Chapter 33 – Into The Shadows
August 12, 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:
33 – Into The Shadows
“No. Seriously. Stop planning this. It is madness.” Esquibel stands on Mandy’s platform. From up there she can loom over them and dominate the argument.
But Mandy and Amy don’t stop lashing bundles of tule reeds together. Their mouths are pressed into grim lines, their eyes stubborn. The rain has stopped and now it’s go time.
Esquibel pleads, “Think about it. What happens if your raft capsizes or gets waterlogged? What will you do?”
Yet they’ve already told her they plan on testing it on the lagoon before they take it inside. They’ve been over this a hundred times.
“I forbid it.” Esquibel crosses her arms.
The bundles are only being lashed together for the test, so the knots are relatively loose. They’ll need to disassemble the raft to get it through the tunnels. Then they’ll lash it all together again in the shaft before stopping up the water and rising to the top. It’s a quite simple plan.
“And what good does it do you to get your contraption up there, Mandy?” She’s trying a new tack now, hands on hips. “So you have a weather station up there. Big deal. You cannot get it down without doing
this stupid bloody trick again.”
“Twine.” Mandy reaches her hand out for it. Amy passes it over the bundles to her. This is really Esquibel at her worst. She is so… stony when it comes to being protective. And she was always like this, long before anyone in the military thought giving her a fancy title and real authority was a good idea.
“You are only thinking about getting there. Not returning. How will you do it?”
Finally, Amy sighs, realizing she’ll have to engage with the woman if she will ever have peace. “Pull the plug, Esquibel. Sink.”
“Okay. Fine. When? When will we know to pull that plug?”
Amy frowns at her tormentor. It’s true she hasn’t worked this part all the way out. But it’s simple and they have a lot of time. She gives it a moment’s thought. “Katrina. On the drone. She’ll be the spotter looking down into the shaft. When she sees that we’ve got Jay back and the weather station is securely in place, she can tell someone to pull it.”
“But the drone can only hover in place for like ten minutes at a time. That isn’t a real solution. And how does that even work? You want someone to slash the tarp? Get inundated with a million liters of water in a tunnel? That’s how you’ve described it. I mean, I haven’t personally seen this tunnel, but—”
“No. You’re right.” Amy scrubs her face and squints her eyes shut. Keep it simple. “You know what? We’ll just bring Jay back through the village and the tunnels and everything. They won’t be able to keep us out. We’ll make it quick. Just cross the square and make a beeline to the exit before they can protest my filthy ass.”
“It would be better if we wait. Why doesn’t someone just go talk to them now? Make sure they will be friendly when you pull this stunt. We don’t need…”
“You know what?” Mandy asks brightly. “That’s a great idea. We can get Katrina to do it. Have her go visit the village and ask the Mayor for her blessing or whatever. Get some diplomacy going. Thanks, Skeebee. You always think of the best details.”
But Esquibel isn’t buying Mandy’s glassy smile for an instant. And hearing Katrina’s name so much is starting to piss her off. Why is the golden girl the one Mandy always thinks can solve her problems? This is the absolutely wrong moment she should have to wonder about Mandy’s fidelity. No, not fidelity, just… During these last few weeks. Esquibel has been enough for her. They have been for each other. And she’d hate for that to end. She can drink of the Mandy River as long as it flows. But just how long will it flow?
“Could you go ask her for us?” Mandy gives Esquibel a sweeter smile and touches her arm. Despite this disagreement, they really are in love. “Please, dearest one?”
How can Esquibel say no? Off she goes across the camp, into the bunker, and finally down into the bottom level of the sub, where Katrina and Triquet eat lunch, smoke a j, and play each other old songs on their phones.
“And that is the great Harry Nilsson. Me And My Arrow was—”
“Katrina.”
“Aye aye, Captain.” Katrina giggles, high as a kite, and flips a salute at her.
Esquibel sighs. “Oh. Never mind. I did not know you would be worthless on drugs. We will talk later.”
Katrina giggles again, then physically wipes the grin off her face. “No. No, I can listen. I promise. What is it?”
“It is Mandy!” Esquibel sags against the table, the words bursting from her. She is surprised by her exasperation. And by her need to share it. But it is a safe topic. “She and Amy won’t give up on that crazy idea! Will somebody please help me talk them out of it? Now they want me to send you to the village and be like, ‘Oh, hello, my friends are about to flood that entire shaft they already burned. Yes, remember when they scared you so much that you wouldn’t talk to us for ten days? Well, they’re doing it again. Oh, yes. And then they’ll be bringing Amy, you know the one of us you really hate? Yes. Well, we’ll be bringing her through your village at the end. That will be okay, won’t it?’ And then they want you to come back and give them a thumbs-up as if that will convince me their idea isn’t a complete disaster waiting to happen!”
Her voice rings in the sub. Triquet and Katrina only regard her. After an awkward moment Triquet holds out the joint.
Esquibel flips up her hand, rejecting it. “No, I don’t want your bloody dope. I want your help. I am not crazy. I know this. Are you crazy like them or will you help me?”
“Uhhh…” Katrina thinks about it, long and hard. “Well. You wouldn’t catch me floating on a raft like they’re talking about. That’s totally insane.”
“Thank you.”
“And you also won’t catch me asking the Mayor if all these things can happen. I think she’s just starting to trust me. And this will, well…” Katrina mimes an explosion beneath her cupped hands, flying outward.
“Big boom.”
“That is what I’m saying! That is all I am saying. Jay’s absence is very serious. It is our number one concern. But what they are proposing will only cause more problems. We need to get Jay back some other way.”
“How?” Triquet makes a face, trying to think of a way to rescue their lost colleague. “I mean, who would we even send? Alonso can’t go. People like Mandy and Flavia don’t have any kind of background in rescuing people. Pradeep? He’ll have a nervous breakdown in five minutes. I don’t think we could get Maahjabeen to care. Who’s left? Katrina and me? Miriam? Shouldn’t you go, Doctor Daine? You’re the only one who has the proper training. And isn’t that your mission here? To protect us?”
The question is innocent but the implications are too much for Esquibel to discuss. She shakes her head no. “No. None of us are properly trained for retrieval. That is a very specific skillset. Those Air Force Parajumpers who rescued Alonso are perhaps the best, and they are the very best soldiers the Air Force has. No. This is a mission for experts like them. We would just be getting ourselves in trouble. What we need to do is ask the Lisicans where Jay might be and if they can get him back for us.”
Katrina throws up her hands, helpless. “I already have! He crossed the river no one crosses. They won’t help us with that. Until he comes back, he’s pretty much gone. Oh. Here. Wait, Triq. This is my friend’s super lush synthwave track. Listen. It’s so fresh. His name is General Zed.” The opening warbling chords of what sounds like the soundtrack to a 70s science fiction film fill the sub. Triquet nods sagely and takes another hit.
As Esquibel assumed, Katrina will be no help. But, really, there is nothing for any of them to do. Wait here. Stop antagonizing the natives. Make their collections then go. Just four more weeks.
“Ay-eh,” Esquibel mutters, plucking the joint out of Katrina’s hand and taking a thin drag. This is what Mandy needs. A mild dissociative and relaxant. Come on, Esquibel! Just keep them all out of trouble for one more goddamn month.
Ξ
At a junction, Jay finally finds a door. He’s been running a good solid 10,000 meter track pace for what must be hours now. His feet are in agony, the impact strikes of his heels against the concrete something he just can’t handle any more. His hips and lower back are starting to go too, especially since his left arm can’t be used to swing properly. His left hand still grips his ribs, where the blood has thankfully stopped flowing. Now it just fucking burns.
His cardio is good though. And the heartbeat in his ears topped out only around 120 bpm so he’s definitely got more in the tank. He’ll need it to deal with whatever might be through this door.
He edges toward it, tip-toeing forward on the balls of his feet to save his heels. He shines his phone light on it. Oh wait. There’s no door. Just a doorway. He ducks through, into a long dark passage with a shallow shelf of a concrete pathway along the left wall. At its end he can see the iron rungs of a ladder.
Wait a sec. This looks just like the way he got in. But there’s no way he’s already all the way back there. How long has he been running, anyway? He checks the time. His phone says 8:23 am. When did they attack him, midnight? He’s been running for eight hours? Yeah, it’s possible. At one point he chained his phone to the battery so he could keep its light on. That was the last time he’d stopped. That was… yeah, that was a long fucking time ago.
Wow. This is some kind of personal record. Eight hours at a track meet pace? Yeah, boy. Rock on with your bad self. Funny what running for your life can get you.
He reaches the end of the passage and puts a hand on the rungs. So this is it? This is the end of the epic chase and maybe the end of his life? Certain death behind him, likely death at the top of this ladder? How will he even deal with popping his head out?
Think, Jay. It’s been hours. Maybe even a full day since they came after you. The hunters can’t have someone just waiting there, poised to strike. It’s not like I pop my head up and get it instantly chopped off. If someone’s there, they’re just like on lookout. And they’re tired of staring at the hatch. So I’ll have a few moments. Maybe I can spook them with my phone again. Flashing lights and heavy metal. Ha. Lord, save me.
He preps his phone, going classic with Ozzy’s Crazy Train. Then he starts to climb. At the last rung up he pauses. The tricky spot is actually pushing his head up over the lip. The morning is gray, he can see that from his vantage, like a groundhog worried about hawks in the sky. He thinks about playing dodge ball in the pool with his cousins. He’d hold his breath as long as he could, knowing they were waiting for him to surface, arms cocked. Then he’d kick up and grab a quick gasp and then be right back down again before the balls could hit. Same thing here, sport.
Jay pops up, flicks his gaze up and around, his survival instinct screaming that a blade is about to chop into the back of his neck. But it doesn’t. He drops back down and reverses his grip. Then he pops back up and twists around to find the redwood fairy ring empty of life. He’s alone here.
The silly fuckers didn’t leave a guard after all.
“And, I mean, why would they?” Jay pulls himself out of the hole and dusts himself off. “This isn’t a super likely scenario here, that I’d somehow, you know, escape. And then come all the way back. Jay-zus. What am I even doing here? Nah, I’m good. I just got to keep moving and they’ll never catch me. Sure of it.” But man oh man, he regrets losing his Salomon approach shoes. They were new and they cost a couple hundred dollars and now he’d never see them again. Just starting to break them in, too…
Jay backtracks, out the glade and up the slope, under the bracken, which provide his feet with a whole new level of pain. He gets lost in the gloomy tunnels and starts having to criss-cross an unfamiliar wood channel of bare stone that bisects his path. This doesn’t look right. He’s somehow gone off-course here in this fucking rodent maze. Back and forth, cramping and wheezing and shuffling on screaming feet. And then, against all odds, a smear of golden pollen appears on a dark limb and he’s right back on track. Ha! It’s still visible from, what, like two days before? Three? How long has he been out here now? It feels like ten years.
Jay finally scrambles out from under the dark thickets and finds himself in the silent pine woods leaking fog from russet carpets of needles and duff. He approaches the meadow from above as it leads to the river. Sweet Christ he’s actually going to make it back to the tunnel mouth village. And who cares about how he gets across the river this time. He’ll just throw himself in and kick his way across. Fuck it. But wait. He should get some things in a plastic bag first. He’s still got one somewhere in here, doesn’t he?
Jay takes off his pack and searches the bottom of the pockets. There. A small white plastic shopping bag that says WAH MEI GROCERY on it, with Chinese and Vietnamese characters below. Oh, right! He remembers getting this bag. Just last month in Daly City. He was on a booty call with Janey’s friend Megan and he’d forgotten condoms. But a late night run saved the date. And now this bag will save his phone and his battery pack and his wallet and a bunch of papers from getting wet.
He ties the top of the plastic bag tight and places it in the pack’s top pocket. Now he’s ready. Looking forward to getting off his feet, even if the water will make his nuts go numb.
Jay ventures out into the meadow. It is a long sloping field, larger than he remembers, dropping from the trees into a wildflower basin. He emerges from the last of the trees to finally see the river, a shining band of gray steel cutting the valley in half.
And on this near bank, in full neolithic battle array, waits the whole-ass village who have been trying to kill him. They stand in ranks, with crazy feather collars of white and black and capes of hide, spears bristling like a Greek fucking phalanx.
Hope dies in Jay’s breast. There are just too many. They wait between him and the river. And he can’t turn back. They’ll chase him down no problem. His feet are a ruin. Aw, man! But—but he can’t just let them execute him! Jay is nowhere near ready to die. An inescapable, dreadful sadness grips him and crumples his face like a child in the throes of a tantrum.
Then he hears his name. “Jay and Jay. Bimeby you listen.”
Jay clears his eyes. Stupefied, he picks out Kula’s squat silhouette off to the side of the village’s military formation. Jidadaa is there as well, holding a halter that leashes the three hunters who attacked them. Ha! They beat them! Ha! Kula and Jidadaa are okay! But how did they get here so fast? And what is happening here, some kind of parley? “Jidadaa. Man am I happy to see you. But what…? How long y’all even been waiting here today?”
Jidadaa points at the gray horizon. “From the sun.”
“Sunrise? So a couple hours? Damn. How’d you…? I mean, I ran like the fucking wind. Oh my god I was so sure they were gonna kill me. Hey. Could you… just like keep them kind of occupied until I get back across the river? I’ll just kind of edge my way…”
“No.” Jidadaa says the word with such force Jay stops. She lifts a hand. “No across the river, Jay. Not yet.”
The villagers stare at him stone-faced. Lady Boss, who spoke the last time they met, is in full battle array, with a splendid headdress of fur and feather and shell, her eyes ringed in black. Neither her nor her personal guard move.
“Okay. No across the river. Yet. Uh. Sure. But why not?”
“You break custom. You must pay.”
“Uh, fine.” A wild, hysterical laugh escapes Jay. “I got, let’s see, I think like forty-seven dollars in my wallet. Or is there punishment too? Is this like one of those online traffic school kind of things? You know, with the stand-up comics and the tricky tests?”
But nobody else laughs. Now they all stare at him in silence.
Jay grimaces. “Yeah. Bad joke. Does an apology help?”
“Blood.”
“What?”
“Pay is blood.”
“What, mine? The fuck it is. I’ve already lost like half a liter last night from that joker and his fucking spear. Look!” And Jay finally removes his hand from his side. The shredded base layer gapes open. His skin is stuck to it. Jay grunts with the sharp pain of removing his hand, reminding himself how badly he got sliced.
Jidadaa consults with Kula. Kula calls out loudly to the leaders of the village, gesturing at her own ribs in sympathy of his case. It seems negotiations are back open.
Jay nods. “Yeah. I’ve already fucking paid. You tell them, Kula. Fucked up my feet. Lost blood. Got the shit scared out of me. Then I had to run halfway around the island. So I think I’ve already paid as much as I’m gonna pay. Blood blood blood. You tell them.”
Kula keeps talking, adding the details that Jidadaa translates from his story. Jay just keeps punctuating her points with outraged comments like, “Yeah!” and “Fuckin’ A!”
Finally Kula stops. Some of the younger members of the village cast sidelong looks at their Lady Boss, waiting on her decision.
Lady Boss makes a low speech in a reasonable tone. At the end of it, she pronounces the word, “Jidadaa!” and then she turns her back on the meadow. Her followers all do the same. After a long moment, to perhaps drive the point home, all the villagers finally set off, back into the trees from where they came.
Jidadaa drops the halter. Two of the hunters pick up the third one, who still seems to be suffering from Jay’s tackle, and follow.
After they disappear, Jay turns to Jidadaa. “Now seriously. How the fuck did you guys get here so fast? Did I miss some shortcut?”
But mother and daughter are deep in conversation and not listening to him. Finally, Jidadaa shares, “Now Jidadaa happen to you, Jay. End of era.”
“What does that even mean?”
“You are lidass. You break the world.”
“No, I didn’t!” Jay fights not to whine. “I just swam across a river. Tell Lady Boss! I didn’t… I mean it’s not like I boned her daughter. I didn’t assassinate the fucking president. Come on!”
Jidadaa says a few words he doesn’t know then says, “She is in danger place.”
“Wait. I didn’t get who. Who’s in a danger place, Kula?”
“No.” Jidadaa points at the villagers who have retreated. She says the same few words, which just don’t stick in Jay’s brain at all.
“Is that Lady Boss? The leader?”
“Yes. She is in danger place. Jidadaa here, Jidadaa all around.”
“Jidadaa is? You… are?” Jay is utterly mystified by this.
“No, no…” Jidadaa shakes her head, downcast. “Jidadaa. Is not name. It is word… It mean… doom. No escape. Doom.”
“Doom?” Jay wheels on Kula. “And that’s what you name your daughter? My sweet little baby doom? What mother does that?”
Kula responds with a brittle laugh, her dark eyes sharp.
Jidadaa continues, “Doom for breaking tradition.”
“What is? You are? Or me, crossing the river?”
“Both.”
“Oh.” Jidadaa’s very birth spelled doom to her and her mother. And she’s had to live with it her whole life. Jay frowns. “Like, do they even know what real doom is? This is nothing. I mean, like everyone’s still here. Nobody died.”
“Custom. Tradition. Tradition die.”
“Well, then, fucking too bad. Tell them to wake up and get with the program. It’s the 21st century, after all. Shit has changed out in the world, yo. You don’t need to let them treat you like this any more. You’re saying they, what, like ran Kula off for sleeping with soldiers and wouldn’t accept you your whole life? Well I’m happy to break that custom. They can eat my ass. Out here just ruining people’s lives left and right because of some stupid tradition. Then they send killers after us because of it? No fucking way.”
“No send. They do no send. Young hunters. They want to end the doom. They think to kill you they end it. But Jidadaa no work this way. The… uh… Lady Boss say. No her idea. Only them.”
“Ohhhh. That’s why they left? And that’s why I’m still alive. It was just a dumb plan by some kids. They tried to get on her good side and she was like, ‘You did what? No! His Jidadaa ain’t like that now. Oh, fuck, now I’m gonna have to be nice to that white boy.’ Something like that? So she wasn’t here waiting for me, she brought the whole village to, what, apologize?”
“No apology. Doom.”
“Yeah. Jidadaa. Got it.”
“You are cut off. No more on this side of river.”
“Yeah. I got to leave. That’s something we can all agree on. And I’m not invited back? That’s fine. It’s a big world out there. I’ll figure out how to survive for the entire rest of my life somehow outside this tiny speck of land in the middle of nowhere.” Now he’s blabbering. Not a good look. He shuts his mouth. “Well.” He sticks his hand out and Jidadaa shakes it again, as they did when they first met. “Sister Christian. Nice knowing ya. Kula. Keep growing that dank herb. Peace. I’m going off the rails on a crazy train.”
“No.” Jidadaa shakes her head, hair falling across her features, corners of her mouth dimpling. For the first time, Jay is struck by her feral looks. “We come.”
“You come? What, with me? Really? Uh…” Jay isn’t sure this is a good idea. In fact, he’s pretty sure it’s not. But he certainly owes them his life, probably several times over. He can’t really say no. “Okay. Well. Just so you know, that river water’s really fucking cold. I hope everyone can swim. And I got to take the rest of this hike slow. My poor fucking feet…”
Jidadaa exclaims wordlessly and reaches into a woven bag at her feet. She takes out Jay’s lost shoes.
“Aw, yiss! Dude! I fucking love you!” Jay hugs the shoes to his chest with a whoop of blind joy.
He never sees the blush on Jidadaa’s cheeks nor the worried scowl from Kula in response.
Ξ
“You know…” Katrina stretches the second word, curling her hair around her finger, “I knew. I knew for like a week before anyone else did. Kept that tea in the cupboard, I did.”
“You knew what?” Pradeep follows her, a step behind, dragging the blue kayak named Aziz.
Katrina stops and gives him an arch half-smile, eyebrow cocked. “That you and Maahjabeen were getting down. I saw you two in bed together the night we all dressed up in Triquet’s clothes.”
“Yes. I see.”
“And I didn’t tell a soul. Kept it to myself. How long had you been boning before that?”
“Ehh.” Pradeep is instantly beleaguered. “I don’t really care for that word, if you don’t mind.”
Katrina hugs the bundle of her wetsuit, fins, and Flavia’s spear close to her chest. “Oh, they’re romantics! That’s so… well… romantic, I guess. Not just an island fling. Pretty serious, huh? So what are your plans for my daughter?”
Pradeep bravely soldiers on in silence, dragging the rear of the kayak through the sand. But as they round the uprooted trunk of the fallen redwood he needs her help to lift it clear. “Could you, please?” He nods at the tail of the craft.
“Oh, yeh. No answer, eh? Well that’s not very salacious. My followers will not be enthused by that silence at all. I wonder what the opposite of salacious is? Prim?”
“Modest.”
“Ooo that’s the perfect word for you. You know, I’ve never gotten to tease such a gorgeous man for so long. You do know you’re gorgeous, right? I mean, look at you.”
He just offers a tight smile and reminds her, “Modest.”
“Fair play. Well, can we at least talk about what a stupendous smoke show your girlfriend is? She’s hotter than hot. She’s like… nuclear fusion hot.”
This brightens Pradeep’s closed face. Extolling the wonders of Maahjabeen has become his favorite pastime. “Oh, yes, quite. She is astounding. I never in a million years thought that someday I, this random little Chakrabarti boy from Hyderabad, would ever even speak, much less touch, or… I mean… You aren’t really going to post this on social media some day, are you?”
They put the kayak down on the clean sand of the beach, the lagoon blue gray and calm. Katrina storms up to Pradeep and pokes him in the chest. “Bitch, I’m the discreet one who didn’t ruin your secret for over a week. You know how hard that was for me? I say every bloody thing that pops into my head. I was literally biting my tongue over you two.”
Pradeep allows a sheepish smile out. “Uh, thank you?”
“Cheers. So what does she look like naked?”
Pradeep groans and turns away, dragging the kayak to the water.
Katrina giggles, following. “What fun! I can keep this up all day.”
“Get in the water, please,” Pradeep calls out over his shoulder in a tone that is as close as he can get to
her raillery.
“Oh, just try to shut me up. Look, I’m fully aware that if I poke fun at Maahjabeen she’ll like cut my off head with a scimitar…”
“That’s racist.” Pradeep puts the kayak down and begins to unpack what he’s stowed in the hatch. First, he’ll need a windshirt and maybe gloves, depending on the temperature of the water.
“Is it? Yeh, I suppose it is. Sorry. See? But I can dish it with you and you won’t get violent, just hilariously uncomfortable.”
“You know this is a work environment and we are subject to rules and laws concerning sexual harassment, don’t you?”
Katrina waves it away. “That’s bosh. Alonso says we’re all a family, remember?”
But now that Pradeep has brought up policy, he has trouble moving on. “Katrina…” He tries to frown at her elfin face. “Look, just because you’re this cute little anime character, it doesn’t mean you get to be inappropriate with your co-workers.”
She throws her arms into the air and screams in joy to the horizon. “He thinks I’m cute!”
Pradeep sighs and turns away, to finish unpacking the nets and dry bags in which he will store Katrina’s haul.
She drops to her knees beside him. “Okay. I’m sorry. This is new territory for me. Usually I’m the one on the receiving end of all the toxic attention and you’re right. Sorry for the inappropriate work environment, mate. I’ve just… nobody has ever taken me seriously before so I always get to say what I want and…” She shrugs. “Real teachable moment there, Pradeep Chakrabarti. Thanks. Hope I didn’t ruin our, you know…”
Now he feels ashamed. This lovely sprite, this sweet young genius, chooses to bestow her attention on him and all he can do is act like his grandfather, storming out of his study with a rolled up newspaper. All she wants is joy. Light and laughter and love. From deep within himself he dredges up a dry giggle. And the more he pulls at it, the more it gives him. He shakes his index finger at her, finding a mock scolding voice, very much the Hindi schoolmaster. “You are a very naughty child.”
“Oh, good, he forgives me!” She catches his hand and kisses it. Then in a single motion she pulls her top off.
Pradeep squawks and turns away.
“What? Just putting on my wetsuit.” Then it’s Katrina’s turn to laugh. She feels the cool morning breeze on the bare skin of her chest, which gives her goosebumps. She rarely wears a bra. Now she has to wrap herself in her shortie, never a fun process. The neoprene is always cold and tougher than it looks. Finally she’s got herself wedged in and she turns her back to Pradeep. “Be a dear and zip me up, would you?”
“Yes, Miss Oksana.”
“Ooo, he’s getting formal. Kinky.”
Pradeep puts on his spray skirt and stows his things in the hatches before and behind. “Push me off, will you?”
“Never, doll. I mean, sure.” Katrina waits for him to get in, then shoves the kayak into the short waves of the lagoon. The water is chill on her feet, not frigid, but sure as shit not warm. This is going to be an adventure no doubt. She sits in the surf and fits the fins on her feet and the mask and snorkel to her face. Then she backs in, falling into the next wave with a shock of salty cold. Oh, this is about three degrees colder than she’d hoped. She may not be able to stay in it too long. Just breathe, Kat. It’s the North Pacific. It will never be as warm as Sydney Harbour.
She falls in and rises with a gasp, breast-stroking out to him. It only gets colder out here, as the sand falls away beneath her feet.
“Careful. Lots of kelp in close today.”
She whoops. “This will get your nipples hard! Oh my god. I’ve got to warm up!” Katrina begins swimming, long overhand strokes with a powerful kick. The frigid water is filled with luminous color. Ghostly stalks of kelp disappear into the dark green floor.
“Where…?” she gasps, kicking strong, to keep her head out of water, “…did all this kelp come from?”
“It was already here. Just hadn’t grown up yet.” Pradeep points to a clump blocking her path with the blade of his paddle. “Bull kelp can grow a meter in a week. We just haven’t been here since it matured. It’s an annual. Completely dies out at the end of the year then starts over again. I should collect a sample, actually. See if it is in any measurable way different from other kelps we’ve sampled.”
Katrina treads water, thinking of how vibrant the life is in coastal waters, how quickly it can grow. She puts her mask underwater and watches anemones and urchins blooming on the rocks, filtering their food, sea stars and red crabs. She’ll have to be careful where she touches, and not let the currents sweep her onto the rocks.
A shadow flits through the kelp stalks beneath her. A twinge of fear turns to sudden wonder as the shadow returns, rolling over to display the inquisitive face of that same Northern fur seal. He steers entirely with his tail, his front claws folded over his chest. After staring at Katrina for a long time, he opens his paws and releases the remains of a crab upward, as if in offering. Katrina reaches out her free hand and snares the fleshy bits still attached to the shell. She mimes eating it and gives the seal a thumbs up, before he shoots back down into the darkness.
Katrina surfaces with a gasp. “Here. Sample this.”
“What?” Pradeep can’t make sense of what she’s handing him. “Oh my god. Did you just eat a crab raw?”
“No, a seal did! He gave it to me! Straight magic, that.”
“A seal? What kind?”
“Light gray with spots? Amy said…”
“Hmm. Juvenile monk seal? How big? Male or female?”
“Nah. Northern fur seal. Male. Amy said. Super sweet.”
“A fur seal? Extraordinary! At some point we’ll need samples from all the pinniped species of the lagoon, but I don’t think any of us have worked out how we will do that yet.”
“You know, when I was down there…” Katrina has finally adjusted to the cold and her mind has started to work properly again. “I was thinking about what you said, you know, about the kelp. It’s an annual. Well, with all these cycles, we should get samples of them in the morning and in the evening.”
“Yes, you’re right. I did get others in previous weeks.”
“Brilliant. I’ve got kind of a stress-test for Plexity. I want to present Flavia with a couple samples stripped of all context tags. To see if she can use the program to derive from initial readings and processes what time of the day it was taken.”
“That’s crazy.” Pradeep’s head cocks to the side. As someone used to original, orthogonal thinking, he understands what must prompt this line of thought. He admires it. But the math involved, or even the import of such an exercise, flies right over his head. “I’m not sure what value it would have in that project, apart from collecting the samples, I suppose…”
“Well, the science of big data is all about how to find needles in haystacks, right? You must have taken the prerequisites.”
“Yes, I have my bioinformatics Eagle Scout badge.”
She giggles. “Right then. So it’s all about designing ways to get at the data you want, right? The filters and algorithms…?”
“Yes, yes. Of course.” Pradeep catches up, blinking, his thoughts coming fast now. “So Flavia can, what? Automate the guessing of raw data stacks into machine learning and train it to recognize daily cycles in the data without needing to be explicitly told?”
Katrina nods. “That’s it. A start at least. But I’m getting cold. Talk more in a sec.”
As she dunks her head back down, Pradeep calls out, “Happy hunting! Or fishing? But nobody says happy fishing. What do they say? Catch a big one! Something like that.” From his vantage flat on the water, Pradeep has trouble seeing too far beyond the edge of the lagoon. The rocks that divide it from the open ocean loom up too large. But a cold wind is blowing in, and a dark horizon is threatening rain.
Just as he thinks it, he sees Mandy walking across the beach diagonally toward them, her hair blowing like a banner in the wind and a sarong wrapped around her doing the same. She looks like some vision of an island girl stepping out of time.
“Storm coming?” Pradeep calls out.
Mandy opens her mouth, pointing at the horizon, then closes it and nods. She beckons to him. “Where’s Katrina?”
“Getting dinner.”
And as he says it, she breaches the water, her breath exploding out of her lungs. A long silver fish is on her spear, thrashing, snapping its fearsome fangs and staining the water with blood. “Help! Gah! Pradeep, help me with this fucking thing!”
It is nearly a meter long, a more powerful swimmer than she is, and it takes all her strength to keep her head above water and not let go of the spear.
“Here! Lift it up to me!” Pradeep coasts alongside her, reaching down. “Holy shit, that’s a Sphyraena argentea, you lunatic!”
With a grunt of effort, Katrina hauls the shining fish into the air. Its hinged jaws snap in protest and it slaps the water with its tail.
As Pradeep reaches for it, a flash of fur and teeth passes between them. The fur seal leaps up and fastens its teeth on the fish’s spine. With a shake of his head the spine cracks and the seal tears the fish in half.
Katrina squeals, jerking away. An appalling amount of blood fills the water. The seal turns and spins twice and vanishes, taking both halves of the fish with him.
Katrina retrieves the spear, gasping and coughing bloody water. She hooks a hand around the prow of the kayak and tries to regain her breath. Then she hears a distant voice screaming at her. “Is that Mandy? What does she want?”
Pradeep calls out. “I’ve got her. She’s fine. Just no dinner. The seal stole it.”
Mandy screams some more, in helpless fear for Katrina and Pradeep’s safety.
“We’re fine…! Just give us a moment.” He paddles strongly, compensating for the woman hanging off one side. “I won’t tell her,” Pradeep stage whispers to Katrina as they approach the beach, “but Sphyraena argentea is the Pacific barracuda.”
Katrina screeches in outrage. “It’s the fucking WHAT?”
Ξ
On his back, Jay’s chest heaves, fighting for breath, the gray sky above wheeling as his head spins. He’d almost lost Jidadaa in the frigid current of the river. Then he’d nearly drowned his own sorry ass. Finally a branch hanging down from the bank had been his salvation and he’d been able to drag himself free. He’d never seen someone who was unable to swim take so bravely to the water.
Her head had vanished so fast underwater the surface tension had snapped with a little cartoonish ploink. Jay had yelled and reached for her, pushing a dog-paddling Kula and his floating backpack toward the far bank as he sucked in a huge breath and dived deep.
Her hands found his wrist. Her grip had been so strong, nearly pulling him down instead of letting him pull her up. It took the strongest kick he’d ever kicked to get them back to the surface. Then he had to lifeguard-carry her across the current and nearly kill himself getting her up that treacherous bank.
After that, he’d fallen back into the swiftest current and gotten spun back out into it. But he didn’t have anything left in the tank. His side was on fire. His arms and legs were made of concrete. Jay’s body started to sink… Then he’d hit that branch hanging off the far bank and lived to see another day. Hallelujah.
His shaking arm rises to his rib. It’s warm but when he wipes it he doesn’t get his hand coated in blood as he fears. Just a bit of pink. Something’s keeping his blood from leaking out. He must have pressed his veins and arteries closed on his big run. Just a little capillary action left. Motherfuck but it hurts.
“Kula. Hey. You still got my pack, right?” He calls out to the sky, unable to lift himself up to check. Losing his phone would be the biggest bummer possible. Four more weeks without his fantasy books and tunes. No thank you. “Kula?”
Jay finally rolls onto his side and sits up. Jidadaa and Kula have vanished, along with his pack. In their place are the two kids who had followed him from the tunnel village to the river, crouched at the edge of the meadow, watching him.
“Whoa. Hey. What’s up, guys? You see two ladies…? Uh… They got some of my stuff.” Jay rolls onto his hands and knees and takes a few shuddering breaths. He has surfed some of the biggest waves in the world over the years but he has hardly ever gotten this close to death. And his fucking rib is just screaming in pain.
With a sharp bark of agony and an indrawn breath against his teeth he regains his feet. Yep. They’re actually gone. Almost no trace, except where the grass is pressed down beside the bank. Fuck. He’s traded his shoes for, well, everything else. His favorite pants, his toiletry bag, his phone, his battery, his bag… Shit. Well. He better get back home before night falls, for sure.
Jay looks across the river. Four masked faces, covered in pollen, are pointed back at him, one cocked comically to the side as if asking a question. The golden childs have returned to the meadow.
“Yep,” Jay calls out to them. “End of an era. Now the next three hundred years belong to me.”
Something catches on his wound, one of the layers of cloth or something, and tears his skin a bit more. He screeches in pain and grabs at his side. Grimly, he limps toward the pair of kids watching him with dispassionate, lupine stares.
Good riddance to the other side of the fucking river. Good riddance to the golden childs and the prophecies and the rest of the island with its secret goddamn tunnels. Good riddance to Kula and Jidadaa. He just needs this adventure to end.
“Man…” Jay groans as he follows the kids up the incline out of the valley to their village up on the ridge.
“Never even discovered any new organisms. What a fucking bust.” He sees another figure, dark and toad-like, crouching off-trail, watching him. “Hey. Freak. What’s shakin’? Course you’re here. Wetchie-ghuy. Yeah, I know who you are. Don’t try any of your tricks with me. I’ll sick the fox on you again. Remember that? When you stole our message? And then the fox took it from you? Huh?” But Wetchie-ghuy only watches him with patient malevolence. “Lisica?” Jay mimes the fox biting Wetchie-ghuy with curved fingers as fangs on his arm. Then he draws tears running down his cheeks and whines like a baby. “Wetchie-ghuy,” he points, reminding him of his defeat.
Wetchie-ghuy only scowls and withdraws into the shadows.
Chapter 32 – Let’s Go For A Run
August 5, 2024
Thanks for joining us for the third volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this episode:
32 – Let’s Go For A Run
In Miriam’s dream, her little brother Denny is dying again. He is slowly drowning himself in his tub with pharmaceuticals, just as he did in real life, and she’s on the phone with someone who is there at the house, watching him but unable to stop him. It’s her Nan, or someone’s auld wan, her creaky voice dispassionately narrating how Denny’s face turns bloated and blue and his eyes lose their light. But Miriam is stuck in traffic, helpless, raging against the oppressive modern world, her face a teary mess.
Then a hand grasps her shoulder and shakes her urgently. She reaches for it in gratitude. Oh, praise be. Someone came to rescue him. She grabs the slender forearm and forces herself awake, the grief sliding off her like a shroud.
“It’s Pradeep!” Mandy squeaks, shaking both her and Alonso. Wait. Where is she? Right. This mad island. And Pradeep is…?
“What is it, Mandy?” Miriam glances at Alonso in the halo of white light that Mandy brought. His curls are wild and his beard is coming back in again. He looks ghoulish, and whatever dream he claws himself up from looks even more harrowing than her own.
Their minds veer toward calamity. Mandy would only ever waken them if he had died. But her face splits into a relieved but tired grin. “He’s awake. He’s back. It’s passed.”
Mere moments later, shivering in their base layers, everyone save Jay are crowded in the lantern-lit clean room, surrounding the cot. Pradeep still lies there with Maahjabeen, and they are arguing and giggling at the same time.
“No, I am telling you that I need to get up.”
“And I am telling you that you just spent nearly three days in a coma and need to take these things slow.”
“I am also not very comfortable with everyone looking at me while your arms are around—”
“No, you cannot turn this into one of your panic attacks, Mahbub. Everyone knows we are in love and nobody cares.”
“What do you mean, nobody cares?” Katrina scowls. “We think it’s a fabulous idea.”
“I’m just jealous,” Flavia adds. “But to say I don’t care would be false. You two are my new favorite soap opera.”
Pradeep giggles some more, the anxiety releasing its grip. He has long thought that the anxiety itself is neuronal circuits primarily in his brain but all along his limbs and deep inside his enteric nervous system in his gut as well. Neurons are always seeking out new connections and at some formative point in his development as a boy he learned to build these extremely strong anxiety pathways. They have nearly no off-branches and they only travel one way. If he thought neurological networks could spiral he would say that’s what his did. But he knows it’s more a feedback loop of endless repetition, the same images and feelings and scripts of fragmented condemnation that flit through his head in interminable cycles. But they are fading. His anxiety cannot hold him right now. The love they all share is too clearly demonstrated here to be questioned. And they are all such lovely people too. “No. Seriously. I’m ready, Maahjabeen. Please let me sit up.”
She scowls, just enough for him to see the ferocious creature she can be when she wants. Then she relents. “Yes, fine. But I am watching you.”
Her grip goes slack and he pushes himself up with gasps and groans until he is sitting cross-legged. Maahjabeen kneels beside him, her hand on his arm. Pradeep drinks water from a flask, then nods at everyone watching him silently. “Hello, everyone. Uh. What time is it?”
“3:32 am, the morning of the twenty-first of April.” Esquibel records the time in her notes then turns on her phone’s light. “We are very happy to have you back. How do you feel?”
“Hungry. Very sore. Kind of… restless.” Pradeep giggles again. “You can all go back to bed now. Please.”
“Yes you are sore from all the CPR. Lean forward?” Pradeep does so and Esquibel lifts the back of his shirt. She takes a photo and displays the screen to the others. “No marks. None at all.”
Pradeep frowns. “There were marks back there?”
“In the shape of a little fox.” Mandy draws the figure in space with pinched fingers. “No, really.”
“It was very much,” Alonso pronounces, “the craziest thing.”
“I’ve got a working hypothesis,” Esquibel tells them. “Obviously no natural process would create such a distinct pattern. It was proof of human intent. Someone poisoned you, Pradeep. Attacked you somehow. I think of it like, well, imagine an old hairbrush, but instead of bristles you have fifteen or twenty poisoned needles in the outline of a fox’s head. You bring it to camp and when your target presents the opportunity… whack!”
“Did anything like that happen to you the night of the big feast, sweetie?” Triquet smooths Pradeep’s hair out of his eyes and cups his chin. “Anything you can remember?”
Pradeep is flattered, nearly dazzled by all this attention. “Uh, no. No, I left the party early. The news that there might be others on the island who weren’t villagers… It shocked me. I was sure we were doomed.” His giggle becomes more neurotic. “Any news on that, by the way? Any, I don’t know, Russian paratroopers discovered on the far side of Lisica while I’ve been down? Any…?”
But they all talk him down, with a chorus of soothing words.
“Wait wait wait.” Miriam holds up a hand. “I want to hear more from Esquibel. What kind of poison would that be? Is it one of these plants here? Should we be worried?”
“I do not know.” Esquibel shrugs. “Perhaps we could have a patient interview discussing its effects from an internal point of view, but I do not have any knowledge of a poison or venom that has primary CNS neurotoxicity with the… phlegm or whatever it was that the woman was able to expel. Maybe it is one of the tree-frog or marine invertebrate toxins but that is pretty far outside the literature. I’ve been looking.”
“The… phlegm…?” Pradeep’s smile turns a bit sickly. “That doesn’t sound good. Oh, dear. Have I been gross?”
“No, no…” Maahjabeen presses her head against his shoulder. “You’ve been so strong.”
“Don’t worry, Prad,” Amy tells him. “You’ve been super sick but you’re better now. And we’ll just keep making sure you get better every day.”
“Good advice.” Esquibel takes out a stethoscope. “Now clear out everybody. I need to take another set of readings and our patient needs his rest.”
“Yes. Well. Happy dreams, everyone,” Alonso says. “We can all sleep easy now that we have our dear Pradeep back.”
“Wait.” Pradeep frowns. “Where’s Jay?”
Ξ
In the morning, Esquibel wakes up in Katrina’s arms. The blonde girl blinks sleepily at her when she feels her stir. Esquibel doesn’t remember anyone joining her and Mandy in bed. But somehow she doesn’t mind. It is very comforting. “Oh. Hello.”
Katrina grunts softly. Her voice is a sleepy drawl. “Mandy said I should hold you…” She drifts off and rouses herself again. “Like Maahjabeen holds Pradeep. You need it.”
A sweet tenderness for Mandy fills Esquibel, and Katrina by association. Nothing sexual, just a softness in her heart. Katrina is a lovely girl, no doubt, and Esquibel could imagine all kinds of erotic delights for her to indulge in with her and Mandy, but she is feeling rather monogamous these days. Mandy just satisfies Esquibel so completely she can’t imagine needing anything physically from anyone else, even someone as luscious as this.
So they hold each other for another long sleepy moment. Then finally Esquibel rouses again and checks the time. Nearly 10am. Ai me. How did it get so late? She should go check on her patient. “Thank you so much, Katrina.” She kisses the tip of her sharp nose and pulls her limbs free. “You’re a doll.”
Katrina rolls onto her belly and gives Esquibel a devilish smile. “Don’t you objectify me.”
Esquibel puts on a light layer of tops and bottoms. The air is so mild. She can take her chances with sandals. She exits the cell and the bunker into camp, where Amy is picking shellfish out of a net and Flavia is working on her laptop. After visiting the trenches, Esquibel finds some breakfast—a mug of hot water and a packet of crisps. She should get something more substantial in her later today but she has a lifelong habit of surviving too long on mere handfuls of crap. The wonders of cuisine have never meant much to her.
Finally she makes her way to the clean room to find it shockingly empty. No Pradeep, no Mandy, no Maahjabeen. She curses under her breath. Those damn kids. Where are they? He needs a week of observation before he should even think about leaving his cot.
She exits the clean room to find Triquet climbing out of the sub. “Hello, Doctor Triquet. Anyone see my patient?”
“No, Doc.” Triquet lifts a thick file. “Been sleuthing the morning away. Did you know the lagoon used to be full of sharks when they first got here? Nurse sharks, by the description, although maybe the biologists can tell better. And the Air Force just fished them all out. Didn’t even eat them. In this one report they say how they were more comfortable swimming in the lagoon after that.”
Amy has entered and caught the last half of that statement. “Whaaa-aat? Well, that’s appalling. Here we are wringing our hands over whether or not we can harvest a few handfuls of seaweed and our grandparents were committing wholesale shark slaughter. Great. Let me see that description.”
Triquet hands Amy the report as Esquibel continues her search for Pradeep. She exits the bunker, crosses the camp, and scrambles atop the fallen trunk to scan the beach. There they are, all three of them at the edge of the water, sitting in the sand.
Esquibel climbs down the trunk on the ocean side and crosses the sloping beach to join them. They are watching a whirling cyclone of white birds out on the open ocean. “There you are. What do you think you’re doing out here?”
“Fresh air.” Pradeep looks dramatically better. His color has returned and his eyes are no longer stained black. His cheeks are still hollow from lack of nourishment over the last few days, but he looks otherwise hale and whole. “Look. It’s feeding time. There must be a giant shoal or school of sardines down there.”
“Fins!” Maahjabeen points at a line of small hooked black fins breaking the surface of the water on the far side of the breakers. “Too small for orcas. Pacific porpoises. So many!” And following them in the air is a line of brown pelicans, thirty or forty strong.
But Esquibel sees enough of the ocean’s wonders aboard ship. She lifts Pradeep’s wrist and finds his pulse. “You have been very sick and we don’t know if there might be a relapse. You had…” But his pulse is quite strong and balanced, even better than her own. She shakes her head. “I am someone who often prescribes some time outdoors to my patients but this is just too soon.”
“I couldn’t be in that bloody plastic box any longer.” Pradeep realizes how this must sound to Esquibel and quickly amends it. “I mean, I am sure it is a snug and proper working environment for you, quite lovely, but I have just spent too long…”
Esquibel pats his hand. “It is fine. I get cabin fever too. But you cannot make these decisions without consulting your doctor first.” She wheels on the girl beside her. “Mandy.”
Mandy shrugs. “Yeah, I made the call. I couldn’t wake you up. You two looked so cute sleeping there.”
Esquibel frowns at Mandy, wondering what her game is. But she only gets a playful glance in return. Well. More to figure out there later. “I think you should come back anyway. You are painfully thin, my good fellow. Have you no appetite?”
“It’s true. I’m starving. I just needed to see the sea.”
“And, as I was just telling them before we were so rudely interrupted…” Mandy stands, pulling Maahjabeen to her feet. “There’s another storm coming. I can just feel it.”
“Feel it?” Esquibel takes Mandy’s hand and rises, dusting sand off. “Now you are becoming one of the mystics?”
“No! I’m just able to see what’s there. Finally. I can just tell now, even without my instruments… I can smell it on the wind. I’ve been forced to use other tools, like older tools, and—”
“You’re a pattern-seeking primate,” Pradeep interjects.
“Exactly. And I’ve been here long enough to see the patterns.”
Esquibel scans the horizon. It looks like it always does, gray and endless. “I don’t see any storm coming.”
Mandy points at the bulk of the island behind them. “That’s why I think it’s coming from the north. Come on. Let’s get back before it surprises us.”
And just as Mandy predicted, as the four of them enter camp a few minutes later, a swirling wind from above the clifftops carries dark clouds with fat raindrops that hit their tarps with flat slaps.
Everyone withdraws into the bunker. Mandy finds Amy. “Hey! I’ve been thinking more about your idea. And look! It’s raining! Now we can fill the elevator shaft up even faster!”
Amy nods. “Right. How wet do you think this storm might be?”
Mandy shrugs. “No clue. But it started well. Lots of moisture in this front with these big drops. And now it’s really pouring! If we can get, like that reservoir, you know wherever that pipe is draining from? If it fills all the way up then like a ton of water can flood the shaft, and maybe we can fill it up in just an hour or two.”
“Should we go down now? Build the raft? Stop up the tunnel?”
“Now? Ehh…” As eager as Mandy is she needs to think this all the way through. Her mouth opens then closes again.
“I know. It’s a one-way ticket. And if we have second thoughts there’s nothing we can do but wait till we get to the top.”
“Maybe we wait, until right at the end of the storm? It’s not like the shaft will fill up with rain falling from the sky. It’s all the other water that’s been building up in the other chambers.”
“Yeah. It’s the drainage. So the more it rains the better and then over the next couple days after that is when the water will flow the heaviest. So we keep waiting?”
“I know you want to find Jay.” Mandy squeezes Amy’s hand. “I want to find him too. We just have to choose the right time. I’ll figure out all I can about this storm and then we’ll get started.”
“Wait! Here is the guy I’ve been waiting to have up and ready for this idea. He can really help. Pradeep.” Amy pulls him out of an intimate conversation with Maahjabeen. “Listen. I need your brain for this. Mandy and I have an idea to flood the elevator shaft in the tunnels so we can ride on a raft up to the top. Back when she lit it on fire you came up with some equations…”
Pradeep shakes his head, as if he hadn’t heard Amy clearly. “Wait, you want to what?”
Esquibel exclaims in wordless exasperation and slaps herself in the forehead with an open palm. “Are you people trying to kill yourselves? I mean, honestly.”
Ξ
“So my mom was a hippie and my dad was a Marine.” Jay walks through the understory of a beautiful glade, the first time he’s been above-ground in two and a half days. Jidadaa walks beside him, her long athletic strides signaling a confidence in this place, an expectation of security and safety. So he tries to relax and answer her many questions. Her English is surprisingly good. She just doesn’t know what anything actually means.
“Wait, Jay. What is…?”
“A hippie?”
“…a Marine? She marries the water? The sea?” Her accent is so cute, hard on the r’s, with almost a liquid sound in her mouth. But when she speaks any of the Lisican words the guttural consonants in the back of her throat sound like a car crash.
Jay laughs, his hands trailing over the soft branches of a young madrone. “No! Ha. A Marine is, uh, a kind of soldier. They live on ships. Well they used to, historically. Anyway, I never met the dude. He took off when I was still being born in the hospital. It was just me and ma. Kind of like… I mean… Kula’s your mom, yeah?”
Jidadaa nods at him. “Yass. She is outcast.”
Jay nods back, slipping down a game trail to the steep bank of a stream. He lifts rocks, hunting crawdads. She joins him, crouched easily at the edge of the water, her brown hair falling in a wave to the water. “So… Your dad taught you English?”
She shakes her head no. “No. Not dad. Chief Master Sergeant Chilton Kincaid of the USAF of America.”
“Oh. He wasn’t your dad, though?”
“Kula has many men.”
“Ohh.” More of their story comes into focus. An awkward silence ensues. Now Jay feels sorry for her. There was evidently just one prostitute on Lisica and she had many customers. And now the islanders want nothing to do with her. Or her daughter. He tries to think of something neutral to say. “So he never taught you about the Marines? Yeah, sounds about right. The Air Force are all a bunch of stuck-up pricks, for sure.”
“You do not talk like him.” Jidadaa’s hand twitches, fast as lightning, and she snatches up a red and brown crawdad, its plated tail curling around her thumb. With a giggle she pops its head off with a practiced flick and slurps on the body while it is still kicking.
“Whoa. Hardcore. Alright.” Jay’s belly growls. He finds a silvery fingerling, probably some trout, in the mud nearby and grabs at it, but it slips out from between his fingers.
Jidadaa laughs at him, then cocks her head and looks up at the canopy. “Egg season. Good to climb.”
“Yeah. April. Definitely the late days of egg time. What we got here? Like, uh, pheasant? Grouse? Quail?”
“Dáax’. Big bird. Fat.”
“Fat is good.” They stand and scramble back up the slope to scan the treetops, seeking movement. Gray mice run rampant across the boughs. Songbirds flit through the eaves. What a pretty day. A pretty place. Jay knows from his view out the gun emplacement’s port that they are on the east side of the island somewhere. Fine living here. If it’s anything like the Hawaiian Islands the east side is wet with tons of storms and rough surf while the west side is dry with big reefs and killer waves. But there’s no reason to think that necessarily applies here. Different ocean and air currents up here. Still. He visualizes building a cool little treehouse and hanging solar panels in the trees. He could live here no problem. Him and these ladies. He chuckles. At least until those hunters track him down.
Jidadaa selects a madrone and scales its lower branches with ease. She is barefoot and her feet seem too big and wide for her size. Probably just from so much use. Her hands are big too, strong and stained dark.
She levers herself up into a high fork in the branches and an outraged squawk greets her. Jidadaa cries out, flapping her free hand, trying to scare the mother hen off the nest. It is a big grouse, dun and off-white, stubbornly defending what is hers. The girl is able to slip a hand in and snare a single egg before retreating, her own blood running down her forearm.
Jidadaa giggles as she drops back to earth, proudly handing Jay the egg. He grabs her arm to inspect her wound.
“Oh, you got sliced pretty—” Then he falls silent. She has gone utterly still the instant he grabbed her. He gently releases her arm and takes a step back. “Sorry, dude. I shouldn’t have just grabbed you like that. That wasn’t…” But the feline stare she gives him robs him of words. Best if he just doesn’t say another thing.
They head back to the hidden manhole that leads to Kula’s underground garden. Jay inspects the egg. Nice size, a bit bigger than a chicken egg, pale blue. Now just add a bagel and some avocado and maybe a bit of salsa then ya boi is livin’ large.
Kula waits for them. She has harvested a salad of her baby greens. She also has old onions and garlic in storage. Is that how her transactions occurred? She led the men to her mattress and they’d leave her some fruit or vegetable seeds? Hoodies and Reeboks? Better than money, for sure, but still. It’s like some appalling fairy tale.
Kula coos over the size of the egg and protests when he tries to talk about sharing it. She pushes it onto the carved plank that serves as Jay’s plate. “No no no. Jay and Jay.” But it’s clear she and Jidadaa expect him to slurp it down raw. And he will, if he has to, but he just really misses hot food.
“Any chance… we can build a fire?”
Kula makes a face, then silently leads him to a pile of garbage beside the edge of the emplacement’s curving gunport. Beneath leaf litter and trash he can make out the remains of a propane stove. It is a dilapidated mess. The canisters are empty. The pan still has a black crust of carbon from whatever meal they cooked on it last. It has quite obviously been years.
“Aw, man. You guys been eating cold this whole time?”
“Not cold, no no,” Kula says, leading him to another spot along the curving view, where a blackened campfire still glows with ruby embers. He recalls that she was smoking a fat joint when he first arrived. She must have gotten the fire from somewhere. Here.
“Right! Excellent. Check it out. Uh… Here.” Jay still holds the neglected pan. With a twig he scrapes it clean and then uses his sleeve to finish the job. Then he places it as levelly as he can on the coals. He cracks the egg onto the pan and they stare at the golden yolk, waiting for the pan to heat up enough to cook it. Soon the whites of the egg are turning milky and the edges are crackling. Jay’s mouth waters in anticipation. “Aw, yiss. This is gonna be so fucking good.”
When they sit again he prevails upon both of them to try the cooked egg. Kula chortles with pleasure, slurping on it, but Jidadaa is uncertain. The consistency is too unfamiliar to her. But her mother pokes fun at her in a guttural dialect that Jay can’t follow at all. Blushing, Jidadaa swallows a mouthful and bestows a weak smile on Jay.
“Yeah, you’re right. Needs butter. But you don’t got to act like I poisoned you. Okay, let’s talk. So, like, I’ve got a whole crew back on the beach. Really solid folks. You’ll love them. And we’ve all got a metric fuck-ton of questions. Maybe you can answer? I mean, we’re just a bunch of scientists and researchers and we’ve been here like a month and we can’t figure anything out, know what I’m saying? There’s all these mysteries here. Like: you know the outside world doesn’t even know Lisica exists, right?” As soon as he says it, he regrets it. They look stunned. Aw, man. It isn’t his job to lay such a heavy trip on them. They need like an anthropologist for this shit. They need a therapist is what they need.
Jay has to start slower. “So. Wait. How long have there been people on the island?”
Kula and Jidadaa confer. “Kula is fourteenth mother.”
“Ah. Aha.” Jay doesn’t know what that means. But then it clicks. “Oh, you mean generations? Like, uh, you’re fifteen? And her mom was thirteen? And her mom’s mom was twelve?”
“I am not fifteenth mother until I have baby.”
“Got it. So, like twenty years per generation… Y’all have been here like three hundred years?”
They just frown at him. In the awkward silence he eats one platter of salad, then another. His appetite is ravenous. The egg is long gone. Finally he stops, afraid that he’s eating into their stores. Kula sure as shit didn’t expect some giant American to suddenly show up and eat her out of house and home. They might even be expecting him to provide some new seedlings or something. Shit. Jay pushes his plate away, still hungry. He’s got to be careful here.
“Wait. I know. Dessert.” Jay takes out his kit and grinds a blend of his Kush with a touch of the Jack. He rolls a fat joint and hands it to Kula, who chatters at it, marveling in her own language at how thin the papers are and how neat the package. “You got to hit this slow, mama. Okay? Tell me you understand. This shit is fire. It will knock you on your ass.”
Jidadaa says something cautionary to Kula, who looks at Jay with lidded eyes, suddenly wary.
“No, it ain’t dangerous. Just take one puff. A little one.” He pulls it from her hands and lights it with his disposable orange Bic. She and Jidadaa both exclaim over the lighter even more than the joint. He instantly realizes how much it could revolutionize their lives, at least until it runs out of fuel. “Yeah. Sure. I got a spare with me and more of them back at camp. Here.” He holds out the lighter and bows his head, smiling as he offers it as a gift.
Kula marvels at it. Jidadaa frowns, a little spooked, and keeps her distance.
After Jay teaches Kula how to use the lighter he passes her the lit joint. She puffs it like a cigar. “No no no!” He pulls at her arm, laughing. “New weed. Big weed! Kula’s head goes boom!” And he mimes her mind getting blown.
But Kula just giggles, until she rolls backward onto the floor and loses her balance. She laughs louder, kicking her feet up.
Jidadaa frowns at her mother, then at Jay. He doesn’t offer the joint to the daughter. Her vibe is all wrong for it. But she doesn’t look upset with him, just disappointed in her mom. Jay takes a drag and asks, “So what’s the deal here? Lisica used to be some kind of… like secret military base then what?”
Jidadaa shrugs. “The men leave ten years.” She holds up all her fingers. Still eating, she has the appetite of a bird, pecking through her salad with nimble fingertips for choice morsels.
“Ten years? Wow. That’s a long time to be alone. And you haven’t seen anyone that whole time?”
“We see men.”
Jay’s eye twitches. “Okay. What does that mean? So the men are gone but you still see men?”
Jidadaa talks to Kula in their pidgin, low and fast. They have a long conversation, perhaps a bit of an argument, and then finally reach an agreement, echoing each other’s phrases.
Kula turns to him. “Yes and yes.”
“Cool. The men are gone. You still see men. I like it. Kinda surreal for sure. And what’s the deal with all the villages? Kula, you don’t like them?”
“Village? Which village?” Jidadaa asks. “Village village village.” She counts off three with her fingers. Then, touching the tip of her thumb like the other Lisicans do, she points at various corners of the island and counts off, “íx̱t’, íx̱t’, yéik deiyí.”
“Huh.” Jay nods emphatically, as if he understands. “So, you’re saying there’s three villages and… then… a whole bunch of other stuff. Got it. Well we’ve only found two villages yet, unless those kids covered in pollen were from the third. You know about that? I saw four kids in the field beside the river with their faces just totally covered in pollen? Thought I was losing my mind.”
Kula asks Jidadaa what he means. She does her best to translate and he waits. Kula’s face falls. She covers her mouth with a hand. She whispers something.
“When? Where did you see the gold childs?” Jidadaa is worried.
“Uhh… Just on the, well, let’s see, that’s the east side of the river in that valley down in the south. You know the one, where the two villages won’t cross it or look at each other? So just after I got across it, they were in the meadow. Super trippy. Fully covered their faces with masks. And then the hunters came and…”
But Kula and Jidadaa have stopped listening to him. They are engaged in an anxious conference, counting days.
“Aw, shit. What is it? What did I do wrong?”
“The golden childs…” Jidadaa frowns. “We do not see them. My whole life we do not see. Now they are here.”
“Wow. First time in twenty years? You’re like, what, twenty? I’m just guessing. Which I’ve been told back home I should really stop doing with the ladies. I don’t know if you have any of the same… I mean… conventions.” Jay flounders. “But like it’s been a while. Got it. So… Why? Why has it been so long? Just not any good pollen season for the last couple decades or…?”
“The golden childs. Bring death. Destruct.” Jidadaa has trouble finding the words. “Old time over. New time begin.”
“End of an era. Got it. That’s wacky. And I saw it happen. Wow. Part of history here. That’s awesome. Yeah, lots of things are about to change. You know they’re about to open this whole island up to…? Yeah. There’s no way you know that. Well, guess what? The men are coming back. A whole bunch of men. Probably heaps and heaps of men. But hopefully they’ll, uh, be nicer this time.” Jay’s words fade out. He has no reason to be optimistic about that. “Oh, wait. End of an era? Because of us? Is it because we’re here?”
“Jay cross river.”
“Yeah. Had to see what was on the rest of the island.”
But Jidadaa only stares at him.
“Oh, fuck! You’re saying I brought about the end of the era? That it was me crossing the river that did it? But—but no…!” He falls back, shocked to have such an effect on the island. They got to understand. “I was just… I mean, my entire fucking job here is to crawl all over the island just like picking up bugs and mushrooms. Right? I had to get across the river if I was going to see the rest of the island.” But they still only regard him in silence. “So, uh, what kind of era are we talking about?”
Jidadaa grins fiercely, her eyes flaring with sudden vengeance. It transforms her from a waif into a fanatic. “The end of Lisica.”
Ξ
“Jay is really who you want for fishing and hunting. I’m really more of a molecular gastronomy guy.” Pradeep looks up from his laptop at the spear and net Amy and Flavia have fashioned. The rain has stopped for a bit and many of them have taken the opportunity to escape the bunker. Some to work on their datasets, like Pradeep. Others, to fashion fishing gear.
“Well he is not here.” Flavia thrusts the spear at him. It is a softwood branch from a bay tree as long as his arm and whittled to a point. “And now that I’ve tasted the fish here, I need more. The big purple one was best. It tastes like steak. I could not believe.”
“Yeah, I can come out on the water with you, Prad.” Amy hoists her net, made from twine and twigs. “I just thought the activity might do you good. Or maybe you’d prefer to get out with your girlfriend instead.”
“Ai, don’t call her that!” He drops the spear and claps his hands over his ears. “It is… excruciating… knowing that everyone follows my personal life this much.”
“Yeah, sorry, champ. But this is what love feels like.” Amy claps him on the shoulder. “Familial love. It’s all support. I mean, you’re welcome to be as private as you want, but we all live together and we all love each other so… better get used to it.”
Pradeep snaps his fingers. “I know! Katrina brought a wetsuit.” He escapes his discomfort by grabbing the spear and wheeling away, crossing to the bunker. “Spear fishing would be perfect for her. It’s probably like a bloody class in Australian high school. Oh, Katrina?” Pradeep opens the door and escapes inside.
Amy shares a smile with Flavia. “Well. At least I can get you some clams with this contraption. Will that be good enough?”
“Ramen con Vongole,” Flavia shrugs. “It is a new dish, but sounds promising. We just need white wine.”
“That’d be super yummy. I didn’t know you were so interested,” Amy ventures, “in helping with the food.”
“Well, I am done for the time being, you know, with my work on Plexity. Or I am just waiting for someone to break the next thing. And I can’t get any more data for Mandy until she puts her new weather station up on the cliffs. So, when I got hungry, I thought about how I might eat better.”
“Don’t tell Alonso or he’ll have you grab a reader.”
“I told him I would take a turn and he told me to ask Miriam. She said later. So now I am on break. And I make fish spears.”
Amy high-fives Flavia. “Nice spears too. Oh. Here comes the rain again.” They listen to it drumming on the canopy as they hurry into the bunker. “Falling on my head like a memory…”
In the bunker, they find Mandy and Miriam returning from a session with the readers in the creekside understory. They are filthy and cold, striped with white and yellow streaks of fungus. Pradeep is cooing at his phone, reading their results in real time. “Oh my god, do you know how long I’ve been looking for a plasmodial slime mold like this? Fuligo septica but different, I’d bet my life on it. Mandy, you might just get a slime named after you!”
“Oh. Wow. Great!” She tries to marshal enthusiasm and fails. Everyone who hears her valiant attempt laughs.
Triquet catches up her hands. “Aw. Now, whenever I see you, Mandy, I’ll think of a slime mold!”
“Super!” she responds with even less enthusiasm.
The door bangs open and Maahjabeen enters. She is doused and shivering. “Here. Here is your stupid reader, Alonso. It is good they can float. I almost lost it. Then I almost lost my oar trying to get it back. And then I got soaked…” Pradeep fetches a towel and starts scrubbing her before she can even get her clothes off. “Ehhh. Thank you, Mahbub. That feels very nice.”
“Let’s get you into dry clothes.” Pradeep leads her to her cell.
Flavia brings her spear to Katrina at the workstations. “Did Pradeep tell you we need more of those big purple fish for dinner?”
Katrina, reading up on language families, pulls her eyes from her screen and gives Flavia a polite smile. “Um? What’s that, love?”
“He says you have a wetsuit.”
“Yeh? Is that a spear? Spearfishing…? Oh my god, I’m supposed to just swim down and run this thing right through their little fishy bodies, am I? Bloody work, that. Wow. Give me a moment to wrap my head around the idea, will you? I mean, um… Maybe later? I’m not sure anyone will let me outside in the storm anyway.”
“No.” Esquibel crosses her arms. “I won’t.”
Katrina nods her head slowly. “After the storm passes then. Yeh, those reef fish are delish. I guess I can give it a shot when things calm down. I did see Aquaman in the theaters five times, I’ll have you know. Jason Momoa could eat me like a snack.”
Flavia waits for more clarification. When it doesn’t come she looks at Amy. “I think that is a yes. Until then, oh well. I guess we are surviving on more packets of tuna and powdered eggs.”
A crack of thunder in the distance makes them all catch their breaths. The storm is intensifying.
Amy sighs. “Fucking hell. Jay is out there somewhere in that. Hope he’s staying dry.”
“I’m sure he’s safe.” Miriam kisses Amy’s hairline and squeezes her for assurance. “Warm and dry and… living his best life.”
Ξ
Jay sprints screaming down the curving concrete tunnel. His blood is hot and slick, running down his side. He keeps slipping on it, barefoot on concrete. His left hand is pressed against his ribs, where the blade slid, tearing his favorite base layer and opening his skin. He won’t remove his hand, not for love or money. Who knows how much blood he’d see then.
They’re still behind him, far back. He can tell. They’re doing the hunter thing, letting him run himself down while keeping a steady pace, to eventually corner their quarry and kill him. He wonders if they will ask for forgiveness or sing a prayer of thanks like Kalahari tribesmen. Or will they just slaughter him like a goat?
He runs harder. What they don’t fucking know about Jay is that he’s a goddamn monster. He can run all day and into the night. Even with blood loss and like zero adrenaline left. His baseline for fitness has always been the ability to hike ten miles uphill, in the rain, at night, while sick. Apart from his recent troubles with his hand and his ankle he’s got that amount of stamina right now no problem. They want to chase me? Eat my fucking dust.
They had come upon him in his sleep. Three hunters. Jidadaa must have heard them and gasped. The sound woke Jay up and all he saw was a shadow darting toward him. He instinctively rolled away and the spear blade opened up his side. Then he just started kicking, whipping his pack around, tangling them in his bivy. If it had been zipped shut he’d be a dead man but it had been a warm night and he’d worn it like a blanket. One hunter got his spear and legs snared in it, clueless how tough the nylon was. The littlest one beside him danced away.
Jay kicked the shaft of the third one’s spear and its point went wide. That dark figure leapt back. In a sudden hot flash of self-preservation and rage Jay picked up his cot and hurled it at them. The littlest one went down.
Jay knew he couldn’t let them corner him. And he knew that he must be endangering Kula and Jidadaa by staying here a moment longer. He charged in behind the cot and missed by sheer chance a spear thrust from the third. He ran past, out of range, but heard his attacker leap after in close pursuit.
Out the passage and into the garden. But Jay hitched his step and swung around. When the hunter appeared in the passage entrance, Jay juked left like a linebacker, lining him up, then slammed the slight youth against the wall with a piledriver of a tackle.
The kid rolled away, gasping and retching. He wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while. Jay grabbed his fallen spear and threw it out the emplacement’s port. Then he paused. Jidadaa and Kula were still struggling with the others in there. Should he go back? But an unfamiliar voice shouted in fury and Kula cried aloud in despair.
“Run, Jay!” Jidadaa’s voice pierced right through him. He considered shoving this fallen hunter through the gap but didn’t know if he’d fall off the cliff to his death. Jay didn’t know if he was ready for murder, even though they quite obviously were. He was barely awake. This wasn’t even his idea. He’d just run instead.
Now, a timeless stretch later, he’s on the curve, spooling back the klicks he’d climbed through the spiral. It’s got to be a spiral, right? That’s the only way it could go on so long. He’s fine with the dark. There was never any obstruction underfoot, he recollects, except when he got to the junctions. And maybe if he’s lucky he can find another door at one of them he could pop up a hatch and get back above-ground.
Yeah, but then what? He knows where these hunters came from. They tracked him from the bad village. And if he goes back up he might still be in their lands and facing far more than just three young ones. They could get like the whole town after him. And he’s leaving a blood trail. No bueno.
Let’s see. He’s running clockwise down the east side of the island, at this point like probably toward the southeast of the coast near four o’clock. If he could, he’d climb to the top now. He must be close to his friends; they’re just on the other side of a mountain of rock. He can’t make any mistakes here. All he can really do is make this a strict out-and-back. Don’t deviate from his former path. Just hope the hunters didn’t like leave anyone back at the first hatch to the south. Well, only one way to find out.
Jay runs. He loves to run. He’s built for it, all legs and lungs and implacable willpower. A lot of people think he’s flighty, just some silly hophead skating by in life. But you don’t survive Mavericks without being a peak athlete. You don’t survive getting lost in the Sur for eight days when you’re fourteen unless you got something fierce in you. At least that’s what the EMT who found him told him. And he’d always taken it to heart. When shit went down, as it so totally has here in the dark underground, Jay likes his chances against nearly anyone he’s ever met.
So come on, you little fuckers. Let’s go for a run.
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 