The whale sang through the empty headphones

Dear Delyara, I study whale migration, and tonight I heard the recording my colleague made on the morning he died. He had gone out alone to check one of our hydrophones, despite the weather warning. The boat was found overturned six hours later. His body was recovered the next day. That was eighteen months ago. We have been cataloguing his files slowly because nobody wanted to open the final folder. Tonight, I did. The recording began with wind, ropes striking the mast, and his voice saying the date. Then there was silence beneath the water until a humpback began singing. My colleague whispered, “There you are,” so softly I almost missed it. For twenty-seven minutes, the whale’s call rose and fell through my headphones while the office lights flickered above me. At the end, my colleague laughed once and said, “Worth freezing for.” Those were the last recorded words we have from him. I removed the headphones, but the room still seemed full of the sound. Scientists are trained to separate data from emotion, to label, archive, and move to the next file. I entered the species, location, and time into the database. In the notes section, where we are supposed to describe acoustic quality, I wrote, “Clear recording.” I did not write that a dead man and a whale had found each other one last time under dark water, and tonight I was the only person left to hear it.