Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover
A novel by Malcolm J. Brenner
Copyright 1974, 1978, 2009 by Malcolm J. Brenner
Published at Smashwords by
Eyes Open Media
5895 Swaying Palm Drive
Punta Gorda, FL 33982
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage or retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a written review in connection in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Disclaimer: This book is a work of fiction. All characters, events and locations described herein, with the exception of public figures, are fictitious and wholly the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual characters, living or dead, is unintentional, accidental and purely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-0-615-33460-8
This book is available in print at most online retailers.
Edited and designed by Eyes Open Media,
Punta Gorda, Florida
eyesopenmedia@comcast.net
Cover photo: Malcolm J. Brenner
Colorization: Sam Pillsbury
Book available at: www.wetgodess.net
Dedication
To John Cunningham Lilly, M.D.,
who inspired me to write it;
To Cay Small, my “shipmate,”
who saw me through some rough weather;
And most of all to D. T. T.,
who was there.
Table of Contents
Prologue: The Least Impossible Improbabilities
Ch. 1 “Welcome to Florida Funland!”
Ch. 2 Invisible Fetters
Ch. 3 Three Scenic Vistas
Ch. 4 Fatally Fogged Film
Ch. 5 Off The Beach
Ch. 6 Echoes
Ch. 7 Language Lessons
Ch. 8 Ruby’s First Overture
Ch. 9 “Avoiding Biased Assumptions”
Ch. 10 Walking On Air
Ch. 11 The Dolphin Of The Mind’s Eye
Ch. 12 Dream Seas
Ch. 13 Warmer Waters
Ch. 14 Pandemonium At The Porpoise Pens!
Ch. 15 Call Of The Deep
Ch. 16 A Sticky Situation
Ch. 17 The Fury Of A Dolphin Scorned
Ch. 18 My Dinner With Salina (And Hank)
Ch. 19 Outside The Fence
Ch. 20 Departures And Other Distractions
Ch. 21 The Last Porpoise Show
Ch. 22 Rapture Of The Deep
Ch. 23 Nightmare
Ch. 24 At The Lillys’ Pad
Ch. 25 A Corner In Time
Ch. 26 Ruby’s Return
Ch. 27 Dead Reckoning
Ch. 28 Reconciliation
Ch. 29 Undertow
Ch. 30 Waverider
Epilogue: Christmas, 1995
Acknowledgements
Writing this novel was a solitary preoccupation, and I am solely responsible for its content. However, a few individuals have added something along the way. John C. Ribbler, a.k.a. "the Scribbler,” gave me early moral support, and Connie Clesczewski typed a manuscript. Joan McIntyre published an excerpt from an early draft of Chapter 7 in her classic anthology Mind In The Waters, and Mark Bower set me up with Penthouse. Steve Roosa rented me a writer's cottage. Barbara Darsey put up with me when I was crazy afterward. Sally Lucke was always encouraging. Dr. A. A. “Mac” Miller at New College taught me three important things about writing, but I forgot what they were. Paul Spong gave me a knowing nod and a wink. Dr. Randall Wells has always listened to my rantings with tolerance and without derision. Marylin Gautier suggested some improvements to the manuscript. Marilyn Tarnowski also helped. Deino Crown has been a big fan and supporter. My brother Hugh supported me for several months. Many compassionate professional counselors helped me deal with the emotional aftershocks of this experience. I’m sure there were others who are worthy of mention here that I’ve overlooked or, sadly, forgotten. My sincerest apologies.
Citations
An excerpt from an earlier version of this novel under a different title was published in the 1974 Scribners’ anthology Mind In the Waters, Joan McIntyre, editor. “Say Rooo-Beee!” pg. 186. Another excerpt, “Making Waves.” appeared in the Nov. 1978 issue of Penthouse. Used with permission. Sources for quotations and lyrics cited at the beginning of each chapter are given in place. They and the following brief excerpts from other works are used under provisions of the Fair Use Act:
See Ruby Fall. Johnny Cash. “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash,” 1970.
Up From The Skies. The Jimi Hendrix Experience, “Axis: Bold As Love,” 1969.
Crown Of Creation. Jefferson Airplane, “Crown Of Creation,” 1968.
Call Any Vegetable. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, “Absolutely Free,” 1968.
Ruby Tuesday. The Rolling Stones, “Flowers,” 1967.
Charitable Note:
A percentage of the cover price from retail sales of this book is donated by the author to non-profit scientific, environmental and conservation organizations that conduct humane and ethical research on dolphins, educate the public, work to protect their environment and lobby on their behalf. – M.J.B.
Author’s Apology
I am sure almost anybody could write a better novel than this. Its chief defect, it seems to me, is that most of it happens to be true.
Looking into his grey eyes and fondling the dense growth on his shoulder, she said, “We are bound to hurt one another so much, again and again. We are so terribly different.”
“Yes,” he said. “But the more different, the more lovely the loving.”
– Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord. Olaf Stapledon, London, England, 1944
Ruby, a bottlenose dolphin (species Tursiops truncatus) in a sea-level pen.
Prologue:
The Least Impossible Improbabilities
My name – please get this right! – is Zachary Zimmerman, and before I level with you about Ruby and me and all the strange, sad and beautiful things that happened to us, let’s get one other detail straight:
I never intended to fall in love with a dolphin!
I mean, I didn’t exactly wake up one morning thinking “Gee, I guess I’ll get romantically involved with a 400-pound, legless marine mammal today!” Nobody does, any more than your average Joe suddenly gets “light in the loafers” or a devoted housewife ditches her hubby and tykes for a Harley and dykes. It just doesn’t happen like that, and anyone who says otherwise is either messing with your head or reaching for your wallet, probably both.
I maintain, if you looked long enough at those people (or at yourself, if this has happened to you), you would always find the unexpected, and usually unwelcome, “revelation” foreshadowed by some obscure event in their past.
Or in my case, several.
With that in mind, you should know that the startling revelations recounted here were just the least unlikely among a suspiciously large number of improbable occurrences during my sophomore college year, when I was still young, stoned and immortal.
Indeed, so many strange events occurred in my proximity in so short a time it would be folly to attribute all of them to chance, or even to my frequent ingestion of mind-altering substances. And while I have, alas, grown older, and I’m no longer as immortal as I used to be, no matter what I eat, drink or smoke, nothing like this happens to me any more, goddamn it!
So I’m certain that a percentage of these events, no matter how unbelievable they now sound, had to be genuine, authentic consensus-reality weirdness! And of that authentic weirdness, the events surrounding Ruby were, by virtue of their consistency, frequency and quality, the least impossible of multiple improbabilities!
Some of these occurrences, while intrinsically interesting, were easily discarded as irrelevant. Others, like a conversation with Salina following our nocturnal skinny-dip in a famous dolphin’s pen, could have been included to buttress my conclusions. I chose otherwise to maintain focus on the development of my relationship with Ruby, which was extraordinary enough without embellishment!
What happened, over the nine months we knew each other in the flesh, was less like an identity crisis and more like a dream wherein I fled a tidal wave in slow motion. The wave looked awesome, even beautiful, all glassy green and translucent, but it was inescapable, and I knew it was going to wash away everything and take me with it.
And surfing the crest of that crashing dream-wave was this dolphin, the one I’m calling Ruby in this story. She was laughing at my slow, bipedal flight, but she was also saying, “Come join me! We can ride this out together.”
To suddenly realize, without warning or guidance, that I was not what society prepared me to be, not what my parents expected me to be, not even who I thought I was or wanted to be, was devastating and destabilizing. By learning to accept me as a human being, Ruby helped me to accept myself, and that was tremendously liberating – so much so I overlooked its dangers. But then, so did she, and I believe she understood them better.
After all, I was a callow college student, still practically a virgin; she was a tough old ‘phin who’d been rolled in the eel grass many times before Beau made a showgirl out of her, and she had the rake-marks to prove it. Given her previous experience, she should have known better than to flip flukes over snout for one of her captor’s species! In addition to being lethal, fickle and clueless under water, we are such very, very conceited creatures…
…Sorry, I digress. To return to my original point, let me repeat it just one more time, a little stronger, for emphasis:
I NEVER INTENDED TO FALL IN LOVE WITH THAT &^%$#@ SHE-DOLPHIN!
There. Got that straight? Good! Because nothing else in this story will be… including me.
This isn’t a great picture, but it does capture the dolphin show’s main features: the big pool, the jumping tower, the hoops, the chickee, the riverboat, Star (jumping) and Hank.
Chapter 1:
I first took genuine interest in dolphins off the coast of New Guinea, where lying on the deck of a small boat I could put my eye some few inches from theirs as they swam alongside in crystalline water. The intelligence in those eyes was a shock to me. I wanted to talk to those animals, and I will swear to this day they were thinking the same thing.
– R.F. Peterson, “Thar What Blows?” Yachting, 1967
At first sight, the bottlenose dolphin that would take me as its lover was only a silvery-gray shimmer rising through water the color of apple cider. Its dorsal fin broke the surface and a moment later it blew, adding a cloud of vapor to the damp Florida air, rolled on its side and stared up at me out of one soft brown eye.
Being this close to a dolphin for the first time thrilled me from my beaded headband to the soles of my cheap sneakers, but wanting to impress my client I tried to appear nonchalant. There was an awkward moment of silence before the client, a tall, buxom redhead standing next to me on the weathered dock, spoke.
“Well, I suppose you should get to know everybody.” After the long and noisy speedboat ride south from Sarasota, her voice sounded no louder than the throaty purr of a lioness. “Let’s start with Ruby, here. Ruby, shake hands with Zack.”
The dolphin (which I now adroitly guessed to be female) obediently raised her right pectoral fin, and I knelt on the dock’s sun-warped planks and shook it. Her skin was like firm wet rubber, but warm and distinctly alive.
The iris of her brown eye appeared round and so deep it went through her and into the umber depths below. Her expression seemed to hold a hint of sadness, but even as I felt that I chuckled at myself for being so damn anthropomorphic. I had no way of assessing a dolphin’s emotions, certainly not from something as intangible as the look in its eye!
The redheaded client’s name was – well, for purposes of this story, let’s call her Salina O’Rourke. She has lawyers and money and connections, and I don’t. Even in deck shoes she towered a good two inches over me, and I’m no shrimp. She had a fine, straight nose and a jaw that could’ve been carved from Grecian marble. Sometime in the misty past an American Indian had paddled through her gene pool, bequeathing her high cheekbones and skin, utterly anomalous for a redhead, that bronzed without burning.
That morning, Salina wore a white cotton blouse knotted under her ample bosom and short gray shorts. Her figure wouldn’t admit she’d brought three children into the world, but the rich can afford things like that. If her hair hadn’t been pulled back and tied with a blue bandanna, it would have rolled down her back like waves on a beach at sunset. But most of all it was Salina’s eyes that caught you. They were jade green, and they could cut you one second and giggle the next.
Not at all like the dolphin’s eyes.
Without knowing why, I had the prickly feeling this was one of those decisive moments that irrevocably shape one’s career, perhaps even one’s future, and I wanted a snapshot of it. But my one and only camera was, by choice and not by chance, sitting safely on a shelf at home, and even if I’d brought it – who would have taken the picture?
Salina knelt beside me, her blouse filling as she leaned over the water, and extended a hand. Ruby rolled on her back, expos-ing an oystershell belly with two faint pink stripes that ran from her pectoral fins (her flippers or “pecs” if you’re a vet or a trainer) to her navel. The woman rubbed gently and the dolphin arched with delight. I was able to observe that, except for a short and curiously unrevealing slit where the peduncle met the trunk, her streamlined undercarriage bore no obvious traces of pubic hair, teats or genitalia.
At that moment the contrast between the females of our two species, mine so well endowed with secondary sexual characteristics, hers so nearly lacking them, couldn’t have been much greater. I took advantage of the fact for a moment before I opened my mouth and blew it.
“How can you tell it’s a she?”
Salina squinted at me, as if I’d asked a stupid question. Fortunately I lifted my gaze in time to meet her eyes.
“Trust me, it’s a female.” She continued rubbing the dolphin’s belly, meaning its blowhole was under water. It hadn’t breathed since rolling on its side.
“Why is the water so brown? Is it dirty?”
“Of course not! This pen is flushed by the tides, can’t you see? It’s the mangroves,” she explained, pointing at the thick green bushes that lined the shore north of us. “Their fallen leaves turn the water brown. Tannic acid, it’s perfectly natural.”
“Why is she kept by herself?”
“She goes out with the Delta Queen and does tricks.”
Salina waved at a Navy-surplus World War II landing craft moored at the end of a nearby dock. Useless smokestacks, an ornate superstructure and a fake revolving paddlewheel made the Queen resemble an old-fashioned Mississippi riverboat, but twin Diesels were what moved her. Emblazoned on the wheel-house was the name of the amusement park, Florida Funland, and its logo, a dolphin leaping through a flaming hoop. Instead of Ol’ Muddy, this boat plied the Intracoastal Waterway, a coast-hugging commercial channel that surrounds Florida like a maritime drag strip. To our west lay Blackburn Bay, the glorified sandbars called keys and then the Gulf of Mexico.
Why doesn’t she just jump the fence and swim off? I wondered, but before I could ask the question Salina spoke. “We’ll take a ride later and catch Ruby’s performance. It’s mind-blowing, as my oldest daughter says!”
“How much extra?” My wallet was empty. We had expeditiously avoided paying the gate fee by arriving from seaward. Salina had repeatedly reassured me we were both guests of the head trainer, with the permission of the park’s owners, a couple of local real estate moguls, but I hadn’t seen anything on paper saying I had a right to be here without paying. Much less do what I came to do.
“What do you think? This is an amusement park, isn’t it? But don’t worry, you’re covered! Come on, let’s find Beau.” Without so much as a fare-thee-well to the sad-eyed dolphin, Salina strode up the dock. I cast one backward glance at Ruby, who was staring after us, and followed her. Behind me, the dolphin breathed, a sound like a blast of air from a high-pressure hose suddenly sucked back in on itself. All the time we had been talking, she had been holding her breath!
The dock became a catwalk running shoreward through a cluster of sea-level pens, some occupied, some empty, Salina didn’t give me time to look. Her long, exfoliated legs devoured the catwalk’s narrow, twisted planks and climbed a marl path leading up a boulder breakwater. Ahead of us I heard a rhythmic noise: ka-chunk, swish, ka-chunk, swish, ka-chunk-chunk, swish!
We topped the breakwater and paused to catch our breath with the dolphin show spread out before us. The centerpiece was a large oval pool, perhaps two hundred feet north-to-south by one hundred feet east-to-west, encircled by a waist-high wooden slat fence. The landscaping was rocks and weedy crushed gravel with a few faded palmettos standing in for decoration.
Small floating docks on the pool’s north, east, and south sides held plastic rings hanging over the water. On the west side, where we stood, a broad concrete apron sloped from the breakwater to the pool. Since we were facing some rusty bleachers, this must be the performance area. The thumping noise came from a palm-thatched hut that the ancient Calusa Indians might have called a chickee if you discounted the power lines, the two-by-four frame and the incongruous carved Polynesian tikis guarding the door. Florida Funland was nothing, if not tacky!
Squinting into the hut against the glare on the pool, I made out a man’s shadowy form moving quickly, a knife flashing in his hand. He took a whole fish from a stainless steel bucket on his left, sliced it on a chopping block and pushed the chunks into a bucket on his right. Several such buckets, filled with fish chunks, sat on the floor beside him. A portable radio on the floor was playing the local country-and-western station. Being into acid rock myself I didn’t recognize the song, but it was impossible to misidentify Johnny Cash’s smoky voice over the honky-tonk piano accompaniment:
I didn’t hold her back when she got restless
One man is not enough when she wants it all
Yeah, I let her go when I saw what she wanted
‘Cause I don’t care to see Ruby fall…
That odd coincidence gave me a moment’s pause, but if Salina noticed it, she said nothing.
As I recollect that afternoon it rushes back like an undelivered postcard, the sunlight warm for late November, the breeze off the bay cool. For a moment the breeze turned seaward, bringing me my first whiff of the chickee’s distinctive odor, an unforgettable blend of rusty iron, ozone from badly grounded electricity, beer, piss, the pharmaceutical nose of veterinary vitamins and the reek of male sweat, but mostly just the smell of a fish market.
“Beau!” Salina yelled, “Hey, Beau! We’re here! I brought the new photographer!”
The man paused, put down the knife, turned and stepped into the sunlight, blinking. He was a touch over five feet tall with tousled blond hair and a mischievous grin. Short, but not the kind of guy you’d pick a fight with; it wouldn’t last long, and you wouldn’t be the one left standing. He wore only a pair of tattered denim cutoffs and a tarnished silver cross on a chain around his neck. The muscles in his bare arms and chest rippled as he wiped watery blood from his hands with a tattered old towel and tossed it carelessly on the ground.
The grin was for Salina. I was apparently invisible. And if the bulge in his shorts meant anything, he certainly was happy to see her!
“Salina! Well how-dee!” He threw open his arms, encircled her hips and lifted her off the ground. She thrashed like a captured crab.
“Beau! Put me down this instant!”
“I’m gonna throw you in with Satan!” He started for the dolphin pool, carrying Salina as if she were a naughty child.
“Don’t you dare! Put me down, now!”
“Gimme a kiss!”
“Put me down first!”
“Promise you’ll give me a kiss?”
“Oh, all right! If no one’s looking…”
He set her on her feet next to a pen where two shark-like fins broke the water. She straightened up, put her arms around his neck, and bent down until their lips met.
Nobody here but us dolphins, I thought.
“That’s better,” he said, after they straightened up.
Salina threw a nod in my direction. “This is the new shooter.” Beau scowled. “He’s a local boy, aren’t you, Zack? He’ll work out great for the book! No travel, no lodging, no day rates!”
“Riverview High School, class of ‘69,” I started to say, not even thinking it sounded funny, when Beau’s blue eyes locked on mine and measured me to the ounce.
Thinking back on it, I’m kind of embarrassed by what they saw. Not my appearance; I looked just like a million other male college students at the time. Long, curly black hair parted down the middle, hanging almost to my shoulders, the hippie head-band holding it out of my myopic eyes, framed by glasses. Freckles showing through my beach tan. Scrawny arms, knock knees. Cutoffs. A tattered purple tank top… and no camera.
No, it was my attitude that now embarrasses me. I was a sophomore at the local liberal arts college; ergo, I knew everything, including the meaning of ergo. I didn’t hold myself above Beau, any more than above Salina, but something in my attitude might have made him think I did.
If Beau saw all this (and looking back I believe he did), he never said anything to me about it except perhaps in the last thing he said to me, some three years later. He may or may not have been quick to judge people, but he kept his opinions to himself. At the time, he just said “What’s your name, son?”
“Oh heavens,” said Salina, “I forgot to introduce you! It’s –”
“Uh, Zimmerman,” I stumbled, suddenly tongue-tied and not at all professional, “Zachary Zimmerman.”
“You go by Zachary all the time? That’s a mouthful.”
“I guess Zack would do…”
At that, Beau grinned, stuck out his hand and said “Howdy, Zack. Welcome to Florida Funland!” It was like shaking hands with an oak. “If you’re such a hotshot photographer like my lady friend here says, where’s your goddamn camera?”
He didn’t let go of my hand.
“First time I go on an assignment,” I explained, trying to sound competent and professional and not quite succeeding, “I just hang out, pick up on what’s going down and try to tune in on the vibes without all the hardware hassles, know what I mean?”
He still didn’t let go of my hand.
“I want to see this park at least once through my naked eyes before I start looking at it through a viewfinder!” I added. “I’m sure there’ll be plenty of other opportunities to take pictures for Salina’s book.”
Beau snorted and let my hand go. It wasn’t hurt, but it was pale and I had to resist the impulse to shake the blood back into it. He glanced over to her.
“Oh, now it’s your book, huh?”
“I’ve seen his work,” Salina said divertingly. “He’s good.”
“What was wrong with that fat guy from New York? I thought he was just…”
A mechanical roar cut him off. Belching smoke, an antique diesel tractor emerged from the palmetto scrub laboriously pulling a train of wheeled carts and rolled up to the bleachers beside the pool, where it discharged a couple of dozen sweaty people in wrinkled Bermuda shorts and damp florid shirts.
Tourists. Showtime. I headed for the cheap seats. “Wait,” Salina yelled, “you can watch it from over here.” We leaned against the north side of the pool fence, just a few feet from the water.
“Don’t pay Beau any attention,” Salina said. “He’s just messing with your head. He’s actually a great guy.”
Before a year had come and gone I would see more dolphin shows than I cared to count, but I never saw another one like Beau’s. It wasn’t the tricks; all dolphin shows are built around pretty much the same behaviors. And it wasn’t the patter, although Beau’s lines got some good laughs.
Looking back, I guess it was just Beau. Even when his dolphins misbehaved and totally exasperated him, he still loved them, and it showed in his voice when he spoke about them. He depended on them for his meal ticket, and he in turn gave to their captivity a meaning that, in the wild, they would have found in each other.
Perhaps I am simply romanticizing all this stuff, but I now believe the dolphins recognized him as the leader of their little pod. Beau would say that was nonsense, but watching other people do the show, even using the same lines, it was just an act. The dolphins would go through their moves, but they were in it for the fish.
With Beau in charge, they worked for him, and the fish were merely a perk.
A second tour train arrived, filling the bleachers with tourists, Salina now a swan standing out against a gaggle of geese. Anticipating the show, the dolphins cavorted in their pens, drawing excited “Oooh’s!” and “Aaah’s!” from the audience each time they surfaced and blew.
Beau strode out of the chickee wearing a stained white T-shirt as a concession to public modesty and a large wireless microphone on a lanyard around his neck.
“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,” he began, the rusty mike booming his voice from the weathered speakers around the pool, “I want to welcome y’all to our Porpoise College here at Florida Funland! These porpoise are called ‘dolphins’ by some, and they’re also called ‘bottlenose’ on account o’ their blunt snouts. They may look like fish to you, but they are ack-shu-ally air-breathin’, warm-blooded mammals like us, that give birth to live young –underwater!”
Whenever Beau mentioned this, the women in the audience would twitter among themselves for a few moments, grateful that God, Darwin or Mother Nature had spared them similar feats of endurance.
But his nomenclature confused me. There simply are no porpoises in Florida’s coastal waters! Beau described what kind of fish they hunted, how they defended themselves and their offspring against sharks. His summation of their mental abilities, however, left me disappointed: “They’re fast learners, alright, and most scientists place ‘em somewhere ‘tween a dog and a chim-pan-zee in intelligence. Now let’s get on with the show!”
Florida Funland’s Porpoise College was similar to all dolphin shows seen around the world at that time, but not like the ones performed today, in the enlightened 21st Century! The dolphins, of course, behaved then just the same as they do now: swimming, jumping, flipping and retrieving objects on command.
We humans, however, have come so far! We are now environmentally sensitive, ozone-friendly, carbon-neutral and even noticeably less dolphin-lethal, at least in some locations. We still put them on public display in fundamentally inadequate facilities, but at least we no longer coerce them to perform inane comedic skits that demean their essential dignity and bear no resemblance to their natural behaviors.
Of course, even here in the 21st Century they’re still chattel, but we don’t make them wear floppy hats anymore, or, in the case of Beau’s lead dolphin, a mortarboard with a nylon rope tassel.
“I call him ‘Star’ on account of he’s the star pupil in our Porpoise College,” Beau boasted, retrieving the plywood prop from the dolphin’s rounded melon. I wondered when I’d be sporting mine. This independent study project to illustrate Salina’s book, or Beau and Salina’s book, was an attempt to pad my rather thin academic portfolio with a few more credits.
After about fifteen minutes of such stunts Beau had run Star through his repertoire, or, as I am more inclined to think nowadays, Star had run Beau through his repertoire.
“Our last trick is a porpoise-powered boat ride,” the trainer announced, sliding an aluminum skiff into the water. Shading his eyes from the sun, he scanned the bleachers. “Any of you kids out there got a birthday today?… Yes, you, young lady –” he pointed out a four-year-old girl whose mother was holding up her hand “– and one more, the lady in the white blouse over there.”
“Oh shit.” Salina shook her head.
Beau wouldn’t hear of it. “Come on down, honey, ol’ Star don’t bite… and neither do I!” Turning to the audience he said, “You know why I picked her, folks? Because a little birdie – I mean, a little porpoise – told me it’s her birthday today!”
Salina, who had been dragging on an ultra-long cigarette, blushed, tossed the butt down and ground it with her heel. “That bastard, he’s actually going to twist my arm! He knows how much I hate being out in public. Hold this!” she said, flinging her purse at me, and stomped down to the pool.
The three passengers climbed in the skiff and Beau tossed the painter, its end looped and padded, into the water. Star thrust his snout through the loop and took off with such a jerk that Salina and the girl almost fell overboard. The audience roared. The dolphin had to race scavenging seagulls for the chunks of fish Beau tossed ahead of him, but it was all part of the show. Over the audience’s applause, Salina shot Beau an I’ll-kill-you! grin.
The skiff slowly circled the pool, Star rising now and then to breathe. Salina relaxed into her cameo. The mother seemed mesmerized by the dolphin. The little girl was nonplussed.
Salina’s purse was hand-tooled leather and smelled new. There was probably a lot of money in her wallet, yet she’d handed it to me without a second thought, even though she’d met me only a few hours before. I resisted the temptation to peek inside.
“Y’all get your cameras ready. When Star gets back to the dock and hands me that rope, it makes a bee-you-ti-ful picture.”
When she got off the skiff, Salina was glowing. She took back her purse, fished inside for a cigarette and lit up. “Star’s eyes nearly fell out when he saw me in that boat!” she gloated.
“You’ve never done that before?”
“My kids have, but not me. You’re lucky you didn’t bring your camera, I’d have taken your film!”
At the time, I thought she was joking.
After Star was penned, the other performing dolphins jumped for fish, which Beau held at the top of a tall steel tower. I was impressed by their physical prowess, but I also felt a little cheated. Sure, Star could locate a dime tossed in the pool, or shoot a basketball off his snout. Saki and Bimbo and Gator, as Beau introduced them, could perform beautifully synchronized high jumps.
But where was the intelligence I was looking for? Where were the dolphin minds I had come to expect from reading the popular literature? The dolphins at Florida Funland behaved like – well, they behaved like a bunch of trained animals, and I, who had never trained an animal more intelligent than a dog to do anything more sophisticated than come when I whistled, wasn’t real impressed with that.
My thoughts were broken by a yell and a wave from Salina, who was trotting down the dock toward the Delta Queen. “Come on,” she called, “We’re taking Ruby out!”
I followed her, still cursing myself for having left my stupid camera at home.
Chapter 2:
According to Prof. (Renéé-Guy) Busnel, the affection of a dolphin for his trainer exists only in the imagination of the trainer. It is an illusion and a myth. Busnel has run a series of experiments demonstrating that a trained dolphin will obey his trainer even if the latter is dressed as a woman. He will also obey a woman – and he will even obey a piece of wood, so long as the dolphin perceives the signal to which he is conditioned.
– Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Phillippe Diolé, Dolphins, 1973.
With a bucket of fish chunks in hand, Beau led us to the riverboat. Sea gulls wheeled expectantly overhead. I caught up with Salina when she paused to watch a guy in a wetsuit sitting on a floating dock in the pen next to Ruby’s. He had a whistle in his mouth, the lanyard around his neck, and he was holding a chunk of fish over the empty water as if he expected something to reach up and grab it.
“Hank!” Salina yelled. “Hey Pulaski, over here!”
The man turned, revealing a shock of curly blond hair atop a face made rugged by a hint of Clint Eastwood, foolish by a trace of Alfred E. Neuman, and waved. At that instant a dolphin burst from the water and snatched the fish from his hand, nearly taking the hand with it.
The man cut loose with a string of invective vilifying the dolphin’s parentage, feeding habits and sexual proclivities, which was probably true, considering it was a dolphin; but being under water the dolphin couldn’t hear him, and Salina didn’t even blush.
“How are you, Hank?”
He stood up, half-a-head taller than Salina, his muscles rippling under the wet suit.
“I was just fine until that shit-head Satan ripped me off! I’ll be glad to get rid of him – meanest goddamn dolphin I ever met! Who’s your hippie friend?”
I was startled to realize he meant me. Salina introduced us. Hank Pulaski captured and trained dolphins for an exhibit on Steel Pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He warmed up a little when I admitted I was born there.
“Ain’t Florida great?” he raved. “While my boss is freezing his ass off up north, I’m down here drinking beer and working on a real tan! We just caught Satan the other day, he’s still a little shy, but I’ll have him jumping through hoops in no time! Wouldn’t do to send him back too quick, though, my boss might get the idea anybody can do this job!” Two toots from the Delta Queen’s air horn cut him off. “Hey, you’re going to miss a boat ride if you don’t get outa my hair!”
“You barely made it, baby!” Beau scolded us as he hauled in the gangplank. “The skipper must like you, we should’ve left five minutes ago!”
By Ruby’s pen a fin broke the water – outside the fence. She was swimming free in Blackburn Bay, with nothing between her and the Gulf of Mexico but a few miles of Casey Key.
Again, I wondered why she didn’t just take off.
Salina dragged me to the bow, where the wind was fierce but the view, from ten feet above the waterline, spectacular. “Beau said he’d let me do the jumps today!” she shouted, as excited as a schoolgirl.
I didn’t understand. “You jump better than the dolphin?”
“No, I get to hold the fish! He’s been promising me this for months, and today’s the day! Look, there she is!”
In the churning froth of the bow wave something gray flickered, then leaped to grab a breath of air between spray and foam. Ruby rolled on her side to stare at us through the shimmering slipstream, holding her place without visible movement. Her eye, no longer lonely, now gleamed in the sunlight.
“Helllooo, Rooobeee!” Salina yelled.
As if in answer the dolphin flung herself into the air, then splashed back into the bow wave with scarcely a ripple. I gulped. At any moment, it seemed Ruby would get caught in the slipstream, swept under the hull, thrown into the props, sliced to bloody ribbons and blown out the backwash – but she didn’t. She rolled on her side and eyed me like a cat lounging on a couch.
I stared at her in awe. No matter how precarious Ruby’s position seemed to me, she obviously loved it, sliding endlessly down that fluid wall of force.
“That’s amazing!”
Salina took it in through her designer sunglasses.
“I told you so! Quite an instinct, isn’t it? She’s only been rehearsing this act for, oh, a few million years. Why, dolphins can…”
She was cut off by Ruby’s flukes flicking water in our faces. Beau was on the deck above us, giving Ruby hand signals, the passengers crowding around him for a better view. He grinned gleefully and pointed his finger. Ruby leaped again, showering us. We laughed like kids at an amusement park, and so did the tourists.
Thirty years later, that scene remains etched in my memory: The cobalt sky filled with glossy clouds, the brilliant sun, the breeze fresh off the Gulf as we sailed in mock majesty, on a fake riverboat, down the Intracoastal Waterway, a dolphin leaping at our bow.
The Delta Queen slowed and turned. “Now y’all gonna see Ruby do her stuff!” Beau shouted over the loudspeakers. “Salina, get yer flukes up here!”
She disappeared up the gangway as Ruby appeared off the port bow, only to disappear underwater as Salina reappeared beside a beaming Beau. He anchored her as she stood on the railing and leaned out over the water, half a fish in her extended hand.
“Rooo-beee! Let’s go!” Beau hollered.
The dolphin arced out of the water and hung leisurely in the air, surveying things, then plunged down without a splash. Beau’s call had to be for our benefit. From hours spent in my family’s swimming pool I knew Mom could yell herself hoarse, there was no way you could hear her underwater. Impedance mismatch, my father the engineer had called it. Between that and the throb of the diesels, the wind noise and…
WHOOSH!
Cold droplets splashed my face as Ruby shot by me. Fourteen feet in the air she nudged the fish with her snout. Salina dropped it, Ruby grabbed it in her jaws and splashed down, only to appear a moment later, the fish inside her.
Salina glowed. Beau’s grin threatened to split his face. Parents were lifting their kids up on their shoulders to glimpse this amazing leaping fish! But it was Ruby’s targeting ability that most impressed me. The boat was not only moving forward but vertically in the swell, and pitching side to side. The environment was totally fluid, with no stable reference points from which to judge either distance or trajectory, both of which would change between the time Ruby left the water and the time she reached the fish in Salina’s hand. She touched the fish every time, but she never touched Salina. She never grabbed the fish, just touched it with her snout, and Salina dropped it. (Back in the main pool, the jumping dolphins had done the same thing, come to think of it, but there, the only things moving were them.) It seemed preposterously polite.
Ruby jumped for Salina five times. The fourth jump was aborted by when a scavenging sea gull cut in, but the last one was perfect. I could almost imagine Ruby was smiling, aside from her standard-issue dolphin rictus. A healthy animal in superb form, her performance commanded my admiration. In the open ocean she was happy and powerful, an altogether different beast from the docile, almost somber creature I had met in the pen an hour ago.
Salina relinquished the last jump to Beau. Clinging to a strut, he hollered for his dolphin and set a whole mackerel’s tail between his teeth. Ruby leaped for range and plunged just as the riverboat pitched into a yacht’s wake. The dolphin shot up as the boat came down. Beside me, someone gasped, and I watched Ruby trying to brake, mid-air, flukes cupped under her like a scoop, her eye huge, white and startled.
Beau jerked back at the last second, correcting for her overkill, and Ruby got her fish plus the hearty cheers of the passengers.
Nobody realized how close Beau had come to getting his face smashed on that jump except the four of us – me, him, Ruby and Salina, who was back beside me.
“My god!” she mumbled. “That’s why he wouldn’t let me do the last jump!”
Beau held the empty fish bucket upside down over the water, and Ruby, seeing it and knowing that her work was done, returned to her spot in the bow wave.
Beau got on the p.a. system and thanked everyone for attending. As we docked, I noticed Ruby waiting outside the gate of her sea-level pen. Why come back? What possible attraction could life in a holding pen have over the freedom of the sea, the choice of her own companions? What invisible fetters had Beau placed on her, that so commanded her loyalty?
(When I finally got them, the answers to those questions would shock and stun me. Ultimately, they would prove impossible to verify, so I am none the wiser.)
The riverboat docked with a pile-shuddering thunk!, the gangplank slid out, and the tourists in their permanent-press shorts went back to the gift shop, the Old West shootout, the petting zoo and the Indian fire-eater. Salina and Beau waited until everyone else got off, and I waited for them.
“You done great today,” he said.
“So did Ruby. She didn’t miss a trick, except that last jump. For a second there I thought you were a goner!”
“‘T’wasn’t her fault. I shoulda made her wait on that wake. Can’t expect her to do all the thinkin’! Say, what time is it get-ting to be?”
“Almost 4:30. Do we have to go?”
Beau looked distressed, I couldn’t guess why. “Pretty soon. You know.” He didn’t explain.
We paused by the main pool, where three of the show dolphins were playing with a ball. Salina lay down on the catwalk between the pens and they immediately swam to her, as if she were a sea-nymph.
“Goodbye, Star. Goodbye, Bimbo. Goodbye, Gator,” she said. The dolphins – three identical gray torpedoes, as far as I could tell – rolled over on their backs for scratching.
On the way back to Salina’s motorboat I looked for Ruby, but if she had been returned to that lonely little pen, I didn’t see her.
§§§
Smoke from Salina’s cigarette curled upward and caught in a beam of light striking from the western window of her parlor. She sat in an overstuffed armchair, the pale afternoon sun doing beautiful, violent things to her hair while leaving her face in shadow. An Asian maid brought us cut-crystal glasses of iced tea with lemon wedges and fresh mint sprigs on a lacquered tray. Salina thanked her. We drank. Salina nodded her approval. The maid left as silently as she had come.
“So how do you like it?”
While the piles of dirt and wood scraps outside her house marked it as brand-new, it was not one of those cheese boxes that were even then spreading malignantly across the Florida countryside. The house’s size and elaborate architecture, the huge front door of hand-carved oak and the many other opulent touches confirmed it as the home of a person of wealth and character, or at least a person of wealth who knew an architect with character.
True, I would not have put it so close to the canal – they have a nasty habit of overflowing during hurricanes, sometimes to a depth of several feet – but it made for easy boat access. And while they harbored mosquitoes, the tall Australian pines around the house did provide shade. Since they were invasive exotics, leaving them standing could scarcely have been a nod to the local ecology.
Still, it was an impressive dwelling outside, sumptuous inside. The oiled hardwood of a baby grand piano glinted darkly in the late afternoon sunshine. Rare books, archaeological artifacts and small but expensive ceramics by a local master potter filled the many nooks and shelves. The paintings, including a large, pastel abstract by a Sarasota neo-Impressionist who never let you forget he was a founding member of the Famous Artists’ School were bold, yet non-discordant.
The overall impression was of someone with enough money to live very well and enough self-confidence not to flaunt it unnecessarily. At that moment Salina seemed more mysterious than the dolphins. Frankly, I was a little in awe of her. And puzzled, too.
“Are they dolphins or porpoises? You and Hank call them dolphins, but Beau…”
“They’re dolphins, of course, from the Greek delphys, the womb of Mother Ocean. Sacred to Helios the sun god, not just Poseidon as you might think, isn’t that odd? It’s because the Greeks believed they appreciated music, and Helios played the lyre. But ‘porpoise’”– the word practically gagged her – “is French for ‘pig-fish!’ I don’t even want to think about the implications. The French are disgusting!” She shuddered. “Beau is a sweet guy, but he learned his trade from Rappaccini, who was a fisherman before he got into training, and a ‘porpoise’ is what a fisherman calls any cetacean smaller than his boat. Beau thinks a ‘dolphin’ is something you eat, a species of fish. The Polynesians call them mahi-mahi, the Spanish dorado. In Latin it’s Coryphaenus hippurus, yes, that’s the species.” She rattled off the names as if they were all her native language. “I’ve tried and tried to correct him, but he’ll never change,” she said resignedly, and took another drag. “But you don’t know Rappaccini, do you? Lucky you. So tell me what you think of Beau.”
I mulled over several possible answers, gave her one that seemed inarguable.
“He strikes me as a very good trainer.”
“He’s the best anywhere. Period.” As I was to learn, the superlatives in Salina’s vocabulary did not exist in degrees. “The riverboat ride with Ruby – do you realize she’s the only dolphin in the world that performs on free-release? Outside of the military, of course.” She scowled. “Nobody else can do it. Only Beau.”
“Does she ever take off?”
“She did, once. Got out when part of the fence collapsed during a storm.”
“What happened?”
“Beau was mortified, of course. We all were. But Ruby turned up a few hours later at a nearby marina, begging handouts from the fishermen. Beau brought her back, she swam right alongside his boat. That’s all in my book, Please, Mr. Porpoise! I gave you a copy, didn’t I?”
I confirmed that she had, but I never told her what I thought of it: a self-indulgence only someone like Salina could afford. Published by a vanity press, the book was a narrated album of her children’s romps with the dolphins during a family vacation the year before. Any informative content seemed purely incidental.
“Why does she come back?”
Salina stared at me as if I’d asked another stupid question. In the shadows, her eyes stood out very white against her bronze skin. The smoke from her cigarette formed an odd vortex that lingered for a moment before dissipating in the room’s random turbulence. She took a long drag, letting the words out with the smoke.
“She loves him. They all do. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. He’s damn good to them, and they know it. There are other trainers out there who are…” She stopped, as if she found the idea of someone mistreating those animals too ghastly to contemplate. “You have no idea. They choose us, you know,” she continued. “They have their favorites. Ruby and Fergus, my youngest, of course. She’s so gentle with him it’s like she’s his mother! Star picked Colleen, my nine-year-old. He loves to tease her by jumping over her when she’s in the water. You’ll have to get a picture of that. Saki – he pines for Nikki, my teenager, but she’s got a crush on Beau.”
“And you?”
She was quiet a moment. “Bimbo. Have you noticed? There’s not a scratch on him. A real gentleman. Protective. Good with the children. Very strong, yet gentle.”
“Will one of them pick me?”
She got a wry grin. “If you hang around long enough, certainly.”
Salina, Beau, Hank and Star in the odd quiet moment at the dolphin show. As I was to learn, such moments were fleeting and infrequent.
Chapter 3:
“Nobody has problems with marijuana!”
– Elliot Gould, Rolling Stone interview circa 1972
Part 1: Among Brothers… and Sisters
Back at New College, my friends were only too happy to celebrate my good fortune with a joint. “Working with dolphins and getting credit for it! Zack, you lucky dog,” Larry “Hazy” Hazelton chuckled, rolling the doobie with a tight, professional twist. He lit up and a billow of pot smoke, so different from the acrid smoke of Salina’s cigarettes, glowed in the backlight washing over his bony shoulders and long blond hair. Hazy toked again, leaned back against the balcony’s sliding glass door and passed the joint to his roommate.
Gilbert Dorfman glanced up uncertainly from “Introductory Russian.”
“Nyet spasisbo, bretats, U myenya dlya izuchyeiya,” he begged off.
Hazy gently twisted his arm. “Boris Badenov say, ‘Toke now! Study later.’”
“Ow! Torture! Well, if you’re going to be that way about it…” Gilbert took a couple of shallow tokes, exhaled quickly and handed me the joint. I took a deep hit and held it, then passed the joint to Terry Newton, who went by the nickname “Tuna.”
“Gilbert, why on earth are you studying Russian?” Tuna asked. “It’s supposed to be the most difficult language in the world! Wouldn’t Spanish or French be more useful?”
“Yeah, it’s real hard.” Gilbert sighed, closed the textbook and tossed it into a corner. “I figure we’ll all be speaking it some day, so I might as well get a head start.”
Hazy turned his attention to some a large piece of poster board, on which he had been drafting a schematic of the Kabalistic Tree of Life, and picked up a pencil and straightedge. “How did you manage it?” he asked, connecting Cochma with Nizah through Chesed.
“Manage what?” I croaked, trying to hold another hit.
“This dolphin gig!”
“Actually, I didn’t do anything. You know that student art show a couple of weeks ago? I’d entered a few of my photos in it. I guess this woman, Salina, who’s writing a book about the dolphins in the park, was shopping for a photographer. She saw my work and asked Professor Shartar whose it was. The next thing I knew, we were on our way to Florida Funland!”
“Amazing,” Tuna said.
“Definitely synchronicity,” Gilbert added.
We were pretty tight, the four of us, and each knew his role: Terry the Philosopher, Gilbert the Clown, Hazy the Mystic and me, the Mad Artist. Or was I the Mad Scientist? The fact that I suck at math would eventually answer that question, but at the time I wasn’t sure. Things could have gone either way.
No, really, they could have.
Tuna threaded up Dave Mason’s album Alone Together on his reel-to-reel tape deck and we listened and toked and rapped for a while before Gilbert put down his textbook and stood up, a little unsteadily. “Wow, I need some air,” he said, sliding open the glass door and stepping out onto the dorm room’s balcony. A moment later he called to us. “Hey guys, check this out!”
The dorm’s balcony overlooked Palm Court, a large, tree-lined courtyard that was the site of many excellent parties. Along the red-tiled walkway that stretched north toward the student center and classrooms, a couple of the sisters were strolling toward us. The one on the left was braless under her tie-dyed T-shirt, her shorts cut practically to the crotch. The one on the right wore a long denim dress, but the sleeveless vest barely covering her breasts more than compensated.
A jetliner rumbled low overhead, descending for a landing at the nearby Sarasota-Bradenton Airport. The sister on the right flung open her vest and flashed her tits at the aircraft in a gesture of civil disobedience. Many complaints lodged by commercial airline pilots had put an end to nude sunbathing by the pool and on the dormitory rooftops.
A coalition of the sisters had argued, with great merit I thought, that they should not have to pay for the institutionalized societal sexism which caused male chauvinist pig private pilots to circle the campus ogling them from small planes, to the endangerment of commercial air traffic; but they had lost, and by the time I’d processed all that the jet was on the runway and the sister had covered her tits again.
We nevertheless applauded her brazen audacity. She looked up at us, waved, and then flashed us.
“You want to come up?” Gilbert yelled. “We’ve got some great pot!”
“No thanks, we just scored some hash,” the tie-dyed sister said as they disappeared around the corner of the building.
“Who are they?” Tuna asked, practically falling over the railing as he tried to follow them.
“The exhibitionist is named Jeanie, I think,” Hazy answered, the joint in his hand forgotten. “The other one is Sallie something. It doesn’t matter, they’re both spoken for.”
“Shit,” Gilbert muttered. “And she had such nice tits, too.”
We all knew what he meant. Most of the sisters at New College were liberated young women who would flash their tits at jet pilots or dive into bed with any guy who caught their fancy; there just weren’t enough of them. The campus male-female ratio at that time was more than two to one, and our class, considered a marked improvement over the college’s first four years, consisted of 122 men, 63 women.
So for a school where the administration looked the other way when couples dumped their assigned roommates and shacked-up, where the mores were looser than cheap bell bottoms and drugs flowed like water, it could be very difficult to get laid if you were a guy at New College, particularly if, like me, you had no social skills whatsoever.
I was not a virgin only by default. At the end of my freshman year, a junior exchange student named Lorraine had taken mercy on me. Staggering drunk, she had dragged me from a late showing of Antonioni’s interminable bourgeois-misery epic "L’Eclipse" back to my frigid dorm room, where, on a bed so narrow two snakes would have had trouble making it, we had copulated furtively and rather more to her satisfaction than mine, although I was extremely grateful, having just turned 19, that she had lifted the curse from me.
Lorraine flattered me afterward by saying she hadn’t realized I was a virgin; that made me grateful for my liberal parents’ sex-education talks. She insisted on staggering back to her own room under her own power, leaving me lying on the bed, wondering what all the fuss was about and if it ever got any better.
Like an idiot absorbed in whatever it was I thought I was doing at the time, I ignored her for almost two weeks, until I realized she actually did like me – I think one of her friends confessed – whereupon I snuck over to her room one morning and found her lounging in bed.
That was rather better.
Two days later she was gone, back to her husband and child in the Midwest. She asked me not to write, so I didn’t. I thought about her, but not with longing. I was a realist. I had liked Lorraine, I had been grateful to Lorraine, but whatever love was, that wasn’t it.
Not that love was what I was looking for, any more than Hazy or Gil or Tuna or most of the other guys on campus. It just seemed ironic that at the height of “free love and flower power,” and on a campus where anything went, sex was a problem acutely felt by many of us guys. As we finished the joint we rapped about our conquests and losses, who was getting what with whom how often, where, on what drugs and in what position (as if we knew), and what our prospects or lack of same were, until Hazy announced he had terminal cotton mouth.
“Same here,” said Gil, opening a mini-fridge and pulling out a large bottle of turbid brown liquid. Hazy brought four thrift-store drinking vessels and set them down before Gil, who poured and handed me a brimming Ball Mason jar.
“What is this?” I asked, sniffing it cautiously.
“Just organic apple cider,” Gil said reassuringly, “straight up.”
“Unfiltered,” Hazy added. “Unadulterated.”
“Wow,” I said, “that’s really… cosmic! This cider is exactly the same color as the water at Florida Funland!”
We pondered that for a minute, stunned by the synchronicity of it all.
“Almost as murky, too,” I added.
“I love dolphins,” Gilbert suddenly announced. “They always look so happy! And they’re so smart! Aren’t they supposed to be more intelligent than we are? Do they talk to you?”
“Not yet,” I said, overwhelmed by his enthusiasm.
“What did you say that woman’s name was? Salina something?” Hazy asked, contemplating the path from Yesod to Hod along Resch.
“O’Rourke. Salina O’Rourke. From somewhere in New York,” I added, giggling.
“I think she has a relative on campus,” Tuna added.
“Who?” Gil, ever hopeful, asked.
“Leo Baer. In the Environmental Studies Program. Not your type.”
“Oh.” Disappointed, Gil returned to his textbook.
“Which reminds me,” I said, checking to make sure that my legs were underneath me before I stood up, “I need to go see Professor Dyne.”
“You’re not going Nat-Sci on us, are you?” Hazy asked.
“Nah. But if I’m going to be shooting pictures of dolphins, I might as well try and get some credit for it, and Wilbur’s the guy to give it to me.”
Part II: Supplicating the Gods of Science
“So. What exactly do you want to do with these dolphins, Zack?”
Everybody – even liberal arts majors – acknowledged that Wilbur Dyne, B.S., M.S., someday-PhD., was one of the coolest profs anywhere. He was young, single, bearded and hip. He was rumored to have the largest collection of underground comix on campus, and he could, if he chose, sprinkle his conversations with allusions to his more-than-passing familiarity with various obscure botanical psychotropics. His doctoral thesis, which had been perilously close to completion for the past several years, was to be the first-ever ecological survey of Sarasota Bay’s benthic organisms.
I considered his question carefully. Salina’s invitation was artistic – “Illustrate my book” – and I could, if I wanted to, approach it from that angle. But I didn’t want to stop there. Some-thing else was tugging at me.