The wind was fierce at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. I wasn’t sure what I expected. Perhaps a quiet calm, a soft breeze that looped around binoculars and played with unwaxed sideburns. Like when a castaway rests on his life raft, arms and legs akimbo. But this ocean wind tore my corneas.
An overweight man stood beside me in full yellow raincoat regalia, dressed head to toe like an unfashionable Paddington bear. His wife was with him, identically dressed, her binoculars pinned to her eyeballs and scuttling from one side of the boat to the other. The two of them approached me before we boarded, waving their printed tickets and asking “are you sure? We booked Orca Watch, not Whale-Some Tours” until my hundred yeses placated them. The couple seemed to find excitement in every empty wave, pointing there then here then back again.
I didn’t expect the ocean to look so desolate. The promised myriad of dolphins and humpbacks were nowhere, replaced by blank undulating water. If I allowed myself to, I could dream an open eye peering back, the iridescent iris of a giant squid waiting to rear its tentacles round our ship.
“Look! An albatross!”
Everyone’s binoculars swivelled to where the finger pointed.
“Percy, that’s a seagull.”
I sat down and the collected saltwater in the pool of the plastic seat soaked into my jeans. The other whale watchers lined the edges of the ship, gripping the metal bars with one hand and their hats in the other, clinging hard to prevent the loss of possessions or bodies. It was still early April and every passenger except me was middle-aged and retired, set loose from life’s responsibilities of children or work to allow for a whale watching tour on a Tuesday morning.
This was my first tour despite living in Vancouver my entire twenty-five years. When I booked my ticket, I had expected the tourists, the yellow overcoats, the boom of the loudspeaker as the tour guide suggested looking for the crest of a dorsal fin or the unmistakable slap of a humpback tail. But I hadn’t expected emptiness.
My former co-worker was the one who suggested going. She was being kind, sending me a text just an hour after I was escorted out of the office. Everyone else didn’t bother.
The text included suggestions other than booking a whale watching tour. Go out of province. Maybe Calgary – it’s the sunniest city in Canada. Treat yourself to some Richmond egg tarts or pineapple buns, the kind of pastries that soak the paper bag with so much grease you worry how much grease there’s left for your mouth. Try to rekindle old passions – what were my passions anyway? I hadn’t texted her back one week later as I sat on a swaying boat, tasting salt.
I plucked at my overgrown cuticles and clenched and unclenched my abdomen with the shifting vessel. The man in the yellow jacket rose onto his toes, pushing his belly against the boat’s metal. How did he get here, a place where you could find the time on a weekday morning to relinquish obligations, dole out the change for a boat ride with nonguaranteed returns of humpbacks bursting from ocean depths? Perhaps he was a successful investor. A tech giant. A clothing company CEO who exclusively made products for women.
At my office – my former office – everyone ventured into one initiative or another. Some were successful and some weren’t, but they all carried the instinct of sniffing out opportunities in a metropolis where opportunities seemed too few and too many. Maybe that was why.
I shook my head. The sudden involuntary reaction made my stomach turn over itself and my ears burned when I saw a woman give me a double take. Maybe I was too rude to Gregory during lunch that time two months ago. He was reheating mackerel in the microwave, infusing the office with an odor the city already possessed and didn’t require in a cubicle.
But the worst part was they did tell me why. HR booked a boardroom, skittered onto my calendar with an innocuous invitation. I should have known.
As I sat on the cold plastic seat, I stared at my fingers and wondered when my knuckles became so pronounced. When my skin became so dry that cracks emerged, tiny slivers of blood marking a maze across the back of my hand.
“Oh my god, there’s some! I see them.”
An arm sleeved in plastic yellow arced high like a beacon across the grey filter of the ocean. Around her, the rest of the passengers leaned against the rails, pitching binoculars to their eyes.
I felt the squelch of my jeans as I rose from my seat. Everyone stood shoulder to shoulder with the length of the boat. Small gasps were released, chatter rose then fell then rose again. I wandered to the furthest edge, felt the wind claw at my throat, eyed the opaque and clear waters lapping the hull, and looked up.
The ocean unfurled as a sleek body torpedoed through the surface waves. I registered more movement behind the first, the rest of the dolphins flickering in and out from view.
“Okay folks, looks like there’s a pod of ‘em dolphins out there on the port side. Gerry, can we move closer?”
Maneuvering alongside the dolphin pod, the creatures didn’t shy from our vessel. They burst from the depths one after another in rapid succession, ignoring the thrum of our engine, the chatter of human excitement. Dorsal fins glistened, and someone shouted, “are they going to spin?” As I assessed the curve of their stomachs, the graceful bend from their beak to their tail, my eyes rose from the end of their group and saw the tip of what looked like a black dorsal.
My former supervisor was a woman with deep-set eyes, hair dark as oil. She had watched as I took my seat, flanked by a man in a ginger suit and a woman in a seafoam pantsuit. Her hands folded in front of her chest, elbows resting on the table, drawing creases against her blouse and brow. The first words out of her mouth were “thank you”. And the rest was air.
Behind the pod and drawing near, black fins carved the surface of the water with unnerving uniformity. They cut clean lines, simultaneously breaking waves and coasting currents. Others noticed, and soon our tour guide echoed their observations over the loudspeaker.
“Five! Boy, we sure got lucky today. Keep your eyes wide open, everyone. It isn’t every day we get to see dolphins and orcas at the same time.”
She asked me if I would like a reference letter. It wasn’t the least she could do, but it was all she could offer. The man in the ginger suit passed me a sheet and I signed where he pointed. I didn’t bother reading the fine print underneath the line of my signature even though I always did. I spent hours, days underneath a nightlamp reading that fine print, referencing my textbooks, asking my former co-workers. Weeks were etched into my skin, and I think she must have seen it because she caught my eye, held it until I looked away, and retrieved the pen into her enclosed palms.
The boat was getting rowdy. Cameras were jostled, voices rose as they clambered for the best shot. I remained where I was, clenching the handrail, and watched as the black dorsal fins began to rearrange themselves. A formation, militaristically and perfectly natural.
If the dolphins were aware of the oncoming orcas before, they were now frantic. Flurries of fins, saltwater sprays; I imagined frenetic clicking as the dolphins pleaded with each other to move. Every second, another dolphin would leap, leaving the ocean behind and gasping for air until they plunged back.
“I can’t watch this. It’s hard enough on those documentaries.” The yellow raincoat man turned away to take a few steps to the seats.
His wife caught his arm and hooked it with her elbow. “We paid 250 bucks for this.”
When I stepped into a waiting taxi, I looked up at my former workplace. The windows of the building reflected sunlight, and I couldn’t see a single face, but I knew. A cardboard box sat in my lap. A container of blue pens, a yellow notepad, one three-ring binder, a bottle of hand sanitizer that was technically company property, a few hair elastics, my unopened lunch bag, and a withered plant I bought my first week. When the taxi stopped in front of my apartment building, I went first to the garbage bins and then to my bed.
At the edge of the pod, a dolphin flicked its tail and arced across the rippling waters, its slender nose directing the ascent. It was either unlucky or slow. Perhaps both. In seconds, the body was enveloped by a wide black and white mouth. We were too far to see teeth, but I felt the clutch of their weight, imagined the strength of the incisors as they caught flesh.
Activity erupted among the pod. Sympathy cries came from our audience, interweaving with exclamations of awe. I watched the orca hold its prey, relishing its triumph. I wondered if the dolphin was still half conscious, marvelling at how precisely it had leapt into waiting jaws.
We watched until the remains sank to the bottom of the Pacific. Watched until the orcas were sated, until the ocean faded from deep darkness to algae green, our tour guide announcing our return. When the boat docked, the still planks beneath my feet became an unbalanced threat to my equilibrium, the air stiff against my swaying body.