‘I’ll never let Arjuna smoke a cigar again,’ Gabi said.
‘Oh, never mind about that,’ Helen said. ‘He has had much worse while you were gone. We have a lot to talk about.’
Hand in hand, they walked off together into the human part of the house to talk about it.
There followed many happy, happy days. As Ocean swelled toward another warm and sunny spring, I had much time to ponder the reunion I had witnessed. I played over in my mind every word that Gabi and Helen had spoken to each other, every inflection, every falling or rising of the timbre of their voices. I savored the salt of their tears, which I tasted in waters that touched the beaches near the Institute. I swam through the light of their sparkling eyes which had found each other with so much gladness. Although I had read of great romances in books and had watched human images radiate affection on glowing screens, I had never experienced the heart-pounding, eye-dancing reality of human love.
The force of Helen’s and Gabi’s mutual accord caused me to entertain uncomfortable thoughts. The two women’s love for each other seemed no different than that of us whales – and scarcely less powerful. Could a whale, I wondered, really love a human as he might his own sister? Right behind the tail of this troubling idea swam an even more astonishing notion: might it be possible for an orca such as I to make a human a part of his family?
I put this question to the other whales. Alkurah, who grew ever wiser with the waxing and waning of each moon, answered for all of us when she said, ‘Love is always love, and so let us wait and see if we want to make a home here with Helen and Gabi.’
With each passing day, the impossible began to seem almost possible. One evening, Gabi spoke of Helen to me, saying, ‘You helped her feel her own heart again.’
Should not brothers and sisters, mothers and sons, strive always to open each other to precisely that kind of joy?
I dwelled with such wonderings through the last of winter and into spring. With its sempiternal surge of life, the vast schools of herring returned to the bay and filled every cove and bit of coastline with liquid white pearls of sperm. We whales feasted morning, afternoon, and night, and Ocean’s life poured into us. In this season of renewal and the rousing of hope long thought dead, we awakened as from a nightmare into miracles. Zavijah’s floppy fin was the first to regain its proud, crescent shape, like the curve of the moon aimed at the stars; then Alkurah’s fin stood upright, and so did those of Salm, Unukalhai, and Bellatrix. Menkalinan leapt from the water in celebration at being restored to himself. He promised to sing of his rebirth in a new rhapsody that would sound through the seven seas throughout the ages. Strangely, it was he – the most battered and broken in spirit of all of us (save for perhaps Bellatrix) – who first regained his joy of quenging. Then Alkurah returned to herself as well, as did her sisters, along with Kitalpha, Hyadum, and finally old, bereaved Bellatrix. On a cool, lovely evening of rising fins and the rising of the Star of Agathange low on the deeply blue and glowing horizon, they quenged together as one.
Unukalhai, however, did not quenge nor could Baby Electra partake of this grace. And I, whose heart still bled with every beat over the bitter iron of Pherkad’s harpoon, struggled fiercely to sing with the others, too. However, the anguished notes that sounded from my flute found echo in hurts of the past and not in future dreams, much less the rushing stillness of bliss of the ever-present moment. Tomorrow, I promised myself, would be a new day. Tomorrow I would quenge, in love, with the water of world, with all the stars, and with the new song of myself that I would sing. I would quenge on and on, like an angel, like a true orca, like a god.
One quiet morning, I floated alone in the bay, meditating on the sound of the world’s beating heart as the Buddhist monk had taught me. The density of the quiet water amplified the little booms of my own heart. The sky above the bay glowed a rich and royal blue along the hills of the horizon, which still hid the rising of the great, eastern sun. Bands of red tinged the blueness like licks of flame.
After a while, I allowed the left half of my brain to pass into sleep, and I dreamed. I journeyed far back to my beginnings. Once again, I dwelled in the peace of my mother’s womb and tasted the sacred salt of her amniotic waters. I listened to the streams of her blood rushing into me with every beat of her beautiful heart: Boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom. Within each boom resonated the sound of an entire universe being born. The explosion into being always entails an agony like unto being cast into the fire of a star but also promises an ecstasy beyond words in one’s becoming pure light. With this realization, in the memoried lucidity of my dream, the booms grew louder. I moved my mind towards hurts that I had known as a baby and then into the sharkfest of pains that had grieved me at Sea Circus. Black clouds tinged with red obscured Ocean’s yellow-white star. Lightning cracked out in jags of electric hell, and thunder broke through the water. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! The explosions nearly deafened me. I opened my eyes to blood and screams and pain and flashes of light.
From across the cove came more cracks of light-fire-thunder. A single man stood there, on the sloping beach of shingle and sand. As I moved from deep dreams into the real nightmare of wakefulness, I saw him lay down his rifle for a moment so that he could pluck one of the grenades hanging from his vest and cast it out into the cove. The explosion that nearly shattered my hearing bones brought me fully awake. Deafened as I was, I could nevertheless make out the shrieks and screams of Zavijah, Salm, and some of the other orcas, all bloodied and broken in the shallow waters close to the beach. Where was Alkurah? As I began swimming, I recalled that she had gone fishing with Unukalhai, Kitalpha, and Hyadum out in the Sound many miles away. Zavijah and Salm had wanted to stay behind to watch their favorite movie, in which three brave humans on a boat named the Orca pursue a great shark across the open sea. Despite wielding harpoons, a shark-proof cage, a strychnine-tipped hypodermic spear, rifles, and a scuba tank used as a bomb, the shark kills two of the humans before the third manages to blow the poor beast into bloody bits. Very similar pieces of flesh now fouled the cove’s clear water. Their touch tore at my skin. I swam faster through a cloud of red. Baby Electra, bathed in the blood gushing from Menkalinan’s head wound, cried out to me.
I blew the stale, steamy air from my lungs and gulped in a huge breath as I prepared to dive. Just then, however, Gabi and Helen exited the house and came running down the beach straight toward the murderous man. He bent to pick up his rifle. Gabi, slightly ahead of the nearly naked Helen, her arms and legs pumping furiously, her bare feet cutting divots out of the sand, screamed at him to stop. He did not stop. Nor did she. The man – he had brown hair and lean flat cheeks glowing red above his bushy beard – wrapped his warm, living fingers around his rifle. As Gabi closed on him, he straightened up. Just then, Helen finally caught up to Gabi. She cried out, ‘No!’ even as she tried to use her body to push Gabi out of the man’s line of sight. The force of her shoulder and hands, however, knocked Gabi off her balance and actually propelled her into the trajectory of the bullet. The little cone of lead blasted away part of her face in an explosion of bits of bone and flesh. A second bullet pierced her eye and blew off the back of her head. The man fired a third bullet through Helen’s small, bare breast. From her beautiful black, black skin bloomed blossoms of blood, the red flowers of evil that humans so often pluck out of the living loam of the human body.
Again, Baby Electra cried out to me from the crimson mess in the water near Menkalinan and Bellatrix. I dove. Bullets sizzled through the water. I began swimming with a fury to move more quickly than any orca ever had through any ocean anywhere. One chance I would get, and one only.
My hearing had returned enough so that I could zang every undulation of the immersed sand leading up to the beach upon which stood the man. I swam in closer – and closer and closer. More bullets exploded from his rifle. Cold water burned across my skin. In a feat that I had practiced many times with Baby Electra in our hunting seals, in a burst of spray and foam and a
shock of rushing air, I launched myself up out of the water onto the beach. I had gauged distances and times nearly perfectly. The man, who fired off one last bullet as he turned toward the great splash and scrape of my landfall, screamed out his astonishment as my teeth closed around his leg. His blue eyes sickened with fear. Horror at being dragged down seized him. In his panic not to let gravity bring him so crushingly and injuriously to earth (or perhaps just in a pure, mind-numbing, limb-freezing panic), he dropped his rifle and threw out his hands. This did not avail him. He fell hard to the sand. Helen and Gabi lay there, too, as still as stones. I bit down with greater force, and felt his leg bone snap. He screamed as I dragged him toward the gently lapping water. The ocean encompassed us.
It would be easy, I thought, to drown him – much easier than it had been to kill the white bear. How, though, could I do this? The golden chords of the Great Covenant rang through my conscience. There, too, a man called Jesus spoke these words: ‘Love your enemies, and do good to those who hate you.’
I opened my jaws to let the thrashing man go. He flailed his arms and kicked furiously at the water to propel himself upward. As he breached, the breath broke from him in a scream of rage and bone-grinding torment. His terror and hatred of me blasted through the water with the force of one of his grenades, and he began fighting his way back to the shore.
‘Swim!’ I shouted at him. ‘Swim as fast as you can!’
Then Baby Electra cried out to me again. Red clouds boiled through the water near her and the other whales. Zavijah called out her farewell to Baby Navi in a plaint so terrible that the entire ocean screamed. I found myself back in Sea Circus’s foul pools listening to the swarms of humans calling for me to do feats.
Shocks of lightning from the humans’ cattle prods jerked my muscles and galvanized my whole body. Electric sparks ignited the oils in my blubber, which blackened and burned me in a shroud of greasy orange flame. The white bear’s claw once again tore open my head, this time breaking through bone and gouging out pink masses of my brain. At last, the harpoon’s point worked its way to the center of my heart. There, in the immense pressures greater than even the crush of the deepest ocean deeps, in a shriek of fracturing metal, it broke apart. My poisoned heart sent fragments ripping through my blood into every part of my body. Each cell, each particle of my being, screamed out as one in a bottomless wrath that I should do a thing.
Other voices cried out other things. I must restrain myself, my grandmother told me. Yes – I could have modulated my rage, integrated mind and emotions, sublimated my urge to kill into a celebration of life in all its terrible beauty. I had a paralimbic lobe to my brain, did I not? I wanted to let flow into my seething blood the cool impulse to spare the man. Wanting to want something, however, is not the same as wanting it. What did I really want? What was my deep, driving desire? Only, I thought, to shred the man into tinier and tinier pieces so that nothing of him remained.
‘O human!’ I called out to him. ‘Do you know the word schadenfreude?’
I did not suppose that he did, nor did he understand the sounds of Wordsong that I aimed at him.
‘Schadenfreude: to take joy in the misfortunes that befall another. Know that you are about to suffer what you will likely perceive as the greatest of misfortunes. Let us make a covenant of pain!’
As he sputtered and clawed at the water in a frantic attempt to reach the shore, I gazed at his hands. Which finger, I wondered, had pulled the trigger of the gun that had killed Gabi? I moved in close, and grabbed his hand. It required only the slightest pressure of my teeth to bite his forefinger off. Through his gasp, I heard myself ask how many more chances I would have to know joy? Could I do the difficult subtraction? Eight more – no, nine! – to go.
Again I bit down, and again, and again. Where was my joy? Not the slightest shred of satisfaction did I feel. I snipped off all his fingers, but that did not console me. I grabbed hold of the man’s good leg, and dragged him back out to deeper water. He screamed as my teeth fractured the bone, which tore through muscle and skin and ripped out of him gouts of blood. I tried to savor the taste of it. Had not Genghis Khan said that the greatest of pleasures is to destroy one’s enemies?
I swam beneath the man, and buoyed him up so that he could suck in the exhalations of Gabi’s and Helen’s dying breaths. He lay on top of me, his belly pressing against my back, and his heart beat little thumps of outrage against my skin. Could he feel in the wounding of his own ravaged body the much greater agony of what he had done? Could he sense the pain of the entire world? I called to him in the beating of my heart: This is your moment! The moment of the possible when you can feel your oneness with the world – and with me! Soon, very soon, you will become a part of me!
I flung him from my back as I might a piece of driftwood. He thrashed about in a panic: he could no longer swim. I spun the jerking man around in the water so that I could look into his eyes. I asked him if he was ready to die. He said yes. How he hated life! How he hated me! I felt his spite gathering in him like a pool of acid, which his heart pushed up through his raging arteries with every pulse to eat all the light of his blighted, blue eyes. Only fear and contempt remained. Because I could not suffer the sight of those hellish eyes, I bit them out of his head. At last, in the frenzy of an act that thrilled my blood with wild hope and terrible possibilities, in an unstoppable surging of my will to destroy a vile, vile thing, the joy came. With great pleasure, I swallowed the bloody, broken orbs. In the man’s panic to keep my teeth from crunching at his face, he screamed and breathed water and choked. I bit off his right hand to keep him from flailing at the sea, and I swallowed it – and his left hand as well. He could no longer keep himself afloat and open his mouth to the life-giving air, and so he began to drown. I did not want the sea to kill him. In what the humans call the coup de grace, I closed my jaws around his neck and sawed off his head.
I took care in ripping off his clothes. I did not want to swallow these plastic garments and obstruct my stomach, even as my sister Mira’s child had eaten plastic bags and died. I tore off the man’s testicles and devoured them, along with his puny penis. I gutted him, and gulped down most of his insides, taking particular relish at the taste of his liver and the pink bubbling of his lights. Finally, I worked my teeth and tongue at his chest bones. There, in the red froth and fury of the sea, I ate his bare, bitter human heart, and it was good.
A last time, Baby Electra called to me. The fire in my belly went out as if I swallowed icy water. I looked upon the cooling, mutilated corpse of the man floating through the water, and I zanged the horror of what I had done. Words – human words – sounded over and over within me:
I have murdered a human being.
I have murdered a human being.
I have slain a beautiful orca.
I have become human myself.
PART THREE
A Covenant With Thee
18
Through the quietening, crimson-clouded waters, I swam over to Baby Electra. I zanged her body. A bullet had grazed her jaw and one of the grenades had blown a bloody crater out of the flesh of her side. Menkalinan, a couple of body lengths away, was dead. He floated like a vast white and black log and bobbed up and down with the passing of each rolling wave.
‘Flee!’ I shouted. ‘The humans have decided to murder us, so we must flee!’
Bellatrix, Zavijah, and Salm swam over to us. I could not bear to zang the many wounds blasted into their beautiful bodies. We moved slowly toward the mouth of the cove. I scanned the land for other humans who might be waiting for us at the choke point to cut off our escape. No one spoke; no one wanted to speak.
No humans did we see. By the time we worked our way toward the bay’s center, Salm had weakened so much that she could not swim. Because we could not abandon her, we kept close so that we might hold her up and help her draw her last breaths of air. She died in a cough and spray of bright lung blood. We swam on. After a while, Bellatrix died too – it seemed that a bul
let had pierced her stomach, though I thought the real reason for her quick demise was that she finally gave up on life.
It took nearly forever to cross the shortest expanse of water, so slowly did Zavijah swim. We all wished that she would move more quickly, but of course no one spoke of this – until Zavijah herself did: ‘I could swim more quickly, if you wish, but then I would die more quickly. Perhaps that would be a good thing.’
‘No, live as long as you can,’ I said. ‘We will swim as slowly as jellyfish if we must.’
We swam nearly as slowly as jellyfish. It did no good. With the bay’s dark green wavelets washing our blood from our bodies, Zavijah said to me, ‘If you ever see Baby Navi again, please tell him how much I loved him.’
I did not think that I would ever meet Baby Navi, but I did not speak of this.
‘I will say goodbye to you now,’ she told me. ‘And you, too, little Electra: I was so cruel to you both when we met. Forgive me! I was not myself. You helped me find myself again, and I love you for that. I wish for you the same miracle.’
She died to the deep-throttled roar of the first of the morning’s fishing boats firing up their engines and moving out into the Sound before us like great, gray floating sharks in pursuit of prey. We waited only ten more heartbeats after that for the last light to go out of her eyes. It astonished me that I seemed suddenly able to count so high.
‘What will we do now?’ Baby Electra asked, weeping inside the way whales do.
Before I could answer her, the cold water carried us to the long-distance, deep call of an orca from many miles away. It was Alkurah’s voice, propagating low and urgent beneath the Sound’s surface waves. She – along with Unukalhai, Hyadum, and Kitalpha – had heard the grenades’ concussions and had immediately begun swimming back to the Institute in order to investigate this dreadful noise.
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