“I’m asking you now,” Mick said.
His tone was aggressive, almost suspicious. I looked at him in surprise.
“Fine,” I said. “The way it usually works is that I get an assignment. I’ll be sent to a specific place to get specific images. I’ve traveled all over — the mountains, the arctic, the desert. But this time it was my choice. I wanted to come here. Nobody asked me to. I made it happen myself.”
“Fair enough,” he said.
“I applied for a grant to do a personal project,” I said. “The islands aren’t that expensive. One of the cheapest places I’ve ever stayed. I’ll have to coast on my savings for some of it. There’s a gallery in D.C. where I’ll be able to show my photos when I’m done. I’ll make the circuit of the usual arts-and-crafts fairs, too. I might even be able to get a book together. I was lucky. I rarely get to stay anywhere this long.”
“Bird lice. No hot water. Spam. Lucky mouse girl!”
“This is the beat I wanted,” I said, staring at the waves.
Mick nodded. I fell silent. There was more I wanted to say, but I found that I could not quite explain.
Over a year ago, I had first glimpsed an image of the archipelago. On a lazy afternoon, I had stumbled onto a snapshot — and that was all it took. Saddle Rock, silhouetted against the sea. White spray breaking on the cliffs. Islets of bare stone, like the skeleton of some massive sea creature, long extinct. I had gazed at that image, stunned and enthralled. It might have been a photograph of loneliness. The Islands of the Dead — they had taken my breath away.
For the first time, I had been pulled to somewhere. In the past, I had craved motion for its own sake. To go from. To go elsewhere, anywhere, away. But the call of the islands had been unmistakable. It was magnetic. It was gravitational.
I could not say these things to Mick. In truth, I did not understand it myself. I had to come here. It was that simple. It never felt like a desire or a wish; it was a requirement, a command. I’d begun to do research, and everything I had learned only made me want it more. Mist without end. Blood in the water. Tetchy biologists. A hundred thousand mice. Sea lions birthing their pups on the granite. Storms like the judgment of a vengeful deity. Shark Season. Boats that had to be lowered into the sea by crane. Mysterious deaths. A lighthouse beacon crying out to an empty ocean. I wanted it all. I was a woman possessed. I was falling in love.
The archipelago was the answer to a question I had not realized I was asking. It was the home I had not known I was looking for, all along.
Now I sighed, remembering how hard I had fought to come here. I had written dozens of letters detailing my love of nature, my résumé, my awareness of how to conduct myself in a marine sanctuary. The biologists who lived on the Farallon Islands had their room and board provided for, as well as their equipment. Nothing more. They took their payment in life experiences and earned no salary. But even their meager government stipend, which kept the cabin’s electricity on and paid Captain Joe’s fare, did not extend to me. As a photographer, I was not eligible to take part. The powers that be — which I now knew to be Galen — had looked askance at my desire to live among these scientists, interfering with their righteous labor.
So I had pleaded. I had cajoled. Into each envelope, I had stuffed dozens of my photographs — rainforest trees, rare animals, polar ice caps, anything that might help my case. I had explained that I was hoping to document, to observe — not to touch or interfere. Photography, like biology, was fundamentally passive. I had filled out so many forms that I could have papered the walls of my father’s house with them. I had done everything but fall to my knees and beg.
At last, after nearly six months, a letter had come in the mail, as lovely as a summer air. It was decorated with Galen’s signature. Your application for residency is approved. I look forward to meeting you in person.
“There’s a market for this kind of work right now,” I said. “Endangered species. Vanishing places.”
“Poof,” Mick said, waving a hand at the islands.
“Global warming,” I said. “Climate change. If the ocean rises by about half an inch, they’ll be gone.”
He nodded. “If it’s too late to save them, we might as well get a few photos of them. You’re a witness to the end of days.”
I leaned back against the railing.
“I showed you mine,” I said. “Now show me yours. Why did you come here?”
“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”
I opened my mouth and shut it again. His expression was a closed door.
There was a pause, the boat rising and dipping on the waves. Mick stroked his nose thoughtfully. I found myself admiring anew his thatch of bristling hair, the curved brow, the strong bones of his jaw. He was, without question, a fine specimen of humanity. I could see this now without feeling the smallest inkling of desire for him. The timeline of my life was divided into two distinct periods: Before Andrew and After Andrew. Before Andrew, I had nursed a crush on Mick. After Andrew, everything was different.
Without warning, Mick punched me in the shoulder.
“Ho!” he cried.
Rubbing my arm, I pivoted in my seat.
At first I thought it was not a whale at all. It was gray and slimy, the size of a dinghy. It was floating on the surface. We were far enough away that it did not seem to pose an immediate threat. Its hide was disfigured by scars and bulges, warty lumps of barnacles. For a minute or two, I thought it was dead — a dead elephant, drifting over from Asia on some strange current — but then it reared. The tail came out of the sea, a cleft fly swatter. A wash of droplets fell like rain. The beast exhaled. An orifice in its back opened, coughing steam. The wind carried the cloud toward us. I can honestly say that I have never smelled anything so foul. A row of Porta-Potties standing in the hot sun would not have come close. I clapped a hand over my nose.
Mick chuckled. “What did Queen Victoria say? ‘We are not amused’?”
And then the sea was filled with them. In every direction, gray bodies appeared, thrusting upward, burst after burst of spray. The entire pod seemed to come up for breath at the same time. They penetrated the surface any old way, upside down, sideways. Massive fins swiveled. Tails poked upward and sank into the ocean again. For an instant, I wondered if I was dreaming. I had been here before, lost at sea, surrounded by animals the size of houses. Their bellies were scored with deep grooves, ridged like the roof of a mouth. Unlike sharks, they had no dorsal fins, which made it hard to tell which end was up. Their faces were oddly expressionless. No nostrils. No ears. Tiny eyes. Some of the whales were an acceptable size — they might have been the juveniles — while others appeared too huge to be real.
As they rose and sank, they disarranged the organized flow of waves. The humpbacks rolled in the surf, and the boat sloshed back and forth. Everywhere I looked, there was a nose, a blowhole, a rim of tail. The animals had skin that was topographical — scarred, seamed, patched with rocky barnacles. The overall impression was one of a new archipelago in the process of forming.
Mick began to lecture me. This was not unexpected. Over the past months, I had been lectured by everyone; they couldn’t help themselves. Diet. Mating habits. Anatomy. Mick was nicer about it than Lucy usually was. He did not make me feel ignorant. I was ignorant, of course. But Mick had a way of explaining things as though he was just thinking out loud.
He told me that the humpbacks had the most complex and beautiful songs of all cetaceans. He told me that they named their children, addressing each calf with a specific chord progression. I was scarcely able to listen. So much was happening. A whale yawned — our entire boat could have fit inside that maw — and I saw the bony struts of baleen. It coughed a wet spume, which climbed against the sky. Ten feet high. Twelve feet. Mick told me that the pod navigated hundreds of miles of open sea. Yet the whales did not use sonar, and they did not use the position of the sun — not exclusively, anyway. The earth’s magnetic field might have had something to do with it. No one knew exactly how they managed to find their way without landmarks, without any visible oceanic bottom, just the wide, blank blue.