“Girl, are you considered different from others on land?”
Again she gave the question silence and thought. “Yes. I think I am. That’s one reason I need to be hidden. I think maybe I’m not quite right. I talk too much about too many things and sometimes I make mistakes. I read books from the library.” She paused, caught by a memory. “I did read a story, once, about a whale swallowing a man. But I didn’t… believe it, exactly.”
“I see,” said Bal. “Well, the evolution of my mouth began before you can imagine. Maybe in the Oligocene epoch, when Antarctica became more isolated from Gondwanaland and the West Wind Drift was formed. It’s possible we had teeth then. Some stories say so. Some ancestors believe the stories. If so, our teeth must have evolved over many years into baleen. I don’t know where teeth go across epochs. Have you read about the Antarctic Convergence, where the warm waters of the sub-Antarctic meet the cold water of the Antarctic? That stirs up nutrients and food chains for many species. Including the upwelling of krill. You see?”
Laisvė nodded.
“I’m thinking that all those stories about leviathans may have been connected to the evolution of teeth in my kind. So many stories. Always swallowing men.”
Laisvė stood up. “In the Christian New Testament, Jonah appears at least twice. In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The ‘sign of Jonah’ is invoked by Jesus — it’s a miracle, since he comes back to life after living for three days inside a whale.”
“Can you picture that? Living inside a whale?” said Bal.
“Not until just now,” Laisvė said.
“What’s it like for you?” Bal asked.
“Amniotic,” Laisvė said. “I am a very good swimmer. In Judaism, the Book of Jonah concerns a minor prophet included in the Tanakh. Jonah, in Judaism, was also swallowed by a giant fish and brought back to life. The Book of Jonah is read every year in Hebrew on Yom Kippur. In this story, the fish is said to have been of a primordial era. The inside of the fish was a synagogue, and the eyes were windows.”
“That’s not a bad metaphor,” Bal said.
“In the Quran, Jonah appears as a prophet faithful to Allah. Dhul-Nun, or ‘the one of the fish,’ is swallowed by a big fish,” Laisvė continued. “He stayed for a few days in the belly. A Persian historian named Al-Tabari wrote in the ninth century that Allah made the body of the fish transparent so that Jonah could see ‘wonders of the deep.’ He also reported that Jonah could hear the fish singing.” She walked toward the front of Bal’s cavernous gut. “I’ve always loved that image. A transparent whale.”
Bal sighed hugely. Her gut shook and Laisvė fell onto her back. “So many stories. Heaped upon one another. I’ve never eaten a man. No whale that I know of, in any lineage, ever has. But the stories seem important to your species. Doesn’t it seem strange, in all these years, that no one tries to learn the truth from the whales? I could tell you stories… the ones we tell about your lot, for instance. You wouldn’t like them, though.”
“I might,” Laisvė said. “I am unusually fond of storytelling. Try me.”
“Here’s one. In 1830, in the waters off the island of Mocha near Chile, an albino sperm whale was killed. The whale was said to have more than twenty harpoons in his back. Sailors at the time described the whale as a ferocious monster. No one asked the whale. Or any whales around. At the time, your people called him Mocha Dick, after the island. You probably know him by another name, from a story about a monstrous whale. But we have a different story.
“Our story is about those twenty harpoons in his back, about the glow of his magnificent skin at night under the moon, about his son and his daughter and those kindred souls he swam with. How he led the great journeys through the Antarctic Convergence, where the roil of the waters stirs up nutrients for many species. Those twenty harpoons? To us, they were points in the night sky.”
“You mean like an undiscovered constellation?” Laisvė asked.
“No, no. The constellations you people imagine are nothing to do with us. For us, the points in the night sky are like story maps.”
“That white whale who carried the harpoons in his back… the stars in the sky are a map to where?” Laisvė asked.
“To our dying grounds. Where our bodies, as they decay, become the life source for other ocean species. And the white of the whale is understood as dying light, like stars, and the black of night, like the black of many whales, is seen as lighting the way for the living.”
Laisvė’s eyes stung with tears. “You mean like beacons or guides? Black light in the water?”
“Yes,” Bal said. “Black is the cosmos. Creation. Life itself.”
They moved in silence for some time.
“I’ve heard recordings of whale songs,” Laisvė said. “They’re not ferocious. They are beautiful.”
Bal’s voice inside the belly vibrated her whole body now. “Here is a story for you — about your species. We will all die, we whales. But your species will not care about the history we are carrying. You won’t care how much older we are than you, how we care for and carry our dead, how we emerged from the time before time, how much older water and mountains and trees are than you. Your species will likely continue to obsess on things like whales being sea monsters, or black being dark or without light — or on idiotic economic things, like the fact that the Antarctic current helps preserve shipwrecks from wood-boring shipworms. You’ll keep searching for buried treasure, at the bottom of the ocean, in the melting ice of Siberia, under the ground. You’ll keep destroying yourselves.
“You will all die too, is the thing. But you haven’t figured out how to make death-stories, and death-places, that have generative power.”
Laisvė took the story into her body without flinching.
“Tell them I’ve never swallowed a man, will you, dear?” Bal said. “Tell them that, when whales die and sink to the ocean floor, our decaying bodies create life, just like your shipwrecks create a new habitat.”
The whale paused a moment, then smiled. “I did once swallow a girl. But that story takes a hundred different forms, a hundred different songs. You can tell ’em that.”
Aster’s Wail
The holding tanks, made of metal, are underwater. Aster can see the soldering, can imagine the process as a metalworker. So this is where they take us.
Aster’s anxiety about being underwater lives near his sternum. He thinks perhaps his oh god got stuck there — the oh god when his wife was shot and fell, the oh god of Laisvė’s plunge from the ferry, the oh god of never again seeing his infant son.
And not only those: the oh god of Joseph’s disappearance one night, the oh god of the air around Aster’s life shifting forever.
Right now, though, what he knows is that he can’t feel his feet. He wishes he could tell Joseph that the opposite of walking the iron is being at the bottom of the ocean, in an enormous puke-green steel tank with no windows and nothing to see except terrified people waiting to be taken away.
Taken where? There were rumors, but no one knew for sure, and no one ever came back. In place of all that nothingness, stories emerged. Maybe the detained people scooped up in the Raids were executed, their bodies dumped as fish food out in the ocean. Who would know? Maybe people were taken to some other island or country or piece of the world, to be deposited like trash and set loose to evolutionary entropy. Wasn’t Australia once a penal colony? Hadn’t Laisvė recited all that to him once, listing it all off the way she did? And what happened to Joseph? Did he sit in a tank exactly like this one?