Weather Station

He had inherited the weather station from his father...

No, that wasn´t right, his father wasn´t dead, yet.

Fine, he had been given the weather station by his father...

No, still not right.

He had been dropped at the weather station by his incensed father who swore that his boy would never see dry land again while he, the father - or respectively he, the son, of course - still lived. That was about right. The weather station was located in the middle of the ocean. Dry land wasn´t to be found anywhere nearby. The boy shrugged. He often found himself in situation where to shrug was the most sensible thing to do. One couldn´t really quarrell with the seabirds who turned up from time to time and tried to remove removeable and non-removeable parts of the expensive but rusty equipment. It wasn´t really sensible. One could, however, shrug at them.

  He didn´t know much about the weather, to be honest. Fortunately the weather was another of those things you could shrug at. There were loads of little panels all over the machinery that had been stuffed inside the rickety old place, each one showing information as indecipherable as any foreign language. His father had not given him any explanation on how to read or use the machines and so the boy had found himself a little lost during the first month inside the weather station.

  For the first week, he remembered with an embarassed little laugh, he had been terribly afraid that there would be no weather at all, unless he learned all the information pertaining to the machines and instruments. He had rummaged through cupboards, turned every dustbin over, lifted every wooden floorboard, searching for instructions which were nowhere to be found. Once he had quieted down enough to observe and think, the boy had learned that all his fears had been useless. Weather pretty much takes care of itself. He had been immensely relieved by this discovery.

  Sometimes fishermen drove past in their noisy boats and shouted at him. They wanted to know what the weather was going to be like. For this eventuality the boy had devised a highly effective ritual. He would make a great show of checking the various instruments, calling out nonsensical terms like "Heliodroggery" or "Submarinoplepsy", then seem to sink deep inside his own thoughts and musings before he would suddenly jump up, point at the horizon and call out, "There will be fine weather for fishing!" or "There is a mild storm coming!" depending on what he saw in the distance.

  The sky, he had found out, would talk to him, telling him, not in language but in the movements of clouds and sudden gusts of wind that sometimes seemed like cold laughter. The sky also spoke with the warmth or coolness of the air, with the lapping of waves against the weather station´s rusty feet.

  So, quite to his surprise, the boy had found that he was not at all inefficient as a weatherman - despite not knowing anything about the weather except for what the weather itself would tell him. He always suspected that the weather would keep one or two secrets to itself and so was not surprised when, occasionally, his predictions turned out to be horribly or fortunately wrong. Once a fishing boat had capsized in a storm that he didn´t foretell and he had to find bedding for four sodden and disgruntled fishermen who had reached the weather station in a little emergency boat. He had shrugged at them and found out that, whatever one does, it is better not to shrug at disgruntled fishermen. Apart from rare events such as this, his life remained quiet and predictable.

  One morning, he got up, as usually extremely disinterested in the busily beeping and ticking instruments, and made his way, as he usually did, down a few rusted stepladders to the place where the waves licked and lapped the mooring ladder, turned greenish and brownish and, in some parts, black by the salt water. He liked to taste the water, thinking that eventually he might be able to taste it if rain of some storm, distant or close, had diluted the salt water. It was a ridiculous idea, of course, but ideas such as this were a good way to start the day - or so the boy thought. Lost in thoughts and the dream memory of mechanical cloud-planes with thunder generators that might or might not circle the weather station while he ran from instrument to instrument looking at the electronic glyphs that might or might not tell him about the planes´ whereabouts if only he could read what they said, the boy dipped his hand into the sea and touched something.

  It was a fish, he found out upon withdrawing his hand. It was a big, no it was an immense fish, almost as heavy as he himself was. It had greenish fins that looked tipped with something the colour and texture of rust which made the boy think, for a moment, that this might be a fish made of metal. Nonsense, he said to himself. A fish of metal would plummet down to the depths instantly.

  But what if it was an ingenious machine, designed to float and swim just like a real fish, maybe containing a bubble of air inside a thin hull? The thought intrigued the boy so much that for a while he quite forgot that there was an actual immense fish which blinked and opened and closed its mouth as if to prove that it was, indeed, not made of metal at all. Woken from his thoughts the boy wondered whether he should be disappointed. A real fish seemed an oddity in this place of corrugated and rusting metal. There was the sea underneath the entire structure, of course, but the sea could be treated the same way one could treat a puddle in the street on a rainy day. The boy had never considered the place where he spent his time as something alive and independent. It seemed difficult to shrug at such a place and so he kept the image out of his head.

  The creature in front of him might be a real fish, but he decided to treat it as an apparatus, something that would work without requiring any sort of understanding from his part. He looked at the fish and asked, "Do you need fuel?"

  The fish regarded him with an unimpressed and glaring eye. There was very little about that eye that could be interpreted as mechanical which made the boy a bit uneasy.

  "What sort of fuel do you require?" the boy continued, feeling rather helpless. He wondered if he should make up a name that sounded like fish food and then offer it to the fish. "I could fetch you some Nurturichtyo..." he said warily.

  The fish stared a little longer. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he shook his head in a violent spasm that sent salt water flying into every direction. "Nurturichtyo," he said in a deep and rusty-sounding voice. "How do you know about Nurturichtyo, young boy?"

  The boy was taken aback at this. The fact that a fish would speak caused him no trouble at all, but that a speaking fish should know something he had just made up...that was a thought that needed some consideration. Having no time to consider, however, the boy said the next thing that came to his mind, "A Glykos brought me some."

  The fish was visibly impressed by this. "A Glykos," he muttered appreciatively. "They do not come to the surface often. You should know yourself honoured, young boy."

  Something happened in the boy´s head, then, something warm and glowing. He began to understand something. "After I danced the dance of the water sprites," he said, not considering but waiting until the syllables dropped from his mouth like ripe fruits, "the Glykoi accepted me as their surface friend. Their connection to the..."

  "...the world of the air-breathers," the fish finished, genuinely impressed. "But that would mean you are the..."

  "...let´s just keep calling me the surface friend." Now it was the boy´s turn to finish the others sentence. He began to enjoy the conversation in a manner he had never enjoyed any conversation he had held in his entire life. His parents and his friends were always talking about sensible things which, upon closer inspection, bore not the least trace of sensibility but were, on the whole, rather raw and undigested. This here was new and entirely sensible. "There were many things spoken between me and the Glykoi king which are best left unsaid. They were beautiful, no doubt, but not meant for each and every ear to hear."

  "Things spoken under the waves turn to noise in the air," the fish said and it seemed like agreement. "Will you accept my invitation to the deep, surface friend? I and my entire wave guard would be deeply honoured by your consent."

  A bubble of excitement swelled in the boys stomach and burst in his head. Images that seemed like memories appeared before his inner eye. He saw great green arches and fields of algae and sea grass waving in the current. An entire city under the waves, he saw, and it was like the city he had lived in, filled with many narrow and crowded lanes and people sleeping (or, in this case, caught by still currents and drifting) on benches and groups of children playing between long strings on which the washing hung to dry (or, staying with this case, what might the washing do under water - the boy was puzzled). The puzzling feeling broke his dreams in two and he found himself facing the rust-coloured fish again. This transit from dream to waking was not as rough as such transits usually are. The dizziness, the increased possibility of thought remained. The boy realized that he did not have to change his way of thinking but could speak whatever was in his head and the fish would simply answer as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  "Is the Weeping Face still off-limits to surfacers?" the boy asked, marveling at the image of a giant statue or rather the giant face of a colossal statue that grew on the bottom of the sea looking up at the unreachable surface with the saddest of expressions.

  "We will make an exception for you," the fish answered as the boy had hoped he would. "Come."
  "It has been a while since I last visited your kingdom, I might have forgotten certain...certain things," the boy said, pinching his nostrils closed with two fingers.

  The fish understood. "Some places keep their gifts. It will return to you. Come now, if you will, surface friend."

  It required only the tiniest switch inside of his mind, like changing the colour of a friend´s shirt in a memory, and he could breathe underwater. The water was cold, though, and his hair and his cloak billowed around him like algeous wings as he held on to the backfin of the rust-coloured fish and swam downward, where the colourless water around them slowly grew greener and darker.

  He had expected…no, he had not expected anything and found that there wasn´t anything to be seen on the way down. The water was as hazy as thick soup now. The fish swam in front of him, occasionally making important seeming noises to chase schools of smaller fishes from their path. This struck the boy as a very odd thing. One may insist on somebody else giving way when meeting on a narrow road, but this here was after all an ocean and as oceans go it was kind of large…in short, he felt uncomfortable as the fishes looked at him with something in their expressions that was either curiosity or disgust – it was difficult to tell with fishes, really. He tried to smile at them politely but the fishes simply turned and swam away. He had quickly forgotten them, however, because a giant shadow passed above them. Let it be a whale, the boy thought, as hard as he could – forgetting that it wasn`t really necessary to think hard at all, but his wish was so heavy and vast, it had to be hard for him to feel his own longing. Let it be a giant whale. Currents, some small and weak which did no more than stroke the boy’s hair like a loving hand, others strong and violent, were caused by the gigantic body of the whale, big as…as what?

  “Big as a city.”

  “Beg your pardon?” He looked down at the mechanical fish who had spoken. From the corner of his eye he saw a whaleshark caught in one of the stronger currents and flung into the darkness of the surrounding sea. The boy was suddenly aware of how small he was, how strange and unnecessary. Something about the mechanical fish made him think of times spent in the self-built workshop in his home, where he had built just such things as that odd fish, their eyes animated by the spirit called electricity. He thought about power shortages and the way all the machinery surrounding him had suddenly stopped and he too had felt he had suddenly stopped, the current of blood that animated him stopping along with the current of electricity. He had imagined death to be like that – to lie somewhere like a turned off toy, never decaying, not even rusting, the ages passing by, until at some distant and unknowable point in the future something would have replaced and improved upon whatever energy it was that made him run and he would be filled with it again, would rise and wipe the dust off his clothes and skin and go about building new machinery.

  “Big as a city,” the fish repeated and the words slowly brought the boy back to consciousness.

  “Not only big as a city,” the boy said, looking upward once again. “It is a city.”

  And so it was. All over the skin of the whale was covered in brownish and greyish dots that a careless observer might have taken for sea-crusts, molluscs and odd diseases of the skin. Looking closer, however, revealed them to be clusters of houses, bridges and roads. There were stadions and flowery knots of highways.

  “Let us go closer,” the boy said and the fish, close enough to be safely pulled along by a steady current caused by the whale, swam upward. The boy felt he was sitting in a plane about to land (a small plane that he flew once as a younger boy and had flown many times inside his head since) and that the body of the whale was an entire continent. What had seemed like tiny clusters grew and grew into districts, into streets and, finally, into fully grown houses.

  The mechanic fish opened and closed his mouth without saying a word as he came closer to the city – and by that time the boy had all but forgotten that it was only the tiniest part of the whale where this city stood, in the same manner as we who constantly forget that we are on a gigantic ball of rock, water and fire hurtling with frightening speed through nothingness. They came closer, close enough for the boy to reach out his hands and touch the shingles of the roof, smiling with delight when bubbles of air that had formed on the shingles and on the algae growing on them burst and rose like a flock of disturbed pigeons. He heard music coming from windows, strange voices, noises of pans and plates and cutlery clicking against each other in some invisible kitchen. It reminded him of the home he had left when he came to the weather station. He thought it was idiotic to cry, but the sounds made him very sad and no matter how often he thought that he was not sad and that he would not cry, the sadness inside did not listen to him and stayed right where it was. In his frustration he grabbed one of the antennas (and what strange radio signals did those people receive, floating through a dark sea on a monstrously gigantic whale?) they happened to float by at the moment and twisted it until it broke.

  A little later he looked at the broken piece of metal in his hands and wondered why he had done it. Why had he disturbed people that he did not know only because he could not bear the anger inside of him? “It is fortunate that the people here have just discovered how to receive transmissions without antennas, isn’t it?” he said tentatively to the fish.

  “Oh, yes, surface friend, so it is,” the fish answered to the boy’s immense relief. “In fact all those antennas are now as useless as dry grass. The people of that house will be glad to see that you have gotten rid of it for them.”

  The boy gave a relieved sigh. There was no need to worry if everything could be repaired with a thought. He was good at thoughts, after all.

  The boy and the mechanic fish drifted through the city for a couple of wonderful hours. Soon the boy was lost in the greyish, greenish mist that filled the streets, broken only when he looked through the windows to see fishes with glowing lights dangling from their heads. At first the sight of such fishes puzzled him and he thought that it was they who lived inside of those houses. But as they passed more windows and he saw more and more of them, he realized that the inhabitants of the houses – who he never saw, except as shadows and silhouettes – used the fishes in the same way that we use candles and electric lights.

  Nobody was out on the streets. The boy saw empty carts and shopfronts and bicycles that had fallen over – once he even saw an apple drift by, surrounded by scores of tiny fish that nibbled at it – but no people.

  “It is that special holiday of yours I have heard of, the day on which all the inhabitants of the whale have a pilgrimage to his eye,” the boy said with satisfaction.

  “To the sacred eye. Do you wish to visit it as well, surface friend? We are quite close.”

  “No just yet,” answered the boy for something had caught his eye. From a window of one of the houses the line of a kite flew high into the watery sky. A kite in itself wasn’t that unusual, the boy himself had played with kites when he had been smaller, but there was laundry hanging from the line of the kite, strange and colourful clothes and heat resistent gloves for taking things out of the oven and socks twice as long as legs could be. “I want to go over there.”

  “As you wish.”

  The fish stopped right in front of the drifting kite and the boy could see down the line, all the way into the window. After such a long time of swimming around in the murky water the boy was surprised and glad to see colours again. He had put up many colorful posters in his room on the weather station – prints of Chagall and Magritte and Miro that he had rescued from his room in his parent’s house – but they had faded with time and it had been years since he had seen such strong colours. He was also surprised that, apparently, he did not even have to speak his wishes in order for them to become real. This pleased him very much and gave him confidence. He looked at the strange clothes and tried to absorb the colours into his mind where they would stay and where he would find them again as soon as he was surrounded by the rusty metal walls of the weather station once more.

  He was busy and careful, looking at each article hanging on the line, slowly travelling towards the window. The boy was lost in the sinuous pattern of a blue and white dishwashing cloth halway down the line when the line suddenly jerked and vanished, piece by unexamined piece, inside the window. He stared at it without understanding. What had he wished for? Were his subconscious wishes now so powerful and oracular that he wouldn’t know why things happened until half and hour later?

  The line began to vanish faster. Now the kite was rushing past the boy’s face. “Follow the line,” said the boy and the mechanic fish swam after the rushing kite as fast as he could. However, he wasn’t fast enough. The kite vanished inside the window and the window was slammed shut.

  The fish nearly crashed into the window, but managed to swerve and stop before window and wall. The boy, naturally, remained calm. He could not think of a reason why this had happened, yet, but still thought that it was only because his skills of wish-making had become more powerful than he could understand. He would understand as soon as he could think of a reason why he would understand. While he was thinking about reasons and understanding, he happened to look through the window.

  There was a girl behind the window and she was just taking the blue and white dishwashing cloth from the line to fold it (now the boy does not wonder about this, his mind being busy elsewhere, but I do – did she really hang her laundry out to dry in the depths of the ocean and, if yes, how did it ever get dry?). She had red hair and wore clothes as bright as those that had just hung on the line. The boy, still busy inside the depths of his mind, did not notice that he was staring at her through the closed window.

  She noticed the stare before the boy noticed it and she got up, opened the window and looked at the boy. “Hello,” she said.

  “You are one of those who care for the houses while the others are on pilgrimage, the close confidants of the whale itself-“

  “Don’t be silly. I’m a girl, just like you.”

  Now this made the boy’s mind stop completely. He had short hair and a rather gaunt face that was not feminine at all. “I…I’m not a girl.”

  The girl looked at him vacantly for a moment. “Did I say you were a girl? Sorry, how silly. I meant you are human, like me.” She paused and looked a little more closely. “Aren’t you?”

  “I have not had contrary evidence,” said the boy a bit stiffly. What was happening here?

  “`I have not had contrary evidence´”, repeated the girl and laughed. “Yes, you’re definitely not a girl in disguise. Want to come in?”

  The boy had the disadvantage of extreme shyness, a disadvantage he had all but forgotten in his long and lonely days on the weather station, but now remembered all the more strongly. He blushed and said nothing.

  The girl watched him. Finally she said, “Well, does your fish want to come in?”

  “With pleasure, madam,” answered the mechanical fish dutifully and swam through the window, carrying the boy inside on his back.

  “Have a seat – or a swim.” She went back to folding her clothes while the fish swam around the room with a red-faced boy on its back. “How did you get here?”

  The boy felt very stupid, sitting on the back of the fish, drifting around in this strange room. He disliked the way his face felt, hot and flushed and he didn’t know what to do to make it stop. “I was brought here by a…a Thimean,” he said decisively.

  “What’s that?” asked the girl without looking up.

  The boy swallowed. How should he know what a Thimean was? He racked his brain but his brain felt surprisingly empty. All his thoughts failed him. “You have to ask my fish,” he said, finally, and he tried to sound full of pride and arrogance but failed, sounding only slightly desperate.

  “Alright,” said the girl. “I like talking to fishes. I have lots of experience with that, you must know. Okay, fish. What’s a…what was it, a Thimean?”

  “Certainly, madam. I am a Thimean.”

  When he heard this answer, the boy blushed even more. What sort of a fool was he, not even knowing the name of the very thing he was sitting on? But – and this gave him comfort – his wish-making seemed to work again, even if it worked a bit differently than he expected it to.

  The girl, meanwhile, simply nodded. “That makes sense, yes. So – where were you before you met the Thimean? Oh, I’m sorry. Thimean. Where was your rider before he met you?”

  The boy blushed even more. Wasn’t there anything one could do to make this embarassment stop? He could talk very well on his own. “I am the highest-ranking meteorologist on one of the most important weather stations in this ocean,” he blurted out before the Thimean could answer. “And I am a very good writer.” This last part was, of course, untrue, although the boy had written experimental letters home which had never been sent. “And I know what I wish for.” His dearest wish at this particular moment was to vanish in a very deep and dark hole. “And I am not a girl and certainly not disguised.”

  The girl took three more articles from her laundry line and carefully folded them before she looked up again. She opened her mouth and closed it again, having found nothing to say.

  The boy, meanwhile, was as red as he could turn. He muttered something about kites and whales and ritual pilgrimages and asked the Thimean to leave. He was shaking so much, he was afraid he might fall off the fish as it turned towards the window.

  “I am doing my laundry here,” called the girl just as they were about to leave through the window. “And…and it takes quite long, so…so, maybe, if the fish, if the Thimean, could, perhaps…help me…I mean only to string the kite, because it is not so easy to find the right current, I mean, I have done it so often I am really quite good at it or not bad at least and there isn’t that much left so it would really only be a very small favour and…and maybe if you are hungry afterwards I could cook something for you, not that I know what a fish of metal would like to eat but maybe I have it here…”

  First she makes fun of me and now she wants me to work for her, thought the boy. What is wrong with that girl? And why is she so intent on the fish? He uttered a decisive “Erm…” as the fish drifted through the window and away from the house. The girl stood in the window, shrinking as they moved further away, and the last of her that vanished in green murk was the red of her hair.

  Away from the girl, the boy found that his thoughts had been returned to him. He inspected them. They were quite as he remembered them. Nothing seemed to be broken, nothing damaged. The blood flowed from his head and he could see the world around him again. He shrugged. It felt good, so he shrugged again. How beautiful, he thought. Wishing and shrugging. I have already learned two important things about the world.

  “Thimean,” he said, thinking that he was indeed hungry. “I have heard so much of the floating restaurant, about Li’s Barge Inn, that always come round here at this time of the day – and, ah, there it is! Let’s go!”

  It floated around the corner, lit up with orange and red and yellow lampions strung to the sides. It was a barge, like the barges the boy remembered looking at in picture books, its sails cut in beautiful and overlapping geometrical shapes, strange and bold writing on them that spelled out the name of the floating restaurant in a script the boy imagined to be Chinese. During his time on the weather station he hadn’t eaten much except canned food and every month – in theory; in practice the shipping lines were sometimes cut off by storms – he had recieved a boatload of potatoes and leeks and cale and sometimes holding a sacred crate of carrots and apples. Those got stale and mouldy very fast and so he ate as much of the vegetables and the fruit as he could and then hated the sight, sound (potatoes do make a sound if they get old enough – you can trust the boy, he knows these things) and thought of potatoes, leeks, cale, carrots and apples for weeks until the delivery boat appeared once more bringing a new load, which he desired grealy by then for the weeks before they arrived were given to developing a new hatred for canned food. In short, a restaurant was the most wonderful thing at the moment, especially one that cooks everything one wishes for.

  Li was not exactly Chinese but as close as the boy could wish him. He had slanted eyes, a colorful robe with dragon and phoenix patterns, a small beard that looked as if it had been drawn by three well-placed strokes of a brush, but when he opened his mouth he spoke like the sailors that had come to the weather station to ask the boy about next day’s weather. This annoyed the boy so much that he simply wished Li to be a mute.

  There were round tables of dark wood all over the barge’s deck, all of them, as well as the small and round chairs, fixed to the planks so they would not move and tumble if the sea got rough (which happened whenever the giant whale decided to turn causing foamy bubbles and strong currents to drift through every street). Candles glowed and incense sticks gleamed at the tips, sending up fine trails of smoke, because every single table was surrounded by a bubble of air so that the guests could enjoy the lovely smells of Li’s food all the better.

  Li did not have anything to serve the Thimean because the boy was now so hungry that all he could wish for were pheasants in a honey and pepper sauce, fresh fruit salad (no apples), steaming rice with saffron and coconut and a boiling pot of tea and found himself unable to wonder what a metallic fish could possibly like to eat. After a short while that made the image of the expected food all the clearer in the boy’s head, Li arrived with a huge silver tablet carried by two of his servants. On it delicacy piled upon delicacy. The boy’s head was a jumble of tastes and half-remembered dishes and his mouth watered as he saw this jumble mirrored on the silver plate. In addition to what he had wished for there were dates, stuffed with couscous and cooked in butter until they had burst, onions simmered in wine and vinegar, pieces of pork and pineapple swimming in an orange sea of sauce, balls of cream and chocolate powdered with sugar and many other things that he was too hungry to recognize. As soon as the tablet entered the bubble of air, the most delicious of smells spread fast, turning the boy almost delirious. The two men put it down carefully, bowed together with Li and shuffled away.

  The boy could hardly believe his eyes. He could hardly believe his nose, either. His mouth would have to do all the believing, then, he thought. He took a spoon and ladled up as much pork and sauce as possible and shuffled all of it into his mouth.

  He chewed.

  He chewed some more.

  He spat the food from his mouth as violently as he could.

  It tasted of cale!

  He took another spoonfull, this time of rice.

  It tasted of leeks!

  In desperation he grabbed one of the stuffed dates and ate it. His face fell,as he forced himself to swallow.

  It tasted of potatoes!

  And while the mechanic eyes of the Thimean rolled to follow the floating pieces of food the boy had ejected, the boy found himself wondering about the limits of memory and of wishes. Li came and stared calmly at the boy. Li looked a little like his father now, the boy noticed. He forced himself to eat another bite.

  “Thimean?”

  “Always here, surface friend.”

  “What is wrong here?” Li looked a little threatening now. He was still smiling, but did not move.

  “The world below is never wrong, surface friend.”

  “I do feel a little scared, Thimean.” He looked at the Thimean and felt uneasy, seeing the rolling, mechanical eyes watching him. He imagined sharp and rusty teeth beneath the lipless metal mouth of the fish. “I could,” he said to distract himself, “I could use a visit to the Glykoi now, I think.” He felt very tired and his head hurt.

  “The Glykoi have all gathered at the eye of the whale, surface-friend.”

  There was a stinging pain just above the boy’s eye. “Isn’t at least one supposed to be here now?”

  “No, surface friend.”

  The boy had closed his eyes before asking the question, hoping to see the shape of a Glykoi when he would open them again. Now all he could hear was a rasping noise of metal and a strange, strangled sound as if someone who had no voice was trying to laugh. He felt afraid.

  “Thimean?” he asked without opening his eyes.

  “Yes, surface friend?” There is was again, this rasping noise of metal, very close to his ear. He felt goosebumps rise all over his body.

  “I would like to go back now.”

  “You do not want to disappoint the Glykoi, do you, surface friend? They would be disappointed if you left before visiting them.” A strange smell filled the bubble. Hot and rusty. The boy suppressed a cough. Shapes, shadows dancing before the vast yellow globe of the whale’s eye appeared before his inner vision. They twisted their bodies and sung in strange voices. The pupil of the gigantic eye, large as a lake and black as a hole swam over the yellow surface and stopped, looking directly at the boy, swallowing him up. A hand closed over his shoulder.

  It was Li’s hand. It was cool and limp. The boy shouted, jumped from his chair, ran across the planks and, without thought, he jumped headfirst over the railing. He fell right through a group of orange lampions, scattering and tearing them. He fell and he swam and he didn’t really know what it was he was doing – houses seemed to pass by, but they were rotating, antennas and empty windows were spinning around like wheels. At last the sensation of falling ended and was replaced by the sensation of lying on something hard and cold. The boy tried to calm down, tried to regain his senses.

  He was lying on his back on the street, clutching an orange lampion in his hands. He blinked slowly, watched the bubbles of air that clung to his motionless body. How long had he been lying here? His mind was peaceful and empty. He couldn’t tell.

  He got up and the bubbles rose from his body. It was the only thing that reminded him that he was underwater – that and the strips of algea on the street and the walls of the houses, caught in soft, hardly recognizable currents and waving like thousand green hands. He looked up, his eyes following the trail of bubbles and he saw the absolute blackness that was the sky. He did not know if he was looking up at the distant surface or down into some bottomless chasm. It made him feel small and alone, made him aware of the whale once more.

  With the suddenness of lightning he remembered the barge and his jump. He felt exposed, here on the street, in plain view for something floating in the dark sky, so he ran until he found a dark opening in one of the walls and hid himself inside of it. This is all because I want it to be so, he thought. I imagined the Thimean as a monster and he became a monster. I must calm down. I must control my thoughts.

  As he sat there, in the dark, trying to gain control over his fear and his thoughts, he noticed something small moving next to him. He was unsure if he should give up concentrating, so he moved around his hand, trying to find out what it was. He could not catch anything but the sense of something moving in the dark did not stop. He was not afraid of it so he could keep up the concentration. His fear was larger than he had expected, it floated through his mind almost as large as the whale and he needed to see it whole and complete. The movement around him did not stop. There seemed to be more things moving now. He imagines himself rising inside of his fear, rising to the surface where the metal skeleton of the weather station stood. His fear reached the surface and it burst.

  Lights went on all around the boy. He was blinded for a moment. When he could see again he saw that the lights were moving around him in gentle, circular motions. He saw tiny metal fishes, not unlike the lamp-fishes he had seen inside the houses but much smaller. They had strange exoskeletons and spiny fins and some had the lights dangling like plants from their foreheads, others held them between two of their many fins and others had no lights at all but two glowing eyes. They swam around the boy, friendly and curious. He felt reassured by them. One of them entered the lampion the boy still held and the entire room began to glow with a warm orange light.

  The lampion was lifted from his hands and floated outside, into the street. The boy, his mind stilled and without fear for now, rose and followed the floating lampion. The other fishes swarmed around him and they followed, too. He walked through the streets and he did not know how long he was walking. He followed the orange light, always surrounded by the tiny fishes. He turned when the light turned, he stopped when the light stopped. It was like walking through an endless tunnel. He could see nothing ahead, nothing behind. At last the lampion stopped and rose upward. The boy lifted his head and expected to see it vanishing into the dark sky, but it stopped in front of a window. After a while the window opened and a rope was lowered down onto the street. At the tip of the rope, the boy could see a kite. The tiny fishes swam up the rope and clung to it like hundred electric Christmas lights. The boy grabbed the rope and was slowly pulled up.

  The red-haired girl closed the window behind him. He wasn’t very nervous now. He felt tired. The lampion had settled in the corner of a room. Both boy and girl watched the tiny fishes. They swam around the room, exploring every dark corner, but if they did it out of curiosity or because they wanted to make sure that there was nothing hiding there, the observers couldn’t say. When they were done with their inspection, the all vanished inside the orange lampion, which glowed ever brighter and stronger, filling the entire room with light and warmth.

  “Are they yours?” the boy asked timidly.

  The girl looked at him and shook her head. “No. I think they are the whale’s. I met them when I first came here. I was terribly afraid then, but they were friendly.”

  “Yes, I believe I know what you mean. Did you…I mean, can you…?”

  “The wishing-thing? No, it went away after that. I was on a boat trip with my parents and I was swimming and met this strange and shimmering mer-man and then…”

  “Yes,” said the boy. It was beautiful to sit here, surrounded by light. He hadn’t thought that the girl was just like him. “Somehow it went wrong. How long…”

  “I don’t know. In the beginning I knew but then there was always something to do – cooking and laundry and cleaning up after the fishes. I forgot.”

  They were silent for a while after that, watching the lampion and listening to a gentle humming that seemed to come from the floor and the walls.

  “So”, began the girl. “What do you do on this weather station?”

  “Things that I don’t understand.”

  “Oh? So, are you good at them,then?”

  “As long as nobody else understands them either, I am very good at them.”

  The girl laughed.

  Silence fell between them again. It was not an unpleasant kind of silence. It made the boy aware of the hum again. It wasn’t constant. It grew a little louder and then fell completely silent for a moment only to begin again.

  “What’s that noise?”

  “I think it’s the whale. Sometimes he sings. It’s so strange and so beautiful.”

  “Did you ever go and visit his eye?”

  “No. They told me that it was an important place, but I just never had time.” The girl seemed nervous. She grabbed a piece of clothing and folded it carefully.

  The boy watched her for a moment, then he got up. “Let’s go.”

  “To the eye?”

  He nodded.

  “Now?”

  He nodded again.

  “But I need to…” The girl stopped speaking. She looked around the room. At last she put down the piece of folded clothing, got up and took the glowing lampion. Flooded in orange light, she smiled at the boy. “I need to go, I think.”
  He opened the window for her and together they went out into the lonely and deserted city. They did not know how long the way to the eye would be and they did not know what would happen to them on the way. Wishes and thoughts would never be as simple and as pleasant as they had been, but this didn’t mean that they weren’t wishing for anything or that they weren’t thinking strange and beautiful thoughts. They had the tiny and helpful fishes with them and they had their shared memory of wishes that came true and of fears that had haunted them and this was more than either of them had known before…