The girl steps forward and taps her knuckles on the glass. When there’s no response from the sea lions inside, she presses her face against it and begins to make a low hum.
‘Hell-ooooo,’ she says.
The glass is thick, the animals won’t hear more than a murmur. The largest sea lion opens its eyes but does not move. The rest of them lie on the rocks and they do nothing, even when the girl knocks again, much harder, and goes on knocking until it hurts her knuckles and she stops.
Of all the extinctions in recent years, the sea lion’s was the most affecting. Species had been disappearing for decades, though usually in a way that went unnoticed by everyone but the scientists most dedicated to their cause. The sea lions put up a fight. Whatever disease it was that took them in the end, it was gruesome. Not just the dead ones that washed up deformed and decayed, but the live ones with swollen heads, skin stretched to bursting and sometimes beyond, with gaping wounds and wide, questioning eyes. They became a favourite subject of documentary-makers who built a narrative of resilience that persists: the defiant, dying sea lions huddled over the swollen form of their pups, refusing veterinary aid or food, savaging all who came near.
As their disease progressed, the value of the survivors soared. The workers of the park dedicated themselves to keeping these last remaining pups alive, and here they were, a success—but for what?
The children look up at Mr Wei with uncertain faces. Again he wonders: is it Ann who has done the right thing?
Mr Wei moves the group on. The Hall of Undersea Secrets has betrayed their expectations. He will not bring the investors here.
Carla is left to lie with her son. Someone has wiped her blood from the floor and the doctors and midwives and nurses have finally left her to regain some sense of her own body, and come to terms with the reality of the small bundle lying against her chest. Her mother is there, somewhere in the corner, watching over. She will take the child if Carla falls too deeply into sleep.
Her son has his fists closed tight as he moves his face to find Carla’s nipple. She leads him there and cradles him, this helpless pup, like one of Uncle Carl’s rescued sea lions.
She likes to think of him, up at dawn to watch over those pups. Her absent uncle learning how to feed a baby sea lion, then back to work, welding steel, laying concrete all day. He’d rarely sounded so happy as when the under-staffed vets had let him stay up half the night feeding formula to those animals.
Not since his promotion, though. Plucked from obscurity, no management experience, a fifty-eight-year-old builder with two missing fingers now the foreman of a multibillion-dollar project? She pretended she didn’t know what it meant. She pretended not to have figured it out.
The missing architect. The missing foreman. They knew.
Uncle Carl was careful. She told him to get through it, to come home. What’s done is done, she said. Don’t speak of it on the phone. They think you are someone who will never figure it out, a lowly worker who will never catch on.
The baby makes a whimper and Carla seeks out the shape of her mother, slumped in a chair in the corner.
‘Mum?’
Her mother stirs.
‘Can you send a message?’
The pollution had been incidental. But there was money to be made, cures for the ailments it caused, the provision of clean air and water, strategies for abatement—a new world of business opportunities. The extinctions were collateral damage, at first, then they were strategic. The world’s biggest theme park featuring the only surviving examples of key animal and bird species, an estimated 500,000 visitors a day. Why not? The park had tripled in value in a year based on the prospectus alone. The worse things became, the more people needed a park like this. The worse things became, the more the investors stood to benefit.
Their last stop on the tour is the whale. Mr Wei reads from his amended script, explaining the rare and enormous thing they are about to see. He manages without a shake in his voice and the visitors fall quiet and file into the aquarium. They slow at the entrance, it’s dark and their eyes take a minute to adjust, and so the tour group bottlenecks until whispers from behind (Hey! Move up!) send the front-runners blindly forward.
Sunlight streams in from the top of the aquarium and there’s Vera, a silhouette the size of a house. Mr Wei slips in at the back and stands against the wall. Children wow and ahh at the sight of her. They ask, What is it? and uncertain parents try to explain how she came to be here.
Mr Wei’s phone buzzes against his thigh. He covers it with his hand to conceal the light until he slips through a door into the control room. It’s a picture. It’s the baby.
Little Carl Jnr born 11.35, our time. At first he had trouble breathing but now he is good.
He takes in the baby’s unfamiliar, screwed up face. He writes back:
I am so proud, what a wonderful baby!
A security guard opens the door.
‘Mr Wei? There’s a problem. About the whale?’
‘What is it?’
His phone buzzes in his hand.
Carla misses you. She says when can you visit?
‘Mr Wei? I think you should come in.’
He slides his phone into his pocket. In the viewing area he is met by confused investors and the sight of air leaking from Vera’s blowholes.
‘Is this whale sick?’ someone says.
Her body has become tilted so that her head rests close to the aquarium floor and her tail angles upwards. A fine stream of bubbles races to the water’s surface.
‘Do something,’ someone says and children edge closer to the glass.
Investors give him expectant looks, but the security team can only shrug and Mr Wei hesitates, clears his throat to explain. He is not sure what to tell them.
‘Ladies and gentlemen. Do not be alarmed.’
Vera hangs there, one vacant eye against the tank’s side. The eye does not move even when investors bang on the glass to measure how near she is to death.
‘I can assure you this is all normal, this is not anything—’
Investors shake their heads as Vera’s tail droops until her whole, deflated body rests on the tank’s floor. The trail of bubbles slows to a stop and someone manages to adjust the lights so Vera fades into darkness.
The investors fall silent and Mr Wei tries again to explain, to apologise. His phone vibrates, reminding him of the baby and he thinks: This is it, he will never return, he will never meet this baby, little Carl Jnr.
He must tell the truth, they should know he did not do this. Fast and firm decisions, that’s his job.
Ann is halfway out of the park with all the belongings she can carry. She has arranged a ride in the back of one of the feed trucks and it’s time to go. The mist has cleared enough that she can make out the arch of the park’s gates through the open doors of the warehouse. Ann only answers the phone because it’s Mr Wei, she trusts him; they are close.
‘Carl?’
He tells her she’s needed at the aquarium. Can she gather her team? They’ll need to hook up the whale and fill her with air.
‘Hook it? But why?’
Mr Wei hears
the truck start its engine and he tries to explain how things have gone. Around him the investors continue to jostle and applaud.
What a wonderful display, they say. It’s the perfect thing, just the message of the park. How did you do it? Can we see it again?
We must see it again.
INCURABLE
Felix was the second to go.
I gave the school permission to hang his photo on the perimeter fence and they put it up next to the picture of the first one.
The first one was a girl, a pudgy girl with eyes that weren’t quite crossed but weren’t exactly looking in a unified direction, either. If I were her father, I would have found a better photo—one that gave a nicer impression.
But I wasn’t, I was Felix’s father, and so instead I looked at the image of my son and the flowers and teddy bears and sad, hand-drawn cards piling beneath it, and I noted the way Felix’s collection of tributes was already up to the fourth twist in the wire fence after just one day.
After three days of being dead, the girl’s pile of gifts was barely equal to my son’s.
I’m not sure where the idea for the photos came from. I first saw it on the news. While Felix was in hospital those last forty-eight hours, his grandparents and I sat by his bed and watched TV. Our attention switched from the rasping sound of his respirator to the 24-hour news channel and back.
‘The government is urging calm as medical professionals warn of a pandemic following the death of eight-year-old Krystal Clayton from a newly identified strain of Influenza A.’
That was her name, Krystal. They showed that same photo of her about ten times an hour. They also showed footage of empty classrooms, and nurses handing out face masks. Although Felix was in a coma, I promised him inside my head that if he died I’d find an appropriate way to honour his memory. As a single-parent family, we’d always had to work extra hard to show the world we were doing things right. We ate meals at the table, talked regularly about our feelings and studied a new synonym from the thesaurus each day.
Just a week before he fell ill, Felix had looked over the dinner table and said, ‘Dad, this food we are fanatically chewing is really hitting the location.’
We laughed and high-fived because we were really making everything work for us; we were self-made men.
That’s why, when he went past the state of coma and doctors said, ‘We’re so sorry,’ I didn’t waste a lot of time. I rang the school and I asked Mrs Sampson, the lady at the front desk, if they would hang Felix’s photo on the fence beside the crossed-eyed girl.
‘Why? Mr Henderson? He isn’t, is he?’
I told her he was.
‘My son Felix passed away a few moments ago. I’d like his photo to be fixed to the school fence as a memorial.’
‘I’m so sorry. Oh, dear Felix.’ Her voice trailed off. ‘Such a sweet and charming boy.’
I interrupted to remind her about the photo.
‘Of course,’ she agreed. ‘Of course we will. I’ll do it myself. I’ll use last year’s school photo; I’ll blow it up on Photoshop. It’s the least we can do.’
The photo has Felix seated at a desk, smiling, his head tilted to one side. He’d chosen what to wear that day—his grey T-shirt with a monster truck roaring across the chest. From out of its exhaust came some words, ‘I’ll destroy you all!’ Mrs Sampson also added a wreath around the edge, circling Felix’s face. She’d done this to Krystal’s too, but the colour did more for Felix’s brown eyes, whereas for Krystal, who I’ve mentioned was verging on cross-eyed, it did no favours.
When the evening edition of the newspaper blew it up to front-page size, Felix’s innocent face really captured the public’s hearts, and the pile of tributes at the school gate grew even larger.
A couple of days later children from Felix’s school were still falling sick but scientists had traced the source of the virus to the carcass of grade three’s beloved classroom pet. Max was an owl and owls were birds and everyone had known for some time that birds carried certain types of influenza which could, in an unclean environment, evolve in scientific ways to infect a human or a number of humans. Max had already been dead a week when they exhumed his body from a shallow grave in the school’s front garden, displacing the paper cards and cut out owl-shaped tributes the children had made with their small and unsuspecting hands.
The media experimented with various names for the new disease, but people soon settled on the wise bird flu. The TV news carried images of birds of all descriptions, but especially owls with their large and impenetrable eyes. They followed this with footage of empty classrooms, face masks and a long zoom in on Felix’s school photograph. His tributes reached up to the eighth twist in the wire.
A day later, five more children were dead.
At school, the photographs of the children (now seven in total, each face wreathed by Mrs Sampson) were lined up on the fence over a stretch of about twelve metres. Affected families had been treated with anti-virals, but with stocks diminishing the rest of the community had to rely on good hygiene for their protection. They kept coming, though—people in face masks with flowers and cards and gifts. Newspapers commented on this touching display of national spirit, the empathy that kept people queuing with tributes. They published Felix’s photo over and over, my son was the face of the wise bird flu, something which I felt was appropriate and I knew he would, too.
Late one evening, I was sitting on a bench at the school as the line of well-wishers dwindled. I was about to leave when I spotted a figure. A round, older man. His posture had something guilty about it, but as I watched him shuffle to the fence and stand in front of Felix’s photo, I supposed he was just another sympathetic member of the public drawn here by the sadness of all this loss.
Most likely he was just another man with a need to make peace with his own state of still being alive.
I watched him bend forward and clutch an armful of Felix’s tributes. He thrust them in the direction of a smaller pile to his left.
I was immediately on the move towards him, in a sprint. Shouts were coming out of my mouth before I could even think of what to say.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, desecrating the memory of my boy?’
The man had not even let go of the tributes before I was on him.
‘What the hell?’ I screamed.
I knocked him to the ground. But instead of hitting or punching, I just held him there. I was still angry, but he was crying, really crying, and I didn’t know if this was just someone overcome with grief and not being himself, which I could relate to if it were the case.
I let him go. He crawled out from under me and sat against the fence. He looked over at Felix’s tributes and that’s when I saw his almost-crossed eyes.
‘You’re Krystal’s dad?’
He nodded. When I looked over at the paltry pile of tributes under his daughter’s photo, I really felt for him. I nodded in a slow and meaningful way, to show I understood his motivations—no matter how screwed up they were.
‘You still have to put those back,’ I said. ‘It’s not appropriate to steal tributes from my dead son. You know it.’
Krystal’s dad nodded back at me.
He turned to her tributes, now mixed with some of Felix’s. Together the two of us grieving dads worked in silence, reading cards, sorting everything back into their right places and exchanging a sad smile every now and again.
It only took about five minutes but they went really slowly.
After that, my visits to the school dropped down to once every couple of days because I’d become heavily involved in plans for a musical tribute to the children. I had Mrs Sampson checking on Felix’s tributes to regularly remove perishable items, as well as those few of a negative or disrespectful nature that had started to appear. That’s why I wasn’t aware of a pertinent event that had taken place in the absence of my attention: the tragic death of the last remaining child in Class 3A, who also happened to be their star pupil, Ramon Simons.
I found out about Ramon when I took a call from 60 Minutes. I’d agreed to a story about my boy, but made it clear I didn’t want any payment. The producer was calling to confirm that the network would make a donation to the Wise Bird Flu Research Fund instead, which had recently adopted Felix’s image as their logo. While I was on the phone, I also took time to make a suggestion I’d been mulling over. Perhaps they could include some photographs of Krystal, or even an interview with her father? The producer said of course they would love to do this, but the show was full up—‘What with your boy and the other one.’
‘The other one?’ I said, because of course I had not then heard of Ramon.
‘The kid kept a video journal—his mother has given us unrestricted access.’
‘A video journal?’
‘It’s incredible,’ the producer told me. ‘Ramon recorded his deepest feelings. Everything’s there, including, apparently, how he overcame his paralysing shyness through his friendship with Max, the owl—who, as you know, transmitted the deadly virus that would ultimately be the downfall of both Ramon and all his dreams.’
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