A House Inside of a Whale

The power bill came like clockwork from Skopje Municipal Power Company, printed in equisite blackletter typeface, popping through the mail slot at 3:02 PM every Saturday. The power had only gone out three times that Marisa could remember, and never for very long. But when she had first answered the ad for a house inside of a whale, she had no idea what to expect.
While she walked over the round bulge under the hallway from the kitchen to the living room, she listened to the whooshing and creaking of the krill and seawater she knew was churning past beneath her feet. She set her dinner, couscous and tender teriyaki-soaked chicken with mixed frozen vegetables, on the tiny round table in front of the couch and went back into the kitchen to answer the phone.

"Hello?" she asked, reaching for a stray cookbook she'd left out. Marisa always felt compelled to clean while she was on the phone.

"Marisa, hey! It's Öner."

"Oh hi! Yeah, I've got the audits mostly done, but," she paused at a rumbling outside that signalled the whale about to clear her blowhole, a move which would break the connexion briefly. "Sorry about that."

"Oh, that is all right." Öner said dismissively. "But was everything ok with our books?"

"As best as I could find. You might want to keep an eye on your Baku office, though. I noticed some basically negligible but possibly ominous slips in their numbers," she said, wiping down the countertop. "Can I call you a little bit later, actually, Öner? I have dinner on the table."

"Oh yes, most certainly. Güle-güle, Marisa."

She hung up the phone and ate her dinner. Sometimes she missed the companionship of living on land, but not so very much. She never questioned too much how it worked, this house inside of a whale. For a year and a half it was hers by a lease that, despite being on standard whitest-white A4 paper, was filled with references not to renter's law, but to magic spells and arcane devices. The whole thing was signed under "Landlord" by "Zhp. Ronald Marietta-Sindowski" in Gujarat script.

The dishes washed up and put away, she took back up her place in reading The False House by
James Stoddard under the light from a stained glass lamp. That was another feature of the cetaceous house, that her cherry bookshelves in the tiny study never failed to have the books she wanted to borrow. They had plates in them or stamps from a half dozen different libraries. Sometimes, if she forgot to put them back on the shelf, they would disappear from where she left them of their own accord. One book, an orange-bound biography of Mishima Yukio bearing a stamp from the University of Pittsburgh Library, had never gone the way of the others. Marisa imagined a frustrated literature student hunting through the distant stacks for a book the system said was in, but sat instead in the depths of the sea.

As she reached a particularly engrossing chapter, she heard a knock at the front door that she hadn't used since moving in. At first she thought it was just some errant junk the whale had swallowed banging up against the tunnel beneath the floor, but when it didn't let up, she stood and hurried to the tiny foyer. "I'm coming!" she yelled, cursing under her breath as she tripped over a box of old blankets left by the door. The foyer had served as her storage room since the beginning.

"Hello?" she said, pulling open the door. A rush of smelly and cold salt air blew in with a fog hanging low in it. At the door stood a skinny brown-haired young man who looked to be in his mid- to early twenties. He was holding a dish of brownies.

"Are you Marisa Alrendarian?" he asked, proffering the brownies. She nodded and gestured for him to come inside. He continued, "I'm Michael Terence George. I just moved in around here." He motioned vaguely towards the dark cavernous belly of the whale behind him and stepped across the threshold.

"There's another house?" Marisa asked, her eyes a bit wide with incredulity. She shut the door quickly and threw the bolt.

"Well, if there wasn't before, there is now." He followed her into the kitchen and set the brownies, covered in smooth tinfoil, on the white laminate countertop beside the antique-looking refrigerator. "I just moved in yesterday, and the landlord said to at least say hello. How long have you been here?"

"A year this April," she replied. "I had no idea there was even enough room for two houses in the whale."

"I was sceptical in the first place," the newcomer said. "I mean, a house in a whale? At first I thought it was one of those kitsch-type houses like you see out West (you are American, right, you sound it) or at the beach. Then I figured maybe it was some kind of extreme survivalist deal, like Jonah on the way to Tarsus or something like that. Either way I was intrigued. Five hundred a month for to bedrooms, a kitchen, study and a living room... I couldn't pass it up. How bad are utilities?"

It was the strangest conversation that Marisa had had in years. This mop-haired guy was talking as though two houses in the belly of a whale was the most ordinary thing in the world, like single-family detached McMansions in Dallas or bungalows in Canberra. She wasn't sure that she even liked the idea of a neighbor - or neighbors! "DId you say two bedrooms?"

"Yeah! My buddy Sam and this girl Sylvia are living there with me. We were going to get a cat, too, but we figured it might not be a good idea."

She had moved away from everyone so as to not have to deal with people; she held too many regrets and lost friendships, and she couldn't have sat through another minute of her parents' messy divorce proceedings. She had to escape. Now the house inside of a whale was no longer her cozy hermitage.

"What are you all planning on doing down in here?" She went to one of the overhead cupboards and creaked open the fine-grained wood door. "Coffee? Tea?" She put on company manners gone a little stiff with disuse.

"Oh, no thanks. Could I get a glass of water, though, if you don't mind?"

"Sure."

Michael took a breath before launching into his and his housemates' plans. "Sylvia's a musician. She says she does a lot of ambient and that being in a whale is inspiring. She has a mad-complicated digital composing setup in her room. Two soundboards and a bunch of instruments. I'm working on a graphic novel. You ever read webcomics?"

"There's no internet here in the whale, Michael. I used to, back in college - but that was five years ago. There weren't many out there to read."

"You don't get access in here?" He looked about, puzzling at the walls and ceiling as though expecting to find a wireless relay above the narrow kitchen table beside the now-sealed gaslight fixture. "We have a fairly decent connection in our place. If you ever need, you could come over and use my computer."

Now it was Marisa's turn to look puzzled. The solitude of the house inside of a whale was nice and far away from the modern world. Logistics of bringing internet to a moving, undersea mammal aside, it stilled seemed unlikely. She had wanted to be "off the 'net" and out of instant touchtype smalltalk. The only "digital age" material she dealt with on anything approaching a "regular basis" was the occasional flash drive of financial data that ran just fine on her 2004 Thinkpad, which she had long stopped using for leisure purposes in the spirit of the house's old-fashionedness and isolation.

"I guess I might ask on occasion to use it... some of my accounting clients even in their developing countries are getting frustrated at having to send me something less than an online form of their books, especially sending them by post." She shrugged. "Let's go sit down in the living room and you tell me some more about this 'graphic novel.'"

Michael scooted a wicker and matte-black wrought iron chair over from a corner and cleared it of Marisa's crocheting bag before plopping down into it. "It's about three farmers in Colorado who find a lost city under their fields and end up going crazy from what they uncover. You could probably call it 'illustrated Lovecraft' - have you ever re-?"

"Yes, I'm well-versed in H.P. Lovecraft," Marisa said with a reminiscent smile. "So what's your friend Sam doing? Is he creative, too?"

"He's writing a book. He claims to be the next David Foster Wallace, whoever that is, but I'm not really a fan of his writing. Too many obscure terms for me, plus Sam never knows when to let a sentence end."

Now Marisa smiled again, at her new neighbor's excitement at and opinion on everything.

this story is incomplete