20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY january 4-10, 2024 www.montereycountyweekly.com The novel is written in two parts, each containing several short chapters. Some chapters are titled with dates (e.g. 2013), others with a PSI numbers, reflecting the measurement of dive tank pressure (pounds per square inch). The entries below are excerpted from early in the novel. –Agata Popeda 3000 PSI Fog blankets the bays in the morning, exhaled from green mountains. Burns off by noon most days, but Jay learned as a kid not to be fooled by a silver sky. It’ll roast you. He withstands its glare in a standstill swelter, breath caught like it is anytime he sees the licking gray froth, the buck and boil, the guttural suck and spilling stew of Monastery Beach. Divers called it “Mortuary Beach” for a reason. Must have dived these waters a dozen times with Mitt. Never alone. Mitt made him promise to never solo it until he was fully grown. Is he fully grown now? Few would say so. Mitt’s diving acolytes sure wouldn’t. Six days ago, walking down Fremont, a dive bro—obvious from his neoprene stink and huge watch—spat on Jay’s shoe. Prick, the dive bro muttered, thinking he knew everything about Mitt, the great diver, and Jay, the spiteful son. Maybe the dive bro knew enough. Jay can’t go on like this. He’s got twelve more months before college, whatever college might look like. Twelve more months to be spat on. A humble crescent of sand is all Monastery Beach is, stretching between Carmel-by-the-Sea and Point Lobos State Natural Reserve. A twenty-minute stroll for tourists who happen to be en route to San Francisco, a percentage of whom will stand with their backs to the water for photos, get swatted by a sleeper wave, and be dragged under by the backwash. It was fit for experienced divers only, and even they had to respect the hidden trough just inside the surf line that, if they didn’t choose their entry right, might roll them over and over, a morsel softened for swallowing. The true wonder, maybe the true horror, comes later, twelve nautical miles into the blue: Monterey Canyon, a ninety-mile-long, mile-deep abyss the size of the Grand Canyon, a frigid black haven for the world’s strangest beings. A spindly stem called Carmel Canyon points at Monastery Beach like the Grim Reaper’s finger. What is it trying to say? Jay thinks of AP English, Dante’s Inferno, the inscription over the gates of hell: Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here. Jay’s murmur is as soft as surf. “Oughta just add it to the signs.” PM 3000 PSI There’s a set of wooden stairs, but the ocean air has chewed them up. The steps, about fifteen, are helixed, wrung like a towel. Jay starts down, and the first step punches a bolt of pain from his heel to his pelvis. Under this much gear, an eight-inch drop feels like eight feet. He tightens his lower back and keeps going. These steps tilt west. Those steps tilt east. The final step is warped at a seesaw angle. Jay slides down it, off the lower edge. His feet plant ankle-deep in the beach’s distinctive round granules of sand. Jay takes five steps, the fifth over a seven-foot carcass of kelp that looks like a decomposing dolphin. Now he can see past the point of the rental property, a macabre fence holding back the exposed roots of a giant tree. Way over on the south end of the beach, a commotion. Two large banks of lights, a tonnage of chugging generators. A bulldozer crawls over the western berm, shovel-mouthed like some Monterey Canyon monster. Thirty or forty people, too, the drivers of all those cars. “Shit.” Jay ducks behind the half-uprooted tree. Eyelines blocked. The weight of his tank pitches him at the fence. He barely stays upright. He’s panting. The wetsuit’s thick, but his heart pounds through it. If the Dirty CGs spot him, they’ll prevent him from diving. He can’t let that happen. His family, the respect of the community, it all rides on this, showing what he can do—what he can do without Mitt Gardiner. Jay focuses on the tide. It skims into the cove in long, curling cones that atomize under their own weight, strike down, scurry like albino snakes, and gasp in pleasure as they are sucked back into the sea between jagged black rocks. This rubble is one reason divers never drop from this pocket of Monastery. One bad foothold and you’re down. But the boulders only extend some twenty feet. Jay shouts self-help that no one but he can hear through the ocean booms. “Get through it fast. If you fall, fall forward. Then kick hard. Get through the danger zone before the next set of waves.” The orders sound like Mitt, so Jay does what Mitt never did and adds some optimism. “You got this, Jay! Sixty seconds and you’re through! Like riding a bike!” He’ll be visible for a few seconds before a rocky pile conceals him. He bends his knees. Regrips his fins. Blows five quick exhales to pump himself up. Holds his mask in his left hand. With his right, he tugs a final time on the mesh bag. The suicide clip chimes. No matter how rough this entry, Jay can’t lose the bag. How else is he going to carry his father’s remains? Excerpted from Whalefall, published in 2023 by Simon & Schuster. Available at local bookstores including RiverHouse Books in Carmel and BookWorks in Pacific Grove. Whalefall: An Excerpt By Daniel Krauss The cover of Whalefall, a 2023 novel by Daniel Kraus that mixes science, adventure, fantasy and thriller. It is set off North Monastery Beach in Carmel.
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