IT WAS COLD on top of the pool, and very dark, even darker than it usually was at 2 A.M. The unlit water was as black and opaque as tar. When the security guard did her regular rounds, she didn’t see or hear Friday. In what changed from concern to near panic, she waited and waited and waited, stock-still, for some sign that the whale was all right, that he was breathing, that he was there at all. She looked at the moon momentarily for strength and—
WAHHHHH!
Just two feet away, Friday burst straight up through the water’s surface, rising higher and higher. As she told the story later, the security guard nearly had a seizure.
“If that whale has a sense of humor,” she said, “you know he was laughing like hell.”
From that night on, scaring the security guards became one of Friday’s favorite late-night games.
IN THE EARLY spring the zoo was approached by an IMAX movie producer who wanted, in exchange for a sizable donation, to come to the zoo when the gallery was closed to the public and capture footage of Friday. Now, half an hour before the zoo would open, Neva escorted a photographer and his assistant to the gallery. They were thrilled when Friday swam right to them, keeping himself neutrally buoyant while he inspected them and their gear. Neva had predicted as much, and they thanked her profusely, but in fact the prediction was a no-brainer: in the early morning Friday had seen no one in the gallery for hours, and anyway he was always glad to see a camera of any kind. The truth was, Friday had begun to earn a reputation around the zoo as a shameless media hog. He would swim the entire length of the pool if a commercial camera appeared, cocking his head, opening his mouth, and giving a cheesy smile. The appearance of a beta-camera could wake him from a sound sleep; he would follow one for hours. No one knew why.
Best of all, this camera was enormous and made a fine, loud ticking sound Neva suspected he could hear through the gallery windows.
The IMAX photographer rolled his film; his assistant worked inside a blackout bag to load up extra cartridges. They filmed Friday inches away through the window; they filmed him following them from one window to the next. At first they were ecstatic, but after fifteen minutes and all the close-up shots they could ever want, it became clear that Friday had no intention of leaving, even though they needed swimming footage. The minutes went by. The cameraman drummed his fingers on his tripod; the assistant went out for a smoke. Friday waited in the windows with the patience of Job.
Finally, defeated, they packed up their gear and were never heard from again.
THE MAX L. Biedelman Zoo, like most other zoos, rented its facility to groups and individuals for private events. One Saturday evening when Truman was working late, he discovered a forlorn bride and groom sitting alone at the reception’s head table in Havenside’s ballroom. The groom was patting the bride’s hand comfortingly. There was no one else in the ballroom, though there were tables that could accommodate somewhere between seventy-five and one hundred guests. On this most special of days, the newlyweds had been upstaged by Friday—all the guests were in the viewing gallery, and had been for nearly an hour. The bride and groom would have liked to cut the cake, but in spite of three requests, no one was coming back to the ballroom.
In the end it took Truman making an announcement over the public address system to pry the guests out of the gallery.
THE PARADE OF celebrities asking to meet Friday up close continued. Truman accommodated them when he could—or rather Neva accommodated them in her ever more time-consuming role of guide and interpreter—but one VIP in particular would always stand out from the rest. He was a musician, possibly the oldest-looking sixty-year-old in the world, stringy and dissipated, a health insurance nightmare, a man easily twenty years past his prime. Once, he had been the opening act for some of the greatest rock musicians in the world. Now he was playing secondary Native American casinos in Washington State. Still, his name was recognizable. He got his promoter to set up a visit with Friday on his one free night. He wanted to see the killer whale he’d been hearing about—the one that was now almost as famous as the musician still was in his dreams.
Neva had a rare night off, so Truman escorted him to the empty viewing gallery in the early evening. For the musician this was the worst time of day, before the bars and clubs got going, after people with families had gone home, when lonely people populated the world. Truman faded back against the wall, leaving the musician to his encounter.
Friday swam over immediately. For a long time the two regarded each other through the glass, red-rimmed eye to red-rimmed eye. The musician saw on the whale’s flanks a quilting of old wounds, teeth marks, lesion scars. He pulled his jacket tight, and then, astonishingly, he closed his eyes and began to yodel. The sound reverberated in the hollow air, haunting and pure.
Friday stayed, rapt. Truman called Neva at home, and she called Gabriel and Libertine, and one by one they arrived and stayed, bearing mute witness to this homage to survival.
EVER SINCE FRIDAY had arrived at the zoo, a municipal clerk from St. Cloud, Minnesota, had called Neva once a month to check on him. She always called during her lunch hour, keeping the calls short and businesslike, and declined whenever Neva offered to call her back, to save her the money it cost to make the calls. In all, the clerk had sent Friday four checks for twenty-five dollars each—what she felt she could afford.
As she explained to Neva, she had never met Friday, or even seen a killer whale in person. She saw Free Willy once with her grandson, and although she liked it well enough, she hadn’t been overly moved. In fact, she couldn’t explain her interest in Friday at all, although she had been following his progress ever since she saw a news clip about him when he first arrived in Bladenham. As she tried to articulate it to Neva, her vigilance on his behalf had to do with her sense of citizenship, the kind that might lead her to keep an eye on a neighborhood dog that had been left outside too much. She felt no psychic pull, just this abiding sense of responsibility.
She visited Bladenham one day after having just attended a professional meeting in Portland. Neva offered to introduce her to Friday, leading her to Friday’s office window first so she could meet him eye to eye. This was always a big hit, but the clerk simply smiled at him when, predictably, he appeared at the glass, nodding in a mild greeting. She watched him for several minutes and then turned to Neva: shall we go? Neva was surprised. No one besides his staff had ever before left Friday before he left them. She asked the clerk if she was sure. Yes, she was sure.
Neva led her upstairs to the pool top, and the clerk looked around her calmly, thoroughly, asking several questions about the toys scattered around, about the tires stacked on the concrete deck. They made small talk about Bladenham and the zoo, about the clerk’s home town in Minnesota. During the conversation the clerk glanced at Friday only occasionally. When they’d exhausted these two subjects, she indicated that she’d seen enough; she would go. Her visit had lasted exactly thirty-five minutes. For this, she’d driven a total of four-and-a-half hours.
A week later, they received her usual check for twenty-five dollars.
IN BOGOTÁ FRIDAY’S lungs had been compromised for years, by either the air quality or a fungal infection or both. Gabriel had been monitoring his breathing closely ever since the whale arrived, asking Sam to record his respirations at rest, after a high-energy exercise session, and during breath-holds. Upon arrival his best breath-hold was three minutes.
At the end of February, Gabriel asked Friday to roll over on his back, submerging his blowhole, and cued Sam to start a stopwatch. Five minutes went by, then ten. The whale lay comfortably on the surface, upside down, receiving a herring from Neva between his teeth from time to time.
At eleven minutes Friday began to fidget, shifting his tail flukes restlessly. Neva clapped to signal her encouragement: hold it just a little longer.
Phwweeeeet! Gabriel blew his whistle, releasing Friday at last. Sam consulted his stopwatch. Friday had held his breath for over thirteen minutes.
AT FOUR O’CLOCK one morning in March, a middle-aged woman approached the Biedelman Zoo’s perimeter on foot, dressed in black clothing and carrying a thermal picnic cooler. She climbed over the fence—no mean feat since she was somewhat bottom-heavy and hadn’t climbed a fence since she was in grade school—and with the stride of a Valkyrie arrived at Friday’s pool without being seen. Her excitement grew as she reached the steel staircase to the pool top, which she’d seen so many times on the evening news. A motion sensor suddenly triggered lights on the outside of the building, but she froze for several minutes in the ragged edges of the darkness and no one responded to the security breach.
As soon as the lights timed out she hurried up the stairs, gripping the cooler handle tightly. Once on the dark pool top she heard Friday before she saw him. His breathing thrilled her—it was as though this magnificent animal were beckoning to her, as though he knew of and agreed with her plan. She wore rubber boots, knowing from the extensive TV coverage that in order to get close enough to him she’d be standing in water. Indeed, Friday was waiting for her at the poolside, mouth wide open. He knew; he must.
She set her cooler down on the dry concrete apron, removing a huge Ziploc plastic bag full of pellets and six lovely young salmon she’d bought yesterday at Pike Street Market in Seattle. It took only a minute to stuff each fish with the pellets; she’d waited to do this until the last possible moment in case contact with the fish broke down their chemical composition. She’d worried that he might sense something, but he swallowed them one after the other without hesitation—more proof that his captivity had ruined him, turned him into a broken animal doomed to live for the rest of his life in a silent, lifeless place. But after all, that was why she was here—a warrior come to deliver him.
She resisted the strong desire to lay her hands on him in benediction. Instead, before she slipped away, she whispered, “It’s going to be all right now. This hell is over. You’re going home.”