Chapter 44 – In The Rain
October 28, 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:
44 – In The Rain
“God, look at that, Jay. Actual sunlight.” It streams through the trees ahead during a break in the storm, illuminating the pillars of redwood groves, which give way to a great expanse on the far side. “Almost there now.”
Jay limps along behind Pradeep, one eye squeezed shut, a hand plastered against his left side. “One sec.” He falls to his knees and heaves up the bile in his stomach. It is empty of food. Bile is all he’s got. Oh, yeah. That definitely makes the incision scream. And now his throat is so torn up it will never be the same. Pain everywhere, inside and out.
“Are you ill, my friend? Or just…” Pradeep makes a sweeping gesture with his hand, including all Jay’s injuries.
“Just…” Jay repeats the gesture, “exhausted.” But it is too painful to speak, the acid scoring his windpipe. He hauls himself to his feet and taps his chest pocket. “Least I got my phone back. Worth it.” He forces himself to move again. They are nearly there.
Dropping down a loose slope onto a wide basin, they shuffle across the forest floor as the groves give way to open ground. The creek has dropped off somewhere to their left. The woods are silent and still, the birds and insects continuing to hide from the storm.
“Weather coming back,” Pradeep observes. “That’s why they don’t come out. They know this is just a quick break. Ugh. Look at the clouds coming. So sick of the rain.”
“Who doesn’t come out?” Jay peers around.
“The animals. The fauna. That’s why it’s so quiet in here.”
Jay slurps a trickle of cold water off a lily’s broad leaf. It leaves a floral, sticky taste in his mouth. But it soothes his throat. Now he can speak again. “Study I read right before I left. Researchers have been listening to forests. In the ultrasonic range, just above human hearing. Plants talk.”
“With a bunch of tiny high-pitched voices? It is so cold today! Like that?” Pradeep is pleased with his joke but Jay doesn’t laugh. Oh, well. This is why he doesn’t crack jokes. Nobody expects humor from him. “Well, this is what I just proved with Plexity and the mycelium networks. Chemical signals travel along immense and far-flung networks carrying data…”
“Yeah, but this is through the air. Sounds like it does underwater. At a coral reef when you dive. All those pops and clicks and trills.”
“Really?” Pradeep listens but of course he can’t hear them.
“The more stressed the plants are the more clicks they make. If we just had a bit better hearing we’d hear them all the time. Know when to water our houseplants and such. Most critters must hear the plants chattering away like constantly. But happy plants only click like once an hour.”
“Well then this is indeed a quiet forest. These trees have to be pretty happy with all this rain and now sun.”
“Wait.” Jay stops, listening intently. “I do hear something.”
Pradeep listens too. It is a voice so distant that they can only sense its tones and textures against the edges of the silence. “Okay. Come on, this way. But quiet. Who knows who it is?”
They step in that direction, finding a gully dividing the ground choked with ferns. They follow it in the general direction of the voice, finally coming to a dead stop at a sudden drop.
A line of dark stone past the vegetation falls away nearly ten meters to a deeper cut in the ground, where their gully joins a larger one. This has running water at the bottom and a sandbar with a figure crouched on it. Wetchie-ghuy. But he isn’t looking at them. He is looking at a bay tree beside the water in which Jidadaa is perched out of reach.
She is speaking Lisican to the shaman. When Pradeep and Jay arrive she doesn’t stop or acknowledge them, nor does Wetchie-ghuy. Her voice ends in a question and his answer is abrupt.
She asks another question. “Xʼoon yadyee x̱ʼaadáx̱ sá?”
“Yax̱adoosh.”
“Ai eh.” Jidadaa finally turns to the two outsiders. “Seven days. That is how long.”
“How long until what?” Jay’s voice is filled with suspicion.
“The little babies are born. The fox babies.”
“Kits.” Pradeep studies this scene. It is some kind of standoff here, where Wetchie-ghuy waits for Jidadaa to, what, surrender? Give him back his little doll? Both? “We call baby foxes kits. But what does that have to do with anything? Don’t they have like five litters a year? I’m just shocked the island isn’t overrun with them.”
Surprisingly, Jidadaa translates Pradeep’s words for Wetchie-ghuy. He only pulls his lips back over his teeth and grimaces. Then, with the compulsion of a pedagogue, he begins to lecture them all on the subject.
Jidadaa says, “Foxes are old here. First fox came with Tuzhit. First man. Lisica beautiful then. All birds, all little mice. Then foxes eat all the birds. All the mice. All the snake and lizard. Then men say, no more fox. They kill. All fox gone. Then Lisica is very bad. Very bad time and all people are unhappy. But one fox is left, hiding. They find. She has baby kits. Eight. One for each village or íx̱tʼ…” She gestures at Wetchie-ghuy. “Long time ago. But now, only three fox left. One, she is gone right now. Hiding to have baby kits. Wetchie-ghuy and Daadaxáats look and look but they don’t find. They fight, to be the one to control fox baby kits.”
Wetchie-ghuy drops into a crouch upon hearing his rival’s name spoken aloud. He mutters darkly to himself.
“Wait…” Pradeep tries to digest all this information. “This is what their argument is about? Who gets custody of the silver fox kits? That’s… bizarre. They’re like kidnapping and poisoning people over it? Bloody hell. So Wetchie-ghuy used to have a fox of his own but it died? It ran away? And now he wants another?”
“He wants all. Make the decide. To decide who get fox. When fox can have baby kits, they are spirit of village. Without fox, village die. With new fox, new life.”
“Jidadaa, watch out!”
Jay barely has the first syllable of her name out before Wetchie-ghuy twitches forward, leaping for the lowest branches of the bay tree. But Jidadaa twitches as well, and seemingly without any effort at all she is crouched on an even higher limb.
Jidadaa holds out Wetchie-ghuy’s doll as a taunt and curses him, the Lisican words coming fast and furious. She threatens to pull the doll apart and the shaman below her relents, falling away from the tree and retreating to the sandbar, where he crouches once more.
“What is that thing you stole?” Pradeep calls out. “Why does he care so much for it?”
“This is magic doll. It tells Wetchie-ghuy where to find foxes.”
“Ah.” Pradeep nods. “That makes sense.”
“It does? In what universe does that make sense?” Jay rasps. “No. What I want to know is what the fucking shamans want with us? Why do they keep after us? Shouldn’t they focus on the fox?”
But Jidadaa doesn’t need to ask Wetchie-ghuy why. She already knows the answer. “You are magic. You are koox̱.”
Jay and Pradeep frown at each other. “Unexpected,” Pradeep finally manages. “I don’t feel like magic. Nor koosh.”
Jidadaa calls out to Wetchie-ghuy, shaking the doll, indicating that if he doesn’t let her go she will throw it in the stream. Finally, he appears to give up. With a final glare over his shoulder at her, he withdraws back up the gully out of sight.
Triumphant, she smiles at Pradeep and Jay. “I will kill his doll.”
“We know you will, sister.” Jay gives her a thumbs up. “Don’t need that jackoff in charge of the foxes anyway. Not when they’re the soul of each village. That’s crazy. So the foxes showed up like three hundred years ago, wiped out all the native populations, then the people wiped out the foxes but then they realized they majorly F’d up and now they got nothing but this strict breeding program like my cousin Becky and her French Bulldogs with the AKC?”
But Jidadaa isn’t really listening. She’s peering back the way Wetchie-ghuy went.
“This makes Morska Vidra a more important figure than we knew,” Pradeep reasons. “Or at least his fox. I’m shocked Wetchie-ghuy doesn’t try to steal his.”
The rain starts again. “Welp.” Jay waves at Jidadaa. “Time to get moving on. This has been crazy, as always. Thanks, I guess, for saving our asses again. Good luck with the doll and the foxes and all that. But we got to get back to our buddies. It’s been too long.” He steps back from the edge of the stone cliff, trying to abandon Jidadaa here and find a way to the open land ahead.
“You don’t have any more questions for her?” Pradeep feels like he could ask Jidadaa questions all day. “She’s the only one who knows what is happening here and has enough English to enlighten us. Like, who are the golden childs, eh? Are they the third village? Jidadaa? The golden man and his childs?”
Finally she turns back to look at them, her face filled with worry. “Secret village. Shidl Dít. Thunderbird House. Live in trees. Hiding tribe. Nobody know them.”
Jay has run out of patience and his exhaustion is threatening to drop him where he stands. “Look, Prad. She’s a thief. I’m not even sure we should believe anything she says about the villages or the foxes or any of the—”
But Pradeep isn’t going to let this opportunity pass. “Yes, I know. But her answers are better than nothing, aren’t they?” He turns back to the girl in the tree. “And what about Lisicans in general? Are they glad we are here? Angry? Are they against us or…? I mean, do they even understand what we’re trying to do here?”
Jidadaa looks across the way to them. “People are sad. Jay is lidass. I am Jidadaa. Time is end.” And then she twitches again. The limb shivers and leaves fall. But she is gone.
“Whoa. How’d she do that? Is she…?” Pradeep tries to get a different angle on the bay tree’s crown, “…still in there somewhere? I mean, she must be, right?”
“Don’t sweat it, Prad. She’ll find us when she finds us. Come on. I think we can get down this way. Let’s hurry back home before the rain starts pouring again.”
Pradeep’s gaze lingers on the green cloud of bay leaves hiding her. “Don’t disappear! Jidadaa! Come with us!”
“Fuck that.” Jay starts without Pradeep, who reluctantly follows after a brief interval. They can’t take the chance on Wetchie-ghuy finding them separated.
“Hold on, Jay. I’m coming.”
And just a few moments later they finally win free of the trees for the first time all day. A great green meadow spreads before them, its hillocks still obscuring the creek. Jay crosses the open ground, the tall green grasses streaking his legs with water. “Okay. Back in business. Now as soon as I find the river again I can navigate us back to the village. Then it’s just a hey-how-you-doing to the villagers and then it’s straight through to the tunnels and the bunker and a hot meal and hammock. Yeah, boy. Let’s do this.”
But Jay reaches one hillock higher than the rest and stops. He turns and turns, his face filling with first confusion, then fear, then despair. He groans and nearly collapses.
Pradeep hurries to his side. “What? What is it?”
Jay is too dispirited to speak. He just makes a weak gesture with his one working arm.
Pradeep turns and turns, looking for the way out. Perhaps he’s just seeing it all wrong. “What is it? Which way, Jay?”
“I don’t know!” Jay falls to his knees, fully spent. “I’ve never been here before! This isn’t the right valley! We’ve been following the wrong creek this whole time and came out in the wrong place! I don’t have a fucking clue where we are!”
Ξ
At the top of the tunnel, Mandy finds Morska Vidra and his fox waiting at the village’s boundary. “Hi…!” she calls out, as sweetly as she can. “Your new neighbors here! Super excited to, like, move in and be part of the community!”
Her bubbly delivery usually works to disarm whoever she points it at. But Morska Vidra appears to be immune to her charms. Bummer. She was hoping to get this started on a positive note. “Here. Triquet said I shouldn’t, but I brought you a little gift.”
Mandy holds out a small package she was able to wrap in a page of a medical device’s line-drawn diagrams and decorate with a bow she painstakingly fashioned from sliced strips of colored paper. He stares at her, making no move to take her offering. His fox darts forward instead, rising up and gently pulling the little box from her hands. The little silver creature scampers away, disappearing into the gray haze of light at the tunnel’s entrance.
Mandy’s reaction is a few seconds too late. “No! Oh, no! Come back! It’s chocolate. Oh my god. I don’t know if… It might be poisonous to a fox. Like you know how dogs and cats, they can’t have chocolate?” Mandy belatedly realizes Morska Vidra has no idea what a dog or cat is. “No, come on. I’m totally serious. It’s like a liver issue or something? We have to get it back.” Mandy hurries past the old man, who still hasn’t made a move. Then she recalls the traditional greeting. “Uh… Bontiik!” She hurries back to him and chucks him under the chin.
A paternal smile creases his face now that the proper forms have been observed. “Bontiik.” His knuckle touches her own chin and he gives her a wide smile.
“Okay. Now let’s find the fox before it hurts itself. I know it’s just a pet but you don’t want it to get sick!”
Mandy exits the cave, scanning the tracks ahead. They quickly disappear in the packed earth of the village proper. She studies the walls of the cliff on either side of the cave mouth, then all the brush crowding against the nearest houses.
A pair of children peek out from a house, no more than six and four years old. They chatter at her, one’s words atop the other. Then their words run together in a shared chant. They giggle.
“Hi! There was a fox…? Have you seen it? I gave it a present. A lovely… tasty… present.” But regardless of where she looks, she can find no sign of where the fox has gone. “Shoot.” She points into the village at random spots and asks the kids, “Where…? Like where does the fox live? Like, where’s its bed?” Mandy grew up with cats. She knows how they think.
But the kids just start another chant, laughing at her.
Mandy slowly enters the wide village square, realizing that she is making a spectacle of herself. Smiling weakly, she just really doesn’t want to be responsible for making their pet sick. That would be the opposite of a positive note. That would be a disaster.
The village is busy, with a small family outside their hut grinding something green and brown in a stone bowl with a rock. Another old man faces a loom, plaiting a long sheet of textiles of black and red bands. An old woman lounges outside her house, leaning back against a pole and chewing a piece of grass. Her eyes are red-rimmed and sad, as if she’s been crying. Mandy addresses her: “You see Morska Vidra’s fox run this way? The little fox? Uh, Lisica?” Yeah, she should have been using that word all along.
The old woman lifts her hand. In it is the gift the fox stole.
“Oh, thank god.” Mandy reels away in relief. Then she circles back to the woman and the gift. “You can have it. It’s for you. I wrapped it myself.” She kneels in front of the old woman and points with excitement at the little cube, its white paper now smudged with dirt and indented with tooth marks.
The old woman only looks at Mandy with her troubled gaze.
“Aw, are you having a bad day? Here. I’ll show you. Look. It’s a present! Do you guys do presents?” Mandy reaches out and gently takes the gift back. “Look. It goes like this.” She had no tape so the paper is folded back in on itself like the origami she was taught in elementary school. Mandy pulls out the corner and unwraps the gift, handing the sheet of paper to the old woman.
She turns it over in her hands, her eyes still sad.
“But wait. There’s more.” Mandy presents the stack of gold-foil wrapped off-brand chocolate squares she’d snared in the airport right before they’d taken off. This has been her stash, a carefully-preserved secret that has kept her going through the darkest days. She has enough for two chocolates per day, three on special days when she really needs the extra love. This is five pieces of dark chocolate, two whole days of her stash, that she’s willing to sacrifice for the good vibes. Now if she can just manifest those vibes…
Carefully peeling the foil from the first chocolate, Mandy hands it to her. The old woman takes the gold wrapping and stares at it in wonder. She gently crumples it around her fingertip and releases a single ‘huh’ as an exclamation.
“Yeah, but that’s not even the best bit. This is.” Mandy breaks off a tiny bit of the chocolate and hands it out to the woman. She dutifully takes it, another inexplicable object in her cupped hands.
“Eat it. Like this.” Mandy nibbles at the corner of the chocolate. “Quick! Before it melts! Yummm! So good!” She mimes bringing the chocolate to her mouth over and over until the old woman does so too.
The old woman tastes the chocolate. She makes a face and spits it out, then hands the little nib back to Mandy. But she keeps the foil and sheet of paper.
“Mandy! What are you doing without your mask and gloves?”
Esquibel stands at the cave mouth, Morska Vidra beside her. She wears her own, the hospital blue of her mask and gloves a shocking artificial color in this brown and green village.
“Oh, right. I didn’t remember…” Mandy searches her pockets for these articles. But before she can find them, she says, “I mean, tons of times we’ve been unmasked in front of the villagers by now. If they were gonna get sick, it would have happened by now.”
“It is policy. Mask use only works if it is consistent.”
With a final smile to the old woman and the kids watching her, Mandy puts the mask and gloves on and joins Esquibel at the edge of the village. “Did you say Bontiik to him?” Mandy indicates Morska Vidra, standing patiently beside Esquibel.
“Huh? Oh. Uh…” Esquibel performs the quick ceremony and allows Morska Vidra to chuck her chin in return. “Remind me to sanitize my chin when I get a chance.” Then she turns, a very large and imposing black woman in the middle of this village of little brown people. She seems not to understand how dramatic her impact is here. “So. This is the village? The outer village where they’re nice, yes? And there’s another village deeper in? And they all live in these sad little huts?” Esquibel stoops and peers in one, its occupants still and silent in the shadows.
“Esquibel. Stop.”
“Stop? Stop what?”
“You’re scaring them.”
“Scaring them?” Esquibel regards the villagers in their doorways and in the square. They all watch her with worry. “Hello. Bontiik. Didn’t I say the word properly? What is wrong with them?”
“You’re just too loud, too big…”
“Too dark?” Esquibel snaps off her glove and holds out her hand for Morska Vidra. He studies it but doesn’t touch it.
“Maybe. I don’t know if they’ve ever seen black skin.”
“Well, Morska Vidra and the Mayor have. Didn’t they tell the others about me? We don’t have time for this kind of culture shock. They need to understand that we’re here and we’re moving in. Or at least through. Where do you think we should set up camp?”
“Maybe they’ll tell us?” But the villagers are already withdrawing back into their houses, faces closed. The positive start is ruined.
“Why don’t I make everyone happy…” Esquibel decides, “and go find out myself. They obviously don’t want me here.” And with that she stalks across the village square and takes the wide path down toward the river.
“No!” Mandy calls out after her. “It’s not that! It’s just that you came in too fast and…” But Esquibel is gone. Mandy turns to the villagers and holds out the piece of unwrapped chocolate melting in her fingers. “Anyone, uh, want to try it?”
“Hello…?” Alonso’s rough voice comes from the cave entrance. He limps out, hair wild, clothes covered in mud. Gasping from the exertion of climbing the fallen tree up the tunnel shaft, he catches his breath. “Are we here? Did I make it? Eh, Morska Vidra. Good to see you again. Oh. Bontiik.” Alonso smiles at the old man as he chucks his chin, then laughs when the fox appears from within Morska Vidra’s robes and climbs on his shoulder to sniff at Alonso. “And this is the famous fox. Lisica. How are you, little friend?” Alonso extends a finger so the fox can smell it.
Evidently he smells fine. With a perfunctory sneeze, the fox makes a decision and sits, coiling its bushy tail around Morska Vidra’s neck. The old man returns the greeting to Alonso, gravely, and then evidently divining his suffering, suddenly steps beside him and supports Alonso’s weight with a strong arm.
The gesture is so unexpected Alonso laughs. It also feels good, to have someone help relieve the pain in his feet. “Gracias, muchas gracias, hermano.” Alonso has a thought that if they can’t grasp his English, he may be able to make his intent more clear in his native Spanish. But then it occurs to him they’ve heard a fair amount of English, and probably no Spanish. “Thank you, my brother. Thank you a million times.”
Morska Vidra leads Alonso to the doorway of the largest hut. The redwood bark planks covering it are black and green with age. It is an impressive structure, the only hut taller than Alonso. “Your house? Very nice. Thank you for all your kindness. Ah. Here?” Alonso grunts as he allows Morska Vidra to lower him onto a woven mat. The fox appears again, nickering in the old man’s ear. As if following its directives, Morska Vidra kneels at Alonso’s feet and pulls at his shoes, trying to take them off.
Alonso barks in pain, his hand reaching urgently for the feet he can’t reach. The sound freezes all activity in the village. Mandy finally rouses herself and hurries to Alonso’s side. “He wants your shoes off. Is that okay? Should we take them off?”
“Just gently. Gently…” Alonso pleads, leaning back, the sudden raw agony in his legs from getting yanked starting to lose its edge.
Mandy picks at the laces, pulling the right shoe wide open before slipping it off. She peels his wet sock off too. Together, she and Morska Vidra regard the swollen purple thing. It is painful merely to look at Alonso’s tortured foot. The toes bend wrong, dents run along the top. An angry red vein crosses his ankle.
The villagers gather to silently regard Alonso’s foot as Mandy gently removes his other shoe and sock. This foot is just as bad, purple as a grape. And his lower leg is scored with scars.
The villagers speak to each other, evidently trying to figure out how someone could sustain such injuries. Alonso watches them, his gaze baleful. “I hope, for your sake, that this kind of brutality is foreign to you. I hope, I pray, it shocks you.” Tears start in his eyes and he groans as Mandy puts a gentle hand on his left ankle.
The smallest of the two children Mandy met bursts into tears and turns to his mother, hiding in her arms.
The Mayor arrives and kneels, inspecting Alonso’s foot. She pokes it and he grunts. She tries to move his right heel and he barks again. Sitting back, she speaks a number of quiet commands.
Several of the young girls in the back of the crowd peel away to their own homes. They return with sheafs of herbs and black leaves and seeds in a pot.
“No no, that’s fine.” Alonso tries to wave the treatment away but he is no longer in charge of this situation. The Mayor pulls up his pant legs and inspects the scars she finds there.
She orders for the seeds to be ground into paste and for the black leaves to be separated, dripping, and placed on the mat beside him. A low hum of discourse surrounds Alonso, villagers discussing the treatment and holding forth on various points. Alonso looks around himself in wonder. He’s been in contact with primitive peoples before—a family of Mongolian nomads invited him into their yurt one night—but he’s never experienced anything like this before. The Lisican sing-song language surrounds him, each distinct voice and individual perspective made manifest. All of them are so unique, the middle-aged woman with the ear pierced with yellow bone, whose animated voice rises over all others. The nonbinary youth in a shawl who seems to dispute what she says with gentle deflections. The silly clown beside them, their hair a mat, who makes a quip that rhymes with the youth’s last words and everyone laughs. Why, it is just like any family anywhere. The crazy aunt, the know-it-all young man, the weird black sheep. And the children with their black and yellow curls, each as vocal as the others, pulling on each other’s arms and arguing in quiet and deferential tones. All do what they can not to interrupt the Mayor.
She taps Mandy’s shoulder and indicates she should get out of the way. Then the Mayor applies the brown paste to the skin of Alonso’s lower legs and feet. He feels very much like he is being spread with Nutella. It is not unpleasant and he finds he can exhale the breath he didn’t know he held. Then she carefully wraps his legs, first with the black leaves, then the green, keeping them snug with a brown cord. Finally she sits back.
“Thank you. Better already.” He can’t feel a thing but at least he isn’t suffering more damage. Alonso isn’t sure what he should do here. All he knows is he doesn’t want to move his legs at all. “Very good. Sitting is good.”
The Mayor gives him a more thorough inspection. She holds his hand and pokes at his belly, his chest, his throat. She has him open his mouth and she looks at his tongue.
“That bad, eh?” Alonso prompts the Mayor but her face remains a mask. “I know. Lose forty kilos and eat right. But don’t you dare mention my liver because I am not giving up my wine.”
Finally she kneels and puts one hand on his heart and one on his lower belly. The Mayor lowers her head and the crowd falls silent.
After a moment, Alonso feels his pulse beneath her hands. At the same instant, the fox yips and leaps from Morska Vidra’s shoulder, scampering into the nearby underbrush. Villagers exchange dark glances. Finally the Mayor sits back. She is drained.
“Ax̱dàataasdʼixʼdáakw,” she declares, and the villagers make dubious sounds, but they are unwilling to argue with her after her exertions. Now Morska Vidra and the others support the Mayor. They lift her to her feet and bring her across the square to her own house, where she is given her own measure of herbs and poultices.
“I am very sorry.” Alonso calls out his apology, watching them tend her. “I did not mean to introduce such…” and by this he means all the horrors of the modern world stitched up in his body. He leans back with a groan and confesses to the sky: “I despise spoiling innocence.”
Ξ
Triquet stages another pile of bags at the bottom of the tree trunk at the base of the tunnel shaft. Somehow they’ll eventually haul all that gear up to the top and out the cave mouth into the village. Just what the stone age Dzaadzitch villagers ever wanted, for sure.
Flavia and Maahjabeen drag muddy bins and boxes most of the way, with Triquet having to lift the containers up into a narrow passage for the last bit, requiring all their strength, again and again.
“Another.” Flavia deposits one more stack at the exchange. For a moment they both pause, breathing heavily in the cramped tunnel, staring at each other’s flushed faces.
“And this is why…” Triquet gasps, exercising their sore arm, “I reluctantly decided against manual labor as a career.”
“But think how strong you would be.” Flavia is beyond tired. Her words come out in a grunt.
“Isn’t there some Jack London quote about the value of a laborer being in his muscles? That’s his capital? But for the owners, their capital is money that increases over their lives while for the laborer their capital diminishes? Something like that? Of course, he put it better than that. Lord, that man could write.”
“I am not sure 19th century economic theory is applicable to us poor little independent contractors down here in this hole.”
“I mean, ultimately, this is a job and we’re wage slaves, I guess. I haven’t really thought about it that way but I did get a sizable honorarium. Didn’t you?”
“Yes. But this is the first day I feel like a coal miner.”
Triquet lifts their aching arms and lets them drop. “Well, all I know is that I started with less capital than most and now I’m all out. There’s been a run on this bank and all my savings are gone.”
“All I know is that I am hungry.” And with that, Flavia turns and trudges back the way she’d come, stepping aside for Maahjabeen, who drags a clutch of damp canvas sacks with one arm.
Triquet heaves Flavia’s goods up the tunnel to the base of the fallen tree. They return to find Maahjabeen depositing her sacks.
“Is there any chance…?” Maahjabeen ventures, “that we will not be able to transport all the items we selected for the move?”
“Chance? Honey, I’m about ready to crap out now. What’s in these? Anything necessary?”
“All our bedding.”
Triquet grabs the sacks. “Yeah. Necessary. Okay. But how about you go get Flavia and tell her we need a rest.”
“Sure. We will just find the tarps and come with you. I need to get out of the dark myself.” And Maahjabeen retreats down her tunnel one last time.
Triquet heaves the sacks up into the narrow passage. The bundled blankets and pillows and sleeping bags fill it completely and they have to push it through like a digestive blockage before the sacks spill out at the base of the shaft at the edge of the pile they’ve made.
Triquet squeezes past all the gear and grabs hold of the lowest branches of the fallen tree. They wrap the drawstrings of the canvas sacks around their wrist and haul them over their shoulder like a filthy misshapen Santa, then slowly scale the broken tree limbs like a ladder.
At the top their legs are shaking and their breath is coming in short gasps. They drag the sacks clear of the shaft and onto the broad floor of the cave mouth. Gray light greets them. Oh, joy. That means it’s still raining out there.
This is far enough. They can wait here until the others catch up. As long as they’re not working any more. Triquet stretches out on the gravel floor beside the muddy sacks, resting their head on one. Ah, bliss…
Moments later Katrina and Amy and Miriam arrive, arms laden, followed by Flavia and finally Maahjabeen, who carries nothing. Her face is a mask of pain, though, as she has needed her injured shoulder to haul herself up the makeshift ladder.
They all collapse with Triquet on the floor, their breaths and perspiration mingling, like they just won a rugby match—or more likely, from their dispirited depletion—badly lost.
“I’ve got the beds,” Triquet manages.
“I have tarps and tents,” Amy answers.
“All we need.” Triquet sits up. “Everything else can wait.”
Miriam hoists her containers. “I’ve got enough food for the night and the morning. And a couple liters of wine.”
“Yes, then we’re definitely all set.” Triquet pushes themself to their feet. “Now let’s see what kind of spot they’ve found for us.”
There is no one at the cave mouth to greet them. They emerge into the rain to find the village empty except for Alonso resting on a mat and the old woman with white hair leaning against her post. There is no sign of Mandy nor Esquibel.
“Yesiniy!” Katrina hurries to the old woman. “What is it? What’s wrong? Uh… šta nije u redu, bako?”
“Bako…?” The old woman peers up at Katrina with her red eyes. Then she accepts the designation, “Eh. Bako. Ua na o au dʼadalyoo ettu. Kam.”
“Ettu. Kam,” Katrina echoes, trying to commit these words to memory. She doesn’t have anything at hand to take notes. “Bako is Bosnian for grandma, yeh? I think that’s right.”
Miriam puts down her containers and hurries past the empty houses to her horizontal husband. “Alonso? What are you doing? Where is everyone?”
“I am resting. On the orders of multiple doctors. And they are all down by a creek, I understand, arguing over where we might have our camp. Esquibel is not… the calmest person right now.”
“Okay, Ames. I think we can chance it,” Miriam calls out. “Nearly empty here. It’s now or never.”
“Should I still wear the bag?” Amy’s muffled voice is anxious. “I’m gonna wear the bag. Just in case.” She slowly emerges from the cave, wearing her blue sleeping bag upside down to hide her head, with her feet sticking out of the opening, her entire body covered. Triquet leads her through the village to the far side.
Yesiniy doesn’t even look their way.
Quickly, Triquet brings Amy out of the village to the broad path heading down toward the river. “Okay. I think you’ve got to be safe here, Amy. We’re well out of the village and on more like neutral territory. At least I think it is.”
Amy pulls the bag off and looks around with worry, single strands of her black hair standing straight from the static charge. “Nobody here to yell at me? They’re all down at the river?”
“Yep. At least I hope so. And I hope we aren’t setting up camp by the loo. Too stinky. Come on, let’s go. Maybe they’ve reached an agreement.”
Katrina and Flavia join them as they walk down the path toward the broad meadow. There they find Esquibel in heated debate with the village elders. She stands, drenched by the latest deluge, at a corner of the meadow near the west treeline, as far upstream as the meadow allows. “Then, here. We will stay here. And that is final.”
“But they already said…” Mandy starts in an exasperated whine, but Esquibel immediately cuts her off.
“Yes. I heard. I heard that we cannot be here. Or there. Or there. Or there.” Esquibel points at locations across the meadow, where they have trampled the green grasses with their activity. “Or anywhere. So if we can’t be anywhere, then we will be where we want to be. And I want to be here.”
“Christ! What are you doing?” Katrina calls out, hurrying over to the congregated villagers as the rain eases and the winds pick up. “That isn’t any way to talk to the Lisicans! We’re their guests!”
“If we were their guests then they would accommodate us. But all I hear from them is ah-ah, which they have demonstrated quite clearly means no.”
“Yeh, that’s right. But did you ask them? Just ask them where we’re supposed to be?”
“What an idea? Why didn’t I think of that?” Esquibel’s temper is very short. “Oh, right. Because I don’t speak a single bloody word of their language. You think we didn’t try?”
“Here. Wait. Let me see. I might be able to stitch something together…” Katrina takes her backpack off. It holds a half dozen laptops. “Just one moment. Here. This one’s mine. And…” Flavia holds a folded tarp above her to keep the electronics dry as Katrina quickly navigates to her notes and starts scrolling through the pages of details she’s documented about the Lisican language. “Okay.” She turns to the Mayor standing beside Morska Vidra. “Uh, we need to… we are…” she encompasses her crew, “one sec here, just looking up versions of ‘to move’ and all I can find is this relational gobbledygook. Um… Oh, here we go. We duladaaw tlein. That’s ‘big move noisily,’ which is definitely us. Like all of us here need to duladaaw tlein.”
She has the attention of the villagers. “Join. Uh, join… No join. They don’t use the word ‘join?’ Uh, together. Together is vooch. Vooch, you and us. Dóode? Here? Or dóode? Where can we camp? Just for a couple weeks.”
She seems to be making headway. The villagers argue with each other, trying to solve Katrina’s problems. But the way they go about it is as mystifying as anything else. They consult the sky, they talk about the meadow, as if representing it at trial, possessively stroking the grasses. One woman appears to be listening to a tree. Finally, Morska Vidra places his fox on the ground and everyone watches it bound from one spot to another. Eventually, it goes into the trees on a slope near the spot Esquibel had just claimed.
The villagers move under the trees and inspect the spot. It is a wide open patch beneath pine trees, their fallen needles a brown carpet preventing much undergrowth. The slope is shallow here and the wind is tamed by the high canopy.
The fox bounds back onto Morska Vidra’s shoulder. By that, they all understand that the deal has been struck.
“I love it!” Triquet calls out. “Thank you so much. Promise we’ll take care of it. You guys are the best.”
Esquibel frowns at the spot. “Not defensible in the slightest.” But she realizes this is the best she can get. “Well. At least it is out of the weather. Why was that so hard to understand? That is why I wanted to be on this side of the meadow.”
“Take your win,” Mandy counsels her, clutching Esquibel by the elbow. “And say something nice.”
Esquibel gives the Mayor a glassy smile. “Something nice.”
Amy and Flavia advance, poking around at the base of a few trees to see where they might build their platforms. The Mayor watches the scene, evidently unmoved by Esquibel’s apology or the tantrum that came before.
“Lucky for you, they’re used to loudmouths and hotheads.” Mandy claps her hands. “Yay. We’re all friends again.”
Several of the villagers answer her claps with their own burst of applause. Mandy and Katrina clap back. This delights them. Soon nearly everyone in the camp is applauding each other, with the exception of Esquibel. She has no time for this nonsense. A clean room needs to be built, and this time it will need to be on one of the platforms. There isn’t an inch of level ground in this entire camp. And these villagers will probably wander everywhere. “And no one is wearing a mask!” she belatedly cries out. But nobody listens. They’re all intermingling now, clapping and chanting and repeating each other’s words and moves, laughing in each other’s faces and touching each other, all laughing, so carefree…
The scene finally overwhelms Esquibel with its charm. These villagers are so genuine when they laugh and copy and tease. Their eyes are so sharp. But they have a gentleness, a tenderness she hadn’t seen in the brief visits from the Mayor and Morska Vidra. These Lisicans are actual people filled with joy and curiosity and love, not just columns of figures on a Navy spreadsheet. And they are worth protecting. Silently, Esquibel adds them to her mission objectives and increases her defensible perimeter to include them and their village. She shouldn’t have gotten so frustrated with them. “I am sorry,” she tells the closest ones, who are laughing and playing with Mandy. “I should have been more patient but…”
Yet they are not listening. A young girl catches Esquibel by the hand and trills like a bird. Oh, Esquibel can do this one. It is a sound the Kikuyu make in their traditional songs. She trills right back and the girl screams with pleasure. Now they are all laughing, every single one.
“What is it? What did we miss?” Miriam leads Alonso into the new camp, his feet and calves still wrapped in black leaves and twine with his unlaced shoes over it all.
Triquet reaches out to them, buoyed by the villagers and their applause. “And here they are! Welcome to your new home, Doctor one and Doctor two. Your loan has been approved! Please sign the lease agreeement on the kitchen table and I’ll leave the keys on the mantle. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.” Then Triquet claps. Everyone claps.
Alonso and Miriam clap and laugh with all the others in the rain.
Chapter 37 – Wetchie-Ghuy
September 9, 2024
Thanks for joining us for the third volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!
Audio for this episode:
37 – Wetchie-Ghuy
“There he is. Hey, guess what?” Katrina comes upon Alonso in the morning on the beach. He is standing bare-chested at the edge of the water, looking out, idly running his fingers through his chest hair in a vulnerable moment of introspection.
He only slowly breaks his reverie and turns back to her. His eyes are still cloudy with thought and his smile is distracted.
“I said, ‘guess what?’ Alonso.”
“Eh, yes? Time for a guessing game?”
“The dam has broke! The secrets are out! All the mysteries have been revealed! Well. Not all of them, but… I’ve been talking with Jidadaa all night and this morning and boy do I have a lot of news. Just endless revelations. But the single most fascinating thing she told me? The island doesn’t have music, it’s true. It’s because the two sisters who founded the island didn’t like music. They came from, well, it must have been one of the old Eyat villages on the Alaska coast. And when they got here they just never passed music down. No songs, no melodies. In all this time Jidadaa is the only one. She had music introduced to her by whatever soldier was with her mother at the time. She sings. They were a shipwreck, like over two hundred years ago. They’ve had fourteen generations, maybe fifteen, depending on if any of her peers have had kids, which she doesn’t know because she’s been in hiding her entire life. Sorry. Babbling now. There was a lot! She is utterly fascinating. I’ve never met someone whose brain works like hers. She got her own… I mean, she says Kula told her when she was little that she would have to teach herself about the world. So Jidadaa built her own way of handling reality from the ground up. I mean, she has whole different ways to access memory and reason and… and everything! This is when the team really needs to have a trained psychiatrist or neurologist on board because wow. This girl is… sui generis.”
“Two hundred years… without music…” Alonso shakes his head, doleful. “Now that is my idea of hell. No. Purgatory. This would be a cold gray purgatory for me if I could not live with my music.”
“Absolutely. Could you imagine? My whole life has a soundtrack. I don’t know who I’d be without it.”
“Forgive me, Katrina, but I have been swimming naked and I was just about to take these things off. So I hope you are aware of European bathing traditions down in Australia.”
“Yeh, get your knickers off. I don’t care. But can you even tell how excited I am? I haven’t slept all night. Jidadaa is a treasure.”
“Yes, Katrina. You’re very excited.” Alonso strips his sweatpants off and steps out of them. His skin is pale beneath, with dark black hairs curling against the backs of his thighs. A single long purple stripe of scar tissue runs down his left hamstring. Several dark indentations on his calves look like puncture wounds. He shivers, then shuffles into the sea. As soon as he can he pushes off and breast strokes out past the tiny waves. He elongates his gasp of cold shock into the opening lines of Carmina Burana. “Ooooo Fortuna, velut Luna…!”
Katrina pulls her tights up to her knees and wades out. “So we should have like a full team session here sometime today because I’ve got a lot of answers for our questions. And some really trippy, creepy stuff too. Things they shouldn’t know about us but they already do. Like, somehow she could tell that Flavia was marked by Wetchie-ghuy for slavery. Said Pradeep was too, which I don’t understand at all. Says Wetchie-ghuy is locked in a mortal duel with the other like big shaman on the island. The rest of us are just pawns in their big game, according to her. And Kula has kept herself alive playing one off against the other since she’s been outcast. I mean, there’s just a ton of stuff here.”
Alonso paddles a slow circle before her. The cold is more than bracing. Miriam was right. But if he can just get his old heart going maybe he can warm up and stay out here longer this time. Because the release of pain in his feet and legs and hips and back is better than any drug, better than any sex or meal or even Mozart opera. It is bliss hanging suspended here. Pure bliss.
“She says we’re totally right about the Katóok village. They really are out to kill us if we trespass on their land. But they’re only in a couple big valleys in the center of the island and we should be able to avoid them. But yeh, there’s a third village we haven’t seen. She says she’s never seen it either. But it’s over, well, her guess is it’s on the west side of the island and she doesn’t really know anything about them. Because none of them talk to each other. There’s no trade or intermarrying or anything. No contact if they can all help it. Part of the duel between the shamans, and how they manipulate the villagers, but also she said it’s because of Jidadaa.”
“It is because of her?”
“That’s what I thought she meant at first too. But no. Jidadaa isn’t a name. It’s a word that means some horrible end is going to come for you because you violated the ancient customs and pissed off the ancestors. And it can take whole generations to play out. So somebody broke some old law like a hundred years ago and it was so bad nobody’s spoken to each other since.”
“Hold on. I am going to try to put my head underwater. But I don’t want to miss what you are saying. That is crazy. The woman named her daughter The Apocalypse.”
“Basically.” But Alonso has disappeared from view. Katrina should have brought him her snorkel and mask. Although it probably wouldn’t fit. His head is so freaking wide. And she is still just a little girl. Like Jidadaa. When they asked her how old she was she didn’t know. Jay guesses she’s like twenty. Katrina thinks she’s younger and that life has just been hard.
Alonso emerges with a gasp. He had stayed down in that emerald kingdom beneath the waves as long as he could. Expecting silence, the slap of waves against nearby rocks and the click and buzz of the creatures in the kelp and on the reefs surprised him. Why, it is as common as birdsong up here above. Life is truly everywhere. A familiar conviction fills him: Plexity is a necessity!
Once he surfaces, Katrina continues. “I figure we should try to get Kula out of there. She’s like hemmed in, it sounds like. Maybe we can get Esquibel to do a wellness check or something. I don’t know. I feel so bad for them. It’s amazing how sweet Jidadaa is after the childhood she had.”
“Ask her if she knows how to swim. This is… life-altering.”
“Isn’t it? It is so amazing in there. Although I haven’t been back in since I speared that barracuda. You, eh, heard about that, yeah? The fur seal and everything?”
“Ha. If something bites me in here I will bite right back. Oh, my dear! You have no idea what it is like to have the pain vanish. I can think again! I can… I can allow myself to feel things! It is not all doom and gloom and suffering! For just a brief moment I am the Alonso of old!”
He laughs and throws a brilliant smile at her and she is struck by the force of his charisma. Ye gods. Is this the star she’s hooked her wagon to? Just with that one glance he is easily one of the most handsome men she has ever seen. Like some Italian movie star.
But he can’t maintain it and his face collapses back into careworn age. He rolls onto his back with a sigh and floats easily with all this fat on him. Alonso stares at the clouded sky, at peace.
Ξ
Triquet wakes, their eyes snapping open. In their cell they sit up, filled with clear purpose. They haven’t been this eager to get to work since they discovered the sub.
Vera Kim. If they were going to bring anyone to Lisica to study the island and its inhabitants, Triquet would call on their old friend Vera. Or Vera’s patron at Trinity College, Doctor Amina Nousrat. Pound for pound, they could bring the most insight and expertise of anyone in the world to this project. Vera has published on Polynesian language evolution, she’s lived in like Tierra del Fuego with the Selk’nam and presented their artifacts at archaeological conferences. And on top of that she’s a crackerjack ethno-botanist. If anyone could figure out how the Lisicans have evolved to integrate into their environment, it would be her.
Instead, the team brought only-partially-trained Triquet. Nearly none of their real strengths are being used here. Now, if Lisica was a 1950’s roller rink that had been abandoned in the 70’s in like Aurora, Illinois, Triquet would shine so bright. But here, without the internet or most research resources, it’s all guesswork and bad theories and needles in haystacks.
Until now. Jidadaa is the best needle they could ever hope for. And she even speaks English! Triquet tries to order their thoughts, then remembers that last night they took assiduous notes. They even gave themself a to-do list for this morning. There. All the thinking has already been done. Today it’s nothing but a ton of investigative footwork.
They start with a mug of tea, provided kindly by Amy. Then it’s out to their tent where most of their clothes still are. Kind of cold today. Maybe the thicker skirt with tights beneath. Clogs. Ooo yes! A kind of hausfrau look. An orange bandana, folded into a triangle and covering their head, completes it. Now if they just had a pilly old green rayon cardigan and some horn-rimmed cat-eyes they could vanish into anonymity in 1982 Stuttgart.
After completing their toilet it’s off to the sub. Down… down… Only in the last couple days have they been able to get back into the real swing of things. They’d begun a pass on the personal papers of Master Sergeant Chester Ernest Radick. Now that they’d integrated all the relevant quartermaster reports and tallies into a timeline, Triquet would be able to match up Radick’s notes and diary entries to specific events from 1954 to 1957 that marked a change on the island, such as ship arrivals and deliveries.
But they ain’t gonna work on such dry material this morning! No no no. They set aside that project and turn once more to the diaries of Colonel Ingles. All his texts have been properly analyzed and they’d thought any more effort put into them here would be a slow slog. These pages have already been pretty finely combed.
But then Jidadaa showed up and blew the doors off everyone’s expectations. Too bad she is only an oral resource. Triquet needs things! And it sounds like most of the interesting artifacts are still being held by the Katóoks, which is a damn shame because that meant the researchers will almost certainly never see them. Oh, but what data Triquet could extract from a few old blankets and bracelets…! Ah, well.
The one thing they want to locate again is a passing mention Ingles made soon after he arrived here. Tuzhit. A word they’ve now heard in a variety of contexts. Last night, sitting in a little cross-legged circle with Amy and Katrina and Jidadaa, they heard it again. It’s a name. Perhaps the central name of all Lisican culture. It was Tuzhit and the two sisters who first landed here, a long time ago when the island was truly empty. They brought their Lisica arctic fox with them. He is the great father figure of the island. And that ceremony they had last week was in honor of him. Ingles even mentioned him somewhere! Triquet is sure of it. But where?
Their pale hand hovers over the chronologically-ordered spines of blue hardcover diaries, stained yellow and black. 1956 was the year the Americans seemed to have the greatest contact with the islanders. Not that they wrote anywhere about their impressions of the people they found. No, these colonizers were far too racist to see the Lisicans as anything other than background noise. But they did mention a few native names when discussing how they solved certain problems.
Triquet opens Colonel Ingles’ diary from 1956. His spidery, formal script recorded brief passages as dry as dust. Triquet shakes their head in despair of ever truly knowing this man. Can you imagine? This is how he was even in his own personal papers. These were the private reflections he shared with himself. And all of them were some variation on, “Cold tonight. Hanging nets to kill birds so we don’t waste any more rifle ammo. Prayed for N. and C.”
A little convulsive shiver shoots through Triquet. Lord, these people were so repressed. Generational repression, going all the way back to the shriveled bosom of Queen Victoria and the goddamn Puritans. Where’s your hopes and dreams, Phil? Your secret longings? You probably told everyone you didn’t have any. Triquet recalls their own grandfather, a man who proudly said his whole life he never dreamed at night. Not one dream ever. And he also thought the pinnacle of American comedy was The Three Stooges. Ugh. Things back then were just so… basic.
Although it comforts Triquet to immerse themself in these long lost days, they can really only do it through the meta-ironic kaleidoscopic lens of their modern life. Good grief, if Triquet had been born, as Phil Ingles had, in 1922, there’s simply no way they would have made it to adulthood. Barring a one-way ticket to Berlin or Paris they would have thrown themself under the blade of a combine harvester or whatever when they were like sixteen.
No… Not in this diary. Perhaps 1957? Well, wait. There’s only a bit about the island starting in 1955. So begin at the beginning and work your way through, Triq. “I know I saw Tuzhit somewhere!”
Their voice rings hollowly in the silent sub. Ooo, creepy. Maybe they can summon Tuzhit’s spirit. That would solve some mysteries for sure. Leafing through the brittle pages, they call out the same words again, “I… saw… Tuzhit! Somewhere!” They listen….
No… No spirit dwelling down here. No ghosts. Ha. Maybe that is how Triq would have made their way a hundred years ago. They would be Madame Doucette, spiritualist and palm reader. Lots of black lace and a collection of veils. Conducting seances and eating mummy body parts. They would have been a huge hit.
No, no mention of Tuzhit in 1955… This might be a very long day. Wait. There it is. Right at the end. December 22, 1955. “By signs I attempted to ask the men if their Tuzhit had celebrated Christmas but the primitives had no idea of the custom.”
Triquet goes to their laptop and opens the file of notes they’d created for this diary. And there, the question ‘Tuhzit? A god?’ stares back at them, the h and z transposed, defeating all attempts to locate it with command F. Triquet makes the minor correction, their OCD eventually simmering down.
Now, to the actual significance of the statement… Why would Tuzhit celebrate Christmas? If he set sail from the Alaskan coast in like 1750 how would he have any exposure to European customs? Is this just Ingles being obtuse? Probably.
But something that has bothered Triquet and Katrina both is that there seems to be no linguistic connection between the word Tuzhit and any Eyat forms. Katrina said it might have like Bosnian roots. And then there’s all those other Slavic words that have made their way into their patois. But how?
It’s equally preposterous that Eyat-speakers of the eighteenth century spoke a Slavic tongue, so the researchers had assumed that it was probably a modern exposure to Soviet and Russian military people over the decades. Yet they’d also had exposure to all these Americans but they could find no evidence the Lisicans allowed any but a few proper names into their lexicon.
“Tuzhit! Who are you?” Triquet scans the piles and stacks of organized materials. Nowhere else can they recollect a mention of the name. But also, they weren’t really looking… They were more focused on the murder mystery of Maureen Dowerd. And now that they know the two are connected, Maureen’s death and her native lover, it makes things even more compelling to find the answers to these age-old questions.
A brief wind riffles the papers of the stack in front of Triquet and they drop fingers onto it to still them. What an uncanny gust. It ran over the hairs on the back of their neck like harp strings. That wind. It did not smell right. With a deep instinctive conviction, Triquet just knows that it brought something. Someone. If they merely turn, they will see a dark figure in the hatch leading down to the tunnels.
They try to turn but find themself frozen solid, whether from panic or distress or… whatever. Fabulous. A bit of sleep paralysis to begin the morning. And I’m not even asleep! They try to find a self-deprecating giggle but terror seems to be gripping their throat tight. And yet, their center remains calm. Detached. The fear that coils in their bowels is an object of great fascination, like some sharp glittering blue crystal tearing at their flesh as it rotates deep within. Amazing. All this from a little breeze.
Breath. I still have my own breath. Breath is everything. Triquet inhales deeply, purging their limbs of whatever shackles them. They visualize their feet moving and, with effort, they finally do.
Triquet turns.
The hatch is empty and dark, which makes it even more spooky. They should retreat through the other hatch behind them and go back up to the bunker now. Get some lunch and share their findings. Freak Flavia out with ghost stories. But for some reason… they don’t.
Following every grim impulse they’ve ever had, Triquet smiles wolfishly and stoops through the dark hatch leading down.
Ξ
Esquibel and Mandy work at the outdoor kitchen tables together. Here, their roles are reversed. The Doctor, who swore never to be a cook, couldn’t say no when Mandy asked her to help feed the crew today. Especially since Mandy is so down.
It is clear why. Her golden dreamgirl Katrina has totally turned away from Mandy. It’s all Jidadaa now. Jidadaa this and Jidadaa that. She is so special and unique and wonderful in all these ways that Mandy could never be. Well. She’d just have to console herself with dusty old Esquibel, that is, if her own pride would let her.
So they work in silence. Esquibel doesn’t know if Mandy even realizes how she feels, or if she cares. Resentment presses against the inside of Esquibel’s ribs and, instead of stooping down for a pot, she sighs and stops, hand on hip. “No, I do not want to be like my parents. I want to talk about our problems.”
Mandy, sauteeing freeze-dried vegetables, looks at Esquibel with a hurt expression. “What? What problems?”
Esquibel sighs again. She swoops down and snares the pot, graceful as a ballerina, and sets it down with a clatter on the burner. “I just want to know if it is the blonde hair that makes her so desirable. Because that is something that you should perhaps look at in your own self as a… I mean, we certainly all have our own preferences, but…” And that is all she can get out. Esquibel shakes her head, choked into silence with bitterness.
“Oh, no!” Mandy squeezes Esquibel’s arm with her free hand. “No! You think I’m upset because I’m, what? Jealous of… of who?”
“We’ve both seen the way Katrina looks at Jidadaa. You lost your chance with her, didn’t you?”
“Oh, Skeebee.” Mandy puts her spatula down and turns to her lover. She wraps her arms around Esquibel’s stiff body, nestling her head in the hollow of her jaw and clavicle. “No. No no no. I mean, yeah, Katrina’s hot and I’ve had all kinds of dirty thoughts about her, but never without you. Always with my Skeebee.”
The words are a balm to Esquibel but she still finds she can’t relax. “But then why are you so unhappy this morning?”
“Because I have to go right back up through the fucking tunnels to the fucking weather station tomorrow morning! Every other day! Oh, Skeeb. I don’t know what I got myself into this time. I don’t like it in there. It’s creepy. And I don’t mean the tunnels. I mean inside the island. I thought, I don’t know, they’re islanders! On Hawai’i there’s this huge native movement and some of them have this super strong belief that if they could just get back in charge or get all the haolies off the island that they’d have bliss. But it isn’t like that! There’d be all kinds of turf wars and like, well, whatever they’re doing to themselves here. Everyone’s so cagey and on guard. I thought we could all be friends.”
“You’re burning.”
“Ah!” Mandy turns back to the pan and pours in a dollop of Alonso’s wine. “Just saved it. Thanks. Could you hand me that salt? And I think there’s a bit of lemon juice still left.”
Esquibel finally releases her ire. Mandy is definitely upset about this, not Katrina at all. She had been, all the day before, filling Esquibel’s ears with long lists of complaint regarding the mud, the dark, the unfriendly villagers, the cliffs, on and on. But then they had all sat around the campfire all night and Esquibel had been alone too long with her jealousy. She hands Mandy the salt and kisses her hand. “I love you, Mands.”
“I love you, too, Skeebee. Don’t lets ever fight.”
They bump hips.
“There has to be a way…” Esquibel thinks aloud, “to make it easier for you to get to that weather station.”
“Yeah. It’s called the elevator shaft. But a certain mean-spirited doctor won’t let me use it.”
“It’s not that I won’t let you use it. It’s just… All your ideas so far are so preposterous. They don’t work at all. Fire? And water? I’m glad you aren’t like an engineer. Mandy the architect would get people killed.”
They both giggle, the joke taking the sting from Esquibel’s words.
“It’s a safety issue, mostly. Falling from a great height.”
“That’s what the water was going to prevent.”
“Flooding the shaft was a stupid idea and you know it.”
“Well. You don’t have to be mean about it. But, yeah. I mean, Amy was going crazy trying to figure out how to get Jay back.”
“And you are just crazy.”
“Well, how would you do it?”
“I don’t know. I am not an engineer either. How wide is it?”
“Like three or four meters. Pretty huge.”
“All the way up?”
“Yep. Straight up.”
“What if… maybe if you had a very wide platform in the center, maybe wide enough that you could lift it and there would be no gaps on the sides for anyone to fall through?”
“Sounds heavy.”
“Yes, but maybe not too heavy to…”
Mandy shakes her head, dumping steaming rice into her vegetables and mixing them. “And how do we lift it? We’d need some kind of like rotary engine, right?”
“Maybe Triquet has something in storage down in the sub.”
“Well unless they have about a kilometer of cable or chain in there then we won’t have enough line to hang it and make it go up and down.”
“Maybe they do. Let’s ask them at lunch.”
“It would certainly solve all our problems.”
“Triquet to the rescue.”
Ξ
“Tessteh…” The warm throaty voice, nearly a whisper, echoes in Maahjabeen’s ear. Then comfort words in Arabic. She sits in her mother’s lap, the air full of spices and laughing relatives. Someone plays old music.
Ama’s fingers play with the curls behind Maahjabeen’s ear as she laughs with cousins from out of town and accepts a lit cigarette. The words flow over the little girl like water. And then the baby nickname again, some private joke Ama made about an old family dog, and a peck on her cheek. “Tessteh, Yala. I need to get up.”
She slips from Ama’s lap and lands with a heavy jolt on the floor. The shock quivers through her heelbones, up her legs…
The room goes quiet. She feels all their eyes on her, but all she sees is color and light. Red and yellow patches in the smoky haze, with dark figures hunched over tables. Maahjabeen tries to focus on her family members but they all fade into shadow.
By the wooden reluctance of her brain to register their faces, she is convinced this is a dream. It is a dream and they are all gone. Yussuf and Auntie B. Mahmoud. Dahlia. A whole generation lost to lung cancer. And then Ama in the wreckage of her car…
With a clatter, the walls of her childhood home fall away like a set in a music video, leaving her little girl’s form alone with the shadows, alone and far from shore…
Yes, she is in the water now. But it is somehow no longer the seat of her power. Or this water doesn’t belong to her. Or perhaps it isn’t water at all… She lifts a hand but the liquid is all dark in the darkness, just another shade of black.
Is she far from shore? Yes. A bruised sky shows a dark line of horizon in the distance. And her limbs are already so fatigued. There is no way she can make it. Just treading water is proving to be too much. She shouldn’t be wearing so much clothing. Maybe she can take a layer off…
Maahjabeen ducks her head under the water to remove the gown hanging heavy around her neck. But it gets twisted and she can’t free her head. A ropy line of fabric crosses her face at a diagonal and she can’t unwind it.
Growing more desperate, she claws at her face. But the fabric will not budge. Her breath is about to burst in her. Light fills her vision. She is dying…
A silhouette appears before her. It is that little golem of a shaman who isn’t Wetchie-ghuy. With a nauseous rush, she finally recalls the last time she saw them, during her nightmare on the beach when Pradeep grew ill. They looked down on her then from the cliff above, drawing their powers from the sky, invoking a fog that leeches life away. That’s how they almost got her that time. And now, invading her through the doorway of grief that is her mother’s death, they have returned.
No longer in the water, but a dark cave. “La! La!” Maahjabeen tries to push the encroaching figure away. But their advance is inexorable. The waddling body looms over her, blocking all sight of anything else. A rank stench emanates from them. Her fingers get tangled in their ratty old figurines and twisted-vine fetishes that hang from braided necklaces. Their face is a goblin’s seamed caricature of humanity. Little skulls, threaded by sinew and separated by teeth, rattle on a bracelet…
Maahjabeen is smothered by the force of their advance. Ah! No! Nooo…! This is how it feels to drown…
A stinging smack knocks her head sideways. Her body is lifted. She lands heavily, cracking the back of her head on the frame of the cot. With supreme effort she pulls her eyelids open.
Pradeep hovers above. He has slapped her. His face is filled with desperate concern but she doesn’t recognize the light in his eye. It is someone else in there… and not the shaman tormenting her…
He comes back to himself and shouts in a language she doesn’t know, his voice cracking with grief, and slaps her once more.
A plug deep inside her is pulled. The shaman finally recedes. She can breathe again. Huge shuddering lungfuls of air fills her and Pradeep cries out. He wraps her in his arms and covers her scalp with kisses. “Oh, lovely… Don’t do that. Don’t ever do it again…”
Maahjabeen sobs, sucking in the sweet draughts. Ahhh. She needs air so much. What happened? How could she nearly kill herself lying here in this cot? No, it wasn’t her. It was that devilish shaman. And this time she won’t forget them like she did the last time the wicked creature messed with her.
“What is it?” Esquibel appears in the doorway of their cell with a flashlight in the dark. She is nearly naked, a white triangle of knickers the only thing dividing the dark skin of her legs from the darker night. Maahjabeen covers her own body with her hands, ashamed for Esquibel despite herself.
But the Doctor has no such modesty. With a growl of displeasure she sits at the edge of the cot and shines her light in Maahjabeen’s face. Esquibel doesn’t like the look of the young woman trembling in Pradeep’s embrace. She grabs a wrist and finds her pulse. It is hammering. Her patient shivers from a deep place.
Cursing under her breath, Esquibel forces Maahjabeen to roll over onto her belly. She pulls up the shirt covering Maahjabeen’s back and shines her light on it.
There it is, a series of raised welts at the base of her spine, all in the silhouette of a fox’s face.
Ξ
Flavia drags her face through the mud, squeezing through the narrowest choke point of the tunnel. She hasn’t been down here since first pursuing that crying child all those weeks ago, when Wetchie-ghuy stole her away. She’s had zero interest in ever coming back.
Yet here she is.
Mandy and Katrina scramble ahead, their lithe girlish forms slipping easily through. As with everything, Flavia has more of a struggle. She fits one shoulder through, then the other, and kicks her way forward until she gets to her hips, where she has to repeat the procedure. There. Now she is through that fucking pipe and she can finally stand up.
“That’s the way to the shaft. Look, Flavia. I’ll show you where we’re going, even though we can’t get there from down here…”
“No, thank you very much, but I do not need any side trips. Just take me to your cliff and bring me back and let’s keep everything very simple. Very linear. That would be best.”
Mandy has another point to make but one look at Flavia’s face silences her. Arguing with the Italian woman turned out to be very weird, and not really what she’d expected. But Mandy realizes Flavia is not a normal Italian woman. She’s like half computer.
In a sense, it was as if Mandy and Katrina only had to put in a single input, that comment at breakfast about feeling safe and free here as women. Then Flavia had reflected on that aloud, bitterly, describing her own experience here as a type of prison. And then before they could protest or amend a thing, she had moved on to the next step, like she was writing a program. “But what does that make me? A prisoner, yes, but one who is basing all her daily choices on fear, the fear that I will see him again, the fear that he will try to make a slave of me again. But I have not seen him in weeks. And yet that fear rules me every day. No. That is an intolerable risk profile strategy. So inefficient. Grazie, Mandy. You make me confront this. Yes, I will come with you today. And if I see Wetchie-ghuy, then,” she shrugs, “I will kick him in the balls.”
“You will…?” Mandy is amazed. “I mean, you’ll come? Oh, I’m so glad. Thanks, Flavia. You’re the sweetest.”
And now here the three of them are at the base of the last tunnel section before confronting once again the island’s interior. They pause, catching their breaths, scouting the way forward.
Katrina laughs a bit to herself. “I’ve got a little pet hypothesis going here. Call me an optimist, but I think there’s a chance they’ll talk to us again. Remember this climb, Flavia? Watch your step.”
The fallen tree that they scramble up like stairs finally leads to the flattened mouth of the cave. Flavia gasps for breath as she reaches the end, the adrenaline thrilling through her and keeping her alert. She expects hands to reach out from the darkness and grab her. Yet they do not and she notes this absence of horror as a significant benefit of a happy hike, in an understated idle voice in her head.
Ahead, Morska Vidra waits for them, silhouetted by silver light.
They put on their masks and gloves. Katrina continues. “My thought is that they didn’t talk to us last time because Jidadaa was here. Like she was passing through and they caught a whiff of her, or maybe she was already following us, or… I don’t know.”
Morska Vidra approaches Katrina and chucks her under the chin. “Bontiik.”
“Bontiik.” Katrina can hardly contain her delight. He is talking to them again, which means her hypothesis might perhaps be true. “Hey, where’s your fox, Morska Vidra? Uh, Gde tvoya lisica?”
“Lisica?” He turns and looks. “Lisica?” Then he shoots a glance back at the researchers with a playful smile.
“My, aren’t you in a good mood. I wish I could learn more about Bontiik. You know? Where it comes from. What the whole gesture means. There isn’t a single word like it in Eyat or the Slavic family, not that I know of. A search only gets me that a bontiik is a bonito fish in Frisian. Did you guys just like make it up?”
Morska Vidra isn’t listening. He has started his own sing song discourse with Mandy and Flavia, pointing at each of them with his thumbtip and then outside.
“Uh, a little help here, Katrina?” Languages have never been a strong suit for Mandy. Learning a new one is so frustrating and takes so long. She hates floundering around in confusion. So she just stands there and gives the little old man a polite smile. “Maybe ask him about Wetchie-ghuy.”
“Wetchie-ghuy?” Morska Vidra repeats, scowling. Then he mutters a whole paragraph of sing song and falls silent. He turns to the light, leading them out.
“Cannot believe you have no music.” Katrina follows, with Flavia and Mandy close behind. “May be the first known case in world history. Didn’t anybody like show up later and teach you? I mean, that’s eventually what happened with Jidadaa—”
Morska Vidra freezes at the mouth of the tunnel. His head slowly swivels back to regard Katrina, who falls silent under the weight of that gaze. He only stares at her, unmoving, for perhaps a dozen seconds. Then, point made, he proceeds.
Katrina releases the breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. She curses herself for a bloody fool and lets Mandy take the lead.
And just right there, after all these weeks, sits the old woman with white and blonde curls who taught them that good-bye means betrayal. Katrina stops, knowing Triquet would never forgive her if she didn’t make some attempt to get some answers. The woman might just be the last living connection to Maureen Dowerd.
The old woman’s hands are skeletal but arthritis doesn’t prevent her from dying reed fibers with a black ink. Her fingertips are stained with it. She looks up and regards Katrina with a level gaze.
“Hello. Uh, Bontiik, uh…” Katrina sidles over to her, as deferential as possible, and lightly taps the woman’s chin.
“Bontiik.” The woman lifts her fist and Katrina lowers her chin onto it. Then she steps back. “Nice… Nice work… Uh…” She quickly consults a list she’s prepared on her phone. “At daké? Work? Good. Uh… Aad’é.” Katrina looks up to see that the Mayor, that somber middle-aged woman with the cares of the village in the lines of her face, watches her from a hut’s door. “Aad’é.” Katrina offers her most charming smile.
The Mayor pulls back into the hut.
“Well, I’ll take that as a good sign. So, hello. I’m Katrina.”
The old woman looks up at her, as if considering whether engaging with this ghostly creature from across the ocean will break her heart again. Finally, she says, “Yesiniy.”
“Yesiniy? That’s your name? It’s a lovely name.” Katrina’s breath hovers in her breast. Her mind is blank. She knows she has to establish some sort of connection before diving right into this woman’s tragic past but she has no idea what comes next. She looks at Mandy and Flavia, who are regarding her from where she left them near the tunnel mouth. “Don’t wait up for me. Sorry. Been waiting forever for this chance.” Katrina turns back to Yesiniy with a sweet smile. “Mind if I sit?”
“Don’t wait? Well.” Mandy makes a face at Flavia. “Gee. Guess it’s just you and me now. Um. You might want like a walking stick. This climb is pretty gnarly. But you got strong legs, right?”
“Strong? What do you mean? Eh. We are going to climb that?”
“I know, right?” Mandy gestures at the steep slope before them with hostility. “It’s the only way up and over. Maybe we didn’t fully describe like the whole route…”
“No, you were very clear. But still.” Flavia shakes her head in distaste. “I thought it would be much more little than that.”
“I’ve got to put up like a rope ladder. Yeah. Last time I did this with like twenty kilos on my back. Thought I was gonna die. Okay. Just follow my footsteps and you’ll be fine. There’s kind of steps cut into the side if you start looking for them. There you go.”
Flavia hasn’t climbed anything this steep since her teenage trips to Cogne and Val D’Aosta. And she was in skiing shape back then. Now, she isn’t in any kind of shape at all. Within twenty steps her thighs are shaking and a cold sweat is running down her back. But she can’t let that colt Mandy get too far ahead. She grits her teeth and squeezes the perspiration out of her eyes. “Dai, Flavia!” She has committed to this course and she must see it through. There is no other path for her. Literally.
Trailwork like this is exactly like data science. The unformed, uncategorized world is out there. And these are the literal step-by-step processes humans have used to bring order and meaning to the world around them. We started with tiny footholds like this, then paths and trails. Then roads and rails and now superhighways and jet airliners and satellites. Same with programming. Just a few generations ago we had punchcards. Now the programs are writing themselves, with massive throughput.
With idle thoughts like these she pulls her way to the top. Mandy is there, panting, hands on knees in the midst of some unpleasant bushes that scratch and pluck at Flavia.
At the crest an erratic wind whips them, dry and warm from the southeast. “Ew. Look.” Mandy points to a long orange band on that horizon. “I bet that’s like dust from the Gobi Desert. Can you smell it?” Mandy faces the dirty smear headed their way. “And all the pollution from factories in China. You know, they find signatures of Chinese coal mining all over North America now. All of it raining down on the whole world. Totally distorting mid-Pacific weather patterns. You know, so we can have fast fashion.”
“Yes, I was in a conference in Beijing once when they had the sandstorms. The whole city turned orange and we could not breathe outside without masks.” Flavia shakes her head. “It was very bad. Ahh… Just when I think I am alone and disconnected from the whole world out here in the middle of nowhere…”
“Chinese pollution cheers you right up! Come on. Believe it or not this is the way down.”
Mandy leads Flavia to the edge of the cliff and a narrow chute that looks like the opening of a slide at a waterpark, except this cliff is six hundred meters high. “Ehh… Are you sure?”
“I know, right? I went after Katrina last time and all she did was follow the footsteps. It’s like the climb before, but, you know, this time down, with your heels. Just lean back.”
“I am sorry but I cannot do that.”
“Okay we can give it a few minutes. It’s not too cold—”
“No, Mandy. It is not a matter of acclimating to the heights. That is insanity. I will not be doing that. Ever.”
“Okay…”
“So you should not waste your time. Go and get your data. Change the batteries. I will go back to the other side back there out of the wind. And I will wait.”
“Esquibel said I shouldn’t really do this alone…”
“I am sorry but what do you want me to do?” The shrill panic in Flavia’s voice cuts through the wind. They are perched on the edge of the cliff like gnats on the edge of a wine glass. The merest puff of air could send them spinning out into oblivion. No. Basta. Enough.
With a pained expression, Mandy turns back to the descent. Without another word, she slowly disappears from view.
Flavia is furious with herself. She should have known this would have been too much for her. Everything is, here. Flavia does not belong on Lisica. And now she has put Mandy in danger.
Well. She might as well get out of the wind.
But someone is blocking her way back up there, hunched on the path like a fallen log.
Wetchie-ghuy.
DW Draffin -- Lisica 