“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 and 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
