Then we saw the glittering surge sleekly upward, and break, and roll back into the sea.
“Whales,” someone breathed, like God was walking on the water. Faces vanished behind cameras and camcorders. Things clicked.
“I wonder,” Alex said softly as we hung our naked faces overboard, “what they see of us.”
Click, click, click.
“How many people know a walrus can sing?” the next lecturer asked. “Not your Uncle George, I mean a real walrus?” He showed us a slide of a rotund, whiskery animal perched on ice, looking, in spite of the enormous tusks hanging out of its face, like Uncle George might look bundled up in mink and smoking a cigar, if I had an Uncle George. Alex giggled.
We heard the walrus sing. And then the humpbacked whale, and the beluga whale, the sperm whale and the killer whale. They sang like ships’ masts swaying in the wind, like a jungle forest whooping and whistling, like a barnyard, like birds, like the earth might sing just before it split in two. Alex took my hand. In the blue light from the screen, I saw a tear run down her face. So I knew her Christmas gift was a success. After the lecture we went back to the tiny cabin and imitated whale noises on the skinny bed. The ship heaved once; I fell off and got wedged between the side of the bed and the bathroom door. The porthole swung open; above Alex’s laughter I thought I heard the deep, private moaning of the whales.
The next afternoon we found the saunas. Everyone was at the bars, or on deck watching the bone-white line of the distant southern horizon come closer and closer. We went into the men’s sauna together, and in the dark, we found another couple, who had left the light off for privacy.
We pulled our towels up and introduced ourselves. Paolo was getting an advanced degree in paleontology. Sharon taught violin and composed. I asked her if she had heard the whales sing.
“Wasn’t it amazing?” she said. By the pale light from the changing room, I saw her eyes widen and gleam; I couldn’t see their color. Her long hair was the yellow-white of the walrus’s tusks. “And what do you do, Jeff?”
“He’s a composer, too,” Alex said proudly. “He has a contract with Oak Hill for three CDs. His first one is called Concerto for Moon and Three Planets.”
“I also play lounge music at an airport hotel,” I said. “I spent the contract advance on this trip. It’s a present for Alex. And an inspiration for my second album.”
“Is it?” Sharon asked.
“Oh, yeah. So far I’ve written a whole cocktail napkin full of song titles.”
They laughed. Paolo, who had, as far as I could make out, a couple of inches and a few more muscles than me, aimed his white smile at Alex. “What about you?”
Alex taught first grade. School was out for the Christmas season. She was also trying to be a writer. Paolo, when he wasn’t digging up mastodons, liked to read mysteries. So did Alex. They got so busy swapping titles, while Sharon and I talked synthesizers, that we all forgot we were on a ship bound for the South Pole, until the changing room door opened and a man entered and undressed.
All he wanted to do was swim. We waited until he went out to the pool before we emerged. Alex looked at the clock on the wall and gripped my arm.
“We missed the penguin lecture!”
“Penguins,” Paolo said. “Aerodynamically challenged birds wearing tuxedos.” His smile, in his dark face, was friendly. But Alex shook her head, oddly upset.
“I wanted to go to all of them,” she said. “I wanted to learn everything. Otherwise what’s the point? We might as well be on the Love Boat.”
“There’s another after dinner,” Sharon said. “There are three a day for the next ten days.”
But Alex was unappeased. “We won’t miss another,” she insisted. “I want to hear them all.”
“It’s your present,” I said.
“Do fish sleep?” the lecturer asked. In the first row, dimly, I saw the smooth ivory-yellow of Sharon’s hair, the color of an old piano key, and beside it, barely visible, Paolo’s curly black head. Alex’s fingers made a tense bracelet around my wrist. She tended to be moody, passionate, driven by obscure desires. This was one of them, I felt, but I was also intrigued by the question. The sleep of fishes. They weren’t human. They weren’t even mammals. They didn’t need to dream. They didn’t have eyelids. How do they sleep?
“Like humans, there are day fish and night fish. And even sharks sleep. As the light fades in the upper regions the patterns on bright butterfly fish change. The parrotfish spins a cocoon of mucus around itself to shield its scent from predators. Crevices in coral reefs begin to fill with small fish finding their safe haven against the hungers of the night. Wrasses bury themselves in sand. As the fish sleep, the coral colonies wake and open their polyps. The shark and the eel move from their resting places to feed. The dark sea becomes full of the tiny luminescent organs, the living lights, of hunting fish.”
The black screen filled with eyes. Alex’s fingers loosened. I heard her take a soft breath; she was absorbed, contented again. I watched the eerie, glowing, hungry dark and waited for the music in me to begin.
We sat through another lecture after dinner, watching sea horses with huge bellies and huge eyes and delicate, elongated faces off a medieval chessboard, court and mate. Their bellies touched. The female deposited eggs into the male and he became pregnant. His body took charge of changing those eggs into tiny seahorses. Labor, which looked like a serious case of hiccups as he pumped and thrust the younglings into the sea, took days. We were too mesmerized to laugh. I tried to imagine what it would feel like having something inside me change my body, rearrange its chemicals, take room for itself to grow without even knowing that it took its life from me. And then to hiccup it out of me, and watch it swim away, tiny as a nail-paring, perfectly formed, completely free, never knowing, as it rose up to the blue skin of the sea...
“Jeff?” Alex whispered. “Are you sick?”
“I’m bonding,” I said. I was clasping my stomach. Alex made a noise somewhere between understanding and a snort.
“Don’t worry. It will pass.”
“Wasn’t that incredible?” Sharon said, as we wandered onto the deck. Paolo didn’t look entirely comfortable, either. He murmured something in Spanish. Sharon tossed her incredible hair and took his arm.
“Moon’s full,” she said. “Let’s get drinks and watch for whales in the moonlight.”
The ship was moving through a dream, between two converging planes so black, so fiery white it was hard to tell where the stars fell into the black sea and froze and floated. We listened for whales’ voices. I kept hearing music, vague, distant, as if walruses were playing rock and roll on an iceberg somewhere. Sharon heard it, too.
“There’s a band somewhere,” she said abruptly. “Let’s find it. Let’s dance.”
The ship seemed bigger than I remembered it. We climbed stairs to an upper deck I hadn’t noticed, and the music grew louder. We opened some doors with stained-glass mermaids on them and found an underwater cavern. Kelp swayed behind glass walls; bright fish darted in and out of the leaves. Musicians with mermaids’ hair, pearls in their ears, in penguin tuxedos, played raucous blues. Screens above the bar and near the band gave us underwater views of coral colonies, and giant clams, worms that looked like chrysanthemums and starfish that looked like feathers. I don’t remember what we resembled in that dim blue light. The Christmas tree, fake pine sprayed with fake snow, looked as if it had floated down from a sinking cruise ship. After a while, after enough beer, we started inventing fishy courtship rituals on the dance floor. Then I found myself out on the deck, blasted by an icy wind. Alex was laughing or crying; I couldn’t tell which. I didn’t remember going to bed.
We made the morning lecture, just barely; Paolo and Sharon didn’t. Alex looked puffy-eyed and grim, her normal hangover expression. I kept hearing “mermaid,” and staring at the screen and seeing a mournful, fleshy, snub-nosed face with big, gentle eyes. A hyacinth eater, the lecturer said. Suckles its young. A docil
e herbivore. Slaughtered in certain countries for its porklike meat. Ability to recognize, remember. Accident-prone. Keeps bumping into propeller blades on speedboats, and slaughtering itself. Too slow to live in modern times. Order Sirenia. The siren, the mermaid. Globally endangered.
“How was the lecture?” Paolo asked at lunch. I shook my head, still groggy.
“Mermaids are an endangered species.”
“It’s not a joke,” Alex said crossly. Sharon pushed her hair out of her eyes and blinked at her salad: a docile herbivore.
“What did we do last night? What did we say? Oh, God, I need a weight room. I need a Jacuzzi. Anyone want to help me look for a Jacuzzi?”
“There’s a lecture,” Alex said. We all looked at her blearily. She looked bleary, too, but somehow still rapt. “Killers and Healers.”
“Fish?” Paolo asked. “Or us?”
She gave him a smile. He had asked the right question; he was still paying attention. He flashed teeth. Sharon poked at her lettuce, wide-eyed. “I still need a Jacuzzi,” she said softly. “Something. You go to the lecture, Paolo. You and Alex. And Jeff.”
Alex gave me a look. It wasn’t easy to interpret; I had a feeling it referred to something hazy in the previous evening. I stuffed my mouth with endive and mandarin orange, and said, after I chewed a bit, “Of course I’m going to the lecture. Killers and Healers. A subject in its way analogous to music. If you get my drift.”
They didn’t. Neither did I. They looked at me, fishy-eyed. Sharon consulted her watch. “Jacuzzi, a swim and then a nap. I’ll meet you in the bar before dinner. The one on C Deck.”
“I thought,” I said stupidly, “there was only one deck. And a poop deck.”
Sharon only laughed, as if I were either remarkably obtuse or joking. Paolo said, “I’ll go to the lecture. At least part of it.”
So I got to catch his profile along with Alex’s, against the pale light of the projector. After a while I stopped looking at her. I was too busy learning how to die by eating pufferfish, by bumping into a Portuguese man-of-war, getting stung by a sea wasp, bitten by an octopus, barbed by a sting ray, stabbed by a stonefish, poisoned by a lionfish, eaten by a shark, or sat on by a whale. I could, on the other hand, discourage a shark with a Moses sole, treat a throat infection with coral, herpes with sea sponges, cancer with a sea cucumber, and heart attacks with a hagfish. When the lights went on, and I looked at Alex again, Paolo was no longer beside her.
“Where’s Paolo? Did he get discouraged by a sole?”
She didn’t get that either. “You’re punchy, Jeff. Let’s go for a swim.”
But we never made it into our suits. I was getting used to the bed; it seemed big enough to accommodate an orgy. By the time we left our cabin, it was nearly dinnertime. We climbed the stairs to C Deck, which seemed made entirely out of tinted glass, so we could see, in any direction, the tinted ocean, the line of the polar icecap, passing islands and ice floes bright with sunlight, dotted with birds and seals, too far to be seen clearly, but there as promised. There was an indoor pool on C Deck, surrounded by exotic tropical plants; there were shops, salons, game rooms, a couple of fast food restaurants, one selling carrot juice, the other French fries. Alex said incredulously, “It’s like a mall up here. Oh, look, Jeff, there are aerobics classes.”
“There’s the bar,” I said. It was full of wooden figureheads, sea captains, and mermaids smiling cheerfully. Ashtrays were clam and abalone shells; table lamps had shades made out of scallop shells. Tiny cowry shells, butterfly shells, baby sand dollars, checkered snail shells were scattered across the table tops and preserved in an inch of acrylic. Tiny trees made of gold tinsel, topped with plastic starfish, stood in the middle of the seashells.
We found Paolo and Sharon sipping drinks with plastic penguins skewered onto their stirrers. “Isn’t this wonderful?” Sharon sighed, gazing at the bottom of the world, which had been approaching for days, it seemed, without getting much closer. “I could live like this forever. I sat in the Jacuzzi and then went for a swim, and by that time I felt so good I went on deck and thought up some themes for my next piece, which will incorporate some of the whale songs we heard. I have a synthesizer that can do those sounds. I thought about references to Bach, and maybe U2—like the whole planet making music.”
She glowed, ivory and sunlight. Paolo glowed bronze. I glowed fungus, the way I felt. But Alex gave me a little private smile, as if I had done something right. I picked a plastic seahorse out of a drink called an Ice Breaker, and drank half of it. It was salty and so cold my facial bones ached in the aftermath. Alex, who seemed to carry the lecture schedule with her even when she was stark naked, pulled it out of the air and consulted it.
“Lights in the Abyss,” she read. “Luminosity in Fish.”
I dropped my head in my arms, groaning. My nose bumped against the plastic seahorse; it smelled oddly dank and briny. “I can’t.”
“Yes, you can,” Alex said calmly. “We’ll go dancing again afterward. I promise. We’ll find every band on the ship.”
“It’ll be better,” Sharon sighed, “when we reach the pole. They’ll take us out on boats to see the penguins and things.”
“How can this ship have so many bars?” I asked the seahorse. “I swear it wasn’t this big when we got on it.”
But they only laughed. Alex finished her drink and went for a swim; Sharon went to buy a tape of the whales’ songs. That left me with Paolo, who excused himself and headed after Alex. I ordered another Ice Breaker and watched an enormous ice cube in the distance. It looked delicate, ethereal, a floating palace rising out of the glittering blue. I watched it a long time; it never came any closer.
Much later, I contemplated the luminosity of Sharon’s hair on the dance floor of yet another bar, and wondered where we were all going, and if we would ever get any closer.
The next morning, in the lecture room, I stared at something huge, alien, with a metallic mouth that kept taking bites out of a fossil reef on some sunny island. It kept eating as, on another screen, the lecturer showed us brilliant branches of coral colonies, and the tiny polyps opening on them like night flowers to feed in the dark, while the parrotfish, who also ate coral, slept. The monster machine kept grinding away at the reef as she spoke. Finally, one of the three other people who had made it out of bed that morning asked.
“A resort,” the lecturer said without expression. “The island is owned by a very poor country. The government is trying to create jobs and to increase its revenues.”
I heard Alex take a breath, then loose it slowly. Polyps or poor people? The lecturer showed us another coral colony. The metallic monster kept soundlessly chewing.
So did we at lunch. In apology for something I didn’t catch, they served mountains of lobster tails, crab legs, shrimp. A boat trip, Sharon sighed, to take a closer look at the iceberg. I watched, mesmerized, as her full lips, the red-pink of coral, closed and sucked.
“What’s the matter with the boats?” Alex asked, peeling a shrimp.
“Nothing,” Sharon said, swallowing. “There’s something wrong with the water.”
“Too choppy?” I guessed, though I hadn’t felt anything. Paolo said something, then translated it.
“A tanker hit the iceberg last night. They’re having trouble containing the oil.”
Alex got up wordlessly; I followed her to the glass walls of the restaurant. But they were tinted; the water looked normal, full of ice floes, sea birds and light. The ice palace had floated past us during the night; it seemed farther away now. One end of the tanker stuck out from behind it, on its side and bleeding. Small boats, trawlers, Coast Guard cutters hovered around it, like gulls around a dying shark. I expected Alex to be upset; she only said absently, “There are other boat trips planned.”
Maybe, I thought incredulously, I had eaten the wrong side of a flounder under a full moon in a month with the letter “K” in it. I was hallucinating the entire cruise. Alex drifted back to the table. She didn’t
look at Paolo. He didn’t look at her. Maybe I was hallucinating that, too: the effort they made not to look at each other.
“Don’t you find this inspiring?” Sharon asked, as I sat down again. “I mean, musically? I’ve been dreaming music.” She cracked a lobster claw, and squirted lemon on it, catching me in the eye with acid. “Oh, Jeff, I’m sorry.”
I blinked away lemon tears. I had lost my napkin on the way to the window. Alex stared at me, then passed her napkin over. But it was too late; my other eye had started tearing in sympathy. I couldn’t stop it. I stood up finally, red-eyed, trying to laugh, while Alex kept staring, and Sharon kept making musical noises, and Paolo looked at his plate. I left them there.
I missed the afternoon lecture, and dinner. I roamed around trying to find the deck in the complex corridors, wanting to hear gulls, waves, wind. Arrows pointed every direction but out. I gave up finally, after climbing up more stairs than I thought the ship had decks for. I found a quiet bar with small tinted portholes covered with plastic green wreaths. A tape kept playing five Christmas carols arranged for synthesizer and marimba over and over. I drank beer and ate cold shrimp, tuna sushi and caviar, and watched trawlers on a screen spread nets that scraped the ocean bottom clean of fish, coral, sponges, sea squirts, urchins, starfish, beer cans, broken bottles, torn sails, and spilled them all onto the deck. The fishers picked through the dying animals, threw out everything but shrimp.
I drifted out finally, to find Alex at the evening lecture.
She wasn’t there.
But I was, so I stayed and watched whales sounding, dolphins leaping, orcas spy-hopping, coral polyps and anemones blossoming, bright reef fish cavorting, kelp swaying. Every now and then something the lecturer said penetrated.
Wonders of the Invisible World Page 26