As the maelstrom caught me up in the winds whirling about its fiery center, each moment became a day and then a year, and each instant swelled into an eternity. I lived longer than all the ages since the first whale left his legs and the land behind to brave the waters of the ocean; I died more times than all the fishes that had ever lived in the seven seas had died since the beginning of time. I died within screams that had no sound, and I died within silent darkness. I died again and again and again, and it was upon the darkest and most despairing of all these many deaths that the voices began:
‘Arjuna, you are free!’
Of course, a whale can always hear voices, songs, cries, zangs, and such at will, and in these remembered (or dreamed) acoustics, there is little difference in the clarity and the sense of reality between the inner sounds and those that emanate from without through the substance of the sea. However, one can always tell which is which – one always knows. That is, a sane whale always knows the difference. In the urgent voices that now sounded inside me, I could no longer distinguish the hallucinatory from the real.
‘Arjuna, you are free to leave your imprisoning pool whenever you wish.’
‘Yes, you are free – breathe water and drown.’
‘You have already escaped – the maelstrom is behind you.’
‘You have escaped into the maelstrom by becoming one with its wild winds.’
‘This is a kind of quenging, Arjuna. Dive down deep enough, and quenging and madness are really one and the same.’
‘You sought the blue peace in the eye at the center of the storm. Is not everything blue?’
The waters of my pool ran blue, as did the color of the flaky paint encrusting the pool’s concrete walls. The metal of the huge flat thing above the big pool shattered into indigo and blue shards as sharp as a shark’s teeth, and the turquoise shirt of excrescence that Jordan wore about his torso suddenly came alive like a jellyfish and began absorbing the tissues of his body in a hot, acid agony. Gabi swam next to me and gazed at me with eyes as blue as periwinkles. And I put out those pretty blue orbs with a single bite that crunched off her entire face.
‘Kill her!’ I heard Unukalhai say. ‘Tear off her legs! Rip out her lights! Devour her heart, and take the humans’ madness into you!’
‘Yes, please kill her for me!’ Zavijah added. ‘Kill her, kill Golden-Hair, kill Painted-Skin – kill them, and bring my baby back to me!’
‘Kill Baby Electra!’ Unukalhai shouted at me. ‘Kill her to spare her the agony of a life that is no life!’
‘Kill them all!’ a deep, resonant voice commanded me. It was a voice from the distant past (and perhaps the far future), and I recognized its speaker as Alsciaukat. ‘Kill the humans, and kill the world that gave birth to these world-killers. Kill all of creation, for are not death and life one and the same?’
And so it went, the char winds near the center of the maelstrom whirling so impossibly quickly that they seemed to have stilled to a relentless, endless blue.
One day while I was thus immersed in myself – one hour, one moment, one aeon – the humans moved old Bellatrix into my pool. So little space did we now have that we could not swim without colliding with each other. That did not matter. Neither of us wanted to swim. We floated in the foul, slimy gag of each other’s excretions, side by side, touching skin to dead, unfeeling skin.
And then silent and speechless Bellatrix spoke to me through the touch of skin and the sound of our mutual affliction:
‘You must not listen to Unukalhai,’ she told me, ‘for he is mad.’
‘So am I! So are you!’
‘Are we, really?’
‘As real as the voices I cannot escape.’
‘There are many kinds of madness, Arjuna, and some are madder than others.’
‘Unukalhai is my friend.’
‘He was my friend, too. For many years, we dwelled far away in another place of prison pools.’
‘I never knew!’
‘And never would Unukalhai have told you that – or told you that he killed a human there.’
‘No, you must have hallucinated that – he could not have broken the Great Covenant!’
‘He caught a human’s tentacle in his teeth, and he dragged him down into the water.’ The skin of Bellatrix’s face vibrated with the effort of her communicating this unbelievable thing to me. ‘He bit off the man’s hand and swallowed it. He ate the man’s sex, and then he tore him open and ate his heart.’
‘No!’
How could I, I wondered, get away from these terrible words that I did not wish to hear?
‘Unukalhai,’ Bellatrix said, ‘killed for me, exactly as Zavijah has asked you to kill Golden-Hair and Painted-Skin. For the humans took my children, too.’
She began whimpering, and her belly sent soft waves of suffering through the waters of the pool.
‘Do not do what Zavijah wants you to do.’
‘I could not! I could not!’
‘You already have, haven’t you? How many times, Arjuna, in the bitter pool of your heart have you slain the humans?’
‘I never have!’ I wanted to shout back to her. ‘I never would!’
Because I did not wish to lie, however, I said nothing.
‘Please do not kill them, Arjuna,’ she said. ‘If you kill them, you will kill the best part of you, which we all love. And I have already lost all that I loved.’
Her whimpering intensified to an open sobbing that took hold of her from head to tail. In the close, shaking water, I could not get away from it. Pulses of pain pierced me in zang upon zang of pure hopelessness, and ripped open the thin tissues of the illusion of separation between us. Her breath moved as my breath did, and her heart beat in rhythm with mine. Her voice caught up inside me like a choke of pure agony and became my own.
‘You will kill the best part of yourself. You will kill, you will kill, you will …’
I could not escape this terrible cry, either. I tried to. Because I could not turn a full circle, I swam straight forward. Water streamed past me for a moment before my head collided with the wall of the pool. Pain exploded through my bruised and bloodied face deep into my skull bones. My brain knocked about inside like a jellyfish flung against submerged rock, but still the voice sounded inside me: ‘You will kill! You will kill! You will kill!’ Again I rammed my head against the side of the pool, and again and again. Clouds of my blood reddened the water. A lightning bolt drove into my eye and split open my head. And still the voice would not stop: ‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’
Gabi found me floating beside Bellatrix like two dead logs that the humans cut from living trees. ‘Oh, my God!’ she cried out. ‘Oh, my Bobo!’
She fell down upon the concrete as if axes had chopped off her legs. Her arm covered her eyes. Her naked belly trembled as if seized by an earthquake, and a succession of barking-like sounds formed up deep in her throat and did violence to her shaking chest.
‘Oh, no, oh, no – goddamnit, no, no, no!’
Time passed – perhaps a day, perhaps a few moments. Jordan had come up to Gabi, who now stood beside him.
‘All right,’ Jordan said, ‘let’s get him into the big pool and get this place cleaned up.’
‘Look at his head! Look, goddamnit!’
‘Don’t panic – Derek will fix him up. But let’s move him, okay!’
‘How are we going to do that?’
‘I’ll get Brad and Cole to—’
‘You can’t just shock these whales like they’re cattle!’
‘I have to tell you, Gabi, that it’s time we considered electro-convulsive therapy for—’
‘Like you did to Shazza in Cancun? Look at her – do you want to make a vegetable out of Bobo, as well?’
‘What else can we do?’
More time passed. My face bled, my jaw hurt, my head swelled into a red clot of agony, but the voices grew only louder. Now I heard new voices – I thought perhaps they issued from the mouths of Painted-Skin and Yellow-Hair, who s
tood above me. In their hands, they held wooden oars tipped with red sticks of metal and excrescence.
‘C’mon, Big Boy, the gate is open. Don’t make me have to use this.’
A month vanished. The moon that I could not see must have been hiding somewhere beyond the blue glister of the endless day. A redness streaked toward me. Lightning flashed out of the cloudless sky and struck me on my side above my tail. Its hard, white fire jolted along my nerves up my spine and into my bruised brain, causing my entire body to jump, heave, and twitch. My feces swam over me – and clouded up around Bellatrix. She did not seem to mind.
‘C’mon, Big Bobo!’
Again, the lightning shocked me with a sickening jag. It seemed that if I swam forward, I might escape it. I swam for many years.
I found myself in the big pool with Bellatrix, but none of the other whales were there. Golden-Hair and Painted-Skin clacked their red-tipped oars together and did a little dance with their legs – I did not know why. They bunched together by the side of the pool, tormenting the air with their overly loud vocalizations. I floated at the very edge of the pool, and I could not stop staring at them. So close they stood to me, with their toes nearly touching the water – so close, so close, so close!
Then Gabi walked up, and I was very glad when they went away.
‘Derek is coming,’ she said to me. ‘We’re going to take care of you.’
She lay down on the rough concrete, which must have hurt her delicate and bony human body. She dipped her arm into the water and touched my jaw behind the wound where it bled. So gentle was her touch! So light, so warm, so knowing!
‘Help me,’ I said to her. I had never imagined speaking such words to a human. ‘Please help me!’
Now she touched my throbbing head, and her fingers danced along the scar above my eye, touching and touching.
‘We’re going to help you,’ she said. ‘You’re going to be all right.’
Like a star streaking out of the sempiternal night that had darkened my mind, one of the sounds that she spoke lit up my hope. As her fingers pressed against my skin and she said you, I understood that she meant me, Arjuna. I realized that the humans had substitute words for people, where we whales only and ever use names. What a strange way of speaking! What a great discovery, a conception that I had dreamed of!
‘I will help you,’ she told me.
A second star shot right down to the ocean following the fiery trail of the first. She wanted to help me – so, the humans had a way to convey the fluidity of acts, events, and states of being instead of freezing concepts hard and cold as ice, which they did in words that I had learned for their things such as boat, plastic, tattoo, and stungun. Therefore, there was a breath of a hope of a chance that they might be able to understand our orca language.
‘Help me,’ I repeated.
Gabi’s hand continued stroking my head. ‘Say that again! You’re asking me to help you, aren’t you?’
‘Help me.’
‘Help – is that right?’
‘Help, yes – help, help, help.’
‘Help, help, help – that is how an orca says help, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, help.’
‘Help – I wish I could say it like you say it. But a whale can’t speak like a person, either.’
Again, I asked for her help with a high-pitched cry of compassion that I lamented a human’s throat and lips could never duplicate.
‘I will help you,’ she said to me. ‘I’m so, so sorry for what we’ve done to you!’
Her belly started bouncing again as it had before, and she made more painful barking sounds. Her blue eyes filled with tears, which spattered onto my head like warm raindrops as she pressed her lips against my skin. It seemed that she needed to give the water of her body to me.
‘Yes, yes – please help me,’ I said. I like the soft, salty rain that fell down upon me.
‘Oh, Bobo, Bobo!’
‘Help me to kill.’
‘I love you.’
‘Help me to kill myself.’
A third star flared inside me. The heavens cast it down into my consciousness upon a miracle of sonance that reverberated through the whole of my being: Gabi’s low, lumpy but strangely lovely human voice somehow flowed into the golden voices of my mother and my grandmother. A single voice, as bright as angel fire, as loud as thunder, overpowered and then obliterated all the voices of darkness and doom that had tormented me. And for a single moment – only for a sliver of an instant of time – I quenged, for does not the essence of quenging lie in discovering life’s deeper and ever more mysterious unities?
And suddenly I knew what I had to do.
‘I must die,’ I told Gabi.
There could be no other way. How else could we whales live in pools that the humans had made? Alkurah, I thought, had lost much of her kindness, which had killed something beautiful within her. Zavijah had lost not just Navi but the very joy necessary to breathe and dream. Unukalhai had ruined his sanity, while Bellatrix had abandoned her very will to live. All had lost something vital of themselves, and so in some part had died.
As I must die, too – as I already had uncountable times in the fury of the maelstrom. Death, my grandmother now reminded me, reinforced by the implorations of Gabi and my mother, came to all things in every moment of time, for no one’s life could hold still any more than the waters of the ocean could stop flowing. There were, however, different ways to die. As Alkurah, Bellatrix and the others had done, one could unconsciously and reflexively react to the humans’ tortures – and so surrender up one’s soul.
A second way, as bright as the track of the star that had streaked down from the sky, also beckoned. Rather than reacting to external afflictions, a whale could act upon himself – and so choose which parts must perish and which might live. Was this not the way of the whale? Do not the Old Ones say this: to live, I die? Have not the greatest of my kind always found in the conscious letting go of the useless or harmful parts of the self a greater life?
How had the whales in this sad place forgotten this? A better question might be how they possibly could have remembered? And the best question of all, for my part, concerned those aspects of myself that I must either allow to wither and perish or must outright slay.
To begin with, I knew, I must give up my quest to quenge in these lifeless pools, for it had driven me into a desperate place through a sick fire more terrible than the lightning that had jolted out of the humans’ stunguns. I must go on without quenging at all – somehow. I must resign myself to sing with my family never again. My longing to swim free once more in the cool ocean must give way to an acceptance of tiny spaces, chlorine water, and concrete. Because the humans, not nature, had their way here, I must leave behind me what I knew as natural law.
I took a bitter solace from this decision to become both participant and primary instigator of my inevitable death. Only in this way – as incredibly difficult as it promised to be – could I become the creator of my new life. What, though, was I to create? Many songs and inspirations, I thought, went into the quickening of a young whale in the natural world: the wisdom of the Old Ones; the sweetness and succor of family; and always, a whale’s own will to be more. The Old Ones, however, dwelled in a place I could no longer reach, and so although I could hear the echoes of their wisdom, I could not understand its meaning. My family, far away, could not sing to me in any music that I could hear. All that remained to me in the world of the humans was for me to sing to myself a strange and new song.
I had only the slightest of intimations, as faint as the glow of a squid’s ink, of what this new composition of myself would sound like. To begin with, I must find my way to a sanity which had formerly seemed insane. Unukalhai had spoken truly in this after all. He was wrong, though, that I must drink in the madness of the human heart in the way I ate the lifeless fish they gave me. I must not become anything like the humans. I must decide for myself what I would call sane or not, and I must participate in only
those aspects of the world which deepened my being and exalted my life. And I must do all this according only to my sapience, my realization of the true, and my defending savagely what goodness remained to me. All else I must leave behind as a sand crab does too small of a shell.
In the immense open waters inside myself, I zanged a dreadful and marvelous shape swimming toward me. This, I sensed, was just my soul. How could I ever escape it? It knew what I seemed not to know – knew within its fiery heart that I should call upon my grandmother’s gift to protect me from a new danger that had arisen from the turbid deeps. An unexpected question now troubled me: if I could make myself anew, could I make myself into anything? How could I let the conceptions and the constraints of my fellow orcas bind me, to say nothing of the manias of man? Should I not only create for myself new ways to supplant the old, useless ones but perhaps even abandon the covenants themselves?
A murmuring of my mother’s old warning to me suggested that I did not have to answer this question immediately. I sensed that I remained still too young and unformed to know what I would permit myself to be and become and what I would not.
One thing did seem as clear to me as a narwhale’s birthing song: I must somehow live within the insanity of the human realm in a sane way. To do that, I must fight off the spiritual death that had touched the other whales. How, though, could I nurture and keep safe the new Arjuna I felt growing inside me?
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