“This place,” he said.

  I didn’t understand, and he waved his hand at the window, a vague gesture to the land. “Tasmanian tigers weren’t the only living things that went extinct here,” he said. “There’s a long history of hunting on this island.”

  Something I’d known about and forgotten, a horror not close enough to immediately recall. Conflict between the Indigenous people of Tasmania and the colonial settlers resulted in slaughter and extermination orders, martial law and a white governor’s instruction to shoot Indigenous inhabitants on sight. The mustering of the Black Line, where every able-bodied male settler was ordered to take part in an organized drive to sweep the island of its original inhabitants, in order to exterminate a people and their culture. How those settlers had stalked and trapped and murdered, how they’d hunted until all the faces left were white, and the meagre remnant of Tasmania’s first peoples to survive the genocide had been dumped on a smaller, less hospitable island, to die of isolation and influenza.

  Genocide and absence, and for some things, for some people, a corresponding Grief that never came. I’d seen an old woman in an old house, the descendant perhaps of a man who’d gone mustering on the Black Line, driven to insanity by the loss of a marsupial wolf but not the indifferent slaughter of a people. Had the destruction of Tasmania’s first peoples ever induced someone like Granny — someone like me — to Grief, or was it only the absence of those so little like us that was memorialized in this way? I’d never thought to check, though the over-representation of Indigenous populations in suicide statistics was a grim, provoking question.

  Of all the places to which George and I had gone on holiday over the years, we’d never come here. I’d suggested it, idly but more than once. George had never wanted to visit. He claimed it was because it made him think too much of home, and I’d always thought he was referring to geography and landscape instead of blood and conflict.

  Hunting and hunting and hunting … I suppose that’s something to be grateful for. That their extinction was deliberate. We weren’t so indifferent to them that we let the world take them. We did it ourselves. We liked doing it.

  It was nothing to be grateful for.

  “What am I supposed to do now?” I said finally, on my third cup of coffee and jittery with it, skimming over a sorrow that had never been recognized enough, at least not by me, the woman who had brought plastic to a friend who mourned more for coral than for culture. George let me do it, too, as if practice had taken away his resentment. I didn’t ask if that were possible. I was more concerned with other possibilities. Such luxuries the lopsidedness of Grief had left us. The eggs I hadn’t been able to finish sat uneasily in my stomach.

  “Am I supposed to walk into a police station and say ‘Hey, there’s an old woman who’s brought back marsupial predators from the dead, and I think she wanted me to help them hunt. You know, for food. Or she was planning to feed me to them herself. I’m not sure.’”

  “They’d lock you up,” said George. “Just long enough to call a doctor.” He didn’t need to say more. Irrationality, a sustained focus on an old extinction … they’d call it Grief, and anything I said after that would be at first suspicious and then irrelevant. I’d likely get the same reaction from everyone — from Granny’s colleagues, and from the press.

  “It’s a miracle you believe me,” I said, hunting for strawberry jam in the little jars they brought with the toast. I wasn’t hungry, but if I didn’t do something with my hands I’d be clutching at my cup with a grip so tightly unsteady it would have spilled the coffee.

  “Yes,” said George, definitive. He’d never been much of a liar. I’d always found that inability to prevaricate an irritating trait. Now it was actually comforting, because if George thought — if he even suspected — that I’d fallen to Grief, he would have flat-out said so to my face.

  “Well, you’re not exactly fanciful, are you?” he said, shifting the coffeepot out of reach as I stretched to refill my cup. I shook my head, cheeks bulging with toast and strawberry. “Question is, what are we going to do now?”

  It was the “we” that did it. Our marriage was ending, an ongoing process neither of us would stop, but when push came to shove it was still “we,” an automatic standing-beside that not even divorce could shift. I burst into tears over the remains of a plate of scrambled eggs, hands over my mouth to prevent jam-coated crumbs from leaking out. George, faintly appalled at all the mess, fished paper napkins out of the dispenser and started mopping me up regardless.

  We were on a flight to New Zealand the next day. I should have felt bad about all this flying — it was only making matters worse, with climate the way it was — but since I’d held in my lap a species brought back from the dead, everything else seemed a little … distant was the best word for it. Like the world had been set slightly askew, and gravity had become less than it was.

  I called the police while George was organizing tickets, to report vandalism of a rental car. I told them kids must have done it while I was visiting. Where kids would have come from that far out in the country I didn’t know, but it was their problem now, and, if nothing else, having the police check for fingerprints and the like would prevent the rental agency people from wandering out there on their own, defenceless. Not that I thought Granny would do anything, precisely. If she were going to hunt, it wouldn’t be in her interest to draw attention to herself.

  I was afraid of what more elaborate schemes Granny might have been planning, and it didn’t help that I lacked information enough to draw any adequate conclusions. There were at least two generations of thylacines in her house, perhaps more. The sheer scale of her operation made me think she couldn’t have done it all herself. Who would be mad enough to help her, and do it in absolute secrecy? It could only be someone else infected with Grief, and that, too, would be unusual. Grief attacked communities sometimes, but the Grief-stricken never worked together, not that I’d ever heard. They lacked the capacity to focus, because they were locked in on themselves and their experience of loss.

  I didn’t know why Granny had reached out to me. I hoped our encounter had prompted her to move more cautiously, for the sake of everyone around her. I hoped that caution would last until I discovered more of what was going on; that the potential for a too-early exposure would keep her contained long enough.

  “Long enough for what, though?” George said, crammed into his window seat and stealing the last of my licorice. He’d never liked loose ends, and there were too many here for comfort. Worse, we were headed in the direction of more.

  “I know it’s odd,” he’d said, after I’d snuffled my way to a soggy silence at yesterday’s breakfast. “But I got an invitation, a couple of weeks back. Before — well.” Before the Sea Witch set herself to suicide, is what he didn’t say, but it was what he meant. “From an old university acquaintance. He was a friend once, but we drifted apart. I thought he was trying to reconnect. We shared a studio at one point, but he was more about design than drawing.” George did biological illustrations in pen and ink. For every anniversary he’d given me a portrait of a different species of jellyfish that were almost more beautiful than the real thing. The last portrait had been of Velella velella, the by-the-wind sailor that made its way through the ocean entirely by chance. By necessity, Velella adapted to the waters it found itself in, although the wind sometimes blew it onto beaches where it stranded and died, incapable of living away from ocean.

  “What was the invitation for?”

  “The rebirth of a bird,” he’d said. “Another resurrection. Not biological, from what I can gather. Something arty, I think, but still …”

  I’d stiffened in my seat. “That seems like too much of a coincidence.”

  George had smiled at me over the table, but there was no humor in it. “Doesn’t it just,” he’d said. His fingertips were blackened with ink, and I suspected he’d spent the flight to Tasmania sketching. He always drew when he was anxious, but he didn’t show the pictures to me anymore.

  “I haven’t spoken to Darren in years,” he’d said, and his inky fingers drummed on the table. “And I can’t help but wonder if that invitation was for me, or if it was a way to get to you.”

  This resurrection was of a different kind. Mine had come with DNA — science and strands and the restoration of the literal dead. I was a scientist myself, and that was a rebirth that spoke to me. An event that held more art critics than scientists was uncommon ground. George was right at home. He pored over the exhibition program, explaining the rationale behind this particular resurrection. The phrase he’d used was “three-dimensional kinetic sculptures that combine biological aesthetic with socio-cultural ecological underpinnings.” He could get technical sometimes, when talking about his work.

  I just called them robots.

  Xenicus gilviventris, the little rock wren. Poor wee beast. Endemic to the South Island of New Zealand, one of the few alpine birds of the country. Already endangered, already vulnerable to introduced predators, the rock wren had not survived the changing climate. Rats colonized the warming mountains, moving higher and higher to where they’d never been before, and the rock wren, a poor flier, could not survive the onslaught. Attempts to relocate surviving populations to offshore islands failed, and a country once known for its bird life lost yet another species.

  So I learned, anyway, from the internet at airports and from George, in the air and on the way to New Zealand. He’d grown up there, in a small North Island town that existed to support regional agriculture. “Cow town,” he called it, and left as soon as he could. The loss of the little bird was an old and distant thing to him, but a cause of sorrow nonetheless. “It’s a grief, not the Grief,” he corrected, at my expression of sympathy. “Truth is, I wasn’t that attached to them. I liked the way their little eyebrows made them look so grumpy, but of all the birds we needed to save, they’d never have been at the top of my list. It’s sad,” he said, “but they weren’t important. Weren’t iconic enough, I guess.”

  I don’t know what it was about his statement that gave me the most discomfort. The idea, still present in all its naïveté, that iconic was enough. The Reef had been iconic, and nothing had been done to stop the pale skeletal death. That iconic was a statement of worth itself, because who were we to judge which absence was the most distressing, or the least deserved? Hard to make that judgment without mirrors, but we did.

  Perhaps, in the end, it was the shadow of Granny over George’s face, as he spoke of a small creature who hadn’t been sufficiently cared for, not by him or by anyone else. A creature that had garnered nothing but a pale admiration, enough for mild regret but not enough for Grief.

  Can you watch something die and let it die?

  The answer, too often, was yes.

  “Except I didn’t watch, did I,” said George, honest to the last. “I left.” So he didn’t have to watch, or because he didn’t care to watch?

  “There’s a difference? It didn’t feel like my land anymore,” he said. But our hotel, when we landed, was situated next to a stand of native bush, and he leaned so carefully from his bedroom window, into air that smelt of damp soil and beech trees, that I wasn’t sure I believed him.

  “Sometimes I think it’s better not to get attached,” he said. And I, so enormously attached to jellyfish, wanted to argue the point. But that was a conversation I could see quickly moving beyond the oceanic. After all, he’d let himself get attached to me, and look how that turned out. Then again, I’d been let go awfully easily. I could call it fairness and a fundamental sense of honor, that he wouldn’t argue for a motherhood I did not want, but the truth was part of me wondered if he had expected to be left all along. A man who could leave himself, leave home and family and country, the ecology of his birth … would it really surprise him that other people could leave as well? Maybe, a few years from now, he’d look back on me, on our lives together, with the same distracted fondness he felt for the rock wren. The same mild regret, only sporadically remembered. I wondered if we were both too disconnected in our own ways, or if regret was coloring my own perception, making the lines of shattering softer than they were. If marriage was attachment, then the loosening of bonds, for one who avoided attachment, could only be secret relief.

  I couldn’t tell anymore.

  Fortunately for me, George’s invitation came with a plus-one. I would have crashed the party regardless. Recent events had hardened me to social niceties. My impending divorce, the Sea Witch’s brutal death … these were bad enough without the echoes of those padded footfalls in the hallway of my memory, or the constant checking of my fingers for tooth marks that were always faint and had long since faded. I’d woken the night before the exhibit opening with bite marks from my own teeth in those same fingers, the taste of blood in my mouth. Etiquette was nothing in comparison.

  “What is it these things do, anyway?” I hissed at George, as we politely circled the floor of Otago Museum in Dunedin, where the birds were to be presented. “Do they just, you know, hop about and stuff?” I pictured the animatronics displays in shop windows at Christmastime, the dead movements of mechanism, stiff and juddery. Something to be kept behind glass, a display piece of failed conservation not much different to the other exhibits around us, where the extinct birds of New Zealand were posed into rigidity. Dead eyes stared out of their glass display cases as if those cases were coffins.

  George held a program in his hand and had clearly studied it. “These are the friendly ones. From what I understand Darren’s done two sorts.” He caught my querying look. “The wrens that have been programmed with realistic behavior, the ones that mimic actual rock wrens, they’re the ones that’ll be let loose in the mountains. These are museum pieces. They’re more curious. More friendly. Designed for human interaction, and part of the exhibit is monitoring the exchange between birds and visitors to see if opinions of the wren change after interaction.”

  “Is that the — what was it — the ‘socio-cultural ecological underpinnings’? Why doesn’t he just say he’s Disneyfied the thing to make it more attractive to humans?”

  “He’s got a grant to justify,” said George. That was something I could understand. Artists, like scientists, always had to beg for money.

  “It seems a bit late for all that, is what I’m saying.” The mountains were empty of anything but rats, so getting people to love the little rock wren enough to mourn it seemed like an invitation to Grief if ever there was one. “Don’t go getting attached,” I said, and elbowed him gently in the side as the speeches were read, and the little robots released. My warning fell on deaf ears, because although George didn’t react as loudly as the children in attendance, I’d seen fascination on his face before, the quick warming rise of wonder, and I knew what infatuation looked like on him. I’d seen it often enough in the early years of our relationship: the same tender cast to his glance, the devoted interest that took in all details. I’d been devoted too. There wasn’t the smallest subtlety in that expression that I had ever missed, and nothing about it that I would fail to miss in future. Seeing him so quietly delighted by something that wasn’t me was surprisingly painful — it would never have hurt like this when our marriage was strong.

  In all fairness, they were attractive little things. Green feathers shading into yellow and cream underneath. Their most appealing feature, as George had commented, were the slanted eyebrows that gave them permanent expressions of disgusted rage which contrasted amusingly with their flirty, fluttery movements. The bodies were round, almost tailless and with stout, widespread little legs that underlined the determined umbrage of their faces. Nothing could ever tear me away from jellies, but it was clear robotics had evolved past where my own disinterest had placed it, because these small, hopping simulacra were indistinguishable from life. If I hadn’t known they were mechanism, I would never have been able to tell. Compared to the recordings of live rock wrens showing on the exhibition screens, there was no difference. The robot wrens scampered and fluttered and flew, only short flights close to the ground but flight nonetheless. They cocked their heads and flicked their wings and piped thin, high-pitched notes. The only difference from the real thing showed when someone knelt in front of them and held out a hand, palm up. The rock wren would jump into it, briefly, before bobbing back into the air and then coming back down to earth to continue their examination of the ground.

  They were heavier than the real thing, but they were sweet and charming. It was hard to look at them and remember they were nothing but mirrors of the dead.

  “I suppose they wind up like clockwork,” I said, as George brought a bird over in his cupped hands for inspection. I reached out to stroke it — something the real bird would never have allowed — and the feathers were so soft, felt so real.

  “Solar batteries,” he said, almost absent in his answer. “So pretty,” he said, and his voice was awe and wistfulness. “Such a pretty birdie.”

  I could picture him holding small animals up for a child’s inspection. He’d always been good with young things, more of a nurturer than I ever was. A consequence, I thought, of the generalized wonder he’d been able to retain somehow — incomprehensible to me, who had wonder narrowed down to bells and tentacles. I couldn’t understand how he could cup jellyfish, the harmless ones, in those same big hands and love them, but not love them more than anything else. It was why I had to leave him. Capacity like that should not be wasted.

  “You don’t trust it, do you,” said Darren, as a waiter passed and we both took drinks. It wasn’t a question. They were his birds, his art, but he spent more time explaining them to me than he did to George, which struck me as strange given that Darren had invited George specifically and I was merely an incidental guest.

 

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