Chapter 14 – Of Lisica
April 1, 2024
Thanks for joining us on our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
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14 – Of Lisica
The ebullience that normally animates Amy is now absent and she looks older than her fifty-six years. “It isn’t what you think, Mandy. I just… My past is…” She shakes her head, wanting to say it right. It’s been a while since she’s had this conversation though. Amy’s eyes scan the eastern horizon. A patch of blue has broken through, illuminating the ocean in that spot with depth. Perhaps that can be her inspiration.
Mandy watches Amy wrestle over her words with growing anxiety. Sheesh. What is the older woman going to say? Just what unwanted burden is Amy about to lay upon her?
Finally, Amy’s shoulders drop and she realizes that none of the long prefaces she was about to add to the statement make any difference. It’s always like this. “This is more information than you wanted, I’m sure, but I’m trans. I was born male.”
“Oh.” Mandy blinks. She exhales a breath she didn’t know she was holding. “Ohh…”
“Sorry. I still wrestle sometimes with all the hidden identity stuff. Dual images and masks. You know. And I just got a little careless there and forgot that you didn’t know what I was talking about and how I might sound. I’m really sorry.”
Mandy is so relieved she’s giddy. “No. That’s fine. I just totally misinterpreted what I was hearing. And that’s on me. Oh my god, that’s so depressing. I thought I was going to get to grow out of all the coming-out stuff someday but I guess not. I can’t believe you never get to let go of it. No, honey, I’m the one who’s sorry. I was like ready to kick you to the curb after one comment.”
“Well it was a pretty weird comment…”
They both laugh again, the tension broken. Mandy grabs Amy’s arm again. “So wait. I thought you and Alonso used to date.”
“Yes, when Alonso and I fell in love, it was 1991 and I was still a man. We were a very happy couple. Really just a summer of love. He and Miriam and me… That became it’s own whole thing. Such a wonderful thing. It’s what taught me that I really was a woman.”
“Then Alonso’s bi?”
“Another thing Miriam taught us. We thought he was as gay as I am. I think she’s the only woman he’s ever loved.”
“Oh. Wow.” Mandy can’t believe how many assumptions she had made about these three old people, which fall away now like ice sheets calving from glaciers, dropping thunderously into the deep. “I had no idea. You discreet fuckers.” She laughs. “Esquibel keeps wondering if Alonso is closet-homophobic. Oh my god. She’s going to get a real hoot out of this.”
“That’s hilarious. I should have said something before. It’s just I’ve always been really private about it, all these years.”
“No, I totally understand. I had no idea. I’m so sorry.”
“And I mean, I knew that you’d probably be okay with it but it’s still something I just don’t talk about with nearly anyone.”
“Well, then I’m flattered.”
“Oh, god,” Amy reels. “That’s not what I meant at all. I’m not so special that the needs of an old maid like me mean so much.”
“Yes you are,” Mandy hugs Amy again, this time with true sisterhood. “And yes they do.”
Ξ
Esquibel inspects Jay in the clean room. The swelling in his hand has gone down and his ankle is regaining mobility. He is healing quite quickly. Good. But she doesn’t need him knowing that yet. He’ll just run off and hurt himself again, as long as Miriam is poking around in those caves under their feet.
“See? My NBA career ain’t over yet.” He smiles bravely so she can’t see how agonizing all that manipulation is. “No headaches in two days. Mandy’s been working it all out, teaching me a whole new meaning of the concept of pain. But I’m all set now.”
“I know. Her manipulations hurt so much, don’t they?” She inspects his pupils with her phone’s light. They are even and responsive. She is running out of reasons to keep him shelved.
“Well, as my uncle once told me, there’s two kinds of pain. There’s permanent pain that leads to damage and nobody wants that. But then there’s temporary pain from like stretching and bruising and adjusting to discomfort. And that doesn’t hurt you. Going through it makes you stronger.”
“Like when I flex your ankle?”
“Ha—aaaah! Okay now you’re just making some sadistic doctor point about something. I didn’t say I was fully healed…”
“And what would you do in a tunnel when you need to depend on that ankle to get you out of a tight spot? Will you push it to failure again? Of course you will.”
“I’m not twelve.”
Esquibel only looks at him. Finally Jay drops his gaze.
“Fine. Tomorrow is a week. Can I please act like a human again after a week?”
“We shall see. Now go rest and stop aggravating everything.”
Jay sits up and hops to his feet. But he hangs back at the clean room’s exit. “Hey, I got a question, Doc, a personal question, if you don’t mind me asking. Since we’re all one big Cuban family.”
Esquibel turns on Jay, hand on hip. “What.”
“I was just wondering. The name Esquibel. I knew a girl in my high school with that name but her family was from Guadalajara. Isn’t it a Spanish name?”
She is unwilling to encourage him, but it is her favorite story. And so far he just looks at her with that puppy innocence. “My mother. She was an exchange student in Mexico City in the nineties. Her host mother was named Esquibel. It was her favorite time in her whole life. She still speaks Spanish, even though she has never been able to return.”
“Oh. Got it. That’s so sad. We should like all pitch in and make sure she gets back there. Mexico kicks ass.”
“We? You don’t even know my mother.”
“Yeah, well her daughter’s been taking real good care of me so I figure I owe her.” Jay flashes a shaka. “Peace out, Doc.”
He leaves the clean room and scans the interior of the bunker. Pradeep is at a microscope. Katrina works on her laptop beside him. Mandy is also there, fussing with her weather station.
Jay walks past them outside. Alonso types furiously on his laptop in his camp chair. Amy is at the edge of the trees, watching the birds through binoculars and taking notes. Miriam and Triquet are down below in some dark cavern, searching for Flavia.
Maahjabeen is down by the water. Jay stands on the redwood trunk looking at her in the distance, trying to decide if he should bother her. Probably not. She isn’t the most friendly person in the best of times and these aren’t the best of times. Also, if he was her, he’d still be totally wracked with guilt about losing Flavia.
But she sees him and to his surprise, Maahjabeen beckons to Jay. He jumps from the log and crosses the beach to her as fast as his aching ankle lets him. “Hey, what’s up? Can I get you something?”
Maahjabeen wears a broad-brimmed sun hat over her headscarf and dark sunglasses. She looks like a movie star trying to go incognito at the Cannes Film Festival. “I can speak with you about this. You will understand and not try to stop me.”
“Ah! Crazy talk! Totally. I’m your boy.”
“I am adding to my list of places to go here. Now at the top it is the sea cave exit. Over there.” She points to the left, the southeast, around the point made of clay and somewhere up that coast. It is the opposite way she had gone before, during the storm. “It is probably hidden from outside so a kayak is the only way to find it.”
“Yeah. That’s your prime sea cave exploration tool, no doubt. Esquibel just gave me the green light to get back on my feet. Well, tomorrow is what we agreed. So you want to just hold off until then I bet we can find it together.”
Maahjabeen shakes her head no. “I’m not quite at that stage in planning yet. Or healing. I won’t be ready to go tomorrow. And listen to you! You are too eager to hurt yourself again.”
“Ha. Look who’s talking. Maybe I’ll just get restless and go discover a cave system under the sub to get lost in instead.”
But that is too much and she falls silent, her mouth a compressed line. Jay is filled with regret. Aw, shit. He did it again. “Sorry. That was out of line.”
“I have an idea.” Maahjabeen studies the impassable breaks. “But it is only if you are a really strong paddler.”
Jay nods. “Kay. Let’s hear it.”
“What if we lash both boats together?”
“Uhh.” Jay can’t see it. “Lengthwise or like side by side?”
Maahjabeen laughs. “Side by side. I’ve been wondering if we can build some outriggers for the kayaks to give them extra stability on the open water. But what could we use as a stabilizing float? I don’t think we have anything disposable in camp. Then it occurred to me when you said we could both go out there together that if the boats are attached somehow side by side—”
“Then they act as each other’s outrigger? Wow, yeah we’d have to be strong paddlers. The added mass would be super tricky.”
“But it might get us over the breaks in one piece.”
“Yeah… Might… If we had something rigid between. And strong enough that it doesn’t just snap in two.”
“And then we can paddle to the sea cave.” Maahjabeen drops her gaze. “And see if Flavia’s body is floating around in there.”
“Aw, come on, Maahj. She isn’t dead. She’s just lost in there somewhere. Triquet can find her. And Miriam is like a world-class expert underground. She’s in good hands.”
Maahjabeen takes off her sunglasses and stares at Jay, offended. “Uh huh. What did you call me again?”
“Maahj? Like short for Maahjabeen? Like a nickname?”
“Don’t do that.”
“Cool. Okay. No worries.”
Maahjabeen sets her sunglasses back in place and stares at the ocean again. “Two days. We heal for two more days and then we try it.” She gives him a rare smile. “Thank you, though, for trying to make me feel better. I do appreciate it.”
Ξ
Pradeep hauls the ten gallon buckets to the waterfall’s pool for a refill. A few times per day the camp goes through an inordinate amount of fresh water. He also brings his pack and a Dyson. At the same point at the same time each day for four days now he’s been sampling the water at a single location. He wants to figure out how to set up a permanent monitoring station, where the microfluidics channels in the sensors are perpetually flushing themselves and giving new readings. He wants a profile of the life forms present throughout the day. In what ways do they wax and wane? Is the severity of the waterfall the only factor?
At the edge of the pond they’ve worn a shallow platform in the mud a handspan above the water’s normal level. He kneels here and submerges the bucket. They’ve stopped treating the water since Esquibel has declared it safe. It’s pure. Delicious too. Now they only regularly monitor it to make sure they don’t contaminate it themselves.
Pradeep dips the end of the Dyson reader into the water and gives it a minute to digest the sample. Then he does it a second time as a precaution and sets the reader aside. He lies down and drinks deeply from the pool. Then he pulls back and regards his shimmering reflection. He hasn’t seen himself in a couple weeks. He looks haggard. Lean and happy. But he really should shave. The few whiskers that lie scattered across his cheeks aren’t even dense enough to be called sparse. And an unruly curl is starting to peek out from behind one ear. He looks like he did on that one vacation they took to visit his mother’s family in Chennai when he was ten. But all in all, not so bad. And everyone here is being so lovely. Supportive. He doesn’t have to keep this ball of anxiety clenched inside him like a fist in his diaphragm. He can let—
Beside him the bushes shiver and a cackle splits the air. A junco in the laurel tree above startles and wings away, cheeping. Pradeep yelps and nearly falls into the pool.
His yelp quiets whoever cackled. After a moment, Triquet calls out, “Hello…?” Their head pokes out from the bushes beside him, in caver helmet, covered in mud. “Oh. We found Pradeep.”
“Praise be.” Miriam’s voice is muffled, deeper in the thicket. “I need to stand.” This is the tunnel to the poolside fox nest she had discovered earlier. It led them out from below. Now they have a legitimate path from surface level to the tunnel complex.
“Where did you come from?” Pradeep hasn’t quite regained his composure. “You gave me a heart attack!”
Triquet pulls themself free of the branches and stands beside Pradeep, dusting their canvas coveralls. But their state is hopeless. They’ll need to be soaked overnight to get all this mud out. “We are the dwarves of the mountain!” they crow. “Long has it been since we have seen the light of the sun.”
Miriam stands, her begrimed face lost in thought. “I don’t know how we can make it functional though. It is such a maze. And this is the tightest tunnel we’ve tried yet. Like I scraped my hip bones kind of tight. It’s like a warren in there, like a giant rabbit warren. Maybe the sub entrance is still the best.”
“Functional?” Pradeep stares doubtfully at the wall of vegetation in front of him, obscuring the cliff from which they emerged. “Like we could have a door to the caves here if we chopped this all back to the cliff face?”
“But what I’m saying is it would hardly be worth it.” Miriam shakes her head, tired and frustrated.
“No Flavia?”
Triquet shakes their head, sad. “No. But we’re being methodical and we’ve only gotten through the bottom two-thirds of tunnels so far. There’s a couple promising ones up top.”
“Seriously? It’s taking that long?”
“You have no idea how confusing it is in there. And we keep coming upon our own twine. We’ve started to annotate it but by the time we come back to it the third or fourth time the labels are just covered in mud. Dark, tight spaces, just looping around and around on themselves. Here. Let me help.” Triquet picks up one of the water buckets and leads the others back to camp. “Time for lunch anyway. I’m starving.”
Jay has already started making pancakes. In a sugar water solution he floats banana chips to rehydrate them. Chewy, but good. He adds more salt. Back when he was a line cook at a ski resort in college he learned just what an unhealthy amount of salt restaurants use in nearly every dish. It gets him compliments about his cooking ever since.
“Smells lovely.” Triquet, looking like they just ran a Tough Mudder race, drops the water bucket at the end of the table. “Now excuse me while I return to the waterfall for a shower.”
“Whoa. Look at you. Yeah, sure. I’ll keep a stack warm for you.”
“You’re a peach.” Triquet trips away, the aches and pains slowly stealing up on them. That was a long morning. Grim. So hopeless. What has become of poor Flavia? How had Triquet so completely messed up ever since the innocuous moment they opened up the deck panel that leads down to the sea cave?
The bambino… Why was the child crying? The mystery of it has cycled around in Triquet’s head a million times in those dark tunnels. Were they lost? Injured? The urgency with which Flavia responded indicated that it was a sharp moment of crisis, not like some steady sobbing from someone who was wandering in the dark. Had they fallen? Why couldn’t Triquet find a hypothetical that would get such a scenario to make sense?
Had someone stolen the child? Their mythical Chinese pilot? With a weary sigh, Triquet pushes their way through the foliage to the pool’s edge, where they primly strip off their clothes and let the icy falls wash all their cares away.
Ξ
It has been two weeks now. The project is one-quarter over. In some ways, it is going better than Alonso anticipated. In some ways, worse. What a time for Flavia to go missing! Right after she sent him a draft of Plexity’s engine, which is the oddest assortment of modules and plug-ins and bespoke code he has ever seen. Cellular automata? Just… why? Ah, well, that’s what happens when you hire a research mathematician to do a programmer’s job.
Most data scientists are big picture thinkers. And Alonso is no different. But he can separate himself from the rest of his mostly theoretical colleagues by busting out his applied maths chops as needed. It is merely the difference between developing a recipe and actually cooking it. He is comfortable in both worlds. What Flavia needs here is fewer ideas and more implementation. She is using Plexity as a testbed for many of her wackiest pet theories, apparently—which is absolutely fine. This is nothing but a grand multidisciplinary experiment after all—but the ultimate goal cannot get lost. So. He will just carve away the fat and inevitably defend his decisions while she rages and curses him in Italian.
Alonso looks up at the dark line of trees hiding her from him. He sighs. Well. As soon as Flavia is found, that is. Then they can fight all they like.
His fingers fly furiously on the keyboard, lines of Perl flowing from him into the machine. He is basically restating his initial attempt, which she had entirely discarded, and adapting it to take the useful ideas she suggested. Oh, she will hate this so much. She is trying to preserve this analog quality throughout the data but she has no idea how much that will defeat all the macro level data science he hopes to do with Plexity. She is only thinking about it locally while he is trying to characterize the entire planet. That fine touch will be nice only at the smallest frames of reference. If she is so excited about it then he will help her find harmonic resonances in the data sets after they reach a trillion inputs.
Miriam emerges from the tunnels again, drained and losing hope. Alonso sets his laptop aside and pushes against the arms of his camp chair, to stand and go take care of her. But his legs still won’t work and he realizes if he does try to stand she will set her own exhaustion aside and help him.
So he remains helplessly seated. Damn and doubly damn his torturers. If he was even six years younger he’d be scrambling through those tunnels more than any of them. “Oye, Novia.”
She crouches at a water bucket, scrubbing the clay mud from her hands. Over her shoulder, she offers a weak smile. Alonso looks like a bewildered castaway in his chair, gray-streaked hair standing straight up. “Still no luck, Zo. But we’re learning. I think the tunnels we just investigated were the first they dug, and have since been abandoned. They are cruder, the wear patterns older, and they lead nowhere. Most just stop. But one tunnel’s path clearly proves my hypothesis that they dug the tunnels with little thought of direction. They were just digging out the soft layers and avoiding the hard. This is more like the behavior of worms than miners.”
He shares a grimace with her. “And no sign at all?”
Miriam shakes her head no. “But there are two tunnels left now. And both are rather large. Flavia-sized. Very promising. We’re just being methodical. I hope it doesn’t cost us.”
“Look.” Alonso points with his cane. “That is nice to see. I wonder what those two could ever find in common.” Esquibel sits on Katrina’s platform beside her, pointing at Katrina’s laptop screen and asking a sharp question.
Miriam stares, flat, at the scene. Her mind is empty. She has no idea what those two young women could find so interesting while Flavia is still gone. All the times Miriam has broken down in tears, alone in a tunnel following a bit of muddy twine, has left her beyond empty. She has unwillingly transitioned over these last two days from a research scientist into a search and rescue volunteer, with no end in sight. “You realize we’ve only seen the tiniest bit of this island, don’t you? If the entire thing is riddled with these tunnels… I don’t know if…” she shakes her head in despair. “I just don’t know where she’s gone. We’ve looked nearly everywhere.”
“Sleep, darling. You are working so hard. There is only so much we can do. And we have so few people who are fit for this work. We need you to be fresh.”
“I’m very hungry.”
“We will feed you. Sit. Sit, and keep me company. Where is Jay? He always wants to do more than he should. Jay!” Alonso calls out in a deep resonant voice and waves his cane.
The bunker’s door opens. “Alonso!” Jay leans out, mimicking the older man’s stentorian delivery. “What you need?”
“Could you do us a favor? Please feed my wife and make sure she gets to bed. That is, if you are not…”
“No no. I’d love to. Playing nursemaid is my jam. Need me to carry you?” He puts a patronizing hand on Miriam’s shoulder.
Wearily she knocks it off. “I’m just hungry. I’m not an infant. Do we have any protein at all?”
“Well. You’re in luck.” Jay fetches one of the five gallon buckets from under the long tables. “Maahjabeen finally gave me the green light to harvest mussels at the shore.”
The bottom of the bucket is filled with dozens of their black and pearl shells. Some are huge, almost the size of her hand.
Miriam nearly swoons. “Oh, Jay! Dearest child! I take back anything mean I said to you. I am your eternal slave.”
Alonso claps his hands. “Ha. I’ve heard that before, Jay. Don’t believe her.”
Jay shrugs. “That’s cool. Not really into slaves anyway. Let me just put a bunch of these in with some garlic flakes and a dash of wine while I get the pasta going. Two shakes.”
He departs as Miriam settles in a chair. “If I lie down I will pass out. What he said sounds heavenly.”
“I hope he knows to make enough for everyone. Now I am famished myself. Oye. Jay…” The young man has returned from the bunker bearing a small plastic tray. “Jay, I think we would all enjoy this meal. Please make as much as you can.”
“How about this.” Jay strikes a Thinking Man pose. “I make Miriam’s first so it’s quick, and when I can I’ll start a big pot that won’t be done for another, I don’t know, twenty minutes?” He bows, presenting the tray to Miriam. It holds a joint, a lighter, and a bottle cap for an ash tray. “This here’s my indica knockout bomb. Just take one or two hits. Remember last time. You’ll be high as a kite for an hour then you’ll sleep like you’re dead.”
“Zo, he’s an angel. An angel straight from heaven.” Miriam lifts the joint and sparks up.
“You always did form unhealthy attachments to your dealers.”
They both chuckle.
Jay hurries once again into the bunker. The pot may be boiling.
Ξ
“Good morning, doll.” Triquet is subdued, in a pair of overalls and a thick shirt. Amy studies the birds, taking videos of the spiraling clusters, brown and black and white, as a band of sunrise flares across the underside of the marine layer and turns the ocean sea-green. Mist rises from the backlit black cliffs. “Any chance you’d care to join me?”
Amy sighs, counting twenty-three pelicans and noting them before giving an answer. This morning she’s seen common murres and Brandt’s cormorants and two black osprey, their enormous wingspans unmistakable against the glowing sky. Closer to the ground, it’s odd to see a redwood grove without so many of its normal birds. Neither robins nor ravens nor crows. Very few songbirds. A few oak titmice root in the undergrowth. Heavens knows how they ever got across twelve hundred kilometers of open ocean. Finally she closes her notebook and smiles sweetly at Triquet. “Anywhere, darling.”
But Triquet doesn’t have the energy to be arch. The search for Flavia has been grueling and hope is running out. “Miriam is still asleep. She needs it. But you aren’t. And I need a second.”
“Oh.” Amy points at the ground beneath her feet.
“Well, more like…” Triquet turns and points at a shallow angle below the earth behind the bunker and the cliff base. “But I can’t just wait up here doing nothing while Flavia’s still…”
“I know.” Amy drops her camera. “I’ll come. Let me just. Um. Get out of these clothes. Ten minutes?”
They meet in the sub a short time later. Amy wears a canvas shirt and jeans that are still wet from being worn down here and washed the night before. She shivers. “Come on. Let’s get to work. I need to warm up.”
Triquet leads Amy through the sub’s first floor, second floor, and then down the tunnel into the muddy crawlspace. They pop out in the culvert, half-hoping to find Flavia here. But it remains empty. They’ve posted an led light here. Amy swaps out its batteries. It shines on a permanent rope emerging from the tunnel they just exited. A sign in a ziploc bag pinned to the earth reads:
FLAVIA
FOLLOW THIS ROPE
TO THE SUB
Before doing anything else, they walk the culvert to its end to examine the sea cave in the hope that Flavia is in there. But it is as lifeless as ever, the waves crashing energetically against the worn concrete piers.
Satisfied that she isn’t down here anywhere, they return to the multitude of tunnel mouths. Small surveyor flags poke out from each one, where twine is tied off. All of them have been so marked except for the two tunnel mouths that gape above. They are divided from those below by a shelf of dull green gray limestone protruding from the earth.
Triquet randomly chooses the tunnel on the upper left. They place a surveyor flag and tie the twine’s end around it, a fat spool hanging from the nylon strap they wear as a belt. “Wish me luck.”
They pull themself upward.
Amy waits, looking up, as the six meters of blue nylon strap connecting them unspools at her feet. Finally she heaves herself into the tunnel, the twine running along a wall clogged with veins of raw rough stone. Soon her fingers are sore from gripping it.
Triquet ahead is having no better luck. It is slow going, weaving between these clusters of stone that shoot through the earth. And they stop to inspect the walls and floor after every step for any sign of Flavia’s passage. After climbing upward at a steep angle for more than twenty meters, the earth gives way to solid stone. But the tunnel slides sideways and then proceeds upward, through a natural water-carved tunnel. It finally rises nearly straight. “Ahh.” Triquet stands at the bottom of a very tall chimney. A tiny bit of indirect silver light, nearly directly above their head, glows, way way up there. “What in the wide world of sports?”
The passage doesn’t look all that daunting though. It is choked with logs and branches all the way up, many of which are solid and provide rungs for a very long ladder. But still. What a death trap.
“What’d you find?” Amy still labors under the shelf of solid rock behind them.
“Well…” Triquet kneels. “The real answer here is to look for her footprints first. Or any sign of passage.” There’s none. The tunnel is dry and mostly stone. The nearest branches and logs look worn, as if many feet had climbed them, but nothing to suggest it was done recently. “It’s a real climb. Like straight up the inside of the cliff. Who knows how high.”
“I’m coming.” Amy scrambles into the bottom of the chimney. It’s close quarters with Triquet. “Sorry if my breath is bad.” She cranes her neck upward. The light filters through the countless branches and logs blocking it. “Whoa… So pretty. But yeah. We shouldn’t climb that. There’s no way that’s safe.”
“I agree. Let’s just report back with news of this one and… I don’t know. I can’t figure out how we might ever actually explore it. I can’t imagine what happens if you fall.”
Amy feels Triquet’s shiver. She rubs their narrow shoulders with her hands to warm them up. Triquet rests their head on Amy’s shoulder. It is a tender, nearly intimate moment. Is this the time she should tell Triquet she’s trans? Now that she’s spoken to Mandy it seems like it’s news most of the team should know, and nobody more than the only non-binary person here. But it would be so very awkward, here in this pit deep underground. Never at work, Amy has always told herself. And this is work. “Let me just back out, my dear Doctor, and you can follow.”
Triquet waits, the chill passing. They peer upward, mind buzzing again. This is a very different form of archaeology here than the Antique Road Show up above. Fascinating. Truly sui generis. Without any other materials available, the natives strategically placed sturdy branches and logs across the wide chimney, braced by natural features. This will require a painstaking investigation. It will certainly need its own whole paper itself.
The strap tugs at their waist. Right. But first, Flavia. What do the Marines say? Leave no man behind? He’s not heavy, he’s my brother? Something like that? “Hoo-ra.” Triquet’s voice is swallowed by the dark. They duck back down under the shelf to follow Amy back the way they came.
Ξ
Miriam opens her eyes. Every bit of her aches, inside and out. Shame and guilt and a slowly rising horror that Flavia might never be found drag on her. But she can’t even lift her head.
When her brother Denny killed himself she was halfway across the world, digging trenches in Ethiopia. She had let him slip away, despite all the warning signs over the years. Even though she’d sent him useless cheery videos whenever she could and helped him with his coursework and even set him up with Hannah from Portsmouth for whatever messy good that did them, it was still far from enough. It had been her responsibility as the older sister to watch out for him and she had failed him. Miriam hauls herself out of bed. She cannot fail Flavia. “I mean, I’m right bloody here.”
Alonso snores contentedly beside her. He’s looking better, his sleeping face clearer. And is he losing weight? He seems less bloated. As dangerous as it is here, Lisica is good for his health.
She laces up her boots and puts on the clothes that are still caked with mud. As she walks down the ramp with her toiletries bag to the long tables, her muscles start to work. Yes, she’s a tough old bird. Constant activity over the years has made her body expect rough living each day. Just a visit to the trenches and a spot of tea, then brush her teeth and off she’ll pop.
It’s as she’s returning from the last of these tasks that Amy and Triquet emerge from the bunker. They are freshly soiled.
“The left side.” Triquet points a weary left arm upward, snaking its convoluted course. “Then up up up.”
“Up?” Miriam places her kit on her platform and secures her caving bag, making sure the water is refilled. “How far up?”
“Who knows. There’s light at the top, but… No sign of her.”
“So that only leaves the last one. I’m coming.”
“Are you sure? You look like you’ve been rode hard and put away wet, honey.” Triquet laughs and squeezes Miriam’s arm to take the sting from the words.
“And you two look like something the cat dragged in.” Miriam steps past them to the bunker door. “Who’s coming?”
They both follow her without a word as Miriam makes her way downstairs. Soon, after all the normal convolutions, they stand in the concrete culvert staring at the eleven tunnel mouths. Triquet and Amy have described to her the tunnel they just explored. They all agree that they hope the final tunnel isn’t like that.
It is not. When Miriam pulls herself up into its narrow opening, it immediately widens into a more comfortable passage, climbing at a forty-degree grade or so. “Oh, praise be.” She is delighted to see that it is all limestone and nearly no mud.
Triquet steps through the narrow mouth to find Miriam kneeling in the tunnel. “Amazing! Did you find anything?”
“Just my first introduction to the true limestone mantle of the island. Look how green! Absolutely microcrystalline. Benthic without a doubt. And this passage is water-worn, over millennia I’m sure. Look, Amy. Tiny fossils. Foraminifera. This is what proves these seas were much shallower at some point in the past. You get much deeper than 4,000 meters in the ocean and calcium forcibly dissolves. So you don’t get limestones in the deep oceans. And as far as I know, this has always been deep ocean here, back to bloody Gondwanaland. So somebody’s models are off. Or rather, everyone’s must be.”
They press on. This passage is generally as large as the concrete culvert below, still rising at a sharp grade. They are able to walk upright quite close together. The passage soon curves up to a bottleneck of spilled jagged stone. “So much calcium in these deposits,” Miriam jabs a rock under her boot with the spike end of her pick, “we could open a chalk factory. So I’m beginning to think this was always an uncharted large shallow platform here in the middle of the ocean. A rogue magma plume probably caused a bubble and then, so close to the surface, it bloomed with life. Reefs in particular. Then after a number of cycles of the reefs collapsing into the crust when the magma bubble stops, then rising again, we get these lovely limestone layers in the middle of the goddamn Pacific Ocean, where nobody expected to find them.”
“Look. Prints.” Triquet kneels at the edge of the cascaded stones. One has a regular imprint of wavy ridges. “Sperry Topsiders or my name ain’t Triquet Carter Soisson.”
Amy blinks. “That’s your full name? Wow.”
“I mean, it’s the same price to change one name or three so get your money’s worth. But I only go by Triquet.”
“I love it.”
“Thank you. But footprints, ladies. This is it. We found her.”
Silently they climb the rockfall and pull themselves up into the next stretch of the passage which continues to rise, doubling back above where they had been. Now they’re avidly scanning the sand on the floor of the tunnel, looking for any more sign of Flavia. But the tunnel floor is too generally disturbed, with nothing conclusive for them to claim as hers.
Another bottleneck makes them climb again. This one features an entire cypress tree that either washed into this tunnel long ago or was somehow placed here. They climb its broken limbs up a long chimney to scramble out onto a short platform. The air is freshening. Light spills from the far end of the tunnel.
They ascend to it. More branches and logs litter this passage, but none block it. Bespelled, they move forward with rising urgency. It is clear what they’ve found before they reach the end. This is a tunnel all the way through the cliffs to the hidden valleys within. There is a passage after all and this is it. The island is unlocked. All its riches are now theirs.
Miriam strains forward, Triquet and Amy no less excited. They don’t even need to speak. The climb is a blur of stumbles and gasps and labored breathing. For a hundred meters they hurry forward until Miriam suddenly stops, raising her hand. “Hear that?”
Triquet and Amy listen. Voices. The easy gabble of a chattering group. More than two, that’s for certain. The voices are indistinct but they aren’t speaking English. It almost sounds like Brazilian Portuguese, lots of vowels in a fluid lyrical cadence. Overlapping sounds. But none of it is angry or distressed.
They cautiously walk forward, alert now. They are perhaps twenty meters from the ragged seam of the tunnel’s exit when the voices suddenly fall silent.
Miriam stops. She shares a worried grimace with Triquet and Amy. They’ve obviously been discovered somehow. But how? And now what? Should they retreat? Move on?
As they have a discussion of silent gesticulations, a silhouette appears in the seam, blocking most of the light. It is a little old man, childlike, with long curly ringlets falling to his waist. He waves his hand in front of his face, as if clearing the air, and then he raises that hand in welcome. “Dobree denda du ya’aak.” His sibilant voice fills the tunnel, then he adds another couple phrases in his singsong chant. As he finishes, a catlike creature steals upward and perches on his shoulder to get a look at them.
The researchers don masks and gloves. “Uh… Hello, mate. We are… uh, we’re looking for our friend.” Miriam looks at Triquet. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just a bloody geologist. You do this. Aren’t you trained in first contact protocols or something?”
Triquet holds their hands up. “This isn’t Star Trek. I’m just a bloody archaeologist. I don’t deal with humans. Just their things.”
It is Amy who hurries forward, hands pressed to her forehead in what she hopes is a universal symbol of peace and respect. “Hi, sir. Hello. It is such an honor to meet you.” She stops at a safe distance and holds her pose. The old man only watches, posture relaxed with all his weight on one hip, as his pet sniffs the air. “That’s a fox. That’s a—a lisica!” Amy points at the animal, her biologist joy overcoming her caution.
“Lisica.” The old man points at the fox. Then a rush of polyglot follows. Amy gave him the impression of knowing his language and now the linguistic floodgates are open. He beckons to them and turns, walking back out into the light.
With an apprehensive look at both the others, Amy edges toward the light. Triquet lifts the blue strap connecting them, thinking if it’s some kind of trap they can yank her back to safety.
After so long underground, the diffuse gray daylight is too much. Amy emerges blinking, wishing she could actually see the world she has finally entered. But she catches just brief snapshots at first: a flat space beside this interior cliff filled with bark longhouses; a crackling fire above which a dozen blackened trout are suspended; a cluster of small people in shifts and loincloths staring at her.
Amy’s hands return to her forehead in Buddhist appeal. She smiles her most beatific smile and walks slowly forward, hoping there aren’t a pair of warriors on either side of her with obsidian axes like Aztec priests. But no, when she looks to either side there is no ambush. Just curiosity.
“Uh. Flavia. My friend. Have you seen her?”
But the nine or ten people only watch her in silence. Now that her eyes are starting to work better she can pick out their fine features and wild range of skin and hair colors. Only a few are golden blond. Others have red hair and the rest have black. But all of them possess long ringlets. Their skin tone ranges from dark brown to ruddy and their faces possess snub noses and pointed chins. It is difficult at first glance to determine gender. She is as tall as the tallest one.
Triquet emerges from behind Amy. “Hello,” they say, waving. “Lovely place. We’re absolutely harmless. Did she tell you?”
Then Miriam emerges. At a loss, she bows to the group. Over her shoulder, she whispers, “Have we found Flavia yet?”
“I was just asking.”
One of the older villagers waddles forward, thin and tough as tree roots. In her gnarled hands she holds a cluster of shells somehow fixed together. She talks as she approaches, a rising and falling cadence that is impossible to follow. The word koox̱ is repeated again and again.
“Did I hear the word ‘American’ in there?” Amy asks.
“I thought I heard ‘colonel.” Triquet holds their hand out for the shells, which the villager is trying to share. “Ah. Ahh.” There is a photo affixed at the center of the shells, making them the frame of a kind of plaque. It is black and white, of a woman with blonde curls. “Yes. Maureen Dowerd. Yes, we know. We know her.”
The crowd erupts, all of them speaking at once. These are known words. They repeat them. “Maureen!” and “Dowerd!” again and again. The chatter begins again from all sides. Others emerge, perhaps thirty in all. The people of Lisica.
Chapter 9 – More Useful
February 26, 2024
Thanks for joining us on our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this chapter:
9 – More Useful
The storm rages for three days. The ten of them remain trapped in the bunker for the duration. It is a grim marathon, punctuated by incoherent breakdowns from Alonso, Pradeep, Flavia, then nearly everyone else. The claustrophobia nearly does Amy in, and she finds herself weeping in Triquet’s arms one night for hours.
For Jay it’s the unrelenting ferocity of the storm. As a California boy his experience with storms is spotty. He’s definitely been out in some ragers, and he’s quite aware of the infinite power of the Pacific Ocean, but this is an assault. Like this is an unrelenting hammer and anvil where physics beats biology every time. It feels like the island will get torn up by the roots and carried away. He didn’t know that storms could be so insane.
Miriam feels like she is sinking in a leaky lifeboat and she only has her cupped hands to bail. Alonso is offline. When he isn’t babbling about AK-47s and gopniks he is asleep. Any decisions that need to be made are now hers to make. At one point, during her darkest hour, Miriam approaches Amy and asks if she knows of any emergency beacon or transmitter that Alonso had privately revealed to her. Because it’s time to hit it. Call in the Marines. But of course Amy knows nothing. Miriam asks Esquibel the same thing, but she only crosses her arms and presses her mouth into a line. “No. Devices would be useless anyway. Like any signal could penetrate these clouds.”
Esquibel is most concerned with Mandy. She has lost all reason. The Doctor sets up a nice cot for her in the clean room, where she attends her nearly the entire three days, sleeping at her side, making sure she feeds herself, and when Mandy tries once again to run out into the storm, forcibly holding her down and demanding her permission to sedate her. After an hour of shouting at each other she finally gets through and the girl meekly lies down and lets Esquibel give her two Benadryl and a Valium. She is asleep soon.
Triquet keeps the endurance racer’s mindset from the beginning. They are the only one who does not collapse. There had been a point at the beginning of their career, crouched in a Guatemalan pit toilet with the dysentery shits as rebel gunfire suddenly echoed through the jungle and killed their guide Topo, when they realized archaeology would some day kill them. The sudden clarity of that epiphany has never left them, and they are at peace with their destiny. They certainly hope it will be later—much later—rather than sooner, but this big old bad world has it out for everybody, and this tremendous storm is just the latest threat to their existence. Poor Maahjabeen. Triquet only hopes she didn’t suffer too much before departing to her Islamic afterlife.
On the morning of the third day the wind finally eases. Mandy is up an hour before dawn, lacing her boots. Esquibel opens her eyes and only watches, weary and heavy-limbed. “Mandy, no… You should wait for light.”
“I have to see.”
“You can’t see. There’s no light.”
“Well I can’t stay here. Not for another moment.” Mandy pulls on her blue storm shell and zips it to her chin. Esquibel is already up and lacing her boots as well. Mandy holds up a hand. “Oh, you don’t have to join—”
“Save it.” Esquibel lifts a portable work light. Its beam function should be sufficient. She grabs her coat as they head for the door of the bunker.
Outside is a ruin. They had brought nearly everything they could inside before things got too bad but the parachute they’d left hung in the trees is now just thin torn strips. The platforms are piles of scattered sticks. A multitude of thick branches have fallen across their path, making navigation to the beach nearly impossible. One of the giant redwoods has fallen, the width of its trunk now four meters tall. Mandy climbs its rough bark, gentle rain still falling.
At the top of the fallen trunk the last of the storm whips her, the air heavy and wet but no longer cold. Over the southeastern sea she can see a pale stripe in the sky that promises dawn and clear skies. Good. By the time she makes her way down to the beach, there should be light enough.
Mandy is bruised, stunned by the apocalyptic days she just endured. She still can’t forgive herself for letting Maahjabeen go, but at least she is admitting to herself that if she had stayed out in the storm she would have died like fifteen different ways.
Despite the obvious risks out here, Esquibel is glad to be outside. But her relief is short-lived. Fatigue steals up on her. She is used to open-ended shifts of intense caregiving, especially during her deployments, but this has been one of her longest. She is light-headed now, nearly delirious, only keeping it together through strength of will. They will take a quick look at the beach, realize Maahjabeen is still gone and how impossible her survival is, then go back to the cot and fall asleep in each other’s arms.
And to Mandy’s dismay, that is exactly what happens.
Ξ
Triquet is belowdecks with Katrina, stringing a line of work lights into the new chambers they’ve discovered. This room is narrow, lined with impossibly cramped bunks for the engine crew. An old odor of pipe tobacco and mildew still somehow lingers. As Katrina dresses the cable along the floor she finds an ammunition box under the furthest bunk.
“Uh, hold up, Triq. We got ourselves a live one here.”
Triquet squeals. Today they wear a galibayah—a striped cotton Egyptian shift, and black knit skullcap under their helmet, in a more somber vein. They just haven’t felt it is appropriate to wear fashion and makeup since the loss of Maahjabeen. They hitch the long skirt up and crouch beside Katrina to stare at the olive green container. “Ammo box. They usually don’t have ammo, though. Waterproof and bombproof. A lot of soldiers kept their valuables in them back then.”
“But what if it is ammunition?”
Triquet frowns. “Yeah… that could be a problem. Explosives can decay and become unstable. I mean, it’s a small chance, but… You’re right, you should probably back away.”
Katrina does so. “What are you gonna do?”
“Uhh. I know. There’s that sink back in the tip. That big enamel monster in the corner. Help me get it.”
They retreat two rooms to the chamber under the control room, where even the largest pieces have now been arranged and placed in rows. They lift the heavy sink and bring it back through the two hatches to rest it on the deck right in front of the ammo box.
“Now I’m just going to…” Triquet unlaces a boot and ties the cord to the handle of the ammo box. Then they tilt the sink at an angle, resting its top edge against the bunk. “Step back again. I’ll drag it until we get it under the sink. Then we drop the sink on it. Blast shield, right?”
“Right.” Katrina withdraws to the hatch as Triquet gently draws the ammo box across the deck toward the sink, which waits like the traps Elmer Fudd used to leave for Bugs Bunny. Thank god for Triquet. When everyone else fell the fuck apart, good old Triquet came through, organizing breakfast and clearing the area around the bunker of storm wreckage before asking for a volunteer to accompany them down here. Katrina has felt so hopeless, watching all these others battle their demons through the dark days and nights. But for her, it’s just more of how she has felt taking care of her brother Pavel. He’d always been ravaged by dark thoughts, even as a child, but now after a year in the gulag he is worse than ever. He’s drawn himself into such a subterranean place that he has gone inert. Katrina can only hope that healing is happening in there. That he is not becoming stuck forever in his dark place.
But now she has seen that phenomenon writ large. A good half dozen people nearly lost their minds in the bunker over the last few days. It was the worst camp-out she’d ever attended, lol. LMAO. ROFL. The acronyms are as heavy as stones in her mind. Yes… losing Maahjabeen has taken even Katrina’s humor away.
“And… so far so good.” Triquet crouches beside the sink. “Help me drop it now.” They gently shift the sink so that it covers the box, resting it upside-down on the deck. Then Triquet stands on a nearby bunk and shoos Katrina back to the hatch. “Ready?”
Katrina nods, not knowing what they are about to do.
Triquet yanks on the boot lace, still tied to the ammo box handle. With each yank, they knock it against the interior of the sink, again and again.
Katrina squints in anticipation, her fingers in her ears.
After a few moments of this, Triquet stops. “See? What I figured. Probably personal possessions. Juicy ones I hope.”
They lift the sink away and Triquet puts a white workcloth in their lap with the ammo box on top. They turn on the headlamp and camera on their helmet. The latch on the ammo box is rusted and needs to be forced, but with a clack it finally releases and the lid creaks open.
Triquet peers within. “Oo, look,” they fish out a foil-wrapped oblong. “Wrigley’s spearmint. You like gum?” They set it aside and draw out a stack of papers. “This is bizarre. I mean, What I don’t understand is how someone could just forget their personal effects. Here. Look. What kind of emergency bugout had to happen…” The stack of papers contains a passport. “See? They even forgot their passport. How could—?” Triquet opens the passport and glances at its contents. Their face goes sober. “Ah. Aha. Well then. That’s how.”
“What? What is it?” Katrina leans forward.
The passport contains a black and white photo of a middle-aged woman with a narrow face and dark lipstick, a 1950s hairstyle forcing her blonde curls into strange shapes. Her name is MAUREEN CATHERINE DOWERD.
“M.C. Dowerd is the gravestone in the trees. She didn’t forget her valuables, Katrina. I guess after she died, everyone else did.”
Ξ
Alonso sits in his camp chair behind the trap door in the corner, out of everyone’s way. His anguish sizzles in him like oil on a pan. He can’t seem to get past it. There is nothing but this pain. He has always suffered it and he will always suffer it and everything else is an abstraction, a comfortable luxury that he can ill afford. The words ring hollow in his head, shorn of meaning: Miriam. Plexity. Lisica. Remember when they were important? They had been the pillars of his sanity. He supposes that is gone now. His sanity has been swept away in that storm along with that poor Tunisian girl. Yet another burden he will carry forever. He will have to contact her family and promise restitution, debase himself with apologies.
Hot tears run down his cheeks again. He has always been weepy for sure, all that opera and those Cuban boleros growing up. They just open your heart. But now his eyes leak like his heart bleeds. He is fracturing, disassembling from grief. And all these people here, gathered from the four corners of the globe at his request, are all waiting on him.
And he can’t do a thing for them.
His hands rest on the cane, massaging its handle. His ruined feet curl under him, in an awkward position that hurts the least. They had broken him in pieces like Humpty Dumpty. And all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again. He has been atomized. Like the opposite of Plexity. They’ve beaten him into isolated bits and all the connective tissue is gone.
That poor child Mandy rouses again, crying out in the clean room. Here is yet another casualty laid at Alonso’s door. How many years of therapy will she require after the last few days? Oh, dios mio… He is ill from the wash of guilt sweeping through him, so he sighs raggedly and closes his eyes. It is all too unbearable.
Mandy breaks free of Esquibel’s embrace and slips through the clean room exit. Alonso opens his eyes to glimpse her bruised eyes and pallid cheeks. Poor dear thing. Ruined.
He has to think of something—anything—that he can contribute to this community he has created. His big Cuban family. If he only had a barbecue he could make them all some Mojo Criollo. But he has none of the meats or spices, not to mention the tools and a barbecue itself, as well as the strength to stand for more than a few seconds at a time. No. Useless. All he can do now is stay out of the way. Make sure that they don’t need to spend their few resources taking care of him. Shrink into yourself, Alonso. It is his only course.
Ξ
The sky is still gray, with dark streamers dropping sheets of rain from time to time. Mandy strides past Amy and Pradeep collecting all the wreckage from the platforms. She climbs the redwood trunk and navigates a fallen bay tree, its aromatic leaves all around her. Then she descends to the shore, filled with piles of sea grass and dead crustaceans. The gulls and other birds are pecking at the harvest, unconcerned by the human in their midst. A single dead sea lion lies rolled on its side, a giant red gash in its black tail.
Mandy reaches the edge of the beach as a fresh shower douses her. The lagoon is still dark. The open ocean has settled into bands of blue, the waves coming in orderly rows. She stands and watches them, vowing not to leave.
The clouds sail across the southern sky and it breaks open. Flavia locates Mandy on the shore hours later. She stands on the redwood trunk behind her, admiring the strands of Mandy’s long hair and scarves flapping in the wind like Cordelia, waiting for her life to begin again.
“Ai, Mandy is here!” Flavia calls out to the others who have come looking with her. Amy has been distracted by the bounties of the fallen redwood and Triquet has decided to try to skirt the fallen behemoth, back toward the grove and around its uprooted base.
The lagoon is settling now. Such a beautiful view, like some of Flavia’s favorite spots on the Ligurian coast. But those are warm enough to swim in and this, no. Never. Ah, look! Flavia is surprised to see curved black dorsal fins running in a line of three behind the line of surf. Are they sharks? They must be the biggest sharks in the whole world! Amy should see them. One rolls onto its side, lifting a pectoral fin, and flashes its black and white patches. Oh! It is one of those killer whales! Like in the movies! “Amy! Amy, come! You have to see! I think it’s killer whales!”
Amy pops up, giving Flavia a little moue of excitement.
Flavia turns back to them. “At first I thought they were sharks but then one showed me his…” Flavia falls silent.
Amy clambers up the side of the redwood trunk, its corrugated bark providing easy hand and foot holds. “Showed you his what?” But Flavia has an indescribable look on her face.
Amy follows her gaze. There, out on the water, three dorsal fins cut behind the surf. And following them is a yellow kayak.
“Ahh!” Amy gasps, flinging her arm out. “Maahjabeen!” She screams in wild joy and clambers from the trunk. Amy fights her way through the fallen bay tree, Flavia finally rousing herself and falling in beside her. They reach Mandy before she has seen from her lower vantage point. Flavia wraps her in her arms, babbling incoherently, and finally Amy turns them to the sea as Maahjabeen surfs through the rollers and carves her way through the lagoon mouth, her arms stiff and her posture wrong. But once she reaches the safety of the still water she turns her boat and lifts her paddle to the sky, calling out to the three orcas who remained behind. “Netcharfou! Yaishek!”
After they depart, she turns back to the shore. She is so depleted she can only move robotically, favoring one side. Mandy is on her knees, crying out to her. The kayak skids to a halt in the sand.
Maahjabeen can’t get herself out. Flavia and Amy try to lift her but she has no strength left. “Okay,” Amy realizes. “Nice and slow. Step by step. Get your legs under you.”
“I can’t—” Maahjabeen’s unused voice halts. She shakes her head no. “I can’t feel my legs.”
“Are they… are you injured?”
Maahjabeen shakes her head no. But she holds up four fingers. “Four times. Four times I tried to get back. Whenever it looked like there would be a gap in the storm.”
“But where were you?” Flavia unzips Maahjabeen’s wind shell, stiff with salt, and wraps her warmer coat around her. “Come on. Just hold on to my neck and we’ll get you out.”
“Four times.” Maahjabeen shakes her head in dismay, unable to communicate in those two words how many hours of terror in the dark on the water that meant. How many times she had believed herself lost. How the cold had been like knives one abysmal night when she was stranded on a seastack. There are no words to describe what she has gone through. But she needs to tell them the most important parts. Before she passes out. “There is a beach. Another one.”
“Another beach!” Amy crows. “Amazing! You are such a hero. So you sheltered there? ”
“Well. Mostly. I—I dug a hole in the sand and turned my kayak over and I was in there for almost two days. But then after I tried to paddle back I nearly died and spent a whole night out on the water. When I got back to the beach the second time I discovered this.” Her shaking hand holds up her phone, displaying a picture.
It is a shadowed image of another concrete bunker.
“I was able to spend the last night in there.”
Triquet arrives in a rush just as Maahjabeen shares this. They shower her return with squeals of joy and delight. Then they give the revealed image the same delirious reaction. “Magnificent! Look at all that trash! Oh, I can spend the rest of my life on this island!”
They all laugh, and with Triquet’s help they’re able to pull Maahjabeen from her kayak. She groans in pain, trembling. Something isn’t right with her back. After bracing the fiberglass shell against the wind that tore at her for two days, something has locked up in her spine. And her shoulders aren’t properly working anymore either after the night on the seastack.
“Let’s get you back inside and cleaned up.” Amy holds her up with a strong arm around her waist. “Can you walk?”
“I don’t know.” Maahjabeen stumbles. Their progress across the beach is slow and awkward. They can’t drape her arms over their shoulders because of the pain.
Triquet makes a face. “Maybe we carry her. Make a travois.”
“No. I’ll be fine. I can make it. Oh!” Maahjabeen blinks at the wreckage on the beach. “Look what happened here!”
Triquet leads the others around the base of the fallen redwood through the grove. “But wait,” Maahjabeen says, pulling on them to stop, her voice a bit querulous. “The last important part.” She sways among the upthrust roots of the fallen giant.
“Yes?” Flavia prompts her.
“The orcas. They brought me back when it was safe. They knew. They knew everything. I’d have never survived without…”
Maahjabeen swoons and Triquet catches her before she falls.
Ξ
In his downtime, Jay reads fantasy novels on his phone. He has an entire library, from old classics to new fanfic. He likes exploration stories best, where a hero adventures alone or with a small band into lands that no human has seen, and they encounter strange new life forms and magic and always—always—a dark secret that only the hero can truly deal with. The formula comforts him, and the fanciful descriptions of different worlds have only become more preposterous the more he learns of field biology in the real world.
Now, he’s having trouble getting into the next story. There’s a blue elf on the edge of a magical forest, gripping his spear and singing about seventeen verses of a song before he’s about to enter. But now that Jay has actually done it in real life—gone alone into the magical forest of an untamed land—he finds that the author has no idea what the hell they’re talking about. Who the fuck is singing songs? Where’s the anxiety, the careful re-checking of gear, the exhaustion you have to shake off after all the hoops you jumped through just to get to the edge of the forest to begin with? This pap is just written by some kid in the suburbs who has never journeyed farther than the local grocery store and whose only idea of nature is an interpretive trail at a state park.
Jay puts his phone down. For one of the first times ever, the spell can’t be sustained. He realizes it’s because he no longer has any need for the escapism. He did it. He’s already in the magical forest on the old haunted island. And it came with bumps and bruises—pretty much all self-inflicted, sure—but he doesn’t need to read about a fictional fantasy when he’s actually living it on the daily.
Maybe he’ll start writing. It’s never been his strong suit. He was diagnosed dyslexic once as a kid and then not dyslexic by like six other specialists but reading and writing still came late to him, only after the characters had stopped wandering all over the page and finally settled down. But the idea of a short story is imposing. That’s a lot of text, and he’s already deep in his field notes each day for hours.
Maybe poetry. Jay grins. He likes that idea. There’s magic here in this world. Maybe he can figure out ways to capture it in verse. “I mean, I’m no Kendrick Lamar but I can spit some mean bars.”
Someone is moving outside the small cell Jay inhabits. This had been Amy’s four walls of woven reeds until he’d hurt himself and she had taken to sleeping like a cat in the corners. He has to make sure she gets it back as soon as possible. His words stop whoever it is passing by. A slow-moving bulk fills his door. It is Alonso.
He blinks at Jay, his watery eyes swimming up from the depths. “I remember, Jay. I remember what I forgot when I split my head. Who I saw. You will never believe this but there is a—”
Miriam, working on her laptop near the bunker’s door, cries out in an excess of emotion, drowning out Alonso. He falls silent as she rushes the door.
Maahjabeen enters, held up by four others. Frail and tottering, but it is really her. Alonso gasps. He cannot believe his eyes. Nearly collapsing, he leans on his cane as a long groan escapes him.
“What is it?” Jay can’t see what they see. He is filled with alarm. Miriam sounds like she saw a ghost. “What, Alonso?”
But Alonso doesn’t even hear Jay. He waddles forward, pain and guilt forgotten for one sweet moment of relief so sharp he cannot contain it. He bellows, releasing the grief.
“Oh my god.” Esquibel exits the clean room and sees them. “Oh my god. Oh my god.” She rushes back into the clean room then rushes right back out again, holding a random piece of medical gear. She can’t get over her shock. “No, bring her in. Bring her in.” Esquibel shakes her head in wonder at the miracle. No, she has never been religious. But it is a miracle nevertheless. The odds of Maahjabeen surviving the last three days must be infinitesimal. Well, that is the miracle. The beating of impossible odds with human ingenuity and endurance.
They lay Maahjabeen down gently in the cot Mandy had used. Then Esquibel shoos the lot of them out, dismayed by the amount of dirt and sand they’ve tracked in. “Now I’ll have to sanitize everything again.”
Esquibel assesses her patient as she gathers her things for an exam. Maahjabeen has definitely suffered from exposure. She watches the doctor with glittering eyes but doesn’t speak.
Esquibel hands Maahjabeen water but the woman shakes her head no. “Water is the only thing… I had.”
“Food?”
“Ran out two days ago.”
Esquibel laughs, passing a hand over Maahjabeen’s forehead and slipping a thermometer into her mouth. “You sure are a tough girl, aren’t you? No simple storm was going to take you out.”
“God… was not willing.”
It’s the closest thing to a joke Maahjabeen has told and Esquibel laughs in appreciation. “First we will start with some of Amy’s tea and broth. You need electrolytes more than anything. I can give it as a shot if you…” But Maahjabeen has passed out. “Yes. Let’s do that then. And maybe a glucose drip. Let’s just put together a nice little cocktail here…”
When Esquibel inserts the IV, Maahjabeen doesn’t even flinch.
Ξ
Alonso once again sits in his camp chair under the trees. The wreckage has been cleared into piles that ring their camp. Pradeep and Katrina are busy rebuilding the platforms with all the new material the storm provided. They are getting ambitious with their ideas. Does he hear something about a deck and walkways? Those crazy kids. Where do they get all this energy?
Miriam approaches, folding her reading glasses into their case and closing her laptop. He sees her face transform from the cogitating academic to the suffering wife as she steps toward him and he resolves to keep himself from further ruining her mood. He is so tired of his self-pity. “Eh, Mirrie. What are you working on?”
She looks at him blankly, as if he spoke a language she doesn’t know. But no. That really was Alonso, speaking like a man again. Keeping her face carefully neutral, so as not to upset whatever delicate balance has led to this fine moment, Miriam says, “New rock and soil samples everywhere after the storm. I’ve got these feldspar flakes. Pattern-matching their crystallography against a database. You?”
He lifts a careless hand. “Haven’t you heard? I’m revolutionizing data science!”
They both share a soft laugh. She puts a hand on his shoulder. It’s Maahjabeen’s return. It has lightened all their hearts. Lisica is no longer a tragedy limping along as a failed science expedition. The tragedy has been reversed and it’s a science expedition again and they haven’t lost a soul. In fact, in the case of Alonso, they might actually regain one.
She asks, “How many beaches are there here, do you imagine?”
“Who knows? The map they showed me only had this one, I think. All of our focus was here. They said cliffs surrounded the island everywhere else so I assumed that meant this was it.”
Miriam thrills to hear his rational thought process again. During the storm she was afraid he’d collapsed into some alternate insanity that he would never escape. Now it looks like Alonso might heal, even from this. Oh, when will the suffering ever end?
He can see the attenuation in her face, her emotional reserves taxed more deeply than any time since her brother’s suicide. That had been their last dark time. It had seemed to last an eternity before she’d found the strength to go on. Now he couldn’t be responsible for adding any more pain to her life. He must be strong for her. The words Miriam and Plexity and Lisica have regained their meaning again, now that Maahjabeen has returned. He might even be able to accomplish some actual work today.
She sees all this play out on his face and Miriam’s heart uncoils a bit more. Can it truly be? She squeezes his hand. Is he back for good? Will she actually be able to focus on geology again? Their best vacations were always work trips for her, where he would stay back and cook for her and massage her shoulders when she was done. She misses his strong hands.
“Can we get into the interior, Zo? You don’t have to tell me details. Just a simple yes or no.”
He holds up a hand in a shrug. “Maybe at the end. They might bring a helicopter back.”
“And until then? I’m just here on the beach? You’re wasting prime Doctor Truitt field time, dear. I could be much more useful elsewhere. Not that I don’t need a vacation. But anyway, let me tell you what I really have in mind next: prospecting for caves. I’d bet if I dig into the limestone shelf behind the waterfall I’d find all kinds of fascinating things.”
But his mind is working now, she can see that. Alonso pats his pockets and frowns. “Could you bring me my laptop, Mirrie dear? And the brick?”
“And the battery and your glasses and a cup of tea. Coming right up.” She had been about to offer him a glass of wine and now she is so glad she did not. There will be more time for celebration later. Now, it is time to work.
Ξ
The celebration finally begins in the afternoon. Amy and Miriam erect the Love Palace on the larger platform that Pradeep is trying to extend in a long walkway to the bunker. Katrina has left him to it so she can set up her sound system again. The cascading strings of a Northern African pop song begin her set.
Maahjabeen, lying on a cot under the sky, lifts her wobbly head in surprise. “Eh. That’s Amani Al Souwasi. I love this song!”
Katrina squeals. “Oh, good! I looked and looked through my tracks. So glad I had a Tunisian. Her voice is amazing.”
Maahjabeen settles again with a smile on her face. She had been haunted those three unending days of the storm with visions of the others rejecting her, with good reason. She’d endangered them all by going out so recklessly onto the open water. Maahjabeen had jeopardized the entire mission. She expected when she returned that they would scream at her and cancel her contract. But there is none of that. No recriminations anywhere. Only Mandy, and her reproach is just for herself. It will be up to Maahjabeen to hold herself accountable here. Well. She definitely has enough self-criticism for that.
Flavia sits beside her with a lopsided smile, holding a tray of food. “Ready for dinner?”
“Starving. Eh.” It still hurts to talk. Her throat is so raw. Too much screaming and crying. “Glucose doesn’t really fill you up.”
“This is mostly broth with just a few noodles and veg. Here. We will start slow.” Flavia feeds her like a baby, tucking a napkin under her chin.
The salty broth tastes so good. Flavia dabs her chin and feeds her another spoonful.
Maahjabeen hates being helpless, hates being waited on. But still it is so nice to find that they care. Flavia cares. Nobody has fed her like this since she broke her collarbone in school and her mother had tended her and given her sponge baths.
Ah! She can’t think of her mother in this state. She is too raw. A sudden sob escapes her, making a mess of the broth. Flavia pulls back, startled and concerned.
“Oh, no. Too fast?” Flavia sets the bowl down and cleans the hot liquid from Maahjabeen’s neck and shoulders.
“No… You just… You made me think of my mom. Feeding me like a baby.”
“Ah. Yes, your mama.” Flavia sighs and shakes her head in pity. “This has not been your year.”
Maahjabeen doesn’t know how to respond to that. Actually, her career has really taken off since she has cast herself free. She has seen more of the world in the last twelve months than nearly the whole rest of her life combined. And opportunities like Lisica would not come too often, she knows. But inside? In the moments before she goes to sleep? Yes. Hot coals. And such isolation. She feels like the only person in the whole world.
Flavia uses a fresh napkin to wipe Maahjabeen’s cheeks free of tears. “There, there. Povero caro.” Now that the fierce Tunisian woman has taken herself to the edge of death, her proud shell has cracked. Flavia likes her a lot more now. “Your mama. Did she come to you? During the storm? In the darkness?”
Maahjabeen only shakes her head no. Nobody came. The nights were spent alone in a breathless suspension of anxiety and discomfort. None of her ancestors ever visited. Only the orcas.
Katrina mixes a classical piece in with her beloved Amani. Perhaps Haydn? It actually sounds good. Even the kick drum. Flavia nods her head in time to the beat. “Eh, our little Bubblegum DJ is pretty sharp. Her music makes me want to dance.”
But first she will finish feeding Maahjabeen. She was sure her mother would have visited. Even an imaginary visit, with all those hours and nothing to think about. Flavia can’t comprehend what Maahjabeen just went through. “I swear, I would have lasted about ten seconds in that storm. I do not know how you did it.”
“At one point my arms failed. My shoulders just wouldn’t work and I tried to lift the paddle but I couldn’t. And a current took me. It was going to smash me against the rocks and there was nothing I could do. Then the orcas appeared. They steered me right out of there back to the open ocean. They saved me, Flavia.”
“That is incredible.”
“And they led me home this morning. They told me when it was time and which way to go. God came to me through them.”
“Incredible.”
Ξ
It has taken all day for Pradeep to adjust to this new storm-tossed reality. And his mental state is still not entirely what it should be. A refrain has been echoing in his head since losing his sanity in front of everyone on more than one occasion. Not good enough not strong enough not tough enough – I don’t belong here… Over and over in an unending cycle. He can hardly look anyone in the eyes now.
But he is grateful for Katrina’s kindness, giving him a task to retreat into, and the effort he puts into rebuilding the platforms bigger and better than before is fueled by his quivering antisocial need to retreat deeply into himself. That is how he will heal.
Amy finds him near the end, when he is building his own platform. He gets a larger deck than he expected because of all the leftover wood. Without asking, Amy organizes the final pile and hands him each branch as he needs it. The work goes quickly.
At the end, he ties off the last joint with twine and stands, his back sore and shoulders burning. He dusts himself off and finds Amy still looking wordlessly at him, but letting him know with one of her irrepressible smiles that she has something for him.
Pradeep sighs. She is still his boss. This is still a job, even though his stipend is pitiful, not even four thousand dollars. He nods, trying to muster a competent air, and follows her out to the beach.
They walk alongside the trunk of the massive fallen redwood in silence. The deep corrugations of its bark—as seen with eye-along trunk, stretching away to the flaring root base—is a deep pattern, mathematics beyond what he can easily conceptualize. But it is still mathematics. The growth of this tremendous organism was as much a mechanical process as a biological one.
Finally Amy brings him to the base. It is truly a massive tree. Its trunk is over five meters in diameter here and the roots that were torn from the ground spread skyward now a good ten meters above his head. They skirt the wreckage, pushing themselves through the ceanothus and ferns. Huge shards of bright orange and red wood litter the area, as if the tree exploded. The underside is cavernous.
Pradeep exhales in wonder. “Oooooo.”
Amy laughs, the silence finally broken. “I knew you’d like it.”
When the tree had fallen, the peripheral roots had snapped and then the central root system had failed. The gust that had taken this tree down must have been immense. Pradeep touches the twisted roots, hard as iron. “This is another sign of anthropogenic global warming. We see no other trees of this size on this beach. And it wasn’t diseased. Therefore the storm that brought it down is measurably more intense than the ones that came before, or we would otherwise have a beach littered with the trees that had fallen in previous storms, quod erat demonstrandum.”
Amy smiles, relieved to have him talking again. These unearthed treasures should keep him busy a good long time. There appears to be an abandoned bobcat den on the periphery of the root system, with piles of bones and scat. Cavities in the rock and soil that have been unearthed are thick with the silk of spider eggs and floor-dwelling arthropods of many varieties. A whole writhing mass of larvae under a fallen sheet of bark still strive to develop.
And then there’s the interactions between soil and root and mycorrhizal fungi, which was always of particular interest to Pradeep. Here, Alonso’s Dyson readers would be invaluable.
“We passed this when we were carrying Maahjabeen back and I thought my god but I didn’t have time to stop. I knew this would be your happiest place. But I myself can’t wait to get a look at the crown. I think it’s accessible. Are you coming?”
Pradeep looks up at Amy, lost already in this miniature world of minerals and microbiology and artifacts. Tree forensics. They have called it that before. While walking in the woods they would stop when they saw fallen trees, discussing how they fell and what caused the initial failure. In crowded conditions it can take a long time to untangle which tree fell first and why. “Eh? Coming? No. But look, Amy. It wasn’t just the wind that knocked it over.”
He points at the exact underside of the tree’s heartwood. It is seared black in a wide jagged crescent. A similar scar in the remaining underground bole is visible under the fallen earth.
“Is that from lightning? Ye gods.” Amy reorders what she sees in her head. Those burst roots aren’t from being forced apart by the wind. Now she can pick out the black edges of certain shards. This trunk was blown out. A bolt with horrific power must have hit it somewhere up its length and shot through all the way into the ground. It must have gone off like a bomb. There were certainly explosions aplenty during the storm. This must have been one of them. “I wonder, is the poor bole dead too? Is this how you kill a redwood? Can its heart survive such a massive lightning strike?”
“How would we even be able to tell?”
“Well, anyway, so much for your climate change proof. This wasn’t necessarily a stronger storm. Unless the degree to which a storm is electrical is modified by anthropogenic factors. Which would be pretty amazing. Is there any data on that?”
“I have no idea. Maybe we can ask Mandy. But what about the surrounding ecology?” Pradeep ranges past the edges of the pit, where whole stands of ferns and buckthorn are crushed by the raw wood fragments. What about the small rodents who lived beneath? The crabs? The insects? “You know… I am not sure if this is what Plexity is really for. I get the sense we are supposed to be trying to measure the island as an entity that is in homeostasis. But this is such a new and dramatic reordering of the local context that, I don’t know, doesn’t it skew everything out of balance? Too much emphasis in favor of one recent dramatic event instead of the thousand years that this tree stood? How do we place correct value on each frame of reference? I suppose that is really a question for Flavia and Katrina…”
“Aw, now I worry that the crown might be blasted clean away. You’re okay here? If I leave you alone?”
Pradeep has trouble meeting Amy’s eyes. But he knows she deserves some recognition of his issue. It is certainly affecting his performance. “Yes. These are the things I study. Nothing is more familiar and comforting to me. Thank you, Doctor Kubota. I have not always had such understanding teachers and bosses in my life. My weakness was always something I had to hide.”
Amy grimaces. “No. Not weakness, Pradeep. Don’t think of it like that. You aren’t weak, by any measure. Right? You must see that. You have, I mean, you’re so competent in so many ways. Some of what you do is like superhero capability.”
“But I still can’t travel to Tucson without a panic attack.”
“Who can? No, but seriously. Ask yourself. Go back in time to yourself as, what, like a nine or ten year old kid? Tell him where you are now and what you’re doing, out here in the wide open world with some of the brightest minds of our time. Tell him he made it! He didn’t remain a prisoner to his fear.”
“Well. If we’re going back that far, can we just tell my parents instead? I think it would have probably been more useful.”
Chapter 7 – The Tunnels
February 12, 2024
Thanks for joining us on our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this chapter:
7 – The Tunnels
Katrina wakes up, her head full of sand, her eyes sticky, her heart hollow. Yeh. That was a trip all right. Now she’s tangled with Jay in bed in the Captain’s cabin underground. It’s pretty dark but a ray of silver light somehow leaks through the boat and down the hall to reflect on the far wall. She takes a deep breath.
Jay is snoring. She giggles joylessly, depleted. Patting the top of his head she tries to pull her limbs clear. They’d been holding each other desperately, wrapped tight. Still fully clothed she’s somewhat surprised that things hadn’t gone farther than they had. At one point she’d started feeling like a dirty girl, grinding against him as the Detroit electro got going. That shit always made her wet. But the sweet boy hadn’t responded in kind. It had frustrated her at the time but she is absolutely relieved now. He’d had some kind of emotional breakthrough instead and gotten all saccharine and romantic. In the end it had been so innocent and pure.
He’d told her he loved her.
Well. Let’s see if that still holds true when his head feels done in.
What is the last thing she remembers? The visuals had been amazing. They’d watched blotches of color pinwheel across the ceiling like clouds, talking about their upbringings. She’d been raised by her single dad. He’d been raised by his single mom. This realization of shared experience led to another flood of tears and desperate embraces from Jay.
What a teddy bear. She can’t remember the last time she’d made herself so available to a man and had him treat her this way. Not rejection—like the exact opposite of rejection. The rejection of objectification, perhaps? She’d danced for him and he burst into tears. Well. How will her ego ever recover? She giggles again. Ah, molly! You are magic! A chemically-guaranteed night of happiness and love every time.
He grunts. She rests her forehead against his and grunts in reply.
Jay unsticks his lips and looks at her with an abashed half-smile. “Water.” His voice is rough and creaky.
“I’ll fetch your bottle. Hold on, player.”
Now she fully extricates herself, dragging her limbs free of the bed. The cool air folds itself about her bare skin and she regrets leaving his warm embrace. Aw. Maybe she still feels a bit of the glow herself. Now. Where did he leave his water?
Jay rouses himself, his dreams fading. He’d been somewhere warm and wet, subterranean. It felt like a birth. Rebirth. Katrina had fed him the magic pill that unlocked his depths and he had—Katrina had… Oh, no. And then he had said all kinds of crazy shit. Told her he loved her. And yeah, sure, a kernel of that dearness still remains. She is awesome, no doubt. But the thrill is gone, baby. Gone for good. Aw, no. What a mess. He just couldn’t handle his drugs and keep his mouth shut! Come on, dude! Grow up! This isn’t a music festival, it’s like a career-defining opportunity with leaders from nearly every scientific field he loves.
Jay rolls onto his back with a groan, black misgivings and regret clawing at him, as chemically-guaranteed as the joy. “What have I done now?” He brushes his broken hand with his chin and hisses in pain. That fourth metacarpal had snapped like a pencil when the rock landed on it. He hopes it will someday heal right. He has so many plans for it. A sudden sob catches in his throat. “Fuck. Now I’ll never be a guitar god.”
Katrina returns with his water and stands framed in the narrow door, her hair curled under her chin like a question mark. “Hey.”
Jay doesn’t move. “Hey.”
Ξ
Pradeep joins Amy in the kitchen just as she finishes making eight bowls of oatmeal. “You can’t feed everyone every meal,” he scolds her. “You have to do your research too.”
“Oh, don’t worry about me,” Amy waves a hand at him. “I’ve got plenty irons in plenty fires. And this isn’t much more than boiling water.”
“And chopping ginger and dried cranberries and making green tea and coffee.”
“Espresso. Careful. Don’t let Flavia hear you call it anything else.” Amy hands him a tray. “Now, let’s go check up on the Love Palace. See if they survived the night.” She follows him with a kettle and a tray of mugs. “You might be able to finally ask the big man some of your questions.”
“Did you notice?” Pradeep drops his voice to a murmur, “Jay never came back to his hammock last night.”
“Yeah the sub sounded like a nightclub til early hours.” Amy grins. “Hookups in the field… Ah, I remember the days. Well, I hope at least they used protection.”
They climb the ramp to the giant tent, sagging now at a couple corners. When she leaves, Amy resolves to reset the guy lines. It’s the least she can do. “Knock knock…?” she sings out.
“A moment,” Miriam answers. Then after some rustling of fabric she unzips the inner door that seals off their sleeping chamber. She is tousled, in a wool jumper and scarf and flannel pajama bottoms. “Just reading. Go ahead and set up in there—”
“Ooo. The foyer!” Amy chuckles.
“—and I’ll see if Zo is ready to get up.”
“How is he?”
“Still alive.” Miriam addresses him over her shoulder. “How are you, mijo?”
“The headache…” his voice rumbles, “is very bad. And my neck. Ah. I cannot move my head.”
Miriam kneels by his pillows and forces her hands beneath his neck. She begins to massage him.
“Ai! Too rough!” He lifts a pleading hand. “Softer! Softer…!”
Amy and Pradeep set places on the tent floor for the oatmeal and tea. Miriam soothes Alonso with murmured words of love.
Finally he groans, something releasing. Then his breath catches and he grasps her wrist. “I remember…”
“Yes? Dancing til dawn?” Miriam tries to lighten the mood with a joke but there is something distracted in his eyes. He searches for something he’s lost.
“Por su puesto, Mirrie, but no… I remember… Last night I saw a vision. In the dark.”
“Is this like the time you saw Jesus walking through the trees?”
“No, that was in college. And I had never drunk brandy.” He laughs sadly at the memory. But no. He makes an effort to regain the evaporating traces of what he saw last night before they are gone for good. It was very significant. Of that he is sure. But the concussion knocked it right out, and his wife’s beautiful face takes his attention now. “Ah, it’s gone. Something about Plexity, no doubt. Hopefully, when we are working on it I will remember.”
They get him to sit up in bed and feed him there with a large towel spread across his lap. The other three sit in the foyer to ply him with questions, which he assures them he can handle. “Please. Get my mind off this headache and make me use my brain again for something other than self-pity.”
“Aha. Yes…” Pradeep doesn’t quite know how to respond to this. Doctor Sergio Alonso Saavedra Colon Ramirez Aguirre is quite possibly his living idol. Pradeep had moved heaven and earth to get into Amy’s lab last semester, partially because of her association with Doctor Alonso. And now, after circling him like a nervous suitor for a week, he is ready to finally ask his first questions. He just hopes that he doesn’t waste Alonso’s time or sound like an idiot. But he needs to start with the basics. “Well, Doctor, I’m hoping I can sort of get your insight into Plexity at the foundational level. Like mission statement onward before we get into—”
“Yes, yes…” Alonso nods. “That is what I am hoping too. You can’t understand this new system just by looking at its features. It is like, Miriam, my dear, like drawing a map from only seeing the mountain peaks without looking at the rivers and the valleys. Yes?”
“Quite.” Pradeep takes a deep breath and tries to collect his thoughts. Amy studiously looks away. This is his moment. She hadn’t let him prepare too much with her. He needs to get over his hero-worship and show Alonso that he belongs here. “So. Who will this survey be for?”
“For?” This is a question Alonso hasn’t truly examined, but it is a worthy one. “Well, when our reports first come out they will be classified. So it will be for the Air Force, I suppose. But that won’t last long. Maybe just a pass over our final draft with a black pen by somebody at the CIA. I don’t know. But eventually we are looking at the top journals, perhaps by the end of the year. And also I am dedicated to popularizing Plexity. For civilians and amateurs. I want this to be our teaching tool, our grand example to the world.” As he speaks his voice gathers resonance and depth again. His throat and chest clear and he speaks with growing conviction. “I want armies of observers fanning out over the entire globe, seeing the web of life in an entirely new way. There. That is who it is for. Does that answer your question?”
“Thank you, yes.” Pradeep laughs at the wild ambition of it. “But what, uh, what kind of security issues do you think we’ll encounter? Is there anything the Air Force told you that you shouldn’t—?”
Alonso laughs. “I have no idea. Do we mention the dead body? The sub buried in the sand? I don’t think we will. But this place is just full of surprises, no?”
Pradeep nods slowly. He can’t get over the feeling that Alonso is still hiding something about the military from them. “So, moving on. I have a question just about a matter of procedure. See, I’ve already started collecting samples but I want to make sure I do it in the proper way. The Plexity way. Now, let’s say I detach a nice bryophyte from a rock and put it in my bag. The way I understand it, you’d like me to focus not on the moss itself, but far more on the context. The mineral composition of the rock. What the moss was doing to it over time. How it establishes with other bryophytes a type of wet little nook, like a nano-climate of its own at the base of a Toyon tree. So what should I sample? The moss, the rock, and the tree? What goes into the plastic bag?”
“Nano-climate. That is an excellent term. So, this issue is exactly the thing that lies at the crux of—”
Pradeep, in his excitement, interrupts Alonso. “And are you even interested in notating the taxonomy of individual species at all any more or are we somehow beyond that?”
Alonso laughs, holding up a hand to deflect the torrent. “Slow down, hermano. Slow down. Yes, we are still recording the classic details. We are recording all of it. Plexity will liberate you as a researcher to bring all your observational skills to each moment. All of them. The color of the sky. The smell in the air. They are all connected. Don’t you see? This is the world of big data now.”
These words are like an invocation to Pradeep. He points at Alonso, a giddy thrill shooting through him. “Exactly! Yes! Global bio-informatics! It is where I was sure you were headed!”
Alonso waves at the island with his cane. “If we collect all the data we can sense and measure, if we soak in the entire context of life-forms here on this island, then that amount of data will be a treasure greater than an entire golden hoard. We will be able to find connections and causalities that so far remain invisible to us. We will be able to chart the humidity of the air above your bryophyte in many different contexts, and that will allow us—”
“Well, frankly, we don’t even know what we will be able to do with the data.” Pradeep sits back, shrugging. “It will be a mine that people can excavate for—well, forever. As new data theory is applied, new insights will emerge. I already work in connective systems primarily. The push and pull of biological and organic pathways. But you want to expand those diagnostics to literally an infinite degree. It’s like studying the heavens with a telescope that sees frequencies we haven’t yet discovered. So we are witnesses here, recorders and researchers. But we can leave theory to others. As long as we keep the record, all else will follow.”
Alonso leans back with a happy sigh. “Ah, yes. This one gets it, Amy. I am very glad you brought him.”
Pradeep feels like light is shining through his skin. This is it. This quiet moment in a tent. This is the moment he has been working toward his entire life. All the sacrifice, the waking up at four in the morning as a ten year old to do his homework before helping to open the restaurant. The lost social life, the bullying and teasing. The desperate academic competitions. It is all for these words, spoken by one of the wisest minds on the planet. This is it. Pradeep belongs. The august society is opening its doors to him. “So… Thank you, Doctor Alonso. Thank you so very much. But, I mean, in your estimation, are there certain systems that are more fundamental than others? Shall we start with some possible bedrock…” Prad makes an inclusive gesture toward Miriam, “…and move outward? Upward? Or are all systems—?”
“All systems are stratum independent and of equal value. No chicken and no egg. Everything all at once, in an organic ball. Recursive, with multiple (possibly infinite) connections and nodes. This is an entire organism here. Lisica. So start wherever you like.”
“Of course. Of course.” Pradeep falls silent, rearranging his plan of attack for the island. He has to think far larger than he has. He’s been focusing the last few years on just single specific cooperative, parasitic, and symbiotic relationships between two species. But now he has to operate from the assumption that every species influences every other species. Interdependence shoots through everything like oxygen.
“So…” Amy takes the opportunity to go even deeper. “Let’s talk about what Plexity looks like at the comparative genomics level, Lonzo. I’m not quite with you. It sounds like we’re going to be massively sequencing everything, and, like, all the time? At different moments? In situ as much as possible? How? My personal take on Plexity is that your vision is astounding and the science is sound but the capability in the field just isn’t there yet. How are we going to acquire and process so many genetic samples? Have you talked to Katrina about this? She has ideas about a unit with realtime displays for operator feedback. So you can tell what you should even be looking at next.”
“Of course.” He waves his hand at her. “Of course. We have thought of all this. And this will not be a perfect attempt. That is what you and Colonel Baitgie and Flavia the mathematician need to understand. This is the first faltering step. What this will do is show us what we need to solve next. Plexity will be iterative, no doubt. As will the study of Lisica.”
“And this Colonel…” Pradeep asks. “I get the sense that he hasn’t officially signed off on your Plexity project?”
Alonso searches for the proper words. In his silence they realize the Colonel has not. Finally, he says, “There is a module in Plexity that will allow us to output our data into more traditional graphs and lists. But listen. I brought it up to Baitgie and his contractors as much as possible but I could tell none of them see the utility in it.”
“That’s why I ask.” Pradeep’s self-assurance grows with each sentence. “I can’t imagine what the military would find worthwhile in Plexity. I’m surprised you mentioned it to them.”
“I just focused on how it will increase resolution and decrease error rates for their environmental impact reports. Because it will do that too. There is a business model, I understand, in selling Plexity software to labs running normal assays for them to pick out new features in their data and modify their systems. But I am not so interested in business myself. Maybe one of you can lead that spin-off and make us all rich, eh? I will be out in the field with my sample kits and laptop. Hopefully for the rest of my life.”
Miriam asks quietly, “Is there any reason to believe the military types will disapprove of what we’re doing here, Zo? Did they know we’d find their sub and that we’d have a drone get a glimpse of the interior? I just don’t want to fall afoul of anyone.”
“No. See. This is an abandoned post. The program was run by postwar generations who are now all dead. It remained forgotten for like thirty years. The Air Force flags it as ‘an outstanding issue to resolve’ every time they take a Pacific Command inventory but it’s always been very far down the list. Baitgie thought he could kill two birds with one stone by getting rid of a nagging bureaucratic detail,” Alonso’s waving cane once again includes the whole island, “and this troublesome scientist their PJs rescued, who, in a single fateful conversation at the military hospital after his debriefing has reawakened the Colonel’s undergrad love of forest management.”
“What’s a PJ?” Amy wonders. “You got rescued by pajamas?”
“A squad of very scary men. The Air Force Parajumper rescuers. They showed up to the gulag one night in silence and spoke to one guard after another. Very frightening. They all moved like ghosts. Nobody even thought to fight them. And I did not recognize much of the hardware they wore, nor any of its purpose. They found me in my box and carried me away, onto a helicopter that looked like a spaceship.”
Pradeep shakes his head in wonder at the trials this man has suffered. But he perseveres. “I just have one more question—”
“Liar.” Amy laughs at Pradeep.
“At least regarding this security slash military side of things…” Pradeep amends. “Esquibel asked the question a couple nights ago. How did a Cuban scientist pass a background check for any United States classified military… anything?”
“Ah.” Alonso sighs. “Just so. For that you have my uncle Don Jorge Colon to thank.” Alonso lets that hang for a moment, just to see the puzzlement grow in the young man’s long face. “You see, Don Colon was one of the ultimate anti-Castro operatives of the 1960s. In Miami he was famous, called El Dueño, the Landlord, for how many CIA people he would host at his hotel, even at his house. But his activity got too hot for the rest of the family so me and my sisters and my cousins all spent the 80s growing up in Madrid instead. None of the rest of us take part in politics at all. Cuban politics is a curse. It killed him, on a visit to Mexico in 1989. And it kills anyone who touches it in any way. They showed me they have a file on me as thick as a phone book. So they know. I am a citizen of the world. I study life not death. And apparently that was enough for them.”
Miriam sips her tea. Amy’s nervous laugh fills the silence. Alonso points with his cane under the platform. “There. Big gray tub, still wrapped with tape. Pradeep. Could you please do me the favor of bringing it up here?”
Amy stands before Pradeep does. “I’ll just help—”
“Amy, por favor. Let the young man do it. This is in response to his question about field collections and also your question about genomic assays. I am not so dreamy that I did not think of the real-world problems. I anticipated them as much as I could.”
“This one?” Pradeep drags a tub of Alonso’s description out from under the platform. A packing list is taped to the lid, a long column of items. “Says… sample kits and I guess their assorted accessories? Oh! Field kits?”
“That’s the one. Please cut it open and bring one of the kits up here. It’s amazing. When you meet the right people in the military it is like magic the things they can accomplish with a phone call. Those contractors… all black-budget. Could you imagine being a black-budget field biologist or geologist who is working on national security issues, with like a completely unlimited budget and no oversight? But nobody except like four people in the whole world would ever know your work. Would you do it?”
Miriam makes a face. “When I’m old and ready to die on a strategically-valuable mountain side.”
“Well, I mean,” Amy hems and haws, “I suppose I could for preservation, like keeping a secret Army base from putting pressure on a threatened species or something. But if they want me to like hunt caribou in the Arctic Circle because… I don’t know, they keep disrupting their radar or something, then no. No thank you.”
“I don’t believe,” Alonso rumbles, “that any of them get a choice in the matter. Maybe when they are very senior. That is certainly one of the trade-offs.” Pradeep tears the tape clear and lifts the lid. He brings them a white oblong carton about the size of a shoebox. A serial number is printed on its side. Nothing more.
“Open it, please,” Alonso instructs Pradeep. “I had a fascinating conversation with one of the contractors one day on the advances in microfluidics and their use as diagnostic machines. A lot has changed in the last five years. It led to these prototypes. We have eleven of the units and then, yes, show us…”
Pradeep holds up the machine. It looks like a giant white credit card reader with a wider tray jutting out from under its keypad.
“It is built to be modular. You put the sample in the front and then we have all these different little boxes you can plug in: micro-robots and solutions acting like transistors and circuits, creating a profile of the sample on, well, whatever module you have in there. You can get blood types and genetic or enzyme profiles, even some electrochemical activity can be captured with the potassium and calcium ion sequencers. The plan is to have it cross-reference an onboard database that fixes the sample as species-specific as well as location and time-specific. It is an integrated, real-time—”
Pradeep goggles. “What are you talking about? This is—? No way. This is an actual working field, like, Star Trek tricorder? But that’s impossible. Not with today’s technology. We are at least five to ten years away from that kind of technological integration, especially for something robust enough to be used in the field. Microfluidics is a particular area of interest for me and I follow the developments very closely and I can assure you what you are promising here simply won’t work like that. At least yet.”
“Let me finish, Pradeep.”
“And that you somehow snapped your fingers and got these units cobbled together in, what, like ten weeks? I’m sorry. Somebody promised you something, Doctor, that they couldn’t deliver.”
“Eight weeks. But they already had invented all the pieces and separately tested and built them for other black budget projects. It was just a matter of putting them all together. Now. That NDA we signed? The one Flavia is so irate about? Yes, it is primarily about these units. They are never allowed to leave the island.”
Pradeep stares at the unit, his preconceptions about the state of current technology falling away in a giddy rush. “Fascinating. But why would they let us have access…?”
“We aren’t the only ones using Lisica as a test bed. My guess is that they didn’t have qualified personnel who could be here in the timeframe and who passed the background checks like you did.”
“Like we did?” As Pradeep echoes this, Amy and Miriam frown. They didn’t know they’d been checked either?
“Yes, and you all passed. Even Maahjabeen at the last second. Now in that secret black budget world, there must be entire labs who developed some component of this thing eagerly awaiting our real world results. I call it a Dyson, in honor of my hero Freeman Dyson, and also because it is like a powerful vacuum in the field.”
Pradeep blinks at Alonso, marshaling his thoughts. “So it seems what you’re telling us, Doctor, is that there are maybe a few solitary elements in the United States military who have a vested interest in research being conducted on the island, in the manner we hope to achieve. But the larger Air Force and military complex, they have basically abandoned this island after using it as a dump and then they put a bunch of arbitrary rules around it that we have to abide by, and also they can’t be bothered to help or hinder our efforts. Does that sound accurate?”
“Yes.”
“Huh. It’s actually a really a fantastic situation to be in,” Pradeep realizes. “We get all the resources with none of the accountability.”
“The American way.”
Ξ
“The only traditional thing I got from the Chinese side of my family,” Mandy tells Jay, who drowses on the beach under a sun hat, “is an ancient healing art that everyone—all my aunts and cousins and everybody—use on each other. It’s called Tui Na. Have you heard of it?”
“Is it like Tai Chi? Or… what’s that other one? Qi Gong?”
“No, not really. Those are like about your energy.”
“Your vibe.”
“This is about tendons and bones and muscles. Scar tissue.”
“Oh. I see.”
“So, like what I’m saying is, I’ve gotten to work on Esquibel in the past and it’s really helped her, especially with her bad hip. So she trusts me.”
“Trusts you to do what?”
“Reset your broken hand.”
“Oh. Ohh…” Jay sits up, fully awake now. “Wait a minute there. Is that what we’re talking about? Because I didn’t realize that’s what we were talking about. I thought the plan would be to just maybe keep it immobilized until we could get it back somewhere they had a surgical unit. Cause this is like a pins situation, isn’t it?”
“Maybe it doesn’t have to be.”
He only stares at her. “Why? What are you going to do?”
Mandy gives him a reassuring smile. “It’s already knitting again, but in the wrong shape. And it’s all scar tissue, even in the bone. And scar tissue looks like this.” She holds out her splayed hands, one over the other. “The fibers are all crossed and stiff. But if we pull on them…” She brings her fingers and hands into alignment, “…it is still scar tissue, but lengthened into orderly rows again so it acts much more like normal tissue.” She shrugs. “You can have almost a full recovery.”
“I’m totally dubious about the ‘pull on them’ part of this, dude.”
“The art is learning how much to pull to release the tension and straighten the fibers without pulling so hard you damage them. That’s the art my family passed down. I’m really good at it.”
“Look, Mandy, it’s a super sweet offer and I really appreciate you. I do. But, like can I have some time to think about it?”
“Okay. But there’s a short window for bone breaks like this. The longer you wait the less successful the recovery is and the more painful it becomes.”
“So it is painful.”
“Oh, you will howl.” Mandy giggles. “But it passes. It’s good pain. Seriously. Healing pain.”
“Man. And you said Esquibel signed off on this?”
Mandy nods. “Can I just see your hand at least?”
“Just see?”
“And maybe touch.”
“It’s super tender, so…”
“That’s why I’m here.”
Jay makes a face, then unwraps his right hand and holds it out to Mandy. She places it in her lap, holding it like an injured bird. “Is that okay?”
Jay nods. He releases a deep breath. The black mood that came after his night of carousing hasn’t lifted, but he is touched by Mandy’s care. He’s being mothered from like eighteen different directions here. And somehow he doesn’t mind at all.
Her index finger runs over the swollen bump below the last knuckle of his ring finger. “Oh, yeah. So angry. I can feel your pulse just like buzzing.”
“You can?”
“We’ve got to get this bone straight, Jay.”
But he doesn’t like how bright her smile is. “Wait. You’re like enjoying this, you fucking sadist.”
Mandy can’t help giggling. “I just know how much it will help once you’re ready. I’m excited for you.”
“You’re just gonna, what, like pull on my ring finger?”
“Mostly. Tui Na is about understanding how bones and tendons and muscles are all connected. So I will hold down the right tendon like this…” She demonstrates on her own hand, flexing her forearm and finding the relevant tendon that bunches near her elbow. She presses down on it and then releases her flex, using the pressure to pull on the tendon. “See? Stretch. Like making saltwater taffy.”
“So will this be a long slow pull or a—”
“No. Short snap. Ready?” Mandy is done being careful with his feelings and is eager to get something accomplished today. She wants to talk to Katrina about her idea for the drone but so far she is nowhere to be seen. Esquibel shooed her out of the clean room with instructions to help Jay. Now she just wants to be able to check this off her list so she can get back to her fruitless attempts to get some actual atmospheric science done on Lisica. The wind looks so calm at the moment she might be able to deploy a weather balloon and radiosonde.
“Short… snap?” Jay holds out his limp hand with a grimace, as if he’s trying to give it away to her. “What do I have to do?”
“Not much, really. Just like stay loose if you can. First I need to move it a bit this way and that so that might hurt. But it’s just the first diagnostic…”
“Aaauggghhh.” Tears squeeze out from under his eyes. “You’re sure you know what you’re doing?”
“It’s just scar tissue, Jay. And it’s all stuck. The blood and the fibers and everything. We just got to—” YANK “—unstick it.”
Jay bawls, jerking his hand away, cradling it and curling up in a ball in the sand. Mandy suppresses a nervous giggle. She knows from experience he would not appreciate hearing it in the least.
Finally he uncurls, flexing his fingers. “Hey… It does hurt less.”
“I told you.”
“I mean, it isn’t perfect…” He runs his fingers over the fourth metacarpal, “but it is better. Oh my god that hurt so much.”
“Now it’s flowing. Your body can heal itself there. We should immobilize it, though. Usually my auntie would help control the pain and swelling with acupuncture but I never learned it. That’s too much of the energy stuff for me. And it doesn’t always work.”
“I’m still gonna get x-rays when I can.”
“You totally should.”
“Wow. This actually is seriously improved. Thank you so much. I can’t believe it. Now do my ankle.”
Mandy laughs, pleased. “No… Esquibel said your ankle is just tendons and soft tissue takes longer. The window doesn’t start for manipulations for another week or more, after the swelling goes down. Then getting more Tui Na done on the scar tissue until the six month period is recommended.”
“Cool. Six months. Okay. So like where you living these days?”
She laughs. “Topanga.”
“Groovy. I’ve got a buddy down there. I’ll come visit every couple weeks and make you lunch and you can pull me apart.”
Ξ
“And just what do you think you’re doing in there, you hussy?”
Katrina has fallen back asleep in the Captain’s bunk, holding Jay’s jacket under her chin. She starts awake to find Triquet standing in the doorway, hands on hips.
“Oh. Hey. Oh.” Katrina wakes from the deepest sleep of her life and draws a breath in, heroically battling the absolute vacuum of energy and life and hope and love within her. She’s so far gone it almost feels like a K hole. It’s not that she has no will left. It’s that there’s now a howling void within her and whatever she feeds it is only sucked away. She sits up anyway, knowing in some abstract sense that’s the societal expectation and poor Triquet’s never done anything to warrant disrespect. “Sorry.”
Triquet holds up a sample kit. “You see what this is, Katrina? This is a field forensics kit. I could dust that mattress for hair and skin cells and get a pretty good reading. At least until you two decided to contaminate the setting with your sideways samba! Now I have to contend with, I don’t know, fresh fluids and pheromones. Is that a joint! Ye gods, children. What else have you done?”
“Nothing.” Katrina can’t square Triquet’s behavior with what she’s starting to recall of last night. “Wait… You were down here with us. You danced with me. Why are you pretending like you’re all shocked now?”
Triquet leans in and with a tiny bit too much sass, says, “Because you’re helpless and vulnerable, darling. It just seemed like the right play. No.” They sigh. “Don’t worry. After I saw where things were headed last night I came down here and took all my samples in this cabin then. So I’m lying about that part. Still wish you wouldn’t sleep on the bunk, though. That old vinyl is already cracking.”
Katrina sits up, her hand falling on Jay’s water bottle. She drains it. Then she puts on his jacket.
Triquet recognizes it. They pat Katrina on the shoulder, as condescending as possible. “So how’s your little heteronormative romance going dear?”
“It was very sweet, actually. Not at all what you’d expect. Do you…? Uh, are you into party drugs?”
Triquet gives Katrina a dimpled smile, leading her to the control room. “I’ve been known to dabble. But not inside any of my actual field sites, sugar. And I’m not sure there’s anyone here who’s really my type, if you know what I’m saying.”
“Oh. For sure. Well, uh, we can just have like a dance party with you, if you like. And we didn’t even do anything, if you want to know the truth. It was just like a sleepover. A really emotional like tearful sleepover. He’s a great guy. Not what I thought at all.”
Triquet gives her a sincere smile. “That’s really sweet. Now quit touching my stuff or I’m going to have to stop liking you so much, Katrina dear. So. Is that the panel down there?”
The dark rectangle in the corner is still resting at an angle against the far wall. Triquet edges closer to the darkness, feeling the cold breath of air crossing their cheek one way, then another. As a fan of all things kooky and weird and occult, this real-world version of abandoned cold wet darkness is a bit too much, even for them. But that’s what the headlamp’s floodlight setting is for, even though it shortens the battery life to an hour.
The floodlight blazes on the chamber down below, picking out molding sheaves of documents scattered across the floor, clothing, boxes upon boxes of beer bottles, furniture stacked and leaning against the walls, on and on, a literal decaying wonderland of postwar memorabilia and artifacts in a belowdecks hold, shot through with rusting pipes and conduit. Triquet quivers like a rabbit in a garden. There’s got to be a catch, right? This absolutely profligate amount of easy discovery can’t come without some price. Finally, Triquet murmurs to themself, “I know what it is.”
Katrina peers down, arms crossed. “You know what what is?”
“The catch. The price for all this bounty. It’s the answer to a question I’ve been asking since I first heard from Alonso: But why bring an archaeologist on a field biology project? He told me it was about integrating Plexity into the human realm and the context of the past, but I didn’t really buy it. I came because he is a legend and his work is fascinating and I could take the semester off.” Triquet crouches at the hatch, preparing to descend. “But now I buy it.”
Katrina watches Triquet hesitate at the edge. Her brain is sludge but even so the answer is apparent. “Alonso knew about this?”
“He must have.” Triquet takes a deep breath. “I cannot believe you went down there all by yourself, child, in the dark. On drugs. Heavens to Betsy. Did you have any kind of light at all?”
Katrina shrugs. “I had my phone. But I didn’t use it.”
Triquet shivers, a mix of excitement and dread. “Well, here I go. Just leave me a new battery every hour and food and water when you remember and I’ll see you in a month.”
Ξ
Miriam sets stakes in the soft moss-crowned dirt. It’s almost a crime to excavate such lovely topsoil. It is a rich chocolate, shot through with pale networks of roots, and only becomes sandy a meter down. Oh, the garden her dad would have grown here!
Esquibel had presented her with the entire New Trench Project after breakfast. It had evidently taken the expertise of nearly every one of them to come to an agreement. And the site they’ve chosen has satisfied none. It does not have a ready supply of sand. The winds might cause an unfavorable stink from time to time. And Jay will have to relocate his hammock. But on a beach this small with eleven giant primates and all their excreta, there is no such thing as a good answer.
But they’d all agreed that Miriam should be the one to dig it, with help from Triquet as needed (although good luck getting them out of the sub). But she had told them she didn’t need the help anyway. She likes digging. And she can use some time alone.
This island feels strangely like home. Perhaps it’s the sunless Irish climate and cold ocean. She doesn’t miss the humid heat or flies of her Japanese expedition, but she did love the tame pygmy deer of Yakushima and the clever macaques holding tourists hostage for food. It’s a shame there’s no large animals here to befriend. Somehow she doubts the otters or crabs or even foxes will do.
The sand is heavy-grained, dark gray with sharp edges. It looks like freshly metamorphosed clay. The larger bits disintegrate with a pinch. Good cat litter, that. Why, the business possibilities just keep coming! The exercise lightens her mood. She stands in the cut, a meter deep and forty centimeters wide but not even a meter long yet. She still has a lot of work to do and the perspiration is now running freely down her back.
There are two activities where Miriam has always considered herself in world-class shape: hiking and digging. She just does so much of both she can sustain the activity all day, at a pace that often puts younger people to shame. So she digs, clawing away the secrets of the earth one spadeful at a time.
Well. Eight weeks here. Then back to home base in Chicago with Alonso for perhaps the summer. Then she’ll need to teach at least two classes next fall and hope that she can get back to Japan for a final wrap-up maybe by winter break. Then they’ll need to find time to present and promote Plexity results. Yes, her life is booked. And it was booked even before the world miraculously returned her lost husband to her. Now, and with him so damaged, now her life is utterly mad. She should hire an assistant. Maybe Katrina would be free, although perhaps organizational skills are not quite her strength. Well, someone… Someone big and strong who might be able to lift Alonso on the days he can’t walk. Perhaps he will be in a wheelchair, and they will have to modify the house. Or sell it. If he can’t get into the loft, then what’s the use of having it? Well, they can transfer its library to the living room, perhaps. And install ramps at the front and back. Yes, perhaps they should just sell it instead. They will have to rethink their entire career trajectory plans, as agreed upon for the last twenty years or so. She’d abandoned hers, of course, over the last five years. And the idea of being brought back to the regimen she’d planned for herself as a twenty-six year old rankled. She’d learned so much since then of what she wanted to do with her life, her very days and hours, that she would need to revisit that agreement with him. In due time.
For now, she is here to dig. The geology of this island remains as much a mystery as before. What she’d seen of the interior suggests erosion as the primary force landscaping the island. Nothing newly volcanic up there, no sign that glaciers might have carved anything in eons past, as they did on Mauna Kea. But Lisica is far lower in elevation, although much further north in latitude…
Dig. Dig and uncover. What will you find today? I half expect there’ll be bones, or an unexploded nuclear torpedo or some such frightful thing. So far just this lovely soil and dark sand. But what must lie beneath? If the bedrock is limestone and we already have proof of caves then how many caves might there be? Why, this whole shelf here might be shot through with all kinds of secrets.
Miriam stops, breathing hard, sweat dripping from the point of her long nose. “Ah, yes. This… this is what my first main goal is here.” The spade bites into the sand once again and she heaves. “Once I’m done here, my job is to find the tunnels.”
Chapter 6 – Rolling Her Eyes
February 5, 2024
Thanks for joining us on our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this chapter:
6 – Rolling Her Eyes
Katrina stands alone on the beach holding the complex controller. The fully-assembled drone crouches at her feet, black rods and spindles extending a meter along every axis. It is afternoon, gray and gloomy. The sea mutters in the lagoon, sending choppy little waves up the dark sand.
Inside the bunker, Pradeep had set up a widescreen monitor for everyone to watch. Then he retreated to his platform outside, to monitor the web app on his laptop for Katrina while she drives. Only Maahjabeen is outside with him. She sits on the edge of her platform with a heavy pair of binoculars and a tablet, taking measurements, watching a line of buoys she set on the lagoon, trying to untangle the oscillations of the ocean’s local interactions with land. The interior of the island is the least of her concerns.
“And away we go…!” Katrina whoops and gently pulls on the joystick, lifting the drone smoothly into the air. “Ah ha ha haaa! Such power!” It rises with a loud whirr, slicing the air. She engages the other joystick, just a touch, and the drone climbs at a steep angle toward the trees and the cliff.
“See what I mean?” Jay asks the room. “Those redwoods are at least a hundred meters. Look at those split trunks! So massive, even at this height! The tallest one on record is over a hundred fifteen!”
“Don’t get too close!” Alonso bellows out the door. “That whole drone package was like the second line on my budget!” He turns to everyone crowded around the monitor. “The gimbal alone to move the camera around cost like three thousand dollars. And the camera lenses? Don’t get me started.”
“You always complain about budgets.” Miriam pats his hand. “But drones like this didn’t even exist five years ago. Be happy for what you have, you old grump.” The drone clears the crowns of the trees and the cliff scrolls upward, dark and fractured. Miriam leans in. “And there it is! Finally! We’re recording this, right?”
Amy calls out, “You’re recording all this video, right, Prad?”
“In 4K!” He finds a button that allows a column of data to be displayed on the bunker’s monitor. GPS coordinates, battery life, windspeed. The altitude climbs above two hundred meters.
“Yes…” Miriam breathes. “The clarity is extraordinary. I might be able to do a proper visual exam from the ground with this tool.”
“If we could only graft a shovel onto its gimbal,” Amy laughs, “Miriam would never need to leave her camp chair.”
Up, up, up it goes, everyone silent. Jay shakes his head at the size of the cliff. It reminds him of El Capitan in Yosemite. He never would have gotten to the top. Falling to his death would have been far more likely. The drone clears a false cliff’s edge at around three hundred-eighty meters, the rounded shoulder’s flats obscured by dense shrubs. Then the true wall rises behind it.
Miriam jumps to her feet. “Here! See? I knew it! Actual igneous spine there exposed on the left! Weathered and worn. Must be ages old. Volcanic origin. Now I can start working on a model. Finally.”
Movement on the cliff face, a blur of gray. “Wait! Stop! There! There!” Amy squeals. “Back! Down! Oh, hurry! Didn’t you see it?Who’s controlling the camera?”
“What?” Katrina calls out. “I can. I think both of us can.”
“Down! We saw a mammal! Please!”
Katrina stops the drone’s ascent and the camera tilts and swivels. “Where?” she asks.
“No, it’s already gone,” Jay groans.
“What was it?” Pradeep asks, scrubbing through the captured video in a separate window. All he catches is a blur of something with the general dimensions of a domestic cat. But it’s gone now. They can’t find it again. It’s vanished into a crevice or hole.
“Lisica!” Katrina calls out. “Fox Island! Now onward! Upward!” She lifts the drone again, eager to get to the top.
“Yes…” Alonso breathes, like he’s watching a football match and the striker is nearing the goal. “Yes…!”
The last of the cliffs, fringed in green coastal grasses and thick trees, finally vanish beneath. They can see nothing now but a gray vault above. Then the camera tilts down from the sky and the entirety of the isle is finally revealed.
As one they all lean in. The bunker fills with their exclamations and sighs of pleasure. Lisica is magnificent, folds of dark green forests dropping into deep canyons. It is like a great emerald jewel, faceted a million-fold, cast carelessly into the gray-blue sea. The folds continue on, dropping and rising in a multitude of ridges and valleys. Soft gray light only makes the greens more deep.
Alonso knows more of the island than the others. He saw a hand-sketched map once in a meeting with Baitgie and his consultants that they wouldn’t let him keep. But even he is astounded by the complexity of the interior. He realizes he had expected the cliffs to be like some simple rim of an elongated bowl, with a single river running its length carving one valley within. But in reality there are uncountable rivers and streams down there, each with its own slot canyon or wide valley, all overlapping and undercutting each other to leave isolated spires crowned by redwoods and bare brown cliffs dropping into shadow.
“This looks exactly like the Santa Cruz Mountains.” Jay sweeps his uninjured hand across the features. “Super deep canyons, all in a maze. So easy to get lost. And the steepest climbs. If there aren’t any trails in there then, yeah. That’s gonna be an adventure for sure. No wonder the helicopter crews came back with nothing.”
“I mean,” Triquet sniffs, “where did they even land? I’ve seen Chinese landscape paintings with more level ground.”
“Oh, but it’s so beautiful,” Amy sighs. “And this is probably as close as we’ll ever get to see it. So pristine. Ah, well. I’m just glad spots like this still exist in the world.”
Katrina patrols the edge of the cliff, the drone never out of direct line of sight. It has a return-home function if the signal is lost but she doesn’t want to test it out unless it’s necessary.
Now Mandy points at the screen. “Oh my god! I wondered if the forests were large enough to generate their own weather patterns. Look at that moisture column riding up the thermal there. Yay. This place is going to change every weather model at NOAA!”
“The battery is at thirty-five,” Miriam calls out with worry.
“Yeh, the show is over, folks!” Katrina takes one last sweeping pass across the top of the cliffs. “Any particular way you want me to come down?”
“Safely!” Alonso answers.
“Bring it down the waterfall!” Jay calls out.
“Ooo neat!”
The drone swings aside toward its new goal. Yet the waterfall doesn’t appear. “Where is it?” Pradeep stands and crosses the beach with his laptop to stand beside Katrina so he can get a clear view of the drone.
She pilots it downward at an angle to the east, trying to intersect the line of water that must at some point lead to the falls. But the cliffs are less monolithic here, and break up into a cluster of tiny rills at the top covered by what look to be madrone trees.
Only by pulling back from the edge and getting an angle nearly a kilometer wide can they finally spot the waterfall spewing from beneath the trees at a spot nearly a hundred meters below the top of the cliffs. Katrina descends, following the falling spout through the soaring terns and gulls, until the redwoods from below hide it from view and with a happy sigh she brings the drone in for a bumpy landing at her feet.
Ξ
Flavia wrestles with Plexity. Alonso’s design document was a mess and it has taken a week just to rewrite it as a list of actionable bullet points that actually make sense and aren’t riddled with internal logic errors. Now she is building the architecture of the program in earnest, testing different modules she always keeps on hand as off-the-shelf solutions to many of its features. She is having modest success, plugging away at her laptop in the bunker sitting beside everyone else, when the magnitude of the island is revealed to her on the drone’s monitor.
It ruins her mood. Not just the enormity of it but the… texture. The mind-numbing complexity. Ah. That is where he got the word. Flavia is fluent but incurious with her English. It isn’t nearly as interesting a language as Python, for example. But no language ever invented can encompass this island. Impossible. So stupid. How can she hope to model all that in Plexity? With only seven weeks left? Alonso is a madman. Mathematics isn’t an employee you can browbeat to follow your deadlines. It is all so hopeless. His outsized ambitions are bounded by the unbreakable laws of nature and time itself.
“And if it were me,” she mutters, deleting a column of code that can be done better, more neatly, elsewhere, “that would be a cask of Nebbiolo instead of that French syrup.”
With the drone landed and the monitor off, the crowd disperses. Flavia sighs, needing a break, needing a change of headspace or scenery or something. Maybe she will take another shower. When Esquibel had told her half an hour ago that the waterfall water was testing clean but she still wanted a stool sample, Flavia had simply stared at her, wrestling with an unreasoning fury, fighting the impulse to call a lawyer.
As everyone departs the bunker, Amy hangs back, hearing the ragged emotion in that sigh. She returns to bow at Flavia’s elbow. “Flavia, I’ve got a nice—”
“No! Basta! No tea! No pity! None of your manipulation, please! You have something to say to me, Amy, you say it to my face!”
“Ah.” Amy blushes and stammers. “I didn’t… I’m sorry. I was just going to ask if you’d like a space of your own.”
“Obviously! I would like nothing more.”
“I’ve been working on these panels. To give people privacy in here. And I was wondering if you’d like a spot with a window—”
“Is there glass in this window?” Flavia stands and allows Amy to lead her to the near wall beside the door.
“Well, it’s this window.” The frame is rusted and a mineral stain in the concrete makes it look ill. It hasn’t held glass in ages.
“Then no. And no, I don’t want it.”
“Okay then let’s just move you further down the wall. Would you like to be next to the kitchen?”
“Of course not! That would be too loud.”
“Yes. Then between them. A little cubicle right here. Maybe the same size as Esquibel’s clean room?”
More protests die on Flavia’s lips. It is no use being irate when the other person is just so soft about everything. It is like punching a pillow. And it only makes her feel less understood and more alone. “Fine. Here will be fine. Thank you for making the panels.”
Katrina walks through the door of the bunker holding the drone. She is crowing in triumph, a wordless happy sound. “Did you see? Did you see it all?” She places the controller beside the monitor and claps her hands. Then she works on disassembling the drone enough for it to fit under the table.
Behind her, the sun suddenly blazes through the door. Amy laughs, “Well doesn’t Katrina just brighten a room!”
It’s the first time the sun has broken through in several days and it draws all of them outside. They find Alonso in his camp chair with Miriam dancing around him. He already has a glass of wine in his hand and his phone plays a torrid Cuban ballad. Miriam sings along…
No se que tiene tu voz que facina No se que tiene tu voz tan divina Que magico vuelo de traje consuelo a mi corazon
Her hands flutter around him, caressing him. He nods along to the old standard, the sun on his face. He can’t recall the last time he was this happy. Miriam is as stunning as ever. The island has finally unlocked its secrets. And the wine is getting even softer on his tongue. He kisses her fingers as they trail across his beard. Suddenly he has the impulse to cut it off. He wants to feel her hand against his cheek like he used to. But he doesn’t even have a razor. He will have to ask someone else. For now, he watches his wife remind him of her indescribable beauty. She is so long and lean, with classic lines. Her strong profile and soulful eyes have always reminded him of a silent film star. She is like Garbo or Marlene Dietrich, an imposing legend of a woman. She sways, sinuous and laughing, around him. Ah, he missed her so much!
Someone re-fills his glass before he can empty it. What a magical time. These young scientists are the future. And the future for once is looking so bright. Why, the sun has come out to celebrate with them! Even the sea lions are singing again!
Maahjabeen is called by them, drawing her away from the loud celebration. She stalks down the beach toward the small colony, noting their new positions on the rocks. Steller Sea Lions are the most massive pinnipeds she’s ever seen, three meters long and a thousand kilos. They could snap her kayaks in half. She will have to steer clear of their favorite spots until she knows them better.
The sun is already low, angling into her eyes as she studies the water. It is so lovely in the afternoon light, crystals sparkling from its edges as a deep blue gelid hue rises from the depths. The water murmurs to her liquidly and the little waves chatter and crump. And then her eye catches movement from the surf beyond the lagoon. A tall black curved dorsal fin.
She recognizes that silhouette. It’s a killer whale. No wonder the sea lions are up on the rocks so close to the humans who disturbed them. They are seeking refuge from hunting orcas.
Fantastic! She has never been in waters that orcas inhabit. This is a tremendous sighting. She should tell the biologists, but she has no impulse to share it with anyone. At least for now… The relationship Maahjabeen has with the ocean is very private and personal. This is like her spirit animal, if she had one, rising from the deep to tell her she is in the right place, on the right path. This curved dorsal fin looks like death to the sea lions but to her it is a sign from God.
Also, it means that there is a navigable route through all that crashing surf. She just needs to paddle like an orca to find it. She laughs at herself. That’s all. Just be like the most powerful swimmer in the ocean. Ha.
Oh, this entire place transforms in the sunlight!
Ξ
“There isn’t much we can do with all the pre-packaged crap but I do try to be creative.” Amy works in the kitchen, dropping a half dozen packages of ramen in a pot at a rolling boil.
Esquibel watches her, arms crossed. She’s never been much of a cook herself. It’s one of those skills she has set aside for others so she can be a proper specialist. Also, whenever she imagines herself bending over the stove she flashes on her grandfather abusing her grandmother with words and blows while she cooked for him. The outrage for this injustice still constricts her chest. And it keeps her out of the kitchen. “I am hoping that a biologist like yourself will not mind if I bring up the subject of human waste while you cook.”
“Well.” Amy wrinkles her nose. “I’ll try not to let it change how I season things. Here. Stir.”
Esquibel takes the wooden spoon from Amy with the air of a sulky teen. She swirls the noodles in the pot while Amy shaves a ginger root with a scalpel-sharp paring knife. “The trench is nearly full. And it is abominable. Not everyone has been good about using the sand to cover their messes.”
“Biggest non-secret in camp, that’s for sure.”
“We need a second trench.”
“We need a bioreactor. Then we can keep using the same trench, at least until we get something more civilized set up some day.”
“Yes, and we need indoor plumbing too but we aren’t getting it any time soon. I don’t know what you mean by bioreactor, though it sounds… experimental. We need a new trench. So I’m consulting you, as the senior field biologist, where you would like us to dig it.”
“Hmm. Well I’ve never been happy about how close that one was to the seasonal tributary that runs about twenty meters away. Let me ask Jay. Nobody has covered more ground here than he has. And let’s think about wind issues. We can’t have it upwind, wherever upwind is. So maybe we should talk to Mandy. Also, it will need to have a plentiful supply of sand nearby. Huh. What a long list. That’s tricky.”
Amy adds chiffoned carrot and a few herbs from a row of jars to an oil infusion in a bowl. Esquibel realizes this will be a process instead of an actual answer. “Well, I will get that started then.” She hands the spoon back to Amy and heads outside to find Mandy.
Esquibel skirts the celebration. She doesn’t nearly ever drink wine or smoke drugs. The whole public display of private emotion like this is discomforting. Why can’t people handle their business themselves without turning everything into a music show?
She finds Mandy crouched beside the kayaks with Maahjabeen, who is giving her much the same energy Esquibel brought into the kitchen. Tough African women, she laughs to herself. Always asserting ourselves. Never given power. Whatever we have, we have to take. She offers a formal nod to the young Tunisian oceanographer, in respect.
“Oh, hey, Skeebee. No, Maahjabeen, the problem is I don’t know how to do the roll thing. In Hawai’i it was all open deck boats. You’d just fall off into the water all the time.”
“Then I am afraid I will not be taking you out onto any of these waters, no matter how calm they are. These are my personal craft, that I brought to Japan for a specific project along the Kagoshima coast. They are my babies.”
“Oh, I totally understand. I love my gear, like, so much. I’m just trying to figure out how I can ever get out of this protected little cove here to take some real measurements. I need to get out and feel the wind!” Mandy stands and stretches, exposing her golden skin to the shuddering breeze. The long flag of her black hair flares out. Esquibel feels a deep stirring again within her. She loves Mandy so much. But she also lusts for her in ways she never really has for any other woman. It is such a deep animal impulse she is embarrassed about it. She’s never spoken of it, not even to Mandy. She only showed her once or twice in the past, getting rougher in bed than the dear Hawaiian girl ever wanted. Esquibel had pulled back then, and she will always keep that animal on a chain, coiled deep in her loins. She is a modern woman—not a beast.
Esquibel asks and Mandy falls silent, taking her question about the placement of the new trench very seriously. Maahjabeen can’t be bothered and stalks away. But she does respond with her own nod to Esquibel as she departs. Finally, Mandy says, “Well, my biggest problem is that the local effects of the cove here form a wind column, our very own thermal that’s heated by the lagoon and dark sand and swirls around as it rises. See, it’s the swirling I’m most concerned about.”
Esquibel realizes this isn’t going to be a simple answer at all. She sighs, pulling a wayward strand of straight black hair from Mandy’s eyes. “You know, I grew up watching Gilligan’s Island on TV for the English. They were all wrecked on an island together. And they never talked about where they left their waste. Not once. It never occurred to me it’d be such a huge issue until I joined the Navy.”
Mandy shrugs. “When I’m on hikes like in Waipi’o Valley you’re just supposed to squat anywhere below the high tide line. But if we did that here, Maahjabeen would tear our throats out.”
“With her sharp claws.”
Mandy leans in, coy. “I think she’s single, though. No ring. And a nomad lifestyle. I mean, uh-huh, girlfriend.”
Esquibel laughs. “Is your gaydar tingling again?”
“I’m just saying. Sharp claws make her… interesting.” Mandy gives Esquibel an impish smile and leans into her. “She isn’t mean or anything. She just wants respect.”
“Don’t we all, sister.” Esquibel gets another idea. “I will go ask Triquet. They may have an idea as an archaeologist. Where would they expect to find a trench here? If you observational scientists can’t help me, maybe the historical record can.”
Ξ
Evening falls and Amy’s ramen is shared and appreciated. The wine makes the rounds as Katrina spins her lush lounge music. The number of crabs that crowd the beaches has dramatically decreased since their first few nights, though the bold ones still scuttle around the edge of the light, in automatic scavenging mode.
Alonso remains in his chair. His wine glass is miraculously never empty. He is profoundly drunk, for the first time in years. Miriam squirms in his lap in the most pleasing way. Katrina, that elf, plays the nicest music. So relaxing. And now the stars are out. The evening star and the crescent moon. Venus is so green it is almost painful to behold. In a few hours the Milky Way will be booming across the sky. But in a few hours he will not be awake to see it. He will pass out. And soon. No. First he needs to relieve himself. He puts a hand on Miriam’s waist, interrupting her conversation with… who is that behind him? Ah. Amy. Of course. The three of them back together again, just like before. Ahh. Like destiny!
“What is it, Zo?” Miriam cups his face and kisses him.
“Bladder.”
“Ah!” She twists herself off him and beckons to Amy. “Help me get him up. Where are we going?”
But the wine makes him proud. “No no. I am fine. Just help me up. I can do the rest myself.”
Amy clucks in disapproval. “It’s pretty dark out there, Lonzo.”
They heave on him and the pain shoots through his feet and up his legs. He shudders, the torture still echoing through him, but he shakes it off with a grimace and starts shuffling toward the closest bank of shadows. And they still guide him by the elbows! Alonso pulls his arms away and draws himself up, clasping himself closely around the pain. It is his. They wouldn’t understand. It is all he has to himself now. And he must do this alone. “Please.”
“Fine,” Miriam backs away. “Don’t let the crabs eat you.”
He turns away, unable to watch how his dark gaze dismays them. He will be right back. But right now it feels as though he will burst. He shuffles through the sand to a nearby tree. Perhaps it is a bit closer to camp than he should be, but he can’t hold it any longer. He fumbles with his pants and releases a hissing stream with a sigh.
Once he’s done he can’t seem to stop standing there, leaning against the tree, the cool darkness all around him. Then to his utter surprise a shape drifts across his view, the size of a tall child like nine years old, with long pale ringlets that catch the faint starlight framing a pointed chin and triangular face. Their foot steps into a patch of dry grass and Alonso hears the susurrus of their passage. No, this is not just a drunken vision. This person is real.
He opens his mouth but the shade ducks under a branch and withdraws silently into the underbrush. Alonso stands petrified in the darkness. Has he just seen a ghost? He would scream but the alcohol has so completely bludgeoned him that he can’t manage to. And if it isn’t a ghost, then what is it? What has he just seen?
This is too much for his addled brain to handle. He needs to tell everyone. If this is an abandoned child here on Lisica then they need to make their rescue the top priority. Now where did he leave his cane? His arms wave around in the darkness until he locates it leaning against the far side of the tree. He begins shuffling back, trying to guess the implications of what having another human here will be. He can’t let it interrupt his research, though. He can’t!
And with that thought Alonso trips on a tree root and pitches forward, his head cracking against another root and his vision exploding with light.
Ξ
Jay leans back against the rusted metal panel of the sub’s engine room, smoking his heaviest indica. It’s just him and Katrina down here. She’s set up some tiny disco lights that shine pastel splotches against the dark walls and she spins a tiny disco ball on her deck. The music is a little more crunchy down here, more techno and less soulful, which only seems appropriate.
“Let me hit that.” She dances over to him, careful not to bump into his extended leg or immobilized arm, and pinches the joint. She takes an expert drag, blowing it into his face with a grin. “How you doing down there, mate?”
“Been better. But this ain’t bad.” He giggles. Katrina does too. “Hotboxing a buried sub. Definitely a first, yo.”
“I’m still so hype from flying the drone. I want to dance all night. Are you gonna stay up with me, sailor?” They’re both young souls, innocent, two kids discussing a sleepover.
“Sure, Katrina. Like I got anything else to do.” He tries and fails to keep the bitterness out of his voice. This injury and its recovery are going to suuuuuck.
She closes one eye and tilts her head. “Well, then. Let’s get this party rolling.” Katrina removes a pair of pills from a small bottle. She wears a pair of corduroy overall shorts in dark pink and the bottle remains in the square snap pocket over her breasts.
“I don’t know, dude. I’ve never done molly when I’m in pain.” That can’t be a good idea. Won’t it make him feel his injury more?
“No, it’s fine,” she assures him, swallowing hers dry. “I utterly wrecked my tailbone on a skateboard last summer and when I was rolling I literally couldn’t feel a thing. Or, rather, I didn’t care.”
He holds his hand out. “Yeah, I could use a big fat slice of not caring right now.” She laughs as he gulps the pill down. They stare at each other. “Now what do we do?”
“Now?” She runs her hands up her sides, swaying to the music. “You can watch me dance.”
“Uh,” Jay takes a sip from his water bottle and then another huge hit from his joint. “Right on.” She returns to her deck and drops the bass, then spins away into a low stance so she can bounce like an ape to the beat, her hair whipping the air. “Damn, girl,” he laughs. “Go get it!”
Jay is drawn to Katrina as a kindred spirit. They are both young and healthy and beautiful. Life is a celebration. He holds up his hand, keeping time, as the first tentacles of MDMA uncoil deep within his blood.
His head falls back and the pain in his ankle and hand and head all dull, spreading over him in an oily ooze. Great. Now he has distributed pain all over his body. He isn’t sure this is any better. He laughs, a sad sound, drawing Katrina’s attention.
She’d closed her eyes, falling deep into the mechanical structure of this classic Squarepusher track. But Jay’s harsh laugh recalls her to this time and place. Oh, the poor boy. Trapped in his body, unable to run free, unable to dance. She reaches out and brushes her fingers down his face, from his forehead to his chin, trying to draw the darkness out of him. He shouldn’t be dark. He’s far too sweet and cute. Katrina kisses the tip of Jay’s nose.
He grunts in surprise. Then she spins away, dancing again. He watches her in wonder, astounded that he has never appreciated the arch of her neck and how it vanishes so nicely into her jaw. Katrina. What a vision. And she’s just so brilliant and sweet. Why, they all are! Even the crabby ones. They are all the most amazing people here. His heart unfolds in gratitude and awe at the beauty around him, the landscape of the world now only truly discernible in emotional terms. He claps his hands to his mouth, overcome.
Katrina spins and spins, her eyes tripping on the pattern her feet make against the steel panels of the floor. The lights deepen their hue and her breath comes shorter in her chest. Oh, here comes the first flush of the trip. Always her favorite. It crashes through her like a wave of hot blood and she surrenders to it. The indescribable pleasures of ecstasy. She never gets tired of it. Her hands reach out to Jay, to join with him in this moment, but he doesn’t reach back.
Katrina realizes her eyes are closed. She opens them to find Jay weeping, his hands over his mouth, watching her. “What is it?” She leans down and pets his hair. “What’s wrong?”
“You’re just so beautiful. It’s all so… Lisica is…!” He holds up a hand, words failing him completely.
She grabs that hand, lacing her fingers through his. It’s so big and warm and the palm has so many hard calluses. She kisses his wrist. “You’re beautiful too, Jay. You are.”
He shakes his head in wonder. “I am?”
She laughs at him. He looks five years old. Until he takes another drag from the joint. He offers it to her and she puffs, but this is good molly. Pure. The best. THC doesn’t even make a dent in her glowing, pulsing aura. She is music. She is love. “We can do this…” she shares a wicked grin, “every night.”
“Damn.” The concept seems beyond him. In fact, the molly seems to be hitting Jay pretty hard. His eyelids flutter and his fingers reach out and poke at her nose and lips. “Are we…? Are we underwater?”
She smiles. “The sub is.”
“Oh.” He nods. This makes sense. They are in a sub, subs are underwater, this sub has water in it. And now they are breathing the heavy warm water. Oh, this is what he thought was blood. But it isn’t. It’s just water and light. Why is Katrina looking at him like that? She is a mermaid, floating here in the deep, bubbles playing about her mouth. Didn’t she just kiss him? A mermaid’s kiss? Wasn’t that supposed to be some kind of luck? Oh. She probably wants me to kiss her back.
Jay leans forward to cup her jaw but Katrina giggles and spins away again. Yes, they are in a sub and the sub is underwater and she is dancing happily with the whales now, the squids and octopi in the benthic deeps. If only she had some bioluminescence to play with, she would decorate herself like an aborigine.
Katrina pushes the slider on the master volume. This passage is one of her favorites. She always played it on her drives home from uni, sunroof open, speakers banging out the chords. Now she lifts her fists to match the beat but knocks one against the far hatch. Ow. That steel is unforgiving.
Steel. Steel everywhere. An entire cocoon of it, with her and Jay the transforming larvae within. For some reason she needs to claim the entirety of the cocoon. So she ducks through the hatch and dances down the hall, blessing the warrant officer and captain’s cabins with her sacred movement. Techno blasts her recklessly down the sub, echoing into clamor. Then for the big chorus she swings into the control room and spins around the periscope pillar like it’s her dance partner.
Back in the engine room, Jay is still overcome with emotion. He still feels her hand on his cheek, and a tendril of her soft hair that tickled him as it fell across his forehead and the bridge of his nose. He has never really been in love before. Girls have never been able to hold his attention for more than a night’s hookup. But the tenderness he feels for Katrina at this moment is a revelation. He understands now with deep insight how a knight can swear himself to a lady—a lady who may never love him in return. It doesn’t matter. Only the sanctity of the love does, and the purity of action that leads from it.
Jay opens his eyes. Wait. She’s gone. He laughs at himself, a big guffaw. Oh, yes, so connected to his lady fair. So connected that he didn’t even realize she’d left. Where did she go? He stands up, forgetting about his ankle until he puts weight on it. Then pain blooms in his extremity and he crashes sideways against the ground. He tries to break his fall with his broken hand and more pain blooms there. Why, he’s like a blooming fucking rosebush with all the pain that erupts from him.
But still she doesn’t come. So with a deep breath he hauls himself upright again and limps from the engine room through the hatch. “Hello?” The light is dim and indirect here. His head spins, but now he is fighting against the high instead of grooving within it. He can only see shadows in the two cabins off the hall. “Katrina?”
Jay continues to the control room, where the light has gotten really murky. Oh wait. He has a phone in his pocket with a light. Yes. Genius move. Now he’s back on top of his game. “Hello-o-o?”
But she isn’t in the control room either. Huh? Hadn’t they told him that the sub ended here? Yeah. The far hatch is welded shut, just like Triquet said. Then where did she go?
Jay’s gaze falls on one of the floor panels in the corner. It is tilted up, revealing a rectangle of darkness below.
Someone is moving in there. Someone wearing pink corduroy overall shorts. Katrina pops her head up from below. “Guess what Triquet said to me right before we came down here?”
Jay is so relieved to see her he can weep. But she demands an answer. “Uh, I don’t know. Lady Katrina. What?”
“That Tench-class diesel subs have two floors, not one.”
Ξ
Esquibel shines a pen light into Alonso’s pupils. Unlike with Jay, his are the same size. “That’s a surprise,” she murmurs to herself.
“What is?” Miriam asks, fearing brain damage. She should never have let the old drunkard go off in the darkness by himself. She must have been daft. Now she squeezes Amy’s hand in fear of Esquibel’s diagnosis.
“No concussion as far as I can tell. Your husband has a rock-solid head.” They had cleaned up his split scalp. The swelling was quite impressive. But the blood had stopped flowing by the time they had found him. Triquet holds an ice pack pressed against Alonso’s forehead. Esquibel gently peels it away to check the wound but it all seems to be stabilized.
Alonso shifts. He is conscious but he hasn’t responded with more than grunts and monosyllabic answers so far. He appears more abashed or embarrassed than injured though. Esquibel fetches a pair of ibuprofen pills and a cup of water.
“How’s things?” Triquet drawls, pressing the ice pack back onto its spot again. “Your brain still working, señor?”
“Unfortunately,” Alonso growls. “It hurts. So much.”
“Well we have things for that, bucko. Just let us mother you…” Triquet steps back so Esquibel can feed him the painkillers, “and you worry about healing yourself. Got it?”
“I drank too much. So stupid.” Alonso is filled with regret. He only recalls the faded glory of this night from when he sat in the camp chair drinking. Why had he ever left the chair? Oh, yes. To relieve himself. Well, why hadn’t he gone back immediately to it to let the good life return to him? What is it about him that always chases danger, that can never be happy, be settled? Why can’t he just let Miriam love him? “Remember, Mirrie? When I left?”
“Left? To pee on the bush? No? Left where, Zo?” She shares a concerned glance with Amy. Is he fully lucid?
“Left you to go to the Altai. We knew then. There was danger. We knew it. And still I went. Why? Why did I do it?”
“It’s where your subjects were.”
“No, I could have hired a local medical crew. I could have spent my time in the lab. Charlie wouldn’t be—Nadya…” He shrugs, dolorous. “They would both be alive if it wasn’t for me.”
Miriam drags on him, forcing him to look up at her. “Hey. Hey, listen to me, Alonso. This is very important. You didn’t kill them. Those thugs did. Those terrible men. You can’t be responsible for murderers running through the mountains. It wasn’t your fault.”
“But why, Mirrie? Why can’t I ever stay still? Why must I always run away to trouble?”
Miriam has long known the answer to this. There are several factors really—his unrequited grief from losing his mother when he was a teenager, his strict Catholic upbringing, his outsider status as a Cuban expatriate in Spain and New England. They had hashed it all out in the past and resolved to untangle his issues together. But now was not the time. “You did not run to trouble.” She kisses his gray hairline. “You collected data for an important study. It just went… all wrong.”
“So wrong.” He sighs, bleak. His mind is empty. He doesn’t deserve this much love. And yet here it is, indisputable. Miriam and Amy and even Esquibel and Triquet are treating him with such care. They are his responsibility. His family. He cannot let them down.
Ξ
Triquet emerges from the trap door downstairs, a thoughtful look on their face. This object they hold just might change everything.
Flavia is the only one still up. Everyone else has gone to bed. She watches Triquet cross the bunker, the old postcard in their hand. “Eh, what did you find, good Doctor?”
“Well… I found a den of iniquity and vice, first off. Those kids wouldn’t keep their hands to themselves. I mean, I know I’m irresistible but there is such a thing as consent.”
“What are you talking about? I thought you just went down there to check Jay’s concussion?”
“I did. As a favor to Doctor Daine so she could get some sleep. And his concussion is, well, impossible to assess when he’s tripping this hard. That’s for sure.”
“Ah, they are on the drugs? Crazy kids.”
“Like I’m saying. Oh, you’re seeing images and hearing things? That can either be your brain bleeding or the MDMA turning your perceptions into chocolate pudding. I mean, I love my party drugs, but right time, right place, please, people.”
“You shouldn’t have to deal with that in a workplace, Dottore! I will make a complaint to Alonso on your behalf in the morning. That is sexual harassment.”
Triquet waves Flavia’s concern away. “Oh, thanks sweetie, but I’m harder to ruffle than that. And frankly, they were so sweet about it I actually felt a bit flattered. It’s just there’s only so many hugs a Triquet can give each night. But look.”
Flavia peers at the postcard—no, it’s an old photo—that Triquet turns over again and again in their hands.
“I told Katrina a few hours ago that the sub most likely had two floors and the crazy girl lifted one of the hatches to access it.”
“Whaaaaaat? Another floor? Underneath?”
“Yes, she says she found a cramped room filled with trash. Like they used it to dump all the things they didn’t want up top. It sounds like an absolute goldmine but I’m not going down there without a lot more lights and a good eight hours of sleep. The wine is still making me sleepy.”
“Let me see.” Flavia gingerly holds the postcard. It is damaged almost beyond repair. Black dust runs down the image. They can only make out a tree and something like a dark finger.
“Don’t touch the image. I have a few tricks I want to try. See if I can save a bit of it. Here.” Triquet lifts it to their pursed lips and gently blows. Most of the black dust vanishes, revealing a black and white landscape photo, decades old. A redwood tree stands beside a beach. The dark finger is an outcropping of rock.
“That is our beach. It is here!” Flavia recognizes the pale lines of the cliffs and clusters of trees at their base. But where the bunker is today, something else stands in its place. “Eh, but what is that?”
Triquet tilts the image toward the light and squints. “Well, if I had to guess, I’d say that’s probably the conning tower of a Tench-class submarine. Looks like they might have lived in it first, before the bunker was built. Then, for some reason, they cut off the tower and left the rest of it buried in the…” Triquet shrugs, unable to think of any reason to do such a thing.
“They built the bunker on top? But why?” They stare at the image, hoping for more clues. But it remains an enigma.
From below, through the trap door, House music starts pounding like a heartbeat and Katrina can be heard to whoop. Flavia and Triquet share a smile. “Kids!” Flavia laughs, rolling her eyes.
Chapter 4 – Welded Shut
January 22, 2024
Thanks for joining us on our escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this Chapter:
4 – Welded Shut
It rains through the night. Those who choose to sleep in the bunker have a generally peaceful night of it. But not Flavia. One of the biggest holes in the roof is on the spine near the door, exposing the pitted I-beam to the elements and requiring two tarps to cover the rusted gaps in the corrugated steel on either side. She was the last one convinced to come inside the night before and that was only if she got the spot beside the door. But the wind picked up the corner of one of these tarps during the night and during gusts she got doused. First she cursed at the sky and the storm and her own ill luck that brought her to Lisica and keeps her here. But she just can’t find the energy to rouse herself and go out into the cold rain to lash it down again. Finally, she decides around 3 am to just relocate, dragging her sodden bedding further in beside Esquibel and Mandy. She notices they lie in an embrace, and how warm that must be. She misses her big dog Boris suddenly with a sharp intensity. Whenever she gets cold at home, the fat Alsatian jumps onto the foot of her bed and covers her legs with heavy warmth.
Flavia sleeps fitfully, finally glad to see the dawn light in the gaps beneath the tarp over the door. Standing, she yawns and stretches her aches and pains away. As far as she can tell she is the first one up. Flavia is surprised how few people took the option to get out of the rain. Jay remained out in his hammock, as did Maahjabeen in her tunnel tent. Pradeep trusted his pyramid. And Miriam and Alonso added a few tarps to their tent roof but remained in what Katrina refers to as their Love Palace.
Dawn light means no clouds, which also means no rain. Flavia steps clear of the huddled, sleeping bodies and peeks out the door. Perhaps she can find some caffeine out here in one of these bins….
Well well well. She isn’t the first one up at all. Down the beach, she can see Maahjabeen and Pradeep carrying the blue and yellow kayaks down to the shore.
Ξ
“I’ll stabilize you.” Maahjabeen puts the nose of her craft in the water and pushes Pradeep’s out to the edge. In his wide-brimmed nylon hat, long sleeve polo windshirt, and dark sunglasses he looks like a golfer. He buckles on the spray skirt and lifts the double-bladed paddle over his head like a weightlifter, stretching. She holds his boat stable as he slips neatly in and seals the skirt. Then she sends him off.
Pradeep glides out silently onto the lagoon with a private laugh. He loves kayaks. With powerful strokes, twisting from his hips, he propels the narrow craft out onto the water. These are pristine fiberglass boats, unbranded, with lines he’s never seen. They must be custom, worth thousands.
Maahjabeen, in her boat, scoots forward into the water. She calls out, “Now before we go any further, show me a roll.”
“What, now?” The chilling water has already spattered Pradeep’s hands and he is unprepared to face more.
“I said last night. Never again. She has brain damage, Pradeep. Now you promised me you all know how to paddle but ecch, I don’t really know. Show me.”
“Yes… You did say.” Pradeep tightens the leash on his sunglasses and grips the sides of his boat. With a grimace and a deep breath he rolls the boat upside down. What a shock it is, even when it is expected. Aach! He is too bony for such cold water. No fat to insulate him. Pradeep holds the paddle lengthwise as he’s been taught. Once he’s under, he leans as far back as he can in the seat and sweeps the paddle back and forth while rocking to roll him up the far side. It is relatively easy for him. He is strong and knows how to leverage his arms correctly. But he still comes up shivering and sputtering and shooting water out of his nose. “How’s that?” He finally manages one of his movie star smiles.
“Sufficient.” Maahjabeen paddles out past him, a half smile on her face. “Now stay behind me. I’ve never seen trickier currents.”
Pradeep is glad to get a bit of direct sun on his shirt. It might dry before this is over. But the wind chills him. He can do nothing but take deep breaths and remember his muay thai training. He flexes every muscle in his core, from his knees to his sternum, and flutter kicks his feet, anything to get himself going. Cold means adventure. He had read that in a popular book by the tracker Tom Brown. It was never more true than today.
“Do you think we are breaking any of Esquibel’s rules by being out here?” he asks Maahjabeen, considering this a neutral subject. “This is the first clear sky since we got here. Satellites could maybe see us out in the open here.”
“I don’t care about the satellites or any Hollywood nonsense.” Maahjabeen is irritated by the reminder that she might be secretly watched the entire eight weeks she is here. Her tent is too small for her to find any consistent privacy. And so far, the ocean is too wide. She paddles cautiously up toward the mouth of the lagoon. But she doesn’t like what she sees. By her calculations, this morning is their best chance over the next forty-eight hours to find a calm swell. Yet the rollers still crash against the breaks with uncommon force. It would take all her skill to get past the front rank of surf and then who knows how to navigate the three or four ranks behind. There are so many breaks out there and the waves are so strong she despairs of ever being able to escape the lagoon.
Maahjabeen never curses. Instead, she hisses. She grips her paddle with all her strength and hisses like an asp.
Pradeep, warmer now, pulls up close enough to hear her. But her frustration is easily understood. The water past the breaks would chew them to pieces. He wouldn’t go out there for love nor money. They surrender their greatest ambitions for the day and peel away from the current drawing them toward the lagoon’s mouth back into still water.
“Careful. Sea grass. The blades get tangled.” Maahjabeen steers them toward a clearer patch, where a liquid sound from ahead indicates that they just missed seeing someone pulling their head underwater who had been watching them.
“Otter? Sea lion?” Pradeep wonders aloud. “Did you see that?”
“I didn’t, but the otters are real rascals out here. I’ve watched them. No fear. I guess no one has hunted them for a long time. They are unlike most populations I’ve known. And so big.”
“Good eating here, I’m sure.” Pradeep looks down into the green murk, visualizing a coral ecosystem directly below of urchins and parrot fish, a sea otter’s ideal feeding grounds. Then he recalls the story of the girl swimming in Lake Shasta who disturbed a pack of nesting freshwater otters. She nearly died before she made it back ashore and required hundreds of stitches. He narrows his grip on his paddle so that his hands don’t reach over the sides.
They back-paddle, hovering in place. “Well, Alonso did say last night he wants us focusing on the lagoon and beach first.” Saying it aloud allows Maahjabeen to release some of her irritation. She will unlock the secrets of the ocean yet. If nothing else, she can follow the channel the Zodiacs used and skate away from this shallow shelf somehow far out into the blue water, but she’ll definitely need support for that. And a lot more research and observation. She once again drags her eyes from the horizon. “So. Here in the lagoon we might share some common goals, I think. You are a field biologist? Any marine biology?”
“Well, yes.” Pradeep immediately grows animated. The number of people he is able to share his enthusiasms with are very few. “Actually you could say it’s been about half my work. I’m neither terrestrial nor aquatic, which doesn’t help my grant proposals any. I have a very strange approach to the species I study. I really only like the weird ones, the ignored ones, the interconnectors that prop up whole ecologies. You could more properly say I’m a systems researcher. I like identifying these weird little ecological bottlenecks wherever I find them, in the sea or on the land or up in the clouds, and characterize them in detail for wider research communities. I’ve already gotten quite a few journal citations, even though as a junior researcher I’ve only had my name on a couple published papers. Parasites and nematodes.”
“You sound like Doctor Alonso.”
“Yes, Amy said he and I would get along famously. I can’t wait to hear more about Plexity. I’ve had similar ideas myself. And what about you? Are you much of a marine biologist yourself or are you strictly about the water and waves?”
“I am strictly about the water and waves,” Maahjabeen says. “And the weather, I suppose. For me, it is the dynamics of the moving water I care about. The fish and the birds and the sea lions, they are just…” she searches for the word, “passengers.”
“Ha. That’s a very unique perspective, I guess. More physics and less biology, I suppose. Well we should make a good team. If you find any interesting diploblasts let me know. And I’ve brought a fairly good USB microscope for seawater samples, among other things, because I’m getting into radiolarians these days.”
“And I suppose it is finally time for me to focus on lagoons and reefs and intertidal zones. My adviser told me someday I must.”
“That’s where my research takes me.” Pradeep skims the flat of his blade over the glassy blue-black water. “The edge of things. Where complexity happens. So many biologists, they are just census takers, you know? Count the herd. The flock. The swarm. I am more like… a criminal investigator. I follow lines of dependence through systems and biomes…”
“Yes yes. It is fascinating.” Maahjabeen’s voice is as flat as the water here. She swings her blade back and forth over its surface, restless. She hasn’t taken her eyes off the mouth of the lagoon but every time the passage clears of a wave another is already coming in, with such tall faces and sharp closeouts that she’s sure she’d be crushed or spun. Those just aren’t waves she can paddle over. “It didn’t look so bad from the ship, or the Zodiac.”
“Yeah,” Pradeep laughs. “Well, give me an outboard motor and like five times a kayak’s stability and I’ll get out there no problem. So…” he surveys the closest arm of coral that breaks the surface, “Shall we start there? You can tell me what you’ve learned about the lagoon and I’ll stop going on and on about my esoteric crap.”
Ξ
“Theory.” Jay kneels in front of Mandy, who sits cross-legged in the sand on a SpongeBob beach towel. “Like engineering theory. Mechanical engineering. Not science. Ready?”
She regards him, eyebrows raised, her consciousness taking its time detaching from the columns of data she’d been comparing.
“Sorry. Am I interrupting?” His eager smile fades, a crestfallen puppy. “I just thought you were someone who could—I heard you talk about building a guyed-out steel tower.” His enthusiasm builds again and his hands come up, describing each word and concept with deft fingers. “But listen: the tallest redwoods, those right there, are already a hundred meters high. And we might already have good reason to climb one. What do you think?”
“Just what are you proposing?” Mandy squints at the tousled and roguish California boy, wondering if he is at all like those jackals she had to contend with at UCLA. So far he hasn’t been lecherous at all, thank god. But what is he saying about the trees? She could put some instruments up near the top, still hidden from Skeebee’s satellites but providing much better meteorological data than what she is able to collect on the ground.
Jay holds up a persuasive hand. “I’ll do the climbing. All the dangerous stuff. Don’t worry about that. Stephen Sillett at Humboldt State developed a system, super safe, for climbing the trees without damaging them. He uses a crossbow to get fishing line over the lowest branches… but I don’t have a crossbow. Or ascenders. But, uh, I was just wondering if you had any ideas.”
“My ideas are usually to call the tower company and tell them where to install it.” Mandy feels hopelessly out of her depth. “I mean, could you like use some of the platforms from camp to build a scaffold to get you up to…? I don’t know. Why do biologists want to get up to the top anyway?”
“Let’s say I get ninety-five percent of the way up one of the big trunks, onto a solid platform where the major branches divide out. Look at the trees closest to the cliffs. Their tops can’t be more than like ten meters from the cliff. But the face is bare rock there. No more dirt or clay at that height. Then maybe I can build like a rope bridge from the trees to the cliff and…” He shakes his head and laughs. “Yeah, now that I say it out loud, it sounds less like a theory and more like…”
“Lunacy?”
“I guess. Unless you think of anything, Doctor Hsu. Well. Let me know. Also, the crowns of Coast redwoods are among the most dense ecosystems in the world. Hundreds of species up there just waiting to be discovered. That’s why. But I’m sure we’ll get to it sooner or later. Thanks for listening. See you on the flip side.”
And just like that he is gone.
Mandy, bemused, goes back to her work.
Ξ
Flavia returns to her tent on its platform to retrieve a battery pack. She has already set up a solar panel in the bare patch of sunlight beside the bunker. But she just discovered that the panel has two ports! So she will maximize her charging hours by filling two of her seven batteries at once. Her tent survived the storm relatively well. It only failed in one corner, where the damp found its way into her clothes and bedding. She will have to get those up and out next, to air them. But she wants the solar panels to… Wait. Flavia pauses her noisy activity and listens. Is that someone crying?
Emerging from her tent, she realizes it comes from the big platform beside her. Alonso is alone in there, his deep husky sobs shaking him. Without a thought, Flavia ascends the ramp and ducks into his tent.
She kneels beside him, placing a hand on his shoulder. “Alonso. What is it?”
He turns, surprised it isn’t Miriam. He’d heard the creaking on the steps and anticipated the touch, but not the voice. His face is a storm. “Ah, Flavia. Thank you. It is just my poor feet. The pain. The doctors wanted me to stay on the opiates for the rest of my days but I wouldn’t. I can’t. I will not be a junkie. I will live with the pain instead.”
Flavia transfers her hands to his feet. She finds them red and swollen, misshapen with lumps where none should be. She just rests her hands lightly on them. “Your feet? What happened to your poor feet?”
“They broke the bones. Again and again. Ahh. Thank you. Just no harder than that. But thank you.” He takes a deep shuddering breath. “I have so many nightmares locked up in my feet.”
She feels electric tremors passing beneath his skin, a jagged disquiet that rises in her like nausea. Flavia wants to pull her hands away but that would be so cruel. So she takes a deep breath and tries to share a smile with him. “I am so sorry, signore dottore.”
“Being here. Doing our work. No dream could be better. Right, Flavia? Worth every bit of agony. So what do you think of the project now that you’ve taken a look at it?”
“Well.” She shifts and her knee rolls forward, crushing the ball of his left foot. Alonso roars in pain, his face squeezing shut. Flavia pulls her hands back, horrified, to her face. The sound coming out of him is a terrible and unending wail.
Miriam comes running. Amy appears from out of the bunker. Flavia pleads with them. “I didn’t—No, please! I was only trying to…” She stands and backs out of the tent. “Ai mi.”
Miriam pushes past her to Alonso’s side. “Amy, we need ice!”
“There’s a small electric cooler. It has a little. But we’ll need more. I guess it’s time to plug in the big one.”
Alonso rocks back and forth in Miriam’s arms like an infant. His eyes are closed, his face twitching, trapped in his trauma. Then he bellows, unable to hold it in any longer.
His release is volcanic, way out of proportion to the small injury to his foot. Flavia falls back, appalled, as he roars and roars. Alonso throws his head back, shredding his throat, years of horror ejecting itself. Amy rushes back up the ramp holding a white washcloth and a handful of ice. But she stops several paces short, stupefied by the outburst. She never knew one person could suffer so.
They all draw close from their platforms and from within the bunker. Esquibel approaches the distraught Flavia and puts a comforting arm around her shoulders. Flavia squeezes her hand in gratitude, but she can’t take her eyes from the big platform.
Finally, after minutes on end, Alonso’s roars lose their power. Finally he chokes on one and gasps in Miriam’s arms. She only rocks him. Now Amy slips in and places the ice within reach before withdrawing again. Alonso’s breath is ragged, still tortured. In her mind, Amy just keeps telling herself, he is a giant, such a giant, but a broken giant now. How can you even break a giant?
Ξ
Triquet stands in the door of the bunker, watching the camp return to a semblance of order. Today they wear a kilt over boxer briefs and their bare legs can only take so much sun. Their mind skitters away from the emotional power of the scene. In Rostov on Don they once toured an orphanage. They heard a child in a ward screaming down a long sterile hall like this. It still resides in their bones, that chilling sound. Now Alonso’s heartbreak would be with them forever as well. That poor man. What he must have endured.
Work. The answer, as always, is work. Work has gotten Triquet to see the world and placed them atop one of the most competitive fields in academic science and research. Work cures all.
And that means the door at the bottom of the stairs. “Where is Esquibel…?” they ask themself, trying to see what has become of her. She has left Flavia’s side, that’s all Triquet can tell. Pradeep is out on the water. Jay is gone. Miriam is… occupied. Maybe they’ll just have to open the door alone?
“That is a terrible idea.” And yet Triquet finds themself back inside the bunker at the top of the stairs holding their helmet and eyeing the door regardless. No water seeps from under its frame. Whatever exists down there, it remained dry through the night. That’s a comfort. More living space perhaps. At least a place to store gear…
Now they’re somehow on the bottom step, their fingers curling under the gap. “This is poor decision making, Triq.” Their voice breaks the spell. They laugh, rueful at their weak will when it comes to underground mysteries. “I can find someone to help. I can. Come on. Take five minutes to do this properly!”
Disturbed by the fugue state from which they just roused themself, Triquet arrows to Amy at the lab tables. She is putting together rows of trays for her specimen collections. “Any chance,” Triquet begins, “you feel like being the bait this time when I open the door?”
“Bait? What door? The door downstairs?”
“As far as I know,” Triquet drawls, looking around, “it’s the only actual door on the island.”
“I was thinking about that,” Amy says, putting the unordered piles of collection equipment back in a bin. “What if we move that door from downstairs, assuming it’s safe, to the front door here so the bunker can finally be closed up again?”
“Otherwise it’s coconut crabs all day and night?”
“Among other things.”
“Well, let’s go see, shall we?”
“Let me just tell…” Amy surveys the camp. “Where did Esquibel go? I don’t want to disturb Alonso and Miriam.”
“Good grief!” Triquet exclaims. “I’ll need to get the whole camp together again before that door is opened!” They look up at the sky. Their sunny morning is ending with a gray shawl drawing itself over the sky. “And if that means more rain Mandy will never let me in there!”
“I’m coming, I’m coming.”
She follows them into the bunker and down to the bottom of the stairs, where Amy waits on one of the lower steps and watches Triquet test the movement of the door. It creaks a bit, stiff but still functional. “Well, here goes nothing.”
Triquet opens the door.
Darkness yawns before them. With a muttered curse, Triquet remembers to turn on the light and begin recording with the camera. A cone of yellow-white LED light illuminates an oval hatch and the dusty floor. Rusted metal panels cover the walls, ceiling, and floor. The room is narrow, cramped with bowed walls. It smells vaguely of oil and diesel, like an engine room. Assemblies of pipes and conduit run along the walls and a cluster drops from the ceiling to a spot in the center of the room where something used to stand. A single stanchion remains, but otherwise the metal panels sport eyelets for bolts that no longer attach to anything.
“So weird.” Triquet ducks through the hatch and breathes in the fumes among the otherwise clean air. “Some kind of wonky DIY adaptation here. This room used to be something else. And look.” Triquet enters the room, followed hesitantly by Amy. “Another door lock. Like in a ship.” The door on the far wall is a watertight portal with a wheel. But it hangs open. Triquet swings this door wide and peers further in. “Yeah, another room like this one. I wonder what they used it for? Come on. There’s another door.”
Amy hesitates at the second hatch. She doesn’t want to let the door and the stairs and the reflected daylight out of her sight. But Triquet crows with delight and beckons even more urgently. “The third room! Wardrobes and bunks! The jackpot! Still narrow. Like super narrow for living quarters. But there will be so many clues in here! Clues upon clues!” They touch a dented and dull piece of chrome that served as a mirror. Initials and phrases are etched in the corners in the immemorial language of graffiti.
Triquet crosses this third room to another hatch. This one opens on an extremely narrow hall. Triquet turns back to Amy, careful not to blind her with the headlamp. “Uhh, Doctor Kubota…?”
“What is it, Doctor Triquet?” Amy doesn’t like how shaken Triquet’s voice is. She presses her mouth into a thin line to overcome her fear of dark cramped spaces like this and stoops to step through the second hatch so she can keep them in view.
“This is, I mean, I think this is a submarine. Like a postwar sub. Probably diesel. Decommissioned and… what then? Buried at the beach? I mean, how? And why? Why would they put an entire submarine in the ground? This is crazy.” Triquet’s wild laugh echoes off the metal plates. They touch the closest one, feeling the accumulated grime.
“We should tell the others.” Amy’s voice is as sober as it gets.
Triquet nods at her, eyes wide.
Ξ
“My guess,” Miriam says as they have another meeting around the long tables while eating a late lunch, “is that Lisica may have become a place for the US military to get rid of a piece of kit they no longer wanted. Maybe the sub was some top-secret prototype?”
“Then why didn’t they just dismantle it at one of the shipyards?” Among them all, it is Esquibel who is reacting the most strongly to this news. She knows how militaries operate and it isn’t safety first. Her initial thought had been to geiger counter the entire beach, but nobody had the forethought to bring radiation sensors. Why would they? “Wait. Triquet. You said you carried a radon sensor. Radon is a kind of natural background uranium decay that leaks from rocks, isn’t it? We can perhaps use it to test the bunker for any nuclear fuel or weapon leakage.”
“I’m telling you it was a postwar diesel sub.” Triquet is unshaken by the possibility they were exposed to radiation. “I’ve seen Operation Petticoat enough times to recognize a Gato-class sub…”
“Actually…” Amy interrupts them, consulting her laptop. “I can’t find a clear floorplan for any of the subs you’re talking about, Triquet, but it definitely isn’t Gato-class. The layout is all wrong. Maybe a Balao or Tench-class from the late-forties instead. Those are still diesel. Anything later than that is much bigger, and that’s when they added nukes.”
“I still think we should scan the island.” Esquibel fights down a rising worry that complacency among the others might just lead to a catastrophe. “As the medical doctor here, please don’t make me deal with radiation poisoning for two months. Just run the test.”
Triquet shrugs. “Fine. But we may want to add like a flange or nozzle to the sensor or something so it isn’t just sampling ocean breezes blowing by. Maybe a control reading in the bunker is our best bet. I’ll get right on it.” They inhale the last bite of their cous-cous, daintily wipe the corners of their mouth, and depart.
Now it is down to seven around the table. Maahjabeen and Pradeep still paddle the lagoon. They’ve been out for hours. Nobody can find Jay. And Alonso still occupies his tent, a forearm flung across his eyes.
“Lastly, ladies…” Miriam nods at them. Her smile is unsteady and her voice is low. “I’d like to thank everyone for your patience and support with…” she waves a forlorn hand at the big platform, “…this. All of this. I didn’t know what I would find and he is… he is very damaged. But this work is not about Alonso. He wouldn’t ever want that. It’s about the system he created, the interdisciplinary classifications that we must always be thinking about, working on.”
“Miriam, I am so so so sorry. I didn’t even realize I was touching his poor foot when I just shifted, just the tiniest—!” Flavia claps her fingers over her mouth.
Miriam consoles Flavia with a calm hand on her shoulder. “No no. If it wasn’t you it would have been someone else. It was bound to happen. I think you… he is filled with poison and you popped the swollen thing and perhaps let it start to drain. It was inevitable and necessary and I hope you don’t hold it against yourself.”
“Grazie, dottore.” Flavia wipes tears away. “I felt so horrible.”
Amy appears at her elbow. “Tea?”
“Oh my god you always do this,” Flavia laughs. “Yes, of course, let me join the club of those who have been shamed publicly so Amy has to make it up with tea. And lots of sugar if you have it.”
The others laugh as Amy scurries off.
Triquet returns, holding up a small unit with a silver lcd screen. “Like I said. All clear. No trace of uranium upstairs or downstairs or anywhere around the bunker. Or, at least, according to a radon sensor I bought on Amazon. This isn’t its intended use at all. So can we rest easy? And get back to exploring the sub?”
Nobody can think of any more objections. With murmurs of excitement, Esquibel, Amy, Mandy, and Miriam disperse to their tents to collect their things, then follow Triquet into the bunker.
Ξ
Flavia remains, sipping her tea glumly. Katrina stares into the middle distance, brooding.
“Well,” Flavia says, “even though the environment here leaves a lot to be desired, eh? The people… the people are very much top notch. Especially after Esquibel calmed down, no?”
But Katrina hardly hears her. Only after a long moment does she say, “Sorry. I’m back now. You said something?”
“No. Just complaining. I feel like I’m the only one complaining here and everyone else is having the time of their lives. Is that how it is for you?”
“Totally. I’m absolutely having the time of my life.” Katrina flashes Flavia a sweet smile. “How about an actual real honest-to-Satan underground rave tonight? In a decommissioned sub buried ten meters deep? I mean, yes please, that is absolutely a legend waiting to happen.”
Flavia frowns at her. “I don’t understand you, Katrina. Is that what you are spending all your time here thinking about? Alonso said you are some great thinker, but so far I don’t see you thinking about anything very much, if you will excuse me.”
“Oh, I’m not thinking about that, Flavia. That’s just a fun little party plan. I’m actually thinking about Miriam and Mandy. And Maahjabeen. Ha. All the M ladies of the project! I’m thinking that it’s easy to say that Alonso brought a geologist because she is his wife but why did he bring an atmospheric scientist and an oceans researcher? It means he must be very serious about mapping the context of every biological classification in time and space, in what he believes constitute the matrices of his life network. Now, Lady Miriam’s already dropped the panspermia word so I don’t think there’s any model I can propose at this point that will be too wacky for this crew but still, we’re going full Gaia hypothesis here if I’m not mistaken and I’m all for it. But what I’m beginning to think now is about your programming, Flavia, and how your greatest challenge will be somehow fixing his data within the context of sea and sky, you know what I mean? And rock too, if you’ve heard Miriam talking about the extremophiles living in bedrock. So we’ve got these fluid surfaces to place our networks on, dynamic and moving, exchanging information and energy themselves. I can see one of your biggest challenges will be some bespoke algorithms that are able to account for this fluidity. That’ll be quite the puzzle. I might be able to help you with that. I’m not a horrible maths girl, but most of my work has been in topology, security stuff for the Australian Defense agencies. Now how can we most simply and elegantly adapt Alonso’s ivory tower thought processes to systems that work in the real world, which by necessity means in real time because anything else will be an intolerable reduction of data to an almost unusable set. So you’ve got to keep it lean, with the user inputs minimal but information-rich, and I’m thinking where I might help best is in some data visualization for the end user, giving them the feedback they need in the field to record better data and interact with their sites more effectively. Maybe some pop-up windows onscreen hosted by cute little animals? That would be too dear. So yeh. In the end I guess I’ve been thinking more about you, Flavia, than anyone.” Katrina’s smile is innocent.
Flavia shakes her head, bemused. “Yes, I see. I see that you’ve been thinking about it quite a bit. That is good. Ha. What an interesting young person you are, Katrina.”
“Oh, come on. I can’t be more than six years younger than you! Let’s just say I’m young at heart. And I’m sorry you were the one who popped Alonso’s poison balloon. You didn’t deserve that.”
“Oh my god I wanted to kill myself. I had no idea…”
“I knew it. I knew it was coming. I just thought it would be with Miriam, of course. But nobody can handle it when it happens…” Katrina shivers as a nasty dark memory slithers through her.
“You’ve gone through this before?” Flavia realizes. “Ai me.”
“My brother. He was in the gulag with Alonso. They met there. Pavel was released first. He… They went through all the same things. Endless interrogations. Electric shocks. Beatings.”
“Why did the Russians do it?”
“We’re not sure who was running the camp. I mean, Pavel was sent to the gulag by the Russians for trying to film a documentary in Saint Petersburg. But no one knows much about the camp itself. There was a guard, Gerasim, who befriended Pavel. He told him the gulag he was in didn’t belong to any one country. They were a bandit group in the Altai mountains right at the intersection of four countries, Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia, and China. Hired themselves out to anyone, I guess. Well, we scraped together a ransom and got Pavel home about a year ago. But he didn’t just have one bad night like that, by the way, screaming like that. Many many nights. Though he’s starting to get better now.”
“My god.”
Katrina unwraps a piece of bubblegum and pops it in her mouth. She starts braiding her hair. “Pavel kept in touch with Gerasim, funny as that might sound. And though he wouldn’t talk about much of what happened at the gulag, Pavel would tell me of this amazing Cuban scientist he met in there, and how his fascinating theories would make the hours speed by. I found his information theory so fascinating. So I began writing to Gerasim too. Because that’s how my own brain works. And Alonso and I became, like… I mean, he’s basically my best friend. I don’t have anyone I can talk to about all the things I think about except him. And he’s the only one who understands what Pavel is going through.”
“So what are your advanced degrees?”
Katrina shrugs. “Crystallography and French modernism. I can’t seem to settle on one thing. Still, in all my departments I never found people who talked about the world around them the way he does. I guess, I’m basically his groupie.”
“No, from the way he talks about you it is obvious that he is yours. Crystallography and French Moderns? What kind of crazy brain do you have?”
Katrina cocks her head and gives Flavia the full elfin effect. “The craziest.” She kisses Flavia on the forehead and skips away.
Ξ
Triquet leads the line of explorers down the trap door’s stairs and through the first three rooms. They follow in silence, swinging their own headlamps and flashlights at the walls.
They stop at the third hatch, leading to the cramped hallway. “This is as far as I got,” Triquet says. “This is when I realized where I was. I bet these are like warrant officer rooms and radio and captain’s quarters along this hall here.”
“How do you know so much about submarines?” Amy asks.
“No more than I know about anything else. I’m just an item fiend, doll. Old, new, big, little. If I didn’t have any scruples I’d just work for Tiffany’s or Christie’s or something. If it’s been made by human hands, I’ll know at least a bit about it. That’s my kink.” Triquet winks at Amy and steps into the hall.
The doors along the left wall are narrow steel panels, rusted nearly black. Triquet taps on one of them and it echoes, hollow. “I swear,” they sigh, “this just becomes more and more of a horror movie set every day. Hello? Housecleaning.” Triquet knocks and opens the door. They whistle when a desk is revealed, its drawers open and empty. Triquet steps in and tries to turn on the desk lamp. It clicks but remains dark. “I mean, of course. That would be so wild if it actually had power.” Amy watches them from the door. Miriam slips past her to the next door. “Excuse me, dear ones. You can take peeks but please don’t handle anything you see until Captain Archaeology here gets a chance first.”
“Of course, Doctor Triquet.” Miriam sings it out cheerily but in the metal hallway underground there is an unsettling flatness to its echoes. She tries to open the next door. “Locked. Or sealed shut somehow. What did you say this one is? Radio room?”
Triquet steps back into the hall. “I’m really just guessing. But there has to be a control room up here. Periscope and conning tower and all that, right?”
“Wouldn’t a conning tower be aboveground?” Esquibel still doesn’t trust this wreck and refuses to touch anything.
Mandy turns and turns, the last one at the rear. “Which way are we faced here? West? This is still west. It was the west side of the bunker and then we extended out west, maybe southwest?”
“Yeah, directly west means trees and taproots,” Amy says. “I’m guessing the sub extends under the beach instead. So we’re kind of at an angle to the shore?”
Mandy says, “Maahjabeen will be so upset when she finds out someone else brought a boat without asking her.” They all laugh. Mandy blushes at her own joke, made at the expense of someone not here. “But maybe there will be some oceanic or naval records for her here. Maybe some weather data for me.”
Amy opens the third door. It is the Captain’s wardroom. A thin veneer of wood paneling is peeling away, but it’s the first color they’ve seen down here besides gray and black. A low bunk is built against the back wall. A built-in desk against the right-hand wall is closed, its top folded up. The chair is against the back corner. It almost looks lived in. Amy tests the mattress. It crackles.
Everyone else crowds the doorway, looking in. “No touching!” Triquet reminds Amy.
“Right. Sorry. I just needed to see if it’s better than my sleeping pad. Cause this is looking pretty cozy down here if you ask me.”
Mandy is still drawn by the siren song of weather logs possibly kept in the control room. She steps toward the hatch at the end of the hall, finding it cracked open. It swings open silently on oiled hinges. She ducks down and sweeps her flashlight through the larger chamber. Yes, the control room has workstations with the screens and vacuum tubes removed. And in the corner are rusted file cabinets. She reacts more strongly than she thought she would to see the periscope column. “Oh, I’m too much of a pacifist to be in this thing for very long, that’s for sure.”
“What did you find?” Mandy didn’t expect Esquibel’s voice so close behind her and she startles, stifling a scream.
“Don’t sneak up on me down here, Skeebee! It’s too creepy!”
They edge their way into the control room. “No spiders, no worms, no signs of life at all. The hull must still be intact.” Esquibel skirts a rusted grate and opens one of the file cabinet drawers to find it empty. “So crazy. This is like stepping back in time. The control rooms of today look nothing like this. I’ve only been on a sub once, a decommissioned one at Diego Garcia. But the control room was like a penthouse suite compared to this.”
“Again with the touching.” Triquet stares their disapproval at Esquibel’s hand on the file cabinet drawer handle. She recoils, guilty, and steps away from it, dusting her clothes. Triquet slowly enters, taking in every detail, their camera recording it all. “Oh, baby.” They clap their hands, doing their best Daffy Duck. “I’m rich! I’m wealthy! I’m independent! I’m financially secure! Is this why Alonso brought me? It must be. Did he know about any of this? Why oh why did they bury this thing in the sand…?”
Miriam, stepping through the hatch, says, “He never said a thing about a submarine in our emails. I got precisely two from him, each three paragraphs. I can recite them from memory, if you like.” She stands and grins, turning on a lantern function on her flashlight that provides bright yellow diffuse light to fill up the room. “There. That’s better. There’s not even any mold down here. I still don’t understand where the air is coming from.”
“Where’s the fire torpedo button?” Amy inspects the conning tower, its oiled hydraulics now clotted with black grease. “Don’t want to do anything crazy here.”
Mandy laughs. “Poor Maahjabeen and Pradeep! Just boating around the lagoon and all of a sudden the beach blows up!”
“It’s… this one?” Triquet frowns at the cluster of buttons and switches below the conning tower faceplate. “Frankly, this is me just using Hollywood as reference again. Always a bad idea. It could be over on that wall somewhere for all I know.”
Mandy sniffs the air. “It is fresh though.” She shares a nod with Miriam. Encouraged, she crouches and tries to follow the gentle air currents. She’d show them that a meteorologist can still be helpful, even underground! Nobody understands convection like she does! It’s one of her favorite atmospheric dynamics! She crosses the control room to the far hatch. This one is still sealed.
No, air issues from the grate below her feet. She kneels on it, finding it still quite solid, and spreads her hands over the gaps. The voices of the others recede as she focuses on the gentle movement of the air, which rises up from the grate. Then after a moment it stops. “Why did it stop?”
That silences the room. “The air?” Miriam asks.
Mandy feels the air sucked gently out of the room now, in a reverse exchange that reminds her uneasily of a giant creature’s respiration. She stands and nods. “Yeah. I’m, uh, not sure we should open that door, Doctor Triquet.”
Triquet, at the hatch, turns lazily away. “Can’t anyway, darling. This is the end of the line, It’s welded shut.”
DW Draffin -- Lisica 