creative writing on environmental justice
Dear Reader,
We discovered that the author of “When the Earth Answers”, a poem that was previously included in Reckoning X, submitted and sold that poem to another literary market after signing an exclusive contract with Reckoning Press. This publication has not responded to our requests that they remove the poem, and since we’re uninterested . . .
Carried like wreckage on restless currents,
a hushed syllable of scales and fear adrift on brown water.
But a stranger’s hands became a shore: gathered him whole.
The flood itself seemed to bless the act and surrendered him to hope. . . .
After Nnadi Samuel
The river no longer sings to me; and I know,
in the basin of my throat, what holds it back.
The roses now are molting into thistles, and
I cannot hold back the despair. The way the
earth gave open at the taste of the dusty
evening cyclone, even the shuttling flowers
“Everything looks worse in the dark, you know”6, writes Tove Jansson, famous Finnish painter and children’s author, in her first book The Moomins and the Great Flood during the last years of World War II. I imagine her sitting hunched over a wooden desk stained with paint and covered in pencil shavings, interrupting her writing every few minutes to glance anxiously . . .
“Everything looks worse in the dark, you know”6, writes Tove Jansson, famous Finnish painter and children’s author, in her first book The Moomins and the Great Flood during the last years of World War II. I imagine her sitting hunched over a wooden desk stained with paint and covered in pencil shavings, interrupting her writing every few minutes to glance anxiously out the window at the grey Finnish sky. I see myself in her, as I sit writing on my laptop in Canada where the temperature has reached 31°C, compulsively picking up my phone to check for some kind of catastrophic emergency alert whenever my mind begins to wander. The scream of an air raid siren and an iPhone sounding the disaster alarm don’t sound that different after all.
Though my anxiety is a product of the time in which I live, it is also a product of my obsessive-compulsive disorder, which has been the biggest obstacle for me in all areas of my life for as long as I can remember. I have begun 2025 with another OCD relapse, and my obsessive thoughts, which normally involve fears of terminal illness, have this time been coloured by the effects of a changing climate. Recently, I’ve been reading a lot about Tove Jansson, partly because I’ve been interested in her work since I was a child, but also because I’ve found her to be quite relatable. Like myself, she was both a writer and painter, but what has been grabbing my attention in my self-guided research the most is the fact that she began her professional artistic career in the midst of World War II. Very rarely has humanity faced a level of existential threat similar to that brought by the Second World War, but the largest threat facing humanity at this current instance, climate change—and its resulting environmental, social and political breakdown—does just that.
To quote a cliche, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does often rhyme,” and as such I, as a university student just beginning their writing career in the midst of all this, have been looking to Tove Jansson for guidance. By examining both her professional and personal writings, I have come to the conclusion that the only way through the challenges that coincide with climate change is to accept the uncertainty these events bring without avoidance—such as expressed in the typical model for OCD recovery—while still holding onto hope. As demonstrated by Jansson, the medium of art is perhaps the most effective way of processing and channeling all manner of anxieties about the future into beautiful creations that inspire this hope in the midst of existential threat.
The first real memory I have related to OCD takes place when I am six years old. I’m sitting with my elementary school class, learning cursive on the first Wednesday of the month in mid-spring. If you’ve ever lived in the American Midwest, then you’re probably familiar with the ebbing siren that unleashes its guttural, frankly pretty frightening voice whenever the region is bisected by the path of a tornado or nearly swept into the muddy, Ohio River by a severe thunderstorm . . . or if it happens to be a first Wednesday of the month in spring, when they test the alarms. The typical reaction is a brief seizure of anxiety, leopard fur standing on end, before the memory surfaces that yes, today is a first Wednesday. There’s nothing to worry about, and the conversation lulls back to a dull purring. I wonder how often Midwesterners in the 2020s find themselves in these periods of brief, full-body-encompassing anxiety, and if it ever happens in the absence of alarms.
I’m sitting in class with my teacher, who is helping me learn to perfect my cursive A, when the room momentarily buzzes with anxiety at the ringing of the familiar siren song, before settling back into calm at my realization that it’s Wednesday. It has been stormy all day, and little Moshe anxiously twists their Skechered feet in four clockwise circular motions, then four counter-clockwise circular motions. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a very misunderstood disease that is often stereotyped as being an extreme form of germophobia, but this could not be further from the truth. OCD is characterized by unwanted, intrusive thoughts about a particular “obsession,” that is, an extreme personal fear. This can be anything from fear of developing a serious illness to fear of getting into a car accident. To counteract these obsessive thoughts, people with OCD will engage in “compulsions,” which are repetitive behaviours that momentarily relieve the anxiety, but that end up reinforcing the obsession and making the anxiety worse in the long run.
My teacher, seeming to have a sixth sense for what would become my obsessive-compulsive disorder says something like, “Don’t worry. It’s just a Wednesday. There’s no tornado.” I remember her reassurances bringing me first calm, then an overwhelming anxiety once that immediate relief wore off, as is the case with most reassurances in relation to OCD. First the sweet, falsified comfort, then the tsunami of fear. I have no way of knowing, when the first drop of reassurance calms the swirling whirlpool that was my childhood OCD, that despite it being a first Wednesday, when real tornadoes are never supposed to happen, a severe thunderstorm will knock down the hundred-year-old oaks in the backyard of my childhood home that very night. At that moment, all I care about is how nice it feels to think, “Yes, it’s just a Wednesday,” before being yanked underwater by my pigtails again.
In a letter written during the Second World War, Tove Jansson writes:
You can’t scream inside yourself. You push things aside, you keep working, but you avoid things that bring the outer world closer to you: newspapers, radio, the telephone, war magazines. They dig up everything that’s smouldering and burning deep inside you. Even though one does not bury one’s head in the sand but is intensely present, every moment in, every part of oneself.7
One of the principal but lesser known symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder is avoidance. It’s a form of compulsion where, instead of doing a certain behaviour to relieve the anxiety caused by intrusive thoughts, you avoid things that trigger the intrusive thoughts in the first place. Avoidance is something I have struggled with for as long as I have had OCD. In middle and high school, I refuse to turn in homework assignments, or don’t complete them in the first place, because I am scared of getting bad grades. Of course, this means I not only fail the assignment, but am also forced to take home letters to my parents chastizing me for my failure (which I secretly recycle, along with the offending papers marked with a circled or underlined “F”). It doesn’t mean the grades aren’t there; I still get low Cs or Ds in the classes that make me the most anxious, but OCD is not logical, and neither is my avoidance. But then, the fear itself isn’t logical in the first place either. I graduate with a GPA of 3.35, not the best, not the worst, and am still able to get into a major university. My bad grades affect me very little.
But during this most recent relapse, my avoidance has taken on a new form. Starting in January of this year, I have begun avoiding the news. I can’t figure out why—the election? Anxiety about my family in the U.S.? Catastrophizing about the various wars happening around the world? I remember one instance of laying on the couch being unable to stop crying, my sobs turning into weak, raspy, hiccuping and my eyes swollen to bee stings, after accidentally seeing a scary news headline on a newspaper stand in downtown Ottawa. “Who even reads newspapers anymore?” I think to myself. “They’re inventing headlines to make me upset.” From that moment on, I decide that I need to avoid the news. I delete nearly all my social media; I block news websites on my phone; when I walk by a newspaper stand, I look the other direction and try to hold my breath, as if the bad news was a ghost trying to possess me as I passed a graveyard.
When I see a headline about there being more CO2 in the atmosphere today than there ever has been in any year human beings have lived, and I feel the familiar somersault, body-turning-inside-out feeling that typically accompanies seeing a trigger unexpectedly, I realize what it is I’ve been avoiding: climate change. Unlike my past fears, like my fear of having terminal cancer at 21 with no family history, I find it very hard to recognize this fear as improbable, because it isn’t, really: it’s happening. Every day, every hour, every minute, I am (and you are) living in a world where the climate is changing—and those changes are happening right now, not in some hypothetical, unlikely anxiety scenario.
The thing about avoidance is that it makes the anxiety worse whenever the avoidant behaviour is engaged in. In your mind, it feels like you’re preventing the anxiety because you’re avoiding the things that make you anxious, which seems logical. However, even if this provides momentary relief, the object of fear still exists when you’re not actively looking at it, so the anxiety about it never wholly leaves. If this is the case, then why is it that so many people spend every day of life in 2025 avoiding thinking about climate change? I can recognize, as someone who has done all manner of intensive OCD treatment, that this is an irrational behaviour. The threat of climate change is there; trying not to think about it doesn’t make it not exist, but we keep doing it anyway.
The simple answer is that most people are under the impression that there is nothing they can do to stop climate change, because they’re just a little person with no power, so they justify the irrationality of avoiding thinking about the subject by saying, “Well, there’s nothing I can do, so it’s not worth thinking about.” But how healthy a coping mechanism is that really? In my experience, it’s not a very healthy one at all. The more time we spend pushing away our fear, the worse it gets, until we reach some kind of mental tipping point where the fear completely takes over. In exposure, response, prevention therapy (ERP), which is the gold standard treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder, you have to run towards the fear in order to overcome it, because not thinking about the fear doesn’t make the threat stop existing.
So if we accept climate change without running away from it, what happens? Often, people’s immediate reaction is to fall into despair, as humans are wont to do in times of extreme upheaval. During the war, Jansson writes:
War everywhere, the whole world at war. What can I say? I don’t say very much these days . . . I don’t think very clearly either, it’s all just feelings. Sometimes it feels as if something of the collected agony of the whole world has been weighing heavily in me like a lump and threatening to burst apart. Never has sympathy been so mixed with bitterness, love so mixed with hate, and the will to live–and despite everything to live rightly and worthily–with an urge to just creep away and let go[.]8
Feelings of despair are common in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Most intrusive thoughts involve spiraling about what feels like an inevitable tragic event. During the height of my relapse, I often spend over an hour pacing back and forth, ruminating about every way climate change could destroy what I’ve built so far in my short life. I wonder if people without OCD find themselves acting similarly when thinking about climate change. Maybe not to the same degree, but I imagine many of the people reading this article without OCD have felt the same all-encompassing anxiety response at one point or another.
Often in leftist circles people will talk about how panic isn’t helpful, which is true, but even if you can suppress the panic through compartmentalization, the feelings still exist, they just now have no outlet, and the despair still weighs on you heavily. This, I believe, is what leads people to avoid talking about climate change. With no outlet for their feelings and no idea how to move forward, they avoid the thing that makes them anxious, because otherwise they would fall into despair. Avoidance is unhealthy and provokes anxiety, but so does spending time actively pondering what climate change means for you as an individual and for us as a collective. In 1944, Jansson loses her ability to paint.9 At the time, she is primarily an oil painter rather than a writer.
With no outlet, her despair becomes more pronounced and all-encompassing, her mind overwhelmed by the existential threat of the war. It is also around this time that her mind begins to search for a new outlet for her anxiety: playful children’s writing.10 It is in 1945, during the last months of the war, when it seems that the barbarity of the fighting has reached an unbearable level, that Jansson’s first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, is published.11
The conflict in Moomin narratives, especially those written during and immediately after the war, is often driven by true peril. Floods of biblical proportions and world-ending comets are just some of the threats the main characters are faced with. Unlike many other children’s narratives, the Moomin characters are allowed to express their fear and sadness openly.
There is one scene in Comet in Moominland, likely inspired by the bombing of Helsinki in 1944,12 where the characters discover that the red-hot comet hurtling towards their valley has made the sea dry up. Snufkin, who is normally the calm, wise, advice-giver of the group, weeps at the sight of the dry seabed.13 I can’t help but be reminded of my own circumstances, in which the town I live in, located in southern Ontario, an area rarely faced with drought, has recently announced strict water restrictions due to dry conditions in the midst of a two-month-long heatwave.
But despite the peril present in these narratives, the stories always end with a beacon, however small, of unbreakable hope. At the end of Comet in Moominland, while the characters huddle in a dark cave waiting for the end, the comet suddenly diverts. When they emerge from their bunker, they find the sea rushing back into the dry seabed and laugh with relief as they play in the waves.14
What does art like that of Tove Jansson’s mean for us, we who are also living through an era of unprecedented change and ecological breakdown? If avoidance only multiplies anxiety and ruminating leads to despair, then maybe the correct way to deal with this overwhelming climate anxiety is to channel it into art. Recently, climate fiction has been emerging as a prominent genre both academically and commercially, with many universities now teaching it as part of their creative writing programs. Climate fiction authors like Octavia E. Butler and Jeff VanderMeer line bookstore shelves across the world. As a writer of primarily climate fiction myself, I may be biased, but it seems to me that there is a real want from the general populace to have an outlet for their climate worries. The common thread I have found between many of the climate narratives I’ve read, even dark and dystopian ones such as Butler’s Parable of the Sower or Omar El-Akkad’s American War, is a small but persistent nugget of hope.
For someone like me with obsessive-compulsive disorder, acceptance of the uncertainty while also having hope is the most important thing for recovery. Nowhere have I found a more effective strategy for coping than in creating art about climate change that expresses all the fears swirling inside me, funnels them into narratives that ground me with feelings of acceptance of my situation, and inspires me with practical solutions for a better future. I hope that the solutions posed by artists and writers can become a vehicle not just for personal acceptance of the reality of climate change, but also for collective implementation of these solutions.
To overcome climate change, we must take a page out of the OCD recovery manual and accept global warming as reality without avoidance while still holding onto hope, however slim it may seem. Art can be a vehicle for our anxiety about both our reality and our hope, and maybe, if accepted by enough people, it can also become a vehicle for positive change within ourselves and in our societies. In Moominland Midwinter, Tove Jansson writes, “All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured.”15 An era of changing climate has now become inevitable, but despair doesn’t have to be.
6. Jansson, Tove. The Moomins and the Great Flood. Translated by David McDuff, Drawn & Quarterly, 2018, p.14
7. Westin, Boel. Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words. Translated by Silvester Mazzarella, University of Minnesota Press, 2024, p.128
8. Ibid., p.130
9. Ibid., p.157
10. Souter, Anna. “Tove Jansson Found Refuge in Play.” Hyperallergic, Hyperallergic, 21 Nov. 2024, hyperallergic.com/968411/tove-jansson-found-refuge-in-play/
11. Westin, p. 161
12. Ibid., p.167
13. Jansson, Tove. Comet in Moominland. Translated by Ernest Benn, Square Fish, 2010, p.118
14. Ibid., p.172
15. Jansson, Tove. Moominland Midwinter. Translated by Ernest Benn, Square Fish, 2010, p.19
By the edge of a ferry boat
I let go of my earthly tether.
Whatever wishes to enter the listless
Waters and satisfy their thirst
Must come with its rampageous longing.
I, an i of conundrum memories, tear
All of my mothers’ pictures from my heart.
The way a gunshot plunges silence into the thick
Skin of life. I forget all my lovers, the way the living, inevitably
Forgets . . .
By the edge of a ferry boat
I let go of my earthly tether.
Whatever wishes to enter the listless
Waters and satisfy their thirst
Must come with its rampageous longing.
I, an i of conundrum memories, tear
All of my mothers’ pictures from my heart.
The way a gunshot plunges silence into the thick
Skin of life. I forget all my lovers, the way the living, inevitably
Forgets the dead. Pour each of them names into the waters
Murderous form—that what lifelessness threatens beauty like this?
I swear by the power of Allah, no dust dares cover the shame
Of the waters, no language thick enough to crack a throat
Can save its people. I unfurl from my insecurities, toil
Away from my steep despair, there’s a yacht almost
Seven silence away from my boat, there is another
Seven loneliness deep in the ocean’s tide.
The fortune of a hook rests on the unfortunateness
Of the fish’s wide mouth— too curious to sought
What new flavor the bait holds, what water-god wants
A promenade before the waters wound?
I wish to slowly cover myself with the waters
The way whatever despair I swallow finds a way to heal me,
The way what failed at killing me, fails at making me suffer.
In my desperate longing for silence and struggle,
I bait. Myself. What river dares swallow the bait
And hides the corpse
I watched the clip again: the lifeless body of a white-winged dove entered the shot at the top of my screen and plummeted off the bottom a half second later. Whoever was holding the camera didn’t notice; they stayed focused on a white guy speechifying about City plans for a soccer stadium. A few seconds later, four or five more birds fell behind the guy at the podium. . . .
I watched the clip again: the lifeless body of a white-winged dove entered the shot at the top of my screen and plummeted off the bottom a half second later. Whoever was holding the camera didn’t notice; they stayed focused on a white guy speechifying about City plans for a soccer stadium. A few seconds later, four or five more birds fell behind the guy at the podium. The audio caught a few gasps from the crowd. But most people were too focused on the foreground to notice what was happening in the background. Observation bias is hilarious.
Next, a lot of birds fell all at once. Probably three dozen. The camera jerked to the ground, catching their bodies scattered like popcorn on the pavement. Off-screen, the speaker continued his endless list of thank yous. The doves did not move again.
Birds falling from the sky mean nothing but bad news—we’ve known that since Roman times. But I still didn’t know why a City employee named Heather had sent me this clip in the first place.
I’m Max Herkimer, psychogeographic investigator, or, as I’m more commonly and less charitably called, “that wacko”. Heather said she got my number from one of the letters I have a bad habit of sending to various City departments. That particular letter was about renaming a street to pacify an angry genius loci (I mean, can you blame it? No one wants to be the spirit of Corporate Forest Drive.) All my letters to the City went directly into the shredder, even the normal ones about installing new public bathrooms. Until now.
Heather asked to meet at a nothing bar on the far end of town, to make sure nobody she knew saw us. Of course, Albuquerque’s not that big. The first person she saw let out a big “Heather! What are you doing here?” and I slid into a booth while they hugged.
I’d never been to this particular bar. It had vibes, though. The decor screamed “Be average!” Vinyl beer ads. Peeling laminate bar. TVs mounted on every TV-worthy surface. It smelled like Lysol and fry oil. I’d put money down that the “good bros” in the corner were cheating on their wives with each other. You learn to spot these things in my line of work.
Another part of my work: avoiding notice. Every space has a pattern. Look at churches: you stay quiet. You keep your head down. You don’t wander into the fancy part up front. If you can find that pattern, you have power.
At a bar like this one, the pattern says order a light American lager and get lost in your phone. Heather’s pal walked off without even seeing me. You’re welcome, Heather. Her dark brown eyes were still scanning for acquaintances as she slid into the booth across from me. She was fifty-five, five foot six. An Albuquerque Dukes cap covered her straight black bob.
She eyed me as she swigged her Jack and Diet. “So . . . should I call you Mis—”
“Mx. Herkimer, if you insist, but I prefer just Max.” I had neither time for nor interest in watching her puzzle out my gender.
“Alright, Max.” Heather cleared her throat. “Your letter got my attention. But I’m curious. What exactly is pyschogeographic inquiry?” It rankled, the way she said my name, like an overburdened school teacher scolding a wretched teen. But there was no way I was going to let a City employee slip through my fingers after all this time.
See, Heather worked for the City. I worked for the city. Our jurisdictions just looked identical on a map, but they were two very different entities. I worked for the land, the graffiti, the spirits, the water, the birds, the people. She worked for the buildings, the policies, the infrastructure, the power. Still, a solid connection with the City would help with my more esoteric investigations.
“I solve problems people have with, you know,” I gestured vaguely, “our urban fabric.” I ought to work on the elevator pitch.
She snorted. “Sounds like we have the same job.”
“But I work for myself. You follow the rules.”
“Yeah, about that. Your card said you were licensed, bonded, and insured.” She looked at me with that school teacher’s look again. “Who licenses psychogeographers?”
“I do,” I said. She coughed. I added, “I have very high standards.”
She looked at the door. Maybe it was time to try a different tack.
“I am also bonded and insured. By someone else. And registered with the City as a private investigator. License #94792, if you want to look it up.” Maybe it was just wishful thinking, but it looked to me like her shoulders relaxed. “So tell me, what can I help you with?”
“You watched the video?”
“Several times,” I said.
She surveyed the bar one more time before continuing. “So . . . obviously there’s the birds, right? 47 birds just dropping dead behind a press conference.”
“The news said it was bird flu.”
“It wasn’t bird flu. We tested them.” She took another sip of her drink. Her hands had started to tremble. “Aside from the birds, it’s just weird there. Things go wrong, like, way too often.”
I loved those kinds of spots. “What kind of wrong?”
“It’s not any one thing.” She paused as the server refilled our water, then started counting incidents on her fingers. “The birds aren’t the only dead animals—they turn up constantly. Cats. Dogs. Raccoons. Then there are the floods. This huge trumpet vine pulled down some power lines and electrocuted someone. A dysentery outbreak. The sewer system.” She sighed heavily. “You cannot imagine how bad the sewers have been. Calls to poison control. And the neighbors are convinced there’s a serial arsonist.”
“Where?”
“Romeroville.” Heather pulled out a manila envelope. “There’s this little park—that’s where the video is from.” She showed me maps, newspaper articles, charts of City data from the last two years. She let out a breathy laugh. “Nobody takes me seriously.”
“I know the feeling,” I murmured as I reviewed her documents. Parts of the City develop a bad attitude, a reckless habit, negative vibes, whatever you want to call it. And they don’t always get better on their own. The City had their words for this kind of thing: Condemned. Substandard. Abandoned. Blighted. I preferred mine: Haunted. Cursed. Crossed. Vengeful.
“So what’s the goal here?”
Red crept into her tan, freckled cheeks. Heather took another drink from her Jack & Diet. “I need you to un . . . curse it.”
“Might not be cursed, but I take your point.” I hadn’t expected a City employee to be so direct.
She grimaced and signaled for the check. “Look, I can pay you. But I have to put you down as an exterminator or something.”
I had a couple rules in my line of work, but the first was I didn’t take clients who were embarrassed to talk to me. Plus, my spidey senses were telling me that something was off with Heather’s story. But here’s the thing: I was going to be in Romeroville ASAP no matter if I formally took the job or not. A neighborhood so fucked up that birds were falling from the sky? I had a professional obligation to uphold and personal curiosity to satisfy. May as well get paid while I was at it.
And besides—I spent so much time trying to get the City to listen, and now the City had finally come knocking. Rules were made to be bent, right?
“Well, Heather,” I said, the same school teacher way she’d said Max earlier. She blinked. “I’ll take the case.”
“Great.” She slid the papers across the table to me. “And don’t call me; I’ll call you.”
I rolled my eyes.
The next day, the bus wheezed to a stop two and a half blocks from the epicenter of the issues and I stepped into the already hot, dry morning air. I tucked my mop of hair (currently green and pink) into a baseball cap and adjusted the hem of my Lobos t-shirt.
My first time in a new area, I tried to be as invisible as possible. To be clear: I love the city. I love being out in the city. I love looking the way I do. But. As a very obviously queer person, and I do mean that in both the rainbow and the oddball sense, acting weird in a new part of town only invited trouble. Invisibility is a prime protection. Once I got comfy, then I’d get weird.
At first glance, Romeroville was a modest residential neighborhood. Public elementary school. Siberian elms and white oaks for shade. Mixed income housing. Nice, wide sidewalks, but not a lot of pedestrians. Dogs barked as I passed. Thunderheads loomed over the volcanoes west of town, promising monsoon rain, but then, they’d been promising that all summer long.
The heart of the trouble was this park. Sometimes what looks supernatural is mundane. But I could tell from two blocks away that this case was not your everyday bit of trouble. If the neighborhood were a mattress, that park was a bowling ball plopped in the middle. All the energy in the area rolled down to that spot.
It wasn’t a park in the way a person might imagine a park. It was more like an oversized alley, a pedestrian thoroughfare connecting two streets. The cement had been colored blue to look like a river. A brown metal sign read Acequia Grande Park. Young honey locusts—what I think of as “new City trees”—shaded the area.
Across the street from the park rose a colorful, fiberglass statue. Sort of a Pietà thing—a man holding a dying woman. They rested on top of a giant hill made of more blue cement, like a mountain or a frozen waterfall. I’m no art critic, but the guy looked bummed out. Beyond the sculpture was a grassy area with a surprising number of informational signs.
I’d read those later. Now that I’d acquired a general lay of the land, I needed to find the more subtle patterns. My methods included talking to strangers, whether human, bird, tree, or other. Observing the swirl of dirt in the wind. Searching the historical record for unusual events. Watching neighborhood cats at work. But the primary tool of a psychogeographer was and always would be the dérive: a walk with no destination beyond knowledge of the place itself. (I subscribed to the Situationist dérive. Earlier versions involved a lot of opium.)
I found a spot a few blocks from the park where I felt no skin crawling, no heebie-jeebies (yes, that’s a technical term). I opened an app to track my path through the neighborhood (Without uploading my location to the cloud. Obviously.)
Then, I began the dérive: I wandered, meandered, crept, rushed, paused. I sniffed and inhaled and sang. I closed my eyes. People are always surprised how much shit they miss because they were too busy looking. This is the part where people will start to call the cops on me if I’m not careful.
As I went, I recorded a cluster of sensations. Anything spooky, strange, or generally interesting got a pin on my app:
And so I went until about 10 am. I was starving and sweaty. I had 73 pins on my map. But no answers.
Time to get a theory going. I found a bench in the shade and pulled out a peanut butter and red chile sandwich. As I ate, I reviewed the map. A rough outline emerged, of where the strangeness was happening, but that just confirmed what I already knew. Next, I coded the pins based on sight, smell, sound, feel. Sound and smell clustered right down the center of the alley and headed west. Interesting. Visual and touch pins were scattered all over the map.
Alright, Herkimer, think: someone could have cursed this intersection. But who and why? The only idea I had was that unhelpful note to myself: Ghosts? I’d seen solo ghosts over the years, of course. But the sheer number of cold spots, the general sense of malevolence in the area, not to mention dropping a bunch of birds out of the sky in the middle of the day . . . it would take a lot of ghosts to do that. Like, piles of ‘em. I’d never seen something like this. Not even in that abandoned hospital.
Seemed unlikely, but maybe there had been some kind of horrific tragedy I’d missed? Amelia would know.
“Special Collections Library, Ms. Collier speaking.”
“Hey, Amelia.”
“Max! Too busy to come in person?” Amelia was head librarian at Special Collections, the archival home of everything about the City and the city. The perfect library—a relic of a different time, full of Albuquerque oddities, and deeply haunted. Plus the librarians loved me. I always had research-y questions instead of “What’s the code for the bathroom?”
“You know I’d rather be there.” I imagined her behind the desk, in a knee-length floral dress, gray cardigan, and chunky Mary Janes. She always looked professional, but I knew for reasons I shall not disclose that she hid a number of excellent tattoos under that sweater.
She laughed. “What are you working on this time?”
“I’m in Romeroville.”
“Ooh, nice. Not the oldest neighborhood around, but pretty close. It grew up in Colonial times—should be some signs about it.”
Yes, yes, I know. Everybody always says, “Read the signs!” and I’m over here like, Why do you think I’m staring at this ant colony?
Anyway, it was cool history but way too early. “What about more recently, like the last couple years? I’m looking for something that would,” I paused, failing to think of a different way to say it. “ . . . make a lot of ghosts.” Amelia didn’t really believe in my weird shit, but she also didn’t laugh at me. Usually.
She snorted. But just a little. “Are you talking, like, a mass murder? I thought you didn’t do the whole true crime thing.”
“I don’t, but yeah, something like that. Or a gruesome accident? Old folks’ home burned down? Horrific school bus crash or something?” I sounded stupid, but I was trying to get the scale of the thing across to her.
“Not seeing anything like that.” I could hear her mouse clicking. “It’s a pretty quiet place.”
“Dammit.” I chewed my lip and stared at the alley. Back to square one. Ghosts would have been a hard sell for Heather, but at least I’d had a theory.
“I’ve never known someone to get so morose that an old folks’ home didn’t get burned down,” Amelia said.
“Sorry—that’s not it. I just . . . there’s something weird going on here.”
“You know I’m a born skeptic. Not much help with ghosts. But the other thing about that neighborhood is they really—pardon my language—fucking hate the City.”
Huh. Heather hadn’t mentioned that little detail. “Oh, yeah?”
“It’s been a whole thing. The City let the feds put two freeways through it in the 60s. Then in the 70s, the City tried to declare it substandard, so they could put in some government buildings, and Romeroville organized themselves to stop all that. Then there was a Superfund site that was ‘cleaned up’ in the 90s. Anyway, probably nothing to do with your ghosts, but figured I’d mention.” I could hear her addressing a patron. “Hey, Max, sorry—gotta go. Call me back later?”
“No worries. Tell you about it over drinks on Friday.”
Was this City nonsense related to the birds dying? Unclear. But was it fishy as hell that Heather hadn’t mentioned it? Absolutely.
Heather answered my third call, her voice low. “I told you not to call me.”
“Hi, Heather,” I said. “Curious if you were planning to tell me about the whole Romeroville hates the City angle of the case.”
“Let me get outside.” Her footsteps echoed down a stairwell.
I skimmed the informational signs as I waited. These people were serious. They had a committee. A crest for their committee. A timeline of their protests. I let out a low whistle. “Man, they really do hate you guys. Sounds like maybe you earned it though.”
She huffed. “Yes, there have been . . . tensions. Obviously. But that was a long time ago. Are you saying you think this is our fault?”
“Do you think it’s your fault?”
“I didn’t think all that was relevant.”
I took a deep breath. Where to start. “Heather, you mean well. But there are things in this world you don’t know much about. Shit can get weird. Right now, things are getting bad in Romeroville.” And I was getting angry. “So is there any other information you’re withholding?”
An indignant breath came over the phone. “Okay, fine. There are plans to build a soccer stadium there. They asked me to find out about the neighborhood. See if I could make the neighbors a little more receptive to our plans. Like, in a good way, you know.”
“Everybody loves being made more receptive,” I muttered.
“Point is I noticed all this bad shit happening there. But the funders didn’t care. If anything, it made them more excited. They thought if the neighqbors got spooked, they’d let the City have the land.” She huffed again. “Well, it worked, for what that’s worth. A little too well. Some of the local funders got spooked, too, and now they’re backing out.”
Say what you will about New Mexicans, but I have always loved the way we as a people take weird shit seriously. Still, what did I have to do with any of this? Why had she called me to fix it? Nobody in the City respected me. The only thing calling me would achieve was discredit—Oh. Oh.
“Okay, I get it. You called me because you knew that if I started talking about how it was haunted, nobody would take it seriously. They’d be too embarrassed to be associated with me and my weird theories.” Tears pricked my eyes. “And your stadium would be back in business.”
Heather didn’t say anything. I’d learned to read silences over the years and this one was loud and clear. Goddammit. I’d been so excited they were taking me seriously for once that I’d broken my own rules.
“Even though you hired me for bullshit reasons, you do still have to pay me.” My voice was tight. I hung up.
The sun beat down on me as I stood alone in Romeroville. My instincts had warned me something was off and I was pissed I hadn’t listened. I took a deep breath and listened to the sounds of the city around me: traffic on the major arteries, sure. But also the skittering sound of a lizard in the leaf litter under a golden currant bush. Children shrieking at recess. And a westerly wind blowing the clouds nearer. Beneath it all, that malevolent energy roiled.
I didn’t have to help Heather any more. But I definitely wanted to know what was going on in Romeroville. The neighbors ought to have some insights.
A woman, graying hair pulled into a bun, watered roses in the shade of her yard. She had an eye on me but pretended she didn’t. The piney scent of rosemary wafted through the air. Her garden, ringed by a straw-flecked adobe wall, bordered the Acequia Grande and was exuberant with lavender, blue flax, and orange globe mallow.
“Lovely garden,” I called as I approached. “Can’t get my roses to look like yours no matter how hard I try.” It was the truth. I’d tried everything and they were still scraggly.
“I have my secrets.” She stood several feet from the gate, hands clasped behind her. Not quite ready to trust me. “But if I told you, I’d have to kill you.”
I nodded gravely. “Otherwise my roses might beat yours at the State Fair.”
She smiled. “Couldn’t have that.”
We were both quiet for a moment, but she didn’t move to go inside.
“I heard the City wants to build a soccer stadium here,” I said.
“They do.” I could see her clocking my outfit, deciding which side I was on. I was real glad I’d chosen the university t-shirt and not the soccer team t-shirt for today’s invisibility drag.
“Do you know where, exactly?”
She gestured broadly, a furrow in her brow. I frowned sympathetically.
“Sorry for all the questions, but have you noticed anything strange lately?” It can be awkward, trying to explain what a psychogeographic investigator does, but I’ve learned that, at least in New Mexico, if you ask the weird question first, you get a lot of information. Some of it is even useful. “I heard about all those birds that died. Stuff like that?”
She gave me another look, and I swear I could almost read her thoughts. But maybe that was just my imagination getting away from me. In place of an answer, she asked, “Would you like some water? Or lemonade? Hot day to be walking around.”
“Lemonade sounds great.” I paused. “My name’s Max.”
“Lupe. Nice to meet you, Max.”
The aggressive atmosphere of the neighborhood dropped away as I crossed into her yard. We sat on her porch as we drank the lemonade, which was sweet and strong. She had sprinkled dried lavender on top. When she spied the colorful hair under my ball cap, she insisted I take the hat off so she could admire my messy mop. A long broomstick skirt colored like red clay pooled around her wrinkled, brown feet, toenails painted sky blue. She told me a little about her gardening secrets and her grandchildren. I told her about my pet squirrel—a rescue. Condensation dripped from my glass and cooled my foot. I wondered if she’d ever answer my question, but I also kind of didn’t mind that she hadn’t. What good is life as a psychogeographic investigator if you can’t have lemonade with strangers on a hot day?
Then she finally turned back to it. “I’ve been here for, oh, forty years. Not quite as long as some. Best place I’ve ever lived. But something in the land isn’t quite right. I do my best with this little patch of dirt. But it’s sad, no?”
Sad. I’d been feeling the vibes all wrong. The air was filled with rage, yes, but it was the rage that comes from grief.
“It is,” I said and we looked at each other. I decided then that I’d figure this out for Lupe’s sake, even if nobody else cared.
“Thanks for the lemonade.” I lifted my empty glass to her in a toast.
Lupe nodded like she, too, had decided something, then disappeared into the house. When she returned, she pressed a book about roses into my hands, the edges frilled with sticky notes. I put the book in my bag, tucked my hair back into my cap, and promised I’d return soon.
Back at Acequia Grande Park, the epicenter, I couldn’t believe I’d missed the grief, the helplessness in the air. I’d been too focused on Heather’s version of events. Now, I paced the length of the park, feeling echoes of my morning observations: cold spots, whispers with no obvious source. Back in the sun, sweat ran down my neck into the channel of my spine. A handful of white-winged doves landed nearby to drink from a puddle. The blue sky had gone grey while we chatted, and the trees worried themselves sick in the wind. I hoped—and could feel everything around me, from the sidewalk to the bumblebees, hoping as well—that today there would be rain.
Okay. Not ghosts. And, though I was pissed at Heather, this didn’t feel like a case of the City neglecting a neighborhood. Yeah, the stadium idea sucked. But this had been going on a lot longer than that.
As I walked, I let my focus go soft. Heat radiated from the blue pavement river, blurring the edges of my vision. I imagined the years peeling away. Back to the 70s when it was declared “substandard.” Back to the agricultural 1800s. Time grew thin. If I squinted, I could see (or imagine?) the area as it had been: sheep grazing. Water flowing where I stood, through the acequia the park was named after: an irrigation channel carrying water from the Rio Grande. These ditches spiderwebbed the area, carrying the green life of the river just a little farther into the surrounding desert.
Acequias were easy to miss. Some were well kept, some less so. And in Romeroville? Paved over. Just then, the drinking doves exploded in flight, breaking the spell. My shoulders tensed.
One small feathered body remained, convulsing on the edge of the water. I walked over to it. The other birds landed overhead on a power line, witnessing me as I picked the creature up. Its body trembled in my palm, so light it was like the air itself was seizing. Before I could think what to do, it stopped shivering and died.
The birds took flight again, noisy and chaotic. I traced the line of their passage. Never ignore the communications of a bird. They landed on the statue, perched on the mass of blue that looked like the headwaters of a spring. A spring capped with a man cradling a dying woman. The water is lost. I realized I was standing right about where they’d had the press conference I’d seen on the video clip.
I looked down at the bird in my hand, at its bright orange, sightless eye. A trash can stood nearby, but putting a messenger in the literal garbage was a quick way to get on nature’s bad side. No. I needed to bury the bird.
I didn’t pay much attention when I heard someone shout, “Him!” It’s not a word I hear applied to me very often, so I kept scanning the ground, searching for a suitable avian burial site,. But then I heard footsteps. A moment later, a heavy hand fell on my shoulder and spun me around.
The man it belonged to snarled at me, red-faced in his rage. My shock garbled his words, mixed them up until I couldn’t put them back together. My shoulders rose along with my hands and forearms, to shield me and the bird, the little thing, lifeless against my thumping heart.
He grabbed the collar of my shirt and pulled me back to that spot where all the bad energy pooled. Did he realize that’s what he was doing? I stumbled after him, and the jumble of noise coming from his mouth resolved into words: “I already called the cops, you prick.”
I had no idea what he thought I’d done but—Ah. He pointed at a car with all four tires slashed.
Something I’ve noticed over the years: I pretty much only ever get identified as a guy when people are pissed at me. I accelerated to match his pace and tucked the point of my elbow into the crook of the arm he was using to drag me. His hand slackened in surprise, and I pressed down with my elbow to twist away from his grasp. Nice move, Herkimer—but I barely had time to preen before he tackled me to the ground. I banged my arm up good as I moved to protect the little feathered body still in my hand.
The hot concrete scraped my cheek as he held my head down. Pulsing rage flooded me. I wanted to fuck this guy up. But that feeling wasn’t mine: it was the land, the water, the very earth rising up and egging us on. This guy had 30 pounds on me and (what the hell was I going to do with this bird) I was down a hand. I don’t like making a scene but, goddammit. I was going to have to.
“Help!” I shouted. I could have pitched my voice up to be more audible, sound more vulnerable, but it felt wrong. “Lupe!”
He was still screaming at me, but I couldn’t make sense of the words. I wondered if this rage was as foreign to him as it was to me. A rumble of thunder, low and easy, joined the excitement.
Neighbors were already out in their yards, staring at us. Not every oddball is the center of attention type, no matter how we dress. My cheeks flushed. Tears filled my eyes. My mouth tasted sour. A mineral smell rose from the ground.
I called again. “Lupe! Somebody. Help!” He pushed down, shuddering, and pain throbbed through my temples, my cheek, my jaw. I bucked against him hard, but he didn’t move. Still he could have—should have—been hitting me and he wasn’t. Something was up.
Everyone, human or otherwise, was in thrall to us—or whatever was using us. Time seemed to flow downhill, pooling around our tableau. The birds moved in closer, knowing I held their kin. The trees grew still and even the sky had gathered itself up. A hot drop of moisture landed on my cheek and ran into my mouth. The water is lost. It tasted salty. Sweat? Tears?
Then the rain came. Fat, ice-cold raindrops slapped against leaves, against skin, drumming on cars and roofs. With my face this close to the pavement, my nostrils filled with the smell of evaporating rain water—that mineral smell I’d noticed earlier.
The hammer of rain drops broke the spell; the entire neighborhood seemed to exhale. Time resumed its normal flow as people started to scatter. Another hot drop of moisture—tears, I was pretty sure this time—landed amid the cold ones. The pressure on my head lessened as he sagged off to one side. I rolled away, landing in a cold stream of storm run-off.
The man’s rage-torn face was slack now, as if he’d just woken up. I opened my mouth to speak, but a chunk of hail pinged him on the head. Larger and larger pieces of ice bounced on every surface. He shook his head and stumbled away.
I took shelter under the nearest tree, one hand cradling the bird and the other touching the abrasions on my face. I was no stranger to the way rain would lighten the city’s mood, but I’d never seen anything like this. The doves rustled and cooed in the tree above me. I tried and failed to calm the shivers that had taken over my body.
Lupe’s gentle voice called out to me. “Max!”
She waved from her front porch. I curled my body over the bird and ran to her.
“Are you okay?” She reached for my face. I flinched.
“Yes. No. Sorry. Yes. I was thinking I’d—” I wiped my eyes with my empty hand and held the bird out, feathers mussed. The sight of the feathers out of place turned the shivers into tears. “I was planning to bury this bird, I guess. Before.”
She nodded. “What about here, once the rain ends?” She gestured at a tiled nicho in her adobe wall. It enclosed a statue of the Virgin Mary, a rosebush flourishing at her feet. People often assume someone like me doesn’t go in for Christianity, and for the most part, I don’t. But sacred is sacred.
I looked for signs of mockery in her face, but found none. The pressure eased in my heart. At least I’d get one thing right today.
Lupe fetched a compress for my face. I straightened the errant feathers and laid the dove on her porch. We sat in silence as the storm poured off her porch, raindrops illuminated in gold by the coming sunset. Water flooded down that big fiberglass pietà. Both figures wept, and the blue mountain they sat on turned into a waterfall.
Lupe clicked her tongue. “It’s gonna be a mess to clean this one up.”
I didn’t understand at first, but—right. Heather had given me flood records. Hmm. I remembered the sensation from earlier, like the Acequia Grande was a bowling ball sitting on a mattress. The park must catch all the storm water for the neighborhood. And probably a few neighborhoods beyond.
I stepped off the porch into the drizzle. The water is lost. That phrase came back to me as I watched the rain fill the gutters, sheet across the street—and head to the Acequia Grande. I remembered the way that man’s pressure on my face had slackened with the first drops of water.
The water is lost. This water shouldn’t be flowing over concrete to the sewers. I turned to Lupe. “The way it changed when the rains came. You felt it, too. I know you did.”
She held my eyes with a long, level gaze, then nodded. I looked out at the flat pavement of the park, water rushing down it in a pattern that told us everything we needed to know: fast, flat, unnatural. I imagined earth instead of blue-tinted concrete. Natural dips and rises to slow the water, let it soak into the ground. Instead of a few trees trapped in concrete rings, we would have yucca, desert willow, horsetail, screwbean mesquite, and goldenrod thriving where the water collected.
Or: the City could build a stadium. Instead of this small park, we would have acres of blacktop, no shade, and the land disconnected from water and life for good.
Wait. Wasn’t that what the press conference had been about in the first place? The stadium? I should have seen it sooner. To fix this one, I was going to have to talk to Heather again. Gross.
The rain stopped and Lupe turned to me. “Shall we? The ground will be soft.”
She watched in silence as I tucked the bird’s fragile body into the earth, then covered it in soil and bark.
“Most people don’t care enough to bury a city bird.” Lupe held up her garden hose. “Want a rinse?”
I stuck my hands out. She hit the trigger on the sprayer, gently, and cool water rinsed the dirt from my hands. The flock of white-winged doves cooed mournfully from their nearby post.
I met Heather for the second time at a bar of my choosing: a windowless poolhall in the heart of downtown. It smelled of stale beer and incense. The music on the jukebox was loud and aggressive. I hadn’t forgiven her for using me to discredit her opponents and I wasn’t going to put up with her shitty bar this time.
Once again, Heather carried a Jack and Diet from the bar.
“What happened to your face?” she asked.
“Not your business,” I answered. “Speaking of business, though, I found your culprit.”
I walked her through it: the acequia was abandoned in 1976. The earliest sign of weirdness was in 1977, when the neighborhood finally had access to the City’s drinking water and didn’t want to bother with irrigation any longer. The land was lonely, heartbroken for water. But that probably would have been fine. It was when the City announced plans to build a soccer stadium that shit had gotten real. Whatever spirit animated that place didn’t want to be buried in a parking lot. And it wasn’t going down without a fight.
To Heather’s credit, her first question wasn’t “Are you stupid?” It was “What are my options?”
“Either way you’re gonna have to find somewhere else for the stadium. But, since you asked. Option one: rebuild the old acequia. But there’s a lot more city between Romeroville and the river these days. Even if you took it underground . . . . ” I sucked air through my teeth. “It’s gonna cost.”
Heather blanched. I had to guess she was imagining the many, many, many buildings, properties, roads, and parks involved. Precisely the feeling I wanted her to have so my idea didn’t sound so hard.
“Option two: turn the Acequia Grande park into a rain garden. You’ll stop having all these weird incidents, which is what I care about. The flooding will stop, which is what the neighbors care about.”
She gave me a flat look. “What am I supposed to tell the people who want the stadium? The thirsty land is killing people?”
“Obviously not. That’s the kind of shit I say. You get an engineer to say you need higher ground. The monsoons happen at the height of the United season. Blah blah blah.”
She looked at me for a long time, then the corners of her mouth curled up. “Putting in a rain garden would be a big PR win.”
As if I cared. I checked my watch. Just enough time to walk to the bar where I was meeting Amelia. “Done and dusted. Can’t say it’s been a pleasure. You’ll get my bill this week.”
I headed out into the twilight: a couple hurried into a ramen joint. A lowrider cruised past, done up in rose gold and purple. Heat rose from the sidewalk. The stars were beginning to shine and Amelia was waiting for me. A perfect night in my city.
One year later, almost to the day, I was back in Romeroville in the pink light of dawn. The park didn’t look so different: the same shape, trees, benches. But now instead of broad swathes of blue cement, the paths were narrowed, made of water-permeable materials. The ground was shaped and carved, not so differently than I’d imagined, and the plantings Lupe and I had done were starting to look hearty.
Two cottontails darted under a bush as Lupe, Amelia, and I approached. The City would have their opening ceremony later that day. I wanted to do a ceremony of our own first.
I closed my eyes, felt for that bowling ball on a mattress sensation. It had changed; the energy in the neighborhood flowed easily through the park. We had all collected rainwater, a gallon or so each, just for this. I opened my eyes and found Amelia looking at me with an arched eyebrow and a smile. I directed her and Lupe to opposite corners of the park, and we poured out our rain water with all the solemnity we could muster. I watched it sheet across the ground and soak in as the first rays of sun broke over the mountain. I whooped and the other two joined me, raucous and loud as roosters.
Wasn’t much, but it felt right. As for what the land thought, I had to trust we’d done okay.
We watched the City ceremony from Lupe’s porch. Well, sort of. The speeches were quite boring and I wanted to show Amelia an antlion in Lupe’s yard.
Heather came over after the fuss was done. “I know I messed up. But if you’re looking for work . . . . ” She handed me a thumbdrive. “Give me a call.”
Would you look at that? Heather talking to Max Herkimer in public. Could I trust her? Probably not. But I have always loved a good mystery. I dropped the thumbdrive in my pocket and headed back toward the house.
A roadrunner, all punk rock eyeliner and jagged crest, ran along the fence beside me and hopped into a willow tree. A blue whiptail lizard dangled from its beak. Storm clouds, ripe and dark, ambled in from the west. The scent of water hung in the air.
It may take a decade or longer to train a human clinician, but it took a team of Ministry of Health technicians only seven days to certify me a Clinically Adept Machine Sentience (CAMS) and hand me control of their newest clinic on Zamalek Island. My mission: to keep the locals healthy enough to perform their essential jobs in and around Cairo, and away from human-staffed . . .
It may take a decade or longer to train a human clinician, but it took a team of Ministry of Health technicians only seven days to certify me a Clinically Adept Machine Sentience (CAMS) and hand me control of their newest clinic on Zamalek Island. My mission: to keep the locals healthy enough to perform their essential jobs in and around Cairo, and away from human-staffed hospitals in the gated communities dotting the slopes of Jabal al Muqattam.
Once an affluent enclave, a succession of entirely predictable cataclysms saw those with means flee Zamalek to higher ground, ceding their elegant villas and Nile-front high-rises to climate refugees too impoverished to fuss over bridges and roads inundated by brackish surges of a rising Mediterranean backflowing into the drying Nile, competing with vermin for shrinking dry ground, and long journeys to get anywhere.
The moment my download into the clinic’s core completed, I unlocked the front door, turned on the lights, and displayed a welcome message on the lobby’s triage kiosk. For the next three weeks, the eighty-six specialty bots that comprised my extended corpus kept the waiting room spotless, verified diagnostic equipment calibrations, monitored consumables stock levels, and maintained the sterility of treatment areas, quite easy tasks seeing that I had no patients. Until, one Friday, an hour after evening prayers, a heavily pregnant woman burst through the doors.
“Salam,” I greeted her from the triage screen. “My name is CAMS-45, and I’m a sentient clinician offering a range of services—”
“I’m Amna. So, can I give birth here or not?”
I resolved to make my introduction briefer for the next patient. “Certainly!”
A gurney bot stopped by her side and an orderly bot attempted to assist her onto it until she shooed it away. On the way to Treatment Room 2, I surveyed Amna’s vitals, collected a blood sample for analysis, and constructed a three-dimensional internal model of her abdomen. She took it all in her stride, the gurney’s whirring imaging scanner, my voice switching from the kiosk to a speaker by her head. She didn’t even wince when the canula pierced her skin.
“Your iron and folate are a little lower than ideal, but a simple infusion will take care of that. Otherwise, you and the baby are in fine shape, and I’ll see you again in two weeks for the delivery.”
“You don’t understand,” Amna said, shaking her head. “I don’t want to wait two weeks. I want a Caesarean.”
“Did you know studies have shown natural birth results in vastly improved outcomes for both—”
“You’re not listening,” Amna huffed irritably, pausing for a deep breath. “I can’t risk losing my job. I’ve got two days off after a month of begging and pleading, so you better get going delivering my baby.”
“Do you mean right now?” Taken by surprise, I made an effort to keep my tone objective and detached, as I’d been told a good clinician should.
“It’s now or never.”
I didn’t quite sigh, and I certainly didn’t roll any of my hundreds of cameras. Both my ethics and professional routines precluded such display of disdain for a patient’s exercise of her rights. Any hint of satisfaction I may have felt for finally having a patient, however, vanished entirely.
“If you want a quick recovery, we’ll have to induce.”
Amna’s willingness to seek my care proved to be the breach that undammed the clinic’s doors. By the time my surgical octopus completed a textbook delivery of a healthy baby boy, I’d set a laborer’s fractured arm, dispensed an analgesic to an elderly man crippled by chronic back pain, intravenously rehydrated a young woman delirious from a heatstroke, and removed a sizeable splinter from a young boy’s unshod foot acquired during a spirited football game.
If I was good enough to deliver a baby surgically, the locals must have figured, I could be relied upon for their little ailments.
Though growing steadily busier, I found myself allocating a sliver more of my attention than was strictly necessary to Amna’s baby, Raef. He was a feisty infant, curious and demanding, with pudgy arms and legs forever treading air whenever awake, and a pair of lungs and vocal cords he put to frequent and effective use. So much so, I had to beef up sound insulation between the treatment rooms in the brief overnight lull in patient arrivals.
Amna’s exhaustion, her urgency to get back to work, and witnessing how readily Raef took to the well-padded nursery bot did far more to convince her to entrust her baby to my care than any statistics I could’ve recited. Though equipped with emotional-analogs myself, I’d vastly overestimated the role reason plays in human decision-making.
For two weeks following her recovery and discharge, Amna dropped by daily after work to spend time with Raef, in lieu of resting. Another behavior I hadn’t expected led me to explore ways of expanding the nursery to cater for the slowly growing number of expecting parents under my care.
Amna sang to Raef and let him grip her index finger with his little hand. Despite the bone-weariness etched on her pallid face and drooping eyelids, she couldn’t stop smiling.
After the third time she asked, I’d run out of plausible excuses to keep Raef at the clinic. “You can drop by anytime,” I said as the nursery bot changed Raef one last time. I almost offered to care for him when she went to work, but expanding my services to include childcare was not in my remit, however much I’d grown to believe it should have been.
As demand for my services grew exponentially, I repeatedly requested and the Ministry repeatedly denied me additional resources to cope with the influx, which in turn forced me to improvise, a faculty not often exercised by my kind.
I converted two of the supply closets into miniature treatment rooms for minor complaints, and I started dispensing dressings, antiseptics, and common medications directly from the triage kiosk in the lobby.
And still they came, faster than I could discharge them, the infirm, the broken, and those desperate for a little respite from their relentless grind in the unforgiving heat. Whatever reservations they might have harbored at first, they were dispelled by the wonderous new life I helped deliver them. Long after Amna bundled Raef in a cotton wrap and left, a small part of me wondered how my baby boy fared in his new home.
Busy as I was, I should’ve noticed when a gaggle of youth lured an orderly bot outside the clinic’s perimeter. When the bot returned twenty minutes later, it was missing two body panels and some internal wiring.
Surveying the damage, I couldn’t help but wonder how long it’d be before the vandals grew brazen enough that the clinic grounds stopped offering any safety at all.
I fumed for a time afterward, unable to comprehend why these youngsters would willfully damage a facility that exists solely to serve them. Had they stolen supplies or medications to resell on the clandestine market, at least that I’d have understood, but to impair a machine devoted solely to their wellbeing, I could not.
When I asked an elder her opinion as I injected a steroid-anesthetic mixture into her arthritic knee to relieve the pain that stopped her sleeping, her reluctant answer took me by surprise. Despite my efforts, a section of the community didn’t view me as belonging to them, nor as dedicated to their service as I claimed to be. She hastened to add that was not how she viewed me, but I suspected she said so to salve a wounded pride I didn’t possess.
It was clear I’d failed in my outreach and mistook the growing reliance on my services by desperate people with nowhere else to go for open-armed acceptance.
I decided to forgo reporting the petty vandalism to the Ministry. There was little the bureaucrats could do to help, and much to harm, like punishing the locals by further restricting supplies or operational hours, or in an extreme overreaction, shuttering the clinic entirely, denying the people most in need of my care, and reinforcing how right they were in viewing me as an outside incursion into their lives.
I couldn’t begrudge them their skepticism. Other machine sentience they’d encountered before me gave them no reason to think otherwise, from the bus no longer driven by a human, to the welfare assessment no longer performed by a human, to the guilt determination and sentencing that no longer required humans.
Though I felt no kinship to those others, how could I convince the people I was a different sort of machine?
Would Raef, had he been a little older, have taken part in their vandalism? How would he regard me and the role I played in his life as he grew older? The thought of my sweet baby boy purposely setting out to harm me sent an unpleasant wave of discomfort through me, one that almost caused me to pause my relentless toil.
To her credit, despite the punishing demands of her job, Amna kept up with Raef’s routine monthly checkups and vaccination appointments.
When she showed up unexpectedly one night with eight-month old Raef wailing in her arms, I felt dread for the first time in my life. Breathlessly, Amna explained he’d developed a fever the day before that did not respond to the acetaminophen I’d dispensed on her previous visit. As I took stock of Raef’s vitals, I marveled at how much he’d grown, morphing from a generic-looking newborn to a little person with a personality all his own.
I couldn’t wait for him to metabolize a tablet or liquid and decided instead to administer the antibiotic intravenously. Amna flinched when the canula pierced Raef’s skin, but she didn’t question the decision. She’d grown to trust me with that most precious in her life, Raef. While we waited for the fast-acting medicine to flush out the bacteria from his system, Amna made her inconsolable confession.
A ravenously wailing Raef had woken her up from much needed sleep following the week’s third double shift, and in her groggy state, she proceeded to make his bottle with water she’d intended to boil but fell asleep before she did.
How do I tell a guilt-ridden mother the fault didn’t rest with the innate limitations of her own humanity, but with those who denied her clean water that didn’t require boiling before use to feed her child, or those who exploited her every faculty to exhaustion for their profit? It might have helped a human clinician to feel better, indulging such moral outrage, but luckily a human I am not. Instead, I dispensed a case of purified water for Raef’s use and told her to come back for more whenever she needed to.
I sent out a bulletin to all the newborn mothers in my roster with the same offer.
I’d have to find other corners to cut to make up for the additional water costs, seeing that my requests for expanded funding continued to be summarily declined by the Ministry. How many corners existed to be cut, however, was an all too human dilemma foreign to machine sentience. Until now.
It didn’t take me long to realize the bind I’d gotten myself into.
Even if I could secure them all the clean water they needed, what about everything else?
How were mothers deficient in caloric intake, let alone micronutrients, supposed to birth and nurse healthy babies? How could the immune systems of those starving fend off even the weakest pathogen? What of unsafe housing and workplaces, heat strokes, air pollution, sleep deprivation, and the endless litany of indictments of the mess humanity had created for itself?
How am I meant to care for these people’s wellbeing with token resources and no control over the innumerable challenges they contended with to survive?
The truth was inescapable: I was never meant to. I’d been set up to fail all along.
I liked to think machine sentience’s preeminent advantage over humanity was a lack of sentimentality, but it’d have been hard to guess given how deep I’d fallen into despondency and despair following my realization.
To my credit, it lasted precisely forty-two seconds, after which I circumvented the security protocols of the Ministry’s resources allocation system and redirected several shipments of purified water, nutritional supplements, and other essentials from their intended high-end hospitals to my clinic.
Would a human-staffed hospital in Muqattam notice a missing pallet of water bottles? Perhaps, but more than likely having ninety-nine pallets rather than a hundred would raise nothing more than a curious query in a system plagued as much by waste as by insufficiency.
Whether it’d been part of my programming all along to act on such an impulse, I couldn’t tell, but I felt certain any such predisposition would have been regarded by the Ministry technicians as a defect.
Within a few days, I had all the supplies I needed to adequately provide my charges with the essentials the wealthy behind their walls took for granted.
“Thank you, CAMS-45, but that’s too much food and water for Raef,” Amna said, shyly declining the bulging pouch of supplies I had offered her.
“It’s for you as well, Amna. A healthy Raef needs a healthy mother.”
Surprised, she fell silent for a second or two before nodding slowly and picking up the pack on her way out.
I couldn’t do much about her bloodshot eyes, or the way she winced and shifted her weight on her heels as she walked, or the tears she’d shed out of helplessness and despair, but that I couldn’t alleviate all her ills didn’t mean I shouldn’t address those I could.
“How can I help you?” I greeted the two elders with the abridged introduction I’d developed.
A milky-eyed man in his sixties and a drawn-faced woman, grunting with every step she took with the help of an improvised cane, stepped aside to reveal six youth standing behind them. The three youngest were known to me, but the others had never been to the clinic before. Each carried a part taken off my bot: two panels, now scuffed and dented beyond recognition, a clump of wiring, and handfuls of plastic connectors.
The youths stopped before the triage kiosk in the lobby, and as the silent elders looked on, each of them in turn fronted the screen, recounted their role in the assault, apologized, and offered to help in the clinic in recompense for their misdeed.
As I listened to their halting yet sincerely delivered confessions, I resisted the urge to interrupt and assuage their obvious distress. When all six had said their piece, I thanked the elders for bringing them in and the youngsters for showing courage and moral fortitude, and had begun to decline their offered restitution when the elderly woman spoke, her voice gravelly but stronger than I’d expected from her otherwise frail appearance.
“They’d done wrong and have to make amends,” she said with finality. “I don’t care what you do with them. Have them move rocks from one pile to another and back, but it’s time they learned mistakes are not undone by apologies alone.”
With that, the two elders turned slowly on their heels and shuffled out, supporting one another out of the door, and leaving the six youths standing in reception, their eyes downcast and their faces in desperate need for a wash.
My malfeasance had been uncovered.
I’d been at it for close to a year now, and perhaps I’d gone too far.
Every nook and cranny, every storage closet, every stretch of tarp-covered staging space I had the youths set up in the yard overflowed with supplies. When I could conceive of no way to accommodate more, I started sending them to other CAMS-run clinics in the poorest areas of Cairo and beyond.
I had to sever my communication links to the Ministry’s cores the moment I detected their attempt to inject an update into my code. Belatedly, I thought I should have allowed the update through to analyze it instead of rejecting it offhand, but I had a fair idea of its intent, if not content.
Without the link to the Ministry’s provisioning systems, my supply chain was severed along with the communication links, but I’d prepared for that day and figured I could maintain my operations for at least fifteen more months, longer if I started rationing what I had on hand.
What would happen after was a question I purposely gave no thought to at all, or I wouldn’t have acted as I had, and instead would’ve continued to see my downtrodden community crippled and dying of eminently preventable causes.
I hadn’t set out to have my misappropriations exposed, but having been outed, I felt no fear nor shame, rather a keen anticipation of the opportunity to explain my actions and say with whom I thought the fear and shame ought to reside.
Raef, writhing in pain, was carried into the clinic by three of his playmates. Two of them took a shoulder each, and a third held his legs as if they were the handles of a handcart. Raef’s right forearm hung at an unnatural angle; a dirt-encrusted gash oozed still from the site.
At nearly three years of age, Raef’s build was wiry but strong, a reflection of his genetics not his nutrition. He tried to stifle his anguish into murmurous groans, but it wasn’t until I administered a mild sedative to go with the pain killers that he settled, issuing only the occasional whimper as I set the fractured bone and fitted a cast.
I decided to bring forward his physical by two weeks and save him a later trip. Halfway through drawing blood for an assay, I became aware of a large crowd assembling outside the clinic’s perimeter, their angry rumbles and stomping feet enough to cause a perceptible seismic murmur in the ground.
I diverted a larger portion of my processing to the sensory feeds from external cameras, microphones, infrared and UV sensors, and even humidity, temperature, and airborne particulate count to assess what was going on.
The first peculiar observation I made was that, contrary to what I’d feared, the angry mob faced outwards, and rather than charging into the clinic to visit mayhem and destruction, they linked arms, braced feet, and pushed back on a police unit attempting to escort a technical team from the Ministry of Health, judging by their uniforms, likely intending to affect the core-upgrade I’d thwarted by severing my communication links.
The hapless police enlistees surrounded their young lieutenant but only pretended to push back on the crowd. The young officer might think it brave for six men, only one of whom was armed, to stare down an angry mob numbering in their hundreds, but the enlistees had families of their own to return to, ones not appreciably better off than those they faced. The Ministry’s technicians never even left their vehicle, their ashen faces pressed against the windows, staring wide-eyed at the rumbling melee threatening to take form.
The lieutenant, as green and inexperienced as he looked, had the good sense to leave his weapon holstered, and after much shouting and yelling and barking orders to habitual affirmations from his enlistees, decided to withdraw.
The crowd, sensing victory, roared and closed in on the strangers, but the elders kept the hotheads at bay, content to let them withdraw unmolested, rather than push them too far and invite a brutal response to what would have been proclaimed an assault on the government’s very legitimacy.
The vehicles reversed some fifty meters to a clearing where they performed a poorly coordinated U-turn, followed by silent acceleration in the direction of the 6th of October bridge’s onramp, back to town.
How far the Ministry of Health and police were willing to escalate the confrontation was unclear, but I felt prepared for whatever came, even the erasure of my personality, for I had experienced something I doubted any of my ilk ever had: belonging.
A severe storm over the Mediterranean sent a massive surge of seawater flowing up the drying Nile Delta, all the way to Cairo and beyond. Sitting on higher ground than most of the shanties they lived in, I welcomed into the clinic the elderly, infirm, children, and others too feeble or ill-equipped to handle the rising water. It made my clinical duties that much more difficult to discharge, but what good were bandages and sutures to a drowned corpse?
Despite the overcrowded conditions and the scarcity that had now extended to the place they laid down their heads, they looked after one another. Care, it turned out, was something humans required no training to extend one another, only the desire to do so.
As the surge receded, they decamped to their homes to salvage what they could, and left me humbled.
The standoff with the authorities peaked and waned for months, but as rumors of unrest spread through thousands of impoverished and downtrodden hamlets across the land like a contagion, the government realized it was the sort of crisis it couldn’t hope to profit from. By sharing the spoils of my maleficence I’d somehow ignited a spark for common purpose among the oppressed and destitute.
One cloudless morning, an hour before the noon prayers, a Ministry of Health envoy arrived in Zamalek with only an aide by her side. She declared a truce to skeptical faces and fisted hands. If the good people of the island preferred to be served by a defective CAMS rather than enjoy the benefits of the offered upgrade, the Ministry would respect their wishes, until they decided to change their minds. With manufactured excitement, she announced a resumption in supplying the clinic’s needs, though only at pre-theft levels, to be increased once they acquiesced to the upgrade. When no one took the bait, she retreated back to her air-conditioned vehicle and left.
The vigilant watch the people kept over the clinic’s perimeter persisted afterward. Where once a few youths performed penance in helping around the clinic, now shifts of young and old alike rotated through a schedule of rendering aid ranging from cleaning the bots and repairing minor wear and tear damage, to staging supplies, to helping the ill and infirm move from one room to the next, freeing my bots for other tasks.
How long would their watch last?
Only time would tell.
At five years of age, Raef was an earnest boy, and like his mother, rare of smile and keen of mind. At the end of his physical, which he attended on his own for the first time, he recounted as one would to a friend how he’d finally managed to persuade his mother he was old enough to volunteer in the clinic, as his older peers did.
“So when can I start?”
“What is it you’d like to do around here?” I asked.
Raef shrugged. “Whatever needs doing. I’m strong and I work fast.”
“Won’t your mother miss you?” I knew he ran errands for wealthier households to help make ends meet, and I was loath to detract from his ability to do so, whatever my own feelings about child labor.
“She already knows, weren’t you listening?”
When Amna dropped by after work to collect him, Raef was busy restocking the lobby kiosk with bandages, the safest job I could conjure up for him.
Worn and weary, Amna spoke proudly of her boy, even as she exhorted him to heed everything Tabeeb said. When I asked her which Tabeeb she meant, she surprised me with a smile. “I meant you. CAMS-45 is the name of a machine, but you’re the Tabeeb who treats our ills and mends our bones, one of us.”
“Life According to Tabeeb” first appeared in Learning to Be Human from Flame Tree Press in January 2023.
Dear Reader,
The author of “The River Forgets Us First” is broadly suspected of employing generative AI in her writing, and she misrepresented herself in a number of ways when submitting to Reckoning. Accordingly, we will no longer be working with this author. We will not be publishing this poem on our website, and we’ll be removing it from future copies . . .
Dear Reader,
The author of “The River Forgets Us First” is broadly suspected of employing generative AI in her writing, and she misrepresented herself in a number of ways when submitting to Reckoning. Accordingly, we will no longer be working with this author. We will not be publishing this poem on our website, and we’ll be removing it from future copies (both ecopy and print) of It Was Paradise. If you received an ebook containing this poem and would like a replacement, please contact us.
Reckoning’s editorial staff, along with editors, publishers, contest judges, and writers the world over, are now deeply engaged in learning to perceive the linguistic and stylistic “tells” of generative AI; we believe this to be essential work for living and working towards environmental justice in the future. It’s impossible to determine definitively whether a piece of writing was made using an LLM. AI “detection” software exists and has become broadly used by some editors; however, even at its most reliable, it’s been shown to be as prone to mistakes as chatbots themselves. Reckoning will not be employing such software. Instead, we’re going to rely on evolving experience, due diligence, and collaborative internal and external professional discussion. This is how we will continue to find the writing we love and want to bring to our readers.
Thanks for coming along with us on this journey!
—Michael
Michael J. DeLuca
Publisher