The Glass Whale

The idea for the submarine had come to Margot at a marine biology conference. She was sitting in a lecture about eelgrass foraging when her mind drifted, as it so often did, to whales. Margot always used the same metaphor in her own lectures on cetaceans: “Picture an iceberg floating in the sea. What we know about whales is what you can see in this picture. We know what happens above the surface: how they breach, how they come up for breath, when they appear to be moving with purpose or foraging. But what happens below the surface? What does the rest of the iceberg look like?” As the eelgrass researcher droned on, Margot swam down, trying to take all of the iceberg in. She imagined herself as a whale floating around the base, inspecting every detail.

In the uncomfortable plastic seat, she reached for her backpack and rummaged through it until she found a magazine article she had read on the plane ride. It was about an absurdly wealthy man whose dream was to reach the deepest point in each of the world’s five oceans. He had contracted a submersible company to design a ship strong enough to withstand the pressure. The article followed the submarine trials with a sense of impending doom. Margot scribbled the name of the submersible company’s lead engineer, Peter Larson, on the back of a napkin.

When Margot finally got through to Peter, he didn’t seem to understand. “Aren’t you in a marine biology department? Don’t you have access to a submarine to use for research?” he asked her. 

“I guess I do,” she said. “But this isn’t about going down and watching the whales. It’s about being a whale.”

“Being a whale…” Peter scoffed.

“I want to be able to follow the humpbacks from Hawai'i up to Alaska and back again. I want to be able to take observations of everything they do, hear their songs, be one of them.”

“And this is a research thing?” he asked.

Margot paused. “This is a me thing.” She could almost hear him shaking his head through the phone.

“You know this is going to cost a lot, right?”

She’d been thinking about that. She was planning to sell her house, use the inheritance she got when her mother died. Maybe she could get a grant. “I know,” Margot said, her fingers picking at a hole she had worn into her desk. “But I just want to do it.”

“Alright,” Peter said. “Let me talk to the other engineers.” When he hung up, Margot walked to the bathroom and lay down in the dry bathtub. She had painted the walls indigo, and with the soft light through the curtains, she could imagine she was underwater. She pulled her pant legs up and ran the tap over her feet, feeling the water turn hot. I’m ready to leave, she thought.

* 

It takes years to build a submarine. Margot wouldn’t budge on the material. It had to be glass. Peter tried to talk her out of it. It would be much more expensive, and a lot harder, but Margot wanted to feel as if she were inside a whale, circling through it like a cell. She wanted to see the ocean all around her, the vastness of it. She kept pushing Peter. It would be as large as a zeppelin. It would be as quiet as possible to not disturb the whales and to allow Margot to hear the sounds of the ocean around her. It would give off a faint, bioluminescent glow. 

Peter was hesitant at first, but as she dreamed bigger and bigger his drawings started to take on a life of their own, becoming more elegant than she could have imagined. He had admitted to her over wine in a downtown restaurant, the plans spread out between them, that this was the most interesting project he had ever worked on. She had smiled and taken his pen, drawing two stick figures sitting together in the belly of the submarine staring up through the glass ceiling.

The night before the launch, Margot couldn’t sleep. She was on a ship off the coast of Hawai'i and the bed swayed beneath her. She imagined it was shaking its head with uncertainty. The glass whale was being towed somewhere behind her. Margot remembered one childhood summer when her father had rented a powerboat and let her sit in the dinghy by herself, a dog on a leash. She had lain back, tried to imagine away the dinghy until it was only the waves cradling her body. Her mother had screamed, thinking she had fallen over the side and into the unforgiving ocean, until Margot lifted her head up and smiled.

Peter had shown the submarine to her in the warehouse. On dry land it had looked so delicate: she’d thought of a champagne flute shattering against her kitchen sink on New Year's Day. But Peter’s team had already tested it under immense pressure. It would hold. She had paced through its cavernous insides and thought about that fact she’d learned when she was a kid: if you cut a blue whale open you could walk through its arteries. She could almost hear a heartbeat as she moved from glass room to glass room. 

Margot had brought heavy boxes in a U-Haul, the remnants of her house that had sat in storage after it sold. She wanted soft surfaces to counteract the glass, to fill the submarine like a nest. Peter and his team helped carry in the couch and her boxes of books. Pots and pans and Tupperware for the kitchen. It all felt routinely domestic, but as she unpacked she found herself fighting off a growing uneasiness. She had been watching movies about astronauts, thinking about what it meant to leave behind the world she knew. 

* 

In the glass whale the phone was crackly. It would only get service when Margot was close to the surface. 

“There’s a whale looking at me,” she said when Peter picked up.

“Margot?” he asked. She pictured him at his desk, a cup of tea going cold, leaving a ring on the plans for whatever submarine he was working on now. “I thought humpbacks could barely see.”

“Technically yes,” she said, walking over to stand at eye-level to the whale beside her ship. She was close enough to see the scars along its side—each one telling a story of a killer whale attack or a near-fatal dance with fishing gear.  “Everything is a grainy black-and-white movie to them. But I think it can see me.”

“And what does it make of you, do you think?”

Margot searched its giant eye, her fingers resting on the glass. She looked at the barnacles on its belly; the way they made the whale’s body into a landscape. “I’ve been devoted to whales since I was a kid. Everything I do I try to do in service of them. I thought I’d accepted that they would never even know about my existence, but this feels… really special.”

“It sounds like you feel seen,” Peter said.

“I do,” she let out a nervous laugh. “I feel very perceived.”

“It’s like they’re an alien species and we’ve sent you down as the envoy for the human race. Don’t fuck it up,” he joked.

“I’ll try not to,” she said, watching as the whale blinked her huge eye and dove away.

That had been Margot’s first morning in the glass whale and she had made sure to set her alarm so she could watch the sunrise from this other world. Slowly the sea above her had brightened, like someone had poured in more water, diluting it from an inky purple to an almost golden blue. She held onto that image for a long moment and lay down on her back. Was she imagining it or did her skin feel warmer? Like the sun was reaching her, even way down there.

Now, hanging up the phone, Margot felt the room dim and she realized the whale was passing over her, a dark cloud. She had been taking observations and knew this humpback had a new calf, a male, who nestled into the side of her belly. Margot watched them break the surface, their bodies sloping. This was it. If she was on the surface right now she would only see a glimpse of a back, a small island, but from here she could see the curve of their tails, the way their fins moved like wings. 

The whale was level with the submarine again, its eye staring unblinking into the soft glow of the submarine. What does it make of you? Peter’s question echoed through the glass room.

* 

Margot had never been religious. Her parents had brought her to church on rare occasions and she remembered staring at the hymn books on the backs of the pew, reading their leathery covers over and over as she waited for the services to end. The only thing she liked about church were the stained-glass windows with their otherworldly glow. That was how Margot felt in the glass whale, the light tinged green and blue all around her. With their language and emotional intelligence, it had always felt like whales knew something Margot didn’t. As they floated above her, haloed by sunbeams, she felt their majesty.

“Yes,” Margot admitted to Peter on the phone late one night, somewhere off the coast of California. “Being down here does kind of feel like a religious experience. But that might just be because I’m barely sleeping.”

“You’ve gone loopy?” Peter asked, concern bleeding into his voice. “Do I need to come down there and get you?”

“No, no. It’s just, have you ever read about people only sleeping in fifteen-minute intervals? That’s me right now.”

Peter sighed, “Those Vice articles never end well.”

“I guess the humpbacks are moving north a lot faster than I anticipated and, well, they’re constantly swimming. Even when they stop to sleep it’s never for more than half an hour. I know the submarine autopilot is great; it’s tracking them really well. But I want to see it all. What if I’m asleep and I miss something?”

“You’re only human, Margot,” Peter said. “I know you wish you weren’t, but… just be careful.”

She had rolled her eyes at that. She felt fine. It’s just that everything was getting a bit hazy: the edges of her vision, the line between the glass and the ocean, the ocean and the sky. Sometimes she would fall asleep in the control room, her cheek against her notes, and wake up to find that the glass had melted away. She would float limply through the expanse of the Pacific Ocean, her mug and pencils circling lazily around the planet of her body. The humpback lullabies would unfurl their notes like black stars to fill the sea around her. They had become the soundtrack of her every waking moment and still they punctuated her dreams. Were they dreams? Margot felt she was floating these days even when she was awake. Maybe her mind had split in two, letting her sleep while she kept swimming through the halls of the glass whale. 

“I have to go,” Peter said. She heard rustling in the background. “Submarine emergency. Call me tomorrow, okay?”

“Yeah, of course,” Margot started to say as the line clicked dead. She reached down into the bottom of her cereal box, searching for the last few kernels. Maybe she should have told him about the other thing, how she’d taken to eating Rice Krispies like fish food, sprinkled into her mouth whenever she remembered to feed herself. She barely felt hungry anymore—maybe it was the darkness getting to her—and the pots and pans she’d brought with her sat mostly untouched. 

Margot shook the box out into her hand and felt only dust. She wandered to the kitchen. She was starting to run out of cereal boxes and the last ones were tucked away in the back of a cupboard, too high for her to reach. The counter creaked as she climbed on top of it, reaching up and up until everything fell away again and she was floating.

*

Margot woke up on the floor. The back of her head ached and she sat up slowly. The lights were off in the kitchen, but through the walls she could see stone pillars surrounding her in the bruised dark. Moving towards the window, she felt the submarine shaking, the vibrations rattling around in her own body. Suddenly she knew what she was seeing: sperm whales sleeping upright, hung from the ocean surface by some invisible string. The submarine was moving slowly between their sleeping bodies and Margot could feel the way the whales touched each other with sound. She held her breath.

Up and down was a dimension she had never really considered much on land, but in this world there could be mountains floating above you and silver stars below you. Giant, disembodied tails swam in straight lines of electricity and jellyfish choked the water around her like soldiers’ parachutes.

The submarine emerged carefully from the pod of sleeping whales and Margot saw the blue vastness open up in front of her. The humpbacks she had been following must have disappeared while she was unconscious—how long had she been out for? She touched the back of her head and felt a slick stickiness. She was too scared to look at her fingers.

Margot wandered down the hallway to the control room and studied the radar. Its circles swam in front of her, but she saw two dots to the east. She fumbled for the autopilot button and turned it off, gripping the steering wheel in shaky hands. As she slowly guided the glass whale towards the small flashes of red on the screen, she felt the sky moving closer. A bull kelp forest engulfed her and she watched as harbor seals drew lazy patterns in the seaweed.

The submarine was close to shore now and Margot could see rocks scraping against the glass below her. The red dots had disappeared from the radar and the control panels around her beeped menacingly. Margot touched her scalp again and winced. Everything had gotten so foggy. 

The top of the submarine was peeking out of the water now. As Margot stared out at the beach in front of her she felt her feet moving towards the ladder, her hands climbing the rungs, reaching for the hatch. Everything inside her was pulled towards the air, craving the overwhelming smell of salt. The beach was calling to her, a siren’s song. Carefully she climbed away from the hatch, closing it tightly behind her.

As Margot slipped from the top of the submarine and into the water, she let out a gasp. All she felt was the freezing cold and her bare feet catching on barnacles, brushing against slime as the waves turned her in violent somersaults. She was coughing up water and salt when the ocean finally spat her out onto the sand. She lay down on her back and looked up; it had been so long since she had seen the sky. She was nowhere, some beach that belonged only to seagulls. When her eyes closed, she saw neon stars like bioluminescence in the water.

 * 

Margot stared down at her body and slowly drew an outline of it in the sand. How small she looked: a lonely carcass washed up on this swath of beach. She left her body lying there and walked along the water’s edge, searching for sea glass. A raven screamed and when Margot looked up she saw a decomposing whale on the sand in front of her; a great grey mass. Everything around her was flickering like the old TV her dad had, the one with the bunny ears. She could feel the static passing through her in slow waves.

Margot heard the wolf’s paws before she saw it slinking towards the dead whale. Its teeth emerged from snarled lips as it began to scavenge. Margot felt this was a part of life that she was not supposed to see, that she had moved too far away from. She stood up and backed away slowly, but the wolf never turned its golden eyes on her.

“Margot!” Peter called, waving to her from a picnic blanket on the beach. He was flickering too. “I got the merlot, I hope that’s okay,” he said, pouring her a glass of wine as she tentatively walked towards him.

“Of course,” Margot said, sitting next to him.

“The sun’s starting to go down.” Peter nodded towards the purple-pink clouds.

“It’s pretty,” Margot said quietly. 

He looked at her, gently touched the back of her head. His fingers felt soft around the edges, like they could pass through her. “I thought I told you to be careful.”

“I might have bitten off more than I could chew,” she said.

“I wanted you to come back.” Peter looked at her from the corner of his eye, his face towards the setting sun.

Margot gave him a hazy smile and turned to watch the glass whale drifting out to the ocean, the start of its own migration. 

Sofia Osborne is a freelance writer, editor, and audio producer, currently completing her MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her award-winning environmental journalism has appeared in The Narwhal, The Tyee, Passage, and more, and she co-hosts and produces the science podcast Beyond Blathers. Her writing is informed and inspired by the Salish Sea and the many creatures that make their homes there, from sea stars to humpback whales.