[Fiction] Paradise

By Alexis Levitin

It was a long bus ride. Everyone slumbered as best they could, and finally they found themselves having coffee in a roadside snack bar as day dawned, bringing an imperceptible gray light to the world. The students looked as groggy as Prof. Starling felt, but at least they were all there. He counted them once again, as he had done in San Diego when they first gathered together, then again at the border, when they entered Baja California. Eighteen students, the guide from San Diego, and himself. They would meet their panga men and their cook later that morning.

They were headed for Magdalena Island, a stretch of desert sand separating the open Pacific from a quiet lagoon, where the California Gray Whale came to breed and give birth to its young. They would spend two weeks on the island, alone, without electricity, running water, or any of the other amenities of civilization. But they would have a local cook, two boatmen, and Gonzalez, their biologist-guide from Baja Expeditions, Inc. They would live in tents, have a roaring bonfire every evening, and be surrounded day and night, by the solemn whoosh of leviathan. From the chatter on the bus, he knew how eagerly they were all looking forward to this immersion in nature, this return to the pristine world before human civilization began to change the face of the earth. Prof. Starling shared their anticipation.

Like somnambulists, the students trudged back to the bus and slumped down in their seats. The driver, short and round, but with powerful shoulders, pulled himself up through the side door, settled himself in the raised front seat, and began to fiddle with the radio. He found an early morning talk show with lots of rapid-fire give and take and hearty laughter. Most of the students slumbered fitfully. Prof. Starling did his perpetual head count and was satisfied. With a grinding of gears, the bus pulled back on the tarmac and they continued their interminable journey toward paradise.

Prof. Starling found a seat by himself for this last leg of the journey, and he was able now to stretch out. During the long haul down from San Diego he had been seated next to a female student of translucent skin and slender, athletic proportions, and had been assailed in the darkness by forces in his blood that he was, of course, obliged to combat and negate. He was a biologist, but in the battle between the laws of nature and the laws of civilization, he had always sided, however reluctantly, with civilization. It was, after all, his duty as a Homo sapiens. He had done so once again, but it had been a disquieting journey, listening to the gentle respiration of the lovely creature slumbering, like a delicate fawn, just by his side. A touch away, there in the night. He was still a bachelor, after all, still in his mid-thirties. And, as it turned out, teaching biology at the college of Eden’s Landing, with its ivy-covered walls and healthy endowment, was not the easy ride it seemed to be. The town was nestled comfortably amongst low rolling hills. The college was exclusive and the students looked freshly scrubbed and well-heeled. Sometimes the sunny smile of a co-ed simply took his breath away. The flashing white teeth. The glistening eyes, blue, gray, hazel, chestnut brown. It was all quite tantalizing. And so he went on, never daring to let down his guard, always resisting primordial yearnings, quietly wrestling within, but allowing nothing to show. Every day he would escape temptation, going on a five-mile run along the well-marked trails in the tamed forest next to campus. He would return home dripping sweat, exhausted and content. Once he thought he saw a unicorn in the woods, but decided never to mention it to anyone. He could lose his job. He might even be incarcerated in a psychiatric ward with madmen. Yes, it was best to forget what he thought he had seen. After all, he was a biologist and a grown man. It must, he told himself, have been simply an illusion. It must have been somebody’s billy goat, astray from a near-by farm. That’s all. A billy goat.

After two hours, the driver slowed down, made a sharp right on to a dirt track, skirted the fishing village of Puerto López Mateos, and came to a stop at the edge of the mudflats bordering Bahia Magdalena. A couple of long pangas were puttering towards them from a broken-down wooden pier. Prof. Starling cleared his throat and called out: “Wake up everybody. Time to get going.” Slowly they began to stir; slowly they rose and staggered down the aisle to the front door. They clustered at the edge of the mudflats, from which heat radiated as the morning sun rose above the mist. Then, as if materializing from the early morning haze, the panga men were there with their two long dugouts, and the students were herded on board and the pangas started toward their destination, a low-lying island of white sand in the distance. A local guide stayed behind with the luggage, waiting for a third panga to show up. As they began their crossing, they could already hear the hollow whoosh of whales drifting slowly by. One whale, its nose encrusted with barnacles, passed them as in a dream, its baby by its side. Mother and infant spouted at the same moment. A student with intent eyes, diary already in hand, murmured with wonder. “Look, they breathe, just like us.”  

After the trip, Prof. Starling, reading their diaries, would come across further expressions of emotion, such as, “I feel a certain friendly feeling when I get close to a whale—it breathes like we do.” Or another student’s reflection on the deep whoosh of the whale’s exhalation: “Somehow, this sound gives me a strange feeling, hard to describe—I guess the best word would be pity—I feel a sort of pity for the whales when I hear the sound.”

Prof. Starling would be touched, remembering his own first encounter with leviathan at a whaling station in Iceland years before. A huge sperm whale had been hauled up by chains onto a concrete runway to be flensed, stripped of its blubber. Lying slack in the middle of the whale’s underbelly was a white sheath, at least six feet long, lolling in flaccid obscenity and shame. Starling remembered feeling at the time that he had never seen so much death before. The Icelandic ponies nearby, covered in volcanic dust, with seaweed dripping from their muzzles, were sturdily alive. The huge sperm whale was profoundly dead, and Starling remembered the pity he had felt.  Why is the death of an enormous creature like that so much more painful than the death of a cockroach or a mouse? As a scientist, it puzzled him. Isn’t death a universal event, no matter the size of the creature? Isn’t it always the same biological certainty, the same incomprehensible mystery? Does size make death more real? Or does it make death more unreal? And that enormous white penis, heavier with death than anything he had ever seen before. The pathos of it all. Yes, that had been his first whale. But here they would be surrounded by life, by mother whales and their calves, cruising the safe and shallow waters of Magdalena Bay, with large spouts and small. He was looking forward to arriving at their camp and taking his first walk along the sandy shore.

Reaching the island, they found Gonzalez’s local crew already setting up camp, with various tents erected at a distance around a blackened stone circle for the traditional evening bonfire. Within minutes, everyone’s backpacks and bags arrived in a separate panga, along with a tangled pile of twisted driftwood, which would serve for the nightly bonfire. The kids would sort themselves out and move their stuff to the tents of their choice. Starling strolled along the shore, away from camp, gazing out into the bay. At first there was nothing, but then there was the whoosh of a large female nearby and almost simultaneously a chorus of whooshes all over the bay. As he strolled along, the phenomenon repeated itself, and it seemed clear that the expulsion of air was coordinated, rhythmically organized, as if some hidden subaqueous signal was shared by the whales throughout the lagoon. And suddenly, he remembered the synchronized swimming of the water babes at outdoor summer shows in Flushing Meadows, back in post-war childhood Queens. The babies here, swimming beside their mothers, gave forth their own tiny plumes of vapor, accompanied by a diminutive whoosh of air. Bulky little water babes in training.

As he turned to go back, he looked to the far side of their desert paradise. Outlined in the distance, against the blue of the open Pacific, stood a wolf, alone, immobile, sniffing the twilit air.

The nights were cool, the days were hot, but sea breezes brought a freshness to their daily explorations. One day they crossed the dunes to reach the far side of Magdalena Island, where the Pacific scattered shells and seaweed along the shore. At one point they found bones half buried in the sand. Starling watched the students scramble around their discovery. It took three sturdy guys to haul the Gray Whale’s head across the sand. The vertebrae could be rolled into place, one at a time. In an hour the students had reassembled the entire whale. Of course, its soul was long gone. Hardly a scientific rumination. He felt embarrassed.

Further down the beach, they came across a sea lion, wheezing and rolling in the wash of the waves. It was still alive, but helpless. Their biologist-guide surmised it was dying of pneumonia. The students stared in solemn silence. Nothing could be done. Prof. Starling knew that soon seagulls would gather, and vultures descend from the heavens for the customary feast. And maybe at night the lone wolf he had seen outlined against the ocean would return to partake. Soon, nothing but a few scattered bones would be left. The implacable efficiency of nature. Starling wasn’t sure what he felt about that perfect balance, that universal process of conversion of life into death, of death into new life. But he did know that that particular sea lion, dying on the edge of the ebbing tide, would soon be gone forever. Starling, middle-aged biologist and bachelor, knew that nothing could be done. It was, after all, the nature of things.

As they doubled back toward camp, following now the inner shore of the quiet lagoon, there was a general exclamation, and the mass of students rushed forward as one creature. There, on an ordinary flat spit of muddy sand, a baby whale had grounded itself.  Feebly, it was trying to wriggle free, but it was unable to turn around and return to the safety of the deeper water. Its mother hovered nearby, cruising back and forth, agitated, but helpless. The eighteen students surrounded the small whale and one girl began to cry. “Do something,” she moaned, standing there bereft. “Do  something.” A couple of the guys grabbed the tail and tried to pull the exhausted creature back into the lagoon. But nothing happened. Then others joined in, some pushing at the head and the sides, others joining at the tail. Prof. Starling thought the effort hopeless and wasn’t sure if his students should be interfering with the workings of nature,

but he simply stood beside the grounded whale and didn’t say a word. The students, excited and galvanized, began to chant themselves into a cohesive force: “One, two three-PUSH! One, two three-PUSH!” And then, to Starling’s surprise and relief, slowly the bulky body with its rubbery skin started to move backwards toward the edge of the sand spit. Pushing, shoving, dragging, heaving, groaning, exhorting each other, exhorting the worn-out creature. Slowly, , the mass of students managed to move it an inch, then two inches, then half a foot, then another half foot, leaving a broad rut in the oozing mud. Slowly, but surely, by brute force and an insistence and belief that only the young could harbor, the teenage mob dragged the baby whale back to safety, back to life. Some students fell down, most of them got muddy and wet, but as they dragged the creature off the shelf of sand, and with one graceful thrust of its tail, it propelled itself to its anxious mother’s side, they burst out in a sustained cheer, as if their college football team had won the big match. Prof. Starling was moved. And then he spoke for the first time since they had arrived at that narrow spit of sand and mud. “Bravo. You have saved a life!”

That evening, after a hearty dinner, the students gathered around a roaring fire, cultivated from the pile of driftwood brought by the panga men from the mainland. All his students had a beer in hand and clearly some of them had already had more than enough. But what is ever enough for the young? Starling stood beside the students, his own beer bottle perspiring in his hand, as he gazed, mesmerized as always, into the flickering flames and listened to the crackling of the wood and the dark voice of the blaze consuming itself. What was this spell that he could never outgrow, never escape?  What was it, he wondered, that made hovering close to an outdoor fire so comforting, so deeply rewarding, so utterly irresistible? It really felt like magic, though he was ashamed to entertain such an unscientific speculation. Maybe it was just a holdover from caveman days, when a blaze at the mouth of the cavern protected our ancestors from saber-toothed tigers and other fearsome creatures lurking in the dark. But whatever the explanation, the appeal could not be denied. One wanted to stare into the flames forever, stand in a circle with one’s fellows, close to the pulsing heat, and drift, motionless, in an enchantment beyond all time.

One of his students called to Starling, as if with a question. The professor ambled over and, when he had come close enough, the student gently pushed against his upper chest and he went tumbling backwards in a heap. Another student had crouched immediately behind him, and he had been unable to brace himself with a tiny step backwards. Everyone burst into laughter and so did he. They helped him scramble up and handed him back his beer which had fallen into the sand. Everyone was smiling and happy.

Then another student addressed him. “Prof. Starling,”

a short, pudgy fellow said, and as he turned to face him, the student gave him a gentle nudge backwards and down he went, once again. This time he was less amused, but the students seemed happy and, after all, gathering round the bonfire was not exactly part of their required biological research. They helped him to his feet once again and he grimly gave a small smile.

But almost immediately, he found himself tumbling backwards yet again. And then again. And then again. He was no longer smiling at all, and some of the girls looked nervous, even as they giggled. Again he was helped to his feet, and again he was toppled over backwards.

And then something snapped. A sudden fury screamed inside him. He grabbed the closest of his tormenters, the biggest and most drunk, a friendly sociology major they all called Chippy, and they fell to the sand together. He quickly put a scissor lock on the long, slender body with his thick runner’s thighs and bulging calves and squeezed as tightly as he could. “Do you give up?” he growled. “Do you give up?” The drunken student said nothing in reply. He squeezed with all his might, but nothing happened. Chippy was too drunk to feel pain, to feel anything. And then Starling began to lose his adrenalin rush, to lose the great force in his legs, and the power of his rage. The young student squirmed and twisted and finally managed to break free from the professor’s scissor lock. Whirling over in the sand, he grabbed his exhausted professor and put him in a headlock. Squeezing tight, he pushed down and buried the professor’s face in the ground. Starling could do nothing and sand was filling his nostrils, his mouth. He could no longer breathe. Finally, he understood that he was defeated. “I give up,” he said with chagrin, “I give up.” Then the student spoke for the first time: “Whadya mean you give up? I’m not gonna let you give up,” and he pushed his face deeper into the sand. As Starling began to convulse, the other students pulled Chippy away and, once again, they helped Starling to his feet. He felt dizzy and he asked for a Coke. He didn’t look at Chippy, who was surrounded by three or four friends keeping their bodies between him and the vanquished professor. He slowly drank down the Coke, feeling some grains of sand between his teeth. The pudgy student brushed some sand from his shoulders, while another student, a biology major, murmured “You OK?” The girls huddled together on the far side of the fire, and everything drifted back towards normal.

When he awoke the next morning, Starling realized that he could say nothing to Chippy, a student who, drunk and innocent, had almost killed him. He, Starling, had drunk beer with them, had gathered in their circle around the blazing campfire, and, when they had tormented him, had reacted with violence. He had joined them in their momentary world without boundaries, he had joined them round a fire from antediluvian times, he had joined them in a primordial experience without rules and regulations, a world without judges, lawyers, policemen, and priests, a world from the past, from before civilization had laid down its implacable restraints, its insistence on order. He had led them to this place where a sea lion lay dying, where gulls and vultures awaited their feast, where a lone wolf sniffed the air, but where they themselves, spontaneous and free, had come together to save a baby whale from certain death.

Starling didn’t know what to make of the whole adventure, but he knew he had no regrets. Something real had happened, something unexpected, and that’s what these winter term expeditions away from campus, away from Ohio, had been all about. Yes, they had confronted something new, something alien, yet strangely recognizable, like a long-lost memory, something they would never have found back at Eden’s Landing. At least he had. And perhaps it was something larger in its vague familiarity even than the great whales whooshing peacefully up and down this timeless Baja California lagoon.

Alexis Levitin's half century of translations have resulted in fifty books to date, including Clarice Lispector's Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade's Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. In response to the fear-tinged isolation during the recent pandemic, he began to write his own stories. So far, sixty-three of them have been published by magazines in the USA, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Italy, and Turkey. A collection of his chess memories and inventions, The Last Ruy Lopez: Tales from the Royal Game, was published by Russell Enterprises in 2023. As for "Paradise," this tale reflects his original background in zoology, his love of nature, and his encounters, as a lifelong professor of English, with books such as Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies.