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Drowning does not frighten Queequeg.
There was terror, yes, during that slow-consuming fever, in the wasting of flesh and spirit. And with it: a sudden, keening panic for the stories tapped so carefully into his skin, decades ago now, his family’s lineage and deeds and mysteries inscribed in precise, concentric spirals, those stories in stories in stories. Would they rot, unmarked and unspoken among strangers who could neither read nor honor them? The prospect of dying away from home had never troubled him in all his wandering years, but death had felt hot and close in a way it hadn’t before. Only carving the shell of his coffin soothed him, like repeating the fondest tales of his childhood on a bleak night.
It’s that same calm now as the whale drags them down into the dark, the Pequod and her crew, the sun a single, wavering eye above until it is not at all. The waters fold over him; his harpoon falls away. The sea taking them, as it will. Queequeg waits for his lungs to strain, his heart to slow. Perhaps to be seized by a shark, drawn to the froth and blood, and rent between its teeth.
He waits, and the sea cradles him but does not consume him. He dreams of Yojo, the soul of home he carried with him across the wide world. Of Ishmael, who had lain in his arms as sweetly as anyone ever had. Of his mother and father and brothers.
Lights come across the water in sweeping tides, and he sees he is not alone; all around him swim the great fish. And there, too, glittering coral, scuttling crustaceans, jetting squids and luminous jellyfish borne along by the current. The shining eyes of leviathan. The blind ones that find their way in the deepest parts of the watery world. Queequeg passes among them, untouched. Now and then, a silvery school of fish darts out of his way. Slowly comes the understanding: he must be changed. The water rushing over his gills is as fresh and life-giving as air. To move, he need only twitch his tail. To eat, open his yawning mouth.
Eventually, his ache for the sun and sky is too great, and he makes for the surface, rising through the bluing light until he finds the crest of waves, the screech of gulls. The sea is empty and bustling altogether. Moby Dick, the white whale, has long since gone. No sign of the wreck, the drowned, the Pequod—as though they never were.
Queequeg swims on, follows the warm currents. His home ocean, all brilliance and abundance.
Later, he startles a canoe of fishermen and so himself; the boat is surprisingly small next to him, and the men swear and jump. Another day, a pod of humpback swims by him, unconcerned and disinterested. It’s some time before one like him comes close enough for him to understand. To recognize the gentle rise of the dorsal and caudal fin, the broad head, the white spots on gray, like a sprawling sky of stars. Queequeg cannot look to see the shape of his own markings, cannot see the new stories written there, but sometimes he swims with others, studies their scattered patterns, seeking meaning.
He goes on this way, the life of a placid giant, quiet and untroubled. Sometimes the whaling ships come close, mistake him for their chosen prey, send their boats and harpooners. But Queequeg has no ambergris or oil to offer them. Only his curiosity, as he watches them scurry from mast to mast, across the towering clouds of sails. Remembers the taste of beer and tack, swaying hammocks and creaking decks lulling him to sleep, and the weight of his harpoon in his hand.
He crosses oceans under nothing but his own power. Has nothing to fear from becalming or scurvy or starvation. He sees the whole of it. The stars wheel overhead, cycling once and again and again. The moon hides and shows her face a hundred times.
Some years on, he’s keeping pace with a merchant vessel for his own amusement. The sailors stand at the rails and point at him, get lashes for loitering. Nonetheless, one afternoon, when the wind has failed them, a few of them jump into the water with him. They dive and frog-kick and splash each other, gamboling in the water like seals. They swim close enough for him to see them, hear them, the echoes of men he knew once, the pleasing polyglot babble of their tongues, mostly forgotten.
The man closest to him touches his side, an incidental, glancing hand over his skin, too tiny to be noticeable. Except a shiver goes through Queequeg, and then more than a shiver. Something in his chest tightens, seizes. He chokes. Thrashes, as he tries to pass water over his gills.
No, not gills—lungs.
Queequeg claws for the surface, swallows a belly-full of seawater as he does. Stings his throat with brine, salt air. Struggles against the hands on him, clutching at his arms, trying to bear him up, up, up. Someone’s shouting. More hands haul him out of the water.
He flops on the deck like a hooked fish. Coughs and gasps. Looks up into the crowd of astonished faces.
The man who touched him, who caught and carried him, lies prone next to him, breathing as hard as he is. His hair clings to his face.
The tattoos are unfamiliar—a picture of a whale surrounded by minute figures. Swathes of text run down his side, across his thighs. Thick spirals with sharp angles unspool on the backs of his hands. The unmarked skin in between darkened, toughened by long hours in the sun. The skin of a sailor. The years showing around his eyes and mouth, under the growth of beard. But it is his face.
Ishmael’s face.
He rolls over onto his side, mirroring Queequeg, as he had that morning in New Bedford, years ago. Touches his cheek, his shoulder, his chest, tracing the lines there. The same gesture, Queequeg understands, that he must have made in the water just now.
“It is you,” Ishmael says, wondering. “I knew it was you.”