It’s a whale. In fact, it’s Moby Dick. Its golden head and body form the handle, and the blade of the opener comes out its tail.
I know the murder weapon, and I know it’s Moby Dick because years ago Pratt pulled it out of his briefcase one day as class was beginning. He held it up for all to see and performed one of his sixty-second, spontaneous tours de force that left you amazed—at how brilliant he was and how brilliant you weren’t.
“This letter opener, students, is a perfect exemplum of the derivative and allusive nature of all that we so innocently call ‘reality.’ It purports to be an opener of letters. Simple enough. But it has a whale for a handle. And not just any whale. This whale is Moby Dick, of literary fame. How do I know this is Moby Dick? Because I bought it myself at Melville’s home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. No whale within a hundred miles of Pittsfield can be any other than Moby Dick. Not in the mind of the purveyor of the whale, nor in the mind of the viewer. History and biography and culture have colluded to equate Pittsfield with Melville and Melville with whale and whale with Moby Dick.
“But of course this is not a whale at all. It’s a piece of cheap pot metal, painted gold. It is merely an iconographic representation of a whale. And it’s certainly not the specific whale Moby Dick. Not only because a whale is flesh and blood and this whale is metal and paint, but because the whale Moby Dick never existed in time and space. Moby Dick never got wet, never ate a squid, never did any whaley things, because it existed only in the mind of Herman Melville. And Melville turned that mental Moby Dick into little black squiggles on a white piece of paper. And those little alphabetic symbols arbitrarily suggest to us ‘whale,’ a highly improbable creature most people have never actually seen with their own eyes but that they are nonetheless certain exists.
“So, this whale-handled letter opener is really a symbol of a symbol of a symbol, the grounds of which were electrochemical discharges in Melville’s brain—whoever Melville was (as if we could ever really know). And that’s not even to mention the person who decided to manipulate this symbol for profit, making this tawdry little curio for bookish tourists, most of whom read novels with the naiveté of children—capitalism again reducing everything it touches to quid pro quo, simplifying the playful complexities of art to the periodic elements of dollars and cents.”
See what I mean? Pratt took your black-and-white, monochromatic world and gave you back a kaleidoscope of colorful, if fleeting, connections. And you thought it was a simple letter opener. Ha!
Seeing the letter opener now, I feel more grief for Dr. Pratt than I had even at the time of his death. Symbol of a symbol of a symbol? Perhaps, but also sharp enough to have made a very effective hole in you, sir—the revenge of simple materiality over all things theoretical.
I give Detective Wilson the short version of all this, assuring him that hundreds of people had seen that letter opener over the years in Pratt’s classes. I can’t tell whether he believes me or not, but he doesn’t read me my rights. He settles for a simple threat.
“You shouldn’t have seen that. If I hear anywhere that the murder weapon was other than a knife, I will know that you are the source of that information and I will charge you with obstructing the investigation. Understand?”
I assure him that I do. And I remember Pratt’s words that day in class as he put the letter opener back in his briefcase.
“I always carry this with me to remind myself that everything we experience is actually a quotation of something else—something only slightly less unreal. And also to fend off attacks from my rival critics!”
We all laughed then, but now it doesn’t seem so funny.
we think its hilarious
SEVEN
Judy sits in the car while I get my warm welcome from Detective Wilson. She greets my return with her best smile.
“Well, Jon, how … I should say, how did it go with Mr. … with Mr. Dick Tracy?” She laughs at her cleverness, and I can’t help but join her.
“It went fine, Jude. He hates that I’m involved and he promises to send me to jail if I mess things up.”
“That is not … I should say, very very nice.”
“No, not nice. But I don’t blame him. If I don’t find anything useful, then I’m just another irritation on an irritating case. And if I do, then he looks incompetent. I know the feeling.”
“Billy was in … incompetent. Sister Brigit said so. He had to wear diapers.”
I let that pass.
As I pull away from the curb, Judy reminds me to buckle my seat belt. She is very legalistic about seat belts, as she is about cigarettes, prayer before meals, sharp objects, bad words, hot stoves, saying please and thank you, brushing your teeth up and down not back and forth, taking your shoes off at the door, setting the table, and too much television. In short, she can be a real pain.
Before we go back to the boat, I’ve got to pick up a part for the stove at Dey’s Appliance on Snelling and then make another stop further north at HarMar Mall. So I take 94 to Snelling and go up to Dey’s. After getting the part, I continue north, negotiating with my thoughts, when Judy suddenly sits up as tall as she can, lifting her eyes above the bottom of the window like a prairie dog looking out its burrow.
“That’s where my daddy of mine takes me for choc … choc … chocolate dips.”
I snap to attention, suddenly and inexplicably nervous. I see the entrance to the state fairgrounds. We have crossed the Rubicon, unawares, into our old neighborhood. In an instant I am taken back to my childhood. Our house was only a few blocks from the fairgrounds. Our parents took us to the fair every year and, as part of the ritual, Dad always bought Judy a vanilla cone dipped in chocolate.
“You’re right, Jude. We used to get ice cream there, didn’t we?”
“Yes … yes we did, Jon. That is where my very own daddy of mine takes me for choc … chocolate dips.”
We sit at a red light for a few seconds in silence.
“I … I … I miss my daddy very much.”
I don’t have anything to say. Our father has been dead for going on thirty years now. How can you miss something you hardly remember having? I was only nine when he died. Judy was thirteen. If it wasn’t for photographs, I couldn’t tell you what he looked like—though I have a feeling his photographs don’t do him justice. I mean, what are photographs anyway? Thousands of little dots of color—or shades of gray. Arrange the dots just so and you fool the eye into thinking it’s seeing something, something from the real world. But it’s just dots. We know this, but we agree to fool ourselves. We agree to play along, to pretend we’re seeing something real.
Come to think of it, the camera only does what the eye itself does first. Our brain sits in splendid isolation, taking in data from the field—from the eyes, the nose, the tongue, the ears, and other scattered parts. The eye receives photons of light bouncing off everything out there, which are converted into electrical impulses and sent along the optic nerve to the brain. Then the brain takes the impulses, throws most of them away, and sorts the rest, transmuting the agitated electrons into a “picture” of the world. And we all agree to participate in the illusion that this picture is Reality.
Yikes! Pratt isn’t dead. He’s alive and well in my overheated brain.
When
