Whalefall by Daniel Kraus EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Daniel Kraus
- Language: English
- Genre: Hard Science Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
3000 PSI
Highway 1 drones. Cypress trees roar. Gulls shriek in squadrons. Yet all
Jay Gardiner hears is his father awakening the family at six a.m. Weekdays,
weekends, holidays, the man’s blood so attuned to tidal patterns that he gets
up without an alarm to begin the bedroom invasions, cowbelling his coffee
cup.
Sleepers, arise!
Mitt Gardiner’s been dead a year now, but his foghorn will be startling
Jay from sleep for the rest of his life, he’s sure of it.
Jay loves his mom, though, and his sisters, they’re okay. So there’s
guilt. For refusing their reasonable requests throughout the whole ugly saga.
Mom, Nan, and Eva have therapists now and talk about “closure.” Jay’s not
sure he believes in therapy. He definitely doesn’t believe in closure. People
aren’t doors. They’re whole floor plans, entire labyrinths, and the harder
you try to escape, the more lost inside them you become.
Jay’s seventeen years deep into the maze, too late to backtrack.
His car sheds rust scabs as he grovels it along the cinnamon shoulder of
Highway 1. A white cloud parachutes over the road, mist from ocean waves
he hears but can’t see. No open parking spots. Weird. This isn’t Huntington
Beach. There are no fudge shops, no bikini boutiques, only the Santa Lucia
Mountains. Early August, quarter to eight in the morning, Monastery Beach
should be a ghost town, aside from Catholic cars tootling up the hill for
mass at the Carmelite Monastery.
Jay uses the first four swear words he thinks of. He should go home,
pick a different day. Crows puff and flap inside his rib cage in stern
disapproval. This sets his heart lobbing, his scalp sweating. He’s psyched
himself up so hard for this, doom metal tunes and coffee, that the idea of
quitting nauseates him. If he leaves now, that’s it, he’ll never come back. To
people who know him, he’ll forever be the shit scraped off Mitt Gardiner’s
shoe.
Over the berm are the waters where Mitt died.
Closure, no. But signposts through the labyrinth? Maybe.
“You’re doing the dive, Jay,” he says.
Moving forward is the only way out. He’s ashamed how badly his
mother misses him. His sisters are furious with him. Seems like no one in
Monterey thinks he even deserves the name Gardiner after how he allowed
his father to suffer without him.
This dive could change all of it.
Unclenched, his jaw lets in the familiar tastes of salt, sand, and fear.
He knows another place to park, a side route to the beach.
U-turn. A great blue heron objects with a swoop as dawn light blinds.
Different from dusk light, though both feel like kinds of snares. Mitt
disagreed. Jay thinks back on it. He’s thought of nothing but his father all
morning.
2015
“Steinbeck called this ‘the hour of the pearl.’ ”
It’s dusk, the dusk of dusk, an unblurred luster. Dad’s talking about John
Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. You can’t go two feet in downtown Monterey
without the book being bragged about on street signs and from
shopwindows. Like the sardine factory ruins on the Row itself, Steinbeck’s
novel evokes a simpler, pitiless time.
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