“They’ll probably do something about it—flood diversion, seawalls,” you explained, sharing climate projections on your computer screen. “But they still might be fucked.”
“So, you wanted to see the motherland before it washed away,” I said.
“Yeah, sure,” you said, like I was kind of a square. “But I also wanted to leave home and apprentice with this tattoo master, Wataru, who invited me to study. I had been sending him my drawings for years—sure, lots of anime fan art, but also futuristic cityscapes and American cryptids like Bigfoot, the chupacabra, and the Snoligoster.”
“The snoli-what?”
“It’s an alligator with a giant spike on its back and a propeller tail. Florida swamp folktale.”
I researched jazz in my spare time to impress you, and one day when you looked like you would collapse from exhaustion, I played Ella Fitzgerald backed by Dizzy Gillespie. You smiled and called me hella obvious, and then we listened together for hours.
Another day, after researching the history of tattoos, I told you the story of a Buddhist priest who tattooed sutras all over his body. “He was doing it to protect himself from evil spirits,” I explained. “But he forgot to tattoo his ears, so a spirit ripped them off!”
“The Miminashi Hoichi tale? You flipping through Wikipedia before our chats or something?” you said, busting me, before inviting me to give a report on everything else I’d learned to impress you. Like the fact that Duke Ellington never officially recorded his first composition, “Soda Fountain Rag,” or that the seas might rise as much as three feet by 2100 with glacial melt even if we do everything right, potentially displacing seven hundred million people, or how the kappa, a Japanese water imp, maintains its power from the water in its bowl-shaped head, but is compelled to reciprocate politeness such as bowing.
“You must have been a real Romeo in school,” you said.
“I had braces and I was in the AV club,” I said.
When I designed a figurehead in your image, you wrote back: Leaving the world should be mythic. I resketched my idea and transformed you into a kirin, a dragon-deer hybrid with your face and the tail of a mermaid. We watched the movie Splash online, and you said that you wished you’d been born early enough to enjoy the ridiculousness of the eighties. I am sure I’ve glorified our brief moments together, all our late-night video chats, for so long that it’s easy to forget, standing over your body, that maybe I never really knew you at all.
By the time your parents shipped you, your body had already begun to bloat, as if microscopic blowfish had infiltrated your veins. Blood fell to your backside, your ass the shade of a stray plum spoiling behind a produce stand. A pathologist from Immortal Ink LLC had already taken large swaths of your tattooed skin, making you look like one of those traveling exhibits of what lies within the human body. You had a strange look on your face that I interpreted as sadness. And if you could have heard me, you might have said: Who doesn’t look sad when they’re dead? But maybe it was disappointment that caught on your last breath, some unfinished task or hidden secret. On your social media profiles, I see adventure after adventure—sitting atop a camel in Egypt, kayaking with the fins of dolphins behind you, tattooing the yakuza in a hot-springs resort, group photos with people who picked you up hitchhiking. So many comments telling you they miss you on your birthday. And where were they all in the end? Had the plague taken them? Did you abandon them, or was it the other way around? I stare at your albums, imagine myself in these places with you, and try to understand if you were running away or merely living.
What would have happened if we had more time? Over one thousand hours of video chats and nearly twenty thousand instant messages. After you signed the final paperwork, you video-called unexpectedly, and I probably smiled more than was professionally necessary. I asked you how you felt, and you described how the meds buying you more time were also tearing you apart— I wish I could taste. I wish I wasn’t so tired all the time. I hate that when I do have the energy to go out, I get angry at all the people who didn’t get the plague or somehow walked away from it scot-free. I hate how the world is finally coming together to help the planet when I’m coming undone. You said you didn’t want to bother me with your problems, and maybe that would have been that, but I told you it was okay. I told you I could listen. At Eden Ice, we treat our customers like family.
“And don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “Who else am I going to hang out with? The nightlife scene in Kodiak isn’t exactly hopping.”