by Anna North
She furled the sails, but the boat began to pitch violently from side to side, and a wave slapped her from the right, and filled her mouth with water that tasted like salt and metal and something very bad, like a living rot that would breed and spread inside her. Then another wave broke over her from the left, and the boat made a new and sickening motion, and she saw the sea rise up level with her eyes, and the surface of the sea was pink for some reason, and then the boat fell away in the opposite direction, swaying like a drunk, and her eyes were parallel with the sky and the sky was veiny, and then she felt the boat tip past some critical point, and it was not tipping but falling, and she was ripping through the skin of the water and scrabbling in its rotten guts.
For a long time she swam. She remembered what her mother had taught her; she flapped her arms and kicked her legs, she pretended that she was in air, but she knew she was under water. The water was cold. It was the first time she had ever felt this, cold water all around her. This was a cold that seemed to suck the heat out of her, to pull it from her chest and groin and armpits until there was nothing left there and it pulled on her limbs, slowing them, making her move like an ant in sticky mango juice. She didn’t breathe or open her mouth, but still she could feel the smell all around her, the smell that was beyond rot, the smell that was getting inside her through her skin. Soon the stale air began to press against her lungs, and come up her throat and press against the backs of her teeth, and she still had not found the surface of the water; she was moving more and more slowly, and she began to think about breathing. She thought about what would happen if she opened her mouth and let the stale air out and took a big, deep breath. Her mouth would fill with rotten water, and then her lungs would fill with it, and probably she would cough, but what would a cough be under water? Probably she would just breathe in more of the ocean, and then her brain would begin to slow, and she would stop swimming, and then she would die. It came to her that she would see her mother. A door would open and her mother would be behind it, facing away from her; then she would hear a sound, like a bell, and her mother would turn, and she would be smiling with happy excitement, like on her days off when it wasn’t too hot and the laundry was done and they could lie on the floor and play rock dolls and make up foreign countries to visit.
“You won’t believe where I’ve been,” she would say, and Darcy could already see it, could already see her turning and smiling and beginning to speak. She knew she had been under a long time, too long, but it would be so easy just to keep listening, to open her mouth and breathe in and keep listening, and this thought came to dominate all the others that raced through her crowded underwater mind. Before giving in to it she opened her eyes.
The salt burned, but after a moment the burning seemed to clear and she could see enormous dark shapes massing around her. They were reddish, like blood clots, and although they had no eyes or mouth or limbs or fins that she could see, she knew they were alive. They moved extremely slowly, but she could tell they were moving toward her, and she felt something coming from them, vibrating from their skins like a low-pitched song. She felt it in her body, and she realized it was despair. She didn’t breathe in. She whipped her head around until she saw a place in the water where the quality of the light was different, and she shook her limbs free of the pull of the cold, and she swam for it. While she was swimming she felt the despair grow stronger, like the shapes were asking her not to leave them, but then it grew weaker again and she broke through the surface of the water and back into the storm.
It was still black and rainy, but now there was lightning, and when it lit up the ocean Darcy could see the hull of the boat floating white in the waves like a bone. She swam and swam and although she got tired and she lost the feeling in her feet and the muscles in her arm began to burn, she didn’t think about dying anymore. She reached the boat and she clung to it, and after a while the rain began to stop.
On the seventh day the air was clear and clean and smelled like pure salt, as though the storm had scrubbed the rot away. After an hour of bobbing and scrambling, she was able to right the boat and crawl back into it. She tried to start the motor but the engine was full of water and it only made a gurgling, coughing noise and then lapsed into silence. The sail was mostly intact except for a few notches on one edge that looked like bite marks, and when she was able to get it strung up it caught the wind and filled out, round as a cheek. For what might have been a minute and might have been an hour, Darcy sat in the bottom of the boat, breathing the cool air, watching the bright green line of the horizon, feeling her muscles mending. Then she remembered the food.
They had tied it down, but the force of the waves had broken the ties, and all of it was gone. Once the shock of this had died down, she realized the water was gone too. All three jugs were sinking through the salt water somewhere, along with her jellyfish and her no doubt sodden and sea-stained blanket. Or would they float? Darcy vaguely remembered a middle school science experiment with salt water and various small toys from GreenValley Meadow Meals. She shielded her eyes and looked out over the ocean, but the sun hit the waves and threw itself back at her, so that all she saw was its white blaze printing itself on her eyeballs, glowing orange when she closed her eyes. She thought of turning about and scouring the sea for her water jugs, but she didn’t know how far the storm had taken her. She might backtrack for hours and still find nothing and then be without food and water with even farther to go. She ran her hands all over the boat, feeling for something she could use for a fishhook, but nothing was small or sharp enough, and even if she could knock a shard off one of the motor blades—her best idea—she didn’t know what she would use for bait. When she considered her only options, her brain recoiled in disgust. So she kept an eye on the wind, and the sail, and the sun climbed up to its apex in the sky and fell away again. As it was falling she began to feel hungry. It started out as normal hunger, the familiar groan and suck in her belly that no jellyfish fully satiated, but with the knowledge that not even jellyfish were coming, a gray scrim came down before her eyes and her ears rang. Then she saw black at the edges of the gray, like the scrim was charring, and her neck felt boneless, and she let her head fall between her knees.
The ringing in her ears rushed and twisted and became a music. She remembered going hungry as a child, nights near the end of the month when her mother would put hot water in the cheese-food cans. How long had they gone like that? A day? Three? But they hadn’t been in the middle of the ocean then, food had been all around them, and she remembered stealing a GreenValley energy bar from the convenience store, begging an empanada from the stall back when she was small enough to suck pity out of people with her gap-toothed smile. They were never really in danger of starving. Still, when the rush in her ears quieted a little, she remembered too how they had made a game of hunger, or rather a game of ignoring it, how the first person to think of food had to pay a penalty, like singing a song in a silly accent or drawing a mustache on her face, how they used the honor system and both cheated a little but it didn’t matter, the point was not really to avoid hunger but to make hunger into a kind of joke instead of something to be afraid or ashamed of.
She started a game of flicking herself in the cheek every time she thought about food. The first flick brought her out of her daze a little. The second roused her. She noticed that she had to urinate and of course the bucket she had used for that was gone. She thought of trying to go over the side and then realized that would be wasteful. She unzipped her salt-caked jumpsuit and crouched over her cupped hand. The feeling of revulsion was strong. The wind chilled her bare shoulders. She had the absurd fear that someone might see her. Then she pushed the fear away, pissed into her palms, and lifted them to her lips. It wasn’t much, it tasted like jellyfish and undernourishment, and it made her double over with disgust, but she got it down.
Afterward she felt slightly stronger. She thought of GreenValley mint candies, and she flicked herself in the cheek again. When it began to get dark
she furled the sail and put out the drag anchor. Then she unhooked the jib and spread it across the width of the boat, loosely, so the fabric dipped at the center. When she was finished the stars were out. For a moment they all looked the same to her, just a white rash on the black, and she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to find hers again. But then the sky took shape, the Milky Way seemed to recede into the background, the constellations popped, and there was the North Star, clear as a street sign. She wasn’t even too far off course—nothing that couldn’t be righted in the morning. It was cold, and there was a new smell on the air, a smell she couldn’t put a name to but that was neither bad nor good and that disappeared whenever she really tried to pay attention to it, and she unhitched the mainsail and wrapped herself up in it and went to sleep.
On the eighth day she woke up just before dawn. The sea and sky were slate blue, and the world seemed frozen in hushed preparedness. A light wet wind blew in from the southeast. In the valley of the jib, as she had hoped, lay a shallow layer of dew. She knelt low, pulled the jib in toward her, folded it into a spout, and held her mouth open as a little brackish water trickled down her throat. Then she hitched up the jib, unwound the mainsail from her body and hitched that up, pulled in the drag anchor, and watched the rising sun green the eastern sky.
All day she felt light and strong and fast, like if the sea would hold her she could run across it in an instant. She stared at the surface of the sea and thought about how it would feel beneath her feet—smooth, but not like Seaboard; more like some strong and flexible skin. Time seemed to pass very slowly. When the sun was high in the sky she got very hungry again, and she began thinking of the rib roast she’d had at Snow Rosen’s. She thought of ways she could have saved it—sticking it down the front of her jumpsuit, lashing it to her thigh. She had to remind herself that that was weeks ago, that it would surely have rotted against her skin by now. She sucked on her thumb and tasted salt. She looked over the side to see if she could see any fish, but all she saw was her own image, rippled and bent like in a fun house. Then she flicked herself in the cheek and sang herself a song and felt a little better.
On the ninth day she saw a person on the sea. The person was standing exactly on the horizon. She could not tell if it was a man or a woman, but it seemed to spread its arms in welcome. She tried to measure it with her thumb and forefinger, but when she held her hand up it went away. She thought maybe she had reached the mainland, maybe Daniel and his followers had erected a giant statue to greet her, but she sailed all day and it never got any closer. It just stood on the horizon, perfectly still, welcoming. She realized that someone must be walking backward across the ocean, leading her. The wind was good all day, and as night drew near, she felt from the person on the sea a sense of great approval.
On the day she forgot what day it was, there were ice crystals in the jib sail. She crunched them between her teeth. The person on the sea was sending her messages, but she couldn’t understand them. It was very cold and the sky was breaking into diamond shapes, and the diamond shapes were falling into the ocean, revealing something behind them. It was a ceiling. It was the ceiling of her apartment. She knew by the leak marks in the shapes of imaginary countries. It was the ceiling of her apartment and she was in her own bed. Outside the rains were starting. She turned over to tell her mother, but her mother was gone. She sat up in bed. Yellow walls came down before her eyes. Just as she was beginning to think that she had seen all this before, she understood the message of the person on the sea. The sails. The person was reminding her about the sails. She got out of bed and the floor rocked underneath her feet, and then she went fumbling about the room looking for the sails. It was hard because her arms and legs were very weak, and because what she saw kept switching back and forth, room boat room boat room boat room, until it got stuck somehow in between and the floor was all patchy where the sea broke through, and the ceiling was spotted with sky, and half the things she tried to grab dissolved like steam in her hands.
Finally she caught something, and held it, and some old muscle memory told her what to do with it, and then there was a mast in the middle of the apartment, with sails on it, and the sails were filling with air, and the apartment was moving on the ocean, and the person was shining through the front wall of the apartment.
Then the boat was moving very fast over the water. The water was screaming past in a green blur. She could hear it screaming. Icebergs began to flash by on both sides, milky green, luminous, shaped like towers, shaped like cows. It got so cold that her breath made a cloud around her head. The water was a new color, cloudy blue-white like a cataract on an aged eye. Its scream was higher. Sheets of ice came and knocked against the boat with a sound like bells ringing. She could see her breath-clouds floating out over the ice. She was weather now.
She saw that this was the final change, that she would become not a bird, but a cloud moving over the ocean. The cloud that she was becoming moved through light, and it moved through darkness. It moved below stars, and it moved below the sun. It saw the water grow thicker and thicker with ice, until the boat slowed down and could barely move. All the while the parts of her that were not cloud were falling away—her hunger, her fingers and toes, her concept of time, her name.
And soon or not soon, when the part of her that was not cloud was almost completely gone, was nothing but a tiny watcher in the middle of the vapor, the boat stopped moving. The ice set up around it, creaking and popping, like a pair of ancient hands closing with her in between. Behind her, before her, to the left of her, to the right of her, everywhere was ice. And then, far in the distance, she saw that the person on the sea had vanished, and in that person’s place were three flags waving in the cold wind, and on those flags were mountain lions.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book and I owe a great debt to my wonderful agent, Julie Barer, whose energy is as infectious as her insights are sharp. I’ve also been incredibly lucky to work with editors Reagan Arthur and Andrea Walker, who believed in the book and made it better, and with awesome publicist Marlena Bittner.
I am forever grateful to my teachers Rick Barot, Ethan Canin, Nan Cohen, Charles D’Ambrosio, Scott Hutchins, David MacDonald, Elizabeth McCracken, Rick Moody, ZZ Packer, Marilynne Robinson, and Malena Watrous. Tobias Wolff has been an invaluable source of knowledge and support. Jonathan Ames provided a key tip early on, and Samantha Chang’s smart and sensitive advice made the book what it is today. Seth Lerer has always been a wise friend to me and my writing. Connie Brothers has mysterious powers that should be acknowledged always.
Great thanks are due to all of my classmates at Iowa for their help and friendship. Ian Breen (who read the first chapter four times), Amanda Briggs, and Jim Mattson deserve a special shout-out. Sarah Heyward, Vauhini Vara, and Jenny Zhang have been better friends than I could ever have known to ask for; I miss you every day. Benjamin Hale has heard all the stories that went into this book and many that didn’t; thanks for listening. Thanks to Greg Wayne and Darryl Stein for reading the book before it went out into the world. And to Anna Holmes and everyone at Jezebel for being inspiring and understanding colleagues. And to Michael Curtis, for all his help with my first published story. Thanks to Meggy Wang for everything—your friendship has been life-sustaining.
Most of all, thanks to my parents and my brother. The seeds of this book were sown in our living room, in front of Doctor Who, and all of you were there.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anna North graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2009, having received a Teaching-Writing Fellowship and a Michener / Copernicus Society Fellowship. North grew up in Los Angeles and lives in Brooklyn.
www.annanorth.net
Reading Group Guide
AMERICA PACIFICA
A novel by
ANNA NORTH
A CONVERSATION WITH ANNA NORTH
The author of America Pacifica discusses her novel with Teddy Wayne
In the not too distant future of Anna North�
�s debut novel, America Pacifica, Darcy lives on the island of America Pacifica—one of the last habitable places on earth after the second ice age. What follows is a harrowing dystopian tale of Darcy’s search for her mother, a journey that unravels Pacifica’s dark history. North is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received a Michener / Copernicus Society Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, where it was nominated for a National Magazine Award, and her nonfiction has been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle and on Jezebel, where she is a staff writer. She grew up in Los Angeles and lives in Brooklyn, which is a borough of New York City in which very few writers and artists live. I spoke with her about her influences, the politics of her novel, and science fiction.
What were some of your literary inspirations for America Pacifica?
While I was writing America Pacifica, I was also reading a lot of noir fiction—Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Jim Thompson. These writers influenced me a lot, especially in their pacing and the isolation their main characters feel. The detectives in noir novels often face danger at every turn and feel like outsiders wherever they go, and I thought about them a lot when I was writing about Darcy’s search for her mom. I was also deeply inspired by Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, which features a young woman who’s raised by a book. I loved its dystopian setting—I’ve always devoured stories of gritty futures—but more than that, I was attracted to the story of a girl from difficult circumstances who grows up to be a hero. I’ve long been interested in what makes a person become heroic, what shapes her into someone with the ability to make history. So, in addition to The Diamond Age, I’ve been influenced by quest narratives such as The Odyssey and Arthurian legend.