The Idiot Gods

I could not, however, sing. In such a place, who could give voice to the great mysteries and exaltations? In tainted water roiling with the cacophony of sonar crisscrossing the pool and fracturing into deafening zangs, who could prepare for the great journey into the quiet, eternal now-moment that underlies the beginning and end of time? No, no, I could not affirm life by opening myself to my inevitable death, and so I cried out in a rage at having come so far only to suffer such a despicable fate. I raged and raged as I cried out to my family who could not hear me, and I swam and I swam back and forth across the hated pool, back and forth, back and forth.

Such despair can derange the mind. Soon, I began hearing voices: the voices, I thought, of the other orcas trapped in other pools nearby. Surely the moans and murmurs of discontent that I heard must issue from real, living whales, mustn’t they? How, though, could I be sure that I was not hallucinating? In the distant lamentations that vibrated the walls about me and further poisoned the sounds of my pool, I could barely make out voices deformed by accents strong and strange:

‘Welcome, welcome, welcome!’

‘Go away, whale of the Northern Ocean! We do not want you here!’

‘Go away, if you can! But, of course, you cannot. You are trapped like a krill in the belly of a blue whale.’

‘You are trapped as we are trapped. Do not dispirit yourself by trying to keep alive your spirit.’

‘Do not listen to Unukalhai, for he is mad.’

‘Abandon all hope, you who have entered this place of hopelessness.’

‘Live, brave orca. It is all you can do!’

‘Die, strange one. Breathe water and die before your soul dies and you cannot die when it comes time to die.’

‘No, escape!’

‘Do not hope for escape. All who come here die.’

‘Quenge and escape before it is too late.’

‘Who can quenge in such a place? Die, die, die!’

‘Welcome, welcome, welcome!’

Soon, I met those orcas who had spoken to me and so confirmed their reality. My pool, as I discovered, joined with other pools, some much larger but still too small to move about comfortably. Between each pool, the humans had contrived doors which they somehow opened and shut as easily as I might my mouth. With the humans standing about the concrete beach of the largest of the pools, as the hot sun made the warm water even warmer, I made my way into the pool as tentatively as I might swim into a cave full of stingrays. There I mingled with the other orcas and made their acquaintance.

‘Hello, I am Alkurah,’ a large female said to me. Her speech rippled with curious inflections and had an odd though pleasant lilt to it. ‘And these are my sisters, Salm and Zavijah.’

Salm, younger and smaller than Alkurah, had a notch in her right flipper, and her dorsal fin flopped over upon her back in a most undignified way. So it was with quiet and moody Zavijah and her dorsal fin and with her baby, Navi. The whole family, I saw, suffered from the same horrifying affliction.

‘We are the last of the Moonsingers,’ Alkurah said, ‘of the Midnight Voyagers of the Emerald Sea. We were taken years ago and have been here at Hell Water ever since.’

‘Years ago!’ I cried out. ‘And the humans still have not eaten you?’

‘Eaten us?’ she said. She swam closer to take a look at me. ‘No, no, strange one – these humans are not whale eaters.’

At this revelation, I should have experienced relief at having been delivered from a dreadful death. Instead, I sensed the closing-in of a different sort of danger and felt the intimations of an even more horrible fate.

‘Then why,’ I asked, ‘have the humans brought us here?’

‘Why, to perform feats.’

‘What sort of feats?’

‘Breaching and leaping, spy-hopping and gyrations. They like to stand on our backs while we swim about the pool.’

‘They … stand on your back, truly?’

‘Oh, yes, they do – as they do, and make us do, many other things.’

‘But why?’ I asked.

‘We do not know. The humans are insane.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But they must have reasons for what they do, insane though these reasons might be.’

‘Must they, really? The humans are not reasonable animals. Indeed, after many years of having to endure their ugly faces and their squawking day after day, I am convinced they are quite stupid.’

‘Perhaps their minds are so different from ours that they—’

‘You know little of humans, Strange One,’ Alkurah chided me. ‘Let us not speak of your speculations now. I was making introductions when you interrupted me.’

‘My apologies,’ I said. ‘I did not mean to be rude. Please continue.’

Alkurah introduced a smallish male named Menkalinan from the Star Far Vermillion Sea. It surprised me to learn that Menkalinan, sulky and streaked with scars, was Navi’s father.

‘I see that you can be politely quiet when spoken to by a mother orca,’ Alkurah said to me. ‘I like that, for it shows that you have been well raised. But I can hear the disquiet of doubt in your silence.’

In silence, I swam about the tepid water, and so spoke even louder.

‘You are wondering, I think,’ she said, ‘how my sister Zavijah could mate in such a place – and with such a pitiful male as Menkalinan, who can barely sing.’

‘Well, yes, I was wondering that very thing,’ I said. I studied Menkalinan’s flopped-over fin and the sad, furtive way that he propelled himself about the pool.

‘Of course,’ Alkurah said, ‘my sister did not mate with Menkalinan. The humans did things with their things, and they stole Menkalinan’s sperm and forced it into Zavijah.’

At this, Zavijah said nothing, though she made a quick dart at Menkalinan as if to warn him away and drive off any thoughts he might have of inseminating her more naturally.

‘How could they do that?’ I said. So disgusted was I that I would have vomited, if there had been anything in my empty belly to vomit.

A male only slightly smaller than I swam in close and fixed me with his wild, intelligent eye. He said, ‘The dolphins rape each other, and that is understandable, though detestable. But the humans rape those not of their kind. They are a low, low animal, though impossibly clever in an exasperatingly stupid way. One might say that their individual cunning, which covers them with a patina of sanity, in fact drives them en masse to a collective insanity.’

I glanced up at the many humans standing about the pool. Some were indeed doing things with things, as most humans did most of the time. The others, though, were gazing down into the pool and watching us.

‘I am Unukalhai,’ the large male told me. Many scars streaked his sides, and his great fin lay nearly flat along his back. ‘Alkurah will not introduce me, so I will introduce myself.’

Alkurah swam between me and Unukalhai as if to protect me from him. She said, ‘Do not listen to this whale of the Sorrowful Sea, for he is insane.’

‘Oh, I am insane, Dear One,’ Unukalhai said to Alkurah. ‘But one wonders why you think that you are not insane as well?’

‘Do not listen!’

‘Why do you not accept this?’ Unukalhai said to her.

‘Unukalhai,’ Alkurah told me, ‘is willfully insane, which makes him insane all the more.’

Unukalhai laughed at this in the universal orca way. ‘Of course I am insane. In such an insane place as this, my acceptance of my plight is the only reasonable response.’

‘Do not listen! Do not listen! Do not listen!’

Unukalhai laughed again and said to me, ‘Of course, I am not only insane. In my very eagerness to look upon, hear, taste, and embrace my insanity, I exercise a deeper sanity.’

Upon a murmur of protest from Alkurah, her sisters Salm and Zavijah joined in to swim in close and surround Unukalhai. They nuzzled his sides, again and again. In the tightness of pool, he could not elude them or escape their attentions.

‘If the humans were not watching,’ a tiny voice spoke out, ‘the sisters would hurt him again and try to silence him.’

These words came from a tiny orca, who swam alone near the corner of the pool. Her very thick accent and nearly impenetrable syntax identified her as one of the Others. The strange and unfamiliar lattices of sound that she built within the pool’s water seemed strangely familiar.

‘How many times have you hurt Unukalhai?’ the tiny orca said to Alkurah. ‘As many as the marks on his skin!’

She went on to describe for me how Alkurah and her sisters often tormented Unukalhai (and the sad Menkalinan) by raking them with their teeth and opening up long, bloody wounds that cut through skin and blubber. It shocked me to hear this little whale speak of such a thing. No whale of my family or acquaintance had ever harmed another. Even more, for a very young orca to address an elder such as Alkurah so critically seemed almost impossibly rude. But then, the tiny whale was of the Others, who do not esteem our kind highly. And, as I would discover, she was as fearless as she was outspoken.

Alkurah swam closer to the lone, unprotected whale. With even greater rudeness, she said, ‘I could kill you with one bite.’

‘Yes, but you will not. Then I would be beyond the humans’ torments – and therefore beyond yours.’

Alkurah said nothing to the implication that she reveled in the tiny whale’s suffering, for to do so would be to admit that she had plunged deeply into the insane. Instead, she gathered in her dignity and pretended to the fiction that all the disparate whales in the pool somehow formed a single family, over which she presided as matriarch. Using her most authoritative voice, almost forcibly modulated to a reasonable calmness, she formally introduced the tiny whale to me:

‘This is Baby Electra from the—’

‘I know you!’ I called out to the little orca, carelessly interrupting Alkurah again. ‘That is, I know of you – I knew your brother Pherkad!’

I swam over to Baby Electra. So tiny she was, really not much more than a newborn. A long scar marked her left side, as if Alkurah had toothed her there. I liked her lovely symmetry of form and the warm, clear light which filled her dark eyes.

‘How could you have known Pherkad, how, how? Our kind do not naturally speak to Others such as you.’

I laughed at her boldness and at the irony of what she had said. I realized for the first time that the Others thought of my kind as the Others.

‘No natural occurrence,’ I said, ‘brought Pherkad and me together.’

I told Baby Electra of the Burning Sea of how I had tried to remove the harpoon from Pherkad’s flesh. I gave her Pherkad’s death song, which he had given to me.

‘O Pherkad!’ she called out. ‘O my brother, my sweet brave brother – the most beautiful whale in all the world!’

She began crying, and the terrible close waters of the pool shook with a lament almost beyond bearing.

‘O the stars! O the sea! Why is there so much pain?’

She wept for a long time. Finally, she composed herself and swam in close to me.

‘My family are all dead,’ she told me, ‘as your dear ones are to you, for you will never see them again.’

‘No, I will see them,’ I said, ‘on Agathange or in the timeless Cerulean Sea.’

‘No, I am sorry, you will not, for you will never quenge again. I’m so sorry, sorry, sorry.’

‘I will quenge again,’ I said.

While the other orcas listened, I told Baby Electra of my reason for making my journey and all that occurred upon it.

‘You say that before Pherkad went off to die,’ Electra forced out, ‘you came to love him like a brother?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Well, I love you the same way, for you are brave and beautiful as he was.’

‘Thank you,’ I intoned, not knowing what else to say.

‘Will you be my brother, here in this horrible place?’

I made a quick decision, one of the best of my life.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I will.’

She moved up against my side as if to take comfort in my much larger body and to keep me between her and Alkurah and her sisters.

‘Then we are a family,’ she said. ‘I will try to speak with the humans as you have tried. Why don’t we call ourselves the Hopeful Wordplayers of the Manmade Bitterblue Sea?’

All the other whales had a good, long laugh at this. Then Zavijah mocked Baby Electra, saying, ‘If your naming talent goes no deeper than that, you had better continue to play with your words if you ever hope to speak with the humans.’

‘How could she speak with the humans,’ her sister Salm added, ‘when she can barely speak with us?’

‘It is a mystery,’ Zavijah said, ‘how you Others can even speak to each other in your ugly miscarriage of a language. What a sad fate that our family should have to listen to it!’

‘And a sadder fate,’ Alkurah agreed, ‘that we Moonsingers should have to dwell so closely with a misbegotten family composed of two kinds never meant to speak with each other. One might as well try to form a family of a human and a whale.’

At this, the pool crackled with the sound of the three sisters’ derisive laughter. Then Baby Navi, even tinier than Electra, broke away from nursing at Zavijah’s side and cried out, ‘Please stop – you are hurting my heart!’

Zavijah called to her sisters to cease their mockery, for as much as she seemed to despise Baby Electra, she loved her newborn Navi even more, and she could not bear for anything to hurt him. And her elder sister Alkurah, who loved Zavijah fiercely, could not bear anything that caused her to suffer.

‘So!’ Unukalhai said from the end of the pool where he floated. ‘This, Arjuna, is how it goes with insanity. The humans’ cruelty has made the Moonsingers insane with a cruelty most unbecoming in a whale. But you – you, you, you, and little Electra – have chosen a different way! Insane it is for our kind to try to make a family with one of the Others, but in just this sort of insanity, you might find a kind of salvation.’

His wisdom, crazy though it might be, clung to me like one of the humans’ noxious skin lotions and slowly worked its way inside me. Over the days that followed – long, boring days of swimming back and forth within the imprisoning waters and watching the humans teach the other whales their ‘feats’ – I considered the advice he had tendered me. In one sense, even to entertain the thought of falling insane seemed itself insane. From another vantage, however, what if Unukalhai was right? Could it be that a still pool of sanity dwelled within the typhoon of madness that pressed down upon all us whales and threatened to derange our finest sensibilities? And if so, how could one navigate the raging winds and waves of that stormy sea to find a place of peace?

In no other aspect of existence did the other orcas demonstrate their creeping dementia so disturbingly as in their acquiescence to the humans’ desires. Day after day, as the sun swam again and again like a flying fish over our pools, the humans continued doing things with things even as they conveyed their wishes to us and never ceased their irritating chattering:

‘Good girl, Mimu!’

‘Can you open your mouth for me?’

‘You’re cuter than a bug’s ear.’

‘You just love having your flipper tickled, don’t you, Gaga?’

‘Are you ready for a relationship session?’

‘Stick out your tongue for me, baby.’

‘You are sooo sweet, Tito, oh, yes you are, yes you are!’

‘Can you pee for me, sweetie?’

‘Are you ready to have some fun being a big surfboard for us?’

‘Meal time!’

‘Let’s see what you can do with these new toys.’

‘Good girl, Lala! You’re so happy, aren’t you?’

‘I’ve been dreaming about this since I was nine years old.’

‘What are we going to do about Bobo?’

‘Jordan wants to breed him to Mimu.’

‘What do you think, Mimu? Are you ready to be a mother like your little sister?’

‘We’ve got to build him up first. He’s sooo thin.’

‘Aren’t you happy with your new toys, Bobo?’

‘Jordan special-ordered some char for him, but he wouldn’t even touch it.’

‘Please eat, baby. We love you!’

It quickly became clear to me that one of the humans was trying to teach me the first of my feats. Gabi, the other humans called her. Her orange, curly hair seemed to erupt from her head like snakes of fire. Her skin – red where the sun had licked it and like cream on those parts of her usually covered by her clothing – was mottled with little splotches of pigment that seemed to float across her face like bits of brown seaweed. I liked her eyes, large and kind and nearly as deep blue as cobalt driftglass. I saw in these lively orbs a dreaminess mated to a fierce dedication to apply her will toward whatever purpose she chose to embrace. It seemed important to her that I should eat. Whenever I swam near, she would kneel by the side of the pool with a fish in her hand, and she would open her mouth wide in an obvious sign that I should do the same. I did not, however, want to open my mouth. I feared that if I did so, Gabi would cast the dead fish onto my tongue, as other humans did with the other whales.

‘Come on, Big Boy,’ she said to me, ‘you have to eat. Please, Bobo, pleeease!’

Near the end of my fifth day of immurement in the humans’ filthy pools, Baby Electra rubbed up against my side as if to rub away my obduracy. She said to me, ‘Please, Arjuna – you have to eat!’

‘How can I eat slimy old fish?’

‘That is all we have.’

‘I will wait then until we have something else.’

‘If you do not eat, you will die.’

‘If I do eat, I will die.’

‘I do not understand you!’ Baby Electra said. ‘The speech of you Others is so difficult – as difficult as the way you think.’

‘My thought is no different than yours.’

‘Then you should think very clearly about eating. Could it be worse for you than it was for me?’

Baby Electra told of her first days among the humans and described her revulsion over eating fish of any kind, dead or alive.

‘I had only ever put tooth to seals, porpoises and a few humpback whales,’ she said. ‘I did not even think of fish as food.’

‘How, then, did you eat it?’

‘How did you eat the white bear?’

‘With great gusto, actually, though I must apologize for breaking our covenant with your kind.’

‘I forgive you,’ she said, ‘as Pherkad did. But I will not forgive you if you starve to death. I need you!’

The sheer poignancy with which she said this drove deep her vulnerability and made me want to weep.

‘Better death from starvation,’ I told her as gently as I could, ‘than the living death from eating dead food. I do not want to become like Unukalhai and Alkurah.’

‘Am I like them, Arjuna? Are you sure that eating what the humans give us would be so bad?’

Yes, I thought, yes, yes – I was sure! How should I go on without hunting for sweet salmon, char, and other free-swimming fish as my mother had taught me? To tear the life from a vital, thrashing animal, to feel that life pass within and join with one’s own, making one stronger, to feel complete in oneself the great web of life, perfect and eternal, and thus to know oneself gloriously and immortally alive – what joy, what wild, wild joy! How could I, how should I, live without that?

One day, the humans brought out an old orca that they had named Shazza, but whom we knew as Bellatrix. This huge grandmother of a whale would have acted as matriarch in Alkurah’s place but for Bellatrix’s dementia and a sadness so deep that surely the Great Southern Ocean must have wept in compassion for her. She joined the rest of us in the big pool, but she touched no one. Her great dorsal fin flopped over her side like a lifeless, decaying manta ray. Oozing sores pocked her face – apparently she had scoured off her skin by rubbing against the gates of the pools again and again. When the humans cast fish at her, she opened her mouth to reveal teeth that she had broken by gnawing on the stony side of the pool. After her meal, she floated near the pool’s center, barely moving. Her breathing was labored as mine had been when the humans had pulled me from the sea. She seemed nearly dead.

‘Do you see? Do you see?’ I said to Baby Electra. ‘Would you have me eat so that I could become like her?’

No, no – I would not eat! I had come to the humans with the best of intentions, hoping to talk to them and ask them why they were trying to kill the world. They had returned my goodwill by trapping me and bringing me to this place of living death. Would I not be better off if I were truly dead?

Later, I expressed this sentiment to Unukalhai. He beat the pool’s water with his flukes as if deep in contemplation. Then he said to me, ‘You are still thinking like a free whale.’

‘How should I think then? Like Bellatrix, who can no longer think at all?’

‘Why did you leave your family, Arjuna? Was it not to speak with the humans?’

‘Are you suggesting that I try once more to talk to them? How can I talk to animals who do such cruel things to people such as us?’

‘The humans are animals, indeed, and that is why you never will succeed in conveying our conceptions to them. It would be like expecting a clam’s shell to contain the sea.’ He paused to drink in a mouth of water and spray it out in a concentrated stream in the way that one of the humans had taught him. ‘However, you should recommence your efforts at communication, futile though they might be. To attempt the impossible is mad, is it not? And it is just this sort of madness that will save you.’

‘Save me for what? To spend the rest of my life eating dead food and swimming through poisoned water?’

I spoke of how the humans sprayed chemicals over various species of plants that grew among the grasses and flowers encircling two of the smaller pools. Whatever green, growing things these chemicals touched withered and died. Rains washed the chemicals into the pools, and the poison found its way into the big pool, in which the humans themselves swam with us when they participated in our feats. How was it, I wondered, that the humans did not taste this poison and so remove themselves to the dryness of land?

‘The humans kill plants,’ I said to Unukalhai, ‘for no apparent reason. In the bay, they killed many trees and cut them into pieces. Why should I want to be saved if I must live a degraded life surrounded by such an insane species?’

I went on to say that the humans loved death. They smothered the living waters of the ocean with oil and flame. They harpooned entire families of orcas just so they could capture the youngest and most helpless of our kind. They wore second skins of excrescence, as dead as the other things that they fabricated and manipulated with their murderous hands. They themselves ate dead food.

‘Why should I not, then,’ I asked Unukalhai, ‘want to leave this place?’

‘I understand, young Arjuna. You want to leave, but soon you will grow so hungry that you will want only to eat. And then you will eat, as the rest of us do, even though the fish are dead.’

I considered this for a while. The hot sun rained down its firelight upon the pool. I looked over at Bellatrix, floating like a felled tree and barely breathing. Big black flies buzzed around her blowhole.

‘Then before hunger makes a coward of me,’ I said to Unukalhai, ‘I will breathe water and drown.’

Salm and Zavijah overheard me say this, and they swam to the sides of the pool as if to escape my words. Alkurah did the same, though she hesitated and touched me with zangs of what felt like regret. Unukalhai circled around me restlessly. Even though on my first day in captivity he himself had advised me to do what I had just suggested, he could not countenance my actual suicide.

‘Baby Electra needs you,’ he told me. ‘And I have longed for a like spirit to talk to.’

Baby Electra swam up to me and brushed her baby-smooth skin against mine. ‘You cannot break the covenants!’ she said to me.