Make It Scream Make It Burn Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Leslie Jamison

  Cover design by Gregg Kulick

  Author photograph by Beowulf Sheehan

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  The essays in this book previously appeared, sometimes in significantly different form, in the following publications: “Up in Jaffna” (as “The Two Faces of Paradise”) in Afar; “52 Blue” in The Atavist; “The Quickening” and “Sim Life” in The Atlantic; “Layover Story” (as “Baggage Claims”) and “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live Again” (as “Giving up the Ghost”) in Harper’s; “No Tongue Can Tell” in the Los Angeles Review of Books; “The Long Trick” (as “Saudades”) in the Mississippi Review; “Rehearsals” in The Nervous Breakdown; “Daughter of a Ghost” (as “In the Shadow of a Fairy Tale”) in the New York Times Magazine; “Make It Scream, Make It Burn” in the Oxford American; and “Maximum Exposure” (as “Going Back”) and “Museum of Broken Hearts” (as “The Breakup Museum”) in the Virginia Quarterly Review.

  ISBN 978-0-316-25966-8

  E3-20190815-DA-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  — I —: Longing 52 Blue

  We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live Again

  Layover Story

  Sim Life

  — II —: Looking Up in Jaffna

  No Tongue Can Tell

  Make It Scream, Make It Burn

  Maximum Exposure

  — III —: Dwelling Rehearsals

  The Long Trick

  The Real Smoke

  Daughter of a Ghost

  Museum of Broken Hearts

  The Quickening

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More Leslie Jamison

  About the Author

  Also by Leslie Jamison

  For my father,

  Dean Tecumseh Jamison

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  When do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it?

  —Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

  — I —

  Longing

  52 Blue

  December 7, 1992. Whidbey Island, Puget Sound. The world wars were over. The other wars were over: Korea, Vietnam. The Cold War was finally over, too. The Whidbey Island Naval Air Station remained. So did the Pacific, its waters vast and fathomless beyond an airfield named for an airman whose body was never found: William Ault, who died in the Battle of the Coral Sea. This is how it goes. The ocean swallows human bodies whole and makes them immortal. William Ault became a runway that sends other men into the sky.

  At the Naval Air Station, the infinite Pacific appeared as finite data gathered by a network of hydrophones spread along the ocean floor. Initially used to monitor Soviet subs during the Cold War, these hydrophones had since been turned toward the sea itself, transforming its formless noises into something measurable: pages of printed graphs rolling out of a spectrograph machine.

  On that particular December day in 1992, petty officer second class Velma Ronquille heard a strange sound. She stretched it out on a different spectrogram so she could see it better. She couldn’t quite believe that it was coming in at 52 hertz. She beckoned one of the audio technicians. He needed to come back, she said. He needed to take another look. The technician came back. He took another look. His name was Joe George. Velma told him, “I think this is a whale.”

  Joe thought, Holy cow. It hardly seemed possible. The sound pattern looked like the call of a blue whale, but blue whales usually came in somewhere between 15 and 20 hertz—an almost imperceptible rumble, on the periphery of what the human ear can detect. Fifty-two hertz was off the charts. But here it was, right in front of them, the audio signature of a creature moving through Pacific waters with a singularly high-pitched song.

  Whales make calls for a number of reasons: to navigate, to find food, to communicate with one another. For certain whales, including humpbacks and blues, songs also play a role in sexual selection. Blue males sing louder than females, and the volume of their singing—at more than 180 decibels—makes them the loudest animals in the world. They click and grunt and trill and hum and moan. They sound like foghorns. Their calls can travel thousands of miles through the ocean.

  Because this whale’s frequency was unprecedented, the folks at Whidbey kept tracking him for years, every migration season, as he made his way south from Alaska to Mexico. They figured it was a he, as only males sing during mating season. His path wasn’t unusual, only his song—along with the fact that they never detected any other whales around him. He always seemed to be alone. This whale was calling out high, and apparently to no one—or at least, no one seemed to be answering. The acoustic technicians called him 52 Blue. A scientific report would eventually acknowledge that no other whale calls with similar characteristics had ever been reported. “It is perhaps difficult to accept,” the report conceded, that “there could have been only one of this kind in this large oceanic expanse.”

  The drive from Seattle to Whidbey Island took me through the plainspoken pageantry of Washington State industry: massive stacks of cut lumber, rivers clogged with tree trunks like fish trapped in pens, towers of candy-colored shipping containers near Skagit port, and a collection of dirty white silos near Deception Pass Bridge, its steel span looming majestically over Puget Sound—hard-sparkling water glinting with shards of sunlight nearly two hundred feet below. On the far side of the bridge, the island felt pastoral and otherworldly, almost defensive. LITTER AND IT WILL HURT, one sign read. Another said, SPACE HEATERS NEED SPACE. Whidbey Island often calls itself the longest island in America, but this isn’t strictly true. “Whidbey is long,” the Seattle Times observed in 2000, “but let’s not stretch it.” It’s long enough to hold a kite festival, a mussel festival, an annual bike race (the Tour de Whidbey), four inland lakes, and a yearly murder-mystery game that turns the entire town of Langley, population 1,035, into a crime scene.

  Joe George, the technician who first identified 52 Blue, still lives in a modest hillside home perched on the northern end of Whidbey, about six miles from the air station. When I visited, he answered the door smiling—a burly man with silver hair, no-nonsense but friendly. Though he hadn’t worked at the air station for twenty years, he was still able to get us past security with his Navy ID. He told me he uses it whenever he comes back to the base to drop off his recycling. Outside the officers’ club, men in
flight suits were drinking cocktails on a wooden deck. The coastline was ragged and beautiful beyond—waves crashing onto dark sand, salt wind moving through the evergreens.

  Joe explained that when he worked at the air station, his team—the team responsible for processing audio data from the hydrophones—was fairly disconnected from the rest of the base. It was a question of security, he said. When we reached his old building, I saw what he meant. It was surrounded by double fences topped with razor wire. He told me that some of the other servicemen on base used to think his building was some kind of prison. They never knew what it was for. When I asked him what he had thought those strange sounds had been, back in 1992, before he realized they were whale calls, he said, “I can’t tell you that. It’s classified.”

  Back at his house, Joe pulled out a sheaf of papers from his days spent tracking 52 Blue. They were computer maps documenting nearly a decade of migratory patterns, the whale’s journey each season marked by a different color—yellow, orange, purple—in the crude lines of mid-’90s computer graphics. Joe showed me charts of 52’s song and explained the lines and metrics so I could compare its signature with more typical whale noise: the lower frequencies of regular blues, the much higher frequencies of humpbacks. Blue-whale songs hold various kinds of sounds—long purrs and moans, constant or modulated—and 52 Blue’s vocalizations showed these same distinctive patterns, only on a wildly different frequency, one just above the lowest note on a tuba. The brief recorded clip of 52 he played me, sped up for human hearing, sounded ghostly: a reedy, pulsing, searching sound, the aural equivalent of a beam of light murkily visible through thick fog on a moonlit night.

  Joe clearly enjoyed explaining his charts and maps. It seemed to have something to do with his love for organization and order. As he proudly showed me the fruits of his various and somewhat surprising hobbies—his impressive collection of carnivorous plants and the bees he raised to feed them, or the pristine musket he’d built from a kit for one of his eighteenth-century fur-trapper rendezvous reenactments—a clear penchant for care and conscientiousness emerged. He had a deep desire to be accurate and meticulous about everything he did. As he showed me the cobra lilies, his favorite plants, he explained how their translucent hoods trick trapped flies into exhausting themselves by flying toward the light—evidently impressed by the economy and ingenuity of their design—and then carefully fixed a frost cloth over their curled green backs to protect them from the cold.

  I sensed that Joe enjoyed the chance to pull out his old whale charts. They took him back to the days when the story of 52 was still unfolding, and he was right in the middle of it. Joe told me he’d arrived at Whidbey after several years of what was technically classified as “arduous duty” on a base in Iceland, though he explained that those years weren’t particularly arduous at all; his kids built snowmen by the Blue Lagoon. Joe was a good candidate for Whidbey. He was already trained as an acoustic technician, already prepared for the work that happened in his squat little bunker behind the razor-wire fences.

  The hydrophone tracking program—also known as the Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS—was a bit of a “bastard child,” Joe told me. After the Cold War ended, without Soviet submarines to listen to, the Navy needed more convincing about how the expensive hydrophone array could earn its keep. The work that emerged surprised even the ones who started doing it. Darel Martin, an acoustic technician who worked with Joe at Whidbey, described it like this: “We went from being experts on sharks of steel to tracking living, breathing animals.” He said: “It’s just endless what you can hear out of the ocean.” Now the mystery of one particular whale survives as a man sitting at his kitchen table, pulling out weathered folders to point out the ordinary-looking graph of an extraordinary song.

  July 2007, Harlem, New York. Leonora knew she was going to die. Not just someday, but soon. She’d been suffering from fibroids and bleeding for years, sometimes so heavily that she was afraid to leave her apartment. She grew obsessed with blood: thinking about blood, dreaming about blood, writing poems about blood. She stopped working as a case supervisor for the city, a job she’d held for more than a decade. At that point, Leonora was forty-eight years old. She had always been a self-sufficient person; she’d been working since she was fourteen. She’d never been married, though she’d had offers. She liked to know that she could support herself. But this was a new level of isolation. One family member told her, “You are in a very dark place,” and said she no longer wanted to see her.

  By summer things had gotten worse. Leonora felt truly ill: relentless nausea, severe constipation, aches across her whole body. Her wrists were swollen, her stomach bloated, her vision blurred with jagged spirals of color. She could hardly breathe when she was lying down, so she barely slept. When she did sleep, her dreams were strange. One night she saw a horse-drawn hearse moving across the cobblestone streets of another century’s Harlem. She picked up the horse’s reins, looked it straight in the eye, and knew it had come for her. She felt so convinced she was going to die that she unlocked her apartment door so her neighbors wouldn’t have trouble removing her body. She called her doctor to tell her as much—I’m pretty sure I’m going to die—and her doctor got pissed, said she needed to call the paramedics, that she was going to live.

  As the paramedics were wheeling Leonora away from her apartment on a gurney, she asked them to turn around and take her back so she could lock the door. This was how she knew she’d regained faith in her own life. If she wasn’t going to die, she didn’t want to leave her door unlocked.

  That request, asking the paramedics to turn around, is the last thing Leonora can remember before two months of darkness. That night in July was the beginning of a medical odyssey—five days of surgery, seven weeks in a coma, six months in the hospital—that would eventually deliver her, in her own time and her own way, to the story of 52 Blue.

  During the years when Joe and Darel were tracking 52 Blue, they worked under the supervision of Bill Watkins, an acoustic expert from Woods Hole who came across the country to Whidbey Island every few months to hear about what they’d found. Everyone who told me about Watkins spoke of him in almost mythic terms. The number of languages he spoke kept changing every time I heard it: six, twelve, thirteen. One of his former research assistants claimed it was twenty. He’d been born to Christian missionaries stationed in French Guinea. According to Darel, Watkins had hunted elephants with his father when he was a kid. “He could actually hear twenty hertz, which is extremely low for any human,” Darel told me. “You and I can’t hear that…but he could actually hear the elephants in the distance. And he would tell his dad which way to go.”

  Over the course of his career, Watkins developed much of the technology and methodology that made it possible to record and analyze whale songs: whale tags, underwater playback experiments, location methods. He developed the first tape recorder capable of capturing whale vocalizations.

  For Joe and Darel, 52 Blue’s unusual frequency was interesting mainly because it made him easy to track. You could always distinguish his call, so you always knew where he was traveling. Other whales were harder to tell apart, their patterns of motion harder to discern. The possibility of particularity—this whale, among all whales—allowed for an ongoing relationship to 52 as an individual creature, while other whales blurred into a more anonymous collective body.

  52’s particularity, as well as his apparent isolation, lent him a certain sheen of personality. “We always laughed when we were tracking him,” Darel told me. “We said, ‘Maybe he’s heading to Baja for the lady blues.’” Darel’s jokes echoed with the familiarity of affectionate condescension, the way frat brothers might talk about the runt of a pledge class who never had much luck with girls: 52 struck out, looked again, tried again. 52 never let up with that song. It was something more than a job. Darel bought his wife a whale necklace during the years he spent tracking 52, and she still wears it.

  Joe had his own fixations. “One time he di
sappeared for over a month,” he said of 52, his inflection registering a mystery that clearly still engaged him. And at the end of the month, when they finally picked him up again, he was farther out in the Pacific than he’d ever been. Why was there that gap? Joe wondered. What had happened during that time?

  Watkins was the driving force behind the whale tracking, but he couldn’t keep it running forever. After 9/11, Joe explained, all the money disappeared for good.

  As it turned out, however, the saga of 52 was just beginning. After the Woods Hole researchers published their findings about 52 Blue for the first time—in 2004, three years after the funding dried up—they started getting inundated with notes about the whale. Bill Watkins had died a month after the paper was accepted, so it was his former research assistant, a woman named Mary Ann Daher, who found herself receiving this flood of letters. They weren’t typical pieces of professional correspondence. They came, as New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin wrote at the time, “from whale lovers lamenting the notion of a lonely heart of the cetacean world” or from people who identified with the whale for other reasons: because he seemed restless or independent, because he sang his own song.

  After Revkin’s story ran that December, headlined “Song of the Sea, a Cappella and Unanswered,” more letters flooded Woods Hole. (One marine-mammal researcher quoted in the story, Kate Stafford, may have inadvertently fanned the flames: “He’s saying, ‘Hey, I’m out here.’ Well, nobody is phoning home.”) These letters came from the heartbroken and the deaf; from the lovelorn and the single; the once bitten, twice shy and the twice bitten, forever shy—people who identified with the whale or hurt for him, ached for whatever set of feelings they projected onto him.