Modern Ghost Story; Dolphin and Fish
Early December Dispatch
Greetings, Pilgrims!
I’ve been really happy with the growth of Intermittent Signal, particularly considering its eclectic mix, lack of political affirmation, and frequent difficulty. Thank you for reading, or when you will, skimming. And, to repeat myself, few readers will like everything on the menu. That’s ok!
We have only three states left. West Virginia, Nebraska, Rhode Island, where are you? At last count, we are up to 77 countries. Please share! It’s free!
I have much more to say about American politics, but perhaps not now. Surely, you’ve heard enough? As much as I love my prose and long to drown in the deep pools of my own thought, asking you to read still more of me on the history of and prospects for the American project is starting to seem downright impolite. Too soon!
Even bracketing the fate of my republic, some big think pieces are en route, and some guests have promised brilliant texts, though they may have detoured. (You know who you are!) For now, however, I have a few odd stories, some discrete pieces written by way of response. Tapas. Bar food. Here’s the first course.
Modern Ghost Story
Writing hard is perilous. Lines blur, fade, finally disappear among memories, thoughts, hopes, fears, dreams, prayers. It gets worse. The lines we maintain, to get through the day if nothing else, falter. I need lines between mind or even spirit and body, between I and thou, between I, das ich, and the world without, and worse, the world within. I need to push down, order, try to ignore the freezing dark water I know to be swirling through channels in the ice, hidden by snow that won’t support my weight. Exhausted on an endless glacier, I once fell into a crevasse, caught myself, don’t think I was roped, think not . . . another age would say the devil takes advantage of the foolish and the weak. And who hasn’t been foolish and weak? But we don’t believe in devils.
Early winter coming on, long day, alone again in the mountains, not even dogs, my back hurts. Everything hurts. The line between mind and body gone. A little therapeutic cooking, drinking, putting the ghosts to bed, listening to alt country music on YouTube. I scroll down to comments, because I am stupid, the comments are always about lost loved ones and this was their song, and suddenly there is talk of a child, a young girl, so “sweet,” and “gone too soon,” and I’m too far gone to protect myself so I click, and now I’m watching some sort of video suicide note, an angelic little girl saying “it’s for the best” and . . .
I lose it. What the fuck? I’m sobbing, may have screamed, I am – there? With her? With her parents? With our failures as a society? (Too easy, what the comments are idiotic, distract yourself by pointing out stupidity, you are so smart, how noble, how pathetic.) With my failures as a father? With God? Staring at Satan? Absolutely powerless, and what am I supposed to do with this? I wanted violence, to hit something, hard. Rage. Weeks later, drafting this, I’m slide back into it, the fearful imaginary, weeping a little. I’m writing in public and it’s modestly embarrassing, but screw it. Then, I was deeper in, couldn’t breathe, my chest tightened, panic.
I shut it down. Got up, walked it off, shook hard like one of my dogs. You have to want to want to live. Horror notwithstanding.
Later, off the mountain and back in society, I finally get a new phone. My cloud account was years old, stalled, because I’m a deadbeat inhabitant of the new dispensation. Shoot me if I don’t channel all “my” data, your raw material, to your server. You got your problems, I got mine. So, I find myself unable to transfer the old phone from “the cloud” (as if your company were nature) onto the new device. Therefore, I am manually going through an old address book.
More than a few of my “contacts” are dead. Hard to contact. Sobering. Others were business contacts, this or that at this or that juncture, and clearly no longer relevant. No problem, just don’t need to connect. Sounds cold, doesn’t it? Is cold, I guess. I’m cold. C’est la vie, perhaps, but . . .
And then comes a name I do not recognize at all. A woman. No messages, and check email, various accounts. Not in an email account. It would be creepy to email and say whooooo, whooooo are you, like an elf from the ‘70s. I google, and . . . the dead child’s digital ghost arises.
I didn’t know the child, couldn’t have known her. It’s just a coincidence, the contact on my phone must be somebody with the same name I met at conference or in a bar, years ago, never followed up. No bells tolling.
Just silence. And a child who did not have the wherewithal to defend her . . . self. She was a soap bubble in a breeze, beautiful while it lasted. Pity. But, you know, bullies. Horrible. But we don’t believe in devils.
Dolphin and Fish
Some years ago, I stayed at a famous resort in the Pacific. Elizabeth Regina, Elton John, and countless other demigods have slept there, so if you are somewhat wealthy maybe you could sleep there, too, and some little bit of the magic might rub off? Japanese couples come to plight their troth, beautifully, photogenically, and at great expense.
Unsurprisingly, the resort features an artificial lagoon among its buildings, with dolphins, beautiful animals, gliding through the water next to the sidewalk on the way to the other bar. At night you can hear them blowing. Although there are dolphins in the Pacific a hundred yards away, the dolphins in the resort lagoon are Atlantic bottlenose. You’ve seen them, at least pictures. Think Sea World, or, if you are old enough, “Flipper.” Sleek muscle wrapped in blue gray, massive brains, language skills . . . Survival, meaning mostly hunting for fish, does not seem to take much of their time. Their days consist of lots of recreational swimming, sex, and games, maybe poetry. Magnificent animals.
Marooned in a Pacific resort, these dolphins were far from their ancestral home: their concrete “lagoon” was thousands of miles of open ocean and the entire North American continent away from bottlenose habitat off the Atlantic seaboard. On Florida’s Forgotten Coast, where dolphins are thick, I’ve kayaked among them, my feet or paddle occasionally bumping their hard bodies. Seen them court. They range in weight from a few hundred pounds to maybe 15 hundred . . . female bellies glow red in the heat of amorous chase. Out on the ocean, in the thick of the amorous thrash of animals all more than me, it ought to have been scary, now that I think about it, but I was entranced and they evidently meant no harm to the awkward (charming?) human.
A large male dolphin that I’ll call Marcus (not his real name) lived in the lagoon. A thousand pounds of swimmer. One day, a trainer approached, and asked, “Marcus, do you want a fish?”
Marcus thought to himself, “Fish? What the hell do you know about fish? About swimming? About water, the soul of our planet? Who are you to even ask if I want a fish?”
To make his point, Marcus began to swim, faster and faster, around the edge of the lagoon. Then upside down. Then he leapt clear of the water, somersaults, twists, combinations that the human eye struggled to follow.
The trainer, a surprisingly literary guy, said to himself: “Marcus, you are a prince among small cetaceans. If, perhaps, a hostage, a barbarian in the safekeeping of the Empire.”
Marcus stood on his tail. He swam with his tail in the air. He splashed the trainer. He held himself at eye level. Finally, Marcus dove to the bottom of the lagoon and retrieved a contact lens lost by one of yesterday’s brides, invisible to all others, and too small for a human hand, much less a dolphin’s snout, to grasp in the swirling water, but he did it nonetheless.
That’s really magnificent, thought the trainer.
“So, Marcus,” the trainer said, “do you want a fish?”
Enjoy the season.
Safe travels.
— David A. Westbrook
"A large male dolphin that I’ll call Marcus (not his real name) lived in the lagoon."
Nicely observed.