“Mmm-hmm,” Zeb says. “I get my money, take care of my mini-me, pay those bills, and then dabble in my vices.”
“Here’s to dabbling.” Q raises his brown bag to Zeb in toast.
They work their way up the mountain at the speed of city bureaucrats approving street repair, avoiding the path that’s been so morbidly cleared. They avoid the grisly displays of earth-regurgitated bones. The man ahead has been collaborating with the mountain, hoping that being respectable will gain its favor.
“How’d we get here?” Zeb asks. “This mess here didn’t rise up overnight.”
“Ain’t no unity in the community.”
“That’s what’s up.”
“We can’t get together, can’t clean up the city, can’t build up what we need. Next thing you know, artists, bureaucrats, and—what do they call them folks with them skinny pants and big beards? Oh yeah—hipsters flow in like they the answer.”
Zeb scans for any sign of the man skulking among the tombstones. “My beef is with the pastors.”
“Come on wit’ it then,” Q says.
“They want to come after rappers for their shakin’ booty videos. But they off drivin’ fine rides and got their church all fancy with their manicured lawns and shit. While they sittin’ in a neighborhood that looks like Beirut.”
“They come round with their coalitions, city giving them money to pray whenever there’s a shooting. Pray for me for free.”
“And got white Jesus plastered all over they walls. The Bible says, ‘skin of bronze’ and ‘hair of wool.’ I know a hood nigga when I hear one.”
“We’re all God having a human experience.” Q leans against a tree canted at an odd angle.
“What kind of experience is he having now?”
I had a church once. My congregation trusted me with their money, and we bought our church building from the United Methodists when they packed up and moved north. They wanted to make sure it went to a church that would make good use of the space for the community. But when our congregation shrank to ten families, we bought a smaller building. I kept the United Methodist’s building. With the neighborhood changing, I thought the property value would increase well into six figures. Remembering the parable of the talents, I was a faithful servant of my master’s goods, and nothing if not a shrewd steward.
I was a member of a pastors’ coalition to walk the streets of the neighborhood to pray over them. The city balked at funding our faith walks, but we insinuated that without us to keep the peace at crime scenes, the police would have difficulty in conducting their investigations. The city paid us. Even gave us a seat on the mayor’s commission. The murder rate has risen every year since 2014, breaking all previous homicide records. The FBI awarded us a special commendation for our work in that time period.
My stomach growls with such ferocious hunger, a voracious need that only grows as I climb. The mountain doesn’t provide. When I lick the moisture from one tilted fountain, I read on its plaque, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I give him will never thirst.—John 4: 13-14.” And I know that I will thirst again. I should shiver without protection from the night winds. The wind tells secrets about the mountain. The ground rises to meet my feet, the landscape undulates before me. I have the vague notion that I should pray, but the thought slips and slides away from me. I arrange the bones as I go, tending to this new temple that grows to lift me up with it.
With every breath, a pervasive fungal odor fills my nose and coats my throat, thick and cloying. A deep rot from repurposed earth. The remains of what went before scattered about like discarded toys. Memorial flowers bruised by the shifting upheaval. In my mind, the tributes vigorously twine around the graves and trees, extending tendrils outward. They assume aggressive new forms in response to their devastation, growing spiny and fierce, surfaces sharpening as they come for me, so that I can only continue forward.
Storm clouds succumb to starless black.
Onward I climb.
The Lilly family mausoleum rests on its side, crumpled. Disrespected. Two figures huddle near the concrete monument, cold lampin’ with the mountain.
“This is a test.” Zeb leans against a cold slab with the name Harrison etched into its side. He lifts his plastic cast and rubs his leg.
“All of life is a test,” Q retorts.
“Yeah, but this is to see what we made of here. Deep down.”
“We can’t let this go on.”
“It’s like this neighborhood is one big jail cell they don’t want us out of … until they do. The city just opened up that senior home. Gonna open that big tech project not far from here. They preparing things. Gonna be moving us out soon. Folks gonna ‘discover’ our neighborhood like Columbus did America, and then it’ll be all lattes and craft beers,” Zeb says.
“I just want to have a home and be peaceful. You talkin’ politics, business, and folks with money and connections coming in. That’s too … big. You can’t fight all that. I’m doing good to keep living beside this mountain.”
“Mountain keeps growing, won’t be nowhere to live in this neighborhood. Not that we can afford.”
“Are you willing to go hard?” Q asked.
“I’m ride or die.”
The mountain has always been here.
It is just the revelation of something vast and unseen, always waiting. It is a reminder of how powerless we truly are. It is the truth I already knew, as I am lost within its awful shadow. I itch with uncertainty, the outward manifestation of the discomfiture of my soul. I thought my place would be at the top of this mountain, at least for a time. But the mountain doesn’t need me.
The mountain has always been here.
Invisible most of the time, its geotrauma reverberates, its proximity a threat. I stumble forward into a zone of alienation and find myself surrounded by two men. The abyss floats between us. I recognize them from the neighborhood, their faces, like the mountain, are both alien and intimate.
“Reverend,” the taller man says. “What’chu gon do with a mountain? Is this who you are now?”
“I am a liar,” I confess, and thus trap myself in a paradox.
“This is our everyday, but it don’t have to be,” the shorter one says. “Look.”
I’m afraid to turn around. The wind fills my ears, all distortion and dissonance, harmonics without tune. I turn, and I see them. Dozens of people climbing, and dozens more approaching behind them. They carry flashlights and … shovels? The two men come forward and stand with me, one on each side.
“This mountain doesn’t belong here,” the tall man says. “We have to take care of it, out in the open.”
The short one grabs a shovel. “Any mountain can be unmade.”
Nobody Lives in the Swamp
by Dee Warrick
It might just be the weather, so flighty and temperamental, rain then sun and then rain again, all in an afternoon. Or maybe it has something to do with the people who move through the streets and over the canals, who breathe the air for a week or a weekend, and then pile into planes that carry them, exhausted, into the sky and deposit them in dull, sober places all over the world. Or maybe a city that survives fascist occupation never really learns to sit still after that, is always fidgeting and covering its face, muttering apologies for its collaborators both past and present.
Or maybe some part of the city really does takes hold of your lapel in a panic, when you and your lads are laughing on your way out of a sex show, or when you and your mom stop for a moment in Dam Square to consult the tourist map you picked up at the airport. It shouts, “You can’t stay here! I am not a home! I am a swamp! The rich buy my canal houses, and the poor sleep beneath Centraal Station, and everyone else leaves! You must leave!” Nobody hears it, of course. Or, of course, they do hear it without knowing they’ve heard it, and they leave. It’s a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to etcetera, etcetera.
Except for the rusalka. The city ca
n’t shake her.
Lots of girls drown. The rusalka heard this stupid rumor once, that you could drown in as little as a teaspoon of water. All over the world, girls are drowning all the time. And coming back after you drown, in the very spot where you stopped struggling and your lungs filled up, that’s not all that remarkable either.
It is almost June, and in a few weeks, the unenforced/unbreakable laws that govern ghosts will loosen, and she’ll be allowed to climb a tree and feel her skin dry out beneath the sun. She’s picked her tree. It’s right next to one of the residential canals, a quieter place than the city center. And it’s a good tree for climbing; the branches are strong and thick, and two of them have contorted over many long seasons into a V perfect for draping herself over. She swims past it, stares at it, imagines herself in it.
Before she was a rusalka, she was an American girl, and her mother was from Ukraine, and before the girl drowned, she listened to old stories for about a week in early June when drowned girls could crawl up the banks of their rivers and lakes and climb up the trunks of trees. Men had to be careful. The drowned girls were mad with grief, possessed by a hideous hunger to drag men down to the muddy beds beneath their grave-waters and hold them there until they died. The girl’s mother never explained why the drowned men didn’t come back. Men make different kinds of ghosts, she guesses.
The girl never got to visit Ukraine, though she’d planned to backpack there the summer that she died. From the Netherlands to Ukraine, then back home to the States. Instead, she drowned in one of the canals. An American woman turned Ukrainian ghost, trapped in the waters of a Dutch swamp city. It was hard not to feel lonely, at first, tugged in that many directions by that many alien legacies. But eventually the herons came, snake-necked and long-legged, their black feather mohawks twitching in the breeze. They’re a funny kind of heron; they look dirtier than their cousins, who live in swamps that haven’t had cities built over them, and they don’t bolt when people come close. They hold their ground, stare you down. Standing on top of a parked car, they seem to will you wordlessly to know that they were here first, and they will be here after you die, and they know when and where every unhappy event will occur.
They don’t speak to the drowned girl, but they sometimes bring her tributes. Stolen things, reminders of what being a real, breathing, human person was like. Tourist maps. Hotel keycards. Sweatshirts, removed and tied insecurely at the waist between bouts of rain, falling to the sidewalk without being noticed. Broken umbrellas stuffed angrily into overflowing trashcans. These she has combined into a long summer dress that twitches and flows behind her in the canal water. It doesn’t do much to keep her warm but having something to wear makes her feel a little more human.
She is treading water in the canal beside her tree, trying to will her skin into the future, to feel the rough bark pressing into the pads of her heels and between her shoulder blades. She is so mesmerized by the fantasy that it takes her longer than it should to notice a stranger—crying, angry—marching out of one of the apartment buildings beside the canal and climbing the rusalka’s chosen tree. The strange girl grunts in frustration as she hauls herself up by the tree’s thick branches, throws herself against the perfect V. The rusalka usually sinks to the canal’s bottom when strangers come close, but the shock of this girl’s anguish, the way she climbs the tree like she’s proving something to whatever has made her so sad, those feelings paralyze the rusalka and she simply floats, watching. The stranger pokes clumsily at her phone once, twice, a few more times, then tosses the phone out of the tree with a sob. It clatters against the sidewalk. And then the stranger is looking at the rusalka, and in the dark, her wide wet eyes seem almost to glow. They stare at each other for a long time. The stranger’s voice, when it comes, wavers in a way that betrays a feeling she’s trying to hide: tears, of course, and fear, of course—the rusalka is a dead thing, and you should always fear dead things—but also hungry hope. She says, “You’re a ghost.”
No other girl has spoken to the rusalka, since she drowned. She says, “Sort of.”
Then the stranger shifts her weight. “What’s your name?”
She forgot her name. Herons don’t have names and had no use for hers, and so soon, she found she had little use for it, either. Eventually, she even forgot how she’d died—beyond that she’d drowned, of course. Still, distantly, numbly, she is angry. It’s unfair. However it is that she ended up here, it’s unfair. And sometimes, when her anger breaks her heart, when the canals begin to feel so narrow and filthy that she can’t move, can’t breathe, that’s when the herons bring her a man. Snare him with their beady, little, mesmerist eyes and lead him to a quiet stretch of canal, where the water is dark and reflects the city lights back at him, and she reaches out, gets her fingers tangled in him. Pulls him down with all the lost bicycles and empty beer cans. Holds him there and waits for the questions to leave his eyes. “You could have left,” she tells him. “This city wanted you to leave. Haven’t you seen the way the canal houses tilt and curl like crooked teeth? The way the swamp tries to swallow them? You’re supposed to leave. No one stays. No one stays but me.”
The men she drowns don’t come back. Men make different kinds of ghosts. The drowned girl, the rusalka girl, see, when she was born, her mother and her father and the doctor who delivered her, they all thought she’d be a man, someday. They were wrong. Death knows. Whatever processes govern the manufacture of ghosts, they operate according to a weirder rubric than mothers and fathers and obstetricians.
The stranger’s name is Claire, she says. She chose it herself, just like the rusalka chose the name she has since forgotten. Claire is a lot like the rusalka; the sort of girl who had to fight to prove it, who had to piece together girl-ness from scraps and guard it jealously from those who would take it from her. The rusalka asks her, “What are you doing here?”
“I live here,” says Claire.
“No, you don’t,” says the rusalka. “No one lives here. This place is a swamp, not a home.”
“Why are crying?”
Claire doesn’t answer. She only stares, her lips shaking. “You’re dead …” she says.
“Lots of people are dead,” says the rusalka. It sounds stupid when she says it. What else do you say? How do you say anything at all?
Around them, the city looms. The canal houses rise at strange angles, forever sinking into the swamp and forever being rescued by expensive construction efforts. Someone, somewhere, howls—that deep, moose-ish howl universal to groups of drunk boys. Claire cringes at the noise, jerks away from it. She looks at the rusalka. “What are you doing here?”
Growing up, she experienced herself as a sort of chemical error, an instinctual wrongness, a self and a body that were distinct and discrete, and each of which mutually negated the other. She once cried, sitting on the edge of her bed while her mother shushed her and patted her too-short hair. Cried, the way only teenagers can cry, like the world is ending, like there’s no such thing as melodrama or hyperbole, like every single thing is everything, and a lot of it. She said, “I think there’s a monster in me,” and was right. There was. Because every woman is a monster, sooner or later. That’s just the kind of ghost the world turns women into. And that’s why Claire is crying. And that’s what the rusalka is doing here.
Before she can stop herself, the rusalka is telling Claire stories. The moon reflects off the water of the canal, and as the rusalka tells stories her mother told her, she imagines that the ripple and glow spin into shapes to match. Dead girls in June, hauling themselves up trees. Men mesmerized into trudging down muddy banks, their shoes filling with grave-water until they’re close enough to grab and pull and hold. Herons dropping gifts into the city’s canals, daring you to meet their gaze, and maybe learn the secrets they keep. A million secret rules applied to ghost-girls and illustrated in abstract with light and water and shadow and wind.
At the end, she says, “So …”
Claire cries. And smiles. Shakes he
r head. Laughs. Then she climbs out of the rusalka’s tree. She’s careful. Slow. Like the tree might shatter, or like she might. She sits on the edge of the canal wall, cupping her elbows in her hands, letting her sneakers dangle near the water’s surface. She says, “Is it lonely?”
The rusalka doesn’t answer. How does anybody ever answer that question?
“I only ask,” says Claire, avoiding the rusalka’s eyes, “because … what if it, um … didn’t have to be?”
The rusalka understands, but she can’t let herself believe she understands. It’s a big idea, one she can’t believe she never considered before, an idea, the promise of which is so warm and dry and seductive that, if she allows herself to acknowledge it, she will be swallowed by it, and nothing but the idea will ever matter again. Once, another girl had loved her. Before the canals, and the herons, and the dead men. Before she sold her car to afford a plane ticket. And that girl had stopped loving her. And she had wept with her head in her mother’s lap and said, “What if this is it for me? Girls like me, we don’t fall in love. People don’t fall in love with us.” And her mother had said, “No, baby,” and there was only a hint of the country she’d come from on her tongue. “This is not forever. It feels like forever. But nothing is forever.” So. The trip. The Netherlands, then Ukraine, then home, perhaps healed, a little, perhaps smarter or harder than she’d been before. Except then, suddenly and painfully, it was forever. She was forever. This was it for her.
Claire says, “The men don’t come back. They make some other kind of ghost, right? But … then there’s me.”
And she lowers herself into the water. The canals are always deeper than people expect them to be, and the water swallows her whole for a second, rising up above her head before she pushes herself back to the surface, gasping at the cold, treading water gracelessly. She laughs. “Could it work?”
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