Chapter Forty-Four. Jonah Pornographically Regarded
CHAPTER
FORTY-FOUR
Jonah Pornographically Regarded
“Why,” asked Locke after we lost the Leviathan, “are you in my office?”
I had a bunch of reasons, if I was honest. But mostly it was because I was kind of freaking out. “That,” I told them, “was fucked.”
“Have you forgotten that this ship has a hierarchy?”
“Have you forgotten that you’re meant to be the one who isn’t insane? Even Flint cut loose before you did.”
Locke always looked prim. This time they looked positively haughty. “That’s rather loaded language. We had a prize, we pursued it.”
“You nearly sank the whole fucking boat.”
“You’ve been on this ship nearly two years. Have you not yet realized that the risk of death is part of the job? Which, incidentally, is why so many on board are still rather annoyed that your friend chose one man’s life over all our income.”
I stared at them. That was the problem with sexualizing people in your head as a defense mechanism: it made them really hard to argue with. “That’s not an answer.”
They half smiled. Locke rarely smiled and I was, sadly, a sucker for rare smiles.
Q smiled all the time, which I probably took too much for granted.
The captain smiled not at all, and that made me treat glares and harsh words as passion.
“I think you’ll find it is,” they replied.
“I’m sorry I don’t have a dream to sell you.
I’m sure that you’d prefer I was driven by some raging tempest in my soul, but I’m not.
This is my job. I’m good at it, but it’s not my calling. ”
The word calling echoed through me like an insult. Which it had no right to, because I was a green hand in the hunter-fleet. Except I had been called. The voice inside me had screamed at the stars until it felt like my skin would split. “And that’s…” I was almost hesitant. “That’s enough for you?”
“I have family on Europa. They live in the Olympian Enclave, far from Cthonius Linea. They sleep in warm beds and eat hydroponic rice most days. My mother makes kimchi when we can get the spices, which is less often than I’d like but more often than most families.”
Unlike the captain’s cabin, Locke’s office had no windows. Deep inside the ship, far from the rush of the wind on the hull or the endless Jovian skyscape, there was something that felt strangely right about that small ambition. And I found myself saying, “No children of your own?”
And there again was that half a smile, that twitch of an eyebrow. “Is that your way of asking if I’m married?” they asked. “And is that, in turn, your way of asking if I’m in the market for an illicit shipboard hookup?”
“I’d also be okay with a licit shipboard hookup.”
Locke pursed their frustratingly perfect lips. “I don’t fraternize with hands before the array.”
“Are you sure? You’re missing out.”
“Think a lot of yourself, don’t you—” And here they said my name, or the one I was using then, at least. And it felt weird.
Like the more complicated kind of intimacy.
The kind I wasn’t looking for because it brought me back instead of taking me away, when away was where I’d wanted to be so badly for so long.
And I couldn’t hack that. So I said, “It’s your loss.” And then I ran.
Not literally ran. I had some pride, for all I’d been taught it was a sin.
But I made my way back to my bunk. And there, I lay down and sorted myself out.
Honestly, I have a bit of a history of fucked-up sexual fantasies and by my standards an uptight corporate watchdog with a strong sense of hierarchy was pretty vanilla.
For example, I’ve always had a thing for Jonah.
Not Jonah himself, obviously. There were pictures of the guy in some of the versions of the catechism I studied as a child and they never bothered to make him look hot. But the story. Something about the story really worked for me in a way that I didn’t really understand at the time.
In case any of the Faithful of the Catechism do read this (and it’s possible, it’s not like we were never allowed books, and some parents were more careful than others), I should say I’m not …
I’m not literally suggesting that Jonah was fucking the whale.
The great apologists teach us that much of the catechism is figurative.
So I guess in a way I’m saying that Jonah was metaphorically fucking the whale.
Not even that, really. Even after all these years I don’t quite have the appetite for blasphemy. But my first sense of what sex and love and passion are and should be—for whatever reason, by whatever twisted path—wound up getting tangled up in my head with the devouring maw of the beast.
This is still sounding fucked up, isn’t it?
Again, it’s not that I wanted anybody to literally eat me.
But that whole sequence of experiences. The fear and the flight and the storm and the sudden crash into cold water and then being so utterly and completely consumed.
Then to be held safe but penitent until at last I’m spat out onto warm sand and I see the Father.
Some part of me, for as long as I can remember, has always wanted that.
Looked for it in women who hold knives to my throat, or who fuck me against windows over endless, cavernous pits into oblivion.
I’ve looked for it kneeling and bowing my head in a parody of prayer.
I’ve lived my life searching for that moment when I come out the other side, disgorged onto the shores of Nineveh and it all makes sense, and it never has.
So again and again I’ve launched myself back into the jaws of the beast, in one way or another.
There is, I will admit, a very slim chance that I have issues.