[The following is a story I wrote five or six years ago about how much it stinks to be in a long-distance relationship.* For whatever reason I did the story as junk Barthelmismo and linked it to a favorite oft-forgotten fact about Hamlet: that Hamlet spends some time off-stage on a pirate ship.]
Hamlet with the Pirates
Hamlet, in a letter to Horatio:
Ere we were two days old at sea, a pirate of very warlike appointment gave us chase. Finding ourselves too slow of sail, we put on a compelled valour. In the grapple I boarded them. On the instant they got clear of our ship; so I alone became their prisoner... (Act IV, Scene 6)
*
Could you really blame the man? After all...
Hard to think with this water all around. Hamlet keeps having to remind himself who's who and what's what as though he were telling this story instead of recalling it. The anger itself he has to generate like a stage effect. Can it have been this way from the start? Talk to yourself long enough and you lose the thread. But what thread? Was there thread? And all this water...
After all (he resumes with force) his uncle simply saw what he wanted and took it. Look at it from the man's perspective: sure, it wasn't a good thing that he'd... But then what is "good"? Hamlet feels in no position to say. The issue is not so much a moral one, after all—although in that case what... What has he gotten himself so worked up about?
His father! Blast it, his father and mother and...
But it all seems so tired now when he says it, the same facts, the same words—just facts, just words—like a man clinging to some long-dead principle, stillborn, in the face of real meaninglessness. His father dead, yes, his mother in—but what difference? A ghost, perhaps, his father back from the... well...
Does he in fact care? Should he? Separate questions, sometimes relevant each to the other in either direction. There are the things you think you think and the things you think you don't think but do think, and a host more by his count, and what does it matter in the end what you thought or thought you thought or—?
Is this something he could turn off? What would he be if he turned it off?
*
The pirates were puzzled by this fellow Hamlet with his funny eyes and his way of talking. He was in his 20s, 30s, hard to tell, walking on their deck with a kind of—what was it, confidence?—such that they half wanted to flee from him, half wanted to string him up by an ankle and poke him with a broom. The captain took a long look at him and said, "Keep him," said, "I like the bastard, keep him," so they kept him.
Hamlet was amused somewhat by the monkeys and wanted to know why they had monkeys, and no one was quite sure how to answer. Why did they have monkeys? He always asked questions you wouldn't have thought to ask. Like what did they eat, the monkeys? The pirates all looked at each other dumbly. What kind of a man would think to ask a question like that?
Everything in the ship when Hamlet boarded took on a different meaning; all the pirates felt it. No one knew what to think about him, and it wasn't as if anyone were actually afraid of him (there was always the urge to go up behind him as he was staring out at the sea and pull his legs out from under him and flip him right over the rail, just to hear if he'd shout—or maybe wrestle him to the ground and sit on him), and yet nobody was going to touch him. Even wild Tom kept his distance, who'd buggered about every captive they'd ever taken; "Don't want to, Tom?" they asked him, and he said, "Aye, aye," but that was that, and afterwards awkward silence of a sort now common on the ship.
They showed Hamlet the brothel, and he asked why it cost money, who was charging money, who got the money, how did this come to be on a sailing vessel? There was no answer to these questions. "Look at 'em," they said, "look at the tasty girlies," but they knew that not a man on the ship had tasted the girlies as none could afford them, and for the first time this made them sad.
They chose to hide from him the three-ring circus.
*
And if after all the whole tragedy's nothing beyond his own sense of it?
Is it that he begins to forget what matters and has to remind himself, or is it instead that he says something about the world and hears himself say it and believes? What he tells himself—is it narration or creation? The pain he feels—is it born from injury, or does it invent injury to justify itself? Did he ever live without that pain? Is the problem something of which his thinking aims to plumb the depths, or something of which his thinking is the very fount?
The life of a seagull must be passing dull.
Could it be no more than that he misses his father? He misses the man—that is to say, the man is not with him. What he feels now—did he not feel it before, before he learned what had—? Do the facts do anything more than fill what space he'd kept already open since the man had died? Before? And now, might it not be that he's—all that he's—just keeping the space alive, the space between father and son? Just worrying it to keep it alive so it doesn't fade or dry or—close?
Does he, did he love the man? Could it— But that's not what this is about, love! Would that he could simply...
Amazing, though, that that's not what this is about. Not about love! Does he, did he? Well? He looks out at the water.
And what of Ophelia?
Ophelia Ophelia Ophelia Ophelia Ophelia Ophelia Ophelia Ophelia Ophelia Ophelia Ophelia Ophelia Ophelia Ophelia Ophelia Ophelia Ophelia Ophelia Ophelia Ophelia Ophelia Ophelia O
*
He was underimpressed by the video arcade and the bullfight, which is not to say he was unresponsive; it's just that his response wasn't what they'd hoped for.
"Arrr," they told him, "booty, it's booty," but they found the answer satisfied them less even than him. What was booty, when all was said and done?
The captain called an emergency meeting when Hamlet was gazing (as he did) off into the empty horizon. Had they shown him the automaton? the sculpture garden? the festive dancing bedbug swarm? Had they let him see the waterfall? the prairie dogs? the Ark? the Grail? the Giacometti? Had they exposed him to the rare-books library or the singing shark or tossed him, blast it, into the bottomless pit?
They had done these things, yes. (His response to the pit had been particularly frustrating.)
Had they shown him yet the song and dance?
They had; he'd critiqued it. And what did they feed the monkeys, the pirates wanted to know. What had they fed the monkeys? The monkeys seemed awfully thin and listless now they'd stopped to think.
The captain called the pirates scurvy, and he spat and shouted, but in the end he was just as lost as the rest of them. They all sat in silence; there was a certain comfort in that.
*
If all the tragedy is but a placeholder, something to fill or to occupy or to be the hole that was the king— But which? Did the tragedy fill or keep open the hole? And how should a man prefer his holes: filled or kept open? When everyone's going to die in the end regardless.
All this water around. Can't expect a man—
*
"To Denmark and be rid of him!"
"Arrr!!?"
Alas, poor Willy...
* That's mostly true, arguably true. I am pretty sure I wrote this story on Valentine's Day.
† This one worked out much better. But it's the thought that counts?
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