Would I have succeeded had the humans left me alone to my explorations? They did not leave me alone. On day after day of relentless sun and cloudless skies, they brought me into the big pool and gave me fish to encourage me to do feats. I pretended not to understand what they wanted me to do. While the human called Gabi jumped up and down with such force that her hair bobbed like coils of orange seaweed, I swam through urine-soaked waters or tried to meditate or dream. Sometimes I floated in silence at the surface, gazing out and up at the curious structure the humans had built at the back of the pool. Perfectly flat it was, and thin, and the outer part was seemingly made of metal painted in purple, periwinkle, vermillion, and aquamarine: the colors of the ocean. Upraised figures of dolphins, seals, and orcas swam through the metal of this frame. Inside it, a smooth expanse of glass moved with images and bursts of light that my eye could not quite follow. Music – a sickening, insipid succession of obnoxious sounds – accompanied these motions and in some bizarre way coordinated with them.
‘All my life,’ Baby Navi said to me one morning as I studied this hideous display, ‘I have wondered why the humans make such glares and noises.’
At first, it had surprised me that the very protective Zavijah would allow her baby to swim anywhere near me. She soon perceived, however, that Navi had taken a liking to me, as I had to him. So fiercely did Zavijah love her little son that she would do almost anything to try to make him happy. And so she reluctantly allowed him to associate with me – all the while, of course, monitoring us from across the pool.
‘It is not noise,’ I instructed Baby Navi. ‘It is music – horrible, purposeless music – but music nonetheless.’
‘I wish I did not have to listen to it.’
‘Try not to.’
‘As you try not to listen to the humans?’
We both looked over at Gabi, who was now leaping higher than she had ever leaped before.
‘Can you not see, Arjuna, that this is what she wants you to do?’
So saying, he swam down and then breached in a great (for a baby) leap. He hung in the air seemingly motionless at the top of his arc for a nearly endless moment of time. I noticed that he had erected his little pink penis and extruded it from his belly for the humans to see. They had never taught him this feat. The playful Baby Navi made this display only because it seemed to excite the humans almost as much as it disturbed them.
After he had splashed into the water and swum back over to me, I said to him, ‘Yes, I can certainly see that that is what Gabi wants me to do.’
‘Then why do you not do it?’
‘Because,’ I told him, ‘the more that I do not, the more that she jumps – and the higher. It is more fun, is it not, to teach the humans feats rather than to perform them?’
Baby Navi agreed that this was so, and he laughed out loud in his squeaky, little voice. Then he said, ‘If you do not do what the humans want you to do, they will do things to you that you do not want them to do.’
‘What more could they possibly do to me?’ I said to him.
Soon after that, a long male walked onto the stone beach surrounding the pool and moved up to Gabi. His face seemed as soft and white as the bread with which the humans cover the meat they consume. His eyes were blue like the pool that imprisoned me – and like that pool, they were clouded with the taint of the unpleasant and the filthy. The male and Gabi began exchanging noises that I assumed to be some sort of meaningful communication – meaningful to the humans. I could understand, after many days, only a few of their many, many utterances. They seemed to be talking about me: the male pointed toward me again and again, and his thin lips formed the sound Bobo even as his ugly eyes glared with what I took to be anger.
‘You still can’t get him to cooperate?’
‘I will, Jordan – just give me a little more time.’
‘Time is money,’ the male said. His name, I guessed, must be Jordan. He moved his feet so that he stood at the edge of the pool. If I had wanted to, I could have knocked him into it. ‘Do you have any idea how much we paid for you, Bobo?’
‘You should be careful what you say to him. I bet he understands more than you think.’
‘I’m sure he understands what you want him to do.’ He looked at Gabi as he said this, then turned back to stare at me. ‘Well, try to understand this, you stubborn whale: No tricky, no fishy.’
I swam up closer to him. I did not like this Jordan male with the evil, pale eyes. I suddenly recalled a feat that one of humans had taught Menkalinan. I rotated over on my side and used my flipper to scoop a great splash of water onto the male.
‘Goddamnit!’ he shouted. ‘How the hell did you learn that when you won’t even do a simple jump?’
As Gabi’s belly tightened in spasms, a staccato of sounds erupted from her mouth, which she covered with her hand.
‘Very funny!’ Jordan said, as he used his fingers to wipe the water from his face. Then he turned toward Gabi. ‘Ok, here’s what I want you to do. Just before feeding time, signal to Bobo to perform the trick he just did. If he doesn’t do it, don’t feed him.’
‘But I can’t do that! We just got Bobo eating!’
‘Well, if he wants to keep on eating, he’s got to perform.’
‘You can’t just starve him!’
‘Of course we’re not going to starve him. A little hunger, though, might motivate him.’
The next morning, the humans failed to offer me my usual lifeless meal, and so on the day after that. A worried Baby Electra swam up to me in the big pool and said, ‘Please Arjuna! Do at least one feat!’
‘I will do one feat,’ I promised her. ‘I will quenge, though the humans will never know what I do or why I do it.’
Bold words I had given to Baby Electra and to Unukalhai, but in truth I found it difficult even to meditate. The humans rarely left us whales alone for very long. At various times of the day – at the same time every day – they fed us or spoke to us or stroked us or tried to teach us feats. Dark purposes seemed to move them, and they impressed these purposes into us. They did curious, creepy things such as collecting our urine and feces. Although I never saw them drink or eat these substances, I revived my old hypothesis that the humans fed upon our waste, perhaps in secret. In the open space around the big pool, I sometimes watched them eat foods that did not look like they could be food. Once, when one of these tidbits fell into the water, I snapped it up with voraciousness, for my empty belly ached. Immediately, though, I spat it back out – the hot dog, as the humans called it, it tasted of chemicals similar to those that the pale ones such as Gabi rubbed into their skin. All the pools reeked with chemicals, particularly with a noxious one that burned my eyes and made them weep. The sounds that jangled the water bruised the rest of my body. Day after day, I endured a continual cacophony of whistles, shouts, clapping hands, and the awful music that blared from the flat metal and glass structure above the big pool. Assaulted by such noises, who could enter the first of the softly streaming currents of quiescence that lead toward the unpolluted pool of quenging?
Late one afternoon, with some welcome gray clouds pressing down upon the world and promising rain, the male called Jordan stood talking with Gabi again. I listened carefully to their garble of words, which I tried to absorb into a brain grown weak and cloudy with hunger:
‘If he won’t perform,’ Jordan said, ‘maybe we can get him to mate with Mimu. Her urine analysis indicates she’s in estrus.’
‘Yes, she went into heat this morning. I could have told you that, if you’d asked.’
‘Let’s put them in the east pool together.’
‘That’s not a good idea – Mimu doesn’t like Bobo. She might bite off his penis.’
‘That’s a million dollar penis you’re talking about. We’ve got four other parks that are waiting for more whales.’
‘I don’t think Mimu is going to let Bobo near her.’
‘Let’s try it and see. We can always inseminate her.’
‘How are we going to do that? We can’t even get Bobo up on the shelf for a urine sample, let alone semen.’
‘All right, then put Bobo with Mimu, and let’s hope for the best.’
With a soft rain pattering down, that evening the humans prodded me into a pool to the east of the big pool. There I found Alkurah, who had finally kemmered after several days of her indicating that she would soon do so. With her seed ripe and ready inside her, she practically heated up the water with her desire. In the natural order of things, she would have sought out a suitable male from another clan with whom to mate – or, rather, she would have allowed an experienced worthy bull orca to seek her out. Nothing, however, about our situation was normal.
‘Would you like to breathe with me?’ she asked me.
Surprised, I said to her, ‘I had never supposed you would want me as a mate.’
‘Why not? You are strong and handsome and brave. You are very intelligent, too, in a strange way.’
‘But I still cannot quenge,’ I told her, ‘and therefore I have not completed my rhapsody. Would you mate with one who is not fully adult?’
‘In a better place and a better time,’ she said, ‘no, of course I would not. But if I do not mate with you, what will I do to have children?’
‘I do not know why you would want to have children here.’
‘If I do not, how will the life my mother gave me go on?’
Because it is pointless to answer a question that is not really a question, I said nothing.
‘If you do not mate with me,’ she said, ‘the humans will put me with Unukalhai or force Menkalinan’s sperm into me – or worse.’
‘What could be worse than that?’
‘This could be worse!’ She beat her tail in anger against the water’s surface. ‘Before Bellatrix ceased talking, she told of what happened to her in her old pools, far from here. The humans mated her with her own son.’
I suddenly felt glad that the humans had not fed me that day. Had my belly been full, I would have disgorged a spew of filthy fish into our tiny pool.
‘Not even the humans would do such a thing,’ I said. ‘It is against all natural law.’
Of course, I did not really believe this. Nothing about the humans seemed natural. I stated it as true because I badly wanted it to be true.
‘We would make a fine baby together,’ she said to me.
‘I am surprised that you would let me come so close.’
‘I know, I have been unkind to you.’ She swam beneath me and rubbed me along my belly. ‘I have been jealous of you: you are more intelligent than I, and you have thoughts that I would never think.’
‘Yes, and all or any of these thoughts I would give to you freely, that they would become your own.’
‘That is exactly what disquiets me. Were we to become friends, or even family, I would come to depend on your greater insight.’
‘How should a family not depend on each other?’
‘But I am the mother of this family, or will be, as soon as you impregnate me. What matriarch would wish to swim in the shadow of the father of her child?’
‘It would not be so. And in this place, so unlike the seas of our home, anything we called family would be unlike—’
‘There is another reason,’ she said, ‘that I have not bestowed upon you the affection that you deserve. What would I do if the humans took you from me? I have already lost so much.’
She told me of how her first child, Minkar, had been killed in the capture of her sisters and her.
‘Life must go on,’ she said. ‘And the life inside you that I have zanged – it is so alive!’
I gazed at her deep blue eye through the blue water.
‘Your sperm are ready,’ she said, ‘like liquid white pearls, like burning raindrops of light.’
She touched her face to mine.
‘I am hot inside, so hot that the fire can be put out only with the flame of your phallus.’
She zanged my blood with a shiver and promise of ecstasy.
‘I want to feel you strong and wild inside me, surging, bursting, reaching for life.’ She rolled slowly about in the water as if to show me how easily I might slide myself into her. ‘Please mate with me, Arjuna – I am ready.’
I too, was ready. I needed no force of will to erect myself, as Baby Navi had done. Rather, my desire for Alkurah drove hot streams of blood into my penis, which pushed out as long as an adult human male is long. The coolness of the water seemed only to inflame it to an unbearable heat. Alkurah swam in close, and rubbed her belly across it so that it pulsed with a red, rage of pain.
‘No, I am sorry,’ I said to her. I swam away from her – or tried to, for she pursued me across the pool. ‘I will not suffer my child to be born in such a place.’
‘Please, Arjuna!’ Alkurah said, rubbing against me again. ‘Please, please, please!’
‘No, no – I am sorry, sorry, sorry!’
With a great force of will, I called the blood from my penis and pulled it back into the safety of my belly. I offered to slip my flipper inside her, but this sort of purely physical satisfaction of erotic play she could find with Unukalhai or Baby Electra or even with one of her sisters.
‘I must live in these pools,’ I explained to her, ‘for the rest of my life, which I pray will not be long. I do not want to live at all unless I can quenge, and I will never be able to quenge if I have to endure the humans doing to my child what they do to you and me.’
Alkurah, being reasonable as all orcas are, should have accepted the logic of my argument, or so I foolishly thought. The blood, though, in any being has reasons deeper than those of the brain.
‘You will never quenge!’ she shouted at me. ‘And I will never offer myself to you again!’
‘I am sorry,’ I repeated.
‘I will never speak with you again, either! And do not speak to me – if you will not give me your seed, I do not want your words inside me.’
The next day, I was moved into an even smaller water. I tasted urine, and looked down through a milky liquidity at the brown shadings of feces that the humans had not yet removed from the pool’s bottom. So tiny was the space in which I moved, that I could hardly move: I could not complete an entire turn without scraping against the walls of the pool and so scraping off layers of my skin. The green chemical that the humans poured into the pools here seemed more concentrated and more toxic, for it burned my eyes with a hot, relentless stinging and worked its acid into the sores which soon opened along my sides. For a day and a night, I remained in this narrow place, without food or word of comfort from Baby Electra or another whale.
That is, almost without food. While meditating near the pool’s slimy bottom, I noticed a duck put down on the surface of the water above me. I gave him a few moments to relax, then I surged upward through the pool to ambush him. I had never eaten a duck. His feathers tickled my throat. At least, I thought, I had a little meat to give me a little strength, the first living meat I had tasted in many days.
On the following morning, Gabi arrived with a bucket of fish. Jordan accompanied her. They stood above me on the rough, flat stone the humans call concrete, and they vocalized to each other:
‘We thought that Bobo needed to be in the private pool for a while,’ Jordan said.
‘You mean, the punishment pool.’
‘You don’t have to like everything we do here, Gabi, in order to work here.’
‘I don’t like this!’
‘I don’t either. You know how much I love these whales.’
‘That’s what you’ve always said. So I don’t understand how you can punish them this way.’
Jordan bent over the side of the pool as if to try to touch me. Then he suddenly drew back his hand. Perhaps he did not want to immerse it in the filthy water.
‘Bobo,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t need to be punished at all if you’d just let Gabi teach you a few things. You’re a willful little whale, aren’t you?’
I roll
ed over on my side to repeat my feat of splashing water over him. He must have anticipated this, however, for he quickly jumped backward across the concrete so that even the strongest splash would not reach him.
‘You’d rather be back in the big pool, wouldn’t you?’ he said to me. ‘Then remember: work makes you free.’
He stepped back over to Gabi, who stood at the edge of the pool with the bucket by her legs. ‘All right, let me see what you can do with him.’
For a while, Gabi gestured and twisted and hopped about the concrete like a sandpiper trying to get me to do feats. I almost felt sorry that I had to frustrate her obvious desire – almost.
‘I should feed him something,’ Gabi said. ‘It wouldn’t hurt to give him one fish, would it?’
‘And reinforce his obduracy?’ Jordan turned to me and articulated sounds that he had before: ‘No tricky, Big Boy, no fishy.’
Just then, Gabi did something I had never seen her do before: leaping up into the air, she twisted her body in a lovely pirouette. Upon returning to the concrete, however, her foot collided with the bucket, knocking it over. Fish spilled into the pool. Despite the tidbit of the duck, I was ravenously hungry. I instantly turned about, not caring that I scraped off yet more flesh on the pool’s rough side. As quickly as I could, I gulped down the many stinking fish.
‘Oops,’ Gabi said, standing up from the spot where she had fallen. ‘I always had trouble landing my triples when I competed.’
‘Do not,’ Jordan said, ‘do that again.’
‘It was an accident!’
‘Listen, Gabi, I know you love working with the whales. And we all love you – we wouldn’t want to see you leave.’
Jordan raised his arm and drooped it across Gabi’s back. They walked off together, chattering and leaving me by myself.
I remained alone the rest of that day and night, and the following day, night and morning as well. No food did the humans give me. Through a light-headed growl of hunger, I decided to take advantage of my solitude. I meditated as well as I could. I sang the old songs. I slept with half my brain and dreamed, and with my other half, I recalled those reverberant days when I quenged with my mother and grandmother in the icy waters of the northern ocean. Here, in another place, I sought my way back to sun-filled, melodious moments.
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