SWELL

by Corwin Ericson

  It was chilly; I found a hoodie from the life jacket compartment under the bench. It had a silhouette of a poodle on the back and said “Black Poodle, Bismuth ME,” which was meant to be an inside islander joke on the dog logo of a wealthy island’s restaurant that had become fashionable with the tourists. A thick creamy moonbeam floated on the surface of the harbor; it ran from Miss Moon, herself, right to me on the Lucky Lady.

  Sometime during the small hours, I spied the glint of moonlight on a ripple of water. The ripple resolved in to a wake; something pretty big was swimming just underwater. I was able to track it as it meandered around the boats slowly arcing on their mooring lines. I figured it for a harbor seal, cruising for leftovers. It kept a heading for me, just like my moonbeam. Soon I could hear it parting the water but could see nothing other than the highlights of the wake. I felt the stern dip a little and realized it had climbed aboard. Seals do this when they think you’re holding. They can be bullies.

  There, on the stern deck stood Waldena. There, on the stern deck stood Waldena, clad only in moonlight and a heavy coating of transparent grease. There, on the stern deck, stood a beautiful Estonindian woman, unblushingly naked and greased, who had recently kidnapped me and menaced me beyond all reason. I should have jumped overboard. Instead, I gawked.

  Waldena wiped her face then squeegeed her body by running her hands over her breasts and belly. Her hands parted to skim each buttock. Then she wrapped her fingers around her thigh and pushed downward as if she were taking off her stocking. Lampreys do something similar to slough off their mucousy coatings, but she was significantly less repulsive. She raised a hand as if she were going to wave, and then flicked a gob of grease at me. Some of it splatted quietly on my chest; I bent my head to sniff it. The unguent had an aroma of balsam and hashish.

  “Towel,” she said. “Orange, close your mouth, and go get me a towel.”

  I wondered why I should take orders from this woman. She was as vulnerable as someone gets; she had been very mean to me; and she hadn’t yet even said hello. So I fetched her a towel.

  After blotting herself a bit, she handed me back the towel, now moist and bewitchingly fragrant. Before I could check myself, I held it to my nose and took a hit off of the pheromonic and hallucinogenic musk that clung to it. Waldena smirked. “You haven’t even said hello.”

  “You’re supposed to ask for permission to board another man’s boat.”

  “Did you?”

  She had a decent point. And she was glistening in the lunar light. The water beaded from her slickered skin and each dot of sea held a pearl of moonlight. “Happy birthday,” I told her.

  “It’s not my birthday.”

  “We call what you’re wearing a ‘birthday suit,’” I said, “because it’s what you were born wearing.”

  “That’s not what we say. But children born wearing fur or cauls are special to us.”

  “Would you like a robe? I bet Bob has a few.”

  “If it would make you more comfortable.”

  I went and pushed the hangers around in the bedroom closets. Shorty kimono, smoking jacket, and a nice après-skinnydip robe. I brought it back out top; she took it and wore it negligently. I wondered if there could be anything on Earth more intimidating than a dangerous, undressed woman.

  “So,” I said, “going visiting?”

  “I come in peace.” Waldena turned away from me to face the town and reached within the robe. She opened a finger-sized ivory container and held out a nicely rolled joint.

  “Where. . .”

  “The pocket of my birthday suit.”

  I was flummoxed, “I’m not so sure.…”

  “Just get a lighter.”

  I did, of course. An assassin sneaks up and tries to drug me? Of course I’ll help. We exchanged the joint quietly, until I said, “That’s not Vap-o-Rub, is it?”

  “No,” she said, opening her robe so she could dredge two fingers through the film that still slicked her belly, “It’s a secret, sacred preparation we have used since the time of the ancients to swim the cold, dark distances. I’ll have to leave before it deteriorates—it gets rank and starts to run in the daylight.” She puffed. “It will probably ruin this robe.”

  I’ve read about the witches of Massachusetts; Hawthorne says they flew to their sabbaths on broomsticks. Later scholars suggested the women’s broomsticks were phalluses lubricated with hallucinogenic grease, and that the flight was metaphoric, though still pretty visceral. Long distance swimmers coat themselves with a gloop called channel grease to keep the cold and jellyfish and all the other stingy and nasty things off of them. Waldena’s form of witchy goo seemed to nicely split the difference.

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “I checked a few boats; it was not difficult.”

  “But how did you know?”

  “A little boy told me,” she said, arching a brow.

  “You mean birdie.”

  “No, I do not.”

  God, that boy had to be Ricky. He was probably tied to her bed or something. Served him right. “Well.” I puffed on the joint. I’d never smoked weed like Waldena’s before. I’d never felt so conclusively massive, yet so likely to fly away. “Well then, how come?”

  “To see you. To ask you a few more questions.”

  “Are you going to throw me overboard?”

  “I bet you’ll fall off all by yourself tonight.”

  We smoked the joint down.

  “Listen,” she said, “you think I’m some kind of thug. What I’m doing is important.”

  “A sadistic Northern Indian ninja witch whale huntress Thor cult priestess coated in hallucinogenic grease.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t think you’re a thug.”

  Waldena seemed as if she were checking in with her astral projection, pausing in a way that suggested time was flowing differently for each of us.

  She toyed with the robe’s sash. “Thugs worshipped Kali, I believe. Stranglers, weren’t they? A knotted cord to the throat? And Thor cult is not that accurate. The Norse had plenty of deities who had to be introduced to the Northern Indian deities when we arrived in Europe. There were the original Arctic ice giants, the Norse gods, the deities that accompanied us from North America to Europe, the Christian deities that seeped up from the desert, all the local gods and spirits, the animal and monster gods, venerable ancestors, the Roman gods the Vikings brought back with them, and there are plenty more too.”

  She leaned in close. “I am sworn to a god you might translate as Thor, but the worship is much more sophisticated than I think you are implying. Besides, this is Thursday, his day, and a full moon. A woman with responsibilities like mine does not just sit quietly and light candles on his night.”

  I must have looked worried. She smirked. “I am not going to sacrifice you, Orange.”

  I did not know the name of the emotion I felt around Waldena. It was a new one on Bismuth. I think she brought it with her the way her ancestors brought their gods eastward on their migration. It was a sense of pleasant imperilment, like I was sitting on the edge of an abyss, whistling and swinging my legs, knowing perfectly well the cliff was crumbling.

  “Oh calm down, Orange,” she said coyly, “I am here on business. Mostly.”

  “So, what then? You’re a businesswoman, a spy, a smuggler, a pirate?”

  “I’m not a spy or a pirate. I’m a cultural ambassador.”

  “And I’m the mayor of Bismuth.”

  “Nice to meet you, your honor.”

  I would have stood and bowed to play along, but I was experiencing a powerfully clement gravitational collapse. The smoke, the aroma of Waldena’s deliquescing salve—part blubber, part deep forest, part cannabis—warming from her body heat, and the homey scent of brine and mild decay that was the harbor on a summer night conspired with the waves to make me feel tremendously open to suggestion and equally unlikely to act on anything.

  “As a cultural ambassador, I travel on b
ehalf of Estonindia to places like Bismuth to promote our culture and help people understand our history.”

  “Make allies, open new trade routes.…”

  “Exactly, Orange. You can imagine a hunting culture is difficult to maintain over millennia; hard simply to survive, and hard now that the character of both hunter and prey have been sapped away by civilization.” She drew up a knee, parting the robe, and smeared a circle on her kneecap. Her pronunciation of my name still thrilled me.

  “We human beings can do two things pretty well when we set our collective will to it: adapt to our environment and change our environment. When the Northern Indians decided to leave here and follow the whale roads to the north we didn’t know we’d arrive in the North Indies—Estonindia and her little sister, Finlindia—many generations later. We were hunting, and we kept getting farther away from our homeland, until we passed the point of no return. Then we became Arctic people.” Waldena pinched a layer of fat on the inside of her thigh. “We adapted. We grew insulation. Animals in the Arctic evolve faster than anywhere on the earth. Forget finches and tortoises—just look at polar bears; they were brown bears just a few thousand years ago.

  “It is because the environment changes, of course. The glaciers advance and recede over and over. When they ebbed, the big beasts flourished and North America was home to the biggest, hairiest animals on the planet. When the slow ice tide came back in, the animals shrank.

  “In the Arctic, we learned how to climb over and swim under the ice from the bears and walruses. We learned the whales had done the same and learned how to hunt for the squid from the sharks.”

  Sensing an oncoming saga, I interrupted the ambassador and asked her if she wanted a beer. She said she wanted something as sweet and potent as could be brewed here. I got us Buttwipers and settled back in to hear the rest.

  “We found the way to Hyperborea. It may not have been real, but the route we discovered and the world we found there was more fantastic, more sublime than a city-oasis in the frigid wastes. We wouldn’t have discovered it, or even made the voyage if we hadn’t learned the umweltern of the Arctic.”

  “What’s the umweltern?”

  “You don’t have a good word for it in English. It’s the sensorium one lives within; the world that is just your own.”

  “Like mood or point-of-view?”

  “No, it’s much more encompassing. It’s the sum of everything perceivable—in a way it’s the subjective realm each of us occupies. Our umweltern are very similar because we share the same senses. We think they’re quite different because of our cultures, but most of what we know and see is translatable between us.”

  Waldena was holding forth, and I liked it more than I should. If my professors in college were more like Waldena, I’d be a genius. Or dead.

  “But the umwelt of a polar bear and the umwelt of a tern are very different, even if they’re both sitting on an iceberg. Their senses and needs are quite different but they converge on the same fish each of them wants to eat. The fish has its own umwelt, the iceberg yet another.”

  “You’re saying the iceberg can sense things?”

  “I can hardly describe the umwelt of an iceberg to you this evening. It’s not something for words in any language. I could yoik it, maybe. Icebergs—they grow, they calve new bergs, they sing, they take voyages. Anything from the Arctic that has any life in it at all is attracted to an iceberg. Modern people see cities, blocks of buildings, cathedrals when they see a herd of bergs. When moderns see Hyperborea, it’s a city above the clouds that the stars themselves are moored to. The stars pivot around the legendary city like boats at anchor.

  “The ancients couldn’t see cities in the north. They had no concept of city in their umweltern. They saw crystal mountains, vast walls of forest—they were mirages and hallucinations, of course, just like the moderns who trudge on and on to the city that they will never find.”

  “But you’re saying your people discovered a passageway to this mirage city that wasn’t even a city?” I was seeing Waldena, nude, behind the crystal wall of a transparent palace. I shook my head to fix on her sitting in the boat again. She didn’t seem to notice.

  “My people discovered they were on a voyage. They changed their minds many times about their ultimate destination—Ultima Thule, as it turned out—but the realization that the voyage was more important than the destination, that’s not something many peoples discover.

  “The voyaging helped us adapt and learn. There were infinite passageways. We found them in the icebergs.

  “A berg is like a planet, wandering the sea instead of the space. It pulls life toward it—shelter for the tiny creatures, hunting ground for the larger ones. They are habitats that house the skeletons of animals from all of history. There are arteries that you and I could swim through side-by-side that vermiform the bergs. Animals use them as caves, as escapes, they ride inside the bergs like passengers on a ship. The tunnels are so slick and twisting that many creatures have died within them, leaving ancient bodies still being consumed by the slowest of microbes. They would hide boats from times before times, boats built to scales for giants and dwarves. Tusks unreasonably long. Some bergs have crevasses that allow one to climb all the way to the bottom of the sea within the berg.

  “As the bergs furrow the seabed, and the water surges through the tunnels and chambers, as the wind whisks around the peaks and ridges, a slow, primal music is made. The tides and waves provide a steady rhythm. The birds sing atop and the whales moan from below; the foot of the berg dragging across the ocean floor makes the sound of an orchestra besieging a symphony; over time their skirmishes resolve into what sounds like a coordinated battle. If you listen long enough, the battles come to tell the stories of peoples—eddas of tribes and nations, sagas of herds and flocks.

  “It took us generations to learn how to hear this music. It’s slow. Compositions just reaching their crescendo now were begun in a time of giant shaggy beasts. We had to learn how to master coldness and stillness. Bears had taught us how to wait for almost unendurable stretches at a breathing hole to spear a seal. The whales and wind had taught us to listen for voices from vast distances from the land. We had to learn to wait through snowblindness, through kayakangst, to learn to float alone, silently, unthinkingly, and break free from the time kept within our bodies to hear the slower music of the bergs.

  “You probably know the story of the Hyperborean king, the frost giant that herded icebergs—he whiled away his days frivolously pushing the bergs around like enormous chess pieces, killing time until he could attack the Norse deities. We tell this story differently. In our tale, he is a sorcerer and a conductor. He is telling the story of the whole world from before the beginning and after the end with the music of the bergs, like an orrery of symphony halls and stadia orbiting in the compass-killing North. That’s part of the Northern Indians’ umweltern; we don’t know the story of the world, but we have heard part of it being sung.”

  I could hear a few halyards clanging and a motor chugging in the distance. Waldena settled into a silence. I tried to hear the music of the spheres above but knew it wasn’t anything for a quick listen. The sky had filled in with sidereal detail, and the fogs, birds, bugs of my planet were gone; earlier, I had felt imbued with gravity, now it was dissipating. I felt as if pathways through the atmosphere were forming, tempting me upwards; I was light-footed but still heavy-headed. I had been enchanted; I was being reeled up to the dome of the sky, an ancient micro-fractured skull with uncountable trepanations.

  The telling and the listening had set us both adrift. We orbited slowly in our own eddies; Waldena’s breathing had become loud and regular. I thought it sounded like a prenatal yoga exercise. That aperçu made me realize my head was out of the ether and back on Bismuth. I grabbed Waldena’s slick foot to pull her down or up from whatever pelagic or celestial realm she was lollygagging in.

  “Hey. Hey! I forget. Why did you swim here?”

  “Umwelt,” she said, af
ter a long prenatal pause. “You needed to hear the big picture.”

  “I think you’ve told me a lot, but I’m not sure you’ve told me anything.”

  “The package, Orange.”

  “Ah, the sampo.”

  “The sampo,” she said mockingly. “Oh, Snorri. He doesn’t deserve it. His people don’t deserve it. It should be ours.”

  “The package?”

  “You know Finlindian wizards used to feed their bears hallucinogenic mushrooms and then drank their urine? It condenses the drug.”

  It actually wasn’t that hard to imagine Snorri with a mug, tailing his bear, waiting for it to piss. “So the package is that important?”

  “Probably not. I don’t think I even want it anymore. It’s the trade we want.”

  “What trade?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what trade?’”

  “I mean, what are you talking about?”

  “I told you this was all about the survival of our hunting culture, right?” she said with hypnagogic testiness.

  “Oh yeah, you’re the Ambassador.”

  “The Finlindians want to destroy our culture, replace it with their insipid ranches and stupid trained whales. We had been selling the Koreans whales for years; now they want whales of their own. They say they were whalers before we were. All they ever did in Korea was wait for them to wash up on shore. You buy our whales, you’re buying a free-range creature that has lived a full life in the world. You see our brands on their haunches, you know you’re buying something that’s lived a rich, natural life. We breed them and let them rove in pods of their own; we only harvest the healthiest, strongest creatures at the peak of their maturity. Finlindian whales are disease-prone dwarf sperm and pygmy melonhead minkes that beg and roll over for their krill-kibble.

  “The Finlindians keep their whalestock in pens in the fjords, breeding them fat and docile. They’re probably breeding miniatures for restaurant aquariums. Their whales have no sense of the breadth of ocean; they’ve never dived for the big squid or called to a pod thousands of miles away. It’s cruel, Orange, it’s cruel to keep a whale like that.” She shook her head sadly.