Kostya arrived with his female Soviet trainer, Chief Petty Officer Mishin, to be the lead dolphin/handler pair in a new, highly classified training program within our facility. Officer Mishin had skin so pale it seemed to glow, especially when she was beside Officer Bloomington, whose years working under the San Diego sun had turned him a nutshell brown. He surprised me by becoming tongue-tied around her – for so long, he had been a confirmed bachelor, committed to us and nobody else. Sometimes, after a training session, I saw him gazing at the puddles she’d left on the jetty as she wrung seawater out of her hair, as if they might give him a clue to understanding her.
He had been instructed to work closely with her and Kostya to learn their training techniques, but he soon realised that Officer Mishin’s approach was as gentle as his own. She teased him about this, told him he was gullible to have believed all the rumours of draconian Iron Curtain methods, and in response he would smile a smile I had never seen on him before, shy and delighted and fearful all at the same time, the smile of a man hopelessly in love and unsure if the feeling could ever be mutual. My daughter and I observed all this with a mix of pity and amusement, secure in the fact that the feeling was not mutual, for we could tell from our scanning that Officer Mishin was left unmoved by Officer Bloomington’s attentions. We did not want to share him.
Kostya had been kept in isolation for a period before the sale went through, despite Officer Mishin’s protests, and for a while he was moody and aggressive because of his confusion, and only allowed to socialise with the group of bachelor dolphins. Once he was allowed to mingle with the females, Kostya also claimed that most of the rumours we’d heard about the Soviets were untrue – much to our disappointment, he told us he’d never been parachuted from a military plane at great heights into the ocean. He did, however, know how to tell the difference between a Soviet submarine and a foreign submarine, and we decided to believe this was ominous just for the thrill of it.
Yet the Navy superiors were convinced that Officer Mishin was hiding something from them. They insisted that Kostya had skills beyond those she allowed him to demonstrate, that he knew how to set sea mines, that he’d been trained to blow up enemy submarines in an emergency kamikaze move, or that – most sinister of all – he had been part of the Soviet Dolphin Division’s Swimmer Nullification Program, trained to attach a device to an enemy diver that could be remotely activated to inject carbon dioxide at high pressure into his bloodstream and force him to the surface, killing him. Officer Mishin vehemently denied this, and said she would have refused to train dolphins to go against their very nature, to be killers, that it would be impossible even if she’d tried. She explained that a dolphin is so sensitive to human distress that it would immediately refuse to repeat any command that caused harm. Officer Bloomington backed her up on this. The powers that be were unconvinced.
Swimmer detection in a conflict situation had traditionally been the remit of MK6, my mother’s old team, but now that resources were scarce the higher-ups decided that members of MK7 should add this skill to our repertoire. The way it had always worked in MK6 was for the dolphins to alert their handlers to the presence of a diver or swimmer, whether friendly or hostile, and leave it to the humans to decide how to respond. Those in charge now decreed that a special team should be trained to tag a diver with a locating device. Officers Bloomington and Mishin at first refused to participate in this training mission, but when they realised it would go ahead with or without their support, they felt they could better protect us by participating. Their superiors assured them we would never be asked to perform this task in a conflict situation, that it was only about broadening our skill base.
I was selected to be part of this classified program along with the other dolphins who had served with me in the first Gulf War; at that stage we were the only ones in the facility with real-world combat experience. Kostya was also included in the team. We were sent to a secluded Navy research base on San Clemente Island for training.
* * *
As the months passed, something about the setting – the isolation of the island, perhaps, or their shared resistance to the thinking behind the mission – began to change the dynamic between Officers Bloomington and Mishin. She started to show signs of affection for him, and quite suddenly, this affection bloomed into something more powerful. She had fallen in love. She kept her feelings hidden from Officer Bloomington, but Kostya and I picked up on them immediately. Soon the love pheromones they were both emitting drenched the air Kostya and I breathed in with each conscious breath we took, but they each suffered in secret, thinking their love was unrequited.
Kostya and I, however, were unable to keep our jealousy a secret from each other because of our cursed scanning ability. He loved Officer Mishin, I loved Officer Bloomington; we did not want to be displaced in their affections, though we knew it was the right and normal nature of events for a man and woman to fall in love. We wanted them to be happy, but we also wanted to be the primary cause of their happiness. Kostya and I tried to fall in love ourselves, but it felt too much like an act of compensation, and after a while we gave up trying.
This was the first time I had been away from my daughter for an extended time, and I missed her with an intensity that was overwhelming. Being a mother had taught me to live in the present, most embodied moment, to respond to her most immediate needs and tune out all other wavelengths of thought and anxiety, to be with her without thinking of past or future. She had surprised me by being her own complete, discrete self as soon as she was born. I had expected her to have a blank-slate quality, but she was herself, utterly, from her first few seconds in the world: composed, cautious, curious. During our separation for those long months at San Clemente, I thought of her constantly. I have never been lonelier.
Officers Bloomington and Mishin took to going hiking on the island on their days off, and afterwards Officer Bloomington would describe the hinterland to me, guiltily, in too much detail, knowing I was unhappy. They had made it their mission to find a surviving feral goat somewhere in the rocky hills. He told me the story of the goats, brought to the island in the nineteenth century and allowed to roam wild as a food source for passing sailors. Eventually they’d become a pest, and a century after the first pairs were brought to San Clemente, the Navy was authorised to eliminate them. Animal rights activists tried to intervene and some goats were put up for adoption on the mainland, but the Navy was given court approval for their extermination. The goats had the upper hand in the terrain and went into hiding, putting the exterminators through their paces. This war of attrition went on for some time, until there was only one small family of goats left on the island. A lone doe was captured and fitted with a radio collar. When released, she led the shooters to her family. She was nicknamed the Judas goat, for betraying those she loved.
Officers Bloomington and Mishin never did find any surviving goats, but it was on one of their hikes together that they revealed their feelings for each other. By the time the San Clemente training mission ended in 1999 and I was reunited with my daughter in San Diego, I had learned to attach a pinging clamp device the size of a golf ball to a human diver, and Officer Bloomington was, for the first time in his forty-one years on earth, engaged to be married. Kostya was as unimpressed by this as I was.
* * *
Theirs was a long engagement. I would sometimes entertain fantasies that they were having second thoughts about getting married, but I could sense their feelings were deepening, becoming more layered, binding them more closely together than any official ceremony could. I tried – and tried – to be happy for them.
* * *
Officer Bloomington’s fear all along had been that if my elite unit performed well on training missions, it would be irresistible for the Navy to put us to work in a real conflict. This was the way military innovation worked. No matter how crazy a method seemed at first, in the right high-stress situation it could all of a sudden be considered legitimate. In our case, the initial cataly
st was the terror attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. Our team’s resources were doubled and we were put on high alert. The following year we were sent to Norway to participate in the large-scale NATO maritime warfare exercise, Blue Game. And then 9/11 happened.
Something else significant, for my species, occurred in 2001, though understandably not many Americans took any notice in the midst of their grief. A scientist published the outcome of her breathtaking research which showed that we dolphins respond to our own images in a mirror. Previously, other than humans, only higher primates such as chimpanzees had been shown to pass what scientists call the ‘mark test’, which indicates an awareness of self, something that human children achieve as toddlers. The dolphins in the study, when marked with temporary ink somewhere on their bodies, went straight to an underwater mirror – signalling they could recognise their own reflection – and examined the mark, proving they could also recognise when their appearance had changed. This study confirmed what Officer Bloomington had known about us all along, that we have a sense of self as sophisticated as any human’s.
But it prompted me to remember something, a conversation I’d overheard between Officers Bloomington and Mishin about the persecution complex that afflicts most humans, and made me wonder: Why do you feel persecuted by us? From the mild feeling of being teased without your consent all the way to the other extreme of the terror of recognition, that we might expose you for what you truly are. What use is a sense of self if all it does is make you feel that self to be constantly under siege?
The shock of the terrorist attacks spurred Officers Bloomington and Mishin to set a date for their wedding. At the ceremony, held beside the pen housing me and my daughter and the one housing Kostya, Officer Bloomington read out a paragraph from the mirror-mark research paper, and thanked us for putting up with humans for the millennia we have co-existed. Officer Mishin gave her new husband a large mirror as a wedding present, knowing that he would want to do the mark test with us as soon as they returned from their honeymoon. She promised to use her own lipstick to mark Kostya. The guests laughed, and – I swear it – Kostya blushed with pleasure.
* * *
In 2003 I was deployed to the Persian Gulf for the second time in my life. The entire MK7 team, including my daughter, was transported from San Diego to the Gulf in the well deck aboard the USS Gunston Hall. Our brief was, as usual, to find underwater mines and booby traps laid in the port of Umm Qasr by Saddam Hussein’s forces and mark them by dropping acoustic transponders close by.
Halfway through the journey, Officers Bloomington and Mishin were given orders that the special-ops team Kostya and I were part of was to be authorised to put locating tags on enemy divers in the port, as we had been trained to do in San Clemente. They resisted at first, to no avail – in wartime, the military culture of obeying orders becomes cultish, something by which to live or die. They decided to focus instead on getting us ready to do the job as safely and efficiently as possible. The orders were that we would be released on individual tagging missions, one at a time, and I was chosen to go first.
My daughter and I communed during the rest of the voyage, side by side in our travel pods on the well deck. She knew about my special mission but she wasn’t concerned about my safety, mostly because of her excitement over her own first deployment. She couldn’t wait to get out into the harbour at Umm Qasr to clean up the seafloor and put to shame the unmanned underwater vehicles installed with technological sonar that the higher-ups had insisted on including in the team. She knew – as did our handlers – that nothing could rival our echolocation abilities in this kind of situation, where the shallow water of the port and the reverberations from clutter on the harbour bed would confuse the machines. Only we could be counted on to distinguish between harmless debris, coral rock and anti-ship mines; only we had the ability to detect the different types of metal in an object. The humans liked to send out a sonar-equipped drone named REMUS to do an initial sweep of the embedded objects on the seafloor, but then it would be up to my daughter to work her magic.
The night before I was to be released into the waters of the harbour for my solitary mission, Officer Bloomington took a long time over my health inspection. This was among the first sets of skills he had taught me as a young trainee, to participate in a routine inspection to ensure my fitness to serve. Many of the days we had spent together had started with him inspecting my teeth, then giving me the signal to relax so that he could take my temperature and a blood sample. I had learned to look forward to the moment when he put the stethoscope beneath my pectoral flipper to check my heart rate. I liked the attentive way he listened, looking at me but not seeing me as he counted and timed my beating heart. But on that night, once he’d registered my heartbeat, he kept the metal disk in place for a long time, no longer listening with medical interest, just listening as if he were trying to commit the thudding pattern to memory.
I was released just before dawn. Intelligence reports showed some kind of attack on Navy harbour assets was imminent, but the details were hazy. Officer Bloomington told me to patrol the waters, to remember what I had been taught about identifying enemy divers, and – should I discover one – to bump into him to attach the locating device to one of his limbs, then get the hell out of there. I believed that the titanium clamp I carried would do no harm, that it was a tracker, nothing more, identical to the ones we’d used during training in San Clemente. I have to believe that Officer Bloomington was similarly unaware, that he had been kept in the dark about the nature of the device.
* * *
I wonder sometimes if the man I killed felt the momentary euphoria that human survivors of animal attacks have reported feeling. Ted Hughes was fascinated by this idea, that there is relief, joy even, at giving oneself over to the ancient cycle of predator and prey. He had read accounts of a man attacked by a mountain lion in British Columbia who felt nothing but compelled by the cat’s golden eyes; of Tolstoy being mauled by a bear and feeling no pain; of Dr Livingston being seized by a lion and going all dreamy. I find this thought reassuring now. Perhaps, as the device injected carbon dioxide into his bloodstream and he began to spiral up through the dark water column, the man I murdered felt his approaching death as a gift, a return to origins.
Men suicide to consolidate a reputation, women suicide to get one. I may have fuelled the sceptics who say female dolphins should not be taken on by the Navy for training, for the same reason women are not always welcomed into the human armed forces. They say we are sentimental, that we feel things too deeply, we fall to pieces, we let guilt destroy us. But I know that if Kostya had been the first one sent out on the mission, he would have done the same. It has nothing to do with being female, and everything to do with being a dolphin.
Humans might be conscious thinkers; we are conscious breathers. It is very easy to choose to die if every breath is a matter of choice. I am not the first dolphin to suicide, nor will I be the last. We take killing a human very hard. It is as taboo for us as killing our own babies. We recognise in you what your ancients used to recognise in us and understood as sacred a long time ago, when killing a dolphin was punishable by death. You used to think of us as being closer to the divine than any other animal on earth, as being messengers and mediators between you and your gods. You honoured us with Delphinus, our own constellation in the northern sky.
And in return, for thousands of years, when we have found a human drowning, we have held him or her up to the surface of the water as we hold our newborns, waiting for them to take their first breath. We have put our own bodies between you and the lurking shapes of sharks. We have swum very gently with your young, with your impaired. We have greeted you with leaps. You should not have forgotten what your own wise ancestors used to know.
* * *
Enough of this death talk. My tale should end with life, and it does, in a sense. Before I was released into the water on my final mission, my scan of Officer Mishin revealed to me that she was pregnant with a baby g
irl, still unbeknown to herself and her husband.
I haven’t yet managed to find your soul out here, Ms Plath, though not for want of looking. There are things about you I would still like to know. Lately I have found myself wondering: After Ted Hughes abandoned you, did you still love his poetry? ‘Who am I?’ the mythical creature, the wodwo, asks in one of his poems, and like many men, the wodwo decides, ‘I am what I want.’ You believed in his genius so fervently when you first fell in love, and all through your remarkable – until it unremarkably fell apart – creative partnership of a marriage. So fervently, in fact, that I began to feel I owed it to you to return to his work, to give it a third chance, to see it through your eyes and hear it through your ears.
I went back to his animal poems and fables for children, and this time I noticed – as much as I wanted to ignore it – that there is something he does with language that makes my brain tingle. A reverse act of scanning, human to dolphin. It happened especially when I was reading my favourite, the one about the moon-whale. I would have liked to read it to my daughter. I imagine you reading it to yours, her little elbows resting against your knee. There is nothing quite like a child’s gorgeous listening energy, ravenous for her mother’s voice.
PSITTACOPHILE
Soul of Parrot
DIED 2006, LEBANON
In her isolation, the parrot was almost a son, a love. He climbed upon her fingers, pecked at her lips, clung to her shawl, and when she rocked her head to and fro like a nurse, the big wings of her cap and the wings of the bird flapped in unison.
Gustave Flaubert, A SIMPLE HEART
It’s called being a citizen, not just of the world, but of all time. It’s what Flaubert described as being ‘brother in God to everything that lives, from the giraffe and the crocodile to man.’ It’s called being a writer.
Only the Animals Page 18