Before We Go Extinct

by Karen Rivers

  Is it okay to say that?

  No, probably not.

  Too soon.

  It will be too soon forever.

  Things that will never be funny again:

  1. All the stuff we used to do together.

  2. Death.

  Anyway, skip over that. Pretend I didn’t say that. Hey, I could just hit Delete. And maybe I will.

  I could start over like this:

  Dear Daff,

  The trees are so old, they make you catch your breath. You can feel them growing. You know they are bored because you and your problems are so tiny and they’ve been here forever already, pulling in the carbon dioxide from generations of lungs, for hundreds of years. They’ve already seen everything there is to see and there is nothing new about you. Some are so big that you could stand ten people around them in a circle, holding hands, and they wouldn’t be able to reach all the way around. They go up to the clouds like steeples and the clouds seem to stick and hang on them, like they are thinking about settling in for a landing.

  I’ve got to be honest, they make me think about God. Or the gods. Or whatever. No? Maybe? Yes?

  Probably no.

  It is so quiet that I can hear myself breathing. Remember that thing we read about how they put people in a completely sound-free room and most people were clawing to get out within minutes?

  Those people would hate it here. They would be splashing out into the sea, swimming for the safety of the city.

  It also feels like a place where a cougar might surprise you with a mitt-sized paw to the jugular. The dogs stopped all at once, growling, while I was walking just now. Then they started barking into the shrubbery that grows along the trail. True fact: I was scared to death. But it’s not like the cougar would have stood a chance against these guys. Dad has given them awful names: Willy and Sunny and Buddy. Seriously. Don’t tell my dad, but I’ve renamed them: Maximus and Apollo and Zeus. Gods of the Forest. Well, really of the snow, but they seem to like it here fine. Somehow when they aren’t inside the cabin, I’m not afraid of them, not even a bit. They fill up this space the way they should.

  But you don’t like dogs that are too big for purses, right? You know, I just remembered that Daisy was a gift from you. Why did you give Daisy to him? You had to know his dad would hate her. I remember asking you and I remember you said, “It’s a special occasion, right?” And he said, “Yeah, it is.” And you said, “Tell him.” And he wouldn’t tell. I guess I know that you hooked up with him. I guess that’s what it was about. And I’m as stupidly jealous now as I was then, even though I know there was nothing after. Maybe. Or was there? I don’t know, Daff. You always left your hand on his arm a little too long after trying to get his attention. Yeah, I’m sure you’re hitting Delete now. I would, too. I don’t know why and I don’t know why and I don’t know why this is how I feel, but I do. I feel like you’re my person, Daff. That’s what I feel. But now you aren’t, because you can’t be, because it killed him.

  Maybe.

  If it wasn’t an accident, I mean.

  If.

  If.

  If.

  What if it wasn’t an accident, Daff?

  I think it wasn’t.

  I think it was.

  Eff this. I’m hitting Delete.

  I’m not hitting Delete.

  I don’t know what the right thing is to do anymore. I am so lost, Daff. These trees are so tall, reaching up higher than anything and I could climb one to the top. And then what? It would be an accident or it wouldn’t.

  I don’t want to talk about The King.

  I can’t write to you (even without sending it, which I won’t) without him being right here, beside me, giving me that look that’s half laughing with me and half laughing at me and I can’t do this. I can’t do anything. I’m not in Brooklyn eating a bag of frozen shrimp from downstairs on the front stoop, waiting for you and The King to come and get me, waiting for something to start.

  I’m here, I’m nowhere. It’s like being someplace that doesn’t exist, which is good, because then I don’t have to exist either. I don’t have to be Sharkboy, the kid whose kinda-famous best friend died when he fell off a building owned by his über famous dad. I can just be. No one even has to know my name.

  Not that there is anyone here to ask.

  You know, I don’t even know what this island is called. I only know that it’s an island. One with towering fir trees, crashing surf, and a couple hundred pounds of dog tearing around me in the six-foot-high salal, flushing out a deer who ricochets away over fallen trees and vanishes up a fern-drenched bluff, performing the best freaking parkour I’ve ever seen.

  Forests are messy. I never realized how messy until now.

  Kind of like life. You think it’s going to be one way, all clearly drawn, and then you get close to it. And it’s just a pile of dead branches, leaves still falling down on you, bark that’s been half eaten away by rot and animals. Dirt. Tree roots in inconvenient places, bulging like some kind of terrible “condition” through the ground.

  If this could be more surreal, I’m not sure how.

  I’ll talk to you soon. Catch ya on the flip side.

  Peace out.

  I miss you. I hate you. I love you. I blame you. Etc.

  Love,

  JC

  19

  I walk in the woods a lot.

  My phone makes a warm square on my leg through the thin material of my shorts, heating up while it searches for enough signal to not send the stuff in my drafts folder that I’ll never send. The unsendable. The marine air tints everything with a cool chill that takes the heat out of the afternoon. The forest path is narrow and underused. I have to watch my feet so I don’t trip on roots or fallen branches. Once, I step off the path altogether to go around a rotting tree and figure out pretty quickly what stinging nettle looks like. My legs burn and the skin tightens and itches all at once. The trail winds along the shoreline. Sandstone beaches pocked with tide pools on my right. Forests dark and heavy on my left, interspersed with sunny meadows that are either mossy or grassy, the grass itself having turned yellow. It’s the kind of pretty that makes you take photos and wish you had someone to send them to. The light is freaking golden. Mom would go crazy for this light. She has a thing about light. Look at it, she’d say. Just look at it. I don’t know how many times I’ve found myself in the kitchen, staring at the way the sunlight pools on the floor and makes a tiny rainbow because of the bevel in the glass, rolling my eyes at her, shrugging, whatever.

  I miss Mom. I’d never say that. But.

  I pull my phone out of my pocket and take a picture. I send it to her.

  Dear Son, What pretty light! she texts back right away. Gorgeous light. I love. Am in Amsterdam. It was rainy today. Now it’s moony. Our hero stepped out with a waitress from the restaurant. Aren’t twenty-five choices enough? These people! Crazy town. xooox Missing you.

  Mom has always treated text messaging like it’s a letter. She doesn’t really quite get how it’s just a conversation. It doesn’t have to work that way, with an opening and closing. But that’s how she is.

  OK, I type back. Bye Mom.

  I walk and walk and try not to think of anything, which means I think of everything, which means by the time the path pops out in a sheltered bay—the “good beach,” I guess—I’m tired from thinking too much.

  Pink mist. Chewed gum all over the concrete. Cigarette butts and puke. The near-silent click of journalists’ cameras. Daff’s dress. Her lips. Daff, Daff, Daff.

  I look at my sneakered feet on the hard-packed dirt path. I have blisters. Stupid shoes are too small. A butterfly flies by in a crooked flight path as if to say, Seriously, man, get over yourself. There are a lot of different birds calling. The waves gently push in and out on the beach. In the far distance, a boat’s engine choppily echoes across the sea. The smell of the sea makes me feel like nothing matters, at the same time reminding me that everything does, and it’s so much. It’s too muc
h. I just want it all to stop.

  And then I’m crying again. Awesome.

  I sit.

  I stop.

  I guess I don’t move for a long time.

  My phone buzzes. Daff. Je peux parler le francaise aussi, jrkface. Appelez-moi, svp.

  Jrkface n’est pas en français, I reply. I hesitate before hitting Send. Too funny? Too friendly? I think about her lips. I think about how she said, “He died for love. It was, like, poetry. But bad poetry. The kind that breaks your heart for the wrong reason.” I think about her red dress. I press Delete instead.

  Je regrette tout, I want to say, but don’t.

  Eventually, the tide rolls out and a sandbar rises up like a huge circular island that stretches beyond the driftwood-lined shore. The air is the perfect temperature. It’s a perfect day. A few dinghies are tied to long lines, resting on their hulls on the driftwood like beached whales. The mooring buoys bobbing in the calm water are all empty, the handful of cabins that stare down into the bay stare vacantly at the water, nobody there.

  I go down to the warm stone island that rises in the center of the bay like a spine. The rock is warm. A bird squawks loud and low and nearby, skimming the surface of the still, green water. I sit and take my shoes off and squish my blisters, which hurts and feels right.

  I went to the Hamptons with The King once and he dared me to dive into the curling surf, which I did. Well, obviously. The waves pushed me down so hard that my belly was scraped raw on the sand below. Then I did it again. And again. By the end of that week, I was a pro, diving through the waves like a freaking dolphin while The King sat on the shore and shouted about rip currents, like a girl.

  He never swam. He said black people weren’t made to go in the water. He said, “Watch the Olympics, man. It’s a white dude’s sport. We have heavier bones.” I tried to drag him in and he panicked, pushed me hard, ran from me, staggering in the sand to get away.

  I didn’t try again. You had to know with him how far he was willing to go. He’d do anything crazy that was high up or otherwise stupid—bungee jump off a crane in a parking lot; rappel down the side of one of his dad’s stupid buildings for charity; tightrope walk anywhere, anytime—but he wouldn’t ever ever ever swim.

  You have to respect that about a person once you know what their fear is. Once you know why they are afraid.

  The sea here is different from in the east, that’s for sure. There is no surf, only a few ripples rolling in and out of a line of mucky shoreline detritus, seaweed and wood chips and a couple of plastic bottles and dead crabs. Out beyond the empty mooring buoys that speckle the water, there’s a raft with a lone deck chair angled to the sun. After a lifetime in Brooklyn, the abandoned feel of this place is both a huge relief and also terrifying in a horror-movie-setting kind of way. I mean, really, sincerely, no one would hear you scream.

  It’s too quiet.

  Too pretty.

  Too nature-y.

  Too much like something that is nothing to do with me.

  A seagull squawks and I jump about a mile. One of the dogs barks at me, staring at me like I have something to give him.

  Nothing, I tell him in my head. He seems to get that. “Nothing,” I try out loud. Because why not? No one is listening and there aren’t rules to this. But then my throat spasms painfully and I start to cough. Choking. I’m choking. It takes me a minute to catch my breath, to swallow smoothly. To breathe.

  It’s the first word I’ve spoken in months. “NOTHING,” I yell, because I can. My voice is loud and unfamiliar and bounces off the glassy surface of the water, ricocheting around the bay.

  I’m starting to see why people went crazy in that quiet room. The dead silence that follows is worse than before. More dead. Deader. The deadest? What’s worse than dead?

  Dead is following me around like the dogs, now flopped out in the shade on wet sand. The heavy wet breath of dead won’t leave me alone. I strip off my T-shirt and wrap my phone up in it and rest it on the rock, then pick my way over the lumpy, painful pebbles to where the sand smooths out. It sinks under my feet, occasionally squirting water at me through the round holes made by clams. The water is colder than I expected, and up close it isn’t as clear as I would have thought. Even beyond the tide line, wood chips and seaweed and jellyfish clutter up the surface. The corpse of a crab. It smells of salt and decay. Weeds growing up from the bottom brush by my legs. I try to ignore them and what they might be hiding. I wade deeper. Beside me, a huge living jellyfish with a red center slides by on the current, gelatinous as a raw egg. I dive in anyway, the water closing over my head, my ears full of the rush of cold silence. I surface, spluttering, and then start to swim. My lips taste salty and strange. It’s different from swimming at the Y, weirder, the water is thicker and lighter and I’m buoyed up by it.

  I swim past the end of the bay, then farther still. It feels like I’m breaking some kind of rule, like someone is going to start shouting at me to stop. To go back. It feels dangerous and also like being free. I could swim forever. I could swim to Vancouver. I mean, I’d drown first, but I could try.

  I could drown. What would Daff say at my funeral?

  Instead, I keep stroking until I get to a sandstone reef that rises like its own private island about a hundred feet from shore. A group of fat seals notice me and then slide, one by one, resentfully, into the sea, bobbing a few feet away. Staring. Pulling myself up onto the rock is harder than you’d think, it’s nothing like the side of a pool, all clean lines and straight edges. It’s slippery and sharp and uneven. I cut my foot on a barnacle. The blood beads up like it’s nothing to do with me. Not my blood. I walk up onto the crest of the stone, leaving a trail of red marks on the bright green seaweed that carpets the sandstone like fur on a seal’s back. Tiny hermit crabs stab my bare feet. I sweep some away and sit down. The sandstone is pocked with holes that are full of water, finger-sized. It’s hard not to stick your fingers into them. The water cupped inside them is hot from the sun.

  From here, I can see even more cabins nestled in the woods that at first you wouldn’t know were there, camouflaged by the trees as they are. One of them is beautiful, it looks like someone’s dream home. The next one is half-built, building materials rotting in piles leaning up against a falling frame. The next is painted the same green-brown of the trees, like its owner was hiding it on purpose.

  Everything is still, like it’s holding its collective breath.

  I sit on the reef, my feet in a warm pool of salt water, which smells terrible. There are huge piles of bird crap and who-knows-what-else everywhere. Time passes and the water starts rising and the island that I’m on starts shrinking. Tide. The skin on my back feels tight and burned by an afternoon in the sun. I look into the green water, at the brown seaweed waving there, and I close my eyes and dive back in, twisting and turning exactly like the seals had, getting only a bit tangled in that kelp, which is slippery and strong in my grasp.

  The water is too cold here for most species of shark, but I know there are mud sharks down there, somewhere underneath me. Dogfish. I try to think what else would be here, in these waters. Maybe threshers. Six gills and seven gills. Angel sharks. Blue sharks, which are everywhere.

  Mako. Hammerheads. Great Whites. It’s really unlikely—they like the open ocean better—but it’s possible.

  I plunge down as deep as I can and open my eyes. A forest of kelp stems moves gently back and forth. A rusty gas can is stuck between two rocks. Even here, away from everything, we dump our crap into the water. It’s pathetic, that’s what it is. We act like the ocean doesn’t matter, when really, it’s the only thing that does. I stay down for as long as I can, until my eyes feel like they are going to bulge out of my head and I have to breathe.

  Sometimes, you have to come up for air.

  20

  I have to swim hard against the current to get back to the bay where I left my clothes. The tide has completely covered the sand with knee-deep icy water from the strait. At first, I
think I’ve swum back to the wrong place, but then I see the dogs lolling and panting right where I left them, the water lapping ever closer to their resting spot. I’m shivering, my hands and feet blue-tinged. I need to lie on the rock for a while and warm up. It’s not until I’m awkwardly pulling myself up on the shrinking rock that I realize I am not alone.

  Sitting next to my shirt, her back to me, is a girl. She has earbuds in and she is bent over a book. The sun glances off her bare shoulders, which are already coppery brown.

  I clear my throat, but she doesn’t move at first. I take another step and she turns around. Stares.

  “Boo,” she says. She grins wide, showing a mouthful of white teeth, held in place by a thin silvery line of braces. Her white-blond hair doesn’t go with her brown skin. She looks like a negative, a reverse of a normal person. Her face is sprayed with dark freckles. She pulls out one earbud and wrinkles her nose. “Your stuff is in my spot. But I guess I’ll forgive you.” She shrugs. “I moved your shirt. I’m glad I didn’t drop your phone. How was I supposed to know it was in there, anyway? Tide’s coming up, so it doesn’t matter where you sit. We’ll both lose our island in a while.”

  I know she’s waiting for me to say something so I try, I really do, but no words come out, so I shrug while what comes out of my mouth sounds like growling. I cough.

  “You okay?” she says. “Cat got your tongue? That’s what my gran would have said. That’s her place.” She points up into the woods where I can see nothing but trees. “Ours now though,” she adds. “She’s dead. Gran, that is. She died. Yeah, Gran died. And anyway, she left it to us. So now it’s mine and my mum’s and my little brother’s. My dad is … Anyway, my brother, Charlie, he’s napping. He has to nap. He’s super hyper and then he crashes. And Mum’s at your—” She stops herself, tapping her lips like she physically is going to stop the words from coming out. “Ohhhhhhkay,” she says. “Not gonna lie. My mum’s got a thing with your dad, if you know what I mean. They are pretty into each other. It’s cute, you know? If you can avoid looking at their tongues when they kiss. Seriously. So. Anyway. Yeah.” She looks at me again, hard, like she can see through me. Her eyes are greenish, flecked with gold, or maybe that’s only the reflection of the sinking sun. “I already know all about you and your dead friend and not talking and shark stuff so I’m not going to pretend that I don’t know because that would be … sort of a lie, I guess. Should I have said that? No, probably not, huh. Well, too bad. I’m just honest. I’m an honest person.”