Chapter 58 – Saving The Baby
February 3, 2025
Thanks for joining us for the fourth and final volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this episode:
58 – Saving The Baby
“I really don’t think this is a good idea,” Alonso confesses, his legs ready to give out from the pain. It clouds his mind, making it hard to think or make decisions or be brave. And the hillside ahead only goes more steeply down, each footfall an increasing stab of agony. “I am sorry, everyone. Here is where I reach the end of my limit.”
“Then here is where we pop you onto the travois.”
“Mirrie, I already told you…”
“Stop, Alonso. Just stop.” Miriam puts a calming hand on his hunched shoulder. “Look. It’s too far to turn back, eh? So if we’ve got to carry you, it might as well be forward as back.”
“I cannot abide the idea of being a literal burden. You know—”
“Zo. Darling. Sweetest?”
“Yes, mi amor?”
“Shut the fuck up and get on the travois.”
Once he finally does so, they follow their earlier tracks down the slope of loose soil under the trees, pine camp behind them. Miriam leads a large knot of the crew, six in all, back to the canyon and the lake. Back in the sub, she’d promised an evening swim. Everyone but Flavia, Mandy, and Esquibel had enthusiastically grabbed towels and followed. Now Amy and Jay range eagerly ahead, finding better paths on the hillside. Maahjabeen descends with Triquet and Miriam toward the stream at the bottom, as Pradeep and Katrina drag Alonso awkwardly downhill. He grunts at every impact and won’t stop complaining, loudly and bitterly, in Spanish.
“Why don’t you sing us something, love?” Miriam asks with forced cheer as she takes her turn at Katrina’s travois pole.
But the way she looks at him only makes Alonso feel more like a child. “No!” he shouts back, petulant. “No lo haré!”
They finally reach the banks of the stream. Alonso rolls out of his conveyance and scoots down the steep bank until he can soak his legs in the cold water. He groans with pleasure and falls back against the rocky shoal behind him. Time passes. He listens to their efforts to dismantle the travois of nylon straps and branches. The warmth of the day fills him. He nearly falls asleep. Then someone blocks the bright sky and he squints up at them. “Yes?”
“We have built a raft for you.”
“Now this is getting ridiculous…”
“Not a word, you ungrateful sod. We have three extra inflatable sleeping pads from storage. Never needed them. Two get used today. Everyone’s been working hard for you while you’ve dozed.”
“Yes, yes… How very kind.” Alonso heaves himself to his feet and stares at the long black avenue of the stream, curving into a canyon dark with woods. There stand Pradeep and Katrina, knee-deep in the shallows, proud to show dad what they made for him. The gesture touches him and he holds up a hand, resolving to act with more grace, regardless of what happens or how much it hurts.
They have bound the mats loosely into an X. He drops himself in the middle. The water is nearly shocking at first, but the streambed is dark, warming the water, and it is getting later in the season. Soon he finds the current refreshing. Amy tows him, wading hip deep upstream. Now he can sing. “Don’t cry for me, Argentina…!” But the ballad isn’t suitable and he lets the echoes fade to silence.
They enter the canyon, wading through the rushing stream. His bottom bumps against the rounded riverstones. Alonso hasn’t ever seen a forest like this. The grove at the beach was just a fringe of trees compared to this deep wilderness. The nooks and crannies of this canyon have never felt the tread of human feet. So this is the pure unspoiled natural world environmentalists rhapsodize about. It is hypnotically beautiful, with glowing mushrooms and hanging lichen and flitting birds and bugs. The winding side canyons they pass are chock full of redwoods and ferns. Their amount of organic wealth defies reason. The higher orders of emergent processes that he and Flavia spoke so persuasively about are writ large here, with such a degree of fineness in the clouds of buzzing gnats and haze of pollen dusting the leaves, that it scales up out of his ability to sense it. Now this is where actual magic is, where we can tell that even after we’ve reached the limits of our measurements, there is still something immeasurable beyond.
The eight people speak in a hush, as if in a cathedral. The water sounds fill the canyon instead, and the intermittent cries of raptors overhead. The sky cracks open just as Alonso looks up through the trees, and a banner of blue appears between the gray clouds. Rays fall on the stream, making its pale-green waters luminous. “Mira.” Alonso tugs on the strap Pradeep hauls on. “The sky. What do the locals think when the blue sky shows up like that, eh? You said you think their sky is a surface. So what is this? Their egg is cracking?”
“No, the idea, as far as I can tell,” Pradeep answers, “isn’t that there’s anything beyond the clouds. They are a ceiling. A dome. Therefore, the blue we see is only a dash of paint against that surface. Their cosmos is enclosed, according to what Jidadaa has told me, although she has nothing but scorn for Lisican beliefs. But what must they think on the rare occasion they see the blinding sun? Where does that light and heat come from? God has gotten angry, very angry indeed.”
“Or the phases of the moon?” Triquet asks, wading at Alonso’s floating shoulder. “Do they even recognize it as the same body when it’s all over the sky in different shapes and colors when they can catch a glimpse of it at all? Can they track the craters and think, ah yes… a planetoid lit from various angles! I doubt it. They’re all just in this big like room of island and water, however many kilometers wide, with a perpetual gray ceiling and people appearing every once in a while from what she called the line between the sea and the sky. How many kilometers is it? Someone do the math. On a clear day how far is the horizon away?”
“Well,” Alonso reasons, “first we must know the curvature of the earth. And then the height of their point of view. I think, standing on the beach, we could see no more than a kilometer or two.”
“Yes,” Maahjabeen adds, “even standing on that fallen log on the beach, you could double the distance. These cliffs, ehh. How high did we say? Four hundred meters? We have seen from the top. It is very far. Maybe a hundred kilometers or more.”
“I’m getting a radius of like 34, 35, if I’m calculating it right.” With one hand, Katrina consults her phone for the equation while she trails her other fingers in the stream, tapping its surface like a keyboard. “Distance = 1.226 x the square root of the height.”
“So that is the extent of your whole world. Seventy kilometers in diameter on a clear day. What is that, like a couple hundred square kilometers?” Triquet muses. “A tiny little universe indeed.”
“And only like twenty of those square kilometers are land. It is nearly all open ocean. But even so, these still aren’t any kind of seafaring people.” Maahjabeen luxuriates in this water, pushing against the strong current. keeping herself in the deeps up to her waist. It is so much warmer than the ocean. And just kinder to her in nearly every way. She has very little experience with fresh water. There wan’t much in Tunisia so she spent all her time on the beach and in the sea. “The Lisicans were always completely closed off from the ocean by the surf and currents just like we were so they could never learn to build boats. Just net fish in the lagoon. So, to people like them, the ocean must be as impassable and mysterious as the sky. What do they think happens beneath its waves? They must see whales and all the marine life break the surface. How do they…? I mean, do they know fish live down there? They must. Their ancestors were a whaling people, yes? Didn’t they teach their children how the world works before disappearing in here?”
“Who knows?” Katrina muses. “They didn’t bring music. I thought music was essential to being human. So that means all kinds of things can be lost or forgotten. Even the sea and the sky.”
They finally fetch up at the base of the deadfall that blocks the canyon, damming the rest of it upstream into the lake. But it is a serious climb, perhaps thirty meters up at a steep angle, on slick black logs poking out every which way. Alonso regards it, baleful. This is impossible. He gives up before he even thinks to try.
“I think the best route is over here,” Jay calls out from the far left of the dam. “Got to hug this side on the way up to avoid a big hole in the center. You don’t want to drop down into like dark rushing water and never be heard from again.”
“Yes,” Alonso declares loudly, “I think I will be just fine here. You can all go on. Please do not worry about me.”
“But we can’t leave our big papa behind!” Katrina pats his head and smiles down at him with love. “We’ll figure something out.”
The others have already started clambering up the wreckage. Miriam turns her back to the dam and sits, scooting upward, using her arms. “Look, Zo. You can do it like this.”
“It is too far, Mirrie.”
“Oh my god, listen to you.” Amy laughs at him in disbelief. “Can you believe this is Alonso, Mir? Our Alonso? Boy used to swing through the trees like Tarzan now you ask him to scooch a bit—”
“And he bawls like a baby.” Miriam joins in her laughter. Alonso scowls at them both. They don’t know how depleted he is.
“Be nice.” Katrina comes to his defense. “Good days and bad days. I learned with Pavel. Probably for a very long time.”
But the older women aren’t chastened. They both sit backwards and scoot their bums up the broken terrain, laughing as they go.
“Fine.” Alonso sits up in his floating mats and grabs the nearest broken branch. He hauls himself to his feet and wades toward the dam. He even manages to take a dozen steps upward before the cold wears off and the pain returns. Then he turns and sits as they did and scoots himself ignominiously backward up the fallen logs. Each move provokes a grunt, but he does find a rhythm, recalling once again the strength that remains in his arms and shoulders. Soon he is the only one left on the face of the dam, the only sounds a trickle of water and his echoing sounds of effort.
His gaze drops. Below, one of the Thunderbird clan stand at the edge of the stream, watching him. Seeing the youth makes Alonso’s breath catch in his throat. He had been lost in his misery, thinking he was alone. But there are few more powerful forces in the human heart than vanity. What a pathetic figure he is. They’ve surely never seen anything like him before, a pale gray man bloated with all the ills of the modern world, unable to climb a pile of logs.
Pride deeply stung, Alonso stands. Ignoring the shattering pain, he marches stiff-legged over the last logs to clear the top edge and behold the lake for the first time.
A patch of sun shines on it. Ancient primeval trees crowd its banks on both sides. The sunlight is luminous, blue and green and gold. All his toil is forgotten. This lake is a paradise. The pain and the humiliation have been worth it, indeed.
The others follow Pradeep, stringing along to the left at the base of the canyon wall where a fringe of lakeshore provides a narrow path further in. Except for Katrina. She’s already in the water, paddling happily beside them like a dog.
Alonso sighs in pleasure and rolls into the lake at his feet.
Their waterproof packs provide both Dyson readers and lunch. At the pocket beach ringed by willows, they find the gravel sharp but the logs plentiful. They set up a porch and benches and a camp chair for Alonso. But he refuses to get out of the water yet.
Maahjabeen does too. Now that she’s in the lake she relishes it. Fresh water has so many different properties from salt. She is less buoyant here and has to work harder to stay afloat. But the water is cool and crisp. So fresh. And she can drink directly from the lake. The best water she’s ever tasted. No, she will never get out. They will have to drag her kicking and screaming from this lake. From now on she is no longer a proud and noble orca, she is an eel slithering about in the mud. And it couldn’t feel better.
Her crew on the shore are busy setting up their day camp. Look at them. Her very own Pradeep, busy and serious as always. Amy, who has gently removed the weak little kit fox from where she kept it, in the chest zipper pocket of her windshirt. She now crouches at the shore, digging up grubs or any other nutrients she can get in its mouth. Katrina, standing unabashedly naked in a spot of warm sun, wringing her hair out. Miriam kneeling at the edge of the treeline, rearranging her backpack for geological work. Triquet in a sarong, picking their way barefoot to the shore, collecting flowers. Jay, scrambling restlessly further in. They are her family. They really are. It did happen. All those she cares about right now in the world are here, in this sacred little valley hidden away from the rest of the world. Sure, add Esquibel and Mandy and Maahjabeen’s Italian sister Flavia and she will be complete. This lake shall be her private little ocean, this canyon her temple to God.
Alonso floats beside her. His trailing hand accidentally snags a strand of her hair that has snuck out from under her wet scarf. “Oh, I am very sorry, Miss Charrad.”
“It is no problem,” she turns her body in the water to face him, “Papa.” And she favors him with a dimpled smile.
Alonso beams with satisfaction, like he just completed a jigsaw puzzle. Maahjabeen had surely been the last holdout, hadn’t she? They had all embraced the family, except for her. But now she has found her own way in, through the love she shares with Pradeep.
“I never want this to end,” she continues. “You are all too dear.”
“Here we have found our heaven,” he agrees.
And then they hear a distant cry, from above the canyon’s rim somewhere, a ragged scream of outrage and pain. It stops them all. Everyone stands and those in the water paddle over to a fallen log so they can stand too, hip deep. The cry comes again, from a voice they don’t know. It is human, certainly, but that is all they can tell.
“Dear lord. Impossible to say…” Miriam studies one rim then the other, “where that originates. Which side…”
“Yeah,” Jay agrees. “First I thought it was from the far side up there. Then our side. Now… I don’t know.”
They wait for another cry. They wait and wait. But it never comes. Five then ten minutes pass.
“Starting to feel foolish here…” Triquet mutters. “Who even was that? And what do we do now, people?”
“Are we sure that was human?” Amy asks. “I’ve heard some calls from rutting elk that didn’t sound too different.”
“Seen any elk on Lisica?” Miriam asks.
“Well, no, but…” Amy shakes her head, none of the catalog of life she has found here appropriate for that tortured sound. “I don’t know. Maybe it is human. But they can’t be looking for us. Right?”
“Maybe they are,” Pradeep shrugs, “but they just can’t find us. Maybe that is their frustration at losing our trail in the stream.”
“Well, I am getting cold,” Alonso decides. “Let us all keep doing what we were doing. Get to work. All we can do is keep our ears open. But I don’t think we should go anywhere. Doing anything rash like moving back to pine camp now will only expose—”
The cry reaches them again, like a white noise wolf’s howl from over the horizon. Its pain and rage is horrible to hear. Whoever it is must be tearing their throat to shreds.
“Yes,” Maahjabeen agrees, climbing up the submerged log until she can grab one of its upraised roots. She holds a hand out for Alonso to join her. “Let us carry on. You are right. Nothing else to do. But Jay, please don’t go any farther. Stay close.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right.” Jay’s spidey sense is totally tingling. That sound is evil, like straight up dangerous. He had been about to skirt around an outcrop to see what the next inlet held but now he returns to the safety of their little pocket beach. Leaning down, he hauls first Alonso then Maahjabeen from the water.
Katrina dresses as they dry off. Jay locates a nice stout branch that would make a good club. Amy begins preparing lunch.
Alonso sits and listens, their watchdog. He leans back and scouts the broken edges of the canyon rims above, their dark shadowed slopes against the sailing clouds. Bits of sky still break through and patches of sun race across the redwood treetops of the far canyon wall. He hears nothing. Idly, he removes his laptop from a dry bag and arranges his workstation with the external hard drive and a pair of batteries. Might as well get some Plexity tasks done.
Miriam finishes ordering her kit and hauls her pack on, facing the wall of the canyon behind them. She only needs to go a few steps before she touches a formation of pale epidosite hiding behind a fern. Finally she might get to see the island’s interior ophiolites in all their glory. It is just further confirmation in her model of uplift and the remnants of the Kula plate beneath. “The Late Cretaceous,” she muses to herself, “was a happening place.”
Maahjabeen joins Pradeep in preparing the Dyson readers for lake organism collection. They have five with them and a couple aren’t charged. They plug those in and Jay takes one, leaving the two others for Pradeep and Maahjabeen. Pradeep crouches at the shoreline, looking under rocks for pale annelids and Belostomatidae waterbugs and Pacifastacus crayfish. She re-enters the water with a sigh, wading out into its velvety embrace. Now it doesn’t feel cold at all. She takes one sample of the lake’s surface water at the edge, then others at meter increments heading into deeper water.
AAAAACCCCCCHHHHH!
The cry echoes through the canyon again, this time closer and if anything even more wild and urgent. Triquet flinches, weaving the flowers into a garland, and scowls at the sky. Maahjabeen ducks her head under, instantly resolving to get water column samples from a place she can’t hear that awful scream. Reveling in the silence, she opens her eyes underwater. It is still and deep green, only turbid and dark below her feet. With her fuzzy vision she looks at her glowing hand and the white reader. Pressing a pair of buttons, she takes a sample at the depth of one meter, then two.
She surfaces just as another scream erupts from above. Yes, it is indisputably human now, there is a slur of inaudible words in the gaps between. Maahjabeen swims over to Pradeep. He looks up at the cliff tops with an anxious frown. No. She will not let him slip into the clutches of his panic. She will hold him tight.
Now there is no break in the screams. The unseen figure circles above somehow like a raptor, their cries splitting the air again and again. The crew share worried glances and draw close.
“There!” Jay shouts, pointing down canyon toward the top of the cliffs. They can all see the huddled figure atop the highest stone, lifting his face from where he found something at his feet all the way up to the sky. But he uncharacteristically sways, this barrel-shaped Lisican, and lifts his arms in triumph. With a final scream he steps confidently out into space, arms windmilling.
They all cry out in shock, watching him plummet over a hundred meters to the ground. His last scream is cut short by impact.
Alonso stifles a sob. Triquet cries out, burying their face in Miriam’s embrace. Maahjabeen can’t move. Her mind is blank. Pradeep whips an arm around her and turns them away.
“No way.” Jay edges back toward the dam. His breath comes in fast shallow gasps. “No fucking way. That just happened.” He can’t process the gruesome event. He doesn’t even want to. But his feet move him to the dam regardless. The man landed past it alongside the stream below on the same side of the canyon they occupy.
Pradeep joins him, as do Katrina, Miriam, and Amy. In silence they make their way down the slope of fallen logs back to the stream. It is the oxbow where they had stopped during their first exploration of the canyon that they halt again. “Yes,” Pradeep estimates. “It was directly up there…”
Jay finds the body a surprising distance from the cliff, in a field of rubble. The man lies still, on his side in a pool of blood and gore, quite dead. “Yooo. Oh my fucking god. It’s Wetchie-ghuy.”
Miriam joins him, clapping a hand over her mouth at the gruesome sight. One of his eyes burst from his skull on impact. His jaw is shattered and blood still leaks from his skull.
“Dear god.” Pradeep grips Miriam’s arm as nausea sweeps through him. Even his trained clinical detachment is challenged by this much carnage. He retches.
Amy stays back, looking up to the clifftop. “There’s still someone up there. Waving.” She waves back.
A tiny voice reaches them, repeating the same phrase again and again: “Ja sam sada íx̱tʼ! Ja sam sada íx̱tʼ!”
“It’s Xaanach.” Amy shades her eyes with her hand. “She’s got something in her hand. Like a paper. Oh! She dropped it!”
The small parcel flutters down to them with the weight of a leaf. It lands in the stream and Jay has to chase it down like a retriever. He returns with his prize, holding it up wordlessly for the others.
It is a small ziploc with a pair of pills and chalky residue in it.
“What am I looking at?” Amy asks.
“Oh my days,” Miriam sighs, recognizing it.
Jay’s voice is flat. “This is the bag of drugs Katrina brought. It was like pretty full when Jidadaa stole it.”
“And then it somehow ended up with Xaanach and…?” Pradeep falls silent, staring up at the cliff top, dark thoughts gathering.
“He lost our rap battle and took off. I didn’t see him again ‘til now…” Jay shakes his head in horror, his own part in this tragedy becoming clear. “I mean, fuck. This is seriously hardcore. Way way too messed up for me. They fed dude the whole freaking bag. “Tripping balls. That was like forty hits of acid and a whole handful of MDMA. He didn’t even know where he was. Or what he was doing when he fell off the cliff. Never even knew he died.”
“Oh, he knew… He knew what he was doing.” Pradeep backs away from Wetchie-ghuy’s corpse to the water’s edge. He can’t take his eyes from the clifftop. “See, that’s where Xaanach left my blood. On top of that rock. Then she filled him with drugs and led him here. That’s my blood on the rock.” His voice trembles, the anxiety clawing at him, impossible to deny. “This wasn’t accidental. He was hunting me.”
“And Xaanach killed him,” Amy tells him, in an attempt to allay his fears, to soothe his trembling limbs and startled eyes. “He’s gone now, Pradeep. He can’t hurt any of us any longer.”
Xaanach sees him from above. She lifts her own ring finger, the same one as Pradeep’s where she drew his blood. Xaanach laughs and calls out to him again in triumph, repeating the same phrase as before. “Ja sam sada íx̱tʼ!”
Ξ
Mandy finds she can move her arm again. It hurts, and it makes her ill thinking how torn and ruptured the fibers of muscle and flesh are, but she can move.
She sits up in the clean room. Esquibel has rebuilt it around her. Pine camp is quiet. It is amazing how exhausted she is from getting shot. Hollywood’s got it all wrong. It’s such an emotional event. There is somehow so much grief in it, like she’s lost a part of herself that she’ll never get back. Like her soul was just punched right out of her frame. And that makes her so tired. But now a bit of her energy has returned. Enough to get her moving.
She finds her sandals and shuffles out the slit door. Esquibel is at the stove, cursing a teapot. Flavia sits in Alonso’s camp chair on her laptop. She looks up in surprise when Mandy appears. “Eh, the soldier rises. She is ready again for battle!”
Mandy smiles at her weakly and waves with her right hand. She moves toward Esquibel, who watches her critically, with a doctor’s assessing eye. “How are you, Mandy?”
“Uhh… great. Fantastic.” A tear leaks from the corner of her eye and she wipes it away. “Hungry.”
“Ah. Well.” Esquibel sets the teapot down and steps away from the table. “That is one thing Flavia and I found we do not do well. Perhaps you can show me how to turn on this stove. And then I can try to make you a—”
“You don’t know how to turn on the stove? It’s been eight weeks.” Mandy doesn’t mean to sound so critical. Or maybe she does. She doesn’t know how she feels about Esquibel anymore.
“We all have our specialties, no?” Flavia calls out.
“You know how I feel about kitchens,” Esquibel says.
Mandy just shakes her head. Cooking is too essential. It’s like saying you don’t know how to bathe yourself or brush your teeth. She turns the stove on but even before she hits the electric ignition she can tell from its silence that its canister is empty. In a bin at her feet she finds a pile of them, the empties mixed with the few full ones left. “Could you please…” Bending hurts. Talking hurts. She nods at the bin. “A full one.”
Esquibel frowns at the bin. “How can I tell which are full?”
“They’re heavier. And they have caps. Please, Esquibel! Stop being so useless right now!”
Esquibel looks at her with a level gaze. “No one has ever called me useless before.” She bends down and grabs a canister, placing it silently on the table before retreating to the clean room.
But Mandy doesn’t have the ability to care. She is bruised, inside and out. She just wants some tea, then some soup, then—
“Phone.” As if by magic, Mandy’s lost phone appears in the air before her, gripped by a slender brown hand. She squeals and jerks back, hurting her shoulder and nearly losing her balance.
Jidadaa stands beside her, a simple smile on her face. She laughs at the physical comedy. “Mandy phone.”
Mandy gathers herself and snares the filthy phone. Its pink shell is cracked and the battery is nearly dead. “Why did you…? What did you do to it?”
“Vid-yo for you. See?” Jidadaa reaches for the phone again but Mandy wards her away.
“Video?” Mandy opens her phone to find a series of photos, most of them obviously unintentional blurred shots of green. But there are a pair of 41 second and 54 second videos near the end.
The first is a covert view of the Ussiaxan village from a distance. Jidadaa, watching over her shoulder, exclaims in disappointment. “Ai. People so little.” Mandy spreads her fingers on the screen to zoom in, eliciting another exclamation from Jidadaa. The people on the screen are now fuzzy blobs of dark pixels in their town square. But she is still able to identify them. “Chinese man. The Daadaxáats shaman. Kasáy.”
“The one we call Lady Boss. What’s her name? Kasay?”
Jidadaa nods. “Means ‘always sweaty.’ Here her men.”
Flavia stands and joins them. “Eh, what are they doing?”
“Kasáy, she make decision. Chinese man her koox̱ now. See?”
He wears a collar and they lead him like a dog. One of the villagers pounds a stake into the ground and they leave him there, leashed to it. The video ends.
“Seriously?” Flavia asks. “That is what Wetchie-ghuy hopes to do with me? Lead me around with a collar and leash?”
Jidadaa shrugs. “If you don’t act good.”
The next clip is from a closer vantage from above. Jidadaa must have taken refuge in a tree. The camera is canted, panning and tilting with frantic energy. Screaming people run beneath the tree. None think to look up. They are all focused on the edge of town.
Nearly a hundred people congregate, surging toward the treeline. They have left Jidadaa behind. Something gray flickers before them in the canopy and they all fall to their knees, like they’ve all been chopped down. The whole crowd falls silent, unmoving.
“What is this?” Flavia demands. “What are we seeing?”
“That is first time they see dla x̱ald, mother fox. First time for Ussiaxan since the eleventh mother. She will choose to give baby fox to one person in Ussiaxan.”
“Wait. The fox decides?” Flavia hadn’t believed this silliness until now. But here is the proof, digitized and indisputable.
Mandy points at the screen. “Look, here comes Kasay-jah like a big bully. Oh my god, even she falls to her knees? Wow, she looks like she’s starstruck. This must be like such a big deal.”
Flavia scowls. “No, do not give the fox to that mean woman…”
Jidadaa laughs as the video ends with the people crying out in shock and outrage. “She do not. The baby go to young girl. Starts big fight. Kasáy try to take baby fox. All people say no. She is sent out of village with her koox̱. Now they must find new home.”
The phone’s battery dies and the screen goes black. Mandy stares stupidly at it. What has she just witnessed? Somebody’s life was just really really fucked with. Two people, actually. The Chinese spy and Lady Boss. Things will never be the same for either of them.
Jidadaa claps, remembering another detail. “And the Ussiaxan wreck the Chinese man radio. No more orders. He is lost.”
Mandy doesn’t know how she feels about that. It brings her no joy that the man who shot her is now a bound slave to an outcast village chief on an undeveloped island thousands of kilometers from his home. Maybe a vindictive person would feel pleasure. But he must have a family and hopes and dreams of his own that have nothing to do with being discarded on Lisica like this. But at the same time, Mandy can’t quite bring herself to feel sorry for him. Fucker shot her.
“Who is there?” Esquibel calls out from the clean room door. “What do you want?”
“It’s just Jidadaa…” Mandy begins but Esquibel interrupts her.
“No. There. Out on the meadow. What do they want?”
Mandy and Flavia turn. Among the green and gold grasses a hundred meters away stand two women, the Mayor and Yesiniy. They watch pine camp, standing patiently in the open.
Jidadaa answers. “I tell them. You leave soon. Sewat and Yesiniy say no, they must tell woman story first. Woman to woman. They do not ever see woman on Lisica. Only Maureen Dowerd. Then only men. Now you are women.”
“Now we are women,” Flavia echoes. “Well, I didn’t know girl power mattered. I mean, if it did, they could have been a lot more nice about it before now. Okay. We have a sisterhood now. Fine. What is this woman story? Some secret?”
“Come.” Jidadaa beckons to Esquibel as well. “Come, please. They wait for you. To tell.”
“Brilliant,” Esquibel mutters. “More nonsense.” But she follows, bringing a chair.
As they approach, Flavia asks, “Ehh, where is Katrina? None of us speak their language. She is the one they want.”
“Maybe one of you could record it for her?” Mandy asks. “My phone’s dead.”
Both Esquibel and Flavia agree, taking out their phones. And not a moment too soon. Before they even reach the meadow, Yesiniy begins intoning a chant.
“Wait! Wait!” Flavia calls out. “We haven’t started recording yet!” They hurry into position as Yesiniy continues.
Jidadaa translates. Esquibel puts her chair down and turns her own camera on her. “It is the story of two sister. First mothers. In beginning they were Ganaaxteidee clan, hibernation frog. Before they are mothers. They are little girls. Two sisters only share little names. Names they only call each other. They forget their old names. They call each other Init and Ta.
“Init and Ta live in Qe’yiłteh. Alone on island. The people do not like Init and Ta. They make their family live alone. They are outcast family. There is no love. But then white men come in big ship. There is fight. Men from the village are killed. They take one white prisoner. This is Tuzhit. He is slave. They make him live with family outside town. He meet Init and Ta.”
“Wait,” Flavia interrupts. “You’re telling me this is their origin story from like three hundred years ago? Can they prove any—?”
Mandy hushes her as Jidadaa continues her translation.
“Hibernation frog clan do not like Tuzhit. Treat him like dog. Tuzhit and Init and Ta steal boat. They try to go down coast but storm take them out to sea. They think they die. Eh. Here is where Yesiniy tells about gods of water and wind. Many gods. Some love, some hate. Three people on the ocean and one mama fox, babies in her belly. Now there is more talk of the gods of wind and water. Sewat repeat what Yesiniy say. Repeat three times. The boat land on Lisica. Here they become big family. Init and Ta have many children. Children marry and have babies. Again and again.
“In the time of sixth mothers there is new shipwreck. Two men. One is dark from south islands named Mkuwelili. One is pale like Tuzhit named Kristaps. Lisica people take them as slave. But time is bad. Island is sick. Too many foxes. Mkuwelili and Kristaps say must kill foxes to save bird and little animal, so people do. They kill many many fox. Then there is almost no fox left and island lose its heart. They blame Mkuwelili and Kristaps. Make them exile in north canyon. Forget their words, forget their language. Only names remember of them.”
“So they were like off some nineteenth century whaling ship?” Esquibel wonders. “Grim end for them, I take it.”
But Jidadaa continues, keeping pace with the chant. “In the time of ninth mother first Japanese ship. They cruel. Lisican people hide. Then American soldier and Russian soldier, all bad. People of all village fight to keep them only on beach. But then Maureen Dowerd come. Everything change.”
“The woman story.” Mandy smiles at the Mayor, who continues her litany uninterrupted.
“Fox say,” Jidadaa tells them in an aside, “Lisica is for woman. First fox tell Init and Ta. They listen with their hearts. That is why, after Tuzhit give them babies, they push him into water and kill.”
“Wait, what? Init and Ta killed Tuzhit?”
“He was first bad man. Bad white man. Bad soldier. Init and Ta escape from bad village. Only after he gone, Lisica is good.”
“Escape from the village back on the Alaskan coast?” Flavia asks. Yesiniy and Sewat have fallen silent, realizing they’ve lost their audience. “So this is the lesson they learn? Murder solves your problems? Their whole lives were bad until they killed the father of their children? But these sisters are not like the Christians, are they? They do not call this murder their original sin. Instead they say it’s when things finally got better. Eh. A brutal age.”
But Jidadaa doesn’t understand the question. She repeats what they already know, just slower. “Init and Ta have clan that hate them. Hibernation frog. They escape with bad man. Come here. Start the people. Past is bad. Him and old clan. So they forget all. Teach children new way. New gods. New traditions. Follow the wisdom of fox.”
“Damn,” Mandy grimaces. “They went hard.”
Sewat, the Mayor, takes up the tale again. Jidadaa shares her words but they already know this part, about Aan Eyagídi the shaman and the love affair between Maureen and Shanno and the baby that came of it. The disputes with Ussiaxan and the advent of the Chinese. The burial of the sub, which cut off their access to the beach for a long cruel time. And how the cycle is coming to a close, with the arrival of the lidass and their inescapable Jidadaa ending this time of peace and prosperity once and for all.
“But why?” Mandy asks. “Why does it have to end? That’s what nobody’s told us. Everybody’s all ready for the good times to turn into the bad times. Why aren’t they like fighting against it?”
“Jidadaa you cannot escape,” the eponymous girl says with a sly smile. “It come when it come.”
“But why are they being punished?” Esquibel shakes her head in disapproval. “This is just a story. There is no real external factor here causing this change, is there? They could stop it if they really wanted to, eh?”
Jidadaa patiently explains. “In the days of third mother they forget to honor first mothers. First bad time. It start long string of curse. First Mkwelili and Kristaps. People from between sea and sky who come. Even Maureen is curse. Yesiniy is curse, all her life. Kula and me. The people deserve Jidadaa very long time. Curse split them into three village. Fox grow very few. Ussiaxan get dark in their chests. Divide island with the creek. Then you come.”
“Oh, yes? We are part of this story now?” Flavia would rather not be included as a co-author on any such disreputable paper.
“You are women,” Jidadaa responds with a simple shrug. “You hear the story and remember.”
Ξ
“No, really. Go on,” Amy tells the others on their return from the lake, stepping away from them. “I’ll be back in a bit.”
“Well… ask him if he like needs anything,” Katrina calls out as she and the others keep walking, heading back to pine camp. The dark mass of the crew disappear into the gloom. They are still mostly stunned from the tragic events of the day and none of them have the energy to argue with her about splitting up.
Amy watches them go, then turns back to the small fire Morska Vidra has built in front of his tiny hut. She approaches the grove of madrones in which he has built it. Her sandals make noise on the dried leaves. In response, his dark head pokes out of the narrow doorway. The old man watches her approach.
“Bontiik.” Amy chucks his chin. He does the same to her. “Where’s your fox?”
But Morska Vidra just looks glumly at her, his face closed.
“I know. Can’t live without them, can we?” Amy gently removes the fox kit she keeps in her pocket. The poor thing is fading. She just can’t find enough nutrients for it.
Its appearance makes Morska Vidra exclaim in shock. He pulls away, outrage flaring in his eyes. He begins to lecture her.
“No no. The mama rejected it. She told me I could have it. It would have died otherwise. I swear.”
But Morska Vidra won’t hear it. He tries to take the baby from her but Amy is afraid of what he might do with it. She clutches it close, daring him to fight her. Protective instincts surge in her.
Morska Vidra sees the ferocity in Amy’s eyes and hesitates. He goes back to appealing to her, his words coming out too fast for her to follow at all.
Amy pulls back and waves goodbye. “Uhh. This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have come here. I’m sorry.” Perhaps she can catch the others before they get too far away.
The old man suddenly stops talking. He looks out at the gloom instead and asks a loud question.
“Oh, shoot.” Amy turns, dismayed. “Someone out there?”
But who emerges from the gloom isn’t human. It is two foxes, Morska Vidra’s fellow and the vixen he impregnated.
“Wait!” Amy cries. “Mama, what are you doing here? Where are your babies? Oh my god, you didn’t lose them…!” She can’t make sense of it. There isn’t hardly a single mammal in the world that will abandon her babies so soon after giving birth.
The vixen’s teats are swollen with milk. Amy drops to her knees as the silver foxes approach. She holds out the tiny kit, wriggling in her palm. Its mother blinks at the tiny thing and approaches. She nickers at it, licking its head, then nudges it toward a teat.
Morska Vidra carefully approaches as Amy encourages the tiny thing to latch and suck. He may have opinions about its life or death but he won’t gainsay its mother. But it may have already been too long. With a gentle pinch Amy coaxes a drop of milk from the teat and the little thing starts slurping greedily.
Morska Vidra’s fox sniffs his child, blessing it with a lick.
The man looks up at Amy, his face filled with wonder.
“Uh… This wasn’t my idea. I only did what she told me.”
It is dark now. Morska Vidra’s face is in shadow. She can only see his eyes. Still he stares at Amy. There is something coiled in him, as if he is about to pounce on her.
“What? What is it?”
His fox pounces instead, landing in Amy’s cross-legged lap. But she is too familiar with animals to react. Staying still, she allows him to crawl around, sniffing at her. The creature stands on her bent knee and watches the mother and baby nurse. Amy finally releases a held breath, which ends with a quiet laugh.
Morska Vidra laughs too, scratching his old boy between his ears.
As the infant finally gets the nourishment it needs, Amy’s maternal anxieties finally ease. “Thank you, Morska Vidra. And thank you, mama.” She reaches out and strokes the vixen’s head with a fingertip. “Thank you for saving the baby.”
Chapter 54 – Where Did It Go?
January 6, 2025
Thanks for joining us for the fourth and final volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this episode:
54 – Where Did It Go?
“What a total disaster.” Mandy yanks on the rope, now tangled in the branches of a nearby madrone. Her weather balloon hangs from a high limb, deflated, its instrument suite swinging like a pendulum beneath, perhaps twenty meters or more above.
“Don’t pull.” Katrina grabs Mandy’s arm. “You’ll just make it worse. Uh. Maybe we can cut it out of there?”
“How?” Mandy drops the rope and tries to find a calm place in her center. But she can’t even feel her center. She only feels an electric irritation racing over her skin. Oh my fucking god. How many times does she have to look like an idiot in front of Katrina?
“Yeh, that’s the question, innit?” Katrina tries snapping the end of the rope to flip it over the branch above. But there is no chance. It is too little snap for so long on such a heavy rope. If someone could climb… even part way… “Jidadaa,” she calls out, catching sight of the girl before she departs camp upslope among the pines. “We need you.”
Jidadaa turns back. Her face is set, a decision having been made. But she returns to Katrina anyway, wordless but with an expectant look on her face. It is Mandy who points glumly upward.
After a moment’s consideration, Jidadaa grasps the trunk of the mature madrone, a meter wide, its rough russet bark only giving way in patches to orange hardwood beneath. With her bare feet and strong hands she scales the trunk, rising five meters before she grasps the first limb. Now she moves even more quickly, weaving through the tapering branches until she reaches the limb that bears the weather balloon and rope.
“Oh! Careful, sweetie!” Mandy cries out, appalled at the precarious position the Lisican girl has so quickly put herself in. The branch is no wider than Jidadaa’s leg and bounces every time she steps out onto it. They wait in dread to hear a crack.
But Jidadaa is too light. She hovers above in the canopy, one leg stretched out to a nearby fork for stability, while she picks at the twists and knots in the climbing rope. But she makes little progress.
“What’s wrong?” Katrina calls out after an impatient minute.
Jidadaa tilts her head down and makes helpless gestures with her hands. “I do not know this.”
“The knots? Just unravel them. You know, like with…” Mandy falls silent, realizing the examples of shoelaces and power cords she was about to use are probably outside Jidadaa’s knowledge. “Uhh… Do you like know about knots and rope at all?”
“Necklaces and nets. This one too hard.”
“Oh! That is Jidadaa up there!” Flavia appears, drawn by the shouting. She has finished packing and is eager to get back down underground where it’s safe. “What is she…?” Then Flavia sees the weather balloon. “No. That is too high. She cannot stay up there.”
“The knots are beyond her.” Katrina’s shoulders sag in despair. “She can’t get the balloon down.”
“Knots? Oh, I love knots!” Flavia perks up. “They are one of my favorite hobbies. No, I am not making a joke. It is true. The topology of knot theory is some of the most advanced maths there is. This is the practical type but still, I wonder what kind they are?”
“Wait!” Mandy brightens, reaching into her pocket for her phone. “I know! If you had pics of them could you figure it out?”
“Maybe…” Flavia shrugs. Whatever gets these ladies moving so they can retreat before the Ussiaxan arrive. “But we should hurry.”
“Mandy, you’re a genius.” Katrina kneels beside her. The smile Mandy responds with is far beyond the worth of the compliment. She primes her phone as a camera then wraps it in the end of the rope. They stand.
“Jidadaa! Pull it up!” Mandy tugs on the rope. “My phone’s in the end! We need pictures!”
By fits and starts the rope is drawn upward. Figuring out how to pull a rope by instinct is something not easily done twenty meters in the air. Then Jidadaa finally grabs the end and pushes the phone out between the gaps in the ball of the knot they tied.
“Take lots! From every angle!” Katrina drops her gaze to ask Flavia, “Or would video be better?”
“Like you could get her to figure out how to switch camera modes. No.” Flavia waves the question away. “Pictures are fine.”
After another excruciating moment of bouncing limbs but no sight of her, Jidadaa finally leans down and waves the phone at them. “Many pictures! Like Jay’s phone!”
“Yes! Exactly! Brilliant!” Katrina claps. “Now just stick it back in that rope end and lower it down to us!”
Jidadaa does so, shoving the phone edge-wise back into the balled knot.
“Slowly!” Mandy begs her.
But this is another thing that is difficult to reason through. Jidadaa drops the ball and the rope plummets to the ground, bouncing off a rhododendron and thudding into the dirt.
“You broke the screen!” Mandy wails after she extracts the phone. “Why did you do it like that? We told you to take it slow!”
Jidadaa watches from above, impassive. In response, she retreats from the crash site to more firm footing in the center of the canopy.
Flavia pulls the phone from Mandy’s hands. “Yes, yes. Let’s see. Ehh. Horrible photos. Ah. Here is one. Here is the problem. The big knot here and the satellite hitch beside it. See,” Flavia adopts a lecturer’s tone. “The linking integral is an invariant that describes how two closed curves link. That is the important part here. But usually maths theoreticians just think of abstract knots in a three-dimensional Euclidean space, but here the linking integrals are still key. See, I like to spend my time solving these riddles in actuality. Other people play sudoku. I untie knots. So there have recently been a number of papers published that blend abstract topology theories with actual mechanical forces and friction. Fascinating work, good for surgeons and industrial… Ah. Yes, first she must free the hitch here and then she will have slack to attack… ehh. No. Look. If she comes at it from the opposite way instead, this part here is a looped mass that only connects to the rest of the tangle at two points. And… Yes! Here. And here. How do I make marks on your phone?” Mandy helps her draw red circles around the two important points. Then they force her phone back into the rope’s ball knot. “Jidadaa. Attack it where I made the red circles!”
The rope ascends more smoothly this time. Within moments, the weather balloon crashes to earth. Mandy squeals in delight and races to it, gathering up the torn fabric and tangled rope to locate the instruments beneath.
Jidadaa descends as quickly as she climbed, dropping lightly back to the ground. Katrina claps for her.
“Yay! Jidadaa in the house! Thank you so much, love!”
Jidadaa, sheepish, accepts the compliment. But she is far more excited about something else. “Now lunch!” She holds out a bird nest she has stored in the folds of her ragged hoodie. It contains four dead spotted chicks, their necks snapped.
The others pull back from the macabre sight. “Oh! Uh… That’s fine. All yours, girlfriend!” Mandy squeaks, patting Jidadaa on the shoulder, then withdrawing when the girl goes still. “Oops. Right. No touching. Sorry.” Mandy sadly lifts the wreckage. “Well, another anemometer in the trash can. Great. That was my last one. I sure hope it got some data at least.”
Katrina gives Mandy a sideways hug. “Aw, poor Mandy dandy. I’m sure it did. Flavia. Let’s download it and perk her spirits up.”
“Now? But my machines are all packed.” Flavia waves at the camp, where her bags wait in a neat row. “We are in the middle of a retreat, remember? The bad guys, they are coming? To kill us?”
“You’re right.” Katrina helps Mandy gather the remains of the weather balloon. They all start walking back to camp. “But I still need a few minutes to get my things together. And so does Mandy. So if you don’t have anything else to do…”
“Ehh! Fine!” Flavia throws her hands into the air. “Anything to make Mandy happy, even if it means we get turned into slaves!”
“You don’t have to…” Mandy begins but Katrina shushes her.
“Thanks, Flavia,” Katrina answers instead. “You’re the best.”
Jidadaa strides away from them with purpose. Katrina calls out after her. “And where are you going so suddenly, little miss?”
Jidadaa turns back, her face troubled. “Today. It is a very important day. No time. No more time!”
“No time for who?” Katrina hates these cryptic warnings. How have they ever helped?
“For our prophet poem. Me and Kula.”
“Oh. You and your mom have your own? I guess everyone does. But… I mean, what’s today that’s so important?”
“For lidass to bow down and give blood to summer wind.”
“And if he doesn’t, your poem like, what, fades away?”
Jidadaa stares at the ground. “It go down one trail. We go down another. We see it through the trees, then no more. We forget. Right now the poem make promise to us. If it is broken, it pass like the wind.”
“I mean, maybe you can ask Jay for a bit of blood, I guess, but he hasn’t been very happy about…” Katrina trails off as Jidadaa stalks away through the camp and into the trees, ignoring her. “Aw crap is she going to be gone for like another three days again?”
Mandy gets serious about removing her belongings from her tent so she can break it down. As she shovels her clothing into a duffel bag, Flavia hurries up to her holding her laptop.
“Mandy, wait. Look. Look.” Flavia thrusts her laptop in front of Mandy, pointing at columns of data. “You did get something. See?You got what you were seeking, eh?”
Mandy’s shoulders slump. “Sorry. I don’t speak math. I only speak English, and not even that good. When will you people realize I’m like way less smart than—?”
“What is this instrument? The CSN-11957?” Flavia indicates the source of the data at the top of the column.
Mandy just shrugs. “I have no clue. What is that, like a serial number? I don’t…” But she moves over to Flavia’s platform, where the remains of the weather balloon’s instrument suite are plugged into another laptop with black USB cords. Lifting each of the units, Mandy finds identifying numbers on each of them. “Yeah. Here. The differential-absorption optical hygrometer.”
Now it is Flavia’s turn to be mystified. “And what is that?”
“Measures humidity by shining two lasers, one that refracts H2O and a control that doesn’t. So it got these like amazing readings? Great. What’s so amazing about them?”
Flavia shrugs. “It is three things. First, the volume of data is far more than from your other instruments. And second, the quality of that data is very good. Its sampling rate seems to mainly be limited by storage, not any performance constraints. So your laser is very busy, giving us these values five times every second. And, three, what the values show is a tremendous dynamic shift in the weather here. That must be of some importance, no?”
“Yeah, it’s a change in humidity. Happens several times a day. Thanks, Flavia. That’s super cool. I’m glad it wasn’t like a total waste of your time…”
“Not at all, not at all,” Flavia answers absently, back at work on the data. “Glad to help. Now I just want to plug this new source into our database quickly here. And look. Remember your heat map? Now it has this extra refined layer of humidity, yes?”
“Yes…” Mandy breathes, leaning in. The island is nearly black with the density of its humidity. Air currents deform around it in every direction. She scrolls outward, seeing the humidity as a spike pinning the wheeling currents and storms of the entire Northeast Pacific. “Look at that, Flavia. It’s all the surface biomass on Lisica. Respiring like a champ. Just enough to make things stick. Oh my god. We really are in the center of the world. The saline shift. The water column. I can’t believe we didn’t know about this place! This will change every model NOAA uses for… everything! Knowing there’s this like pin in the pinwheel is…” Mandy shakes her head, helpless. “It’s all these trees. These giant trees. See, they attract the water in the air locally, but that starts a cascade effect that draws more and more water to them from further and further away until a forest of sufficient size can condense a rainstorm out of clear skies. Add some mountains to break the surface-level wind and this becomes like a major feature on the open ocean. This tiny dot of green. Oh my god.”
They look first at each other, then at the emerald treetops waving above. “It is like,” Flavia points at the sky, “a column of water rising like a volcano. It is invisible, but it never stops erupting. Not for a million years.”
“And it’s all feedback loopy. The more moisture the island calls the more rain falls and the more plants grow and it just goes and goes until, I don’t know, maybe there’s like a maximum, uh…”
“Carrying capacity for every square meter of the island? Yes, there must be. Finite resources, constrained on multiple levels. We could work on that next if you like. See what the upper limit of the island’s humidity generation is. It is too bad we lost the drone, because we do not have any close scans of the north half. But maybe we could extrapolate, based on what data we do have. Well. Enough. It is time we must go. Again. We will do this work when we are safely back in the sub. Now if you need any more help here, I will be happy to do whatever. Packing, cleaning up. But we need to go.”
Ξ
“Ugh. Where is Katrina? I can make no sense of this woman.” Esquibel stands at the edge of the village square in a mask and gloves haggling with the Mayor. “Look. We won’t even stay for lunch or put our things down. We will just pass right through. Down into the ground, yes? And you may want to join us. The Ussiaxan, yes? Very angry. Bloody furious. On their way.” She mimes holding an imagined spear above her head but the Mayor responds with equal fervor, indicating the village and the people, her hand on Esquibel’s arm, pulling her close.
“I tell you they are coming. We had a drone. Remember?” She points at the sky and makes a bzzzzhhhh sound, tracking it across the treetops. “Then the Ussiaxan shot it down. They scattered into the hills in fright. But Jidadaa tells us they will regroup and attack in the dark.”
The Mayor calls out to one of the youths. It is the non-binary villager, their hands busy packing a wet paste into woven baskets. But without a word of complaint they set their work aside and fetch something from the Mayor’s hut. It is a spear. The Mayor takes it from them, still lecturing Esquibel, and holds it above her own head. Her meaning is clear: We will stay and fight.
Esquibel blinks rapidly, shaking her head. “No, no, bad idea. Look. There is no defense here. Once the enemy got across the creek they’d just overwhelm you, wouldn’t they? Think this through. You can’t have more than, what, sixty people here? Fifty who can fight? They have four times that number if they come at you with everyone they’ve got. And they can just come at you across this entire line here. This broad slope. You can’t hold it. They would have every advantage. Triquet. Come here. Help me reason with her.”
But the Mayor doesn’t wait for Triquet’s arrival before spreading her legs into a stance that grips the earth, taking a deep breath, and intoning a long and formal chant. Her thumbtip points at spots across the island, near and far.
Esquibel drops her hands. “Oh, great. Now what is she doing?”
Triquet listens closely, finally starting to hear the individual words in the cascade of sound. “My guess is this is her prophet poem. You know, that thing everyone’s banging on about right now? And she believes it holds all the answers to our questions. She is giving you your answer, right here. Shame we can’t understand it. But I don’t like this. Seems they’re all headed for a big conflict, where all the prophet poems say opposite things about these days. They’re all getting really heated about it too.”
“So she is just…” Esquibel reaches for the words. “This is her briefing. Situational overview. Mission objectives. Available resources. But what happens when we get to the review? We need to be able to understand each other to work together, and I’m trying to tell her we can do that much better together in the caves. Bottleneck their assault. Small numbers can hold up far better against larger forces in… Wait. Now where is she going? Is she upset because I am ignoring her?”
“What do you think?”
“Well she is ignoring me too, so…”
Alonso catches up to Esquibel and Triquet, limping along behind them carrying a small backpack. “What is it? Something wrong?”
“It is that Mayor woman,” Esquibel says. “She won’t let us go into the caves. And I have told her that she is about to be invaded but she thinks…” Esquibel gives a helpless shrug, unable to describe what the Mayor thinks.
“There’s a ritual thing going on here,” Triquet interjects, their voice quiet. “Pretty sure. We’re getting deep in their cosmology now. We are like so so in the wrong place at the wrong time with these people. Who knows how peaceful their little transition would have gone if we’d never shown up and wrecked it all.”
“What did we wreck?” Alonso asks. “We have been very good. After we leave, there will be no trace of us.”
“Except for a burned out elevator shaft. That was us.” Flavia is compelled to keep the record straight, even though calling it out makes Mandy—who approaches arm in arm with Katrina—turn away in sudden grief.
“Well, yes, but that could have been anything.” Alonso gives them an eloquent shrug. “Lightning could have done that.”
“Katrina.” Esquibel raps out an order. “Go make sense to that Mayor person. We don’t need anything from them except passage through their village. See if you can make her see—”
“Make her? Ah, Christ,” Katrina groans, “What have you done this time, Lieutenant Commander?” She pushes past Esquibel with a smile on her face and a Bontiik for everyone she sees. Slowly Katrina makes her way across the village to the Mayor’s hut, where the older woman is in and out, packing a small pouch with stones and cords. A sling? Is she going bird-hunting? Now? “Bontiik?” Katrina offers, stepping close and chucking the chin of the Mayor. The woman looks tired today, her eyes even more deep-set and worried than usual. Katrina studies her, marveling at her features. She has a strong aquiline nose with a blunted tip that hangs above her pointed chin. Wide sad eyes. A broad forehead that somehow promises strength and wisdom. An expressive, downturned mouth. She likes her. Katrina smiles at the Mayor in admiration, like some daffy undergrad meeting her favorite folk singer at the coffee shop, and tries to communicate. “The Ussiaxan…”
The Mayor grunts and steps past her out into the village square, headed for the slope behind the huts and the line of trees to the west. Unspooling the cords as she goes, a leather patch is revealed that can hold the surprisingly small stones. She is going bird hunting. This isn’t what they’re supposed to be doing. Not at all. There’s a fucking war about to start, mate. We have to defend ourselves. Yet Katrina can’t say these things. She follows at a discreet distance instead.
The Mayor steps softly through the undergrowth, head cocked, sling hanging from her wrist. Her feet are noiseless on the dry pine needles. Her eyes flick from tree to tree above.
The canopies are alive with birds. If she’s hunting for food there’s plenty of fat targets flying all around her. But she must be after one particular kind of bird. Or maybe one bird. Maybe there’s like one bird out here who’s been keeping her up all night and she’s just had it. And his name is like Justin. Justin, you’ve had your day, boy. Now she’s coming to get you.
When it happens, it’s so fast Katrina doesn’t really grasp what she saw. Reconstructing it later, she figures the Mayor dropped a stone from her palm into the leather patch, swung it like not even more than a half-arc with a snap of her wrist, and was stepping to where the dark songbird lay twitching on the ground before its suddenly stilled song had left the air.
It has a black coat and blue edge feathers. That’s all Katrina can see of it before the Mayor stoops over her victim and disembowels it with a flake of obsidian hafted to a wooden handle like a pencil. She pours its innards and blood onto her hand and pokes through them with her miniature spear.
The Mayor turns to Katrina and glares at her, as if displeased to have been followed. But then she says something… something about the Ussiaxan…
“The Ussiaxan, they are not coming.” Katrina turns to find Jidadaa standing behind her, along with an old villager. Ah. That’s Morska Vidra and his fox. Katrina takes a long moment to ingest the meaning of these translated words.
“They aren’t…? You mean like according to the poor little bird entrails?” Katrina doesn’t think she can get her rational-minded colleagues to go along with that.
Jidadaa nods slowly, a gesture she’s seen the researchers make. “And me. I go there. I listen. They talk about fox. Not Keleptel village. Ussiaxan not come here. Fox has babies tomorrow. They listen to new poem. Now Daadaxáats is koox̱.”
It takes a moment for Katrina to translate this. “Daadaxáats is the sky shaman. Sherman. And koox̱ is slave. Yes, they have them as a slave. I saw. So the shaman is getting the villagers all riled up about the fox with their own prophet poem?”
“Shaman lead them. They all go back into the hills. To find her. Fox babies are all thing to a village. Ussiaxan live with none. Many years now. Why them so danger. No soul. No heart. No love.”
“Okay. So what you’re saying…” But now Jidadaa is telling the Mayor the same news in her own language, that they are safe, that the Keleptel village will not be invaded. “Yeh, your Honor,” Katrina agrees. “Turns out the entrails spoke the truth.”
The Mayor leads them back to the village, to find that Esquibel has moved into position at the cave mouth, while Alonso stands with the others where they were left, now engaged in animated arguments about what to do next. He sees those who approach and breaks off his dispute with Miriam, squeezing her arm. “Eh. It is the Mayor! Uh, Bontiik! Ma’am! I very much want to thank you for those leaf wraps and your herbal treatment! It has done wonders! And I was hoping I could perhaps get another, when you had a chance… Oh! Pardon.” Alonso steps back, realizing that the Mayor is trying to get around him and has something to announce. She calls out in a voice loud enough to carry to every corner of the village. Heads lift then drop, the villagers going back to their daily chores. They all seem content to let her news pass with silence. Then the Mayor returns to her hut and goes inside.
“What did she say?” Alonso asks Katrina.
“That there will be no attack. The Ussiaxan are hunting foxes.”
“Oh, praise be.” Miriam sighs and puts down the huge pack she carries, like ninety percent of their belongings. She hadn’t looked forward to wrestling it through the tunnel and now she won’t need to. “So can we stay here?”
“Did you hear that, Esquibel?” Alonso calls out across the village. “Peace has been restored. There will be no attack.”
“What?” Esquibel squawks, too far away. She steps from the cave mouth, unwilling to come out much farther. “Why?”
But instead of answering her, Jidadaa turns to Alonso. “And Morska Vidra. He saw your friend Amy.”
“He did?” Alonso and Miriam both turn, to the girl and the old man and then back to each other, overcome by the sudden relief of hearing word of Amy. “She is fine?” Alonso asks.
“She is with the fox. For birth.”
“Oh my days she’s a midwife,” Miriam laughs, releasing even more tension. Then she sighs. “This must be some kind of absolute dream come true for Amy. And she’s well? She’s safe?”
Jidadaa smiles. “The fox is still alive.”
Ξ
Pradeep walks under the eaves of the trees the Mayor just visited. The bird life here is so rich. They flit and soar and flutter, the air alive with their wings. In just a single glance he finds a Steller’s Jay, two nuthatches, and a family of robins, with two red-tail hawks soaring above and a clutch of quails rustling below. A riot of passerine life, loud and boisterous and mostly fearless. The jay lands close and brays at him, cocking an irate eye.
Pradeep bows. “Pardon my trespass. I am only here to look.”
He steps deeper into the trees, thinking of Amy. She is out here somewhere living like an animal, in the world of animals. If it had been anyone else, Pradeep would have been concerned. But back at Cal State Monterey her exploits were legendary. Who knows? This is maybe just another Tuesday to her.
But he misses Amy, so he consoles himself with the birds she loves. She taught him nearly everything he knows about West Coast populations and distributions. They only had a handful of mornings together in the hills above Prunedale, cataloguing the chickadees in the grasses. But she expanded his view out to the horizon and the sea birds that dwell there. The dunes and coastline are themselves an entire ecosystem, with pipers and pelicans and egrets seen nowhere else.
On Lisica, he’d just like to find an inland pond of some size. That’s the goal he’s set himself these last few days here. Alonso wants new data, from under-represented sites? Good. A nice pond or lake would be brilliant. So he’ll just stretch his legs to the top of this ridgeline and see if the neighboring valley has any bodies of water he can see from above.
As he ascends to a saddle between two impassable outcrops, a head disappears from view. It is one of the Thunderbird clan. So Jidadaa was right. They are still watching from a distance. What an odd name for them. How are they in any way the Thunderbird? They are the most secretive and mystical of all the tribes here. Why would they have such a bellicose name? Maybe Katrina knows…
No, he can see nothing of the next valley on the far side. The view is too obscured with thick forest. And there’s no clear way down from here that wouldn’t involve some bouldering and perhaps a bit of rappelling. So. Time to turn around.
He is surprised to find Xaanach trailing him, chewing on a stick. “Oh. Hello. Pleased to meet you.” Pradeep doesn’t recognize her. He’d been insensate when she led the others back to him before.
“Wetchie-ghuy.” She crosses her eyes and sticks her tongue out, then smiles wolfishly at him.
“Ah. Yes. Indeed.” There is something uncanny about this child. She is tiny, and waif-thin. Also quite ratty in appearance, with her hair a tangle of detritus and her shift torn to rags. “Wetchie-ghuy is a bad man. Common enemy. Friends, yes?” Pradeep can’t seem to shake his stiff formality. He had never been good with kids. Even when he was a kid. Perhaps this little urchin has the same problem. “Pradeep.” He places a hand on his chest and bows.
“Xaanach.”
“Ah! Xaanach! I remember you now! Our little rescuer. Flavia loves you, you know. And you don’t live… with the others or… anywhere…?” He looks around, questioning each compass point. But she doesn’t seem to respond to any one direction.
So Pradeep points to the birds instead, naming them. “Let’s see. Black-capped chickadee. Goldfinch. Goldfinch. Steller’s Jay. You know what?” he asks her, heartened to see Xaanach pays close attention. “I haven’t seen any of the larger Corvidae since we got here. No crows or ravens or… Huh. These jays are the largest we’ve seen. No magpies. Do you have magpies here?”
The girl responds in a torrent of mish-mash. It sounds like child talk, not even Lisican. She presses her filthy palms together and twists them, then reaches out to grasp him by the wrist.
“Oh. Uh… Okay.” Pradeep allows himself to be led back down the slope, but at a northeastern angle away from the village below. Yet she almost immediately thinks better of it. She halts and says something abrupt, then pulls Pradeep around and releases his hand. She yanks at the tail of his shirt, trying to get under it. “Wow! Uh, what are you, uh…?”
She repeats one word until he understands it. Lisica. She wants to see if he still has a fox on his tailbone. “How do you know about that? Just who is this kid?” He looks around, as if he might see her parents waiting patiently at a distance. But of course Pradeep and Xaanach are alone. And evidently his Thunderbird bodyguard doesn’t consider her a threat. So…
Pradeep untucks his shirt and displays his lower back to her. She gets uncomfortably close and he smells her rankness. The poor thing has maybe never had a bath in her life. She prods his skin and picks at something like a scab. Then she steps away and grabs his wrist again. But he pulls away. “Let me—Hold on! Let me get my shirt back in first then I’ll go wherever you want. I promise.”
The instant his hand is free again she snares it and pulls him forward once more. She drops down the steepest pitch of the slope, heedless to the dirt sliding around their feet, then picks her way patiently along a spine of descending rock to the crown of a massive red granite outcrop overlooking the valley below.
“Whoa…!” They stop at the very edge, the void appearing suddenly beneath their feet and falling away a hundred meters to a jumble of fallen stone. Maybe more. Pradeep scrambles back and Xaanach giggles, joining him, still holding his wrist. “Could use a warning, if you’re going to take me over a cliff. Next time.”
He examines the view more closely. This is one of the most narrow valleys he has seen. Beyond the rockfall is a pretty glade of ancient bay trees and the glitter of water through the trees. Is that the lake he seeks? “So pretty. Such a nice little sightseeing tour…”
But now the girl only grows more serious. She begins chanting, in ragged imitation of the other prophet poems they have heard. Pradeep turns away from the view of the canyon to study her instead. This is hers? This little wilderness orphan even has a poem? Who taught her? What is her story? Oh, how he wishes he could understand her. Pradeep fumbles with his phone, to record her, but of course only gets the last few fragments before she stops. Then she grasps his hand again, this time in a ritual manner.
Pradeep puts his phone away and stands straight, attempting to give this girl the gravity she demands. Then she takes out a small flake of flint and slices open the tip of his ring finger. “Ow! Hey! I didn’t say you could…!”
But she waves his protests away and snares his hand again, chuckling to herself in a way no child does. She pulls on his finger, pressing it against the stone of the cliff top, as near to the edge as he will let her take him. “Stop! You’ll get it infected!” But she isn’t satisfied until a good fat smear of purple blood is pressed into the granite. Then she releases him.
“Absolutely mad, you are.” Pradeep backs away from the girl and her precipice, holding his finger up. Wilderness medical training says to bleed a small wound like this, use the blood to wash the dirt out. Flush it back up to the surface of the skin. So he is satisfied to see another bright bead roll down his finger. Good. The cut is clean. That rock had been sharp. It should heal fine.
Xaanach appears to be done with him. In fact, the smile she grants him is one of great relief, as if she just accomplished something she has long been attempting. Then she turns away, looking out over the valley, and emits a piercing scream in perfect imitation of the red-tail hawks soaring over the treetops.
Ξ
Several of the villagers are still awake in the dark, tending small fires before their huts. Their murmurs are punctuated by laughter. Where Morska Vidra’s house had been is now a makeshift camp for a handful of the crew. Alonso stretches out on a pile of mats and bags under the cloudy sky while Mandy and Katrina try to resume their treatment of his legs. Jidadaa sits nearby, watching.
Mandy marvels at the progress he has made. “Oh my god. The tissues are actually moving again. Feel that?” She moves her hands at contrasting angles across his left calf. Before, it had been a shockingly undifferentiated mass of scar tissue and swollen flesh, but now the individual muscles and tendons can be identified. “Even your scars look better. Like the ones on your feet. We got to get some of that magic herbal treatment for Esquibel’s hip. And for everything Jay’s gone through. How does it feel?”
“Still very painful to the touch like that,” Alonso answers tightly, his breath caught in his diaphragm. “Yes, it is much better, more than I could dare dream, but I’d also say that your adjustments were a critical part of that, Mandy, even though they hurt like the fucking devil. So you have my deepest gratitude. Are you going to now do more of the same?”
“Oh yeah, frankly we’re just getting started. You need months of these treatments. But better the pain now…”
Alonso lifts an interrupting hand. “Platitudes are unnecessary.” He lies back, frowning at the dark gray sky. “Do what you must.”
“Ooo look at the tough chap.” Katrina pokes him in the shoulder and Jidadaa laughs. “Trying desperately to remember the Stoic philosophers he read in college right now. Or is it the Buddhists?”
“What are you adding here, Katrina, exactly?” Alonso pushes her irritating pokes away. “Did you expect me to take your drugs? Here? With all that is happening?”
Katrina shrugs. “I mean, I did bring them…” She takes out a folded and sealed ziploc. “But I understand your concerns.”
Alonso waves the baggie away. “I cannot, as the head of this mission, with all these active security concerns. I must be better. No more nights of drunken stupor. No more drugs until I am relieved of command. Please do not try to convince me otherwise.”
Katrina shakes her head and sets the MDMA and LSD aside. “I will not. I never would. I mean, these tiny paper squares only make the pretty pictures if you’re open and ready and your surroundings are safe. And our surroundings…” She looks around herself, shaking her head in despair. “Nice to hear news of Amy, yeh?”
“My god, yes.” Alonso appreciates how carefully Katrina is handling him as he deals with the apprehension of yet more pain. Mandy’s hands have already started to pull apart things that do not want to be separated. He wants to focus instead on Katrina. “You know, I do find that our two sessions have had a very deep, very profound effect on me. I would not want you to think I do not appreciate them, even if I do not quite recall most of them, and what I do is very… Ah! Yes, that long one, Mandy, is the center of the whole left ankle problem. No, Katrina, what I do recall is very embarrassing. But the thing is, it actually isn’t. I mean, I remember weeping like a baby and saying all kinds of humiliating things. All my weakness on display. And yet, even with these memories, I am not embarrassed. I know I should be, or rather that I would have been in the past, but none of the crazy things I did before you mattered because I know I was surrounded by love. We all love each other. I hope Pavel your brother, when you see him, appreciates all the love you bring to his healing.”
“Aw, that’s so kind and thoughtful. Thank you so much.” Katrina smiles sincerely and cocks her head. “So can I ask you what your trips were like, I mean as much as you can tell me, and about how it changed? You know, for like my own research…”
But now Alonso is groaning as Mandy presses on his ankle’s scar tissue and flexes his foot, forcing the fibers to stretch and align. He starts panting, reaching out for Katrina’s hand to squeeze.
“Breathe.” Mandy spares a hand to press down on Alonso’s diaphragm. He is shocked to have his attention brought there and it makes him gasp, releasing so much of what he holds. He takes his first deep breath and Mandy stretches his foot even further.
“Oi.” Katrina is playfully merciless. “I’m talking here. Taking data. You know, for science? So if you could maybe stop thinking about yourself for a moment, you old queen, and answer?”
Alonso stutters a laugh through the pain. “Alright. Yes. Good idea. Get my mind off it with some pleasant—ah! recollections. Yes. Well, I will have to say that I did not enjoy either drug so much as when we finally combined them together that one night with the dancing. That was… I mean, that was space travel.”
“Yeh, that’s what we call it. Space tripping and candy flipping. The mind and the body altogether at once. The deep celebration.”
“Yes, that is very much how it feels. To allow yourself to love what you have, even the very ooooohhhhhh…” Mandy’s hands grind his words to a halt.
“Even the very…? Yes?” But Katrina will get nothing more from him for a long while. “Lots of forgiveness in these sessions. To other people and also yourself. I saw you forgive yourself for a lot of things on those nights.” Katrina takes her own deep breath and gently shifts her hand in his tightening grasp before he breaks it.
Alonso squeezes tears out from between his closed eyes. “Yes. Gracias. This is much of what I oohhhh… what I am saying. I have forgiven my legs for looking like this. The pain for making me feel so stupid and depressed. There had been… so much guilt.”
“Breathe!” Mandy presses on Alonso’s diaphragm again. “You tense up and it doesn’t work.”
But Alonso finds it nearly impossible to release and face the pain defenseless. It is just too much. And Mandy is relentless. He goes rigid, slamming the back of his head against the ground to take his attention away from Mandy, who is tearing his feet from his legs and taking whole minutes to do it.
“Hey, hey… Shh…” Katrina cradles Alonso’s head and his eyes snap open, flicking up and left, then off to the middle distance. “Okay, bit of neuro-linguistic programming here. According to my sources in the military what you’re doing is processing some of the trauma that’s connected to those exact injuries here. A little bit of flashback, maybe?”
Alonso nods, trying to let the shade of the cackling sadist pass through him and not catch on anything rough or jagged. He needs to be clear to survive this, to let the pain cleanse him instead of damage him. The acrid smell of his torturer, the chill in the air. These are the sensations he needs to forget before he can finally face the looming silhouette of the man over him. “There is still… one forgiveness…” he pants, “I am having trouble with, Katrina my dear…” Alonso gags on the memory. “I thought I was doing far better than this. But there are still demons hiding in my legs. Ah!”
The Mayor silently appears at the edge of their camp with a frown. She holds wads of black leaves and a jar of paste.
Alonso sees her. He sits up and reaches out to her as a savior. “Ah! Yes, please, Your Honor! Thank you so much for your help!”
But the Mayor doesn’t approach. She shares a disturbed look with them instead, distressed by this much pain.
“It isn’t me, mate,” Katrina mocks, “Mandy’s the one who did all the nasty stuff to him. I’m just here for the internal bits.”
“I never hurt him!” Mandy is indignant. “This is healing pain!” She reaches tentatively for the Mayor’s left arm and grasps it. Then after rotating it, Mandy says, “this one’s a bit tight here. See?” She traps the tendon and pulls gently on it. Then she massages it a bit and hands the Mayor her arm back.
The Mayor flexes her arm and studies Mandy. Then she drops to Alonso’s side and begins to cover his right leg with paste while Mandy continues her work on his left. They work in silence. Soon he is wrapped in dark leaves and dozing, his head in Katrina’s lap.
After all the others quietly depart, Katrina is alone with Alonso. “Now where…?” She pats around herself for the folded ziploc baggie, unwilling to shift and disturb him. “Uh oh. That’s bad. Where did it go?”
Chapter 42 – A Basketball Game
October 14, 2024
Thanks for joining us for the third volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this episode:
42 – A Basketball Game
“Jay. Jay, stop…” Pradeep has been repeating the words for a long time now but this time they work. Jay stumbles to a halt in front of him, seeing it too. Silver light shines indirectly into their tunnel. “We did it. We got out.”
Jay’s breathing is ragged. Holy hell. He took one look at those demon eyes and got the F out of there. Who knows how long he’s been charging forward, dragging Pradeep behind him? But now he can smell the plants and the soil and the fresh air leaking in from ahead. “Jeee-zus, this acid is sooo strong. It’s been like a seventeen hour trip so far. Thanks a fucking bunch, Katrina.”
“Let us stop, please.” Pradeep removes his hand from Jay’s belt, where he held on for dear life. The webbing has cut into his palm and it is a burning pain that keeps him from otherwise thinking clearly. “Why are you so crazed? What did you see, anyway?”
Jay turns back to regard the darkness. Yep, the demons are still lurking back there, staring malevolently at the two escapees. The tunnel’s darkness encompasses one of their infernal hells, with tiers upon tiers of crypts in the pit’s walls, countless fiends staring out. How did he and Pradeep ever survive that? “Uh, there’s, uh, something down here. But we got away. Lots of somethings.”
“What, like… badgers?”
The question is so random and ludicrous Jay can’t help but wheeze with laughter. Oh, yeah. He feels that in his ribs. “The fuck? Badgers? There’s no badgers on this island. Dude. Don’t be dense. We’d have seen sign or spoor by now. No. Demons. Now come on. Maybe there’s some water out here.”
Jay continues forward. Pradeep stands there, dumbstruck, feeling a fool for running around all night fleeing Jay’s acid trip. Damn. Well at least he didn’t lose the bloody moron. And they did finally find a way out. But where are they?
They emerge from a natural crevice on a nearly vertical slope, the opening almost completely obscured by fern fronds. Nearby redwoods are gigantic black columns against an empty sky. Framed between two of the largest is a nearly full moon. Its harsh light bathes this narrow canyon in monochrome light and shadow.
Jay blinks. He’s been underground so long his eyes are super sensitive. This moonlight is like full daylight to him. “I can’t even remember… the last time I saw the moon.” The cloud cover of Lisica hadn’t been getting to him. He hadn’t thought it had, at least. But seeing the full clear night sky again, with the vaulting Milky Way and planets shining in all their brilliant hues… It rocks him. He stumbles from the crevice, wisps of black demon smoke dispersing in the crystal air around his head like bats winging away from their cave. Free. He groans aloud and raises his hands to the shimmering sky. “Free!”
Pradeep claps his hands over his mouth. The shining face of the moon is a profound sight, so bright he can’t look directly at it. The ground falls away before him, purple and black, with dazzling patches of silver that catch the light. He can’t navigate through that. Finding a solid foothold and handhold where he stands, he carefully leans out and looks upslope. No, that is even worse, a massive stone overhang disappearing out of sight above. He’s a climber but he isn’t a reckless fool. That would be like five dynos in a row just to get up what he can see, and his arms are already blown from wrestling all night with Jay. “So… down?”
“Down?” Jay shakes his head and frowns at the sudden motion. His thoughts are clear again but a massive headache is starting up. Oh, fuck. Not now. Not here. Owww! He’s gonna kill Katrina when he sees her again. Absently, his fingers find a fresh joint and his lighter. Soon he is sparking up.
Pradeep exclaims at the sudden flare of light then hisses in disapproval. “Put that away. No idea who might see us here.”
“Good point.” Jay takes a huge hit and rubs the space between his brows with a knuckle. Now he needs water more than ever. His throat is like made of sand and the hot smoke goes down like fire. “Well, water is always down.” And with no more consideration, he drops onto a shelf he can barely see about three meters below.
Pradeep mutters anxiously, his legs trembling. Then he grits his teeth and follows with a halfhearted crouching leap.
Now the weed finally does its job and Jay’s poor brain unlocks. He is able to escape his mind for the first time in ages and reside in his body. Drop. Scramble. Swing. This is real exercise again, the good kind. Not that claustrophobic hell with Pradeep. This is bouldering by moonlight, yo. Not the first time he’s done such a thing. Come on, demons. See if you can catch me now. He patrols the edge of the shelf, then finds a bit of a route on a more shallow slope to his left. Down he goes, his shoes filling with sandy soil.
The ferns are thick. They give way to rhododendron. This is a wet canyon. Jay can tell just by the plant life. More redwoods tower above, stabilizing the cliff walls with their immense roots. They are so slippery, though, and Jay falls from one network into the duff below, sliding into a blackberry bush, where he’s pierced by a hundred thorns. “Oww. Watch that, Prad. It… Fuck! Ow!”
Pradeep perches on the redwood roots above, listening to Jay crash and bellow in the underbrush, all attempts at stealth forgotten. The last thing he wants is to continue this descent. “Shouldn’t there be a traverse across somewhere? Are you sure we want to get to the bottom?”
“Ah. Ahh…” Jay groans as a dozen thorns or more break off in his skin. But he’s still got to push through. He’s past the thick of it now. Just a few more sliding steps, with a few more thorns in his calf, then he’s free. He calls back up to Pradeep. “Yeah, dude. The bottom’s where the water is. Wouldn’t even be a canyon here without water. ” He tilts his gaze back down into the darkness below, the trees obscuring the way down from the moon, and mutters to himself, “And I need a drink bad.”
“But then how will we ever get back up?”
Pradeep’s voice is distant. Jay stops and struggles to find his patience. Can’t lose his buddy now. “No getting back up, homie. Down and out. We’ll have to find another way back.”
“Ugh. I do not like that answer.”
“Come on, Prad. Swing yourself over this way. You can avoid the blackberries if you drop over here. Just watch out for rocks.”
Jay takes another drag on his joint. Even though it majorly tears up his throat it sure does good things to his mental state. He’s back in business now. And if he strains to listen he can hear the gurgle of a creek. “Fuck yeah, there’s a creek. This is a deep canyon and that was a big storm.” Jay drops onto a boulder and hurries down a broadening slope into a dark grove. Finally. The redwoods hold the soil here on a forest floor that is flattening out. Mossy banks and ferns are barely visible in the tiny bit of light that penetrates.
Jay worms his way forward, using the toes of one foot to sense his path forward. There is no path, just a jumble of fallen logs covered with moss and clumps of ferns. But the water is closer now, a full liquid gargle that promises an end of thirst. It urges him forward until he is at its side hanging over the wide creek, the dangling roots of the redwoods an impassable barrier above the rushing water. He needs to find a sandbar or something. Unless he fully throws himself in the creek he can’t reach it from here. And he isn’t willing to do that yet. He just got his phone back, for fuck’s sake.
But he’s so thirsty.
Jay pulls back and picks his way further downstream, the thorns in the heels of his hand and the skin of his calf stabbing him with every move. But finally he finds a spot where the dirt slopes steeply to the water. By holding onto a root and lowering himself headfirst he’s able to dip his chin into the frigid stream and gulp down some of the best water he’s ever tasted. Drenching his front, the cold sobers him further. Finally he has to pull away, even though he feels like he could drink forever.
When Jay regains his balance he finds Pradeep above, navigating down to him with his phone light. “Water,” Jay calls out, perhaps unnecessarily. But it is the only thing that matters.
Pradeep pauses, his head whirling. This precipitous slope is nearly as bad as being in the tunnels. At least in there he had no chance of pitching himself forward and drowning in a rain-swollen creek. “Where are we?” he demands. “Which way should we go?”
“You think I know?” Jay’s answer is querulous, followed by a sharp laugh that verges on hysterics. “Feels like I’ve spent half my waking moments on this fucking island lost in the dark.”
“Yes. Well. We need to make a choice, and I am not going to drop down any further to you until…”
“You ain’t thirsty? Damn. Well, it’s a simple call. Downstream. Duh. That’s where we’ll eventually like get back to where we once belonged.”
“Okay. Which way is that?”
“To the right.”
“And what is upstream?”
“Well, come on, don’t stop using your brain here. That must be the high country, right? The ridgeline that collected all this water.”
“No… I am asking… Wasn’t it on a hill top that Triquet escaped from? And Flavia? The shamans are above somewhere.”
“All the more reason to go down. Oh, fuck. I soaked the last of my joint. Goddamnit. Now I’m gonna have to roll a new one. Shine your light—”
“No! I will not!” In response, Pradeep turns off his light. “There is only two percent battery left. I was just getting very angry about how you made me use more to come down here. We can’t use the last on your drug habit. It’s the drugs that got us into this mess!”
“Fine. I’ll just suffer in silence then. At least until we find a patch of moonlight. Come on.”
They follow the course of the creek as well as they can from the slope above, about ten meters up. But the canyon walls are cut by endless rills and streams of side canyons that bring water down to add to the larger creek. It is in the second of these that Pradeep finds a spot where he can drink. And Jay is right. It is amazingly restorative. Now the prospect of hiking the entire rest of the night doesn’t seem quite so daunting. And the moonlight certainly helps.
Jay certainly thinks so. He’s crouched down and balanced his kit on his knee. After carefully rolling a pair of joints, one for energy and one for relaxation, he slides them into a dry pocket. Then with the last of the dust he makes a little binger that he smokes to ash. “We might want to find a spot to hole up for the rest of the night.”
Pradeep shrugs. “Let us walk while we can.”
The canyon eventually opens onto a wider valley. The trees do not cover the entire forest floor, leaving wide patches of silver light they pick their way through. The creek has flooded here, filling the flat ground with pools and puddles, making progress difficult. Eventually they have to give up trying to keep their shoes and pants dry, and start wading along its verge in the icy water.
Finally, a solid rise clears the floodwaters ahead like an island, featuring a pair of giant bay trees and little more. Pradeep throws himself down onto its dry banks, panting from the exertion and the anxiety, needing a break from banging his shins against submerged logs and squinting into the dark. Now he’s got a headache too.
Jay’s is also getting worse. He worries about the return of his headaches. This would be the worst place for them, by far. “At least it’s dark,” he grunts, kneading the back of his neck.
“What is wrong?”
“Migraines are worse in bright light. So at least I got that going for me, which is nice.”
“You have a migraine? Shit. I didn’t know you got migraines.” Pradeep makes a worried face. His mother has this curse. He learned early on what to do for her. “Here. Turn a bit. Now breathe.” Pradeep buries his knuckles in the straps of muscle connecting Jay’s back and neck. He certainly has a lot more mass than Pradeep’s mom but hopefully the principle is the same. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Pradeep’s strong fingers are like fangs piercing his flesh. But Jay knows to keep still and relaxed if it’s going to be helpful. He’s just got to breathe through the added pain. “Yeah,” he grunts. “Got them pretty much under control. Except I guess when I wrestle with demons on acid.”
“Underground. In the cold and dark.”
“With no food or water.”
“It does make sense. Jay, I’m worried.”
“Not now, chief. Trying to clear my mind of worry.”
“Yes, well…” Pradeep has no such avenue for himself. “My mind is primarily composed of worry, perhaps 98% by weight. I’m only thinking about this creek. If we are on the right bank, and it is eventually the same river that divides the two warring villages, then which bank do we want to be on?”
“Oh, man, are you trying to break my brain?” But Jay knows this is a valid concern. There’s no point in fighting their way through hours of forest only to throw themselves on the spearpoints of the Katóok tribe, after Jay had sworn to never return to their territory. “Yeah, let’s see. Downstream is like this… We stay on this side. Yeah, we’re on the correct bank. The good side, the west side where they won’t kill us. Pretty sure.”
“Good. Because I don’t think we can cross that creek anyway.”
“Yeah, that’s like the whole idea about it, for sure. No crossing allowed. And I guess that holds true all the way up to the top of the island. Fucking weirdos.”
“So hungry.” Pradeep finds a fallen log that would make a good chair. He sits and takes off his shoes, clearing them of all the debris.
“For sure. You think I can get a pizza delivered?” Jay decides if he can’t eat he’ll smoke more weed. Sativa it is. Bolster his energy.
“Oh. No.” Pradeep’s words are so harrowed that they interrupt Jay, mid-inhalation. “It’s him.”
“Him? Who him?” Then Jay’s eyes adjust from the flare of the lighter to spy the dim hulking figure here on this rise with them, just a few paces away. “Oh, is it that Wetchie-ghuy fucker? What up, dude? You sure been causing us a metric fuck-ton of trouble.” With force, Jay blows the remainder of his smoke at the distant figure, who remains still, watching them.
Pradeep groans. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand… How could I know what he looked like in my mind if I’d never seen him in real life? And now when I see him, he looks the same? How did he get inside my mind?”
“Don’t let him fool you, Prad. This dude’s got tricks.”
“No. It is no trick. A bargain has been made. Somehow. He knows it as well as I. And now he is coming to collect.”
“The fuck he is. Sit down, Prad. Dude doesn’t get to just roll up and claim people. It doesn’t work like that. The only reason you needed any help in the first place is because his buddy tried to kill you with poison. Fuck both of them. You owe him nothing.”
Now Wetchie-ghuy holds out a loop of braided leather. They both know what that is for. Pradeep’s shoulders slump, accepting his fate. He knew Maahjabeen and his exciting new career were too good to be true. He just knew it, deep inside. And there is a gleam in that old man’s eye, a curious little opening into a larger truth. This is the siren song Pradeep heard in the darkness last night that originally made him leave the sub. It is here, in this shaman’s knowledge, the universal truths Pradeep has always sought. See? This transaction has further benefits for him. He will only sit at his new master’s feet and take in whatever crumbs and morsels Wetchie-ghuy cares to share. It will be worth it…
“Prad! I said sit the fuck back down.” Jay pulls on Pradeep, who has risen again to go to the awful old man. But Jay has another idea. “No. Wait. Let’s make a deal, Wetchie-ghuy. You want my boy but you can’t have him. You can’t have either of us. But I got something even better. Bigger juju, dude. Look.” And Jay gets between the shaman and the man he has claimed, blowing another billow of smoke at Wetchie-ghuy.
The shaman coughs, waving his hand in front of his face, then he mutters something in reaction and cocks his head.
“Yeah, smells good, don’t it? Here’s the deal. You can have the joint. But I get to keep Pradeep. Right? Fair and final, yeah?”
Wetchie-ghuy lifts a gnarled hand. Jay puts the joint in it. “That’s it. Smoke up, bro. Like you saw me do. Then we’re square.”
Wetchie-ghuy inhales, the end of the joint crackling cherry red. He does not exhale.
Ξ
Katrina is in a febrile dream. She is so thirsty. There’s a park of red sandstone near her house she’s been going to as a child but now it’s drought season and all its pools are dusty dry, like the inside of her poor wretched mouth.
Someone wakes her. She gratefully pulls herself out of the vision. It was absolutely no fun, filled with loops of thought she’s been around and around so many times they’ve worn grooves in her brain. And now she’s awake, the curving shadows of the sub’s hull over her head, waking in the Captain’s bed with Alonso sitting at her side. He looks at her with paternal care, holding water.
“Here.”
He feeds it to her like a bottle to a baby. She slurps greedily, a rivulet running down her chin and pooling in the hollow of her neck. Finally she breaks away. “Thanks, mate. Glorious.”
“You were muttering for water and I couldn’t sleep.”
“Yeh. Brilliant. What time is it?”
“It is near morning. And we are still alive. So.” He pats her head and gives her a pitying smile. “How is the come down? Bad?”
“The worst. Usually I have a lot more control of how my trips end. Lots of hot water and vitamins and meditation. Not… Well. Whatever the fuck that was.”
Alonso’s response is a full belly laugh. He smooths the fine strands of blonde hair away from her forehead. “Yes. The bugout. The big bugout of May Second. It will go down in history.”
“And somehow you’re in a good mood about it?” Katrina sits up, somewhat resentful of Alonso’s tone. Then she remembers how irritable she will be today and remembers to keep it to herself.
“Yes, well… I have always, during crisis, you know, at least before the last crisis, the big one, the long one, the five years…” He shrugs, re-setting himself. “I was always at my best in a crisis. I can put my feelings away and take care of all the problems and needs of others. So. My colleague asks for water, I get water. My Doctor tells me to hide in a sub, I hide in a sub. And I take care of people. It is one of the things I do best. You wouldn’t know it from meeting me now, but I assure you it is true. Is there anything else I can get you?”
Katrina shakes her head no. “Any sign of… you know, anyone? Jay and Pradeep? The golden man? Russian Marines?”
“No one. Maahjabeen and Flavia convinced Esquibel to move her barrier further up the tunnel so they could visit the sea cave. So they were gone for like an hour. But they’re back now. Everyone else is still asleep.”
“He was real, you know. It wasn’t the drugs. We really did see the golden man and he really did tell us the Russians were coming. I mean, Pradeep and Jay didn’t just vanish for fun.”
“We know. And we know which way our two wayward sons went. But nobody is allowed to follow them. It’s a new tunnel.”
“New tunnel. Fucking fantastic.” Katrina groans and falls back against the wall, bumping her head. “Yeh. Coming back online now. Ah, sobriety. You were not missed. Any coffee anywhere?”
“Not yet. But I can start a pot. Just not in here. The ventilation is not so good.”
“So like no boots tramping around above? No gunfire or…?”
Alonso shrugs. “The bunker’s concrete floor is too solid.”
Katrina looks more closely at his silhouette. “Are you sure I was just out for a few hours? Not like… days?”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Just skip this whole unpleasant episode and wake up when it’s safe again. Why? What is it?”
“You’re… I mean, maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but you look really good, Doctor Alonso. I think you’ve lost some weight.”
“This is quite the time to turn into a flatterer.” Alonso stands straighter, sucking in his belly. “Well, a man can only drink so much wine. Really? You think so?”
“I really do.” The transformation is fairly striking. His hair is growing out as well, a leonine mane of silver and black sweeping back from his forehead. And his jawline has returned.
“You are so sweet. Let me just get the water going and I will be right back for more compliments.” With a soft chuckle he turns and vanishes, leaving Katrina alone with her chaotic thoughts.
He returns a moment later, bearing a bag of dried fruit and a handful of supplements. “Here. Electrolytes for what you lost. And more water. Your coffee is coming.” He makes sure she swallows the pills and drinks more water and eats a handful of fruit. “Now. Tell me more nice things about how I look.”
Katrina laughs for his sake, her insides made of sand. She doesn’t think she can sleep any more but she also can’t offer much more in the way of social niceties. “You do look fab. I love your hair.”
Alonso passes a self-conscious hand over his curls. “You are such a doll. You have no idea how vain I am.”
Katrina pauses, mid-sip. She lowers the water bottle and looks at him. “Now I’m remembering my last great insight from last night. And it’s a real doozy. Are you ready?”
Alonso isn’t sure he likes the strange look in Katrina’s eyes. “Yes, I suppose, if it has merit.”
“Well, not much, but it’s still interesting regardless. So… I guess in the back of my mind I was chewing on our data collection issues and how the clock is really ticking down and we’re no closer to getting what we need for Plexity.”
Alonso leans back. “Yes, I have been thinking very much about the same thing. And my solutions so far are not very good. Mostly about hiding here when they come to pick us up so I have enough time to finish my initial assay of the island. What is your solution?”
“Well, it’s really just kind of a philosophical word game my brain was playing while tripping. Semantics. But, I mean, remember how the basis of Plexity is the interconnectedness of all life?”
“Certainly.”
“And how we’ve been working our asses off trying to get as many samples of life and examples of that interconnection as we can? Well, what I started thinking… Right! It started as a way to extend the deadline, like what you’re saying. And in my cracked-out state I was tripping on the possibility of a terrarium, you know those glass bowls with all the plants and a bit of sand and water and—?”
“Yes, I know what a terrarium is.”
“So on acid, you can get really obsessive. And I was imagining stuffing my own terrarium with all the samples we couldn’t get to on Lisica, so that when we left we’d still have a tiny little replica of the island we could work on. You know? Not that it would be representative or accurate or…”
“Well, yes, that is the thing, isn’t it? You have forty species in your little glass globe and that can’t replicate the richness—or, rather, by the choice of which species we bring we could absolutely misrepresent the baseline activity for everything in the bowl and also misrepresent the profile for life on the island.”
“Yes. Of course. That’s why I said it has little worth… Anyway. It’s really nothing more than a thought experiment but what if we lean a little bit more into that interconnectedness concept?”
“What do you mean? How?”
“Well, like,” Katrina grabs Alonso’s hand and interlaces her fingers with his. “Think about, I don’t know, the seagulls.”
“You can’t fit a seagull in a terrarium.”
“Yeh, that’s kinda what I’m getting at. So maybe we don’t need to. The seagull eats what, fish? Then it discards the carcass and flies away. But the fish guts give rise to bacteria in the water. So then we come along and harvest the bacteria and find proteins in it that came from fish blood. We also find traces of seagull saliva. But we only have the bacteria.”
“I don’t think even the Dyson readers are this powerful.”
“No, mate. No chance. But gentle reminder: I was tripping balls. And like I said, this may not have much merit. But here’s another word we should be looking at more closely: life.”
“Okay. Life. Are you saying expand the definition?”
“Well, sort of. I mean that we keep talking about life on Lisica but we keep forgetting to add a whole new component: us. We are life on Lisica. You and me and the whole gang. And we are making impacts on it and it is making impacts on us. Maahjabeen and Pradeep getting poisoned. I mean, now that we’re fishing the lagoon we’re consuming all the local bugs.” Katrina has been speaking to her own toes, her legs stuck straight out before her on the bed. She hazards a glance at Alonso and finds that his gaze is troubled. “So then I realized we don’t need no stinkin’ terarria. We are the fragile glass globes containing all the bits and bobs of Lisica within us. The bacteria, the proteins, the dynamic interactions. They’re already all inside us. It’s just a shame we didn’t like start with bloodtest baseline records or something. That would make it much easier at the end to compare one result with the other…”
“Yes, now that is something that would be very interesting. I wonder if any of the military hospitals I stayed in have kept any of my many blood samples? Probably not. Because I could get a blood draw taken when we get back and I would be very curious about the results. Not your results, with the thirdhand bacteria and proteins. There is just… I think you are dramatically overestimating the specificity and sensitivity of modern instruments—”
“Yeh, that’s why I agreed there wouldn’t be very many merits.” Katrina clamps her mouth shut and puts a leash on her irritation. But it’s too late. Alonso registers it. And now she’s embarrassed. Doing drugs around squares, or even just a bunch of sober people, is hard work. You can’t put any of the downsides onto them, not like if you were actually sick or heartbroken. This was your choice and now the resulting shit is all your own to handle, haiku triplet. Just keep your mouth shut until you can be nice again.
Yet Katrina’s next impulse is to carry on. “Sorry. I mean, it’s definitely science fiction, but it really is the ultimate goal of Plexity, eh? That we’re not just interconnected, we’re like intershot with all the matter and the interactions that wash through us. Collisions like galaxies in my bones and blood. But the work we’re doing here will someday allow it. The specificity will be there. The sensitivity to detect quantum fluctuations that happened in a faraway star system but eventually flutter my heart. Linear thinkers like talking about the butterfly effect but nobody wants to discuss the billion butterflies effect, the billion-butterflies-every-second-since-the-big-bang-effect. They think it all just dissolves into noise but—”
“No!” Alonso halts her train of thought with an upraised finger. “It dissolves into life! That is the nature of life, all those interactions hitting us from a million different angles at all times, enriching us and mutating us and giving complexity to every subatomic unit and all the higher-order processes they create. Yes. I have nibbled around the edges of those thoughts. And I am glad you’re the one who took the acid and had the experience yourself so now I will not need to. It does not seem to have made you happier.”
“It just makes me wonder what we’re doing here. It’s really easy to lose the thread of our work when we collect and record and all data just kind of generalizes out to an infinite number of bits, none more interesting than the other. But, oh well. Just thought I should share the vision before I lost it. Thought it might help.”
Alonso’s eyes are dark, introspective. “It does, actually. I have been having trouble with this deadline in a couple weeks, for sure, but I have also been having an equal amount of trouble with the suggestion Flavia made that we only characterize the life of the lagoon and beach and, as Miriam agreed with her, that the rest should be a grant proposal to return as soon as possible with more teams and greater resources and maybe a fucking helicopter so we can actually get inland for once. And I think your idea… It is wild and crazy and impossible, and will most likely remain impossible forever barring the revocation of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, at which point we might as well free ourselves from causality entirely and start time-traveling, forget about just finding the record of an entire island in a drop of blood. But no. No… Your idea does not need to be possible for it to have merit. And the merit it has is the prospect that Flavia is right, and that we can legitimately gain an accurate snapshot of the wider island in the samples of the lagoon.”
“Oh.” Katrina doesn’t know if she’s helped or hurt him with this line of thought. He doesn’t seem very pleased with it. “I’m sorry, Doctor Alonso. Plexity and Lisica is for sure the most thrilling thing I’ve ever been involved with and I don’t want it to end. Except this scary part, where all our lives keep getting threatened. But barring that, I’d stay here for ages working on this with you.”
“Thank you. I have no idea if we will have the chance, later.”
“You know, people get this idea that just because you do certain drugs, it must mean that you’re stupid, but I’ve had the most—”
“No.” Again Alonso interrupts Katrina. “It doesn’t make you stupid. Obviously. But it makes you unreliable. Like my wine. And Jay’s weed. As long as you understand that, then you are having a more honest relationship with whatever is the vice of your choice.”
“I’m just in it for the visions.” Katrina shrugs. “Which makes me even more unreliable. Just this mad woman of Sydney. But I guess in the long run I’m not really looking for anyone’s approval.”
Alonso stands and pats her leg. “No. No, you certainly are not.”
Ξ
Triquet crouches in a bush. Milo is in front of him, seated on the ground with his feet planted on either side, knees as high as a frog. The youth’s legs are thin to the point of malnutrition, the muscles like cords along each femur. Yes, there is something paleolithic about these golden childs. Triquet wonders if they’re perhaps nomadic. Maybe that’s the difference between them and the people of Morska Vidra’s village.
Triquet is tired of sitting here. Their brain is far too active to fall into this kind of endless pre-modern reverie that people like Milo can effortlessly achieve. And it’s been, what, all night and into the morning now? Fifteen hours? Something like that? And their eagle bite is throbbing.
Milo had scared the hell out of them in the dark, finding Triquet by touch, who was only comforted when their own fingers found the golden mask. Then they had roughly clasped each other in the dark and the cold, both bodies shivering, and finally fallen asleep.
It was upon waking that Triquet decided this golden childs needed a name. It was a longstanding policy to know at least the first name of those Triquet had slept with and they didn’t want to break it now. So. The little man had become Milo.
It hadn’t gotten any drier or warmer but Triquet had finally disentangled themself from the warm embrace to crawl forward and peer out from under the thick eaves of the underbrush. Its small, almond-shaped leaves with serrated edges drip endless drops onto the black earth, which sheets with water.
“Well, Milo.” Triquet now addresses his back. “Moment of truth and all that. How’s your Russian?” Then they fall forward stiffly on all fours and stifle a groan. They are so stiff and sore. Crawling forward, they lower their chin to the dead leaves, which prickle, and peer out. There’s some dark vertical surface out there, covered in networks of lichen and algae. From a slightly different vantage it resolves into a wall—the back of the bunker, stained and blackened by time. Oh, well. That’s good. The bushes back here are a nice safe place to be, for sure. Just miserable-as-can-be is all.
On the far side of that wall was their home for the last few weeks, now returned to an unassuming bare ruin. It had been filled with their cute little cells and the kitchen and all the laptops at the work tables in a row. It had been nice. And the hatch leading to the sub must be just a few meters away. If Triquet could somehow get to it and slip down there with the others, dry and safe and hidden… It seems like the greatest possible luxury. Maybe they can just start with the dirt beneath their feet and dig straight down, hoping the sub runs under here. But they know it doesn’t. It starts at the bottom of the stairs, ten meters off to Triquet’s left and down another eight, before heading off under the beach at an angle. Not a passage they can scrape away with their hands. And then there’s the matter of the concrete and the steel hull. No getting through them with just like elbow grease and fingernails. They’re still trapped out here. So close and yet so far.
Well. Then it is a matter of being a scout again. Be optimistic. There’s a strong chance that no Russian soldiers ever arrived here. That’s what we call the reality-based chance. And if Triquet can confirm that now, then hooray, we can all resume our daily lives and just like lock Katrina and Jay in the warrant officer’s cabin for the remainder of the stay.
Triquet recalls the placement of the window in the back, and how they’d heard that a fox jumped out it when they first arrived. That fox probably had a trail… Triquet pulls back and scans the forest floor for any sign of one. There: an unsteady depression running generally in the right direction, thin as thread.
Triquet crawls carefully along this game trail, finding that it ends at a woody bush whose main limb serves as a springboard to the empty window ahead. Triquet can see claw marks and dirty paw prints on the limb, clear as day. They are pleased that for once an educated guess actually turns out to be true.
Triquet looks back at Milo, who seems to be watching them from behind the blankness of the golden mask. “Just going to take a peek,” Triquet silently mouths to him, pointing at the window. Then they slowly rise…
Thunk. Triquet stops. Something heavy bumped against another object in the bunker. Just on the other side of the wall, not even their own body’s length away. Then they hear breathing, a heavy snuffling, and an indistinct muttering. Somebody is in there. Unmistakably. It isn’t a fox. It’s a man. A Russian? Triquet can’t hear enough of the words. Whoever it is, they are obviously alone, muttering to themself with idle observations. Could it be one of the Lisicans? It doesn’t really sound like them. This person is less… healthy? Or maybe it’s one of the shamans. It could very well be. Talking to themselves is very on brand for them, poking around in the bunker after getting their golden mask buddies to spook the researchers away for whatever malevolent reason. Yes, paranoia argues that this has all just been a game to them. Or, like some complex side tactic in their great argument. Those assholes.
Or maybe it’s a Russian soldier after all and if Triquet pops their head up to see, it gets blown off. No real way to tell.
The body shifts within. Steps are taken, dried ferns brushing against the floor. Yes, there is a heaviness to the steps, perhaps a bit of a waddle or limp. They only take like three so it’s hard to tell. Then a long exhalation and a word that sounds like shivyit.
The figure moves through the bunker and out the door, their movement tapering to silence. Now Triquet doesn’t know what to do. Should they try to confirm the person’s identity? How are they supposed to do that when any movement will likely be too much?
A gout of rain solves that issue. It suddenly falls with such force that Triquet is easily able to withdraw deeper into the bushes without fear of being heard. It really pounds down, a trickle of cold water worming its way around the collar of their coat and down their neck. Their feet are already made of ice, probably as blue as the boots they wear. And the rain doesn’t let up.
Emboldened, Triquet uses the downpour to crawl around the building counter-clockwise, still staying in the bushes close to the ground. They ease wide so their sightline is clear of the corner of the building. There is no one there. Well, obviously. Who in their right mind would stand in the middle of this deluge if there’s a building right there beside them? They must have gone back inside and Triquet couldn’t hear it over the battering the corrugated steel roof endures.
Too many unknowns. What will prove that camp is unsafe? Well. A mental checklist appears in Triquet’s mind. If they find out it’s a Russian. Check. If they find more than one person. That means it isn’t a shaman so therefore it has to be soldiers. Check. If they hear any metal sounds. Lisicans don’t wear metal. Check. If their feet leave tread like the lugs of boot soles. Check. If Triquet can figure out what the fuck shivyit means. Check.
And what would prove that camp is safe? Prove? That is much harder, proving a negative. Hard to prove an absence of threat when there’s obviously someone in there prowling around. And there’s very little chance it’s someone who looks on Alonso and his crew kindly, either way. So no checklist there.
And what if it’s just one of the golden childs in the bunker? Maybe they didn’t know Triquet was close and let their guard down a bit, dropping the whole silent mask routine? Maybe they’re still just patrolling the empty camp because they wouldn’t go into the sub? That prospect suddenly seems the most likely and Triquet pushes forward, eager to catch sight of a gold mask in the bunker’s door. But they can’t see anyone out there and moving forward any more would take them out of the bushes entirely and that’s a big no thank you from Triquet.
Triquet schools themself to patience and pulls back to the window to peek within. The bunker is empty, rain pouring in shining columns through the gaps in the roof. It looks so cozy. They are sorely tempted to crawl through and hide. Perhaps if they covered themself with some dead ferns and just kept still? They could happily sleep the day away.
But that would never do.
The rain eases. A break in the sky suddenly appears above the cliffs and an eerie golden light filters through the drizzle. The wind picks up and the trees shed their soaked dead leaves. And in the cathedral light that slants down into the bushes, Triquet can now see a wider path through the thicket behind them leading away from camp, back toward the cliffs. This must be one of the paths to the secret tunnels. They slept like not two steps away from it and they’re only just seeing it now.
Fabulous.
Well, no time like the present. Bye bye bunker. They can retreat from these dangers and dive down into the dark now to find their way back to the sub and the loving embrace of Miriam and Alonso and all the others.
But can they? It is still an open question if it is safe for the others to come out. And without Triquet’s eyes and ears out here, they’ll never know if it gets any safer. No, they can’t retreat and put that burden on someone else. They need to figure this out once and for all. So no tunnel for them. Yet.
Triquet rocks back on their heels and tries to think strategically. Okay. The storm is breaking up and the beach is getting a patch or two of sun. Gusts of wind chase clouds from the sky. Sneaking off to the right, toward the trenches and Tenure Grove, will provide good cover but take Triquet further from camp, and maybe make it harder for them to see what might be occurring out there. But if they go the other way, alongside the creek to the left, staying in that deep underbrush and peeking out every few minutes to see, they could probably get a good survey from the door of the bunker all the way to camp and down to the beach.
And that’s when they hear the whistle, faintly from the lagoon. Three short blasts. Not a bird whistle, but the sound made from a small metal object, like a referee uses at a basketball game.h1 { color: #000000; letter-spacing: 2.0pt; line-height: 150%; text-align: center; page-break-inside: avoid; orphans: 0; widows: 0; margin-top: 0in; margin-bottom: 0in; border: none; padding: 0in; direction: ltr; background: transparent; text-decoration: underline; page-break-after: avoid }h1.western { font-family: “Wallington”; font-size: 12pt; so-language: en-US; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal }h1.cjk { font-family: “Droid Serif”; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal }h1.ctl { font-family: “Droid Serif”; font-size: 12pt; so-language: ar-SA; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal }p { color: #000000; line-height: 115%; text-align: justify; orphans: 0; widows: 0; margin-right: 0.5in; margin-top: 0.17in; margin-bottom: 0.08in; direction: ltr; background: transparent }p.western { font-family: “Calibri”, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; so-language: en-US }p.cjk { font-family: “Calibri”, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt }p.ctl { font-family: “Times New Roman”, serif; font-size: 11pt; so-language: ar-SA }em { font-style: italic }a:link { color: #000080; so-language: zxx; text
Chapter 40 – The Rest Of Us Can Hide
September 30, 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:
40 – The Rest Of Us Can Hide
Katrina kneels before the golden childs in the gray rainstorm. They’ve rigged a tarp up over the door of the bunker where four of their guardians huddle, protected from the downpour. The masked figures will not come inside and they will not leave. So the crew have done what they can. She offers a steaming pot of hot water and four mugs. “Here you go, lads. Warm the core. Wait. Wasn’t there a fifth one? What happened to him?”
They make no move to accept the tray or what it holds.
She sits back, studying them, and zips her parka tighter, all the way up to her nose, so cold drafts don’t go down her neck. But here they sit, naked save for loincloths and masks, without a care in the world. They aren’t even shivering.
These aren’t the original golden childs. One looks old, with a bit of a paunch. He definitely wasn’t here before. And the others are new too, two young and slender, one kind of stocky with pale blond curls and ochre skin. Their loincloths are cured leather, twisted in sumo wrestler fashion. The world’s burliest thongs.
Otherwise they are barefoot and naked. Their hands and feet are darker than the rest, nails long and dirty. They somehow seem more primitive than the Dzaadzitch villagers, almost from an earlier era. She lifts a mug and sips from it. “Mmmm…! Good!”
Katrina offers the mug to the person seated closest. They don’t respond. Bollocks.
“Lisica.” She points at the ground. “Yeh? Uh, dzaadzitch and katóok. Wetchie-ghuy. Morska Vidra. Yesiniy. Uh…” No she doesn’t know any more of their proper names. She taps at her own chest. “Katrina. Pleasure to meet you. Katrina.”
Their faces are all pointed at her. They do seem to be paying attention. Each mask looks like a beetle’s back, with a line down the center dividing it into two curved faces, rich with gold. “Can I ask? How do you get the pollen to stick on there? And can you actually see through?” She lifts a hand, finger extended. But the golden child leans away, avoiding contact. She drops her hand, no point in forcing the issue. These people are here to help, right? Keep those wicked sorcerers from stealing any more of them away?
“Just how old are they, anyway? The shamans. Wetchie-ghuy? Fifty? Sixty? More? I wonder if they knew Maureen Dowerd. I mean, wouldn’t that just sort of neatly tie up a bunch of things? Maybe you lot popped out of a tunnel in like 1962 and scared the soldiers and they thought the only reasonable response would be to bury an entire fucking sub in the beach. Yeh. Because that makes sense. Maybe when they arrived there was a Jidadaa too. End of an era. Now coming faster and more furious for sure.”
The rain falls harder, angling under the tarp and wetting the legs of several golden childs. They seem unconcerned.
“Could I offer some blankets? Umbrellas? I mean, you blokes shouldn’t just sit out here like this. You’ll catch your death.”
Katrina stands, wiping the wet sand from her knees. She views the camp. Yep. There’s the fifth one, sitting out there miserably at the edge of the platforms. “How do you keep the pollen from just washing off?” she calls out but of course she gets no response. She shakes her head. “So many questions.”
Opening the door of reeds and twine behind her, she re-enters the bunker. Here there is life and noise and warmth, everyone working in close quarters on all their projects.
“No?” Amy sees that the tray is still in Katrina’s hands. She is crestfallen. “I don’t like that they won’t take my tea. I’ve always argued that a good cup of tea is a universal language of love.”
“They won’t take anything. Still won’t say a word. One poor blighter is in the middle of camp just getting drenched.”
Amy relieves Katrina of the tray and disappears into the back. Katrina sits heavily on an unoccupied bin, discouraged and tired.
Jay sits beside her, rattling away on a keyboard, organizing his notes from the day before. “What’s another word for scaly?”
“Reptilian? Segmented? Uh… That’s actually a hard one.”
“I know! And I’ve already used scaly like five times.”
“I thought there were no reptiles or snakes on the island.”
“Aw, I hope that isn’t true. But I meant this.” Jay gingerly lifts his shirt to display the line of scabs falling away from his healing wound. “Gonna have a wicked scar for sure.”
“Oh, you’re the reptile. God, Jay, that looks mean.”
“It was super shallow. Ridiculous luck. Otherwise it was like goodbye liver. And it’s doing much better. I think the humid air is what it needs right now. And the cold doesn’t hurt much either. I figure by the time this storm is over I can resume normal activities like a real man.”
“A real man.” Miriam sits on the other side of Jay, working on her own notes. She chuckles. “Just what we need. Doll, you know that as soon as you can move around you’re just going to hurt yourself again. Even I know that about you, and we just met.”
“Damn. Hurtful, Miriam. Very hurtful.” Jay scowls at her. “I thought you liked me.”
“Oh, I do, darling. I adore you. But I think you’ve demonstrated what kind of trouble you like to get into.”
“I can be safe. I hardly ever get injured at home.”
“Safe? Okay. Tell us what you plan to do once you heal up?”
“Well. I’m gonna reef dive for some more of those rockfish. And there’s the matter of Sherman’s osprey platform, so we got to climb that tree. And…”
“Need I say more?” Miriam chuckles at him. Katrina joins her. “One man wrecking crew, you are.”
Jay frowns, somewhat offended. “I’ll take that as a compliment. Fine. Nothing but dead weight to you, I guess. Just recuperating in the bunker every day eating you out of house and home.” He rattles off a few more typed words and then signs out of his account. With a sigh, he turns to Katrina. “Hey, do you think they’ll let us into the sub for a while?”
“Probably not. Why?”
“Cause I’m bored and I’m fucking sick of this reality. Let’s drop some of your acid down there and find a new one.”
“Yuuup.” Katrina likes the sound of that. She’s been wanting to dose but she didn’t want to do it alone. Not here. Not with all the challenges facing them. But with a buddy? “Yeh, I could definitely use a restart on this day.”
“Do you really think…?” Miriam frowns at them, but then shakes her head no. “No. I swore I’d never be the old person bumming out anyone’s trip. Fair play. Get along then. Just remember to drink a lot of water.” She leans in, conspiratorial. “And whatever you do, for god’s sake don’t mention it to Esquibel.”
“Should we invite anyone else?” Jay stands, wincing. The incision still crackles like a bolt of electricity from time to time.
“I say…” Katrina recalls this particular batch of blotter. It’s jet fuel. Super pure, and some of the strongest LSD she’s ever had. “Let’s keep it with the professionals this time. Make sure this drug works in this setting. Then we can try again later with others.”
“Cool cool. Let me just grab my herb and some layers and I’ll meet you in the back, little lady.”
“And I’ll just grab a couple itsy-bitsy tiny little bits of paper. And some water. Be right there.”
They both depart. Miriam shakes her head, bemused. “Ah, youth. Well, at least they have each other.”
A few minutes later Katrina has recreated the scene they shared on molly. Jay sits on a bench in the closest chamber in the sub to the stairs leading back to the surface. She has brought her laptop, to spin beats, and a couple of her fairy lights for color. Triquet has recently finished their work down here and it has transformed into a snug little museum-piece of a setting.
The millimeter square of paper settles under Jay’s tongue. “Like the world’s tiniest postage stamp.” He lights a joint and passes it to her. This is his Jack, to give them enough energy to ride this wave.
“Yeh, and you’re the envelope with the letter inside. And I just mailed your ass to the moon!” She leans in and kisses Jay.
He grunts in surprise and responds, her lips so soft and hot and wet. But she breaks off and stares at him.
“Sorry. Already breaking the barriers. Drugs haven’t even kicked in yet.”
“You’re good.” He thinks to draw her in for another kiss but no, this isn’t a hookup kind of situation, is it? This is psychedelia time.
“Don’t know why but coming on,” Katrina confesses, “this acid makes me really horny. But only for the first bit. So if you find me grinding up on you, nothing personal, right, mate?”
“Now that one, I can’t tell if it’s a compliment or an insult.”
They both laugh. Katrina leans against Jay. “No no. You’re hot and you know it. You’re even quite lovable. But we’re not…” She shakes her head at the improbability of Jay ever being her lover.
He agrees. “Yeah. You are too. I mean, back in high school they were always trying to hook me up with all the blonde chicks. Like some people just want to see all the blondes together.”
“Like some kind of busybody Nazi eugenics.”
“Yeah, now that I think of it. But no. Like, I could just see one of my old buddies trying to hook me up with his younger sister and then I find out it’s you.”
“Ha. You’re not that much older.” She leans forward, the first filaments of the lysergic acid uncoiling in her spine. Katrina kneads his thighs like a kitten making biscuits. “Ooo and you don’t know my brother. Although I think you’d like Pavel. He’d think you’re cool, for sure.”
Jay takes a huge drag on the joint, remembering that this entire endeavor is about changing his headspace. Katrina is complex, a jewel with more facets than he can count. But it’s all beauty through and through. No flaws. Just… brilliance. “Oh, man. Here come some visuals. Thank the maker. Man… Aw, you’ve got like little fairy flowers growing out of your eyelashes. Like…” He reaches out to touch them. “I needed this, yo. I’m used to having my phone, you know. My screentime. But now my whole optical nerve is like atrophying because that nasty old hag stole my shit.”
Katrina runs a fingertip over her own eyelashes. “What kind of flowers? I can’t feel them.” A flush envelops her and she presses herself forward against him. The contact feels so good she nearly swoons. With a drunken laugh she rolls her head against his chest. “My, you’ve got some fine muscles, lad.”
But Jay is blinking at the far wall, his vision fully engaged. Patches of lurid color bloom beneath the sepia tones of the photos Triquet has hung, bringing them to life. “Would you look at that.” It’s like an invisible hand is colorizing the old photos in realtime. On one portrait a flush of health appears on the smiling cheeks of some lieutenant. His hair gleams blue black. “Katrina… Dude. Can you see that?”
“Hmm?” Katrina looks up, realizing she was fumbling with Jay’s fly. Then he realizes it. “Oh. Oops. Like I said, I turn into this hot little devil, at least for the next like half hour. See what?”
She turns to look at the bare, cold chamber behind her. It holds no interest to her. In fact, it’s the exact opposite of Jay’s warmth. She backs up against him, snuggling close.
He chuckles. “Damn, girl. You sure you aren’t rolling instead of tripping? I’ve never seen anyone get so randy on acid.”
“Yeah, it just… plays my brain… like a… an oboe.” The words are halting and wrong. She laughs instead, an inebriated snort. “And I get all vibrate-y. Will you brush my hair? I bet I’d love it if you brush my hair. Like a cat.”
“Uh, sure.” Not really what he had in mind, but whatever floats her boat. It’s her acid, after all.
She turns around on the floor and leans back against his knees, pushing them open. Then she holds out a hairbrush over her shoulder. “You don’t have to. Except I really really… Yeh. I guess you have to.”
“I guess I have to. Sorry. Just not very practiced with…” He lightly strokes her scalp with the brush but the long fine hairs start to tangle. “Uh…”
“Long smooth strokes. That’s it. From root to end. Ahh. Oh, that feels lovely. And it’s a really fine man doing it.” She wiggles her hips in pleasure, rolling them up against his feet bracing her.
“I just…” Jay has to focus on what he’s doing to make it work. His eyes are starting to lose focus on her honey hair. “I mean, why do you think Jidadaa did it?”
That stops her. Katrina comes back to herself, the sensation falling away. “Huh. Jidadaa. She’s so awesome. What about her?”
“Yeah, well, you can have her. She keeps calling me the lidass and expecting me to kill everyone on the island. I mean, what is up with that? I’m just a surfer, girl.”
“Why did you stop brushing?” Jay dutifully resumes. “No, I think she’s wonderful. Don’t you think she is?”
“I mean, I think the word for her is unique.”
“Yes! So special. I’ve never met anyone like her.” Katrina turns to stare at Jay, a wicked little gleam in her eye.
“Well, you can forget about whatever naughty thought you got going in your little head because she doesn’t do drugs. Not even weed. Now her mom…”
Katrina collapses against him again. “Bummer. Brush!”
“Brushing. Your hair is so fine. And straight. I never had straight hair. Mine’s always been so curly. You’re like a spider… Like if Medusa… Instead of snakes you had spider silk…”
“Now it’s my turn to say I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or an insult. So. What do you say? I’ve got about twenty more minutes of the hots. Oral sex, yay or nay?”
But Jay drops a hand on her shoulder for her attention. Oops. Did she go too far? Again? She pivots to him, an apologetic smile on her face. But Jay isn’t looking at her.
He’s staring at the hatch to his left, leading deeper into the sub. One of the golden childs is there, facing them. But this one is a bit different. The mask is more ornate. They wear a necklace of feather and bone. The man wearing it is older, to judge by the wrinkles and sagging skin of his belly and chest.
“Oh, Christ. Don’t scare us like that, grandpa!” Katrina pulls herself away from Jay and hauls herself onto the bench beside him. After a long moment she says, “Hello? Konnichi-wa? Uh, mushi mushi? What do you think? Should I offer to dose him?”
A rough voice comes from behind the mask. “Chto ne tak s toboy? Ty boleyesh’?”
Katrina blinks. Wait. She can understand those words. “That’s Russian. That bloke just spoke Russian.”
“What did he say?”
“He asked what is wrong with me? Am I sick?” She shakes her head no and answers the golden… man? “Net, otets. Prosto na narkotikakh.” She translates for Jay. “No, father. Just on drugs.”
Ξ
“Yes?” Alonso looks up from his laptop to see whose shadow it is darkening the door of his cell. The rain drums so loud on the tarps and steel roof that he doesn’t think he’ll hear the answer. He squints. Who is that?
“I said, ‘Can I ask you a question?’” Triquet repeats more loudly, feeling like they’re intruding on some senile elder who needs to be shouted at. Alonso is perched on his cot with a lap blanket, shawl, and half-moon reading glasses. He looks like Santa taking a day off.
“Yes?” Alonso repeats in the same gruff manner as before.
Now Triquet hesitates. What the hell do they think they’re doing in there? The man is obviously busy working. He has no time for Triquet’s gossip. Or whatever it is. Triquet turns away, suddenly ashamed, clutching the hem of their housegown. “You know, never mind. I’ll catch up with you when you’re not so…”
“No no. I need a break. Plexity is just laughing at me today. I can’t make it do anything any more. The creation has surpassed its creator and I have to learn to let go.”
“Yes…” Triquet lingers in the door. “They grow up so fast. But what’s wrong with it?”
“Ehh…” Alonso leans back, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “It’s just maths. A trick I was trying to use to change the bounded requirements of this dataset. If we can derive meaningful relationships from fewer data points then maybe…” He sighs, not wanting to say it aloud. “It’s possible we don’t have to do so much collecting to achieve the same results.”
“Well that sounds promising.” Triquet tries to be bright, even when their insides are in turmoil. Alonso deserves that much.
“It would be if I could make it work! But there is some fly in the ointment somewhere, preventing the results from computing properly. And I just can’t find it. It is driving me crazy. So, yes. Please ask me your question. But come in here so we aren’t shouting at each other like drunk college kids.”
“Roll Tide!” Triquet bellows, then chuckles at themself and with a measure of meekness enters the cell and sits on the side of Alonso’s cot, picking at the dried resin on their arm that still covers the eagle bite. “Nice job with the…” Triquet waves at the blank walls in a fruitless attempt at making small talk. “Love what you’ve done with the place.”
“Your question?”
“Yes…” Triquet takes a deep breath, knowing they’re about to make a terrible mistake. Oh, well. “Have you ever been in love with a married woman?”
Alonso shrugs, not absorbing the question. His laptop screen is still mocking him. So he closes it. “Only Miriam. Why? Ah.”
Triquet nods solemnly. “I wasn’t going to talk to you at first. And then I thought, why would I do that? Why would I hide…?”
“It is fine. She told me of your night together. All the lurid details. And yes. She is very lovable. I grant you that. Ha. So she has cast her spell again, has she?” Alonso leans back, a pleased smile warming him. Yes, he needs a change of topic and this is perfect. A way to think with his heart instead of his head.
“So you aren’t upset? Threatened?”
“Threatened? Why? Are you planning on stealing her away from me? She told me you both had other ideas…”
“I am. She’s right. No. Not steal at all. It’s just hard to hear, for most people, that somebody is in love with their wife.”
“Do you know how many times I have had this conversation over the years? Oy oy oy. Especially when we were both teaching at Boston College together. I would be sitting in my office hours and some frat boy would come in and challenge me to a duel over her favors like we were knights at Camelot.”
“Really? A duel?”
“Well, once. And he was a tremendous nerd, the kind who would roleplay as a fantasy character on weekends. He had no idea that Miriam hates that shit. He didn’t have a chance.”
“Oh, dear. If she hates nerds I don’t like my chances.”
“Well, there are nerds and there are nerds. And you are much more stylish than that, my dear Triquet. No. I’d say your chances with my wife are pretty great. She understands how special and wonderful you are. And now she is falling in love with you too.”
Triquet mouths the words ‘thank you,’ tears welling up in their eyes, surprised by the immense tenderness they feel for Alonso. “She is… You are both so amazing. I just… I mean, I can’t believe the life she’s led! When she told me about going on a hike with Joan Didion I almost fell out of my chair. She knows everybody.”
Alonso chuckles. “Yes, Joan was smitten with Miriam as well. Those were good days. Very happy. It has definitely been a good life. I just hope…” And now tears fill Alonso’s eyes all of a sudden and fear grips his throat.
Triquet grimaces. “Look. It’s still hard. There’s still jealousy. And insecurity. No matter how hard we try to balance—”
“No, it isn’t that,” Alonso forces the words through. “I mean, sure, yes, you’re right. You will both need to take very good care of me to not feel left out, that’s for sure. But that’s not what worries me. We’ve had such amazing lives. Like, every academic dream I ever had has come true, and a whole bunch of others beside. You want names? When I was very young I shared a bed with Andy Warhol. The Tom Tom Club. Elton John once stuck his hand down my pants. I could go on and on. And I’m not any kind of mystic or religious nut, but it always felt like I was using up more than my fair share of beauty and light. I knew there must someday be darkness ahead. And there was. Oh, there certainly was. I could face what they did to me in the gulag, at least a little bit, because I knew that I had already enjoyed the glorious meal and this was just the bill come due. But it makes me worry. Miriam has never fallen from her heights. And I’m so afraid that when she does, because she has risen so very high…” He shakes his head in despair. “She doesn’t know… You don’t know. How dark life can be.”
Triquet nods in compassion and grasps Alonso’s thick forearm. “I think you’re probably the strongest man I’ve ever met.”
“Yes, that’s the stuff. You want to steal my wife I better get some damn fine honeyed words in the deal.”
“I can’t imagine stealing. Only… joining…” Triquet hopes it doesn’t sound like a come on. But then they hope it does.
“Yes, but why are you so shy with me? Eh? I am not used to it. I am used to being like Mirrie. Having people throw themselves… I mean, here.” Alonso takes out his phone. He presses his mouth into a thin line, opening a folder of photos he hasn’t looked at since he regained access to them. He swipes quickly through scenes he remembers so well, as if they’d happened yesterday, but at the same time a century ago, and to somebody else. Then he finds the picture he wants. It is 1993 and he is in Vancouver with Kevin and Chui, a quasi-official scholarly road trip and gay bar tour of the Pacific Northwest. Alonso is twenty-six, his hair thick and black, his eyes merry and dark face that of a Spanish noble. His shirt is unbuttoned and muscles are clearly defined beneath. “See?”
Triquet’s mouth drops open. “Holy shit.” On impulse they throw themself at Alonso and kiss him with passion. Alonso laughs at the gesture then responds in kind, reveling in this slender young body squirming in his lap.
Triquet breaks off. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“That was very superficial of me. Objectifying you like that. But sweet Jesus. I was into you the first moment I met you, Alonso. As a bratty sophomore at Penn. I’m sure you don’t remember.”
“I remember that we kept in touch. And that is why you’re here today. Your emails were always so funny and so smart.”
“And I guess I just did one of those ageist things where I forgot, or I let the old man window-dressing here distract me from the real you under all this gray hair.”
“No. This is the real me now, Triquet. They beat this guy…” he casts aside his phone, “out of me. I mean, I’ve still got a lot of healing to do, but I know what I look like now. I know who I am.”
Triquet gives Alonso a strong hug in sympathy, trying to impart strength. “I can’t imagine what you must be going through. And then to have some young asshole like me show up and threaten your marriage…”
“Yeah, these are definitely crazy days here on Lisica. In the gulag I could get so bored. Sometimes they would forget about me in a box for like a week. And my mind would rove. I would spend hours just watching a trail of ants. Everything here that happens in a single day would have been enough material there to occupy my brain for like a year.”
Another gust of rain sweeps overhead, crashing into the roof, and the two of them clutch each other harder, shivering. “Yeah. I guess I didn’t have a question after all. I just couldn’t stop thinking about how amazing and hot and brilliant Miriam is and I didn’t think I could share that feeling with anyone. Then I went, “Hold up, Triq. There’s at least one person here who’s as into her as you are and maybe you could celebrate her together.”
“I am glad you came. Yes, we can. Her smell.”
“Like milk and honey.”
“And her brain. She has an absolute top-shelf brain. People don’t understand. It is like when you are an athlete, no? If you are in bad shape you can’t run up a hill. But when you are in okay shape you can. But only the runners in the very best shape can run uphill at any speed. Have you noticed this? Unless you are very fit, you can only run at your favored speed. But if you are in top shape then you can run as fast or slow as the people beside you and it doesn’t matter. Your muscles and stamina can work at any pace. That is Miriam’s brain. She is lightning fast with her creative thoughts and perceptive insights, but also she is able to keep timescales of half a billion years in her head. I can’t even remember… I mean, there’s the Devonian and the Ordovician and… That’s all I got. Married to the world’s greatest geologist and I can’t even recall the most basic facts about her—Oh!” Alonso starts, seeing another pair of figures looming out of the hallway. “Dios mio. Who is that?”
Triquet gasps. “Oh, my god, what happened to you two?”
Katrina and Jay lean against the doorframe, eyes wide, pasty and disheveled. Their energy is fractured and they can’t hold Alonso or Triquet’s gaze.
Katrina waves at them although she already has their attention. Finally she gets her mouth to work. “We got a problem, boss.”
Ξ
“Tell them.” Alonso finds a seat on a bin in the indoor kitchen in the back of the bunker. It is the end of the day and the storm has already darkened the skies. Miriam comes and stands beside him, a querying look sent his way. Everyone is here.
Jay covers his face in his hands. He can’t stop giggling.
Katrina is taking very dramatic breaths, Mandy holding her hands. This makes them all confused and a bit frightened. Finally she gathers herself. “Okay, first I got to apologize because we’re tripping. Whoa. Are you all doing that or…?”
“Doing what?” Amy asks, collecting enough mugs for tea.
“Your faces… Are fish. And we’re all underwater.”
Jay cackles, still holding his face in his hands. Katrina drags her fingertips through the air in wonder. She makes bubble sounds and giggles. Then she sees the way they’re looking at her. “Oh. Right.”
“You were going to tell us something?” Miriam prompts.
“What is wrong with them?” Maahjabeen asks Pradeep beside her. “I do not and will not ever understand drugs. I thought we were all in danger. Don’t you realize how foolish you both look?”
“They don’t care,” Flavia sighs. “Wish I could be so secure in myself but no. Never would I do this in front of sober people.”
Alonso prompts her. “Come on, Katrina. Remember how you said it was urgent?”
“It’s Alonso!” Her face beams with radiance. “Sorry. It’s just… sheets of color and you’re like a lion in the center! Aslan. Did you ever read the Narnia books?”
“Katrina. Focus. You said our safety is threatened.”
“I did?”
“You saw another one of the golden childs.”
“The golden man.” Recalling him shocks Katrina back into this reality. She grows instantly subdued. “Yeh. The golden man came to us when we were tripping in the sub. He was in the hatch watching. And he spoke Russian to me. Clear as a bell. Maybe a kind of Volgograd accent, the way he clipped his consonants—”
“Katrina.” Alonso is losing his patience. “What did he tell you?”
“Who?” Katrina looks around her. What is she doing in this dark room and why are all these strangers watching her?
Jay drops his hands. “He said the Russians are coming.” His eyes flicker and he’s unable to steady his gaze. But he shakes his head and tries his damnedest. This is the real shit. And he shouldn’t be fucked-up on goofballs at the moment. But he is. And he’s got to do something about it. He sees an open bucket of water at the base of the kitchen tables. He quickly kneels and dunks his head into it. The frigid shock makes his head spin. Not at all the right sensation. It just intensifies his trip. Now he’s in an ice cave like Superman. Except the cave is inside his head. And Superman is inside the cave. And inside Superman is… He pounds on his own forehead. “Uhhh… Slap me. Someone slap me.”
“No no.” Alonso holds up a paternal hand. “Nobody needs to—”
CRACK. Esquibel’s open-hand strike rocks Jay’s head back. A trickle of blood appears at the corner of his mouth. She grabs him. “The Russians? What are you talking about, you ridiculous child? You will come to your senses, both of you, right now, or I will—”
Katrina rides these bad vibes back into sobriety, if only briefly. “Hey, it’s okay. Let him go. We just had to tell you. The Russians are on their way. And, like, they don’t know we’re even here.”
“Oh my god, you’re serious?” Flavia squirms in her seat and Maahjabeen clutches her hand. “This isn’t the drugs? They are on the drugs, yes? This man, he wasn’t real. This is a made-up man.”
“Well then how did they both see him?” Alonso asks the room. “And how did they hear the same thing?”
“This story doesn’t make sense.” Esquibel releases Jay, who dabs at the blood and then loses himself in the bright red dollop on his fingertip. Nobody comes to his aid. They wait impatiently for the pair to continue. Esquibel prompts them. “So you’re telling me that a whole new golden person appeared in the sub while you were on drugs, speaking a language you know, and he told you the Russians are coming? Okay. Fine. Which Russians? Scientists like us or soldiers?”
“Soldiers,” Katrina echoes. And again. “Solll… diers…”
Then Jay, quietly: “He said if they find us here we’ll die.”
The entire room falls silent.
The tension is unbearable. Jay makes a loud bleating sound, covering his ears and scrunching up his face. “Stop… stopping. Time can’t just end. Somebody say something.”
“Is this a joke?” Triquet desperately hopes that it is, that this wildly inappropriate story is just in poor taste. Then Esquibel can yell at them and everyone else can go back to what they were doing, right? “Well is it?”
“You have to understand how difficult it is for us to believe you when you’re in this state.” Miriam crosses her arms, trying to quell her rising temper. “What are you children on, anyway?”
“Katrina’s acid,” Mandy informs them, to a chorus of groans.
“Acid?” Triquet snorts. “Okay, well here’s what really happened. One of you imagined this figure, this golden man, in the hatch, and then you told the other all about it and now you’re both convinced you saw him. You made up the whole thing about the Russians like in a bad dream. It’s all a dream, honey, okay?”
Katrina and Jay share a sidelong look. They know it wasn’t a dream. But how to convince the others? “Look,” Katrina begins. “I’m not what you call a rookie on this drug. I’ve dropped acid over a hundred times. I am an accomplished astronaut.”
“Oh my god did you really pull me out of the clean room and all my work just to scare me with this nonsense?” Esquibel claps her palm to her forehead. She is starting to get really angry. “Don’t tell me how many times you’ve done these drugs. It makes it so I can’t even trust you when you’re sober.”
“Exactly.” For once Miriam and Esquibel find themselves on the same side of an issue. “Look, Katrina, we all live, laugh, love here like a big Cuban family, doubtless, but you’re really trying our patience. And frightening us too.”
“No.” Jay spreads his hands outward, another ripple of panic washing through him. Whenever he can remember, he’s absolutely terrified of what the golden man told them. “Look. I don’t know if he came to us because we were on the drugs, though that’s how it seemed. But he was definitely real. Definitely definitely. And he said we got till dawn to hide. All our stuff. All our…” Jay waves at the bunker and camp, trying to include it all. “Hammock. Boats. We got to like cover our trenches somehow…”
“Hide? Did you completely forget…” Flavia protests, her fear making her irate, “that we are in the middle of a fucking storm? How are we supposed to take down our platforms and cover the trenches in all this wind and rain?”
“And how would anyone expect a boat or even helicopter to land during this?” Maahjabeen shakes her head in disapproval. “This is a fantasy you idiots have built up in your heads. No, the Russians aren’t coming. How could they?”
“Dawn.” Katrina shakes her head in despair at all the improvised structures in the bunker. They’ve got a lot of work ahead of them. “He said we have until dawn before the Russians get here.”
Miriam glances at Alonso, hoping to share her incredulous cynicism with him. But his face is drawn and his eyes are haunted. Right. The Russians. All he hears is he’s getting sent back to the gulag. These bloody fools are plucking on his heartstrings and they don’t even know it. “Now we’re going to stop this right here. Right now. Look what you’re doing to Alonso. You are going to repeat after me: There are no Russians coming at dawn. Say it.”
Jay and Katrina look helplessly at each other. “Sorry, Miriam,” Jay finally manages. “I know what I saw. And heard. It just didn’t go the way Triquet said. We didn’t imagine it. This acid don’t hit that hard. I mean, it does. But it didn’t.”
Alonso is beginning to tremble. Ah, no. His facade will slip again. Not Russian soldiers. Not again. Nothing is more horrible than the prospect of being returned to what he so recently escaped. Five more years. The very thought makes him audibly groan.
“Say it, Jay. Katrina.” Now it is Esquibel making the demand. “There are no Russians coming at dawn. And you will be handing the rest of that acid over to me for proper disposal.”
“I can’t. It happened.” Jay begs them. “What do you want me to do? We came and told you all as soon as it happened. We’re in danger, dude!”
“Jay! You are not in danger! There was no man down there!” Esquibel has had enough. She considers sedating them both against their will until this drug trip passes out of their systems. But she doubts she’ll get much support for such a drastic move. Then she recalls one of her activities from two days before. “Listen. It is impossible, anyway. I blocked off the tunnels again at the lowest level. Nobody could come up that way. He is only in your mind.”
“Katrina.” These are Pradeep’s first words. Once again, he speaks in a tone that seems to cut right to the heart of the matter. “If you want us to believe you, your words are not enough, regardless of how terrifying they may be. You have to give us proof. Actual physical proof that the man was there.”
Both Jay and Katrina nod. A jagged sadness rises in her. They don’t believe her and Jay. The Russians are going to show up and mow them down with guns. Or send them off to torture. She’ll be like Alonso and Pavel, broken for the rest of her life. They don’t believe her, all because of their prejudice against lysergic acid 25.
“I mean, we can look…” Jay isn’t ready to give up yet. Pradeep has given him something to do. “Come on, Prad. Bring your phone. See if we can find, like footprints or something. I don’t have my phone. Jidadaa stole it. And if I ever see Kula again…”
“Yes, Jay. We know.” Pradeep lets go of Maahjabeen’s hand and stands. “Come on. Let us see what we can find. Hold on, everyone. We will be right back.”
Jay leads Pradeep to the stairs and descends into the sub. After only a slight hesitation, Pradeep follows.
“Well. I guess this is what idleness and boredom gets you.” Miriam tries not to be angry at the kids. She has definitely been there herself. But anyone with eyes in their head can see how this farce is affecting Alonso. She just wants it all to end. “Can we agree not to take any more psychedelics while under threat of attack? I mean, what were you thinking, Katrina?”
“Uh…” Katrina sincerely tries to remember what they had been thinking. “Oh, yeh. We were thinking it was a whole day or more cooped up in this box so why not try something new?”
Esquibel growls. “Even the remotest chance that there is some kind of hostile maritime force landing on our beach at dawn will keep me from getting any sleep tonight. Preparations must be made. Even if it all is proven false. We still must guard against every eventuality.” Her anger nearly makes her helpless. She turns on Katrina, shaking a finger. “It is time for you to grow up!”
“This is ridiculous.” Flavia twists the fingers of one hand in the other. “Now it’s Russian soldiers? I cannot just sit here and wait for the next crazy part of this story. I am going to bed.”
“Wait.” Esquibel holds up a hand, an imagined spreadsheet with divisions of tasks filling her vision. “We need to… Ugh. We don’t know what we need to do first until we hear back from those two. And we need them back here as workers. Even if they are wrong and there is no threat, there will still be work to do before we can relax tonight.”
They all wait in silence.
“Where did you say you saw the golden man again?” Amy asks Katrina, who is staring at her own hand as its fingers slowly flex and spread. “Katrina? Where did you see him?”
“Um? In the sub. Didn’t we tell you?”
“Which chamber in the sub?”
“Just the first one there.”
Maahjabeen scowls. “Then what is taking them so long?”
“They are checking the whole sub to make sure there is nothing there.” Miriam feels like she needs to speak slowly for some reason. Maybe because Alonso is breaking apart and Katrina is on another planet. “And then when Jay is convinced it was a figment of his addled goddamned imagination they’ll come back and we can put this all to rest. Yes?”
After another long moment of silence, Mandy offers, “I was supposed to return to the weather station today to download data but of course that isn’t happening so… Kind of operating off stale measurements here but there’s got to be at least like another night of this storm before it abates.”
Esquibel spins to Mandy, cross. “I know! The idea that any landing force could brave the elements in the dark and hit the beach during this storm is just… I mean, it beggars belief, no?”
“Totally,” Mandy answers.
“Absolutely,” Miriam confirms, squeezing Alonso’s hand.
They wait another minute or two in uncomfortable suspense, the silence stretching.
“Watch,” Triquet says. “Pradeep climbs those stairs wearing a gold mask, shouting in Russian, run for your lives!”
“Bezhat’ za svoyu zhizn’!” Katrina helpfully translates, crowing at the roof. Then she giggles.
“How long has it been?” Flavia frets, checking her phone. “Five minutes? More?”
“More.” Esquibel frowns at the dark trap door and the stairs leading down. “Maybe we send someone to check on them…”
Flavia stands. “No. No more. This is how we always lose people, remember? We are not supposed to break up.”
“Calm down, Flavia. They’re coming back.” Amy puts on her bravest smile. “Anyone like some tea?”
Nobody responds. And Pradeep and Jay don’t come back. Not for another ten minutes, not for an hour.
Finally Alonso can take no more. The pressure within him cannot be contained any longer. He groans into his hands and sobs. Miriam looks urgently at Esquibel.
“Yes. Well. I guess something is going on down there after all. Thank you, Katrina, for your warning. Now…” Esquibel’s head drops. This is going to be an absolute mountain of work. “I guess we have to figure out how the rest of us can hide.”
DW Draffin -- Lisica 