I considered deleting the snapshots. But the photographer in me would not allow that. They were a chronicle, and any chronicle was sacrosanct. A few of them were quite beautiful, too — I had been able to catch the energy of those fiery embraces, the motion of two bodies swaying together. I would hide the camera under my bed. From now on, I would not use it publicly, just in case.
Eventually I realized how tired I was. It was nearly one in the morning. I lay down. I wondered how often Mick and Forest had made these late-night journeys during my time on the islands. I wondered how they managed to behave so normally the next day. Rising at their usual hour. Greeting each other casually, like friends, like colleagues. Showering one another’s sweat off their skin.
AT DAWN, I awoke with a frightened jolt. I had been dreaming about Andrew. This often happened; it was a nightmare I could not seem to escape. Sometimes I had to relive the rape — breath on my neck, weight on my belly. Sometimes I saw the ghost again, glimmering in the corner of my room. Sometimes Andrew was bloodied and battered in these dreams. Half-dead in the darkness above me. His head bashed in. Dripping fluids and brain matter onto my pillow.
This time, though, I shook off the nightmare fairly quickly. I was doing mental calculations. On the night in question — the worst night, the night everything had changed — I knew exactly where everyone in the cabin had been. I had considered it many times. Galen: drunk and incapable. Charlene: lost in music, headphones on. Lucy: asleep. Mick and Forest: out on the grounds.
Until today, I had thought those two were whale-watching by moonlight. It was a silly explanation, but it was the only one I’d been able to come up with. Now, of course, I knew the truth. My mouth was dry. I sat up in bed, shoving the blanket away. Outside the window, the fog was so thick that I could not see the ocean. It had been two months since Andrew had assaulted me. On that night, Mick and Forest had slipped away to the coast guard house to make love.
Huddled on the mattress, I gave a whimper. Mick was my friend. He was a true friend, maybe the first I’d ever had. If he had known what was happening, he would have stopped it. He would have protected me.
I could not be sure of the others. I could not be sure of any of them. No one had been a witness to my assault, of course. But even if they had, I did not know how they might have reacted. They were biologists. Cold. Impassive. Uninvolved. If Forest had been in the cabin that night, I could imagine him putting a pillow over his head to block out the noise. If Charlene had caught the creak of bedsprings, she might not have thought it was her place to interfere. Galen might not have leapt into action either. He might have analyzed the situation, head cocked, listening. He might have studied my rape as he would observe the struggle of a lost seal pup.
Lucy was a wild card. She disliked me, and she had loved Andrew. Her mind was a dark morass. I could not begin to parse her motivations, let alone predict what she might have done if she had woken in the night to the sound of muffled cries above her, her boyfriend’s heavy breathing, the clang of my headboard.
But I knew about Mick. He would have fought for me. He would have saved me.
For the first time, I wondered if Andrew had been aware of this too. He might have made a similar calculation, tallying up the location of each biologist, weighing the risk. He had chosen a time when he would not be overheard. He had waited for footsteps on the porch, the murmur of Mick and Forest’s voices. In his quest for romance and release, Mick had left me vulnerable. He had left me all alone.
23
THE ELEPHANT SEALS are giving birth. Throughout the month of January, the females have appeared by the dozen. I am enraptured by them. Unlike their male counterparts, they are beautiful in the traditional manner of seals: smooth and rotund, their faces vaguely canine, their black eyes filled with pinniped intelligence. I have photographed more births than I can count. The pups are charcoal-colored when they arrive, slimy and blind. More blood on the rocks. They uncurl their bodies, sticky with amniotic gel, teeth flashing. The females sing to them in booming, grating voices. They are imprinting themselves on their newborns. They are telling each pup which scent and voice belong to its mother.
The elephant seals have altered the architecture of the islands. They have made the coastline soft. They doze in heaps, the gray mountain of their bodies jeweled with small, dark shapes — the pups slumbering and keening and nuzzling. Nearby, the alpha males lord it over their domain. Each is the master of forty or fifty females. They parade up and down the shore, inflating their noses to make a cry that sounds like a drumbeat. The members of their harems snipe at one another good-naturedly. They spend their days nursing. Their milk is some of the richest in the animal kingdom. The babies gain ten pounds a day. I have photographed this too — coming back to the same family each morning, watching the infant swelling like a balloon.
The pups have to be careful. The rookery is not a safe place. The roar of the elephant seals is louder than the ocean. The babies must navigate through a landscape of identical figures, picking their mother’s individual call out of the chorus. More than a few have died. Some have traveled the wrong way across the grounds, leaving the pod behind, lost and gone forever. Some have drowned, too little and helpless to swim. Though the females are watchful and conscientious, the males are too aggressive — or too large — to pay attention. A few pups have been killed by their fathers, who are massive enough to crush them beneath their immense bulk without realizing it.
I still dream of the lost seal pup Mick and I saw on the grounds. I still follow it through the mist. I still listen to it crying for its mother.
The other day I was on Marine Terrace with Jewel, my large-format camera. I was attempting to capture yet another birth. The labor of an elephant seal is not an arduous process. The mother naps between contractions. The baby emerges without undue fuss. With my head beneath the black cloak, I found myself thinking about guillotines. My brain — my eyes, my visual cortex, my artistic sensibility — was separated from my body by a fall of cloth. I was gazing through the viewfinder, framing an image of the new mother lolling on her back, nipples exposed, her infant pressed against her, drinking assiduously. Then I straightened up. I removed the cloak from my head. I felt cleaved somehow, as though I had been decapitated, as though my mind had been separated from my flesh and organs, floating on the air.
Still, our work continues. Lucy has been captivated by the local population of pigeon guillemots. These birds look exactly like their landlocked counterparts — the gray, ordinary pigeons found scarfing up peanuts on the National Mall — but they are actually seabirds. They forage for food by diving to the ocean floor, plummeting up to 150 feet underwater in search of a meal. Lucy has been nattering on about “alcids” and “two eggs, rather than one” and “incubating for four weeks.” She has been hurrying all over the grounds with a handful of bands. She has been sighing a lot about how hard it is to tag the birds alone, how much Andrew loved this work.
Mick, of course, is busy with the elephant seals. The weather is still too wild to take trips in the boat. It may be a while before Captain Joe can safely visit the islands. In the meantime, Mick is trying to identify his favorite pinnipeds by their signature markings. The other day he came dashing into the cabin, almost too excited to speak. He had glimpsed a double birth — twins — a rarity. He and Charlene were so pleased that they went into the kitchen and celebrated with glasses of Perrier.