The Whale
My dad’s 1996 Toyota Land Cruiser barreled down the I-5 freeway, sending gentle wafts of balmy air over my mother, father and sister. Like hot breath, it descended directly beyond the third-row passenger seat and on to my nerves. I shifted uncomfortably in my torn black jeans, perspiring underneath a thick woolen beanie and an even thicker mat of brown curly hair that poked out from the front and enshrouded the right half of my face. A clammy Skullcandy ear-bud defiantly blasted Alkaline Trio into my skull to combat the grating noise of a dullard’s NPR discussion that cut erratically in and out of the car radio’s dusty depths. Beads of sweat clung to the buttons of my translucent purple Gameboy Color as I wrapped up my fiftieth playthrough of Pokémon Red. Blue bowed his head in digital defeat, and I furrowed my brow in quiet discern.
“Dad, can we turn on the A/C for a bit?” I groaned. One million plants and insects whizzed by the left window, just as dismissive to my plight as my father.
“Nope,” he replied, “it sucks down the gas mileage. Besides, we’re almost there.”
“You suck the life out of my soul…” I muttered underneath my breath. My sister’s daggers met mine as they shot from her eyes over her shoulder. After an obligatory ‘shut the hell up’, a humid silence was established and she resumed reading her Chuck Palahniuk novel.
Eager to break the tension, my mom chimed in: “Isn’t this exciting, Kaitlin? This is the first step of many in your new life!”
Kaitlin looked up from her book and her face quickly transformed to match my mom’s beaming smile. “Can’t wait!” she chirped cheerily.
Satisfied, my mom turned to face the road with a grin. From behind her, I could see Kaitlin’s smile fall as quickly as it came, followed by a quiet sigh that seemed to miss everyone’s ears but mine.
2
My stomach rumbled as I unwrapped my homemade turkey sandwich. It stared bleakly back at me in a pathetic, wilted slump. I took a half-hearted bite and gazed somberly through the window at the rows of uniformly packed cars on the opposite side of the median. They cast a curious silhouette against the sparkling ocean that stretched beyond the horizon: a view interrupted only by the semi transparency of tinted windows and the indifferent faces behind them.
I thought of my friends back home; all enjoying the freedom that summer granted in the months following the seventh grade. Jade and Rachel were kayaking through the lower Salmon River, and trying their first beers, probably. Eizaak was no doubt adding to his insectoid collection; helping him would have to wait. Rainier and Chase were definitely doing some really cool shit in the woods without me, and I knew they would almost certainly hang their exclusively heroic exploits over my head upon my return. The oncoming helter-skelter of cars and trucks towed with them an ache—one by one, accommodating a new anxious passenger to the carpool of who or what might have been.
Worst of all were the plans so gracefully shredded by my father and sister. I had given them up against my will when my dad finally found a place into which my sister could move, with about a week of warning in advance. Her first semester at college…surely there must have been more planning than this? My fate was bound and chained, despite the fact that my best friend Babs had long since invited me on a fishing trip to Brown Lee with his father and uncle. I hated to admit how excited I was to see what that was like. Babs’ father, Dan, was like mine: terse, grumpy and always busy with something. The exception was that Dan always found the time to bond with his sons, whether it was boating on the lake or snowmobiling through the vast Idaho backcountry. I didn’t need the validation, I suppose…but I yearned for a chance to feel like I was more than just my father’s son.
I snapped out of my malaise as the car slowed and pulled into an innocuous-looking apartment complex. It was done up in the classic mission revival style, with a sequence of brown-orange tiles capping the roof like braided red hair over a sullen beige face. A collective sigh of relief resounded when the car doors opened. Our backs and knees cracked in contention with the stiff leather seats, and my dad’s
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face seemed to soften when he inhaled the pungent aroma of the nearby sea. Kaitlin seemed far away, lost in her thoughts.
Mom and Kaitlin dedicated themselves to a brief and heated stint in interior design while my father and I silently lugged her things from the car. It took nearly an hour to unload all of Kaitlin’s belongings—neatly packed and labeled meticulously: true to her nature. We set our final boxes atop a pile of personal effects, and listened from the bottom of the stairs. Reverberating through the walls and down the steps was the sound of a muffled, yet passionate argument over whether “feng shui” connotes aesthetics or spiritual ambience. Dad pursed his lips and side-eyed me from the landing.
“Wanna check out the beach?” “Sure.”
With my stomach still rumbling angrily, I walked behind him through the doors, down the street and West toward the beach. My eyes never left him as we neared the bluff entrance. Something was happening here, right in front of me. The rigid man I knew all my life unraveled into his younger self within minutes. His slightly hunched, shuffled gait gradually became an upright strut. He was filled with a prideful vigor: taking tremendous strides with an unnatural pep in his step. His eyes darted across the scenery, accompanied by a cheeky grin. The moment we touched our feet to the grainy Santa Barbara sand, he excitedly began pointing out the sites of some of his most treasured memories.
“UCSB is my alma mater, you know.”
“I actually…didn’t know that.” I admitted sheepishly. How did I not know that?
He pointed to an alcove with gusto: “Over there is where my buddies and I would meet up after class for a quick surf sesh. Grab a couple beers, maybe some joints, and we had our plans booked for the afternoon.”
I was utterly speechless. Did he say joints?
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He knew every wave by name, every section of the beach, and every building that loomed beyond the bluff. Time was no stranger to him in his fifty-five years, but his love for the sea had been preserved, everything as clear as the day he left.
As we pressed on along the coastline, we both noticed a strange acrid smell lingering in the air. We wrinkled our noses and remarked how incredibly bad the odor was. It seemed to be completely out of place amongst the gentle lapping waves and the soft ochre of the sand between our toes. The
looming maw of the ocean exuded a noise that almost seemed as though applause was erupting from the vast emptiness of the void. Occasionally the crashing waves would strike the upturned bluff on the shore, cascading droplets of Poseidon’s eminence over our hair and t-shirts.
The smell grew in crescendo the further we ventured North. The stench was so awful that I began to taste it on the back of my tongue. It was the smell of rot—the olfactory indication of life and death below the seemingly vacant surface of the water. It cast a bitter and rancorous flavor onto my taste buds, one to which the devil himself might have turned up his nose.
Every waft of the humid air brought with it this great ghost of something past. It turned my sweat sticky, and my stomach into knots. As we rounded a bend on the beach, the answer to our unspoken question had been answered. The body of a blue whale lay motionless, washed ashore post-mortem.
My father’s face fell. My hand involuntarily covered my face with my shirt. The whale lay with its mouth agape, crying in silent protest to the swarm of seagulls that circled hungrily over its colossal corpse.
My father closed his eyes and turned toward the glistening orange sunset over the dappled blue waves. “The ocean is the ancestor of all life here on Earth, Kellen. The life it gives is reclaimed by everything that still remains.”
My eyes were locked with the whale’s gaunt sockets, which rhythmically discharged a biblical flood of flies as the ocean breeze caressed its legendary cadaver.
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“Try as you might, all things are inevitably caught by time. You, me…this guy.” He motioned with his head toward the decaying monster. “And just like the ocean, all things come to the surface. But you, you’ve got this big ol’ chip on your shoulder, son.”
I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the bus-sized hunk of rotting meat, and he stared pensively into the sunset. A gull picked through the whale’s uneven baleen.
He sighed. “You’re young, you’ve got a lot of things to figure out, I know. You’re gonna be a teenager, and things will probably get a lot worse before they get better, believe me. You wouldn’t believe the crap we went through with Kaitlin,” he chuckled, though his face quickly turned to stone once again. “But your mother and I would do it all again if it meant that all of you were set up to live a good life. A life without debt, or loans or strife. Don’t ever let yourself fall into debt, Kellen. Remember that. The people you owe will try to take everything from you.”
He picked up a rock and slung it into a gentle skip across the receding tideline.
“We could barely afford to send your sister to college. But she’s here. And I’m gonna keep working every day until she graduates. Your brother, too. However long it takes, however much it hurts, I know that I’m here to ensure their future. And one day, yours too.”
The whale stared back at me in baleful woe, and a tear ran down my cheek, followed by another. I had never heard him speak like this.
“But your future isn’t decided by me, or anyone else. You are the main character in your story.
It’s up to you what book you write; if you keep getting into trouble and getting bad grades then you might end up with a story that you don’t like. And maybe I don’t want to see you make mistakes that are so…predictable. Y’know?”
I quickly wiped away my tears before he turned to face me. “Yeah…I know.” I nodded.
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“And one day you’ll wind up like that whale over there, and it’ll all be over, with nothing to show for except for what you’ve left behind.”
“Right.” I choked.
“You’re a good kid,” he said, grinning. “Learn to ride a wave instead of allowing yourself to be crushed by the ocean.”
I didn’t know what to say. Instead, I flattened my lips and looked away, nodding. “Whaddaya say we get out of here, huh? This beach smells like shit,” he added tersely. “Yes, please.” I laughed in relief.
The walk back South along the beach felt as though we were traveling downhill. A mysterious weight had been lifted from my shoulders, and I began to notice the symmetry of the palms dotted haphazardly along the sand. I felt warmer, but hungrier. Somehow famished yet tacit. I then knew why my Dad had fought so ardently throughout my childhood.
Kaitlin’s apartment had a new kind of flair to it when we arrived. Her kitchen items were symmetrically organized, and the surfaces beneath them were scrubbed to a radiant sheen. Her room was unquestionably homey and pleasant. The secrets of feng shui had no doubt been hashed out to a science, and the evidence was plain to see. We found Kaitlin and my Mom laughing in the living room, snacking on vegan cheese and crackers.
“FINALLY,” Kaitlin bellowed, her full mouth sending pieces of cracker flying. “We’re STARVING.”
“Seconded,” I groaned. There was no time to waste. There had been talk of some exalted Thai restaurant in the car, and I definitely heard that over my ear-buds at one point.
Dusk had long since fallen by the time we were seated at the restaurant. One by one, our butts hit the velvety cushions around the oval table. My Dad ordered some wine, and my Mom filled him in on
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everything we missed in the apartment. I was so light-headed from my hollow stomach, which gurgled and screamed at me from beneath my salty shirt. The waiters came and went, like sprites in a dream. Kaitlin noticed that I was clutching my stomach in agony, and she passed me some vegetarian spring rolls with a wink. I accepted, and tore into one ravenously.
“So uh,” I mumbled in between bites. “You excited for college?”
A long exhale came from her nose as she munched her greens. “Yeah…I’m a little nervous. I guess I’m just worried about making friends, among other things.”
I blinked as she looked away coyly. She had always been so confident; so sure of herself and her abilities. I washed the spring roll down with a sip of my Mom’s wine before she had a chance to notice.
“Well,” I said. “You’ve always been the smartest out of all of us. You’ll figure out some cheeky algorithm or quirky social queue that’ll get you on track. Fake it ‘til you make it, right?” She smirked and her eyes smiled back at me.
It was then that the waiters paraded from the kitchen toward us, adorned with steaming dishes piled high with rice, meat and vegetables. An overflowing plate of chicken chow mein touted its mouth- watering brilliance as it landed gently before my withered body. With the willpower of a Tibetan monk, I waited until my family’s plates were laid out in front of them before I dug in.
A drove of pigs might as well have dined where we sat. There was no sound, save for the scraping of forks onto plates and the occasional grunt of satisfaction. Nary a few minutes passed by the time our bellies were full. My dad loosened his belt, and my mom slapped his arm for his lack of manners. “God, I don’t know if I could stomach dessert right now. I’m stuffed,” he wheezed.
My ears perked up. Dessert? We never get dessert…are we gonna try some weird Thai pastry? My dad read my thoughts, to my surprise: “Mango sticky rice.” He burped, raising his eyebrows. “Have you ever tried mango sticky rice, Kel?” Kaitlin asked.
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Before I could respond, another plate was set in front of us. The rice shone white like pearls, and the mango as bright as the setting sun. Johann Sebastian Bach’s cello suite No. 1 in G minor began to play over the atmospheric chatter, and the plate illuminated my face in a yellow glow: begotten only by the most sacred of angels. The clatter of the restaurant faded away, and the ambience of strangers’ voices seemed hushed and muffled. It was there, in front of me. Mankind’s greatest achievement to date. Neil Armstrong be damned. Bach’s arpeggiated allemande accompanied a fork-full of rice and mango into my impatient mouth. The moment the sweet rice and tangy mango struck my tongue, the world in front of me erupted into a sea of color and light. My eyes closed, and I was sent hurtling through ten galaxies worth of flavor and mystique. Words I could not pronounce began to speak themselves into existence, and my thoughts became a tumultuous waterfall of effervescent splendor that ricocheted across the walls of my brain and into my heart. I could feel the Earth breathing beneath my feet, and I could hear the sounds of clandestine conversations from across the street: the quiet whispers that none could sense without the divine touch of the soul’s alignment with the stars and God.
“Are you…are you okay?” Kaitlin asked incredulously. “What drugs are in this?” I muttered.
“What?”
“What DRUGS,” I shouted, slamming my fist into the table, which caused my parents and several patrons to turn to me with concern. “Sorry,” I continued, looking around at everyone. “…what drugs are IN this!?”
“Um…” Kaitlin raised her eyebrow. “None?”
“Wow.” My family gave me the same look that one would give to a drunken village idiot, stumbling home from the bar.
I finished every morsel on the plate. My mom sternly scolded me for literally licking the plate clean. “That’s unbecoming, Kellen. Come on.”
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To be honest, I couldn’t really tell you anything else that happened that night. I was struck by something that preceded mankind’s wonder, and his ability to hate and love. The mango sticky rice transcended everything I knew to be true and fair; black and white—dead or alive. All I knew was that I wound up on a pull-out couch in Kaitlin’s apartment: staring blankly at the ceiling. In a daze, I pondered the meaning of life. My life, and everything else within it. Amidst this never-ending dance of thrall and dark nothingness, therein lied the profound magic of immortal consciousness in one exotic dish. Blessed was the damned, who sought light in the raging sea of mortal certainty.
The next day we said our goodbyes to Kaitlin, who seemed to have taken a load off her shoulders. I could tell she was excited, despite her apprehension. She waved to us from the curb as we drove away, and my mom began crying into her sleeve. The muggy Californian sun once again permeated the back seat of the Land Cruiser, and I prepared for the inevitably hot and uncomfortable eighteen-hour drive back home. As I reached to pull my beanie from my sweaty brow, I felt a familiar cool breeze stroke my cheek. I looked up in awe: my dad had turned on the A/C. From the rear-view mirror, I caught a glimpse of his teal and turquoise eyes. He winked.