>[01]
I don’t know what I expected Bon’s death to sound like. I’d heard floods before. Collapsing metal and radio static were constants when we turned our campus into a refuge. But the water mixed it all up again and made it strange. Made sewage and bones and rebar in new shapes none of them were designed for. I can’t imagine it looked better in person, beneath flare smoke and pulsing emergency lights. I held Mads until we stopped shaking and waited for Kim to turn off the display.
When I finally leave my room, I head for the pool. The solid black wall becomes a mess of letters, hearts, and dates as I approach the stairwell. Bon’s name is somewhere among the thousands we’ve painted. Although I read some every time I visit, the ones I’d know are a few dozen feet above my head. Some decades ago, my mom and her friends blocked a similar stairwell further down campus, lying still for hours as they read another list of names to passing students.
She told me how cold the floor felt through her damp hair, how blurry the crowd gathering in her periphery seemed, how similar it felt to lying in bed as the world rediscovered a politics-of-death. She told me how cold it stayed until a sophomore and his friends pressed into her shoulder, asking to lie down as well, whispering something kind before joining the steady chant. I step over them tenderly as I head downstairs.
Kim is atop the bleachers. Warm orange light ripples across the wall and over her face. She doesn’t speak for what feels like an eternity, so we just sit as the candles flicker out. When she finally exhales, her rusting throatbox quivers with a tone I’ve never heard before.
“Bon could never leave a place like this, so I’m wondering if I killed them the moment I asked to start that library together. And I want to remember and feel about them and to talk about that feeling, but I keep tripping over myself. Over this anger. And I know it doesn’t truly have anything to say about Bon. It’s just me. It’s the most selfish kind of grief.
I close my eyes expecting them and all I see is red. Red skies and sirens and stolen tomorrows. Black oil drowning the bay we came from. Drones torn from scars in the earth, screeching through schools and hospitals and aid trucks for the pink flesh hiding in them.
And I knew it was coming, I’ve always known. How could it have been any different? Raise a generation of Kassandras with the promise that the world will end and the threat of hunger should they do anything about it. I’ve gotten so used to hearing about people for the first time when learning that they’ve died. I’ve grieved thousands in abstract and the dozens I did know are becoming blurrier as time passes. But Bon just made them real to me again. He made them real in a way that makes the theft undeniable.
I lost so much sleep in college learning how to crunch numbers that we no longer collect, to plead mercy from legislators who no longer look, to barely afford a room on an island that no longer exists. Most of my peers just made extraction marginally more efficient, and our employers who cared were stuck cleaning up their mess. All while the water kept rising and the bombs kept falling. So I don’t know if these tools were ever going to do what I wanted them to back then. I don’t know if they ever will.”
I pull her closer.
Kim is dying in her own way. She’s not as humble or graceful as Mads, and she lacks the finality of a diagnosis. Kim is angry, and through her bangs, I can see someone new ripping through a husk once driven by fear. She sobs into my shoulder and I last about a second before I start sobbing too. This time is different. From now on, we will die as many times as we need to, as we are forced to, but we will choose the parts we kill.