“OoOoOoOo—”
I watch him jump.
“Miss, won’t you help me?”
“Miss.” I smile. “That’s a first.”
I have two names: Janelle Picarro and Blister. My mother gave me the first name, my sisters, the latter. Nobody has ever addressed me so formally.
“Can you take me to the seawall in Bahía Rosa?”
A visitor to New Florida usually wants to see the jungle, the ruins. Locals hire us to pole them to the fishing nets, the floating markets. We take children to the school in the morning, weaving around the shadows of the wrecked cruise liners, helping them up the gangplanks to their classrooms. Nobody asks to go to the seawall. My sisters won’t pole within a mile of the black buoys.
“We don’t go there.”
“We?” The man opens an antique red wallet. “But I’m asking you.”
Two miles away, behind the tangled red mangroves, home calls to me. My sisters and I live inside the ruins of a seaplane hangar, built out of metal and glass a hundred years ago. By now my sisters will be rinsing the salt water from their gondolas. Only my boat slip will be empty. I can hear the twangy echo of my absence in the hangar, a hollow note that gives me a queer twist of pleasure in my gut.
“Money can make sense out of almost anything, can’t it?” I watch his black thumbnail riffle the paper. “It’s magic that way. But no amount of money can turn a trip to the seawall into a sane journey.”
The seawall was erected by the army corps as a last-ditch attempt to protect the city from getting swallowed. It failed, of course, and thousands drowned. We call the silent bay that surrounds it Bahía Rosa—a pretty name for a rippling nowhere. Once, the green lights used by fishing boats draped the ocean in a miasmic fog, so bright it was visible from outer space. Now reddish blooms of a fish-killing algae cover the entire bay. Bahía Rosa gets blamed for everything from cancer to bad dreams. A desire to go there suggests a highly contaminated assessment of risk, reward. Smugglers supposedly meet at the seawall, a rumor I did not much credit until this moment.
“Please, miss. I am falling behind schedule.”
He offers me a stupendous sum of money. More than I make in a month as a gondolier on Bahía del Oro.
“Double that,” I tell him.
As we pole away from the jetty, I hear a faint, awful rumbling, but I can’t decide if this is the true echo of some future disaster or only my guilt. This man is sick, and he has no supplies, no food. But if my last fare wants me to leave him in the middle of the sea, that’s his business; my business is transportation. He didn’t hire me to ask questions.
Only a lunatic or a criminal goes to the seawall—that’s what Viola would say. Viola is my oldest sister, the most responsible of us and in some ways the most guileless; she wouldn’t understand the humming in my body that begins when I hear the words “Bahía Rosa.” I have been wanting to make this trip myself, and I’m grateful to have the stranger’s money as my alibi. Once I deliver him to the seawall, I’ll have hours to myself in the unmappable dark. A part of me is already flying into the future, where I am rid of this person, free and alone, and swimming under the blind moon of Bahía Rosa.
His coughing jolts me back into the boat, and I feel sick myself for a miserable moment, wondering if I should turn back. It’s a relief to pull clear of the mangroves and join up with the fast-moving current. We go rushing into the wide bay, where the echoes make my decisions for me.
Two birds, one stone. The old, brutal saying returns to me out of the blue. I can’t remember where I first heard it; I house thousands of these fragments. Echoes of unknown origin. Words that went skipping across minds for centuries, apparently, before sinking into mine.
* * *
The current races us through the ruins of Old City, where a teenage boatman drowned just last week. My sisters and I have a monopoly on this territory. Even locals lose their way here, where the debris rearranges itself in a slowly turning kaleidoscope, the garbage mountains always changing shape. The glare of the sun is intense at six o’clock, splintering around the concrete grottoes. We enter the shade of a domed ceiling, poling around the brass-and-silver letters: MI I PL ET RIUM. Former home of the phony night sky, where hundreds of translucent fish now sway, nibbling at the algae on the auditorium walls. Rows of spongy seats glide just below us, a reef of huge brown scallops. Staircases that move like our singing does, lunging in two directions at once.
“OOOoooOOOooo—”
Middle C to E minor. Orange to pink to blue. The song sweeps in front of the bow. I crutch around the drowned beams that fill the planetarium’s lobby, singing at the top of my register. Echoes shower into me. My spine feels ignited by them.
New Florida is composed of grassy water, the bleached reefs of submerged and abandoned cities, and dozens of floating villages. It’s illegal to live here, although thousands of us do. Holdouts and the spawn of holdouts. Old Florida is a glassy figment in the minds of the soon to be deceased. If you think our song is monotonous, you should hear our neighbors reminiscing: Oh, the highways, the indoor malls! Soil as far as a man could travel. Funerals, remember those? The coffins we planted like seeds in the ground. That Florida, if it ever existed, has no reality for me.
We go mazing between the toppled condominiums, which loom like dark whelks lying on their sides. Golden awnings bloom on the former city’s northern border; the tenanted ruins rise in the west. Generator lights glow in several of the third- and fourth-story windows. My passenger turns on the bow seat and shouts over my singing, “Miss, didn’t we just come from that tunnel? Are we going in circles?”
“Yes,” I call down, enjoying my height. “It’s the only way out.”
Satellites have been down for half a century. Even those who navigate with salvaged equipment fail to detect the dangers hidden under the water. Perhaps these vintage technologies work on sleepier seas; I have only ever lived here. My sisters and I navigate these margins with breath and bones. We sing, and we absorb the echoes into our skeletons. A map draws itself inside us, revises us.
Three hard strokes, brake. Sit and paddle around a forest of streetlights. Launching my voice against a wall, I can hear the sunken pylons that mean to kill me, and I swerve, changing the future. This happens hundreds of times a day in New Florida.
“Lean back,” I tell my passenger, and he folds himself into the gondola as if it’s a casket, crossing his arms against the crinkling slicker. It ripples across him, and it’s easy to pretend that I am transporting the sea itself, the wind made flesh. We enter the archway to a vanished city park, now a deep green pool. Smells change as we travel: rotting wood, salt-eaten aluminum. The song boomerangs around a flooded parking garage, once large enough to stable hundreds of cars. I close my eyes as we spin around a stone nautilus. Hiding just ahead of us is the decaying, waterlogged hulk of a poinciana tree blocking the exit. Echoes push its branching shape into my skull, and into the skulls of my sisters in the distant, adjacent hangar. Always, we are this close and this remote. Vibrations unite us. We can hear the golden algae that gloves the underwater city and the long bald stretches of sunlit wall. Spongy sounds and waffled ones. But tonight the map is my own creation, the product of a single looping input. C stroke. J stroke. I brace the pole against my chest. The song hunts for an opening, and water spits us into unbroken sky.
When I open my eyes, the man is staring up at me.
“Ah. I’ve heard about you.” He smiles uncertainly. “You’re one of those bat girls. The echolocators.”
“What luck.” I smile back at him. “I am.”
* * *
We call ourselves the Gondoliers. Four singing sisters, poling the canals of New Florida. There are other boats on the water, but only my sisters and I take passengers through Old City. According to Vi, when our mother was alive, people would count four girls seate
d behind her on the long skiff and reliably say, “Trying for the boy?” “As a matter of fact,” she’d snap, “God has blessed me with daughters. If I could, I’d make a hundred more.”
My sisters tell this story all the goddamn time. So often that it feels like my memory. She drowned when I was three years old, before the cameras in my mind turned on.
Our regulars suspect there’s more to our nasally singing than we let on. For sure they know it’s not Italian. “Lady, can I please pay you to shut up?” tourists have begged me. I used to think that we were very special, the best boatwomen in the world, but Viola says no, we are only vessels ourselves: something wants to be born. Perhaps there are many others like us around the bays of New Florida and elsewhere. Women who know enough to be silent about what is developing inside their bodies.
This sensitivity grew in us softly, softly. I can only compare it to seeing in the dark. We sing, and shapes tighten out of an interior darkness. Edges and densities. Objects sing back at us: Turn hard left to avoid the fallen tree. Pole southwest to miss the gluey hill of floating garbage. Pillars thin as lampposts push fuzzily into our minds; a heartbeat later they rear out of the bay, fatally real.
Our mother could not echolocate, according to my sisters. When I was a child, I found this frightening and sad. Imagine seeing a thousand colors streaking the sky and realizing that your mother saw only one unbroken gray. But Viola says our mother could hear us crying from impressive distances, and now I wonder if she had some precursor of this ability.
Our gift is not a true clairvoyance, or what I imagine that to be. There’s no time for anything like that. It’s more like a muscular intuition of what the water is going to do next. And with our poles flying, rattling the oarlocks, we move to accommodate the future of the river.
* * *
“You could be my age,” I tell my new last fare, “in the right lighting.”
“Yes.” He doesn’t turn, but I hear his smile. “Darkness is a real fountain of youth, isn’t it.”
We slice under the mangroves, riding high with the outgoing tide. His narrow face looks even leaner inside the slicker, like a spadeful of white clay. Nobody I know is so pale. We live on sunshine here, where the canals are inkwells of blinding light. Leaf freckles cover him and disappear again as we bob into the sun. I like knowing that my arms are the engine of this transformation. Masking and unmasking him.
But then I glimpse the real sea rolling beyond the bay, and I remember with a start: No, you really don’t know anything about him. Only surfaces and angles.
* * *
In this neighborhood of Bahía del Oro, pollution tints everything with phosphor. Mosses drop in shimmering clumps from the floating oar. I pole from starboard, my bare feet planted against the cypress boards. Orange plants with soft drunken voices slide around the hull, drawling a beautiful lace behind my eyelids.
“I like your boat. Very pretty.”
The man’s deep voice startles me and causes the shy plants to fall silent. He raps a fist against the hull. I can hear the solidity of my gondola behind the hollowness of his compliment. “Such an unusual design…”
Suck my dick.
You can’t say that to a paying customer, chides Viola in my mind.
“Suck my cock,” I say instead.
He slams a laugh into my chest.
“I haven’t heard that one in decades.”
I read it on the wall of the flooded school, which is covered in the vanished teenagers’ hieroglyphs. SUCK MY DICK. RIDE MY DICK. LICK MY JUICY PUSSY. Names that are still legible at low tide: PAOLA WAS HERE. GABRIEL WAS HERE. SAY MY NAME. HURT LIKE I DO. KISS ME, SOMEONE. Writing that survives the bodies that produced it is always haunted, I guess. But the underwater graffiti of the lost world feels especially so.
“I don’t like false praise,” I tell him. “And I see that you have eyes.”
My gondola is decorated with crude stars that I knifed into the wood. The end result was less like artwork than an attack my boat survived. My boat looks nothing like my sisters’ perfectly lovely gondolas, and that is how I wanted it.
After that, there is a long silence. The sun seems to tarry behind the trees, extending our opportunity to beg it to stay. Bright water ripples around either side of us, and the black mangroves slant off into the distance.
“Do you live on Bahía del Oro, sir? I’ve never seen you out here.”
“No, you haven’t. That is certainly by design.”
“What a feat. A recluse among recluses.”
“You don’t like false praise. I don’t like false people. I choose my company carefully.”
Undeterred, the man taps at the steel ornament fixed to the bow, my birthday bird, welded for me by Luna as a counterbalance to my weight in the stern.
“Your work?”
“My sister Luna made it for me. She’s the family artist.”
The heron is painted a somber Madonna blue, my only criticism of it. Turquoise would have been my choice, I tell him. “Turquoise is what that blue would look like if she divorced the night and went on a fabulous vacation.”
He laughs again, a laugh which I bounce back to him at the same low frequency. Warmth stirs in my belly.
“Do you gondoliers ever take a vacation?”
“Oh, never. I feel like I’m always working, even when I’m sleeping. Our beds are practically floating. Our home sits half in water.”
“Home.” It sounds like a foreign word, the way he intones it. “Where is home?”
It’s taboo to ask this question of a stranger in New Florida, but perhaps he does not know our etiquette. I have a bad thought, staring at his bony face—that I can answer him without fear, because he is very close to the end of his life.
“We live in an old seaplane hangar.”
“Almost like a cave. Perfect for a bat girl.”
“Water laps inside it. You should see the four of us, rowing home at night. Like horses swimming into a barn stall.”
He smiles at me strangely, his eyes crossing a little.
“Horses. Have you ever seen a horse?”
I shake my head, embarrassed. Only in books, with waterlogged pictures. Stories fly out of the mouths of my oldest neighbors. But I have never seen a swimming horse myself, it’s true.
“Tell me, when were you born?”
I whisper the year to him, and something like awe crosses his face.
“How lucky! So you remember nothing, then—none of the evacuations, none of the flooding. None of the floating bodies…”
His face puckers and relaxes, a quick civil war.
“You don’t remember any of that.”
“I know what my older sisters tell me,” I say. “It’s almost like a memory.”
“And what do they tell you?”
“Very little.”
We skirt the cathedral, half hidden behind the shivering leaves of the mangroves. A brass steeple soars over the trees, a canted X on which several anhingas dry their wings. Framed by the sun, their glossy feathers look emerald. Hundreds more roost around the ruins. Snakebirds, the ocean swans. Egrets, pelicans, herons. Someone lives here now, it seems. Rope ladders tumble down the walls. As we glide under the cathedral window, a dog begins to bark.
We are only allowed to stay here, says Viola, because officially, we don’t exist. Most mainlanders have forgotten us. New Florida has been declared a “wasteland,” which is a hilariously inaccurate term, in my opinion, when the southern marshes are brimming with fish and reptiles and birds. “A resurrection,” say the old-timers. But for me, it’s the world as it always has been.
“We’re almost there,” I keep promising the man. I don’t like the way the eastern clouds are rumbling. “Twenty minutes,” I say. The standard lie. Like a cracker you can hand people to p
ut off their appetite. Every twenty minutes, you repeat this increment. But his impatience seems to burn off him as soon as we pull away from Old City. He begins to hum along with my singing, a beautiful surprise, like someone walking beside me, taking my hand.
“Look,” he says dreamily, and points to where the moon is rising, bright and enormous as the door to another galaxy, on the opposite side of the bay.
* * *
OoOoOoOo.
OoOoOoOo.
A whiskery sun flashes between the sunken rooftops, but dark clouds have rolled in from the southeast, a bad surprise. I imagine my sisters pointing up at them, shaking their heads.
“Do you feel that?” His frowning face retreats inside the cowl.
Glimmering threads begin to fall. A hissing starts in the back of my brain. Rain is no good. Rain scatters the echoes. I can feel the massing thunderheads like gloved hands at my back, pushing me to go faster and faster. The current is moving us steadily seaward, at a speed of perhaps fifteen knots.
The clouds racing toward us give me a tingling déjà vu, and I realize it’s a sky I’ve seen in dreams, lowering itself into my home. I wasn’t yet born when the ocean rode across the peninsula. The great floods happened before Bahía Rosa was Bahía Rosa, back when everything had a different name. But I can hear the waves rearing back, slamming forward, causing the walls to buckle. The cries of the abandoned families, the ambulance boats with their droning sirens. My older sisters become quite agitated when I describe these dreams. “You have no idea what it was like then,” Vi told me. “You never lived a day on land. Quit stealing our stories.”
Perhaps the memories filtered into me through our mother’s blood? I once suggested to my sisters. Viola, in her most condescending voice, then told me to “leave the grieving to the grown-ups.” She still thinks of me as her three-year-old ward. It will shock her, someday, to look up and discover that I am an adult now, with secrets of my own.
Orange World and Other Stories Page 17