When we’re out far enough, I cut the engine. I enclose my digital voice recorder in a waterproof sleeve, since you wanted every second of your last moments recorded just as your life had been tattooed on your skin. Back in my office, there’s a package waiting for me that your mother told me not to open until the service was over. I know it’s a part of you—a piece of skin, a memory in ink. I’m not certain how long it will take for you to melt into the sea, but I plan on staying here until you do. Cargo ships blow their horns in the distance. Seals, perhaps seeing an interesting place to rest, circle, nudging their noses at the bow. I scream a gibberish war cry to frighten them off.
A couple of hours have passed and already waves are washing over the sinking deck. Two of the masts have broken in half and a sail is dissolving quickly like cotton candy. Your figurehead is largely intact, but beads of water run down your face, your dragon-scaled chest. Your deer horns have become demonic nubs. The sun is high overhead and the seam where I froze you to the rest of the schooner is coming undone. Soon you’ll have no choice but to prove your mermaid and dragon skills. I pull on my fins and life jacket so that I may join you. My dry suit is tight and secure, my mask and snorkel ready. The schooner begins to crack again, the fractures sounding off like a multitude of tiny whips. And before I’m ready for it, you splash into the water, bobbing up and down, hitting what remains of the hull. I jump in and drag you away from danger.
It’s only the two of us now. Your eyes are nothing but subtle concave indentations, your nose a minor bump in a round piece of ice. You’re floating on your back, staring at the sky. My hands are around your waist, preventing you from spinning between the waves like a crystal log. The battery on my recorder is fading. I fear water has seeped inside it. Before there is nothing left to hold, I want to tell you all the things I never got to say, what I would have said if I could have played a larger role in what remained of your life. I could have loved you; I did anyway （and maybe if our lives had been different you could have loved me, too）。 I tell you a million other little things until nothing remains of your kirin-mermaid self except for a piece in my hands the size of a large hailstone, until that too melts.
Grave Friends
On the hypertube ride from Tokyo Narita Airport island to the archipelago of Niigata City, my sister never once reminded me of how I abandoned our family five years ago. At first, everyone assumed I had simply extended my visit to America. But after one month passed and then another, I finally worked up the courage to send a letter home with a photo of me in a wedding dress on the shore of Lake Michigan. I’m sorry, I wrote. Sorry for making everyone think I had been kidnapped or worse. Sorry I didn’t want to live in the same sinking town for my entire life or have my ashes stored in a shared urn with the other families on our street, stuck in one place for all eternity.
Beside me, Tamami chronicled the lives of my old neighborhood, the grave friends, the network of five tight-knit families who’d agreed two generations ago to mix their ashes together. The shared urn started out as a money-and space-saving venture when the plague hit and no one knew what to do with the dead. But our neighborhood found a new appreciation for the shared community after our city become an archipelago amid the rising seas of the Great Transition of 2070, over thirty years ago now.
The grave friends network consisted of five households, although there had at one time been more. The oldest member and the social nexus of the neighborhood was my grandmother, my baba, who used to go from house to house every afternoon to talk stories over cheap wine. There was also my pervy “uncle” Michihiro, who often came over to drink and play darts with my father, staring at me in my Sailor Moon–style uniform when I was in high school; and the Fujita sisters, who both worked as gothic Lolita hostesses, donning frilly black Victorian frocks. Mrs. Kishimoto next door had given me koto lessons after school. And Mr. Takata, after he retired from the Mitsubishi solar farm, cared for everybody’s gardens in exchange for a modest bounty of herbs and vegetables. Tomorrow, I would pick out Baba’s bones from a tray of ash in front of all these people. And soon after, I’d have to tell my mother that my ashes would never become one with hers and Father’s and everyone else’s we loved.
As the tube capsule slowed, drifting beyond rice paddy villages stuck in time, I saw the outskirts of Niigata City. Once notable for sake and tulips and a long-ago gold rush, the nondescript skyline had become famous for the several dozen funerary skyscrapers dotting a series of tiny islands that served a large percentage of northern Japan—dark monolithic towers, punctuated by clouds and 3-D billboards reminding the city that we’ll all die one day and we should take advantage of their mortuary package specials. But beneath their shadows, I could see the old city, the aging utilitarian apartment buildings nestled beside secondhand shops, love hotels crowned with gaudy neon signs. Next to my old high school was the large stone torii gate, now half-submerged in water, carved with the names of those who died during the plague—a former place of picnics and reunions before the waves crept slowly past the park. Beyond the train station, self-driving company cars idled in a roundabout before zipping through the familiar arteries of Bandai district—the labyrinth of bars and mom-and-pop shops that hadn’t changed in decades, the cracked streets of the past merged onto the floating bridges connecting the city like a cobweb. Peeking out from the water: the Rainbow Tower, a refurbished remnant of an old shopping complex that became an underwater hotel. As a child I used to watch fireworks from the tower’s spinning observation elevator, marveling at the silhouettes of the drowned shopping mall with each explosion. Students and grannies on bikes still clogged sidewalks, riding beside thirty-foot-high seawalls and across neighborhood bridges. I didn’t want to only remember the good times, but I had a sudden hankering for pizza with mayonnaise, a shrimp burger from McDonald’s, a bowl of udon with vegetable tempura to slurp alongside grumpy salarymen. I wanted to call my old friends from school, maybe sing our hearts out in some karaoke booth. This was my drowned world. Of course, I knew none of this would happen right away.