Sweet Lamb of Heaven (43)
“I can’t say what it was like, exactly,” she went on, shaking her head and staring at the floor in front of her. The others also looked at the floor, as though listening to the shameful confessions of an addict. “I don’t know how to describe it.”
I saw Burke nodding slowly, pensive, also not lifting his eyes from the linoleum. I had no idea what Linda was getting at, couldn’t make sense of it in the least, and was gazing distractedly at the side table, thinking about eating a cookie—they had some that were an unnatural shade of pink, those long rectangular wafers stamped with a waffle pattern that seem like play food. Lena had play food—she had fruit and vegetables made of wood that you could slice and put back together with Velcro. She had berry pie slices made of plastic. No! Stop.
“First I thought I was making it up,” said Linda, “truth is I’d been real unhappy there lately, I don’t like how we keep the animals—you have to understand, we only stay, most of the trainers stay because we’re sorry for them, deeply sorry. We stay to do what we can for these creatures. For years I couldn’t leave because of that, I’m so attached to them, you know, the little guy especially. Not that little, of course, since he’s fourteen feet long.” She laughed nervously.
I got up, telling myself to block out the lingering image of Lena at play, and gingerly approached the snack table; I put one of the waffle cookies on the tip of my tongue. Like balsa wood with sugar, I thought, and sawdust between the layers—sawdust with sugar. Still I chewed it, studiously not letting my thoughts stray back to Lena with her toys.
“Point is I was stressed out. Still. I finally had to admit to myself that something was there. I mean not the clicks and whistles and chirps, the usual elements of calls that we occasionally hear, you know, the vocalizing . . . it wasn’t that.”
I stopped mechanically chewing the balsa wood/sawdust wafer and turned toward the circle, where others were also gazing at her, their faces unreadable to me. She meant she’d heard the killer whale, I thought, and had an abrupt urge to laugh.
Instead I swallowed the mouthful and sat down on my chair again, careful to make no noise. I wanted to be very polite. It was Big Linda, I thought, who’d always been so kind to us—to think of ridiculing her made me wince. I would be unfailingly polite, I would be more attentive than I had been before, and I would suppress the instinct to laugh. It’d be hysterical laughter anyway, I told myself: again I had signs of incipient hysteria, as I had after Ned heard the voice. Both euphoria and hysteria had risen in me as I jogged along our street in the dark. Now they threatened to rise in me again.
But I was still a wretch. My misery came crashing back. I felt no lightheartedness at all; I was as heavy as lead.
“I always heard it, whenever I was at the tank, and I couldn’t tell you how I got anything from it, but I knew—something about the way it was, somehow the rhythms were linked, how he’d be moving around and I’d be hearing it. I knew it was connected to him. He’d just been separated from his mother, you know, he’d just been weaned, but in the wild the male orcas stay at their mothers’ sides for their whole lives. He’d been taken away from her, you could tell he was lost, basically, and then there was this—it was a kind of wall of sound, I guess, a wall of sound that also felt like a wall of feeling.”
In the end—to me at least—a baby, a whale, there was nothing more nonsensical there than anywhere else.
Male humpback whales have been described by biologists as “inveterate composers” of songs that are “strikingly similar” to the products of human musical tradition. —Wikipedia 2015
I TRIED TEXTING Ned’s various numbers, the temporary cell phones he’d used recently as well as his old number, the one he’d had for years. I repeatedly typed messages such as I’ll do anything you want me to, I accept your terms, Give her back and I’ll do whatever you say. For several nights there was no amount of abjection I wouldn’t stoop to.
Finally I pulled up short and pretended to be made of granite, went from spineless to fossilized. There wasn’t a middle ground. I knew it wouldn’t last, either, the rock-like immobility, the erasure of my real life.
It was unbearable to submit to my profound weakness and so the only choice was to shore up surface strength.
Plants might be able to eavesdrop on their neighbors and use the sounds they “hear” to guide their own growth, according to a new study that suggests plants use acoustic signaling to communicate with one another. Findings published in the journal BMC Ecology suggest that plants can not only “smell” the chemicals and “see” the reflected light of their neighbors, they may also “listen” to the plants around them. —National Geographic News
ONE EVENING AROUND dusk there was a call from a new number, and when I picked it up after one ring, as I picked up all calls—instantly, slavishly—I heard her.
“Mommy?” said Lena, on the brink of tears.
“I’m here! I’m here!” is all I remember saying.
The phone was passed from Lena to someone else, an adult voice I didn’t recognize. A contract was being faxed, it said, and I would have to sign it in front of a notary. We both understood, technically, that it wasn’t binding, wouldn’t hold up in court since it was being signed under duress, etc., but Ned also knew I knew that if I didn’t stick to its terms this would simply happen again.