Whalefall

by Daniel Kraus

Jay’s not sure he believes in therapy. He definitely doesn’t believe in closure. People aren’t doors. They’re whole floor plans, entire labyrinths, and the harder you try to escape, the more lost inside them you become.

It’s not the fifty-pound tank he carries, not the fifteen pounds of weights and batteries. It’s seventeen years of being Mitt Gardiner’s son, the expectations and disappointments, all of it on his back one more time.

The first thing Jay feels is offended by Mom’s quavering tone, her obvious expectation that Jay will break down and rush home, everything that happened between him and his dad forgotten. As if contracting cancer is a deed so selfless it erases everything past.

Last night Jay dreamed of his father’s bones, buttery in a nest of purple kelp, bejeweled with red sea slugs like holiday lights. The bones were soft in his hands, a gentle touch he never got from Mitt and therefore never gave back. He slid them against his cheek. He kissed them. He woke up tasting marrow. Funny, it tasted like tears.

One way or the other, Mitt Gardiner always swallowed him alive.

What he feels most is exhaustion. His body has been clenched for sixteen years.

He’s never felt more male, more destructive, more like Mitt Gardiner.

Can a man really vanish down here? Bones and all? When before, that man was the whole bay, the mountains, everything?

She will reach out, hold him, and everything will go back to normal. Better than normal. Mitt’s dead.

So Dad’s got mesothelioma. Sucks for him. For Jay’s mom and sisters. Dad will have to get through it without a son, same way Jay got through life without a father.

Jay looks away. Sunsplash off trailer park roofs. Eyeball pain. A rogue thought. Maybe I should kill you. Before you kill me.

“Oh, I’ve made mistakes. At least four of them.” Dad’s facial scars tighten with his glare. Count ’em off: Zara, Nan, Eva, and the everyday insult known as his son.

Jay’s up, to the bow, patting himself for wounds, finding none but knowing they exist.

In the old days, women’s corsets were made of whalebone. Inside the whale’s literal bones, he’s everything Mitt believed he was. Girlish, useless, a sobbing sissy better off with his mother and sisters.

Stop)) “Don’t mind him, Beaky.” Don’t mind Jay Gardiner, either, talking to his dead dad and half a squid beak like it’s normal.

The sperm whale is everything to everyone. Always has been. Food, oil, devil, god. Inscrutable monster. Only a father.

Jay’s nine. How do you respond to statements like that?

Don’t sons have responsibilities, too? The answer is yes, they do. To hold their fathers accountable.

The simple sharing of hope, its weight not so heavy after all, is a wonder. A lifting. A rising. A surfacing.

He’s at Dad’s bedside now. Finally, he got here. Jay feels Mom behind him, Nan, Eva, Hewey. He has a funny thought. No one carries the best parts of themselves. The best parts are those held inside of others.

A single life is nothing but a spark. The explosion is everything after death, the generations of reverberation. Every consumed morsel of your body, your wisdom, your kindness, your art, is another bid for perfection, a chance to get it right this time, or next time, or the time after that.