The Idiot Gods

‘He’ll eat you if you don’t get your arm out of the water.’

‘No, if he was that hungry, he could’ve eaten Kelly when she wiped out. I don’t think orcas eat people.’

‘What do they eat?’

‘Seals and penguins and things like that.’

‘Do you think he’d eat some fish?’

‘Did you bring any fish?’

‘I’ve got a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.’

‘Did you ever give a dog peanut butter? They lick their teeth for like an hour ’cause they can’t get it off.’

‘We’re not going to give an orca peanut butter!’

‘What do you think he wants?’

I moved in as close to the boat as I could.

‘Listen! Listen! Listen!’ I said. I spoke as slowly as I could. ‘W-wait-wait-wait-A-wait-wait-wait-T-wait-wait-wait-E-wait-wait-wait-R!’

‘I don’t know, but it sounds like he’s in distress.’

‘I think he just wants attention. He’s a pushy little whale.’

‘Maybe we should play him some music. I hear whales like music.’

‘What kind?’

‘I don’t know – what do you have?’

One of the humans, with a hairy face and a second skin of sheeny blue, lifted a black object onto the wooden surface near the boat’s tail. He did something to it with the tentacles of his hands.

‘I hope he likes it.’

A great noise burst from the black object and broke through the air. The noise drove against my skin and set the very water around me humming. It took a few moments for me to realize that the noise comprised different strands of sound: human voices and howling vibrations and a relentless thumping like that of a heart beating with an insane rhythm.

Boom boom anger anger anger! Boom boom anger anger anger! Boom boom …

‘Please stop!’ I cried out. ‘It hurts my head, hurts my soul!’

I came up out of the water, spy-hopping, which brought my head nearly level with the booming black thing. I opened my mouth, thinking I might be able to snatch it from between the human’s hands and crush it between my jaws.

‘Look! Bobo is smiling! He likes it – turn it louder!’

Boom! Boom! Boom …

As other humans had set fire to the sea’s surface with their dirty oil, these humans made even the water itself sick with sound. Although I longed to speak with them – particularly with the yellow-haired female – I had to get away from them and their boat as quickly as I could. I dove, but at first that only exacerbated the torment of the hideous noise, for sound moves more quickly and completely through water than it does through air. Only by swimming as far as I could away from the boat would I be able to make the noise attenuate to a distant and tolerable irritation.

And swim I did. For the rest of that day, and during the days that followed, I explored the large bay I had entered. I never really escaped the noise of the humans, for they were everywhere on the bay and on the shore surrounding it. Many boats disturbed the bay’s blue waters, and most of them sent high-pitched, shrieking sounds piercing every nook and cove. From the forests rising up from the sea came a similar buzz and clash, as if the very air were being torn apart. From time to time, great trees broke into splinters and crashed to the earth. Humans dropped the bare spines of the tree’s corpses into the water with splash after tremendous splash.

How long, I wondered, would I be able to live amidst this cacophony without falling as insane as the humans themselves seemed to be? Could I bear another day, another hour, another moment? Somehow, I told myself, I had to bear it. In the way my mother had showed me many years before, I must learn to dwell within softer, interior sounds called up from memory or imagination, which would overpower all the human noise and drive it away.

It dismayed me that the humans fouled the pretty bay with things other than noise. I found floating on the water many objects that the humans cast from their boats. Some were second skins made of that highly shapeable substance the humans used for so many unfathomable purposes. Because I needed a name for this unnatural substance, I thought of it as excrescence. Excrescence composed most of the objects the humans handled, as it did the bodies of their boats. I zanged as well metallic and clear stone shells from which they drank various liquids. Everywhere I went, the water tasted of oils suppurating from their boats and from the bitter cream the humans rubbed into their skin.

Except for the ubiquitous excrescence, which could be found floating in island-like masses even on the northern oceans, the worst of the humans’ befoulment was the feces that poured from many streams into the bay. Why, I wondered, did humans drop their feces into water when they were creatures of the land? Why did they concentrate it into a brownish sludge? Did they wish to flavor the water through which they swam? That seemed to me unlikely, for when I put tongue to their feces, I detect traces of boat oil, excrescence, and other poisons that could only have tasted as unpleasant to the humans as they did to me.

I came across a hint of an answer to these questions as I was exploring a peninsula on the east side of the bay. Two tongues of land licked out from the peninsula’s tip into the water. On one of these tongues – treeless and covered with grass – humans stood striking shiny metal sticks against spherical white eggs which arced through the air before falling to earth and rolling across the grass. From time to time, one of the eggs, made of yet another kind of excrescence, would sail off the peninsula and plop into the water. Then the humans would call out such stridencies as ‘Goddamned ball is unbalanced!’ and other sounds that made no sense to me.

On the other bit of land, across a slip of water, trees grew out an expanse of grass. There humans reclined on second skins and cast other kinds of eggs at each other. They burned fish in fires, shouted out cries to each other, and they did a thing with feces that fascinated me.

Some sort of mammal – some looked like little wolves – accompanied many of the humans. Long strands probably made of excrescence connected the two-legged to four-legged. The little wolves would dart about, put nose to ground, and cause the humans’ limbs to jerk in whatever direction the wolves chose to move. Whenever the wolves arched their backs to defecate, the humans waited by their sides. At the completion of each defecation, the humans made cooing sounds as if pleased to receive what the wolves had given them. They gathered up the feces in clear skins of excrescence, which they carried proudly in their hands as the wolves led them on a continuation of their erratic journey across the grass.

Why, I wondered, did the humans gather up wolf feces? Did they eat it as snails eat the excretions of fish? Did they lick down the feces of their own kind? That could not be possible. And yet, when it came to humans, almost nothing seemed impossible. I could be sure of little more than the fact that humans collected feces of varying kinds. Perhaps when these collections grew too large, the humans vented some into the sea.

My puzzlement at the humans’ diet caused me to realize that it had been too long since I had eaten. I badly wanted and needed to catch a few salmon or perhaps some more delicious herring. However, the channel through which I swam formed a part of the traditional fishing grounds of the Truthful Word Painter Clan. I felt sure that these distant cousins of mine would not begrudge me a few mouthfuls of fish, but good manners dictated that I first ask permission before indulging in such a feast. I had to wait through many days of rumbling in my empty belly before I had a chance to do so. One clear night, with the moon-silvered waters around me rippling in a soft breeze, the orcas of the Scarlett Tiralee family of the Truthful Word Painter Clan swam into the channel and made my acquaintance.

Only six of them did I greet: Mother Agena and her three children, Diadem, Furud, and Mekbuda, and Agena’s sister Celaeno, who had recently given birth to Baby Kornephoros. When I asked after their health, Agena told me, ‘We are well enough now, though misfortunes have reduced our family, as you can see.’

We spent the rest of night recounting stories and telling of our respective families. I listened with great sadness as Agena described the agonizing death of her mother, who had perished before her time of a mysterious wasting disease. Agena’s first child had died in a collision with one of the humans’ boats while her second had succumbed to a fever. I related similar woes, though I tried to gloss over my relief that my family had prospered in the face of great trials largely due to my grandmother’s guidance. Together we sang songs of mourning and remembrance. Finally just after dawn with the sun red upon a cloud-heavy horizon, I told the Scarlett Word Painters of the white bear and the burning sea, and I explained why I had journeyed so far from home.

‘I have never imagined,’ Mother Agena said, ‘losing my ability to quenge. Would you not be better off dead?’

‘I would be, yes,’ I replied, ‘if I had no hope of regaining from the humans what they have taken from me.’

‘You are a wonder of a whale,’ Agena said to me. ‘You are inquisitive and strong and brave, but you are also prideful and not a little foolish to think that you have been called to speak with the humans. Such hubris, if you persist, will be punished.’

‘How so?’ I asked.

I did not wish to dispute an elder, particularly not a mother of another clan. I waited for Agena to say more.

‘Do you have any idea of how many of the Word Painters have tried to speak with the humans?’ Agena slapped her tail against the water and whistled out into the morning air. ‘I cannot say whether or not the humans have language or might be sentient, but this I know: if you cleave to them too closely, either their insanity will become yours or else they will murder you.’

This warning more or less ended our conversation, for how could I respond to such bitter despair that masqueraded as wisdom and even prophecy? I did not want to believe Mother Agena’s fraught words. I could not believe them. And so when it came time to part, I sang farewells and blessings with all the polite passion that I could summon.

‘Goodbye, Bright One, marked by lightning and beloved of the sea,’ Mother Agena said to me as she nudged the scar over my eye. ‘We will not remain in this unfortunate place, which was once our home. It is yours, if you wish. Therefore, you are welcome to all the fish you might find – if the humans let you take them.’

As she moved off with the Word Painters, I pondered the meaning of her last words. Her voice lingered in the water and broke apart into quaverings of ruin that I did not want to hear. I was hungry, and fish abounded all about me. I made my way into the sea’s inky forebodings to go find them.

4

For three days of wind and storm, I ranged about the channel hunting salmon to my belly’s contentment. I came across many boats. Most of these, while moving across the greenish surface of the bay, emitted a nearly deafening buzz from their underbellies, near their rear. How could these human things make such an obnoxious noise? An impulse drove me toward one of the boat’s vibrating parts, obscured by churning water and clouds of silvery bubbles. I wanted to press my face against this organ of sound as I might touch my mouth to the swim bladder of a toadfish to determine how it could be so loud. A second impulse, however, held me back. In a revulsion of ambivalence that was to flavor my interactions with the humans, I realized that I did not want to get too near the boat, which was made of excrescence as were so many of the things associated with the humans.

At other times, however, my curiosity carried me very close to these strange, two-legged beings. On a day of gentle swells, when the sky had cleared to a pale blue, I came upon a boat whose humans busied themselves with using strands of excrescence to pull salmon out of the sea. What a clever hunting technique! I thought. I swam in close to the boat to investigate.

One of the humans sighted me, and barked out what seemed to be the human danger cry: ‘Orca! Orca! Orca!’

How could I show them that I posed them no threat? Perhaps if I snatched a salmon from the excrescence strands and presented it to them, they would perceive my good intentions. I swam through the rippling water.

‘That damned blackfish is after our catch!’ A hairy-faced human called out.

His top half nearly doubled over the lower in that disturbingly human way of exercising their strangely-jointed bodies. When he straightened up, he clasped some sort of wooden and metallic stick in his hands.

‘What are you doing?’ his pink-faced companion called out.

‘Just shooting at that damned blackfish!’

‘I can see that – but what are you doing? Do you want to go to prison for killing a whale?’

‘Who would know? Anyway, I’m just going to have a little target practice to scare him off.’

‘Put your goddamned gun away!’

‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill him – unless he tries to take our salmon.’

A great noise cracked out; just beside me, the water opened with a small hole which almost immediately closed.

‘How did you do that?’ I shouted as I moved in toward the boat.

Again the stick made its hideous noise, and again the water jumped in response.

‘Once more!’ I said, taking a great liking to this game. ‘Make the water dance once more!’

I swam in even closer, and the holes touched the water scarcely a tongue’s lick from my face. What beguiling powers these humans had! Orcas can stun a fish with a zang of sonar, and the deep gods – who have the Great Voice, the voice of death – kill swarms of squid in this manner. No whale, however, can speak and make the very waters part.

‘If you shoot that orca,’ the pink-face called out, ‘I’m going to shoot you!’

The human holding the wood and metal stick lowered it, and the water moved no more.

‘Please, please!’ I said. ‘Let us play!’

If the humans, though, could not understand the simple word for water, how could they comprehend my more complex request? To show my gratitude that they had possessed the wit to play at all, I caught a salmon and swam right up to the edge of the boat.

‘I think he wants us to have it!’ the pink-faced human said. ‘He’s giving us his fish!’

I pushed up out of the water, with the salmon still thrashing between my teeth. Hands reached out to grasp it and take it from me. Then I dove and caught another salmon for the humans, and another. They seemed to like this game.

During the days that followed, I ranged the channel and played games with other humans. Some were as trifling as balancing pieces of driftwood on my face, while others demanded planning and coordination. The humans seemed titillated when I rose up from the deeps near their boats and flew unannounced high into the air. Many times, I surprised their littlest boats, propelled across the channel by lone humans pushing sticks through the water. It was great sport to leap over both boat and human in the same way that Kajam had once leaped over Alnitak’s back.

In the course of nearly all these encounters, the humans involved made various vocalizations, for they proved to be among the noisiest of animals. Their voices seemed to reach out to me with a terrible longing, as if the humans hoped to find in me some ineffable thing they could not appreciate within themselves. I sucked up every sound they made and examined their incessant barking and crooning for pattern and possible meaning:

‘Hey, look it’s Bobo! You can tell it’s him by the scar over his eye.’

‘I hear he likes to play.’

‘What a joyful spirit!’

‘He’s the spirit of my grandfather who has come to tell us something.’

‘I heard that some fisherman took shots at him.’

‘He was brought here for some purpose.’

‘Look in his eyes – there’s more there than in most people.’

‘Why is Bobo all alone? What happened to the rest of his pod?’

‘I think he’s lonely.’

‘When he looks at me that way, I can feel my soul dancing.’

As the days shortened toward another winter of cloud and storm, I felt a growing urge to understand the mystery of the humans. Buried inside me, like a pearl in an oyster, I felt a hard realization pressing against my softer tissues of doubt. More and more, I wanted to draw out the pearl and hold it up sparkling in the sun.

I wondered what might explain what I experienced in my forays up and down the channel. I assumed that the humans really did have a keen intelligence, though of a different and lesser quality than that of whales. They must have some sort of language, too, for how else could they organize so many complex activities? During quiet moments when the cold ocean stilled to a vast blue clarity, I could see the intelligence lighting up the humans’ eyes just as I could feel their desire to communicate with me. Do not the Old Ones say that the eyes sing with the sound of the soul?

My ancestors also tell of the forming of all things in the eternal creation of the world. From out of the oneness of water and its accompanying sound comes love, which can never be wholly distinct from its source. From out of love, in turn, emanate the sacred triadic harmonies of goodness, beauty, and truth. How could one ever marvel ecstatic at the beauty of the rising of the Thallow constellation over the starlit sea without the goodness of the heart to let in the tinkling luminosity? How know goodness absent the truth that all the horrors of life find validation in the love of life that all creatures embrace? The journey to the deepest of love, my grandmother once told me, must always lead through truth, beauty, and goodness. And of these, the waters of truth are much the hardest to navigate.

‘Only through quenging into utter honesty with ourselves,’ she had said, ‘can we hope to become more fully and consciously ourselves. Is this not what the world wants of us? If not, why did the sea separate itself into individual peals of life in the first place? That is why we must always tell the truth. For if we do not, the great song that we make of ourselves will ring false. But, Arjuna, who has the courage to really listen to the cry of one’s heart and to embrace the totality of one’s own being? Who can even behold it?’

It is a truth universally acknowledged among my kind that one can never hear completely the truth of one’s own soul. We cannot make out the ridges and troughs that form the seascapes of our deepest selves, any more than we can zang through miles of dark, turbid waters to study the bottom of the ocean. Then, too, the eye can never see itself, just as I could not look directly at the scar marking my forehead. Worst of all, we avoid doing so with a will toward the expunging of our best senses. As seals seek dark and narrow coves in which to flee the teeth of the orcas, we hide from our truest selves for we do not want to be devoured by the most primeval of all our passions.

‘What does any whale really want?’ my grandmother had asked. ‘Were we not born to be the mightiest of hunters? Do we not, in the end, pursue greater life in ourselves that we might know the infinitely vaster life of the world around us?’

We do, we do – of course we do! And yet in this glorious becoming of our greater selves, as streamlined and lovely as the orcas of Agathange, we must leave behind our lesser selves. This realization of the best and truest within us, though it yields eternal life, always feels like death. One thing only emboldens us to make the journey through life’s terrors and agonies to the end of time and the beginning of the world.

How, though, was I to achieve this greatest of purposes absent my family’s devotion and encouragement? How, without my mother, Alnitak, Mira, and everyone else, would I come by the pellucid honesty through which I would find my way through the great ocean of truth?

Although I had no answers to these questions, I knew what my grandmother would say: I must begin with the truth that I had grasped but which I was reluctant to really sink my teeth into. After playing many games with the humans, I not only hypothesized that they were intelligent, I zanged it in my heart. Why, though, had I not listened to what I had zanged so deeply?

I thought I knew the reason, and it had to do with an essential paradox: that only through looking out at all the manifold forms and features of the world can we ever apprehend the much stranger phenomena of ourselves. Just as we can see stars only against the blackness of the nighttime sky, so we need others to show us the many ways that we shine as unique sparks of creation. The greater the contrast in this relationship, the deeper the understanding.

For instance, were not females, such as lovely Mother Agena, a part of the great unknown? No other work of nature was more like a male orca such as I, and yet so utterly different. How should I then long to find myself within the wild, wet clutch of her body and even the wilder ocean of her soul? Would it not be, I wondered, that precisely in closing the difference between us and daring to enter the most dangerous place in the universe I would discover an exalted and ecstatic Arjuna whom I might otherwise not ever know?

So it was with the humans. To a whale such as I, their kind beckoned as the Great Other in whom I might discover secrets about myself that I had never suspected. Although it seemed absurd that the humans’ intelligence could in any way illuminate my own, I came to realize that I had been hiding from the truth that the humans had something precious to give me.

‘O Arjuna, Arjuna!’ I cried out, ‘that is why you have not wanted to believe what you have zanged so clearly!’

Even as I said these words, however, I knew that I was still evading myself, for I had carried through the waters a deeper reason for denying the humans’ obvious intelligence. To admit to myself that humans might have minds anything like those of whales would impel me to want to touch those minds – to need to touch them. How could I allow myself to be so weak? How could I bear the terrible truth that I was desperately, desperately lonely?

I had to bear it. I had to accept it, for my grandmother had also said this to me: ‘If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is inside you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’

After that, I renewed my efforts to speak with the two-leggeds and enter their psyches. One day, when the clear cerulean sky almost perfectly matched the blueness of the sea, I came upon the boat carrying the humans I had first met in the bay. They waved their arms and whistled and called out their warning cry, which seemed completely absent of warning or apprehension:

‘Orca! Orca! Orca!’

‘Look, it’s Bobo! He’s come back to us!’

I swam up to their bobbing boat and said hello.

‘Lil’ Bobo,’ the longer of the two males said. ‘We’re sorry we scared you off last time. I guess you don’t like acid rap.’

The shorter of the males, who had blue eyes and golden hair like that of the female surfer who stood next to him, drank from a metallic shell and let out a belch. He said, ‘Who does like it? Why don’t we try something else?’

‘What about Radiohead?’ the longer male said.

The female surfer used her writhing fingers to pull back her golden hair. She lay belly-flat on the front of the boat, and dipped her hand into the water to stroke my head.

‘Let’s play him some classical music.’

‘I don’t have anything like that,’ the golden-haired male said. I guessed he must be the surfer’s brother.

‘I downloaded a bunch of classical a few weeks ago,’ the surfer said, ‘just in case.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know – I don’t really know anything about classical.’

‘Let me see,’ the longer male said.

He bent over, and when he straightened, he held in his hand a shiny metallic thing, like half of an abalone shell.