FOREWORD : Thoughts
To Catherine Langford
To Steve Jablonsky
To Lily, my ghost, my ward, and my muse.
I wrote this story because I wanted to read it.
PROLOGUE
DAYDREAM
Dream or die
Daydreaming was her small act of rebellion in a world that didn't make sense to her, from the moment she opened her eyes in the morning to the time she went to sleep. But then, she saw, the world wouldn't let her rebel that easily, even if her act was so quiet and discreet and non-boastful. In exchange of that emptiness she needed for her daydreams, it imposed her a loneliness that was so viscid, and the more she fought it, the more she was glued into it, restricted to stillness.
She thought about it. It must mean that dreaming was a misuse of her existence. It must mean that she was doing life wrong. She became convinced of it. Daydreaming was guilty, a price to pay about that, it didn’t amount to anything. It just built a feeling that rested on nothing tangible, raised no number in her monthly salary, magically repaired nothing in the list of issues her old car had under its hood, invited no solitude-breaking company within the four walls of her home. Produced no two point five kids, erected no picket fence, mowed no green lawn, grabbed no American dream by the collar, collected no coins for a savings account.
Daydreaming was more than that, more than anything the existing world could build for a human being’s content.
One memory
One day in June, she had been scolded by her aunt and uncle because she had ignored their demands that she’d be back before dark on a Friday night, when she was a young girl. It had happened just before her graduating seventh grade and technically she had been grounded for that, especially after the only response she had had to their reprimands was a blasé shrug, but she had gotten out of it during the twenty-four hours of her celebrating her graduation and the imminent start of the summer.
The family had planned to take a boat tour on the Baltic Sea around the island of Brüsolln, accompanied by a little group of tourist. It was the end of Spring but a bit chilly that day, however, the water was calm. Such interaction with the wild sea breeze, hiding under anoraks, and taking pictures of holding each other against the wind had the power to turn any new teenager back to a child again and Eugenie and her guardians had laughed together and hung out.
“Whales!” they suddenly heard. Aunt Diana shuffled on Max’s chest, her husband, to grab the camera he was holding hanging at the neck without turning her eyes away from the horizon where the crests of the waves mingled with some occasional peeping fins. Then a geyser of water launched itself upward from one of the cetacean’s breathing hole. Eugenie had been shocked by how near those creatures were. The edges of a giant arm flipper caressed the surface.
“Here it is my love” Max handed the heavy camera to his wife, “look at those fins”
Eugenie had read about the excursion in advance and even seen pictures in the brochure distributed at the moment of reservation –these days, you had to phone them to drive to the pier, there were no online tickets— and the front page of the flyer was decorated by the impressive photograph of a whale who had entirely breached the water and jumped in the air with the little boat of tourists in the background, for their delight. The rest of the documented images inside the brochure only showed faraway fins and blowholes little sparse volcanoes on the water that people used binoculars to see. They could easily be confused with some little mounds of rocks slicing out of the sea. Not that the creatures operated so far, but the water wasn’t clear and the mix of living mastodon and dark liquid produced a non-contrasted result to the eye of the viewers on deck, and the whales seemed shy.
She had a plan. Eugenie’s heart skipped a beat as she undid the straps of her backpack, deposited it carefully on a bench near the boat’s railway and fetched her scuba diving mask. “Eugenie, what are you doing?” There was no time for thinking further about the validity of the plan, she saw, and she darted a panicked look at Diana and Max (they both ran marathons for fun in the summer but they were also gifted sprinters) before throwing her anorak on the group to distract her. Then she slid out of her sweatshirt. Running for the starboard as she knew that jumping in the water from the back of the boat was quite perilous, she unzipped her pants and just left them behind. “NOO” She heard a collective protest in the back, not just her aunt and uncle but the entire crowd of the watchers as she flew in her underwear from the railing.
Eugenie was an excellent swimmer, it was typical of Swedish people, and accustomed to the cold. Once in the water, she focused on her breathing, she knew that she would process the temperature quickly and that soon, it would become a simple envelope on her skin, something that wouldn’t touch her mind –only in the long run would she have to be concerned by the effects of the cold and she knew she shouldn’t linger more than five minutes in the water. She positioned the mask on her eyes and nose, took a big gulp of air and dove. The first thing she saw was the huge and dark eye of the whale that was closest to her, buried inside some thick fold of rubbery skin, and so much peace and what resembled infinite wisdom in it that Eugenie diverted her stare, intimidated.
Stolen story; please report.
Rookie mistake. Looking around while swimming in the open sea should only be done if one was ready to feel small and alone and easy to crush. Her white toes wriggled on top of total blackness from underneath and, glancing left and right, the same blackness, gargantuan. Only the two whales, themselves colossal, provided distraction from this dreadful and terror-inducing black hole, like a space station to which an astronaut could be tethered before a space walk. She swam up to the surface to recharge in air and waved reassuringly at her family and the people on the small boat, “don’t worry” she shouted, out of breath, “I’ll be back right away!” She didn’t have a lot of time as, soon, the little ship would aim at her rescue and the engines and propellers would scare the whales away.
Eugenie rinsed her mask with quivering fingers, their tip blue and purple, her index’ fingernail surrounded by red, and she spat on the glass before putting the mask back on.
She was right. She had totally forgotten about the coldness of the sea now that she was terrified about the desolate watery night underneath. But whales! When next would she be able to approach some whales so near? Never, she thought, as her punishment from Diana and Max would not only be restored and prolonged but she guessed that she would forever be kept from stepping on a whale-watching tour. Like a convict ready for the hanging offered one last cigarette, she dove again and, again, she was stunned by the paralyzing feeling that the abyss created in her; it was too abyssal and for an instant, she felt that she wouldn’t be able to go on with her plan. Like a child wavering at zooming out of the basement and not looking back to forget the monsters below.
Then, she heard the sound. Submerged in the water, through the deafening beats of her heart, she squinted her eyes inside the mask, as absurdly as someone looking for a street sign in a car lowered the volume of the radio to better see. It was a whale song. It began as crackles of bubbles, then tore through the fabric of the water and drilled into the ears of Eugenie. She shook as if she had been struck by an underwater shock wave. Something so heartbreaking, something so heavenly, the deep and hollow clicks following were creepy and menacing, like a siren forbidding trespass with a resounding click of her tongue, t t t t. And yet it nourished Eugenie through the pores of her skin and the veins in her body. Boosted by the whale song, she felt the fear distance itself and she swam closer to the whales in energetic strides.
What a gorgeous pair they were. In that season, Eugenie doubted that those two were mother and baby, otherwise, baby would have been smaller. They were of the same immense size, only one looking more timid than the other and hiding behind the one whose eye was still pointed at Eugenie. The effects of the low temperature of her swim were commencing to be felt in her body, tingles in her fingers, the heels of her feet, heavy limbs, light head, but Eugenie knew it was her last chance. She pierced the line of the surface one last time to inhale some big air, found her lungs strained by the pressure of the cold.
She was running out of time but, when it came to apnea, she had one more breathing trick up her sleeve she had learned competing with bigger kids who challenged her at the fjord for touching the deep algae bottom and retrieve a little crowned coin or a shiny stone or some keys to a home hanging on some leather lace. In reality, it was how one was meant to survive falling through a crack of ice with the freezing temperatures making it virtually impossible for muscles like the diaphragm to move, paralyzing a person into suffocating. It was training breath to happen on its own without effort but, Eugenie had noticed, it was an exercise that could extend holding one’s breath too, if no falling was involved into frosty pool and no survival was at stake.
Eugenie knew how to do it. She paused between undulating water and fixed sky, and inhaled. She held herself floating there long enough so she could count thirty quickening breaths in of actively absorbed air, swallowed down and expelled strongly, quaking inside her like a balloon ready to be freed to the sky, before she rolled down and dove below the waves again, mouth closed. She had had to accelerate this enterprise in order to escape the rescue mission the boat was conducting on her, but it would work. She fought some dizziness, more motivated than ever; that sort of drawing in raspy air was buzzing and inverting cardinal points, and it was normal.
Hello she greeted the whales. The one in front of her seemed to be doing a slow and graceful waltz, movements that, now and again, exposed her belly which would then propagate a flash of white through the darkness. The song was transcending. Eugenie thrashed her arms around to lower herself as deep as she could in order to be able to levitate somewhat in front of the face of the animal. Eugenie felt like if the whale rose her flipper, she could swat her away, or shake her hand. The spell of the encounter and the face to face finally grabbed her by the throat and the heart and she started weeping inside her mask but her chest was laughing hysterically. She did a circling motion with her right arm in the water to indicate a salute, since her mast was too foggy to be able to establish real eye contact.
All fear sank at the bottom of the sea, that black bottom that she couldn’t distinguish, leaving her behind, up there, letting Eugenie’s weightless body continue flapping and kicking to maintain her hovering position. Wildly, she saw that they were both two children of the earth, the whale and she, and the whale’s more guarded friend in the back. Three children of the sea. There wasn’t anything to fear about that black fog surrounding everything down there, there wasn’t vertigo to have about the immensity of the deserted landscape around her. It was a big womb, it was meant for humans to dive into it and survive, for Homo Sapiens to be able to encounter wild whales and connect with them.
When later she learned about people being born with mutated genes and, more specifically, when she comprehended that there were people who could control time, she would often think about that moment. Nothing existed anymore but Eugenie and the two whales, in a place of openness, not emptiness, but openness, and in a place where time didn’t exist anymore. Eugenie couldn’t say if she was being capricious because she dared resupplying in air above or if she lingered there with the sufficient amount stored in her lungs. The shadow of the boat coming to fish her out of the water hadn't materialized above yet so, technically, she could do it.
Those were faraway preoccupations, so she ignored them, she knew from experience in the water how to add weight to her body so she could dive lower, descend towards the whales. She mouthed an O and let go of most of her air she had collected, felt the pull of her dip increase, her movements follow her thinking. Now it was time for the apnea magic. She was empty of air but he had breathed hard enough up there, at the surface, nourished her lungs capillaries enough with stored oxygen that they would rise up and down inside her chest as if moved by a remotely activated life, her lungs would still swell up with air and breathe for her, not responding to breathing movements she made, but just functioning out of pure mechanics.
Having practiced this technique enough times through the years, Eugenie knew not to panic when she felt like bursting and gasping for air was impending: her lungs would just pick up the task then, and resume their autonomous breathing. Believing and trusting this process when you were trying it out on land with the birds singing on trees was one thing, but doing it under four meters of water was like a superpower. For Eugenie, it was magic.
She blew out her last air, completely abandoned to her faith in her lungs, her soul swallowed by the round eye of the whale and her ears melting under the song, and her eyes hooked on the sheer size of that animal. Her brain’s message, to hurry for the surface –there aren't any ups and downs anymore, she opposed—, to stop wasting time –there is no time—, manifested from another dimension which she had left behind now, it struggled to get to her, muffled. Her body lost sensations of cold or hot, all physical warnings of danger –that alone should have been warning enough.
The boat coming for her was almost there, she could hear the faint calling of her name from way above her. Cocooned by the rising and falling of her lungs out of magic inside her body, she felt she could drift to sleep, right there and then. Happy, she nodded to the whale and dove forward, swam in the direction of the massive flipper. She would shake her hand or die trying.