How to imagine a Tsunami: thousands of grains of rice thrown into water going over a dam.
The death of a million people is a statistic; the death of one, a tragedy, as Stalin put it.
Each grain of rice with a human face. Nico’s face.
Mrs. Whitewood hesitated, finger on ADD TO CART for a pair of Striped Calf Hair & Leather Lace-Up Boots. $1,250. Not outrageous, but she already had a pair almost exactly like it. As she tried to decide, she became aware of Maria, standing beside her, twisting her rag, waiting to be acknowledged.
“Yes?” Mrs. Whitewood asked, expecting Maria to ask for an advance. Or a day off. Or a job for one of innumerable ‘cousins’…. Whenever Maria had to work up the nerve to ask a favor, she thought sneaking up on the answer would help.
But instead, Maria asked, “Have you heard about that poor Bottom Billion boy?”
“Yes.” Of course Mrs. Whitewood had. Everyone had. “Such a tragedy.” It was one of those sensational stories: a boy escaping the wars caused by rising seas had tried to cross the Aegean with his family in one of those flimsy smuggler boats when it capsized, drowning more than 50 people. Happened all the time, it seemed. At least often enough to be unremarkable. Like the weather. Twenty today, chance of 30 by Wednesday morning…. What turned this statistic into a tragedy was the boy’s body had washed up on a beach in Turkey—near the resort in Bodrum where Mrs. Whitewood had once lain getting a tan—and within hours, a million people had reposted a heartrending photo of the boy in his tiny red shirt and blue shorts, dressed like he’d just left the house to go to school, and instead ended up facedown in the sand. Like a piece of driftwood. His little corpse was a bloodless white, the way fingers got when you soaked in a Jacuzzi too long. Recently, an artist had made a 3D avatar of the boy and geotagged it to the spot on the beach where the body had been found. Anyone standing on that beach could look through the camera of their smartphone and see the boy lying there in the surf as if they were the first ones to come upon the body. To remember, the artist said.
Maria kept standing there, worried. “With a computer you can see it,” she said.
What? What was she asking? “Did?— Did you want to see it?” Mrs. Whitewood asked, offering her computer, not knowing what else to say, the designer shoes still on-screen.
Maria shook her head. Then she described, haltingly, something else she had heard: someone had made a picture of every refugee who had died trying to escape rising seas, or drought, or fires, or the fighting caused by them, and placed them at the exact spot where each person had died—like those crosses that families placed along highways where a son or daughter had been killed in an accident.
Mrs. Whitewood knew what she was talking about but Maria hadn’t gotten it right: someone had leaked databases of refugee deaths and an artist had mapped them onto the actual physical places with avatars standing at each spot: virtual corpses littered the Aegean Sea, the Syrian deserts, the beaches of Greece and Italy, railroad tracks, bridges, canals, and other routes through Serbia, Hungry…. Hundreds had died in one of the blazes that roared through the vineyard country of Sonoma Valley, well-heeled refugees bringing pets and mementos. Most of the underfed corpses were along the U.S.-Mexican border.
Maria was now talking about a sister she had expected weeks ago but had never arrived. She was very worried. She was hoping that the website could give her some news. Maybe a glimpse?—of those who had died so she’d know her sister wasn’t among them….
Mrs. Whitewood tried to explain that you couldn’t use the computer to see these sites. You had to be there with a smartphone. The bodies were virtual, after all. Maria just stood there confused.
Too hard to explain, Mrs. Whitewood thought she’d just show her, but poking around on the web she found a review that described what the app could do, and as the world in the video turned, it showed sites from Bangladesh to New Orleans that had been mapped. There was a virtual memorial to retirees who drowned in their RVs as they fled what was left of Myrtle Beach. Maria stepped closer, anxious, as though the virtual images were as real as the rag in her hand.
Mrs. Whitewood clicked on the Mexico-U.S. border and the screen filled with a skeleton standing at the spot in the Sonora Desert where border patrol soldiers had found a dehydrated corpse. Then the camera pulled back, giving a bird’s-eye view of the desert—and of hundreds of other skeletons, each standing where someone had died trying to cross the Arizona desert; it kept pulling back, and as polka dots on a balloon grow closer together as the balloon deflates, the number of skeletons marking spots where someone had died became so dense that they looked like a forest of skeletons. There were no identifying features, just data points, and far too many to pick out one.