The Impossible Resurrection of Grief Read online

  The Sea Witch didn’t look at me, but her hands stilled in her lap. She sat there, silent as stone, until it became clear I didn’t understand, and then she sighed again, a small, sad sound. “Table of contents,” she said.

  I flipped to the beginning of the journal, started reading titles aloud. When I read one that described future-proofing coastal infrastructure against climate, her hands began to move again. “That one,” she said, and I could see her shoulders soften a little at the sound of tearing.

  In summer, I persuaded Marjorie to take the Sea Witch out to marvel at the blooms of box jellyfish. They were far more attractive afloat than washed up on beaches. Even if I couldn’t swim in every swarm — the stings were unpleasant and, in box species like Chironex fleckeri, could be fatal — I still found them a wonder, and reassuring. They were more tolerant of climate change than many organisms, able to adapt to warming waters and lower oxygen content, and if the once-warnings of jellyfish seas had not entirely eventuated, there were certainly more of them than before, and their populations were spreading.

  Stretched flat on the deck with my head over the side, I stared down at the ocean, my arms crossed beneath my chin. It was an awkward position, but one that allowed me to get close enough for a good view of the jellies that floated below. Their bodies brushed against the side of the hull. They looked so delicate, and so innocent. “Not everything is gone,” I said.

  “They’re a sign that a lot is, though,” Marjorie replied — for her, the warmth that brought the jellies also brought the hungry, migrating starfish, and made the Reef a more vulnerable place. The increased presence of predators, combined with the slow bleaching of the coral due to rising temperatures, undermined the entire ecology.

  “They’re part of your Reef too,” I said, but the look on her face told me that the Reef was more to her than the success of a single organism. It was an ecosystem, and one past balance or return. No wonder she didn’t see the jellies as marvelous, a reminder of the wonder of our time at Jellyfish Lake. That experience was far behind her, the memory lost in the hazard of the present.

  “Some of them can get bigger than humans,” I reminded her. “Bells over two metres wide and tentacles over thirty metres long.” It was the greatest day of my life, the day George and I saw a lion’s mane swimming off the coast of New Zealand, on an early trip taken to visit his family. I’ve heard stories of similar-sized creatures in the waters of Japan, where I’ve never been — Nomura’s jellyfish. It made me happy knowing they existed, still, that they were thriving in a world where so much no longer was.

  The ones below us were considerably smaller. One of them looked strange, not like the others. I was close enough that I could reach down and snag it, but before my fingers touched the water Marjorie grabbed at my arm. “It’ll sting you,” she said, and it was true that swimming in this particular swarm would see me hospitalized or worse. Beaches were closed regularly over summer, when a swarm like this moved close to the coast.

  “Not this one,” I said, and what I brought up wasn’t a jellyfish at all. It was a plastic bag, somehow twisted and swollen so that when floating it could pass for jelly.

  “Horrible things,” I said, scowling, and got up to stuff the bag somewhere safe, until we could get back to shore and dispose of it properly.

  “Yes,” said Marjorie, absently, still staring down. “Horrible.”

  I’d never swum in the saltwater pool. For me, it had always been a wreck that kids sneaked into at night on dares. The pipes that used to fill it, that came from the ocean, were capped. It seemed a difficult task, in retrospect — having to filter all the things that could have come in. Those filters were long since gone. Perhaps they were looted, perhaps recycled, but if the pipes were opened back up now, salt water would fill the pool and with it would come the jellyfish. Not the golden jellyfish of Palau either, but the ones with powerful stings. Ocean swimming was more hazardous now, though for people like me it was perhaps more beautiful. So much of the danger came from migrating jellies, but the sea had always been a dangerous place. Tides could kill as quick as toxins, and no one who had seen tentacles drift for metres in the currents could ever forget the multiplicity of threat, no matter how much buoyancy was gifted to them by saltwater.

  The Sea Witch, in her empty pool, created jellyfish of her own. She made them out of plastic bags, forming pieces of floating trash into the mimicry of movement. If I’d known this was what she wanted them for I’d never have brought the bags to her. I didn’t care how limp they were, stranded on the dry bottom of the pool. No one made something like this without expecting them — without wanting them — to float.

  “You know what plastic does!” I told her. “You know how dangerous it is to sea life.” The remnants of populations that would get caught in it, that would swallow it and starve.

  The Sea Witch shrugged. “So?” she said. “We kill everything anyway. It’s what we do.” The Grief was speaking through her, but I’d never heard of it manifesting as an active agent of further destruction. She held out a plastic jelly she’d finished wrenching into shape. “Look,” she said.

  Inside the bell was paper. A page, well insulated, and ripping through the plastic I found old warnings. Of what would happen if we didn’t change, of what would happen if we didn’t stop it, the shifting consequences of climate. I knew these papers. I’d written some of them myself. None of them were ever listened to. Certainly few of the recommendations were ever followed.

  “Nothing we said made a difference. We might as well have said nothing at all,” said the Sea Witch, disconsolate, a plastic comb in her hands. She turned it over and over. I remembered her refusing a hairbrush when I brought it to her, though it had been plastic as well. The comb hadn’t been used on her hair. Even from a distance I could see the handle had been sharpened into a blade. “We might as well have been voiceless,” she said. “We might as well have given up our tongues.” And then she cut hers out, swiftly, brutally, with the comb edge of sharpened plastic, the comb I never knew she had, and her blood and my vomit spattered over the pool floor.

  The Sea Witch, red-chinned, red-throated, recovered before I did. By the time I looked up from bile she had opened the pipe that connected the pool to the ocean. Saltwater streamed in, and brought the ocean with it. With the filters long gone, the currents brought fragments of kelp and floating algae. I saw a small fish sucked through, an ice-cream wrapper, a crab. A beer can. And between them all the jellyfish: the real, and the imagined.

  At first I couldn’t tell them apart. The Sea Witch hated jellyfish, but her mimicries moved as if they were flesh not flotsam. The plastic jellies rose with the waters, and the papers within their silent bells were accusation and consequence, the cost of looking away. The real jellyfish, the ones sucked in from the outside, swarmed between them, their tentacles caught in eddies and plastic. There were so many of them. I managed to get myself to the edge of the pool and out, but the Sea Witch was weakened by Grief and blood loss, and she was not fast enough. The jellyfish wrapped her in their gossamer tentacles, a beautiful angry bloom, and kept her there until her screams and Grief were silent.

  2

  The package arrived three days after a memorial service that hardly anyone attended. I didn’t know what I expected — part of me, feeling the shape and heft of it, hoped for a book of fairy tales. The Andersen, which was by now sodden and disintegrating at the bottom of the pool, would have been a touching present, one left behind by a woman who could no longer bear what she had made of the world.

  Instead, it was letters. A packet of them, tied together, all from the Sea Witch, and all to someone I didn’t know. I tried to read them, but they were misery and running ink, the decompensation of a once-brilliant mind into madness. There was no apology, no explanation. Many of the pages made no sense. The writing was more scrawl than recognizable letters, and the lines crossed each other in different directions, as if the writer overlaid new understandings on top of old, and couldn’t see that the earliest expressions of comprehension obscured the later. The notation at the top of one of them, made in a different hand and with precision in the ink, was equally unclear. “The sanest of them all,” it said. The writing was the same as that on the front of the package, the same as that on the return address.

  “If this is an invitation,” said George, “I suggest you don’t accept.” We were divorcing, the dissolution of our marriage regretted on both our parts. He wanted children, and I didn’t. The change of heart was mine. He pored over the letters with all the attention he gave to the divorce agreement — an attention born of scrupulous fairness and careful consideration. He peered at me through glasses. “We both know it’s an invitation.”

  “There’s nothing that says I have to accept.”

  “Good. Don’t. You’ve always been able to turn away, and I’ve always liked that about you.” That he could say this even when he was one of the things I’d turned away from was almost enough to make me reconsider leaving him. If I’d cared for him less I would have stayed, but he’d been my best friend for over ten years, and I couldn’t bring myself to compromise his happiness by insisting on a sterility that suited only one of us. “For all we know it was getting involved with people like this that made Marjorie turn out the way that she did.” He waved one of the pages at me. “The sanest of them all, really? If someone sent me a letter like this I wouldn’t be trying to justify it. I’d think they needed psychiatric help.”

  George had never called Marjorie the Sea Witch. Had flatly refused to do so, considered it catering to delusion where I called it a last kindness to a friend sinking into a darkness no one would ever be able to retrieve her from.

  “I think she was more susceptible than I am.” Less settled in the common world. “Come on, George. We both know I’m not the flighty type.”

  “It’s never been flightiness that opens people up to Grief,” he said. “You know that as well as I do.” He stacked the letters neatly, almost fussy in his movements — a precision I’d always found slightly incongruous when contrasted with the sheer size of him, and the thick strong fingers that made mine look pale and flexible as tentacles.

  “It’s never been curiosity either,” I said, but that was belief on my part, not established fact.

  Truth was no one knows what prompted a person to turn to Grief. Some said it ran in families. Others that it came down to vocation or brain chemistry. If there was a shared characteristic there might be hope for inoculation, but there was no vaccine, nor any psychological panacea that had proven effective. It was just waiting, until the day Grief hamstrung from behind and another person started to gnaw on themselves for the things they had or hadn’t done, for the loss they couldn’t recreate.

  Marjorie’s transformation into the Sea Witch had made Grief a frequent topic of conversation in our house. I still remembered the both of us in bed, the sheet pulled over our heads, lying on our sides and George’s warm breath in my face. “Do you ever think it will happen to us?” I’d asked. “I don’t think I could bear it.”

  “You’d only have to bear it if it happened to me,” George replied, prosaic to the last. That was typical of him — his idea of comfort was a considered assessment of possibility. “If Grief came for you, you wouldn’t care. You’d be too deep in it to mind.”

  His ability to reason both side of things wouldn’t save him from Grief, but it made me feel better regardless, as if such careful fairness would act as inoculation. Truthfully, I was more concerned about myself. There, George was less comforting.

  “I worry how easily you shut things out,” he said. “It doesn’t seem such a short step, sometimes.”

  That was a conversational path I hadn’t wanted to go down. It was too reminiscent of our discussions about children.

  I’d wondered if it were passivity that brought it on. George had only scoffed. “It’s not passivity you’re thinking of. It’s accepting the inevitable and not liking it. This business with Marjorie is the first time you’ve really had to do that.”

  He didn’t say “Nice for some,” but I could see that he was thinking it. At first I thought he was talking about us, the divorce looming ever clearer on the horizon, but pressed warm against each other under the covers we had both wanted to pretend that our marriage was solid. “Tell me,” I said.

  “Hurt’s easy enough to live with,” he said. “If there’s an end to it. Break your arm and it hurts, but it heals soon enough and the hurt goes away. Even a small pain, if it never leaves … It wears you down,” he said. “In the end it isn’t the hurt that gets you, it’s the exhaustion.”

  Indigenous peoples suffered more from Grief, he said. The experience of watching the world change around them, the loss of land, was an old wound kept open.

  “Do you hurt that way?” I asked, because even if I could no longer see myself staying with him he was my best friend still. The thought of his hurt was painful to me. It was also something I failed to understand. I was afraid if I couldn’t understand it, one day I’d use that lack of comprehension to discount experiences that weren’t mine. It wasn’t a part of myself that I liked, that temptation to discard, but when George said I found it easy to limit myself he was telling an unpleasant truth.

  “You’re asking because I left.” It wasn’t a question, and George — who knew my small selfish spaces as well as anyone alive — regarded me with an honesty that silently spoke of the uneasy places he knew existed within himself. It was something I’d teased him about before, when the conversations between us were less fraught. So many New Zealanders had come to live in Australia, and many of those, like George, were Indigenous. The Grief had cut swathes through the people of Aotearoa, as it had with many communities, and Māori, like the other Indigenous populations, were over-represented. “Some lands are easier to love at a distance.”

  The last two times I’d suggested we travel back to see his family he’d refused. Not for reasons of dislocation or alienation. At least, that was what he said, and George was never one for prevarication or self-deception.

  “I’ve lived here twenty years,” he said. “This is home now.”

  I didn’t ask if his new home was less exhausting. If he found it so, it had always been to my benefit. And maybe to his.

  We learn to protect ourselves in the ugliest of ways.

  Perhaps I should have asked, but sorrow is so terrifying.

  George was right when he said the letters were an invitation. By themselves, I might have been able to leave well enough alone, but there was that little note scrawled across the top. The sanest of them all. There was nothing of sanity in the Sea Witch at the end. It had drained away, as it did with all the others like her. The sanest of them all could only have come from someone who was compromised themselves; someone who couldn’t recognize lunacy and how it could pull a person down and into dark water. To expect answers from someone caught in the currents of their own Grief was madness.

  Of course I went anyway. How could I not? George scowled and disapproved, but friendship has a claim even when the friend is gone. Those letters were sent to me for a purpose, and I intended to find out what it was.

  The Sea Witch had sent her letters to an address in Tasmania, an island I’d never visited. That same address was on the back of the packet which passed those letters on to me. Travel was easy to book, and leave easier to obtain. The desire to travel showed an interest in life, something different from the obsession of Grief, and the university encouraged it.

  “I don’t care what the university thinks,” said George. “There’s something wrong here.” He didn’t ask me not to go, because it wasn’t his place anymore and we were too careful in our boundaries now. But he drove me to the airport and slipped a packet of soft licorice into my purse and stood with his arms crossed while I checked in. You’ve always been able to turn away, and I’ve always liked that about you, he’d said, the man who had learned to turn away from home and family himself, and that was what I’d always liked best about him: his capacity to let go, easily and without apparent resentment.

  “Just be careful,” he said, and did not kiss me goodbye. “Call me when you get there.”

  I did call. I could give him that, at least.

  Tasmania was green and blue and salt-scented, with wind so strong I had to braid my hair to keep it from tangling. It was cooler than the north, and as I headed towards the more mountainous centre I admired the deciduous beech trees and the rainforest. More than this, I admired the eucalypt forests, the tall enormous stands of swamp gum, breathing in their kerosene scents as I stopped underneath them for lunch, leaned against the crumbling bark of their trunks, and examined the hard little gum nuts that fell about me. They were so tight and contained and separate that I wondered how they ever survived.

  I would have been more interested in sharing my impressions of it with George if I’d felt less disturbed. That wasn’t an admission that would have made either of us feel any better about my being here, so I kept it to myself and walked into a place of extinction. In all that green and blue and salt, extinction was a familiar odour.

  At my destination — the remote, run-down farmhouse that corresponded to the address on the packet of letters — photographs of the same striped animals adorned the walls like family portraits. Amid the still pictures, short videos played on wall-mounted screens. The recordings, like the photos, were taken as the species was dying. We had so little surveillance of them, and most of that was centered around extinction. On each screen, thylacines paced up and down cages, the last specimens of a lost bloodline. They were meaty, elongated creatures, with short legs and jaws that gaped like a basking shark’s. They did not move like jellyfish, and I did not love them for it.