“Okay. You want coffee?”
Charlie snaps his no so sharply it might be a door slamming, and then I think back at him what do you take me for, little monkey? But he is impervious, so I lean on them with my own sharpness. They’re too stupid to feel their minds ripple, to notice that the slammed no opens into yes. In the kitchen I collect mugs on a tray, and I breathe over them, and over the sugar packets, the cream, covering all with the faint and invisible film of my breath. Salt.
#
It will swamp you with the smack of saltwater, especially you, Charlie, in the instant your lips touch the lip of the cup that has upon it the salt of my mouth. You will find yourself unable to stop thinking of the moment your head goes under, how for an instant your scalp is dry under your hair, before water winkles through to the roots and your skin leaps to goosebumps, and then submerged you tilt your head and seawater is in to your eardrums, and your sinuses, and down your throat, and all the wrigglers, the drifters, the spunk, the free-floating ovum, combining into the drifting zygotes of a billion different creatures, the single-celled and the amoebic, microbial colonies and embryonic clusters. Charlie. The salt stings inside you, as the water carries all those creatures up into your skull, before you release them in a snort and a bloom of mucus. You’re tumbling and buoyant in the cold and the salt, a bluegreen element constituted of bodies fucking, and dying, and being born, and growing, and leaving behind their recombined genetic matter to further recombine.
For an instant he is a drowned man. He rouses himself long enough to pay the bill and trail after the others up the hill to the guesthouse. He knows that somewhere there’s a trigger, but he’s too stupid to remember the taste of my breath in his coffee. That evening the setting sun glanced between the edge of cloud and the horizon. For a moment the air was cool-smelling and wet, as it will be in October, when the tourists are gone, and only newly-drunk teenagers will still go swimming.
That night some of Charlie’s crew will creep into bedrooms not their own, carrying condoms and bottles of brandy. The tedious young man who so loves microbrews will smoke a cigarette in the gazebo at the bottom of the garden, the one that overlooks the wetlands at the head of the bay. And he will call his girlfriend, and plead with her to just talk to him please just talk to him.
At home, my feet out of their work-shoes will be swollen and bear the imprint of my socks, so I put them up on the coffee table and decide to skip laundry. I think about the girl from Tuamotu with her anklet of pearl, and try to name her—Afaitu? Poe?—but in ten thousand years there are more names than even I can remember.
#
Though it began last night when Charlie felt the wave close over his head, that—like the alkman, like the button—was only the harbinger. One of the youngest ones, just twenty, assigned to the meticulous work of the teaspoon and the whisk, finds a Starbucks mug showing the name and skyline of an unfamiliar city.
“I don’t know,” she says. For a moment she is stupid. She thinks the mistake is hers, and she’ll get in trouble for digging into the wrong past. She looks through the earth to comfort herself with familiar things, the threads of a cedar apron, the abalone spangles. Instead she uncovers a flip phone with a pink sparkly butterfly sticker on the back. It’s covered in ash. If they had a Geiger counter it would tick.
“What did you do?” Charlie asks the girl when she shows him the flip phone. He didn’t sleep well last night, and when he did sleep he dreamed of deep water. His forehead is muddy where he scratched in the compulsive motion he makes when he is anxious, and his work goes poorly. When he’s not working, he thinks—incessantly—about the moment of submersion.
Though he snaps at them, it doesn’t stop. They find PDAs and tamagochis, a bottle of Spelman’s Elixir ca. 1873. A single white tennis sock with a pale pink bobble folded as though to protect the delicate whale-bone hook from an antique carver of great art. Find greenstone from Aotearoa, and black argillite that traveled down the coast from the Gwaii in the foot of a canoe. Find a bladder of oolichan oil. Find Oribeware, up the coast from what is just now called “Oregon,” the result of a shipwrecked Japanese fishing boat in an earlier millennium. Find a single page of that Rolling Stone from 1993, with Janet Jackson on the cover.
Charlie sweats through his khaki camp shirt. He stops the three who’ve uncovered the Rolling Stone and calls them all to the tent. It is summer again, after the previous day’s unseasonable rain. They think he’s going to reveal something to him, some plan, some theory.
“That’s it for today,” is all Charlie says, after a long moment in which he stares at their assembled feet. “Go on back to the house.”
When they troop past, I see the beer-enthusiast text his silent girlfriend, thumbs jabbing his unnameable anxiety onto the screen, though he deletes the words before he can send them.
Charlie, left behind, stops his work to stare out into the bay. Despite my little gift of the previous night he is too stupid to know that he stands on time’s faultline. The kids know better than to play there, and the teenagers don’t go there at night to drink and fuck in secret, though it’s far enough from town to be suitable for both activities.
But Charlie is not clever, so he keeps digging, alone, and finds a piece of gorilla glass and aluminum fused in an unfamiliar configuration, embedded deep in what must have been hot ash. A tetrapack of juice with a chip that raves in a thin, repetitive voice about the miraculous properties of its organic Jaboncilla.
It is not the noisy tetrapack, nor the evidence of ash that surrounds the unfamiliar hardware that stops him. It is the skull just visible beneath the most ancient layer at the bottom of the pit. A skull that—when it is disinterred—bears the irrefutable signs of an embedded electronic device, gold fused to the bone at the right temple beside a worn hole—trepanning of a still-to-come kind—where filaments once passed into the long-gone brain.
When he reaches the skull Charlie leaves without saying anything, and walks up to the restaurant, which is empty but for me at a table where I can watch the door, wrapping flatware in paper napkins.
“Charlie,” I say, as he pushes the plastic ribbons aside and comes in. “Charlie?”
“Oh,” he says. “Right, it’s…?”
“Lin.”
“Okay, Lynn.” He says. “Can I get some coffee?” It looks like a question, but it doesn’t sound like one.
I gather the cup and the coffee, and I think it’s not easy to touch the other shore. He has been narrow-minded. He has ignored the evidence of time’s instability, though it is before his eyes. But it is not easy.
“Maybe I can help,” I say as I set out his coffee. “Maybe I can give you a hand.”
I wait. An opportunity for repentance, I think. A chance to ask.
“Lynn, look, I’m kind of working here. I kind of need you to leave me alone.”
You are insistent in your ignorance. I would like a little awe.
Lean hard. It’s all there: earthquake, tsunami, subduction, meltwaters, gyres, currents, rising tides, reactors. There were prophetic dreams, and floods. Immigrants and refugees. Sasquatch and contrails and fallout shelters.
He’s sweating now. He puts a hand up to his head where he sees sparks that swim—like sperm, like schools of bright-bellied fish—through his peripheral vision.
Under the silt, and hidden by the barnacles of an earlier tide-line, the bronze canon of a Spanish galleon. There was a giantess with a basket made of snakes, kidnapping children to eat for her supper. There were gold ingots in the woods, and a set of steps carved in the granite mountainside, descending to a corridor that, once found and left, is never found again. The epoch of the glacier and the epoch of its withdrawal, when breakneck meltwaters trip down the hillsides, and all the things taken up by its dragging underbelly are revealed again to the air. I remember when we found frozen mammoths in the till of withdrawing glaciers, how we’d search them out, and relish them for the tang of extinction.
Cha
rlie makes a sound like gurgling.
Drones. Oil spills. The ticktick of the geigercounter. The goo of dormant nanobots. Charlie’s breath bubbles in his chest. Thunderbirds—a family of them lived as humans, far to the northwest of here. And, Charlie, there will be thunderbirds again. The sea withdraws or advances daily, seasonally, on an epochal clock.
The other shore is indefinite: saltwater, and fresh, stone and liquid, invertebrate and mammal, spit and inlet, then and now shoved against one another by time’s tectonics. If you were a wiser man, Charlie, water logic would not so disturb you. But you are stupid, and you are small.
#
I have often forgotten how fragile they are, thinly-armoured like spot prawns, their minds translucent like the grey-green shell they call Pododesmus macrochisma. The hightide line I make on the inside of his skull swells one side of his face, one eye rolls up, as though he is searching the ceiling.
I am always so sorry, and it is always too late. I should be punished for what I’ve done, but who can punish me? There’s only exile, which I chose after Afaitu, with the Tahitian pearl on her ankle, or the silly boy who lost the bone hook I carved for him with great and original art.
As I have done before, I should walk into the island’s interior valleys, and live with the mountain lion and the argumentative corvidae. I should walk until I can no longer hear the sea, and then walk further, and wait for the terminal wave that is, one day, coming, soon, yesterday, tomorrow, that will disorder time with its passage, or has already done so, that will leave nothing in its wake. Not even me.
AFTERPARTY:
or, NOT OUT OF THE WOODS
Chaz Brenchley
The enchanted forest is found in fairytales around the world. In real life, woods look mysterious and they are full of both danger and opportunity. The woods are homes for a myriad of organisms, some of which are poisonous, some of which are predators, and some of which are food. Night falls sooner in the woods than anywhere else, and even in mid-day it's hard to see between the trees. A deer can escape from a hunter in the woods with ease, and a bear can take the hunter completely by surprise. Is it so strange to picture that unicorns could hide between the trees, or that bears can talk? In folklore, enchanted forests are places of magic, adventure, and transformation.
Enchanted forests can be places of menace or refuge, hindrance or help. Sometimes they are all of these things, in turn. The Beast's castle in "Beauty and the Beast" is located in the forest, and at various points in the story it is a place of menace, redemption, and physical and spiritual transformation. Hansel and Gretel find an evil witch’s' cottage in the forest, and Snow White finds refuge in the cottage of the dwarves. In many fairy tales and in medieval romances, the woods are a place to find love, often in surprising ways. For instance, a different Snow White, the sister of Rose Red, marries a prince who was transformed into a bear, while Rose Red marries the prince's brother.
Enchanted forest stories can take many forms, but they carry common threads of mystery, magic, and transformation. The protagonist of an enchanted forest story enters the woods (or lives in the woods and encounters something new about them) and has an adventure, after which they are not the same. Sometimes the story is inverted—instead of the hero coming to the woods, the woods come to the hero. A bear stumbles into the sisters' cottage and becomes a prince. An imp who lives in the woods appears before an imprisoned girl and helps her turn straw into gold. The theme of mystery and transformation holds true. The woods give you what you need, if not want you want.
***
“…It’s not a wake, though, right?”
“It’s not a wake, Gordy, no. We had a wake. Remember?”
“’Course I remember, I was there.”
“Too right you were. Which is why I doubt you can remember.”
“I remember you. Stepping politely outside to throw up in the gutter, like you were still a kid.”
“Honey, you obviously didn’t know me as a kid. I was never that polite. I’d throw up on anything. Anyone. Quin knew.”
“I’m sure.”
“Hell, it was Quin’s fault, more often than not. He had no sense of rationing the young—”
“Enough, people. Seriously. We need to decide if we’re doing this or not. It’s not a wake; it’s not for Quin at all. This one’s for Gerard. Look, we had this amazing year, yeah? We were amazing. We’ll never be that good again. We gave Quin his long farewell, we took care of him all the way; we saw him out and we buried him and we drank a tot or two, or in Gordy’s case a bottle. And through it all Gerard was in the house, living it; and I guess we did what we could for him but it wasn’t about him, it couldn’t be. And it strikes me now that I never saw him crack a smile, even when the rest of us were romping. He carried all of us, if you ask me, more than any of us knew, and he shouldn’t have had to do that. And now he’s doing the hardest thing, he’s selling up and moving on, moving out; and if we let him he’ll pack and sort that whole bloody house by himself, and I just don’t think he should have to do that. Many hands make light work; we could do it for him in a weekend.”
“We could, aye. And we’ll get under his feet and in his way like we always did, going way back, before Quin was even sick. And he’ll scowl behind his glasses and flay us with that awful masterful sarcastic voice of his, and you think he’ll enjoy that? You think he’ll be grateful?”
“Yes, I do. More than that, I think he needs it. I don’t think he actually can do this by himself, I think it’ll break him. The house always needed the two of them to keep it in check. With Quin gone… Well. That’s why he’s selling, of course. He should have done it sooner. But what say, people? Are we doing this?”
“Hell, yes.”
“Of course we are.”
“Did you even need to ask?”
#
It’s not the house. It never was the house. I didn’t say a word because I didn’t need to, they took me for granted as they always had, as they always should have done—but I could have told them better, if I ever thought they’d listen. Not the house.
The house is a ’twenties suburban semi, on a lane that overlooks a park and then peters out into woodland, one of those urban pockets of an older England entirely subsumed by an overreaching population that doesn’t know, that never will know what jewels it has swallowed down.
At least the trees survive, that odd little isolated patch of them: something to be grateful for. There’s enough wood there for kids to scare themselves, for teenagers to hang out and hide up, for older men—us—to take a walk, take a break when things got too much with Quin and the park below was just too open and exposed. Trauma nurtures the furtive in all of us; at one time or another we all need to run for cover.
The park’s Victorian, and untouchable. Even the railings are original. They run along the south side of the lane; the north side is built up all the way, fifty houses just like Quin’s, tucked side by side and here’s hoping you get on with your neighbours.
I asked him once, why that house, why there? He smiled and said, “For the boys, of course. They come out of the trees, ready for anything; someone needs to be here, to pick them up.” He gave me a moment to think about that, and then he said, “As I remember, you were one of them, weren’t you, Jody?”
I gave him a smile for remembering and a kiss for my name, because this was quite late in the year, and by then he wasn’t always sure quite who we were or where our stories crossed. I said, “Oh, I surely was. And I’ve been here or hereabouts ever since, and I’m not sure I ever said thank you. Not properly.”
“Of course not. You’d never let me down that badly. I trained you better.”
His voice was as thin as his bones by then, and that was as much talk as he was good for, he who used to run on and on at the mouth as though he had words banked up, reservoirs and oceans, as though he never could run dry.
I slipped a cube of cold beef consommé between his lips, and left him to suck o
n it. Which he would do because it was soothing to his throat and strong to his palate, something he could taste yet, something to absorb him; which we wanted him to do because it was pure protein almost, the better part of a cow boiled down, something to absorb.
I should know, I’d made it. When I wasn’t sitting with him, I spent most of my time in the kitchen—but there was nothing new in that. I always had.
#
As I came walking down the lane, early that Saturday morning, there were half a dozen more of us sitting on the garden wall, all in a line. We never used to show up so many altogether, we had a roster and we stuck to it, pretty much; but Quin’s last days changed that, and the days after. We were all there for his leaving, for the funeral and the wake—and then we made a mess of it afterwards, because you can draw up a roster for nursing a sick friend but not for visiting his bereaved. Especially not when it’s Gerard. He’d have known. So we turned up in awkward clumps, or else not at all for days on end; and when he grew tired of that he just locked up the house and went away for a while.
Once he was back we did plan, we phoned around in the old round robin and agreed to leave him strictly alone until he invited us. Which he did, by twos and threes, for dinner or a concert or a gallery opening, all those things we couldn’t do with Quin. And we went, of course; and we gave him invitations in our turn, militarily, by ones and twos in strict rotation; and almost everything was edgy and we almost never saw each other except like that, in small parties with Gerard.
Until he let Pete know that he was moving, and Pete called us all to the pub; and now we were here, and now this, one last gathering of the clan.
“You did let him know, right, Pete? That we were coming to help?”
“Of course I did; he’s expecting a crowd. And a skip. I thought maybe we’d wait out here until the skip turns the corner, so we can overwhelm him in a very helpful rush. Did you bring breakfast, in that attractive basket?”
Genius Loci Page 28