I APPROACH THE transition where even my finned fellows seem to murmur and quail, while others grow strangely silent. Hic sunt dracones—Here there be monsters. The water begins the taste of the briny depths as the freshwater of that mighty estuary that brought so many of my kind inland over the centuries past mixes with salt water from the greater sea ahead.
A segregation of sorts occurs as the physics of the water divides layer from layer. I feel my buoyancy change as I attempt to ascend and descend the watery steppes. The temperatures vary as well. I feel a new influence, a new pull, as the moon—that other globulus lightshape ruling the night through the waters above—takes control of my new surroundings. As new upwellings of life bloom around and enfold me, I am even more lost. Lost in a crowd that is at once fearful and comforting.
These waters, waters of the Viking, the French, and the Scots, are cleaner and colder, yet the vessels are mightier as well. Long, heaving muscles of iron and steel. …
Up to this point, I felt an admittedly guilty superiority over its piscine denizens due to my greater size and shape. That self-estimation was soon to change. The depths gradually grow more cavernous, more echoing, more dark and boundless.
Up to now the water was in a way friendly, hospitable—stranger though I was. But now I had to reintroduce myself, to earn my entrance. To wonder whether I would be accepted once more. This castle keep was well guarded. I hear rumors. No, I feel rumors of greater beings here. Beings that could roll over me, that could crush me, that could swallow me whole, without a thought. The interaction would be fearful while even being devoid of malevolence, simply due to its magnitude.
For this is the realm of Leviathan. Arising from the deep, belly full of newly vanquished squid, leviathan’s call echoes over miles, giving me no idea of its true location. Though my thoughts are that they knew more of me than I knew of them.
At first, as if to lull me, I pass a pale-white pair of playful belugas, who swirl and corkscrew like their bottle-nosed cousins. These canaries of the sea call back and forth with their curious chirping songs. Are they welcoming me to their deep abode? Or are they laughing amongst themselves at my strange, awkward presence in their midst, fellow mammal though I be.
I have no time to mull, for my forward motion is sonically halted by the 200-decibel blare of the Spermaceti. I am suddenly encompassed by a pod of curious, echo-locating sperm whales who surround me like a circular firing squad armed with machine guns. The water suffused red around my head as their pulsing bloodied my ears. The bones of my rib cage are pummeled by a thousand manic hammer strokes. My body curls fetal to protect my core from their punishing greeting, for my massive company is unaware of the damage and pain they are inducing on their unaccustomed trespasser. I swim—or spin—in strange, orgasmic pirouettes, wondering when death will come. Soon I will be but some mangled flesh falling to the bottom of the abyss, taking my place in the seabed as food for worms, crabs, and myriad species of foraging shrimps.
* * *
My real fear was not of leviathan’s sound—painful though it was to my tender membranes—but of their memory. I knew the corporate knowledge of these massive breathing mountains, having overheard many of their remarks already on my watery wanderings. I even sensed that they intended me to hear.
But the whale was different. Like a mystery behind a curtain. A royalty enshrouded in darkness, yet fully knowing, fully able. Was it their mercy or their memory? Memories of ships, harpoons. Recollections of fiery cauldrons. I was totally helpless, a defenseless victim to my ancestors’ greasy harvest.
This foreboding adds to my already unshakable sense that I have been all along some disobedient prophet, drifting in a sea of judgment, running current-borne from my own personal Nineveh.
Satisfied there would be no chance of communion here, and leaving me alone to deal with my inherited guilt, these cylindrical gray masses move off, bubbles trailing in their wakes. Mothers herding their calves, males leading the way, back into the murky, primal blackness that is their home, not mine.
* * *
I float—still numb and bleeding—for an interminable space. What is left of my hearing picks up minute vibrations in the water. I no longer care if its source is near or far. I had long ago given myself over to my fate. I had somehow survived the crashing Niagara, had now weathered a leviathanic lookover. I had no idea what would finally do me in, if anything.
Perhaps I was being protected, upheld in some impervious bubble of fate. Like some Job-like figure, susceptible to all dangers and pains except death itself. Why did I deserve this? Why was I especially blessed? My eyes exuded their salty likeness, unnoticed, into my surroundings, leaving their tiny briny wake.
* * *
It is not until a day and a night pass that I sense I have stumbled upon a road of sorts. Like a desert creature dragging itself across the cooling asphalt path of a sleepy nighttime trucker, I am unaware of the tons of steel hurtling remorselessly toward me through the dark. Yet, on it comes. As the powers of migration and hunger far outweigh my puny existence, I can only pray for mercy.
* * *
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