R2: The Rice Review

There had been a storm. For three days the sound of it broke around her, the muted sound of wind on the walls, sensing twice in the night the sharp but distant thwack of a pine split and fallen far above the tideline. But it was quiet now, early on the fourth morning. Sunlight crossed the room in armadas.
Leaving the house she walked to the water, through storm-permuted dunes. The fog was so thick that she could not see the shore beyond the dune, and looking back after a minute she could not see the house, only an atmosphere of total light.

She followed the wave sounds to the beach. Walking over the line of bullkelp and beerglass drawn up the night before, the flies scattering and reconforming behind her, she followed the curve of the bay still hidden by mist, walking high on the shore, beyond even the longest waves. She looked at all the sea had thrown in her absence, each mangled nest of metal and wood a work of muscle irreconcilable with the quiet sea beside her, scrunching and rolling like the back of a silver dog. It was all similar and cold, her caneholding hand rosy with cold.

Then—down the beach she saw on the white plains of shore and sea something dark. A skiff hauled halfway out the water, she thought, even though she knew it was not, it did not have the shape. It was long, reaching the tideline and sparkling like a slab of black wet marble. A skiff, a skiff ran into the sand—

And then she saw it gently heave with life.

***

At home she boiled water. Outside was still mistsullen. As the water simmered she found she could not keep the two in her mind at once—what she knew lay outside, and the calm kitchen before her, the calm heater churning away. She paused at the window. A whale. Beyond the mist slowly receding. Thinking of it pulsing with breath she became conscious of her own. With ease she had done it all morning but now she felt a faint whistle. Had she really smoked so much? Sixty years of cigarettes, yesterday’s stuck to the windowsill like thunderstruck oaks. But she had come far. Whatever scars her body had gathered had not caused it to stop moving altogether. 

She drifted through the room. Yes, she had weathered well. Not like her mother, numbed away at sixty and gone by seventy. Evidently some things had been lost. Movement, mostly, and her skin wept a little on the bone. Yet it was all superfluity, shaved away to reveal more clearly now than ever the exacting scholar’s mind within. Not even her husband—magnificent as he was, even at the end—could follow her here, to face each torrent of wind with unshielded eyes, straining for meaning. The mist would lift soon. To reveal, to reveal—she hesitated, pent in a half-turn. Would she be able to see it from the window? 

More and more she saw all things as symbols of what was passing or to come, messages ferried to her from a providential world. Like Joan of Arc she was another in a great line of human listeners, those weathervanes receptive to the faintest whispers. But beyond the fog was not a message. On the beach it lay mute and dying or dead already. It did not beckon her, and there was nothing to do, the main road fifty miles off, the closest town further. It was too simple, too futile, too suggestive of an utter lack of fluency in a language elemental and unforgiving. There would be no inconsistency if she had never seen it, if only she had never seen it—but now life before the whale had become so unimaginable, rendered so illogical in this new system of thought, that it had been voided entirely; like the universe before the first day. 

***

By early afternoon the fog had lifted and the fishermen had come in. The village had only two fishermen now, and only needed two. Tall Raúl and Small Pedro. Both were badly sunblemished, and being nearly eighty, had the sinewy thinness of men who had once been muscular. Each household solicited the services of one of them exclusively in arrangements determined by old family circumstances, and they came to their respective doorsteps twice a week with packaged rockfish and mackerel. Raúl had seen the beached whale from the bay, and after mooring his boat he walked along the beach to look at it better. Pedro came in later and had seen Raúl first (there were so few who could still stand that straight) and then saw the whale and followed in curiosity. 

“Jesus,” Pedro said, walking up behind Raúl and the whale. The blubber sparkled in the new sunlight. 

“Dead,” Raúl said. “I have not seen one for a long time.” 

“Do we have to do anything?” Pedro asked. 

“No.” 

There was silence. 

“These types have ambergris sometimes,” Raúl said. “In the guts. Calcified blocks of squid beaks and shit. They use it in perfumes and the companies buy it for millions.” 

“Alright, Ishmael.” 

“You’ve read Moby Dick?” 

“Do I look like I have time to read?” 

“Yes.” 

“Fucker,” he says. “Have you read it?” 

“No. But I don’t go around calling people Ishmael.” 

Raúl left and Pedro left soon after. When Raúl returned to his boat the fish were swimming weakly in the faintly bloodstrewn water, shallow in the two refashioned paint buckets. He took them to his house. One by one he drove an iron spike through their brains and bled them out in the sink. Each time the spike was driven in, the fish would tense under his hands and the fins would flay outwards and globes of blood would form and fall across the head. 

An hour later Raúl was knocking at a door with a cooler of fish wrapped in waxpaper.

“Raúl,” the woman said, opening the unlocked door. 

“Mrs. Hogsden.” 

“I keep saying since Mr. Hogsden has been gone for four years it would be better if you called me Ellen.” 

“It would be too much like childhood. They say you become a child again when you are old, and I do not want it yet.” 

“Sure, sure,” she said. “Would you like to come in?” 

“I have three more houses.” 

“I see. Thank you for the fish then.” 

She had put her hand on the doorknob but Raúl did not move away. He was thinking of the whale. He did not know if he should mention it. She has probably already seen it, he thought. She does walk in the mornings. And if she hasn’t? Then what? She would come out just to see it? There is something sacreligious in that. It is better that she stumbles upon it herself. And what would I say? There is nothing to say. It is too macabre for a widow anyways. She has had enough of death. 

“Mrs. Aimard is going to live with her sons,” he said abruptly. 

“I heard. It doesn’t surprise me. She has been ill for some time.” 

“We will soon be empty.” 

“Yes,” she said and sighed. 

“Well,” Raúl said. “Goodbye.” 

“Goodbye.” 

He did not mention the whale to any of the other residents and neither did they. This was strange, as the sky had cleared and, since all the houses lay on a single road around the bay, you could see it lying massively on the beach from almost everywhere. Raúl began to feel like he alone could see it and followed it with his eye as he walked from house to house. He watched two seagulls lower onto its breast. He waited nervously for them to whine and bellow and summon the rest of the screaming flock, knowing that ignoring the corpse would be impossible then, but they remained utterly silent and in an hour they had gone. 

* * * 

Pedro had no money, but there was no shame in this since he had no children or wife and his brothers were dead. He had stopped receiving cash when the town became so small that it regressed into barter. He received tomatoes and cucumbers instead, and this did not bother him until now. Now he could no longer look at his house without wincing a little. A century of salted air had rendered it more archaeological than architectural. The pipes were naked and rusted and you could taste the rust in the water. 

He winced now because he saw himself dying—in his sleep, he would have it no other way—and being left to lie in the house for days before the paramedics came and unmummied him dead and stinking from the bedsheets. He saw their pity and hated it. Seeing him encased in the pathetic ruin of a house, he knew they would make for themselves a version of his life miserable enough to merit the grotesque end. He needed a worthier mausoleum, and so he needed money. 

So he was thinking about the ambergris. Raúl was smarter than himself. Maybe it was not all bullshit. He watched the window darken as the room took on an inert dread. At this time he could always feel the isopods in the walls. It wouldn’t hurt to try, he thought. An animal among animals among animals. He looked to the spot on the beach where the dead whale sat eclipsed by darkness. Thoughts fell through him like boulders into a pond. It wouldn’t hurt. It wouldn’t hurt to try. Then he went to the kitchen for his two largest knives and took his camping lantern from its hook beside the door and walked into the night. 

A hundred little things scuttled invisibly over the rocks and into grass as the carcass appeared under his light. It already had an ungodly smell. He was not on the right side and had to straddle it to cross over, and illuminating the underbelly with his light he saw that it was already roseate. He knelt beside it and began to cut long and horizontally into the blubber and continued this way for ten minutes. Blood, unlike human blood, viscous and lavender-colored, spilled from the incision. Since the whale had not unbuckled entirely he began to cut vertical crosses. 

He had made the third cross when he saw the lightbeam. It had been sauntering over the dunes without him seeing for some time but he managed to look up right when it became too late to shut off the lantern and leave anonymously in the dark. He could tell from the light’s sudden hard direction that it had seen him. Pedro stood up. He was still holding the knife, which was covered in fat and blood that was spreading down his hands. He knew who it was and was not worried about scaring him. 

“Motherfucker,” Raúl said. “Motherfucker.” 

Pedro did not say anything but stood like a psycho with the knife still up. 

“Fucking Ishmael,” Raúl said. The contours of his face were visible now behind the lightbeam. “Who’s fucking Ishmael now.” 

“Alright alright,” Pedro said. He knew how he looked. “We can split it.” 

“Bullshit,” Raúl said. “I suggested it.” 

“Sixty-forty,” Pedro said. 

“Bullshit.” 

“Seventy-thirty.” 

“Asshole,” Raúl said, placing his flashlight down and stationing himself distantly from Pedro and beginning to cut at the belly. An assembly of moths wrought dim and folding shadows over the light but still it was too bright. They did not want to see each other or themselves and wanted their hands to be the hands of others.

It took thirty minutes for the incision to rupture. Festoons of steaming whalegut spilled onto the beach and Pedro, looking at Raúl, opened his mouth to speak, but did not speak. The smell had infiltrated him, and he turned to retch on the rocks. Finishing and walking back to Raúl he stopped and retched again. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand he stood looking at Raúl with the desolate sick wild eyes of a martyr. They learned to mouthbreathe, and crouched to begin dismantling the mass of knotted flesh. 

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” they said sieving through the guts. At first they used their knives, then their hands, running back and forth to the ocean to wash them. Over and over Raúl made the symbol of the cross and since his hands were bloody there were red spots on his forehead and chest. Pedro did not even know what ambergris looked like, and was thinking of a massive pearl. Hell is nothing Raúl was whispering my soles will burn in hell but it will not be this. Often the undead smell would thicken in their throats and overflow, flooding their noses from behind, and they would double over and add to the puddle. 

A general pain was blooming in them. This came with an outer pain, a hot pricking pain like every hair had become a needle. The world slowed and they slowed with it, clutching at their blistered hands, cursing. Ten minutes had passed and they did not touch the corpse and sat on the rocks cursing. They looked at each other as if to say do not rest but they knew now that they had sat nothing could make them return. The lamplight clung to the knives in the blood and their desecration lay twisted and undone in chiaroscuro. 

“Aye,” Raúl said. He heard himself and it was the same sound his father used to make in the morning with the arthritis, when he needed Raúl to help him out of bed. They shut off the lights and sat in the darkness. Slowly they saw again. The moon was thin and useless for light. The tide was lunging upwards, drawing in langours at the end of the carcass. Flies bristled against them and though they could not see them clotting over the opened corpse they heard them, and the sound was another manifestation of pain. “Aye,” Raúl said again before getting up and walking away along the beach, carrying his flashlight but not using it. Pedro did not move and remained there with his brain just noise. Murmuring language droned in his head like a river sounding, running into a canyon. Mostly indecipherable, but from time to time the vestige of a word drifted by before slipping down into the canyon. It was an hour until he could pick up his knives and Raúl’s knife and the lantern, and it was nearly two in the morning when he began to hobble blindly homeward, certain his sleep would be his final sleep. 

***

She looked out a window and felt like a fish under a frozen river. Shy columns of sun impaled the clouds, setting patches of grass briefly alight before being doused again by darkness. Raúl had not come the day before. He had not missed a day like that for twenty-six years. She walked around the house, smoking and thinking. Ah, she thought, feeling her age when her mind ascribed his absence to death almost automatically. Well how will I get my fish then. I will have to go to Pedro, she thought. What she knew about Pedro she did not like, but the other option was to call her son for groceries, and she would not do this unless she had to. She resolved to go to Raúl’s house and then to Pedro’s if Raúl did not answer. 

* * * 

Raúl had left town. The day before a pain had woken him and there were boils on his hands and arms. He could see the predawn light outside and forgetting the boils in a trance of habit he went out to the boat. As usual he had put everything in a trunk on the boat the night before so there would be no time wasted in the morning. All he had to do was unmoor it. Bending down and grasping the bristling rope in his hand he felt an inhuman pain and shrieked and was rung out of his trance by his own noise. In the fuzzy ring of first light he looked at his hands and saw the boils black as tarpits.

He went to Pedro’s house. Pedro had the same, but more of it. 

“The fucking whale,” Pedro said. “God knows what was inside the whale.” 

“I’m going to the hospital,” Raúl said. 

“It will go away on its own.” 

“I rather not die over this.” 

“Will you tell them about the whale?” 

“No.” 

“Because it was illegal?” 

“Yes.” 

“What will you say then?” Pedro asked. 

“I will say it came from a fish, and that I am a fisherman.” 

They exchanged goodbyes that were almost sentimental and Raúl went to start his truck. His hands and arms were burning and the pain was extraordinary. He thought of telling his clients he would be gone so they could make arrangements but reckoned this was unnecessary since he would soon be back, and that he had served the bastards faultlessly for decades and did not have to excuse himself this one time. The pain was too great and he had to martial his energy for the hourlong drive to the hospital. All that time he would have to suppress the thought that had burgeoned in him from when he had decided on going, the thought that half the town had gone to die in that hospital. 

Pedro heard his name called at the door in the midafternoon. God damn it, he thought. One of Raúl’s women. Hogsden maybe. “Pedro,” she cried sternly at the door. Pedro was lying in bed with a towel over his head and the window open. The boils hurt like hell but it was the fever and nausea which had come in the morning that made him immobile and light-sensitive and made her voice sound like a million copper bells. “Pedro,” she said again and he thought if she says Pedro again she will kill me. She did not say it again. She stood on the doorstep and looked into the bay, noting for the third time that the boats of Pedro and Raúl were both moored and bobbing dumbly against the bulkhead so they could not have died at sea. Thinking that Pedro might have been out walking she sat nearby and Pedro could hear her cursing about how useless they were and how she hoped that Pedro and Raúl both were dead because it was the only excuse she would accept. She stayed for thirty minutes, called his name again, and left. 

At home she stared violently at the telephone and called her son. 

* * * 

She was adjusting a vase when he came in. 

“Mamma,” he said, carrying two bags of groceries. He had the face of an opossum, and a body that with any other face would have been formidable. 

“They were out of the wafers,” he said, placing the bags on the table. “So I got something similar.” He was excellent at this type of kindness, these attempts to soften the concessions of life that led people to say he would make a good father. At forty-five this remained hypothetical.

“You like chamomile tea,” she said, going to boil water. 

“Yes, thank you,” he said and though this had not been true for many years, seeing her emerge from the kitchen, stooped and small, ended all possibility of telling her this and countless other things. She pulled out a chair to sit and splayed her hands on the tablecloth. He sat opposite to her and he looked at the dull calico roses that patterned the tablecloth that had not changed. 

He did not speak much. Both were tired by a spell of arguments which had erupted over his attempts a year before to convince her to move to a nursing home. He had not visited for months and she did not want him to, and when they spoke they spoke with fragile carefulness. Most conversations expired in minutes and were extended only by excessive attention to detail (how much were the eggs?) as long as the details did not dredge up the past or question the future. Like ants they spoke and existed within a thin margin of the present. 

“Mind if I step outside?” he asked.

“Why?” 

“Cathy was wondering what this place looked like and I was going to take some photos.” “Of course, of course. Go ahead.” 

And so he stepped out. She watched him stand on the porch for a moment, back heaving. Cathy. The lawyer. She had heard the name years ago. Perhaps he was resuming with her. Continuity would be good for him. She looked at him and wondered if he was cold and if he would step back in. Him, her only son, her only child. For a seconfefd it seemed this was so. But he did not. He stretched, throwing his arms out at nothing, and began to walk to the sea. 

There was little residual mist. She watched him shrink into the sandhills. He would only have to make it to the beach to see it. But he cannot see it, she thought. She looked at the bubbles that rose and expired in her tea and thought he must not see it. It was not that she wished to protect him. A dead whale is no worse than a dead man, and he had seen that, his father, and if anything it had done him good, spurred him on. But that had been different. She could appreciate now the immense questionless grief of his death. 

But the whale, the whale. It emerged from the same void her husband had so exquisitely disappeared into four years ago. Like a bullet it ripped through her and at night she felt the cold hemorrhage it had left inside. But she could take it, she could bear it, if she could do so alone. The whale had become entangled with too much of herself and if he were to return saying have you seen it it would begin an unraveling that would lay everything bare. He has probably seen it already, she thought, looking out the window. Imagining him prodding it and photographing it she felt more naked than she had ever felt in her life. 

She did not know how long it had been when she saw him through the window, returning. She closed her eyes and heard the door open and close. 

“There’s no connection here,” he said, waving his phone. 

Nothing. She waited. 

“Got some pictures though. I’ll send them to her later.” 

“Oh. Good, that’s good,” she said finally. 

“Well,” he said. “I should be going.” 

“Yes,” she said, getting up. “Don’t forget anything.” 

She walked with him to the door with weary authority. He stumbled into his car and waved back to her as he loosened from a turn, as he used to do. She watched the car recede into the outside land. Under the medley of loss and love was something else entirely—a quiet triumph. Yes, she thought. I have kept myself. 

* * * 

As he drove it rained and the raindrops on the window drew shadows on his hands that made them look mottled and old. Again and again he began to think of what was on the beach. 

* * * 

For months she did not go to the sea, finding other paths far up in the marram. She watched summer row over the hills, the summer sun tasseled over her skin. It was never warm, but there was a crisp vividity in these days of waiting. She did not know how long it would take. She remembered after her husband’s death there had been a hurry to ‘lay him to rest.’ Surely then it would not be long with the sun and the flies. Still she waited. Patience that she had lacked for her entire life now came to her effortlessly. 

She never saw Raúl again or Pedro, the lights in Pedro’s house never turning back on. There were no fish. The few complaints from those remaining were silenced when they learned there was no one to receive them. It was as if a conspiracy had descended onto the town that the two fishermen had not masterminded but became conduit to, channeling the austere dictate of time that had before forced a thousand grander exoduses by subtler means. 

Cars, miraculously clean, began to clot the single road. Out of them came families, trim-bearded men in flannel, fleeced women who had not seen the sea for months. On the beach, grandchildren—the younger ones running from the cold surf like sanderlings, charged with the long-fettered curiosity of city children, and the older ones bundled up in scattered, wandering flocks, living out wilderness fantasies and coupling off arbitrarily as twilight fell—they spoke a disparate language, born and accumulated for an alien purpose, deriving from the land a romantic enjoyment endearing but incomprehensible to their grandparents, who watched from behind screen windows as their adult children rolled up carpets and threw out judiciously things that could be replaced or bettered in the city. One by one the houses emptied, gleaned of their essentials, left to be sold for land, not before serving as background for family photos, three, sometimes four generations packed in, the littlest standing head-to-head with their time-curled elders in arrangements that would be elegiac if not for the strained smiles. All that time, the corpse. Suddenly smaller than life, deflated and rotting, barely even noticed, unremembered by the children. 

And yet she stayed, without fish she stayed; she did not need her son again. She watched the cars hurtle away with her neighbors with amused and benign resentment, subsisting on less and less, needing nothing and imbued with the same divine patience, the intention of her patience shifting as fall turned to winter. Every morning she looked outside and assessed the weather, the light, looking for a set of conditions satisfied that she could not enumerate explicitly; did not even consciously calculate but would know if she saw. She ate tuna from ancient tin cans with the still-tempered intensity of a starved alley cat, knowing but not worrying that she was running out. She became stationary, hazy-eyed in the wicker chair with an unopened book on her lap (always a book of one-act plays, which she seemed to know without ever reading, the characters crying out in her mind the exact lines); and yet her mind’s tumult grew in inverse proportion to her movement, the static noise mounting, mounting— 

And then silence. Waking up one morning there was total resounding silence. The mist outside opaque and white. She could almost forget that beyond it were the other houses, all emptied now, nature slowly claiming them again like snakeskin on a forest floor. She would leave. 

Closing the door behind her she carved a trail through a mist so thick it melted on her clothes. Through and through the silent hills she walked towards the sea. On the beach she looked into the visible sphere around her. The ocean was a silver pond. Visions of seas incarnadine, of perverted dews of blood and oil and a fat corpse smell, all of it vanquished by the pale invariable flood. It was not living or dying. Walking over the stones she looked into the mist, she strained into the mist, and she saw; pale on pale she saw the fronds of bone.