Craig Davidson - The Fighter

This animal-rights group held a rally to free her a few years ago. A bunch of protesters chained themselves to the park gates, and they had this giant blow-up whale with a lead ball and chain clapped to its dorsal fin. The park agreed to set her free; they drugged her to the gills and flew her to Vancouver Island and dumped her in Queen Charlotte Sound. But the thing is, this whale, she was born and bred in captivity. Her whole life she’s fed, cared for, protected. She was out of shape, bloated, and sickly. She didn’t know how to protect herself. Her life was this tiny pointless world where all she’d ever done was perform tricks when the trainer’s whistle blew. Maybe she dreamed — if whales dream at all — about her natural place in the world, the ancestral sea.

But even so, would she really have understood?”

Max the Interventionist opened his mouth to interject. Paul shut it with a look.

“I think of her limited world blowing up in those new unknowable depths,” he went on, “the strange fish and new waters and her not even having a concept of those depths, not knowing the language of any whale pods she might meet. That sudden, violent explosion of her world, lawless, lacking the parameters that had governed her existence: just bubbles and seaweed and storms and freighters and volumes of blue water that went on and on forever. A tuna boat found her floating near a wharf. She was drawn to sounds she understood: machinery, motors, human voices. Her belly was slashed open. She got chewed by a boat’s rotor blades, or maybe killed by other whales — or by creatures much smaller than her. Her tongue and lower jaw had been eaten.

“They winched the body in and buried it in a whale-sized casket. Over a thousand people at her funeral. A picture in the paper: a giant half-moon-shaped coffin lowered into the ground. The caption went, Noble burial for a noble creature.”

Paul laughed, a brittle hack. “Burying a whale. How unnatural is that?”

“Paul—”

Singleton said.

“Shut up and let me finish. I think about the whale and wonder — who’s to blame? The amusement park for keeping her penned up all those years? The protesters for freeing her? The more I think about it, the more I come back to the idea that it was nobody’s fault. The whale was born in captivity, the trainers loved and cared for her, the protesters were doing what they thought was right. Everybody’s heart in the right place. But the reality is this poor whale adrift in a place she doesn’t understand, scared shitless and so fucking witless she didn’t last a week on her own. But what if she’d been given a chance to strengthen herself so that she might survive?”

“Paul,” Singleton said, “all these fears and regrets can be worked through in therapy.”

“Jesus Christ,” Paul said, “did you hear a word I said? I don’t have any regrets!”

“But first you need to admit you need help,” Singleton overrode him. “Will you do that, Paul — admit you need help? Will you let us help you?”

“You knew the answer to that the minute I walked in here.” Singleton nodded. “I’d like you to set your credit and bank cards on the table.”

“Why?”

“Your bank account’s been frozen.” Jack Harris looked impossibly weary: a man crossing a desert on a mission whose purpose he could not recall. “The cards are in my name.”

Barb’s needless clarification: “They aren’t yours, Paul.”

“They aren’t, are they? I can’t lay claim to any of it. Nothing stands in my name. None of it’s mine.”

He fished the cards from his wallet and laid them on the glass-topped coffee table.

“They’re yours again,” said Singleton. “Anytime you’d like. Just let us help.”

Paul looked at his father and mother sitting on the couch, hopeless and confused.

“Why didn’t you ever let me suffer?” he said. “Just once, let me struggle?”

“We’re your parents,” Barb said. “We love you. How could we let you suffer?”

He went to his bedroom to gather a few things. The room smelled musty and tomblike, a scent peculiar to places long absent of human habitation.

His mother poked her head through the door.

“Is it okay?”

“Come on in.”

Barbara sat on the edge of the bed. “Was it really so bad, Paul? The life you — the lives we had together?”

“It wasn’t bad,” Paul told her, “just fake and empty. All the people I knew, guys I went to school with — what stories did we have? You and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa, their parents and on back — you have stories.”

“You really believe that, don’t you? That everyone who came before had it rough.

Sorry to tell you, kiddo, but it didn’t happen that way. I was a farmer’s daughter, your dad a farmer’s son. Our parents weren’t rich but there was always enough. Christmases, birthdays… god, I had a pony. And my dad fought in the war, yes, but with no choice. Was he courageous? I’d like to think so — but he was courageous because the situation called for it.

Circumstance can make a hero out of anyone.”

“Or a coward.”

She smiled sadly. “Is it worth it, Paul — to suffer your whole life just to prove you can?”

Paul could not tell her his deepest fear: that his suffering would always be insufficient and never enough to ensure any lasting happiness. “Do you ever think of the old house we lived in, before Dad bulldozed it? You ever think, what if we’d lived there forever?”

“Sometimes I do,” Barb admitted. “But our life… we’ve moved on.” She fixed her hair and said, “We could get you counseling, Paul. You could stay here with us, or we could rent you a place, and you could see a therapist.

I’ve heard Prozac—”

“Mom, I love you and I love that you’re trying to understand what I’m going through, but…” He hugged her, kissed her cheek, held her at arm’s length with his hands on her shoulders.

Barb reached into her skirt pocket and produced a tinfoil packet. “Hold out your hand.”

She dropped two small objects into his palm. Whitish yellow, the size of corn kernels, each tapering to a pair of reddened tips.

“I called Faith, the girl you were out with,” she said, “the night… that night. She told me the bar you’d been at. I went the next day and hunted around for hours until I found them.”

Paul picked one up, rolled it between his fingers.

“Mom, is this — are these — my teeth ?”

She nodded, her entire being swollen with hope. Did she really think it would be that easy? Like his teeth were the wave of some magic wand and — poof ! — everything went back the way it was? Paul turned them over in the light, realizing, with dawning awareness…

“Oh my god — these aren’t my teeth!”

“Sure they are,” Barb said quickly. “Who else’s?”

“No, they aren’t,” he insisted. “They’re too… big, or something. Too yellow. This one’s practically brown .” He saw the tiny lead plug. “It’s got a filling! I never had a cavity in my life!”

“Maybe you did,” his mother reasoned. “Maybe you forgot.”

“How do you forget that?”

“You’ve been hit in the head a lot lately.”

But they were obviously not his teeth, which brought up the obvious question:

“Mom, who the hell’s teeth are these? Where in god’s name do you find teeth!’ Paul’s mind reeled. He saw his mother rummaging through Dumpsters behind the dental clinic. Creeping through windows to snatch molars from beneath sleeping children’s pillows. “Did you buy them? How much does a tooth go for in today’s market?”