“What happened?” he said when I was within earshot.
“I tried it.” When I was standing next to him I laid my head on his shoulder for a moment, then lifted it, and looked him right in the face.
“Can you remember everything now?” he said. He held his hand to my neck, as if to take my pulse. I shook my head. “Well did anything happen? Did you resist?”
“My mother appeared.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing.” I was not going to tell him that my mother was very sad about something; that she had cried in my arms.
“Well, how do you feel?” he asked. He ran his hand up and down my arm. “You look pallid.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Is the light funny today? I feel dizzy.”
Gabe looked up at the sky. “Not especially. Are you sure you should go out on the boat?”
I looked over at the whale watch boat, The Dolphin II, which was docked next to us. Tourists were positioning themselves along the wooden railings and adjusting the lenses of their cameras. Getz stood near the gangplank. He leaned against the rail, smoking a Camel unfiltered and watched me scrupulously, as if he were a private detective, hired by my husband to find out why I was so listless, went for long walks in the evenings and no longer paid any attention to him. “Why not?” I said. It sounded more like a dare than a question.
Gabe kissed me goodbye and waited till I had boarded the boat before he turned to leave. He took a few steps and came back again. They were pulling up the gangplank. “Are you sure?” he yelled. When I did not answer he turned and walked away.
Getz dropped the butt of his cigarette in the water and lit another one. “What’s with him?” he said, motioning the new cigarette at Gabe.
“He’s just worried.” I looked at Getz, tracing the sharp lines in his face. He was so handsome, and so severe — he unsettled me. I wished I could remember.
“What’s with you?” he asked. “You look like you’ve seen God.”
“Not quite.”
He looked at me oddly, as if he wanted to know what I meant, but thought it would be a breach of privacy to ask.
“Well, Angelo’s a nervous wreck,” he said. “We better go find him and just hang around where he can see us.”
He took my arm and led me around toward the front of the boat. It was much larger than I had expected. A jazz band played on the upper deck, and a bar was set up nearby, where the tourists bought Cape Codders and then lingered near the clarinet player, watching him wince and contort his shoulders to elicit the raunchy high notes, casting furtive glances at the water and the receding shoreline. I stood next to the rail and looked back at the town. It seemed precious from far away, so diminutive and harmless, like an architect’s model or a toy.
“Thank God you came,” Angelo said, coming up behind me at the rail, and clapping me on the back. I looked at him with puzzlement; I did not know why I had suddenly become so necessary. Angelo followed the camera crew around, showing them where to lay cables so the tourists would not trip over them. While he directed them, he fiddled with his cameras, loading and unloading them, pulling canisters of film out of his pockets, changing lenses, looking through the different colored filters. When he noticed me leaning quietly against the rail, watching him, he said, “Stay right there; don’t go away,” as if he expected me to bolt the minute I was out of his sight. Getz came up and stood next to me like a guard, smoking one cigarette after another, looking at me intensely and not saying anything, as if conversation would be false or useless to him today, when he was surrounded by water, heading out to sea. But then, Getz never said much anyway. He stared into his drink or at the smoke curling up from the tip of his burning cigarette and appeared to brood.
When the cameramen were set up, they picked a spot at the front of the boat, installed Angelo amidst the quaint disarray of ropes, nets, tackle and rigging, with his cameras strapped across his chest, and introduced him to the viewers. They asked him about his background in marine biology, his studies of seals and his interests in whales. Then they pulled the camera back and trailed him while he ran around the boat holding the megaphone to his mouth, charming the tourists with the history of the Cape end, stories of shipwrecks and whaling catastrophes, until they would reach the area out past Race Point where they were most likely to see the whales.
I wandered to the back of the boat, and watched Provincetown become smaller and smaller, until it was simply a point on the horizon, indistinguishable from all the others, unless you knew it was there. I wondered at this, at how easy it was to obliterate something just by moving away from it. Is this how I had dissolved my memory, by casting out, traveling farther and farther, until the thing I wanted to forget was just a blur, a moment indistinguishable from all the others, rubbed out, like Gabe’s form beneath the glare of the sunlight? And if so, how did I find my way back, back to that moment I had succeeded so diligently in forgetting, the moment when my mother told me something I did not want to hear?
I felt I was being watched, and turned around. Getz was standing at a polite distance a few yards off, leaning against the wall of the cabin, his eyes fixed on me. He approached me now and stood next to me at the rail, staring down into the water, the way he stared at his drink or his cigarette. “Have you ever just watched the water?” he said. “I can do it for hours. I get lost in it.” He gazed down at the dips, pools, whorls and currents as if he were in love. The light reflected up into his face and shimmered there, like an answer. “Have you ever tried it?” I shook my head. “You should. You lose yourself. It’s soothing, like the difference between being conscious and self conscious.”
The sun was still too bright for me. Everything around me — the railing, the planks beneath my feet, the sky, Getz’s arm next to mine — appeared raw and overexposed. I looked down into the water and tried to forget myself. The glare was almost blinding, and soon, that was all I could see, a bright luminescent silver that slid and shifted rhythmically with the motions of the water, lulling me, tempting me into abandonment, so that when the upheaval came, just the slightest lifting up, the gentlest pressure on my arms and legs, and then the soft quick falling, it was almost imperceptible, and I lay floating naturally in the water, just as calm and as absent as I had been looking down into it, the happy silver glare all around me, the gentle lapping about my ears like contented murmurs, a purr of oblivion. If I had thought about anything then, lying in the current with no notion of danger or death, I would have known that this was oblivion, and oblivion was the peace and satisfaction, the rest from longing and desire, the surfeit I had been seeking all along, and had never found until that moment.
The shouting brought me back to consciousness. I looked up and saw the back of the boat at a distance, the tiny people at the railing in their brightly colored shirts, waving and shouting: “Killer Whale! Killer Whale!” throwing ropes and life preservers into the water. They looked precious, the way Provincetown looked when the boat had drawn away from shore.
I looked up at the sun. I did not want this, the noise and commotion, the running and shouting. I wanted to go away again, into that peaceful place the glare had sent me, where I was finally satisfied. I stared at the sun for a while, and felt as if I were losing myself again, going under, back into oblivion. I even felt that gentle lifting, as if something good intentioned was displacing me. This almost convinced me I would return to that place, but the shrieks from the boat grew even louder. I opened my eyes just as I felt my head break the surface of the water. I blew the water out of my mouth by instinct, and looked around. They were throwing a small life raft into the water. I could see Angelo at the rail holding the megaphone.
“Kate!” he shouted. “Don’t be afraid. The whale won’t hurt you. It’s trying to keep you afloat.”
I peered down into the water. My arms and legs were now too numb from the cold to actually feel, and it gave me an odd sensation to see them treading water, when I could not sense the swoosh of the currents. On my lef
t, out of my side vision, I caught a swatch of white pass by, and then a dark body of black follow on top of it. Even this close in the water, the animal seemed too small to be a whale, too nimble and sprightly, as if it had some playful mischief in mind. I watched it circle, surface, breach, and dive again, and tried to follow its course underneath and around me. It was much too small and sleek to be a whale, I decided, and it had that bright white patch underneath its head. It looked more like a dolphin.
“Kate!” Angelo shouted again. “It’s the orca that was hanging around the harbor a few weeks ago. It will let you swim with it. Grab hold of the fin. Put your hand on the fin.”
It seemed like the simplest thing in the world to do — grab on to the fin. I only had to reach out my hand and catch hold of it, and the animal would do the rest. I looked around at the water, at the bright sun, at my own disembodied limbs below, treading to keep me afloat, and I wondered at how arbitrary it all was. I was not sure I wanted to go back, but if I grabbed hold of its fin, the dolphin would take me, and if I did not, the dolphin would just go for a swim, expend its mischief.
While I tried to make up my mind, the dolphin circled, and the tourists yelled from the boat, and Getz climbed down a ladder into the raft to come after me. In the end it was not really a decision; they weren’t going to allow me my oblivion. All I did was reach out my hand, and the dolphin took me.
***
When I woke up in the projection booth of the Bad Attitude Cinema I was sitting in a director’s chair, wrapped in blankets. Joe, Getz and Gabe stood around me like the Trinity, talking about the Orca, but when they saw I had moved and opened my eyes they all stopped and stared at me, waiting for me to speak. It reminded me of the end of The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy wakes up from her knock on the head and everyone who had been in her dream is standing around her bed. I wanted to recite Dorothy’s speech, tell them I had visited a magical land and they were all in it. But instead I said, “See any whales? What time is it? What am I doing here?”
“These are all rhetorical questions,” Lance shouted from the balcony. “Sounds like she’s awake.”
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Gabe said. “He’s full of himself. He’s been hired on as a consultant to make a Hollywood feature film about Harper Martin.”
“How’d he get that?” I said.
“Through one of Angelo’s CBS cameramen. They’re out there right now, talking about the deal.”
“Lance has Hollywood written all over him,” Joe said.
“Why do they want Lance?” I said.
“He was born here,” Gabe said. “His mother was born here. His grandmother was born here. They want a Provincetown expert.”
“You can trace his family all the way back to the Pilgrims,” Getz said.
“He wanted to get into film making anyway, so they figured they’d hire him cheap, and he’ll get the experience he needs,” Joe explained.
“Thank God,” Gabe said. “He never would have gone to film school. But now look at him; he’s full of himself.”
They glanced out the door of the projection room and watched Lance talk to Angelo. Lance was dancing with a director’s chair, imitating Fred Astaire’s dance with the hat rack in Royal Wedding. Then he jumped up into it, sat down on his knees, and began to sing “I’m Putting All My Eggs In One Basket.”
“So how’d the filming of the whale watch go?” I said, looking up at them and adjusting my blankets to keep warm.
“You were the star catastrophe,” Getz said patting me on the shoulder. “After that it kind of went downhill.”
“Did you see any whales?” I asked. “Or did you have to take me back to shore?”
“The Rescue Squad picked you up in a helicopter,” Getz said. “We saw a few whales after that; the clarinet player always draws a crowd.”
“People really pay all that money for a whale watch tour just to hear the clarinet player?” Gabe said.
“No,” Getz said. “The clarinet player draws a crowd of whales.”
“Why would they like the clarinet player?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Getz said. “They like that sultry stuff he cranks out.”
“I wonder why whales like the clarinet,” Gabe said.
“Just his clarinet,” Getz said. “The same thing happens if that guy plays the sax. It has to be that guy.”
“He was good,” I said. The three men looked at me as if I’d just come back from Mars. “So what am I doing here anyway?” I added, pulling at the blankets. “I mean, how come I’m not at home?”
“You were at home,” Gabe said. “But you kept saying you didn’t want to miss the Benefit screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and you were afraid everyone was going to leave you alone, so we brought you here.”
“The Rescue Squad guys say it’s safer anyway,” Getz said, “since they’re right downstairs in Pumper Number Two.”
“Yeah, screwing up my sound system with their dispatch radio,” Joe said.
“Safer?” I said. “Why safer?”
“You might go into shock,” Gabe said.
There was an awkward silence while we all looked at each other.
“Well, I better get moving,” Joe said. “The film canisters are downstairs.” He stroked his glove and walked to the door. Getz followed him, offering to give him a hand. “Don’t overdo it,” Joe said to me, and the two men left together.
When they had gone and I was alone with Gabe, I said, “Why do I get the feeling that this whole thing was planned?” I repositioned myself in the director’s chair to try and get comfortable, but nothing worked; all my limbs ached from treading water.
“I talked to your doctor at the Lahey Clinic,” he said. He leaned against the counter where the spare reels were stacked and crossed his arms against his chest. “He told me they’d tried just about everything, but a trauma might restore your memory. I decided to try the hypnosis first, and if that didn’t work — well, I knew you could swim, the way you’re always talking about that pool you had in the backyard in Los Angeles when you were a kid, and how your mom hated pools and would come out to the yard every evening at dinner time and stand at the coping just smoking a cigarette and not say anything until you got out of the pool, and then she would wrap the towel around you and take you back into the house.”
He stopped talking. I couldn’t remember telling him about my mother and the pool.
“You were never in any danger,” he said. “Getz knew about it, and so did Angelo. They weren’t going to let you get into any trouble out there. Getz is a scuba diver, you know.”
“Did you tell them about my amnesia? Did you tell the Voodoo Woman?” He said no. “So how were you so sure I’d fall overboard? Did you drug me or something?”
He laughed. “You’ve been watching too many movies. Getz dropped you over.”
“Getz dropped me!”
“It was the safest way. He could pick the moment; he would be ready.”
“There could have been sharks in the water.”
“There weren’t any sharks. He saw the Orca. He dropped you in on purpose then. It was safer that way.”
“A killer whale!”
“They just call them that. It’s just a dolphin. They don’t eat people. You knew that. It’s been in the bay the last few weeks. It’s practically a domesticated animal. The Provincetown mascot.”
“I didn’t agree to this, you know,” I said.
“How can you volunteer for a life threatening experience? It had to be a surprise. You had to think you were in danger. Of course, you weren’t. We knew that.”
“Great.”
“So can you remember everything now? Did your whole life come flashing before you in that moment when you thought you were drowning?”
“It was very peaceful. I didn’t remember anything. My mind was a total blank.”
He stood up and paced around the projection room, tapping on the posters as he went by them. “You’re hopeless,” he said. “Yo
u’re absolutely hopeless.”
“I know.”
He walked to the door. “I’m going now. Lance and Angelo are right out here if you need them. And the Rescue Squad is just downstairs. Joe and Getz should be back with the movie reels in a minute.” He peered down the stairs.
“What time is it? Aren’t you going to stay and see Rocky Horror?”
“Eleven-thirty. I’m going home to bed. You want to meet me there afterward? I can keep my eye on you that way. The doctor said not to leave you alone until morning.” I said I would meet him after the show. “Get Lance or Getz to drive you over. You shouldn’t walk that far.” He smiled sadly at me, and left. I could hear him talking to Joe and Getz on the stairs as he went down.
They hauled the film canisters inside the projection room; Joe took the reels out and shelved them in the racks so they’d be ready to use, and began to set the first two up on the projectors, threading the film between the lenses and bobbins, testing the sound system and lights. He checked on me now and then, looking over at me as if he thought I might disappear. Finally, he said, “What was the ride like?” and gave me an embarrassed smile.
“The ride?” I said.
“Getz says you hitched a ride with that dolphin that’s been hanging out by the wharf lately. I heard it was really something.”
I thought about the ride with the dolphin. I didn’t know how to explain it.
Getz carried in the last few canisters of film, set them down on the counter for Joe, took one look at me and said, “Now you look like you really have seen God.”
“Not quite.”
Angelo and Lance came bustling in to the projection room. Lance waltzed around my director’s chair singing “Dancing Cheek to Cheek,” then bowed gravely in front of me and kissed my hand. “Kate, Kate, feeling better?” Angelo said. “Can we talk?”
“Talk to me, talk to me,” Lance drawled in a fake Brooklynese.
“Could you guys take her out on the balcony?” Joe said. “I don’t have enough room in here, and it’s going to get hot when I crank up these monsters.” He pointed to the film projectors.
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