would want me sink into the springs of my mattress, or further, to be swallowed whole, funneled excruciatingly down into a small greedy crack in the ground. That horrid squeezing, I remember it, and ever accompanied by the faster and faster beating of my heart.
@@     @@Before waking. A dream is a curious thing—in my view—because it presents a reality so unmistakably real, so true to the very root of your brainstem that you'll indulge it in unknowing confidence, but can be offloaded in seconds as waking crashes its car into the tree of reality. The experience of that paralysis felt like simultaneously seconds, minutes, and days, in the moment. But what of 8 hours? Each night we betray our physicality into an unknowable abyss, the only remnants of which we regard the truest insight into our beings, yet is staggeringly incomplete and disposable. Everything and nothing compresses into the most basic biological function. Rest. Sleep. Could we comprehend what we are missing?
@@     @@Nonetheless, some remnants do stick out to us. For I it has always been that constricting lethargy, bleeding into any sluggish move or halting grip. Facing this awake, panic does not so much overcome me as it rises from the base of my soul overcoming my prior faculties with the desire to leave. And to this, I was swiftly becoming tired of getting hugged by this mountain of a man. I needed to wake him—"Queequeg!—Queequeg! Get off me"—but all he did was snore. I almost thought it hopeless. Still, in an attempt to release my soul's exhilaration, I found all the energy in me to call my arms to sensation and push them in whatever direction would have them—which for not dislodging Queequeg—introduced me to the colder open air of the bedroom as the counterpane slid off of the both of us. On that burst of vital air, a grunt sounded. Then a stirring, and soon Queequeg was broke free from the tight grip of slumber—and I could beg him release me from his tight grip of slumber too.
@@     @@Once loose I went about the motions of re-dressing myself, but it quickly dawned upon me that I had no clue where my bag was. I took a hazy scan of the room, trying to bring forth an idea that might remind me of its location, and upon spying the fireboard—somewhat circuitously—this did occur. Mind not my wandering mind for what draws out facts from it, but it was that very fireboard which depicted with great painterly quality a whale being struck, and to my estimation—though I left it unvoiced—it must have entered the abode from the same hands as designed that tremendous faded painting in the entry chamber. Entrance well awakened, I can be sure my bag was with me then—and is not now—so where else could my bag be but the barstool I'd stood vigil upon just last night. 
@@     @@As I had been working through the strung out conspiracy board of my thoughts, Queequeg got to his own work, retrieving day-clothes from a drawer and dressing quite efficiently. He was almost out of the room when I called out to him—worried I'd miss an opportunity that did not involve personal embarrassment—to see if he would find my bag for me at the bar. He was kind to do so before swiftly heading on his way. Odd jobs to tend to, he said, then left.
@@     @@
@@     @@

= [[size 150%]]**CHAPTER 5. Breakfast.**[[/size]]

@@     @@I followed in due time—allowing myself space both temporally and about the room to dress myself in a way becoming of a man aching in such a dual fashion—and found Peter Coffin standing dutifully at the bar. His face housed that same grin from the night before. My face was much less kind. A grudge feels unbecoming, however, so I softly insisted some sort of hang-over cure to pay for his little game. The cup of coffee was plenty for my hopes; but so kind was the landlord that he cracked an egg into a shot glass. It went down slow, but he tossed me a painkiller after I downed it.
@@     @@The morning Spouter-Inn was a starkly different tone to the night prior. Homely—almost—free of the claustrophobic press of salted sailor bodies, spare the few boarded lingerers in much similar straights to me.  Deadbeats, some, alcoholics already dusting off another glass—but they too have to sate that ever haunting ache, I can't help but pity. We are kept raw by our vices, and my blasting headache would not pass.
@@     @@I took a breath to center myself. I find, friendly to this state of stammering pulses, that I can relax the pain if I engage with it, focusing in on the outward pressing pressure escaping from my skull in waves. I tried this technique, but my mind was wrong. My blood felt regular in my veins, my thoughts for stable, was screaming from inside to be free. No, it was a headache from the outside. A thrum that no other—clearly—could hear, pushing in at me, screaming, like I'd forgotten how to resist the constant press of the air above.
@@     @@It became a present necessity to clear my head—and I was sure that would not happen in company of folks here—so I left the Spouter to take a stroll.
@@     @@
@@     @@

= [[size 150%]]**CHAPTER 6. The Street.**[[/size]]

@@     @@A beach town—or coastal one, if you can't convince anyone you have a beach—is a tragic sight during the off season. Walking, as you will—for there is little more to do—through the half-shuttered main street and the vacated holiday-homes, it reads of a place that is haunted by its own specter, slivers of a once-had joy peering through windows and coloring the walls. For nothing else, one would imagine it the perfect locale for the isolated walker—who does not dream of stepping through a world populated only by them?—but that pulsing headache you so hardily earned with last night's drinking will make a population of any space.
@@     @@It didn't get quieter with some fresh air. In fact, it almost felt like it had gotten louder or—if not louder—clearer, if a headache can be so clear. Wherein the Spouter it was rough and assaulting my every sense, opening my horizons had allowed me to identify and element of directionality to my ailment, which was not comforting in the slightest.
@@     @@I had found myself completely alone yet overwhelmingly anxious. Like a rabbit, Inflicted at all times with the condition of survival, such prey animals know when they're being stalked—for it might as well always be—and carries that sensibility about it. This sense—not unfamiliar to me—was completely absent from my mind. Instead, in this forest of rotting headboards and dead dreams, I found not a single morsel of malice in my watcher's covert eyes. Instead, it was the passivity of the glare on the back of my head that irked me. To imagine I could be in the seat of the predator at all, even if placed against my own will—or else, thrust into an entirely foreign dynamic.
@@     @@I—on more than one occasion on that walk—found myself quickly turning as though to spot my stalker in the act, but was met with no perpetrator. It was a suburb. The shadows kept their regular length. The winds wound through the blocks. The headache—though it could not be a normal headache, surely—screamed, louder, softer, blaring, fainter down one block than the other, the sole audience for its obnoxious chorus. Could I be so superstitious to feel a sound was chasing me? Call me that, then. As it is the truth that I began to run from it.
@@     @@It became that I was inward bound. Sprinting. What little triangulation I could ascertain from this new sense, it was centered in the sea—so the dock was no good. Thus I was surging through the horrible main street once more, with its empty facades and barren trees, planted for the illusion of rustic tendency when out-of-towners come round. It was no place to rest—a mockery of a half-place—but I caught my breath against a post. It was still too loud.
@@     @@So further I ran. I couldn't flee by train—they would not have me and I would not survive the wait. To imagine staying still in one spot in that moment while the sound searched me out—I couldn't bear it. It was the heartbeat constancy once more, risen to the real from the dream and proving the sheer fact of its pattering perseverance on the outsides of my skull. I could feel it closing in as I ran, soon blindly, the only thought in my head was "Get away"—"Get Away"—"GET AWAY". 
@@     @@And in a moment it was gone. Flickered out like an LED light, so not even heat emanated off of its unseen bulb. Purest silence.
@@     @@I was standing before a chapel, of sorts. Tall, with interesting, very naturalistic architecture, as though a corpse were stood upright and encased in brickwork and bannisters. I saw no reason to doubt that the silence was due to some otherworldly interference on its part.
@@     @@I saw no reason not to go in.
@@     @@
@@     @@

= [[size 150%]]**CHAPTER 7. The Chapel.**[[/size]]

@@     @@Though you won't find a full score of regular parishioners, a certain chapel sits somewhere in the outskirts of New Bedford to this day. It is a whaleman's chapel—notice the obsolete profession—and sits in abandon for that self-same reason.
@@     @@It is a structure of and for its own, built dually on the buried corpus of whalemen and whales alike. From the foundations to the skies, you will see climbing up into the bannisters are structural cores of whalebone, columns of masts, all decorated with retired ships ropes and sail drapings that meet at the fore in a pulpit fit for the once great captain. Here, the stylings resemble the prow of his ship—at what would be better for his preaching—where he once told the sermon of the seas. It is his right, and it is his reap. To this day, the candles are kept alight with whale oil and his hallowed spermaceti.
@@     @@I was so shoved into the chapel on that screaming day by circumstance, echoing my footsteps in its hallowed halls so disgracefully—I am besides myself—but it is a divine grace to be honored with such a personal anecdote. It is leaving home for the first time, and returning. Any opportunity to see a place anew will do.
@@     @@And so here I ran my hand against the ivory pews and sat at a middle-most row—closer to the wall—as it took my fancy. That muffled silence reigned, peace allowing me to appreciate the otherwise abject quality of the daily weather. Sunny, mostly cloudless, and beaming down upon me, yet I felt no warmth from the rays. This told me the outside was still turned against me—at least—and I shifted my seat out of its way, closer now to the wall, which I noticed was lined fully with marble tablets, with black borders, masoned from the sides of chapel. Upon revisiting, I've taken their contents down. A handful of certain distinction read as such:—
@@     @@SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF The late CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY, Who in the bows of his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, August 3d, 1833. THIS TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS WIDOW.
@@     @@And it was upon reading these that the headache I had so misidentified returned in force—not in the aimless screaming that had characterized it prior—instead in the stinging tears of a transparent woman crying in the pew just beside me. I turned to see her in her quasi-physicality and startled. For all my engagement in superstition this day I would never had called myself one who believed in ghosts, but here, right before my eyes—and rudely testing my ears—the dead took form.
@@     @@To even begin to image that great stopping force inverted. A deep part of anyone's soul would be thrilled by it, the subversion of the time-worn expectation of terminality in our terrestrial stay. But of that, how would we go on? If there is no need to stake one's flag into the ground of earth's history, what of it all? Life's meaning, fragile as it is, takes form in the little box of worldy experience we so gather. Pop the bubble, and we return to the void. That emptiness we all fear. That hole we all wish to cram full of something, anything. 
@@     @@And yet, in my incredulity, there was an element of familiarity in her form that quelled my nerves. The light. She was surrounded by a halo of that same light I swore I'd hallucinated around Queequeg as he fixed the window last night. It was static, prickling off of her form as though it was hardly holding itself together. So apt was this comparison that as I neared to test her corporeality—my curiosity the better of me—that energy jumped off at me exactly the same as would a friction-built shock. My hand shot back, and she was gone.
@@     @@Though as I am never allowed to ruminate upon strange occurrences, I turned to hear loud clatter echoing through the chapel.
@@     @@
@@     @@

= [[size 150%]]**CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit.**[[/size]]

@@     @@It sounded from the pulpit, the racketing cry, and in less than a moment I had convinced myself to approach. Very simply, the chapel had been incredibly kind to me thus far—and seeing no reason as to why that tide could have turned—I banked on the rising wave of my luck to continue to carry me through this endeavor. 
@@     @@And so approaching in my utmost confidence, gracing the hard stone floors once more with the echoes of my gait, I strode round the outmost edge of the chapel in the direction of the pulpit. That emboldenment—my purest ego escaping my body and rubbing against the the walls and floor—cast out more of those frantic sparks as I walk, awaking fleeting memories of mourners seated, kneeling, and begging to the lord to end their momentary despair. Their words pulled back at my every nerve, nettles of my own impulses strewn out in front of me, building with proximity to the pulpit, and yet I was still so set on its source-less echo that I grasped the rope ladder and got climbing without turning to acknowledge the revitalized screams into the abyss. Reaching the top of the ladder, I bounded over the ledge with a crackling scream at my tail. And who else would be sitting at the dead center of the prow, crouched over, but Queequeg.
@@     @@He noticed my interruption immediately, and turned up with fists raised, but crooned his neck upon noticing that it was I that arrived. I, crackling I, static I, with a trail of sparks flitting off my feet. I don't dare to imagine the gap in impressions that was pressing against the sides of his mind in that moment—and in that moment I had yet to form an impression of my self either, so I do not blame him. It was nonetheless a standoff in furtive opposite to our morning's parting.
@@     @@"Ishmael?"—He spoke, shaking his clean hands off as though they were caked in dust—"How did you get here?"
@@     @@"Get here?"—I stammered—"I didn't—What are you doing here?"
@@     @@You'll find I have a great distaste for confusion—If it's not so obvious in the demeanor of my storytelling, I find the world is often quite comprehensible and banal if given thought. But were I to entertain the idea of its validity, I would not call space for confusion a space at all. No, it is a rude doorstop shoved through the many entries to the domain of curiosity, allowing and hope of sense to flow out into the oblivion of doubt and error. To any situation I bring my utmost reason and gentility. That is to say; spare this one.
@@     @@"Nothing,"—His shaken hands traveled idly behind his back—"Nothing at all!"
@@     @@"Hell, Queequeg,"—I shouted—"Shit on the floor in front of me and call it nothing."
@@     @@(I restate. I accept the unbecoming nature of my response in this, but I am a committed tale teller if there ever was one.) 
@@     @@Thereon we batted stammering excuses and accusations back and forth between us, him insisting to doing nothing when it was plainly clear not, and I becoming more and more charged. This, as you must expect, culminated in a frustrated gesture from my own arm so grandious and sweeping, that all the collected energies of friction between us, I, the air, and the chapel, lit a chain of lightning in the direction of the puplit's foremast. It was scorched. The air was thick with ozone. Nobody spoke. 
@@     @@
@@     @@

= [[size 150%]]**CHAPTER 9. The Sermon.**[[/size]]

@@     @@Until the voiceless voiced,
@@     @@
@@          @@//“The ribs and terrors in the whale,//
@@          @@//Arched over me a dismal gloom,//
@@          @@//While all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by,//
@@          @@//And lift me deepening down to doom.//
@@          @@
@@     @@And the specter rose from the ashes in its borrowed power.
@@          @@
@@          @@//“I saw the opening maw of hell,//
@@          @@//With endless pains and sorrows there;//
@@          @@//Which none but they that feel can tell—//
@@          @@//Oh, I was plunging to despair.//
@@          @@
@@     @@Alight. So alight was its halo and thick with mirth.
@@          @@
@@          @@//“In black distress, I called my God,//
@@          @@//When I could scarce believe him mine,//
@@          @@//He bowed his ear to my complaints—//
@@          @@//No more the whale did me confine.//
@@          @@
@@     @@And traveled from his brimming holiness as seafoam to ceil.
@@          @@
@@          @@//“With speed he flew to my relief,//
@@          @@//As on a radiant dolphin borne;//
@@          @@//Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone//
@@          @@//The face of my Deliverer God.//
@@          @@
@@     @@The figure turned its eyes down to me.
@@     @@
@@          @@//“My song for ever shall record//
@@          @@//That terrible, that joyful hour;//
@@          @@//I give the glory to my God,//
@@          @@//His all the mercy and the power.”//
@@     @@
@@     @@And reached down its hand to my forehead, and Queequeg's in turn.
@@     @@
@@     @@No further words were needed within the chapel.
@@     @@
@@     @@

= [[size 150%]]**CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend.**[[/size]]

@@     @@Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the chapel, we found ourselves there quite alone—as it was generally empty for the midday—but Queequeg had his own key through the back. Returning to his room, we sat one to the bed—myself—and the other leaning against the window—who else? He kept touching his forehead as we walked, as though to feel a point of entry, a bump, a cut, or some other mark—yet none graced him—muttering under his breath the whole time.
@@     @@After a few minutes of that same silent contemplation, I saw a shift in his face—perhaps a resigned self chastisement—something that caused him to shrivel inward rather than out, defacing the confidence and stoicism he otherwise defused. He was rifling through his large personal bag—half-hidden from view previously in the corner of the room—to find something, something deeply buried. So deeply buried, to my great confusion, that he kept excavating the bag far past what I presumed would fit in it—I couldn't help but step over to gaze down into it. It was a deep pool of oil just behind the zipper, wherein he he dove and wove his hand, fishing about for each loose trinket and bauble that he could surface.
@@     @@I began to speak, but he shushed me.
@@     @@In time, he drew forth the largest—and most likely oldest—tome I had ever seen to that point. Bedecked with the tiniest scrawl of annotations and tabs—sticking out every which way and when—as he piled through it, still muttering, cursing, and touching his head. I tried to follow his dive into the tome, but the very text danced in my view, slushing about the page like upturned grains of sand in a roiling current.
@@     @@I yet again began to speak, but he shushed me—This time rudely.
@@     @@In more time, he eventually found the page he had been digging for, and taking his hands before him began to twist and writhe his fingers, bending and contorting—as I knew he could do—to such extreme degrees that either his bones should snap, or they were not so consistently built within him as I thought. A wriggling, juicy, urging, tone grew out from the space within his shifting grip, and then the world snapped. 
@@     @@I threw up into his bag. He did not stop me.
@@     @@Instead, I turned up to see his face is a mix of contented self-satisfaction and an insidious pang of worry. But more significantly—or noticeably—it was his eyes that told the story of eternities. Deep and black, concave to a degree. They were a whale's, and in those pits of wisdom I saw the very ripples that trailed off from the next movement of my hand before I even did it. The dragging-behind line in the sand, this history I chiseled into the earth with every movement.
@@     @@He saw it all.
@@     @@And then he blinked, and his last-eyes returned. Soulful, but shallow in comparison to the whale's depths. I wanted to keep peering into them, so beautiful were they even in their failure to encompass all, but his mouth was moving.
@@     @@"It seems we're married." he said.
@@     @@And that felt correct. I had not known exactly what it was, but that same bubbling foam from the chapel's specter was sitting on the edges of his soul, and from it drew a line of almost imperceptible sparks through to me and mine. I beckoned him sit on the bed.
@@     @@I could extoll all the wild and personal stories we shared in that moment—and you know I would and will on some other date—but all you needs know is that we ended that night sharing a long drag from his tomahawk, and riding those sweet fumes into the knight, consummated the affair.
@@ @@
@@ @@

= [[size 150%]]**INTERLUDE 2. Moby Dick.**[[/size]]

@@     @@I dream of his eyes.
@@     @@His new-eyes.
Which see every hidden part of me.
@@     @@I dream of his eyes.
@@     @@His old eyes.
Sitting within the body of a great whale.
Bloodshot. Burning. Straining.
@@     @@And he speaks to me,
@@     @@
@@          @@//"What comen comen upon the shoren"//
@@          @@//"Bedecked to seke burstinde sak"//
@@          @@//"Thy bloated flesh ne bekenen gnauen"//
@@          @@//"Hir holinesse bifore."//
@@          @@
@@          @@//"Drinchen from hir hir oils pur,"//
@@          @@//"Drinchen eke fomen true"//
 @@          @@//"For whanne the occean riseth"//
 @@          @@//"She drinchen riche from you."//
@@ @@
The pure white whale spoke these words to me.
@@ @@
All heard the omen ring.
@@ @@
@@ @@
----
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[[module rate]]
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MOBY DICK

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