‘You’re frigid, you’re rigid and you have no soul.’

Jack’s break up words played in Evie’s head like a haunting melody on repeat. 

These were not his exact words. What he’d actually said was something like, ‘I dunno, babe. I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like it’s impossible to loosen you up. Sometimes I look at you and it’s like, you’re not even there. Nobody home.’

He was a little stoned when he said all this, but she knew he didn’t regret it, because he got together with Cassandra Carrington the next day. They were relentless in their mutual affection. They both signed up to do a summer semester at sea so they wouldn’t have to spend their vacation apart.

Against her better judgment, Evie signed up to the same program. She’d imprinted on Jack like a duckling on a pitbull. She couldn’t keep herself away from him, no matter how cruel he was to her.

They were learning about marine mammals. Evie couldn’t concentrate. She wasn’t good at environmental science or biology. These subjects were too messy, fraught with error and doubt. She preferred math. Computer science. Linguistics.

A specialist on whale songs joined their boat when they reached Maui. She taught them that male humpbacks sing to each other in low frequencies that can span up to 10,000 miles of ocean. She played them some of their melodic sequences, and pointed out how the whales changed them slightly over time. The students listened to her recordings with appropriate awe.

‘That’s a beautiful song,’ Jack crooned, his hand stroking the back of Cassandra’s neck.

A beautiful song.

The phrase jolted through Evie like an electric current. It was decidedly not a beautiful song. It was absurd to say such a thing. It was—what was the term?

Ill formed. 

The term they used in linguistics to label an expression that a native speaker would never utter.

The whales would never say it was a beautiful song. 

They’d say—they were saying—singing—that it was a gathering song.

The humpback songs were not just melodies, they were strings of syntax—a series of noun phrases, with the noun and indefinite article remaining ever constant: a song, a song, a song. What varied was the adjective that preceded the noun. It never-failingly referred to the song’s purpose.

A gathering song.

A loving song.

A healing song.

A journeying song.

Sometimes, in the response times, the whales would insert an evaluative adjective, but this new addition never occurred alone in the phrase. It always accompanied, and preceded the purpose adjective.

A beautiful gathering song.

A raucous loving song.

A helpful healing song.

A circuitous journeying song.

The whales would never utter ‘a beautiful song’. A phrase without a purpose adjective would always be ill formed.

Evie listened to recording after recording to validate her findings. A new tune formed in her own mind, a response to the whale melodies. A discovery song.

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