Gene: Life And Times

by Julie Lunde

Instead of writing yet another sad poem or trying to find a reliable, in-network psychiatrist, you decide one day to take a friend’s advice and book a new patient session with a whale’s blowhole. Not a poem, but another impenetrable pit—the perfect place into which you can, and will, slip your most shameful confessions, admit the hardest emotions, or whisper your tenderest memories; then watch as the hole imbibes all of it up like air, inhaling your speech into its inky interior, after which the whale’s plug, a muscle, will slide back into place like a seasnail’s operculum, sealing your story in its silence while shutting everything else unwanted out.

The gargantuan echo chamber that is your whale will then—for you— abandon the surface and swim down, down, down, shepherding your disclosures to a depth oceanologists colloquially call ‘the twilight zone’. Cushioned in blubber, safely chaperoned, your story will remain submerged in that shocking cold until it has cooled off. (At this depth, the human body would collapse under pressure; the lungs would give out.) The whale provides this service pro bono because it is better-suited, biologically, for the task, what with its capacity for occasional anaerobic respiration. (A life-saving act, meaning you don’t need to go there.)

Each session lasts on average one hour. When your whale resurfaces, its blowhole will reopen and exhale, expressing a vapor that, when the light hits it right, resembles an eruption of color. Some droplets will pelt you in their descent. The rest evaporate in a mist. You’ll do this regularly, though you’re a nonbeliever. Week after week. You’ll come to expect the scene: the whale’s wise, wide gaze fixed ahead as you whisper; the slip of the plug; how your whale bows, swims off, emerges again.

Though sometimes—this is also true—when a whale’s belly has become too heavy with the detritus that is the metabolic byproduct of stories, it will retire to the dark lagoon where whales die. (Never again to resurface.) What then? What will you do the next week: your whale dead, your schedule cleared, and stripped of all your own secrets? Of course, at first, you will return to the scene, out of habit. For a swim. Nonbelieving. Week after week. Meanwhile your whale will be hard at work on shedding itself. Decomposition: the old flesh dissolving in a saline wash, leaving behind just the bare bones, and a ribcage as wide as the shell of a car.

You’ll know whether your whale had done its job correctly because (if it had) one day, your ear buried in a wave, you’ll hear the rising vibrations of an unknown language which nevertheless opens itself up to you—whalesong in translation—unfurling the stories and secrets of your whale. Gene: your whale’s name. You’ll listen as the lapping waves recount Gene’s several heartbreaks, and his triumphs; the failure to procreate, his ultimate devastation; his small social faux pas (Gene’s barnacle problem). You’ll hear how he researched and devised this new therapy: A Method of Neutralizing Traumas Through Mesopelagic Zonal Storage (G. Koskelothval, 2008), his greatest achievement.

Then you’ll do what whales can’t. You’ll parade his name in full sunshine. The next week, you’ll take his memories with you on a land hike. (A whale out of water would be crushed by its own weight; would burn up, overheated by its own insulation). One week, you’ll write his story down in a bittersweet poem titled Gene: Life and Times. To your whale, you’re a miracle; you’re Gene’s balloon.

To your surprise, you’re floating. From that day on you too will be able to splash around in the depths and return unharmed. You’ll do this week after week. Until one day, cruising the whispery waves at the surface, you’ll encounter not only the secrets of Gene but also your own old thoughts, resurfaced once more: unchanged, still in their original form. Treading water as their sounds swim past, you’ll realize Gene was a genius, and full of shit. You’re just doing exactly what you’d been doing this whole time: wave after wave, staying afloat in a medium composed of what, you’d once thought, would drown you.

Julie Lunde is a writer based in Tucson, Arizona. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Seneca Review, Fourth Genre, Cream City Review, Western Humanities Review, and in the anthologies Letter to A Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us (Algonquin 2022) and Rooted 2: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction (Outpost19 2023). She holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Arizona, serves as an assistant nonfiction editor at DIAGRAM, and is the writer in residence at her dog’s house. See more at julielunde.com.