Report: Wasting Syndrome (SSWS) in Pisaster Ochraceus
Location: Dog Island Research Station, Puget Sound, 48.5607° N, 122.7623° W
Author: Liis Reishus, PhD, Affiliated Researcher, Dept. of Marine Ecology, University of Washington.
People like to believe they have influence over disasters, catastrophes, losses—by which they mean control—but that’s illusion, and she was done with illusion. Could she write that in her report? You’re all suffering under an illusion. Instead, she picked up the phone and texted: Island//illusion. Illusion//island. They sound the same when you say them enough. There’s a word for that, but I can’t remember it now. I can’t remember anything clearly. All my words are inverted and mirrored. edrorrim. See? Take your picture with your phone, and you reverse yourself. Is it still you? Send. The words rose on the phone’s screen like detritus bobbing to the surface of the sea and floated, unanswered.
In the hours after dark, her last night on the island, she lay on the floor of the research station’s sleeping quarters with her phone positioned over her heart, her arms and legs spread wide, her body made star. Asteroidea sapien, she named herself. She gave herself license to name everything, like a colonist. Like a mother. She needed to pin it down to keep it close. This wasn’t Dog Island, but Satan’s Head. (Look at the map, she’d say to anyone who questioned her. The place has horns.) The research station: Chambre d’Isolement. The yellow flowers that studded the field beyond the front door: Sneeze-Weed. The stars, the clouds, the wind that was a writhing animal out here at the edge of the sea—all labeled. Each sea star got a name. So did her own body. So did the child—the one that was gone. She said that name aloud like a spell she was casting around herself, protective and possessive: Alena. Daughter.
Again, she picked up the phone and typed: Did you know that some species of sea stars have the ability to regenerate an amputated arm? Did you know that some stars have the ability to split themselves for reproduction, breaking arm from arm to become one, two, three wholly new individuals? From one star, many. Go forth and multiply. I contain multitudes. Blah blah blah. Send. The words materialized in their little amniotic sac on the screen.
On the floor, arms and legs flared to four long points, she said to the rafters, “I’m making myself a star.” The crown of her head was just the stub of her missing fifth limb. The missing limb had not killed her, but it would never regenerate.
What she would write in the report was that the imminent reality of dissolution was perhaps proof of health. Who dies but the living, anyway?
Into the phone, her fingers typed: I miss you. What am I going to do? The words rose and hung in jade suspension on the screen.
But, of course, there was no answer.
The sea stars began disappearing in early 2013. The first reports of a decline in their population came from the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, then from north in British Columbia, Canada. Fishermen and naturalists who kept informal observation logs started posting alarming counts online. Where there had been hundreds of thousands of stars the year before, there were tens of thousands, then merely thousands, then hundreds, and all of them wasting. Densovirus, the amateurs speculated. There’d been similar plagues in the ’70s, on the East Coast and in California, though never as devastating as this one seemed to be. By midspring, stars were reported wasting in Oregon, California, Mexico. The virus—if that’s what it was—had swept nearly the full North American Pacific coastline in a single season, radically reducing the sea star population. Why?
A team of researchers including faculty from three different university marine biology departments, as well as a NOAA scientist and a zoologist from an aquarium in Seattle, set out to answer the question. They began taking samples at several coastal posts in B.C.: populated Victoria and Nanaimo, remote Quadra Island, the Johnstone Strait, the Duke of Edinburgh Ecological Reserve, and the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve. The work was slow going, fastidious. They collected water in plastic tubes and shoveled wasting stars into bags. They mapped out sites between tide pools on the coastal shoreline and counted stars, recording their numbers, planning to return in a week to count again. The disease presented first as lesions, then a whitening of the stars’ saturated reds and purples. A diseased arm looked to be netted in a white doily. From there, the creature had hours before its organs began to slide from the inside out. The white goo the disease made of the stars’ once bright and rigid bodies, slick as mucus, the researchers collected for examination. They measured water temperature and depth, read tide records for anomalies, compared their data to archives. They tested mollusks and seaweed and sand. The disease only affected the stars, but every species of them in every place sea stars existed. Wasting stars clung, sickly, to the creosote pilings of ferry docks, went slack and sticky between the barnacle-scabbed rocks of pristine preserves, melted like colored lumps of warm candy into the sand at the lip of a beach crowded with screaming children and their umbrella-toting parents. The environmental particulars of the place seemed not to predict the presence of the disease; it was, simply, everywhere.
In April, someone in an online forum suggested Fukushima. Hadn’t rubble from the Tōhoku earthquake been turning up for the last two years all along the Pacific coast? Car fenders bent like driftwood, traffic signs with Japanese lettering, an entire Harley Davidson motorcycle, children’s plastic toys, buoys and glass fishing net baubles and soccer balls. A rusted ship, floating upright and ghostly, un-captained, through the dawn fog off the coast of B.C. Didn’t all of that suggest something essential about the westward drift of the current from Asia, and—perhaps—about the possibility of seaborne radioactive residue from the Fukushima meltdown? Maybe it wasn’t densovirus at all? Or maybe not just the virus? Maybe the sweep of the virus had been farther, faster because the toxicity of the water had damaged the stars’ immune responses?
A journalist picked this up, then concerned citizens carried it like hysteria through the traffic of internet forums. For a month there was a panic. Everyone along the entire coastline had been in the water—fishermen and researchers and children and marine enthusiasts. Was the water toxic? News sites ran stories that posed the question. Coastal villages shuttered their beaches until further notice.
This wasn’t it though, it turned out. The water tested negative. It was something else.
Time passed without any progress.
Then, it was late spring, a year after the first wasting stars were documented—June 2014. By this time, the stars had nearly vanished up and down the Pacific coastline of North America. They had vanished everywhere but one just-discovered location: Dog Island. Researchers went out to investigate. Dog Island was a sanctuary, a preserve, already equipped with a university-run research station, though the station was largely out of commission. Graduate students still stayed there occasionally and now and then ornithologists and whale researchers. A team of marine ecologists went for initial testing, but their tests had turned up nothing. Perhaps the water was colder, some speculated. Perhaps the particular current that swept around the archipelago kept the disease—if it was disease—from settling in the Dog Island tide pools. Perhaps there was something atypical about the kelp beds just off the island that served as protection. They needed more data. They needed a more functional lab and more time.
This is when Liis got the email from an old colleague. The job: Take up residence on the island for a month and manage the initial lab setup there. Make daily documentation of the water, the land, the sea stars. Write a report at the end of her stay. It would be tedious work, which was why no tenured faculty member wanted it. A team was going to be posted on the island, but not until midsummer, when the temperatures might show the most deviation from the norm, and therefore be most informative. They needed her merely as a bridge—someone to keep the site from complete shutdown for a month. Would she take it?
Merely as a bridge. She read the line in the email over and over.
Liis was a forty-eight-year-old adjunct professor with a stalled book project on the reproductive decline in marine echinoderms as water temperatures rose. She’d published well fifteen years earlier. At the beginning of her career, she’d even been considered “promising,” a researcher to watch. But then she fell pregnant, left her postdoc, turned down all offers to travel with research teams up to Alaska or across the water to Japan. She vanished herself into another life, domesticity, and she was—unfashionably, unspeakably—happy there.
Now her life was something else again. Her daughter had died in late February 2011. Afterward, grief. When she got the email from her former colleague—one of the few people who knew about Alena—Liis was a year into the dissolution of her marriage. Still sick in love, still deep in grief. She said yes and packed her bag.
The day she left the mainland, she stood on the deck of the ferry and felt the wind rush through her body. Not at or around, but through. She texted her nearly-ex-husband: I’m truly gone now. And when she could not stop herself, added: Have I made a huge mistake?
Three dots appeared and vanished. She waited. Finally, from him: You’ll be okay. This is good.
Maybe he was right. She was molting one self so that a new skin could harden around her. She shut off the phone and leaned into the force of the wind, letting it hold her upright, a brace.
Two hours later, she was on Dog Island, the chartered boat the university had hired to carry her there motoring away from her, a long white tail of wake frothing in the water between her and everything she’d left. She was, she realized, wholly alone for the first time in years. Again she thought, I’ve made a mistake. There was nothing to be done about any of it now. She collected herself and followed her own shadow up the footpath from the dock to the research station, ignoring the terror of her loneliness, which was, even as she forced herself to dismiss it, already a quiet ticking in her chest, a clock unwinding against time.
Six weeks earlier, she’d sat across from her husband at a table in the lobby of the art museum where they’d met twenty years before, asking him what he wanted from her. She’d chosen the location but not to twist the knife; it was simply their spot, the place they’d come nearly every weekend for coffee. Once she was there though, she regretted it. The museum had recently been renovated, and the charm of the old version of the building was reduced to the saucer and teacup under her fingers—the last of the former place to survive reconstruction. Now, the museum was a cathedral of minimalism, all white walls and vaulted ceilings crested in glass. The wood floors had been stripped to their barest nude and varnished in a clear matte, honed precisely to look unfinished. It was luxury posing as austerity—all the rage in Seattle. She hated it, and her hatred grew the longer she sat in the space with him. The space, in fact, began to feel like a metaphor for the man, for the life they’d had before. He had changed, he said. The last year—Alena’s death—had changed him, and he couldn’t be a person he no longer was.
“What does that even mean?”
“I can’t tell you more than what I’ve said.”
“But I know you.”
“Yes.” He put his hand on hers.
“Change is part of it, right? Part of aging. I knew you’d change.” She wanted to get up and move around the table to face him, to sit in his lap, to wrap herself around him. A cat. Possessive and feral and demanding. She looked at the other patrons: a woman in a beige wool coat drinking an espresso, an old couple reading a physical newspaper, a young mother in yoga clothes spooning yogurt into the open mouth of a child in a stroller. They’d stare, but what would it matter?
“I’m walking away,” he said. “I have to.” He said it like it was his only choice, the way to save himself.
“Away from me, you mean,” she said.
“Those were the wrong words.” He withdrew his hand, balled up his napkin. He was about to leave.
She felt frantic, panicked. Her heart beat arrhythmically in her chest. She forced herself to stay in her seat.
He said, “I shouldn’t have said I’m walking away. I mean I need to go forward, Liis. I understand that you’re not there yet, and that’s fine. But I can’t talk about it anymore.”
Overhead, tethered to the highest beams of the museum’s new ceiling, an installation of papier-mâché birds soared, suspended, their massive white bodies and spread wings throwing arcs of shadow down onto the floor below. She thought about the logistics of raising those bodies from the floor, the impossible weight of something that now looked so weightless. They seemed almost to be wheeling circles up there, in motion. It made her want to close her eyes.
She stood up. “Say goodbye then,” she told him, and they went out to her car, leaving his in the parking lot, and drove to the apartment that had been theirs together but was now only hers, and they got into bed and stayed there until dusk, and there was comfort in those hours. She knew the smell of his skin, the way his scalp felt under her fingers, the way her legs felt around his hips. She knew these things like she had once known her own body, and now both were foreign to her, or she to them. What was that? Grief? Did grief necessarily make an exile of the grieving? She said, “Stay with me,” by which she meant both Don’t do this—don’t leave, and also, more literally, Don’t pull out. And for a few minutes he did stay, and she felt him pulse once, twice, and then just the heat of him close to her before he withdrew and rolled away.
When she returned him to the museum lot to retrieve his car, it was dark, and she said, “We don’t have to do this.”
He was crying. “You’re a ghost,” he said. “You’ve made yourself a ghost.”
A year earlier, she might have felt those words, but now, nothing. She nodded, and he opened the car door. “I’ll never see you again,” she said.
“That’s not true. You’re being dramatic.”
“I’ll never see you again,” she said again though, and he got in his car and drove away.
Back at the apartment, she called her sister.
“I don’t know what I expected,” Liis said.
“Decency,” her sister answered.
“He’s doing the best he can.”
“I doubt that.”
“He said I’m a ghost.”
Silence. Then, “You are, but it’s not forever. He’s supposed to wait for you to come back.”
“You feel like I’m gone too?”
“You’re coping with a trauma.”
“So the separation is my fault?”
“Look, Liis, you always let him off the hook, even before.”
“I know. Because I love him.”
“You have to stop that.”
When they hung up, Liis typed in a new text message: Do you believe in an afterlife? I want to believe. I want to believe we’ll see each other there, if never here again. She left the phone in the bedroom and filled a bath and got into it, let the water lap around the soft mound of her belly, which she once hated but now felt disembodied affection for. It would forever be rounded, never fully submersible again.
The island was small, steep sided, and verdant with spring that first week of her stay. Liis slowly adjusted to the rhythm of its landscape and of her own isolation there. Each morning, she woke up to the sunrise and made coffee with the electric kettle and a single-cup filter. She fried an egg on the hot plate that served as a kitchen and ate standing at the window, watching the water go from black to blue to silver white. Water could be light on the island, she learned. It could also be wind or fog or a sheet of tiny diamonds dropped like a towel from the bare flank of a late-morning sky. It twisted and reformed itself, the same but different.
After eating, she dressed and gathered supplies, panted down to the beach for her samples and then panted as she hiked back up to the station again, breaking a sweat beneath her arms and under her breasts and down the length of her spine. She hadn’t moved this much in over a year, and it was strange to feel her body working in service of her will. Her legs were weak beneath her, and only the landscape kept her distracted from the burn in her calves. Under her feet, a pelt of moss covered the ground in electric green, and between the spare red bones of the madrone stands, wild rose bushes spotted with fuchsia-colored buds grew in thickets. Small glittering clouds of gnats hung in vibrating sheets here and there. Near each rose bush, bees thrummed, eager, anticipatory. They made the place seem to undulate at times, a disorienting reality that Liis couldn’t get used to. And everywhere there was the salt smell of the water, the sound of the tide smashing its face against the rocks, the open-palmed wind gusting up from the water and across the crown of the land.
There were also the gulls. The gulls! Were they always so loud? They called and circled, called and circled. Sometimes they roosted on the peak of the research station, shitting white luminescent streaks down the metal slant of the roof. They bickered and stank. They carried clam shells and blue-black mussels up from the beach and dropped them on the concrete patio just outside Liis’s sleeping quarters, splitting them open for their meat. Each day there seemed to be more broken shells. How could the place produce such an abundance? It was as if the moment the gulls scavenged something from the seafloor, a replacement materialized in its place. Sometimes, a school of fish moved through the water near the island, and the gulls lifted as one and flew out, seeming to multiply before her eyes, until they had become a churning single organism, a cyclone made of wings that rotated and spun a few feet from shore, one or two birds at time diving down to pluck a silver body from the water. When this happened, she remembered the museum installation, as if these gulls were an echo of those and all her life was just a net of connections she would never escape. That was a low moment thought though.
The practical explanation for the gulls: The island was teeming with life. It was a wildlife sanctuary, which was why the station had been built. Ornithologists came out each year to track migratory changes. Botanists came to record the effects of the deer on the grasses. Now and then, she’d been told, an artist was permitted a week to photograph or paint the island, which was rough but beautiful, feral and fecund, a little otherworldly. People who’d stayed at the station had recorded waking to the sound of whales exhaling in unison as they passed the shore. The populations of white-tail deer and red foxes were large here, where there were no predators. There were bald eagles roosting on the sheltered western side of the island, and the rocks at the beach could be overturned to reveal urchins and crabs, anemones in bright orange and pink and spongy green. At night, she’d seen opalescent nudibranchs, jellyfish lit ghostly blue, spider crabs creeping the tide pools on their spindly stems like daddy longlegs. They were all relatively safe in this untouched place—even the sea stars, inexplicably. The longer she stayed, the more she began looking for the expected other side of such a place: death. As she walked the game trails, she kept her eyes out for a carcass or the remains of a deer or a fox. The hawks had to drop prey now and then. And where were the bones of those fish she’d seen picked from the water? Where were the bits left to sink into the ground, fertilizer for the roses? She didn’t see anything, and the longer she stayed, the more she began to think there was a link she was missing between these other animals and the sea stars. What kept everything alive here? Part of her wondered, illogically, if it truly kept everything alive. What could such a possibility mean? She held her phone in her chest pocket where it bumped against her breast as she walked. What if there were a place where everything lived? The question tucked itself into her side like a stitch and ached as she walked. She tried to ignore it.
By the end of the first week, she had fallen into a new pattern, waking at daybreak and going about her first collection of the day, spending the late morning and early afternoon testing samples and wandering the island taking notes before returning to the station to sleep until her hunger woke her. She’d eat and go out again, crossing the fields with a lantern and a headlamp. Under her beams, the dark fell away and the water burned a bright bottle green. She could see what wasn’t visible by daylight: moon snails with their skirted feet out and rippling, tiny schools of flashing fish with yellow eyes. Once she spotted a little octopus, red and cartoonish, bobbing between two rocks. Another time, a flat expanse of anemones open like dahlias beneath the water. And the sea stars! Purple and orange, white and burgundy. There were dozens of them, and every one she saw appeared healthy, thick limbed, vibrantly fleshed. Each night she scooped water from around them, lifted them gently and scraped the edge of her plastic vial against their bodies.
At the end of the week, having found nothing in her water samples, she selected a dozen stars to bring back to the lab; she would have to test their bodies. All the way back up the hillside, she felt the stars on her back the way she’d have felt a collection of stones weighing down her pack. Psychic weight, she thought. She hated to destroy something so beautiful. What could a sea star know about destruction though? What could anyone know, for that matter, until it happened?
That night, she worked late. She tested the water she’d gathered, recorded her temperature readings from the shoreline, and finally laid out the stars and cut one limb from each. These she dropped into plastic bags, labeling the bags with the stars’ names and the coordinates of the locations at which she’d pulled them from the water. She put the arms into the lab’s mini freezer. In the morning, she’d pack them with ice into a cooler, which she’d take to the dock and leave for the same man who had ferried her out to carry back to the mainland for testing. The maimed stars, she would return to the water in the morning too; though for the night, she left them in a bucket of sea water and then dropped into her sleeping bag. Just before she slept, she reached for her phone. Like a window to another place and time, it lit up a small, bright square in the darkness. She typed I wish I could hold you, then shut off the phone and fell asleep.
Alena’s death is the black hole at the center of everything. A Charybdis. It spins and sucks, infinite in its desire to pull Liis down. She can only walk to the lip of its churning. If she stays too long there, she’ll dive in and let herself drown in it.
What came before is hard to remember, not because Liis can’t recall it, but because it hurts.
What happened following Alena’s death though, she lays bare for herself again and again, scouring the past as if the work will rub it smooth of scars.
First, there were months of crying, then months of yelling, then months of silence.
For a while, there was a therapist—a short woman with cropped hair the color of cornsilk and eyes that drooped at their outer corners in a way that made her appear pitying, patronizing. She made recommendations and let them talk, first Thomas and then Liis, because if Liis began, Thomas never got his turn.
Liis could be uncontrollable in her grief, and it was unmooring for him. She had always been measured, clearheaded, even calculating. She was a scientist, for fuck’s sake. Thomas said this, and Liis looked at him, bewildered by his anger and his misreading of her.
This wasn’t true, she said. She’d never been any of those things. Or, no—that wasn’t true either. She’d never been clearheaded, never measured. Calculating, maybe. Controlled, certainly. There was a difference between what one felt and what one showed of those feelings, wasn’t there? There was an inner and an outer self. But the barrier between the two had been weakened by Alena’s death. Everything in her that was a mess—she couldn’t hide it. And he shouldn’t ask her to.
No, he said. No. Maybe he shouldn’t, but he didn’t know how to hold it all for himself and her too. That was the problem. She wanted to grieve forever, like it would keep Alena with them. She wanted to let her grief infect their whole lives forever.
You’re wrong, she told him. It wounded her to hear him say it as he had: infect. As if her sorrow was a poison and not their shared love inverted. Isn’t that what Alena had been—the manifestation of their shared love? How could he not see that grief was simply the same love turned inside out? That grief was the shadow that love had left behind? What Liis wanted now was for time to move backward. She wanted a do-over. She wanted to wake up one morning and find that none of it had really happened at all.
They argued in quiet, even tones, which the therapist said was healthy—an airing. But as much as they aired it all, nothing was repaired, and Liis left the sessions feeling as if she had held her head over a toilet for an hour and come out empty of everything. It was she who ended their appointments.
After that, there was a dinner one night just after Thomas finally moved out. He’d found an apartment for himself across the city—a studio, tiny and spare and too sad for Liis to bear considering as his living space. He didn’t seem to care though. For a few weeks, he seemed to have vanished wholly, and then out of nowhere he texted her about meeting. Liis’s stomach sank at the invitation, which she assumed he was arranging in order to tell her that he’d begun dating again, that he wanted to divorce. But it wasn’t that. I miss you, he said in his text. Could they grab a meal together?
They ate at their old restaurant—not one where they’d taken Alena, but one they went to together, on date nights. They had a bottle of wine, and he reached for her hand as they left, suggesting they walk the pier near the apartment, like they’d always done. It was Liis who kissed him—a risk, but also nothing after twenty years of kisses. How strange, that duality. She said it aloud after she pulled away from him. What is this? Not a first kiss but not familiar. He laughed and kissed her again. He went home with her, to their home, and it wasn’t until the morning that she realized he hadn’t slept there but had waited for her to sleep and then left. It felt like a trick. If he’d stayed the night, she would have been hopeful about the future, but because he’d left, the whole evening became an uncertainty. Suddenly the dinner wasn’t about reconnection but about her loneliness. The sex she’d thought was good was now merely nostalgic. And she—she was not desirable, the love of his life returned to him. No. She was foolish. A fool. There was a note on the counter: Thank you for a nice evening, it read. So neutral. She balled it up and threw it out.
But he called again the next week and the following one too, and each time she said yes and met him for dinner and then brought him home—for sex, or sex and a movie, or just a movie sometimes—as if the easy companionship between them had returned. Each time, he declined to stay too long, pulling on his coat and going back to his own apartment to sleep, walking away from her again and again. Some mornings, the apartment smelled of him—his pillow, the sheets—but other than that, there was no trace of him, and a part of her wondered if she was imagining it all. Was it possible that Thomas had never come back into her life after the separation, that she—somehow—was losing her grip on the veil between fantasy and reality? Could you want a thing enough to trick yourself into believing you had it? Was she losing her mind? She remembered stories she’d read of women with phantom pregnancies and veterans with pain in limbs long ago amputated from their bodies and states of psychosis that enabled a person to slide from one personality to another. It could happen. This terrified her.
Her sister said she was being melodramatic and ridiculous. “He’s using you because he can’t figure out what he wants,” her sister said. “That’s what’s happening. Stop seeing him, Liis.”
“You can’t understand. Everything you have is still intact.”
The truth was that she didn’t want to stop, though. She’d rather have a spectral marriage than no marriage at all.
In the morning, the walk to the beach to return the stars was slow, the bucket heavy with their bodies and the water, where they clung to one another in a heap. Liis paused to breathe and to look out across the stretch of silver gray to the other islands just visible in the distance: Lucia and Varg. There was a strangeness to the landscape this morning, a dreaminess. Fog had rolled in overnight, and it lay in an opaque band a foot above the water’s surface. Behind it, the western horizon was still deep and silty gray. The fog had socked in the air rather than letting wind move freely around the island, and Liis descended to the sea through heavy smell of salt and mineral. On the beach itself, a great raft of driftwood was banked against the cliff wall and swaths of green and red kelp hung from the logs. She hadn’t been wakened by the sounds of a storm, but the evidence of massive waves and wind was everywhere, as if the sea floor had been churned upward and left to dry on the sand.
She squatted at the waterline, about to withdraw a star from the bucket to place between the rocks, when the phone in her pocket chimed. It hadn’t done that since she’d come out to the island. There was no service here, and her only way to call out had been the radio. None of her own texts had sent. But she paused and took out her phone and looked at it. I wish I could hold you, the screen read. It was her own words from the night before come back to her. But also, no—these weren’t exactly her words. Her outgoing message hung above these words, still protected in its green bubble. These words sat below it, not enclosed, but free-floating, just type on the screen face, gray and faint. A glitch, she told herself and dropped it back in her pocket, went about her work.
For the rest of the morning she felt trailed by the sensation that something had slipped through the veil. As she walked around the island, she felt the phone bouncing against her leg. When she left the cooler of iced sea star arms on the east-side dock, she asked the private boat’s pilot if he got reception out here. He was a craggy-faced man in his late fifties, his gray hair tied back in a ponytail.
“I don’t carry a phone,” he said. “A radio, fine. But no phone.” His face split in a rough grin. “Who’d call me?” A grizzled laugh, and he stepped into his swaying boat and waved over his shoulder as he left her alone again.
All day, she worried it, an idea slowly taking shape in her mind.
A memory: She is standing at the kitchen window, washing the dinner dishes. It’s the blue hour, late winter. Thomas is in his backyard studio, finishing the day’s work. He has a new series in mind: ten large-scale paintings in cyan and gold and black, abstract but reminiscent of the nets that light and shadow cast on water. Each canvas will be slightly different than the others; mounted together, they’ll form a wall of water. He’s excited about the project in a way he hasn’t been about any of his work for quite some time, and she’s happy for him. Happy to see him lit up from the inside—his capacity for generating his own sense of purpose something she most admires in him. She has always used him like a flare, following his light while her own falters.
Tonight, she can see him in silhouette through the fogged studio window, and her love for him feels immense, overpowering. She can never admit this to him—that she loves him so boundlessly, so lavishly. She can never tell him that she thinks she’d die without him. That without him, she knows she’d atrophy and become nothing. It’s repellant to her, this dependence. It’s shameful. And beyond that, it’d be too much for him to hold. But watching the shape of him through the window, she has to will herself in place so that she doesn’t run out across the dark lawn in her bare feet to embrace him.
She’s thinking this when there’s a call. She fishes her phone from her pocket with still-wet hands, catching it on the last ring.
“Liis.” It’s Alena’s coach.
Her memory of the next hour is punctured with great holes through which only pain is visible.
Liis did run to Thomas in the studio. Together, they rushed to the high school pool. Alena had hit her head during a dive, swallowed water, and been pulled unconscious to the tile deck. The coach had done CPR, and she’d come to, vomited. Liis and Thomas pulled up just as the paramedics were loading Alena into the ambulance. The other parents watched as Liis climbed in beside her daughter. They were going to take their own wet-headed children home and feed them and go to bed knowing all was well. Liis thought this as the ambulance doors closed on her.
The hospital. Waiting. Florescent lights and smells of disinfectant, sickness, coffee. One doctor and another, pulling Liis and Thomas aside. A bed in a room in the ER, followed by an MRI, followed by a bed in the trauma unit. A nurse with close-cropped hair and a warm hand. A nurse with a tight ponytail and a sharp tone. A nurse. A nurse. A nurse. Liis’s sister arrived and sat with her but left at eight o’clock to return to her own children and her husband. Impossible to think that their nighttime routine was carrying on as usual though the world had stopped. At midnight, Liis, who had been dozing in the chair beside Alena’s hospital bed, woke to the machines in the room all screaming and Alena blue lipped on the bank of white pillows. Alena’s hand was still in Liis’s, their fingers interlaced.
And then it was over.
Unthinkable.
Everything else can only be Afterward.
She spends the month following Alena’s death under her own kind of water. It laps at her and tugs her deeper. In March, from the screen of her laptop, she sits in bed in her darkened bedroom watching footage of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. She cannot stop watching. “A seismic rupture,” she hears a reporter say, and the words dislodge something in her gut that comes up in the form of sobs. When Thomas finds her, she is on the bedroom floor.
Later, in May, his series of paintings is finished, and he exhibits at a gallery he has been trying to get into for years. He is a wild success. A glowing review runs in the paper ahead of the opening. The gallery owner orders a crate of champagne.
When Liis walks into the gallery, she sees the work before she sees her husband. What he said months before comes back to her: a wall of water. She staggers forward. The wall is at the back of a wide and empty room. The space is flooded with white light. Standing in front of it, Liis closes her eyes. She sees the riotous brilliance of one of her memory holes, but this time she steps through it, and when she opens her eyes again, she is inches from the blue wave of Thomas’s paintings. She gasps.
When they finally go to therapy, Thomas will tell the placid therapist about this night and how Liis left before the champagne was served, how he spent the evening worrying about where she’d gone and if she was okay. How he could not be present in the moment, a professional peak. He is not a bad man. This is not about his ego. He was anxious when he should have been celebrating. Liis will apologize. The wall of water will pool between them.
Where had she gone? the therapist will wonder aloud, but Liis won’t be able to tell her.
“I walked,” she’ll say, which will be true, though she won’t be sure where she walked or how she ended up across the city, looking out at Puget Sound and its rippling darkness, the whole of the water spotted with reflected lights that seemed to shine both from beyond and from beneath. “How could that be?” Liis will ask the therapist, and the poor woman will turn her pitying face to Thomas and nod.
On the island, she waited for dusk, stowed a lantern and her dinner in her pack, and hiked down to the beach. The tide was low but beginning to come back in, and the pools between the rocks were exposed. When she shone the lantern beam at her feet, it illuminated a garden of anemones and limpets, quarter-sized crabs, sea stars. Liis pulled her phone from her pocket. To Alena’s number, she texted Where are you?
For several minutes, she stood with the phone in her hand, waiting. When the sun fully slid into the sea, she sat and ate her meal and watched the phone.
Around her, the pools crackled and whispered.
Still nothing on the phone.
She pulled up Thomas’s number and typed I think she’s looking for me. I think she’s found me out here on the island. Send. A moment later, a chime that made her heart stop, but it was just the error message. Nothing could get through to Thomas.
It occurred to her to put her feet in the water. If the water was truly regenerative, special, it may be contact that mattered. She had her hands in it on the first day. She touched the water, and then she touched her phone. This seemed logical. She stripped to bare feet and climbed past the tide pools to a flat section of rock. The incoming tide licked her feet.
The water was frigid. Again, part of her mind wondered at this—the chill here and how the water around the island seemed to remain cooler than farther north. Disease in the stars would spread more quickly in warmer temperatures, where the creatures’ systems were already stressed. Climate change and toxicity and plague, they were bedfellows, no different from grief and depression and divorce. One crisis would always beget another. There were no isolated events.
As she waited, she remembered the videos of the Tōhoku tsunami—the way the whole of the sea drew away from the land as if sucking in its breath before letting loose a fury. She’d read somewhere that the tsunami waves had come at the coastline as fast as five miles per second and ruined centuries of development in a single wash. What was remarkable about disasters was not just their interconnection (the shifting plates, the shaking land, the flood), but also the way they collapsed time, folding it on itself, making clear the reality that the past is always present, and the present is a long coil of return. If there was any barrier between this world and whatever lay beyond it, that barrier was time. Wherever there was forward motion, destruction and ruin would come again and with them, also, a new beginning. Time was a cycle. A cyclone. A whirlpool. And nothing living could escape its turning.
Although, she thought, Thomas had.
She texted him: How could you put all your grief into the paintings? How could you do that? She resented him. She acknowledged it to herself as she hadn’t before. She resented the way he’d pulled away from her after Alena was gone, which he’d done so naturally, not a seam between their daughter’s disappearance and his work’s emergence. The day after her death, he was in the studio. He was there early in the mornings and late into the night. All the hours while Liis was in the bedroom watching tsunami footage and reliving that night in the hospital, Thomas was in the studio working. Compelled. Focused. Creating. She resented that the energy of their shared grief had become productive for him—a birth—while for her it had been a force of wreckage.
The text sat in its bubble, unanswered. A failure message chimed. Liis put on her shoes and began up the cliffside.
The act of remembering that night is never intentional. Memory forces itself through her consciousness like a headache. The holes in what she recalls appear first—bright, excruciating blasts of light at the backs of her eyes that wake her from deep sleep or hit her as she passes Alena’s closed bedroom door. Sometimes, a memory begins not with light but with sound—a roaring like a train through her skull. She wakes up shaking, deaf to anything but the rumbling. There’s an ache, as if her joints are grinding against themselves with the rupture of what she’s submerged. She fights this, but once a memory is moving, she has to wait for it to wash over and through her. Sometimes she has to lie down on her back to resist the vertigo, the nausea, of remembering. It’s incapacitating. Thomas didn’t know how to help her. He brought her Alena’s pillow, which for weeks after her death still smelled like her. This helped until it didn’t. Then he lay his own body beside hers, curling around her, but how long could they stay inert? He asked finally: How long, Liis? Now, he’s gone, and she must weather these moments alone, and maybe this is better. Without him, she has no choice but to give into the flood. One lesson of grief is submission.
Back at the station, she packed in near darkness, emptying and cleaning the lab equipment, locking the cabinets, sweeping the sand from the floor with only the light of her lantern casting a sallow haze over the lab. In the sleeping quarters, she filled her backpack with her clothes and notebook and toiletries—a life could be reduced to so little. Her mouth tasted like metal—had she bitten herself?—and so she went out into the night with her toothbrush and water bottle and brushed and spat into the tall grass. All around her, the island hushed and chittered. The gulls were quieted at night, but the insects hummed their nocturnal songs, and the rising tide threw itself against the beach. Liis stood still in the center of it all—the darkness and the noise. The violence and the return. Overhead, stars like punctures in the sky. Below, the black varnish of the sea. She could, she knew, walk to the edge of the eastern side of the island and jump. The cold would kill her before she drowned, and that death would not be so miserable—an initial shuddering, then lethargy. She thought of the scenes from Tōhoku—the detritus of so many lives slopping and bobbing in the flood waters. Couches and beds. Automobiles and dining tables and the soft, indistinguishable lumps of fabric that might have been winter coats or bedroom curtains or the backs of the drowned.
She knew she wouldn’t be able to dive into the sea. She couldn’t explain how she belonged on this side any more than she could explain how her daughter belonged on the other, but she understood that the passage across their divide was an impossibility.
She went into the station and shut off the lantern and lay on the floor to wait for morning, when she would radio the private boat pilot to come get her. She was done here. She would write the report from home. She would use it to negotiate herself a new adjunct post in the university’s lab, perhaps. Or maybe not that. Maybe she would sell the apartment but not go anywhere; just stay with her sister until she knew what should come next. Until she knew where to go, now that she’d washed up on the shore of her life once more. Maybe she would sell the apartment and travel. There were sea stars to be studied in Canada, in Mexico. One way or another, she had no choice but to begin again.
The station was cold and silent, and she felt herself lift out of her body and hover like a gull riding the channel of wind between waking and sleeping. She named the losses: Pisaster ochraceus, Pisaster giganteus, Pisaster brevispinus, Filia Alena, Amatus Thomas. Almost a prayer. They passed behind her eyes, bright blossoming flares—beautiful—and then vanished. Into the phone, her fingers typed: I miss you. What am I going to do?
The words rose and hung on the screen.