Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings Christopher Moore

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I Lick the Body Electric

The Maui sunset had set the sky on fire and everything in the bungalow had taken on the glowing pink tone of paradise – or hell, depending on where you were standing. Clay dismembered the bird and put the severed pieces on a platter to transport them to the grill.

"You'll need something to bring those in on," Clair said. Her dress was a purple hibiscus-flower print, and the orchid she wore in her hair looked like lavender dragonflies humping. She was dicing pickles into the macaroni salad.

"What's wrong with this?" Clay held up the plate with the raw chicken.

"You can't use the same plate. You'll get salmonella."

"Fine, fuck it," Clay said, tossing the plate into the yard. The chicken parts bounced nicely, breading themselves with a light coating of sand, ants, and dried grass. "When did chicken become like plutonium anyway, for Christ's sake? You can't let it touch you or it's certain fucking death. And eggs and hamburgers kill you unless you cook them to the consistency of limestone! And if you turn on your fucking cell phone, the plane is going to plunge out of the sky in a ball of flames? And kids can't take a dump anymore but they have to have a helmet and pads on make them look like the Road Warrior. Right? Right? What the fuck happened to the world? When did everything get so goddamn deadly? Huh? I've been going to sea for thirty damned years, and nothing's killed me. I've swum with everything that can bite, sting, or eat you, and I've done every stupid thing at depth that any human can – and I'm still alive. Fuck, Clair, I was unconscious for an hour underwater less than a week ago, and it didn't kill me. Now you're going to tell me that I'm going to get whacked by a fucking chicken leg? Well, just fuck it then!"

He didn't know where to go, so he came back in and slammed the screen door behind him, then opened it and slammed it again. "Goddamn it!" And he stood there, breathing hard. Not really looking at anything.

Clair put down her knife and pickle, then wiped her hands. As she came toward Clay she pulled a large bobby pin from the back of her hair, and her long, thick locks cascaded down her back. She took Clay's right hand and kissed each of his fingertips, licked his thumb, then took his index finger in her mouth and made a show of removing it slowly and with maximum moisture. Clay looked at the floor, shaking.

"Baby," she said as she placed the bobby pin firmly between Clay's wet thumb and index finger, "I need you to go over to that wall and take this bobby pin and insert it ever so firmly into that electrical outlet over there."

Clay looked up at her at last.

"Because," she continued, "I know that you aren't mad at me and that you're just grieving for your friends, but I think you need to be reminded that you aren't invulnerable and that you can hurt even more than you do now. And I think it would be better if you did it yourself, because otherwise I'll have to brain you with your own iron skillet."

"That would be wrong," Clay said.

"It is a cruel world, baby."

Clay took her in his arms and buried his face in her hair and just stood there in the doorway for a long time.

Amy had been missing for thirty-two hours. That morning a fisherman had found her kayak washing against some rocks on Molokai and had called the rental company in Maui. A life jacket was still strapped on the front of the boat, he said. The Coast Guard had stopped looking already.

"Now, let me go," Clair said. "I have to get that chicken out of the yard and rinse it off."

"I don't think we should eat that."

"Please. I'm going to cook it up for Kona. You're taking me out."

"I am?"

"Of course."

"After I stick this in the outlet, right?"

"You can grieve, Clay – that's as it should be – but you can't feel guilty for being alive."

"So, I don't have to stick this in the outlet?"

"You used foul language at me, baby. I don't see any way around it."

"Oh, well, that's true. You go get Kona's chicken out of the yard. I'll do this."

* * *

On the second morning after Amy was lost at sea, Clay walked to the seaside, a rocky beach between some condos north of Lahaina – too short for morning runners, too shallow for a bathing crowd. He stood on an outcropping of rocks with the waves crashing around him and tried to let pure hatred run out of his heart. Clay Demodocus was a guy who liked things, and among the things he had liked the most was the sea, but this morning he held nothing but disdain for his old friend. The sapphire blue was indifferent, the waves elitist. She'd kill you without even learning your name. "You bitch," Clay said, loud enough for the sea to hear. He spit into her face and walked back home.

That old trickster Maui had been sitting on a rock nearby watching, and he laughed at Clay's hubris. Maui admired a man with more balls than brains, even a haole. He cast a small blessing at the photographer – just a trinket for the laugh, a trifling little mango of magic – and then he headed off to the great banyan tree to fog the film of Japanese tourists.

* * *

Back in what was now only his office, Clay dug Amy's resume out of his files and made the call. He braced himself, trying to figure out how, exactly, he was going to tell these strangers that their daughter was missing and assumed to have drowned. He felt sad and alone, and his elbow hurt from the jolt of electricity he'd taken the night before. He didn't want to do this. He reached for the phone, then stopped and closed his eyes, as if he could make the whole thing go away, but on the back of his eyelids he saw the face of his mother as he had last seen her, looking up at him out of her barrel of brine, "Make the call, you pussy. If anyone knows how not to get bad news, it's you. Part of loyalty is following up, you sniveling coward. Don't be like your brothers."

Ah, sweet Mama, Clay thought. He dialed the phone – a number with a 716 area code, Tonawanda, New York. It rang three times, and the recorded operator came on, saying that the number he'd reached was not in service at this time. He checked it, then dialed the next number down, which also turned out not to be working. He called Tonawanda information for Amy's parents, and the operator told him there was no such listing. At a loss, he called Woods Hole Oceanographic Center, where Amy had gotten her master's. Clay knew one of her advisers, Marcus Loughten, an irascible Brit who had worked at Woods Hole for twenty years and was famous in the field for his work in underwater acoustics. Loughten answered on the third ring.

"Loughten," Loughten said.:

"Marcus, this is Clay Demodocus. We worked together on -"

"Yes, Clay, I bloody know who you are. Calling from Hawaii, are you?"

"Well, yes, I -"

"Probably, what, seventy-eight degrees with a breeze? It's seven below zero Fahrenheit here. I'm out installing bloody sound buoys in a monthlong blizzard to keep right whales from getting run over by supertankers."

"Right, the sound buoys. How are those working out?"

"They're not."

"No? Why not?"

"Well, right whales are stupid as shit, aren't they? It's not like a supertanker is quiet. If sound was going to deter them, then they'd be bloody well deterred by the engine noise, wouldn't they? They don't make the connection. Stupid shits."

"Oh, sorry to hear that. Uh, why keep doing it then?"

"We have funding."

"Right. Look, Marcus, I need some information on one of your students who came out here to work with us. Amy Earhart? Would have been with you guys until fall of last year."

"No, I don't know that name."

"Sure you do, five-five, thin, pale, dark hair with kind of unnatural blue highlights, smart as a whip."

"Sorry, Clay. That doesn't fit any of my students."

Clay took a deep breath and trudged on. Biologists were notorious for treating their grad students as subhuman, but Clay was surprised that Loughten didn't remember Amy. She was cute, and if Clay could judge from a night of drinking he'd done with Loughten at a marine mammal conference in France, the Brit was more than a bit of a horndog.

"Great ass, Marcus. You'd remember."

"I'm sure I would, but I don't."

Clay studied the resume. "What about Peter? Would he -"

"No, Clay, I know all of Peter's grad students as well. Did you call to confirm her references when you took her on?"

"Well, no."

"Good work, then. Abscond with your Nikons, did she?"

"No, she's missing at sea. I'm trying to contact her family."

"Sorry. Wish I could be of help. I'll check the records, just to be sure – in case I've had a ministroke that killed the part of the brain that remembers fine bottoms."

"Thanks."

"Good luck, Clay. My best to Quinn."

Clay cringed. It turned out he really wasn't up for bearing bad news. "Will do, Marcus. Good-bye." Clay hung up and resumed staring at the phone. Well, he thought, I knew absolutely nothing about this woman that I thought I knew. Libby Quinn had already called (sobbing) to say that they should have some kind of joint service at the sanctuary for Nate and Amy, and that Clay should speak. What was he going to say about Amy? Dearly beloved, I think we all knew Amy as scientist, a colleague, a friend, a woman who showed up out of nowhere with a completely manufactured history, but I think, because she saved my life, that I came to know her better than anyone here, and I can tell you unequivocally, she was a smart aleck with a cute butt.

Yeah, he'd need to work on that. Damn it, he missed them both.

* * *

Clay decided to kill the day by editing video: time-eating busywork that supplied at least an imaginary escape from the real world. The afternoon found him going through the rebreather footage he'd taken on the day the whale had conked him, for the first time going past the point where he was unconscious, just to see if the camera picked up anything usable. Clay let the video run: minutes of blue water, the camera tossing around at the end of the wrist lanyard, then Amy's leg as she comes down to stop his descent. He cranked the audio. Hiss of ambient noise, then the bubbles from Amy's regulator, the slow hiss of his own breathing through the rebreather. As Amy starts to swim to the surface, the camera catches his fins hanging limply against a field of blue, then Amy's fins kicking in and out of the frame. Both their breathing is steady on the audio track.

Clay looked at the time signature of the video. Fifteen minutes when the motion stops. Amy making her first decompression stop. On the audio he hears the chorus of distant singing humpbacks, a boat motor not too far off, and Amy's steady bubbles. Then the bubbles stop.

The camera settles against his thigh and drifts, the lens up, catches light from the surface, then Amy's hand holding on to his buoyancy vest, reading the data off his dive computer. Her regulator is out of her mouth. On the audio there's only his breathing. The camera swings away.

Ten minutes more pass. Clay listens for Amy's breathing to resume. The motion from her hooking into the rescue tank on the rebreather should move the camera, but there's just the same gentle drift. They move up. Clay guesses maybe to seventy-five feet. Amy is doing another decompression stop, doing it by the book, despite the emergency. Except he still can hear only one person breathing.

She pulls him to more shallow depth. The frame lightens up, and the camera swings around, the wide angle showing Clay's unconscious form and Amy kicking, the regulator out of her mouth, looking at the surface. She hasn't used the bail-out tank on Clay's rebreather, and she hasn't taken a breath for, as far as Clay can tell, forty minutes. This can't be right.

He listens, watching until the time signature shows sixty and the tape ends – the entire thing having been dubbed to the hard drive. He rewinds it on-screen, slowing down when the camera shows anything but blue, listening again.

"No fucking way."

Clay backed away from the monitor, watching as the video ran out again and froze on the image of Amy holding him steady at twenty or so feet down, no regulator in her mouth.

He ran out the door, calling, "Kona! Kona!"

The surfer came shuffling out of his bungalow in a cloud of smoke. "Just tracking down navy spies, boss."

"Where did you guys put the rebreather? The day they took me to the hospital?"

"She's in the storage shed."

Clay made a beeline for the bungalow they used to store dive and boat equipment. He waved Kona after him. "Come."

"What?"

"Did you guys refill the oxygen or the bail-out tanks?"

"We just rinsed it and put it in the case."

Clay pulled the big Pelican case off a stack of scuba tanks and popped the latches. The rebreather was snug in the foam padding. Clay wrenched it out onto the wooden floor and turned on the computer that was an integral part of it. He hit buttons on the display console and watched the gray liquid-crystal display cycle through the numbers. The last dive: Downtime had been seventy-five minutes, forty-three seconds. The oxygen cylinder was nearly full. The bail-out air supply was full. Full. It hadn't been touched. Somehow Amy had stayed underwater for an hour without an air supply.

Clay turned to the surfer. "Do you remember anything that Nate showed you about what he was working on? I need details – I know in general." Clay wasn't sure what he was looking for, but this had to mean something, and all he had to fall back on was Nate's research.

The surfer scratched the dreadless side of his head. "Something about the whales singing binary."

"Come show me." Clay stormed through the door and back to the office.

"What you looking for?"

"I don't know. Clues. Mysteries. Meaning."

"You gone lolo, you know?"

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