WHALEFALL
Lorenza is honest in therapy about everything except the whales.
She tells Dr. Adams a purgatory of bland truths: her hands shake, jelly seismic activity, when she walks outside and the world is small and real and people look at her with pupils that dilate too fast under the glow of a baleen-toothed sun; she cried this morning because the woman waiting at the bus stop across the street with the purple streak in her hair did not smile back.
She scratches at her eczema and avoids her reflection in the mirror. Can whales see their
reflection in tanks? Stupid whales. Throw a ball, and they’ll catch it like a dog, sing like a bird
underwater. What’s an IQ to a whale?
She can’t remember the diagnosis Dr. Adams gave her, only the whalesong that poured out of his mouth like sound was a prophecy delivered by angels with wings made of blubber.
It starts with a vowel, she thinks.
***
Breathe, she tells herself, and she applies the topical lotion to her skin. She is going outside. Think about sweet corn and hydrogen peroxide and the dust bunnies hosting afternoon tea underneath your green velvet couch.
She got that couch off the side of the road. Dr. Adams told her not to because it was upholstered. He believes in bed bugs. She believes in vacuums.
What’s a little more itching when her skin is already in tatters and burns like it stole all the sun the angler fish never got.
***
Dr. Adams has a leather couch in his office. She doesn’t trust his opinions on interior design.
***
She tells Dr. Adams that moving to a new city is scary, and she isn’t very brave when it comes to large things, because she knows this has enough glass fragments of trauma response sticking out of it to make Dr. Adams grin. When Dr. Adams smiles she can count his cavities, see which of his molars have sucrose rot gnawing into the insides of his bones, exposing the nerves and roots of him to the open air, like a whale breach in the middle of an empty ocean.
That’s what it’s like to move to a new city, she tells him, a cavity. She does not tell him about the whales.
***
Ever since Lorenza stepped across the clear grey air of invisible geography, ever since she found herself tumbling with the car tires over state lines to a patch of land that met up with the ocean along its collarbones, she has heard whalesong. It lives in her now. She is 70% whalesong like she is 70% water, like she is percent enough water for a whale to swim in her, a whole pod of them, like they made their homes in her lovely sternum.
A whalefall is a burst of life in the underground crevices, a spark of joy in the places so deep the fish never learned to weep at how sunlight warms the skin in gentle, reassuring particles.
She wishes she had heard blobfish instead of whales. They’re trendy.
***
Moving to New York from Kansas brings out an algal bloom of rashes on her skin. Rashes she hasn’t had since she was a baby. It’s like being born again. When she was a kid, she would pick every dandelion she saw and wish for the sick gold frogs in Panama to win the battle against extinction. Nowadays, if she had a dandelion, she’d wish for better lotion or for the bodega near her apartment to be empty whenever she needs to buy US Weekly and tampons.
***
Agoraphobic, her doctor called her, but she couldn’t hear him over the whales.
***
When a whale in captivity dies, it cannot be reborn into the phytoplankton and the bottom
feeders. It cannot find new life in the nitrogen cycle. It is only a tragedy of dead matter.
Over the chatter of a living city, she hears their overwhelming vibration, swears the sky must be an ocean full of whales. Dumb fucks, she thinks. Too big. Too gentle. Salty-eyed luminaries. The noise bleeds her brain dry as landfall. Oh the whales, she thinks, oh what a bright and fearsome tragedy it must be, to be so cold, to live in water but breathe air, to communicate pain by singing.