No Singing Where You're Going
For the week leading up to Halloween, Iâm writing a different scary short story every night, and posting it here. This is the fourth in the series.
The big breakthrough happened on Day 217. Roberta was the first to verbalize. âHere. Here.â Allie and Jamel stopped in their tracks, unsure that theyâd heard what they thought they heard, and turned to the speakers at the end of the tank. There was some static and then an emphatic âHere! Here!â Digitized as it was through the computerâs interpretation, but clear as day. There was no mistaking it.
Allie turned to the observation deck and shouted âPeter, turn down the music and turn up the transmitters! Do we know who it was?â Earth Angel faded out mid-chorus and Peter replied on the intercom âThat would be Roberta. Sheâs doing all the talking.â
Allie walked to the edge of the tank and found Robertaâs dorsal fin cutting across the surface alongside Kitâs -- both distinct. Jamel joined her side and watched the dolphins circle the tank. âCâmon say it again,â Allie whispered. And then she had an idea. âPeter, turn the music back up slowly.â As soon as Earth Angel creeped back onto the speakers, Roberta chimed in again âHere! Here! Here!â And another voice, marked with a distinctly different tenor, joined âHere!â
âAnd thatâs Kit, of course.â Peter offered through the intercom.
âMan, they really love doo-wop donât they,â Jamel laughed. âOkay, theyâre talking. Away we go.â
The dolphinsâ enthusiastic response to doo-wop music -- The Platters, The Capris, The Marcels -- was evident early on in the verbalization trials, and Allie had long suspected it would be the thing that sparked that big breakthrough. Some seven months later, it did.
There had been so many fits and starts, wrong turns, and detours. But through round-the-clock training and discipline -- studying the dolphinsâ behavior and speech patterns, their interplay, analyzing decades of collected data -- they had built the systems and found their way here. They had successfully begun to translate the dolphinsâ whistles, burst-pulsed sounds, and clicks into English in real time. Inter-species communication.
In a matter of days Doll and Huck joined in the âHere!â party. âHere!â in this case, the crew came to understand as positive affirmation. Here, as in, this moment, whatâs happening right now in the present, is good. We want this to continue. âHereâ should keep happening. Keep playing the doo-wop music. Keep feeding us, keep playing with us. âHereâ was also the key to everything that came after. From there, Peter, Jamel, and Allie could begin mapping out a structure for more translation. More whistles, sounds, and clicks -- and the variations of each within -- to create more words: dive, glide, up, eat, more, stop, agree, push, go, we, you, I. And the more varied their vocabularies got -- or more accurately, the deeper the crewâs understanding of the dolphinsâ already rich vocabularies grew -- the closer they came to constructing sentences. And then, ultimately, sentences to describe circumstances outside of whatever the dolphins were immediately observing or feeling. Sentences of representation. The holy grail.
âWe go, we go, we go.â Kit was leading the group in short bursts and darts zigzagging the tank while Jamel took notes. It had been four months since the first âHereâ and now they were openly conversing. âKeep going, keep goingâ Jamel cheered them on, and his words were processed by interceptors, transmitted in clicks and whistles beneath the surface. âAnd slower,â Jamel instructed, and the dolphins slowed down. âAnd separate,â and the 4 dolphins broke formation. Beneath the platform, Allie observed them through the glass. Doll glided by her, and that was when the very first question came.
Allieâs heart stopped, as she watched Doll swim laps around the tankâs diameter. Peter radioed to her, âUhhh I think sheâs talking to you, Allie.â
Allie cleared her throat and spoke into the small mic at her collar. âMy name is Allie. Iâm human. Iâm a mammal like you.â
Doll circled the tank again, and approached her. âYou are here.â
Allie puzzled over that momentarily, then responded, âYes, I am here.â
The second question. Allie felt incredible pressure to give the correct answer, whatever the correct answer was. She could hear The Closer You Are by the Channels playing above her. âYou stay here. Right here with me.â
The third question. Allie wasnât sure how to respond. And that face, circling the tank, that perpetual dolphin smile, started to get to her. Before Allie could respond, Doll asked a fourth question.
âYou keep me. When do you let me go?â
They were off script now, and Allie chose her words carefully. âYou and Kit and Roberta and Huck stay here with me, Jamel, and Peter. We all stay here together. Here.â Doll did 3 more laps without speaking, locking eyes with Allie each time she passed her, and then she joined Huck at the opposite end. Question and answer time was over.
Over the following weeks, there were other incidents like this. The usual childlike banter between the crew and the dolphins were peppered with odd, and only vaguely coherent phrases and sentences that could be interpreted any number of ways. The most notable of these happened when Kit and Huck took to mimicking lyrics from I Only Have Eyes For You -- one of the dolphinsâ longtime favorites.
âWhat is the sound?â Kit asked Jamel.
âThis is a song,â Jamel told him. âThis is when humans sing.â
âDo you sing?â Huck asked.
âYou are here and so am I.â Huck replied, and Kit parroted. âYou are here and so am I. I only have eyes. I only have eyes.â
âYou like this song.â Jamel noted. âI like this song, too.â
âWhere are you going?â Kit asked.
âNowhere. Iâm here with you. Or as you and The Flamingos would say, âYou are here and so am I.ââ
âI only have eyes. Thereâs no singing where youâre going. I only have eyes.â Kit replied.
Jamel stopped and watched Kitâs dorsal fin cut waves through the water. The speakers behind him announced once more, âI only have eyes. Thereâs no singing where youâre going. No singing where youâre going.â
âWhere am I going?â Jamel asked.
âYou are here and so am I,â Huck replied.
âWhere are we going?â Allie asked from below.
âHere. Here. Here. Here. Here.â Doll replied.
The next morning, Allie arrived at the lab to find several police cars and ambulances. Jamel intercepted her as she stepped out of her car. He had found Peter when he got in that morning. They wouldnât know the cause of death for at least a few days, but it was clear Peter had suffered some sort of aneurysm during his night shift. When Jamel found him, he was wearing headphones, slumped over on his desk in the observation deck in a pool of blood. Allie started to feel sick. Jamel urged her to go home, but she insisted on reviewing the tapes from the night before. She had to.
They spent hours reviewing the audio tapes. For the most part they were perfectly benign. At some point during the night, coinciding with Peter playing âDevil or Angelâ by Bobby Vee, there had been a particularly frenzied round of âHere, here, hereâ chants, lasting about 20 minutes. In and of itself, that was nothing unusual. But when they separated the audio by channels, they noticed Roberta had been entirely silent during all of it. She didnât emit a single âHere.â So they watched the video coinciding with this chunk of time. Roberta could be seen near the bottom of the tank, distant from the other three who were frantically splashing and here-ing. She moved very little, tossing back and forth in strange and unpredictable rhythms. Neither Allie or Jamel could remember ever seeing her behave that way.
As they were walking out, Dollâs voice came over the speakers. âWhy is Peter so sad?â
Jamel walked over to the tank. âPeterâs gone. He left us. Heâs not here anymore.â
Doll flapped her tail, dove, and rose again. âWhere?â
âHeâs just gone. Iâm sorry.â
âWhen do we go?â This voice was Robertaâs. âYou keep us. When do we go?â
And with that Allie lost it. âYou stay here. HERE! I told you. Youâre staying here. Stop fucking asking me that. Youâre staying here.â
There was silence for a little while, and then Robertaâs voice again, âThereâs no singing where Peter is. I only have eyes for you. I only have eyes. Thereâs no singing where youâre going.â
At some point Allie managed to fall asleep that night, and when she did she dreamt. In her dream she was adrift at sea, all alone, naked, swimming through the waves. She looked up at the sun and the clouds melting in wisps around it and then something pulled her under the surface. Down, down, pulling her, digging its claws into the flesh of her legs, pulling her toward something ancient, primitive, prehistoric. Something that had been waiting for her, for everyone, for a very long time. And Peter was there, of course, and so were many others, and she understood in that moment, in the darkness and the depth, that she had gotten something very wrong. She had severely miscalculated something important. Something simple. Something that would elude her from the second she woke up, but would always be there, nagging, pulling her closer toward itself, taunting her, punishing her for something sheâd never understand.
And then she woke up. Here.