PROLOGUE Several years ago, just before the last presidential election and before the Portland homeless riots, a group of jurors walked out of a well-heated federal courtroom in Seattle after convicting a defendant of murder, kidnapping and child trafficking. The small squadron of cops and social workers soon moved on to other complicated disasters, but the
Seattle Times ran a profile, both in print and online, of the “scientist gumshoe” who had been instrumental in the case. The scientist gumshoe, they said, had broken up a small child-trafficking ring and was one of the few private investigators to have aided law enforcement since the dubious contribution of the Pinkertons during the labor wars of the 1920s. The profile outlined her career working out of Sitka, Alaska alongside her late husband, a writer and investigator himself. Just above the fold in an article featuring a color photo with her and her husband, the paper noted that she was more unique and adventurous than the fictional characters her husband had created. Even in a cynical age, the paper also noted, she had “gone against type and had done her civic duty to a T.”
People who knew Delphine laughed at the characterization. It would have made Delphine laugh as well if she had read it, which of course she couldn’t.
CHAPTER ONE It was another day with a follow-up appointment. Delphine worked on her transfer memos in the morning. She wrote on an ironing board at the foot of her bed in the hotel room where she had been living across the street from the Seattle Hospital. She had not been home to Alaska for five months. Her doctor appointments and infusions came often enough it wasn’t worth traveling back. Insurance did not pay for her flights, but it helped her cover the expense of the hotel. After the second month of treatment, she decided to write the memos for her students and colleagues, to conclude the story of her research.
Delphine intended for the memos to sound like a cross between a formal scientific paper and a well-researched article for a popular journal. Not a personal memoir. There would be no graphs or tables. There would be nothing about cancer or grief. She wanted her words to have the voice of mature curiosity, which turned out to be a difficult tone to maintain. She had written two memos already, one for the humpback whales and one for the killer whales, but the memo that kept drawing her mind off into the shadowy gloom of her imagination was the one concerning the myriad unanswered questions about the sperm whales. She had been trying to develop a common thread, but she was still struggling with the thought she wanted to convey.
How do animals with large brain mass and a high degree of dexterity within their dynamic environment develop strategies for getting what they want: food, breeding opportunities, safety? She split the question into two parts—how could large-brained animals gain things they wanted, like feeding or breeding strategy, and how could they avoid the things they didn’t want, like predators or having cancer (there it was again) or having a dead partner at the time when she needed him most.
Delphine was not happy with her efforts so far. Diving into the murky waters of judging another creature’s intelligence tempted her scientist’s mind toward solipsism. By the time she finished her fifth draft of the sperm whale memo and walked to her follow-up appointment, she had decided she wanted to stick with what she had seen, photographed and gathered in her forty years of research. There was plenty there to consider.
Outside, it was early summer, and songbirds fluttered in the plantings around the hospital. Through the open window of the examination room, she could barely make out the scent of Puget Sound, while the constant traffic thrummed from the freeway and cars honked intersections to life. A car alarm blared, and a child somewhere was crying at the top of their lungs. The crying should have been distressing but it wasn’t. In fact, the small calamity sounded as if it were drifting away on a balloon.
The paper on the padded examination table crackled underneath her butt. She tried to focus on the sounds outside of the window rather than the young doctor in front of her. She had grown up here, but now Seattle had the soundscape of a big city that had forgotten where and what it was. She was listening to learn this new place. The city swirled with cultural indicators of the times, like printed signs exhorting people to SUSPEND THE CONSTITUTION AND REINSTATE THE PRESIDENT. One billboard near the international district suggested that GOD IS MY PRESIDENT. The cultural divide was laid out in the blurred swirl of hand-drawn graffiti: JAIL ALL DEMOCRATS and EAT THE RICH. Other graffiti proclaimed gang names or suggested that poverty was the open door to anarchy.
“All right, big breath in now, that’s a good girl,” the young doctor said in his mannerly way. He had big teeth and clean fingernails.
In her three years of undergoing treatment, Delphine had never ceased to be amazed at how condescending young doctors could be. She was sixty-eight years old and almost every visit bespoke some sense of superiority, as if underneath it all, these circumstances were her fault. The nurses were almost always kind, but the young doctors made her feel guilty, leaving her mind to reel after each appointment.
Delphine had been a gatherer of data. She loved photographing animals out on the ocean, taking notes and making observations. She loved pushing her yellow skiff along the wake of a diving whale to photograph the flukes of the big animals. She had so much more work to do, more photographs to take, more data to go through, more students to foster toward their own research. She couldn’t stand ruminating about her own illness.
“You have some more congestion, dear. Have you told Dr. Walters?”
“I will be sure to mention it to Dr. Walters, darling,” she said in her most kind, sarcastic voice.
Delphine didn’t offer up any other sort of answer because she didn’t really believe the young man was listening. That and she couldn’t stand the assumption that she was his “dear.” Clearly, he wanted to transfer his concern to his boss so he would not be expected to do anything substantial. Most young doctors never really want to stick their tidy heads up out of the foxhole. He checked the nursing notes about when and how much medication she had been given. He could always push blame downhill onto the nurses. He wished the grumpy old woman no ill will, but these were difficult times and the hospital administrators needed her spot on the schedule.
Delphine stopped studying the young doctor. More than a thousand miles away in the North Pacific, a group of male sperm whales lay at the surface breathing, expelling carbon dioxide and taking in oxygen, watching the ocean below them, hoping to take more black cod off a fisherman’s longline. Sitting on the rolled-out paper of the examination table, Delphine swam with them.
She had little respect for people who thought that sperm whales were the smartest creatures on earth—and yes, there were many who thought that sperm whales were spiritually enhanced animals. “How could we possibly know the specifics of their vast superiority,” she had asked her students, “before we even know the basics of how they live, feed and navigate on this planet?”
Delphine had her gnawing doubts about human beings’ capability to judge the huge mammal’s intellectual supremacy. Here was a whale that made the entire basin of the Pacific Ocean its home. Males wandered the upper northern latitudes while females and calves stayed in equatorial waters. They clearly had a social dynamic. Yet humans knew less about sperm whales than they did about most other charismatic megafauna. Humpback whales were endlessly studied and photographed, and killer whales were considered demigods for their language, distinct DNA types and complex social dynamics. What made these animals almost magical to human beings, who were both humbled by the whales and tainted with the guilt of their own ignorance?
What fascinated her about marine mammals was their mystery. This was the purpose of her transfer memos to her students and colleagues: to convey what we don’t know and couldn’t know, and, perhaps most importantly, what wasn’t worth trying to figure out. What she loved about her life was the sensation that discovery is an unending relay race of research.
It bothered her a great deal that most young students wanted to know more than anything—what is it really like to
be a sperm whale, a mountain gorilla or a wolf? Many of them did not enjoy the hard work of trying to understand the creatures that held sway over them.
Delphine blamed the books that were so widely published for this lack of motivation: science fiction, nature mysticism, tales of the downfall of big dumb men. Students often wanted to know not just what sperm whales were thinking but what they were
trying to say to us. They wanted to know what some thinkers call an animal’s umwelt, their worldview. But sperm whales are so sensationally distant from our own experience. We hardly know what they do, the specifics of their sociality, mating, feeding or even the mortal danger they are in because of changing climate. They have been largely unobserved, obscured by their distance out to sea but also by the great depths of their world. To spend time worrying about sperm whales’ umwelt is akin to planning a conversation with a space alien before you know that one actually exists.
Most idealistic young students who wanted a picture of a sperm whale’s umwelt had an almost visceral disdain for understanding human beings. Being treated by modern American medicine did little to change Delphine’s mind about humanity’s ability to empathize. The entire institution seemed to be absorbed with its own self-perpetuated hierarchy of prestige. “I did such a good job with your surgery,” the young female surgeon said right before admitting that Delphine’s condition,
unfortunately, was only going to get worse and worse. “It’s lucky that your kind of cancer is relatively slow. You should have more life left to live than expected, even though the surgery wasn’t effective.”
Delphine thought about this as the young doctor continued reading her chart, as she considered the neighborhood around the hospital where she was living. The little hilltop community reminded her of a tide pool: dynamic and blossoming with the energy of feeders and prey. Wafting through it all were the doctors in their tunicate white coats carrying tall coffee cups, oblivious or at least hardened to the sickness around them, patients clutching on to paperwork, and now, more and more homeless people drifting like large ungulates across the grasslands of the human-built plains. She had come to know several homeless people during the last five months. She had tried to buy them food rather than giving them cash. There was the man who ate her leftover pizza nearly every night. He was shockingly thin. There was the young couple who argued on street corners and outside of bodegas along Madison. The woman always seemed to be holding a different pink- or blue-clad baby.
The young doctor left the room without explanation. Delphine remained on the examining table with her shoulders slumped. Her mind again wandered to the northern basin of the Pacific Ocean. She imagined sounds of whales, the hissing of deep ocean background noise.
Copyright © 2024 by John Straley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
