by Lily Markova
“But you don’t take care of them?” said Joy.
“We do take care of them.” Whale pressed his hand to his chest, inside which his lungeyeart was growing emptier and colder. “We sustain their energy. They have no need for food, nor do they need a shelter—”
“But you don’t want to take care of them? You don’t love them? You don’t fall in love with the other parent? You only do that because your kind has to last?”
“Well, we do treat the matter of our survival responsibly. That’s why we have a second child when we’re thirty—to make sure our numbers do not go down, or up, too fast. Two parents, two children.”
“How old are you, Whale?”
“He’s twenty-six,” Julius said.
“Yes, I do have an eight-year-old child out there somewhere. And parents, and a brother, and the mother of my son. And they all basically have one personality, the same personality I have. I’m not even certain you can call that a full-fledged personality. Every one of us is the average of one hundred million individuals. You can see that there’s not much space left for imagination, without which”—he smiled—“it’s hard to fall in love.”
“But this is. . .” Joy hesitated for a word strong enough to describe how horribly wrong that seemed to her. “Lame.”
“Said by someone whose kind makes a cult of one feeling. You can be so tragic just because the one you love is no more, or you can never see them again, or”—Whale shifted his meaningful gaze from Joy to Julius—“because they can’t see you. You people suffer from love while you could be, I don’t know, traveling and happy to carry this warm feeling within you?”
“I got your point,” Joy said pressingly, blushing at once and looking away.
“Yeah, me, however, you’ve lost on the word ‘imagination,’ ” confessed Julius.
“Oh, no, no, no.” With a sensation of ice-cold drainage in his chest, Whale remembered, too late, that he shouldn’t get carried away like this. He swayed and steadied himself with his hand against the slippery glass wall.
“Hey, hey, what is it? Jules, help me.” The pair of them sped to support Whale on both sides.
“I’m not supposed to chatter so much,” said Whale, and having spent the last of his energy on the explanation, he slid, as if suddenly boneless, down the glass.
“He does that a lot, doesn’t he?” panted Julius, picking Whale up under the arms before he could crash onto the balcony floor, or through it.
Chapter 00011
Whale dreamed that he was standing at the end of the pier, and out of his lungeyeart poured a low-pitched, deep-chested howling—his yearning for the lost family, which also used to be his home. The ocean splashed against his face more and more fiercely, and Whale was starting to suffocate. He threw his arm up in an effort to shield himself from the wall of water that wouldn’t let him take a deep breath, and his hand knocked against something solid.
The pain in his knuckles woke him up, and after a few more moments of suffocating in reality, Whale became aware that the darkness before his open eyes and the wetness on his face were brought about by the towel that had dropped on his head. He wrestled it off and sat up, drawing in a gasping lungful of damp air smelling of coconut shampoo. Stretching to warm up his stiff back and numb legs a little, he looked around. They had placed him into the tub this time, which must mean Joy was a bit angry with him about their last conversation, but Whale thought this was still too kind of her—they could have just carried him out of the apartment and left him on the stairs.
Having climbed out of the bath, Whale went over to the round mirror to take a closer look at his sloppy reflection. He passed his hand across the prickly gray stubble shading his chin, which made his face appear wearier and older. His hair was all tangled, so Whale dug a black hair tie out of his jeans pocket and gathered the strands into a short ponytail at the nape of his neck, wincing when he accidentally touched the burning spot where the gripping sensation had once been.
“This is bullshift.” He heard Julius’s distant grumbling from behind the door.
Whale stepped out into the main room. Julius was sitting at the desk in front of the screens, all six of them glowing in the semidarkness, and he was holding his head in his hands. A moment later, Julius laced his fingers behind his neck, stretched his back with a crack, and swinging his arms forward in a circular motion, as if he was going to dive underwater, returned to striking the clattering keys. He typed so fast that Whale wondered how Julius didn’t dislocate his fingers. Between checking all the displays and keeping an eye on the balcony door, through which Joy’s silhouette could be seen, Julius also managed to cast an occasional glance out of the nearest window. The last disturbed Whale in particular.
“There’s a woman,” said Julius, yawning. He did not stop typing and did not turn to look at Whale, but Whale knew that the words were addressed to him. “Down there, on the street. She is walking past the building right now, and her code is pretty much the same as yours. Thought you might want to know.”
Whale’s half-awake brain took its time digesting the information.
“Well, why are you still standing there?” said Julius. “Forgot how to close your mouth? Go!”
Whale unfroze. “Right!” He rushed to the door, then back to the center of the room. His heart was drumming a militant march against his ribcage. A second later, he was hugging Julius’s indignant neck. “Thank you, thank you!”
“No, no, no, stop it, what the hex are you doing?” Julius tried to free himself from the clutches of Whale’s gratefulness. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have said anything. And you could use a shave,” he added crossly, rubbing his cheek.
But Whale didn’t hear that piece of advice; when the sound of the door slamming shut behind him reached his ears, he was already pressing the elevator call button—repeatedly, even though he knew that it wouldn’t persuade the elevator to drop everybody off and hurry up to him.
Three of the four elevators remained inactive on the other floors, and the last one crept upward as slowly as if someone were pulling it back down.
“Come on, come on,” Whale muttered desperately, pushing the button a few more times, but the metal tortoise was inexorable.
Whale gritted his teeth and dashed for the staircase. He whirled down the stairs like a hurricane, and when he finally leapt out onto the street, the rusty taste of blood was burning his throat, and the first gulp of the cool evening air reverberated with a dull pain in his lungs. He could even feel the pulsation of hot blood in his eyelids, and the lively street seemed to flicker in front of his eyes. Cars. Flashing. Honking. Chattering. Laughter. Faces, faces, faces. The annoyed faces of strangers, who either shouldered Whale aside, or had to skirt him.
Whale staggered backward from the middle of the sidewalk, bumping into passersby and apologizing. He set his back against the cold wall of the building, next to the revolving door he had just run out through, and took a moment to catch his breath. He craned his neck to see over people’s heads, but the endless stream of them was too thick. What had he been thinking? How was he going to find her? Whale was unlikely to be nominated for “Relative of the Year”: He could not remember all of the hundred million faces of his family members.
He closed his eyes and tried to listen to his intuition. There was no sign, not a single hint. Whale felt as helpless as ordinary people did when they lost one of their senses. He was blind, he was deaf. If he wanted to find his family, he would have to grope his way to them.
Whale lunged into the crowd at random; he kept turning his head around, and soon he himself came spinning forward, trying to look into the face of every person he passed or ran into.
Meanwhile, the revolving door spat out a breathless Joy, who was still wearing her pair of indoor shorts and a loose white T-shirt. Her feet were bare in the sneakers, their laces untied and dangling. “WHALE!” she yelled at the top of her lungs, ignoring the snorts and derisive glances that ensued. Joy looked around and noticed some disturb
ance in the torrent of people. The commotion seemed to be moving through the crowd. She flung herself into the current and let it carry her toward the cause of the jostling, which she was sure would turn out to be Whale.
Exhausted and hopeless, Whale stopped in the middle of the sidewalk again, pressing both hands against his chest, over his lungeyeart, the only freezing island inside his burning body. People pushed and shoved and swore, but he simply stood there, the ringing in his head drowning all the hasty sounds of the street.
And then he saw her. He had drawn ahead of her, and now the young woman was walking toward him so smoothly that she seemed to be floating above the ground, carried forward by a nonexistent wind. Her short fine blonde hair remained still as she moved, and the tails of her unbuttoned red plaid coat did not billow or flap around her legs.
It wasn’t the calm, polite confidence with which the girl was staring in front of her that had helped Whale recognize her. It wasn’t the peaceful, ancient wisdom in her twenty-six-year-old eyes. Her figure did not emit any magical glow letting her stand out from the colorless mass in the background. He just knew her well; in fact, he knew her so well that they’d had a child together. Whale had never been so happy to see anyone in his life.
His first impulse was to run over and hug her, but Whale thought better of it. His kind did not practice such reckless behavior. Who needed to express their affection when everybody could read one another’s mind?
Whale was trembling from head to foot, either with excitement or fearful anticipation—he himself couldn’t tell what exactly the muddled emotion was. He nearly missed the girl while bracing himself.
“Uh, hi!” he said—almost yelled at her—as she was about to bypass him. He could feel his cheeks turning red.
The girl paused, raising her eyebrows and giving him a small smile. Whale waited for her to say something, but apparently, she was waiting for him to speak, too.
“Do you recognize me?” He held his breath, and even his heart stopped beating for a second.
She shook her head slowly, her smile a little wider, and guiltier.
Boom. His heart started again. The girl stepped back, allowing an elderly couple to stroll between her and Whale.
“I—but—please! I’m one of you,” Whale said, looking imploringly into her childish, curious face. “Something went wrong with my—” He raised his hand to his neck. It was so inconvenient that they did not have any name for that gripping sensation. “I—have you really not noticed? Can you really not feel that there are fewer of you now?”
The girl looked around, her expression guarded.
“Um, the Phaeton?” he asked, in the faint hope that the word would be familiar to her.
“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head again. “We have to go. Sorry.”
“Please, I need your help! I just want to get back. . . .”
Whale watched the mother of his child slip away into the crowd. Of course. Even if it was in her power to help, she wouldn’t bother. His kind did not interfere when they saw people suffer every day, why would they make an exception for him? He was an ordinary person now. An ordinary person with a lungeyeart, yes, but what was the good of having a lungeyeart if he was excluded from the main source of energy?
“Get out the way, idiot! Not again with your stupid flash mobs!” Someone shouldered him once more, but Whale did not move; his misery petrified him.
“Hey,” said Joy’s voice behind him. Whale let her pull him sideways, into an arched niche in the wall of the nearest building. “What happened? Was she one of the Phaetons?”
Joy crossed her arms in front of her chest and rubbed her shoulders, shivering. Whale looked down at her blankly, his eyes wide. The sense of desolation gradually gave way to a weird, detached calmness—the calmness of the last survivor, a warrior walking among his friends’ and enemies’ unmoving bodies. The war was over, and everyone had lost, and everyone was dead. No strength to grieve or regret; no miracles, no hope ahead. The end. Finality. A heavy, heavy finality had settled in his chest.
“Whale?” Joy called again.
“She can’t—she can’t see me,” he said.
“What do you mean, ‘she can’t see you’? Of course she can see you. She was talking to you, wasn’t she?”
“No, she can’t see me,” Whale said. “She can’t—we don’t have a word for that. It’s just. . .sight, smell, hearing—that’s not how we perceive the world. Those senses are secondary to us.” He let out a tired sigh, meeting Joy’s puzzled gaze. “Well, imagine that Julius is a ghost—”
Joy grimaced, baring her teeth, as if she had seen someone get injured. “I’d really rather not.”
“—and you know he’s in the room, you can somehow sense it, but you can’t see him, you can’t hear what he’s shouting to you, you can’t touch him.” Whale stared over Joy’s shaking shoulder. “I’m like a ghost to them now. A dead man.”
“I’m sorry.” Joy squeezed his elbow gently. “But it’s not the end of the world. Maybe you’ll figure it out, maybe you won’t, but either way, you’re going to be okay.”
Whale couldn’t refrain from giving a wry smile. Those naïve words people repeated over and over to comfort one another. You’re going to be okay. Was anyone ever okay at all? He didn’t want to be okay, anyway. He wanted his family back. They were alive, but it still felt as though they’d died, all at once.
“I should know,” said Joy, “because I hardly ever see my parents anymore. Since my brother turned twenty-one, they would just hop onto a plane or ship, blow me an air kiss, and leave Billy in charge. But, hey”—she looked at her feet and chuckled, as if she’d remembered something funny—“they are awesome parents. And it doesn’t matter that we’re apart. You know what matters? They’re alive, they’re happy out there somewhere, and so am I. Come on! Your family is fine. You are fine. Just. . .separately fine. Lonely doesn’t have to be so scary. You’ve still got yourself.”
Once more, a tide of tenderness toward this ordinary girl swept over Whale.
“You’re freezing,” he said. “You should go home.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Let’s go.” She stepped onto the sidewalk and turned to look inquiringly at Whale, who was still standing under the arch with a bewildered look on his face. “What is it?”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you so kind to me?”
Joy frowned and returned into the niche.
“Becaaause,” she said, drawing out the word, as if collecting her thoughts, “while you were asleep, Jules told me what he knows. About the Phaeton, about your being cut off. I mean, he kept saying you guys have tentacles, but—” She rolled her eyes. “Don’t assume that I approve of what you do. I don’t. I think that before fashioning people into whatever you please, you should ask us if we want to survive all of those apocalypses at such a cost. But I understand that you meant well, and I know that you’re hungry and about to collapse asleep again, and I know that you wouldn’t ask for help.”
“No, Joy—”
“Whale, it’s okay to ask for help. Actually, I was running after you because I was afraid you wouldn’t return, and I wanted to ask you to help me. What do you say about such an upside down? Is it okay if I ask something of you?”
“Sure,” he said, although he wasn’t at all sure that he could be of any use to anyone now.
“Great! But that’s tomorrow, and today you need to recharge your”—Joy nodded at his chest—“battery.” She stuck her elbow out, inviting Whale to link his arm with hers, and he obeyed.
“What is it with the tentacles, though?” she asked, as they strode back toward Joy’s home. “Julius is never wrong—don’t tell him I said that.”
“When Julius looks at my code, he sees not only what I actually am, but also who I am potentially. Well, not I, really, I’m just a carrier—the person to whom I’d pass on one of the gene patterns from my store.”
“So, basically, there’s this scena
rio of human evolution according to which we’re going to need tentacles?”
“And gills,” said Whale. “That people will return underwater in the near future is not as improbable as you might think.”
And Whale told Joy about miscellaneous upgrades that the human race was destined to undergo. About skin that reflected light so brightly that people would need polarizing filters built into their eyes to be able to look at one another, about elephant-like trunks, about triceratops-like frills protecting the neck, about walking on all fours again. Joy was now terrified, now laughing, now punching him in the shoulder and yelling “No way!” As Whale wondered at her sincere interest in the future, the future she knew she wouldn’t be a part of; as he wondered at her childlike buoyancy undaunted by her oncoming transformation, he calmed down entirely and discarded the gloomy thoughts of his own fate. It was pleasant to share his knowledge with someone; it almost felt nice to worry about someone other than himself, to forget his own sorrow. That was why, he thought, people loved stories so much, that was why they consumed books that made them sob and movies that made them bite their nails in fear.
He didn’t have bad dreams that night and despite what he’d expected, didn’t suffer from anxious insomnia either. That was chiefly because as soon as he and Joy had made it to the apartment, Whale, who had been keenly giving away all his kind’s secrets to Joy, had dropped to the floor, completely discharged. The last thing he’d heard was Julius’s sarcastic murmuring about narcolepsy and drawing mustaches.
On the following morning, Whale found himself where he’d fallen, found a pillow under his cheek and a blanket over his shoulders—Joy’s courtesy—as well as a magnifier, a stethoscope, and a Geiger counter beside him. Apparently, Julius hadn’t wasted the chance to investigate into him further.
Julius, as was his habit, sat solemnly on his wire-enmeshed throne. Now and then, one of the computers would issue an obnoxious beep, and its screen would begin to dance with multicolored lines. The merry rainbow didn’t seem to uplift Julius’s spirits too much, which was evident from the way he mimed banging his head on the desk and groaned “What the bug?”
