The show opens with the sea lions. Their flatiron-sized flippers collide wetly, broken barks rebounding off the domed cupola. Trainers steer them through a standard routine: balancing striped balls on their noses and catching bright red rings around their necks until the act segues into a Keystone Kops–style chase, animals loping across the stage with trainers in fist-shaking pursuit. The action is punctuated by boinks, tah-dahs, and wah-wah-waaas supplied by the audio booth technician.
I sit cooling my feet in the pools. Sweat rolls down my neck, wicked by the collar of my wetsuit. Off to my left, a young girl in a wheelchair sits beneath the handicapped pavilion’s wind-whipped awning. She looks maybe twelve, though could fall five years on either side: her disease makes parts of the body look worn, while others remain strangely undeveloped. The girl’s father sits beside her, rubbing her arm. I glance down, depressed in an unfocused sort of way, and catch Niska rising through the water.
The orca’s head crests the surface, sleek as a ballistic missile. Sun limns the contours of her black snout, thin golden traceries like the veins on a leaf. Her mouth yawns open, revealing teeth blunted with age and disuse. I reach down and slap her tongue—wet and bristled, like a piglet’s hide—and feed her mackerel from a stainless steel bucket. She submerges for a moment before resurfacing, a gurgle issuing from her blowhole.
“Go on, you big hog,” I say. “No more ’til showtime.”
When the sea lions are finished, Kona’s brought out from the opposite wait pool. He performs a few lackluster highbows then swims a lap around the pool, lashing his atrophied tail to the beat of “Feelin’ Hot Hot Hot,” by Buster Poindexter and the Banshees. Niska butts her snout against the metal gate separating the pools. She has a habit of rousing Kona’s ardor, which, during shows, leads to a lot of “Mommy, what’s that?” questions as Kona’s thick, pink, six-foot-long cock spools out of its sheath like a bizarre Hindu rope trick.
When Kona’s safely penned I crank a winch and raise the gate, ushering Niska into the show pool. I dive in after her. The cool water tastes of brine and chlorine. I blink the sting out of my eyes as Niska circles, body a rippled distortion beneath the waves. I feel the displacement of water as she rises, smooth and powerful, pushing me back. She surfaces in front of me, maw open. Breath like a fishmonger’s floor, rags of mackerel hanging between her teeth. I catch my reflection—curly blond hair, dimpled chin, stubbled cheeks—in the black convex of one of her golfball-sized eyes.
I slap her tongue. “Let’s do this thing, girl.”
The Rocket Ride is the triple lindy of marine mammal behaviors. Anchoring your feet on Niska’s snout, she takes you down into the water. Nearing the pool’s bottom you arch your spine and surge towards the surface. Then, with a thrust of her tail, Niska launches you from the water. That you hit twenty feet is a given—Niska’s feeling frisky, thirty’s a definite possibility. At the height of your ascent perform a snap-pike before slicing down into the water. It’s a shot of pure adrenaline: like being strapped to the nosecone of a Stinger missile.
Twenty feet underwater and the outside world disappears. Gone the crowd, the music, the birds and sun and sky. The water bitingly cold and pressure beating against my eardrums, hamstrings screaming as Niska propels me downwards. The pool basin rushes at me: flaking blue paint, thin serrate cracks, the shiny disc of a quarter some tourist must’ve prompted his kid to toss into the pool—make a wish. Brace my neck and arch my back and then I’m hurtling up through the water at phenomenal speed, lungs burning, a pearlescent helix of air bubbles corkscrewing up to the surface.
Niska’s mouth opens. My left leg slips inside. Thigh raked down a row of teeth, shredding the wetsuit. Rocketing upward, faster now. My crotch smashes the crook of her mouth and something goes snap. Jam a hand into Niska’s mouth and pry with everything I’ve got, her jaws a jammed elevator I’m trying to open. Whale gagging on the foot lodged deep in her throat, huge muscles constricting and relaxing. Bubbles swirling and ears roaring, mind panicked and lungs starved for oxygen, a bright flame of terror dancing behind my eyes and yet there remains this great liquid silence, all things distant and muted in this veil of salt water. A disconnected image races through my head: that famous black-and-white snapshot of a Buddhist monk sitting serenely in lotus position as flames consume him.
Immense pressure shatters my tibia below the hip. A wave of pain roars up my spine and through my neck, nearly tears my skull off. Open my mouth to scream and water rushes in, electric ozone taste choking my sinuses and then I’m breaking the pool’s surface, hurtling up into the warm summer air, arms stretched towards the cloudless sky, gulls screeching, the syncopated beat of salsa music and the handicapped girl sitting beside her wide-eyed father, smiling an odd inscrutable smile.
I hit the water again and then I’m paddling like a dog, kicking but not really going anywhere. I’m not afraid—have never felt calmer in my life, in fact—but my body doesn’t want to obey. It’s so silly, almost funny. Why is everyone yelling? The water’s red and the other trainers scream my name—Oh god over here, Ben, over HERE!—and I try to swim in their direction if only to shut them up but I can’t, my body’s all fucked so I end up paddling over to the wall. I try to get a grip on the wet concrete but my hands are sliced up, bloody, pinkie finger snapped at the knuckle and hanging like a half-opened penknife. Niska bumps my side, a gentle nudge and the screams intensify, earsplitting decibels and I’m thinking, Christ, will you people please shut up? Prismatic bars of color streak my vision as I stare into the stands, where the girl who’d been eyeing me slumps with her face buried in the chest of the fruit-hatted woman. I remember the blue of her eyes—as though cut from the sky—and wish she’d turn them on me once more.
A cute but clingy trainer I’d pointedly ignored since fucking her late last summer tosses me a life preserver. Hook an arm through the blue plastic doughnut, towed to the pool’s edge like a bead on a thread. Hands dig into my armpits and drag me onstage. All the color’s washed out of things, the radiant reds, blues, greens, and pinks of the stage blended into neutral grays and then I see what’s left of my leg, a shredded mess, adipose tissues encased in a yellow layer of fat, splintered bone shining in the crisp sunlight.
Niska swims slowly past. My leg hangs from her jaws, loosely flexed at the knee. Flashbulbs pop in the stands and I think, That’s not what they came to see, but then maybe it is. My wetsuit’s torn to the breastbone, peeled back in flaps to reveal tanned flesh, gym-sculpted abs, clean-shaven groin, my painfully erect cock. Brachial veins running like river systems under the elastic flesh, its size—6 3⁄4 inches: I’d measured, digging the ruler into my crotch for an added quarter-inch— grossly amplified, monstrous and hemorrhaging blood.
The cute trainer’s lips move but no sound comes out. “I’m okay,” I tell her, and smile. “It’s o-o-kay, I’m … fine.” She’s crying, she’s shaking her head. Overhead, a big pale sun burns without heat. I wish everyone would go away and leave me alone, wish I were somewhere dark and quiet and cool. My gaze drawn to a gap between the topmost seats and the amphitheater roof: calm ongoing sky reaching off to the horizon, remotely beautiful, all things in alignment.
Jesus, do something, do something…Paramedics, move, move …
The leg, where’s the fucking leg …
Quit pumping the plasma expander, his blood’s thin as Kool-Aid …
These voices, even in the haze.
FIVE MONTHS LATER I’m in a VW Beetle driving down the QEW. Snow piled along the highway-side and Lake Ontario a frozen white stretch off to the north. I can just make out the slender spike of the CN Tower rising beyond the Toronto harbor. Over the guardrails and down the snow-covered shoreline, two muffled figures sit round a hole drilled through the ice.
I sit in the passenger seat, cheek pressed to the window glass. My right leg rests against the padded doorframe. My left leg is mostly gone: a rude stump two inches below my crotch. The surgeons did a fine job, considering: high-gauge stitches
left a ring of baby-pink dimples, a balloon knot of puckered flesh at the stub. I nearly died, or so I’m told. The sacral, varicose, basilic, and femoral arteries merge in the upper thigh, pumping a pint of blood a minute. I lost over a gallon before the medics transfused me. From Niagara Falls, I was airlifted to the Hotel Dieu in St. Catharines, where a team of surgeons operated for two hours. Battleground surgery: a hundred years ago, some meatball medic would’ve jammed a rum-soaked leather thong between my teeth and slathered the stump with boiling tar. Thanks to today’s wonder drugs, I don’t recall a damn thing.
I awoke two days later. The hospital room’s every ledge festooned with flowers in frosted glass vases, plush white teddy bears, balloon bouquets bump-bumping in the AC flow. Condolences: family and friends and co-workers, old high-school acquaintances, ex-girlfriends softened by my pathetic state, a War Amps rep, the morbidly curious. A summer intern conducted a brief interview for the Standard.
“Tell me what happened, in your own words.”
“In my own words? A whale bit my leg off.”
“I see.” Scribbles on a notepad. “Did you see this coming?”
“What?”
“Was there, well, any … hostility … between the two of you?”
“Yes. I was envious of the whale’s career.”
“Is that so?”
“Insanely jealous, yes.”
“Will you be suing?”
“Who—the whale?”
“Is that possible?”
“Get out of here.”
Animal rights protesters held a rally on the hospital’s front lawn. They toted placards bearing slogans: FREE NISKA and CAPTIVITY + MISTREATMENT = MURDER. They had a boombox playing “Freedom Calling” and a huge inflatable whale with shackles over its pectoral fins. My father got into a fistfight with the ringleader, a dreadlocked grad student from the local university. They rolled across the grass throwing punches until a groundskeeper broke them apart. Dad got in one good shot: it landed with the sound of a hatchet halving a cantaloupe, splattering the protester’s nose.
The car is my mother’s. Slender and composed in jeans and a heavy sweater, silvery hair cut short in bob style, she sits ramrod straight with both hands on the wheel. Radio tuned to Light 98.1, Kenny G blowing a soulful sax. I reach over to change the station. She slaps my hand.
“My car, my music.”
“Oh, god,” I say. “Gonna slip into a coma, here.”
“You’ll survive.”
My mother is a palliative care nurse. She passes each shift in a ward strung with shattered, hopeless, bedridden bodies, victims of voracious and uncaring diseases, kids with inoperable egg-sized tumors latched to their brainstems, infants born with horrible genetic defects. As a matter of basic survival she’s developed a professional detachment to the frailties, grotesqueries, and fateful idiosyncrasies affecting the human body. Emotional scar tissue, my father calls it. This brusqueness carries over to her family life. As a child, I dreaded the most minor cut or abrasion: she’d break out the iodine and cotton swabs for an unsympathetic clean and dress, slapping my hands away from the wound as I wailed. When I once complained of mild constipation, she insisted on giving me an enema. I recall leaning over the toilet, hands braced on cold porcelain and pants wadded around ankles, penis flapping between trembling legs as she inserted a greased plastic tube, followed by a spurt of warm, bung-loosening water. The whole experience was seriously … oedipal.
“What do you think about me running across the country, like Terry Fox?”
“You wouldn’t make it to the end of the block. And don’t compare yourself to Terry.”
“Why not? He lost a leg, I lost a leg.”
“Terry Fox had cancer.”
“So what, you got to have cancer to do something noble?”
“It’s a start.”
“What if I donated all the money I raised to support the eradication of marine mammals? Fill the oceans with drift nets. Capsize oil supertankers. The Extinction Foundation. Once all the whales are gone we could get to work on the manatees.”
“That’s an awful sentiment, Benjamin. Just … awful.”
The highway cuts sharply west, spanning a narrow inlet splitting into a spider’s web of iced-over streams. Back in high school, me and my friends took a rutted track to the mouth of the inlet, searching for chinook salmon that’d swim up the swollen tributaries to spawn. The spring runoff slackened and the streambeds dried up, leaving thousands stranded in shallow pools. They swam in restless, agitated circles, throwing themselves at the slippery mud banks. We’d tie triple-barbed hooks to our lines and jig them through the water. With a quick jerk, we’d snag a fin or a gill flap, a belly, a tail. The salmon were so plentiful it required no real skill at all. We hauled them thrashing to the shore and checked the sex; we squeezed the females’ guts, emptying their eggs—orange globes in thick, briny liquor—into a gallon ice cream tub, for sale to a local bait shop.
One time my friend Joe hung a big female on a rotted fencepost; the fish had bent his last hook out of shape, and Joe held the thing’s stubborn will to live against it. A few minutes later the fish was still bucking and thrashing. Joe picked up a stream-polished stone and chucked it. The stone struck with a heavy wet thud. The rest of us found rocks and hurled them. We hit the salmon’s head and gut and fins, missing often, rocks sailing into the brush or bouncing off the post with a hollow wok! All of us laughing: the horsey, trollish laughter of teenage boys. Stones smacked the salmon’s ugly sloped head, smashed its hooked jaw and gouged luminous flesh to reveal the stark contour of its skull. A shard of flint cut its belly and the pressure of our assault forced the pink of its gut through the slit. The post slick with blood and burst roe and incandescent scales winking in the pale spring sunlight. We became bored and returned to our rods. The fish continued to flop and flap, not quite alive, not entirely dead.
I think of these things. Casual brutalities, unthinking and profane. Think of them often.
DR. ALEXIS VITIAS’S CLINIC is located on the seventeenth floor of the Hunts-Abrams medical complex in downtown Toronto. Mom gets my crutches from the trunk and trails me as I clump to the elevators. She attempts to straighten the hem on my jeans: with one leg rolled up and safety-pinned to my ass they don’t hang right. I slap her hand.
“Jesus, stop touching me. It’s not right.”
“What’s not right? I’m molesting you?”
“Christ, like you’ve got that Munchausen’s syndrome or something.”
“Don’t be an idiot.”
“You’re one of those mothers who convince themselves their kid’s sick so they can hold on to them. Soak toothbrushes in drain cleanser. Sprinkle arsenic in oatmeal. All kinds of sick shit.”
The whole time I’m talking, she’s tugging at my pants. “I’m helping you look presentable, Benjamin, not poisoning your breakfast. You wouldn’t eat oatmeal, anyway—it’s good for you.”
“Munchausen’s syndrome. A chronic case. One sick puppy.”
“I don’t care if you grow up.”
“Sure you do. You’ve still got my baby foreskin in a jar of formaldehyde.”
“I don’t,” she lies. Rifling her drawers for loose change as a kid, I found it tucked behind some balled socks: a wrinkly gray tube floating in a vial of piss-yellow fluid. Looked like a calamari ring. Years later, dad told me she’d bullied the doctor into handing it over. “You’re imagining things.”
“Imagining my ass. You keep my foreskin in a jar. A piece of your grown son’s anatomy in a Gerber babyfood jar—”
“Settle down, you’re getting all worked up—”
“—Gerber Split Pea and Carrot, you bizarre woman, would you please to Christ stop touching me?”
“Alright Mr. Hands Off,” she says—then, with a sly tug as the elevator doors open, straightens the hem.
The waiting room’s decor adheres to a design concept glimpsed on high-class porno sets: thick white carpeting, white calfskin sofa draped in a fa
ux-leopardskin pelt, glass-legged endtables piled with glossy magazines. Vitias’s receptionist sits behind a half-moon desk.
“I’m here for a fitting.” Offer her a look I privately think of as the Panty Melter. “This horse needs a new shoe.”
A pitying expression crosses the receptionist’s face; perhaps she’s trying to picture me before the missing leg and the extra forty pounds, result of four months spent in bed—the first month medically mandated, the remainder elective. This trip marks the first time I’ve ventured from my parents’ house since what my mother refers to as The Mishap.
She consults her appointment book, frowns. “You’re early.” I get the sense I’ve committed a slight but shameful faux pas. “Take a seat. I’ll find the doctor.”
Dr. Vitias’s body conjures up images of an ambulatory fire hydrant: thick and densely muscled, a vague flaring at his shoulders the only anomaly on an otherwise unvarying frame. Eyes the hue of antifreeze dart above the wiry unkempt beard of a Macedonian bull god. There is something in the palpitations of his tapered fingers indicative of a barely contained vitality, a potency, that he’s constantly struggling to keep in check.
“Hello!” His exquisite right hand envelops mine, left gripping my elbow, shaking as though my arm’s the pump-handle on a village well. “Here for a leg, yes?”
I acknowledge his brazen statement of the obvious.
“Okay, okay. Let me show you what I’ve got.”
He leads us through a pebbled-glass door. I feel as though I’ve been ushered into a medieval torture chamber, albeit a sanitary and amply lit one. The room’s dominated by a trio of lab benches strewn with all manner of equipment: chromium screws and shiny servo motors and stainless steel tools whose purpose I cannot fathom, a bolt of artificial skin threaded on a wooden dowel, curls and corkscrews of buttery latex overflowing the trashcan below. Two Rubbermaid bins: the first contains articulated fingers and toes, the second full of garishly painted finger- and toenails. An unfinished leg bent across the near bench, all pistons and hinges and metal tubes, skinless, cyborgean. Artificial arms and legs dangle from the ceiling like pots and pans from a chef ’s rack.
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