ODD?

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Back in the ten seconds when I tried to begin again, and choked. Back in the darkness before Real Life.

  I started looking for a village, that year, remembering stories from a Haitian girl I knew in school, about the Leaf Doctors who work for the Green Man, and protect the forest from all harm . . .

  I think about the drowsy, rooty, mossy way any forest calls you to go to sleep in the daytime, find a bed of pine boughs and whatever else is handy, and get out of the light, get out of the day, root down into Mother Earth like a cicada, and change . . .

  And what rough imago, all the while, slouching past your camera, turns its head at the flash of change, while the whales beach, and the seas leach . . .

  Sometimes, when you go looking for a village, what you find is the Island of the Lotus Eaters, like the one in The Odyssey or The Iliad or whichever the fuck one it was we had to read back at Our Lady. In my foggy memory, on the bank of the stream, Mountain Grrl washed clothes on a flat rock and spun rumors out the needle-exchange of her summer wasp mouth and Liza Minelli nose, that Goo had warrants out for his arrest, or he was a sex offender or some dumb damn thing.

  She was the first of the droves to leave. She never said goodbye. I’m glad.

  You see how weird I got out there? What it did to me now, when I try to explain what happened? You probably don’t. Not yet.

  But I’m the only one who made it off that co-op alive.

  The last night. The last night I was there.

  Comma, damn it.

  My new California Grrl (twelve years my junior, with her silver eye shadow and big black spiral earrings and rather athletic ways of nearly killing her old man in bed) wants me to write about the last night at the Aeolus Co-Op Farm.

  Sonia doesn’t understand. I haven’t explained much. Like why I was such a recluse, then, or how seventy people could just disappear and the cops not give a fuck. They were just dirty hippies, I want to tell her. They weren’t people. Not to the law.

  I remember lying on moldy sleeping bags, on my last night at the co-op. I remember dreaming about the face on the stone that Portland State University dragged out of the Columbia River down at Sauvie Island.

  That round-eyed, inhuman face, neither condemning nor condoning, natural as a cloud. Impersonal, yet entirely predatory, in the cast of its filed teeth, the jut of its cannibal belly.

  I remember seeing the Columbia Stone in the Portland Art Museum just last year, when I made myself go back for a friend’s opening there. I remember having to go back to the hotel and

  and take a Xanax. I remember wondering if there was ever human blood spilled across that great stone face.

  I remember waking up throwing up. I haven’t been back to the museum. I go to AA instead. It’s big down here. It doesn’t really help, but it gives me something else to look at . . .

  I want to remember the way it got dark so quickly, even on the edge of the edge of Portland, after the November monsoons. We had every dwelling cold-proofed and rain-proofed, an activity that the summer months were for, by mutual consent and to the mutual way of thinking. (That part needed no infighting to accomplish, and fast.)

  Every dwelling, too, had its own deadwood or peat fires going in the little scrounged stovepipe flues we had set up one to a room, made from fifty-gallon drums and spare parts. Waking up in the darkness there all those nights, I always felt as though I was eight again, sleeping over at my Gramma’s, on the hide-a-bed in the living room by the old wood stove . . .

  I remember the way it snowed a good foot or two both years I was there, weird for Oregon even in winter. A.J. made some noises about climate change when he was trying to start up the old Willys Jeep we called Furthur. Furthur’s radiator apparently suffered massive reflux at the onset of the first blizzards that fell hard upon the land, and took it by surprise.

  I remember that A.J. bought most of the weed I grew. I remember that he was all right. Italian, I think. He talked with an East Coast accent. Never said where he came from. But I remember him. I do . . .

  I remember there were flowers breaking into bloom everywhere on Aeolus Farm that cold, cold spring the year after we incorporated, out at the edge of the Eighty-Second Avenue Miracle Mile toward Boring on the Springwater Electric Railway, out past the Rhodie-Gardens and golf courses, out where Portland starts to become Something Else.

  Flowers everywhere, flowers on the violet-clad roof down below the tree, housing the longhouse structure that Big Scott, our token Polynesian, called the falé, where people slept most of the time. The falé smelled like sex and weed and was generally first-come first . . . whatever you were into, because it had the softest-built beds.

  Aeolus was regularly hailed by the armchair anthropologists of the Downtown Weekly papers as an experiment in sustainability, since Deuce Longbow’s family bought the land with that purpose and then traipsed away off to Tahiti to die of ingesting some unknown psychedelic, to hear wild-eyed Deuce (or Douche, as some of us came to know the titular oligarch of the collective) tell it.

  Douche, of the mad composer hair, and the Gore-Tex clothes he wore until they stunk like rabid, rutting goat, like . . . Mountain Grrl. But I couldn’t think about Mountain Grrl. That wasn’t always her name, and she didn’t always stink.

  She used to bathe, like me, and wear weird oils like me, and wash her dreadies a few times a week to keep the bugs out. She was the farm’s Chief Engineer, and I was their pet journalist. Everyone dug in their heels when we broke up. No one wanted to leave.

  I still remember her the way she was, kneeling on the bank of the stream, washing clothes on a flat rock, spinning rumors out the needle-exchange of her summer wasp mouth and Liza Minelli nose, that Goo had warrants out for his arrest, or he was a sex offender or some dumb damn thing.

  (She was the first of the droves to leave. She never said goodbye. I’m glad.)

  Deuce came down out of his ivory tree-sit tower pretty quick and put a whole new kink in that situation: Him. (The Frankenstein monster of a relationship that resulted when they got together almost put me off women for good, but Moth was no better.)

  Deuce, of the big yompin Herman Survivor boots that steamed with pig manure from the two pot-bellied pigs that fertilized the back strawberry patches. (They stank about as much as the composting outhouses, which was barely at all.)

  Deuce who kept up the sauna that a long ago “villager” named Jukka had dug into the side of the hill and made of fitted rock, and cob. Deuce, who liked bugs so much he almost socked me for killing a hornet when I was making the earthwork around the picking-garden.

  He kept saying this word Ahimsa, Ahimsa. I kicked him in the balls, and down he went. Big Scott had to pull us apart and waddle us down the trail until we decided we were done. It felt like Deuce let him do it. Maybe he did.

  Deuce was a touchy one. When I was first initiated onto that land, I saw his hyper-vigilance as a good thing. Like how he’d always finish people’s sentences, and be right.

  But after a while, I started to wonder. A lot. After a while, I started to hang wards around my hut, and sleep with a machete I made myself, one that I sharpened on a rock for one and one half weeks. I counted. I waited. I hardly slept. I was getting out.

  That machete got me out. I don’t like to talk about that. Not even in Group, or at meetings. But I remember. Oh, I do. . .

  “Didn’t you used to be a Trustafarian?” I remember asking Moth, who was breaking up a big bag of marijuana buds and taking the seeds out before he left my hut with two dozen eggs’ worth of ditch-weed. “Didn’t you used to go to school? What the fuck are any of us even doing?”

  Moodily, I chewed the strip of beef jerky almost forgotten in my right hand, looking at the waterlogged old Samuel R. Delany paperback I wasn’t really reading since Moth interrupted me with his knock. Moth made a gesture with one small surgeon’s hand that meant he was going to swat me, but he couldn’t stop smiling.

  I kept looking out the loophole window in the front door, thinking about hi
s willing replacement Pandora, when we made sweet squeaky love in the milk shed and her hot, slithery cunt yanked my cock to shuddering orgasm in sinuous waves, greater and greater each time . . .

  What was this? Every time I started thinking about real things, there’d be some intrusion like that . . . I had enough to do out here that I just stopped thinking, for longer and longer periods. But as the Poet said, the hook brought me back.

  Like I was starting to know my place in the hunt. Like I was starting to become worthy to hunt, and eat, and feed on the lesser beasts that we could now herd . . .

  Oh, my dreams were getting strange, and the thoughts in my own head ran far off course with no brain-mouth clutch in the way, sitting in the Delphic cave of my hut when I wasn’t out chopping brush or sowing corn.

  “ . . . You know? Like, how people back in Maya,” Moth used words like that like he was reading them from a book he held in his hands, and that irritating little smile never quit flipping up the corners of those big cock-sucking lips. “Civilization, whatever, they never mean it when they say How’s It Going. They don’t really fucking care. Do you?”

  I shrugged. “Like sex and checks and special effects, child, it all depends on position and circumstance.”

  Moth frowned, his designer eyes that weren’t contacts narrowing. “Eww. Meat.” He was looking at the strip of beef jerky in my free hand. “You know that stuff rots for four years in your colon?”

  I barely looked up. “Seems like you eat meat quite a bit.” Moth blushed, and looked hurt. I knew I’d gotten to him. But I was getting really tired of the Come To Jesus meetings. About the only things he was good at were in bed. For some reason. But that, too, got old fast.

  “Deuce . . . he told me once that he wanted to start a school for children and just . . . bend them to his will. And that if the aliens took over, he’d sign on with them.” Moth’s sea-blue eyes seemed to shine with their own light of fear. “And he was totally straight up. I was like ‘Oh, ha-ha, Deuce made a funny—’“ The smile was instantly gone. “And he’s just like, ‘No. What you got to say?’“

  But Moth left, too. Bound for Parts Unknown, Boring or Forest Grove or homeless on Hawthorne and singing for his supper, or maybe mumbled bones eaten cleaner than wolves could do, clutched by thumbs not quite thumbs . . .

  But no one talked about that. At Aeolus we talked, talked, talked everything into the ground, ground, ground, in the weirdest, most stilted vocabulary-by-committee I ever heard. Except things like that. The things that were too terrifying.

  It all seems like a dream now. Like someone else’s summer job.

  All I wanted was a hole in the ground to hide in, and a little time to think. I carved out my tiny chicken-coop of space from a sod hut and a hollow tree behind it, into a cozy outpost of words and images in the forest, drawing on home-stretched vellum and birch bark paper, writing the kind of poems I never thought I could.

  Until four members of the co-op (and how that word looks like ‘coop’ to me even now) disappeared.

  Read that again. Disappeared.

  They didn’t die, leave or get arrested. They just disappeared. Moth, Juice, Goo and Josh. Sounds like a goddamn band. All four of those heads just vanished the same spring, my second hiding out from everything I was hiding out from, doing everything I was doing, everything I would miss and still miss now . . .

  Everyone had a theory. Everyone had a weapon. Everyone had a grudge, a pet beef, a sick hole shining through the set-up . . . which Aeolus was really starting to look like. But the bare fact was that we were being picked off by an unknown factor out in the middle of nowhere, and we couldn’t call anyone. No one cared. We’d cut ourselves off from society, and now reaped our cry of Wolf.

  There were a lot of malenky homeless tweakers denning in the blackberry brakes and living out of Burleigh trailers and mountain bikes by Johnson’s Creek. Often, those wayfarers bashed each other bloody over a teener of meth or a half-rack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. We gave them food when they came by the farm, food and short shrift and very little else.

  In pondering the Procrustean bandits of the Springwater Corridor, I feared the worst in my 20/20 rearview. Deuce stalled on getting the cops involved, though we were all residents of the land, and paid taxes from all the enterprises we had out there to keep ourselves from getting Waco’ed. (Hell, we had two sustainability grants from Mayor Katz, and one from the Governor!)

  But Deuce kept whining through his black beard about our Rights, how the Cops would Take Away Our Rights, and we have Rights to do Something About It Ourselves, and We’re Gonna Post A Watch, and the next night I heard Goo screaming All. Night. Long. Under the ground. All. Night. Long. And no one . . .

  People started leaving in droves, and the ones that stayed were the bottom of the barrel. We all kept to ourselves, did what we had to do, bared our fangs and popped our claws. Me the most of all.

  No one believed Cassandra, either, when she foretold wars, and rumors of wars. No one believes the cursed prophet who can’t keep his nose out of the home brew, or his running mouth from running down everyone, himself the most of all. Blind Tiresias here didn’t play well with others, you see. Blind Tiresias came to the land to forget.

  I was drunk, and in a blackout for most of the afternoon. I was laid up drunk in my hut. I heard him screaming under the ground. I couldn’t sleep, but didn’t want to move. It makes me panic, when I get like that, when I drink like that, panic and lock up and I could hear Goo, I could hear him calling out for his Momma and praying to God the Father Son Anna Holy Ghost O My God I Am Heartily Sorry Fa Havin Offended Thee . . .

  I tried to tell them, the next day, with predictable results. “Smoke a bowl,” AJ told me. “You got the DT’s. Take some ibuprofen from the First Aid kit in the falé. Shit, I’ll cook youse a steak, if ya hang out for a minute. Yeah, pack that bowl up. And drink some water, like, now . . .”

  I stood watch all night long, stoned and hooty owl-eyed, with A.J.’s bolt-action .30-06 laying across my knees. The woods were lovely, dark and deep, and I cursed every ROADWAY NOT IMPROVED sign down the chugging, thundering potholed way there over Foster Road and half the weird little side streets without a name in Multnomah County that shriek in fear at some incorporation date.

  AJ took the Jeep into town once a week for provisions to trade weed or salvia or ten other herbs we grew down at the co-ops in Southeast and Sellwood. We had one computer that ran off a solar panel, and a Honda generator for this, that, and the other. With two whole gallons of gas. Go, Us.

  I waited for the night to end, and drank coffee from a metal Goodwill percolator on a wood rack across the fire. (Big Scott made that rack. His oddly small hands had the feel for wood.)

  Eventually, the sun rose and dispelled the vague, irrelevant mist of fear above the stream that wended through the farm.

  Mountain Grrl never gave me a reason to want to stick around. Pandora did.

  Pandora was a true crone-in-training, and I loved her. She went without a shirt when it was warm, and climbed around in the canopy trying to find the spots with the best echo to play this bamboo flute she had. That night was her six months’ anniversary at Aeolus, and she still never ran out of surprises.

  Behind us in my hut on the last night of that world, the Coleman lantern hissed out its firefly glow on the PGE wire-spool endtable. She brushed a shock of blonde dreadies out of her face and whaled out this Ziploc bag of weed that looked like a throw-pillow.

  Her cerulean eyes sparkled. I could see a pack of rolling papers stuffed into the top, just beyond the yellow-and-blue-make-green of the seal.

  “This is my headies, from before.” she told me. “I was saving it.” She reached for something in the front pocket of her too-long corduroy overalls. “‘Cos this most definitely is a rainy day.”

  I looked toward the stretched canvas flap of the door. “Should I—” She rapidly shook her head, moving closer to me with her eyes on the seal of the bag.

  One soft black anorak
-clad shoulder brushed mine. She snagged the papers and peeled off two. “I still owe you, D.K.”

  I sat down on the mass of sleeping-bags and Army blankets that was the bed, goggling up at the tin ceiling, sealed with cedar pitch boiled from the sap of Large Marge, Moth’s waggish name for the thickest tree whose trunk was the right corner of this room.

  Pandora was incuriously bending up a massive joint with two of the papers. Eventually, she popped a match on one scrimshaw thumbnail, fired up the fireplace and passed it on down.

  We hooked up off-and-on, Pandora and me. Out there, the usual bounds of a relationship were blown wide. We were all friends. She was her own woman. But I noticed every time anyone else got friendlier with her than the huggy sort of group mind would allow, they were gently but emphatically rebuffed. Things happen on their own clock in the woods.

  I barely remember what we talked about while we got high. Before I knew it, we were giving each other shotguns, mouth-to-mouth hits of warm sweet smoke that ended the way a shotgun usually does between a boy and a girl, or one sex and some other thing. . .

  I remember she roached the joint with less than a third to go in that round, and pushed me back onto the palette, murmuring: “I’m cold,” as she peeled off her anorak and silenced me with another long, wet kiss.

  I remember her sucking me off for what seemed like six hours of near-orgasm . . .

  Then the air horns were screaming on all sides of us like Hell with the lid off—

  (AJ brought them from an RV store when he first joined our little Ewok band, and rigged them to tripwires around the perimeter. If anyone or anything got too close, we’d hear a “WHEEEAAA—” and either go down and shut off the horn, or make ready. One or two of them played a solo sometimes when a varmint or a branch tripped the switch.)

  —all screaming at once and we were UP! UP! UP! and charging out into A HIGH, ULULATING WARBLE THAT HOWLED DOWN FROM THE WOODS, LOUDER THAN THE AIR HORNS, and no Person As I Understood the Definition Was Making That Sound, Yet The Throat Was Sentient . . .