Narrowband

by John C. Lilly, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

He came in at 16:40 on a Thursday in November, in a canvas stretcher between four men in waders, and the first thing I wrote about him was his weight.

31.5 kg. Length 118 cm, rostrum to fluke notch. Male. Juvenile, by the teeth and the length. Found by a woman walking a dog on the mud below the dyke at Paesens, lying on his left side in a runnel with the tide going out from under him. Skin abrasions on the left flank and the left pectoral fin. Respiration 3 per minute. Heart rate not obtained.

I was eleven years an intensive care nurse in Leeuwarden before I came to the seal station, and the habit has not left me. I chart. At the station we have a form for seals, which has a box for Animal ID, a box for Location found, a box for Condition on arrival and a box at the bottom marked Notes. There is no form for porpoises, because we are a seal station and porpoises do not usually come to us alive. I took a seal form and crossed out seal and wrote bruinvis above it, and under Animal ID I wrote the number the rescue team had given him on the beach, which was 26-114, and then I went to put on my drysuit.

Bauke Wiersma, our vet, listened to his chest for a long time and made a face I had seen doctors make in Leeuwarden over X-rays they did not like.

"Lungworm, probably," he said. "They nearly all have it, the ones that strand. And he lists. Look." In the round pool the porpoise floated at an angle, his left side down, the blowhole tilting toward the water. Every time he breathed he had to roll to lift it clear, and every roll took him a little further over. "If he goes all the way he'll drown. He can't hold himself up. Someone will have to hold him up for him."

"Till when?"

"Till he can, or till the van comes from the south. They've said Saturday. Maybe Friday afternoon." He was already writing the dose of the injection on his own sheet. "Two-hour shifts. Not more. The water's nine degrees."

So that was the arrangement. Lieke, who is twenty-three and a volunteer and studying to be a vet herself, took the evening. I took the night with her, two hours in and two hours out, because she could not do it alone and the others had children. Wytse came at eight o'clock with a plastic crate.

---

Wytse is a doctoral student from Groningen. He studies porpoise sound, and for three years he has been studying it the way most of them do now, by fixing recorders to anchors in the Wadden Sea and coming back months later for the data. He had never had a living one in a pool in front of him, and he was so pleased that he was ashamed of it, and kept saying how sad it was while he unpacked.

He put a hydrophone into the water at the far side of the pool, on a weighted cable, and ran the cable to a recorder and the recorder to a laptop on a plastic garden chair, well back from the edge. On the screen was a black field with a white line along the bottom.

"Sample rate is five hundred kilohertz," he said. "Has to be. He's at a hundred and thirty."

"A hundred and thirty what?"

"Kilohertz. His clicks. You'll never hear him. Nobody hears him. We hear up to twenty, if we're young. Dogs, forty-five. Bats go up there, but bats aren't in the water." He tapped the screen. "When he clicks you'll see it here. A little vertical mark, high up. A train of them, when he's looking at something."

"Looking."

"That's what it's for. He sees with it. He'll be looking at you."

I was standing in the pool at the time, in the drysuit, with my hands under the porpoise's chest just behind the pectoral fins, the way Bauke had shown me, keeping him level. The water came to my ribs. Through the neoprene gloves I could feel very little of him except the weight, which was less in the water than it had been in the stretcher, and a slow pressure every time he breathed.

On the screen, as Wytse turned it toward me, there was a column of small white marks high on the black. Then a gap. Then another column, denser, the marks running together.

"That's you," Wytse said. "He's doing your torso."

---

I want to put down what the pool is like at night, because it matters to what follows and because I did not know it until that night.

The station is a former pig barn, a long brick building behind the dyke, and the round pool is in its own room at the end, with a concrete floor that slopes to a drain and a high window that lets in the light from the yard. At 23:00 Lieke switched off the yard light, because a light makes him rise to look at it and he must not rise. The only light left was the red one on my headband, which I kept on its lowest setting, and the screen of Wytse's laptop, which he had turned down until the black field was nearly the colour of the room.

Wytse went home at midnight. He left me a sheet in his neat handwriting: If the recorder light goes red, the card is full, change it, spares in the crate. Lieke went to sleep on the sofa in the office. That left the porpoise, the water, the filter pump, and me.

The pump runs all the time. It is a low noise and you stop hearing it after ten minutes, the way you stop hearing a ventilator, but it is in everything. It is in the water and in the floor, and through the soles of the suit it came up into my legs.

At 00:50 I noticed that I could not tell where my hands stopped. The gloves were good, but nine degrees is nine degrees, and the cold had come through them by then the way it does, not as pain but as a loss of edges. I knew that I was holding him because I could feel his weight in my shoulders. In my hands I could feel only the cold.

I wrote that down. We keep a slate at the side of the pool, the kind divers use, white plastic and a grease pencil on a string, so that whoever is in the water can note breaths without getting out. I had been noting his breaths. I added, underneath:

00:50. Hands: no position sense. Know I hold him by shoulders only.

It seemed to me a fact about the night, and in the intensive care unit we were taught to chart what we observed and not what we concluded. I did not then know what I would conclude.

---

His breathing was the clock of the shift. A rest, then a rising — I felt it as a slight lift under my palms — then the blowhole opening with a sound like someone blowing out a candle with their mouth too close to it, then the intake, sharper, then the close. Between breaths, twenty seconds, sometimes thirty. I counted them. Three a minute. Two. Three.

Between breaths, on the screen, the white columns. I watched them for a long time without knowing what I watched.

What Wytse had said was that he sees with it, and the thing about seeing with sound is that it goes into a body. Light stops at the skin. Sound at that frequency goes in until it meets something that differs from the water around it, and in the body of a mammal the thing that differs most from water is air. It reflects. Bones too, but air above all. That is how they find fish in murky water: the swim bladder of the fish shines.

My lungs would shine. I was standing in the water from the ribs down, the top of my lungs above the surface and the bottom of them below it, in a neoprene suit with air trapped in its folds, and every column on the screen was him looking at that.

I had seen my own lungs once. A chest X-ray, years ago, after a cough that would not go. The radiologist put it on the light box and there they were, two dark wings, the heart a pale fist between them, and I remember thinking that I did not recognise myself.

The columns went on. Rest. Rise. Breath. Columns.

00:58, I wrote, he scans approx. every 6–10 s between breaths. Scanning me? Or the hydrophone? Or the wall?

I had no way to tell. That is the first thing to say about the whole night. A porpoise in a pool four metres across is surrounded by things, and I was only one of them.

---

Lieke came in at 01:00 and I got out, and stood under the hot shower in the yard building in the suit until I could feel my fingers, and then took the suit down to the waist and drank tea and ate two slices of bread with cheese. At 03:00 I went back in. Lieke looked at me in the red light as she climbed out, her face grey with cold, and said, "He's better on your side, I think. He fights me."

I did not answer, because I had no evidence either way, and because I was already watching his blowhole.

It was during this second shift that I switched the pump off.

I should say that this was not in any instruction. Bauke had said nothing about the pump. But the water in the pool had been changed that afternoon, and he had been in it ten hours, and I knew from the station log that the filter could stand an hour or two of rest. I knew too, from the ICU, that animals and people hold themselves differently in silence: a sleeping patient who has been restless will settle when the infusion pump alarm is muted, before the nurse has crossed the room. I wanted to see whether he would settle. I also, I will be honest, wanted to see the screen without the pump in it, because Wytse had told me before he left that the pump made a band of noise low on the display that he would have to filter out later.

At 03:20 I reached across to the switch on the wall, which is within arm's length of the pool's edge if you keep one hand under the animal, and turned it off.

The silence was so great that I thought for a moment I had gone deaf. There was the drip of water from the edge of the pool onto the concrete, perhaps once a minute. There was my own breathing inside the hood of the suit. Then there was my heart, which I had not heard in years, a dull double knock in my ears, more felt than heard, sixty-something a minute — I counted it against my watch and got sixty-four. And then, at intervals, his breath, louder now than anything else in the world.

The red light. The black screen. The cold, which had taken my hands again. The water at my ribs, the same temperature now as the suit, so that I could not have said where the water began. I was a weight in the shoulders and a heartbeat and a pair of eyes watching a screen.

I have read that people in isolation tanks, in warm salt water, in the dark, begin after a time to see and hear things that are not there. I had never been in one. I had thought, when I read it, that it was a curiosity of the nervous system, like the floaters in the eye. What I found, standing in nine degrees with a porpoise in my arms, was that it was not a curiosity. It was what was left.

At 03:41 I saw, at the edge of the red light, the corridor of the ICU in Leeuwarden — not as a picture, but as a sort of certainty that if I turned my head it would be there: the linoleum, the hand-gel dispenser, the board with the bed numbers. I did not turn my head.

03:41, I wrote. Strong image: ICU corridor. Not seen. Known.

At 03:55 I heard the monitor alarm, the three-tone one that goes for a low saturation. Clearly, at the volume of a monitor in the next bay.

03:55. Heard sat alarm. Three tones. Pump off. No electronics in room except laptop + recorder, both silent.

I looked at what I had written. If a patient had said these things to me I would have written hallucinating in the notes and told the doctor at the next round. I knew that word. I had written it many times. It saves time. It tells the next nurse what not to bother about.

I left the word out. I wrote down the alarm, and the time, and the pump.

---

There was a patient in Leeuwarden, in my seventh year. A man of fifty-two, a brainstem stroke. He was ventilated, he did not move, he did not open his eyes to voice or to pain, and for nine days he was charted, by me among others, as unresponsive. I washed him. I turned him. I talked to him, as we are told to, about the weather and the football, the way you talk to a radio that is switched off. On the tenth day a neurologist who was new to the hospital stood at the foot of his bed and said, in an ordinary voice, If you can hear me, look up. And the man's eyes, under their half-closed lids, went up.

He could hear everything. He had heard all nine days. He had heard the football.

We had not been wrong about what we saw. He did not move; he did not open his eyes. We had been wrong about the word. Unresponsive had closed the question, and nine days had gone by behind it before somebody thought to ask in the one channel he still had.

I have never got over the football.

---

At 04:02 I did a thing that I want to set down exactly, because Wytse asked me afterwards to set it down exactly, and when he asked I could not.

I put my face in the water.

There is a soft hood on the drysuit, and a mask clipped to the pool's edge for checking the drain. I put the mask on, and holding the porpoise level with my forearms now, my hands too cold to be trusted, I bent until my face was under the surface and my mouth was a hand's width from his head, from the rounded bulge in front of the blowhole where Wytse had said the sound is made and aimed.

Under water there was nothing to hear. I knew there would be nothing. I knew that he was very likely, at that moment, looking at the inside of my head, the air in my sinuses, the mask, the bones, and that I would never hear him do it, not if I listened for a hundred years.

So I clicked.

You can make a click under water with your tongue against the roof of your mouth. It is a crude sound, a broad smack across every frequency, nothing like his. But he hears most of what we hear and far above it, and Wytse had said that wild ones will startle at a boat's engine a long way off. A click would reach him. Whether it meant anything was another matter.

I clicked three times, evenly spaced, about a second apart. Then I lifted my face out of the water, breathed, and looked at the screen.

For perhaps two seconds there was nothing. Then a column, dense, the marks so close together they made a white bar.

I put my face back under and clicked three times again.

Nothing for a second. Then, when I lifted my face, a bar.

I did it fourteen times, between 04:02 and 04:40, with his breaths in between, and I wrote each one on the slate as I went, the grease pencil skidding on the wet plastic, in two columns. On the left, the time of my three clicks. On the right, how many seconds until the next dense bar on the screen. I did not then know that what I was doing had a name. I only knew that I was asking in the one channel he still had, which was also the only one I had, and that I could not hear his answer, and could only see its shadow on a screen.

At 04:12, between the sixth and the seventh, I heard my name.

Not in the water. In the room, behind me, at about the height of a man standing. Sjoukje. In no voice I knew. Not loud.

I did not turn round. I knew that Lieke was asleep in the office and that the door was shut, because I could see the line of light under it, unbroken. I knew that the pump was off and that the room was empty. I knew all that, and I heard it. I wrote it on the slate under the sixth trial, small, so that I would not be able to pretend in the morning that it had not happened:

04:12 — heard name. Room empty. Source: me?

Then I put my face back in the water and clicked three times.

At 04:40 I stopped because my mask had fogged and my lips had gone numb and I could no longer make the click cleanly. I switched the pump back on. The noise came back into the floor and into my legs. I stood in the dark holding him level, my forearms aching, and counted his breaths until Lieke came at 05:00, and I did not tell her anything.

---

Wytse came back at 07:15 with a bag of rolls, and Bauke at 07:30. The porpoise was alive. He was still listing. Bauke listened to his chest again and made the same face as before, a little less of it.

I gave Wytse the slate.

He read it standing up, then sat down on the garden chair and read it again, and then he took the card out of the recorder, put it into the laptop, and was quiet for forty minutes while Bauke and I and Lieke talked about the van. It was coming today now, at two. There was a pool for him in the south that was deeper, and warmer, and had people in it who did nothing else.

At 08:20 Wytse called me over.

On the screen he had the night. He had found my clicks — they were visible, he said, as broad smudges right down the frequency range, nothing like the clean high marks of the porpoise — and he had found every one of my fourteen sets of three. He had measured the gap after each set to the next of the porpoise's dense bars. He had written the numbers beside mine.

"Your times are good," he said. "You're within a second, mostly. I've corrected the last three. Your mask was fogging, I suppose."

"And?"

"Nine out of fourteen, he does a buzz within three seconds. That's what the dense bar is. A buzz. It's what they do when they close on something, when they look at it from very near."

"Nine out of fourteen."

"Yes." He scrolled back. "But look." He showed me 02:00 to 03:00, when Lieke had been in the water and nobody was clicking at all. The same white bars came at intervals all through that hour, every few seconds. "He buzzes all the time. Every three seconds or so, on average. If you pick any moment in the night and wait three seconds, you have about a sixty per cent chance of a buzz. Nine out of fourteen is sixty-four per cent." He looked at me, rather miserably. "It's nothing. I'm sorry. It's what chance gives you."

Bauke had come up behind us with his coffee and was reading over Wytse's shoulder.

"You've been up since yesterday morning," he said, not unkindly. "In nine-degree water, in the dark. You heard someone say your name." He tapped the bottom of the slate with his finger. "People hear things."

I looked at the slate, at the two columns and the small writing under the sixth row.

"Yes," I said. "I heard it. I wrote it down."

"Well, then."

"No," I said, "I mean that's what I want to know about. Why that. Why my name, and the corridor, and the alarm. I didn't hear Brahms. I didn't see the sea." I didn't know how to say it better. "What came up was what's in me. That isn't nothing. It's information about me. And the clicks." I turned to Wytse. "It's nothing, you said."

"Statistically."

"So we know he doesn't answer in threes, with a buzz, within three seconds. We know that now. We didn't know it at four o'clock."

Wytse was looking at me as if I had said something in a language he had studied but never heard spoken.

"It's a negative result," he said slowly.

"It's a result."

"It wasn't designed. There's no control. I'd need someone clicking who couldn't see the screen, and someone watching who couldn't hear the clicking. I'd need different intervals, not just threes. Pairs. Fives. I'd need to know what he does when a person is merely in the water and not clicking at all — I've got that, actually, I've got Lieke's hour." He was talking faster. "And the buzz might be the wrong thing to look for. Maybe he changes the rate. Maybe the intervals between clicks within a train. You can't see that by eye, I'd have to—" He stopped. "He goes at two."

"He goes at two," Bauke said.

Wytse looked at the clock on the laptop. 08:31.

"Five hours," he said.

---

I will not make more of the morning than it was. Wytse wrote out a protocol on the back of the seal form, in his neat hand, with Lieke clicking in the water and wearing ear plugs and a blindfold so that she could not hear the porpoise breathe or see the screen, and me at the laptop with my back to the pool, calling out nothing, only marking the time of every buzz on a sheet. He varied the sets: one click, two, three, five, at random from a list he made by rolling dice on the office floor. Bauke watched for twenty minutes with his arms folded and then went to phone the south and tell them, I heard him say through the office wall, that the animal was stable and that the staff were doing some sort of acoustic thing, he didn't fully understand it, nothing invasive.

We did forty-one trials between 09:10 and 12:30 in four shifts in the water. I did not hear my name again. I had slept two hours on the office sofa and drunk a great deal of coffee, and the pump was on, and the yard light was on, and Wytse was talking. Nothing came up in me. There was too much coming in.

At 13:15 Wytse said, without looking up from the laptop: "I don't know yet. I need a week." And then, "It's not obviously nothing. It's not obviously anything."

That is still, as I write this, where it stands. It is not obviously anything.

---

The van came at 14:05. The men from the south brought a stretcher of their own, a better one, with cut-outs for the pectoral fins, and a foam-lined box. Two of them got into the pool with Lieke and lifted him, and he rolled a little in the stretcher, to the left, and breathed, and was still. They carried him out through the barn and the yard and slid him into the back of the van, and one of the men got in with him to keep his skin wet with a sponge for the three hours to the south.

Before they shut the doors I went to the foam box and looked at him. His eye, small and dark, was a little open. I knew that he could not see me well in air. I knew too that he had seen inside me the night before more completely than any person ever had, the air in my lungs and the bones of my face, and had made of it whatever a porpoise makes. Of that I knew nothing at all.

I did not say anything to him. I did not click. There was no water between us to carry it.

The doors shut. The van went up the ramp of the dyke and over it, and was gone.

I went back into the barn. The round pool was empty and the pump was running, and Wytse's hydrophone still hung from its cable at the far side, recording nothing. On the plastic chair was the seal form with seal crossed out and bruinvis written above, and on its back Wytse's protocol, and on the slate beside it, smeared now but legible, my fourteen times and his fourteen gaps and the small line under the sixth.

I had to complete the form for the transfer. I sat on the edge of the pool and took the pen. Under Condition on departure I wrote stable, listing left, resp. 3/min. Under Notes I began to write Animal responded, and stopped, and crossed it out, because it was not true, and I did not know that it was false.

I wrote instead: He looked at me all night, and I looked back. Recording on card 3, W. de Haan, Groningen. Result not yet known.

Then I took the slate and, instead of wiping it, put it in a plastic bag, and wrote the date on the bag, and put it in the drawer of the office desk with the spare cards, where it still is.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Novembribus (1 November 2026), ab Iōanne Lilliō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

John C. Lilly, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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