It was mid-June. He had already dusted off his collection of the vinyl bearing the name and grown tired from the spinning. Outside, the sky drew the air into a color like asphyxiation. How he felt every day on this reservation.
The home he shared with his mother, sister, and her son was large and airy. It had been built for them by his nephew's father, on land held by his father. It was barely tribal, a sort of no-man's land unclaimed even by those that resided on it.
Arlee wasn't much of a town. Most people passed through without giving it much thought. He wished his soul had done just that. He was tired of the place and the life that came with it. Most of his time was spent on the property doing maintenance on the house, the barn, and the land. At one point he had found it fulfilling. Then came the fallout from the trial. Everything felt designed to fall apart since then.
Somewhere around the time they got high speed internet, Aiden found himself losing interest in his family. The long help dramatics were not only an annoyance, but something to be avoided at all costs. When his sister found herself pregnant at sixteen, he felt himself turning to his father's spirit for advice. A spirit that had abandoned them around the time she was born.
Magi was a difficult person loved by many. Her son, Denma, was parented by many young men who adored her, except for the father. It was an unkept secret that bound them: she had never slept with any of them. It was something she acted smugly toward anyone who knew. As her eldest brother, Aiden felt a quiet rage brimming around town about the matter, as if his life of protecting her was drawn to a conclusion of disrespect.
The relationship that Magi and their mother had was different in a deeply esoteric way that felt criminal to him. When Magi turned fifteen things accelerated rapidly, and then the baby came. He would never forget the discussions he had overheard, things that they threatened him at gunpoint to keep silence over. It was driving him away.
So when he saw on the news that story about the whales in France, he turned all of his loving attention to it. One day, when he had finally found himself completely exhausted by the tension, he began looking up flights. Then to his bank account, swollen with savings slowly being drained by the conniving women. Then back to looking at the flights again.
With the enthusiasm of one facing execution he began to pack. He had this black backpack he had only used one time, and dusted it off guiltily. He packed lightly, knowing the pain which would creep in whenever he tried to leave this place that would drag him down. He wanted to move fast, so he couldn't turn around or be held back.
A final look in the big windows of the cabin on his way out reflected a man who was rejecting defeat. He stood tall like his father: about six feet and another half. His hair was long and streaked with sunbleach. He wore mostly canvas and linen, with denim, and a heavy amount of intricate jewelry made by his own design. His eyes were permanently narrowed and his jaw drawn in geometry which spoke of resilience. He saw his nephew making a pig on one of the windows and felt this deep sadness intensify. Giving him a little wave, he turned quickly and climbed into his truck. The dust enveloped him as he sped to the nearby airport.
In the sky he felt shock and awe at how easy this had been. In all of his life he had only left there one summer, to entertain the pow wow circuit as a dancer and sell jewelry. As a heavy drinker he had found the environment unfriendly and never tried it again, instead turning to the internet during the pandemic and finding significant financial success which left him feeling emptier the greater it became.
Below him receded everything he had ever known, and as it did so he began to breathe more freely. He did not know what to expect in France, but found himself refusing to care. What he did know was that he had not seen the ocean outside of a screen and dreams, and in that great expanse of planet earth were creatures not unlike himself. He felt drawn to them all of his life and in fact had been planning the expedition towards it for some time.
There weren't just whales where he was headed, and ironically he wasn't going to see the ocean for the first time this way either. But he knew there were creatures that belonged there, and they were trapped in a place they could not survive. He knew exactly how that felt and spent many sleepless nights in obsessive panic about it. When he did sleep, his dreams were consumed by thoughts of what this must be like. It was like he was under the water with them, seeing what they saw, feeling what they felt. He couldn't take another second of it.
With a shaking hand he helped the attendant understand he would be needing a drink. It was a lifelong battle he had resigned himself to: a quantum level entanglement of nervous energy throughout his very blood that only felt soothed by strong liquor. The clink of the ice was like a symphony he needed to hear. He put on his headphones knowing it echoed and resumed his consummation of the death in June discography, covering his eyes and trying to allow himself to be open to possibility.
He tried to ready himself emotionally for the greeting that would await him. Some employees of a long distance friend who he owed a visit promised to usher him to a secluded retreat that the well known actor was retired within. It didn't excite him, and he didn't know what to expect. They had met on his own turf and knew one another as well as two men possibly could. In his heart was a little apprehension connected to a desire to always know exactly how to behave, something that had drawn the two together tightly over time. Aiden sighed, swallowed a pill, and impatiently waited for it to take effect. In a stretch that seemed practically immeasurable against the infinite with which he was familiar, he went back to his visions of what was happening at the park in France.