She’s been sick for seven days—a thick, vaporous flu whose only nourishment is sleep. She drinks sleep in draughts. She swims through sleep like water.
Through her fever-haze, she hears her fifteen-year-old son and his friends who use the house like a hotel. They’re all bones and baggy pants and rubbery-smelling feet. They never ask how she feels but she senses their love, like a pack
of faithful dogs.
They go to the store and buy her Gatorade.
They raid the pantry and make her soup.
And, during heady summer nights, they disappear and meet girls whom they kiss and love, even though they say they don’t. They float back exuding sex, delinquency, and magic. They sleep till noon.
She dreams that the designs on the world’s temples stand for energy fields we know but don’t remember. The designs on the temples are musical notes—frequencies so subtle we hear them without knowing. So are patterns of stars. When early sailors used celestial navigation, they used their ears as well as their eyes.

Her husband calls, interrupting the dream. He is the current Captain Cereal, purveyor of cereal rings and idol of children. He says he’s on a new mission and it’s going beautifully. A few mishaps, a few lost rings, but that’s what you’d expect when launching a new cereal.
How are you? he asks.
I have the flu.
Excuse me! he says. C.C. has been called!
The Captain speaks in exclamation points and refers to himself by initials so he won’t be confused with his earlier self, Daniel Martinson, a disillusioned web designer. When she married him, she thought he was going to do doing blue-collar work because the economy had collapsed. She didn’t know he’d go to Cereal School and become the official Captain Cereal. Creating code, he told her, is just chasing shadows. But magic rings and red capes are translations.
Translations of what?
If you don’t know, I can’t explain.
He only gives her cereal rings that don’t light up.

This morning, she feels well enough to make coffee and bring it to bed, a bed she once shared with Captain Cereal and once nursed her son. She looks at patterns on the lace curtains and wonders if they hide energy fields and whether she should try to hear them. She listens to the curtains and hears nothing.

Did Dad just call? her son asks.
In a manner of speaking.
I wish you wouldn’t be sarcastic about him.
I’m not. It’s just a thing people say.
A child-therapist has told her that her son has ambivalent feelings because he’s living in a schizoid marriage. She doesn’t know how to talk to him about it because his feelings are like buried rocks. The therapist says her awareness is the key. If she knows about the rocks they’ll come to the surface and break apart. She doesn’t tell him that she has an advanced degree in earth science or that geologists detect ultrasonic waves in canyons.

She tells her son she’s sorry and drinks more sleep until Leonard, her sort-of boyfriend, calls.
I’m sitting on my porch with a beer, he says. I hate it when you exile me.
The boys are here.
You know they all have girlfriends. And your husband is fucking an early version of Queen Elizabeth. How come you’re the only person in the house who can’t have a sex life?
I can. I just can’t be public about it.
I’ll bring you groceries. I’ll say I’m a delivery person
She says she’d like this, but the same therapist has warned that her son mustn’t know about Leonard until she has a conventional divorce. It doesn’t matter if he knows Captain Cereal is spending weekends with a lover. Male children, the therapist intones, are deeply identified with their fathers and even celebrate their extra-marital lives. But they feel abandoned when their mothers do the same thing.
You can’t psychoanalyze life, Leonard says. Let me come over.
I’ll think about it.
You’re always thinking about it.
Because I’m married.
I am, too, says Leonard. But we’re not living together.
At least she’s real.
What do you mean?
I mean she’s a music therapist.

***

There’s a big paper heart hanging from the curtains. Her son and the former Daniel Martinson made it for a long-ago Valentine’s Day. She takes it down—it’s been up for years—and shoves the heart under the pillow before the boys stampede into the bedroom.
We want to see the blue whale, they say, referring to the only blue whale that’s ever been rescued and whose picture is all over the papers.
He’s in recovery, she says. He doesn’t want visitors.
But people are going to see him all the time. It’s on television. Please, please, we want to go.
They make doe-eyes at her–the kind they used to make all the time but now make only when they want something.
I don’t think I’m up to driving that far.
The new Marina Refuge, is close, says Seth. I mean really, really close.
He talks quickly, because he never gets his way at home and learned to ask for things so no one can understand him. Matthew, whose parents sent him to a desert boot camp, looks at the floor. Juan and the other boys mill around, except for her son who stares with a pitiless eye.
It’s never been on land before, says Matthew.
Because it’s so enormous, says her son.
Predictably enormous, says Juan.
Juan came to this country five years ago and knows more words than any of them. The other day he said that all the water on the planet would dry up because of our moral turpitude.
The boys stare like sad-animals and she thinks about the whale, whose photograph she’s seen—an enormous inkblot in a concrete pool. He seems lonely, in spite of his visitors. She’s actually thought of going to see him yet doesn’t want to crowd him. But now the boys are pleading and she thinks why not?

They stop for a candy called Big Rings, except for Seth, who’s a vegetarian, and knows they’re made from hoofs. Everyone gets a drink called Mango-A-Go-Go, and the car smells like a jellybean. By the time they get to the Marina Refuge, she’s swimming in sweet, thick air, and all she wants to do is sleep and eat the dark like cotton candy.

****

The whale’s name is Sparky, which seems wrong, since Sparky is for parakeets or gerbils. He’s in a specially constructed octagonal building with a pool that’s one kilometer in all directions, open to the sky, filled with pumps from the ocean. There’s a crowd around the building, but only two can visit at a time. The building wall is filled with flowers and cards of well wishes. No one has shown them to the whale.
She moves closer to the building and sees Sanskrit symbols on the door. From a long-ago visit to a temple, she remembers they are musical notes and wonders if they’re also energy fields. And now, in the distance, she hears the Captain and his entourage arguing with a red-haired woman. They want to see the whale and give blessings.
Sparky doesn’t need a blessing, says the woman. He has over a thousand cards and flowers.
But there are blessings and there are blessings, says the Captain.
The woman says she’s not interested in parsing words and the Captain’s voice rises in a crescendo of exclamation points. On the periphery, she sees a gray-haired woman in a brown pantsuit holding a small black purse. The woman whispers in the Captain’s ear and they leave.
One by one the boys go in and come out saying that the whale is hella cool. And now the red-haired woman walks toward her, smiling.

The vast green room smells of the ocean. The pool is almost as big as Times Square. The whale is breaching.
He’s slowly getting better, says the woman. We hope he’ll be out to sea in a week.
Was it an injury?
We think so. Probably a fight—a tear on his right side in his ear. We think it may have confused his celestial navigation. They’re very much in contact with the stars, you know. Look…he likes you….
The whale is swimming close to her and reaches the silver bar around the pool. His eyes bore into hers. An arc of light flies between them.
He’s never swum up to anyone before, says the woman. Have you taken care of whales?
Not really. When I was a kid, I used to go to sea on a motorboat with my dad. He’s a marine biologist.
Did you communicate with sea life?
No. I was scared we’d drown.
Then it must be you and this whale. It’s healing when an animal trusts a person. Did you know his heart is five feet long?

The woman leaves and she and the blue whale are alone. His eyes are small compared to other whales, like two grapefruits on a huge boulder. Even so, she can only see one eye at a time. They’re a soft reddish brown, so deep they remind her of the ocean. The eyes seek her out again. And now she hears his voice inside her:
I can’t stand the name Sparky, but please don’t ever tell them.
I understand, she says. I wouldn’t like it either.
Dusk settles in. The whale arches his back and looks at the sky.
Cassiopeia has been in ascendance every night and must bore the whale, who uses the sky to chart his course. She hears his voice again.
I miss the stars.
I know. They’re further out.
I can’t even hear them.
Do they sound like music?
What is music?
She hums a few bars of Scarborough Fair. The whale says it’s not quite the same.

Hey, Mom, says her son when she comes out, how come you got to be alone?
I guess the whale and I had some kind of encounter.
Some paranormal deal? says her son.
We just liked each other, she said.
The kids laugh. They get back in the cloying car and she can’t stop thinking about the whale’s eyes. They’re deeper than the Captain’s, which are more like slits of cereal, cut into fourths of their puffed-up size. Maybe deeper than Leonard’s.
Give things time, she hears Leonard saying.
I can’t, she says out loud.
What? says Matthew.
She’s freaked because she had a thing with that whale, says Juan.
No, says her son quietly. She’s freaked because the Captain was there. My dad.
You saw him and didn’t tell me?
I talked to him. Greta was there, too.
Her son speaks impartially–an exile between frequencies, a guru of human relations. Tonight he’ll put his arms around a girl with silky hair and forget that if you love someone, you’ll turn into a freak like your parents.

When they get home, the Captain is in the living room, wrapped in his cape and brooding. He’s heard about her audience with the whale and wants to know her secret. She says there wasn’t any secret.
Just tell me, he says.
I can’t because there wasn’t any.
Just tell me, he says again.
There’s nothing to tell.
He hands her a cereal ring with a green jewel. Mysteriously, the ring lights and she rises toward the ceiling. She sees the tops of chairs, the Captain’s bald spot, a wine stain on the couch. She floats to a window and sees the constellation of Cassiopeia that bores the whale and fainter stars that will guide the whale to sea. Below, the Captain is saying that there must be something wrong with the ring–they don’t make people levitate, that’s just hype for the kids. Maybe the ring is radioactive. She must come down.
The Captain’s voice barely registers. She stays by the window looking at stars; a source of calm and steady light, and so far out, the whale can dive almost two-thousand feet, a depth where darkness has a pulse and becomes a kind of singing.
She shivers at the thrill of it.