The man who thinks he’s a dolphin

This is what my new life is like.

Seth (I will not be calling him the dolphin man) is out of bed now. He’s doesn’t seem to need the Americans, Dr Walker and Dr Weybridge, to nurse him all day anymore. They’ve been giving him drips and drugs and seem a bit more relaxed. Walker won’t talk to me, and Weybridge has been absorbed in bringing Seth back from the brink. He says they have a plan now, but he doesn’t say what it is, or when he will tell me.

I am also puzzled at why they don’t mind my using this computer, Seth’s satellite laptop which lives with me now, to update this blog but that’s just one of many things I don’t understand.

For instance, I don’t understand how Seth can go fishing and catch fish without using a mask or fins. It’s true. He gets up at dawn and goes fishing. Spear fishing. I watch him from my tent as the sun rises. He still has the speargun that Kiki gave him, I’ve seen it in his hut, but now he’s using long thin slender spears made of wood with metal and bone attachments on the end.

He goes swimming in the morning for half an hour, and comes back with fish. It’s quite amazing really until you remember that’s all he’s capable of.

He eats his raw, and then wraps up a couple in a palm leaf for me. If this were years ago I would be impressed, touched even, by the way he leaves me food each morning.

I make a fire to cook mine. This evening Walker and Weybridge went off to see the Maori, and Seth came down and sat with me for a while. He must have heard me crying.

I told him I’d been reading the blog, and how I was worried after the weird posts and the long silence… he nodded but didn’t say anything. That’s all I have for proof that he can hear me at all.

The state he’s in it’s physically hard to look at him.

I can’t get him to wear any clothes. He’s skinny like a famine victim, and he’s got more insect bites and scratches on his body that I can count, probably from coral when he goes fishing as he can’t see anything.

And then there’s the sores from spending so long in bed, and the wound on his back which has changed. I’m sure it was self-inflicted. It looks a bit less infected. Probably because the seawater is washing out the puss and crap.

Pity it won’t wash his brains out. He still won’t talk, even though we both know he understands me. My arriving here has freaked him out. I saved his life really, but he’s so… nonchalant… out there… it makes me think he didn’t want to be saved at all. He wouldn’t have lasted another week.

As soon as the sun goes down Seth just retreats back to his hut and lies down next to his equipment, which he arranges to partially block the door. You can hear him murmur “Kuru… Kuru… Kuru…” as he sleeps while he’s away… away with the dolphins.

I know I loved him once but we’ve lost him. The man is insane.

I sleep on the beach in my tent. It’s cold at night and there are flies, insects and tiny crabs and god knows what else and I’m covered with bites too.

I have strange feelings about how this will all end. I should be relieved now that Walker and Weybridge are here and Seth won’t die, but instead I’m frightened in another way. I maxed out my last credit card island hopping my way here, so until the American’s mystery plan comes together, I’m stuck too.

A survivor speaks

I am a survivor from Seth’s previous life. A long time ago, me and the Dolphin Man, Seth, were lovers. That’s his name. Seth.

He’s not going to die anymore. Walker and Weybridge are taking care of that, giving me time to sit on the beach and ponder my new reality: writing a blog on behalf of a man who went insane on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere by messing around with dolphins… messing around with nature.

I think he’s surprised that I came, that I found him, but it was easy, really. It took a lot of asking and some dark stares as I got nearer but I knew he’d be here.

We’ve been here before, well, very near to here, a neighbouring island. Four of us came, me and Seth and our two best friends. When they were alive and we were all friends.

That was what started it all for Seth, that gap year, backpacking our way around the world. We all did the touristy dolphin swimming thing. He always said he wanted to come back and study the dolphins properly. We all thought it was a joke then but things happened, and he did it. He went back to uni, did the phd, got the publications…

How many years ago was that? I don’t care to count. The past is the past.

He’s lucky. If I hadn’t been travelling around Australia I wouldn’t have come at all.

Arrivals

Help has arrived! I think.

It wasn’t quite the rescue I expected but the panic is over. We are saved.

Yesterday I saw the Maori, all three of them, tying up a new boat and then walking down the beach towards me. At first I thought that at last they’d decided to help, but no, they were just guiding a new arrival to this smelly, shitty corner of the world.

The first arrival calls himself Mr Walker. He’s American, has a strong New York accent, and is not dressed for the weather. It’s not summer anymore but he only wears a suit even though it’s hot in the day and freezing at night. He says he’s a scientist, works for the US government, and he’s come to get their property back.

That’s pretty much all he has said. I asked why no one from the university has come and he just said it’s been duly noted, will be taken care of, and that I didn’t need to worry: more help would arrive.

Then he asked who I was. I was so shocked I could have died on the spot but then I realised I haven’t told anyone who I am, so how would he know? Today has been weird, so it will just have to wait.

I asked him if I could leave and he eventually says that he wouldn’t stop me from leaving if I want to, but that I should stay for a while to look after ‘my friend’. Doesn’t he realise that looking after ‘my friend’ is the only help we need?

Anyway, Walker slept in his clothes outside the door of the hut and returned today with an older, shorter man, Dr Weybridge.

He’s more approachable than Walker, and is the real scientist and looks the part too: short, balding lanky greasy hair, thick glasses etc. He speaks quickly and is nervous but is helpful so I like him.

He’s asking me lots of questions. What I know about the project, what I know about dolphins, what the locals have been up to. I think he actually cares because he asked how I was bearing up, about bloody time!

But they won’t actually tell me what’s going to happen now. I can’t believe for that they came here without a plan of what to do. “Something,” the doc says, “We’ll do something.”

The doc made a shiny new tent up for me so I don’t have to sleep in that awful hut. In fact, I haven’t our ‘Dolphin Man’, since the Americans arrived.

I don’t care. They can look after him now.

I don’t want to see him. I’ve seen him enough.

PLEASE!!!!!!

I need help here.

I tried talking to the locals. They say he is cursed, and worse, and refuse to do anything to help.

There’s a sore, a wound on his back and its infected and weeping all sorts of smelly shit all over the place. There are rotting fish everywhere in his room and piles of puke, urine… you would not believe the stench.

He’s naked and won’t leave his bed. He is a skeleton. He’s starving to death. I that he’s lost the power of speech because I knew him and he would speak to me.

I can’t call for help because my phone doesn’t work out here in the middle of nowhere, that’s why he has a satellite laptop, the one I’m writing this on now. I’ve sent a few emails, but I don’t think anyone is taking me seriously.

Grief, where the hell is everyone? Why am I the only one here?

Where are the people that sent him in the first place?

PLEASE!

Help!

I found him. It doesn’t look good.

Please, somebody has to come here and soon or he’ll die. I can’t make him move, eat or drink anything.

We’re on a tiny island just off the coast of Pitt Island. It’s one of the Chatham Islands in the South Pacific, about 500 miles from New Zealand.

Someone, anyone who is reading this please send help NOW!

What university is sponsoring all of this? Where the hell are they?