Chapter Fifty-Three
Doc woke up in the middle of the night for what he already knew would be the first of many sessions of aching, staring, and recriminating. The kind of moment when he almost regretted giving up cigarettes. But not really. You learn what you can’t live with and what you can’t live without. When they’re the same thing, it just makes it interesting. He stood up, slipped into swim trunks and stepped out of his bus, admiring the play of the full moon on the bay. He was parked by the gasoline pier outside the marina channel, which is as far south as you can park. He stepped down a few boulders, pulled on his mask and snorkel, and slid into the moonlit water.
The swim out to Cabo’s signature arch is only a mile or so, but Doc did it the hard way, going deep into the dark water, bashing his lungs, then bursting back to the surface. He couldn’t see the turquoise and gold in the dark, but he could feel the silver shimmer of moon on the mirrored black surface soothing him, his motion through the water wiping him clean.
Out past the end of the Cape he floated like driftwood, watching what the moon did to the spray of Pacific rollers thrashing through the stone arch, then swam under it and waded ashore into the sand-floored cave on the other side. He took off his trunks and wrung them out, shrugged himself dry like a dog, and lay down in the mouth of the cave to feel the surf pound the rocks and watch the stars blaze in the clear desert sky.
He dozed on the damp sand for a very short time because he wasn’t at all stiff when the noise snapped him awake. He came to his feet smoothly, scanning the quicksilver sea for a source of the sound. Then he heard it again, less than fifty yards away; the breathy detonation of a gray whale’s exhalation. The big beast right out there in the dark, sighing like a steam locomotive.
He looked away to the North, hoping to catch sight of the pod and when he turned back he felt the hair rise and tremble all the way down his back. He was staring straight out at an apparition that had no business being there, as bluntly surreal as a Magritte. A new stone tower rose out of the ocean where there hadn’t been one before, another dark column thrust up beside the other trailings of the Cape. Then slowly the column began to lean, then to fall into the water. A large Grey Whale had breached and was slipping back down into the water. He could see the flippers, make out the great eye. With no thought or pause, Doc plunged naked into the surf, wading out waist deep towards that obelisk of moonshined flesh. As the whale splashed back into the sea in ghostly slow motion, the sound absorbed into the roar of surf, Doc suddenly heard a static buzz very clearly in his head, like the hours of Adrian Cronauer’s AFRVN broadcasts he’d listened to, a snatch of yowling feedback, and a phantom voice singing, “And castles…made of stone…fall into the sea…and the wind…cries…Mary”. Then the neural broadcast switched off and the whale subsided into the troughs of jade-dark water. Doc could see him undulating North, moving as fast as a man could walk, breaking water, then slipping out of sight, shedding moonshine, then turning black as obsidian.
He stood transfixed, the foam frothing and tussling around his thighs and belly, frozen between a dark throbbing impulse to dive in and swim blindly after the whale, and the heavy urge to sink back down into sleep.