It occurred to him that he might have underestimated the effect this animal could have on the entire zoo.
He decided to walk through the zoo grounds, joining a tidal wave of visitors who were skipping all the other exhibits in favor of Friday’s pool. Halfway there he caught up with a young couple with two tow-headed boys wearing SHAMU sweatshirts and tugging at their hands to make them go faster. “They’re both just crazy about killer whales,” the woman told Truman ruefully. “We’ve already taken them to SeaWorld twice, and he’s only eight.” She indicated the older boy. “When I told them we were going to get to see a killer whale right here at home, I thought they’d pop they were so excited.”
“Are you from Bladenham?”
“Well, Tacoma, which is a heck of a lot closer than San Diego. We promised the boys we’d buy a zoo membership so they can come as often as they want. I home school them, and I’d already planned a unit on marine mammals, so this is just perfect. You’re not planning on getting any more, by any chance?”
“No,” said Truman. “I think we’ll have our hands full just with Friday.”
The boys, who’d never stopped tugging on her hands, said in unison, “Mom, come on!” As soon as they got near the doors to the viewing gallery they sprinted ahead, calling over their shoulders, “Hurry up! Come on, come on, we’re going to miss him,” as though the animal could come and go from the pool at will.
Truman slipped into the gallery behind them, staying on an elevated walkway at the back so he could see the visitors as well as the whale. A frisson of anticipation pulsed through the gallery like an electrical charge. When at last Friday made a single sluggish pass-by, a deafening cheer rang out.
WHEN MARTIN CHOI finally got inside the viewing gallery after waiting in line for twenty freaking minutes—he could have invoked journalistic privilege, but he decided to maintain his anonymity to preserve the integrity of his story—he arrived to find four empty windows. Water, water, water; no whale. He asked a woman standing next to him what the hell. “If you look up there,” she told him, pointing, “you can just barely see his tail flukes.”
She was right—he could see them hanging down in the water. Once he’d pressed his way through the crowd to stand directly in front of the window and look up, he could see not only the flukes but the whale’s whole undercarriage.
“Hey, is he dead?” someone called from the crowd. “Because I don’t see him breathing or nothing. I heard he might die.”
A murmur of concern rippled through the two hundred or so people in the gallery.
“Nah, he’s been like that for an hour,” someone else said. “If you watch for a while, you’ll see him take a breath. Then he just lays there. He could be dying, but they’re not going to tell you that. You’ll just read it in the paper one day.”
A child started wailing, “Don’t let him die, Mommy, don’t let him die!”
The cry was instantly taken up by other children throughout the gallery. Martin turned to face the crowd, both arms raised as though to invoke a benediction, and said, “Don’t worry—I’m a reporter. I’ll get to the bottom of this and run it in Monday’s News-Tribune.” Given that today was only Friday he knew how lame that sounded, but what else could he do?
“So is he dead?” a woman at the back of the gallery demanded. “Or what?”
“He’s not dead,” said a quiet voice at Martin Choi’s elbow. “He’s not even dying. He’s just tired. It was a long trip from Colombia to here.”
Martin looked down upon a pink-nosed, frowsy-haired little woman standing beside him. He was lucky he’d even heard her. Feeling his whale-death exposé slipping away, he said, “How do you know?”
“I just do.”
“How?”
The woman sighed. “He told me.”
“He told you? Who told you, the whale?”
“The whale, Friday. Yes.”
“No shit. You talk to whales?”
“Not all whales, no, just the ones who approach me. I don’t talk to them, exactly. I communicate with them.”
Martin could feel his heart rate increase and his palms get damp. Here, just like that, might be the story of a lifetime, his ticket out. “I thought his name was Viernes.”
“Viernes means Friday in Spanish,” said the woman.
“Oh, yeah? How come they named him that?”
“I assume he was captured on a Friday.”
“And you know that how?”
“I don’t. It’s a guess.”
Suddenly the flukes above them kicked, the whale heaved into motion, and the gallery erupted.
“Someone’s feeding him,” said the woman beside him.
“You can see that?” Martin said, peering up into the water. All he could see was the killer whale’s belly on the far side of the pool. “How can you see that?”
“I can’t.”
But sure enough a few minutes later a couple of fish drifted down. When Friday swam after them and picked them off, the gallery collectively lost its mind. Martin grabbed his camera and took shot after shot through the window.
“So listen—how about I interview you?” he said when Friday had once more disappeared from view. “Since you have, you know, an inside track.”
He watched the woman dig an old Starbucks napkin out of her purse and blow her nose, fold the napkin carefully, and return it to her purse.
“So, like, what else is going on with him?” Martin asked.
“I don’t know. He’s not actually communicating with me right now—I only know what I can sense.”
“Yeah?”
“Mostly, he’s tired.”
“Yeah, I get that.”
“There are actually some similarities between what’s been happening to him in the last few days and what would happen if he were still in the wild.”
“Why would he be in the wild?”
“He was born there.”
“Huh.”
“So either way, he’d probably have been headed north.”
“Why?”
“There are annual herring runs up north.”
“Yeah?”
The psychic waited a beat. “They eat herring.”
“Oh. Sure, yeah, I get that. So what does he think about being here?”
The woman sighed. “As I said, he isn’t communicating with me right now. But he’s obviously in a much better situation now than he was at that terrible place. Of course, he is still in captivity.”
“Yeah?”
“He used to live in the wild. Now he’s an attraction.” She gestured around the gallery at the cheering people, many of whom were knocking on the thick acrylic windows to try to entice him back.
“He told you this?”
“No. He hasn’t asked me to say anything on his behalf.”
“He asks you to speak? Jeez, what a story!” He scribbled frantically in his reporter’s spiral notebook, more to keep his excitement under control than for the notes themselves. You didn’t need them anymore; everything was on his digital recorder, there for the replaying. Sometimes he interviewed people and didn’t write down a single thing. “So what other stuff do you think he’ll want you to say?”
The psychic shook her head wearily. “There’s no way of knowing that until he communicates with me again. But I imagine he wants to go home. It’s what they all want.”
“Yeah? Who?”
“The captive killer whales who were born in the wild.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding.”
He’d finished writing and was staring into the empty water of the pool when she said, “I’m going to leave now. Is there anything else you want to ask me?”
His first thought was, if she was really a psychic, shouldn’t she know that without having to ask? But it was just as well if she couldn’t read his mind, because he was thinking he’d better get her photo before she started to look any worse. He’d hate to see what was at the bottom of that gene pool. Instead, he said, “I’m j
ust processing what you’re telling me. It’s, you know, sad.”
The psychic nodded silently.
“So what’s your name?”
“Libertine. Libertine Adagio.”
“Your parents must have been patriots, huh? Liberty and all that. Okay, so hey, thanks for this. No kidding. You planning on talking to anyone else?”
She shook her head. “No—at least not for now.”
Far out—he’d gotten the scoop! “Don’t talk to anyone else if they contact you, okay? We’ll treat this as an exclusive. I’ll have the story filed in time to run in Monday’s paper.” Silently he railed again at the fact that the pissant News-Tribune only came out twice a week, and the publisher was considering dropping that to once a week if ad revenues continued to decline. Since the HuffPost was strictly online, it was always coming out—something newsworthy came along, you filed the story, and bam!, the thing went live online immediately, with your byline out there for the whole world to see. God, but he couldn’t wait for that day. He would definitely put this story on the Associated Press’s news feed, too, because he was absolutely sure it would be picked up.
The minute the psychic was out the door Martin hotfooted it to the back of the newsroom and told his editor, O’Reilly, that he had a story as big as the one he broke when the zoo was fighting over its elephant—maybe bigger. O’Reilly was a tool, but he also must have smelled journalistic gold because he gave Martin the go-ahead to work from home, where there would be no distractions. He beat feet to his car, an old Honda Civic he’d be able to replace once he was earning a living wage at the HuffPost.
At home, he cracked open a beer—he thought more clearly with a beer or two under his belt, which he loved about himself—and tore into the story.
DESPITE TRUMAN’S JITTERS, the ribbon-cutting ceremony went off without a hitch at midday, and in record time—Dink delivered a three-minute set of comments that Truman scripted for him, the mayor gave two minutes of observations about the zoo’s importance to the community, and a round of applause rang out. Despite his father’s urging, he hadn’t included Martin Choi in the program. Dink snipped the ribbon in two with a pair of hastily found garden shears loaned by the buildings and grounds crew, and the zoo visitors surged back into the briefly closed gallery.
At the windows Friday showed for the first time his alleged fascination with babies, a fact they’d all been told about but doubted. Now, however, Truman saw him select a little girl in her mother’s arms at the front of the crowd, hover in the water right in front of her, and watch her for a long time without going up for a breath of air. The child looked back at him, smiled, offered her bottle. The whale nodded and stayed on and on in the window, watching the bottle, watching the baby, going with them as her parents finally walked away with a regretful last look to a place where the killer whale couldn’t follow.
The atmosphere in the gallery was what Truman imagined it would be at Lourdes. Though they were packed in shoulder to shoulder, people talked in hushed tones; many cheeks were wet with tears. Cameras were ubiquitous. And Friday delivered. Still dingy with the last of the zinc oxide ointment, and trailing peeling skin like mourning ribbons, he gave his visitors his fullest attention. Once the baby was gone, people set their toddlers on the deep windowsills in front of them and watched excitedly as the killer whale homed in on one after another, bringing his eye to the window inches away to look them over. For Truman there was something slightly unnerving about the intensity of both the whale’s interest and the crowd’s. It was as though they were beholding a superhero or saint.
He left the gallery for the back area and office. Gabriel was at the computer when Truman came in. From the office’s underwater window he could still see Friday across the pool, at the gallery windows.
“It’s amazing,” Truman told Gabriel. “Are all killer whales treated with this kind of, I don’t know, reverence?”
“Yep. Blows your mind, doesn’t it?”
Truman admitted it did. “But why?” he asked. “What’s the draw?”
“They’re black and white,” Gabriel said, consulting a handwritten slip of paper and continuing to type.
“What do you mean?”
Gabriel swiveled around to face Truman. “People just go nuts over black-and-white animals. Pandas, penguins, zebras, white tigers, snow leopards, killer whales. No one knows why.”
“Really?” To Truman the statement was at once outrageous and plausible.
“Absolutely. Don’t take my word for it—ask any zookeeper and they’ll tell you the same thing.”
In bed that night, Truman floated Gabriel’s theory past Neva. “Well, sure!” she said. “I thought everyone knew that.”
FIRST THING MONDAY morning, Truman picked up a copy of the News-Tribune and spread it on his desktop. The headline was: KILLER WHALE WANTS TO GO HOME. The sole source quoted was one Libertine Adagio, animal psychic—the woman he’d met two days ago sitting by the side of the road. There couldn’t possibly be two women with that name.
After reading it, which took a surprising amount of fortitude, he paced in his office, trying to decide what to do. He’d always known trouble would find them—god knows Neva had hammered that home—but he hadn’t imagined it would be so soon, or come from so close by. But in Truman’s mind it was counterbalanced against Friday’s rapt attention to the visitors who now packed his gallery. Truman was already overhearing visitors describing his antics: Friday, drifting by the gallery windows upside down and with his eyes closed; Friday, opening his mouth wide and waggling his tongue at the crowd; Friday, nodding his head as though accepting obeisance. It didn’t take an animal behaviorist to see that this animal didn’t just enjoy human interaction, he thrived on it.
And now some animal psychic was declaring that this very same animal was yearning to be released back to the wild.
Truman was undecided about an appropriate response to the article when he heard a smart knock on his door frame and then saw Ivy swirling into his office in her customary Egyptian abaya and Nikes, with Julio Iglesias in tow on a purple leash studded with dog-bone-shaped rivets. She threw herself into one of Truman’s visitors’ chairs, plunked Julio Iglesias into the other, and crowed, “So I gather our boy’s a huge hit! There’s a line past the parking lot. How are the numbers?”
“Excellent,” Truman said glumly.
“And this is a problem why?”
“It’s not a problem. Our favorite reporter, Martin Choi, is the problem.”
“The idiot at the local paper?”
“The very same,” said Truman. “He’s dug up some animal psychic who’s claiming that Friday wants to go home.”
“To Bogotá?”
“To the North Atlantic.”
“Why on earth would he want to go there?”
“I’m really not sure—the story wasn’t very clear.”
“Honey, he’s an idiot,” said Ivy.
“I know he’s an idiot,” Truman agreed.
“You said he was quoting an animal psychic?” Ivy asked thoughtfully.
“Evidently.”
“I met one the day after Friday got here,” said Ivy. “Well, a communicator. She doesn’t like to be called a psychic.”
“Here? In Bladenham?”
Ivy nodded. “Her name’s Libertine Adagio, and I had dinner with her at the Oat Maiden. She was eating alone, I was eating alone, so I invited myself to her table.”
“And was she raving?”
“Not at all. She was actually quite articulate. And genuine.”
“About channeling for animals?”
“I know,” Ivy said. “It sounded far-fetched to me, too, but she was very earnest.”
“Does she think she’s channeling for Friday?”
“She must,” Ivy said.
“Well, she’s given Martin Choi the worst kind of story we could have out there. ‘Zoo as prison,’ that kind of thing.”
“Need I remind you who wrote the article? It’s entirely possible
that there’s not a single accurate word in that entire story. Honestly, she seemed like a very gentle soul. Maybe I’ll see if she can come in and talk to you.”
Truman looked at her with alarm. “Are you planning to see her again?”
“Absolutely,” Ivy said. “As soon as I can track her down. I liked her. I want to introduce her to Johnson Johnson.”
Truman was appalled. “Why on earth would you do that?”
“To see if she can rent his apartment, of course. She’s very poor, anyone can see that, and she apparently feels obligated to stick around for a while, so she’ll need a place to stay.”
“Encouraging her isn’t in the zoo’s best interests,” Truman protested. “You know that.”
“Oh, hush. I didn’t say I agreed with her, just that I see no point in shunning her. And it wouldn’t do you any harm to meet her. In the belly of the beast and all that. If you’re your father’s son, you won’t banish her, you’ll find a way to put her to good use.”
BY LATE AFTERNOON Friday was napping with his head in a corner of the pool, and Gabriel and Neva, wearing bathing suits, were sprawled on the teak benches in the shower downstairs, beneath dual, steaming showerheads. Gabriel had finished two-and-a-half hours of cleaning on the bottom of the pool; Neva had been in and out of the water three times in an ongoing courtship. During her final attempt, Friday had let her swim up to him and take hold of his dorsal fin, which she’d assumed would feel pliable but instead found to be fixed and rigid, the curl as tight as a fist.
“I don’t think heat has ever felt so good,” she said now. “And I mean ever.”
“One of God’s little mercies. I’ve seen grown men weep under here, it’s felt so good.”
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