Chapter 46 – Pork On The Barbie
November 11, 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:
Book IV – Hypotenuse Of Hope
46 – Pork On The Barbie
In the Dzaadzitch village the next morning, Mandy and Miriam try to share gifts and make plans. With Morska Vidra beside her, Miriam watches a trio of younger villagers emerge from the cave mouth, bearing fish from the beach. “Oh, that’s a lovely catch. Now that you’ve got the lagoon to yourselves it’s fish every day, eh? You were just waiting for us to leave before you went back down there, weren’t you?”
But the villagers don’t engage with her. They are intent on their feast, exclaiming over the shining fish.
“What I was saying,” Mandy repeats loudly and slowly, trying to regain Morska Vidra’s attention, “is that if it’s okay with you guys we want to get out to the cliff tops daily. Day-lee. Understand?”
The silver fox appears, scrambling up the leg of one of the youths to sniff at his catch. They all speak to the fox with deference, waiting for its blessing. With a sneeze the fox gives it, darting away, and the villagers call out, pleased. They disperse to gather their fixings. The Mayor starts building a fire while others bring baskets filled with mash wrapped in green leaves.
“And do you have any rope?” Miriam extends an invisible line through her hands, trying to communicate the concept to him. But he hardly takes his eyes from the fish. “I want to drop down that shaft up there. Study the rocks. The layers and the history of the island? The rocks?” She points at the cliffs visible through the trees. “Hanging from a long rope, tied to something solid at the top?”
But before they can gain his approval, a young girl appears from the far side of the village. She passes between the huts and enters the village square, chanting to them all about something she just saw. The village falls silent. The Mayor stops building her fire and listens. The girl stops, turning back again and again, to poke at the air behind her with the tip of her thumb or her little pointed chin. The Mayor finally stands and says something. Then she points with her own thumb at Miriam and Mandy, directing the girl to them.
The girl skips forward, as light as a fawn on her feet. Her small dark eyes are alive with excitement and her black and gold curls bounce like springs. She chatters at Miriam and Mandy, fearless, then waits for their answer.
Morska Vidra turns to Miriam. She shrugs at him, confused. He pushes her gently toward the young girl.
“Aye. You want me to…? right.” Miriam bends over, the girl is quite small up close. “Hello, love. How can we help you?”
The girl slips her narrow hand into Miriam’s and pulls her forward. “Oh. Come with you?”
“Not alone.” Mandy starts, nervous as a rabbit, delaying Miriam with a hand on her elbow. “Never alone. Not after Amy.”
“And all the other disappearances. So come with me, please.”
“Uh, where?” Mandy peers doubtfully into the woods from which the girl emerged. “This is how we get in trouble, isn’t it?”
The girl pulls more firmly on Miriam, ignoring her resistance. But then she stops, trying a new tack. She places her other thumb against her chin. “Xaanach.”
“Shah-nock. Xaanach. Oh my god, I remember Flavia talking about you.” Miriam stops struggling and falls in step with the girl. “You’re the one who saved her from Wetchie ghuy, aren’t you?”
“Wetchie-ghuy…” Xaanach makes a horrid face. She tears at her own windpipe, then crosses her eyes and lolls her tongue out the side of her mouth. Then she laughs and pulls on Miriam again. “Pođi sa. Hwai.”
“Come on, Mandy. She hates him as much as we do. And she wants to show us something. We’ll be fine. At least we know she isn’t leading us to that sour old bastard.”
But Mandy really doesn’t have it in her. She’s here to climb the cliff behind her facing the sea, to reset her weather station, and that will take all her energy. She’s sure of it. With a groan she collapses against her companion instead. “I just don’t think I can do this any more, Miriam. I mean, honestly. I didn’t sign up to be, like, hunted. Russians on the beach, shamans in the trees. Come on.”
“Don’t fret, darling. We always have our golden childs with us.” Miriam indicates the patient figure standing outside the village, waiting for his two charges to return.
Giving in with a growl of supreme irritation, Mandy clenches her fists and follows, knowing with every step she takes that she is heading further into danger. “Why do we keep doing this?” she wonders aloud. “We know this is just going to be trouble but here we go again anyway.”
“Not sure what our other options are.” Miriam is committed to this course now and her long strides keep up with Xaanach’s happy bounding. “Come on, Mandy.”
As they pass the last huts and climb the forested slope behind them, Miriam examines the girl pulling her. There is something different about Xaanach, the particular weeds woven into her hair, the rattiness of her shift, her ebullience. And the way the Mayor spoke with her… There was a formality to it. It wasn’t how she speaks to any of her own people. Xaanach isn’t of the village. “Well, that must be right,” Miriam says to her aloud. “You pulled Flavia out of Wetchie ghuy’s hut in the middle of the night and by all accounts that’s like an hour or two from here. They wouldn’t let a… what are you, eight? nine year old girl? out alone, would they? All night, messing with the medicine man. Where the devil are your parents anyway? Just who are you, Xaanach?”
The girl stops and touches her chin with the tip of her thumb. “Xaanach.”
“Yes. Miriam.” She repeats the gesture on her own chin.
“Mandy. Nice to meet you. Please don’t hurt us.”
“Mee-yum. Man-dee. Hwai.” Xaanach waves them forward.
Somewhat mollified by the charming little pixie, Mandy allows herself to be led upward to the edge of a thicket. Down they go, crawling beneath its sharp branches, and out the other side to a rocky cliff face. Xaanach has been chanting this whole time, telling them all kinds of fascinating details about the world around them. Now she points at the cliff and finally releases Miriam’s wrist so they can both climb.
Mandy falls back and groans again. “I knew this was a bad idea.”
“It would be…” Miriam peers at the cliff, picking at it with a fingernail, “if Xaanach hadn’t just led us to a deposit of plagioclase feldspar. What is this doing at the surface? My my my.” She croons at the crystal admixture. “You’ll be changing my island models for sure. See, Mandy? This is already a beneficial side-journey.”
“Yeah… I’m not sure how much climbing I’m good for.”
“Look. Xaanach’s already vanished up there in that cleft. Seems like it’s just a few meters then pop.” Miriam hauls herself onto the stone wall, the fractured face offering plentiful hand and foot holds.
Xaanach’s little face re-appears above, calling out, “Mee-yum. Man-dee. Hwai.”
“Why are you so, like, brave about all this?” Mandy really wishes she could let go of all this irritation but her unresolved fight with Esquibel has made her crabby and defensive, dragging her mindset back to the first few weeks of this trip, when she couldn’t ever get anything done. “Aren’t you worried about where she’s taking us?”
“Aye, for certain I am. But listen to yourself. You seem to have this notion that there’s an option here that gives you everything you want, and that’s just not how things are out here, love. It’s not like we say no to Xaanach and then just get to choose how the day goes. This is a… I mean, like, if we dropped ourselves into Times Square and said we’re going to live here for eight weeks, we’d have to spend a fair bit of time negotiating with the locals and making sure everyone was fine with us being there, aye?”
“It’s just…” Mandy drops her hands, knowing she’s lost yet another fight. “This has nothing to do with atmospheric science, okay?” With a muttered curse she hauls herself up the cliff face.
At the top, they find themselves at the top of a slope that drops away into a nice wide valley interspersed with oak groves and green meadows. Far away, there is a lighter bit of emerald moving against the dark green carpet of bushes. It is Jay in his softshell jacket, picking his way through dense growth. His face is burned red by the sun and wind and he is limping, his hand at his side.
“Jay!” Mandy calls out.
He is quite far away, hundreds of meters. Jay stops, unable to locate the voice, or even tell if it was an auditory hallucination or not. He blinks at his surroundings. Where is he now? Traversing this wide bowl, coming down from a steep motherfucking gradient behind him where he nearly got wrecked in a minor landslide. Its aftermath prevented Pradeep from following at a healthy clip.
“Jay! Over here!” The voice is so thin. It’s got to be one of the crew, though. Up ahead? He shades his eyes, the overcast sky still bright enough to matter. Are those figures up there? He waves.
Within moments, Miriam and Mandy and a little Lisican girl are down in the meadow with him. They drape his arms over their shoulders, and even though it stretches his scar, he lets them support his weight. “I am so so so happy to see you. Swear I could like kiss you both.”
“Deal.” Miriam laughs and kisses his cheek. “Ah. Maybe a wash-up first then I’m all yours.”
Mandy frowns. “But where’s Pradeep?”
“Yeah, he needs more help than me. Back this way.” Jay tries to turn them all around. Reversing course is the one thing he really hates doing. But it doesn’t matter now. He found help at last.
They tell Jay about their days and nights of labor and the move to the pine camp inland. He exclaims, “No way!” a dozen times at the proper intervals, shocked that the Russians or someone like them really did land on their beach. “The lagoon’s out of bounds? Like for the whole rest of the trip? Just when we set up the gill net? Aw, man. That is a major major bummer.”
“Why did you leave Pradeep behind?” Mandy’s worry grows. “Don’t you know we can’t do that any more?”
“Yeah…” How to communicate what the last day has been like? How they’ve woven their own paths, despite all their best attempts to stay together, across the southwest of the island? “It’s just, like, really choked with vegetation in there. Like really choked. Like, we haven’t seen a real trail in days.”
Jay leads them to another slope, this one carpeted with soaring Douglas firs like a proper Oregon forest. He just spent all morning coming down that way on feet and knees screaming with agony. It wasn’t that he’d put a lot of steps in, really, it was more that he just hadn’t been able to ever stop and rest them.
“Is Pradeep injured?” Miriam is starting to feel Jay’s weight. Just how far back are they going to have to go?
“Nah. Just… I get into a zone and… I should have waited but…” He shakes his head. There was so much he was going to tell these people! But now that he sees them, all the words he’d prepared in his endless hours of walking lack any meaning or power.
They walk under the tall firs, their brown needles carpeting the ground. After a few minutes of steady climbing, Jay stops.
On the slope ahead, a tableau:
Pradeep’s long dark form is face down on the hillside, unmoving. A golden childs stands on the far side of him, his back to Pradeep, arms raised. Wetchie-ghuy is crouched on a stone above, clutching a forked stick. Jidadaa is at a right angle to their stand-off, holding Wetchie-ghuy’s fetish. They are all stone still, so the newcomers also fall silent. No one speaks, not even Xaanach.
“Prad!” It is Jay who finally breaks the spell and charges forward, lumbering uphill with a bad limp.
Twitch. Wetchie-ghuy vanishes from the boulder.
In three bounds, the golden childs stands where Wetchie-ghuy had just crouched but the shaman is nowhere to be seen. Twitch. The golden childs also vanishes from view.
With a smile, Jidadaa turns to Miriam and Mandy. “Ah, hello, friends. Wetchie-ghuy, he almost gets this one,” she points at Pradeep, who still doesn’t move, “but we say no no no.”
Ξ
The racks that hold the solar panels were damaged in the move, struts now bent and bolts missing. Flavia tries to fix them with sticks and twine, but it is slow-going. She has placed the array at the edge of the trees facing the sun to the southeast. Finally she is able to make it sturdy, although it no longer has the ability to be adjusted. This will impact their recharge rate. Yet another thing to slow their research down.
Regardless of this frustrating task, Flavia likes it here in pine camp. Or, more precisely, she prefers it. She doesn’t actually like anything having to do with Lisica. She hasn’t felt any actual pleasures of satisfaction or desire since she left home. But that is probably due to the fact that home is Italy. She has heard this from Italian migrants before. Nowhere in the whole world is quite so warm, so bright, so emotional as the Italian Peninsula. Outside the borders of Her sea and mountains, people grow cold, the food bland and ingredients cheap. Even politics are more interesting and fierce in Italy than other countries, although they drive her crazy. But that’s the thing, other places don’t drive Flavia crazy. They only inconvenience her, like with these branches and this twine on this godforsaken frozen island in the middle of nowhere.
And yet, it is far better at pine camp than at the beach. That ocean wind had been driving her mad, the relentless movement of air that robbed her of peace and steadiness and the basic ability to think. Now, here in this protected valley, she can hear the songbirds trill instead of the waves boom, and she is mollified.
Flavia returns to camp. She checks her laptop to find it is now charging, the skeletal power network she has built for the camp now alive with solar-derived electricity. She loves technology that is so clean, with no moving parts. Moving parts are so… industrial revolution. Flavia likes her tech more elegant than that.
Alonso is at work in his camp chair, hunched over the laptop balanced on his knees. Now that she has checked off her first task of the day, it is time to move on to the second one before she gets hungry for lunch. Flavia locates an empty bin and turns it upside-down for it to be used as a chair. Then she places it facing Alonso and joins him at his platform, their knees nearly touching.
He is deep in Plexity. He grunts at her but his fingers don’t stop typing. She knows better than to interrupt him.
By the time Flavia arranges her laptop’s windows into her standard workflow, Alonso is able to break away.
“Yes, Flavia?”
“Buongiorno, Dottore. How are you?”
“Eh.” He makes a face. “You really don’t want to know. Really. I mean, I feel like… I’m a chef who has to feed two hundred people tonight and only half my ingredients have been delivered. Not even half. Just a tenth. Just… the eggs. And some water. Feh. What am I supposed to make with that?” He shakes his head in despair. “No, I am not looking for your pity. I understand that it is my fault. What I asked of the team here is impossible. The sheer number of unique inputs required is staggering. But Plexity is… I mean, I have to keep working on it. Can’t you see? Nothing else matters. Not really. As soon as I had the epiphany about it in the gulag and I saw it in all its glory, what it could become and the answers it could provide, then there was no point in ever working on anything else. Because the fundamental answers to nearly every problem can be found in Plexity, in its connections, in the web of life. So. How am I? Not very well, thank you. I just keep banging my head against this very firmly shut door, trying to salvage something from our six weeks in that lagoon. But the gaps in the data are too large. I can’t establish any of the baselines necessary to derive meaningful measurements. You of all people must understand what I mean.”
Flavia only stares at Alonso, mute. If she was the one feeling such frustration, any possible response he made would only end with shouting. She would lash out with all that anger. And she doesn’t need to be Alonso’s target, so she keeps her mouth shut.
Alonso nods, bitter. “Of course you do. This is what you’ve been trying to tell me since we got here. And now,” he gestures at his screen, “it is all ashes. Worse than ashes. At least ashes used to be wood, and when you burned them, the fires warmed you. This… this was all just a fool’s errand, with no benefit in the least. Just chasing our tails for six weeks.”
Flavia shrugs. “The American generals will not think so.”
“You don’t know. I got us here with some very big promises. Bold promises of what Plexity will be able to do.”
“Oh, yes? Like what? How would the military even use it?”
“Well, they had those two biologist contractors who were very impressed with the scalable resolution we should be able to offer. They could see its promise, especially at macro levels. With enough collectors and boots on the ground, they are certainly right. In the end Plexity will still probably be what I was able to promise. I will just never be the person who is seeing it. They will cast me aside and it will be someone else who—”
“Wait, wait.” Flavia holds up an urgent hand. “Cast aside? Are you telling me you don’t own the rights to Plexity any more?”
Alonso does not look up from his screen.
Her head rocks back, the implications hitting her like a truck. “Are you telling me all this work we are doing is for the American military, for a new technological platform that the American military will control? Ai, Alonso…”
“It is a very generous license they have given us for academic use and publishing.” His voice is quiet. “It is not something I wanted, for sure. And… they said it was a change in the contract that came down from the top at the last second, but no, I didn’t believe them. They probably knew how they were going to play me all along. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been in a bargaining situation where the terms were changed just as I was about to sign. But what could I do? I had to sign the rights away. I had no leverage.”
Flavia slams her open hand down onto her knee. “You say no. You walk away when that happens.”
Tears spring into his eyes and Alonso holds his shaking hands out, pleading. “But I couldn’t walk. Flavia, I was in their hospital, after they had rescued me. And healed me. And their scientists said I could be of use. You don’t know. After five years, hearing those words… Being of use. Nothing sounded better.”
Flavia shakes her head, disgusted by the machinations of large bureaucracies. Che pazzo. She had been about to make his day brighter by proposing a new approach to Plexity, a modest way to salvage what they could of their enormous project. Flavia thought they might use the data they’d already collected as a massive filter for what they found next, screening every life form and compound from pine camp against what they’d found before in the lagoon, focusing on the scientifically-significant differences between biomes instead of the connections, per se. Then they might at least return with a handful of deep insights for their masters. But now she knows how much her masters the military men are. No. She will not work for them, not when they will enjoy all the data and share nothing with the wider academic world. Flavia has refused all military industrial complex work during her career and she has no intention of starting now. “But Alonso… The problem, as I’m sure you know, is that this… ehh, we should have known that… Well. I guess this just forces us to realize what the end-result of all this data collection will be. You must realize if we find anything too valuable with Plexity it will never be published, yes? It will disappear into their black budgets. Let us show them a failure instead. Or at most just the smallest amount of progress. We need to be thinking much much more strategically about what we are doing on this project. And you need to share with us the terms of your ‘generous academic license’ so we can figure out what we can tell them and what we cannot. Oh, Alonso. Were you really going to give them a fully-operational Plexity? And expect them to keep their promises about what you would be able to share?”
Alonso shrugs. “Look, those biologists were the only ones in the room who understood anything of what I was saying. The others didn’t have a clue. They could just tell the eggheads were very impressed and the general in charge really trusted both them and Colonel Baitgie. So I thought maybe I’d go back and if I’m lucky the contractors wouldn’t be there and I’m presenting to a room full of nothing but morons in uniform. Even Baitgie wouldn’t really understand Plexity’s implications if I kept it technical enough. They would just say, ‘Yes, great job. Mission accomplished,’ and I would leave with all my licenses and prototypes intact. And sure, maybe that is a little naive, but it is the best I was able to do.”
They stare at each other, two individuals trapped in the decisions they’d made with their lives. Neither feel there are any options for them to change their circumstances. Neither see any way forward.
The corner of Alonso’s mouth twitches. “This is when Amy is supposed to swing between us with an offer of tea. I miss her very much. Do you think she is okay?”
Flavia knows Alonso means that he wants her insight into what Wetchie-ghuy must be doing to Amy. It must be Wetchie-ghuy who took her, despite the efforts of the golden childs and their retreat to the pine camp. And nobody knows more about Wetchie-ghuy’s enslavement than Flavia. So Alonso wants her to relive that madness. She shivers and shakes it off. No. She won’t. “I have no idea, Alonso. I just hope they are a very happy couple.”
“Esquibel…!” A distant voice comes from the meadow near the creek. “Maahjabeen…! Esquibel…!”
“Is that Miriam?” Alonso tries to twist in his chair but his legs have fallen asleep. With a grimace he gets them working again and he stands. Flavia rises beside him.
“Who is calling my name?” Esquibel pokes her head out of the plastic slit door of the clean room. “Who is that?”
Maahjabeen emerges from her tent and stands atop her platform, shading her eyes. She squawks. “That is Pradeep! Alhamdulillah! They have Pradeep! Come!”
She rushes through the trees to him, Esquibel on her heels.
Miriam and Mandy drag Pradeep’s black-clad body through the grasses toward the camp on a crude travois, Jay limping beside them. There is no sign of Xaanach nor the golden childs who left with them.
Maahjabeen throws herself down beside them when they are still fifty paces from camp. Pradeep is unconscious, his head lolled to one side. She gathers him with a sob in her arms and holds him. “What is it? What happened to him?”
“Wetchie-ghuy…” Miriam is gasping. It has been a long journey. “He did something horrid to him, some voodoo bullshit…”
Maahjabeen wails and hauls on Pradeep, pulling his slack torso forward and tugging at his clothes. Alonso arrives, hurried across the meadow by Triquet and Flavia’s strong arms.
“No, there’s no fox or whatever on his tailbone.” Mandy reels away from her handle of the travois, her palms burning, her arms exhausted. She shakes her arms and groans. “We checked.”
“And Jidadaa told us,” Miriam adds, “that the fox was a symbol of the other one anyway, not Wetchie-ghuy. That Sherman the shaman. They’re the one who poisons people and puts the stamp on our spines, not Wetchie-ghuy. She told us a lot.”
“Then what is it?” Maahjabeen kisses Pradeep’s slack face, trying to transfer her love into him like she did before, when he was dying of that cold mud. She chafes his frozen hands.
“Uh…” Miriam shares a furtive look with Jay. “Well, according to Jidadaa, she said Wetchie-ghuy took Pradeep’s soul.”
“Not true.” Jay’s first words are a rasp. “I bought it back from him with a joint. Fair deal. Pradeep doesn’t belong to Wetchie-ghuy any more. He smoked that whole reefer to his head.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Triquet can’t make sense of any part of Jay’s statement.
Jay tries to recap but his head is buzzing with fatigue. His own words echo in his skull. “Pradeep knew that Wetchie-ghuy had claimed him and the first time that old asshole showed up he was just going to like go with him. But I made a deal to give him my weed instead and that’s when Wetchie-ghuy started smoking like a chimney and he just went apeshit and attacked me. Then…”
Jay falls silent, remembering what the golden man had begged of him all those nights before in the tunnels: Kill Wetchie-ghuy. Jay is lidass. It is his destiny. But he turned his back on that, didn’t he? And now his buddy got taken instead, despite all Jay’s best efforts. He failed Pradeep. He was supposed to take care of him, defend him from Wetchie-ghuy even if it meant killing the old man. As if Jay’s actually capable of taking a life. As if he could actually get his hands on the old man. And what that would have done to Jay, all that blood on his hands… Well. Looks like it’s one soul or another, Jay’s or Pradeep’s. That’s the price Lisica is demanding.
But the others aren’t listening to him any more. They’ve moved on without him, hurrying back to camp, Esquibel racing ahead. Jay stops and looks around, his face bitter. Well here it is. This is the meadow he’s been seeking for days, this broad expanse from weeks before where he first saw the golden childs and the Katóok tribe and all the rest. And now the crew lives here, up in the trees a good hundred paces from the creek. Well well well. Plenty of places to hang a hammock, for sure. Almost back to normal.
But now they said Amy’s gone. The one person he’s closest to in like his whole life right now. Man, she’s not just a boss. She’s his mentor and friend and guide. Without her, Jay wouldn’t even be in grad school, and he knows it.
“If I’d killed Wetchie-ghuy when I saw him… Pradeep and Amy would both be here.” He shakes his head in wonder at the surreal nature of the universe. Him. A killer. And not of just anyone, a shaman of an endangered Pacific Island tribe. At the request of another shaman from another endangered tribe… I mean, that’s who that golden man was, yeah? A third shaman? But so far him and his kids have been good to the team, watching over them and protecting them, for whatever reason. He was the one to beg Jay to kill Wetchie-ghuy. He must have known what was coming.
“I got to talk to that dude again. Maybe with Katrina in tow. Get some answers.” Jay shakes his head at how much they are up against. He takes one last look at the cold gray sky before stepping under the trees. “That’s what we need now. Answers. Information war, my peeps. It’s where we at.”
Ξ
Maahjabeen hurries from her tent back to the clean room, her head empty. She realizes distantly that for the first time in memory she has no thought of the sea. Or of God. Only Pradeep fills her heart and soul. She knows it is blasphemy but she is quite close to not caring. Maahjabeen has never known love before. She thought she had, but those were the first tottering steps of a child compared to the—the splendid dances they share. And love is all.
These disquieting revelations about her true nature almost make her stumble. She isn’t pious after all, but an imperfect creature of passions both romantic and sexual. Yet she hurries on regardless, back to the clean room with a clutch of socks, to give Pradeep a bit of a sponge bath and make him more comfortable, even in a coma.
She slips through the plastic slit, relieved to find the clean room empty of others. Only Pradeep is here, covered in blankets, an IV drip feeding him, and his eyes are open!
Maahjabeen rushes to him and covers his face with kisses. He only stares at the ceiling, hardly responsive. “Pradeep! Pradeep…!”
“Yes.” The word is like a pebble dropped into a pond, cold and inert. His eyes remain distant.
Maahjabeen pulls back. “What is it? Are you okay?”
“No.” He says it in the same empty way. His eyes do not move from their point on the ceiling.
“What is it? What is it, Mahbub?” She encircles him in her arms, pressing his slack face against her. But when he doesn’t respond she holds him at arm’s length again. “Tell me. Is it the cold mud?”
“No.”
She frowns. He doesn’t struggle. He is awake, just merely not present. And he apparently only answers yes and no questions. “Is it something else?”
“No.” Wherever she moves his head it stays, same with his arms and body. They are all heavy and inanimate.
“It’s… nothing else?” Unlike all the atheists here, Maahjabeen knows it is the soul that animates the body. So when she heard that Wetchie-ghuy had claimed Pradeep’s, she’d taken it quite seriously. And now, this dispassion is what one would expect of a man whose soul has been taken. He is nothing now but a golem. “Nothing at all in there…?”
Maahjabeen grabs his hand and spreads both hers and his against his chest over his heart. He blinks. “Yes.”
“Oh, where is it, Lord? Where has he taken it?” Maahjabeen laces her fingers with Pradeep’s and kneels by his side, in prayer.
This is how Esquibel finds them a timeless interlude later. She puts the packages she carries down and crosses to the cot. “Eh, he is awake. I knew he just needed some rest and fluids. How are you, Pradeep? Eh?” Esquibel is surprised by the storm in Maahjabeen’s eyes. She had expected to find relief there. “What is wrong?”
“He can only answer yes and no questions!” After this inexplicable statement, Maahjabeen dissolves into tears.
Puzzled, Esquibel turns to Pradeep. “Nonsense. He is just tired. How are you feeling? Can you tell me your name?”
Pradeep looks dully ahead, into the middle distance.
Esquibel takes out her phone and shines its light into Pradeep’s eyes. He has no pupil reflex, none at all. No reaction to the light response test, the swinging flashlight test, nor the near response test. Both pupils remain unchanged, with a median pupillary aperture, despite any stimulus. She leans into his field of view, frowning. “Can you… can you see me?”
“Yes.”
Oh, she doesn’t like the sound of Pradeep’s voice at all. Cold as a corpse. Frowning, Esquibel finds his pulse. It is like… footsteps in sand. Not weak, just… contained, with no real resonance to it, like a machine is pumping his heart instead of contractile muscle. She passes a hand over his brow. “Can you tell me what the day of the week is?” Silence. Esquibel tells Maahjabeen lightly, “I’d have been surprised if he knew it. I’d have to check to know, myself.” Then back to Pradeep, “So can you tell me your name?”
He only stares ahead. She snaps his fingers beneath his nose. No reaction. She taps the sharp edge of her phone against the patellar tendon of his knee. No reflex response. “What in the world?”
“Pradeep,” Maahjabeen forces out his name from between sobs. “Tell us, Mahbub. Do you have a soul?”
He turns his hollow eyes to them. “No.”
An icy chill runs down Esquibel’s spine. Forcefully, she shakes her head in cynical rejection of it. “These god damn medicine men and their hallucinogens, I swear. But this one seems to be more of a dissociative, I would guess. Shutting down the perfectly good brains of my colleagues. Why don’t any of these dangerous substances come with antidotes?”
“Oh… They do.” Maahjabeen remembers Pradeep telling her of how she had been brought back by a foul-smelling concoction of rotten black leaves when she was suffering. “That girl. Jidadaa. She brought me those herbs. We need her to…”
But Esquibel is shaking her head. “No. No more drugs on top of drugs. And Jidadaa was already with Pradeep, anyway. She saw what had happened to him and she was the one who said he had a, what? A soul-ectomy? Some kind of metaphysical amputation? So she obviously can’t be of any more use.”
“Then this is a matter of faith.” Maahjabeen resumes her prayer.
But Esquibel interrupts it with a firm hand. “No, this is the time for modern medical interventions. I was too worried about contra-indications and unknown side-effects when you were both poisoned but with hindsight I don’t think being so tentative did anyone any favors. So this time I will respond more strongly. First, deactivated charcoal, and then perhaps some epinephrine.” She puts a hand on Pradeep’s arm. “Are you in pain?”
“No.”
“Well that’s a relief. Maahjabeen, I need you to do your religious practice somewhere else. Here is where his monitor must go.”
“There is nothing medically wrong with him.”
“Oh, here we go again.” Esquibel rears back, hands on hips, about to deliver another lecture on the dangers of superstitious thinking, when she is caught by the torment in Maahjabeen’s face. It reminds her of the day workers she used to see in Kenya when she was a resident, the young women with hopeless eyes and faces worn twice their age from brutal lives in factories and workhouses. And that forces her to recall what originally made her become a doctor: to ease suffering. The world is filled with so much of it. Palliative care is the best one can do for the bleeding world.
With a sigh, Esquibel rearranges the clean room so the monitor can be placed on Pradeep’s other side. She drapes a blanket around Maahjabeen’s shoulders, pats her bowed head, and leaves the two lovers alone.
Ξ
“What if I grab your hand? What then?” Katrina reaches for the hand of the golden childs accompanying her. The youth pulls away and she is delighted by his meekness. It is one of the only really human responses she’s ever seen from them.
They sit in a narrow cleft of gray stone, a fissure running down into the next valley to the northwest of pine camp. Katrina needs to be alone today, as much as is safe, and at first the golden childs gave her the solitude she craved. But the knots in her mind became no less untangled. Finally, surrendering to the impossibility that she could find any solutions to her troubles, she’d set a bit of an ambush here for the golden childs following her. She needs to talk to someone about this.
“A ty govorish’ po russki?” The youth just hides quietly behind his bloody golden mask and doesn’t say a word. “Okay, can you speak any language besides Russian? And I know you can speak behind your mask. The golden man did. Zolotoy chelovek sdela.”
Katrina takes a deep breath, trying to clear her head. “Why does your chief speak Russian, though? They must come here often. But not to the south? Not to the beach? The Russians must have some other way to access the interior of the island? One the Yanks don’t know? Okay, but why? Listening post… Regional base… Look. Mr. Singlung He was my sponsor for the Singapore Conferences and he used to go on and on about maritime supremacy being the foundation of regional hegemons. But the Americans must have known the Russians were here. They must. Their own little Cold War, yeh? Right here in paradise, murdering each other in their sleep. God, the spooks always think they’re so fucking clever…”
She tosses a rock from her perch in the fissure down the slope into the bushes below. A cluster of dark birds wing away.
“Multi-polar. A multi-polar island, with at least four axes. The way I see it you got your Americans here…” Katrina places a jagged piece of quartz in the dust at her feet. “Your Russians. Your Lisicans, who can be further divided into the competing villages and shamans with all their different agendas…” Then she picks up a small flat stone. “And the Japanese.”
Katrina watches the golden childs to see if the word triggers any reaction. But the pollen-laden mask remains impassive.
“I said what I said. She told me last night it was the Japanese. I told her that I hope they like show tunes because that’s all I put on the USB stick she gave them. She said I didn’t understand.” Katrina pushes herself again to her feet. “Thought she was going to kill me then. Wouldn’t take her hand from her gun. So I didn’t push it. But Christ how many players are there at this table? We thought Lisica was all remote and empty but now we can hardly spend a day without finding a whole new nationality has arrived. What, do you get the Hawaiians here too?”
Katrina entertains herself with images of barechested Polynesians paddling longboats through the waves at the mouth of the lagoon.
She sighs, studying the youth. “You’re a good bloke. Don’t talk too much. I like that in a man. But the big problem is what am I going to do? Should I tell Alonso? Mandy? I mean, yeh, I definitely will. I don’t hold any allegiances to Esquibel. Kind of a bitch, to be honest. But I don’t need to like ruin her life with one ill-considered confession to the wrong people at the wrong time…”
Katrina reflects on how it had ended last night in the dark. They had been so close, whispering urgently in each other’s ears, gripping each other. Full darkness. The only sensations were Esquibel’s stale exhalations against her cheek and her strong hand encircling Katrina’s arm. She had just finished a breathless tale of subterfuge, insisting that selling the Plexity secrets to the Japanese had been an order from her superiors. She shared how it had all started six months before, when a very nice elderly Japanese naval officer had made an initial contact with Esquibel at a medical conference in Jakarta. He’d made an offer so oblique she didn’t even understand what he was asking until she’d had time to consider it. But when she did she’d gone straight to the spooks at Langley and they’d ordered her to keep quiet and string the Japanese intelligence agency along. They told her the Plexity data wasn’t significant but sharing it would build trust. She was one of the good guys, she swore. She wasn’t doing anything wrong, but Katrina had to understand that they must keep up appearances.
It occurs to Katrina now that Esquibel might have very well killed her and hidden the body in pursuit of her mission’s goals. Yet what stopped her most likely wasn’t decency but the presence of the golden childs, four of them crouched at the edge of camp. So instead she implored Katrina to forget what she’d seen and to keep her mouth shut. Otherwise there might be a real nasty mess when they got picked up in two weeks. If, say, at the Air Force debriefing, Katrina suddenly starts going on about a Japanese soldier in the night then all kinds of hell could break loose. Be discreet, Esquibel had begged her. I love you all and I am here to protect you, she’d finally confessed, emotion choking her voice. Then she’d stepped close, a leg sliding between Katrina’s to press up intimately against her, and kissed her. Then she’d repeated, “I do love you, Katrina,” which put her in a state of wordless shock, before Esquibel had disengaged and slipped off into the cold dark night.
Katrina hadn’t slept a wink since then.
She picks up the dark flat rock that signifies the Japanese. “Just… like… We got enough going on here, folks. Don’t come back and everything will be fine.” She tosses the rock into the bushes below.
This time, the rock hits an animal in the bushes and it squeals, a dreadful baritone rattle. The bushes shake with violence.
Now the golden childs beside Katrina stirs. He leaps forward and puts himself between the creature in the bushes and her. The animal storms out from under the branches, still outraged. A boar. It’s a huge boar, like the size of a moped. And not much slower. It charges up the slope toward them with dreadful speed.
“Climb. I’ll climb.” Katrina hears her own breathless words in her ear. They sound faint and weak and tardy. This monster and its ragged tusks are going to wreck them both. She hauls herself onto the fissure’s wall, trying to swing herself up and clear of the ground below. But she isn’t fast enough. The boar is beneath them now, tossing its head against the golden childs.
The youth leaps at the last instant, clear of the splintered tusks, and lands on the opposite wall of the fissure. He scrambles up before the boar can turn and charge again.
“There’s boars…” Katrina pants, over and over, “boars here on Lisica. There’s boars… on Lisica…” Finally she climbs to a safe perch and crouches there. The golden childs pulls himself up, nearly to the top edge of the cliff. “When were you ever going to tell me? Come on, then. Time for some pork on the barbie.”
Chapter 44 – In The Rain
October 28, 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:
44 – In The Rain
“God, look at that, Jay. Actual sunlight.” It streams through the trees ahead during a break in the storm, illuminating the pillars of redwood groves, which give way to a great expanse on the far side. “Almost there now.”
Jay limps along behind Pradeep, one eye squeezed shut, a hand plastered against his left side. “One sec.” He falls to his knees and heaves up the bile in his stomach. It is empty of food. Bile is all he’s got. Oh, yeah. That definitely makes the incision scream. And now his throat is so torn up it will never be the same. Pain everywhere, inside and out.
“Are you ill, my friend? Or just…” Pradeep makes a sweeping gesture with his hand, including all Jay’s injuries.
“Just…” Jay repeats the gesture, “exhausted.” But it is too painful to speak, the acid scoring his windpipe. He hauls himself to his feet and taps his chest pocket. “Least I got my phone back. Worth it.” He forces himself to move again. They are nearly there.
Dropping down a loose slope onto a wide basin, they shuffle across the forest floor as the groves give way to open ground. The creek has dropped off somewhere to their left. The woods are silent and still, the birds and insects continuing to hide from the storm.
“Weather coming back,” Pradeep observes. “That’s why they don’t come out. They know this is just a quick break. Ugh. Look at the clouds coming. So sick of the rain.”
“Who doesn’t come out?” Jay peers around.
“The animals. The fauna. That’s why it’s so quiet in here.”
Jay slurps a trickle of cold water off a lily’s broad leaf. It leaves a floral, sticky taste in his mouth. But it soothes his throat. Now he can speak again. “Study I read right before I left. Researchers have been listening to forests. In the ultrasonic range, just above human hearing. Plants talk.”
“With a bunch of tiny high-pitched voices? It is so cold today! Like that?” Pradeep is pleased with his joke but Jay doesn’t laugh. Oh, well. This is why he doesn’t crack jokes. Nobody expects humor from him. “Well, this is what I just proved with Plexity and the mycelium networks. Chemical signals travel along immense and far-flung networks carrying data…”
“Yeah, but this is through the air. Sounds like it does underwater. At a coral reef when you dive. All those pops and clicks and trills.”
“Really?” Pradeep listens but of course he can’t hear them.
“The more stressed the plants are the more clicks they make. If we just had a bit better hearing we’d hear them all the time. Know when to water our houseplants and such. Most critters must hear the plants chattering away like constantly. But happy plants only click like once an hour.”
“Well then this is indeed a quiet forest. These trees have to be pretty happy with all this rain and now sun.”
“Wait.” Jay stops, listening intently. “I do hear something.”
Pradeep listens too. It is a voice so distant that they can only sense its tones and textures against the edges of the silence. “Okay. Come on, this way. But quiet. Who knows who it is?”
They step in that direction, finding a gully dividing the ground choked with ferns. They follow it in the general direction of the voice, finally coming to a dead stop at a sudden drop.
A line of dark stone past the vegetation falls away nearly ten meters to a deeper cut in the ground, where their gully joins a larger one. This has running water at the bottom and a sandbar with a figure crouched on it. Wetchie-ghuy. But he isn’t looking at them. He is looking at a bay tree beside the water in which Jidadaa is perched out of reach.
She is speaking Lisican to the shaman. When Pradeep and Jay arrive she doesn’t stop or acknowledge them, nor does Wetchie-ghuy. Her voice ends in a question and his answer is abrupt.
She asks another question. “Xʼoon yadyee x̱ʼaadáx̱ sá?”
“Yax̱adoosh.”
“Ai eh.” Jidadaa finally turns to the two outsiders. “Seven days. That is how long.”
“How long until what?” Jay’s voice is filled with suspicion.
“The little babies are born. The fox babies.”
“Kits.” Pradeep studies this scene. It is some kind of standoff here, where Wetchie-ghuy waits for Jidadaa to, what, surrender? Give him back his little doll? Both? “We call baby foxes kits. But what does that have to do with anything? Don’t they have like five litters a year? I’m just shocked the island isn’t overrun with them.”
Surprisingly, Jidadaa translates Pradeep’s words for Wetchie-ghuy. He only pulls his lips back over his teeth and grimaces. Then, with the compulsion of a pedagogue, he begins to lecture them all on the subject.
Jidadaa says, “Foxes are old here. First fox came with Tuzhit. First man. Lisica beautiful then. All birds, all little mice. Then foxes eat all the birds. All the mice. All the snake and lizard. Then men say, no more fox. They kill. All fox gone. Then Lisica is very bad. Very bad time and all people are unhappy. But one fox is left, hiding. They find. She has baby kits. Eight. One for each village or íx̱tʼ…” She gestures at Wetchie-ghuy. “Long time ago. But now, only three fox left. One, she is gone right now. Hiding to have baby kits. Wetchie-ghuy and Daadaxáats look and look but they don’t find. They fight, to be the one to control fox baby kits.”
Wetchie-ghuy drops into a crouch upon hearing his rival’s name spoken aloud. He mutters darkly to himself.
“Wait…” Pradeep tries to digest all this information. “This is what their argument is about? Who gets custody of the silver fox kits? That’s… bizarre. They’re like kidnapping and poisoning people over it? Bloody hell. So Wetchie-ghuy used to have a fox of his own but it died? It ran away? And now he wants another?”
“He wants all. Make the decide. To decide who get fox. When fox can have baby kits, they are spirit of village. Without fox, village die. With new fox, new life.”
“Jidadaa, watch out!”
Jay barely has the first syllable of her name out before Wetchie-ghuy twitches forward, leaping for the lowest branches of the bay tree. But Jidadaa twitches as well, and seemingly without any effort at all she is crouched on an even higher limb.
Jidadaa holds out Wetchie-ghuy’s doll as a taunt and curses him, the Lisican words coming fast and furious. She threatens to pull the doll apart and the shaman below her relents, falling away from the tree and retreating to the sandbar, where he crouches once more.
“What is that thing you stole?” Pradeep calls out. “Why does he care so much for it?”
“This is magic doll. It tells Wetchie-ghuy where to find foxes.”
“Ah.” Pradeep nods. “That makes sense.”
“It does? In what universe does that make sense?” Jay rasps. “No. What I want to know is what the fucking shamans want with us? Why do they keep after us? Shouldn’t they focus on the fox?”
But Jidadaa doesn’t need to ask Wetchie-ghuy why. She already knows the answer. “You are magic. You are koox̱.”
Jay and Pradeep frown at each other. “Unexpected,” Pradeep finally manages. “I don’t feel like magic. Nor koosh.”
Jidadaa calls out to Wetchie-ghuy, shaking the doll, indicating that if he doesn’t let her go she will throw it in the stream. Finally, he appears to give up. With a final glare over his shoulder at her, he withdraws back up the gully out of sight.
Triumphant, she smiles at Pradeep and Jay. “I will kill his doll.”
“We know you will, sister.” Jay gives her a thumbs up. “Don’t need that jackoff in charge of the foxes anyway. Not when they’re the soul of each village. That’s crazy. So the foxes showed up like three hundred years ago, wiped out all the native populations, then the people wiped out the foxes but then they realized they majorly F’d up and now they got nothing but this strict breeding program like my cousin Becky and her French Bulldogs with the AKC?”
But Jidadaa isn’t really listening. She’s peering back the way Wetchie-ghuy went.
“This makes Morska Vidra a more important figure than we knew,” Pradeep reasons. “Or at least his fox. I’m shocked Wetchie-ghuy doesn’t try to steal his.”
The rain starts again. “Welp.” Jay waves at Jidadaa. “Time to get moving on. This has been crazy, as always. Thanks, I guess, for saving our asses again. Good luck with the doll and the foxes and all that. But we got to get back to our buddies. It’s been too long.” He steps back from the edge of the stone cliff, trying to abandon Jidadaa here and find a way to the open land ahead.
“You don’t have any more questions for her?” Pradeep feels like he could ask Jidadaa questions all day. “She’s the only one who knows what is happening here and has enough English to enlighten us. Like, who are the golden childs, eh? Are they the third village? Jidadaa? The golden man and his childs?”
Finally she turns back to look at them, her face filled with worry. “Secret village. Shidl Dít. Thunderbird House. Live in trees. Hiding tribe. Nobody know them.”
Jay has run out of patience and his exhaustion is threatening to drop him where he stands. “Look, Prad. She’s a thief. I’m not even sure we should believe anything she says about the villages or the foxes or any of the—”
But Pradeep isn’t going to let this opportunity pass. “Yes, I know. But her answers are better than nothing, aren’t they?” He turns back to the girl in the tree. “And what about Lisicans in general? Are they glad we are here? Angry? Are they against us or…? I mean, do they even understand what we’re trying to do here?”
Jidadaa looks across the way to them. “People are sad. Jay is lidass. I am Jidadaa. Time is end.” And then she twitches again. The limb shivers and leaves fall. But she is gone.
“Whoa. How’d she do that? Is she…?” Pradeep tries to get a different angle on the bay tree’s crown, “…still in there somewhere? I mean, she must be, right?”
“Don’t sweat it, Prad. She’ll find us when she finds us. Come on. I think we can get down this way. Let’s hurry back home before the rain starts pouring again.”
Pradeep’s gaze lingers on the green cloud of bay leaves hiding her. “Don’t disappear! Jidadaa! Come with us!”
“Fuck that.” Jay starts without Pradeep, who reluctantly follows after a brief interval. They can’t take the chance on Wetchie-ghuy finding them separated.
“Hold on, Jay. I’m coming.”
And just a few moments later they finally win free of the trees for the first time all day. A great green meadow spreads before them, its hillocks still obscuring the creek. Jay crosses the open ground, the tall green grasses streaking his legs with water. “Okay. Back in business. Now as soon as I find the river again I can navigate us back to the village. Then it’s just a hey-how-you-doing to the villagers and then it’s straight through to the tunnels and the bunker and a hot meal and hammock. Yeah, boy. Let’s do this.”
But Jay reaches one hillock higher than the rest and stops. He turns and turns, his face filling with first confusion, then fear, then despair. He groans and nearly collapses.
Pradeep hurries to his side. “What? What is it?”
Jay is too dispirited to speak. He just makes a weak gesture with his one working arm.
Pradeep turns and turns, looking for the way out. Perhaps he’s just seeing it all wrong. “What is it? Which way, Jay?”
“I don’t know!” Jay falls to his knees, fully spent. “I’ve never been here before! This isn’t the right valley! We’ve been following the wrong creek this whole time and came out in the wrong place! I don’t have a fucking clue where we are!”
Ξ
At the top of the tunnel, Mandy finds Morska Vidra and his fox waiting at the village’s boundary. “Hi…!” she calls out, as sweetly as she can. “Your new neighbors here! Super excited to, like, move in and be part of the community!”
Her bubbly delivery usually works to disarm whoever she points it at. But Morska Vidra appears to be immune to her charms. Bummer. She was hoping to get this started on a positive note. “Here. Triquet said I shouldn’t, but I brought you a little gift.”
Mandy holds out a small package she was able to wrap in a page of a medical device’s line-drawn diagrams and decorate with a bow she painstakingly fashioned from sliced strips of colored paper. He stares at her, making no move to take her offering. His fox darts forward instead, rising up and gently pulling the little box from her hands. The little silver creature scampers away, disappearing into the gray haze of light at the tunnel’s entrance.
Mandy’s reaction is a few seconds too late. “No! Oh, no! Come back! It’s chocolate. Oh my god. I don’t know if… It might be poisonous to a fox. Like you know how dogs and cats, they can’t have chocolate?” Mandy belatedly realizes Morska Vidra has no idea what a dog or cat is. “No, come on. I’m totally serious. It’s like a liver issue or something? We have to get it back.” Mandy hurries past the old man, who still hasn’t made a move. Then she recalls the traditional greeting. “Uh… Bontiik!” She hurries back to him and chucks him under the chin.
A paternal smile creases his face now that the proper forms have been observed. “Bontiik.” His knuckle touches her own chin and he gives her a wide smile.
“Okay. Now let’s find the fox before it hurts itself. I know it’s just a pet but you don’t want it to get sick!”
Mandy exits the cave, scanning the tracks ahead. They quickly disappear in the packed earth of the village proper. She studies the walls of the cliff on either side of the cave mouth, then all the brush crowding against the nearest houses.
A pair of children peek out from a house, no more than six and four years old. They chatter at her, one’s words atop the other. Then their words run together in a shared chant. They giggle.
“Hi! There was a fox…? Have you seen it? I gave it a present. A lovely… tasty… present.” But regardless of where she looks, she can find no sign of where the fox has gone. “Shoot.” She points into the village at random spots and asks the kids, “Where…? Like where does the fox live? Like, where’s its bed?” Mandy grew up with cats. She knows how they think.
But the kids just start another chant, laughing at her.
Mandy slowly enters the wide village square, realizing that she is making a spectacle of herself. Smiling weakly, she just really doesn’t want to be responsible for making their pet sick. That would be the opposite of a positive note. That would be a disaster.
The village is busy, with a small family outside their hut grinding something green and brown in a stone bowl with a rock. Another old man faces a loom, plaiting a long sheet of textiles of black and red bands. An old woman lounges outside her house, leaning back against a pole and chewing a piece of grass. Her eyes are red-rimmed and sad, as if she’s been crying. Mandy addresses her: “You see Morska Vidra’s fox run this way? The little fox? Uh, Lisica?” Yeah, she should have been using that word all along.
The old woman lifts her hand. In it is the gift the fox stole.
“Oh, thank god.” Mandy reels away in relief. Then she circles back to the woman and the gift. “You can have it. It’s for you. I wrapped it myself.” She kneels in front of the old woman and points with excitement at the little cube, its white paper now smudged with dirt and indented with tooth marks.
The old woman only looks at Mandy with her troubled gaze.
“Aw, are you having a bad day? Here. I’ll show you. Look. It’s a present! Do you guys do presents?” Mandy reaches out and gently takes the gift back. “Look. It goes like this.” She had no tape so the paper is folded back in on itself like the origami she was taught in elementary school. Mandy pulls out the corner and unwraps the gift, handing the sheet of paper to the old woman.
She turns it over in her hands, her eyes still sad.
“But wait. There’s more.” Mandy presents the stack of gold-foil wrapped off-brand chocolate squares she’d snared in the airport right before they’d taken off. This has been her stash, a carefully-preserved secret that has kept her going through the darkest days. She has enough for two chocolates per day, three on special days when she really needs the extra love. This is five pieces of dark chocolate, two whole days of her stash, that she’s willing to sacrifice for the good vibes. Now if she can just manifest those vibes…
Carefully peeling the foil from the first chocolate, Mandy hands it to her. The old woman takes the gold wrapping and stares at it in wonder. She gently crumples it around her fingertip and releases a single ‘huh’ as an exclamation.
“Yeah, but that’s not even the best bit. This is.” Mandy breaks off a tiny bit of the chocolate and hands it out to the woman. She dutifully takes it, another inexplicable object in her cupped hands.
“Eat it. Like this.” Mandy nibbles at the corner of the chocolate. “Quick! Before it melts! Yummm! So good!” She mimes bringing the chocolate to her mouth over and over until the old woman does so too.
The old woman tastes the chocolate. She makes a face and spits it out, then hands the little nib back to Mandy. But she keeps the foil and sheet of paper.
“Mandy! What are you doing without your mask and gloves?”
Esquibel stands at the cave mouth, Morska Vidra beside her. She wears her own, the hospital blue of her mask and gloves a shocking artificial color in this brown and green village.
“Oh, right. I didn’t remember…” Mandy searches her pockets for these articles. But before she can find them, she says, “I mean, tons of times we’ve been unmasked in front of the villagers by now. If they were gonna get sick, it would have happened by now.”
“It is policy. Mask use only works if it is consistent.”
With a final smile to the old woman and the kids watching her, Mandy puts the mask and gloves on and joins Esquibel at the edge of the village. “Did you say Bontiik to him?” Mandy indicates Morska Vidra, standing patiently beside Esquibel.
“Huh? Oh. Uh…” Esquibel performs the quick ceremony and allows Morska Vidra to chuck her chin in return. “Remind me to sanitize my chin when I get a chance.” Then she turns, a very large and imposing black woman in the middle of this village of little brown people. She seems not to understand how dramatic her impact is here. “So. This is the village? The outer village where they’re nice, yes? And there’s another village deeper in? And they all live in these sad little huts?” Esquibel stoops and peers in one, its occupants still and silent in the shadows.
“Esquibel. Stop.”
“Stop? Stop what?”
“You’re scaring them.”
“Scaring them?” Esquibel regards the villagers in their doorways and in the square. They all watch her with worry. “Hello. Bontiik. Didn’t I say the word properly? What is wrong with them?”
“You’re just too loud, too big…”
“Too dark?” Esquibel snaps off her glove and holds out her hand for Morska Vidra. He studies it but doesn’t touch it.
“Maybe. I don’t know if they’ve ever seen black skin.”
“Well, Morska Vidra and the Mayor have. Didn’t they tell the others about me? We don’t have time for this kind of culture shock. They need to understand that we’re here and we’re moving in. Or at least through. Where do you think we should set up camp?”
“Maybe they’ll tell us?” But the villagers are already withdrawing back into their houses, faces closed. The positive start is ruined.
“Why don’t I make everyone happy…” Esquibel decides, “and go find out myself. They obviously don’t want me here.” And with that she stalks across the village square and takes the wide path down toward the river.
“No!” Mandy calls out after her. “It’s not that! It’s just that you came in too fast and…” But Esquibel is gone. Mandy turns to the villagers and holds out the piece of unwrapped chocolate melting in her fingers. “Anyone, uh, want to try it?”
“Hello…?” Alonso’s rough voice comes from the cave entrance. He limps out, hair wild, clothes covered in mud. Gasping from the exertion of climbing the fallen tree up the tunnel shaft, he catches his breath. “Are we here? Did I make it? Eh, Morska Vidra. Good to see you again. Oh. Bontiik.” Alonso smiles at the old man as he chucks his chin, then laughs when the fox appears from within Morska Vidra’s robes and climbs on his shoulder to sniff at Alonso. “And this is the famous fox. Lisica. How are you, little friend?” Alonso extends a finger so the fox can smell it.
Evidently he smells fine. With a perfunctory sneeze, the fox makes a decision and sits, coiling its bushy tail around Morska Vidra’s neck. The old man returns the greeting to Alonso, gravely, and then evidently divining his suffering, suddenly steps beside him and supports Alonso’s weight with a strong arm.
The gesture is so unexpected Alonso laughs. It also feels good, to have someone help relieve the pain in his feet. “Gracias, muchas gracias, hermano.” Alonso has a thought that if they can’t grasp his English, he may be able to make his intent more clear in his native Spanish. But then it occurs to him they’ve heard a fair amount of English, and probably no Spanish. “Thank you, my brother. Thank you a million times.”
Morska Vidra leads Alonso to the doorway of the largest hut. The redwood bark planks covering it are black and green with age. It is an impressive structure, the only hut taller than Alonso. “Your house? Very nice. Thank you for all your kindness. Ah. Here?” Alonso grunts as he allows Morska Vidra to lower him onto a woven mat. The fox appears again, nickering in the old man’s ear. As if following its directives, Morska Vidra kneels at Alonso’s feet and pulls at his shoes, trying to take them off.
Alonso barks in pain, his hand reaching urgently for the feet he can’t reach. The sound freezes all activity in the village. Mandy finally rouses herself and hurries to Alonso’s side. “He wants your shoes off. Is that okay? Should we take them off?”
“Just gently. Gently…” Alonso pleads, leaning back, the sudden raw agony in his legs from getting yanked starting to lose its edge.
Mandy picks at the laces, pulling the right shoe wide open before slipping it off. She peels his wet sock off too. Together, she and Morska Vidra regard the swollen purple thing. It is painful merely to look at Alonso’s tortured foot. The toes bend wrong, dents run along the top. An angry red vein crosses his ankle.
The villagers gather to silently regard Alonso’s foot as Mandy gently removes his other shoe and sock. This foot is just as bad, purple as a grape. And his lower leg is scored with scars.
The villagers speak to each other, evidently trying to figure out how someone could sustain such injuries. Alonso watches them, his gaze baleful. “I hope, for your sake, that this kind of brutality is foreign to you. I hope, I pray, it shocks you.” Tears start in his eyes and he groans as Mandy puts a gentle hand on his left ankle.
The smallest of the two children Mandy met bursts into tears and turns to his mother, hiding in her arms.
The Mayor arrives and kneels, inspecting Alonso’s foot. She pokes it and he grunts. She tries to move his right heel and he barks again. Sitting back, she speaks a number of quiet commands.
Several of the young girls in the back of the crowd peel away to their own homes. They return with sheafs of herbs and black leaves and seeds in a pot.
“No no, that’s fine.” Alonso tries to wave the treatment away but he is no longer in charge of this situation. The Mayor pulls up his pant legs and inspects the scars she finds there.
She orders for the seeds to be ground into paste and for the black leaves to be separated, dripping, and placed on the mat beside him. A low hum of discourse surrounds Alonso, villagers discussing the treatment and holding forth on various points. Alonso looks around himself in wonder. He’s been in contact with primitive peoples before—a family of Mongolian nomads invited him into their yurt one night—but he’s never experienced anything like this before. The Lisican sing-song language surrounds him, each distinct voice and individual perspective made manifest. All of them are so unique, the middle-aged woman with the ear pierced with yellow bone, whose animated voice rises over all others. The nonbinary youth in a shawl who seems to dispute what she says with gentle deflections. The silly clown beside them, their hair a mat, who makes a quip that rhymes with the youth’s last words and everyone laughs. Why, it is just like any family anywhere. The crazy aunt, the know-it-all young man, the weird black sheep. And the children with their black and yellow curls, each as vocal as the others, pulling on each other’s arms and arguing in quiet and deferential tones. All do what they can not to interrupt the Mayor.
She taps Mandy’s shoulder and indicates she should get out of the way. Then the Mayor applies the brown paste to the skin of Alonso’s lower legs and feet. He feels very much like he is being spread with Nutella. It is not unpleasant and he finds he can exhale the breath he didn’t know he held. Then she carefully wraps his legs, first with the black leaves, then the green, keeping them snug with a brown cord. Finally she sits back.
“Thank you. Better already.” He can’t feel a thing but at least he isn’t suffering more damage. Alonso isn’t sure what he should do here. All he knows is he doesn’t want to move his legs at all. “Very good. Sitting is good.”
The Mayor gives him a more thorough inspection. She holds his hand and pokes at his belly, his chest, his throat. She has him open his mouth and she looks at his tongue.
“That bad, eh?” Alonso prompts the Mayor but her face remains a mask. “I know. Lose forty kilos and eat right. But don’t you dare mention my liver because I am not giving up my wine.”
Finally she kneels and puts one hand on his heart and one on his lower belly. The Mayor lowers her head and the crowd falls silent.
After a moment, Alonso feels his pulse beneath her hands. At the same instant, the fox yips and leaps from Morska Vidra’s shoulder, scampering into the nearby underbrush. Villagers exchange dark glances. Finally the Mayor sits back. She is drained.
“Ax̱dàataasdʼixʼdáakw,” she declares, and the villagers make dubious sounds, but they are unwilling to argue with her after her exertions. Now Morska Vidra and the others support the Mayor. They lift her to her feet and bring her across the square to her own house, where she is given her own measure of herbs and poultices.
“I am very sorry.” Alonso calls out his apology, watching them tend her. “I did not mean to introduce such…” and by this he means all the horrors of the modern world stitched up in his body. He leans back with a groan and confesses to the sky: “I despise spoiling innocence.”
Ξ
Triquet stages another pile of bags at the bottom of the tree trunk at the base of the tunnel shaft. Somehow they’ll eventually haul all that gear up to the top and out the cave mouth into the village. Just what the stone age Dzaadzitch villagers ever wanted, for sure.
Flavia and Maahjabeen drag muddy bins and boxes most of the way, with Triquet having to lift the containers up into a narrow passage for the last bit, requiring all their strength, again and again.
“Another.” Flavia deposits one more stack at the exchange. For a moment they both pause, breathing heavily in the cramped tunnel, staring at each other’s flushed faces.
“And this is why…” Triquet gasps, exercising their sore arm, “I reluctantly decided against manual labor as a career.”
“But think how strong you would be.” Flavia is beyond tired. Her words come out in a grunt.
“Isn’t there some Jack London quote about the value of a laborer being in his muscles? That’s his capital? But for the owners, their capital is money that increases over their lives while for the laborer their capital diminishes? Something like that? Of course, he put it better than that. Lord, that man could write.”
“I am not sure 19th century economic theory is applicable to us poor little independent contractors down here in this hole.”
“I mean, ultimately, this is a job and we’re wage slaves, I guess. I haven’t really thought about it that way but I did get a sizable honorarium. Didn’t you?”
“Yes. But this is the first day I feel like a coal miner.”
Triquet lifts their aching arms and lets them drop. “Well, all I know is that I started with less capital than most and now I’m all out. There’s been a run on this bank and all my savings are gone.”
“All I know is that I am hungry.” And with that, Flavia turns and trudges back the way she’d come, stepping aside for Maahjabeen, who drags a clutch of damp canvas sacks with one arm.
Triquet heaves Flavia’s goods up the tunnel to the base of the fallen tree. They return to find Maahjabeen depositing her sacks.
“Is there any chance…?” Maahjabeen ventures, “that we will not be able to transport all the items we selected for the move?”
“Chance? Honey, I’m about ready to crap out now. What’s in these? Anything necessary?”
“All our bedding.”
Triquet grabs the sacks. “Yeah. Necessary. Okay. But how about you go get Flavia and tell her we need a rest.”
“Sure. We will just find the tarps and come with you. I need to get out of the dark myself.” And Maahjabeen retreats down her tunnel one last time.
Triquet heaves the sacks up into the narrow passage. The bundled blankets and pillows and sleeping bags fill it completely and they have to push it through like a digestive blockage before the sacks spill out at the base of the shaft at the edge of the pile they’ve made.
Triquet squeezes past all the gear and grabs hold of the lowest branches of the fallen tree. They wrap the drawstrings of the canvas sacks around their wrist and haul them over their shoulder like a filthy misshapen Santa, then slowly scale the broken tree limbs like a ladder.
At the top their legs are shaking and their breath is coming in short gasps. They drag the sacks clear of the shaft and onto the broad floor of the cave mouth. Gray light greets them. Oh, joy. That means it’s still raining out there.
This is far enough. They can wait here until the others catch up. As long as they’re not working any more. Triquet stretches out on the gravel floor beside the muddy sacks, resting their head on one. Ah, bliss…
Moments later Katrina and Amy and Miriam arrive, arms laden, followed by Flavia and finally Maahjabeen, who carries nothing. Her face is a mask of pain, though, as she has needed her injured shoulder to haul herself up the makeshift ladder.
They all collapse with Triquet on the floor, their breaths and perspiration mingling, like they just won a rugby match—or more likely, from their dispirited depletion—badly lost.
“I’ve got the beds,” Triquet manages.
“I have tarps and tents,” Amy answers.
“All we need.” Triquet sits up. “Everything else can wait.”
Miriam hoists her containers. “I’ve got enough food for the night and the morning. And a couple liters of wine.”
“Yes, then we’re definitely all set.” Triquet pushes themself to their feet. “Now let’s see what kind of spot they’ve found for us.”
There is no one at the cave mouth to greet them. They emerge into the rain to find the village empty except for Alonso resting on a mat and the old woman with white hair leaning against her post. There is no sign of Mandy nor Esquibel.
“Yesiniy!” Katrina hurries to the old woman. “What is it? What’s wrong? Uh… šta nije u redu, bako?”
“Bako…?” The old woman peers up at Katrina with her red eyes. Then she accepts the designation, “Eh. Bako. Ua na o au dʼadalyoo ettu. Kam.”
“Ettu. Kam,” Katrina echoes, trying to commit these words to memory. She doesn’t have anything at hand to take notes. “Bako is Bosnian for grandma, yeh? I think that’s right.”
Miriam puts down her containers and hurries past the empty houses to her horizontal husband. “Alonso? What are you doing? Where is everyone?”
“I am resting. On the orders of multiple doctors. And they are all down by a creek, I understand, arguing over where we might have our camp. Esquibel is not… the calmest person right now.”
“Okay, Ames. I think we can chance it,” Miriam calls out. “Nearly empty here. It’s now or never.”
“Should I still wear the bag?” Amy’s muffled voice is anxious. “I’m gonna wear the bag. Just in case.” She slowly emerges from the cave, wearing her blue sleeping bag upside down to hide her head, with her feet sticking out of the opening, her entire body covered. Triquet leads her through the village to the far side.
Yesiniy doesn’t even look their way.
Quickly, Triquet brings Amy out of the village to the broad path heading down toward the river. “Okay. I think you’ve got to be safe here, Amy. We’re well out of the village and on more like neutral territory. At least I think it is.”
Amy pulls the bag off and looks around with worry, single strands of her black hair standing straight from the static charge. “Nobody here to yell at me? They’re all down at the river?”
“Yep. At least I hope so. And I hope we aren’t setting up camp by the loo. Too stinky. Come on, let’s go. Maybe they’ve reached an agreement.”
Katrina and Flavia join them as they walk down the path toward the broad meadow. There they find Esquibel in heated debate with the village elders. She stands, drenched by the latest deluge, at a corner of the meadow near the west treeline, as far upstream as the meadow allows. “Then, here. We will stay here. And that is final.”
“But they already said…” Mandy starts in an exasperated whine, but Esquibel immediately cuts her off.
“Yes. I heard. I heard that we cannot be here. Or there. Or there. Or there.” Esquibel points at locations across the meadow, where they have trampled the green grasses with their activity. “Or anywhere. So if we can’t be anywhere, then we will be where we want to be. And I want to be here.”
“Christ! What are you doing?” Katrina calls out, hurrying over to the congregated villagers as the rain eases and the winds pick up. “That isn’t any way to talk to the Lisicans! We’re their guests!”
“If we were their guests then they would accommodate us. But all I hear from them is ah-ah, which they have demonstrated quite clearly means no.”
“Yeh, that’s right. But did you ask them? Just ask them where we’re supposed to be?”
“What an idea? Why didn’t I think of that?” Esquibel’s temper is very short. “Oh, right. Because I don’t speak a single bloody word of their language. You think we didn’t try?”
“Here. Wait. Let me see. I might be able to stitch something together…” Katrina takes her backpack off. It holds a half dozen laptops. “Just one moment. Here. This one’s mine. And…” Flavia holds a folded tarp above her to keep the electronics dry as Katrina quickly navigates to her notes and starts scrolling through the pages of details she’s documented about the Lisican language. “Okay.” She turns to the Mayor standing beside Morska Vidra. “Uh, we need to… we are…” she encompasses her crew, “one sec here, just looking up versions of ‘to move’ and all I can find is this relational gobbledygook. Um… Oh, here we go. We duladaaw tlein. That’s ‘big move noisily,’ which is definitely us. Like all of us here need to duladaaw tlein.”
She has the attention of the villagers. “Join. Uh, join… No join. They don’t use the word ‘join?’ Uh, together. Together is vooch. Vooch, you and us. Dóode? Here? Or dóode? Where can we camp? Just for a couple weeks.”
She seems to be making headway. The villagers argue with each other, trying to solve Katrina’s problems. But the way they go about it is as mystifying as anything else. They consult the sky, they talk about the meadow, as if representing it at trial, possessively stroking the grasses. One woman appears to be listening to a tree. Finally, Morska Vidra places his fox on the ground and everyone watches it bound from one spot to another. Eventually, it goes into the trees on a slope near the spot Esquibel had just claimed.
The villagers move under the trees and inspect the spot. It is a wide open patch beneath pine trees, their fallen needles a brown carpet preventing much undergrowth. The slope is shallow here and the wind is tamed by the high canopy.
The fox bounds back onto Morska Vidra’s shoulder. By that, they all understand that the deal has been struck.
“I love it!” Triquet calls out. “Thank you so much. Promise we’ll take care of it. You guys are the best.”
Esquibel frowns at the spot. “Not defensible in the slightest.” But she realizes this is the best she can get. “Well. At least it is out of the weather. Why was that so hard to understand? That is why I wanted to be on this side of the meadow.”
“Take your win,” Mandy counsels her, clutching Esquibel by the elbow. “And say something nice.”
Esquibel gives the Mayor a glassy smile. “Something nice.”
Amy and Flavia advance, poking around at the base of a few trees to see where they might build their platforms. The Mayor watches the scene, evidently unmoved by Esquibel’s apology or the tantrum that came before.
“Lucky for you, they’re used to loudmouths and hotheads.” Mandy claps her hands. “Yay. We’re all friends again.”
Several of the villagers answer her claps with their own burst of applause. Mandy and Katrina clap back. This delights them. Soon nearly everyone in the camp is applauding each other, with the exception of Esquibel. She has no time for this nonsense. A clean room needs to be built, and this time it will need to be on one of the platforms. There isn’t an inch of level ground in this entire camp. And these villagers will probably wander everywhere. “And no one is wearing a mask!” she belatedly cries out. But nobody listens. They’re all intermingling now, clapping and chanting and repeating each other’s words and moves, laughing in each other’s faces and touching each other, all laughing, so carefree…
The scene finally overwhelms Esquibel with its charm. These villagers are so genuine when they laugh and copy and tease. Their eyes are so sharp. But they have a gentleness, a tenderness she hadn’t seen in the brief visits from the Mayor and Morska Vidra. These Lisicans are actual people filled with joy and curiosity and love, not just columns of figures on a Navy spreadsheet. And they are worth protecting. Silently, Esquibel adds them to her mission objectives and increases her defensible perimeter to include them and their village. She shouldn’t have gotten so frustrated with them. “I am sorry,” she tells the closest ones, who are laughing and playing with Mandy. “I should have been more patient but…”
Yet they are not listening. A young girl catches Esquibel by the hand and trills like a bird. Oh, Esquibel can do this one. It is a sound the Kikuyu make in their traditional songs. She trills right back and the girl screams with pleasure. Now they are all laughing, every single one.
“What is it? What did we miss?” Miriam leads Alonso into the new camp, his feet and calves still wrapped in black leaves and twine with his unlaced shoes over it all.
Triquet reaches out to them, buoyed by the villagers and their applause. “And here they are! Welcome to your new home, Doctor one and Doctor two. Your loan has been approved! Please sign the lease agreeement on the kitchen table and I’ll leave the keys on the mantle. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.” Then Triquet claps. Everyone claps.
Alonso and Miriam clap and laugh with all the others in the rain.
Chapter 42 – A Basketball Game
October 14, 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:
42 – A Basketball Game
“Jay. Jay, stop…” Pradeep has been repeating the words for a long time now but this time they work. Jay stumbles to a halt in front of him, seeing it too. Silver light shines indirectly into their tunnel. “We did it. We got out.”
Jay’s breathing is ragged. Holy hell. He took one look at those demon eyes and got the F out of there. Who knows how long he’s been charging forward, dragging Pradeep behind him? But now he can smell the plants and the soil and the fresh air leaking in from ahead. “Jeee-zus, this acid is sooo strong. It’s been like a seventeen hour trip so far. Thanks a fucking bunch, Katrina.”
“Let us stop, please.” Pradeep removes his hand from Jay’s belt, where he held on for dear life. The webbing has cut into his palm and it is a burning pain that keeps him from otherwise thinking clearly. “Why are you so crazed? What did you see, anyway?”
Jay turns back to regard the darkness. Yep, the demons are still lurking back there, staring malevolently at the two escapees. The tunnel’s darkness encompasses one of their infernal hells, with tiers upon tiers of crypts in the pit’s walls, countless fiends staring out. How did he and Pradeep ever survive that? “Uh, there’s, uh, something down here. But we got away. Lots of somethings.”
“What, like… badgers?”
The question is so random and ludicrous Jay can’t help but wheeze with laughter. Oh, yeah. He feels that in his ribs. “The fuck? Badgers? There’s no badgers on this island. Dude. Don’t be dense. We’d have seen sign or spoor by now. No. Demons. Now come on. Maybe there’s some water out here.”
Jay continues forward. Pradeep stands there, dumbstruck, feeling a fool for running around all night fleeing Jay’s acid trip. Damn. Well at least he didn’t lose the bloody moron. And they did finally find a way out. But where are they?
They emerge from a natural crevice on a nearly vertical slope, the opening almost completely obscured by fern fronds. Nearby redwoods are gigantic black columns against an empty sky. Framed between two of the largest is a nearly full moon. Its harsh light bathes this narrow canyon in monochrome light and shadow.
Jay blinks. He’s been underground so long his eyes are super sensitive. This moonlight is like full daylight to him. “I can’t even remember… the last time I saw the moon.” The cloud cover of Lisica hadn’t been getting to him. He hadn’t thought it had, at least. But seeing the full clear night sky again, with the vaulting Milky Way and planets shining in all their brilliant hues… It rocks him. He stumbles from the crevice, wisps of black demon smoke dispersing in the crystal air around his head like bats winging away from their cave. Free. He groans aloud and raises his hands to the shimmering sky. “Free!”
Pradeep claps his hands over his mouth. The shining face of the moon is a profound sight, so bright he can’t look directly at it. The ground falls away before him, purple and black, with dazzling patches of silver that catch the light. He can’t navigate through that. Finding a solid foothold and handhold where he stands, he carefully leans out and looks upslope. No, that is even worse, a massive stone overhang disappearing out of sight above. He’s a climber but he isn’t a reckless fool. That would be like five dynos in a row just to get up what he can see, and his arms are already blown from wrestling all night with Jay. “So… down?”
“Down?” Jay shakes his head and frowns at the sudden motion. His thoughts are clear again but a massive headache is starting up. Oh, fuck. Not now. Not here. Owww! He’s gonna kill Katrina when he sees her again. Absently, his fingers find a fresh joint and his lighter. Soon he is sparking up.
Pradeep exclaims at the sudden flare of light then hisses in disapproval. “Put that away. No idea who might see us here.”
“Good point.” Jay takes a huge hit and rubs the space between his brows with a knuckle. Now he needs water more than ever. His throat is like made of sand and the hot smoke goes down like fire. “Well, water is always down.” And with no more consideration, he drops onto a shelf he can barely see about three meters below.
Pradeep mutters anxiously, his legs trembling. Then he grits his teeth and follows with a halfhearted crouching leap.
Now the weed finally does its job and Jay’s poor brain unlocks. He is able to escape his mind for the first time in ages and reside in his body. Drop. Scramble. Swing. This is real exercise again, the good kind. Not that claustrophobic hell with Pradeep. This is bouldering by moonlight, yo. Not the first time he’s done such a thing. Come on, demons. See if you can catch me now. He patrols the edge of the shelf, then finds a bit of a route on a more shallow slope to his left. Down he goes, his shoes filling with sandy soil.
The ferns are thick. They give way to rhododendron. This is a wet canyon. Jay can tell just by the plant life. More redwoods tower above, stabilizing the cliff walls with their immense roots. They are so slippery, though, and Jay falls from one network into the duff below, sliding into a blackberry bush, where he’s pierced by a hundred thorns. “Oww. Watch that, Prad. It… Fuck! Ow!”
Pradeep perches on the redwood roots above, listening to Jay crash and bellow in the underbrush, all attempts at stealth forgotten. The last thing he wants is to continue this descent. “Shouldn’t there be a traverse across somewhere? Are you sure we want to get to the bottom?”
“Ah. Ahh…” Jay groans as a dozen thorns or more break off in his skin. But he’s still got to push through. He’s past the thick of it now. Just a few more sliding steps, with a few more thorns in his calf, then he’s free. He calls back up to Pradeep. “Yeah, dude. The bottom’s where the water is. Wouldn’t even be a canyon here without water. ” He tilts his gaze back down into the darkness below, the trees obscuring the way down from the moon, and mutters to himself, “And I need a drink bad.”
“But then how will we ever get back up?”
Pradeep’s voice is distant. Jay stops and struggles to find his patience. Can’t lose his buddy now. “No getting back up, homie. Down and out. We’ll have to find another way back.”
“Ugh. I do not like that answer.”
“Come on, Prad. Swing yourself over this way. You can avoid the blackberries if you drop over here. Just watch out for rocks.”
Jay takes another drag on his joint. Even though it majorly tears up his throat it sure does good things to his mental state. He’s back in business now. And if he strains to listen he can hear the gurgle of a creek. “Fuck yeah, there’s a creek. This is a deep canyon and that was a big storm.” Jay drops onto a boulder and hurries down a broadening slope into a dark grove. Finally. The redwoods hold the soil here on a forest floor that is flattening out. Mossy banks and ferns are barely visible in the tiny bit of light that penetrates.
Jay worms his way forward, using the toes of one foot to sense his path forward. There is no path, just a jumble of fallen logs covered with moss and clumps of ferns. But the water is closer now, a full liquid gargle that promises an end of thirst. It urges him forward until he is at its side hanging over the wide creek, the dangling roots of the redwoods an impassable barrier above the rushing water. He needs to find a sandbar or something. Unless he fully throws himself in the creek he can’t reach it from here. And he isn’t willing to do that yet. He just got his phone back, for fuck’s sake.
But he’s so thirsty.
Jay pulls back and picks his way further downstream, the thorns in the heels of his hand and the skin of his calf stabbing him with every move. But finally he finds a spot where the dirt slopes steeply to the water. By holding onto a root and lowering himself headfirst he’s able to dip his chin into the frigid stream and gulp down some of the best water he’s ever tasted. Drenching his front, the cold sobers him further. Finally he has to pull away, even though he feels like he could drink forever.
When Jay regains his balance he finds Pradeep above, navigating down to him with his phone light. “Water,” Jay calls out, perhaps unnecessarily. But it is the only thing that matters.
Pradeep pauses, his head whirling. This precipitous slope is nearly as bad as being in the tunnels. At least in there he had no chance of pitching himself forward and drowning in a rain-swollen creek. “Where are we?” he demands. “Which way should we go?”
“You think I know?” Jay’s answer is querulous, followed by a sharp laugh that verges on hysterics. “Feels like I’ve spent half my waking moments on this fucking island lost in the dark.”
“Yes. Well. We need to make a choice, and I am not going to drop down any further to you until…”
“You ain’t thirsty? Damn. Well, it’s a simple call. Downstream. Duh. That’s where we’ll eventually like get back to where we once belonged.”
“Okay. Which way is that?”
“To the right.”
“And what is upstream?”
“Well, come on, don’t stop using your brain here. That must be the high country, right? The ridgeline that collected all this water.”
“No… I am asking… Wasn’t it on a hill top that Triquet escaped from? And Flavia? The shamans are above somewhere.”
“All the more reason to go down. Oh, fuck. I soaked the last of my joint. Goddamnit. Now I’m gonna have to roll a new one. Shine your light—”
“No! I will not!” In response, Pradeep turns off his light. “There is only two percent battery left. I was just getting very angry about how you made me use more to come down here. We can’t use the last on your drug habit. It’s the drugs that got us into this mess!”
“Fine. I’ll just suffer in silence then. At least until we find a patch of moonlight. Come on.”
They follow the course of the creek as well as they can from the slope above, about ten meters up. But the canyon walls are cut by endless rills and streams of side canyons that bring water down to add to the larger creek. It is in the second of these that Pradeep finds a spot where he can drink. And Jay is right. It is amazingly restorative. Now the prospect of hiking the entire rest of the night doesn’t seem quite so daunting. And the moonlight certainly helps.
Jay certainly thinks so. He’s crouched down and balanced his kit on his knee. After carefully rolling a pair of joints, one for energy and one for relaxation, he slides them into a dry pocket. Then with the last of the dust he makes a little binger that he smokes to ash. “We might want to find a spot to hole up for the rest of the night.”
Pradeep shrugs. “Let us walk while we can.”
The canyon eventually opens onto a wider valley. The trees do not cover the entire forest floor, leaving wide patches of silver light they pick their way through. The creek has flooded here, filling the flat ground with pools and puddles, making progress difficult. Eventually they have to give up trying to keep their shoes and pants dry, and start wading along its verge in the icy water.
Finally, a solid rise clears the floodwaters ahead like an island, featuring a pair of giant bay trees and little more. Pradeep throws himself down onto its dry banks, panting from the exertion and the anxiety, needing a break from banging his shins against submerged logs and squinting into the dark. Now he’s got a headache too.
Jay’s is also getting worse. He worries about the return of his headaches. This would be the worst place for them, by far. “At least it’s dark,” he grunts, kneading the back of his neck.
“What is wrong?”
“Migraines are worse in bright light. So at least I got that going for me, which is nice.”
“You have a migraine? Shit. I didn’t know you got migraines.” Pradeep makes a worried face. His mother has this curse. He learned early on what to do for her. “Here. Turn a bit. Now breathe.” Pradeep buries his knuckles in the straps of muscle connecting Jay’s back and neck. He certainly has a lot more mass than Pradeep’s mom but hopefully the principle is the same. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Pradeep’s strong fingers are like fangs piercing his flesh. But Jay knows to keep still and relaxed if it’s going to be helpful. He’s just got to breathe through the added pain. “Yeah,” he grunts. “Got them pretty much under control. Except I guess when I wrestle with demons on acid.”
“Underground. In the cold and dark.”
“With no food or water.”
“It does make sense. Jay, I’m worried.”
“Not now, chief. Trying to clear my mind of worry.”
“Yes, well…” Pradeep has no such avenue for himself. “My mind is primarily composed of worry, perhaps 98% by weight. I’m only thinking about this creek. If we are on the right bank, and it is eventually the same river that divides the two warring villages, then which bank do we want to be on?”
“Oh, man, are you trying to break my brain?” But Jay knows this is a valid concern. There’s no point in fighting their way through hours of forest only to throw themselves on the spearpoints of the Katóok tribe, after Jay had sworn to never return to their territory. “Yeah, let’s see. Downstream is like this… We stay on this side. Yeah, we’re on the correct bank. The good side, the west side where they won’t kill us. Pretty sure.”
“Good. Because I don’t think we can cross that creek anyway.”
“Yeah, that’s like the whole idea about it, for sure. No crossing allowed. And I guess that holds true all the way up to the top of the island. Fucking weirdos.”
“So hungry.” Pradeep finds a fallen log that would make a good chair. He sits and takes off his shoes, clearing them of all the debris.
“For sure. You think I can get a pizza delivered?” Jay decides if he can’t eat he’ll smoke more weed. Sativa it is. Bolster his energy.
“Oh. No.” Pradeep’s words are so harrowed that they interrupt Jay, mid-inhalation. “It’s him.”
“Him? Who him?” Then Jay’s eyes adjust from the flare of the lighter to spy the dim hulking figure here on this rise with them, just a few paces away. “Oh, is it that Wetchie-ghuy fucker? What up, dude? You sure been causing us a metric fuck-ton of trouble.” With force, Jay blows the remainder of his smoke at the distant figure, who remains still, watching them.
Pradeep groans. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand… How could I know what he looked like in my mind if I’d never seen him in real life? And now when I see him, he looks the same? How did he get inside my mind?”
“Don’t let him fool you, Prad. This dude’s got tricks.”
“No. It is no trick. A bargain has been made. Somehow. He knows it as well as I. And now he is coming to collect.”
“The fuck he is. Sit down, Prad. Dude doesn’t get to just roll up and claim people. It doesn’t work like that. The only reason you needed any help in the first place is because his buddy tried to kill you with poison. Fuck both of them. You owe him nothing.”
Now Wetchie-ghuy holds out a loop of braided leather. They both know what that is for. Pradeep’s shoulders slump, accepting his fate. He knew Maahjabeen and his exciting new career were too good to be true. He just knew it, deep inside. And there is a gleam in that old man’s eye, a curious little opening into a larger truth. This is the siren song Pradeep heard in the darkness last night that originally made him leave the sub. It is here, in this shaman’s knowledge, the universal truths Pradeep has always sought. See? This transaction has further benefits for him. He will only sit at his new master’s feet and take in whatever crumbs and morsels Wetchie-ghuy cares to share. It will be worth it…
“Prad! I said sit the fuck back down.” Jay pulls on Pradeep, who has risen again to go to the awful old man. But Jay has another idea. “No. Wait. Let’s make a deal, Wetchie-ghuy. You want my boy but you can’t have him. You can’t have either of us. But I got something even better. Bigger juju, dude. Look.” And Jay gets between the shaman and the man he has claimed, blowing another billow of smoke at Wetchie-ghuy.
The shaman coughs, waving his hand in front of his face, then he mutters something in reaction and cocks his head.
“Yeah, smells good, don’t it? Here’s the deal. You can have the joint. But I get to keep Pradeep. Right? Fair and final, yeah?”
Wetchie-ghuy lifts a gnarled hand. Jay puts the joint in it. “That’s it. Smoke up, bro. Like you saw me do. Then we’re square.”
Wetchie-ghuy inhales, the end of the joint crackling cherry red. He does not exhale.
Ξ
Katrina is in a febrile dream. She is so thirsty. There’s a park of red sandstone near her house she’s been going to as a child but now it’s drought season and all its pools are dusty dry, like the inside of her poor wretched mouth.
Someone wakes her. She gratefully pulls herself out of the vision. It was absolutely no fun, filled with loops of thought she’s been around and around so many times they’ve worn grooves in her brain. And now she’s awake, the curving shadows of the sub’s hull over her head, waking in the Captain’s bed with Alonso sitting at her side. He looks at her with paternal care, holding water.
“Here.”
He feeds it to her like a bottle to a baby. She slurps greedily, a rivulet running down her chin and pooling in the hollow of her neck. Finally she breaks away. “Thanks, mate. Glorious.”
“You were muttering for water and I couldn’t sleep.”
“Yeh. Brilliant. What time is it?”
“It is near morning. And we are still alive. So.” He pats her head and gives her a pitying smile. “How is the come down? Bad?”
“The worst. Usually I have a lot more control of how my trips end. Lots of hot water and vitamins and meditation. Not… Well. Whatever the fuck that was.”
Alonso’s response is a full belly laugh. He smooths the fine strands of blonde hair away from her forehead. “Yes. The bugout. The big bugout of May Second. It will go down in history.”
“And somehow you’re in a good mood about it?” Katrina sits up, somewhat resentful of Alonso’s tone. Then she remembers how irritable she will be today and remembers to keep it to herself.
“Yes, well… I have always, during crisis, you know, at least before the last crisis, the big one, the long one, the five years…” He shrugs, re-setting himself. “I was always at my best in a crisis. I can put my feelings away and take care of all the problems and needs of others. So. My colleague asks for water, I get water. My Doctor tells me to hide in a sub, I hide in a sub. And I take care of people. It is one of the things I do best. You wouldn’t know it from meeting me now, but I assure you it is true. Is there anything else I can get you?”
Katrina shakes her head no. “Any sign of… you know, anyone? Jay and Pradeep? The golden man? Russian Marines?”
“No one. Maahjabeen and Flavia convinced Esquibel to move her barrier further up the tunnel so they could visit the sea cave. So they were gone for like an hour. But they’re back now. Everyone else is still asleep.”
“He was real, you know. It wasn’t the drugs. We really did see the golden man and he really did tell us the Russians were coming. I mean, Pradeep and Jay didn’t just vanish for fun.”
“We know. And we know which way our two wayward sons went. But nobody is allowed to follow them. It’s a new tunnel.”
“New tunnel. Fucking fantastic.” Katrina groans and falls back against the wall, bumping her head. “Yeh. Coming back online now. Ah, sobriety. You were not missed. Any coffee anywhere?”
“Not yet. But I can start a pot. Just not in here. The ventilation is not so good.”
“So like no boots tramping around above? No gunfire or…?”
Alonso shrugs. “The bunker’s concrete floor is too solid.”
Katrina looks more closely at his silhouette. “Are you sure I was just out for a few hours? Not like… days?”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Just skip this whole unpleasant episode and wake up when it’s safe again. Why? What is it?”
“You’re… I mean, maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but you look really good, Doctor Alonso. I think you’ve lost some weight.”
“This is quite the time to turn into a flatterer.” Alonso stands straighter, sucking in his belly. “Well, a man can only drink so much wine. Really? You think so?”
“I really do.” The transformation is fairly striking. His hair is growing out as well, a leonine mane of silver and black sweeping back from his forehead. And his jawline has returned.
“You are so sweet. Let me just get the water going and I will be right back for more compliments.” With a soft chuckle he turns and vanishes, leaving Katrina alone with her chaotic thoughts.
He returns a moment later, bearing a bag of dried fruit and a handful of supplements. “Here. Electrolytes for what you lost. And more water. Your coffee is coming.” He makes sure she swallows the pills and drinks more water and eats a handful of fruit. “Now. Tell me more nice things about how I look.”
Katrina laughs for his sake, her insides made of sand. She doesn’t think she can sleep any more but she also can’t offer much more in the way of social niceties. “You do look fab. I love your hair.”
Alonso passes a self-conscious hand over his curls. “You are such a doll. You have no idea how vain I am.”
Katrina pauses, mid-sip. She lowers the water bottle and looks at him. “Now I’m remembering my last great insight from last night. And it’s a real doozy. Are you ready?”
Alonso isn’t sure he likes the strange look in Katrina’s eyes. “Yes, I suppose, if it has merit.”
“Well, not much, but it’s still interesting regardless. So… I guess in the back of my mind I was chewing on our data collection issues and how the clock is really ticking down and we’re no closer to getting what we need for Plexity.”
Alonso leans back. “Yes, I have been thinking very much about the same thing. And my solutions so far are not very good. Mostly about hiding here when they come to pick us up so I have enough time to finish my initial assay of the island. What is your solution?”
“Well, it’s really just kind of a philosophical word game my brain was playing while tripping. Semantics. But, I mean, remember how the basis of Plexity is the interconnectedness of all life?”
“Certainly.”
“And how we’ve been working our asses off trying to get as many samples of life and examples of that interconnection as we can? Well, what I started thinking… Right! It started as a way to extend the deadline, like what you’re saying. And in my cracked-out state I was tripping on the possibility of a terrarium, you know those glass bowls with all the plants and a bit of sand and water and—?”
“Yes, I know what a terrarium is.”
“So on acid, you can get really obsessive. And I was imagining stuffing my own terrarium with all the samples we couldn’t get to on Lisica, so that when we left we’d still have a tiny little replica of the island we could work on. You know? Not that it would be representative or accurate or…”
“Well, yes, that is the thing, isn’t it? You have forty species in your little glass globe and that can’t replicate the richness—or, rather, by the choice of which species we bring we could absolutely misrepresent the baseline activity for everything in the bowl and also misrepresent the profile for life on the island.”
“Yes. Of course. That’s why I said it has little worth… Anyway. It’s really nothing more than a thought experiment but what if we lean a little bit more into that interconnectedness concept?”
“What do you mean? How?”
“Well, like,” Katrina grabs Alonso’s hand and interlaces her fingers with his. “Think about, I don’t know, the seagulls.”
“You can’t fit a seagull in a terrarium.”
“Yeh, that’s kinda what I’m getting at. So maybe we don’t need to. The seagull eats what, fish? Then it discards the carcass and flies away. But the fish guts give rise to bacteria in the water. So then we come along and harvest the bacteria and find proteins in it that came from fish blood. We also find traces of seagull saliva. But we only have the bacteria.”
“I don’t think even the Dyson readers are this powerful.”
“No, mate. No chance. But gentle reminder: I was tripping balls. And like I said, this may not have much merit. But here’s another word we should be looking at more closely: life.”
“Okay. Life. Are you saying expand the definition?”
“Well, sort of. I mean that we keep talking about life on Lisica but we keep forgetting to add a whole new component: us. We are life on Lisica. You and me and the whole gang. And we are making impacts on it and it is making impacts on us. Maahjabeen and Pradeep getting poisoned. I mean, now that we’re fishing the lagoon we’re consuming all the local bugs.” Katrina has been speaking to her own toes, her legs stuck straight out before her on the bed. She hazards a glance at Alonso and finds that his gaze is troubled. “So then I realized we don’t need no stinkin’ terarria. We are the fragile glass globes containing all the bits and bobs of Lisica within us. The bacteria, the proteins, the dynamic interactions. They’re already all inside us. It’s just a shame we didn’t like start with bloodtest baseline records or something. That would make it much easier at the end to compare one result with the other…”
“Yes, now that is something that would be very interesting. I wonder if any of the military hospitals I stayed in have kept any of my many blood samples? Probably not. Because I could get a blood draw taken when we get back and I would be very curious about the results. Not your results, with the thirdhand bacteria and proteins. There is just… I think you are dramatically overestimating the specificity and sensitivity of modern instruments—”
“Yeh, that’s why I agreed there wouldn’t be very many merits.” Katrina clamps her mouth shut and puts a leash on her irritation. But it’s too late. Alonso registers it. And now she’s embarrassed. Doing drugs around squares, or even just a bunch of sober people, is hard work. You can’t put any of the downsides onto them, not like if you were actually sick or heartbroken. This was your choice and now the resulting shit is all your own to handle, haiku triplet. Just keep your mouth shut until you can be nice again.
Yet Katrina’s next impulse is to carry on. “Sorry. I mean, it’s definitely science fiction, but it really is the ultimate goal of Plexity, eh? That we’re not just interconnected, we’re like intershot with all the matter and the interactions that wash through us. Collisions like galaxies in my bones and blood. But the work we’re doing here will someday allow it. The specificity will be there. The sensitivity to detect quantum fluctuations that happened in a faraway star system but eventually flutter my heart. Linear thinkers like talking about the butterfly effect but nobody wants to discuss the billion butterflies effect, the billion-butterflies-every-second-since-the-big-bang-effect. They think it all just dissolves into noise but—”
“No!” Alonso halts her train of thought with an upraised finger. “It dissolves into life! That is the nature of life, all those interactions hitting us from a million different angles at all times, enriching us and mutating us and giving complexity to every subatomic unit and all the higher-order processes they create. Yes. I have nibbled around the edges of those thoughts. And I am glad you’re the one who took the acid and had the experience yourself so now I will not need to. It does not seem to have made you happier.”
“It just makes me wonder what we’re doing here. It’s really easy to lose the thread of our work when we collect and record and all data just kind of generalizes out to an infinite number of bits, none more interesting than the other. But, oh well. Just thought I should share the vision before I lost it. Thought it might help.”
Alonso’s eyes are dark, introspective. “It does, actually. I have been having trouble with this deadline in a couple weeks, for sure, but I have also been having an equal amount of trouble with the suggestion Flavia made that we only characterize the life of the lagoon and beach and, as Miriam agreed with her, that the rest should be a grant proposal to return as soon as possible with more teams and greater resources and maybe a fucking helicopter so we can actually get inland for once. And I think your idea… It is wild and crazy and impossible, and will most likely remain impossible forever barring the revocation of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, at which point we might as well free ourselves from causality entirely and start time-traveling, forget about just finding the record of an entire island in a drop of blood. But no. No… Your idea does not need to be possible for it to have merit. And the merit it has is the prospect that Flavia is right, and that we can legitimately gain an accurate snapshot of the wider island in the samples of the lagoon.”
“Oh.” Katrina doesn’t know if she’s helped or hurt him with this line of thought. He doesn’t seem very pleased with it. “I’m sorry, Doctor Alonso. Plexity and Lisica is for sure the most thrilling thing I’ve ever been involved with and I don’t want it to end. Except this scary part, where all our lives keep getting threatened. But barring that, I’d stay here for ages working on this with you.”
“Thank you. I have no idea if we will have the chance, later.”
“You know, people get this idea that just because you do certain drugs, it must mean that you’re stupid, but I’ve had the most—”
“No.” Again Alonso interrupts Katrina. “It doesn’t make you stupid. Obviously. But it makes you unreliable. Like my wine. And Jay’s weed. As long as you understand that, then you are having a more honest relationship with whatever is the vice of your choice.”
“I’m just in it for the visions.” Katrina shrugs. “Which makes me even more unreliable. Just this mad woman of Sydney. But I guess in the long run I’m not really looking for anyone’s approval.”
Alonso stands and pats her leg. “No. No, you certainly are not.”
Ξ
Triquet crouches in a bush. Milo is in front of him, seated on the ground with his feet planted on either side, knees as high as a frog. The youth’s legs are thin to the point of malnutrition, the muscles like cords along each femur. Yes, there is something paleolithic about these golden childs. Triquet wonders if they’re perhaps nomadic. Maybe that’s the difference between them and the people of Morska Vidra’s village.
Triquet is tired of sitting here. Their brain is far too active to fall into this kind of endless pre-modern reverie that people like Milo can effortlessly achieve. And it’s been, what, all night and into the morning now? Fifteen hours? Something like that? And their eagle bite is throbbing.
Milo had scared the hell out of them in the dark, finding Triquet by touch, who was only comforted when their own fingers found the golden mask. Then they had roughly clasped each other in the dark and the cold, both bodies shivering, and finally fallen asleep.
It was upon waking that Triquet decided this golden childs needed a name. It was a longstanding policy to know at least the first name of those Triquet had slept with and they didn’t want to break it now. So. The little man had become Milo.
It hadn’t gotten any drier or warmer but Triquet had finally disentangled themself from the warm embrace to crawl forward and peer out from under the thick eaves of the underbrush. Its small, almond-shaped leaves with serrated edges drip endless drops onto the black earth, which sheets with water.
“Well, Milo.” Triquet now addresses his back. “Moment of truth and all that. How’s your Russian?” Then they fall forward stiffly on all fours and stifle a groan. They are so stiff and sore. Crawling forward, they lower their chin to the dead leaves, which prickle, and peer out. There’s some dark vertical surface out there, covered in networks of lichen and algae. From a slightly different vantage it resolves into a wall—the back of the bunker, stained and blackened by time. Oh, well. That’s good. The bushes back here are a nice safe place to be, for sure. Just miserable-as-can-be is all.
On the far side of that wall was their home for the last few weeks, now returned to an unassuming bare ruin. It had been filled with their cute little cells and the kitchen and all the laptops at the work tables in a row. It had been nice. And the hatch leading to the sub must be just a few meters away. If Triquet could somehow get to it and slip down there with the others, dry and safe and hidden… It seems like the greatest possible luxury. Maybe they can just start with the dirt beneath their feet and dig straight down, hoping the sub runs under here. But they know it doesn’t. It starts at the bottom of the stairs, ten meters off to Triquet’s left and down another eight, before heading off under the beach at an angle. Not a passage they can scrape away with their hands. And then there’s the matter of the concrete and the steel hull. No getting through them with just like elbow grease and fingernails. They’re still trapped out here. So close and yet so far.
Well. Then it is a matter of being a scout again. Be optimistic. There’s a strong chance that no Russian soldiers ever arrived here. That’s what we call the reality-based chance. And if Triquet can confirm that now, then hooray, we can all resume our daily lives and just like lock Katrina and Jay in the warrant officer’s cabin for the remainder of the stay.
Triquet recalls the placement of the window in the back, and how they’d heard that a fox jumped out it when they first arrived. That fox probably had a trail… Triquet pulls back and scans the forest floor for any sign of one. There: an unsteady depression running generally in the right direction, thin as thread.
Triquet crawls carefully along this game trail, finding that it ends at a woody bush whose main limb serves as a springboard to the empty window ahead. Triquet can see claw marks and dirty paw prints on the limb, clear as day. They are pleased that for once an educated guess actually turns out to be true.
Triquet looks back at Milo, who seems to be watching them from behind the blankness of the golden mask. “Just going to take a peek,” Triquet silently mouths to him, pointing at the window. Then they slowly rise…
Thunk. Triquet stops. Something heavy bumped against another object in the bunker. Just on the other side of the wall, not even their own body’s length away. Then they hear breathing, a heavy snuffling, and an indistinct muttering. Somebody is in there. Unmistakably. It isn’t a fox. It’s a man. A Russian? Triquet can’t hear enough of the words. Whoever it is, they are obviously alone, muttering to themself with idle observations. Could it be one of the Lisicans? It doesn’t really sound like them. This person is less… healthy? Or maybe it’s one of the shamans. It could very well be. Talking to themselves is very on brand for them, poking around in the bunker after getting their golden mask buddies to spook the researchers away for whatever malevolent reason. Yes, paranoia argues that this has all just been a game to them. Or, like some complex side tactic in their great argument. Those assholes.
Or maybe it’s a Russian soldier after all and if Triquet pops their head up to see, it gets blown off. No real way to tell.
The body shifts within. Steps are taken, dried ferns brushing against the floor. Yes, there is a heaviness to the steps, perhaps a bit of a waddle or limp. They only take like three so it’s hard to tell. Then a long exhalation and a word that sounds like shivyit.
The figure moves through the bunker and out the door, their movement tapering to silence. Now Triquet doesn’t know what to do. Should they try to confirm the person’s identity? How are they supposed to do that when any movement will likely be too much?
A gout of rain solves that issue. It suddenly falls with such force that Triquet is easily able to withdraw deeper into the bushes without fear of being heard. It really pounds down, a trickle of cold water worming its way around the collar of their coat and down their neck. Their feet are already made of ice, probably as blue as the boots they wear. And the rain doesn’t let up.
Emboldened, Triquet uses the downpour to crawl around the building counter-clockwise, still staying in the bushes close to the ground. They ease wide so their sightline is clear of the corner of the building. There is no one there. Well, obviously. Who in their right mind would stand in the middle of this deluge if there’s a building right there beside them? They must have gone back inside and Triquet couldn’t hear it over the battering the corrugated steel roof endures.
Too many unknowns. What will prove that camp is unsafe? Well. A mental checklist appears in Triquet’s mind. If they find out it’s a Russian. Check. If they find more than one person. That means it isn’t a shaman so therefore it has to be soldiers. Check. If they hear any metal sounds. Lisicans don’t wear metal. Check. If their feet leave tread like the lugs of boot soles. Check. If Triquet can figure out what the fuck shivyit means. Check.
And what would prove that camp is safe? Prove? That is much harder, proving a negative. Hard to prove an absence of threat when there’s obviously someone in there prowling around. And there’s very little chance it’s someone who looks on Alonso and his crew kindly, either way. So no checklist there.
And what if it’s just one of the golden childs in the bunker? Maybe they didn’t know Triquet was close and let their guard down a bit, dropping the whole silent mask routine? Maybe they’re still just patrolling the empty camp because they wouldn’t go into the sub? That prospect suddenly seems the most likely and Triquet pushes forward, eager to catch sight of a gold mask in the bunker’s door. But they can’t see anyone out there and moving forward any more would take them out of the bushes entirely and that’s a big no thank you from Triquet.
Triquet schools themself to patience and pulls back to the window to peek within. The bunker is empty, rain pouring in shining columns through the gaps in the roof. It looks so cozy. They are sorely tempted to crawl through and hide. Perhaps if they covered themself with some dead ferns and just kept still? They could happily sleep the day away.
But that would never do.
The rain eases. A break in the sky suddenly appears above the cliffs and an eerie golden light filters through the drizzle. The wind picks up and the trees shed their soaked dead leaves. And in the cathedral light that slants down into the bushes, Triquet can now see a wider path through the thicket behind them leading away from camp, back toward the cliffs. This must be one of the paths to the secret tunnels. They slept like not two steps away from it and they’re only just seeing it now.
Fabulous.
Well, no time like the present. Bye bye bunker. They can retreat from these dangers and dive down into the dark now to find their way back to the sub and the loving embrace of Miriam and Alonso and all the others.
But can they? It is still an open question if it is safe for the others to come out. And without Triquet’s eyes and ears out here, they’ll never know if it gets any safer. No, they can’t retreat and put that burden on someone else. They need to figure this out once and for all. So no tunnel for them. Yet.
Triquet rocks back on their heels and tries to think strategically. Okay. The storm is breaking up and the beach is getting a patch or two of sun. Gusts of wind chase clouds from the sky. Sneaking off to the right, toward the trenches and Tenure Grove, will provide good cover but take Triquet further from camp, and maybe make it harder for them to see what might be occurring out there. But if they go the other way, alongside the creek to the left, staying in that deep underbrush and peeking out every few minutes to see, they could probably get a good survey from the door of the bunker all the way to camp and down to the beach.
And that’s when they hear the whistle, faintly from the lagoon. Three short blasts. Not a bird whistle, but the sound made from a small metal object, like a referee uses at a basketball game.h1 { color: #000000; letter-spacing: 2.0pt; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; page-break-inside: avoid; orphans: 0; widows: 0; margin-top: 0in; margin-bottom: 0in; border: none; padding: 0in; direction: ltr; background: transparent; text-decoration: underline; page-break-after: avoid }h1.western { font-family: “Wallington”; font-size: 12pt; so-language: en-US; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal }h1.cjk { font-family: “Droid Serif”; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal }h1.ctl { font-family: “Droid Serif”; font-size: 12pt; so-language: ar-SA; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal }p { color: #000000; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; orphans: 0; widows: 0; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-top: 0.17in; margin-bottom: 0.08in; direction: ltr; background: transparent }p.western { font-family: “Calibri”, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; so-language: en-US }p.cjk { font-family: “Calibri”, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt }p.ctl { font-family: “Times New Roman”, serif; font-size: 11pt; so-language: ar-SA }em { font-style: italic }a:link { color: #000080; so-language: zxx; text
DW Draffin -- Lisica 