MIGRATORY PATTERNS
After she walked away I remained standing on the beach next to the towel and the empty bottle of wine. There was a full moon but I did not enjoy the sight of it. Some time after dawn, the full moon disappeared. It was there one moment and then it wasn’t there. Eventually I lay down on the towel and closed my eyes. It was a mediocre sunlight that strained against the darkness. It stung, at first, but then I fell asleep. It was a cool day.
When I woke up it must have been close to noon, or shortly after. I sat up and blinked two or three times. The beach was as empty as it had been last night. No, not at all, I was wrong. There was a whale lying on its side about thirty or forty yards down the beach. I stood up and brushed sand from my jeans and walked over to the whale until I could feel the quiet force of his exhalations. He was silent, blue and gray like the sky, and he was not struggling. I had watched someone in the process of dying slowly before and the whale did not resemble that person at all. He was noble and I expected a distinguished British narration to inform me about what was happening now, as well as the circumstances that had brought this whale here.
Instead, the whale spoke to me in a deep voice that was not tinged with accent or dialect.
“My mother died in front of me when I was a child and all I can remember is the harpoon, and the blood. From then on I roamed the water. When other whales were learning to waltz at the autumn ball I was marked by scientists in diving suits. I had never had an audience and so I sang for them, and every once in a while, they sang back to me through their machines.”
I held my hand out in front of the whale’s eye. I waved my hand back and forth and the whale followed the movement of my hand, watching. I wondered how much time he had left.
“One day I heard a song that was not artificial. It was the most beautiful song I had ever heard. Before I heard the song I roamed without purpose but after the song I was always hunting. For you, as well as us, this is the way of things, with music, there is always one song that will wrap your heart in a cocoon. I searched for the song without tiring. I barely ate, just enough to keep myself alive, because what use is sustenance to a hungry heart? And I was singing my song, calling out to her, and sometimes, when the moon was full and the waves were still, I heard her singing back to me.”
I looked over my shoulder at the towel and empty bottle of wine. No one had stolen the towel. There was no one else on the beach. I wished I had brought another bottle of wine. It was an affordable Riesling of above-average quality. We had shared it, passing the bottle back and forth without words. I looked back at the whale.
“But now I am here, and she isn’t here, and neither is her song, and so what has it all come to? Better to have ended with the harpoon, and the blood. No one will remember me, and if any of the other whales have heard her song, they will eventually forget it, and we will become memories engraved in audio recordings, archived in university libraries, and then our songs will become dust. But that is all right. It was enough to have heard the song in the first place. I loved her. And that was enough, as well.”
The whale closed his eyes. I waited until he stopped breathing and then I touched his cheek. It was surprisingly warm.