The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel

by David Poyer

  Sara put her hand on the small woman’s arm. Auer was shaking. “Eddi, calm down. Let’s discuss this. I’m sure they’ll pay you for the footage—”

  Dorée said, “We’re feeding her and transporting her. She’s an employee.”

  “Fuck all of you. I made my arrangements with the CPL office. I’m a filmmaker—”

  Perrault said, voice iron, “Shut up. Everyone, just shut up.”

  The captain nodded to Quill, who stepped into his place at the wheel, and walked forward, furious gaze jumping from one face to the next. “We will not have screaming matches on my boat. We are shipmates in a dangerous sea. We will behave with courtesy to each other. Is that clear to everyone?”

  “We need a photographer—”

  “That’s enough, Tehiyah. The two of you will clean the heads tonight. After dinner, which you will prepare together. If you can’t cooperate voluntarily, I must teach you to. C’est clair?”

  Dorée flushed. She grabbed the lifeline as Anemone pitched. Sara noticed the whales had moved off, as if sensing the outbreak of hostilities aboard their big new friend. “I’m not cleaning any toilets—”

  “Yes you are. Or you won’t use them. Would you rather hang over the stern? You will all get along. Or you’ll regret it.”

  “I’d take that warning aboard, if I were you people,” Quill put in from the helm. He looked quite jolly now. “The captain’s word is law. Especially under the French maritime code.”

  Dorée started to speak, then closed her mouth. Her eyes blazed. She turned away and glared seaward.

  “Eddi? Understand?”

  Auer nodded, lips set. “Yeah.”

  “Very good.” Perrault’s gaze met Sara’s. Did the crinkles around his eyes deepen? If so, she didn’t understand the message. He turned away and hiked back to the wheel, bending en route to repin a flapping sock that was threatening to blow overboard.

  Sara eased a breath out and looked for the humpbacks again. They were half a mile distant now. Milky spouts jetted up here and there amid the crests. The minkes, if that’s what they’d been, were far away over the curved bluegreen.

  “Hey, here’s Cappuccino,” Auer said, voice trying for lightness.

  “Cappuccino?” Madsen said. He spat over the side.

  “That’s what color it is. Or maybe a mocha latte. But he sure is a venti.”

  Sara followed Eddi’s finger to gaze at a lighter patch glimmering many fathoms down through the green sea. She stared for a moment, puzzled, as it slipped aft, silent, shimmering, seeming to hang motionless down there. Then her eye suddenly assembled it into reality, existence, into something she recognized.

  It was the same sperm she’d seen far off, but this time nearly directly below the boat. It shimmered through the jade membrane between them as she leaned over the gunwale, camera dangling forgotten, trying to make it out. Its color … a light coffee, as Auer had just said? Or even lighter, the hue of tanned human skin? The surface was veined with lighter creases, like an old handbag or boot. Its size stunned her. It was longer than Anemone. Yet its shape did not make sense. Then she realized the squared-off head, larger than a shipping container, was turned on its side, the tiny dark eye gazing up. Did it glimpse them, too, or only the swell of hull? It blinked slowly. Did it understand them as sentient beings? Or comprehend only bits of color in a world of blue? Behind that staring eye the creases became prunelike furrows fissuring away to the vast body.

  Then it rolled again, wheeling with enormous ease and gracefulness despite its immense size. To her astonishment, as it passed through the falling slanted rays of the sun it glittered, glimmered, flashed, deep down there in the jade, the fissures veined like some immense mine with yellow metal. “It’s golden,” she murmured, hardly able to credit what she was seeing. “But how can—”

  “Diatoms,” Madsen said. “They swim through them, and pick up the color.”

  The whale’s bulk shrank, dropping away, parting, all that immensity fading slowly through deep green into infinite blue, and vanished in a complexly braided swirl of refracting sea.

  Auer chuckled uncertainly. After a moment Sara joined in. Madsen only looked sour. Quill and Perrault, by the wheel, didn’t even glance their way. Dorée, alone on the bow, clung to the stay as she gazed down into the sea. As if each one of them, only an arm’s length distant from the others, was really alone.

  7

  Secrets

  She was losing track of time. It was the eternal half-light, like a perpetual late afternoon. Each day seemed dimmer, not really dusk, for you could see the solar disc, orange or russet or carmine depending on its altitude above the horizon. But never fully day. A ghostly twilight fit for neither sleep nor waking, as if they hovered between one world and the next.

  The night after spotting the whales, she’d passed the little closet that served as toilet up forward—there was another, more luxurious one in the owner’s cabin aft—to see Auer on her knees, rump pushed up, scrubbing in silence. She blinked. Beside her, Georgita squatted on an overturned plastic bucket, hugging her splinted arm. Her breath steamed in the chill air. “Where’s Tehiyah?” Sara asked.

  Auer silently sprayed and scrubbed. “She said she’d do the after head. Not this one,” Georgita said.

  “She’s the only one who uses that one.”

  “Right.” The videographer straightened and dragged a sleeve across her face. “So … how’s that?”

  “Much better,” Georgita said. “Look, sorry I was so sick for so long.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Sara and Eddi said together. They looked at each other and laughed.

  “Sara,” Bodine’s voice echoed from up forward.

  She excused herself and stepped that way, very carefully. She ducked through the little hatch into the always-claustrophobic forward space with its swaying lines, its banks of equipment. Bodine half smiled at her from his chair. She wondered if he slept in it. “Yes, Mick?”

  “Do something for me?”

  “Sure. What?”

  “See if Jamie’s in the engine room. Ask if he has some acid—muriatic, sulfuric, whatever. I need to clean these corroded contacts.”

  She nodded and headed aft. Through the salon, past the dome, down the passageway. Halfway there she heard a groan and stopped. Oriented, in the dim corridor, toward one of the doors. It eased open, then closed again with the boat’s pitch. She reached for, almost touched it. Then Anemone rolled and it parted another inch, just enough to cut her a narrow slice of what lay within.

  On the wide master bed a white rump worked between splayed knees. The legs were darker-complected than the narrow rump, which was fair-skinned. The groan came again. No, a moan, of sexual ecstasy, real or simulated she could not tell. The other answered in kind. Human mating vocalizations, some corner of her mind noted.

  “Like that?” Madsen’s voice. Then a hand slid down across his back. The rump paused.

  “Who’s there?” Dorée said sharply.

  Sara took a slow breath and backed away, fingers still extended. A step back. Another. Then, when the stiles touched the jamb again, turned and half ran to the ladder down.

  When she came back up the passageway, oh-so-carefully balancing a vial of clear acid, the door was firmly closed.

  * * *

  Topside the next morning she blinked into a white nothingness. The temperature had dropped again, and the fog was back big-time. Enough light to see by, but no more. Quill had insisted over and over that they wear a safety line whenever one crew member was topside alone. She snapped her carabiner to the jackline, clambered out of the cockpit, and walked forward.

  Anemone moved steadily through the sea, the featureless fog driving along only a little faster in the same direction. Heeling slightly, she overtook each crest and surfed with it for several seconds, bow wave rolling out to either side, before sinking into the trough and beginning to overtake the next.

  Sara stripped off a glove. The mist’s cold breath flowed over her ex
tended hand like the exhalation of some icy-temperatured animal. A shiver thrilled up her spine. The queer no-color muffled the boom’s clank, the cutwater’s rush. The sails trapped it and turned it to water. It ran down the taut fabrics as if they were weeping, pattering on the deck in a rhythm she found familiar, though she couldn’t say how. Then she did: the tap of a gentle rain on a porch roof. A skin of ice gleamed where the drops fell.

  She clung to the lifeline, wondering if they should be going so fast. Bits of ice the size and texture of snowballs bobbed as they passed, then slid smoothly astern, spinning and rocking in the broad path Anemone smoothed on obsidian water. They reminded her of a white body against another, darker one. Apparently Dorée had chosen her sleepover buddy for the voyage.

  She frowned and lifted her head, closing her eyes. Sniffing a dank, sharp, somehow black—if black could be a smell—odor. Like the inside of a squirt gun had smelled, when you were a child.

  Iceberg? Like the one they’d passed days before, upset and distorted like a fever dream? She went back to the cockpit and examined the radar. The waves sparkled all around, in every direction, but she couldn’t tell what was ice and what wasn’t. She cracked the companionway hatch. “Dru?”

  He glanced up from the navigation nook, eyebrows lifted.

  “I think I smell ice.”

  “Wouldn’t be surprising.” He bent to examine the display at the nav station, which would be identical to that in the cockpit and the dome. He glanced at Eddi, up in the steering station, but didn’t say anything.

  “Shouldn’t we slow down? We can’t see.”

  “Nothing on the screen. There’s been very little ice so far.”

  “I still smell something.”

  He sighed. “Be right up.”

  As he bent beside her to sheet out, the freezing mist flowed past them like a white river. They lost way at once and skated to port before Eddi corrected, the sails slatting and drooping, the long but insubstantial hull rapidly losing impetus. He frowned at the radar screen, then searched ahead. Muttered something in French. Then bent to a rubberized button she hadn’t noticed before. A deep drone boomed out, sustained for seconds as he kept the button depressed.

  He let up and straightened, facing forward, curved blade of a nose searching the wind. The mist blew past faster now that they’d slowed. His eyelids sank closed. She examined the graying stubble at the point of his chin, then closed her eyes and listened too.

  “Anything?”

  She shivered. Icy tendrils of fog crept down her collar. “… no.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “But you do smell it?”

  He cocked his head. “Non. You are quite sure?”

  “Well … maybe it’s just the fog.”

  “It is below freezing. Perhaps that’s what you smell. I want to keep making easting.”

  “The fleet?”

  “No sign yet, but it must lie somewhere. Still, I will reduce our speed. Until visibility improves.” He seized the coaming, started to lower his head, then lifted it again. “Sara. You know … you strike me as a person worthy of trust.”

  An awkward pause. What was he trying to say? “Thanks,” she said at last, unsure where to look.

  He glanced at her, then away. Seemed to want to add something, but finally said only, “Well, there it is. So you did right to call me. Whenever you suspect danger, you must let me know. C’est clair?”

  She said quietly that she understood. He told her to stay on deck and sound the horn every two minutes. Then swung below again, releasing himself a few feet above the deck sole and landing lightly, knees bent. There was a balletic grace to the way he moved about the boat. His boat; the one he’d designed, Eddi had said.

  Not for the first time, she wondered what had happened on his last round-the-world race. It obviously preyed on his mind. But there’d never seemed a good time to ask, and probing someone else’s failures … she wouldn’t like it if he started interrogating her about her research at Brown. No more than Bodine seemed to want to talk about whatever mistake or mischance had cost him his legs and his military career.

  Now that she thought about it, each one aboard seemed to have a reserve, some part of him- or herself kept apart and private. The captain and his lost race. Dorée shared nothing; well, except for her sexual favors. Georgita was utterly passive. Lars was friendly enough, but only enthusiastic when the subject was whales, or what was being done to them by humans. Only little Edwige Auer seemed to meet everyone openly. She too had been grievously wounded. Her very body had been torn apart. Yet instead of denying her scars, she’d made them part of herself; acknowledged them with art.

  Had it been two minutes? She gave it another thirty seconds, counting, and bent to press the cold hard black rubber. Held it down, one thousand, two thousand; then let up and straightened, head throbbing with the basso drone, listening with all her attention for echoes from that all-obliterating whiteness that writhed and thickened all around.

  * * *

  An hour later Lars came up. The fog was just as thick. By then she was chilled and shaking, fantasizing unsettling shapes in the flitting whiteness. She thought of asking if he’d enjoyed his time in the aft cabin, but didn’t. It wasn’t her business, and there was no way she wouldn’t come off sounding jealous. She climbed below gratefully and made a steaming mug of Eddi’s brown-rice green tea, listening to the every-so-often drone of the foghorn.

  On impulse, she made a second mug. But Perrault wasn’t in the salon, nor in the engine room. She hesitated, knuckles lifted to knock, outside his stateroom aft. The captain’s was next to the master’s cabin, but smaller. In the few times she’d been in it, almost cenobitic: plain varnished wood, a vertical locker, a bunk not much larger than hers. A fold-down desk with computer and repeater. She imagined him asleep in it. No … wait … what was she doing? She dropped her fist and trudged back to the salon.

  Eddi was still slumped in the steering chair, one booted leg dangling, the other propped on the dashboard-cum-instrument panel. “Want me to take a turn?” Sara asked.

  “Thanks, Sara-oh. I’m fine. Might as well sit around up here as down there.”

  “What’s it doing?”

  “Wind’s up to … twenty-five. Still super foggy.”

  “Want some green tea? I made some hot.”

  “Thanks. And a sandwich, if you wouldn’t mind making one.”

  Right, it was lunchtime. But no one else had been in the galley. She checked the Sharpie’d duty list on the fridge.

  “Tehiyah!” She pounded on the door, scowling.

  A stirring inside; then, “What?”

  “Your turn to make lunch. It’s already past noon!”

  A muffled laugh from within. Echoed, after a moment, by a male chuckle.

  Fury ran through her like flame. She had a fist raised again, ready to charge in and make a scene, when something crunched beneath her feet.

  A much larger fist than her own, only invisible, grabbed her and slammed her into the bulkhead so hard she couldn’t suppress a scream. The boat jarred around them, and a deep grinding came from beneath.

  Perrault’s door slammed open. “Suits,” he yelled. “Everyone into suits, now.” He scrambled past, not even glancing at her, and ran for the companionway in stockinged feet. Only steps behind, Quill erupted from the engine room and pounded after.

  She picked herself up, laboring to catch her breath. Terror caught in her throat, making her so dizzy she had to lean on the bulkhead as Anemone rolled. A new noise, a clanking grate, came from below each time the boat pitched.

  By the time she’d pulled on the orange suit, heavy and musty-smelling despite the airing a few days before, and gone topside, the others were gathered on the foredeck. Someone had furled the foresail and quick-dropped the main, which lay in roughly bundled folds. Fine powdery snow blew steadily past, and the seas surged them up and down, huge and rough, like big brothers tossing an infant sister back and forth. Or maybe with less care. Th
e world was a circle fifty yards in every direction. Beyond that was only the blurry dim, out of which the waves took shape, surged past, faded again. No birds. Nothing above but the nodding mast and more blank whiteness.

  She shivered, wrapping herself with crossed arms, exchanging glances with Georgita, who sat alone in the cockpit, looking frightened. She looked for a safety line, but they all led up forward. In use. She hesitated—not leaving the cockpit without harness and line was second nature now—but finally forced herself to pick her way forward. Very carefully; the deck was snow-slick, and each step threatened to send her overboard into that leaden, sluggish, somehow oily-looking sea.

  “Bloody hell sounds like ice,” Quill was saying, leaning far out over the bow, one arm anchoring him to the stay. The others stood around looking worried. The forward hatch was open, and Bodine stood in it, elbows braced. “But damn it all—where is it?”

  “Ice floats,” Dorée said.

  Perrault was looking over the side aft of where Quill stared. Sara knelt on the snow-crust and looked down. The sea rolled and pitched them, and slaty brine so cold it stopped her heart slapped her face, instantly numbing it.

  The captain cleared his throat. “Okay, we will not see anything up here. Jamie, check below. Lars, get the emergency beacons out. Eddi, bring the abandon-ship bags up. Sara, Tehiyah, get the Zodiac ready to put into the sea.”

  “Me?” said Bodine.

  “Get our position and prepare an emergency transmission. Do not send it yet, but get it ready. Now everybody, move.”

  Sara found herself opposite Tehiyah, fumbling with the lashings on the inflatable. They were caked over with inches of solid ice, transparent as cast glass but nowhere near as fragile. “Shit, this isn’t going to untie,” the actress panted from the far side.

  Sara opened the cockpit locker, looking for something they could bang it off with. “Tehiyah? Here, try this.” She craned around the rubber bulk and handed over one of the winch handles. Then started flailing away at her side with the other. Ice chips stung her face. At the next blow, something sharp flew unerringly up under the lens of her glasses into her bare eye. She gasped at the sudden pain, but closed that eye and struck again. And again, until the ice cracked and whitened and tumbled apart, disclosing layer after layer like a cut pearl.