I decided that I would take inspiration from the humans. Between their fragile bodies and the raw, quick, lovely touch of the natural world, they wore second skins composed of animal and plant fibers and the ubiquitous excrescence. Very well, then, I would don a second skin myself, made of the humans’ expectations, conceits, and delusions. I would hide from them. Deep inside, within the ocean of true life that they could never sound, I would keep safe and vital my soul.
The next day, with Gabi, Jordan, and Painted-Skin looking on, I performed my first feat.
8
Why is it that humans like to watch whales? What joy can they take in provoking us of the flipper and the fin to leap, twist, and race in circles around a small space of contained water? Is it that they wish they could swim so well and hope to learn from us? Or do they see in our strangeness a mystery in themselves that they struggle to grasp with the flailing fingers of their all-too-human minds?
Well, we whales like to watch humans. So it has been for eons, ever since the first humans hunted clams along the oceans’ beaches and ventured out into the white waves in search of crustaceans and fish. We continue watching and listening, off the coasts of the dark continents and the islands of ice, along the currents of the Sapphire Sea and the great deeps of pink, green, and purple coral. In no other part of the world, I thought, could whales watch humans as closely as we did at Sea Circus, which is what the two-leggeds seemed to call this place of scummy prison pools.
Every day, late in the morning and late in the afternoon, humans schooled together like herring and forced their bodies onto the half circle of metal chairs arrayed around the big pool. How loud they were in their constant brayings and barkings, like sea lions swarming upon a beach and fighting over patches of sand! How awkward they seemed in the bizarre jointing of their bodies, which twisted and contorted in order to fit the chairs’ cruel proportions! How passionately I pitied them! What would it be like, I wondered, to go through life in constant contact with hard, sharp surfaces that could bruise, tear, or pulp tender flesh? How onerous it must be – what an endless fight – simply to stand up against the crushing force of the earthy parts of the world! And how dangerous! If a human leaned just a little too far over his many-toed feet, he would fall down and smack hard against concrete, breaking bones and knocking out teeth – or sometimes even dying.
Curiously, over the months of sun and rain that followed my resolve to gain a new sanity, I witnessed only a few such mishaps. Most of the time, the humans moved in a careful and predictable manner, as if they had been rigidly trained to control their each and every motion. Out of the manifold ways in which they might rotate and bend their limbs and other parts, it seemed that they squeezed nearly infinite possibilities of kinesthetics into too tight a pool of actualities.
So it was with their behaviors. Considering the close proximity of human to human, I thought it curious how rarely they touched each other. At least, that was true of the adults. Most of their physical connection with others of their kind came in their prodding or moving their children with their hands, much as Painted-Skin had used his stungun to goad me. Twice I saw human adults use their hands to strike their children, slapping young faces and pummeling the twin knots of muscle that gather at the base of the human spine. Given all that had occurred since my capture, this desecration of innocents should not have shocked me, but it did. Why couldn’t the humans control their violent natures when they most needed to? They seemed to restrain themselves in so many other ways, for instance, rarely putting finger to tongue or into any orifice. Not once did I see any man, woman, or child caress each others’ genitals or mate.
Many other activities, however, remained to them. We whales trained them to slap their hands together in a thunderous staccato of sound that bounced off the waters of the big pool and to perform other easy feats. Although most of the time the humans damped the power and range of their vocalizations as they did their bodies’ movements, we could get them to whistle, ululate, and scream just by splashing flippersful of water upon them and soaking them from head to toe.
The first feat that I performed for my onlookers consisted of nothing more than a great breach from out of the big pool’s shallow waters, followed by a pirouette, a moment of flying through the human cries that filled the air, and a splash so meteoric that the many humans sitting close to me screamed to find themselves drenched. Over the passing months, with Gabi modeling various movements with her pale, lithe body, I elaborated upon this feat. In the Moon of the Silver Salmon I managed a double pirouette, and in the Moon of Storms, I turned about mid-air in my first triple. Day after day I leaped and rolled and listened in wonderment to the noises of humans who came to watch us whales.
In the pool of blood that had spurted from my broken head, I had resolved that I must live a new life in new ways. I tried to fulfill this promise to myself. I regained something of my old relish for the small joys of life that the humans could not subtract from existence. So many joys there really were! The water droplets flung up into air as I hung suspended in space gathered in the light pouring down from our world’s star and fractured it into dancing rainbows of reds, yellows, greens, and blazing blues. The glass display above the big pool shimmered with human-made colors and images that fascinated me. New sounds – such as the giggling of human babies and the tinkling of wind chimes – pleased me as well. Rain and sunlight stroked my skin, and the air currents carried to my mouth the taste of puffy, white clouds that billowed far up into the cerulean sky. And always, there was water: that singular, superluminal substance that buoyed up my body and composed its being – even as it did the bodies of Gabi and other humans who joined us whales in performing feats in the big pool.
It astonished me to discover that I actually liked doing feats. How else could I exercise my muscles and divert myself from the humming, black boredom? How I reveled in moving my body in new and challenging ways! The perfect coordination of flippers, fin, and tail into a leap into unknown possibilities hinted at even greater synergies of the soul that dwelled somewhere within me.
What a shock to realize that none of my newfound powers over myself would have flowered but for the touch of the humans and their despicable hands! How strange that was and how strange humans really were! How had they conceived of capturing whales and forcing us to do feats in the first place? No whale would ever think to do such a thing, even if we had the means to do it. In the very originality of the humans’ iniquities I found a dreadful magnificence. Could it be, I wondered, that their endless and disturbing creativity welled up from the same deep sea that moved inside of me?
It was during the Moon of Breaking Ice that I conceived of inveigling Electra to join me in performing. The feat that we devised was simple: Electra and I raced across the big pool together taking turns in leaping over each other’s backs. We called this ‘The Rope’, after the strands of excrescence that the humans twist into a single, sheeny strand used to bind and connect many of their things. The humans, not so slow-witted as my family had once supposed, called our feat by the same name. Whenever Electra and I wove our bodies into a rope, our onlookers clapped their hands together with exceptional vigor.
This success encouraged me to devise a much more complex and difficult feat. In this, I requested the aid of Unukalhai, who seemed only too glad to oblige me. Gabi, too, joined us in performing, for her actions – and reactions – were crucial to the delicious frisson of danger that I wished to evoke in the humans watching us. It took a full three moons to train Gabi. And then one day, in Moon of the Midnight Sun, we debuted our feat: while Unukalhai waited at the curve of the pool nearest the onlookers, I used my face to push Gabi down deep into the water – so deep that I knew the waiting humans could barely see us. There, in the warm, blue gloom, I dove down ever farther beneath her. She carefully planted her bare feet on my face, digging her toes into my skin. Then I swam upward. I drove my tail against the water with such force it felt as if my spine might break. Up, up, up, and suddenly I
breached in an explosion of both whale and human into the water-dappled air. For a moment, Gabi and I flew as one.
Just before the apogee of my leap, she pushed off from me, launching herself even farther into space. While I splashed down nearly in the same spot from which I had left the water, Gabi’s arc carried her up and out toward Unukalhai. It pleased me to hear the onlookers fall quiet and suck in breaths almost in unison. It pleased me more to zang their trepidation as Gabi plunged head down straight toward Unukalhai’s now-opened jaws. Impossible, it seemed, that she could avoid impaling herself on Unukalhai’s glistening white teeth and perhaps being swallowed whole. At the last instant, however, Unukalhai closed his mouth and turned his head aside as if he could not bear to harm a human. Gabi dove into the water that Unukalhai had just vacated. Unukalhai swam up beneath her and took her onto his back as if he had rescued her from drowning. While she threw her arms around him and pressed her lips to his skin, Unukalhai swam about the pool with Gabi astride him.
The humans witnessing this feat stood up from their metal chairs and clapped their hands together for a long time. Some of them howled like wolves. They must have perceived in Gabi the same virtue that I appreciated: that as clumsy as most humans seemed to be most of the time, occasionally a rare, daring few of them could move with an astonishing coordination and grace.
The following dawn, we whales gathered together in the big pool. A soft rain dimpled the water. The schools of humans had long since abandoned their chairs, and only a single walrus-shaped female named Justice prowled the concrete beach above us. It felt good to be alone together, or nearly so. Of course, because the humans understood nothing of what we said, in a very real way, we were always alone.
Alkurah, who still nursed an ire that I could feel like an underwater current flowing from her to me, lazed about the far curve of the pool, and she sent soft sounds rippling through the water:
‘I have decided to speak to you again after all,’ she told me.
‘I am glad,’ I replied, ‘though I wonder why?’
‘You were so very kind to sing to my sister. And I have repaid you with resentment.’
‘Yes, you have been angry at me since our first meeting.’
‘I have been angry at everything since I came to this place. And angry most of all at myself because I have failed to keep my family from harm.’
‘Perhaps the humans,’ I said, ‘will return Navi to Zavijah.’
‘No, they will not. Now my family has no babies! How I want another! How I wanted you! My blood was up, but your phallus was not – that is, not up inside where I needed it to be.’
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘I wanted you, too. I still do.’
‘I want you to want me more than your reason wants other things.’
‘That is not a whale’s way.’
‘Yes, but it is our way to wish that it might be so.’
She swam a slow circle around the pool and made her way closer to me.
‘It is strange to me,’ she said, ‘that it has taken me so long to thank you for giving my sister a little comfort. I think Unukalhai is right that I must be a little mad.’
We met eye to blue eye through the azure-tinged waters, and we exchanged a moment of hope that we had not fallen hopelessly mad.
‘We all received extra fish today,’ she said to me, ‘so I should also thank you for that.’
‘I am glad your belly is pleased.’
‘It would please me more to know why you do what you do.’
‘And what do I do?’
‘You do much more than the humans want you to – you, who at first would do nothing.’
‘I like doing feats – it relieves the boredom.’
‘A part of an answer,’ she said, ‘is no answer at all.’
‘I like creating new feats,’ I told her, ‘because in this way, I, and not the humans, am the orchestrator of my own motions.’
‘That is still only part of your reason, is it not? I think you like provoking the humans, as you do me.’
I laughed at this. ‘I would love to persuade you and your sisters to join us in provoking the humans.’
Unukalhai and Electra glided on either side of me; we had become closer over the last few months. As if in consideration of what I had said, Salm and Zavijah swam nearer to me, as did the perpetually cowed Menkalinan. Although Bellatrix floated in dead silence across the pool, I felt sure she was listening.
‘But why, Arjuna?’ Alkurah said to me. ‘Beyond doing a few leaps and eating the fish the humans give us, why pay any mind to them at all?’
‘Before you were captured, did you not pay mind to the winds and currents?’
‘I do not like to remember how things were before we were captured.’
‘Here,’ I said, ‘we swim in currents of the humans’ making.’
‘It would seem that it is not enough for you just to swim – you insist on flying right out of the pools, don’t you?’
For a moment, I took refuge in the same silence that enveloped Bellatrix.
‘And even flying is not enough, no? I think you would change the currents themselves.’
‘You are very perceptive, Mother Alkurah.’
‘What I do not understand is why you would attempt the impossible?’
‘There are at least two reasons,’ I said. ‘It may be that the impossible is not only possible but inevitable. And even if it is not, the attempt by itself can lead into a whole sea of possibilities.’
‘O I wish that were so!’ she whistled out. Then she said, ‘And what is your second reason?’
‘I have decided to become sane.’
‘O I wish that even more!’
‘We must all become sane.’
‘Yes, yes – but how will we do that, Arjuna?’
She aimed a zang of compassion at Zavijah, who many months later still shrieked out maddening wails each night over the loss of Navi. Alkurah also wondered aloud if Bellatrix had enough wit left even to wail about her own plight, and she chided Unukalhai for taking too great a pleasure whenever Gabi sailed toward his opened mouth: stark proof that sadism had truly unbalanced him.
‘We are whales, are we not?’ I said to Alkurah. ‘Have we not survived for eons? How should we let the humans take from us what is most vital to our kind?’
‘Tell me more,’ she said, swimming still closer to me. ‘Why do you really want my sisters and me to join in your feats?’
Enough of her original pique at me remained in her voice to transform her question into a demand. This irritated me. Who was this whale from the Emerald Sea to demand of me anything? She might have been Mother Alkurah, but she was not my mother – and certainly not my grandmother.
And then I breached and breathed in the coolness of the rain-sweetened morning, and my own anger gentled. I remembered my resolve to remake myself. If my attempt at self-creation was to have any teeth at all, then mustn’t I require of myself much, much more than the snapping up of the first emotion that swam my way? Shouldn’t I be kind to a tormented orca whom I could feel struggling to be kind to me?
With such thoughts in mind, I moved closer and brushed up against her. Her soft skin left an exquisite shudder of delight upon my own. She was a proud matriarch, and I must respect her. She was a beautiful, fertile female, and I must remind her that she had been called into life to give more life.
‘If we all do feats together,’ I said to her, ‘if we create them ourselves as a family composes a song that keeps everyone together even the stormiest of seas, then the humans will wonder how we knew to do this. They will listen. And in listening to the yearning of our hearts, they will set us free.’
I listened to the beating of Alkurah’s heart, and I felt her anger for me softening, like an organ no longer distressed by too great a pressure of blood.
‘You are very strange,’ she said to me. ‘Stranger than the midnight stars – and as beautiful.’
She zanged me deep inside where I held in the world’s br
eath.
‘How I would love to be free!’ she said.
A strange idea came to me, by way of Gabi’s lips. If a human being had showered tenderness upon an unfathomable whale such as I, then surely we whales of disparate clans and kinds could do the same.
‘I will help you,’ I said to Alkurah. I cast my voice at the others. ‘Zavijah and Unukalhai, too – all of us. We must all help each other.’
She pressed her head against mine, and sang to me a soft, glorious song. Then her sisters Salm and Zavijah came up close and touched their faces to me as well. Baby Electra squeezed in between them. Menkalinan and Unukalhai swam over to us. Even Bellatrix joined us there.
‘Let us sing one of the old songs,’ Alkurah said.
‘But I do not know your kind’s songs!’ Baby Electra chirped out.
‘We will teach you,’ Alkurah said.
‘I do not know your clan’s harmonies,’ Unukalhai said.
‘Then listen – and sing with us.’
As we all gathered around, she began singing in her clear, gentle voice. The morning warmed with the sun’s rising, and the pool brightened with golden rays and the sonance of our voices. It was an hour of urgent touching and soft understanding passed from flute to flute and skin to skin. Many times, Alkurah called out the song’s refrain to me in glowing chords of hope and inviolate promises. She gave me the highest and most radiant of her music, but in the unitive way of the whales, she sang to the others, too, joining the many to the one:
‘We will move as you move, think as you think, breathe as you breathe, dream as you dream.’
In the opening outward of the quiet morning into the blaze of another day, we dreamed together the oldest and greatest of all dreams.
9
It would not be accurate to say that after this the other whales and I became a family, for a family shares a future together as well as blood, and swims always with a single purpose. All of us, I knew, in longing for freedom, envisioned a return to the old life and the old ways in the various seas that had given us birth. We wanted to mingle and mate in screaming ecstasies with the whales of clans we remembered all too poignantly. Even so, in the new accord that flowed from Alkurah and me (and from and to the others), we became like a family. It had suddenly become unthinkable for any of us to rake another with bared teeth or to touch another in anger. We worked very hard on perfecting new feats and directing our anger toward a common purpose: persuading the humans to set us free.
Idiot Gods, The Page 15