Whalefall

by Daniel Kraus

He plugs the regulator into his mouth. Voids it of glop. Breathes deep. That familiar dry tank air. Clarity knives into his brain. How to get out. How to get out. Jay doesn’t have the dexterity to crawl backward, not inside this bubbling gel. He’s got to turn around, get back to the first chamber. Seems impossible. But he has to try.

He’s sitting upright. Okay. Good. Now, tuck and roll forward, a gymnast in slow-motion dismount. His hooded scalp scrapes along the top of the stomach, stretching it just enough for his head to pass. The valve of his tank snags muscle, but Jay’s got gravity on his side. The tank skids across mucus and he flops forward, splashes down, head under acid. What will happen to his face? Fuck it. Faces aren’t a worry when the body you’re inside isn’t yours. He’s done it. He’s turned back around, facing the first chamber again. ((((MOVE)))) Jay’s hands, even the beaked one, tighten his BCD. Doesn’t even think about it. This is how well he was trained.

Jay’s had enough stomach viruses to know that bodily systems revolt, and when they do, it doesn’t matter if a digestive tract was designed as a one-way street.

The stomach contracts. The whale knows he’s back. It’s worse without the buffer of the giant squid. The Faber tank is driven into Jay’s vertebrae. He thinks he hears the dolphin whine of bending steel. Every ball of bone in his skeleton—shoulder knobs, elbows, hips, knees, ankles—are fastballs against brick, nerve endings pinned. Hard parts of the BCD imprint deep into his flesh. One upside: he barely feels the itch of his acid burns.

How much more air does he have? Jay runs a hand down his side until he finds the hose leading to the instrument console. It’s pinched under his pelvis, and yanking it out is like tugging his own intestines. The console snags on stomachs: the wetsuit’s, the whale’s. The hard plastic plows a bruising trail up his chest and neck. It pops free, a bright surprise. The two dial faces are glow-in-the-dark limes. The compass says he’s headed north. Does a compass work inside a whale? The depth gauge says 100 feet, but same question. The pressure gauge, though, there’s no reason it shouldn’t be accurate. Jay holds it flat to his mask.

1720 psi. That’s not good. Jay’s been inside the whale twenty minutes, twenty-five max, and in the ocean another twenty before that. Mitt taught him consumption-rate formulas, a fiddlier calculus than anything taught at school. SAC rate, RMV rate, tank conversion factor, depth factor, multiply this, divide that, with the final quotient being How Long Your Air Will Last.

He’s been using his tank for fortysome minutes. His SPG shouldn’t be this low. He’s guzzling air. Jay pictures the Faber on his back: silver, chipped, pinged with dents, but solid. Elkhorn Dive Center filled it to 3000 psi.

Jay sobs, chokes, coughs, wails. Dad’s woken up Jay so often: Sleepers, arise! But not once has he put him to sleep. He’ll fail. Dad doesn’t know how it’s done, all he knows is how to order Jay around. What Dad says is a surprise. “You’re hyperventilating. It’s something I know about. Any diver who’s paid their dues has hyperventilated.

“It’s the same stuff we’ve talked about with diving tanks. You’re breathing out more CO2 than you’re breathing in oxygen, which makes your brain go goofy. Your thoughts are flying all over the place, right?” It’s true. Jay nods. More tears spill. “Put your lips like this. Like you’re whistling. There we go. Now breathe into your diaphragm, not your lungs. I want to see that belly pooch. Good. Give me five more. Now hold your breath. Ten seconds. Can you do that? Three, four, five, six, seven, eight—now let it out. Back to the diaphragm, give me six breaths. Now let go. Don’t think about it. See? We call this breathing sleepy

An Architeuthis beak. “Diamond of the sea,” Hewey called it. Harder than metal, unscratchable and unbreakable, Mitt once rhapsodized. Severs prey’s spinal cords as easy as a knife through noodles. Squid beaks were the base ingredient of ambergris, the waxy lumps shat by sperm whales and used in luxury perfumes, every poor fisherman’s dream, selling for roughly twenty-five grand per pound. People used to carry ambergris to ward off the Black Death.

I wouldn’t even be here if not for you. I was out looking for you.” (Yes) “Even though you never looked for me.” (We are looking now) “You just assumed I’d always be there to order around.” (Did you not assume) (That we would always be there too)

The reply startles Jay. Didn’t see that one coming. It’s too hard under this duress to lie to himself, so Jay admits it, sure, it’s true, he figured Mitt Gardiner would persist indefinitely, even post-diagnosis.

No more telling me what to do. No more telling anyone. No more Sleepers, arise! We Gardiners awake when we want. Jay’s played out the fantasy a hundred times. He’ll never get to live it: Mitt’s suicide finished off any dreams of triumph. It wasn’t enough that Jay had to live according to Mitt’s design. Now he’s got to die like Mitt wants, too. “You always wanted to be the big man. Well, you got it. Sixty tons.”

Like a coyote howl, but less manic; like a wolf croon in reverse, not mournful but hopeful, a cry less of earth and fur than air and sand, an arcing siren, high pitch rising higher, nipping the cusp of what Jay’s broken eardrums can perceive. Comparisons fail. A thin rubber wheel scribbling over tile? Air squealing from a stretched balloon? Pure, pleading grief this is. Not for the whale itself but for the vexing obstruction in its throat. The whale is crying.

Jay goes fetal, comfiest pose for his final cradle. The whale will bleed out soon. If eaters don’t annihilate it instantly, the whale’s carcass—and Jay’s carcass inside it—will sink quietly through the fathoms, all six and a half thousand feet of Monterey Canyon, before gentling onto the sea bottom, soft and pliable from its own putrefying gases. Every scorching wound in Jay’s body cools as he fancies it. Scientists call it a whale fall.

A single dead whale nurtures its deep-sea landing spot for ages. Creatures of mind-boggling anatomy, ignorant of the concept of light, come to feed. Rattails. Hagfish. Isopods. They tunnel and gnaw and lick and suck and absorb until the fatty colossus is nothing but methane bubbles, spilled oil, and bone. Life doesn’t stop there. Bacteria gobble up the fat inside whale bones. This makes hydrogen sulfide. Which powers microbes. Soon the bones vanish beneath glittering carpets of worms, glowing bacterial mats of clams, mussels, snails, limpets. Hundreds of species over decades, centuries. At last the bones are so nibbled away they create something like a coral reef—an entire new ecosystem of life. Sermons call this communion.

How was the world “dull and solvent,” but Mitt’s lingering inactivity wasn’t? Jay gets it now. All the things he hoped to learn after graduating and leaving Monterey, the degree at Berkeley, the job at Yellowstone, it’s all here. The infinite inside the infinitesimal. Look at the stomach. Really look at it. See the wagon trails traced through vessels and fat. See Jupiter’s storms. Valleys of fire. Collapsing constellations. A million teardrops. Paths through forests. Dinosaurs, future dinosaurs. A yellow crescent moon. Men, women, snakes. Kissing lips. The silver ritual of rings.

The curve of a lover’s back. Baby chub. Elderly wrinkles. Cracked continents. The wrong road. A flood. Things drowned and ascended. Snowfall. A tree to climb. Spiderwebs. Solar flares. Shh. See it?

“Maybe we. Should pray.” (Too late) (To start now) Both their voices slowing. “The Bible’s got. A story for everything.” (Steinbeck is better than God) “Come on. You only read Cannery Row.” (You only read Cannery Row) “Okay. Hit me. With some Steinbeck.” (Steinbeck trained as a) (Marine biologist) “A-ha. So that’s why. You dig him. I remember one part. Of the book. Where the guy. The main guy. He collects starfish. He’s pulling them out of a bag. And starfish like to cling to stuff. But there’s nothing to cling to. So they cling to each other. So tight they get all knotted up. That was neat. To imagine.”

(You wanted a verse) “Oh. Right.” (There’s more) “Go ahead.” (All of our so-called successful men are sick men with bad stomachs and bad souls)

“Do me a giant favor and tell me your name?” Some holy books end on questions. But Jay’s never been religious. “Jay.” The woman smiles. She has a cherub’s face. “Hi, Jay. I’m Joy.” Yes, you are, Jay thinks. “You’re going to be fine, Jay.” Yes, I am, Jay thinks. Fact: sperm whales sleep less than any mammal on Earth. Jay, son of Mitt, son of whale, will follow suit.

The whole of the bay lifts and shushes, the prehistoric rock and desperate kelp and larking sea life exhaling as one, a refrain, the first words Jay ever remembers hearing transformed from a frustrated father’s complaint to a dad’s inspiration, gauntlets Jay will need to face right here on the naked beach, and tomorrow plugged into hospital tubes, and the day after, and the day after that, and every day that life washes another whale into his path. The refrain is but two words: and the world is the comma between them.

Sleeper, arise!