Fighting the Tide
Of course, Jed Jeffanie didn’t believe the whale was real at first. It felt more like a mirage, a false shape that had slipped into his world to challenge his bearing. Just a moment earlier, he’d been in the Darkness, in himself, in that internal void where crude shadows repeated his past around him. He’d been drinking coffee from an incomplete mug at Mac’s diner, then sitting with Jen Schumann in the rubble of a house in the woods, bricks and trees around him blinking in and out of existence, her fingers and legs forming and fading, only her face remaining constant. Then he was there, all of a sudden, walking along the shore of an empty beach, the weight returned to his legs, lungs expanding, a newspaper in his hand. He was confused, and for some time doubted the transition. It seemed that everything around him–shifting water, gusts of wind, smooth sand, oddly cold morning air–all of it could have followed him out of the Darkness. And it was then that he came upon the whale.
Instinctively he tested whether his present reality was solid. He looked back the way he’d come to find his bare foot prints still in the sand, a fence in the distance. He looked the way he was heading and found another fence a hundred yards off. Toward the city was yet another fence and a slow trickle of cars streaming past on the other side, maybe occupied, maybe not. No people were visible anywhere, and he felt like he was locked in a cage at the end of the world.
He checked his newspaper. It was the local chronicle–one of the expensive paper editions. The date was legible and unwavering: a Sunday morning in June. If it was today’s paper, then the city’s churches were in session, which could explain part of the beach’s emptiness. The fences around him maybe explained the rest. But that didn’t tell him how he’d gotten within those fences or how a creature that had been thought extinct had wound up on the beach before him. It all made him feel ill-prepared.
Jed approached the whale slowly, as he might have approached a stranger in the woods, afraid both that it would disappear and that it might remain. Only when he was next to it, with his hands wet upon its blubber and the smell of brine and death in his nostrils, was he convinced of its existence. He felt the flesh on its back, the surprising resistance of the fat beneath the skin. He saw how it shone in the white morning light like a Mustang after a coat of wax, how it started so wide–wider than he was tall–then tapered down to the width of a utility pole before fanning out again. He wondered if it were afraid, if it felt panic, and thought that it might, but wondered if that was only because he wanted to matter to it.
Then the whale inhaled, a great heave and a sick sputter, and Jed jumped back. He thought of Mac coughing his smoker’s cough. He thought of that wheezing laugh and pig-pink face. And for a moment he believed that everything around him would dissolve, that soon he would slide back onto his stool at the diner to pick up the thread of some old conversation about draining the Great Lakes, fixing up water-transport trucks, saving a bit of money. But the world remained, and when he looked at the newspaper again the text neither shifted nor dissolved.
Still, there was no one around at all.
He looked for reassurance in the front page, studied it more closely now. The top half held a familiar picture of the Bernhard boy, a headline reading “Two Weeks Missing, Family Turns to God.” The letters beneath told the same story they’d told the last time he’d read them. But when was that? Jed could still remember pieces of it. The family was prosperous, the boy chipped and tracked–but the mother said he’d just disappeared from his room in the night as though ‘the Lord himself had taken him up.’ The article spent some time exploring that possibility before chalking the inexplicability of the situation up to the mystery of God’s creation, supporting this claim with stories of a woman in Kansas who’d pulled a full-grown cow from a sinkhole, two teenage girls in Oregon who’d flipped an overturned grain trailer off their dad. Jed didn’t see how the stories related, but he was glad to read them.
He lifted his eyes to the whale and the beach. The water rolled back and forth, just twenty yards away, the plastic bags offshore rising and falling on the surface, lifting to the white clouds in the white sky, sinking to converge with the other bags.
When he turned from the water he saw a young woman standing on the sidewalk, on the other side of the fence separating the sand from Seashore Drive, looking at Jed and the whale. She reached for her hand screen.
Jed called out to her, his voice hoarse and wavering. “You–you think we should do something about this?” he said.
The woman looked down to her screen and started typing without acknowledging Jed.
Maybe she wasn’t even there.
Jed checked the newspaper, looked back up to the woman still typing, and figured maybe she was getting help. That was what he wanted to believe, at least.
He sighed, tossed the newspaper aside, swung his arms, dug footholds with his heel into sand still firm from the tide, then put his hands to the whale again. For a moment he paused, looked at the liver spots on his skin, the veins below his knuckles, the narrowness of his wrists, and he wondered what he was doing. What had the doctors told him about stress? Wouldn’t it aggravate his condition?
But he had to try.
He crouched low and pressed his right shoulder into the blubber behind the blowhole. Then he pushed. Hard. He threw all his weight into the animal, his breath held, his ears ready to pop, and for a moment, with blood drumming in his head and the strain arcing from his arms to his feet, he thought he felt the whale shift ever so slightly, maybe an inch up, maybe an inch forward.
He stopped and stumbled back, panting. The ocean’s edge continued lapping the shore, carrying on its perpetual push and pull, push and pull, farther away now than when he’d found the whale. He was sure of it. And the whale, of course, was right where it had been.
But Jed wondered if that was the only possibility. After all, there was the woman in Kansas and the girls in Oregon. With or without God, such stories seemed to hint at a clause in the contract of reality that allowed for impossible acts in extraordinary circumstances. The problem, he figured, the cause of his continued averageness, was in his motivation. Great things were the result of great inspiration, great emotion, but when was the last time he’d been moved by anything?
Jen Schumann. That day in the woods thirty years ago. Right before she left. And every day since had been shorter than the last, and each one had left him slightly more disoriented, slightly more apathetic. Even now, with the most incredible thing he’d ever seen lying before him, the only feeling he could summon was dread.
“What were you doing?” he asked the whale. “You think you’d just hop ashore and roll on back when you were ready?” He looked at the empty beach to his left and right again, then rested his forearms on the whale’s back. He hung his head. “I don’t think that’s how it works.”
He stood upright again, feeling light-headed still, turned around so that he faced the street, leaned back against the whale, and slid down until he was sitting in the sand. The whale exhaled, and Jed heard in it a familiar disappointment.
“Hold on, buddy. Just…I just gotta think for a second.”
He looked at the woman, his sole spectator, smiling into her palm screen. She actually looked a bit like Jen did back then. Brown hair. Short like that. And he wondered where Jen was right at that moment, how old her kids were now. And he hoped that whoever this woman was texting would get there soon.
His attention drifted from her to the flashing exterior screens of the Irish-pub-tapas-joint at the corner of Main Street. Similar screens were flashing all throughout town–they lined the tiers of boutiques and doctor’s offices and sensory-relief studios, the four or five stories of apartments on top of those. Wires connecting them all crisscrossed over the streets and alleys, dividing up concrete and steel, fragmenting a sky bleached white by poison.
Jed knew that Mac had been right to leave. Jen too. The town was coughing up blood. The whole state was. All the shops leap-frogging over each other, all the buildings tottering ever higher–the flood had pressed everything together and made it all sick.
But still, Jed reminded himself, home was home.
The woman on the sidewalk had stopped texting. She was staring at Jed now, and when Jed met her gaze he waved. The woman didn’t wave back. She definitely could see him, but she didn’t wave. Jed squinted, shaded his eyes, looked at her more carefully. There was an emptiness in her expression, a hunger. Jed had seen that look all his life. And he was sure then that she wasn’t calling for help. At least not for the whale.
He wished more than anything that someone was there with him. Someone he trusted. He patted the pockets of his jeans: no wallet, no keys, no screen. And even if he could find a screen nearby, who would he call? It didn’t matter. Jed couldn’t leave. The vultures had caught the scent, and Jed knew he had to watch over the whale, to scare those scavengers away, until help found its way to him.
He sighed, closed his eyes, and imagined again that he were a different sort of man. He pictured himself marching toward the road (his hair thicker, his arms bigger) and flagging down a whole parade of cars. He imagined a crowd emerging, tramping down the beach, and together rolling the giant back into the water, heaving on the count of three, shouting, laughing, patting each other on the back. He saw them fight the swells and win, and while the whale swam back to wherever it belonged they waved. And the whale waved back the only way it could, by slapping the water’s surface with its tail. And Mac was there. And Jen looking just the way she did senior year. And she remembered everything she’d loved about Jed, why she wanted to be with him, why all the years since high school had been a mistake. And at their wedding everyone would be there, even the whale in a giant aquarium. And Mac. And little Lonnie Bernhard, wearing that faded red sweatshirt from the paper.
The world went quiet then. The laughter of the crowd, the music of the reception, all of it faded as the shapes of Mac and Lonnie and the whale slipped away. When Jed opened his eyes again, he found something familiar yet old: cinderblocks stacked into low, unfinished walls with vines climbing through them, dead leaves carpeting the ground below. Jen–younger, really a girl still–sat beside him on the bricks. She tapped two cigarettes out of her pack, lit both, and handed one to Jed. A tear hung from her chin. Jed wanted his hand to reach out and brush it away, but it wouldn’t move. The trees around him were shifting, the cigarette no longer in his hand. And he understood that he had no control over this scene, that he was a spectator in the Darkness, playing along with the shapes while they practiced forming all the mistakes he’d ever made.
“Don’t cry, Jen” his voice said. “I’ll be right here.”
She shook her head. “That’s the problem, Jed. You’ll be right here. You think this is the center of the universe and everything that leaves will be pulled back to you some day. But it won’t. This place is nowhere and I don’t want to come back.” She looked at him with red eyes, lines of freckles on her cheeks darkened by tears. “Come with me. Please. What can I say?”
“Stop,” he said. “You know I can’t.”
“You just won’t.”
“You’ll be going to classes and meeting all these interesting people. I’ll just be dead weight.”
“Life is what you make it, Jed.”
“How do I make my life what you want it to be?”
“Try.”
“I mean, what would I even do?”
“Work. Maybe apply for classes next spring. What are you gonna do here?”
“I’ve got a job. I’ve got friends. This is home.”
“I thought I was your home.” Those were his words coming out of her mouth and again he felt trapped–in the moment, in the conversation, in the decision he was doomed to repeat forever.
All he could do was shake his head. And as he did, as though the world around him were drawn on an Etch-A-Sketch, Jennifer Schumann dissolved, the cinderblocks of the house they sat upon scattered, and the trees shook and shed until they were darker, colder, dryer. What was left was a different forest, a different time. But Jed still felt trapped.
A thick fog wove between the brush and rendered what trees remained permanent in shades of blue. Behind one waited something he didn’t want to see again. But no matter how much he willed it, he couldn’t run. Instead, of its own accord, his body crouched and his eyes closed. And yet, as though his eyelids were wet wax paper, he could still see. So when the figure finally emerged, tall, stooped, and shrouded in shadow, Jed Jeffanie couldn’t help but watch. It walked toward him with its neck bent forward and the red hood covering its head, the trees around it fading as it grew larger. And when it was upon him, when it loomed over him, Jed looked up. He found no eyes, no nose, just an infinite bright white where the face should have been.
Jed sat up straight, gasping. The world was white again, the sound of wind and waves in his ears. The whale was moving behind him, shaking, and for a moment he believed that it too was waking, that soon it would lift itself off the sand and crawl back into the waves. Then he heard the sound of the water, felt the coldness biting his feet, saw the white sky above, and remembered where he was. On and on and on it went.
Still the whale was shaking.
He pushed himself to his feet, turned, and found half a dozen people standing at the whale’s stomach: three men, three women. The man standing directly across from him had his head lowered, and a frayed baseball cap covered his face. He was evidently struggling with something.
“Mac?” Jed said, but his voice was barely a whisper. He cleared his throat. “Are you here to help?” he asked.
The man lifted his head and Jed didn’t recognize the face narrowing its eyes back at him. The cheeks were hollow, the eyes dull. Jed glanced at the others and saw that they too were marked by emaciation–it looked like none of them had eaten a solid meal in weeks.
“When was the last time you seen a drone?” the man demanded.
“What?” Jed asked. The question was so far from what he’d expected that it made him feel as though he’d woken up into the wrong world. All the moments leading up to this began loosening and falling away. He tried to grab them, but caught only pieces: the trash on the water, the diner, the wedding. “I don’t know,” he said, and felt the tears in his eyes.
“Who owns this beach?” the man asked.
Jed shook his head.
A woman closer to the tail said, “I’m telling you he doesn’t know anything.” Jed followed the voice and found the woman who’d been watching him through the fence. “He’s just some bum. Fell asleep on the damn thing.”
Jed shook his head but knew it was true. Then he realized what that meant–what the presence of the woman meant, too: he’d messed it up the way he messed up everything. “No,” he said. “No.”
The waves rolled in and out, in and out. The wind lifted the spray off the break, over the whale, onto Jed’s face. He put a hand on the whale’s skin and began stumbling toward its head, the word “no” escaping from his lips in a whisper with every step.
The people on the other side had their heads down and their shoulders moving, sweat pouring off their chins, and still Jed hoped that they were helping, that they were tying a tow strap to the whale maybe, maybe working some sort of track under it that would roll it to the ocean. But when he rounded the whale’s head he saw irregular squares of flesh missing from its stomach. Each person had a knife deep in the blubber, stacks of fat and meat piled on a tarp at their feet.
Jed lurched forward and grabbed the nearest man by the shoulder and wrenched him away from the whale. The man staggered back a step, then sprang forward and shoved Jed. Jed’s ankle rolled and he fell. When he looked back up, the man had retrieved his knife from the whale and was pointing it at Jed. The man didn’t say a word. For a long moment they stayed like that, then the man turned and plunged his knife back into the whale.
Jed scrambled to his feet and ran back around to the whale’s blowhole. He watched it a moment, willing the hole to open and sputter out breath. There was nothing. He pressed against the whale again, put his ear to the flesh behind the eye, and listened. The only heartbeat he could find was his own in his ear. Beneath that, beneath the waves laughing cruelly now, only the inner stillness of a stone remained, the silence of an empty house. But maybe he just couldn’t hear–maybe the whale’s body was too dense. Maybe it wasn’t too late.
Hands on the flesh. Lower. He crouched, thinking–believing–that there was still a chance. There had to be. All he had to do was lift. Just lift.
The blood in his body rushed to the surface until it felt like his skin wouldn’t be able to hold it in any longer. He lifted with his legs, and his arms, and his back, sure that every muscle he had was tearing, every tendon and ligament snapping like a stretched rubber band slit with a knife. His vision faded to white, beautiful and endless, and from somewhere in the distance he heard a scream like a cow being torn apart by wolves.
And then his body relaxed.
No. Not relaxed. But it understood something. He understood something: that his pain wasn’t true, that his life didn’t need some extraordinary love for it to be remarkable, that to make his world what he wanted it to be he simply had to reach into the Darkness and pull out the shapes that were right. He just had to look past the averageness of the world, let the life to which he clung drop away. Because he’d held on so tight for so long. But he didn’t need to. He’d never needed to. And when he let go, finally, the weight of his limbs was gone. There was no coldness in his feet. There was no torment in his muscles or mind. Effort was no longer necessary.
In one easy motion he straightened his legs and spine. The whale rose with him–only its tail remained in the sand–and even when its body was over his head, it felt no heavier than a pillow.
The vultures on the other side of the whale backed away. Some of them fell. Some of them still held their knives, but their grips were looser now, unsteady. The woman who’d been watching Jed from the street fumbled for her screen. Jed considered them all for a moment, then brushed them away from his mind like so many flies and focused on his destination.
His first step was unsure, weakened by the memory of life before. But his second had confidence. There was no reason for it not to be confident. Movement was simple. Success was inevitable. One foot in front of the other. That’s all it took.
He looked to the water: the back and forth was more jarring now, the give and take more exacting. Waves crashed into the shore and dragged back foam. Spitting and roaring, spitting and roaring. The sound called to him the entire way. It filled his head while the water filled his shoes and rose to his knees, while the sun broke through the clouds and lit the sea around him.
Raymond Virginiais a writer and editor based in the Chicago area. He’s currently working on expanding the world of Fighting the Tide into a novel.