SWELL

by Corwin Ericson

  The Bombardier sisters were teasing me. It made me glad the Harbinger wasn’t a sperm.

  “The Council does not think he is becoming like a whale,” said Snorri, trying to keep things from getting silly. “They believe he has a nascent ability to understand them.”

  “Like singing?” I asked.

  “You’re not going to give him yoiking lessons,” said Angie, with a tone of menace. “Wait, why does your Whale Council even know who Orange is?”

  “They know him from the WhaleNet, of course. They helped me make his telephone. They’ve been monitoring the WhaleNet since its inception.”

  “Monitoring? How so?” said Angie, with a heaping measure of dread.

  “In all ways. You know we have been field testing the network for nearly a year now,” said Snorri. “Listening? Looking?”

  “Of course.”

  Mini, the older, financially-triumphant sister and CNN’s most popular proponent of privacy, blended tones of condescension and pity with Angie’s name with such practice it belied a lifetime of expert sororal agitation. “Oh, Angie. . . to whom?”

  Angie blanched then flushed. Her neck prickled with red hives that spread like the very opposite of frost on a window pane. “Nobody!” she said.

  I just knew they had to be talking about sexting. I’d had phones for close to a year and nobody had yet sexted me. It was like living next to an invisible mountain. Who had Angie sexted, why hadn’t she sexted me? Should I have sexted her first? Can one be sexted by one’s girlfriend? If not, I was all set, since she was not my girlfriend. I felt as if I had waited my entire life for the invention of sexting, and now it had passed me by. Who had Angie sexted, and why wasn’t it me? I tried to think of polite ways to elaborate on how I would like to be sexted. ‘Angie, I too would also like to be sent a photograph of you unclad. The opportunities you have afforded me to form memories over the last year have been cherished and embellished, but the days at sea are long and the nights on my couch are boring and often my memory and imagination lead me to much duller places than I deserve and a naked picture of you would serve as an objective correlative, a lighthouse to guide my visual imagination to a warm snug harbor.’ As usual, it was good that I did not speak what was on my mind. I tried to give Angie a non-leering, thoroughly supportive look, but it came out all wrong. There is probably no polite way to say you find someone’s embarrassment provocative.

  Snorri must have sensed some of this. Who knows what he’d photographed and forwarded. Maybe he was a sexting sensitive. Which is what I’d have much preferred over being a whale empath. He addressed himself to Mini and I, so Angie wouldn’t feel too self-conscious. “As I learned how the Whalenet was being established, technicians told me cellular architectures they had worked on before often picked up babbling and crying children. These engineers were typically childless men with no last names, so they did not realize they were listening to the broadcasts of baby monitors throughout the Northern Indies.”

  Mini snorted. This sort of eavesdropping was the kernel of so many of her presentations on privacy.

  “I suppose,” Snorri continued, “the infants could have been scandals or state secrets themselves, but they were highly unlikely to utter anything worth overhearing.”

  “So our joint-stock company got its start peeping on babies,” said Mini.

  “No, no, I just brought that up because it was the first time I had heard of baby monitors and it is a fitting analogy. The Whale Council is only watching over the WhaleNet the way parents monitor their newborns from another room.”

  “That’s creepy,” said Angie.

  “It is a very significant investment,” he said.

  “There’s how many of us?” asked Mini.

  I knew the screenful of icons well. “Seven people, one cat, and one hallucination.”

  “You are forgetting several dozen belugas at sea,” said Snorri. “That is the Council’s principal concern.”

  “They never call,” I said.

  “What some North American islanders have to say about each other is not important to them. They are not listening to your conversations. Or if they do, it is just to monitor quality assurance.”

  Angie uttered a groan that signaled embarrassment eroding into exasperation.

  Mini said, “Why do you use the WhaleNet phone so much; we knew from the start how insecure it was.”

  “It’s free. And I get access to just about everything. It’s kind of weird,” Angie said.

  “You do not use yours much, outside of calling me, do you?” Snorri asked Mini.

  “No, but it’s beautiful, Snorri, the legacy of so much craft and care. It’s a wonderful accessory.”

  Snorri didn’t seem to like her accessorizing with his cultural legacy, ‘the heirloom from the future, I think he had once called it. “It is not a handbag.”

  “Oh, but it holds so much,” said Mini. “So many memories, so much elegance and history. It is a badge of endearment. I look at this phone and can almost hear you whispering in my ear, and behind your voice, a chorus of your ancestors.”

  Snorri groomed an eyebrow. Angie and I looked at each other. Her sister sure could bullshit.

  “You, though,” Snorri said to me, “are a Chatty Cindy.”

  “That’s Cathy, and no I’m not.”

  “Who do you call?” asked Angie, with a little suspicion.

  “Almost nobody.”

  Snorri asked if he could see my phone, and I passed it to him. He opened it up and turned it on. His expression suggested my phone was in poor taste.

  “What?” I asked.

  “This is among the shoddiest plastic clamshells available!” He scoffed as he turned it over. “I am surprised it does not take double Ds.”

  “I think you mean D cells,” said Mini.

  Snorri asked, “May I?” and I nodded. He poked the green button and looked at the display screen. He frowned and waved his finger over the screen as if admonishing a tiny phone gremlin. Then he held the phone horizontally and frowned again. He squeezed the sides and the phone broke into a few pieces. “It is just the shit tab-and-slot plastic case. We can glue it.”

  “My numbers were in there, my icons too,” I said.

  “Snorri!” said Mini.

  “This phone is indefensible,” said Snorri. Sensing his harsh judgment of the phone had not been shared, Snorri tried reassembling it as if he were re-stacking a deck of cards. “See, it still works. Don’t worry, there are many better devices in store for you,” he told me.

  I was thinking of lobsters and what mutilations they could survive. The phone did seem to still work. I could see the lighted display screen and most of the workings were still connected by tiny colored wires. Maybe it could grow a new shell.

  Snorri was inspecting the screen. “You know that your cat Rover does not have her own telephone. This icon represents you.”

  I did know that, although I think I had forgotten it at some point. I had called her a number of times this winter and chided her for not answering.

  “I do not know what this is, however,” he said, tapping the ghost icon with the nail of his right little finger.

  “You just called it,” I said.

  “What, or who?”

  “I don’t know, I thought it might be you—like an avatar.” “That is a nice idea, but no,” he said.

  “Who is it?” asked Angie.

  I shrugged. “See if it answers. It doesn’t usually. Sometimes it calls me though.”

  “A glitch, maybe? It just looks like electronic fuzz.” said Mineola.

  “Sometimes it calls me at night when I can’t sleep,” I said. “What kind of ringtone does it have?” asked Snorri.

  “It doesn’t.”

  “How do you know when to answer?”

  “It usually happens when I’ve been holding it and looking at the screen for a while.” “Then it rings?” he said.

  “No, it’s more like after a while I notice I’ve been talking. . . well, no,
it’s more like we just spend time together.” Snorri looked alarmed.

  Angie looked concerned. “Tell me you’re reading a novel or something with it.”

  “Why would I need a phone to read?”

  “That’s not. . . do you talk to it?” said Snorri.

  “Not really. Usually I just watch the icon swirl around. I can sometimes hear whooshing and thumps and sometimes clicks and beeps. Once in a while there’s a drone that lasts hours. I thought maybe it was picking up satellites or spy ships.”

  “Why?” said Angie.

  “Maybe the whale antennae are receiving covert transmissions on the Atlantic; I could see how that would be possible,” said Mini.

  “No,” said Angie, “I mean, Orange, why do you look at a gray blur and listen to your phone drone and thump?”

  What disturbed me about this question is that I had never thought about it critically. Angie had a good point, though I was certainly never going to tell her that staring at a phone was among the least eccentric and most socially acceptable things I did when left alone too long in the winter. It was an odd thing to do—even watching infomercials all night was more reasonable. The smirch on the phone was soothing. I liked the whoosh, thump, and drone. I felt big and old and dark when I listened to it. Not that it was the only icon I watched. I also would not be telling Angie that I looked at hers quite a bit too. I had told myself that at times I could tell when she was looking at my icon too, but I didn’t believe myself. I looked at Waldena’s sometimes too. The first time it winked at me, I hid the phone under a sofa pillow. That ghostly smudge of electrons though, the one that looked like a thumbnail of a fetal sonogram, occasionally I felt like I’d been places with it. Where, I had no idea, but it was like transport without traveling. Sometimes the effect was more settling. It could make me feel like a goldfish in the best bowl ever: just the right polished quartz for gravel, a not overlarge plastic plant swaying in the bubbles, pleasant-tasting water at a perfect temperature. I felt as if I could sit in the bowl and watch a cat watch me all day long.

  “Orange! You’re doing it right now!” Angie said.

  She was right. I hadn’t even been aware I was looking at it. I had to take the image in my mind and iris it down to a tight beam and send it back into the phone. I did not literally do anything but blink stupidly, but that was the way I’d come up with to hang up the phone without giving myself the psychic equivalent of a slap to the face with a halibut, which is something I had genuinely experienced many times working with Donny on his dad’s boat.

  “Oof,” I said.

  “Oof?” repeated Angie, as if I’d just woofed.

  They were all looking at me; I looked out the window at the water beyond the treetops so that I wouldn’t look back at the phone.

  “Remarkable,” said Snorri. “I was watching the icon. I saw it

  too.”

  “Saw what?” asked Mini.

  “I do not know. Maybe some of what Orange saw. Orange, what did you see?”

  “Nothing, just the telephone. You’re making too big a deal of this.”

  “Tell me honestly,” he said, “What did you see? None of us heard anything. You did not hear anything did you? Can you tell me if you saw any sounds? Could you hear shapes in your mind’s ear?”

  I hadn’t found words yet for the images in my mind. It had never occurred to me to think on it, and when I did now, I could only come up with an invisible, indescribable cavern, a place I knew intuitively like a goldfish knew the boundary of the bowl without seeing it.

  Snorri was being too earnest for me to be sarcastic. I tried answering. “It’s like a somewhere, but not a place? But I could tell you how to get from here to there within it? Cloud-sized silent cushions pressing me with reassuring news?”

  Angie was massaging the bridge of her nose. Her sister was looking at my phone. Snorri was looking at me like I had a third eye. “Orange Whippey!” he said, startling all of us. “I should not have doubted the Whale Council. This is a shamanic trance you are describing. Powerful sampo,” he added, solemnly.

  “It’s a fucking staring spell,” said Angie.

  “So he’s a shaman now?” said Mini.

  “It is absurd, is it not?” said Snorri. “But see it from the Whale Council’s perspective.…”

  “Don’t you mean umwelt?” interrupted Angie, who was not taking the news of my ascension to spiritual leadership with wonderment and awe, but who did seem as if she were about to be bodily possessed by the great spirit of sarcasm.

  Since I’d known him, Snorri had typically been insouciant with detractors of his spiritual world view; he was in tune with the infinite and felt free to mock the natterings of naysayers. But the opportunity to spread his culture usually triumphed and he was often a tolerant, though expository man. “The Whale Council is almost entirely human,” he said, “their umwelt would be virtually the same as ours—their sensoriums only slightly altered by their cultural and.…”

  Angie put her hands over her face and groaned another interruption.

  “I think this is kind of interesting,” I said, feeling sensitive and maybe whalish.

  “Thank you,” he said. “You have fire in your scrotum and the aurora in your eyes. A direct quotation from the Whale Council.”

  Angie snorted into her palms.

  “You’re gonna give him airs,” warned Mini.

  “Well, none of this made me comfortable either,” said Snorri. “When the Council suggested Orange may be a shaman, a whale sensitive, I was shocked too. I was reminded though of the historic cultural role of the shaman. An outsider from within the community—a fool sometimes, othertimes a healer or an oracle. Occasionally, a real pest. Someone who can be an interlocutor between the animal world and the spiritual world.”

  “What about the human world?” asked Mini.

  “That is the animal world. We are animals too. Shamans in the Arctic and in the Northern Indian tradition as well usually have spirit guides in the form of animals. The animals tell or show or somehow imply how a community should behave.”

  “The whale tells me what to tell the islanders?”

  “In a sense.”

  I thought about it. I reached out to the whale. “The whale says, ‘Hey,’” I told Mini and Angie, “and it says, ‘Stop hunting us’ to you,” I told Snorri.

  “We do not hunt whales, we herd,” said Snorri.

  “The whale gets you and the Estonindians confused sometimes. The whale also says the shaman needs more beer.”

  “You will have to take the spiritual journey to the refrigerator yourself, Shaman,” said Mineola.

  Angie had been pushed too far. “I, the island of Bismuth, for that matter, do not need Orange any more abstruse or arrogant than he already is. This is like pouring diesel on a beach bonfire at three AM. The wrong way to enlightenment. Do you know the expression ‘blowing smoke up someone’s ass’?”

  “Is it about beach fire, or sex?” asked Snorri.

  Instead of answering, Angie glared at her sister.

  “How’m I supposed to talk to whales, anyway?” I asked.

  “You just showed us,” said Snorri.

  “I was making that up.”

  “No, I mean here,” he said, pointing to the pieces of my telephone.

  I still didn’t get it.

  “Orange, you have been in contact with the Harbinger Whale for close to a year now; you two chat on the phone almost daily.”

  “The phone?”

  “There! That icon you call the ghost; it’s the whale!”

  I talked to a ghost whale every day? I felt unfamiliar with myself. The Shaman really did need a beer, so I got up and got him one.

  “Why?” I asked Snorri when I returned. “Get me one too,” said Angie.

  “Why?” I asked when I returned again with her bottle.

  “We discussed this, the Council and I. There’s no simple answer of course. Maybe it’s your habitual use of seagum—you do not know what actually prod
uces seagum do you?”

  I said no.

  “Well maybe it is something that inculcates a whalish propinquity.”

  Angie tittered into her beer.

  “Or it is genetic. It could be your ‘staring spells’ as Angie calls them. One thing we are all certain about is that you sacrificed your WhaleNet phone to the Harbinger Whale.”

  “There was an exigency,” I said.

  “Whatever you feel your reason was, your offering was accepted. At first I thought what you had done was, frankly, idiotic. But you yourself convinced me quickly of the wisdom of the sacrifice. I had not grasped how the Council’s interest in establishing the WhaleNet was so congruent with the mythology of the Harbinger Whale. I do not even know if they intended to look for it. I suspect, given the Whale Council’s millennia-old history, they put many plans into operation long before the modern era, and, like their predecessors, the current councilors concocted a scheme to profit from whaling while attending to their own long-term plans. In this case, I think, even if the WhaleNet were a failed business venture, they would still have informants swimming the North Atlantic who could help them investigate the mythologies that the sagas and histories simply do not explain.”

  “They didn’t know about the Harbinger Whale?” I asked.

  “They suspected it. Our myths and legends had been proven historically accurate so often in the twentieth century that it has become worthwhile to sort out what might be metaphorical and what might be actual. Everything from the sasquatch to the Hyperboreans is being reconsidered. So the Harbinger might really be carrying news from the past about our future. Or perhaps the study of the whale will help the Whale Council re-learn how to navigate and exploit the Arctic after it melts.

  “Human sources and historical documents are all the modern scholars have relied on. But in the past we were much more involved with other animals as collaborators. The Council’s interest in the Harbinger signals a return to the older traditions of working more closely with our fellow creatures to prepare for our return to the Arctic.”

  “Let’s say for a moment,” said Mini, “that it is somehow possible to talk with a whale; why would it tell you anything—you’re their worst predators.”