Chapter 32 – Let’s Go For A Run
August 5, 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:
32 – Let’s Go For A Run
In Miriam’s dream, her little brother Denny is dying again. He is slowly drowning himself in his tub with pharmaceuticals, just as he did in real life, and she’s on the phone with someone who is there at the house, watching him but unable to stop him. It’s her Nan, or someone’s auld wan, her creaky voice dispassionately narrating how Denny’s face turns bloated and blue and his eyes lose their light. But Miriam is stuck in traffic, helpless, raging against the oppressive modern world, her face a teary mess.
Then a hand grasps her shoulder and shakes her urgently. She reaches for it in gratitude. Oh, praise be. Someone came to rescue him. She grabs the slender forearm and forces herself awake, the grief sliding off her like a shroud.
“It’s Pradeep!” Mandy squeaks, shaking both her and Alonso. Wait. Where is she? Right. This mad island. And Pradeep is…?
“What is it, Mandy?” Miriam glances at Alonso in the halo of white light that Mandy brought. His curls are wild and his beard is coming back in again. He looks ghoulish, and whatever dream he claws himself up from looks even more harrowing than her own.
Their minds veer toward calamity. Mandy would only ever waken them if he had died. But her face splits into a relieved but tired grin. “He’s awake. He’s back. It’s passed.”
Mere moments later, shivering in their base layers, everyone save Jay are crowded in the lantern-lit clean room, surrounding the cot. Pradeep still lies there with Maahjabeen, and they are arguing and giggling at the same time.
“No, I am telling you that I need to get up.”
“And I am telling you that you just spent nearly three days in a coma and need to take these things slow.”
“I am also not very comfortable with everyone looking at me while your arms are around—”
“No, you cannot turn this into one of your panic attacks, Mahbub. Everyone knows we are in love and nobody cares.”
“What do you mean, nobody cares?” Katrina scowls. “We think it’s a fabulous idea.”
“I’m just jealous,” Flavia adds. “But to say I don’t care would be false. You two are my new favorite soap opera.”
Pradeep giggles some more, the anxiety releasing its grip. He has long thought that the anxiety itself is neuronal circuits primarily in his brain but all along his limbs and deep inside his enteric nervous system in his gut as well. Neurons are always seeking out new connections and at some formative point in his development as a boy he learned to build these extremely strong anxiety pathways. They have nearly no off-branches and they only travel one way. If he thought neurological networks could spiral he would say that’s what his did. But he knows it’s more a feedback loop of endless repetition, the same images and feelings and scripts of fragmented condemnation that flit through his head in interminable cycles. But they are fading. His anxiety cannot hold him right now. The love they all share is too clearly demonstrated here to be questioned. And they are all such lovely people too. “No. Seriously. I’m ready, Maahjabeen. Please let me sit up.”
She scowls, just enough for him to see the ferocious creature she can be when she wants. Then she relents. “Yes, fine. But I am watching you.”
Her grip goes slack and he pushes himself up with gasps and groans until he is sitting cross-legged. Maahjabeen kneels beside him, her hand on his arm. Pradeep drinks water from a flask, then nods at everyone watching him silently. “Hello, everyone. Uh. What time is it?”
“3:32 am, the morning of the twenty-first of April.” Esquibel records the time in her notes then turns on her phone’s light. “We are very happy to have you back. How do you feel?”
“Hungry. Very sore. Kind of… restless.” Pradeep giggles again. “You can all go back to bed now. Please.”
“Yes you are sore from all the CPR. Lean forward?” Pradeep does so and Esquibel lifts the back of his shirt. She takes a photo and displays the screen to the others. “No marks. None at all.”
Pradeep frowns. “There were marks back there?”
“In the shape of a little fox.” Mandy draws the figure in space with pinched fingers. “No, really.”
“It was very much,” Alonso pronounces, “the craziest thing.”
“I’ve got a working hypothesis,” Esquibel tells them. “Obviously no natural process would create such a distinct pattern. It was proof of human intent. Someone poisoned you, Pradeep. Attacked you somehow. I think of it like, well, imagine an old hairbrush, but instead of bristles you have fifteen or twenty poisoned needles in the outline of a fox’s head. You bring it to camp and when your target presents the opportunity… whack!”
“Did anything like that happen to you the night of the big feast, sweetie?” Triquet smooths Pradeep’s hair out of his eyes and cups his chin. “Anything you can remember?”
Pradeep is flattered, nearly dazzled by all this attention. “Uh, no. No, I left the party early. The news that there might be others on the island who weren’t villagers… It shocked me. I was sure we were doomed.” His giggle becomes more neurotic. “Any news on that, by the way? Any, I don’t know, Russian paratroopers discovered on the far side of Lisica while I’ve been down? Any…?”
But they all talk him down, with a chorus of soothing words.
“Wait wait wait.” Miriam holds up a hand. “I want to hear more from Esquibel. What kind of poison would that be? Is it one of these plants here? Should we be worried?”
“I do not know.” Esquibel shrugs. “Perhaps we could have a patient interview discussing its effects from an internal point of view, but I do not have any knowledge of a poison or venom that has primary CNS neurotoxicity with the… phlegm or whatever it was that the woman was able to expel. Maybe it is one of the tree-frog or marine invertebrate toxins but that is pretty far outside the literature. I’ve been looking.”
“The… phlegm…?” Pradeep’s smile turns a bit sickly. “That doesn’t sound good. Oh, dear. Have I been gross?”
“No, no…” Maahjabeen presses her head against his shoulder. “You’ve been so strong.”
“Don’t worry, Prad,” Amy tells him. “You’ve been super sick but you’re better now. And we’ll just keep making sure you get better every day.”
“Good advice.” Esquibel takes out a stethoscope. “Now clear out everybody. I need to take another set of readings and our patient needs his rest.”
“Yes. Well. Happy dreams, everyone,” Alonso says. “We can all sleep easy now that we have our dear Pradeep back.”
“Wait.” Pradeep frowns. “Where’s Jay?”
Ξ
In the morning, Esquibel wakes up in Katrina’s arms. The blonde girl blinks sleepily at her when she feels her stir. Esquibel doesn’t remember anyone joining her and Mandy in bed. But somehow she doesn’t mind. It is very comforting. “Oh. Hello.”
Katrina grunts softly. Her voice is a sleepy drawl. “Mandy said I should hold you…” She drifts off and rouses herself again. “Like Maahjabeen holds Pradeep. You need it.”
A sweet tenderness for Mandy fills Esquibel, and Katrina by association. Nothing sexual, just a softness in her heart. Katrina is a lovely girl, no doubt, and Esquibel could imagine all kinds of erotic delights for her to indulge in with her and Mandy, but she is feeling rather monogamous these days. Mandy just satisfies Esquibel so completely she can’t imagine needing anything physically from anyone else, even someone as luscious as this.
So they hold each other for another long sleepy moment. Then finally Esquibel rouses again and checks the time. Nearly 10am. Ai me. How did it get so late? She should go check on her patient. “Thank you so much, Katrina.” She kisses the tip of her sharp nose and pulls her limbs free. “You’re a doll.”
Katrina rolls onto her belly and gives Esquibel a devilish smile. “Don’t you objectify me.”
Esquibel puts on a light layer of tops and bottoms. The air is so mild. She can take her chances with sandals. She exits the cell and the bunker into camp, where Amy is picking shellfish out of a net and Flavia is working on her laptop. After visiting the trenches, Esquibel finds some breakfast—a mug of hot water and a packet of crisps. She should get something more substantial in her later today but she has a lifelong habit of surviving too long on mere handfuls of crap. The wonders of cuisine have never meant much to her.
Finally she makes her way to the clean room to find it shockingly empty. No Pradeep, no Mandy, no Maahjabeen. She curses under her breath. Those damn kids. Where are they? He needs a week of observation before he should even think about leaving his cot.
She exits the clean room to find Triquet climbing out of the sub. “Hello, Doctor Triquet. Anyone see my patient?”
“No, Doc.” Triquet lifts a thick file. “Been sleuthing the morning away. Did you know the lagoon used to be full of sharks when they first got here? Nurse sharks, by the description, although maybe the biologists can tell better. And the Air Force just fished them all out. Didn’t even eat them. In this one report they say how they were more comfortable swimming in the lagoon after that.”
Amy has entered and caught the last half of that statement. “Whaaa-aat? Well, that’s appalling. Here we are wringing our hands over whether or not we can harvest a few handfuls of seaweed and our grandparents were committing wholesale shark slaughter. Great. Let me see that description.”
Triquet hands Amy the report as Esquibel continues her search for Pradeep. She exits the bunker, crosses the camp, and scrambles atop the fallen trunk to scan the beach. There they are, all three of them at the edge of the water, sitting in the sand.
Esquibel climbs down the trunk on the ocean side and crosses the sloping beach to join them. They are watching a whirling cyclone of white birds out on the open ocean. “There you are. What do you think you’re doing out here?”
“Fresh air.” Pradeep looks dramatically better. His color has returned and his eyes are no longer stained black. His cheeks are still hollow from lack of nourishment over the last few days, but he looks otherwise hale and whole. “Look. It’s feeding time. There must be a giant shoal or school of sardines down there.”
“Fins!” Maahjabeen points at a line of small hooked black fins breaking the surface of the water on the far side of the breakers. “Too small for orcas. Pacific porpoises. So many!” And following them in the air is a line of brown pelicans, thirty or forty strong.
But Esquibel sees enough of the ocean’s wonders aboard ship. She lifts Pradeep’s wrist and finds his pulse. “You have been very sick and we don’t know if there might be a relapse. You had…” But his pulse is quite strong and balanced, even better than her own. She shakes her head. “I am someone who often prescribes some time outdoors to my patients but this is just too soon.”
“I couldn’t be in that bloody plastic box any longer.” Pradeep realizes how this must sound to Esquibel and quickly amends it. “I mean, I am sure it is a snug and proper working environment for you, quite lovely, but I have just spent too long…”
Esquibel pats his hand. “It is fine. I get cabin fever too. But you cannot make these decisions without consulting your doctor first.” She wheels on the girl beside her. “Mandy.”
Mandy shrugs. “Yeah, I made the call. I couldn’t wake you up. You two looked so cute sleeping there.”
Esquibel frowns at Mandy, wondering what her game is. But she only gets a playful glance in return. Well. More to figure out there later. “I think you should come back anyway. You are painfully thin, my good fellow. Have you no appetite?”
“It’s true. I’m starving. I just needed to see the sea.”
“And, as I was just telling them before we were so rudely interrupted…” Mandy stands, pulling Maahjabeen to her feet. “There’s another storm coming. I can just feel it.”
“Feel it?” Esquibel takes Mandy’s hand and rises, dusting sand off. “Now you are becoming one of the mystics?”
“No! I’m just able to see what’s there. Finally. I can just tell now, even without my instruments… I can smell it on the wind. I’ve been forced to use other tools, like older tools, and—”
“You’re a pattern-seeking primate,” Pradeep interjects.
“Exactly. And I’ve been here long enough to see the patterns.”
Esquibel scans the horizon. It looks like it always does, gray and endless. “I don’t see any storm coming.”
Mandy points at the bulk of the island behind them. “That’s why I think it’s coming from the north. Come on. Let’s get back before it surprises us.”
And just as Mandy predicted, as the four of them enter camp a few minutes later, a swirling wind from above the clifftops carries dark clouds with fat raindrops that hit their tarps with flat slaps.
Everyone withdraws into the bunker. Mandy finds Amy. “Hey! I’ve been thinking more about your idea. And look! It’s raining! Now we can fill the elevator shaft up even faster!”
Amy nods. “Right. How wet do you think this storm might be?”
Mandy shrugs. “No clue. But it started well. Lots of moisture in this front with these big drops. And now it’s really pouring! If we can get, like that reservoir, you know wherever that pipe is draining from? If it fills all the way up then like a ton of water can flood the shaft, and maybe we can fill it up in just an hour or two.”
“Should we go down now? Build the raft? Stop up the tunnel?”
“Now? Ehh…” As eager as Mandy is she needs to think this all the way through. Her mouth opens then closes again.
“I know. It’s a one-way ticket. And if we have second thoughts there’s nothing we can do but wait till we get to the top.”
“Maybe we wait, until right at the end of the storm? It’s not like the shaft will fill up with rain falling from the sky. It’s all the other water that’s been building up in the other chambers.”
“Yeah. It’s the drainage. So the more it rains the better and then over the next couple days after that is when the water will flow the heaviest. So we keep waiting?”
“I know you want to find Jay.” Mandy squeezes Amy’s hand. “I want to find him too. We just have to choose the right time. I’ll figure out all I can about this storm and then we’ll get started.”
“Wait! Here is the guy I’ve been waiting to have up and ready for this idea. He can really help. Pradeep.” Amy pulls him out of an intimate conversation with Maahjabeen. “Listen. I need your brain for this. Mandy and I have an idea to flood the elevator shaft in the tunnels so we can ride on a raft up to the top. Back when she lit it on fire you came up with some equations…”
Pradeep shakes his head, as if he hadn’t heard Amy clearly. “Wait, you want to what?”
Esquibel exclaims in wordless exasperation and slaps herself in the forehead with an open palm. “Are you people trying to kill yourselves? I mean, honestly.”
Ξ
“So my mom was a hippie and my dad was a Marine.” Jay walks through the understory of a beautiful glade, the first time he’s been above-ground in two and a half days. Jidadaa walks beside him, her long athletic strides signaling a confidence in this place, an expectation of security and safety. So he tries to relax and answer her many questions. Her English is surprisingly good. She just doesn’t know what anything actually means.
“Wait, Jay. What is…?”
“A hippie?”
“…a Marine? She marries the water? The sea?” Her accent is so cute, hard on the r’s, with almost a liquid sound in her mouth. But when she speaks any of the Lisican words the guttural consonants in the back of her throat sound like a car crash.
Jay laughs, his hands trailing over the soft branches of a young madrone. “No! Ha. A Marine is, uh, a kind of soldier. They live on ships. Well they used to, historically. Anyway, I never met the dude. He took off when I was still being born in the hospital. It was just me and ma. Kind of like… I mean… Kula’s your mom, yeah?”
Jidadaa nods at him. “Yass. She is outcast.”
Jay nods back, slipping down a game trail to the steep bank of a stream. He lifts rocks, hunting crawdads. She joins him, crouched easily at the edge of the water, her brown hair falling in a wave to the water. “So… Your dad taught you English?”
She shakes her head no. “No. Not dad. Chief Master Sergeant Chilton Kincaid of the USAF of America.”
“Oh. He wasn’t your dad, though?”
“Kula has many men.”
“Ohh.” More of their story comes into focus. An awkward silence ensues. Now Jay feels sorry for her. There was evidently just one prostitute on Lisica and she had many customers. And now the islanders want nothing to do with her. Or her daughter. He tries to think of something neutral to say. “So he never taught you about the Marines? Yeah, sounds about right. The Air Force are all a bunch of stuck-up pricks, for sure.”
“You do not talk like him.” Jidadaa’s hand twitches, fast as lightning, and she snatches up a red and brown crawdad, its plated tail curling around her thumb. With a giggle she pops its head off with a practiced flick and slurps on the body while it is still kicking.
“Whoa. Hardcore. Alright.” Jay’s belly growls. He finds a silvery fingerling, probably some trout, in the mud nearby and grabs at it, but it slips out from between his fingers.
Jidadaa laughs at him, then cocks her head and looks up at the canopy. “Egg season. Good to climb.”
“Yeah. April. Definitely the late days of egg time. What we got here? Like, uh, pheasant? Grouse? Quail?”
“Dáax’. Big bird. Fat.”
“Fat is good.” They stand and scramble back up the slope to scan the treetops, seeking movement. Gray mice run rampant across the boughs. Songbirds flit through the eaves. What a pretty day. A pretty place. Jay knows from his view out the gun emplacement’s port that they are on the east side of the island somewhere. Fine living here. If it’s anything like the Hawaiian Islands the east side is wet with tons of storms and rough surf while the west side is dry with big reefs and killer waves. But there’s no reason to think that necessarily applies here. Different ocean and air currents up here. Still. He visualizes building a cool little treehouse and hanging solar panels in the trees. He could live here no problem. Him and these ladies. He chuckles. At least until those hunters track him down.
Jidadaa selects a madrone and scales its lower branches with ease. She is barefoot and her feet seem too big and wide for her size. Probably just from so much use. Her hands are big too, strong and stained dark.
She levers herself up into a high fork in the branches and an outraged squawk greets her. Jidadaa cries out, flapping her free hand, trying to scare the mother hen off the nest. It is a big grouse, dun and off-white, stubbornly defending what is hers. The girl is able to slip a hand in and snare a single egg before retreating, her own blood running down her forearm.
Jidadaa giggles as she drops back to earth, proudly handing Jay the egg. He grabs her arm to inspect her wound.
“Oh, you got sliced pretty—” Then he falls silent. She has gone utterly still the instant he grabbed her. He gently releases her arm and takes a step back. “Sorry, dude. I shouldn’t have just grabbed you like that. That wasn’t…” But the feline stare she gives him robs him of words. Best if he just doesn’t say another thing.
They head back to the hidden manhole that leads to Kula’s underground garden. Jay inspects the egg. Nice size, a bit bigger than a chicken egg, pale blue. Now just add a bagel and some avocado and maybe a bit of salsa then ya boi is livin’ large.
Kula waits for them. She has harvested a salad of her baby greens. She also has old onions and garlic in storage. Is that how her transactions occurred? She led the men to her mattress and they’d leave her some fruit or vegetable seeds? Hoodies and Reeboks? Better than money, for sure, but still. It’s like some appalling fairy tale.
Kula coos over the size of the egg and protests when he tries to talk about sharing it. She pushes it onto the carved plank that serves as Jay’s plate. “No no no. Jay and Jay.” But it’s clear she and Jidadaa expect him to slurp it down raw. And he will, if he has to, but he just really misses hot food.
“Any chance… we can build a fire?”
Kula makes a face, then silently leads him to a pile of garbage beside the edge of the emplacement’s curving gunport. Beneath leaf litter and trash he can make out the remains of a propane stove. It is a dilapidated mess. The canisters are empty. The pan still has a black crust of carbon from whatever meal they cooked on it last. It has quite obviously been years.
“Aw, man. You guys been eating cold this whole time?”
“Not cold, no no,” Kula says, leading him to another spot along the curving view, where a blackened campfire still glows with ruby embers. He recalls that she was smoking a fat joint when he first arrived. She must have gotten the fire from somewhere. Here.
“Right! Excellent. Check it out. Uh… Here.” Jay still holds the neglected pan. With a twig he scrapes it clean and then uses his sleeve to finish the job. Then he places it as levelly as he can on the coals. He cracks the egg onto the pan and they stare at the golden yolk, waiting for the pan to heat up enough to cook it. Soon the whites of the egg are turning milky and the edges are crackling. Jay’s mouth waters in anticipation. “Aw, yiss. This is gonna be so fucking good.”
When they sit again he prevails upon both of them to try the cooked egg. Kula chortles with pleasure, slurping on it, but Jidadaa is uncertain. The consistency is too unfamiliar to her. But her mother pokes fun at her in a guttural dialect that Jay can’t follow at all. Blushing, Jidadaa swallows a mouthful and bestows a weak smile on Jay.
“Yeah, you’re right. Needs butter. But you don’t got to act like I poisoned you. Okay, let’s talk. So, like, I’ve got a whole crew back on the beach. Really solid folks. You’ll love them. And we’ve all got a metric fuck-ton of questions. Maybe you can answer? I mean, we’re just a bunch of scientists and researchers and we’ve been here like a month and we can’t figure anything out, know what I’m saying? There’s all these mysteries here. Like: you know the outside world doesn’t even know Lisica exists, right?” As soon as he says it, he regrets it. They look stunned. Aw, man. It isn’t his job to lay such a heavy trip on them. They need like an anthropologist for this shit. They need a therapist is what they need.
Jay has to start slower. “So. Wait. How long have there been people on the island?”
Kula and Jidadaa confer. “Kula is fourteenth mother.”
“Ah. Aha.” Jay doesn’t know what that means. But then it clicks. “Oh, you mean generations? Like, uh, you’re fifteen? And her mom was thirteen? And her mom’s mom was twelve?”
“I am not fifteenth mother until I have baby.”
“Got it. So, like twenty years per generation… Y’all have been here like three hundred years?”
They just frown at him. In the awkward silence he eats one platter of salad, then another. His appetite is ravenous. The egg is long gone. Finally he stops, afraid that he’s eating into their stores. Kula sure as shit didn’t expect some giant American to suddenly show up and eat her out of house and home. They might even be expecting him to provide some new seedlings or something. Shit. Jay pushes his plate away, still hungry. He’s got to be careful here.
“Wait. I know. Dessert.” Jay takes out his kit and grinds a blend of his Kush with a touch of the Jack. He rolls a fat joint and hands it to Kula, who chatters at it, marveling in her own language at how thin the papers are and how neat the package. “You got to hit this slow, mama. Okay? Tell me you understand. This shit is fire. It will knock you on your ass.”
Jidadaa says something cautionary to Kula, who looks at Jay with lidded eyes, suddenly wary.
“No, it ain’t dangerous. Just take one puff. A little one.” He pulls it from her hands and lights it with his disposable orange Bic. She and Jidadaa both exclaim over the lighter even more than the joint. He instantly realizes how much it could revolutionize their lives, at least until it runs out of fuel. “Yeah. Sure. I got a spare with me and more of them back at camp. Here.” He holds out the lighter and bows his head, smiling as he offers it as a gift.
Kula marvels at it. Jidadaa frowns, a little spooked, and keeps her distance.
After Jay teaches Kula how to use the lighter he passes her the lit joint. She puffs it like a cigar. “No no no!” He pulls at her arm, laughing. “New weed. Big weed! Kula’s head goes boom!” And he mimes her mind getting blown.
But Kula just giggles, until she rolls backward onto the floor and loses her balance. She laughs louder, kicking her feet up.
Jidadaa frowns at her mother, then at Jay. He doesn’t offer the joint to the daughter. Her vibe is all wrong for it. But she doesn’t look upset with him, just disappointed in her mom. Jay takes a drag and asks, “So what’s the deal here? Lisica used to be some kind of… like secret military base then what?”
Jidadaa shrugs. “The men leave ten years.” She holds up all her fingers. Still eating, she has the appetite of a bird, pecking through her salad with nimble fingertips for choice morsels.
“Ten years? Wow. That’s a long time to be alone. And you haven’t seen anyone that whole time?”
“We see men.”
Jay’s eye twitches. “Okay. What does that mean? So the men are gone but you still see men?”
Jidadaa talks to Kula in their pidgin, low and fast. They have a long conversation, perhaps a bit of an argument, and then finally reach an agreement, echoing each other’s phrases.
Kula turns to him. “Yes and yes.”
“Cool. The men are gone. You still see men. I like it. Kinda surreal for sure. And what’s the deal with all the villages? Kula, you don’t like them?”
“Village? Which village?” Jidadaa asks. “Village village village.” She counts off three with her fingers. Then, touching the tip of her thumb like the other Lisicans do, she points at various corners of the island and counts off, “íx̱t’, íx̱t’, yéik deiyí.”
“Huh.” Jay nods emphatically, as if he understands. “So, you’re saying there’s three villages and… then… a whole bunch of other stuff. Got it. Well we’ve only found two villages yet, unless those kids covered in pollen were from the third. You know about that? I saw four kids in the field beside the river with their faces just totally covered in pollen? Thought I was losing my mind.”
Kula asks Jidadaa what he means. She does her best to translate and he waits. Kula’s face falls. She covers her mouth with a hand. She whispers something.
“When? Where did you see the gold childs?” Jidadaa is worried.
“Uhh… Just on the, well, let’s see, that’s the east side of the river in that valley down in the south. You know the one, where the two villages won’t cross it or look at each other? So just after I got across it, they were in the meadow. Super trippy. Fully covered their faces with masks. And then the hunters came and…”
But Kula and Jidadaa have stopped listening to him. They are engaged in an anxious conference, counting days.
“Aw, shit. What is it? What did I do wrong?”
“The golden childs…” Jidadaa frowns. “We do not see them. My whole life we do not see. Now they are here.”
“Wow. First time in twenty years? You’re like, what, twenty? I’m just guessing. Which I’ve been told back home I should really stop doing with the ladies. I don’t know if you have any of the same… I mean… conventions.” Jay flounders. “But like it’s been a while. Got it. So… Why? Why has it been so long? Just not any good pollen season for the last couple decades or…?”
“The golden childs. Bring death. Destruct.” Jidadaa has trouble finding the words. “Old time over. New time begin.”
“End of an era. Got it. That’s wacky. And I saw it happen. Wow. Part of history here. That’s awesome. Yeah, lots of things are about to change. You know they’re about to open this whole island up to…? Yeah. There’s no way you know that. Well, guess what? The men are coming back. A whole bunch of men. Probably heaps and heaps of men. But hopefully they’ll, uh, be nicer this time.” Jay’s words fade out. He has no reason to be optimistic about that. “Oh, wait. End of an era? Because of us? Is it because we’re here?”
“Jay cross river.”
“Yeah. Had to see what was on the rest of the island.”
But Jidadaa only stares at him.
“Oh, fuck! You’re saying I brought about the end of the era? That it was me crossing the river that did it? But—but no…!” He falls back, shocked to have such an effect on the island. They got to understand. “I was just… I mean, my entire fucking job here is to crawl all over the island just like picking up bugs and mushrooms. Right? I had to get across the river if I was going to see the rest of the island.” But they still only regard him in silence. “So, uh, what kind of era are we talking about?”
Jidadaa grins fiercely, her eyes flaring with sudden vengeance. It transforms her from a waif into a fanatic. “The end of Lisica.”
Ξ
“Jay is really who you want for fishing and hunting. I’m really more of a molecular gastronomy guy.” Pradeep looks up from his laptop at the spear and net Amy and Flavia have fashioned. The rain has stopped for a bit and many of them have taken the opportunity to escape the bunker. Some to work on their datasets, like Pradeep. Others, to fashion fishing gear.
“Well he is not here.” Flavia thrusts the spear at him. It is a softwood branch from a bay tree as long as his arm and whittled to a point. “And now that I’ve tasted the fish here, I need more. The big purple one was best. It tastes like steak. I could not believe.”
“Yeah, I can come out on the water with you, Prad.” Amy hoists her net, made from twine and twigs. “I just thought the activity might do you good. Or maybe you’d prefer to get out with your girlfriend instead.”
“Ai, don’t call her that!” He drops the spear and claps his hands over his ears. “It is… excruciating… knowing that everyone follows my personal life this much.”
“Yeah, sorry, champ. But this is what love feels like.” Amy claps him on the shoulder. “Familial love. It’s all support. I mean, you’re welcome to be as private as you want, but we all live together and we all love each other so… better get used to it.”
Pradeep snaps his fingers. “I know! Katrina brought a wetsuit.” He escapes his discomfort by grabbing the spear and wheeling away, crossing to the bunker. “Spear fishing would be perfect for her. It’s probably like a bloody class in Australian high school. Oh, Katrina?” Pradeep opens the door and escapes inside.
Amy shares a smile with Flavia. “Well. At least I can get you some clams with this contraption. Will that be good enough?”
“Ramen con Vongole,” Flavia shrugs. “It is a new dish, but sounds promising. We just need white wine.”
“That’d be super yummy. I didn’t know you were so interested,” Amy ventures, “in helping with the food.”
“Well, I am done for the time being, you know, with my work on Plexity. Or I am just waiting for someone to break the next thing. And I can’t get any more data for Mandy until she puts her new weather station up on the cliffs. So, when I got hungry, I thought about how I might eat better.”
“Don’t tell Alonso or he’ll have you grab a reader.”
“I told him I would take a turn and he told me to ask Miriam. She said later. So now I am on break. And I make fish spears.”
Amy high-fives Flavia. “Nice spears too. Oh. Here comes the rain again.” They listen to it drumming on the canopy as they hurry into the bunker. “Falling on my head like a memory…”
In the bunker, they find Mandy and Miriam returning from a session with the readers in the creekside understory. They are filthy and cold, striped with white and yellow streaks of fungus. Pradeep is cooing at his phone, reading their results in real time. “Oh my god, do you know how long I’ve been looking for a plasmodial slime mold like this? Fuligo septica but different, I’d bet my life on it. Mandy, you might just get a slime named after you!”
“Oh. Wow. Great!” She tries to marshal enthusiasm and fails. Everyone who hears her valiant attempt laughs.
Triquet catches up her hands. “Aw. Now, whenever I see you, Mandy, I’ll think of a slime mold!”
“Super!” she responds with even less enthusiasm.
The door bangs open and Maahjabeen enters. She is doused and shivering. “Here. Here is your stupid reader, Alonso. It is good they can float. I almost lost it. Then I almost lost my oar trying to get it back. And then I got soaked…” Pradeep fetches a towel and starts scrubbing her before she can even get her clothes off. “Ehhh. Thank you, Mahbub. That feels very nice.”
“Let’s get you into dry clothes.” Pradeep leads her to her cell.
Flavia brings her spear to Katrina at the workstations. “Did Pradeep tell you we need more of those big purple fish for dinner?”
Katrina, reading up on language families, pulls her eyes from her screen and gives Flavia a polite smile. “Um? What’s that, love?”
“He says you have a wetsuit.”
“Yeh? Is that a spear? Spearfishing…? Oh my god, I’m supposed to just swim down and run this thing right through their little fishy bodies, am I? Bloody work, that. Wow. Give me a moment to wrap my head around the idea, will you? I mean, um… Maybe later? I’m not sure anyone will let me outside in the storm anyway.”
“No.” Esquibel crosses her arms. “I won’t.”
Katrina nods her head slowly. “After the storm passes then. Yeh, those reef fish are delish. I guess I can give it a shot when things calm down. I did see Aquaman in the theaters five times, I’ll have you know. Jason Momoa could eat me like a snack.”
Flavia waits for more clarification. When it doesn’t come she looks at Amy. “I think that is a yes. Until then, oh well. I guess we are surviving on more packets of tuna and powdered eggs.”
A crack of thunder in the distance makes them all catch their breaths. The storm is intensifying.
Amy sighs. “Fucking hell. Jay is out there somewhere in that. Hope he’s staying dry.”
“I’m sure he’s safe.” Miriam kisses Amy’s hairline and squeezes her for assurance. “Warm and dry and… living his best life.”
Ξ
Jay sprints screaming down the curving concrete tunnel. His blood is hot and slick, running down his side. He keeps slipping on it, barefoot on concrete. His left hand is pressed against his ribs, where the blade slid, tearing his favorite base layer and opening his skin. He won’t remove his hand, not for love or money. Who knows how much blood he’d see then.
They’re still behind him, far back. He can tell. They’re doing the hunter thing, letting him run himself down while keeping a steady pace, to eventually corner their quarry and kill him. He wonders if they will ask for forgiveness or sing a prayer of thanks like Kalahari tribesmen. Or will they just slaughter him like a goat?
He runs harder. What they don’t fucking know about Jay is that he’s a goddamn monster. He can run all day and into the night. Even with blood loss and like zero adrenaline left. His baseline for fitness has always been the ability to hike ten miles uphill, in the rain, at night, while sick. Apart from his recent troubles with his hand and his ankle he’s got that amount of stamina right now no problem. They want to chase me? Eat my fucking dust.
They had come upon him in his sleep. Three hunters. Jidadaa must have heard them and gasped. The sound woke Jay up and all he saw was a shadow darting toward him. He instinctively rolled away and the spear blade opened up his side. Then he just started kicking, whipping his pack around, tangling them in his bivy. If it had been zipped shut he’d be a dead man but it had been a warm night and he’d worn it like a blanket. One hunter got his spear and legs snared in it, clueless how tough the nylon was. The littlest one beside him danced away.
Jay kicked the shaft of the third one’s spear and its point went wide. That dark figure leapt back. In a sudden hot flash of self-preservation and rage Jay picked up his cot and hurled it at them. The littlest one went down.
Jay knew he couldn’t let them corner him. And he knew that he must be endangering Kula and Jidadaa by staying here a moment longer. He charged in behind the cot and missed by sheer chance a spear thrust from the third. He ran past, out of range, but heard his attacker leap after in close pursuit.
Out the passage and into the garden. But Jay hitched his step and swung around. When the hunter appeared in the passage entrance, Jay juked left like a linebacker, lining him up, then slammed the slight youth against the wall with a piledriver of a tackle.
The kid rolled away, gasping and retching. He wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while. Jay grabbed his fallen spear and threw it out the emplacement’s port. Then he paused. Jidadaa and Kula were still struggling with the others in there. Should he go back? But an unfamiliar voice shouted in fury and Kula cried aloud in despair.
“Run, Jay!” Jidadaa’s voice pierced right through him. He considered shoving this fallen hunter through the gap but didn’t know if he’d fall off the cliff to his death. Jay didn’t know if he was ready for murder, even though they quite obviously were. He was barely awake. This wasn’t even his idea. He’d just run instead.
Now, a timeless stretch later, he’s on the curve, spooling back the klicks he’d climbed through the spiral. It’s got to be a spiral, right? That’s the only way it could go on so long. He’s fine with the dark. There was never any obstruction underfoot, he recollects, except when he got to the junctions. And maybe if he’s lucky he can find another door at one of them he could pop up a hatch and get back above-ground.
Yeah, but then what? He knows where these hunters came from. They tracked him from the bad village. And if he goes back up he might still be in their lands and facing far more than just three young ones. They could get like the whole town after him. And he’s leaving a blood trail. No bueno.
Let’s see. He’s running clockwise down the east side of the island, at this point like probably toward the southeast of the coast near four o’clock. If he could, he’d climb to the top now. He must be close to his friends; they’re just on the other side of a mountain of rock. He can’t make any mistakes here. All he can really do is make this a strict out-and-back. Don’t deviate from his former path. Just hope the hunters didn’t like leave anyone back at the first hatch to the south. Well, only one way to find out.
Jay runs. He loves to run. He’s built for it, all legs and lungs and implacable willpower. A lot of people think he’s flighty, just some silly hophead skating by in life. But you don’t survive Mavericks without being a peak athlete. You don’t survive getting lost in the Sur for eight days when you’re fourteen unless you got something fierce in you. At least that’s what the EMT who found him told him. And he’d always taken it to heart. When shit went down, as it so totally has here in the dark underground, Jay likes his chances against nearly anyone he’s ever met.
So come on, you little fuckers. Let’s go for a run.
Chapter 31 – Ja Sam Wetchie-Ghuy
July 29, 2024
Thanks for joining us for the third volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this episode:
Book III – Methodology of Madness
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
— John Steinbeck
31 – Ja Sam Wetchie-Ghuy
“And what do you make of this?” Triquet pushes their taped-up photo across the table before Morska Vidra. The elder stares at the image of the Tlingit tapestry, carved bone fishing spear, and word written in Cyrillic that Triquet has reconstructed.
Morska Vidra studies the photo in sad silence.
“Ji-na-háa.” Katrina sounds out the Cyrillic letters phonetically. But the word is unbearable to the old Lisican and he leans away from her, blanching. Finally he murmurs an answer.
“What’s that? Could you repeat, uh… povtori pozhaluysta?”
Morska Vidra speaks a few more broken sentences. “Something like, he’s only seen these once as a kid. The people who are beyond the river. They have them? These are their artifacts?” Katrina picks up the photo and mimes giving it to people in the interior of the island.
Morska Vidra only falls silent. He glares at her, apparently resentful that she brought it up.
“Ji-da-daa,” Katrina repeats. “I want to learn what that is. It seems to be key to the whole…”
But repeating the word is too much for Morska Vidra. With an outraged chuff he pulls himself awkwardly from the unfamiliar camp chair and stalks away, toward the creek. He does not return.
“Oops!” Katrina squeaks. “Sorry! God, this is just so… random. There’s this whole perspective shift thing I still do not get at all. Like in Lisican you’re not an actual being. You’re just a collection of other people’s impressions of you, who you’re related to, where you stand, where you’re going. It’s all very postmodern I guess.”
“Sounds like Plexity.” Alonso’s voice comes from the far side of his big platform. “Environment is everything. I think maybe I’ve gotten these people wrong. Perhaps they are very wise.”
“I guess it makes sense if you think about it,” Katrina continues, while Triquet studies the photo with frustration. “Maybe we all started with this kind of deep subjectivity. But how did we ever disconnect from thinking about the world that way? Imagine everybody understands that they’re all part of the web, right? And then one day some absolute psycho shows up and says, Fuck that. I’m only me. And I’m holy. And I’m in charge. And I’m not connected to any of you bitches or anything in the whole world around me. I mean, what an absolute bloody narcissist.”
Alonso laughs. “Context. It’s all context. We live in a data-rich age of context, right, Katrina?”
“You know, we did this breakout session at one of the security conferences I attended,” Katrina tells them, “where we had to try to re-imagine law and justice to be more fair. And they all got into how laws could be more universally applied. But I was like, hold up, that’s retrograde thinking. Three hundred years old. Our ancestors conceived of universal justice like that because they couldn’t see how to do it better. But we can. My idea is that each punishment or rehabilitation strategy should instead be tailored to each criminal as specifically as possible. Context, yeh. So I proposed that each person gets an official profile, open-sourced and secure, and we assign hundreds of numerical values to a whole spectrum of factors: upbringing, job, education, intent when committing the crime, you know, any amount of remorse… and then we use that profile and a shit ton of machine learning to construct a custom solution for every perpetrator.”
“I mean, isn’t this what we’re already doing?” Triquet sighs in surrender and puts the photo back in its manila folder. “Apart from your creepy digital profile idea, I mean, isn’t this what the justice system already does? At least it’s supposed to. It gives weight to things like background. In most countries at least, right? There’s steps to this. Pre-trial hearings. Jury of your peers. Sentencing. They already take things like intent and remorse into account. We don’t need a robot deciding who goes to jail or not.”
“Yeh, it wasn’t very popular at the conference, either. But I’m just talking about deriving more nuanced solutions for each crime. It’s all context now. That’s all I’m saying. I mean, you’ve heard of personalized medicine, yeh? Same concept. Individualize diagnosis and treatment, with increased efficacy that drives down the price. Everything’s data science now. Everything.”
This conversation is straying into territory that Alonso has hardly ever allowed himself to seriously consider. But the wild ideas he gets at night right before he falls asleep suddenly seem a little less wild. “She is right. This young generation will forever be known as the great collectors. Everything is about input now. We aren’t even really collating the data yet. That will be the goal of the next generation. Now is when we record the richness of life on this planet before it vanishes completely. Details, and the patterns within the details. That is our gold. And then, who knows, in a few hundred years, after the world has finished burning, it will be these records we are making right now that will bring all the life back.”
“Ji-da-daa…” Katrina repeats it again, looking up the word in first her Eyat then her Tlingit vocabulary lists. “I mean, there’s ‘jinduháayi,’ which means post office, or more precisely, ‘Building, around paper, delivered by hand.’ See what I mean? That’s some convoluted bullshit there. Or, ‘jinkaat,’ which is their number for ten, but specifically means, ‘hands facing each other.’ Whoa.” She drops her hands, helpless. “I’m sorry, Triq. This was supposed to answer a bunch of questions, but instead…”
Triquet stands, shrugging philosophically. “We just get more questions. It’s the way of the world, little sister.” They kiss the top of Katrina’s head and collect their things.
The door to the bunker opens. Esquibel stands in the frame. “What is this I hear about one of the Lisicans visiting us?”
Katrina falls back against her chair. “He’s already gone.”
“What? Why? We need one of them to look at Pradeep! He’s been poisoned or something! How did you just let him go?”
“Oh. Ack. Sorry. You’re right.” Katrina stands. “I’ll go find him. He went this way. Just… Ugh. I’ll be right back.” She hurries away.
Triquet grimaces in apology. “Sorry, Doc. It was my fault. I’m just trying to solve all these mysteries.”
“Yes, well…” Esquibel tries to find something to say that won’t indicate how very cross she is. “Me too.”
Ξ
“Okay, Pradeep. We’re going to roll over on three, okay?” Mandy holds his legs. Esquibel grips his shoulders. Maahjabeen still won’t release her full-body embrace.
The Lisican woman they refer to as the Mayor stands in a corner of the clean room, frowning terribly. Katrina hadn’t been able to find Morska Vidra, following his trail all the way back through the creekside tunnels to the village. But she had implored the Mayor to return with her. She suspects the woman might even understand a bit what is needed. Now Mandy and Maahjabeen and Esquibel all wear masks and gloves, their delirious patient fighting for breath.
Pradeep groans, a weak wet sound, phlegm rattling in his throat. They roll him over so Maahjabeen is on her back with him above. Esquibel pulls up his shirt, revealing the fox’s profile of angry red and black dots and the swelling at the base of his spine.
The Mayor pulls back with a hiss, like she’s seen a viper. She looks at each of them with wide-eyed outrage, pointing the tip of her thumb at each while intoning a chant.
“What is it? What?” Esquibel begs the woman.
“Lisica, yes?” Katrina prods her, outlining the shape of the fox’s head on his skin with her finger.
But the Mayor disagrees vociferously, her words coming in such a clashing rush that Katrina can’t follow. She fumbles her phone out and begins recording just as the Mayor’s speech ends.
“Okay. Got it. I mean, I didn’t get any of it, but I got that this isn’t Lisica. No. This is… some other fox then? I’m so confused.”
The Mayor is very upset with them. She begins lecturing, Katrina recording. The Mayor picks up the closest items off Esquibel’s bins, a short stack of paper. She tosses them to the ground, indicating that they are useless. Then with a loud wordless yell—Ayo! she leans over Pradeep, resting her elbow in the middle of his back. The Mayor puts her weight behind her elbow and presses until he expels his breath, a bubbling wetness. She presses harder and he expels more, finally ending with a trickle of milky brown rheum trickling from his chin. The Mayor stands back and points at it, careful not to touch it. “Kadziyiki.” She repeats the word again and again until Katrina echoes it.
“What is that?” Esquibel inspects the discharge, but the Mayor draws the doctor’s hand away before she can touch it. So she looks at it through her otoscope from a handspan’s distance. “Fine. I won’t touch it, I promise. But I should get a sample for testing…”
“Let’s see. Kadziyiki means…” Katrina scrolls through her vocabulary list. “Mud. A swamp place.” She points at Pradeep’s belly and repeats the word.
As confirmation, the Mayor repeats the word as well.
“I think she’s saying it’s magic of some kind or other. A curse.”
“Why would Wetchie-ghuy do this?” Katrina asks.
The name stops the Mayor in mid-sentence. She bares her teeth in an involuntary show of disgust and makes it clear with words and gestures that Pradeep’s illness is not the work of Wetchie-ghuy. But a new thought appears to interrupt her and after a long moment of consideration she repeats the name. “Wetchie-ghuy…”
Mandy releases Pradeep’s feet and shakes her hands to get his illness off them. The nausea seeping into her immediately fades. “Uh, then what if we get that Wetchie-ghuy guy to help Pradeep?”
Esquibel holds up an importuning hand. “Wait. As your doctor, I am not in favor of this idea.”
“Oh, because you’ve still got so many ideas of your own?” Mandy giggles to take the sting out of her words, but Esquibel scowls at her regardless. “I mean, if it’s some weird infectious fluid, wouldn’t we rather have them deal with it instead of us anyway?”
“I think we’ve got a bigger problem than that,” Katrina says. “How can we bring Wetchie-ghuy into camp without Flavia losing her mind?”
Esquibel demands, “I will not allow some—some herbalist to treat one of my patients. Especially since we know he is hostile. Or is she perhaps not saying that Wetchie-ghuy is responsible for doing this? That is crazy to think there might be another one. I mean, how many shamans does an island this size need?”
“Pradeep…” Maahjabeen murmurs. The others fall silent and she blushes. “Mahbub. I need to go to the trenches. I will be…”
Pradeep groans. His eyelids flutter. He seems to struggle at the edge of consciousness, unable to break through.
“I am so sorry. I’ve been holding it for hours…”
“That’s fine,” Katrina says. “I can wrap him up for a bit. You go take care of yourself. Maybe grab a bite.”
“No. I can’t.” Maahjabeen gasps when she releases her embrace. She’d forgotten how newly healed her shoulders are and now they scream as she moves them. Pradeep is unmoving. She slides out from under him, the pain and the heartache making her sob.
The Mayor watches her, stone-faced. Maahjabeen locks eyes with her and vows that she will not show another sign of weakness to this cypher of a woman. Maahjabeen can be stoic. Just watch.
Mandy and Katrina pull her free and she stands, clamping her mouth shut. She is still staring at the Mayor, whose black eyes seem to possess a reservoir of strength that Maahjabeen can access. Now she realizes the Lisican woman isn’t judging her, but silently lending her support.
Katrina scoots into position. “So… just like give him a good cuddle? Anything I should know? Any places I shouldn’t touch?”
Mandy giggles.
Maahjabeen can’t wait any longer. Her mind has no space for the prospect of beautiful blonde Katrina wrapping herself around Pradeep and nursing him while Maahjabeen departs. But the jealousy she expects doesn’t appear. Only a tired gratitude for Katrina and a screaming terror of worry for Pradeep. She pushes herself through the plastic sheets of the clean room, determined to do this as fast as possible.
Katrina lies down beside Pradeep. “Come here, luv.” She wraps herself around him, drawing him over her like a blanket. His sandalwood scent, which she had found so attractive before, has now turned sour. She recalls their spider hunt in the bushes, when she had such a strong impulse to kiss him that she’d kissed Mandy instead. Now she has no desire for this ailing man. But isn’t this when he needs her affection the most? She turns her face and kisses his ear, softly, with real tenderness, and breathes through her nose into the nape of his neck. Somewhere deep inside he quivers but his limbs are so heavy they’re nearly rigid. Poor bloke. What had he and Maahjabeen done out there to deserve this?
Suddenly a sharp wrongness knifes through Katrina. Horror fills her. “Wait. Esquibel. I don’t think he’s breathing. I…”
Esquibel curses and with a strong hand pulls Pradeep away from Katrina, who shifts herself entirely off the cot onto the floor. Esquibel rolls him onto his back and straddles his prostrate form. She pulls her mask off and points at the Mayor, “Get that woman out of here!” before beginning a strenuous round of CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Ξ
An hour later, a muddy Amy finds Mandy at the camp’s kitchen tables, fixing a pot of tea. “Could I get one of those?” Amy has already cleaned her hands in the creek before returning to camp but she still pinches the handle of a mug daintily, afraid the mud on her sleeve might touch it.
“Of course. What’d you do? You look like something the cat dragged in.” Mandy fills Amy’s cup with steaming green tea.
“I was in your elevator shaft.”
“You were?” Now Amy has Mandy’s full attention. “What were you doing in there?”
“Figuring out how to get to the top.”
“Oh my god. Really? And did you? Oh, please… That would be so… I mean, why? Why do you even want to get to the top?”
“I’ve got to find Jay, Mandy. As soon as possible. We have no idea how much danger he might be in. He’s my responsibility. My grad student. But I can’t even cross the fucking village to get to the trailhead he took. They won’t let me. So I need to find another way into the interior. Or my time here will be an entire waste. No. Worse than that. I swear to god if I have to go back home without Jay or Pradeep I’ll just…” Amy suddenly dissolves in tears.
Mandy catches the blocky little woman in her arms and kisses the top of her head. “Oh… Oh, no… He’s fine. I’m sure of it. Jay’s like some super outdoorsman. Living outside here is a snap for someone like him. And Pradeep…” She has no words for his condition. Esquibel had barely been able to bring him back from the brink last time, and he hadn’t stabilized until Mandy had gone to find Maahjabeen, who raced back to wrap her beloved once more in her arms. Instead, she tries to change the subject with gossip. “So. Did you know Maahjabeen and Pradeep were a thing? Or did everyone know but me?”
That stops Amy’s tears. Her breath catches in her throat. “They what? What kind of thing? What are you talking about? No, honey. I’m pretty sure Pradeep is a virgin.”
“Well maybe that’s what Maahjabeen loves so much about him. His purity. Katrina said she found them one night last week. She was in his bed. Isn’t that sweet?”
“Really? Sweet, uh, yeah…” For some reason, Amy can’t process this new information. It’s just so unlikely. “I’m not sure if, I mean, I don’t know if Maahjabeen is really introductory girlfriend material, know what I mean? And why’d he hide it from me of all people? Just… Seriously? Are you sure?”
“Maahjabeen won’t let anyone else hold him. She said it’s their love that’s keeping him alive. And after he coded last time she let go we’re inclined to believe her.”
“I don’t know what to say. Pradeep. You secretive bastard. Ah… he couldn’t tell me because of her. She needed it to be a secret. Some weird Muslim thing, right? That’s it, isn’t it?”
Mandy shrugs and rests her forehead against Amy’s in sweet intimacy. “Who knows? Love works in mysterious ways.”
Amy shakes her head in wonder. “Well. I hope it works out. Their children would look like… movie stars, that’s for sure.”
“I know, right?” Mandy giggles and releases Amy.
“Thanks for that, dear one. And let me repay you by telling you how I think we can get to the top of the shaft.”
“Fuck yes! Oh, Amy, thank you so much! You have no idea how hard it’s been for me to figure out a safe way to the—”
“Well, don’t get too attached to that ‘safe’ idea.”
“Oh, crap. What is it?”
“I mean, it’s as safe as I can come up with. But it is like hundreds of meters straight up. There is no super safe way for people to go up and down that thing without like a professional construction crew. But ain’t none of us here engineers so we’ll do what we can.”
“Now I don’t know what to think.”
“Well. Let me just drink my tea and you get some caving clothes on. It’s easier to show you what I have in mind than tell you.”
“Kay kay. Meet you back here in five.”
Later, after all the descents and struggles through muddy tunnels, Mandy stands with Amy at the base of the shaft. It is no longer flooded, and when the water drained it took a lot of the ash and cinders with it, leaving a long black trail down to the concrete culvert and the sea cave. Now they can tell that beneath the blackened ashes that remain is a solid concrete floor to the shaft. But whatever anchor points Mandy had been trying to blindly find with her frozen feet a few days before are not there.
They drag the last intact limbs clear of the center of the floor and stare upward at the small dot of gray light far above. It looks impossible to Mandy, and nobody wants to get up there as bad as her. But it’s just so far.
“Tell me what you see.” Amy’s voice echoes in the shaft, a harsh reverberation off the concrete walls.
Mandy swings her phone’s light up the shaft. “Not much. Lots of vertical. No handholds. Uh… Tons of burn marks. Can I have a hint? What am I looking for here?”
“Okay. What are the walls made of?”
Mandy drops her light to eye level. She brushes her hand over the smooth blocks. “Yeah, okay, it’s only concrete here at the bottom. Then it’s, I don’t know, what is it up there? Clay? Rock?”
“It’s rock. Care for another hint?”
“Please.”
Amy silently points at the trail of ash and cinders at their feet, leading out of the shaft’s base into the tunnel.
“Uhh, neat.” Mandy turns away so Amy can’t see how irritated she is. “Maybe I’m just not as smart as everybody else here, okay, Amy? Maybe I don’t have all these spectacular doctorates from world-class programs so you’ll have to excuse me—”
“No, no. I’m not—You’re not… Sorry. I’m being too playfully obtuse. I was just standing where you are, looking up, cursing that little fucking hole in the top. Then I thought to myself: How did this shaft get made? They didn’t drill it. It’s not quite that regular.”
“I don’t know. How did all the other tunnels get made?”
Amy lifts her eyebrows and points once again at the trail of black slurry running out of view.
“It burned…?” Mandy scrunches up her face. “But that makes no sense. What burned? The rock?”
“No. Sorry, Mandy. I’ll stop playing games. It’s water. Water carved this shaft, and nearly all the tunnels we’ve seen in here. Now come here. Let me show you something else I found.”
Mandy is still mystified. Amy keeps telling her she’ll tell her what she means and then she just keeps adding more and more random details that make no sense. “Sure. Now what?’
Amy takes Mandy back into the tunnel, but before it reaches the junction with the passage that heads upwards to the Lisican village, Amy stops at an outcrop of rock. She points her light at a pair of rusted iron pipes that run vertically from ceiling to floor. “Listen.”
“Listen…?” Mandy wipes the pipe as clean as she can and then presses her ear against it. Liquid, and not a trickle. These old pipes are still functional.
“The Army Corps of Engineers must have been in here. These are probably drainage for some other chamber up above to keep it clear. I bet it empties into their culvert and then the sea cave. But look.” Amy pockets her phone and grasps a circular handle. Her forearm muscles bunch and she grunts. Then it turns.
After a few rotations the pipe closes off. Amy pulls Mandy to the wall beside her and points to a bypass pipe. Now the water shoots out its end, much more than a liter per second. It splashes onto the tunnel’s floor and runs down back toward the culvert.
Mandy looks at Amy, who has the most self-satisfied smile on her face of her life. But then her smile drops when she realizes that Mandy still doesn’t see what she means. “Oh. Right. So… Next step. Block the passage leading down to the culvert there with tarps and rocks, forming a plug. And then ta-daaa!” Amy spreads her hands wide. But Mandy still only glares at her. “Ah. I mean, of course, the final thing I still have to mention is that we’re floating on a raft. In the elevator shaft. And there’s nowhere for the water to go. Except up. We fill the shaft and ride it to the top!”
Now Mandy laughs. “Are you insane? I set the shaft on fire and now you’re going to flood it? Is this some kind of competition?”
Amy laughs too. “No! Think about it! I mean, it’s got its share of drawbacks, for sure. It’s not something we can do, well, probably more than once. And I have no idea how long it would take to fill it. A day or two? So that part stinks. I mean, there’s a lot wrong with the whole idea but I just can’t figure out how else to do it!”
“I asked Katrina if she’d fly the drone up the shaft and try to attach some cable or something up there.” Mandy shakes her head. “But she said the shaft is too narrow. She’d have to turn collision-avoidance off and then she said she wasn’t good enough to not crash manually into the walls.”
“Well and then what?” Amy grimaces. “Let’s say we’ve got like three hundred meters of twine dangling down to us. So? We don’t have more than a third of that distance in climbing rope. What else are we going to use? Dental floss? I mean, I could manufacture some rope from the long-fiber creekside plants but that would take days if not weeks. We need to find Jay now.”
Mandy thinks about sitting in a raft for hours on end as the water level slowly rises toward the top. Just her and Amy and her weather station. But it wouldn’t even have any weight requirements this time. She could load it up with all the best gear. Hygrometer. Full windspeed rotor. She could even bring spare batteries and just hook them up in sequence. And she wouldn’t have to check on it more than once every few days. “Wait. Ugh. I should have asked him when I had the… Ah, hell.”
“What is it?”
“Jay! When he got trapped in the village with Triquet and Miriam he said that one day he went with the villagers to see the top of the tunnel, where the fire came from. And I was like, ‘Aha! The villagers can lead me to the spot from above. He said they climbed over the edge of the cliffs and came down to the top of this shaft on the ocean side. And I was going to have him show me so I could start making that my route but then we stopped talking to the villagers. And then I forgot with all the other madness going on. So now we’re all buddies again but he’s gone. Crap!”
“Well, still. That solves your problem, doesn’t it? You can go ask the villagers to lead you to any spot you want on the cliffs. It just needs to be high and like securely-placed, right?”
“Yeah, but…” Mandy sighs. “I think I still have your problem. Not that they hate me per se…”
“Oh, thanks.”
“No! It’s just that they can shut off the village to us whenever they like and I need regular access to my weather station. We can’t depend on them. We need our own way in.”
Amy nods. “So… What do you think we could make the raft of?”
“Maybe we could use Maahjabeen’s kayaks.”
“Yeah, and maybe Brad Pitt will be my sex slave.” Amy laughs in such hilarious disbelief that Mandy starts to as well.
Ξ
Pradeep twists and turns on the bed, fighting for his life. He thrashes, the cords in his neck straining. He drums the back of his head against the pillow, fighting to rid himself of this horrid infestation.
But he knows that in reality he does none of these things. His body remains slack, eyes glazed. The fight is entirely internal. Nobody can see how hard he struggles.
He knows he is about to die. He tries to find peace. Maahjabeen pressed against him gives indescribable relief. After his unending struggle against the cold pit of mud within him he is almost ready to surrender to oblivion. He has gotten to love the most beautiful woman on Earth. What more is there, really, after that? It is such an impossibility for a kasmaalam nerd like himself to have loved such an angel. Death is really the only possible thing next. But his regret will not let him go. Regret for not knowing her better, touching this unbelievable skin just a bit more. Regret that they will not grow old together, that he will not be there for her when she will need him. That is such a distasteful thought that it gets him to fight once more against the pit.
The little bit of his brain that remains working now puzzles out a possible way to combat the pit of mud. Within himself, where he feels the edges of it, he has drawn a ring of fire around it, stopping its slow seeping spread up into the rest of him. The fire is love and anger and every scrap of his survival instinct that he can muster. Now he has the fire burn down, all around the sides of the pit. He will excise it entirely with fire. He will find its bottom and burn beneath that and then isolate this cauterized pit of mud within him like a giant bloated splinter. Once it is encased entirely in fire then he can remove it. He can take himself back.
Burn… Burn… He doesn’t know what it is he burns here in the abstract internal world of his spirit. It is certainly some essential part of himself. Tissues… or memories… Perhaps he is destroying himself to save himself. Yes. Like a fever. Without fever he will die.
Why was this done to him? What did Pradeep do to deserve this? They say a fox bit him in the back, which makes no sense. And now he is dying of, what… rabies? Is that what this is?
It’s all muddled. He can’t keep straight any of the details they’ve told him. Disjointed phrases keep circling in his head. He realizes how slowly they revolve. Too slow. The cold mud is winning again. Where is his fire? Has it gone out?
No, it has just disappeared deep into the black firmament of his mind, still surrounding the pit of mud as it crackles its way downward. Now Pradeep feels an attenuated pain, as if someone strikes his spinal cord like a piano note. This time he grunts and he knows Maahjabeen hears it. Pain. Yes, pain is good. Pain is life.
She looks at him, her eyes ravaged from so many tears. But she is not hopeless. So he cannot be. He fights the words out, the corners of his mouth twitching upward bravely. “I am… not… dead.”
Ξ
“Ventilation ain’t your problem, Kula. It’s got to be humidity. I mean, this is like fog grand central. Here.” Jay holds up the frosty bud, its fan leaves curling, nearly black. “Look at the cola, dude. Smell it. You got to harvest now or shit’s gonna mold out on you.”
Kula, the Lisican gardener, stands at his shoulder smoking her joint. Her face is seamed with a perpetual smile and her black curls are a frizzy mass. She grunts and waters a row of lettuces with a cracked plastic watering can. “Bimeby Jay help. Wit Kula, yaw?”
Her pidgin is surprisingly understandable. Jay has no idea what that indicates about the island, or, more importantly, his safety here. Who taught her to speak English? Where did she get all this gear? And what about all this weed? Not that there aren’t a wide variety of other fruits and vegetables in these planters. Jay wonders why Kula doesn’t cultivate her garden on the surface. “This can’t be the best spot to grow on the island. You need more sun, sister.”
Kula claps her hand on his shoulder. She’s been friendly from the get go. She pushes her cigar at him again and he takes a big wet toke. Very grassy weed. Probably not too much in the way of THC but who knows about its terpenes. Once they get settled he’ll bust out his homegrown Kush and blow Kula’s goddamn mind.
Rows of raised beds, built from raw saplings bound together with frayed nylon straps, have been filled with a dark loamy soil that probably came from the redwoods above. And it looks like a lot of starters are already pushing through the surface. Her spring plantings are a success. What day is it? Like mid-April? He takes out his phone. The date is April 20.
“Yoooooo! Look at that, Kula! 420! 420! We hit it just right!”
But of course she has no idea what he’s talking about. She just gabbles something he doesn’t understand, much like he’s gabbling something at her. But that’s cool. They’re high. And hidden. And safe. “Four twenty…!” Jay leans out the gun emplacement’s curving opening, shouting over the open ocean far below. His words are immediately snatched by the wind. But he doesn’t care. He laughs, falling back. “Hey… Maybe you can help us, Kula. If you know like all the plants here, maybe you can like, I mean, we’re sort of doing a survey, you know. Flora and fauna. Maybe you could like help us identify a whole bunch of genera.”
“Eh. Eh.” Kula nods vigorously. She pulls something up by the roots, like a stringy white carrot, and pushes it into Jay’s hands. “Takee boss. Jay good good. Je rotkvica, yass.”
“Okay. If you say so…” Jay brushes the rest of the soil off and nibbles at its end. It crunches between his teeth and releases a clean watery taste across his tongue. It’s good. “Right on. This would be so good in a salad. Man, I’m gonna make the best fucking salads. Any olive oil and balsamic here by any chance?”
But Kula is back to her watering and weeding, talking to herself in a satisfied sing-song, the words a jumble of English and Lisican and who knows what else. What an odd duck. For one thing, she’s fat. Jay hasn’t seen any fat Lisicans before. Her skin is bad and she’s wearing an old hoodie with HOLLISTER stenciled across the chest. Her formerly-white Reeboks are split along each side. Her hair is lank and greasy. She is obviously suffering the effects of prolonged contact with the modern world. Now she looks just like any other shut-in anywhere in the world. Just get her a laptop and a VPN and she’d never see another live human ever again.
He wanders away from the plants for the first time to a dark corner recessed in the bare rock. He expected to find some kind of rat’s nest of bedding but instead he finds a neatly cut-out rectangle in the rock that runs as a passage to a contained chamber, far enough back to protect its occupants from explosions in the gun emplacement. This must have been command and control back here. The room is only like five by six meters, with seven wide ventilation shafts in the ceiling. Since its abandonment, these holes have allowed in trickles of detritus and the shafts are no longer clear; they only let in a bit of diffracted daylight.
Beneath the seven holes sit undisturbed conical piles of dirt surrounded by a scattering of leaves. “Ooo, creepy. Looks like some kind of… crypt in here yo.”
Kula, behind him, giggles. “Atsa sugoya eet ká. Yass, Jay. Me an me.” She takes him by the hand and leads him to a flattened and stained Navy cot mattress against the far wall. Ah. The rat’s nest.
“Uh… Not here looking for love, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m a grad student. Not a… I mean, not that grad students don’t get down. It’s just… That’s real flattering, Kula, you know what I mean? But, uh, I’m kind of in the middle of something right now.”
Kula giggles at him some more, hooking her fingers into his pockets. She snares a wad of leaves he collected and she frowns at them. “Me and me and Jay make three…” But her voice falters, looking at him with concern.
“What? Those are some rhododendron variety I found down in the river valley. You know the one? Over by the…? Well you got your tunnel-mouth tribe, down in the southeast corner of the island. You know, the one with Morska Vidra? And then there’s the bad guy village. Somewhere deeper in? Yeah. That valley.”
“Morska Vidra…” Kula’s nose twitches like a rabbit’s. She wipes it with the back of her hand and sneers. She lists off a bunch of other names. The only one Jay catches is “Wetchie-ghuy…”
“Yeah. That’s the one. That’s where I got the leaves. There.” He points where his internal compass guesses southeast is.
“Yass. Me and Jay znamo.”
“So I was wondering if you could help me with the classifica—”
But Kula hisses and throws the leaves on the ground. They are unclean to her or something. Then she stiffens. She casts a devilish grin sideways at Jay. “Jidadaa.”
Jay just nods stupidly, wondering what she means. Her change of mood is so mercurial he can’t follow it. Kula crosses back to the entrance to the chamber but a low black oblong against the wall to his right catches Jay’s attention. It is a decades-old military radio. And its power is on. A bank of batteries are connected and several wires run up one of the ventilation shafts to the surface. Jay peers at it closely. Its glowing analog dials and needles twitch slightly, picking up some signal. He squints at its frontpiece, finding the volume knob. He turns it, hearing static and garbled voices and nothing more.
He turns, calling out, “Where’d you get this, Kula…?” And then the words die in his throat. Someone new enters, slight and tall for a Lisican. Young, like twenty at the most. Her face is more pale and narrow. Her eyes are gray and sad. She is singing. A Lisican girl is singing, a soft wordless ballad. When she sees Jay she stops.
“Jidadaa.” Kula points to her. “Jay.”
Jidadaa just looks at Jay, her face neutral, hands hiding each other, lower lip glistening in the dim light.
“Hey, what’s up?” His greeting feels so awkward and paltry he resolves to do better. “Jay Darmer. Uh. Nice to meet you.” It’s clear what he’s looking at here, a mother and daughter. And now the whole story makes sense. Kula fell in love with some mystery military dude. They had a baby. She had to hide. He still provides for her somehow? They’re in touch by radio? “I like your song.”
Jidadaa’s eyes twitch and a tiny smile teases the corner of her mouth. She is angular with a prominent nose and wavy brown hair, but her mother’s slyness is still in her, around the broad cheekbones and shifting eyes. She edges her way into the chamber, beginning to sing again. There is a coiled excitement in her that makes Jay think she’s about to spring some surprise on him. But she looks so harmless. How bad can it be?
Jidadaa hugs herself in her stained hoodie, one palm running up and down the other arm. Her song seems to be nonsense syllables in a simple scale, like when someone plays around on a piano without knowing how to bring it to life. Jay starts adding his own notes to her song and she stops, clapping a hand over her mouth. Now she is quite close to him. She sticks out her hand.
“Uh, hi.” Jay and Jidadaa shake hands, like business partners.
Ξ
When the vessels of your body are empty, they collapse, the walls sucking up wetly against each other. Your esophagus doesn’t stay open when not in use. It rests flat like a bike tire’s uninflated tube.
It is in such an evacuated space that Pradeep now finds his body. The walls of the pit cling to him, robbing him of sight and sense and air. Freezing mucus and mud coat his skin, leaching the last of his vitality away. He has finally lost his battle against the curse within him and slid down, down, down… For too long he’s been thrashing in a panic to get out. Now stars are blooming in his vision and he knows that oxygen isn’t getting to his brain. This is the end. And he can’t feel Maahjabeen’s embrace any more.
The stars cover his vision and the world goes white.
Pradeep kneels on cold flagstones. He is bent into a deep prostrate pose, like he’s doing yoga or praying to Maahjabeen’s god. He looks up, surveying a space filled with light, infinitely wide. Is that where he is? Has he crossed some threshold into the divine?
People at the end of their lives talk about letting go of their earthly cares. But Pradeep burns with regrets. A coruscating waterfall of hopes and plans and memories rushes through him, filling him with an unbearable ache of lost opportunity. He was by every measure too young. And his life was just about to get really really good.
Footsteps echo in the distance. He turns, trying to locate their source, but he can’t find anyone approaching from the glare on the horizon from any direction.
He opens his mouth to call out but he realizes he would only do so as a function of his anxiety. What? Oh, fucking great. Not even in death does he escape it? Bloody hell. It has become too much a part of who he is for him to leave it behind. Anxiety is in his soul.
So this is his soul. It did survive biological death. Fascinating. And how many of the other stories are true? He recalls the five layers of a human form in the Taittiriya Upanishad. The body on the outside, then biological energy, mental energy, intuition and wisdom, and deep inside is his core essence, a seed of eternal bliss. Well let us get on with it. I am ready to shed the outer layers to find my blissful center, because I certainly do not feel it now.
Remembering the lessons of his boyhood, Pradeep sits cross-legged in a lotus pose and rests his wrists on his knees. He closes his eyes, or whatever passes for eyes here, and allows his mind to calm so he can more properly listen.
He hears the footsteps again. He had thought that whoever was coming would inevitably reach him here but perhaps that isn’t true. Perhaps they’re looking for him in this bright directionless place and can’t find him. Perhaps they’re lost.
Pradeep’s mouth opens to call out. But then his anxiety, disguised as common sense, reminds him that he may not want who-or-what-ever it is in this unknown place to find him. He may want to remain hidden. At least until he knows more of who it is.
His eyes snap open, anxiety building toward panic. Oh, he just had to introduce the idea of extra-dimensional terrors into his list of neuroses, didn’t he? Now how will he ever have a moment’s rest again? He takes a shuddering breath of sharply clean air and tries to master himself. Come on, Pradeep. You can do this. You have no choice. Face your future.
With an assertive impulse Pradeep rises to his feet. “I am here,” he calls out in a ringing voice. Too loud. But it had sounded resolute. Liking that, he stands taller.
The footsteps grow louder, seeming to come from all around. Then they resolve into a shadow, a dark stain in the glare directly ahead. A hunched figure waddles toward him. It is an old man with a brown face, bits of feather and fur hanging from his fringes. He grunts at Pradeep then mutters in a sing-song Pradeep almost recognizes. This isn’t who he expected at all.
The man stops in front of Pradeep and scowls up at him, still muttering. Pradeep realizes it is the language he’s been hearing the last couple weeks. “You’re Lisican.”
The man holds up a leather loop in one hand and turns a glittering stare onto Pradeep. “Ja sam Wetchie-ghuy.”
Chapter 30 – The Cigar
July 22, 2024
Thanks for joining us for the second volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this episode:
30 – The Cigar
The next morning, Triquet sits cross-legged in their tent in a pink rayon frock dress from 1975, surrounded by stacks of neatly folded clothes and trays filled with make-up and beauty products. They sing to themself in a soft alto, channeling Beth Gibbons from Portishead: “Cause I’m still feeling lonely… Feel so unholy… Cause the child rose as light… tried to reveal what I could feel… And this loneliness… It just won’t leave me alone… It just won’t leave me—”
“Hello? Triq?” Mandy’s head leans into view, long black hair hanging down like a flag. Triquet would kill to have hair like that. This mop of fine, frizzled pale nonsense they were born with has been the bane of every costume and incarnation they ever tried.
“Present and accounted for. Come on in here, Mandy girl.”
“Oh. Uh… I mean, okay. It’s not a big… I just wanted to ask— I’m just taking kind of a survey…”
“Ask what you like. Sit yourself down and I’ll do your nails.” Triquet takes a deep breath to prepare themself, feeling old and wise. Mandy’s voice has a neurotic edge that promises trouble. Maybe with a bit of kindness Triquet can help.
Mandy crawls in. “Oh, wow… I haven’t seen…” The inside of the small tent is crowded with items, all ordered in their places. The sleeping bag and pillow are rolled neatly in the corner and Triquet sits on what looks like an ornate prayer rug. Scarves and small tapestries hang from the roof’s seams and LED candles of a variety of pastel hues illuminate the corners to give the interior a soft, homey feel.
“Here. Sit here, facing me. Nice and close.” Mandy dutifully scoots in, cross-legged, til her knees bump into theirs. Triquet holds Mandy’s childlike hands, smiling at her with warmth. “Oh, poor baby’s got a chill. Got to warm you up.” Triquet pulls out an orange shawl they knit last winter from a thick acrylic yarn, and drapes it about Mandy’s shoulders.
The girl’s lower lip still trembles. Her eyes remain haunted. “Thanks. That’s so nice. I just—” Mandy’s breath catches in her throat. “I just wanted to make sure… Just asking everybody… I mean, I know people must blame me for Jay being gone…”
“What? Whoa. No. You?” Triquet’s parental smile falters and their face splits into a disbelieving grimace. “What an odd idea. What does his disappearance have to do with you?”
But Mandy has worked it all out in her head. “I forced him to deal with that shaft when he didn’t want to, and for far too long, and I was going to force him today to do it again, so he obviously left to avoid me and then things just spiraled out of control. So…”
“To avoid you? Seriously?” Triquet unwraps a travel packet of wet wipes and cleans Mandy’s hands with them. Ye gods, how dirty they all are. This will need a second wipe. “Oh, honey-bunches-of-oats, I hope you take this in the best way possible but this is all beginning to sound like a pretty serious case of main character syndrome. Know what I mean?”
“No, this isn’t about me, but it is about what I did to—”
“What you did? Please. Okay, will you bet me? Like if you win, I’ll give you a full makeover and if I win you give me one of those amazing massages? Please. Cause this is the easiest bet ever. I can one hundred percent guarantee you that you, young and brilliant Mandy Hsu, are one of the last things rattling around in Jay’s brain. Think for just a second who we’re talking about here.”
“It isn’t main character syndrome,” Mandy protests sullenly, holding out her fingers as Triquet begins to trim her ragged cuticles with a pair of nail scissors, “if it’s just my idiocy that gets people to endanger themselves all the time. Again and again. I mean, he might be dead! We don’t even know! They said nobody’s ever come back from across the river! Not in like six generations! Katrina asked the villagers as many ways as she could!”
“Mandy. You’ll have to sit still or I can’t guarantee the quality of my work. Please. I’m an artist.”
Mandy takes a deep breath and stops fidgeting, watching Triquet work with minute precision on her nails.
“I think…” Triquet murmurs, “Jay has a plan of his own. Some rare plant he’s looking for or some wild theory he needs to test. He didn’t go just on a whim, or in reaction to what any of us might have said to him yesterday. This is all on Jay, that crazy bastard. But I will bet you he’s still alive. Don’t worry about that. He may be a goofball, but there’s something pretty resilient about him. He reminds me of the stereotypical American G.I. of World War Two. The Germans called him undisciplined and independent. He wouldn’t even stand up straight! But they learned the hard way that there’s something more important than looking good on parade. Jay’s got that. Sure he doesn’t look like much, but I bet in a pinch he’d be the first person you’d want by your side.”
Mandy finally drops her shoulders. “I guess you’re right. I just feel so awful about it! And I don’t know what to do with all this guilt! Every time something bad happens! I just get manic. I mean, what am I supposed to do?”
“Do? I don’t know, do what you did with Pradeep. You and Esquibel have been doing a great job with him. Or are you somehow responsible for his mystery ailment as well?”
“Yeesh. I feel so bad for that poor guy. I wish I could help him more but every time I put my hands on him I can’t help it. I turn green. He has something seriously wrong. Like way deep inside.”
“But it isn’t your fault.”
“No. Of course it isn’t.”
“And Maahjabeen going out to sea isn’t your fault.”
Mandy opens her mouth, then closes it. She finally allows, “I’ve learned that if I say that it was anything other than Maahjabeen’s own choice, she might physically attack me.”
“And we would cheer her on. Have you always been like this?”
Mandy nods. “I was a pretty difficult older sister to my brother, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t let him have a thought of his own until he was like ten. I always need everything just so.”
“Control freak.”
“The freakiest.”
“Okay. And now finally…”
Mandy gives Triquet her full attention. She appreciates the care they’ve shown her, even if it leads to difficult conversations about herself spoken with a bluntness she finds shocking. “Yes?”
Triquet holds up two bottles of nail polish. “Green or orange? They’re both gels and they both work with your coloring.”
Ξ
Alonso and Flavia sit side by side in their camp chairs. A bit of ragged sun keeps peeking through the cloud cover, warming the air. Flavia compiles her latest version of Plexity’s user interface and watches the progress bar slowly advance across her screen. How much of her life has she dedicated to watching that bar? Years? At least. “And… done. Try it now.”
Their laptops are linked. Alonso opens the program and tries out her changes. “Wait. Where did my options go on this screen?”
“I wanted to make them consistent across all the screens so you can find them under the…”
“Ah. Everything’s in the settings now. Not sure I like that. Yes, it’s more organized but the user will need to take two extra steps to access them. I’m actually wondering, since the collections are all so context-specific, if we might make the intake options part of the collection process. Like a prompt screen before they begin, to reset their parameters for each input. Because what we are learning…”
“Well, sure we could do that, if you want to take fifteen years to finish all your collections…”
“…is that our collectors are spending as much time fiddling with the framework as they are with the actual upload of data.”
Flavia sighs. An inevitable crisis faces Plexity. Perhaps this is finally the time to bring it up with Alonso. “Well. Maybe slow is better after all. Because, you do realize, signore Dottore, that we will never collect even ten percent of the samples you want from the interior of the island. Not in the next four weeks, at least.”
Alonso remains stubbornly silent. His hand finally opens and rotates, as if to say, perhaps/perhaps not.
“Listen, Alonso. You haven’t been in there but the rest of us have. And the idea you have, before you ever spent time in there, is too simple. This island is huge. It’s like—like I don’t know. The size of Venice. You would need so much time to fully explore each and every canyon and hilltop in there. There is no possible way in the four weeks we have left. Especially with hostile natives.”
“If they weren’t so hostile we would already be halfway done.”
This statement is so obviously false Flavia isn’t certain how to respond. She leans back with an irritated sigh. “No. No, you don’t get to blame your unrealistic goals on them. Look. You need to step back from this and look at it better. I know this was like your pacifier when you were locked away but you need to think of it as a funder would. Or a school oversight committee. Think, Alonso. What would you say if someone proposed to cover like twenty square kilometers of an island with a small team in two months?”
“If the concept was sound, I would support it with all my heart.”
“But the concept isn’t sound. The logistics are completely off. I don’t know. I’ve been wondering if there is a way we could get the islanders to help us with collecting but it seems like we’re moving farther away from that, instead of closer. And we only have four extra readers anyway. That’s the real bottleneck.”
“But I’m counting on you. You said your machine learning would help. The automated algorithms. What happened to that?”
Now Flavia is affronted. Instead of acknowledging his own shortcomings, he’s attacking her? “No, that has nothing to do with it. They are already saving you so much time and effort. But they can’t crawl around in the woods on their hands and knees. For that, you still need people. A lot of people. And a lot of readers.”
“So what do you propose?” Alonso has never felt such immense irritability. This—this nerd seems to do nothing but complain. She lives to point out flaws in everyone else’s work and ideas. “I’m beginning to feel that if things were up to you, Flavia, nothing would ever get done.”
“Nothing would ever—? I built you a working fucking prototype of Plexity in two weeks, you ungrateful asshole. And now you are being an even bigger asshole, thinking you can push everyone to do this impossible amount of work in the next four weeks. If I was in charge of your grant application, it would be denied. I wouldn’t even read past the first page. You need to re-focus on something you can actually accomplish here. Like just the lagoon and beach. It is reasonably cut off from—”
“Reasonably cut off? Think about what you just said, Flavia. There is no boundary for ‘reasonability’ in Plexity. It needs to be a hermetic, enclosed system for us to achieve the proper baseline for the program. It is making me wonder if you truly grasp what it is we are doing here.”
“Now don’t you talk down to me, you boomer.”
Alonso sits up straight. “I am Gen X, I will have you know.”
“Boomer is an attitude, not an age. Just do the math, if you’re such an amazing data scientist. I would say we still have 18 square kilometers of work to accomplish. In 29 days. Let’s see. That’s almost 621 square meters per day, or the area of a small house.”
“Divided by just those four readers and that’s only 150 or so. Ha. The math didn’t work out in your favor, did it?” Flavia only frowns at him. “Look, I know it will be hard. I know we don’t have nearly enough time. If I had written the grant I would have set the initial mission for two years here.” This provokes an involuntary shiver of revulsion from Flavia. “But we only have eight weeks. So we shoot for the stars. I am convinced, as we speak, that Jay is somewhere in the interior making a huge number of collections.”
“He didn’t take a reader.”
“Amy says he doesn’t need one. He will bring back hundreds of samples at least. And with his scouting report we will be able to decide how to approach the rest of the island. I am glad he took the initiative. We have been moving too slowly.”
Flavia just stares at him, then shakes her head in distaste. “Men.”
Ξ
Esquibel exits the bunker, stiff-legged and squinting. She realizes it’s the first time she’s been outside the clean room in nearly two days. The camp is gray. There’s a ground fog still at the edges of the camp under the ferns, but a sea breeze is beginning to riffle the air and chase it away. She shivers. “Doesn’t it ever get actually warm here?”
The only one here to answer her rhetorical question is Katrina at the kitchen tables. “Yeh, why couldn’t we come in the summer? I bet it’s pretty nice.”
But Amy, returning from the creek with a wash basin, disagrees. “I bet it’s more like San Francisco summers here. Temperature inversion. Howling fog. No, I bet this is the nicest weather it gets. Remember how Alonso said it’s under a cloud cover nearly every day of the year?”
“Well, then, next time can we please study a tropical island in the Indian Ocean?” Esquibel crosses to Katrina, who hands her a mug of hot water. “Ah, thank you. I am freezing.”
“How’s the patient?” Katrina stands before a hot pan, making a tottering stack of pancakes. She puts three on a plate for Esquibel and hands her a fork and a packet of honey.
Amy pauses drying the dishes to hear Esquibel’s answer.
“I don’t…” Esquibel drops her head, suddenly weary. “I need better diagnostics. Actual labs. This is some weird island bug that I haven’t seen before. Primary neurotoxic activity with secondary cardiovascular effects. And he just isn’t responding to any of the treatments yet. I’ve been going very slow, only trying things with few contra-indications and minimal side effects. Gram-positive antibiotics. Gabapentin. Nortriptyline. But anything else I try moving forward will have serious risks. I don’t like having to make blind guesses. I’m not used to it.”
“Is Pradeep in pain?” Amy brushes a tear away and goes back to wiping down the plates. “Is he stable?”
Esquibel shrugs. “He hasn’t coded again. But sometimes it seems he is getting close. And his breathing can get very weak. I gave him CPR like three times last night when it seemed he stopped.”
“Jesus.” Katrina kneels beside Esquibel and hugs her. “What a hero. You need to get some sleep.”
“Yes. Just a bit of fresh air and a bathroom break and then a quick nap. Mandy has instructions to wake me if there is any change in his condition.”
“What if…?” Flavia trails off, her mind racing. “Alonso, what if we took a Dyson reader blood sample from Pradeep? Perhaps it could find a virus or bacteria that isn’t supposed to be there.”
Alonso just stares at her. “Huh. I don’t know if we have a control… Has anyone put their own sample into a reader yet?”
Esquibel shrugs. “I don’t know what good that will do anyone. It would only be able to tell us like what the molar weight of a viral factor would be and maybe whether it’s gram negative or positive. Without a database of already known pathogens, we wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it.”
“Well, does it have any human source data?” Alonso asks Flavia. “The Dyson readers came pre-loaded with all kinds of databases of known organic…” His voice tapers off as he queries Plexity about its own capabilities.
Flavia shrugs. “I haven’t looked. There’s been no reason.”
Alonso reads aloud, “Chinese Female Proteomic snapshot, Liaoning Prefecture, Age 29. Chinese Male. Age 33. Female, 22, Hebei. There’s hundreds. Huh. Who knew? And why are they all Chinese? But I don’t know if there’s any kind of directory or…”
Flavia’s fingers fly on her keyboard. “Where did you find that?”
“Under Miscellaneous. Remember? We created that folder for all the bells and whistles we thought we wouldn’t use.”
“As long as the data is there, I can create a query that will find what we want.” Flavia is back in her element. Actual concrete inputs that she can work with. She unzips a whole hidden database of human-derived samples. Columns of newly-liberated data scroll down her laptop. “Wow. It is a lot. Scattershot DNA. Proteomics profiles. Microbiomes. I will need some time. Sort through all the garbage. Figure out what the best lexical strategy is.”
Mandy appears in the doorway of the bunker, on wobbly knees. She leans against the frame.
“What is it?” Esquibel stands immediately, putting her plate on the table. “Is he in trouble?”
Mandy holds up a weak hand. “No. He’s fine. Just me. I fainted. I…” Mandy takes a couple steps, then doubles over and grabs her knees. “I was just trying to offer a little support, you know. Just hold his feet like I do for Alonso, but wow. Maahjabeen just found me on the floor. She said she’d heard me collapse. She’s in with him now. I just need some…” Esquibel wraps an arm of support around Mandy as she sags against her. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him, Skeebee. But whatever’s stuck in him, it’s awful.”
Ξ
“Pradeep.” Maahjabeen waits for Mandy to depart then she kneels beside his cot and kisses his slack mouth. “Darling. Mahbub.”
But he doesn’t respond.
She doesn’t care. She doesn’t care anymore who might see her, who might learn their secret. He is gravely ill. The only man who has ever truly loved her, the only man whom she has ever truly loved. He is only twenty-four and he has a whole life ahead of him. She kisses him again and rests her head on his hollowed-out chest, a mewling cry escaping her.
Maahjabeen prays silently, fiercely, calling on Allah to bring His grace back to Pradeep. She lifts the cold brown hands, kisses every knuckle. A panic rises in her. He shouldn’t still be on this island. He should be on a medical evacuation helicopter. He should be getting wheeled into a state-of-the-art hospital, surrounded by trained staff and beeping machines. Instead he rests on a makeshift cot in a room made of plastic sheets. And they are only waiting.
What bit him? Maahjabeen hasn’t seen any sign, in all her time on the beach, of any of the spiny urchins or anemones that could have caused this. He didn’t ever cry out. There was no point where he appeared to get injured. He just fell asleep on the beach after his panic attack. Maybe this was part of that somehow. Stress could do strange things to people. She knew a girl in college who studied so hard she held the muscles in her neck rigid for too long and caused stress fractures in her cervical vertebra. She literally studied so hard she broke her neck. Crazy things could happen. Or maybe it was intentional. Maybe it all started that night before, with the Lisicans sharing their seafood catch and Pradeep retreating into his tent. Maybe they had secretly drugged him somehow? Then that led to his paranoia and a reaction to it. He somehow knew all along. And now he’s dying…
Or maybe he just ate a handful of bad berries.
“We don’t know. Darling, we just don’t know…” His eyelids flutter so she kisses them again and chafes his hands. Now his breath deepens. Maahjabeen cries out and gathers him in her arms. She keeps chattering at him, making pillow talk in Arabic.
Pradeep pulls his eyes open. They are watery, distant, covered in a milky film. His hand trembles in her grip. He tries to speak but his jaw slides sideways and drool drips from his lip. “Eyyyyhhh…”
“Pradeep. I’m here, my dearest. I will always be here.”
His face slowly screws up into a trembling scowl. His lips purse. “Mock. Jah. Bean.” Then his neck can no longer hold his head and his forehead falls against her shoulder.
A long moment later, after a trickle of warmth has flowed into him, he pushes his face up against hers, then pulls back to look her in the eyes. He says it for the very first time. “I… love you.”
“I love you, too, you amazing man. And you will get better.”
“Just having you here…” His back engages and he sits up a bit. The film over his eyes starts to clear. “I am not so cold. Because you are here… and I love you. It’s the cold, Maahjabeen. That’s what… is killing me.”
“I will never let you get cold. Ever again.” Maahjabeen opens her jacket and pulls him into it, nestling him against her warm skin. She rolls him back onto the cot, cooing. Then she turns, to place herself beside him.
And that’s when she sees Esquibel standing in the entrance of the clean room, frozen in shock, hands parting the plastic sheets. Maahjabeen has no idea how long she has been standing there. She doesn’t know what she heard. Ah, well. Inshallah. What’s done is done. The important part is that being here helps Pradeep. She nods at the doorway. “Come. Doctor Daine. He is conscious.”
“Yes…” Esquibel moves decisively into the room and sanitizes her hands. She puts on a mask and nitrile gloves, then places a hand on Maahjabeen’s shoulder. “Please. I need to inspect him.”
“I cannot let go.” Maahjabeen’s eyes flash protectively. “My warmth is what is keeping him awake. He just told me.”
Esquibel pauses only half a breath before shaking her head to clear it, to strip this salacious scene of all its implications and to move forward with the new information alone, just as any trauma care doctor must do. Data is data right now. It can be a soap opera later. She puts a stethoscope against Pradeep’s neck, to hear it slow and turgid through his carotid. But as she listens it seems to deepen in volume and capacity, steadying. Huh. Perhaps the Tunisian siren is right. Well. It is nice to see her care for someone, even if it is a shock to see the two of them like this. “Pradeep…?” She gets down into his field of view. His eyes are open, dark and staring at the floor. His trembling arms disappear around Maahjabeen inside her jacket. What in the world. “Are you with us?”
“Hello… Doctor…” Pradeep’s voice is a ragged whisper. “You have to… help me fight this.”
“Yes. Good. That is the plan. We are both fighting together, yes? Can you tell me what it is we are fighting, though?”
“It’s down here…” Pradeep pushes the heel of one hand against the top of his pubis bone, just below his navel. He writhes upon making contact, twisting in Maahjabeen’s embrace. “Aaaugh…”
“La, la. Shh.” She soothes him, drawing him in again. Her eyes catch on Esquibel’s wondering stare and flicker defiantly, then soften into helplessness.
Esquibel’s own gaze melts and she puts a loving hand alongside Maahjabeen’s face. Their secret is out. Good for them. Two lovely idols, they are. And besides, their NDAs will keep the secret theirs. Now it is just between the Muslim girl and her god and Esquibel has an atheist’s impatience with the significance of that.
Pradeep settles, Maahjabeen replacing the pressure of his hand with the fullness of her hip, solid against his belly. Her voluptuous warmth soothes him and he releases a groan.
“Lower intestine?” Esquibel wonders aloud. “Digestive? Would you say it is digestive what you are experiencing?”
Pradeep shakes his head no. “Forgot I even had… an appetite. No. That’s all vanished. It’s just… this pit…”
“My guess has been neurological, from your symptoms. Have you ever suffered nerve pain or any nerve conditions before?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Just if you have a point of reference. Neuralgia doesn’t all feel like hitting funny bones. There’s impinging pain, like when a muscle entraps a nerve, or when you get a kink in your neck, or really nasty trigeminal pain from teeth. It can be burning or itching or sharp stabbing. Would any of those apply to how you feel?”
Pradeep shakes his wobbling head no. “More like… I’m being… pulled down… into the cold pit.”
“How cold? Are you going numb?” Esquibel, crouching beside him on the balls of her feet, pivots so she can grab his leg. She hits his patellar tendon below the kneecap with the edge of her stethoscope and is encouraged to see his reflex work properly. She takes off his shoe. “Tell me if you can sense this.” She softly pinches his big toe. “Can you feel anything?”
“Uhh…” Pradeep frowns. “Your hand on my heel?”
She squeezes his toe more firmly. “Yes. My hand is on your heel. How about anything else?” She pinches the meat of his toe.
Pradeep’s face collapses with anxiety. “That’s my toe, isn’t it? Why can’t I feel my toe?”
Esquibel takes off his sock and tries the other toes on his foot. First she runs the cold surface of the stethoscope across them but he doesn’t react at all. Then she pinches each of them.
“No! No! What happened to my toes?” Pradeep buries his face in Maahjabeen’s neck. She holds him tight and stares at Esquibel with urgent need.
Esquibel replaces Pradeep’s sock and shoe then gently pulls one of his hands away from Maahjabeen and pokes at his fingertips.
“Ow. Okay. I can feel my fingertips. Just my toes then. My poor toes. They’ve been… in the pit too long. You got to…” He shakes his head, the image of the endless mud overpowering what he sees with his eyes. “Nngh. You got to get me out.”
Esquibel goes back to his legs. She runs her hands up his sciatic nerve, rolling him onto his side. She pulls down his pants and tracks it into the base of his spine, directly above the girdle of his hips. With an inhaled hiss of disquiet, she takes out her light to more closely view what she has found there.
“What?” Maahjabeen heard her hiss and fears what it could mean. “What is it?”
“Right at his lowest vertebra, like lumbar five here. A pattern of dots. And now they are inflamed. And here. They look like this.”
Esquibel takes a photo and holds her phone up for Maahjabeen to see. It is the outline of an animal’s head, a tight constellation of puncture wounds in the small of his back. Each of them have grown angry and infected, connecting to each other in the vague outlines of a cave painting. It is unmistakably the head of a fox.
Ξ
“Ta-daaa…” Katrina kneels before Alonso, unveiling a plate with a pile of rice, a filet of whitefish, and a sprinkle of seaweed.
“Oh, thank you, my dear. How did you know I am starving?”
“I don’t think you’ve moved all day, have you?”
“No. I…” Alonso gestures helplessly at his laptop. “I am very busy. I am very much feeling the deadlines closing in on us.”
“Ha! Are you? We’ve still got like three weeks left, right?”
“Four! Exactly four weeks. Exactly halfway today. And Flavia, in her artless and direct way, informed me she thinks there’s no way we will finish our primary Plexity mission before we must leave. So now I am very busy.”
Katrina sets the plate on the platform beside his chair and stands.
“Do you?”
His voice makes her pause. “Eh? What’s that, mate?”
Alonso repeats, “Do you think we can finish in time?”
Katrina wonders how she might handle this situation best. She doesn’t have enough data to decide. She must listen first. “Well… Remind me what the goals of the primary mission are.”
“To characterize all the life on the island.”
Katrina nods slowly. “Okay. Well then I’ve got a question for you. Does it require a rich context for each sample? You know, what the sample is near, at different times and places, all that?”
“Of course. The relationships are the primary hallmarks of life. Not their own individual characteristics. That is the whole point. The purpose of Plexity is to show there is a larger living breathing meta-organism that—”
“Then no.”
“No? What do you mean, no?”
“You need a hundred thousand samples. We can’t get you a hundred thousand samples in the time remaining. I’m sorry. But it’s just physically impossible. You see that, right? I’m not saying the whole project is impossible. But if what you’re asking for is a variety of samples of about, I don’t know, 9000 life forms? Can we get you one Dyson profile for each of those 9000 samples by May 19th? Yes, I think so. And that can be like your scaffold, right?”
Alonso leans back with exasperation, lifting the plate and shoveling food into his mouth.
“Right? Isn’t that how it usually works? I figure we’re doing a great initial assay of the site, right? Isn’t that, uh, standard protocol for something like this? We get a nice broad overview and then we go back to our institutions, those of us who have them, and show them all this fantastic documentation and write a huge grant proposal for another year out here or something. That’s what I figured we were doing here. I mean, the idea that we could be finished here in eight weeks is, well, kind of silly, isn’t it?”
Alonso can’t look at her. He stares at the columns of data on his screen but he can’t derive meaning from them at the moment. His emotions churn so strongly in him he is afraid he will be ill. “And you think they will let us back on the island after our eight weeks is over? Eh, Katrina? Is that what you are counting on?”
“I’m not counting on anything. But why wouldn’t they? I mean, who does it belong to? Still the military? I thought they were about to give the island up because of some big new satellite agreement. Isn’t that what’s happening? So then we just have to worry about, I don’t know, competing research programs showing up and like rich assholes with yachts? I mean, who’s going to come all the way out here for an unsupported expedition except lunatics like us? All I’m saying is I don’t think we need to be completely done here in four weeks. We just need to show a compelling snapshot to the powers that be so we can continue our work. I mean, Pradeep and Amy said they could spend the rest of their careers here, easily.”
“Yes. Of course. You’re right, it’s just…” Alonso lifts and drops a hand, unable to put into words how much he has invested in these expectations. They literally kept him alive. And sane.
Katrina covers Alonso’s hand with her own. “Hey. It’s okay now. You aren’t like fighting for your life any more. You’re surrounded by all your loved ones. And like, admirers. Right? It was something Pavel could never accept. That he could like put these things down that he held for so long to help him survive and finally relax.”
Alonso nods, not really hearing her. “Yes. Well, thank you for your kind words. I should get back to Plexity, now that we’ve all decided that it will just be a shadow of what it could be. Yes.”
“Alonso, that’s not what I meant. I’m in this for the long haul. Eight weeks, eight years. You hear me? I want to see the end of this. But properly. You had to know eight weeks wouldn’t be enough. I mean, didn’t they show you the size of the island?”
Alonso shrugs. “Yes, I admit, it is larger and… more complex… than anticipated. I didn’t know about all these tunnels. I thought we would be further along than this by now. Yes. But all we need are four six-hour shifts for collection teams. And during that six hours you just need to cover one hundred square meters. Flavia worked it all out. In the 28 days left it is really quite a reasonable goal. Then boom. One hundred thousand samples just like so.”
Katrina nods, her smile empty, realizing she has told him all he is able to hear at the moment. She brushes a strand of his curly black and silver hair back from in front of his eyes. “Got it. You know… Another thing… Mandy and I were talking… Thinking maybe this isn’t your very best night to try a round of MDMA therapy?”
But Alonso has already returned his attention to his laptop. “Eh? What’s that? What is MDAA…?”
“The molly.”
“Ah. Yes, we should definitely wait.” Alonso makes a weary face. “Between Jay’s disappearance and Pradeep’s… condition, I can’t ask anyone to face more risk or…”
“Well, it’s not risk. It’s perfectly safe, but the vibe is certainly…”
“Regardless of that, I think we can both agree that yes, this is not the right time for it. Thank you for checking in. And please. My compliments to the chef. The dinner is delicious.”
Ξ
“Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.” Jay stands at the bottom of a shaft of gray light, the first natural light he’s seen in thirty hours, rolling a joint. It’s not the easiest thing to do without a table. That’s why he’d pre-rolled five fatties before he’d started on this whole trip. But those are all gone now.
First he grinds some of his daily driver, a combination of OG Kush and Alaskan Thunderfuck. It usually gives him the old solid rocket booster in the shorts when he needs it. But it doesn’t make him paranoid or manic. The Kush keeps him grounded.
It’s been a hard day so he adds a bit more than normal. Then he unscrews the grinder to scoop out some of the kief dust that had collected in the bottom tray. A real hard day, yo.
He dabs his tongue along the paper’s edges and twists it closed. “Man, I love getting high.” Jay lights the joint and takes a couple big cigar puffs to get it going. Then he releases the billows of smoke into the shaft of light, watching their edges uncurl like seventh-dimension monsters of thought. “It’s like, I get to schedule all my highs and lows throughout the day. Like guaranteed.” He feels the rush outward through his scalp into the universe above as his feet send down roots into the soil below. “And now I’m on this planet again, but for real. Yooo. I’m back, bitches.”
He has been walking for hours already this morning, following the interminable curving tunnel, always bearing left ahead of him. He walked all day yesterday as well. It doesn’t make any sense. Math has never been his strong suit but he’s been trying to puzzle it out in his head as he went. The circumference of Lisica can’t be more than, what, twenty kilometers? If it’s like on average four by five kilometers, let’s say a diameter of five. Then it’s… uh… 3πr? So the radius would be like two and a half. Three times pi is nine. Nine times two and a half is like twenty-three. “There’s no way I’ve only walked twenty-three klicks! I’ve put in like twenty solid hours.”
But this is the first time he’s seen any light coming in from above. He relishes the change, after the monotonous hours that hadn’t afforded much of any entertainment. He almost wishes to be like Pradeep, who can effortlessly generate all these fantastical monsters out of the dark to be terrified of—which would be entertaining, but his brain just doesn’t work that way. Jay sees what’s in front of him and that’s pretty much it. And what he’s been seeing for too long is this gray tunnel and its curving parallel rails. Last night he hiked until his phone battery died. Then he crawled into his emergency bivy in a doorway out of the way of the rails just in case anything ever came down them. He plugged his phone into his spare battery and slept pretty soundly, all things considered.
No. He’s not really given to flights of fancy. What he knows with certainty, deep in his roots, is that this world they live in surpasses all else in wonder. No imagined fantasy monsters or palaces or even religions that people can make up in their heads can ever compare to the true infinite complexity of Mother Earth around them, the majesty Jay gets to study each day.
“And I get it.” He cinches his pack, takes one last gigantic drag off the joint before he crushes the roach beneath his heel and field-strips the paper and ash. He fishes out an energy bar and continues walking. “I’ve seen what it’s like in Nebraska. I drove across a few times. But who knows, maybe religion there does seem like a bigger deal on the flat land. I get it. But what you got to do, brother, is just travel one day west and you’re in the Rockies. Then you’ll see what religion’s all about. The peaks. The canyons. I mean, this whole island is all the god I need. Rising up like a… a giant statue from the deep. Yeah. And now I’m crawling across god’s face.”
Jay likes the sound of his own voice. The rush the weed brings delights him and fills him with the fantasies he just derided. He sees the island rising up from crashing seas like a vengeful Polynesian volcano deity with an insatiable hunger for virgins.
Oh, now he’s entertained.
He walks for a couple more hours, his sparkling high fading into monotony. He passes another couple slanting rays of gray daylight, shining through cracks in the tunnel above. He eats some banana chips and empties his last water bottle. But still he doesn’t worry. He likes walking. And he’s needed a huge hike like this to really unscramble himself after being laid up for so long. He’ll find some water somewhere.
Every once in a while he passes junctions, where the rails split and veer into solidly sealed-off tunnels. But it doesn’t look like a mining operation here. Everything’s too clean. It’s all just solid concrete that hasn’t nearly ever cracked or even stained over the decades. Sometimes he’ll find chipped and faded orange numbers at the junctions. He made out 13 at the last one. It relieved him to recognize the language. If this had been like a giant Soviet weapon installation he was crawling through, that would creep him out. It would be like playing a video game in real life. And not fucking Stardew Valley either. This is more like Half Life.
“Come on, now.” Jay takes a deep breath. “Well, you said you were bored and wanted to freak yourself out.” He groans, his feet finally dragging. “Aw, man. This is so dumb. What am I missing? I got to be missing something. There’s no way those kids came all this way. This is like some seriously Kafka bullshit here.”
He realizes if there’s anything anywhere it’s got to be at the junctions. He hadn’t looked very closely at 13 back there because it seemed like all the others and he’d gotten it into his head at the beginning of this walk that the way out would just be at the end. “Come on, now. You can turn around. It’s just right back there.” But Jay has a masculine intransigence that keeps him straining forward. It’s been his undoing down here for sure. “There won’t be another junction for hours, tough guy. Come on. Turn back.”
So with a last lingering look at the unchanging curving tunnel ahead, Jay finally swings himself around and retreats to the junction he left ten minutes before.
His phone is already at 78%. He’s kept it on the lowest setting for the light to extend the battery but he’s not too worried about losing power. The brick he carries is strong enough for five full recharges. Now he cranks it up, painfully bright, to investigate all the nooks and crannies of the wide junction. It is an irregular chamber, with two branching rail lines going off to two directions toward the left, shaped like an aorta from a heart. He inspects the solid concrete walls that seal off the two tunnels. No, there’s no getting through either of them. Maybe he’s wrong. Maybe he’s just in an irregular spiral that somehow continues forever. Maybe he’s already dead and he doesn’t even know it.
Oh. Wait. There’s a door.
Ha. Just as he was about to give in to despair after all. Fucking door right in front of him. Inset in the wall behind the orange number 13. But does it open?
Jay pushes on the steel panel with the toe of his boot and it swings partially open, metal on dust the only sound. A hallway beyond is filled with gray light.
Jay turns off his phone light, squinting in the glare. There’s a smell here, a smell he never thought he’d smell on Lisica.
Jay totters forward toward the light, a ridiculous smile on his face. He hears water trickling in the distance, and sees that the hall ends in an old gun emplacement dug into the cliffs. The gun is long gone but its narrowed defensible view still commands a broad swath of the ocean’s horizon out there. The gray light slants in at a strong angle. This interior chamber, a good thirty meters wide, is full of plants. Their gardener works among them, pulling weeds. She stands, an old Lisican woman in a modern canvas apron, t-shirt and jeans, smoking a giant handmade cigar. She looks at Jay blankly. He can’t tell if he is welcome here.
Jay points at the sativa bush beside him with glee. “Ganja.”
The woman nods, expressionless, and extends to Jay the cigar.
Chapter 29 – Kill Him
July 17, 2024
Thanks for joining us for the second volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this episode:
29 – Kill Him
“Has anyone seen Jay?” Mandy addresses the wider bunker, then parts the slits of the clean room to check in on Esquibel.
She is reading an official report of some kind, which she dismisses from her phone as Mandy enters. “Jay? Eh, no. I am sure he is out somewhere collecting Alonso’s million samples.”
“Yeah… That’s what I figured. That flake. He said he’d help me with my elevator idea today and I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Mandy enters the clean room and kneels beside Esquibel, kissing her temple and dragging her nails through the tight curls of her lover’s scalp. She rests her head on Esquibel’s shoulder. “So tired. I danced so hard last night. And now we’ve got an MDMA session set up for Alonso tonight. Poor me and all my excesses. Maybe instead of working on the elevator I should disco nap instead.”
“Yes, that is a good idea.” Esquibel turns to her laptop and opens a research paper that she has been meaning to study on the treatment of dermal fungal infections. “You go ahead and I’ll be in there soon. Rub your feet. Then I’ll wake you when he gets back.”
“Mm.” Mandy likes the sound of that. “You’re the sweetest. What are you working on?”
“I am starting to see an incidence in foot problems. My own, and Miriam has made a complaint. We may be picking up new types of infection from the sand and everything. We have no idea about the microbes here, despite Alonso and his Plexity. It doesn’t matter, all of the information it gives us, none of it can tell us yet if these new strains of fungus or bacteria will actually harm us, or how to treat them. Not even in a petri dish or a clinical setting, to say nothing of disease in the real world. No, Triquet…” Esquibel addresses their imagined presence, “the social sciences do not win. Medicine, biology, chemistry, and physics still rule us all.”
Mandy blinks at Esquibel. “Are you okay?”
Esquibel’s smile turns to glass and her insides go cold. There is something so incisive about the way Mandy asks that it seems to shine light into all her shadows. She pretends to misunderstand. “Oh, yes. It’s just a bit of itching and cracking between the toes. Frankly, it could be that the skin is getting dried out by the wind and saltwater that we are constantly exposing them to.”
“That’s good. But, no. I mean…” Mandy grasps for the words that might describe the dissonant vibe coming off Esquibel. It’s something she’s noticed more and more over the last… three days? Four? Something is bothering Skeebee and she isn’t letting on. Mandy shakes her head. “If you were having any problems, you’d like share them with me, right? You wouldn’t be the protective big sister or anything to protect my feelings, would you?”
“No.” Esquibel covers Mandy’s hand with her own. “I mean, yes. I wouldn’t hide things from you, Mandy. Not anything I’m… required not to. But that’s just military stuff. Nothing to do with you. With us. I guess if you’re sensing anything it’s just that I wish I had more to do. I’m happy to take samples for the project all day every day but it just seems…” Esquibel shrugs. “It is something that a grad student could do. Most of my skills remain… unused.”
“Ooo, what kinds of skills? Are you like a, what do they call them, a general practitioner? Sorry I’ve never asked. Almost all the doctors I know are specialists but you haven’t mentioned any…”
“If you recall, I was always interested in surgery so that has become my specialty. Combat medicine. Field surgery. Pulling bullets and shrapnel out of muscle and bone. But we do not get very many of those injuries when we are not at war. So it is a lot of training and simulation. So, yes. I am, for the most part, a GP like you thought. Dispensing Tylenol and referring sailors to physical therapists and psychologists. You, know, the real fun stuff.”
“God, are they scared of you? I bet they must be scared of you, coming to you with their problems.”
“What do you mean?” This is a safer conversation and Esquibel giggles, reminding herself how much she loves Mandy. “I am an excellent doctor.”
“You’re just so fierce. Nobody would want to tell you their problems. I can’t imagine wondering if I had, like, chlamydia and having to talk to judgmental old Doctor Daine about it. You’d probably yell at them for not wearing condoms.”
“Of course I would! That is my job! And these aren’t normal civilians you have to coddle. They are military personnel. I give them orders. They follow them or get written up. It is… very different from this situation here.”
Mandy laughs at her. “That’s what I thought, you big bully.” She cups Esquibel’s sculpted cheek in her hand. “It’s good to see you laugh. Don’t forget to.” Then Mandy kisses her marvelous full lips and stands. “Off to find someone, anyone who might help me figure out my elevator.”
“Yes, but after your nap. I’ll be right there.” Esquibel watches Mandy’s lithe form slip away, overwhelming fondness rushing through her. She is the heart of what Esquibel fights for, the prize who is easily worth all the sacrifices. As long as Mandy and all these other dear ones remain safe, Esquibel doesn’t mind whatever eventually happens to her own self. As Mandy’s brown and black silhouette dissolves in the semi-opaque plastic sheet of the clean room, Esquibel chuckles sadly. Because, make no mistake, there will be no happy fairy-tale ending for me.
In the bunker, Mandy finds Katrina at the work tables. She leans over the golden girl and rests her chin in the notch of her clavicle. Katrina, deep in a column of Python, absently reaches back and pats her head. The soft sheen of the long hair identifies who it is. “Mmm. Mandy Dandy.”
“Katrina, my dream-a.” Mandy kisses her ear and sits back. “Sorry to interrupt. You haven’t seen Jay, have you?”
“Noper.” Katrina just wants to resolve this last bit of logic before she tears her attention away. “Maybe he’s, uh, fishing?”
“Oh! That’s a good thought. Hey, we need to talk about our upcoming session tonight sometime. Coordinate some things, I figure. Let me know when you’re free.” Mandy kisses her again, unable to get enough of the feeling of Katrina’s soft skin against her lips. Her smell. She kisses the edge of her hairline one last time.
“Mm.” Katrina waves in the air, wanting Mandy to feel seen and heard, but she is already gone.
Through the door and across a mostly empty camp, with only Alonso and Flavia working on their laptops in silence, Mandy shuffles through and onto the beach. She crosses to the redwood trunk and scales it, squinting against a band of silver-white afternoon light against the horizon. It’s almost easy to forget there’s this huge, impossibly vast ocean out here. Mandy realizes that the redwood trunk falling across the beach and blocking their view of relentless infinity has done wonders for them. It’s allowed them to turn inward and get to know each other. It’s like some kooky feng shui principle. All their energy was leaking out into the open sea before, lost to this cold uncaring oblivion. Now they can conserve it and build something here. Hopefully… an elevator!
On the beach, Maahjabeen helps Pradeep haul the kayaks free of the lagoon’s lapping tides. He swoons and falls to his knees. Oh, no! What’s wrong with Pradeep? She scrambles down toward them. There’s no sign of Jay, not on the sand or in the shallows. Maybe he’s hiding in the little lean-to beside her, taking the nap that Mandy is fighting so hard against.
She drops onto the sand and finds the driftwood lean-to empty, although a blue fleece blanket almost entirely covered in sand has survived at least one high tide. Mandy pulls it out and twists the seawater out of it. She hurries toward Maahjabeen and Pradeep. “Hey there. Are you guys okay? How’s the water?”
Maahjabeen laughs, a short unhappy bark. “Very cold. Very… adventurous.”
“We fell asleep on this pocket beach over there.” Pradeep points east, along the coast beyond the sea cave entrance. “Got hit by a wave. Totally doused. Still feel…” He shakes his head, eyes blank.
Maahjabeen pulls the blanket from Mandy’s hands a little too roughly. It is evidence of a tryst she needs to hide. “Thank you. Sorry. I left it in there and forgot it.” She tosses it into the hatch of the kayak and drags it further up the beach. “Ehh. So hungry.”
“Yeah, I really need something warm. Has Jay cooked any more feasts today?” Pradeep moves like a zombie, his limbs stiff.
“I can’t find him! I hoped he was down here fishing.”
“Probably in the trees somewhere like a… simian.” Pradeep stumbles and drops his kayak. “Woo-ooo. I’m sorry. I can’t seem to… I think I might be getting sick.” Pradeep stands again, face ashen, and takes a deep breath, trying to marshal his reserves.
“Oh, no!” Mandy hurries to him and relieves him of the plastic handle at the yellow kayak’s prow. She hauls on it, following Maahjabeen around the end of the trunk in the woods.
Pradeep shuffles behind.
“How can he be sick?” Mandy asks Maahjabeen as she catches up to her. “There’s no new bugs on this island, nobody to even catch anything from.”
“I don’t know, but it is my fault.” Maahjabeen seems more upset about this than Mandy thought she’d be. “I felt the water hit but I kept sleeping. We both did. I should have realized what was happening and gotten him up earlier. But of course we were so far apart from each other, sleeping nearly on opposite sides of the beach, really. Now it is a shock to his system I think. Exposure or something. Maybe Esquibel should look at him. Ugh. So stupid!”
Maahjabeen lets her anger at herself fuel her march through the sand, which is difficult when she is so tired and hungry. She finally deposits Aziz under the big platform and directs Mandy to do the same with Firewater. But Pradeep struggles through the sand to get to them. Throwing caution to the wind, Maahjabeen hurries to him and puts an arm around his shoulder to support him as they make their way to the bunker and Esquibel in the clean room.
Mandy watches them go. There’s a whole host of strange vibes coming off them, enough to make whatever is afflicting Esquibel seem innocuous. When did everyone start getting so mysterious? She thought they’d reached some kind of transparency and fellowship here in the last few days. Mandy shrugs, letting it go. Who ever even knows with Maahjabeen? She’s always unhappy about something. “And I still haven’t found Jay!”
Ξ
“Now this is more like it.” Jay thinks he may have rediscovered the trail taken by the pollen people on this downward slope into a small canyon. It’s no more than a game trail but at least he can convince himself the depressions in the soft soil were made by human feet.
Tracking them was easy at first. The pollen of their masks left a trail like magic fairy dust, at least for the first few hundred paces. But as the woods grew more dense and the trunks of the fir trees crowded together into a gloomy, witchy canopy no more than a meter off the ground, the golden dust appeared less and less frequently until it disappeared entirely.
At the edge of the thicket Jay had to make a guess, dropping onto all fours and crawling through a dense stand. His backpack off, pushing it ahead of himself through the low passage, he was quite certain he’d lost his quarry when he spied one last faint streak of pollen on a branch above.
That led to the slope and this little hidden canyon. It is a cleft in a limestone cliff hidden by black oaks. There are no more signs or tracks leading to it but this must be where they headed. It’s that or they scaled the vertical cliffs and he sees no way to do that.
“Into the mouth of the monster.” Jay reads too much fantasy to think about this in any way other than epic adventure. Gird thyself for battle, young hero. But what kind? He’s never seen himself as like a classic fighter type. He’s more of a druid or a ranger. He’d like carry a spear and speak with the animals. If there was any magic in the world at all, he’d be a ranger of the mountains, sand, and sea. Ensconced in his daydream, he pushes his way through a stiff stand of ceanothus, preparing himself for conflict. Maybe he should get his knife out. Or at least keep it handy. “Bah. Who am I kidding? I’m not a fighter or a ranger or anything like that.” Jay takes out his phone instead. “I’m a wizard.”
Now he pauses at the entrance to the canyon. He really doesn’t want to surprise anyone. Not after his last interaction. He’d get his ass feathered with a dozen arrows before he took a step. “Actually, haven’t seen any bows and arrows. It’s all spears and nets so far. Wonder why? Whoa… Uh. Ding dong.” Jay has stepped between the sheltering trees into the canyon to find a lovely little glen, filled with madrone trees and butterflies and wildflowers. “So beautiful.” Jay brushes a hand over the flowers and inspects his palm. Next to no pollen. So, they must have played their games here first before going further afield. What is that all about, anyway? “Some kind of… spring festival? Rite of passage? Pollen collection service? Hello? Anyone home…?”
Jay edges his way into the glen, keeping up his nonsensical chatter. He’s never seen irises so gigantic, with varieties he’s pretty sure exist nowhere else. Also, the luxuriant dark green ferns have a weird extra bend in their sprouting fiddleheads. Neat. He might get something named after himself here after all. But stop goggling at everything, you dope. Now is not the time to do fieldwork.
He parts the fronds of the ferns to push deeper into the glen. “Guys? I just have questions, more than anything. What’s all that pollen for? And were those hunters gonna spear you too? Or are you like part of their tribe? Sorry if tribe isn’t the right word…”
A small grove of mature redwoods stands at the head of the canyon, hoarding nearly all the water and leaving a meager muddy stream for the rest of the glen. There is no sign of human presence or activity anywhere he looks. It remains entirely untouched. Despite his anxieties over being lost in what appears to be enemy territory, Jay allows himself a pleased smile. Alone in nature, getting up to trouble. That’s been his whole life. And it’s just so got damn beautiful in here. If this is where he dies, so be it.
Jay steps into the fairy ring of the redwoods and pulls up short. “What the…?” There is a ragged pit at his feet, leading down into darkness. The roots of the redwoods have been manipulated around it over the decades in an irregular woven ring. He drops to his knees, to make out recent disturbances in the duff from several pairs of feet. This is it. He did it. He tracked them all the way back. “To what, though? What is this?”
Jay turns on his phone’s light and shines it into the hole. “No way. That’s impossible. Isn’t it?” The light shines on the rusted steel structure of a ladder’s top rungs. He inches closer and tilts his phone further down, careful not to hold it directly above the hole in case he drops it. Yeah, that’s a long ladder alright. Dropping way way down into pitch blackness.
Jay rolls back onto his heels. “Well. That’s creepy as shit. But what am I going to do? Sit here and wait for the hunters to track me down? No way. I bet this is another one of those uncrossable borders, like, between these people and the others. Like we got the river as a border between the two villages, right? A super strong border. Cause who in their right minds would go down this thing unless they know what’s at the bottom?” He takes a deep breath, surprised how disappointed he is to find an artifact of the modern world here in this wilderness. “Yeah… Just when I’d thought I was getting away from all the madness of civilization.” As he talks he senses a bit of white noise from the vegetation on the far side of the redwoods, further up the glen but heading close. When he stops talking the noise also stops.
The hunters. They’re coming.
Jay shivers and pulls his pack back on. “Yeah. Okay. Fuck. That didn’t take long. Oh, well. It’s been a nice life. Bit short, but at least I got to discover some plants.” And then, holding his breath like a scuba diver rolling off a boat, Jay thrusts his legs through the hole and starts climbing down the rungs as fast as he safely can.
He counts his steps, eyes squeezed shut. When he gets to thirty he realizes he’s still holding his breath. He lets it out in a silent stream, unwilling now to give any more clues to the hunters above where he may have headed. Not that there’s any doubt where he went.
After just two more steps he finds himself on a concrete shelf. The hole mouth is a small gray opening far above. He wants to move away from it as fast as he can but he isn’t sure how. He feels forward with his feet, hoping against hope that the hunters’ heads don’t appear in the hole above.
The shelf is narrow with a sharp drop off, only a meter wide. Jay edges away from the ladder and the hole above, feeling with his hands along the dirty concrete wall at his back. What in the ever-loving Cold War of his grandparents is all this concrete doing down here? Just how many wildernesses around the world did those busy bastards ruin? Looks like the answer is all of them.
His fingers reach the flaking rust of a steel frame. A doorway. And it’s wet for some reason. If he ducks through then he’ll be out of sight of the hole above and he can use his phone’s light.
The door is smaller than he estimated and his pack gets caught on a ragged piece of steel. It tears the ripstop nylon a bit before the old rusted flake falls off with a clatter.
Cursing under his breath, Jay kicks the bit of metal through the door and carefully feels his way along the frame where his pack caught. He doesn’t want to leave any fibers in the frame for trackers to find. That’s what he’d be doing, if he was hunting himself. He’d be looking at all these choke points for any bits and bobs of hair or cloth.
Now he’s through and his hands are shaking. His breath’s a bit ragged too. “Turns out,” Jay whispers to himself, “it’s hella stressful to get hunted in the dark. Who knew?”
He lifts his phone and turns on his light. “Holy smokes.”
Jay stands in a grand curving tunnel. The tunnel has rails and a couple small derelict carts pushed up against the end of the line to his right. Like mine carts but with specific fasteners and brackets atop. Long unused. Like decades. “Are they even American…?” Jay wipes the grime from one cart, looking for serial numbers or anything. He can only find a few raised symbols at the base of the steel brackets, but those could belong to anyone.
“Damn, I don’t want to be down here with all this industrial crap. I want to be outside.” He stands unhappily in the middle of the tunnel, looking back and forth over and over. “You know, where I can be spitted like a pig and they can nail my hide to the front gate as a warning to all others.”
Jay sighs unhappily, cinches his waistbelt tight, and marches resolutely down the curving tunnel to his left.
Ξ
“Gah, I need a better shaker table for the amount of material we’re talking about here. Something bigger and automated. This little tray is taking forever!” Miriam stands back from her worksite at the far edge of the camp, and tilts the corner of the multi-layered tray into a plastic cup, where a fine sand has been separated from the dross. “I got one reading from the Dyson reader with a dry sample but I should see what a wet one does.”
Triquet stands to the side, leaning on a shovel, trying to recall what motors they might have on hand that could be repurposed into an automatic shaker. “We just need one really good vibrator strapped to one of the legs. We should ask everyone.”
Miriam wasn’t listening closely. She makes a shocked face. “Uh, what? A vibrator? Whose legs?”
“No. To the table leg. Get your mind out of the gutter, you catty old thing. I’m just trying to figure out your problem.”
“Ohh. Not a terrible idea. Who do you think might have one?”
“Well. If I was a betting person, First I’d bet on myself. But…” Triquet flutters a modest hand over their chest, “it is one of my regrets that I did not bring with me the toy I affectionately refer to as my bone flute. There wasn’t any room in my bag and I thought we’d be in more dorm-like sleeping arrangements so…”
Miriam is unable to stop laughing. She needs to sit, holding a hand in front of her mouth. “Oh my god, Triq. You just rocked my world. If I ever hear the phrase ‘bone flute’ again I’ll probably wet my pants.”
“Well, what do you call yours in Ireland? Your… your tea and crumpets? Your bangers and mash?”
Now Miriam is laughing so hard she can hardly breathe. “Stop! Stop! I’m already dead!”
“So, then, definitely not me. I’d say you and Amy are up there in terms of vibrator candidates. Everyone knows how you old ladies love playing with your cootchies.”
Miriam’s laugh turns rueful. “Well, I can’t answer for Ames, but I haven’t… I mean, I kind of went cold for a few years. It was all too emotional and intimate so I just threw myself into my work…”
“Wait. Girl. Are you telling me you’re not taking care of yourself? Tell me. When was the last time you had an orgasm?”
Miriam blushes. “Uh, two nights ago? No, don’t worry about me. Alonso is a very considerate lover. Very. But it’s true, there was a long dry spell, there. And I do mean dry.”
“Oh, you poor thing. So no for Miriam. Yeah, and I don’t think I know Amy well enough to ask her. Despite all that bubbly cheer she’s actually quite private, isn’t she?”
“Oh, yes, that’s her mask. The bubblier she gets the more upset she is. She can never figure out how I know, but when she’s gotten me a third cup of tea in five minutes I can tell she’s upset.”
“The tea! Seriously. What is up with that? Okay. Well. We’ll skip her. My next guess would be Jay. He probably puts all kinds of things up his butt. What? Don’t you think?”
But Miriam is laughing too hard again. “Or, god, Pradeep. If he has one it’s probably made of ice or something.”
“Ice pick as vibrator. Dangerous but exciting. Yeah, he’s a weird one. Not sure he’s ever touched himself, or had anyone touch him. I wonder if he’s still a virgin.”
“Him and Flavia and—”
“No, there’s no way, sister. I don’t think Italian women are even virgins when they’re born. Ew. Wait. Sorry. That came out wrong. They’re just so… worldly. I just think that Flavia has such a math brain that she can’t be bothered to have sex with a human being. Maybe her vibrator is like an entire robot that she’s constantly re-programming to get her off better.”
“Who’s left? I can’t imagine Katrina even needs one.”
Triquet makes a judicious face. “No, that chick is like a walking vibrator. Just being near her gets everyone hot and bothered. Imagine what living a day in her shoes would be like.”
Miriam sighs. “Exhausting! No, I doubt there are any vibrators here. If Mandy and Esquibel are using any then I can’t in good conscience take their toys away.”
“Not without washing them at least.”
They laugh again, until Miriam is wiping the tears away. She hugs Triquet. “Oh, thank you so much, dear Doctor. I haven’t had such a good laugh in ages. God… Now that I’m climbing out of my hole I’m seeing how deep and dark it was. But no more holes!”
“Well, especially if there aren’t any vibrators around…”
They laugh even more. Miriam pushes herself away from the worksite, exhausted by the problem-solving and the labor. “And just like that, it’s dinner time. Come wash up with me, Triq-star.”
“Ooo, I like that.” Triquet strikes a pose. “I am the Triq Star. Falling down from above. Like some David Bowie character.”
“Did I ever tell you about the time I saw Bowie live?”
“Oh my GOD I’m just going to cut open your skull and take like a bath in all your memories.” Triquet grabs Miriam’s head and playfully squeezes it. “Was it Ziggy Stardust? Please tell me it was Ziggy. Although if it was, oh my god, I’d have to kill you.”
“No. It was in the 80s. The Let’s Dance tour. So much fun. I dressed as his Little China Girl for Halloween one year. Christ. Can’t believe how racist that is now…”
“Uh, where is everyone?” They’ve made their way to the wash basin at the kitchen tables in camp. But the platforms and tents are all empty. “We weren’t that far away, were we? Are they in the…? Hello?” Triquet opens the door to the bunker.
Everyone is in there. Alonso and Amy, Katrina and Flavia and Maahjabeen, who looks like she’s been crying. They all stare at the clean room, where Esquibel and Mandy’s blurry figures bend over Pradeep’s prone form.
Miriam’s carefree smile fades as she enters. Alonso reaches out to her. His face is a storm. “Ah, Mirrie. Please.”
“What? What is it, Zo?”
He kisses her hands over and over, tears in his eyes. “Pradeep. He-he just suffered a cardiac arrest.”
“He WHAT?” Miriam cries out in grief, her knees buckling.
Triquet is struck dumb. Their face closes and their spine folds, as if they’ve been punched in the gut.
“Is he…? I mean…?” Miriam can’t say the words.
“Esquibel has stabilized him.” Amy’s voice is entirely without inflection. Miriam has never heard it sound like this before. “He’s out of danger now. She says.”
Miriam throws her arms around Amy, who can’t seem to find it in herself to respond. “But what happened? A heart attack? Really? But… how? He’s like twenty-four. Perfect health.”
“It was our nap on the beach.” Maahjabeen’s face is fearsome to behold. Her eyes are so sharp with pain Miriam can’t hold her gaze. “My fault. All my fault. I should have woken him sooner.”
“What, just some cold water…?” Miriam shakes her head. “But that doesn’t make any sense.”
“Yeah, I think he was maybe stung by something in the tides.” Amy says this quietly. Alonso and Katrina nod in support. “Urchin or sea snail or… But so far we can’t find any site on his skin where he might have…” She shrugs as Maahjabeen wails aloud in guilt.
“But… will he be okay?” Miriam’s voice is tiny, hopeful.
“We don’t know yet.” Alonso’s mood is as dark as it’s ever been. “We don’t know how long his brain had to go without oxygen. Hopefully no time at all but… We just don’t know.”
“No imaging equipment here,” Katrina murmurs. “Doc said she’s just got to go off visible symptoms and old-fashioned manual diagnoses. But right now she’s having him rest.”
A glottal sound is expelled from Pradeep’s throat and his body convulses. Esquibel raps out an order and Mandy holds him down. Maahjabeen wails again and Amy drops her head in anguish.
“I can’t get him to stop shaking.” Esquibel’s voice is a bit strident, out of patience. “If that happens again it’s recommended to put him in a medical coma, but I don’t have nearly the monitoring—”
Pradeep convulses again.
“No, Pradeep! Please! La tamutu, ‘ana ‘uhibuk jdaan!”
Katrina glances at Maahjabeen. She’s learned enough Arabic to know Maahjabeen has just professed aloud her love for Pradeep. But she doesn’t know if anyone else could translate her cry of grief. She doesn’t think so. Oh, what a tragedy.
Pradeep’s face twitches and he settles again. “Perhaps I will just try sedation. We can take turns watching his vitals. I will just try diphenhydramine first. Intra-muscular.” Esquibel opens a series of small plastic boxes, preparing the injection.
“Is that safe?” Alonso has always held the medical superstition that the longer a thing’s name is, the more dangerous it must be.
“Yes. It’s just Benadryl. They use it for outpatient procedures all the time. Like a colonoscopy. Very safe…” Esquibel bends over the form of Pradeep. He grunts, then his breath rattles in his throat. “Turn his head. Clear his… Here.” Esquibel puts down her implements and with a hooked finger pulls Pradeep’s tongue clear of his airway. “Such barbaric conditions. But there. He’s already doing better now.” She checks his wrist pulse with her fingertips while consulting her watch. “I think your guess about a neurotoxin from a marine creature is a good one, Amy. Even if we can’t find a site where it bit or stung him. Who knows? Maybe he ingested it. Either way, I just want to calm his nervous system down.”
“He didn’t eat anything.” Maahjabeen stands, unable to sit out here any longer without him. She approaches the clean room and parts the slit with her hand.
“Please don’t,” Esquibel tells her, holding up a hand. “It might be infectious. You might make him worse. Or he might infect you. I’m sorry, but we will let you know when you can…”
But Maahjabeen doesn’t wait to hear the rest of Esquibel’s official visitation policy. With a ragged sob, she turns and flees from the bunker.
“Gor blimey, we’ve been here, what? Four weeks?” Miriam shakes her head in wonder. “Who knew this place would be so dangerous?”
Ξ
“They say you don’t know what you don’t know…” Katrina and Mandy sit beside the creek, tossing pebbles in, “…but sometimes I think I don’t even know what I do know. You know?”
Mandy sighs. “No, I don’t know. I didn’t know very much before I came here. Just enough atmospheric science to make a career of it, maybe get a state or federal job in the next couple years. But now… I mean… I guess I know how to start a fire. Screw up a science mission. Turns out those are the only things I’m good at.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, babe.” Katrina playfully kicks Mandy’s foot. “You’re a world-class arsonist. Biggest fire this island’s ever seen. They could see that shit from space.”
“Ugggh. I can’t believe you’re teasing me about it. I thought you liked me. But you’re so mean.” Mandy kicks her back.
“I do like you, Mandy Dandy. You should hear what I say about people I hate.”
“Everyone thinks you’re just this sweet little Australian blonde girl, don’t they? But you’re a raging bitch under there, aren’t you?” Mandy holds up a hand to forestall any protest. “I mean, as a closet raging bitch myself…”
“Closet? You sure about that?” Katrina cocks her head to one side, closing one eye in a grimace of disbelief.
Mandy squeals in outrage and swats Katrina, who giggles, then sighs and checks the time on her phone. “Looks like I’m stood up.”
“What? Damn it, is the dude just like hiding from me at this point? What did I say to him?”
“Well, a closet bitch wouldn’t ever say anything bad, would they?”
Mandy swats Katrina again. “I wish I was like you. Get to work on anything you want, just following your brilliant little ideas. But I. Can’t. Do. Any. Work. Here and it’s driving me insane. I have like six thousand dollars worth of software on two pretty new laptops and I can’t use any of it. And everyone else is like earning Nobel prizes every day while I sit here picking my nose.”
“Maybe he meant 6pm California time. Which is probably more like 7pm. But where is he? He asked me to do him the favor. It wasn’t like I was pining for his attention.”
“No. God. How could you? Jay is so goofy. Even if I was into guys, I wouldn’t be able to even like finish a first date with him.”
“Aw, I think he’s cute. But he’s got the self-awareness of like a yellow lab. Definitely not husband material. But I bet you could have a killer spring break with him. I love surfer bodies. To me, that’s the ideal human shape. Male or female or whatever. Yum. I’m sorry. What were we talking about?”
“Oh my god,” Mandy curls a lip in distaste. “Are you crushing on Jay? I thought I respected you and your taste.”
“No! Not crushing at all, Mandy. I think maybe I just have a… less discriminating palate than you. Like you’re a super taster and I’m one of those chicks that just eats everything. If it looks good and it’s in front of me, then it’s all mine.”
Mandy giggles, tossing another rock in the stream. But her ego takes a hit. She thought Katrina felt the same way about Mandy as Mandy did about her. Now Mandy realizes that even though she just got past the first audition, everyone else did too. She ain’t as special as she thought she was…
Amy appears, ducking her head around the broad green leaves of the creekside vegetation. “Oh! Hello hello. Anyone seen Jay?”
They laugh at her.
“What? You’re waiting for him too? This is like some Agatha Christie scene. Where is the murderer?”
“I think Mandy sees it more like Waiting for Godot.”
Mandy lifts helpless hands. “I’ve been looking for him all day!”
“And he told me on the dance floor last night to meet him out here tonight at sunset,” Katrina adds, “cause he wanted to show me something totally boss.”
“Hm. Yeah. We’ve been doing creek samples for the last couple days at different hours and under different weather conditions. Tonight is supposed to be eighteen hundred hours. I thought I was going to be apologizing to him for being late.”
“So where could he be?” Katrina asks. “Last time I saw him he was on the dance floor trying to teach his new mates to twerk.”
“Did anyone see if he slept in his hammock?” Mandy wrinkles her nose, a growing unease trickling into her.
“Oh, god.” Amy realizes the implications and hisses with worry. She turns back to camp and hastens to it. As they cross the sand she sees that Mandy and Katrina have caught up to her. “I was in Jay’s things earlier, looking for one of the Dysons. And at one point I was like, ‘huh, this pile seems light,’ but I didn’t think any more about it.” The day’s light fades as Amy leads them to his hammock and its small platform where he keeps his gear. She rifles through it. “No pack. No water bottle. Yeah, that’s fine if he’s just out collecting all day. But there’s a bivy I gave him for his birthday that is missing here. You only take that out for overnights. Ugh. No no no. What are you doing, Jay?”
“Wait. You think he went back to sleep with the Lisicans last night? He wasn’t that drunk.”
“I think we can all agree,” Amy says tightly, walking slowly back toward camp, “that Jay doesn’t make the best decisions all the time. Come on. Somebody hold my hand when I tell Alonso. This isn’t going to be very much fun.”
Ξ
Pradeep regains consciousness in darkness. It’s as if he is dragging himself with all his strength from a deep airless pit of sucking mud. He is first aware of his breath, catching it with his diaphragm and bearing down with all his might so he can build the resolve to drag himself another millimeter clear of the mud. But he knows it is just a metaphor. He is trapped somewhere deep within his body. And he is so weak and cold…
He bears down again, pulling himself clear of whatever is dragging him down. He realizes it’s dark because his eyes aren’t open. Lifting his lids will take another herculean effort and he doesn’t know if he’s up for the task. His inexhaustible curiosity scratches at some outside door of his mind like a cat wanting to be let back in. But he can do no more than listen to it scratch.
These metaphors are quite useful. Let’s see. What happens if he lets that cat in? Then his curiosity can re-engage. But does he have the energy for it? Somewhere, floating in this febrile trembling sea of ink, a measure of vitality must still survive somewhere…
Pradeep braces himself and pushes his eyelids flutteringly up, the muscles of his brow and nosebridge spasming from the effort. He is surprised to find himself in the clean room. It is well-lit. Esquibel dozes in a camp chair at his side.
Pradeep is blank. His head totters on his neck and his fingers tremble. What is wrong with him? His eyes focus on the gleaming outline of Esquibel’s sculpted cheek. Her skin somehow reflects the harsh LED light of the lantern, lending her a halo. His holy protector. What do they call those…? He gropes for the word. “You’re… my… angel.” It comes out as a slurring mess. Pradeep stops, appalled at how he sounds.
But the noise wakens Esquibel. Her eyes clear and she looks intently at Pradeep, surprised to find him looking back at her. “Eh. Pradeep. Nice to see you here with us.”
He only stares at her. Her words fall down into that mud pit in his center, pulling away any meaning or impetus to act.
“How are you. Thirsty, I imagine?” She holds a water bottle with a straw up to his face. He blinks slowly as she tries to push his lips apart to insert the straw. “Drink. Come on, now.”
Pradeep can only watch her. But she is right. His mouth is so dry it is sealed shut. Maybe he should obey her.
Sucking is hard, but probably easier than any other activity. It is perhaps the first instinct a baby has. His esophagus and cheeks contract and a drop of water reaches his mouth.
It clears the dryness from the tissues but when it trickles down his throat it seems to feed the mud pit deep within him. A bloated pressure of nausea builds in his guts. He stops and closes his eyes.
Pradeep feels Esquibel’s hand on his forehead checking for fever. Her fingertips press against his pulse on his right wrist. But he can’t seem to get his eyes back open. “What is wrong with me?” Well, the intention of his statement at least is recognizable in the moan and grunt that come out.
“Something stung you, we think, when you were out at the beach with Maahjabeen. Were you stung? Do you remember?”
But Pradeep hears no word after Maahjabeen. It is like a spell that unlocks something deep and preserved within him. There he is, way far away, hidden in a tiny little cavern deep inside himself. Why is he down there, when he can be out in the world again with the most beautiful woman alive? “Mach.” It is very important for him to say her name and have it come out right. “Mach. Jah. Bean.” Like a prayer against vampires, compelling them to withdraw from his holy words, her name finally forces the pit of cold mud to recede and lessen its grip on him.
Now he takes a deeper breath, opening his eyes again. “She… is… here…? She’s… okay?”
Esquibel marvels at his resolve. “Uh, yes. Everyone else is fine. Maahjabeen is fine. Except we appear to have lost Jay and now everyone is out in the middle of the night looking for him. Some of them have even gone through the tunnels to talk to the Lisicans. Madness. So, just you and me left here. We obviously couldn’t leave you alone.”
“Why…? am I sick?”
Esquibel hides her worry behind the professional mask she long ago adopted. Pradeep looks like a stage four cancer patient. His cheeks and eye sockets are bruised hollows. His skin is ashen. “Well. Not as sick as we feared. Looks like you’re getting better as we speak. But you don’t remember anything biting you? Stinging you? Did you step on anything? Eat anything? No?”
Pradeep shakes his tottering head. He thinks back to what he recalls last. Nothing about getting here. Only being at that lovely little pocket beach, Maahjabeen’s hip in the palm of his hand, her dimpled smile for him, a tenderness building… Ah! That’s right! He was having a panic attack. He was worried that the Lisicans would… would… He feels a trickle of that old familiar anxiety. But it seems to call the mud. Oh, no. His energy is fading again. It bubbles up once more from within him, this disgusting enervating affliction that someone has laid upon him. It’s unlike anything he’s ever felt. Not the pneumonia or dysentery or malaria he struggled through as a child, none of them felt this way. They burned and sizzled in him, dragged on his guts in different ways. But there is something calculated and malevolent about this… this thing he feels inside him. He knows deep in his bones that it was laid upon him intentionally, and that if he cannot find a cure, it will kill him.
Chapter 27 – Ji-da-daa
July 1, 2024
Thanks for joining us for the second volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this episode:
27 – Ji-da-daa
Pradeep’s phone buzzes. It is one of the reminders he set to repeat each year, every April 12th. FILE TAXES. Well. That will certainly be a problem. He is surprised at himself for not anticipating this. Usually he is very detailed and obsessive when it comes to financial matters. He just hadn’t connected the fully off-the-grid nature of this project with his finances. “Fuck. Damn.” He is so poor at cursing. And now he can hate himself for that too. “Bollocks!”
He throws off his bag and pulls himself from under his pyramid tarp and stalks away barefoot onto the sand, rubbing sleep from his eyes. The camp is lit by the faintest blue light of dawn. Nobody is awake. But Maahjabeen ducks her head out, quickly scanning the silent tents before shooting him a meaningful, intimate glare.
Pradeep wants to call out, wake the whole camp, ask who else forgot to take care of their basic paperwork. But half these people aren’t even American and others, like Alonso, have had bigger problems. This is Pradeep’s alone to deal with. So he gestures uselessly at his phone and makes a plaintive face at Maahjabeen, then wanders out toward the beach. He climbs the log, the chill of the wind off the open ocean cutting through his base layers. It is far too cold to be out here without a windbreaker. Whatever. It is his punishment for being such a dumbass.
The horizon is dark, bruised nearly black. Perhaps a storm passes them to the south, heading for the coast of North America. It will slam into the waiting Pacific Northwest and cover it with rain. That unbroken stretch of green forest that runs from Alaska down to like Santa Barbara is so amazing. Fed constantly by these storms spinning outward like a reverse whirlpool, flinging wind and water and life itself out into the wide world. Lisica is like the seed of all life, right in the center of this vortex like the pearl of an oyster. The vision thrills him, reversing what he thought was surely true. In this scenario, it is the genesis point itself, using the storms to cast all kinds of embryonic potential outward. Lisica, not Eden, is the secret garden from which all life emerged.
It’s a silly notion but it takes his mind off his troubles. Another figure scrambles onto the log beside him. It is Maahjabeen in her coat and boots. “What is wrong?” Her face is intense, nearly irate.
Pradeep steps away from her, afraid for her sake they might be seen together by anyone else. But she steps closer, clasping his arm. He just shakes his head. Her passion is too great for his silly error. It makes him feel a fool. He shrugs. “It’s just. My taxes. I forgot to pay them, I mean file them, before I left. It’s nothing.”
“Ohh…” She releases his arm.
“I’m just an idiot. I’m just angry with myself.”
“That is such a relief. I mean… I thought, well, I thought you had somehow found out, I mean, from your reaction back there, I would have guessed someone in your family had died.” She casts her eyes down, her brows flickering with pain.
They haven’t yet spoken of this. They haven’t had enough time alone together to peel away the layers of grief still tormenting Maahjabeen. He has wanted to say something but he doesn’t ever want to presume. He just wants to kiss her and take her in his arms and baby her while she lets it all go.
She scowls, clearing her head with a sharp toss. “I knew there was no way you could be getting a notification. I still… I had to see. Because, you know, when I found out such a terrible thing myself, I was totally alone. For a long time. And that made it very hard.”
Pradeep is overwhelmed by longing for this goddess beside him. Casting caution to the very cold wind, he pulls on her hand and they topple forward over the far side of the log so that no others might see them. They crawl across the freezing sand into the shelter she rebuilt, unable to resist touching and tasting each other.
He’s shivering. Oh, her sweet boy is too thin to survive this ocean wind without the proper gear. She will be his blanket. Maahjabeen unzips her jacket and covers Pradeep with her warmth.
Ξ
“Anyone seen Jay this morning?”
“He’s in the sub with Triquet and Mandy,” Katrina calls out from the tables beside the bunker.
Amy enters, shaking her head. “We had a date to collect some creekside gametophytes. What are they doing in the sub?”
“Who knows?” Katrina is busy with her linguistic puzzles. “They’ve been down there since last night.”
“Crazy kids.” Amy descends through the trap door into the sub, where she finds the entire top floor empty. She lowers herself to the next level to find Triquet in the main room among their stacks. For the first time, Amy realizes Triquet hasn’t dressed with their usual flamboyance since their ordeal in the village. She hopes nothing’s wrong. “Uh. Hey there.”
Triquet looks up, a bit of a worn, sad look on their face. “Oh. Hi, Amy. Is it morning already?”
Amy nods. “My goodness, Doctor. Have you been up all night?”
Triquet nods, glum, trailing long delicate fingers over a stack of files. “Couldn’t let it go. Haunted.”
“Haunted by what?” A shiver crawls up the back of Amy’s neck but she quickly suppresses it.
“The image of Katrina’s shawl. That Eyat piece. I swear I saw something similar in the files here. At some point. But I’ve checked my notes and I can’t find it. I must not have annotated it, like a big dumbbell. Or maybe I did but I used a descriptor for it I’m just not remembering. I really need a better tagging system. It’s driving me craaaaazy.”
“What was it? A photo or…?”
“I can’t remember! There’s so much material here and I’ve gone cross-eyed over the last few weeks trying to index it all. Thousands of entries. Tens of thousands to go. But I just know I saw… ugh, something. I just can’t remember what.”
Amy gives Triquet a hug. At first their body is rigid, intent on their project. But soon the warmth and human contact sinks deep. Then Triquet allows themself to be held. The two of them stand in silence, needing it. “Oh… thank you, Doctor Kubota.”
Amy steps away. “You’re welcome, Doctor Triquet. Any time.”
“People… who need people…” Triquet begins to sing, lacing their fingers in with Amy’s.
“Are the luckiest people…!” Amy joins in.
“In the world…!” They finish.
Amy laughs. “Hey now, you’re not old enough to know Barbara Streisand. That’s illegal.”
“No way. Yentl was my first crush.”
Amy sighs. “Young Babs is my kryptonite. What’s Up, Doc? Ooo baby. She’s amazing.” They share a laugh.
Triquet sags, wilting in the face of so many documents. They don’t know what to try next. This is hopeless. Finally someone actually needs an archaeologist to be of use on this crazy trip and Triquet is unable to provide.
“I didn’t even know you had such… neutral clothes.” Amy picks at the sleeve of Triquet’s khaki short-sleeve work shirt.
“It was for the Lisicans. I wanted to dress, well, I didn’t want our interaction to be about my fashion choices. I wanted it to be about that stupid display that none of them ever looked at. And the other reason is I have just loads of laundry to get done.” Triquet lifts a thick file they’ve already gone through five times and drops it again. “I swear, Amy, if I have to take another loss today I just think I might have to bring out the black veil and get maudlin.”
The words are lightly-spoken but their bitterness can’t be denied. Amy rests her head against Triquet’s shoulder. They are so much taller. Just a pale figure, standing strong and alone. Amy tilts her head back and smiles up at Triquet. “You know what, Triq? I really admire you.”
Triquet shakes off the compliment. “Wha-a-a-at? You admire that I can’t keep track of my own collections? How sweet.”
“No. I admire… who you are. The path you’ve taken in life. Sorry. Kind of out of the blue, I know. I just wanted to let you know. I know it’s not always easy. Actually, it’s never easy, is it?”
Triquet smiles gently, feeling a bit patronized. “Thank you, dear. That’s very nice, I guess. No, it isn’t ever easy, watching everyone pair off and have flings while I’m left with no one. No one but my chiffon and lace! You’re very sweet to think of me. Most people don’t. But what made you think of it? Do you… have someone like me in your life?”
“Do I…?” Amy’s brow wrinkles. “Uh, yeah. Me. I have me in my life. My whole life.”
Triquet doesn’t understand what all that pronoun wrangling is about. They just pat Amy’s hand and shake their head, a teensy mystified and bemused. “Yes. Well, we all do, don’t we?” Oh, well. It had been a nice gesture, but now Triquet is beginning to feel a bit like they’ve just been All Lives Matter-ed out of their identity. Of course everyone has their own memories of shame and ostracism. It’s just a bit different being non-binary.
But Amy won’t let it rest. “Oh my god, didn’t anybody tell you? I was sure Mandy would have told you.” She guffaws into her hands.
“Told me what, sweetie?” Triquet tries to force their attention back to the records. This conversation is getting too awkward. But they are just so tired. Maybe they should go crawl in bed.
Amy seizes Triquet’s hands and beams at them. “I was born in a male body, Triquet. I transitioned… well, half a lifetime ago now. I mean, I still transition every day. And I’ve had to deal with all of it. Lost a teaching position. Sued the university. Got hate mail. Still get hate mail. Chased out of a bathroom once, well, actually—”
“Oh, sweet child!” Triquet has no idea where the tears suddenly come from. They wrap Amy in a fierce and passionate embrace. Then they hold her out at arm’s length. “You are? Why didn’t anyone…?” But Triquet knows the answer to that before they finish asking it. Everyone handles their gender issues in their own way. Oh, but what they wouldn’t have given to know they had a real sister here this whole time! “Oh, Amy. You are the most beautiful goddess I’ve ever known!”
Amy laughs. “You said it again! Remember? When we met? You called me a goddess? And I said we were going to be best friends?”
“Ohhh it all makes sense now. You sweet sweet little…” Triquet is filled with love. Relief. Safety. A sense of belonging. They catch Amy up in another fierce hug and dot her face with kisses. “But wait. I don’t understand. Did Alonso…? I mean, when you were dating. He knew you were trans, right? He must have.”
“It was before, when I still identified as a gay man.”
“Wait. Alonso’s…? Aaaaaaaahhh! What is happening? I thought I knew who all you people were!” Triquet grips their head in their hands, reeling against the work table. “I’m always telling people not to fall victim to their own assumptions and I just—wow. I’m so sorry, Amy. I’m making more assumptions than anyone.”
“Not at all. I just wanted you to know. So you don’t have to feel so alone, Triquet. We—I mean none of us are gender-fluid—”
“Non-binary.”
“Non-binary. Right. Sorry. But the point is, we’re not the squares you think we are. Not in the least. In fact, go back a few decades the three of us were considered positively dangerous. We’re just old and tired now.”
Now Triquet thinks of a young dashing Alonso, a fierce Miriam, a brave Amy. Wow. The 80s just got a lot more interesting. These people must have been young gods. Triquet shakes their head in disbelief. “Did you come down here just to tell me that? I mean, why now? Do I look so forlorn?”
“Oh. Right. No, I’m looking for Jay. Have you seen him?”
“Yeah, he and Mandy went into the tunnels hours ago.”
“Well.” Amy steps back from Triquet with a sweet smile. “Guess I’ll go find them. Good luck with your haystack and needle and everything. But you should really get some sleep first.”
Triquet nods, the emotions draining from their limbs, leaving nothing but heavy-lidded exhaustion. But now it is a different exhaustion. Triquet feels swaddled up like a newborn. As Amy ducks through the next hatch, they call out, “Hey.” Amy stops and ducks her head back under with a querying look. “I admire you too. Goddess of the Hearth.”
Amy shakes her head and rolls her eyes in pleasure. “You always know just what to say!” She blows a kiss and returns to the dimly lit chamber ahead, still in search of Jay and Mandy. Into the last room and down the hole… The remains of Esquibel’s barricade have been neatly stacked against one wall. She sits on the edge of the metal panels and dangles her feet over. The joys of being short.
And then, at the bottom, where she has to wriggle through the long mud cave, she gains no advantage from her small stature. Because as well as being the shortest member of the team, she’s the thickest. So, if anything, she gets even more filthy than the others. The joys of being… spherical.
But Amy has long ago accepted that she will never be the girlish Liza Minelli in Cabaret of her dreams. Although she did all she could through college to learn those tap dance routines. Well. That was an unexpected encounter with Triquet, but so necessary! And now, by the light of her phone, she navigates to the left-hand tunnel and the sound of voices in the distance.
Amy pops out into the bottom of a chimney filled with a meter or more of wet ash and a slurry of cinders. Jay is crouched on a bit of solid ground above the mess on the far wall. Mandy sloshes through the stew, drenched and stained nearly black by her hours of exertions. “Hey!” Amy calls out.
Mandy screams in surprise and nearly loses her footing.
Jay gasps at Amy, then immediately starts laughing to expel the sudden shot of adrenaline. “Hey hey. What up, boss.”
“We had a date, young man.” Amy peers upward, to see the chimney arrow straight upward with a ragged hole of gray way high up at the very top. As she watches, a tiny cloud crosses the opening, proving to her what she sees. “Who-o-o-o-a…!” She looks down at them in wonder. “How high is that?”
“Thinking like 400 meters or more,” Jay shrugs. “Straight up.”
“You two are crazy!” Amy laughs at them. “That’s so high! What do you even think you can do in here?”
“Well. It’s kinda been a long process, I guess.” Jay scrubs his hair while Mandy continues wading in circles, feeling for something with her feet. “It took hours just to break the last of the big burnt pieces into little pieces so we could get in here. Then we, well, we made some silly guesses about what we were seeing until we figured it out. It’s much more clear now, with the daylight up there.”
“We sort of had to reverse-engineer… No! I’ve already been here! Ugh.” Mandy reverses course. “So I mean yeah, Jay and I argued, and I now admit that we might not be able to get to the top this way ourselves but we started thinking, well, how the fuck did the military ever get up and down this shaft?”
“Elevator?” Amy guesses. “Honey, you got to get out of that water, your teeth are chattering.”
“In a minute. Right. An elevator. Must have been. Ain’t nobody climbing a ladder for hundreds of meters. So if I can just find the old metal connections down here… Not here… Oh, my feet are so numb I’m not sure I’d even feel them if I did. Like pulleys we think? Or at least some kind of anchor points…”
“And Mandy won’t let it drain any more before she checks.” Jay gave up an hour ago. “Sorry. Forgot about the date, Amy. Or, I mean, I actually didn’t, I just didn’t know it was already dawn.”
“It’s like 8:30. You two have been down here for like ten hours.”
“F-fine.” Mandy has waded over toward Amy and now holds her trembling arms upward like a child asking to be picked up. “We can come back in an hour.”
“Ha.” Amy pulls the waifish girl from the water and drags her up the slope of the passage floor to a dry spot before letting go. “You can come back tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow!” Mandy wails, but she doesn’t resist as Amy pulls her close and briskly rubs her back with a strong hand.
“Yes, Mandy. Tomorrow.” Amy shares a perplexed glance with Jay. What is wrong with Mandy? Her obsessive behavior is going to give her pneumonia.
Jay slides back into the slurry, wincing at the cold as he wades across. He is so done with freezing water. Even his bones are cold. “I know, but what was I gonna do, leave her?”
Ξ
Now that Plexity is mostly up and running, Flavia has taken a break from all the bug reports its users are generating to work a bit on the atmospheric modeling Katrina suggested they do for Mandy. First, they need to build a model of the lagoon and cliff faces in a virtual environment, then they should be able to start running processes.
It seemed like an impossible task at first. But Flavia discovered that the drone captures its flight path down to the closest meter. It also has collision-avoidance that doesn’t allow it to get closer than three meters to an object. So she and Katrina have spent all morning criss-crossing the lagoon, beach, creek, grove, and cliffs up to about a hundred meters, all at a three meter distance from said objects. Now their batteries are re-charging.
She has downloaded the flight data and created a plot of 1m2 resolution. It’s nearly a square kilometer so at a hundred meter height she has one hundred million data points. She can already feel her poor CPU crying. Katrina says she’ll build a beautiful visual representation of the wind current data but Flavia needs no such graphical user interface. She is happy with the columns of raw data. It is a nearly randomly-generated testbed, like a Minecraft seed. But it still follows organic principles of fractal erosion and Fibonacci propagation. The record in this dataset for vertical change between one square meter node and the next is on the cliffs, where there is a thirty-one meter differential. Amazing. They should also skin these tiles. Then she can assign friction values to each and perhaps, who knows, heat and humidity values? Well. Flavia will create the template and Mandy can hang whatever values she likes on them. Assuming they don’t melt their processors. But there will be shortcuts aplenty once it is up and running. Algorithms will automate nearly all of it once it is properly characterized. This will be fun! Of course it remains useless until they get proper readings for wind currents in the higher atmosphere but it is a good start.
Triquet emerges from a cell wearing their fanciest evening gown, dark blue satin adorned with costume jewels. They sashay around the bunker, dark red lipstick making their mouth a voluptuous heart. Without a word they approach each person and kiss them soundly on the cheek before discreetly re-applying the lipstick and moving on to the next. Soon, Flavia, Esquibel, and Maahjabeen are all kissed. And they are each given small gifts, chocolates wrapped with a tiny hand-written-and-decorated invitation.
Flavia cackles when Triquet kisses her. She needed someone to brighten her mood and here they are. She opens the invitation. It says, “Something special is in the air!” Bells and stars adorn the card. “Lunch outside at 1pm sharp, please.”
There is something about this day where everything feels settled. Flavia’s past life in Torino and Bergamo seems a faded dream now. This is her daily routine. She has adapted to squatting over the stinking trenches and casting handfuls of sand on her feces. Cold showers under the waterfall have become a thrilling treat and her little cell makes her imagine herself a nun in a convent, devoted in contemplation to the grand mysteries of life. And the beauty of the island can’t be denied. It is filling her with something deep and green, like the ancient Roman alabaster statues that grow moss on their lower fringes. She is ancient now like them, integrated into the world in ways she has never been, or ever wanted to be.
Katrina spins down the narrow hall between the cells, as pretty as a doll in Triquet’s borrowed finery. Her arms are above her head like she is some kind of calypso dancer and she is adorned with shiny bells and bands of gold. Her slender body is wrapped in tight layers of gold and silver lamé. A lion’s face has been artfully painted upon hers, with whiskers above hollows in her furred cheeks and a golden brow. “You are absolutely a vision!” Flavia catches her hand as she passes and kisses it.
Katrina purrs, “You think I don’t know?” She bumps her hip into Flavia’s shoulder then bends and kisses her other cheek.
“What is happening here? What is so special? Is it Carnaval?”
“No idea, love.” Katrina giggles. “But when Triquet tells you it’s open season on their wardrobe you don’t ask questions.” With a flourish, Katrina passes through the door to the camp outside.
Flavia hasn’t been on many field expeditions. In her experience, a career in mathematics has generally led to a lot of solitude with workstations and socially-inept conferences in sterile work spaces. But are life sciences expeditions all like this? Flavia turns to Maahjabeen. “Eh, sorellina, is today a holiday and I didn’t know?”
Maahjabeen is staring at her phone, hypnotized by the display options Plexity is offering her as she inputs tidal data from various points on the lagoon. Katrina has really outdone herself in offering ways to present, annotate, and track data. She is so impressed she doesn’t see Katrina’s costume and can’t tear her eyes from her screen. “Eh, Flavia…? What did you call me? What is a sorellina?”
“Ah. Little sister. No. Listen. I feel like I have been missing out. Are all biologist field trips like this such a party all the time?”
“What? No. Never.” Maahjabeen grimaces at the door and dismisses it all with a backward wave of her hand. “These people are weird. It is because of Alonso, I think. He is the first weird one. And he got Amy and Miriam to bring all their other weird people here. Then there is Katrina with her music and that drug addict Jay. These are not normal scientists. Not by any means.”
“Oh, good. I felt like I was taking the crazy pills. How do these people ever get any work done? I mean, not that I mind. I don’t always need it to be so formal…” And as if to prove her point, Katrina’s music blares from the camp, a lively Brazilian festival tune with a cheering chorus and lots of horns and drums.
At that moment, Jay and Mandy climb the stairs to the trap door and emerge from the rear of the bunker, shaking with cold and covered head to foot in ash and mud. But the music immediately grabs Jay and he shuffles stiffly forward. “What’s that I hear? The song of my peeps. All right. Hold on, DJ Bubblegum. On my way.”
His filthy appearance and joyous reaction are so preposterous that the initial shock Esquibel, Maahjabeen, and Flavia had upon seeing Jay and Mandy is released as gales of laughter. Jay waddles out the door, whooping like a cowboy. But Mandy is in more dire need. She collapses in Esquibel’s arms.
“Oh my god, Mands. You’re a mess. What have you done?”
“I’ve been…” Mandy releases a shuddering breath, “doing real work. Finally. After all these weeks. I’ve been working.”
“Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up.” Esquibel begins peeling clothes from Mandy’s soaked body.
Amy appears with two large towels, wiping her own clothes clean. “Wait. Where’s the boy?”
Flavia leans forward and peers out the door. “Dancing. Poorly.”
“What a loon. Oh, wow. What’s the big celebration here?”
Flavia shrugs. “Nobody knows but Triquet.”
Triquet, dancing a fair bit better than Jay, reappears in the door and hands out more invitations. They kiss Amy soundly on the cheek and crow, “This party is for Doctor Kubota! Goddess of the Hearth!” Then they hand Mandy an invitation but Esquibel fends off their ritual kiss until she can scrub Mandy’s cheek clean.
“There.”
Triquet leans in and kisses the clean cheek presented. “Oh, dear one. You’re freezing!” Triquet breathes into the hollow of Mandy’s neck and holds her icy hands as Esquibel scrubs her back.
Flavia realizes she will get no more work done this day. With a sigh she saves her work one last time and puts her laptop to sleep. Well, she is hungry anyway. And if there is drinking in the future she needs to have something in her empty belly first.
The day outside is eerily beautiful. The marine layer that nearly always covers the sky now only rests atop the island, like a dark gray hat that protects it from prying eyes. But the surrounding sea is luminous green with sunlight. And the wind is warm. Ahh. She could get used to a warm wind. It feels like such a luxury.
Katrina is up on her platform, swaying in time to her beats. Flavia is struck once again by the vision. This lively sprite… she deserves a better nickname than DJ Bubblegum. It occurs to Flavia that she must actually have one. She is a real DJ in Australia. She must have like a professional stage name. She crosses to Katrina and shouts up at her, “You are fabulous. What is your real name?”
Katrina isn’t sure she heard Flavia right so she pulls her headphones all the way off and laughs. “Repeat that?”
“We call you DJ Bubblegum. But what is your real DJ name?”
“Oh. Ha. I’ve had several. When I was fifteen me and my mates just took silly names. I was Seventy-heaven and I spun J-pop and house. Then when I was really into dark techno and gabber they called me Lamassu. But for the last few years I’ve been on this lush electro thing and I’m known as haiku triplet.”
“Haiku triplet? That’s what people call you?”
“It’s my slogan, a haiku with a little extra on the end:
First I will measure
the breadth of my life
and then I will cut to its depth.”
Flavia nods, appreciating the rule-breaking rhythmic triplet of the last line. Katrina hops back to her decks for a transition into a disco beat. Flavia turns away, recalling her mission to get food, but Jay grabs her by the hands and gets her dancing with him. She does all she can to avoid his mud and ash but within moments they mark her clothes. Ah well. Not that this top was clean anyway.
She finally disentangles herself and slips away to the kitchen tables, where she locates a clean plate and fork. Peeking under several pot lids rewards her with beans and rice. Topped with some of this horrible American parmesan and olive oil it isn’t half bad.
Flavia sits on the edge of Alonso’s platform beside him in his camp chair. She puts a hand on his shoulder, to ask if she can get him anything, but before words can issue from her open mouth he gasps. They all do. A troop of young Lisicans has issued from the door of the bunker. They are bare-chested, carrying nets and double-pronged fishing spears. They had been chattering but when the door opens they fall silent and goggle at Katrina’s music and the details of the camp.
“Uh oh. Wait. Hey.” Amy doesn’t know what to say. She stands and waves her hands ineffectually in both warning and welcome.
Katrina cuts the volume by half and grimaces in apology. She doesn’t know how bizarre that looks through her lion makeup. Jay, dancing with his eyes closed, raises his arms when the volume drops and bawls, “Aw, c’mon!” Then he opens his eyes and sees the villagers huddled by the door. “Ah. Oh. Hey, what’s up, my brothers and sisters? Fuck yeah. Little bit of dancing, little bit of fishing. This day’s looking up!” He claps his hands softly to the beat as he approaches the Lisicans, waddling on stiff legs. “Hey, gang. How they runnin’?”
The boldest of the Lisicans, a young woman they have seen before up in the village, steps into the camp. She speaks a long string of words to Jay, then points at him with the tip of her thumb, as if she is identifying him. “Ya-assa-ghay.”
Katrina mimics that last word into her mic, “Ya-assa-ghay,” looping the phrase over and over again in an echo. The Lisicans turn toward the sound in wonder as it skirls up a major scale and shatters like glass. “Okay. Sorry, that was a bit much. But check it out, peeps. Uh… ‘Lisica,’” she breathes, making it echo gently in a soothing refrain, fading like waves on the shore.
The villagers talk energetically to each other, recognizing the word. Katrina squeals with pleasure, jumping from her platform and bringing the microphone with her. She stands in front of the young woman with her friendliest smile. “Good morning.”
The young woman points at her own face with the tip of her thumb and says, “G̱óo-n-aa.”
“G̱óo-n-aa? That’s your name?” But the rising inflection of the question is obviously wrong. Katrina repeats it as a musician, not a linguist, getting the pace and intonation right. “G̱óo-n-aa.”
G̱óo-n-aa smiles when Katrina speaks her name into the mic.
“I’m Katrina. Uh. Bontiik. Listen up. G̱óo-n-aa…” She sings it, a long pretty croon that maintains the tonal profile but elongates the vowels. Katrina retreats to her platform where she records another loop and mixes the name into a violin arpeggio. G̱óo-n-aa cries out in a register that’s alien to the researchers. They can’t tell if it’s pleasure or outrage or terror. The other Lisicans start calling out G̱óo-n-aa as well, layering their voices in with the dance track. It is soon a discordant wreck, but everyone seems merry about it except for G̱óo-n-aa.
She steps through the camp, gaze turning from the laptop to the kitchen tables to the parachute hanging above. Then her eyes drop to the beach. She is alarmed to see the huge fallen redwood trunk, and calls out to the other villagers, making it clear that she hasn’t seen the beach since the tree fell a couple weeks before.
“Who wants to hear their name next?” Katrina asks into the mic.
Alonso holds up a hand. “Katrina. It’s too much.”
She smiles, abashed, knowing it’s true. With a sigh she steps back, shaking her head in rueful surrender. She just couldn’t switch gears fast enough and now she’s spooked them. Not that there was going to be a chance they’d meet in the middle today, not when her enthusiasm was already so high. “Good call, Alonso. I was about to offer them some LSD.”
“Katrina! How could you—?” Mandy sputters, outraged that she could ever consider such a thing.
“Joking. Just joking here.” Katrina holds up her hands. “Sorry. I like cracking jokes in inappropriate settings. I thought we’d already discovered that about me.”
The Lisicans, unburdened for a moment by the attention of the researchers, take the opportunity to slip out onto the beach. They climb the trunk and disappear on the far side, Jay not too far behind. The others only watch as he clambers stiffly over the log and calls out to the Lisicans before dropping out of view.
The others stand, watching, the forgotten music still pumping out a disco beat. Finally, Pradeep rouses himself. “So this lagoon is a regular fishing resource for them. We should have registered that when they came through last time. So that changes our approach here doesn’t it? This lagoon and beach isn’t any kind of pristine ecological environment, Alonso. It is being harvested and most likely cultivated by this, uh, this civilization here. This is a garden, not a wild forest. We can’t properly characterize the life on Lisica without…” He trails away, knowing Alonso doesn’t want to hear it.
But Alonso is a scientist, and this is where the data leads. Human presence and all that it implies. He sighs in acceptance. Regardless of the headaches it will cause, Lisicans fishing in the lagoon is what life on the island is actually about. Now he just wishes he’d thought to bring his friend Alastair Brock, a wonderful anthropologist. He would have known just what to do with these villagers. But none of the rest of them really do. “We will need to figure out how to handle these interactions. Like Esquibel said, we need some kind of protocol. We should work on developing that, team. Until then… Eh… Just keep the locals safe and treat them with respect. That is our first priority.”
“Yes, we should all be wearing masks, people.” Esquibel hurries to the kitchen tables and opens one of the plastic bins beneath, where she finds a box of unopened masks. She hands them out. “Ugh. And we should definitely be getting one to Jay.”
“I’m beginning to wonder if they really have any effect.” Miriam holds hers in her hands, not yet putting it on.
“Oh, Doctor Truitt,” Esquibel begins. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those. People who think masks don’t work aren’t—”
“Nay, I’m not an idiot. I know a properly-fitted medical-grade mask does its job. I’m just saying we’ve been afraid this whole time that we’d get these islanders sick. But so far our hygiene has been… not great, and we keep having contacts with them where they have long exposures to us when we’re not wearing masks, I mean, like that one time when the kids had Katrina for hours in the rain down here? And as far as we know none of them have gotten sick. Has anyone seen any signs of illness in the Lisicans since we’ve made contact?”
They all shake their heads no, sharing frowns.
“No no no. That is very bad news,” Pradeep stands and crosses his arms. “Because I can only think of a couple scenarios where that is possible and one of them isn’t possible at all, that they have some kind of super-universal immunity to all the diseases that we have stored in us.”
“Yes, there is no way that is true.” Esquibel is at a loss. “That would be a medical miracle that has never been seen yet it is impossible. But it has only been a couple weeks. Perhaps many of the diseases we have infected them with are still incubating?” Her voice trails off even as she says it, the likelihood of that being true of every strain of herpes and rhinovirus that they carry as a matter of course can’t be true either.
“So then what’s your other scenario, Pradeep?” Flavia demands. “The one that is making you so nervous?”
He blanches. “The other, likely, possibility we may have to consider here is that the Lisicans have enough regular contact with others in the modern world that they’ve already had their plagues and adaptations and gained enough immunity to global diseases. And if that is the case, then that means we may not be as alone here as we think we are…”
“Ehhh… No, I do not like that idea,” Esquibel exclaims. “Like who are we talking? Like—like spies?”
“Shouldn’t you be the one who knows?” Miriam shakes her head with worry. “But getting back to my original point, let me be clear: I’m not saying we should stop using masks. I’m just disturbed by the lack of, uh, medical issues that have been caused so far.”
“Who else could it be?” Flavia wonders. “There was that Chinese plane wing that Maahjabeen discovered.”
“Maybe the Japanese? How long have they been gone from that other bunker you discovered during the storm, Maahjabeen?”
“No no.” She dismisses the idea. “The Japanese have been gone since the end of the war. The Russians were in there after. Maybe it is them. Maybe there are still Russians who come in. Or maybe it’s more American military types. There is no reason to believe, well, anything they have told us about the history of the island. It has been nothing but surprises since we came here.”
“Or… somebody private…?” Katrina thinks back to the Jules Verne book she read when she was like twelve about an island in the Pacific and the evil genius who lived in the sea caves beneath. “Wait. Wasn’t that Captain Nemo? In the story?” But she can tell she’s lost them all. “Or maybe like a James Bond villain somewhere down there. We could’ve been drinking martinis this whole time.”
Esquibel shakes her head. “No, please no fantasy stories right now. It makes no sense. But Pradeep is correct. With the amount of contact we’ve had, we should have seen at least a common cold or two by now. But I don’t know how to actually plan for that. We just don’t have evidence for other, eh, modern people being here. Yet another security concern for us. I wish you would let me at least fortify the bunker. We must remain vigilant.”
The music stops. Katrina scurries off to the bunker, to return with her laptop and its list of Eyat phrases. Triquet sighs, sad. “Apparently so. Mother mercy it’s hard getting you people in a proper party mood and when I finally do, the locals show up and ruin all our fun. Colonial tourism just isn’t the glory it used to be.”
“What is this party anyway, Triquet? What is it about a lunch?” Alonso is glad the subject has been changed. He is never happy to have geopolitics and paranoia dominate his science mission.
“Oh. Well. Just a little celebration I wanted to have. Not that I did any cooking. You’re all on your own for that. But I just wanted to… I’ve been feeling… very alone here… But I had a marvelous little gabfest with Doctor Goddess Kubota here and found out I’m not quite the special little pony here that I thought I was.”
“What are they talking about, Amy?” Alonso turns to her, helpless with confusion.
“Triquet didn’t know you and I were gay lovers.”
“Ah! Yes. The good old days.” Alonso chuckles.
“Wait. What?” Maahjabeen looks from face to knowing face. Evidently she is the last one to not know this. Gay lovers? Is she not understanding some weird American slang? How could that even be true between Alonso and Amy? She is missing something here. She studies Pradeep’s face. He appears unsurprised. What is this, an inside joke? She will ask him when they are alone together.
“Bless. Amy’s old news is worth celebrating?” Miriam laughs. “What if I told you I once made out with Sinead O’Connor?”
Katrina’s head snaps up. “Fuck off. No way.”
Triquet squeals and throws themself into Miriam’s lap. “Details! Details! Was she still bald? What did she smell like?”
But Miriam is laughing too hard to answer.
“See. Here’s the problem.” Katrina slams her laptop closed and gestures at it as if it’s misbehaving. “There’s no Bontiik in this Eyat list. And no Ya-assa-ghay or Wetchie-ghuy. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they’re from a different language group entirely. And I just can’t wrap my head around some of this phrasing.” She opens her laptop again and reads out, “A ee- ⁓ a- (postpositional pronoun) her; him; to | to her/him (a non-main character of a narrative or event) | third person obviate postpositional • used in certain verbs where something is going towards the object (literally or figuratively).” She screws her face up in consternation. “I mean, there’s this whole weird way of looking at the world they have that is just so alien to us. Like their homeland is an object toward which the sea is directed. But the movement of the sea is the important part. Not the object, the homeland itself. Or it is so modified by activity and motion upon it that it becomes something else.”
This dense info-dump stuns them into silence. In the distance they can hear Jay whoop with joy but they still can’t see him.
Triquet dusts off their skirt and smirks at everyone. “Great party, no? I only throw the best. But anyway. Before I lose the spotlight completely here, I just wanted to share one other little thought about things. Amy, you know how I was down in the sub looking all night for an image I’d seen that reminded me of Katrina’s textile artifact?”
“Oh my god.” Amy sits up. “Did you find it?”
“I did. I couldn’t remember where I’d seen it because it was just a fragment of one of the torn-up photos. And I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing when I sorted them. But now I’ve put it back together.” Triquet crosses to their platform and lifts a manila folder. Opening it carefully, they show everyone the photo they have painstakingly re-assembled.
“What is that word?” Alonso squints at the letters written above the wall in the grainy black and white photo. It displays an altar with an ancient Eastern Orthodox cross, a battered lacquer reliquary box, a fishing spear made of bone, and a tapestry like the one Katrina photographed. “I think the letters are in Cyrillic.”
Triquet shows the photo to Katrina. Phonetically, she sounds out a word unknown to them all: “Ji-da-daa.”
Chapter 26 – Starting Over Now
June 25, 2024
Thanks for joining us for the second volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this episode:
26 – Starting Over Now
Triquet sits up, happy to be done with the worst night of sleep they have ever had. No blankets. Not a stitch. Just their four bodies lying in a shivering pile outside the entrance to the smoking tunnel. Now Triquet extricates themself from the others and rub their own shoulders, trying to get some circulation going again. Ye gods, that was awful. And it felt like fourteen hours. Just interminable. Only now, with the silver dawn filling the interior valleys, are they able to move. Finding a latrine is probably the first order of business, but they don’t know where they are. Far enough away that the stink doesn’t carry to the village. And not anywhere down the path they took the day before.
The stand-off with the other village had lasted into the afternoon, until the wind had finally shifted and the smoke no longer pressed them up against their bank of the river. Once they departed, the others on the far side did too, without a word of farewell or warning. Triquet could tell it was obviously a distinct cultural convention, and worth all the study in the world, but it was really somewhat outside their wheelhouse. Where’s Clifford Geertz when you need him?
So they’d returned to the smoky village to find that Wetchie-ghuy or his minions had been there, with a new feather and stick fetish hanging from a hut’s pole and his name on everyone’s lips. The villagers, who had grown very glum since the smoke had begun, now grew even more downcast.
They’d all shuffled sadly into their huts as night had fallen, leaving Triquet, Miriam, Katrina, and Jay to fend for themselves. So they found a hollow at the base of a cliff and basically used Jay as a bed. He insisted that it wasn’t the first time it happened and Katrina had laughingly corroborated him.
It must have dropped into the mid teens at night. And none of them in insulating layers. They shifted and shivered and held each other tight, sleeping in fits and starts. At one point smoke rolled in again. Just as they thought they might need to evacuate the village it cleared away and they tried to sleep once more.
Now Triquet is glad to be up. Their mask had gone crooked during the night so they make sure to affix it properly again. Afflicting these poor villagers with a plague would be adding more than insult to injury. Gah, what a curse modern humans are. We helplessly destroy everything we touch.
The two options Triquet has to relieve their bladder are the two trails they’ve successfully traveled on: the wide trail leading down to the river and the game trail Jay followed Morska Vidra and the others up and over. Deciding against pissing in the wind, Triquet hurries down the wide trail, thinking that before they get to the first stream there is a broad forest behind which they might find a moment’s privacy.
Moments later, straightening from a crouch, Triquet feels eyes on them. They hurrily finish, scrubbing themself clean with a handful of moss, covering their mess, and pull their pants up. The dark eyes in the seamed face gleam in the morning light.
“Good morning. Not polite to stare, you know. At least where I’m from.” Triquet doesn’t recognize this old man. He is short, with a barrel-chest and round face. His curls are gray but he isn’t ancient. Perhaps in his fifties. And he crouches at the side of the trail, where Triquet left it to find some privacy. Now they will have to pass him to return to the trail.
There is something malevolent in the old man. The staff he leans on doesn’t look dangerous, but Triquet remembers how villagers from across the river carried spears. Maybe he was from there. That would just be Triquet’s luck.
Triquet doesn’t know self-defense, but in an earlier life they weren’t a bad soccer player and they still trust their kicks. If the old creep gets up to anything, then…
And that’s exactly what happens. As Triquet nears him, the old man says something unwholesome and grabs his own genitals. Then he says the word koox̱ and reaches for Triquet’s.
With a shrill scream, Triquet jumps back and away, their foot connecting with the man’s outstretched forearm. He watched Triquet as they did their business. Now he wants to confirm what he saw. What is the great goddamn fascination certain people have with nongendered people and bathrooms? How, in the middle of absolutely nowhere planet earth is Triquet still being forced to deal with this utter bullshit?
Triquet hurries down the path, the old man’s croupy laugh in their ears. Disgusting. Horrible. Infuriating. It’s only when Triquet re-enters the village and their gaze falls on the fetish that had been waiting here in the village when they’d returned last night that Triquet realizes who that was.
“Where were you?” Jay whispers and Triquet jumps. He did an admirable job of creeping noiselessly across the village to join Triquet here beside the hut that sports the fetish. “You find a spot to pee?”
Triquet shakes their head no and leads Jay by the arm away from the wide trail heading down to the river. “Up there. That’s your best bet.”
A wind rises and the morning birds go silent. A few villagers appear in their doors, looking with fear at the sky.
Triquet and Jay look skyward as well. The smoke is still there, hanging in the still air. Why is the air still? They just heard the wind. But it isn’t a wind. It’s an uncanny sound, with a high pitched whine slicing the air… It’s the oncoming white noise of a black drone. That’s what the birds and villagers both heard.
It hovers above them, slowly circling, as if unsure it sees them. Jay yelps, leaping into the air. “Yo! Here! We’re here!”
Katrina stumbles out from her spot beside the cliff, dragged out of sleep, unable to process what is happening. Jay pushes her arms into the air.
“There! Up there! You see it?”
But it isn’t getting any lower. Now it hovers over the clearing. The villagers have all vanished inside again. Whatever omen this inexplicable thing brings is entirely unwelcome, that’s for sure.
After a long moment, the drone’s servo underneath, that Katrina usually uses to hook Mandy’s weather station, now releases a small sachet or bag. It spins downward at an angle, catching a breeze, and blows into the trees that lead to the river.
Jay yelps again and takes off at a loping run, crossing the village and heading down the wide path. It couldn’t have gone much farther than this. The breeze wasn’t that stiff. But it fell like it was almost pulled under the eaves…
A small brown figure crouches over a bush, using a staff to pull the sachet to them. Wetchie-ghuy. He’s stealing what the drone dropped. “Hey!” Jay runs to him but the old man cackles and spins away, diving into the ceanothus and disappearing underneath.
Jay tries to follow but he is much larger. The old man tumbles forward with shocking speed, vanishing in an instant from view.
“Hey! Hey! Now, goddamnit that’s not yours!” Jay has hardly ever felt such fury. It was just such a patently wicked thing to do, he is outraged to his core. Just who the fuck is this guy?
But he’s lost him in the underbrush. The clever little bastard has wriggled away like a cat. Jay has lost. With a ragged sigh he pulls himself out of the clawing branches and turns dejectedly toward the village. The drone is gone. Probably out of battery. And their plan is ruined, whatever it was.
A cry of pain emerges from the underbrush. Jay turns back to it. After a bit, a silver fox trots out beside Jay, carrying the sachet in its mouth. It’s close enough for Jay to see a folded piece of paper in the transparent silk sack. With a crow of delight he reaches for the fox but it trots clear and takes the sachet back to the village.
Ah. This is Morska Vidra’s fox. Now the sachet belongs to him.
Ξ
“Hurry! It’s very strong!” Flavia grips a stick with monofilament line wrapped around it as a primitive fishing pole. Her first catch!
Maahjabeen lopes across the sand, laughing at her. “Ohh, very good. Jay is going to be so jealous that we started without him.”
“Well… we can hope…” Flavia grunts with effort between each phrase, “…that they get back… in time… for him to cook it!”
“He really is the best cook.” Maahjabeen drops to her knees at the edge of the water. Flavia marches steadily backward, feet digging into the sand. How large is this beast?
Finally it emerges, a pink rockfish nearly half a meter in length. It struggles mightily, and Maahjabeen wades into the water to hold its spiny ridge against her leg while she stabs her filet knife behind its skull, severing its spine. It shivers and blood stains the water. Something deep and sad plunges within her as it always does. This is such a beautiful and complex life that she has taken. “Inshallah,” she breathes, knowing that God is in even this—especially this—even if she is having trouble finding Him. She pulls the heavy creature from the water, Flavia whooping and carrying on like she just scored a goal at the World Cup. Maahjabeen smiles gently at her friend, realizing that, to the mathematician, this beautiful fish is just food.
Perhaps Pradeep is the same. How could he not be? He is a killer of epic proportions. He wipes out entire colonies of mold and bacteria for the sake of his curiosity and career. He affixes bugs to pins and feeds the blood of birds and fish into those creepy readers the army gave them. Echh… Maahjabeen doesn’t trust them. She doesn’t know why, or how they could possibly be misused. But their origin is all she needs to despise them. Fortunately, her work hardly requires their use. But even so, she suggests, “We should get a sample for Plexity before we cut it up into sushi.”
Flavia cackles and lifts the fish. It is surprisingly heavy. She has never landed such a huge fish. It weighs like three kilos. The most she’d ever caught were little shining sardines in a net off the Amalfi coast one summer that she and her brother always put back. But this is enough to feed the whole camp. “Is it good? Can we eat it?”
“Rockfish? Oh, yes. Very tasty. You find it in most supermarkets. But ehh, now I am wondering how the removal of this fellow will affect the lagoon’s balance here and the reef where it hunted. We are having an impact for sure. I don’t know what rockfish eat, but whatever it is will breathe a sigh of relief tonight. At least until another one moves in.”
“It is our original sin, eh? Humans. We stain whatever we touch. With dirt and blood. Concrete and steel…” A kind of restless claustrophobia possesses Flavia. She is of a generation that sees nothing but its own impact. She can’t even have this, without guilt. But what is she to do? She needs to eat. Something usually dies somewhere when it is time for her to eat. Now multiply that by eight billion. A daily river of blood.
Flavia is reminded of a conversation she had with Jay the week before and now her perspective pulls far back, as it often does, to encompass the entire planet over eons. She watches the wars and the slaughter and the founding of cities on coasts and along rivers, clay and stone accretions rising like termite mounds in pyramids then skyscrapers, tiny chrysalis collections filled with light and life… “Huh. That is all we are, no?”
Maahjabeen looks at Flavia sidelong, envious of the dreamy abstractions she so effortlessly conjures. “What?”
“We aren’t individuals, us wriggling hairless worms. No. No, we aren’t even a swarm or a collective. We aren’t the point at all. See, you have to think about it over a long enough timescale. What is the first thing we do anywhere we go? We build. Look, if you were an alien in the sky studying Earth over millennia, you would see what is happening down here more like coral reefs. Our identity isn’t in this.” Flavia sweeps her hand over her body. “Or even in this.” She taps her temple. “It’s in the buildings that house us. They satisfy all our needs for safety and security and sturdiness, our claims against death. We want immortality. Concrete and steel give it. Wood and tile. My mother’s family has a villa in Verona that was built in 1582. It has outlived everyone. It is the family, in ways that none of us are. We are just the wriggling worms bringing it food and minerals so it can grow larger. And then families combine into villages and towns. Our cities now are concrete for hundreds of square kilometers. The nervous system is the power grid, the blood vessels and digestion the water and sewer lines. Huh. Jay told me this and I have never seen it so clearly before. All our science and religion matter less than our architecture. We build reefs.”
Maahjabeen was with her until that last bit. No, there must be a way to include Allah in this thrilling vision. It runs so counter to what Maahjabeen has ever believed to be true: that instead she is a unique shriven soul standing alone in God’s light, with her family and culture more important than anything but the ocean itself. To instead put all the emphasis on inert walls and roofs and floors seems heretical somehow. “I don’t like it. It removes the human from the system.”
“Well, that’s the thing. It’s only the accumulated expression of millions of humans over thousands of years that eventually makes a city state. We build and build. I wonder what the endpoint might be? A conscious city? Perhaps Hong Kong might be a good test lab, constrained and geographically isolated as it is. But no. Think. What is Hong Kong but an expression of human thought and will? Production and creativity? Towers rising to the sky. The entire landscape remade to suit its own needs. So we are not humans, no, we are towns and cities with millions of tiny little human agents working within.”
Maahjabeen shudders, the images getting too uncanny. What does that make her, then, as a solitary researcher on the waves? Perhaps she is a spore or whatever the coral polyps have that is floating on the currents, off to explore the world and found her own colony. But eh. “No. Building more buildings is not at all what I want from my life.”
“We don’t even have to,” Flavia shrugs, staring out over the water at the gray horizon, visualizing what she sees: a jumble of all the great structures she can imagine, and even some more humble, farms isolated in fields. “There are already enough sites. Our era just needs to contribute to the structures already on them.”
Prophet save her. That’s enough science fiction for one day. Maahjabeen lifts the rockfish to her shoulder and carries it across the sand back to camp. Halfway back, she tries to assure Flavia that she will get all the credit for catching dinner tonight, but when she turns to say so she realizes Flavia hasn’t come with her. She is still on the beach, staring pensively out at the horizon, caught in her vision of the distant future. What a strange person.
As she reaches the edges of the camp, Mandy rushes up to Maahjabeen, clapping and squealing with joy. Her grief has vanished and she is spritely again, her long hair pulled away in a ponytail. She goggles at the fish but it hardly delays her own good news: “There’s rain coming! Ra-a-a-i-i-i-i-n! It’ll put out the fire!”
Ξ
Esquibel has never taken a better bite of food than the rice and fish steaming in her bowl. Fresh fish is such a luxury. So nutrient-dense. She can already feel her body start to respond, as if chambers deep in her thoracic cavity and legs only now fill with vitality after being bare-as-her-childhood-cupboards for so long.
Triquet is telling the story of their separation by fairy light, LED strands which Katrina hung upon her return while Jay happily deboned the fish and made this incredible meal. They all look well and Miriam assured her they practiced good mask discipline during their forty-three hour ordeal. Now Esquibel’s mind can’t focus on Triquet’s story, which flits from subject to observation to conjecture, too much all at once for her to absorb.
She sighs and takes another bite. It’s the meal that is disordering her focus more than anything. It’s nearly a sexual experience. Somewhere between sex and the religious ecstasies she witnessed in Nairobi’s Pentecostal churches. Paroxysms of joy. The meaning of life in sensory pleasure. Or rather, sensation so profound it introduces you to one or more gods. Life can be so good! Esquibel privately resolves to stop thinking poorly of Jay. The strapping lad obviously has his uses. And he is such a gentle soul. She can taste it in the broth in the bottom of the bowl. Nourishing. Comforting. How could he do that with such simple ingredients?
She studies Jay across the circle of chairs as they eat, Triquet’s narrative including smoke and storm and a whole new village of warlike Lisicans to worry about. Jay is an engaged listener, nodding and laughing at each recollection without taking the focus away from Triquet, who is of course an excellent storyteller. Jay feels Esquibel’s eyes on him and when he looks her way she toasts him with the bowl. “It’s lovely. Thank you.”
He blushes, looking like he’s six years old. Esquibel shakes her head in amusement. She’s never known someone so truly young. So callow. Is this how they breed them in California? Puff them with innocence like marshmallows? Or is it only that life is so easy on his beach? This is a man who has never needed to learn how to be an adult. Life has removed those considerations. She is at once envious and bitterly judgmental. How can someone ever learn any kind of toughness unless he has faced adversity? How could he truly have a worthwhile character if each one of his needs every day of his life was met by merely holding out his hand? Look at him. He doesn’t even know how good he’s got it. That charming smile. Those blond good looks and that open, friendly innocence are worth millions of dollars. More. They are priceless. They will open every door for him throughout his life.
Ahh, her head is skipping again from thing to thing. It’s almost like she is drunk! She has to have better self-control or she will start to think about things that would remain better-off unthought and get herself in trouble. With effort, Esquibel stiffens her spine, levering what she had once identified as her T2 thoracic vertebra to rock back into a military posture. There. Now her training will help her master herself. Her head suddenly rises so high it stops Triquet’s recitation.
“What? What is it, Doc? Something in the dark?”
“Ehh?” Esquibel realizes she has pulled focus. Now everyone is looking at her. “Ah. Yes. Something maybe I heard. But I don’t think so. I think it was just… never mind. Please continue. I am only hearing things.” She waves everyone’s concern away and puts the bowl to her lips again, to hide behind it.
Triquet resumes where they left off. “And then, after I was done I pulled up my drawers and who do you think is standing there watching me? Wetchie-ghuy.”
“No.” Flavia shoots to her feet, holding a warding hand between her and Triquet. “No, I do not want to hear this story. So please maybe you do not tell it.”
Triquet sighs. “That’s fine. I won’t go into details. It went… okay. But he’s just a disgusting little toad, for sure. No, Flavia. Please stay. I’ll skip that whole part. But I can’t skip his involvement in what came next. You have to hear about what happened to the little bag the drone dropped. He stole it.”
“I swear,” Jay says, “he voodoo-ed that shit down into where he was hiding in the trees. There was no reason it should have dropped the way it did. Like at a forty degree angle.”
Triquet bows toward Jay with a flourish. “And superhero here went scrambling after it, but Wetchie-ghuy got to it first.”
“Of course!” Flavia scowls as Maahjabeen puts an arm around her. “The little creep.”
“But just as he was getting away…” Jay pauses. “You’ll like this, Flavia, the village fox ran into the bushes where he was hiding and bit him. Stole the, what was it like a big tea sachet? out of his hand and ran it right back to Morska Vidra, who didn’t want to touch it at all. But they wouldn’t let us have it back either. So they argued about it all night and into the storm. We never did get the sachet back. And as far as I know they still haven’t opened it. What does it even say?”
“Just an explanation of the current state of affairs, in case you didn’t know them.” Pradeep leans back against one of the posts of his platform, bowl balanced on his knees. “Where the fire was and how it got started and estimates on how long it might burn. Amy added some very nice words of encouragement. And Esquibel included a medical pamphlet for common field wounds.”
“Christ,” Miriam shakes her head, “imagine how they’re reacting to those mysterious written artifacts now. That were delivered by a giant buzzing black sky insect. We just invented an entire bloody religion with that one stunt. Thanks, Sony.”
“I tried to keep it up out of view but I suppose it is such a unique sound that they hadn’t heard before there was no way I could hide it.” Pradeep shrugs, helpless. “Shoot. The drone seemed like such a good idea at the time. But when it came time to actually write out the message, it turned out there was hardly anything to tell you besides to hang tight. And now I’ve traumatized an entire village. I’ve broken the prime directive!”
“Uh, we all have at this point, mate. We’re pretty bad trekkies for sure. Can I share a bit of my own story?” Katrina squeezes Triquet’s arm. “I’ve been so busy since we got back but now I have some results to share.”
“Yeah, you vanished, there at the end.” Triquet steps back, granting the space to Katrina, and finds their bowl. Time for seconds. Over their shoulder, they call out, “I was afraid our debacle had left you hurting, sweetie, but I didn’t want to intrude.”
“No. Not at all. See, well, confession time. I did a bit of a no-no yesterday when we got driven out of the village by the smoke and I hung back a bit to snap this.” Katrina holds up her phone. On it is a photo of a rough bare interior wall, on which hangs a cape or a tapestry. The flash illuminates its details sharply: it is quite old and tattered, its dark blocky designs faded to shadow. Katrina zooms in on the textile piece and hands her phone around. “I really hope no one was still in there, like hanging back, like hiding in the corner when my flash went off. Talk about starting a religion.”
“What is that?” Alonso can’t make sense of the abstract shapes, inexplicable as cave paintings. “I don’t get it. Is that a shawl?”
“I didn’t dare mention I’d done it while we were still there. In case any of them found out.” Katrina’s voice is conspiratorial. “What if I’d broken a real taboo? So I waited until we were back here safe and sound to bring it up. So look. I compared this image to all the art examples I could find for all the nearby peoples. I started pretty much counterclockwise. The Kiril Islanders. The Ainu of Japan. Various Polynesian groups in Samoa and Hawai’i. All the Native American peoples of the West Coast. And I finally found a close match for the artistic style.”
“You did?” Triquet’s voice is loudest above the others. This is big news and they’re all excited by it. Triquet begs for Katrina’s phone for another inspection of the artifact.
But now Katrina plays coy. “No no, you pack of geniuses. Guess. Whose artwork is it? Who does this look like to you?”
“It’s gonna be something weird,” Amy chuckles, “like from Chile or not even the Pacific Ocean. What do Bosnian designs look like?”
Pradeep holds his hand out. “Let me see it again.” Katrina hands him her phone and he studies it in silence as the others think.
“Didn’t one of us have a Masters in Design or something?” Jay wonders. “Ask them.”
“Yeah,” Mandy snorts. “Katrina.”
Katrina shrugs. “I’m not the expert here. Triquet’s our star archaeologist. But that’s cheating. Let’s hear what the amateurs think first.”
Pradeep finally pronounces, “That art style is so familiar. Like the faces on a totem pole. I will guess one of the peoples of the Northwest. Like near Seattle.”
“Good eye!” Katrina takes her phone back and indicates different parts of the faded artwork. “These do indeed compare to the distinct artistic styles of the Northwest Pacific cultures. See if you look real close here you can still find a tiny bit of red and blue pigments. Then look. This is what it looks like if you take a couple hours to digitally fill in those gaps with paint… Here’s my rough attempt.” She swipes to the next photo, where she’s painted the spots that have faded. “See? It nearly looks like what it is…”
Triquet finally snatches the phone from her hand, brow furrowed, to crouch in the sand and study the photos in detail.
“Who are the tribes of Seattle? Or the nations, I guess?” Mandy tries to remember what she knows of them.
Katrina starts bouncing up and down, unable to contain her excitement. “Well, here’s the thing. Totem poles and this kind of indigenous Northwest style is somewhat shared among the different Salish peoples. But it goes all the way up the coast and that’s where our Lisicans are from. Alaska. But they aren’t Salishan. They’re probably related to the modern-day Tlingit.”
“Tlingit!” Triquet exclaims. “I see it! The geometric patterns! Excellent detective work, love!” Katrina takes a small bow.
“Tlingit…” Alonso has heard the word before, but knows next to nothing about the people behind it. “And is Tlingit their word for themselves or our word for them?”
“Well, I’ve only done the most preliminary reading, so I’m not really sure. They live on Alaska’s panhandle, you know that part that stretches down into Canada? There are four basic divisions, apparently.” Katrina reads from her phone, “Southern Tlingit, Northern, Inland, and Gulf Coast Tlingit. And each of these regions have a bunch of different tribes and councils. So they all have names of their own for themselves. Says they’re all super private, so there isn’t much about them in our files. I can do better research, of course, when we’re back somewhere online but…”
“I am unconvinced.” Alonso sits back, automatically settling into his old position of judging doctoral candidates. “Your evidence is too tenuous. It is only a single item. What if they are from somewhere completely different, like a tribe from the south or something, and a single Tlingit once visited them a hundred years ago and left this piece as a gift? What if it is not Tlingit at all? You need more than a sample size of one.”
Katrina vigorously nods in agreement. “Yes. Yes, and that’s why I was overjoyed to find this, like, blog with some Tlingit phrases. There isn’t like a translation program or a whole online dictionary really anywhere, at least that I can access here. But some of the words do match. So here’s my second line of evidence. Then I looked more deeply and realized it’s actually more related to an extinct Athabascan language called Eyat. So I’ve been listening to Eyat recordings and the Lisicans’ speeches get so so close to making sense. Something about the forefather. Something about the seasons or the calendar. The storms seem to be connected to Wetchie-ghuy, who is an outcast shaman who used to be part of the tribe? Maybe? Something like that.”
“You have been translating their words?” This makes Alonso sit up. Katrina has suddenly gone so far so fast.
Katrina nods again. “That word koox̱ that we keep hearing get thrown around? Flavia. It doesn’t mean wife.”
“No? Well good. What does it mean?”
“It means slave.”
“Ai! Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“Slave? Wetchie-ghuy was trying to enslave her?” Now Triquet wishes they weren’t so gentle with their kicks. “Not just a sexual predator but a slaver too? You know, I don’t like this whole Jabba the Hut plot turn. Leia here isn’t ready for bikini season.”
Katrina reads aloud: “Hereditary slavery was a substantial part of Eyat culture until shortly before their extinction, when it was outlawed by the US government over a hundred years ago.”
“Hereditary?” Mandy makes an offended sound. “These people keep slaves for like generations? Ew. Can we please go back to not understanding what the Lisicans were saying? I liked them more back then.”
“What else do we know?” Triquet asks, finally looking up from the phone. “From what I can see, I can tell you this is most likely a pinniped’s hide, like a sealskin, scraped clean and bleached, then painted with organic dyes. I remember hearing in a lecture how interdependent the coastal trade and culture networks were between the coastal settlements and Athabascan Diné folks in the interior. But that’s all I got. Maybe they got their dyes by trade? Not many plants to harvest on like glaciers, I’d imagine.”
“No, they aren’t on glaciers. It actually isn’t that icy that far south.” Amy recollects her visits to Juneau and the Tongass National Forest. “Rainy and cold as hell. But so beautiful. Just endless trees, right up to the water. Wolves and eagles. Tons of fishing. The Eyat must have had it so good for so long.”
“So good they kept slaves.” Mandy can’t get over the fact that they’re sharing an island with people who keep slaves—who tried to enslave them the first time they saw them!
“Not all of them,” Miriam amends. “Maybe just Wetchie-ghuy. Morska Vidra and his people didn’t try to enslave us. Or maybe it’s that other tribe that does? Maybe there’s some kind of dispute between them? About slaves? Or outcast shamans?”
Katrina shrugs. “I don’t have a clue. Yet. But I’ll keep working on it. But it’s definitely slow going. Like I said, there’s this weird Slavic word-bombing going on in their language and just when I think I’m starting to get their like pidgin Eyat, all of a sudden I’m playing Bosnian word games with my schoolgirl friend again.”
“You say it’s a pidgin?” Now the discoveries are coming fast and furious. Triquet remembers that one undergrad linguistics theory class that broke their brain. Their near-failure in that course played a distinct part in their choice to become an archaeologist and not an anthropologist. Things instead of people. Triquet has never regretted their decision. “I don’t know much, but I do recall that there are like established metrics you can use to chart how many generations a language has drifted from its origins. Pidgin languages nearly always develop in pretty standard ways.”
“So if we find one of those matrices,” Pradeep reasons, “we can model the age of the pidgin’s development and find when they separated from the mainland and colonized Lisica.”
Katrina holds up her hands. “Maybe. Like after a lot more study. I’ve got a good ear for languages but you’ve heard how they sound. Like a musical trash compactor. They sound very little like any modern Athabascan language I’ve found. Those are more guttural. This is, I don’t know, chatty and light. As long as the vocabulary makes sense I’m going with Eyat, at least until further notice.”
Triquet raises Katrina’s hand in victory like she just won a boxing bout. “Winner and still champ-een! The soft social sciences! Ha! Without us, life would hardly be worth living.”
Ξ
Mandy excuses herself to use the trenches. They are all calling for more glasses now. It looks like it will be another celebration, with everyone returned. Maybe Katrina will play some more of that sultry music that makes Esquibel move like a cat in heat.
Upon Mandy’s return, at the edge of the grove she finds Jay walking toward her. He nods and she does too. But his expression is pained. She stops. “Oh, no. What is it, Jay?”
“Just uhh… Just had to let you know…” He shakes his head. “I didn’t rat you out. Never did. Nobody knows who started the fire.”
“Oh!” Mandy claps her hand over her mouth. The predicament Jay has been struggling with is instantly apparent to her. He’s been keeping her arson a secret! “I’m so sorry! I mean, everyone already knows it was me. Don’t worry. It was my stupid idea.”
“No, it was my stupid idea.” Jay struggles to keep his temper. He shakes his head, bitter. “Sorry. Not angry with you. Just myself. I can’t just go shooting my mouth off like that. I can’t!”
“No. Jay, no.” Mandy consoles him, a hand on his arm. “Please. Seriously. This is like my formal apology, okay? I was just so upset not being able to contribute any science I got really reckless and didn’t think about the long-term effects a fire would have.”
“Still.” Jay is stiff, unwilling to forgive himself. “It wouldn’t have even occurred to you if I wasn’t still fucking around… I just got to wise up, know what I’m saying?”
“I guess we both do.” Mandy gives him a fist bump. But he still isn’t over being upset. She searches for common ground. “Uh. It’ll be okay. So weird being the youngest ones here, right? You, me, and Katrina I guess. Back home I was running a lab of undergrads every day. They made fun of me for being so old. Now here I am the baby again. And nobody listens to what we say. And then when we do something it turns out to be a total fucking trainwreck.”
“Yeah.” But Jay isn’t ready to hear consoling words. “Speaking as a biologist, The real tragic part is the entire like biome that must have existed in that tunnel. There were probably a dozen different bird and animal species, maybe small mammals, and countless insect and plant and fungus—”
“I know!” Mandy turns away from the unbearable litany. “I mean, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! I just thought it would burn like a chimney fire all nice and cozy for a few hours then I could just go and sweep out the ashes and start figuring out how to climb up to the top to install my instruments. I was so excited! But I’m just so dumb when it comes to things like this.”
“Man… I saw the flare from the top.” Jay shakes his head at the memory of the brilliant flame, like a burning oil well. Those villagers had never seen anything like it, that’s for sure. “That fucker burned so hot.”
“Pradeep said it could have burned for like a week. But I’m so glad the rain came and doused it. But it didn’t make things any better. The fire is out but the tunnel is still blocked. So we’re left with the worst of both worlds.”
“Nah. That fire was full-on jet engine style. We were getting air currents at the cave mouth sucking more oxygen into it. I’d be surprised if there’s any fuel left. It burned hot.”
“Are you serious? You think so?” This perks Mandy up. The prospect of having a clear path up the cliffs again revives her. She clasps hands with still-doleful Jay. “If it’s actually clear it almost makes it worth it. Let’s go check. Will you come?”
“Uh, now?” Jay hadn’t made any plan beyond finding Mandy and telling her he hadn’t snitched on her, but he didn’t expect the conversation to turn into a night-time underground expedition.
“Yeah. Why not?” Mandy swings his hand, trying to infuse him with her energy. “We’re the young ones, remember? We wake up at night? I do all my best work after sunset.”
Jay nods, unable to dispute it. “True dat.” He allows her to lead him back to camp, his reluctance slowly shifting to excitement.
As they go, Mandy spots a shifting shadow. Esquibel. She must have followed Jay to watch over Mandy. Jay never saw her. Now she silently nods, to signal that all is well and Mandy is safe. Oh, Esquibel. Mandy chuckles to herself. She knows she is safe, and certainly from Jay. He’s just a big goof.
Ξ
“You know the strangest part, Zo?” They lie in bed, in the dark, Miriam and Alonso, his head on her chest. His eyes are closed but hers are open, seeing visions in the blackness.
He’s been drifting. Alonso grunts, pleased to hear the sound of her voice. Anything to have her keep talking. She starts stroking his hair. That too. He will never tire of how dear she is.
“The strangest part was that it was the first time we’ve spent a night apart since we found each other.”
“Hm.” Alonso opens his eyes, remembering a jumble of slurred images from the night before, after the seven glasses of wine that eventually allowed him to not worry himself to pieces over Miriam’s safety. “Yes. It was awful.”
She hugs him tight, kissing the crown of his head. “It was. Just dreadful sleep. And it got cold. No blankets.” Miriam snuggles closer to Alonso, reveling in his heat. “But that wasn’t the strangest thing. The strangest thing was, that I wasn’t with you and I missed you but… I mean, I really missed you, but… it was okay. For the first time in five years it was okay. I knew I was safe and you were safe and it would just be a matter of time until we saw each other again. So, I mean, I missed you. I certainly did. But for the first time I was able to really be, you know, myself. Not… just…”
“The grieving widow?”
“Yes! My entire bloody identity has been so bound up in you and your disappearance. It was crazy. Really difficult transition for me. We were never like this before. I was never Sergio Alonso Aguirre’s wife first and Miriam Truitt second.”
“No. Not you. My fierce independent little fox.”
“And not you, you big crazy adventurer. We’ve always been our own people. And for five bloody years I couldn’t…”
Now he hugs her. “Oh, Mirrie. I am so sorry.”
“No. It’s not your fault. This isn’t about you. It’s about my relationship with myself. It has nothing to do with you.”
“Of course it does, I inflicted my whole crisis onto you.”
“I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”
“I know. But I did. And I owe you so much for that.”
“You owe me nothing. Because you came back. Now if you hadn’t come back…”
“Yes. You would curse my ghost.” They settle in each other’s arms and Alonso considers the implications of her words. “So… are you saying you would like some space? Would you like to maybe find another place to sleep, until…?”
She swats him, hard. “Don’t be daft. Of course not. I have no idea what it means. I guess I want to return to who I used to be. But I know I kind of can’t, can I? I’ll never be so… so brave, so unwise, so happy… To be free like that again. The nightmare went on so long I hardly realized it after a while. But the trouble is that… that solitary vigil I held, it changed me. A lot. I guess I just thought I was getting old, that this kind of despair was what getting old meant. But that isn’t true either, is it? This is some wild shit, Zo. I just don’t know who I am any more. It’s kind of scary.”
Alonso is tempted to say he knows a bit about what she means, but he knows that it will change the subject and make it all about his suffering again, which must always be the primary suffering, always the first and last one mentioned, like the Lord’s Prayer. And he’s already sick of that. He doesn’t want to eclipse her, not now. This is her time to unravel what she has become. Here in his arms. “I will love you whoever you want to be.” It sounds weak but it is true. She doesn’t know how much an equivocation it is. But he has already spoken things aloud that he thought he’d never speak and even lived through traumatic memories that he’d forbidden himself with the help of good friends and better drugs.
He had been so sure he would never heal. In the gulag and in the military hospitals, surrounded by men broken in war. He would have bet all the money in the world he was broken too, beyond repair. But bodies are wonderful things. All this computational biology unfolding within him. They never stop, the synapses firing and the blood chemistry shifting, unless you mentally stop yourself. And the last thing Alonso wants to do is to be like Katrina’s brother Pavel and mentally stop himself, stuck in his torture, unable to move beyond it. Oh, it still shackles Alonso to the earth, there is no doubt that he will be dealing with this pain for the rest of his life. But now he has a life.
Miriam floats up and away from the bed, her mind taking flight. Yes, who is she? And who shall she become…? Old ambitions reawaken in her. She sees canyons in Ethiopia and the Gobi Desert. Her view rises to the moon. Sweet Christ, with Alonso back she can scratch that itch she’s had for decades about lunar geology. That very charming astrogeologist postdoc invited Miriam to her lab last year and she had never followed up. Now she could. She could wander the earth’s hidden caverns again and learn the secrets of the sky. Oh, bless. Her whole life is starting over now.
Chapter 25 – Blows Him A Kiss
June 17, 2024
Thanks for joining us for the second volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this episode:
25 – Blows Him A Kiss
Maahjabeen lifts another armful of heavy branches and carries them across the beach to the lean-to she is rebuilding against the trunk of the fallen redwood. It had been Pradeep who had made it for her a few weeks ago, and then again after that sleeper wave, but the last storm had once again erased all sign of it.
Now, as a labor of love, she builds it again.
Catching her breath, she leans against the giant mass of the horizontal trunk behind her. The sun is breaking through, with silver streaks lighting the ocean in the far distance like spotlights tilted down from heaven. Imagine being a school of sardines out in the open ocean and all of a sudden God decides it is your time to be the star of the show. Maahjabeen is a firm believer in the growing marine biology discoveries about fish intelligence and social complexity. So she imagines they would react to the beneficent touch of the creator with glee. They might be dancing with the stars under the waves, for all she knows.
Maahjabeen giggles. She is in love, truly in love. This is what it is supposed to feel like. She is in wonder at the purity of Pradeep. Mind and body, he is unlike anyone she thinks can even exist in this world. And he is hers. All hers. She wraps her arms around herself with a sense of deep completion. After losing her mother and then her family and town and country and culture, she has been adrift, literally following the currents wherever they take her, ever since. She has had no home, no roots. And it has not been a thrilling adventure. It has really only felt like bleak survival. Because when there is nothing to fall back on, your thoughts return again and again to finding stability. These short oceanography contracts have kept her afloat (again, literally) but she can’t depend on finding them consistently over the years. She needs a larger plan. Before, she just couldn’t decide where to build her life. Now she knows: wherever Pradeep is.
Then she realizes she doesn’t know where Pradeep currently lives. This is important information. It can be a home base for her, a landing spot between her contracts all over the world. Maybe he could even come with her sometimes as another researcher.
Maahjabeen giggles again. She has never been like this. She comes from a family of reserved, educated women. Even their love they dispense in brief but intense dollops. But that is the Tunisian way. And Maahjabeen is now a citizen of the world, is she not? Her time in Japan, in Indonesia and Dar es Salaam and Belize has shown her how wildly different humans can be. Only some of them follow the prophet. Some follow other religions. And others appear to be entirely without God. What had dismayed her is that she couldn’t readily tell which was which. She’d thought that by looking at the hovels and high-rises of Hokkaido and Sumatra and Corozal she could discern the godly among them. But the atheist Japanese had the cleanest and fairest towns and villages of all and her brothers and sisters in Islam in Dar and in Jakarta had been some of the most despairing.
It has caused doubt in her. Not in her faith, which remains as deep and profound as it ever had, but rather in her cultural connection to her faith. She is still a devout Muslim. But she realizes she is no longer the Tunisian version of that. She can now see Allah everywhere, in every tall tree of this island and every wave that laps against the gray shore. She sees holiness in the faces of unbelievers and knows that God is omnipresent, regardless of whether they believe it or not. He watches over them all.
So in that sense, Pradeep has already joined the ummah just by his willingness to listen. She is already doing great work by revealing the Prophet’s words to him. Maahjabeen can rest assured that her intimacy with him is no sin. And besides, not a living soul will know what happened here. It will be their secret forever.
The god rays break through the clouds and their spotlights widen on the ocean’s shining surface, creating white gold luminescences that are painful to behold. She turns toward the southwest instead, to study the dark horizon. It is always a comfort to her, to see the infinite sea disappearing over the furthest edge of the world. This is where the Pacific has every other ocean beat. She has felt this same sweet solitude on the Indian and Atlantic Oceans for sure, but the scale that the Pacific provides is something else. God is here again. The scale of god, the power that comes with infinity. She suspects that God’s divinity specifically derives from His endlessness. Her mathematic brain has always thought so.
What she would give to be out on that open ocean, well-supplied and with a clear forecast for like five days. To be surrounded by nothing but water… It has been too long. She is not really made to live this long on land. She hopes that Pradeep understands that he is dating a mermaid.
This gets another chuckle out of her. What her lover’s amazing brain has reminded her, in their trips together in the kayaks, is that they aren’t skating over a shining surface of a two-dimensional world. It is the roof of an entire rich ecosystem that she is often unwilling to fully take into account. Perhaps it messes with her solitude, the idea that she is far from alone when she is on the water. Perhaps she has a bit of thalassophobia, a fear of the deep, that she has never properly reconciled. But how can you reconcile that terror? Look at those patches out there right now.
She scrambles atop the trunk to get a better view. Blue and green and gray fields exist on the surface of the nearby ocean. They indicate many things, one of them being the depth of the water beneath. The ocean floor could be like 3800 meters here and it wouldn’t surprise her. To fall… to be pulled down into inky, icy oblivion… La. She isn’t sure there is a healthy way to deal with the human need to avoid the deep.
Now. Back to work. How did Pradeep build this thing…? Oh, you idiot. He had twine. Maahjabeen can’t do much here without it. Well. It won’t be more than a moment to retrieve a roll. And maybe she can grab a bite while she’s in camp.
Maahjabeen scrambles onto the fallen log once more, this time facing camp. And that’s when she sees it: the plume of gray smoke streaming from a hole in the top of the cliffs directly above. The wind whips the smoke up and away before it reaches them. That is why she hasn’t smelled it.
But the island is on fire.
Ξ
“I knew it was Jay’s idea!” Esquibel has heard all she needs to hear. It is always Jay. He is the one problem with this whole mission.
“No, no…” Mandy waves her hand in defeat. “You can’t pin it on him. I’m the idiot who actually set the fire.”
“But why… Why would you do that?” Alonso is at a loss. A giant plume of smoke streams from the island like it’s the chimney of a log fucking cabin. Any ship within range will see them. If the skies continue to break up every satellite in this whole hemisphere will turn their cameras onto Lisica.
Amy puts a calming hand on Mandy’s arm. “More importantly, why would you do that without consulting us first?”
“I just—I’m so sorry! I just thought that it wouldn’t be such a big deal. I guess I don’t have much experience with fires. But it seemed safe since it’s all contained in that one like chimney there. So I thought I could just build a quick fire at the base and… I don’t know. I guess I thought it would all go poof and then I’d have an easy way up to the platform on the cliff.”
“It must be like thousands of cubic meters of dry fuel.” Pradeep shakes his head in despair. “It could burn for, like, weeks. Not that it will. But it must be a massive amount of dry wood. We’re talking a four hundred meter shaft, minimum, with like a three meter cross-section. Let’s say the wood is only able to fill half that volume. That’s still… I mean, I can do some calculations… There are equations for how fast wood burns, I’m sure.”
“And how hot is it getting in there?” Amy shakes her head in despair. “It’s like a giant rocket stove. I wouldn’t want to be any of the critters who set up homes in there.”
“Oh my god I didn’t even think about them!” Mandy holds her face in her hands. This is a nightmare. She doesn’t even feel Esquibel’s comforting hand on her back. Now she has to bear the burden of dead wildlife. She ruined the entire field study. She probably ruined their relationship with the Lisicans. And now she has all this blood on her hands. Mandy’s never had to handle this amount of guilt. She can’t take it.
Pradeep has stepped away to the bunker. He returns, calling out, “That’s what I thought. You can feel a noticeable draft pulling air through the sub. Much stronger than before. Amy is right. With all that fuel it must be drawing the air up it and creating a kind of rocket effect. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was hot enough to melt steel in there.”
“Oh, god!” Mandy can’t bear any more. She tears herself away and flees, out of camp, away from this reality. But she stumbles in the sand and falls on her side, hands still covering her face. She is wracked by grief, only dimly aware that Esquibel and Amy kneel on either side, consoling her.
Alonso sighs, shaking his head. He wishes he had more fury. But instead he just feels a great weariness. This is how it happens. Not even halfway through the study. The military ships return and the island is taken away from them, just as Plexity is beginning to show its promise. Is this shock? Perhaps he’s in shock.
“Lonzo, we need to come up with a bit of a plan.” Amy encircles his wrist with her hand.
He can only manage a grunt.
She can divine his helplessness. After a compassionate smile and a hand pressed against his cheek, Amy turns toward the others. “Okay. Listen up, everyone. Safety protocol. As long as smoke is coming out of that hole, nobody is allowed in the tunnels. Actually, we probably want to close up the sub as tight as we can.”
“But what if it’s the others coming back?” Esquibel’s question, called out from Mandy’s side, stops them all. Even Mandy sits up.
Through her tears she bawls, “Oh, you’re right! What if they don’t want to be stuck in the interior and they try something dangerous! We need—Oh, Esquibel, you’ve got to call in the Air Force now. Or whoever. Please. We need help.”
But Esquibel only has a helpless shrug for Mandy. “I would if I could, Mands. You know I’d do anything for you.”
It is this evidence that finally convinces Pradeep that Esquibel really doesn’t have a secret link to the outside world. She would do anything for Mandy. “Shit. We really are alone here, aren’t we?”
“It is what Alonso and I have been telling you.” But it is not a point Esquibel needs to hammer home right now, not with how it’s making poor Mandy feel. Esquibel knows what the girl did is reckless but she does feel sympathy. She might have done the same thing in Mandy’s place. It was a reasonable course of action. Who can tell how long fires burn?
“Have we found any other route to the village? Amy? Anyone?” Pradeep tries to get back on track. “Could you see any trails when you were there? I have heard of a few, but…”
“Well, there’s the bad trail,” Amy lists, “and then another wide trail that heads down, I assume to their water source. Then there were a few game trails heading into the trees but I didn’t ever have time to see…”
“It’s possible there’s another way through,” Pradeep says. “But all the ways we know right now bottle-neck at the tunnel right next to the one on fire. So unless Triquet and the others somehow surprise us, they’re stuck there.”
Mandy wails and Amy comforts her with an arm over her shoulders. “Yeah, I think that’s clear, Prad. But maybe we can find a way to reach them. It won’t be weeks. Not with the fire burning that hot. I bet it’s done in another hour or two. We’ll see them again in the morning. I’m sure of it.” But the words sound hollow to them all, even to Amy herself. She eventually stops trying and pushes herself to her feet. “Well, I guess I’ll go close up the sub. Oh, don’t worry, Mandy. I won’t lock them out. I’ll make it so they can push the doors open. I just want to keep the smoke out.”
The impromptu meeting disperses as afternoon progresses into evening. Soon it is only Esquibel and Mandy left, one holding the other. Then Alonso calls out for Esquibel and she squeezes Mandy one last time before abandoning her. No. That is too harsh. She is just busy. With real work. Something Mandy cannot have.
Coming from the shadows, a voice growls, “Well I for one am glad you lit the tunnels on fire. I hope it collapses them and makes it impossible for anyone to go through them.” Flavia leans forward, her eyes burning. “Tonight I will sleep with more peace than I have in weeks.”
Ξ
“We will wait. We won’t do anything rash. We will only see what happens next. Jay…” Miriam puts a heavy hand on his forearm. He is filled with so many wild plans. “We aren’t going to search for the waterfall right now and we certainly aren’t going to launch anything off it.”
He frowns but nods, disappointed.
Miriam surveys the village. The Lisicans have stopped talking to them. They’ve stopped doing nearly all their normal daily work. The smoke has really rattled them. The researchers now stand off to the side, beside a bush and a rockfall in a neglected corner at the edge of the village beside the cliff the tunnel emerges from. It has been an hour, maybe more. They are doing all they can not to draw any more attention to themselves.
Morska Vidra emerges from a hut, blinking at the bright light. His face is thoughtful. With the tip of his thumb he selects several young villagers, talking to them in his sing-song. None of them look happy to be selected. Their heads hang down and their eyes are hooded, but they follow him.
Morska Vidra scrambles up a rockfall to a game trail in a cleft. He is headed toward the source of the smoke, but overland.
Jay can’t stay still any longer. “Fact-finding mission. We got to get in on this.” He slips away from the others and crosses the tunnel mouth to join them. “Heeey gang, mind if I tag along? I know a bunch more songs I could sing.”
“Jay!” Miriam’s voice is too loud, a dreadful whipcrack in this quiet little hamlet. Dozens of heads snap toward her. She lifts a hand in apology and her face goes red. She puts her hand over her mouth. Then she finally manages, “Jay, please get back here.”
But it’s too late. With a helpless shrug, Jay follows the last of the villagers into the cleft, obscured by overhanging boughs of cedar.
Miriam quivers with fury. Triquet ventures a light touch on her elbow but Miriam doesn’t even seem to register it. Triquet withdraws their hand.
“Well.” Katrina likes challenges for sure. But this is a bit much. Their only way out is gone. “And they’ve got to think we did it, somehow. Us or the others at the beach. They must be furious. I hope it doesn’t burn down anything sacred or whatever or we might get a taste of their penal code.”
“Well, Jay can take whatever punishment.” Miriam shakes her hands, trying to release the emotion roaring through her. “We can just watch. Now. We can’t just sit here and pretend to be invisible. We need to show them we can be of value.”
“I’ve got a first aid kit.” Triquet pulls off their backpack and takes out a small ziploc filled with medical supplies. “I don’t… I have no idea how to indicate to them how that might be useful though. Oh, why did Jay have to follow them? I was hoping he’d lose his mind and drop down into the tunnels and somehow save us all. Now I guess I’ll have to be the one to do it.”
“No.” Miriam and Katrina say it at the same time, both putting hands on Triquet. Miriam continues, “We have no idea how dangerous that is. And smoke inhalation is a real killer. You can’t. We just have to be patient.”
Triquet falls back into their embraces with a ragged sigh.
Jay has always prided himself on his climbing skills but these kids are flat-out amazing. First they’ve got top-notch ankle mobility, which he’s always struggled with as a basic bitch white boy. And their joints and hip flexors are as explosive as soccer midfielders. They hammer up the nearly vertical face, their toes grabbing little pockets in the dried clay here, kicking themselves upward like mountain goats.
Jay scrambles, his shoes unwieldy here. Finally he takes them off and crushes his toes getting them to follow in their barefoot tracks. They finally crest the cliff and Jay is surprised to see a wide hollow up here instead of the edge of the cliff dropping to the beach. But no. There’s yet a higher cliff beyond this one, rising up even more. And they’re headed toward it at a brisk pace. Jay starts running to keep up with them on the open land. He nearly reaches the Lisicans by the time they start ascending this cliff. They still haven’t acknowledged him in any way.
The cliff leads upward through a narrow maze of green limestone channels tufted by shrubs like a Doctor Seuss illustration. Jay pulls his way up through them, the soft skin of his feet already so tender. He hasn’t toughened them up in too long and now he’s paying the price. Well, the smoke’s getting worse too and this is what he’s here to see. Good thing he’s got a proper N95 mask already on.
They crest this cliff and here he is. On top of the entire fucking world. The seawinds whip at him from across the island to the north. The gray dome of clouds that conceals the island touches the sea in nearly every direction. He can see it all now, better than any drone. The island makes sense. “Ahh. Miriam’s gotta see this. Incredible.” He takes out his phone and gets a dozen shots before the others move on out of view. He hurries to join them.
They’ve dropped down the front face of this cliff, which sweeps outward in a smoke-filled bowl about the size of a basketball court. They get to the far edge of it, where the smoke is quite bad. Morska Vidra puts his feet over an edge and lowers himself down, face squeezed shut against the fumes. The others follow.
Finally Jay, heart pounding, crawls nearly blind to the spot and sits at the edge. He drops his legs over and feels a small ridge under his heel, no more than a couple centimeters wide. This is it? Then what? Man… Sometimes being heedless has its downsides for sure.
He slowly scoots down a fairly sheer face, sometimes hanging from the fabric of his shirt and shorts. But then he hears their voices below him and realizes they stand on a spine that is level here. He joins them, uncomfortably close on the small ridge.
This close to the fire, the air is suddenly scorching. Jay realizes it’s just on the other side of this ridge. And it’s roaring. The cliffs had hidden all this from them before but now they can hear it. It’s like a giant Roman fucking candle sending a huge jet of yellow flame straight up into the air. Cinders fall everywhere. They can’t get any closer.
Finally Jay realizes what he’s looking at. He understands what happened here. He remembers that it was his own words.
Now the Lisicans finally look at him. Shock, sadness, fear. He can’t bear their gazes. They don’t even realize how right they are to blame him for what they’re seeing. Jesus, dude. You’ve really got to learn to watch your fucking mouth. But never in a million years did I think she’d actually go and do it!
Ξ
Flavia hates waking up at night on this island, ever since those crabs took over the beach on one of the first nights. She’s never really gotten over that. Since then, if it’s dark, she does all she can not to open her eyes. But her alarm goes off all the same. Even before she is awake her hand moves to silence it.
Here in her cell, she starts to drift off again but a tiny inquisitive voice in the back of her head starts asking what that alarm was for. And now, until she can figure it out, she can’t get back to sleep. Flavia squints at her phone screen. It presents a reminder:
YOUR FOURTH WEEK STARTS TODAY.
Flavia drops her head back on her pillow. Right. Her ordeal here isn’t even halfway over. But at least she can go back to sleep now. Since most of the heavy-lifting with Plexity is already done maybe she can just sleep through all of the next day.
What is that sound? Ah, yes. The fire. It is like an old-fashioned boiler in the next flat, an uneven sputtering of white noise in the far distance. And the ground outside flickers with its firelight. It is still burning quite hot. What a foolish thing that was for Mandy to do.
How hot is the fire getting? Flavia is generally comforted by feedback loop transfer functions and the state-space equations that can describe them. Now she lets them trickle through her mind. But she doesn’t know the starting values of the fuel or what its ignition point is. She will have to guess, which mostly makes the exercise irrelevant. And now she isn’t falling back to sleep at all.
She hears a giggle. Strange. The only other ones in here tonight are Maahjabeen and Pradeep and neither of them are the giggling type. Perhaps Maahjabeen is having a silly childhood dream. That’s what it sounds like. Such a carefree giggle.
Flavia wishes she could feel so carefree. But her life has never been so easy. Not that she’s had to deal with any particular challenges. She comes from a privileged family with historical roots and a tradition of philosophy and science in their ranks. She was mildly bullied for being a nerd in school and mildly assaulted once by a couple boys, who learned to keep their hands to themselves after she knocked one’s teeth out and dislocated the other one’s knee. But apart from a few rattling moments like that, her life has been pretty much her own. She is the paragon of a modern Italian woman, in control of her body and her career and her daily life.
After Prozia Giulia left her a sizable inheritance and an old farm in the Po River Valley, Flavia had become independently… well, not wealthy, but secure. And her work brings in enough revenue that she can almost pretend she is a success. It is when her patents start to make money that she will truly build her empire. Then she will be carefree. Until that day, it is projects for others like this.
No. Not like this. Never again like this. If anyone ever asks her to work onsite again she will laugh in their faces. From now on, she will do all her work from the comfort of her couch or not at all. Flavia has learned her lesson.
Maahjabeen giggles again. Ha. It must be quite a sweet dream!
Ξ
Miriam picks at the wall of the cliff beside her with her smallest tool. She’s getting flakes of dried clay intermixed with a variety of sandstones. The cladding, again. This is what hides the interesting layers from her, even here. When oh when will she finally be able to discover the roots of this island? She needs a bloody sluice to tear the earth off this cliff so she can finally see what she wants!
Suppressing a grimace, she shifts to see what else she can reach. They really haven’t moved since they’ve gotten here. Katrina and Triquet still stand with her in the corner of the village, unwilling to make a peep. It’s quite clear that their team is responsible for the fire and the villagers are extremely upset with them. It is a sign of their civility that they have been so restrained in their response.
Jay eventually returns with the others. His face is streaked with dirt and soot and he is uncharacteristically silent, eyes downcast. Whatever he saw up there has disturbed him greatly. Katrina tries to ask, then cajole answers from him. But he only shakes his head and shoves his hands into his pockets.
“Well, this is ridiculous.” Miriam looks to Triquet and Katrina for support. “We need whatever information you’ve got, Jay. Did you see the fire?”
Jay nods yes, his face even more unhappy.
“It’s not the camp, is it? Please God tell me it isn’t camp.”
“No, no…” This rouses Jay enough to speak. “Everyone’s safe.”
“Then where is the fire?” Triquet snaps fingers under Jay’s nose. “Hey I know you’re upset and you’re not like playing coy here but we need some real answers now. Dude. What’s on fire? Are we in trouble? When will it go out so we can get home?”
Jay groans. “It might be days. We gotta… We gotta, like find some food I guess. It’s one of the tunnels. The vertical one filled with branches and logs. And now it’s burning.”
“Ohh.” Triquet nods. “Yeah, that makes sense. But how did a fire get started…?”
Jay only crosses his arms and shakes his head no. He ain’t no snitch. And even though it was his idea, he’ll definitely have some choice words for Mandy himself, in private.
As the day progresses into afternoon, the wind shifts and billows of smoke come rolling through the tunnel mouth to cover the village. Now Miriam and the others have to move, scurrying with the Lisicans out of the village down the main path, deeper into the valley. The smoke, heavier than air, rolls after them.
The path is two people wide and the bare tree roots and soil soon give way to rounded river stones beneath their feet. Miriam kneels to scoop up a few. Quartz. Ha. This is an old riverbed and there must be a seam of quartz up-canyon. Here’s another pink quartz shot through with pyrite. Nearly everything else is sandstone of various hardness. She stands, pockets the samples, and hurries after the others, smoke chasing her.
Miriam is quite glad to have a properly-fitting mask, but her eyes are still streaming in the dense smoke. Her breath labors through the filter and her chest aches. Her heart is beating too fast.
The trail flattens out into a wide river valley. It follows a narrow stream, with a worn bank where the villagers must get their water. Here, they’re far enough from the rim of cliffs that the wind blows across, pushing the smoke off to the west. The villagers cross deep into the valley to get as far from the smoke as they can, finally standing along the tall bank of a larger creek in a long line.
This flight has revived Jay and he’s back to problem-solving mode. Where will they cross this little river here? It’s deep and flowing fast, the water dark blue and brown, reflected in the nauseous sky. The first flecks of ash are sprinkling its surface.
Jay and his crew look up and down the bank. There is no bridge, no ford, no fallen log. As far as they can tell, there is no way across. The Lisicans stand waiting, anxious but fleeing no farther, their backs to the river.
“Uh, won’t we be better off like, over there?” Jay can’t help but say it aloud to the closest Lisican, a relatively tall man who comes up to his shoulder. Jay points at the far side of the river. Then he corrects himself and points again using the tip of his thumb. But the man won’t even turn around to look.
“Who’s that?” Katrina hasn’t said much these last few hours. Usually in a crisis she likes to chatter or sing a song but here, in masks and smoke, she can’t lift her own spirits, much less those of anyone else. But now she sees a figure on the far bank, a teen girl in a blue feather cape, who stands at a distance and calls out.
“Eeeyyyyy-Yee!” The girl’s voice ends in a piercing crack. “Laak lilḵa Dunaax̱oo?”
The woman who first lectured Katrina at the entrance of the hut now separates herself from the others and takes fifteen or twenty steps away from the river before she turns around. She responds to the girl with a long loud chant that carries across the river, pointing at the fire, then at the tall strangers in their midst.
The girl considers the speech for a long moment, then turns and vanishes. The woman on this bank hurries back to join the others, waving a hand in front of her own face and coughing. The villagers all fall to talking to each other. Still, none of them will turn to look across the river.
“Anyone else,” Triquet drawls, “starting to think we shouldn’t be looking this direction? Some kind of taboo, I guess.”
“Who knows?” Katrina shrugs. “We may be exempt. Who even knows what’s going on here? Christ. It’s nothing but one bloody incomprehensible thing after the other. All I know is we haven’t brought them a single moment of joy since we got here. They must be so sick of us.”
“Maybe we… uh…” Jay looks over the heads of the Lisicans up and down the bank to find a more suitable place to stand, away from the villagers who hate them so much. But stands of reeds and clumps of vegetation block his view each way. “Let me just check downstream here.” Jay breaks formation and steps away from the river, crossing before the last clutch of villagers on their left to investigate what lies beyond a surprisingly-tall stand of catchfly.
A gap in the vegetation on the bank is infilled with tule reeds. No real place for them here. Pushing through the reeds leads to a marsh with sucking mud. And if he goes any further away from the river in search of solid ground he’ll be right back in the smoke.
In defeat, Jay returns to the others, where the air remains clear.
Katrina has used the time he’s been gone to make a plan with Triquet. After the woman addressed the girl on the far bank, she had returned to her place at the riverside, next to the old crone Katrina had been trying to meet in her hut. Of course she’s been evacuated too. Now this might be their only chance to speak with her. But Triquet isn’t convinced.
“Give the old thing a chance to catch her breath first, girlfriend. She ain’t going nowhere.” Triquet still carries the folded display in the internal sleeve of their backpack where a water pouch should go. But they make no move yet to retrieve it.
When Jay returns, he taps them each on the arms and gestures with his chin at the far bank. They look over their shoulders to see the members of another entire village standing outside the edge of the woods there, regarding them.
Their leader is a tall woman with tight gray curls carrying what looks like a spear with a cross-brace. She begins speaking but Jay can’t follow. His mind’s awhirl with what that cross-brace means. A spear like that is only used in big-game hunting, like elk or bison. If your prey has the potential of lunging and goring you then you put a cross-brace on your spear so it won’t plunge further than a certain depth. It keeps you away from antlers and tusks. She wears a hide cape and skirt. Further proof these people hunt big game. There’s large mammals on this island!
Katrina is discreetly recording the woman’s speech. She speaks softly into her phone during a silence. “This is the other like chief, I guess. Like the lady boss. That’s what I’ll call her. Now Lady Boss is pointing at the trees and the cliffs and the river. Listen! She’s saying the same word Morska Vidra used! Tuzhit! Tuzhit! Tuzhit everywhere!”
Triquet narrates what happens next. “Now our own Lady Boss, the crone’s daughter? She’s stepping away from the river to reply. There’s some kind of holy significance perhaps? A significant cultural element of both their villages, this river? That if they get too close they can’t look at it? Good fences make good neighbors?”
“We’ll call our Lady Boss, uh, the Mayor? I think she’s repeating what she told the girl.” They listen to her speech again, and when she indicates the tall strangers in their midst, Jay for one feels compelled to bow in the direction of the new tribe.
That doesn’t go over well. Lady Boss lifts her spear and shouts in a dreadful guttural voice at them, her consonants crashing together and her eyes flashing. They haven’t seen this kind of aggression from anyone in this village. “Whoa. That ain’t good.” Jay averts his eyes like the others.
Lady Boss makes a decision. She directs some of her villagers to go stand on their own bank of the river. Katrina glances back to see that a good twenty of their tribe line it in opposition, their own backs to the river. “Well, this is ridiculous.”
“Norms must be observed,” Miriam tells Katrina, squeezing her hand for patience. “Especially during a crisis. That’s what they’re for.” Miriam takes a long glance herself. Lady Boss and the rest of her village have left, leaving only the score of those on the far bank. “Even if we have no fucking clue what they mean.”
Triquet shares a glum look with Katrina, then Jay. “Anyone else getting hungry?”
“Oh, damn,” Jay groans, “you had to mention it.”
Ξ
“This is my processing site here.” Pradeep leads Amy to a small clearing in the grove, near Maureen Dowerd’s grave. He has excavated a long trench of turf, topsoil, and clay, removing the long narrow samples of earth to lie in rows, where they’ve been marked with small pins adorned with white flags. “The flags mark the boundaries of each medium, gravel, clay, etc. We’ll need Miriam to help us analyze what each of the minerals are. But we get to categorize any life forms we find in each layer.”
Amy crouches beside the samples and studies them, marveling that there can be so much life in such places. “We need to isolate strains, and there might be millions. The soil alone probably contains… who knows?”
Pradeep falls into lecture mode. “Recent papers estimate five thousand bacterial species. But that’s from a soil sample in Bergen, Norway. Lisica might have somewhat more or less, but it’s definitely a very different environment. But here’s the magic of the military-industrial complex. The Dyson readers make short work of the samples. Watch…” And he loads a couple milligrams of loose soil into its tray, which withdraws into the body of the unit. Pradeep’s phone buzzes. He consults it, then shares its display with Amy. A steady stream of eubacterial identifications scroll down the screen. Most cannot be identified by name, which may mean they’re unique and undiscovered.
“Sweet Jesus,” she laughs. “Just identifying the first strain… Instantaneous here but god, just doing that took the entire second semester of my sophomore year. Now it’s happening in the blink of an eye in batches by the thousand. I’m so old.”
Pradeep laughs. “My generation of scientists will be so meta. Or specialists so narrowly-focused they only speak a language like three other people do. Nobody in-between, for sure. So now back to work. The important part here is to keep all the samples straight and annotate the context of each sample with the Plexity keywords. I’ve got it set up like an assembly-line. And I’ve only got a few hours of work here left. So if you start on this end, and take a tiny scoop, no more than a milligram or two, then we can work together toward the bottom…” His stomach growls loudly enough to interrupt him and they both laugh.
“When was the last time you had a proper meal?” Amy frowns at him, knowing she won’t like the answer.
“Yes. Last night. You’re right. I’ll grab a snack when we’re done. I’ve just got another project that—”
“Why don’t you go grab a bowl and spoon out some of the rice on the stove. It’s still warm. There’s curry powder in the little blue bin if you want. But hot food! Now! And plenty of it!”
But Pradeep hesitates. “Yes. Okay. I just want to make sure we’re clear here. Do you get the collection protocol?”
“What do you think I’ve been doing the last two weeks? Just not on this scale. But yes! Go! Eat!”
Satisfied that the work will continue without him, Pradeep smiles his gratitude to Amy and scurries back to camp. Now that his hunger has announced itself it claws at him, interrupting his every train of thought. Biology, even his own, has its demands.
The rice and curry isn’t enough. He finds a packet of powdered eggs and reconstitutes them with a bit of oil and water. There. A foam of yellow protein. That will keep him going. He sits with a bowl near Alonso, Flavia, and Esquibel, who all work on laptops in silence. Alonso peers over his reading glasses with a frown and addresses Pradeep. “How goes the processing facility?”
“Grand. I’ve got Amy working it right now while I grab a bite. The species identification software in those Dyson readers is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen. Or perhaps it’s part of the microfluidics process itself. Probably both. Anyway. Now that I know readers like these exist, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do fieldwork again without them.”
“It’s excellent data. Mm, that smells good. I’m getting hungry.”
“Don’t move, Alonso.” Pradeep stands. “I left an extra serving in the pot. Here. And would you like a glass of wine with that?”
Alonso holds up his hand to forestall Pradeep. “No wine. Not this early. And no more drugs. Not for a good long time, at least. Just food. Thank you so much, Pradeep. You are a prince.”
Pradeep recalls how Alonso looked at him with such ardor while he was rolling on Molly. Pradeep blushes and looks down, hoping Alonso has no memory of the event. That’s how those party drugs work, isn’t it? People black out and need to be told what they did when they lost all control. Pradeep finds the concept unimaginable. His anxiety would never let him do such a thing.
After finishing his own bowl, Pradeep washes it and moves on to his next project. He really should have started this hours ago but it didn’t occur to him until he was knee-deep in the soil samples and nobody else seems to feel such urgency about their lost colleagues.
But still, he should have done this sooner. Pradeep hauls out the case that contains the drone and the headset and joysticks Katrina uses to fly it. He has never worked with such an advanced model. The old DJI mini he used before didn’t even come with a headset, just a flatscreen monitor and grainy resolution.
“Pradeep. What are you up to…?” Pradeep can’t locate the source of the voice. How odd. He takes off the headset and looks around. Who was it who spoke? They sounded so… forlorn.
“Just, uh, working with the drone,” Pradeep calls out in a neutral tone. “Thinking I might get it up and over the cliff. Send a note to the village. I don’t know. Maybe it’s crazy.”
“You can’t take the drone!” It’s Mandy. She leans out of the bug netting that had shadowed her. She looks dreadful, her hair hanging in lank strands, dark circles under her eyes. “I mean, we need it for the weather station. What if you lose it? Then I won’t have anything.” She lets the last word fall, realizing how lame she sounds. What has happened to her? How has she become such a loser? She can hardly show her face in camp anymore.
Pradeep sits back, recognizing the screech in her voice. Mandy is ruled by her emotions at the moment, her spirit nearly broken by the mistakes she’s made. He blinks at her. Consolation is hard for him. Not that he doesn’t feel for Mandy. He just doesn’t know how to put his care into words without triggering his own anxiety. Then what a fine pair they’d be, huddled in two opposite corners of her tent, curled fetal, facing away from each other. No, he has to be more helpful than that somehow. “Uh, it’s okay. There’s a second battery, you know.”
But now Mandy is crying, utterly miserable. Poor girl. Pradeep wonders how he might respond if it was Maahjabeen in tears. He stands and crosses to her platform. Pradeep sits awkwardly on the edge. He pats Mandy’s shoulder.
She sobs more loudly and pushes her face into his shoulder. She just wants to hide. That’s all she wants now.
Pradeep puts an arm around her, worried that he might smell too bad, his clothes, his armpits, his breath. “There, there.”
He looks up, across the camp, to find Esquibel watching them with a crooked smile, entertained by his predicament. Pradeep makes a face at her, in sympathy of Mandy.
Esquibel, to his surprise, smiles warmly and blows him a kiss.
Chapter 22 – Ba-a-a-a!
May 27, 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!
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22 – Ba-a-a-a!
That night, the sky clears. The stars come out in all their glory. Esquibel stands on the beach, her mind empty, letting the high vault of the night sky, so rarely seen, calm her.
She is playing such a dangerous game.
The camp has been asleep for hours. She knows she is the only one awake, especially after Katrina’s blowout for Flavia’s birthday. What debauchery. If it hadn’t grown so cold, they would have all ended up naked. But instead they passed out in shivering piles.
After several hours, Esquibel had gently pulled herself free of them to use the trenches. Then instead of heading back to bed she has snuck out here to the verge of the strand to watch the stars. She inhales the sharp salt tang on the air and tilts her face further upward. The Milky Way is a bold stripe against the darkness, a purple glow of cosmic gas behind it. Very little of this magnificent sky is actually black. Oh, but the universe is so inhospitably crowded with stars. Good thing it’s also enormous.
She hears the hiss of a line. Here it is. This is actually happening. What she’s been working toward for years. She turns to the cliff on the northwest side of the beach, where it drops precipitously into the water. A dark figure is rappelling down toward the beach.
Esquibel fingers the USB drive in her pocket. Worth more than gold, that. It is her precious entry into their world. She watches the figure drop onto the rocks fringing the cliff, then pick their way lightly across, splashing through a few spots, to the beach. Then they stride purposely toward her.
The figure is clad entirely in black, face covered. They approach, the fabric of their suit nearly invisible in the dark. This person is a bit shorter than Esquibel, facing her. She can’t tell anything about them. It is probably best that way, at least at this stage.
The figure holds out a black-gloved hand. She drops the USB stick into it. The fingers of the hand close. The hand disappears inside the suit. It is done. There is no turning back now.
The figure glides away, still facing her. Their movement is so uncanny Esquibel fears it must be a ghost. A spirit has just visited her. That’s all. And she whispered secrets in its ear. And now the ghosts will trust her and welcome her into their realm. And that is all that is important.
Esquibel faces the camp. Now her mind is full, alive with moves and strategies. Everything is going exactly as it should. She is even enjoying herself, falling in love with each of these lovely people. None of their hard words or recriminations mark her. They have no idea what they’re doing here or how valuable their innocent labors are. They are just so precious. It is ultimately them and people like them for whom she fights. That is all she must remember: to fight in secret for the world’s salvation.
Ξ
“I wouldn’t call it resentment…” Jay holds up a hand.
“Jealousy.” Amy laughs at him when he nods.
“Yeah, I guess that is more like it.”
“Oh, at least you get a fresh start with the Lisicans. They won’t even let me back in the village.”
“Well if Esquibel gets her way we’ll never see the village again!” A plaintive whine edges Jay’s voice. He plucks at his trousers like a child. “Man, I always wanted to have this kind of first contact situation. There’s so much to learn! They’ve been making their own world here for what, a hundred years? More?”
“I’d guess more. But who knows how long? We should have brought a linguist. But not even the Air Force could anticipate needing one of those.”
“So what’s it like in there? Really. Nobody’s told me. I just get these little snatches of detail that people think are enough. I mean, there’s a path? Okay. Well, is it lined with domesticated plants or wild? How wide is it? Is the one going to Wetchie-ghuy’s spot different? Do they maintain the trail? Is there like gravel in the washouts? Come on. That’s the kind of stuff I got to know. But when I ask everybody just shrugs and goes, ‘You know. It just looked kind of normal.’ And I’m like aaaagh.”
Amy holds up a hand to protect herself from his onslaught, shaking her head in amusement. “I guess I should have taken pictures. But I didn’t want to freak anyone out. Don’t worry, Jay. Remember what Katrina said? Esquibel is being security-crazy now but in another week or so I bet we’re all on the best of terms and your ankle will be back to normal. How’s the hand?”
“Still stiff.”
“Any more headaches?”
“No. Huh. I hadn’t really realized that, actually. Wow. Thanks for checking in, boss. You’re right. I’ve just got like a lot less pain in general. The hand, the head, the ankle. I was miserable!”
“So just hold tight, kid. We’ll get you in those tunnels in no time. And then up into the heart of it.”
“What if…? Do you ever think…?” Jay shakes his head. “Man. A nearly empty island, with all these gorgeous natural features at this latitude… I could just like build a treehouse here and get a fishing line and… Seriously. I’m never gonna need to leave. I could like stay here forever. Prad.”
Jay calls out to Pradeep, who is crossing through the camp, pulling his collections backpack off his shoulder. “Yes, Jay?” Pradeep is preoccupied by his latest discoveries, a Eucestoda flatworm he had wrongly classified as a Lepidoptera larvae. But no, it has a fully-developed white body, like a parasitic worm he’d find in animal stool samples. These were in leaf litter that seemed to have an extra stench to them. Perhaps there was dung in it.
“Would you live here, Prad? Like forever?”
Pradeep blinks at Jay, his mind far away. He studies the crowns of both trees and cliffs. Then he shakes his head and involuntarily shivers. “Ugh. Why do you ask me these things? What is wrong with you? Are you trying to freak me out?”
“No, dude. Think about it. There’s a lot of empty land—”
“I won’t!” Pradeep chops the air with his hand. “I get to go home to a normal life in a normal house and sleep in a normal bed. Very soon. This is a nice vacation. And perhaps if it is truly safe someday I would like to return. But—but there is no amount of preparation I can do that would make me feel like I could stay here forever.”
“Wow. Well, hike your own hike, dude. Get me some fish hooks and a garden and I could stay here until I’m about ninety-seven.”
Pradeep tries to make light of the situation. He reaches for something clever to say but it’s hard when his anxiety is jangling like this. Finally he comes up with, “Sometimes I wonder if you are truly a modern human, Jay. Perhaps you have more paleolithic or even archaic lineages in you, expressed so strongly in your, well, your morphology and behavior.”
Pradeep and Amy watch Jay’s face for a reaction to this unkind comment. He takes a long moment to digest it, then Jay blushes and drops his eyes to the ground. “You think so? That’s like the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me. Dude, I’m like an atavistic throwback to our wild past! I thought I was the only one who realized it. Y’all are way too civilized for me.”
Pradeep and Amy share a complex look. Only Jay would take these words this way. Pradeep shakes his head, mildly annoyed, and gets back to his work.
“Hey, Prad.”
“What.” Pradeep doesn’t even look up. He is excavating his bag for the worm samples. The Dyson reader will be able to identify it instantly. Then he can see how it fits in with the larger—
“When the tunnels open back up, you and me, right? We head inland. Check out the whole island.”
But the panic such possibilities bring shoots through him and his hands spasm, scattering his carefully stacked sample bags. “Amy,” Pradeep seethes, “keep him away from me or I swear I’ll kill him.”
“What?” Jay asks as Amy hauls him down the beach. “What did I say? I’m just trying to tell him how awesome he is…!”
Finally Jay’s voice fades into the crashing of the waves and the cawing of the gulls. Pradeep takes a deep breath and looks up. His eyes catch Maahjabeen’s. She is doing minor repairs to her kayaks after the big platform collapsed on them during the storm. Just cosmetic stuff. Her brow is pinched, from working on a fiberglass hairline fracture with some epoxy, and her frown is deep. But she is still so beautiful.
Maahjabeen realizes she is grimacing when she sees Pradeep making the same face. They are both working too hard. She smiles at him, shy, and drops her gaze, her brow suddenly clear.
Pradeep stifles a smile and looks down. But he doesn’t see the worm or his collection bags under his hands any more. He only sees Maahjabeen’s body beneath his, an absolute wonder of beauty and sensuality. Lying with her is like bathing in a river of maple syrup. He didn’t know such a thing could be addicting, but now all he wants is another deep drink of her. Last night was a frustration. Nobody would leave them alone. They couldn’t do more than squeeze hands in the dark. Privacy is what they need. How will he find intimacy with Maahjabeen ever again?
Ξ
“I haven’t been down here in so long.” Flavia picks her way across the second wardroom of the lower deck of the sub.
Triquet is with her, checking all the piles and collections to make sure nothing has been disturbed. “It does feel like the Lisicans have been down here. I mean, honestly, I expect them to have been here. But nothing’s actually out of place or…”
“Why would you expect them?” Flavia pulls back in fear toward the hatch leading back to the surface. “Don’t say things like that. There is no reason they would come here. All they ever did is show us how little they want us here. Maybe they know we are gone in another five weeks so they are just trying to wait us out.”
“Okay. How would they know that?”
But Flavia is already over this conversation. “I don’t care. I will not think about them for one second longer.” She talks herself into staying and she drifts back to Triquet’s side. “But you know who I am thinking about? Maahjabeen. I am worried that she is being treated poorly again. This time her boss kicked her out of her cell and had sex in her cot. We must be nicer to her. Did you know she lost her mother not even a year ago? Car accident.”
“No. No, I did not.” Triquet blinks at Flavia. “I know next to nothing about her. She hasn’t really befriended a weirdo like me. And she isn’t interested in any of my wardrobe. Uh, let me know what I can do to help. So how was your birthday?”
“It was very special and you were all very nice. Thank you. Of all my birthdays I rank it fourth.”
“You rank your…? Of course you do. All about the numbers, yes? You absolute madwoman. All right. So tell me about your ranking system? What made this one fourth?”
“Well. I have a weighted system of analysis that assigns points to various attributes of a birthday. How healthy I am. How many of my favorite people are here. What kinds of gifts. What kinds of unique experience. Each experience is valued differently, with a library of metrics that cover all types of encounters possible for humans in the real world. Special moments each get between one to three points. And there are modifiers to account for age-related changes in myself and certain epi-cycles I’ve charted that show how my personality waxes and wanes over the years like the moon. This year’s birthday scored 1341.337 points, putting it just over two points behind the best birthday of my childhood, when I turned five and rode on a pony.”
“Fascinating. Well, nearly. So when you turned five was third? What was second?”
“1833.242 points. When I turned nineteen I lost my virginity on my birthday to the most gorgeous boy in the whole school.”
And first?”
“The very next year. When I was twenty I dumped him. And it was the best feeling ever. 2115.902 points. My record.”
Triquet laughs. “And what about your worst birthday?”
“Ah, it was only 27.644 points. Last year. I was alone. No family. No celebration. No presents. I felt like I would never have a good birthday again. But then… this! Last night was fantastic! If only my mother or brother or someone like that had ben here it would have put it over the top, especially with the bonus qualifiers Katrina earned for playing all my favorite Björk songs.”
Triquet is bemused. “I love this idea. It kind of works with mine. Maybe makes it better. See, what I’ve learned is that birthdays and holidays are extremely important and that the biggest deal possible should be made of them.”
“No, that is not what I am saying, Triquet. I do not make a big deal. Things happen or they do not, then I score them afterwards. I am not trying to reach my highest score each year. That is not how I do it.”
“No, but listen. This is how I do it. Birthdays aren’t about parties and presents. It’s about mental health. You work too hard. Right?”
“Of course. We all do.”
“Yes. And even if your institution has good personal day and vacation policies, it’s still hard to take all the time we need, right?”
“For most Italians I would say you have no idea what you are talking about. They aspire to do nothing every day. But in my case, yes. Our department is very fierce with their focus. Schedules are very tight. It is hard to not work too much.”
“Unless… you make your special days really special. Now, personally, I don’t care about turning thirty, or thirty-three, or whatever. But it is one of those common cultural things that many people do care about. So I’ve learned to care about them too.”
“But why? That is just like, what do they call it in America? Greeting card culture?”
“Exactly! Hallmark holidays galore! Yeah, I work in the States where it is a sin to want a day off. Like ever. So I’ve told all my co-workers that I really really care about my birthday. And they’re really happy for me! It’s a great story. I told them when I turned twenty-nine, back at Loyola, that my childhood dream had always been to go to Singapore when I was twenty-nine.”
“What? What kind of crazy kid idea is that?”
“No, see, I was lying. I don’t care about birthdays but I do care about time off. I don’t care about any holiday really, but you ask my coworkers and I’m the biggest Christmas elf and Easter bunny the world has ever seen. And that’s how I get two weeks off every time I have a birthday. I come back with pictures and stories and tell everyone how much I thought about my uncle who died from lymphoma. Every ten years, I take six weeks. Because I just HAD to make all my dreams come true when I turned thirty! I climbed Haleakala in Maui and wandered the South Pacific. It was glorious. When I turn forty I’m gonna, I don’t know…”
“Go to the moon!”
“Perfect! Then my return flight could get delayed and I could get even more time off!”
Flavia laughs. “Clever. You are right. I will start doing this too. Whenever I need a break. Now. Did you find what you were looking for down here? I should get back to my work. Plexity is becoming such a mess. Alonso has already broken the beta.”
“Oh. Okay. Just some light reading then.” Triquet lifts a large stack of folders and loose papers. “I’m sure it’s in here somewhere. It was just the briefest glance and I didn’t attach any significance to it at the time. But why would anyone even try to correspond with an Iranian embassy in 1954 unless you were like part of the CIA coup that had just deposed Mosaddegh? Especially coming at them as a representative of the U.S. Military. Very fishy. So yeah. I’ll just take it all upstairs and sift through.”
Flavia mimics Triquet’s encompassing gesture but she wraps her arms around herself instead of archaeological treasures. “Don’t you ever get spooked down here? Ghosts of submarine sailors?”
“I wish. Like, of all the people in the world, I’d be the happiest one if I could talk to a ghost.” Triquet turns to address the empty chamber. “You hear me, ghosts? I’m your huckleberry. Right here.” Triquet sighs and addresses Flavia again. “They were there. They saw the world I’m just trying to reconstruct. They could tell me so much. Ghosts…!” Triquet’s voice rings out, harsh against the metal bulkheads, “If you’re here, make a sign! We have cookies.”
Triquet waits a moment in silence and then a hollow boom echoes from below. Flavia cries out and bolts for the hatch back up to the surface. Triquet yelps and loses their grip on all the files. They cascade to the floor in a mess. “Hold on! Just hold—!” But Flavia is already gone. Triquet giggles, convincing themself the boom was the sub sinking further in the water-logged sand and making the noise that old houses do when they settle.
But still, the bowels of the sub aren’t the most welcome place to be right now, especially alone. This is breaking Esquibel’s protocol. Nobody alone at any time. But Triquet can’t just leave these files here alone on the floor.
As they gather them, another paper slips out, catching Triquet’s eye. It has Korean characters written on it in faded black ink. But they look simplified. “Flavia…?” Triquet wants to show off how much they know about the development of the modern Korean language. This doesn’t look like Hangul, but the modernized form that they briefly tried to introduce after the war, when Korea shook itself free from all Japanese influence. “That was an initiative by Syngman Rhee, right? And when did it officially start? Must have been around 1953. I’m sensing a theme…”
Triquet stands, the gathered papers pressed awkwardly against their chest. A bit of a head rush nearly makes them swoon. When their vision clears, a figure resolves from a blurry outline at the far hatch, the hatch that leads further down.
It is the Lisican elder who first welcomed them to the village. His fox is curled on his shoulder, staring at Triquet with dark beady eyes. It locates a patch of mud on its tail and licks itself clean with a deft pink tongue.
Triquet is silent. In this moment, they have nothing but stillness and emptiness to offer. They probably couldn’t move if they tried.
The man points at Triquet with the tip of his thumb. He mutters a brief incantation. Then, his voice rough and eyes swimming with tears, a long preamble ends with him confessing something profound to Triquet. It is difficult for the old man to get it all out and by the end he is spent. He leans on a staff, careful to touch no part of the sub.
“Undisturbed.” Triquet’s voice is a breathy sigh. “You all come and go but you leave it all undisturbed. You don’t touch anything in the sub when you pass through. And now we’ve taken this path away. I’m sorry. We didn’t know.” Intuitively, Triquet holds out a gift as an apology. It is a cheap chrome ballpoint pen with a retractable tip.
The fox leaps from the man’s shoulder and runs along one of Triquet’s work tables to sniff at the pen. It turns away, rejecting the offering. The animal leaves no tracks on the scattered white pages. But hadn’t they come through the muddy tunnels below? Triquet wonders if the fox and the man are ghosts after all. But no. That very real boom let them in. Ghosts wouldn’t need to break down barriers. They could pass through walls, right? Ghosts wouldn’t want a dollar store ballpoint pen…
But the man is intrigued. He crosses to where Triquet stands. The fox leaps back onto his shoulder as he reaches for the gift.
“Pen,” Triquet instructs him. “Ballpoint pen. See?” With a sweep of their hand, Triquet drags the pen’s tip across an empty page, leaving an unsteady blue line.
The man’s eyes narrow. He closely inspects the paper.
“Oh, you like that? Well check this out.” Triquet holds the page in place and signs their name with a flourish. Triquet Carter Soisson. They are quite proud of their florid signature.
The man grunts. He drags his finger over the ink and streaks it a bit off the line.
“That’s right. It’s like paint. It’s just like fingerpaints in a cave or what have you, but this blue paint is forced to come out through this tiny little hole. Here, you see it? Right there at the very tip? That’s a ball. It’s a ball point. The ball rolls and deposits the ink. The paint. Here. You try.”
The man holds the pen like a stick he just picked off the ground. Smelling it, he wrinkles his nose at the complex tang of the ink. He talks to the fox, trying to reason this all out. And he appears to be hearing replies from the fox as well, to judge by his moments of listening and responses. Triquet finds it all quite fascinating.
The man jabs the paper. Too hard. The paper tears. He grunts again. He pushes the pen back into Triquet’s hands and glares at them with a dark expression, making a long speech indicating the items of the sub around him.
“No, it’s okay. It’s fine. Just paper. You didn’t like… ruin any of the church treasures here. Plenty of paper.” Triquet picks up another sheet and blithely tears it, letting the halves drop to the floor. But this has the opposite effect from the one intended.
The man draws himself up and sternly lectures Triquet while the fox darts forward to snare the fallen halves. The man crouches and takes the torn sheet back, placing it on the table and smoothing it out. He tries to do the same with the sheet the pen tore.
Triquet watches in confused silence. “I mean, it’s okay. That wasn’t even the sub’s paper. I brought it. From my own notebook. It isn’t like… special or anything.” Triquet offers the pen again, clicking the chrome push button to withdraw the tip.
The man’s eyes bulge. With childlike glee he snatches the pen from Triquet’s grip and carefully presses the button. The tip emerges and then sets with a click. He looks at Triquet with profound wonder, sharing the magic trick.
“Oh, good. You like that? Yes. I guess that’s the second best part of the whole pen experience. The clicking. Okay. So are we friends now? Can we agree to like live in peace and not block any more passages and steal any more people away? Huh?”
The man turns back to the hatch and says something. Another head emerges from it, a younger person in a fur cloak. All Triquet can register is that their gender is indeterminate. They have a heavier triangular face and delicate pointed chin, but their eyes aren’t feminine. Long curly hair, narrow shoulders. A feather and bead necklace. All Triquet’s instincts say this is an indigenous non-binary person. Wow wow wow.
Then another Lisican emerges, a young woman with bare breasts. Well. Nothing indeterminate about those. But now Triquet is seeing the Lisicans in a whole new light, as individuals with the same identity issues and expressions as themself. Are these two a couple? Who knows? The girl might be in love with her very own Triquet. The man shows them the pen, lecturing them on its uses, clicking it again and again. They cry out with pleasure.
Triquet’s head whirls with the potential significance of a non-binary native. This could be huge. Enormous. Assuming they aren’t wildly misreading the situation here, the prospect of studying a figure like this in the wild and the resulting papers, why… It feels like destiny. It’s as if Triquet’s whole life has just been practice for this one moment. All the archaeology and collection and study, all in preparation to have the necessary skills in place when an individual like this appeared.
But their instincts tell them to hang back. It’s fairly clear that Triquet shouldn’t stay. There is a quiet intimacy to the three Lisicans and the fox, crowded around the pen. Maybe they’re a family? Dad and two kids. Equally legitimate. And one is two spirits, like some of the Plains nations of American natives. Are they a shaman? Some kind of spiritual figure? An entire flood of questions fills Triquet. “Don’t want to disturb your fun…” Now is not the time to press. They still have weeks here on the island. A light touch is needed. Triquet will circle back to this enthralling person in time. They haven’t responded to their words at all. “Guess I’ll head back to camp.” With a final reassortment of the papers in their grasp, they turn to the hatch Flavia used.
The three Lisicans follow.
Ξ
Miriam is at the stove, making a proper cup of tea. She isn’t much of a traditionalist by any stretch, but every once in a while the Irish grandmother who lives in her bones wants a nice cuppa, steeped properly. She brought her own box of Assam loose-leaf black tea and when she feels the need to really ground herself like she does today, she drops a pinch into a rolling boil as a treat.
The important thing is to not let it steep too long because then it becomes too bitter. But just as she reminds herself primly of this canonical tea fact, the door at the bottom of the stairs creaks open and someone else emerges from the sub. Flavia had come out just a few minutes before, muttering about worker rights and safety.
Miriam forgets all about the tea as Triquet, followed by three Lisicans, climb the stairs from below and enter the bunker.
Before anything else happens, the man’s silver fox leaps from his shoulder and dashes through the cells to the open door, where it disappears outside.
Jay’s voice cries out, “Whoa! Did you see that? Vulpes sighting!” Then he comes running to the doorway just as the Lisicans cross the bunker. He falls silent when he realizes he’s blocking the door. “Uh, what the fuck? I mean, hey. Howdy. What’s up?” He makes a series of awkward gestures like waves and greetings and salutes. “Is that fox yours? Or are you his? Heh.”
The three Lisicans stand before him, faces closed.
“Jay, get out of the doorway,” Amy says. The old man turns to Amy and sees her. His face darkens. He makes a pronouncement and steps away from her, closer to the door. She tries a half-hearted diplomatic greeting. “Bontiik? Aw, seriously? I’m still blacklisted? Even here? Dude, it was just one step on the path…”
Jay finally withdraws. The three Lisicans slip outside, crossing the camp toward the beach, moving with purpose.
Most of the researchers are here, apart from Maahjabeen and Pradeep and Mandy. They all fall silent and make no moves, just quietly following the progress of the old man and his two sidekicks out of the camp toward the lagoon.
Alonso is overwhelmed with emotion. Anxiety sweeps through him, that the sudden advent of the Lisicans in his camp could ruin everything. But he is also thrilled by the contact with them, the daylight exposure to these actual living people, whom he has only ever glimpsed by starlight. His heart hammers and a near panic claws at his diaphragm, tightening his chest. They skip up over the fallen redwood on the beach, the old man no less agile than the two others, and vanish. “What…?” Alonso searches quickly for his cane. He finds it and hurries forward, shuffling through the sand. “What are they doing? Where are they going?”
“The water…” Katrina is the first one up on top of the trunk. “They’re unrolling something. A big dark open-weave textile or… No, it’s a net. I think it’s a big net. They’re going fishing.”
By the time Alonso reaches the fallen trunk everyone else has passed him and stands looking out at the lagoon. He remembers so clearly how to climb a surface like this, how to flex and spring and scamper upward with a lithe body and catlike reflexes. But now he is made of sand and there is no power in his calves and feet. He can’t spring anywhere. He grips the rough bark of the fallen redwood and hauls himself up, sheets of connective tissue in his back and hips complaining. This is preposterous. Humiliating. A three year old could climb better. But a three year old doesn’t weigh a hundred kilos.
“Well that was quick,” Amy observes just as Alonso pulls himself up to the top of the log. This is the first time he has seen the ocean from this vantage and it commands his attention. Gunmetal gray and rippled, a faraway band of luminous turquoise water at the southeastern horizon indicates that the sun breaks through out there. So many colors. And textures. And he wants to define all of them! Now what are the Lisicans doing? Ah, yes. They are knee-deep in the lagoon, drawing the net to them. A half-dozen fish are already tangled in the cords, helplessly wriggling.
“Oh, man, I wish Maahjabeen could see this.” Jay knew the lagoon held such bounty. Here’s the proof. And so easily caught…
“She does see it.” Katrina points to the left, at the far side of the beach where Maahjabeen and Mandy stand watching.
Alonso does a quick headcount. Everyone is here but Pradeep and Flavia. He turns back to see the two of them in camp. Both look spooked, and Flavia holds Pradeep’s arm close. Alonso waves his cane at them. “It is fine!” he calls out, but his voice doesn’t carry that far. He tries again. “They are just fishing!”
But Flavia and Pradeep look no better assured.
Mandy and Maahjabeen haven’t moved. They stand still, watching the scene with fascination. The net is cast again and the Lisicans draw it in, picking kelp out of it and placing live fish in sacks they wear at their hips.
“I guess they got sick of not having fresh fish since we got here.” Amy wishes she could divine these people better. She wants nothing more than to be wise enough to be appreciated by a native person who lives in harmony with the land. It has always been her belief that they would be the only ones who would understand and appreciate her. The sacrifices she’s made. The obsessions she has that almost no other modern human seems to share. But the moment she met them, she set her foot on the wrong path and now she is forever rejected in their eyes. So hideously monstrously unfair. Nobody here wants their respect more!
Within a few short minutes the net is rolled back up and stowed in a fabric bag. “I counted thirty-three fish.” Jay shakes his head. “But I don’t think I got them all. They’re gonna feast tonight! Man, I wish I could join them.”
Alonso shakes his head, watching them return. “Not yet. Maybe someday.” The old man must be a decade older than Alonso but he still moves with the lightness of youth. The silver fox scampers at his side, smelling the fish wriggling in the sacks.
The Lisicans approach the researchers standing on the log. The old man studies them, searching their faces. He stops the others before the log and calls out, “Axh hidii! Yasiteh ribah.” Then he pulls a silver bream from the sack, its mouth gaping in the air.
“What is he saying?” Alonso’s voice is a rumble in contrast to the old man’s high sibilance. They all turn to him.
So the old man does too, realizing that Alonso is the elder here. He holds the fish out to Alonso, who is afraid that if he leans forward and takes it he will topple on the old fellow. So he instructs Jay with a gesture, who reaches out and takes the fish gratefully, bowing again and again, repeating, “Aw, yeah. Aw, YEAH!” as he scampers with it back to camp.
The old man is lecturing Alonso now, laying out particulars. He points at each corner of the lagoon, then several spots in the cliffs. Then he jabs the tip of his thumb toward his own face. He looks at Alonso with quiet challenge.
“I think,” Miriam mutters in his ear, “that he is claiming the beach as his. The fish was a statement.”
Alonso nods. “That it is his to give. Not ours. We are guests. Yes.” Alonso repeats it loudly for the man, nodding. “We are guests. And this is yours.” Alonso tries to encompass the lagoon and point it back in the old man’s direction but he isn’t sure his gestures and words are well-received. The old man frowns at Alonso with frustration.
“Alonso.” He points to himself. “Bontiik.” Then he gestures with a swipe of his fist in the general direction of the old man’s chin.
The elder seems to have understood the greeting. He now spreads his fingers and places them against his ribs on both sides, a way of indicating his own person. “Morska Vidra.”
“Ha!” Katrina laughs. “Tebya zovut morskaya vydra?” She turns to the others with a giggle. “He says his name is sea otter.”
“Why does he speak Russian?” Alonso holds a polite smile in place as his mind races with the implications.
“He doesn’t. I’ve tried. A ty govorish’ po russki? See?”
The old man, Morska Vidra, looks at them with an empty gaze. He repeats his name louder, as if they couldn’t hear him.
“Morska Vidra!” Katrina giggles again and spreads her hands across her own body. “Daisy Dolphin!”
Morska Vidra looks at her for a long moment, then the young woman at his shoulder suggests something and the old man replies. The young woman reaches into her own sack and pulls out a limp parrotfish. She hands it to Katrina.
“Oh, right on! Thank you! Spasiba! Oh, thank you so much!”
Morska Vidra evidently decides social hour is over. He presses his mouth into a line and slaps his hand against his bare thigh. The fox responds to this signal by leaping atop his shoulder. The three Lisicans climb the log, chatting low in their sing-song language, and head back to camp.
Flavia and Pradeep withdraw as the others follow Morska Vidra and his helpers to the bunker. Without another word to the island’s guests, the Lisicans descend the stairs into the sub.
Ξ
Esquibel sits, arms crossed, encircled by people lecturing her. She holds up a hand to get a word in edgewise but Amy is interrupted by Katrina who is undercut by Triquet. Esquibel drops her hand and crosses her arms again. All these daft statements of ideals. Like they’re writing a new bloody constitution for a utopian commune instead of hammering out rules of engagement with a dangerous foe. What fools they can be.
Their self-righteous speeches are finally cut short by Jay, of all people, whooping like a cowboy and slapping his knee. “Well, all right! Listen up, everyone!” He points at Maahjabeen, with whom he’s been conferring. “This wonderful amazing goddess of a scientist just said we could pull our own fish out of the lagoon!”
“No more than a few at a time. And not every day.” Maahjabeen glares at them, sure they will abuse her trust. “And we will have a survey first and a strict accounting of the populations. Do not impact any species too much. And no fishing where the Lisicans cast their net. Maybe only at the edges of the lagoon.”
“Yeah! Of course!” Jay is not to be contained. “Now who’s ready for some sushi tonight?”
“Ew, no.” Amy waves his offer away. “We need to flash freeze the fish to kill all the parasites before they’re safe to eat raw. And we don’t have a way to do that.”
“Fine. Fine. Baked Alaska it is,” Jay amends. “I don’t care, man. As long as I get some fresh fish in me. Yo, seriously. This is gonna be the most amazing meal of our lives. Just show me where.”
“What, right now?” Maahjabeen squints at the sky. It will be dark in an hour.
“Sunset’s great for fishing. Let me just rig a line and hook. Find some bait.”
“Did I not just tell you that we must do a survey first?”
“Well…” Jay paces a bit, undeterred. “I’ll definitely keep track of the species. We can like add it to the count after. If I get more than one of a species then it’s just catch and release, bro. I swear.”
“Do not call me bro.” Maahjabeen glares at Jay, wondering if she is making a mistake working with him at all. “And what if it is the only example of that species in the lagoon? And now you have eaten it before we understand its place in the ecosystem? No, we will need to do a full survey first.”
“Well of course I wouldn’t be keeping any atypical—” Jay lifts his hands and drops them, helpless. “Look. I am an actual wildlife biologist. An actual fisheries manager. Been fishing my whole life. Come on. You’re treating me like I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ll stick with stock species like Scaridae and Salvenlinus. I can—I can… ah, hell.” Jay finally registers Alonso slowly shaking his head at him and patting the air for patience. “Fine. I’ll start the survey instead. The lagoon’s barely been scratched, Plexity-wise.”
Without another word, Jay hurries to the tables, grabs a reader, and makes his way toward the beach.
Alonso sighs. He turns to Amy. “His feelings are hurt. Will we have to repair this in any way?”
“What, with Jay? Not at all. Believe me, he doesn’t feel wounded by this at all. He grew up in a very intense family environment, with lots of yelling and teasing and bullying. What he considers normal is… far from what the rest of us do.”
That makes a few of them chuckle. Esquibel has used the respite to look at this impasse from another angle and now she takes the opportunity Jay has given her. “Alright, wait now. Before we all start yelling again let us figure this out together. We need a single defensible place, somewhere the islanders will not be able to reach us if we don’t want. I thought it was the bunker, properly sealed. But I don’t have the ability to keep the cliff tunnels closed without heavy machinery and like, concrete and steel bars.”
“Says the prison warden,” Miriam scowls.
“Mirrie. Let her finish. Please.” Alonso realizes the sense in what Esquibel is saying. After the last five years he needs safety too.
“That is all I’m saying.” Esquibel holds her hands up in surrender. “They’ve already gotten through all our defenses and can obviously come and go at will. But what happens when they show up in the middle of the night? What if it’s—?”
“Don’t say his name.” Flavia stands. “What about the sea cave? We could make that our safe house. One way in. Backs to the sea.”
“Good idea!” Amy likes that they’re trying to think of creative ways out of this mess. All these big brains together. They’ll figure something out.
But Esquibel is shaking her head no. “We would need a secure passage to the sub and access to the surface. It is too easily taken away from us. What if they block that tunnel down below and then come at us from their other tunnels in the cliffs?”
Pradeep barks, a sound halfway between a laugh and a gasp. He twists the fabric of his slacks in his hands. “Okay. That’s enough story time for me. Perhaps I’ll check up on Jay. Give him a hand. Since I obviously won’t be getting any sleep tonight.” Pradeep escapes from the argument, heading toward the beach.
“Well, if the Lisicans can control all the entrances and exits and there are so many… then I don’t know what we can do to be safe and secure.” Alonso reaches this reluctant conclusion but it doesn’t make him as uneasy as it should. These villagers are much less dangerous than gopniks, despite what games their outcast shaman plays. “I guess we must learn to live with insecurity.”
Esquibel shakes her head stubbornly no. “My orders specifically state that I must have a properly-secured and defended—”
“Well, fine!” Triquet has had enough. “Then tell us, Lieutenant Commander, what we’re supposed to do? Make weapons out of bone and sleep in shifts? Build our own bunker out of like redwood bark and sand? Sleep on a big raft in the lagoon? You’re full of objections to the way we’re doing things but you’re not offering any reasonable alternatives. And the one strategy you did have lasted all of two days, after the rains stopped.”
They all wait on Esquibel now. She knows that if this was a proper mission then yes, they’d sleep on the beach with a secured perimeter and regular guards. They’d have thermal imaging and trip wires and motion sensors. And they’d all understand that regardless of what the politicians say in their various capitals the world is actually at war. It always has been and always will be and not enough people actually realize it. She sighs. “You people make me feel like a shepherd who is leading her flock over a cliff.”
Katrina giggles. “Ba-a-a-a!”
Chapter 21 – Drift Away
May 20, 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:
21 – Drift Away
Triquet stands before all of them. Most are seated in chairs beside the workstation but Katrina and Mandy cuddle on the concrete floor in a nest of sleeping bags and Amy, as ever, hurries back and forth from the kitchen bearing drinks one way and empty dishes the other. Triquet nods at Mandy. “Archaeology comes before Atmospheric Sciences so I guess I’ll start. Okay, so my latest project proposal is provisionally entitled ‘Abandoned Artifacts of a Postwar Listening Post,’ but that’s a little too Scientific American for my tastes. I need to bring some kind of sociocultural insight into the paper or I might as well be a day laborer. But interpretation remains, like, so far away. So far. I thought exhuming Maureen Dowerd would solve everything but it just raises more questions. Why did she die? Who killed her? There is absolutely zero mention of anything like that in the last two years of records on board. So it was a secret. But her grave wasn’t. It kind of points more toward foul play than an accident. Or at least a cover-up. I don’t know. What is everyone’s personal favorite scenario so far?”
“Oh, I know.” Jay sits up. “Check it out. Lisica isn’t the isolated listening post the Air Force wants you to think it is. It’s a special forces playground, man. They’ve been sending in the Japanese, the Russians, and now the Chinese? Right? That old bit of the plane we found? Who hasn’t forgotten about that? And that second bunker Maahjabeen found up the coast. Yeah? This place has been contested for ages. You see where I’m going with this?”
“Not really. I mean…” Triquet isn’t really into indulging in Tom Clancy fantasies like this. There just hadn’t been enough reason to, yet. “Okay. You are definitely onto something with all those other loose ends. I was thinking myself more locally, about the beach and the items in the sub, but it’s true. In the big picture we still haven’t investigated nearly any of this island. We have no idea. So what are you saying, Jay? The Russians killed Maureen? And then the Air Force couldn’t record her death because that was all too top secret? Maybe they took those records with them when they left?”
“I don’t like it. How does that account for the buried sub?” Pradeep’s question makes them all frown. “How does anything?”
“You know who knows?” Katrina’s voice has returned to full strength. She lounges against Mandy, sucking on an end of hair. “A very unpleasant, very old lady up in the village. She acted like I owed her something. Like I’d made her some promise before. But I think she was promised something she never got. Who knows what it was. I tried to work out some language with the kids, Triquet. But I’m making like the slowest progress. It’s impossible so far. Like they have a completely different frame of reference and we can’t figure out the way the other one looks at things. Yet.”
“What do you mean yet?” Flavia demands. “You have plans to see them again? Where?”
Katrina holds up a tentative hand. “Remember, Flavia. They hate Wetchie-ghuy as much as you do. The kids were terrified of him, when I mentioned his name.”
“But what does all that old bad blood have to do with Maureen Dowerd?” Triquet shakes their head in despair.
“They always kill the woman, though, don’t they.” Maahjabeen shakes her head, cynical. “An island full of one hundred men and one woman and she is the one who is dead.”
“You aren’t wrong. They had a picture of her, in the village,” Amy recollects.
“And she had blonde hair,” Alonso adds. It was the first thing he ever noticed about the one child he saw, the way their curly hair gleamed in the moonlight.
“Ohhhhh…” Jay and Katrina both groan, rocking back with surprise. “She was stepping out!” Jay crows.
“Fell in love with one of the Lisicans,” Katrina adds. “Had the wrong color baby. Esquibel. Could you tell, during the autopsy, if she’d ever had a child? Or maybe if she was still carrying?”
“No. I didn’t have time for a pelvic exam. We focused up above on the blunt force trauma. And then the rain came.”
“And the old woman up there,” Katrina says, “was like her long-lost daughter… Wow. No wonder she feels betrayed.”
“Or maybe,” Alonso pats the air with a hand. He needs to slow down this rampant speculation before the whole day is wasted. “Maureen Dowerd fell and hit her head and they never wrote it down because she wasn’t ever officially supposed to be here in the first place. Simple explanations, everyone. Let us keep to the simple ones and not turn this into a telenovela.”
“Then why are they blond?” Katrina asks.
Amy appears, holding a tray with diced-up energy bars and a defrosted berry sauce. “I don’t know, maybe from those Russians Jay thinks were crawling all over the island. Snacks?”
Flavia takes a handful. “Or maybe both. We are talking decades or maybe even centuries here. We know this island has been discovered at least like three times: once by the Lisicans, once by the Japanese, and once by the Americans. There is no reason to think it hasn’t been visited by even more.”
But Alonso has had enough. “Speculation, people. Please. Bring Doctor Triquet evidence if you have any. Otherwise, this is the kind of conversation I have with laymen who don’t understand what I can never get past a grant committee. You all know the feeling. Let’s be rigorous here. Doctor Triquet, is there anything you would like to add to your presentation before we move on?”
“No, thank you, Doctor Alonso. I seem to have stirred the pot quite enough.”
Alonso nods at Mandy. “Then Atmospheric Sciences.”
“Well, I can’t tell you much.” Mandy sits up and stretches like a cat. “But I can say that if I was betting on when the storm ends I’d say maybe this afternoon. The rain’s getting warmer, the wind has pivoted out to the west, and it’s just getting ragged. Can you feel it? The rhythm of the storm?”
Alonso nods. “That would be very good news indeed. What can you tell us of any work you may have done in regards to Plexity?”
“Yes, well,” Mandy rolls her eyes and shakes her head. “That’s where the fun comes in. So you’ve been saying, ‘Context, context, provide Plexity context!’ so now I’m like your Queen of context. Katrina’s been helping me plot out my readings as a base timeline and then with those recorded weather stats each day you get all the context you need. Place any organism or ecological subsystem on the timeline and you get the rain opening the flowers and releasing the pheromones and then the bees and the birds and… Well, I don’t know what happens then.” Mandy guffaws into her open hand. “The biologists can tell us. I just wish I could do that AlphaFold thing Flavia keeps talking about, instead of proteins it’d be atmospheric effects and it’d like let me tell you what the daily weather was in the past. That would be fire.”
“Not impossible,” Flavia declares. “In broad strokes, at least. And we do have a hundred years of climate data from like Hawaii and California, do we not? You get me the data and we could start to look at ways to extend our resolution back in time.”
Mandy makes a face. “Oh, there are already tons of recursion models and paleo-climate nerds who just go on and on about this, for sure. I’ll see if Alonso brought enough of the internet to see if any of their work is available. Super mathy stuff, no doubt. But!” Mandy holds up a finger. This is the important thing she needs said. “What I really need is data points, Alonso. I’m not able to do this properly with just that one DIY weather station at the top of the cliff and one down here. I need sensors all over the island. And in the water, too.”
This is the kind of progress he had expected from this meeting. Alonso nods emphatically. “That is a good idea. When the storm ends, perhaps you and Miss Charrad can find a way to add some of your instruments to her buoys.”
Maahjabeen shrugs. “I mean, the base station already records air temperature and windspeed. That is where I tether them to land. We could add, what, a barometer?”
Mandy blanches, unimpressed. “What I’d really like is if you could install some stations on these sea stacks. Really get unfiltered samples from the far horizon. Is that possible? Some day? Maybe?”
Maahjabeen nods. “Yes. It will just require a new arrangement. I have had time to think of what my next move is when the storm is over and I have realized we must paddle the kayaks into the sea cave and keep them down there. It is too difficult up here to fight the way out of the lagoon. The sea cave is a far better entrance into the water. Much better protected. So we will only push out through the lagoon once more and then paddle into the sea cave. Keep them there, then come back up through the tunnels. So whenever we need—”
“Have you forgotten,” Esquibel interposes, “that the tunnels are blocked and you can’t come back up?”
“And have you forgotten,” Katrina asks, “that I just spent half the night with a bunch of native kids who don’t care one bit about your bloody blocked tunnels, mate.”
Maahjabeen shrugs. “This is how I can do what Mandy asked. I could get a weather station on a kayak to a sea stack no problem from down there. Its outlet has splendid access to them. Very safe. I can do my work as intended if the boats are down there.”
“Katrina,” Esquibel says, “I will need you to tell me where that cave was last night the children showed you. You said it was one we don’t know.”
Triquet throws their hands into the air, exasperated now. “You just really aren’t getting the whole, ‘there’s far too many caves in these cliffs for us to block them all’ thing, are you? I get that it’s your training, but please, sister.”
“Alonso.” Esquibel turns away from Triquet, ignoring them. “I can assure you that Maureen Dowerd did not fall and hit her head. This was no accident.”
“Why not? In the dark, the roots tripped me and nearly killed me, didn’t they?”
“The roots did not choke you first. Her throat was so contused it almost looked like she wore a black necklace. But the choking did not kill her. The blow to the back of her head did. And the object that fractured her skull had one straight, even edge. Not even a sharp stone would leave a wound like that.”
The bunker goes quiet. Mandy’s right. The wind and rain are more ragged now, the storm’s remnants chasing the main mass south across the ocean.
“So what I’m saying,” Esquibel continues in a weary voice, “is that we have not only a kidnapper on this island but evidence of a murder. Old, yes, but it is within the bounds of possibility that the murderer is still alive and on this island. And you don’t want me to take any security precautions. What is wrong with you people?”
“Don’t listen to them, Esquibel!” Flavia waves derisively at the others. “I very much want you to close off all the tunnels. Blow them up with explosives! I don’t care.”
“Easy for you to say, Flavia,” Triquet tells her. “None of your work requires access to any of these areas. But ours does. Doctor Daine, you’re acting like this is the first time any of us have been in a dangerous situation. Honey, please. In Honduras my dig was in the middle of a guerrilla war, okay? Alonso knew he was going to a dangerous spot in Central Asia and ended up in a gulag. We know there are risks. We aren’t these pie-eyed innocents you think we are. It’s just we accept some risks in the pursuit of what we do. Science. Just like the medicine you’ve dedicated your life to. Science is why we’re here. The Lisicans are just another risk like getting injured or surviving the storm outside. Ask Maahjabeen which she thinks is more deadly. Getting lost in a storm or interacting with the natives?”
“I was very much hoping,” Alonso says in the awkward silence, “that we could keep this meeting on track. Miss Hsu, do you have any other meteorological observations to share with us? No? Then, moving on. Who is next? The biologists? Amy?”
“Well.” Amy stops moving for once. She puts the stack of dirty dishes on a table and cocks her head, collecting her thoughts. “We were making great headway there right before the storm hit. I think you’d have to agree, Pradeep, Jay, that we were really starting to hoover up a bunch of samples.”
Pradeep only nods. Jay beams and gives a thumbs up.
“Have you noticed,” Alonso asks, “any surprising trends? Broad patterns? Things you maybe did not expect?”
“I mean, that’s everything here.” Amy spreads her hands. “The redwoods aren’t supposed to be here. I discovered a new sub-order of Hymenoptera, ground wasps that may be unique to the island. Jay is like a kid on Christmas morning. He’d bring me new things every day before the storm hit. And I can’t speak for Pradeep any more. He’s in some deep territory.”
“Yes, Pradeep? What is this territory? How deep?”
“Quite deep indeed! About a meter underground, a mycelium signaling network in the grove that talks to the roots of the plants and enriches the soils. It’s been documented elsewhere, but the ones I’ve been looking at here underneath our feet are some of the most robust examples we have of large-scale, cross-kingdom fungal and plant biochemical communication networks. We may also have Animalia agents such as Ariolimax slugs and eriophyid mites that contribute to the—the release of chemical markers that create phase changes in the wider forest. The use of the Dyson reader just allows me to document these changes in realtime. So I will say it is an unalloyed success, Doctor Alonso. Bravo.”
“Yes!” Alonso hauls himself to his feet and points at Pradeep, who beams at him. “This is what I am talking about! This is the gold here! These are the kinds of papers that will show what Plexity is capable of! Publishing world, watch out!”
“Ehh, I don’t understand how you think you’re going to be able to publish any of this work.” Flavia’s face is bleak. “Nobody will ever be able to replicate our work, Alonso. Bespoke operating system. Classified technologies. How will anyone ever peer-review what we are doing? They can’t even visit the island yet or use the readers without signing one of those terrible NDAs. It will take decades. Admit it. We are really only doing this for ourselves.”
“Years, maybe,” Alonso allows. “Not decades. The Dyson reader is slated for release some day, I am sure. And Plexity will be as well. As soon as the patents and trademarks are properly filed. So yes. This will take some time. Many of our most astounding discoveries will have to wait. But long-term, this work is everything. It is the basis for an entirely new science.”
“It’s our retirement,” Miriam amends. She’s been quiet today, letting others fight Esquibel. Also, the LSD still hasn’t entirely left her system. She remains slightly disoriented and she has trouble following the denser details of the conversation. “So A, B, who’s next? Is it me? G? Geologist?”
Flavia points at Alonso. “D for data scientist. Or G for geneticist, which comes before geology. It is Alonso’s turn first.”
“Yes.” Alonso settles back. “The data science here, well, I think most of you have each heard from me how it affects your discipline in particular. In general, it is a large-scale effort, with powerful tools that will derive new findings from huge datasets. So now that we’ve finally got the collection pipeline set up—with apologies to Miss Hsu for the delay in adding her meteorological capabilities—for most of us now our work is entirely about collection. Like ninety percent of our energies should be dedicated to collecting, recording, and characterizing life now for the remainder of our time here. Don’t worry so much about categorization or theory-building at the moment. Let’s inhale this beach and lagoon. Fill our lungs. And I would like it to be an all-hands-on-deck effort. Doctor Daine, if your medical and security issues allow you extra time, please assist in any way that you think may help. Doctor Triquet, if you can provide a human, archaeological framework to our work, to please remind us that we always see everything through a flawed, human lens. That is really why you are here. Because there is no such thing as a direct connection to nature. It all comes through our imperfect senses and our poorly-formed biases and flawed perspectives to be considered by our fallible brains. So I find the work you are doing in the sub as important as any other. We need to know what this island does to people, no? And what they do to it. Also, if you are ever free, I am sure Miriam could use more help with the digging.”
Flavia holds up a hand. “I am sorry. But using me as some kind of untrained field helper is a terrible use of resources. I will stay here in the bunker, safe and sound, and keep making sure all the code works as intended so all our machines keep running as needed. I can promise you it is a full-time job. And the rest of my hours… I am tired. I need sleep.”
“Yes, I am not much use myself,” Alonso agrees. “But I am feeling better. Did you notice I can stand like a real person again without a cane? I mean, not all day, but…”
Esquibel lifts Mandy’s hand like the winner of a boxing match. “The magic hands of our physical therapist here!”
Mandy demurs. “Oh, I’ve hardly done anything yet.”
“Yet?” Alonso pales. “That means it will get harder?”
Mandy smiles wickedly at him. “Just you wait.”
Alonso nods. “Yes, I will wait, you sadist. I will wait until I have about seventeen glasses of wine in me.” The thought of it deflates him and he finds his chair again. “Now I am the one who must apologize for taking us off track. Eh. Where were we?”
“G for geology?” Amy asks.
“Yes. Miriam. Please.” Alonso rubs his eyes as his wife begins her presentation. He sighs, hoping the concussion’s headaches aren’t back. Just a moment’s rest…
Miriam stands, a bit wobbly, a philosophical air possessing her. “Allow me to take you back to the early days of planet Earth, when the skies were red and lava ran like rivers from volcanoes. It was a time of great change, when—”
“Oh, god,” Flavia exclaims. “Why does every geologist have to start their talk like this? Numbers. Tell me the numbers. How old?”
Miriam makes a face at Flavia. “Fine. Let us begin one hundred ninety million years ago with the formation of the Pacific Plate, which is the tectonic plate under nearly all of the Pacific Ocean. Now we know that hot spots punched through the mantle to create isolated archipelagos like the Hawaiian Islands, but the model I’ve created here allows for an ancient upthrust that was initially a single event. Just one island, aye? And at first it didn’t reach the surface. It was just a raised underwater platform of coral and shellfish, slowly depositing calcium over the igneous roots. So after several more eons lava found its way up this tube again and this column had a second upthrust in the relatively near geologic past, perhaps quite near, like within ten thousand years. This is when it broke the surface of the waves, capped by limestone.” Her thoughts are beginning to run more fluidly now, the foundations established. “Regarding Plexity… there are countless examples of interactions in the geology literature such as alkalines leaching into water and changing the composition of plant life. Now I can… Well… Uh… Depending on a number of factors outside my control…” She locks her neck so that she doesn’t turn to glare at Esquibel, “I may be able to conduct mineralogical examinations to provide some, eh, fruitful matrices upon which much of the life here flourishes.” Miriam looks at a fixed point over their heads on the back wall and says stiffly, “I will only say that the study of this island’s interior would be… a rather significant event in modern geology.”
Miriam sits back down. Her brain hasn’t stopped spinning yet. This entire dim rainy day-long conference has an air of unreality to it. She is just so tired. All she wants is to sleep this day away.
“Who is next?” Amy calls out. “Medicine? Or math first? And what are we calling Katrina?”
“My maths.” Flavia stands, more formal than the others, holding her laptop. “Alonso, I know I said the beta wouldn’t be ready for testing until next week but I lied. It will be tomorrow. After these last few days with the storm and nothing else to do I have made tremendous progress. Now, when we go live it won’t have any of your precious modules, this will just be the core program…”
“Of course. Of course,” Alonso leans forward and blows Flavia kisses. “But Flavia. You are a genius. I cannot believe you are able to deliver the beta. You did it in like twenty days. What a miracle.”
She holds up a hand. “Talk to me about miracles after we debug it. But no, like you said, Plexity is only a thousand lines of code. Not so tough. Just a tricky little puzzle. Most of the tough problems were already solved years ago in bioinformatics. I will just have to keep my cellular automata for some other fancy project instead.”
“Let us work on this as soon as the meeting ends, Flavia. I am very eager to see how you resolved a few of those pathways. Were you able to keep the richness of the data? You were talking about the analog signals of the Dyson readers…”
“Yes. More of my off-the-shelf modules. These inspired from soundwave design programs. You know how they have made such advances in getting digital bits to sound like waveforms. So I was able to repurpose some of those algorithms. But!” Flavia holds her finger straight up like a referee calling a foul. “If you want your precious program to keep running and growing and improving then you will keep me out of the fields and forests like a cartoon character chasing bugs with a bugnet!”
“Yes, Flavia.” Alonso laughs. “Anything for Plexity. I will feed you espresso and noodles myself all day long. Fantastic news. Thank you. Now who did we say was next? Medicine? Doctor?”
Esquibel shrugs. “Medically, we are doing well at the moment. No new injuries. And the storm is forcing us to stay still in here so those of us who were already injured have had time to heal. Our nutrition could be better. I worry about the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables. Phyto-nutrients. It might start to degrade our physical and mental performance. Just a bit. If we were staying longer I’d say we should plant a garden.”
Jay sits up. “Check this out. What if we start harvesting seaweed from the lagoon? Like as a regular operation? Super healthy. Bull kelp and nori. Lots of compounds we need. And there’s so much we’d hardly make a dent. Also, kelp is the fastest growing plant on the planet. A meter a day. So, it could really help…”
They all turn to Maahjabeen. She crosses her arms. “If I can gain access to the sea cave,” she bargains, “then I will not have time to properly manage the lagoon alone. So perhaps we could discuss some compromises.”
Jay pumps his fist. “Yes! I’d be happy to take over! I’ve been a fisheries manager in the past. You won’t be sorry—”
“But this is all dependent on regular access to the sea cave first.” Maahjabeen’s voice cuts right through Jay’s celebration. They all look to Esquibel.
She sighs and shakes her head. “Okay. How about this. We have planned entries and exits. We secure perimeters and scout our route. Nobody travels alone. We do a bit of self-defense training before anyone goes anywhere. With those basic precautions… I suppose we can learn to live on this dangerous island.”
“Miriam? Triquet? These terms are acceptable? Katrina?” Alonso studies each of their faces. They are all lost in thought.
Then Katrina links arms with the other two who had been mentioned. “Yeh, boss. We’re your underground team now. Maahjabeen, you need to get to the sea cave? Just let us know. The three of us will bring you. I want to talk to the Lisican kids? They talk to all three of us. Triquet wants time in the sub? We help. Miriam wants to dig in the tunnels? We dig!”
“That will slow us down like so much,” Triquet complains. “I’ll never have a full day of work again.”
But now Katrina has seized the initiative in the meeting. “Look. Real talk, Triq. We’re only getting in all these fights about the interior because it’s new and weird and scary and we don’t know what happens next. But I bet you, in a couple weeks at most, all this will just be a memory. And we’ll be like sharing feasts with the Lisicans and we’ll have full access to the whole island and fucking Wetchie-ghuy will be in Lisican jail or whatever. Just like a week or two at the most we need to be careful. Cautious. Right, Esquibel? Just until we can adjust to this new reality. Then we can optimize.”
Esquibel grudgingly nods. “Maybe, Katrina. If we are lucky.”
“Well, that’s what I’m saying, baby,” Katrina drawls, winking at Esquibel. “They call me Lady Luck for a reason.”
This elicits laughter from nearly everyone.
Katrina spreads her hands in a dramatic gesture. “Okay, freaks and geeks, you want an update? It’s my turn now. First, I got to say thanks for warming me back up this morning. That was so sweet the way you took care of me and I love you all and owe you all so much. Now, the next thing on my agenda is dance party. We got to celebrate the end of this storm, peeps. If it’s over in the next few hours, then we got to dance ourselves clean. So join me under the trees in the camp tonight and we’ll get us some soul in our souls if you know what I mean.”
“Oh my god, after last night I don’t need another party for like two years,” Flavia groans, tilting her head back. “Maahjabeen. Come on. Tell them. Last night was too much.”
“Yes, Maahjabeen, was it?” Katrina asks, a hair too eagerly. Pradeep burns holes in her, but Katrina giggles his stare away. “Was last night too much? Or was it just right?”
“Ehh…” Maahjabeen looks away. “It was all right. I do not mind the music so much any more. I guess I have grown used to it.”
“Feh.” Flavia flips a hand at her. “Traitor. But be serious now, Katrina. What about your work? What about Plexity?”
“Yeh, okay. So those readers are where I’ve been focusing my energies. Brilliant pieces of gear. Truly. But they’re still lacking a bit in the user experience side of things. I mean, you put a sample in, it flashes red or green, you carry on. The interesting results only emerge when you’re back at the lab putting it all together. But what if there was an app on your phone instead?”
“What?” Flavia is the most surprised one of them all. “What app? I haven’t heard of this. What are you talking about?”
“It just occurred to me, Flavia. We’ve talked about rigging external screens to the thing but why should we? Think about it. There’s no ports in the readers. They’re using encrypted bluetooth to speak to those USB dongles they gave us. So I can hack into the bluetooth and just run a basic app with some like simple data visualization and geotagging and such. You know. An app.”
“You’ve talked a bit about this before,” Pradeep says. “But I couldn’t really see it or how we could use it in tandem with the readers, out in the field where my hands are already full of trowels and collection bags and lights. But yes. Having an app on my phone that would allow me to instantly classify, say the various mycorrhizae… I’ve already been doing a mostly manual version of this and it would save me so much time.”
“Good! Then I’ll bash that together this afternoon. Aw, you look tired, Pradeep. Maybe you didn’t get enough sleep. Well, you can take a nap in a bit and when you wake up it’ll be done! I won’t even make it very expensive, but of course there will be in-app purchases and micro-transactions for sure.”
Jay barks out a laugh, the only one who gets it. “Loot boxes yo.”
Katrina giggles. “I mean, a girl’s gotta monetize what she can in this life. Also, I have a thought about how we might use some of our maths, Flavia, to help Mandy develop better weather models. I’m thinking we might be able to emulate virtual weather stations for her at certain distances, using triangulated data and complexity theories. If nothing else, it’ll help refine her models locally.”
“Ai, it sounds like my work is gonna become about the weather,” Flavia observes, “both at the macro level and at the micro. Well. It is time I understood it better.”
“Oh my god that is so sweet,” Mandy says. “I’m not exactly sure what you mean by virtual weather stations but, like, whatever help would be huge. I mean, how do you even make a virtual weather station? What’s the point?”
“It’s mostly predictive, particle physics on deterministic paths, acting like waves and currents, right? If we measure a gust of wind at one location, we can have a certain degree of confidence that it carries on over a predictable path. So if we have an accurate enough measurement of the land and sea in this general location, and then I think at minimum three actual real weather stations at wide intervals, we can create a virtual environment of the weather where you could sample it from any point—”
“Well, not any point, Katrina, dear,” Flavia amends. “Nobody brought a cryogenically-cooled supercomputer, did they? We cannot keep track of more than a few hundred data points on the hardware we have here. And we can effectively predict even fewer points. But I’m sure we can improve on Mandy’s data analysis using these techniques, yes.”
“That is wild.” Mandy shakes her head. She knows about virtual atmospheric environments from some of her computation classes in grad school, but she hadn’t thought how she might apply them in the real world. Katrina is utterly brilliant. She must think Mandy is a total dunce. She shakes her head in disbelief. “And that’s something you can just, like, whip up out of thin air?”
Katrina shrugs. “I’ll put it on the list. Also, I’ve been thinking of ways we can re-treat the wall panels in the sub to get away from that lifeless cold war aesthetic. It’s so gray! We need more warmth down there. I know that’s not strictly Plexity-related, but come on.”
“Eek,” Triquet hunches their shoulders. “This is blasphemy. Perhaps some detachable wall coverings or something but please don’t renovate my museum. It’s so… pure.”
Alonso tries to keep his focus on this conversation but their voices are starting to fade out. He is spent and he feels his age again. No. Older. Miriam and Amy remain far more vital than he is. He squeezes his gnarled hands, massaging out the pain. This meeting is interminable. They have spoken about too much and covered too many subjects. It has no clear direction any more. He doesn’t know how to wrap it up. “Okay. It is lunch time. We need to think of ways to… eh.” He waves a hand in surrender. “Enough thinking for a while. Anything else to bring up before we are done?”
Flavia lifts a shy hand. “Only that it is my birthday today, if anyone cares.”
They all cry out in celebration. The youngest ones surge against Flavia, squealing and hugging her. The others hang back, calling out and clapping. She is smothered with affection.
Katrina kisses Flavia again and again. Then she leans back and howls, “And you said no more parties! Ha! Tonight we rage!”
Finally Flavia emerges, hands upraised. “Basta! Basta!”
“How old, love?” Miriam asks. “It’s all about numbers, right?”
Flavia recognizes the jab and smiles. “Only one hundred ninety million years. No. Thirty-one. I am a… what is the word, spinster? now.”
Amy and Miriam laugh long and loud. To them, thirty-one is a whole generation ago. Esquibel links arms with Flavia. “Thirty-one gang rise up.”
Flavia is shocked. “We are the same age? No.”
Esquibel pulls away. “Why? What age did you think I was? Older or younger?”
Flavia can’t answer that. “Ehh. I guess I never thought of it like, like—I mean, Doctor Daine you are so accomplished so I guess I thought you were older—But of course that would be impossible because you look so many years younger than me…”
Esquibel’s laugh is free and easy, everyone’s favorite sound. “Ha! That is a lie! Don’t worry about offending me, Flavia! This face isn’t as fresh as it used to be! And that is fine! I’ve been trying to be an old lady my whole life! Let’s see… You are exactly… 89 days younger than me. There. More numbers for you.”
“That makes your birthday…” Flavia does a quick calculation, “Wait… Christmas Day?”
“The day after. Boxing Day.”
“The thirties are your best,” Miriam says. “Still so much energy but you aren’t a crazy person any more like you were in your teens and twenties. You’re going to survive. You’ve figured out life skills and how to live a daily life but everything is still so fresh and new.”
“Is it?” Flavia asks. “I have never had enough energy and I have never been a crazy person. I am a very normal person and my twenties were not like that. Also, nothing feels new.” She sighs, a melodramatic sound. “I guess I am also an old lady in training.”
“As am I,” Maahjabeen adds. “When I was growing up I hated being a little girl. Nobody listening to a word I’d say. I couldn’t wait to drive a car and shop for my own food. Independence!”
“Should I feel bad,” Katrina asks Mandy, “if I never wanted to grow up and move past the playdates and sleepover stage of life?”
“I’m with you,” Mandy says. “For me, childhood was playing all day in the waves of the north shore. I mean… I never wanted it to end. Getting old scares me.”
Miriam joins them. “Me too! To the young at heart!” Triquet also links arms with them. Jay does too.
They laughingly divide themselves into two groups. Only Katrina registers Maahjabeen pulling Pradeep into the embrace of the old souls. He wears his nervous, brittle smile as they surround him.
“Amy!” Flavia calls out. “You can’t stay in the middle! Alonso! You have to choose! Old or young, eh?”
But Amy is torn. “I can’t decide. Some of me feels so young and some so old. I’m a perfectly-balanced mix, I guess.”
“Ah, coward!” Flavia laughs at her. They all wait for Alonso.
He shakes his head, bemused. “I don’t know… how to fit myself into this idea. I feel… I guess… I think when I was young I was really young, even younger and more innocent than anyone here. My entire identity forever was to be this boy wonder. Remember, Amy? All our professors telling me to grow up? But then… I never did. I am like a sapling who got broken before he ever became a tree. And that makes me feel old. But I feel like… I feel like I never spent any time being an actual man, you know?”
Miriam squeezes his hand. Pradeep offers, “Isn’t that what you are doing right now? Leading this project? Being the patron of this big family? Here’s a manhood to be proud of right here, Alonso.”
“Salud. Thank you, my friend. Those are kind words…” But Alonso’s final sentence trails off. He is spent.
“Aww. Our big patron has had a big day now and it looks like he needs a big nap.” Amy steps into a cell and retrieves a blanket. “Let’s put him right back in the cell where we slept. The cots are still set up. Whose cell is this, anyway? Who did we evict?”
“Maahjabeen.” Katrina pounces on these opportunities like a cat with a mouse. Her eyes dart playfully over to where Maahjabeen stands with Pradeep. They step slightly away from each other.
“Oh?” Amy shakes her head. “So sorry to push you out. Where’d you end up sleeping last night?”
Maahjabeen just waves her hand. “I was fine. I just found a spot of my own.”
But Amy hugs her in apology. “You poor dear! You must have suffered so!”
It takes all of Katrina’s willpower not to say something.
Maahjabeen breaks away to approach Alonso. She places a hand on his arm. “Doctor, can I offer you a hand?”
“Yes… Miss Charrad…” Alonso allows her and a few others to haul him to his feet. Now his old injuries are throbbing again. Ah, well. He glimpsed health and happiness these last few days. It will be a long road back, but he is most certainly on that road now.
Mandy registers his grimace. When they get him settled, she will kneel at his bedside and put her hands on his feet again. This is a really good time for Tui Na, although she doesn’t like the damp chill in the air. Never conducive to pliable muscles and tendons. Scar tissue seems to shrink in such conditions. But there will still be things she can do to get things flowing again in his extremities.
Also, she’s still got a bit of the old MDMA afterglow coursing through her. Touching things still seems like the solution to all the world’s problems. In fact, wouldn’t deep intimate contact also be the solution to Alonso’s problems? Isn’t that how healing works?Mandy doesn’t know. But she knows who would. Katrina. “Hey… I was just thinking about working on Alonso, you know. But like, both inside and out. Not just the scars in his feet but like the scars in his brain. Those are probably even worse and we should be trying to do something about them too.”
Katrina turns surprisingly sober eyes to Mandy and she belatedly remembers Katrina’s brother Pavel. “Yeh. I think about it all the time. You know, torture is something that happens once and then it like repeats itself again and again in the victim whenever it can. And they can’t stop it. Sometimes I wish I could just cut it straight out of their heads. The trauma circuit. Just snip. Gone.”
“Yeah. Well, I was wondering if you knew at all about MDMA for PTSD. War veterans and rape victims and everyone.”
Katrina throws her hands helplessly into the air. “Of course. I’m like an expert on guided trips! I know drugs. I tried to get Pavel to do it but he wouldn’t. Not with his little sister. And he just doesn’t believe in it. So… I mean, if someone doesn’t believe an experience like that can help them then it won’t.”
“But Alonso…”
Katrina gapes at Mandy, then laughs. “Oh my god. You think? I guess I… I mean, maybe it was just really age-ist of me but I honestly didn’t think to ask him. It was such a fight with Pavel I just didn’t… Huh. Silly me. Hey, Alonso…”
Katrina and Mandy follow the others into Maahjabeen’s cell.
“Yes?” Alonso grunts from the cot. Amy is tucking a sleeping bag under his chin while Maahjabeen discreetly gathers her things for a bit of a move to another cell.
“Let’s talk drugs, mate.” Katrina sits beside Alonso on the side of the cot while Mandy kneels at his feet. She takes them into her hands and he groans.
“Drugs. Sure. I always loved drugs.”
Katrina claps. “Good man. Have you ever had Molly?”
Alonso opens his eyes to frown at Katrina. Now what kind of crazy plan is she talking about? “I never touched her.”
Miriam laughs, leaning in. “No, Zo. Molly is MDMA. What we called ecstasy back in the day. Alonso here was a major consumer of dance party drugs in the late 80s. We all were.”
“Eh. Ecstasy. Yes. I would take some and start kissing everyone. They always called me the Painted Whore.”
“Remember when you sang Happy Birthday Mr. President to Professor Bynum and grinded on his lap for his birthday?”
“Oh, god,” Alonso laughs. “I almost lost my department chair.” He sobers, thinking of the implications of their words. “But, what? You want me to take some now? I’m telling you, I just need some sleep. Then I’ll be better.”
“Not now, but maybe when you’re ready. There’s been a huge amount of documentation about how MDMA can dissociate you from traumatic emotions. You can look at them from a distance and build a new relationship with your interior reality.” Katrina knows. She’s seen it happen again and again. She’s felt it herself.
But now Alonso understands what’s expected of him. “You want me to revisit all the torture? But this time on drugs? Ah. Ladies. I can’t think of something I want to do less.”
“All I’m saying,” Katrina holds up both hands, “is that there is a significant amount of healing it can offer. Like Mandy’s hands. It only hurts at first and then it gets better. And the hurt with Molly is only the anxiety you feel beforehand. When it gets started there’s no pain at all.”
“Huh.” Now Alonso is closed off. He studies them all with heavy-lidded eyes. “That is what you think.”
Katrina pats his leg. “Well. Like I said, not now. When you’re ready, maybe. I got to see some of this Painted Whore in action, if nothing else.”
Alonso giggles, then allows himself to drift away.
Chapter 20 – Her Lovely Smile Fades
May 13, 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:
20 – Her Lovely Smile Fades
The rain pounds against the bunker. People lie huddled in corners with their lights and screens, trying to block it out. But Jay can’t settle. Just when his ankle has healed and his body has decided it’s time to climb some trees, this fucking storm has shut everything down. He paces through the bunker, weaving between the cells and workstations in endless figure eights.
“Jay.” Flavia’s voice is as cold as the storm. “Please stop walking past my door every fifteen seconds. You are driving me crazy.”
“Sorry, Flavia.” Jay stops. Mandy flashes an irritated glance at him and Amy clucks, shaking her head. Shit. He’s gone and done it again, annoying everyone. It’s hard being a big loud guy sometimes when you’re locked in a little box and you have no ability to turn it down. “Maybe I’ll go do laps in the sub. That’s okay, isn’t it?”
Nobody answers. Nobody has an answer. Most aren’t even listening to him. Finally Triquet calls out, “Go ahead.”
“Thanks, Triq.” Jay heads toward the trap door. “I’ll let you know if I see anything I shouldn’t. Anyone…” He tarries at the stairs heading down. “Hey, you know what I just thought. That NDA we all signed. We can’t say a thing about this whole experience to anyone when we get home, can we?”
Esquibel leans her head out of the clean room and nods. “That is correct. The NDA is completely ironclad. What happens here stays here. Everything.”
“Like Vegas times a thousand. Well well well…” Jay rubs his hands together. “Huh. That’s gotta make things way more interesting here, don’t it? I mean, we could all have like a giant drug orgy every night and nobody would ever know. We could… Huh. Well, the possibilities are endless. I never felt more free.”
And with that innocent observation, he descends the stairs and opens the door to the sub. When it closes, the bunker is silent. Only the wind and the rain fill the space.
Mandy is intent on building her airflow model for the transition zone between the treetops and the cliff face. But Jay’s last words echo in her ears. She looks up at Esquibel, who is studying her with narrowed eyes. Unintentionally, Mandy’s eyes glance sideways at Katrina. She instantly pulls her gaze back to Esquibel, her face growing hot. How could a glance be considered cheating? As if she and Esquibel have made any promises to each other out here anyway. There hasn’t been any point.
But Mandy’s fears are groundless. Esquibel is also looking at Katrina now. The funny thing is that DJ Bubblegum has also stopped working and is herself staring at Triquet with idle fascination. Triquet mutters to themself, shaking their head, as they continue to write out their latest outline, a composite of two earlier outlines that they realize they can now marry since the autopsy. But the breathless pressure of the bunker finally unnerves them. They look up to find all these girls staring at them. “What.”
“I wish we could time it with like a big thunderclap.” Triquet sits with Maahjabeen near the reed door of the bunker. They’ve set up their lights to shine against the walls of the cells in the most theatrical way possible and Katrina is somewhere in back cueing up a slamming house track. “You know, for the first big moment.” The electronic beats start to speed up toward a raucous anthem. “And… action!” Triquet claps their hands together then manually flips the lights off and on in a poor imitation of a strobe.
Amy is first, strutting out of the narrow hall wearing Triquet’s floral housecoat strapped tight around her waist with a wide black sash. Amy’s hair has been tight-braided against her scalp and huge black cat-eyes drawn from the corner of her eyes outward.
She unhooks the sash and winks at them, grinding to the music, then flashes them wearing Miriam’s bodice, which is nearly bursting with middle-aged muscle and cleavage.
Triquet screams like a bobby-soxer and their phone’s flash goes off again and again like paparazzi. Maahjabeen squeals with laughter, unable to applaud, and pulls at Amy’s forearm to get her to cover back up. But Amy, haughty, pulls away and stalks off stage with a steamy glare over her shoulder.
Katrina is next in her rave princess gown of shimmering blue satin, clinging to her. She dances out, showing off the twine sandals she’s made, and busts a move, spanking her own ass. Then she leans over and kisses Triquet, then does the same to Maahjabeen, who only laughs more and pushes her away.
Mandy and Miriam come out together, hand in hand, wearing a collection of scarves wrapped artfully around their bodies. Mandy pulls Miriam into an embrace and begins dancing with her, backs straight, eyes locked. With a brief kiss they dance off-stage.
Then it is Esquibel, her eyes smoked and her lips glossy pink, in a literal wrap she has made of the remaining translucent plastic sheet. It hugs her shadowed clefts and crevices and she moves with sinuous grace. The audience is shocked to see this side of the good doctor, and perhaps there is something in her vulnerability in the way of making amends, but the sight is so stunning all the others can do nothing but goggle. Esquibel’s eyes are closed as she sways lightly to the music, a faraway smile on her face. Then she bumps against Maahjabeen’s legs and her eyes open. She sees how utterly stunned the Muslim woman is and Esquibel laughs, spinning away into Mandy’s embrace.
There is a long pause and the audience begins to grow restless. Finally Pradeep shuffles in, squinting into the light. He wears a safari jacket and white-collar shirt, with an ascot accenting his jaw. But he is painfully uncomfortable as the center of attention, regardless of how dashing he looks. Amy has worked his hair back and it is now a black lacquered helmet pulled back from his high forehead. He puts his hand up over his face. “Can I go now?”
“Oi!” Miriam shouts at him, “we’ll need more quality from you, mate, before we let you sit. Put your hand down.”
“And stop squinting!”
“And start dancing!”
But each command just makes him more and more anxious. He squirms in the light. Finally Maahjabeen rises from her chair and grabs his hands and leads Pradeep back to her seat. “There there. Don’t listen to them. I think you look rather smart.”
Pradeep collapses gratefully into the camp chair, face dark with embarrassment. Then:
From the back, a deep opera baritone sings an improvised line over the house track. Then Flavia and Alonso step into the light.
He is in full drag, wrapped in Triquet’s feather boa with his hair pulled back by an embroidered headband. Blue and yellow eyeshadow stripes his lids and transforms his face like a Kabuki villain. But his lips are red and the gown borrowed from Triquet isn’t even zipped up the back.
Flavia is in a simple black pantsuit with her hair pinned back and a white towel over her forearm. She attends Alonso like a manservant as he careens around the stage in bombastic style.
Alonso sings a mashup of Latin, Italian, and Spanish, rhyming his verses as well as he can, striding back and forth before them blowing kisses and striking poses. The crowd goes wild. It is the best he’s felt in ages.
Amy embraces him. They sway back and forth to the music, unable to keep passé dance moves of the 80s from sneaking in. Soon they are all dancing together, repeating the lyric line that Alonso has invented, “Sueño simplicado…” over and over.
Jay emerges from the trap door and walks through the cells to find the party going full bore. He giggles. “What have I done.”
Ξ
Late at night, a shadow appears at Pradeep’s door. He isn’t asleep. How could he be? They are all dancing the night away. The whole last thirty-six hours has been a nightmare of crashing thunder and close-quarter contact. And now someone wants something from him? Oh dear.
“Do not mind me,” Maahjabeen growls at Pradeep. “I am only here because they have taken over my bed and every other bed. I think they are into Katrina’s drugs now.”
“Ah. Yes. Of course.” Pradeep grips the interior edge of his sleeping bag tight up against his chin, glad that he is still wearing tights and not just boxer briefs as he does some nights. He feels like a spinster aunt caught by the gardener, clutching at his hems.
Maahjabeen enters Pradeep’s cell, head pounding, resentment throbbing in her. She shuffles her feet across the concrete, sure she will find piles of gear there as it is in her own cell. But no, here the floor is austerely clean. Cold. And it will be her bed. She sits.
There is a long silence. Finally Pradeep turns his head and regards her, the silhouette of the woman in his cell backlit by the light outside the cell. “Uh, what are you doing?”
“You don’t have a spare blanket or pillow or anything, do you? I couldn’t rescue any of them.”
“Yes, of course.” Pradeep automatically sits up and offers her his pillow. “I mean… Here. You should go ahead and take my bed. I’m not really using it.”
“No no…”
“I mean, I’m not sleeping. I can’t sleep. I’ll sit up and you sleep.”
“Stop it, Pradeep. La. La. I can’t take your bed.”
“It’s fine. Really.” Pradeep stands. Maahjabeen does too. They face each other in the darkness, a handspan apart. “It’s a warm bag and, uh, you should find that—”
Maahjabeen takes Pradeep’s hand. She kisses him.
He quivers. They separate with a wondering sigh.
“There isn’t, ah… I mean, your family in India…” Maahjabeen’s voice is even huskier than usual. “There isn’t any chance that you come from a Muslim family, is there?”
“Devout Hindu.” Pradeep blinks at Maahjabeen, his dark eyes filled with bewildered concern. “Why did you do that?”
Maahjabeen places her palm against his chest, admiring the flat muscles, amused by the hammering heart beneath. “You are a very beautiful man, Pradeep.”
“Ah. You do know, yes. I was afraid,” he stammers, “that it was a case of mistaken identity and you thought you’d kissed someone else, in which case…”
“Stop.” Maahjabeen pulls him close and kisses him again. There is something of cinnamon to his taste. And salt. She decides he is delicious. With regret, she pulls back. “Are you a practicing, eh, Hindu? Or is there any chance I might someday persuade you to join me in Islam?”
But Pradeep is reeling. Kisses from Maahjabeen are like sips of ambrosia from a holy chalice. “More of an agnostic, really. I’d say. Why are we talking of…? Oh.” His brain catches up, to realize the significance of how she stands, nearly demure, by the side of his bed. “I, uh…” His anxiety is hammering at him, trying to take this night away from him. But he can’t. He won’t let it. He’s stronger now. As a child he had no control of it but now… Now he does. “I don’t know… uh, where my faith or lack of it might lead me. But I really like you, Maahjabeen and, uh… I guess I’m willing to follow wherever you might lead me.”
She draws him back down to the bed.
Ξ
Katrina doesn’t want to disentangle herself from the pile but she really needs to pee. And in this storm doing one’s business has become a major production. So she groans, head pounding, mouth filled with sand, and slides her arms and legs out of the soft embrace of Triquet and Esquibel and Mandy to find Jay passed out, thoroughly crushed beneath them. They literally have been using him as their bed. She giggles despite herself and hauls herself to her feet. A mew of longing escapes Esquibel but she doesn’t even open her eyes.
Katrina careens out of the cell and tries to find her own. But it’s so dark in here and everyone’s in the wrong beds. She finally finds her cell and reaches for her raincoat, bladder near to bursting, and bumps a cot where one isn’t supposed to be. She looks down to see Pradeep and Maahjabeen asleep and naked in each other’s arms.
Katrina gasps in silent shock and shakes her head at the ways of the world. Well well well. Everyone gets lonely after a few weeks. How sweet. She can’t think of two more deserving people. And they would make the most beautiful babies in the entire world.
But where is her bloody cell? She doesn’t have any time to find it. Out of desperation she snares the coat hanging in the corner and hauls it on. Pradeep’s storm coat, still damp and smelling of him, a salty tang. Good. It’s so big it reaches halfway down her thighs. Barefoot. No time to find her shoes.
Katrina hurries for the door. Relieved, she finds her phone in her pocket as she pushes it open. The cold shocks her and she sputters, lighting her way across camp and into the bushes on the far side of Jay’s sodden hammock. This is preposterous. The water is sheeting across the ground. She doesn’t even think she needs to make it all the way to the trenches. They might already be flooded.
With that thought she decides where she stands is as good a place as any and she squats to relieve herself, Pradeep’s giant hood and shell forming a bit of a tent. But she soaked her leggings when she pulled them down and now pulling them back up over her bottom is super unpleasant. She shivers. It’s time to get back to bed.
Then she sees them, a trio of young children from the village above. Lisicans. How long have they been hiding there? They’ve edged out from the shadow of the woods so Katrina can spot them. They wear feather capes smeared with mud, branches sticking out of them. Their eyes are earnest.
Katrina sputters and eventually finds her voice. “G’day, uh, everyone. Your parents somewhere close?” Despite the universal-acceptance vibe that Katrina always has going, this spooks her no end. What if their parents are? How many Lisicans are here? And why? Are there enough to like overwhelm her and carry her away?
The poor dears are drenched, their curly hair plastered against their dark, wide faces. The tallest one points at her with his thumb. It’s a boy, perhaps ten or twelve. He says something to her in his thick impenetrable language. The others echo his words.
She holds an apologetic hand up. “Of course you are always welcome down here. It’s your island, after all. We’re just guests. And we know it. We’ll be gone soon and then…” Katrina shrugs, shivering again. She needs to get back inside and quick. “Then who knows what happens. Life goes on.”
But the cold rain doesn’t seem to affect the children. They regard her solemnly, waiting for her to do something or say something more. Finally the little girl at the boy’s left elbow points at Katrina with her thumb and sing-songs, “Sad…So! So sad… So!”
And with this enchanting warble, Katrina realizes they want her to take her phone out so they can hear Elton John again.
Ξ
When Maahjabeen wakes she is alone in an unfamiliar cot. That must be bad. But a deep languor fills her, making her limbs heavy. She doesn’t want to get up. She likes it here. It is so warm and cozy, and smells like her deepest desires. But where exactly is here?
She rolls her head to the side and sees Pradeep’s clothes hanging from hooks in the reed walls. Ah, yes. Her wild indiscretion. She shakes her head in prim judgment as her eyes roam the walls, studying the one photo he’s hung beside his bed. It is a close-up of insect larvae, a heaped slimy white lump with little black eyes scattered like poppyseeds. Absolutely disgusting. Where others would place a picture of their mother or wife or children, he has these little nightmare slugs. Of course.
Maahjabeen realizes she’s holding her breath. She lets it out in a thin stream, controlling it and forcing herself to be calm. Why is she doing that? Well, obviously, she’s awaiting God’s punishment. Or her own decent self to rise up within her and shame her for her unwed romance. At least when she had sex with Amal she was able to convince herself it was fine because he was a good Muslim boy and they were getting married. But then he met her mother and, well, that’s when it all fell apart. They hated each other on sight and Amal suddenly became controlling and cruel. It hadn’t taken Maahjabeen long to decide that her own freedom had been worth more than the regard of his family or even hers. That had been the beginning of her travels.
She touches herself in the places Pradeep had. Nothing is bruised or hurt. The sex had been more like twisting gently in satin sheets. Lots of sighing. That’s what she remembers most. Pradeep’s long lean body was so delicious, his skin and hair so soft. She could wrap herself in him like a blanket for days.
And, who knows? Maybe the wisdom of the Prophet could cure his anxious mind. And if not the Prophet’s wisdom, perhaps her own. With that thought, she realizes he will never come back to her here in this bed on the morning after. Unless their encounter gave him more heart than she thinks is possible, Pradeep is probably somewhere out there shivering like a PTSD victim. Ha. Is that what she will call her lovers? Her victims? Ha.
Maahjabeen exits Pradeep’s cell to find that Esquibel and Mandy and Triquet and Jay are all in a snoring pile. Alonso and Miriam and Amy are in another, as she can see through the open door of her own cell. They even brought in a second cot so there’d be enough room for all. Even passing out at the end of a party, middle-aged people are so sensible. Maahjabeen aspires to it.
The storm rattles the door. She doesn’t want to go out there and somehow, perhaps because of how abstemious she was last night, she doesn’t need to yet. Is Pradeep out there in the wet and cold? She prays that she didn’t drive him outside with her lust.
Or perhaps he’s down in the sub? Unlikely… but still worth investigating. Maahjabeen crosses the bunker to find it sealed up. Someone has placed heavy bins atop the closed trap door, as if worried about the Lisicans bursting through from below. Odd. She didn’t recall any paranoid passages at the end of the night. But she had fallen asleep long before the others.
She’s just so relieved nobody saw her in Pradeep’s arms.
Then Maahjabeen finds him. He is sitting in Esquibel’s clean room. His hazy brown and black silhouette is seated in the center of the floor, facing the wall. Is he meditating? Then he looks up. No, he is on his phone.
Maahjabeen slips silently within the plastic sheets behind him. She lightly clears her throat and his head twitches to the side. Then Pradeep slowly swivels toward Maahjabeen, eyes unable to hold hers. He quickly looks away.
“Ehh. Good morning. I don’t know what happened last night. If I did anything wrong I am very sorry—”
Maahjabeen steps in and puts a finger against his lips. She leans down and kisses Pradeep. He holds her chin gently, his lips and fingertips trembling. She pulls back and gives him a dimpled smile. “I know you are. But la! Listen to me, Pradeep. You do not get to use me and our night together as more fuel for your panic. Not me. Not last night. That was too nice.”
She releases him. Pradeep blinks at her, his gaze wounded, filled with disbelief. He can only repeat, “Ehh…”
Maahjabeen laughs at him.
“Really?” Pradeep can’t make the next leap. The big one. Of all the scenarios he had concocted about how this morning might unfold, this one had never occurred to him. Maahjabeen still likes him? Even after last night? Madness. He looks up at her with wonder. She is astoundingly beautiful. Her skin is polished bronze, her hair a disordered black river. Her wide-set eyes gaze at him with level affection. This is like when his mum used to get Glamour magazines and he would take them into the bathroom to stare at the models in the perfume ads, amazed that such beauty could exist. And here is a model just for him. Impossible. He has never been attracted to the women most men consider pretty. Usually he is first drawn to a woman’s mind. But in this miraculous case he is being offered both. A brilliant, ferocious mind and the beauty of a goddess. For a moment he believes in reincarnation again. What amazing sacrifices did he make in some past life to earn all this?
Pradeep lifts a hand to touch her incredible face but stops short. She must hate being objectified. He remembers this lesson from his cousin Ashra. Pretty girls grow up different, always under a lens. They become self-conscious and hardened to the attention. The last thing he wants to do is objectify her. He drops his hand.
But Maahjabeen catches it and lifts it to her cheek. She presses it against the side of her face, her cheekbone settling into his hand. This feels so good. She won’t let him retreat back into his hole.
Pradeep can’t handle the unbearable vulnerability in her gaze. He flushes, his eyes welling with tears, and drops them. But she lifts his chin.
Maahjabeen softens her gaze. It is no longer a yearning. Now it is a confident belief in him. In them. She finds herself falling so far so fast now. He better be okay with being Muslim because she’s never felt anything like this before and she can’t imagine ever letting it stop. Wait. Is this what Alonso and Miriam felt, that day on the beach in the rain? It had seemed excessive when it happened but now maybe she understands. Nothing is sweeter than love. It has its own holiness. She covers her mouth with her hand. “And we can even share the water.”
It’s a random, bizarre statement but Pradeep instantly divines what she means. For some reason, this is the signal he needed to truly believe that he really can be loved. Maahjabeen means the ocean. They can paddle together in the places most important to her. The compliment she has just given him rings through him like a bell. How fantastic. The ocean goddess has looked upon him with favor. This is like falling under the spell of a mermaid to live with her for a thousand years under the waves. He is blessed.
Adoration for Maahjabeen rushes through Pradeep. Suddenly he needs to know everything about her. First he will learn her language and eat her food and meet her family and study her religion. Islam? Sure. Anything that will allow him to stay near this miraculous creature. Or is that objectifying too? He really doesn’t want to do that. Perhaps she is the essence of humanity and he is the creature, something weird and malformed outside the realm of normal men. But no. The way Maahjabeen looks at him… For perhaps the first time Pradeep doesn’t feel like he is alone and cold outside, looking in on the laughing crowd. He is the one who is in. This is inside. He is inside the world for once, with her. And it is glorious. Pradeep stands and Maahjabeen steps back.
His eyes are dark and burning, filled with an intention she has never seen. But it is not alarming. There is a compelling masculine allure to his gaze. Maahjabeen melts within it. Pradeep squeezes her hands so hard they hurt. He pulls her close.
They kiss. Maahjabeen collapses against his strength, marveling at it. This is the most romantic moment of her life. She feels like a movie star.
No. Better. She feels like the beloved of a worthy man.
Ξ
Alonso’s eyes snap open. Limbs cross his. His back is cold. Oh no. He is back in the yama. The punishment pit the torturers threw him in when they were done with him. The yama was deep and cold and he was never the only one in there. The bodies were broken. Some had been dead. The smell… He did not think that stench would ever fully wash away. Rats came in the night. Blue bare legs across his chest. Crushed hands, twitching.
He finds a strength he never had in the yama before. He pushes the limbs off him and rises up…
Miriam and Amy fall away. Amy gets pushed straight off the cot onto the platform. They both look stupidly up at Alonso, blinking sleep out of their eyes.
He is naked in the center of the cell, eyes far away, panting like he’s run a marathon. Miriam reaches for him, her voice muzzy with the final stages of a drug trip. “No, Zo. It’s okay. I’m here.”
“Aaah!” His eyes finally clear and he sees what he has done. The relief knifes through him with a delicious thrill and as he stoops down to help Amy back into bed he remembers how they rolled around like children for hours the night before. What joy. The intense swing from terror and despair to luxurious pleasure is almost too much for his heart and brain to encompass.
“Oh my god…” Amy croaks, shaking her head sadly. “Are you okay, Lonzo?”
He registers her words distantly. At first it sounds like just a general question but then she touches the scars on his chest. The brands and punctures. He reflexively jerks away but then realizes he doesn’t need to. He is safe. He closes her hand over them. “Yes, dear one. These wounds, they are closed now.” Brave words. Maybe someday he can make them come true.
But he’s not fooling anyone. He had just thrashed his way out of bed like he was fighting to get out of hell. “Come back,” Miriam pouts, her gaze still clouded with hallucinations. “Let me put my arms around you.”
“Yes.” Alonso smiles down at Amy and Miriam, his eyes still sad. With effort he tells himself, “This is good. This is… love. Health. Happiness. It is like the preamble to our own constitution, no? It guarantees the right to parties and sex and dreams coming true.” He runs his hands along Amy’s body. He still isn’t used to it in moments like this. When they had been together long ago Amy had been a boy and Alonso had adored his little square hardness. But it turned out that Amy had a very clear sense of who she was, and after years and decades of quiet desperation, had realized that the hardness was exactly who she wasn’t. It degraded her like an infection, one she couldn’t get rid of for ages. She told Alonso of the beatings when she wore dresses as a young boy and how she’d never forgotten the shame. But cross-dressing was just so true, the truest thing she’d ever done.
Alonso leans down and kisses Amy before rolling over her onto the bed. He settles with a sigh. Miriam digs her pointy chin into his chest. She takes a sharp breath, to clear her head and engage speech centers like a normal human. “Something I noticed, eh?”
“How good I look naked?”
“Well, of course, love, always. But no, when you jumped up you didn’t react to your feet. Think about it. The whole time you stood. Nary a grimace nor a scowl.”
“I think you’re right.”
“How do they feel now?”
“Pulpy.”
Amy cuddles close. “Mmm. Octopus.”
Alonso laughs. “Yes, basically, I have two octopi at the bottom of my legs today. It is like some of your kinky Japanese porn, Amy.”
“Not my porn, you pervert. I can’t stand hentai. It’s all about controlling women and invading them. Super gross.”
Miriam sighs. “Isn’t everything?” She runs her fingers through Amy’s hair. Her eyes are starting to clear. “I kind of don’t want this to end. Eight weeks seemed a long time at first but now it doesn’t seem long enough. I don’t need to go back to all that shite.”
“If we weren’t gonna run out of ramen packets in the next five weeks, I’d agree.” Amy glories in the warmth of Alonso’s body. It has been far too long since she could just cuddle someone all night long. It restored her in a way she’d forgotten she needed. And what a way to get restored! Alonso was one of the most beautiful boys she had ever seen and being with him had been her every dream come true. Now, he is barrel-chested and smells musty but he is still one of the great loves of her life. So is Miriam. The warmth spreading through Amy turns into contentment. She is home, where she is understood, accepted, and loved.
They begin to drowse again. But it is only moments before movement in another cell prevents them from drifting away.
“AlphaFold.” Flavia’s eager voice is like an alarm. She is already awake, standing in the door of this cell. Her words startle them and Alonso jolts awake. Miriam, in his embrace, stirs but doesn’t open her eyes. Amy rolls over and throws a comforting arm over him. She settles again as Alonso unsticks his eyes and regards Flavia.
“What did you call me?”
Flavia sits on the side of the bed with her laptop and one of the Dyson readers. “I was smoking one of Jay’s mad blunts last night and it hit me. The characteristics of the math in the Dyson interface reminded me of something but I couldn’t remember what. Then I remembered. While I was dancing. What do you know of AlphaFold?”
“Yeah, I know those guys. It’s a distributed software platform, right? It predicts folding proteins. But my knowledge is five years old. They have advanced?”
“So much. Their refinement transformations have revolutionized the field. People are unironically calling it specialized A.I. now. So that’s just what DeepMind and Google are able to do in the public sphere. But these Dyson readers are from the black labs and their science fiction advances that nobody knows. So I started hacking the reader, to integrate it with a bit of Plexity here, and I realized they have gone so much farther. Look.” She turns her laptop to show him columns of numbers. “Here is one of Pradeep’s latest samples. A marine bacterium called Prochlorococcus marinus marinus. Now the channels have already rendered the sample down to the chromosomal level but the proteomic readout it provides is what reminded me of AlphaFold. At their conferences they theorize that with enough computing power they can not only predict the folding of every protein but also take those proteins back in time, tracing the origins of each genetic lineage. Here. You see this work here? It looks like a bizarre simple algorithm, no? Well they must have some super geniuses in those labs because that is the most astounding piece of mathematics I have ever seen. These readers. They must have like a terabyte of memory in them or more. Look, Alonso. We can even turn the visualizations on. That is thanks to Katrina. See? The bacterium goes back in time, only a tiny number of superficial mutations over such a long time. Very stable genome. But here. Now I will show you this blood sample from one of the sea gulls that Amy got. You get down to the proteomic level, and… I mean, it’s a whole story. It’s like taking any organism back to all its earlier versions of itself. Incredible.”
Alonso goggles at the richness of the data revealed to him. His mind whirls with an infinity of possibilities. But the deepest insight is the most thrilling. “Time… Time itself vanishes from our studies. Or becomes an independent variable that we can tune to our liking. Astounding. But I need…”
Flavia shakes the reader in his face. “The most incredible thing I have ever held! Who knew they were working so hard on life sciences? I thought it was all lasers and bombs in those secret labs.”
Alonso grunts. “Such a Devil’s choice. Live in comfort. Every resource is yours. No more grant writing ever again. Just pure research. Or at least that’s how I imagine it. Now that I say it out loud I figure it must be just as deadly as academia, just with bigger budgets and secret oversight. Horrible. But before you say another word, Flavia, you have to get me one of those cups of espresso so I can think like a human being again.”
“Sì. Aspetta un momento.” She disappears and Alonso shakes his head, listening to the rain sheeting against the metal roof. Well things could definitely be worse. They certainly became a family last night. And after such a bitter fight between Esquibel and Miriam… One of his last memories is watching the two of them intertwined on the dance floor, weeping, gripping each other’s hands. Perhaps the Kenyans fight like the Irish do, fiercely but with much forgiveness after.
“Was that important?” Miriam’s voice comes from faraway. “It sounded important.”
“Very. But don’t you worry your pretty little head, my love. You need more sleep after your big day.”
“Mmm.” Miriam settles. “Can’t sleep. Drugs are bad, Zo.”
“They always are the next day, yes.”
“The pictures in my head were so cool for the first few hours but now it’s been all night. I just want them to stop.” Yet her words trail away and soon she is out once more.
“What day is this?” Alonso has lost all track of time. He picks up his phone and consults it. “April second. Twenty-three days. Thirty-five left. That means that yesterday was April Fool’s. Yes. That is definitely what it was. A day for fools. Por supuesto.”
Just as Alonso is about to fall back to sleep he is roused once more. Why won’t Flavia give them just one or two more hours?
But it isn’t Flavia. It’s Esquibel. “Doctor Alonso.”
He grunts, opening his eyes again.
“It is Katrina. She is missing.”
They dress as quickly as they can, forcibly reminded of the dangers the island holds. “Where is Flavia?” Amy asks. “Does she know?”
“She is helping us look.”
“Could Katrina be in the sub?” Amy asks.
“We blocked off the trap door last night. The bins are too heavy for one person to move. And they haven’t been moved.”
“So she’s outside…?” Amy shakes her head, dubious. The rain has been unrelenting for about eighteen hours. Anyone outside would be in danger of getting literally washed away.
Jay returns from his initial sweep of the camp. He went out with no raingear and his base layers are drenched. “No sign. All the shelters are down and empty.” He’s already shivering. Maahjabeen appears with a towel and starts vigorously scrubbing his back.
Triquet is the first one fully suited up. “Okay. I’ll start at the trenches then move my way back toward the waterfall pool. Whoever comes next, start at the pool.”
“Will do.” Amy only needs to find her boots then she’ll be right out after them.
Triquet swings open the door, bracing for the cold.
Katrina stands outside, reaching for the door herself. She is completely soaked and trembling, nearly blue.
Triquet exclaims wordlessly and hauls her inside.
“Towels! More towels!” Amy calls out, hustling for the stove. Hot water is the answer here, and as soon as possible.
Esquibel kneels before Katrina, who only stands silently before them, shaking hard. Mandy wraps her in an embrace and Katrina sags against her. “Someone like boil water!”
“It’s coming!” Amy’s voice calls out.
Esquibel inspects the dear girl’s fingers and toes for signs of hypothermia. But nothing is purple and swollen. Nothing seems painful to the touch. Just exposure. And a dangerously low core temperature. “We should put her in a bath. Hurry.”
“Ha. We have no bath,” says Flavia. “Or I’d be in it every day.”
Maahjabeen says, “A kayak. Waterproof, eh? Can keep water in as well as keep it out. Come, Triquet. Help me.” She pulls on her storm shell and joins Triquet at the door.
Pradeep says, “Are you sure you want to put hot water inside the kayak, Maahjabeen? What if it damages it?”
“First we will save Katrina and then I will worry about that.” Then Maahjabeen ducks out into the storm, Triquet on her heels.
Mandy mothers Katrina, murmuring baby words as she strips the shell and her soaked clothes from her. “Somebody find her something fresh and dry. Where are her bags?”
Miriam roots around in the duffels they brought in and stowed beneath the workstations. “This one’s Katrina’s yeah?” She holds up a bright yellow sack, then unzips it before hearing any answer. She brings it all to Katrina, pulling out a heavyweight thermal top. “Here, love. This one looks warm.”
Pradeep has taken over toweling Katrina’s naked body. She looks like a forlorn waif rescued from the gutters, hair plastered against her head. But he balks at her private parts. Mandy takes over, making sure the icy water is all gone. Then she wraps Katrina up again as Amy appears with the first steaming pot.
Esquibel makes compresses and puts them across the base of Katrina’s neck, the inside of her wrists, and the tops of her thighs. “More water, please. A steady supply.”
“Yes. Of course.” Amy hurries back to the kitchen.
“We just need to get your core warm, darling.” Esquibel puts a hand on Katrina’s face and smiles at her. But Katrina is in shock or otherwise incapable of speech. She only looks urgently outward, at a point just beyond Esquibel’s face.
The door opens and Pradeep holds it wide as Triquet backs in carrying one end of Aziz. “Sorry it took so long. The whole platform is a shambles. Had to pull it out.”
“Not the… Love Palace!” They are Katrina’s first words and everyone cheers. But her teeth chatter too much to add more.
“Not too hot!” Esquibel calls out to Amy. “Gradual increase is better than a sharp shock!”
“Then I might be ready now! Jay! Give me a hand!” There are four pots in the kitchen that are eight liters or larger. Amy has filled them all with lukewarm water. Now they pour one after the other into the kayak, nearly filling it.
Esquibel and Pradeep lift Katrina. Maahjabeen guides her stiff legs into the cockpit until she is sitting within. “Okay,” the doctor says. “Now gradually increase. You can pour boiling water bit by bit. Maybe in this back hatch.”
“Coming up! Jay, fill the pots with me. Rainwater’s fine.”
“I call next bath.” Triquet peels off their rain gear and shivers as well. “That rain is so damn cold.”
Mandy stands behind Katrina, breathing hot breaths onto the base of her neck. The poor sweet dear. How could she do this to herself? Mandy can never forgive herself for letting Katrina slip out of their lovely little dog pile. What had Mandy been thinking?
Katrina spasms and then releases a long-held breath. Her words come in bursts between chattering teeth. “Oh my god. So cold. But they… kept me… out of the rain.”
“Who did?” Flavia pushes herself through the crowd to face Katrina, her face a storm. “Wetchie-ghuy?”
“No. No…” Katrina shakes her head and smiles at the memory. “It was the kids. They missed the music. I played them music when we left… and they wanted to hear more. That’s all.” She leans back as hotter water makes its way to her. “Aaahhh. Thanks, Amy. That’s… uh, that’s better than sex.”
They all laugh. But Katrina’s eyes catch on Pradeep’s. Hers sparkle merrily. His face flushes with heat. Wait. Does she know? How does she know? Uh oh. She was wearing Pradeep’s shell. How had she gotten it? It was hanging right beside his bed. Oh.
“Did they take you back to the village?” Miriam cracks the door open to see if she can spot any villagers out there in the morning rain. But the camp is empty.
“Not the village. They have another cave. One we hadn’t found. So big. Nice and dry too. We just played with my phone and sang songs… all night. It was… it was actually… really nice.”
But Pradeep no longer hears what Katrina is saying. He has to deal with the fact that his huge transgression is public knowledge. Stricken, he looks across the room at Maahjabeen. She is smiling, listening to Katrina’s story. But as she sees the look on Pradeep’s face, her lovely smile fades.
DW Draffin -- Lisica 