Granta 133

by Неизвестный

  I distrusted the inflection in their voices even as I too brimmed with guesswork, troubled by the whale from afar. Offered in candour these theories were conspiratorial; premised on the assumption of unspoken consensus struck on the existence of deeper streams of logic running behind the frail authority of science, biology and the wildlife officers’ superintendence of the whale. Narratives in those tones could prove no whale-beaching hypothesis to the crowd’s satisfaction. Their loyalty was to the unverifiable hunch, to intuited patterns of allegory, augury or plot. As if the whale itself, in its fleshly presence, testified to hitherto unfathomed dimensions of reality. Or so it seemed then, as the sun found its zenith and the temperature climbed.

  One woman broke free from the crowd and strode into the water with the wreath in her fists overhead. She sang clearly. It took three wildlife officers to pull her off the side of the whale, kicking. She had spiritual reasons, she said. She had spiritual skills. Her fury wasn’t dignified. It was incandescent. But the whale never wore the sodden wreath.

  When I searched later for reasons why humpbacks founder, I learned that in the coastal currents some whales become entangled in abandoned fishing kit or ingest trash – bags, wrappers and mesh. Because they are so well insulated by that thick layer of blubber they attract fat-soluble toxins as well, absorbing heavy metals and inorganic compounds found in pesticides, fertilizers and the other pollutants that powder the modern sea. The body of a whale is a magnifier for these insidious agrochemicals because cetaceans live a long time and accrue a toxic load from their prey. Levels build up over many seasons, making some animals far more polluted than their surrounding environment.

  I read that estuarine beluga in Canada had been found to be so noxious that their carcasses were classified as toxic waste for disposal. Tissue sampling of sperm whales around the world revealed quantities of cadmium that would kill living cells in a lab. (Cadmium, a compound found in paint and industrial manufacturing, and a by-product of burning fossil fuels, causes metal fume fever, fluid in the lungs, kidney disease and cancer in humans.) The most polluted animals on the face of the earth were thought to be American killer whales in Puget Sound, a place where the starfish had been observed actually melting. The data supported a highly improbable hypothesis, even given the levels of contaminants in the area: that the whales had been chewing batteries or drinking flame retardant to supplement their marine dinners.

  I thought of the humpback in the dump. The whale as landfill. It was a metaphor, and then it wasn’t.

  Swirled through blubber, scientists believed these stored chemicals remained ‘metabolically inert’, which is to say they didn’t harm otherwise healthy whales because they weren’t metabolized and recirculated through the animal’s organs. The effects on humans who ate whales, however, were reportedly much more pernicious. I read that Greenland’s Inuit women, who seasonally consume whale meat, whale skin and fat as part of a traditional diet, had been warned off beluga during pregnancy and advised to stop breastfeeding their babies altogether. These women may occupy some of the most isolated and deindustrialized regions in the world, but sustaining themselves on whales had made their bodies into sites of concentrated contamination. Nearly all the Inuit people who had been tested had levels of mercury and organochlorides that exceeded World Health Organization Standards. When a whale begins to starve, as when it is stranded, its body reverts to ketosis – breaking down blubber for energy in the absence of food. Stored toxins then cease to be dormant and are released back into the bloodstream. This can poison the whale from within, just as it harms those people who eat blighted whale meat. The humpbacks that stream along the Australian coast on their annual migrations are less likely to be afflicted with a chemical ballast as cetacean species elsewhere – these animals spend much of their life cycle in the comparatively benign Southern Ocean (though these waters are also now changing). But the fact that whales were turning up in many other places around the globe full of industrial by-products, plastic and pesticide seemed to me to cast gloom over the intangible symbolism of whales everywhere, and here.

  In the weeks that followed the beaching I found myself preoccupied with an unhappy idea. Our feelings about the dying whale, what it signified and how to save it, might have been misplaced. Chiefly what we talked about, when we talked about whales, was how we’d learned to leave them in the sea, to stop taking them from the wild. This was a self-satisfied story to tell in Australia, a story that was as much about our human capacity for benevolence and awe as it was about the resilience of other species. But what if we were now taking the wildness out of the whale? If deep inside whales the indelible imprint of humans could be found, could we go on recounting the myth of their remarkable otherness, their strange, wondrous and vast animalian world? It struck me that the green dream, lethal and serene, might have been ours after all.

  Here is a story I heard on the beach, about whales that die very far out to sea, perhaps of old age or ship strike. If they are not washed into shallower water by the wind and tides, their massive bodies eventually sink, and simultaneously decay as they sink; they are continuously pecked at by fish, swimming crabs, amphipods and sharks attracted to the carcass. It takes a long time. Weeks, months. Later the whale will slip below the depth where epipelagic foragers can feed off it. As the pressure compounds, the whale’s body decelerates in its fall, and putrefying gases build up in its softening tissues. It drifts past fish that no longer look like anything we might call fish, but bottled fireworks, reticulated rigging and musical instruments turned inside out. The whale enters the abyssopelagic zone. No light has ever shone here, for so long as the world has had water. Purblind hagfish creep, jawless, pale as the liberated internal organs of other sea animals. The only sound is the tickly scrunch of brittle stars, splitting themselves in half and eating one another alive. Slowly. It is very cold. Hell’s analogue on earth. Hagfish rise to meet the carcass and tunnel in, lathering their burrows with mucus. They absorb whalish nutrients through their skin.

  The whale body reaches a point where the buoyancy of its meat and organs is only tethered down by the force of its falling bones. Methane is released in minuscule bubbles. It scatters skin and sodden flesh below it, upon which grows a carpet of white worms waving upwards (grass on its grave). Then, sometimes, the entire whale skeleton will suddenly burst through the cloud of its carcass. For a time, the skeleton might stay hitched jerkily at the spine to its parachute of muscle; a macabre marionette dangling in the slight currents. Then it drops, falls quickly to the sea floor, into the plush cemetery of the worms. Gusts of billowing silt roll away. The mantle of the whale’s pulpier parts settles over it. Marine snow (anonymous matter, ground to a salt in the lighter layers of the sea) beats down ceaselessly. Rat-tails, devouring snails and more polychaetes appear. The bones are stripped and then fluff up with silver-white bacteria, so that it appears as if the skeleton is draped in metres of downy towelling. Years may pass, decades even, before there is nothing left except a dent that holds the dark darker.

  Whales are conscious breathers, which means they have to remember to do it. Towards the end, low tide and a small group persisting, I shuffled in close to hear its irregular gasps. The whale’s eye – midnight, mid-ocean – had no eyelashes and, according to another wildlife officer, no tear ducts (for what would be the point of crying in the sea?). I hovered as near as I was able to, speaking sometimes to the whale’s blowhole. What felt important in that moment was the act of seeing this through to the end, of agreeing not to leave the whale alone. Kinship, I guess, was what we proffered. Who could say if it was more or less welcome than the barbiturate injection still packed up in the van? No one clicked a cartridge into a rifle or brandished the merciful stick of explosive. Nature, as they say, would run its course. That was a phrase we trusted. We repeated it.

  Inside the whale it grew hotter and hotter, though that proved difficult to imagine. We humans, I think, devise death as a gradual loss of fire; the gleam retracted from every cor
ner, pulled to a wick within, guttering out. The whale’s descent was different. I had an idea of each sentence as I spoke it, cool and round as a stone, dropping for five minutes or longer down into the whale’s head. But what did the whale understand by my speech? A germane sound, inlaid with information, or just noise, background babble as the wind speaks in the trees, as dogs bark, being dragged off by their owners on leashes. Do human voices sound as ethereal to the whale as whale voices sound to us? Or do we scratch and irritate the whale, a pin in the ear?

  I put one hand briefly on the skin of the whale and felt its distant heartbeat, an electrical throbbing like a refrigerator. Life on that scale – mammalian life on that scale – so unfamiliar and familiar simultaneously. Oh, the alien whale. The world-bound whale. A net of shadows spread out across the ribby sand. All of us swayed slightly on the spot. By-catch. The occasional plosive rush of air, less frequent. The mumbling of the tide in the tiny bays of the sea.

  LADY NEPTUNE

  Ann Beattie

  Mrs Edward R. was pushed into the building in a wheelchair with a half-sized seat, several straps pulled not exactly tightly, but tightly enough, over her lap. She loved, loved those skirts from several years ago, weighted at the bottom and voluminous, with ruched sides billowing below the stitches into parachutes – so comfortable, so (as is said) forgiving.

  But of course, with a real parachute you’d be up in the air, dangling above the Atlantic. Blowing right past the condos overlooking the water, such as 1800 Atlantic, where her son Darryl lived with the nicer of his twin sons following an abominable stroke when he was fifty-six: a non-smoker; a jogger; okay – a few too many recreational drugs in his youth. Darryl spent many days on the balcony, staring at the water. She didn’t do that – she wasn’t in that sort of shape, thank God – but she did sometimes cross her eyes and look at nothing as a way of introspecting.

  She was being carried into the building’s private elevator, key-activated so that everyone else coming to the party would have to climb the stairs, regardless of age, infirmity, fame. That, or they’d already know better than to come. Only for her, only for Alva, did the host admit to having the key. ‘Alvie,’ he’d said to her years ago, ‘it’s our little secret.’ Among their other little secrets was that they sent the cook away and had a flute of champagne with lunch, and that they’d found an accountant who had ingenious ways for his clients to cheat on their taxes. Her husband R. (that was their nasty nickname for him. He’d read too many Russian novels.) had never particularly liked Duncan Oswald, though he, too, had usually gone to Duncan’s annual Christmas party. It was a small community, and one didn’t want to give offense by not attending. Still, one year R. had sent Alva along without him – back when she simply walked places – and sent flowers the next day with a note of apology about his ostensible last-minute nausea, but the florist had gotten the orders mixed up, so Duncan – who always did like R., or at least appreciate that he was often wittingly or not the occasion for fun – received a bouquet of tulips with a dirty note about how their dowsing heads wanted to be you-know-where. It was Key West, so of course the florist had just written down whatever message the caller gave. Though he had nothing to do with the mix-up, obviously, R. resented Duncan for the amount of kidding he’d had to endure: Duncan had spread this story around, he hadn’t.

  Ned, the less-nice of her grandsons, was accompanying her. At this very moment, he was squeezing into the little elevator, placing a hand on her shoulder. The elevator’s slowness made him nervous. ‘Here we go,’ he said tensely. He had nothing else to say as they ascended. She plucked up a bit of fabric so that it fell even lower on her leg – she hoped low enough to obscure the bruise. She couldn’t get into pantyhose anymore, and she detested those stockings that ended just at the knee. That scam was always somehow humiliatingly revealed, and then you felt worse, and the person seeing felt worse.

  Less-Nice Ned (she and Duncan had agreed on this, over a little Taittinger) was on best behavior tonight, for whatever reason. Duncan’s cook (who had previously been a burglar in Miami; he got early parole because it was a first offense, and the prison was filled to bursting) almost collided with her grandson as the elevator door opened, in his haste to be helpful. Less-Nice Ned rolled her forward as the cook swept away imaginary obstacles, including a full-body block of a potted hibiscus at least eight feet away from the wheelchair.

  Christmas lights twinkled around the pot. They twinkled from the ceiling beams, hanging like little glittering stalactites. Soon Gay Santa would appear, to change into his faux-edgy costume and perform the annual ritual of handing out small wrapped presents to all the people. You could really end up on the short end of the stick, sometimes. The previous year, one guest had received a package of airplane peanuts.

  Her present, though, was a promissory note: ‘My devotion forever, and my cook for your birthday, who will prepare dinner for up to ten friends.’ Very generous! And yes – she had ten friends. Especially if you counted her son and his two boys, though her son would not attend, even if he said he would, and probably if Less-Nice Ned got a better offer, he’d cancel at the last minute. Her accountant and his wife would be there. Her psychiatrist. Jeannelle, who walked her dog every night (somebody not worth inviting walked the dog in the morning and mid-afternoon). Marie and Harry would be there. Maybe the Perrys. The cook, himself. Shouldn’t she include the cook, and of course the gift-giver? Was that ten, or more than ten?

  She settled on the sofa this way: the narrow wheelchair was turned sideways, with the cook fanning dust out of the air, as if its settling might somehow interfere with the transfer. (There was no dust; the cook also cleaned.) Next, she slid one-two-three (moving prematurely on ‘two’), with her grandson’s hand lightly curled under her armpit, guiding her along what even she could see was a short, sideways bump on to the Naugahyde sectional sofa. Under the cushion, she knew, were books. Duncan put them there because otherwise the cushion sank down too much, and rising would be difficult. Three decorative pillows in varying shades of green were available to be placed behind her back, if she might want to sit a little farther forward. She wasn’t sure about that; it made a person look too eager, too truly on the edge of the chair.

  Ah! It was very comfortable, but books or not, she was not pleased about the amount of armpit pressure that would have to be applied at the end of the evening. Still, she looked up and gave a small smile and nodded. ‘Everything comfortable?’ the cook said. He always spoke with bravado. He had found God while in jail, but had given Him up the second he was paroled. Also, he knew they drank champagne – she’d seen him peeking once, before he left – but what did he care? What might the cook truly care about? He was not a person she would have known in her youth. Old people couldn’t meet anyone new – other people looked right through you. And her friends; she didn’t want to know any more about them.

  ‘If you could have anything in the world, what might that be?’ she said to the cook.

  He looked momentarily confused, as if someone might be standing behind his back. ‘A lot of money,’ he said.

  She considered this. It seemed an honest answer. Also, just because she was old and in not very good shape, why should she be allowed a follow-up question? So she didn’t ask it. It would be taking advantage of his position. Making a monkey of him. You could only talk about a zebra’s stripes because they didn’t speak. Now, it was turning out that if you said something about a monkey, the monkey would probably understand entirely and even consider an ironic reply. Or was that gorillas? What was Koko?

  ‘My husband was a great believer in mutual funds. In diversifying. But I do understand that you have to have money in order to “grow your money”. Even grass doesn’t grow on its own. Or at least you have to water it and not let anyone walk on it and then worry about it for the rest of your life, those times it does take.’

  ‘Ma’am,’ he said.

  ‘Well, that’s enough of that conversation,’ Less-Nice Ned said.

&nb
sp; Duncan had given her her present the day before, delivered by messenger. Of course, the cook had been the messenger, coming with the little wrapped box in his bike basket, crossing paths with Olinda the Boring Dog Walker, flirting with her, in her deep-cut tank shirt and shorts with the peace sign on the back pockets. Still, she’d never considered the possibility that the cook might have replied, ‘Olinda.’

  ‘You stop hovering like bees around the nest and get yourselves something to drink,’ Duncan said to all the people suddenly grouped in front of them. Then he plopped down beside her. Duncan was eighty. He went to the gym two days a week and power-walked on the sidewalk by the beach another couple of nights. He had a droopy eye, but nothing was going to fix that. It wasn’t even entirely age-related. When the bees scattered, he patted her knee lightly, through peaks and gulleys of fabric. ‘And if you could have anything you wanted, what would it be?’

  ‘Are you mad that I asked him?’ she said.

  ‘No, dear. He’s not quite at the cut-off age where it would only be condescending. He’s turned his life around since his incarceration, we see that. If he doesn’t kill me in my sleep, or something. I’ve promised him money when I die, and he doesn’t want to go back to prison and he doesn’t seem violent, anyway. You know, they caught him because he peed a little during the robbery. How they cross-match pee, I don’t know. Or maybe it was a hair that finally did him in.’

  She started laughing. Her eyes darted to the cook, who was standing talking to her grandson and another man who’d entered the party but not come over to say hello. No, wait: it was Olinda. Olinda, in one of those trilbies everybody wore, pulled down low, and black leather motorcycle pants and black boots, her eyebrows drawn on darkly, her hair jaggedly cut off. As short a haircut as a man would have! And a black leather jacket to complete the outfit. Olinda raised a Heineken bottle in greeting.