1.
I am writing this account, in another man’s book, by candlelight, inside the belly of a fish. I have been eaten. I have been eaten, yet I am living still.
I have tried to get out. I have made many attempts. But I must conclude that it is not possible. I am trapped within an enormous creature and am slowly being digested. I have found a strange place to exist, a cave between life and death. It is an unhappy miracle.
I am afraid of the dark.
The dark is coming for me.
I have candles; they are my small protection. And I have this purloined book that I shall slowly fill.
Before the last candle dies, I’ll tell my tale. I give you fair warning: I can boast you no battlefields; this is no murderer’s story; there is no great romance. But before all this, back on land, I did an extraordinary thing. An impossible thing. And for that thing—in order that the world may be put back in balance—I am now paying a severe cost. I shall tell my terrible shame, my tale of the supernatural, though so devastatingly real.
Am I to account myself very fortunate, or entirely devoid of luck? I considered myself, before this last tumble, a very fortunate individual, blessed of more good luck, surely, than was my fair portion. Back on land, after all, I had made a miracle, I had fashioned an impossible thing. But this piece of good luck is overshadowed by a rather enormous piece of bad luck that I am not quite able to forget, for I live with the fact every day.
A monster-fish has swallowed me—a shark or relative of that species, I am no expert. It is no small basking shark that has thus contained me, I say that straight, no catfish with grand opinions of himself. I have been taken by a colossus, perhaps the largest of its kind that ever was. Perhaps the last surviving megalodon, of prehistoric vintage. Deep in such a thing do I dwell.
I had heard of this monster-beast, this hunger-creature, ere I braved the waters. Did I head out in a large military vessel equipped with cannon and musket, with harpoon and barbed hook? No, I must own I did not. I set forth into the watery world on a dinghy, a rather ancient craft. It floated, it was seaworthy, so long as the sea was in good humor. I went out because someone had told me—was it a cruel joke, I wonder now?—that my own son was on the water in distress, and I wanted him back. I wanted, to be clear, to save him. But I did not save him. Of that, I am most keenly aware. I bought a small boat. It seemed a solid boat to me, but I am ignorant of such matters, and the farther I rowed, the less certain I was.
Some miles out, the water began to move strangely. Waves, when before it had been calm. My little boat rocking, soon some water spilling in. An increasing storm upon me. My little boat trembling more and more, and then waves breaking and the sea opening—as if it were boiling—and then the great mouth itself was upon me. The hole, rushing forward. The living tunnel hurtling unto me. Such a size, no hope against such a thing, like the world had erupted. The sea creature, colossus, flesh-mountain. I saw it only fleetingly, for a handful of seconds. Like Moses it split the water, and suddenly before me was a great black depth.
I fell, for there was no alternative, toward it and within it.
Into the very mouth.
I saw its teeth. Arranged in rows two or three deep. A graveyard.
On I fell, out and away from everything I knew.
Confined, constricted. Stolen!
How shall I ever find him now?
I shall never see him again.
I smashed down the dark tunnel, my body thrown and thumped, dashed and dragged, I was desperate for breath. Down and down, darker and damper, until at last the falling ceased. I had landed and now could breathe again. But what land was this, what peculiar geography? I was up to my knees in liquid. I puffed, I panted—I, somehow, lived! Scraped here and there, disheveled certainly, bruised and bloody, but still, no matter the unlikeliness, still alive. And yet what living could this be?
Rickety and miserable, harrowed by the dank rocking darkness, at last I started feeling about. The floor was moist yet solid enough, but even as I fumbled I could find no end to it. Timidly I rose, fully expecting my head to strike a surface, but soon I was standing at full height and still I found no roof. I lifted my shaking hands above me with caution, fully prepared for them to strike something solid. But the strike did not come. I proceeded to extend my height as well as I could and yet I touched only more unoccupied space. Only after a moment did rumors of the high ceiling begin to reach me, in the form of liquid dripping from above. I have suffered this small rain ever since.
Here, then, was space.
I set out east five paces, no limit; west ten paces, no end yet. The ground, I report, was not even. I tried to walk forward and stumbled upon objects, pieces of half-eaten sea life, yet still the place went on.
I called out, and the altered sound of my voice was a terror to me.
“Hallooo!”
The noise was unpleasant, and there came the response: Hallo! Hallo! Hallo! All the time quieter, the decreasing ghosts of my original sound.
I felt about further, in total darkness, no hint of anything but black and black and ever more of black, until I bumped into something solid. A wall, cast out at an angle, but not of flesh—it seemed to me, somehow, to be of wood. Planks of wood. Curving upward. Wood? Impossible!
I followed this wall with shaking hands and, finding its end, pulled myself up onto it. This took some doing, and I failed many times. But then—at the peak of its curve—a flat surface! Flat, here? Flat, true? Flat!
It could not be. And yet it was.
I crawled upon this flat and had not been long about it when suddenly there was an opening in the flat ground and I tumbled downward, into something else. I had fallen again. Not so very far this time; about the height, I surmised, of a full-grown man. There was blood in my mouth. I felt about: more flat . . . and yet not only. I could not trust myself to believe it.
Stairs!
My hands discovered actual solid stairs.
No! Impossible! But there was no mistake. I had fallen down a set of stairs. Did this peculiar creature have perhaps a spiral stairway within its intestines? Was there an ornate rotunda to its heart? Twin outhouses of kidneys? Its esophagus a redbrick chimney flue? How strange, that a great fish should master the concept of right angles.
On the floor—solid floor, now, this was—I felt boxes, wooden crates spilled about. These were surely not a natural part of my enormous host, I sensed, but rather something consumable, like me. The lid of one I proceeded to break loose, then felt about its insides. Stacked in neat rows, I felt a particular column I was only too familiar with, made, I supposed—O irony!—of whale fat. Candles! Spermaceti pillars, so many night-killers, so many suns. And dry, by my word.
Hallo, tallow!
To light one and see again: how lovely that would be. I fumbled about, hoping to find a tinderbox to rescue me, but no such miracle was there. I was so thirsty to see again that I panicked myself utterly. Until in my weeping misery it at last occurred to me that I may have had the solution with me all along.
Joseph, Joseph, I said to myself, have you ever been the smoker of a pipe?
Aye, I answered myself, I am part of that fraternity. If there were light, I should show you my right index finger and thumb, be-yellowed by my habit. You would spy the evidence of a staining to the hairs of my upper lip. You would meet my teeth, also witnesses of this behavior.
So then.
Ah! Left trouser cupboard? Empty but for the leg. Right side: Something else there?
Careful now, careful, withdraw with steadiness. Is it there, I ask you?
Oh! It is, it is. Beautiful lady, Lucy, my Lucifer. So then, to strike the box of her, open her eyes.
I sent up a flare to heaven.
I lit my vesta.
I had light.
Light, ho!
It may have been a yellow, oily smear to you; it may have been hardly worth the effort; but to me it was the great flame of living. This flower, this beautiful ghost, this miracle of nature! I quickly applied match to candle, amplifying my illumination. I held aloft the flame and looked only into it. Oh, how I adored its darling warmth, its swinging form. I confess tears did prick me, and—good companion—it cried with me: the first splash of hot wax fell upon my hand. Here is light in my darkness, a whole crate of daylight for me. Seven crates in all.
Now I may fight against the night of the monster’s belly.
I was in a small room, I learned now, a sort of antechamber, that much was plain. There were rooms east and west of me, incredibly, and there again were the stairs. I ascended them now with my fragile flame to better understand my situation.
Finally I comprehended that I stood upon a ship. By name Maria, from Copenhagen, it says on the stern and sides.
It seemed my capacious host, as if it were a fine hotelier anticipating my arrival, had set about to provide me accommodation. As it moved through the ocean, it had come upon a fishing schooner. Mistaking the ship for a marvelous morsel, it opened its drawbridge and swallowed the vessel whole.
And so, you see, I have a home. If you see my son, my love, my art, please have him write to me at my new address:
Giuseppe Lorenzini
The schooner Maria, late of Copenhagen
Inside the Beast Piscus Pesces
Mediterranean Sea
Her masts are three, mizzen, main and fore. All are cracked and splintered. The tallest reaches up to the ceiling of the creature and has wedged itself there, fish bone–like, and can never, I suppose, be unwedged again.
Here is my playground, my country, my scene. I have a forecastle, I boast me a poop deck and do stroll about upon the main. I lack not a quantity of soiled sailcloth. There are three hatches down into the ship, with berths within for eight or ten or twelve. There are hammocks and a captain’s chart room, where this hallowed book was found, and beyond that his cabin. There are mess tables bolted to the floor in the galley. There is, in short, more space here than in the home I had before, for that place was in comparison rather limited—though I did prefer it.
But what space I have before me now! I am a monarch of space. Emperor of Inner Sharkland.
“Let slip, midshipmen,” I call. “We sail! Hoist the mainsail!”
Key
a. to front of monster
b. to rear of monster
1. foremast
2. mainmast
3. mizzenmast
4. bowsprit
5. forecastle
6. main deck
7. poop
8. galley
9. captain’s chart room
10. captain’s quarters
11. water tanks
I have made me a model of my home, in gratitude, out of things purloined hereabouts, as though I might have occasion to sail it like a boy on a Sunday afternoon.
Can you imagine: a ship.
I am, despite everything, grateful to the Maria. For when my host swallows a deal of liquid—we are never dry in here—she lifts off the surface awhile and bobs and even tosses a little, from side to side, and in these brief moments of buoyancy I am kept safe by her, escaping the sudden drenching caused by the arrival of the latest great swallow. So then, this is sure fortune for me. And yet I wonder if the fact of the Maria is not in truth a piece of ill fate, since without her I should surely have been extinguished by now, and spared this watery purgatory.
I am, I suppose, being ungrateful. This wood is good Danish wood, and I am its captain. And there are treasures to be found within Maria. May I tell you?
List of Life
(Provisions found inside the good vessel Maria)
Tins of preserved meat
Hardtack
Bottles of wine
Raisins
Cheese
Coffee
Sugar
Tallow candles
Waxed matches
And in the bow of the ship, at the very bottom, are my life: the water tanks.
Here indeed is living.
And? Oh, happy discovery, this. This book. This journal. This sea captain’s log come upon in a gloomy cabin. This tome in my tomb. So that I may write, and keep a little buoyant. Here, in this leather-bound volume found inside a desolate bark, I write my life. The history of my confinement.
There’s not a dry spot in all this house. The walls are damp, the ceiling drips, the floor is moisture-laden. How careful I must be to protect this book from the encroaching wet. How often I have slipped—this is dangerous: I am not a young man—on this floor. The air here is thin and foul. It is rancid. Sometimes a new wave of stench comes in and affronts me. Sometimes the stink is but a whisper; at others it is a roar. But it always is a shade of stink.
Here, I am Josephus Odorous. Joey “the Kipper” Lorenzini. Putrefaction ’petto. Should I ever happen to be set free—an unlikely thing, I know—I feel sure that no matter what soaps are used, what lavenders and rosemaries and flannels and brushes applied, no matter the personality of your talcum, the stench will never, ever leave me. Free though I might be, I shall still reek of imprisonment.
I reside, mostly, within the captain’s cabin; it is my greatest pleasure. I have all the chattels of a captain, and am very shipshape. I do pretend me a rank: Neither admiral nor commodore, I am but Captain Lorenzini. He has two rooms to himself, this captain does. A chart room with a table and nautical implements, and through a door the captain’s cabin. The captain’s bed is bolted to the floor, but it is attached to two large spindles that allow the bed to stay steady even as the ship sways with the sea. In that bed, even as the monster tosses, do I keep a kind of steadiness.
In the captain’s cabin are various personal items that I have studied at length, though they were the captain’s private company. There is the captain’s wine; I drink it, a little at a time, and toast his good health. There is a stuffed owl; it gave me such a turn when I first saw it, I nearly dropped my candle and lit myself and the ship. Why he went to sea with a deceased but preserved bird I cannot imagine: Sailors do travel with caged birds sometimes, for if anyone can find land for a lost ship it is a bird, but this is no live bird but an incontinent piece of taxidermy, whose owl shape slowly diminishes in favor of a pile of sawdust on the floor. I cannot explain the owl, but he does look at me, and I am a little discomfited by it.
But I have made other, greater discoveries: some paints, some colors, some tubes of rainbow. The captain painted! He was an amateur—a few of his pictures were left behind, and his portrait of a fish looks like an old person in distress—but I am so very glad of the paint. Here is also the captain’s theodolite, though for me it gauges naught but the belly-roof, and his maps and charts, though not of this fish-country, and his compass, so that I always know the direction my prison is heading. O useless knowledge! We do travel, miles and miles, yet I never go anywhere.
There is, above all, this book, my captain’s log. Great, beautiful, leather-bound. It has several pages written in it by the captain. I have left them there, and I study them with profound wonder. His name Harald Tugthus, his penmanship excellent, his words impressive, though what they mean I cannot say. Danish, you see, and I not a drop of Dane. All that was Tugthus is mine now. I am thief.
And so, in these pages, in this big book, I write this account of myself, for on the whole I would rather not suffer alone. I write it out for my son, for I am a proud father and I am also a considerable artist. With some strange piece of mighty good fortune, perhaps these words may one day be found, and be traced, perhaps, by digits other than my own. Should that happen, I pray you, my dear book rescuer, please read my account aloud to a great gathering, to all the people you know, or even deliver it in fond whispers to your maiden aunt, who is ill and perhaps lives at home with you. But please, great rescuer, living creature of sunlight and land, do me this favor, though you live far away: Tell my son. Do all you can to find him.
For, with all my achievements, I count this above every other:
I had a son.
Oftentimes, without quite knowing exactly what I am about, I become aware of myself holding some piece of Maria—hugging some beam or banister—and in so doing I have the dreaming notion that I have hold of my boy. I am made sensible always by the creeping knowledge that the wood is dead and makes no movement, being only still, lifeless wood.
My darling boy, wheresoe’er you are, keep away! The great fish seeks you out, I am certain. If you are yet on land, do not dip one woody toe into the ocean. Stay away from the sea!
My little lad.
Woodle.
I shall pour it all out in this book now. The tale of my son.