Just after the sun went behind the mountain in Raja Ampat, an archipelago in Indonesia with the most biodiverse reefs in the world, I put my book down and dove into the water. That time I snorkeled to the left instead of the right, away from the village, along the bay toward the western end, past rubble and turtle grass in the shallows, past a dragonface pipefish, past mating egg cowries, a baby alligator fish half the length of my pinky, the sole of a girl’s sandal. Hard as I looked, no seahorses. There were panda butterflyfish in pairs. There were puffers with maps drawn in acid on their skin, silverside minnows streaming around me like flocking flecks of mirror—and acres of staghorn coral the color of my hut’s thatching. Cup coral with thin mauve edges. I kicked faster and faster, my thighs burning, the arches of my feet cramping, as if I were racing someone I didn’t like very much and I had to beat him, a gay, judgmental man-child living from the neck up.
Way beyond the coconut grove and the skeletons of unfinished huts, in front of where the rainforest came down to the beach, were a few thickets of purple coral. They startled me. They were looking at me. I heard the meditation teacher Munindra saying he practiced so he could see the little purple flowers along the road. I heard Shug in Alice Walker’s novel saying, “I think it pisses off God if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” I don’t really know much about God, but I stopped swimming. Low tide: my chest was a few inches above the short, paddle-like branches where lavender and midnight-blue spaghetti sponges were entangled. I had forgotten my camera, so I wasn’t looking at the reef through a touchscreen. A lot still separated us, though: coral mucus, seawater, mask, cornea, eyeball fluids, skull, cortex, my very serious sense of self. Hundreds of small fish blew about in a kaleidoscopic cloud. The purple throbbed, it burned, it called me by my secret name.
Looking down at the coral reminded me of looking up once at a fresco. The one inside the dome of the Church of San Antonio de la Florida, completed by Francisco Goya in 1798. One summer on a bench in the empty church, I lay on my back: hills and sky filled most of the painted dome, but along its equator was the bustle of eighteenth-century Madrid, including a saint pointing two fingers toward a murdered man. Groaning with bewildered gratitude as rigor mortis subsides, the victim is raised from the dead. Though some people on the crowded street don’t notice or care, most of them seem amazed at the spectacle, including an onlooker traditionally known as the toothless beggar. He’s hungry, I imagined, and sleeps on the street, where he’s chased by strays, spat on, and taunted. His mouth, given the condition of his teeth, hurts. He has fleas and hookworms. His spine is painfully curved and twisted, so he holds a cane in one hand and with the other grips the railing to watch the miracle, instead of looking down at his feet in shame. His eyes are tender. Despite his pain, astonished, admiring, curious attention—wonder—radiates from him as naturally as light from bioluminescent plankton. Wonder glows. Embedded in his wow is longing: Could you heal me too? Could you? If someone murdered can be resurrected, a spine can be straightened and teeth replaced. A homeless man can be sheltered, permafrost stay frozen, dead reefs come back to life.
I pretended he was snorkeling beside me wearing bright orange waterwings, his waistcoat undulating in the slight current. Floating eased the pressure on his spine, so he could move more freely than on land; and I had the illusion of companionship, ten thousand miles from a friend, five years since my last partner. Gazing at the coral like he looks at the resurrection, I softened. I could see a grouper, orange-red with blue spots, hiding beneath a ledge. Juvenile longfin spadefish, which resemble zebra-striped maple keys, swam lazily nearby. Blacktail humbugs scattered and swarmed; clownfish left the tentacles of their anemone home to warn me off; anthias crowded between the purple branches that were each distinctly shaped, pitted, and angled, some of which had broken off.
I tried to photograph the scene mentally, cellularly, as if my wetsuit were the retina of a peacock mantis shrimp studded with twelve different photoreceptors instead of my human three. Slow your breathing to four breaths a minute, I told myself. Are you relaxed? Aware? Look softly and stay still—more difficult underwater than in a church because of the current, because water gets into your snorkel or leaks into your mask and a box jellyfish could be about to brush against you. Buck up, no, buck down, stay as still as you can, with your limbs out like the arms of a starfish. Like pinecones that burst open only when wildfires melt their wax, like salamanders that wake up and rise from the ground when the winter rains come, so much inside you lies dormant waiting for beauty. Tear open your wet suit! Imagine the coral atomized into blobs of balm, tiny as zooplankton, and it’s flying toward you—absorb it, let it work itself into you to soothe the anguish of what you can’t or won’t express. Imagine the coral dematerializes to just a purple shaft of cathedral light: it shines up through you to the misfiring neurons that keep you small. Undergo the beauty, let it change you, don’t just glance.
This is the best I can do: in places the coral was the dark purple of a berry-gorging grizzly’s scat—in others it was like the eggplant grown in the island’s village, or juniper berries floating in a Spanish gin and tonic, or the McDonald’s character Grimace, or dusty amethyst. Had I been more devout, I would have called myself one of the magi and each polyp a holy child in a limestone manger. It was Christmas Eve, after all, and it can feel good to gush, to find the sacred or create it. Adoration that day meant feeling wonder, which is unbidden but snuffed out by hurrying. Adoration meant staring urgently yet receptively, gratefully, as if the purple’s wavelength was about to shorten to invisible ultraviolet, and I would soon be left with the white of a dead man’s bones.
The coral didn’t need me. It didn’t even know what wonder was, or permafrost, or suicide. I was the one who needed wonder, to feel as if I were coming back to life. Sometimes I didn’t know why I should open my eyes in the morning. Why I should stop tapping at a screen and meet the eyes of someone trying to love me. For years it seemed I’d been tightly curled into a ball—addicted, ashamed, not knowing my purpose. I had been the snake motionless in chilly Walden Pond that for Thoreau symbolized most people’s dejected tunnel vision. “If they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them,” he wrote, “they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life. I had previously seen the snakes in frosty mornings in my patch with portions of their bodies still numb and inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw them.” There was no better way to spend my time, it seemed to me, than appreciating beautiful creatures my species and I were unintentionally destroying. My wonder wasn’t purely an accident; it required pausing and paying attention. It was a small, futile attempt, by one of the 108 billion who have ever lived, to atone for the Sixth Mass Extinction. I alone cannot stop it. At this point, it may be unstoppable. Autumn of autumns, arouse in me an allegiance, unshakable and brave, to the dying sea, to cuttlefish and lightning whelks, to barracuda, diatoms, krill.
Look long enough at any creature, I told myself, and the universal fact of change, of withering, knocks the breath out of you. Resurrection, outside of frescoes, comes when eggs hatch, the ones that flies laid after feeding on your corpse. As in the rest of Raja Ampat, this island’s reefs by and large were thriving, its coral curiously able to withstand big temperature swings. So I often forgot that I was there during a global mass bleaching of corals, the third in recorded history, at a time when CO2 levels were rising one hundred times faster than at the end of the last Ice Age. Within my lifetime, coral reefs will be gone. The ecosystem—covering 1 percent of the ocean floor but home to 25 percent of marine species—will be the first we’ve caused to go extinct. But as I looked longer at the purple coral, I remembered. Over the crunching of parrotfish eating the reef, I could’ve sworn I heard the West Antarctic Ice Sheet buckling and sighing: after it melts, ten feet of water will slosh inside the Doge’s Palace in Venice and Battle Ground Baptist Church in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans; my boyhood home in Florida will be underwater, as will hundreds of millions of other homes, as dear to their owners as mine, and many more graves. By then, even if its proud inhabitants retreat up the low mountain, this island will be hotter, eventually inhospitably so. As this century lurches on, the world’s poor—especially refugees and the homeless—will suffer more and more from our carbon, yours and mine.
Then, just as a word repeated over and over loses its meaning and becomes pure sound, all that looking caused my future-tripping to stop. My assumptions about the coral unfastened. I was looking at it—but was it really looking back, with eyespots of uric acid? Or was it tasting me instead, my pheromones, my nontoxic sunscreen? Did it understand me as a fellow colony, made of forty trillion human cells and ten times as many bacteria? Was it telegraphing me chemical cries, as it does to fish when algae begin to smother it? Or was I as imperceptible to it as mermen were to me? Ninety-five percent of the universe consists of unknown, undetectable matter and energy. Is that darkness like the shoebox for our cosmic diorama? Excelsior filling the shipping crate we’re packed inside? Ashes in the cosmic urn and we’re the bone bits? Wonder contemplating itself as wonder?
“People think pleasing God is all God care about,” Shug goes on to tell Celie in The Color Purple. “But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.” It pleases, thankfully—and horrifies, baffles, and is usually a blur. All of which Goya’s fresco shows. There may be a miracle happening in it, but a woman with a long, white scarf is leaning on the railing, staring off into space; the murderer is running away before his resurrected victim can implicate him; and a yellow-hooded, evil hag looks down at us, her back to the saint—she means the world harm. There are those who mean us harm. Inside me, as I snorkeled off the island, was the hag with shadows instead of eyes: that day I was bored before lunch—a feast of animal flesh—and threw bugs into the traps of ant lions beneath my hut; watching the insects get swallowed alive, I didn’t give a damn; neither did I as a child when I burned grasshoppers with a magnifying glass or spit watermelon seeds into the face of a boy I envied. Inside me also was the escaping criminal, with three tons of blood carbon on my hands from my travels.
And after fifteen minutes with the coral, I was the daydreaming maiden with the white scarf: I was guessing how much whiskey was left in my bottle and craving ice cubes, which I hadn’t seen in weeks. Diving with wild dolphins once, one of which rubbed up against me, I was distracted by thoughts of my next Halloween costume, the width of my hips, the length of my sideburns. Squeamishness with the present moment is partly what makes us human: we deny reality, flee from embodied presence, and rush on, planning, obsessing, worrying, disliking, fantasizing. Meanwhile, bracken ferns blowing at the edge of a spruce grove—or the smell of creosote after a desert thunderstorm, or the feel of a sea cucumber’s knobby leather—goes unnoticed. Why try to save what you’ve never really known?
I was just about to get out of the water when I saw a big sea slug on some coral rubble. The oval-shaped body was covered in tubercles, closely bunched cones that looked like stupas made from lunar bricks, like firs covered in dirty snow. It was so camouflaged that, had it been still, I wouldn’t have noticed it. But it was moving, slowly, sniffing with its rhinophores, feeling with its spotted underside for sponges to eat, and the tassels of its external lungs swayed. Dendrodoris tuberculosa: the goddess of oceanic fertility dwells in these warty trees. It did what it needed to survive, but it wasn’t in a hurry; it had no knots of tension; it didn’t think of itself as broken or wrong or dirty; it was utterly itself. Neurotic restlessness isn’t in its DNA, just as abiding continuously in the beauty of nature isn’t in mine. And I remembered a sign I saw once driving through Florida, on my way to my mother’s house: if you died today, do you know where you’d spend eternity? As I stood up to take off my mask, I hoped my afterlife, if it comes, would be in some imperishable version of Raja Ampat. I would slide like the slug across that bay, and then one bay over, and so on, until I knew every coral polyp in the archipelago, on Earth, on every exoplanet with brine. May past and future fall away. May the afterworld be an eternity of unceasing wonder, of intimacy with all things, in fields where in a few places there’s purple coral. I prayed all of that, more or less, and removed my fins. I rubbed my eyes, zipped up my torn wetsuit, and went to find my bourbon.
