In the lobby, dripping rainwater onto the carpeted mat, I overheard a group of nurses quarreling about the monsters. Most locals don’t believe the monsters exist, refer to the monsters as a “superstition” of the “natives.” Still, this season is always tense around town! There is a direct relationship between the level of tension and the number of bodies on the beach. Even for those who don’t believe in the monsters, the possibility is terrifying. That the monsters themselves might come ashore. That this town might get consumed alive overnight.
“The monsters have gotten bigger,” whispered a nurse, blinking through browline glasses.
“No one has ever seen one,” laughed a plump nurse.
“But an octopus?” said a nurse with a flattop haircut.
Oh, yes, I forgot to mention: The night before, a gigantic scarlet octopus had washed ashore, its arms tangled dementedly, its mantle crushed like a piece of rotten fruit. It is rare for the monsters to kill something of that magnitude. Until last night, an octopus had not washed ashore for seven years.
“The animals get killed by boats,” the plump nurse laughed.
“Propellers,” called a passing nurse, embracing a clipboard of paperwork.
“Or poachers,” the plump nurse said.
The nurse with the flattop haircut was shaking his head, huffily.
“The monsters can take human form! That’s why no one has ever seen one! We probably have but didn’t know!” the nurse with the flattop haircut argued, his hands on his waist.
I racked the broken umbrella, keyed the code for the elevator, rode to the floor above. It wasn’t illogical to think that the monsters could take human form. Organisms often evolve cryptic features. Jellyfish have evolved transparency. Sharks have evolved camouflaged skins, turtles have evolved camouflaged shells. Squid have evolved skin that changes color, sea slugs can mimic coral polyps, frogfish can mimic stones, pipefish can mimic seagrass, scorpion fish can mimic dead brown leaves. So the monsters might mimic us. That sort of crypsis would have an obvious logic, evolutionarily. Another species might have been living among us for centuries without us knowing. Perhaps so many centuries that the monsters themselves had forgotten, by now, that they were mimicking, that they were something separate, that human form didn’t mean human, necessarily.
The hallway upstairs is the length of an escape tunnel, although, for people who live there, it never leads to that. My stepbrother stood gazing out a bank of windows, lightning flickering across him, a puddle forming around his heels. Bright-red woolen hat, unbuttoned trench coat, red tie, charcoal suit, polished brogues. A nurse was murmuring somewhere, checking charts.
“He’s still sleeping,” Peter said.
He was gazing at the mountains in the distance, through the haze of rainfall.
“More loggers came,” Peter murmured. “They’re clear-cutting the backside of the mountains.” Lightning flashed again. “Destroying the whole ecosystem for a bit of profit.”
Peter and his girlfriend share a run-down, drafty lodge in the mountains overlooking a logging road. The lodge is smoky, and cramped, and leaks during storms, but nevertheless gives Peter and his girlfriend and his coconspirators an isolated location to prepare for their fires.
Just then, a number of seemingly unconnected details connected in my mind, images from that morning in the attic a few days ago: his unshaven cheeks, his mucky brogues, the fresh scrapes (barbwire, probably, maybe thorns) that had marked his palms and knuckles. It finally dawned on me where he had been, what he had been out doing, before coming to visit me. He had been scouting.
“Are you planning another event?” I said.
Peter blinked, glanced at me.
“Do you want to be a lookout?” Peter said.
“No,” I said.
“Because we could really use another lookout,” Peter said.
“No, no, no, no, no,” I said.
Peter grinned, teeth flashing. His grin faded. His voice lowered.
“Did you see the news last night?” Peter said.
“I don’t have a television,” I said.
“It’s like the media can sense the fires are coming,” Peter said, voice lowering even further. “Yesterday the stations in Juneau ran recaps of the other fires. Maps of the locations, photos of the buildings, random theories of random citizens.”
“There probably aren’t any other stories to run,” I said.
“Everybody interviewed referred to us as ‘ecoterrorists.’ Never ‘activists,’ never ‘guerrillas,’ never even ‘extremists.’ The ‘ecoterrorists.’ Every single time,” Peter said.
“Just, whatever you’re planning, please don’t get caught,” I said.
“Terrorists,” Peter grumbled, digging through the pockets of his trench coat. “With that word, in this country, you could hang anybody. In three hundred years we’ll have museums about terrorist executions, same as we have museums about witch burnings now. If Guantanamo isn’t the new Salem, I don’t know what is.”
Peter slipped a pair of date bars from his pockets. Date cashew cardamom, based on the color of the wrappers. Or, maybe, date pecan ginger. I no longer have the colors memorized.
“Hungry?” Peter said.
“Those have wrappers,” I said.
“I’ll recycle the wrappers,” Peter said.
“Those kind you can’t recycle,” I said.
Peter ate the date bars—four bites apiece—and stuffed the wrappers in a pocket.
“And whoever made those bars must have consumed electricity, with overwhelming odds the electricity was sourced from a coal plant or a nuclear reactor, which profit from the destruction of whole ecosystems,” I said.
“You have to make certain concessions, if you’re going to live a life,” Peter said through a mouthful, still chewing.
“That’s what the loggers say,” I said.
He swallowed, and laughed, and grinned again.
“Time to work,” Peter said.
He slapped my back, and turned to leave.
“Make sure he eats his breakfast,” Peter called.
As his footsteps receded toward the elevator, past doorway after doorway of wrecked bodies, I stared at the mountains, thinking through another proof.
1. Terrorism is the use of violence in pursuit of political objectives.
2. The purpose of a soldier is to use violence in pursuit of political objectives.
3. (1, 2) ⇒ The purpose of a soldier is to perform terrorism.
4. One is a terrorist ⇔ one performs terrorism.
5. (3, 4) ⇒ Soldiers are terrorists.
∴ Soldiers are terrorists.
Consequently,
6. Practically every government in the world has a military with soldiers.
7. (5, 6) ⇒ Practically every government in the world maintains terrorists.
8. Practically every government in the world has avowed hatred of terrorism.
9. (4, 7, 8) ⇒ Governments hate funding some programs.
∴ Governments hate funding some programs.
Grandpa Uyaquq’s room faces the ocean rather than the mountains. Filtered through the storm, the daylight cast a sea-green tint across the curtains, the wallpaper, the furniture, the motionless shapes of sleeping men. I sat in an upholstered chair alongside Grandpa Uyaquq, holding his wrist with my hand. A nurse pushing a cart clattered past the doorway; Mr. Nome, Grandpa Uyaquq’s roommate, blinked awake. He stared at me. He reached unsteadily for the eyeglasses on his nightstand, hesitantly hooked the eyeglasses to his ears, carefully adjusted the eyeglasses on his nose, and then stared at me, again, through the eyeglasses. After that he ignored me. He unbuttoned and rebuttoned the upper button of his pajamas, performed a grooming ritual involving his eyebrows, and then began writing an entry in his diary (just a plain leather journal, no unicorns, sorry). Mr. Nome h
as no family, never gets any visitors of his own. Since his stroke, he can use only a single hand, a single arm, a single leg, a single foot. Only half of his face can frown and smile. Furthermore, he has lost certain brain functions, suffering from a condition known as asemia. This means that Mr. Nome cannot understand symbols. All signs, all symbols, are now meaningless to him. The letters of our alphabet, with their loops and tittles and tails, are as inscrutable to him as the tildes and cedillas and breves of a foreign alphabet. Ditto marks, pound signs, ampersands, pilcrows, commas are indecipherable. Numbers are incomprehensible. An exit sign, a voltage warning, the gender symbols on public toilets, are utterly unintelligible. Cautionary crossbones might as well mean “recyclable”; slashed circles, “support fascism”; curved arrows, “beyond this point no hats allowed.” There are authors who experiment with asemic writing—writing novels and poetry in meaningless symbols—but Mr. Nome is not experimental. He simply cannot express himself any other way. Nonsense symbols are now his only outlet. Like glossolalia. Speaking in tongues. Writing the symbols seems to calm him.
I’m writing in my own now. A nurse has wheeled Mr. Nome off to the cafeteria for breakfast. Grandpa Uyaquq is wheezing in his sleep, drooling a bit on his pillow. I don’t know what he dreams of. Maybe he dreams of the monsters. Grandpa Uyaquq always wanted proof. He has six hundred dollars in an account at the bank where Peter works, reserved for whoever can document a sighting. Maybe that’s the truth about why I’ve been watching the beach so closely. I don’t want the money. But, just once, before the dementia totally consumes him, I wish that he could hold it. A photograph, a sketch, a description, anything. Proof he wasn’t wrong.
May 16th
Just read some. This latest chapter opens, “Feelings? Feelings? Any animal can have feelings! —Octun Odrade, A Makeshift Homunculus.” After the accidental destruction of the floating city, the novel has relocated (yet again) to a mythical city in the volcanoes of the Congo Basin, constructed in gleaming magma chambers by sovereign ngola with enslaved abika. The debtor soldier, concealed behind the stuffed hide of a mountain gorilla, is eavesdropping on a bizarre ceremony, after being forbidden, on eleven separate occasions, from watching.
Take note, unicorns: I’ve decided that just holding the proof isn’t enough. I want my grandfather to see the monsters himself. ∴, after work today, I walked to the pioneer home, signed him out, and wheeled him down through town to the harbor (stopping occasionally to pick up some crumpled aluminum, a stained napkin, a pink rubber band). A plaid woolen blanket was slung over my shoulders, and the camouflage binoculars hung from my neck, and the novel was stuffed into the seat of my jeans. Grandpa Uyaquq was zipped into a sky-blue down parka. His hair was plastered to his forehead in the front and matted chaotically to his neck in the back and puffing out wildly on both sides, which, if it had been an actual hairstyle, might have been called a “napper.” His wheelchair has wheels that squeak with each rotation. Along the way, I tried to talk to him, but his mind wasn’t there. A seaplane with bright pontoons landed in the harbor with a splash, which made his eyes widen, but that was as alert as his mind ever got. Unlike Mr. Nome, Grandpa Uyaquq can still use both sides of his body—both hands, both arms, both legs, both feet—and the linguistic consequences of his dementia are also different from those of asemia. He can’t speak anymore, but he can still comprehend written language, and he can still communicate. When his mind is there, he can shake his head “yes” and “no” to answer your questions. He can smile and frown, can laugh and groan, can rap his knuckles on your chest to scold you.
At the end of the boardwalk, I helped him stand, collapsed the wheelchair, and (lugging the wheelchair) then helped him totter across the black sand toward the point in the distance. The beach was deserted. There weren’t even footprints, just rippled divots molded into the sand by the wind. Flies hovered above the seals, the walruses, the porpoises, the giant octopus with the tangled arms. Birds fluttered from carcass to carcass, scavenging rotten meat. Crows, magpies, shrieking crested jays. At the point, I expanded the wheelchair, and helped him lower himself into the seat. I wrapped him in the plaid woolen blanket, set the camouflage binoculars on his lap, and then settled onto the boulder. All right! We were ready now! Let the monsters come! I thought.
“If you see anything, use the binoculars,” I said.
Grandpa Uyaquq was blinking as if about to fall back to sleep. Behind us, the pines obscured any view of the houses looming on the hillside above the beach. Pinecones occasionally dropped from the branches into the underbrush.
We hadn’t been there long when back toward the harbor a distorted, blurred figure stepped from the boardwalk, into the sand, and then began, like a mirage, flickering toward us along the shoreline. The figure gained definition gradually, took on form, but not until it somehow tripped over the sand, caught itself, did I recognize who it was. She was marching directly at us. That girl. Ash. I was overwhelmed suddenly by contradictory emotions: joy, dismay, relief, panic. I became very aware of the stain (chocolate, salvaged) on the sleeve of my sweater. I was possibly blushing, and definitely sweating. (None of this made any sense whatsoever. But you unicorns deserve to know the truth. I can be that illogical.)
For the entire length of the beach, the girl marched directly at us, intently, resolutely, without wavering—and then proceeded to walk directly past us. Not far, but did. Then stopped, and—still ignoring us—bent to look at a dead seal. (One of the hundreds—who knows how she chose it?)
After perusing the carcass, and sniffing the air, and gagging dramatically, she straightened again. She glanced at us. As if just noticing us sitting there, she waved, and strolled back over.
She stood between the wheelchair and the boulder, her hands propped on her hips, scrutinizing my grandfather, then turning to me.
“So, giant, you’re on monster duty today too?” Ash said.
I pointed at Grandpa Uyaquq.
“He’s the expert,” I said.
Her face changed abruptly—an aspiring musician in the presence of a rock star.
“You know stuff about the bloodsuckers?” she said to him, in almost a whisper, awed.
Grandpa Uyaquq blinked at the ocean, oblivious.
“Sorry, his mind isn’t always there,” I said.
She frowned.
“Oh,” she said.
She pursed her lips, and cocked her head, peering at him.
“Hey, Gramps, I like your hair,” she said.
Grandpa Uyaquq blinked at the ocean, oblivious.
“I like his hair,” she whispered at me, like a secret.
She nudged the novel aside, brushed the surface of the boulder, as if sweeping off invisible dust, and then sat with me. Her hair hung from the raised hood of a gigantic anorak. Now that her hair was dry, it was a paler gray, almost white. There wasn’t any rain today. Nevertheless, just in case, I had brought my umbrella, which is fixed, partially. (At the pioneer home yesterday, while I was sitting with Grandpa Uyaquq, a nurse found the umbrella on the rack in the lobby and—probably assuming it had been abandoned—garbaged it. I had to dig it out of the dumpster afterward.) Ash examined the umbrella, touching the duct tape hesitantly, as if attempting to read the pulse of a sleeping animal.
“How did your hair get that color?” I said.
“Dye,” she said.
She shoved her hands into the pockets of her anorak.
“I have to use special shampoo,” she said.
She hunched, shivering.
“If you knew how much the shampoo costs, you’d hate me forever,” she said.
She turned toward the horizon. I couldn’t think of anything at all to say. Wind thrashed across the ocean, making the waves whitecaps.
“We aren’t going to be lovers,” she said.
“OK,” I said.
“Good, great, you didn’t even put up a fight,” she said.
>
I hoped Grandpa Uyaquq hadn’t caught that line about lovers. (I did agree, though, that anything romantic was totally out of the question.) She tucked her hair, within the hood, behind her ears. Her lips were crusted with something like raspberry jam.
“Let’s pretend that I’m a monster,” she said, “a monster that ran away, and now I’ve come here searching for the others, waiting for my kind to come for me, but I haven’t decided yet whether I actually want to go back.”
She examined the novel, flipping past dog-eared pages, water-damaged pages, the varicolored marginalia of library patrons.
“Maybe I’m only eighteen—nineteen in a month—but I’ve already been everywhere and seen everything,” she said. “My parents wear boring clothes, my parents have boring haircuts, but my parents are into cryptids. Teachers, totally ordinary, except for that one weird thing. We didn’t take trips to monuments, to amusement parks, to sightsee big buildings. Every trip we took, we were looking for cryptids. Here, there, all over the country.”
“But your parents are dead now?” I said.
She squinted, thinking.
“Yes,” she said.
She set the novel aside again.
“Thanks for reminding me,” she said.
She batted at some flies hovering near the boulder.
“We took camping trips looking for Urayuli, Sasquatch, Chasquatch. We took road trips looking for the Grassman, the Goatman, the Mothman, the Beaman. We took boating trips looking for Bessie, Tessie, Chessie, Sharlie, Champie. We took hiking trips looking for Wampus Cats, Skunk Apes, Thunderbirds. The Beast of Bladenboro. The Mogollon Monster. The Fouke Creature. The Jersey Devil. The Dover Demon. The Loveland Frog. Momo, which supposedly has a head the shape of a pumpkin. Melon Heads, which supposedly have heads the shape of melons. Chupacabra, which suck the blood of goats and sheep. Pukwudgie, which are supposedly scary, but are probably cute. Even things nobody else considers cryptids! The lights in Paulding, Michigan. The lights in Gurdon, Arkansas. The lights in Ballard, Utah. The lights in Marfa, Texas. The lights in Hornet, Missouri. The lights in Oviedo, Florida. The totally unexplained humming sounds in Taos, New Mexico; in Kokomo, Indiana; in Hilo, Hawaii. My parents thought the hums were from some unidentified species of giant bat, like their song or their call or whatever, when the bats were mating.”
Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes Page 33