Among Whistling Blue Sands

A little girl is reading the funnies somewhere beside me.

"Daddy, when’s it coming?" I hear her say. But it’s not only that. Her high-pitched sighs and ever-changing seating positions reveal a fidgetiness native to childhood. The café feels crowded for a weekday morning. A chorus of mostly female voices texture the atmosphere, mixed with the smell of eggs, coffee and burnt toast. The girl squeals and then struggled to flip the large newspaper page with tiny hands the size of silver dollars. Of course the luxury of turning and looking at her is out of the question. Uncouth, my mother used to say of such flagrant behavior. From her voice, though, I know the child’s face. A mature face for an eight or nine year-old, the thick young voice came from the back of the throat indicating a wide mouth and strong vocal chords. She might be a singer when she grows up. Or an auctioneer.

I feel her eyes on me now. Sometime about her age I remember being presented a silver dolphin pendant necklace from my paternal grandfather. He had talked and smiled out of the side of his mouth. Against his grand, cigar-smoking stature, my head barely reached his hip. I loved that necklace. Naturally, I lost it on the bus coming home from school one day.

I’ve just dropped a forkful of eggs on my lap, aiming for my mouth of course. I talk to myself sometimes and don’t realize it; I know people see this. They don’t see me when I’m well dressed on the days I put on makeup, or when I look intelligent with my prop glasses. Sometimes I sit at the wrong bench waiting for the bus. My street has them spaced out in even intervals, and on bad days I lose count. Putting on my pineapple lip balm and then wiping my finger on the underside of my chair, these are the things people see. The props, I imagined, garnered only half the attention. My movements cut uneven right angles into the sea of blackness around me. They slice through the air in tentative chops, fork to mouth, brush to hair, hoping, aiming for the proper destination. I dropped another forkful on my lap, this time potatoes. Damn it!

"Nice place," Jason had said once while I heard him set my stack of mail on the fireplace mantle. Magazines and some heavy book. I unlocked the door for him every day at 4:00. At first it felt good having him there in my studio apartment, though I knew he’d be wondering about the bed. A solid cherry, king-sized number from Ethan Allen, it must’ve looked like a throne against all the menagerie of other Wal-Mart assembly-required furniture. He became my lover completely by accident. Of course, in my condition, making the first move seemed impossible. I hadn’t been this way long enough to develop such suave skills.

"Nellie," he had said from another room. I turned from the kitchen sink to face his voice. Jason was six feet tall or thereabouts, I could tell by the way he closed up the distance between us in three giant steps. And as I sensed his approach, I felt no fear -- not in my mind or in my body. This, I knew, meant something. This was a first.

For a man so strong and large, to me he was the gentlest of all lovers. Not shy by nature, I felt tentative around him at first, afraid to touch him, afraid of what might happen. I fell in love with his Roman nose and hairy chest. Without obvious advantages, my insight from the other senses deepened – and not eventually but immediately. Things like the smell of his aftershave drove me beyond composure. He kept an air of playfulness around him that found its way into my bed. Even when I drew him to me, he teased me by pulling away leaving me panting and sweaty.

I think I have a good body although I don’t see it the way other people do. I’ve been kind to it over the years, almost forty now, in compensation for what circumstances captured from me. Jason tells me I’m beautiful when I’m sleeping, when the sun casts a glow then a shadow over parts of my face. He delivers the mail to my part of the city. For most people, envelopes and small boxes are stuffed through holes in doors or stacked in freestanding metal boxes outside. My mail is hand-delivered. We slept together, Jason and me, exactly one month after we first met. And I had never been that sort, not before or after it all happened. In thirty-nine years I’d had only three lovers. My eyes surreptitiously flirted with him in the beginning; I couldn’t make them stop. They blinked more often than necessary, and opened up wide to reveal what empty, cavernous tombs they were. He caught on quick to my intentions, lonely enough to be versed in female body language. Like a cat I smelled his nervous apprehension on my furniture and clothes every time he left the apartment. He didn’t know, at first, and I didn’t let on. In the past seven years I’d learned some things. Standard human responses. Gestures. Facial expressions. Jason was as steady as time, the freak antithesis of my normal stream of broken stereotype between-jobs losers. A month ago he even brought over a toothbrush and some shaving cream to keep in my bathroom. Tomorrow would have been six months since our first date. So much for ceremony.

My mother disagreed with everything.

"You need a dog."

"Dogs are for the rich," I told her. She didn’t understand. But how could she? She said once that I’d never have a normal relationship with a man because of my preoccupation with animals.

"You’re like one of those queer old ladies," she explained as if she wasn’t one herself, "stuck living alone in a big house with dead mice in the basement and thirteen cats. They take care of all those animals but can’t have normal conversations with other humans." Pot calling the kettle black. Except the cats, in my case, were dolphins.

The plans are set. Schedules synchronized, itineraries confirmed. The moving truck should arrive at seven to transport my life in San Diego to a building across the street from the Boston Aquarium. I was scared shitless. After all, I have no family East of the Mississippi, let alone New England. And sometimes I still push on doors that say pull. Before, I was scared. Now I’m terrified.

With my mother, the debate never ends. Even Jason asked me once if I thought I had it easier than people who were born this way. I lived for thirty-two years in a world of vision where seeing is everything. Yet this fact never managed to illuminate paths through the dark forest I traveled in now. Sure, people say flower and my mind paints a picture based on stored memory archives. But it doesn’t put a flower where there wasn’t one before. In those thirty-two years, I earned one degree in Marine Science and another in Aquatic Mammal Behavior. To some, I had accomplished a lot. And to others, I had barely lived.

But not until the accident did I become able to interpret the language of dolphins.

In my community I’m known as the Jane Goodall of marine wildlife. Kela is a ten year old female Pacific Bottle-nosed dolphin that I’ve been studying for eight years. Also in Kela’s community are Jean-Paul, Winchester, Sable, Daisy and Malushe - all Pacific Bottle-nosed indigenous to the Pacific coast. Though Kela remains my favorite, I have learned to keep this fact a secret from the others. Dolphins are unbelievably hip to nonverbal communication. They can tell by my voice or the way I stand what mood I’m in and they respond accordingly. When I feel vulnerable or exposed, they move slower and hover around me being the good listeners nature intended them to be. As a non- Ph.D. quasi-scientist, I published three scholarly papers on dolphin dialogue. And the scientific community treated me like a circus freak. "Girl Goes Blind, Talks to Fish." Didn’t matter that they’re mammals. Nobody understood.

"Change your focus, Nellie," my editor suggested one day during lunch. "You need to make your papers geared more to the scientific community rather than the psychic hotline." The hell with her.

As a scholar I’ve been trained to understand and label the sounds, squeaks and clicks dolphins make underwater. But I’ve acquired a peculiar ability that transcends just comprehension through translation. I actually hear what they’re communicating to each other. I can speak their language.

Boston was not at all what I expected. The Aquarium’s mammoth size mocked my previous conception of big. My voice echoed in the bathroom stalls. I’ll never find my way around here, I thought the first day. And the actual city felt strange. I could tell it was a vertical place by traffic sounds reflected off buildings. The sky seemed farther away than in San Diego. The streets were narrower; I could get across them in ten steps as opposed to twenty or thirty back home.

"Get a guide dog," my mother kept saying. She hated me being away from her in a strange city. "Who will read your letters to you, and open your mail and help you pay bills?" This nagging went on for the first month. But through an unexpected turn of events, Kela came with me. The original invitation went as follows:

I could use an assistant to help me work with our group of dolphins here. It will be like an exchange. Someone from our fish and wildlife unit will arrive at Marine World end of the month. Please come as soon as possible, everything’s all set up. We’ll pay you three thousand dollars a month.

Signed by someone initialed M.F. Three thousand dollars a month. The magic words. In three months I could save up enough to pay for the operation which some say would restore the sight to my one eye. The other eye’s too far gone but who needs two anyway.

They transported her in an aircraft water tank, and Kela arrived at the aquarium without a blemish. Marine World relocated me to this vast facility, paid the movers, paid my first month’s rent in a third floor apartment upstairs from a bar. Everything my hands touched vibrated. I moved the first day of spring, and it rained continuously the first two weeks. The walks I took familiarized me with this strange new territory. After supper one night, I found my way around Faneil Hall and Quincy Market, just a few blocks from the aquarium. Outside, the moist air warmed my body as it tunneled in through my nostrils. Paul Revere’s horse galloped over these streets, I thought while repeatedly yanking my cane from the chasmal grooves between the cobblestones. An old man at the bus stop told me about a famous pizza place on the wharf. Everywhere I went seemed blanketed by a thousand voices. Despite its size, though, people were friendly. "Here, let me help you," they all said under some collective unconscious, as if they’d been expecting me.

"Your new boss will be Maria. She’s in charge of the dolphins," a perky young woman named Brenda told me over the phone. In charge, I thought. This ought to be interesting.

"You must be Nellie Noll," she said in the cafeteria line one day like I wore a sign on my head. I nodded, gave a polite smile and turned toward the voice. "I’m Maria Fresno," she said.

She sounded strong. Her accent made me think of brown lipstick and coffee. I pictured her tall and stocky with big, watery eyes and graying hair cut blunt just above her shoulders. She would look the most natural in loose clothes and clunky shoes. She spoke loud and swore when she got angry. In my mind, anyway. She led us to a table far away from the food line by the windows.

"So I understand they talk to you," she said not wasting any time.

"No, of course not. I don’t think it would be possible. But I do understand them when they talk to each other."

She laughed.

"You don’t believe me," I said.

"You’re saying you speak the language of dolphins." She said it as a statement rather than a question, her voice unbelieving.

"I’ve heard of the aquarium’s luminescent purple lighting in the halls and doorways of each room. When you stand under it, the purple light makes the whites of your clothing fluorescent. I can’t see it, but I feel a strange vibration when it’s on my skin." Enough to shut her up for the moment. She would tire of the blind, crazy lady routine soon though. Most people did.

After our first encounter, I learned to quietly endure Maria’s crude remarks and sarcasm surrounding my unusual ability. She hooked me up with headphones that had a tiny microphone attached to the interior wall of the outside pool. I sat under an awning connected to my new community of dolphins via an umbilical-like thin black chord.

For three days Kela didn’t utter a sound. She was, like me, the stranger in the group. The only Pacific Bottle-nosed dolphin in the aquarium, she struggled to fit in with the established clique of rival Atlantics. Sadly, too, I identified with her feelings of alienation. Every morning I tried to contact the local chapter for The Federation for the Blind. And the infuriating message I received came as unwelcome as a rash. "You have reached the -------" and then it cut off. But all of my primary needs were being met. I could find my way to the small corner grocery store on Atlantic Avenue four bus stops from the aquarium. And the pizza place and a second hand clothing store were across the street. These amenities I found within a ten minute walk from my apartment building. But there was a hole in my life that each day became more difficult to ignore.

My five foot two inch body seemed to encompass but a spec on my king-sized bed. I missed the smell of Jason’s toothpaste on his pillow, and the warm spot he left on my mattress when he got up to use the john. The first week the phone rang only once. My mother called to relay information she’d obtained on a guide dog company that came to your home to train you with the dog. No room for excuses now, she said. I told her I had enough trouble keeping myself warm and fed. So, I spent every waking hour with Kela, observing her estranged behavior among her new group of friends.

Some of the other dolphins were named for months of the year. I heard Maria’s thick, Gestapo-like voice commanding them to the edge of the pool for feedings. "January, June, April, come!"

Absurd, I thought.

"Have you read the article about that group of scientists in Hawaii who were trying to teach dolphins to speak Polynesian?" Maria asked me one morning while I was connected to the headphones. "What was that?" I said pretending I hadn’t heard her. "I’ll be gone the rest of the week," she mumbled before leaving.

Why is she so threatened by me, I asked myself day after day. Maria invited me to this facility to work alongside her in compensation for an astronomical salary. Every morning she brings me a cup of coffee from the kitchen with milk and sugar, just the way I like it. Yet, she’s found every conceivable way to reject me.

Enough is enough, I thought, and the next day I brought in the expensive laptop computer I purchased from the settlement. Time to do some transcribing. Storing up an extra four hours sleep and a knapsack of granola bars, I anchored myself to the table and chair by the edge of the pool. For twenty-four hours I listened and typed, concentrating on the empty silence where I didn’t hear Kela’s voice, until I’d done over twenty pages of dolphin transcription. From my first encounter when I was six, I felt at home with these creatures. They gave me something human beings could not, something beyond description. The minute I unhooked from the headphones and turned the computer off, I heard Kela make a sound. Finally, I thought, half smiling-half cursing her. I heard her soar so high out of the water I thought she might jump on me.

"What?" I said with a chill in my spine. "What’s the matter? Oh, you want to talk to me now after you’ve made me so lonely waiting for you?" I teased. She stopped moving the minute she heard my voice.

On Friday evening when I finished, the public part of the aquarium had closed so it was easy finding my way to the administrative office in the basement. "You’ll find the elevator down a ramp that veers left from the penguins and then makes a sharp right turn," Maria told me the first day. Tonight I didn’t hear the familiar buzz of the fluorescent lights above my head; everything dark, everyone gone. I flipped the switch on the back of Maria’s computer and waited until it booted up before I popped my disk into the floppy drive. Before the accident, I worked as a computer programmer for a small San Diego electronics firm. Only part-time, but it paid my bills during school. After my accident, I panicked at the thought of getting on the computer again. How will I write, I asked myself. When I tried it, though, it became obvious that I remembered the sounds the computer made while performing its many tasks. While the pages of my transcription started printing, I moved with my cane around the basement office and got acquainted with the layout. Not a perfect square, small furniture set in the corners of the room, things like corner tables and plant stands. Unusual for an office, I thought, with no towering file cabinets or storage closets. I accidentally ran into two tall plants. One ficus, one rubber tree with enormous, thick leaves. My cane kept getting caught on the edge of a large area rug in the center of the room. After all twenty pages of the transcription printed out, I stapled them and then set the stack on Maria’s chair. Might as well have set down a hand grenade.

Still buried in sleep, the phone woke me up at three a.m. the next morning.

"Sorry it’s such short notice, but I thought you might want to join us tomorrow for the whale watch. They launch from Central Wharf and this time of year is a great opportunity to sight dolphins."

This confused me, but I kept listening.

"We thought..."

"We?" I interrupted. Maria hated that.

She paused to acknowledge my indignance. "I thought you could interpret for us what the dolphins were saying."

I could see her grotesque, smirking face, the rolling of her eyes, her coarse, wiry hair sticking out at forty-five degree angles. Will you be charging admission, I considered asking. "Alright," I said. I had my reasons.

The best revenge came from Jason. When he said he was coming, I sent him cab money from Logan to my apartment building. He told me Maria tried to hang up when he answered the phone in my apartment the previous night. I could hear her thoughts. Blind people don’t have relationships and certainly not sex. The night he arrived gave me my first good night sleep in two months. I invited him to go on the whale watch. I knew this would not go unnoticed to the other scientists. Because of the accident, I’d been nervous about the boat for days. Even though I didn’t know about the whale watch until recently, my body seemed to have been preparing me for something -- tight stomach, headaches, the runs. My reaction, though, I failed to anticipate.

I breathed in the musky, salty water, heard the gulls, my fingers grazed the edge of a rope on the dock and, in that instant, my stomach caved. Jason caught me from behind. Seven years and no progress. From hanging over the rail, the sun burned my face and neck, wind chafed my skin raw. In my senior year at USC, we rented a sailboat, four of us, for an underwater photography project. The School of Marine Science called them field excursions. We all had to pass a boatworthiness test. "Just a safety precaution," our professor had said. The last thing I remember is loading film into a camera. My body seemed to fling itself over the edge of the sailboat. I didn’t realize until later that the boom hit me from behind, causing my hips and feet to soar over my top-half. My skull crashed into the starboard fiberglass hull and I knew in a second what I’d lost.

Like he had been there when it happened, Jason realized my current predicament. "You’re okay," he whispered stroking my hair, my sunburned neck. He wiped some inadvertent tears from my cheekbones. "That was a long time ago, Nell. I’ll take care of you now." I tried to believe him.

"What on earth is that for?" Maria asked when I withdrew the laptop computer from my briefcase.

"For transcribing, what else? Isn’t that why you asked me here?"

Her acrimonious stare spilled down on me from her towering presence, translated to me by her gritty tone. "I wanted you to, you know, do it out loud."

"Sorry," I said trying hard to hide the smile forming on my lips. "You’ll have to wait." I knew she wouldn’t, though. I sat with my back to the edge of the boat and for a while heard nothing but waves and seagulls. The sun seemed too hot for early November. In my bag, I brought a windbreaker, a cotton v-neck sweater and a liter of water -- my consciousness still rooted in a desert climate. I knew the trees surrounding the waterfront would be a blaze of orange red and yellow leaves. For a week I’d detected the distinctive scent of leaf mold from the ground when I walked.

"There, that," Maria said jumping to her feet. "What was that?"

"One syllable doesn’t mean anything, Maria," I answered with as much condescent as my lips would allow. "It’s out of context, but it sounded like a temperature designation. Cold or hot or something."

"Maybe it detected heat from the boat’s engine," Jason suggested. He meant well. I turned toward him fondly, grateful for the strength our allied presence displayed among this group of academic oddballs. Don’t get involved in this, I told him with my mind, though, nodding at his comment. Maria stayed quiet for a long time, yet I could tell she was intrigued by the clicking of my keys. Not a single sound came from the water below us. So what could I be writing?

Jason’s visit confirmed to me the naggings of my subconscious over the past several months.

"You’re not happy here," he said.

"Why do you say that?"

"You went grocery shopping and took three hours. Back home, you have your sister, your mother, the chapter, not to mention me to take care of you. You have a network there and all that’s keeping you here is Kela. Do you even see her very much?"

I endured this feckless banter for two weeks. Suddenly, the time came to make a decision.

The whale watch with Maria and her graduate student boot-lickers did have its merits. Not only did I record their utterances by transcribing them onto the laptop, but I brought a hand-held tape recorder that told me much more than my ears had. My fingers translated only about one in every ten dolphin sounds. But later on in my own living room, I reviewed the sounds on the tape and discovered even more words than the first time around. Dangerhot-mother-whistle-home-light-safe-blue-sand. I couldn’t fathom how these fragmented, inexplicable words escaped my sensitive ears the first time around. "Blue sand," I repeated to myself and then made the connection from my experiences scuba diving. Beneath the water’s surface, the sand and everything around is blueblueblue. I could barely breathe thinking about it.

The hours rolled by like a quiet parade while I typed and scribbled my ideas. This was the voice I remembered. Kela’s voice.

Dull, grainy silt surrounds the separation between light and darkness, morning and night. We slide through caves and coral, seaweed, shipwrecks and corpses -- chance victims of the cruelest food chain, exploring through play. The predators of our species, great whites and families of killer whales, feed on the weakest links, the lingering, socially conscious delphinidae that are, in fact, more like fish than mammals. We breathe air, we give birth, we are warm-blooded creatures that live as a collective. When we are threatened by either man or nature, we slide down and disappear in the ocean of blue around us, listening to the squeaky whistling sound the sand makes when the tide comes back in. Translating to human phrases from the clicks and calls of the dolphin seemed to me like watching a braille sunset.

Two days after Jason returned to San Diego, I received an overnight package from him. The nine by twelve envelope felt like it contained nothing but air. Brenda, the receptionist at the front desk, opened the package for me.

"Very intriguing," she mumbled pulling apart the sticky sides, and then her breathing stopped. "Nel-lie," she said opening up what sounded like a small metal-hinged box. Oh my God, I thought. Not that. Neither one of us spoke for what seemed like an hour.

"Give me your hand," she demanded. She raised my fourth finger and plunged the heavy ring onto it. How could this be, I wondered. It fit perfect and I could find no explanation for this. Then it occurred to me. "Mother!" I said aloud shaking my head.

"This is from your mother?" Brenda asked in her gum-chewing voice, worthy of her job title. But I couldn’t answer her, I couldn’t speak, nothing came out except a wide, stupid grin. The dark lining to this bright diamond cloud quickly revealed itself, though. By moving back to San Diego to live with Jason, Kela would remain here at the aquarium. None of it seemed fair. I risked Kela’s life to bring her across the country, a risk not only in physical parameters but in social ones, too. The likelihood of her making friends with an established pod of Atlantic bottle-nosed dolphins went beyond a longshot. She adapted fine, though, after a brief adjustment. And not a moment before she did, I got invited to attend the rest of my life just as I’d dreamt it a thousand times. Making her travel back three thousand miles would be too much for her, they told me. The fact that she’d been born in captivity meant regular meals, no predatory attacks and a general higher life expectancy but less overall resilience to change. I understood but rebelled against this irony of fate. Like cutting off someone’s arm and they grow an extra finger on the other hand. My mother’s words about the thirteen cats lady came flooding back to me. When I spoke to her on the phone, I received her usual litany of regrets, disappointment and whining. In her argument for me to return to San Diego, she added, "... besides, they’re only dolphins."

Her reaction to Jason’s marriage proposal didn’t surprise me, either. My mother and I share a common disability, though she’s blind in a different way. I understand now that she comes from a generation and school of thought that believes the handicapped are damaged goods and no one would want them in any way resembling desire. In a way, I felt proud to be the one to break that pathetic chain, though I knew my mother would change her thinking the day hell froze.

I cried the whole bus ride back, or at least to the middle of the country. How could you do this, I kept asking myself over and over, since no answer seemed to respond to my thoughts. How did Jason ever win over Kela? As the 92102 mail carrier, he doesn’t make a lot of money, doesn’t even iron his clothes. But he can cook, knows how to make a real cup of coffee and doesn’t have a single hair on his bathroom floor. These were the criteria by which I measured a man’s worth. But besides these rare trivialities, I couldn’t ignore how his presence made me feel. With his arms around me, I could see past walls and mountains beyond the limits of the city with a laser-like, superman clarity that surpassed all my previous experiences with sight. Kela let me hug her cold, slippery body sometimes and responded to my voice like it came from heaven. But even during our long friendship, I still slept alone every night.

At one of the Greyhound stops in Lincoln, Nebraska, I allowed myself what I called an ONT -- occasional nutritional transgression: coconut cream pie. It was one of those highway stops that has fast food, frozen yogurt and a gift shop. My legs were shaky and tired; I felt the after-supper darkness shoving its arms around me. Real darkness. After being fed and relieved of nature’s calling, I felt my way to the gift shop. No one said hello or can I help you. Are they closed? Are all the lights out and everyone staring at me? Am I about to crash into a wall of canned corn? Then, out of nowhere, an older woman’s voice sounded.

"Can I help you, Miss?" I felt her smile at me.

"Would you by chance have any dolphin necklaces?" I asked her, secretly crossing my fingers behind my back.

"Right over here," she said walking around the console to meet me. "There’s a silver one and a gold one, but with the same design. Well, not real gold and silver, of course," she clarified.

I thought of Kela at that moment, and felt vaguely safe inside this hub of heartland strangers. After she clasped the long chain around my neck, the woman put a hand on my shoulder and, quite by surprise, I felt tears flood my eyes.

"I had one of these a long time ago," I explained.

Kela’s muscular, silvery body would be swimming at this moment, bobbing out of salty water, perhaps admiring the moon’s quiet reflection on the ocean’s surface, then vanishing among the whistling blue sands.