Nur’aishah Shafiq, Void

Void

Nur’aishah Shafiq

She’s supposed to be in class. Rebuilding Cultural Heritages. The irony is not lost on Amal as she lingers in the entrance hall of the Institute. Seemingly endless crowds stream past her, some people brushing her aside, others shoving not quite as gently—a river parting around a rock. School field trips, tour groups, scientists, businessmen, TV hosts, journalists—ticket sales haven’t yet stopped skyrocketing, despite the Institute’s opening almost a year ago now. Why would they? Nothing beats the glamour of a place promising the return of a bygone age. Even if that bygone age is just a few years dead and the Institute’s promise a hollow thing.

It’s been a while since Amal last skived, back when the stifling warmth of this many people in one place stoked a zeal in her until she nearly burned. She hesitates, but walks inside anyway, bathed immediately in the blue glow of chlorinated water behind walls of plexiglass. The contents of her stomach start churning uncomfortably.

Amal wanders, ghostlike. Halls lead into antechambers down into viewing rooms up into smaller halls, bigger halls, more chambers. An infinite labyrinth of aquariums stretching from wall to ceiling, display boxes for the ocean’s wealth, from the coastal shorelines to the high seas. Fluorescent jellyfish adorn whole showcases, next to a tank of sharks bearing scars not from each other. An entire gallery recreates the lost corals of the world—the Great Barrier Reef, Coral Triangle, Fiji’s Rainbow. Only one hall is devoid of aquariums, its walls bearing instead plaque upon plaque of extinct marine fauna—dugongs and albatrosses and polar bears and zooplankton and, and, and. This hall is entirely empty.

Amal hovers before one exhibit, becoming ice as she stares at the paraphernalia from Operation Burning Water. Light glints off sharpened metal and serrated edges. Teenage Amal, warrior Amal would have driven her fist through the glass and proceeded to splatter mud and oil and fake blood all over the mess. The press would’ve eaten it up. That girl is gone though. Amal walks away from the display, leaving the glass intact.

The crowd’s murmur grows when she reaches a narrow corridor surrounded by ghostly dolphins, all limp tails and blanched skin. An Institute tour group is ahead, gathering at the entrance of yet another chamber.

“Our finest specimen, ladies and gentlemen,” someone is announcing. “The pride of our institution! You won’t find anything else like it anywhere else in the country.”

The air is electric with anticipation. Amal shoulders her way through, the urgency pulling her forward a resurrected thing. Some lost part of her awakens, the heart of sun and sky that she thought drowned with the land, a pinprick of warmth amidst the gaping coldness inside of her.

She stumbles to the front of the crowd, breath catching somewhere between her lungs and throat. The tour guide continues her spiel, but Amal registers only fragments. Her gaze is fixed on the aquarium, on the other it contains.

Boxed by a paltry enclosure, 10 by 10 feet, she slumps against a side wall, a hulking meaty crescent twice the length and width of a grown man, squished against the front viewing panel. A shroud of diaphanous dark hair swirls languidly around her body, billowing through the water to splay against the plexiglass.

“… native to the Polynesian Triangle, but all our specimens were collected from the depths of the Pacific … many weren’t salvageable, and some that were didn’t survive the extraction process …”

She is utterly still. Eyes closed. Her face the only part of her untouched. The rest of her body is home to blatant violence, visible through the ebb and flow of her hair.

“… when land-water border skirmishes escalated into open war … the coastal tribes rallied with the deepwater tribes … tried to hoard the fuel sources … the operation lasted 100 days … exterminate the threat …”

Ridges chart a course of abuse across her flesh. A patchwork of scars criss-crosses her midriff, etching deep in the shadow of a net, webbing arms atrophying in the chemically treated water. Worse still are the gouges scattered between these longer marks, amid the missing scales of her tail. So visceral are these poorly healed wounds that Amal need not have stopped at the earlier exhibit to imagine the giant hooks that had found purchase within the other, latching onto sinew and muscle, tearing through her body as lines snapped taut with a ship’s engine.

“our experts here are dedicated to rescue and rehabilitation … awardwinning center for conservation research—”

The tour guide’s performance is effectively halted when Amal falls to her knees and empties the contents of her stomach all over the floor. She dry-heaves when there is nothing left within her, feeling arms taking her by the shoulder, stroking her hair back in an attempt at comfort. More disembodied voices filter through but Amal looks up to the aquarium, hugging herself desperately, face pained, pleading.

She’s dying. Even so, the mermaid is beautiful, but of a ruinous kind that stirs both awe and fear. Like an ocean in the throes of a storm. Her eyes are open now. Her face tilted to the sea of humans beyond the cage, to the young woman kneeling before her. Do you see me? Amal wants to cry. I’m not like them, believe me. In answer, the mermaid looks away, unforgiving.

Amal returns the next day. She’s missing class again—Post-Anthropocene Poetics this time—another echo of the countless Fridays she had skived in her adolescence. The crowd has thinned, and she notices the row of empty tanks on either side of the one occupied. There’s no need to even speculate as to the whereabouts of their residents.

The mermaid has not moved since yesterday. Perhaps she has not stirred at all since whoever it was put her here. In the recent past, this hall would’ve struggled to contain all the youth and labor activists and indigenous people who’d come to occupy for the right of all life to life. But the old movements are dead, and Amal is the only one sitting in today, a meager remnant of that hopeful time. She feels silly coming here, but all such intentions seem that way these days.

Amal is now a foot away from the glass, far closer than any visitor would venture, who all keep their distance despite an abject fascination towards the other being. This close, the mermaid towers over her. This close, one cannot escape the scars. A familiar nausea begins its crawl up Amal’s throat, but she swallows it.

“I wish it were me in there.”

The confession is quiet. Barely audible even to someone on the same side of the glass. Amal reaches out a hand, pressing her palm against the tank wall. Beyond, an emaciated abdomen stiffens, as if registering the touch. Amal withdraws her hand slightly but raises her palms before her in a symbol of placation, of peace.

“I’m sorry we hurt you,” she continues in a half-whisper, but sighs right after; the words are empty even to her.

She’s tired of emptiness, of the nothingness everywhere. In the oceans, in the ranches and flat fields that have replaced the forests. In the abandoned homes of those who flee flood and famine. In the eyes of her peers who had raged through the streets like a rising tide when the air was still charged with possibility. In herself, when before there was only a devotion to her home and all other islands of the world. She’s tired. Of the years sitting on her ass, screaming words, carrying signs, only to watch the absence spread, until there’s nothing left of the beautiful wild places in the world. Until there’s nothing left of the beautiful wild places in her heart.

The mermaid does not move. Amal sighs, stands and leaves.

But returns the next day. And the next, and the day after that. Every day, Amal resumes her seat on this side of the glass. Sometimes speaking her quiet confessions, sometimes staying silent. Often with her palm pressed gently against the aquarium.

On the days of confession, she remembers. The taste of almost-victory years ago, when the streets had swelled with millions demanding change. The defeat that followed, profit trumping all else, launched a thousand

ships on a crusade for the last of black gold, that most coveted treasure. Most of all, she remembers home. Running through the waves beneath a sky that was yet to be blackened, splashing through water still untainted by blood.

On the days of silence, she mourns.

On one such day—the twenty-seventh? twenty-ninth?—a hand on her shoulder jolts Amal from the haze of her thoughts. She looks up into the blurry face of a little girl who stares down at her unabashedly.

“Why are you crying?”

Amal blinks. The barefaced innocence in the question, the girl’s wide luminous eyes, has Amal haphazardly swiping at her face but she stops herself midway. Turning back, she sees the mermaid still lying there, as motionless as the first time Amal had seen her, but not completely without change. With each new day, her skin grows ever translucent, drawing tighter against the edges of her bones. The luster of her dark hair has paled, the corrupting flesh around her wounds spread. The least Amal can do is let the tears fall, unhidden and unashamed.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?”

The girl smiles. “Emma.”

“Well, Emma,” Amal starts carefully, face still shining. “I’m crying because I’m sad. About a lot of things, but mostly I’m sad that she’s in there.” At this, the girl’s gaze lifts up to the mermaid, and she chews her lip thoughtfully. After a moment, her eyes brighten with revelation.

“Maybe if you leave then you won’t be sad. If you leave, you won’t be reminded that she’s here. Then you don’t have to cry anymore.”

Amal’s eyes widen. “I don’t think that’s gonna work, sweetheart.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t leave her.”

Emma’s frown deepens. Amal sighs, struggling to gather the words that’ll make the other understand. “She’s all alone here. No one really comes to see her. They look at her once, see something we conquered so we could keep building our cities and driving our cars, and then they leave. I won’t though.” Amal isn’t sure how much sense she’s making to the child, so she concludes simply. “Because she’s a living being too. And no living being deserves this. Even if she isn’t like us.”

“Is she going to die, Miss?”

“Yes,” Amal whispers. “But I won’t let her die alone.”

Emma says nothing, and Amal goes back to her silent vigil. The mermaid is ethereal in her stillness, more wraith than flesh. Amal feels a sudden urge to find an emergency escape hammer and shatter the glass that separates them so the other need not die in a cage. But to die out of the water seems a crueler fate. So she places her palm against the aquarium, over the mermaid’s shoulder, and hangs her head, clenching her eyes against the pain. A soft nudge on her hand makes Amal look up. Emma’s palm is pressed against the glass too.

They stay like that for a while, two humans watching over the dying mermaid, reaching out the only way they know how.

“Can you help me find my mommy?” the girl asks abruptly.

Amal huffs a tired laugh. She stands and takes Emma’s hand. “The poor woman must be worried sick. Let’s head back.”

As they leave, Amal glances one last time towards the aquarium. A webbed palm is pressed against the glass, hovering against the memory of human touch.

Amal returns the next day, feeling warmer than she has in a long time. But when she arrives, she’s met only with an empty hall bearing only a row of empty tanks.