Thrust: A Novel

“Well, Balaenoptera musculus, but that’s in your language. If you like, you can call me Bal. I think humans are comforted by names, isn’t that right?”

Laisvė gives thought to the question. “Yes, I think names and naming do matter a lot. For good or bad. Also, I think names can slip their meanings.”

The whale continues. “I see. You may be right about that. I’m not familiar with meaning-making gestures in your species — you seem so lost and angry all the time. Like you have no songs in you. Anyway, the mythology that we swallow men—that didn’t come from us. That story emerged because the moment your kind catches sight of us a fear emerges in them from our so-called monstrous size, or maybe from a fear of drowning; and that fear needs someplace to go. Or that seems to be true of most humans, at least. The more interesting of you seem to be more inclined to see us as an instance of the sublime. Anyway, I’ve long understood that our size is the key. That’s the whole idea of monsters, how you got from monster to monstrosity. You’ve turned my gaping mouth into an icon of danger even as I go on eating krill, not men, as I always have.”

Laisvė looked around the belly of the whale: luminescent pinks and blues and grays, surfaces slick with digestive goo.

“Think about that,” Bal said. “Krill! My teeth are not like daggers. They’re more like enormous unruly hair. They’re not even teeth, really — they’re plates.”

Laisvė stared at the roof of the whale, then out toward the baleen plates. “Yes,” she said. “I know. They’re filter-feeding systems. You take in water filled with krill, then push it back out in a great heave, so that the krill gets filtered by the baleen. I read that it’s made from keratin. My fingernails and hair have keratin too.”

“Girl, are you considered different from others on land?”

Again she gave the question silence and thought. “Yes. I think I am. That’s one reason I need to be hidden. I think maybe I’m not quite right. I talk too much about too many things and sometimes I make mistakes. I read books from the library.” She paused, caught by a memory. “I did read a story, once, about a whale swallowing a man. But I didn’t… believe it, exactly.”

“I see,” said Bal. “Well, the evolution of my mouth began before you can imagine. Maybe in the Oligocene epoch, when Antarctica became more isolated from Gondwanaland and the West Wind Drift was formed. It’s possible we had teeth then. Some stories say so. Some ancestors believe the stories. If so, our teeth must have evolved over many years into baleen. I don’t know where teeth go across epochs. Have you read about the Antarctic Convergence, where the warm waters of the sub-Antarctic meet the cold water of the Antarctic? That stirs up nutrients and food chains for many species. Including the upwelling of krill. You see?”

Laisvė nodded.

“I’m thinking that all those stories about leviathans may have been connected to the evolution of teeth in my kind. So many stories. Always swallowing men.”

Laisvė stood up. “In the Christian New Testament, Jonah appears at least twice. In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The ‘sign of Jonah’ is invoked by Jesus — it’s a miracle, since he comes back to life after living for three days inside a whale.”

“Can you picture that? Living inside a whale?” said Bal.

“Not until just now,” Laisvė said.

“What’s it like for you?” Bal asked.

“Amniotic,” Laisvė said. “I am a very good swimmer. In Judaism, the Book of Jonah concerns a minor prophet included in the Tanakh. Jonah, in Judaism, was also swallowed by a giant fish and brought back to life. The Book of Jonah is read every year in Hebrew on Yom Kippur. In this story, the fish is said to have been of a primordial era. The inside of the fish was a synagogue, and the eyes were windows.”

“That’s not a bad metaphor,” Bal said.

“In the Quran, Jonah appears as a prophet faithful to Allah. Dhul-Nun, or ‘the one of the fish,’ is swallowed by a big fish,” Laisvė continued. “He stayed for a few days in the belly. A Persian historian named Al-Tabari wrote in the ninth century that Allah made the body of the fish transparent so that Jonah could see ‘wonders of the deep.’ He also reported that Jonah could hear the fish singing.” She walked toward the front of Bal’s cavernous gut. “I’ve always loved that image. A transparent whale.”

Bal sighed hugely. Her gut shook and Laisvė fell onto her back. “So many stories. Heaped upon one another. I’ve never eaten a man. No whale that I know of, in any lineage, ever has. But the stories seem important to your species. Doesn’t it seem strange, in all these years, that no one tries to learn the truth from the whales? I could tell you stories… the ones we tell about your lot, for instance. You wouldn’t like them, though.”

“I might,” Laisvė said. “I am unusually fond of storytelling. Try me.”