Whalefall

The jellyfish, a Periphylla periphylla, wraps its tentacles around Jay’s fist. It squirts slime onto his dive mask, but the sock absorbs the venom, leaving him unharmed. Confident, he pushes through the whale’s injured sphincter and into its esophagus. His air tank briefly gets stuck, but he forces it through.

Plunged into darkness, Jay needs a light source. He prods the jellyfish, which responds by emitting a brilliant, bioluminescent blaze, illuminating the narrow space.

Using the glowing jellyfish as a lantern, Jay surveys the gullet. He discovers that it is a collapsed tube of slick, fibrous flesh with enough texture to serve as handholds.

Jay pulls both legs out of the stomach chamber. Securing his grip within the gullet’s walls, he begins his ascent toward the whale’s mouth.

The climb up the esophagus is difficult because the throat muscles continually ripple and shift. He worries that the whale might swallow, which would force him back down. As the whale nears the surface, its lungs inflate on either side of the gullet. The expansion squeezes Jay tightly, but he continues upward.

The jellyfish’s light suddenly fails, plunging Jay into darkness. He freezes, shaken by the whale’s rhythmic heartbeats. Simultaneously, his foot cramps violently and his regulator begins to leak. Overwhelmed by pain, fear, and silence from the consciousness that he identifies as his father, Jay almost gives up, but a sudden memory of his family’s struggle during Mitt’s illness gives him the resolve to continue.

Jay’s cramp subsides, and he learns to filter the leaking water with his tongue. Remembering that the jellyfish’s light can be reactivated, he head-butts the creature, causing it to glow red once more. Using the renewed light, Jay finds new holds and resumes his climb. He feels a powerful, hallucinatory connection to his family, and this thought fuels his determination.

After a grueling climb, Jay reaches the top of the gullet, only to find the whale’s mouth sealed shut. The jellyfish’s light flickers and dies permanently. In its final glimmer, Jay notices a beak-shaped column of flesh that he can hold onto. In the darkness, the whale suddenly breaches, launching its body violently out of the water.

As the whale becomes airborne, Jay experiences a moment of weightlessness. He anticipates the violent impact and grabs the beak-shaped column of flesh, hooking his arm securely around it just as the creature crashes back into the sea.

A series of four brief flashbacks catalogs Jay’s history of severe physical trauma. In 2014, he falls down church stairs. In 2017, he is knocked unconscious during a football game. In 2019, a car accident cracks his head against fiberglass. The final flashback returns to the present reality of 2022, in which he is swallowed by a whale.

The force of the whale’s landing shatters Jay’s body. He hears bones snapping in his neck, ribs, and hip. Despite the pain, he clings to the column of flesh.

Jay identifies a hissing sound as spray from the whale’s blowhole and realizes that he and the whale are at the surface. He forces his eyes open and sees daylight leaking through the whale’s sealed mouth.

Dangling from the column of flesh, Jay feels fresh air and smells scents from the outside world. He sees a blush of light through the whale’s baleen, and his hope surges when he hears people on a nearby boat.

Jay recognizes the voices and engine as belonging to whale-watching tourists. He spits out his regulator and screams for help. The tourists misinterpret his muffled cries as whale vocalizations and applaud. Panicked, Jay feels his grip slipping and cries out for his father.

Jay sobs uncontrollably, crying out again for his father. The Mitt-voice responds for the first time since Jay’s climb. It asks Jay what he is holding on to.

Jay initially misinterprets the question as a metaphor and begins listing all of his misguided beliefs and emotional issues, but the voice clarifies that the question is literal. Jay examines the column of flesh that he is currently clinging to and identifies it as the whale’s larynx. He recalls its unique anatomy from his father’s lessons. The voice then tells him to listen to his own crying, which triggers two memories.

In one memory, Jay is in a truck with his father and Hewey. Hewey relays a theory from a cetacean specialist who said that baby sperm whales might use a specific vocal fold in their larynx to cry out; while dormant in adults, this vocal fold could potentially produce the loudest scream in the sea if it were ever reactivated by an adult whale.

In another flashback, a 10-year-old Jay, who is seriously ill, hides an antibiotic pill that he cannot bring himself to swallow. His father discovers the deception and forces him to dig through the trash to find it. The incident sparks a heated argument between Mitt and Jay’s mother. As Jay sobs, Mitt cruelly ridicules his crying.

In the present, Jay rips the sock and dead jellyfish from his hand. Guided by a memory of his sister Nan, a speech pathologist, he feels around the larynx and finds a cartilage “handle.” As the whale exhales, Jay pulls the handle, activating the whale’s dormant vocal fold. The whale emits a piercing, unnatural cry.

The whale’s shocking cry silences the tourists. Jay feels a moment of triumph, but it is short-lived. The whale’s mouth opens to feed, and a rush of seawater and fish pours in, knocking Jay from his perch. The whale’s swallowing reflex engages, forcing him back down the gullet.

Back in the whale’s stomach, Jay discovers that his legs broke on impact. He accepts that he can no longer escape and feels an odd serenity washing over him. He reframes his impending death as a form of communion, believing that he will become part of the whale.

Jay contemplates the biological process of a “whale fall,” in which a whale’s carcass sinks to the ocean floor and supports an ecosystem for many, many years to come. He visualizes his own body encased within the whale’s remains and reflects that he too will become the foundation for a new community of deep-sea life: a fate that he finds beautiful.

The Mitt-whale consciousness apologizes to Jay. Jay comforts the voice, telling it that he finally understands his father’s true nature. He then has a transcendent vision and perceives a whole universe of images in the patterns of the stomach lining.

Jay finds the suicide clip on his mesh bag but lets it fall away. He and the Mitt-whale voice have a final, gentle conversation about their lives and regrets. In this shared moment, they both find peace.

Jay feels the whale’s body bumping the sea floor and realizes that it has swum up into the shallows to die. As the whale’s body fails, Jay comforts it. The Mitt-whale consciousness speaks a final truth: It wants Jay to escape and has always wanted him to escape.

In a vivid memory, Jay experiences being a one-month-old infant as a weeping Mitt holds him. Mitt whispers that he is unworthy of Jay and will inevitably ruin Jay’s life, but he also vows to give his son all the tools he will need to escape him and live a free life.

Urged on by the whale’s wish for him to survive, Jay smells methane building in the stomach. He remembers lessons that he learned from his sister, Eva, and forms a desperate escape plan. When he finds a box containing steel wool and locates one last 9-volt battery in his BCD pocket, he realizes that he can create a spark to ignite the methane gas and trigger an explosion.

Jay bites the box open. Recalling Eva’s warnings about blast force, he knows that an explosion confined within the stomach would kill him outright. He must first cut through the stomach wall to vent the blast. He retrieves his squid-beak tool, Beaky, to perform the task.

Jay repeatedly stabs and saws at the stomach wall, eventually cutting a hole through to the whale’s body cavity. Methane flows through the opening. As he works to widen the hole, Beaky slips from his grasp and is lost forever. Jay grieves for his essential tool.

Jay notes that his right hand has been completely destroyed from the stabbing motions of the squid beak. Using his mangled fingers, he retrieves the 9-volt battery and steel wool. He feels a mix of terror and awe, marveling that the whale has provided him with every tool he needs for his escape.

A memory of his mother explaining the fire triangle—fuel, heat, and oxygen—makes Jay realize that his plan is missing a key component. He needs to incorporate oxygen from his air tank in order to create a spark. He removes his BCD and allows the tank’s remaining air to flow through the hole that he cut. He then pushes the battery and steel wool through the opening with his ruined hand, reasoning that it is better to lose the wounded hand than the one that is relatively intact.

Jay remembers a conversation with his father in which Mitt described how 19th-century whalers, after harpooning a whale, would lie on the floor of their boat and pray for their line to hold, surrendering to a power greater than their own.

Jay presses his body to the floor and connects the battery to the steel wool on the other side of the wall, creating a spark. His vision flashes orange as the methane ignites. He hears a massive, concussive sound just before his eardrums fail, followed by a final, whispered word from the whale consciousness: “Live.”

A single question is asked across different points in time, from 1965 to 2000, and asking what each era has “provided.”

In response to the preceding questions, the narrative shifts to 2005, stating that this is when Jay is born “[f]or the very first time” (308).

Jay regains consciousness inside the whale’s ruptured carcass. He sees sunlight and hears the ocean, gulls, and people shouting. He tries to breathe but finds his airway blocked by flesh, and he begins to suffocate.

Struggling for air and suffocating on blood, Jay claws through the whale’s ruptured organs. He can still hear people nearby, but his mind hallucinates, transforming the wreckage into a dumpster at the landfill where his father once worked.

Jay crawls forward until he is blocked by the whale’s massive, intact heart. Realizing that he is trapped, he gives up and embraces the heart as his final breath escapes. As he accepts his fate, he hears his father’s voice give a clear instruction: “Break it.”

Filled with a final surge of adrenaline, Jay attacks the whale’s heart, biting and tearing at the muscle with his hands and teeth. He forces his body into the organ, continuing to hack his way through the tissue until his hand is touched by direct sunlight.

Jay experiences a moment of self-realization. He understands that the answer to the implicit question “Where are you?” is the single word “Hineini,” a Hebrew term meaning “Here I am.”

A hand grabs Jay’s and pulls him from the carcass as rescuers cut away the remaining flesh. He takes his first, ragged breath and sees a massive pod of sperm whales breaching in the distance. He also sees another, smaller whale already beached on the shore, and he realizes that his rescuers were already present because they were conducting this smaller whale’s necropsy. The last of the whale’s heart slips off him. A rescuer named Joy speaks to him as he is carried ashore. Jay feels a deep peace, understanding that he is now his father’s living “remains.”

The final line is a command: “Sleeper, arise!”