Patricia Engel - The Veins of the Ocean

“I will miss you too,” I say. “But I will understand it.”

“So what do we do then?”

I want to say this will end , the same way that everything in life does, and we will both begin again the way we’ve both done before in order to bring ourselves to this very night.

Instead, all I say is, “I don’t know. Tonight is tonight. Tomorrow is tomorrow.”

The new dolphin arrives the next day. They close the dolphinarium because I guess they want to keep the truth of how animals come to the facility a mystery to the public. And you’d never know it if you were driving along the Overseas Highway, that next to you, in that big white truck that looks like it should be moving furniture or fruit from Central America, there is a dolphin lying on a stretcher, its fins poking through holes cut through the canvas, with water being poured over its back by its human handlers, having just been flown from Biloxi to the Key West airport.

They keep us lower staff on the sidelines, far from the commotion of the dolphin being carried in, the trainers anxious and excited, the vets and techs leaning over their clipboards, comparing notes. Nesto and I find a spot in the shade below the stilted hut that looks over all the pens.

We didn’t talk much this morning at the cottage. Normally he wakes up full of energy, but today he moved about heavily, and instead of showering like he usually does, he just dipped his face under the bathroom faucet and put on his clothes from the day before.

He had to come in early again for the final once-over of the fencing. In the case of the other dolphins, Mo once told me, even the time activists came in at night and cut out a part of the fence, the dolphins hardly budged, unable to understand they could swim through the gap in the fence and be in open water. But the new dolphin isn’t so far removed from her wild days so they aren’t going to chance her ability to free herself.

When the dolphin handlers get to the pen, Mo asks Nesto to come help them. He’s not even in his work wetsuit but ends up in the water in his jeans, helping steer the stretcher to the center of the pen until it’s announced they can lower it and help the dolphin swim out. It takes a bit for her to move. She seems reluctant, with all those people watching, holding their breath like she’s a child about to take her first steps. But then she squirms enough to be out of their circle and as the handlers retreat to the edge of the pen, they watch the new girl slowly take inventory of her new surroundings and everyone starts clapping and whistling, as if they’ve all done something amazing together.

Later, when I’m sent to help out the interns in the fish house, separating the mangled mackerel from the pretty-looking complete ones that are used for shows, fattening them up by injecting them with water, Mo comes in to get a fresh bucket for the new dolphin and I ask how she’s doing.

“Good,” he says, sliding his hand onto my back. “We’re going to change her name though. We already had a Roxi here who passed away in ninety-four. We want something new for this girl. Any ideas?”

I shrug. “It doesn’t really matter what you call her. I mean, the names are for us, not for her.”

Then I let slip out something that Jojo told me: mother dolphins imprint a name on a baby dolphin with a language of sounds and the baby can recognize it with its sonar from miles away.

Mo and the interns watch me, surprised.

“Well, she needs a name we can pronounce,” he says, now, clutching my shoulder. “We’re her parents now.”

For days they keep the new dolphin’s pen cordoned off from the rest of the walkway so visitors can’t check her out, but sometimes I wander in, lower myself onto the dock, and watch Rachel or one of the other trainers in the water with her, rubbing her side when she lets them, and trying to get her attention when she swims to the edge of the pen facing the gulf. They’re still excited about her, even if a little worried that she’s not as sweet as promised, as eager to engage. In fact, she doesn’t seem interested in them at all.

When they leave her alone, I stay behind. The dolphin never leaves the fence, only letting herself drift along its periphery, and I’m not sure at first, but then it becomes clear to me that she’s pushing her head against the wiring, softly, and then with more force, as if trying to get out.

Years ago, when I was sitting across from Carlito in the visitors’ room at the prison, he told me about the orca at the aquarium in Miami, that, so miserable in his tiny pool, so far from his northern Pacific home and family pod, took to bashing his head against the walls of his tank so hard he sometimes cracked the glass, and eventually caused the brain hemorrhage that killed him. I was too young to remember when it happened, but it was local lore, like our family’s crimes.

That day during our visit, Carlito said he understood why the whale did that to himself. He told me he, too, had the urge at times to throw his own head against the walls of his prison cell, against the bulletproof glass window on the steel door that contained him, and if all the pain in his heart could be translated to physical strength, he knew he would have been able to break free.

But it wasn’t the case. The glass and the walls were too thick.

There was no way home.

Not for the whale. Not for Carlito.

When I got the call about Carlito’s suicide, I remembered how Carlito had told me, because he was the smarter one who’d read philosophy books and learned about so many things I hadn’t, that the great minds of the world say the instinct of any living being is to survive. But Carlito had another theory; he said once freedom is taken away along with one’s basic dignities, a living being either has to deny its own instincts and surrender to the oppressor, or be consumed by a new instinct: to reach for its own death.

I watch Roxi, or whatever they’re going to call her, since they’ve decided to let the public submit names, then put it to a vote. Rachel comes up behind me and sees me with my eyes on the dolphin, still trying to push her way out of the pen.

“Don’t worry,” she says, though by her tone, it sounds like she’s trying to reassure herself more than me. “She’ll settle in here in no time. They all do.”

“I guess she doesn’t have a choice,” I say, but Rachel is already lowering herself into the water to try her work again with the dolphin, cooing toward her. The dolphin doesn’t respond and remains with her back to us, by the fence, eyes on the water on the other side.

At my old job, I could face clients, listen to all their problems like their disintegrating marriages, horrible children, financial debts, and feel for them as I looked into their eyes. But when an appointment was up and the next client sat in the chair opposite me, I’d forget about the one who came before. By day’s end, I’d shake off all their troubled words like dirty water down the sink drain and return to my little life.

I don’t understand why I can’t do that anymore after my days at the dolphinarium, why I can’t accept what I’m told about how well they care for the animals and how they’re better off here than in the big, bad wild.

I used to be able to walk past their pens. Now I linger beside each one, feeling guilty every time I have to peel away to move on to the rest of my day’s duties.

I don’t need the burden of caring. I want to turn away from them, forget them when I punch out on the time clock to go home, clear my mind of the conditions and rituals of their confinement.

When I do manage to put thoughts of the animals aside, it’s only to think of Nesto, the confession of his upcoming remarriage, still an abstraction like those predictions they give out at the start of every hurricane season speculating on either a mild or a vicious summer.