Our trajectory is unknowable, you
tell me: the planet
corkscrews around the Sun, sure,
but the Sun corkscrews around
a black hole at
the heart of the Milky Way,
and our whole galaxy travels on
some mysterious, incalculable vector. But sister, I
saw a photograph in
which two whale
sharks were brought to
heel by men in simple reed boats just
off the coast of the Philippines.
All that they had
to do was often feed
the whales gallons upon gallons
of frozen shrimp, poured from
plastic garbage
bags into their six-foot
gaping maws to portside.
Gargantuan, sure, but still
as obedient and eager for food
as backyard squirrels. I
remembered a grainy
internet video—I saw
it probably seven or
eight years back—in which
a captured whale shark
was winched
ashore in Madagascar, or
maybe it was the
Philippines again—no matter—
the thing still had life left
in it and struggled to
breathe while a crowd of
people gathered around—there were
women carrying babies,
girls holding baskets atop
their heads—and then the
men came with a long slender
blade and sliced clean through
the whale’s spine, vivisected it
right on the dock, and
the onlookers stood there quite
unfazed—I remember
being shocked at
the effortlessness of the cut,
the pinkness of the whale’s blood,
and the boredom in the onlookers'
eyes. Our father
took us down to San Antonio
on one of his business
trips there when we were five
or six—I think
you were probably
too young to
remember it—
it was when you and I
saw the ocean for the first
time. We drove down
to the Gulf of Mexico,
and we saw waves breaking
out near the horizon in pale
sunlight. I kept
scanning for a dorsal
fin off beyond
the breakers, thinking
that I might spot one—
sandy brown, mottled with
cream spots and glistening—so
that I might be able to
say to you, pointing, “look,
sister, there is a whale
shark!” Years
later we would learn
that he traveled down
to San Antonio so
frequently because he was a
philanderer. As a child I
believed that whale sharks
crisscrossed the ocean following
paths that we couldn’t
fathom, that
their concerns were
somehow beyond our
comprehension, but then
Keppler pinned down
the shape of the
Earth’s orbit over four hundred
years ago,
and the lives of ancient
sea titans are sundered
effortlessly
by men with indifferent faces.
