5

The flight back to Australia was quiet. The wren, still in its thermos, was buried in a suitcase, stuffed round with clothes. It hadn’t stopped shuffling so I’d killed the power, and when still it looked enough like a sculpture to pass for artwork. “It hasn’t seen sunlight for days,” George had grumbled when I disconnected the solar battery using tweezers from my make-up kit. “When’s the stupid robot going to die?” He’d insisted we take the first flight we could. I hadn’t even had time to shower.

I had more to concern myself with than hygiene, or solar batteries. The Andersen was in the overhead locker. I wanted to take it out, hold it on my lap and trace the swollen pages with my fingertips. Although tactile sensation sometimes aided understanding, I didn’t believe that this time it would have helped. The book was a symbol, that was all — not even a universal one. Fully half the stories I’d propped myself up with since I’d left home were found in the pages of other story books entirely, for all fairy tales were a linking theme. What had been left beneath that holographic kettle hole wasn’t any kind of road map. It was a calling card, the leavings of a woman I’d known, once, who had turned into someone fundamentally unknowable. For so long, I’d told myself that Grief was an aspect of personality instead of all of it, thinking that the vestiges of Marjorie that I’d seen surface and sink in the sustained mourning of the Sea Witch’s mind meant that she was still there, at least in part. That was always the hardest part of Grief — the realization that the absence, and the loss, was total.

The Marjorie I knew had been playful, but games like this weren’t for her. They were too cruel in their ambiguities. And now I had to face the fact that the Sea Witch might exist, still, using the body of my friend as a conduit. It was a little too much like resurrection, again — the raising of the dead for purpose, because the loss of those dead was too great.

If the Sea Witch did exist, it meant that the scene at the pool had been nothing but farce. For what purpose, I didn’t know, but the farce would have been extensive. Holographic, perhaps? With the water real, and the appearance of jellies rising up beneath me, so that I was never in it with them, so that I never broke through the layers of pretence to see it for what it was. If so, it required more engineering knowledge than Marjorie had ever possessed. It also required a certainty on the Sea Witch’s part that I would let her go, and that my actions would not interfere enough to break the illusion. It required that others not break it as well. The rising body count of Grief had led to less investigation by doctors — a diagnosis was thought to be enough, and rarely did any medical examiner require an autopsy of those whose suicide came from Grief. Even so, I’d called emergency services, and they’d come, and the body had been extricated and examined, prepared for funeral. It had been buried. I’d attended the service. For all those things to come to pass, the Sea Witch would have to be dead.

Or she’d have to be treated as dead, by those who knew enough — who had privilege and access enough — to cover for her, to make the appearance of her passing solid and undeniable.

If that were true, Grief had spread further than I had ever guessed. Worse, those who helped her had passed — were passing — as unaffected. Tasmania had taught me that was possible. Granny had been able to retain an appearance of trustworthiness long enough to exploit the research project she was involved in, and to destroy what she no longer needed when she left it. Darren, smiling for photographers and celebrated by the public for his restoration of the rock wren, had managed to deceive everyone around him when he’d reprogramed the wren and released it on the mountainside. And I had no idea who was recreating kettle holes in landscapes, but clearly they had access to sophisticated technology or they wouldn’t have been able to simulate the kettle in the first place. There was no way to predict how they’d use those resources in the future.

It was the ambiguity of it all that disturbed me the most. I’d seen at the museum how willing people were to be enraptured by the return of the dead. I’d felt the fascination myself, in Tasmania. It was the reason George and I were both still reluctant to contact authorities. Even if they did show up, suspicious of Grief in us if not in others, there were such easy explanations, and no evidence we had amounted to any sort of proof that the recreations we’d seen were hostile. For most, our recent encounters with the resurrected dead were something to be celebrated. Even if the wren we’d taken was found to have poison seeping from it, all Darren had to say was that the poison was meant for rats. He’d probably be feted for it.

The only path forward was to do nothing. I’d like to say it was a decision that came hard, but the truth was a life spent glorying in the now-abundant jellyfish was good practice for looking away. The things I loved survived climate change. They flourished in it. That other species did not was regrettable, but not undermining. I’d managed to distance myself from loss.

The divorce was my doing, or so I told myself. True, the differences were irreconcilable, but we might have staggered on longer, content if not actually happy. I’d seen the coming schism and anticipated, pushing away because I could, and because it was easier to take the loss than to fight against it.

So many things came easily to me. I’d become inured to loss. And now, when I didn’t know what to do, I fell back into easy. George dropped me off at my apartment, and handed over the thermos without argument. Neither of us wanted it. I kicked it under the bed and left it there, put the battery in my bedside drawer because I didn’t want to reconnect it and reanimate the wren. The constant shuffling would have kept me awake. It would have kept me aware. With the silence, some days I didn’t even remember the thermos and its dead contents until I was on my third cup of coffee. Even then it was a minor mental effort to forget it again. George didn’t remind me. I didn’t hear from him, and refused to consider what that might mean, or who he might have been talking to instead.

Minor as it was, that forgetful effort collapsed in on itself when the Sea Witch sauntered into my office, and settled herself in the chair across from my desk. It was the chair students sat in when they came to query the syllabus; it didn’t take me long to realize that I was the one who should be sitting in it.

“I wish I could say your reaction was a surprise,” said the Sea Witch. “I was hoping for better.” Her skirt was still ragged. Plastic was twisted round her arms, in the braids of her hair, but what struck me most was that she was capable of speech. The last time I’d seen her, she’d cut out her own tongue … yet the woman I saw before me had that tongue firmly rooted inside her mouth.

“It was too much,” said the Sea Witch, after I gaped and stammered through greeting. “I needed to think. I needed to work through thinking. It wasn’t as if speech had done much for me back when I was alive.”

There was too much to work through. The memory of journals under my fingers, yes, the failed warnings of environmental advocacy. It hadn’t been enough, and I couldn’t say I was entirely surprised she’d come to resent the work that hadn’t been enough to keep coral alive. I resented it sometimes too — the repeated arguments that changed so few minds and fewer practices. The endless pained exhaustion of a fight we were never going to win. That small shared sympathy was drowned, though, by the horror and mystery of her presence.

“When you were alive?” I repeated, inelegantly. “You’re not bloody dead.” That at least I was sure of. The Sea Witch sat before me and she wasn’t a robot, or a hologram, or grown in a lab. She was a living being that hadn’t died yet.

“No?” she said. “Watch this.” She’d left the door open, and one of our colleagues walked past. His nose, as always, was buried in a book. “Hi, Sandy!” said the Sea Witch.

He looked up and smiled, and then something happened to that smile. It froze, just slightly — an expression I’d seen on him before, at faculty fundraisers, when he was talking to someone he should have known but couldn’t place. “Hey!” he said. “Great to see you. Sorry I can’t stop to chat. Gotta run.”

“Told you,” said the Sea Witch. “People hear you’ve got Grief and they stop looking. Afraid to see their own futures, I expect.”

“I didn’t stop looking.” The opposite, in fact. I’d kept on looking, kept on visiting, bringing paper and plastic and the remembrance of a friendship that I wasn’t sure I wanted anymore. A friendship that became more burdensome by the day.

“You keep telling yourself that,” said the Sea Witch.

“You think I’m lying?”

“I did appreciate it. The effort. The attempt at empathy. Though let’s not pretend your devotion was the result of anything but a determination to retain a certain level of self-respect in the face of imminent deprivation. You were losing a friend, and good people don’t abandon their friends, or not easily, so you stayed until I gave you the proper opportunity to let go.” She poked her tongue out at me and waggled it, playful. “But good people don’t let go either — not the way you did — so when the chance came again, when a packet of letters arrived in your mailbox … Tell me, was it a chance to paper over what you’d done?”

I sat back in my chair, and kept my gaze locked on hers because the alternative was worse. “Can you watch something die and let it die? Yeah, I got the message, thanks. I could, and I did, and I honestly don’t know how to feel about that. If you give me a few more months I’ll learn to live with it. In a year or two I probably won’t even feel bad.”

The Sea Witch grinned, and it was honest admiration. “I’ve always liked that about you,” she said. “Monstrous self-interest masquerading as emotional stability.”

“Not all of us feel the need to beat our breasts so damn publicly.”

“Resentment, much?”

There was nothing to say to that. Partly because it was true, and mostly because it was awful. For all I’d tried to cling to Marjorie after she’d begun her transformation into the Sea Witch, it was a clinging that came with condescension. Grief had made such a wasteland of society. It was constant reproach — that we hadn’t done enough, and that we weren’t sensitive enough. No one ever wanted mental illness, but deep inside there remained the wondering: why hadn’t I succumbed? What was lacking in me that I could see the world change so profoundly, and with such loss, and do nothing but shrug? Oh, not in my actions. I researched. I was an advocate for biodiversity and climate mitigation. Many of the absences did hurt. Yet those hurts were brief, and I got on. And part of me, the small secret part that I didn’t like very much, looked down on those who couldn’t.

“Say it,” said the Sea Witch.

I said nothing.

“Say it.”

“I wish you’d stayed dead,” I said, finally. “Life was easier when you were dead. I didn’t have to try and fight for you anymore. I didn’t have to pretend it was possible to fight for you.” I wondered, briefly, if this was how George felt. If this was the reason he left the home he was born in. The reason he hadn’t tried harder to make me stay in the home we’d made together.

“And now you can’t pretend you have to think,” mocked the Sea Witch. Her mouth was a small, mean moue, and she reached for one of the licorice pieces I kept in a bowl on my desk, her tongue twining about it. “And choose. How’s George, by the way?” Her smirk told me she already knew, but I answered anyway.

“Fine. We signed the divorce papers this morning.” Afterwards I’d driven him to the airport, slipped licorice into his pocket, and waved goodbye as he flew back to New Zealand. I hoped it was to visit his family. I hoped it so hard I didn’t ask for confirmation. It was no longer my business.

“No distractions, then.”

“Not for you.” This was a conversation we’d both been waiting for. Even not knowing if she was still alive, and not knowing if she’d show up if she were, I’d still been waiting for it.

“Or for him,” she said. “I wonder what he’s open to doing now, your no-longer husband?” She smiled again. “All the pieces of your old life, just washed away. All the structure gone out of it. All the structure that meant something anyway. Home. Work. You’ve not gone near a jellyfish since you got back from New Zealand. Not written a single word about them.”

“You’ve been watching me.” Of course she had. For all her disgust with medusae, I’d begun to see that the Sea Witch had tentacles in everything. I shouldn’t have found it surprising. All organisms found their niche eventually.

“I’ve seen what happens when structure fades away,” she said. “When the skeleton bleaches white and all the coral dies. Something needs to take its place.”

“What is it you’re trying to build?” I asked the Sea Witch. The sanest of them all, Granny had called her, but this wasn’t sanity. It was opportunism. It was adaptation to environment — the jellyfish way, to flourish in a warmer ocean. Perhaps to survive in this new world that climate had made, opportunism, for some, was the clearest path to sanity.

“I don’t want to build anything,” said the Sea Witch. “I want the old world back.”

“It’s not coming back. We killed it. We watched it die and we let it die. Isn’t that what you’ve been telling me all along?”

The Sea Witch waved a hand, indifferent. “You knew that. I gave you motivation to admit it. I’m more interested in aftermaths. Have you never wondered? The proficiency we showed. The indifference. When we saw how good we were at killing, when we made it part of us. Did you think it would just go away?”

I didn’t think of it at all. But now that I did, the inevitability was plain.

“All the creatures that died when the Reef did. The venomous, the camouflaged, the predators. All those empty spaces. What did we expect to fill them with, if not ourselves?”

That was the genesis of Grief, laid open. Come not from what we’d done to the other, but what we’d done to ourselves. No wonder it all ended in suicide. Self-knowledge was the clearest thing in the world. It was also the unkindest.

“At least it never left me voiceless,” said the Sea Witch, when I told her so. “I looked into a mirror, and saw something die, and I let her die, because she had to. She’d earned it. That’s what I told her. And when I let her go, that woman in the mirror, all that was left was knowledge. I could watch something die and let it die, and I could do it over and over.

“Suicide,” she said, leaning over my desk, her breath smelling of salt, “is not the only way.”

Grief ended in death, always. “You want me to take up murder.”

“I want you to be what you are,” said the Sea Witch. “Someone who loved the glory and wonder of the world.” Golden jellyfish, migrating through lake water. “Someone who loves it still.” Not looking down to the layers beneath, the dark waters, and dangerous. “Grief was never about the loss. It was about the killing, the sheer culpable scale of it. You’re selfish enough to survive the knowledge, that’s all. And once you know what you are,” she said, “you know what you can do.”

No more sharks in the Reef. No more sea snakes, no more stonefish. Just the things that killed them.

“Don’t you want to pay them back?” said the Sea Witch.

I wondered how many of them there were. How many had taken their Grief and forged it into weaponry, made marvels come from anger and given their hearts to the dead instead of the living. How many could no longer look in the mirror, knowing what they had done, and how they had thereby impoverished both the world around them and themselves.

“When I go out to the Reef now, it’s all dead but for the jellyfish,” said the Sea Witch.

I loved jellyfish. I did. Sometimes, with George gone, they felt like the only things I loved.

“It’s so lonely there,” mourned the Sea Witch.

I would not cry. I wouldn’t.