Lisica Chapters

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:

35 – My Brakes Don’t Work So Good

“Slow down, Prad. Slow.” Jay holds his side as he gingerly follows Pradeep along the western edge of Tenure Grove.

Pradeep stops and takes out his phone. He opens a notepad app and dictates, “25 April, 9:33 am. Jay has just uttered the words ‘slow down’ for the first time in his life ever, to my knowledge.”

“Oh, he’s a comedian. Like a real funny guy.” Jay winces as he stops beside his friend, his left hand splayed protectively across his ribs. “Fuckin A, this didn’t hurt nearly as much the day of. What did Doctor Daine do to me? I thought her stitch-up went so well.”

“It is just healing. You know, that thing you will never sit still long enough to do?”

“Getting my blood flowing is also good for healing. I just got to make sure I don’t engage, well, like my entire left side. Turns out, it’s amazing how much you use the left side of your ribcage. Like putting on my sandals. Even the slip ons need me to lift my legs in a way that is just no no no bueno.”

Pradeep stops at the base of a huge coast live oak. “And here is as far as I’ll bring you. I even brought a tarp for you to lie on. The leaves are all prickly.” He unfolds it and spreads it on the ground under the boughs.

Jay sinks to his knees with a groan. “Oh, hell yeah. Now just feed me some lunch, baby, and you got yourself a date.”

But Pradeep is excited to get started. His face is already pointed at the canopy. This is a massive oak, as much as thirty meters high. He might be able to get about twenty meters up. Now. How to start? The massive trunk rises far above his reach before it divides. There are no obvious handholds. “Well. This is why we train.”

“Bro, you seriously ready to do this? They said you just flatlined on a cot like a couple nights ago.”

Pradeep stops and assesses his fitness, hands on hips. “I am somehow better than I have any right to be. Not perfect. My sternum still hurts. But I’m not nearly as weak as yesterday. Just don’t tell the Doctor we’re doing this.”

“No doubt. Well come on, then. Get on that bad boy. I want to see you pull some gnarly parkour shit up there.”

Pradeep takes out a length of climbing rope about twelve meters long. In one end he ties an alpine hitch. The other end he throws over the lowest crook in the trunk. Then he feeds that end through the loop of the hitch and pulls the rope tight.

“Bingo bango bongo, our boy is ready to roll.”

Pradeep dries his hands on his pants, takes a deep breath, and pulls himself hand over hand up the rope. It is too narrow and cuts into his palms. Gritting his teeth, kicking his toes up crevices in the rough bark, he rises one meter, then two. Somewhere between three and four meters is where he can hook his elbow around a nearly horizontal branch as thick as his leg. Then he swings his foot into the crook where his rope disappears. He shakes the pain out of his hands and peers upward through the greenery. “No real path yet available. This old Quercus agrifolia bastard has just extended itself in every direction. Need a loop.”

Pulling at the rope under his foot, he removes it from the tree. Then he makes a wider arborist’s loop of it on one end and gives himself a second one on the other end. He swings them into the branches, catching onto holds that are sometimes secure enough to bear his weight. He swings out and up, cheered on by Jay’s faint whoops from below. Finally he gets to branches built to a human scale. He sits in a fork of the limbs like a saddle, breathing hard, coiling the ropes and stowing them in his daypack. He takes out a Dyson reader. “After the last storm,” he calls out, “I was doing pull-ups on a branch of that coast fir beside you. And I found the remains of a huge uprooted porcini, just resting on the branch. At first I thought someone had put it up there as a joke. But that was impossible. The storm had blown it down onto the branch from above. So. Logically, giant mushrooms are up here somewhere.”

“Giant edible mushrooms.”

“Likely but uncertain. It was in end stages, just almost a clump of slime. So I’m like 98% sure it was porcini. Couldn’t use the branch after that. No grip. Now up here, I don’t see any troubles yet…” The outer edges of the oak are hung with long Spanish mosses but the interior, along the old trunk and branch lines where he climbs, are mostly dry and clear of life. He needs to get higher.

“Hey, hold the fucking phone. What kind of fir did you say that was?” Jay pulls his eyes from Pradeep’s exploits to study it.

“Coast fir of some variety. I hadn’t identified it. Just used it for pullups. No, the mushroom took my attention first—”

“Cause look at these bristlecones. Seriously, this is a bristlecone fir, dude. This might just be an actual Santa Lucia. Rarest fir tree in the world, dude. Only found in the canyons of Big Sur. Whoa. Seriously. Oh my god. We found an honest to goodness Abies bracteata Santa Lucia on Lisica. Holy shit. We’re gonna be like rockstar famous when we get back. You realize that, right?”

“NDA, Jay.”

“Shit. Right. Forgot about that. Well, some day.”

“Famous?” Pradeep blanches and swings up into the high branches, a good fifteen meters from the ground. “No thank you. I never need to be famous. Just give me a twenty year grant and a cabin somewhere and I will send you papers at regular intervals.”

Pradeep’s motion startles a nesting osprey. The massive black bird launches into the air with a shrill cry, screaming for its mate.

“Oh, no way! You got to get out of there, Prad! Sea eagles are super mean! Territorial! They can fuck you up!”

The osprey wheels into the sky. Now they see the gray and white highlights on her nearly three meter wingspan. She is a cunning hunter and a fierce protector of her nest. She wings quickly back to the tree, swooping past Pradeep, screeching at him.

“Yeah… Yeah, not good here…” Pradeep retreats, hiding behind two narrow trunks growing together. “See here’s a real operational flaw in Alonso’s plan.” He ducks as the osprey swings back at him, beating the nearby branches with her wings. “Theoretically, we are supposed to be collecting samples from every life form on the island.” She circles the tree and tries to attack him from the far side, but the leafy cover is thicker there and she peels away. “So who is going to get the osprey sample, you or me?”

“And her mate.”

“And the eggs? There must be eggs up there. Or hatchlings.”

“I mean, there are…” But the osprey has returned again, interrupting Jay. “There are protocols for sure. We just don’t, I mean, I didn’t bring any gear for trapping and sedating large raptors, did you?”

And now they hear the second osprey, out hunting over the water, returning with cries of urgency. Pradeep makes a quick decision. “Okay. Coming down quick. You might want to, uh, watch out.”

Jay moves as quickly as he can, which is agonizingly slow. He needs to get under cover. Pradeep runs out the limb he’s on and drops crashing down through the outer branches he can reach.

Both ospreys come in hard, reaching through the thicket for him with grasping talons and razor beaks. Pradeep yelps and releases his grip, falling onto a clump of others below. Then he rolls off them to land heavily on the ground. He scrambles away, unhurt, to join Jay under the protective eaves of the Santa Lucia fir. They peer upward. The birds have gone silent.

A trilling whistle pierces the air. Jay realizes it’s being repeated. He just couldn’t pick it out before during all the crashing and screaming birds. He and Pradeep step out and look up, to see a figure far above, a tiny dark silhouette in the canopy of one of the neighboring redwoods, nearly a hundred meters up.

The ospreys wing up toward the figure on a nearby thermal, who holds something out to them. Whoever it is stands on the branch with no concern for the height. They appear to be unsecured, just waiting for the birds. The lead eagle snatches the offering from the human’s hand. Somehow mollified by this, the pair of great birds return to their nest together.

Pradeep and Jay share expressions of open-mouthed shock.

Ξ

Esquibel wakes late. She lies alone on her cot, wrapped in fleece blankets and covered in Mandy’s sleeping bag. She is warm and snug, with no real memory of what came before. Oh, that’s right. Last night was dancing. Celebration. The return of the men.

She yawns and stretches, sitting up. This narrow cell closest to the clean room has become her own. She has not decorated it in any way, but the one clear wall has been filled with shelves stacked with trays and boxes. All the tools of her trade. They are what identify her. Sometimes she wonders what her life would have been like a thousand years ago. She’d be some hedge witch in a village with her stock of plants and poultices and people would hike for days to find her. But she would probably have to live as a hermit in the mountains after they found her in bed with a woman. It would be just her in a hut, alone with the leopards and the crocs.

Something itches in her cleavage, under the tank top she wears when she sleeps. She adjusts it and finds a slip of paper, like what you’d find in a fortune cookie, against her skin. She takes it out, assuming that it’s some manufacturer tag that came loose in the night. But it isn’t. It’s rice paper, folded endwise, so that when she unfolds it three times it’s as long as an uncooked noodle. And there’s writing on it.

DATA INSUFFICIENT. MORE OR NO DEAL. WEDNESDAY NIGHT. SAME LOC AS BEFORE. BURN THIS NOW.

Esquibel goes cold. How…? She covers her breastbone with her palms, hunching over protectively. Where did this come from? How did they get in here? Mandy was here with her at one point, wasn’t she? Oh, the violation! How could this happen?

Then the ice is replaced with fury. How dare they take this risk! So sloppy. Is this what she is getting involved with? No no no, this is too unsafe. If their spycraft is this loose then it certainly increases her own risk. She might break off the deal just because of that.

And what is this about asking for more? Such bald manipulation. Also very concerning. They obviously have no idea how to lure in an asset. Ugh. She may have gone in too hard about Dissatisfaction With The Americans in her contact letter. Now they must think she’s desperate. Well she isn’t. She’s… well, more than anything she’s offended. Legitimacy is hard to come by in this world, especially for an African woman. With this reckless contact she feels like she has been relegated to some lower division. Fine. If nothing else, that will just increase her price.

But she has no more USB sticks to spare. And she has no idea how to find one. Well. Keep her eyes out. It is all she can do. And yes. She will make herself some tea and use the stovetop to burn this note, then if anyone complains of the smoke she can stage a paper napkin or something catching fire.

Ehh, she had woken with such… relaxation. She had been empty. Now she is all anxiety and duplicity. This note is like that black splinter in the bull kelp, its existence solitary but still distorting the whole world around it. Horrible.

Ξ

Triquet wakes before Miriam does. They are tangled together, almost entirely naked. Oh dear, Triq. What have you done now? Never been a homewrecker before. Triquet squeezes their face shut, trying to make all the parts work. Their eyes are too dry. Their mouth. All the muscles of their face and jaw ache. And their neck and shoulders. It’s all a painful mess.

But Lord that was fun. Well, it started with fun. Then it got so goddamn touching and meaningful they couldn’t stand it, with poor Alonso wandering through his internal halls of grief. Then it got fun again, then it got… well… super hot and heavy. What an absolute shocker. Nothing Triquet had ever experienced before. Miriam is by far the best lover they’ve ever had. She was tender and fierce and artful and just so, so connected to Triquet’s every need and desire. Good golly, this is how it’s supposed to be? An ache rises in Triquet’s chest, a deep pang of regret over all the wasted years of fumbling hesitancy and miscommunication. Miriam had driven their body like a fucking speedboat through the waters, her hands and lips so sure.

And now what? Triquet can’t just let that go. It was revelatory, more precious than gold. They’d do anything to have a repeat of it, tonight if she’s willing. But on the other hand, this is a man’s wife. Your boss. Your boss who was tortured for five years and spent all night weeping out his trauma. And here you were, two tents over, banging his wife, singing Siouxsie and the Banshees. Eesh. Not a good look, Triq. And just not, well, what good people do.

Now what? Well, keeping secrets really isn’t Triquet’s way. If it was, they’d have just kept their birth gender and birth name and lived a private life of fantasy in a closet somewhere. But they just couldn’t ever keep their big mouth shut. Fuck. Their sigh sounds more like a groan of pain. It wakes Miriam and she smiles.

“Gor, I feel like shite.” She laughs, a croupy sound. Triquet counts the wrinkles at her eyes, realizing again how many years separate them. Miriam stretches and untangles her arms. “Way too old to be the party people. How you doing, lover?” And she kisses Triquet on the tip of their nose.

“Well, that’s one relief. That you aren’t waking up screeching, ‘What have I done?’ So thanks for that.”

“Why?” Miriam frowns. “What did we do? Nothing indecent, right? I don’t really think…”

“I mean, nothing…” Triquet grasps for a delicate way to put it, “…well, penetrative, but…”

“Exactly. Just some good old-fashioned fooling around. I mean, my menopause is almost upon me, dear, but birth control is still a thing in my life. Assuming you’re…”

“I’m not, I mean we can’t…” But Triquet doesn’t have the brain power this morning or the will to discuss it. “So we’re not…? We’re still friends, yeah? I didn’t ruin anything?”

“Ruin…? Honey, anyone who spends an hour going down on me isn’t ruining a thing. Mother Mary, when I finally came I thought the sky exploded.”

Triquet giggles, worry sheeting from them. “As long as you kept telling stories about Patty Smith and Debbie Harry I couldn’t keep my hands off you. Jesus, Miriam. You’ve met everybody.”

“Well, no. I was just very seriously into dancing in the clubs for a good fifteen years. It may be hard to imagine now, but I had this very particular look that, well, it just worked for me.”

Triquet finds it very easy to imagine, this long-legged, red-headed Irish girl gyrating elegantly under the lights. She must have been a legend. They put a hand on Miriam’s forearm. “You know, um. I have to tell Alonso. About last night. I hope you understand…” But Miriam laughs aloud. “What?”

“No way. We might have to race. I want to tell him first. But I guess you can if you want. He’ll love this.”

“Oh.” This is a scenario Triquet hadn’t considered. “For real? He won’t be jealous or…?”

“Oh, he’ll be fiendishly jealous. But only because he missed out. Not sure how you feel about my big Cuban bear, but I’m sure he’ll want to be part of the fun next time.” Miriam puts a tender hand against Triquet’s heart. “Assuming there is a next time.”

Triquet shakes their head in wonder. “God, who are you people and why has it taken me so long to find you? Of course. Yes, please. I’ve had a crush on Alonso since I first met him. Who wouldn’t? It would be an honor and a pleasure and, like a whole-ass fantasy come true. Just maybe give me a day or two to recover. I’m not as young as I used to be.” Triquet sighs again, and once more it sounds like a groan. They sit up and a headache announces itself. “Water.”

“Good call. Let’s find some.”

They stumble from the tent and the platform hand in hand.

Ξ

Amy sits at the long table in the sub’s belowdecks, facing Morska Vidra and the Mayor, who haven’t yet sat in the chairs provided. At Amy’s side is Katrina, recording everything and taking notes.

Running a finger down a list of words they believe are defined, Amy pulls out, “Uh, dzaadzitch. The word you repeated when you arrived. What is that? Dzaadzitch?” Amy holds her hands out, palms up, and shrugs.

The Mayor speaks slowly. Amy picks out the word katóok.

“Hold on. Hold on…” She consults the list. “No katóok here.”

“Katóok,” Katrina reads from her Eyat glossary. “Variants: dadóok, which can mean cave. Otherwise it means interior.”

“Jay was in a cave. I mean, we’re in a cave right now.”

“Or the island’s interior…” Katrina studies the Mayor’s placid face. No clues there. Katrina points at their feet with the tip of her thumb. “Katóok?” Seeing no response she points to where she guesses the center of Lisica’s hidden valleys and canyons must be. “Or, katóok. Is it out there?”

With her own thumbtip, the Mayor agrees by pointing to the island’s interior and repeating the word katóok.

“Okay. Progress! Yes!” Katrina writes down the word on Amy’s list. “But what about dzaadzitch? There is no mention of any word like it in the lexicons. In Slavic languages the closest you’d get is, well…” She shrugs, thinking, “I mean, maybe like a baby lamb? But Lisica doesn’t have sheep.”

The Mayor interrupts her reasoning with a long, emphatic speech, with plenty more mentions of dzaadzitch and katóok.

“I mean…” Katrina shakes her head, mystified. “We have to assume it’s been a good number of generations and of course they’ve invented their own words in the meantime, especially with all the loan words they eventually got from—”

The Mayor abruptly leans across the table, speaking again, and grasps Katrina by the wrist. She pulls on her arm until their joined limbs hang suspended over the table. With her thumbtip, the Mayor indicates the length of their connected arms.

“Dzaadzitch means arms?” Amy makes the suggestion in a meek voice, hating to be wrong. She grasps her own arm. “Dzaadzitch? Yes? Your arms? Your joined arms?”

The Mayor, still holding Katrina’s arm aloft, shakes both of them for emphasis. She tries to pull it even more taut and nearly lifts Katrina from her seat.

“Wait wait wait.” Katrina struggles to regain her balance, smiling and nodding at their guests. “I think I’ve got it. It’s some kind of connection. The ‘dza’ sound is in a bunch of words. Like, uh, ‘dzáaxʼ kadz’ means ‘string connecting a pair of mittens.’ Right? Like our arms are connected, yeah? Dzaadzitch.”

The Mayor repeats the phrase dzáaxʼ kadz and smiles. She seems mollified by Katrina’s line of reasoning. The Lisican woman uses her free hand to indicate herself, explaining something with a sentence that once again ends with the word katóok.

“You are? You’re katóok? You’re the interior?” Katrina’s smile falters. Wait. Maybe it doesn’t mean what she thinks after all.

“Oh, I get it.” Amy stands. “She’s Lisica. Or the heartland or whatever. Your arms are the conduit connecting the interior world with the exterior. And then you are… well, us. Right?” Amy asks brightly, pointing at Katrina. “Scientists? Uh… Americans?”

The Mayor grunts “Merriguns,” then once more points at herself and says, “Katóok.”

“Americans here. Lisicans here. But here? Who dzaadzitch?”

This prompts a long speech by Morska Vidra, who leans on the table and lists off a number of words.

“Wait. I know that one. That’s a name? I thought it was, like, a condition. These are names he’s listing, yeah?”

Amy nods. “I think so. He keeps saying Jay.”

Repeating it makes Morska Vidra say the name Jay again.

“And Jidadaa? That’s a name? Kula, Jay, Jidadaa? And they are the dzaadzitch, the connection between the island and the outside world? Is that what we’re getting here? I think that’s what we’re getting, Katrina.”

“Okay, but what does that mean?”

“Jidadaa. That’s the key. Remember, that’s the word on the photo we showed them when they got so upset? Said all those items were kept at the other village? Now it’s a person? Maybe it’s a title. Like something hereditary, cause that was an old photo. Too old.”

The four people stand around the table smiling foolishly at each other. The Mayor has released Katrina’s arm.

Katrina goes once more through her notes. “We need to ask Jay what he remembers. Didn’t he say the woman’s name was Kula?”

“The woman with the daughter?” Amy turns to the Lisicans. “Kula…” She puts her hand at one height, then moves it to the side and drops it a bit. “Jidadaa… Yeah? Mother…” She repeats the gesture, indicating one and then the other. “…daughter.”

With a thumbtip, Morska Vidra indicates the daughter. “Jidadaa.” Then he points at The Mayor: “Dzaadzitch.”

“Aha! Progress!” Katrina makes a note of it. “So it is a name! But what does it mean? Okay, so both Jidadaa and the Mayor are what connects the inside and the out.”

“Jay says Kula stole his gear and vanished. I doubt we’ll be seeing them again. And they live on the far side of the river, where we’re forbidden on like pain of death. So… Not sure how we…”

Amy falls silent as the Mayor and Morska Vidra confer, trying to figure out how to communicate more from their end. But nothing seems to resolve. Then Morska Vidra falls silent. He grunts.

An animal sound echoes from further within the sub. It is his silver fox, bleating for them, an expressive urgent note.

Morska Vidra grunts something then turns and bends at the waist. He vanishes through the hatch.

The Mayor regards them. Although her face remains impassive, the depth of her dark gaze indicates how deeply the animal’s call and Morska Vidra’s reaction shook her.

That surprises them all. “What? What is it?” Katrina still hasn’t figured out how to ask a proper question.

For a moment the Mayor looks frail. She places a hand on the table and regards them. “Wetchie-ghuy,” she informs them, tapping at her own chin with her thumbtip. “Moj brat.”

Then she follows Morska Vidra through the hatch.

Amy releases an anxious sigh. “Whoaa. What was that?”

But Katrina can barely hear Amy. She absently shakes her head, implications and glimpses of meaning shooting through her. “Well. Either Wetchie-ghuy is in trouble, or he’s causing it.”

But Amy makes a disbelieving face. “They can tell that from a fox’s cry? Proper names? I mean, I’ve seen some amazingly complex behavior in animals, but…”

“Yeah, I didn’t think about that. Kind of wild. No, I was all caught up in what she said after that. Those were Slavic words. Wetchie-ghuy is the Mayor’s brother.”

Ξ

“Fantastico!” Flavia puts her fishing pole in the crook of her elbow and applauds Maahjabeen, who has lifted a net filled with swarming crabs and placed it atop the kayak. She paddles with urgency; the writhing mass in the net could easily slide back into the water.

“We make these crabs in Tunisia, on La Goulette. With a humiss and oil. So good. But, eh. No chickpeas here. Careful!”

But the crabs have slid back into the water and Maahjabeen almost loses her paddle lunging for the trailing rope. She draws them back to the kayak and places them back atop the deck. “Just like six more strokes!” But when she digs in with the paddle the net slides toward her and against her sprayskirt. “La! Ehhh! They’re scratching at me! I can feel them! Through the fabric of my…!” Paddling frantically, Maahjabeen brings her boat back to shore. She pushes the crab net away and pulls herself free of the boat. Then she reels them in, scowling.

But Flavia is dancing. She celebrates Maahjabeen’s bounty, lifting the net up and counting how many she can see of the wriggling pale brown crabs, some wider than her hand.

“Oh, we have so many ways in Italy of eating crab. And we can make precisely zero of them here on this island! Ha! But imagine. Crab ravioli with ricotta and spinach… Or soup. Garlic and oil…”

“You are driving yourself crazy.”

“How can you do this?” Flavia holds the crabs as Maahjabeen gathers her gear and begins hauling her kayak up the beach. “I did not know what I was getting myself into out here but you did. You do this all the time. Leave civilization. Leave garlic and wine…”

“Not wine. I do not drink.”

“No. Well, but all the finer things in the world. You all make the crazy decision, consciously, to deprive yourselves of restaurants and movies and people and for what? To come out here and catalogue the very last of the last, like a bunch of obsessive compulsive teenagers who can’t leave a few stones in the world unturned. Eh? Why must you live like this? Like monks and nuns.”

“Yes, I think that is part of it.” Maahjabeen looks out over the ocean, shining in alternating bands of silver and gray. “We know that the knowledge we gain out here is deeper. We are that much closer to God.”

“Eh. God. If we are going to be friends then we will have to talk about this god.”

Maahjabeen stops, a storm quick to form in her eyes. “Eh? What about God?”

“I know your religion is very important to you but you will have to understand I have no faith. No god has ever spoken to me. So in that way we are very different. Just please. Keep it in mind.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I’m quite aware that I’m surrounded by unbelievers. It is the way of things, not just for me but for any Muslim who ventures out. You people always make me, eh, code-switch or you threaten me with your atheist outrage. As if an atheist has any basis to feel outrage. I never understand that. Rage, sure, anger and irritation. All that. But I have atheists come at me in the West filled with righteous fury. How is that possible? Where is the righteousness coming from if they are without God?”

“I think it is just people who have been hurt by religion in the past and the outrage comes from those injuries.”

“Yes, well, God is everywhere. And He is good. And so you will not ever get me to stop talking about Allah. He is the Light.”

“Well, you will never get me to stop telling you to stop. So there.”

“Eh. We are a proper Mediterranean standoff.”

“The Fourth Punic War.”

They walk companionably into the camp.

Ξ

Finally the world has stopped spinning. Alonso hasn’t slept all night. Life has beaten down all his doors and he has no defenses left. He is just a bare soul, trapped deep within himself, battered and bloody.

But the fight is over, at least for the time being. He can… rest? No, there’s no rest in him. He is blasted, strung out, attenuated by the chemicals into something less than human. Wrung dry.

How can his muscles be so sore when he has hardly moved for the last, what, eighteen hours? Ai, he is too old for this shit. Party drugs are a young man’s game. It’s easy when you’re twenty-two and pliable as a willow tree. Now he’s skeletal. There’s no bounce back, no sunny disposition to rely upon. Just a broken old man forced to face the remainder of his life with scars and demons and a slow tapering good night. Ugh. This is not the life he signed up for. Claustrophobia drags at him, pulling him into a desperate panic. No no no. This is not how the end will be for Doctor Sergio Alonso Saavedra Colon Ramirez Aguirre. He will not suffer pain. He stares at its baleful inescapability and finds a fatalistic Latin chuckle. No, he will not suffer pain. He will enjoy it.

“I will celebrate it!” His voice is ghastly, hoarse and (yes!) painful! “Nessun Dorma! Nessun Dorma!” Oh it’s like his throat is on fire.

“Knock knock.” Jay climbs the ramp to the Love Palace, his form a shadow behind the mesh.

“Yes, Jay.”

The tent is unzipped and the curly mop of reddish-blond curls ducks through. The youth grins and unslings a small satchel. “How you doing today, O Jefe my Jefe?”

“Fantastic.” Alonso doesn’t care if the boy is immune to his heavy sarcasm. He lets him have it. “Dancing on the ceiling.”

Jay laughs. “Yeah, been there, my dude. The coming-down blues. The worst one I ever heard… One of my high school buddies joined the Marines and he was like stationed in the Philippines?And they dropped acid right before some guerrillas ambushed them in the jungle. He was tripping hard, like peaking, when he got shot. He said he could feel the bullet pushing through his skin and every cell of his body reacting in super-slow—”

“Jay.” Alonso puts up an urgent hand. “Jay. Not another word.”

“Ten-four, boss. Anyway, Miriam sent me in. Said you’d need some of my medicine.”

“Water.”

Jay lifts a familiar metal cylinder from his satchel. “Hot water in the thermos. Here you go. But sip. It’s fucking pipin’, bro. We’ll just pour some into the lid. Now check it out. Honey packets. Amy said she was saving them for a special occasion and I guess this counts. Yeah, get it all in there. That’ll do it.”

Alonso has never experienced anything so soothing. He wants the honey and hot water to continue forever; it is such an immense relief. What an idiot. He had begun his drug trip absolutely drunk. And then he had screamed and cried for hours. None of it good for his throat. And never enough water. But this is like the oasis in the desert. “Gracias, muchas gracias, Jay. I am restored.”

“Miriam said you’d also appreciate one of my little juh-highnts. Ease the pains, dull the edges, get the flow back to flowing.” Jay pulls out a pair of thin joints and presents them against his upraised palm. “One will wake you up and one will let you sleep. Your choice. But they’ve both got some killer terpenes for healing—”

Alonso waves him away. “No. My poor throat. It would kill…”

“Right. Roger that.” Jay is crestfallen. But after a quick moment he perks back up. “Wait! I made some oil! Hold up!”

Before Alonso can protest Jay is back through his tent flap and hurrying across the sand to his hammock. He returns moments later, holding his left side. “Got to slow down, man. Shit hurts. Get too excited about life sometimes.”

Alonso only stares at him with a dull expression. His physical pain is fading now but the mental… it is like his brain is made of concrete. All the channels collapsed and depleted.

Jay pours a dollop of oil into Alonso’s lid cup, nodding like a mad sage. “This’ll cure what ails ya, Jefe. Super strong. You’ll sleep like a baby now. That’s what you need, right?”

“I am…” Alonso swallows, squeezing his eyes shut in pain, “I am currently suffering from the side effects of my last drug trip and you want to fix this by giving me more drugs? Madness. So what will it be with this one? What are the side effects?”

“I already told you. Sleep like a baby. The primary effects will be psychokinetic with some heavy visuals if you let them happen. But then it will knock you the fuck out and when you wake up it will be out of your neural pathways and just stored in your fat for another week or two. You won’t pass any drug tests, that’s for sure. But, I mean, it’s just weed, Alonso. It isn’t a drug.”

Alonso laughs. “You are crazy.” But the siren song of oblivion calls to him and Jay is the only one offering him a way there. “I do need to rest. Well. ¡Salud!” Alonso sips at the water, then finding it not too hot now, he tosses it all back and grins.

The oil puts a vegetal tinge on the back of his tongue. And he doesn’t know if he’s still tripping from the night before or if this is a whole new thing, but he senses filaments growing from the oil into the wall of his trachea, spreading outward like one of Pradeep’s underground fungal networks into every bit of him. A sigh from deep in his bowels takes the concrete out of him. Now he is like a discarded pile of clothes, tossed on the bed. He falls back, heavily, onto the cot and pillows.

Jay laughs in surprise and reaches for Alonso to break his fall but he winces instead and covers the wound to his left side. All he can do is grab the man’s leg.

But Alonso didn’t feel a thing. He is now sailing on a peaceful cloud. He can’t believe the effects hit so soon. This must be a Pavlovian response. A placebo… A palliative. And all the other nice P words he can think of, por su puesto. He grins at handsome Jay from the cot. “No no. I’m okay.”

“Yeah, whoa. Look at you. Yeah, you are. I’ll check up on you from time to time. Make sure you stay that way. So… things went well last night? You covered some ground? I mean, I don’t know if you’re ready to talk about it.”

“It was fine. Everything is fine.” And everything really is. Alonso wonders if this is part of Katrina and Mandy’s therapy. Hit him with the hard stuff to begin then have the gentle hippie boy show up with his balms in the morning. “You are the nicest fellow.”

“Wait til I get you an omelette. Then you’ll think I’m a god.”

They both laugh. Alonso realizes how hungry he is. “Oh, yes, pretty please, my darling. Sorry. My dude. No, it was…” He sighs again, collecting his thoughts. He owes it to Jay to give him a serious answer after the nice things he has done for him. “I can’t say it was hard because it took no effort from me to go back to those horrible places. And something about the way the drugs work meant I didn’t try to run away. So there was no… no struggle on my part, you understand? It was like once it started I was just along for the ride. So I do not blame myself for anything. It would be like getting flushed down the toilet and blaming yourself instead of the sewer for how you smell.” Ah, he likes that analogy. His brain is working again. “What an amazing oil you made. The flow is indeed flowing again. And I am very grateful. I had to face the men who tortured me last night and there was a lot of… yes, a lot of ground that I covered, but still I feel like I have been in a fucking riot. I am just beat up, inside and out. I remember… I remember Triquet was such a sweetheart. And Mandy… I swore she was pulling long shards of glass from my legs. I howled. Or I think I did. Maybe it was only inside my head.”

“No, you definitely howled. For hours.”

“Oh. Well. My apologies to everyone.”

“We were all so glad! I mean, she was barely touching you. But she’s got the gift. Mandy said I’ve got to heal more before she’ll lay hands on me like that but I can’t wait. Girl makes me scream.”

“But how are you?” Alonso reaches out and clasps Jay’s solid forearm. His skin is so soft, the corded muscles beneath admirable and worthy of envy. He is youth personified. The MDMA must not be entirely out of Alonso’s system. Something of the night’s glow illuminates the contact between the two men.

Jay is quite used to spending his time with people on drugs. He leans back, lights his daytime joint, and just shrugs. “Pretty good. Just chillin’. Trying not to open the stitches. Do not want to set myself back, know what I mean?”

Alonso nods. “Yes, but how are you after your… your ordeal? Tell me more. What did it look like, the rest of the island? The island that we will now never see?”

“Yeah, sorry about that. I had no idea that I was bringing about an end to an era! I was just following the job description, man.”

“No. This isn’t over. You made important new allies and it sounds as though there is now maybe a path to speak to this interior village. This… what did Amy call it?”

“We’re calling it the Katóok village now. The one on the other side of the river. And this one at the tunnel mouth with the Mayor is the Dzaadzitch Village, the connecting village.”

“Someone will need to write these words down. I cannot keep them in my head.”

“Sure thing. Yeah. Maybe I do need a full-on molly and massage debriefing like you had here. I mean, not that what I went through is anything like your nightmare, but—”

“Jay, you had screaming natives chasing you through caves with spears! I would say yes! Let Katrina and Mandy heal you. If you are having trouble getting past it, I mean, who wouldn’t after what happened to you?”

“You know, the whole time I was pretty sure you would all be so pissed at me for leaving. I was super stoked when I came back and everyone was so nice.”

“No, we were very angry. It was a very stupid thing. At times you are truly a dangerous moron.”

“Fair enough. Yeah, there’s a third village in there somewhere. And then I guess a whole bunch of other free agents like Kula and Jidadaa floating around. Wetchie-ghuy and his whole deal. But this one thing they said, I couldn’t make sense of. So Jidadaa, she’s only half Lisican, right? She never knew her father, one of the men, right? She said that the men are gone but the men still come. I mean, what does that even…? Blew my freaking mind.”

“Men? I mean, if we just replace the word with soldiers it makes more sense, no? The soldiers left and the soldiers still come. Maybe they had a regular base but now there’s only periodic visits.”

“Poor women. Outcast from all the villages but still stuck here. They said they’d come back with me and I thought we could…” Jay shrugs. “I don’t know. We’d figure something out. Thought we had a deal. But they snaked my shit instead!”

“And they spoke English?”

“Jidadaa spoke some. She’s a smart girl.”

“Good. Good…” Alonso struggles to say more, but his demons seem to have returned. He can hear them calling in the distance, taunting him with their gleeful agonies in a variety of Russian dialects. They are not vanquished, merely held at bay. Well. It is the other side of the MDMA, is it not? It provides respite. But maybe he will never heal, not fully. Not even with Jay’s herbs.

Jay watches the hopeless pall cast over his patient’s eyes. He grabs Alonso’s forearm in turn, like they’re Romans greeting each other. “You know what you need, my brother? You need a good swim. We need to wash your ass clean.”

“I smell that bad?” Alonso is able to unearth a fossilized smile.

“No. Not literally. The opposite of literally. You smell fine.”

“Figuratively.”

“Yeah, that. Also, it gets the weight off your feet and it’s so absolutely fucking cold it all goes numb in just a minute anyway. Can you swim?”

“Yes, I am a good swimmer.”

“You rest. Just let the oil do its work. And when you get up, we’ll get you in the water.”

“Yes, Jay. But wait.”

Jay slowly gathers his things. “Don’t slow me down now. I’m gonna go get that omelette going for you.”

“Listen. I am a data scientist. Of all the people here, I think of the big picture the most. That is my specialty in my field. Yes?”

“Sure. That’s why they pay you the big bucks.”

“There is something happening across many fronts here in Lisica. Not just among what Plexity tells us about the life here, but in a wider sense. The military is unveiling the island in May. You have caused some prophecy to come to life that spells the end of an era. Those children with the golden masks. We are here to witness some change, some transformation, from one world to the next.”

“Yep yep.” Jay nods soberly. “We definitely live in a time of accelerating change. And me, my brakes don’t work so good.”