Leviathan [(1) 9/19/2008]

Originally this story was based off a doodle i did, in which a gigantic whale, so big that i had drawn other tiny whales swimming around it like pilot-fish, rose to the surface under a tiny oil tanker with the caption "The blue god comes!" I thought it was pretty amusing at the time, and seeing a "visit Alaska" ad on the tube today made me think of it. The story that emerged could really only ever be called "Leviathan", and so, halfway through writing it i went on to wikipedia to look up the word "leviathan" and see if i could weave a little extra symbolism into the story. Mostly, it turned out, the leviathan was just a big, angry, biblical fish. The only two points of real interest were that a.) some references to it indicated that it was a big giant whale-dog for god to play with, which was interesting but not very useful, and that 2.) in some parables, when god created all the animals, he made the leviathan, like everything else, a mating pair, but then as soon as they were created he immediately killed the female, because if they were to ever procreate, nothing - man or beast - would ever be able to oppose them. And so the male leviathan was left to be the sole example of its kind, for all eternity

I didn't believe it until I saw it for myself. Nobody believed it until they saw it for themselves. Satellite pictures of it had been floating around the internet for months, as well as grainy cell-phone photos, every single one discredited out of hand by experts as poorly photo-shopped fakes. I mean, their reactions were completely understandable - a monster whale six miles long, as big as an island and visible from space. It just didn't make sense.

The Japanese were the first nation to officially encounter it. They'd heard the half-mad rumors about it; how it was attracting countless other whales to it as it sketched its languorous figure-eight path along the currents of the pacific, as if they had suddenly all become cetacean pilgrims following their oceanic saint. Even if only half the stories about it were true, they decided, hunting it down would still be an excellent opportunity for "science". They sent whaler after whaler after it, and though every vessel found it – for it made no attempts to hide itself, and its crooning song reverberated through the ocean for a hundred miles – they all returned with empty cargo holds, and captains unable to explain to increasingly cross superiors the overwhelming sense of grief and sadness and pity that they found in its stadium-sized eyes.

We were a U.N. task force sent out of San Diego to observe it, uncertain of our actual responsibilities would be when we caught up to the beast. With satellite tracking, finding it was no trouble, and, knowing where it was going, we managed to place ourselves in front of it with little difficulty. Our little oceanographer's sub hung in its path a hundred feet below the surface, a few hours before it was expected to arrive. At that depth all color bled to blue.

When it came, we at first didn't understand what we were looking at. The ocean in front of us turned dark, but even though we knew, intellectually, what was coming, in practice it was too large a segment for us to accept as anything but cloud cover. And so, when we finally perceived that it had arrived, it was as if we had been snuck up upon by a mountain. We were all in a panic to get our instruments started up and working – by the time we had realized what had happened, it was already starting to pass us. O'Connell had managed to get the cameras running as it drew alongside us, and Yee's aquatic audio recorders were warming up, but the Kubokawas' sonar imagine device was blue screening on them, and they were understandably upset.

And then it looked at us, and all of us faltered in our activities. We all knew that it saw us. It watched us carefully, for far too long to be coincidence, its eyes tracking us as it moved, fixing us with a stare as deep and impenetrable as the ocean itself. "Allah, be merciful with your might," Pahlavi murmured, although to this day I'm still not sure if he was speaking of the whale, or to it. Beneath that gaze it was impossible to pretend we were anything but tiny scurrying creatures, and yet at the same time it never dismissed us. It was like being judged by Poseidon himself, who found us neither exceptional nor wanting.

It took a half an hour for it to pass us, and we watched as the landscape of its side slid past us; acres of barnacles, the canyon of its mouth opened a sliver revealing a forest of baleen, and fins the size of three city blocks, lifting, lifting, pausing, turning, pushing down with the force of tides. The whole time our submarine bobbed next to it like a bathtub toy. Some of us watched through monitors, but most of us – too many of us to fit comfortably, but none of us complained – pressed our faces to the glass at the front, as if we were compelled to be as close to the creature as possible. We watched the monstrous thing glide past us with a grace it should not by any rights have possessed, and our eyes grew dry as we tried not to blink, as if in blinking, even for a moment, we would miss some of its magnificance. Just before it disappeared back into the blue from which it had come, it let out a cry, a low and mournful whalesong, which cut through the little submarine as if its walls had been designed for conducting sound. The air itself seemed to shake in response, and though none of our equipment could confirm it in any scientific way, we suddenly understood why whales would follow the beast for hundreds of miles; we would have as well, were it possible, if only to ease the loneliness etched in those harmonics.

And then it was gone.