Orange World and Other Stories

by Karen Russell

  “The algae.” I hold up the flat of my oar. “You see? It’s changing color.” Brownish gold to reddish pink. Which means we are drawing very near to the seawall. The worst pollution seems to be concentrated under the blooms.

  “Do you ever see mutants out this way?” the man asks me, turtled in his hood. He keeps his voice nonchalant, but I watch him peering into the darkening water.

  You hear tales of goliath groupers with multicolored eyes, two-headed manatee calves.

  “Never once. Does that disappoint you?”

  In fact, when I first entered Bahía Rosa, I found something even stranger. But I don’t tell the man this; why burden him with a new fear, when we are finally sitting level on the water?

  II. THE BRIDGE

  One slow afternoon last May, I found myself in the middle of Bahía Rosa. For two hours I’d been tailing a dolphin through the polluted zone, reasoning that if she could breathe here, so could I. When I reached the outermost limits of our territory, where the black buoys warn boaters to turn back, I pushed onward. By this point, the dolphin had disappeared, but I’d already traveled so far from home that it seemed obligatory to continue exploring. My sisters could feel the growing distance between us, but there was nothing they could do about it; they were working in Old City, two hours behind me.

  Long before I saw the seawall, I heard it lifting out of the ocean. At last it appeared, a thick hallucination striping the ruddy bay. I knew the stories, but I’d never seen this fossil for myself. Here it was, rising out of the ocean, a monument to its own failure. This mile-long section was largely intact, with bright moving gaps where the maroon water had eaten through the crumbling stone. First I heard, and then saw, what must have been the seawall’s former landside edge. It curled toward me, as if uninformed that the land had pulled away, and it was easy to imagine the whole peninsula slipping out of this relaxed embrace and sinking.

  What must have once been solid, unbroken coastline, in our mother’s youth, was now a pointillist landscape of small tree islands. Many were less than one acre wide, knuckles of limestone covered in flowering vegetation. I had been hugging their muddy shorelines for the past hour. Now I let the springy echoes from the seawall choreograph my passage into deeper water. As smoothly as a happy thought turns black, I found myself in the middle of Bahía Rosa, where the algae waved in every direction. The absence of birdsong made the sky feel empty and tall. A stinging odor lifted off the water. Almost immediately, I developed a terrible headache.

  I found the deadspot, or it found me, just as I poled up to the huge, broken molars of the seawall’s northern end. Three hundred yards behind me, the bald mangroves lifted onto their tiptoes, as if they, too, were surprised to find this barrier still standing. I could hear its secret skeleton, the weep holes and the reinforcement rods. I heard, as well, the gargling cracks where the wall had failed at the waterline. Pointy barnacles covered the eroded stone, dissipating my song; it seemed possible that in another hundred years they might fuse together into a single speckled shell. I was poling through a pocket of dense red algae that had collected around the wall’s concave edge when something astonishing happened to me. The echoes ceased entirely. My sisters’ singing fell away, and I was alone. The suddenness of this silence shocked me more than any detonation could have done. The deep sonority of our chorus vanished, and all I could hear was a single, flattened cry. This, I realized, was my voice—separated from the others. Fear spun me around: What had happened to my sisters? Somehow, it seemed, I had poled out of range; I was floating in a kind of deadspot.

  I watched the waves collapsing into the limestone wall for miles and miles, a birdless sky stretching above me. Nothing sang back to me. The present seemed to spill eternally around me, and no echoes reached my ears. I removed my clothes and slid into the toxic water. I don’t know what possessed me to do this, but it was no accident: I pushed my head below the surface, through the slippery blooms, kicking down.

  I’d never felt this far removed from my sisters. Under the water, I stopped hearing even the whoosh of my blood. What happened next, I’ll never know, because I sank out of earshot of my thoughts.

  I surfaced to a grogginess that exceeded anything I’d ever felt in my waking life. A ruff of pearly-blue sea scum encircled me. The plants floating here seemed to emit their own red glow. A light independent of any moon. The raw throats of cypress trunks scraped the sky. I didn’t know who I was, what I was. The face floating on the water was not mine, not yet. It wrinkled and smoothed with a foreign serenity. Nothing remembered me.

  The seawater I spit out tasted poisonous. Creaturelike, I watched my limbs moving through it. I could name the colors of the bay before I knew what sort of animal I was. An acrid smell lifted off the water, impossible to ignore at low tide, bringing with it visions of putrefying flesh. A smell that should have been incompatible with my bliss, but somehow was not. How interesting, I thought from a great distance, rolling my arms through the rosy water, turning onto my back.

  “Sensation returned” conveys none of the extraordinary pain I felt, coming to consciousness. My joints began to pulse. A bad sunburn crackled across the mask of my face. When I heard the waves slapping against my gondola, memories swept through me: I was Janelle Picarro again, one of four gondoliers, afloat in the forbidden waters of Bahía Rosa.

  My sisters. Queasily I swam for my gondola. The seawall loomed on the horizon, and once I poled out of the dense algae I could hear them again. Viola. Mila. Luna. Seeping back into my skull, a wailing harmony. Only then did I take the measure of what I had done.

  Just this once, I thought. Once, and never again. This magic phrase inoculated me against my guilt. I pulled the red weeds from my hair and bailed water from the boat. I didn’t know that I was setting a precedent. It felt like coming back from the dead that night, rowing into the seaplane hangar under a full moon. My sisters were very angry with me. They wanted to know where I’d been. Those heavy tones fell into me like lead weights after the freedom of the afternoon.

  The lie was spontaneous.

  Ordinarily it is very difficult to lie to my sisters. But the deadspot had inspired me. Without thinking, I screamed back at them. Swinging my oar, striking at bedrock. Using tone alone, I changed the night’s direction.

  “Where were you?” I counteraccused. “Why didn’t anybody answer me?”

  I began to sob. I let them witness the release of so much blackness from my body, recalling the silence that had flooded me while I floated under the wavy ceiling of algae. “I was calling and calling for you. I have never felt so all alone on the water.”

  The best lies have a fleck of truth folded inside them. All good performers know this. Real gold to bite down on. The ringing truth overrides the hollowness of the lie. I could see from my sisters’ horrified expressions that they believed me. The transfer of my guilt into their bodies was a success. I even began to believe myself.

  My sisters apologized to me. They blamed the weather, interference from the scattered raindrops. We embraced. My relief could not have been more sincere.

  That night, I lay awake for hours in an itchy reverie, curling my toes on the bed railing. We sleep in cots stanchioned to the walls. Luna’s body was a lump in the cot above mine; Mila was snoring down below. Waves lapped into the hangar. Never again, I promised my sleeping sisters. I could always return to the deadspot in my memory—it was enough to know that kind of quiet existed. I went to sleep feeling warm and lucky. Grateful for the strange experience, and snug in my conviction that I would never repeat it.

  Seven hours later, I was poling back toward the deadspot.

  III. THE DEADSPOT

  We vowel down the channels. Darkness reaches around the eastern skyscrapers, and then those stalagmites are behind us. A pink line stitches day to night. A few early stars have appeared, but that light tells me nothing about our position. Unl
ess I am singing, I really can’t tell south from north after dark. Barking seagulls scatter the echoes, and I get caught in a swirling cul-de-sac of water on the outskirts of Old City.

  Crackling into my body, I hear my sisters’ voices combing the darkening bay like searchlights:

  “AAAaaaaaAAA—”

  “UuuUuuuUuu—”

  Disappearing can make you feel like your own biographer. You hear the absence of your voice, and the notes you are failing to hit make their own shadow melody. You unlid the spaces ordinarily hidden by your body: a new song comes fluting through them. Whenever I hear my sisters singing without me, I get a flash of my own silhouette.

  I bounce back a B-flat at the top of my register. The note quivers there, reassuring them: I am alive, in Old City. The songlines connecting us pull tight, relax. I hear a pulsing silence: my sisters listening as I move away from them. When I return, I will pile money on the table. I will give my sisters hundreds of reasons to forgive me. What will Viola say, I wonder, when I tell her I’ve made more in a night than she makes in a summer month on Bahía del Oro?

  My passenger cranes around to stare at me, wearing the oddest look. The slicker lays heavily on top of him, alien as frog skin. It seems to breathe on its own.

  “Old MacDonald had a farm. E-I-E-I-O—”

  I stare down at him, stirring the gold from the bay.

  “You sound like you are calling pigs to the trough,” he says, but he is smiling.

  I like this man. He fixes me with a lolling curiosity, despite his urgency to reach the seawall. He does not offer to help me to row the gondola, as some of the nervous men do. He does not snap at me when I pause to rest my voice. His eyes are mild. He is turning his palms, catching the fat droplets of rain.

  “Were you born with the ability?” he asks. “Or is it something you taught yourself out here?”

  I feel the song idling in my belly, changing slyly inside me.

  “Both, I think.”

  People talk about heredity as if it’s linear and vertical. Dead people passing things “down” to the young. But my sisters and I are evolving together, I tell the man. All day, we swap notes around. We blur our voices into one song. Something grows in the fast-moving channels between us, and it’s changing all the time. It moves with us, this thing we are inheriting.

  To our left, ivory columns stand guard over a submerged pavilion.

  “That was a bank once,” I tell him. “Did you see the vault in the middle of the floor?” Ferns are curling around it now. “Can you believe that? People kept their money at a great distance from their body.”

  “I believe it,” he says. “But I’m quite a bit older than you.”

  “My oldest sister, Viola, says—”

  “You youngsters only know the stories.”

  His tone is wistful, but I hear the scolding note. My sisters and I are no strangers to this attitude. Older passengers often seem dismayed that they have to cede the Earth to creatures like us. They are aghast that we know so little about their world and bewildered by our happiness in this one. We know more than you can imagine, I want to tell him. But not as badly as I want my tip.

  “I wish that I remembered the land, for what it’s worth,” I tell the man, watching his pale eyes swim over my face. “I would have loved to know what my mother’s yard looked like.”

  “ ‘Yaaard.’ ” He looks up at me thoughtfully. “What an odd word. I never noticed that before. Don’t mind me, miss. You should forget even the stories. Look how lightly you sit on the water, remembering only water…”

  I picture the healthy eelgrass waving in the limpid shallows of Bahía de las Nubes. “The grass is always greener, I guess.”

  He laughs at that. “Where did you hear that one? I’m surprised that it survived the floods. You know all our corny sayings. You’re like a jukebox, miss.”

  His face reminds me of the wild dogs we see on the tree islands, panting with silent laughter. He speaks in a monotone, so I don’t know if I should be complimented or insulted. Perhaps I’m being invited to laugh with him.

  “A jokebox—”

  “A jukebox. It was a machine that played the same stale songs over and over.”

  Blood rushes into my face. Does he think that’s what I’m doing? Repeating myself? Can’t he hear my singing changing on the air?

  We crane up at the washed-violet sky behind the rotting ceiling. The bank shrinks into the distance. When the stranger turns, his face is as composed as a poem, its symmetries perfectly mysterious. My fantasies don’t run in his direction. But fear prickles my neck, and it feels almost like lust.

  “Hey. What’s your name?” I ask him. “Who are you going to meet in Bahía Rosa, where nobody lives?”

  He gapes up at me, his Adam’s apple jumping. I feel the oddest déjà vu.

  “Make up a name for me. Any name you’d like. Give me a nickname while you’re at it. I am always in the market for a new name.”

  “Let me think on it,” I tell him. “Maybe we can borrow a name from the posters.”

  I say this to make a joke and wind up frightening myself. The MISSING PERSON posters flap against the walls of Old City, most bleached beyond recognition. Men and women and children who disappeared in the floods. There is no way to read them as anything but obituaries today.

  “Ah, the posters. Yes. I’ve seen those. A missing person. How perceptive you are. That’s me to a T.”

  He turns back to the light rain fizzing on the water, his hairy knuckles wrapped around the heron’s throat. I’ve retreated into my own thoughts when he calls back, “All of those faces are my face, why not? All of those names can be me. We are fungible sponges, we missing people.”

  I can’t get my bearings in this conversation—is he joking? Is he really a missing person?

  “Were you here for the floods?”

  He stares at me for a long moment before answering.

  “I’m part of a dying breed, bat girl. An Old Floridian. I grew up on a street called Coral Way. In a house with a foundation.”

  “But you stayed.”

  “No, miss. We fled. I was in the first wave of evacuations. But I wanted to come home before I died. To see my home again.” His laugh becomes the phlegmy cough. “I’d need a scuba suit to find it, I guess. I’ve been here for three weeks, and I can’t find a trace of that life.”

  It does not surprise me that I have a neighbor whose face I’ve never seen. Millions of people once lived in the coastal cities; thousands of us remain. SQUATTERS RIGHTS, BRO, someone spray-painted on the tallest standing condominium in Old City. But property disputes are rare on moving, glowing water. You have to live here to discover that the pollution isn’t strong enough to kill you.

  “Where are you moored?”

  “I’ve been camping at the university. On the roof of the library, I believe. It’s a good retirement home. The twilight zone, for my twilight years.”

  “Come on. You’re not that old.”

  We laugh together, a sound I often draw like a tarpaulin over what I do not understand.

  “Down here, the world has already ended. It’s very peaceful, in its way.”

  It always surprises me when visitors treat New Florida as if it’s a graveyard. Our home is no afterlife, no wasteland. Not an hour earlier, we poled through a rookery that shook with the hungry sobs of fledgling birds. Wood stork chicks and starry white ibis and little green herons wading around the rooftop sloughs. But if my passenger failed to hear them, I doubt my voice can convince him that our world is newborn.

  “Do you have a family, sir? Up north?”

  “I did. A wife, two sons. Terrestrials, all.”

  “They must be worried about you. Do they know where you are?”

  “They drowned.”


  “Oh. I’m so sorry.”

  “I killed them,” he elaborates. “I was one of the marine engineers who designed the seawall.”

  “I don’t blame you,” I blurt out.

  “You should. People my age are criminals. We ruined the world.”

  Reminiscing about his guilt seems, perversely, to cheer my passenger. His voice brightens as he describes the scale of the failure. “We built the wall to withstand winds of one hundred fifty miles per hour. Does that sound naïve to you?”

  I wonder if he can hear the note of pride inside of what he seems to mean as an apology to me. It’s a bloated, underwater sound. He’s chosen a funny moment to have this conversation, I think, with the wind picking up all around us and rain slanting between our faces.

  “You failed.” I nod—it seems to be the line he’s written for me to say.

  “Our imaginations failed us. Our models failed us.”

  A smile is still playing at the corners of his mouth. I wonder if he knows he’s smiling. There is a profoundly unchaperoned quality to his gaze, now that his mind has traveled back in time. I try to listen to the details of his story, but it’s his slack, abandoned face that fascinates me. His eyes roll up to the gray clouds, as if something is dragging him skyward by the roots of his hair.

  “We all knew the end was coming. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”

  It would be cruel, I decide, to remind him that life is flourishing in New Florida; that it is our world now, not his any longer; that, actually, he is the one who is dying.

  “This used to be paradise. I’m sorry, little bat. We ate up the whole horizon. We left you a ghost town. Not even a town. A toxic slough—”

  “This is our home,” I tell him. “And we are not ghosts.”

  I stop poling and stare at him. Water rolls along his slicker, capturing the light. As if the green skin is sweating for him. In his voice I hear a longing for release so close to my own that it is almost unbearable.