The Impossible Resurrection of Grief

was. A consequence, I thought, of the generalized wonder he’d been able to retain somehow — incomprehensible to me, who had wonder narrowed down to bells and tentacles. I couldn’t understand how he could cup jellyfish, the harmless ones, in those same big hands and love them, but not love them more than anything else. It was why I had to leave him. Capacity like that should not be wasted.
“You don’t trust it, do you,” said Darren, as a waiter passed and we both took drinks. It wasn’t a question. They were his birds, his art, but he spent more time explaining them to me than he did to George, which struck me as strange given that Darren had invited George specifically and I was merely an incidental guest.
“It’s not distrust, exactly,” I said, though distrust was exactly what it was. “It’s more … frustration, I guess. They weren’t worth enough to save, and they’re not worth enough to bring back. Not as they were, anyway.”
“Disneyfied,” he said, with a pained twist to his mouth. “I heard you.”
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s true. I always thought art was meant to hurt, a little, and this does. For that reason. So I guess it’s a success.”
He didn’t look happy, and I couldn’t blame him. Debates of value and nostalgia aside, likewise the sweetening of a dead past based on a flawed assessment of worth, this was a culminating night for him, the result of many years’ work, and I’d been impolite. I’d spoiled things. Trust for the new resurrectionists was thin since my encounter with Granny, only a few days since, but that was no excuse. Coincidence or not, it wouldn’t do to aggravate.
“It is a success,” I said, and gestured at the knots of people crowded around the leaping robots, completely enamoured. “I don’t even like birds that much and I can see that.”
“I’ve heard you’re a jellyfish kind of girl,” he said, and the smile eased his face open.
“What can I say — I like animals that have a sting to them. Perhaps it’s an undiscovered artistic side of me,” I said, tipping my champagne flute at him. A rock wren noticed the movement and fluttered up, perching on the rim of the glass. “It looks so perfect,” I said, and it was unalloyed praise. Darren chuckled a little, under his breath, and it seemed like a moment to turn dispraise into tease. “It’s not going to burst into song, is it?”
He laughed out loud. “I haven’t gone that far, no. You’ll have to go elsewhere if you want to play Snow White.”
I don’t know what made me say it. I hadn’t made any connection — not consciously, anyway. I’d like to say it was illumination, a flash of logic and insight, but the moment after I said it, all I could think of was jellyfish and how they trailed tentacles through the water behind them, fishing for prey.
“I’m more of an Andersen girl myself. Give me ‘The Little Mermaid’ over the Brothers Grimm any day of the week.”
“Really.” That wasn’t a question either, but the moment of absolute stillness in his shoulders reminded me of meat-scented breath wafting through dark corridors and the bite of small teeth on fingers. Had they been only a little older, those teeth could have drawn blood.
“Mmm. They’re sadder, I think, but ultimately I find them more hopeful.” This was probably the biggest lie I’d ever told in my life, as Andersen had always struck me as someone who parceled the world up into misery and portioned it out again, but I was sick of undercurrents and fishing for bait.
“I always liked the story about the Nightingale,” he said. “I used to read it again and again when I was a kid. The mechanical bird that enchanted a king, and how the song of the bird — the real bird — was so beautiful that it won mercy from death.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, as the robotic rock wren fluttered from my glass, “but if those peeps it makes are meant to be the most beautiful song in the world, I worry for your hearing.”
“The rock wren really isn’t much of a singer,” Darren agreed. “But it was the idea that captured me — that something so beautiful could make such a difference.” He didn’t say any more then, as one of the docents pulled him away to meet a donor, but I knew what he didn’t say. That desire for panacea, that attempt to bargain with the inevitable. There’s no nightingale alive that can turn aside the progression of Grief, once it starts, and no rock wren either. But what if there was a possibility, even so, of Grief not starting at all? How many little wrens, how many little joeys, could prevent that endless sensation of loss? Not for all, but for some.
Would it make a difference? I didn’t know. It was hard to forget that the birds were mechanical. In Andersen, the simulacra broke down, and only the real bird could suffice. In this world, this much grimmer and sadder world, the simulacra, for some species, might have been all that was left.
A false resurrection, it was true. But did its deceit affect its value?
Apparently an interest in fairy tales was enough to garner a second invitation — to an area in the mountains, where the more realistic of the robotic wrens had been released. These wrens were not programed for human interaction. They were to be as natural as possible, given the information available. “I like to think,” said Darren, “that people will see them when they go tramping. Just out of the corner of their eye. And it will remind them of what used to be here.”
The rats might hunt these birds, but their teeth would close on metal beneath the feathers, and the robots at least would survive when their predecessors had not.
“The official release date is next month. But there’s a study