K Story: Kayla
Aug. 23rd, 2012 09:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7“Killer whales are incredibly smart,” he says. “We just don’t have the means to understand how smart they are. They’re enormous, and powerful, but capable of the most delicate movements— their lips are dextrous, like fingers. I’ve had one come up behind me and unfasten the velcro on the back of my diving glove.” He mimics the gesture, thumb and forefinger, drawing across the back of his hand as if fastening a narrow band of velcro.
“And when they look at you— you see their eyes above water, they don’t look like much. Enormous, kind of mucousy, dull. They don’t look like much. But that mucous is just a protective layer. Underwater, their eyes are luminous, a bright glowing turquoise. And you can see how intelligent they are. They look at you and they know what you are. They watch what you do. They know what’s going on. And they love to play. They like having their tongues scratched. They’d swim up to you with their mouths open and the crowd always thought they were about to attack us, and I loved sticking my arm into their mouths to scratch their tongues and watching the spectators’ reactions through the glass.”
The conversation had started when someone had mentioned a then-recent attack wherein a killer whale had murdered its trainer, and K’s wife S had said that was why he quit working as a diver at the waterpark— a killer whale attack.
“The whale wasn’t trying to hurt me,” K says, shaking his head. “I played with that whale all the time. It was playing. It just didn’t realize how fragile I was. I know for a fact it didn’t mean me any harm. I’ve no doubt some of the attacks in captivity that you hear about are on purpose. But Kayla— that was its name— Kayla wasn’t mean, and wasn’t trying to assert dominance or anything. I played with it all the time. It just wanted to play.”
We veer off, conversationally, in another direction for the night, and it isn’t until another day that we come back to it. We are discussing the weather, and debating whether it will rain. I ask K what his knee thinks, jokingly, but he shakes his head and laughs. “My knee doesn’t know shit,” he says. “But my ribs— they’re usually pretty good. They don’t know if it’s going to rain here, exactly, but they know if a front’s coming through. Ask me in half an hour and I’ll let you know what the ribs say.”
“Which ribs?” I ask.
“The barfight ones are the most precise,” he says. “More recent.”
“How many ribs have you had broken?” I ask. I know I’ve heard stories, but I can’t remember precisely.
He laughs. “All of ‘em,” he answers. “Except the floating one on this side.” He gestures. “I guess I’m saving that one for a special occasion.”
“All at once?” I ask. “Or all different stuff?”
“Oh yeah,” he says. “All at once. As well as different stuff.”
“You seen some shit,” I comment.
“I seen some shit,” he agrees.
“So, how?” I ask. “I mean, the all at once.”
“Killer whale,” he answers, and I take a moment to grab a drink because surely he will tell the rest of the story now.
He settles himself, and raises his hands, and the others in camp stop to pay attention, because while we don’t all have weather-predicting ribs, we know when a good K story is coming.
“I saw a dark shape to one side,” he said, gesturing. “All I remember is motion, a dark blur, and then wham, everything went black. What had happened was Kayla had rammed me into the side of the tank. That whale was like four or five thousand pounds— there’s no way it hit me full force, or I woulda just been a grease smear. Kayla pulled that blow. It knew humans were delicate, it just underestimated how delicate. Slammed me up against the side, and broke—“ he draws his hand down his right side. “All the ribs on this side, and all the ribs on the other, except this one little floating rib.” He smiles at me. “The one I’m saving. Also cracked my pelvis, my collarbone,” he draws his finger along the right side of his face, “my jaw, and my eye socket. Knocked me instantly unconscious, and since I was in full SCUBA with a weight belt and everything, I started to sink. I would’ve died; nobody would have dared get in that pool until it was too late. My friend Bob was watching from the surface, saw the whole thing, and he was sure I was dead instantly.”
“Then the whale put her snout under me and kept me from sinking,” he goes on. “From Bob’s angle, it looked like I was in her mouth. He thought she was eating me. He’s losing his mind on the radio. He said he was just waiting for the cloud of blood when Kayla bit me in half. But she wasn’t biting me. She had her snout under me and was lifting me. And here’s the thing where you realize how smart these animals are: you know how SCUBA divers can’t surface suddenly, and if you hold your breath— you can’t hold your breath, you gotta keep breathing? She knew that. Those whales had watched the divers and observed how we always surfaced slowly. So she brought me slowly to the surface, at the right speed so I didn’t get the bends.”
“Holy shit,” someone says.
“She nosed me over to the slideout.” He pauses, and gestures, indicating a sloping plane. “There’s a kind of ramp thing that comes up out of the water where the whale can beach itself for tricks and things, and it makes a good place for the trainers to interact with the whales in shallow water. She took me there and shoved me out of the water as far as she could reach, and pulled back a little way, shrieking and making all kinds of racket. Bob couldn’t believe that I was still in one piece. He didn’t know what to do— it would be dangerous to approach the whale— but we were pretty good friends, him and I, and so he says he just went for it before he could think better. He ran out and grabbed me and hauled me out of there, none too gently because he thought I was dead and the whale was going to grab him next.”
He laughs. “That’s probably how I got hurt. Not the whale, but Bob manhandling me. That’s what broke all those bones. He thought he was just pulling my body out so at least I could have an open casket.”
“Of course,” I say.
“I don’t remember much of it,” he goes on. “I know it hurt when they put me on the gurney. I had a pretty nasty concussion. I woke up in the hospital eventually, and I was completely disoriented and confused, thought I was still at the waterpark, really mad that I was still there. Took me quite a while to catch up.”
“Who could blame you?” I comment.
He runs down a tally of his injuries, touching lightly at the site of each break. “Ribs, collarbone, jaw, eye socket, pelvis... they bandaged me, didn’t splint me or put me in a cast or anything since they were clean breaks, and sent me home. Just like that. They sent me home the next day. I’m out of my mind with the pain, I’m on so many drugs I can’t see straight, and they send me home, for S to deal with.” He grimaces. “The ribs were annoying, but the pelvis was the worst. And the eye socket. The jaw healed all right. But the eye socket. Holy shit. That fuckin’ hurt. For a really long time.”
“I bet,” I say, amid a general murmur of agreement. No one else in the group has had a broken eye socket, it turns out. There’s a general refilling of drinks; people think the story’s over. But there’s a coda.
“So it’s the next day,” he says. “The day after they sent me home, which was the day after the attack. So, two days. I’m lying on the couch because I can’t get into bed and S can’t lift me. Remember this was right after the [water-based armed forces], I’m still in [armed forces] shape. I don’t even have a neck, I’m like this wide.” He holds his hands out, indicating the kind of musculature that starts at the jaw and goes to the collarbones. He is still a biggish man, with powerful arms, but his neck is distinct from his shoulders nowadays.
“And S was a lot smaller then. She was, like, a hundred ten pounds with her pockets full, soaking wet. Manhandling a very broken, grouchy, drugged-out lummox like me is no easy task. And I’m lying there and I can hear her on the phone just hollering at somebody like she’s gonna flay the skin right off them. It wakes me out of my drugged stupor, and she comes in, face like a thundercloud, and hands me the phone, and just spits tacks: ‘They want you to come in.’
“I take the phone, and remember I have a broken jaw and I’m high as fuck, so I’m like ‘whfzzr hackng bour?’ And it’s the whale trainer. And he’s like, ‘I’m really sorry K, I know you’re in rough shape, but I need you to come in. You have to. It can’t wait.’”
“They wanted you to come in,” I say. “With every bone in your body broken.”
“No fuckin’ shit,” he says. “Fortunately I was too high to even process the anger. S was pretty close to blowing a gasket. But she does it, she hauls me in there. And they wanted me to put a wetsuit on. And I told them to go fuck themselves. Fortunately with a broken jaw they couldn’t understand me. They got the point, though, and relented on the wetsuit. But do you know what they wanted me to do?”
We all shake our heads, wondering.
“They want me to go sit on the fucking slideout,” he says, “and give the whale a fish.”
“Really?” We’re incredulous.
“Really,” he says. “Because she’s in mourning. She won’t eat. She won’t play. She’s moping. She knows she broke me so she’s fasting. They want me to show myself to her so she knows I’m alive.”
We’re all touched by this, in an Animal Planet sort of gooey mystical interspecies connection kind of way, and he shakes his head. “I was fucking terrified. Scariest moment of my damn life. Because all I know is, that whale just tried to kill me, and now they want me to go down where it can reach me, and I’m too injured to run, I’m too injured even to struggle, and they want me to sit there within jaw’s reach and fuckin' hand that maniac a fuckin' fish? I was literally shaking, and not just from the pain. But it was crystal fucking clear who was more valuable— humans are a dime a dozen but have you any idea what a captive orca is worth? Tens of thousands of fuckin' dollars. They’re not letting Kayla starve herself to death in mourning for some glorified underwater janitor.”
“So did you?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “I went down there, practically pissing myself, and I sat on that slideout, and she came up and she’s eyeing me, and I can feel her sonar. You probably don’t know what that feels like? I can’t describe it. Dolphins do it, and whales; when they’re checking you out, they use their sonar on you and it… you just kind of feel it. It’s really unsettling. So she’s sonar-ing me, and in a minute she comes up the slideout— if I could’ve moved I would’ve jumped right out of my skin, but I was so broken I just sort of sat there braced like well, if she wants me dead, she’ll do it now, and these assholes will just sit and watch.”
“She didn’t, though,” I said.
“I gave her the fish, and she took it, and ate it, and everybody cheered.” He shrugs. “I mean, I’m glad she did. I’m glad it really was just that she was upset at hurting me. I don’t hold it against the whale at all. As I said, she was playing. She didn’t mean to hurt me at all. And I’ve no doubt she really was sorry. After that she went back to eating normally, and playing, and I think she’s still out there somewhere. Beautiful animal. I hold her no ill-will. But I got out of that slideout and I decided there was no fucking way I was coming back to that job. Three years I worked there, four trips to the hospital, every one of them an animal attack. No thanks, I was safer defusing mines.”
He cocks an eye skyward. “By the way,” he says, “I’m pretty sure it’s gonna rain.”
Kayla, according to Wikipedia, is still alive and lives in Orlando.
“And when they look at you— you see their eyes above water, they don’t look like much. Enormous, kind of mucousy, dull. They don’t look like much. But that mucous is just a protective layer. Underwater, their eyes are luminous, a bright glowing turquoise. And you can see how intelligent they are. They look at you and they know what you are. They watch what you do. They know what’s going on. And they love to play. They like having their tongues scratched. They’d swim up to you with their mouths open and the crowd always thought they were about to attack us, and I loved sticking my arm into their mouths to scratch their tongues and watching the spectators’ reactions through the glass.”
The conversation had started when someone had mentioned a then-recent attack wherein a killer whale had murdered its trainer, and K’s wife S had said that was why he quit working as a diver at the waterpark— a killer whale attack.
“The whale wasn’t trying to hurt me,” K says, shaking his head. “I played with that whale all the time. It was playing. It just didn’t realize how fragile I was. I know for a fact it didn’t mean me any harm. I’ve no doubt some of the attacks in captivity that you hear about are on purpose. But Kayla— that was its name— Kayla wasn’t mean, and wasn’t trying to assert dominance or anything. I played with it all the time. It just wanted to play.”
We veer off, conversationally, in another direction for the night, and it isn’t until another day that we come back to it. We are discussing the weather, and debating whether it will rain. I ask K what his knee thinks, jokingly, but he shakes his head and laughs. “My knee doesn’t know shit,” he says. “But my ribs— they’re usually pretty good. They don’t know if it’s going to rain here, exactly, but they know if a front’s coming through. Ask me in half an hour and I’ll let you know what the ribs say.”
“Which ribs?” I ask.
“The barfight ones are the most precise,” he says. “More recent.”
“How many ribs have you had broken?” I ask. I know I’ve heard stories, but I can’t remember precisely.
He laughs. “All of ‘em,” he answers. “Except the floating one on this side.” He gestures. “I guess I’m saving that one for a special occasion.”
“All at once?” I ask. “Or all different stuff?”
“Oh yeah,” he says. “All at once. As well as different stuff.”
“You seen some shit,” I comment.
“I seen some shit,” he agrees.
“So, how?” I ask. “I mean, the all at once.”
“Killer whale,” he answers, and I take a moment to grab a drink because surely he will tell the rest of the story now.
He settles himself, and raises his hands, and the others in camp stop to pay attention, because while we don’t all have weather-predicting ribs, we know when a good K story is coming.
“I saw a dark shape to one side,” he said, gesturing. “All I remember is motion, a dark blur, and then wham, everything went black. What had happened was Kayla had rammed me into the side of the tank. That whale was like four or five thousand pounds— there’s no way it hit me full force, or I woulda just been a grease smear. Kayla pulled that blow. It knew humans were delicate, it just underestimated how delicate. Slammed me up against the side, and broke—“ he draws his hand down his right side. “All the ribs on this side, and all the ribs on the other, except this one little floating rib.” He smiles at me. “The one I’m saving. Also cracked my pelvis, my collarbone,” he draws his finger along the right side of his face, “my jaw, and my eye socket. Knocked me instantly unconscious, and since I was in full SCUBA with a weight belt and everything, I started to sink. I would’ve died; nobody would have dared get in that pool until it was too late. My friend Bob was watching from the surface, saw the whole thing, and he was sure I was dead instantly.”
“Then the whale put her snout under me and kept me from sinking,” he goes on. “From Bob’s angle, it looked like I was in her mouth. He thought she was eating me. He’s losing his mind on the radio. He said he was just waiting for the cloud of blood when Kayla bit me in half. But she wasn’t biting me. She had her snout under me and was lifting me. And here’s the thing where you realize how smart these animals are: you know how SCUBA divers can’t surface suddenly, and if you hold your breath— you can’t hold your breath, you gotta keep breathing? She knew that. Those whales had watched the divers and observed how we always surfaced slowly. So she brought me slowly to the surface, at the right speed so I didn’t get the bends.”
“Holy shit,” someone says.
“She nosed me over to the slideout.” He pauses, and gestures, indicating a sloping plane. “There’s a kind of ramp thing that comes up out of the water where the whale can beach itself for tricks and things, and it makes a good place for the trainers to interact with the whales in shallow water. She took me there and shoved me out of the water as far as she could reach, and pulled back a little way, shrieking and making all kinds of racket. Bob couldn’t believe that I was still in one piece. He didn’t know what to do— it would be dangerous to approach the whale— but we were pretty good friends, him and I, and so he says he just went for it before he could think better. He ran out and grabbed me and hauled me out of there, none too gently because he thought I was dead and the whale was going to grab him next.”
He laughs. “That’s probably how I got hurt. Not the whale, but Bob manhandling me. That’s what broke all those bones. He thought he was just pulling my body out so at least I could have an open casket.”
“Of course,” I say.
“I don’t remember much of it,” he goes on. “I know it hurt when they put me on the gurney. I had a pretty nasty concussion. I woke up in the hospital eventually, and I was completely disoriented and confused, thought I was still at the waterpark, really mad that I was still there. Took me quite a while to catch up.”
“Who could blame you?” I comment.
He runs down a tally of his injuries, touching lightly at the site of each break. “Ribs, collarbone, jaw, eye socket, pelvis... they bandaged me, didn’t splint me or put me in a cast or anything since they were clean breaks, and sent me home. Just like that. They sent me home the next day. I’m out of my mind with the pain, I’m on so many drugs I can’t see straight, and they send me home, for S to deal with.” He grimaces. “The ribs were annoying, but the pelvis was the worst. And the eye socket. The jaw healed all right. But the eye socket. Holy shit. That fuckin’ hurt. For a really long time.”
“I bet,” I say, amid a general murmur of agreement. No one else in the group has had a broken eye socket, it turns out. There’s a general refilling of drinks; people think the story’s over. But there’s a coda.
“So it’s the next day,” he says. “The day after they sent me home, which was the day after the attack. So, two days. I’m lying on the couch because I can’t get into bed and S can’t lift me. Remember this was right after the [water-based armed forces], I’m still in [armed forces] shape. I don’t even have a neck, I’m like this wide.” He holds his hands out, indicating the kind of musculature that starts at the jaw and goes to the collarbones. He is still a biggish man, with powerful arms, but his neck is distinct from his shoulders nowadays.
“And S was a lot smaller then. She was, like, a hundred ten pounds with her pockets full, soaking wet. Manhandling a very broken, grouchy, drugged-out lummox like me is no easy task. And I’m lying there and I can hear her on the phone just hollering at somebody like she’s gonna flay the skin right off them. It wakes me out of my drugged stupor, and she comes in, face like a thundercloud, and hands me the phone, and just spits tacks: ‘They want you to come in.’
“I take the phone, and remember I have a broken jaw and I’m high as fuck, so I’m like ‘whfzzr hackng bour?’ And it’s the whale trainer. And he’s like, ‘I’m really sorry K, I know you’re in rough shape, but I need you to come in. You have to. It can’t wait.’”
“They wanted you to come in,” I say. “With every bone in your body broken.”
“No fuckin’ shit,” he says. “Fortunately I was too high to even process the anger. S was pretty close to blowing a gasket. But she does it, she hauls me in there. And they wanted me to put a wetsuit on. And I told them to go fuck themselves. Fortunately with a broken jaw they couldn’t understand me. They got the point, though, and relented on the wetsuit. But do you know what they wanted me to do?”
We all shake our heads, wondering.
“They want me to go sit on the fucking slideout,” he says, “and give the whale a fish.”
“Really?” We’re incredulous.
“Really,” he says. “Because she’s in mourning. She won’t eat. She won’t play. She’s moping. She knows she broke me so she’s fasting. They want me to show myself to her so she knows I’m alive.”
We’re all touched by this, in an Animal Planet sort of gooey mystical interspecies connection kind of way, and he shakes his head. “I was fucking terrified. Scariest moment of my damn life. Because all I know is, that whale just tried to kill me, and now they want me to go down where it can reach me, and I’m too injured to run, I’m too injured even to struggle, and they want me to sit there within jaw’s reach and fuckin' hand that maniac a fuckin' fish? I was literally shaking, and not just from the pain. But it was crystal fucking clear who was more valuable— humans are a dime a dozen but have you any idea what a captive orca is worth? Tens of thousands of fuckin' dollars. They’re not letting Kayla starve herself to death in mourning for some glorified underwater janitor.”
“So did you?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “I went down there, practically pissing myself, and I sat on that slideout, and she came up and she’s eyeing me, and I can feel her sonar. You probably don’t know what that feels like? I can’t describe it. Dolphins do it, and whales; when they’re checking you out, they use their sonar on you and it… you just kind of feel it. It’s really unsettling. So she’s sonar-ing me, and in a minute she comes up the slideout— if I could’ve moved I would’ve jumped right out of my skin, but I was so broken I just sort of sat there braced like well, if she wants me dead, she’ll do it now, and these assholes will just sit and watch.”
“She didn’t, though,” I said.
“I gave her the fish, and she took it, and ate it, and everybody cheered.” He shrugs. “I mean, I’m glad she did. I’m glad it really was just that she was upset at hurting me. I don’t hold it against the whale at all. As I said, she was playing. She didn’t mean to hurt me at all. And I’ve no doubt she really was sorry. After that she went back to eating normally, and playing, and I think she’s still out there somewhere. Beautiful animal. I hold her no ill-will. But I got out of that slideout and I decided there was no fucking way I was coming back to that job. Three years I worked there, four trips to the hospital, every one of them an animal attack. No thanks, I was safer defusing mines.”
He cocks an eye skyward. “By the way,” he says, “I’m pretty sure it’s gonna rain.”
Kayla, according to Wikipedia, is still alive and lives in Orlando.
