Some were more aggressive than others. Tilikum, she said. Blackfish.
Of course killer whales aren’t whales in the sense of baleen whales, the kind of whales that cruise gently through the deep, slowly straining millions of krill and copepod through large maws full of white comb-like structures (she told us). The orcas were toothed whales, big dolphins really, though also apex predators, if we were familiar with the term. They were so highly intelligent that parts of their brain appeared a good deal more complex than our own—the part that processes emotion, she said, was so highly developed that some neurologists believe orcas’ emotional lives are more complex than those of humans.
We know so little about them, she said, even the scientists, but they have language, even different dialects. They have culture. There are three kinds of orcas in the wild, all with their different cultures.
“They are astonishing creatures,” she said, her voice trembling. “Some peoples hold them to be sacred.”
I think I wasn’t the only one to feel how much she cared, in the moment when she said that—how palpable her passion was—and how also, on this large, horse-faced older woman, passion like that looked almost pitiable.
Anyway, her favorite whale was a youngster who’d been bred and born in captivity, which is still fairly rare, she said, they die off more quickly than they can reproduce, the captive ones. His mother and father were popular with the crowds who visited the aquarium-amusement park where she worked (swiftly I shut down the mental link children, blocked an image of children laughing, splashed by the orca’s leap).
Big Linda was alone one morning at the pool—the pools they live in, she added, only have to be twice the length of an orca’s body. Main Linda cleared her throat, jerking Big Linda out of her sad reverie.
There was a silence, a pleasant tranquillity, said Big Linda. This was Florida in summer; there were palm trees overhead, the smell of heating pavement.
“I can’t say what it was like, exactly,” she went on, shaking her head and staring at the floor in front of her. The others also looked at the floor, as though listening to the shameful confessions of an addict. “I don’t know how to describe it.”
I saw Burke nodding slowly, pensive, also not lifting his eyes from the linoleum. I had no idea what Linda was getting at, couldn’t make sense of it in the least, and was gazing distractedly at the side table, thinking about eating a cookie—they had some that were an unnatural shade of pink, those long rectangular wafers stamped with a waffle pattern that seem like play food. Lena had play food—she had fruit and vegetables made of wood that you could slice and put back together with Velcro. She had berry pie slices made of plastic. No! Stop.
“First I thought I was making it up,” said Linda, “truth is I’d been real unhappy there lately, I don’t like how we keep the animals—you have to understand, we only stay, most of the trainers stay because we’re sorry for them, deeply sorry. We stay to do what we can for these creatures. For years I couldn’t leave because of that, I’m so attached to them, you know, the little guy especially. Not that little, of course, since he’s fourteen feet long.” She laughed nervously.
I got up, telling myself to block out the lingering image of Lena at play, and gingerly approached the snack table; I put one of the waffle cookies on the tip of my tongue. Like balsa wood with sugar, I thought, and sawdust between the layers—sawdust with sugar. Still I chewed it, studiously not letting my thoughts stray back to Lena with her toys.
“Point is I was stressed out. Still. I finally had to admit to myself that something was there. I mean not the clicks and whistles and chirps, the usual elements of calls that we occasionally hear, you know, the vocalizing . . . it wasn’t that.”
I stopped mechanically chewing the balsa wood/sawdust wafer and turned toward the circle, where others were also gazing at her, their faces unreadable to me. She meant she’d heard the killer whale, I thought, and had an abrupt urge to laugh.
Instead I swallowed the mouthful and sat down on my chair again, careful to make no noise. I wanted to be very polite. It was Big Linda, I thought, who’d always been so kind to us—to think of ridiculing her made me wince. I would be unfailingly polite, I would be more attentive than I had been before, and I would suppress the instinct to laugh. It’d be hysterical laughter anyway, I told myself: again I had signs of incipient hysteria, as I had after Ned heard the voice. Both euphoria and hysteria had risen in me as I jogged along our street in the dark. Now they threatened to rise in me again.