Before We Go Extinct

by Karen Rivers

  Or maybe someone murdered her for her fins, leaving her body to sink slowly to the ocean floor. Leaving this baby to wonder what happened. To find his own way.

  He found his way to dead.

  I stood beside him in knee-deep water while the fisheries man explained everything and nothing. Darcy came down for a bit and listened and then she prayed on the rock, her back to us, kneeling to the sun. If I’d had my phone, that would have been the best Instagram shot of the year. The way the sun shone down, like it was shining a spotlight on her. I don’t know about praying, but I know what’s beautiful. So does Dad, I guess. He proposed.

  She said, “Yes.” I don’t know when it happened and Dad isn’t talking, he’s tight-lipped but smiling, and I get it, I do. But I’m still sad because, Mom. And because, everything.

  The shark wasn’t really that big, maybe nine feet from nose to tail. He looked so huge in the water. He looked like everything I’ve ever believed in and couldn’t save.

  I took a tooth. It wasn’t easy. I had to wait until the fisheries guy was busy in his boat, organizing other fisheries guys to prepare nets to haul the shark away. I pried the tooth out of his mouth with Kelby’s pocketknife. It was like trying to pull a table leg off a table, it was stuck so firm. I cut my finger really deeply. It started to bleed in a way that would have been scary a few months ago but now didn’t mean anything. My finger. My blood. The tinny taste of it in my mouth.

  “Sorry,” I whispered, and that sorry stretched out so far between me and the shark that the invisible thread stretched to infinity and to heaven and to wherever the spirit of stuff goes when it dies because it has to go somewhere, and I think it got all the way to The King, that’s how far it went. I cried, now waist deep in the rising tide, and the corpse of the shark was tethered to the fisheries boat, to be dragged somewhere for scientists to study and destroy and take pictures of for the local news.

  48

  Back at the cabin, I opened the e-mails from Daff, one by one.

  It took me a while to read through them all, but then I got to the one with the attachment.

  I got to the one with the letter from The King.

  I got to the thing I never wanted to see but now I couldn’t help it. There was nothing I could do to protect myself from it anymore. There was nothing I wanted to do.

  I opened it.

  I read it.

  Finally, I went up to the loft and packed my stuff. I loaded it into the boat and I waited for Dad to be ready to take me in. I’m not good at goodbyes, that’s the thing. I’m just not. He was pretty quiet. I mean, there wasn’t much to say.

  At the airport, when he hugged me, I didn’t even flinch. I hugged him back.

  “I really liked the book, Dad,” I said. “Maybe you should put a shark in it.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Think I will, kid.”

  And that was it. I guess you were probably expecting more, but it was just another chapter that ended differently from how I would have thought.

  It just stopped.

  Dad waved and got into his stupid purple car, which choked and spluttered but finally started, calling like a mateless whale into the evening light.

  I walked into the airport and got ready to go home, the shark’s tooth in my pocket, pressing sharply against the summer-tanned flesh of my thigh.

  49

  Dude,

  I don’t know how to write a suicide note. I Googled it. Which made me even more sure that I wanted to kill myself. Because seriously, you can Google suicide notes. You can Google how to write a suicide note. What is the point in any one life when any answer you can possibly seek can be found on Google? I found this poem, which is apparently a famous suicide poem. Maybe you should start by reading this poem that I didn’t write. I didn’t write any poems. So already this guy’s life, I guess, was worth more than mine:

  Delicate line between heaven and earth …

  The calm of the ages,

  all the world’s worth.

  Such minuscule measure,

  while we think it so grand …

  Just five specks of smallness,

  This soft quiet land.

  So frail and so fleeting,

  in the end you will see

  Simple dreams were Horatio’s philosophy.

  For all the truth,

  all creation,

  all secrets of yore

  Can be told in an instant,

  by then they’re no more.

  Ah, The Unexplainable

  All worries unsettled,

  heartache unresolved …

  All questions unanswered,

  with death, shall be solved.

  We already teeter,

  this sheer cliff so high.

  When we fall to corruption,

  insecurities die.

  To end is to start;

  to surrender is to know.

  Despair and depression,

  together they grow.

  Hope shall meet hopeless

  when there’s nowhere to go.

  Is that beautiful? I thought it was when I found it on Wikipedia, but now I don’t know. Maybe I don’t know what beauty is anymore. What is it? Some freaking flower? The way someone looks? Light? I don’t remember. I can’t find it. There’s no beauty here for me, you know? When I hold it up and inspect it, that dumb poem looks kind of thin on the ground, if you know what I mean. Crappy, overworked. But that last bit: hope shall meet hopeless when there’s nowhere to go. That’s the truth.

  The only poem I ever liked is that one we rapped for Mr. D. Remember that one? I can’t remember the whole thing, but I remember the last part, my part:

  we’re anything brighter than even the sun

  (we’re everything greater

  than books

  might mean)

  we’re everyanything more than believe

  (with a spin

  leap

  alive we’re alive)

  we’re wonderful one times one

  Sharky, we were so fucking bright, like the sun. I don’t want you to think …

  I don’t know. You, me, and Daff. We were everything. But you know what? It would have ended. We would have grown up. Everything was about to change. You and Daff were gonna be You and Daff. And I was gonna just be me.

  But that’s not the reason. It’s one of the reasons.

  When people ask you why, you can say: because reasons.

  I was scared all the time. I was so freaking scared. Reasons.

  Here’s some other stuff that I Googled:

  1. How to tell your best friend that you’re gay.

  2. How to not be your father.

  Then I realized, for real, that I’d rather die than do it. Not telling you. I could have told you. I should have. I don’t know why I had to. I could have told you that I was in love with you. It would have been easy. So easy. I thought telling my dad was the hardest thing, but it wasn’t. He already hated me because I was exactly like him. You get that, right? I was exactly like him. I was not going to be that man. No way. No how. But I was. It was already too late. All that genetic material of him knitting together to make me, him, me, him, make me into him.

  That’s who I’m never going to be, buddy. I’m not. I couldn’t stop it though. I was already such a jerk. I already hated myself. I wasn’t good enough for you, even if you were gay, too, which I know you weren’t. And I got that. I was okay with that. You’re an amazing guy though. God, I could have loved you. But you would have hated me eventually, because I would have become him. He was bigger than all of us. He was the biggest thing. The every everything. You know?

  This letter needs editing but fuck that. I don’t have to make it good. It’s a suicide note, not a paper that’s gonna get me into college, like I couldn’t have had my pick of schools anyway, because Dad.

  Death just sounds a lot more interesting to me than reenacting his effing script. You and I both know how it would have gone. I would have slowly become less likable but wou
ld have gotten more friends. I would have had more money and less taste. I would have stopped caring about the stuff that matters, stuff that you and Daff care about, like the goddamn rain forest. I already don’t care about it. I know on some level that I should, but I don’t. I’m already him.

  I am him.

  My dad is the only person in the world who I ever hated, except for me.

  I was always jealous that you had a mom. I think if I had a mom, I wouldn’t be like this.

  I’m really freaking broken, Sharkboy. I don’t think you had any idea. Have any idea. Will ever have any idea.

  You know when I first met you and I said you were going to be a hero, because you’re the underdog? I was lying. Not about the heroism, but about the underdog. You’re no underdog, man. You were born to be the hero, all six feet tall and noble and good and all that other crap that at first I thought couldn’t be for real, but is. It is real. You are already a hero, you idiot. There is nothing heroic about being rich, it’s just something that happens when you don’t give one single damn about anyone but yourself. But there’s something heroic about you and your stupid sharks and the way you just go ahead and cry in front of everyone in the world because one day you might suffocate when the plankton runs out. You are insane, kid. I would have traded places with you in an instant.

  Hear me out:

  This is your future: you are going to change things. You’re going to be the goddamn Time magazine Man of the Year one day. You’re Harry freakin’ Potter, but you have no idea that you are. You think you’re just a Muggle. (And yeah, I know you didn’t get my thing with that book, but what can I say? It was a good book. A good series of books. You might not get this, but a guy like me is going to wish he was a kid who could go to wizarding school, who is living in the wrong family by mistake, but there’s something better out there. That’s what I wanted: Hogwarts. Which isn’t real. Everything I wanted wasn’t real. Do you get it?)

  You’re a wizard.

  This is my future: I am going to crash and burn. I am going to be tabloid fodder. I am going to act out the same story of rich-kid-gone-wrong that every rich-kid-gone-wrong has acted out before me and I’m so goddamn bored of that story already and I can’t do it. I can’t do it. Sharky, listen, I’m already blowing congressmen in the bushes. I am already so far down I can’t see the surface from down here and I’ve told you a million times, black guys don’t swim.

  I can’t swim.

  I don’t even want to swim.

  I’m not going to do it. I don’t want to do it. I’m sorry but I’m not cut out to do it. Everything is a choice.

  I’m choosing.

  Now I’m going to steal from someone else’s letter. It’s not plagiarism. Or it is, but who is going to give one single damn? Is someone going to sue me in the grave? Well, probably. But screw it.

  Hopefully, they’ll sue my old man.

  Hopefully, he’ll lose.

  Here it is:

  If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.

  That’s the truth, JC. That’s what I would have written if Virginia Woolf didn’t think of it first. You are good.

  This last jump, this final parkour party trick, this is going to be everything. This is going to be the real me. Finally. Out there. At last.

  You won’t believe me. I know you won’t believe me. Not when you see what you’ll see and goddamnit, I don’t want you to but I’m also as selfish as anything and I do want you to because I don’t want to go alone and I love you. I love you. I love you and I always will.

  And not in a gay way.

  Okay, sort of in a gay way.

  What you need to know is that what I’m going to be feeling is free. I’m going to be so freaking happy on that ride. It’s going to be the fall of a lifetime.

  The ride is the thing.

  I’m sorry, Great White Hero. You don’t believe me, but it’s true.

  I’m sick. Sick of all the bullshit. Sick of pretending. Sick of the world. Sick of being broken. I’m taking all the broken things and making them into a parachute, just like Mr. B. taught us.

  Except parachutes are for sissies.

  I’ve got to go.

  Love,

  Marvin (“The King”) Johnston III

  50

  The French word for “the end” is fin.

  * * *

  This feels just about as important as anything else as you make your way down the crowded sidewalk toward the iron gates of the Academy of Rich Gods and Goddesses of the World on the first day of your senior year. Your shoes look too new and shiny and they hurt your heels. Your feet would like to reject the shoes. You’d like to drop your backpack and make your way up and over that fence, there, beyond that brownstone to that alley to that garden to maybe a park where you could find a tree and climb it, your back arching against the pain where the branch rests. You’d flip over and back, free-falling for just a second before being jarred back to earth by the way your feet hurt when you land. You’d take off your tie and start to run. Maybe you’d get to the subway, maybe not, maybe the subway would go to a beach. Maybe when you got there, you’d take off your stupid shoes and socks and even your pants and tie and shirt and jacket and then maybe you’d walk into the sea. Maybe you’d swim. Maybe you’d hold your breath and go deep and maybe, just maybe, you’d see something under the water: a girl or a shark or both. And maybe that would change everything forever or for now.

  Or maybe you’ll keep walking. Maybe when you get to the school, your best friend, Daffodil Blue, of recent Gawker fame and “It Girl” status, will be sitting on the front steps, her hair tufted up around her head in her signature ’fro that half the class is sporting. Or maybe she’ll have shaved her head, to make a statement. The kind of statement that says, Yeah? Well, copy this if you dare. Maybe she’ll be waiting for you. Maybe you’ll say, Hey. Maybe she’ll say, Hey yerself, Sharkman. And maybe you’ll walk into the school together, touching but not touching, close enough that you can smell how she smells this year, like lemon soap and cloves and slightly of salty sea air. Maybe she’ll say, Lunch at Mo’s. Maybe you’ll agree. Maybe the two of you will invent a complicated gang handshake, right there in the entrance of the school, just because.

  Maybe there will be a plaque in the front lobby and a photo of The King. Maybe it will be some kind of memorial. Maybe you’ll look at it and your stomach will fall, like you’re dropping from a great height and maybe you’ll feel something like nausea or panic or maybe you’ll try to understand what he meant by joy. Maybe you’ll excuse yourself after the bell goes and go into the bathroom where you’ll be alone. Maybe after you wash your hands, you’ll look up and see yourself in the mirror and there, standing behind you, will be a funny-looking black kid with a cigarette in his hands. Maybe the kid will say, “So, heeeee-ro, what’ll it be this year?” Maybe you’ll blink and he’ll be gone.

  Then maybe, just maybe, you’ll take your new phone out of your pocket. You’ll be breathing too shallow and too fast. You’ll need oxygen. You’ll take a photo and send it to someone who maybe lives in Canada, someone who is about to be your stepsister, a girl with a halo of platinum hair. Maybe you’ll type, I saw a ghost. I saw a star. #ghostsarejuststarswestillsee #Igetit #Imissyou

  Maybe then you’ll straighten your tie a bit and dry your hands. When you look in the mirror, maybe you’ll see that you look like your dad. Maybe you won’t hate this. Maybe you’ll think, My dad is one of the good guys. And you’ll smile a little bit at yourself because he is and you are.

  Maybe then you’ll be able to breathe slowly enough that you can walk into class. You can say, Good to see you, man. You can say, Dude, good summer? And maybe when someone asks you the same question then you’ll be able to smile and say, Yes.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I don’t know how old I wa
s when I read Peter Benchley’s Jaws. I want to say I was pretty young. Too young, definitely. And it was the book, not the movie, that really did me in. (For the record, I’m still too young for the movie.) From that day forward, whenever I was in the ocean (which was a lot! I lived on an island), I just waited for the shadow that always lurked below me to show itself to be the great white shark that was waiting to bite me. Even when it didn’t make sense. Especially when it didn’t make sense. As I grew up, I read everything I could about this fish that instilled so much terror in me as a child. I stopped being afraid. Most importantly, I learned that sharks rarely bite people. This year (I’m writing this in 2015), there have been an unusual number of shark bites reported, and this is due to a conflagration of issues: climate change, overfishing, more people in the ocean, swimmers at beaches that are also baited for fishing, and murky water. The list goes on. The facts remain unchanged though: sharks are not out to get us. Having survived five major extinctions, sharks are simply going about the business of surviving, just like the rest of us. The shark-finning industry has almost entirely emptied the ocean of the majority of its sharks. No one can say with 100 percent certainty what happens when an apex predator is removed from the food chain, but we know that it will have far-reaching implications.

  The people behind the documentary Sharkwater (sharkwater.com) are making a difference. Shark activists around the world are making a difference. But it might be too little, too late. Please consider throwing your own loud voice in with the rising chorus who are working to shut down the shark-finning industry. This book is for them and for you and for all of us who hope to continue to survive on a planet that we are very quickly depleting of sharks (and everything else, for that matter). If nothing else, I hope you start paying attention. Say no to shark fin soup and restaurants that serve it. Please.