Unknown

REEF

K. C. Norton

Coral Reefs are a communal creation, made of many colonies that in turn are made of many individual, yet deeply connected, polyps. In the case of stony corals, thousands of polyps live side by side, nested in cups of calcium carbonite and connected by gastrovascular canals. These canals allow the polyps to exchange nutrients and some cellular material. The polyps in a single coral colony are genetically identical.

Most coral reefs that we enjoy today are about 5000-10,000 years old, although their ancestors began growing around 240 million years ago. Coral have a symbiotic relationship with algae. Each polyp houses a single-celled alga that produces oxygen and other nutrients. In return, the coral provides the algae with other nutrients and with carbon dioxide. There are dozens of other symbiotic relationships on the reef that don't involve the coral so directly. Clown fish, who are immune to anemone stings, hide from predators in the arms of the anemone, and in return the clownfish clean the anemone, provide food, and chase away the anemone's predators. Many species of fish make a living by cleaning the skins of other fish. They get food, and the other fish get relief from parasites and contaminants on their skin. The coral reef is a land in which nothing exists in isolation.

A coral reef is made of many organisms that are connected both physically (by means of connecting tissue) and mechanistically (the coral polyps need each other and the polyps and the algae need each other). For all practical purposes, they are essentially one giant organism. While the animals that make the reef their home are more obviously individual, they are singular in the sense that they all depend on the reef and on each other to live. A reef is a riot of millions of individuals and yet it is also a single, cohesive, interdependent ecosystem.

"The Reef", by K.C. Norton, pictures a reef as having a single mind that can unite and direct all of its inhabitants. Reefs are terribly threatened by global warming, invasive species, and pollutants. They are also threatened by over fishing—usually not from people seeking food but from people seeking to sell fish for private aquariums. Millions of reef dwellers are collected each year for the aquarium trade, and most do not survive. May all reefs be as ferociously defended as the reef in Norton's story.

***

There is no joy like the knowledge of your own infinity—there is no joy like the joy of coral.

I am my neighbor; we are the pillar and the breakwater and the wrecker's reef. Starfish kiss us, parrotfish eat us, paired seahorses hook their tails around us to avoid being eddied away into loneliness, and we love them. The whole of me loves them.

No single living creature has a heart as unified as the uncountable hearts of a reef.

There is a human girl who comes to visit us. By now we know her as well as the sharks and triggerfish. We call her Nei, because unlike coral, humans think of themselves as individual creatures.

She has long limbs that flash bream-brown in the filtered light. Sometimes her skin is all she wears. She fills her lungs with air and plugs her nostrils and dives down from her world to ours, where her quick clever fingers explore us until she finds what she is looking for. Usually she is after pearls. Perhaps it is their shine, or their layers, or their paradox—we don't know what she likes about them. When she is finished, she darts for the surface, chasing her own bubbles of used-up air.

Nei is not the only diver, though there are fewer these days. But she is our favorite, and so from time to time we yield up secret gifts for her: we coax her alongside an eagle ray, we lure the whale shark to her and the great white away. Once, we give her a tiny fraction of our own body, a shiny black shard of ourself.

The next time she appears, that part of us hangs around her neck from a goat-hide thong. We emit our own used-up bubbles in pleasure. We like to see ourselves there, our dark skin against her dark skin, although the part of us that hangs there has gone numb and dead.

In early summer, the sea becomes warm and gentle—we trust summer, before the storms roll in, uprooting trees and washing inland sand out through the rivers. Summer is the calm time between cold and chaos.

Or it should be.

This summer, the swells bring something new: not the carcasses of whales, or sharks on their parade across the Atlantic. This summer, the sea brings unfamiliar boats.

They are small boats, with small engines that cut the waves into slices. Nei stands along the shoreline to watch them come in. Like us, Nei is unused to polished boats with fresh paint and foreign names. She seems nervous, but she speaks to the boaters in a confident jumble of human words. We cannot tell what they want. On dry land, they are too far away to hear.

For a few days, the boaters motor through the gardens; they skim at us with nets, tearing up our weeds, netting fish that they do not toss back. But they do not seem happy.

We do not give them anything. We hide our gifts.

On the fourth day, it rains, and the boats leave us be. But on the fifth day that are back, and this time they bring Nei.

We know why they bring her: her limbs are tough, strong as shark fins, and she knows us almost as well as we know ourself. We have shown her our secrets. She wears the evidence about her neck.

When she dives from one of the new boats, we greet her reluctantly. She wears one of the strangers' black rubber suits and in it she does not look like Nei at all. We feel hesitation, distrust, and it is not a familiar feeling. She is reluctant, too. She dives a few times, never touching, only looking. She is a tourist here today, not our guest.

But every time she returns, our resolve weakens. This is Nei. Our Nei. We love her. We have known her since she was small, since the first time she visited. Air and sunlight linger in her hair and skin, as they always have—and when she surfaces, the sea salt clings to her fingernails and eyelashes. We do not want to hate her.

We love her.

When she finds a seahorse, she cries out with surprise, a wordless burst of bubbles. We know she loves them, because she has always been delighted at their alien bodies, their delicate proportions.

This time, she pinches the seahorse between her fingers and bobs to the surface. She knows this is not right. We do not understand; the seahorse does not understand. He is distressed to be taken from his mate. He is afraid of air and the faraway blue of the sky.

Nei shows the boaters her prize—they shout and clap their hands and pet her hair. They are happy. Nei is not sure whether to be happy with them.

Only minutes later, the first diver drops in.

Seahorses mate for life. They are bound together by an unseen thread. When one is taken, his mate searches for him until he is found or given up for dead. A seahorse's heart is not too small to break.

We are bound to our fellows by proximity. By our life force. We need every polyp; we are bound by every polyp; we are every polyp. We do not suffer when we are apart.

We simply die.

Cyanide spray, the strangers tell Nei, is only meant to stun. The divers, twelve altogether, point their spray bottles between my layers, targeting the smallest and most brilliant fish: purple grammas and gradated gobies, spiny puffers and striped clowns, angels and triggerfish and seahorses. Everything is hauled up to the boats in little nets and sorted. The plain fish, mackerel and butterfish and scowling john dories, are dumped back overboard. They sink dully through the water, unable to swim; the sea moves them in little eddies as they drift to the sea bed.

Whole sections of us, whole colonies, go silent, poisoned by the spray. Those of us on the edges of ruin reach out only to find neighborhoods gone necrotic.

Individuals—seahorses and girls—know how to hurt from loss. Nei curls over the side of the boat, her eyes wet with tears like seawater. One small hand clasps the branch of me that she wears. Her fingers polish the fragment smooth as sea glass. But one mind, one heart, cannot feel grief like the grief of coral.

Half of the fish on the boat are coming to, confused and groggy. The other half are already dead.

There was not always a reef here.

Once, aeons ago, there was only stone. The world was too young for sand then. There was no beach as it is now, only dead rock sloping into lifeless sea.

And then: we came.

We came in ones and twos, then clusters, then clouds. We floated and explored and finally settled: staghorn, brain, blue maomao and black cabbage, fire coral and elephant ear. One by one, branch upon branch, we built ourselves into the reef.

When something is dead, is cannot be revived. We know that. The fish that sift down to the bottom and lie there, glass-eyed, are lost. They mean nothing to the boaters.

But they mean something to Nei.

Love is not stagnant. It moves, like the arms of an anemone, and it grasp. It clings. We love Nei, and she loves the reef. Nei is not a polyp, is not a fish, is not at home in water.

Nei's eyes seek out the tanks of wriggling fish. Those that have survived dart back and forth behind the glass, their colors overlapping.

Nei is not a polyp, but she is part of the reef. She tucks the necklace into her damp shirt and rises on unsteady legs.

While Nei paces on the boat, we are taking our own action: subtle variations in current carry Irukandji and box jellies toward the divers; scorpionfish and blue ringed octopuses creep out from our cracks and crevices; stingrays shake the sand off their circular bodies; cone snails begin their slow suction-cup march toward the intruders. We may be living stone, but we have a hundred weapons at our disposal. Strike at us with poison, and we will strike back in kind.

Nei struggles with the weight of the glass tanks. She pours the first one over the side; the fish spill back into my realm like living jewels. One of the boaters cries out at the sound, grabbing at her, threatening her health. Her life.

She dodges, clutching at the second tank. The boater strikes at her with his fist—he's got strong arms. Nei lifts the tank to tilt it, spilling some of the fish into the deck. When she sees the seahorses and clownfish wriggling there against the boat's glass bottom, she chokes.

The boater clutches at her. His fingers leave bruises on her arms. But Nei is stronger than she seems, and slipperier than an eel. She tears herself out of his grasp and tilts her body in the old, familiar arc of the dive, takes a deep breath, and plunges.

The boater moves to follow her—but lionfish fins cut the water to ribbons, and the translucent white-blue bodies of jellyfish bar his way. He slips in the spilled tank water, clinging to the boat for dear life.

Through the glass bottom, he watches Nei descend. A dozen fatal species part before her, granting her safe passage as she dives.

Eleven divers return to the boats, many of them stung and bitten, their hands too swollen to hold their spray bottles. They wait for the twelfth as long as they dare; in the end, so many of them need care that they feel it more urgent to leave than to stay.

When the sun sets and gibbous moon hangs above the ocean like a flying fish, Nei returns to shore. Her skin is raw and rashy from salt, but she is otherwise unharmed.

The surviving boaters are all in hospitals or sleeping, bitten and stung, made weak. They are not there to see Nei drain the rest of the tanks into the surf, praying for fish who she knows are unlikely to survive.

She laces the boats' fuel tanks with coarse-grain sea salt and dead coral dust.

When this is done, she comes out to the ocean's edge, staring out across the black waves. There are people who only know the ocean from that angle, from the froth and boil of water.

Her fingers find her necklace. She knows better.

Nothing is certain on the reef. Storms batter ancient formations to pulp in half a day. Crown-of-thorns starfish digest us alive. A warm winter or a cold summer can leave us blanched and sickly.

But there are dangers everywhere.

And no single living creature has a heart as unified as the uncountable hearts of a reef. even when one of those hearts beats in a skinny human body on dry land.