Chapter 44 – In The Rain
October 28, 2024
Thanks for joining us for the third volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this episode:
44 – In The Rain
“God, look at that, Jay. Actual sunlight.” It streams through the trees ahead during a break in the storm, illuminating the pillars of redwood groves, which give way to a great expanse on the far side. “Almost there now.”
Jay limps along behind Pradeep, one eye squeezed shut, a hand plastered against his left side. “One sec.” He falls to his knees and heaves up the bile in his stomach. It is empty of food. Bile is all he’s got. Oh, yeah. That definitely makes the incision scream. And now his throat is so torn up it will never be the same. Pain everywhere, inside and out.
“Are you ill, my friend? Or just…” Pradeep makes a sweeping gesture with his hand, including all Jay’s injuries.
“Just…” Jay repeats the gesture, “exhausted.” But it is too painful to speak, the acid scoring his windpipe. He hauls himself to his feet and taps his chest pocket. “Least I got my phone back. Worth it.” He forces himself to move again. They are nearly there.
Dropping down a loose slope onto a wide basin, they shuffle across the forest floor as the groves give way to open ground. The creek has dropped off somewhere to their left. The woods are silent and still, the birds and insects continuing to hide from the storm.
“Weather coming back,” Pradeep observes. “That’s why they don’t come out. They know this is just a quick break. Ugh. Look at the clouds coming. So sick of the rain.”
“Who doesn’t come out?” Jay peers around.
“The animals. The fauna. That’s why it’s so quiet in here.”
Jay slurps a trickle of cold water off a lily’s broad leaf. It leaves a floral, sticky taste in his mouth. But it soothes his throat. Now he can speak again. “Study I read right before I left. Researchers have been listening to forests. In the ultrasonic range, just above human hearing. Plants talk.”
“With a bunch of tiny high-pitched voices? It is so cold today! Like that?” Pradeep is pleased with his joke but Jay doesn’t laugh. Oh, well. This is why he doesn’t crack jokes. Nobody expects humor from him. “Well, this is what I just proved with Plexity and the mycelium networks. Chemical signals travel along immense and far-flung networks carrying data…”
“Yeah, but this is through the air. Sounds like it does underwater. At a coral reef when you dive. All those pops and clicks and trills.”
“Really?” Pradeep listens but of course he can’t hear them.
“The more stressed the plants are the more clicks they make. If we just had a bit better hearing we’d hear them all the time. Know when to water our houseplants and such. Most critters must hear the plants chattering away like constantly. But happy plants only click like once an hour.”
“Well then this is indeed a quiet forest. These trees have to be pretty happy with all this rain and now sun.”
“Wait.” Jay stops, listening intently. “I do hear something.”
Pradeep listens too. It is a voice so distant that they can only sense its tones and textures against the edges of the silence. “Okay. Come on, this way. But quiet. Who knows who it is?”
They step in that direction, finding a gully dividing the ground choked with ferns. They follow it in the general direction of the voice, finally coming to a dead stop at a sudden drop.
A line of dark stone past the vegetation falls away nearly ten meters to a deeper cut in the ground, where their gully joins a larger one. This has running water at the bottom and a sandbar with a figure crouched on it. Wetchie-ghuy. But he isn’t looking at them. He is looking at a bay tree beside the water in which Jidadaa is perched out of reach.
She is speaking Lisican to the shaman. When Pradeep and Jay arrive she doesn’t stop or acknowledge them, nor does Wetchie-ghuy. Her voice ends in a question and his answer is abrupt.
She asks another question. “Xʼoon yadyee x̱ʼaadáx̱ sá?”
“Yax̱adoosh.”
“Ai eh.” Jidadaa finally turns to the two outsiders. “Seven days. That is how long.”
“How long until what?” Jay’s voice is filled with suspicion.
“The little babies are born. The fox babies.”
“Kits.” Pradeep studies this scene. It is some kind of standoff here, where Wetchie-ghuy waits for Jidadaa to, what, surrender? Give him back his little doll? Both? “We call baby foxes kits. But what does that have to do with anything? Don’t they have like five litters a year? I’m just shocked the island isn’t overrun with them.”
Surprisingly, Jidadaa translates Pradeep’s words for Wetchie-ghuy. He only pulls his lips back over his teeth and grimaces. Then, with the compulsion of a pedagogue, he begins to lecture them all on the subject.
Jidadaa says, “Foxes are old here. First fox came with Tuzhit. First man. Lisica beautiful then. All birds, all little mice. Then foxes eat all the birds. All the mice. All the snake and lizard. Then men say, no more fox. They kill. All fox gone. Then Lisica is very bad. Very bad time and all people are unhappy. But one fox is left, hiding. They find. She has baby kits. Eight. One for each village or íx̱tʼ…” She gestures at Wetchie-ghuy. “Long time ago. But now, only three fox left. One, she is gone right now. Hiding to have baby kits. Wetchie-ghuy and Daadaxáats look and look but they don’t find. They fight, to be the one to control fox baby kits.”
Wetchie-ghuy drops into a crouch upon hearing his rival’s name spoken aloud. He mutters darkly to himself.
“Wait…” Pradeep tries to digest all this information. “This is what their argument is about? Who gets custody of the silver fox kits? That’s… bizarre. They’re like kidnapping and poisoning people over it? Bloody hell. So Wetchie-ghuy used to have a fox of his own but it died? It ran away? And now he wants another?”
“He wants all. Make the decide. To decide who get fox. When fox can have baby kits, they are spirit of village. Without fox, village die. With new fox, new life.”
“Jidadaa, watch out!”
Jay barely has the first syllable of her name out before Wetchie-ghuy twitches forward, leaping for the lowest branches of the bay tree. But Jidadaa twitches as well, and seemingly without any effort at all she is crouched on an even higher limb.
Jidadaa holds out Wetchie-ghuy’s doll as a taunt and curses him, the Lisican words coming fast and furious. She threatens to pull the doll apart and the shaman below her relents, falling away from the tree and retreating to the sandbar, where he crouches once more.
“What is that thing you stole?” Pradeep calls out. “Why does he care so much for it?”
“This is magic doll. It tells Wetchie-ghuy where to find foxes.”
“Ah.” Pradeep nods. “That makes sense.”
“It does? In what universe does that make sense?” Jay rasps. “No. What I want to know is what the fucking shamans want with us? Why do they keep after us? Shouldn’t they focus on the fox?”
But Jidadaa doesn’t need to ask Wetchie-ghuy why. She already knows the answer. “You are magic. You are koox̱.”
Jay and Pradeep frown at each other. “Unexpected,” Pradeep finally manages. “I don’t feel like magic. Nor koosh.”
Jidadaa calls out to Wetchie-ghuy, shaking the doll, indicating that if he doesn’t let her go she will throw it in the stream. Finally, he appears to give up. With a final glare over his shoulder at her, he withdraws back up the gully out of sight.
Triumphant, she smiles at Pradeep and Jay. “I will kill his doll.”
“We know you will, sister.” Jay gives her a thumbs up. “Don’t need that jackoff in charge of the foxes anyway. Not when they’re the soul of each village. That’s crazy. So the foxes showed up like three hundred years ago, wiped out all the native populations, then the people wiped out the foxes but then they realized they majorly F’d up and now they got nothing but this strict breeding program like my cousin Becky and her French Bulldogs with the AKC?”
But Jidadaa isn’t really listening. She’s peering back the way Wetchie-ghuy went.
“This makes Morska Vidra a more important figure than we knew,” Pradeep reasons. “Or at least his fox. I’m shocked Wetchie-ghuy doesn’t try to steal his.”
The rain starts again. “Welp.” Jay waves at Jidadaa. “Time to get moving on. This has been crazy, as always. Thanks, I guess, for saving our asses again. Good luck with the doll and the foxes and all that. But we got to get back to our buddies. It’s been too long.” He steps back from the edge of the stone cliff, trying to abandon Jidadaa here and find a way to the open land ahead.
“You don’t have any more questions for her?” Pradeep feels like he could ask Jidadaa questions all day. “She’s the only one who knows what is happening here and has enough English to enlighten us. Like, who are the golden childs, eh? Are they the third village? Jidadaa? The golden man and his childs?”
Finally she turns back to look at them, her face filled with worry. “Secret village. Shidl Dít. Thunderbird House. Live in trees. Hiding tribe. Nobody know them.”
Jay has run out of patience and his exhaustion is threatening to drop him where he stands. “Look, Prad. She’s a thief. I’m not even sure we should believe anything she says about the villages or the foxes or any of the—”
But Pradeep isn’t going to let this opportunity pass. “Yes, I know. But her answers are better than nothing, aren’t they?” He turns back to the girl in the tree. “And what about Lisicans in general? Are they glad we are here? Angry? Are they against us or…? I mean, do they even understand what we’re trying to do here?”
Jidadaa looks across the way to them. “People are sad. Jay is lidass. I am Jidadaa. Time is end.” And then she twitches again. The limb shivers and leaves fall. But she is gone.
“Whoa. How’d she do that? Is she…?” Pradeep tries to get a different angle on the bay tree’s crown, “…still in there somewhere? I mean, she must be, right?”
“Don’t sweat it, Prad. She’ll find us when she finds us. Come on. I think we can get down this way. Let’s hurry back home before the rain starts pouring again.”
Pradeep’s gaze lingers on the green cloud of bay leaves hiding her. “Don’t disappear! Jidadaa! Come with us!”
“Fuck that.” Jay starts without Pradeep, who reluctantly follows after a brief interval. They can’t take the chance on Wetchie-ghuy finding them separated.
“Hold on, Jay. I’m coming.”
And just a few moments later they finally win free of the trees for the first time all day. A great green meadow spreads before them, its hillocks still obscuring the creek. Jay crosses the open ground, the tall green grasses streaking his legs with water. “Okay. Back in business. Now as soon as I find the river again I can navigate us back to the village. Then it’s just a hey-how-you-doing to the villagers and then it’s straight through to the tunnels and the bunker and a hot meal and hammock. Yeah, boy. Let’s do this.”
But Jay reaches one hillock higher than the rest and stops. He turns and turns, his face filling with first confusion, then fear, then despair. He groans and nearly collapses.
Pradeep hurries to his side. “What? What is it?”
Jay is too dispirited to speak. He just makes a weak gesture with his one working arm.
Pradeep turns and turns, looking for the way out. Perhaps he’s just seeing it all wrong. “What is it? Which way, Jay?”
“I don’t know!” Jay falls to his knees, fully spent. “I’ve never been here before! This isn’t the right valley! We’ve been following the wrong creek this whole time and came out in the wrong place! I don’t have a fucking clue where we are!”
Ξ
At the top of the tunnel, Mandy finds Morska Vidra and his fox waiting at the village’s boundary. “Hi…!” she calls out, as sweetly as she can. “Your new neighbors here! Super excited to, like, move in and be part of the community!”
Her bubbly delivery usually works to disarm whoever she points it at. But Morska Vidra appears to be immune to her charms. Bummer. She was hoping to get this started on a positive note. “Here. Triquet said I shouldn’t, but I brought you a little gift.”
Mandy holds out a small package she was able to wrap in a page of a medical device’s line-drawn diagrams and decorate with a bow she painstakingly fashioned from sliced strips of colored paper. He stares at her, making no move to take her offering. His fox darts forward instead, rising up and gently pulling the little box from her hands. The little silver creature scampers away, disappearing into the gray haze of light at the tunnel’s entrance.
Mandy’s reaction is a few seconds too late. “No! Oh, no! Come back! It’s chocolate. Oh my god. I don’t know if… It might be poisonous to a fox. Like you know how dogs and cats, they can’t have chocolate?” Mandy belatedly realizes Morska Vidra has no idea what a dog or cat is. “No, come on. I’m totally serious. It’s like a liver issue or something? We have to get it back.” Mandy hurries past the old man, who still hasn’t made a move. Then she recalls the traditional greeting. “Uh… Bontiik!” She hurries back to him and chucks him under the chin.
A paternal smile creases his face now that the proper forms have been observed. “Bontiik.” His knuckle touches her own chin and he gives her a wide smile.
“Okay. Now let’s find the fox before it hurts itself. I know it’s just a pet but you don’t want it to get sick!”
Mandy exits the cave, scanning the tracks ahead. They quickly disappear in the packed earth of the village proper. She studies the walls of the cliff on either side of the cave mouth, then all the brush crowding against the nearest houses.
A pair of children peek out from a house, no more than six and four years old. They chatter at her, one’s words atop the other. Then their words run together in a shared chant. They giggle.
“Hi! There was a fox…? Have you seen it? I gave it a present. A lovely… tasty… present.” But regardless of where she looks, she can find no sign of where the fox has gone. “Shoot.” She points into the village at random spots and asks the kids, “Where…? Like where does the fox live? Like, where’s its bed?” Mandy grew up with cats. She knows how they think.
But the kids just start another chant, laughing at her.
Mandy slowly enters the wide village square, realizing that she is making a spectacle of herself. Smiling weakly, she just really doesn’t want to be responsible for making their pet sick. That would be the opposite of a positive note. That would be a disaster.
The village is busy, with a small family outside their hut grinding something green and brown in a stone bowl with a rock. Another old man faces a loom, plaiting a long sheet of textiles of black and red bands. An old woman lounges outside her house, leaning back against a pole and chewing a piece of grass. Her eyes are red-rimmed and sad, as if she’s been crying. Mandy addresses her: “You see Morska Vidra’s fox run this way? The little fox? Uh, Lisica?” Yeah, she should have been using that word all along.
The old woman lifts her hand. In it is the gift the fox stole.
“Oh, thank god.” Mandy reels away in relief. Then she circles back to the woman and the gift. “You can have it. It’s for you. I wrapped it myself.” She kneels in front of the old woman and points with excitement at the little cube, its white paper now smudged with dirt and indented with tooth marks.
The old woman only looks at Mandy with her troubled gaze.
“Aw, are you having a bad day? Here. I’ll show you. Look. It’s a present! Do you guys do presents?” Mandy reaches out and gently takes the gift back. “Look. It goes like this.” She had no tape so the paper is folded back in on itself like the origami she was taught in elementary school. Mandy pulls out the corner and unwraps the gift, handing the sheet of paper to the old woman.
She turns it over in her hands, her eyes still sad.
“But wait. There’s more.” Mandy presents the stack of gold-foil wrapped off-brand chocolate squares she’d snared in the airport right before they’d taken off. This has been her stash, a carefully-preserved secret that has kept her going through the darkest days. She has enough for two chocolates per day, three on special days when she really needs the extra love. This is five pieces of dark chocolate, two whole days of her stash, that she’s willing to sacrifice for the good vibes. Now if she can just manifest those vibes…
Carefully peeling the foil from the first chocolate, Mandy hands it to her. The old woman takes the gold wrapping and stares at it in wonder. She gently crumples it around her fingertip and releases a single ‘huh’ as an exclamation.
“Yeah, but that’s not even the best bit. This is.” Mandy breaks off a tiny bit of the chocolate and hands it out to the woman. She dutifully takes it, another inexplicable object in her cupped hands.
“Eat it. Like this.” Mandy nibbles at the corner of the chocolate. “Quick! Before it melts! Yummm! So good!” She mimes bringing the chocolate to her mouth over and over until the old woman does so too.
The old woman tastes the chocolate. She makes a face and spits it out, then hands the little nib back to Mandy. But she keeps the foil and sheet of paper.
“Mandy! What are you doing without your mask and gloves?”
Esquibel stands at the cave mouth, Morska Vidra beside her. She wears her own, the hospital blue of her mask and gloves a shocking artificial color in this brown and green village.
“Oh, right. I didn’t remember…” Mandy searches her pockets for these articles. But before she can find them, she says, “I mean, tons of times we’ve been unmasked in front of the villagers by now. If they were gonna get sick, it would have happened by now.”
“It is policy. Mask use only works if it is consistent.”
With a final smile to the old woman and the kids watching her, Mandy puts the mask and gloves on and joins Esquibel at the edge of the village. “Did you say Bontiik to him?” Mandy indicates Morska Vidra, standing patiently beside Esquibel.
“Huh? Oh. Uh…” Esquibel performs the quick ceremony and allows Morska Vidra to chuck her chin in return. “Remind me to sanitize my chin when I get a chance.” Then she turns, a very large and imposing black woman in the middle of this village of little brown people. She seems not to understand how dramatic her impact is here. “So. This is the village? The outer village where they’re nice, yes? And there’s another village deeper in? And they all live in these sad little huts?” Esquibel stoops and peers in one, its occupants still and silent in the shadows.
“Esquibel. Stop.”
“Stop? Stop what?”
“You’re scaring them.”
“Scaring them?” Esquibel regards the villagers in their doorways and in the square. They all watch her with worry. “Hello. Bontiik. Didn’t I say the word properly? What is wrong with them?”
“You’re just too loud, too big…”
“Too dark?” Esquibel snaps off her glove and holds out her hand for Morska Vidra. He studies it but doesn’t touch it.
“Maybe. I don’t know if they’ve ever seen black skin.”
“Well, Morska Vidra and the Mayor have. Didn’t they tell the others about me? We don’t have time for this kind of culture shock. They need to understand that we’re here and we’re moving in. Or at least through. Where do you think we should set up camp?”
“Maybe they’ll tell us?” But the villagers are already withdrawing back into their houses, faces closed. The positive start is ruined.
“Why don’t I make everyone happy…” Esquibel decides, “and go find out myself. They obviously don’t want me here.” And with that she stalks across the village square and takes the wide path down toward the river.
“No!” Mandy calls out after her. “It’s not that! It’s just that you came in too fast and…” But Esquibel is gone. Mandy turns to the villagers and holds out the piece of unwrapped chocolate melting in her fingers. “Anyone, uh, want to try it?”
“Hello…?” Alonso’s rough voice comes from the cave entrance. He limps out, hair wild, clothes covered in mud. Gasping from the exertion of climbing the fallen tree up the tunnel shaft, he catches his breath. “Are we here? Did I make it? Eh, Morska Vidra. Good to see you again. Oh. Bontiik.” Alonso smiles at the old man as he chucks his chin, then laughs when the fox appears from within Morska Vidra’s robes and climbs on his shoulder to sniff at Alonso. “And this is the famous fox. Lisica. How are you, little friend?” Alonso extends a finger so the fox can smell it.
Evidently he smells fine. With a perfunctory sneeze, the fox makes a decision and sits, coiling its bushy tail around Morska Vidra’s neck. The old man returns the greeting to Alonso, gravely, and then evidently divining his suffering, suddenly steps beside him and supports Alonso’s weight with a strong arm.
The gesture is so unexpected Alonso laughs. It also feels good, to have someone help relieve the pain in his feet. “Gracias, muchas gracias, hermano.” Alonso has a thought that if they can’t grasp his English, he may be able to make his intent more clear in his native Spanish. But then it occurs to him they’ve heard a fair amount of English, and probably no Spanish. “Thank you, my brother. Thank you a million times.”
Morska Vidra leads Alonso to the doorway of the largest hut. The redwood bark planks covering it are black and green with age. It is an impressive structure, the only hut taller than Alonso. “Your house? Very nice. Thank you for all your kindness. Ah. Here?” Alonso grunts as he allows Morska Vidra to lower him onto a woven mat. The fox appears again, nickering in the old man’s ear. As if following its directives, Morska Vidra kneels at Alonso’s feet and pulls at his shoes, trying to take them off.
Alonso barks in pain, his hand reaching urgently for the feet he can’t reach. The sound freezes all activity in the village. Mandy finally rouses herself and hurries to Alonso’s side. “He wants your shoes off. Is that okay? Should we take them off?”
“Just gently. Gently…” Alonso pleads, leaning back, the sudden raw agony in his legs from getting yanked starting to lose its edge.
Mandy picks at the laces, pulling the right shoe wide open before slipping it off. She peels his wet sock off too. Together, she and Morska Vidra regard the swollen purple thing. It is painful merely to look at Alonso’s tortured foot. The toes bend wrong, dents run along the top. An angry red vein crosses his ankle.
The villagers gather to silently regard Alonso’s foot as Mandy gently removes his other shoe and sock. This foot is just as bad, purple as a grape. And his lower leg is scored with scars.
The villagers speak to each other, evidently trying to figure out how someone could sustain such injuries. Alonso watches them, his gaze baleful. “I hope, for your sake, that this kind of brutality is foreign to you. I hope, I pray, it shocks you.” Tears start in his eyes and he groans as Mandy puts a gentle hand on his left ankle.
The smallest of the two children Mandy met bursts into tears and turns to his mother, hiding in her arms.
The Mayor arrives and kneels, inspecting Alonso’s foot. She pokes it and he grunts. She tries to move his right heel and he barks again. Sitting back, she speaks a number of quiet commands.
Several of the young girls in the back of the crowd peel away to their own homes. They return with sheafs of herbs and black leaves and seeds in a pot.
“No no, that’s fine.” Alonso tries to wave the treatment away but he is no longer in charge of this situation. The Mayor pulls up his pant legs and inspects the scars she finds there.
She orders for the seeds to be ground into paste and for the black leaves to be separated, dripping, and placed on the mat beside him. A low hum of discourse surrounds Alonso, villagers discussing the treatment and holding forth on various points. Alonso looks around himself in wonder. He’s been in contact with primitive peoples before—a family of Mongolian nomads invited him into their yurt one night—but he’s never experienced anything like this before. The Lisican sing-song language surrounds him, each distinct voice and individual perspective made manifest. All of them are so unique, the middle-aged woman with the ear pierced with yellow bone, whose animated voice rises over all others. The nonbinary youth in a shawl who seems to dispute what she says with gentle deflections. The silly clown beside them, their hair a mat, who makes a quip that rhymes with the youth’s last words and everyone laughs. Why, it is just like any family anywhere. The crazy aunt, the know-it-all young man, the weird black sheep. And the children with their black and yellow curls, each as vocal as the others, pulling on each other’s arms and arguing in quiet and deferential tones. All do what they can not to interrupt the Mayor.
She taps Mandy’s shoulder and indicates she should get out of the way. Then the Mayor applies the brown paste to the skin of Alonso’s lower legs and feet. He feels very much like he is being spread with Nutella. It is not unpleasant and he finds he can exhale the breath he didn’t know he held. Then she carefully wraps his legs, first with the black leaves, then the green, keeping them snug with a brown cord. Finally she sits back.
“Thank you. Better already.” He can’t feel a thing but at least he isn’t suffering more damage. Alonso isn’t sure what he should do here. All he knows is he doesn’t want to move his legs at all. “Very good. Sitting is good.”
The Mayor gives him a more thorough inspection. She holds his hand and pokes at his belly, his chest, his throat. She has him open his mouth and she looks at his tongue.
“That bad, eh?” Alonso prompts the Mayor but her face remains a mask. “I know. Lose forty kilos and eat right. But don’t you dare mention my liver because I am not giving up my wine.”
Finally she kneels and puts one hand on his heart and one on his lower belly. The Mayor lowers her head and the crowd falls silent.
After a moment, Alonso feels his pulse beneath her hands. At the same instant, the fox yips and leaps from Morska Vidra’s shoulder, scampering into the nearby underbrush. Villagers exchange dark glances. Finally the Mayor sits back. She is drained.
“Ax̱dàataasdʼixʼdáakw,” she declares, and the villagers make dubious sounds, but they are unwilling to argue with her after her exertions. Now Morska Vidra and the others support the Mayor. They lift her to her feet and bring her across the square to her own house, where she is given her own measure of herbs and poultices.
“I am very sorry.” Alonso calls out his apology, watching them tend her. “I did not mean to introduce such…” and by this he means all the horrors of the modern world stitched up in his body. He leans back with a groan and confesses to the sky: “I despise spoiling innocence.”
Ξ
Triquet stages another pile of bags at the bottom of the tree trunk at the base of the tunnel shaft. Somehow they’ll eventually haul all that gear up to the top and out the cave mouth into the village. Just what the stone age Dzaadzitch villagers ever wanted, for sure.
Flavia and Maahjabeen drag muddy bins and boxes most of the way, with Triquet having to lift the containers up into a narrow passage for the last bit, requiring all their strength, again and again.
“Another.” Flavia deposits one more stack at the exchange. For a moment they both pause, breathing heavily in the cramped tunnel, staring at each other’s flushed faces.
“And this is why…” Triquet gasps, exercising their sore arm, “I reluctantly decided against manual labor as a career.”
“But think how strong you would be.” Flavia is beyond tired. Her words come out in a grunt.
“Isn’t there some Jack London quote about the value of a laborer being in his muscles? That’s his capital? But for the owners, their capital is money that increases over their lives while for the laborer their capital diminishes? Something like that? Of course, he put it better than that. Lord, that man could write.”
“I am not sure 19th century economic theory is applicable to us poor little independent contractors down here in this hole.”
“I mean, ultimately, this is a job and we’re wage slaves, I guess. I haven’t really thought about it that way but I did get a sizable honorarium. Didn’t you?”
“Yes. But this is the first day I feel like a coal miner.”
Triquet lifts their aching arms and lets them drop. “Well, all I know is that I started with less capital than most and now I’m all out. There’s been a run on this bank and all my savings are gone.”
“All I know is that I am hungry.” And with that, Flavia turns and trudges back the way she’d come, stepping aside for Maahjabeen, who drags a clutch of damp canvas sacks with one arm.
Triquet heaves Flavia’s goods up the tunnel to the base of the fallen tree. They return to find Maahjabeen depositing her sacks.
“Is there any chance…?” Maahjabeen ventures, “that we will not be able to transport all the items we selected for the move?”
“Chance? Honey, I’m about ready to crap out now. What’s in these? Anything necessary?”
“All our bedding.”
Triquet grabs the sacks. “Yeah. Necessary. Okay. But how about you go get Flavia and tell her we need a rest.”
“Sure. We will just find the tarps and come with you. I need to get out of the dark myself.” And Maahjabeen retreats down her tunnel one last time.
Triquet heaves the sacks up into the narrow passage. The bundled blankets and pillows and sleeping bags fill it completely and they have to push it through like a digestive blockage before the sacks spill out at the base of the shaft at the edge of the pile they’ve made.
Triquet squeezes past all the gear and grabs hold of the lowest branches of the fallen tree. They wrap the drawstrings of the canvas sacks around their wrist and haul them over their shoulder like a filthy misshapen Santa, then slowly scale the broken tree limbs like a ladder.
At the top their legs are shaking and their breath is coming in short gasps. They drag the sacks clear of the shaft and onto the broad floor of the cave mouth. Gray light greets them. Oh, joy. That means it’s still raining out there.
This is far enough. They can wait here until the others catch up. As long as they’re not working any more. Triquet stretches out on the gravel floor beside the muddy sacks, resting their head on one. Ah, bliss…
Moments later Katrina and Amy and Miriam arrive, arms laden, followed by Flavia and finally Maahjabeen, who carries nothing. Her face is a mask of pain, though, as she has needed her injured shoulder to haul herself up the makeshift ladder.
They all collapse with Triquet on the floor, their breaths and perspiration mingling, like they just won a rugby match—or more likely, from their dispirited depletion—badly lost.
“I’ve got the beds,” Triquet manages.
“I have tarps and tents,” Amy answers.
“All we need.” Triquet sits up. “Everything else can wait.”
Miriam hoists her containers. “I’ve got enough food for the night and the morning. And a couple liters of wine.”
“Yes, then we’re definitely all set.” Triquet pushes themself to their feet. “Now let’s see what kind of spot they’ve found for us.”
There is no one at the cave mouth to greet them. They emerge into the rain to find the village empty except for Alonso resting on a mat and the old woman with white hair leaning against her post. There is no sign of Mandy nor Esquibel.
“Yesiniy!” Katrina hurries to the old woman. “What is it? What’s wrong? Uh… šta nije u redu, bako?”
“Bako…?” The old woman peers up at Katrina with her red eyes. Then she accepts the designation, “Eh. Bako. Ua na o au dʼadalyoo ettu. Kam.”
“Ettu. Kam,” Katrina echoes, trying to commit these words to memory. She doesn’t have anything at hand to take notes. “Bako is Bosnian for grandma, yeh? I think that’s right.”
Miriam puts down her containers and hurries past the empty houses to her horizontal husband. “Alonso? What are you doing? Where is everyone?”
“I am resting. On the orders of multiple doctors. And they are all down by a creek, I understand, arguing over where we might have our camp. Esquibel is not… the calmest person right now.”
“Okay, Ames. I think we can chance it,” Miriam calls out. “Nearly empty here. It’s now or never.”
“Should I still wear the bag?” Amy’s muffled voice is anxious. “I’m gonna wear the bag. Just in case.” She slowly emerges from the cave, wearing her blue sleeping bag upside down to hide her head, with her feet sticking out of the opening, her entire body covered. Triquet leads her through the village to the far side.
Yesiniy doesn’t even look their way.
Quickly, Triquet brings Amy out of the village to the broad path heading down toward the river. “Okay. I think you’ve got to be safe here, Amy. We’re well out of the village and on more like neutral territory. At least I think it is.”
Amy pulls the bag off and looks around with worry, single strands of her black hair standing straight from the static charge. “Nobody here to yell at me? They’re all down at the river?”
“Yep. At least I hope so. And I hope we aren’t setting up camp by the loo. Too stinky. Come on, let’s go. Maybe they’ve reached an agreement.”
Katrina and Flavia join them as they walk down the path toward the broad meadow. There they find Esquibel in heated debate with the village elders. She stands, drenched by the latest deluge, at a corner of the meadow near the west treeline, as far upstream as the meadow allows. “Then, here. We will stay here. And that is final.”
“But they already said…” Mandy starts in an exasperated whine, but Esquibel immediately cuts her off.
“Yes. I heard. I heard that we cannot be here. Or there. Or there. Or there.” Esquibel points at locations across the meadow, where they have trampled the green grasses with their activity. “Or anywhere. So if we can’t be anywhere, then we will be where we want to be. And I want to be here.”
“Christ! What are you doing?” Katrina calls out, hurrying over to the congregated villagers as the rain eases and the winds pick up. “That isn’t any way to talk to the Lisicans! We’re their guests!”
“If we were their guests then they would accommodate us. But all I hear from them is ah-ah, which they have demonstrated quite clearly means no.”
“Yeh, that’s right. But did you ask them? Just ask them where we’re supposed to be?”
“What an idea? Why didn’t I think of that?” Esquibel’s temper is very short. “Oh, right. Because I don’t speak a single bloody word of their language. You think we didn’t try?”
“Here. Wait. Let me see. I might be able to stitch something together…” Katrina takes her backpack off. It holds a half dozen laptops. “Just one moment. Here. This one’s mine. And…” Flavia holds a folded tarp above her to keep the electronics dry as Katrina quickly navigates to her notes and starts scrolling through the pages of details she’s documented about the Lisican language. “Okay.” She turns to the Mayor standing beside Morska Vidra. “Uh, we need to… we are…” she encompasses her crew, “one sec here, just looking up versions of ‘to move’ and all I can find is this relational gobbledygook. Um… Oh, here we go. We duladaaw tlein. That’s ‘big move noisily,’ which is definitely us. Like all of us here need to duladaaw tlein.”
She has the attention of the villagers. “Join. Uh, join… No join. They don’t use the word ‘join?’ Uh, together. Together is vooch. Vooch, you and us. Dóode? Here? Or dóode? Where can we camp? Just for a couple weeks.”
She seems to be making headway. The villagers argue with each other, trying to solve Katrina’s problems. But the way they go about it is as mystifying as anything else. They consult the sky, they talk about the meadow, as if representing it at trial, possessively stroking the grasses. One woman appears to be listening to a tree. Finally, Morska Vidra places his fox on the ground and everyone watches it bound from one spot to another. Eventually, it goes into the trees on a slope near the spot Esquibel had just claimed.
The villagers move under the trees and inspect the spot. It is a wide open patch beneath pine trees, their fallen needles a brown carpet preventing much undergrowth. The slope is shallow here and the wind is tamed by the high canopy.
The fox bounds back onto Morska Vidra’s shoulder. By that, they all understand that the deal has been struck.
“I love it!” Triquet calls out. “Thank you so much. Promise we’ll take care of it. You guys are the best.”
Esquibel frowns at the spot. “Not defensible in the slightest.” But she realizes this is the best she can get. “Well. At least it is out of the weather. Why was that so hard to understand? That is why I wanted to be on this side of the meadow.”
“Take your win,” Mandy counsels her, clutching Esquibel by the elbow. “And say something nice.”
Esquibel gives the Mayor a glassy smile. “Something nice.”
Amy and Flavia advance, poking around at the base of a few trees to see where they might build their platforms. The Mayor watches the scene, evidently unmoved by Esquibel’s apology or the tantrum that came before.
“Lucky for you, they’re used to loudmouths and hotheads.” Mandy claps her hands. “Yay. We’re all friends again.”
Several of the villagers answer her claps with their own burst of applause. Mandy and Katrina clap back. This delights them. Soon nearly everyone in the camp is applauding each other, with the exception of Esquibel. She has no time for this nonsense. A clean room needs to be built, and this time it will need to be on one of the platforms. There isn’t an inch of level ground in this entire camp. And these villagers will probably wander everywhere. “And no one is wearing a mask!” she belatedly cries out. But nobody listens. They’re all intermingling now, clapping and chanting and repeating each other’s words and moves, laughing in each other’s faces and touching each other, all laughing, so carefree…
The scene finally overwhelms Esquibel with its charm. These villagers are so genuine when they laugh and copy and tease. Their eyes are so sharp. But they have a gentleness, a tenderness she hadn’t seen in the brief visits from the Mayor and Morska Vidra. These Lisicans are actual people filled with joy and curiosity and love, not just columns of figures on a Navy spreadsheet. And they are worth protecting. Silently, Esquibel adds them to her mission objectives and increases her defensible perimeter to include them and their village. She shouldn’t have gotten so frustrated with them. “I am sorry,” she tells the closest ones, who are laughing and playing with Mandy. “I should have been more patient but…”
Yet they are not listening. A young girl catches Esquibel by the hand and trills like a bird. Oh, Esquibel can do this one. It is a sound the Kikuyu make in their traditional songs. She trills right back and the girl screams with pleasure. Now they are all laughing, every single one.
“What is it? What did we miss?” Miriam leads Alonso into the new camp, his feet and calves still wrapped in black leaves and twine with his unlaced shoes over it all.
Triquet reaches out to them, buoyed by the villagers and their applause. “And here they are! Welcome to your new home, Doctor one and Doctor two. Your loan has been approved! Please sign the lease agreeement on the kitchen table and I’ll leave the keys on the mantle. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.” Then Triquet claps. Everyone claps.
Alonso and Miriam clap and laugh with all the others in the rain.
Chapter 31 – Ja Sam Wetchie-Ghuy
July 29, 2024
Thanks for joining us for the third volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this episode:
Book III – Methodology of Madness
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
— John Steinbeck
31 – Ja Sam Wetchie-Ghuy
“And what do you make of this?” Triquet pushes their taped-up photo across the table before Morska Vidra. The elder stares at the image of the Tlingit tapestry, carved bone fishing spear, and word written in Cyrillic that Triquet has reconstructed.
Morska Vidra studies the photo in sad silence.
“Ji-na-háa.” Katrina sounds out the Cyrillic letters phonetically. But the word is unbearable to the old Lisican and he leans away from her, blanching. Finally he murmurs an answer.
“What’s that? Could you repeat, uh… povtori pozhaluysta?”
Morska Vidra speaks a few more broken sentences. “Something like, he’s only seen these once as a kid. The people who are beyond the river. They have them? These are their artifacts?” Katrina picks up the photo and mimes giving it to people in the interior of the island.
Morska Vidra only falls silent. He glares at her, apparently resentful that she brought it up.
“Ji-da-daa,” Katrina repeats. “I want to learn what that is. It seems to be key to the whole…”
But repeating the word is too much for Morska Vidra. With an outraged chuff he pulls himself awkwardly from the unfamiliar camp chair and stalks away, toward the creek. He does not return.
“Oops!” Katrina squeaks. “Sorry! God, this is just so… random. There’s this whole perspective shift thing I still do not get at all. Like in Lisican you’re not an actual being. You’re just a collection of other people’s impressions of you, who you’re related to, where you stand, where you’re going. It’s all very postmodern I guess.”
“Sounds like Plexity.” Alonso’s voice comes from the far side of his big platform. “Environment is everything. I think maybe I’ve gotten these people wrong. Perhaps they are very wise.”
“I guess it makes sense if you think about it,” Katrina continues, while Triquet studies the photo with frustration. “Maybe we all started with this kind of deep subjectivity. But how did we ever disconnect from thinking about the world that way? Imagine everybody understands that they’re all part of the web, right? And then one day some absolute psycho shows up and says, Fuck that. I’m only me. And I’m holy. And I’m in charge. And I’m not connected to any of you bitches or anything in the whole world around me. I mean, what an absolute bloody narcissist.”
Alonso laughs. “Context. It’s all context. We live in a data-rich age of context, right, Katrina?”
“You know, we did this breakout session at one of the security conferences I attended,” Katrina tells them, “where we had to try to re-imagine law and justice to be more fair. And they all got into how laws could be more universally applied. But I was like, hold up, that’s retrograde thinking. Three hundred years old. Our ancestors conceived of universal justice like that because they couldn’t see how to do it better. But we can. My idea is that each punishment or rehabilitation strategy should instead be tailored to each criminal as specifically as possible. Context, yeh. So I proposed that each person gets an official profile, open-sourced and secure, and we assign hundreds of numerical values to a whole spectrum of factors: upbringing, job, education, intent when committing the crime, you know, any amount of remorse… and then we use that profile and a shit ton of machine learning to construct a custom solution for every perpetrator.”
“I mean, isn’t this what we’re already doing?” Triquet sighs in surrender and puts the photo back in its manila folder. “Apart from your creepy digital profile idea, I mean, isn’t this what the justice system already does? At least it’s supposed to. It gives weight to things like background. In most countries at least, right? There’s steps to this. Pre-trial hearings. Jury of your peers. Sentencing. They already take things like intent and remorse into account. We don’t need a robot deciding who goes to jail or not.”
“Yeh, it wasn’t very popular at the conference, either. But I’m just talking about deriving more nuanced solutions for each crime. It’s all context now. That’s all I’m saying. I mean, you’ve heard of personalized medicine, yeh? Same concept. Individualize diagnosis and treatment, with increased efficacy that drives down the price. Everything’s data science now. Everything.”
This conversation is straying into territory that Alonso has hardly ever allowed himself to seriously consider. But the wild ideas he gets at night right before he falls asleep suddenly seem a little less wild. “She is right. This young generation will forever be known as the great collectors. Everything is about input now. We aren’t even really collating the data yet. That will be the goal of the next generation. Now is when we record the richness of life on this planet before it vanishes completely. Details, and the patterns within the details. That is our gold. And then, who knows, in a few hundred years, after the world has finished burning, it will be these records we are making right now that will bring all the life back.”
“Ji-da-daa…” Katrina repeats it again, looking up the word in first her Eyat then her Tlingit vocabulary lists. “I mean, there’s ‘jinduháayi,’ which means post office, or more precisely, ‘Building, around paper, delivered by hand.’ See what I mean? That’s some convoluted bullshit there. Or, ‘jinkaat,’ which is their number for ten, but specifically means, ‘hands facing each other.’ Whoa.” She drops her hands, helpless. “I’m sorry, Triq. This was supposed to answer a bunch of questions, but instead…”
Triquet stands, shrugging philosophically. “We just get more questions. It’s the way of the world, little sister.” They kiss the top of Katrina’s head and collect their things.
The door to the bunker opens. Esquibel stands in the frame. “What is this I hear about one of the Lisicans visiting us?”
Katrina falls back against her chair. “He’s already gone.”
“What? Why? We need one of them to look at Pradeep! He’s been poisoned or something! How did you just let him go?”
“Oh. Ack. Sorry. You’re right.” Katrina stands. “I’ll go find him. He went this way. Just… Ugh. I’ll be right back.” She hurries away.
Triquet grimaces in apology. “Sorry, Doc. It was my fault. I’m just trying to solve all these mysteries.”
“Yes, well…” Esquibel tries to find something to say that won’t indicate how very cross she is. “Me too.”
Ξ
“Okay, Pradeep. We’re going to roll over on three, okay?” Mandy holds his legs. Esquibel grips his shoulders. Maahjabeen still won’t release her full-body embrace.
The Lisican woman they refer to as the Mayor stands in a corner of the clean room, frowning terribly. Katrina hadn’t been able to find Morska Vidra, following his trail all the way back through the creekside tunnels to the village. But she had implored the Mayor to return with her. She suspects the woman might even understand a bit what is needed. Now Mandy and Maahjabeen and Esquibel all wear masks and gloves, their delirious patient fighting for breath.
Pradeep groans, a weak wet sound, phlegm rattling in his throat. They roll him over so Maahjabeen is on her back with him above. Esquibel pulls up his shirt, revealing the fox’s profile of angry red and black dots and the swelling at the base of his spine.
The Mayor pulls back with a hiss, like she’s seen a viper. She looks at each of them with wide-eyed outrage, pointing the tip of her thumb at each while intoning a chant.
“What is it? What?” Esquibel begs the woman.
“Lisica, yes?” Katrina prods her, outlining the shape of the fox’s head on his skin with her finger.
But the Mayor disagrees vociferously, her words coming in such a clashing rush that Katrina can’t follow. She fumbles her phone out and begins recording just as the Mayor’s speech ends.
“Okay. Got it. I mean, I didn’t get any of it, but I got that this isn’t Lisica. No. This is… some other fox then? I’m so confused.”
The Mayor is very upset with them. She begins lecturing, Katrina recording. The Mayor picks up the closest items off Esquibel’s bins, a short stack of paper. She tosses them to the ground, indicating that they are useless. Then with a loud wordless yell—Ayo! she leans over Pradeep, resting her elbow in the middle of his back. The Mayor puts her weight behind her elbow and presses until he expels his breath, a bubbling wetness. She presses harder and he expels more, finally ending with a trickle of milky brown rheum trickling from his chin. The Mayor stands back and points at it, careful not to touch it. “Kadziyiki.” She repeats the word again and again until Katrina echoes it.
“What is that?” Esquibel inspects the discharge, but the Mayor draws the doctor’s hand away before she can touch it. So she looks at it through her otoscope from a handspan’s distance. “Fine. I won’t touch it, I promise. But I should get a sample for testing…”
“Let’s see. Kadziyiki means…” Katrina scrolls through her vocabulary list. “Mud. A swamp place.” She points at Pradeep’s belly and repeats the word.
As confirmation, the Mayor repeats the word as well.
“I think she’s saying it’s magic of some kind or other. A curse.”
“Why would Wetchie-ghuy do this?” Katrina asks.
The name stops the Mayor in mid-sentence. She bares her teeth in an involuntary show of disgust and makes it clear with words and gestures that Pradeep’s illness is not the work of Wetchie-ghuy. But a new thought appears to interrupt her and after a long moment of consideration she repeats the name. “Wetchie-ghuy…”
Mandy releases Pradeep’s feet and shakes her hands to get his illness off them. The nausea seeping into her immediately fades. “Uh, then what if we get that Wetchie-ghuy guy to help Pradeep?”
Esquibel holds up an importuning hand. “Wait. As your doctor, I am not in favor of this idea.”
“Oh, because you’ve still got so many ideas of your own?” Mandy giggles to take the sting out of her words, but Esquibel scowls at her regardless. “I mean, if it’s some weird infectious fluid, wouldn’t we rather have them deal with it instead of us anyway?”
“I think we’ve got a bigger problem than that,” Katrina says. “How can we bring Wetchie-ghuy into camp without Flavia losing her mind?”
Esquibel demands, “I will not allow some—some herbalist to treat one of my patients. Especially since we know he is hostile. Or is she perhaps not saying that Wetchie-ghuy is responsible for doing this? That is crazy to think there might be another one. I mean, how many shamans does an island this size need?”
“Pradeep…” Maahjabeen murmurs. The others fall silent and she blushes. “Mahbub. I need to go to the trenches. I will be…”
Pradeep groans. His eyelids flutter. He seems to struggle at the edge of consciousness, unable to break through.
“I am so sorry. I’ve been holding it for hours…”
“That’s fine,” Katrina says. “I can wrap him up for a bit. You go take care of yourself. Maybe grab a bite.”
“No. I can’t.” Maahjabeen gasps when she releases her embrace. She’d forgotten how newly healed her shoulders are and now they scream as she moves them. Pradeep is unmoving. She slides out from under him, the pain and the heartache making her sob.
The Mayor watches her, stone-faced. Maahjabeen locks eyes with her and vows that she will not show another sign of weakness to this cypher of a woman. Maahjabeen can be stoic. Just watch.
Mandy and Katrina pull her free and she stands, clamping her mouth shut. She is still staring at the Mayor, whose black eyes seem to possess a reservoir of strength that Maahjabeen can access. Now she realizes the Lisican woman isn’t judging her, but silently lending her support.
Katrina scoots into position. “So… just like give him a good cuddle? Anything I should know? Any places I shouldn’t touch?”
Mandy giggles.
Maahjabeen can’t wait any longer. Her mind has no space for the prospect of beautiful blonde Katrina wrapping herself around Pradeep and nursing him while Maahjabeen departs. But the jealousy she expects doesn’t appear. Only a tired gratitude for Katrina and a screaming terror of worry for Pradeep. She pushes herself through the plastic sheets of the clean room, determined to do this as fast as possible.
Katrina lies down beside Pradeep. “Come here, luv.” She wraps herself around him, drawing him over her like a blanket. His sandalwood scent, which she had found so attractive before, has now turned sour. She recalls their spider hunt in the bushes, when she had such a strong impulse to kiss him that she’d kissed Mandy instead. Now she has no desire for this ailing man. But isn’t this when he needs her affection the most? She turns her face and kisses his ear, softly, with real tenderness, and breathes through her nose into the nape of his neck. Somewhere deep inside he quivers but his limbs are so heavy they’re nearly rigid. Poor bloke. What had he and Maahjabeen done out there to deserve this?
Suddenly a sharp wrongness knifes through Katrina. Horror fills her. “Wait. Esquibel. I don’t think he’s breathing. I…”
Esquibel curses and with a strong hand pulls Pradeep away from Katrina, who shifts herself entirely off the cot onto the floor. Esquibel rolls him onto his back and straddles his prostrate form. She pulls her mask off and points at the Mayor, “Get that woman out of here!” before beginning a strenuous round of CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Ξ
An hour later, a muddy Amy finds Mandy at the camp’s kitchen tables, fixing a pot of tea. “Could I get one of those?” Amy has already cleaned her hands in the creek before returning to camp but she still pinches the handle of a mug daintily, afraid the mud on her sleeve might touch it.
“Of course. What’d you do? You look like something the cat dragged in.” Mandy fills Amy’s cup with steaming green tea.
“I was in your elevator shaft.”
“You were?” Now Amy has Mandy’s full attention. “What were you doing in there?”
“Figuring out how to get to the top.”
“Oh my god. Really? And did you? Oh, please… That would be so… I mean, why? Why do you even want to get to the top?”
“I’ve got to find Jay, Mandy. As soon as possible. We have no idea how much danger he might be in. He’s my responsibility. My grad student. But I can’t even cross the fucking village to get to the trailhead he took. They won’t let me. So I need to find another way into the interior. Or my time here will be an entire waste. No. Worse than that. I swear to god if I have to go back home without Jay or Pradeep I’ll just…” Amy suddenly dissolves in tears.
Mandy catches the blocky little woman in her arms and kisses the top of her head. “Oh… Oh, no… He’s fine. I’m sure of it. Jay’s like some super outdoorsman. Living outside here is a snap for someone like him. And Pradeep…” She has no words for his condition. Esquibel had barely been able to bring him back from the brink last time, and he hadn’t stabilized until Mandy had gone to find Maahjabeen, who raced back to wrap her beloved once more in her arms. Instead, she tries to change the subject with gossip. “So. Did you know Maahjabeen and Pradeep were a thing? Or did everyone know but me?”
That stops Amy’s tears. Her breath catches in her throat. “They what? What kind of thing? What are you talking about? No, honey. I’m pretty sure Pradeep is a virgin.”
“Well maybe that’s what Maahjabeen loves so much about him. His purity. Katrina said she found them one night last week. She was in his bed. Isn’t that sweet?”
“Really? Sweet, uh, yeah…” For some reason, Amy can’t process this new information. It’s just so unlikely. “I’m not sure if, I mean, I don’t know if Maahjabeen is really introductory girlfriend material, know what I mean? And why’d he hide it from me of all people? Just… Seriously? Are you sure?”
“Maahjabeen won’t let anyone else hold him. She said it’s their love that’s keeping him alive. And after he coded last time she let go we’re inclined to believe her.”
“I don’t know what to say. Pradeep. You secretive bastard. Ah… he couldn’t tell me because of her. She needed it to be a secret. Some weird Muslim thing, right? That’s it, isn’t it?”
Mandy shrugs and rests her forehead against Amy’s in sweet intimacy. “Who knows? Love works in mysterious ways.”
Amy shakes her head in wonder. “Well. I hope it works out. Their children would look like… movie stars, that’s for sure.”
“I know, right?” Mandy giggles and releases Amy.
“Thanks for that, dear one. And let me repay you by telling you how I think we can get to the top of the shaft.”
“Fuck yes! Oh, Amy, thank you so much! You have no idea how hard it’s been for me to figure out a safe way to the—”
“Well, don’t get too attached to that ‘safe’ idea.”
“Oh, crap. What is it?”
“I mean, it’s as safe as I can come up with. But it is like hundreds of meters straight up. There is no super safe way for people to go up and down that thing without like a professional construction crew. But ain’t none of us here engineers so we’ll do what we can.”
“Now I don’t know what to think.”
“Well. Let me just drink my tea and you get some caving clothes on. It’s easier to show you what I have in mind than tell you.”
“Kay kay. Meet you back here in five.”
Later, after all the descents and struggles through muddy tunnels, Mandy stands with Amy at the base of the shaft. It is no longer flooded, and when the water drained it took a lot of the ash and cinders with it, leaving a long black trail down to the concrete culvert and the sea cave. Now they can tell that beneath the blackened ashes that remain is a solid concrete floor to the shaft. But whatever anchor points Mandy had been trying to blindly find with her frozen feet a few days before are not there.
They drag the last intact limbs clear of the center of the floor and stare upward at the small dot of gray light far above. It looks impossible to Mandy, and nobody wants to get up there as bad as her. But it’s just so far.
“Tell me what you see.” Amy’s voice echoes in the shaft, a harsh reverberation off the concrete walls.
Mandy swings her phone’s light up the shaft. “Not much. Lots of vertical. No handholds. Uh… Tons of burn marks. Can I have a hint? What am I looking for here?”
“Okay. What are the walls made of?”
Mandy drops her light to eye level. She brushes her hand over the smooth blocks. “Yeah, okay, it’s only concrete here at the bottom. Then it’s, I don’t know, what is it up there? Clay? Rock?”
“It’s rock. Care for another hint?”
“Please.”
Amy silently points at the trail of ash and cinders at their feet, leading out of the shaft’s base into the tunnel.
“Uhh, neat.” Mandy turns away so Amy can’t see how irritated she is. “Maybe I’m just not as smart as everybody else here, okay, Amy? Maybe I don’t have all these spectacular doctorates from world-class programs so you’ll have to excuse me—”
“No, no. I’m not—You’re not… Sorry. I’m being too playfully obtuse. I was just standing where you are, looking up, cursing that little fucking hole in the top. Then I thought to myself: How did this shaft get made? They didn’t drill it. It’s not quite that regular.”
“I don’t know. How did all the other tunnels get made?”
Amy lifts her eyebrows and points once again at the trail of black slurry running out of view.
“It burned…?” Mandy scrunches up her face. “But that makes no sense. What burned? The rock?”
“No. Sorry, Mandy. I’ll stop playing games. It’s water. Water carved this shaft, and nearly all the tunnels we’ve seen in here. Now come here. Let me show you something else I found.”
Mandy is still mystified. Amy keeps telling her she’ll tell her what she means and then she just keeps adding more and more random details that make no sense. “Sure. Now what?’
Amy takes Mandy back into the tunnel, but before it reaches the junction with the passage that heads upwards to the Lisican village, Amy stops at an outcrop of rock. She points her light at a pair of rusted iron pipes that run vertically from ceiling to floor. “Listen.”
“Listen…?” Mandy wipes the pipe as clean as she can and then presses her ear against it. Liquid, and not a trickle. These old pipes are still functional.
“The Army Corps of Engineers must have been in here. These are probably drainage for some other chamber up above to keep it clear. I bet it empties into their culvert and then the sea cave. But look.” Amy pockets her phone and grasps a circular handle. Her forearm muscles bunch and she grunts. Then it turns.
After a few rotations the pipe closes off. Amy pulls Mandy to the wall beside her and points to a bypass pipe. Now the water shoots out its end, much more than a liter per second. It splashes onto the tunnel’s floor and runs down back toward the culvert.
Mandy looks at Amy, who has the most self-satisfied smile on her face of her life. But then her smile drops when she realizes that Mandy still doesn’t see what she means. “Oh. Right. So… Next step. Block the passage leading down to the culvert there with tarps and rocks, forming a plug. And then ta-daaa!” Amy spreads her hands wide. But Mandy still only glares at her. “Ah. I mean, of course, the final thing I still have to mention is that we’re floating on a raft. In the elevator shaft. And there’s nowhere for the water to go. Except up. We fill the shaft and ride it to the top!”
Now Mandy laughs. “Are you insane? I set the shaft on fire and now you’re going to flood it? Is this some kind of competition?”
Amy laughs too. “No! Think about it! I mean, it’s got its share of drawbacks, for sure. It’s not something we can do, well, probably more than once. And I have no idea how long it would take to fill it. A day or two? So that part stinks. I mean, there’s a lot wrong with the whole idea but I just can’t figure out how else to do it!”
“I asked Katrina if she’d fly the drone up the shaft and try to attach some cable or something up there.” Mandy shakes her head. “But she said the shaft is too narrow. She’d have to turn collision-avoidance off and then she said she wasn’t good enough to not crash manually into the walls.”
“Well and then what?” Amy grimaces. “Let’s say we’ve got like three hundred meters of twine dangling down to us. So? We don’t have more than a third of that distance in climbing rope. What else are we going to use? Dental floss? I mean, I could manufacture some rope from the long-fiber creekside plants but that would take days if not weeks. We need to find Jay now.”
Mandy thinks about sitting in a raft for hours on end as the water level slowly rises toward the top. Just her and Amy and her weather station. But it wouldn’t even have any weight requirements this time. She could load it up with all the best gear. Hygrometer. Full windspeed rotor. She could even bring spare batteries and just hook them up in sequence. And she wouldn’t have to check on it more than once every few days. “Wait. Ugh. I should have asked him when I had the… Ah, hell.”
“What is it?”
“Jay! When he got trapped in the village with Triquet and Miriam he said that one day he went with the villagers to see the top of the tunnel, where the fire came from. And I was like, ‘Aha! The villagers can lead me to the spot from above. He said they climbed over the edge of the cliffs and came down to the top of this shaft on the ocean side. And I was going to have him show me so I could start making that my route but then we stopped talking to the villagers. And then I forgot with all the other madness going on. So now we’re all buddies again but he’s gone. Crap!”
“Well, still. That solves your problem, doesn’t it? You can go ask the villagers to lead you to any spot you want on the cliffs. It just needs to be high and like securely-placed, right?”
“Yeah, but…” Mandy sighs. “I think I still have your problem. Not that they hate me per se…”
“Oh, thanks.”
“No! It’s just that they can shut off the village to us whenever they like and I need regular access to my weather station. We can’t depend on them. We need our own way in.”
Amy nods. “So… What do you think we could make the raft of?”
“Maybe we could use Maahjabeen’s kayaks.”
“Yeah, and maybe Brad Pitt will be my sex slave.” Amy laughs in such hilarious disbelief that Mandy starts to as well.
Ξ
Pradeep twists and turns on the bed, fighting for his life. He thrashes, the cords in his neck straining. He drums the back of his head against the pillow, fighting to rid himself of this horrid infestation.
But he knows that in reality he does none of these things. His body remains slack, eyes glazed. The fight is entirely internal. Nobody can see how hard he struggles.
He knows he is about to die. He tries to find peace. Maahjabeen pressed against him gives indescribable relief. After his unending struggle against the cold pit of mud within him he is almost ready to surrender to oblivion. He has gotten to love the most beautiful woman on Earth. What more is there, really, after that? It is such an impossibility for a kasmaalam nerd like himself to have loved such an angel. Death is really the only possible thing next. But his regret will not let him go. Regret for not knowing her better, touching this unbelievable skin just a bit more. Regret that they will not grow old together, that he will not be there for her when she will need him. That is such a distasteful thought that it gets him to fight once more against the pit.
The little bit of his brain that remains working now puzzles out a possible way to combat the pit of mud. Within himself, where he feels the edges of it, he has drawn a ring of fire around it, stopping its slow seeping spread up into the rest of him. The fire is love and anger and every scrap of his survival instinct that he can muster. Now he has the fire burn down, all around the sides of the pit. He will excise it entirely with fire. He will find its bottom and burn beneath that and then isolate this cauterized pit of mud within him like a giant bloated splinter. Once it is encased entirely in fire then he can remove it. He can take himself back.
Burn… Burn… He doesn’t know what it is he burns here in the abstract internal world of his spirit. It is certainly some essential part of himself. Tissues… or memories… Perhaps he is destroying himself to save himself. Yes. Like a fever. Without fever he will die.
Why was this done to him? What did Pradeep do to deserve this? They say a fox bit him in the back, which makes no sense. And now he is dying of, what… rabies? Is that what this is?
It’s all muddled. He can’t keep straight any of the details they’ve told him. Disjointed phrases keep circling in his head. He realizes how slowly they revolve. Too slow. The cold mud is winning again. Where is his fire? Has it gone out?
No, it has just disappeared deep into the black firmament of his mind, still surrounding the pit of mud as it crackles its way downward. Now Pradeep feels an attenuated pain, as if someone strikes his spinal cord like a piano note. This time he grunts and he knows Maahjabeen hears it. Pain. Yes, pain is good. Pain is life.
She looks at him, her eyes ravaged from so many tears. But she is not hopeless. So he cannot be. He fights the words out, the corners of his mouth twitching upward bravely. “I am… not… dead.”
Ξ
“Ventilation ain’t your problem, Kula. It’s got to be humidity. I mean, this is like fog grand central. Here.” Jay holds up the frosty bud, its fan leaves curling, nearly black. “Look at the cola, dude. Smell it. You got to harvest now or shit’s gonna mold out on you.”
Kula, the Lisican gardener, stands at his shoulder smoking her joint. Her face is seamed with a perpetual smile and her black curls are a frizzy mass. She grunts and waters a row of lettuces with a cracked plastic watering can. “Bimeby Jay help. Wit Kula, yaw?”
Her pidgin is surprisingly understandable. Jay has no idea what that indicates about the island, or, more importantly, his safety here. Who taught her to speak English? Where did she get all this gear? And what about all this weed? Not that there aren’t a wide variety of other fruits and vegetables in these planters. Jay wonders why Kula doesn’t cultivate her garden on the surface. “This can’t be the best spot to grow on the island. You need more sun, sister.”
Kula claps her hand on his shoulder. She’s been friendly from the get go. She pushes her cigar at him again and he takes a big wet toke. Very grassy weed. Probably not too much in the way of THC but who knows about its terpenes. Once they get settled he’ll bust out his homegrown Kush and blow Kula’s goddamn mind.
Rows of raised beds, built from raw saplings bound together with frayed nylon straps, have been filled with a dark loamy soil that probably came from the redwoods above. And it looks like a lot of starters are already pushing through the surface. Her spring plantings are a success. What day is it? Like mid-April? He takes out his phone. The date is April 20.
“Yoooooo! Look at that, Kula! 420! 420! We hit it just right!”
But of course she has no idea what he’s talking about. She just gabbles something he doesn’t understand, much like he’s gabbling something at her. But that’s cool. They’re high. And hidden. And safe. “Four twenty…!” Jay leans out the gun emplacement’s curving opening, shouting over the open ocean far below. His words are immediately snatched by the wind. But he doesn’t care. He laughs, falling back. “Hey… Maybe you can help us, Kula. If you know like all the plants here, maybe you can like, I mean, we’re sort of doing a survey, you know. Flora and fauna. Maybe you could like help us identify a whole bunch of genera.”
“Eh. Eh.” Kula nods vigorously. She pulls something up by the roots, like a stringy white carrot, and pushes it into Jay’s hands. “Takee boss. Jay good good. Je rotkvica, yass.”
“Okay. If you say so…” Jay brushes the rest of the soil off and nibbles at its end. It crunches between his teeth and releases a clean watery taste across his tongue. It’s good. “Right on. This would be so good in a salad. Man, I’m gonna make the best fucking salads. Any olive oil and balsamic here by any chance?”
But Kula is back to her watering and weeding, talking to herself in a satisfied sing-song, the words a jumble of English and Lisican and who knows what else. What an odd duck. For one thing, she’s fat. Jay hasn’t seen any fat Lisicans before. Her skin is bad and she’s wearing an old hoodie with HOLLISTER stenciled across the chest. Her formerly-white Reeboks are split along each side. Her hair is lank and greasy. She is obviously suffering the effects of prolonged contact with the modern world. Now she looks just like any other shut-in anywhere in the world. Just get her a laptop and a VPN and she’d never see another live human ever again.
He wanders away from the plants for the first time to a dark corner recessed in the bare rock. He expected to find some kind of rat’s nest of bedding but instead he finds a neatly cut-out rectangle in the rock that runs as a passage to a contained chamber, far enough back to protect its occupants from explosions in the gun emplacement. This must have been command and control back here. The room is only like five by six meters, with seven wide ventilation shafts in the ceiling. Since its abandonment, these holes have allowed in trickles of detritus and the shafts are no longer clear; they only let in a bit of diffracted daylight.
Beneath the seven holes sit undisturbed conical piles of dirt surrounded by a scattering of leaves. “Ooo, creepy. Looks like some kind of… crypt in here yo.”
Kula, behind him, giggles. “Atsa sugoya eet ká. Yass, Jay. Me an me.” She takes him by the hand and leads him to a flattened and stained Navy cot mattress against the far wall. Ah. The rat’s nest.
“Uh… Not here looking for love, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m a grad student. Not a… I mean, not that grad students don’t get down. It’s just… That’s real flattering, Kula, you know what I mean? But, uh, I’m kind of in the middle of something right now.”
Kula giggles at him some more, hooking her fingers into his pockets. She snares a wad of leaves he collected and she frowns at them. “Me and me and Jay make three…” But her voice falters, looking at him with concern.
“What? Those are some rhododendron variety I found down in the river valley. You know the one? Over by the…? Well you got your tunnel-mouth tribe, down in the southeast corner of the island. You know, the one with Morska Vidra? And then there’s the bad guy village. Somewhere deeper in? Yeah. That valley.”
“Morska Vidra…” Kula’s nose twitches like a rabbit’s. She wipes it with the back of her hand and sneers. She lists off a bunch of other names. The only one Jay catches is “Wetchie-ghuy…”
“Yeah. That’s the one. That’s where I got the leaves. There.” He points where his internal compass guesses southeast is.
“Yass. Me and Jay znamo.”
“So I was wondering if you could help me with the classifica—”
But Kula hisses and throws the leaves on the ground. They are unclean to her or something. Then she stiffens. She casts a devilish grin sideways at Jay. “Jidadaa.”
Jay just nods stupidly, wondering what she means. Her change of mood is so mercurial he can’t follow it. Kula crosses back to the entrance to the chamber but a low black oblong against the wall to his right catches Jay’s attention. It is a decades-old military radio. And its power is on. A bank of batteries are connected and several wires run up one of the ventilation shafts to the surface. Jay peers at it closely. Its glowing analog dials and needles twitch slightly, picking up some signal. He squints at its frontpiece, finding the volume knob. He turns it, hearing static and garbled voices and nothing more.
He turns, calling out, “Where’d you get this, Kula…?” And then the words die in his throat. Someone new enters, slight and tall for a Lisican. Young, like twenty at the most. Her face is more pale and narrow. Her eyes are gray and sad. She is singing. A Lisican girl is singing, a soft wordless ballad. When she sees Jay she stops.
“Jidadaa.” Kula points to her. “Jay.”
Jidadaa just looks at Jay, her face neutral, hands hiding each other, lower lip glistening in the dim light.
“Hey, what’s up?” His greeting feels so awkward and paltry he resolves to do better. “Jay Darmer. Uh. Nice to meet you.” It’s clear what he’s looking at here, a mother and daughter. And now the whole story makes sense. Kula fell in love with some mystery military dude. They had a baby. She had to hide. He still provides for her somehow? They’re in touch by radio? “I like your song.”
Jidadaa’s eyes twitch and a tiny smile teases the corner of her mouth. She is angular with a prominent nose and wavy brown hair, but her mother’s slyness is still in her, around the broad cheekbones and shifting eyes. She edges her way into the chamber, beginning to sing again. There is a coiled excitement in her that makes Jay think she’s about to spring some surprise on him. But she looks so harmless. How bad can it be?
Jidadaa hugs herself in her stained hoodie, one palm running up and down the other arm. Her song seems to be nonsense syllables in a simple scale, like when someone plays around on a piano without knowing how to bring it to life. Jay starts adding his own notes to her song and she stops, clapping a hand over her mouth. Now she is quite close to him. She sticks out her hand.
“Uh, hi.” Jay and Jidadaa shake hands, like business partners.
Ξ
When the vessels of your body are empty, they collapse, the walls sucking up wetly against each other. Your esophagus doesn’t stay open when not in use. It rests flat like a bike tire’s uninflated tube.
It is in such an evacuated space that Pradeep now finds his body. The walls of the pit cling to him, robbing him of sight and sense and air. Freezing mucus and mud coat his skin, leaching the last of his vitality away. He has finally lost his battle against the curse within him and slid down, down, down… For too long he’s been thrashing in a panic to get out. Now stars are blooming in his vision and he knows that oxygen isn’t getting to his brain. This is the end. And he can’t feel Maahjabeen’s embrace any more.
The stars cover his vision and the world goes white.
Pradeep kneels on cold flagstones. He is bent into a deep prostrate pose, like he’s doing yoga or praying to Maahjabeen’s god. He looks up, surveying a space filled with light, infinitely wide. Is that where he is? Has he crossed some threshold into the divine?
People at the end of their lives talk about letting go of their earthly cares. But Pradeep burns with regrets. A coruscating waterfall of hopes and plans and memories rushes through him, filling him with an unbearable ache of lost opportunity. He was by every measure too young. And his life was just about to get really really good.
Footsteps echo in the distance. He turns, trying to locate their source, but he can’t find anyone approaching from the glare on the horizon from any direction.
He opens his mouth to call out but he realizes he would only do so as a function of his anxiety. What? Oh, fucking great. Not even in death does he escape it? Bloody hell. It has become too much a part of who he is for him to leave it behind. Anxiety is in his soul.
So this is his soul. It did survive biological death. Fascinating. And how many of the other stories are true? He recalls the five layers of a human form in the Taittiriya Upanishad. The body on the outside, then biological energy, mental energy, intuition and wisdom, and deep inside is his core essence, a seed of eternal bliss. Well let us get on with it. I am ready to shed the outer layers to find my blissful center, because I certainly do not feel it now.
Remembering the lessons of his boyhood, Pradeep sits cross-legged in a lotus pose and rests his wrists on his knees. He closes his eyes, or whatever passes for eyes here, and allows his mind to calm so he can more properly listen.
He hears the footsteps again. He had thought that whoever was coming would inevitably reach him here but perhaps that isn’t true. Perhaps they’re looking for him in this bright directionless place and can’t find him. Perhaps they’re lost.
Pradeep’s mouth opens to call out. But then his anxiety, disguised as common sense, reminds him that he may not want who-or-what-ever it is in this unknown place to find him. He may want to remain hidden. At least until he knows more of who it is.
His eyes snap open, anxiety building toward panic. Oh, he just had to introduce the idea of extra-dimensional terrors into his list of neuroses, didn’t he? Now how will he ever have a moment’s rest again? He takes a shuddering breath of sharply clean air and tries to master himself. Come on, Pradeep. You can do this. You have no choice. Face your future.
With an assertive impulse Pradeep rises to his feet. “I am here,” he calls out in a ringing voice. Too loud. But it had sounded resolute. Liking that, he stands taller.
The footsteps grow louder, seeming to come from all around. Then they resolve into a shadow, a dark stain in the glare directly ahead. A hunched figure waddles toward him. It is an old man with a brown face, bits of feather and fur hanging from his fringes. He grunts at Pradeep then mutters in a sing-song Pradeep almost recognizes. This isn’t who he expected at all.
The man stops in front of Pradeep and scowls up at him, still muttering. Pradeep realizes it is the language he’s been hearing the last couple weeks. “You’re Lisican.”
The man holds up a leather loop in one hand and turns a glittering stare onto Pradeep. “Ja sam Wetchie-ghuy.”
DW Draffin -- Lisica 