Five percent of my attention is on my hands as I work. Delicate work like this reminds me that my fingers are thicker than they used to be. They have become that way as they’ve become gray, because the rubbery skin takes up more room. Yet I am still able to grasp the pictures and hold a pen, and do all manner of hand-related activities. My fingernails, though, are little more than slivers at the top of each finger. Soon they will be gone entirely. I am not bothered by this, but I occasionally wonder if I should be.
Vanishing Alexios.
Exhaling is so vain.
In the pile are a few pictures of the clinic, which I took by sticking my head above water. In one of these pictures, several lab techs can be seen eating lunch together on an outdoor patio. One of the techs in the picture, I notice, is Frances. I put this picture above the manatees, not because I care to look at the lab techs, but because they are one of the life forms, like seaweed and dolphins, that live in my world. I am being thorough.
A funny feeling comes over me when I get to the bottom of the stack, as though I have eaten something bad. The very last pictures are three of me, Alexios. I had forgotten about those, and now, looking at them, I am baffled as to why I took them. There is no mirror in my habitat, just as there was no mirror in my old room at the Genetic Radiance clinic. I do not care to see myself. And yet, here are these three images. One is a close-up of my head. The other two are of my whole body, floating near the amusement park. To take those, I set the camera on the very highest point of the Ferris wheel and used the camera’s timer. Why? Thoroughness again?
I shrink from my image.
And yet I cannot take my eyes off these photographs. They hold me in place, pin me to them.
All figures of speech.
There I am, big, gray head, with bulging eyes to accommodate underwater sight. Short torso, long arms. Legs that, when held together, resemble a dolphin’s lower body, but when moving appear to be two long gray paddles. And above them is the only article of clothing I wear, a pair of underwear like a wetsuit, as gray as my body, to give me some human modesty.
There is Alexios. I imagine fitting two of me into a rectangular box and I try to calculate the best positions to use. This is made difficult by the size of my head. If there were three of me, though, and a larger box, I could come up with a satisfactory solution.
Three monsters.
Stern theorems.
Ten storms here.
If I were to put these pictures on the wall, in which row would I place myself? With the seaweed? With the lab techs? With the underwater mammals? Instead, I lay the self-portraits across my desk. The world through a camera lens is a different world. Is Frances a kind of camera lens? I cannot explain how, but merely speaking with her has altered the look of things.
My dinner is finished. I swing across the room to stuff the tray back into its slot. It is time to get back to work.
6. THE OCEAN
Above the sea paddock, the sun is going down. It has crossed from Greece to Italy and is heading west. This is another figure of speech, personification. The sun is an inanimate object, stationary relative to the Earth. We are the ones moving, at 1,037 miles per hour at the equator—though it is more like 800 miles per hour here in Greece (if I knew our exact location, I would have a better number, but as it is, I can only estimate).
Estimations.
Time is a snot!
Nevertheless, there is still plenty of light. The flock of chimeras has moved closer to land, as they do each day at this time, brought in by the tide, you might say, though it would be metaphor since there is hardly any tide here, toward the warmer water inshore.
It takes only a few moments to locate Snake, who is snuffling through the red seaweed near the center of the flock. Snake is fully grown, but shorter than the average adult manatee. He makes up for this with his huge girth. He is nearly twice as fat as most of his flockmates. More beach ball than blimp. So “Snake.” Irony.
The flock grunts and chirps as I glide above them. I am carrying a head of lettuce in one hand, and this captures their attention. Manatees love the taste of lettuce—the seaweed of the land—and yet it has a dramatically polarizing effect on the flock. The ones who’ve had organs removed are shuffling away—not so fast as to attract my attention, but fast enough that in a few moments they have dispersed into the darkening water. The manatees who have never been to the surgery pod are floating eagerly toward me.
You see, the lettuce is the lure, the enticement, the way I get them into surgery. After a few operations, I have to use something better, like bananas. But this is Snake’s first time and he grunts with surprise and ecstasy when I scratch his back—out of the whole flock, I have come to him! I peel off a lettuce leaf and watch it disappear into his mouth. Through the translator, I say, “Follow!” and he does, gobbling up the lettuce that I strew, bread crumbs through the twilight forest. Metaphor.
As we swim, I notice all seven dolphins gathered some distance away, observing. They understand the sequence of events beginning with lettuce and ending with an injured manatee who smells of blood and humans, and like fair-weather sports fans they want to watch but also keep the process at arm’s length. That is simile and metaphor, but I don’t need to keep telling you, do I?
The surgery pod resembles an old-fashioned submarine without any windows. Like my habitat, it can be entered from below by sea-based visitors. The doctors enter from above, by means of a ramp from the jetty.
Food, food, food, food, Snake says, executing a stately rotation to get closer to the head of lettuce.
“Food,” I agree, through the translator.
I have lured manatees here ninety-seven times, and yet this evening I notice particularly how easy the job is. When I press the button above our heads, there is the immediate sound of a steel door sliding open. Snake glances up, his sunken eyes regarding the alien structure above us.
“Food,” I say again, tearing off half the lettuce.
As the door comes fully open, I can see two doctors and several lab techs in the pressurized pod above, peering down through the surface of the water. The sling is already dropping, and as Snake eats the last of the lettuce, I secure the straps around his body.
Food, food, food? Snake inquires, looking this way and that for more lettuce. But he has eaten it all.
With a creaking whine, the winch engages. The sling tightens around Snake’s body as it hoists him upward.
Play? he asks me, noticing the pressure of the thing. There is no fear in his small eyes, because Snake was born in the paddock and has spent his life here. He has no reason to be afraid.
I do not answer him. He is trying to move his flippers, but his body is already half out of the water. To me, he looks distorted where his body breaks the surface, so that the top half of him is tiny, the bottom half far too big. He is passing from his own world into another, where humans and gravity hold sway. Up there, he isn’t Snake. He is only Chimera624, property of the Blessed Cures Consortium. If I were to examine the Consortium’s books, would I find myself listed as property too?
Snake is fully inside, and a lab tech leans down and gives me a thumbs-up.
All is well here.
We’ll raise hell.
For a moment I have a view of the sling carrying Snake toward the stainless-steel operating table, but the door is sliding shut, and I turn away. A heart and pancreas will be removed, and Snake will not even realize he is missing them. He will leave the surgery pod with only stitches and an unfocused sense of dread.
Several manatees are still floating hopefully nearby, searching for lettuce.
Food, food, food? they ask as I swim among them.
There is no manatee word for no as far as I can tell. There is only majestic disregard, so this is how I answer them, by floating solemnly away. I am thinking of the
six people I saw in the surgery pod, and calculating how many copies of each I would have to make to fill the pod entirely. The answer varies depending on whether I leave room for Snake. I have a strong feeling that I would rather not leave room. In this imaginary scenario, can I not envision him swimming freely, untouched by human hands?
I float aimlessly for a time, until I have an answer: Fifty-one. That’s how many of those doctors and lab techs it would take to entirely fill the surgery pod. Several of them would have to be cut into smaller pieces to fill in the nooks and crannies, but that’s often the case.
True twilight has crept through the paddock, bringing shadows and mystery. Is this a figure of speech? The answer is not always as clear as I make it out to be. Caroline, at Genetic Radiance, is the one who explained figurative language to me. “It is the language of imagination,” she said. “It lets us describe the ordinary world in unexpected ways.”
Tonight, what I see is this: the evolution of language is toward metaphor. Hundreds of years ago, if someone said “I burn with desire!” that would have been metaphor. Now, you can find that imaginative definition nailed down, in prosaic detail, in any dictionary. I know because I have been given access to twelve dictionaries. We have taken the imagination and made it routine.
The brush of fate.
The tempest in her eyes.
The dagger in my heart.
All once figures of speech, and yet all tied down, beaten down, by lexicographers. Over time, our speech has become increasingly figurative. Does that mean that humans, as a race, have allowed imagination and beauty to infiltrate their lives with each passing generation? Or have they destroyed imagination and beauty by capturing and codifying them? In which case—am I the final result? Am I a metaphor, an irony, embodied and made ordinary?
The manatees who ran away when I took Snake are now coming back, grunting hello as they work their way toward their favorite twilight sea grass bed. Bluebear swims toward me, but then I perceive unpleasant thoughts crossing his mind: lettuce, play, follow, stomach, ouch. He thinks better of it and veers away to settle onto the seabed with the others. He will forget by tomorrow, but for now I am tainted by association with the one source of pain in his protected world.
How do I know what has crossed Bluebear’s mind? I told Mr. Tavoularis that “I just do,” that I know what they are thinking because I live with them. But it occurs to me: I was given a bigger head and extra neurons that I didn’t use when I lived on a bed in the Genetic Radiance clinic. Am I using them now? Have they formed, inside my misshapen skull, alternate pathways of consciousness for this underwater world?
Dolphin brain.
I, blind orphan.
I have drifted into the kelp forest, which is little more than slender, looming shapes on every side of me in the low light, when a chorus of clicks and chirps erupts in the distance. Immediately, the noise grows louder—the dolphin pod is swimming toward me at full speed. I blink twice, to bring my nighttime vision into play. It is a modification I use sparingly, because it turns the ocean into an unnatural seascape of bright white and takes away most of my depth perception. But I am thankful for it now, as I see the seven dolphins, materializing from the darkness around me, screeching in agitation.
Enemy, enemy, enemy! Human! Many!
Loud Mike swims close, and the moment I have taken hold of his dorsal fin, we are off. In my night vision, the ocean is a blur of highlights. We pass from the kelp forest, by the Ferris wheel, and then we are approaching the net. The mesh appears as contrasting streaks of bright and dark, and just as the dolphins warned me, there are three human intruders floating on the other side.
Enemy, enemy, enemy! Loud Mike tells me.
The dolphins, who can perceive the world almost as well in the night as in the day, because of their echolocation, are never quite sure what I’m able to see, and Loud Mike is counting the intruders for me.
I have unhooked my stunner and am raising it toward them when the three figures on the other side of the net do something unexpected. They turn on a light and point it not at us but at themselves. They flare so brightly in my night vision that I have to shut my eyes and turn away.
Then a voice travels through the water, speaking English.
“We’re here for you,” it says.
How can they speak underwater? I double-blink, returning my eyes to normal vision.
“Will you speak to us?” comes the voice again, piercing and eerie.
In the light of their lamp, I see that the closest man is wearing something around his neck, and it is this apparatus that is speaking to me. By their body language, all three are telling me, Look, we’re not enemies. We are showing ourselves to you!
My stunner is aimed at them, but my fingers hesitate on the trigger. One of the men holds a camera, which was pointed in the direction of the surgery pod until a moment ago, but which is now pointed at me. The other two men have empty hands.
Empty hands.
Many depths.
“We are here for you,” the closest one tells me again through the device.
In response, I raise my weapon.
“Wait! Wait!” he says.
I am not supposed to wait. But for some reason, tonight, I do.
“Where is our friend?” he asks.
I could point upward, telling them that the man who came to the paddock earlier is up in the world of air and land, but I don’t know for sure that this is true. The Blessed Cures Consortium might be interrogating their friend right now, or he might be walking free back to whichever consortium he works for, or he might be dead and floating in the sea.
My pod of dolphins chirps questioningly, Go? Take? Enemy?
The man with the voice box is holding his hands up in a placating gesture. His eyes, behind his goggles, are fixed on my weapon, and yet he beckons me closer.
“We can take you,” he says. “Give you a better life than what you have here. Give you dignity.”
So. They have not come merely to steal the Blessed Cures Consortium’s industrial secrets of manatee husbandry and dolphin instruction. They have come to steal me.
“We can help you,” the intruder says.
He has floated closer to the net. Through his goggles, his eyes are imploring me.
Loud Mike nudges my shoulder. The other dolphins are chirruping anxiously. This is not what we’ve practiced.
All three intruders float up to the net, three sets of eyes pinned to me.
I imagine myself as viewed through their eyes. Gray, rubbery, a jellyfish-like head, with the rest of me dangling below. At best, a vassal to the Blessed Cures Consortium; at worst, a slave.
If I were to go with them, where would they take me? To another underwater habitat, owned by some other company for whom I would wrangle dolphins? To a research laboratory, where they could pick apart the modifications made by Genetic Radiance? To a human rights group, who would put me on the video feeds as a victim of scientific arrogance?
Human monstrosity!
Man mounts history!
“Please,” the intruder tells me with his eerie, mechanical voice. “Come with us.”
I pull the trigger of my stunner. Then I aim methodically at the other two men, pulling the trigger twice more. Six torpedoes launch toward the net.
The intruders, blinded by their own lamp, do not see the missiles heading for them and they disperse only at the last moment, when it is too late. In the time it takes me to reach the net, all three men convulse into limpness, until their arms trail behind them and bubbles trickle from their mouths.
I slice the net with my special knife. The dolphins are ecstatic, chittering all around me as I work. Yes, yes, yes! Excitement! Win, win, win! When I have created a large opening, I send out the signature whistle of the entire pod:
“Everyone! Go take!”
All eight of us swim through the net to the unconscious intruders. But as I get close to the limp forms, I understand that I have misread the situation. They are not all incapacitated. The third intruder, the one near the camera, is starting to move.
Look! chirps Loud Mike.
The third man kicks free of the other two, with whom he had become tangled. He turns toward the approaching dolphins, and he raises a dish-shaped device.
And then…
…the world hiccups.
It is as though something travels through the water toward us, past us. A wave of force tickles through me.
The dolphins shriek in unison, a high series of squeals that I have never heard before but that plainly mean Pain! So much pain!
The man fires at us again, and I feel the second wave glide through me. My ears pop, while the dolphins go into a renewed frenzy of screeching. It is a sonic weapon of some kind, attacking their acute sense of hearing. And while they are immobilized, he is swimming toward me, a cylinder in his right hand. I know it—it is an underwater syringe. He is going to take me.
In my surprise, I have let my weapon float away to the end of its tether. The man has closed the distance and grabs my arm. I kick him with a flipper, but he pays this no mind—my legs allow me to swim, but they are not an effective means of attack. He reaches the syringe toward my neck, while behind me I can hear Loud Mike saying, Ouch, ouch, ouch!
Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful Page 12
