Shamans and whales

In 1999, I visited the Guatemalan-American writer and translator Victor Perera at a rehabilitation center in California. The previous year he had had a stroke that had destroyed his ability to speak clearly. But he talked to me at length and with great enthusiasm. I had the impression he was telling me about the visions of a near-death experience he had had during the stroke. In 1978, my father took me to an aquarium in British Columbia. We had read that the Indians believed it was good luck when the mist from an orca’s exhalation touches you, so I sat close to the water for the orca show, and the wind carried the mist of a breath to me. Afterwards, the young untrained one and I gravitated to one another like magnets. She was named Miracle because, out on the ocean, some people had shot her and her mother with automatic rifles, and while her mother had died, she had survived. I leaned over the fence and stroked her face, touched her conical teeth, and shook her tongue, which a trainer had said orcas like. I lay on my belly and reached under the fence to stroke her better, only stopping when my shoulder got sore. I Googled her recently and found that she died in 1980 of lingering complications from having been hit by so many bullets. In 1995 I had my last unimpeded conversation with Victor. He spoke about the Lacandon Maya shaman Chan K’in, who had been his mentor during some visits to the Mexican rainforest in the early 1970s. “When I learned that Chan K’in died,” Victor said, “I was really sad, and I talked about it with the Kogi shaman where I was staying in Colombia. He said, ‘Now that Chan K’in has died, you have to be Chan K’in.’” In 1998, shortly before the stroke, Victor sent me a letter which mentioned that a female humpback whale had flirted with him off the coast of Chile as he was making observations for a conservation project he was working on. He said she made it abundantly clear through her body language that the two of them would be fantastic lovers were it not for the barrier of being incarnated in the forms of different species. In 2007, in front of my computer, I tinker with these passages until my eyes sting; move them around, try to sum them up. Victor died in 2003; I wonder if he’s with that humpback whale now. I let the cat in from the hallway of the apartment building and he leaps up on my lap and headbutts me in the chin. I think we may have to be the shamans, the rainforests, the orcas. In the center of the universe, in the middle of time, everything we have been and will be is arrayed around us, a network of breathing light.