The Dolphin House
ALSO BY
AUDREY SCHULMAN
Theory of Bastards
Three Weeks in December
Swimming with Jonah
A House Named Brazil
The Cage
Europa Editions
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2022 by Audrey Schulman
First publication 2022 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
instagram.com/emanueleragnisco
Cover design by Ginevra Rapisardi
Cover illustration © Xuan Loc Xuan
Gray letters throughout the text are intentional.
ISBN 9781609457464
Audrey Schulman
THE DOLPHIN
HOUSE
THE DOLPHIN
HOUSE
This is a work of fiction based on an experiment that happened in the summer of 1965 at a research facility in St. Thomas.
Although some of the events occurred, the characters are the product of my imagination and not based on real people, living or dead.
ONE
Tampa, Florida
Feb. 1965
At the age of 21, Cora got a job as a waitress in a club in Tampa.
It seemed right that the costume was difficult to pull on. She had to wiggle in and tug it on, then lie down to zip it up. The management required all the suits be cut one size too small. The outfit had ribs that pressed tight against her skin and pushed her breasts up. The result transformed her. Standing up, she was sleek and curved, had a rabbit’s ears and a tail. She did not recognize herself in the mirror.
The things the men said, the things they did, she tried to consider as intended for the rabbit.
The work shifts were long. She developed welts along her sides from the costume’s ribs. Her arms, strong from mucking out her dad’s pigs, trembled by the end of the night from carrying the trays of drinks and dishes.
One plus was, in this echoing hard-surfaced club with the loud music, everyone was partly deaf and had ringing in their ears. Here, she had the advantage of knowing how to lipread. And, since her shift didn’t start until five in the afternoon, she had the whole day to be outside.
She worked here for three months. Rented a room nearby and bit by bit finished paying off her new hearing aids, the ones that masqueraded as cat-eye glasses, no bulky transistor hidden in her clothing. Instead, everything was built into the thick arms of the glasses, a miracle of miniaturization. She was so grateful. Wearing these eyeglasses outside, under the right circumstances, she heard things she hadn’t heard since she was eight. Paper crinkling, a bird chirping, her own gut rumbling. The first time she heard a child laughing, she jerked around from surprise. The toddler, some blond tourist kid, walked by, staring.
Of course, she didn’t wear the glasses in the club. Management didn’t allow that.
That final night at the club, she wasn’t sure what set her off, what made this interaction different from the others. Perhaps it was something about the way the stranger did it, reaching out with no notice, cupping her left breast like his hand was a scale. She had always considered touch as another language, more honest than speech. It expressed what the person would never say.
The stranger didn’t look at her face, had no interest in her reaction. The way a butcher would heft a lamb, thinking of the meal, not the animal.
Nice piece of tail—he said, pretending to refer to the tail pinned to the back of her costume.
Lipreading, she would have thought he had said nice piece of hail, but she glimpsed his tongue tap the roof of his mouth to make the T sound. Most times she could lipread men more accurately than women, their mouths closer to the level of her eyes, easier to spot the movements of the tongue.
With this man, from the way his head was angled, she knew he wasn’t addressing her, but was talking to his friends, two executives in suits standing next to him. He was trying to impress them with his membership key to this club, the young women in their costumes, his action of grabbing her breast.
His hand squeezed. He didn’t squeeze to the point of pain like some of the men did, but this was one touch too many. Her vision tunnelling in, a staticky sound rising in her ears.
(Her dad’s nickname for her was Scrawny, after a terrier who was an escape artist, would nearly kill herself to get free at least once a week).
She reached between the man’s legs, to cup what her granddad called the tackle. She lowered her voice as though from desire and said her shift ended in an hour, which was his car?
There was a pause. He was looking at her now, focused. When he spoke this time, it was to her, not his friends.
She strode off to the changing room, switched into her real clothes and collected her hearing glasses. Exiting the building through the kitchen, she picked up a sugar pourer. In the parking lot, she poured the contents into his gas tank.
She never went back.
Walking home that night through downtown, she passed the Tampa Theatre. A brightly lit marquee for the musical South Pacific caught her eye. The posters by the door showed a beach and the sea, a woman leaning against a palm tree, all alone and staring out at the waves. What kept Cora’s attention was the woman.
To the men back in the club, this poster would be inviting, each imagining himself approaching, the woman turning, her need.
Cora saw the poster differently. She thought the woman looked happy staring out at the water all alone.
So she went to the travel agent’s the next day, leafed through some brochures and ended up buying a one-way ticket to St. Thomas, an island not that far away, less expensive, more tropical. She hoped there, she wouldn’t have to dress like an animal to get a job.
TWO
Aug. 1957
Ogunquit, Maine
Reaching the top of the dune, Blum saw the crowd standing on the beach. Off to the side was the policeman assigned to protect the body for him and Tibbet. The policeman and a few others had handkerchiefs pressed to their faces like mourners. All of them stared about 30 feet away at what appeared to be a dark ledge of rock lying half in the water.
When a wave hit the rock, its tail undulated.
A pilot whale, the smooth curves, the gleaming oneness. A body so simple in form, a backbone sheathed in muscle and fat.
Blum shifted the bag of surgical instruments to his other hand and strode forward.
With the first incision, the smell was released. Blum and Tibbet began to cough. Insulated by blubber, the internal warmth had cooked the body.
Behind them, the policeman and crowd backed up, pressing the handkerchiefs closer.
The scalpel, intended for human bodies, was too small. Blum switched to the carving knife. Once he’d reached the skull, he picked up the hatchet. He and Tibbet took turns, stopping every few hits to see if there was any sign of breaking through the bone.
The next time Blum looked over his shoulder, the crowd was gone.
He chain-smoked to reduce the stench. Each time he needed a cigarette, he’d tap one partway out, then tug it out the rest of the way with his lips so his hands in the surgical gloves never fouled it.
So far as he knew, they were the first scientists to do this, to harvest a whale’s brain and bring it back for study. A decade ago, Blum had been the first to publish on the brains of the chimpanzee and gorilla. Even though the weight of the apes’ brains was less than half of that of a human’s, he’d found strong similarities in the convoluted furrows, in the shape and size of the frontal lobe. He’d concluded there were likely implications in terms of intelligence and abilities. Quickly a scrum of other researchers had followed him, all competitively trying to define their specialty in the new field of great-ape neuroscience. In response he’d decided, as soon as his current research was published, to switch to a different species. He was considering elephants, had heard their brains were huge. The problem was that elephants were so far away, expensive to ship and feed.
Then yesterday he’d spotted an article about this stranding. Modern science knew so little about cetaceans. It was possible they were smart. And there was the added benefit that in New England, they lived just off the coast, so the subjects could be easily replenished.
When he spoke at public events, the audience tended to assume that Blum was an infallible expert, capable in every field of science. Although he would never admit this in public, he’d nearly failed statistics in college, as well as organic chemistry. Even now he relied on his postdocs for these parts of the work.
No, his greatest strength was curiosity. An interesting research question caught him, wouldn’t let him go. He’d started with gorillas because, after paging through a National Geographic article, he’d had a dream that night about one of them shaving. Handling the shaver adeptly, stretching the mouth to the side to get the cheeks, eyeing the progress in the mirror, the ape had removed the hair bit by bit, looking more and more human. In the morning, Blum had woken, wondering just how smart they were under all that fur.
Several times so far, once he’d started investigating a subject, other researchers would follow, the topic becoming trendy. By then he would already have established himself, made a few big discoveries, and he could move on to some new subject.
His second strength was being able to convey the importance of the work with a single well-chosen analogy—essential to securing funding. Other neuroscientists might be as good or better with the science, but they didn’t comprehend the funders’ desire to be associated with an analogy like that, to buy it with money and mention it at parties.
When he started his research on gorillas, the newspapers had been filled with stories about computers and their many potential applications. The word, “computers,” no longer referred to women in the back office hunched over adding machines, but instead to huge cabinets of humming machinery capable of adding up a thousand numbers in a second. This new type of mechanical computer was associated with everything futuristic and impressive.
And so, with his research into gorilla brains, he’d associated the work with computers. He told the funders that brains were like biological computers and he would unlock the secrets to the gorillas’ foreign circuitry, capabilities and speed.
Blum and Tibbet had opened a crack in the whale’s skull with the hatchet. Blum was Tibbet’s department head. When Blum asked him for help, he’d said yes.
They used a hammer and wood shims to widen the crack systematically. They worked carefully, so they wouldn’t harm the brain or its protective bag of meninges. When the crack was wide enough, running three quarters of the way around the skull, Tibbet got his fingers into the crack and leaned back, pulling. Blum sat on the animal’s forehead and applied the crowbar. Working together, rocking with their bodies, the gap widened. There was a sudden crack and the top of the skull opened.
Blum fell forward onto the side of the animal. His eyes at the level of the brain, he stared across its surface like an astronaut on the moon.
Even through the thin cloth of meninges, the organ was clearly convoluted and dense with power.
Jesus—said Blum and sat up.
Gently he slid his hands in, between the meninges and the skull, to heft the bag of brains up—the contents a trifle soupy from decomposition. Tibbet cut the bag free at the base and Blum pulled it out.
He held the organ in his arms, a father cradling a newborn. Or a miner with a bag of gold.
But Tibbet must have nicked the meninges, for the fabric began to sag at the base, then simply to rip, the contents dribbling out. Within a moment, no matter how he grasped and hugged the organ, he ended up holding just the wet and empty bag.
Not that it really mattered.
For from the moment he cupped the weight of that brain—easily twice as much as a human’s—he knew his life’s direction had been changed.
THREE
May 1965
On St. Thomas, Cora got a position at the Cantab, a bar on a dock in the harbor. When the boats landed, the Cantab was the first place the tourists saw. It was always crowded.
There was a Help Wanted sign in the window, so she’d stepped inside to ask about it. When she said she had experience, the manager hired her.
Dishwasher?—she asked, hoping for a job with minimal conversation.
He blew air out of his mouth, amused. He looked her over and said—Waitress.
It was a noisy restaurant, the clatter of silverware and plates, the blender in the kitchen and the background chatter. With the customers sitting down, facing their menus, it was hard to see their tongues. Even with her hearing glasses, she frequently had to ask people to repeat.
The men would smile and lean toward her, wanting a reason to get closer. Staring at their mouths, she’d try to figure out if they were saying Some fries or Beers, guys? They liked her looking. On the other hand, when she asked the women to repeat, their eyes got hard and they tightened their mouths, making it harder to see what they were saying.
(Most of us understand so little about sound. Having always had good hearing, we take it for granted, never analyzing it.
So much of what we experience as sound is not the original sound, but its reflection off nearby objects.
Say the word Hello in a large auditorium with hard surfaces. The word ricochets around, tiny and lost.
Now say Hello at the same volume in a living room full of furniture. It bounces once off the walls and is caught in the soft cushions. The sound is clear and solid.
Finally say Hello on a lake, in the fog. The word flies away and is gone without a ripple.
As a child, her favorite place was the pig barn, the hay and the dirt floor, the wood walls and the backs of the pigs. Sound reflected just enough. Her second favorite place was the mudroom at home, a contained area with raincoats, shoes, bags of laundry and a carpet. The sound gentle and warm. If she wanted to talk to anyone in her family, if it was going to be a conversation longer than a sentence or two, she would time for this moment as they stood in this room, pulling on or off their shoes.)
The restaurant had three distinct sections.
• The main seating area was long and narrow, with a wood floor and old rafters. It functioned as an echo chamber that two or three tables of customers could fill, every sound multiplied. A single laugh barked back and forth, harsh, hurting the ears.