Genius Loci

by Edited by Jaym Gates

  He stopped, maybe six inches from the edge of the circle, and put his hands up like he was leaning against an invisible wall.

  “I don’t think I know what you’re talking about,” I said. I found my legs could move again, if a little, and so I made them do that. One slide step back, and then another, and then I froze when I saw him noticing.

  “I think you do,” he said. “I think you’re a little too curious for your own good. So I’m going to give you something, something free.”

  “I don’t want no gifts from you, sir.” The ‘sir’ was involuntary, and his smile got nasty when he heard it.

  “It’s not the sort of thing you refuse, son. The Devil wants to give you a gift, you take it. You take it and you say thank you, or he might decide to give you another one.”

  “I’ve got everything I want from you,” I said.

  “No, you don’t,” he replied, and stepped out of the circle. Grass died under his boots as he took slow steps toward me. “What, you thought there was some magic keeping me in there? You didn’t draw that circle, son. Wasn’t no medicine man or priest, neither. I walked that line, and I made that boundary, and I can cross it any time I please.”

  “Please.” I echoed him. “I just want to go.” My knees felt weak, felt like they were going to buckle.

  The Devil shook his head, and brought his hand up in benediction. “I don’t think so. You see, you gave me something tonight. It isn’t often I get a chance to explain myself, and there’s a certain pleasure in that. So if you gave me something, it’s only right and proper that I give you something back. And if what you want is to see, well, I can give you Sight.”

  My legs gave out, and I dropped to my knees. “No,” I said. “I don’t want to see any more.”

  The Devil placed his hand on my forehead. “What you want is about the least important thing in the world right now. I give you Sight, so you can see what’s hiding under the skin of the world. Some of it’s my handiwork, some of it’s the other fella’s. Down these parts, you’ll see a lot more that’s mine. This is haunted country, son, and I give it to you in all its glory and terror. ‘Cause I been working real hard, and it’s about damn time someone could appreciate what I done.”

  Then he said something in some language I don’t know and don’t want to know, and his hand caught fire. And that fire, it poured down his fingers and into those sharp black nails, and from there it flowed like oily water and cheap wine into my eyes. It burned, so help me, it burned. It burned away my old way of seeing, it burned away my old eyes. I could feel it pouring in and filling every fiber, could feel it thrumming through me like a high tension wire in the wind.

  And then he pulled his hand away, and I Saw.

  Saw the molten hell-rock of the Tramping Ground, stamped flat with a thousand hoof prints just underneath that white dirt and sand. I saw shapes moving in the forest that weren’t beasts and weren’t men. I looked up and saw a line in the sky where an angel had flown by, and it was so beautiful I wanted to just sit down and cry.

  “One other thing,” he said, and that snapped my attention right back. There were no angels here, and none coming to help me neither.

  “Yessir?” I said.

  He smiled. “You’ve laid eyes on the Devil, and you’re going to walk away after you’ve done so. That’s a rare thing, son, a rare and powerful thing. But that also means you’ve had the Devil’s eyes upon you, and once I’ve seen you, up close and personal like this, I don’t ever stop seeing you. I’ll know where you are, boy. I’ll know where to find you. You’ll have the Devil looking over your shoulder any time I damn well please to cast my eye that way, and you’ll be thinking ‘bout that every time you kiss your mother’s cheek or make love to that long-legged whore you call a lady friend. That’s where the real price for your answer starts to be paid, boy. As for the rest of it? I’ll think of other things. I always do.”

  I swallowed hard. “I don’t know what I could ever do for you, sir.”

  “You will,” he said. “Now go. I got some thinking to do.” And he turned and started walking away, and where he did the hell-rock bubbled up around his feet.

  I waited ’til I was sure he couldn’t see me, and then I turned and ran back down to the road. Nothing followed me but his laughter, but that was enough.

  THE OTHER SHORE

  Rebecca Campbell

  Rebecca Campbell, author of "The Other Shore", grew up in the village of Cowchican Bay on the coast of British Columbia. Originally home to First Nations People, it was settled by Europeans in the 1860s and for many years was a busy fishing and logging community. Today, the main industries are fishing and tourism. The lives of people, fish, birds, mammals, and all other life in the region are completely dependent on the health of the ocean, and the life cycle of the salmon that spawn and hatch in the area every year.

  In 2011, a tsunami caused three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in Japan to meltdown. As a result of the accident, tainted water flowed into the ocean, causing concerns about the impact to ocean life and, by extension, human beings. Campbell found this to be "enraging". It became the catalyst for her vision of an avenging genius loci who could protect the sea from the predations and pollutions of humans.

  In this story, the archeologists incur the wrath of the Genius Loci because they refuse to comprehend the inter-connectedness of the people, animals, and other organisms that make the whole of the sea. Every small thing has some purpose, some story, some place in the story of the ocean. To ignore this, to exploit the sea for the need of the moment, is to invite disaster.

  ***

  The shoreline is indefinite, having been closer to the village, or across the bay, or far out in what is now a channel. For a few hours on a day in 1700 it was a kilometer up the river valley. I know this because I remember the day in 1700, but if one is shorter-lived—or not so clever—one might know that temporary high-tide by the shattered stumps that still stand just short of where the ground rises, exactly as they did on the afternoon of the tsunami. It’s a ghost forest now, and runs all along the river, so far inland that when one reaches its edge, one can no longer hear the waves.

  Every summer for a decade now, Charlie brings a gang of them to town. They change year to year, students mostly. In other years I ignored them, maybe said hello Charlie when I passed him on the street or the restaurant.

  This year, though, their dig takes in the midden. Do you see the grey heron poised above his supper, where the beach is the white of discarded molluscs? That is a human undertaking, and nearly as old as I am. Its history does not instantly reveal itself to shortlived creatures of Charlie’s kind, and in ten thousand years there has been little change in the whorl of the periwinkle, or the abalone’s deep and iridescent shell. Someone pried them open. Someone cut the muscly foot that anchored the hinge, and ate its body, and discarded its shell on the heap. If Charlie climbs up the hill from the midden, into town and the restaurant, I’ll serve them a similar creature garnished with lemon wedges, or wrapped in a cone of irradiated nori.

  Charlie’s crew brings trowels and huge spools of high-visibility twine. They bring the laws of stratiography that fix time and its progressions in place by measuring the earth below their feet. They segment the ghost forest and dig up flat spangles cut from mother-of-pearl, chips of obsidian from a quarry eight hundred kilometers to the south and far inland; a dusting of volcanic ash, and the denser, blacker deposits of a forest fire.

  They don’t often know what they’re looking at, though their work is meticulous. Even Charlie misses evidence of the other shore: ancient tree-roots sunk in the unforgiving salt. Palm fronds. They find but do not recognize the tooth-chip from a shipwrecked sailor who left a village outside of Quanzhou during the reign of Gegeen Khan. Filaments of rope from an outrigger canoe. A Tahitian pearl. They find a glass float—faintly bluegreen, as though constituted in the water from which it emerged after decades mid-Pacific, passenger on a Ma
rch storm of 1930—that belonged to Susumu, a Meiji fisherman.

  #

  In the afternoon the sun throws long shadows toward the beach, and Charlie leads them up the hill from the dig to the restaurant, where they take one of the big tables on the sidewalk. I make sure they’re in my section, so I can listen, and say, “Hey guys, I’m Lin. I’ll be looking after you,” and bring them pitchers of Sea Dog Amber Ale. One of the younger men talks—uninterruptable—about microbrews until I don’t know how Charlie stands it.

  I bring them calamari and the aforementioned sweet abalone (imported, having been fished to near-extinction twenty years ago). Chips, deep fried mac&cheese, sashimi (the salmon is farmed, the snapper is not), mercury-rich tuna tataki. Extra napkins. I know what they want before they do, in the manner of one who serves with great talent.

  “So, what did you guys find today?”

  The girl with the unwashed hair says, “Some rope fragments. A glass float.”

  “Those are so pretty!“

  “Pretty. Okay.” Corrected by the young man who cares so much about microbrews. He’s the one who explained to me, the first day, that they are archaeologists. He is an MA Candidate. He works on pre-contact material culture of the Malahat Nation. I think of Susumu, and how he lost the five floats his uncle made when he was little, that he inherited from his father the season before. How four shattered while this one survived the Pacific gyre to alight here. Unlikely. “They’re for collectors,” he adds.

  “They’re nicer than Styrofoam, that looks so awful on the beach. We’re doing a great oyster burger today.”

  “How’s the halibut?” Charlie asks.

  I look for my manager. She’s distracted.

  “I wouldn’t, if I’m honest. But the chowder is awesome.” I think about immigrant cattle from Jersey, and the long migrations of saffron. Their unlikely collision with bacon and scallops at this far western margin. They order the chowder.

  From the sidewalk we can see most of town, hear the sharp, sweet echo of footsteps on concrete at the bottom of the street, where the kids are now emerging from the afternoon, caped in beach towels, their parents laden with coolers, laden also with radiation and its malignant gleam. On my way to Charlie’s table with ketchup bottles and malt vinegar I stop to watch the kids climb toward the ice cream shop and wish I could tell them to fill their mouths with seawater and then order a double cone, so salt might render the ice cream sweeter than anything that has ever existed.

  #

  Their first opportunity came in the form of a button that unsettled their stratiography. I felt the frisson when they found it, spreading through the six as though through a single body and I knew they had touched the other shore. I thought maybe it’s time. I was hopeful.

  The button arrived on the waistcoat of a very young midshipman-and-water-colourist who leaned over the gunwale of the longboat in which he travelled from the HMS Encounter to an earlier iteration of this very village. Under the water he saw an even earlier village, drowned, though he could make out the fallen poles of a longhouse. He was contemplating its age when he realized that a face returned his gaze. It was a whale, perhaps, or a thunderbird carved in wood, with a few grains of paint still affixed, showing the eyes staring upward. An amnesiac ancient, he thinks, god or genius loci dozing among the dooryards of what was once a village, that had squatted on what was once the shoreline, before the glaciers melted, the waters rose, or the land fell.

  The watercolourist is not a good sailor. His uniform is in bad repair, and one button of his waistcoat rests against the gunwale as he reaches down to the surface through which he looks—past his own eyes, which make anxious contact with their doubles, as though in warning—and down to the other shore, just out of reach. He leans, dirtying further his dirty cuffs, and the indifferent stitches of his last mend break and the button springs over the gunwale and into the water and clops like a stone that won’t skip. The old creature, the amnesiac, reaches out one hand to catch the falling button to its bosom.

  That’s gone, then. Back onboard HMS Encounter he’ll be admonished for his disgraceful appearance. Behind him the button remains, covered in silt, then in sand, then in a plastic baggie with a tag in Charlie’s terrible handwriting. He keeps it in his pocket because it confuses him. It is a disobedient button. It undermines known laws regarding the deposition of strata, and the careful exhumation of the past. It is only the beginning.

  But before that, and just this moment, the longboat surges toward the shore and the arboreal haunting stands knee deep in yellow grasses, the midden white at its feet. The Midshipman cannot imagine it, but there was once an enormous wave, rising through the shallows until it curled over the low bush of the shore, and rising through the villages it dragged the children out to sea, sending them all down to the other shore.

  #

  If Charlie’s lot were the kind who had prophetic dreams, and if it were among my talents to provide them with prophetic dreams, I would send them this. I would have one—the girl who doesn’t wash her hair, perhaps—awaken in a longboat, or a kayak, or a canoe. She would look down to find herself wearing a skirt of cedar bark. She would lean where the watercolourist also leaned, and seeing the drowned world, the faintest, whitened outline of its foundations, a glimpse of stainless steel through the seaweed. Or—if I am ambitious, and trust her to understand—the gleam of something that does not yet exist from her perspective: an underwater bulb attached to a surviving solar panel that still works, sometimes, despite the microbial haze of seawater. In the manner of dreams she finds her eyes zooming in to see, beside the panel, a cellphone lying on the ocean bed, where no such thing should exist.

  #

  The next day my feet hurt before I’d even put on my black nurse’s shoes, and the hot oil of the fryer had so penetrated my work skirt that it stunk—like fish, like fryer grease—even as I pulled it off the morning laundry line. And I thought, I will never not smell of fried fish, even if I live another ten millennia, even if the Kula plate rises again like Lost Atlantis. Even if the radioactive plume re-collects itself, and the glaciers return with the Thunderbirds and abalone. I remember smelling of smokehouses and doghair, and before that of mud and green things, but never so inescapably as I do now.

  That is the day—when I cannot stand the humanish smell of my awful black polyester work-skirt—that they come into the restaurant carrying a yellow sony sport alkman, filthy, from 1986, and set it on the table.

  “Oh, hey,” I say pointedly, “do you guys want a towel for that?” And when they don’t answer—rendered giddy and stupid by the object before them—I bring them bar towels anyway, with which they do nothing, preferring to stare at the alkman as it leaks ash onto my nice red plastic tablecloth. Though they found it under the deposits of a pre-industrial forest fire it is still brightly yellow. Inside there is a mixtape from 1987 whose second side is made up entirely of “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” repeated six times.

  “We’ve got some awesome specials—”

  “—Charlie, it’s a hoax—”

  “I’ll give you some time,” I say, but Charlie calls out to me, over his shoulder, waving his hand as though I’m a taxicab. It would only be worse if he snapped his fingers.

  “A couple pitchers of the Lager, eh?”

  “Yeah yeah,” I say, “on their way.”

  The next morning it rains. When I’ve finished with the ketchup bottles I go out back through the kitchen with bag after bag of trash—dirty napkins, and child-gnawed straws from lunch, the fragile shells of shrimp with their powerful stench. In the parking lot, which is puddled and oilslicked with rainbows, I think about them under their tent, washing the fragments that so obsess them. These tourists, who reach their hands for the other shore without knowing a damn thing. These temporary souls, trespassers, immigrants, how immune they remain to unlikelihood.

  They will find or have found the anklet of a Tuamotuan woman who reached this blue-green shore
by a series of tragedies and accidents I alone remember. She arrived in an outrigger, blown from the far western islands, four months pregnant, her skin caked with salt and her eyes fluttering in their sockets, but the little swimmer in her womb turning his somersaults, and kept safe in his own seabed of salt and blood. I brought her water, and fed her salmon and salal berries from a cedar bowl. She bore her child. She died twenty-five years later, left five children, and her anklet in the earth below a longhouse whose remains are now halfway across the bay. A black Tahitian pearl, a bead of polished lava, and another of island coral that shed a faint light—diffuse, atomic, tropical—from the atoll of its birth.

  They’ll find the pearl. They’ll find the stone weight from five thousand years before, that a young man strung on a line of tendon and flung out across the bay, and promptly lost, the silly boy, though it was my gift to him, when he needed it.

  #

  That evening I brought them three pitchers, and then another three, and they drank under the awning while the rain fell. The first, prescient bronze on the maple leaves, hinting at autumn in high summer.

  “So it’s contaminated,” Charlie says, his greasy grey hair hanging in elfknots to his beard. He is remarkable for the constant dirt beneath his fingernails, the nervous flutter of his eyes.

  “But the sedimentation—”

  “—Sure. Fine. But there’s a coke bottle in a strata of archaic cedar ash.”

  Charlie has made it clear that he will not be taken in because Time’s voyage is one-way—even in a Tsunami—and he is blind to the tangled logic of the high-tide line. When I ask if they want to try the banoffee pie we’ve got on for dessert, he ignores me, and that’s just childish, Charlie, I thought you were better than that. You’re just rude.