The Whale Song Translation: A Voyage of Discovery To Neptune and Beyond (10 page)

Following Melanie’s lead, Dmitri and Greg tossed their sandals into a cordoned area jam-packed with footwear. Then they hot-footed back to the surf, and merged with the section of the bucket brigade closest to the leviathan. Melanie handed the pails directly to the SoCalSci professors. Reaching high, they spilled the contents onto the whale’s linen-covered back.

“This is amazing, pal.” Greg lifted his voice above the roar of the breakers. “I never imagined getting so close to such a large animal. Look at the size of these fins. More than double our height.”

“It’s too bad we’re here under such crappy circumstances.” Dmitri fought to keep both legs steady in the churning surf.

Gorman walked the line of volunteers. “Okay, folks!” he yelled. “Listen up. Keep those sheets moist. Just keep dousing them.”

“Hi, Chris.” Melanie’s greeting captured Gorman’s attention. “You look like you need some sleep.”

Gorman approached her. “Hiya, Mel. Yeah, duty calls. We’ve been going nonstop with rotating shifts for almost forty-eight hours. Thanks for being here.”

She nodded in the direction of the two SoCalSci professors. “I brought some friends along to help.”

“I know these gentlemen. Thanks for interrupting your vacation. Now you see for yourselves what I was venting about the other day.”

“What are its chances for survival?” asked Dmitri, after he’d dumped his bucket onto the victim’s back. He winced in reaction to the asthmatic brew of wheezing and moaning noises.

“To be honest with you, I don’t think this poor little guy can survive much longer.” Gorman spoke in listless tones as the creature’s body convulsed in the struggle to capture each life-sustaining breath. “If it was healthier, we could hope it would ride out with the next high tide. Sad to say, its breathing has become more labored and irregular.”

“Like a person in a comatose state,” Dmitri replied. A wave of melancholy overtook him, the memory of a bedside vigil during his mother’s final hours.

“So what’s the use of continuing to douse the sheets?” The contemptuous voice belonged to a spiky-haired teen. His arms and shoulders were tattooed with the distinctive comic book scenes of Japanese manga art.

Gorman scanned the teen’s body before answering. “You’ve got to realize, even though marine mammals can still breathe when they’re out of the water, their massive bodies aren’t designed to survive on the land. Their internal organs can be crushed by their own weight. Nothing we can do about that, but we can reduce its suffering and prolong its survival by lowering the body temperature. Think about it. The thick layers of blubber that insulate in the water trap the heat inside the whale now that it’s exposed to the warm air. That’s why we’re keeping it moist. The sheets also protect its skin from the sun’s ultraviolet rays.”

“He certainly doesn’t look like a ‘little guy’ to me,” said the teen. “These fins are huge. They look like dragon’s wings.” There was a touch of awe in his voice.

“Even a juvenile can be thirty feet long and weigh twenty-five tons like this specimen,” replied Gorman. “If he lived to maturity, he could grow to nearly fifty feet and weigh fifty tons.”

“This is definitely a labor of love.” Melanie pushed out the nasal-toned words through tight lips. “The odor of its breath is pretty foul.”

“That’s the way it is with humpbacks.” Gorman sighed. “We think it’s the bacteria in their digestive or respiratory tracts. After a while, you get used to it.”

Dmitri crinkled his nose and inhaled very shallow breaths. “You’re a better man than I.”

“Wait,” barked the tattooed teen. “Did you hear that? The breathing’s changed. It sounds even more depressing.”

Gorman angled closer to the whale’s head and peered at his wristwatch. In a few seconds, he shook his head and muttered, “You’re right, the rate is slowing down.” The marine biologist’s entire body appeared to sag. “I gotta go check on the other volunteers.” A veil of resignation settled upon Gorman’s face. “Carry on.”

Dmitri stopped what he was doing and approached Melanie. “I didn’t realize you knew Chris Gorman.”

“Everybody knows everybody on the cozy island of Maui,” she remarked blithely. “Which means that no secrets are safe around here.”

“Stop that kid!” Chris Gorman’s voice eclipsed the ambient chatter.

Heads turned as the blur of a pixie-like figure dashed across the field of Dmitri’s peripheral vision. The intruder, a small blond girl, had somehow evaded detection and breached the barrier of humans. She made a beeline to the humpback. Adorned in a striped bathing suit, and with her arms, legs, and face caked with wet sand, she looked like a motley-colored doll. She kneeled on the sand and placed a cuddly, stuffed-animal whale next to its mammoth head. It reminded Dmitri of a scene in a fairy tale, with a munchkin huddled next to a giant. The child clasped her hands together, stared directly into the whale’s eye, and moved her lips as if in silent prayer. While she paid tribute to the creature, a pair of volunteers crept up behind her, then froze like statues as many gasped.

“Quiet! Do you hear it?” Gorman called.

Dmitri heard a familiar haunting sound. The humpback had begun to sing its ethereal aria, a song heard only in the ocean depths. He held his breath as successive waves of low, mournful tones ebbed away into muted sadness. But as the whale’s voice comingled with the air, Dmitri thought he heard faint threads of something new—emotionally uplifting filaments embedded in the fabric of the lamentation. Straining to hear every sound, he realized he wasn’t mistaken. An ornamentation of new phrases had blossomed from the elegiac. Like the sliding tones of a tenor’s portamento, each brief passage climbed a staircase of brightening frequency. A richer texture emerged, woven into a perfect harmony of joy and sorrow, music as sublime as Brahms’s
Requiem
. Dmitri observed his own amazement mirrored in the sea of faces around him. Melanie’s eyes glistened with moisture.

More gasps cracked the panes of human silence. One of the whale’s gigantic pectoral fins lurched sideways like a stilled heart reanimated by a defibrillating spark. As the humpback continued to sing, its fin began to rise up, at first almost imperceptibly, from the sand. Dmitri saw the girl and the two volunteers stumble backward, their mouths agape, as the giant wing inched toward the sky. Pausing briefly at the zenith of its ascent, it reversed course and began a gradual descent. About halfway down, the fin made a sharp right turn and swept laterally in a wide arc, back and forth, parallel to the ground. Then, like a puppet whose strings had suddenly snapped, it fell to the earth with a thunderous thud.

“That was spooky, pal.” Greg slapped himself gently on the cheek. “Am I crazy, or did that whale just make the sign of the cross?”

Too perplexed to respond to Greg’s question, Dmitri noticed the couple next to him wave their arms in a familiar ritualistic gesture. Seeing the same devotional proliferating all around him, he realized that Greg’s observation was shared by many. Like a wave of falling dominoes sweeping through the multitude, many knelt upon the sand, closed their eyes, and clasped their hands in supplication. A scientist, Dmitri was completely baffled by the inexplicable events unfolding around him.

A ghastly noise assailed Dmitri’s mind, triggering an adrenalin surge and the sight of Melanie’s pained reaction. She squeezed her hands to her ears as a sputtering and gurgling cacophony spewed from the giant’s mouth and blow hole.

In a few seconds it was all over. The familiar sounds of the whale’s breathing were no more. A suffocating silence and a dreadful stench filled the void. Wherever he turned, Dmitri saw ashen faces and vacant stares. He felt a bit queasy and experienced the unsettling sensation of his pulse throbbing inside his skull. Punctuated bursts of “Oh, my God!” and “Oh no!” pierced the veil of his shock.

“This . . . this is terrible,” Melanie choked through quivering lips. “I . . . I . . .” Tears cascaded down her cheeks.

Although he had just witnessed a death rattle of epic proportions, Dmitri’s main concern was for Melanie. He inhaled a restorative breath, dropped his bucket, and wrapped both arms around her shoulders. When she’d begun to convulse with sobs, he felt the full intensity of her grip. Squeezing her tenderly, he could not have imagined a more unlikely set of circumstances for their first embrace. In fact, it was like no other first hug he’d experienced in his adult life, more bonding than romantic. Yet it felt so good; it felt so right. He desperately yearned to comfort her.

While she quaked in his arms, he wondered if this was what fate was all about, the remarkable chain of events culminating in this moment. He’d discovered her on a sacred mountain by following a light in the night sky. Her devotion to her hearing-challenged students had kindled his attraction to her. And now they shared this moment of communion. They’d been hurled together by a mysterious force emanating from the spirit of a dying humpback whale. Maybe she was the “one?”

As she pressed against him, Dmitri’s eyes panned the crowd. He saw grief-stricken faces comforted by similar embraces and the clasping of hands. Some, like Melanie, emoted the full intensity of their heartache, including the little girl who had been reunited with her mother. The familiar figure of the TV newscaster suddenly barged into the assembly of mourners and careened into Dmitri and Melanie. After a perfunctory apology, she marched over to the youngster, signaled to the cameraman, and shoved a microphone in front of the girl’s face.

“Tell us, sweetie, what did you say to the poor whale?”

At first bewildered, the child looked directly into the camera, flooding it with the tears pouring from her eyes. “I told the whalie to take my gift to heaven.” Her words were punctuated by rasping sobs. She turned to face her mother. “Mommy, where do the whales go after they die? Is there a whale heaven?”

Dmitri tapped Greg on the shoulder. “Wow. That girl just delivered the most poignant plea in the history of any save-the-whales campaign. It’ll go viral by nightfall on YouTube and every newscast.”

“You got that right. Uh-oh, look who’s coming.”

They saw Chris Gorman looming large and heading directly for the newscaster. Upon arrival, he reached for the microphone. She handed it over without hesitation, and Gorman turned to face the cameraman.

“Ladies and gentlemen.” Gorman’s voice conveyed both calm and conviction. With his sand-encrusted hair and weathered face, he looked like a proverbial holy man back from a desert pilgrimage. “Write to your congressman. Tell them to stop the Navy’s sonar experiments. They’re slaughtering Maui’s young whales. Probably at this very moment, a Navy research vessel is blasting the bodies of humpbacks for target practice to test the latest version of their equipment.” He returned the microphone and loped away.

A man standing upwind from Dmitri uttered a barrage of anti-military epithets laced with garlic fumes. Sympathetic protest slogans erupted from the crowd. Engrossed in interpreting the clot of vehement remarks, Dmitri was startled by the sound of fingers snapping directly in his face. It was Greg.

“Hey, D&D, good buddy. As hard as it is for me to admit, I humbly apologize for giving you grief about the whale song work. After the catastrophe we just witnessed, the humpbacks need all the help they can get. I’ll do anything to assist.” Greg surprised Dmitri with a bear hug and then excused himself. It was time for his daily five-mile run.

Dmitri, still shaken, stood by while Melanie engaged in a whale-related conversation with the devout couple who had crossed themselves minutes earlier. Impressed by their camaraderie, Dmitri’s heart and mind agreed that all who had witnessed the tragedy on the beach had been bonded together by a life-altering experience. He realized now, more than ever, that the existential crises of humans and whales were inextricably intertwined. A sense of urgency infused his desire to resolve the McPinsky Challenge. If he could somehow decode the signals in their songs, gain even the briefest glimpse of their language, he could raise public awareness about the plight of humpbacks and address McPinsky’s goal of ending our species isolation.

Dmitri felt the tug of an arm and heard a familiar voice.

“We’ve done all that we can do here.” Melanie sounded wistful. “Let’s go to the Island’s best sushi house and discuss your plans to study the whale songs.”

For the first time all afternoon, Dmitri smiled.

S
HARING A
P
ASSION

Sansui Sushi Restaurant, Kapalua, Maui—5 p.m.

Thirty minutes later, Dmitri followed Melanie into her favorite restaurant. They waited, silently, in front of the hostess stand. He observed an eclectic crowd of tourists and locals, families and couples, engaged in subdued conversations and savoring the generous portions of their early-bird dinners.

“Oh, my God,” Melanie moaned, “what a day.”

Dmitri felt relieved. Except for giving directions to the restaurant, those were the first words she’d spoken since they’d left the beach. “I’m still in shock, too.” He tapped his chest. “That was a terrible scene.”

“Which might explain why this place is so quiet.”

“Let’s grab a table and talk about cheerier subjects.”

When they’d been seated in their cushioned, koa wood chairs, he ordered a bottle of his favorite California wine. Now that they were alone together for the first time, he noticed that Melanie’s grief and the candlelight had softened her face. She looked luminous, like the first time he had seen her on Haleakala Mountain.