Gallagher and the Whale

Prologue

When I was closer to the coast,

I thought I knew its shape

But I was painting sea boats,

While you drained out a lake.

-- El May, “Draining A Lake”

The day your best friend Gallagher offed himself was the day you found yourself.

It didn’t happen how you always imagined it would­- a sudden epiphany like a bolt of lightning on your way to the grocery store, a book in hand and a knot in your chest. Rather, it fell from the sky and into your head and when you awoke in the morning, you knew everything was going to change.

You were watching Wonder Pets at the time, one hand on the popcorn bowl, the other on the remote. Your eldest sister, the doctor, sat next you and told you that Gallagher had taken his own life. She used words like shocking and unfortunate and then watched you, waiting for a reaction you could not give. You could not bring yourself to tell her you had listened through the keyhole while your family discussed how to break the news to you. You could not bring yourself to describe the strange feeling in your stomach, like a bird beating against the cage of your ribs.

You asked her how he did it.

Well, she said, Sometimes people just –

No, you cut her off, Not why, how.

She was confused, but answered anyway. A dog walker found him washed up on the shore this morning. His pockets were filled with rocks.

Ah, rocks. How Virginia Woolf of him.

If your sister seemed surprised at your nonchalance, she did not show it. Instead, she began to give you the routine speech about diverted grief: how when you bottle it up, it explodes, like a can of soda, and your insides and outsides will be drenched, but you did not hear it, because you tuned out. There was a humming in your ears, and you knew it was only there because you wanted it to be. You are terrific at tuning out of the present. In your head, you decided that the entire situation was devastating. But not because Gallagher was dead, and certainly not because he killed himself. What upset you the most was that you could not have thought of a more fitting way for Gallagher, the ocean fanatic, to end his own life, than to plainly walk into the sea, pockets full of rocks.