One morning, with little yellow birds chattering in the trees above the big pool, Jordan walked onto the concrete beach and made a call that sounded like a rumble of thunder. Gabi moved over to him. I swam in slow circles about the water. I had to concentrate to hear what they were saying.
‘You’ve done wonders with the orcas,’ he said to her. ‘Particularly with Bobo.’
I knew those silly, plosive sounds of Bo-Bo too well. Jordan was talking about me; it seemed he always wanted to talk about me.
‘Thank you,’ Gabi said, ‘but it’s Bobo who has done most of the work. At times, I think he’s training me.’
Jordan made the peculiar rolling, coughing sound that often accompanies the upcurving of the humans’ mouths. ‘That’s funny,’ he said.
‘No, really. We were practicing the Rocket when Kimoku came up to watch. When he opened his mouth that first time, I thought I was going to pee my suit.’
She made a noise similar to Jordan’s, but the corners of her mouth turned up only slightly. I zanged in her the quickened beating of her heart, which might have been excitement or apprehension.
‘I swear that Bobo called him over,’ she said. ‘It was as if they’d planned the whole thing.’
‘You really think these whales are that intelligent?’
‘He talks to me – I’m sure he does. I just don’t understand what he’s saying.’
‘Pet owners think their dogs talk to them, too.’
‘But they do!’
Again Jordan made the coughing noise and the curving of his mouth.
‘There was a Border Collie, Chaser,’ he said, ‘that understood a thousand commands to fetch various things. How many do you think Bobo understands?’
Gabi turned to look at me. ‘We shouldn’t even be having this discussion here. I don’t know what he understands.’
‘Come on, Gabi!’
‘It’s different with these whales than with dogs, particularly with Bobo. It’s not so much how many words he understands but the way that he understands them.’
‘I know how much you love him – don’t you think you might be projecting?’
‘I’m not projecting! Look at him – really look! There’s a person there!’
Jordan’s eyes rolled up for a moment as the lids covering them pulled back. Then his head dropped down, and he used his marvelously multifarious hand to rub his eyes.
‘Now you’re anthropomorphizing,’ he said to her. ‘Whatever it takes.’
‘Yeah, whatever it takes – like starvation and stun guns.’
‘It worked, didn’t it? Isn’t he a lot more cooperative now?’
‘I doubt if we had anything to do with that.’
‘Isn’t he happier, too?’
‘I don’t know! I wish I could just ask him.’
Now Jordan’s head turned back and forth.
‘Listen, no one will ever talk to a whale, even if whales could talk, which they can’t.’
‘How can you be so sure? Helen Agar thinks they can.’
‘Is that the linguist you met at the conference?’
‘Yeah, we’ve been in touch. I told her how Bobo is trying to speak to me, all his sounds. She mentioned coming here and studying the orcas when we’re not working with them.’
Jordan’s fingers stroked his jaw. ‘That’s actually not such a bad idea – we can use that.’
‘Is that all you can think of?’
‘Listen, you’re paid to train the whales, and I’m paid to make sure you keep getting paid.’
‘But you can’t just turn a chance to do important science into a publicity stunt!’
‘Do you know how much revenue has increased since the flying Bobo started launching you toward Kimoku’s throat? We can always use good publicity.’
Gabi said nothing as she looked down at the pool and we gazed at each other.
‘And we can really use Bobo’s semen now,’ Jordan continued. ‘Since he’s become famous, all the ocean parks are calling us. His million-dollar penis is probably worth more like ten million.’
Now it was Gabi’s turn to perform the eye-rolling feat. She said, ‘We haven’t been able to get Bobo to have an erection – I don’t know why.’
‘Well, keep trying.’
Gabi stared at Jordan. Her eyes seemed to harden, like beached jellyfish drying out in the sun. ‘Then should I tell Helen Agar we’re interested?’
‘Let me think about that. There’s a lot to consider here, and we should talk about it at length. Are you free for dinner on Saturday?’
I have said that I resolved to hide from the humans, but the more I moved through the water with Gabi, the more I found myself wanting to show myself to her – at least, to show the bright, enthusiastic parts. The dark thing that I had discovered during my worst moments of madness I swallowed down deep inside where no breath of air might give it greater life. How should I want Gabi even to glimpse this dread energy when I did not dare to behold it myself? And yet, I knew that someday I must. I sensed that I would never be able to speak to the soul-shadowed humans with a totality of truth until I first embraced the totality of myself.
And I did want to speak to these cruel sun-walkers – how badly I wanted this! Had I not deserted my first family in the cold seas of the far north so that I might show humans what they were doing to the watery parts of the world that they could not perceive? Would it not mock my family’s love for me if I abandoned my efforts to fulfill this purpose?
Even as the old call renewed its keening inside me, I realized that the vaporous notion of talking with the human animals had condensed into a single stream of desire to speak with a single human person, and that was Gabi. The more that I cavorted with her through the waters of the big pool – as we exchanged murmurs of meaning and looked into each other’s eyes – the more certain I became that she was a person. I had asked for her help, and the gentleness of her breath and the knowingness of her hands had touched much of my diffidence away. She seemed to assure me that as long as she watched over me, she would do everything in her power to lift up my spirit, with hope and zest, even as I carried her on leap after leap up into the sun-filled sky. She spoke soft words to me, so many, many human words. I understood more and more of them. I knew that in some deep way she had come to trust me as I did her. I felt her trying to uncover things that caused her pain. In the plaintiveness of her voice, no less than the sounds of the word ‘help’, I knew that she was asking for my help, too.
On a day of storm and thunder, when the dark clouds had finally pulled back to reveal the ocean of blueness above, Gabi walked onto the concrete beach accompanied by a human female whose like I had never seen. So tall she was – nearly as tall as Painted-Skin and Jordan! And so erect her long, slender body, as if the line between foot and head connected the earth directly to the heavens! And yet, there was a paradox in her posture: Although she stood straighter than the slouching humans I had encountered, she seemed to do so more naturally and with less effort, as if the crushing earth force had no power over her – or rather, as if she had decided not to allow it to weigh her down. How lightly she moved toward my pool, with what grace, like a song on the wind! Of all the marvels of this unusual woman, however, none compared with the marvel of her skin, its rich, lovely color. The human hides I had seen were as creamy as pus, as yellow as dead teeth, as brown as excrement, as pink as bloody lungs. But, oh, this woman’s glorious covering! So black it was – almost a pure and seamless black. In the air’s almost liquid radiance, her naked shoulders and arms shone like obsidian, like the black pearls of the palpulve oysters, like the moonlit waters of the Arctic Ocean at midnight – and more, like the black skin of beautiful orcas such as my mother and my sister Turais and mighty Alnitak.
‘Hello, Bobo,’ she said to me, moving over to the edge of pool and kneeling down. ‘I know that is not your real name, so please forgive me. You can call me … squeak shrill trill whistle click!’
I stopped swimming my lazy circles, st
unned into motionlessness. What had I just heard? The black-skinned woman had just called out a cacophony of sounds that were a mockery of orca speech – or were they? Nothing about this woman’s eyes mocked; rather they played.
‘Oh, so you want to try to speak Orca, do you,’ I said to her. ‘How sorry I am for you!’
Her eyes sparkled like stars. I swam as close to her as I could. I loved her eyes. Black as the dazzling substance of space they were, and their bottomless black centers danced with little lights. They danced with my eyes, inviting me to play. I realized that something within me urged me to swim deep into the humans’ eyes (some of them), for they seemed sharper than a whale’s eyes and full of thoughts that a whale would never think. I reveled in their proportions, the way the twin orbs of luminosity dominate the human face.
‘Seriously,’ the black-skinned female finally said to me, tapping her chest, ‘my name is Helen Agar. I would love to know your real name, for I find it difficult to call you Bobo.’
I could not say why I felt a desire to tell her my true name, but I did. I called it out to her, in the song of glory that my mother had taught me. Helen listened, with her marvelous black eyes. And, I thought, with her heart.
‘I would like to try to talk to you,’ she said to me. ‘I know you can talk; I know that you and Kimoku communicated together the idea of your famous stunt with Gabi.’
‘I want to talk to you!’ I called back to her. ‘But why is it that you humans understand nothing of what we whales say?’
‘If it is all right with you,’ she said, still kneeling across from me, ‘I would like to try to teach you some words of English. And I hope you will try to teach your Orca words to me.’
‘Perhaps I can teach you,’ I said to her, ‘as I taught Gabi the word for help.’
‘Will you help me, beautiful whale? And let me help you?’
The Helen woman had made the sound for help! She wanted to help me – or needed my help. Would I do as she asked? Yes, I cried out to her, yes, yes – help!
Two days later, she returned to the big pool followed by Painted-Skin, Golden-Hair, and Gabi, who carried boxes of things onto the concrete beach. Gabi went off and came back with a big bucket of fish. She stood by the side of the pool with Helen.
‘Will you play a game with me?’ Helen asked me.
It was rare when I had the big pool to myself, and I was enjoying my relative freedom to swim where I wanted. I decided that I wanted to swim over to Helen.
‘This is how the game will work,’ she explained to me. From one of the boxes, she withdrew an object that I recognized, whose human name I knew.
‘This is a pinecone,’ she told me. ‘P-i-n-e-c-o-n-e. I am going to throw it out into the pool, and you are to bring it back to me.’
Her arm drew back, then snapped forward. The pinecone flew in an arc over my head. I could tell from the splash exactly where it hit the water.
‘Can you bring it to me, Bobo?’
At the utterance of my name, Gabi blew her whistle, as she often did when she wished me to perform one feat or another. I knew well enough what Helen was asking me to do. However, given the circumstances, I did not want to do it.
‘I told you,’ Gabi said to Helen. ‘It’s the fish – Bobo gave up working for rewards months ago. He considers that beneath his dignity.’
‘You did tell me that,’ Helen said, ‘and I should have listened. But Jordan insisted on my training Bobo his way: one trick, one treat.’
‘That’s how the other trainers and other orcas work, but Bobo and I have a special arrangement.’
‘Well, I would like to have the same arrangement. Do you suppose it would be all right if we took the fish away?’
‘Sure, but Jordan said he’d stop by to see how things are going.’
‘Then why don’t we hope that by the time he does, things are going quite well?’
I watched as Painted-Skin carried the bucket of stinking fish away. Soon enough, I would eat another meal of clotted, dead meat. I did not wish my obligatory eating, however, to depend on which feats I chose to do or not do.
‘Let’s try again,’ Helen said. ‘Can you bring me the pinecone?’
I did not wait for Gabi to blow her whistle. I swam to the center of the pool, scooped up the pinecone, and returned to drop it on the concrete beach by Helen’s feet.
‘Very good! Now I’m going to tell you the names of a few more things.’
One by one, she removed various objects from the boxes, named them, and threw them out into the pool: Bottle. Can. Kleenex box. Ball. Stick. Pen. Apple. Tape dispenser. Notebook. Pushpin. Knife. Fork. Spoon.
The names of some of these objects I had long since learned in similar naming games I had played with the first humans I had encountered in the bay. Most names, however, were new to me.
‘All right,’ Helen said, ‘can you bring me the apple?’
I turned, swam, and brought her the apple.
‘Can – can you bring me the can?’
I brought her the can.
‘Stick, Bobo, s-t-i-c-k.’
I retrieved that piney, bark-covered object as well.
‘Now ball. B-a-l-l.’
I did not move.
‘Pushpin – can you find the pushpin, or is it too small for you?’
One zang of sonar would have sufficed to locate the tiny bit of the pushpin floating behind me, but I did not want to take it into my mouth.
‘How about the candle?’ Helen asked me.
I found the candle, and gave it into her hand.
‘Very good – now the jacket. J-a-c-k-e-t.’
For a while, she called out names to me, and sometimes I swam through the clutter of objects floating in an ugly mass on the pool’s surface and seized a specific thing, and sometimes I did not. The game went on and on: Newspaper. Frisbee. Bookmark. Fan. Bag. Toothbrush. Toothpick. Toothpaste tube. Wallet. Plate. Bowl. Cup. Tongs. Socks. CD. Balloon …
After I had retrieved a cantaloupe, I heard Gabi say to Helen, ‘This isn’t exactly a rigorous, double-blind experiment is it?’
Helen’s eyes lit up with what I took to be amusement, and she said, ‘I must tell you a secret, Gabi. I think we have liked and trusted each other from the first time we met, so I know that you will keep what I am about to say to yourself.’
‘I promise,’ Gabi said.
‘Good. Then please know that while I intend to do as much good science as I can with the orcas, that is not my primary purpose.’ She drew in a breath through her lovely, flared black nose and looked at me. ‘I would flush every well-received paper that I have ever written down the toilet in exchange for finding a way to talk to these people.’
Then she slapped hands with Gabi, and they wrapped their arms around each other like two octopi entangling themselves in their tentacles.
Later in the day, when the white clouds dappling the sky had grown gray and thick, Jordan appeared. I heard him say: ‘How’s my favorite flying whale doing?’
Helen held a board to which was attached a piece of white paper covered with little black marks like the legs of insects. She looked down at the paper, and said, ‘We have tested Bobo on 484 objects. He has successfully identified 71 of them.’
‘Not bad for a day’s work, Big Boy!’ Jordan called out to me.
He bent down and reached across the water to bounce his hand on top of my head. As I always did when he touched me, I restrained the urge to bite it off.
‘Not bad,’ he said, standing up to turn toward Helen, ‘but not very good. That’s slightly less than a 15% accuracy rate.’
‘What were you hoping for?’ Helen said to him.
‘Well, Chaser, the Border Collie, scored better than 90% on more than a thousand named toys.’
‘Yes, but Chaser did not learn all those names in a few hours.’
‘Then I should be proud of my little whale.’
‘It seems that if he hears a name a single time, he memorizes it immediately.’
&n
bsp; ‘Some names, apparently.’
‘I am sure he will do better as time goes on.’
‘All right, I’ll give you until tomorrow to get him up to a 100%.’ Jordan made the rolling, coughing sound, which in him seemed more unpleasant than it did in other humans. ‘I’m joking! Take as much time as you need. Why don’t we circle up again in a few more days and see how things are going?’
After he had walked off, Helen stood looking down at her paper. She said, ‘This is a little odd. Bobo did not identify the toothbrush or the toothpaste tube, but he retrieved the toothpick, which must be much harder to locate.’
‘Here, may I see that?’ Gabi said.
Helen gave the board and paper to her.
‘Oh, my God!’ she said. ‘I kind of knew there was something strange going on, but I didn’t quite know that I knew, if you know what I mean.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, look, all the objects he retrieved are wood, paper, leather, fruit, or other natural substances. Everything he ignored is made of plastic.’
Helen moved close to Gabi and re-examined the paper.
‘All right,’ she said, ‘can you clear the water so that we might start over again?’
I wondered why Painted-Skin and Golden-Hair used nets attached to long poles to scoop up the many objects from the pool. Was the silly game over?
‘All right, my friend,’ Helen said, reaching into one of the boxes, ‘let us see if you can improve upon your slightly less than 15%.’
Again Helen named objects to me: Block. Bead. Amber. Fruit Loop. Floor tile. Scrabble tile. Egg carton. Jeans. Paper airplane. Celery. Yarn. Tangerine …
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