Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

radio, a small kitchenette with two burners and a microwave, two full bookshelves under the window that looked out onto the compound, and a yellowed print of two of Gauguin's Tahitian girls between the windows over the bed. At one time, before the plantations had been automated, ten people probably slept in this room. In grad school at UC Santa Cruz, Nathan Quinn had lived in quarters about this same size. Progress.
    The paper on Nate's desk was empty, the bottle of Myers's Dark Rum beside it half empty. The door and windows were open, and Nate could hear the warm trades rattling the fronds of two tall coconut palms out front. There was a tap on the door, and Nate looked up to see Amy silhouetted in the doorway. She stepped into the light.
    "Nathan, can I come in?" She was wearing a T-shirt dress that hit her about midthigh.
    Nate put his hand over the paper, embarrassed that there was nothing written on it. "I was just trying to put a plan together for -" He looked past the paper to the bottle, then back at Amy. "Do you want a drink?" He picked up the bottle, looked around for a glass, then just held the bottle out to her.
    Amy shook her head. "Are you all right?"
    "I started this work when I was your age. I don't know if I have the energy to start it all over again."
    "It's a lot of work. I'm really sorry this happened."
    "Why? You didn't do it. I was close, Amy. There's something that I've been missing, but I was close."
    "It will still be there. You know, we have the field notes from the last couple of years. I'll help you put as much of it back together as I can."
    "I know you will, but Clay's right. Nobody cares. I should have gone into biochemistry or become an ecowarrior or something."
    "I care."
    Nate looked at her feet to avoid looking her in the eye. "I know you do. But without the recordings… well – then…" He shrugged and took a sip from the rum bottle. "You can't drink, you know," he said, now the professor, now the Ph.D., now the head researcher. "You can't do anything or have anything in your life that gets in the way of researching whales."
    "Okay," Amy said. "I just wanted to see if you were okay."
    "Yeah, I'm okay."
    "We'll get started putting it back together tomorrow. Good night, Nate." She backed out the door.
    "Night, Amy." Nate noticed that she wasn't wearing anything under the T-shirt dress and felt sleazy for it. He turned his attention back to his blank piece of paper, and before he could figure out why, he wrote BITE ME in big block letters and underlined it so hard that he ripped the page.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Hey, Buddy, Why the Big Brain?
    The next morning the four of them stood in a row on the front of the old Pioneer Hotel, looking across the Lahaina Harbor at the whitecaps in the channel. Wind was whipping the palm trees. Down by the breakwater two little girls were trying to surf waves whose faces were bumpy with wind chop and whose curls blew back over the crests like the hair of a sprinter.
    "It could calm down," Amy said. She was standing next to Kona, thinking, This guy's pecs are so cut you could stick business cards under them and they'd stay. And my, is he tan. Where Amy came from, no one was tan, and she hadn't been in Hawaii long enough to realize that a good tan was just a function of showing up.
    "Supposed to stay like this for the next three days," Nate said. As disappointed as he appeared to be, he was extraordinarily relieved that they wouldn't be going out this morning. He had a rogue hangover, and his eyes were bloodred behind his sunglasses. Self-loathing had set in, and he thought, My life's work is shit, and if we went out there today and I didn't spend the morning retching over the side, I'd be tempted to drown myself. He would rather have been thinking about whales, which is what he usually thought about. Then he noticed Amy sneaking glances at Kona's bare chest and felt even worse.
    "Ya, mon. Kona can spark up a spliff and calm down that bumpy brine for all me new science dreadies. We can take the boat no matter what the wind be," Kona said. He was thinking, I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, but I really want to get out there with the whales.
    "Breakfast at Longee's, and then we'll see how it looks," Clay said. He was thinking, We'll have breakfast at Longee's, and then we'll see how it looks.
    None of them moved. They just stood there, looking out at the blowout channel. Occasionally a whale would blow, and the mist would run over the water like