Pretend it isn’t happening
No one wants to see dead animals. They’re a reminder of the things that matter but not enough. The silent beaks, the red-stained feathers, are accusation—You chose this—and they are right.
To soften the accusation, the webcam is turned off twice. The first time is meant to be a kindness because what is broadcast is simply too sad, it is thought, for public consumption. It turns out that a black screen is a more effective reminder than bodies and upsets people more, so the webcam is turned back on. Decomposition is its own rebuke, and when the camera is turned off for the second time, it returns to what appears to be a healthy animal.
It is not a healthy animal, but it is nothing that the Bloom can harm either. A stuffed albatross from the museum, dead for years, stripped out of exhibit and pinned in place on the nest. Another reminder, but one that can be tolerated. A stuffed chick too, settled underneath, and the weighing of the chick goes on, every day, a ritualized response to slaughter. Every day a ranger goes out to ease the stuffed chick from beneath its stuffed mother, to cradle it gently within a bag and to hold it up to scales and record the weight.
The weight does not change. Most people don’t notice. Many don’t care. There is an albatross chick and a ranger, and the Bloom can’t hurt them now.
Taxidermy is a delicate process. The skin is stretched over a model form, wood and wires and stuffing. The models on Taiaroa Head are exposed to wind and rain. They begin to mould, and the museum only has so many specimens.
Inorganic models are better. These albatrosses can be 3D-printed, they can be jointed, they can have batteries inserted inside them, waterproofed mechanism, and when the webcam catches the small movements, they’re as good as living now, anyway, and the dead albatrosses—the oldest ones—are returned to the museum. The younger ones, in red decomposition, get a shallow grave out of the way of lenses.
Replicate the pretence
Boat rides along the peninsula, the wildlife-watching excursions, are cancelled, most of them. There’s nothing left to see that isn’t mortuary, and the Bloom is so thick in harbour water that the corpses of albatrosses and penguins and fish, even the odd sea lion, are encrusted, unappealing lumps.
Some boat trips persist. There’s something very unsettling about the red tide, the eerie transmutation of landscape. It’s like floating on the shores of a different planet. The voyagers wear masks, and because a different planet is a chance to impose upon a different biology, to re-educate the food chain as to the new hierarchy of species and place, the voyagers also have guns. The opportunity to kill an albatross has been gone for so long, and the bad luck’s already arrived with the tide. How much worse can it get? There are arguments that any surviving albatross, found struggling in the Bloom, should be put out of its misery, but they’re fished out and taken off for cleaning, so. Opportunity lost—or it would be if the webcam hadn’t shown how facsimile could satisfy as well as the original.
For all the water of Otago Harbour has changed, the wind persists. There are long strings tied to boats and buoys, and albatrosses fly over the harbour in the form of kites. The most expensive are three-dimensional and have a balloon of blood inside them.
Anyone who bags one of these albatrosses gets to take it home, where, in lieu of funeral and hung above the fireplace, it looks damn close to real. It doesn’t even need cleaning. That’s the advantage over the real thing: The stench of fish oil that the birds could vomit onto predators is entirely absent. There are no nasty pieces of gut to deal with; even the fake blood is machine washable.
The slaughter boats never become as popular as the wildlife-watching trips, but they are not far off it.
Burning Bird Man
Albatrosses begin to reappear on Taiaroa Head. They are larger than before. With the light behind them they appear hulking, mutilated. Their wings are oddly shaped; they fail and dislocate when an albatross tries to fly.
After a while, the rangers don’t even try to stop them. “I’ve considered doing it myself,” says a ranger on his knees before the webcam with a squirming chick waiting to be weighed. He squeezes the chick to prompt more movement and the artificial sac inside the artificial bird results in a squawk that is almost accurate. “But it feels like such a waste of a life.”
“It’s not a waste,” says one of the albatrosses. She has spent months sewing her costume, has built wings from balsa wood and canvas. She doesn’t have cancer. She’s not depressed. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” she says, smiling. “I just want to fly, that’s all. I miss seeing them fly. Maybe if enough of us fly too, they’ll come back.”
Far below, the sea is red and beautiful. “I’m glad I’m not the only one to think so,” she says. “Red has always been my favourite colour.”
When the albatross leaps from Taiaroa Head, it’s high enough and windy enough that she soars for long seconds before the ocean takes her. When the coast guard goes out to find the body, she’s face down in the Bloom, tangled in broken pieces of balsa and canvas. So many albatrosses end this way that the coast guard, when they look up—and they don’t often, not anymore—see a line of flyers, all waiting their turn on the Head.
The albatross, sodden and stained, is awkward to hoist out of water. The coast guard needs a diver to go in and cut her free of wreckage before the body can be reclaimed, but there are no volunteers to swim in the Bloom, and no one believes they should be forced. Instead, the coast guard douses the albatross with alcohol and sets her alight with flares, and she burns in the Bloom and sinks there.
If asked, the albatross would say that she died happy, getting what she wanted. Before the end and the bogging and the breaking and the Bloom, she was able to fly.
The albatross that follows her leaves behind a letter. He has built his wings of flax and silk and has had himself tattooed all over with feathers. “We are all albatrosses now,” he writes.
“Don’t feel sorry for me,” he says. “It’s such a relief.”
Burial at sea
Occasionally they wash up. Someone will be walking along the beach and amidst the red will be a flash of white, the wings spread out and sinking, and for a moment, the walker says—they all say—they thought the albatross was alive, that the swell of waves beneath the body was actually a sign of struggle as the bird tried to pull itself out of the gravity of the Bloom.
Every time, the walker wades into surf to try and pull them out. Clutches the bird to them, the heavy, sunken wings, the dragging feet. Every time they say the same thing. “I thought it would be heavier.” The albatross is never heavier. It is sometimes lighter, if enough of the fish have survived to nibble away at the body, and when this happens the walker tries to fold the wings over the red ruin beneath, tuck the face beneath feathers as if the bird is only sleeping.
These birds are buried at sea. There’s a terrible cruelty in this, resigning them in death to the thick red waves that they could never escape in life, but if there are fish still surviving in the mire that the Bloom has made of the harbour, then perhaps the return of the albatross will allow them to hang on a little longer. “Besides,” says one of the walkers, “it’s not as if the albatross didn’t eat plenty of fish when it was alive.” Before the Bloom, before the red tide and the silence.
The Bloom is light dependent, surface organisms. Beneath the thick bright layer, in the deeper waters, there is a place where the albatross can sink beneath the red. None of the walkers ever use fishing line. There’s rope and a sinker and the albatross is let go, gently, its beak still tucked under the useless remains of wing. Sometimes the albatross is left to sink in waters outside the harbour, beyond the reach of the red tides, but there are always algae in its feathers and rinsed through the mangled flesh, and the further away from tides that the bird is buried, the more chance that the Bloom will spread into those waters too, so more often the albatross is returned close to Taiaroa Head.
It’s a grief to see them go. Feels like treachery, even, that the poor thing can’t escape the Bloom even in death, that if there’s an albatross spirit that survives the colonisation and consumption of the flesh, then that spirit will open its eyes beneath the surface, straining for air, and will forever be separated from it.
That’s why the walkers, who see those flash-patches of white in the red sea, always wade out to claim it. They hope, within themselves, for the efficacy of Bloom and the absence of fish, for if the albatross is whole, then there’s a different method of disposal available to it.
Smoke, rising up forever
When an albatross is put to the pyre, it doesn’t burn alone. The cremators layer garlands beneath it, leaves and flowers from plants that are pollinated by the winds. There’s a small ceremony, offerings and apologies. People are tired of pretending. A real albatross, on the pyre, gets more sympathy than the people cloaking themselves in feathers and plummeting from clifftops.
Incense is thrown into the fire as the albatross burns. Messages on scraps of paper, small bright pieces of cloth like flags. The bird burns to ashes and the ashes, those which don’t blow away as part of the burning, are carefully collected and released on top of headlands—small, remnant clouds that blow over the Pacific. If the albatross is lucky, the ash will circulate for months at a time, will float high above the ocean and never come down again.
If the albatross is not lucky, the ash will rain down onto the Bloom. (The albatross is never lucky.)
The people who watch hope for the first but can’t see the second—the particles are too small, their eyes too weak—and that allows them to pretend and to tell themselves that pretending makes them feel better.
Mostly it does, but then they are practiced and not looking too closely and the cremation ritualises closure and that is good enough.
The Mausoleum
The museum loses many of its stuffed albatrosses to the abandoned nests and the webcam on Taiaroa Head. Replacing them with albatrosses lost to the Bloom, pulled out of the red sink between peninsula and city, proves impossible.
It isn’t that the curators don’t try. There are albatross carcasses placed carefully in plastic bags and stored in freezers. The birds are necropsied, their organs displaced, and the skins cleaned and dried and stretched over moulded forms, but no matter how carefully the feathers are cleaned, the stain of Bloom remained. The birds, blood red. They make exhibitions look like a massacre.
“If we didn’t know about the Bloom, and if they hadn’t died the way that they did, they’d almost look pretty,” says one of the curators. Less pretty is the effort of an amateur taxidermist who takes a corpse from the water and stuffs it. The resulting revulsion is less for the preserved semi-corpse of albatross, which is technically proficient, than it is for the fact that the taxidermist has given the albatross eyes that are the same shade of red as the Bloom. “It looks like the undead,” says the curator, who considers this addition disrespectful.
“It looks accurate to me,” says the taxidermist. He has taken to wearing red-lensed glasses and so all the world is a shade of Bloom and blood. “Taxidermy,” he says, “is as much art as science, and art is a commentary on the world. If people didn’t want to look at red albatrosses, they should never have made them in the first place.”
Replicating the pretence, again
The taxidermist has a point, and soon red glasses are common on the streets of the city. There’s a shortage of appropriately tinted lenses, but cellophane is easily available and can easily be seen through, and soon even people who never ordinarily wear glasses—the clear-sighted and the contact-wearers and the vain—have red before their eyes.
All the albatrosses look red now. There are more facsimiles of them than on Taiaroa Head, and if taxidermy is a dying art and the availability of corpses is limited, then an albatross can be made from many things: wool and plastic bottles and origami paper, and it doesn’t matter what colour any of them come in, if the paper is yellow and the bottles are clear and the wool is streaked with dyes and chalk, because the lenses transform them all to red, and the city is festooned with them, a monument to red tide and flight.
The most photographed of the albatrosses is only a head. It’s created from tinted resin and laminated paper, a literary collage that can survive the elements, and it’s fitted over the head of the Robert Burns statue in the Octagon. “This isn’t the first time that algae has come to a Burns statue,” says a member of the city council. “There’s a statue over in Scotland, in Dumfries I think, that had to be cleaned a while back because it was covered over in algae. There’s wasn’t the same sort of red as ours, of course.” The cleaning, she goes on to say, was expensive. At least the albatross head limits the extent of a similar damage.
Burdened by the head of a dead bird, the statue looms over the Octagon, and tourists take pictures of it, evidence of their presence at ecological disaster. “It reminds me of those plague birds,” one of them says, of the medical costumes that doctors wore in old contagions on old continents.
The comparison is invitation enough, and soon the city is filled with plague doctors. The cloth masks from Covid are out, and the new are made from papier-mâché and leather. In the days of bubonic plague, the beaks were filled with herbs and flowers, both to block out the smell and because it was thought that scent was a barrier to miasma and infection.
What scent is there that can possibly block out the Bloom?
Whatever is used, it’s not enough. Albatrosses fall from Taiaroa Head and are burned at sea, their bird man apparatus aflame around them, but in the city the albatrosses are plague doctors. They plummet from the roofs of libraries and skyscrapers and covered-over swimming pools, and they are covered with blankets and flowers and herbs to keep out the stench until they can be put on pyres, like a drowned uneaten albatross, and have their ashes sent to the sky.
Editor: Aigner Loren Wilson
First Reader: Aigner Loren Wilson
Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department
Accessibility: Accessibility Editors