The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel (12 page)

“Why not?”

“The krill eat sea growth on the bottoms of the ice. Less ice, less krill; less krill, fewer whales.” He grimaced. “So there’s both the Japanese killing them, and less food to go round. I’m not a fanatic, like Lars. But we don’t
need
to wipe out species with brains bigger than ours, that sing songs so complex that even after decades of study, we have no idea what they’re communicating.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. Again she started to lift a hand; again, dropped it. You can’t do that, Sara, she told herself. Can’t rub your assistant’s neck. No matter how harmless it might seem. She stood abruptly, hitting her head on a dangling plastic-and-metal foot. “Oh—sorry. I’m going back topside. Shall I ask Dru to stay with one of the pods?”

“He wants to keep pushing east. But if we could run with the humpies for a few more hours, I might be able to get something recorded. If the hard drive hasn’t totally crashed.”

*   *   *

Topside everyone was still hanging over the lines, passing binoculars back and forth. Eddi had lashed herself to the mast to free both hands for the camera. The captain listened to Sara’s request without expression. Before he could say anything Madsen put in, “We’re not out here to watch whales. We’re here to stop the slaughter. Right, Dru?”

“The owner’s orders are to locate and pursue the fleet,” the captain said, gaze fixed above them both.

She said, persuasively as she could without sounding coy, “I understand that, Lars. Dru. But I
am
here to observe. So if we could get just a bit closer?”

Perrault pursed his lips in a fine Gallic expression that held absolutely no possibility of English translation. “I’ll stay with them for a couple of hours. But if Mick picks up emissions, I’m heading after the fleet.” He took a breath, released it; then put the wheel over. Hauled the mainsheet in hand over hand so quickly the line blurred, and jerked it up into the stainless jaws of the block.
Anemone
heeled as she came around, sails luffing, then snapping back into full draw as she steadied on the new course.

The humpbacks did not seem to mind their company. They continued to spout. The younger ones ventured closer, then were sheepdogged away by vigilant … parents? Aunts? She hung over the side, wishing there was some way to make out the sex of these giants.

“Bubble herding,” Madsen called down. “See those four off the bow, swimming in a circle? They surround a school, leaving trails of bubbles. The prey moves away from the bubbles, and from the white patches on the whales’ fins.”

Sara gasped as the sea bulged from beneath. One after the other, the whales came up within the boiling mass of encircled prey, gaping mouths the size of hotel swimming pools, the grooved skin of their lower jaws expanding to take in many tons of seawater and food. Tiny silverine fish leaped within those rapidly shrinking ponds, frantically trying to escape what was already certain destruction. She clung to a shroud, entranced. The whales were cooperating. Using tools to hunt. As clearly as a chimp using a stalk of grass to raid a termite nest.

Another calf ventured their way, but this time its larger guardian hung back. Sara shaded her eyes as it wallowed closer. Hard to call something that huge
cute
, but …

Auer called from her perch, “Bend down a little, Sara. As if you’re talking to it. That’s right.” She looked up to see the lens pointed at her.

Dorée came around the coach house and stood watching as Eddi kept asking Sara to turn this way and that. Sara grew annoyed. Had she asked to be filmed? Finally she straightened. “Eddi, I don’t really—”

“Oh, a
mother and calf
,” the actress said brightly, with a lilting, ardent inflection that turned every head on deck.

Sara blinked. A heavy sweater was unzipped to showcase cleavage. Tehiyah’s shaken-out hair streamed in the wind like a dark banner. Her eyes, no longer narrowed at Sara, sparkled. Somehow she’d seized center stage, as if the open deck of the slowly slipping sailboat were the boards of a theater. Those eyes! Sara couldn’t pull her gaze from them. Those great tawny pools welcomed the universe, beaming love. Dorée circled the coach house to emerge on the foredeck, where the lines of the swelling sail intersected. As if magnetized, Auer’s lens followed. “Can you hear?” Dorée called. “A mother, singing a lullaby to her child.”

Sara didn’t hear anything but the wind. But every face on deck followed the actress, drawn like sunflowers to the rays of morning. She stopped at the bow and bent; thoughtful; attentive. Beneath the water a cerulean blue flickered, slowly faded, then rose again.

The whales surfaced without haste, the smaller first, closest to the dipping and rising prow. Snapping her attention back from the actress, Sara noted the protuberances of modified hair follicles, the limpish sag of a black dorsal.

She leaned forward, concentrating on the massive beasts that arched and flexed a few arm’s lengths away, bathed and cradled by the sea. The massive backs were crosshatched with circular marks, like the scars of many whippings.

“Oh, gosh,” Eddi whispered.

White spray burst up, then rained down, the mist drifting for many yards until it swept over them, wild with a dank rankness of fish paste and animal breath. A slitted double nostril gaped, inhaling, one aperture much wider than the other; then snapped closed as a wave washed over it.

The young whale rolled onto its back, flinging out its fins to expose the white underside, long grooves running along it as precisely as if machined. A tight slit perhaps two feet long came into view, surrounded by puckered flesh. “Female,” Madsen noted. “Two, three years old.”

Dorée pulled her hair back with a graceful motion to reveal a grave, transfigured expression. She spoke to the lens. “These wonderful creatures are being slaughtered by the hundreds each Antarctic summer. A new Holocaust, perpetuated through the ignorance and greed of a few, and the apathy of the rest of us. Only the Cetacean Protectors are here to intervene, at the very bottom of the world.—Pan down to them, Eddi, then close-up on me.—But we will protect these gentle giants. Find their murderers, and the killing will stop.”

Auer cleared her throat. “Tehiyah? I didn’t come up here to—”

“Back to the whales, Eddi. Then …
cut
. Let’s do another take. I
love
the baby.”

Sara remembered her own Canon, and pulled it from her pocket. There had to be millions of pictures of humpbacks online. These same whales wintered in the Hawaiian Islands. Maybe an opening slide for a presentation. If she ever got invited to another academic conference, which was an open question.

The massive mother blew, an explosive
pffoootsch
that rained down over the sea. She arched her back, an expanse of wet black rubber large enough to play tennis on. Sara snapped off shots as the flukes lifted in a black rainbow, executed a complex flourish, showing the maculated cream-white underside for several seconds. Then the female slipped slowly under.

“Fantastic,” Eddi said. “They do put on a terrific show.”

“They’re not circus animals,” Madsen snapped. When Sara looked his jaw was set. “They are not here for our
entertainment
.”

“Looking doesn’t hurt them, Lars,” Eddi said mildly.

“That’s what the tour operators say. Then they chase and harass them for hours. We don’t just destroy their habitat, slaughter them, make them into meat. We have to make them exhibits, too.”

“Look, they’re coming back.”

They turned to the gigantic animals now rising again, blowing, on the other side. Dorée trotted across the foredeck, calling, “Okay, let’s do it again.”

“Sorry, Tehiyah. You have your assistant for that.”

“And she’s fucking useless, so you’re my cinematographer now. Get down here. Shoot upward, into my face.”

Instead Auer’s lip came out. She stuffed the camera back into its case. “Fuck you. I’m not taking orders from you.”

“Eddi,” Perrault said from the helm. “Control yourself. Your job—”

She whirled, and Sara recoiled from the sudden passion in her voice. “My
job
? Nobody here’s paying me! I paid my own airfare down. Anything I film is mine!”

“Anything you film is
ours
,” Dorée said.

“That’s not the agreement I made.”

“Why else would you be along? I assure you, if you don’t do your job, you won’t work in film again. Or anywhere else in entertainment—aquatic or otherwise.”

Sara put her hand on the small woman’s arm. Auer was shaking. “Eddi, calm down. Let’s discuss this. I’m sure they’ll pay you for the footage—”

Dorée said, “We’re feeding her and transporting her. She’s an
employee.
”

“Fuck all of you. I made my arrangements with the CPL office. I’m a
filmmaker
—”

Perrault said, voice iron, “Shut up. Everyone, just
shut up.
”

The captain nodded to Quill, who stepped into his place at the wheel, and walked forward, furious gaze jumping from one face to the next. “We will not have screaming matches on my boat. We are shipmates in a dangerous sea. We will behave with courtesy to each other. Is that clear to everyone?”

“We need a photographer—”

“That’s
enough
, Tehiyah. The two of you will clean the heads tonight. After dinner, which you will prepare together. If you can’t cooperate voluntarily, I must teach you to.
C’est clair?
”

Dorée flushed. She grabbed the lifeline as
Anemone
pitched. Sara noticed the whales had moved off, as if sensing the outbreak of hostilities aboard their big new friend. “
I’m
not cleaning any
toilets
—”

“Yes you are. Or you won’t use them. Would you rather hang over the stern? You will all get along. Or you’ll regret it.”

“I’d take that warning aboard, if I were you people,” Quill put in from the helm. He looked quite jolly now. “The captain’s word is law. Especially under the
French
maritime code.”

Dorée started to speak, then closed her mouth. Her eyes blazed. She turned away and glared seaward.

“Eddi? Understand?”

Auer nodded, lips set. “Yeah.”

“Very good.” Perrault’s gaze met Sara’s. Did the crinkles around his eyes deepen? If so, she didn’t understand the message. He turned away and hiked back to the wheel, bending en route to repin a flapping sock that was threatening to blow overboard.

Sara eased a breath out and looked for the humpbacks again. They were half a mile distant now. Milky spouts jetted up here and there amid the crests. The minkes, if that’s what they’d been, were far away over the curved bluegreen.

“Hey, here’s Cappuccino,” Auer said, voice trying for lightness.

“Cappuccino?” Madsen said. He spat over the side.

“That’s what color it is. Or maybe a mocha latte. But he sure is a venti.”

Sara followed Eddi’s finger to gaze at a lighter patch glimmering many fathoms down through the green sea. She stared for a moment, puzzled, as it slipped aft, silent, shimmering, seeming to hang motionless down there. Then her eye suddenly assembled it into reality, existence, into something she recognized.

It was the same sperm she’d seen far off, but this time nearly directly below the boat. It shimmered through the jade membrane between them as she leaned over the gunwale, camera dangling forgotten, trying to make it out. Its color … a light coffee, as Auer had just said? Or even lighter, the hue of tanned human skin? The surface was veined with lighter creases, like an old handbag or boot. Its size stunned her. It was longer than
Anemone
. Yet its shape did not make sense. Then she realized the squared-off head, larger than a shipping container, was turned on its side, the tiny dark eye gazing up. Did it glimpse them, too, or only the swell of hull? It blinked slowly. Did it understand them as sentient beings? Or comprehend only bits of color in a world of blue? Behind that staring eye the creases became prunelike furrows fissuring away to the vast body.

Then it rolled again, wheeling with enormous ease and gracefulness despite its immense size. To her astonishment, as it passed through the falling slanted rays of the sun it glittered, glimmered, flashed, deep down there in the jade, the fissures veined like some immense mine with yellow metal. “It’s
golden
,” she murmured, hardly able to credit what she was seeing. “But how can—”

“Diatoms,” Madsen said. “They swim through them, and pick up the color.”

The whale’s bulk shrank, dropping away, parting, all that immensity fading slowly through deep green into infinite blue, and vanished in a complexly braided swirl of refracting sea.

Auer chuckled uncertainly. After a moment Sara joined in. Madsen only looked sour. Quill and Perrault, by the wheel, didn’t even glance their way. Dorée, alone on the bow, clung to the stay as she gazed down into the sea. As if each one of them, only an arm’s length distant from the others, was really alone.

7

Secrets

She was losing track of time. It was the eternal half-light, like a perpetual late afternoon. Each day seemed dimmer, not really dusk, for you could see the solar disc, orange or russet or carmine depending on its altitude above the horizon. But never fully day. A ghostly twilight fit for neither sleep nor waking, as if they hovered between one world and the next.

The night after spotting the whales, she’d passed the little closet that served as toilet up forward—there was another, more luxurious one in the owner’s cabin aft—to see Auer on her knees, rump pushed up, scrubbing in silence. She blinked. Beside her, Georgita squatted on an overturned plastic bucket, hugging her splinted arm. Her breath steamed in the chill air. “Where’s Tehiyah?” Sara asked.

Auer silently sprayed and scrubbed. “She said she’d do the after head. Not this one,” Georgita said.

“She’s the only one who uses that one.”

“Right.” The videographer straightened and dragged a sleeve across her face. “So … how’s that?”

“Much better,” Georgita said. “Look, sorry I was so sick for so long.”