The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel (44 page)

Part of the sea. Part of Nature again. But had she ever really not been? And was all that immensity truly heartless? Maybe that was only her own error, her own blindness or conceit.

Her vision softened. She looked out across the beach to a light in a window. She knew that glowing square. It was the cottage she’d seen before. Now the shutters were thrown back and a welcoming flame glimmered and swayed. A kerosene light, like the one …

The one in her grandmother’s house, out on the dunes. She remembered now how her mother’s hand had enclosed her much smaller one. The sand had been gritty in her swimsuit. How she’d cried. She’d never thought of it since. But there the memory was, buried so long but still shining like dug-up gold.

Her heart beat, then beat again. Each time more weakly, as her blood congealed. As the world faded, she forced her eyes open for one last look.

She took the shape at first for a mirage, or a dream. A fragment of the sea that had separated from that sea to stand upright. Only when she’d closed her eyes, then opened them again, only when she saw it arching above her, blurry but there, present, real, and heard the voices calling down to her, did she believe it was the gray prow of ANS
Guerrico
, heading straight for her.

Epilogue

Los Angeles

The drama was done. Why then, she wondered, was she still here?

For the movie. Of course.

The press conference was at the Four Seasons. The lead actress had been joking with reporters that her six kids were bigger fans of her movies than she was. But this one, she predicted, would be different. She smoothed back long dark shining hair and curved those sensuous full lips and Sara could not help recalling how much Tehiyah had both scorned her and yearned to be her. And now the woman she’d envied most in the world would play her on the screen.

The director took the mike next. He leaned into it and his face fell into somber lines to convey
now we are in earnest
. “Seriously, this is an important film about a great woman and a cause she gave everything for. A wonderful actress gave her life to do something more important to her even than the cinema: defending the noblest creatures of the deep.
Eco Martyr
—the epic of the CPL’s attack on the whaling fleet, and her heroic death—will be the most meaningful film of the year. Angelina, anything else?”

“Absolutely. I’m honored to be playing Tehiyah Dorée, and only hope she’ll smile down on our efforts when the cameras start rolling.”

Sara stood next to them on the platform, but did not speak. They’d all insisted she too was a “hero.” Whatever that meant.

The Argentinian corvette that had picked her up had scoured the sea for other survivors. They’d found none, of course. But amid the floating life jackets and wreckage had bobbed Eddi’s camera, buoyant in its waterproof housing. Captain Giordano said they’d picked up Madsen’s distress calls, though Lars apparently hadn’t been able to hear
Guerrico
’s replies on
Anemone
’s little handheld. The ship had homed in on the signal, but then he’d stopped transmitting, and they’d had to start a search.

She alone had survived to tell the tale. More than that: She had a book contract. An offer to narrate Eddi Auer’s footage, as a PBS documentary. And a job as an adviser to this film, a “dramatization,” “based on a true story.”

More to the point, the Japanese had announced a voluntary halving of their quota for the next season, and would finally permit inspectors from the Whaling Commission aboard factory ships to certify the count.

It wasn’t exactly what Mick and Lars had died for—nor, she guessed, Tehiyah and Eddi and Hideyashi and Dru—but it was a step forward. She herself had lost three fingers and the feeling in her hands and feet, but in view of what had happened to nearly everyone else who’d sailed from Ushuaia on the doomed
Black Anemone
, she’d won the lottery.

At center stage, the director introduced Jules-Louis Vergeigne. Dorée’s former lover spoke for fifteen minutes about the CPL as bright-faced young volunteers passed out even brighter buttons with the League’s logo and the legend
Earth to Japan: Whale Meat
=
Murder
. “We will never rest until we win,” he ended. “As a token of that resolve, we have renamed the ship just chartered for next season’s voyage. It will be christened …
Tehiyah Dorée
.”

A burst of applause, in which everyone on the platform joined. When it died away Vergeigne leaned to the mike again. “And now, some brief remarks by Dr. Sara Pollard, the incredibly brave sole survivor of that fatal encounter with the whaling fleet that ended in Tehiyah’s tragic death and the sinking of the antiwhaling cruiser
Black Anemone
.”

She flinched. That wasn’t what had happened, exactly. But she’d seen the advance script, and this wouldn’t be the only change in the story. It’s a movie, they kept saying. Roll with it. Take the money and run.

And that’s exactly what she was doing, because they’d been perfectly clear: it would be made with or without her. Still, she didn’t have to like it. And maybe someday, somehow, she’d find a way to tell the true story. The
whole
story.

The room quieted as she stepped forward. A buzz swept the audience as they noted the missing fingers, her clumsiness in grasping the mike. “I am so grateful to Angelina and Jules-Louis for honoring my good friend in this powerful way,” she began. “We became so very close, all of us aboard
Anemone.
There was never any disagreement about our—our mission. Or the level of personal commitment it entailed from each of us. I will be proud to help make this film as authentic and exciting a re-creation of our voyage as I know Sebastian and John and everyone else wants it to be.” She glanced at the director, who smiled and gestured;
Go on.

She took a deep breath, and plunged ahead.

“I know you’re here because of her and not me. And even Tehiyah wasn’t really as big a star as she would’ve been, I think, if she’d lived. But I hope the film will convey something I came to realize while we were out there, freezing, tired, hurting, sick, afraid.

“All life is connected. In defending the great whales, we defend ourselves. In defending the earth, we defend our children’s children. That’s why this film will be so important. Those who died in the Antarctic wastes were the real heroes. I only hope … that we can do them justice.”

She felt like throwing up, but they’d made her practice these “spontaneous remarks” over and over. There, she’d said them. She thrust the mike into someone’s hands, she did not see just who, and pushed through to the stairs. A murmur rose, then trailed off. Heads swung away from Sara as the beautiful star took the mike again. Her honeyed words rose and laughter followed, cut off by the doors as they swung closed.

The young man who’d trailed her out joined her as she waited for the elevator. Her handler. She couldn’t remember his name. “You’re not staying for the party? Dr. Pollard?”

“What? Oh, no—no, I can’t.”

“Another commitment? You’re not supposed to give any interviews, you know, until after—”

“They’ll do better without me.” She grinned as the door slid open. “The skeleton at the feast.”

He made as if to come with her, but she halted him with a raised hand. “I’m kidding. Okay? I’ll be back. I promise. Just need some air.”

He looked doubtful, but stopped as the doors closed behind her.

*   *   *

Outside she stood for a long time bathed in the LA summer heat and car exhaust and the exhalation of air conditioners. Sweat prickled her skin. She plucked her shirt away, panting in sudden terror.

Around her human beings seethed like krill sensing a warming sea. They thronged the sidewalks and surged across the street. So many. So different. Their expressions worried, intent. Yet here and there … that lone man across the street … that woman at the wheel of the small car. Here and there, in passing visages, she saw the outcast, the beast. The rogue.

She no longer knew what that word meant. Only, perhaps, one who went solitary, perhaps even hated, but whose course was set by the compass of his own will. Those individuals wrote history.

But there was a larger stage, even, than human history.

Alone among the species of earth, one had gone rogue. Its hand, like Ishmael’s, was raised against all others.

Lifting her head to soaring towers rearing into a darkening sky, she shuddered as if harrowed by an icy wind. Solitary, self-willed, self-obsessed, contemptuous of the past and careless of the future, Man himself was the rogue. But only for a time.

Only for a time.

Acknowledgments

Ex nihilo nihil fit.
First of all thanks to the master, Herman Melville, in whose deep-graven wake—along with that of Joseph Conrad—all writers of the sea must sail. For this book I’m also indebted to J. C. Alonso, Robert P. Arthur, David Baxter, Ina Birch, Julia Blythe, Barbara Brown, Bonnie Culver, Lourdes Figueroa, Herb Gilliland, Adam Goldberger, Terra Layton, Terta Gillian Lewis, Kate Longley, Eric LoPresti, Pamela McGrady, Kate Ottaviano, Charle Ricci, Kathryn Parise, Naia Poyer, Matt Shear, Kenneth J. Silver, Bob White, Tom and Jean Wescott, Frances Anagnost Williams, and Georgina Winton, along with the following institutions: the Nantucket Atheneum, the Maria Mitchell Natural Science Museum, the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies, the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, the Nantucket Whaling Museum, the New Bedford Whaling Museum and Research Library, the Wilkes University Creative Writing Program, the Eastern Shore Public Library, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Mt. San Angelo.

Few novels stem from pure imagination. My discussions of humpback songs were informed by Mercado, Herman, and Pack in
Aquatic Mammals
, 2003. The description of sperm codas is from the papers of Ricardo Antunes, Luke Rendell, Hal Whitehead, Shane Gero, and Tyler Schulz. Descriptions of chimp behavior and primate research were largely from Muller and Mitani, 2005, and John Cohen’s “Thinking Like a Chimpanzee” in the September 2010 issue of
Smithsonian
. The discussion of Von Economo neurons was written after perusing Ingrei Chen’s “The Social Brain” in the June 2009 issue of the same magazine. Philip Hoare’s magical
The Whale
has great descriptions of sperm whales in close-up, as does, of course, Melville. The tactics employed by the fictional CPL and their Japanese adversaries were informed by Peter Heller’s
Whale Warriors
and the
Whale Wars
television series, plus U.S. Navy and IMO antiboarding protocols and my own experiences in the Arctic and elsewhere both in large craft and under sail. John Nelson’s
A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine
was useful for Hy Kimura’s background. Other helpful works were Shapiro and Bjelke’s
Time on Ice
, the Lonely Planet
Guide to Antarctica
, and Dan Beachy-Quick’s poetic and haunting
A Whaler’s Dictionary
, which I had the great pleasure of hearing him read from at the 2011 AWP conference in New York.

Let’s emphasize that these were consulted for the purposes of
fiction.
I am
not
saying that anything in these references leads to the conclusions my characters reach or voice.

The translation of Soseki’s haiku is widely quoted, but I have been unable to find any attribution for insertion of the original translator’s name.

My most grateful thanks to George Witte, long-time editor and friend, with whom I’ve been discussing a reprise of the Mocha Dick legend for some years; to J. Michael Lennon, Wilkes University colleague, who also shared his thoughts on how to tell an old tale anew; and to Lenore Hart, anchor on lee shores, and my guiding star when skies are clear.

As always, all errors and deficiencies are my own.

Previous Books by David Poyer

T
ALES
OF
THE
M
ODERN
N
AVY

The Towers

The Crisis

The Weapon

Korea Strait

The Threat

The Command

Black Storm

China Sea

Tomahawk

The Passage

The Circle

The Gulf

The Med

T
ILLER
G
ALLOWAY

Down to a Sunless Sea

Louisiana Blue

Bahamas Blue

Hatteras Blue

T
HE
C
IVIL
W
AR
AT
S
EA

That Anvil of Our Souls

A Country of Our Own

Fire on the Waters

H
EMLOCK
C
OUNTY

Thunder on the Mountain

As the Wolf Loves Winter

Winter in the Heart

The Dead of Winter

O
THER
B
OOKS

Happier Than This Day and Time

Ghosting

The Only Thing to Fear

Stepfather Bank

The Return of Philo T. McGiffin

Star Seed

The Shiloh Project

White Continent

About the Author