Bridge of Sighs

Noonan was surprised not to see full sea-captain regalia when he flung the classroom door open and entered, with Three Mock in attendance. But except for the block of wood attached to his shoe, he was dressed as usual, in dark slacks dusted liberally with cigarette ash and a short-sleeved white shirt, its neck stained yellow. With difficulty he mounted the stage—Mr. Davis’s awkward apparatus apparently meant to suggest Ahab’s whalebone prosthesis. Three Mock, his black Pip, Noonan supposed, lent a hand until, no longer needed, he retreated to the far corner of the stage.
    Mr. Berg stood still for a moment, his back to the class. When he finally spoke, his voice sounded as if it were traveling up from a dark, deep cave. “
All…visible…objects
…are but as pasteboard masks,” he said, then fell silent.
    “Mr. Berg?” Perry Kozlowski said, and was ignored.
    “Some unknown but reasoning thing puts forth the molding of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will
strike
—”
    And with this the block of wood came down on the feeble stage to thunderous effect. Everyone jolted upright. Noonan glanced over at Nan, who happened to be sitting closest to the door, and she looked ready to bolt.
    Now Mr. Berg pivoted painfully, looking very much like a man whose leg had been shorn from his body, his face contorted, positively aglow with madness. “
Strike
through the mask!” he said, shaking his fist at them so violently that he lost his balance and nearly fell. “How can the prisoner reach outside except by
thrusting
through the wall!”
    The question was clearly rhetorical, but Perry raised his hand. “Uh, Mr. Berg?”
    Good God, Noonan thought. Did Perry really think he was going to forestall his dramatic performance in order to answer some stupid question like
Will this be on the test?
    Focusing on Perry as he would a mutinous seaman, Mr. Berg clomped over to the edge of the stage and glared down on him with such a murderous expression that Perry actually leaned back in his chair. Ahab’s voice became low, conspiratorial. “To me,” he confided, “the white whale is that wall. Sometimes…I think there’s naught beyond.” Perry didn’t look like this possibility troubled him greatly, though everything else about the proceedings did.
    “But ’tis enough,” Mr. Berg continued, straightening now and clomping back down the stage, stopping before each member of the class and inspecting the student as a captain would his crew, assessing character and courage. “He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him hideous strength with an insidious malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate, and be the white whale agent or principal, I will
wreak
that hate upon him.”
    Perry, exasperated, was now scanning the novel’s table of contents. “Mr. Berg,” he pleaded, “can you at least tell us what chapter you’re on?” he pleaded.
    Mr. Berg practically flew back down the stage. “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man!” he exploded, as if Perry had done precisely this. “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me!” And to emphasize this point, he again crashed the wooden block down on the stage. “Who’s over me?” he demanded to know, first of Perry, then the rest of them. “Who’s over me?”
    Noonan half expected Perry to suggest Principal Watkins, but to everyone’s surprise it was Lucy who spoke. “God?” he suggested, precisely as the
Pequod
’s first mate, Starbuck, had done in the book, if Noonan remembered correctly from his reading the night before. His friend, however, seemed to be raising the point on his own, and Noonan could tell he was serious. He didn’t know, though, whether it was the game itself that had turned serious or something outside the game. Was this Starbuck finally standing up to Ahab, or Lucy Lynch confronting the man who despised him?
    Mr. Berg said nothing for a long moment, and when he finally did, his whisper was barely audible, intended only, so far as Noonan could tell, for the boy he was fixing:
“Truth…knows…no…confines.”
There was something both vicious and contemptuous in his delivery of these words, something Noonan didn’t recall from the novel. Hadn’t Ahab considered Starbuck his sole friend, the one man on the
Pequod
who might understand his purpose? Lucy did his best to hold his gaze, but finally had to look down at his desktop. Only then did Mr. Berg turn his attention back to Perry. “Chapter thirty-six,” he