RONAN
The sea today has turned to blood. It billows in the water, turns the churning whitecaps pink.
Blood-drenched men move all around me. Heaving, cutting, sawing, stripping. Flaying. Metal knives as long as swords. I stand on the deck, blinking in the bright harsh hot sun. A moment ago I was somewhere far away, very cold but not drenched in blood. My hands are deep red; my body is black with it.
I sense it, off to the right. Lashed to starboard. I refuse to look, but its black bulk looms heavy in my mind. Rolling slowly, as the diabolical instruments slowly strip it of its blubber.
This is where we came from, says a voice in my ear, part Katch and part whale cry, and then I’m not on the ocean anymore. I’m standing in Hudson, still covered in black dried blood. White snow is everywhere, except where bright red blood spatters it. Giant metal pots billow black smoke. Two whale carcasses loll in the shallow water. Men carry strips of blubber to the blackened pots. Barrels await. Blood seeps into the soil.
This is what you are. What we are.
“Why would you want to protect us?” I ask. “After we did all this to you?”
Protect you, says the voice, and I think it laughs, but it’s hard to say with a whale cry. Maybe there’s some sadness in there, too. Some rage.
Human words are such imprecise instruments, the voice continues. Like everything you make. Protection is only one piece of what we have built, here in Hudson. We are bound up together. All of us. The murderers and the murdered. The small and the large. We protect you, yes, for all time we protect you, and we fill you up with magic, but we punish you as well.
Again the scene shifts: darkened bedrooms; sleeping shapes writhing inside of nightmares. They feed us on their dreams, but we feed them on our nightmares. We feed off of each other. Parasite-on-parasite symbiosis.
A man stands there, leaning against the railing. He sees me looking and smiles. Waves. A woman is with him. She sees me, too. I have never seen a smile so huge.
I gasp: “Mom?”
* * *
I SAID IT AGAIN, softer this time. But my mother wasn’t there.
Neither was my father. Just a cold wind, its bite a welcome jolt, and the smell of water.
My head still spun, emerging slowly from a short chemical slumber. I shut my eyes and the dizziness subsided slightly.
“You’re awake,” came a garbled voice, from across a great distance. “I’m sorry.”
“You said that before,” I said to Attalah. “Where are we? And why am I here?”
“It’ll all be clear soon enough.”
A sharp updraft struck my face. Snow, carried on a harsh wind. The kind of wind that whistles through the wide-open spaces where there are no trees or hills or buildings to impede it. The kind of wind that howls through the Hudson Valley in winter.
All my dizziness ebbed away. I was awake. I was present. My hands were cuffed behind my back. My shoulder felt like a truck had hit it.
I was kneeling on the pedestrian walkway of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge. Staring down into the same dizzying dark, the same twenty-story fall that swallowed up my mother.
A train whistle wailed. Southbound—funny how I could tell the difference by how the sound Dopplered. The train I should have been on. I watched it from the bridge, a long narrow line of light moving through the dark, and remembered looking up at the bridge from the train on the night I arrived.
I watched it abandon me. Everything felt so flimsy. Like a dream I knew I was about to wake up from.