Coffins Patch

Coffins Patch is dying, and everything suggests there is no hope of saving it. Still, wet suit clad, Ei Mun rolls backward off the boat. Here is the world flipping upside down, feet parting from the wooden deck’s solid flank, joyful, headlong crash into the churning waves. Here is the velocity, here is the escape. Going from one world — humid, oppressive, filled with people and fumes and engine noise — to another: still and empty, like the inside of a sapphire.

The sea is crystalline, light-flecked. Ei Mun floats, calms her breath, but the usual stillness eludes her. Her fingers are cold with excitement, her stomach, hollow and queasy. It’s not as if she hasn’t dived before; 327 times before, according to the worn blue notebook that is her dive log. But those were recreational, undertaken for pleasure, without expectation. This, on the other hand, is her first professional field assignment. At forty-one, she’s the oldest intern at Timmel Marine Laboratory, the foremost center for the study of oceanic reef life in the Florida Keys, and the only intern diving with the biologists.

Ei Mun pinches her nose, blowing gently to equalize. Soft, satisfying pops in her ears. She checks her equipment again: air flows freely through the regulator into her mouth, her vest fills and empties as it should, the seal of her mask is flush against her cheeks. She flutters a fin and spins a slow circle, taking in the emptiness around her. Before the restrictions came into force, these waters were crowded with groups of vacation divers, identifiable from a distance by their clumsy bicycle kicks and GoPros on extendable rods. Some brought their children, outfitting them in colorful wet suits and kid-sized air tanks. Since the disease hit the reef six months ago, however, the waters have been empty, cleared by a local government emergency order in an attempt to slow the mysterious devastation. It’s far too little, far, far too late. The oceans are changing, whether they clear it of holiday makers or not, and the disease is just the latest crisis to hit. Six months on, the biologists still haven’t figured out a cure. All they know is thirty-six-thousand acres of reef have turned brittle and crumbling, an estimated 18 percent of the Florida Keys’ entire population lost. Of the pillar coral colonies — the lab’s focus — only 9 percent remains, most of it concentrated in Coffins Patch, the last sizeable pillar coral population in North America. Hence the hammer, the chisel, the pouch of chlorinated epoxy. Strapped to her belt, talismans of a hopeless cause. Ei Mun touches them one at a time.

________

In the past three months she’s spent at the lab, Ei Mun has watched the marine biologists go out each morning, noble in sleek wet suits, rubber masks strapped like crowns to their foreheads. Each with their own hammers and chisels strapped around their waists, just above the weight belts used to control their buoyancy. She’d stand by the window in the corner of the lab, under the pretense of polishing some incubation tank or another, surreptitiously watching the divers march out onto the pier and pile into the dive boat with their armory of gear. Only when the boat’s engine faded to a distant whine would she return to her intern’s work of data entry and equipment cleaning, made unbearable by the feeling of being left behind.

And still, while the other twenty-something-year-old interns skipped out to dangle their legs off piers and blow cigarette smoke into the shimmering summer air, Ei Mun stayed behind. The lab’s air-conditioning was weak and old, the room stifling, and yet she toiled away. She’d volunteered to work on an analysis of historical disease spread data, a project which involved sifting through decades-old paperwork and painstakingly transferring the relevant information into spreadsheets. It was valuable data, but no one had the time or wherewithal to undertake the challenge. The biologists had laughingly told her that many an intern had tried the same project...