and deafened me. I cried and cried, but no murmur of help came from without or sounded through the dead ocean within.
For a long time the humans moved me with their various conveyances – I did not know where. The last of these, another land ship, I thought, jumped and stopped, then speeded up with a growl and a belch of smoke, only to stop again, many, many times. I could discern no pattern to its noisy motions. It occurred to me that I should seek relief from all the crushing and the lurching by swimming off into sleep. For the first time in my life, I could sleep with all my brain and mind without breathing water and drowning. I could not sleep, however, even within the tiniest kernel of myself, even for a moment. For if I did sleep, I knew that I would die a different kind of death, becoming so lost within dreams of the family and the freedom I had left behind that I would never want to wake up.
At last, the land ship came to stop longer than any of the other stops. Human voices sounded from outside the metal skin that encased me. Then, from farther away, came other voices, fainter but much more pleasing to my mind: I heard birds squawking and sea lions barking out obnoxious sounds similar to those made by the humans’ dogs. A beluga, too, called out in the sweet dreamy beluga language. A walrus whistled as if to warn me away. Voices of orcas picked up this alarm.
The humans used their cleverness with things to lift me out of the land ship and lower me into a pool of water. How warm it was – too warm, almost as warm as a pool of urine! How it tasted of excrement and chemicals and decaying fish! Even so, it was water, no matter how lifeless or foul, and immediately the crushing force released its hold on my lungs, and I could breathe again. In a way, I was home.
‘Water, water, water!’ I shouted out.
My heart began beating to the wild rhythm of unexpected relief. I felt compelled to swim down nearly to the bottom of the pool and then up to leap high into the air before crashing back down into the water with a huge splash.
‘Yes, that’s right, Bobo!’ A voice hung in the air like a hovering seagull. ‘That’s why we rescued you, why you’re here. Good Bobo, good – very good!’
Humans stood around the edge of the pool. Many of them there were, and each encased in the colorful coverings that they call clothes. These humans, however, unlike those I had known in the bay, covered less of their bodies. I looked up upon bare, brown arms and horribly hairy legs sticking out of half tubes of blue or yellow or red plastic fabric. One of the females was nearly as naked as a whale, with only thin black strips to cover her genital slit and her milk glands.
‘Can you jump again for me?’ she said to me. From a plastic bucket full of dead, dirty fish, she removed a herring and tossed it into the water.
I swam over and nuzzled the herring. Although I was hungry, I did not want to eat this slimy bit of carrion.
‘Here, like this,’ she said.
She clamped her arms against her sides, then jumped up and kicked her feet in a clumsy mockery of a whale’s leap into the air.
‘If he’s as smart as they say he is, Gabi,’ one of the females standing near her said, ‘you’ll have him doing pirouettes in a month.’
‘Wow, look at the size of him!’ a male said. ‘They weren’t lying about how big he is.’
‘Yes, you are big, aren’t you, Bobo?’ the female said. ‘And in a few more months, you’re going to be our biggest star. Welcome to Sea Circus!’
My elation at being once again immersed in water vanished upon a quick exploration of my new environs. How tiny my pool of water was! I could swim across it in little more than a heartbeat. It seemed nearly as tight as a womb, though nothing about it nurtured or comforted. The pool’s walls seemed made of stone covered in blue paint. Whenever I loosed a zang of sonar to keep from colliding with one of the walls, the echoes bounced wildly from wall to wall and filled the pool with a maddening noise. I felt disoriented, abandoned, and lost within a few fathoms of filthy water. I could barely hear myself think.
I did not understand at first why the humans delayed in devouring me. Then, after half a day in the pool, I formed a hypothesis: the few humans I had seen could not possibly eat a whale such as I by themselves. Perhaps they waited for others of their kind to join the feast. Or perhaps they had captured and trapped me for a more sinister reason: here, within a pool so small that I had trouble turning around, they could cut pieces out of me over many days and thus consume me from skin to blubber to muscle to bone. It would take a long time for me to die, and the humans could fill their small mouths and bellies many times. Protected as the pool was by its hard, impenetrable walls, no sharks would arrive to steal me from the humans and finish me off. I would have nearly forever to complete the composition of my death song, which I had begun when trapped by netting in the bay.
I could not, however, sing. In such a place, who could give voice to the great mysteries and exaltations? In tainted water roiling with the cacophony of sonar crisscrossing the pool and fracturing into deafening zangs, who could prepare for the great journey into the quiet, eternal now-moment that underlies the beginning and end of time? No, no, I could not affirm life by opening myself to my inevitable death, and so I cried out in a rage at having come so far only to suffer such a despicable fate. I raged and raged as I cried out to my family who could not hear me, and I swam and I swam back and forth across the hated pool, back and forth, back and forth.
Such despair can derange the mind. Soon, I began hearing voices: the voices, I thought, of the other orcas trapped in other pools nearby. Surely the moans and murmurs of discontent that I heard must issue from real, living whales, mustn’t they? How, though, could I be sure that I was not hallucinating? In the distant lamentations that vibrated the walls about me and further poisoned the sounds of my pool, I could barely make out voices deformed by accents strong and strange:
‘Welcome, welcome, welcome!’
‘Go away, whale of the Northern Ocean! We do not want you here!’
‘Go away, if you can! But, of course, you cannot. You are trapped like a krill in the belly of a blue whale.’
‘You are trapped as we are trapped. Do not dispirit yourself by trying to keep alive your spirit.’
‘Do not listen to Unukalhai, for he is mad.’
‘Abandon all hope, you who have entered this place of hopelessness.’
‘Live, brave orca. It is all you can do!’
‘Die, strange one. Breathe water and die before your soul dies and you cannot die when it comes time to die.’
‘No, escape!’
‘Do not hope for escape. All who come here die.’
‘Quenge and escape before it is too late.’
‘Who can quenge in such a place? Die, die, die!’
‘Welcome, welcome, welcome!’
Soon, I met those orcas who had spoken to me and so confirmed their reality. My pool, as I discovered, joined with other pools, some much larger but still too small to move about comfortably. Between each pool, the humans had contrived doors which they somehow opened and shut as easily as I might my mouth. With the humans standing about the concrete beach of the largest of the pools, as the hot sun made the warm water even warmer, I made my way into the pool as tentatively as I might swim into a cave full of stingrays. There I mingled with the other orcas and made their acquaintance.
