Chapter 9 – More Useful
February 26, 2024
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Audio for this chapter:
9 – More Useful
The storm rages for three days. The ten of them remain trapped in the bunker for the duration. It is a grim marathon, punctuated by incoherent breakdowns from Alonso, Pradeep, Flavia, then nearly everyone else. The claustrophobia nearly does Amy in, and she finds herself weeping in Triquet’s arms one night for hours.
For Jay it’s the unrelenting ferocity of the storm. As a California boy his experience with storms is spotty. He’s definitely been out in some ragers, and he’s quite aware of the infinite power of the Pacific Ocean, but this is an assault. Like this is an unrelenting hammer and anvil where physics beats biology every time. It feels like the island will get torn up by the roots and carried away. He didn’t know that storms could be so insane.
Miriam feels like she is sinking in a leaky lifeboat and she only has her cupped hands to bail. Alonso is offline. When he isn’t babbling about AK-47s and gopniks he is asleep. Any decisions that need to be made are now hers to make. At one point, during her darkest hour, Miriam approaches Amy and asks if she knows of any emergency beacon or transmitter that Alonso had privately revealed to her. Because it’s time to hit it. Call in the Marines. But of course Amy knows nothing. Miriam asks Esquibel the same thing, but she only crosses her arms and presses her mouth into a line. “No. Devices would be useless anyway. Like any signal could penetrate these clouds.”
Esquibel is most concerned with Mandy. She has lost all reason. The Doctor sets up a nice cot for her in the clean room, where she attends her nearly the entire three days, sleeping at her side, making sure she feeds herself, and when Mandy tries once again to run out into the storm, forcibly holding her down and demanding her permission to sedate her. After an hour of shouting at each other she finally gets through and the girl meekly lies down and lets Esquibel give her two Benadryl and a Valium. She is asleep soon.
Triquet keeps the endurance racer’s mindset from the beginning. They are the only one who does not collapse. There had been a point at the beginning of their career, crouched in a Guatemalan pit toilet with the dysentery shits as rebel gunfire suddenly echoed through the jungle and killed their guide Topo, when they realized archaeology would some day kill them. The sudden clarity of that epiphany has never left them, and they are at peace with their destiny. They certainly hope it will be later—much later—rather than sooner, but this big old bad world has it out for everybody, and this tremendous storm is just the latest threat to their existence. Poor Maahjabeen. Triquet only hopes she didn’t suffer too much before departing to her Islamic afterlife.
On the morning of the third day the wind finally eases. Mandy is up an hour before dawn, lacing her boots. Esquibel opens her eyes and only watches, weary and heavy-limbed. “Mandy, no… You should wait for light.”
“I have to see.”
“You can’t see. There’s no light.”
“Well I can’t stay here. Not for another moment.” Mandy pulls on her blue storm shell and zips it to her chin. Esquibel is already up and lacing her boots as well. Mandy holds up a hand. “Oh, you don’t have to join—”
“Save it.” Esquibel lifts a portable work light. Its beam function should be sufficient. She grabs her coat as they head for the door of the bunker.
Outside is a ruin. They had brought nearly everything they could inside before things got too bad but the parachute they’d left hung in the trees is now just thin torn strips. The platforms are piles of scattered sticks. A multitude of thick branches have fallen across their path, making navigation to the beach nearly impossible. One of the giant redwoods has fallen, the width of its trunk now four meters tall. Mandy climbs its rough bark, gentle rain still falling.
At the top of the fallen trunk the last of the storm whips her, the air heavy and wet but no longer cold. Over the southeastern sea she can see a pale stripe in the sky that promises dawn and clear skies. Good. By the time she makes her way down to the beach, there should be light enough.
Mandy is bruised, stunned by the apocalyptic days she just endured. She still can’t forgive herself for letting Maahjabeen go, but at least she is admitting to herself that if she had stayed out in the storm she would have died like fifteen different ways.
Despite the obvious risks out here, Esquibel is glad to be outside. But her relief is short-lived. Fatigue steals up on her. She is used to open-ended shifts of intense caregiving, especially during her deployments, but this has been one of her longest. She is light-headed now, nearly delirious, only keeping it together through strength of will. They will take a quick look at the beach, realize Maahjabeen is still gone and how impossible her survival is, then go back to the cot and fall asleep in each other’s arms.
And to Mandy’s dismay, that is exactly what happens.
Ξ
Triquet is belowdecks with Katrina, stringing a line of work lights into the new chambers they’ve discovered. This room is narrow, lined with impossibly cramped bunks for the engine crew. An old odor of pipe tobacco and mildew still somehow lingers. As Katrina dresses the cable along the floor she finds an ammunition box under the furthest bunk.
“Uh, hold up, Triq. We got ourselves a live one here.”
Triquet squeals. Today they wear a galibayah—a striped cotton Egyptian shift, and black knit skullcap under their helmet, in a more somber vein. They just haven’t felt it is appropriate to wear fashion and makeup since the loss of Maahjabeen. They hitch the long skirt up and crouch beside Katrina to stare at the olive green container. “Ammo box. They usually don’t have ammo, though. Waterproof and bombproof. A lot of soldiers kept their valuables in them back then.”
“But what if it is ammunition?”
Triquet frowns. “Yeah… that could be a problem. Explosives can decay and become unstable. I mean, it’s a small chance, but… You’re right, you should probably back away.”
Katrina does so. “What are you gonna do?”
“Uhh. I know. There’s that sink back in the tip. That big enamel monster in the corner. Help me get it.”
They retreat two rooms to the chamber under the control room, where even the largest pieces have now been arranged and placed in rows. They lift the heavy sink and bring it back through the two hatches to rest it on the deck right in front of the ammo box.
“Now I’m just going to…” Triquet unlaces a boot and ties the cord to the handle of the ammo box. Then they tilt the sink at an angle, resting its top edge against the bunk. “Step back again. I’ll drag it until we get it under the sink. Then we drop the sink on it. Blast shield, right?”
“Right.” Katrina withdraws to the hatch as Triquet gently draws the ammo box across the deck toward the sink, which waits like the traps Elmer Fudd used to leave for Bugs Bunny. Thank god for Triquet. When everyone else fell the fuck apart, good old Triquet came through, organizing breakfast and clearing the area around the bunker of storm wreckage before asking for a volunteer to accompany them down here. Katrina has felt so hopeless, watching all these others battle their demons through the dark days and nights. But for her, it’s just more of how she has felt taking care of her brother Pavel. He’d always been ravaged by dark thoughts, even as a child, but now after a year in the gulag he is worse than ever. He’s drawn himself into such a subterranean place that he has gone inert. Katrina can only hope that healing is happening in there. That he is not becoming stuck forever in his dark place.
But now she has seen that phenomenon writ large. A good half dozen people nearly lost their minds in the bunker over the last few days. It was the worst camp-out she’d ever attended, lol. LMAO. ROFL. The acronyms are as heavy as stones in her mind. Yes… losing Maahjabeen has taken even Katrina’s humor away.
“And… so far so good.” Triquet crouches beside the sink. “Help me drop it now.” They gently shift the sink so that it covers the box, resting it upside-down on the deck. Then Triquet stands on a nearby bunk and shoos Katrina back to the hatch. “Ready?”
Katrina nods, not knowing what they are about to do.
Triquet yanks on the boot lace, still tied to the ammo box handle. With each yank, they knock it against the interior of the sink, again and again.
Katrina squints in anticipation, her fingers in her ears.
After a few moments of this, Triquet stops. “See? What I figured. Probably personal possessions. Juicy ones I hope.”
They lift the sink away and Triquet puts a white workcloth in their lap with the ammo box on top. They turn on the headlamp and camera on their helmet. The latch on the ammo box is rusted and needs to be forced, but with a clack it finally releases and the lid creaks open.
Triquet peers within. “Oo, look,” they fish out a foil-wrapped oblong. “Wrigley’s spearmint. You like gum?” They set it aside and draw out a stack of papers. “This is bizarre. I mean, What I don’t understand is how someone could just forget their personal effects. Here. Look. What kind of emergency bugout had to happen…” The stack of papers contains a passport. “See? They even forgot their passport. How could—?” Triquet opens the passport and glances at its contents. Their face goes sober. “Ah. Aha. Well then. That’s how.”
“What? What is it?” Katrina leans forward.
The passport contains a black and white photo of a middle-aged woman with a narrow face and dark lipstick, a 1950s hairstyle forcing her blonde curls into strange shapes. Her name is MAUREEN CATHERINE DOWERD.
“M.C. Dowerd is the gravestone in the trees. She didn’t forget her valuables, Katrina. I guess after she died, everyone else did.”
Ξ
Alonso sits in his camp chair behind the trap door in the corner, out of everyone’s way. His anguish sizzles in him like oil on a pan. He can’t seem to get past it. There is nothing but this pain. He has always suffered it and he will always suffer it and everything else is an abstraction, a comfortable luxury that he can ill afford. The words ring hollow in his head, shorn of meaning: Miriam. Plexity. Lisica. Remember when they were important? They had been the pillars of his sanity. He supposes that is gone now. His sanity has been swept away in that storm along with that poor Tunisian girl. Yet another burden he will carry forever. He will have to contact her family and promise restitution, debase himself with apologies.
Hot tears run down his cheeks again. He has always been weepy for sure, all that opera and those Cuban boleros growing up. They just open your heart. But now his eyes leak like his heart bleeds. He is fracturing, disassembling from grief. And all these people here, gathered from the four corners of the globe at his request, are all waiting on him.
And he can’t do a thing for them.
His hands rest on the cane, massaging its handle. His ruined feet curl under him, in an awkward position that hurts the least. They had broken him in pieces like Humpty Dumpty. And all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again. He has been atomized. Like the opposite of Plexity. They’ve beaten him into isolated bits and all the connective tissue is gone.
That poor child Mandy rouses again, crying out in the clean room. Here is yet another casualty laid at Alonso’s door. How many years of therapy will she require after the last few days? Oh, dios mio… He is ill from the wash of guilt sweeping through him, so he sighs raggedly and closes his eyes. It is all too unbearable.
Mandy breaks free of Esquibel’s embrace and slips through the clean room exit. Alonso opens his eyes to glimpse her bruised eyes and pallid cheeks. Poor dear thing. Ruined.
He has to think of something—anything—that he can contribute to this community he has created. His big Cuban family. If he only had a barbecue he could make them all some Mojo Criollo. But he has none of the meats or spices, not to mention the tools and a barbecue itself, as well as the strength to stand for more than a few seconds at a time. No. Useless. All he can do now is stay out of the way. Make sure that they don’t need to spend their few resources taking care of him. Shrink into yourself, Alonso. It is his only course.
Ξ
The sky is still gray, with dark streamers dropping sheets of rain from time to time. Mandy strides past Amy and Pradeep collecting all the wreckage from the platforms. She climbs the redwood trunk and navigates a fallen bay tree, its aromatic leaves all around her. Then she descends to the shore, filled with piles of sea grass and dead crustaceans. The gulls and other birds are pecking at the harvest, unconcerned by the human in their midst. A single dead sea lion lies rolled on its side, a giant red gash in its black tail.
Mandy reaches the edge of the beach as a fresh shower douses her. The lagoon is still dark. The open ocean has settled into bands of blue, the waves coming in orderly rows. She stands and watches them, vowing not to leave.
The clouds sail across the southern sky and it breaks open. Flavia locates Mandy on the shore hours later. She stands on the redwood trunk behind her, admiring the strands of Mandy’s long hair and scarves flapping in the wind like Cordelia, waiting for her life to begin again.
“Ai, Mandy is here!” Flavia calls out to the others who have come looking with her. Amy has been distracted by the bounties of the fallen redwood and Triquet has decided to try to skirt the fallen behemoth, back toward the grove and around its uprooted base.
The lagoon is settling now. Such a beautiful view, like some of Flavia’s favorite spots on the Ligurian coast. But those are warm enough to swim in and this, no. Never. Ah, look! Flavia is surprised to see curved black dorsal fins running in a line of three behind the line of surf. Are they sharks? They must be the biggest sharks in the whole world! Amy should see them. One rolls onto its side, lifting a pectoral fin, and flashes its black and white patches. Oh! It is one of those killer whales! Like in the movies! “Amy! Amy, come! You have to see! I think it’s killer whales!”
Amy pops up, giving Flavia a little moue of excitement.
Flavia turns back to them. “At first I thought they were sharks but then one showed me his…” Flavia falls silent.
Amy clambers up the side of the redwood trunk, its corrugated bark providing easy hand and foot holds. “Showed you his what?” But Flavia has an indescribable look on her face.
Amy follows her gaze. There, out on the water, three dorsal fins cut behind the surf. And following them is a yellow kayak.
“Ahh!” Amy gasps, flinging her arm out. “Maahjabeen!” She screams in wild joy and clambers from the trunk. Amy fights her way through the fallen bay tree, Flavia finally rousing herself and falling in beside her. They reach Mandy before she has seen from her lower vantage point. Flavia wraps her in her arms, babbling incoherently, and finally Amy turns them to the sea as Maahjabeen surfs through the rollers and carves her way through the lagoon mouth, her arms stiff and her posture wrong. But once she reaches the safety of the still water she turns her boat and lifts her paddle to the sky, calling out to the three orcas who remained behind. “Netcharfou! Yaishek!”
After they depart, she turns back to the shore. She is so depleted she can only move robotically, favoring one side. Mandy is on her knees, crying out to her. The kayak skids to a halt in the sand.
Maahjabeen can’t get herself out. Flavia and Amy try to lift her but she has no strength left. “Okay,” Amy realizes. “Nice and slow. Step by step. Get your legs under you.”
“I can’t—” Maahjabeen’s unused voice halts. She shakes her head no. “I can’t feel my legs.”
“Are they… are you injured?”
Maahjabeen shakes her head no. But she holds up four fingers. “Four times. Four times I tried to get back. Whenever it looked like there would be a gap in the storm.”
“But where were you?” Flavia unzips Maahjabeen’s wind shell, stiff with salt, and wraps her warmer coat around her. “Come on. Just hold on to my neck and we’ll get you out.”
“Four times.” Maahjabeen shakes her head in dismay, unable to communicate in those two words how many hours of terror in the dark on the water that meant. How many times she had believed herself lost. How the cold had been like knives one abysmal night when she was stranded on a seastack. There are no words to describe what she has gone through. But she needs to tell them the most important parts. Before she passes out. “There is a beach. Another one.”
“Another beach!” Amy crows. “Amazing! You are such a hero. So you sheltered there? ”
“Well. Mostly. I—I dug a hole in the sand and turned my kayak over and I was in there for almost two days. But then after I tried to paddle back I nearly died and spent a whole night out on the water. When I got back to the beach the second time I discovered this.” Her shaking hand holds up her phone, displaying a picture.
It is a shadowed image of another concrete bunker.
“I was able to spend the last night in there.”
Triquet arrives in a rush just as Maahjabeen shares this. They shower her return with squeals of joy and delight. Then they give the revealed image the same delirious reaction. “Magnificent! Look at all that trash! Oh, I can spend the rest of my life on this island!”
They all laugh, and with Triquet’s help they’re able to pull Maahjabeen from her kayak. She groans in pain, trembling. Something isn’t right with her back. After bracing the fiberglass shell against the wind that tore at her for two days, something has locked up in her spine. And her shoulders aren’t properly working anymore either after the night on the seastack.
“Let’s get you back inside and cleaned up.” Amy holds her up with a strong arm around her waist. “Can you walk?”
“I don’t know.” Maahjabeen stumbles. Their progress across the beach is slow and awkward. They can’t drape her arms over their shoulders because of the pain.
Triquet makes a face. “Maybe we carry her. Make a travois.”
“No. I’ll be fine. I can make it. Oh!” Maahjabeen blinks at the wreckage on the beach. “Look what happened here!”
Triquet leads the others around the base of the fallen redwood through the grove. “But wait,” Maahjabeen says, pulling on them to stop, her voice a bit querulous. “The last important part.” She sways among the upthrust roots of the fallen giant.
“Yes?” Flavia prompts her.
“The orcas. They brought me back when it was safe. They knew. They knew everything. I’d have never survived without…”
Maahjabeen swoons and Triquet catches her before she falls.
Ξ
In his downtime, Jay reads fantasy novels on his phone. He has an entire library, from old classics to new fanfic. He likes exploration stories best, where a hero adventures alone or with a small band into lands that no human has seen, and they encounter strange new life forms and magic and always—always—a dark secret that only the hero can truly deal with. The formula comforts him, and the fanciful descriptions of different worlds have only become more preposterous the more he learns of field biology in the real world.
Now, he’s having trouble getting into the next story. There’s a blue elf on the edge of a magical forest, gripping his spear and singing about seventeen verses of a song before he’s about to enter. But now that Jay has actually done it in real life—gone alone into the magical forest of an untamed land—he finds that the author has no idea what the hell they’re talking about. Who the fuck is singing songs? Where’s the anxiety, the careful re-checking of gear, the exhaustion you have to shake off after all the hoops you jumped through just to get to the edge of the forest to begin with? This pap is just written by some kid in the suburbs who has never journeyed farther than the local grocery store and whose only idea of nature is an interpretive trail at a state park.
Jay puts his phone down. For one of the first times ever, the spell can’t be sustained. He realizes it’s because he no longer has any need for the escapism. He did it. He’s already in the magical forest on the old haunted island. And it came with bumps and bruises—pretty much all self-inflicted, sure—but he doesn’t need to read about a fictional fantasy when he’s actually living it on the daily.
Maybe he’ll start writing. It’s never been his strong suit. He was diagnosed dyslexic once as a kid and then not dyslexic by like six other specialists but reading and writing still came late to him, only after the characters had stopped wandering all over the page and finally settled down. But the idea of a short story is imposing. That’s a lot of text, and he’s already deep in his field notes each day for hours.
Maybe poetry. Jay grins. He likes that idea. There’s magic here in this world. Maybe he can figure out ways to capture it in verse. “I mean, I’m no Kendrick Lamar but I can spit some mean bars.”
Someone is moving outside the small cell Jay inhabits. This had been Amy’s four walls of woven reeds until he’d hurt himself and she had taken to sleeping like a cat in the corners. He has to make sure she gets it back as soon as possible. His words stop whoever it is passing by. A slow-moving bulk fills his door. It is Alonso.
He blinks at Jay, his watery eyes swimming up from the depths. “I remember, Jay. I remember what I forgot when I split my head. Who I saw. You will never believe this but there is a—”
Miriam, working on her laptop near the bunker’s door, cries out in an excess of emotion, drowning out Alonso. He falls silent as she rushes the door.
Maahjabeen enters, held up by four others. Frail and tottering, but it is really her. Alonso gasps. He cannot believe his eyes. Nearly collapsing, he leans on his cane as a long groan escapes him.
“What is it?” Jay can’t see what they see. He is filled with alarm. Miriam sounds like she saw a ghost. “What, Alonso?”
But Alonso doesn’t even hear Jay. He waddles forward, pain and guilt forgotten for one sweet moment of relief so sharp he cannot contain it. He bellows, releasing the grief.
“Oh my god.” Esquibel exits the clean room and sees them. “Oh my god. Oh my god.” She rushes back into the clean room then rushes right back out again, holding a random piece of medical gear. She can’t get over her shock. “No, bring her in. Bring her in.” Esquibel shakes her head in wonder at the miracle. No, she has never been religious. But it is a miracle nevertheless. The odds of Maahjabeen surviving the last three days must be infinitesimal. Well, that is the miracle. The beating of impossible odds with human ingenuity and endurance.
They lay Maahjabeen down gently in the cot Mandy had used. Then Esquibel shoos the lot of them out, dismayed by the amount of dirt and sand they’ve tracked in. “Now I’ll have to sanitize everything again.”
Esquibel assesses her patient as she gathers her things for an exam. Maahjabeen has definitely suffered from exposure. She watches the doctor with glittering eyes but doesn’t speak.
Esquibel hands Maahjabeen water but the woman shakes her head no. “Water is the only thing… I had.”
“Food?”
“Ran out two days ago.”
Esquibel laughs, passing a hand over Maahjabeen’s forehead and slipping a thermometer into her mouth. “You sure are a tough girl, aren’t you? No simple storm was going to take you out.”
“God… was not willing.”
It’s the closest thing to a joke Maahjabeen has told and Esquibel laughs in appreciation. “First we will start with some of Amy’s tea and broth. You need electrolytes more than anything. I can give it as a shot if you…” But Maahjabeen has passed out. “Yes. Let’s do that then. And maybe a glucose drip. Let’s just put together a nice little cocktail here…”
When Esquibel inserts the IV, Maahjabeen doesn’t even flinch.
Ξ
Alonso once again sits in his camp chair under the trees. The wreckage has been cleared into piles that ring their camp. Pradeep and Katrina are busy rebuilding the platforms with all the new material the storm provided. They are getting ambitious with their ideas. Does he hear something about a deck and walkways? Those crazy kids. Where do they get all this energy?
Miriam approaches, folding her reading glasses into their case and closing her laptop. He sees her face transform from the cogitating academic to the suffering wife as she steps toward him and he resolves to keep himself from further ruining her mood. He is so tired of his self-pity. “Eh, Mirrie. What are you working on?”
She looks at him blankly, as if he spoke a language she doesn’t know. But no. That really was Alonso, speaking like a man again. Keeping her face carefully neutral, so as not to upset whatever delicate balance has led to this fine moment, Miriam says, “New rock and soil samples everywhere after the storm. I’ve got these feldspar flakes. Pattern-matching their crystallography against a database. You?”
He lifts a careless hand. “Haven’t you heard? I’m revolutionizing data science!”
They both share a soft laugh. She puts a hand on his shoulder. It’s Maahjabeen’s return. It has lightened all their hearts. Lisica is no longer a tragedy limping along as a failed science expedition. The tragedy has been reversed and it’s a science expedition again and they haven’t lost a soul. In fact, in the case of Alonso, they might actually regain one.
She asks, “How many beaches are there here, do you imagine?”
“Who knows? The map they showed me only had this one, I think. All of our focus was here. They said cliffs surrounded the island everywhere else so I assumed that meant this was it.”
Miriam thrills to hear his rational thought process again. During the storm she was afraid he’d collapsed into some alternate insanity that he would never escape. Now it looks like Alonso might heal, even from this. Oh, when will the suffering ever end?
He can see the attenuation in her face, her emotional reserves taxed more deeply than any time since her brother’s suicide. That had been their last dark time. It had seemed to last an eternity before she’d found the strength to go on. Now he couldn’t be responsible for adding any more pain to her life. He must be strong for her. The words Miriam and Plexity and Lisica have regained their meaning again, now that Maahjabeen has returned. He might even be able to accomplish some actual work today.
She sees all this play out on his face and Miriam’s heart uncoils a bit more. Can it truly be? She squeezes his hand. Is he back for good? Will she actually be able to focus on geology again? Their best vacations were always work trips for her, where he would stay back and cook for her and massage her shoulders when she was done. She misses his strong hands.
“Can we get into the interior, Zo? You don’t have to tell me details. Just a simple yes or no.”
He holds up a hand in a shrug. “Maybe at the end. They might bring a helicopter back.”
“And until then? I’m just here on the beach? You’re wasting prime Doctor Truitt field time, dear. I could be much more useful elsewhere. Not that I don’t need a vacation. But anyway, let me tell you what I really have in mind next: prospecting for caves. I’d bet if I dig into the limestone shelf behind the waterfall I’d find all kinds of fascinating things.”
But his mind is working now, she can see that. Alonso pats his pockets and frowns. “Could you bring me my laptop, Mirrie dear? And the brick?”
“And the battery and your glasses and a cup of tea. Coming right up.” She had been about to offer him a glass of wine and now she is so glad she did not. There will be more time for celebration later. Now, it is time to work.
Ξ
The celebration finally begins in the afternoon. Amy and Miriam erect the Love Palace on the larger platform that Pradeep is trying to extend in a long walkway to the bunker. Katrina has left him to it so she can set up her sound system again. The cascading strings of a Northern African pop song begin her set.
Maahjabeen, lying on a cot under the sky, lifts her wobbly head in surprise. “Eh. That’s Amani Al Souwasi. I love this song!”
Katrina squeals. “Oh, good! I looked and looked through my tracks. So glad I had a Tunisian. Her voice is amazing.”
Maahjabeen settles again with a smile on her face. She had been haunted those three unending days of the storm with visions of the others rejecting her, with good reason. She’d endangered them all by going out so recklessly onto the open water. Maahjabeen had jeopardized the entire mission. She expected when she returned that they would scream at her and cancel her contract. But there is none of that. No recriminations anywhere. Only Mandy, and her reproach is just for herself. It will be up to Maahjabeen to hold herself accountable here. Well. She definitely has enough self-criticism for that.
Flavia sits beside her with a lopsided smile, holding a tray of food. “Ready for dinner?”
“Starving. Eh.” It still hurts to talk. Her throat is so raw. Too much screaming and crying. “Glucose doesn’t really fill you up.”
“This is mostly broth with just a few noodles and veg. Here. We will start slow.” Flavia feeds her like a baby, tucking a napkin under her chin.
The salty broth tastes so good. Flavia dabs her chin and feeds her another spoonful.
Maahjabeen hates being helpless, hates being waited on. But still it is so nice to find that they care. Flavia cares. Nobody has fed her like this since she broke her collarbone in school and her mother had tended her and given her sponge baths.
Ah! She can’t think of her mother in this state. She is too raw. A sudden sob escapes her, making a mess of the broth. Flavia pulls back, startled and concerned.
“Oh, no. Too fast?” Flavia sets the bowl down and cleans the hot liquid from Maahjabeen’s neck and shoulders.
“No… You just… You made me think of my mom. Feeding me like a baby.”
“Ah. Yes, your mama.” Flavia sighs and shakes her head in pity. “This has not been your year.”
Maahjabeen doesn’t know how to respond to that. Actually, her career has really taken off since she has cast herself free. She has seen more of the world in the last twelve months than nearly the whole rest of her life combined. And opportunities like Lisica would not come too often, she knows. But inside? In the moments before she goes to sleep? Yes. Hot coals. And such isolation. She feels like the only person in the whole world.
Flavia uses a fresh napkin to wipe Maahjabeen’s cheeks free of tears. “There, there. Povero caro.” Now that the fierce Tunisian woman has taken herself to the edge of death, her proud shell has cracked. Flavia likes her a lot more now. “Your mama. Did she come to you? During the storm? In the darkness?”
Maahjabeen only shakes her head no. Nobody came. The nights were spent alone in a breathless suspension of anxiety and discomfort. None of her ancestors ever visited. Only the orcas.
Katrina mixes a classical piece in with her beloved Amani. Perhaps Haydn? It actually sounds good. Even the kick drum. Flavia nods her head in time to the beat. “Eh, our little Bubblegum DJ is pretty sharp. Her music makes me want to dance.”
But first she will finish feeding Maahjabeen. She was sure her mother would have visited. Even an imaginary visit, with all those hours and nothing to think about. Flavia can’t comprehend what Maahjabeen just went through. “I swear, I would have lasted about ten seconds in that storm. I do not know how you did it.”
“At one point my arms failed. My shoulders just wouldn’t work and I tried to lift the paddle but I couldn’t. And a current took me. It was going to smash me against the rocks and there was nothing I could do. Then the orcas appeared. They steered me right out of there back to the open ocean. They saved me, Flavia.”
“That is incredible.”
“And they led me home this morning. They told me when it was time and which way to go. God came to me through them.”
“Incredible.”
Ξ
It has taken all day for Pradeep to adjust to this new storm-tossed reality. And his mental state is still not entirely what it should be. A refrain has been echoing in his head since losing his sanity in front of everyone on more than one occasion. Not good enough not strong enough not tough enough – I don’t belong here… Over and over in an unending cycle. He can hardly look anyone in the eyes now.
But he is grateful for Katrina’s kindness, giving him a task to retreat into, and the effort he puts into rebuilding the platforms bigger and better than before is fueled by his quivering antisocial need to retreat deeply into himself. That is how he will heal.
Amy finds him near the end, when he is building his own platform. He gets a larger deck than he expected because of all the leftover wood. Without asking, Amy organizes the final pile and hands him each branch as he needs it. The work goes quickly.
At the end, he ties off the last joint with twine and stands, his back sore and shoulders burning. He dusts himself off and finds Amy still looking wordlessly at him, but letting him know with one of her irrepressible smiles that she has something for him.
Pradeep sighs. She is still his boss. This is still a job, even though his stipend is pitiful, not even four thousand dollars. He nods, trying to muster a competent air, and follows her out to the beach.
They walk alongside the trunk of the massive fallen redwood in silence. The deep corrugations of its bark—as seen with eye-along trunk, stretching away to the flaring root base—is a deep pattern, mathematics beyond what he can easily conceptualize. But it is still mathematics. The growth of this tremendous organism was as much a mechanical process as a biological one.
Finally Amy brings him to the base. It is truly a massive tree. Its trunk is over five meters in diameter here and the roots that were torn from the ground spread skyward now a good ten meters above his head. They skirt the wreckage, pushing themselves through the ceanothus and ferns. Huge shards of bright orange and red wood litter the area, as if the tree exploded. The underside is cavernous.
Pradeep exhales in wonder. “Oooooo.”
Amy laughs, the silence finally broken. “I knew you’d like it.”
When the tree had fallen, the peripheral roots had snapped and then the central root system had failed. The gust that had taken this tree down must have been immense. Pradeep touches the twisted roots, hard as iron. “This is another sign of anthropogenic global warming. We see no other trees of this size on this beach. And it wasn’t diseased. Therefore the storm that brought it down is measurably more intense than the ones that came before, or we would otherwise have a beach littered with the trees that had fallen in previous storms, quod erat demonstrandum.”
Amy smiles, relieved to have him talking again. These unearthed treasures should keep him busy a good long time. There appears to be an abandoned bobcat den on the periphery of the root system, with piles of bones and scat. Cavities in the rock and soil that have been unearthed are thick with the silk of spider eggs and floor-dwelling arthropods of many varieties. A whole writhing mass of larvae under a fallen sheet of bark still strive to develop.
And then there’s the interactions between soil and root and mycorrhizal fungi, which was always of particular interest to Pradeep. Here, Alonso’s Dyson readers would be invaluable.
“We passed this when we were carrying Maahjabeen back and I thought my god but I didn’t have time to stop. I knew this would be your happiest place. But I myself can’t wait to get a look at the crown. I think it’s accessible. Are you coming?”
Pradeep looks up at Amy, lost already in this miniature world of minerals and microbiology and artifacts. Tree forensics. They have called it that before. While walking in the woods they would stop when they saw fallen trees, discussing how they fell and what caused the initial failure. In crowded conditions it can take a long time to untangle which tree fell first and why. “Eh? Coming? No. But look, Amy. It wasn’t just the wind that knocked it over.”
He points at the exact underside of the tree’s heartwood. It is seared black in a wide jagged crescent. A similar scar in the remaining underground bole is visible under the fallen earth.
“Is that from lightning? Ye gods.” Amy reorders what she sees in her head. Those burst roots aren’t from being forced apart by the wind. Now she can pick out the black edges of certain shards. This trunk was blown out. A bolt with horrific power must have hit it somewhere up its length and shot through all the way into the ground. It must have gone off like a bomb. There were certainly explosions aplenty during the storm. This must have been one of them. “I wonder, is the poor bole dead too? Is this how you kill a redwood? Can its heart survive such a massive lightning strike?”
“How would we even be able to tell?”
“Well, anyway, so much for your climate change proof. This wasn’t necessarily a stronger storm. Unless the degree to which a storm is electrical is modified by anthropogenic factors. Which would be pretty amazing. Is there any data on that?”
“I have no idea. Maybe we can ask Mandy. But what about the surrounding ecology?” Pradeep ranges past the edges of the pit, where whole stands of ferns and buckthorn are crushed by the raw wood fragments. What about the small rodents who lived beneath? The crabs? The insects? “You know… I am not sure if this is what Plexity is really for. I get the sense we are supposed to be trying to measure the island as an entity that is in homeostasis. But this is such a new and dramatic reordering of the local context that, I don’t know, doesn’t it skew everything out of balance? Too much emphasis in favor of one recent dramatic event instead of the thousand years that this tree stood? How do we place correct value on each frame of reference? I suppose that is really a question for Flavia and Katrina…”
“Aw, now I worry that the crown might be blasted clean away. You’re okay here? If I leave you alone?”
Pradeep has trouble meeting Amy’s eyes. But he knows she deserves some recognition of his issue. It is certainly affecting his performance. “Yes. These are the things I study. Nothing is more familiar and comforting to me. Thank you, Doctor Kubota. I have not always had such understanding teachers and bosses in my life. My weakness was always something I had to hide.”
Amy grimaces. “No. Not weakness, Pradeep. Don’t think of it like that. You aren’t weak, by any measure. Right? You must see that. You have, I mean, you’re so competent in so many ways. Some of what you do is like superhero capability.”
“But I still can’t travel to Tucson without a panic attack.”
“Who can? No, but seriously. Ask yourself. Go back in time to yourself as, what, like a nine or ten year old kid? Tell him where you are now and what you’re doing, out here in the wide open world with some of the brightest minds of our time. Tell him he made it! He didn’t remain a prisoner to his fear.”
“Well. If we’re going back that far, can we just tell my parents instead? I think it would have probably been more useful.”
Chapter 4 – Welded Shut
January 22, 2024
Thanks for joining us on our 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 Chapter:
4 – Welded Shut
It rains through the night. Those who choose to sleep in the bunker have a generally peaceful night of it. But not Flavia. One of the biggest holes in the roof is on the spine near the door, exposing the pitted I-beam to the elements and requiring two tarps to cover the rusted gaps in the corrugated steel on either side. She was the last one convinced to come inside the night before and that was only if she got the spot beside the door. But the wind picked up the corner of one of these tarps during the night and during gusts she got doused. First she cursed at the sky and the storm and her own ill luck that brought her to Lisica and keeps her here. But she just can’t find the energy to rouse herself and go out into the cold rain to lash it down again. Finally, she decides around 3 am to just relocate, dragging her sodden bedding further in beside Esquibel and Mandy. She notices they lie in an embrace, and how warm that must be. She misses her big dog Boris suddenly with a sharp intensity. Whenever she gets cold at home, the fat Alsatian jumps onto the foot of her bed and covers her legs with heavy warmth.
Flavia sleeps fitfully, finally glad to see the dawn light in the gaps beneath the tarp over the door. Standing, she yawns and stretches her aches and pains away. As far as she can tell she is the first one up. Flavia is surprised how few people took the option to get out of the rain. Jay remained out in his hammock, as did Maahjabeen in her tunnel tent. Pradeep trusted his pyramid. And Miriam and Alonso added a few tarps to their tent roof but remained in what Katrina refers to as their Love Palace.
Dawn light means no clouds, which also means no rain. Flavia steps clear of the huddled, sleeping bodies and peeks out the door. Perhaps she can find some caffeine out here in one of these bins….
Well well well. She isn’t the first one up at all. Down the beach, she can see Maahjabeen and Pradeep carrying the blue and yellow kayaks down to the shore.
Ξ
“I’ll stabilize you.” Maahjabeen puts the nose of her craft in the water and pushes Pradeep’s out to the edge. In his wide-brimmed nylon hat, long sleeve polo windshirt, and dark sunglasses he looks like a golfer. He buckles on the spray skirt and lifts the double-bladed paddle over his head like a weightlifter, stretching. She holds his boat stable as he slips neatly in and seals the skirt. Then she sends him off.
Pradeep glides out silently onto the lagoon with a private laugh. He loves kayaks. With powerful strokes, twisting from his hips, he propels the narrow craft out onto the water. These are pristine fiberglass boats, unbranded, with lines he’s never seen. They must be custom, worth thousands.
Maahjabeen, in her boat, scoots forward into the water. She calls out, “Now before we go any further, show me a roll.”
“What, now?” The chilling water has already spattered Pradeep’s hands and he is unprepared to face more.
“I said last night. Never again. She has brain damage, Pradeep. Now you promised me you all know how to paddle but ecch, I don’t really know. Show me.”
“Yes… You did say.” Pradeep tightens the leash on his sunglasses and grips the sides of his boat. With a grimace and a deep breath he rolls the boat upside down. What a shock it is, even when it is expected. Aach! He is too bony for such cold water. No fat to insulate him. Pradeep holds the paddle lengthwise as he’s been taught. Once he’s under, he leans as far back as he can in the seat and sweeps the paddle back and forth while rocking to roll him up the far side. It is relatively easy for him. He is strong and knows how to leverage his arms correctly. But he still comes up shivering and sputtering and shooting water out of his nose. “How’s that?” He finally manages one of his movie star smiles.
“Sufficient.” Maahjabeen paddles out past him, a half smile on her face. “Now stay behind me. I’ve never seen trickier currents.”
Pradeep is glad to get a bit of direct sun on his shirt. It might dry before this is over. But the wind chills him. He can do nothing but take deep breaths and remember his muay thai training. He flexes every muscle in his core, from his knees to his sternum, and flutter kicks his feet, anything to get himself going. Cold means adventure. He had read that in a popular book by the tracker Tom Brown. It was never more true than today.
“Do you think we are breaking any of Esquibel’s rules by being out here?” he asks Maahjabeen, considering this a neutral subject. “This is the first clear sky since we got here. Satellites could maybe see us out in the open here.”
“I don’t care about the satellites or any Hollywood nonsense.” Maahjabeen is irritated by the reminder that she might be secretly watched the entire eight weeks she is here. Her tent is too small for her to find any consistent privacy. And so far, the ocean is too wide. She paddles cautiously up toward the mouth of the lagoon. But she doesn’t like what she sees. By her calculations, this morning is their best chance over the next forty-eight hours to find a calm swell. Yet the rollers still crash against the breaks with uncommon force. It would take all her skill to get past the front rank of surf and then who knows how to navigate the three or four ranks behind. There are so many breaks out there and the waves are so strong she despairs of ever being able to escape the lagoon.
Maahjabeen never curses. Instead, she hisses. She grips her paddle with all her strength and hisses like an asp.
Pradeep, warmer now, pulls up close enough to hear her. But her frustration is easily understood. The water past the breaks would chew them to pieces. He wouldn’t go out there for love nor money. They surrender their greatest ambitions for the day and peel away from the current drawing them toward the lagoon’s mouth back into still water.
“Careful. Sea grass. The blades get tangled.” Maahjabeen steers them toward a clearer patch, where a liquid sound from ahead indicates that they just missed seeing someone pulling their head underwater who had been watching them.
“Otter? Sea lion?” Pradeep wonders aloud. “Did you see that?”
“I didn’t, but the otters are real rascals out here. I’ve watched them. No fear. I guess no one has hunted them for a long time. They are unlike most populations I’ve known. And so big.”
“Good eating here, I’m sure.” Pradeep looks down into the green murk, visualizing a coral ecosystem directly below of urchins and parrot fish, a sea otter’s ideal feeding grounds. Then he recalls the story of the girl swimming in Lake Shasta who disturbed a pack of nesting freshwater otters. She nearly died before she made it back ashore and required hundreds of stitches. He narrows his grip on his paddle so that his hands don’t reach over the sides.
They back-paddle, hovering in place. “Well, Alonso did say last night he wants us focusing on the lagoon and beach first.” Saying it aloud allows Maahjabeen to release some of her irritation. She will unlock the secrets of the ocean yet. If nothing else, she can follow the channel the Zodiacs used and skate away from this shallow shelf somehow far out into the blue water, but she’ll definitely need support for that. And a lot more research and observation. She once again drags her eyes from the horizon. “So. Here in the lagoon we might share some common goals, I think. You are a field biologist? Any marine biology?”
“Well, yes.” Pradeep immediately grows animated. The number of people he is able to share his enthusiasms with are very few. “Actually you could say it’s been about half my work. I’m neither terrestrial nor aquatic, which doesn’t help my grant proposals any. I have a very strange approach to the species I study. I really only like the weird ones, the ignored ones, the interconnectors that prop up whole ecologies. You could more properly say I’m a systems researcher. I like identifying these weird little ecological bottlenecks wherever I find them, in the sea or on the land or up in the clouds, and characterize them in detail for wider research communities. I’ve already gotten quite a few journal citations, even though as a junior researcher I’ve only had my name on a couple published papers. Parasites and nematodes.”
“You sound like Doctor Alonso.”
“Yes, Amy said he and I would get along famously. I can’t wait to hear more about Plexity. I’ve had similar ideas myself. And what about you? Are you much of a marine biologist yourself or are you strictly about the water and waves?”
“I am strictly about the water and waves,” Maahjabeen says. “And the weather, I suppose. For me, it is the dynamics of the moving water I care about. The fish and the birds and the sea lions, they are just…” she searches for the word, “passengers.”
“Ha. That’s a very unique perspective, I guess. More physics and less biology, I suppose. Well we should make a good team. If you find any interesting diploblasts let me know. And I’ve brought a fairly good USB microscope for seawater samples, among other things, because I’m getting into radiolarians these days.”
“And I suppose it is finally time for me to focus on lagoons and reefs and intertidal zones. My adviser told me someday I must.”
“That’s where my research takes me.” Pradeep skims the flat of his blade over the glassy blue-black water. “The edge of things. Where complexity happens. So many biologists, they are just census takers, you know? Count the herd. The flock. The swarm. I am more like… a criminal investigator. I follow lines of dependence through systems and biomes…”
“Yes yes. It is fascinating.” Maahjabeen’s voice is as flat as the water here. She swings her blade back and forth over its surface, restless. She hasn’t taken her eyes off the mouth of the lagoon but every time the passage clears of a wave another is already coming in, with such tall faces and sharp closeouts that she’s sure she’d be crushed or spun. Those just aren’t waves she can paddle over. “It didn’t look so bad from the ship, or the Zodiac.”
“Yeah,” Pradeep laughs. “Well, give me an outboard motor and like five times a kayak’s stability and I’ll get out there no problem. So…” he surveys the closest arm of coral that breaks the surface, “Shall we start there? You can tell me what you’ve learned about the lagoon and I’ll stop going on and on about my esoteric crap.”
Ξ
“Theory.” Jay kneels in front of Mandy, who sits cross-legged in the sand on a SpongeBob beach towel. “Like engineering theory. Mechanical engineering. Not science. Ready?”
She regards him, eyebrows raised, her consciousness taking its time detaching from the columns of data she’d been comparing.
“Sorry. Am I interrupting?” His eager smile fades, a crestfallen puppy. “I just thought you were someone who could—I heard you talk about building a guyed-out steel tower.” His enthusiasm builds again and his hands come up, describing each word and concept with deft fingers. “But listen: the tallest redwoods, those right there, are already a hundred meters high. And we might already have good reason to climb one. What do you think?”
“Just what are you proposing?” Mandy squints at the tousled and roguish California boy, wondering if he is at all like those jackals she had to contend with at UCLA. So far he hasn’t been lecherous at all, thank god. But what is he saying about the trees? She could put some instruments up near the top, still hidden from Skeebee’s satellites but providing much better meteorological data than what she is able to collect on the ground.
Jay holds up a persuasive hand. “I’ll do the climbing. All the dangerous stuff. Don’t worry about that. Stephen Sillett at Humboldt State developed a system, super safe, for climbing the trees without damaging them. He uses a crossbow to get fishing line over the lowest branches… but I don’t have a crossbow. Or ascenders. But, uh, I was just wondering if you had any ideas.”
“My ideas are usually to call the tower company and tell them where to install it.” Mandy feels hopelessly out of her depth. “I mean, could you like use some of the platforms from camp to build a scaffold to get you up to…? I don’t know. Why do biologists want to get up to the top anyway?”
“Let’s say I get ninety-five percent of the way up one of the big trunks, onto a solid platform where the major branches divide out. Look at the trees closest to the cliffs. Their tops can’t be more than like ten meters from the cliff. But the face is bare rock there. No more dirt or clay at that height. Then maybe I can build like a rope bridge from the trees to the cliff and…” He shakes his head and laughs. “Yeah, now that I say it out loud, it sounds less like a theory and more like…”
“Lunacy?”
“I guess. Unless you think of anything, Doctor Hsu. Well. Let me know. Also, the crowns of Coast redwoods are among the most dense ecosystems in the world. Hundreds of species up there just waiting to be discovered. That’s why. But I’m sure we’ll get to it sooner or later. Thanks for listening. See you on the flip side.”
And just like that he is gone.
Mandy, bemused, goes back to her work.
Ξ
Flavia returns to her tent on its platform to retrieve a battery pack. She has already set up a solar panel in the bare patch of sunlight beside the bunker. But she just discovered that the panel has two ports! So she will maximize her charging hours by filling two of her seven batteries at once. Her tent survived the storm relatively well. It only failed in one corner, where the damp found its way into her clothes and bedding. She will have to get those up and out next, to air them. But she wants the solar panels to… Wait. Flavia pauses her noisy activity and listens. Is that someone crying?
Emerging from her tent, she realizes it comes from the big platform beside her. Alonso is alone in there, his deep husky sobs shaking him. Without a thought, Flavia ascends the ramp and ducks into his tent.
She kneels beside him, placing a hand on his shoulder. “Alonso. What is it?”
He turns, surprised it isn’t Miriam. He’d heard the creaking on the steps and anticipated the touch, but not the voice. His face is a storm. “Ah, Flavia. Thank you. It is just my poor feet. The pain. The doctors wanted me to stay on the opiates for the rest of my days but I wouldn’t. I can’t. I will not be a junkie. I will live with the pain instead.”
Flavia transfers her hands to his feet. She finds them red and swollen, misshapen with lumps where none should be. She just rests her hands lightly on them. “Your feet? What happened to your poor feet?”
“They broke the bones. Again and again. Ahh. Thank you. Just no harder than that. But thank you.” He takes a deep shuddering breath. “I have so many nightmares locked up in my feet.”
She feels electric tremors passing beneath his skin, a jagged disquiet that rises in her like nausea. Flavia wants to pull her hands away but that would be so cruel. So she takes a deep breath and tries to share a smile with him. “I am so sorry, signore dottore.”
“Being here. Doing our work. No dream could be better. Right, Flavia? Worth every bit of agony. So what do you think of the project now that you’ve taken a look at it?”
“Well.” She shifts and her knee rolls forward, crushing the ball of his left foot. Alonso roars in pain, his face squeezing shut. Flavia pulls her hands back, horrified, to her face. The sound coming out of him is a terrible and unending wail.
Miriam comes running. Amy appears from out of the bunker. Flavia pleads with them. “I didn’t—No, please! I was only trying to…” She stands and backs out of the tent. “Ai mi.”
Miriam pushes past her to Alonso’s side. “Amy, we need ice!”
“There’s a small electric cooler. It has a little. But we’ll need more. I guess it’s time to plug in the big one.”
Alonso rocks back and forth in Miriam’s arms like an infant. His eyes are closed, his face twitching, trapped in his trauma. Then he bellows, unable to hold it in any longer.
His release is volcanic, way out of proportion to the small injury to his foot. Flavia falls back, appalled, as he roars and roars. Alonso throws his head back, shredding his throat, years of horror ejecting itself. Amy rushes back up the ramp holding a white washcloth and a handful of ice. But she stops several paces short, stupefied by the outburst. She never knew one person could suffer so.
They all draw close from their platforms and from within the bunker. Esquibel approaches the distraught Flavia and puts a comforting arm around her shoulders. Flavia squeezes her hand in gratitude, but she can’t take her eyes from the big platform.
Finally, after minutes on end, Alonso’s roars lose their power. Finally he chokes on one and gasps in Miriam’s arms. She only rocks him. Now Amy slips in and places the ice within reach before withdrawing again. Alonso’s breath is ragged, still tortured. In her mind, Amy just keeps telling herself, he is a giant, such a giant, but a broken giant now. How can you even break a giant?
Ξ
Triquet stands in the door of the bunker, watching the camp return to a semblance of order. Today they wear a kilt over boxer briefs and their bare legs can only take so much sun. Their mind skitters away from the emotional power of the scene. In Rostov on Don they once toured an orphanage. They heard a child in a ward screaming down a long sterile hall like this. It still resides in their bones, that chilling sound. Now Alonso’s heartbreak would be with them forever as well. That poor man. What he must have endured.
Work. The answer, as always, is work. Work has gotten Triquet to see the world and placed them atop one of the most competitive fields in academic science and research. Work cures all.
And that means the door at the bottom of the stairs. “Where is Esquibel…?” they ask themself, trying to see what has become of her. She has left Flavia’s side, that’s all Triquet can tell. Pradeep is out on the water. Jay is gone. Miriam is… occupied. Maybe they’ll just have to open the door alone?
“That is a terrible idea.” And yet Triquet finds themself back inside the bunker at the top of the stairs holding their helmet and eyeing the door regardless. No water seeps from under its frame. Whatever exists down there, it remained dry through the night. That’s a comfort. More living space perhaps. At least a place to store gear…
Now they’re somehow on the bottom step, their fingers curling under the gap. “This is poor decision making, Triq.” Their voice breaks the spell. They laugh, rueful at their weak will when it comes to underground mysteries. “I can find someone to help. I can. Come on. Take five minutes to do this properly!”
Disturbed by the fugue state from which they just roused themself, Triquet arrows to Amy at the lab tables. She is putting together rows of trays for her specimen collections. “Any chance,” Triquet begins, “you feel like being the bait this time when I open the door?”
“Bait? What door? The door downstairs?”
“As far as I know,” Triquet drawls, looking around, “it’s the only actual door on the island.”
“I was thinking about that,” Amy says, putting the unordered piles of collection equipment back in a bin. “What if we move that door from downstairs, assuming it’s safe, to the front door here so the bunker can finally be closed up again?”
“Otherwise it’s coconut crabs all day and night?”
“Among other things.”
“Well, let’s go see, shall we?”
“Let me just tell…” Amy surveys the camp. “Where did Esquibel go? I don’t want to disturb Alonso and Miriam.”
“Good grief!” Triquet exclaims. “I’ll need to get the whole camp together again before that door is opened!” They look up at the sky. Their sunny morning is ending with a gray shawl drawing itself over the sky. “And if that means more rain Mandy will never let me in there!”
“I’m coming, I’m coming.”
She follows them into the bunker and down to the bottom of the stairs, where Amy waits on one of the lower steps and watches Triquet test the movement of the door. It creaks a bit, stiff but still functional. “Well, here goes nothing.”
Triquet opens the door.
Darkness yawns before them. With a muttered curse, Triquet remembers to turn on the light and begin recording with the camera. A cone of yellow-white LED light illuminates an oval hatch and the dusty floor. Rusted metal panels cover the walls, ceiling, and floor. The room is narrow, cramped with bowed walls. It smells vaguely of oil and diesel, like an engine room. Assemblies of pipes and conduit run along the walls and a cluster drops from the ceiling to a spot in the center of the room where something used to stand. A single stanchion remains, but otherwise the metal panels sport eyelets for bolts that no longer attach to anything.
“So weird.” Triquet ducks through the hatch and breathes in the fumes among the otherwise clean air. “Some kind of wonky DIY adaptation here. This room used to be something else. And look.” Triquet enters the room, followed hesitantly by Amy. “Another door lock. Like in a ship.” The door on the far wall is a watertight portal with a wheel. But it hangs open. Triquet swings this door wide and peers further in. “Yeah, another room like this one. I wonder what they used it for? Come on. There’s another door.”
Amy hesitates at the second hatch. She doesn’t want to let the door and the stairs and the reflected daylight out of her sight. But Triquet crows with delight and beckons even more urgently. “The third room! Wardrobes and bunks! The jackpot! Still narrow. Like super narrow for living quarters. But there will be so many clues in here! Clues upon clues!” They touch a dented and dull piece of chrome that served as a mirror. Initials and phrases are etched in the corners in the immemorial language of graffiti.
Triquet crosses this third room to another hatch. This one opens on an extremely narrow hall. Triquet turns back to Amy, careful not to blind her with the headlamp. “Uhh, Doctor Kubota…?”
“What is it, Doctor Triquet?” Amy doesn’t like how shaken Triquet’s voice is. She presses her mouth into a thin line to overcome her fear of dark cramped spaces like this and stoops to step through the second hatch so she can keep them in view.
“This is, I mean, I think this is a submarine. Like a postwar sub. Probably diesel. Decommissioned and… what then? Buried at the beach? I mean, how? And why? Why would they put an entire submarine in the ground? This is crazy.” Triquet’s wild laugh echoes off the metal plates. They touch the closest one, feeling the accumulated grime.
“We should tell the others.” Amy’s voice is as sober as it gets.
Triquet nods at her, eyes wide.
Ξ
“My guess,” Miriam says as they have another meeting around the long tables while eating a late lunch, “is that Lisica may have become a place for the US military to get rid of a piece of kit they no longer wanted. Maybe the sub was some top-secret prototype?”
“Then why didn’t they just dismantle it at one of the shipyards?” Among them all, it is Esquibel who is reacting the most strongly to this news. She knows how militaries operate and it isn’t safety first. Her initial thought had been to geiger counter the entire beach, but nobody had the forethought to bring radiation sensors. Why would they? “Wait. Triquet. You said you carried a radon sensor. Radon is a kind of natural background uranium decay that leaks from rocks, isn’t it? We can perhaps use it to test the bunker for any nuclear fuel or weapon leakage.”
“I’m telling you it was a postwar diesel sub.” Triquet is unshaken by the possibility they were exposed to radiation. “I’ve seen Operation Petticoat enough times to recognize a Gato-class sub…”
“Actually…” Amy interrupts them, consulting her laptop. “I can’t find a clear floorplan for any of the subs you’re talking about, Triquet, but it definitely isn’t Gato-class. The layout is all wrong. Maybe a Balao or Tench-class from the late-forties instead. Those are still diesel. Anything later than that is much bigger, and that’s when they added nukes.”
“I still think we should scan the island.” Esquibel fights down a rising worry that complacency among the others might just lead to a catastrophe. “As the medical doctor here, please don’t make me deal with radiation poisoning for two months. Just run the test.”
Triquet shrugs. “Fine. But we may want to add like a flange or nozzle to the sensor or something so it isn’t just sampling ocean breezes blowing by. Maybe a control reading in the bunker is our best bet. I’ll get right on it.” They inhale the last bite of their cous-cous, daintily wipe the corners of their mouth, and depart.
Now it is down to seven around the table. Maahjabeen and Pradeep still paddle the lagoon. They’ve been out for hours. Nobody can find Jay. And Alonso still occupies his tent, a forearm flung across his eyes.
“Lastly, ladies…” Miriam nods at them. Her smile is unsteady and her voice is low. “I’d like to thank everyone for your patience and support with…” she waves a forlorn hand at the big platform, “…this. All of this. I didn’t know what I would find and he is… he is very damaged. But this work is not about Alonso. He wouldn’t ever want that. It’s about the system he created, the interdisciplinary classifications that we must always be thinking about, working on.”
“Miriam, I am so so so sorry. I didn’t even realize I was touching his poor foot when I just shifted, just the tiniest—!” Flavia claps her fingers over her mouth.
Miriam consoles Flavia with a calm hand on her shoulder. “No no. If it wasn’t you it would have been someone else. It was bound to happen. I think you… he is filled with poison and you popped the swollen thing and perhaps let it start to drain. It was inevitable and necessary and I hope you don’t hold it against yourself.”
“Grazie, dottore.” Flavia wipes tears away. “I felt so horrible.”
Amy appears at her elbow. “Tea?”
“Oh my god you always do this,” Flavia laughs. “Yes, of course, let me join the club of those who have been shamed publicly so Amy has to make it up with tea. And lots of sugar if you have it.”
The others laugh as Amy scurries off.
Triquet returns, holding up a small unit with a silver lcd screen. “Like I said. All clear. No trace of uranium upstairs or downstairs or anywhere around the bunker. Or, at least, according to a radon sensor I bought on Amazon. This isn’t its intended use at all. So can we rest easy? And get back to exploring the sub?”
Nobody can think of any more objections. With murmurs of excitement, Esquibel, Amy, Mandy, and Miriam disperse to their tents to collect their things, then follow Triquet into the bunker.
Ξ
Flavia remains, sipping her tea glumly. Katrina stares into the middle distance, brooding.
“Well,” Flavia says, “even though the environment here leaves a lot to be desired, eh? The people… the people are very much top notch. Especially after Esquibel calmed down, no?”
But Katrina hardly hears her. Only after a long moment does she say, “Sorry. I’m back now. You said something?”
“No. Just complaining. I feel like I’m the only one complaining here and everyone else is having the time of their lives. Is that how it is for you?”
“Totally. I’m absolutely having the time of my life.” Katrina flashes Flavia a sweet smile. “How about an actual real honest-to-Satan underground rave tonight? In a decommissioned sub buried ten meters deep? I mean, yes please, that is absolutely a legend waiting to happen.”
Flavia frowns at her. “I don’t understand you, Katrina. Is that what you are spending all your time here thinking about? Alonso said you are some great thinker, but so far I don’t see you thinking about anything very much, if you will excuse me.”
“Oh, I’m not thinking about that, Flavia. That’s just a fun little party plan. I’m actually thinking about Miriam and Mandy. And Maahjabeen. Ha. All the M ladies of the project! I’m thinking that it’s easy to say that Alonso brought a geologist because she is his wife but why did he bring an atmospheric scientist and an oceans researcher? It means he must be very serious about mapping the context of every biological classification in time and space, in what he believes constitute the matrices of his life network. Now, Lady Miriam’s already dropped the panspermia word so I don’t think there’s any model I can propose at this point that will be too wacky for this crew but still, we’re going full Gaia hypothesis here if I’m not mistaken and I’m all for it. But what I’m beginning to think now is about your programming, Flavia, and how your greatest challenge will be somehow fixing his data within the context of sea and sky, you know what I mean? And rock too, if you’ve heard Miriam talking about the extremophiles living in bedrock. So we’ve got these fluid surfaces to place our networks on, dynamic and moving, exchanging information and energy themselves. I can see one of your biggest challenges will be some bespoke algorithms that are able to account for this fluidity. That’ll be quite the puzzle. I might be able to help you with that. I’m not a horrible maths girl, but most of my work has been in topology, security stuff for the Australian Defense agencies. Now how can we most simply and elegantly adapt Alonso’s ivory tower thought processes to systems that work in the real world, which by necessity means in real time because anything else will be an intolerable reduction of data to an almost unusable set. So you’ve got to keep it lean, with the user inputs minimal but information-rich, and I’m thinking where I might help best is in some data visualization for the end user, giving them the feedback they need in the field to record better data and interact with their sites more effectively. Maybe some pop-up windows onscreen hosted by cute little animals? That would be too dear. So yeh. In the end I guess I’ve been thinking more about you, Flavia, than anyone.” Katrina’s smile is innocent.
Flavia shakes her head, bemused. “Yes, I see. I see that you’ve been thinking about it quite a bit. That is good. Ha. What an interesting young person you are, Katrina.”
“Oh, come on. I can’t be more than six years younger than you! Let’s just say I’m young at heart. And I’m sorry you were the one who popped Alonso’s poison balloon. You didn’t deserve that.”
“Oh my god I wanted to kill myself. I had no idea…”
“I knew it. I knew it was coming. I just thought it would be with Miriam, of course. But nobody can handle it when it happens…” Katrina shivers as a nasty dark memory slithers through her.
“You’ve gone through this before?” Flavia realizes. “Ai me.”
“My brother. He was in the gulag with Alonso. They met there. Pavel was released first. He… They went through all the same things. Endless interrogations. Electric shocks. Beatings.”
“Why did the Russians do it?”
“We’re not sure who was running the camp. I mean, Pavel was sent to the gulag by the Russians for trying to film a documentary in Saint Petersburg. But no one knows much about the camp itself. There was a guard, Gerasim, who befriended Pavel. He told him the gulag he was in didn’t belong to any one country. They were a bandit group in the Altai mountains right at the intersection of four countries, Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia, and China. Hired themselves out to anyone, I guess. Well, we scraped together a ransom and got Pavel home about a year ago. But he didn’t just have one bad night like that, by the way, screaming like that. Many many nights. Though he’s starting to get better now.”
“My god.”
Katrina unwraps a piece of bubblegum and pops it in her mouth. She starts braiding her hair. “Pavel kept in touch with Gerasim, funny as that might sound. And though he wouldn’t talk about much of what happened at the gulag, Pavel would tell me of this amazing Cuban scientist he met in there, and how his fascinating theories would make the hours speed by. I found his information theory so fascinating. So I began writing to Gerasim too. Because that’s how my own brain works. And Alonso and I became, like… I mean, he’s basically my best friend. I don’t have anyone I can talk to about all the things I think about except him. And he’s the only one who understands what Pavel is going through.”
“So what are your advanced degrees?”
Katrina shrugs. “Crystallography and French modernism. I can’t seem to settle on one thing. Still, in all my departments I never found people who talked about the world around them the way he does. I guess, I’m basically his groupie.”
“No, from the way he talks about you it is obvious that he is yours. Crystallography and French Moderns? What kind of crazy brain do you have?”
Katrina cocks her head and gives Flavia the full elfin effect. “The craziest.” She kisses Flavia on the forehead and skips away.
Ξ
Triquet leads the line of explorers down the trap door’s stairs and through the first three rooms. They follow in silence, swinging their own headlamps and flashlights at the walls.
They stop at the third hatch, leading to the cramped hallway. “This is as far as I got,” Triquet says. “This is when I realized where I was. I bet these are like warrant officer rooms and radio and captain’s quarters along this hall here.”
“How do you know so much about submarines?” Amy asks.
“No more than I know about anything else. I’m just an item fiend, doll. Old, new, big, little. If I didn’t have any scruples I’d just work for Tiffany’s or Christie’s or something. If it’s been made by human hands, I’ll know at least a bit about it. That’s my kink.” Triquet winks at Amy and steps into the hall.
The doors along the left wall are narrow steel panels, rusted nearly black. Triquet taps on one of them and it echoes, hollow. “I swear,” they sigh, “this just becomes more and more of a horror movie set every day. Hello? Housecleaning.” Triquet knocks and opens the door. They whistle when a desk is revealed, its drawers open and empty. Triquet steps in and tries to turn on the desk lamp. It clicks but remains dark. “I mean, of course. That would be so wild if it actually had power.” Amy watches them from the door. Miriam slips past her to the next door. “Excuse me, dear ones. You can take peeks but please don’t handle anything you see until Captain Archaeology here gets a chance first.”
“Of course, Doctor Triquet.” Miriam sings it out cheerily but in the metal hallway underground there is an unsettling flatness to its echoes. She tries to open the next door. “Locked. Or sealed shut somehow. What did you say this one is? Radio room?”
Triquet steps back into the hall. “I’m really just guessing. But there has to be a control room up here. Periscope and conning tower and all that, right?”
“Wouldn’t a conning tower be aboveground?” Esquibel still doesn’t trust this wreck and refuses to touch anything.
Mandy turns and turns, the last one at the rear. “Which way are we faced here? West? This is still west. It was the west side of the bunker and then we extended out west, maybe southwest?”
“Yeah, directly west means trees and taproots,” Amy says. “I’m guessing the sub extends under the beach instead. So we’re kind of at an angle to the shore?”
Mandy says, “Maahjabeen will be so upset when she finds out someone else brought a boat without asking her.” They all laugh. Mandy blushes at her own joke, made at the expense of someone not here. “But maybe there will be some oceanic or naval records for her here. Maybe some weather data for me.”
Amy opens the third door. It is the Captain’s wardroom. A thin veneer of wood paneling is peeling away, but it’s the first color they’ve seen down here besides gray and black. A low bunk is built against the back wall. A built-in desk against the right-hand wall is closed, its top folded up. The chair is against the back corner. It almost looks lived in. Amy tests the mattress. It crackles.
Everyone else crowds the doorway, looking in. “No touching!” Triquet reminds Amy.
“Right. Sorry. I just needed to see if it’s better than my sleeping pad. Cause this is looking pretty cozy down here if you ask me.”
Mandy is still drawn by the siren song of weather logs possibly kept in the control room. She steps toward the hatch at the end of the hall, finding it cracked open. It swings open silently on oiled hinges. She ducks down and sweeps her flashlight through the larger chamber. Yes, the control room has workstations with the screens and vacuum tubes removed. And in the corner are rusted file cabinets. She reacts more strongly than she thought she would to see the periscope column. “Oh, I’m too much of a pacifist to be in this thing for very long, that’s for sure.”
“What did you find?” Mandy didn’t expect Esquibel’s voice so close behind her and she startles, stifling a scream.
“Don’t sneak up on me down here, Skeebee! It’s too creepy!”
They edge their way into the control room. “No spiders, no worms, no signs of life at all. The hull must still be intact.” Esquibel skirts a rusted grate and opens one of the file cabinet drawers to find it empty. “So crazy. This is like stepping back in time. The control rooms of today look nothing like this. I’ve only been on a sub once, a decommissioned one at Diego Garcia. But the control room was like a penthouse suite compared to this.”
“Again with the touching.” Triquet stares their disapproval at Esquibel’s hand on the file cabinet drawer handle. She recoils, guilty, and steps away from it, dusting her clothes. Triquet slowly enters, taking in every detail, their camera recording it all. “Oh, baby.” They clap their hands, doing their best Daffy Duck. “I’m rich! I’m wealthy! I’m independent! I’m financially secure! Is this why Alonso brought me? It must be. Did he know about any of this? Why oh why did they bury this thing in the sand…?”
Miriam, stepping through the hatch, says, “He never said a thing about a submarine in our emails. I got precisely two from him, each three paragraphs. I can recite them from memory, if you like.” She stands and grins, turning on a lantern function on her flashlight that provides bright yellow diffuse light to fill up the room. “There. That’s better. There’s not even any mold down here. I still don’t understand where the air is coming from.”
“Where’s the fire torpedo button?” Amy inspects the conning tower, its oiled hydraulics now clotted with black grease. “Don’t want to do anything crazy here.”
Mandy laughs. “Poor Maahjabeen and Pradeep! Just boating around the lagoon and all of a sudden the beach blows up!”
“It’s… this one?” Triquet frowns at the cluster of buttons and switches below the conning tower faceplate. “Frankly, this is me just using Hollywood as reference again. Always a bad idea. It could be over on that wall somewhere for all I know.”
Mandy sniffs the air. “It is fresh though.” She shares a nod with Miriam. Encouraged, she crouches and tries to follow the gentle air currents. She’d show them that a meteorologist can still be helpful, even underground! Nobody understands convection like she does! It’s one of her favorite atmospheric dynamics! She crosses the control room to the far hatch. This one is still sealed.
No, air issues from the grate below her feet. She kneels on it, finding it still quite solid, and spreads her hands over the gaps. The voices of the others recede as she focuses on the gentle movement of the air, which rises up from the grate. Then after a moment it stops. “Why did it stop?”
That silences the room. “The air?” Miriam asks.
Mandy feels the air sucked gently out of the room now, in a reverse exchange that reminds her uneasily of a giant creature’s respiration. She stands and nods. “Yeah. I’m, uh, not sure we should open that door, Doctor Triquet.”
Triquet, at the hatch, turns lazily away. “Can’t anyway, darling. This is the end of the line, It’s welded shut.”
DW Draffin -- Lisica 