He turned slightly in his seat to look behind him. A teenager wearing a large set of headphones sat directly behind him. An elderly woman reading the snack list was behind Rad. Neither were paying them any attention.
He faced forward again and said, “I propagated a worldwide hoax.”
She said, “So what? The documentary was entertaining, and it made you famous. Doesn’t sound too bad to me.” She was silent a moment before adding, “You never said they had wonky foreheads. You never once mentioned echolocation.”
“Because their mermaid in the video didn’t have a melon. Their special effects guys either never thought about giving it one or, more likely, they wanted to keep it a stereotypical mermaid: beautiful, exotic, seductive. Anyway, I’m done talking about this, Rad.”
“Done! I’ve known you for two years, Marty, and I hardly know anything about you! I think you owe it to me to talk about whatever I want to know.”
“Not the documentary.”
“Come on! So it was a hoax. So you got punked. So what. Can’t you let it go?”
“Let it go?” he said angrily. “It ruined my life, Rad. How do you let something like that go?”
“I mean, you’re here now, in Sri Lanka. You have a new life. You’re on the verge of the greatest discovery of your career. Live in the moment.”
“I’m trying to.”
“If you want my opinion, to do that you need to be at peace with yourself. And for that, you need to talk about what’s eating you up. You know what they say about repressing negative emotions—”
“I’m not repressing anything. Jesus, I’m simply trying to leave the past behind and move on with my life. Why don’t you get that? If my family died in a house fire, you wouldn’t be prodding me to talk about them, would you?”
“If their memories were eating you up inside, I would.”
Shaking his head again, he closed his eyes again.
The Pomeranian yapped twice. Radhika murmured to it, using Marty’s name over and over, which made her impossible to tune out.
∆∆∆
“Marty?”
He didn’t know if Rad was talking to him or the dog. He cracked open one eye and looked sideways at her.
“Were you sleeping?”
He’d been dozing in the netherworld between sleep and non-sleep. “Was,” he said emphatically. “What is it?”
“I’ve been thinking about something you mentioned in the documentary.”
He closed his eye.
She elbowed him sharply.
“Ow!” he said, glaring at her. “Give it a rest, Rad.”
“You know when you were talking about whales?” she went on, unperturbed. “You mentioned how they used to live on land, evolving from small animals into the biggest fish in the ocean.”
“Mammals,” he corrected her. “The biggest mammals in the ocean.”
The general theory regarding the evolution of whales was that around fifty million years ago there were several different groups of amphibious hoofed mammals that favored hunting along the rivers and estuaries and salt marshes of prehistoric Asia, as the bodies of water allowed a convenient escape from predators. Some of the mammals were deer-like and racoon-sized, while others were more crocodile-like with large jaws, or otter-like with powerful tails. Over time, their descendants spent more and more time in their aquatic environments, and their bodies adapted for swimming. Their forelimbs became flippers and their tails’ flukes, their hind legs disappeared, and blubber replaced their fur coats to keep them warm and streamlined. The now fully aquatic mammals began to expand their ranges and diversify, eventually giving rise to the two groups of whales alive today: baleen filter feeders that lost their teeth (such as blue and humpback whales), and those that kept their teeth (such as dolphins, porpoises, orcas, and sperm whales).