WHALE

Megaptera novaeangliae. Only males sing.
Cut out musical lines from a spectrograph,
analyze, overlap them over and over again.
Identify individual voices in a quartet and
write out the score.

MY HANDS GROPE for the switch, but everything is black. I hear the sound of footsteps in the house. I let out a scream, muffled and only part-sure. A man comes toward me and grips my arm.

The room sways and I sink into a chair, half in and half out of the world.

A man’s voice. Heart palpitations. The hideous thump. Out of the chair. Ice cold, and retching as though seasick. I’ve lost my sense of time and space. Remain calm.

Oh, god.

My age swallows even an intruder’s ability to scene steal. It is me who becomes the shocking thing. Narrowed eyes, heaving body, I see in the dark the outline.

It’s me.

How did you find me?

He doesn’t answer.

Do you want to sit down? He helps me onto the sofa and fills one of the American’s plentiful drinking vessels full of tap water and finds an enamel basin and places it on my knees with lapidary precision.

It doesn’t matter. I had to come. There’s something we need to talk about.

I know, I manage to say.

How do you know?

My mind lurches. I am slipping away. I’m going to die. But my instinct is to rat-hole. I can’t breathe. Like the old whales who have to keep one portion of their brains perpetually alert, night and day, to make sure they keep breathing by surfacing regularly. Sometimes when they are very old, they strand themselves on a shallow beach where they can die without drowning. Without having to think about drowning.

This is not how I wanted to see him again. Flickers of sharp reality cant into a deeper, dark space. My mind inaccessible.

I attempt focus through the blur.

How did you escape?

He lights a match, that beautiful striking sound, and brings it to his face.

Lev.

I try to hold still my perception. Hold on. But my control flickers. No. I retch again into the basin. Whirling eyes, hot flashing up my neck and face. I’ve not spoken Lev’s name aloud, I have scissored him from my memory. A victim of my silence. But he reappears, my limbs turned to ash. This meaningless body. Every memory of him an assault.

Time does not heal, it medicates.

I look at this face in the blue light. Untamed. Hair thick and tangled and owling out in parts. Once, in Paris, looking for Lev, a woman described a man to me who wore his hair parted low to one side. But no, I realized, I would be incapable of being with such an exacting man.

Eyes flashing. Long fingers.

Lev? He says it out loud as a question.

Yes.

It’s me.

My mind searches for his name, like a lost word, refusing to form in my mouth. I cannot think. An after-image of his face. A black wing. Cold country. Siberian eyes. His voice. Paris. Notes and sounds and enigmata drifting through.

I do not know who you are, I say, genuinely shocked at this. Knowing, at least, that I should be.

He registers fear.

He takes me by the shoulders. The conservatory. The Yukon. Wolves. Fuck. I mean, Please.

Skeet. The attack has passed, the floor levels. Cognition limps back in.

OfcourseSkeet.

I need to talk to you Frame.

How did you find me?

Jesus Frame. I track animals.

Well yes, I say, you do.

I’m so sorry, he says, looking into my eyes. I had no idea I would scare you like that. Are you all right?

I’m fine.

Did you receive a letter from the conservatory?

I have been waiting but no, it never came. What I received—

So she didn’t mention anything about someone coming to interview you?

No.

He looks down and then directly into my eyes. The person to be dispatched is not from the university.

I don’t understand. A consultant?

No. The outside person is not connected to the conservatory at all. They’ve ordered a psychiatrist from a clinic, dread slows his breath, an assessment. To see if you are not—all here.

I would never let such a person—

I know. She knows. That is why it is under the guise of your work. So he can gain full access to make his assessment.

What? How is it even possible when I am engaged in research for them?

That’s the thing. He hesitates. I tried to explain a while ago, at Hotel du Nord. But I wasn’t sure what was actually going on at the university and the conservatory. They think you—

Please don’t say it, Skeet. For god’s sake. Though I’m certain after what you just witnessed, you have your own doubts.

Jesus, Frame, why do you think I’m here?

Why are you here, Skeet? Shouldn’t you be compiling the data? You have that big conference in Denmark.

There is no more work for me.

I don’t understand.

They’ve cut the funding for your project, a lot of projects, he says, reaching for the basin and taking it away. They even hired a PR firm to smooth everything over. Some company out of Los Angeles that just helped a breakaway nation emerge. An entire country. One of the istans, he says. The pipes creak as he turns on the tap. Apparently one of the women is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. Knows how to spin crap into gold.

Sanity isn’t a question, until you are thought to be mad. This I know. If only there were some form of assurance, like the swing of a crucifix around the necks of European women who lean into their housework. But it’s not like that. This addling. This passing change in perception.

Skeet has told me before about new research into aging. Techniques being engineered, attempting to reverse the wear on bodies by replacing lost cells in bones, in hearts.

But what if those cells are supposed to be lost? What if they contain the parts of our lives meant to disappear?

But who wouldn’t choose the alternative, he says.

The body grows cold, Skeet. Hard as ice. A worn-out container. When I look out, there are only these eyes not attached to any particular skin, flensed, no particular body but something less than a body. But who cares about the body? By the time you are old you live in it so little, though still, it is all we are. The thing about growing old is its suddenness. One day you look up and find that you no longer recognize anything, not even your own face.

Skeet shifts uncomfortably, pale light coming through, daylight faintly suggested.

Skeet, I say quietly, attempting to remain calm, I would rather drink lighter fluid than go into one of those homes. Those places smell like death. All those people identical, locked away as though they have a communicable disease. Do you know what people become in these places? Their rheumy eyes clouded over like a jar of bacon fat kept under the sink. Women who have lost the use of some part of their body or mind. Mme. Tissaud used to say that the mind is like a mirror, it collects dust. The problem is to remove the dust. Each face confused with all the other faces. Attendant. As though they are awaiting final instructions. You know what it is? It is as though they have already died.

At convent school they forced us to pay visits to these places, which I considered a traumatic activity. I remembered them being decorated with horrid paintings by children with virtually no artistic talent. There was a tiny shrunken woman with white shiny skin thin as bible paper who refused to visit her daughter in the south because she believed her exotic lily was about to bloom. The thing was awful. It smelled like a corpse and looked like a phallus. It’s a very rare plant, you know, the woman protested. I am already an old woman, she said, and if I leave now, I most surely will never see it bloom. And in fact the nurses overwatered it, and when they read up on it, realized that it could be decades before a bloom emerged, if ever. There was also a woman who clutched what looked like a jewellery box. What she carried in the box was her husband. She would thrust it toward me, pointing to what looked like seashells propped up in sand. His shoulder blades, she said in an odd tone that I realized was pride. Most of the people who work there are mannish women with mean little eyes that seem invigorated by the taunting. All that wordless suffering, like helpless creatures. And the thing that is so impossible Skeet, is that those people are us. That is me, and will be you someday, sooner than you can imagine.

He stares at me. He is too young for this to register. It probably isn’t the time.

I have come here because— He stops. There are things you should know.

The post-vertigo has produced a hollow pit, a terrible hunger. Skeet, may we be civilized about this?

He is already moving in the kitchen, half complicit.

Any eggs in the coop, Frame?

Yes, I tell him. But he’s not heard. Coffee, I say. I still get a prick of pleasure to think of the first cup. It remains one of the cheapest enjoyments in life.

Bread, fruit, cigarettes too, I say brightly, grateful to be holding on to this thin calm. The eggs are from the farmer’s wife, the only ones I dare eat. Those hens are magnificently cared for. Though the activists would probably disown me if they knew I consumed animal byproducts. Skeet puts his hands over his ears. I feel a flood of affection for him, for his long limbs, his rustic charm, his clean way of moving through things. Maybe that is the ability of the young, obstacles are merely chimeric, whereas in age they are made of stone.

There is a great unfairness, Skeet.

In the conservatory?

In life. I hear the whump of the gas igniting.

We wait and wait, but by the time we are fledged we are already on the descent.

The eggs skitter and pop on the stovetop.

It makes me think of how my obsessive listening to the rawest most private noise has allowed me to hear rapture in everything. In recordings. Ravel. Arvo. Satie. In Sappho’s rhythms. Eros has shaken my wits, like a wind from the mountain falling on oaks. This read in Toronto, everything licked clean. All the sound dreams when I first arrived. In one, I am huddled in burgundy ditches of dogwood surrounded by owls making their low rasping noises, scratchy and ethereal like the fragile 78 in Lev’s studio. When I tried to transcribe it, everything fell silent and it was just a needle rhythmically hitting the centre of a record like a heartbeat. In another, I am startled by a fox who creeps up to me and begins speaking. There is no actual voice but I hear the words, We did not reveal this to you so that you would do nothing. The other animals sit watching, like a jury. I wake up panicked, remembering that Freud said that every dream is either a wish or a counter-wish.

Breton had asked in his manifesto, Why is it that we attach more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams?