And one by one, as she repeated the names and asked me to retrieve them, I brought the objects back to her. I liked this game a little better, for none of the objects was of plastic. How should I ever want to touch my mouth to anything made of sickening, slick, dead plastic?
‘He got them all!’ Gabi cried out. ‘I can’t wait to see Jordan’s face when I tell him!’
Helen said something to Painted-Skin and Golden-Hair. They went away, leaving Gabi and her alone with me.
‘Perhaps we should not tell him so soon,’ Helen said. ‘Jordan seems to be overburdened with numbers such as percentages and dollar amounts. I would first like to see how Bobo does with abstract nouns.’
‘How are you going to do that? You can’t bring out a box of love and start throwing things like affection, endearment, and friendship into the pool.’
‘You are forgetting yourself,’ Helen said. ‘You have already taught Bobo the word for the abstraction help, and I believe he has given us in return the orca sound for that concept.’
‘But that might have been a fluke. Bobo and I had a special connection that day.’
‘Then we must try to ensure that we have the same depth of connection on other days. Why don’t we begin again on Monday and see how Bobo reacts to music?’
It surprised me how sad I felt when Helen went away soon after that. Would I ever see her again, I wondered? I understood well enough that she had tried to teach me the humans’ language. I hoped that my lack of progress – and my failure to teach her almost anything of my language – had not discouraged her.
The next day, during our performance of feats for the schools of humans that crowded the metal chairs, there occurred a disturbing incident that touched off zangs of new understanding as to how the humans communicated with each other. Just after Gabi had dared death yet again in Unukalhai’s jaws, a human female very close to the big pool cried out what at first seemed to be an alarm. She stood up holding a baby away from her big chest with stiffened arms. A brown splotch of what seemed to be excrement besmeared her white shirt. The tension of her opened, squared mouth thinned her whitened lips as if they were rubber bands. Her thick eyebrows pulled together and downward, which made her glowering eyes narrow. She stared straight ahead at her baby as a wolf might regard a snow rabbit.
‘No, no, no!’ she called out from the mouth of her uglified face as she began shaking her baby in front of her. ‘Bad, bad, bad!’
Even as another women close to her began screaming the word Stop!, I came into a full realization of something that had been gnawing at me beneath my conscious awareness for quite a while: the humans used their faces to talk to each other! It was as if they could not hold themselves inside, as their babies could not contain their excretions. The humans leaked out their emotions through their mouths and muscles in a most indecent way.
Later that day, in my second round of doing feats, I studied the many expressions of the many humans who watched me: the curved lips, pushed-up cheeks, and crows’ feet wrinkles at the corners of the eyes that I associated with happiness; the flabby lips and wrinkled nose of disgust; the raised upper eyelids and pulled-back lips of the face of fear.
A couple of days later, these new insights facilitated the language games that Helen and I played with each other. With the sun hanging over the grounds like the big orange ball that Helen had cast into the pool at our first meeting, she and Gabi arrived with more boxes of things. Helen removed them and named them for me: Computer. Converter cable. Diffuser. Mixer. Monitor. Filter. Amp. Headphones. Hydrophone. Only one of these – the hydrophone – did she set into the water.
After a while, with the sun’s orange fire heating up the morning, she said, ‘All right, my beautiful one, are you ready?’
Waves of pounding sonance suddenly filled the pool. I was so astonished that I almost leaped from the water, for the sound issued from beneath the water and nearly forced me from it with its savage power. From the hydrophone, of course, it came. The cruel, cunning humans made things that spoke beneath the water even as we whales speak.
‘How do you like this music?’ Helen said to me.
Crashing chords and complicated rhythms that felt like a dozen kinds of fish thrashing inside my belly pierced straight through me. Various themes, as jagged as a shark’s teeth, tore into one another, interacted for a moment, and then gave birth to new expressions which incorporated the old. Brooding harmonies collided, moved apart, and then invited in a higher order of chaos. Such a brutal beauty! So much blood, exaltation, and splendor in the humans’ music!
‘O music!’ I cried out. I breached, and spoke right into Helen’s face. ‘Music! Music! Music!’
‘Can you say that again, lovely one?’ Helen asked me. ‘Music.’
‘Music!’ I called back to her. I had to remember to hold my sounds to a precise pitch, pattern, and tempo. The humans, I reminded myself, could not comprehend variation or context in their utterances, or so I thought.
‘M-u-s-i-c!’
‘Music – I’ve got it!’ Helen said. She made the human happy face, which her eyes reinforced by dancing out little twinkles of light. ‘Listen, my bright one.’
From the hydrophone burst the very sounds for the word music that I had just spoken! How had she reproduced them? How clever the humans were, so impossibly and beautifully clever!
‘Music,’ Helen said to me.
‘Music,’ I called back to her.
‘Music, music, music!’ Gabi shouted out.
‘Music, music, music – sing me more!’
A new music flowed from the hydrophone, delighting the very water. So different from the first it was, and yet so alike, for within its simpler melodies and purer beauty dwelled an immense affirmation of life. A great chorus of human voices sang of this. It was almost as if the Old Ones were calling to me.
O the stars! O the sea! They sang of joy!
Without Gabi asking me, I dove down into the sound-sweetened water, and then breached in a double-twisting back flip. I swam over to Gabi and Helen. I cried out to them: ‘Joy!’
And Helen said to me, ‘Joy?’
‘Joy, joy, j-o-y!’ I called back.
‘The music was Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.’
‘Yes, yes – joy!’
Helen clapped hands with Gabi, entangled her in her arms, and pressed her mouth to Gabi’s face. The corners of her lips pulled almost straight upward into the crows’ feet wrinkles of black skin at her temples. Her black, black eyes radiated joy, joy, joy.
‘I did some research,’ Helen said to Gabi. ‘In the bay where Bobo was captured. I was told that he likes Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.’
I did not understand most of the words that Helen had just spoken. To return her to the day’s play, I drew in a mouthful of water and sprayed it over her.
‘W-a-t-e-r,’ I enunciated.
She bent down and gathered up some of the pool’s water in the cup of her hand.
‘Water,’ she said. Then she sent one of our orcas’ sets of sounds for water streaming out of the hydrophone.
‘Water, water, water!’
‘Water, water, water!’
O, the stars! O joy! I had finally taught the humans to speak!
I sprayed Helen again. I watched as she took water from her beautiful, black hand into her mouth. Then she spat a cascade of sparkling droplets over me.
‘How does it feel to be sprayed, my playful one?’
‘Spray,’ I said, dousing her again. ‘Spray me.’
Again, Helen sprayed me.
‘Spray me,’ she said.
It is possible that no other whale in all of the ages of the world had ever sprayed so huge a mouthful of water over the head of a human being.
‘Spray me!’ I said to her.
‘Spray me!’
‘Spray! Spray! Spray!’
‘Oh, my God!’ Gabi shouted out. ‘Now he’s working on the verbs!’
Helen, Gabi, a
nd I played together for the rest of the morning, until it came time to do feats for the daily onlookers. I learned many new words: Swim. Cough. Laugh. Blink. Flex. Walk. Breach. Trust. Friendship. Cry. Of course, the meaning of some of the words tried to escape me like darting schools of silvery fish. I felt unsure, for instance, of the difference between fun and joy. Even so, I thought, it was a very good beginning, certainly the best day since my capture and one of the most auspicious ones of my life.
‘All right,’ Gabi said to Helen, ‘I have to get ready for the show.’
‘Goodbye, my huge one,’ Helen said to me. ‘I will be back tomorrow.’
‘Goodbye,’ I said to her. And then, ‘Help me.’
‘Of course I am going to help you.’
‘Help joy.’
‘What? Help you joy?’
I also found it difficult to distinguish between joy and freedom, at least in the human formulations of these conceptions. I said to Helen, and to Gabi, ‘Free me – free all of us. Help us to become joyously free!’
I could not tell at first if they understood me. Helen’s face remained as immobile as a great pillar of black basalt rising up from the sea. No emotion that I could detect seeped out of her. Then water filled her eyes at nearly the same moment that Gabi’s eyes also overflowed. Tears, the humans called this salty substance. They wept for me! So great was the pressure of my heart just then that I would have done the same, but whales weep not.
‘Yes, my wild one,’ Helen said to me. ‘That is why I am really here. I will help you to become free.’
The sun took its time in burning itself cool that day, and the moon rose like a silver dreaming in the east. Then the sun blazed red and full, while the moon lost pieces of itself to the devouring sun, which flared orange against a sky of cobalt glass, then glowed white through a gathering mist and sometimes yellow, at noon when the onlookers cheered Unukalhai, Electra, and me. And all this time, Gabi and Helen spoke to me as I did to them.
We did not speak well or clearly. Because the humans could not hear many of the sounds I formed, Helen had to use her machines instead of her ears to record them. We made a little covenant: as soon as I understood (or thought I did) a simple word of the humans’ language, I would adopt my orca speech, pruning all complexity, context, and nuance into the simplest of sounds that might enfold my meaning. I might have hoped to speak to a clam in this way. The language I thus produced for Gabi and Helen could not have been called anything like true orca speech, but it was all I had to give them.
In a way that I could not comprehend, Helen’s machines drank in the flow of rudimentary sounds and somehow excreted human words that correlated with mine – usually but not always the same human words whose meanings I had tried to enfold in my clumsy little compositions. It vexed me that these two humans could understand my utterances (all but a few of them) only through Helen’s machines. Why couldn’t we always speak flute to blood, mouth to mind, heart to heart? Why must the humans mediate nearly all of their existence through their tools and machines?
As little as Helen and Gabi could make out of my speech directly, with those horrifically convoluted flaps of flesh that they called ears, I found myself getting a better and better grip upon their speech. The more words that I learned, the more I could learn, for with each new suggestion of meaning came context which invited in the meaning of new words. For some reason that I could not fathom, it seemed that the humans divided their most important conceptions into two classes of words, called nouns and verbs. I could not be sure of this, however, for it seemed that many words could be used both nounily and verbily. The order in which humans arranged their words – linearly! – like plastic beads on one of their hideous necklaces, seemed to matter. I had to continually remind myself, for instance, that pricking a finger and fingering a prick meant two entirely different things. My forgetting of the primitiveness and constraints of Gabi’s and Helen’s language led to many confusions.
One dark night, when the great white shark of time had completely swallowed up the moon and Helen stood tending her machines, Gabi sat at the pool edge dangling her legs in the water. Unusually (for her), her body bent in the curve of a slump, and she held her hand over her eyes. She seemed to have fallen into the same sort of motionlessness that usually paralyzed Bellatrix.
‘What is it that has dispirited you?’ I asked her.
The sounds of my query zanged into Helen’s machine. Human words dribbled out of them. I heard Helen say: ‘I think he’s speaking to you, Gabi.’
Gabi did not move. I swam over to her and touched my face to her foot.
Finally, she stroked my head, then looked up at Helen and asked, ‘What did he say?’
‘Didn’t you hear? It looks as if it translates into: “Sad why?”’
‘Yes, why sad, Gabi?’ I asked. ‘Hurt what heart?’
‘It looks as if he has got the order wrong again,’ Helen said. ‘I think he means, “What hurt heart?”’
‘I don’t know what to tell him!’ Gabi cried out.
‘Why don’t you tell him the truth?’ Helen said. ‘As you would to any friend?’
Gabi kicked her feet through the water. She started to cry. She shook her head, wiped tears from her eyes, and shook her head again. Then she told me: ‘I have to hurt you, Bobo.’
I shook my head, too, a little feat I had learned. ‘You me hurt?’
‘At least, they want me to hurt you,’ Gabi said continuing to stroke me. ‘But I’m not going to do it, because what Jordan is really asking amounts to rape, although of course he doesn’t see it that way, but how would he like to be drugged, especially with the one we paid to have developed, which you might as well call animal Viagra – as if he’d think it was all right for someone to spike his food and dose him without knowing just so they could steal his sperm and … oh, my God, he’s such a prick!’
I touched my tongue to her hand and said, ‘Prick finger?’
‘No, Bobo, I’m all right.’
‘Finger prick?’
‘Yeah, that’s about it – but I’d sooner cut off his goddamned prick.’
Helen abandoned her machine to come over and lay her hand on Gabi’s hand. I heard her say, ‘That was a little too much, too fast. I don’t think he understood very much of what you said.’
‘Don’t worry, Bobo,’ Gabi said, kissing me. ‘I’m not going to hurt you – and I’m not going to let them hurt you, either, even if it kills me.’
‘Oh, no – please do not be rash in what you say to Jordan and in what you do!’ Helen said. ‘If you are made to leave, who will help me? And more importantly, who will help Bobo?’
Two nights later, with the edge of the new moon cutting the black sky with its white, baby’s tooth, Gabi and Helen spoke with me for a long time. I listened, and listened – and then listened some more. I tried to understand the amazing things I thought they explained to me. I tried to make myself understood. Everything they asked of me would depend on a clear understanding.
‘Do you think he will tell the others?’ Helen said to Gabi.
‘I’m sure he will – I think they tell each other everything.’ Gabi twisted a strand of her already twisted hair, as she often did when she was thinking. ‘I’m worried about Shazza, though. I don’t know what she’ll do when the time comes.’
‘Why wouldn’t she do what you ask her to do?’
‘Did you know that we opened all the gates once before as a sort of publicity stunt?’
‘No, I did not,’ Helen said, shaking her head.
‘Well, we did. We’d had a lot of criticism at the old park, so when they built this one, management wanted to be able to tell everyone that the whales are free to leave, to swim out to the ocean, if they wish.’ Gabi looped her hair around her finger, and made a fist. ‘They called in the press for a demonstration, and Jordan made a big show of “releasing” Shazza. Of course, it was all a big lie. They drugged her up first, I think. Or maybe, after spending years in captivity, she was too afr
aid or too confused to leave what Jordan described as her “home”. I’m not even sure she understood the gate was open.’
‘I am sure she will this time,’ Helen said.
‘Let’s hope so. I’m not sure what the others will do if she freezes up like before.’
Later, with the bit of moon shining even brighter, I rejoined the other whales in the holding pool. And I told them what I felt sure that Gabi and Helen had told me:
‘The ocean is close to this place,’ I whispered to Alkurah and Zavijah. Their sister Salm swam in closer to hear what I was saying. So did Menkalinan, Unukalhai, and Baby Electra. So did Bellatrix. ‘In fact, the pools are refreshed with the waters of the sea.’
‘The humans told you this, yes?’ Alkurah said.
I aimed a zang of sonar at the metal gate that let out onto the punishment pool. Everyone looked that way with their hearing.
‘They told me,’ I said, ‘that the punishment pool’s far gate, which none of us except Bellatrix has even seen opened, would open onto a long tunnel if it were opened.’
‘Go on!’ Electra said, pushing up against me.
‘The tunnel,’ I said, ‘leads to a channel, and the channel flows into a bay. Beyond the bay swells the open sea.’
‘Go on!’ Menkalinan and Unukalhai chimed in. ‘Go on!’
‘Gabi has made friends with the star-watchers,’ I said, referring to the humans who walked the decks of the pools all through the night. ‘The female called Justice and the male called Trent. When the moon is full and tide is up and calls to our blood, all the gates will be opened.’
A great silence enveloped the water. At the same moment, we all drew in a breath, and for the first time I felt in the expanding of our lungs a mutual sense that we could partake of each other’s being and dwell together, almost as a true family. The sweet air we shared seemed pregnant with infinite possibilities. Now Zavijah and Salm sang out and renewed the outpouring of orca concord, and even old, crazed Bellatrix gave voice to the jubilation that moved the waters of the pool:
‘Go on! Go on! Go on!’ she cried out. ‘Tell us, Arjuna, that we will be free again and happy. Please never stop telling me so that I never need to be mute and despondent again.’
Idiot Gods, The Page 17