So that was the conversation that really launched his operation in what he would call its mature form. He obtained a copy of Moby-Dick and kept it around for occasional check-ins as to whether he had truly gone off his rocker. He got an audiobook of it too so that he could listen to it on headphones while he was sitting in the dark. Ahab didn’t show up until pretty far into the book. He didn’t out himself as an obsessed maniac until some little while after that. And then, of course, it was completely obvious why Dr. Rutledge had drawn a parallel between Rufus and Ahab. But, for Rufus, that analogy didn’t really "take" because by that point in the novel he had already become interested in the harpooneers: the tattooed cannibal Queequeg, the "unmixed Indian" Tashtego, and the "gigantic, coal-black negro-savage" Daggoo. The most interesting thing about these characters was that they all made more money—a larger share of the ship’s profits—and enjoyed higher rank and status than anyone else on the Pequod save Ahab and the three mates. According to Rufus’s calculations, which he worked out on a spreadsheet in his trailer, Queequeg made 3.333 times as much as Ishmael, the book’s narrator.