Lisica Chapters

Thanks for joining us for the third volume of 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 episode:

Book III – Methodology of Madness

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
— John Steinbeck

31 – Ja Sam Wetchie-Ghuy

“And what do you make of this?” Triquet pushes their taped-up photo across the table before Morska Vidra. The elder stares at the image of the Tlingit tapestry, carved bone fishing spear, and word written in Cyrillic that Triquet has reconstructed.

Morska Vidra studies the photo in sad silence.

“Ji-na-háa.” Katrina sounds out the Cyrillic letters phonetically. But the word is unbearable to the old Lisican and he leans away from her, blanching. Finally he murmurs an answer.

“What’s that? Could you repeat, uh… povtori pozhaluysta?”

Morska Vidra speaks a few more broken sentences. “Something like, he’s only seen these once as a kid. The people who are beyond the river. They have them? These are their artifacts?” Katrina picks up the photo and mimes giving it to people in the interior of the island.

Morska Vidra only falls silent. He glares at her, apparently resentful that she brought it up.

“Ji-da-daa,” Katrina repeats. “I want to learn what that is. It seems to be key to the whole…”

But repeating the word is too much for Morska Vidra. With an outraged chuff he pulls himself awkwardly from the unfamiliar camp chair and stalks away, toward the creek. He does not return.

“Oops!” Katrina squeaks. “Sorry! God, this is just so… random. There’s this whole perspective shift thing I still do not get at all. Like in Lisican you’re not an actual being. You’re just a collection of other people’s impressions of you, who you’re related to, where you stand, where you’re going. It’s all very postmodern I guess.”

“Sounds like Plexity.” Alonso’s voice comes from the far side of his big platform. “Environment is everything. I think maybe I’ve gotten these people wrong. Perhaps they are very wise.”

“I guess it makes sense if you think about it,” Katrina continues, while Triquet studies the photo with frustration. “Maybe we all started with this kind of deep subjectivity. But how did we ever disconnect from thinking about the world that way? Imagine everybody understands that they’re all part of the web, right? And then one day some absolute psycho shows up and says, Fuck that. I’m only me. And I’m holy. And I’m in charge. And I’m not connected to any of you bitches or anything in the whole world around me. I mean, what an absolute bloody narcissist.”

Alonso laughs. “Context. It’s all context. We live in a data-rich age of context, right, Katrina?”

“You know, we did this breakout session at one of the security conferences I attended,” Katrina tells them, “where we had to try to re-imagine law and justice to be more fair. And they all got into how laws could be more universally applied. But I was like, hold up, that’s retrograde thinking. Three hundred years old. Our ancestors conceived of universal justice like that because they couldn’t see how to do it better. But we can. My idea is that each punishment or rehabilitation strategy should instead be tailored to each criminal as specifically as possible. Context, yeh. So I proposed that each person gets an official profile, open-sourced and secure, and we assign hundreds of numerical values to a whole spectrum of factors: upbringing, job, education, intent when committing the crime, you know, any amount of remorse… and then we use that profile and a shit ton of machine learning to construct a custom solution for every perpetrator.”

“I mean, isn’t this what we’re already doing?” Triquet sighs in surrender and puts the photo back in its manila folder. “Apart from your creepy digital profile idea, I mean, isn’t this what the justice system already does? At least it’s supposed to. It gives weight to things like background. In most countries at least, right? There’s steps to this. Pre-trial hearings. Jury of your peers. Sentencing. They already take things like intent and remorse into account. We don’t need a robot deciding who goes to jail or not.”

“Yeh, it wasn’t very popular at the conference, either. But I’m just talking about deriving more nuanced solutions for each crime. It’s all context now. That’s all I’m saying. I mean, you’ve heard of personalized medicine, yeh? Same concept. Individualize diagnosis and treatment, with increased efficacy that drives down the price. Everything’s data science now. Everything.”

This conversation is straying into territory that Alonso has hardly ever allowed himself to seriously consider. But the wild ideas he gets at night right before he falls asleep suddenly seem a little less wild. “She is right. This young generation will forever be known as the great collectors. Everything is about input now. We aren’t even really collating the data yet. That will be the goal of the next generation. Now is when we record the richness of life on this planet before it vanishes completely. Details, and the patterns within the details. That is our gold. And then, who knows, in a few hundred years, after the world has finished burning, it will be these records we are making right now that will bring all the life back.”

“Ji-da-daa…” Katrina repeats it again, looking up the word in first her Eyat then her Tlingit vocabulary lists. “I mean, there’s ‘jinduháayi,’ which means post office, or more precisely, ‘Building, around paper, delivered by hand.’ See what I mean? That’s some convoluted bullshit there. Or, ‘jinkaat,’ which is their number for ten, but specifically means, ‘hands facing each other.’ Whoa.” She drops her hands, helpless. “I’m sorry, Triq. This was supposed to answer a bunch of questions, but instead…”

Triquet stands, shrugging philosophically. “We just get more questions. It’s the way of the world, little sister.” They kiss the top of Katrina’s head and collect their things.

The door to the bunker opens. Esquibel stands in the frame. “What is this I hear about one of the Lisicans visiting us?”

Katrina falls back against her chair. “He’s already gone.”

“What? Why? We need one of them to look at Pradeep! He’s been poisoned or something! How did you just let him go?”

“Oh. Ack. Sorry. You’re right.” Katrina stands. “I’ll go find him. He went this way. Just… Ugh. I’ll be right back.” She hurries away.

Triquet grimaces in apology. “Sorry, Doc. It was my fault. I’m just trying to solve all these mysteries.”

“Yes, well…” Esquibel tries to find something to say that won’t indicate how very cross she is. “Me too.”

Ξ

“Okay, Pradeep. We’re going to roll over on three, okay?” Mandy holds his legs. Esquibel grips his shoulders. Maahjabeen still won’t release her full-body embrace.

The Lisican woman they refer to as the Mayor stands in a corner of the clean room, frowning terribly. Katrina hadn’t been able to find Morska Vidra, following his trail all the way back through the creekside tunnels to the village. But she had implored the Mayor to return with her. She suspects the woman might even understand a bit what is needed. Now Mandy and Maahjabeen and Esquibel all wear masks and gloves, their delirious patient fighting for breath.

Pradeep groans, a weak wet sound, phlegm rattling in his throat. They roll him over so Maahjabeen is on her back with him above. Esquibel pulls up his shirt, revealing the fox’s profile of angry red and black dots and the swelling at the base of his spine.

The Mayor pulls back with a hiss, like she’s seen a viper. She looks at each of them with wide-eyed outrage, pointing the tip of her thumb at each while intoning a chant.

“What is it? What?” Esquibel begs the woman.

“Lisica, yes?” Katrina prods her, outlining the shape of the fox’s head on his skin with her finger.

But the Mayor disagrees vociferously, her words coming in such a clashing rush that Katrina can’t follow. She fumbles her phone out and begins recording just as the Mayor’s speech ends.

“Okay. Got it. I mean, I didn’t get any of it, but I got that this isn’t Lisica. No. This is… some other fox then? I’m so confused.”

The Mayor is very upset with them. She begins lecturing, Katrina recording. The Mayor picks up the closest items off Esquibel’s bins, a short stack of paper. She tosses them to the ground, indicating that they are useless. Then with a loud wordless yell—Ayo! she leans over Pradeep, resting her elbow in the middle of his back. The Mayor puts her weight behind her elbow and presses until he expels his breath, a bubbling wetness. She presses harder and he expels more, finally ending with a trickle of milky brown rheum trickling from his chin. The Mayor stands back and points at it, careful not to touch it. “Kadziyiki.” She repeats the word again and again until Katrina echoes it.

“What is that?” Esquibel inspects the discharge, but the Mayor draws the doctor’s hand away before she can touch it. So she looks at it through her otoscope from a handspan’s distance. “Fine. I won’t touch it, I promise. But I should get a sample for testing…”

“Let’s see. Kadziyiki means…” Katrina scrolls through her vocabulary list. “Mud. A swamp place.” She points at Pradeep’s belly and repeats the word.

As confirmation, the Mayor repeats the word as well.

“I think she’s saying it’s magic of some kind or other. A curse.”

“Why would Wetchie-ghuy do this?” Katrina asks.

The name stops the Mayor in mid-sentence. She bares her teeth in an involuntary show of disgust and makes it clear with words and gestures that Pradeep’s illness is not the work of Wetchie-ghuy. But a new thought appears to interrupt her and after a long moment of consideration she repeats the name. “Wetchie-ghuy…”

Mandy releases Pradeep’s feet and shakes her hands to get his illness off them. The nausea seeping into her immediately fades. “Uh, then what if we get that Wetchie-ghuy guy to help Pradeep?”

Esquibel holds up an importuning hand. “Wait. As your doctor, I am not in favor of this idea.”

“Oh, because you’ve still got so many ideas of your own?” Mandy giggles to take the sting out of her words, but Esquibel scowls at her regardless. “I mean, if it’s some weird infectious fluid, wouldn’t we rather have them deal with it instead of us anyway?”

“I think we’ve got a bigger problem than that,” Katrina says. “How can we bring Wetchie-ghuy into camp without Flavia losing her mind?”

Esquibel demands, “I will not allow some—some herbalist to treat one of my patients. Especially since we know he is hostile. Or is she perhaps not saying that Wetchie-ghuy is responsible for doing this? That is crazy to think there might be another one. I mean, how many shamans does an island this size need?”

“Pradeep…” Maahjabeen murmurs. The others fall silent and she blushes. “Mahbub. I need to go to the trenches. I will be…”

Pradeep groans. His eyelids flutter. He seems to struggle at the edge of consciousness, unable to break through.

“I am so sorry. I’ve been holding it for hours…”

“That’s fine,” Katrina says. “I can wrap him up for a bit. You go take care of yourself. Maybe grab a bite.”

“No. I can’t.” Maahjabeen gasps when she releases her embrace. She’d forgotten how newly healed her shoulders are and now they scream as she moves them. Pradeep is unmoving. She slides out from under him, the pain and the heartache making her sob.

The Mayor watches her, stone-faced. Maahjabeen locks eyes with her and vows that she will not show another sign of weakness to this cypher of a woman. Maahjabeen can be stoic. Just watch.

Mandy and Katrina pull her free and she stands, clamping her mouth shut. She is still staring at the Mayor, whose black eyes seem to possess a reservoir of strength that Maahjabeen can access. Now she realizes the Lisican woman isn’t judging her, but silently lending her support.

Katrina scoots into position. “So… just like give him a good cuddle? Anything I should know? Any places I shouldn’t touch?”

Mandy giggles.

Maahjabeen can’t wait any longer. Her mind has no space for the prospect of beautiful blonde Katrina wrapping herself around Pradeep and nursing him while Maahjabeen departs. But the jealousy she expects doesn’t appear. Only a tired gratitude for Katrina and a screaming terror of worry for Pradeep. She pushes herself through the plastic sheets of the clean room, determined to do this as fast as possible.

Katrina lies down beside Pradeep. “Come here, luv.” She wraps herself around him, drawing him over her like a blanket. His sandalwood scent, which she had found so attractive before, has now turned sour. She recalls their spider hunt in the bushes, when she had such a strong impulse to kiss him that she’d kissed Mandy instead. Now she has no desire for this ailing man. But isn’t this when he needs her affection the most? She turns her face and kisses his ear, softly, with real tenderness, and breathes through her nose into the nape of his neck. Somewhere deep inside he quivers but his limbs are so heavy they’re nearly rigid. Poor bloke. What had he and Maahjabeen done out there to deserve this?

Suddenly a sharp wrongness knifes through Katrina. Horror fills her. “Wait. Esquibel. I don’t think he’s breathing. I…”

Esquibel curses and with a strong hand pulls Pradeep away from Katrina, who shifts herself entirely off the cot onto the floor. Esquibel rolls him onto his back and straddles his prostrate form. She pulls her mask off and points at the Mayor, “Get that woman out of here!” before beginning a strenuous round of CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Ξ

An hour later, a muddy Amy finds Mandy at the camp’s kitchen tables, fixing a pot of tea. “Could I get one of those?” Amy has already cleaned her hands in the creek before returning to camp but she still pinches the handle of a mug daintily, afraid the mud on her sleeve might touch it.

“Of course. What’d you do? You look like something the cat dragged in.” Mandy fills Amy’s cup with steaming green tea.

“I was in your elevator shaft.”

“You were?” Now Amy has Mandy’s full attention. “What were you doing in there?”

“Figuring out how to get to the top.”

“Oh my god. Really? And did you? Oh, please… That would be so… I mean, why? Why do you even want to get to the top?”

“I’ve got to find Jay, Mandy. As soon as possible. We have no idea how much danger he might be in. He’s my responsibility. My grad student. But I can’t even cross the fucking village to get to the trailhead he took. They won’t let me. So I need to find another way into the interior. Or my time here will be an entire waste. No. Worse than that. I swear to god if I have to go back home without Jay or Pradeep I’ll just…” Amy suddenly dissolves in tears.

Mandy catches the blocky little woman in her arms and kisses the top of her head. “Oh… Oh, no… He’s fine. I’m sure of it. Jay’s like some super outdoorsman. Living outside here is a snap for someone like him. And Pradeep…” She has no words for his condition. Esquibel had barely been able to bring him back from the brink last time, and he hadn’t stabilized until Mandy had gone to find Maahjabeen, who raced back to wrap her beloved once more in her arms. Instead, she tries to change the subject with gossip. “So. Did you know Maahjabeen and Pradeep were a thing? Or did everyone know but me?”

That stops Amy’s tears. Her breath catches in her throat. “They what? What kind of thing? What are you talking about? No, honey. I’m pretty sure Pradeep is a virgin.”

“Well maybe that’s what Maahjabeen loves so much about him. His purity. Katrina said she found them one night last week. She was in his bed. Isn’t that sweet?”

“Really? Sweet, uh, yeah…” For some reason, Amy can’t process this new information. It’s just so unlikely. “I’m not sure if, I mean, I don’t know if Maahjabeen is really introductory girlfriend material, know what I mean? And why’d he hide it from me of all people? Just… Seriously? Are you sure?”

“Maahjabeen won’t let anyone else hold him. She said it’s their love that’s keeping him alive. And after he coded last time she let go we’re inclined to believe her.”

“I don’t know what to say. Pradeep. You secretive bastard. Ah… he couldn’t tell me because of her. She needed it to be a secret. Some weird Muslim thing, right? That’s it, isn’t it?”

Mandy shrugs and rests her forehead against Amy’s in sweet intimacy. “Who knows? Love works in mysterious ways.”

Amy shakes her head in wonder. “Well. I hope it works out. Their children would look like… movie stars, that’s for sure.”

“I know, right?” Mandy giggles and releases Amy.

“Thanks for that, dear one. And let me repay you by telling you how I think we can get to the top of the shaft.”

“Fuck yes! Oh, Amy, thank you so much! You have no idea how hard it’s been for me to figure out a safe way to the—”

“Well, don’t get too attached to that ‘safe’ idea.”

“Oh, crap. What is it?”

“I mean, it’s as safe as I can come up with. But it is like hundreds of meters straight up. There is no super safe way for people to go up and down that thing without like a professional construction crew. But ain’t none of us here engineers so we’ll do what we can.”

“Now I don’t know what to think.”

“Well. Let me just drink my tea and you get some caving clothes on. It’s easier to show you what I have in mind than tell you.”

“Kay kay. Meet you back here in five.”

Later, after all the descents and struggles through muddy tunnels, Mandy stands with Amy at the base of the shaft. It is no longer flooded, and when the water drained it took a lot of the ash and cinders with it, leaving a long black trail down to the concrete culvert and the sea cave. Now they can tell that beneath the blackened ashes that remain is a solid concrete floor to the shaft. But whatever anchor points Mandy had been trying to blindly find with her frozen feet a few days before are not there.

They drag the last intact limbs clear of the center of the floor and stare upward at the small dot of gray light far above. It looks impossible to Mandy, and nobody wants to get up there as bad as her. But it’s just so far.

“Tell me what you see.” Amy’s voice echoes in the shaft, a harsh reverberation off the concrete walls.

Mandy swings her phone’s light up the shaft. “Not much. Lots of vertical. No handholds. Uh… Tons of burn marks. Can I have a hint? What am I looking for here?”

“Okay. What are the walls made of?”

Mandy drops her light to eye level. She brushes her hand over the smooth blocks. “Yeah, okay, it’s only concrete here at the bottom. Then it’s, I don’t know, what is it up there? Clay? Rock?”

“It’s rock. Care for another hint?”

“Please.”

Amy silently points at the trail of ash and cinders at their feet, leading out of the shaft’s base into the tunnel.

“Uhh, neat.” Mandy turns away so Amy can’t see how irritated she is. “Maybe I’m just not as smart as everybody else here, okay, Amy? Maybe I don’t have all these spectacular doctorates from world-class programs so you’ll have to excuse me—”

“No, no. I’m not—You’re not… Sorry. I’m being too playfully obtuse. I was just standing where you are, looking up, cursing that little fucking hole in the top. Then I thought to myself: How did this shaft get made? They didn’t drill it. It’s not quite that regular.”

“I don’t know. How did all the other tunnels get made?”

Amy lifts her eyebrows and points once again at the trail of black slurry running out of view.

“It burned…?” Mandy scrunches up her face. “But that makes no sense. What burned? The rock?”

“No. Sorry, Mandy. I’ll stop playing games. It’s water. Water carved this shaft, and nearly all the tunnels we’ve seen in here. Now come here. Let me show you something else I found.”

Mandy is still mystified. Amy keeps telling her she’ll tell her what she means and then she just keeps adding more and more random details that make no sense. “Sure. Now what?’

Amy takes Mandy back into the tunnel, but before it reaches the junction with the passage that heads upwards to the Lisican village, Amy stops at an outcrop of rock. She points her light at a pair of rusted iron pipes that run vertically from ceiling to floor. “Listen.”

“Listen…?” Mandy wipes the pipe as clean as she can and then presses her ear against it. Liquid, and not a trickle. These old pipes are still functional.

“The Army Corps of Engineers must have been in here. These are probably drainage for some other chamber up above to keep it clear. I bet it empties into their culvert and then the sea cave. But look.” Amy pockets her phone and grasps a circular handle. Her forearm muscles bunch and she grunts. Then it turns.

After a few rotations the pipe closes off. Amy pulls Mandy to the wall beside her and points to a bypass pipe. Now the water shoots out its end, much more than a liter per second. It splashes onto the tunnel’s floor and runs down back toward the culvert.

Mandy looks at Amy, who has the most self-satisfied smile on her face of her life. But then her smile drops when she realizes that Mandy still doesn’t see what she means. “Oh. Right. So… Next step. Block the passage leading down to the culvert there with tarps and rocks, forming a plug. And then ta-daaa!” Amy spreads her hands wide. But Mandy still only glares at her. “Ah. I mean, of course, the final thing I still have to mention is that we’re floating on a raft. In the elevator shaft. And there’s nowhere for the water to go. Except up. We fill the shaft and ride it to the top!”

Now Mandy laughs. “Are you insane? I set the shaft on fire and now you’re going to flood it? Is this some kind of competition?”

Amy laughs too. “No! Think about it! I mean, it’s got its share of drawbacks, for sure. It’s not something we can do, well, probably more than once. And I have no idea how long it would take to fill it. A day or two? So that part stinks. I mean, there’s a lot wrong with the whole idea but I just can’t figure out how else to do it!”

“I asked Katrina if she’d fly the drone up the shaft and try to attach some cable or something up there.” Mandy shakes her head. “But she said the shaft is too narrow. She’d have to turn collision-avoidance off and then she said she wasn’t good enough to not crash manually into the walls.”

“Well and then what?” Amy grimaces. “Let’s say we’ve got like three hundred meters of twine dangling down to us. So? We don’t have more than a third of that distance in climbing rope. What else are we going to use? Dental floss? I mean, I could manufacture some rope from the long-fiber creekside plants but that would take days if not weeks. We need to find Jay now.”

Mandy thinks about sitting in a raft for hours on end as the water level slowly rises toward the top. Just her and Amy and her weather station. But it wouldn’t even have any weight requirements this time. She could load it up with all the best gear. Hygrometer. Full windspeed rotor. She could even bring spare batteries and just hook them up in sequence. And she wouldn’t have to check on it more than once every few days. “Wait. Ugh. I should have asked him when I had the… Ah, hell.”

“What is it?”

“Jay! When he got trapped in the village with Triquet and Miriam he said that one day he went with the villagers to see the top of the tunnel, where the fire came from. And I was like, ‘Aha! The villagers can lead me to the spot from above. He said they climbed over the edge of the cliffs and came down to the top of this shaft on the ocean side. And I was going to have him show me so I could start making that my route but then we stopped talking to the villagers. And then I forgot with all the other madness going on. So now we’re all buddies again but he’s gone. Crap!”

“Well, still. That solves your problem, doesn’t it? You can go ask the villagers to lead you to any spot you want on the cliffs. It just needs to be high and like securely-placed, right?”

“Yeah, but…” Mandy sighs. “I think I still have your problem. Not that they hate me per se…”

“Oh, thanks.”

“No! It’s just that they can shut off the village to us whenever they like and I need regular access to my weather station. We can’t depend on them. We need our own way in.”

Amy nods. “So… What do you think we could make the raft of?”

“Maybe we could use Maahjabeen’s kayaks.”

“Yeah, and maybe Brad Pitt will be my sex slave.” Amy laughs in such hilarious disbelief that Mandy starts to as well.

Ξ

Pradeep twists and turns on the bed, fighting for his life. He thrashes, the cords in his neck straining. He drums the back of his head against the pillow, fighting to rid himself of this horrid infestation.

But he knows that in reality he does none of these things. His body remains slack, eyes glazed. The fight is entirely internal. Nobody can see how hard he struggles.

He knows he is about to die. He tries to find peace. Maahjabeen pressed against him gives indescribable relief. After his unending struggle against the cold pit of mud within him he is almost ready to surrender to oblivion. He has gotten to love the most beautiful woman on Earth. What more is there, really, after that? It is such an impossibility for a kasmaalam nerd like himself to have loved such an angel. Death is really the only possible thing next. But his regret will not let him go. Regret for not knowing her better, touching this unbelievable skin just a bit more. Regret that they will not grow old together, that he will not be there for her when she will need him. That is such a distasteful thought that it gets him to fight once more against the pit.

The little bit of his brain that remains working now puzzles out a possible way to combat the pit of mud. Within himself, where he feels the edges of it, he has drawn a ring of fire around it, stopping its slow seeping spread up into the rest of him. The fire is love and anger and every scrap of his survival instinct that he can muster. Now he has the fire burn down, all around the sides of the pit. He will excise it entirely with fire. He will find its bottom and burn beneath that and then isolate this cauterized pit of mud within him like a giant bloated splinter. Once it is encased entirely in fire then he can remove it. He can take himself back.

Burn… Burn… He doesn’t know what it is he burns here in the abstract internal world of his spirit. It is certainly some essential part of himself. Tissues… or memories… Perhaps he is destroying himself to save himself. Yes. Like a fever. Without fever he will die.

Why was this done to him? What did Pradeep do to deserve this? They say a fox bit him in the back, which makes no sense. And now he is dying of, what… rabies? Is that what this is?

It’s all muddled. He can’t keep straight any of the details they’ve told him. Disjointed phrases keep circling in his head. He realizes how slowly they revolve. Too slow. The cold mud is winning again. Where is his fire? Has it gone out?

No, it has just disappeared deep into the black firmament of his mind, still surrounding the pit of mud as it crackles its way downward. Now Pradeep feels an attenuated pain, as if someone strikes his spinal cord like a piano note. This time he grunts and he knows Maahjabeen hears it. Pain. Yes, pain is good. Pain is life.

She looks at him, her eyes ravaged from so many tears. But she is not hopeless. So he cannot be. He fights the words out, the corners of his mouth twitching upward bravely. “I am… not… dead.”

Ξ

“Ventilation ain’t your problem, Kula. It’s got to be humidity. I mean, this is like fog grand central. Here.” Jay holds up the frosty bud, its fan leaves curling, nearly black. “Look at the cola, dude. Smell it. You got to harvest now or shit’s gonna mold out on you.”

Kula, the Lisican gardener, stands at his shoulder smoking her joint. Her face is seamed with a perpetual smile and her black curls are a frizzy mass. She grunts and waters a row of lettuces with a cracked plastic watering can. “Bimeby Jay help. Wit Kula, yaw?”

Her pidgin is surprisingly understandable. Jay has no idea what that indicates about the island, or, more importantly, his safety here. Who taught her to speak English? Where did she get all this gear? And what about all this weed? Not that there aren’t a wide variety of other fruits and vegetables in these planters. Jay wonders why Kula doesn’t cultivate her garden on the surface. “This can’t be the best spot to grow on the island. You need more sun, sister.”

Kula claps her hand on his shoulder. She’s been friendly from the get go. She pushes her cigar at him again and he takes a big wet toke. Very grassy weed. Probably not too much in the way of THC but who knows about its terpenes. Once they get settled he’ll bust out his homegrown Kush and blow Kula’s goddamn mind.

Rows of raised beds, built from raw saplings bound together with frayed nylon straps, have been filled with a dark loamy soil that probably came from the redwoods above. And it looks like a lot of starters are already pushing through the surface. Her spring plantings are a success. What day is it? Like mid-April? He takes out his phone. The date is April 20.

“Yoooooo! Look at that, Kula! 420! 420! We hit it just right!”

But of course she has no idea what he’s talking about. She just gabbles something he doesn’t understand, much like he’s gabbling something at her. But that’s cool. They’re high. And hidden. And safe. “Four twenty…!” Jay leans out the gun emplacement’s curving opening, shouting over the open ocean far below. His words are immediately snatched by the wind. But he doesn’t care. He laughs, falling back. “Hey… Maybe you can help us, Kula. If you know like all the plants here, maybe you can like, I mean, we’re sort of doing a survey, you know. Flora and fauna. Maybe you could like help us identify a whole bunch of genera.”

“Eh. Eh.” Kula nods vigorously. She pulls something up by the roots, like a stringy white carrot, and pushes it into Jay’s hands. “Takee boss. Jay good good. Je rotkvica, yass.”

“Okay. If you say so…” Jay brushes the rest of the soil off and nibbles at its end. It crunches between his teeth and releases a clean watery taste across his tongue. It’s good. “Right on. This would be so good in a salad. Man, I’m gonna make the best fucking salads. Any olive oil and balsamic here by any chance?”

But Kula is back to her watering and weeding, talking to herself in a satisfied sing-song, the words a jumble of English and Lisican and who knows what else. What an odd duck. For one thing, she’s fat. Jay hasn’t seen any fat Lisicans before. Her skin is bad and she’s wearing an old hoodie with HOLLISTER stenciled across the chest. Her formerly-white Reeboks are split along each side. Her hair is lank and greasy. She is obviously suffering the effects of prolonged contact with the modern world. Now she looks just like any other shut-in anywhere in the world. Just get her a laptop and a VPN and she’d never see another live human ever again.

He wanders away from the plants for the first time to a dark corner recessed in the bare rock. He expected to find some kind of rat’s nest of bedding but instead he finds a neatly cut-out rectangle in the rock that runs as a passage to a contained chamber, far enough back to protect its occupants from explosions in the gun emplacement. This must have been command and control back here. The room is only like five by six meters, with seven wide ventilation shafts in the ceiling. Since its abandonment, these holes have allowed in trickles of detritus and the shafts are no longer clear; they only let in a bit of diffracted daylight.

Beneath the seven holes sit undisturbed conical piles of dirt surrounded by a scattering of leaves. “Ooo, creepy. Looks like some kind of… crypt in here yo.”

Kula, behind him, giggles. “Atsa sugoya eet ká. Yass, Jay. Me an me.” She takes him by the hand and leads him to a flattened and stained Navy cot mattress against the far wall. Ah. The rat’s nest.

“Uh… Not here looking for love, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m a grad student. Not a… I mean, not that grad students don’t get down. It’s just… That’s real flattering, Kula, you know what I mean? But, uh, I’m kind of in the middle of something right now.”

Kula giggles at him some more, hooking her fingers into his pockets. She snares a wad of leaves he collected and she frowns at them. “Me and me and Jay make three…” But her voice falters, looking at him with concern.

“What? Those are some rhododendron variety I found down in the river valley. You know the one? Over by the…? Well you got your tunnel-mouth tribe, down in the southeast corner of the island. You know, the one with Morska Vidra? And then there’s the bad guy village. Somewhere deeper in? Yeah. That valley.”

“Morska Vidra…” Kula’s nose twitches like a rabbit’s. She wipes it with the back of her hand and sneers. She lists off a bunch of other names. The only one Jay catches is “Wetchie-ghuy…”

“Yeah. That’s the one. That’s where I got the leaves. There.” He points where his internal compass guesses southeast is.

“Yass. Me and Jay znamo.”

“So I was wondering if you could help me with the classifica—”

But Kula hisses and throws the leaves on the ground. They are unclean to her or something. Then she stiffens. She casts a devilish grin sideways at Jay. “Jidadaa.”

Jay just nods stupidly, wondering what she means. Her change of mood is so mercurial he can’t follow it. Kula crosses back to the entrance to the chamber but a low black oblong against the wall to his right catches Jay’s attention. It is a decades-old military radio. And its power is on. A bank of batteries are connected and several wires run up one of the ventilation shafts to the surface. Jay peers at it closely. Its glowing analog dials and needles twitch slightly, picking up some signal. He squints at its frontpiece, finding the volume knob. He turns it, hearing static and garbled voices and nothing more.

He turns, calling out, “Where’d you get this, Kula…?” And then the words die in his throat. Someone new enters, slight and tall for a Lisican. Young, like twenty at the most. Her face is more pale and narrow. Her eyes are gray and sad. She is singing. A Lisican girl is singing, a soft wordless ballad. When she sees Jay she stops.

“Jidadaa.” Kula points to her. “Jay.”

Jidadaa just looks at Jay, her face neutral, hands hiding each other, lower lip glistening in the dim light.

“Hey, what’s up?” His greeting feels so awkward and paltry he resolves to do better. “Jay Darmer. Uh. Nice to meet you.” It’s clear what he’s looking at here, a mother and daughter. And now the whole story makes sense. Kula fell in love with some mystery military dude. They had a baby. She had to hide. He still provides for her somehow? They’re in touch by radio? “I like your song.”

Jidadaa’s eyes twitch and a tiny smile teases the corner of her mouth. She is angular with a prominent nose and wavy brown hair, but her mother’s slyness is still in her, around the broad cheekbones and shifting eyes. She edges her way into the chamber, beginning to sing again. There is a coiled excitement in her that makes Jay think she’s about to spring some surprise on him. But she looks so harmless. How bad can it be?

Jidadaa hugs herself in her stained hoodie, one palm running up and down the other arm. Her song seems to be nonsense syllables in a simple scale, like when someone plays around on a piano without knowing how to bring it to life. Jay starts adding his own notes to her song and she stops, clapping a hand over her mouth. Now she is quite close to him. She sticks out her hand.

“Uh, hi.” Jay and Jidadaa shake hands, like business partners.

Ξ

When the vessels of your body are empty, they collapse, the walls sucking up wetly against each other. Your esophagus doesn’t stay open when not in use. It rests flat like a bike tire’s uninflated tube.

It is in such an evacuated space that Pradeep now finds his body. The walls of the pit cling to him, robbing him of sight and sense and air. Freezing mucus and mud coat his skin, leaching the last of his vitality away. He has finally lost his battle against the curse within him and slid down, down, down… For too long he’s been thrashing in a panic to get out. Now stars are blooming in his vision and he knows that oxygen isn’t getting to his brain. This is the end. And he can’t feel Maahjabeen’s embrace any more.

The stars cover his vision and the world goes white.

Pradeep kneels on cold flagstones. He is bent into a deep prostrate pose, like he’s doing yoga or praying to Maahjabeen’s god. He looks up, surveying a space filled with light, infinitely wide. Is that where he is? Has he crossed some threshold into the divine?

People at the end of their lives talk about letting go of their earthly cares. But Pradeep burns with regrets. A coruscating waterfall of hopes and plans and memories rushes through him, filling him with an unbearable ache of lost opportunity. He was by every measure too young. And his life was just about to get really really good.

Footsteps echo in the distance. He turns, trying to locate their source, but he can’t find anyone approaching from the glare on the horizon from any direction.

He opens his mouth to call out but he realizes he would only do so as a function of his anxiety. What? Oh, fucking great. Not even in death does he escape it? Bloody hell. It has become too much a part of who he is for him to leave it behind. Anxiety is in his soul.

So this is his soul. It did survive biological death. Fascinating. And how many of the other stories are true? He recalls the five layers of a human form in the Taittiriya Upanishad. The body on the outside, then biological energy, mental energy, intuition and wisdom, and deep inside is his core essence, a seed of eternal bliss. Well let us get on with it. I am ready to shed the outer layers to find my blissful center, because I certainly do not feel it now.

Remembering the lessons of his boyhood, Pradeep sits cross-legged in a lotus pose and rests his wrists on his knees. He closes his eyes, or whatever passes for eyes here, and allows his mind to calm so he can more properly listen.

He hears the footsteps again. He had thought that whoever was coming would inevitably reach him here but perhaps that isn’t true. Perhaps they’re looking for him in this bright directionless place and can’t find him. Perhaps they’re lost.

Pradeep’s mouth opens to call out. But then his anxiety, disguised as common sense, reminds him that he may not want who-or-what-ever it is in this unknown place to find him. He may want to remain hidden. At least until he knows more of who it is.

His eyes snap open, anxiety building toward panic. Oh, he just had to introduce the idea of extra-dimensional terrors into his list of neuroses, didn’t he? Now how will he ever have a moment’s rest again? He takes a shuddering breath of sharply clean air and tries to master himself. Come on, Pradeep. You can do this. You have no choice. Face your future.

With an assertive impulse Pradeep rises to his feet. “I am here,” he calls out in a ringing voice. Too loud. But it had sounded resolute. Liking that, he stands taller.

The footsteps grow louder, seeming to come from all around. Then they resolve into a shadow, a dark stain in the glare directly ahead. A hunched figure waddles toward him. It is an old man with a brown face, bits of feather and fur hanging from his fringes. He grunts at Pradeep then mutters in a sing-song Pradeep almost recognizes. This isn’t who he expected at all.

The man stops in front of Pradeep and scowls up at him, still muttering. Pradeep realizes it is the language he’s been hearing the last couple weeks. “You’re Lisican.”

The man holds up a leather loop in one hand and turns a glittering stare onto Pradeep. “Ja sam Wetchie-ghuy.”