Fault Lines

          David sat alone in the lab, listening to the rising and lowering frequency that ebbed and flowed in intensity, at first sounding like the creaking door of a gothic mansion morphing into the sound of a chainsaw looking for a tree.  In between the doors and chainsaws were mixed pops and whistles that, to David’s knowledgeable ear, were the sounds of dolphin chatter.  David sat in silhouette against the illuminated blue of the viewing port.  On the other side of the window were two bottlenose dolphins, Scotty and Spray, who cruised by from time to time.  He leaned in closer to the port, the patterns of refracted light and shadow highlighting the contours of his face.

          David looked at his clipboard, covered with spreadsheets and pie charts and text highlighted in different neon colors.  Both his eyes and his ears watch the dolphins pass by the window once again.  The view is hypnotic, meditative and, as David realizes, distracting him from his work.  Breaking his trance, he looks down and then back behind him.  The computer work station is dark; only a few red L.E.D. lights show any life, at all. 

     Pushing off the wall of the tank with his feet, David rolls over to the work center on his office chair and flips on a switch.  Under the fluorescent light, the wall behind the computer is covered with graphs, charts and photos of dolphin acoustic anatomy.  There are wavy, black sonograms that look like an EKG nightmare; there are graphics of various pool toys: Frisbees, surfboards, balls, hoops, fish and oddly-shaped dog toys.  After his eyes as they adjusted to the light, David reached over to the mouse and woke the computer from its nap.  The monitor powered up and displayed the lab’s logo: Cetacean Ethology and Cognitive Research. David refocused on his research and began to type a mad concerto on the keyboard.  He multitasked further by turning up the volume on a recording of the dolphins’ sonic chatter.  Lights, buzzing, squeaking, computer blips and thonks along with the random pattern of tapping keys formed into a dissonance of sensory chaos.  From this whirlwind, David spoke into a computer microphone, reading from his clipboard and matching specific dolphin chatter to each of the trial’s tasks.

     “Scotty. Question. Ball?”

      A clip of the recording played. A dolphin buzzed, ending with a high pitch and then slow clicking, like a clock.

     “No. Question.  Pipe?  No. Error one.”

     A long pattern of squeaks twittered from the speaker.

      “String Pattern. Sorry?”

     Another string of chirps and chatter sounds.

     “Stop.”

     More chirps and chatter.

     “Yes.  Surfboard?”  Aaaanger?  No.  Surfboard?   No.  Fish.  LRS.”  David types without breaking for a breath.  “String pattern.  Sorry?  Sorry.  Payday Fish.  End trial six-ten-b.  Match to acoustical pattern of Trial six-ten-a. End.”  He picked up a tablet pen and made red circles around a sonogram above a spreadsheet.

     It makes sense to me.  Why hasn’t anyone else recognized it? It’s staring me in the face. 

     David looked back at the viewing port, where Scotty and Spray had stopped circling and were just hovering, their gaze turning side-to-side to look at David.  Looking at them, David could see his own reflection in the window.  It reminded him that he needed a shave. 

          I wish I could be like Scotty and Spray.  They were born with a couple of whiskers that completely disappeared after a month or two, leaving them clean and smooth for the rest of their lives.  When it comes to shaving, we are backwards.

     God, I just love to watch them move.  Doesn’t it seem like they are dancing with the light?  I understand what the incredible Mr. Limpet must have felt before he turned into a fish.  It was just one of the silliest movies I remember watching as a kid.  I wonder now if Limpet’s screenwriter felt then as I do now; how Mr. Limpet got to live the rest of his life as a happy fish. Being born as a human had been for him, as Limpet said it at the end, simply a mistake of nature.

     Where was I?  Recording data.  What am I not doing?

     David looked up to an analog clock on the wall.  Its hands pointed to one and twenty.

     Oh, crap.  In a burst of motion that looked like organized panic, David picked up his notes, scattering them before condensing them into a pile, ran out the door, ran back in and threw on an official looking white lab coat over his T-shirt and shorts and then ran out the door again.  A moment later he re-returned to shut off the light and close the door.  As David ran up the stairs, he thought he could hear the echolocating buzzes following him.  As soon as he hit daylight, the voices disappeared replaced by the ambient sounds of civilization.

     The cetacean lab had been built on a sand spit that was bordered on one side by a sandy lagoon and on the other by a small marina.  The psychology department’s lecture hall was about two hundred feet above sea level and a half mile away and David felt the rise of every step as he ran for the lecture that had begun at 1 o’clock.  David entered the lecture hall, according to the digital clock outside the back entrance, at 1:40. 

     He scuttled to a seat behind thirty rows of disinterested undergrads; most of them looked like fourth graders at assembly.  In front of every few students, there were electronic toys of one kind or another, some making an effort to look like they were taking notes, others obviously bored beyond belief, seeking relief in a PSP escape, or in My(nearly naked women)Space, or in thumb-flying text messaging. At the bottom of the lectern pit was his project advisor, Richard Chase.  As usual, Dr. Chase appeared just as bored as his students in his lecture on some of the broader applications of biostatistics.  David couldn’t blame the students for their quiet rebellion.

     Chase looked up from his white board notes and saw David seated in the back of the hall.  David didn’t see Chase see him; he was trying to get his own notes, which had slipped out sideways, back onto his clipboard.

     “Better late than never, Mr. Forrester?”

     David looked up at Chase as the students looked back David.  David self-consciously smiled back at all of them.  David had a sense of déjà vu, hadn’t he seen this same scene in a teenage angst movie somewhere before?

     “Mr. Forrester is our Ph.D. candidate on the dolphin cognition project.” Chase continued, walking away from the lectern.  “He is going to beguile us with the magic of applied biostatistical analysis.”

     David saw the students, in unison, lowering their laptop screens, hiding their cellphones and snaking away their cellphones, guilty of the crime of inattentiveness.  David saw them but didn’t care about their toys, he was too afraid about what they would think about him.  Looking at himself from the outside, he recognized the makings of the next clumsy professor.  David got to the lectern, still juggling the folders on his clipboard with the disc of his PowerPoint.  Dr. Chase helped by pulling down the white screen and then walking away.

     “Um, yes, thank-you, Dr. Chase.”  David fiddled with the control panel for the projector, looking for an on, or power or panic button.  “Just give me a minute.  This should work.”  He fiddled some more but the disc kept ejecting itself from the computer.

Please, don’t hate me today, he pleaded with the disc drive.  Give me a break for a change, for Christ’s sake.

     The sound of the dolphins’ chatter echoed off the walls, sounding like a swarm of killer bees.  David turned a knob and the sound went from killer bee level to hungry mosquito level.

     “I think I have it now.  Is everybody ready?”

     David noticed the eyes upon him.  If anyone out there was ready, they were too disinterested in answering.  The close-up of two smiling dolphins in blue water is faded by the drab overhead lights. “These are the sounds of Scotty and Spray, two ten-year-old dolphins of the species Tursiops truncatus.”  David pointed to the screen behind him while he looked at his notes.  “They were collected from the Gulf of Mexico and have been in residence at our ethology and cognition lab down at Long’s Harbor.” 

     As a doctoral candidate, he tried to mimic the voice pattern of an academic scholar.  He felt a little more comfortable in this role and released his death grip on the lectern.  That was until he noticed that he was wearing a lab coat with shorts and flip-flops; a breach of university professional fashion standards.  It was then that he remembered that no one could see the slide, and his ridiculous wardrobe faux paux with the lights on.

     “Um, can someone turn down the lights?” David asked.

     Dr. Chase stood up from his seat in the second row where he sat between uncomfortable undergrads. He found the slider for the lights on the wall and the room descended into darkness.

      David changed the slide.  The spreadsheets, graphs and pie charts looked very official, but Dr. Chase, reseated with the captive audience, rolled his eyes.  David pulled out his laser pointer.  He figured that might help clear up any misunderstandings of his data.

     “We started with a series of basic operant protocols and then moved to match-to-sample runs that, after a couple of months of approximation, were running at about a 98 per cent overall success.”  He felt better about presenting his research but feared the next part of his lecture might be so misunderstood that even a laser pointer wouldn’t help.  “We quickly repeated the syntactic runs, which you can see by this table, “ David circled the pointer around the screen, “were met with similar correl- lative, um, ah, similar correlated results.”

     Incomprehensible charts flashed by on the projection screen.  The undergrads went back to their texting as David clicked through the charts and graphs to get to the important stuff, the stuff of he thought could be his doctoral dissertation, if he could simplify what he wanted to say.  He rifled through the PowerPoint until he clicked past a slide of sonographs. He had to back up until he saw the compressed sine waves of dolphin chatter.

     “Here.”  David put the red dot of light on the graph.  “I found Scotty using this emotive carrier signal within his vocalizations.  See the pattern?  You see, here,” He fumbled with the pointer; it got stuck between his fingers as he tried to dance it in circles, and dropped it.  It rolled away and David had to chase it before it rolled under the first row of seats.  He grabbed it and pointed it toward the screen again only nothing happened.

     David motioned with his hands, making an unintended shadow puppet on the screen behind him.  “Here.”

     “Emotive carrier signal?”  Dr. Chase spoke from the dim view of the second row, stage right.

     “Yes.”  David had rehearsed this part, using Scotty and Spray as his friendly audience.  He had also imagined Dr. Chase naked, which he didn’t want to imagine again.  “I pulled out emotive signal matched to the cognitive states associated with specific interactions.”

     “I was asking you to be a little more specific.”

     “Oh.”  David took a breath.  The hard stuff was approaching fast; it was hard to stay focused.  He wanted to sound empirical.  He didn’t want to be laughed at.  “I found a frequency of response associated only in the interaction with the trainer.”

    From the back of the lecture hall, a male voice called out, “So long and thanks for all the fish?”

    “Pha love Pa?” This time a female student, one of the texters, added from the stage left hall.  There was a light chorus of subdued, just kidding, laughter.

     David knew both references; the satiric novel with the same name as the taunt and the talking dolphin Alpha who counted and spoke English words to George C. Scott in the movie, Day of the Dolphin.  The undergrads went silent when Dr. Chase swiveled his body around to address the students with the evil eye.  His psychology students feared the look because those eyes barely held back pop quizzes and extra reading. The crowd raised their heads, listening Time for the hard stuff.  Time to believe in his research methods that might earn him some grant money, or get him expelled.

     “Well, uh, not love, per se.  Not as I can tell.”  David said.  “Not exactly.  The signal I found more aggressively, well, aggressive isn’t the word I would use.  I matched these sonograms, of both dolphins mind you, with a behavior and emotive pattern humans would associate with contriteness.  Apologetic.”

     David watched Dr. Chase as he dropped his face into his right hand.  Maybe he had a migraine, David thought, but probably not.  It wasn’t easy presenting his findings with only preliminary research trials.

     “I can report the anecdotal points that might clear up points of my research.” David searched for the wireless mouse, clicked it several times, but the slides refused to move forward.  “I’m sorry, I know you can’t understand this research in a brief abstract, I mean, I’ve been working with this hypothesis and I’ve cut myself several times with Occam’s Razor.”  Nobody laughed.  David’s mouth grew dry as he flipped through the pages on his clipboard.

    The lights came up on the students, the students had stopped listening, and were, David realized, back to using browsing their MySpace, Facebook and Twitter messages.  Dr. Chase walked across the stage until he was standing close to David that he could smell the professor’s bourbon breath.

     “An interesting hypothesis, Mr. Forrester.  I’ll review your research proposal again and see how it proves out or falls apart in your trials.”

     The younger researcher, understanding the depth of his advisor’s disapproval, gathered up his notes, discs, and broken laser pointer.  He walked out of the lecture hall, blending with the river of sophomores draining out the door. That was when David heard laughter.  He felt humiliated.  Laughed at by undergraduate ingrates.  No, David took a deep breath; they were laughing at something else.   Stop being paranoid.

      The daylight was merging into night when David noticed that time had seemed to stand still while he was re-verifying the data that confirmed his new hypothesis.  He ran his fingers through his unwashed hair, which had the shine of black shoe polish.  He had forgotten to shower for three days.  His 5 o’clock shadow had grown into past-midnight beard.

     All of his lab partners, most of them graduate students, had left the lab as soon as the Ph.D. hopeful arrived, back from his lecture.  David shifted his documents around, highlighted different paragraphs with multiple colored highlighters with his left hand while he slid the mouse around with his right.

     He stopped briefly, like a program caught in a loop whose only escape was control-alt-delete.  He shook his head and his waxy hair., David hit the left click button and leaned back in his chair.  The sonograms played over and over again, displaying high and low tones amid a pattern of hypersonic echolocation.  He looped the pattern such.   The audio played over and over again, the graph repeating the same tracing over and over again.  He leaned forward in his chair again and traced the pattern with his finger before leaning back again.  He put his forehead in his right hand the same way Dr. Chase had done in response to his presentation.

     I’m sorry.  I’m sorry.  David slowly dropped his head down onto the keyboard, exhausted from his brain-draining cognitive/linguistic analyses.  I’m sorry I’m so freakin’ stupid.  For a moment, he thought of his mother.  She was devout and trained all of her kids that swearing sinful.  David couldn’t even take the Lord’s name in vain even after he had become an atheist.

     Coming to the conclusion that he was mentally and physically drained, he mouse clicked three times and found himself on an iTunes playlist.  Two more clicks and the baroque fugues of Bach played through one set of speakers while the dolphin chatter softly harmonized on another.

     Forgive.  The music played along with the graphic waves of the dolphin clicks.  Forgive.  David’s body relaxed as if the word made more sense the quieter his mind became.

     Forgive.

      The smell of smelt reached past David’s dreams and caused his nose to twitch.  He opened his eyes to see a bucket of dead silver fish in front of him.  Shirley, a graduate assistant working at the lab, gradually came into focus as his eyes accommodated to the light of day.

     “Good morning, Starshine.”  Shirley chirped.  “Your back is going to scream at you today if you slept like that last night.”

      David looked up at the clock.  Six o’clock.  Fish prep.

     “Thanks, Shirl.  If you want, I can help with the first trial.”

     “Nah.  You need to go back to a real bed and get some real rest.

     “Yeah.  I’ll be back for the afternoon trials.”  David said as he dragged himself up the stairs.  Without looking back, he said, “I’ll see you at one.”

     David, stepping out into the park just west of the lab, noticed the yellow-orange fragments of light slipping through the tall palms.  The dorms were another half-mile beyond the lecture hall, uphill another couple of hundred feet above sea level, but David thought that he would fall asleep on his feet waiting for the shuttle.  He followed the winding bike path through the park to where it paralleled the sidewalk.

     He had just punched the crosswalk button when he heard someone talking to herself behind him.  There were a lot of homeless people who slept hidden away in the dense landscaping, many of them not sane or sober enough to work or too poor to do anything but beg for change and collect cans.  David turned around and saw a woman walking towards him, carrying on an animated conversation with herself.  She didn’t look insane or in need of a 12-step program and, with her neat business outfit suit with a tight skirt that had a small slit in the back, she certainly wasn’t there to collect cans.  David noticed her vacant stare.  Is she a schizo?   She passed by; only then did he see the blue tooth in her ear.   Language is a trickster, he thought.  David watched her continue her phantom conversation until she climbed into her Prius and sped off.   Only context makes meaning, he thought.

     The traffic light went through a full cycle, skipping the crosswalk signal.  David hit the button with his fist and then pushed it five more times.  The traffic slowed as the light turned yellow and then red.

     “Forgive.”  A small voice spoke behind David as he waited for his turn.  Another chatty blue-toother or a beggar, trying to get his attention and money?  Maybe a snotty undergrad from yesterday’s lecture.  He turned around and saw nobody.

     His eyes caught a slight movement down among the grass.  A tan gecko popped its head up from the leaves, scuttled a short distance more towards David, and then stopped at the border to the sidewalk.  It stared at David and David stared back until its tiny tongue reached out of its mouth to lick its own eyeball.  Amusing little critter, he thought.  The little lizard bobbed its head up and down, still looking at David and opened its mouth again.

     “Forgive,” the gecko said.

     I must be hallucinating from sleep deprivation.  David wiped his eyes and when he opened them again, it was just in time to see the gecko’s tail disappear under the grass.

     David wanted to sit down right there and fall asleep or cry.  My mind can’t shut down from this project.  I must get some sleep.

     When David looked up to the walk light, he saw it blinking “Don’t Walk.”  He would have to wait another round.

      The main street to the dorms led up a hill, sidelined with small mall of different shops and restaurants.  He passed small cafes, boutique fashion stores, and a head shop.  He approached a pet shop, barely noticing the small litter of baby bunnies hopping around behind the glass.  He walked on to pass by the liquor store on the far side of the pet store and felt a strange buzzing in his ears.  The buzzing turned into a patter of child-like voices.

     “Forgive, forgive, forgive.”  The bunnies had all turned to face the glass and were looking out, right into his eyes.

     Sleep, sleep, sleeeeep, David told himself.  When he stepped back from the window, the rabbit began romping around again, but he stepped onto the tail of a stray dog, sleeping in the shadows.  The terrier mutt jumped out of his way, scampering away with a half-surprised yelp.

     “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” The dog’s voice faded as it disappeared into the shadows of an alley.

     David stumbled into the street. I can’t have delusions of animals speaking to me.  I will invalidate everything I’ve done.

     He crossed the street, to the front of a Chinese restaurant.  A giant fish tank adorned the front lobby, all kinds of tropical fish flitted between white coral heads.  A moray eel with a snowflake on black pattern opened its maw, showing its broken glass teeth.

“Forgive,” it whispered.  “Forgive.”

     In disbelief, David looked beyond the tank to the buffet line where a chef sliced raw fish into sushi and sashimi.  The floral pattern he created with flesh was beautiful, but David felt like his stomach acids rising in his throat.  The chef and David caught each other’s gaze before David continued up the street.

     He couldn’t remember how or when he got to his dorm room.  Yet, there he was is the morning light, a disheveled mess of human flesh under blankets, still wearing the clothes he had worn for the past two, (or was it three?) days before.  Other than the headiness that came after sleeping so soundly, and a stinkiness that made his own nostrils burn, David thought he felt much better.  David had heard of the phantasms that occurred under the spell of highway hypnosis, or the psychosis that occured when humans couldn’t reach REM sleep or dream.  The dolphins have it good, David thought. They fall asleep with only one-half of their brain at a time.  They’re neither awake nor asleep when they dream.

     After a shower, shave and change of clothes, David knew he had to go back down the hill and re-work his hypothesis.  He was sure the phantasms had gone back under to his unconscious mind.  The morning traffic was loud, as usual, but the mist from an early shower created a rainbow that was almost a perfect circle above the above the hills.  David’s head was clear and yesterday’s delusions were just illusions.  Walking down the hill every day to the lab was the sweet preface to his day.  It would all work out, he assured himself.

     At the first crosswalk, David slowed as he approached a young woman standing at the curb with a rust-colored golden retriever.  To prove his sanity, he approached the dog and looked it in the eye.  The golden responded with small whines and whimpers, talking dog-talk but not saying anything particularly intelligible.

     “You got a problem?” The young woman pulled the dog closer to her side.

     “No.  No problem, at all.  Have a nice day.”

     When David entered the park west of the research center, he listened to the birds chirping and whistling in the trees as he walked.  He had always enjoyed listening to the seagulls caw above the marina.  He pulled out his keys and unlocked the door to the lab.

     “Forgive…”  David heard it again.  The seagulls had left the marina and now circled overhead.  It started as whispers in seagull voices, “forgive,” one voice cawed, “forgive,” a second voice joined the first until the flock of forgiving birds cried over each other, “for, give for, give, give, for give.”  David yanked open the door, fumbled to get the key out of the lock, and then pulled the door shut behind him.  Outside, he heard the cawing fade away as the gulls moved on.

     The stairway down to the office was dark, but David heard familiar voices in the light seeping up from the work center.  Bob and Paul, the psychology graduate students at the dolphin lab, were sitting in front of the work desk. Shelley, a linguistics student, had a bucket of smelt and was weighing it on the scale across from the port window.  Scotty and Spray watched with their eyes up against the glass, their heads turning from side-to-side.

     Shirly picked up the bucket and made her way to the stairs.  “Hey, David.  What happened to you yesterday?”

     “I was comatose.  A 24-hour bug.”

     She pulled a fish out of the bucket and pointed it at Bob and Paul, who were talking quietly to each other. “Let those two do some work.”  Shirly walked past the two idlers on her way to the stairs.  “You two.  Work.”

     Bob smiled and replied in his worst imitation of an Austrian bergermeister. 

     “Yah, ve do da vork gud.  Ve crunch de noombers like de Yeti crunch the young vuns in da snow. Yah, iz gud.”

    “Yah, good to crunch de kinder.” Paul added.

     “Crunch.” Bob said.

     “Kinders.” Paul said.

     “Crunch.” Bob said.

     “Kinders.” Paul said.

     “Yah,” said Bob.

     “Yah,” said Paul.

     “Yah.”  Bob and Paul said together.  They continued this routine until Shirley was long gone.

     “Tough night?”  Paul asked David in his normal voice.  “Anything you want to, ummmm, confess?”

     “Funny.”  David watched Scotty and Spray’s tail flukes flash back and forth at the window, keeping themselves vertical in the water. Shirly had arrived topside and was directly above him on the training platform, handing out fish.

     “Hey, David,” Bob’s tone turned from humorous to serious, “You should have been here yesterday.”  His voice turned to a whisper.  “I found evidence that will support your hypothesis.”

     What now?  David was skeptical but even a little support could make his life easier.

     “We found this Ceratophrys ornate specimen,” Paul nodded, “it gave the most emotive vocalizations I’ve ever seen; my initial findings support your findings. I think you should take a look.”

     “What are you talking about?” David shook his head, his eyebrows lowered.

     “Look for yourself.”  Paul pointed to a spot behind David.  He turned around and, on the desk behind him, sat a bullfrog, not doing anything in particular.

     Paul held back a laugh with an obnoxious snork.  He bent over and talked directly into the frog’s ear.  “Well, go on!  Do your thing.”

     The frog didn’t move.  Bob stepped up next to Paul and he, too, spoke to the frog’s other ear.

     “Come on!  Emote!”  Nothing happened.  Bob looked at Paul and shrugged. Paul looked at Bob and shrugged.   The frog looked at David or at the wall behind him.  It was hard to tell.  David crossed his arms in front of his chest.    This wasn’t funny, either.

     “I don’t get it.” Paul said.  “Not more than an hour ago, he was singing and dancing all over the place.”

     Bob picked up the frog so that its green webbed feet dangled above the desk blotter and shook the frog as he began singing.

     “Hello, ma baby!  Hello, ma honey!  Hello, ma ragtime gaaal!”

     The frog danced back and forth, its small front legs sticking out straight while its back legs swayed to and fro as Bob danced it across the desk.

     David, after taking the frog out of the chorus line, sent Bob and Paul out to scrub the walls of the dolphin tank.  As usual, the two had ended their pranks with a “just kidding,” as if that made the hurt feelings go away.  It was an insult and no matter what their opinion was of his research, David still outranked them in the lab hierarchy.  Payback is a bitch, David thought.   

     After returning the frog to the park, David returned to his statistical analysis. Statistics can tell you what you want to hear, if you crunch long enough.  Statistics has no heart. His thoughts interrupted his work as they chattered away inside his brain. David put his full attention on his monitor, listening deeply, over and over again, to the dolphins’ sonor, as he watched their frequency and pitch scan across the screen.  He tapped a few keys and pulled up a split screen view and watched images of Scotty and Spray lowering their heads into the water, repeating the same behavior over and over again, David matched the video loop of the behavior to the sonogram’s tracing.

      David’s head bounced up and down, his eyes closing, following the beat. It was jazz from another world. The jazz continued until David felt a dissonant tapping on his shoulder. He opened his eyes and saw Shirley standing beside him.

     “You’ve got mail,” she said.

     The hallway leading to the faculty offices on the second floor of the science building, David noticed, still had that new construction smell.  His footsteps made a flippity-floppity echo as he walked over the polished granite tiles. He looked for Dr. Chase’s office along the rows of doors.  Dr. Chase had tenure up the yin-yang and these offices, with their architectural details, reflected ivory tower tastes. Mahogany doors with their mosaics of beveled glass windows graced the entry to each office.  This was the top of the institutional food chain.

     In the final office down at the very end of the hallway, David found the one he was looking for.  On the wall outside the door, a white marble square topped by a brass plate read; Dr. Richard Chase, M.D., Ph.D. Dean of Psychology and Cognitive Science.  The name plate reminded David of the square base at the bottom of little league trophies.

      David walked through the outer door and into a small reception area.  A receptionist nodded to him and then nodded back to the door of an inner, executive office.

      “Knock and then go on in,” she said. “Be careful.  He’s been in a pissy mood all day.”

      David stood on the far side of the desk from Dr. Chase.  Pages of spreadsheets, graphs and tables and binders were spread out in no particular order.  Chase sat and looked at David, evaluating his shorts, T-shirt and rubber sandal ensemble through the pyramid he had made with his fingers.

     “I’m telling you, Dr. Chase,” David tried not to plead but his heart was in the research, “all of my research points to the same conclusion.  I would like to have a chance to prove that there is an entire emotional language imbedded within the echolocation.”

     “This work was not in your original proposal.”

     “When I saw this behavior in every context, and the sonograms correlated each time, it was like seeing the light from Edison’s thousandth light bulb, the first one that worked.”

     Dr. Chase looked down from his pyramid at the papers on the desk.

     “I’m not seeing it here.”

     “I didn’t expect you to, really.”  David wiped off the fog that had collected on his glasses. “I mean, I have to come up with the analogs.  The algorithms aren’t quite evident, yet.  I mean, I know what I know but the translation is still, um,” He tried to find the right word but he ended fumbling out the answer as a question, “Muddy?”

     “This isn’t mud, Mister Forrester.  This is thin ice.”  Chase’s finger pyramid collapsed as he gestured to David with his hands. “Look at you!  Your research looks like you’re trying to be competent but,” Chase waved his hand up and down, “well, look at yourself.”

    David looked down at his sandals, his shorts, and his t-shirt that had the face of Freud colored in pink.

     “I like to think that there’s more to me than my looks.”  David’s eyes looked into Freud’s pink eyes.

     “Not when you make a fool of yourself.  In front of the undergraduates, no less!”  David listened to Chase with embarrassment in his eyes.  Chase continued, “You have got to put forth an impression.  Looking competent breeds confidence.  My God, our department has fought very hard to be taken seriously.  I look at you and I see a circus.”

     “It’s just that I know what I’m hearing!  It’s like when you go to travel to another country and the language, at first, sounds like linguistic gibberish.  After a while, you begin to pick out words based on body language and emotion.  I keep hearing that same first word: forgive, forgive, forgive!” 

     David knew he was pleading, but it was not for himself, but for a reprieve for his research.

     “How long have you been hearing dolphins talking to you?  They’re not talking to anyone else, are they?”

     “They are talking all the time.”  David said.  “They’re emotional responses that you can’t see in the stats.  I don’t know why forgive is the first word I picked up on.  I don’t have a guilty, unconscious life.”  He paced to the large windows of the corner office.  “I know there’s more.”

     “Have any other animals ever talked to you?”

     David looked out the window, where a murder of crows sat in the trees, whispering in conspirational tones beneath the ca-caws; “Forgive,” they continued.  “Forgive.”

     “I just need to know what it means,” David looked up to the sky as more crows began to glide into the murder. “if I can confirm what they’re saying.”

     Dr. Chase took a deep breath and grabbed a small note pad out of his desk drawer and began to scribble.

     “Take this.”  Chase held out the script note and spoke an imperative.  “Go to the Health Center and have this filled.

     David took the paper, looked at the writing, and returned a confused look to Chase.

     “You think I’m sick?”

     “I know that the human mind will try to fill in the gaps when given only part of a story.  You know that, too.  I think you’ll be able to see things a little more clearly if we quiet down some of that subconscious chatter.”

     David stood there, looking at the prescription.

     “If I don’t take this?”

     Chase leaned back, putting the pad back in his drawer.

     “The choice is yours, always.  You also know very well that the wrong choices have consequences you may regret later on.  Don’t think you’re the first student who have had the same stress issues.”

      The campus was quiet as it usually was on a Friday afternoon.  David walked down the main campus road, looks of dejection and horror played across his face.  There were green bushes and ivy growing up the sides of the old campus library.  Everywhere in the shadows of the green over the red brick, he heard animals he couldn’t see.  The trees and grass took on a glow like a golden aura as a chorus chattered an apologetic opera.  The Student Health Center was on the far side of the library.  David walked in that direction.

     It was night when David finally returned to his dorm room.  David couldn’t help but to look in the mirror at his own face.   Pink Freud stared back from his t-shirt.

     I’m not crazy. David spoke back to the committee of internal voices criticizing, diminishing his confidence. I have nothing to be sorry for. 

     He pulled out a prescription bottle and looked at the pills. I don’t believe in confession.  I believe in scientific method.  He shook one pill out and swallowed it with water.

     The hands on the clock pointed to three and twelve.  Saturday morning alone in the lab, David stabbed his fingertips on the keys of his computer. 

     Question.  Hoop.  No.  Correct response, fish.  Wait…

     On another monitor, David simultaneously watched a video recording of another language trial.  Buzzes and clicks, squawks and whistles all sung together.  It

     Question.  Ball.  Incorrect response. Wait.

     David listened to the buzz, clicks and whistles of vocalizations as he reviewed the responses on the monitor. His hands crunched up pages and pages of his data into paper snowballs. He pulled out pages of spreadsheets and sonograms, tearing through his reports, tossing pages onto the floor. He stopped for just a moment, breathing and breathing hard and when he stood up in the middle of the floor, standing on his graphs and notes, David bent over in half as if he were about to wretch but instead began to take in deep lungful of air.  The inhalation didn’t stop until his abdomen pulled in and his chest stood out. David’s head tilted back and his jaw opened wide and his voice howled out in a release of primal angst.

     He was bent over again as the howl tailed off into a whimper. David’s head came up, his cheeks red and sweaty.  A look of utter humiliation flooded his face. 

     Oh, God, I’m not getting it. Oh, God, oh, God.

     The clock hands pointed to seven and twelve.  David sat before the port window, looking at the morning light coming in through the watery window.  Scotty and Spray hovered and swam in figure-eights into the blue water and floated back to the window.   David looked as if he’d been watching them like this since the clock read three-thirty-five.

     On some cue that only David seemed hear, he stood up, grabbed a cardboard box and turned it upside down, its contents flailing out over his work station. Most of it was overflow from the trash can: banana peels, apple cores and burger wrappers.   It took him about a half-hour to refill the box with every scrap of spreadsheet, every video recording and the scatter of papers tossed on the floor.  He carried it, with some effort, up the stairs and out the door.

      David walked toward a large metal dumpster and heaved the box over the lip. David had taken the first step away before it hit the bottom of the dumpster with a metal thunk.  A rat squealed and scattered from the rain of research and slipped to the underside, where it was dark and safe.  He continued walking away from the lab towards the park where, at this hour, there were no crowds, no screaming children, and no vendors calling out for customers.  He could hear the sound of waves pushing over the top of a coral barrier, into the lagoon.

     Morning sun turned the ocean to brilliant gold; David squinted as he moved toward the glow.  The air was juicy with mist off the water and twinkling drops like stars on the leaves on the trees.  He stopped, tilting his head, listening.  Somewhere in the park, someone was playing a guitar, its chords playing above the sound of the waves.  David searched as a voice began to rise from the trees, where the grass stopped and the sand began. It was a song of the freedom that would come from forgiveness.

Old pirates, yes, they rob I,

Sold I to merchant ships,

Minutes after they took I

From the bottomless pit…

     David opened his eyes and saw all the life around him, heard the singing and buzzing and barking and the rustling of the trees from the touch of the onshore breezes.  Forgive, forgive, forgive.

Won’t you help to sing,

These songs of freedom?

Cause all I ever had:

Redemption song;

Redemption song;

Redemption song.

     The voice led his eyes to a small bit of underbrush where he saw a man sitting on the ground.  He was one of the many transients David had seen on his walks to and from the lab.  He was wearing the uniform of his life: a stained jacket worn thin at the shoulders and sleeves; black army boots with dry, cracking leather and generations of mud; a face too old for his years.  The man saw David looking his way and waved him over.

     “You know dis Bob Marley?  You know dis song?  Come, sit, sing wid me.”

David sat down across from the man as his dark fingers began passing over the strings.     The guitar looked as old as the man’s eyes.  They began to sing.

                                                                       # # #

     The sign above the entry door to a white mobile home read “Primate Linguistics.”  The structure had been permanently parked in front of a twenty foot wire mesh box on a flat spot on an otherwise uneven dirt parking lot.  The inside of the house had been turned into a research facility, with video monitors and colorful, soft baby toys spread around the floor.  It was not very different from the dolphin language lab, except for the outdoor gorilla habitat instead of marine mammal water tanks.

     A young man in jeans and a t-shirt with a Dian Fossey graphic print on the front.  He watched a monitor that followed a large gorilla sat hunched over on grassy patch of dirt surrounded by car tires and various shaped and sized dog toys.  The gorilla makes gestures with her hands to no one in particular. 

      An older woman wearing a white lab jacket stepped in beside the man, both of their eyes on the gorilla.  The young man pulled up a few data cells on a spread sheet and then opened a window for a chart.  He sat down in his chair and swiveled back and forth.

     “When did she start on this kick?” the woman asked.

     “About a week ago.” The man answered.  “She ran through her match-to-sample runs okay, but she’s throwing off the stats with this spontaneous signing that really doesn’t say that she wants anything specific.”

     “This is the third non-sequitur kick she’s been on.”

     “The third since we first noticed the pattern,” the man said.  “She started with stop.”  She made the sign by making an X with her hands; her left hand flat, the right one perpendicular  “Every fifth or sixth sign was stop and it took us a while to figure out that there wasn’t anything she wanted us to stop doing, just to stop.  We thought she was just like a two-year-old who’s learned how to say no.”

     “How long did that go on for?” she asked.

     “About a month."  Then she switched to various signs indicating forgiveness or sorrow.  She really got on a jag about apologizing.  It made us feel guilty but we had no idea of why she felt sorry,” he said. 

     The woman moved her fist in a small circle on her sternum, trying to see the pattern within the pattern.

     “Forgiveness,” she said.

     The man pointed to the monitor.  “Now, she’s gotten obsessive with another sign,” he said, guiding the camera that followed the gorilla as she moved around the enclosure.  Her black hands occasionally at the camera and waved.  “She dropped the apologies and began making the farewell sign.”

     “Maybe she’s planning on going somewhere,” the man zoomed-forward the camera lens, bringing the primate’s head and chest into view.

     “Or maybe she thinks we’re leaving.”

     The two researchers looked at the gorilla, who looked back at them through the camera and waved a farewell.