My name–please get this right!–is Zachary Zimmerman, and before I level with you about Ruby and me and all the strange, sad and beautiful things that happened to us, let’s get one other detail straight: I never intended to fall in love with a dolphin! I mean, I didn’t exactly wake up one morning thinking “Gee, I guess I’ll get romantically involved with a 400-pound, legless marine mammal today!” Nobody does, any more than your average Joe suddenly gets “light in the loafers” or a devoted housewife ditches her hubby and tykes for a Harley and dykes. It just doesn’t happen like that, and anyone who says otherwise is either messing with your head or reaching for your wallet, probably both. I maintain, if you looked long enough at those people (or at yourself, if this has happened to you), you would always find the unexpected, and usually unwelcome, “revelation” foreshadowed by some obscure event in their past. Or in my case, several. With that in mind, you should know that the startling revelations recounted here were just the least unlikely among a suspiciously large number of improbable occurrences during my sophomore college year, when I was still young, stoned and immortal. Indeed, so many strange events occurred in my proximity in so short a time it would be folly to attribute all of them to chance, or even to my frequent ingestion of mind-altering substances. And while I have, alas, grown older, and I’m no longer as immortal as I used to be, no matter what I eat, drink or smoke, nothing like this happens to me anymore, goddamn it! So I’m certain that a percentage of these events, no matter how unbelievable they now sound, had to be genuine, authentic consensus-reality weirdness! And of that authentic weirdness, the events surrounding Ruby were, by virtue of their consistency, frequency and quality, the least impossible of multiple improbabilities! Some of these occurrences, while intrinsically interesting, were easily discarded as irrelevant. Others, like a conversation with Salina following our nocturnal skinny-dip in a famous dolphin’s pen, could have been included to buttress my conclusions. I chose otherwise to maintain focus on the development of my relationship with Ruby, which was extraordinary enough without embellishment! What happened, over the nine months we knew each other in the flesh, was less like an identity crisis and more like a dream wherein I fled a tidal wave in slow motion. The wave looked awesome, even beautiful, all glassy green and translucent, but it was inescapable, and I knew it was going to wash away everything and take me with it.
And surfing the crest of that crashing dream-wave was this dolphin, the one I’m calling Ruby in this story. She was laughing at my slow, bipedal flight, but she was also saying, “Come join me! We can ride this out together.” To suddenly realize, without warning or guidance, that I was not what society prepared me to be, not what my parents expected me to be, not even who I thought I was or wanted to be, was devastating and destabilizing. By learning to accept me as a human being, Ruby helped me to accept myself, and that was tremendously liberating–so much so I overlooked its dangers. But then, so did she, and I believe she understood them better.After all, I was a callow college student, still practically a virgin; she was a tough old ‘phin who’d been rolled in the eel grass many times before Beau made a showgirl out of her, and she had the rake-marks to prove it. Given her previous experience, she should have known better than to flip flukes over snout for one of her captor’s species! In addition to being lethal, fickle and clueless under water, we are such very, very conceited creatures… …Sorry, I digress. To return to my original point, let me repeat it just one more time, a little stronger, for emphasis: I NEVER INTENDED TO FALL IN LOVE WITH THAT &^%$#@ SHE-DOLPHIN! There. Got that straight? Good! Because nothing else in this story will be… including me.