Chapter 41 – To The Sub
October 7, 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:
41 – To The Sub
Pradeep descends the narrow set of concrete stairs. Jay’s back, silhouetted by the light coming from the sub below, bends nearly double before vanishing through the hatch. Well. Pradeep has mostly done a good job avoiding the sub and the tunnels and the entire bloody interior of the island but now his help is needed. His clarity. His common sense. Pradeep takes a deep breath to calm himself but the growing knot of anxiety in his guts can’t be so easily released. It is beyond his control.
Yes. So is everything. Lisica has robbed him entirely of self-rule. And some of that is fantastic. He will happily worship Maahjabeen for the rest of his days. He is thrilled to be working with Doctor Alonso, the luminary. But the rest of it… Actually living out these fearsome experiences might be too much for his faint heart.
“There it is!” Jay crows from within. Heartened, Pradeep ducks through the hatch and straightens in the cramped chamber, its curving walls tapering together near his head, increasing his claustrophobia, sepia and yellow light everywhere. Jay stands proudly, holding the remains of a dead roach. He searches his pockets for his lighter. Nope, no lighter. But ah! There it is on the ground, red and chrome, like a child’s forgotten toy.
He sparks up, hoping the weed can ground him a bit. Having to do actual real-world shit while peaking on acid fucking sucks.
Jay realizes Pradeep is talking to him. And the weed isn’t hitting at all, it just got yeeted straight out of his brain by the stronger drug. Fuck. “What’s that, Prad?” Oh, weird. Did he actually say those words out loud or imagine them?
“So where is it?”
“Huh?” Jay notices the way Pradeep purses his lips when he’s upset. He sure is a stress case. “Oh! Uh… I just had it.” With a triumphant smile he presents the lighter to Pradeep. “Ta-daa.”
“No, abe saale,” Pradeep snatches the lighter from Jay’s hand and shoves it back into his front pockets. “The evidence. Where is the evidence?” Jay only looks at him, stupefied. Pradeep shakes him by the shoulders. “No no no. You have to stay here with me. You have to tell me. This golden man. Where did you see him?”
“Right! The golden man!” Jay grabs Pradeep by the elbows, his face filled with revelation. “Dude! It was right here! I was sitting here buzzing. And Katrina wanted to go down on me but I said, hold up. We’re like not alone in here. So she—”
“Wait. She what?” Pradeep is scandalized. “Is that what you two were doing down here? Isn’t she like seventeen?”
“Aw, come on, Prad. She’s twenty-two. She’s only like nineteen months younger than me. Why’s everybody gotta disrespect the one and only DJ Bubblegum?”
“Okay. Well, I didn’t know you were…” Pradeep makes a vague back-and-forth gesture with his hands, “into each other.”
“Are we?” The overwhelmed look on Jay’s face indicates that this is a calculation that is way beyond his abilities at the moment.
“So anyway…” Pradeep hauls his friend back to the here and now. “Where did you see the golden man?”
“I was here. Katrina was here. Golden man was here.”
“Okay. Did he ever come into this room or did he stay in that doorway there? That hatch?”
“He stayed in the hatch. Oh, shit. That’s right, Prad. The Russians. They’re on their way. We got to hide.”
“Yes, well…” Pradeep can’t think how to finish that sentence. He supposes it is within the realm of possibility that Russian military forces still visit the island. Katrina had detected Slavic words in Lisican speech. They must have gotten it somewhere. But he dreads the notion. Armed soldiers prowling through camp, with orders to shoot anyone they find there. It’s terrifying. They are so utterly alone and defenseless here, so far from any help at all. “What exactly did he say?”
“Uhh…” Jay scrubs his forehead. Visual memories turn into words and back again, forming some abstract orthogonal space in his head that refuses to resolve into speech. “You know, he was speaking Russian. And I don’t understand Russian.”
“Right. So Katrina was translating. And how did that go? Was he nice? Was he angry? Did he threaten you?”
Jay giggles. “Show me on the doll where he touched you.”
Pradeep claps his hands. “Jay. Let us be serious here. They are upstairs waiting for us.”
“Be vewy vewy quiet. We’re hunting wabbits!” Jay falls forward onto all fours and Pradeep is afraid he’s lost him again. But no. Jay crawls slowly forward, scanning the deck. All things considered, it’s probably what they should both be doing. Pradeep inspects the walls instead. Triquet has done a nice job, putting up a gallery of portraits in a row here, the uniformed men in black and white who served on this sub and perhaps buried it here. Their postwar faces look so simple, the light in their eyes so certain. Well. Life was far more straightforward back then, that’s for sure.
Jay crawls through the hatch, still not looking up. It is dark on the far side, something Pradeep isn’t yet willing to encounter. He takes out his phone and lights the chamber beyond. Then he closely inspects the frame of the hatch. But the frame is clear of pollen. Pradeep fights his impatience down. Careful, now. Don’t jump to any conclusions yet. Frankly, he hadn’t believed Jay’s story of the golden childs and their strange rituals at first until he was shocked to find them surrounding the camp a few nights ago. All kinds of bizarre things happen here. This might be one of them. “You must understand. Because of your condition, we can’t just take your word for it. It is too important. We need to know.”
Jay rolls over, nodding. “Knowledge. Not just like opinions but…” He wants to make a speech on the value of true knowledge but an ire blazes in Pradeep’s shadowed face that makes him hesitate. “What? What did I do?”
“Just stay on task. The golden man. We need to find him.”
“Yeah. But we don’t speak Russian. We should have brought Katrina. She could have—”
“Not on your life. I’m having enough trouble with one of you.” Pradeep scans the dark chamber. Lit by just his narrow white beam, it seems far more spooky. “Come on. Figure it out!”
“Will do. I think he went this way.”
Pradeep follows Jay through the next hatch into the narrow corridor and its three doors. It is only getting more dark and scary. Each of the offices and ward rooms are empty. In the Captain’s cabin a twisted blanket still lies on the mattress. That was where Alonso was when Pradeep found him. Also on drugs. He came on to Pradeep quite hard… That was awkward. What is it with these crazy people? For the first time he’s happy about Maahjabeen’s strict temperance. He needs at least one stable person in his life.
They creep through the corridor, Jay scouring the grate of the deck and the stained walls of the hallway. The end of the passage is lit by an indirect light. Pradeep recalls that Triquet leaves work lights on down here quite a lot.
They step through into the control room. Jay is quite pleased with himself. He’s been able to stay on task for a whole five minutes now. Perhaps the peak is already passing. Then he’ll just have to deal with coming down, which is horrible. But hopefully they’ll be back up in the bunker by then.
The work light in the corner is tilted upward, making crazy shadows that expand the higher they go. The shadows all converge on the ceiling, which troubles him. It seems significant somehow. Malevolent. “Shit.” The last thing Jay needs while hallucinating his nuts off is an actual confrontation with one of the evil spirits of the island. He’s sure they’re here. It’s almost like he can sense them. The acid gives him a second sight. But, thankfully, the control room is clear. And there’s no sign that anyone went down the hole in the deck in the corner onto the jumble of stacked furniture below. “If there’s gonna be pollen anywhere, it’d be here…”
They both inspect the ragged hole, the rusted edges of expanded steel clean of anything resembling gold dust. “Can we say this is proof, then?” Pradeep studies Jay’s bleary face. “Will you accept that this golden man wasn’t real? That it was the drugs and only the drugs?”
An immense weariness washes through Jay. He recalls that his side was slashed open. That was a real thing. The pain he still feels in his skin is a real thing. Maybe the golden man was not? Who even knows any more? The last few hours are nothing but a jumble in his fatigued brain. Perhaps he doesn’t know anything about anything at all. “Sure, man. Whatever you say.”
Pradeep nods, pleased with Jay’s mumbled concession. “Fine. Good. Then let’s get back and tell them before…”
And that’s when they both see the far hatch in the control room, the one that had been welded shut and convinced them in the days early on that this was the end of the sub, is now cracked open.
“What in the world…?” Pradeep edges up to it. “But how…?” He runs his light along the edges of its door. It is still welded shut. Yet there is a seam outside the door frame that has been broken open. It may not even be on a hinge. The entire bulkhead is just a giant heavy panel made of rusted steel that has now been heaved aside, with a gap wide enough for a man to pass through.
“Oh, shit. I knew it…” All Jay’s fears become manifest, coalescing in the darkness on the other side of this hatch. “I fucking knew it. This is too freaky, bro. We got to pull back and come at this with a little more…”
But Pradeep is absorbed by something he sees through the gap. He peers more closely, listens more intently. “Hang on.”
Then he steps through, into darkness.
Ξ
Triquet wakes with a start. Then a deep shiver. Oh, that’s right. Here they are. Alone and lost. At their lowest point yet.
It is dark, maybe already dawn. They lie face down in the mud outside the bunker beneath a bush somewhere by the creek and the pool. The waterfall is a steady rushing white noise beside them, with the slap of falling water on flat stones nearby.
They’re soaking wet and freezing, eagle bite throbbing, wrapped imperfectly in their rain suit. How did they manage to actually fall asleep out here? Oh. Right. They are utterly exhausted.
It had been a race to break down the camp and the bunker, some kind of awful marathon filled with rising anxiety and shouting matches and Esquibel’s outrageous threats. At least they’d already done half the work, back when the rains had started. They’d already struck the tents and hammock and lowered the camp tarps and stowed the solar panels. If those things had still been up last night, there was no way they could have finished in time.
They’d begged the golden childs to help them, Katrina even haranguing them all in Russian, using the exact same phrases the golden man had said to her. But the childs remained unmoved. They evidently had their orders and were sticking to them.
Then there had been the bunker. Amy’s reed panels had all been pulled apart and carried down into the sub, where they’d decided they could hide. The clean room had taken a godawful amount of time to disassemble, as did the kitchens and all their food. But then finally the bunker had stood bare, the holes in the roof once again uncovered, and rain had poured in.
Then they’d had the final argument.
They all realized that if they just pulled the trap door shut behind them, it would stick out like a sore thumb to anyone who came looking. One of them needed to remain behind and cover their tracks so that the trap door wouldn’t be discovered. And after an argument, a few rounds of rochambeau, and another yelling match that had gotten painfully personal, Triquet had been selected as the lucky one to be left behind.
At 4:45 am they had closed the trap door on every other person they knew on this island and scattered a sheaf of rotting fern leaves atop it. Perhaps the coconut crabs would even move back in.
Then, as a final task, Triquet had gone out to the trenches and done their best to fill them in. The trenches themselves would be hard to find, but the smell definitely needed to be controlled, or all their concealment would go to waste.
And how much work it had been. A whirlwind of activity. Their hands are cut and bloody, with bone bruises in their wrists and knees from wrestling heavy objects, all fueled by adrenaline and rising terror….
Then it had been up to Triquet to find their own way back into the tunnels from the hidden openings in the base of the cliff. But it had been such a long struggle. And it was so wet and dark that they soon got lost in the maze of narrow trails beneath the underbrush.
At a certain point they’d given up, closing their eyes to conserve energy. Now they’re waking up, who knows how much time later. It might be well after dawn. There might be soldiers patrolling the trail beside their head. If they take out their phone to check on the time, one of them might see the glowing screen and open fire.
Triquet strains to listen. There is nothing but the unbroken white noise of the waterfall. No other sound can break through. Shoot, so much for stealth. Triquet could sing an entire Depeche Mode album at the top of their lungs and nobody would hear them.
And then they strain to see. Afraid to move, they slowly roll their head to the side and peer along the length of the forest floor. It is all black, but after a while they can see a variegated pattern of gray and deep purple. Either moonlight or dawnlight. But with this rain it can’t be the moon. It must be morning. And the Russians must already be here.
Where did the golden childs go? Do any still watch over Triquet? Or is that whole psychotic shaman game called off until the even more psychotic Russians leave? Maybe one or more of the childs hide nearby, silently watching over Triquet. Wouldn’t that be nice?
But now what do they do? Can they move? Do they have to stay here? For how long? There’s no end date on this Russian visit. Nobody said if they’re staying for an hour or a month. How will Triquet know when it’s over if all they’re doing is squeezing their eyes shut, face down in the mud?
Triquet realizes their fate isn’t to escape into the tunnels and find their way back up into the sub with the others. It is to be their scout while they safely hide. Well, crap on a stick. This is turning out to be a much worse bargain than expected. Amy and Miriam had both volunteered to be the one left behind, but Triquet’s youth and experience with these tunnels out near the waterfall had won the argument. At the time, they had felt so gallant.
Now they just feel wretched. What exactly do they think they can accomplish here? They’re no soldier. They’re hardly an athlete. All their physical reserves were blown breaking down the camp. They need a good forty-eight hours of nothing but hot cocoa and a full season of Househunters. But instead they somehow have to turn into a ninja.
That’s where it always starts with Triquet. If they ever need to transform themself for any reason, it begins with the costume. But they have no access to yards of black silk so their imagination will just have to do. They will swath their entire body in it, with one of those ninja headbands and a black kerchief covering everything but their eyes. Their hands and feet will be covered in those cute little traditional Japanese gloves and shoes with soft leather soles. And they’ll carry nothing but a short sword and a blowgun. Then they’ll run along rooftops on their way to assassinate the Shogun…
Okay. Well, the mindset is there. Now they’re ready to strike out, back toward camp, stealthy as a cat. Too bad they’re actually wearing a yellow vinyl rainsuit and blue patent leather boots. They’ll get spotted the instant they come out from under cover.
So the answer must be to stay under cover. These little fox trails that wind every which way must provide for routes around the back of the camp. They appear to be everywhere else.
“No time to be frightened. Just do it.” Triquet mouths the words out loud, then slips off to their left, down a dark tunnel of bare branches under brown leaves.
Ξ
“Where does this go?” Pradeep’s light fades to black past twenty meters or so, and yet the low and narrow hand-carved tunnel continues straight on, its walls sandstone, its floor pale sand.
“No way…” Jay is astounded by what he sees, even though it’s just a forced perspective of rough walls disappearing into the dark. He’s still firmly in his peak so lights shimmer along the length, first outward in a wavy rainbow pattern, then back to him, crawling up his feet and legs, suffusing him with warmth and certainty. It’s like being in a birth canal, and he’s reliving his own delivery. He shivers. “No fucking way.”
Pradeep peers ahead as far as he can. “I mean, I figure it has to go under the cliffs to the island’s interior. Obviously. Yet another of the many ways the Lisicans access the beach here. But so much work! And it can’t be too stable…” Pradeep stops, convinced. “Yes. This is enough. We can go back, as you said, and tell the others. This is the evidence we needed.” Pradeep listens to the patter of water draining through the tunnel. Right, the storm is soaking the ground above. This thing could collapse at any moment. And yet… despite his rising anxiety, something alluring beckons to him in the heart of that darkness. There is some great intellectual itch to be scratched through there. He can tell, that if he continued on, that he would be able to delve into the greater secrets of this island and maybe even life itself…
Pradeep shakes himself, breaking the reverie. “Yes, well, but that would be foolish. And say what you like of Pradeep Chakrabarti, no one can call him a fool.”
“Okay.” Jay has no idea what Pradeep is talking about. He just realized that he suddenly needs to piss like a race horse. How’s he going to accomplish that down here?
Pradeep turns away from the darkness and pushes past Jay. “Come on. Let’s get back to Maahjabeen and the others. We can explore this more later.”
“Yeah. Good call.” Jay can hustle back to the surface and empty himself out and maybe crash in his hammock for a bit. He turns, swaying, and then stampedes forward with urgency, his bladder his only thought. Once he gets past Pradeep he pushes on into the darkness back to the sub. The light swings up once behind him, offering a glimpse of the tunnel ahead, and then it swings to the floor so Pradeep can light his own footsteps.
Jay charges forward, breaths short, doing all he can to keep from wetting himself. The way back to the sub is just a few steps ahead now. And then it’s just a bunch of rooms and stairs til he can finally get outside and water a bush. Ugh! Don’t think about it! Just move!
“Jay! Slow down!” Pradeep is more uncertain in the tunnel. He hadn’t realized how wet it was in here on the way in. The clay of the tunnel floor sucks at his feet. “You don’t have a light! Stupid hophead. You can’t just blunder off into the dark.”
Pradeep trudges behind, cursing Jay. Then he realizes he’s gone more than a hundred paces on his way back to the sub. There is no chance that they walked more than a hundred paces into this tunnel at the outset. Far less. And now they’ve done far more. “Wait. Jay?”
“I come from the land down under…” Jay’s song lyrics are nearly grunted aloud from far ahead.
“Jay, we have to stop.”
“Can’t really do that right now, homie.” And with that apology, Jay redoubles his efforts and hurries ahead, about to burst.
Pradeep yelps, hearing Jay disappear into the distance. “Jay, stop! Please! You can’t…” Pradeep stops moving. They went the wrong way. It’s the only thing that makes sense. There must have been a branch in the tunnel they didn’t see on the way in. And Jay went down it, continues to go down it, away from the sub. And the last thing Pradeep wants to do is go further in after him. But he also can’t go back alone. For one, he doesn’t know which way they turned wrong. He could easily get even more lost, and then it’d just be him alone wandering under the surface of the island along a separate path until he dies of starvation. Pradeep shivers. No, he can’t go back alone. “Jay, wait!” He hurries down the tunnel.
After a long timeless ordeal, during which the tunnel grows more ragged and small, dropping and rising in the clay and gravel and forcing Pradeep to twist himself through the constricted passage, he finally comes upon Jay leaning against a wall, pissing into a small pool. “Oh. Yuck. Do you have to, Jay? We might step in it and—”
“As a matter of fact,” Jay answers loudly, “I do. Very much. Have to. Sorry.” And the stream continues, a shocking amount. Jay sags with relief against the wall. Finally he finishes, putting himself away and groaning in relief. “Yeah, we’re lost. But at least with this smell we’ll be able to tell if we ever come back this way. Come on, Prad.” And Jay steps past the puddle to continue on.
“Wait. Why are you still going that way? We should go back.”
“I am going back.”
“Oh, no no no. Don’t do that to me, Jay. We came from this way. I just came from this direction. I am sure of it. You were leaning against that wall. Making a puddle right there.”
“Really? I would have sworn it’s the other side. I just stepped away from the wall. Look. The puddle’s already gone in the sand.”
“It’s this way, Jay. Please. Don’t make us even more lost. This is a big island.”
“Don’t I know it. But are you sure…?” Jay studies their footprints in the clay. There are tracks in both directions. Many of them. “Aw, hell. Look, Prad. They’re everywhere. We’re boned.”
“What? How? I thought I had the only other footprints here. Maybe these are the tracks of your golden man.” Pradeep tries to make out whether the tracks have the imprint of modern soles or if they are from bare feet or whatever the hell the man must be wearing. “But I am still telling you, our way back is this way. Do not make me go any further in.”
Jay knows Pradeep is wrong but he also knows he won’t win the fight. Ah, well. People don’t just build tunnels to nowhere. They must all eventually head somewhere. So it doesn’t really matter. He’ll just have to see where this one pops out. Dutifully, he falls in behind and lets Pradeep lead.
They walk in silence for a long time. Pradeep consults the time. It’s 10:51pm. They’ve been out for over an hour. The others back in the bunker must be getting worried. I am so sorry, babi! Pradeep silently mouths, sending his love to Maahjabeen.
For Jay, an outcrop of rock under his hand sends him spinning into the deepest revelations he’s ever had. That rock has formed down here, unseen by any eyes, for millions of years. Then busy little men had formed this channel in the mud, revealing it. And now there are tunnels shot through the mud and rock everywhere. They’re like the wrinkled passageways of a brain. God’s brain. He is walking through the mind of a deity. And what makes God so all-powerful is how ancient God is. Formed of the earth’s living crust, the thoughts that arise and coalesce in the divine mind are these rocks, which form over eons, millions upon millions of years. This is what God’s speech looks like, these mineral accretions. And that’s why humans will never understand the language of divinity. Because God speaks so slow. Little humans live and die in a flash, just as God is forming the beginning of a syllable that leads to a word that someday will be a sentence, a profound statement about the nature of the universe. But humans will never hear it. “Dude. We can only ever hear the briefest little snippet.”
“What’s that?” Pradeep can make no sense of the non sequitur. “Don’t worry, Jay. I think we’re nearly back now. The tunnel is straightening out.”
But Jay is satisfied to be here now, crawling around in the mind of the immortal. It doesn’t matter if he’s above ground or below any more. All of it is within God’s loving embrace. “Hey. Man. I just wanted to tell you… I think it’s cool your girlfriend is so religious. It’s like, I never really thought about it much before, but I get it. Now I get it.”
“She will not want to hear that you equate your drug trip to her faith. But I’m, uh, I guess I’m glad you like her.”
“Oh, sure. She’s awesome. I just wish she liked me.”
Pradeep searches for a way to refute that statement but can’t think of one. Jay is right. Poor bastard. He sure seems to rub a lot of people the wrong way. Even Pradeep can’t wait to separate from him and get back to Maahjabeen. She is still recovering from her poisoning. She needs him by her side.
And that is when he realizes he’s been walking down this straight passage for too long. Again. He stops. This isn’t the way back to the sub? He is somehow getting further from it. And now they have been gone for almost ninety minutes. And his phone battery is only half-full. Pradeep turns and turns again. Now what?
“Hey, man.” Jay stumbles to a stop and gives him a sleepy grin. “You as thirsty as me?”
“Improbable. You just lost half your bodyweight in urine.”
“I did?” Then Jay remembers. “Oh yeah. Highlight of my night.” Jay pushes past Pradeep, who is entirely at a loss. “Then let’s get going, homie. I need a drink.”
“But Jay, I don’t…” And that’s when they see the golden man, bent nearly double, coming toward them from the darkness ahead. The gleaming pollen of his mask refracts in the phone’s harsh light.
“Well, shit. There he is. See? We told you…” Jay shakes his head, confounded. “Now what? You speak any Russian?”
“No.” Pradeep speaks in a hush, spooked by the appearance of the figure. It appears that he really will have to trust Jay’s wild statements more than he has. That doesn’t make him happy. It opens up an entire psychedelic kaleidoscope of realities that he would prefer to keep unreal. “Hello. Uh. Sir. Nice to meet you.”
The golden man’s muffled voice, deep and guttural, fills the tunnel. Yep. Russian. Crazy. All of this is intolerably crazy.
“Can’t understand, dude.” Jay jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “Katrina’s back at the sub. That way? Yeah, how do we get out of here, anyway?”
“That’s it,” Pradeep encourages Jay. “Have him lead us out of here. He must know…”
But the golden man only speaks more Russian, heavily, as if reciting a long unhappy speech. He points at Jay with the tip of his thumb and makes another statement. Then, when the two young men before him seem to lack understanding, the golden man switches to Lisican. Jay hears the words Wetchie-ghuy and lidass but registers nothing more. “Whoa. Hold on, hold on there, big fella. We don’t… We can’t—Hey! That’s my phone!” The golden man holds out Jay’s phone to him and he snatches it. “Aw, damn! She cracked the screen! Look at that, Prad! Fucking Kula. And now that it’s broken, of course that’s when she hands it back. No, wait. I think it might actually…” Jay is startled to find it remains on, the smallest amount of power still in its battery.
Someone had been in the process of composing a text. “It’s in English so it must be Kula. Or Jidadaa. But word on the street is she’s hiding from the golden childs so… Yeah. This sounds like Kula for sure. It says, ‘Jay leedass, you byand bye gota stop Wetchie-ghuy. End the argument. Leedass. Kill. Jay kill Wetchie-ghuy.’ Oh, fuck all the way off. What the hell?”
The golden man is speaking again, once he hears the words he himself had been saying. Now he urges Jay, the words lidass and Wetchie-ghuy coming fast and furious.
“No. Absolutely not. I ain’t killing nobody. That ain’t my job here. I’m just a… I mean, have your Russian soldiers do it, if you’re so buddy buddy with them.”
The golden man falls silent.
Pradeep asks one of his incisive questions, his tone demanding attention. “So when will the Russians leave? When…? Ah. When will…?” Pradeep acts out the Russian soldiers landing on the beach, looking around, then leaving. He has no idea if any of that was clear at all. “When?”
But the golden man pushes Pradeep firmly away with the flat of his hand against his sternum. Pradeep stumbles back and the golden man makes another speech, mentioning Wetchie-ghuy twice. Then, jabbing at Pradeep with the tip of his thumb, he snarls, “Lisica. Na Daadaxáats giuxhe dan. Lisica.” And he turns and points at his own tailbone. “Lisica.”
“Oh, damn.” Jay shakes his head in wonder. “Dod-ah-shats was Jidadaa’s name for Sherman the shaman. And looks like he knows about your fox tramp stamp. But what does any of that have to do with Wetchie-ghuy and why is he so aggro about you—?”
A sudden sob escapes Pradeep. That dreadful vision swims up in front of his eyes, here in the dark, of the shaman looming over him in the space between life and death, making a deal for his soul. “Because I belong to him. The shaman attacked me and filled me with his cold mud. Wetchie-ghuy saved me, but only for a price.”
To Jay, nearing the end of his acid trip, reality is a tattered cloth and now he’s falling through the holes. Did Pradeep actually say what Jay thought he said? Jay turns to the masked figure to ask, and finds him on his knees scrubbing his hand against the wet sand where he pushed Pradeep. Unclean. “What the F? What’s going on here, grandpa?”
The golden man stands and grasps Jay by the wrist, pulling him forward, evidently to do battle against Wetchie-ghuy. His speech is urgent, decisive. But Jay digs in his heels.
“Whoa whoa whoa. Hold on.” Jay pulls his wrist away and turns back to Pradeep, who is hunched around the impact on his chest, head down. “We aren’t leaving Pradeep. We aren’t leaving you, Prad. Not ever.”
“We should go back to the sub.” Pradeep’s voice is reedy, distant, as if something brittle deep inside him has snapped. “I don’t want to be down here any more.”
“Yeah. For sure. Me either. But we still don’t know which way that is. Golden dude here wants us—or, me—to go further down this tunnel with him. So that’s probably not where our crew is. But that way, back the way we just came, is where we just were! And we know there’s no sub back there.”
Pradeep only stares at Jay, shorn of all bravery. He is empty and frail. A febrile panic attack announces its arrival and he almost rushes to it, the one familiar thing amongst all this madness. Like a freight train it roars through this tunnel, picking up Pradeep and carrying him away on the fast track to hysteric madness. Tears leak out from his squeezed-shut eyes and his limbs quiver, dropping him to the tunnel floor. His hands go to his throat. He can’t breathe.
Jay hauls on Pradeep. “Fuck. That.” He holds him tight, as close as lovers, Pradeep’s legs not bearing any of his weight. “And fuck you, golden dude. I ain’t going with you. I’m staying here and taking care of my buddy. And fuck Wetchie-ghuy for doing this. You can go kill him yourself. Go!”
Jay’s meaning is plain. The golden man retreats in defeat, still muttering. He withdraws down the tunnel until the darkness swallows him. Soon they are alone in the dark and all they can hear is Pradeep’s gasping breath.
“Jay. Jay! We’re going to die down here.”
The incision in Jay’s side starts to complain and he grimaces. “No way, Prad. You’re just spooked. And this is the dark part of the trip. When all the demons come out to play. That’s all.”
And as if Jay invoked them, the darkness surrounding him fills with infernal pairs of slanted teardrop eyes, blazing red.
Ξ
“Here. I’ll go first and then you will see that it is safe.” Her friend Maahjabeen disappears into the dark ahead as Flavia hangs back, unwilling to enter the sea cave. “See?”
“No. I don’t see. It is cold. And wet. And I need to sleep, not explore all these fucking caves.”
“There is no exploration. It is already explored. Yala, Flavia. Get out of that little tunnel. It is nice in this cave.”
Finally Flavia emerges, blinking distrustfully at the gloomy reaches of the cavern. “More darkness. Fantastico.”
“No, off to the left. That is where it opens to the sea. Just take two more steps. Look.”
“Yes, that is gray light. Hooray. You have convinced me. What a wonderful cave.” Flavia’s flat voice echoes against the far walls. Then a wave rushes in and fills the cave with its hiss. She listens as it departs, registering the deep churn of the low curtain fall behind her to her right, where the water comes in from above.
“That is your river there. When you take a shower in the cold waterfall every morning, that water washes down to here.”
“I see. Then maybe I will be able to find that hair tie I lost.” But despite her black mood, she can’t help but be impressed. Flavia takes another couple steps inside. She uncrosses her arms. The air is cool but pleasant. What a strange place. It feels like a theme park ride, with the collapsing pier and sunken boat and everything. “You and Pradeep, you rowed your boats into here? Madness.”
“Oh, yes. More than once.” Then Maahjabeen giggles, her tough exterior cracking. “I’m sorry. This cave has become very dear to us. It is one of our favorite places. I just wish I could get the boats through the mud tunnel. Then it would be so easy to launch from here. But it is always… kind of a death-defying process to get out of the lagoon and along the coast here. Don’t tell Alonso. Or he won’t let us do it any more.” Not that the storm will allow it these days. She is surprised that the sea level remains so low. If there had been a significant surge, it must have already passed.
Flavia realizes how tense she is. Now that they’ve reached the end and found no threats, she can finally relax. And, oh, how sore her muscles are! She sags against Maahjabeen. “Oh my god I need to pass out. Breaking down the camp. That was more physical work than I have done in… well, more than I have ever done. Ever ever. In my entire life. I mean, seriously! I must have gone up and down those steps a hundred times!”
“I worry about Triquet.” Sudden tears fill Maahjabeen’s eyes and she hugs Flavia tight. “And Pradeep. Of course.”
“And Jay?”
“Sure.”
They stand in silence, hearing another sweep of white noise that echoes from the sea cave’s entrance to them. It adds layers to the other water sounds in this cavern: the curtain fall; the slap of waves against the rock shelf; the boom of the distant surf. “It is the rainfall on the ocean,” Maahjabeen finally realizes, the water sounds acting like a siren’s song upon her. “Come. Let me show you.”
They pick their way closer to the sea cave entrance, following a narrow path along the left wall that eventually widens into a manmade cavern. Flavia steps on the worn concrete pilings, unwilling to go much farther. It sounds like an angry ocean out there, one that could tear them to pieces. But Maahjabeen strides confidently forward toward the diffuse gray light.
“It would have to be a sudden epic storm swell to sweep us off these rocks. We will be fine. But listen.”
Flavia studies Maahjabeen’s rapturous face. She is dubious. What about this situation could possibly inspire such a reaction? “Is this a religious thing? It must be. Because I do not understand—”
“Listen.” Maahjabeen grabs Flavia’s forearm and they go silent.
The sheeting of rain on the water rises and falls over the regular slap of the tide. Flavia lifts her eyes to the gray light, happy to have something to look at, and patiently waits for Maahjabeen’s special moment to end. “Did you hear, Flavia? That is the voice of God.”
“I heard sh-shhhh-shhhhhh and that is all. It is just water.”
“No, listen with your heart for once. Not your head. Listen to the world with your soul.”
Flavia makes a face and stands in cold silence for another ten seconds. “Ah. There it is. God is telling me to stop being such a stupid fool and to go back to the sub.”
“Flavia…” Maahjabeen grasps her by both hands. “You cannot be deaf to it anymore. It is happening all around us. The golden childs and their prophecies. The signs everywhere. The attack on me and Pradeep. These are happening. And they aren’t… they can’t be fully understood by science and the rational mind.”
“Well I am glad we agree you are not being rational.”
“Of course I am not! Because the world isn’t entirely rational! It is mysterious and strange and divine! Just because experiments are the only thing we can reproduce does not mean they encompass every facet of life. Don’t you see? Sure, science is a wonderful tool. The best. But we need other tools as well to really understand the nature of the universe. Be honest with yourself.”
“Honest? You want to talk about honest? Okay. How about you tell me why it is that in brainscans of religious people, they are found to have a circuit in the brainstem that fires more than a normal person’s does? That is all your religion is. You have built yourselves a self-reinforcing feedback loop in your heads that sees omens and all kinds of weird subtexts and your god circuits fire off these learned sensations to make you feel holy. It is very simple. You are not hearing the voice of god. It is just a cognitive module you were given by others, most likely your parents.”
Maahjabeen has never heard this. But it does make sense. At least the first part. “Okay, I can accept that our brains are wired different, but has it occurred to you that this may not be a closed circuit but instead like a—an… antenna? Actually connecting us to the divine? And when we pray, we are strengthening the antenna as we broadcast and receive.”
Flavia looks at her strangely. “Okay, that’s halfway sensible. If you please put that hypothesis in the language of Information Theory, especially with a quantum field emphasis, you might get me to listen. But guess what. Your hypothesis is inherently untestable. That is the problem with what you are saying. Yes, experiments always need to be reproduced, or what? Or it is all nonsense. It is whatever you want to say the world is and there is no foundation, no underlying truth. Just feelings. And what is the point of talking about feelings? They are ultimately subjective. They cannot be shared. I mean, we use language and all kinds of art forms to try, but no. You cannot truly share an experience like two computers share files. So what you are talking about is the ultimate subjective experience. The one that is between you and whatever private biological interface you are having with the world around you. It is not the infinite. It is the opposite. The isolated number. The more you talk of god the further you get from the world around you and the more you sink into yourself. And please, Maahjabeen. Do not tell me about the wonders of religion. There is a reason it has fallen out of favor in more and more of the world. It is because the wrong people do the wrong things with it. The reason we need science at all is because there are so many people with bad intentions who try to tell us the world is ruled by their god. Science says no. It is like the laws in a government. We need to understand and all agree that the world works in a certain way or guess what? We get insane religious wars again about who goes to heaven and who does not. No. I do not hear any voices or music in the wind. I hear water on water. I only see light. Ai ai ai. Do not make me question your intelligence. You are too nice for that.” And with a somewhat disgusted shake of her head, Flavia breaks away from Maahjabeen and retreats out of the cave back into the dark tunnels leading to the sub.
Chapter 18 – Quite So Well
April 29, 2024
Thanks for joining us on 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:
18 – Quite So Well
Flavia is so happy to see Amy she could kiss her. At last. She has won back her freedom. She wants to collapse and just be carried away to her cot in the bunker but she knows she can’t lay down her burdens quite yet. She turns to Xaanach, her shadow these last couple days. But the tiny girl is gone, vanished into the greenery. Well. That may be for the best. As far as Flavia can tell, Xaanach and the hermits of the mountain aren’t welcome in the villages.
Katrina is yelping with joy, wrapping her in her arms, kissing her cheeks like a long-lost relation. Flavia grips her back. Now that she is in the embrace of her friends her ordeal takes on a dreamlike quality. It recedes instantly into the past.
Amy hugs her too. The warm contact against her skin nearly makes Flavia weep. “Basta. Please. We still have to get home.” She steps back and wipes her eyes. “But where are Maahjabeen and Triquet? We have to find them. I think they followed me.”
“Followed you?” Amy frowns. “When?”
“That first day. The day they stole me.”
“No, no.” Katrina assures Flavia. “They got back safe and sound. Don’t worry about them. It’s just you.”
“Now…” Amy wonders, “how do we actually get back? They won’t let us back in the village to the way out.”
Flavia pulls away from Amy, a manic desperation filling her. “Where? Who won’t let us leave?”
Katrina indicates the knot of adult villagers still standing in the center of the clearing, hands up, watching them with wary hostility. “They think you’re some kind of bad juju, that’s for sure.”
“It isn’t me. No! It’s Wetchie-ghuy.”
The name provokes a collective low moan from the villagers. The children who had been watching from the doorways of their redwood bark houses duck their heads back in, squealing in fear.
Flavia steps into the village. “Wetchie-ghuy does not own me. I am not his—his wife. I am not his property. I am a free woman.”
But they still look at her with stone faces. She has been touched, infected or stained like Amy was for just taking a single step up his trail. For Flavia, this is too much.
“No! I hate him! I am my own person! Fuck Wetchie-ghuy!” She lifts a fist and shakes it at the mountain behind her. With two quick strides she returns to his trailhead and spits on it. Flavia drags her foot across the dirt, renouncing him. Then she realizes she still wears the shawl of silver fur that he had draped over her shoulders. She throws it on the ground and stamps on it.
The villagers hiss with worry.
“I am done. I am completely done.” Flavia marches into the village and they raise their hands. But she lifts her own to ward them away, aiming directly for the tunnel mouth. They fall away from her before she can touch them.
Katrina and Amy scamper through in her wake, hurrying past the villagers with downcast eyes.
Flavia is forced to stop. A single man stands in the tunnel mouth, barring her path. It is the first man they always meet, the elder with the fox—who is nowhere to be seen. She stops in front of him, needing him to understand she plays no part in Wetchie-ghuy’s devious machinations. She points at the mountain. “Wetchie-ghuy. Nák. Wetchie-ghuy chán. Bad. È cattivo.” She mimics strangling a kneeling figure. She points at its imagined face. “Wetchie-ghuy.” With all her effort she chokes him.
The elder watching her keeps his face impassive. But his eyes are surprisingly filled with grief. In silence he finally turns away, shoulders slumped in defeat, leaving the passage open. Flavia pushes past him with a muttered Italian curse. But she stops after just a step.
The fox crouches before her. One last challenge.
But this is something Flavia feels she can actually do. Boris her dog has taught her all kinds of canine manners. She patiently kneels, holding out the back of her hand for the fox to smell. It does so, idly, looking up at her with black shining eyes.
Without knowing why, words speak themselves from her lips. “I won’t tell anyone. I will keep your secret.” She doesn’t know what it means but it still somehow seems to make sense.
Satisfied, the fox flickers away, appearing once more on the shoulder of the elder who is rejoining his people in the village.
Amy hurries after Flavia, filled with more shame than she’s ever felt. These people were so joyful and welcoming just an hour ago. And she still doesn’t fully understand what she did wrong.
Katrina tarries at the tunnel mouth. She can’t let it end like this. Her DJ instincts kick in and she lifts her phone. With a few quick flicks of her fingers, a song begins at max volume, filling the space with piano and strings. Then Elton John’s plaintive voice sings:
What have I gotta do to make you love me?
What have I gotta do to make you care?
What do I do when lightning strikes me?
They goggle at her, the ethereal sounds coming from the phone clearly unlike anything they’ve ever heard. She holds it high as the kids peek their heads out again. The music draws them forward.
What do I say when it’s all over?
And sorry seems to be the hardest word…
Katrina puts her hand over her heart and starts swaying back and forth in time to the music, signaling her apology with gestures. She lets the song play out, the villagers swaying in time with her by the end. She lets the silence stretch for a long moment before blowing a kiss to the crowd and holding up a peace sign. Then she turns and hurries after the others into the dark passage back home.
Ξ
“Hey… I got an idea…” Jay stands in front of Katrina’s platform, happily stumbly drunk. “Let’s dance.”
She’s spinning what she calls her digestive set at the moment, a spacey atmospheric collection of chords with no beats that she likes to play for everyone after dinner. They all ate and drank too much and now, after the intense celebration Triquet led the whole crew in once Flavia had emerged from the trap door in the bunker, they are all depleted and content. Well, all are except Jay.
“Yeeeeah!” Katrina loves the unstoppable surfer dude. “That’s the spirit, mate! Ain’t no party if the party people say that the party won’t stop til dawn!”
“Right on!”
“I said it won’t stop bumping til dawn!”
“Right on!”
“Til dawn!”
“Right on!”
She hits him with a dropping bass note, then spins it into a techno remix of Liszt’s La Campanella, the piano’s chimes interlaced with real bells and a disco drum line beneath.
Jay stumbles away in the sand, satisfied with the beat. He can’t dance the way he wants with this bum leg but he can’t sit still. Not with Flavia back! There’s never been a celebration like this one.
Mandy stands and spins into the empty space. “Ooo pretty!” As a twelve year-old piano student she had once played this at a recital. It never occurred to her to dance to it. But now, high on Alonso’s wine and Jay’s weed, she feels like a breathless spinning wind-up Victorian doll, her beach skirt flaring as she turns. She throws herself into Jay’s arms and he catches her neatly despite his injuries. They laugh.
Mandy leaps away, closing her eyes and raising her arms. She feels so pretty, spinning neatly in the sand. She just wants her glow to shine in the gathering darkness, for anyone else who might need it. Love and beauty, in the end, are all that matter. Then her eyes open to even more beauty.
Maahjabeen dances before her, in a sinuous Tunisian style that almost makes Mandy do something very foolish. But she keeps her hands to herself and just watches the woman with open-mouthed fascination.
Maahjabeen has never been so happy in her life. When she had lost herself in the storm it was one thing to survive and return, but losing someone else… La. Now she knows how Mandy had felt when she had abandoned her on the beach. The crushing responsibility for another woman’s life. How had she been so cavalier about it before? Thank you, God, for Flavia’s safe return. Impulsively she grabs Mandy’s hands and hugs her tightly. “Chokran. Chokran, Mandy. Thank you for caring for me.”
Mandy has no idea what the lovely woman means but she does her best to hug her back in exactly the same way. Her eyes catch Esquibel’s watching from their platform. Her lover is laughing at her, fully-aware how bowled over Maahjabeen’s embrace makes Mandy. And she won’t let go. Mandy can only widen her eyes to communicate her shock. Esquibel laughs even harder.
Katrina will never waste an opportunity to make Maahjabeen happy. She finds the Amani Al Souwasi track and mixes it with a bit of hard drum and bass. Now it’s time to see how much she can make Maahjabeen move.
Amy cries out, clapping her hands. Maahjabeen whirls in response, performing a sharp traditional step she’s only done at weddings. They all cheer her. She likes this, how carefree it is, how there are no pushy men to fend off, how much she is appreciated. She has never felt more seen, but in a way she somehow loves. For once she doesn’t want to hide beneath her scarf or out on the open ocean. She wants them to see her for who she truly is. With every gesture she reveals herself and they cry out with joy. This is really happening. She’s blossoming like a flower. And Katrina keeps driving the music deeper, harder… Oh, now it is becoming physical and nearly sexual. But this is as far as Maahjabeen will go. She is still a proper Muslim girl.
With a laugh she spins away, falling against Pradeep. He yelps but holds her up. With an impulse she’s never felt before she cups his square chin and wetly kisses him before pulling away.
Pradeep quivers like he’s been struck by lightning. The camp laughs at him. Everyone laughs, including Maahjabeen. Oh no. Why did she do that? Why are they laughing? He looks from face to face, his anxiety rising…
But Jay barrels into him, roughing him up like a sport teammate. “Oh, no you don’t, Pradeep. You don’t get to be this gorgeous guy getting kisses like that from gorgeous chicks and respond like this.” He presses his joint into Pradeep’s hands.
Abashed, Pradeep glances at the others while he inhales from it. They’re all smiling at him, nodding in agreement. “Oh, this is an excruciating amount of attention, everyone, but I do appreciate your attempt to, well, help.”
“It was a very nice kiss.” Maahjabeen can’t believe she says this and she laughs, covering her mouth. “I recommend everyone kiss Pradeep. He is very kissable.”
Jay crows. “Yeah, baby! That’s the truth!” And he plants his grizzled lips against Pradeep’s clean-shaven mouth. But nothing stirs between them except merriment. With a laugh, Jay falls away. Next, Miriam grabs Pradeep by the wrist. She is very drunk, her pale face flushed red. “Don’t mind if I do.”
Pradeep is only able to yelp before she drops him backward like a Hollywood ingenue and kisses him with passionate force. It is an amazing kiss, something Pradeep has never experienced, a gushing tender passionate sweep of sensation and emotion that leaves him with fingers and toes tingling. He doesn’t even know if he’s attracted to Miriam but with a kiss like that it hardly matters.
She leads a dazzled Pradeep a couple steps to Alonso’s chair. With a happy laugh he grabs Pradeep’s face and kisses him tenderly like a father. Then it’s Triquet’s turn.
They make a delicious little show of it. “Oh… Pardon me… I was just freshening up.” From somewhere, Triquet has taken out a small make-up kit and is running glossy red lipstick around their lips in a pursed moue.
Katrina cat-calls into her microphone and Triquet sends her an exaggerated wink. Then, adorned in their floral housecoat and chiffon scarf, they stride forward, sultry, fixating Pradeep with a steamy gaze, then Triquet rushes him and kisses him soundly.
Pradeep falls back into the sand under the passionate assault. Triquet ravages him for a good ten seconds before breaking away.
Pradeep can do nothing but gasp and laugh. Now Triquet is tickling him, rolling around on top of him talking baby talk and giggling. Pradeep is laughing so hard he is crying.
Katrina, Esquibel, and Mandy dogpile them, everyone kissing and tickling each other. Flavia, who hasn’t been able to move from her camp chair since returning, lifts her wine glass and cheers.
Alonso looks strangely at Amy, slowly shaking his head with wonder. “What is it with kids these days? I think this is the most beautiful and innocent thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Wait wait wait.” Esquibel disentangles herself from the giggling mass. She stands, dusting the sand from her legs. “It isn’t over yet. I have something to show you first.”
Everyone falls apart, gasping for air. They needed that release. Pradeep is smashed at the bottom, his head whirling, quite sure he has never had so many people touching him at the same time. And the anxiety is still there, about the regrets they’ll all have in the morning, but he must admit that he didn’t actually die of shame and they didn’t recoil once they realized who he ‘really was’ or whatever Pradeep happened to be worried about at the time. They still care for him. It is just that the sensation is so overwhelming…
Esquibel has scampered over to Katrina’s laptop. Katrina sits up, Mandy’s head in her lap. “Yeeeeaaah!” she howls, urging Esquibel on. “Do it, doc!”
With a brilliant smile, Esquibel switches tracks. A woman’s voice calls out, a long sustained note, before descending in non-Western microtones to Maasai drums and a soundscape of driving energy.
Esquibel is the DJ now. And her joy forces them to their feet. Yes. She will show them what dancing is all about.
Mandy is the only one not moving. She only stares, stupefied at the good doctor. “I can’t believe how good you are at everything!” she finally shouts, dropping into a deep dancing stance and rocking her hips. “This is so good!”
Katrina spins free and points at Esquibel. “Respect. You are—”
“Oh, shut up,” Esquibel snarls at her, “and dance.”
Ξ
“Do the kayaks have names?” Amy asks between grunts as they muscle the boats over the sand.
“Names? No.” Maahjabeen makes a face. People are always trying to not only anthropomorphize their gear but infantilize it. “They are tools, Amy. Do you name tools?”
“Well, some of them.” They leave the blue kayak at the edge of the fallen redwood’s roots so they can haul the yellow one through the undergrowth. “I mean, boats and ships do traditionally have names. For like hundreds of years if not more.”
“Fine. So what would you name them?”
“Well, wouldn’t it be appropriate for them to have names that are special to you? Like from Tunisia? I’m sorry. Does Tunisia have its own language or do you just speak Arabic?”
“We don’t ‘just’ speak Arabic. It is our own version called Derja. There are many words and pronunciations specific to Tunisia, and each region has its own vocabulary. There is an old Tunisian Berber language too. Many of our names come from it.”
“Is yours an old name? What does Maahjabeen mean?”
“Yes. It means my face is like the moon.”
“Oh! That’s so nice. What kind of names do boats have? Let’s see. We could call this one… I mean, what’s yellow on the ocean? I know. Let’s call it Firewater. Her or him?”
“All boats are female. Firewater. Okay.”
“And the blue one…” They put Firewater down and return for it.
Maahjabeen puts her hand on the blue boats’ nose. “Aziz.”
“Oh! That’s pretty. What does it mean?”
“It is the name of the man who sold me the boats. He gave me a good deal or I would not have been able to afford them.”
“Well that’s as good a reason for a name as any! Better, I’d say!” Amy looks proudly at the two boats lying side-by-side. “Firewater and Aziz. There! That’s better.”
“If you like.” But Maahjabeen is pleased that Amy is showing her beloved boats so much attention. They are all friends now and that means very specific things to Maahjabeen. She will share her food and drink, tell them of her hopes and dreams, trust them on the open water. She has gone through storm and nightmare with these people and now their bond means something. “I like the names.”
Amy beams at her. “I am so glad you’re here, Maahjabeen. Now let’s see if your predictions are correct.”
“Your predictions. I just observed what you pointed out.” It is easy to be deferential to the older woman, now that her knowledge is proven. Maahjabeen is eager to see if today is finally the day. She slips into Aziz’s seat and seals her spray skirt. Amy pushes her off into the lagoon and then joins her in Firewater. The water today is fairly calm, brushed into tiny ridges by the breeze. White surf beyond the break rolls in with as much force as ever.
“After you.” Maahjabeen nods and points with the blade of her paddle at the mouth of the lagoon.
Amy laughs, demurring. “No no. I’m out of practice. Please. Show me the way, Maahjabeen.”
So she digs in, propelling Aziz forward through the mouth. She is on high alert, the surf crashing so close. But there are gaps between the waves and also the rocks they crash against. By timing her moves, she is able to climb the ebb tide up to their faces and then ride them at a diagonal to safety. It’s kind of like Tarzan swinging on vines. She never understood that story. How would he know there is another vine to grab until he has already let go of the first one and is flying helplessly through the air? Well, how will she know a wave won’t behave other than expected and smash her against these jagged black teeth?
And the answer is faith. Her faith always sees her through. Perhaps Tarzan had a similar faith. Perhaps he was a believer without even knowing it.
She finds a calm little pool protected behind a shoulder of rock and she waits here for Amy, who has been caught up on the crest of a wave, heading toward her. She is surfing it expertly, smile wide in a rictus grin of concentration, but she is cutting across its face at too sharp an angle. Maahjabeen is worried that she will get carried onto the rocks…
At the last moment, Amy paddles off the top and into the swell behind, shooting sideways toward Maahjabeen with the thunder of the surf ejecting her.
Amy pulls up with a squeal, fighting Firewater to a standstill beside Aziz. She is panting hard.
“That was… quite a bit of paddling.” Maahjabeen can’t tell if it had been intentional or not. If so, it was the flashiest maneuver she’d ever seen.
“Oh god. I think I wet myself.” Amy shivers. “So soaked I can’t even tell. What do Tunisians say, when you almost die like that?”
“Inshallah. By the grace of God.”
“Exactly. That was definitely my big inshallah moment.”
“Here is your stillwater passage. But watch out for these rip curls on the side, Amy. Are we strong enough to get over them to the quiet water before the waves get to us?”
“Oh, those are pretty huge.” From the shore, Amy hadn’t been able to see these spinning whirlpools the waves create as they rush toward the rocks. “But, yeah. I think we got it, as long as it isn’t a huge one.”
Maahjabeen angles the nose of Aziz toward her final destination, past the rollers in the open water. “Inshallah!” A blessedly small wave crests but gets undercut by the shelf beneath the water here. It dissipates before it even reaches the rocks. She paddles for all she’s worth, the stiff length of the boat reaching across the edges of the whirlpools to the smooth water on the far side. She doesn’t have long, she knows. It is time to paddle to freedom.
Amy watches her companion dig deep in the water and shoot forward with ease. Soon Aziz is halfway across the danger zone but a big wave is already rising in the coming set, maybe three waves out. Maahjabeen will have to hurry.
The next waves slow her, the current stopping her in her tracks and the climb over the mounting swell harder each time. She has her eye on the big wave coming in too. She needs to hit it just right to win past or it will carry her all the way back to the rocks.
She does so, with a grunt and a scream, shooting over the lip just as it begins to form. Maahjabeen made it! She’s out on the open ocean now! She’s safe!
Turning back, her wide grin of triumph is answered with a salute of Amy’s paddle. But she just sits there and her smile slowly fades. She is surprised how long Amy takes, letting four whole sets go by before she sees a wave she likes. To Maahjabeen’s eye it isn’t a particularly auspicious wave, but Amy seems to think otherwise.
And Amy is right. The rhythms of the ocean slacken and she’s given a flat peaceful ride out to where Maahjabeen waits.
“Whew!” Amy cackles. “That was lucky.”
Maahjabeen shakes her head at her, rueful. “I can’t wait until I am old enough to have such patience.”
And now they are on the shining sea together, the sun breaking through the clouds over the island behind them. It is a beautiful day and they are finally free.
Maahjabeen laughs and pulls ahead, in her element. She plies the currents like a dolphin, the smooth sides of Aziz cleaving a tiny wake on either side. She is surprised to see Amy keeping pace off her port side. The older woman has perfect technique, the blade spinning and dipping in her hands. Firewater bobs like a happy duck on the ocean.
They curve off to the left, to follow the cliffs to the east that none of them have yet studied. The seastacks are painted white with bird droppings and some unknown pinnipeds cluster on a pocket beach in the shadow of the cliffs.
Amy crows with delight upon seeing them and paddles closer. “Oh my GOD! Maahjabeen, look!”
But Maahjabeen is worried about the closeouts here. It takes all her strength not to get sucked in by the currents racing toward the rocks. “What? What is it?”
“Unless I’m mistaken these are Hawaiian monk seals! Found only on Hawai’i! And they’re endangered! My old friend Mark Van Dorn will lose his MIND when I tell him I’ve found a new population. This is huge!”
“Do you have one of those readers Alonso wants everyone to carry? The—the… what do you call it?”
“The Dyson readers?” Amy laughs. “I don’t think a seal would fit in the collection bay. No, I’ll need to get a blood sample at some point. And wow! Look at the seabirds! Those aren’t just any Uria lomvia. They’re too dark! They must be lomvia arra, the North Pacific variant of the thick-billed murre. This is wild. Nowhere else on earth do we see these two species, one from Hawai’i and one from the Arctic, intermix like this. I wonder if there’s any actual interaction? Pradeep will have a field day here! Literally!”
“My estimate is that this is a rising tide for the next four hours, Amy. We shouldn’t spend too much time…”
“Yes, it’s true. If we want to see more of the cliffs we should move on before our window closes. But just think of how much research is to be done here! Eight weeks is—!”
“Well, more like five and a half weeks now. That is why it was so hard to lose those first couple weeks.”
“Exactly. We have to come out here every day now!”
They paddle on, the shadow of the island on their left side stretching across the water, chilling them. Amy picks up her pace, keeping warm with the effort. How nice it had felt to have the sun on her skin, if only for a brief moment. Now it’s time to go to work. Let’s see if her old muscles will put up with the exercise. It’s been… three months? four? Since she’d been in a boat? And that was just goofing around with friends in Elkhorn Slough.
But there’d been a time, in the not too distant past, when she was such a monster on the water that she could literally paddle all day. She had once soloed the entire Humboldt coast in six nights for crying out loud! She can do this. But her shoulders and core are already starting to build up that lactic acid…
“Look!” Maahjabeen points her paddle at a fold in the cliffs where the water disappears within. “I think that is the sea cave!”
“Oh, wow. Should we go in?”
“I have been wanting to for days now. Weeks.” Maahjabeen shoots forward, eager to see it. The channel cuts into the black and gray cliffs at an angle, which makes its mouth nearly impossible to spot. But she isn’t looking at the landmass, she’s following the water, and there’s a current sucking in and billowing out there, she is sure of it.
She reaches the channel atop a modest wave, that allows her to coast off its lip behind as it crashes against the walls and fills the channel with foam. Maahjabeen backpaddles slowly behind, waiting for Amy to join her on the next wave. The channel is much wider than she thought, perhaps twenty meters across. But the stone of the cliffs has been sheared away ahead. This has been artificially expanded, probably to accommodate larger boats.
Amy coasts in behind her and they both have to fight over the foam of the wave to maintain position in the center of the channel. Then they scoot forward, amazed looks on their faces. At first, the passage is open to the sky, a deep cleft in the rock. But then it closes far over their heads and the way forward grows dim.
Sea stars populate the wet walls. A fringe of mollusks and seaweed marks the tideline. It is enchanting, the sharp tang of sea creatures and the vegetal smell of the seaweed beneath barely masking the stench of something rotten. The channel opens into the cavern, but they don’t even realize it at first because the bare stone columns separating the water into multiple channels are so broad. This is where the surf is broken into harmless ripples, leading to the calmer ebb and flow issuing from the cave.
They glide into the darkness. A natural shelf above the tideline holds the carcass of a sea lion, its tail partially torn off. Amy holds her breath and paddles closer, fascinated to see teeth marks on the flesh of the poor creature. She rejoins Maahjabeen and finally releases her breath with a gasp. “Well! Pradeep will absolutely adore that fellow! Shark bite. Or orca…”
“Orca? Really?” Maahjabeen has kept her eyes peeled today but she has yet to see them. She considers this a good omen, that they are silently watching over her.
“Good grief,” Amy shakes her head, “the American military is… so weird!” She peers into a chamber they carved into the rock, its irregular floor flooded with concrete that still supports rusting iron struts. “What were they doing in here?”
“Who knows. Those people are crazy. They bomb cities for no reason. They bury a sub in the beach. It makes no sense.”
Maahjabeen feels the need to explore every corner of the sea cave. She is finally scratching the itch she first got when they lost Flavia last week and they discovered it from the other side. And who knows when she’ll find the time to come back?
The jetty is fairly dangerous, having partially collapsed into the black water. She steers clear of it. The open water on the far side of it receives the flow of the freshwater fall from above. So strange that it should flow here in an unbroken roar, unseen and unknown, for so long. From water collected in the island’s interior, then down the cliffs of that fantastic waterfall and along the creek… why, this is the water they drink at camp. Then underground and falling in a wide shelf into this cave. For ages. A hidden wonderland.
As with so many of her encounters with nature, the world of mankind falls away as a laughably thin construct and she is left with eternity. The never-seen face of Allah. Peace.
Ξ
Mandy holds Alonso’s swollen feet in her hands. They buzz with his agony. Really no point in doing any actual work on them yet. They are still too raw. So she just holds them, keeping herself clear so she doesn’t accumulate his pain, breathing through the soles of her feet into the earth.
His breaths are ragged. He lies back on his cot with his sleeping bag over him, his forearm across his eyes. There is so much trauma here Mandy isn’t sure she can encompass it. He needs some way to get rid of it, a path for it to leave his body. Maybe putting it into words will help. “Can you tell me about it?” she asks.
“No.” He doesn’t move. But his leg twitches.
Mandy is relieved despite herself. The last thing she needs is to hear a torture victim recount the details. She can only be so clear for so long before darkness like that would find its way in. That’s a lot of darkness.
“How do your feet like feel?” Maybe this is safer territory. “Can we just, you know, like write an abstract here? How would you introduce the subject of your feet in a paper?”
“Like… like may I present some very roughly ground hamburger. Hamburger that is always buzzing in agony. Sometimes spikes of nerve pain. Then there is the bone ache. So deep and relentless. It is… I cannot think. I am only the pain.”
“Are my hands okay?”
“Your hands are wonderful.”
“Thanks. I never liked my hands. I was always dropping things growing up and my mom would say my hands were all thumbs and I’ve never been able to get that image out of my head.”
Alonso gives her a polite laugh. He is just… hovering here in his cot, not giving her an opening. He is evidently not ready for this. She shifts her hands to cup his ankles. “How’s this?”
But he can’t answer her through his sudden tears. His hand opens then clenches in a fist. Ah, how he used to run! He was always so fast, a sprinter on his athletic club track team and a wing when they played fútbol. And he could hike for days. Climb mountains… Now it was gone, all gone forever and he couldn’t let go of the grief. Was he really going to spend the remainder of his days just sitting or lying down watching his body turn to sludge? He couldn’t bear the thought of it. And the pity of this… this waif here at his feet. Also unbearable. She is so light and spritely. Yet even being this close to the ruin he’d become has darkened her and brought her down. Intolerable.
He struggles to sit up. “Fine. I am fine. And I’m sure there is other work that you need to be doing at the moment, Miss Hsu.”
But she doesn’t let go. She’s too connected, and when a stab of pain shoots through him it lurches through her gut and she gasps. “No no. Nothing better to do, Doc. Just starting here, step by step. We need to be patient.”
“But it is ridiculous. I mean, there is no scientific basis in what you are doing. You know that, right?”
“There’s no basis in stretching tendons and aligning scar tissue?”
“Well, of course there is. But that isn’t what you are doing. You are just holding my abominable feet and taking deep breaths. That isn’t anything. That’s just voodoo nonsense…”
“Then why is it a problem? You said my hands feel wonderful.”
“They did. And you are very nice to do this, Mandy, but…”
“But it’s hard for me to make contact like this without you having to take a deep breath yourself, isn’t it? And you don’t want to take a deep breath.”
He falls back, staggered a bit by the insight. “Is that what it is?”
“Well, I think so. At least at this stage. Since I’ve been in here, you haven’t taken a single deep breath. You haven’t even taken a normal breath. It’s like you’re scared of me.”
“Well, I am.” He laughs a bit more heartily, and this releases his diaphragm a bit. He hadn’t even realized how much he’d been holding it. Now he sighs, his breath hovering in his throat. “And you’re right. I don’t know what will happen if I take a deep breath. I don’t know… why it is so hard…”
“No way. I’d be so scared after what you went through. But it’s okay. You realize it can’t hurt you any more, right? It’s just the past and the past is over. It’s done. And all that is left is to step forward. Like stepping off a cliff and helplessly falling…”
“Afraid of how much it will hurt when I land. Yes. That is why, certainly. Can’t we do this when I am unconscious or something, though? I wish they could just shut off all the pain receptors in my body. I never need to feel pain ever again. It has been too much.”
“You have absolutely been through too much pain. But come on, Alonso. A deal: Six deep breaths and I’ll leave you alone. Just six.”
“Six is a lot. You don’t know what you’re asking of me.” He holds up a hand to clarify. “I do like your company, Miss Hsu. I just want you to stop touching me.”
They both laugh now and his breath eases a little more.
“There you go. I felt the muscles of your legs relax a bit.”
“So what? What does that get me? Voodoo, I say.”
“Come on. It can’t be controversial that increased bloodflow to a wound site will bring more healing factors. But we like to constrict them, shut them off from the things that help them—”
“I reject the proposition that some unmeasurable spiritual healing energy is flying through your hands…”
“I didn’t say there were! I’m saying things like white blood cells, uh, growth factors, all the things your blood carries literally can’t get to the site because you’re tensing it. It needs to be released so the juices can get in there. Right? This is like physical therapy 101. That can’t be controversial, can it?”
“Well, the controversial part is that releasing these muscles leads to uncontrollable pain. And you don’t have anything for the pain. That’s the thing. It will be like putting my legs in a fire and I can’t take them back out.”
“But your body will heal, if you let it. Until about six months have passed there’s a window with the scar tissue. You’re still in that window. But when it closes and your feet are just a mass of scars? I don’t think you’ll even be able to walk. It’s kind of a now or never scenario, Doc.”
“Okay! Fine! So what do you want me to do?” Panic grips him. She isn’t giving him a way out. Where is Miriam? She knows how to handle him when he’s this grumpy. This… kid… simply doesn’t know what she’s doing.
“Just six breaths. Deep. From your belly. That’s all I’m asking for today. Don’t think about like flexing your legs or anything else. Just keep your mind empty and give me six good deep breaths. Then I’ll leave you alone.”
“Wait. There is Doctor Daine. Doctor! Do you have a moment?”
Esquibel stops at the edge of the big platform and peers through the mesh into the tent. “Yes, Doctor Alonso?”
“There is an important thing about nerve pain, yes? Where if you allow too much to be felt, especially if it is chronic, it like burns a permanent circuit into that nerve, yes? And that is when it becomes neuropathy. I have been reading. That is my primary fear now. That I will end up with permanent nerve damage if I let the pain get too intense. I can’t allow it to burn those circuits. But your… protege here, she wants me to just suffer through it.”
“Yes, Doctor. Her approach is extremely painful. In the short-term. It is true.”
“But I don’t want the permanence of the pain. We need to deaden my nerves. I cannot handle any more pain. Maybe you could give me something for it so I can go through this process without making things worse.”
Esquibel looks at Mandy, who obviously disapproves of this. But Esquibel has been a doctor now for a good long time. She knows what to do. “Yes, Alonso. I do have something. A calcium-channel blocker. Quite powerful. It will probably put you to sleep.”
“Sounds perfect. Can I have four?”
“Oh, one should definitely be enough. But I’ll give you two just to be sure. Will a painkiller interfere with your treatment, Mandy?”
“Well, kind of, yeah. His responses will be off.”
“Not with this one. It is a new experimental compound. Quite specific. Showing wonderful results. Here. I will get it. And no side effects!” Esquibel calls out over her shoulder as she hurries to the bunker. A moment later she is back with her medical kit. She removes a bottle and hands a pair of clear gel pills to Alonso.
He frowns at it. “What is it called?”
“It is hormone-based. Very safe. Let’s see.” She reads the bottle. “Ehh, cholecalciferol. Here. Drink with water so it doesn’t upset your stomach.”
Alonso nods, eagerly tosses the pills back, and sips them down.
Mandy grins at him, encouraging. “Six breaths.”
“Will you wait, please? You are too eager to hurt me. How long, Doctor? When will I feel the effects?”
Esquibel holds his wrist pulse and consults a watch. She nods, satisfied. “It is very fast-acting. Through your saliva glands. You should start to feel sleepy now. And the pain should be subsiding.”
“Mm. Perhaps. But I am definitely feeling the tiredness. Okay.” Alonso settles back in his bag, his lids drooping. “Okay, fine. Let the torture begin once more. Deep breath number one.” He takes a shuddering breath that only fills the upper lobes of his lungs.
Mandy shares an agonized look with Esquibel. “Oh my god I’m like the opposite of a torturer.”
“Shh. He knows.” Esquibel pats Mandy’s shoulder.
Alonso looks at them with dull resentment, letting the drug’s effects claim him. “And two.”
“How is the pain?” Esquibel cups his jaw.
“You are right. Much better. Three.” This is a real deep breath, and his legs roll away from each other, finally releasing. “See, Miss Hsu. This is all I wanted, was for you to do your work without…” But he is fading fast. He waves a vague hand and settles. “And four.” But it is the last deep breath he takes before a rattling snore indicates that he’s asleep.
Mandy holds the swollen, angry feet, throbbing out of sync. She feels the fibers unwind under her fingers and slacken. Now she can do some gentle work, figuring out the extent of the damage and planning a way forward. They are somewhat pliable now. His ankles are frozen. Probably shattered. And his metatarsal bones are sheathed in traumatized fascia. But the change is so dramatic she can’t believe it. Mandy exchanges a surprised look with Esquibel. “That was so fast! What is that miracle drug? I need it for all my patients. Choleca… what was it?”
“Cholecalciferol. No, it was just a couple pills of Vitamin D3. Just a placebo.” Esquibel places a gentle hand across Alonso’s brow, untroubled for the first time. “But I didn’t realize it would work quite so well.”
Chapter 17 – It Means Betrayal
April 22, 2024
Thanks for joining us on 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:
17 – It Means Betrayal
Triquet wants a second mug of tea but they’re damned if they’ll let Amy get it for them. So it takes a bit of effort to escape her eagle eye. With a nod to be excused from the meeting, Triquet backs themself away from the long tables before heading to the trenches, the mug carefully hidden in a crook of their arm. Last night’s brief storm littered the sand with branches and clusters of moss, stippling the sand with the imprint of rain. After returning from the trenches they circle around camp into the bunker and to the kettle with hot water. On their return, Amy watches with narrowed eyes.
“Oh.” Triquet plays dumb. “Anyone else need anything? Tea?”
“I’ll take some.” Mandy holds up her mug. With a wink to Amy, Triquet turns right back around and fetches it. “Coming right up! Don’t forget to tip your servers!”
Once they all settle, there is a lull in the discussion that can be neatly filled with Triquet’s concerns. “I’d like to talk more about the Lisicans.” Alonso gives an encouraging nod. “As the only one here with any anthropological training at all, I guess it’s my role to remind people that we should be in as little contact with the native population as possible.”
“Yes,” Miriam leans forward in her camp chair, her half-eaten dinner of lentils and rice perched precariously on her knee, “let’s design an actual policy here, people. If we don’t, these poor blighters won’t know what hit them when the modern world beats down their door. They have no idea what meeting us means. And this whole island will be open for business come summer? Shit idea, that. We know what it always means, don’t we? Disease, loss of culture, loss of traditions…”
Mandy nods, “Loss of language, loss of identity…”
Esquibel adds, “Alcohol and drug dependency will skyrocket, as will suicides. All kinds of mental issues with displaced populations. We have it very bad in Kenya. I have seen so many cases.”
Triquet settles back. “Well good. I was afraid I was going to have to dissuade some pollyanna here who thinks it’s their mission all of a sudden to muck up the Lisicans’ lives and save them.”
“No, not save them…” Amy shrugs, thinking on how charming and suddenly intimate her interactions with the little people have been. “But I don’t see any harm in safe interactions for the purpose of further study. These have to be important moments, right? First contact before we pollute their minds? So I’ve been recording as much of it as I can. I started transcribing the words I can recognize into a spreadsheet. Very few meanings attached to any of them yet. Except for good morning or hello, which is—!”
They all repeat after her in lifeless rote, “Bontiik!” and chuck each other gently under the chin. She’s already taught them all.
“Oh.” Amy’s enthusiasm drops. “Yeah. Well, that’s all I got so far. I’m actually a terrible linguist. Can anyone else…?”
“That sounds like something Katrina might do.” Alonso nods to her at the end of the table, playing a game on her phone. “Eh?”
Feeling their eyes on her, Katrina looks up. “Oh no! What did I miss? Did someone say something sexy? Uh… That’s not the only thing I’d like to lick, mate.”
They all laugh. Mandy says, “No, you silly. Do you have any background in languages or linguistics?”
“Well…” Katrina sits up. “I’m not supposed to talk about it but I did contract with the Singaporean Air Defense when I was really young. And they thought they could use some of the algorithms I’d written to find like who might be a possible threat in the Malay border population using keywords and statistical modeling.”
“Wait. When you were really young?” This is too much for Jay.
“Yeh. Fifteen.” The table erupts in disbelief but Katrina holds up a hand. “They didn’t know I was fifteen. Come on. I forged the security documents. To them I was just another online contractor. But it was too icky. I didn’t like the way they were using my tools to suppress minorities so I started feeding them false data to make them think there were spies in their own ministries. It was a blast.”
“I’m not sure that was an answer,” Alonso rumbles, “but it was a hell of a story. So do you think you might be the best of us to study Lisican speech?”
Katrina shrugs. “I do speak five languages.”
She looks around the table. Alonso says four. Amy and Miriam say two. Esquibel and Maahjabeen say three. Pradeep says three. Triquet adds, “Just Russian and Spanish really. But I don’t know if Klingon counts.” Jay offers, “Donde esta el taco?”
Katrina rolls her eyes. “Fucking Americans, although Aussies are just as bad. Right. So if that’s the metric then I guess it’s me. Okay. When it’s time to rock a funky joint, I’m on point.”
Alonso looks at Jay for help. “Is that a yes?”
“Come on, dude. House of Pain was from the nineties. That was your music. Definitely a reference you should get.”
“My music? The nineties for me was Andrea Bocelli.”
“Am I the only one,” Mandy suddenly stands, frowning, “who thinks we shouldn’t be talking to the Lisicans at all? Like maybe even boarding up the tunnels and waiting for real professionals? Like, aren’t there some primitive tribes who refuse contact with the modern world? And I think they’re better off.”
“Well, we could,” Amy agrees, “if they didn’t have Flavia. That cow is very much already out of the barn. They’re getting all kinds of contact now whether we like it or not and whatever policy or plans we may have had are just…” She shrugs. “Look. I think we should engage as much as needed to gain trust so that we can get Flavia back. Then we can re-visit this subject afterwards. But she needs to be rescued. We can’t forget what’s important here.”
“We absolutely need her return.” Miriam shakes her head in frustration. “But we just can’t ever seem to get past the point in the conversation where they acknowledge they’ve seen her, inform us that she’s gone further inland, but then that’s it! They have nothing more to say. Nobody can lead us there. They can’t even tell us where she is exactly. It’s as if they literally stop understanding what we ask, no matter how we act it out.”
“And we have to remember too,” Triquet is relieved that nobody expects them to take on this anthropological burden. They’re already busy enough with their artifacts. “This isn’t first contact. They showed you an old photo of Maureen Dowerd. Remember Lieutenant DeVry and his fraternizing? I mean it’s been sixty years but I wonder where they got all those blond curls?”
Maahjabeen lifts her hands in helpless curiosity. “And where did they even come from in the first place? Hawai’i? On open boats? Impossible. The currents all lead away from this place. That’s what they told Alonso. So how did anyone ever find this place by boat?”
“You know what I find even more interesting?” Pradeep looks around the table. “Where did the fox come from? And when? Silver foxes are pretty rare on the West Coast.”
“Lisica.” Katrina stands. “Fox Island. I guess we can’t just say the foxes were always here. But nothing was always here. Not even the trees. So, we need answers, do we? Righty-ho. Let’s see if the natives recognize any combination of French, Russian, and Malay. But first… has anyone found a way to get through the tunnels to them without crawling through mud?”
Jay shakes his head no. “Not yet. But it’s a nice mud. Like good for your pores.”
“Yeh, I’ll just pop out on the other side with a mud facial and cucumber slices on my eyes. They’ll think I’m some kind of salad monster.” Katrina giggles. “Well, no time like the present. Come on, Amy. You can introduce me to all your new friends.”
Ξ
“Devonian, I’m pretty sure.” Miriam stares at the cliff face. “But there’s only one way to prove it, ladies.” She hands one canvas bag to Esquibel and another to Maahjabeen. “Stromatoporoid fossils. Let’s see if we can find any. Tiny sea creatures that went extinct after the Hangenberg Event.”
Esquibel only stares at her. “I know nothing about whatever it is you’re talking about. I’m very sorry.”
“Geology, right?” Maahjabeen guesses. “I think I’ve heard of the Devonian. But what is a Hangenberg Event?”
“The Hangenberg Event.” Miriam pushes through the ferns and brush to find that low tunnel she and Amy and Triquet had exited. Esquibel and Maahjabeen haven’t crawled through the brush yet and they hang back.
Esquibel peers suspiciously into the tunnel mouth. “Ehh. Can you guarantee there are no venomous snakes or spiders in there, Doctor Truitt?”
Miriam laughs. “I can guarantee nothing. I only know rocks. But so far you haven’t had to treat any bites, have you?”
“True. But you did not grow up nor practice medicine in East Africa, where there are a million things trying to kill you. It is still very difficult for me to accept that I can safely be outside here, just crashing about in the bushes.”
“Well, I appreciate that you were both able to come. We should all see the tunnels and so far this is the easiest way to get to them. Now, since you asked, the Hangenberg Event was the second largest mass extinction event of the age, second only to the Late Devonian Mass Extinction, which occurred only thirteen million years before. Watch this branch here. It has thorns.”
“How long ago was this?” Maahjabeen follows Esquibel, her shoulders and back still aching but doing much better. Coming along seemed like a good idea and nothing has changed that so far. She needs to do the physical work and she admires Miriam.
“Oh, this was all Panthalassa back then, a gigantic sea that covered nearly the entire Northern hemisphere. But that doesn’t help answer our geologic mysteries, does it? Almost all of the sea floor that existed back then has subducted under newer, more modern tectonic plates. Ah, right. When? Well, the Devonian spanned about 419 to 359 million years ago.”
“Aha.” The numbers mean nothing to Esquibel. She wears two layers of nitrile gloves and the first have already been torn on a hidden leaf. “When my grandma was young.”
“Oh, I dream of popping into a time machine!” Miriam hurries forward, lost in her vision. “To see the planet when it was all lava or all water! To see its bones first developing! It would be like witnessing its birth. All of our births. And the Devonian has nothing on the Ordovician. Absolutely my favorite. Aha. There’s the exit up ahead. I can see the light through the branches. Uh, where is everyone?” Miriam realizes she hurried ahead. She turns back. “Come on, you slugs! I’m twice your age, you know!”
Esquibel appears, replying with a brave smile and nod. She holds up one hand, now that its glove is shredded and useless. But her slow pace is holding up both her and Maahjabeen behind her. She finds a short fat stick she can use as a staff to ward away the twigs. Soon, they’ve re-joined Miriam. She leads them into the light.
“Here. If I remember correctly, we’ll have access to an actual living weathered stone cliff face.”
“But you didn’t finish your story.” Maahjabeen is frustrated to have fallen behind. She pulls herself up beside Miriam. “How did the Hangenberg Event kill everything?”
“Honestly, we don’t know. There’s several theories. Glacial melt could have led to climate change and eutrophic dead zones. Algae blooms. One of the more interesting theories is that fossils dated to the event show chromosomal and genetic damage, meaning there may have been a massive radiation spike. Gamma rays from a nearby supernova or something. Just wiped out nearly all of the life on Earth in a flash. But those studies remain inconclusive.”
She stands, where the tunnel opens up to a tiny trail around the outcrop, to disappear in the folds of vegetation on the far side. “Yes, here!” Miriam croons, reaching up, to brush the dirt clinging to the cliff face. “Here we can dig to it!”
But the bedrock is less accessible than she hoped. Damn organics covering everything on this bloody island! She needs to work in a desert again after this and Japan. She was fighting with plants and soils and clays everywhere she turned there too. Maddening. With a sigh she drops to the ground to see if any loose stones have fallen. Yes. Here’s a shoebox-sized oblong covered in moss. She scrapes the green rind off it. Then she splashes the bare stone with water and rubs it clean. “Yes, a dolomite or I’m a baboon. Look at this.”
Maahjabeen kneels beside Miriam. Esquibel is still too happy to be standing to get right back down on her knees. “What is it?”
“A type of limestone. It’s utterly preposterous to find it out here in the middle of the North Pacific like this but nothing about this island makes sense from a geologic standpoint so who’s to say? I only know dolomite when I see it and, once I give it a proper microcrystal assay under some better lights I can tell you even more than that. You see the green flecks? Feldspar. So this is a metamorphic suspension, igneous-based. But if we can find any of those micro-fossils…” Miriam finds a rock that fits in the palm of her hand. She turns it over and scrapes away the clay with a pick. “And this one is pure sandstone. Well here’s some fossils. But they aren’t ancient enough to tell the secret of the island.” Miriam holds out the rock to Esquibel, who looks at both sides.
“I can confirm it is a rock.”
“Please put it in your sack for me. I’m hoping we can fill up all three before we get back.”
“Just any rock?” Maahjabeen takes it from Esquibel to study the fossils. She frowns and puts the rock in her sack.
“Any rock. I’ve really only found other sandstone examples near, you guessed it, the sand. And I’ve been dying to get some actual samples from the cliff. Here. I think if I brace myself on the far wall I can chimney up into position.”
“Don’t!” Esquibel snares the older woman’s sleeve. “That is not a solid surface, Miriam.”
“You’re right. Fine. I’ll scrape the face clean first.”
Maahjabeen stares at Esquibel, trying to silently communicate how quickly she wants this project to end. But Esquibel doesn’t get the message. “It is true. I am no fun at parties.”
Maahjabeen shakes her head in bemused frustration at Esquibel. “You are so serious all the time. Except when you are with Mandy. If I ever invite you to a party I must make sure she comes too.”
Esquibel can’t tell if that’s an insult. She’s pretty sure it isn’t a compliment. It seems like a bit of a betrayal, having Maahjabeen of all people questioning her reserve. “It’s not like I don’t know how to have fun. It’s just this is a professional environment and I am an active-duty Lieutenant Commander, you know.”
“Well, I was a crossing guard for my primary school but I can still laugh every once in a while.” Maahjabeen says it in a teasing voice but she feels sorry for Esquibel, trapped all day every day in her clean room with no reason to leave. It must be hard to be a doctor. All you see are the results of worst-case scenarios. You never see the million successes, only the few bloody failures. It must frighten you and tilt your perception of every reality.
But Miriam and Esquibel share a surprised glance. Maahjabeen is lecturing anyone on social graces? Hilarious. Miriam can only hope it means the rigid Tunisian woman is finally starting to relax and let them in.
Esquibel puts a hand on Maahjabeen’s shoulder and gives her a mocking acknowledgement. “Thank you for your service.”
“Oh, look!” Miriam gasps, tearing aside a stand of ferns. “Glories and treasures! A whole pile of aggregates and silicates! Dear lord, will wonders never cease?”
Ξ
Under Miriam’s direction, Maahjabeen deposits her full canvas sack beneath the long tables at camp and finally retreats to her tiny cell in the bunker for some privacy. The ladies treated her well and she feels they are all proper friends now, but still. Maahjabeen is just not a people person. She is an ocean person.
So then what is she doing sitting in this concrete box, listening to Mandy tap tap tap on her keyboard? Maahjabeen stands. This isn’t where she belongs. She pulls on her sandals that she has just taken off and grabs her hat and sunglasses. It is now 1300 hours. She has not yet studied Amy’s wave phenomenon at this hour. So far it has only formed long enough for her to transit at low tides below 1.2. And it should be low tide again in another ninety minutes.
She strides through camp with purpose, sparing only a thought of pity for Alonso trapped in his camp chair and a kind of general contempt for everyone else who could be out on the water with her, but instead choose to waste their lives on the small and mean demands of land. The continents are nothing, just slivers of bare rock, basically glorified reefs with bits of life crawling atop. The rest is endless ocean. Panthalassa. Maahjabeen loves that new word. Imagine how it used to be! Sea monsters and volcanoes bubbling up from below. And just endless quiet, endless open skies and rocking liquid silence. She could spend a hundred million years in her boat and never see another soul. Oh, Lord. Why did you put me in this place and time? Chasing vanishing corners of isolation in a crowded world. I am tired of all the people.
With restless exuberance she climbs over the fallen redwood for the first time. Only when she stands atop it can she see the lagoon, and from a higher vantage than she’s used to having. The wave sets really are much clearer from up here. There’s an underwater snag or prominence that tugs on the break to the left. That’s where Amy’s barrier seastack is and its secret path out.
But Maahjabeen remains unconvinced. It cannot be so easy to escape this lagoon. If it had been so easy then why did it take so long to find? She knows that is logically not how such things work but her fatalist view of the world inspires a relentless cynical internal monologue.
At least that’s what I tell myself. La. There is smoke coming from the lean-to Pradeep made for her. Ah! That drug addict! She marches down the length of the trunk to the lean-to and climbs down beside it. “Yala!” She leans in. “This is not your place, Jay. Why do you always think you can just—?” But Jay is not alone.
Pradeep currently has a joint to his lips. He squawks in surprise and pulls it away, shoving it into the sand.
Jay calls out in dismay, “Aw, man… Don’t waste it.”
Maahjabeen is so surprised to see Pradeep in this context that she can only shake her head and drop her gaze. “I mean… Of course you are welcome to… I mean, you built the structure, Pradeep.”
“No. You’re right. I am sorry. I did not think how this would look to you. I only thought of relaxing and watching the waves.”
Until he says it aloud he doesn’t realize how much he desires Maahjabeen’s approval. The anxiety that grips him now is of the claustrophobic social variety, where his thoughtless mistake will humiliate him in front of everyone. “I’ll go.”
But she pushes him back in, growing more irritated. “No no. What kind of hostess would I be if I let you leave like that? Sit down. And smoke your drugs if you must. It is not like the smoke will stay. Not with this crosswind.” The social obligations allow her an easy way out. She’ll just get them situated and then watch the waves from the trunk above. Somewhere upwind.
“Not really sure I can any more.” Pradeep sits again, sheepish and awkward. “I was just trying to relax and now I’m not—”
Maahjabeen throws her hands up. “Oh, please. I do not really care. It’s not like the smoke makes you murderous or lecherous or anything. It just makes you stupid. And I don’t understand why anyone would want to be stupid. So here.” She kneels in the cold sand and excavates the joint, handing it to Jay.
He makes anxious maternal noises as he tries to dry the joint out with the lighter, held at a distance. Finally satisfied, he lights it and puffs it back to life. “Ahh. That’s my baby. Close call.”
Maahjabeen sits back on her heels. “Maybe you can explain it to me. Because I do not understand. Islam requires us to keep our bodies and minds clean. I cannot comprehend why you would ever want to make it dirty.”
“Well, the thing is…” Jay takes another puff and cocks his head at a philosophical angle.
Maahjabeen plucks the joint from his fingers and hands it to Pradeep. “No. I want to hear from Pradeep. I respect his opinion.”
“Well, Jesus. Okay, then.” Jay falls back with an explosive laugh. “Guess I know where I stand.”
Pradeep gingerly takes a hit. He needed this. But he doesn’t think it will help his case with Maahjabeen if she hears that. He knows how she feels. He spent the first year working with Jay in solid disapproval of his stoner ways. But certain cannabis strains relieve Pradeep’s anxiety as well as any pharmaceutical. He shrugs. “I just see it as part of the continuum of life. We are merely animals who have evolved over millions of years, and we have always interacted with our environment, other animals and…” he holds up the burning joint, “…plants. We eat them, we smoke them, we rub them on our bodies and shove them up our bums. And it’s all for the effects. It’s the same as eating a papaya for the digestive enzymes. There’s nothing inherently wrong in the practice.”
“The Prophet said every intoxicant is unlawful.”
“But is that like how all your people feel?” Jay just can’t keep his mouth shut. “Because I once knew this Iranian dude in San Jose. Super chill. He said weed was basically fine in his culture because they didn’t think of it as a drug, just as like a relaxant and appetite stimulant. He said the Middle East basically invented herb.”
“It is true.” Pradeep takes another puff. “Sri Lanka can claim to have cultivated the first cannabis, as the Afghans also do with their Kush. It may have arisen in multiple places. Why did the Prophet hate intoxicants?”
“The people of the city had fallen into vice and could no longer hear the words of Allah. You do not need this. That is what he was trying to tell us. You do not need to burn a plant to find peace. Just listen to the word of God and you will…” Maahjabeen stops, interrupted by an unsettling silence.
Pradeep leans in. “What is it?”
“Hush.” Maahjabeen ducks under the door and steps outside. Why is it so quiet? The wind has died and the gray clouds are suspended above like curtains. The waves. The waves stopped. For one moment she watches in excited discovery as the water pulls back from the mouth of the lagoon, briefly revealing a shallow shelf of stone.
Then she realizes what that means.
“Up. Go. Run.” Her voice is hoarse. The words can’t come out of her mouth fast enough. “Yala. Up! Tsunami!”
That magic word gets the boys tumbling out the door and onto the sand. Maahjabeen is already scrambling up the side of the trunk as the water rushes in, overtopping the barrier rocks on the far side of the lagoon and filling it in an instant. It floods the beach. The water rises and rises…
From atop the trunk, the three of them cling to each other. With a fatalist dread they watch the sea green water rush toward them. It moves faster than they can run. But it is already slowing. By the time the swirling water reaches the trunk it is hardly a meter high. It foams at their feet for a long angry moment before pulling away, taking one of the planks of Maahjabeen’s shelter with it.
Then it is gone.
Maahjabeen shakes herself like a cat. That was close. The utterly terrifying power of the ocean and her own insignificance chop at her roots with stunning force. She’s as weak as this fallen tree.
Jay hops back down, laughing at their brush with death. “That was boss. Look, Prad. It took all the sand from under the trunk.”
“Ah! The poor shelter.” Pradeep scrambles back down to see if he can save it. Now that the sand floor has been pulled away, the twine-secured planks sag sadly against the trunk.
“But check out beneath. So much more is exposed. And see. There’s a big burl down here. This old boy may have been dealing with more infections than we knew.”
The thought that a viral infection might have felled this giant instead of a lightning bolt pleases Pradeep. He leaves the shelter aside. Not much he can do here without more twine. The tsunami, if that’s what it was, still rattles him. He doesn’t know how Jay can be so nonchalant. They were nearly swept away. He looks up at Maahjabeen with a frown. “Was that a true tsunami?”
“I am not sure yet. But sometimes there can be more than one. You should both stay up here with me until the sea settles.”
The wave sets have been obliterated by the tsunami and the green sea is a roiling, rocking mess webbed with foam. Why, she could paddle through that cauldron no problem to reach the open sea. Everything cancels everything else out. But for how long? She laughs like a madwoman, thinking how dangerous it would be.
Pradeep and Jay clamber back up onto the log beside her. They all watch the sea in silence as it slowly reorders itself.
From out of seemingly nowhere, Jay pulls out the still-lit joint and sucks on it, then passes it to Pradeep.
Maahjabeen has trouble categorizing what she just witnessed. “So there are rogue waves and there are tsunamis and they both have very different causes…”
But she isn’t teaching Pradeep and Jay anything they don’t already know. “Yeah, that was either a distant earthquake in the sea bed or, well…” Jay shrugs, “nobody’s really quite sure what causes rogue waves yet, do they?”
“The nonlinear Schrödinger equation!” Maahjabeen and Pradeep recite at the same time. Then they laugh. She continues. “Ah, you know about that? It is one of my favorite theories.”
“Fascinating bit of nonlinear modeling,” Pradeep agrees. “One wave might be able to steal the energy not only of the waves that follow, building itself up, but even from the one before it too.”
“Wait. How?” Jay can’t fathom how a wave racing forward could somehow pull energy from the wave in front of it. That’s why it was in front, wasn’t it? Because the one behind couldn’t reach it. The whole idea contradicts every surfer instinct he possesses.
“Basically little feedback loops can build solitons—” Pradeep begins before Maahjabeen excitedly takes over.
“Hyperbolic secant envelope solitons! They’re self-reinforcing wave packets that can maintain their coherence like halfway across the ocean. But the equations are so…” She throws up her hands. It is the physics of waves where she found the limits of her maths brain. “Like as long as a novel and tangled like a knot.”
“Ohh I love the classical field equations.” Pradeep takes his final hit. His thoughts are starting to collapse and settle within him. “They are so comforting.”
Maahjabeen hasn’t been able to talk about this with anyone in too long. “Alonso told me the island is a computer. Well the ocean is one too, just infinitely more complex. A squid eats a fish off the coast of Indonesia and it butterfly effects the motion into waves and currents that we still feel here. I once heard, though, that in order to model every interaction in the ocean, the computer would have to be the size of the ocean. So, to me, we should just study the ocean itself and learn what its outputs look like instead of building supercomputers to create simplistic artificial versions of it. Like, I don’t think we ever pay enough attention to laminar flow in the water surface layers myself. It is a very powerful interaction.”
“Wind knocking down my waves,” Jay agrees. “Bums me out.”
“But let’s say it was a tsunami…” Maahjabeen estimates where it likely originated, perhaps the Asian east coast. The Pacific and its ring of fire, all the hotspots that encircle the ocean, triggering volcanic eruptions and earthquakes and seaquakes that reshape the world. “Where would you say that is?”
“Uh, Taiwan?” Pradeep sights along her arm. “But I hope not. I mean I hope everyone is okay.”
“Inshallah,” Maahjabeen intones, then drops her arm. “Well. The sea is returning to normal. I will say it is most likely a rogue wave. Tsunamis are faster and more like a general flood.”
Jay is skeptical. “That didn’t feel like a flood to you? There was no crest to that wave. No impact. Rogue wave, they might have heard the crunch back in camp. But nobody heard nothing.”
“Is everybody here an oceanic researcher?” Maahjabeen doesn’t mean for it to come out as petulant as it does, but she is tired of always being corrected. “Rogue waves can also be silent. That is why they can be called sleeper waves.”
“Fair point.” For as combative as Jay is, he gives up an argument as quickly as he starts one. “And I’m not disputing your expertise. Just a lifelong beach bum here. Yeah, they say when my family first had a ranch in Carmel, my like great-great aunt was sunbathing on the beach and got pulled out and drowned by a sleeper wave. They full-on terrify me.”
“So I guess no one will ever be spending the night in the shelter.” Pradeep sighs. “Oh, well. It was a good idea while it lasted.”
“No. Please rebuild it.” Maahjabeen touches Pradeep’s elbow and doesn’t register how electric he considers the contact. “We will be grateful to have it. It is for watching the ocean, yes?”
Pradeep gives her a tight smile. He is glad she appreciates her bungalow. But he really wishes she would lay those long graceful fingers on someone or something else.
Ξ
“This is the last climb here.” Amy calls down to Katrina, waiting for her to make her way past the tree that the Lisicans have placed inside the tunnel, a pale spotlight of indirect daylight illuminating the roughly vertical shaft. These villagers are like these sturdy little industrial shrews of humanity. Amy is reminded of the ancient troglodytes of the limestone caves of France. They lived in them over thousands of years. Some people are just born to dig.
“This is wild.” Katrina finally pulls herself up to Amy, eyes wide. “You should know, for your peace of mind, I’ve long ago stopped trying to think of where the best place to have a rave down here is. I just got really into the idea at first. Rave in a cave. Rave in a cave. It was like a refrain. But there’s just no way. I had no idea how immense it is down here. Just really incredible.”
“Rave in a cave.” Amy snorts. “Not sure how the Lisicans would feel about that.”
“Well. They’re all invited. Have you heard their music yet?”
“No music.” Amy’s breath is coming in short gasps as she climbs toward the last level bit of passage that leads to the village. “But their whole language is like music. You’ll see. Very sing-song.”
They approach the tunnel’s end to see the same man waiting for them as before, the silver fox curled at his feet.
Amy affixes a mask over her mouth and approaches. “Bontiik!” She chucks him under the chin. He does the same to her. The fox sniffs at her toes. Amy spreads her arms inclusively wide and turns to Katrina, who also puts a mask in place. “My friend! Katrina!”
The little man looks at her with shining dark eyes. He has reddish curls, not blond at all, and a calm authoritative air. He gestures with an open palm and says something long and involved in a mush of vowels and soft consonants. At least that’s how it sounds to Katrina. But then a single word sticks out. Ostati. It’s a form of ‘remain’ in Slavic languages. She repeats it aloud. “Ostati? Stay? Remain? Who stays?” Then, slow and simplified, she asks, “Da li govorite russki? Do you speak Russian?”
The man holds up a finger. “Da. Da li.” And then he continues, his words once again disintegrating into mush. But Amy was right. It is a pleasing sing-song mush. She just can’t make any sense of it.
“Are those Slavic words or is it just a coincidence?”
“That a fox is named Lisica in both languages? Impossible. Has to be. I wonder how he always knows we’re coming.” Amy nods and smiles again and again, making notes on her phone.
“What’s his name? Do we know?”
“Feel free to try.” Amy makes an exasperated gesture. She’s all out of ideas how to advance their dialogue.
Katrina pats herself on the chest. “Katrina. Katrina Oksana. Drago mi je… Um… Kako… kako se zoves?” She laughs. “Listen to me. I sound like a Serb. Come on, dude. What’s your name?”
He responds pleasantly, at length, his voice rising and falling. The more she hears of Lisican the more the words start to separate into units. But there’s all kinds of sub-vocalized consonants and glottal stops and fricatives Katrina doesn’t recognize. This will take some study, for sure. She takes out her own phone and starts recording everything he says.
After his speech he slides a dry slender hand across Katrina’s palm and grips it. He leads her from the tunnel.
The fox still sniffs at Amy’s feet. Finally satisfied, it turns and scampers after its human. “Woot. Passed the test.” She steps out and away from the cliff, to find that the village is framed in vibrant color, wreathed in flowers. “Wait. This wasn’t… Wow. Where’d all these flowers come from? This must be the spring bloom. How lovely!” Amy points at the clusters of orange and violet and pink and white flowers in clusters. “Yarrow and angelica and this is chamomile. You could make tea!” She has an audience now, four children and three adults hanging on each word. She holds up a chamomile flower and one of the little girls plucks it from its stem and pops it into her mouth.
The natives look healthy. Apart from their diminutive stature, their dark skin is clear, their bellies are not swollen. The elders don’t appear to be afflicted too badly by arthritis. Their teeth are strong. Amy wonders what their life expectancy is.
The man who greeted them now leads Katrina from house to house, speaking to someone within at each stop. Katrina nods her head and waves, but she can’t see inside the gloom. It feels like a formal tradition so she keeps her mouth shut and follows his lead.
At one house, older and more dilapidated than the others, the man puts a hand across Katrina’s chest to keep her at a distance. He doesn’t seem to realize or care that his forearm is pressed against her breast. He ducks low to send his voice through the low dark doorway and calls out in an aggressive, nearly hostile voice.
An ancient crone peers out, one eye filled with white cataracts. Her hair is white and nearly gone, the curls limp against her dark skull. She lifts a bony hand and speaks. It almost sounds like a curse. This is not a happy moment. He has evidently roused her from a long isolation.
The man takes the crone’s hand and pulls her forward to where Katrina waits. Tottering forward, complaining, her one good eye stares at the ground. The man joins her hand to Katrina’s and she finally looks up, blinking at the young Australian woman’s face.
For a long, trembling moment, everyone in the village watches the crone cup Katrina’s chin. Then with a ragged cry she pushes her away. “Guh-byyye.” She flaps a hand dismissively at Katrina and everyone starts talking all at once, begging the old woman to reconsider. But she only repeats the farewell again and again. “Guh-byyye. Guh-byyye.”
“Well.” Katrina tries not to feel rejected. This has nothing to do with her. But still, somehow, it stings. “They know some English, it seems. Uhh.” She waves at the old woman, who stares at her with hot tears and clenched, shaking fists. “Good-bye?”
The woman groans and spins away. The others all talk at once, some pulling at Katrina to ask further questions and others pulling at those to dissuade them. The man with the fox holds up his hands and defends his decision to bring her here.
Amy watches from the edge of the village, hands full of flowers. “Everything okay over there, Katrina?”
“I haven’t the foggiest.”
A woman emerges from her house bearing an abalone shell filled with smaller tusk shells and feathers. She carefully picks out three shells and a glossy black feather and presses them into Katrina’s hand. By her urging, Katrina offers the gift to the crone.
But the crone will not engage with Katrina. She is back at the door of her house, squatting to go back inside. She still mutters, “Guh-byyye… Guh-byyye…” with unmistakeable grief.
“She won’t take them.” Katrina hands the treasures back to the woman. “Nice try, though. Why doesn’t she like me?”
Now all the women and children and men speak, their words falling over each other, mild arguments springing up on each side. They pull on each other sharply to interrupt, although none of the heated words sound like insults.
Katrina records it all. “Uh… What do you think, Amy? Feel like we’ve out-stayed our welcome. Don’t you?”
“Maybe so.” Amy turns to the closest adults, a woman and man wearing tight headbands of twisted leaf and not much else. “But I still want to find out more about my friend Flavia. Flavia.”
They all fall silent to see if they can divine the meaning of her words. The children try to imitate her. “Flobby-uhh.”
Amy points at the tunnel mouth. “She was the first one out. Remember? And then you said she went up this way?” Amy retraces the path through the village to a tiny overgrown footpath on the far side. She points up it. “Flavia. Remember?”
Now the village falls silent again. Katrina marvels at the change and how quickly it came. Their faces go from animated and wide open to closed and staring at the ground. But this isn’t the same reaction they had with the crone. This is something… darker.
“I don’t like the looks on their faces much, to be honest.” Katrina sidles up to Amy. She doesn’t feel threatened. It’s only that these people are so alien. And she is so far from home. “What did they do to Flavia? Don’t tell me we found cannibals.”
“Uh, that’s racist.” But Amy’s words are hollow. Her mind is calculating, trying to tell if she’d get in any trouble by taking this trail. She holds up her hands, beseeching the villagers. “We have to find her. If she went this way we have to go. She’s our friend.”
Amy parts the fern fronds and takes her first step up the trail. She looks back. A wordless seething resentment sweeps through the villagers. One young boy lifts a hand and yells at her, “jidadaa!” but his mother pulls his arm down and shields him from Amy.
“Okay. Fine. I don’t understand why but I’ll turn back if you don’t want me to go.” Amy lifts her hands in surrender to re-enter the village. But the adults of the village hurry forward, holding their hands up, muttering the words Wetchie-ghuy and koox̱. She is not welcome any more. Amy steps back, not wanting to be pushed. “Oh. Ehh. Shoot. I appear to have made some terrible mistake. Sorry. So sorry. I promise I won’t do it again.”
But still they won’t let her back into the village. The children withdraw into the houses and even the man with the fox won’t look at her. He only holds his hands up to push her out if she tries to come back in.
“Oh no! Katrina! Help! What have I done?”
“You went up the wrong path, I guess. The koox̱ path. Maybe… Maybe you need some of those gifts like the shells and the feathers. Maybe they’ll forgive you then.”
“Fine. Yeah. And how am I supposed to get them from here? I wasn’t doing anything wrong! We need to find Flavia.” Amy can’t believe she lost their love so quickly. Things had been going so well! “Come on, guys! It isn’t like I have a choice!”
“We should get you out of there.” Katrina starts scouting the heavily-wooded edges of the village. “Do you think you can like skirt around back to the tunnel mouth? Get you back to camp and try this again someday?”
“I’m trying…” But Amy can tell the thickets are impassable. The only way back is through the village. “But they won’t let me. I think I might have to go up this trail and look for Flavia myself, Katrina. I mean, it’s the only way left.”
Katrina has no words. Amy is right, but there’s too much inexplicable significance here. These decisions are clearly too weighty to be blundered into. “Okay. Gah. I hate it but you’re right, I guess. Well, good-bye.”
“Good-bye.” Amy turns to leave. But another voice from further up the koox̱ trail stops her.
“Don’t say good-bye.” It is Flavia. “To them it means betrayal.”
Chapter 13 – My Secret Past
March 25, 2024
Thanks for joining us on 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:
13 – My Secret Past
“You know, despite this current emergency,” Esquibel confides to Amy as they hurry toward the beach, trying to beat the setting sun, “I’m not nearly as unhappy here as I normally am.”
“Not nearly? Ha. That could be the travel slogan.” Amy climbs the fallen redwood trunk and drops down into the sand. “Come to Lisica! Be 84% less unhappy!”
Esquibel leaps gracefully from the trunk. “Careful here.” She kneels, peering at the churned up sand. “Can we see if any of them made tracks here…?”
Amy sighs. “Too many. All the endless comings and goings over the last few days. And who knows what shoes they’re all wearing. Triquet’s usually in those big boots but… Flavia is usually in like slip-ons? Maahjabeen could be barefoot for all I know. And maybe they aren’t even together.”
“Ehh. I think they must be. Otherwise all three of them chose today to independently disappear for six hours.”
“Unlikely, I agree. But maybe one thing set them off in different directions.” They follow the gentle slope down to the water, where weathered steps in the sand are now little more than shallow depressions. No footprints remain in the tideline. Either the water has washed them away or they were never there to begin with. “We just don’t know, Esquibel. So let’s not make assumptions without more data. Right now it’s just fairy tales.”
“Like how Katrina thinks the Chinese kidnapped them?”
Amy shrugs. “I mean, it does sound paranoid but it also sounds like she has some kind of background in spy stuff so who knows? We find the wreckage of a Chinese plane at the same time they go missing? Is that just coincidence or something more?”
A voice cries out to them from back the way they came. It is Miriam, who has climbed atop the fallen trunk to wave at them, calling out details that are carried away by the wind. So instead she just beckons them toward her.
They hurry back. When Amy and Esquibel get nearer Miriam yells, “They went into the sub!”
“Oh, thank god.” Amy grabs Miriam’s lowered hand and jumps up the log. “But I thought we checked the sub? Where were they?”
Esquibel leaps onto the log and scrambles up beside Miriam. “And are they okay?”
“No,” Miriam shakes her head. “I mean, we haven’t found them yet. We don’t know if they’re okay. They went all the way through and out the bottom underground somehow. There’s another hole in the sub that leads further down.”
“Another hole? Where? And they’re down there somewhere?” Amy begins to hurry. “Oh, Jesus.”
Esquibel takes off at a run toward the bunker, calling out over her shoulder, “I will get my supplies and meet you there!”
Amy follows Miriam into the bunker, then through the trap door and down the narrow steps into the sub. In the first wardroom they encounter Jay, who is slowly making his way along the deck with a bad limp. Amy slips her head under his shoulder and he gratefully uses her as a crutch. Esquibel appears, pushing past them.
“Thanks, boss. Hey. Wait. It’s the air. Miriam. Think about it.”
Miriam leads them in a hurry through the narrow hall to the control room. She waits for Jay impatiently in there, needing clarification. He skipped too many steps. “What do you mean?”
“Your tunnels! It’s got to be. They found a way in.”
“You think they’re in tunnels? Good heavens. There’s no way that’s safe. If it’s limestone channels formed by water they’re going to be wet and it will be slick and completely treacherous.”
Jay winces and grunts to drop himself belowdecks. Then he hurries through the three rooms down here to find Katrina and Pradeep crouched in the last one at a dark hole in the deck. His eyes are wide, fists clenched beneath his chin. She is beside him, clutching his arm, trying to keep his panic attack from spiraling.
“Good.” Pradeep springs up when he sees the newcomers and shakes off her grasp. “They are here. And I am certain you will not be needing me any more. Good,” he repeats, brushing past Amy and Jay and Miriam and fleeing the sub.
Katrina sighs and sits at the edge, dangling her feet into the void. “Poor bloke. Glad you’re here. We got a pretty puzzle.”
Amy and Jay cautiously approach. “What—what is it?” he asks.
“Don’t know yet.” Katrina shines her phone’s light through a rusted hole in the sub’s steel hull into a tunnel of raw earth. “Their footprints are definitely at the bottom. And they go off that way.”
Esquibel looks down at the ragged hole with a frown. “Has anyone else gone down there yet?”
“Nope. Where’s Mandy and Alonso?”
“They’re still searching the grove,” Miriam says. “Or Mandy is. Alonso is home base.”
“I can’t believe anyone got Flavia down there.” Katrina prepares herself to descend. “Well. If she can go I can go. Who’s with me?”
“Me.” Jay shuffles forward.
“Stop, stop.” Esquibel pulls Katrina away. She puts her other hand on Jay’s chest. “Have you lost your minds? We aren’t just jumping in after them. They have been gone too long. They are lost or maybe dead. Think clearly.”
“It’s just there’s steps worn into the side here.” Katrina shines her light against the tunnel wall directly beneath her. “Can’t be any harm in dropping down to the mud on the bottom, taking a peek around the curve, see if there’s anything to see.”
“First we will discuss this.” Esquibel does not let go of the two young adventurers.
Amy tugs on Jay’s sleeve. “Amen. Hold up, Jay. Let’s make sure we do this right. Get everything we need. Let’s get a list going. Ropes and water and lights. How many of us are going?”
“Three sounds good.” Jay eases back. He tries not to sound too eager. They aren’t convinced yet. “Cool deal. Good plan all around. And Katrina’s got a nice little scouting idea there.”
“You are certainly not going down there,” Esquibel tells Jay. “Not if your ankle will ever properly heal. Alonso cannot. Mandy will fall and break something, I swear. And I shouldn’t. It is Navy doctrine not to risk the doctor.”
“Well, this is my field of expertise.” Miriam steps forward and peers into the hole. “Wow, was this dug by hand? Look at the marks on the walls.” Grooves and rough planes score the earth. She steps back. “Okay. Let’s pull back to the surface and really plan this out. Time is of the essence but we need to hear from Alonso on this. He may know something. We’ll approach it as a virgin caving expedition. So I’ll lead and we’ll be daisy-chained together with rope. I’ll take Amy. I’d like a third but I need someone with caving experience.”
Katrina says, “Well, I’ve just fooled around in some sea caves. Gone on a couple tours. But I don’t get claustrophobic.”
“Okay. That’s definitely a big part of it. We’ll see. ”
Ξ
An hour later, Miriam has returned to the hand-carved tunnel. Now she wears a helmet with a headlamp. A field pack with a short-handled pick and an extra satchel filled with water bottles slung across a shoulder completes her loadout. Her climbing harness is strapped into Katrina’s six meters behind her, whose rope harness is improvised but solid. Amy, in Miriam’s second harness and helmet, has another six meters of rope at the rear. Behind her the other hundred meters waits coiled, its end tied off.
Miriam will do all the real work. The other two will just be there to help remove injured team members or brace a line when she needs to climb or descend.
Jay, sulking, watches them go. “I could totally do those steps. I’m your caving third. I’ve got like a thousand hours underground.”
“Don’t make them take care of your fragile male ego right now.” Esquibel pats Jay on the shoulder. “They’re busy. Now it’s a hundred-fifty meters of rope. You go to the end, you come back. You never go off-rope. Right?”
“Aye aye, Captain,” Miriam salutes.
“Lieutenant Commander, please. And if anyone needs any medical attention, do not move them unless absolutely necessary.”
“Yes, Doctor.” Amy waves, cheery. “I mean, Commander. And two yanks means pull us back up!”
“Is that a thing?” Jay asks as Miriam starts to descend, careful not to let the rusted metal edges anywhere close to her limbs. “Cause that sounds like it should totally be a thing we should do.”
“Yes. Sure. Agreed.” Miriam can barely contain her excitement. This is the most significant and dangerous thing she has done in quite a long time. Explore an uncharted cave system and lead a rescue mission at the same time? Now this is some fair craic. This is like Super Geologist comic book territory.
The lugs of her boots bite into the soft earth of the hand-carved steps. She secures her footing and climbs down, nine tall irregular steps to the mud floor. It smells damp, with alkalines and calcites in the air. The temperature is cooler down here. She crouches to inspect the slurry under her feet.
Katrina lowers herself in after. Her heels find the steps and she quickly descends, a bubble of excitement rising in her chest. Finally she’s getting treated as an equal around here. Way past time she gets to be the dangerous one.
Amy is next, thinking how lucky she is to go out on an adventure like this with Miriam again after all these years. They have done great things together in the past. Big Bend and Churchill, Ontario and the Columbia River Gorge. Either it was Amy getting brought onto a geology study as a field biologist consultant or Amy hiring Miriam to be the geologist consultant in turn. Back and forth, trading jobs and positions on projects across North America. But it has been a long time. Success in both their careers the last decade or so has made such scheduling impossible.
Now she’s back in action with one of her favorite partners. The long lean form of Miriam stoops forward, drawing the other two ahead. Katrina mirrors her movement. There’s something of Miriam in the young Aussie, Amy thinks. They have the same hardiness and intensity. Yet they both possess such delicate edges.
“The curve narrows here,” Miriam calls out, her voice muffled. “Hold on. Let me remove my bags. Katrina. Please send them in after me. I hope it’s just a chokepoint but if it’s a sustained crawl I’ll need you to—Here. I’ll just tie them onto the line myself. Then I can drag them when I need them. Wish me luck.”
Amy can’t see past Katrina or hear what she murmurs to her. She must just patiently stand here in this pit, waiting to hear if there is good news or bad news from ahead.
Miriam is gone a fairly long time, long enough for Amy to get worried. Esquibel calls down to them, “What is happening?”
“Just some scouting.” Amy keeps her voice light. No point in alarming anyone. “Taking it nice and slow. Careful.”
“Good.” Esquibel retreats from the opening above.
“Any news?” Amy rests a hand on Katrina’s shoulder.
“Uh, the Nikkei Price Index fell by one and a third on news of a bleak commodities report today.”
“Very funny. Anything from Miriam? Two yanks? Anything?”
“No. She doesn’t even appear to be moving forward much. I can only see her feet. She’s definitely crawling. Like a worm. Ah! There we go!”
Amy hears fabric sliding across the mud. “Are those her bags?”
“Yeh. Looks like she got through to the far side and now she’s pulling it after. Maybe she can just pull us through. Get the full mud experience.”
Katrina kneels and puts a hand on the sloping roof of the tunnel. “My turn?”
Miriam’s voice is indistinct. Katrina thinks she hears an encouraging tone. She shrugs, realizing it’s all she’s going to get. Ducking down, she worms her way forward until she is lying on her chin, cold mud pressing against her entire front, soaking into her jeans and socks. “Here I come!” And to herself: Yeh, it’s a good thing I’m not claustrophobic.
It isn’t such a tight squeeze that she needs to force her way through but her movement is definitely constricted. She can’t raise her elbows and knees more than a bit. Slowly she scrambles forward. After about five meters she breaks through.
Amy is last. She loves a good Army crawl, although some of her earliest associations with it are less than pleasant. Anything military is always Okinawa to her first, and she was never happy there. Yet it’s good to be little, that she knows. This is her time to shine. But, like, wow. This sure is a lot of mud.
Amy spills laughing from the hole, covered in filth, falling onto a concrete floor. Whoa. Wait. Concrete? “What is this?” On her hands and knees she stares at the green-stained concrete floor before her. Water sheets downslope, from right to left. Above to the right the culvert is mostly collapsed and the water only trickles through. She can’t for the life of her figure out what it means.
“I know,” Miriam complains. “I was just finally getting used to a bit of soil and stone then nope! Yet another obstacle in my way!”
“Some kind of underground culvert or something I think.” Katrina sends her light ahead. “Like a concrete aqueduct. Maybe they used this to channel water somewhere? For some reason?”
Amy is utterly confounded. “I—I don’t know. I guess I just really didn’t expect this. I mean, none of Triquet’s records talk about an underground concrete project at any point in time. I can’t imagine what it was for.”
“If you’re very quiet…” Miriam says, holding up her hand, “you can hear the surf.”
They listen. Beyond the steady gurgle of water nearby, a deep subsonic rumble trembles the air every few seconds. “Which way is this? I’m so turned around. Are we pointed at the beach?”
“We must be. Come on then, ladies.”
“Wait. First,” Miriam delays them, shining her light backward. “Look. This mess is what probably kept them from finding their way back.”
The concrete wall they’ve emerged from has partially collapsed, exposing gaps that reveal bare earth. Each one of these gaps has been dug into, a whole yawning cluster of tunnel mouths heading off into different directions. Katrina counts eleven. Only because their climbing rope still runs out of the bottom, partially-collapsed entrance do they know that it is the way back. Without that clue it would be impossible to tell. She takes a picture on her phone, the flash blinding them for a moment.
“Oh, no… You think they took a wrong one back somehow?”
“I do.” Miriam turns back to the sound of the surf and the long dark concrete culvert ahead. “But let’s investigate this first. Easier going ahead, for one thing.”
Miriam slings her bags back on and steps forward. The roof is nearly two meters high and the slime-covered concrete walls are far enough apart they don’t need to touch them. But soon they reach the end of their hundred-fifty meter range. Amy calls out when she feels the rope behind go taut against her waist.
“Turn back?” Katrina is surprised the two older women haven’t suggested it yet. She isn’t used to being the voice of common sense.
“I have no desire to crawl through the muck just to tell Esquibel this much,” Amy says. “Cause then we’ll have to come right back and do it all again, if she even lets us. Maybe we can detach for a bit and leave the rope here?”
“Breaking the law, oooo.” But Katrina doesn’t actually think it’s dangerous. The culvert isn’t going to flood anytime soon, is it? And it’s not like they’re dangling from a pit.
“Agreed.” Miriam begins working on the rope tied to the back of Amy’s harness. She lets it fall. “We can remain roped in between the three of us but this rope leading back is really most useful as a breadcrumb trail just indicating which tunnel gets us to the sub.”
“Let’s just remember,” Amy adds, “bottom-most tunnel, looks like it’s blocked from this side, right in the middle. Everyone got it?” She drops the rope. Then she picks it up again. “But we can’t just leave this here. Maybe I should tie it off. So they can’t pull it back by mistake.”
Katrina nods, giddy. She can’t believe she’s in the presence of such daring old ladies. For a hilarious moment it occurs to her that she might indeed have to be the wise head down here.“Yeh, good thinking. Here.” She finds a fissure in the concrete. “Just like wedge that knot in here. We can make it impossible to get out.”
Amy agrees with a grunt, forcing it under a jagged hanging lip of concrete. There. No amount of pulling will dislodge it.
Miriam leads Katrina and Amy deeper down the culvert. After a short stretch the tunnel widens and water drops into a deeper trench with a walkway raised along the left side. They progress carefully, the concrete slick, the danger of falling and sliding into the trench real. Doors line the wall, three steel panels painted dark blue, their red insignia faded.
These doors are locked or welded shut. There is no give to them. “Triquet can figure these out later.” Miriam shakes her head in dismay at how many directions they’ve already been given to search. She leads Katrina and Amy past the doors toward the end of the culvert. A large grate, mostly rusted through, bars the wide opening. It is here that the freshwater spilling past them from above meets the ocean, whose gentle waves make noise on the far side. The air is closed off when the water fills the gap, sending gulping shockwaves of pressure up the culvert, bringing with it the inhalation and exhalation of air they felt all the way up in the sub.
Beside this grate at the end of the walk is a tall rusted steel door, slightly ajar. The sound of the surf is much louder here. Miriam makes an excited face to the others and slips through. Katrina peeks, then follows. Amy looks behind herself, left all alone and suddenly fearing ghosts, then she hurries through the door as well.
They find themselves in a sea cave, crowded with stalactites. The main feature is a broad waterfall from behind them that is joined by the culvert’s effluence to push a steady stream of white foam into the lapping seawater. Its ceiling is no more than four meters high but the cavern appears to be vast, large striated shelves of bare limestone creating channels through the rushing water and stone platforms in alcoves up above the waterline, on which the remains of pillbox bunkers and buildings stand. The remnants of a concrete pier jut out into the water, its steel rails rusted black. The half-sunk remains of a postwar patrol boat lie at the edge.
This was a hidden port, only big enough for small boats and submarines but nothing larger. It is a modest installation, but still an astounding one to their eyes. Some excavation has been done, but for the most part the structures fit in among the hanging stone and rushing channels. The one foundation by the port looks like it was a small boathouse or command center. Others further along look like storage, hidden in shadow.
To the far left, past obscuring columns and wandering currents, an indirect band of silver daylight dimly lights the cavern. Out on a forward platform near the sea cave’s entrance, a figure sits on the concrete and looks out at the light. It is Maahjabeen.
Ξ
“So the plan must be from now on,” Esquibel demands, standing at the head of the long table at camp, “anyone goes anywhere, someone at camp has to know. At least write a note.”
“Kind of unworkable.” Jay says it louder than intended. He’d meant to keep it to himself.
“And not really applicable in this case,” Katrina agrees with him. “I mean, if we’d all known they were down there they still would have gotten lost on the way back and we still would have waited too long.” She shrugs. “Not a real rules person myself.”
“You are both young.” Esquibel isn’t used to having to defend her medical orders. “You’re like the two youngest people here and your sense of risk is too high.”
“I’m young,” Mandy counters, “and I love rules! My sense of risk is very low. I’m not sure whose case that helps but… you know, like another data point?”
“Esquibel is right.” Everyone silences to hear Maahjabeen’s quiet voice. “It is my fault. I started the whole thing. And I should have left word where we were going. I just didn’t think… One thing led to another and suddenly we were in the tunnel chasing Flavia—”
“Wait,” Miriam interrupts her. “Flavia was in front?”
“She said she heard desperate cries for help. She hardly waited for us to respond before she just dived in headfirst.”
“Did you or Triquet hear any of these cries?”
“No. But we had to go after her.” Maahjabeen shivers. Then she laughs a bit sadly at herself before continuing. “Not been my best week. I’m not even fully recovered from the storm.”
“Of course you aren’t,” Esquibel scolds her. “You can barely move. What were you thinking?”
“She was thinking,” Jay answers for her, “that we still hadn’t figured out the source of the air in the sub.”
“Precisely. It was just an innocent exploration.” Maahjabeen leans back, irritated that Jay would speak for her but relieved that at least somebody gets it. “But by the time we crawled through that horrible mud tunnel and got into that concrete culvert thing she was gone. That was the last we saw of her.”
“The last?” Amy shakes her head. “That was almost seven hours ago. What happened to Triquet?”
“We explored the sea cave together, thinking Flavia had gone that way. We even searched the water in case she had fallen in. But no. She must have tried to return through one of the other tunnels. Just crazy. Triquet told me to wait there. That they would come back to get you and then we would all search for her together.”
Miriam groans. “And then Triquet must have tried to go back to the sub and taken the wrong way back instead. So all three of you are in completely different places, heading in different directions. Fantastic. We’re going to have to explore that entire system, step by step. But I don’t even understand how it all got there. Those tunnels are dug. Some of the marks are even quite fresh.”
“The island,” Alonso reminds her, “is inhabited.”
“So the natives have had access to us this entire time?” Esquibel clicks her tongue, worried. “Great.”
Amy stands. “Welp. I guess I’ll just like wait down in the culvert in case any of them get back. They’ll need a guide back to the right way to the sub. I had just gotten the mud off but oh well.”
Esquibel raises a finger. “You will not go alone.”
“Yeah, I’m with you, boss.” Jay hops to his feet.
“Jay, you aren’t going anywhere. And that is an order.” Esquibel wonders how she might enforce discipline among all her wayward civilians. Reasoning gives them too much wiggle room. And the illusion of free agency. In a crisis they need to follow her orders.
“And we did leave the rope down there for anyone to follow,” Katrina reminds Amy.
“Still.” In her mind Amy can see all the ways a pair of helping hands could rescue bewildered victims in the dark underground. “They’ll need all the help they can get.”
“Hold up. You hear that?” Jay puts a hand in the air to quiet them. They all listen. Something heavy is crashing through the underbrush toward them on its way from the pool.
Esquibel stands, wishing her black satchel was nearby. Miriam, having guessed what’s in it, does too.
Triquet limps wild-eyed and filthy from the undergrowth. They are drenched and shivering, wearing only a single boot.
Amy yelps. “Triquet!”
Esquibel runs to the tottering figure. Miriam fetches a blanket. As she wraps them in it, Triquet smiles weakly at her. “Found the way to your hidden chambers, Miriam. The ones behind the waterfall. Looking out from inside the cliff. Pretty cool.”
“Good Christ is that the way you came out?” Miriam scrubs their shoulders to warm them. Triquet leans in and Miriam takes this as a signal for a hug. Amy joins them around the back, pressing their heat into Triquet’s chilled slender body.
“You know me. Just one catastrophic decision after another.” They scan the camp over Miriam’s shoulder. “Oh good. You found Maahjabeen. Girl, I will never say another word to you about being reckless in the storm after the shit that I just pulled. Oh, baby. What was I thinking?”
“Did you like come through the waterfall?” Jay laughs at the preposterous image but Triquet only shrugs.
“There’s enough room in the chamber behind it to get a running start. I thought if I could get enough Delta V like a rocket, if you know what I’m saying, and just kind of bust through with enough horizontal velocity, then, you know, I’d be free. Frankly I was absolutely beyond done with my situation and ready to explode. It had been hours and I was desperate.”
“Oh, Triquet…” Alonso laughs.
“Yeah, I got slapped down like a rag doll. Just gargling foam.”
“Oh my god there’s a whirlpool in that pool.” Miriam pulls her head back to share her facial expression of just how deranged she thinks Triquet is.
“I know. And it almost took me. But I grabbed some roots and hauled myself out. If I hadn’t, then yikes. I would have like shot out into the waterfall in the sea cave and, I don’t know, had to swim all the way around the island to get back.”
“That is what the underground waterfall is, isn’t it? Yes, that’s about what I’d figured.” Miriam completes the course of the submerged creek in the model of the island she carries in her head. “That waterfall in the sea cave must be where this pool drains. But who knows how long you’d be submerged before it spit you out.”
“Yeah, and I don’t need to be the one to test that idea. Whoo! Any spare seats? It’s been a long day.” Triquet collapses onto Pradeep’s platform, a sodden mess. He smiles and offers Triquet a bottle. “Thanks, Pradeep. But do I look like I need water?”
“So where’s Flavia?” Alonso asks.
Triquet sits up. “She’s not with you? Oh, no. I assumed she was cleaning up inside or… No…?”
Miriam lifts her field pack again, the matter decided. “The whole system. As soon as we can, Alonso. And who did she hear crying? Somebody else in trouble? Then they need our help too.”
“Or someone pretending.” Esquibel points to the fragment of the aircraft wing set aside and wrapped in a blue tarp. “Need I remind you that we may have a Chinese PLA soldier running loose on the island as well? Ultimately, this mission still has military oversight for a reason.”
“Oversight? What happened to partnership? And I think you’re overstating the likelihood of any Chinese presence.” Pradeep doesn’t want to contradict Esquibel but she is becoming worryingly autocratic. “You know, after the tsunami in Japan they were finding litter just like that all along the Oregon coast for years. This could have come from anywhere. It could be years old. Take it from someone who is like a world-class paranoid. You guys are being paranoid about this. The probability is next to nothing.”
But he can tell from their blank stares that he hasn’t convinced anyone. Triquet shakes their head. “No, but she was really upset. Flavia just cried out and threw her hands in the air and went for it. I asked and she just shouted, ‘Can’t you hear the bambino crying?’ And then I couldn’t keep up and I lost her. Man, I wish I hadn’t lost her. You can’t explore it all, Miriam. At least not tonight. The tunnels branch and some of them curve back on themselves. It’s a total maze. I was lost in there for hours. Totally losing my mind. When I found the chambers behind the waterfall I was so relieved I fell down and cried.”
“Flavia is lost in there?” Miriam turns and regards the ground and the cliff, trying to visualize the network. “It might be huge or you might have just gone around and around the same three tunnels. We need a proper exploration.”
“Shouldn’t we wait,” Alonso wonders, “until morning? It is getting late, Mirrie.”
But Miriam shakes her head. “Come on, Amy. Underground it doesn’t matter if it’s day or night, Zo. We’ll bring just endless rolls of twine, untangle all the tunnels. Just think, the poor thing has been trapped in there for ages.”
“With no espresso or Nutella,” Jay jokes. “She must be wasting away. Man, this crowd is tough. Come on. Lighten up. She’s going to be fine. We all know it.”
“I hope you’re right, Jay.” Amy’s voice is uncharacteristically quiet. “Miriam and I will spend two hours below then come back up and sleep. It is getting late.”
Miriam is about to protest the time limit, but she nods. “What do you say, Esquibel? There’s no point in delaying. We’ll unspool the twine behind us and never, I swear this time never unhook. Two hours tonight and then as long as it takes going forward.”
Esquibel nods, mollified that the chain of command is at least being respected. “Two hours.”
Ξ
Mandy wakes right at dawn. Today is a work day so dawn it is. Her eyes snap open of their own accord and she stares at the rust spots of the ceiling’s corrugated steel. The bunker isn’t what she’d call cozy, but it does keep them dry.
Esquibel has rolled away and sleeps with her back to her. She is a furnace under a blanket, as extra as they come, even as she sleeps. Mandy chuckles, pushing off that hip she’s been kneading and pulling apart like a big tough piece of stale chewing gum. But it’s getting better, and the two of them might have never found a way into each other’s pants all those years ago without the excuse of this bad hip, a poorly-healed injury from her childhood.
Mandy kisses the glorious hip and rises. She has to visit the trench and see what the day will bring. The weather station setup with the drone has worked well so far and she’s finally starting to be able to look at her data as a progression instead of just curious snapshots. She unhooks the door and trips out into the blue light of another overcast day. Her Hawaiian skin could use a tiny bit more sun. Not that she’s complaining. Mandy has suffered through some truly terrible weather in the last few years of her career and she knows that Lisica is pretty much blessed. It’s like chilling on the Oregon coast year-round. Probably doesn’t even form frosts in the winter and hardly anyone here ever dies of exposure.
Mandy speculates what the natives must be like. And how long have they been here? Do they live in little ewok villages up above and sing songs all day? Or are they cannibals? Maybe something in-between? Her head fills with visions, of elders crouched under hanging eaves during a downpour, and then how they instruct her in the ways of the storms and take her into their circle.
The Pacific is filled with all kinds of isolated island people. Isn’t there that one island where they all worshipped Queen Elizabeth’s husband as a god? Like, still to this day. These people could be all kinds of weird. And it might be like two or three generations since anyone has contacted them. Wild. Like literally. Wild child times a hundred. Imagine growing up without the twenty-first century: the movies, the cell phones, the cars, the plagues, the crowding… living in blissful ignorance of the oncoming catastrophes. Amazing. They must be better off here without us.
On her way back from the trench to the bunker she sees Amy already awake and standing away from the trees, watching the cliff. As Mandy nears, she points above. “Look at those guys.” Amy directs her attention to a cluster of dark birds with pale undersides winging their way upward into mist. “You see their eyes? The white circle around them? Spectacled guillemots. Not ever seen this far east before. Usually just on the Russian and Japanese coasts.”
“That’s so cool. Oh my god. There’s so many.”
“Yeah, this is a huge colony of just countless seabird varieties. I really shouldn’t have ignored it this long. But I got caught up in all the other things down here on the ground. The birds were the first thing I noticed when we first arrived but then I kept my head down for too long. I forgot to look up.”
“Those thermals are so strong. Look at them!”
“The Pacific gulls? Yeah. This is their highway. And then they each have their little off-ramps to go back to their own little nest. ‘Honey, I’m home!’ Such a perfect existence.”
Even larger birds wheel upward on the strong draft. It reminds Mandy of the cyclone nook in the back of the grove. She might be able to conduct another experiment here. What she started doing is taking long videos of the twisters and then uploading them into a program her colleague built for situations like this that tracks litter in a windstorm. She’s been able to get all kinds of interesting data from that so far. But here she won’t be taking video of redwood duff and leaves, it would instead be birds spiraling upward.
“Brown pelicans.”
Mandy claps her hands, excited, and describes what she has in mind to Amy. “I think I can set up a camera here and get a long video and be able to characterize basically the entire open ocean air current as it interacts orographically with the island.” She takes out her phone to try a test video. But the darker birds aren’t visible against the dark cliffs. She needs white birds.
“Which ones are white? I can’t see the pelicans.”
“Well… Most of the gulls. All of them. A lot of the pipers. Half the murres. The arctic terns. Those are who you need. But I’ve never seen more. And they’re such incredible flyers.”
“When do they fly?”
“When…? Ha. That’s a good question. We have tons of observed behavior with terns in the literature. But this colony here remains unstudied. So who knows? They’re just transient here, resting for a few days or maybe if we’re lucky a few months to raise their chicks. They never winter. Arctic terns fly from one pole to the other throughout the year, following the summer. So these guys are headed north. They’ll probably be gone in another couple weeks. But the chicks have already had time to sprout feathers and join them in the air. You know, they’ve found three month-old tern chicks halfway across the world from where they hatched. And they live thirty years. Fascinating birds. They mate for life.”
“Yeah, I mean, do they come out for breakfast? At like what time? Or are they like bats who only come out at night?”
“When they aren’t flying they’re constantly feeding. Dawn might be a good idea because they’re waking up and it’s time to go fishing. Look, there’s a couple winging away to the open ocean there. Godspeed and good hunting, you two!”
Mandy claps again. “Look how they slice into the wind! It’s blowing like directly against them and they still find the angle to soar ahead! I wish I could do that.”
“You and me both, sister.”
Mandy leans against Amy and squeezes the older woman’s bicep. “You are just the sweetest, Amy. Thank you for taking such good care of us all the time.”
“Heh. Looking for muscle in there? You won’t find any.”
“Are you kidding? You are so strong. I think you’re like the strongest person in the whole camp.”
Amy makes a surprisingly bitter face about that. “I don’t know, Mandy. That’s not really something I’d like to be known for.”
“No way. We need to celebrate strong women!” Mandy wraps her arms around Amy and squeezes her. Amy squeals as she is lifted off her feet. They both laugh with abandon.
Amy lifts Mandy in turn and shakes her like a rag doll, her long black hair flying about. Then when they’re all laughed out they separate. “I love your question about what time terns eat. Maybe we can figure their patterns out together. So we can both use your long video and I’ll do a count. See if it changes.”
“According to different weather patterns. You think? We could do the first cross-discipline arctic tern atmospheric science paper like ever.”
“Oh, there’s probably been some before. We aren’t that original. And we could talk to Maahjabeen about different food sources and when they might arrive. Like are they just following giant schools of anchovies around the Pacific?”
“Right. They’re responding to the fish, who are responding to the, what, like, plankton? Who are following minerals along the temperature and pressure gradients underwater. Wow…” Mandy looks out over the water. “I just had the trippiest idea…” She shakes her head. “I don’t even know if there would be a way to measure it but… Well, anyway. I’m really into convection pumps, like when forests create rainfall above them. And I wonder if a school of like anchovies would transpire enough to create the conditions for deep convection. Could a big enough school of fish be enough biomass to call down rain on itself? The school would have to be huge. But some of them are, right?”
“I think so. But you can’t just equate one anchovy to one tree. These forests are huge too. Where this has been witnessed the most is the Amazon, so that’s the kind of scale we’re looking at. But it’s true, each tree releases a huge amount of water vapor each day. Stomata transpiration is what I think you’re talking about. So each tree can exhale a vast amount more moisture than a little fish… But on the other hand… we aren’t just talking about the fish. They’re following all that plankton and they also bring along bigger fish and squids and whales and all the birds we were admiring. So maybe if you add up all that wheeling biomass you can get your atmospheric effects. Possibly?”
“I just love the idea,” Mandy says wistfully, “of a whole bunch of little fish leading so much transpiring life around the ocean that they start all the storms in this half of the world, just shepherding whole cloud formations across the Pacific. That would be so rad.”
“Ooo. We could never predict the weather because we weren’t following the fish?” Amy chuckles. “As a wildlife biologist this has every stamp of my approval that I possess.”
“And if we end up killing all the fish then the storms…” Mandy visualizes every dynamic in the ocean grinding to a halt, every cloud system dispersing into fog. But of course it wouldn’t be like that. It would be catastrophic in the short term, yeah, until new dynamics form elsewhere dependent on other humidity profiles and temperature differentials.
“You’ve evidently been smoking some of Jay’s stash.” Amy giggles at Mandy. “I like the ambition but let’s stick with videos of guillemots and terns for the moment if that’s okay with you.”
“No, I’m not high. I mean. Maybe I am. High on life.” Mandy is effervescent this morning. Studies with great promise seem to be literally falling out of the sky today. “Sure thing. I’ll get a tripod and make sure there’s enough space on my phone. Might be time to delete those bachelorette party pics from Vegas last year.”
“What? All those pics of your besties drinking themselves stupid will be a literal blackmail goldmine in about five years. You’ve got to keep them.” Amy steeples her fingers with a diabolical laugh.
“Okay, creepy, but good point. Heh.” There was something uncanny about Amy revealing this dark side of herself that it fully unnerves Mandy and derails her good mood. “That’s a side of you I’ve never seen, Amy.”
Amy links her arm in Mandy’s and walks them both back to camp. “Oh, there are so many sides of me you’ve never seen.”
“Also creepy.” Mandy stops and untangles her arm. “Come on, Amy. Are you like trying to trigger me? What do you mean about other sides? My sister had a boyfriend who talked like that and she ended up in the hospital one night. Now I know you’re not—”
“No no. I’m sorry.” Amy holds up her hands, innocence on her face. “I was just making a few jokes and ehh. No, I hear how bad that sounds.” Amy stops, at a loss. “I suppose, in all fairness, it’s time. I should tell you of my secret past.”
DW Draffin -- Lisica 