Buck’s vindictive howls pursued them to the oxidized-copper doors of the main entrance.
It was early morning and the aquarium was uncrowded. Liquefactious sounds ran up and down the smooth walls, child voices ricocheted from the ceiling. Holding Io by the hand, Alison wandered through the interior twilight, past tanks of sea horses, scorpion fish, African tilapia. Pausing before an endlessly gyrating school of salmon, she saw that some of the fish were eyeless, the sockets empty and perfectly cleaned. The blind fish swam with the rest, staying in line, turning with the school.
Io appeared not to notice them.
In the next hall, Alison halted her daughter before each tank, reading from the lighted presentation the name of the animal contained, its habitat and Latin name. The child regarded all with gravity.
At the end of the east wing was a room brighter than the rest; it was the room in which porpoises lived in tanks that were open to the sky. As Alison entered it, she experienced a curiously pleasant sensation.
“Look,” she said to Io. “Dolphins.”
“Dolphins?”
They walked up to the glass of the largest tank; its lower area was fouled with small handprints. Within, a solitary blue-gray beast was rounding furiously, describing gorgeous curves with figure eights, skimming the walls at half an inch’s distance. Alison’s mouth opened in awe.
“An Atlantic Dolphin,” she told Io in a soft, reverential voice. “From the Atlantic Ocean. On the other side of America. Where Providence is.”
“And Grandpa,” Io said.
“And Grandpa is in Providence too.”
For the space of several seconds, the dream feeling returned to her with an intensity that took her breath away. There had been some loving presence in it and a discovery.
She stared into the tank until the light that filtered through the churning water began to suggest the numinous. Io, perceiving that her mother was not about to move on, retraced her steps toward the halls through which they had come, and commenced seeing the fish over again. Whenever an aquarium-goer smiled at her she looked away in terror.
Alison stood transfixed, trying to force recall. It had been something special, something important. But silly — as with dreams. She found herself laughing and then, in the next moment, numb with loss as the dream’s sense faded. Her heart was racing with the drug.
God, she thought, it’s all just flashes and fits. We’re just out here in this shit.
With sudden horror she realized at once that there had been another part of the dream and that it involved the fact that she and Io were just out there and that this was not a dream from which one awakened. Because one was, after all.
She turned anxiously to look for Io and saw the child several galleries back, standing in front of the tank where the blind fish were.
The dream had been about getting out of it, trying to come in and make it stop. In the end, when it was most terrible, she had been mercifully carried into a presence before which things had been resolved. The memory of that resolution made her want to weep.
Her eye fell on the animal in the tank. She followed its flights and charges with fascination.
There had been some sort of communication, with or without words.
A trained scientist, Alison loved logic above all else; it was her only important pleasure. If the part about one being out there was true — and it was — what then about the resolution? It seemed to her; as she watched the porpoise, that even dreamed things must have their origin in a kind of truth, that no level of the mind was capable of utterly unfounded construction. Even hallucinations — phenomena with which Alison had become drearily familiar — needed their origins in the empirically verifiable — a cast of light, a sound on the wind. Somehow, she thought, somewhere in the universe, the resolving presence must exist.
Her thoughts raced, and she licked her lips to cool the sere dryness cracking them. Her heart gave a desperate leap.
“Was it you?” she asked the porpoise.
“Yes,” she heard him say. “Yes, it was.”
Alison burst into tears. When she had finished sobbing, she took a Kleenex from her bag, wiped her eyes and leaned against the cool marble beside the tank.
Prepsychosis. Disorders of thought. Failure to abstract.
“This is ridiculous,” she said.
From deep within, from the dreaming place, sounded a voice.
“You’re here,” the porpoise told her. “That’s what matters now.”
Nothing in the creature’s manner suggested communication or even the faintest sentience. But human attitudes of engagement, Alison reminded herself, were not to be expected. To expect them was anthropocentrism — a limiting, reactionary position like ethnocentrism or sexism.
“It’s very hard for me,” she told the porpoise. “I can’t communicate well at the best of times. And an aquarium situation is pretty weird.” At a loss for further words, Alison fell back on indignation. “It must be awful for you.”
“It’s somewhat weird,” she understood the porpoise to say. “I wouldn’t call it awful.”
Alison trembled.
“But … how can it not be awful? A conscious mind shut up in a tank with stupid people staring at you? Not,” she hastened to add, “that I think I’m any better. But the way you’re stuck in here with these slimy, repulsive fish.”
“I don’t find fish slimy and repulsive,” the porpoise told her.
Mortified, Alison began to stammer an apology, but the creature cut her off. “The only fish I see are the ones they feed me. It’s people I see all day. I wonder if you can realize how dry you all are.”
“Good Lord!” She moved closer to the tank. “You must hate us.”
She became aware of laughter.
“I don’t hate.”
Alison’s pleasure at receiving this information was tempered by a political anxiety. The beast’s complacency suggested something objectionable; the suspicion clouded her mind that her interlocutor might be a mere Aquarium Porpoise, a deracinated stooge, an Uncle—
The laughter sounded again.
“I’m sorry,” Alison said. “My head is full of such shit.”
“Our condition is profoundly different from yours. We don’t require the same things. Our souls are as different from yours as our bodies are.”
“I have the feeling,” Alison said, “that yours are better.”
“I think they are. But I’m a porpoise.”
The animal in the tank darted upward, torpedolike, toward the fog-colored surface, then plunged again in a column of spinning, bubbling foam.
“You called me here, didn’t you?” Alison asked. “You wanted me to come.”
“In a way.”
“Only in a way?”
“We communicated our presence here. A number of you might have responded. Personally, I’m satisfied that it was yourself.”
“Are you?” Alison cried joyfully. She was aware that her words echoed through the great room. “You see, I asked because I’ve been having these dreams. Odd things have been happening to me.” She paused thoughtfully. “Like I’ve been listening to the radio sometimes and I’ve heard these wild things — like just for a second. As though there’s been kind of a pattern. Was it you guys?”
“Some of the time. We have our ways.”
“Then,” she asked breathlessly, “why me?”
“Don’t you know why?” the beast asked softly.
“It must have been because you knew I would understand.”
There was no response.
“It must have been because you knew how much I hate the way things are with us. Because you knew I’d listen. Because I need something so much.”
“Yet,” the porpoise said sternly, “you made things this way. You thought you needed them the way they are.”