The Impossible Resurrection of Grief Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Stelliform Press Info

  Publication Information

  Octavia Cade

  Stelliform Press

  Hamilton, Ontario

  1

  The Sea Witch lived in an abandoned saltwater pool. I knew her when she was called Marjorie and had the office next to mine at the university, but when the Grief came on her she stopped coming into work and set herself up at the derelict public pool with a stack of useless journal articles and a lifetime supply of plastic. The only reason she let me in the door anymore was when I brought her more.

  “I don’t want this,” she said, shoving plastic bowls back at me, plastic bottles, even a plastic hairbrush. She hesitated over cling-wrap. “I only want the bags,” she said, but the cling-wrap disappeared into her pockets anyway.

  The bags were getting harder to find. Not like the old days, when everything was packed into them at supermarkets. But plastic endures. It always had, and asking around netted me the odd stash shoved in the back of cupboards and forgotten.

  “Marj,” I started, but she hissed and flinched, hunched in on herself. “I’m sorry. Sea Witch, is there nothing else I can get you? Nothing else that you want?” We were friends, once. Still would be, if I had my way, but friendship is a mutual choice and the Sea Witch had forgotten mutuality. I’d brought her so many different objects but she rejected them all, discarded everything from a former life she didn’t want to keep. I tried blankets, because it was cold at the pool with the roof fallen in and rubble scattered over the space below, but the Sea Witch shook her head and huddled into corners, out of the way of the worst of debris and indifferent to the cold night air and the rain that fell through the remnants of roof. I tried books, because there’d been a time when the Sea Witch had loved to read, and the journal articles she kept in small neat piles even now spoke of a fingertip hold left to literacy, but she never so much as glanced inside their covers. Even the collection of fairy tales she’d had since childhood, the Andersen which had once been her favourite, failed to move her. I left it anyway, balanced on the pool edge over the old intake pipe that had once filled the pool with ocean water. I’d tried food — which she didn’t eat — and medicine — which she didn’t take — and I’d dragged other people there, doctors and psychologists, every sort of therapist I could think of. They all shrugged and turned away, weariness etched into the small sloping shelves of shoulders. “She’s a great deal better off than most of them,” said one. “Even the plastic … I suppose it’s a sort of therapy. And I’m sorry, but we just don’t have the beds.”

  I even brought her, once, the charred remnants of a ship’s wheel, picked out of the fire she’d set that night on the beach. I thought it might remind her. She’d stared at it for a long time, looked through it as if into a past ocean, and turned away.

  “Sea Witch,” I said again. “Is there nothing I can do for you?”

  She looked at me then, with empty eyes. “Can you bring it back?” she said.

  It’s the one question they all ask, and the answer is always the same.

  We met on an overseas trip, Marjorie and I. Both of us were travelers, and we both preferred to travel alone and make friends as we went. Truthfully, I wasn’t looking for a friend at the time — for the duration of the trip, I’d decided to consider them a distraction. I’d wanted to visit Palau for so long, to swim with the jellyfish for so long, that when I was finally able to go I wanted nothing to interfere with my focus. It was to be a concentrated experience, and one that might never come again.

  Jellyfish Lake was a small saltwater lake clouded with migrating cnidarians. The golden jellyfish, isolated from the outside world, posed no danger to humans. Although they possessed the stinging organs of other jellies, theirs were so weak that people could swim through the soft, billowing clouds of them without fear. The jellyfish migrated through the lake during the day, and snorkelers could swim with them, with thousands of jellies, with millions of them, and see in their lovely, delicate forms the histories of another life. They pulsed around me like little golden hearts, shimmering in the surface layer of waters, and it was as close as I’ve ever come to religious communion. Insulated from the world above by water, it was as if the jellyfish and I were the only creatures alive that mattered, and their bells beat in time with my heart.

  We weren’t allowed to do anything more than snorkeling. The lake was layered, and below the oxygenation of the upper waters, the thin surface of visibility, was hydrogen sulphide, which was toxic when absorbed through the skin. Moreover, the bubbles from scuba diving might have damaged the jellyfish, which was a reason more important to me than perhaps it was to the other tourists — with the exception of Marjorie.

  “Though it’s funny,” she said afterwards, making conversation as our hair dried in ropes around us. “That danger beneath, and the way we refuse to go there. To see for ourselves. It would be stupid, I know, but how good are we at ignoring something that’s only a few metres away? Something close enough, almost, to reach out and touch?”

  I paid small attention. Truthfully, I’d forgotten the toxic layer as soon as I saw the jellyfish around me, that enormous silent swarm. They were so beautiful, and so present, that anything that wasn’t them had been wiped clean out of me. I couldn’t think of anything else, and I didn’t want to. All I wanted was to bask in the experience, and to remember how connected it had made me feel to them, as if my flesh had taken on aspects of jellyfish, free-floating and delicate and perfectly suited for the world in which they found themselves.

  It was only later that I realized I’d bonded with more than jellyfish. When Marjorie rang to tell me her university had a position opening up that would suit me I didn’t hesitate to apply. She’d become one of my closest friends, a bond begun in lake water and wonder, and when I started my first day on campus she left a stuffed jellyfish on my desk, holding in its tentacles an invitation to come sailing with her on the boat she had just bought.

  “Do you think it will ever happen to us? The Grief, I mean.”

  I should have listened harder. Instead I put it down to a temporary melancholy, and a temporary recurrence of the realization of loneliness. Marjorie’s relationship with her boyfriend had just ended, and I saw sometimes how she looked at George and me, the comfort we found in each other then. So I made her come out with me instead, left George at home with his easel, and took her dancing until our feet blistered and stabbed, and melancholy was forgotten amid pulsing beats and pretty drinks.

  Grief was never something I was comfortable thinking about. I mean, no-one enjoyed navigating absence — the common experience of loss that came with funerals and memorial services and disappointments — yet I was as competent with these small sorrows as anyone else. But Grief, the undermining upwelling of loss in response to ecosystem devastation, the failure of conservation, was far harder to comprehend. I acknowledged it as little as possible. Still, it took real effort to look away from anything that had so much power, and so much spread. Like a contagion, it ran through entire families, through populations and with random outbreaks, until everyone knew someone who had it, who had succumbed.

  “It’s the experience of loss,” the psychologists said, but more than that it was a loss underlined by guilt, because that loss had no natural cause; not if you didn’t count humans as natural, and I didn’t. We weren’t thunderstorms, nor did we blunder about, blind as bacteria. We had the ca
pacity for choice, and what we had chosen — what we continued to choose — was death.

  The shift in climate that we’d ignored for so long, that we’d only given lip service to preventing … when it came it took so many of us with it, took us with floods and droughts. That was a small thing, really, and we were practised at looking away, so long as it only happened to other people, in other places. But when it started taking what lived with us — the birds and beasts and creatures that we loved, the green world that grew up around us, well. That was a loss we hadn’t prepared for, for all we had allowed it … encouraged it, even, through our choices.

  It had never occurred to me — to any of us — how intensely we could mourn another species once that species was gone.

  It wasn’t the same for everyone. Some people didn’t get it at all. Some people got it more than others — there was a higher rate of Grief in Indigenous populations, another negative metric people didn’t want to acknowledge lest it highlight their own culpability and continued privilege. Some people were set off by old extinctions, some by new. Some felt it well up inside them with each new charred koala, burnt to death by bushfires. For some it was the sight of starved rockhopper penguins, for some the quiet, empty spaces where the little rock wrens had been, or the fading of alpine buttercups. The skeletal bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef had triggered the Grief of entire communities, and looking back now, I realized that there Marjorie had shown her susceptibility.

  “It’s all right for you,” she said. “No matter what happens, you’ll always have your jellyfish.”

  I wish I’d seen less bitterness. I wish I’d found another way to share the jellyfish with her. A better way. But with the Reef gone, there was no substitute for her, nothing she could ever learn to love so well.

  The thing about Grief: once it comes it never leaves. The Grief is spiralling down and down into loss that can never be recovered, that will never lack culpability. It’s the guilt that makes it so devastating … and so profoundly destructive.

  The Grief always ends in suicide.

  The day that Marjorie became the Sea Witch she fired her boat to ashes. The Sea Witch was too large, and too unwieldy, for her to haul it up into sands on her own, so she beached it at the highest point she could and waited for low tide. The sands around the keel were wet, and my footprints filled with water as soon as the weight was lifted, so I hoped for spluttering and a slow harmless guttering of flame, as all my efforts to talk her out of burning failed.

  “I don’t want her anymore,” she said.

  “Then sell her! Or give her away if you have to. Don’t destroy just for the sake of it.” Marjorie loved the Sea Witch, no matter how much she tried to persuade me that she no longer cared. It had been freedom for her, and accommodation, and salt movement. I’d spent more than my share of time aboard, watching the affection on her face as she smoothed down surfaces, painted varnish over old wood, talked to every sail and joint.

  “Why not destroy for the sake of it?” she said. “Isn’t that what we’ve always done?” That utterance was an exaggeration and a culmination both, because Marjorie had spent her life in conservation, and it had failed her as much as she had failed it. She’d tried, again and again, to bring back and build up, and the repudiation of that wasn’t just false, it was wallowing.

  “If you can’t bear to watch, you can go home,” she said, but I couldn’t. That would be abandonment and we’d been friends so long. I wouldn’t forgive myself. Already I could see the Grief rising in her, though I didn’t want to. Once manifested it never left, only got worse and worse until the Grief was all that was left. The Grief, and the ways of ending it.

  Part of me was afraid she’d throw herself into the fire, burn herself down alongside the Sea Witch. That was what made me stay; that was what made me hope for the futility of burning … that perhaps she’d see the futility as well as the flames and snap herself out of it.

  I should have expected accelerant. There was no hysterics, no determined rush to annihilation, just a quiet slopping of fuel that sounded like seashore, a match, and the end of the vessel. It burnt quickly enough and Marjorie stood back and watched with folded arms, never made so much as a move towards the conflagration once she’d sparked it.

  “Is it enough?” I asked her, when the Sea Witch had burnt down to wet sand and ashes, mostly, with parts of her left over for wreckage. The wheel had kept its shape; I could see its print in the sand, half-buried. The Sea Witch’s course was set.

  “It’s never enough,” she said.

  The Sea Witch skimmed over water, light and beautiful. I could feel the crash and drag of waves reverberating through her wood; it made the boat feel alive. In the sunlight she was warm wood over warm water, curves and salt spray and the sails pulled taut in wind.

  “At least something here is alive,” said Marjorie. It was hyperbole but not one I pointed out, because there was such dislocation in her eyes that to address it seemed cruel. It’s hard to lose a life’s work, and her research on the Reef had changed to something that no longer appealed — a necropsy in many parts. The species left behind were not ones she felt any sympathy for.

  “You can see them down there, clinging,” she said, of the starfish, the Crown of Thorns. Warming water and migration saw them overwhelm the fragile corals, and their sinuous, grasping arms caught at the coral and devoured it. “I hope they die when so much of their food has gone,” she said. “I hope they die.”

  Her vehemence reassured me. Such loathing for another living creature had never, it seemed to me, been a hallmark of Grief. George pointed out after, as kindly as he could, that I had never been an expert on Grief, so how would I know? My specialty was jellyfish, and I’d refused to look at other layers, floated in the sunlit surfaces of my own intellectual waters, not even glancing down at the danger beneath. But I believed that she was safe, that hatred had been inoculation for her, and that her vocation and her emotion could transform a career in preservation to one in pest control. It seems so foolish now. If something had come to kill the jellyfish of the world — if it had left that little lake in Palau a sterile and barren place — I’d have wanted to murder too, but it would have done nothing for the miserable pain of absence.

  “It reminds me of Andersen,” she said, staring down into waters which were so full, once. “I named this boat for him, you know. The Sea Witch in “The Little Mermaid,” she lived in an underwater forest. I think it was meant to be terrifying, full of tentacles and polyps and skeletal things, but all I saw when I read it was anemones and sea snakes and all the coral creatures. I know it said no flowers grew there but I always thought they did — that stupid mermaid never saw anything but what she wanted. Now I’m not so sure. The Sea Witch lived in a place of power, but all that’s down there now is tentacles, like the story said, and they grab and grab until there’s nothing left, until the wonder is all torn apart.

  “I always felt,” she said, “that I was never the one who’d look away. I wanted to be the Sea Witch, so clear-eyed. Now I wonder if the mermaid was all I ever was.” She shook her head. “If there was ever a Sea Witch who lived down in the coral she’s not there anymore.”

  “Maybe she took her power with her,” I offered.

  “I hope so,” said Marjorie, her eyes on depths and horizons in turn. “I hope she found new places to make her bargains, when the old ones died around her.”

  In the saltwater pool, the Sea Witch was crafting. Plastic ran through her fingers like water, her long fingernails shredding the thin material into strips that matched the ragged bell-shaped curve of her skirt. If there’d been water in the pool, more than the puddles the ruined roof let in, it might have billowed around her as if she were a jellyfish, but there wasn’t. Instead the plastic lay limp as the skirt, lacking the animation that would cause the thin strips of either material to float and shift in water, detritus that mimicked movement and found itself swallowed by unwitting gullets. Poor sustenance for the starving bodies of birds an
d fish and turtles, for undernourished dolphins.

  “Can you bring me those papers?” she said. Not looking at me, because she didn’t anymore. All her attention was in her hands, their mechanistic motion of shred and twist and how the dry repetition of it flaked her flesh, drew blisters with the transparent surface of cling-film.

  I’d thought the journals she kept were her own. That is, journals that had published one or another of her papers, useless as she now thought them to be, reflecting as they did an ecology that no longer existed. But when I picked among them, I saw a diversity greater than I’d expected, and research from fields not her own. Some were new. Some were decades old. Terrestrial biology, geography, urban planning. Most researchers, I knew from my own experience, rarely had time to read outside their own specialty. If there was a common thread I couldn’t see it.

  The Sea Witch was scrunching papers, crushing them in her fists to make them small, unreadable, the words blurring into each other. Wanting to help, to connect with the shell of someone I’d once known as well as myself, I tore a paper for her, made the page compact and wrinkled, handed it over.

  “Not that one,” she said, and how could she know, barely ever looking up as she did?

  “One’s much the same as the other, isn’t it?” It was a flippant response. Deliberately so. There had to be some way to break through to her, to get her to talk about more than plastic, more than absence, the great sucking whirlpool that Grief had made of her mind. She talked so little now. Barely more than she looked, and that was not at all. I tore the next page slowly, loudly, trying to get her attention.

  “Not that one either,” she said, and sighed. “Don’t you even see what it’s about? Don’t you even notice?”

  I smoothed out the crumpled page and looked for keywords. “Something to do with transport stations and school districts. The effective placements of city planning, at a guess.”