Lisica Chapters

Thanks for joining us on our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!

Audio for this chapter:

9 – More Useful

The storm rages for three days. The ten of them remain trapped in the bunker for the duration. It is a grim marathon, punctuated by incoherent breakdowns from Alonso, Pradeep, Flavia, then nearly everyone else. The claustrophobia nearly does Amy in, and she finds herself weeping in Triquet’s arms one night for hours.

For Jay it’s the unrelenting ferocity of the storm. As a California boy his experience with storms is spotty. He’s definitely been out in some ragers, and he’s quite aware of the infinite power of the Pacific Ocean, but this is an assault. Like this is an unrelenting hammer and anvil where physics beats biology every time. It feels like the island will get torn up by the roots and carried away. He didn’t know that storms could be so insane.

Miriam feels like she is sinking in a leaky lifeboat and she only has her cupped hands to bail. Alonso is offline. When he isn’t babbling about AK-47s and gopniks he is asleep. Any decisions that need to be made are now hers to make. At one point, during her darkest hour, Miriam approaches Amy and asks if she knows of any emergency beacon or transmitter that Alonso had privately revealed to her. Because it’s time to hit it. Call in the Marines. But of course Amy knows nothing. Miriam asks Esquibel the same thing, but she only crosses her arms and presses her mouth into a line. “No. Devices would be useless anyway. Like any signal could penetrate these clouds.”

Esquibel is most concerned with Mandy. She has lost all reason. The Doctor sets up a nice cot for her in the clean room, where she attends her nearly the entire three days, sleeping at her side, making sure she feeds herself, and when Mandy tries once again to run out into the storm, forcibly holding her down and demanding her permission to sedate her. After an hour of shouting at each other she finally gets through and the girl meekly lies down and lets Esquibel give her two Benadryl and a Valium. She is asleep soon.

Triquet keeps the endurance racer’s mindset from the beginning. They are the only one who does not collapse. There had been a point at the beginning of their career, crouched in a Guatemalan pit toilet with the dysentery shits as rebel gunfire suddenly echoed through the jungle and killed their guide Topo, when they realized archaeology would some day kill them. The sudden clarity of that epiphany has never left them, and they are at peace with their destiny. They certainly hope it will be later—much later—rather than sooner, but this big old bad world has it out for everybody, and this tremendous storm is just the latest threat to their existence. Poor Maahjabeen. Triquet only hopes she didn’t suffer too much before departing to her Islamic afterlife.

On the morning of the third day the wind finally eases. Mandy is up an hour before dawn, lacing her boots. Esquibel opens her eyes and only watches, weary and heavy-limbed. “Mandy, no… You should wait for light.”

“I have to see.”

“You can’t see. There’s no light.”

“Well I can’t stay here. Not for another moment.” Mandy pulls on her blue storm shell and zips it to her chin. Esquibel is already up and lacing her boots as well. Mandy holds up a hand. “Oh, you don’t have to join—”

“Save it.” Esquibel lifts a portable work light. Its beam function should be sufficient. She grabs her coat as they head for the door of the bunker.

Outside is a ruin. They had brought nearly everything they could inside before things got too bad but the parachute they’d left hung in the trees is now just thin torn strips. The platforms are piles of scattered sticks. A multitude of thick branches have fallen across their path, making navigation to the beach nearly impossible. One of the giant redwoods has fallen, the width of its trunk now four meters tall. Mandy climbs its rough bark, gentle rain still falling.

At the top of the fallen trunk the last of the storm whips her, the air heavy and wet but no longer cold. Over the southeastern sea she can see a pale stripe in the sky that promises dawn and clear skies. Good. By the time she makes her way down to the beach, there should be light enough.

Mandy is bruised, stunned by the apocalyptic days she just endured. She still can’t forgive herself for letting Maahjabeen go, but at least she is admitting to herself that if she had stayed out in the storm she would have died like fifteen different ways.

Despite the obvious risks out here, Esquibel is glad to be outside. But her relief is short-lived. Fatigue steals up on her. She is used to open-ended shifts of intense caregiving, especially during her deployments, but this has been one of her longest. She is light-headed now, nearly delirious, only keeping it together through strength of will. They will take a quick look at the beach, realize Maahjabeen is still gone and how impossible her survival is, then go back to the cot and fall asleep in each other’s arms.

And to Mandy’s dismay, that is exactly what happens.

Ξ

Triquet is belowdecks with Katrina, stringing a line of work lights into the new chambers they’ve discovered. This room is narrow, lined with impossibly cramped bunks for the engine crew. An old odor of pipe tobacco and mildew still somehow lingers. As Katrina dresses the cable along the floor she finds an ammunition box under the furthest bunk.

“Uh, hold up, Triq. We got ourselves a live one here.”

Triquet squeals. Today they wear a galibayah—a striped cotton Egyptian shift, and black knit skullcap under their helmet, in a more somber vein. They just haven’t felt it is appropriate to wear fashion and makeup since the loss of Maahjabeen. They hitch the long skirt up and crouch beside Katrina to stare at the olive green container. “Ammo box. They usually don’t have ammo, though. Waterproof and bombproof. A lot of soldiers kept their valuables in them back then.”

“But what if it is ammunition?”

Triquet frowns. “Yeah… that could be a problem. Explosives can decay and become unstable. I mean, it’s a small chance, but… You’re right, you should probably back away.”

Katrina does so. “What are you gonna do?”

“Uhh. I know. There’s that sink back in the tip. That big enamel monster in the corner. Help me get it.”

They retreat two rooms to the chamber under the control room, where even the largest pieces have now been arranged and placed in rows. They lift the heavy sink and bring it back through the two hatches to rest it on the deck right in front of the ammo box.

“Now I’m just going to…” Triquet unlaces a boot and ties the cord to the handle of the ammo box. Then they tilt the sink at an angle, resting its top edge against the bunk. “Step back again. I’ll drag it until we get it under the sink. Then we drop the sink on it. Blast shield, right?”

“Right.” Katrina withdraws to the hatch as Triquet gently draws the ammo box across the deck toward the sink, which waits like the traps Elmer Fudd used to leave for Bugs Bunny. Thank god for Triquet. When everyone else fell the fuck apart, good old Triquet came through, organizing breakfast and clearing the area around the bunker of storm wreckage before asking for a volunteer to accompany them down here. Katrina has felt so hopeless, watching all these others battle their demons through the dark days and nights. But for her, it’s just more of how she has felt taking care of her brother Pavel. He’d always been ravaged by dark thoughts, even as a child, but now after a year in the gulag he is worse than ever. He’s drawn himself into such a subterranean place that he has gone inert. Katrina can only hope that healing is happening in there. That he is not becoming stuck forever in his dark place.

But now she has seen that phenomenon writ large. A good half dozen people nearly lost their minds in the bunker over the last few days. It was the worst camp-out she’d ever attended, lol. LMAO. ROFL. The acronyms are as heavy as stones in her mind. Yes… losing Maahjabeen has taken even Katrina’s humor away.

“And… so far so good.” Triquet crouches beside the sink. “Help me drop it now.” They gently shift the sink so that it covers the box, resting it upside-down on the deck. Then Triquet stands on a nearby bunk and shoos Katrina back to the hatch. “Ready?”

Katrina nods, not knowing what they are about to do.

Triquet yanks on the boot lace, still tied to the ammo box handle. With each yank, they knock it against the interior of the sink, again and again.

Katrina squints in anticipation, her fingers in her ears.

After a few moments of this, Triquet stops. “See? What I figured. Probably personal possessions. Juicy ones I hope.”

They lift the sink away and Triquet puts a white workcloth in their lap with the ammo box on top. They turn on the headlamp and camera on their helmet. The latch on the ammo box is rusted and needs to be forced, but with a clack it finally releases and the lid creaks open.

Triquet peers within. “Oo, look,” they fish out a foil-wrapped oblong. “Wrigley’s spearmint. You like gum?” They set it aside and draw out a stack of papers. “This is bizarre. I mean, What I don’t understand is how someone could just forget their personal effects. Here. Look. What kind of emergency bugout had to happen…” The stack of papers contains a passport. “See? They even forgot their passport. How could—?” Triquet opens the passport and glances at its contents. Their face goes sober. “Ah. Aha. Well then. That’s how.”

“What? What is it?” Katrina leans forward.

The passport contains a black and white photo of a middle-aged woman with a narrow face and dark lipstick, a 1950s hairstyle forcing her blonde curls into strange shapes. Her name is MAUREEN CATHERINE DOWERD.

“M.C. Dowerd is the gravestone in the trees. She didn’t forget her valuables, Katrina. I guess after she died, everyone else did.”

Ξ

Alonso sits in his camp chair behind the trap door in the corner, out of everyone’s way. His anguish sizzles in him like oil on a pan. He can’t seem to get past it. There is nothing but this pain. He has always suffered it and he will always suffer it and everything else is an abstraction, a comfortable luxury that he can ill afford. The words ring hollow in his head, shorn of meaning: Miriam. Plexity. Lisica. Remember when they were important? They had been the pillars of his sanity. He supposes that is gone now. His sanity has been swept away in that storm along with that poor Tunisian girl. Yet another burden he will carry forever. He will have to contact her family and promise restitution, debase himself with apologies.

Hot tears run down his cheeks again. He has always been weepy for sure, all that opera and those Cuban boleros growing up. They just open your heart. But now his eyes leak like his heart bleeds. He is fracturing, disassembling from grief. And all these people here, gathered from the four corners of the globe at his request, are all waiting on him.

And he can’t do a thing for them.

His hands rest on the cane, massaging its handle. His ruined feet curl under him, in an awkward position that hurts the least. They had broken him in pieces like Humpty Dumpty. And all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again. He has been atomized. Like the opposite of Plexity. They’ve beaten him into isolated bits and all the connective tissue is gone.

That poor child Mandy rouses again, crying out in the clean room. Here is yet another casualty laid at Alonso’s door. How many years of therapy will she require after the last few days? Oh, dios mio… He is ill from the wash of guilt sweeping through him, so he sighs raggedly and closes his eyes. It is all too unbearable.

Mandy breaks free of Esquibel’s embrace and slips through the clean room exit. Alonso opens his eyes to glimpse her bruised eyes and pallid cheeks. Poor dear thing. Ruined.

He has to think of something—anything—that he can contribute to this community he has created. His big Cuban family. If he only had a barbecue he could make them all some Mojo Criollo. But he has none of the meats or spices, not to mention the tools and a barbecue itself, as well as the strength to stand for more than a few seconds at a time. No. Useless. All he can do now is stay out of the way. Make sure that they don’t need to spend their few resources taking care of him. Shrink into yourself, Alonso. It is his only course.

Ξ

The sky is still gray, with dark streamers dropping sheets of rain from time to time. Mandy strides past Amy and Pradeep collecting all the wreckage from the platforms. She climbs the redwood trunk and navigates a fallen bay tree, its aromatic leaves all around her. Then she descends to the shore, filled with piles of sea grass and dead crustaceans. The gulls and other birds are pecking at the harvest, unconcerned by the human in their midst. A single dead sea lion lies rolled on its side, a giant red gash in its black tail.

Mandy reaches the edge of the beach as a fresh shower douses her. The lagoon is still dark. The open ocean has settled into bands of blue, the waves coming in orderly rows. She stands and watches them, vowing not to leave.

The clouds sail across the southern sky and it breaks open. Flavia locates Mandy on the shore hours later. She stands on the redwood trunk behind her, admiring the strands of Mandy’s long hair and scarves flapping in the wind like Cordelia, waiting for her life to begin again.

“Ai, Mandy is here!” Flavia calls out to the others who have come looking with her. Amy has been distracted by the bounties of the fallen redwood and Triquet has decided to try to skirt the fallen behemoth, back toward the grove and around its uprooted base.

The lagoon is settling now. Such a beautiful view, like some of Flavia’s favorite spots on the Ligurian coast. But those are warm enough to swim in and this, no. Never. Ah, look! Flavia is surprised to see curved black dorsal fins running in a line of three behind the line of surf. Are they sharks? They must be the biggest sharks in the whole world! Amy should see them. One rolls onto its side, lifting a pectoral fin, and flashes its black and white patches. Oh! It is one of those killer whales! Like in the movies! “Amy! Amy, come! You have to see! I think it’s killer whales!”

Amy pops up, giving Flavia a little moue of excitement.

Flavia turns back to them. “At first I thought they were sharks but then one showed me his…” Flavia falls silent.

Amy clambers up the side of the redwood trunk, its corrugated bark providing easy hand and foot holds. “Showed you his what?” But Flavia has an indescribable look on her face.

Amy follows her gaze. There, out on the water, three dorsal fins cut behind the surf. And following them is a yellow kayak.

“Ahh!” Amy gasps, flinging her arm out. “Maahjabeen!” She screams in wild joy and clambers from the trunk. Amy fights her way through the fallen bay tree, Flavia finally rousing herself and falling in beside her. They reach Mandy before she has seen from her lower vantage point. Flavia wraps her in her arms, babbling incoherently, and finally Amy turns them to the sea as Maahjabeen surfs through the rollers and carves her way through the lagoon mouth, her arms stiff and her posture wrong. But once she reaches the safety of the still water she turns her boat and lifts her paddle to the sky, calling out to the three orcas who remained behind. “Netcharfou! Yaishek!”

After they depart, she turns back to the shore. She is so depleted she can only move robotically, favoring one side. Mandy is on her knees, crying out to her. The kayak skids to a halt in the sand.

Maahjabeen can’t get herself out. Flavia and Amy try to lift her but she has no strength left. “Okay,” Amy realizes. “Nice and slow. Step by step. Get your legs under you.”

“I can’t—” Maahjabeen’s unused voice halts. She shakes her head no. “I can’t feel my legs.”

“Are they… are you injured?”

Maahjabeen shakes her head no. But she holds up four fingers. “Four times. Four times I tried to get back. Whenever it looked like there would be a gap in the storm.”

“But where were you?” Flavia unzips Maahjabeen’s wind shell, stiff with salt, and wraps her warmer coat around her. “Come on. Just hold on to my neck and we’ll get you out.”

“Four times.” Maahjabeen shakes her head in dismay, unable to communicate in those two words how many hours of terror in the dark on the water that meant. How many times she had believed herself lost. How the cold had been like knives one abysmal night when she was stranded on a seastack. There are no words to describe what she has gone through. But she needs to tell them the most important parts. Before she passes out. “There is a beach. Another one.”

“Another beach!” Amy crows. “Amazing! You are such a hero. So you sheltered there? ”

“Well. Mostly. I—I dug a hole in the sand and turned my kayak over and I was in there for almost two days. But then after I tried to paddle back I nearly died and spent a whole night out on the water. When I got back to the beach the second time I discovered this.” Her shaking hand holds up her phone, displaying a picture.

It is a shadowed image of another concrete bunker.

“I was able to spend the last night in there.”

Triquet arrives in a rush just as Maahjabeen shares this. They shower her return with squeals of joy and delight. Then they give the revealed image the same delirious reaction. “Magnificent! Look at all that trash! Oh, I can spend the rest of my life on this island!”

They all laugh, and with Triquet’s help they’re able to pull Maahjabeen from her kayak. She groans in pain, trembling. Something isn’t right with her back. After bracing the fiberglass shell against the wind that tore at her for two days, something has locked up in her spine. And her shoulders aren’t properly working anymore either after the night on the seastack.

“Let’s get you back inside and cleaned up.” Amy holds her up with a strong arm around her waist. “Can you walk?”

“I don’t know.” Maahjabeen stumbles. Their progress across the beach is slow and awkward. They can’t drape her arms over their shoulders because of the pain.

Triquet makes a face. “Maybe we carry her. Make a travois.”

“No. I’ll be fine. I can make it. Oh!” Maahjabeen blinks at the wreckage on the beach. “Look what happened here!”

Triquet leads the others around the base of the fallen redwood through the grove. “But wait,” Maahjabeen says, pulling on them to stop, her voice a bit querulous. “The last important part.” She sways among the upthrust roots of the fallen giant.

“Yes?” Flavia prompts her.

“The orcas. They brought me back when it was safe. They knew. They knew everything. I’d have never survived without…”

Maahjabeen swoons and Triquet catches her before she falls.

Ξ

In his downtime, Jay reads fantasy novels on his phone. He has an entire library, from old classics to new fanfic. He likes exploration stories best, where a hero adventures alone or with a small band into lands that no human has seen, and they encounter strange new life forms and magic and always—always—a dark secret that only the hero can truly deal with. The formula comforts him, and the fanciful descriptions of different worlds have only become more preposterous the more he learns of field biology in the real world.

Now, he’s having trouble getting into the next story. There’s a blue elf on the edge of a magical forest, gripping his spear and singing about seventeen verses of a song before he’s about to enter. But now that Jay has actually done it in real life—gone alone into the magical forest of an untamed land—he finds that the author has no idea what the hell they’re talking about. Who the fuck is singing songs? Where’s the anxiety, the careful re-checking of gear, the exhaustion you have to shake off after all the hoops you jumped through just to get to the edge of the forest to begin with? This pap is just written by some kid in the suburbs who has never journeyed farther than the local grocery store and whose only idea of nature is an interpretive trail at a state park.

Jay puts his phone down. For one of the first times ever, the spell can’t be sustained. He realizes it’s because he no longer has any need for the escapism. He did it. He’s already in the magical forest on the old haunted island. And it came with bumps and bruises—pretty much all self-inflicted, sure—but he doesn’t need to read about a fictional fantasy when he’s actually living it on the daily.

Maybe he’ll start writing. It’s never been his strong suit. He was diagnosed dyslexic once as a kid and then not dyslexic by like six other specialists but reading and writing still came late to him, only after the characters had stopped wandering all over the page and finally settled down. But the idea of a short story is imposing. That’s a lot of text, and he’s already deep in his field notes each day for hours.

Maybe poetry. Jay grins. He likes that idea. There’s magic here in this world. Maybe he can figure out ways to capture it in verse. “I mean, I’m no Kendrick Lamar but I can spit some mean bars.”

Someone is moving outside the small cell Jay inhabits. This had been Amy’s four walls of woven reeds until he’d hurt himself and she had taken to sleeping like a cat in the corners. He has to make sure she gets it back as soon as possible. His words stop whoever it is passing by. A slow-moving bulk fills his door. It is Alonso.

He blinks at Jay, his watery eyes swimming up from the depths. “I remember, Jay. I remember what I forgot when I split my head. Who I saw. You will never believe this but there is a—”

Miriam, working on her laptop near the bunker’s door, cries out in an excess of emotion, drowning out Alonso. He falls silent as she rushes the door.

Maahjabeen enters, held up by four others. Frail and tottering, but it is really her. Alonso gasps. He cannot believe his eyes. Nearly collapsing, he leans on his cane as a long groan escapes him.

“What is it?” Jay can’t see what they see. He is filled with alarm. Miriam sounds like she saw a ghost. “What, Alonso?”

But Alonso doesn’t even hear Jay. He waddles forward, pain and guilt forgotten for one sweet moment of relief so sharp he cannot contain it. He bellows, releasing the grief.

“Oh my god.” Esquibel exits the clean room and sees them. “Oh my god. Oh my god.” She rushes back into the clean room then rushes right back out again, holding a random piece of medical gear. She can’t get over her shock. “No, bring her in. Bring her in.” Esquibel shakes her head in wonder at the miracle. No, she has never been religious. But it is a miracle nevertheless. The odds of Maahjabeen surviving the last three days must be infinitesimal. Well, that is the miracle. The beating of impossible odds with human ingenuity and endurance.

They lay Maahjabeen down gently in the cot Mandy had used. Then Esquibel shoos the lot of them out, dismayed by the amount of dirt and sand they’ve tracked in. “Now I’ll have to sanitize everything again.”

Esquibel assesses her patient as she gathers her things for an exam. Maahjabeen has definitely suffered from exposure. She watches the doctor with glittering eyes but doesn’t speak.

Esquibel hands Maahjabeen water but the woman shakes her head no. “Water is the only thing… I had.”

“Food?”

“Ran out two days ago.”

Esquibel laughs, passing a hand over Maahjabeen’s forehead and slipping a thermometer into her mouth. “You sure are a tough girl, aren’t you? No simple storm was going to take you out.”

“God… was not willing.”

It’s the closest thing to a joke Maahjabeen has told and Esquibel laughs in appreciation. “First we will start with some of Amy’s tea and broth. You need electrolytes more than anything. I can give it as a shot if you…” But Maahjabeen has passed out. “Yes. Let’s do that then. And maybe a glucose drip. Let’s just put together a nice little cocktail here…”

When Esquibel inserts the IV, Maahjabeen doesn’t even flinch.

Ξ

Alonso once again sits in his camp chair under the trees. The wreckage has been cleared into piles that ring their camp. Pradeep and Katrina are busy rebuilding the platforms with all the new material the storm provided. They are getting ambitious with their ideas. Does he hear something about a deck and walkways? Those crazy kids. Where do they get all this energy?

Miriam approaches, folding her reading glasses into their case and closing her laptop. He sees her face transform from the cogitating academic to the suffering wife as she steps toward him and he resolves to keep himself from further ruining her mood. He is so tired of his self-pity. “Eh, Mirrie. What are you working on?”

She looks at him blankly, as if he spoke a language she doesn’t know. But no. That really was Alonso, speaking like a man again. Keeping her face carefully neutral, so as not to upset whatever delicate balance has led to this fine moment, Miriam says, “New rock and soil samples everywhere after the storm. I’ve got these feldspar flakes. Pattern-matching their crystallography against a database. You?”

He lifts a careless hand. “Haven’t you heard? I’m revolutionizing data science!”

They both share a soft laugh. She puts a hand on his shoulder. It’s Maahjabeen’s return. It has lightened all their hearts. Lisica is no longer a tragedy limping along as a failed science expedition. The tragedy has been reversed and it’s a science expedition again and they haven’t lost a soul. In fact, in the case of Alonso, they might actually regain one.

She asks, “How many beaches are there here, do you imagine?”

“Who knows? The map they showed me only had this one, I think. All of our focus was here. They said cliffs surrounded the island everywhere else so I assumed that meant this was it.”

Miriam thrills to hear his rational thought process again. During the storm she was afraid he’d collapsed into some alternate insanity that he would never escape. Now it looks like Alonso might heal, even from this. Oh, when will the suffering ever end?

He can see the attenuation in her face, her emotional reserves taxed more deeply than any time since her brother’s suicide. That had been their last dark time. It had seemed to last an eternity before she’d found the strength to go on. Now he couldn’t be responsible for adding any more pain to her life. He must be strong for her. The words Miriam and Plexity and Lisica have regained their meaning again, now that Maahjabeen has returned. He might even be able to accomplish some actual work today.

She sees all this play out on his face and Miriam’s heart uncoils a bit more. Can it truly be? She squeezes his hand. Is he back for good? Will she actually be able to focus on geology again? Their best vacations were always work trips for her, where he would stay back and cook for her and massage her shoulders when she was done. She misses his strong hands.

“Can we get into the interior, Zo? You don’t have to tell me details. Just a simple yes or no.”

He holds up a hand in a shrug. “Maybe at the end. They might bring a helicopter back.”

“And until then? I’m just here on the beach? You’re wasting prime Doctor Truitt field time, dear. I could be much more useful elsewhere. Not that I don’t need a vacation. But anyway, let me tell you what I really have in mind next: prospecting for caves. I’d bet if I dig into the limestone shelf behind the waterfall I’d find all kinds of fascinating things.”

But his mind is working now, she can see that. Alonso pats his pockets and frowns. “Could you bring me my laptop, Mirrie dear? And the brick?”

“And the battery and your glasses and a cup of tea. Coming right up.” She had been about to offer him a glass of wine and now she is so glad she did not. There will be more time for celebration later. Now, it is time to work.

Ξ

The celebration finally begins in the afternoon. Amy and Miriam erect the Love Palace on the larger platform that Pradeep is trying to extend in a long walkway to the bunker. Katrina has left him to it so she can set up her sound system again. The cascading strings of a Northern African pop song begin her set.

Maahjabeen, lying on a cot under the sky, lifts her wobbly head in surprise. “Eh. That’s Amani Al Souwasi. I love this song!”

Katrina squeals. “Oh, good! I looked and looked through my tracks. So glad I had a Tunisian. Her voice is amazing.”

Maahjabeen settles again with a smile on her face. She had been haunted those three unending days of the storm with visions of the others rejecting her, with good reason. She’d endangered them all by going out so recklessly onto the open water. Maahjabeen had jeopardized the entire mission. She expected when she returned that they would scream at her and cancel her contract. But there is none of that. No recriminations anywhere. Only Mandy, and her reproach is just for herself. It will be up to Maahjabeen to hold herself accountable here. Well. She definitely has enough self-criticism for that.

Flavia sits beside her with a lopsided smile, holding a tray of food. “Ready for dinner?”

“Starving. Eh.” It still hurts to talk. Her throat is so raw. Too much screaming and crying. “Glucose doesn’t really fill you up.”

“This is mostly broth with just a few noodles and veg. Here. We will start slow.” Flavia feeds her like a baby, tucking a napkin under her chin.

The salty broth tastes so good. Flavia dabs her chin and feeds her another spoonful.

Maahjabeen hates being helpless, hates being waited on. But still it is so nice to find that they care. Flavia cares. Nobody has fed her like this since she broke her collarbone in school and her mother had tended her and given her sponge baths.

Ah! She can’t think of her mother in this state. She is too raw. A sudden sob escapes her, making a mess of the broth. Flavia pulls back, startled and concerned.

“Oh, no. Too fast?” Flavia sets the bowl down and cleans the hot liquid from Maahjabeen’s neck and shoulders.

“No… You just… You made me think of my mom. Feeding me like a baby.”

“Ah. Yes, your mama.” Flavia sighs and shakes her head in pity. “This has not been your year.”

Maahjabeen doesn’t know how to respond to that. Actually, her career has really taken off since she has cast herself free. She has seen more of the world in the last twelve months than nearly the whole rest of her life combined. And opportunities like Lisica would not come too often, she knows. But inside? In the moments before she goes to sleep? Yes. Hot coals. And such isolation. She feels like the only person in the whole world.

Flavia uses a fresh napkin to wipe Maahjabeen’s cheeks free of tears. “There, there. Povero caro.” Now that the fierce Tunisian woman has taken herself to the edge of death, her proud shell has cracked. Flavia likes her a lot more now. “Your mama. Did she come to you? During the storm? In the darkness?”

Maahjabeen only shakes her head no. Nobody came. The nights were spent alone in a breathless suspension of anxiety and discomfort. None of her ancestors ever visited. Only the orcas.

Katrina mixes a classical piece in with her beloved Amani. Perhaps Haydn? It actually sounds good. Even the kick drum. Flavia nods her head in time to the beat. “Eh, our little Bubblegum DJ is pretty sharp. Her music makes me want to dance.”

But first she will finish feeding Maahjabeen. She was sure her mother would have visited. Even an imaginary visit, with all those hours and nothing to think about. Flavia can’t comprehend what Maahjabeen just went through. “I swear, I would have lasted about ten seconds in that storm. I do not know how you did it.”

“At one point my arms failed. My shoulders just wouldn’t work and I tried to lift the paddle but I couldn’t. And a current took me. It was going to smash me against the rocks and there was nothing I could do. Then the orcas appeared. They steered me right out of there back to the open ocean. They saved me, Flavia.”

“That is incredible.”

“And they led me home this morning. They told me when it was time and which way to go. God came to me through them.”

“Incredible.”

Ξ

It has taken all day for Pradeep to adjust to this new storm-tossed reality. And his mental state is still not entirely what it should be. A refrain has been echoing in his head since losing his sanity in front of everyone on more than one occasion. Not good enough not strong enough not tough enough – I don’t belong here… Over and over in an unending cycle. He can hardly look anyone in the eyes now.

But he is grateful for Katrina’s kindness, giving him a task to retreat into, and the effort he puts into rebuilding the platforms bigger and better than before is fueled by his quivering antisocial need to retreat deeply into himself. That is how he will heal.

Amy finds him near the end, when he is building his own platform. He gets a larger deck than he expected because of all the leftover wood. Without asking, Amy organizes the final pile and hands him each branch as he needs it. The work goes quickly.

At the end, he ties off the last joint with twine and stands, his back sore and shoulders burning. He dusts himself off and finds Amy still looking wordlessly at him, but letting him know with one of her irrepressible smiles that she has something for him.

Pradeep sighs. She is still his boss. This is still a job, even though his stipend is pitiful, not even four thousand dollars. He nods, trying to muster a competent air, and follows her out to the beach.

They walk alongside the trunk of the massive fallen redwood in silence. The deep corrugations of its bark—as seen with eye-along trunk, stretching away to the flaring root base—is a deep pattern, mathematics beyond what he can easily conceptualize. But it is still mathematics. The growth of this tremendous organism was as much a mechanical process as a biological one.

Finally Amy brings him to the base. It is truly a massive tree. Its trunk is over five meters in diameter here and the roots that were torn from the ground spread skyward now a good ten meters above his head. They skirt the wreckage, pushing themselves through the ceanothus and ferns. Huge shards of bright orange and red wood litter the area, as if the tree exploded. The underside is cavernous.

Pradeep exhales in wonder. “Oooooo.”

Amy laughs, the silence finally broken. “I knew you’d like it.”

When the tree had fallen, the peripheral roots had snapped and then the central root system had failed. The gust that had taken this tree down must have been immense. Pradeep touches the twisted roots, hard as iron. “This is another sign of anthropogenic global warming. We see no other trees of this size on this beach. And it wasn’t diseased. Therefore the storm that brought it down is measurably more intense than the ones that came before, or we would otherwise have a beach littered with the trees that had fallen in previous storms, quod erat demonstrandum.”

Amy smiles, relieved to have him talking again. These unearthed treasures should keep him busy a good long time. There appears to be an abandoned bobcat den on the periphery of the root system, with piles of bones and scat. Cavities in the rock and soil that have been unearthed are thick with the silk of spider eggs and floor-dwelling arthropods of many varieties. A whole writhing mass of larvae under a fallen sheet of bark still strive to develop.

And then there’s the interactions between soil and root and mycorrhizal fungi, which was always of particular interest to Pradeep. Here, Alonso’s Dyson readers would be invaluable.

“We passed this when we were carrying Maahjabeen back and I thought my god but I didn’t have time to stop. I knew this would be your happiest place. But I myself can’t wait to get a look at the crown. I think it’s accessible. Are you coming?”

Pradeep looks up at Amy, lost already in this miniature world of minerals and microbiology and artifacts. Tree forensics. They have called it that before. While walking in the woods they would stop when they saw fallen trees, discussing how they fell and what caused the initial failure. In crowded conditions it can take a long time to untangle which tree fell first and why. “Eh? Coming? No. But look, Amy. It wasn’t just the wind that knocked it over.”

He points at the exact underside of the tree’s heartwood. It is seared black in a wide jagged crescent. A similar scar in the remaining underground bole is visible under the fallen earth.

“Is that from lightning? Ye gods.” Amy reorders what she sees in her head. Those burst roots aren’t from being forced apart by the wind. Now she can pick out the black edges of certain shards. This trunk was blown out. A bolt with horrific power must have hit it somewhere up its length and shot through all the way into the ground. It must have gone off like a bomb. There were certainly explosions aplenty during the storm. This must have been one of them. “I wonder, is the poor bole dead too? Is this how you kill a redwood? Can its heart survive such a massive lightning strike?”

“How would we even be able to tell?”

“Well, anyway, so much for your climate change proof. This wasn’t necessarily a stronger storm. Unless the degree to which a storm is electrical is modified by anthropogenic factors. Which would be pretty amazing. Is there any data on that?”

“I have no idea. Maybe we can ask Mandy. But what about the surrounding ecology?” Pradeep ranges past the edges of the pit, where whole stands of ferns and buckthorn are crushed by the raw wood fragments. What about the small rodents who lived beneath? The crabs? The insects? “You know… I am not sure if this is what Plexity is really for. I get the sense we are supposed to be trying to measure the island as an entity that is in homeostasis. But this is such a new and dramatic reordering of the local context that, I don’t know, doesn’t it skew everything out of balance? Too much emphasis in favor of one recent dramatic event instead of the thousand years that this tree stood? How do we place correct value on each frame of reference? I suppose that is really a question for Flavia and Katrina…”

“Aw, now I worry that the crown might be blasted clean away. You’re okay here? If I leave you alone?”

Pradeep has trouble meeting Amy’s eyes. But he knows she deserves some recognition of his issue. It is certainly affecting his performance. “Yes. These are the things I study. Nothing is more familiar and comforting to me. Thank you, Doctor Kubota. I have not always had such understanding teachers and bosses in my life. My weakness was always something I had to hide.”

Amy grimaces. “No. Not weakness, Pradeep. Don’t think of it like that. You aren’t weak, by any measure. Right? You must see that. You have, I mean, you’re so competent in so many ways. Some of what you do is like superhero capability.”

“But I still can’t travel to Tucson without a panic attack.”

“Who can? No, but seriously. Ask yourself. Go back in time to yourself as, what, like a nine or ten year old kid? Tell him where you are now and what you’re doing, out here in the wide open world with some of the brightest minds of our time. Tell him he made it! He didn’t remain a prisoner to his fear.”

“Well. If we’re going back that far, can we just tell my parents instead? I think it would have probably been more useful.”