December 10, 2024
Echo and Bubbles
Performing dolphin rewarded with food at Miami Seaquarium. 1955. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.
The idea of freeing Echo and Bubbles snuck into their lives as a periodic tease. When Sam stumbled down the stairs in the middle of a weekday, high already, asking Russell what he knew about Jewish pirates or Plunderphonics or the Pentagon’s UFO disclosure timeline, Russell had to make a quick decision about whether he wanted to talk for hours or be left alone. If he wanted to be left alone, he’d ask Sam why he wasn’t in his room watching Echo and Bubbles on his laptop – had they escaped? Depending on his own mood, Sam would say, “Yeah dude, they did,” and wave his computer in front of Russell with some esoteric video queued up, or get the hint and stumble back upstairs.
Echo and Bubbles were two dolphins kept in a tank at the coastal research station of a nearby university, whose livestream Sam had become fixated on. This was the latest of the manias that he cycled through at a predictable rate.
He’d first seen the stream linked on some academic’s ancient webpage when his interest in low-frequency music was peaking. He’d lined his room with discarded car subwoofers and tuned his pawn shop bass guitar way down. For weeks his room buzzed and shook. The noises were so guttural and bizarre that neighbors repeatedly called the power company about a malfunctioning transformer, never guessing their real source. By the time the parts he needed to “upgrade” the enormous speaker he had disassembled and spread across their dining table arrived, Sam was spending half of every day watching Echo and Bubbles. When he made dinner for himself, he kept the stream open on a computer on the counter. He ran into the bumpers of cars when he walked down the street because he was leaning over his phone with the video running.
During one of their landlord’s unprompted walkarounds of the apartment, Russell caught Sam showing the landlord the stream, explaining that Echo usually played with the rings and hoops and that Bubbles usually played with the balls, but that today they were switching it up. Sam was so captivated by this novelty he didn’t notice a draft from the open window blowing the inch-thick pile of ash that had accumulated on the sill into the room. The ashtray had gone missing months ago and on principle, Russell refused to clean up Sam’s messes himself. On days like today, when guests were expected, Russell put a plant in front of the pile for discretion. Now, in disbelief, he watched a film of ash settle on the landlord’s thin, pomaded hair. The landlord swabbed at his head without noticing and did not look away from the stream. He smiled vaguely when one of the dolphins made a funny face. He asked Sam whether he knew what dolphins liked to eat.
When the landlord left, Russell cornered Sam.
“Are you trying to get us evicted?” Russell said.
“I think he liked learning about them,” Sam said.
A few weeks later, Russell came home with a date late on a Saturday night to find Sam alone on the couch inhaling cookies and staring as the dolphins listed near the top of the tank, asleep.
“What’s going on?” Russell asked.
“I think they’re asleep,” said Sam.
Russell and his date laughed about this in his room. “Have you seen him doing that before?”
“Yes.”
“Do you ever watch with him?”
“Sometimes.”
“Does he have friends?”
“A few.”
“Do you think he’s a virgin?”
“Couldn’t tell you.”
Sam and Russell met in college, placed together in the special housing reserved for students who’d taken more than 5 years to graduate. The atmosphere in the room they shared had been happy if only because college, which Russell thought of as an embarrassing failure and Sam thought of as kind of boring, was coming to an end.
They’d moved Los Angeles together, like so many people they knew, with vague plans to work in film. Russell found part-time work answering phones and writing grant applications for a documentary producer long past his prime, who had made well-regarded films about Native American protest movements as a young man and was now contracted by a multinational to produce shorts highlighting how lithium mining in Chile created jobs for indigenous people.. Russell described his role competing for the company’s business with a laugh to some friends, and didn’t mention it to those with political convictions more sincere than his own.
For his first few years in Los Angeles, Sam worked front of house jobs at cafes and restaurants from which he was continually laid off with suggestive, but not explicit cause. A week after he spilled a full pitcher of water onto the tuna roll and then the shawl of a lawyer, the manager at Ichiban told him they were scaling back schedules to finance renovating the outdoor seating area. When Sam asked how they were going to serve more tables with fewer staff, the manager nodded and shuffled off. Sam eventually found steady work as a weekend “Exhibit Maintenance Specialist” at a children’s museum, where he spent a lot of time vacuuming glitter out of the carpet in the Art Zone.
There had been minor successes over the years. A character actor known for his stoic face attached to one of Russell’s scripts, an invitation to coffee from an Oscar-nominated production designer who liked one of Sam’s sets. But basic stability, let alone the massive success each had daydreamed about remained elusive.
The more people they knew moved up in the industry or moved out of LA, the more gawky and ridiculous they appeared to themselves.
Did they know something about the importance of struggling toward a dream that their peers did not, or were they developmentally stunted? Did they yet have the capacity to do good work? Or had everyone talented enough to succeed in their cohort already made it? These remained open questions to them, and probably to the world as well.
Their lives trundled along until one night Russell started to pull his ID out for a doorman at a club, and the doorman said “no need, I can see your face.” A few nights later, Russell asked Sam, “What do you think it would look like to free Echo and Bubbles?”
They didn’t have to do much work to convince each other to go through with the idea. Years of humility and lack of action, of half-watched documentaries about socialist revolutions, tenants union meetings RSVPd to and then skipped, and the daily humiliations of work congealed into recklessness. The clandestine element and the fact that the dolphins could not object one way or another made it almost irresistible.
There was the question of whether they should write a manifesto. Russell, already savoring the hints he would drop about his experiment in radical environmentalism at parties, believed they should wear balaclavas, modulate their voices, and record a video of themselves reading a document that claimed they were a sleeper cell of the ALF. Sam thought the news reports of an unsigned action would be more effective at inspiring copycats. They compromised. A typed letter mailed to the Marina Del Rey Daily Breeze that hinted, ominously, at more actions to come.
A survey of the coastal research center showed them that it wouldn’t be all that hard. The tank was half inside half outside, with only one entrance lightly surveilled by an ancient CCTV camera. The project should be as simple as Russell cutting the fence that abutted the ocean, Sam sliding through it, swimming through the tank to the interior, and then letting Russell in. All the equipment they’d need to move the dolphins would be inside. The hardest part would be coaxing the dolphins into their transport slings. But Sam had watched them for long enough that he deeply believed he understood their behaviors and preferences. He’d know just how to nudge Echo and just which of Bubbles’ toys to gesture with.
Neither of them really believed they would go through with it until they started accumulating supplies. On the ripped pleather sitting chair in their living room something new appeared every day. First two wetsuits, then a pair of bolt cutters, then flashlights with red light filters on them and burner phones. Without much formal planning, they spent two pay-checks between them. Each planned to dip into savings to make rent.
They finally decided on a date. As it drew near, they were no longer excited. They avoided looking at the pile of supplies. It made them queasy.
Sam had a long-running bit where he’d ape someone annoying. It always made Russell laugh. So, at the hardware store in front of a novelty shirt with a woman downing a martini that read “A woman’s work is never done… so why do it,” Sam said, “Erm…. ok… that’s gonna be a problem.” Russell said “oh man,” and asked the clerk where they kept dollies.
The night before the escape, Russell had gone to the birthday party of a mutual friend. Sam hadn’t been invited and Russell hadn’t mentioned it, unsure of whether this particular snub would hurt Sam’s feelings. When Sam texted Russell around 10 p.m. asking him if he wanted to watch something, Russell knew he had to respond honestly: “Can’t I’m at Olga’s birthday.”
“Oh damn,” Sam wrote. Russell couldn’t tell whether this was a passive-aggressive emanation or just a sigh.
Because Sam was not awake at 10 or 11 or 12 the next day Russell went to get the U-Haul alone. When he returned with the truck in the afternoon, Sam was making a tiny but elaborate breakfast sandwich for himself.
“Brain fuel,” Russell said.
Sam didn’t respond.
“I parked the truck a few blocks away, on Arlington.”
“Very convenient.”
Music from a car driving by shook the windows. Russell noticed that some of Sam’s sketches, which had been pinned to a corkboard in the kitchen for years, were gone.
“I felt lucky to find a spot that big.” Sam put the plate he had set out back in the cabinet and wrapped the sandwich in a paper towel. When he disappeared into his room, Russell heard the door lock.
The drive from their apartment to the research center wound through one of Southern California’s many industrial neighborhoods built to support the aerospace industry and retrofitted to support trade with China. Sam stared out the window. A seafood importer, Korean Evangelical Church, and a crossfit gym shared an office park. The streets were empty but for a few long haul truckers headed east. When they turned, a metal fastener rattled from one side of the u-haul’s cargo bay to the other. This all worked on their nerves.
Russell tried to act normal.
"How's Lia?"
Lia was a set decorator from a horror short Sam had worked on a year ago. Sam pretended he wasn’t excited to have a romantic prospect after a few dry years. But he’d taken every opportunity he could to ask Russell how he might respond to this or that text of Lia’s about furnishing the haunted cabin that was their shooting location. For weeks, he sent suggestive, but plausibly deniable texts about blood bags and taxidermy.
When Sam finally did ask Lia out, she said no, but she'd continued to text him updates about the director’s acting out on her latest project. These texts lead to lots of analysis on Russell and Sam's side, and nothing happening whatsoever.
"Someone said she got a boyfriend."
The roads deteriorated as they approached the research center. When they saw the center’s long gravel driveway they turned off the truck. As rehearsed, they pulled on balaclavas, and pulled off the truck’s license plates. Russell thought Sam looked funny dressed like a bank robber in the headlights, standing with his feet angled out and a tiny bump from his belly showing through his shirt.
When Sam cut the first chain link, the tide lapping 30 feet beneath them, they heard a shrill beep. They froze. A few seconds later, they heard another one. A few seconds later, another. The regularity convinced them that they had not set it off. Sam kept cutting.
They saw two dark forms drifting near the top of the tank. Sam looked at Russell, and pulled himself over the tank’s railing, disappearing with a little splash. Russell was alone, and very nervous. He groped around in his mind for something that would comfort him. He had once had poetry memorized but that was gone. He thought that saying the lord's prayer to himself was a bit dramatic, and would only make things worse.
So he thought, as usual, of the worst thing that could happen. He thought that even getting caught and going to federal prison for 5 years would be better than how he had been living. He’d be a martyr to the environmental left. People would make infographics about him. Maybe he’d even have a suggestive behind-bars correspondence with some fan.
Russell saw Sam's red flashlight wave through a foggy window, then heard an interior door open, then another, then finally the click of the push bar on the door leading outside. Sam stood in the entryway, happy and wet.
“Can you imagine how much fun they are going to have when they get to swim in the ocean?” Sam asked.
Russell smiled stupidly at this. They stood quietly for a moment. Then an unusually cold coastal breeze carrying the smell of rotting kelp threatened to shut the door. Russell thrust his foot into the jamb.
They found the transport containers, which looked like 500-gallon coolers with wheels, in a dark corner of the lab. . They were rolled up alongside the lab bulletin board. A curling print of long graduated students summiting one of the mountains that looks over the Los Angeles basin was pinned next to a large glossy of the professor who ran the lab awkwardly mohawked, fronting a metal band at an event hall nearby.
The slings they’d used to lift the dolphins out of the tank were hidden in a supply closet. They looked like battlefield stretchers with a complicated series of rachets and straps running along the top to keep the animals secure.
At first, both Sam and Russell worked to maneuver the animals. But Echo and Bubbles clicked and whistled nervously whenever Russell put his arm into the water. When he gestured at them with a beach ball, they swam to the other side of the tank. Sam asked Russell if maybe he could work on preparing the winch.
Russell walked a little resentfully away from the tank. Over his shoulder, he heard Sam cooing and nudging the dolphins. They splashed and laughed. The more Sam worked with them the more high-pitched and insane the sound became. “This is so cool it sounds like they’re drunk!” Sam yelled. The dolphins bobbed up and down and clapped like babies.
“You know that means they’re anxious,” Russell said.
Sam was not listening to Russell. He buckled the dolphins into their harnesses. They seemed happy restrained too, in peaceful submission under Sam’s hand.
They lifted the dolphins into the containers. The first hints of sunrise appeared on the horizon as they loaded the containers into the truck.
The release of the dolphins stayed in the local press for two days. The reactions were predictable. Old leftists cheered the revival of the spirit of the 1980s, and conservative commentators made fun of the names they’d used to sign their manifesto. “The Marine Freedom Alliance??” one snarled.
The university that backed the research center said that its insurance policy would more than cover the transport of new dolphins to the facility, as well as the hiring of a part-time “aquatic animals safety liaison,” who would ensure that animals were kept in accordance with “widely agreed upon international standards.”
On the drive back to the u-haul after putting the dolphins in the marina, Sam told Russell that he was going to move out. Russell was not surprised but pretended he was. They made plans for a goodbye party that never happened because Sam’s subletter wanted to move in a few weeks early.
Hayden Betts is a journalist living in New York City.