Chapter 37 – Wetchie-Ghuy
September 9, 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:
37 – Wetchie-Ghuy
“There he is. Hey, guess what?” Katrina comes upon Alonso in the morning on the beach. He is standing bare-chested at the edge of the water, looking out, idly running his fingers through his chest hair in a vulnerable moment of introspection.
He only slowly breaks his reverie and turns back to her. His eyes are still cloudy with thought and his smile is distracted.
“I said, ‘guess what?’ Alonso.”
“Eh, yes? Time for a guessing game?”
“The dam has broke! The secrets are out! All the mysteries have been revealed! Well. Not all of them, but… I’ve been talking with Jidadaa all night and this morning and boy do I have a lot of news. Just endless revelations. But the single most fascinating thing she told me? The island doesn’t have music, it’s true. It’s because the two sisters who founded the island didn’t like music. They came from, well, it must have been one of the old Eyat villages on the Alaska coast. And when they got here they just never passed music down. No songs, no melodies. In all this time Jidadaa is the only one. She had music introduced to her by whatever soldier was with her mother at the time. She sings. They were a shipwreck, like over two hundred years ago. They’ve had fourteen generations, maybe fifteen, depending on if any of her peers have had kids, which she doesn’t know because she’s been in hiding her entire life. Sorry. Babbling now. There was a lot! She is utterly fascinating. I’ve never met someone whose brain works like hers. She got her own… I mean, she says Kula told her when she was little that she would have to teach herself about the world. So Jidadaa built her own way of handling reality from the ground up. I mean, she has whole different ways to access memory and reason and… and everything! This is when the team really needs to have a trained psychiatrist or neurologist on board because wow. This girl is… sui generis.”
“Two hundred years… without music…” Alonso shakes his head, doleful. “Now that is my idea of hell. No. Purgatory. This would be a cold gray purgatory for me if I could not live with my music.”
“Absolutely. Could you imagine? My whole life has a soundtrack. I don’t know who I’d be without it.”
“Forgive me, Katrina, but I have been swimming naked and I was just about to take these things off. So I hope you are aware of European bathing traditions down in Australia.”
“Yeh, get your knickers off. I don’t care. But can you even tell how excited I am? I haven’t slept all night. Jidadaa is a treasure.”
“Yes, Katrina. You’re very excited.” Alonso strips his sweatpants off and steps out of them. His skin is pale beneath, with dark black hairs curling against the backs of his thighs. A single long purple stripe of scar tissue runs down his left hamstring. Several dark indentations on his calves look like puncture wounds. He shivers, then shuffles into the sea. As soon as he can he pushes off and breast strokes out past the tiny waves. He elongates his gasp of cold shock into the opening lines of Carmina Burana. “Ooooo Fortuna, velut Luna…!”
Katrina pulls her tights up to her knees and wades out. “So we should have like a full team session here sometime today because I’ve got a lot of answers for our questions. And some really trippy, creepy stuff too. Things they shouldn’t know about us but they already do. Like, somehow she could tell that Flavia was marked by Wetchie-ghuy for slavery. Said Pradeep was too, which I don’t understand at all. Says Wetchie-ghuy is locked in a mortal duel with the other like big shaman on the island. The rest of us are just pawns in their big game, according to her. And Kula has kept herself alive playing one off against the other since she’s been outcast. I mean, there’s just a ton of stuff here.”
Alonso paddles a slow circle before her. The cold is more than bracing. Miriam was right. But if he can just get his old heart going maybe he can warm up and stay out here longer this time. Because the release of pain in his feet and legs and hips and back is better than any drug, better than any sex or meal or even Mozart opera. It is bliss hanging suspended here. Pure bliss.
“She says we’re totally right about the Katóok village. They really are out to kill us if we trespass on their land. But they’re only in a couple big valleys in the center of the island and we should be able to avoid them. But yeh, there’s a third village we haven’t seen. She says she’s never seen it either. But it’s over, well, her guess is it’s on the west side of the island and she doesn’t really know anything about them. Because none of them talk to each other. There’s no trade or intermarrying or anything. No contact if they can all help it. Part of the duel between the shamans, and how they manipulate the villagers, but also she said it’s because of Jidadaa.”
“It is because of her?”
“That’s what I thought she meant at first too. But no. Jidadaa isn’t a name. It’s a word that means some horrible end is going to come for you because you violated the ancient customs and pissed off the ancestors. And it can take whole generations to play out. So somebody broke some old law like a hundred years ago and it was so bad nobody’s spoken to each other since.”
“Hold on. I am going to try to put my head underwater. But I don’t want to miss what you are saying. That is crazy. The woman named her daughter The Apocalypse.”
“Basically.” But Alonso has disappeared from view. Katrina should have brought him her snorkel and mask. Although it probably wouldn’t fit. His head is so freaking wide. And she is still just a little girl. Like Jidadaa. When they asked her how old she was she didn’t know. Jay guesses she’s like twenty. Katrina thinks she’s younger and that life has just been hard.
Alonso emerges with a gasp. He had stayed down in that emerald kingdom beneath the waves as long as he could. Expecting silence, the slap of waves against nearby rocks and the click and buzz of the creatures in the kelp and on the reefs surprised him. Why, it is as common as birdsong up here above. Life is truly everywhere. A familiar conviction fills him: Plexity is a necessity!
Once he surfaces, Katrina continues. “I figure we should try to get Kula out of there. She’s like hemmed in, it sounds like. Maybe we can get Esquibel to do a wellness check or something. I don’t know. I feel so bad for them. It’s amazing how sweet Jidadaa is after the childhood she had.”
“Ask her if she knows how to swim. This is… life-altering.”
“Isn’t it? It is so amazing in there. Although I haven’t been back in since I speared that barracuda. You, eh, heard about that, yeah? The fur seal and everything?”
“Ha. If something bites me in here I will bite right back. Oh, my dear! You have no idea what it is like to have the pain vanish. I can think again! I can… I can allow myself to feel things! It is not all doom and gloom and suffering! For just a brief moment I am the Alonso of old!”
He laughs and throws a brilliant smile at her and she is struck by the force of his charisma. Ye gods. Is this the star she’s hooked her wagon to? Just with that one glance he is easily one of the most handsome men she has ever seen. Like some Italian movie star.
But he can’t maintain it and his face collapses back into careworn age. He rolls onto his back with a sigh and floats easily with all this fat on him. Alonso stares at the clouded sky, at peace.
Ξ
Triquet wakes, their eyes snapping open. In their cell they sit up, filled with clear purpose. They haven’t been this eager to get to work since they discovered the sub.
Vera Kim. If they were going to bring anyone to Lisica to study the island and its inhabitants, Triquet would call on their old friend Vera. Or Vera’s patron at Trinity College, Doctor Amina Nousrat. Pound for pound, they could bring the most insight and expertise of anyone in the world to this project. Vera has published on Polynesian language evolution, she’s lived in like Tierra del Fuego with the Selk’nam and presented their artifacts at archaeological conferences. And on top of that she’s a crackerjack ethno-botanist. If anyone could figure out how the Lisicans have evolved to integrate into their environment, it would be her.
Instead, the team brought only-partially-trained Triquet. Nearly none of their real strengths are being used here. Now, if Lisica was a 1950’s roller rink that had been abandoned in the 70’s in like Aurora, Illinois, Triquet would shine so bright. But here, without the internet or most research resources, it’s all guesswork and bad theories and needles in haystacks.
Until now. Jidadaa is the best needle they could ever hope for. And she even speaks English! Triquet tries to order their thoughts, then remembers that last night they took assiduous notes. They even gave themself a to-do list for this morning. There. All the thinking has already been done. Today it’s nothing but a ton of investigative footwork.
They start with a mug of tea, provided kindly by Amy. Then it’s out to their tent where most of their clothes still are. Kind of cold today. Maybe the thicker skirt with tights beneath. Clogs. Ooo yes! A kind of hausfrau look. An orange bandana, folded into a triangle and covering their head, completes it. Now if they just had a pilly old green rayon cardigan and some horn-rimmed cat-eyes they could vanish into anonymity in 1982 Stuttgart.
After completing their toilet it’s off to the sub. Down… down… Only in the last couple days have they been able to get back into the real swing of things. They’d begun a pass on the personal papers of Master Sergeant Chester Ernest Radick. Now that they’d integrated all the relevant quartermaster reports and tallies into a timeline, Triquet would be able to match up Radick’s notes and diary entries to specific events from 1954 to 1957 that marked a change on the island, such as ship arrivals and deliveries.
But they ain’t gonna work on such dry material this morning! No no no. They set aside that project and turn once more to the diaries of Colonel Ingles. All his texts have been properly analyzed and they’d thought any more effort put into them here would be a slow slog. These pages have already been pretty finely combed.
But then Jidadaa showed up and blew the doors off everyone’s expectations. Too bad she is only an oral resource. Triquet needs things! And it sounds like most of the interesting artifacts are still being held by the Katóoks, which is a damn shame because that meant the researchers will almost certainly never see them. Oh, but what data Triquet could extract from a few old blankets and bracelets…! Ah, well.
The one thing they want to locate again is a passing mention Ingles made soon after he arrived here. Tuzhit. A word they’ve now heard in a variety of contexts. Last night, sitting in a little cross-legged circle with Amy and Katrina and Jidadaa, they heard it again. It’s a name. Perhaps the central name of all Lisican culture. It was Tuzhit and the two sisters who first landed here, a long time ago when the island was truly empty. They brought their Lisica arctic fox with them. He is the great father figure of the island. And that ceremony they had last week was in honor of him. Ingles even mentioned him somewhere! Triquet is sure of it. But where?
Their pale hand hovers over the chronologically-ordered spines of blue hardcover diaries, stained yellow and black. 1956 was the year the Americans seemed to have the greatest contact with the islanders. Not that they wrote anywhere about their impressions of the people they found. No, these colonizers were far too racist to see the Lisicans as anything other than background noise. But they did mention a few native names when discussing how they solved certain problems.
Triquet opens Colonel Ingles’ diary from 1956. His spidery, formal script recorded brief passages as dry as dust. Triquet shakes their head in despair of ever truly knowing this man. Can you imagine? This is how he was even in his own personal papers. These were the private reflections he shared with himself. And all of them were some variation on, “Cold tonight. Hanging nets to kill birds so we don’t waste any more rifle ammo. Prayed for N. and C.”
A little convulsive shiver shoots through Triquet. Lord, these people were so repressed. Generational repression, going all the way back to the shriveled bosom of Queen Victoria and the goddamn Puritans. Where’s your hopes and dreams, Phil? Your secret longings? You probably told everyone you didn’t have any. Triquet recalls their own grandfather, a man who proudly said his whole life he never dreamed at night. Not one dream ever. And he also thought the pinnacle of American comedy was The Three Stooges. Ugh. Things back then were just so… basic.
Although it comforts Triquet to immerse themself in these long lost days, they can really only do it through the meta-ironic kaleidoscopic lens of their modern life. Good grief, if Triquet had been born, as Phil Ingles had, in 1922, there’s simply no way they would have made it to adulthood. Barring a one-way ticket to Berlin or Paris they would have thrown themself under the blade of a combine harvester or whatever when they were like sixteen.
No… Not in this diary. Perhaps 1957? Well, wait. There’s only a bit about the island starting in 1955. So begin at the beginning and work your way through, Triq. “I know I saw Tuzhit somewhere!”
Their voice rings hollowly in the silent sub. Ooo, creepy. Maybe they can summon Tuzhit’s spirit. That would solve some mysteries for sure. Leafing through the brittle pages, they call out the same words again, “I… saw… Tuzhit! Somewhere!” They listen….
No… No spirit dwelling down here. No ghosts. Ha. Maybe that is how Triq would have made their way a hundred years ago. They would be Madame Doucette, spiritualist and palm reader. Lots of black lace and a collection of veils. Conducting seances and eating mummy body parts. They would have been a huge hit.
No, no mention of Tuzhit in 1955… This might be a very long day. Wait. There it is. Right at the end. December 22, 1955. “By signs I attempted to ask the men if their Tuzhit had celebrated Christmas but the primitives had no idea of the custom.”
Triquet goes to their laptop and opens the file of notes they’d created for this diary. And there, the question ‘Tuhzit? A god?’ stares back at them, the h and z transposed, defeating all attempts to locate it with command F. Triquet makes the minor correction, their OCD eventually simmering down.
Now, to the actual significance of the statement… Why would Tuzhit celebrate Christmas? If he set sail from the Alaskan coast in like 1750 how would he have any exposure to European customs? Is this just Ingles being obtuse? Probably.
But something that has bothered Triquet and Katrina both is that there seems to be no linguistic connection between the word Tuzhit and any Eyat forms. Katrina said it might have like Bosnian roots. And then there’s all those other Slavic words that have made their way into their patois. But how?
It’s equally preposterous that Eyat-speakers of the eighteenth century spoke a Slavic tongue, so the researchers had assumed that it was probably a modern exposure to Soviet and Russian military people over the decades. Yet they’d also had exposure to all these Americans but they could find no evidence the Lisicans allowed any but a few proper names into their lexicon.
“Tuzhit! Who are you?” Triquet scans the piles and stacks of organized materials. Nowhere else can they recollect a mention of the name. But also, they weren’t really looking… They were more focused on the murder mystery of Maureen Dowerd. And now that they know the two are connected, Maureen’s death and her native lover, it makes things even more compelling to find the answers to these age-old questions.
A brief wind riffles the papers of the stack in front of Triquet and they drop fingers onto it to still them. What an uncanny gust. It ran over the hairs on the back of their neck like harp strings. That wind. It did not smell right. With a deep instinctive conviction, Triquet just knows that it brought something. Someone. If they merely turn, they will see a dark figure in the hatch leading down to the tunnels.
They try to turn but find themself frozen solid, whether from panic or distress or… whatever. Fabulous. A bit of sleep paralysis to begin the morning. And I’m not even asleep! They try to find a self-deprecating giggle but terror seems to be gripping their throat tight. And yet, their center remains calm. Detached. The fear that coils in their bowels is an object of great fascination, like some sharp glittering blue crystal tearing at their flesh as it rotates deep within. Amazing. All this from a little breeze.
Breath. I still have my own breath. Breath is everything. Triquet inhales deeply, purging their limbs of whatever shackles them. They visualize their feet moving and, with effort, they finally do.
Triquet turns.
The hatch is empty and dark, which makes it even more spooky. They should retreat through the other hatch behind them and go back up to the bunker now. Get some lunch and share their findings. Freak Flavia out with ghost stories. But for some reason… they don’t.
Following every grim impulse they’ve ever had, Triquet smiles wolfishly and stoops through the dark hatch leading down.
Ξ
Esquibel and Mandy work at the outdoor kitchen tables together. Here, their roles are reversed. The Doctor, who swore never to be a cook, couldn’t say no when Mandy asked her to help feed the crew today. Especially since Mandy is so down.
It is clear why. Her golden dreamgirl Katrina has totally turned away from Mandy. It’s all Jidadaa now. Jidadaa this and Jidadaa that. She is so special and unique and wonderful in all these ways that Mandy could never be. Well. She’d just have to console herself with dusty old Esquibel, that is, if her own pride would let her.
So they work in silence. Esquibel doesn’t know if Mandy even realizes how she feels, or if she cares. Resentment presses against the inside of Esquibel’s ribs and, instead of stooping down for a pot, she sighs and stops, hand on hip. “No, I do not want to be like my parents. I want to talk about our problems.”
Mandy, sauteeing freeze-dried vegetables, looks at Esquibel with a hurt expression. “What? What problems?”
Esquibel sighs again. She swoops down and snares the pot, graceful as a ballerina, and sets it down with a clatter on the burner. “I just want to know if it is the blonde hair that makes her so desirable. Because that is something that you should perhaps look at in your own self as a… I mean, we certainly all have our own preferences, but…” And that is all she can get out. Esquibel shakes her head, choked into silence with bitterness.
“Oh, no!” Mandy squeezes Esquibel’s arm with her free hand. “No! You think I’m upset because I’m, what? Jealous of… of who?”
“We’ve both seen the way Katrina looks at Jidadaa. You lost your chance with her, didn’t you?”
“Oh, Skeebee.” Mandy puts her spatula down and turns to her lover. She wraps her arms around Esquibel’s stiff body, nestling her head in the hollow of her jaw and clavicle. “No. No no no. I mean, yeah, Katrina’s hot and I’ve had all kinds of dirty thoughts about her, but never without you. Always with my Skeebee.”
The words are a balm to Esquibel but she still finds she can’t relax. “But then why are you so unhappy this morning?”
“Because I have to go right back up through the fucking tunnels to the fucking weather station tomorrow morning! Every other day! Oh, Skeeb. I don’t know what I got myself into this time. I don’t like it in there. It’s creepy. And I don’t mean the tunnels. I mean inside the island. I thought, I don’t know, they’re islanders! On Hawai’i there’s this huge native movement and some of them have this super strong belief that if they could just get back in charge or get all the haolies off the island that they’d have bliss. But it isn’t like that! There’d be all kinds of turf wars and like, well, whatever they’re doing to themselves here. Everyone’s so cagey and on guard. I thought we could all be friends.”
“You’re burning.”
“Ah!” Mandy turns back to the pan and pours in a dollop of Alonso’s wine. “Just saved it. Thanks. Could you hand me that salt? And I think there’s a bit of lemon juice still left.”
Esquibel finally releases her ire. Mandy is definitely upset about this, not Katrina at all. She had been, all the day before, filling Esquibel’s ears with long lists of complaint regarding the mud, the dark, the unfriendly villagers, the cliffs, on and on. But then they had all sat around the campfire all night and Esquibel had been alone too long with her jealousy. She hands Mandy the salt and kisses her hand. “I love you, Mands.”
“I love you, too, Skeebee. Don’t lets ever fight.”
They bump hips.
“There has to be a way…” Esquibel thinks aloud, “to make it easier for you to get to that weather station.”
“Yeah. It’s called the elevator shaft. But a certain mean-spirited doctor won’t let me use it.”
“It’s not that I won’t let you use it. It’s just… All your ideas so far are so preposterous. They don’t work at all. Fire? And water? I’m glad you aren’t like an engineer. Mandy the architect would get people killed.”
They both giggle, the joke taking the sting from Esquibel’s words.
“It’s a safety issue, mostly. Falling from a great height.”
“That’s what the water was going to prevent.”
“Flooding the shaft was a stupid idea and you know it.”
“Well. You don’t have to be mean about it. But, yeah. I mean, Amy was going crazy trying to figure out how to get Jay back.”
“And you are just crazy.”
“Well, how would you do it?”
“I don’t know. I am not an engineer either. How wide is it?”
“Like three or four meters. Pretty huge.”
“All the way up?”
“Yep. Straight up.”
“What if… maybe if you had a very wide platform in the center, maybe wide enough that you could lift it and there would be no gaps on the sides for anyone to fall through?”
“Sounds heavy.”
“Yes, but maybe not too heavy to…”
Mandy shakes her head, dumping steaming rice into her vegetables and mixing them. “And how do we lift it? We’d need some kind of like rotary engine, right?”
“Maybe Triquet has something in storage down in the sub.”
“Well unless they have about a kilometer of cable or chain in there then we won’t have enough line to hang it and make it go up and down.”
“Maybe they do. Let’s ask them at lunch.”
“It would certainly solve all our problems.”
“Triquet to the rescue.”
Ξ
“Tessteh…” The warm throaty voice, nearly a whisper, echoes in Maahjabeen’s ear. Then comfort words in Arabic. She sits in her mother’s lap, the air full of spices and laughing relatives. Someone plays old music.
Ama’s fingers play with the curls behind Maahjabeen’s ear as she laughs with cousins from out of town and accepts a lit cigarette. The words flow over the little girl like water. And then the baby nickname again, some private joke Ama made about an old family dog, and a peck on her cheek. “Tessteh, Yala. I need to get up.”
She slips from Ama’s lap and lands with a heavy jolt on the floor. The shock quivers through her heelbones, up her legs…
The room goes quiet. She feels all their eyes on her, but all she sees is color and light. Red and yellow patches in the smoky haze, with dark figures hunched over tables. Maahjabeen tries to focus on her family members but they all fade into shadow.
By the wooden reluctance of her brain to register their faces, she is convinced this is a dream. It is a dream and they are all gone. Yussuf and Auntie B. Mahmoud. Dahlia. A whole generation lost to lung cancer. And then Ama in the wreckage of her car…
With a clatter, the walls of her childhood home fall away like a set in a music video, leaving her little girl’s form alone with the shadows, alone and far from shore…
Yes, she is in the water now. But it is somehow no longer the seat of her power. Or this water doesn’t belong to her. Or perhaps it isn’t water at all… She lifts a hand but the liquid is all dark in the darkness, just another shade of black.
Is she far from shore? Yes. A bruised sky shows a dark line of horizon in the distance. And her limbs are already so fatigued. There is no way she can make it. Just treading water is proving to be too much. She shouldn’t be wearing so much clothing. Maybe she can take a layer off…
Maahjabeen ducks her head under the water to remove the gown hanging heavy around her neck. But it gets twisted and she can’t free her head. A ropy line of fabric crosses her face at a diagonal and she can’t unwind it.
Growing more desperate, she claws at her face. But the fabric will not budge. Her breath is about to burst in her. Light fills her vision. She is dying…
A silhouette appears before her. It is that little golem of a shaman who isn’t Wetchie-ghuy. With a nauseous rush, she finally recalls the last time she saw them, during her nightmare on the beach when Pradeep grew ill. They looked down on her then from the cliff above, drawing their powers from the sky, invoking a fog that leeches life away. That’s how they almost got her that time. And now, invading her through the doorway of grief that is her mother’s death, they have returned.
No longer in the water, but a dark cave. “La! La!” Maahjabeen tries to push the encroaching figure away. But their advance is inexorable. The waddling body looms over her, blocking all sight of anything else. A rank stench emanates from them. Her fingers get tangled in their ratty old figurines and twisted-vine fetishes that hang from braided necklaces. Their face is a goblin’s seamed caricature of humanity. Little skulls, threaded by sinew and separated by teeth, rattle on a bracelet…
Maahjabeen is smothered by the force of their advance. Ah! No! Nooo…! This is how it feels to drown…
A stinging smack knocks her head sideways. Her body is lifted. She lands heavily, cracking the back of her head on the frame of the cot. With supreme effort she pulls her eyelids open.
Pradeep hovers above. He has slapped her. His face is filled with desperate concern but she doesn’t recognize the light in his eye. It is someone else in there… and not the shaman tormenting her…
He comes back to himself and shouts in a language she doesn’t know, his voice cracking with grief, and slaps her once more.
A plug deep inside her is pulled. The shaman finally recedes. She can breathe again. Huge shuddering lungfuls of air fills her and Pradeep cries out. He wraps her in his arms and covers her scalp with kisses. “Oh, lovely… Don’t do that. Don’t ever do it again…”
Maahjabeen sobs, sucking in the sweet draughts. Ahhh. She needs air so much. What happened? How could she nearly kill herself lying here in this cot? No, it wasn’t her. It was that devilish shaman. And this time she won’t forget them like she did the last time the wicked creature messed with her.
“What is it?” Esquibel appears in the doorway of their cell with a flashlight in the dark. She is nearly naked, a white triangle of knickers the only thing dividing the dark skin of her legs from the darker night. Maahjabeen covers her own body with her hands, ashamed for Esquibel despite herself.
But the Doctor has no such modesty. With a growl of displeasure she sits at the edge of the cot and shines her light in Maahjabeen’s face. Esquibel doesn’t like the look of the young woman trembling in Pradeep’s embrace. She grabs a wrist and finds her pulse. It is hammering. Her patient shivers from a deep place.
Cursing under her breath, Esquibel forces Maahjabeen to roll over onto her belly. She pulls up the shirt covering Maahjabeen’s back and shines her light on it.
There it is, a series of raised welts at the base of her spine, all in the silhouette of a fox’s face.
Ξ
Flavia drags her face through the mud, squeezing through the narrowest choke point of the tunnel. She hasn’t been down here since first pursuing that crying child all those weeks ago, when Wetchie-ghuy stole her away. She’s had zero interest in ever coming back.
Yet here she is.
Mandy and Katrina scramble ahead, their lithe girlish forms slipping easily through. As with everything, Flavia has more of a struggle. She fits one shoulder through, then the other, and kicks her way forward until she gets to her hips, where she has to repeat the procedure. There. Now she is through that fucking pipe and she can finally stand up.
“That’s the way to the shaft. Look, Flavia. I’ll show you where we’re going, even though we can’t get there from down here…”
“No, thank you very much, but I do not need any side trips. Just take me to your cliff and bring me back and let’s keep everything very simple. Very linear. That would be best.”
Mandy has another point to make but one look at Flavia’s face silences her. Arguing with the Italian woman turned out to be very weird, and not really what she’d expected. But Mandy realizes Flavia is not a normal Italian woman. She’s like half computer.
In a sense, it was as if Mandy and Katrina only had to put in a single input, that comment at breakfast about feeling safe and free here as women. Then Flavia had reflected on that aloud, bitterly, describing her own experience here as a type of prison. And then before they could protest or amend a thing, she had moved on to the next step, like she was writing a program. “But what does that make me? A prisoner, yes, but one who is basing all her daily choices on fear, the fear that I will see him again, the fear that he will try to make a slave of me again. But I have not seen him in weeks. And yet that fear rules me every day. No. That is an intolerable risk profile strategy. So inefficient. Grazie, Mandy. You make me confront this. Yes, I will come with you today. And if I see Wetchie-ghuy, then,” she shrugs, “I will kick him in the balls.”
“You will…?” Mandy is amazed. “I mean, you’ll come? Oh, I’m so glad. Thanks, Flavia. You’re the sweetest.”
And now here the three of them are at the base of the last tunnel section before confronting once again the island’s interior. They pause, catching their breaths, scouting the way forward.
Katrina laughs a bit to herself. “I’ve got a little pet hypothesis going here. Call me an optimist, but I think there’s a chance they’ll talk to us again. Remember this climb, Flavia? Watch your step.”
The fallen tree that they scramble up like stairs finally leads to the flattened mouth of the cave. Flavia gasps for breath as she reaches the end, the adrenaline thrilling through her and keeping her alert. She expects hands to reach out from the darkness and grab her. Yet they do not and she notes this absence of horror as a significant benefit of a happy hike, in an understated idle voice in her head.
Ahead, Morska Vidra waits for them, silhouetted by silver light.
They put on their masks and gloves. Katrina continues. “My thought is that they didn’t talk to us last time because Jidadaa was here. Like she was passing through and they caught a whiff of her, or maybe she was already following us, or… I don’t know.”
Morska Vidra approaches Katrina and chucks her under the chin. “Bontiik.”
“Bontiik.” Katrina can hardly contain her delight. He is talking to them again, which means her hypothesis might perhaps be true. “Hey, where’s your fox, Morska Vidra? Uh, Gde tvoya lisica?”
“Lisica?” He turns and looks. “Lisica?” Then he shoots a glance back at the researchers with a playful smile.
“My, aren’t you in a good mood. I wish I could learn more about Bontiik. You know? Where it comes from. What the whole gesture means. There isn’t a single word like it in Eyat or the Slavic family, not that I know of. A search only gets me that a bontiik is a bonito fish in Frisian. Did you guys just like make it up?”
Morska Vidra isn’t listening. He has started his own sing song discourse with Mandy and Flavia, pointing at each of them with his thumbtip and then outside.
“Uh, a little help here, Katrina?” Languages have never been a strong suit for Mandy. Learning a new one is so frustrating and takes so long. She hates floundering around in confusion. So she just stands there and gives the little old man a polite smile. “Maybe ask him about Wetchie-ghuy.”
“Wetchie-ghuy?” Morska Vidra repeats, scowling. Then he mutters a whole paragraph of sing song and falls silent. He turns to the light, leading them out.
“Cannot believe you have no music.” Katrina follows, with Flavia and Mandy close behind. “May be the first known case in world history. Didn’t anybody like show up later and teach you? I mean, that’s eventually what happened with Jidadaa—”
Morska Vidra freezes at the mouth of the tunnel. His head slowly swivels back to regard Katrina, who falls silent under the weight of that gaze. He only stares at her, unmoving, for perhaps a dozen seconds. Then, point made, he proceeds.
Katrina releases the breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. She curses herself for a bloody fool and lets Mandy take the lead.
And just right there, after all these weeks, sits the old woman with white and blonde curls who taught them that good-bye means betrayal. Katrina stops, knowing Triquet would never forgive her if she didn’t make some attempt to get some answers. The woman might just be the last living connection to Maureen Dowerd.
The old woman’s hands are skeletal but arthritis doesn’t prevent her from dying reed fibers with a black ink. Her fingertips are stained with it. She looks up and regards Katrina with a level gaze.
“Hello. Uh, Bontiik, uh…” Katrina sidles over to her, as deferential as possible, and lightly taps the woman’s chin.
“Bontiik.” The woman lifts her fist and Katrina lowers her chin onto it. Then she steps back. “Nice… Nice work… Uh…” She quickly consults a list she’s prepared on her phone. “At daké? Work? Good. Uh… Aad’é.” Katrina looks up to see that the Mayor, that somber middle-aged woman with the cares of the village in the lines of her face, watches her from a hut’s door. “Aad’é.” Katrina offers her most charming smile.
The Mayor pulls back into the hut.
“Well, I’ll take that as a good sign. So, hello. I’m Katrina.”
The old woman looks up at her, as if considering whether engaging with this ghostly creature from across the ocean will break her heart again. Finally, she says, “Yesiniy.”
“Yesiniy? That’s your name? It’s a lovely name.” Katrina’s breath hovers in her breast. Her mind is blank. She knows she has to establish some sort of connection before diving right into this woman’s tragic past but she has no idea what comes next. She looks at Mandy and Flavia, who are regarding her from where she left them near the tunnel mouth. “Don’t wait up for me. Sorry. Been waiting forever for this chance.” Katrina turns back to Yesiniy with a sweet smile. “Mind if I sit?”
“Don’t wait? Well.” Mandy makes a face at Flavia. “Gee. Guess it’s just you and me now. Um. You might want like a walking stick. This climb is pretty gnarly. But you got strong legs, right?”
“Strong? What do you mean? Eh. We are going to climb that?”
“I know, right?” Mandy gestures at the steep slope before them with hostility. “It’s the only way up and over. Maybe we didn’t fully describe like the whole route…”
“No, you were very clear. But still.” Flavia shakes her head in distaste. “I thought it would be much more little than that.”
“I’ve got to put up like a rope ladder. Yeah. Last time I did this with like twenty kilos on my back. Thought I was gonna die. Okay. Just follow my footsteps and you’ll be fine. There’s kind of steps cut into the side if you start looking for them. There you go.”
Flavia hasn’t climbed anything this steep since her teenage trips to Cogne and Val D’Aosta. And she was in skiing shape back then. Now, she isn’t in any kind of shape at all. Within twenty steps her thighs are shaking and a cold sweat is running down her back. But she can’t let that colt Mandy get too far ahead. She grits her teeth and squeezes the perspiration out of her eyes. “Dai, Flavia!” She has committed to this course and she must see it through. There is no other path for her. Literally.
Trailwork like this is exactly like data science. The unformed, uncategorized world is out there. And these are the literal step-by-step processes humans have used to bring order and meaning to the world around them. We started with tiny footholds like this, then paths and trails. Then roads and rails and now superhighways and jet airliners and satellites. Same with programming. Just a few generations ago we had punchcards. Now the programs are writing themselves, with massive throughput.
With idle thoughts like these she pulls her way to the top. Mandy is there, panting, hands on knees in the midst of some unpleasant bushes that scratch and pluck at Flavia.
At the crest an erratic wind whips them, dry and warm from the southeast. “Ew. Look.” Mandy points to a long orange band on that horizon. “I bet that’s like dust from the Gobi Desert. Can you smell it?” Mandy faces the dirty smear headed their way. “And all the pollution from factories in China. You know, they find signatures of Chinese coal mining all over North America now. All of it raining down on the whole world. Totally distorting mid-Pacific weather patterns. You know, so we can have fast fashion.”
“Yes, I was in a conference in Beijing once when they had the sandstorms. The whole city turned orange and we could not breathe outside without masks.” Flavia shakes her head. “It was very bad. Ahh… Just when I think I am alone and disconnected from the whole world out here in the middle of nowhere…”
“Chinese pollution cheers you right up! Come on. Believe it or not this is the way down.”
Mandy leads Flavia to the edge of the cliff and a narrow chute that looks like the opening of a slide at a waterpark, except this cliff is six hundred meters high. “Ehh… Are you sure?”
“I know, right? I went after Katrina last time and all she did was follow the footsteps. It’s like the climb before, but, you know, this time down, with your heels. Just lean back.”
“I am sorry but I cannot do that.”
“Okay we can give it a few minutes. It’s not too cold—”
“No, Mandy. It is not a matter of acclimating to the heights. That is insanity. I will not be doing that. Ever.”
“Okay…”
“So you should not waste your time. Go and get your data. Change the batteries. I will go back to the other side back there out of the wind. And I will wait.”
“Esquibel said I shouldn’t really do this alone…”
“I am sorry but what do you want me to do?” The shrill panic in Flavia’s voice cuts through the wind. They are perched on the edge of the cliff like gnats on the edge of a wine glass. The merest puff of air could send them spinning out into oblivion. No. Basta. Enough.
With a pained expression, Mandy turns back to the descent. Without another word, she slowly disappears from view.
Flavia is furious with herself. She should have known this would have been too much for her. Everything is, here. Flavia does not belong on Lisica. And now she has put Mandy in danger.
Well. She might as well get out of the wind.
But someone is blocking her way back up there, hunched on the path like a fallen log.
Wetchie-ghuy.
Chapter 31 – Ja Sam Wetchie-Ghuy
July 29, 2024
Thanks for joining us for the third volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this episode:
Book III – Methodology of Madness
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
— John Steinbeck
31 – Ja Sam Wetchie-Ghuy
“And what do you make of this?” Triquet pushes their taped-up photo across the table before Morska Vidra. The elder stares at the image of the Tlingit tapestry, carved bone fishing spear, and word written in Cyrillic that Triquet has reconstructed.
Morska Vidra studies the photo in sad silence.
“Ji-na-háa.” Katrina sounds out the Cyrillic letters phonetically. But the word is unbearable to the old Lisican and he leans away from her, blanching. Finally he murmurs an answer.
“What’s that? Could you repeat, uh… povtori pozhaluysta?”
Morska Vidra speaks a few more broken sentences. “Something like, he’s only seen these once as a kid. The people who are beyond the river. They have them? These are their artifacts?” Katrina picks up the photo and mimes giving it to people in the interior of the island.
Morska Vidra only falls silent. He glares at her, apparently resentful that she brought it up.
“Ji-da-daa,” Katrina repeats. “I want to learn what that is. It seems to be key to the whole…”
But repeating the word is too much for Morska Vidra. With an outraged chuff he pulls himself awkwardly from the unfamiliar camp chair and stalks away, toward the creek. He does not return.
“Oops!” Katrina squeaks. “Sorry! God, this is just so… random. There’s this whole perspective shift thing I still do not get at all. Like in Lisican you’re not an actual being. You’re just a collection of other people’s impressions of you, who you’re related to, where you stand, where you’re going. It’s all very postmodern I guess.”
“Sounds like Plexity.” Alonso’s voice comes from the far side of his big platform. “Environment is everything. I think maybe I’ve gotten these people wrong. Perhaps they are very wise.”
“I guess it makes sense if you think about it,” Katrina continues, while Triquet studies the photo with frustration. “Maybe we all started with this kind of deep subjectivity. But how did we ever disconnect from thinking about the world that way? Imagine everybody understands that they’re all part of the web, right? And then one day some absolute psycho shows up and says, Fuck that. I’m only me. And I’m holy. And I’m in charge. And I’m not connected to any of you bitches or anything in the whole world around me. I mean, what an absolute bloody narcissist.”
Alonso laughs. “Context. It’s all context. We live in a data-rich age of context, right, Katrina?”
“You know, we did this breakout session at one of the security conferences I attended,” Katrina tells them, “where we had to try to re-imagine law and justice to be more fair. And they all got into how laws could be more universally applied. But I was like, hold up, that’s retrograde thinking. Three hundred years old. Our ancestors conceived of universal justice like that because they couldn’t see how to do it better. But we can. My idea is that each punishment or rehabilitation strategy should instead be tailored to each criminal as specifically as possible. Context, yeh. So I proposed that each person gets an official profile, open-sourced and secure, and we assign hundreds of numerical values to a whole spectrum of factors: upbringing, job, education, intent when committing the crime, you know, any amount of remorse… and then we use that profile and a shit ton of machine learning to construct a custom solution for every perpetrator.”
“I mean, isn’t this what we’re already doing?” Triquet sighs in surrender and puts the photo back in its manila folder. “Apart from your creepy digital profile idea, I mean, isn’t this what the justice system already does? At least it’s supposed to. It gives weight to things like background. In most countries at least, right? There’s steps to this. Pre-trial hearings. Jury of your peers. Sentencing. They already take things like intent and remorse into account. We don’t need a robot deciding who goes to jail or not.”
“Yeh, it wasn’t very popular at the conference, either. But I’m just talking about deriving more nuanced solutions for each crime. It’s all context now. That’s all I’m saying. I mean, you’ve heard of personalized medicine, yeh? Same concept. Individualize diagnosis and treatment, with increased efficacy that drives down the price. Everything’s data science now. Everything.”
This conversation is straying into territory that Alonso has hardly ever allowed himself to seriously consider. But the wild ideas he gets at night right before he falls asleep suddenly seem a little less wild. “She is right. This young generation will forever be known as the great collectors. Everything is about input now. We aren’t even really collating the data yet. That will be the goal of the next generation. Now is when we record the richness of life on this planet before it vanishes completely. Details, and the patterns within the details. That is our gold. And then, who knows, in a few hundred years, after the world has finished burning, it will be these records we are making right now that will bring all the life back.”
“Ji-da-daa…” Katrina repeats it again, looking up the word in first her Eyat then her Tlingit vocabulary lists. “I mean, there’s ‘jinduháayi,’ which means post office, or more precisely, ‘Building, around paper, delivered by hand.’ See what I mean? That’s some convoluted bullshit there. Or, ‘jinkaat,’ which is their number for ten, but specifically means, ‘hands facing each other.’ Whoa.” She drops her hands, helpless. “I’m sorry, Triq. This was supposed to answer a bunch of questions, but instead…”
Triquet stands, shrugging philosophically. “We just get more questions. It’s the way of the world, little sister.” They kiss the top of Katrina’s head and collect their things.
The door to the bunker opens. Esquibel stands in the frame. “What is this I hear about one of the Lisicans visiting us?”
Katrina falls back against her chair. “He’s already gone.”
“What? Why? We need one of them to look at Pradeep! He’s been poisoned or something! How did you just let him go?”
“Oh. Ack. Sorry. You’re right.” Katrina stands. “I’ll go find him. He went this way. Just… Ugh. I’ll be right back.” She hurries away.
Triquet grimaces in apology. “Sorry, Doc. It was my fault. I’m just trying to solve all these mysteries.”
“Yes, well…” Esquibel tries to find something to say that won’t indicate how very cross she is. “Me too.”
Ξ
“Okay, Pradeep. We’re going to roll over on three, okay?” Mandy holds his legs. Esquibel grips his shoulders. Maahjabeen still won’t release her full-body embrace.
The Lisican woman they refer to as the Mayor stands in a corner of the clean room, frowning terribly. Katrina hadn’t been able to find Morska Vidra, following his trail all the way back through the creekside tunnels to the village. But she had implored the Mayor to return with her. She suspects the woman might even understand a bit what is needed. Now Mandy and Maahjabeen and Esquibel all wear masks and gloves, their delirious patient fighting for breath.
Pradeep groans, a weak wet sound, phlegm rattling in his throat. They roll him over so Maahjabeen is on her back with him above. Esquibel pulls up his shirt, revealing the fox’s profile of angry red and black dots and the swelling at the base of his spine.
The Mayor pulls back with a hiss, like she’s seen a viper. She looks at each of them with wide-eyed outrage, pointing the tip of her thumb at each while intoning a chant.
“What is it? What?” Esquibel begs the woman.
“Lisica, yes?” Katrina prods her, outlining the shape of the fox’s head on his skin with her finger.
But the Mayor disagrees vociferously, her words coming in such a clashing rush that Katrina can’t follow. She fumbles her phone out and begins recording just as the Mayor’s speech ends.
“Okay. Got it. I mean, I didn’t get any of it, but I got that this isn’t Lisica. No. This is… some other fox then? I’m so confused.”
The Mayor is very upset with them. She begins lecturing, Katrina recording. The Mayor picks up the closest items off Esquibel’s bins, a short stack of paper. She tosses them to the ground, indicating that they are useless. Then with a loud wordless yell—Ayo! she leans over Pradeep, resting her elbow in the middle of his back. The Mayor puts her weight behind her elbow and presses until he expels his breath, a bubbling wetness. She presses harder and he expels more, finally ending with a trickle of milky brown rheum trickling from his chin. The Mayor stands back and points at it, careful not to touch it. “Kadziyiki.” She repeats the word again and again until Katrina echoes it.
“What is that?” Esquibel inspects the discharge, but the Mayor draws the doctor’s hand away before she can touch it. So she looks at it through her otoscope from a handspan’s distance. “Fine. I won’t touch it, I promise. But I should get a sample for testing…”
“Let’s see. Kadziyiki means…” Katrina scrolls through her vocabulary list. “Mud. A swamp place.” She points at Pradeep’s belly and repeats the word.
As confirmation, the Mayor repeats the word as well.
“I think she’s saying it’s magic of some kind or other. A curse.”
“Why would Wetchie-ghuy do this?” Katrina asks.
The name stops the Mayor in mid-sentence. She bares her teeth in an involuntary show of disgust and makes it clear with words and gestures that Pradeep’s illness is not the work of Wetchie-ghuy. But a new thought appears to interrupt her and after a long moment of consideration she repeats the name. “Wetchie-ghuy…”
Mandy releases Pradeep’s feet and shakes her hands to get his illness off them. The nausea seeping into her immediately fades. “Uh, then what if we get that Wetchie-ghuy guy to help Pradeep?”
Esquibel holds up an importuning hand. “Wait. As your doctor, I am not in favor of this idea.”
“Oh, because you’ve still got so many ideas of your own?” Mandy giggles to take the sting out of her words, but Esquibel scowls at her regardless. “I mean, if it’s some weird infectious fluid, wouldn’t we rather have them deal with it instead of us anyway?”
“I think we’ve got a bigger problem than that,” Katrina says. “How can we bring Wetchie-ghuy into camp without Flavia losing her mind?”
Esquibel demands, “I will not allow some—some herbalist to treat one of my patients. Especially since we know he is hostile. Or is she perhaps not saying that Wetchie-ghuy is responsible for doing this? That is crazy to think there might be another one. I mean, how many shamans does an island this size need?”
“Pradeep…” Maahjabeen murmurs. The others fall silent and she blushes. “Mahbub. I need to go to the trenches. I will be…”
Pradeep groans. His eyelids flutter. He seems to struggle at the edge of consciousness, unable to break through.
“I am so sorry. I’ve been holding it for hours…”
“That’s fine,” Katrina says. “I can wrap him up for a bit. You go take care of yourself. Maybe grab a bite.”
“No. I can’t.” Maahjabeen gasps when she releases her embrace. She’d forgotten how newly healed her shoulders are and now they scream as she moves them. Pradeep is unmoving. She slides out from under him, the pain and the heartache making her sob.
The Mayor watches her, stone-faced. Maahjabeen locks eyes with her and vows that she will not show another sign of weakness to this cypher of a woman. Maahjabeen can be stoic. Just watch.
Mandy and Katrina pull her free and she stands, clamping her mouth shut. She is still staring at the Mayor, whose black eyes seem to possess a reservoir of strength that Maahjabeen can access. Now she realizes the Lisican woman isn’t judging her, but silently lending her support.
Katrina scoots into position. “So… just like give him a good cuddle? Anything I should know? Any places I shouldn’t touch?”
Mandy giggles.
Maahjabeen can’t wait any longer. Her mind has no space for the prospect of beautiful blonde Katrina wrapping herself around Pradeep and nursing him while Maahjabeen departs. But the jealousy she expects doesn’t appear. Only a tired gratitude for Katrina and a screaming terror of worry for Pradeep. She pushes herself through the plastic sheets of the clean room, determined to do this as fast as possible.
Katrina lies down beside Pradeep. “Come here, luv.” She wraps herself around him, drawing him over her like a blanket. His sandalwood scent, which she had found so attractive before, has now turned sour. She recalls their spider hunt in the bushes, when she had such a strong impulse to kiss him that she’d kissed Mandy instead. Now she has no desire for this ailing man. But isn’t this when he needs her affection the most? She turns her face and kisses his ear, softly, with real tenderness, and breathes through her nose into the nape of his neck. Somewhere deep inside he quivers but his limbs are so heavy they’re nearly rigid. Poor bloke. What had he and Maahjabeen done out there to deserve this?
Suddenly a sharp wrongness knifes through Katrina. Horror fills her. “Wait. Esquibel. I don’t think he’s breathing. I…”
Esquibel curses and with a strong hand pulls Pradeep away from Katrina, who shifts herself entirely off the cot onto the floor. Esquibel rolls him onto his back and straddles his prostrate form. She pulls her mask off and points at the Mayor, “Get that woman out of here!” before beginning a strenuous round of CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Ξ
An hour later, a muddy Amy finds Mandy at the camp’s kitchen tables, fixing a pot of tea. “Could I get one of those?” Amy has already cleaned her hands in the creek before returning to camp but she still pinches the handle of a mug daintily, afraid the mud on her sleeve might touch it.
“Of course. What’d you do? You look like something the cat dragged in.” Mandy fills Amy’s cup with steaming green tea.
“I was in your elevator shaft.”
“You were?” Now Amy has Mandy’s full attention. “What were you doing in there?”
“Figuring out how to get to the top.”
“Oh my god. Really? And did you? Oh, please… That would be so… I mean, why? Why do you even want to get to the top?”
“I’ve got to find Jay, Mandy. As soon as possible. We have no idea how much danger he might be in. He’s my responsibility. My grad student. But I can’t even cross the fucking village to get to the trailhead he took. They won’t let me. So I need to find another way into the interior. Or my time here will be an entire waste. No. Worse than that. I swear to god if I have to go back home without Jay or Pradeep I’ll just…” Amy suddenly dissolves in tears.
Mandy catches the blocky little woman in her arms and kisses the top of her head. “Oh… Oh, no… He’s fine. I’m sure of it. Jay’s like some super outdoorsman. Living outside here is a snap for someone like him. And Pradeep…” She has no words for his condition. Esquibel had barely been able to bring him back from the brink last time, and he hadn’t stabilized until Mandy had gone to find Maahjabeen, who raced back to wrap her beloved once more in her arms. Instead, she tries to change the subject with gossip. “So. Did you know Maahjabeen and Pradeep were a thing? Or did everyone know but me?”
That stops Amy’s tears. Her breath catches in her throat. “They what? What kind of thing? What are you talking about? No, honey. I’m pretty sure Pradeep is a virgin.”
“Well maybe that’s what Maahjabeen loves so much about him. His purity. Katrina said she found them one night last week. She was in his bed. Isn’t that sweet?”
“Really? Sweet, uh, yeah…” For some reason, Amy can’t process this new information. It’s just so unlikely. “I’m not sure if, I mean, I don’t know if Maahjabeen is really introductory girlfriend material, know what I mean? And why’d he hide it from me of all people? Just… Seriously? Are you sure?”
“Maahjabeen won’t let anyone else hold him. She said it’s their love that’s keeping him alive. And after he coded last time she let go we’re inclined to believe her.”
“I don’t know what to say. Pradeep. You secretive bastard. Ah… he couldn’t tell me because of her. She needed it to be a secret. Some weird Muslim thing, right? That’s it, isn’t it?”
Mandy shrugs and rests her forehead against Amy’s in sweet intimacy. “Who knows? Love works in mysterious ways.”
Amy shakes her head in wonder. “Well. I hope it works out. Their children would look like… movie stars, that’s for sure.”
“I know, right?” Mandy giggles and releases Amy.
“Thanks for that, dear one. And let me repay you by telling you how I think we can get to the top of the shaft.”
“Fuck yes! Oh, Amy, thank you so much! You have no idea how hard it’s been for me to figure out a safe way to the—”
“Well, don’t get too attached to that ‘safe’ idea.”
“Oh, crap. What is it?”
“I mean, it’s as safe as I can come up with. But it is like hundreds of meters straight up. There is no super safe way for people to go up and down that thing without like a professional construction crew. But ain’t none of us here engineers so we’ll do what we can.”
“Now I don’t know what to think.”
“Well. Let me just drink my tea and you get some caving clothes on. It’s easier to show you what I have in mind than tell you.”
“Kay kay. Meet you back here in five.”
Later, after all the descents and struggles through muddy tunnels, Mandy stands with Amy at the base of the shaft. It is no longer flooded, and when the water drained it took a lot of the ash and cinders with it, leaving a long black trail down to the concrete culvert and the sea cave. Now they can tell that beneath the blackened ashes that remain is a solid concrete floor to the shaft. But whatever anchor points Mandy had been trying to blindly find with her frozen feet a few days before are not there.
They drag the last intact limbs clear of the center of the floor and stare upward at the small dot of gray light far above. It looks impossible to Mandy, and nobody wants to get up there as bad as her. But it’s just so far.
“Tell me what you see.” Amy’s voice echoes in the shaft, a harsh reverberation off the concrete walls.
Mandy swings her phone’s light up the shaft. “Not much. Lots of vertical. No handholds. Uh… Tons of burn marks. Can I have a hint? What am I looking for here?”
“Okay. What are the walls made of?”
Mandy drops her light to eye level. She brushes her hand over the smooth blocks. “Yeah, okay, it’s only concrete here at the bottom. Then it’s, I don’t know, what is it up there? Clay? Rock?”
“It’s rock. Care for another hint?”
“Please.”
Amy silently points at the trail of ash and cinders at their feet, leading out of the shaft’s base into the tunnel.
“Uhh, neat.” Mandy turns away so Amy can’t see how irritated she is. “Maybe I’m just not as smart as everybody else here, okay, Amy? Maybe I don’t have all these spectacular doctorates from world-class programs so you’ll have to excuse me—”
“No, no. I’m not—You’re not… Sorry. I’m being too playfully obtuse. I was just standing where you are, looking up, cursing that little fucking hole in the top. Then I thought to myself: How did this shaft get made? They didn’t drill it. It’s not quite that regular.”
“I don’t know. How did all the other tunnels get made?”
Amy lifts her eyebrows and points once again at the trail of black slurry running out of view.
“It burned…?” Mandy scrunches up her face. “But that makes no sense. What burned? The rock?”
“No. Sorry, Mandy. I’ll stop playing games. It’s water. Water carved this shaft, and nearly all the tunnels we’ve seen in here. Now come here. Let me show you something else I found.”
Mandy is still mystified. Amy keeps telling her she’ll tell her what she means and then she just keeps adding more and more random details that make no sense. “Sure. Now what?’
Amy takes Mandy back into the tunnel, but before it reaches the junction with the passage that heads upwards to the Lisican village, Amy stops at an outcrop of rock. She points her light at a pair of rusted iron pipes that run vertically from ceiling to floor. “Listen.”
“Listen…?” Mandy wipes the pipe as clean as she can and then presses her ear against it. Liquid, and not a trickle. These old pipes are still functional.
“The Army Corps of Engineers must have been in here. These are probably drainage for some other chamber up above to keep it clear. I bet it empties into their culvert and then the sea cave. But look.” Amy pockets her phone and grasps a circular handle. Her forearm muscles bunch and she grunts. Then it turns.
After a few rotations the pipe closes off. Amy pulls Mandy to the wall beside her and points to a bypass pipe. Now the water shoots out its end, much more than a liter per second. It splashes onto the tunnel’s floor and runs down back toward the culvert.
Mandy looks at Amy, who has the most self-satisfied smile on her face of her life. But then her smile drops when she realizes that Mandy still doesn’t see what she means. “Oh. Right. So… Next step. Block the passage leading down to the culvert there with tarps and rocks, forming a plug. And then ta-daaa!” Amy spreads her hands wide. But Mandy still only glares at her. “Ah. I mean, of course, the final thing I still have to mention is that we’re floating on a raft. In the elevator shaft. And there’s nowhere for the water to go. Except up. We fill the shaft and ride it to the top!”
Now Mandy laughs. “Are you insane? I set the shaft on fire and now you’re going to flood it? Is this some kind of competition?”
Amy laughs too. “No! Think about it! I mean, it’s got its share of drawbacks, for sure. It’s not something we can do, well, probably more than once. And I have no idea how long it would take to fill it. A day or two? So that part stinks. I mean, there’s a lot wrong with the whole idea but I just can’t figure out how else to do it!”
“I asked Katrina if she’d fly the drone up the shaft and try to attach some cable or something up there.” Mandy shakes her head. “But she said the shaft is too narrow. She’d have to turn collision-avoidance off and then she said she wasn’t good enough to not crash manually into the walls.”
“Well and then what?” Amy grimaces. “Let’s say we’ve got like three hundred meters of twine dangling down to us. So? We don’t have more than a third of that distance in climbing rope. What else are we going to use? Dental floss? I mean, I could manufacture some rope from the long-fiber creekside plants but that would take days if not weeks. We need to find Jay now.”
Mandy thinks about sitting in a raft for hours on end as the water level slowly rises toward the top. Just her and Amy and her weather station. But it wouldn’t even have any weight requirements this time. She could load it up with all the best gear. Hygrometer. Full windspeed rotor. She could even bring spare batteries and just hook them up in sequence. And she wouldn’t have to check on it more than once every few days. “Wait. Ugh. I should have asked him when I had the… Ah, hell.”
“What is it?”
“Jay! When he got trapped in the village with Triquet and Miriam he said that one day he went with the villagers to see the top of the tunnel, where the fire came from. And I was like, ‘Aha! The villagers can lead me to the spot from above. He said they climbed over the edge of the cliffs and came down to the top of this shaft on the ocean side. And I was going to have him show me so I could start making that my route but then we stopped talking to the villagers. And then I forgot with all the other madness going on. So now we’re all buddies again but he’s gone. Crap!”
“Well, still. That solves your problem, doesn’t it? You can go ask the villagers to lead you to any spot you want on the cliffs. It just needs to be high and like securely-placed, right?”
“Yeah, but…” Mandy sighs. “I think I still have your problem. Not that they hate me per se…”
“Oh, thanks.”
“No! It’s just that they can shut off the village to us whenever they like and I need regular access to my weather station. We can’t depend on them. We need our own way in.”
Amy nods. “So… What do you think we could make the raft of?”
“Maybe we could use Maahjabeen’s kayaks.”
“Yeah, and maybe Brad Pitt will be my sex slave.” Amy laughs in such hilarious disbelief that Mandy starts to as well.
Ξ
Pradeep twists and turns on the bed, fighting for his life. He thrashes, the cords in his neck straining. He drums the back of his head against the pillow, fighting to rid himself of this horrid infestation.
But he knows that in reality he does none of these things. His body remains slack, eyes glazed. The fight is entirely internal. Nobody can see how hard he struggles.
He knows he is about to die. He tries to find peace. Maahjabeen pressed against him gives indescribable relief. After his unending struggle against the cold pit of mud within him he is almost ready to surrender to oblivion. He has gotten to love the most beautiful woman on Earth. What more is there, really, after that? It is such an impossibility for a kasmaalam nerd like himself to have loved such an angel. Death is really the only possible thing next. But his regret will not let him go. Regret for not knowing her better, touching this unbelievable skin just a bit more. Regret that they will not grow old together, that he will not be there for her when she will need him. That is such a distasteful thought that it gets him to fight once more against the pit.
The little bit of his brain that remains working now puzzles out a possible way to combat the pit of mud. Within himself, where he feels the edges of it, he has drawn a ring of fire around it, stopping its slow seeping spread up into the rest of him. The fire is love and anger and every scrap of his survival instinct that he can muster. Now he has the fire burn down, all around the sides of the pit. He will excise it entirely with fire. He will find its bottom and burn beneath that and then isolate this cauterized pit of mud within him like a giant bloated splinter. Once it is encased entirely in fire then he can remove it. He can take himself back.
Burn… Burn… He doesn’t know what it is he burns here in the abstract internal world of his spirit. It is certainly some essential part of himself. Tissues… or memories… Perhaps he is destroying himself to save himself. Yes. Like a fever. Without fever he will die.
Why was this done to him? What did Pradeep do to deserve this? They say a fox bit him in the back, which makes no sense. And now he is dying of, what… rabies? Is that what this is?
It’s all muddled. He can’t keep straight any of the details they’ve told him. Disjointed phrases keep circling in his head. He realizes how slowly they revolve. Too slow. The cold mud is winning again. Where is his fire? Has it gone out?
No, it has just disappeared deep into the black firmament of his mind, still surrounding the pit of mud as it crackles its way downward. Now Pradeep feels an attenuated pain, as if someone strikes his spinal cord like a piano note. This time he grunts and he knows Maahjabeen hears it. Pain. Yes, pain is good. Pain is life.
She looks at him, her eyes ravaged from so many tears. But she is not hopeless. So he cannot be. He fights the words out, the corners of his mouth twitching upward bravely. “I am… not… dead.”
Ξ
“Ventilation ain’t your problem, Kula. It’s got to be humidity. I mean, this is like fog grand central. Here.” Jay holds up the frosty bud, its fan leaves curling, nearly black. “Look at the cola, dude. Smell it. You got to harvest now or shit’s gonna mold out on you.”
Kula, the Lisican gardener, stands at his shoulder smoking her joint. Her face is seamed with a perpetual smile and her black curls are a frizzy mass. She grunts and waters a row of lettuces with a cracked plastic watering can. “Bimeby Jay help. Wit Kula, yaw?”
Her pidgin is surprisingly understandable. Jay has no idea what that indicates about the island, or, more importantly, his safety here. Who taught her to speak English? Where did she get all this gear? And what about all this weed? Not that there aren’t a wide variety of other fruits and vegetables in these planters. Jay wonders why Kula doesn’t cultivate her garden on the surface. “This can’t be the best spot to grow on the island. You need more sun, sister.”
Kula claps her hand on his shoulder. She’s been friendly from the get go. She pushes her cigar at him again and he takes a big wet toke. Very grassy weed. Probably not too much in the way of THC but who knows about its terpenes. Once they get settled he’ll bust out his homegrown Kush and blow Kula’s goddamn mind.
Rows of raised beds, built from raw saplings bound together with frayed nylon straps, have been filled with a dark loamy soil that probably came from the redwoods above. And it looks like a lot of starters are already pushing through the surface. Her spring plantings are a success. What day is it? Like mid-April? He takes out his phone. The date is April 20.
“Yoooooo! Look at that, Kula! 420! 420! We hit it just right!”
But of course she has no idea what he’s talking about. She just gabbles something he doesn’t understand, much like he’s gabbling something at her. But that’s cool. They’re high. And hidden. And safe. “Four twenty…!” Jay leans out the gun emplacement’s curving opening, shouting over the open ocean far below. His words are immediately snatched by the wind. But he doesn’t care. He laughs, falling back. “Hey… Maybe you can help us, Kula. If you know like all the plants here, maybe you can like, I mean, we’re sort of doing a survey, you know. Flora and fauna. Maybe you could like help us identify a whole bunch of genera.”
“Eh. Eh.” Kula nods vigorously. She pulls something up by the roots, like a stringy white carrot, and pushes it into Jay’s hands. “Takee boss. Jay good good. Je rotkvica, yass.”
“Okay. If you say so…” Jay brushes the rest of the soil off and nibbles at its end. It crunches between his teeth and releases a clean watery taste across his tongue. It’s good. “Right on. This would be so good in a salad. Man, I’m gonna make the best fucking salads. Any olive oil and balsamic here by any chance?”
But Kula is back to her watering and weeding, talking to herself in a satisfied sing-song, the words a jumble of English and Lisican and who knows what else. What an odd duck. For one thing, she’s fat. Jay hasn’t seen any fat Lisicans before. Her skin is bad and she’s wearing an old hoodie with HOLLISTER stenciled across the chest. Her formerly-white Reeboks are split along each side. Her hair is lank and greasy. She is obviously suffering the effects of prolonged contact with the modern world. Now she looks just like any other shut-in anywhere in the world. Just get her a laptop and a VPN and she’d never see another live human ever again.
He wanders away from the plants for the first time to a dark corner recessed in the bare rock. He expected to find some kind of rat’s nest of bedding but instead he finds a neatly cut-out rectangle in the rock that runs as a passage to a contained chamber, far enough back to protect its occupants from explosions in the gun emplacement. This must have been command and control back here. The room is only like five by six meters, with seven wide ventilation shafts in the ceiling. Since its abandonment, these holes have allowed in trickles of detritus and the shafts are no longer clear; they only let in a bit of diffracted daylight.
Beneath the seven holes sit undisturbed conical piles of dirt surrounded by a scattering of leaves. “Ooo, creepy. Looks like some kind of… crypt in here yo.”
Kula, behind him, giggles. “Atsa sugoya eet ká. Yass, Jay. Me an me.” She takes him by the hand and leads him to a flattened and stained Navy cot mattress against the far wall. Ah. The rat’s nest.
“Uh… Not here looking for love, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m a grad student. Not a… I mean, not that grad students don’t get down. It’s just… That’s real flattering, Kula, you know what I mean? But, uh, I’m kind of in the middle of something right now.”
Kula giggles at him some more, hooking her fingers into his pockets. She snares a wad of leaves he collected and she frowns at them. “Me and me and Jay make three…” But her voice falters, looking at him with concern.
“What? Those are some rhododendron variety I found down in the river valley. You know the one? Over by the…? Well you got your tunnel-mouth tribe, down in the southeast corner of the island. You know, the one with Morska Vidra? And then there’s the bad guy village. Somewhere deeper in? Yeah. That valley.”
“Morska Vidra…” Kula’s nose twitches like a rabbit’s. She wipes it with the back of her hand and sneers. She lists off a bunch of other names. The only one Jay catches is “Wetchie-ghuy…”
“Yeah. That’s the one. That’s where I got the leaves. There.” He points where his internal compass guesses southeast is.
“Yass. Me and Jay znamo.”
“So I was wondering if you could help me with the classifica—”
But Kula hisses and throws the leaves on the ground. They are unclean to her or something. Then she stiffens. She casts a devilish grin sideways at Jay. “Jidadaa.”
Jay just nods stupidly, wondering what she means. Her change of mood is so mercurial he can’t follow it. Kula crosses back to the entrance to the chamber but a low black oblong against the wall to his right catches Jay’s attention. It is a decades-old military radio. And its power is on. A bank of batteries are connected and several wires run up one of the ventilation shafts to the surface. Jay peers at it closely. Its glowing analog dials and needles twitch slightly, picking up some signal. He squints at its frontpiece, finding the volume knob. He turns it, hearing static and garbled voices and nothing more.
He turns, calling out, “Where’d you get this, Kula…?” And then the words die in his throat. Someone new enters, slight and tall for a Lisican. Young, like twenty at the most. Her face is more pale and narrow. Her eyes are gray and sad. She is singing. A Lisican girl is singing, a soft wordless ballad. When she sees Jay she stops.
“Jidadaa.” Kula points to her. “Jay.”
Jidadaa just looks at Jay, her face neutral, hands hiding each other, lower lip glistening in the dim light.
“Hey, what’s up?” His greeting feels so awkward and paltry he resolves to do better. “Jay Darmer. Uh. Nice to meet you.” It’s clear what he’s looking at here, a mother and daughter. And now the whole story makes sense. Kula fell in love with some mystery military dude. They had a baby. She had to hide. He still provides for her somehow? They’re in touch by radio? “I like your song.”
Jidadaa’s eyes twitch and a tiny smile teases the corner of her mouth. She is angular with a prominent nose and wavy brown hair, but her mother’s slyness is still in her, around the broad cheekbones and shifting eyes. She edges her way into the chamber, beginning to sing again. There is a coiled excitement in her that makes Jay think she’s about to spring some surprise on him. But she looks so harmless. How bad can it be?
Jidadaa hugs herself in her stained hoodie, one palm running up and down the other arm. Her song seems to be nonsense syllables in a simple scale, like when someone plays around on a piano without knowing how to bring it to life. Jay starts adding his own notes to her song and she stops, clapping a hand over her mouth. Now she is quite close to him. She sticks out her hand.
“Uh, hi.” Jay and Jidadaa shake hands, like business partners.
Ξ
When the vessels of your body are empty, they collapse, the walls sucking up wetly against each other. Your esophagus doesn’t stay open when not in use. It rests flat like a bike tire’s uninflated tube.
It is in such an evacuated space that Pradeep now finds his body. The walls of the pit cling to him, robbing him of sight and sense and air. Freezing mucus and mud coat his skin, leaching the last of his vitality away. He has finally lost his battle against the curse within him and slid down, down, down… For too long he’s been thrashing in a panic to get out. Now stars are blooming in his vision and he knows that oxygen isn’t getting to his brain. This is the end. And he can’t feel Maahjabeen’s embrace any more.
The stars cover his vision and the world goes white.
Pradeep kneels on cold flagstones. He is bent into a deep prostrate pose, like he’s doing yoga or praying to Maahjabeen’s god. He looks up, surveying a space filled with light, infinitely wide. Is that where he is? Has he crossed some threshold into the divine?
People at the end of their lives talk about letting go of their earthly cares. But Pradeep burns with regrets. A coruscating waterfall of hopes and plans and memories rushes through him, filling him with an unbearable ache of lost opportunity. He was by every measure too young. And his life was just about to get really really good.
Footsteps echo in the distance. He turns, trying to locate their source, but he can’t find anyone approaching from the glare on the horizon from any direction.
He opens his mouth to call out but he realizes he would only do so as a function of his anxiety. What? Oh, fucking great. Not even in death does he escape it? Bloody hell. It has become too much a part of who he is for him to leave it behind. Anxiety is in his soul.
So this is his soul. It did survive biological death. Fascinating. And how many of the other stories are true? He recalls the five layers of a human form in the Taittiriya Upanishad. The body on the outside, then biological energy, mental energy, intuition and wisdom, and deep inside is his core essence, a seed of eternal bliss. Well let us get on with it. I am ready to shed the outer layers to find my blissful center, because I certainly do not feel it now.
Remembering the lessons of his boyhood, Pradeep sits cross-legged in a lotus pose and rests his wrists on his knees. He closes his eyes, or whatever passes for eyes here, and allows his mind to calm so he can more properly listen.
He hears the footsteps again. He had thought that whoever was coming would inevitably reach him here but perhaps that isn’t true. Perhaps they’re looking for him in this bright directionless place and can’t find him. Perhaps they’re lost.
Pradeep’s mouth opens to call out. But then his anxiety, disguised as common sense, reminds him that he may not want who-or-what-ever it is in this unknown place to find him. He may want to remain hidden. At least until he knows more of who it is.
His eyes snap open, anxiety building toward panic. Oh, he just had to introduce the idea of extra-dimensional terrors into his list of neuroses, didn’t he? Now how will he ever have a moment’s rest again? He takes a shuddering breath of sharply clean air and tries to master himself. Come on, Pradeep. You can do this. You have no choice. Face your future.
With an assertive impulse Pradeep rises to his feet. “I am here,” he calls out in a ringing voice. Too loud. But it had sounded resolute. Liking that, he stands taller.
The footsteps grow louder, seeming to come from all around. Then they resolve into a shadow, a dark stain in the glare directly ahead. A hunched figure waddles toward him. It is an old man with a brown face, bits of feather and fur hanging from his fringes. He grunts at Pradeep then mutters in a sing-song Pradeep almost recognizes. This isn’t who he expected at all.
The man stops in front of Pradeep and scowls up at him, still muttering. Pradeep realizes it is the language he’s been hearing the last couple weeks. “You’re Lisican.”
The man holds up a leather loop in one hand and turns a glittering stare onto Pradeep. “Ja sam Wetchie-ghuy.”
Chapter 30 – The Cigar
July 22, 2024
Thanks for joining us for the second 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:
30 – The Cigar
The next morning, Triquet sits cross-legged in their tent in a pink rayon frock dress from 1975, surrounded by stacks of neatly folded clothes and trays filled with make-up and beauty products. They sing to themself in a soft alto, channeling Beth Gibbons from Portishead: “Cause I’m still feeling lonely… Feel so unholy… Cause the child rose as light… tried to reveal what I could feel… And this loneliness… It just won’t leave me alone… It just won’t leave me—”
“Hello? Triq?” Mandy’s head leans into view, long black hair hanging down like a flag. Triquet would kill to have hair like that. This mop of fine, frizzled pale nonsense they were born with has been the bane of every costume and incarnation they ever tried.
“Present and accounted for. Come on in here, Mandy girl.”
“Oh. Uh… I mean, okay. It’s not a big… I just wanted to ask— I’m just taking kind of a survey…”
“Ask what you like. Sit yourself down and I’ll do your nails.” Triquet takes a deep breath to prepare themself, feeling old and wise. Mandy’s voice has a neurotic edge that promises trouble. Maybe with a bit of kindness Triquet can help.
Mandy crawls in. “Oh, wow… I haven’t seen…” The inside of the small tent is crowded with items, all ordered in their places. The sleeping bag and pillow are rolled neatly in the corner and Triquet sits on what looks like an ornate prayer rug. Scarves and small tapestries hang from the roof’s seams and LED candles of a variety of pastel hues illuminate the corners to give the interior a soft, homey feel.
“Here. Sit here, facing me. Nice and close.” Mandy dutifully scoots in, cross-legged, til her knees bump into theirs. Triquet holds Mandy’s childlike hands, smiling at her with warmth. “Oh, poor baby’s got a chill. Got to warm you up.” Triquet pulls out an orange shawl they knit last winter from a thick acrylic yarn, and drapes it about Mandy’s shoulders.
The girl’s lower lip still trembles. Her eyes remain haunted. “Thanks. That’s so nice. I just—” Mandy’s breath catches in her throat. “I just wanted to make sure… Just asking everybody… I mean, I know people must blame me for Jay being gone…”
“What? Whoa. No. You?” Triquet’s parental smile falters and their face splits into a disbelieving grimace. “What an odd idea. What does his disappearance have to do with you?”
But Mandy has worked it all out in her head. “I forced him to deal with that shaft when he didn’t want to, and for far too long, and I was going to force him today to do it again, so he obviously left to avoid me and then things just spiraled out of control. So…”
“To avoid you? Seriously?” Triquet unwraps a travel packet of wet wipes and cleans Mandy’s hands with them. Ye gods, how dirty they all are. This will need a second wipe. “Oh, honey-bunches-of-oats, I hope you take this in the best way possible but this is all beginning to sound like a pretty serious case of main character syndrome. Know what I mean?”
“No, this isn’t about me, but it is about what I did to—”
“What you did? Please. Okay, will you bet me? Like if you win, I’ll give you a full makeover and if I win you give me one of those amazing massages? Please. Cause this is the easiest bet ever. I can one hundred percent guarantee you that you, young and brilliant Mandy Hsu, are one of the last things rattling around in Jay’s brain. Think for just a second who we’re talking about here.”
“It isn’t main character syndrome,” Mandy protests sullenly, holding out her fingers as Triquet begins to trim her ragged cuticles with a pair of nail scissors, “if it’s just my idiocy that gets people to endanger themselves all the time. Again and again. I mean, he might be dead! We don’t even know! They said nobody’s ever come back from across the river! Not in like six generations! Katrina asked the villagers as many ways as she could!”
“Mandy. You’ll have to sit still or I can’t guarantee the quality of my work. Please. I’m an artist.”
Mandy takes a deep breath and stops fidgeting, watching Triquet work with minute precision on her nails.
“I think…” Triquet murmurs, “Jay has a plan of his own. Some rare plant he’s looking for or some wild theory he needs to test. He didn’t go just on a whim, or in reaction to what any of us might have said to him yesterday. This is all on Jay, that crazy bastard. But I will bet you he’s still alive. Don’t worry about that. He may be a goofball, but there’s something pretty resilient about him. He reminds me of the stereotypical American G.I. of World War Two. The Germans called him undisciplined and independent. He wouldn’t even stand up straight! But they learned the hard way that there’s something more important than looking good on parade. Jay’s got that. Sure he doesn’t look like much, but I bet in a pinch he’d be the first person you’d want by your side.”
Mandy finally drops her shoulders. “I guess you’re right. I just feel so awful about it! And I don’t know what to do with all this guilt! Every time something bad happens! I just get manic. I mean, what am I supposed to do?”
“Do? I don’t know, do what you did with Pradeep. You and Esquibel have been doing a great job with him. Or are you somehow responsible for his mystery ailment as well?”
“Yeesh. I feel so bad for that poor guy. I wish I could help him more but every time I put my hands on him I can’t help it. I turn green. He has something seriously wrong. Like way deep inside.”
“But it isn’t your fault.”
“No. Of course it isn’t.”
“And Maahjabeen going out to sea isn’t your fault.”
Mandy opens her mouth, then closes it. She finally allows, “I’ve learned that if I say that it was anything other than Maahjabeen’s own choice, she might physically attack me.”
“And we would cheer her on. Have you always been like this?”
Mandy nods. “I was a pretty difficult older sister to my brother, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t let him have a thought of his own until he was like ten. I always need everything just so.”
“Control freak.”
“The freakiest.”
“Okay. And now finally…”
Mandy gives Triquet her full attention. She appreciates the care they’ve shown her, even if it leads to difficult conversations about herself spoken with a bluntness she finds shocking. “Yes?”
Triquet holds up two bottles of nail polish. “Green or orange? They’re both gels and they both work with your coloring.”
Ξ
Alonso and Flavia sit side by side in their camp chairs. A bit of ragged sun keeps peeking through the cloud cover, warming the air. Flavia compiles her latest version of Plexity’s user interface and watches the progress bar slowly advance across her screen. How much of her life has she dedicated to watching that bar? Years? At least. “And… done. Try it now.”
Their laptops are linked. Alonso opens the program and tries out her changes. “Wait. Where did my options go on this screen?”
“I wanted to make them consistent across all the screens so you can find them under the…”
“Ah. Everything’s in the settings now. Not sure I like that. Yes, it’s more organized but the user will need to take two extra steps to access them. I’m actually wondering, since the collections are all so context-specific, if we might make the intake options part of the collection process. Like a prompt screen before they begin, to reset their parameters for each input. Because what we are learning…”
“Well, sure we could do that, if you want to take fifteen years to finish all your collections…”
“…is that our collectors are spending as much time fiddling with the framework as they are with the actual upload of data.”
Flavia sighs. An inevitable crisis faces Plexity. Perhaps this is finally the time to bring it up with Alonso. “Well. Maybe slow is better after all. Because, you do realize, signore Dottore, that we will never collect even ten percent of the samples you want from the interior of the island. Not in the next four weeks, at least.”
Alonso remains stubbornly silent. His hand finally opens and rotates, as if to say, perhaps/perhaps not.
“Listen, Alonso. You haven’t been in there but the rest of us have. And the idea you have, before you ever spent time in there, is too simple. This island is huge. It’s like—like I don’t know. The size of Venice. You would need so much time to fully explore each and every canyon and hilltop in there. There is no possible way in the four weeks we have left. Especially with hostile natives.”
“If they weren’t so hostile we would already be halfway done.”
This statement is so obviously false Flavia isn’t certain how to respond. She leans back with an irritated sigh. “No. No, you don’t get to blame your unrealistic goals on them. Look. You need to step back from this and look at it better. I know this was like your pacifier when you were locked away but you need to think of it as a funder would. Or a school oversight committee. Think, Alonso. What would you say if someone proposed to cover like twenty square kilometers of an island with a small team in two months?”
“If the concept was sound, I would support it with all my heart.”
“But the concept isn’t sound. The logistics are completely off. I don’t know. I’ve been wondering if there is a way we could get the islanders to help us with collecting but it seems like we’re moving farther away from that, instead of closer. And we only have four extra readers anyway. That’s the real bottleneck.”
“But I’m counting on you. You said your machine learning would help. The automated algorithms. What happened to that?”
Now Flavia is affronted. Instead of acknowledging his own shortcomings, he’s attacking her? “No, that has nothing to do with it. They are already saving you so much time and effort. But they can’t crawl around in the woods on their hands and knees. For that, you still need people. A lot of people. And a lot of readers.”
“So what do you propose?” Alonso has never felt such immense irritability. This—this nerd seems to do nothing but complain. She lives to point out flaws in everyone else’s work and ideas. “I’m beginning to feel that if things were up to you, Flavia, nothing would ever get done.”
“Nothing would ever—? I built you a working fucking prototype of Plexity in two weeks, you ungrateful asshole. And now you are being an even bigger asshole, thinking you can push everyone to do this impossible amount of work in the next four weeks. If I was in charge of your grant application, it would be denied. I wouldn’t even read past the first page. You need to re-focus on something you can actually accomplish here. Like just the lagoon and beach. It is reasonably cut off from—”
“Reasonably cut off? Think about what you just said, Flavia. There is no boundary for ‘reasonability’ in Plexity. It needs to be a hermetic, enclosed system for us to achieve the proper baseline for the program. It is making me wonder if you truly grasp what it is we are doing here.”
“Now don’t you talk down to me, you boomer.”
Alonso sits up straight. “I am Gen X, I will have you know.”
“Boomer is an attitude, not an age. Just do the math, if you’re such an amazing data scientist. I would say we still have 18 square kilometers of work to accomplish. In 29 days. Let’s see. That’s almost 621 square meters per day, or the area of a small house.”
“Divided by just those four readers and that’s only 150 or so. Ha. The math didn’t work out in your favor, did it?” Flavia only frowns at him. “Look, I know it will be hard. I know we don’t have nearly enough time. If I had written the grant I would have set the initial mission for two years here.” This provokes an involuntary shiver of revulsion from Flavia. “But we only have eight weeks. So we shoot for the stars. I am convinced, as we speak, that Jay is somewhere in the interior making a huge number of collections.”
“He didn’t take a reader.”
“Amy says he doesn’t need one. He will bring back hundreds of samples at least. And with his scouting report we will be able to decide how to approach the rest of the island. I am glad he took the initiative. We have been moving too slowly.”
Flavia just stares at him, then shakes her head in distaste. “Men.”
Ξ
Esquibel exits the bunker, stiff-legged and squinting. She realizes it’s the first time she’s been outside the clean room in nearly two days. The camp is gray. There’s a ground fog still at the edges of the camp under the ferns, but a sea breeze is beginning to riffle the air and chase it away. She shivers. “Doesn’t it ever get actually warm here?”
The only one here to answer her rhetorical question is Katrina at the kitchen tables. “Yeh, why couldn’t we come in the summer? I bet it’s pretty nice.”
But Amy, returning from the creek with a wash basin, disagrees. “I bet it’s more like San Francisco summers here. Temperature inversion. Howling fog. No, I bet this is the nicest weather it gets. Remember how Alonso said it’s under a cloud cover nearly every day of the year?”
“Well, then, next time can we please study a tropical island in the Indian Ocean?” Esquibel crosses to Katrina, who hands her a mug of hot water. “Ah, thank you. I am freezing.”
“How’s the patient?” Katrina stands before a hot pan, making a tottering stack of pancakes. She puts three on a plate for Esquibel and hands her a fork and a packet of honey.
Amy pauses drying the dishes to hear Esquibel’s answer.
“I don’t…” Esquibel drops her head, suddenly weary. “I need better diagnostics. Actual labs. This is some weird island bug that I haven’t seen before. Primary neurotoxic activity with secondary cardiovascular effects. And he just isn’t responding to any of the treatments yet. I’ve been going very slow, only trying things with few contra-indications and minimal side effects. Gram-positive antibiotics. Gabapentin. Nortriptyline. But anything else I try moving forward will have serious risks. I don’t like having to make blind guesses. I’m not used to it.”
“Is Pradeep in pain?” Amy brushes a tear away and goes back to wiping down the plates. “Is he stable?”
Esquibel shrugs. “He hasn’t coded again. But sometimes it seems he is getting close. And his breathing can get very weak. I gave him CPR like three times last night when it seemed he stopped.”
“Jesus.” Katrina kneels beside Esquibel and hugs her. “What a hero. You need to get some sleep.”
“Yes. Just a bit of fresh air and a bathroom break and then a quick nap. Mandy has instructions to wake me if there is any change in his condition.”
“What if…?” Flavia trails off, her mind racing. “Alonso, what if we took a Dyson reader blood sample from Pradeep? Perhaps it could find a virus or bacteria that isn’t supposed to be there.”
Alonso just stares at her. “Huh. I don’t know if we have a control… Has anyone put their own sample into a reader yet?”
Esquibel shrugs. “I don’t know what good that will do anyone. It would only be able to tell us like what the molar weight of a viral factor would be and maybe whether it’s gram negative or positive. Without a database of already known pathogens, we wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it.”
“Well, does it have any human source data?” Alonso asks Flavia. “The Dyson readers came pre-loaded with all kinds of databases of known organic…” His voice tapers off as he queries Plexity about its own capabilities.
Flavia shrugs. “I haven’t looked. There’s been no reason.”
Alonso reads aloud, “Chinese Female Proteomic snapshot, Liaoning Prefecture, Age 29. Chinese Male. Age 33. Female, 22, Hebei. There’s hundreds. Huh. Who knew? And why are they all Chinese? But I don’t know if there’s any kind of directory or…”
Flavia’s fingers fly on her keyboard. “Where did you find that?”
“Under Miscellaneous. Remember? We created that folder for all the bells and whistles we thought we wouldn’t use.”
“As long as the data is there, I can create a query that will find what we want.” Flavia is back in her element. Actual concrete inputs that she can work with. She unzips a whole hidden database of human-derived samples. Columns of newly-liberated data scroll down her laptop. “Wow. It is a lot. Scattershot DNA. Proteomics profiles. Microbiomes. I will need some time. Sort through all the garbage. Figure out what the best lexical strategy is.”
Mandy appears in the doorway of the bunker, on wobbly knees. She leans against the frame.
“What is it?” Esquibel stands immediately, putting her plate on the table. “Is he in trouble?”
Mandy holds up a weak hand. “No. He’s fine. Just me. I fainted. I…” Mandy takes a couple steps, then doubles over and grabs her knees. “I was just trying to offer a little support, you know. Just hold his feet like I do for Alonso, but wow. Maahjabeen just found me on the floor. She said she’d heard me collapse. She’s in with him now. I just need some…” Esquibel wraps an arm of support around Mandy as she sags against her. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him, Skeebee. But whatever’s stuck in him, it’s awful.”
Ξ
“Pradeep.” Maahjabeen waits for Mandy to depart then she kneels beside his cot and kisses his slack mouth. “Darling. Mahbub.”
But he doesn’t respond.
She doesn’t care. She doesn’t care anymore who might see her, who might learn their secret. He is gravely ill. The only man who has ever truly loved her, the only man whom she has ever truly loved. He is only twenty-four and he has a whole life ahead of him. She kisses him again and rests her head on his hollowed-out chest, a mewling cry escaping her.
Maahjabeen prays silently, fiercely, calling on Allah to bring His grace back to Pradeep. She lifts the cold brown hands, kisses every knuckle. A panic rises in her. He shouldn’t still be on this island. He should be on a medical evacuation helicopter. He should be getting wheeled into a state-of-the-art hospital, surrounded by trained staff and beeping machines. Instead he rests on a makeshift cot in a room made of plastic sheets. And they are only waiting.
What bit him? Maahjabeen hasn’t seen any sign, in all her time on the beach, of any of the spiny urchins or anemones that could have caused this. He didn’t ever cry out. There was no point where he appeared to get injured. He just fell asleep on the beach after his panic attack. Maybe this was part of that somehow. Stress could do strange things to people. She knew a girl in college who studied so hard she held the muscles in her neck rigid for too long and caused stress fractures in her cervical vertebra. She literally studied so hard she broke her neck. Crazy things could happen. Or maybe it was intentional. Maybe it all started that night before, with the Lisicans sharing their seafood catch and Pradeep retreating into his tent. Maybe they had secretly drugged him somehow? Then that led to his paranoia and a reaction to it. He somehow knew all along. And now he’s dying…
Or maybe he just ate a handful of bad berries.
“We don’t know. Darling, we just don’t know…” His eyelids flutter so she kisses them again and chafes his hands. Now his breath deepens. Maahjabeen cries out and gathers him in her arms. She keeps chattering at him, making pillow talk in Arabic.
Pradeep pulls his eyes open. They are watery, distant, covered in a milky film. His hand trembles in her grip. He tries to speak but his jaw slides sideways and drool drips from his lip. “Eyyyyhhh…”
“Pradeep. I’m here, my dearest. I will always be here.”
His face slowly screws up into a trembling scowl. His lips purse. “Mock. Jah. Bean.” Then his neck can no longer hold his head and his forehead falls against her shoulder.
A long moment later, after a trickle of warmth has flowed into him, he pushes his face up against hers, then pulls back to look her in the eyes. He says it for the very first time. “I… love you.”
“I love you, too, you amazing man. And you will get better.”
“Just having you here…” His back engages and he sits up a bit. The film over his eyes starts to clear. “I am not so cold. Because you are here… and I love you. It’s the cold, Maahjabeen. That’s what… is killing me.”
“I will never let you get cold. Ever again.” Maahjabeen opens her jacket and pulls him into it, nestling him against her warm skin. She rolls him back onto the cot, cooing. Then she turns, to place herself beside him.
And that’s when she sees Esquibel standing in the entrance of the clean room, frozen in shock, hands parting the plastic sheets. Maahjabeen has no idea how long she has been standing there. She doesn’t know what she heard. Ah, well. Inshallah. What’s done is done. The important part is that being here helps Pradeep. She nods at the doorway. “Come. Doctor Daine. He is conscious.”
“Yes…” Esquibel moves decisively into the room and sanitizes her hands. She puts on a mask and nitrile gloves, then places a hand on Maahjabeen’s shoulder. “Please. I need to inspect him.”
“I cannot let go.” Maahjabeen’s eyes flash protectively. “My warmth is what is keeping him awake. He just told me.”
Esquibel pauses only half a breath before shaking her head to clear it, to strip this salacious scene of all its implications and to move forward with the new information alone, just as any trauma care doctor must do. Data is data right now. It can be a soap opera later. She puts a stethoscope against Pradeep’s neck, to hear it slow and turgid through his carotid. But as she listens it seems to deepen in volume and capacity, steadying. Huh. Perhaps the Tunisian siren is right. Well. It is nice to see her care for someone, even if it is a shock to see the two of them like this. “Pradeep…?” She gets down into his field of view. His eyes are open, dark and staring at the floor. His trembling arms disappear around Maahjabeen inside her jacket. What in the world. “Are you with us?”
“Hello… Doctor…” Pradeep’s voice is a ragged whisper. “You have to… help me fight this.”
“Yes. Good. That is the plan. We are both fighting together, yes? Can you tell me what it is we are fighting, though?”
“It’s down here…” Pradeep pushes the heel of one hand against the top of his pubis bone, just below his navel. He writhes upon making contact, twisting in Maahjabeen’s embrace. “Aaaugh…”
“La, la. Shh.” She soothes him, drawing him in again. Her eyes catch on Esquibel’s wondering stare and flicker defiantly, then soften into helplessness.
Esquibel’s own gaze melts and she puts a loving hand alongside Maahjabeen’s face. Their secret is out. Good for them. Two lovely idols, they are. And besides, their NDAs will keep the secret theirs. Now it is just between the Muslim girl and her god and Esquibel has an atheist’s impatience with the significance of that.
Pradeep settles, Maahjabeen replacing the pressure of his hand with the fullness of her hip, solid against his belly. Her voluptuous warmth soothes him and he releases a groan.
“Lower intestine?” Esquibel wonders aloud. “Digestive? Would you say it is digestive what you are experiencing?”
Pradeep shakes his head no. “Forgot I even had… an appetite. No. That’s all vanished. It’s just… this pit…”
“My guess has been neurological, from your symptoms. Have you ever suffered nerve pain or any nerve conditions before?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Just if you have a point of reference. Neuralgia doesn’t all feel like hitting funny bones. There’s impinging pain, like when a muscle entraps a nerve, or when you get a kink in your neck, or really nasty trigeminal pain from teeth. It can be burning or itching or sharp stabbing. Would any of those apply to how you feel?”
Pradeep shakes his wobbling head no. “More like… I’m being… pulled down… into the cold pit.”
“How cold? Are you going numb?” Esquibel, crouching beside him on the balls of her feet, pivots so she can grab his leg. She hits his patellar tendon below the kneecap with the edge of her stethoscope and is encouraged to see his reflex work properly. She takes off his shoe. “Tell me if you can sense this.” She softly pinches his big toe. “Can you feel anything?”
“Uhh…” Pradeep frowns. “Your hand on my heel?”
She squeezes his toe more firmly. “Yes. My hand is on your heel. How about anything else?” She pinches the meat of his toe.
Pradeep’s face collapses with anxiety. “That’s my toe, isn’t it? Why can’t I feel my toe?”
Esquibel takes off his sock and tries the other toes on his foot. First she runs the cold surface of the stethoscope across them but he doesn’t react at all. Then she pinches each of them.
“No! No! What happened to my toes?” Pradeep buries his face in Maahjabeen’s neck. She holds him tight and stares at Esquibel with urgent need.
Esquibel replaces Pradeep’s sock and shoe then gently pulls one of his hands away from Maahjabeen and pokes at his fingertips.
“Ow. Okay. I can feel my fingertips. Just my toes then. My poor toes. They’ve been… in the pit too long. You got to…” He shakes his head, the image of the endless mud overpowering what he sees with his eyes. “Nngh. You got to get me out.”
Esquibel goes back to his legs. She runs her hands up his sciatic nerve, rolling him onto his side. She pulls down his pants and tracks it into the base of his spine, directly above the girdle of his hips. With an inhaled hiss of disquiet, she takes out her light to more closely view what she has found there.
“What?” Maahjabeen heard her hiss and fears what it could mean. “What is it?”
“Right at his lowest vertebra, like lumbar five here. A pattern of dots. And now they are inflamed. And here. They look like this.”
Esquibel takes a photo and holds her phone up for Maahjabeen to see. It is the outline of an animal’s head, a tight constellation of puncture wounds in the small of his back. Each of them have grown angry and infected, connecting to each other in the vague outlines of a cave painting. It is unmistakably the head of a fox.
Ξ
“Ta-daaa…” Katrina kneels before Alonso, unveiling a plate with a pile of rice, a filet of whitefish, and a sprinkle of seaweed.
“Oh, thank you, my dear. How did you know I am starving?”
“I don’t think you’ve moved all day, have you?”
“No. I…” Alonso gestures helplessly at his laptop. “I am very busy. I am very much feeling the deadlines closing in on us.”
“Ha! Are you? We’ve still got like three weeks left, right?”
“Four! Exactly four weeks. Exactly halfway today. And Flavia, in her artless and direct way, informed me she thinks there’s no way we will finish our primary Plexity mission before we must leave. So now I am very busy.”
Katrina sets the plate on the platform beside his chair and stands.
“Do you?”
His voice makes her pause. “Eh? What’s that, mate?”
Alonso repeats, “Do you think we can finish in time?”
Katrina wonders how she might handle this situation best. She doesn’t have enough data to decide. She must listen first. “Well… Remind me what the goals of the primary mission are.”
“To characterize all the life on the island.”
Katrina nods slowly. “Okay. Well then I’ve got a question for you. Does it require a rich context for each sample? You know, what the sample is near, at different times and places, all that?”
“Of course. The relationships are the primary hallmarks of life. Not their own individual characteristics. That is the whole point. The purpose of Plexity is to show there is a larger living breathing meta-organism that—”
“Then no.”
“No? What do you mean, no?”
“You need a hundred thousand samples. We can’t get you a hundred thousand samples in the time remaining. I’m sorry. But it’s just physically impossible. You see that, right? I’m not saying the whole project is impossible. But if what you’re asking for is a variety of samples of about, I don’t know, 9000 life forms? Can we get you one Dyson profile for each of those 9000 samples by May 19th? Yes, I think so. And that can be like your scaffold, right?”
Alonso leans back with exasperation, lifting the plate and shoveling food into his mouth.
“Right? Isn’t that how it usually works? I figure we’re doing a great initial assay of the site, right? Isn’t that, uh, standard protocol for something like this? We get a nice broad overview and then we go back to our institutions, those of us who have them, and show them all this fantastic documentation and write a huge grant proposal for another year out here or something. That’s what I figured we were doing here. I mean, the idea that we could be finished here in eight weeks is, well, kind of silly, isn’t it?”
Alonso can’t look at her. He stares at the columns of data on his screen but he can’t derive meaning from them at the moment. His emotions churn so strongly in him he is afraid he will be ill. “And you think they will let us back on the island after our eight weeks is over? Eh, Katrina? Is that what you are counting on?”
“I’m not counting on anything. But why wouldn’t they? I mean, who does it belong to? Still the military? I thought they were about to give the island up because of some big new satellite agreement. Isn’t that what’s happening? So then we just have to worry about, I don’t know, competing research programs showing up and like rich assholes with yachts? I mean, who’s going to come all the way out here for an unsupported expedition except lunatics like us? All I’m saying is I don’t think we need to be completely done here in four weeks. We just need to show a compelling snapshot to the powers that be so we can continue our work. I mean, Pradeep and Amy said they could spend the rest of their careers here, easily.”
“Yes. Of course. You’re right, it’s just…” Alonso lifts and drops a hand, unable to put into words how much he has invested in these expectations. They literally kept him alive. And sane.
Katrina covers Alonso’s hand with her own. “Hey. It’s okay now. You aren’t like fighting for your life any more. You’re surrounded by all your loved ones. And like, admirers. Right? It was something Pavel could never accept. That he could like put these things down that he held for so long to help him survive and finally relax.”
Alonso nods, not really hearing her. “Yes. Well, thank you for your kind words. I should get back to Plexity, now that we’ve all decided that it will just be a shadow of what it could be. Yes.”
“Alonso, that’s not what I meant. I’m in this for the long haul. Eight weeks, eight years. You hear me? I want to see the end of this. But properly. You had to know eight weeks wouldn’t be enough. I mean, didn’t they show you the size of the island?”
Alonso shrugs. “Yes, I admit, it is larger and… more complex… than anticipated. I didn’t know about all these tunnels. I thought we would be further along than this by now. Yes. But all we need are four six-hour shifts for collection teams. And during that six hours you just need to cover one hundred square meters. Flavia worked it all out. In the 28 days left it is really quite a reasonable goal. Then boom. One hundred thousand samples just like so.”
Katrina nods, her smile empty, realizing she has told him all he is able to hear at the moment. She brushes a strand of his curly black and silver hair back from in front of his eyes. “Got it. You know… Another thing… Mandy and I were talking… Thinking maybe this isn’t your very best night to try a round of MDMA therapy?”
But Alonso has already returned his attention to his laptop. “Eh? What’s that? What is MDAA…?”
“The molly.”
“Ah. Yes, we should definitely wait.” Alonso makes a weary face. “Between Jay’s disappearance and Pradeep’s… condition, I can’t ask anyone to face more risk or…”
“Well, it’s not risk. It’s perfectly safe, but the vibe is certainly…”
“Regardless of that, I think we can both agree that yes, this is not the right time for it. Thank you for checking in. And please. My compliments to the chef. The dinner is delicious.”
Ξ
“Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.” Jay stands at the bottom of a shaft of gray light, the first natural light he’s seen in thirty hours, rolling a joint. It’s not the easiest thing to do without a table. That’s why he’d pre-rolled five fatties before he’d started on this whole trip. But those are all gone now.
First he grinds some of his daily driver, a combination of OG Kush and Alaskan Thunderfuck. It usually gives him the old solid rocket booster in the shorts when he needs it. But it doesn’t make him paranoid or manic. The Kush keeps him grounded.
It’s been a hard day so he adds a bit more than normal. Then he unscrews the grinder to scoop out some of the kief dust that had collected in the bottom tray. A real hard day, yo.
He dabs his tongue along the paper’s edges and twists it closed. “Man, I love getting high.” Jay lights the joint and takes a couple big cigar puffs to get it going. Then he releases the billows of smoke into the shaft of light, watching their edges uncurl like seventh-dimension monsters of thought. “It’s like, I get to schedule all my highs and lows throughout the day. Like guaranteed.” He feels the rush outward through his scalp into the universe above as his feet send down roots into the soil below. “And now I’m on this planet again, but for real. Yooo. I’m back, bitches.”
He has been walking for hours already this morning, following the interminable curving tunnel, always bearing left ahead of him. He walked all day yesterday as well. It doesn’t make any sense. Math has never been his strong suit but he’s been trying to puzzle it out in his head as he went. The circumference of Lisica can’t be more than, what, twenty kilometers? If it’s like on average four by five kilometers, let’s say a diameter of five. Then it’s… uh… 3πr? So the radius would be like two and a half. Three times pi is nine. Nine times two and a half is like twenty-three. “There’s no way I’ve only walked twenty-three klicks! I’ve put in like twenty solid hours.”
But this is the first time he’s seen any light coming in from above. He relishes the change, after the monotonous hours that hadn’t afforded much of any entertainment. He almost wishes to be like Pradeep, who can effortlessly generate all these fantastical monsters out of the dark to be terrified of—which would be entertaining, but his brain just doesn’t work that way. Jay sees what’s in front of him and that’s pretty much it. And what he’s been seeing for too long is this gray tunnel and its curving parallel rails. Last night he hiked until his phone battery died. Then he crawled into his emergency bivy in a doorway out of the way of the rails just in case anything ever came down them. He plugged his phone into his spare battery and slept pretty soundly, all things considered.
No. He’s not really given to flights of fancy. What he knows with certainty, deep in his roots, is that this world they live in surpasses all else in wonder. No imagined fantasy monsters or palaces or even religions that people can make up in their heads can ever compare to the true infinite complexity of Mother Earth around them, the majesty Jay gets to study each day.
“And I get it.” He cinches his pack, takes one last gigantic drag off the joint before he crushes the roach beneath his heel and field-strips the paper and ash. He fishes out an energy bar and continues walking. “I’ve seen what it’s like in Nebraska. I drove across a few times. But who knows, maybe religion there does seem like a bigger deal on the flat land. I get it. But what you got to do, brother, is just travel one day west and you’re in the Rockies. Then you’ll see what religion’s all about. The peaks. The canyons. I mean, this whole island is all the god I need. Rising up like a… a giant statue from the deep. Yeah. And now I’m crawling across god’s face.”
Jay likes the sound of his own voice. The rush the weed brings delights him and fills him with the fantasies he just derided. He sees the island rising up from crashing seas like a vengeful Polynesian volcano deity with an insatiable hunger for virgins.
Oh, now he’s entertained.
He walks for a couple more hours, his sparkling high fading into monotony. He passes another couple slanting rays of gray daylight, shining through cracks in the tunnel above. He eats some banana chips and empties his last water bottle. But still he doesn’t worry. He likes walking. And he’s needed a huge hike like this to really unscramble himself after being laid up for so long. He’ll find some water somewhere.
Every once in a while he passes junctions, where the rails split and veer into solidly sealed-off tunnels. But it doesn’t look like a mining operation here. Everything’s too clean. It’s all just solid concrete that hasn’t nearly ever cracked or even stained over the decades. Sometimes he’ll find chipped and faded orange numbers at the junctions. He made out 13 at the last one. It relieved him to recognize the language. If this had been like a giant Soviet weapon installation he was crawling through, that would creep him out. It would be like playing a video game in real life. And not fucking Stardew Valley either. This is more like Half Life.
“Come on, now.” Jay takes a deep breath. “Well, you said you were bored and wanted to freak yourself out.” He groans, his feet finally dragging. “Aw, man. This is so dumb. What am I missing? I got to be missing something. There’s no way those kids came all this way. This is like some seriously Kafka bullshit here.”
He realizes if there’s anything anywhere it’s got to be at the junctions. He hadn’t looked very closely at 13 back there because it seemed like all the others and he’d gotten it into his head at the beginning of this walk that the way out would just be at the end. “Come on, now. You can turn around. It’s just right back there.” But Jay has a masculine intransigence that keeps him straining forward. It’s been his undoing down here for sure. “There won’t be another junction for hours, tough guy. Come on. Turn back.”
So with a last lingering look at the unchanging curving tunnel ahead, Jay finally swings himself around and retreats to the junction he left ten minutes before.
His phone is already at 78%. He’s kept it on the lowest setting for the light to extend the battery but he’s not too worried about losing power. The brick he carries is strong enough for five full recharges. Now he cranks it up, painfully bright, to investigate all the nooks and crannies of the wide junction. It is an irregular chamber, with two branching rail lines going off to two directions toward the left, shaped like an aorta from a heart. He inspects the solid concrete walls that seal off the two tunnels. No, there’s no getting through either of them. Maybe he’s wrong. Maybe he’s just in an irregular spiral that somehow continues forever. Maybe he’s already dead and he doesn’t even know it.
Oh. Wait. There’s a door.
Ha. Just as he was about to give in to despair after all. Fucking door right in front of him. Inset in the wall behind the orange number 13. But does it open?
Jay pushes on the steel panel with the toe of his boot and it swings partially open, metal on dust the only sound. A hallway beyond is filled with gray light.
Jay turns off his phone light, squinting in the glare. There’s a smell here, a smell he never thought he’d smell on Lisica.
Jay totters forward toward the light, a ridiculous smile on his face. He hears water trickling in the distance, and sees that the hall ends in an old gun emplacement dug into the cliffs. The gun is long gone but its narrowed defensible view still commands a broad swath of the ocean’s horizon out there. The gray light slants in at a strong angle. This interior chamber, a good thirty meters wide, is full of plants. Their gardener works among them, pulling weeds. She stands, an old Lisican woman in a modern canvas apron, t-shirt and jeans, smoking a giant handmade cigar. She looks at Jay blankly. He can’t tell if he is welcome here.
Jay points at the sativa bush beside him with glee. “Ganja.”
The woman nods, expressionless, and extends to Jay the cigar.
DW Draffin -- Lisica 