Radiance

After a long day of digging up clams-which-were-not-really-clams and prying whelks-which-were-not-really-whelks free of rocks, Anchises saw something on the magenta-mauve sand. It stopped him in his steps. It stopped his breath in his chest. He knew what it was faster than he would have known his own face in a mirror. He had drawn a picture of one a long time ago, had seen it so clearly in his head it had been like a photograph.

It was a callowhale frond.

The thing was the colour of copper and as long as three fishing boats. It lay on the beach like a dead serpent out of the corner of some old map. Fine, long hairs and thick viney stalks draped off of it, and each hair and stalk forked off into fringes like coral or ferns. Flaps of skin like flowers and leaves, silvery and mossy like verdigris, flopped helplessly in the foamy, calm water. A huge gas bladder, drained and wrinkled and empty, was sinking slowly into the wet sand. Anchises thought he could see dim lights flickering inside it, lights like eyes opening deep beneath the skin of the balloon, if it was really skin. None of the seabirds (which are not really seabirds) or scuttling crabs (which are not really crabs) would come near it.

Anchises stared at the frond for a long time. The lights burst weakly inside it, hot green and searing blue. It was still warm. It was still wet. It smelled like a thousand things at once, so many that he could not sort the stink into its parts in order to say later what it had been like. Its shadow stretched deep and wide.

“Hello,” said Doctor Callow, and in that moment he truly could not recall any other name anyone might have called him in the history of the world. “Hi.”

The frond did not reply. The lights, if there were lights, did not grow brighter or dimmer. The sea-stench of the thing did not grow less or more powerful. Was its callowhale still alive? Was it sick? Was it in pain? The boy had never heard of a beached frond. Fronds did not come off like hair in a brush. Divers who accidentally touched one came home bruised, as though they had boxed a train. Or with missing hands. Or missing eyes. Or crisscrossed with scars from wounds they had never suffered. Or not at all.

Doctor Callow put out his hand hesitantly. His bare hand—he did not have divers’ gloves or a mesh suit, only his pink, fleshy fingers. He held them above the skin of the great frond. He felt nothing but the warmth rising from it like tea-steam. He took his hand away and smelled it; it smelled like him, nothing more. He tried again, going a bit closer to that copper-coloured callowflesh. Nothing—and so he drew closer still, inching forward, the rest of his body eager, impatient. When he finally allowed his fingers to fall just above the body of the frond-flesh, Doctor Callow gasped. A sort of rusty, electric, half-sour crackling blossomed between him and it. It pushed up weakly against him, invisibly. It made colours in his mind, colours without names. His whole body felt it, firing off whatever involuntary reactions it could think of: goose bumps, shivers, sweat, stomach fluttering, heart racing, pupils dilating to great black holes in his face, hair standing erect, and other parts of him erect, too. But it didn’t hurt. He still had both hands, both eyes. No bruises or scars. It felt good, even, though it felt like something that shouldn’t, like putting his fingertips in the wax of his father’s candles. Maybe because it was dying. Maybe because it didn’t have its whale anymore.

Doctor Callow closed his eyes. He was not quite brave enough to actually touch it. So he just let his arm go slack.

It fell onto the flesh of the callowhale frond with a soft wet smack.

Doctor Callow felt as though he were swimming in the rusty-sour electric crackle, in the nameless colours. He felt as though he had never really been warm in his whole life, even though the Land of Milk and Desire is a hot and wet and heavy place. He laughed and he cried a little. He petted it like a dog. He was so shivery and prickly and hard and short of breath his everything ached. But he would have traded every ease he’d known for that ache and called it a bargain. The boy who loved callowhales stroked the severed arm of his beloved. He whispered to it. And, after a long while, little Doctor Callow curled up in a coppery curve of the frond; pulled the fine, soft hairs over him; and fell asleep in its dying embrace. The last of the ghostlights flashed on his dreaming skin.

“I wish,” he whispered as he drifted toward the cliff edge of sleep, “I wish that I’ll never see your face, that I’ll never look you in the eye, that I’ll never know you at all.”