Suspicious shamans would come down to the dying whale and perform rituals over it, followed by amateur photographs and thrill-seekers. A teacher from a village school brought her whole classroom, and the children were tasked with drawing ‘The Whale’s Farewell’.
Usually it took several days for the whale to die. In that time, the people on the shore became accustomed to the tranquil, magisterial being with its impenetrable will. Someone would name it, usually a human name. The local television station would show up, and the whole country, and the whole world, would take part in the death, thanks to satellite TV. The problem of this individual on the beach would conclude every news broadcast on three continents. Then they’d take the opportunity to talk about global warming and ecology. Scholars would be brought into the studios for debates, and politicians would tack earth-related topics onto their election platforms. Why do whales do this? The ichthyologists and the ecologists all gave different answers.
A collapsed echolocation system. Water pollution. A thermonuclear bomb at the bottom of the sea that no country would admit to setting off. Could it not be a decision, the kind elephants make? Old age? Disenchantment? As was recently discovered, after all, little distinguishes the whale’s brain from the human’s; a whale’s brain even contains certain areas Homo sapiens lack, in the best, the most developed portion of the frontal lobe.
In the end, the whale would finish dying, and its body would need to be removed from the beach. The crowds would have dispersed by this time – in fact, no one would be left, except the service people in bright green jackets who would cut the corpse up and load it onto trailers to haul if off somewhere. If there was a cemetery for whales, that’s definitely where they were headed.
Billy, an orca, drowned in air.
Everyone inconsolable in their grief.
Although there have been instances of people managing to save the whales. In response to the great and dedicated efforts of dozens of volunteers, these whales would take deep breaths and head back into the open sea. Their famous fountains could be seen springing joyfully up towards the sky, and then they would dive down into the depths of the ocean. The crowd would break into applause.
A few weeks later they’d be caught off the coast of Japan, and their gentle, pretty bodies would be turned into dog food.
GODZONE
She’s been packing for days. Her things lie in piles on the rug in their room. To get to the bed she steps between them, wading in among the stacks of shirts and underwear and balled-up socks, trousers folded neat along the crease, and a couple of books for the road, the novels everyone’s been talking about that she has not had time to read. And then a heavy jumper and a pair of winter boots, which she’s purchased just for this – she’s about to venture, after all, into the heart of winter.
They’re just things – soft, inscrutable skins that can be shed time and time again, protective cases for a brittle body in its fifties, to shield from ultraviolet rays and prying gazes. Indispensible on her long voyage, as well as when she gets there, for her weeks at the ends of the earth. She has set everything out on the floor, guided by a list she spent days making, working on it in rare free moments, knowing already she’d need to go. Once you give your word, you have to keep it.
As she carefully fills her red suitcase, she acknowledges she doesn’t really need much. With each passing year she’s discovered she needs less. Thus far she’s eliminated skirts, mousse, nail polish and anything else having to do with her nails, earrings, her portable iron. Cigarettes. Just this year she’d discovered she no longer needed pads.
‘You don’t have to take me,’ she says to the man who now turns his face to her, still basically asleep. ‘I’ll take a taxi.’
With the backs of her fingers she brushes his delicate pale eyelids, and she kisses him on the cheek.
‘Call me when you get there or I’ll worry sick,’ he mumbles, and then his head drops back down into the pillow. He’d had the night shift at the hospital. There had been some kind of accident; the patient had died.
She puts on a pair of black trousers and a black linen tunic. She pulls on her boots and slings her purse over her shoulder. Now she’s standing motionless in the hall without even knowing why herself. In her family they used to say that you always had to sit for a minute before heading off on any kind of trip – an old provincial Polish habit – but this little entrance has no place to sit on, no chair. So she stands there and sets her internal clock, her inner chronometer, so to speak, speaking cosmopolitan, that flesh-and-blood timer ticking dully to the rhythm of her human breath. And suddenly she collects herself, grabs the handle of her suitcase in her hand, like a child that got distracted, and she flings open the door. It’s time to go. So she gets going.
A cab driver with darker skin carefully arranges her bag in the boot. Several of his gestures strike her as unnecessary, and overly intimate: as he lays down her suitcase, for instance, she thinks she seems him giving it a tender caress.
‘Going on a trip, are we?’ he says, smiling, revealing his big white teeth.
She confirms that she is. He smiles even wider, via the discreet intermediary of the rearview mirror.
‘To Europe,’ she adds, and the taxi driver expresses his awe with a sound that was half exclamation and half sigh.
They go along the bay; the tide is just going out, and the water slowly discloses its stony, mussel-strewn bottom. The sun is blinding, and very hot. You had to be careful of your skin. Now she thinks forlornly of her plants in the garden and wonders if her husband will really water them like he said he would; she thinks of her mandarin oranges and wonders if they’ll make it to when she gets back – if so, she’ll make marmalade – and she thinks of her figs that have just begun to ripen and of her herbs that had been exiled to the driest place in the garden, where the soil is almost rock, though they seem to like it there, because this year the tarragon had attained unprecedented proportions. Even the clothes she hangs to dry above the garden return suffused with its brisk, tart scent.
‘Ten,’ the taxi driver says.
She pays him.
In that local airport, she shows her ticket at the counter and takes her luggage up to customs. She’s left with just her backpack, and she heads straight for her plane; sleepy people are already being loaded onto it, with children, with dogs, with plastic bags brimming over with provisions.
As the little plane that will transport her to the main airport becomes aloft she sees a view so beautiful that for a moment she is overwhelmed by a kind of elation. ‘Elation’, a funny, lofty word, originally meaning ‘to be raised up’, and now here she is literally being lifted up into the clouds. These islands, the sandy beaches are as much a part of her as her own hands and feet; the sea that winds up into foaming coils at the shores, scraps of ships and boats, the gentle, undulating shoreline, the green insides of the islands all belong to her. Godzone, that’s what the island’s inhabitants call it. It’s where God came to settle down, bringing with him all the beauty in the world. Now he gives that beauty out, for free, to everybody on the island, requesting nothing in return.
At the big airport she goes to the toilet to wash her face. She watches the edgy little line to use the free computer for a while. Travellers pause here for a moment to let people near and far know they are here. It occurred to her that even she might go up to one of those screens, type in the name of her server, and then her address, and check who might have written to her, too – but she knows what she will find: nothing of note. Something about the project she’s working on now, jokes from a friend in Australia, perhaps a rare email from one of her kids. The sender of the messages that had given rise to this expedition had been silent for some time.