Chapter 57 – A Straight Demon
January 27, 2025
Thanks for joining us for the fourth and final 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:
57 – A Straight Demon
“I have been thinking lately about time. How the present moment is a collision between the path stretching behind us and the future racing ahead. A perfect fusion.” Pradeep sits on the edge of the bunk, Maahjabeen at his side. “This is your realm more than mine, Triquet. Although in your case, maybe less about the future. But I would like to hear your thoughts on the subject.”
“Yeah… It’s weird.” Triquet sits further down the ward room on a bunk with Miriam and Alonso. But now they stand, pacing up and down the narrow aisle, weaving between the outflung arms and legs. Since Maahjabeen and Pradeep returned from the sea cave none of them have moved. They’ve all been in this ward room for hours, processing the events of the past few days. Now, after the most urgent subjects have been properly covered, their thoughts are turning more philosophical. “All these destiny and prophecy themes. Think about how all the Lisicans consider time and chronology. They have a hard date for the beginning of their world and evidently an equally hard date for its end. That’s got to change how you approach each day.”
“And the sky is a ceiling that contains only you and the ocean,” Pradeep adds. “Yes. We are in a place with different geometry. At home we think of the generations growing and developing, often in contrast or rebellion to the generation before. And this is a limitless line of progress stretching to a vanishing point ahead. But here? What would be the point to build or develop anything if your world will end in 72 days with a cataclysmic Jidadaa of doom?”
“Or, in this case,” Katrina chimes in, “72 hours.”
Pradeep nods. “Quite so. Why be curious about the outside world if it is invisible and impossible to reach? The arrival of outsiders must really mess with this cosmology.”
“Except,” Amy says, “that they themselves were once outsiders and I’m not sure there’s been like a real break in immigration since they first arrived. There’s always someone new here. Maybe the Lisicans are just ethnocentric and don’t think the rest of us are worth their time. And why would you, if you lived in paradise?”
“Eh, as far as islands go, I prefer Sardegna.” Flavia doesn’t even look up from her laptop.
“Yeah, it’s like…” Jay searches for the words. “I just went up top to get baked and I was thinking about that. Here I am in a bunker built in 1961 smoking a plant that was illegal when the soldiers were here. Imagine how much I could have blown their minds! You said they were all unhappy here, Triquet. Well, here comes Doctor Jay from the future with a jay.”
“Layers of time,” Triquet nods. “We make our own fleeting little depositions here in the sub and then in a few days we’ll pass on just like the sailors did. And someday someone else will sit in this bunk and wonder why it smells faintly of marijuana smoke.” The room fills with laughter. “Oh, I need this. Some unstructured thoughts. How about it? Breakout session, everyone. Let’s hear everyone’s most out-of-the-box ideas about these last few weeks. Nothing’s too wild. Come on. Miriam? How about you? What do you got?”
“Well…” Miriam smiles at Esquibel’s aggrieved glance to Flavia. “Nothing too crazy, ladies, I promise. But yes, I have been waiting to tell my own tale. Just a few things I found up in that canyon with a lake.” She pulls her backpack from its storage beneath the bunk and unzips it. From a hardshell container she removes a handful of white chip fragments and shows them to everyone.
“Fossils,” Triquet says. “Far older than what I usually handle.”
“Oh, far.” Miriam takes out another, a rounded lump with a series of short curved lines along its side. “This is a Trigonia clam. Unmistakable little ridges there, that look like eyelashes, aye?”
“Aye.” Katrina peers at the fossil. “It’s cute. How’s it taste?”
“Nobody knows.” Miriam holds it up. “The entire Trigonia genus has been extinct since the Paleocene, 56 million years ago. This lad solves my chronology riddle. So here’s my Plexity datum, right here, thank you very much. The limestone layers that make up so much of this island’s geology are at least 56 million years old. Certainly older, but that’s the nearest in time it can be. And I was able to get some pretty solid geomagnetic readings out there too. The bedrock below is rare stuff. It shows fragmentary clues of the theorized plate that existed here before the Pacific plate subducted it around 48 million years ago. Which means there was an eight million year window where the ancient plate and the limestone crust atop it still had exposure to the surface. So this is our time range. Now near the end of that window was the transition to a new geological epoch. I imagine the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum must have been a real pivotal time here, when ocean temperatures spiked and there was a mass die-off, leaving all these fossils. But that subducted plate… I’ve never really studied North Pacific plate formations before. You know what it’s name is?”
“Uh… Jerry?” Jay guesses.
“It is the Kula Plate, an ancient remnant that hasn’t been seen on the surface in 48 million years.”
“Kula!” Jay exclaims. “No way. What are the odds? All buried and covered up for sure.”
“And it turns out Kula is a Tlingit word,” Miriam continues, “a word that actually means ‘all gone.’”
“So is that her name or is that just what the villagers decided to call her when she got buried in the tunnels?”
“Subducted.” Katrina says the word with distaste.
“Poor Kula. What a life. Imagine being named ‘all gone.’ Yeah, you’re going to name your daughter ‘doom.’ This shit sounds like a Johnny Cash song.” Jay snorts. “Hey, Miriam, if you’re all finished can I go next?”
Miriam nods. “Aye. I’m done.”
“Right on. Now. Prophecy poems.” Jay nods slowly. “These are wild. So I started like researching them. And I came across the songlines of the Australian aborigines. Anyone heard of these?”
“Oh, yes. I had a seminar on them a few years ago.” Triquet still can’t sit still. They climb onto an empty top bunk and start doing exercises. “Love love love their dreaming tracks. But Lisica hardly compares. This place has only been inhabited for three hundred years. The aboriginal culture stretches back over sixty thousand years in Australia. Their dreamworld is unimaginably deep.”
“Oh, no doubt,” Jay agrees. “But I think it’s got some of the same like features. Rhythm. The aborigines would walk in these long rhythms for days, and the songs are sung in that rhythm. The chants here are something like that. And the Lisicans have woven all their plants and rocks and mountains into their chants, kind of in the same way.”
“I do not know,” Alonso tells them, “about these songlines. What makes them so significant in Australia?”
“Well,” Triquet answers, “say you live in your village in Australia and for various cultural or religious reasons you’ve got to travel like a thousand kilometers on a special journey. Off you go. You don’t ask anyone directions. You already know the way. It’s in the songs you’ve been taught since you were born. And this way-song is like literally a list of directions as well as a kind of literary description of the first ancestors who walked this way and created the land as they walked it. Created all the plants and animals with each step and word. And now you’re just re-tracing their steps while you sing their song. But that’s just the barest description of it. Their whole culture is based around these songs that are like baked in to the actual landscape. A mountain is a story is a dream is a journey.”
“I don’t understand,” Alonso confesses.
Triquet nods in agreement. “Oh, for sure. Nobody who isn’t aboriginal really does. I mean, it’s like the Eyat, where it just forces you to stand on your head and look at the world in a fundamentally different way. Time is different to them. Life and death. Same with the Lisicans, I’m sure. Totally unique beliefs.”
“I would guess,” Flavia contributes, still not looking up from her laptop screen, “that our Tuzhit founding father fellow mustn’t have been a very pious Christian, or we’d have Orthodox iconography all over the place. And these people would be a lot more tortured.”
Maahjabeen waves the insult away. “You just can’t help yourself, can you? Flavia, you think more about religion than I do.”
“So…” Jay interposes, in an attempt to head off the argument, “I decided I’d make my own prophet poem, about this island, and being lidass and all that. I mean, I know plants and animals. I can rap about like cliffs and forests all day. And I can’t just let all these others decide my destiny. I can’t just be a cameo guest appearance on someone else’s track. Time to get my own voice out there.”
“MC Jay on the mic!” Katrina crows.
“So what is the song?” Miriam asks. “Have you finished it?”
“Uh, still a work in progress, but…” Jay shrugs. “Takes a rhyme to beat a rhyme. You said you wanted wacky. Here’s wacky. The wackiest shit on this whole wack island.”
“It certainly is,” Esquibel sourly agrees.
“Well, what about you then?” Jay asks with a frown. “You’re pretty good, Doc, at telling everyone where they’re wrong. But what about you? What’s the craziest most far-out weirdness you’ve seen here? Huh?”
Esquibel has to think about that. It is true that this island is a strange place, but she learned growing up on the outskirts of Nairobi that her future lay with the modern world, not with the ignorance and superstitions of her neighbors messing about in the bush. And she saw how many times their forecasts and warnings were wrong, and how easy it was for them to explain those misses away. But science and medicine do not make those same mistakes. They work or they do not, at least if properly applied. The clear problem here is that science is no longer being properly applied. They are falling into unreason and a kind of new age voodoo that she absolutely despises. “Weirdness… I only have concerns about what this place is doing to our objectivity. I think, if we had just been able to keep a solid internet connection, that most of this madness wouldn’t have affected us so strongly.”
“Oh now you would give my satellite phone back?” Flavia cries. “I cannot believe you.”
“Seriously?” Miriam laughs at Esquibel. “After all that has been done to us here, you’re still saying there’s really nothing out of the ordinary with Lisica? Are you blind?”
“I am saying there is no magic. No prophecy or omen or curse here that has any power in the least.” Mandy lies sleeping behind Esquibel on the bunk. The doctor turns and places a comforting hand over Mandy’s gunshot wound, indicating with her action what is really important here. “There are only imperfect humans with our imperfect senses.”
But Maahjabeen isn’t buying it. “So you have no faith.”
Esquibel sneers. “I never did. If I did I would be married and trapped in some man’s house giving him children and free labor.”
Maahjabeen shakes her head no. “Oh, like me? I understand the challenges you faced and I am not saying it is easy. But you don’t have to run so far in the other direction that you would deny that a world exists outside science—” She speaks louder to override both Esquibel and Flavia’s objections. “And yes I understand that it cannot be properly measured or replicated or characterized by our brains. But you are crazy, willfully blind, if you insist that it doesn’t exist and we only live in your, ehhh, deterministic clockwork.”
“Says the average 16th century woman,” Flavia retorts, “on the subject of unsolvable mysteries such as gravity and medicine. Just because we don’t understand the phenomena yet, doesn’t mean—”
“Oh, we’ve solved the science of gravity now?” Miriam mock wonders. “That’s grand.”
“And medicine? Ha.” Maahjabeen grips Pradeep’s arm. “When we were poisoned Doctor Daine had no clue what was happening to us. No offense, you did the best you could to the limits of your abilities, but you weren’t the reason we were healed. It was those shamans and their spells. No, medicine is as much an art as a science and you know it.”
“So what you are saying, Flavia,” Alonso rumbles, “is that these things that some of us are interpreting as mystical events are actually real-world phenomena that can be characterized by physics and mathematics. We just don’t know how yet.”
“Exactly. My grandparents didn’t know about chaos theory. And now, without it, the whole modern world could not exist. Quantum mechanics is used in my laser pointer when I lecture. I have a whole bit about it with my phone, how we hold so much exotic computation so easily in our hands. There are even higher-order outputs, as systems get more and more complex and interact at more refined levels. These things might manifest to us as emotions and dreams and ideas like faith and destiny. But it is only because there are an innumerable amount of particles and interactions collapsing onto this moment in spacetime all at once that we have to abstract and simplify them just so we can see them. But our sight is imperfect, eh? And in the end we are all still drooling monkeys with monkey brains. So we hold on tight to these ideas rooted deep in our biological brains. Family. Sex. Fear of death. Belief in higher powers. I mean, until a few centuries ago, Maahjabeen, you would have told me lightning was your god being angry with me.”
“Sometimes it is.”
“Then you say things like that and I despair for our future…” Flavia holds up a hand, surrendering after that cheap shot. “No. I am done. The world is full of all kinds of people, that is for sure the truth. Some looking forward and some looking back. And some,” she leans to the side and rests her head on Jay’s broad shoulder, “who are happily here in the present.”
“Facts.” Jay nods judiciously, deciding it’s a compliment.
“Okay. I think what Flavia is describing,” Alonso ventures, “is ultimately a positive vision, an idea of progress where our greater understanding of crazy things like what is happening to us here can eventually fall under the domain of formal things like public policy and therapy, instead of shamans and curses and doom.”
“Yeh, that’s where I am,” Katrina agrees. “Except I like a bit more ghost in my machine. It ain’t mechanistic what Flavia and I do, Maahjabeen. That’s the thing. It’s both science and religion all at once. We’re all saying the same thing here, just with different terms. Remember, there wouldn’t even be any higher maths today without the great Arab thinkers like Al-Khwarizmi and Omar Khayyam. And they invented their mathematical concepts as a sacred language in glory to Allah, yeh?”
“Yes, I love maths,” Maahjabeen agrees. “I do. And I appreciate your understanding of the history—”
“All I’m saying is that the sacred language of maths just keeps getting closer and closer to god. We develop it like you develop your own sacred works, with more pronouncements coming out from your faith leaders on a regular basis, yeh? They’re trying to understand the world and the divine that much better. We’re on the same path, everyone. None of us here are trying to hide from the world, like nearly everyone I know back home. We’re the weird ones. That’s what I love about my big Cuban family here. We’re all looking for the truth, with our hearts and minds and everything at our disposal. We’re just hungry, you know?”
The sweetness pouring from Katrina mollifies them all. After a brief silence, Pradeep is the first to continue. “I really appreciate what you said, Katrina. But I want to circle back to something else Flavia mentioned before we change topics. Emergent phenomena. Yes, Amy is nodding her head. She knows what I mean. This is how emergence feels, what we are experiencing here. There is, like I said about time being a collision between the past and future, it’s like all of Plexity’s factors and metrics are colliding upon us all at once, and it is… breathtaking. Too much for my mind to track all at the same time. Never have I felt so…”
“Much like a horse wearing blinders,” Amy finishes for him. “Oh my god that’s exactly how it was in there with the vixen. After the first couple days I felt the rhythm. Remember how we were talking a few weeks ago about plants chirping like reef ecosystems? I could feel it. Not hear it. These old ears can’t hear much. But…”
“Yes,” Pradeep jumps back in, excited. “And that is what I was trying to show you last month, Alonso, with those mycorrhizal networks, the way they were speaking to each other, the grand networks that exist everywhere…”
“Yes…! Yes!” Alonso does remember. Pradeep’s insights had sparked visions that lasted his entire trip. “Networks everywhere! The flow of information! It can be unbearable at times!”
“And then I asked if you could hack the language of the trees so we could change the tune?” Katrina adds with a laugh. “What ever happened to that idea?”
“Yes…” Pradeep frowns, his enthusiastic charge halted by the audacity of the concept. “But I couldn’t imagine it would help then and I still can’t see how it would help now.”
“Oh my god.” The epiphany rises in Amy like a sleeper wave, flooding her with a holistic overview of the entire island. “When they say the foxes rule the island, this is what they mean. Keystone species. Gentle nudges of the ecosystems. Harmonics. Remember, Alonso? Way back at the beginning. We were talking about all the harmonics that Plexity can measure. The microfluidic channels of the Dyson readers being more analog than digital. Remember those arguments, Pradeep? Flavia?”
Alonso laughs, a deep sound filled with pleasure. “Ha ha ha. She has got you there, does she not, Flavia? Your harmonics were too mystical for this old data scientist, remember? We are all at the edge of our respective disciplines, and sometimes we step off. But this is what Katrina was just talking about, isn’t it? We are all striving toward the same goal with different languages?”
“Harmonics is a very well understood mathematical concept.” Flavia shrugs, defensive. “But if you want to make it like a Harry Potter spell or whatever, with like a long string of nonsense rhymes and wiggling fingers, then be my guest.”
“Wait.” Pradeep reaches across the aisle and grabs Katrina’s hand. She inhales sharply at the same instant, her eyes scanning the ceiling.
Then she sees it too. Katrina cries out, “Oh my god.”
Flavia holds up a hand, seeing what they see. “Oh, no no no.”
Pradeep tries to infect her with the beauty of his vision. “No, it’s everything, Flavia. It’s everything that we’ve just talked about. It’s not just… hacking the forest. It’s—”
“Wait.” Alonso scowls. “What is going on here with you three? You can actually do that?”
“Well,” Pradeep stops his runaway train of thought once more to address this. “I mean, it’s just communication. And the most direct means to speak with a forest, for example, would be with fire, yes? Trees react quite dramatically to the presence of—”
“No, you can’t!” Amy protests. “What are you thinking?”
“Or water,” Pradeep allows. “I’m not a monster. I’m just saying these are basic elements we can use. Sunlight. Cold. Parasites. But what I am really saying is that we all need to think much bigger here. Think like Jay.”
“Like Jay?” For Esquibel, this is too much. “You are joking.”
“What I am saying is that he’s writing a prophecy poem and the rest of us are providing him the language. But the audience for his poem isn’t the Lisican villagers. It is the flora and fauna of the island. The winds and the rain and the stars.”
“You are…” Esquibel bites her tongue, trying to find a gentle way to say it. She likes Pradeep and admires his intellect. “A romantic.”
But this is the final piece of the puzzle for Jay. His head rocks back. “Whoa…” He nods, his destiny locking in. “Ohh, this is what they meant by the whole lidass thing. Oh, man. Me myself and I. I’m the man of words and the man of action. Right place at the right time and all that. Dude. Fuck. Got to choose the right words, though. I can really get into some trouble out here, can’t I…?”
“What the hell are you all talking about?” Esquibel demands. “Talking to the trees? What? Singing to them? Changing their song? This doesn’t make any sense.”
“I will begin with an analysis of some of these networks we’ve identified in Plexity,” Flavia tells Pradeep. “And tell you where the most likely entry points into the wider systems might be.”
He nods and points at Amy. “Ring the whole island like a bell. And Amy can help me identify what means we have to introduce permutations to the ecosystems. There are a few pheromones we can isolate and I think we can perhaps also trigger some reactions with compounds we currently have with us.”
“You are going to change the ecosystem of Lisica?” Alonso echoes, his heart dropping. “Isn’t that the one thing we said we would never do?”
“Well.” Pradeep takes a deep breath. It seems like every choice he’s ever had to make in his life is a devil’s bargain. “This is like climate change, Alonso. It is already happening, whether we do anything or not. This island will change in just a couple days, is already changing to hear Jidadaa tell it. The Russians are here, the Chinese are here. Wetchie-ghuy is enslaving people and trying to steal foxes. Everyone is already trying to change it. And this is the means we have to short circuit all their efforts.”
“But to what end?” Esquibel wonders. “Each mission must have a goal. This cannot just be an exercise for its own sake. Just to stop what others are trying to do? Is that why we’re here?”
“Yes, listen to this. Esquibel makes a very good point. What do we say the goal of such a project should be?” Alonso surveys the room. They are for the most part excited by this topic. Good. He loves that they are all once more working together.
“I don’t want to choose sides,” Flavia asserts, “between all the geopolitical monsters. China, America… I don’t care.”
Amy nods. “And I won’t do anything that contributes to the destruction of the habitats here. Not a single thing.”
“Perhaps,” Miriam offers, “our mission goal here is just that old medical guideline: do no harm. Eh, Esquibel?”
“Can’t it be more proactive than that?” Pradeep asks. “More like ‘we are here to de-escalate conflicts,’ or something like that. Like what the blue helmets do for the UN. ‘Send your wounded to us.’ I just want to be a force for actual harm reduction, not just avoidance.”
“I think,” Jay says in the silence, “that if this is like the songlines, what we’re supposed to do is dream up the most beautiful world we can, the world we really want to see, everybody all shiny and healthy and happy, and that’s what we sing into the trees. Show them the best possible world and have them yearn for it. Love not war, yo. It’s not just words or a concept. It’s a… vision. Now it’s up to us to speak it into existence.”
Ξ
Perhaps an hour later, the sub has fallen silent. Some work at their screens, others drowse. Katrina hums as she plays a game on her phone. Then she stops. “Hear that?”
“Hear what…?” Jay lifts his head, blinking away his runaway thoughts. “Oh.” The faintest knock comes from belowdecks. It repeats. “Shit. The spy found us?”
“Doubt he’d knock.” Miriam sits up. “He didn’t seem the polite type. More of a shoot-first-ask-questions-later kind of chap.”
“Then who is it?” Jay rises, frowning at the hatch leading further into the sub. “And what do they want?”
He takes a step but Esquibel grabs his leg. “Wait. He is armed. We can’t take any risks.”
“And what’s he knocking on?” Katrina wonders. “You didn’t barricade the way in down there again, did you, Esquibel?”
“I couldn’t. You people stole all my materials.”
Jay makes a decision. “Well, I’m going to see who it is. We can’t just hide in here for three days.”
“Why not?” Flavia demands. “That is exactly what we should do. We shouldn’t even go back into the island’s interior now that we have an honest-to-god spy after us.”
Jay appeals to authority. “Come on, Esquibel. Let me go check it out. Somebody might need us.”
Esquibel sighs, looking up at Jay with a total lack of confidence. She turns and regards Mandy for a moment. She has her eyes open and she watches Esquibel in turn. “Don’t worry, Mands. I won’t let anyone harm you.”
“See who it is,” Mandy tells her weakly. “We can’t just hide.”
Esquibel frowns, then stands. “Okay. But stay behind me, Jay.” She grabs her black satchel and steps toward the hatch.
She leads him down the narrow hall, past the door leading to the warrant officer’s cabin. Then as they pass the locked door of the radio room the knock is repeated, so close it startles them both and they fall against the far wall.
“It’s from in there.” Esquibel removes her pistol and points it at her feet, the safety still on.
“No way. How did somebody even get in there?” Jay is spooked. “I thought it was coming from below. Had to be. You know…”
“Like someone from the village, yes.” Esquibel’s eyes are wide. She is having trouble controlling her breathing. “But this…”
The knock repeats. It is a tentative sound, with a halting forlorn rhythm. Jay inspects the door. The steel panel is set into the frame with no gaps. He tries the knob. It doesn’t turn.
But his efforts have been noticed on the far side. The knock comes again, more urgent, and Miriam ducks through the hatch behind them. “Who is it?”
“Uh, the radioman, if we’re making guesses…” But Jay doesn’t like his own joke. He steps back. “Somebody trapped in there. We should like get them out.”
The knock sounds again.
The three of them share glances. “You could like shoot the lock off,” Jay suggests.
Esquibel looks at him as if he’s deranged. “Does the word ricochet mean anything to you? Anything at all?”
Jay ducks his head into the Captain’s cabin, looking for tools. “Just like need a crowbar or…” He searches the desk drawers, only finding a paper clip hidden in a corner. “Hold up. This might work. Did some larceny as a kid. Let’s see if I still got it.”
Jay pulls out his phone and kneels before the radio room door. He shines his light into the old-fashioned lock and starts poking at it with the paper clip. “Naah. Shit is frozen. Need some lubricant more than anything. See if Triquet can—”
And then a giant bang shakes the door and the door knob falls off. The seal cracks for the first time in decades, a sharp sound of rust flakes breaking off.
Jay pushes on the door. It swings inward with a billow of dust. Inside the cramped room stands Jidadaa holding a metal strut. She is panting, smeared in mud, eyes wild.
“What?” Jay is disappointed. “Aw, it’s just you. How the fuck did you get stuck in there?”
Jidadaa steps aside to show him the hole in the wall behind her and the tunnel leading down into darkness. “Jay lidass. I have been to Ussiaxan. Let me out.”
Jay turns away from the door in disgust. “Fuck. It’s just Jidadaa. Stirring up shit. I’ll be in my bunk.” He pushes past Esquibel and Miriam to return to the ward room.
Jidadaa hurries after him, smearing her mud on both women. “Wait, Jay. The Chinese man. I can tell.” She ducks through the hatch, Esquibel and Miriam following, to address the entire crew. “I can tell you all. He is in a cage.”
“It’s Jidadaa!” Katrina cries, scrambling to her feet and reaching for her, then pulling her hands back. “Who’s in a cage?”
“The Daadaxáats shaman argue with Chinese man. Ussiaxan decide Chinese man is wrong. They put him in cage. He is stuck in it. You are free to go.”
“Put him in a cage…?” Alonso asks. “They imprisoned him? They put the spy in jail? In Ussiaxan jail?”
“Yes.” Jidadaa is relieved to hear the right words. “Chinese spy in jail. No more sneak at night.”
“Ha! Seriously?” Katrina cackles. “Ha! Tried to get them to come after us and they were like, nah, mate. We’re looking for foxes now. Chill out.”
“Yes!” Jidadaa claps her hands. She steps forward and leans over Mandy. “No more spy. No more blood.” With her thumbtip she points at the gunshot wound, leaning close. Then she pulls back abruptly and addresses the room. “You are safe. Now I must go.”
Ξ
“We are here,” Katrina informs the Mayor, her words slow and deliberate, “to find Jidadaa. We think she stole Mandy’s phone.”
The Mayor’s expression does not change. She stares at Katrina and Jay with a flat expression of disbelief, or perhaps distaste.
“Uhh… Where is everybody?” Katrina peers past the Mayor to the village beyond, at least what she can see from the cave mouth. She can only see Yesiniy and the non-binary youth, who plucks the feathers from a dead bird the size of a partridge. She holds her own phone up. “Looks like this but with a pink case. Chinese model. Has all her stuff on it. Uh…” Katrina edges past the Mayor and slips into the village. “That Jidadaa’s sure got sticky fingers.” She nods at Yesiniy, who gapes irate at her. “Ma’am. Don’t mind us. Just passing through.”
Yesiniy’s response is a hoarse warble that reminds Katrina how close to the end the old woman is. She must be like seventy or more, which has got to be old here, without any modern medicine. Perhaps Katrina can find a time to persuade Yesiniy to record a few long interviews before they go. She can translate them when she gets back home. Her perspective would just be so invaluable to preserve. Then Katrina looks away, guilty at the appraising look she measured the crone with, as if she was already dead. Instead, she should focus on what Yesiniy’s saying. Her condemning tone. Okay. She is obviously telling Katrina that things are going wrong. And that she and her friends won’t win. The fox always wins.
Katrina emphatically nods back and uses all the Lisican, Eyat, and Slavic constructions she knows to signal her agreement. “Yes. Absolutely. We won’t win at all. Totally. That’s why we’re leaving in a couple days. Just need that phone first.”
Yesiniy’s response is even more heated and she tries to get to her feet, but that is difficult now without help. The youth hurries over and gives her their hands. But as they pull her up their own voice rises in contrast to whatever point the old woman is making. The two Lisicans argue face to face, in an embrace, shaking each other. Finally Yesiniy falls silent and looks away in surrender. All Katrina can tell the fight was about was some mention of Yesiniy’s sacred tree and, somehow, the allocation of water to each hut. Strange. Must be a list of random grievances getting worked out.
The youth turns their smooth brown face to the two trespassers and looks blandly at them. They have a stronger jaw than most of their kin, and a body trending toward stoutness in a few years. They also have the longest hair in the village, black ringlets intermixed with gold, braided loosely around their face to keep it out of their eyes. Their shift is a style that only the women wear. And their easy manner reminds Katrina of a brash middle-aged Filipina bar owner in Lidcombe she knows and loves. She decides she likes the youth, and nods, giving them her most brilliant smile. “Cheers.” She places a hand against her chest. “Katrina.”
After a long moment of consideration, the youth decides to share their own name. “Xeik’w.”
Xeik’w turns away and deposits Yesiniy back on her mat in front of her hut. Jay notices the streaks of drying bird blood that remain on Yesiniy’s upper arms from where Xeik’w grasped her. Wicked. “Man, now I get why you cats all decided Jidadaa wasn’t welcome in the village. Fucking thief. Mandy needs her phone back pronto. Mui importante.”
“They don’t speak Spanish, Jay. That’s been well-established.”
“They get what I mean.” But the three villagers have all returned to their tasks and are no longer paying attention. “But seriously. Where’d everyone else go? Pine camp?”
Following this assumption, they withdraw from the village and head down the path toward the creek. But as they go, they hear the mewling cry of a child echo around them, urgent and lost…
Katrina and Jay stop at the trailhead and look back up the slope of the hill behind the huts. Is that someone moving in the dense undergrowth? “Xaanach?” Jay calls out. “That you?” He turns toward the sound and moves toward it. “What’s wrong, kid?”
But the Mayor and Xeik’w hurry to intercept Jay. There is real fear in Xeik’w’s face. The Mayor has the blackest gaze Jay’s ever seen. “What is it? Is she okay? I just wanted to check on her.” Then Jay remembers that Xaanach doesn’t belong to the village. She’s an outcast like Jidadaa. Oh, is this like the pariah treatment they gave Amy? Man, these people sure do like kicking folks out.
“Uh… where is she?” Katrina asks, slowly returning to the village square, trying to puzzle out the Mayor’s response.
“I only saw the bushes moving up there.” Jay points at a spot, but as he does so he hears the cry come from a further spot, downslope at a diagonal, at a surprising distance. It is an uncanny sound. Even though it is filled with a child’s heartbreak, something about it makes Jay’s hackles rise. “Nah, dude. Stop. They’re right. Come back to me. Uhh. So creepy. That ain’t a child.”
“What do you mean it isn’t a…?” Katrina tries to reconcile his words with the cry for help that tugs at her heartstrings, and in the pause that it takes her to process, Wetchie-ghuy scuttles onto the trail between her and the village, cutting her off from the others.
“Aw, shit. Hey.” Jay strains in the surprisingly strong grip of both the Mayor and Xeik’w. “Hey, you leave her alone. Katrina. Stay back. Don’t get near him.”
Katrina puts her hands up, her breath suddenly fluttering in her breast like a trapped bird. He has divided her from the others like a sheep dog with his flock. But Wetchie-ghuy isn’t facing her. He confronts the others, hunched over, smelling ripe and evil. She steps further back, nearer the trailhead, to get out of his range.
Wetchie-ghuy mewls like a lost child one last time, then cackles and says something derogatory about Jay and Katrina, with a careless gesture behind him to include her.
“No, fuck you. You can just—” But Jay’s heated words are cut off by the Mayor’s even hotter response. She quivers in fury, spitting her words at the shaman, cursing his filthy bare feet. And Wetchie-ghuy just crouches there and takes it, face split into a malevolent grin. No, there’s no joy in that face. It’s a grimace of pain. He bares his teeth at the Mayor in challenge.
“Isn’t she his sister, yeh?” Katrina calls out.
“Oh, fuck. You’re right. Totally spaced that. Yeah, look at them. That’s how siblings and only siblings can—”
Wetchie-ghuy suddenly storms forward, holding up a talisman of bone and sinew. The Mayor meets his charge and tries to slap it out of his hand but he is too fast. They both are. In an eyeblink they have wrestled themselves into a deadlock, standing hip to hip holding each other by the wrists down by their ankles, trying to pull each other off balance.
Wetchie-ghuy springs free. The talisman has lost one of its sinew straps. He hisses in fury and backs away, chanting.
The Mayor marches after him, in the rhythm of her own chant. These must be their prophet poems, at war. “Oh, hell yeah. Full on rap battle.” Jay cheers. “Get him, sister. Chop him up.”
Xeik’w holds Jay back, calling out a chant in care of the Mayor. Yesiniy lends her own screeching cadence from her door. These rhymers don’t even take turns. It is pure cacophony.
But then Wetchie-ghuy steps past his sister and reaches for Jay, his rhyme ending in an unmistakable—lidass!
“Oh, you coming for me now? My turn?” Jay throws his arms wide, fronting, blood rushing to his brain. This dude wants a battle with him? Jay is up for it like he’s never been up for anything. But the noise is too much, all the fools yelling so nobody can’t hear nothing. Jay bellows, “You coming for me?” and the white-hot fury in his voice finally silences them.
His favorite MF Doom song springs unbidden to his lips. He quotes Megalon at the opening: “Who you think I am?”
The existentialist cry fills the air. Before Wetchie-ghuy or the Mayor or anyone else can respond, Jay drops into the rhymes.
“…Loved not for who you think I am,
but who you want me to be
A true thuggin emcee, true thugs, with no strings attached
I wanna give you my slugs and don’t wanna take em.”
Katrina screams in pleasure. She had no idea Jay could be so hot on the mic. She falls behind his bouncing figure, his hype girl, shouting out echoes and refrains of each line’s end. Opening an app on her phone as she bounces, she makes quick adjustments, and instrumental beats fill the square in time to Jay’s rhymes.
Wetchie-ghuy is dumbfounded. The Mayor falls back, amazed. The look on Xeik’w’s face is a mixture of amazement and horror. MF Doom is obviously unlike anything they have ever heard.
But the heat keeps rising in Jay. This motherfucker has been after them since they got here. No more. Jay drops the memorized lyrics and switches to a snarling freestyle, getting personal with his bars:
“You want Doom? I’m your doomsday killer.
Rap battle? Ain’t no MC sounds iller.
Cold clock? You been sneak up by my bed
Reach for me, homie, gonna wish you was dead.
The birds in the trees and the bees all know
That motherfucking Wetchie-ghuy is the one who’s got to go.
Lee-dass? Lid-ass? You want a piece of this?
When you coming for the chosen one you best not miss.”
The wall of hostility is too much for the shaman. He steps back with a scowl, his words just fragments, trying to find a way to force his way back in but Jay is too much.
“Got fools scared cause you call yourself the shaman,
but you’re the wicked one who should be feeling all the shaming,
so lame how you frame the facts to rig the game
accusing all others when you’re the one to blame.”
A strong hand pulls Jay back. It is the Mayor. She cautions him from following Wetchie-ghuy too deeply in his retreat. Now it finally dawns on him and his flow falters. Oh, shit. Jay isn’t defending the Mayor. Wetchie-ghuy didn’t come here to confront his sister, he came here for the lidass. And if Jay takes another couple steps out of her protection, the bastard might actually get him. Jay’s not anyone’s white knight coming to the rescue here. He’s the precious one they’re trying to keep alive. Crazy.
Now Wetchie-ghuy’s face collapses into an even more black scowl. All his attempts to confront or kidnap the lidass have been confounded. With a last curse and shake of his talisman he vanishes into the underbrush. But they can hear him for a long time as he departs, refusing to give up, shouting his prophecy poem in a shaking voice that sounds of nothing but futility.
With a wild cackle, Katrina opens a keyboard app and plays a final few chords, just to put a fine point of resolution onto the conflict. Then in the ensuing silence her laughter is the only sound. She squeezes Jay tight. “Aw, lad! Where’d you learn to spit like that? You’re a straight demon!”
Chapter 49 – We’re Good
December 2, 2024
Thanks for joining us for the fourth and final 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:
49 – We’re Good
It was a couple hours later that the roof blew off the hut. Near evening, with no light in the sky, the heavens detonated. It began with a great rushing through the far trees. Then a moment of dreadful silence, followed by a great screaming roar like a steam locomotive falling off a cliff. Trees cracked and splintered and fell. Then the wind hit the hut with concussive force and half the roof peeled away and vanished.
Now screams and whipping water fill the hut. Chaos. Figures dive across Pradeep, shielding him from falling pieces of wood. Jay and Maahjabeen lash him to the travois they’d kept him in. Then they grab the few things they can and, nearly blind and deaf, follow the others out into the battering cyclone before the entire hut collapses around them.
They all know to make their way to the cave. But the wind blasts over the northern ridges behind them and slaps them down into the mud, again and again. Trees groan and fall in every direction. A redwood lands on a hut on the far side of the village with an unbearable crash, shaking the ground.
Jay is nearly horizontal to the ground, clawing through the mud as the wind hits him with unbearable force. He drags the travois, Maahjabeen somewhere back behind controlling its tail.
He comes upon Alonso, crawling across the mud, eyes squeezed shut. Jay grabs at his coat and pulls him in the right direction.
Finally they find themselves in the cave mouth. It is already filling with floodwaters. But there is a high slope and shelf where the wooden and textile belongings of the villagers have been stowed. It should remain above nearly any amount of water. If that isn’t safe then nowhere is.
They pull themselves out of the water and up the slope. Their refuge is more of a side grotto, a low gallery of deep depressions worn away in the limestone band here.
Shuddering groans and vocalized shock are all they can utter as they each take up residency among the baskets and bundles of firewood and cooking pots. Here they huddle, watching the water below them rise and fill the tunnel leading into the cave and the shaft with the tilted tree. Now they’re trapped here. This flood effectively blocks them from descending any deeper.
The temperature tilts to near freezing. A shattering blast of hail hits the cliff wall outside and chunks of ice the size of blueberries skitter in. Then, as suddenly, the hailstorm stops.
“Dead,” Jay pronounces. “We’d be dead for sure if we were still out there.”
The winds swirl now, buffeting across the mouth of the cave with harmonic concussions. Between that and the water swirling down the interior, closing the tunnel like a valve, the air pressure beats at them and they all squeeze their eyes shut and cover their ears.
Then the rain returns, a downpour as dense as a waterfall. The water in the cave rises even higher, only four meters or so from where they perch. The storm comes from the northwest, which is right along the line of the village into the cave mouth. The ragged hole screams, as if the god of thunder plays it like a flute, and gouts of water slap against the floor. This lasts for heart-stopping minutes and the water rises even higher. Then it abates and the storm’s fury lessens.
They grasp each other tight, shivering, terrified by what they have just witnessed. Finally Esquibel does a head count with her phone’s light and a shaking hand. Yes. All ten of them. And five golden childs, hunkered in a corner closer to the cave mouth. But wait. Their masks have been removed.
“Iwikanu!” Katrina croaks, stumbling forward. One of the youths rises and holds his hand out to her. “The wind…” she explains to the others. “I guess this is finally when it blew the pollen away.”
“Oh, good,” Esquibel tries to muster sarcasm, but it only comes out as sincere. “I am glad they are human again.”
Flavia stands and holds out the pigskin bag to the former golden childs. She shines her own light into it, displaying the three uneaten but cooked steaks. She motions to them, offering the food.
One of the other youths smiles, teeth bright in the darkness, and lifts his own sack. They are evidently still provisioned.
“The villagers knew this would happen, didn’t they?” Katrina asks Iwikanu. “The… oh, what are they called? The Keleptel? Buggered straight off, didn’t they, gé? The Keleptel.” She has one hand dive through the other, of Morska Vidra and his people retreating through the tunnels. She tells her colleagues, “You use the interrogative suffix ‘gé?’ to ask a yes or no question.”
“Da,” Iwikanu answers. “Oni poshli na plyazh.”
“The beach?” Katrina exclaims. “All the way down there? In this weather? Or is that the only place where they know for a fact it won’t flood?” She translates the question into Russian.
“Da, da…” Iwikanu agrees. “Tam net vody.”
“No water, he says. I bet the cliffs protect it. So they’re all in the bunker, just chilling. Bloody brilliant. We just left the one place on the island where it’s actually safe to be in this storm.”
“Not just a storm,” Mandy corrects her. “Bomb cyclone. Some of the most violent events on the planet. But it might be over soon.”
“That was like a whole war’s full of bomb cyclones, honey.” Triquet has never seen anything like it.
“They have the best names.” Mandy’s voice quivers in the dark but her enthusiasm for the subject warms her. “Officially, explosive cyclogenesis. Bombogenesis. They almost always form over the sea and aren’t usually experienced on land. The baroclinic instability of the Northwest Pacific is pretty well known. Just, like, rarely actually lived through. This was only one of the many bomb events they must get out here, leaking east this time I guess away from the instability and hitting the island. The cliffs and the local humidity might have actually triggered the whole thing. And it got so cold for May. There must be some deep upwelling off Kamchatka right now. But it can’t last much longer this late in the season. Yeah. Listen. It’s already easing.”
They hear the wind and rain relent to gusting showers. But the water is no less, coursing across the entrance at their feet. Jay tries to peer through the cave mouth at the village outside but he doesn’t have the angle. He considers if the current is too strong to actually wade through. He extends a sandal into the brown water…
An iron grip seizes his arm. “Don’t.” It’s Miriam. “Flood like this will get worse before it gets better.”
“Yeah, but the last of the light in the sky is dying and I wanted to see if there’s any… Oh, well.” Jay gives up on the plan. Miriam’s right. That water is running too fast.
Maahjabeen leans back in the shadows so none may see the look on her face. She is cold and frightened, yes, but also prepared. Coiled for a counter-attack, she listens to the rain ease, knowing this might be her opportunity here.
She has known for days and now, even more so, these last few hours. It was after Katrina had told them all of what the golden man had shared with her that Maahjabeen had asked if they had talked about Pradeep at all and what could be done to save him. Katrina had leaned back against the blackened timbers of the hut beside her and said they had spoken about such matters only in regards to the shamans, and how they store the spirits they steal in clay jars on shelves in their homes.
Most of the unbelievers in the hut had laughed at the words but to Maahjabeen it sounded credible, like something an ancient Bedouin mystic would do, the kind of satanic witchcraft the Prophet first encountered in the desert and fought against. Yes, it is like a djinn in its lamp. Her Pradeep is bottled up, kept from her where one of the shamans hide him.
Katrina hadn’t asked the old man where they might find them. Not for lack of trying. Any attempts to draw a map or even discuss the island by landmarks had become hopelessly confused, she’d said. He couldn’t grasp any graphical or visual representations of the island at all. According to the Dandawu, the island is a poem.
Again, this makes sense to Maahjabeen in a way that it can’t to the others. Her entire life is shaped by verse. Of course the island is a poem. And once the Lisicans someday learn of the even greater poems of the Quran their lives will truly be saved.
So none of the researchers know where to find the shamans and their hidden shelves. But these Thunderbird youths probably do. Maahjabeen is counting on it. She’ll enlist one or more of them to lead her there so she can steal her lover’s soul right back.
But she can’t let the others know what she plans. They’d never let her go, especially Esquibel. So she must wait until she can slip away, probably right as this storm ends. Perhaps she can get Katrina’s friend to come with her. She said he’s good with a spear.
Ξ
Flavia and Mandy climb the cliff trail at dawn, still shivering and wet but determined not to spend another instant in that wretched cave after their long sleepless night. The strenuous activity warms them in the chill air. The dark cliffside is wreathed in fog and dashed intermittently with rain.
The trail is nearly gone, churned unrecognizable by the cyclone. Small trees and saplings lie across it, hampering their ascent. But soon they arrive at the first shelf above. It’s been a week or more since they were here and the lush meadow has erupted with thick bunches of grass that tower over their heads.
Mandy leads, parting the blades and stepping through to the cliff behind and the scramble to the top. Flavia is close behind. This is where they lost her to Wetchie-ghuy before and this time she is determined to stick right beside Mandy. It is why she came, to erase that bad memory and replace it with a better one.
They climb the fissure and arrive at the top. Where Wetchie-ghuy had crouched last time is nothing now but open sky. They are alone here, at the top of the island, clinging to the edge, the ocean everywhere, swallowing them in its embrace. Vertiginous, Flavia gasps. Sometimes she can forget just how isolated Lisica is. And then she has brain-breaking moments like these…
Mandy slips through the chute and scampers down the sloping face of the cliff leading to the edge, over which is nearly a kilometer drop down to rocks and surf. Mandy is moving much too fast for Flavia. But she forces herself to overcome her fear of heights and move faster. If she trips, there is still enough shallow slope here for her to tumble to a shrieking stop. She is still a good twenty meters from the edge.
Mandy cries out in dismay and hurries to the edge of the cliff on the far side of the concrete shaft. “Oh, drat! All gone…!” Not only her weather station but the platform of old wooden planks she’d affixed it to. Oh no. That thing had survived all the storms that came before. Was it worsening storms? Climate change? Probably. But also clamping a bulky weather station to it couldn’t have helped. Eek. She’ll have to tell Triquet she was responsible for the destruction of a historical site structure. They’ll be so mad at her.
Flavia follows Mandy slowly, stopping at the concrete lip of the shaft and peering down into darkness. “Can’t even see the bottom. But what was this whole thing for?”
“Oh, it was military so they probably had like guns up here. So they built a whole elevator or a lift or something. To like deliver all the ammo I guess.” She lifts her hands and drops them. “Flavia, I got none of that data! The whole station’s just gone! Every bit of it! Like all these broken components will wash up on the coast of Baja California in like two months. You know what? I should have put my address on them! Shit, I’m so stupid! Stupid stupid!”
It’s been a brutal week and Mandy can’t take any more right now. She crumples, hiding her face in her hands, hardly feeling Flavia’s sympathetic embrace. Mandy had gotten into meteorology to understand frightening and world-altering things like hurricanes and floods, so that she might better prepare for them and never be hurt by them. But actually living through one had shaken her to her control-freak core. The sheer power of that cyclone had turned her into a meaningless speck of life. A flea. She and all her friends could have been crushed and drowned and swept out to sea in an instant and the world would have carried on this morning just like nothing had happened. But that is unacceptable. Entirely. She can’t live in such a… crude thoughtless biological place. She has to somehow be more special than that, doesn’t she?
“There, there. We can figure out the data. I hate losing data.” Flavia soothes her, knowing that Mandy’s reaction is out of all proportion to a lost instrument or two. Yet after what they’ve been through, Flavia is surprised that Mandy hasn’t fallen apart entirely. “Poor little bambina. What is it, eh?”
Mandy allows her face to be drawn upward. She blinks her tears away and smiles gratefully at Flavia. “Oh, just a little thing I think they call ego death. That’s all. How about you?”
“I am fine. Counting down the days now. Yes. We are at eleven. Which is a prime number, indivisible. An important day to maths nerds like me. See, every day that comes until seven will be able to be further broken down. Ten days left? Why, we just have to live through five days twice. That’s two work weeks. No trouble. Nine days? That’s three days, three times. Easy. Eight? A month of weekends. Then seven. And seven feels like a lot again because you can’t divide it. A whole week. You see?”
Mandy nods. She likes systems like this. “Okay, but that isn’t the problem. The problem is… I mean, I shouldn’t want to leave this island at all.”
“What are you talking about? That is crazy. Of course everyone wants to leave. This place is trying to kill us.”
“I study weather. That’s my entire career. This is, like… I mean this spot is the nursery for some of the biggest storms on the planet. Shouldn’t I want to be here, experiencing all this weather? It’s like if you woke up one day and realized all those numbers you’ve been studying were an earth-shattering force that could easily kill you. Would you still study them?”
“But mathematics are an earth-shattering force that can easily kill me. What do you think like the entire Industrial Age was?”
“You know what I mean. I’m—I’m just frightened and I want to go home. I don’t want to live through any more catastrophes.”
“You and me both, Mandy. You and me both.”
Ξ
Miriam directs Jay and Katrina and Alonso to bring the pieces of the destroyed village to the central square. They were going to just pass through on their way back to pine camp but the devastation here can’t be ignored.
“I don’t know, Doctor Truitt…” Jay hangs back, fishing in his shirt pocket for his rolling papers and lighter. “I bet we mess it up even more somehow. Like there’s probably a whole system. They probably know which piece of wood belongs where in the whole village. We’ll just make it worse.” He deftly rolls a little morning joint and sparks up.
“We can’t leave it like this. Maybe we just straighten things…” Miriam pulls a collapsed heap of redwood bark panels, soaked through, from where they lay. As she places the pieces in rows on the ground before her, a fresh shower sweeps across the village and up the cliffs. But such modest amounts of weather hardly register any more. They all bow to their task, untangling the wood and laying it out in clean patterns. The four of them work together in silence. The marine layer above nearly breaks apart, but doesn’t. It only shows silver lines of sunlight in the cracks.
“God, I’ve changed,” Miriam mutters, attacking a pile beside Alonso. “Isn’t that the strange thing, Zo? Seeing you and being with you again, I’m not like picking up where I left off as a forty-seven year old field researcher five years ago. No, I feel most like I’m a twenty-three year old rock star again and we’re back in Nevada and San Diego and Reno. And… I’m just such a different person from how I used to be. I was terrible.”
Alonso laughs. “You were the vixen.”
“Which, strangely, also means fox,” Katrina interjects. “Mate, we’re surrounded by them.”
Miriam orders the closest pile. “I was just very much in love with myself. I didn’t have this kind of care of others, you know?”
Alonso nods. “Oh, I know.”
“You were the only one who could actually touch my heart under all those layers and masks and everything.”
“It was my abuela’s cooking.”
Miriam giggles and falls against him. He grunts, pleased, and goes back to sorting large pieces of wood. This redwood bark is amazing. Some of it is as thick as his arm, huge curving sheets taller and wider than himself. Beautiful, black with age.
Esquibel and Triquet exit the cave with the last pair of youths, stepping out into the clear morning air. “What are you doing?” she calls out to the others. “Did you lose something?”
“No. We just… feel bad for them.” Jay heaves on a plank, forcing a nearly-collapsed wall back into position.
“Ha. Feel bad for yourselves. Imagine what pine camp must look like.” And Esquibel stalks through the village alone.
Triquet bends to help. “Oh my god. Some of these places are like entirely gone. These poor people.”
“I wonder…” Alonso grunts, forcing his creaky body to work. “Do they have to rebuild like this a lot? Maybe more than once a year? Because that would get very old very fast.”
“Why ever clean when you can just disassemble and reassemble? Good lord these big ones are heavy. Just like sponges. So much water in them.”
Another figure steps out from the cave mouth. The first of the villagers. It is one of the shy preteen girls of the Mayor’s household. She has the darkest and curliest hair, nearly an afro. No one has ever heard her name. Slowly she emerges from the cave and stares dispassionately at the wreckage of her village.
“Eh, sorry.” Miriam has no words for this. “I know it must look bad but maybe we can help rebuild…” She shrugs at the girl.
“Mirrie…” Alonso’s face grows worried. “Don’t make promises we can’t keep. We still have so much work of our own and we have fallen so far behind…”
Miriam’s face flickers, her composure nearly cracking. It is hard to take Alonso’s continuing dreams of Plexity seriously here in day forty-bloody-seven in the aftermath of a major cyclone. But god forbid ever saying such a thing aloud. “Alonso, I love you,” she says instead, meaning it, and goes back to work.
The girl watches them for a few minutes before turning around and going back into the cave. A few minutes later, Mandy and Flavia re-enter the village by descending from the southern cliff in a small rock slide.
“Aw, what a good idea.” Mandy hurries to help the others. “We can put their houses back together for them. Show some gratitude for once. Or… at least just make it neat?”
“We’re afraid to do any more,” Triquet says.
Flavia only watches. She is fatigued, sore and battered from her night and then this epic climb and descent with Mandy. Now she is supposed to do manual labor? For how long? It would take days to fix this village. There are piles of wood everywhere.
A fox scampers from the cave mouth into the village, sniffing at the arranged pieces of wood. It sniffs the air too, its gleaming eyes taking in the scene. Then it scampers away.
“Wish I had a fox,” Jay grumbles. “Be so cool. Just this rad pet who feeds himself and lives like this parallel life, still a wild creature, you know what I’m saying? Just like, friends.”
Morska Vidra emerges from the cave, followed by the Mayor and Yesiniy and all the others. They gather at the near end of the village, watching the outsiders awkwardly labor with the remains of their houses. But Miriam and the others have the sense to stop, and gently lay down the pieces they hold. They withdraw to the far end of the village, at the trailhead leading down to the creek and meadow and pine camp. Morska Vidra crosses the village to them, his fox scampering ahead. “Bontiik.” He greets each of them, his face deadpan but his eyes smiling. Perhaps he appreciates their gesture after all. They murmur the greeting in turn, chucking him under the chin. The fox on his shoulder chitters at Alonso and they all laugh, releasing tension.
“Ask him if that’s a girl or boy fox.” Jay tugs at Katrina’s sleeve. “Tired of calling a living creature ‘it.’ Feel me?”
“Totally, dude.” Katrina turns to Morska Vidra, composing the question in her head. Then she thinks of a better approach. Yes or no questions only. “Lisica… kʼisáani, gé?”
“Da.” Morska Vidra turns to his fox, pulling it from his shoulder and holding it like a cat, stroking its fur.
“They always answer yes or no like a Slav. So weird.” Katrina turns back to Jay. “His fox is a boy.”
“Does he have a name?”
She shrugs, miming “Katrina,” then, “Morska Vidra,” then, pointing at the fox, she asks, “Saa? Name?”
“Nyet.” Then Morska Vidra laughs, as if the idea is comical. Behind him, the villagers have spread out into the remains of their homes. They pore over the organized rows of wood like shoppers at the market, lifting a certain piece and exclaiming its story. But they all seem to be seeking specific pieces, and some of them begin to find them. They lift the pieces of bark, large or small, and shout out their relief and gratitude, which is echoed by the others.
Morska Vidra returns to his own hut, which remains partially standing. The roof is gone and most of the wall around the door, but the remainder of it still stands.
He doesn’t look very happy about it, though. He searches for his own special piece of wood and when he finds it, it has been split lengthwise by the storm. It is an old, elongated plank of bark worn to roundness at the edges, but something cleaved it perfectly in two. Morska Vidra lifts up both riven pieces, his voice shaking and dolorous. His neighbors all call out to him and many flock to his side, putting a hand on him in sympathy.
“Like the keystone? But it’s wood. The heartwood.” Jay tries to find the meaning in this scene. “The one piece. Maybe like the OG piece, the last one left or something. Put there by his dad. Aw, Morska Vidra! Mad respect, dude! So sorry for your loss!”
His neighbors go back to their own disasters, leaving Morska Vidra alone in the remains of his house. He sits there, heartbroken, for a long time. Even his fox has left him.
“Should we go? We should go.” Triquet thinks a quiet exit is probably for the best.
Then Morska Vidra rises, chanting something roughly. He pushes on the remaining walls of his house, but they stubbornly resist him. His chant grows louder, a list of imprecations and curses from the sound of them, and he uses all his strength. The wall totters and falls, twisting in a heap to the ground.
Morska Vidra pulls the panels of his house apart, scattering them. His neighbors immediately start scavenging the biggest and most useful pieces. He stalks away, under the trees, his head held high and his eyes faraway.
Then another figure exits the cave. It is Pradeep.
He blinks in the bright morning light. “Where…? Where is—?” His voice is so unused, as if it’s coming from somewhere under the ocean. For a moment he can’t remember her name. Then he does. “Maahjabeen. Where…?”
“Prad!” Jay finally sees the tottering figure. He rushes to him, slamming into him with a bear hug. “You’re back!” But he goes gentle almost immediately. Pradeep is so fragile.
“Never left. Where is she?”
“Eh, Mandy? Flavia?” Alonso asks as he hurries with the others to congregate around Pradeep. “Did you leave Maahjabeen up on the cliff this morning?”
“Maahjabeen didn’t come with us,” Flavia answers. “We haven’t seen her.”
Miriam frowns. “Oh, we were sure the three of you were off together. Well then where is she? Was she still in the cave when you left?”
Mandy shrugs. “I have no idea. We didn’t check.”
“Then how long…?” Pradeep forces the words out. “How long has she been gone?”
Alonso shrugs. “I don’t think we can say. Maybe all night.”
Then Miriam remembers that talk of souls and the underworld in the meadow. Oh, no. Maahjabeen has resolved to be a holy warrior, she’s pretty sure. “I just hope she didn’t hurt anyone.”
“Maahjabeen? Why what did she do?” Pradeep shakes his head. With each word, each step forward, each embrace from a friend he is restored to himself. Soon his thoughts might even flow freely again, as they used to. “Never. She couldn’t hurt a fly.”
“To rescue you, though?” Miriam holds Pradeep steady, rubbing his back. He looks anemic. “I think she’d be capable of quite a lot. She’s a tiger, that one. Saving her beloved from the evil wizard. Wait. I know just the thing to fix you up.”
Miriam hurries back into the cave.
“Wait, what is the implication here? How could Maahjabeen have possibly rescued Pradeep?” Flavia’s voice immediately rises in ire. “She disappeared. She wasn’t even here.”
Katrina’s laugh is low and spooky. “That’s what we’re saying, I reckon. She was out stealing his spirit back for him.”
“See, that is what I knew you were saying and I could tell you were all being foolish. Because that is impossible, what you are saying. Maahjabeen did no such thing. The drugs they gave him just finally wore off. Right, Pradeep? Isn’t that what happened?”
“I—I have no idea.”
“Well, what was it like?” Triquet asks. “You said the last one was like drowning in cold mud. Was this the same?”
“No. It was like…” Pradeep tries to grasp the memory of it, the fleeting impressions that single clear present sensation left in him. But he had no ability to reflect on himself during the whole ordeal. He was only a passive witness to all their words and actions. He saw it all, but he couldn’t keep it. “Inside I was hollow. No pain. No… emotion. But then like an hour ago I came back.”
“Smashed your jar, I bet.” Katrina gives Pradeep a long hug, trying to fill him with her warmth and life. “Big strong lad like you, deserves to get his jar smashed every night.” She kisses Pradeep on the jawline, but nothing stirs in him, not even from the teasing.
“I feel… newborn.”
“Whoa. Trippy. What do you mean? Like you have amnesia?” Mandy asks. “You can’t remember anything?”
“No… More like…”
She interrogates him with a laugh. “Quick. What’s your name? Where were you born?”
“Uh… Pradeep Chakrabarti. Hyderabad. No, I still have all the information. I just couldn’t… Just…”
“Had no soul?” Mandy ventures.
Flavia throws her hands into the air. “Now you are putting words into his mouth. Preposterous. Has nobody here done ketamine?”
“Sure,” Katrina responds. “Loads.”
“Well, that will make you feel as if you have no soul. Like that.” Flavia snaps her fingers. “This, ehh, it just lasted longer.”
Miriam returns from the cave with the pigskin bag holding three uneaten pork steaks. She pulls one out of the bag and holds it out to Pradeep. “Here, love. This will cure what ails you.”
“I do try to be a vegetarian.” Pradeep looks at the cube of meat with worry. “But I haven’t eaten in days, have I?”
“Just take what you can stomach,” Miriam counsels him. “You need something, that’s for sure. You’re like a ghost.”
Pradeep nibbles at the flesh of the boar. It is carbon bitter, the rind coated with ash. Then he tastes the gamey, cold steak, greasy and rich. There is something unpalatable and savage in the meat, as if the rage of the boar still sizzles in its blood. It only takes a few bites for him to be overwhelmed by the sensation. Pradeep makes a face and hands the remainder back to Miriam.
His heart suddenly hammers. Testosterone and adrenaline surge through Pradeep’s limbs. As his digestive tract voraciously tears the fibers of the meat apart, he is reset on some primal level. The violence at the heart of this animal’s death terrifies and saddens him. But now he is part of it. Now Pradeep is made of that violence. His eyes snap. He has trouble keeping himself from snarling aloud. Finally he finds his voice again.
“Okay. I’m back now.”
Ξ
Flavia approaches pine camp, fighting her way through the long wet grasses of the meadow to the tree line. It has taken all morning to get back here. First there was the climb with Mandy and then the whole scene at the destroyed village with Pradeep and all the Lisicans and finally a long frustrating interlude with the recently unhoused Morska Vidra.
She’d come upon the old man in the woods beside the trail. He was wandering aimlessly, nearly sightlessly, through a shadowy stand of pines. His fox pounced gaily ahead, chittering and digging for grubs, almost like the little fellow was trying to cheer him up. Boris does that for Flavia when she is sad.
She would have left him alone if he hadn’t stumbled and fallen as she’d passed. It was the first time she had seen that of any Lisican. They were always so sure-footed. Flavia hurried to Morska Vidra’s side and helped him stand. When he faced her he seemed to have visibly aged. In sympathy, she hugged his frail shoulders. He didn’t know what to do with the embrace, though, and only stood before her in silent grief.
Flavia searched for the right words. “My mother’s side of the family. We have an old house in Verona that my second cousins live in. Right downtown. It is over six hundred years old. The walls are so thick you can sit in the windows. It has been in our family for… what, thirty generations? I can’t imagine how I would feel if a storm destroyed it. All my ancestors. All those memories.”
Her voice soothed him and his shoulders dropped. He leaned into her embrace and the fox sniffed gently about her ankles.
Then the practical side of her kicked in. “But where will you live now? Build on the same spot? I didn’t see too many other options right there in the village. Or do you want to come live with us for a while? Eh? We have room, I am sure.”
Morska Vidra sat back on his heels and regarded Flavia gravely. She felt the weight of his judgment and fell silent. This wasn’t just him looking at her, this was… this was a man who was beginning to understand that his entire way of life was about to vanish. And it was all coming at the hands of Flavia and people like her. There was a deep melancholy in his eyes as well as a bitter outrage. It burst against her like a camera’s flash and she turned away, unable to bear what she saw.
When Flavia finally did look back, Morska Vidra had shrunken in on himself again, his fox curled in his lap. As far as she could tell, they were staying there forever. She moved on.
Now, she finds pine camp mostly empty and still in quite a state. The clean room has collapsed and its translucent plastic sheets lie twisted in the mud. The only person Flavia can see is Jay, standing against the only wall of the clean room that has been rebuilt. He is entirely naked, brushing his thick reddish-blond hair back from his brown forehead.
“Oh. Hey.” Jay makes no move to cover himself.
Flavia takes this as a welcome signal that she can, well, not ogle him exactly, but maybe appreciate a male body for what feels like the first time in ages. And he has such a nice one, with wide shoulders and long lean arms, a flat belly and long shapely legs. He is like a coursing hound, built to run.
“Welcome to my sponge bath, Flavia. Feels great, yo.”
“It really does.” Esquibel calls out from the other side of the sheet. Her long dark body can be seen in hazy silhouette through the plastic, her hands running all over her curves. “I may never put clothes on again.”
Flavia plucks at her own shirt and trousers. They are soaked and filthy and they make her skin crawl. Without a thought she peels them off and steps clear of what had always been her favorite clothes. Maybe after a thorough washing they can be again. Her skin prickles in the mild morning air. “Eh, where is the sponge?”
Esquibel steps around the edge of the sheet with a small bucket. She hands it to Flavia and examines her body with professional detachment. “And how are you? You look thin. Like you aren’t eating enough.”
“Are any of us?” Flavia pokes Esquibel’s own ribs, visible beneath her breasts.
Esquibel twitches back and swats Flavia’s hand. “Do not do that. I am ticklish. Otherwise you are fine? Turn around.”
Flavia lets Esquibel spin her slowly, lifting her arms and inspecting her minutely. The care and attention actually feels somewhat nice. She casts a sidelong look at Jay but he is still brushing out his hair, staring at nothing. Flavia is affronted.
She elbows him. “Hey. I am glad you are not like staring at me like a jackal but we are still two naked women standing here in front of you. I mean, you can at least say something nice.”
“Uh. Yeah, for sure.” Jay breaks his reverie, the violent rush of jagged images and sounds from the night before finally receding. “You guys look great. Molto bene. Is that how you say it?”
Esquibel frowns. “I do not need a man’s approval to feel good about my body. So how are you, Jay? All your contusions and incisions. Show me your ribs.”
“It is all about the ribs today.” Flavia runs her hands up and down her own. Yes, there is very little cushion beneath this skin. She can’t recall ever being so thin. And yet, she doesn’t want to feast and regain her lost padding. She likes how she feels. Food is something she only needs in spare mouthfuls throughout the day.
Esquibel traces the red line of Jay’s spear wound. It is healing well. “No infection. At least we can be thankful for that. How are the deeper layers…” She palpates the scar and he winces.
“Yeah, still pretty sore, Doc. Am I gonna get full range back? Got some big surfing plans coming up.”
“I think so. But you will feel it, certainly, the rest of your life.”
“Damn. Already damaged goods. And only twenty-two.”
“Here. Look at this one.” Esquibel raises her arms and turns her backside to them. She has a neat puncture wound above her right hip, an indentation that appears quite old. “Leaned against a broken fence post when I was eight. Almost died of tetanus. The time I spent in the hospital is what made me want to be a doctor. I still feel it, twenty years later.”
“Oh, I got no shortage of scars.” Jay proceeds to proudly point out the biggest ones, on his chest, on his shoulder, on his hip, on his shin. “Fell off a cliff, motorcycle, motorcycle, and sharp rock in the shallows at the end of a wave. Broke my fucking leg.”
Esquibel appraises him coolly. “And I am quite certain you are nowhere near done.” She shakes her head. “Human bodies. They are all so different. Look at us. All the colors and shapes. But we all still run the same.”
Alonso and Miriam arrive, stepping under the trees. They stop and regard the ruins of their camp. Not a platform still remains standing. Their own tent is a twisted heap covered in mud. The clean room is just a single wall of plastic, in front of which stand three naked members of their crew.
Without a word, Alonso and Miriam take off their clothes and join them. Flavia scrubs Alonso’s back with the soapy sponge she finds in the bucket and then Miriam does hers.
Nobody speaks. Alonso’s body is totally littered with scars, some broad and angry welts, some puncture wounds like Esquibel’s. All down his legs to his crooked feet. The words they just shared about their own scars ring shamefully in their ears.
Beside Alonso, Miriam is a pale and slender nymph. She piles her auburn hair on her head and lets her husband scrub her shoulders and the back of her neck. She purrs, closing her eyes.
“The family that bathes together,” Alonso laughs, “stays together. What is wrong, Doctor Daine? Have you never seen a torture victim before?”
“I am very surprised, Doctor Alonso,” she answers in a quiet voice, affronted by what was done to his body, “that you are as healthy as you are and not heavily addicted to opiates.”
“Yes, in large part that is what this trip is about. Learning to live with the pain. Otherwise I will be a junkie like that.” He snaps his fingers. “And the Fentanyl on the street kills people these days. So I would not last very long. No. My drug is Plexity. And all you beautiful children. You are what keep me here.”
Flavia turns outward peering through the trees at the far ridge. She imagines her vision telescoping even further, across the water back to the mainland, then spanning the whole continent. There is madness and torture everywhere. “This crazy world. Why does it have so many monsters in it?”
Alonso shakes his head. “They are everywhere. Sadists and evil bullies. Even here, in utopia…”
“Ha!” Flavia turns back, scorn in her face. “This can’t be utopia. It doesn’t have enough sunshine. Or hot water.”
“Yes, I would not call it utopia,” Esquibel agrees. “That implies perfection. And does anything about this camp look perfect to you? It is more a nice vacation.”
“Well…” Alonso shrugs. The sponge bath is over, but like the others he has no desire to get back into his clothes. “Here are my thoughts about utopia. First, it is impossible. Think of how different everyone is. What would be utopia for me, with lots of naked men and fully-funded science missions, would not be utopia for others.”
“I’m with you on the naked men!” Flavia grabs the muscles of Jay’s arm and he smiles indulgently at her. “But not here. Maybe Monaco. Or one of the Greek islands.”
“Plenty of naked men there,” Alonso agrees. “But I doubt they would all like my idea of utopia. And I wouldn’t care much for theirs. But utopias still do exist. It is only that they are fleeting. They last only a single moment and everyone thinks, whoa, that was a perfect little jewel of an experience, like this wonderful bath we all shared. But by the time you think it, it is already over. When you are outside the moment, appreciating it, you are no longer living in it and the spell is broken. Have you ever had that, yes?”
Jay nods slowly. “Dude. That’s so deep. Yeah, like every time I catch a wave. Those are my own little utopias for sure.”
“Uhhh, hi?” Mandy steps under the pine trees and approaches the knot of naked people. “Like what’s even going on here, guys?”
“Sponge bath,” Esquibel answers. “Then we just kind of… forgot it was over. Forgot we were naked, I guess. It feels so good to be out of those hideous clothes. Come on, you should try.”
“Well… isn’t it a party.” Katrina approaches with Pradeep, her arm around his shoulder. They took it nice and easy down the trail and across the meadow. He may be returned to them but he is still at the tail-end of an ordeal that lasted days. Now Katrina can’t stop goggling at all the skin, while Pradeep keeps his own eyes averted. “Don’t mind if I do.” Katrina shucks off her clothes.
The others welcome her into their circle, pouring soapy water on her blonde hair and scrubbing her skin with the sponge. Katrina moans in pleasure. “Ohh… I had no idea how much I needed group bathing in my life. Fantastic.”
“Mandy. Pradeep.” Esquibel orders them. “Come on. You need to get cleaned up.”
Mandy and Pradeep share a bashful gaze. They both step back in reflexive refusal. Mandy holds up a hand. “Uhh… No, thanks… We’re good.”
Chapter 45 – The USB Stick
November 5, 2024
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:
45 – The USB Drive
Persistent birdsong penetrates the dense canopy. What bird is that? Jay doesn’t recognize its calls. It switches from buzzing to chirping to long melodic lines of warbling. Is that all one bird? Fascinating. It must be a mimic, like a mockingbird.
Jay opens his eyes. It is evening. The rain has stopped and their little hollow no longer drips maddeningly at arrhythmic intervals. Pradeep still sleeps beside him, their legs entangled for warmth.
“In my experience…” Jay mutters, his voice thick, “mockingbirds don’t sing at night. Just in the morning.”
“What’s that?” Pradeep’s voice is muffled. His face is tucked down, toward the pit of the hollow where redwood roots gather. He lifts his face. Jay is surprised to see how worn he looks, like he’s gained decades in the last couple days. Jay must look the same.
“Bird. Crazy song.” Jay pulls himself free. It’s too cold to lie here any longer. “We got to get moving, bro-him.”
“My legs. They really don’t want to.”
“Freeze our asses if we stay. Come on, Prad. Be the change you want to see…” Jay stands and grabs Pradeep’s upper arm, “…in the world!” And he hauls his groaning friend to his feet.
“Wow. I hate you for doing that.”
“Got to climb. Remember the plan? That’ll warm us up.”
“Perhaps I am not as cold as you. I could have stayed in that hole for another couple hours with no complaints.”
“Yeah, I’m freezing.” Now that he’s standing, Jay can see that it isn’t evening yet. The canopy just blocks most of the light. It is late afternoon and a golden glow suffuses the blue sky.
“Well we could just switch positions. I am still utterly exhausted.”
“We should hit this hill while we still got a little light.”
“It is true I don’t want to wait until morning. And now my phone is dead. No more flashlight.”
“Yeah mine too.”
“Fine then. Lead on. But don’t stop anywhere too long. Or I will pass out on my feet.”
“No doubt.” Jay surveys their surroundings, the pain of his many injuries making him feel like a badly-stitched-together golem. The sun is just setting over the far ridge, the meadow in shadow below with its low grassy hillocks, the very spot where they learned that they had dropped all the way into the wrong valley. Yep. There it is right there where his heart broke in fucking half. Good times. Anyway… After their tragic discovery they’d climbed up this way in a kind of daze, just to get away from it, and then they’d crapped out at the base of this tree. Said they’d just get a minute of shut-eye. That was like… six hours ago? Seven?
“The shadows…” Pradeep points at the nearby trees that are still lit by the setting sun. “From the shadows the sun is setting there,” he points at the slope across the meadow and then tracks a fair bit further south toward the equator. “We’re at like fortieth parallel so we’ve got to adjust the compass like so, and I’d say true west is about there. Hooray for one brief moment of sunshine.”
“Yeah, good call. That’s west. So north, east, south.” Jay rotates, pointing at each in turn. “Yeah. So I’m thinking that western ridge is the rim of the island. That west coast we’ve never seen.”
“Except Maahjabeen. In the first storm.”
“Right. But that’s like exactly the wrong way. We got to get back to our beach and our bunker and our… babes?”
“No. You will never call her a babe. She will tear your head right off. Yes, if the island is a clock, then the lagoon is at like 5:30 and we are currently at sort of… 7:30 or 8 on the dial?”
“Got to be. Which isn’t that far at all as crows fly. But you know it’s gonna be a fucking maze between here and there.”
“It always has been. You know, next time I take a posting on an island, I will make sure it is a flat sandbar. With one palm tree.”
“And a killer break. Come on, Prad. We’ll know more if we get up top here. We can chase the sun.”
“How… mythological.” Pradeep falls in line behind the limping, gasping Jay, who attacks the hillside with little forethought. “Wait. Wait. We can’t just charge this slope, Jay. We have to follow some contour lines. Bring us northeast for a bit first. Switchbacks.”
“Right on. Yeah. Get up top wherever. From the main ridge. We can get anywhere. On the island. In no time at all.”
“Yes. But climb. Out of the valleys. They are killing us.”
Then they speak no more, their energy turned to their poor feet and legs. Pradeep’s shins are covered in bruises. His climbing muscles scream with stiffness. But as he slowly warms up it all turns into a barely-tolerable throbbing ache and somehow he generates more mental fortitude from endocrine releases and conductive salts in cell walls and he keeps up with the mad Californian above.
Jay pivots them on the slope, making a switchback that heads more properly east-by-southeast where they need to go. Contours are only helpful if they actually take you to your destination. Sometimes you got to just take a mountain on its own terms.
For an hour they climb, passing out of the redwoods and through a stand of madrones and rhododendrons, then oak and sorrel, and finally grasslands near the spine of the ridge, which is marked by jagged lines of dark brown rock. They achieve the summit while the setting sun is just visible hanging over the western horizon, now distant and dim and pink, bisected by a pair of thin clouds. The wind whips them up here, bringing the marine chill. Vast and immaculately empty, the ocean surrounds them.
Now Jay looks down to regard the island. They are indeed on a ridgeline that connects with a larger main ridge up behind them, perhaps another eight hundred meters higher. Wow. This island’s got some walls on it for sure. But if they manage to stay on the ridges then they can skip all the ups and downs and meandering mazes. “Yes. Here’s our shortcut, yo.”
Pradeep frowns at the higher ridge. “Due north? That far? May I remind you that we’re trying to go southeast?”
“Yeah but once you get up top it runs east-west. We get on that ridge and head east, then when we get to the right valley, we follow that like sub-ridge down and boom, we’re home by supper.”
“Yes, I think you’re right.”
“Man, I’m glad we agree about all this. Imagine if we were like fighting all the time. I’ve been in that situation before when—”
“Or if like one of us was high on acid.”
“Yeah yeah. That wasn’t my finest hour.” Jay picks his way along the spine of rocks, the slope they just climbed falling away before them. The ridge is broader than he expected and he doesn’t even see the far slope yet or into what it must descend. “Oh, no way!”
“What is it?” Pradeep steps past the outcrop Jay just vanished around and joins him in delight at the sight of a tiny waterfall, surrounded by lilies and ferns, splashing strongly from the recent rains. “Wow. That must be one full water table to get a waterfall going this strong this far up the slope. And I bet it’s quite clean.” Pradeep leans in and cups his hand under it. He lifts the cold water to his mouth and slurps. “Delicious.”
“Fuck yeah it is.” Jay is on all fours at the edge of the little pool below, drinking directly from it like a dog. “Best water ever.”
Movement. Pradeep cringes, his primal instincts unleashing anxiety that disperses the peace of this moment like a knife through smoke. He squawks, turning back the way they came, to confront one of the golden childs sneaking around the outcrop after them. “Oh. It’s just you. One of you.”
“What the…?” Jay rolls over, blinking at the silhouette of the golden childs against the bright sky. “Hey, what’s up, dude?”
“How long have you been following us?” The masked figure stops and drops their arms. The youth was obviously surprised to find his quarry here, but he shows no reaction to being caught out.
“Oh, that’s just swell. Do you think he started with us from the beginning? Like he secretly followed us through the tunnels and everything? Dude, you could have helped out sooo much, so many times. Do you even know we’re completely fucking lost and we’re just trying to get back? I mean, just show us the way. Which way…?What are some of their names? Uh, Lisica. Morska Vidra.”
“Yes. Let’s get some directions. Jidadaa. Wetchie-ghuy.” Pradeep points where Jay is pointing. “That way?”
The youth only watches them through his golden mask, their inscrutable bodyguard.
“Right.” Now Pradeep feels the urge to lead. “Let’s head out then.” He tries one last attempt at communication, pointing out their route. “We’re climbing the north ridgeline up there then heading west, and finally southeast. Back home, eh?”
But the youth hurries past them and turns to bar their way. He holds up his hands as if to block them.
“Oh, no way. You won’t let us climb that ridge? Why not?” In frustration Jay scrubs water into his hair and steps away from the pool. “ Come on, G money. We got to go that way. Got to.”
“Closed to foreigners?” Pradeep crosses the width of the spine to study the new valley that is revealed to the east and the main ridge overlooking it all. From this angle he can see a bit more of the ridge’s profile. Is that a thin filament of smoke he sees behind its central peak? “Aha. Look, Jay.”
“What? Where. A bird?”
“Smoke. I think.”
“Do not see it.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure I do. Just the briefest… Well, anyway, do you think that’s what our masked protector here is doing? Keeping us from crossing paths with whoever is up there?”
“I mean, their entire job is to protect us from Wetchie-ghuy and Sherman the shaman as far as I know. So… yeah.”
“I guess we aren’t taking the north ridge.”
Jay can’t stand the sight of the winding valley at the base of their ridge to the east. Its cleft is hidden in darkness. “Bro, if we drop into whatever canyon that is down there I guarantee you we won’t get out of it before nightfall.”
“Well, contours. Maybe we don’t need to stay up on the ridge. But maybe we don’t need to drop all the way down into the creeks. Maybe this golden childs will let us advance the way we want if we just drop a hundred meters or so below the top and get back in the trees. We can still follow the ridge, just in a more hidden way.”
“I don’t know.” The complaint sounds querulous to Jay’s own ears. “That’s a shit ton more climbing. But yeah. Not like they’re giving us a choice.” So much for being home by dinner. “Well. It is what it is. Lead on.”
Ξ
“You know what I’m thinking?” Amy asks Triquet, who builds a platform beside her in their new camp. Amy has already finished her own platform and tent and worries there is still so much to be done in the waning hours of this day.
“Uhh. Tea. Got to be something about tea. Like Earl Grey or Lapsang Souchong? None for me, thanks.”
“No.” Amy straightens, peering at the patchy sky. “Laundry.”
From the far side of the camp, Mandy calls out, “Oh my god, yes! I’ve got a whole load!”
“Where? Like in the river?” Triquet frowns at it, the impassable natural barrier with its fast-moving dark currents dividing this side of the island from the other. “I don’t think the Lisicans would like that. Don’t want anyone hucking a spear at my head.”
“No, I was thinking we could just climb up its bank here until we found a little tributary. So many streams are running right now. Don’t have to get anywhere near the main river. Just a tiny dab of biodegradable soap and some elbow grease and we might even get them to line dry before it gets too dark.”
“I wish,” Miriam sighs, erecting the tent on a new platform, “that we could wash our sleeping bags. They are so foul. But there’s no way they’ll ever dry out here and then what do we do at night?”
“I have thought that again and again.” Esquibel emerges from within her clean room. “I dream of turning my sleeping bag inside out and strip-cleaning its fabrics with alcohol.”
“Okay, crew.” Amy empties her big expedition backpack into her tent, returning the articles of dirty clothing and accessories she should wash back into it. “You guys keep working. I’ll be the washing machine and dryer. Put your things in there with any special instructions. I can’t promise perfection, but…”
“Oh, you’re the best. Thank you so much. I think the weather might even hold all night.” Mandy appears with a small handful of things, followed by Triquet and Miriam and Esquibel. Amy’s pack is quickly full. She’s glad the others aren’t here to take her up on the offer. Laundry by hand takes forever. With any more to wash, Amy wouldn’t get back until midnight.
“You sure… you’re okay going alone?” Triquet has returned to building their platform.
“Who says I’ll be alone?” Amy nods at the golden childs who stand deeper in the woods above. Five of them had re-appeared once the villagers had left, watching over the new camp from a distance. And as Amy hauls the pack onto her back and buckles the waistbelt, one of the crouching masked youths rises to follow her.
She aims for the north edge of the meadow, where it gives way to trees. The black rushing river to her right is even more swollen than before. There is a point on its bank where the meadow ends and the pines begin. Amy pauses here for a bit. Such a delicious spot for a wildlife biologist, the intersection of three biomes in one place—forest, meadow, and water. Insect and fungal life probably exists in this ten square meters that exists nowhere else. If she has time, she will certainly collect every sample she can. Why, it’s like Plexity in miniature. “No. Actually…” Amy stands, reasoning aloud. “It’s the opposite of Plexity, which is a closed system. This transition zone has no boundaries at all. Its openness is its main characteristic. Huh.” Keeping the river to her right, she climbs up the north slope, a suddenly difficult outcrop of soil and brown pine needles sliding under her boots. The river begins to gargle beside her, dropping from the hills she’s climbing to the flat of the meadow behind. Maybe up this way she’ll find more falls.
The golden childs hovers behind her like a concerned parent, waiting patiently for her to navigate this crumbling obstacle. Amy reaches for the base of a sapling and hauls herself upward. Finally, the top. A bank of budding Osmaronia cerasiformis greets her on this bluff, while the river is now hidden in a cut that is a good five meters below, making all kinds of noise.
Amy pushes her way through the dense woody branches and wins through to a cloistered glade of clover and vetch, coated in rain. No more than a dozen paces wide, it is like a little chapel of light and life. The scene is so idyllic and pure that she doesn’t want to disturb it. Perhaps she should be like those Shinto monks who apologize to each creature they crush before taking a step.
The little glade bespells her. Unlike the transition zone below, this remote notch is far removed from the rhythms of the world. Purple blossoms and green leaves glow in the light of the setting sun. A pair of green-tailed towhees flicker in the branches of the pines above. Quiet and peace reign here. If she wasn’t the product of a modern education she would swear the glade is sentient.
During Amy’s childhood, Shinto had been a kind of strict folklore tradition she’d learned to hate. The rites and details of the rituals had seemed to always obscure the life it was supposedly praising. In Shinto, Japan has a mythological dimension, with gods and demons and fairies hiding in glens like this one. But Shinto is immutably Japanese, so there can be no such thing as a Lisican version of Shinto. It must just be its own magic here, its own unique power connected to place with its own secret name.
Amy has been pursuing this elusive nature of nature her entire life. Back in the 80s she had really gotten into complexity theory and for an entire generation the concept of emergent behavior was her specialty. Once complex systems reach a critical mass then new harmonics emerge, new behaviors and effects that are not always predictable based on the inputs, like steam from a kettle or human consciousness itself. Has that happened here in this glade? Has it… embodied somehow the essence of its nature? Does it have a giggling sylph or dryad hiding in the pines?
This elusive emergent property is the phenomenon of life itself, a rare miracle in the universe, firmly affixed to this tiny green and blue rock hurtling through the void. The study of emergence is the end result of the connections Plexity is trying to make. This is the evanescent heart of the matter here. Each scoop of dirt and rock that took billions of years to become soil and life has made unique interactions manifest in higher orders such as birds sipping nectar from beckoning flowers. And their song is its secret name…
Dark eyes stare back at Amy from within the stand of sword ferns across the glade. Wide and staring, round and beady… The inexact descriptors echo through her mind as she goes still. Yellow. Shiny. Quite certainly inhuman, perhaps canine? Oh, it’s a fox. Is that Morska Vidra’s fox? No… This one has a reddish lip and a narrow snout. The ears are different too, now that she can see them.
The little silver fox slowly waddles out from under the fern boughs onto the clover. Its belly is swollen and at first Amy thinks it’s diseased. Then she realizes she’s looking at a vixen, a female, and that she’s very pregnant.
This is wildly unheard of behavior. Foxes expecting litters like this will generally withdraw and be impossible to find. For one to seek her out is… preposterous. But then again, why do animals hide themselves to give birth? To protect against predators. If there are no predators of foxes on Lisica, then she can build a nest wherever she pleases. Astounding. But this one needs something from her? The pregnancy isn’t going well? Some veterinary surgery will be required out here in the middle of nowhere with no proper tools?
The vixen looks gravely at Amy with her yellow eyes. Then she turns and heads to the edge of the glade away from the creek, uphill. She pauses before she disappears once again into the ferns.
“You’re asking me…? Oh. You want me to come with you. Uh. Yeah. Hold on. I’ll just leave the bag here for a sec.”
Amy unbuckles the expedition backpack, trying to think if there’s anything she can use as rags if she finds herself attending a birth here. She snags a pair of someone’s socks from the top of it before closing it back up and resting it beside the bole of an old stump. There will be some crawling ahead, of that she is sure. Good thing her phone is fully charged if she needs light.
Ducking into the bushes, Amy disappears from view. After a long moment the fronds of the ferns stop shaking and return to stillness. Lavender butterflies flit across the opening. The towhees begin to sing again.
A moment later, the golden childs appears, looking for her. They find the backpack filled with dirty clothes and nothing else.
Ξ
Miriam finds Alonso in the meadow, studying the far hills. He has just enraged Maahjabeen again, who is stomping away from him back through the grass to what they’ve started calling pine camp.
Maahjabeen’s face is dark and her eyes are full of fire. She scowls at Miriam as she passes her. “Your husband can be so mean. He doesn’t have to be so mean.”
“Mean? Alonso?” Miriam blinks at her, but Maahjabeen doesn’t stop to hear her answer. She is too angry. “My Alonso? Never.”
Miriam joins her husband in the meadow. “You’re standing.”
“I am, aren’t I?” Alonso is preoccupied, though. Fighting with Maahjabeen always leaves such a bad taste in his mouth.
“What did you do to her this time?”
“Told her to stop making preparations to live in the sea cave and help us find missing people first and make this camp here.”
“You monster.”
“And I didn’t tell her she couldn’t do it. Oh, no. She would have killed me for that. I just told her to stop making it her top priority, especially when she will need help. We have no time to spare Amy or whoever for a dangerous kayak adventure. Not now.”
“She said living inland makes her crazy. I guess this is what she meant.” Miriam studies Alonso. Despite his current displeasure he is standing straight again and his shoulders have settled. This is how she always knew him before, but these last six weeks have been life with a fat old man hunched over his pain. Now he is starting to regain himself. Miriam never thought he might recover quite so quickly. “How’s the… what is it? Peanut butter and banana leaves treatment? How’s the wrap?”
“Not banana. Amy said maybe lily. It feels very odd. Warm, like warmer than it should, all the way inside. There is definitely an active compound or two in the Mayor’s treatment. I just hope there aren’t any serious side effects.”
“How long are you meant to leave it on?”
“I have no idea.”
They both laugh, a careworn sound. With a sigh, Alonso pulls Miriam close and they lean against each other, foreheads touching. The sky is filling once again with clouds, about to obscure the evening star. When it vanishes behind the rolling bank of gray the air begins to chill and they turn back, arm-in-arm, to camp.
There they find more arguing. Mandy storms from the clean room carrying her own bag. “She’s too much! I can’t take it any more. I’ll just—”
“You don’t have to like break up with me,” Esquibel exits as well, standing in the slit door entrance holding a white hand towel, “just because I asked you to move a few things that—”
“You’re hounding me! You’re always hounding me!” Mandy finds her own platform and drops her things on it. Now she’ll need to put up her own tent. At least maybe she can do it in peace.
“Well pardon me for being a doctor in a medical clinic!” Holding her hands up, Esquibel makes a visible effort to rein in her temper. “Perhaps I could have said it more nicely, and for that I am sorry, dearest Mandy, but please don’t make me apologize out here in front of everybody. It isn’t…”
“I’m not making you do a single thing. Ever notice that?” Mandy doesn’t know where this monumental irritation has come from. But she just can’t take the constant badgering and criticism any more. She needs her own space.
“You are…” Esquibel lifts a helpless hand and lets it drop, “…a wonderful partner. It is true. I am sorry.”
“Oh, Mandy loves you. It’s just, I think what she’s trying to say is that sometimes you…” Katrina offers in a helpful voice.
But Esquibel blazes once more. “Oh, don’t you dare put yourself in the middle of this. Not you.”
Katrina retreats, stung, the light of innocence dying in her eyes.
Miriam calls out, “Ladies, ladies. Please don’t let your frustration and exhaustion turn things sour. It’s just been a long few days. We’re frightened and at the ends of our ropes. That’s all. Things will be better after a nice hot dinner and full night’s rest.”
“Right. I can’t build my tent.” Mandy drops its aluminum poles with a clatter and stands, still quivering with indignation. “I have to cook dinner. Amy can’t. Jay isn’t even fucking here. It’s all on me. God! How did I end up with so much still to do?”
“I’ll put up your tent, sweetie,” Triquet offers. “I’d help you in the kitchen too but I’m not…”
“I can help in the kitchen.” Alonso moves toward it. He is not without pain and stiffness, but it is not corroding him. There is no timer on him standing up anymore. Now he has stamina. “Where is Amy, anyway?”
“Doing laundry.”
“Ohh… I have a few things… Where is she?”
Miriam points upstream. It is getting dark now and the slope is obscured in shadow. “Somewhere up there.”
“Well. Then I will wait until morning. Coming, Mandy. I will be your prep cook and dishwasher.”
Ξ
“So, this time we are neighbors, eh?” Flavia finally finishes putting her platform together, wrapping twine around the sawn pine branches and testing it with her feet. She smiles at Triquet. “Perhaps that means I can borrow some of your fabulous clothes.”
“Whenever you want, girlfriend.”
They work side-by-side for a long while in companionable silence. Triquet reaches for something more to say. Flavia is pretty much the only one Triquet hasn’t established a deeper relationship with and all they know of her is that she’s an Italian nerd who spends the whole day on her laptop. “You know, I have a cousin who’s a research math professor. Smart as a whip.”
Flavia isn’t too excited by this awkward small talk but she does appreciate the effort. “Oh? What does she study?”
“Uh. Mainly insurance? She wrote a book called ‘The Hidden History of Deductibles.’ Fascinating stuff, I’m sure.”
“Well, it can be. There is good work being done characterizing human behavior using maths. When done properly, it is actually kind of scary. We really aren’t that much more complex than a paramecium, if you get right down to it. People can be reduced to a few simple equations and interactions no problem. ”
But for a humanist such as Triquet this is a bit much. “We can? Just a few? I always thought I was a bit more… I don’t know, mystifying than that. I mean, in my case, I got a little coy with my internal motivations years ago when everyone tried to convince me that my choices don’t make sense.”
“Oh, they do. You are just… Triquet my friend you are outside the frame of reference. I would say most researchers are running maths simulations that you do not properly fit into. But the problem is not with the maths, it’s with their definitions.”
Triquet makes a face. This reductionism doesn’t sit right with them. As an archaeologist, the historical record of humanity is a rich and bewildering tapestry of unique characters and actions that can never be so neatly encapsulated. “So you’re telling me that all my behavior is… computable? That the reason I built a platform here as opposed to against another tree—say, that one—is just a basic function of mathematics?”
Flavia shrugs and pushes her hair from her face, taking a break from erecting her tent. “I mean, sure. Don’t you see? There are a finite number of factors that caused you to choose that tree. Each factor has values that can be assigned and those values…”
“But what if some of those factors remain hidden? Maybe I don’t quite know why I chose this tree. Maybe my father was killed by an oak tree and I’ve like subconsciously avoided them for years.”
“Your knowledge of the factors that shape your decision are not necessary for computation to occur. The calculations still happen independently of your self-regard.” She suppresses a sigh. To Flavia, this ontological perspective is painfully self-evident and at this point in her life, automatic. But she has also had enough of these conversations to know how unpopular they are. “Look. A lot of people thinks this means we must live in a horrible clockwork universe without free will, but I am not saying that. I am just saying these maths are the tools we use to make our way in the world. But there is no destined solution these tools are leading you toward. They are just another way we make decisions and express them.”
Triquet shrugs agreeably. “Okay. Then let’s say we’re able to identify all these factors that make me choose this particular pine tree to build my platform around. It makes sense, your numbers all add up, and the results are clear. But what if, at the last moment, I decide to randomly choose another tree. What if I stop what I’m doing for no reason at all, and just build a platform around this little sapling instead? Then what?”
Flavia narrows her eyes and expels her breath through her nose, trying not to groan aloud in exasperation. Why must maths be so hard for people to understand? “It is still a rational expression. Even if it is randomly generated. Especially if it is. If you roll the dice for your decision, that is very simple arithmetic. We generate random values all the time in my field.”
“But it isn’t rolling dice, it’s…” Triquet puts their hand to their heart, trying to find words for the chaotic welter of emotions and desires that flow through them. “My heart isn’t made of numbers. It’s made of feelings, many of them contradictory, yeah? I’m afraid that all you…” Ah, but how to mention ‘computer nerds’ without hurting her feelings? “It’s just that life isn’t as neat as you want it to be. Look at the golden childs. Why are they protecting us? Some kind of prophecy? Why do they believe in the prophecy? Faith, I guess. But how do you measure faith? How do you turn it into a quadratic equation or whatever? Don’t you feel like you’d miss out on essential elements of the whole thing?”
Flavia shakes her head no. “Quadratic equations are not the best tool for these jobs because they are univariate. No. Listen. This is a linguistic thing I know. The ‘es’ in ‘essential’ is one of the oldest roots in Indo-European languages, from thousands of years before the Latin ‘essentialis.’ It means ‘to be.’ So our essence is that which makes us be. Not how we imagine ourselves in a different universe based on magical thinking, not how we wish to be, but how we are in this physical world. The physical world can only be described by physics, which means maths, so…” she shrugs, “I do not know what to tell you except this is starting to sound like the arguments I have with Maahjabeen about god.”
“No, I’m not like a religious…” Triquet objects, then falls silent, realizing that the subjectivity they are championing will eventually lead to that spiritual conclusion. Religion. Myth. Magic. Triquet’s always given a kind of formal academic honor to those concepts, making sure that they are properly respectful of the cultures they study without needing to make a final decision about whether those myths and religions are actually provably true. But if it came down to it, does Triquet actually believe in any of the the ritual traditions their subjects practice? When the Yanomami of Brazil eat their hallucinogenic Yopo plants do they really gain access to hekura spirits that rule the physical world? When orphans in Crimea have nightmares about Baba Yaga does the old crone actually manifest or is it just their imagination? And what about those beliefs that conflict, such as when sects of Christianity turn on each other like in, oh, The Hundred Years War? Are both of their interpretations of the Bible true? Neither? Can two contradictory things be true at the same time? Can things be true only on the local or individual level? Perhaps acts of faith are the opposite of universal, especially in this age of tribalism. “I have always…” Triquet gathers their thoughts, sitting on the end of their platform struggling to put their unstated policy into words. “I guess the way I try to think about it is that we are each of us different kinds of magicians.”
“What? No.”
“Yes! Haven’t you ever thought of things this way? I had Dia, an old great-aunt who swore she had dreams that could tell the future. Did you have anybody in your family like that growing up?”
“Of course. In Italy, anyone over the age of sixty has some kind of supernatural power.”
“Right. And our first reaction to Dia’s dreams would always be disbelief. Cynicism. My parents would argue with her about her crackpot soothsaying dreams and astrology readings long after dinner was over. And at first I was on my parents’ side.”
“Only at first? Then what?”
“Then it occurred to me one day that maybe universal laws just aren’t so universal. I know that my dreams can’t tell the future. But can I really authoritatively assert that nobody’s dreams can tell the future? Maybe that’s just the kind of magic that Dia can practice. My magic is, like, in my costumes. I can turn an entire party on its head by showing up dressed as Cher. And I don’t mean that it’s the sequins and lipstick. It’s that I cast a spell, honey, and people fall under that spell and it really works. What’s your magic?”
“My magic? Eh.” Flavia tries to forcibly shift her perspective for the sake of this conversation. “Alonso with his big Cuban family magic. Katrina with her DJ magic. I mean, aren’t those just other words for wine and drugs?”
“You know there’s more to it than that.”
“Is there? I am Flavia. I have no magic. Full stop. I am entirely a creature made of numbers. Is that magical to you? Because to me it is not. It is just like graduate-level seminar statistics. These things you are talking about are mathematical probabilities, not voodoo.”
“The point I’m trying to make is that, in my humble estimation, I can’t be certain of the empirical universality of anything. Sure, every star we’ve discovered so far fuses hydrogen into heavier elements. But does that mean all stars will, everywhere, forever? I can’t know that, so I have to stay humble and not get tempted by calling things absolutes. Ultimately my subjectivity trumps all. I mean, I can’t be a religious worshipper because I have no faith. But for those who do, maybe their universe is truly so different that I honestly can’t speak to whether they are actually talking to their god or not. I just don’t have that talent. But I do have other talents. You have your numbers, but that doesn’t preclude Maahjabeen’s access to Allah or whatever. That’s just her own inimitable talent. The Lisicans. They live in such a different reality we can’t just slap our Western number system, our analytics, on them and say we get it. We’ve been trying to understand their life and culture for six fucking weeks and gotten no closer.”
“Maybe they have their own maths.”
This stops both of them, the notion that all Lisican behavior might be described by an indigenous mathematical structure that is separate and unique from the numerical traditions they know.
Triquet rubs their chin, mind sparking with half-formed insights. “Well there’s another career’s worth of study right there. No, it’s just that I’ve always given space to people and their traditions. Respecting them allows us to see more of the humanity in our subjects. In other words, post-colonial guilt, and lots of it. See, to me, the very definition of humanity is something that transcends math and science. This is why in every one of our cultures we talk of spirit and soul. There is something else to it, in ways that we all interpret in our own unique subjective ways. I mean, we had some pretty wise ancestors and they tried to teach us things, yeah? So like celebrate diversity, sister. We are all of us, all eight billion humans, individuals with unique patterns and points of view.”
Flavia laughs. “Or, as your aunt the insurance researcher has proven, we are no more than five major personality types with billions of us fundamentally identical. Not that there is anything wrong with that… That is how biological agents interact with environments to create what look like unique phenomena, but are really just the same base integers in different combinations, and our own ability to remember these patterns or even correctly identify them is very bad because really we are still just a bunch of apes.”
“Finally, something we can agree on.” Triquet scratches their ribs in caricature of a primate. “Oo oo. Aah aah.”
Ξ
In the middle of the night her eyes open, belatedly realizing Amy never came back from doing laundry. Is that true? She’s pretty sure it is. Casting off her sleeping bag with a silent curse, she slips from her tent with her phone in hand. She pads over to Amy’s tent and shines its light within. Yep, still empty.
But someone is awake. Through the trees she can see their dim silhouette out on the meadow, standing tall and silent in the gloom. Stepping closer, she turns the light off and peers through the obscuring branches to see if it is who she fears it might be.
Clouds stripe the sky, their edges lit by an intermittent moon. Shadows roll across the meadow. When they retreat the figure is gone. No… Just crouching, closer to the trees now. And someone else is with them, a small dark figure dressed all in black.
She eases forward to see what they’re doing. Their heads lean together for a long moment and then the second figure rises to a crouch and scurries away. But this is no native, and definitely no one in her crew. They move like some lethal video game character, like an assassin or a spy. After a moment they are swallowed by the shadows. The second figure stands, tall and dark.
Esquibel.
Wrapping her black coat around herself, Esquibel steps quietly back into camp. She wishes for nothing more than a long hot shower to wash all this grime away. But she will not have one of those for two more weeks. She must stay filthy until then.
Stepping from the quiet grasses of the meadow to the dry twigs and needles of the pine forest requires all her care. She takes it extremely slowly, lifting and dropping each foot in slow motion. The camp is ahead, cloaked in darkness. If she can just get back to her cot in the clean room she will know she is home free.
It had taken so much nattering of Mandy to get her to leave her side tonight the pangs of guilt poke at her, again and again. Well. She is doing all this for Mandy and the others. Someday they will hear of her sacrifices and maybe understand. And now that it is over she can go back to treating Mandy like the princess she is.
Resisting an impulse to cross the camp and join Mandy’s lovely sleeping form right now, Esquibel takes another careful step.
Wait. Someone is there, in the darkness, watching her. Esquibel is sure of it. She can’t see a figure but she knows deep in her bones they are there. She stops, like a fool, her hand straying to the back of her waistband, and stares at where their eyes must be.
“Identify yourself.” Esquibel’s whisper tries to sound forceful without waking anyone else up.
But whoever it is doesn’t speak or move. They only dwell in the center of the darkness. She can’t even see their eyes.
Esquibel hesitates. Is it one of the golden childs crouching in the bushes? Almost certainly. Or maybe one of those odious shamans who are causing so much trouble. “Go ahead. Just try to kidnap me,” she mutters. “Just try it.”
Still no movement. She can see nothing but the dark. It’s just a presence she can sense, an unbearable prickling a millimeter under her skin. Someone is there. Isn’t there?
Or is it just her imagination? Another dimension of her rampant guilt? No, there is no one there, surely. She took every precaution. These people are all dead tired. None of them are awake. And none of them crouch in the dark like this, like a panther… No. This is just her fear of being found out.
“It isn’t what you think,” she mutters, surprised at how much she needs to confess to this knot of darkness. “I am not doing this for myself, but for those I love. I am not a traitor.”
This is the one thing Esquibel told herself she could never do. Say the words aloud. As long as she keeps them within the confines of her own skull she is safe, never to be discovered. But she didn’t know how difficult that would be, how it would contort every one of her thoughts and actions to hide the little secret inside, like that one unknown dark sliver Pradeep found in the knot of seaweed. She is bloated by her secret and just needs the relief of the pressure. Just a bit, just by whispering her secret to a spot of darkness.
“The money is good but it’s not about that. We’re playing a very deep game here. A very necessary game with geopolitical interests. And besides, it’s just the Japanese. They’re harmless.”
The darkness absorbs the sentences. But a bitter judgment still somehow emanates from it. Esquibel can tell her words are insufficient. Espionage is espionage, no matter how you cut it. Ah, well. She feels no better for confessing. “What a bloody mess.”
Esquibel shakes her head and finally drops her hand from her waistband. She steps past the knot of darkness feeling wretched and misunderstood. Thoughts of her cold hard cot fill her head. Yes, oblivion is all she can hope for now.
And then, to her utter dreadful surprise, a whisper emerges from the darkness, a voice she knows. “Fucking hell. I knew you were up to something. Well, guess what. I switched the USB drive.”
Chapter 26 – Starting Over Now
June 25, 2024
Thanks for joining us for the second 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:
26 – Starting Over Now
Triquet sits up, happy to be done with the worst night of sleep they have ever had. No blankets. Not a stitch. Just their four bodies lying in a shivering pile outside the entrance to the smoking tunnel. Now Triquet extricates themself from the others and rub their own shoulders, trying to get some circulation going again. Ye gods, that was awful. And it felt like fourteen hours. Just interminable. Only now, with the silver dawn filling the interior valleys, are they able to move. Finding a latrine is probably the first order of business, but they don’t know where they are. Far enough away that the stink doesn’t carry to the village. And not anywhere down the path they took the day before.
The stand-off with the other village had lasted into the afternoon, until the wind had finally shifted and the smoke no longer pressed them up against their bank of the river. Once they departed, the others on the far side did too, without a word of farewell or warning. Triquet could tell it was obviously a distinct cultural convention, and worth all the study in the world, but it was really somewhat outside their wheelhouse. Where’s Clifford Geertz when you need him?
So they’d returned to the smoky village to find that Wetchie-ghuy or his minions had been there, with a new feather and stick fetish hanging from a hut’s pole and his name on everyone’s lips. The villagers, who had grown very glum since the smoke had begun, now grew even more downcast.
They’d all shuffled sadly into their huts as night had fallen, leaving Triquet, Miriam, Katrina, and Jay to fend for themselves. So they found a hollow at the base of a cliff and basically used Jay as a bed. He insisted that it wasn’t the first time it happened and Katrina had laughingly corroborated him.
It must have dropped into the mid teens at night. And none of them in insulating layers. They shifted and shivered and held each other tight, sleeping in fits and starts. At one point smoke rolled in again. Just as they thought they might need to evacuate the village it cleared away and they tried to sleep once more.
Now Triquet is glad to be up. Their mask had gone crooked during the night so they make sure to affix it properly again. Afflicting these poor villagers with a plague would be adding more than insult to injury. Gah, what a curse modern humans are. We helplessly destroy everything we touch.
The two options Triquet has to relieve their bladder are the two trails they’ve successfully traveled on: the wide trail leading down to the river and the game trail Jay followed Morska Vidra and the others up and over. Deciding against pissing in the wind, Triquet hurries down the wide trail, thinking that before they get to the first stream there is a broad forest behind which they might find a moment’s privacy.
Moments later, straightening from a crouch, Triquet feels eyes on them. They hurrily finish, scrubbing themself clean with a handful of moss, covering their mess, and pull their pants up. The dark eyes in the seamed face gleam in the morning light.
“Good morning. Not polite to stare, you know. At least where I’m from.” Triquet doesn’t recognize this old man. He is short, with a barrel-chest and round face. His curls are gray but he isn’t ancient. Perhaps in his fifties. And he crouches at the side of the trail, where Triquet left it to find some privacy. Now they will have to pass him to return to the trail.
There is something malevolent in the old man. The staff he leans on doesn’t look dangerous, but Triquet remembers how villagers from across the river carried spears. Maybe he was from there. That would just be Triquet’s luck.
Triquet doesn’t know self-defense, but in an earlier life they weren’t a bad soccer player and they still trust their kicks. If the old creep gets up to anything, then…
And that’s exactly what happens. As Triquet nears him, the old man says something unwholesome and grabs his own genitals. Then he says the word koox̱ and reaches for Triquet’s.
With a shrill scream, Triquet jumps back and away, their foot connecting with the man’s outstretched forearm. He watched Triquet as they did their business. Now he wants to confirm what he saw. What is the great goddamn fascination certain people have with nongendered people and bathrooms? How, in the middle of absolutely nowhere planet earth is Triquet still being forced to deal with this utter bullshit?
Triquet hurries down the path, the old man’s croupy laugh in their ears. Disgusting. Horrible. Infuriating. It’s only when Triquet re-enters the village and their gaze falls on the fetish that had been waiting here in the village when they’d returned last night that Triquet realizes who that was.
“Where were you?” Jay whispers and Triquet jumps. He did an admirable job of creeping noiselessly across the village to join Triquet here beside the hut that sports the fetish. “You find a spot to pee?”
Triquet shakes their head no and leads Jay by the arm away from the wide trail heading down to the river. “Up there. That’s your best bet.”
A wind rises and the morning birds go silent. A few villagers appear in their doors, looking with fear at the sky.
Triquet and Jay look skyward as well. The smoke is still there, hanging in the still air. Why is the air still? They just heard the wind. But it isn’t a wind. It’s an uncanny sound, with a high pitched whine slicing the air… It’s the oncoming white noise of a black drone. That’s what the birds and villagers both heard.
It hovers above them, slowly circling, as if unsure it sees them. Jay yelps, leaping into the air. “Yo! Here! We’re here!”
Katrina stumbles out from her spot beside the cliff, dragged out of sleep, unable to process what is happening. Jay pushes her arms into the air.
“There! Up there! You see it?”
But it isn’t getting any lower. Now it hovers over the clearing. The villagers have all vanished inside again. Whatever omen this inexplicable thing brings is entirely unwelcome, that’s for sure.
After a long moment, the drone’s servo underneath, that Katrina usually uses to hook Mandy’s weather station, now releases a small sachet or bag. It spins downward at an angle, catching a breeze, and blows into the trees that lead to the river.
Jay yelps again and takes off at a loping run, crossing the village and heading down the wide path. It couldn’t have gone much farther than this. The breeze wasn’t that stiff. But it fell like it was almost pulled under the eaves…
A small brown figure crouches over a bush, using a staff to pull the sachet to them. Wetchie-ghuy. He’s stealing what the drone dropped. “Hey!” Jay runs to him but the old man cackles and spins away, diving into the ceanothus and disappearing underneath.
Jay tries to follow but he is much larger. The old man tumbles forward with shocking speed, vanishing in an instant from view.
“Hey! Hey! Now, goddamnit that’s not yours!” Jay has hardly ever felt such fury. It was just such a patently wicked thing to do, he is outraged to his core. Just who the fuck is this guy?
But he’s lost him in the underbrush. The clever little bastard has wriggled away like a cat. Jay has lost. With a ragged sigh he pulls himself out of the clawing branches and turns dejectedly toward the village. The drone is gone. Probably out of battery. And their plan is ruined, whatever it was.
A cry of pain emerges from the underbrush. Jay turns back to it. After a bit, a silver fox trots out beside Jay, carrying the sachet in its mouth. It’s close enough for Jay to see a folded piece of paper in the transparent silk sack. With a crow of delight he reaches for the fox but it trots clear and takes the sachet back to the village.
Ah. This is Morska Vidra’s fox. Now the sachet belongs to him.
Ξ
“Hurry! It’s very strong!” Flavia grips a stick with monofilament line wrapped around it as a primitive fishing pole. Her first catch!
Maahjabeen lopes across the sand, laughing at her. “Ohh, very good. Jay is going to be so jealous that we started without him.”
“Well… we can hope…” Flavia grunts with effort between each phrase, “…that they get back… in time… for him to cook it!”
“He really is the best cook.” Maahjabeen drops to her knees at the edge of the water. Flavia marches steadily backward, feet digging into the sand. How large is this beast?
Finally it emerges, a pink rockfish nearly half a meter in length. It struggles mightily, and Maahjabeen wades into the water to hold its spiny ridge against her leg while she stabs her filet knife behind its skull, severing its spine. It shivers and blood stains the water. Something deep and sad plunges within her as it always does. This is such a beautiful and complex life that she has taken. “Inshallah,” she breathes, knowing that God is in even this—especially this—even if she is having trouble finding Him. She pulls the heavy creature from the water, Flavia whooping and carrying on like she just scored a goal at the World Cup. Maahjabeen smiles gently at her friend, realizing that, to the mathematician, this beautiful fish is just food.
Perhaps Pradeep is the same. How could he not be? He is a killer of epic proportions. He wipes out entire colonies of mold and bacteria for the sake of his curiosity and career. He affixes bugs to pins and feeds the blood of birds and fish into those creepy readers the army gave them. Echh… Maahjabeen doesn’t trust them. She doesn’t know why, or how they could possibly be misused. But their origin is all she needs to despise them. Fortunately, her work hardly requires their use. But even so, she suggests, “We should get a sample for Plexity before we cut it up into sushi.”
Flavia cackles and lifts the fish. It is surprisingly heavy. She has never landed such a huge fish. It weighs like three kilos. The most she’d ever caught were little shining sardines in a net off the Amalfi coast one summer that she and her brother always put back. But this is enough to feed the whole camp. “Is it good? Can we eat it?”
“Rockfish? Oh, yes. Very tasty. You find it in most supermarkets. But ehh, now I am wondering how the removal of this fellow will affect the lagoon’s balance here and the reef where it hunted. We are having an impact for sure. I don’t know what rockfish eat, but whatever it is will breathe a sigh of relief tonight. At least until another one moves in.”
“It is our original sin, eh? Humans. We stain whatever we touch. With dirt and blood. Concrete and steel…” A kind of restless claustrophobia possesses Flavia. She is of a generation that sees nothing but its own impact. She can’t even have this, without guilt. But what is she to do? She needs to eat. Something usually dies somewhere when it is time for her to eat. Now multiply that by eight billion. A daily river of blood.
Flavia is reminded of a conversation she had with Jay the week before and now her perspective pulls far back, as it often does, to encompass the entire planet over eons. She watches the wars and the slaughter and the founding of cities on coasts and along rivers, clay and stone accretions rising like termite mounds in pyramids then skyscrapers, tiny chrysalis collections filled with light and life… “Huh. That is all we are, no?”
Maahjabeen looks at Flavia sidelong, envious of the dreamy abstractions she so effortlessly conjures. “What?”
“We aren’t individuals, us wriggling hairless worms. No. No, we aren’t even a swarm or a collective. We aren’t the point at all. See, you have to think about it over a long enough timescale. What is the first thing we do anywhere we go? We build. Look, if you were an alien in the sky studying Earth over millennia, you would see what is happening down here more like coral reefs. Our identity isn’t in this.” Flavia sweeps her hand over her body. “Or even in this.” She taps her temple. “It’s in the buildings that house us. They satisfy all our needs for safety and security and sturdiness, our claims against death. We want immortality. Concrete and steel give it. Wood and tile. My mother’s family has a villa in Verona that was built in 1582. It has outlived everyone. It is the family, in ways that none of us are. We are just the wriggling worms bringing it food and minerals so it can grow larger. And then families combine into villages and towns. Our cities now are concrete for hundreds of square kilometers. The nervous system is the power grid, the blood vessels and digestion the water and sewer lines. Huh. Jay told me this and I have never seen it so clearly before. All our science and religion matter less than our architecture. We build reefs.”
Maahjabeen was with her until that last bit. No, there must be a way to include Allah in this thrilling vision. It runs so counter to what Maahjabeen has ever believed to be true: that instead she is a unique shriven soul standing alone in God’s light, with her family and culture more important than anything but the ocean itself. To instead put all the emphasis on inert walls and roofs and floors seems heretical somehow. “I don’t like it. It removes the human from the system.”
“Well, that’s the thing. It’s only the accumulated expression of millions of humans over thousands of years that eventually makes a city state. We build and build. I wonder what the endpoint might be? A conscious city? Perhaps Hong Kong might be a good test lab, constrained and geographically isolated as it is. But no. Think. What is Hong Kong but an expression of human thought and will? Production and creativity? Towers rising to the sky. The entire landscape remade to suit its own needs. So we are not humans, no, we are towns and cities with millions of tiny little human agents working within.”
Maahjabeen shudders, the images getting too uncanny. What does that make her, then, as a solitary researcher on the waves? Perhaps she is a spore or whatever the coral polyps have that is floating on the currents, off to explore the world and found her own colony. But eh. “No. Building more buildings is not at all what I want from my life.”
“We don’t even have to,” Flavia shrugs, staring out over the water at the gray horizon, visualizing what she sees: a jumble of all the great structures she can imagine, and even some more humble, farms isolated in fields. “There are already enough sites. Our era just needs to contribute to the structures already on them.”
Prophet save her. That’s enough science fiction for one day. Maahjabeen lifts the rockfish to her shoulder and carries it across the sand back to camp. Halfway back, she tries to assure Flavia that she will get all the credit for catching dinner tonight, but when she turns to say so she realizes Flavia hasn’t come with her. She is still on the beach, staring pensively out at the horizon, caught in her vision of the distant future. What a strange person.
As she reaches the edges of the camp, Mandy rushes up to Maahjabeen, clapping and squealing with joy. Her grief has vanished and she is spritely again, her long hair pulled away in a ponytail. She goggles at the fish but it hardly delays her own good news: “There’s rain coming! Ra-a-a-i-i-i-i-n! It’ll put out the fire!”
Ξ
Esquibel has never taken a better bite of food than the rice and fish steaming in her bowl. Fresh fish is such a luxury. So nutrient-dense. She can already feel her body start to respond, as if chambers deep in her thoracic cavity and legs only now fill with vitality after being bare-as-her-childhood-cupboards for so long.
Triquet is telling the story of their separation by fairy light, LED strands which Katrina hung upon her return while Jay happily deboned the fish and made this incredible meal. They all look well and Miriam assured her they practiced good mask discipline during their forty-three hour ordeal. Now Esquibel’s mind can’t focus on Triquet’s story, which flits from subject to observation to conjecture, too much all at once for her to absorb.
She sighs and takes another bite. It’s the meal that is disordering her focus more than anything. It’s nearly a sexual experience. Somewhere between sex and the religious ecstasies she witnessed in Nairobi’s Pentecostal churches. Paroxysms of joy. The meaning of life in sensory pleasure. Or rather, sensation so profound it introduces you to one or more gods. Life can be so good! Esquibel privately resolves to stop thinking poorly of Jay. The strapping lad obviously has his uses. And he is such a gentle soul. She can taste it in the broth in the bottom of the bowl. Nourishing. Comforting. How could he do that with such simple ingredients?
She studies Jay across the circle of chairs as they eat, Triquet’s narrative including smoke and storm and a whole new village of warlike Lisicans to worry about. Jay is an engaged listener, nodding and laughing at each recollection without taking the focus away from Triquet, who is of course an excellent storyteller. Jay feels Esquibel’s eyes on him and when he looks her way she toasts him with the bowl. “It’s lovely. Thank you.”
He blushes, looking like he’s six years old. Esquibel shakes her head in amusement. She’s never known someone so truly young. So callow. Is this how they breed them in California? Puff them with innocence like marshmallows? Or is it only that life is so easy on his beach? This is a man who has never needed to learn how to be an adult. Life has removed those considerations. She is at once envious and bitterly judgmental. How can someone ever learn any kind of toughness unless he has faced adversity? How could he truly have a worthwhile character if each one of his needs every day of his life was met by merely holding out his hand? Look at him. He doesn’t even know how good he’s got it. That charming smile. Those blond good looks and that open, friendly innocence are worth millions of dollars. More. They are priceless. They will open every door for him throughout his life.
Ahh, her head is skipping again from thing to thing. It’s almost like she is drunk! She has to have better self-control or she will start to think about things that would remain better-off unthought and get herself in trouble. With effort, Esquibel stiffens her spine, levering what she had once identified as her T2 thoracic vertebra to rock back into a military posture. There. Now her training will help her master herself. Her head suddenly rises so high it stops Triquet’s recitation.
“What? What is it, Doc? Something in the dark?”
“Ehh?” Esquibel realizes she has pulled focus. Now everyone is looking at her. “Ah. Yes. Something maybe I heard. But I don’t think so. I think it was just… never mind. Please continue. I am only hearing things.” She waves everyone’s concern away and puts the bowl to her lips again, to hide behind it.
Triquet resumes where they left off. “And then, after I was done I pulled up my drawers and who do you think is standing there watching me? Wetchie-ghuy.”
“No.” Flavia shoots to her feet, holding a warding hand between her and Triquet. “No, I do not want to hear this story. So please maybe you do not tell it.”
Triquet sighs. “That’s fine. I won’t go into details. It went… okay. But he’s just a disgusting little toad, for sure. No, Flavia. Please stay. I’ll skip that whole part. But I can’t skip his involvement in what came next. You have to hear about what happened to the little bag the drone dropped. He stole it.”
“I swear,” Jay says, “he voodoo-ed that shit down into where he was hiding in the trees. There was no reason it should have dropped the way it did. Like at a forty degree angle.”
Triquet bows toward Jay with a flourish. “And superhero here went scrambling after it, but Wetchie-ghuy got to it first.”
“Of course!” Flavia scowls as Maahjabeen puts an arm around her. “The little creep.”
“But just as he was getting away…” Jay pauses. “You’ll like this, Flavia, the village fox ran into the bushes where he was hiding and bit him. Stole the, what was it like a big tea sachet? out of his hand and ran it right back to Morska Vidra, who didn’t want to touch it at all. But they wouldn’t let us have it back either. So they argued about it all night and into the storm. We never did get the sachet back. And as far as I know they still haven’t opened it. What does it even say?”
“Just an explanation of the current state of affairs, in case you didn’t know them.” Pradeep leans back against one of the posts of his platform, bowl balanced on his knees. “Where the fire was and how it got started and estimates on how long it might burn. Amy added some very nice words of encouragement. And Esquibel included a medical pamphlet for common field wounds.”
“Christ,” Miriam shakes her head, “imagine how they’re reacting to those mysterious written artifacts now. That were delivered by a giant buzzing black sky insect. We just invented an entire bloody religion with that one stunt. Thanks, Sony.”
“I tried to keep it up out of view but I suppose it is such a unique sound that they hadn’t heard before there was no way I could hide it.” Pradeep shrugs, helpless. “Shoot. The drone seemed like such a good idea at the time. But when it came time to actually write out the message, it turned out there was hardly anything to tell you besides to hang tight. And now I’ve traumatized an entire village. I’ve broken the prime directive!”
“Uh, we all have at this point, mate. We’re pretty bad trekkies for sure. Can I share a bit of my own story?” Katrina squeezes Triquet’s arm. “I’ve been so busy since we got back but now I have some results to share.”
“Yeah, you vanished, there at the end.” Triquet steps back, granting the space to Katrina, and finds their bowl. Time for seconds. Over their shoulder, they call out, “I was afraid our debacle had left you hurting, sweetie, but I didn’t want to intrude.”
“No. Not at all. See, well, confession time. I did a bit of a no-no yesterday when we got driven out of the village by the smoke and I hung back a bit to snap this.” Katrina holds up her phone. On it is a photo of a rough bare interior wall, on which hangs a cape or a tapestry. The flash illuminates its details sharply: it is quite old and tattered, its dark blocky designs faded to shadow. Katrina zooms in on the textile piece and hands her phone around. “I really hope no one was still in there, like hanging back, like hiding in the corner when my flash went off. Talk about starting a religion.”
“What is that?” Alonso can’t make sense of the abstract shapes, inexplicable as cave paintings. “I don’t get it. Is that a shawl?”
“I didn’t dare mention I’d done it while we were still there. In case any of them found out.” Katrina’s voice is conspiratorial. “What if I’d broken a real taboo? So I waited until we were back here safe and sound to bring it up. So look. I compared this image to all the art examples I could find for all the nearby peoples. I started pretty much counterclockwise. The Kiril Islanders. The Ainu of Japan. Various Polynesian groups in Samoa and Hawai’i. All the Native American peoples of the West Coast. And I finally found a close match for the artistic style.”
“You did?” Triquet’s voice is loudest above the others. This is big news and they’re all excited by it. Triquet begs for Katrina’s phone for another inspection of the artifact.
But now Katrina plays coy. “No no, you pack of geniuses. Guess. Whose artwork is it? Who does this look like to you?”
“It’s gonna be something weird,” Amy chuckles, “like from Chile or not even the Pacific Ocean. What do Bosnian designs look like?”
Pradeep holds his hand out. “Let me see it again.” Katrina hands him her phone and he studies it in silence as the others think.
“Didn’t one of us have a Masters in Design or something?” Jay wonders. “Ask them.”
“Yeah,” Mandy snorts. “Katrina.”
Katrina shrugs. “I’m not the expert here. Triquet’s our star archaeologist. But that’s cheating. Let’s hear what the amateurs think first.”
Pradeep finally pronounces, “That art style is so familiar. Like the faces on a totem pole. I will guess one of the peoples of the Northwest. Like near Seattle.”
“Good eye!” Katrina takes her phone back and indicates different parts of the faded artwork. “These do indeed compare to the distinct artistic styles of the Northwest Pacific cultures. See if you look real close here you can still find a tiny bit of red and blue pigments. Then look. This is what it looks like if you take a couple hours to digitally fill in those gaps with paint… Here’s my rough attempt.” She swipes to the next photo, where she’s painted the spots that have faded. “See? It nearly looks like what it is…”
Triquet finally snatches the phone from her hand, brow furrowed, to crouch in the sand and study the photos in detail.
“Who are the tribes of Seattle? Or the nations, I guess?” Mandy tries to remember what she knows of them.
Katrina starts bouncing up and down, unable to contain her excitement. “Well, here’s the thing. Totem poles and this kind of indigenous Northwest style is somewhat shared among the different Salish peoples. But it goes all the way up the coast and that’s where our Lisicans are from. Alaska. But they aren’t Salishan. They’re probably related to the modern-day Tlingit.”
“Tlingit!” Triquet exclaims. “I see it! The geometric patterns! Excellent detective work, love!” Katrina takes a small bow.
“Tlingit…” Alonso has heard the word before, but knows next to nothing about the people behind it. “And is Tlingit their word for themselves or our word for them?”
“Well, I’ve only done the most preliminary reading, so I’m not really sure. They live on Alaska’s panhandle, you know that part that stretches down into Canada? There are four basic divisions, apparently.” Katrina reads from her phone, “Southern Tlingit, Northern, Inland, and Gulf Coast Tlingit. And each of these regions have a bunch of different tribes and councils. So they all have names of their own for themselves. Says they’re all super private, so there isn’t much about them in our files. I can do better research, of course, when we’re back somewhere online but…”
“I am unconvinced.” Alonso sits back, automatically settling into his old position of judging doctoral candidates. “Your evidence is too tenuous. It is only a single item. What if they are from somewhere completely different, like a tribe from the south or something, and a single Tlingit once visited them a hundred years ago and left this piece as a gift? What if it is not Tlingit at all? You need more than a sample size of one.”
Katrina vigorously nods in agreement. “Yes. Yes, and that’s why I was overjoyed to find this, like, blog with some Tlingit phrases. There isn’t like a translation program or a whole online dictionary really anywhere, at least that I can access here. But some of the words do match. So here’s my second line of evidence. Then I looked more deeply and realized it’s actually more related to an extinct Athabascan language called Eyat. So I’ve been listening to Eyat recordings and the Lisicans’ speeches get so so close to making sense. Something about the forefather. Something about the seasons or the calendar. The storms seem to be connected to Wetchie-ghuy, who is an outcast shaman who used to be part of the tribe? Maybe? Something like that.”
“You have been translating their words?” This makes Alonso sit up. Katrina has suddenly gone so far so fast.
Katrina nods again. “That word koox̱ that we keep hearing get thrown around? Flavia. It doesn’t mean wife.”
“No? Well good. What does it mean?”
“It means slave.”
“Ai! Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“Slave? Wetchie-ghuy was trying to enslave her?” Now Triquet wishes they weren’t so gentle with their kicks. “Not just a sexual predator but a slaver too? You know, I don’t like this whole Jabba the Hut plot turn. Leia here isn’t ready for bikini season.”
Katrina reads aloud: “Hereditary slavery was a substantial part of Eyat culture until shortly before their extinction, when it was outlawed by the US government over a hundred years ago.”
“Hereditary?” Mandy makes an offended sound. “These people keep slaves for like generations? Ew. Can we please go back to not understanding what the Lisicans were saying? I liked them more back then.”
“What else do we know?” Triquet asks, finally looking up from the phone. “From what I can see, I can tell you this is most likely a pinniped’s hide, like a sealskin, scraped clean and bleached, then painted with organic dyes. I remember hearing in a lecture how interdependent the coastal trade and culture networks were between the coastal settlements and Athabascan Diné folks in the interior. But that’s all I got. Maybe they got their dyes by trade? Not many plants to harvest on like glaciers, I’d imagine.”
“No, they aren’t on glaciers. It actually isn’t that icy that far south.” Amy recollects her visits to Juneau and the Tongass National Forest. “Rainy and cold as hell. But so beautiful. Just endless trees, right up to the water. Wolves and eagles. Tons of fishing. The Eyat must have had it so good for so long.”
“So good they kept slaves.” Mandy can’t get over the fact that they’re sharing an island with people who keep slaves—who tried to enslave them the first time they saw them!
“Not all of them,” Miriam amends. “Maybe just Wetchie-ghuy. Morska Vidra and his people didn’t try to enslave us. Or maybe it’s that other tribe that does? Maybe there’s some kind of dispute between them? About slaves? Or outcast shamans?”
Katrina shrugs. “I don’t have a clue. Yet. But I’ll keep working on it. But it’s definitely slow going. Like I said, there’s this weird Slavic word-bombing going on in their language and just when I think I’m starting to get their like pidgin Eyat, all of a sudden I’m playing Bosnian word games with my schoolgirl friend again.”
“You say it’s a pidgin?” Now the discoveries are coming fast and furious. Triquet remembers that one undergrad linguistics theory class that broke their brain. Their near-failure in that course played a distinct part in their choice to become an archaeologist and not an anthropologist. Things instead of people. Triquet has never regretted their decision. “I don’t know much, but I do recall that there are like established metrics you can use to chart how many generations a language has drifted from its origins. Pidgin languages nearly always develop in pretty standard ways.”
“So if we find one of those matrices,” Pradeep reasons, “we can model the age of the pidgin’s development and find when they separated from the mainland and colonized Lisica.”
Katrina holds up her hands. “Maybe. Like after a lot more study. I’ve got a good ear for languages but you’ve heard how they sound. Like a musical trash compactor. They sound very little like any modern Athabascan language I’ve found. Those are more guttural. This is, I don’t know, chatty and light. As long as the vocabulary makes sense I’m going with Eyat, at least until further notice.”
Triquet raises Katrina’s hand in victory like she just won a boxing bout. “Winner and still champ-een! The soft social sciences! Ha! Without us, life would hardly be worth living.”
Ξ
Mandy excuses herself to use the trenches. They are all calling for more glasses now. It looks like it will be another celebration, with everyone returned. Maybe Katrina will play some more of that sultry music that makes Esquibel move like a cat in heat.
Upon Mandy’s return, at the edge of the grove she finds Jay walking toward her. He nods and she does too. But his expression is pained. She stops. “Oh, no. What is it, Jay?”
“Just uhh… Just had to let you know…” He shakes his head. “I didn’t rat you out. Never did. Nobody knows who started the fire.”
“Oh!” Mandy claps her hand over her mouth. The predicament Jay has been struggling with is instantly apparent to her. He’s been keeping her arson a secret! “I’m so sorry! I mean, everyone already knows it was me. Don’t worry. It was my stupid idea.”
“No, it was my stupid idea.” Jay struggles to keep his temper. He shakes his head, bitter. “Sorry. Not angry with you. Just myself. I can’t just go shooting my mouth off like that. I can’t!”
“No. Jay, no.” Mandy consoles him, a hand on his arm. “Please. Seriously. This is like my formal apology, okay? I was just so upset not being able to contribute any science I got really reckless and didn’t think about the long-term effects a fire would have.”
“Still.” Jay is stiff, unwilling to forgive himself. “It wouldn’t have even occurred to you if I wasn’t still fucking around… I just got to wise up, know what I’m saying?”
“I guess we both do.” Mandy gives him a fist bump. But he still isn’t over being upset. She searches for common ground. “Uh. It’ll be okay. So weird being the youngest ones here, right? You, me, and Katrina I guess. Back home I was running a lab of undergrads every day. They made fun of me for being so old. Now here I am the baby again. And nobody listens to what we say. And then when we do something it turns out to be a total fucking trainwreck.”
“Yeah.” But Jay isn’t ready to hear consoling words. “Speaking as a biologist, The real tragic part is the entire like biome that must have existed in that tunnel. There were probably a dozen different bird and animal species, maybe small mammals, and countless insect and plant and fungus—”
“I know!” Mandy turns away from the unbearable litany. “I mean, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! I just thought it would burn like a chimney fire all nice and cozy for a few hours then I could just go and sweep out the ashes and start figuring out how to climb up to the top to install my instruments. I was so excited! But I’m just so dumb when it comes to things like this.”
“Man… I saw the flare from the top.” Jay shakes his head at the memory of the brilliant flame, like a burning oil well. Those villagers had never seen anything like it, that’s for sure. “That fucker burned so hot.”
“Pradeep said it could have burned for like a week. But I’m so glad the rain came and doused it. But it didn’t make things any better. The fire is out but the tunnel is still blocked. So we’re left with the worst of both worlds.”
“Nah. That fire was full-on jet engine style. We were getting air currents at the cave mouth sucking more oxygen into it. I’d be surprised if there’s any fuel left. It burned hot.”
“Are you serious? You think so?” This perks Mandy up. The prospect of having a clear path up the cliffs again revives her. She clasps hands with still-doleful Jay. “If it’s actually clear it almost makes it worth it. Let’s go check. Will you come?”
“Uh, now?” Jay hadn’t made any plan beyond finding Mandy and telling her he hadn’t snitched on her, but he didn’t expect the conversation to turn into a night-time underground expedition.
“Yeah. Why not?” Mandy swings his hand, trying to infuse him with her energy. “We’re the young ones, remember? We wake up at night? I do all my best work after sunset.”
Jay nods, unable to dispute it. “True dat.” He allows her to lead him back to camp, his reluctance slowly shifting to excitement.
As they go, Mandy spots a shifting shadow. Esquibel. She must have followed Jay to watch over Mandy. Jay never saw her. Now she silently nods, to signal that all is well and Mandy is safe. Oh, Esquibel. Mandy chuckles to herself. She knows she is safe, and certainly from Jay. He’s just a big goof.
Ξ
“You know the strangest part, Zo?” They lie in bed, in the dark, Miriam and Alonso, his head on her chest. His eyes are closed but hers are open, seeing visions in the blackness.
He’s been drifting. Alonso grunts, pleased to hear the sound of her voice. Anything to have her keep talking. She starts stroking his hair. That too. He will never tire of how dear she is.
“The strangest part was that it was the first time we’ve spent a night apart since we found each other.”
“Hm.” Alonso opens his eyes, remembering a jumble of slurred images from the night before, after the seven glasses of wine that eventually allowed him to not worry himself to pieces over Miriam’s safety. “Yes. It was awful.”
She hugs him tight, kissing the crown of his head. “It was. Just dreadful sleep. And it got cold. No blankets.” Miriam snuggles closer to Alonso, reveling in his heat. “But that wasn’t the strangest thing. The strangest thing was, that I wasn’t with you and I missed you but… I mean, I really missed you, but… it was okay. For the first time in five years it was okay. I knew I was safe and you were safe and it would just be a matter of time until we saw each other again. So, I mean, I missed you. I certainly did. But for the first time I was able to really be, you know, myself. Not… just…”
“The grieving widow?”
“Yes! My entire bloody identity has been so bound up in you and your disappearance. It was crazy. Really difficult transition for me. We were never like this before. I was never Sergio Alonso Aguirre’s wife first and Miriam Truitt second.”
“No. Not you. My fierce independent little fox.”
“And not you, you big crazy adventurer. We’ve always been our own people. And for five bloody years I couldn’t…”
Now he hugs her. “Oh, Mirrie. I am so sorry.”
“No. It’s not your fault. This isn’t about you. It’s about my relationship with myself. It has nothing to do with you.”
“Of course it does, I inflicted my whole crisis onto you.”
“I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”
“I know. But I did. And I owe you so much for that.”
“You owe me nothing. Because you came back. Now if you hadn’t come back…”
“Yes. You would curse my ghost.” They settle in each other’s arms and Alonso considers the implications of her words. “So… are you saying you would like some space? Would you like to maybe find another place to sleep, until…?”
She swats him, hard. “Don’t be daft. Of course not. I have no idea what it means. I guess I want to return to who I used to be. But I know I kind of can’t, can I? I’ll never be so… so brave, so unwise, so happy… To be free like that again. The nightmare went on so long I hardly realized it after a while. But the trouble is that… that solitary vigil I held, it changed me. A lot. I guess I just thought I was getting old, that this kind of despair was what getting old meant. But that isn’t true either, is it? This is some wild shit, Zo. I just don’t know who I am any more. It’s kind of scary.”
Alonso is tempted to say he knows a bit about what she means, but he knows that it will change the subject and make it all about his suffering again, which must always be the primary suffering, always the first and last one mentioned, like the Lord’s Prayer. And he’s already sick of that. He doesn’t want to eclipse her, not now. This is her time to unravel what she has become. Here in his arms. “I will love you whoever you want to be.” It sounds weak but it is true. She doesn’t know how much an equivocation it is. But he has already spoken things aloud that he thought he’d never speak and even lived through traumatic memories that he’d forbidden himself with the help of good friends and better drugs.
He had been so sure he would never heal. In the gulag and in the military hospitals, surrounded by men broken in war. He would have bet all the money in the world he was broken too, beyond repair. But bodies are wonderful things. All this computational biology unfolding within him. They never stop, the synapses firing and the blood chemistry shifting, unless you mentally stop yourself. And the last thing Alonso wants to do is to be like Katrina’s brother Pavel and mentally stop himself, stuck in his torture, unable to move beyond it. Oh, it still shackles Alonso to the earth, there is no doubt that he will be dealing with this pain for the rest of his life. But now he has a life.
Miriam floats up and away from the bed, her mind taking flight. Yes, who is she? And who shall she become…? Old ambitions reawaken in her. She sees canyons in Ethiopia and the Gobi Desert. Her view rises to the moon. Sweet Christ, with Alonso back she can scratch that itch she’s had for decades about lunar geology. That very charming astrogeologist postdoc invited Miriam to her lab last year and she had never followed up. Now she could. She could wander the earth’s hidden caverns again and learn the secrets of the sky. Oh, bless. Her whole life is starting over now.
Chapter 25 – Blows Him A Kiss
June 17, 2024
Thanks for joining us for the second 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:
25 – Blows Him A Kiss
Maahjabeen lifts another armful of heavy branches and carries them across the beach to the lean-to she is rebuilding against the trunk of the fallen redwood. It had been Pradeep who had made it for her a few weeks ago, and then again after that sleeper wave, but the last storm had once again erased all sign of it.
Now, as a labor of love, she builds it again.
Catching her breath, she leans against the giant mass of the horizontal trunk behind her. The sun is breaking through, with silver streaks lighting the ocean in the far distance like spotlights tilted down from heaven. Imagine being a school of sardines out in the open ocean and all of a sudden God decides it is your time to be the star of the show. Maahjabeen is a firm believer in the growing marine biology discoveries about fish intelligence and social complexity. So she imagines they would react to the beneficent touch of the creator with glee. They might be dancing with the stars under the waves, for all she knows.
Maahjabeen giggles. She is in love, truly in love. This is what it is supposed to feel like. She is in wonder at the purity of Pradeep. Mind and body, he is unlike anyone she thinks can even exist in this world. And he is hers. All hers. She wraps her arms around herself with a sense of deep completion. After losing her mother and then her family and town and country and culture, she has been adrift, literally following the currents wherever they take her, ever since. She has had no home, no roots. And it has not been a thrilling adventure. It has really only felt like bleak survival. Because when there is nothing to fall back on, your thoughts return again and again to finding stability. These short oceanography contracts have kept her afloat (again, literally) but she can’t depend on finding them consistently over the years. She needs a larger plan. Before, she just couldn’t decide where to build her life. Now she knows: wherever Pradeep is.
Then she realizes she doesn’t know where Pradeep currently lives. This is important information. It can be a home base for her, a landing spot between her contracts all over the world. Maybe he could even come with her sometimes as another researcher.
Maahjabeen giggles again. She has never been like this. She comes from a family of reserved, educated women. Even their love they dispense in brief but intense dollops. But that is the Tunisian way. And Maahjabeen is now a citizen of the world, is she not? Her time in Japan, in Indonesia and Dar es Salaam and Belize has shown her how wildly different humans can be. Only some of them follow the prophet. Some follow other religions. And others appear to be entirely without God. What had dismayed her is that she couldn’t readily tell which was which. She’d thought that by looking at the hovels and high-rises of Hokkaido and Sumatra and Corozal she could discern the godly among them. But the atheist Japanese had the cleanest and fairest towns and villages of all and her brothers and sisters in Islam in Dar and in Jakarta had been some of the most despairing.
It has caused doubt in her. Not in her faith, which remains as deep and profound as it ever had, but rather in her cultural connection to her faith. She is still a devout Muslim. But she realizes she is no longer the Tunisian version of that. She can now see Allah everywhere, in every tall tree of this island and every wave that laps against the gray shore. She sees holiness in the faces of unbelievers and knows that God is omnipresent, regardless of whether they believe it or not. He watches over them all.
So in that sense, Pradeep has already joined the ummah just by his willingness to listen. She is already doing great work by revealing the Prophet’s words to him. Maahjabeen can rest assured that her intimacy with him is no sin. And besides, not a living soul will know what happened here. It will be their secret forever.
The god rays break through the clouds and their spotlights widen on the ocean’s shining surface, creating white gold luminescences that are painful to behold. She turns toward the southwest instead, to study the dark horizon. It is always a comfort to her, to see the infinite sea disappearing over the furthest edge of the world. This is where the Pacific has every other ocean beat. She has felt this same sweet solitude on the Indian and Atlantic Oceans for sure, but the scale that the Pacific provides is something else. God is here again. The scale of god, the power that comes with infinity. She suspects that God’s divinity specifically derives from His endlessness. Her mathematic brain has always thought so.
What she would give to be out on that open ocean, well-supplied and with a clear forecast for like five days. To be surrounded by nothing but water… It has been too long. She is not really made to live this long on land. She hopes that Pradeep understands that he is dating a mermaid.
This gets another chuckle out of her. What her lover’s amazing brain has reminded her, in their trips together in the kayaks, is that they aren’t skating over a shining surface of a two-dimensional world. It is the roof of an entire rich ecosystem that she is often unwilling to fully take into account. Perhaps it messes with her solitude, the idea that she is far from alone when she is on the water. Perhaps she has a bit of thalassophobia, a fear of the deep, that she has never properly reconciled. But how can you reconcile that terror? Look at those patches out there right now.
She scrambles atop the trunk to get a better view. Blue and green and gray fields exist on the surface of the nearby ocean. They indicate many things, one of them being the depth of the water beneath. The ocean floor could be like 3800 meters here and it wouldn’t surprise her. To fall… to be pulled down into inky, icy oblivion… La. She isn’t sure there is a healthy way to deal with the human need to avoid the deep.
Now. Back to work. How did Pradeep build this thing…? Oh, you idiot. He had twine. Maahjabeen can’t do much here without it. Well. It won’t be more than a moment to retrieve a roll. And maybe she can grab a bite while she’s in camp.
Maahjabeen scrambles onto the fallen log once more, this time facing camp. And that’s when she sees it: the plume of gray smoke streaming from a hole in the top of the cliffs directly above. The wind whips the smoke up and away before it reaches them. That is why she hasn’t smelled it.
But the island is on fire.
Ξ
“I knew it was Jay’s idea!” Esquibel has heard all she needs to hear. It is always Jay. He is the one problem with this whole mission.
“No, no…” Mandy waves her hand in defeat. “You can’t pin it on him. I’m the idiot who actually set the fire.”
“But why… Why would you do that?” Alonso is at a loss. A giant plume of smoke streams from the island like it’s the chimney of a log fucking cabin. Any ship within range will see them. If the skies continue to break up every satellite in this whole hemisphere will turn their cameras onto Lisica.
Amy puts a calming hand on Mandy’s arm. “More importantly, why would you do that without consulting us first?”
“I just—I’m so sorry! I just thought that it wouldn’t be such a big deal. I guess I don’t have much experience with fires. But it seemed safe since it’s all contained in that one like chimney there. So I thought I could just build a quick fire at the base and… I don’t know. I guess I thought it would all go poof and then I’d have an easy way up to the platform on the cliff.”
“It must be like thousands of cubic meters of dry fuel.” Pradeep shakes his head in despair. “It could burn for, like, weeks. Not that it will. But it must be a massive amount of dry wood. We’re talking a four hundred meter shaft, minimum, with like a three meter cross-section. Let’s say the wood is only able to fill half that volume. That’s still… I mean, I can do some calculations… There are equations for how fast wood burns, I’m sure.”
“And how hot is it getting in there?” Amy shakes her head in despair. “It’s like a giant rocket stove. I wouldn’t want to be any of the critters who set up homes in there.”
“Oh my god I didn’t even think about them!” Mandy holds her face in her hands. This is a nightmare. She doesn’t even feel Esquibel’s comforting hand on her back. Now she has to bear the burden of dead wildlife. She ruined the entire field study. She probably ruined their relationship with the Lisicans. And now she has all this blood on her hands. Mandy’s never had to handle this amount of guilt. She can’t take it.
Pradeep has stepped away to the bunker. He returns, calling out, “That’s what I thought. You can feel a noticeable draft pulling air through the sub. Much stronger than before. Amy is right. With all that fuel it must be drawing the air up it and creating a kind of rocket effect. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was hot enough to melt steel in there.”
“Oh, god!” Mandy can’t bear any more. She tears herself away and flees, out of camp, away from this reality. But she stumbles in the sand and falls on her side, hands still covering her face. She is wracked by grief, only dimly aware that Esquibel and Amy kneel on either side, consoling her.
Alonso sighs, shaking his head. He wishes he had more fury. But instead he just feels a great weariness. This is how it happens. Not even halfway through the study. The military ships return and the island is taken away from them, just as Plexity is beginning to show its promise. Is this shock? Perhaps he’s in shock.
“Lonzo, we need to come up with a bit of a plan.” Amy encircles his wrist with her hand.
He can only manage a grunt.
She can divine his helplessness. After a compassionate smile and a hand pressed against his cheek, Amy turns toward the others. “Okay. Listen up, everyone. Safety protocol. As long as smoke is coming out of that hole, nobody is allowed in the tunnels. Actually, we probably want to close up the sub as tight as we can.”
“But what if it’s the others coming back?” Esquibel’s question, called out from Mandy’s side, stops them all. Even Mandy sits up.
Through her tears she bawls, “Oh, you’re right! What if they don’t want to be stuck in the interior and they try something dangerous! We need—Oh, Esquibel, you’ve got to call in the Air Force now. Or whoever. Please. We need help.”
But Esquibel only has a helpless shrug for Mandy. “I would if I could, Mands. You know I’d do anything for you.”
It is this evidence that finally convinces Pradeep that Esquibel really doesn’t have a secret link to the outside world. She would do anything for Mandy. “Shit. We really are alone here, aren’t we?”
“It is what Alonso and I have been telling you.” But it is not a point Esquibel needs to hammer home right now, not with how it’s making poor Mandy feel. Esquibel knows what the girl did is reckless but she does feel sympathy. She might have done the same thing in Mandy’s place. It was a reasonable course of action. Who can tell how long fires burn?
“Have we found any other route to the village? Amy? Anyone?” Pradeep tries to get back on track. “Could you see any trails when you were there? I have heard of a few, but…”
“Well, there’s the bad trail,” Amy lists, “and then another wide trail that heads down, I assume to their water source. Then there were a few game trails heading into the trees but I didn’t ever have time to see…”
“It’s possible there’s another way through,” Pradeep says. “But all the ways we know right now bottle-neck at the tunnel right next to the one on fire. So unless Triquet and the others somehow surprise us, they’re stuck there.”
Mandy wails and Amy comforts her with an arm over her shoulders. “Yeah, I think that’s clear, Prad. But maybe we can find a way to reach them. It won’t be weeks. Not with the fire burning that hot. I bet it’s done in another hour or two. We’ll see them again in the morning. I’m sure of it.” But the words sound hollow to them all, even to Amy herself. She eventually stops trying and pushes herself to her feet. “Well, I guess I’ll go close up the sub. Oh, don’t worry, Mandy. I won’t lock them out. I’ll make it so they can push the doors open. I just want to keep the smoke out.”
The impromptu meeting disperses as afternoon progresses into evening. Soon it is only Esquibel and Mandy left, one holding the other. Then Alonso calls out for Esquibel and she squeezes Mandy one last time before abandoning her. No. That is too harsh. She is just busy. With real work. Something Mandy cannot have.
Coming from the shadows, a voice growls, “Well I for one am glad you lit the tunnels on fire. I hope it collapses them and makes it impossible for anyone to go through them.” Flavia leans forward, her eyes burning. “Tonight I will sleep with more peace than I have in weeks.”
Ξ
“We will wait. We won’t do anything rash. We will only see what happens next. Jay…” Miriam puts a heavy hand on his forearm. He is filled with so many wild plans. “We aren’t going to search for the waterfall right now and we certainly aren’t going to launch anything off it.”
He frowns but nods, disappointed.
Miriam surveys the village. The Lisicans have stopped talking to them. They’ve stopped doing nearly all their normal daily work. The smoke has really rattled them. The researchers now stand off to the side, beside a bush and a rockfall in a neglected corner at the edge of the village beside the cliff the tunnel emerges from. It has been an hour, maybe more. They are doing all they can not to draw any more attention to themselves.
Morska Vidra emerges from a hut, blinking at the bright light. His face is thoughtful. With the tip of his thumb he selects several young villagers, talking to them in his sing-song. None of them look happy to be selected. Their heads hang down and their eyes are hooded, but they follow him.
Morska Vidra scrambles up a rockfall to a game trail in a cleft. He is headed toward the source of the smoke, but overland.
Jay can’t stay still any longer. “Fact-finding mission. We got to get in on this.” He slips away from the others and crosses the tunnel mouth to join them. “Heeey gang, mind if I tag along? I know a bunch more songs I could sing.”
“Jay!” Miriam’s voice is too loud, a dreadful whipcrack in this quiet little hamlet. Dozens of heads snap toward her. She lifts a hand in apology and her face goes red. She puts her hand over her mouth. Then she finally manages, “Jay, please get back here.”
But it’s too late. With a helpless shrug, Jay follows the last of the villagers into the cleft, obscured by overhanging boughs of cedar.
Miriam quivers with fury. Triquet ventures a light touch on her elbow but Miriam doesn’t even seem to register it. Triquet withdraws their hand.
“Well.” Katrina likes challenges for sure. But this is a bit much. Their only way out is gone. “And they’ve got to think we did it, somehow. Us or the others at the beach. They must be furious. I hope it doesn’t burn down anything sacred or whatever or we might get a taste of their penal code.”
“Well, Jay can take whatever punishment.” Miriam shakes her hands, trying to release the emotion roaring through her. “We can just watch. Now. We can’t just sit here and pretend to be invisible. We need to show them we can be of value.”
“I’ve got a first aid kit.” Triquet pulls off their backpack and takes out a small ziploc filled with medical supplies. “I don’t… I have no idea how to indicate to them how that might be useful though. Oh, why did Jay have to follow them? I was hoping he’d lose his mind and drop down into the tunnels and somehow save us all. Now I guess I’ll have to be the one to do it.”
“No.” Miriam and Katrina say it at the same time, both putting hands on Triquet. Miriam continues, “We have no idea how dangerous that is. And smoke inhalation is a real killer. You can’t. We just have to be patient.”
Triquet falls back into their embraces with a ragged sigh.
Jay has always prided himself on his climbing skills but these kids are flat-out amazing. First they’ve got top-notch ankle mobility, which he’s always struggled with as a basic bitch white boy. And their joints and hip flexors are as explosive as soccer midfielders. They hammer up the nearly vertical face, their toes grabbing little pockets in the dried clay here, kicking themselves upward like mountain goats.
Jay scrambles, his shoes unwieldy here. Finally he takes them off and crushes his toes getting them to follow in their barefoot tracks. They finally crest the cliff and Jay is surprised to see a wide hollow up here instead of the edge of the cliff dropping to the beach. But no. There’s yet a higher cliff beyond this one, rising up even more. And they’re headed toward it at a brisk pace. Jay starts running to keep up with them on the open land. He nearly reaches the Lisicans by the time they start ascending this cliff. They still haven’t acknowledged him in any way.
The cliff leads upward through a narrow maze of green limestone channels tufted by shrubs like a Doctor Seuss illustration. Jay pulls his way up through them, the soft skin of his feet already so tender. He hasn’t toughened them up in too long and now he’s paying the price. Well, the smoke’s getting worse too and this is what he’s here to see. Good thing he’s got a proper N95 mask already on.
They crest this cliff and here he is. On top of the entire fucking world. The seawinds whip at him from across the island to the north. The gray dome of clouds that conceals the island touches the sea in nearly every direction. He can see it all now, better than any drone. The island makes sense. “Ahh. Miriam’s gotta see this. Incredible.” He takes out his phone and gets a dozen shots before the others move on out of view. He hurries to join them.
They’ve dropped down the front face of this cliff, which sweeps outward in a smoke-filled bowl about the size of a basketball court. They get to the far edge of it, where the smoke is quite bad. Morska Vidra puts his feet over an edge and lowers himself down, face squeezed shut against the fumes. The others follow.
Finally Jay, heart pounding, crawls nearly blind to the spot and sits at the edge. He drops his legs over and feels a small ridge under his heel, no more than a couple centimeters wide. This is it? Then what? Man… Sometimes being heedless has its downsides for sure.
He slowly scoots down a fairly sheer face, sometimes hanging from the fabric of his shirt and shorts. But then he hears their voices below him and realizes they stand on a spine that is level here. He joins them, uncomfortably close on the small ridge.
This close to the fire, the air is suddenly scorching. Jay realizes it’s just on the other side of this ridge. And it’s roaring. The cliffs had hidden all this from them before but now they can hear it. It’s like a giant Roman fucking candle sending a huge jet of yellow flame straight up into the air. Cinders fall everywhere. They can’t get any closer.
Finally Jay realizes what he’s looking at. He understands what happened here. He remembers that it was his own words.
Now the Lisicans finally look at him. Shock, sadness, fear. He can’t bear their gazes. They don’t even realize how right they are to blame him for what they’re seeing. Jesus, dude. You’ve really got to learn to watch your fucking mouth. But never in a million years did I think she’d actually go and do it!
Ξ
Flavia hates waking up at night on this island, ever since those crabs took over the beach on one of the first nights. She’s never really gotten over that. Since then, if it’s dark, she does all she can not to open her eyes. But her alarm goes off all the same. Even before she is awake her hand moves to silence it.
Here in her cell, she starts to drift off again but a tiny inquisitive voice in the back of her head starts asking what that alarm was for. And now, until she can figure it out, she can’t get back to sleep. Flavia squints at her phone screen. It presents a reminder:
YOUR FOURTH WEEK STARTS TODAY.
Flavia drops her head back on her pillow. Right. Her ordeal here isn’t even halfway over. But at least she can go back to sleep now. Since most of the heavy-lifting with Plexity is already done maybe she can just sleep through all of the next day.
What is that sound? Ah, yes. The fire. It is like an old-fashioned boiler in the next flat, an uneven sputtering of white noise in the far distance. And the ground outside flickers with its firelight. It is still burning quite hot. What a foolish thing that was for Mandy to do.
How hot is the fire getting? Flavia is generally comforted by feedback loop transfer functions and the state-space equations that can describe them. Now she lets them trickle through her mind. But she doesn’t know the starting values of the fuel or what its ignition point is. She will have to guess, which mostly makes the exercise irrelevant. And now she isn’t falling back to sleep at all.
She hears a giggle. Strange. The only other ones in here tonight are Maahjabeen and Pradeep and neither of them are the giggling type. Perhaps Maahjabeen is having a silly childhood dream. That’s what it sounds like. Such a carefree giggle.
Flavia wishes she could feel so carefree. But her life has never been so easy. Not that she’s had to deal with any particular challenges. She comes from a privileged family with historical roots and a tradition of philosophy and science in their ranks. She was mildly bullied for being a nerd in school and mildly assaulted once by a couple boys, who learned to keep their hands to themselves after she knocked one’s teeth out and dislocated the other one’s knee. But apart from a few rattling moments like that, her life has been pretty much her own. She is the paragon of a modern Italian woman, in control of her body and her career and her daily life.
After Prozia Giulia left her a sizable inheritance and an old farm in the Po River Valley, Flavia had become independently… well, not wealthy, but secure. And her work brings in enough revenue that she can almost pretend she is a success. It is when her patents start to make money that she will truly build her empire. Then she will be carefree. Until that day, it is projects for others like this.
No. Not like this. Never again like this. If anyone ever asks her to work onsite again she will laugh in their faces. From now on, she will do all her work from the comfort of her couch or not at all. Flavia has learned her lesson.
Maahjabeen giggles again. Ha. It must be quite a sweet dream!
Ξ
Miriam picks at the wall of the cliff beside her with her smallest tool. She’s getting flakes of dried clay intermixed with a variety of sandstones. The cladding, again. This is what hides the interesting layers from her, even here. When oh when will she finally be able to discover the roots of this island? She needs a bloody sluice to tear the earth off this cliff so she can finally see what she wants!
Suppressing a grimace, she shifts to see what else she can reach. They really haven’t moved since they’ve gotten here. Katrina and Triquet still stand with her in the corner of the village, unwilling to make a peep. It’s quite clear that their team is responsible for the fire and the villagers are extremely upset with them. It is a sign of their civility that they have been so restrained in their response.
Jay eventually returns with the others. His face is streaked with dirt and soot and he is uncharacteristically silent, eyes downcast. Whatever he saw up there has disturbed him greatly. Katrina tries to ask, then cajole answers from him. But he only shakes his head and shoves his hands into his pockets.
“Well, this is ridiculous.” Miriam looks to Triquet and Katrina for support. “We need whatever information you’ve got, Jay. Did you see the fire?”
Jay nods yes, his face even more unhappy.
“It’s not the camp, is it? Please God tell me it isn’t camp.”
“No, no…” This rouses Jay enough to speak. “Everyone’s safe.”
“Then where is the fire?” Triquet snaps fingers under Jay’s nose. “Hey I know you’re upset and you’re not like playing coy here but we need some real answers now. Dude. What’s on fire? Are we in trouble? When will it go out so we can get home?”
Jay groans. “It might be days. We gotta… We gotta, like find some food I guess. It’s one of the tunnels. The vertical one filled with branches and logs. And now it’s burning.”
“Ohh.” Triquet nods. “Yeah, that makes sense. But how did a fire get started…?”
Jay only crosses his arms and shakes his head no. He ain’t no snitch. And even though it was his idea, he’ll definitely have some choice words for Mandy himself, in private.
As the day progresses into afternoon, the wind shifts and billows of smoke come rolling through the tunnel mouth to cover the village. Now Miriam and the others have to move, scurrying with the Lisicans out of the village down the main path, deeper into the valley. The smoke, heavier than air, rolls after them.
The path is two people wide and the bare tree roots and soil soon give way to rounded river stones beneath their feet. Miriam kneels to scoop up a few. Quartz. Ha. This is an old riverbed and there must be a seam of quartz up-canyon. Here’s another pink quartz shot through with pyrite. Nearly everything else is sandstone of various hardness. She stands, pockets the samples, and hurries after the others, smoke chasing her.
Miriam is quite glad to have a properly-fitting mask, but her eyes are still streaming in the dense smoke. Her breath labors through the filter and her chest aches. Her heart is beating too fast.
The trail flattens out into a wide river valley. It follows a narrow stream, with a worn bank where the villagers must get their water. Here, they’re far enough from the rim of cliffs that the wind blows across, pushing the smoke off to the west. The villagers cross deep into the valley to get as far from the smoke as they can, finally standing along the tall bank of a larger creek in a long line.
This flight has revived Jay and he’s back to problem-solving mode. Where will they cross this little river here? It’s deep and flowing fast, the water dark blue and brown, reflected in the nauseous sky. The first flecks of ash are sprinkling its surface.
Jay and his crew look up and down the bank. There is no bridge, no ford, no fallen log. As far as they can tell, there is no way across. The Lisicans stand waiting, anxious but fleeing no farther, their backs to the river.
“Uh, won’t we be better off like, over there?” Jay can’t help but say it aloud to the closest Lisican, a relatively tall man who comes up to his shoulder. Jay points at the far side of the river. Then he corrects himself and points again using the tip of his thumb. But the man won’t even turn around to look.
“Who’s that?” Katrina hasn’t said much these last few hours. Usually in a crisis she likes to chatter or sing a song but here, in masks and smoke, she can’t lift her own spirits, much less those of anyone else. But now she sees a figure on the far bank, a teen girl in a blue feather cape, who stands at a distance and calls out.
“Eeeyyyyy-Yee!” The girl’s voice ends in a piercing crack. “Laak lilḵa Dunaax̱oo?”
The woman who first lectured Katrina at the entrance of the hut now separates herself from the others and takes fifteen or twenty steps away from the river before she turns around. She responds to the girl with a long loud chant that carries across the river, pointing at the fire, then at the tall strangers in their midst.
The girl considers the speech for a long moment, then turns and vanishes. The woman on this bank hurries back to join the others, waving a hand in front of her own face and coughing. The villagers all fall to talking to each other. Still, none of them will turn to look across the river.
“Anyone else,” Triquet drawls, “starting to think we shouldn’t be looking this direction? Some kind of taboo, I guess.”
“Who knows?” Katrina shrugs. “We may be exempt. Who even knows what’s going on here? Christ. It’s nothing but one bloody incomprehensible thing after the other. All I know is we haven’t brought them a single moment of joy since we got here. They must be so sick of us.”
“Maybe we… uh…” Jay looks over the heads of the Lisicans up and down the bank to find a more suitable place to stand, away from the villagers who hate them so much. But stands of reeds and clumps of vegetation block his view each way. “Let me just check downstream here.” Jay breaks formation and steps away from the river, crossing before the last clutch of villagers on their left to investigate what lies beyond a surprisingly-tall stand of catchfly.
A gap in the vegetation on the bank is infilled with tule reeds. No real place for them here. Pushing through the reeds leads to a marsh with sucking mud. And if he goes any further away from the river in search of solid ground he’ll be right back in the smoke.
In defeat, Jay returns to the others, where the air remains clear.
Katrina has used the time he’s been gone to make a plan with Triquet. After the woman addressed the girl on the far bank, she had returned to her place at the riverside, next to the old crone Katrina had been trying to meet in her hut. Of course she’s been evacuated too. Now this might be their only chance to speak with her. But Triquet isn’t convinced.
“Give the old thing a chance to catch her breath first, girlfriend. She ain’t going nowhere.” Triquet still carries the folded display in the internal sleeve of their backpack where a water pouch should go. But they make no move yet to retrieve it.
When Jay returns, he taps them each on the arms and gestures with his chin at the far bank. They look over their shoulders to see the members of another entire village standing outside the edge of the woods there, regarding them.
Their leader is a tall woman with tight gray curls carrying what looks like a spear with a cross-brace. She begins speaking but Jay can’t follow. His mind’s awhirl with what that cross-brace means. A spear like that is only used in big-game hunting, like elk or bison. If your prey has the potential of lunging and goring you then you put a cross-brace on your spear so it won’t plunge further than a certain depth. It keeps you away from antlers and tusks. She wears a hide cape and skirt. Further proof these people hunt big game. There’s large mammals on this island!
Katrina is discreetly recording the woman’s speech. She speaks softly into her phone during a silence. “This is the other like chief, I guess. Like the lady boss. That’s what I’ll call her. Now Lady Boss is pointing at the trees and the cliffs and the river. Listen! She’s saying the same word Morska Vidra used! Tuzhit! Tuzhit! Tuzhit everywhere!”
Triquet narrates what happens next. “Now our own Lady Boss, the crone’s daughter? She’s stepping away from the river to reply. There’s some kind of holy significance perhaps? A significant cultural element of both their villages, this river? That if they get too close they can’t look at it? Good fences make good neighbors?”
“We’ll call our Lady Boss, uh, the Mayor? I think she’s repeating what she told the girl.” They listen to her speech again, and when she indicates the tall strangers in their midst, Jay for one feels compelled to bow in the direction of the new tribe.
That doesn’t go over well. Lady Boss lifts her spear and shouts in a dreadful guttural voice at them, her consonants crashing together and her eyes flashing. They haven’t seen this kind of aggression from anyone in this village. “Whoa. That ain’t good.” Jay averts his eyes like the others.
Lady Boss makes a decision. She directs some of her villagers to go stand on their own bank of the river. Katrina glances back to see that a good twenty of their tribe line it in opposition, their own backs to the river. “Well, this is ridiculous.”
“Norms must be observed,” Miriam tells Katrina, squeezing her hand for patience. “Especially during a crisis. That’s what they’re for.” Miriam takes a long glance herself. Lady Boss and the rest of her village have left, leaving only the score of those on the far bank. “Even if we have no fucking clue what they mean.”
Triquet shares a glum look with Katrina, then Jay. “Anyone else getting hungry?”
“Oh, damn,” Jay groans, “you had to mention it.”
Ξ
“This is my processing site here.” Pradeep leads Amy to a small clearing in the grove, near Maureen Dowerd’s grave. He has excavated a long trench of turf, topsoil, and clay, removing the long narrow samples of earth to lie in rows, where they’ve been marked with small pins adorned with white flags. “The flags mark the boundaries of each medium, gravel, clay, etc. We’ll need Miriam to help us analyze what each of the minerals are. But we get to categorize any life forms we find in each layer.”
Amy crouches beside the samples and studies them, marveling that there can be so much life in such places. “We need to isolate strains, and there might be millions. The soil alone probably contains… who knows?”
Pradeep falls into lecture mode. “Recent papers estimate five thousand bacterial species. But that’s from a soil sample in Bergen, Norway. Lisica might have somewhat more or less, but it’s definitely a very different environment. But here’s the magic of the military-industrial complex. The Dyson readers make short work of the samples. Watch…” And he loads a couple milligrams of loose soil into its tray, which withdraws into the body of the unit. Pradeep’s phone buzzes. He consults it, then shares its display with Amy. A steady stream of eubacterial identifications scroll down the screen. Most cannot be identified by name, which may mean they’re unique and undiscovered.
“Sweet Jesus,” she laughs. “Just identifying the first strain… Instantaneous here but god, just doing that took the entire second semester of my sophomore year. Now it’s happening in the blink of an eye in batches by the thousand. I’m so old.”
Pradeep laughs. “My generation of scientists will be so meta. Or specialists so narrowly-focused they only speak a language like three other people do. Nobody in-between, for sure. So now back to work. The important part here is to keep all the samples straight and annotate the context of each sample with the Plexity keywords. I’ve got it set up like an assembly-line. And I’ve only got a few hours of work here left. So if you start on this end, and take a tiny scoop, no more than a milligram or two, then we can work together toward the bottom…” His stomach growls loudly enough to interrupt him and they both laugh.
“When was the last time you had a proper meal?” Amy frowns at him, knowing she won’t like the answer.
“Yes. Last night. You’re right. I’ll grab a snack when we’re done. I’ve just got another project that—”
“Why don’t you go grab a bowl and spoon out some of the rice on the stove. It’s still warm. There’s curry powder in the little blue bin if you want. But hot food! Now! And plenty of it!”
But Pradeep hesitates. “Yes. Okay. I just want to make sure we’re clear here. Do you get the collection protocol?”
“What do you think I’ve been doing the last two weeks? Just not on this scale. But yes! Go! Eat!”
Satisfied that the work will continue without him, Pradeep smiles his gratitude to Amy and scurries back to camp. Now that his hunger has announced itself it claws at him, interrupting his every train of thought. Biology, even his own, has its demands.
The rice and curry isn’t enough. He finds a packet of powdered eggs and reconstitutes them with a bit of oil and water. There. A foam of yellow protein. That will keep him going. He sits with a bowl near Alonso, Flavia, and Esquibel, who all work on laptops in silence. Alonso peers over his reading glasses with a frown and addresses Pradeep. “How goes the processing facility?”
“Grand. I’ve got Amy working it right now while I grab a bite. The species identification software in those Dyson readers is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen. Or perhaps it’s part of the microfluidics process itself. Probably both. Anyway. Now that I know readers like these exist, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do fieldwork again without them.”
“It’s excellent data. Mm, that smells good. I’m getting hungry.”
“Don’t move, Alonso.” Pradeep stands. “I left an extra serving in the pot. Here. And would you like a glass of wine with that?”
Alonso holds up his hand to forestall Pradeep. “No wine. Not this early. And no more drugs. Not for a good long time, at least. Just food. Thank you so much, Pradeep. You are a prince.”
Pradeep recalls how Alonso looked at him with such ardor while he was rolling on Molly. Pradeep blushes and looks down, hoping Alonso has no memory of the event. That’s how those party drugs work, isn’t it? People black out and need to be told what they did when they lost all control. Pradeep finds the concept unimaginable. His anxiety would never let him do such a thing.
After finishing his own bowl, Pradeep washes it and moves on to his next project. He really should have started this hours ago but it didn’t occur to him until he was knee-deep in the soil samples and nobody else seems to feel such urgency about their lost colleagues.
But still, he should have done this sooner. Pradeep hauls out the case that contains the drone and the headset and joysticks Katrina uses to fly it. He has never worked with such an advanced model. The old DJI mini he used before didn’t even come with a headset, just a flatscreen monitor and grainy resolution.
“Pradeep. What are you up to…?” Pradeep can’t locate the source of the voice. How odd. He takes off the headset and looks around. Who was it who spoke? They sounded so… forlorn.
“Just, uh, working with the drone,” Pradeep calls out in a neutral tone. “Thinking I might get it up and over the cliff. Send a note to the village. I don’t know. Maybe it’s crazy.”
“You can’t take the drone!” It’s Mandy. She leans out of the bug netting that had shadowed her. She looks dreadful, her hair hanging in lank strands, dark circles under her eyes. “I mean, we need it for the weather station. What if you lose it? Then I won’t have anything.” She lets the last word fall, realizing how lame she sounds. What has happened to her? How has she become such a loser? She can hardly show her face in camp anymore.
Pradeep sits back, recognizing the screech in her voice. Mandy is ruled by her emotions at the moment, her spirit nearly broken by the mistakes she’s made. He blinks at her. Consolation is hard for him. Not that he doesn’t feel for Mandy. He just doesn’t know how to put his care into words without triggering his own anxiety. Then what a fine pair they’d be, huddled in two opposite corners of her tent, curled fetal, facing away from each other. No, he has to be more helpful than that somehow. “Uh, it’s okay. There’s a second battery, you know.”
But now Mandy is crying, utterly miserable. Poor girl. Pradeep wonders how he might respond if it was Maahjabeen in tears. He stands and crosses to her platform. Pradeep sits awkwardly on the edge. He pats Mandy’s shoulder.
She sobs more loudly and pushes her face into his shoulder. She just wants to hide. That’s all she wants now.
Pradeep puts an arm around her, worried that he might smell too bad, his clothes, his armpits, his breath. “There, there.”
He looks up, across the camp, to find Esquibel watching them with a crooked smile, entertained by his predicament. Pradeep makes a face at her, in sympathy of Mandy.
Esquibel, to his surprise, smiles warmly and blows him a kiss.
Chapter 18 – Quite So Well
April 29, 2024
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 episode:
18 – Quite So Well
Flavia is so happy to see Amy she could kiss her. At last. She has won back her freedom. She wants to collapse and just be carried away to her cot in the bunker but she knows she can’t lay down her burdens quite yet. She turns to Xaanach, her shadow these last couple days. But the tiny girl is gone, vanished into the greenery. Well. That may be for the best. As far as Flavia can tell, Xaanach and the hermits of the mountain aren’t welcome in the villages.
Katrina is yelping with joy, wrapping her in her arms, kissing her cheeks like a long-lost relation. Flavia grips her back. Now that she is in the embrace of her friends her ordeal takes on a dreamlike quality. It recedes instantly into the past.
Amy hugs her too. The warm contact against her skin nearly makes Flavia weep. “Basta. Please. We still have to get home.” She steps back and wipes her eyes. “But where are Maahjabeen and Triquet? We have to find them. I think they followed me.”
“Followed you?” Amy frowns. “When?”
“That first day. The day they stole me.”
“No, no.” Katrina assures Flavia. “They got back safe and sound. Don’t worry about them. It’s just you.”
“Now…” Amy wonders, “how do we actually get back? They won’t let us back in the village to the way out.”
Flavia pulls away from Amy, a manic desperation filling her. “Where? Who won’t let us leave?”
Katrina indicates the knot of adult villagers still standing in the center of the clearing, hands up, watching them with wary hostility. “They think you’re some kind of bad juju, that’s for sure.”
“It isn’t me. No! It’s Wetchie-ghuy.”
The name provokes a collective low moan from the villagers. The children who had been watching from the doorways of their redwood bark houses duck their heads back in, squealing in fear.
Flavia steps into the village. “Wetchie-ghuy does not own me. I am not his—his wife. I am not his property. I am a free woman.”
But they still look at her with stone faces. She has been touched, infected or stained like Amy was for just taking a single step up his trail. For Flavia, this is too much.
“No! I hate him! I am my own person! Fuck Wetchie-ghuy!” She lifts a fist and shakes it at the mountain behind her. With two quick strides she returns to his trailhead and spits on it. Flavia drags her foot across the dirt, renouncing him. Then she realizes she still wears the shawl of silver fur that he had draped over her shoulders. She throws it on the ground and stamps on it.
The villagers hiss with worry.
“I am done. I am completely done.” Flavia marches into the village and they raise their hands. But she lifts her own to ward them away, aiming directly for the tunnel mouth. They fall away from her before she can touch them.
Katrina and Amy scamper through in her wake, hurrying past the villagers with downcast eyes.
Flavia is forced to stop. A single man stands in the tunnel mouth, barring her path. It is the first man they always meet, the elder with the fox—who is nowhere to be seen. She stops in front of him, needing him to understand she plays no part in Wetchie-ghuy’s devious machinations. She points at the mountain. “Wetchie-ghuy. Nák. Wetchie-ghuy chán. Bad. È cattivo.” She mimics strangling a kneeling figure. She points at its imagined face. “Wetchie-ghuy.” With all her effort she chokes him.
The elder watching her keeps his face impassive. But his eyes are surprisingly filled with grief. In silence he finally turns away, shoulders slumped in defeat, leaving the passage open. Flavia pushes past him with a muttered Italian curse. But she stops after just a step.
The fox crouches before her. One last challenge.
But this is something Flavia feels she can actually do. Boris her dog has taught her all kinds of canine manners. She patiently kneels, holding out the back of her hand for the fox to smell. It does so, idly, looking up at her with black shining eyes.
Without knowing why, words speak themselves from her lips. “I won’t tell anyone. I will keep your secret.” She doesn’t know what it means but it still somehow seems to make sense.
Satisfied, the fox flickers away, appearing once more on the shoulder of the elder who is rejoining his people in the village.
Amy hurries after Flavia, filled with more shame than she’s ever felt. These people were so joyful and welcoming just an hour ago. And she still doesn’t fully understand what she did wrong.
Katrina tarries at the tunnel mouth. She can’t let it end like this. Her DJ instincts kick in and she lifts her phone. With a few quick flicks of her fingers, a song begins at max volume, filling the space with piano and strings. Then Elton John’s plaintive voice sings:
What have I gotta do to make you love me?
What have I gotta do to make you care?
What do I do when lightning strikes me?
They goggle at her, the ethereal sounds coming from the phone clearly unlike anything they’ve ever heard. She holds it high as the kids peek their heads out again. The music draws them forward.
What do I say when it’s all over?
And sorry seems to be the hardest word…
Katrina puts her hand over her heart and starts swaying back and forth in time to the music, signaling her apology with gestures. She lets the song play out, the villagers swaying in time with her by the end. She lets the silence stretch for a long moment before blowing a kiss to the crowd and holding up a peace sign. Then she turns and hurries after the others into the dark passage back home.
Ξ
“Hey… I got an idea…” Jay stands in front of Katrina’s platform, happily stumbly drunk. “Let’s dance.”
She’s spinning what she calls her digestive set at the moment, a spacey atmospheric collection of chords with no beats that she likes to play for everyone after dinner. They all ate and drank too much and now, after the intense celebration Triquet led the whole crew in once Flavia had emerged from the trap door in the bunker, they are all depleted and content. Well, all are except Jay.
“Yeeeeah!” Katrina loves the unstoppable surfer dude. “That’s the spirit, mate! Ain’t no party if the party people say that the party won’t stop til dawn!”
“Right on!”
“I said it won’t stop bumping til dawn!”
“Right on!”
“Til dawn!”
“Right on!”
She hits him with a dropping bass note, then spins it into a techno remix of Liszt’s La Campanella, the piano’s chimes interlaced with real bells and a disco drum line beneath.
Jay stumbles away in the sand, satisfied with the beat. He can’t dance the way he wants with this bum leg but he can’t sit still. Not with Flavia back! There’s never been a celebration like this one.
Mandy stands and spins into the empty space. “Ooo pretty!” As a twelve year-old piano student she had once played this at a recital. It never occurred to her to dance to it. But now, high on Alonso’s wine and Jay’s weed, she feels like a breathless spinning wind-up Victorian doll, her beach skirt flaring as she turns. She throws herself into Jay’s arms and he catches her neatly despite his injuries. They laugh.
Mandy leaps away, closing her eyes and raising her arms. She feels so pretty, spinning neatly in the sand. She just wants her glow to shine in the gathering darkness, for anyone else who might need it. Love and beauty, in the end, are all that matter. Then her eyes open to even more beauty.
Maahjabeen dances before her, in a sinuous Tunisian style that almost makes Mandy do something very foolish. But she keeps her hands to herself and just watches the woman with open-mouthed fascination.
Maahjabeen has never been so happy in her life. When she had lost herself in the storm it was one thing to survive and return, but losing someone else… La. Now she knows how Mandy had felt when she had abandoned her on the beach. The crushing responsibility for another woman’s life. How had she been so cavalier about it before? Thank you, God, for Flavia’s safe return. Impulsively she grabs Mandy’s hands and hugs her tightly. “Chokran. Chokran, Mandy. Thank you for caring for me.”
Mandy has no idea what the lovely woman means but she does her best to hug her back in exactly the same way. Her eyes catch Esquibel’s watching from their platform. Her lover is laughing at her, fully-aware how bowled over Maahjabeen’s embrace makes Mandy. And she won’t let go. Mandy can only widen her eyes to communicate her shock. Esquibel laughs even harder.
Katrina will never waste an opportunity to make Maahjabeen happy. She finds the Amani Al Souwasi track and mixes it with a bit of hard drum and bass. Now it’s time to see how much she can make Maahjabeen move.
Amy cries out, clapping her hands. Maahjabeen whirls in response, performing a sharp traditional step she’s only done at weddings. They all cheer her. She likes this, how carefree it is, how there are no pushy men to fend off, how much she is appreciated. She has never felt more seen, but in a way she somehow loves. For once she doesn’t want to hide beneath her scarf or out on the open ocean. She wants them to see her for who she truly is. With every gesture she reveals herself and they cry out with joy. This is really happening. She’s blossoming like a flower. And Katrina keeps driving the music deeper, harder… Oh, now it is becoming physical and nearly sexual. But this is as far as Maahjabeen will go. She is still a proper Muslim girl.
With a laugh she spins away, falling against Pradeep. He yelps but holds her up. With an impulse she’s never felt before she cups his square chin and wetly kisses him before pulling away.
Pradeep quivers like he’s been struck by lightning. The camp laughs at him. Everyone laughs, including Maahjabeen. Oh no. Why did she do that? Why are they laughing? He looks from face to face, his anxiety rising…
But Jay barrels into him, roughing him up like a sport teammate. “Oh, no you don’t, Pradeep. You don’t get to be this gorgeous guy getting kisses like that from gorgeous chicks and respond like this.” He presses his joint into Pradeep’s hands.
Abashed, Pradeep glances at the others while he inhales from it. They’re all smiling at him, nodding in agreement. “Oh, this is an excruciating amount of attention, everyone, but I do appreciate your attempt to, well, help.”
“It was a very nice kiss.” Maahjabeen can’t believe she says this and she laughs, covering her mouth. “I recommend everyone kiss Pradeep. He is very kissable.”
Jay crows. “Yeah, baby! That’s the truth!” And he plants his grizzled lips against Pradeep’s clean-shaven mouth. But nothing stirs between them except merriment. With a laugh, Jay falls away. Next, Miriam grabs Pradeep by the wrist. She is very drunk, her pale face flushed red. “Don’t mind if I do.”
Pradeep is only able to yelp before she drops him backward like a Hollywood ingenue and kisses him with passionate force. It is an amazing kiss, something Pradeep has never experienced, a gushing tender passionate sweep of sensation and emotion that leaves him with fingers and toes tingling. He doesn’t even know if he’s attracted to Miriam but with a kiss like that it hardly matters.
She leads a dazzled Pradeep a couple steps to Alonso’s chair. With a happy laugh he grabs Pradeep’s face and kisses him tenderly like a father. Then it’s Triquet’s turn.
They make a delicious little show of it. “Oh… Pardon me… I was just freshening up.” From somewhere, Triquet has taken out a small make-up kit and is running glossy red lipstick around their lips in a pursed moue.
Katrina cat-calls into her microphone and Triquet sends her an exaggerated wink. Then, adorned in their floral housecoat and chiffon scarf, they stride forward, sultry, fixating Pradeep with a steamy gaze, then Triquet rushes him and kisses him soundly.
Pradeep falls back into the sand under the passionate assault. Triquet ravages him for a good ten seconds before breaking away.
Pradeep can do nothing but gasp and laugh. Now Triquet is tickling him, rolling around on top of him talking baby talk and giggling. Pradeep is laughing so hard he is crying.
Katrina, Esquibel, and Mandy dogpile them, everyone kissing and tickling each other. Flavia, who hasn’t been able to move from her camp chair since returning, lifts her wine glass and cheers.
Alonso looks strangely at Amy, slowly shaking his head with wonder. “What is it with kids these days? I think this is the most beautiful and innocent thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Wait wait wait.” Esquibel disentangles herself from the giggling mass. She stands, dusting the sand from her legs. “It isn’t over yet. I have something to show you first.”
Everyone falls apart, gasping for air. They needed that release. Pradeep is smashed at the bottom, his head whirling, quite sure he has never had so many people touching him at the same time. And the anxiety is still there, about the regrets they’ll all have in the morning, but he must admit that he didn’t actually die of shame and they didn’t recoil once they realized who he ‘really was’ or whatever Pradeep happened to be worried about at the time. They still care for him. It is just that the sensation is so overwhelming…
Esquibel has scampered over to Katrina’s laptop. Katrina sits up, Mandy’s head in her lap. “Yeeeeaaah!” she howls, urging Esquibel on. “Do it, doc!”
With a brilliant smile, Esquibel switches tracks. A woman’s voice calls out, a long sustained note, before descending in non-Western microtones to Maasai drums and a soundscape of driving energy.
Esquibel is the DJ now. And her joy forces them to their feet. Yes. She will show them what dancing is all about.
Mandy is the only one not moving. She only stares, stupefied at the good doctor. “I can’t believe how good you are at everything!” she finally shouts, dropping into a deep dancing stance and rocking her hips. “This is so good!”
Katrina spins free and points at Esquibel. “Respect. You are—”
“Oh, shut up,” Esquibel snarls at her, “and dance.”
Ξ
“Do the kayaks have names?” Amy asks between grunts as they muscle the boats over the sand.
“Names? No.” Maahjabeen makes a face. People are always trying to not only anthropomorphize their gear but infantilize it. “They are tools, Amy. Do you name tools?”
“Well, some of them.” They leave the blue kayak at the edge of the fallen redwood’s roots so they can haul the yellow one through the undergrowth. “I mean, boats and ships do traditionally have names. For like hundreds of years if not more.”
“Fine. So what would you name them?”
“Well, wouldn’t it be appropriate for them to have names that are special to you? Like from Tunisia? I’m sorry. Does Tunisia have its own language or do you just speak Arabic?”
“We don’t ‘just’ speak Arabic. It is our own version called Derja. There are many words and pronunciations specific to Tunisia, and each region has its own vocabulary. There is an old Tunisian Berber language too. Many of our names come from it.”
“Is yours an old name? What does Maahjabeen mean?”
“Yes. It means my face is like the moon.”
“Oh! That’s so nice. What kind of names do boats have? Let’s see. We could call this one… I mean, what’s yellow on the ocean? I know. Let’s call it Firewater. Her or him?”
“All boats are female. Firewater. Okay.”
“And the blue one…” They put Firewater down and return for it.
Maahjabeen puts her hand on the blue boats’ nose. “Aziz.”
“Oh! That’s pretty. What does it mean?”
“It is the name of the man who sold me the boats. He gave me a good deal or I would not have been able to afford them.”
“Well that’s as good a reason for a name as any! Better, I’d say!” Amy looks proudly at the two boats lying side-by-side. “Firewater and Aziz. There! That’s better.”
“If you like.” But Maahjabeen is pleased that Amy is showing her beloved boats so much attention. They are all friends now and that means very specific things to Maahjabeen. She will share her food and drink, tell them of her hopes and dreams, trust them on the open water. She has gone through storm and nightmare with these people and now their bond means something. “I like the names.”
Amy beams at her. “I am so glad you’re here, Maahjabeen. Now let’s see if your predictions are correct.”
“Your predictions. I just observed what you pointed out.” It is easy to be deferential to the older woman, now that her knowledge is proven. Maahjabeen is eager to see if today is finally the day. She slips into Aziz’s seat and seals her spray skirt. Amy pushes her off into the lagoon and then joins her in Firewater. The water today is fairly calm, brushed into tiny ridges by the breeze. White surf beyond the break rolls in with as much force as ever.
“After you.” Maahjabeen nods and points with the blade of her paddle at the mouth of the lagoon.
Amy laughs, demurring. “No no. I’m out of practice. Please. Show me the way, Maahjabeen.”
So she digs in, propelling Aziz forward through the mouth. She is on high alert, the surf crashing so close. But there are gaps between the waves and also the rocks they crash against. By timing her moves, she is able to climb the ebb tide up to their faces and then ride them at a diagonal to safety. It’s kind of like Tarzan swinging on vines. She never understood that story. How would he know there is another vine to grab until he has already let go of the first one and is flying helplessly through the air? Well, how will she know a wave won’t behave other than expected and smash her against these jagged black teeth?
And the answer is faith. Her faith always sees her through. Perhaps Tarzan had a similar faith. Perhaps he was a believer without even knowing it.
She finds a calm little pool protected behind a shoulder of rock and she waits here for Amy, who has been caught up on the crest of a wave, heading toward her. She is surfing it expertly, smile wide in a rictus grin of concentration, but she is cutting across its face at too sharp an angle. Maahjabeen is worried that she will get carried onto the rocks…
At the last moment, Amy paddles off the top and into the swell behind, shooting sideways toward Maahjabeen with the thunder of the surf ejecting her.
Amy pulls up with a squeal, fighting Firewater to a standstill beside Aziz. She is panting hard.
“That was… quite a bit of paddling.” Maahjabeen can’t tell if it had been intentional or not. If so, it was the flashiest maneuver she’d ever seen.
“Oh god. I think I wet myself.” Amy shivers. “So soaked I can’t even tell. What do Tunisians say, when you almost die like that?”
“Inshallah. By the grace of God.”
“Exactly. That was definitely my big inshallah moment.”
“Here is your stillwater passage. But watch out for these rip curls on the side, Amy. Are we strong enough to get over them to the quiet water before the waves get to us?”
“Oh, those are pretty huge.” From the shore, Amy hadn’t been able to see these spinning whirlpools the waves create as they rush toward the rocks. “But, yeah. I think we got it, as long as it isn’t a huge one.”
Maahjabeen angles the nose of Aziz toward her final destination, past the rollers in the open water. “Inshallah!” A blessedly small wave crests but gets undercut by the shelf beneath the water here. It dissipates before it even reaches the rocks. She paddles for all she’s worth, the stiff length of the boat reaching across the edges of the whirlpools to the smooth water on the far side. She doesn’t have long, she knows. It is time to paddle to freedom.
Amy watches her companion dig deep in the water and shoot forward with ease. Soon Aziz is halfway across the danger zone but a big wave is already rising in the coming set, maybe three waves out. Maahjabeen will have to hurry.
The next waves slow her, the current stopping her in her tracks and the climb over the mounting swell harder each time. She has her eye on the big wave coming in too. She needs to hit it just right to win past or it will carry her all the way back to the rocks.
She does so, with a grunt and a scream, shooting over the lip just as it begins to form. Maahjabeen made it! She’s out on the open ocean now! She’s safe!
Turning back, her wide grin of triumph is answered with a salute of Amy’s paddle. But she just sits there and her smile slowly fades. She is surprised how long Amy takes, letting four whole sets go by before she sees a wave she likes. To Maahjabeen’s eye it isn’t a particularly auspicious wave, but Amy seems to think otherwise.
And Amy is right. The rhythms of the ocean slacken and she’s given a flat peaceful ride out to where Maahjabeen waits.
“Whew!” Amy cackles. “That was lucky.”
Maahjabeen shakes her head at her, rueful. “I can’t wait until I am old enough to have such patience.”
And now they are on the shining sea together, the sun breaking through the clouds over the island behind them. It is a beautiful day and they are finally free.
Maahjabeen laughs and pulls ahead, in her element. She plies the currents like a dolphin, the smooth sides of Aziz cleaving a tiny wake on either side. She is surprised to see Amy keeping pace off her port side. The older woman has perfect technique, the blade spinning and dipping in her hands. Firewater bobs like a happy duck on the ocean.
They curve off to the left, to follow the cliffs to the east that none of them have yet studied. The seastacks are painted white with bird droppings and some unknown pinnipeds cluster on a pocket beach in the shadow of the cliffs.
Amy crows with delight upon seeing them and paddles closer. “Oh my GOD! Maahjabeen, look!”
But Maahjabeen is worried about the closeouts here. It takes all her strength not to get sucked in by the currents racing toward the rocks. “What? What is it?”
“Unless I’m mistaken these are Hawaiian monk seals! Found only on Hawai’i! And they’re endangered! My old friend Mark Van Dorn will lose his MIND when I tell him I’ve found a new population. This is huge!”
“Do you have one of those readers Alonso wants everyone to carry? The—the… what do you call it?”
“The Dyson readers?” Amy laughs. “I don’t think a seal would fit in the collection bay. No, I’ll need to get a blood sample at some point. And wow! Look at the seabirds! Those aren’t just any Uria lomvia. They’re too dark! They must be lomvia arra, the North Pacific variant of the thick-billed murre. This is wild. Nowhere else on earth do we see these two species, one from Hawai’i and one from the Arctic, intermix like this. I wonder if there’s any actual interaction? Pradeep will have a field day here! Literally!”
“My estimate is that this is a rising tide for the next four hours, Amy. We shouldn’t spend too much time…”
“Yes, it’s true. If we want to see more of the cliffs we should move on before our window closes. But just think of how much research is to be done here! Eight weeks is—!”
“Well, more like five and a half weeks now. That is why it was so hard to lose those first couple weeks.”
“Exactly. We have to come out here every day now!”
They paddle on, the shadow of the island on their left side stretching across the water, chilling them. Amy picks up her pace, keeping warm with the effort. How nice it had felt to have the sun on her skin, if only for a brief moment. Now it’s time to go to work. Let’s see if her old muscles will put up with the exercise. It’s been… three months? four? Since she’d been in a boat? And that was just goofing around with friends in Elkhorn Slough.
But there’d been a time, in the not too distant past, when she was such a monster on the water that she could literally paddle all day. She had once soloed the entire Humboldt coast in six nights for crying out loud! She can do this. But her shoulders and core are already starting to build up that lactic acid…
“Look!” Maahjabeen points her paddle at a fold in the cliffs where the water disappears within. “I think that is the sea cave!”
“Oh, wow. Should we go in?”
“I have been wanting to for days now. Weeks.” Maahjabeen shoots forward, eager to see it. The channel cuts into the black and gray cliffs at an angle, which makes its mouth nearly impossible to spot. But she isn’t looking at the landmass, she’s following the water, and there’s a current sucking in and billowing out there, she is sure of it.
She reaches the channel atop a modest wave, that allows her to coast off its lip behind as it crashes against the walls and fills the channel with foam. Maahjabeen backpaddles slowly behind, waiting for Amy to join her on the next wave. The channel is much wider than she thought, perhaps twenty meters across. But the stone of the cliffs has been sheared away ahead. This has been artificially expanded, probably to accommodate larger boats.
Amy coasts in behind her and they both have to fight over the foam of the wave to maintain position in the center of the channel. Then they scoot forward, amazed looks on their faces. At first, the passage is open to the sky, a deep cleft in the rock. But then it closes far over their heads and the way forward grows dim.
Sea stars populate the wet walls. A fringe of mollusks and seaweed marks the tideline. It is enchanting, the sharp tang of sea creatures and the vegetal smell of the seaweed beneath barely masking the stench of something rotten. The channel opens into the cavern, but they don’t even realize it at first because the bare stone columns separating the water into multiple channels are so broad. This is where the surf is broken into harmless ripples, leading to the calmer ebb and flow issuing from the cave.
They glide into the darkness. A natural shelf above the tideline holds the carcass of a sea lion, its tail partially torn off. Amy holds her breath and paddles closer, fascinated to see teeth marks on the flesh of the poor creature. She rejoins Maahjabeen and finally releases her breath with a gasp. “Well! Pradeep will absolutely adore that fellow! Shark bite. Or orca…”
“Orca? Really?” Maahjabeen has kept her eyes peeled today but she has yet to see them. She considers this a good omen, that they are silently watching over her.
“Good grief,” Amy shakes her head, “the American military is… so weird!” She peers into a chamber they carved into the rock, its irregular floor flooded with concrete that still supports rusting iron struts. “What were they doing in here?”
“Who knows. Those people are crazy. They bomb cities for no reason. They bury a sub in the beach. It makes no sense.”
Maahjabeen feels the need to explore every corner of the sea cave. She is finally scratching the itch she first got when they lost Flavia last week and they discovered it from the other side. And who knows when she’ll find the time to come back?
The jetty is fairly dangerous, having partially collapsed into the black water. She steers clear of it. The open water on the far side of it receives the flow of the freshwater fall from above. So strange that it should flow here in an unbroken roar, unseen and unknown, for so long. From water collected in the island’s interior, then down the cliffs of that fantastic waterfall and along the creek… why, this is the water they drink at camp. Then underground and falling in a wide shelf into this cave. For ages. A hidden wonderland.
As with so many of her encounters with nature, the world of mankind falls away as a laughably thin construct and she is left with eternity. The never-seen face of Allah. Peace.
Ξ
Mandy holds Alonso’s swollen feet in her hands. They buzz with his agony. Really no point in doing any actual work on them yet. They are still too raw. So she just holds them, keeping herself clear so she doesn’t accumulate his pain, breathing through the soles of her feet into the earth.
His breaths are ragged. He lies back on his cot with his sleeping bag over him, his forearm across his eyes. There is so much trauma here Mandy isn’t sure she can encompass it. He needs some way to get rid of it, a path for it to leave his body. Maybe putting it into words will help. “Can you tell me about it?” she asks.
“No.” He doesn’t move. But his leg twitches.
Mandy is relieved despite herself. The last thing she needs is to hear a torture victim recount the details. She can only be so clear for so long before darkness like that would find its way in. That’s a lot of darkness.
“How do your feet like feel?” Maybe this is safer territory. “Can we just, you know, like write an abstract here? How would you introduce the subject of your feet in a paper?”
“Like… like may I present some very roughly ground hamburger. Hamburger that is always buzzing in agony. Sometimes spikes of nerve pain. Then there is the bone ache. So deep and relentless. It is… I cannot think. I am only the pain.”
“Are my hands okay?”
“Your hands are wonderful.”
“Thanks. I never liked my hands. I was always dropping things growing up and my mom would say my hands were all thumbs and I’ve never been able to get that image out of my head.”
Alonso gives her a polite laugh. He is just… hovering here in his cot, not giving her an opening. He is evidently not ready for this. She shifts her hands to cup his ankles. “How’s this?”
But he can’t answer her through his sudden tears. His hand opens then clenches in a fist. Ah, how he used to run! He was always so fast, a sprinter on his athletic club track team and a wing when they played fútbol. And he could hike for days. Climb mountains… Now it was gone, all gone forever and he couldn’t let go of the grief. Was he really going to spend the remainder of his days just sitting or lying down watching his body turn to sludge? He couldn’t bear the thought of it. And the pity of this… this waif here at his feet. Also unbearable. She is so light and spritely. Yet even being this close to the ruin he’d become has darkened her and brought her down. Intolerable.
He struggles to sit up. “Fine. I am fine. And I’m sure there is other work that you need to be doing at the moment, Miss Hsu.”
But she doesn’t let go. She’s too connected, and when a stab of pain shoots through him it lurches through her gut and she gasps. “No no. Nothing better to do, Doc. Just starting here, step by step. We need to be patient.”
“But it is ridiculous. I mean, there is no scientific basis in what you are doing. You know that, right?”
“There’s no basis in stretching tendons and aligning scar tissue?”
“Well, of course there is. But that isn’t what you are doing. You are just holding my abominable feet and taking deep breaths. That isn’t anything. That’s just voodoo nonsense…”
“Then why is it a problem? You said my hands feel wonderful.”
“They did. And you are very nice to do this, Mandy, but…”
“But it’s hard for me to make contact like this without you having to take a deep breath yourself, isn’t it? And you don’t want to take a deep breath.”
He falls back, staggered a bit by the insight. “Is that what it is?”
“Well, I think so. At least at this stage. Since I’ve been in here, you haven’t taken a single deep breath. You haven’t even taken a normal breath. It’s like you’re scared of me.”
“Well, I am.” He laughs a bit more heartily, and this releases his diaphragm a bit. He hadn’t even realized how much he’d been holding it. Now he sighs, his breath hovering in his throat. “And you’re right. I don’t know what will happen if I take a deep breath. I don’t know… why it is so hard…”
“No way. I’d be so scared after what you went through. But it’s okay. You realize it can’t hurt you any more, right? It’s just the past and the past is over. It’s done. And all that is left is to step forward. Like stepping off a cliff and helplessly falling…”
“Afraid of how much it will hurt when I land. Yes. That is why, certainly. Can’t we do this when I am unconscious or something, though? I wish they could just shut off all the pain receptors in my body. I never need to feel pain ever again. It has been too much.”
“You have absolutely been through too much pain. But come on, Alonso. A deal: Six deep breaths and I’ll leave you alone. Just six.”
“Six is a lot. You don’t know what you’re asking of me.” He holds up a hand to clarify. “I do like your company, Miss Hsu. I just want you to stop touching me.”
They both laugh now and his breath eases a little more.
“There you go. I felt the muscles of your legs relax a bit.”
“So what? What does that get me? Voodoo, I say.”
“Come on. It can’t be controversial that increased bloodflow to a wound site will bring more healing factors. But we like to constrict them, shut them off from the things that help them—”
“I reject the proposition that some unmeasurable spiritual healing energy is flying through your hands…”
“I didn’t say there were! I’m saying things like white blood cells, uh, growth factors, all the things your blood carries literally can’t get to the site because you’re tensing it. It needs to be released so the juices can get in there. Right? This is like physical therapy 101. That can’t be controversial, can it?”
“Well, the controversial part is that releasing these muscles leads to uncontrollable pain. And you don’t have anything for the pain. That’s the thing. It will be like putting my legs in a fire and I can’t take them back out.”
“But your body will heal, if you let it. Until about six months have passed there’s a window with the scar tissue. You’re still in that window. But when it closes and your feet are just a mass of scars? I don’t think you’ll even be able to walk. It’s kind of a now or never scenario, Doc.”
“Okay! Fine! So what do you want me to do?” Panic grips him. She isn’t giving him a way out. Where is Miriam? She knows how to handle him when he’s this grumpy. This… kid… simply doesn’t know what she’s doing.
“Just six breaths. Deep. From your belly. That’s all I’m asking for today. Don’t think about like flexing your legs or anything else. Just keep your mind empty and give me six good deep breaths. Then I’ll leave you alone.”
“Wait. There is Doctor Daine. Doctor! Do you have a moment?”
Esquibel stops at the edge of the big platform and peers through the mesh into the tent. “Yes, Doctor Alonso?”
“There is an important thing about nerve pain, yes? Where if you allow too much to be felt, especially if it is chronic, it like burns a permanent circuit into that nerve, yes? And that is when it becomes neuropathy. I have been reading. That is my primary fear now. That I will end up with permanent nerve damage if I let the pain get too intense. I can’t allow it to burn those circuits. But your… protege here, she wants me to just suffer through it.”
“Yes, Doctor. Her approach is extremely painful. In the short-term. It is true.”
“But I don’t want the permanence of the pain. We need to deaden my nerves. I cannot handle any more pain. Maybe you could give me something for it so I can go through this process without making things worse.”
Esquibel looks at Mandy, who obviously disapproves of this. But Esquibel has been a doctor now for a good long time. She knows what to do. “Yes, Alonso. I do have something. A calcium-channel blocker. Quite powerful. It will probably put you to sleep.”
“Sounds perfect. Can I have four?”
“Oh, one should definitely be enough. But I’ll give you two just to be sure. Will a painkiller interfere with your treatment, Mandy?”
“Well, kind of, yeah. His responses will be off.”
“Not with this one. It is a new experimental compound. Quite specific. Showing wonderful results. Here. I will get it. And no side effects!” Esquibel calls out over her shoulder as she hurries to the bunker. A moment later she is back with her medical kit. She removes a bottle and hands a pair of clear gel pills to Alonso.
He frowns at it. “What is it called?”
“It is hormone-based. Very safe. Let’s see.” She reads the bottle. “Ehh, cholecalciferol. Here. Drink with water so it doesn’t upset your stomach.”
Alonso nods, eagerly tosses the pills back, and sips them down.
Mandy grins at him, encouraging. “Six breaths.”
“Will you wait, please? You are too eager to hurt me. How long, Doctor? When will I feel the effects?”
Esquibel holds his wrist pulse and consults a watch. She nods, satisfied. “It is very fast-acting. Through your saliva glands. You should start to feel sleepy now. And the pain should be subsiding.”
“Mm. Perhaps. But I am definitely feeling the tiredness. Okay.” Alonso settles back in his bag, his lids drooping. “Okay, fine. Let the torture begin once more. Deep breath number one.” He takes a shuddering breath that only fills the upper lobes of his lungs.
Mandy shares an agonized look with Esquibel. “Oh my god I’m like the opposite of a torturer.”
“Shh. He knows.” Esquibel pats Mandy’s shoulder.
Alonso looks at them with dull resentment, letting the drug’s effects claim him. “And two.”
“How is the pain?” Esquibel cups his jaw.
“You are right. Much better. Three.” This is a real deep breath, and his legs roll away from each other, finally releasing. “See, Miss Hsu. This is all I wanted, was for you to do your work without…” But he is fading fast. He waves a vague hand and settles. “And four.” But it is the last deep breath he takes before a rattling snore indicates that he’s asleep.
Mandy holds the swollen, angry feet, throbbing out of sync. She feels the fibers unwind under her fingers and slacken. Now she can do some gentle work, figuring out the extent of the damage and planning a way forward. They are somewhat pliable now. His ankles are frozen. Probably shattered. And his metatarsal bones are sheathed in traumatized fascia. But the change is so dramatic she can’t believe it. Mandy exchanges a surprised look with Esquibel. “That was so fast! What is that miracle drug? I need it for all my patients. Choleca… what was it?”
“Cholecalciferol. No, it was just a couple pills of Vitamin D3. Just a placebo.” Esquibel places a gentle hand across Alonso’s brow, untroubled for the first time. “But I didn’t realize it would work quite so well.”
DW Draffin -- Lisica 