Whalefall

by Daniel Kraus

Highway 1 drones. Cypress trees roar. Gulls shriek in squadrons. Yet all Jay Gardiner hears is his father awakening the family at six a.m. Weekdays, weekends, holidays, the man’s blood so attuned to tidal patterns that he gets up without an alarm to begin the bedroom invasions, cowbelling his coffee cup. Sleepers, arise! Mitt Gardiner’s been dead a year now, but his foghorn will be startling Jay from sleep for the rest of his life, he’s sure of it. Jay loves his mom, though, and his sisters, they’re okay. So there’s guilt. For refusing their reasonable requests throughout the whole ugly saga.

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. Jay’s seventeen years deep into the maze, too late to backtrack.

Soothing whispers from all around—spindrift, wild rye. This is what diving could have been like. What water could have been like. If he hadn’t been bullied into both with the martial fanfare of Sleepers, arise! Five more steps and pennants of mist billow away. There it is, the beach, Mitt’s graveyard, its rock jaws wide like it’s hungry for the ocean itself.

There’s a set of wooden stairs, but the ocean air has chewed them up. The steps, about fifteen, are helixed, wrung like a towel. Jay starts down, and the first step punches a bolt of pain from his heel to his pelvis. Under this much gear, an eight-inch drop feels like eight feet. He tightens his lower back and keeps going. These steps tilt west. Those steps tilt east. The final step is warped at a seesaw angle. Jay slides down it, off the lower edge. His feet plant ankle-deep in the beach’s distinctive round granules of sand.

He had big plans, he told them. Graduate in the top 5 percent of his class. Get a forestry degree from Berkeley, a job at Yellowstone.

Before going nomad, Jay lived for fifteen years in Seaside, a west Monterey suburb, in a small, one-story, coral-colored house with a red-stone lawn overlooking a trailer park. The house Mom grew up in. If you mentioned that, though, Dad got mad. Young Jay didn’t know why, but his sisters said it was emasculating. What’s that mean? It means cutting off Dad’s balls. What’s that mean? It’s a metaphor for money.

“Dad feels like a loser because he can’t buy a place he actually likes,” Nan said. “Of course he can’t,” Eva added. “He can’t hold a job more than thirty seconds.” A place Dad liked? That meant a place on the ocean if not a houseboat. Dad often stood on the red-rock lawn, blandly returning neighbor howdys, neck muscles taut as he strained for the sea.

Hope collapsed every morning at six a.m.: Sleepers, arise! Jay began to see Dad’s siren as the opening punch of a boxing match, Mitt Gardiner versus his life. Dad didn’t want the house, not really. He didn’t want the family, not always. Only Jay, by bad luck the only other balls-haver in the house, was doomed to join Dad’s fight, to be brought up as a first mate on a ship headed straight for the rocks.

When diving with a buddy, or one’s hard-ass father, there’s a checklist. How’s your buddy’s physical and mental sharpness? How’s your own? What’s the navigation plan? The depth expectation? Do we know our hand signals? Is air flowing? Are the cylinders secure? Jay alarm-clocked himself before dawn—his own Sleepers, arise!—to drill the checklist into his brain and consult local tide tables, so he might enter the water between ebb and flood.

He’s back with two trays of food. He hears an echo of what Dad used to say when he came home with a bucket of fish to fry: Grub, ho! His favorite sentiment next to Sleepers, arise! But the mood has changed. Mom’s eyes, never concealed, have always been her best quality, gorgeously cowlike, lashes like kelp fronds. She’s losing hair a bit at the seam and trying to obscure it; it makes Jay feel protective. He’d do anything for her. Except move back. Just name it. “He’s asking for you, Jay,” she says. “You’re all he talks about.”

Mitt taught him color loss due to light reflection. Another way of intuiting depth. You lose red at twenty feet, orange at twenty-five, yellow at thirty, green at forty. Jay’s in the violet, past sixty feet, past seventy. Same news from his depth gauge but in different colors. He’s deep into the orange, red right around the curve.

Mom says. “The second you get home, and you don’t wake up till morning. I’m worried.” “Like I said. I’m busy.” “You’re depressed, Jay,” Nan sighs. “Are you this dense?” “Not about Dad. Not about Dad I’m not.” “He’s fighting. Fighting so hard. Every day. Only in the hopes that you’ll come see him.” Mom’s crying now. At In-N-Out Burger. Jesus. “Baby, everything in him is broken now. I know it’s hard. I know it. But please don’t break his heart, too.”

Right in front of Jay, one wheel of stars flattens into the shape of a lash. A second wheel does the same. A third, a fourth, every star cluster now an interstellar highway. This is no hallucination, no underwater UFO. These are the bioluminescent lights of Architeuthis. The giant squid. The gruff suck of his regulator reminds Jay that he’s alive. He exhales. Bubbles bounce off his face as if the squid data in his brain is pouring out. Millions of giant squid live in the ocean deep. At least that’s the theory.

Mitt didn’t believe in underwater photography, claimed it made it impossible to live in the moment.

This is happening. And it beats anything Mitt ever saw. Brick-red in actuality, midnight-blue down here, Architeuthis is thirtysome feet long from mantle fins to tentacle toes. Half a ton of gloppy flesh, floating in place, spreading like oil, its natural lights the glinting eclipses of a thousand moons. As it rotates, an eye rolls into view. The size of a soccer ball, it’s the largest eyeball on Earth, a white disc of flame in the ocean black.

Something is happening. A tsunami. An undersea earthquake. The abyss speaks. TAK Mitt used to rap Jay’s tank for attention, a muffled underwater gong. This is like that, but everywhere and everything. The current gets stormier. It spins Jay, skids him parallel to the cliff. He’s got no control. He skews under one of the squid’s long tentacles, all it has to do is flex and Jay will be snagged, a parcel for deep-sea drowning. But the squid looks equally stunned, jelly quivering with every TAK, TAK, TAK, a cannonade Jay receives as a series of blows to his sternum.

He’s an astronaut cut from his space station. He’s way over the canyon’s open mouth. Fish pelt him. Beneath deafening TAK blasts, he hears their little bones break.

It is the moon, pale blue, mottled, massive, dream, legend. Rising. A ship of gods from primordial tar, yard after yard of wrinkled black bulk, a farce of size displacing the entire ocean.

Jay’s stupor permits the dull understanding that this crescent is a mouth, twenty feet of closed mouth, and this obsidian skyscraper is no surfacing Atlantis. No colliding planet. It is a living thing. Mitt, in his foulest of moods, pissed at some landlubber who got the best of him, said human beings were suckers to think they, with their matchstick villages balanced atop bread crusts of dry land, controlled anything at all. The lords lived below. Fins tiny, yet still twice the size of Jay. Motionless now but one flap of them, and surely tides would surge all along the western coast.

He needs to swim away as hard as he can. Before he does, Jay tips forward, looks past his legs into the canyon gloom. Visibility’s better here, if blotchy. Far, far ...

Dad erases the sand drawing, his half-gone ring finger not helping, and stands to gaze over Carmel Beach. The correct answer sizzles like ocean breakers. “Sperm whale,” Dad says. Jay’s confidence, the sand, both scattered. “But we don’t see sperm whales,” he says hopefully. “Sometimes we do. Out on a boat. But they’re rare.

In all the art Jay’s seen, sperm whales are barges of fat. But when the whale before him curls its fluked tail to the side, muscles larger than Jay pull tight, pinching seams through the blubber. It must be the strongest thing that ever lived, matched only by its unexpected grace.

The old father of the sea, Mitt called the sperm whale. Wait until the dive bros hear about this. Jay will outright tell them. There won’t be any more spitting on any shoes. They’ll want to hear every detail. Jay will tell them, and they’ll start to see that he’s not Mitt Gardiner’s flunky. He’s a man of his own.

The sperm’s right eye peeks into view fifteen feet down the endless snout. A tiny, irised marble all but lost in the vastness of ebony skin. Jay feels the eye lock with his own. Intelligence, patience, curiosity. Jay’s outside his own body. No heiliger Schauer. This is no bully. The whale is a fellow mammal; its gaze has a simian weight. By acknowledging Jay, it shares that it has a soul.

Dad’s data pumps into Jay’s skull; he’s heir to it. Sperm whale. Physeter macrocephalus. Sixty tons, the weight of twelve elephants, its block head taking up one-third of its mass and filled with an oil that whalers dubbed spermaceti. Even curled like biceps, this male is the size of a warehouse.

The white arcs of its closed mouth and genitals are only the most conspicuous deviations from its charcoal color. Pale squiggles roadmap its wadded skin. These are scars—hieroglyphics that tell the violent saga of this primeval giant. Battles with other bull sperms. Skirmishes with killer whales. Clashes with human debris. Both the whale’s flukes are hatcheted, probably from propellors.

The whale’s squiggly scars are one thing. But the interlocking rings all over the whale’s head? Those are sucker marks from other squids that fought for their lives. Mitt told Jay dozens of times. Architeuthis has only one predator. The sperm whale. That’s why the whale has surfaced from the canyon. It is hunting the squid.

Artists made clear what each combatant brought to the fight. Whales have the power, the weight. But each squid arm is a glut of suction cups, hundreds, each ringed in serrated teeth capable of sawing through whale flesh. Artwork portrayed lots of thrashing, the whole sea at a boil. Jay might not survive it. I need to leave, he thinks. He kicks for the cliff, stirring the canyon’s crypt. His exhaled bubbles occlude his vision: he’s barely moving.

This close, it’s like being hit with a cannonball. Jay’s flesh ripples, muscles wobble, tendons twang, bones ring. Eyeballs rattled, he’s blind. When sight splotches back, the bay’s sunny lid is lost, he’s in midnight somersault. Mid-spiral he understands the noise is powerful enough to crack his ribs into his lungs. It’s the sonic wallop Mitt used to listen for through Sleep’s hydrophone. The sperm whale’s echolocational clicks.

It hurts, muscle-deep, organ-deep. Jay needs to triple his efforts. Swim so hard his limbs dislocate. Find a gap between cliff rocks and take cover from the whale’s decibels, right alongside Mitt Gardiner’s bones, if he’s lucky, one last father-and-son adventure beneath the sea. He never gets a chance.

Sperms are the only whales that converse via click codas, a language scientists still can’t decode.

Galaxies whiz overhead, the squid’s bioluminescent flesh blurred in motion. Jay thinks Architeuthis is making its escape until he sees all ten appendages streaming the wrong direction. The squid is being pulled through the water. Jay is startled but glad the beast is exiting, until he realizes he’s being pulled, too.

The view from his mask is abridged, obscured. Bubbles, his own; an ogling eyeball, the squid’s; the burly bow of a fleshy ship, the whale’s. The sucking force pulls his tendons, bone-ends eight-balling into sockets. Pure panic whines from Jay’s chest. What’s happening? Cylinder malfunction? Canyon rip current? Then Jay’s facing the whale, and the oily megalith splits open as if by ghostly hatchet. The bottom jaw lowers six feet. After that, all Jay sees are teeth. Forty, fifty, sixty teeth.

Mitt emphasized that sperm whale suction was still a theory. Some think whales simply outswim their prey. Some think their echolocation blasts are weapon enough. Many, though, insist sperms feed via suction. Mitt knew a woman who’d helped cut up a dead sperm whale with no bottom jaw, lost in battle or accident. Yet still it had a bellyful of squid. Pretty strong argument for suction, Mitt said.

The whale’s top jaw is toothless, bleach-white gums pitted with holes for sleeving the lower jaw’s teeth when not in use. They are definitely in use: a U-shape of chipped, broken, yellow cattle horns as thick as Jay’s wrists. He and the squid are being sucked right into them. The squid gets there first. The whale’s mouth half closes, teeth snagging the tubular mantle and a wreath of tangled arms.

Jay tumbles toward the whale. He’s only a few feet away, no stopping now. The whale is appalling hyperbole, bigger than his house, its mouth an absurdly small chain saw hinged to the underside.

Jay hits the whale how he wants, left fin on the lower slope of the nose, right fin on the knobby tip of the lower jaw. But the sperm’s head is harder than Monastery Beach rock. Jay’s fins are EVA plastic and the left one snaps in half, the blade pinwheeling into blackness. Could have been Jay’s foot—his toes, white tapioca beads, are exposed. A rod of pain drills through his left leg, heel to hip, a highway pileup of leg bones. His bare foot slips off the icy nose, souring Jay’s balance so that his right heel goes between the whale’s front teeth and he slides feetfirst into its mouth on two inches of warm slime, the effluvia of a thousand squids past.

Teeth are all Jay has to grab on to. He takes one in each hand. Thick as bottles but greased with ocean sludge and squid mucus, he can’t hold on, can’t hold on, tries to roll out the right side of the mouth, but teeth fence the path, and is the mouth closing? Is it closing? Is that what’s happening?

Jay survived ingestion. So did Architeuthis. Twenty suckers ringed in sawblade teeth screw into Jay’s neck. He feels his wetsuit hood tighten, then a liquid gush. It’s his throat slit, lifeblood slurping out. No, the fluid’s too cold—it’s the slicing open of his neoprene hood, the compression seal disrupted, saltwater flooding in. Icy liquid slaloms down his torso and exits from the whale-tooth rip in his wetsuit’s right side. Jay pulls away, but where’s he going?

Pressed against Jay, the squid abandons its battle against the formless foe of the stomach. All ten appendages curl around Jay. Strangulation. Jay can’t even gasp. His breathing gear can’t work if his ribs won’t expand, and the squid crushes like wet cement. Drumming through the squid’s jelly are what feel like three hard little fists. Jay knows what they are. A giant squid has three hearts. Jay has but one. Man versus ocean. It’s not a fair fight. It never was.

Architeuthis died. But it left behind a gift. “I’m not crazy.” He’s sobbing it. “I’m not crazy, I’m not crazy.” It’s squid residue that lights up the stomach. The few inches of sloshing seawater are lumpy with matter. What looks like junk, trash, dregs of plastic. Most of it, though, looks like weird fish, strange critters, still alive and glowing hazily like lights on the bottom of a pool. Luminous beings like these could only be found in the Monterey Canyon depths.

Can he escape through the anus? No idea, but he can’t stay put. He begins turning onto his belly, a real struggle, his tank sticks out too far and so does his right fin. He uses his left toes to rip the fin off his right foot. Both feet, naked, sploosh into stomach muck, all the hidden things. Don’t think about it. Losing the fins helps. Forward, into the darkness where the squid vanished. (Don’t) Jay drags himself with his elbows, audible squishes. ((Don’t)) Why would he listen to the whale that swallowed him? Anywhere is better than here.

Can’t see much. Uses his hands. The texture here is different, tighter, pursing like lips. He fits his hands inside, prayer formation, then pulls them apart: forceps, speculum. The hoop of muscle reacts like a poked insect, retracts from his touch. (((Don’t))) Jay grapples an elbow into the spasming opening before him, now a second elbow, now he’s pulling his head in after, he’s through, he’s through. ((((DON’T))))

He’s no longer in the whale. He’s in hell. Fiery haze warps his vision, it’s twice as bright here, so violet it’s pink, neon ghosts waltzing over a bubbling, crimson stew, all within a purple-red bag roughly the same size and tightness of the previous space Jay was in. It’s sweaty hot. Stinks of spoiling meat. Loud, too: flatulent cracks between the spit, gurgle, squeal, and suck. Jay pulls himself through the fleshy portal.

A dark orb is stuck to his palm. Slightly bigger than a ping-pong ball. And, Jay realizes, not a ball at all but an abstract sculpture, brown as polished walnut, a fusion of smooth, curved plates that scythe down into opposite pincers. The top of which is embedded in his palm. Jay’s blood, orangish in hell’s light, dribbles from the point of impalement. He knows what this object is. A giant squid beak. The one part of a squid that sperm whales can’t digest.

The beak resembles that of a large parrot. Its mandibles are held together by a clump of beige muscle, acid-eaten and drizzled like pumpkin guts. Jay grips the mandible dug into his palm. It’s the hardest thing he’s touched during this soft nightmare. Jay pulls on the beak. His palm skin tents outward. Jay feels the point of the beak grind against a hand bone. Blood, thicker and darker, syrups out. The pain is polychromatic, barbed wire through every nerve, white blindness.

Jay’s exposed skin is on a slow burn, getting worse by the second. With the beak still pinned to his right palm, Jay leans against a knot of pinched muscle, the gateway to chamber three.

Burning sludge licks Jay’s chin. Spatters scald his throat, he’s gagging, he’s coughing, he’s telling himself to let it happen, get it over with. (((Put it back))) Inhale. Pinwheel vision. Inhale. Hummingbird heart. Inhale. Black sponge, self-erase, fade out. ((((PUT IT BACK JAY)))) Brain bad. Not think good. Did whale—did whale say his name?

Methane. Colorless. Odorless. It’s what poisoned Mitt Gardiner at Sheol Landfill. What turned four feet of scummy water into a labyrinth Mitt had no interest in escaping.

Simply kneeling beside Mitt at the lagoon, Jay got dizzy, euphoric. Here in the second chamber of the stomach, he’ll soon deplete of any self-protective instinct. He’ll slip into fatigue, then coma. He’ll slump beneath the acids. They will glug down his open throat, start dissolving his innards. ((((MOVE)))) Jay hasn’t followed a Mitt Gardiner order in two years, but he follows this one.