Fall is the season of memory, or so my mother always told me. Every leaf turns in its delicate dance with death. They beckon us to recall what the world looked like flush with green newness, what it looks like revealing grey emptiness. My mother was scared of the winter, of an infinite dark sky, ashes falling from the clouds.
In the fall, she would instead ask me to remember. Every autumnal equinox, she walked into my room and fed me a fairy tale, something warm to press back against the cold and dark of the night. It would begin like this:
“This is a story about the end of the world.”
And it always was. When I was six, this was the equinox story she told me:
“This is a story about the end of the world. There’s a fault line that runs the length of a state, through the middle of a city. And one day, but I don’t know when, it’s going to split it all down the center. This is a city with buildings that reach to the sky like trembling fingers, and buses crawling its streets like beetles in the garden, and a liveliness, a pulse of history. It’s always raining in the city, I think, and no one dares look towards the precipitous heavens.”
She took my hand then, and I almost lost the thread of the story, distracted by the way her fingernail curved around the tip of her middle finger, hugging close to the dry skin there.
“One day, this fault line shivers. Everyone is looking at the ground, they see the way it ripples below their feet. They look up then, in fear. They look at the person on the sidewalk next to them, at the table to their right, across the aisle on the bus. Their mouths are pressed closed, but their eyes have changed. Their eyes are open now. ‘Did you feel that?’ their eyes ask. Not ‘did you see the way the ground shook.’ Not ‘did you hear the way the earth groaned.’ Did you feel that? Did you feel it, same as I, the way the world felt it too? Did you feel it like a rumbling sadness, or a shaking anger, or something a little like love?
“You know the rest, I’m sure. The world split open like an egg. The streets ripped themselves apart. The cars all fell into the abyss, and the buildings, and the cobblestones, and the sewer grates, and the fire hydrants, and the everything, the all of it, the things that they built and called indestructible. When it was all done falling into the chasm, even some people, I think, the remaining few looked at each other, really looked, and they said, did you feel it, too? Do you know where we go next? And even if they couldn’t answer the question then, they gazed back at each other, and they tried to find an answer in the ruins.
“That’s how the world ends, tonight,” she whispered, and kissed me on the forehead. She turned out the lamp, and stood in my doorway, a silhouette against the light in the hall. She looked over her shoulder in a promise to me—to our home—that she would return, as if she would be gone a long time. The next morning, of course, she opened the door and gently shook me out of the little apocalypses in my dreams.
two.
In the fall of my seventeenth year, the skies greyed and the leaves turned with an urgency I’d never seen before. The world was dry as a bone, the sweet summer humidity sucked away as cleanly as marrow. Life felt empty, empty, empty, but when I stumbled home on the equinox, I was full, so full, of light and laughter and warmth. A little too much liquor. A rose would envy the blooms of my cheeks.
I pressed open the door, ever so quiet, and there she was on the couch. Wrapped in a blanket, gaze fixed on the wall. I was swaying in my too-tall black boots, trying to remember what day it was, when she turned to me, holding out a glass of water. She made me take off my shoes, walked me up the stairs.
She was all sighs and tired eyes, and I didn’t know it then, but there was nothing like disapproval there. There was only joy and reassurance in her heart, even if it didn’t know how to make itself known.
I sat on the bed, toed off my socks, my shoulders readying to flinch against her reprimand. But instead: “This story is about the end of the world,” she said. I tried to stop her, thinking of the personal statements and exam scores and recommendation letters on the hard drive of the downstairs computer.
I don’t need any other stories, I thought. I know my own, and I know how I’ve written it. I know how the rest of the words will write themselves—“And I don’t need to hear the stories you’re going to say.” She looked at me, then, her eyes dark and sorrowed and liquid, and she refused to stop.
“This story is about the end of the world. It started with the birds. They took to the skies, a streak across the blue, a cloud, if a cloud could be angry. Then the deer, crossing the road in front of cars. They were already limping, great lacerations in their haunches, fear in their eyes. And all the people in the town, they only noticed the intricacy of the antlers, not the way that they stared.
“The world was trying to share the most difficult truth in the universe: its heart was broken. When our hearts are broken, we feel like we only know brokenness. Everything that we touch, we think, breaks too. That is the greatest tragedy, that we blind ourselves to reality. Nothing is broken because we have touched it. It is transformed. It is made anew. The world, too, wants to transform, wants to make anew. The world is dry, and searing, and wounded. From there, it’s only a small step to wildfire. The blaze sweeps over our little lives, and its heart, its heart, wants nothing more than to feel warm, to share its warmth, to transform and make anew the coldness that is locked away in each of us. It does make something new, but this story isn’t about that. It’s about the end of the world, the ashes and the smoke and a hand pushing out of the scorched earth and into the steaming air, always, always reaching for the light, and reaching for each other.”
She stood, paused at the door, looked back. “Good night,” she whispered, but I was already falling, the alcohol dulling and dizzying the room. When the lightning bolt moon woke me up before the dawn, I’d already forgotten that she sat on the bed, that she told me a story. The blankets were disarrayed, and there was no impression of her in the mattress.
three.
When I was 27, there was no moon on the equinox. Nothing but silent dark. Earlier, I had stormed into my apartment, my roommate startling at the timbre of my footsteps. “Are you okay?” she asked, the paused TV a glossy reflection on her wide eyes.
“Yeah,” I said, leaning against the counter. “My mom and I got into an argument.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. What mothers and daughters always fight about, I guess. How to survive.” She blinked at me, inviting more explanation, but I had nothing left to give.
Instead, I laid in bed under the moonless sky, looking out at the streetlamp across the road, its brilliant orange Cyclops eye a beacon in the misty dark. What does the light illuminate, and what does it leave in the dark? My mother, in a fluorescent-bright kitchen, all the light in the world, and the shadows spiraling from the man across the scarred wooden table. My voice, inherited from the greatest storyteller I knew. In each exaltation and whisper and pause, in each valley and peak, she was there. All those cadences, and I couldn’t convince her to leave.
Apocalypses abound. The end of the world is unnervingly quiet, static on a telephone wire. Light slanted across my curious eyes, even as they closed, even as I slipped away.
In the morning, a voicemail: “This story is about the end of the world. This time, it happens in a city on a coast, where the ocean hugs the land. The ocean loves too much, if there were such a thing. It loves the timid ground and the blazing skies, but most of all, it loves the moon. But this isn’t a story about the ocean, or the moon, or love. It’s a story about the winter, which threatens to freeze the waters and the people and the everything into something static and immovable. Before all that, though, in this city on the coast, life is good. It’s a city that you can always find a parking spot in. A city that has the best sandwich in the whole world right around the corner. A city that makes your legs ache because you never want to stop walking it. Who lives here? Let me tell you. People who have forgotten what love is, almost. Every night, they look out at the ocean, and they see the way that it crashes on the shore, and it reaches for the moon, and they wonder what it feels like to yearn and to want and to love.
“Until one night, the ocean rises, the wind stirs it into hurricane, and the waters crash against the buildings, they swallow until there’s nothing left, nothing but an I wonder why the ocean moves just so echoing in the empty air. Good night, my love.”
four.
A decade later, I picked up the phone when my mother called. She was living with my estranged brother; we were connected by a straight line interstate, with an impossible ocean of time and space stretching between us. I couldn’t remember what the backs of her hands looked like. When her voice crackled out of the faraway silence, her words were laced with a distress I only heard when she talked about the winter. “Get me out of here,” she said, and it was the only time in my whole life that she had ever called me and told me, exactly, in no uncertain terms, what she wanted.
I crossed two state borders that evening, helped her pack, noticed how the dry skin around her middle finger was peeling even worse than it was twelve years ago, how the fingernail on her left thumb was ridged and distressed. I remembered more than I thought I did. I packed faster, hands folding and compressing and pushing down, the only place I knew how to direct my force.
In the car, speeding against the twilight, we were quiet, only the steady hum of the fan between us. The road stretched out, languid and lazy beyond the windshield. There were too many cars on the highway for an arbitrary Tuesday twilight, and my shoulders were hunched, fingers tight.
A car swerved into the lane ahead of us, close, close, close, like the metal was aching to be touched, even if it meant being destroyed, and I pressed against the brakes with too much force.
The silence between us was tense, after, and I said, “I’m sorry.” She looked at me, and I could feel her eyes on me, in the weighted way that mothers look at daughters, with hope and love and fear. “I know,” she said. A pause. “This is a story about the end of the world.”
five.
At thirty-eight, on the equinox, I don’t understand what she’s saying. Her eyes are as clear and bright as always, but her traitorous tongue speaks words beyond my scope. A language I never learned. The soft rhythms and smooth vowels of her childhood, narratives beyond my grasp, a brief word here or there, but nothing like a story.
And as my confusion grows, her panic becomes more pronounced. Quivering words and shaking hands and a crease between her brows. She takes my fingers in her own, wraps them tightly, tries to press the words between our skin since the air was so inadequate. I hold onto her.
I say:
“This is a story about the end of the world. Imagine a mother and a daughter. Imagine two women, with the darkness of a whole universe pressing against them. Imagine the light between them, the thing that keeps them awake, and alive. The thing that puts them to sleep, without any fear at all.
“Can you picture this? But how is this the end of the world, you wonder? How is this anything except beautiful? It’s the end of the world, you see, because that galaxy between them is gone. The thing that they created together, the landscapes and the oceans and the valleys and the hills and the jungles and the deserts and the trenches and the caves, it’s not there anymore. The world ended. Questions, questions, questions, and not an answer to be found. Fall is the season of memory. Every equinox, you asked me to remember. And I do, I finally do.”
The mystery behind humans and their avarice for power is unfathomable. Over the years this enigma has perturbed our hearts; still no answer is readily available. For so long our forefathers have been water nomads, leaving abruptly at the sight of humans and their heavy machineries polluting our waters. It has become a habit for us, expecting them to always invade our homes once we find a new settlement. The aged ones tell us tales of how minelayer and torpedo annihilate our former homes in one strike, sending our loved ones to their early graves.
When we sleep in the deep and calm waters, they come again, encroaching our space without regard for our privacy. We scamper higgledy-piggledy, calling out to our families, carrying only the valuables: totem, spears, trove, and shell pendants. We swim farther, away from the deadly scents of humans. We watch the statues and the tombstones of our ancestors collapse to a second death. Mother says never to look back, all that is destroyed is in the past.
With tears and an unforeseen bleak future we seek for a refuge. Temporarily we find one. Though the constant inclement weather tugs at our hearts, unsolicited fears hold our entire bodies prisoner. It is no surprise that our new home is already inhabited by malevolent merfolk who do not regard that we are both autochthons of the sea. They call us spiteful names, raining invective on the leader of our tribes. It’s not our fault that our skins and flippers are in high demand by humans. After much deliberation, they grant us a temporary place to stay. We are reminded of the hegemon in charge. The mermaids scowl at us, repeatedly telling our females to stay clear of their mermen before flipping their iridescent turquoise scaly tails and dragging their mermen away as though they are priceless jewels.
I have no interest in those flirty mermen. All that matters is the safety of my tribe. The first time we saw our hosts in action, they destroyed a caisson with their weapons, leaving the carcass as a souvenir for its human owners. The ways of the merfolk are brutish. Their leader, wielding the trident, had once said, Humans do not give a fuck about you. Do what you must to survive. They have no regard for your homes. The humans sent a frogman to ascertain the cause of the damage. He never returned to his people. Our hosts called our attention once they had caught and restrained him. We saw his foot fins, flippers, lying on the ground. Mother charged at him, asking why he killed our kind and used our body parts. What an audacity, we echoed. He drowned after the gas in his air cylinder was exhausted.
In exchange for food and safety, some of us offer ourselves in pleasure to the mermen, stripping our coats to reveal our voluptuous figures for their pleasure. They take us to their chambers and ram us in excitement, not minding some of us are celibate. We do what must be done to survive. The oracle’s voice reverberates in our subconscious when we permit them entry into our bodies.
Sometimes when the waves become unusually tempestuous, the mermen swim to the surface. We are excited to bask in the stories they tell us of humans. Not all humans are bad, they say, with all manner of sincerity, forgetting they have already told us that humans are terrible. They adorn our necks with tawdry human trinkets, confess their love for us, and take off our skins so they can further dwell in awe of our naked bodies, whether we want them to or not.
One serene afternoon, the sun rises to its highest, beaming and smiling at us while we sit beneath the cerulean water. Little do we know that the rays piercing the depth of the sea are a harbinger telling us to be wary. Human soldiers dive into the water in force, looking for the frogman that we killed. They catch us unprepared, our spears are no match for their assault rifles. Few of us are lucky, swimming fast to safety. After all, that is all we know how to do—run, run, always run.
Perhaps the merfolk are right to have called us a cursed tribe. Our mothers pray fervently to the gods, wishing for a safe home. The gods answer, bringing us to a river devoid of harmful human activities. Aside from the usual fishing of the locals, teenagers swimming before sunset, their actions pose no threat. A few urinate and shit into the water, toss empty bottles of ogogoro into it. This doesn’t scare us. We already knew that humans have no respect for nature.
We have no cause to leave our home until a trace of danger raises its ugly head. Deep in the silvery-streaked, not-too-tainted water, we frolic. Tranquility towers higher than the seamount. The mollusks treat us to a melody that also serenades the sea anemones. The image of the sun is distorted from our location, but we can tell it’s happy we finally have a safe haven. Even the heavy downpour graces our homes with warmth and comfort. There’s a plonk in the water—someone has plunged in.
“Tutu, go and find the stranger disturbing our peace this afternoon,” Mama says.
She trusts me to be careful in my surreptitious movements.
“Mama, it’s probably nothing serious,” I reply, engrossed in applying mascara. “I am certain it’s teenagers who can’t do without their afternoon swim.”
She believes in my judgment. If we are to survive here, we must lay low. Humans must not be killed. This is a rule sacrosanct to the tribes. The last thing we want is to draw fire from them. Rather than hurt them, we destroy their equipment—a strategy we learned from the merfolk.
There is another plonk. This time it shakes the peaceful waters. Imran calls my attention, says he sees a machine in the water. I lead the two teenagers in my company through the anfractuous boulders we built to conceal our presence. Living here has helped me glean information about the kind of human who comes to our shore. Besides the fishermen, teenagers skinny-dip, tourists smoke and toss their tiny cigarettes and scrunched cans into the water, and girls gossip seated on the sand, oblivious of me taking their make-up kits, no other humans have frequented the river until now.
“What do you think that thing is?” Imran asks, hiding behind a seamount jutting out of the wavy seaweeds.
“Oh no!” I say. “It’s happening again.”
”What’s happening—” Olu cuts in.
I command him to remain silent. An aquanaut dives into the water. In his hand is a sonar device. We watch him gingerly work his way around a blue bathysphere. My best guess is they are just scientists who come to explore. Nothing more. A throbbing thought jumps out of my head: Humans do not just explore the water, unless they take interest in it. Imran suggests we scare him, give him the beating of his life. Olu is quick to remind him what will happen when the diver is out of the water telling his human-group about a bunch of selkies who attacked him. Olu is one of my bright learners; he has quickly understood the secrets of surviving in the deep.
The aquanaut completes his connections. As soon he leaves, I advance towards the bathysphere, scanning the wonders of human creation. Eureka! I mutter, when I find the main camera that would have allowed the intruders a complete view of our home, breaking it with a stone.
The council calls an emergency meeting. Amidst the fears being hurled around I try to find words of hope. The children are already clinging to their parents. The stories of what humans have done to our kind bring them a full course meal of nightmares. Even the plants shrink, recoiling at the mention of humans. I see mama’s flippers quiver.
“No evil will come to us,” I say, to allay the fears of their troubled hearts. “I will come up with a plan to drive them away. We will keep our new home safe.”
They believe in me too much for me to fail them.
Later that night, when everyone is asleep, I creep out of my space, swimming all the way up. Slowly, I stick out my head, looking left and right to be certain no human is at shore. I know it’s stupid, but my coming out here almost every night has become habitual. I strip off my coat, place it atop a scraggy rock rooted close to the shallow waters. Naked, I step from the waves and lie back on the sand. The feel of earth on my body is enchanting. Face up, I stare at the sparkling shy stars peeping from their cocoon: incongruously, the constellations form what appears to be a man, kneeling to propose to a selkie. This is a scene that plays in my head. Our kind are betrothed after birth. Ladi, the selkie I am betrothed to, is patient enough to wait for me till I am nineteen before we are joined in the ritual of selkie-man and wife. The waters climb on each other. At intervals, the foamy water touches my skin before retreating and joining the rest of its body. Humans are blessed creatures. I wonder why the ground they walk on is not enough to quench their pleasure. Perhaps they are solipsistic.
I am still basking in the tranquil breeze when a faint patter on sand contaminates my peace. I jolt up, scamper and hide close to a shack. A young man approaches, with dark-skin that beam in spotlight of the full moon. He stands akimbo, facing the water. Around his neck is a strap clipped to a digital camera. He takes few shots, walking into the water, snapping the rock and the sky. From where I hide, I pray he doesn’t find my coat. When he leaves, it’s the cue for me to leave as well. I run to get my coat, don it with shaky hands, submerge deeper away from danger.
Back in bed I think of the human. Something about him is different.
Panic clouds the waters and carves unequivocal fright on everyone’s faces the following morning. Black oil meanders atop the water surface, blocking the soothing warmth of the morning sun. No one knows what it is. But we fear such a substance will be toxic enough to kill us. Someone calls it black shit.
“The devilish humans will never know peace for invading our lands,” another cries from the crowd.
Murmurations agitate the serenity. Mama holds me closer, scared that the curse has finally taken its grip on us.
“What do you suggest we do?” a council member questions.
All eyes are glued to me, waiting for a miracle answer. Dread crackles in my veins, whispering words of capitulation. Truthfully, I am void of an answer.
“You are the one who has spent the most time on the humans’ land,” another says.
“I can’t tell you what that substance is,” I reply, gulping some of the fear clogging my throat. “Humans will not stop driving us out of our homes. The only way out of this is to fight back. First, I will study them.”
They all stare in befuddlement. Some of their mouths are ajar, trying to grapple with the gibberish I just uttered. How can I compare a selkie’s strength with a human’s? Their deadly weapons and war tactics? They will strike all of us down with a single barrage from their automated machine guns. The cowardice of the tribe’s response irritates me—running away was always their way out.
I know the challenges facing me. My skin will desiccate if I linger on land for long after taking human form. Humans might discover my true identity, enslaving and interrogating me to give up the tribes’ location. Human food could cause my stomach to swell, stiffen my innards, exploding from inside to cause an untimely death. But this is an inevitable mission, I think, and one that must be taken. Mama’s teary eyes don’t change my mind. Ladi’s sweet words of conviction only brush the threshold of my consciousness.
I study the human for each of the four nights that he comes to take pictures. The black oil continues spreading across the water. The children are the first to experience wheezing. Something in the substance is baleful to their health. The time to act is now. The entry plan is this: Ladi will take custody of my coat and wait for me in the early hours of the morning where I will meet him to return to the deep.
“Be careful, my daughter,” Mama says. “Humans possess dark hearts.”
The oracle puts a unique shell pendant of intricate markings around my neck.
“The gods will keep you safe, child. Go in peace,” he says, placing his adorned staff on my back while I genuflect in front of him.
I hand my coat to Ladi. He kisses me, wishing me luck on my quest. My heart beats irregularly when I think of this foolhardy mission. I can feel it attempting to force its way out of the cordoned barricade, separating itself from the other organs. I remain in the water, a scuba mask in my hand, with a bikini and lappa over my body—clothing I stole from careless humans.
I notice the human engage in his usual activity. He touches the black oil, rubbing it against his fingers.
“Help! Help!” I scream, acting theatrically as if trying to stay afloat.
He hears me scream and drops his camera, comes rushing into the water to save me. He pulls me out, lays me flat on the sand. Rushing words drop like pellets from his mouth.
“What is your name?” he ask with a charming tone.
Lounging in his aura, the chill and plush of his hands, I pretend that I’m unable to speak. His eyes remind me of the coral eyes of a merman I once fucked.
“Can you walk? Let’s get you to safety,” he says.
He loops his camera around his neck, helps me up, and slings my right hand over his shoulder. I look back, squinting, to find Ladi watching us. As the human takes me further, Ladi becomes blurry and distant. Soon I lose sight of him.
Sizzling sounds and a pungent smell kick me awake. What surrounds me isn’t the feel of water on my skin, elodea beautifying the walls of my room, or a seahorse waking me up after I overslept. Around me are books hilled on a brown table, a kaleidoscope of rectangular pictures—both colored and black and white—of water and sea animals pinned on the wall. Wine bottles of various sizes are collected in a corner on a wooden stand, and a camera lies on a single cushioned chair. A tomahawk hung askew almost squeezes my heart with trepidation. There are other items I can’t identify. My senses nudge me back to reality—I’m sitting on a bed with a cotton quilt, and wearing a shirt with the slanted, scribbled words, I am married to the sea.
This is happening. I am actually in a human’s home. He appears, smiling, holding a tray of sweet-smelling food in his hand.
“I see you are finally awake,” he says, placing the tray neatly on the bed.
I withdraw, staring into his eyes without speaking, maintaining a grim demeanor.
“My name is Koyo. You called out for help last night. What is your name? Where are you from?”
My attention is glued on the tray in front of me. Humans really know how to care for a guest. Koyo takes a bite, buttressing in action that his intention is not to poison me. I have seen this food before. The merfolk had a library before it was destroyed. Being an autodidact helped me garner all the needed knowledge. Koyo must paint me as a glutton after I devour the meal without civility. The hot tea scalds my tongue.
I spill out the cooked-up story for his perusal. My name is Vivian. My family and I were on a boat cruise when we had an accident. I swam away from the fire as far as I could before you found me close to the shore. The ploy works. He believes every word I say, assures me he will look for my family.
Dusk descends like a fog while I immerse myself in combing Koyo’s room, flipping through his books, scanning everything that might give a direction on how to stop the pollution in our waters. I find nothing useful. At least nothing that indicates the reason for their inhumane acts.
Noises slither into my ear from outside. I grab Koyo’s brown pants and go out to see for myself. The throng of humans engaging in their ceaseless talk spooks the living daylights out of me. Blend in. Remain calm. They ignore me, spitting rains of fury about how the government has given permission to foreigners to exploit the crude oil in their land. The exploration has led to the contamination of the lakes and rivers, destroying their staple means of livelihood. They too are beginning to suffer the same way we do. For the first time ever, I feel sympathy for them. Koyo is among the fuming villagers, airing out his grievances. I dodge him, making my way to the shack, waiting for Ladi to show up with my coat.
The tribe finds my words incredulous when I narrate the happenings on land. Some of them say I am growing a soft spot for the humans, defending their actions. Olu and the others are glad to see me, asking if the humans hurt me. Ladi’s hug almost asphyxiates me. That night as I lie in bed, I bring out an orb which I stole from Koyo’s room. Marooned in it is a small wooden ship having dummy sailors. I shake it, excited at the bubbles dancing about. Koyo clings to my mind. His hair, those enchanting eyes, pointed nose, the stubble. I have never known a fine human-man act with such benevolence before. I shove away thought of a blissful ending with him. Falling for him will place a grave curse on the tribe and bring ignominy to my family.
It is expedient that I return to the humans. Ladi frown against it, but he dare not counter the words of the oracle. The mission, our safety, our home is of utmost priority.
Koyo’s mouth is ajar when he opens the door. I can’t fathom if he is delighted to see me or vexed that I stole his orb and left without a word. He invites me in, asking where I’ve been. Succinctly, I tell of my adventure to the neighboring village, hoping to question anyone who might have seen my family.
“Why is this orb so important to you anyway,” I say, when he requests I give it back.
“It’s an heirloom,” he says. “Come let me show you.”
We walk past the walls of his room, covered in beautiful pictures. He speaks of his love for nature, particularly the sea. I ask about the tomahawk. He brings it down, places it in my hands. The weapon chills my veins. It was a gift from his grandfather. Having fed my eyes on so much, he sits me down. He bed pulls out a fusty box with inscribed images of whales and dolphins from under the bed.
“My late grandfather said he bought this box at a dockyard on his first trip to Zanzibar,” he explains.
Contained in the box are sea shells of various colors still smelling of freshness, shot harpoons, a diary, miscellaneous water artifacts, and a photo album full of sepia colored images of his grandfather and other people. The eleventh page arouses abhorrence in me when I see seals caged in a trammel on top of a boat. As if to further ignite my ire, there are pictures of sealskin layered on the floor as men celebrate around this priceless material. It makes me cringe.
“Are you ok?” Koyo asks, noticing the scowl on my face.
I allow my anger to deliquesce, segueing to something else.
“I am starving.“Do you have something I can eat?” I say, smiling sheepishly.
Koyo stands up, heading towards the kitchen to serve me a rechauffe. He inquires about my family. There isn’t much to tell. He will call me demented if I reveal my identity to him.
“I saw some people gathered on the road the day I left,” I say. “They seem furious.”
“Their means of livelihood has been threatened. The government permitted an oil company to extract their crude oil, but the aftermath of this action is ruining our lands. Have you seen the water recently?”
It’s apparent that we and humans are facing the same challenge. The question nudges me, chimes in my head—what can I do about it? We spend the rest of the day touring the village. Such peculiar monuments humans have. He buys me a swellegant flannel dress. We head to a local pub for a plate of pepper soup and palm wine. The palm-wine makes me a little dizzy. We listen to tales about the tradition of the land from grizzled old men.
Shit! I mutter.
It is difficult to escape from Koyo when all he does is stare and lace my fingers with his. Passing towards the beach that night on our way home, I know Ladi will be waiting with my coat. He quacks at me. Koyo hears it, too. I disentangle my fingers from him, allowing him to take pictures of me. Click, click, click. The shutter sound mixes with the whispering night breeze. I begin to remove my dress without shame, climbing out of it, walking to the beach.
“Someone might see you,” Koyo says, looking back to be certain we are the only ones present. By the time he returns his gaze at me he has lost me. Beneath the rippled waters I tell Ladi of the mission, reminding him that I have to spend more time with the humans to gather enough information to report to the tribe. Annoyance clouds his face. He grabs my hand, forcing me to go down into the deep with him. I struggle, break free of his grasp, bobbing to the surface to the sight of a distressed Koyo.
“You scared me,” Koyo says, panting. “I thought I had lost you again.”
I rise, dawdle towards him, allowing him an undiluted stare at my naked body. He hands me my dress, we go home with my head on his shoulder. Days roll over days. Crude oil extends to the river and lake, slowly becoming a scourge. Humans can no longer go fishing. Koyo explains the adverse effect of this, how poverty and crime are the result of this unfortunate situation. I attend the community meetings with Koyo. The villagers agree that the foreigners responsible for this mess must pay for it.
I rest on Koyo after we pleasure each other, playing with the hair on his chest. Later, a sharp noise wakes us. We look from the window: a man carries a boy. A small hand dangles, lifeless. Sympathizers follow them, ululating intermittently. I watch the burial rites. The boy is buried near the riverbank, so that his soul can transcend to their afterlife without being a vagrant. Koyo rushes back home to get his camera. Every click brings bitterness to my heart, drowns me in a gloomy pool. Pictures capture the emotions the heart cannot speak, Koyo says. He is so engrossed in seizing these moments that for a minute I imagine he is oblivious to them.
When the sympathizers leave for their homes, Koyo simmers, ire erupting from him. A boy died today, most likely from swimming in the poisoned water. Who will be next? The tribe will suggest we take our leave once I mention this to them. We who inhabit the deep are prone to suffer. A final goodbye to Koyo is soon to come. A fisherman claimed to have found the boy’s cold body on the wavy water surface. I know better than to think the child’s death isn’t cause by someone from my tribe. Patiently, I wait for the night to come.
Night. Koyo is snoring when I leave and shut the door carefully.
“I knew you would come,” Ladi says, face caked with evil grins.
I look back at the stretched darkness draping the entire village, snatch my coat from him, plunging into the river. On our way home I ask if he had a hand in the child’s death. His response is indifferent. It has to be him.
Mama is disappointed at my inconsiderate attitude, ranting about how I abandoned the tribe to spend time with the humans. The council commands I never see Koyo again. Other members of the tribe spare no time in expressing loathing towards my love for humans, saying I forgot my origins, reminding me why I was sent up there. I try to reason with them, emphasize the need to linger more with the humans, devise strategies to curb the pollutions ravaging our home. My opinions fall on deaf ears. The most important thing of all is protecting our home. For how long are we going to keep abandoning our homes once we feel threatened? This is the crux of my argument to the tribe. The oracle know my words to be true. After all, he breaks bread with the gods.
“I am pregnant by the human,” I say, further aggravating their disgust.
Silence moves as an angry bird, flapping its wings. Mama falls backward. Deep in her eyes I see a volcanic steam of ire she had never shown before. Everyone avoids me, moves away from my presence. Olu pats me on the back as he leaves, an expression of disappointment on his face. The tribe has forgone the mission of protecting our home, they are getting ready to leave. As always.
Being ostracized from the tribe is an inevitable punishment for my act. At least I get to keep my coat and spend more time with Koyo. Sunlight angles in from the windows in his house, providing warmth on my feet. I’m curled up at one corner of the bed, thinking over my actions, wondering if Koyo is worth all of this. Then I hear it, the sound of feet trampling on the ground waking the sleeping dust. I peep and see some see people brandishing cutlasses, axes, and knives. My first thought is to go out and find Koyo. I am new in this settlement—where could I possibly go to look for him? I touch the shell pendant around my neck, praying to the gods for the bravery to face the hurdles on the road. Koyo rushes in and grabs his camera.
“Let’s go,” he says. “There’s something you have to see.”
When we get to the beach, my eyes fall on a sight my mouth couldn’t express. The beach is thronged with both young and old. Part of the water is bloody. A sperm whale, presumably dead, lies in the water. Humans spare no time in cutting their chunks of meat from this helpless beast. The glee in their faces evokes rage in me. My guess is this meat will be a consolation for their days of not fishing since the black oil attacked their livelihood. Dead squids and few fishes fall out of the whale when a boy plunge his knife into its belly. The tribe must have been long gone. Koyo covers all of this with his camera. Sometimes I wonder if his penchant for pictures is a mere hobby, or if he wishes to keep them as a trophy rather than use them to help the villagers.
No single human in the beach shows a hint of remorse. Now I see the reason Mama doesn’t like me mingling with them. The ones who have a basin full of whale flesh leave and others return, looking for a spot to cut their own share.
That night I spoke with Koyo, telling him how those people do not feel bad for their actions. I tell how I lost my family due to the environmental hazards of humans. I want to express a deluge of my revulsion for them. All of their actions from inception have been geared towards polluting the sea, lakes and rivers. Do they even consider the creatures living beneath? Perhaps they don’t realize that their smug attitude would wreak great consequences on the sea dwellers.
Koyo is rapt. He has never found me to be a loquacious person. I admit I am a bit verbose.
“You sound like you are friends with a mermaid,” he says, making a jest. “It’s a good thing you mentioned it, I think I have gathered enough pictures to tell the world of what has been happening here. First, I need permission to post the picture of the dead boy,” he says, with regret and hurt in his voice.
Dawn push away the stubborn darkness refusing to leave its space. We go to the late boy’s mother, seeking her permission to share the burial pictures.
“Shey dis one go bring my pikin back,” she ask, tears streaming down her face.
Koyo comfort her, assuring her that the pictures might be a first step in curtailing the actions of the company responsible for her misfortune. She gave him the go ahead. Koyo shares the pictures online, alongside the hashtags of various environmental bodies and news agencies, calling for the need to save the sea and everything that lives in and beside it. At intervals we check for the feedback on the pictures. The engagements are coming in.
After all that has happened, we think the gravest of disasters has already passed us by. We thought wrong. This is just the beginning. People start to fall sick. The majority of them are the consumers of the dead sperm whale. I need no soothsayer to tell me that the whale must have been poisoned by the black oil. The sea and river are no longer habitable for fishing and swimming. It has become a black murk of wastes and dead animals blocking the flow of sunlight and air into the deep. The tribe is right to have suggested we leave. I pray they are safe wherever they are.
I allow one of Koyo’s neighbors to plait my hair when the sun is about setting, though part of its yellow ring is yet to leave the vast sky. Five people approach us. Their dress indicates they are not from around here.
“Hello,” one of them says. “My name is Matilda. I was told I would find the photographer who took these pictures.”
She holds out some of Koyo’s pictures, printed in color. I still feel the remains of queasiness, seeing the skeletal frame of the dead whale.
“We are representatives of an international body protecting communities suffering from environmental hazards. We want to help bring an end to this menace,” Matilda says.
I feel my body swathed in joy. Someone has come to our aid. They meet with Koyo, asking him to enlarge the pictures and pass them on while they take the necessary actions. The only thing the government did was temporarily close down the oil extraction project. The villagers know how it will all play out—once the heat of the moment is gone, the project will resume.
The moon appears as a crescent in the dotted sky. Koyo is fast asleep. I visit the river, bend under the red tape barricade used to restrict people from going beyond. It smells of putrid fish. I extend my walk into the stagnant water, pushing my feet through the obstacles of dead things. I sing to the river, its stench filling my body with disgust. We selkies communicate with our voices no matter how far away we are. Uncertain if my call will be acknowledged, I keep singing, stretching my voice far into the sullied air. My message is clear to the tribe; we are on the verge of victory, completely halting the project that has rendered the villagers jobless and made us lose our home. I wait for a reply from a member of the tribe, but their voices are silent.
Reporters of different television and radio stations set their equipment in front of the village square. The village had met, decided to march to the government house. In the hands of the village leader is an international signed petition demanding the government shut down further operations, demanding payment of damages, and demanding the guaranteed safety of the waters.
While reporters are questioning Koyo and the rest of the community, I sense I belong here with them. A huge part of me wishes the tribe was here. Then I feel a tap from behind: It’s Olu, and he’s smiling at me. Mama and the rest of the tribe are present, too.
“Ladi did a great deal of work in convincing us to come back. He reached out to the merfolks. I don’t know what he did, but his words swayed them to come join in the march,” Mama says. “He didn’t kill the child. The child was already dead when he found him.”
My distant relatives are prepared for this peaceful protest.
“Mama told me you deserve the praises for bringing the tribe here,” I say to Ladi.
He shakes his head in disapproval.
“I simply gave them a reason to keep their faith strong. Ever since your ban I waited for your song. The night I heard it from the ripples of the water, I knew I had to do everything to support you. Besides, I was tired of always having to find a new home.”
I want to hear the words about his innocence of the dead child. I ask him.
“I took offence when you found love with the human. I wanted you to be as angry as I was. But I am no killer. The poor child died when he went swimming that night. The spillage must have made breathing difficult.”
We file out en masse, holding placards and pictures. The humans sing in their native dialect, and the vigor in their voices cuts through the rising dusts and the levitating aura. We sing as well, in ours.
I am sunbathing in the beach when people point at a creature in the water. It’s a seal, and the seal is Olu. People are taking pictures of him. Olu sees me, and calls to me before submerging into the deep. Fishing has not fully resumed. Our cries and demands yield results. The villagers received part-payment for the damages, and operations are permanently suspended. The water has not yet fully cleared, though we are hopeful that it will soon.
Koyo offered to help Olu get a job when I introduced him as my brother. But Olu’s bond with the sea has not let him fully decide to start living on land.
“If I didn’t know you well enough I’d say you share a common affinity with the sea,” Koyo say, holding a necklace having a blue pendant he bought for me. I wear it around my neck, next to the shell pendant.
I giggle, shrug, and rub my protruding stomach. In few months I’ll birth a child. Eventually I’ll have to tell Koyo the truth. I hope that when I do, the affinities that we share will be enough.
My granddaughter Nisha bounces on the tips of her toes, with flutter kicks in between, a hummingbird barely touching the sidewalk. I adjust the rebreather plugged into my nostrils and push myself forward. Keeping up with her has gotten harder, not just because of my age. Walking is different now. The air resists my habitual gait. Little hops lift me into the thickened atmosphere that slows my return to Earth. It’s undignified, but it’s past time I got used to this. I’m not that old. I bob along after her.
“Not too far,” I call. Talking is different too. It takes more effort, timing it with the rebreather. The sounds distort, vowels overwhelming consonants in the heavy air. I have to listen carefully to understand people. Nisha, considerate of my limitations, gives me a thumbs-up. The playground is close, but I grew up not trusting the world. I’ve watched it change along apocalyptic predictions, down to the air getting hotter, wetter, and thicker every year. And stranger changes, that no one predicted, overwrote the science I learned in school. It’s literally a different world than the one I grew up in. I won’t trust it with Nisha, unsupervised. While my son and daughter-in-law are at work, the responsibility is mine.
Plots of kudzu line the sidewalk, taller than Nisha. She turns the corner. I quicken my bobs, sucking air through the rebreather with the hollow sound of a patient in a hospital. The kudzu of my childhood was engineered into a kind of terrestrial kelp, with broad leaves undulating in the thickened breeze. Tiny creatures like fish dart among the fronds. The kudzu still tries to spread over everything, but it traps pollutants in nodules that bud like cancer along its stalks. Rebreathers kept the cancer from my generation’s bodies. Kudzu keeps it from Nisha’s. Maybe I don’t need a rebreather now, but I’m susceptible to pneumonia and a panicked sense of drowning when the viscous air enters my lungs. My son calls the dry, thin product of the device “nostalgic air.” He doesn’t care for it.
Privately, I spend some time every day inhaling the unfiltered atmosphere, training myself not to choke. Sometimes I succeed. It’s a trust fall into the world. I’m trying.
The playground’s plastic and metal equipment is not much different from my own childhood’s. Nisha has a routine. Even before greeting her friends, she scrambles up a ladder and crawls the monkey bars, skipping every other bar. From the last bar she launches herself into space. The air will catch her. I don’t wait underneath like I used to, but I don’t sit down on a bench until she lands on the web of ropes and climbs to a platform.
“You have kids here?” the young mom next to me asks kindly. An unused rebreather is clipped to her shoulder. The kids don’t need them, their parents have them “just in case,” and their grandparents suck on them like life support. Fashion across the generations.
“Granddaughter,” I say, gesturing to Nisha.
“Those two are mine,” she says, pointing at a pair of boys, a few years older than Nisha, doing their best to hurl each other, and all comers, off the highest platform. “We used to go to a different park, but this one’s actually closer.”
I correctly guess they go to Nisha’s school, and we talk about homework, teachers, and activities. She’s patient as I time my words with the rebreather.
I hear shouting from the playground equipment as if through water. A boy sails over a platform’s railing. I can’t tell if he was thrown by my bench-mate’s boys or jettisoned himself. All the adults watch. None rise to their feet. Kids fly now, but I’m the only one still with a helicopter instinct. I grip the bench and keep my seat. The hiss of my rebreather is fast and shallow. The air will catch him. It’s like a prayer. The boy somersaults in slow motion, somehow landing on his feet. He bounces and is airborne again, climbing the ropes onto the platforms.
“I’ll never get used to that,” I say.
“My mother says one never stops worrying.”
Her mother says that. I suppose it’s true. Maybe every generation looks askance at the wonders of the next, afraid to trust them.
I’m embarrassed and irritated by the sound of my breathing. I’m no invalid. As casually as I can manage, I pull the rebreather from my nostrils. I inhale a thick, wet deluge, and manage not to cough. My chest expands. I’m not drowning. I let it out, and bring it back.
Nisha isn’t roughhousing. She’s talking with girls her age, their voices distorted by the atmospheric soup. But at any moment they could fling themselves from a ladder.
Would you jump off a roof if your friends did? My parents asked me that.
I would if it looked fun, I didn’t dare reply.
How the world has changed.
And it does look fun.
I’m on my feet. I don’t remember rising. I step onto the ladder rung and pull myself up. This movement is familiar, easier than walking. I’m not as strong anymore, but now I’m buoyant. The strange science that resists me walking also holds me up. The young parents watch with amusement, not worry. They’ve learned to trust the world. Can I?
I crawl the bars like my granddaughter, every other one, building momentum in slow motion. I grip the last bar with both hands and kick as though swimming, which I haven’t done in years. My body remembers.
This is your reservation reminder from Palmetto Kayak Adventure Tours. Your four-hour self-guided tour is scheduled for today, 1–5pm. Reply 1 to confirm, 2 to cancel. Hope to see you soon!
The text is waiting when I wake up. White letters stark against the black text box. I don’t bother looking at the number. I’ve made no such reservation, nor the one for Lowcountry Marsh Tours that I was sent on last year, or Saltmarsh Wanderings the year before that. The origin of the texts remains untraceable, and I’ve had some smart people looking.
The first time, I thought I’d won a giveaway. I like to ramble down to Charleston and the Sea Islands a few times a year, spend half a day out on the water laughing with the gulls and crying in wonder at the rays and dolphins. A giveaway wasn’t too far-fetched. It wasn’t until I got where I was going that I knew why I was there. Now it’s an affirmation of faith, a call and response between me and the sea.
I text back to confirm and dress for the day. Water leggings, sports bra, and a long-sleeved sun shirt; baseball cap from a school in the northern part of the state. I’m what they call a local tourist, not quite a local, definitely not one of the out-of-state offenses the Sun Belt is forced to rely upon for revenue. Still, it’s an hour drive down to Folly Island and I have time to sit in the quiet truck and talk to myself, make sure this is what I want to do. What I still want to do. It’s not new to me. Ten years since that first text and I’ve taken over a dozen of these impromptu trips, trusting that I’m doing my small part to leave the marsh—maybe the world—better than I found it.
My friends marvel at my impulsiveness. My bravery. My joie de vivre. They can’t imagine going anywhere on their own, much less out onto the water, but I’m rarely more than a few hundred yards from shore and 80% of the water I’m on isn’t even over my head. It’s not like I’m out free climbing red rocks without a safety partner.
“Ms. McDonald?”
I’m never what they’re expecting and today less so. It’s a perfect November day and the weather is beautiful—bright blue sky, sun blade-sharp as it glints off the dark water—but there’s a storm off the coast and the breeze is fierce. I’ll be paddling into a 15mph wind and spend most of the paddle out against the tide. I don’t look like the athletic type.
Whatever that’s supposed to mean.
“Like the farmer,” I confirm with a very realistic moo-moo here. Sometimes the joke lands, sometimes it doesn’t, but the couple behind the counter is closer to my age, granola crunchy sapphics from the upstate who made their way south in the nineties and found Charleston more hospitable. Angela’s name tag boasts a rainbow flag pin not too different than the one she’s just noticed on my hat. She grins back and I add, “That’s me.”
“Gonna be a rough afternoon out there,” she warns, but she takes my credit card anyway. “But if you stick to the edges, you’ll be alright. Should be able to get a little paddling in before the wind gets worse.”
I’ve paid for four hours. I’m not coming in until it’s storming or dark, but I’m used to people underestimating me. When I was younger, when I had more to prove, it used to infuriate me. Somewhere around thirty, I realized it was a gift. By the time I turned forty, it was a miracle.
No one expects much of a round, middle-aged white woman. They suspect her even less.
Angela and I make small talk as I sign the necessary waivers and give them my emergency contacts. Her wife, Kathy, tells me to be careful. They seem a little reluctant to send me out until I show them my waterproof phone in its floaty bag. They ask if I have water and I show them my favorite insulated steel flask. It’s so big it has its own sling across my back and holds enough water for most of the day. If I have to I can use it as a bludgeoning weapon.
They don’t need to know that last part.
“There’s an old boat they beached on this little creek,” Angie says, handing me a laminated map of the King Flats Creek and its tiny tributaries. Some of the brackish waterways are so small they only really exist at high tide. “It’s full of crabs.”
“I’ll be sure to check it out.”
It’s all very up and up. They give me back my card and I head out to the landing. The salt in the air is holy, by day’s end I’ll be dusted and glittering like a sea pixie, anointed.
The Folly kid waiting with my bright red kayak is too young to be a burned-out hippy, but he’s burned out just the same. A full-time resident of the island, with long, salt-dried, sun-bleached hair that might have once been brown, skin burned and bronzed like the bottom of a biscuit. I couldn’t guess at his age; his face and hands are weathered from outdoor life. What brain cells he has left know more about the tides and marsh than I ever will.
But it doesn’t call to him.
“You’re a local right?” he asks, hope drawing a frown between his warm, brown eyes.
“Local tourist,” I admit with a smile that always disarms. “From swamp country, an hour or so north.”
We have our own tourist problem, though it’s migratory. Every spring, they come for the lakes and the golf-course weather. If there’s a polo-shirt, cleat-wearing version of me wildflower-bombing thousands of acres of pesticide-soaked bentgrass, I don’t need to know about it, but I wish her well.
“Ah.” Folly kid nods in almost approval, like he knows a little of what I’m thinking. Maybe he does. He takes a deep breath and I find myself inhaling with him, a slow toke of pungent pluff mud air. “Bit different down here.”
He likes me, feels safe around me just like most wild creatures. He smells a little sweet, like good pot and seawater. Nothing worse to him than the necessary evil of tourists.
“It is,” I agree. “But it’s nice to get out on someone else’s water every now and then.”
I’m not arrogant enough to think myself at home here. This isn’t my land. It’s not even the land of my people. Some of my people stole it from the Kussoe centuries ago. I’m an interloper. An occasional predator necessary to the ecosystem, but neither resident nor invasive.
He nods again, sagely, points with his chin at the rough, rippling water. “Too salty here for snakes or alligators.”
It’s mostly true. They’re what biologists call transient species. Animals who only spend part of their lives in the marsh. Alligators are as rare as I am; the daily commuters are dolphins, rays, and small sharks. Each drawn into the intertidal area by the promise of calm water and good hunting.
Local tourists, like me.
“It’ll be a little rough getting across,” he says. He’s worried about the currents too. The river is wide here, a dark reflection of autumn sky. Clouds may gather like omens a few miles southeast, but the way the weather wavers, it’s unlikely I’ll see rain.
I zip on my life vest just to make him feel better and assure him that I have been kayaking before. He gives me the same speech he gives everyone, marks a couple of points of interest on the map with a wet fingertip, including the crab boat.
“Just stick to the edge,” he says, finally. “Tide’ll be with you on the way back, make the return a whole lot easier.”
He pushes my boat half out into the water, and waits for me to get settled. I take my time, storing my water bottle out of the way, clipping my floaty-bag to a bungee by my seat. I have a multi-tool in my waist pouch and a mesh bag for litter. There’s always something out there that shouldn’t be.
“Ready?”
It’s been a rough two years, pandemic and all that, and this is my first trip beyond my own swamp in eighteen months. I brace myself, mentally and physically, for the send-off. I’m not a small woman, and part of me still expects to be too big, too heavy for something as simple and finite as the laws of buoyancy. I don’t know why—except cultural conditioning—it’s not like I’m close to the kayak’s weight limit, but it’s hard being a woman who takes up space.
Fat. I know we’re supposed to be reclaiming that word, giving it the neutral value it’s supposed to have, but it’s never been neutral to me. Maybe if I were a whale or a seal or a manatee. Maybe if fat was something you had instead of something you are.
I tug on my gloves and pick up my paddle. “Ready.”
On the water, I’m just another round marine creature. I’m heavy, but I’m strong. My body has never failed to do what I want or need it to. That’s all the water cares about. If it cares at all. Bigger and stronger than I get lost beneath its surface every day. Having come back from drowning twice as a child, I’m acutely aware of this. I still get a cold skitter down my spine whenever I cross deep, dark water. Doesn’t matter how many times I manage it safely. There’s only one wrong breath between us and oblivion.
The Folly kid was right; it’s rough crossing the widest part of the river. It’s deep water, permanent. I look both ways before I start to cross, a mostly useless habit out here. The big boats stick to the center, and most run a low wake, but not all. It’s not like a kayaker is fast enough to get out of the way. We rely on common courtesy, the laws—both written and not—of water etiquette.
Across the water, miles of Spartina grass wave, green and gilded and filled with the surf-sounding tumble of a brisk sea wind. The water along the edge is calm as promised, and I’m halfway across when an offshore fishing boat goes zipping by too fast. Post-911 country music blares, louder than the breeze, and the tattered nylon buzz of an American flag hangs past respectful retirement on the Master Baiter’s stern. I raise my paddle and let the waves push me roughly toward the bank. Assholes. Serve them right if it’s them that I’m here for, but there’s no use worrying about that yet.
The kayak bottoms out, a soft bump then a harsh grate as the tough plastic scrapes against oyster shells clustered in the shallows. I wait for the water to calm again, for the smell of diesel exhaust to sweep past me and vanish, before I push back off, paddle digging into the muddy bank. A handful of long-legged oystercatchers dash along beside me, footprints disappearing in the damp sand, bright red bills flashing amid grey-shelled oysters. They’re not bothered by the assholes; maybe I shouldn’t be either.
Not yet.
My paddling form is terrible, clunky. Doesn’t matter how often I come. My arms are short or I’m clumsy. Maybe both. I don’t know. I just know practice hasn’t cured me. But the wildlife never seems to mind. I know it’s partly because they’re accustomed to worse than me, but I like to think they know I’m no threat to them, that they welcome me among them. I paddle ahead of the birds and grab my phone, snap photos as the wind pushes me back. A scoop of pelicans swoop low in front of me and I get their pictures as well before I lose too much momentum. Then it’s back to balancing, staying close enough to the bank that I don’t have to fight the wind, but not so close that I’m bottoming out every dozen yards.
I might not be getting my steps in, but I’m getting my workout. At least I’m not sweaty. Soaked through from wind and sub-par paddling form, but not sweaty. I love being out here. Surrounded by water, sky, and marsh. The entire day is blue-white and golden, a perfect mid-seventies. Overhead a red-tailed hawk circles. Tiny birds dart through the cordgrass, marsh wrens and saltmarsh sparrows, nibbling on grass seeds and insects.
Every time I check my map or stop for water, I drift back. I’ve kayaked before but nothing like this. The marsh is usually peaceful as a warm bath, and I’ve never really bemoaned my poor paddling form, but I’m regretting it today, even as I’m grateful to have remembered my gloves. My first time out I went home with blisters and that was on water as smooth as glass.
The grass opens up on my left, the small tributary with the promised crab boat. It’s not quite the halfway point of my four hours, but I’m tired enough to take the respite. The wind doesn’t roar here, it sighs, and so do I, letting as much of the last year go as I can. I take a selfie with a great blue heron who seems utterly unconcerned with my presence, post it and a few other pictures to the ‘gram. Establishing a timeline. An alibi.
Perfect fall day on the water!
As promised, just around a bend, a derelict fishing boat has been overturned and run aground. Repurposed as a crab habitat, its sun-scoured, barnacle-covered surface swarms with orange-fisted fiddler crabs, claws raised in warning as my shadow falls too close. I salute the intrepid arthropods and paddle past, bank my kayak and take a few more photos, then a water break in the quiet. The sun is nap-warm and my arms are just starting to get tired. I toy with the idea of hiding here for what little is left of the afternoon, but there’s work waiting for me.
A chip wrapper flashes silver from the bank. Beside it lies a plastic milk jug and a tangled knot of fishing line the size of my fist. The fishing line is the worst, but that silver flashes like a lure to more than me out here. I use my paddle to drag the rubbish to the edge of my kayak, throw one leg off the other side to balance as I lean down to pick it up. The water’s cold this late in the season, and even knowing the bottom is only inches beneath my dangling foot, I feel the silty truth of my own vulnerability. I distract myself with a few curses for all litterbugs and head back out.
The tide turns as I reach the widest part of the creek. It’s deep water here, and the storm current is strong, pushing me back the way I’ve come even as the leaving tide pulls me forward. I fight along with the water, because it’s not in me not to, because there is a single crystalline moment when it’s just me and the water and the wind and I am both insignificantly small and cosmically stubborn. Immortal, ephemeral. My entire being surrendering to the frantic pursuit of perseverance, ultimately going nowhere.
I hate it, but I am still paddling.
I have a moment to doubt, a moment to wonder if the marsh really chose me or if my descent into madness was the inevitable product of growing up in a late-stage capitalist hellscape, consuming too many Disney Princess movies and 90s environmentalist cartoons. What makes me any different than the white kids deep-diving into far-right radicalism on Youtube?
An hour before sunset, the marsh grass shadows stretch long, dark reflections in the unquiet water. The Atlantic is just a song away; the salt in the air thickens. Last time I was here, my sister and I turned back about a quarter-mile before King Flats merges with Folly and Oak Island creeks, but I’ve never been this far out alone. A pair of osprey crisscross above me, hunting cries all but lost in the wind, and even though I’m expecting them, I startle when the first bonnethead shark bumps the bottom of my boat.
“You’re late,” I accuse, as if there is any timeline but that of the marsh.
The second little shark swipes the side of my kayak, movements reminiscent of herding dogs. Soon there are a dozen swimming close to the surface, avoiding my paddle with enviable agility. Bonnethead sharks aren’t big enough to threaten people, even if they wanted to, which they don’t. They’re the smallest of the hammerheads—in hammer and in length—tending around three to four feet long and traveling in schools of twelve to fifteen. Omnivores, if you can imagine. They’re the only sharks we know of whose diet consists equally of plants. They forage into the marsh because they like swimming along the bottom of shallow water, grazing on sea lettuce and crustaceans.
I take a deep breath, my doubts sinking to the bottom like so much detritus. It won’t be long now. Longest it’s ever taken from pick up to target is ten minutes. I lift my paddle from the water and let the bonnetheads bump and nudge and push the nose of my kayak in the direction they want me going. Nothing about my escort is natural. They’re not false-smiling bottle-nosed dolphins charming boaters with swim-bys and strand feedings.
Whatever time is left, I spend preparing: turning off my phone, making sure it’s safely secured in the kayak. I take a few gulps of water. No matter how often we do this my throat always gets dry. My shirt is salt-crusted, lips wind-chapped. I’d be sunburned if I didn’t insist on an unreasonable SPF. I check the fit of my gloves, flex salt from the creases. My arms feel like jelly and my feet have pressed to the pegs for so long, I can’t tell what my legs are doing. That’s pretty normal, especially after a long time sitting in the boat. When I finally get back to the landing, Folly kid will tell me to go slow getting up and he’ll hover, not wanting a customer to land on their ass.
A curved fin breaks the water beside me, and my heart leaps free of its fears as a pair of dolphins breach gently, grey sides slick with watercolor sunset. They cross in front of my kayak and then something heavier than a bonnethead bumps beneath my seat. What makes me different from those radicalized kids? They do. An unnatural alliance. Sharks, dolphins, and the raptors overhead. Disparate species gathering together, water and wildlife willing me on their way.
Whatever my reluctance, it’s lost in exaltation. We make the last deep bend of King Flats Creek. Ahead is Folly Creek, then a half-mile farther the Atlantic. The Master Baiter is anchored in the confluence of the three creeks, and yes, I’m glad it’s them. The water is dark, filled with the sky’s reflection, but there’s something floating like oil just below all that sky. As I draw closer to the boat, I can see that it’s blood.
It’s legal to chum in South Carolina; it’s a standard fishing practice. There are certain restrictions around certain beaches, but I’ve never bothered learning them. I don’t care about what’s legal, I only care about what’s right. Here, in this quiet sanctuary, it is defilement. Sacrilege. I pick up my paddle, stick one end forward on my right and cut hard to port.
They’re “shark fishing.” The kind of nonsense that leaves hooks in mouths and bullet wound scars on heads, backs, and sides. We’re supposed to leave nothing behind, but some people think that the only way to be remembered is to leave a scar upon the earth. They’re always the same. White men with too much or too little money. Ignorant of all but their own entitlement. I don’t need to have the first fin brought to my attention, but whatever brought me out here wants to be sure of my investment, I guess. One of the dolphins swims up alongside, eye lifted out of the water, a dark certainty in the meeting of our gaze. The fin in her mouth is small, cut clean, not torn or ripped like any non-human might manage.
The Master Baiter looms with laughter and loud music. Three figures move along the deck, but they haven’t noticed me. It’s impossible to hear the gunshots over the wind, but the creatures around my boat recoil with every shot, and the kayak seems to reverberate with fear and anger and my own trembling rage. When my bow brushes the side of the boat, the sharks and dolphins dive. I don’t see the darker shadow that follows, but I can feel it, a low quiet rising from the deep water like a promise.
They’re too busy taking turns shooting into the water to notice me. I grab a line and tether my kayak to the ladder on the side of the boat. By the time they realize they’re not alone, I’m onboard, leaning back against the rail, situation and targets assessed.
Early twenties. Gym muscles and soft hands. Beach blonde hair growing out from hundred-dollar haircuts. Perfect teeth, expensive sunglasses. They’re not kids; they’re grown-ass men languishing too long under the protective banner of boys. Their parents have summer homes in places like Beaufort and Isle of Palms and Frogmore Isle, but they like to come to the marshes and cosplay the local rednecks in cut-up Dirty Crab t-shirts of buxom cartoon girls covered in double entendres.
“I called ahoy,” I lie with a nod back to my kayak. The boat smells like beer and blood and fish guts and there’s a red, white, and jingoist anthem twanging from the stereo. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but cruelty has its own cadence. There’s no doubt about why I’m here. “Water was getting rough. Y’all mind if I tie up for a few minutes, get my second wind?”
They glance back and forth between each other. The one holding the gun—it’s a 9mm Glock; I can’t even—tucks it into the back waistband of jeans he bought already ripped to hell.
“Naw.” His accent is bad, either a part of the south I’m not from or something he picked up on those faux southern reality shows, the ones that wouldn’t know a real southern accent if it blessed their fucking hearts. “We’re just doing a little fishing.”
He pulls at the brim of his trucker hat. I can’t tell if he’s trying to tip it at me politely or if he’s just nervous. I can’t see his eyes, but I don’t need to. He realizes he’s caught. He just doesn’t know what net he’s in.
“Water’s rough for fishing,” I say as his buddies fall back to flank him. They’re just out of arm’s reach, but that’s okay. I’ve nearly got my legs back.
The other two aren’t nervous. They’ve done nothing wrong and they’re used to being the most important people in any given room. The guy with the gun, well, he’s a little squirmy, wondering how much I saw, how much trouble I can get him in. He’s been in trouble for stupid shit before. I don’t know this for certain, but I recognize the type. Daddy’s important or wants to be; Junior keeps costing him money and reputation with the cover-ups.
“S’posed to calm down this evening,” says one of Junior’s buddies. He’s got blood and offal on the hem of his t-shirt, and I avoid looking at the mess on deck. It’s clear they’ve never cleaned a fish before; they’re not fishing for food or even sport. They just want to kill something. “Hoping to get a good haul tonight.”
Junior can’t decide what to do with his hands. He crosses his arms in front of his chest. Uncrosses them. I don’t say anything about the gun; I already know it’s mine. Just as soon as he turns his back to me. Whether that’s before or after one of his buddies hits the water is all that remains to be seen.
I just want to kill something too.
“Not really the ideal spot for shark fishing,” I say lightly. They could shrug it off if they wanted to, but they’re not the type to take criticism from a woman who isn’t their momma or their unfortunate girlfriend.
“It is if you put enough bait out.” Junior laughs, and I decide I’m going to leave him for last.
I don’t answer. Instead, I make a show of stretching. When a fat woman does anything active, people tend to look away or stare in judgment. They turn back to the rail, and I’m instantly forgotten as the third one leans too far over, reaching down toward the water.
“Chad, on your right!” Bloody Hem says excitedly.
I get close enough to see that he has a bangstick partially submerged. I’ve never seen one in action—they’re used by divers and spear-fishers as shark deterrents—and I doubt this is anything like the right way, but I’ve seen the effects of them, photographs of three-inch deep holes in the broad beautiful heads of bull sharks somehow still swimming.
Chad leans farther out, stretching, stretching . . . stretching.
It doesn’t take much. The idiot isn’t even flat-footed. He’s on his toes, leaning out as far as he can and still keep his weapon in the water. His buddies are cheering him on. When he tips face-first into the water, it takes them entirely too long to realize I pushed him. Hell, if I hadn’t grabbed Junior’s gun—easily, far too easily—they might have kept laughing, assuming Chad was shit-faced enough to lose his balance.
But I have Junior’s gun.
“What the fuck, bitch?!”
The violence simmers up on an outraged shout that is always just beneath the surface with these kinds of men. Junior takes a step towards me and I shake my head once. He should be grateful I’m not stuck using my vacuum flask.
“Shh . . . .” I don’t know if they can hear me over the wind, over the country music twanging beneath cries of the gathering gulls, but they still, gazes darting to each other like frightened baitfish.
It’s been years since I held a handgun. I’ve always preferred revolvers, at least until the gun nuts ruined that for the rest of us. I have a rifle and a shotgun at home. One for hunting, the other for scaring off coyotes or any other uninviteds too close to my house. The 9mm feels like a toy, but Bloody Hem and Junior are taking me seriously now that I have it leveled at them. I wonder how many bullets are left in the clip.
“You can’t steal my boat.” Junior has misread the situation.
I can’t help but laugh. Confusion reddens their faces.
“I don’t want your boat.” I make eye contact with Bloody Hem through his polarized shades, point toward the water with the gun, then back at him. “Go on. You can take your chances in the water or don’t. But I’ma see how many bullets you have left in three . . . two . . . .”
They stare at me in disbelief, but they jump before I get to one. I’m actually a little surprised, though I shouldn’t be. Courage is in short supply among this particular demographic. They don’t know what to do when they aren’t the ones holding the gun.
Twin splashes quickly become desperate thrashing. Just off the bow, the water writhes and churns with blood and unidentifiable voids. When I see a terrified face too close to the surface, I lean out and down, close enough that skill hardly matters. Close enough that the Glock could have been a bangstick. I put a bullet between Chad’s wide blue eyes. Now he’s bait. If there’s an afterlife or a next life or purgatory, maybe someone can teach him about irony and just deserts.
Bloody Hem screams something watery and incoherent, but he’s no fool. He’s swimming hard for the ladder at the boat’s stern. He doesn’t see the unnaturally large bull shark gliding behind him, Junior’s arm hanging out one side of her beautiful mouth.
But I do.
She’s not a real shark. With very rare exceptions, even the biggest and hungriest sharks want little to do with us. She’s something else, both more and less than the reality of a bull shark. She’s vengeance and requiem, the physical manifestation of the marsh’s need.
Junior surfaces behind her with a scream, his remaining hand clutching the bloody stump of his arm. Bloody Hem looks back and sees . . . well, he’s not sure what he sees. He’s not the kind to recognize his own end, but I make sure Junior sees me raise the gun. His buddy falls back, eyes round and mouth gaping, blood spreading bright across Dirty Crab’s Bait Shack.
Junior doesn’t suffer nearly as long as I want him to, but I need to head home. I put the last bullet in his back and toss the gun overboard. When the scavengers come to feast, I slip down the ladder, feet just above the autumn sea, waiting. The bonnetheads and dolphins return, the little sharks feasting on the small bits of fresh bait. There’s a flash of metal at the corner of one gaping mouth, impossible to ignore. I slip out of my life jacket and into the bloody water. It’s chilly, not enough to be dangerous, but it’s not a pleasant swim. The earth is warming and so the waters are cooling from polar icecap melt. Another month and the bonnetheads may well be swimming south to warmer waters. It’s now or spring, if I even see the same ones again.
I’m never sure; I don’t always join them. Baiting is bad, even for the best reasons, like data collecting and scientific observation and what I’m doing now: pulling hooks out of lips and fishing lines off of tails with my multi-tool. The last thing wild creatures need is to get too accustomed to humans, but the reality is, they’re already tangling with us on the regular. Doing nothing feels like violence.
I tug loose one last hook from the mouth of a large female, fumble my multi-tool back into my pack with cold fingers and the jerky movements of prey that she’s polite enough to ignore. When I’m done, she glides around me, silking past me like a cat. Once, twice, three times. She presses her head up against my empty hand, shark-skin benediction scratching lightly at my glove. I would linger if I could, but this is her home, not mine. Maybe one day I’ll be another wild creature and not just their agent, but not today.
I climb back out and into my kayak, teeth chattering and shivering in the breeze. The dolphins bump me away, escort me through water painted mango-bright with Lowcountry sunset. Is that water-color reflection stained brighter red than the clouds? I can’t say, but it feels like it should be. Red skies and warnings and all of that.
When I turn my phone back on, there is a text waiting.
Thank you for adventuring with us today! We hope to see you again, but not soon.
Paige was twelve years old when she first noticed the buds along her spine. She was in the upstairs bathroom, the one with the vining yellow flowers in the wallpaper and the faux-tile linoleum, about to get in the shower. She stopped to examine herself in the mirror above the sink, not yet steamed with the hot water. Did her elbows look weird? Were her widening hips and thighs fat or beautiful? She turned and twisted, trying to see herself from every angle. Pulling her long, pecan-colored hair forward over her shoulder, she noticed the little constellation of four raised bumps in the middle of her back, two on each side of her spine, just between her shoulder blades. Her stomach jolted.
She knew what they were, of course. Sort of knew. Her mother had spoken of her own chambers abstractly: a promise, an honor, a gift from God. But seeing those bumps there on her own back, raised up under her own skin—as yet, the color of the rest of her and featureless—Paige did not feel honored at all. What right did God have to put chambers into her back? It would be years still until the buds would split open, a pouch having formed inside each one, and the tenant moths would come to lay their eggs in the little hollow chambers. But in her horror, Paige thought she could feel the moth larvae in there already, moving and growing, taking possession of her in their small way.
Paige didn’t tell her mom about the chambers after she discovered them that day in the bathroom mirror. Instead, she got into the shower and tried to scrub them off until her arms ached. She didn’t want to be a keeper. If this was a blessing, then she didn’t want blessings. Paige saw the faces that people made at her mother’s exposed back during tenant season, heard them grumbling at her, telling her to cover up. Not everyone was rude. Most people didn’t care. But there were always a few who wanted to talk about it. If their parents had friends over for dinner in the summer, they might do a special toast to the moths and to Paige’s mother. And then they would ask about the girls with curiosity.
“Not yet,” their mom would say, looking wistfully at her daughters. “Lord willing.”
Every year, on their anniversary, their dad made the same joke: “She’s a keeper,” he always said, and his eyes crinkled up as he looked at their mom, “in more ways than one.”
Paige didn’t want any of this said about her. She thought that if she didn’t tell her mother, it wouldn’t happen. So she told her sister instead.
Heather was fifteen, a young-for-her-grade sophomore, who nonetheless was a favorite among the juniors and seniors. She seemed, to Paige, to know all the secrets of fitting in and had taught Paige everything she knew about fashion, make-up, and sleepover etiquette. And so, body wrapped in a large green towel, hair turbaned into a pink one, and eyes red from shampoo and crying, Paige crept into Heather’s room.
“What, Paigelina?” Heather was belly-down on her bed, reading a novel, her chin propped on the heel of her hand. “I’m busy.”
“Can I tell you something? But you can’t tell mom.”
“What is it?”
“You can’t tell mom, though.”
Heather put her finger in her book and looked at Paige. “I won’t. What is it?”
Paige turned around and lowered the towel a little.
“Paige. What are you—” And then Heather was quiet. Paige turned her head over her shoulder to look at her sister’s hard, blank face.
“They’re just zits, right?” Paige begged her sister. Heather got up and walked closer, tossing her book onto her pillow.
“I don’t think so.”
“Can you just try and pop them?”
“Ew, no.”
“Please, Heather? Please? I don’t want them.” Paige felt the tears rising in her eyes again.
Behind her, Heather made a sound of annoyance—a grating in the back of her throat. “Fine.” She put a finger on each side and squeezed the buds until her fingernails left bright red marks on Paige’s skin. Paige bit her lip and whimpered. When Heather finally gave up, Paige threw herself onto Heather’s bed and cried into the lilac-print comforter. Heather sat beside her, petting her little sister’s calves gently. Eventually, Heather took a breath as if to speak but sighed it out. She put her hand back in her lap and tried again.
“It’s probably too late for me, right?”
“What do you mean?” Paige asked, wiggling her way into a sitting position, clinging to her towel.
“It’s just, you’re younger than me, so if you’re getting them now, I won’t, right?”
“How would I know?”
“Sometimes people don’t show until they’re older, but it’s probably too late for me. I think that’s how it works.”
“Do you want them?” Paige could hardly believe this. Heather showed no interest whatsoever as their mom tracked her tenancies in her little red journal or asked for someone to help her dab cream on the skin around the chambers. Paige hadn’t been interested either, and she wasn’t interested now.
Heather didn’t speak right away. She looked into Paige’s teary eyes, then away. “Of course I don’t want them. No one wants them.” Paige felt, in these words, a cruel new reality settling over her: she was something different from her sister, now.
Both Heather and their mother denied that Heather had told, but it was only two days later when, under the pretense of tucking a tag back into Paige’s shirt, their mother saw the still-bruised buds and gave a little yelp of joy, covering her mouth with her hands. Almost in a single breath, she scolded Paige for the bruises and began telling her what a gift it was. She couldn’t stop touching the emergent chambers. She let go of Paige only long enough to disappear upstairs. She came back with a little book that she had stashed away in her dresser, just in case: Tenant Moths and You, a Guide for Keepers. She handed it over as if it were a diploma.
That night at dinner, as they all held hands, her mother added a special prayer to the meal’s blessing:
“And Lord,” she had said, her voice unsteady with emotion, “I just want to thank you for making your will known in the life of our Paigey. We thank you for making her a part of your plan for this world and for revealing to her and to us all this one small part of her mission here on Earth. We bless your name and thank you for your mercy. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
Paige did not say “Amen” with the others. The buds in her back felt sore and massive, like heavy stones. Whatever she did now, she did it as a keeper. From now on, for the rest of her life. She would be a keeper doctor, a keeper teacher, a keeper beautician. God had decided for her. Without even asking. Without caring what she wanted.
It took five years for the buds to darken, thicken, and open. Another five for the skin inside to fully mature and the top fold to extend down like an eyelid over the bottom, signaling readiness.
The drive to her parents’ house was just over an hour—far enough to justify living on campus but not far enough that Paige could get out of regular family dinners with her parents and Heather, who still lived close.
The smell of tuna casserole and cooked peas hit Paige as soon as she came through the door. She tossed her keys into her backpack and called her hello into the empty front rooms. The table in the dining room was set, a pitcher of ice water making a little damp spot on the tablecloth. Paige threw her backpack into the corner of the living room beside Heather’s angular peach-and-white purse.
Paige’s mother came bustling out of the kitchen to greet her daughter.
“Oh, honey, you look a mess.” There was concern in her voice.
“Thanks, mom.”
“Is that Paigelina?” It was Heather, still in the kitchen. “You’re late.”
“I know, shut up. I was working on that big stats project.” She had spent hours trying to make sense of the sample data, but anytime she reached for the words to explain how the data’s underlying probability distribution might intersect with her claims that checklist protocols could reduce racial disparity in home visits, certainty slipped away from her. “I wish I could drop the class, but it’s a requirement for my program.”
“I’m sorry, honey,” their mother said. “Are you hungry? We waited dinner for you.”
“Yeah, I am. Thanks. Sorry I’m late.”
Paige’s mother turned back towards the dining room. “Heather, can you call Dad? Tell him we’re ready.”
Heather breezed through the dining room and over to the stairs, booping Paige’s nose on the way by. She bounded up in a few long-legged strides to find their father.
Paige didn’t have much to add to the conversation at dinner, but it didn’t matter. Heather filled the air with stories. She had just gotten back from her friend Kari’s bachelorette party in Costa Rica. Paige listened reflexively, imagining her sister ziplining through the jungle like some well-preened travel brochure model, impossibly spruce in all that humidity. Would it have been different, Paige wondered as she rolled her peas around on her plate, if Heather were the keeper instead of her? Would she fly so blithely through the canopy if she was? Heather had always been concerned about her “image,” saving every dollar for an eyeshadow palette or the exact right pair of jeans. Even when she was drunk, she was pretty. Even when she was sleeping. It was annoying.
“How’s that stats project coming?” their dad asked, trying to give Paige a chance to talk, but Paige didn’t particularly want it.
She shrugged and got up to clear her plate. “It’s okay. It’s hard, but I think I’ll pass the class.”
“I should take a stats class,” Heather said, sitting back and letting her mother take her plate. She tapped thoughtfully at her chin. “It would look good on my resume. There’s a senior brand management position opening up, and I’m going to go for it.” The conversation veered back to Heather, and Paige wandered to the living room, picking up a year-old copy of National Geographic from the coffee table.
She was flipping through a photo essay on prairies when their mother came out to the living room, wiping her hands on her hips and pausing at the bottom of the staircase. “Paigey, can you come upstairs with me? There are some boxes I want you to look through.” Paige’s old bedroom was slated to become a craft room, and her mom had been on a cleaning spree to make space for all the hot glue guns, glass beads, shears, and rolls of fabric that she had been stuffing in a hallway closet for years. Paige got to her feet and followed obediently up the stairs.
“I’m thinking of a murphy bed,” Paige’s mother said as she slid a dilapidated banker’s box out from under the desk, “so I can spread out when no one’s sleeping here.”
“You could’ve just thrown these away,” Paige said, leafing through high school history papers and chemistry tests piled in the worn cardboard box.
“There might be something in there that you still want,” her mom said. She pulled the heavy curtains back from the window with both hands and tilted her head to consider them.
“What could I possibly want?” There was a certificate of participation for band. A playbill from the one musical she had participated in her sophomore year. Junk.
Then Paige understood. She opened a blue-grey folder and flipped through the handouts, charts, and pamphlets inside. It was everything that she had acquired over the years in her keeper classes. She became aware that her mother had turned from the window and was watching her. “Mom, I don’t need any of this stuff,” she said without looking up.
“Oh, but you don’t know how you’re going to feel your first time, dear. It’ll be so nice to have some information handy. Just hang onto it.”
Paige sighed and closed the folder. She dropped the other papers back on top of the keeper materials and turned to face her mother. “Really, I don’t need it.”
“Well, I’m just going to hang onto it for you.” Her mom took the banker’s box from her and set it on top of Paige’s old desk.
“It’s your house. Keep whatever you want.”
They were quiet for a moment. Paige looked around the room. She had spent a lot of time up here, hiding from the world.
“Paigey,” her mom said. Paige knew what was coming. “Can I do a little check? Would you mind?”
Paige sighed again. “Sure.” She sat down on the desk chair and hitched her shirt up over her shoulders, giving her mother a clear view of her back. Paige knew what her mother was seeing. It wasn’t like she hadn’t been checking them herself.
“Soon, now,” Paige’s mother told her, touching the chambers, gently prodding and inspecting.
“Yeah, maybe. Who knows?” Paige shrugged at her shirt and shifted on the chair, uncomfortable with the attention.
“Don’t worry, honey.” Her mother’s voice sounded soft and faraway. She tapped lightly on Paige’s back. “It will be your turn soon.”
Paige hadn’t been worried. She didn’t resent God anymore for giving her tenant moth chambers. But then, she didn’t really believe in God anymore. The chambers, she knew now, were not a divine gift or a punishment—just a recessive genetic attribute. Her mother had both copies of the gene, but her father had never been tested, so until Paige’s buds appeared, no one knew if the girls would be keepers like their mother.
Paige had always thought that Heather’s life must be, on the whole, simpler because she was not a keeper. She didn’t have to think about the someday occupation of her body, learn to sleep on her stomach, go to once-a-month programs with other keeper kids to learn about the reproductive cycle of tenant moths and special hygiene for the chambers. For a long time, Paige had felt sure that Heather was happier than she was because of this.
But somehow, the closer the chambers got to maturity, the less they seemed to matter. Paige had other things to worry about now—legitimate things. As she sat there on the chair, letting her mother coo over her chambers, she still had three final papers to write, not to mention the stats project. She would rather not think about the chambers at all, but there they were. And here her mother was, reminding Paige of them at every opportunity.
“I’m not worried, Mom,” she said.
“Of course not, honey. It’s all part of God’s plan. And it will be very good for you, you know. There are lots of health benefits.” Paige knew the studies her mother was referring to; she recited them to her all the time. A mild mood elevation during tenancy, a slight bump in longevity for keepers.
“Hey, you guys—oh, sorry.” Heather withdrew immediately from the doorway where she had leaned in, face bright, a moment before.
“What is it, honey?” their mother asked, still touching Paige’s back with her cool fingertips.
Heather remained out of sight in the hallway. “Dad wanted me to tell you the brownies were ready, but if you’re . . . .”
“It’s fine, Heather. We’re done,” Paige said, shrugging off her mother’s touch and pulling her shirt back down. “It’s safe.”
Paige hadn’t planned on being a social worker. She entered undergrad as an elementary education major. Every week when their Introduction to Elementary Education class had an afternoon block, they would all be shuttled around to different schools in the region to get real in-class experience. After a few placements with older grades, which did not interest her, Paige had been put in a first-grade classroom at a small private school. The teacher, Una—everyone went by first names at this school, so she was Una to students and Paige alike—had, at first, seemed like everything Paige wanted to be: kind, creative, intuitive.
Halfway through free-play time, two children started shouting and slapping at each other over by the little plastic kitchen set. Una rushed over, putting herself between them.
“Hey, no! Stop, stop! What happened?” Una asked, her voice sorrowful. She looked at the little boy. “Remy?”
“Jewel won’t let me play,” Remy complained. “It’s not fair.”
“Jewel? Everyone’s allowed to play with the toys. You know that. What’s going on, sweetie?” At first, the little girl was silent, tears falling steadily and her nose dripping. But Una was patient and tender and finally, Jewel started talking, though her voice was so quiet that Paige couldn’t hear what she was saying. Una’s eyes filled as she listened.
“Remy? Does that help you understand what Jewel was thinking?”
“I’m sorry about your grandma, Jewel,” Remy said. And his own chin crinkled with tears. “Do you want a hug?” Jewel nodded, her eyes on the ground. Remy squeezed her in his arms and let go, and Jewel dissolved into sobs. Una picked her up and carried her into the hallway.
Later in the afternoon, Paige went outside with the kids for recess and watched them swarming over the playground. The air was thick with their laughter. The chains of the swingset chimed against the steel pole, and the spring riders were alive with gleeful motion. This is good, Paige thought. This is what kids need. But then, behind Paige, came a sneering little voice:
“Keeper, keeper, booty-peeper!”
Paige stiffened, her stomach clenching. Her hand went to her neckline to see if it had slipped down to expose the bumps on her back. But as she turned, she realized that the child was not taunting her but a classmate, a little boy with big glasses.
“Your mama’s a keeper, your daddy’s a keeper, your dog is a keeper, your fish is a keeper . . . .”
“No they aren’t. Animals aren’t,” the boy whined in response to his tormentor.
“Yours are! And you’re gonna be a keeper, too!”
“I’m not!” The little boy was growing panicked, breathing harder.
“You are,” said one of the other kids gathered around him. “If your mommy and your daddy are, then you are.”
“Moths are going to mess up your brain! You’re going to be a zombie.”
“That’s not true!”
“It is true. I know. My dad’s a scientist, and he said keepers are . . . .”
Paige turned fully towards the group and took a step in their direction. The ringleader, a chinless kid with flat, stone-brown hair, glanced up at her, then elbowed the others.
“Just kidding,” said the chinless kid through a gappy grin. “We’re just joking, Ry.” And Ry was treated to a round of excuses, each of the bullies shooting a look up at Paige before they peeled off.
“You okay, Ry?” Paige asked.
“Uh-huh,” Ry said, trying to keep it together. “It was just a joke.”
“It wasn’t a very funny joke, though, was it?”
Ry dropped his head. “Does it mess up your brain?”
“No, sweetheart,” Paige said, crouching down. “Nothing happens to your brain.” Paige wasn’t actually sure about this. She had more or less stopped reading the articles her mother sent her. “But did you know that keepers actually have a slightly longer life expectancy?”
Ry stared at her.
“That means keepers live longer than other people.”
“They do?”
“Yeah, buddy. Don’t listen to those kids. Being a keeper is no big deal.”
“Have you done it?” Ry asked, his eyes drifting towards her shoulder.
Paige shook her head. “But my mom is a keeper. She’s hosted lots of times, and she’s definitely not a zombie.” She smiled at Ry and sent him back to play.
At their debriefing at the end of the day, Paige told Una about the playground. Una tsked her tongue and swept her curly, dark hair back from her face.
“Oh, poor Ry. Why do we wait so long to educate kids about . . . about the moths?” She flitted her long-fingered hands in the air. “We really should start introducing these things earlier. And not just for the ones who . . . .” She waved her hands back over her own shoulders. “I mean, keepers aren’t some kind of Other. Kids need to hear that message while they’re young, before it’s clear who’s who. Keepers don’t even know for sure until they’re, what? Ten?”
“Sometimes older,” Paige said. Una’s enthusiasm made her uncomfortable. “You want to do a lesson?”
“Yeah, you know—about the eggs and the moth season.” Una’s voice was lively with excitement. “Gosh, just talking about this is making me realize: all of us really need this. It’s not like anyone taught us about them, right?”
Paige smiled tightly, but she did not correct Una’s assumption about her. “Totally,” she said.
“I love this, Paige. I wonder if Ry’s mom or dad would want to come in and talk to our classes.”
Paige imagined having her own mother in front of a room of her peers, turning around to show her swollen chambers, red and full with their tenants. “Wouldn’t that put Ry in a weird spot?”
Una finished up a note to herself on her phone and brushed away a curl of hair that had fallen across her forehead. “But here’s the thing, right? Ry is already in a weird spot. He is going to be a keeper, and so he’s going to have to deal with that.”
“So, if all the kids learn about tenancy . . . .”
Una beamed at Paige. “Right. They can understand the keeper kids. They can help share the burden.”
Paige couldn’t stop thinking about what Una had said. At dinner, she took her plate of lasagna and wan green beans to an empty table in the dining hall and stared out into the November twilight. The word “burden” bothered her more, somehow, than the playground teasing. From that first night in the bathroom, staring at her back in the mirror, Paige had hated the fact that she was a keeper; as her chambers puckered and deepened year by year in anticipation of their tenants, she had agonized over them, but it wasn’t because hosting was a “burden.” Keepers barely had to do anything. She had observed her mother’s summer tenancies, and they were nothing. A little swelling, a little itching maybe, a little extra attention paid, but not burdensome. The only reason she hated being a keeper was because other people thought it meant something. It didn’t. It didn’t mean anything.
Una’s plan to turn Ry into an object lesson was exactly the wrong approach. Paige knew all too well that the cruelty of playground bullies wasn’t a matter of misunderstanding. Tenancy wasn’t that complicated. Some people have chambers on their backs. The tenant moth lays its eggs in the chambers. The larvae crawl out when they are ready. Whatever made kids tease other kids about turning into zombies, whatever made Heather recoil whenever the topic came up, it wasn’t a lack of information. That impulse was already there, looking to find its way out.
So she withdrew from Intro to Elementary Education and changed her major to Psychology. On the advice of her professors, she applied to a respected graduate social work program, not too far from home. Her acceptance had felt like a sign.
Finals came and went, and Paige pulled in a B- in Stats, acing her social work-specific classes. Summer term would begin in a week. Paige had a practicum lined up with a women’s center on the north side of the city. She was only vaguely aware of the news that tenant moths had been spotted in town—a headline from a local news station had popped up in her feed. She didn’t even open the article. She just clocked the news and moved on.
She should start paying closer attention. This was probably the year when a tenant moth, having flirted in the dusky evening air with a mate, would find her, alight between her shoulders, and deposit its eggs into one of her chambers. Her mom had bought her a few keeper shirts—some with open backs, some with more discreet slits—but she only wore them when she had her hair down to hide their function. It was customary for keepers to either leave their windows open at night or take evening walks during the breeding weeks. Paige didn’t do any of this. If it happened, it happened. A few weeks, and even the small inconveniences of hosting would be over, and her life would return to normal until next summer. Just a few weeks, she told herself whenever the thought surfaced. It’s nothing.
It was a Thursday evening, and Paige was walking through the parking lot of the Shoprite, on her way to get some milk and eggs and a few other odds and ends, when the moth blundered into her face. She jerked away and swatted at the bug, not fully registering its import. Undeterred, the moth returned and landed on her right shoulder. Paige craned her neck to see it. Between the lights of the parking lot and the lingering sunset in the summer sky, Paige could make out its distinguishing features. Dark, fuzzy thorax and striped abdomen, tufted at its end; the wings, a soft, veined grey, with a greenish band edging the forewings and a single, black splotch on each hindwing. All light seemed to disappear into its compound eyes. Paige was surprised to find her heart racing a little. The moth began to crawl, its legs tickling her bare shoulder as it made its way toward her back. Paige gently pulled her hair forward to clear the way.
“Oh my god, look,” said a woman walking up behind Paige. Paige was still frozen in place, not knowing if her movement would scare the moth off. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the woman staring, another figure beside her. The pair of them apparently felt no shame in gawking openly at the spectacle now taking place in and on Paige’s body.
“Gross,” said the woman, or her companion maybe. Then they kept walking, strolling through the sliding doors of the grocery store with a lingering glance of disgust back at Paige.
Angry and nervous, Paige eased herself towards a bench a few feet from the entrance, its back against the plate glass of the storefront. Paige sat on the far end of the bench, where she would be shielded by a large vinyl decal advertising pre-made salads and juice smoothies for sale inside. She did not want anyone else to see this. She might be resigned to this tenancy, but she was not resigned to being casually, comfortably reviled by some bitch on her way to get a case of Diet Coke and a twelve-pack of toilet paper.
As she sat and waited, Paige began to calm. She could feel the faint tickle of the moth’s fine feet and its tufted abdomen. She remembered practicing this part of the tenancy in keeper classes when she was young: simulating the crawl and ovipositing with paint brushes so that the children could learn to keep still as it happened. Paige sat patiently as the tenant moth did her quiet work.
As she waited, Paige thought about her summer practicum at the women’s center, about the women she would meet, drowning in a ruthless system, their abusers hovering in the shadows. Her heart swelled with the desire to protect those women. She cut herself off abruptly—that was savior bullshit, as her Micro Practice professor would call it. And she had to cut it out. Micro Practice was taught by a woman who had been a social worker with the city for twenty-five years.
“You aren’t here to save anyone,” she said to them. “Get that out of your heads. This is work, not missionary service. Even if you do your job perfectly, you don’t save anyone at the end of the day. And you aren’t going to do your job perfectly. Make peace with that. You are going to make mistakes and miss things and watch the consequences fall on other people. You do not have the worst end of the deal, here. Your clients do. The things that bring your clients to you in the first place—hunger, poverty, mental illness, racism, trauma—they’re big-ass problems. You do what you can to help them navigate the system, but you cannot and you will not save them. That’s not the job. Go in expecting to save people, and you will burn yourself to the ground and take everyone else down with you.”
The best she could hope for was to help a little if she could. Paige leaned forward as she had been taught, straightening her shoulders to relax the skin of her back. Maybe she owed this to the universe—giving herself to somebody, even if it was just a soft-bodied moth with light-absorbing eyes. It was a little thing, she reminded herself, such a little thing to be a keeper.
There was the barest flutter by Paige’s left ear, and she turned to see the moth fly off. Perhaps to lay additional eggs in another keeper’s chamber. Perhaps to die. But the moth had done her work. She had laid her eggs and, on her feet, carried a fungus which would now proliferate in the pouch as the eggs developed. By hatching time, there would be a scaly, yeasty overgrowth all around the eggs. It would discolor Paige’s skin, but it would give the larvae their first food. When the caterpillars vacated the chambers, her body would regain its natural balance.
She should probably get the app, Paige thought. She pulled her phone out and went to the app store. Her finger hesitated over the download button. It wasn’t strictly necessary. She could track the dates of this clutch of eggs and those that might be laid in her other chambers over the next few weeks manually, like her mother used to. The memory of that little red-backed grid-paper notebook brought with it a tart mix of nostalgia, affection, sadness, and revulsion. She clicked the download button quickly, looking away over the parking lot as the program loaded. When she looked down again, there on her screen was a new little icon of a tenant moth cupped in a pair of hands. Paige’s eyes stung and blurred, and she blinked, sending the tears streaming down her face. She felt silly crying about this thing that was so peripheral to her life. She wiped her tears and forced herself to enter her age, weight, height, and gender along with the date and location of the deposit. If she didn’t do it right away, she might never open the app again.
After the buds appeared, Paige’s mother had started telling stories about Paige’s grandpa, who died when she was only four.
“He was so proud of being a keeper,” her mom told her as they looked at a picture of him: young, slight-figured and hard-eyed. “He said that when he first developed—and he was even younger than you, Paigey—all the kids at his school envied him. Some even tried to pretend they were keepers. They would catch bees and make them sting their backs to get the welts. Can you imagine that?”
“No,” Heather had said. She was in the dining room, working on her homework at the table. “They must have been crazy. It’s so gross.”
“Heather, stop it. That’s unkind,” their mother scolded, waving her older daughter back to her schoolwork. “He always said it was the greatest honor of his life. ‘The Lord doesn’t choose just anyone,’ he used to say. He’d be so proud of you, honey.”
Paige had nodded, secretly glad that he had never known this about her.
“No one envies keepers anymore, Mom,” Heather said.
Their mother had frowned. “Well, they should. It’s a very special experience.”
It wasn’t just the stories, though. Everything in Paige’s life seemed to be about the chambers. There were the keeper diet kicks, which her mom heard about from a friend or found online. For months at a time, Paige wouldn’t be allowed white flour or sugar. Heather and their dad would be having dinner rolls and corn on the cob with their Sunday roast beef, while Paige suffered through dry slices of sprouted-grain bread and bitter greens in a watery pile.
“Mom, please,” Paige would beg, “can I just have normal food?”
“It’s good for us, honey,” her mother would reply, pulling out the bag of stiff, brown sliced bread from the freezer. “It helps develop the chambers.”
“But it’s disgusting. And it doesn’t even matter. I asked my counselor at the keeper class, and they said keepers can eat anything anyone else can.”
“This is good, healthy food, Paigey. We can’t let it go to waste.” Paige came to dread the sight of grocery bags on the counter, never sure what she would be forced to eat next.
Worst of all were the Saturday morning brunches with her mother’s keeper friends. The whole morning would be them complaining about disrespectful comments, about the reduced tax credit, about insulting misconceptions that had ruffled their feathers.
“What we do is a benefit to this world,” they would say to one another. “The research has only just begun to reveal the full extent of what God has ordained in us. People forget. These surgeries they’re having. It’s a sin! To reject a gift that God has given is a sin.”
“Remember that, Paigey,” her mother would tell her. “You cannot change who you are.”
Once, Paige’s mother had taken her to the cemetery on their way home from brunch. It was a bright April day, though the sun was layered away behind a film of clouds. Paige stood sullenly beside her mother in the chilly afternoon and looked at her grandfather’s gravestone. Above his name, its wings spread wide, was the carved image of a tenant moth. Paige cried when she saw it. That night, she wrote instructions for her own funeral in her journal, forbidding anyone from mentioning moths.
The first day at the women’s center consisted mostly of following the director, Irina Poe, from one room to another and being introduced to harried staff as they passed in the hallway. While Irina took a call with a grant officer, Paige worked through the forms on confidentiality and liability. She was left to imagine what sort of dangers, exactly, were implied here, as the language was fairly broad. She signed anyway, as easily as she agreed to the terms and conditions of the keeper app, as easily as she signed her student loan papers, as easily as she had sworn whatever she had sworn when she had been fingerprinted for the background check. Paige wondered how many of these contracts she had violated in her life—sharing a password, checking the wrong box. If all her agreements were enforced, what would her life be? But she was counting on the fact that no one would ever come after her with evidence of her carelessness.
“Did you bring your lunch?” Irina asked. Paige looked up from the clipboard. Irina had finished the call, placed her phone face down on a pile of paper-thick folders, and was now rubbing her eyes and face wearily.
“I didn’t,” said Paige, flustered. “I wasn’t sure if there was a fridge or . . . .”
“You know what?” Irina said. “Why don’t I take you to this little place around the corner? Do you like Indian food?”
“Definitely,” Paige said, embarrassed by forcing her new supervisor into a position of needing to feed her.
“Great. Let me get my purse.” Irina tossed her phone in and fished around until she found a pair of semi-iridescent bug-eye sunglasses and pushed them into her coiffed hair. “Okay, follow me.”
Paige did as she was told, grabbing her backpack from the corner of the office, just in case Irina wasn’t actually offering to pay for lunch.
On their way to the front door, Irina stopped to let Taja, who coordinated the counseling programs at the center, know that she would be out of the building for about an hour.
“Okay,” Taja said. She was sitting at the reception desk, eating salad out of a repurposed takeout container as she flipped through a stack of paperwork. “When you get back, though, can we talk about the intake rooms?”
Irina sighed. “Yes, Taja. We’re going to talk about that.” Irina looked at Paige with an expression of mixed annoyance and apology. “Space is a constant issue for us.” Paige nodded, unsure of what else Irina wanted from her in response.
The front door swung open, and a woman ushered her slow-footed son—probably ten or eleven years old—out of the bright summer afternoon.
“Well, look who it is,” Taja said, a wide smile on her face. “Evan, Evan, Pumpkin Pie.” The kid smiled a little, then immediately took a seat in one of the cushy chairs in the lounge. He picked up a home decorating magazine and opened it. Taja laughed and pouted. “Okay, you be that way. It’s fine. You’re not hurting my feelings.”
Irina gave her attention to the mother. “Hello, Mandy. Nice to see you. How are you?”
The woman took off her sunglasses, revealing a bruised and bleeding face. Paige gasped loudly. Irina and Taja both shot her warning looks. Taja put down her fork.
“Mandy,” Irina said, readjusting her hold on her purse strap, “do you need me to take you to the hospital?”
The woman, Mandy, moved her head uncertainly. “I don’t know.” Her voice was raw. “I’m sorry. I just—I don’t know.”
Irina shook her head. “That’s okay, my dear. I do want to see you taken care of, though. Is the hospital okay? Does that feel safe?”
“I don’t know,” Mandy said.
The phone rang, and Taja answered it, turning away to talk, though Paige saw her eyes darting over to where Evan sat.
“Mandy,” Irina was saying, “why don’t we go back to my office? You can sit down. You and I can figure out next steps together.” Irina extended one hand towards Mandy and the other back down the hallway towards her office. “Is Evan hurt?”
Mandy shook her head, looking at her son sitting on the chair, seemingly absorbed in the magazine. “He didn’t touch him.”
“Okay,” Irina said. “Paige, would you sit with Evan while Mandy and I talk?”
“Sure,” Paige said. “Of course.”
“Taja will be here if you need anything.”
Taja smiled up at Paige, putting her hand over the receiver. “I’ll be right over,” she whispered.
Irina and Mandy walked back towards Irina’s office, and Paige went over to the boy and stood beside his chair.
“Hi, Evan,” she said to him. He shifted in his seat, looking over at her dull, office-appropriate shoes. “I’m Paige. Is it okay if I sit beside you?” Her voice sounded strained to her, and she cleared her throat.
“Yeah.” Evan turned his eyes back to the page, which was ruffling in the breeze from the open window.
“Thanks.” Paige sat down. “I’m just going to sit here with you so that you’re not alone. We can talk if you want, but it’s okay to be quiet, too.”
“Mm-hm,” said Evan. Paige wondered how many times he had done this. He had not turned the page of the magazine. Paige paced her own breathing, letting it grow slower and steadier, hoping this would somehow communicate to Evan, intangibly, a sense of calm.
A soft tapping at the open window to Paige’s right drew her attention. Evan, too, looked up at the window. A moth with green-edged wings was bumping at the screen. It was unusual for them to be out at this time of day, but perhaps this one had been weathering the brightness under the windowsill and was tempted into the light by Paige’s pheromones.
Paige looked over at the boy. His face had soured with disgust.
“It’s just a moth,” she said. “Just a bug.”
“It’s dirty,” he said.
“Not really,” she murmured, conscious of the slight heat of the two filled pouches on her back. Another moth had found her just last night and deposited its eggs in one of the empty chambers. There were still two vacancies.
“My dad hates them,” Evan said, still staring at the moth. “He wants to kill them all with bugspray.” Evan looked back at the magazine on his lap. He seemed, suddenly, to become aware that he had no interest in its contents. He shut it, putting it on the coffee table to his left, and began hunting around for something else to read.
“Does your dad feel that way about all kinds of bugs?” Paige asked. Evan shrugged but did not answer. “Well,” Paige said, if only to keep the conversation going. “I think they’re pretty.” It was an incomplete truth, but true nonetheless. “And they’re an important part of the ecosystem.”
Evan looked at Paige with a blank expression.
“You know what an ecosystem is?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Evan said, insulted.
“So you know that without tenant moths, the bats might go hungry.”
“Bats are dirty, too.”
“Well, what about the flowers that the moths pollinate? You don’t want the flowers to die, do you?”
“I didn’t say I wanted it. I said my dad does.” Evan gave up on the magazines and slouched back in his chair, eyes wide, lips pressed together.
Paige swallowed back all the arguments rising in her throat, realizing that she had walked into dangerous territory with the boy.
“Hey, Pumpkin Pie.” It was Taja. She crouched in front of Evan, her hands on either armrest of his chair.
“Hi,” Evan said.
“You doing okay?”
Evan didn’t answer Taja’s question.
“You want to play a game?”
Evan gave such a small nod that it was almost imperceptible.
“Okay, I’ve got Monopoly, Sorry, checkers, Hippos. I’m not sure what else. Let’s go look.” Taja stood up and offered Evan her hand. He took it. “Thanks so much, hon,” Taja said to Paige and headed over with Evan to the shelves of games by the reception desk.
Paige sat in her chair feeling pointless and clumsy. She fought back waves of embarrassment as she rehearsed all that she had done wrong today: gasping at Mandy’s face, forgetting to bring her lunch, forcing Evan to talk about his dad in the immediate aftermath of his trauma. This was the point of education, she reminded herself, to learn how to become less pointless, less clumsy. But she couldn’t forgive herself just yet. The question of saving was not even on the table.
Paige watched the moth crawling patiently around the screen, its antennae in constant motion as it walked back and forth, looking for an opening.
“Just make sure there are no gaps,” Paige said, handing a roll of medical tape to her sister.
“Are you sure about this?” Heather asked, her sculpted eyebrows pinched together prettily.
“Yes, I’m sure,” Paige answered. They had plans to go out, but Paige had pulled her sister into the bathroom, tape in hand, and asked her—feigning casualness—to tape closed the two unoccupied chambers on her back.
“Is it even allowed?”
“What do you mean, ‘Is it allowed?’ Who do you think is in charge here? There aren’t laws.”
“Huh.”
“Did you really think there were laws forcing me to host tenant moths?”
“I never thought about it.”
That, Paige knew, was true. After that first night, Heather hadn’t touched Paige’s back again. Eventually, she even stopped eavesdropping on the lectures on tenancy and family history. Paige would be trapped there, listening as their mother unburdened herself of all the things she could tell no one else.
“Does Mom know you’re doing this?” Heather asked. She peeled the medical tape from the roll, tearing off inch-long pieces and sticking them on her finger in a line.
“No.” Paige was annoyed at the question, and she turned her back to her sister, both to avoid her eyes and to present the chambers for the tape. The scoop back of her billowy top made for easy access.
“Don’t you think you should tell her?” Heather set the roll of tape on the bathroom counter.
“Why?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m not. I just don’t think it’s any of her business.”
“Whatever,” Heather said, and she began taping the chamber openings shut. “Just these two, right?” she asked. Paige looked back to see Heather pointing to the catty-corner empty chambers in the mirror. The occupied chambers were now reddened and a little puffy.
“Yeah,” Paige said. “Just the empty ones.” She felt sure Heather was avoiding touching the chambers with her bare fingers as she taped.
Paige turned her eyes to the bathroom window, a dark square of night framed into the wall. Even now, there was probably at least one moth pacing on her window frame, anxious to get to her. It made her uncomfortable, to be perceived with such intensity.
“All done,” Heather said.
When Paige turned around, Heather plunked the roll of tape into her palm.
“Ready?” she asked Paige, putting on a carefree smile. “I can drive.”
At the bar, Heather asked whether Paige could drink.
“Yeah,” Paige said, raising her voice over the music, “it’s fine. I probably shouldn’t go crazy, but it’s okay.”
“Cool,” Heather said and ordered their first round.
“It’s hot in here,” Paige said. “Do you have a hair tie?” Heather took one out of her purse and handed it to her sister. Paige swept her hair up into a ponytail, relieved to have it off her neck.
Heather lifted their sidecars off the bar and nodded towards an empty booth. “Let’s sit.” They slid in over the curved, padded bench until they met in the middle.
“I’m so over this scene,” Heather said, taking a sip of her cloudy-orange drink. “Men do not leave me alone at these places. You’d think that I could at least have some good conversations, but let me tell you, they do not care what’s going on in here.” She tapped her head.
“Yeah, I bet.” Paige fiddled with the curl of orange peel on the edge of her glass.
“Trust me, Paigelina. Being this cute has its drawbacks.” She made a goofy face, trying—though not too hard—to mock her own beauty. “There’s really nothing to be jealous of.”
“I’m not jealous of you, Heather.”
“I know, that’s what I’m saying. Uh-oh. See what I’m talking about?” Heather pointed. A tall, scruffy-faced man was approaching their booth. Heather took a big drink of her sidecar and smiled up at him.
“Hi,” he said. He looked to be in his late twenties, maybe a boyish thirty-something. He was loose and easy in his walk and seemed to hang together by suggestion alone.
“Hi,” Heather said, her voice playful but aggressive. “Can we help you?”
“I’m Greg.” He had a lopsided smile.
Heather propped her fingers together in front of her. “Whatcha want, Greg?”
“Just looking for someone to talk to.”
Paige snorted. “Sorry, Heather was just telling me how men don’t like to talk to her. So . . . .” She gave a hokey shrug.
“Then I’ll talk to you,” Greg said and plunked down on Paige’s end of the booth, a wide curve of cushion between them. She caught the scent of cloves.
“Oh, okay,” Paige laughed. She turned to Heather, who raised her eyebrows in surprise over the rim of her drink. Paige looked back to Greg. “What do you want to talk about?”
Greg leaned back and cocked his head to think. “Please don’t tell me what you do for work. I want something real.” He leaned forward again. “When’s the last time you had a flat tire?”
Paige thought about it. “Never.”
Greg grinned. “Wow. Never?”
“Seriously, never?!” Heather echoed, swirling the remainder of her drink with more flair than was strictly necessary, but Greg was still looking at Paige. Paige wondered how long Heather’s good mood would last if Greg never turned that easy-going smile on her.
“Nope,” Paige said, looking from Heather back to Greg.
“Not even, like, on a bicycle?”
“Nope.”
Greg crossed his arms and beamed at Paige. “Wow, you’re good luck. I’ve always said that about keepers.”
Paige straightened and pinched the stem of her glass uncomfortably.
Heather dropped her jaw. “Woah, how did you know?”
“I’m sorry,” Greg said to Paige, scratching his half-grown beard nervously. “I noticed when you put your hair up. I don’t mean to be a creep. I know a lot of people are weird about it, but I think it’s awesome.”
“Are you one, too?” Heather asked stiffly. At the bar, a triad of middle-aged men let out a howl of groans and oohs in response to some unheard jibe.
Greg shook his head. “I wish.”
“You do?” Heather blurted. She looked sideways at Paige but didn’t stop herself. She had always been a light touch with alcohol, and she had finished her drink quickly. “You want that?” She shuddered. “No offense,” she said to Paige, “but it’s not like you even want it, and you have it.”
“You don’t?” Greg asked, giving Paige a pained look. “Is that what the tape is all about?”
Paige didn’t know what to say. She glared at her sister.
Heather rolled her eyes. “You’re the one who made me tape your damn holes up!” She tipped her glass to get the last drops.
“I’m not exactly sure what I want.” Paige ran her thumb through the wet of her glass and rubbed it between her fingers.
“Why not?” Greg insisted. “What happens between you and the moths—it’s beautiful. It’s a miracle. Excuse me for geeking out, but did you know that tenant moths are keystone pollinators for Hesperides’ Trumpet? And that’s what they use to make Clozanagen, which is a treatment for lymphoma.”
Paige pushed at her drink as Greg spoke. “No, I know that,” she said.
“And it’s like, who else gets to do this? Be part of the life cycle of another species. Multiple other species when you think about it. You have this whole biome that you anchor. None of the rest of us have that. Nothing in this world is better off with us here. You’re so lucky.”
Paige shrugged uncomfortably. She could feel the eggs inside their chambers. That was impossible, though. They were so small. In her. Not her. Her tenants.
“Okay, I’m out,” Heather said, forcing a laugh. “You two have fun. I’m going to go dance.”
Paige watched her sister prance into the room, saw the half-dozen faces that turned towards her, as if it were compulsory. When she looked back at Greg, she found his eyes still on her. Their expression was tender.
“I dated this woman for a few years, a while back,” he said, his eyes drifting from Paige’s face to the caddy of condiments. “She was amazing. She would start the season down south, wherever the first reports came out. She would go outside at night totally naked, totally open. She had all her tenants within, like, two days of the first emergence. She’d hang out until her chambers were clear, then she’d drive up to wherever the emergence was at that point and do it again. She could do, like, three or four tenancies a year. I used to go with her, and it was so beautiful, like we were part of something, you know?”
“I don’t know,” Paige said.
“What is there not to know?” Greg’s eyes were firmly on Paige again. He was wearing that lopsided grin. “It’s like, you have your life’s purpose told to you. Everyone else, they have to muddle around and figure that out without any clues. But you? It’s different. It’s like the universe is talking directly to you.” He winced. “Look, you have to block out all that crap that people say. Keepers aren’t . . . ” He leaned towards Paige, his tone desperately earnest. “ . . . there’s nothing wrong with you.”
Paige’s lips tightened. “I know there’s nothing wrong with me.”
“What I mean is, it’s the opposite. There’s something right about you. You—people like you—it’s the next level of humanity. It’s evolution. It’s everything.” Greg shook his head, seemingly overwhelmed by the truth of what he had just spoken. “Please,” he said, extending one hand towards Paige’s on the table, taking her hand, holding it. His palm was as tough and smooth as a leather jacket. Part of her could think of nothing except his hand. Part of her itched to pull her hand away. “Please. Promise me one thing.”
“Promise you?”
“Promise me you won’t get the surgery.”
Paige pulled her hand into her lap. “Dude. You don’t even know my name.”
“But I know you,” he said, tears rising in his eyes.
“You really don’t. Excuse me.” Paige scooted out of the booth and went to find Heather.
“Can we go?” she shouted over the music, leaning towards her sister’s ear.
“Really?” Heather made a pouty face. “He was cute, though.”
“Please?”
“Okay, whatever.” Heather went to the bar to settle up and then edged her way to the door, Paige following in her wake.
Outside, walking the two blocks to Heather’s car, Heather kept looking over at Paige and shaking her head.
“What?” Paige asked, finally.
“Nothing.” But then Heather stopped, in front of the rolled-down grille of a storefront café. “I just—I don’t know what you want.”
Paige tensed. “Are you talking about the chambers?”
“Yes, that. And the guy. You complain all the time how people are so grossed out by keepers. Well, he wasn’t grossed out. And he was cute.”
“I don’t complain all the time. And he was a creep. He was too interested.”
“You’re ridiculous. You get so much attention for those stupid moth sacs. But now it’s like, No thank you, tape ’em up! What do you want, Paige?”
“What do you mean, what do I want? I just want to be a person.”
“Then be a person. No one is stopping you.”
“You don’t get it, Heather. I can’t. Even when they’re empty, they’re waiting. It’s like I’m more than a person or less than one—I don’t know. Maybe I don’t know what I want. More time? What I really want is to have my life back, but this time I want it without them. But I can’t have that. So I taped them up. It’s not what I want, but it’s something.”
Heather turned toward the lowered grille and linked her fingers through its bars. She peered at the glass of the entryway. “It’s not like it’s easy not having them,” she said to Paige’s reflection.
Paige stared back into the window, but Heather’s face was obscured by shadow. “You want mine?” she asked. Heather gave a stiff laugh, a rush of air with no voice in it. Behind them, a car passed with its music playing loud, thumping into their chests.
Heather turned away from the café and wiped her eyes. “You’re impossible. You know that? Just impossible.” She took Paige’s arm, and they walked on towards the car.
After Heather dropped her off, Paige stood in her bathroom, paused in the middle of her nighttime routine, the toothbrush clenched between her teeth. She kept thinking about her conversation with Heather. What could be easier than not having the chambers? Heather had flaunted the ease of not having them all their lives. She had built walls between herself and Paige and defended them. She didn’t want to know anything, hear anything, see anything that might complicate matters.
Just then, Paige’s phone, face down on the window ledge by the toilet, rang. Paige turned the phone over to see who it was.
“Tattletale,” Paige said, her mouth full of toothpaste foam. She spat into the sink, did a quick rinse, and answered. “Hi, Mom.”
“What are you doing, Paige?”
Paige knew what her mom was asking, but she didn’t feel like being cooperative. She wandered out of the bathroom, past the bed, and into the dark of the living room. “Nothing. I’m just getting ready for bed. What’s up?”
“Heather told me what you asked her to do.”
“Mom . . . .” Paige flopped herself onto the couch, staring up at the fanned pattern of the apartment’s plaster ceiling. The light from the bedroom door was long and stark across its surface.
“Paige, you have to take the tape off.”
“No, I don’t.”
“If they can’t get to you, they can’t deposit.”
“I have two tenants already, Ma.”
“That’s what Heather said . . . .” Paige could hear her mother sigh in that way she had, almost a whimper. “Why didn’t you tell me when it happened?”
“I didn’t know you wanted to know,” Paige said, rubbing her eyes, reminding herself of Irina with this gesture of weariness.
“Of course I want to know! It’s your first time. I thought you would tell me.”
“Well, I’m sorry. But you know now, so . . . whoop-de-doo. I have moths.”
“You have two open, though. I bet if you went outside right now, you could get both deposits tonight. It’s a very active time.”
Paige imagined this: picking the tape off and standing under the parking lot lights in her pajamas. Her back crawling with green-and-grey moths with dark-splotched wings, their velvet abdomens slipping eggs into the chambers of her back. It wasn’t a fearful thought to her. But it wasn’t fear that had made her ask Heather to tape her up. It wasn’t fear that led her to lock her windows as soon as she got home, that kept her here inside. It was something just as urgent but less fleeting.
“No, Mom. I’m not going outside. I don’t want the other chambers filled. I wish I had taped them all up before it was too late.”
“Paige!”
“What? Mom! I don’t want them. I’m allowed to decide that.”
“Who told you that?”
“No one told me. It’s just how it is.”
There was no answer to this, at first. Paige checked the phone to make sure they were still connected. When her mother spoke again, she sounded strange—it was a tone Paige had never heard her use before. It was not cajoling, not scolding, not flattering or soothing. Her voice was bare, somehow. It embarrassed her to hear her mother sound like this.
“You kids think your lives are all about you. They’re not.”
Paige was taken aback. “All about me? That’s not fair, Mom. I do plenty of things for other people. But my body is about me.”
“No, it’s not.” Paige half-laughed at such an audacious statement, but her mother kept going: “You are part of something, Paige. Your body is part of it. God designed you in a very specific way for a very specific purpose. You don’t get to opt out of his plan for you. You don’t get to choose who you are.”
“Mom!”
“I’m serious. I’m sick of all this nonsense about, ‘You can be whatever you want to be.’ I never told you girls that. You have gifts and you have obligations, and you are responsible to both of those things.”
“But Mom, if I don’t want it, it’s not a gift. It’s clutter.” Paige kicked herself for saying this and sat up on the couch, ready for a fight, but her mother wasn’t saying anything. “Mom, I’m sorry. I know it’s not like that for you, but . . . I’m not you. That has to be okay.”
“It’s not okay, Paige. It’s not. You have a responsibility. Now, do it.” And she hung up.
Paige leaned back on the couch, looking up at the half-lit ceiling.
Someone had made those fan shapes in the plaster. There had been a person on a ladder, she thought, their ridged trowel moving in gentle arcs, one after another. Had this worker, this artist, imagined her, some future occupant of the apartment, sitting in this room staring at the ceiling? Perhaps the fan shapes were there for their own sake. Because the ceiling was a blank asking to be filled with some sort of intention. Paige put herself on that ladder, smoothing the ceiling back out, returning it to emptiness.
God’s design, her mother had said. His plan for her. But if God were real—the God her mother believed in, the God who created all things and held the vast universe in mind at all times—then God was too powerful a being to understand the implication of its choices in a human life. What did such a being know of vulnerability, of anxiety, of longing for erasure? But Paige didn’t think that God was real. She didn’t believe in whatever Greg was peddling, either: that the universe, speaking the language of evolution and interconnectedness and whatever else, had determined her purpose and written it into her back.
Was it worse, that there was no plan for her? It was the same loneliness and powerlessness, in the end, to think that one was misjudged and misperceived and to know that one was not perceived at all but merely circumstantial. Those warm pockets between her shoulder blades were filled with someone else’s life—a life that was no part of her. It was another being’s need and ambition that sought her out, desired her. Like Heather: pursued, everyone thinking about her, trying to get close to her, but she herself was irrelevant. Paige felt herself the object of all this attention—her mother’s, Greg’s, God’s, the moths’—but she herself was see-through, a screen in the shape of a person. Being a keeper—it was so little a thing. Too little. It threatened to shrink her away to nothing.
And Paige wanted to be something. Beyond her hot, dark little chambers, the world was large with importance. There was Evan. His father, blood on his hands, teaching his son what was dirty and deserving of violence. His mother, faced with the impossible question of what she needed. When Paige went back in the morning, Mandy and Evan wouldn’t be there. They would be staying in a room in the shelter across town, or else they would have gone back home—persisting day after day. Their lives—so broad and unknowable—had met with Paige’s in a fleeting touch and then pulled away. In this exchange, she had been the parasite—timid and fragile, slow and peripheral, using their pain to learn her profession.
What would it take to truly face up to such enormity? How did Irina do it? By filling out all those papers? How did Taja? By eating salad at her desk and playing games with sad boys? These women could teach her about their work—the concessions to bureaucracy required to step towards justice. But perhaps Paige, bound to the little things inside of her, was already too small to meet the world in its entirety.
So what, then? Should she quit the program? She could get some other job—any other job—that began and ended and did not crawl inside of her and reside there. She could add columns or rack up sales or something. She could untape her back and accept that which came to her on green-edged wings, soft and assuming.
Paige stood up from the couch and went to the window that looked down onto the parking lot. In the orange lights, a swarm of insects flashed and fluttered. Heather was right. To go outside and let the moths intersect their little lives with hers—that would be the easy thing, like signing a form, checking a box. She wouldn’t have to do anything—just sit there and let the soft-footed moth crawl across her back. The harder choice was emptiness. Paige turned and walked into the bright bedroom. She switched off the light in the bathroom, the tall lamp by the dresser. Curled in bed, she set her alarm and placed her phone on the bedside table, its charger cord snaking down to the outlet. Then she flipped over onto her stomach. In her back, pale green larvae were growing tight in their eggs; perhaps the first were already beginning to hatch.
Let them hatch, then. Let them work their way out of her body and leave her vacant. She would not let them fill her up again. It was time to stop signing her name to contracts that she had not read. She took a breath so deep it burned her lungs. When she let it out, there was relief in it. Resolve. Never again. She would safeguard the space within her. She would close herself off. She would remain undetermined, uncluttered by anyone’s gifts.
“Does the defendant admit posting this message after the sinking of the ship Deep Power?” The prosecution lawyer looked up from his papers, directly at Kaveri. “I quote: ‘A hundred oilers nowhere near make up for even a single whale fall, but I guess it’s a start, el-oh-el’.”
My cousin, blank-faced in the dock, said, “Yes.”
The tight bun she’d made of her plaited hair was coming undone. I wanted to go to her and re-tie it. I gripped my thighs with aching fingers and waited.
It wasn’t truly an oil ship—I don’t know if any ultra-deepwater drilling ships still operate—but trawling for rare earth elements was hardly different, in her mind.
I was scared they’d ask if she believed what she wrote.
Instead, the lawyer said, “Can you elaborate on your meaning?” He must have been hired locally by the company. I can’t distinguish subtle regional variations, but knew his accent was a New Zealand one.
“Entire deep sea ecosystems were created and thrived on the nutrition from dead whales that sank to the seafloor, but in the absence of whales, I guess humans will do.”
The judge frowned.
No one I care about was particularly sad when the Deep Power sank. So much we loved was already lost beneath the sea—we had no sympathy to spare. But all of us, except Kaveri, had kept those thoughts to ourselves.
She looked thinner, as worn as her patched-up secondhand clothes, standing there alone. Her friends hadn’t come to support her. I didn’t blame them. We knew as soon as she was questioned that this would, at the very least, jeopardise her—our—climate residency. Then, the previous month, her charges were read out in this same courtroom—a rearranged hall in the International Seabed Authority’s local premises. The list started with something like ‘anti-green energy propaganda’ and ended with blowing a hole in a ship carrying ninety-seven crew members. No one wanted to risk being associated with that.
A little money did quietly appear in our bank account, enough to talk to a lawyer. They told me it was Kaveri’s bad luck that the ship hadn’t sunk in Aotearoa waters; the International Seabed Authority had its own way of handling trials, and national courts wouldn’t want to touch this case. I’d be permitted to attest to Kaveri’s good character if called as a witness, but unless they found new fragmented evidence six thousand metres underwater to prove she was involved, the outcome would largely depend on a judge’s assessment of her social media statements.
The company representative, when his turn came, spent a long minute staring at his papers. He addressed the entire courtroom, eyes darting often towards the lone reporter and their camera. “We have a chance to break free from petroleum—from a world dependent on burning the carcasses of millions-of-years-dead organisms to pollute the air—and to avert future wars centred on the resources of vulnerable nations already devastated by the effects of climate change.” He held his hands out, palms up, and lowered his voice. “The seafloor is common property; we could all be richer for sharing its wealth. Deep Power, and its crew, stood for that promise. We all believed the time of conflict minerals was past. And now, these . . . eco-terrorists have devastated that—”
He was cut off by the judge, who reminded him that no eco-terrorism had yet been proven.
I wondered if others in the courtroom saw through his evangelism, or if I was the only one on Kaveri’s side.
An old neighbour rows me back to the house, anchoring upriver at the rusted post that used to be a front gate. He says he’ll be back in a few hours and leaves me to pick through the remnants of our long-lost lives.
The blue-inked label on the cassette is an illegible smudge. Even if it hadn’t been water damaged, we must have re-recorded over it dozens of times. Nevertheless, it takes me back twenty years to that morning when I stood beneath screeching gulls, nose wrinkled as I pressed buttons at random on the video camera inherited from our great-grandmother.
That memory is so clear. It cools my heart to find something that cuts through the blur of the trial last month—the thin grey carpet, pens tapping against polished-wood tables, and stuffy summer air.
We’d collected the camera the day before, from the antique shop that repaired it and found us an old tape. My little cousin was determined to film her own documentary for school and apparently my new cellphone was an environmental travesty.
“Can we do this quickly? It stinks like rotting sewage!”
“It’s RICH NUTRIENTS that go into the OCEAN,” Kaveri replied. “Anyway, I’m ready. It’s you that should hurry up.”
“If only Chinnamma and Chiththappa had named you for a deity instead of this damned river, we might be singing at the temple right now!”
She danced barefoot, between lumpy tree-roots that bent upwards seeking air through mud. Waggled thin fingers overhead, as if to mimic their reach. “There’s a red light when you start recording.”
I finally found it.
She put on her best television voice. She’d been watching old clips of some famous British naturalist. “These ancient mangroves may not seem much at first glance, but—”
Her next words were about carbon fixing and nutrients flushed into the coastal ocean. The beauty of the mangroves. I noticed that her leggings were covered in mud, and somehow she’d managed to smear it on her hair. I contemplated how to prevent her dirtying the car: whether we should just leave it there and trek home through the muck, or find clean water to rinse off. I thought of how we could have gone to a zoo to film lions from a pristine concrete walkway, or visited beautiful plants in the botanical gardens full of fragrances that aimed to please the human nose. By the time we’d found crabs and oysters, or whatever she was looking for, and she’d told the camera how mangroves slowed climate change and protected us from storm surges, gloopy sediment clung to my legs too, and we had run out of tape.
“Ah well, the marks are just for the essay,” she said, trailing a toe through silt sodden with the rising tide. I wondered why she’d needed me at all, but only briefly. The smell had faded into the background as we searched for animal tracks and flicked through her plant book, and I overflowed with love for her, and the joys she always introduced me to.
“Ivvalavumthana?” says the neighbour, studying the plastic cassette in my hand. He scuffs bare feet through what used to be our garden. “Isn’t there anything else?”
We both look downhill at the boat. I always hoped we would return, once I’d saved enough for the voyage, thinking we’d benefit from closure after the way we fled during the worst of the storms. I should be grateful to find anything left here to say a proper farewell to. But seeing the house only reminds me I’ve lost two homes now.
I shake my head. “Found everything salvageable. Some knick-knacks upstairs.” I tap the suitcase beside me. “Old books.”
Not the photo albums, the letters, the remnants of my family. Not her.
I keep clutching the tape.
The smell from that day down in the mangroves seems to have suffused the air here too, although nowadays it could well be from rotting sewage. Still, when I inhale, it brings with it the recollection of something else Kaveri said: “Mangroves are the lungs of the ocean.” She breathes so much life into this world.
I think of those roots straining for oxygen above the incoming tide. When the waters recede, what’s left are memories, coated in sediment and bad smells. The richness is always washed into the sea.
At Kaveri’s questioning, she said whatever came to mind, as she always had.
She talked about her work. Yes, they had seen the Deep Power and yes, she had gone for a dive nearby because she’d never seen a deep-sea miner before and yes, she was an environmentalist or she wouldn’t be volunteering to reseed coral reefs while her cousin paid the bills, would she? The prosecution lawyer asked what she knew about deep-sea mining. She talked about creatures that grew on metallic nodules that grew in the depths of the ocean. About noises and echolocation and plumes of sediment that clouded the water for kilometres. About how everything that happened on this planet was connected.
“I didn’t know the ship that sank was the same one I saw until I was ordered to come in for questioning.”
The lawyer pursed his lips before asking what I’d dreaded. Did she believe what she had written?
She folded her arms. For the first time, her voice quivered. “If things had been different, we could have still had whales.”
When I was sworn in, the judge kept telling me to talk louder. The sound sank into the humidity. It reminded me of early days here, when people kept telling me to speak up or repeat myself, correcting the way I pronounced words I’d known my whole life.
I told the court how our family had raised my cousin to care about everyone around her.
“So you agree she has a single-minded focus on wildlife preservation?”
“No, not wildlife—humans too. We’re not separate. There’s no ‘them’ and ‘us’,” I said, hands clasped tight. This couldn’t be helping her case. “Kaveri said it already. We’re part of the same ecosystem. It’s better for everyone when it’s in balance.”
She looked up at me then, eyes bright.
I told them about the river she was named for and its delta in which we grew up; the city lost to the sea centuries ago; the family we lost in the storms. “Kaveri knows loss. She wouldn’t inflict it on anyone. Even when she was a little kid, she just wanted to show the world the beauty of what was left. She used to have me film her own documentaries . . . . I wish I could show you. I had them on my phone but everything’s gone. When we came here, we had nothing except my job offer.” My shoulders ached. I seemed to have swallowed a whole lot of air, making my stomach churn. “And Kaveri wouldn’t have knowingly put our residency application at risk either. She made a thoughtless comment, and maybe she doesn’t understand how it looks, but she didn’t mean to hurt anyone, and she definitely had nothing to do with the ship sinking.”
She gazed fixedly past me at the white-painted walls.
Now everyone knew who I was, I sat at the back of the public gallery, as far as possible from relatives and friends of the crew. The reporter, adjusting their camera, was the only person with a smile for me; Kaveri didn’t turn back in my direction. And, in the end, my attempt to emphasise her naivete made little difference.
“I didn’t do it,” she said. “And I don’t celebrate death; I only celebrate that it happened where it did. The oceans we came from are our mother. We have taken life from her and left her starving, we’ve made it impossible for our siblings to live. I hope eventually we will crawl into the oceans, and re-evolve to replace what we stole. But since this cannot happen for millennia, and since this is all we can do now, why not celebrate any chance to give back? When I die, I want my body to feed the abyssal depths. Bury me in the sea, too.”
She was sent back to her cell and they wouldn’t let me talk to her. They said judgement was reserved. It could be months before a verdict. I had to take the train back up north to wait for news.
Our residency application was declined a week later.
That night, the wind blew strong and the bay glimmered in blue light. A crowd stretched along the sand flats, well after midnight, taking photos. I left off packing to join them. It seemed a good omen: microscopic life, thriving. A respite from my despair.
Several hundred long-finned pilot whales—Kaveri would remind me they’re dolphins, really—stranded in the morning, the deep red tide of the water that brought them mirroring the brightness of pōhutukawa blossom against dark leaves and blue sky.
We cooled them with towels soaked in toxic seawater, into which we’d refloat survivors when the tide returned.
Sea-salt and sweat-salt stuck to our t-shirts. Others took breaks to lather on sunscreen. The waves lapped higher.
As our dolphin gave a weak tail-flick, the person working beside me said, “I wish we could have helped. If nothing else, maybe they’ll fall to the seafloor?”
“I was thinking the same. My cousin said . . . .”
“We’ve got it from here,” said a rescue officer, approaching. “Thanks.”
The two of us turned to wade back.
“You’re Kaveri’s cousin, eh?”
“Were you at the trial?” I stopped, a low wave sloshing at my shins.
“My friend sent me the last video.” They splashed up next to me, pushing cracked sunglasses onto their forehead. “He’s been on her side from the start. I’m sorry, must be rough waiting. Though . . . she’s right, isn’t she? About giving back?”
Unwilling to dump the ruined tape, I take it back to where I’m staying, in the spare room of a stranger’s house near the Kaveri River delta. Here, I eke out what remains of our savings, seeking work that might offer me a visa back to Aotearoa. This is a new kind of loneliness—albeit an incomplete one, because every day, I receive more messages:
“I saw her testimony. I’m writing it in my will.”
“My sister runs a charter boat company and found a funeral director to team up with. They’re booked solid.”
“I’d like to interview you about Kaveri’s trial.”
“I’ve been sending that court video to everyone I know, it’s incredible.”
“Would you be able to put us in touch with your cousin?”
I can’t, because Kaveri is languishing in custody still waiting for the verdict. In the meantime, the company has launched a new forensic investigation.
But now, out here—all over the planet—we bury our dead at sea.
Later I am a woven mat, to clean oil spills in the Indian Ocean. Before I was a forbidden braid, made with trembling hands and YouTube videos in a locked and midnight bathroom. But now I am loose and free, lax between the stylist’s comb and humming shears, as Lian meets their own eyes in the wall-length mirror.
“Just the left side,” they say.
The stylist winks. “I hear you,” he says.
And then he begins to trim.
It is nothing like when Lian first shaves themself. They don’t dare buy shaving cream. A razor could be slipped into a hoodie’s sleeve. A can of liquid could not. Instead they rub shampoo into their warm-soaked legs, like they do to me and my hundred thousand siblings on the occasions they could force themself to strip and shower and see themself, all of themself, even the parts they wish they could take a blade to and make disappear, like how with each pass of the razor the jungle sprouting from their skin thins and thins and thins. Until their skin is smooth and bare as farmland. They watch their hairs swirl down the drain and ask whose nightmares they are now. And I know that their body is theirs alone, its terrors only for them to see.
Then, they are lying in bed and watching Australia burn in the palm of their hand. They wonder if the world would heal faster without them in it. Their father throws open the door. He holds up a mass of tangled hairs in one hand, a plunger in the other.
“You can’t pass your classes, but you can waste your time and my money on vanity?” Lian flinches as their father hurls the evidence of their crimes in their face, and the tangled hairs are thick with sewage. “How dare you?”
Lian mumbles an apology, they’re sorry for hurting him, they didn’t mean to, they’ll clean up their mess, and their father isn’t there anymore, and Lian runs a thumb along my side, numbly, and I am greasy and tangled from weeks without washing, and if I had any more oil America would invade. Lian’s legs are prickly, they hurt them with every step, but as long as they eat their father’s food and sleep under their father’s roof, they daren’t hurt him by shaving again.
The stylist’s blade scythes through me, and I am free, dancing around Lian’s shoulders as I arc to the ground. Lian’s father is not here. Lian’s father is years and miles and memories away. But still he scoffs as the stylist’s nimble fingers work. “Twenty dollars for a sideshave? I could do that myself.” His eyes track each drifting hair as if he could count their costs. As if he could see the entirety of time from behind every eye, weigh the agonies and blessings of any choice, and with the confidence of eternity deem Lian’s haircut an injustice.
And Lian is filthy, scrubbing furiously at their tangled hair, feeling the muck of months wash free from their skin. Lian’s father is outside the bathroom door. Lian takes short showers. He appreciates that about them. Lian shakes the water from their hair, feeling the pleasant, soaked weight of it. Their hair could hold so much, they think. More than its weight in water. They wonder what else it could hold.
I land at Lian’s feet, and the stylist steps back. One half of Lian’s hair pours over their shoulder like black gold. The other is bare, stark, controlled, theirs. Very little is theirs, nowadays. A room they share, a job they hold, a form they own. Even their ideas are not their own. They wonder—if hair can cling to so much oil in water, could it perhaps soak oil from the dark-spilled seas? They search the Internet and are not sure whether to be disappointed that they are not the first, that a company in San Francisco has been making oil nets from human hair since before Lian knew their name.
I have known it all along, that Lian is neither the beginning nor the end. My long strands are swept aside, and Lian regards themself, the sleek and shimmer of their hair, while the stylist counts up the price.
Lian’s father is not here, but he spits, “Was it worth it? For you to feel better?”
Nobody is there to respond, but Lian’s lips still quirk up as they say, “Let’s find out.”
Later, I am a woven mat, to clean oil spills in the Indian ocean. Before, I was a forbidden braid, made with trembling hands and YouTube videos in a locked and midnight bathroom. But now I am proud as Lian rises, thanks the stylist, and lives the strand of their life to its nowless end.
Near the end of the last year of her projected life expectancy, Cora knows she shouldn’t be spending any moment on frivolities. Her store of oxygen tanks is depleting. Her body begins wheezing halfway up the stairs to her apartment. Every last breath in her body needs to be spent on work, on microscopes and slideshows and documentation and the full spectrum of mycelium she’s endeavored so hard to engineer.
But instead of thinking about any of this, she, like everyone else, is riveted to her newsfeed. She clings to every eddy of information.
The satellites spot them first at night: lights where there should be none, sparse enough to be mistaken for dead pixels in the ocean’s inky gut. Before long, the lights splatter into a constellation orbiting 32°N and 145°W, and those who know the significance of that migratory path are summoned to interviews that flood every social media feed.
WHAT IS IN THE NORTH PACIFIC GYRE?
There’s speculation, amazement, alarm. Journalists and researchers and influencers livestream their journeys by sea and sky toward the light, cameras panning across the ocean’s seemingly endless blue, and then its seemingly endless heaving crust of bags, bottles, rope. Even that far out from the coast, the currents gleam in rainbow neons from runoff. Telephoto lenses show a reusable straw jabbing skyward like an arm waving for rescue. Snap-lid plastic tubs bob like polygonal turtle shells, one of which is lifted and upturned by a reporter with a waterplane, revealing barnacles fisted underneath, alive, floating: foreshadowing.
“There are people living out here,” says the only influencer Cora follows, a girl who speaks in awe through a branded lavender nasal cannula. Self-consciously, Cora adjusts her own, and takes a steadying breath as she zooms her phone camera in on grainy, irregular silhouettes in the ocean’s distance.
Over the next weeks, the extent of the floater colony becomes clear. Boats of all models slung to rafts slung to bridges slung to shelters of all sizes, constructed of plastic bottles stuffed with salt-crusted litter and compressed into bricks. A panoply of desalination vats and solar panels bob alongside, dappled with flags, indicating the floaters’ various origins. They range from disillusioned tech heirs to typhooned refugees floated out to sea alongside the ruins of sub-sea-level cities. At night, the Gyre rekindles the ocean’s horizon, radiating gold and crimson from headlights and lanterns and bulbs on hefty rubber wire.
It’s—inspiring.
The monitor in the lab breakroom remains fixed on Gyre newstreams, for hatewatching.
Cora’s project manager: “Do they really think they can stay out there forever?”
One of the marketing people: “Living the material-free, zero-waste lifestyle on a luxury yacht—”
An intern, laughing, eager to fit in: “All that garbage they say they hate so much—where do they think all of it is coming from, now?”
Cora feels the words whirl in her belly, coalescing into a hard, sharp knot. It swells. It hurts.
I don’t know, she wants to say. When a storm washed me out to sea as a child, I think I would have been alright ending up there.
She shuts her eyes.
Focus. Her air is too precious to waste on arguments. She adjusts her cannula, tries to calm down, stares at the news. Overhead, an influencer grimaces and laughs as she rates the output of the Gyre’s pelagic forage: slurry stewed with amphipods netted and flash-sanitized from beneath the ocean’s crusty skin, snails chopped raw with microgreens raised in a greenhousing boat, fish dried on solar-heated racks.
“Cora,” someone calls. It’s her boss. “Let’s do our dry run.”
A withdrawal. In the hallway, Cora’s boss starts talking in Tagalog.
“You’ve been spending a lot of time on Gyre news,” he says, “Cora, you need to focus on here and now,” and this time, she can’t help her protest.
“But—solar panels—mariculture—housing—”
There’s even more she wants to say: Anyone that makes it out there gets space, and everyone there is sifting the ocean clean, and it’s not just the rich, there are people like me, or people who just didn’t want to pay rent, and scientists, everyone who left the field because they couldn’t find investors but finally have the dedicated community, and actual applications—
But she can’t continue. Those first words were her limit, the only sounds that her deepest breath can inflate. She gags and coughs, and her boss lays a sympathetic hand on her shoulder.
“They’ve—done more good—than we have—in years,” Cora forces herself to spit out, and he frowns.
“Our work comes to fruition today, Cora. You’re willing to throw it all away because of a handful of—sea hippies? Cora,” he says finally, “focus,” and it’s these final words that sink into her like lead, sealing her mouth tight behind them.
Focus.
So close to the end, she can’t risk being pulled off this project. The path has been so hard—convincing her boss to have a spot on his team—begging allowance to work from home during flareups—nodding her head in every meeting, holding her head up over office gossip about the tank she rolls with her on bad days. She has no illusions; even with her GPA and degrees and circlet of prestigious scholarships, she’s the kind of person a lab of this caliber and venture backing took only to improve their diversity numbers. It was challenging work—and, Luis scoffed, relentless—but her best chance at getting what she really wanted.
I want to do something with my life, she wrote on her cover letter. I want to be the last to suffer this way. I want to die in peace.
She got the job.
They review the presentation one last time; and then, later that afternoon, in front of the board of directors, Cora’s boss recites points from their slideshow flawlessly. Mycolution’s arsenal of fungi is ready for deployment. Exhaustive experiments and projections show their full set of offerings is capable of digesting over eighty percent of humanity’s most non-degradable waste products, reducing even the most ancient plastics to harmless, reasonably edible mushrooms. Observers can even see the mycelium working: engineered luminescence indicates where hyphae have detected, and are digesting, plastic-based nutrients. Cora displays the diorama on the conference table, three acrylic boxes filled with her best specimen, tweaked and optimized. Each box contains different debris collected from the beach, left with the mycelium for half a year. Someone turns off the lights, for better visibility. Threading through the waste in each box is a lacework of vivid, fervent violet.
This is by far the most impressive demonstration their lab has ever been able to yield—but no one is interested. Cora’s chest tightens as one of the board interrupts the presentation halfway through and spends the remainder of the time on interrogation. The developed fungi varieties are fine, but how would the mycelium be transported to landfills? How could companies select the proper species to digest each dump’s specific stew of pesticides and nurdles and retired polyester clothing? What appeal was there for a company to wait decades before they could advertise having made any meaningful dent on the planet’s health? The costs in time and money and effort were high—there weren’t any subsidies for technology this new—and what would be the psychological cost, of bringing back to public consciousness the existence of a bunch of evacuated wastelands that public relations companies had already successfully hidden from view?
Cora gapes. Are they . . . serious? Just because problems are hidden or take a long time to resolve don’t mean they aren’t affecting anyone. It’s exactly because of companies making decisions like this that she has had to spend her life like this, not just in pain, but just trying to—clean up—
Focus, she tells herself, focus, be calm, focus, but her head is heating, and her chest is tightening, and all at once she dissolves, into coughing so harsh that she loses her balance—pitches into a wall—gasps, her breathing awful, inoutinoutinoutinoutinout.
In the end, her boss looks relieved at her struggling. It’s the perfect excuse to end the meeting.
The next day, she can’t even get up from bed. Her head spins. She fumbles herself together just enough message her boss that she’s too sick to come in, and accepts his immediate return voice call.
“I know you’re discouraged,” he says. “But the mycelium aren’t completely shelved. Let’s do the marketing research, find the money, and try again.”
I’ve already done the research, Cora types back. Her eyes are sore with it, with not sleeping, not resting. Everything they mentioned, the zero-waste certifications, the focus group branding. It takes a lot of time. More than I have left.
“None of us will ever see the fruit of our labor,” her boss argues. “All of this work is always for a future we’ll never see.” But he knows what she really means, and adds: “I don’t want to hear you sound so hopeless. This place has good coverage. You’ll live as long as anyone else. Just rest, and come back when you’re feeling better, alright?”
The way he says it, he’s forgotten that this is the only day of paid-time-off she reserves for herself shamelessly every year. She was supposed to spend her birthday in celebration of the project taking off; and in relaxation, one final breather before she dedicated herself to assembling all her documentation for whoever would inherit her work. She isn’t supposed to be shuddering nauseous on her couch—dizzy with reviewing PDFs about market and government certifications—nearly collapsing after opening the door for Luis, who arrives with birthday cake. She tries to hold herself together when the candles light, but her tears spatter on the icing. Her body squeaks, struggling to refill after she fails to blow out every candle.
I think, Cora wants to say, that this is it—but she can’t say it, her body judders, inoutinoutinoutinout, and Luis hugs her, holds her face to their chest. They understand.
In the end, Luis’s mother also hadn’t been able to blow out her candles. It all happened fast, after that.
“All I—want—is one more—year,” Cora sobs between breaths. “Just to—to know—that I—”
Luis’s arms around her tighten.
“Cora,” they say. “You’ve done all that you could. Please—please—just let go of the work. If this is really . . . you know I’ll be with you, until the end. But if this is really it . . . I can’t bear to see you spend your last days like this. You’ve done enough.”
No. She hadn’t managed even close to enough. But any protest Cora might have then is interrupted by her buzzing phone. A news alert, for the Gyre: another interview, about water purification methods they’re experimenting with. And their new coordinates, near mainland. The alert displays above her boss’s last message, a reiteration: Come back tomorrow when you’re feeling better.
Luis sees the message. “Don’t,” they say. Their voice is low with contempt. “Let’s just enjoy the time we have left. They don’t deserve your labor, much less you.”
They don’t, Cora agrees with a shake of her head. Still, she keeps looking at her phone. Her hand, shaking on her oxygen tubing, fists.
“Luis,” she says. “You—mean it? With me—until—the end?”
Luis meets her gaze, trying to understand the turn of her voice. Slowly, they nod.
“Okay,” Cora says. “Then—I think—I’ll go back.”
Just one last time.
She met Luis in the university hospital as a teen, back when no one knew the name of what was killing her. She was an orphan, a refugee of Tropical Storm Bagwis, jobless, a student. For her, and for Luis’s mother, the stipend given in exchange for their cooperation was better than nothing, and adhering to experiment protocols was well worth the hope they might one day breathe freely, rather than only in spurts, at times sucking for air like fish out of water.
Doctors barraged them with tests, and chased the symptoms around and down to their roots: the blood vessels that branched and withered over and over again in their lungs, like the boughs of trees in manic seasons. That wild growth and anti-growth was thanks to a frantic pendulum of hormones; and that was thanks to the chemicals leeched into their bloodstreams by plastics, apparently ingested in fatal levels by both Cora and Luis’s mother. They were too numerous and minuscule to extract or neutralize. Luis, who always hated seafood even when it was fried anonymously into bacalaitos, remained unaffected, though it wasn’t obvious from how they cried and hugged their mother and Cora both upon official diagnosis.
The news coined their own name for it, vulgar and catchy: trash lung. An islander’s affliction, carried by superstorm exiles along with whatever baggies of memory cards and soggy photo prints they could keep hold of, adrift, before being scooped up by rescue boats. It felt unfair that the city was where things were safe to eat, with its meat trucked in from toxic mass production facilities. It felt criminal that Cora’s poison was bangús she chose from the market alongside her mother, fried and eaten with rice, plain and simple and miasmatic with microplastics and pollution finer than fish bones, and sticking deeper in the throat.
The injustice was obvious. Luis’s mother died; and Cora picked them up from their grief, cooked food, helped parse out all the bills, now in Luis’s name. It was like the sickness had simply happened, with no one to blame: no paper trails, no culprits, and no cures. When Cora asked, the doctors told her that the funding had dried up.
“And what about us?” Cora demanded. “All us research subjects? And what about everyone else in the world that has this?”
I know you’re discouraged, was all they said. Let’s just find the money, and try again.
They told her that she had a while yet—at least until age twenty-eight. She waited, and then she didn’t. She wasn’t going to die having done nothing. She’d heard of a lab, run by someone from her same hometown, who was trying to use the earth to purify the water.
Presently, Luis searches the chat forums while she makes her final preparations.
And I found someone, they message. On a Gyre forum. Their boat can take us out to the coordinates the Gyre announced they’d be at in a week. I got the time off. Do you think you have that amount of time?
Yes, Cora responds.
There’s a pause. Luis says, And you’re sure you want to do this?
Yes, Cora repeats.
And to her own body she begs: Seven more days. That’s it.
All I want is seven more days.
All her life, she’s had to balance so much: insurance, co-pays, tuition, grants, rent, oxygen. So it’s a blessing, really, that none of that matters at all, anymore. Her life has only one last to-do item.
She heads back to work—after hours, after packing her things, and after connecting herself to a fresh tank. Despite her conviction, her hands shake. The substrate drawers rattle as she opens them—in her anxiety, she accidentally opens one against her tank roller, causing it to clank against a cabinet—and when she finally rights it, and starts to palm a bit of spore-laden substrate into a spare vial, the vial slips, and when she tries to catch it her wild hand instead smashes it.
The sound pierces, echoes. Her breathing goes into overdrive, and then stops: Inout—in. In the silence, even the sound of her blood dripping from her palm sounds like a drum. But no one comes when she tamps the soil and spores into the vials with her bleeding hand. No one comes when she slips the vials into her pockets, sock-padded to quiet the clinking. No one comes when she heads out the door. Luis picks her up at the lab’s back door, and inside the car is Peregrin, a tanned white woman with a catamaran and a wealth of optimism, who on short notice agreed to delay her departure just another day. They make introductions. At the moorage, Peregrin points at the water, which is scaly with wrappers and plastic bottles and gleams magenta in the moonlight.
“So you’ve got mushrooms that can eat this stuff?”
“Wait,” Luis says. Cora is wheezing already, with the effort of walking across the pier. In the catamaran, Peregrin helps her into a seat, and by the time they’ve made it out of the sound, Cora’s pained but steady breathing is deafened by the groan of the boat, the hiss of seafoam on the windows.
Inside her single bag is two changes of clothing, her laptop, and binder-sized substrate trays, with humidifier layers and battery-powered warming elements. Each tray is speckled with various kinds of plastic waste, and labeled according to which mycelium can digest it. It’s equipment from home, things she used in the past to continue research over the weekend. She takes a deep breath.
The soil in the vials is studded with spores and fluffy hyphae that, once the lights are off, glow: purple, tangerine, cyan, neon jade. On some vials spores luminesce in whorl-shapes, stamped by Cora’s thumb. On others, there are smears of blood.
“Cora,” Luis gasps. “When did you cut yourself?”
“It’s nothing.” Her palm is still bleeding, even stinging, sharply—but a brief glance shows her no shards of vial glass, just a little dirt.
“It’s not nothing! Cora—”
Cora frowns at them. This is the least of my worries. But she accepts antibiotics and a bandage that Peregrin procures from a cabinet, and then returns to work, upending the vials and stirs the spores into the trays. Peregrin peers over Cora’s shoulders, impressed.
“That’s it? That dirt?”
Cora nods.
“That is so fucking cool, Cora,” Peregrin laughs. “This stuff definitely deserves to be out in the Gyre, rather than in corporate purgatory. You’re a goddamn hero. Honestly, I’m honored y’all chose me to help you. Count me in until the end.”
Thanks for helping, Cora writes. And then, not wanting to get distracted: As long these mycelium have nutrients, they’re fine anywhere. A toxic dump. An ocean.
That night, she focuses, and writes everything she can remember about mycelium, about hyphae, about enzymes, polymers, monomers. About detergents and fuel and polystyrene. About how the eventual luminescent caps can be eaten, with no adverse affect whatsoever. It’s useful—it deserves a life out there. She stays up the whole night, drawing diagrams, arranging files.
All I want, she thinks the next morning, is six more days.
“How about taking a break?” Luis asks, halfway through the next day, when she asks them to roll down another tank from her meager storage. “Just for an afternoon? Just for an hour? Just for the sunset?”
No, Cora writes. I have to focus.
So close to the end, she can’t risk this falling through the cracks, can’t risk the last moment of her life being filled with regret. Peregrin brings cut apples as Cora is writing about optimal temperature ranges. Luis brings another air tank as Cora is writing about instructions for how to mix new substrate. Cora writes and writes, and when she starts slowing down on facts, she starts adding dreams, describing training the mycelium’s fibrous body into brick-shaped molds, describing a glowing city fruiting on the ocean, stretching, chewing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch up and spitting it out as homes, or at least as floating mycelium reefs.
To actually construct something out of material like that would take years, if not decades, of course—and who knows how it would all fare long-term, in the harsh salt and sun of the Gyre—but she can see it all so clearly, which is a blessing, because if any of this ever became reality, it would be long after her death.
Which is fine, she thinks firmly, it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine, and she steels herself as she feels her body constrict again—inoutinoutinout.
At the end of Luis’s mother’s life, these attacks had come on so fast and close together that she’d deflated in the space of a week. Gasping, eyes watering, Cora pinches her cut thumb, comforted by the simple sharp pain of it.
All I want is five more days.
By the time the boat noses through water cloudy with polyethylene bags, Cora feels a stab of relief—We must be close! But this delight breaks as the day proceeds and the seamless blue of their journey turns murky, then blistered, with debris. A two-second dip of Peregrin’s landing net yields handfuls of waste: salt-blunted chips of white and gray and blue plastic, flakes of wave-softened styrofoam. She upends it all onto the deck, and three of them pick through it, with gloves, and morbid curiosity. For a moment Cora raises her hand and wills her fingers to drift and rest, prophetic, on something scattered by a lola or even older ancestor: maybe a family photograph storm-flung by some miracle, through decades and miles, to her possession, an omen, a sign that someone approves of how she’s chosen to live and die. But most of the stuff is slimy knots of trawling net, and tatters of fluorescent fishing rope: castoff sloughed off secretly, before it could be counted by an expense report.
Luis is somberly silent. Peregrin wipes her eyes.
“It’s different,” she murmurs. “When you see it in person.”
Cora nods, not wanting to waste air on a useless, depressed Yes. The sight of all this garbage, scabbed over the ocean and never healing, congeals in her like she sometimes imagines the plastic inside her does: not ruining her through some haywire of hormones but with something even more basic, as if the blame for her weakening body rests on crackling film and crumbling egg crates lodged between every capillary, too deep for fingers or fine instruments to wedge out. Thinking about it, she feels her chest tighten again, with a kind of claustrophobia—she scratches her skin, as if she could claw the poison inside her out—her cut palm catches on something, and bleeds anew, and the color is so wildly bright and spills so fast and for a moment she feels her chest going again, inoutinoutinoutin—
When she returns to consciousness, it’s in panic.
Luis, she tries to scream, and she feels her hand, gripped. Luis is in chair beside her hammock; Peregrin is standing over, as well. Both are teary.
“Hey, girl,” Peregrin says. “How are you?”
Fine, Cora mouths. She reaches her arm out, toward her laptop, but Luis takes her hand, and squeezes it.
“Cora,” they say, “I think you’ve done enough,” and for the first time, Cora can’t find the energy to argue. She slumps.
“There are nurses in the Gyre,” Peregrin whispers. “Doctors too, maybe. You think maybe one of them could help her? I don’t know, I mean—if they could even buy her just another month, or—”
“Maybe,” Luis says, and then turns back to Cora, making a smile. “Just four more days. Hang in there, Cora. This—this isn’t how you’re supposed to go. Don’t you . . . do you want to see the Gyre? Isn’t that worth staying here for, just a glimpse of it? You have to see it. You have to see where your work will go. Don’t you?”
Their eyes are red.
I’ll try, Cora mouths, because she knows they’d only protest if she said, I’m sorry you have to watch this happen all over again. You don’t deserve this.
Luis brushes her hair. “You’ve done enough,” they say, “just rest now, just sleep,” and for the first time, it’s the easiest thing in the world to do.
Maybe Luis is right.
I’ve done everything I needed.
I’ve done everything I could.
I can die now, in peace—
But in the days and hours before her death, robbed of the lush distraction of work, all she can think about is how hard it is to breathe. How cold she feels, even with Peregrin’s hand-knit shawl. How her whole body aches, especially her cut hand, even her whole arm. How Luis’s mother, in her deathbed, had painkillers, and movies, and short books—but all Cora has is an ache deeper than the one in her chest, something hard and huge in her belly, something that says, This can’t happen.
I can’t die yet. I still want—all I want—
Is . . . to . . . to see the Gyre.
Yes.
Just three more days. To know the mycelium made it, and then, Cora swears, I’ll die, I know it, it’ll be fine, I’ll go without complaint, and so for the first time Cora listens exactly to what Luis says, stays wrapped in the hammock, drinks Peregrin’s bone broth, tries to ignore Peregrin and Luis whispering around her in anxiety, and Cora wishes, hopes, begs.
All I want is three more days.
Two.
One, please, one.
“Cora,” Luis calls, and Peregrin says, “Cora, sweetheart, wake up, we’re all docked and locked in, I’ve got your air, let’s go,” and together they heft her out of the hammock, out of the boat, and she thrashes, violently, but Luis says, “It’s alright, Cora, I packed the mycelium up, just like you wrote, they’re here, look,” and it’s true: the trays are stacked and labeled neatly, and now there’s someone here, and they’re taking the mycelium, legs wide and careful to keep balance because, yes, they’re all on a bridge, which is floating on the water, swaying gently. All around her are lights, and boats, rising and shining in the night.
She made it.
This is it.
I got it, everything I wanted.
I can—finally I can—
But peace, a comforting blanket of triumph and private fulfillment she always imagined, doesn’t come. Instead her lungs are burning, and her body is heaving. People are around her, lifting her up, and she hears Luis’s voice, “Please, Cora, please, hang in there,” and somehow her feet move beneath her, bringing her forward, forward, with some wild animal hope, as if there might really be someplace left still for her to go, and that place turns out to be a boat heady with the smell of sanitizer. Cora gasps hideously as she is released into a cot; Luis grips her hand as someone approaches, a nurse, maybe, with a stethoscope, and Cora inhales, and inhales, and inhales, ineffectually, and knows, suddenly, that this is really, actually it. Her final moments will be spent like this, in pain, in furious misery and marrow longing and nothing at all of being glad that she did something useful with her life. Somewhere in the burning of her body, her mind is even hotter, incendiary.
I want—all I want—is—
Not just one more day.
She wants days, months, years, more, everything: her whole life, all the years she should have had left, stolen from her because she was cheaper than the unspeakable complexities of a corporation cleaning up after itself. Their extravagance stole her hometown, her body, and her future, and left her not even this last minute on earth that she could spend in anything other than excruciation.
The nurse grips Cora’s shoulders.
“You’re having a panic attack,” they say. Their voice is firm: “Close your eyes. Listen. Breathe with me, using your diaphragm, right here,” and Cora almost tries to use her precious little wisp of air to shout, You don’t know what you’re talking about, but she sees it now, finally, in the blur of her tears, the nurse’s nasal cannula, and her tank, too, and Cora mashes her palms against her eyes, aligns her breathing to the nurse’s slow count: inoutinoutin . . . out . . . in . . . out.
“See?” the nurse says, smiling warmly, and Cora—inhales. Deeply—fully. She trembles, not from exhaustion now, or cold, but startled awe. As the world starts to re-align around her, she spots Luis, and gapes.
“Look,” she gasps, purely from disbelief, and Luis says, “No. You look.”
“At what?” Cora asks. She looks at the nurse, at the faces of the others in the room, coming into focus again, all staring, at her. Peregrin is covering her mouth. Cora looks down, and notices it, finally, under her collar. Trembling, she rips off her shawl, her sweater, her shirt.
Her skin is glowing. Threading through her palm, her forearm, and up across her entire chest is a lacework of vivid, fervent violet.
‘What is the meaning of this?’ Pradip Shankar yelled as five men with sticks burst into his OB/GYN consultation chamber. The receptionist screamed. She ran out the glass doors just seconds before a stick swung and shattered them to fragments. The two patients who were waiting to see him, Mrs Singh and Mrs Malkani, grabbed each other as glass shrapnel flew everywhere. One of the men turned to look at them and grinned. ‘Leave now, randis,’ he said. ‘Or stay for the fun.’ The two women took one look at his red grin and fled for their lives. Downstairs, Pradip heard the shrill screeching of his wife’s pediatric patients. ‘Spare them,’ he muttered. ‘They’re innocent.’
‘We know,’ said the man. He raised his stick and smashed the monitor on the receptionist’s desk with a quick, professional jab. The other men took care of the TV. Pradip stood there helplessly. ‘Why?’ he wailed. Then a huge figure barreled through the broken glass doors and kept going until Pradip was pinned up against a poster of a smiling mother and baby. ‘Ramprolac is best for your growing boy!’ the buxom mother seemed to be saying. Pradip stared up at his former friend and patient. ‘Himmat Singh?’
Himmat Singh ripped Pradip’s black-framed glasses off his nose and stomped them. ‘I thought you were a good doctor,’ he said. ‘I thought you understood.’
‘I do! I do!’ Pradip whimpered as Himmat Singh squashed him into the mother’s cardboard breasts. ‘Tell me what it is that I should have understood!’
‘Guddu,’ Himmat Singh spat. ‘You said never to call him guddu.’
‘What?’ Then a memory stirred. ‘Yes, I did say that.’ Pradip giggled nervously. ‘It was just a joke. Your wife, Himmat bhai, your wife was apprehensive in the ultrasound room, it is her first time after all, so I tried to put her at ease. First babies tend to be small for their gestational aaaaaaaaah!’ Pradip’s head hit the wall as he tried to avoid the speculum in Himmat Singh’s hand. It clacked like a raptor’s beak under his nose.
‘You told my wife he looked like a doll.’ Himmat Singh shook him. ‘My unborn son.’ The speculum clattered on the tiles. ‘She thought you were saying she was carrying a girl.’
‘I never said that!’ Tears squeezed out of Pradip’s eyes. ‘It was a joke! A joke!’
Himmat Singh snarled. ‘I thought you were speaking in signs, to save your reputation, because the law punishes if you tell me what she bears. I thought you didn’t want the taint, so I took her to another doctor for the work.’
A horrified realisation began to dawn on Pradip. ‘Wait . . . you didn’t . . . did you . . . ? I hope you haven’t done anything foolish, Himmat Singh.’
Himmat Singh roared. ‘No redblooded man wants his first child to be a girl! So I took the stupid bitch to a hack, a sawbones, and said, “drop her belly”. But guess what we found after the deed was done, eh, Mr I-Came-Top-of-My-Class-At Chandigarh-Medical-College?’
‘You . . . aborted the fetus? No!’
Himmat Singh’s eyes turned cold. ‘You said you would look after my family. You said I would have children I could be proud of.’ He straightened and dusted his hands. ‘Now I want to make sure you never have the courage to hurt a father like me again. Daljeet! Sajao isko.’
Daljeet, a squat, ugly man in a misspelled Arsenal t-shirt, grinned. He came over and patted Pradip’s sweaty cheek. ‘Now we shall play football-football.’ Two men shoved him into a chair. Daljeet stroked Pradip’s left knee and drawled in the tones of a derpy commentator, ‘Gooooaaaal!’
‘Please, please, please . . . .’ Pradip gibbered as they took his left leg and stretched it over the fallen water cooler. Himmat Singh squatted a couple of times and massaged his stiff calves. Then he grabbed Pradip’s jaw in his huge hand again. ‘Listen carefully, you scum. If you ever practice medicine again, I will bury you and sell your lovely wife over the border.’
‘Please, please, don’t hurt me, I promise I’ll make things right, just give me another ch . . . .’
Himmat Singh grunted and raised his enormous sandal-clad foot. He stared into Pradip’s terror-stricken eyes. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I won’t twist the bone. You’d make a pathetic cripple, anyway.’
Then the foot came down, and the lights went out.
‘Ahhhh! Mummy!’
‘Stay still, ji.’
Pradip struggled to open his eyes. In the chink of reality thus revealed, he saw his wife’s hands wrapping a medical journal round his thigh and securing it with lengths of packing tape. ‘That should stabilise the bone till we get him to the hospital.’
‘Ambulance is here, madam.’
‘Call the stretcher-bearers. He must be lifted carefully.’
‘Priya! Help me . . . .’
‘It’s all right, husband.’ A hand grasped his. ‘They’ve gone.’
‘Priya!’ He clutched her and pulled her to him. ‘Simple fracture of the upper left femur,’ he gasped. ‘Blunt force trauma applied anterolaterally to the . . . .’ The lights dimmed and flickered.
‘He’s out. Lift him on three. One . . . . Two . . . .’
He wanted to say he wasn’t out, but the sudden pain made his teeth lock.
When he came round again, he was in a hospital bed. His left leg was in a sling. Priya was sitting by his bedside, reading a book titled What Girls Need. The window showed night sky above the Chandigarh skyline.
‘Oh good, you’ve come round.’ She looked up and smiled. ‘We put a plate in your leg. Shivani wants to keep you for observation. You’ll be discharged on Sunday if all’s well. I’ve cancelled your appointments.’
‘Priya,’ he moaned. ‘I am ruined.’
She wavered, then rallied and smiled again. ‘It’s a clean break, ji. It should heal without sequelae.’
‘He said . . . he said he’d murder me if I ever practiced again.’
‘Worry about that later.’ She stroked his hand. ‘For now you must rest.’
‘Will you stay? Priya! Please . . . I need . . . .’
She hesitated. ‘I have my Study Club reading tonight.’
‘But . . . .’ His other hand waved vaguely, trying to free itself from the coils of the drip tube.
‘Shivani’s on duty. She’ll see you get the best care.’
‘Is your club more important than your own husband?’
‘All right, I’ll text them.’ She quickly typed a message on her phone, then she went back to holding his hand. A nurse came in, smiled at Priya, took Pradip’s IV channel and pushed 2.5 mg midazolam into it, as Priya had requested. Priya waited for the drug to take effect, then got up quietly and left. She looked in at Orthopedics on her way out. ‘Thank you, Shivani,’ she said to her friend. ‘Watch him till I get back.’
‘Doctor Mrs Khair Bintam,’ said Priya to the twenty or so young women sitting on rickety chairs in the little one-room shed. ‘In her, we lost a champion. But we still have this.’ She held up What Girls Need. ‘Khair Bintam was a scholar of women’s history at the Turkish University of the Humanities in Istanbul. Do you know where Istanbul is?’ Some of the more eager girls nodded. ‘She wrote this little book for her two daughters, Ayala and Lila. They were then teenagers, and they didn’t understand why their mother was never home.’
The girls listened attentively. Most came from hard-scrabble backgrounds, and some were first-generation learners. Priya had begun this initiative after she’d met Rani, a sixteen-year-old domestic worker who had showed up at Priya’s pediatric practice, twelve weeks pregnant and begging for an abortion. In vain Priya had protested that she was a ‘child-doctor’; Rani had merely said, ‘Yes, child-doctor, make this child go away. If you don’t, it will finish me.’ So Priya had had a word with Pradip, who had grumbled and objected and finally done a D&C. Then he had insisted that Rani get ‘counselling’ at the local satsang. Rani had shaken her head firmly. ‘He forced me, that Bappa from the bus terminus,’ she said. ‘I was minding my own business. He did it. Give Bappa your counselling, not me.’ Priya had wanted Rani to file a police complaint, but the girl had laughed bitterly. ‘Me go to the police station? Hah! You want five cops to do what Bappa did to me?’
‘I’ll go with you.’ But Rani hadn’t answered, just taken the strip of antibiotics Priya had handed her and gone home without another word. Pradip had read Priya the riot act for getting involved, then washed his hands of the whole affair.
But Priya hadn’t been able to forget Rani. She’d reached out to some of her wealthy friends from school and medical college, and they’d started the Study Club for Educational Uplift of Disadvantaged and Vulnerable Girls. Priya had then nagged Rani and a few other maids and nannies from her slum neighbourhood to attend. In spite of its grandiose name, it was little more than an after-hours training centre with a pair of donated computers and a couple of shelves of dogeared books. Here the kids learned to use spreadsheets, write emails and keep basic accounts. Priya had told them this was the way to a better life, and so far they hadn’t disagreed.
Since it was run by Doctor Madam, the middle-class housewives who employed the girls gave them grudging permission to spend time there. Some of them complained that the Study Club made the girls ‘uppity’, but the wives and employers all agreed it was better than those church groups that were luring girls with promises of free food and education. On Friday nights some notable female leader in their circle would drop in to give a talk, usually a yogin, a doctor or a lawyer. This week it was Priya’s turn.
‘Khair Bintam had a husband and two daughters, just like many of you, but unlike you she was always campaigning and teaching and explaining, just as I am doing for you today. She wanted girls to learn and use their minds, to work and be productive. Her books inspired me to start this club.’ She noticed with a twinge of disquiet that Sudha, one of the older girls, was grinning broadly, as if she knew something very amusing.
‘But of all the Bintam books, I love this little one the most. It’s written in the form of letters to her daughters, and each letter answers a question that one of them has asked. What does wealth mean for women? Is motherhood an instinct? Should I wear makeup? Whom should I marry? Can menstruation kill you? How do I know if I’m in love?’ Priya smiled. ‘All questions I wouldn’t have dared to ask my own mother when I was growing up.’
‘Me neither,’ said Rani with feeling. ‘Very quick way to get a thick ear.’
‘Those girls are lucky to have had a mother like that,’ said Rani’s friend Radha. The others nodded solemnly. Sudha was grinning and fidgeting.
‘Yes indeed,’ said Priya. ‘In the introduction, Dr Mrs Bintam says that the reason mothers get angry when questioned is because they’ve been taught that knowing too much is bad for girls. So, because they love their girls, they discourage them from learning how to ask questions. Even though they wish someone had answered their own questions when they were younger. They do this because they don’t know any better.’
‘But they always say they know better,’ Rani snorted. ‘All the time.’
‘Actually, Dr Mrs Bintam says that the older women, the mothers and aunts, in a sense do know better, because when they were young, they were taken aside and taught a lesson. Then they were told, if you breathe a word of this, bad things will happen,’ said Priya.
Rani’s mouth hardened.
‘So instead of answering questions, the mothers were taught to keep secrets.’ Priya tapped the book. ‘It’s all in here. But Dr Mrs Bintam decided she was tired of keeping secrets. She resolved to speak out.’
‘And what happened to her?’ asked Sudha. ‘How did she die?’
Too late, Priya remembered that Sudha was a nanny, and that nannies watched television all the time, because they were stationed in front of it with their wards, feeding them, playing with them, bathing and dressing them. They didn’t always watch the cartoon channels. Sometimes they got glimpses of the news. ‘It was a very sad business,’ she said. ‘She . . . she was shot by unknown men. On the steps of her university, as she was going home.’
Sudha nodded sagely. Priya went on, unable to stop herself. ‘They burned her body before the police could get there. On a pyre of her own books.’ For days after seeing the news clip, she hadn’t been able to sleep.
‘No wonder.’ Sudha pursed her lips. ‘What a wicked mother to write such things! Strange men can read all about her daughters’ monthlies? Haw.’ The other girls giggled nervously. Priya cleared her throat.
Rani frowned and turned to Priya. ‘I have a question,’ she said. ‘The family next door to ours has three girls and they’re always crying and begging for food. They used to have five but the two eldest were sent away to some uncle in the country. No one’s seen them for years.’
‘So? Why do you care?’ Sudha snapped.
‘Let her ask her question,’ said Priya, but Rani had jumped to her feet. ‘I care! Someone has to! When our father left us—’
‘Same old excuses! Trying to pretend!’ Sudha also rose, fixing her with a stern glare. ‘Everyone knows what you did, Rani.’
‘I did nothing!’
‘You care about those girls because you should have shared their fate! You’re just like them! Piece of shit!’
Priya stepped forward. ‘Both of you, sit down!’
Rani was flushed and close to tears. She thumped back down on her chair. Sudha twirled the end of her pigtail between her fingers, and took her time smoothing her dupatta as she sat. Priya said, ‘Sudha, please do not disrupt the class. Don’t you want to hear what is in this book?’
Sudha shrugged. ‘My mother says, when I marry I have to pay for a hut and a scooter for the groom’s family, otherwise I will get a man who beats me.’ Sudha pointed at the book. ‘Does it say where to find those things? I think not. And why is that?’ She turned to the other girls and spread her hands. ‘Is it because Doctor Madam’s daughters never had to worry about getting husbands who beat them?’
Priya sighed and laid the book aside. ‘Sudha, in my family, I have five elder sisters. My father could only marry off three of them before our dowries and wedding expenses bankrup
ed him. My fourth sister vowed never to marry. She nursed my parents through their last years. I always knew I had to study hard, get a job, find my own husband. And I was lucky. I met a man who told me, “You are a good doctor, you can make ten dowries if you want.” He believes in me.’ She smiled, filled with a sudden rush of tenderness for her stricken husband. ‘There are such men, you know. They’re rare, but they exist.’
‘How did you get into medical college, didi?’ asked Radha.
‘I studied hard and scored well in the entrance test.’
‘Huh,’ muttered Sudha, and looked Rani up and down. ‘You can forget it, trashbag. The only entrance test you know is how to open your legs.’
‘Sudha!’
She grinned and folded her arms. ‘I will say no more.’ They could all hear Rani grinding her teeth. Priya heaved a big sigh. ‘All right then,’ she said, acknowledging defeat. ‘As Sudha is determined to be difficult today, we’ll discuss the questions next time.’
‘Why are you like this?’ Radha hissed, but Sudha only laughed nastily.
Rani remained sitting as the others left. Sudha lingered in the doorway with her cronies. ‘Now she’s going to cry to Doctor Madam. Just see, buckets will come down.’
‘Sudha, go,’ said Priya sharply. ‘Meeting is over.’
Rani got to her feet. ‘I’m going too.’
‘Stay, Rani. Don’t lis—’ Rani rushed away. Priya almost followed her, then remembered she had to get back to the hospital before Pradip woke up. She sighed, locked the doors and left.
Pradip Shankar brooded. His left leg, bound up in its brace, felt as though it no longer belonged to him. Like a failed and sullen traitor forced to go on living in the household of the betrayed master. He grimaced as his bare right foot brushed the rough surface of the bandage.
Himmat Singh was right. He was a failure. All through medical college, he had nurtured the dream of building India’s future. Now even his own personal future was slipping through his fingers. He had joined medical school to get a career, but then something slightly shameful had happened to him: he had grown to love medicine for its own sake. He was supposed to be learning how to provide for his family and acquire status in society, not dream of utopian futures. But dream he did, all through his student years.
The world was in crisis, every news feed said so. Too many people were clogging up the works, from primary schools to metro stations. Mothers and their baby-hunger were a threat to world civilisation. He’d always known this, but until now, he’d never really had the leisure to examine the problem.
So what should be the solution? Himmat Singh had wanted a son: was that so wrong? Men want sons: they are our only chance at immortality, he thought, trying futilely to scratch his left knee. In the course of acquiring sons, fathers produce surplus children, failed attempts, so to speak. In other words, daughters. Daughters must be married: they can’t be left lying around for random men to take advantage of and shame the family. Therefore, he thought, reaching for a notepad embossed with bouncing babies, the proposed solution must at one stroke decrease unwanted births and lessen the upward trend of world population in subsequent generations.
He wrote in a careful, rounded hand: ‘Sons produce no babies. Therefore, in the long run, sons decrease world population.’
But how to achieve this outcome? He felt the edge of something slip past him, an idea so brilliant it took his breath away. Where were his old molecular genomics notes? He tried to rise and grimaced as his leg twinged.
‘Priya? O Priya! Priya? Oho, have you gone deaf?’
Priya looked in at the doorway of his empty chamber. ‘What is it, ji?’
‘My old notes. Where are they?’
‘What old notes?’
‘From college! My special project!’
‘I have no idea what you mean,’ she said, ‘but all your papers from before we were married are in the trunk in the back room. I’ll tell Jasbir to bring it here for you. Why do you want those old things?’
‘Because I am a man of science. No matter what Himmat Singh says, I am a man of knowledge and intellect. I topped my class; you were the second topper, Priya. How dare he forbid me—!’ His voice had risen sharply. He began again. ‘If I do not use my mind, I will die. I will die, Priya!’
She came in and sat down beside him. ‘No you won’t. You need to rest and heal now. All this nonsense will blow over eventually. You know what this city is like. There will be new scandals, new feuds. One man’s tragedy is a straw in the wind.’
‘Priya, you do not understand. Himmat Singh is a fixer, a wielder of influence. His roots run deep into the sources of power. And I have hurt his most sensitive spot. He will not forget. As long as he lives, I am a dead man walking.’ He grunted a bitter laugh. ‘Or rather, a sitting duck. He has hung a padlock on my mind as surely as if he had slapped a court order on me.’
‘Can you not explain to him?’
‘I tried, that day when he trashed the place. He was too angry to listen then, and he will keep me away now.’ He turned to her. ‘Anyway, what can I say? I should have been wiser. It has only been a year since we set up our joint clinic, and now there is so much damage to pay for.’
‘The insurance will cover it. And I still have my pediatric practice.’
‘No! I refuse to live off my wife’s earnings like a pimp. If I cannot practice medicine, I must find some other calling. That’s why I want my notes.’ He slammed a fist into the desk. ‘No man of reason should have to suffer as I am suffering. I must fix it.’
‘Don’t be angry, ji. Have some compassion for the man also. He is angry because he is ignorant. If the common folk knew anything, they would be the doctors, not us.’
‘Exactly! This country no longer respects learning. All it respects is wealth. And power. Hah! You remember I wanted to specialise in gene tech, but then I realised I would have to work in some government lab for a pittance. OB/GYN was my second choice, with much better prospects.’ A manic gleam appeared in his eyes. ‘Hmmm, maybe God is telling me something. Maybe I am meant for higher things.’
‘That’s nice, ji.’ She patted his hand. ‘I’ll send the trunk up with your afternoon tea.’
‘Hey Pradip!’ Natwarlal Nehra roared. ‘Look, boys, it’s Pradip Shankar. Come here, you old sawbones. Bearer, bring another round. How’s the leg?’
‘Better,’ said Pradip bravely, as he took a seat in the snug of the Punjab Achievers’ Club and leaned his silver-headed cane, a gift from Priya, against the polished mahogany table. Shortly after setting up his clinic, he’d joined this club in the hope that it would bring him high-profile patients, and it had, but it has also brought him into Natwarlal’s ambit, which was a mixed blessing. Natwarlal ran a vast commercial empire, although he affected a Gandhian humility in person, always scrupulously buying only the second most expensive whiskey on the menu.
There was a new face in the usual circle of Natwarlal’s cronies, a fair and decidedly non-Indian face. Pradip tried not to stare. Natwarlal clapped him on the back. ‘Meet Lesley Chen,’ he boomed. ‘We were just talking about you.’
‘Namaste.’ Pradip folded his hands and bowed.
‘English, please. Lesley has only been here a few weeks. He’s a big engineering man in Ramdhun Corporation of Singapore. He is invited to Vij Vaghela’s pure veg parties and all. Very big man. Bearer! Whiskey, Pradip? Single malt of course.’
Pradip nodded. Lesley smiled. ‘It’s okay, Nattie. My introduction to Chandigarh was a big Punjabi wedding: my own, so I do know some of the words. Namaste!’
‘You got married in Chandigarh?’
‘Indeed he did!’ Natwarlal roared. ‘To Reshmi Arora, star of my favourite Punjabi soap!’
‘Congratulations,’ said Pradip sincerely. ‘Reshmi is my wife’s favourite actress also.’ Lesley was blushing at all the attention.
Natwarlal barrelled on. ‘I was recommending you to Lesley for consultation, Pradip, for when his lovely wife gets her good news, then I remembered your, ahem, problem.’ He waggled an eyebrow at the cane. He leaned towards Pradip. ‘No more trouble from that quarter, I hope?’
Pradip shook his head. ‘He has not shown his face since.’
‘And he won’t. So long as you don’t practice publicly. But in private . . . much can be done.’
‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ said Pradip. ‘I have an idea. It is better than medical practice. It is really about what happens before my patients come to me.’
‘Oho!’ Natwarlal’s eyes twinkled. ‘You want to become a sex doctor?’
Pradip turned a furious red. ‘No! I want to help men have sons.’
‘Isn’t that what you do already?’ asked Lesley.
‘No, I help women have babies. I do absolutely nothing for the fathers. That must change.’
Their drinks arrived. And then they had a very interesting conversation about Pradip’s future plans. By the end of the evening, well lubricated with whiskey and veggie kebabs, Pradip was feeling more positive about his project than he had in weeks.
‘My idea will work,’ he muttered to himself as his car came round to take him home. ‘I will show them all.’
‘So what do you think?’ asked Pradip Shankar.
Priya paged through the document, her gaze lingering first on this diagram, then on that. When she didn’t respond, he asked with more acerbity, ‘You do understand the science, yes?’
‘Pradipji, you can’t do this.’
‘Why not? I said I would solve the problem of Himmat Singh. Is this not an elegant solution?’
‘It’s . . . unethical. You could be stripped of your licence.’
‘Uffoh, don’t worry about that. I have friends.’
‘And . . . you can’t call it a vaccine. Vaccines prevent diseases, and this . . . what does this prevent?’
‘Poverty,’ said Pradip Shankar. ‘Overpopulation. Underdevelopment. Prostitution. Climate change. So many evils will be prevented by Humane Choice.’
‘Climate change?’
‘It is very simple, Priya. There are one billion people in India alone. If half of those people become mothers even once, that is an extra half-billion people in the next twenty years at least, overloading the planet beyond capacity. But,’ and he raised a finger to forestall her objections, ‘if the children of those mothers cannot have children themselves, the problem is stopped from growing. Ergo, those children must be males. We have to save the planet by having sons, not daughters. In one generation, we can reduce earth’s population to manageable levels without any suffering or chaos. We need to have just enough daughters to keep the core population renewed.’
‘The core population? But how will you—’
‘Uff, Priya, you are so simple. The core of society is the families with the resources and the will to bring their daughters up correctly.’ He fixed her with a stern glare. ‘You of all people know how expensive it is to rear a daughter, not least because we must have security, surveillance and good staff to keep them safe. That burden will henceforth be only taken by choice.’
‘Choice?’
‘Fathers who want daughters can opt to delay the administering of Humane Choice until they have had them. They will be the lucky few in charge of creating the next, sustainable generation. Sub-par fathers need not burden themselves with girls at all. They can take Humane Choice straight away.’
‘Sub-par?’
‘If we restrict the production of surplus females, the ones we produce will be able to fulfil their sacred destiny as mothers without destroying the earth, and they will be treated as the precious resource they truly are. Thus our society can protect women, fathers will have the children they desire, and people will stop foolishly blaming mothers for giving birth to girls.’
‘But what will—’
‘This will eradicate the evils of dowry. More than seventy years of Independence and we have still not managed to do that. But now we will.’
‘What about the mothers? Don’t they get a say in this?’
‘Of course they do. This is for their benefit. You know as well as I do that sex selection happens through the male contribution. Yet women are blamed for it, or they are forced to risk their health by bringing failed attempts to term. The government is at fault for this. By criminalising sex selection of fetuses before birth, they only spread fear. Himmat Singh thought I was talking in some secret code. Would this have happened in an enlightened country? Do you know that in US, they have parties when they find out the sex of the coming child? We are robbing our fathers of that privilege.’
‘I know all this, ji. You don’t have to convince me. But you cannot release a vaccine without undergoing clinical trials. There is a procedure.’
‘Do not worry about all that. Natwarlal Nehra of NehraMed has agreed to arrange that part for me. They have hospitals and facilities all over the country. They will do the needful. But I have to make the requisite number of doses within the next six months and that’s where I need your help. NehraMed Chandigarh has offered me a factory to make it. I need you to recruit the people, design the manufacturing process and keep the books. You are good at such tasks.’
She stared at the pages helplessly. ‘You are going to use a carrier virus to deliver a payload to germline cells? What is this rAAVan? People will ask why you have maned it after the most notorious villain in Indian mythology!’’
‘It’s the Recombinant Adeno-Associated Viral Analogue I am using,’ he said a little sulkily. ‘Never mind that part. This is a secret formula, protected by corporate law. The public will not see it.’
‘Corporate . . . law?’
‘Indeed, yes. Lesley explained how to do it. Ah, I forgot to tell you, I have made a new friend. See? I am expanding my circle, just like you asked.’
‘Good, but—’
‘His name is Lesley Chen. He is a Chinese engineer from Singap
re, but he is here in Chandigarh building the new State Assembly Annexe for Ramdhun Habitat Projects. He is married to Reshmi Arora.’
‘The TV star?’
‘She is retired now. He wants a son. He helped me set up Humane Choice Private Limited. I will need your signature, you are also a partner. Lesley and Natwarji’s legal team will bring the paperwork next month. You are agreeable, yes?’
‘As you wish, but you really should have consulted me before you got into all of this. It looks . . . .’
‘Consulted you? Why?’ Pradip’s moustache bristled. ‘I am the one Himmat Singh attacked. It is up to me to fix this. Lesley has been very helpful. I must take advantage of his contacts while he is here. Any day Ramdhun may order him back to Singapore. Reshmi wants to meet you. Also, I took the vaccine, so you may consider the human trials to have officially begun.’
‘What!?’
Pradip looked slightly uncomfortable. ‘They challenged me, Lesley and his friends, to show that my vaccine is harmless. So the last time I visited the Achievers Club, I took with me a dose from my first viable batch, and I injected myself with Humane Choice in front of them. To convince them.’
Priya stared at him. He made an irritable gesture. ‘I would be a poor inventor if I did not believe in my own creations. In any case, Priya, we have vowed never to have children, so it does not affect us. My OB/GYN practice has been murdered in the cradle, but your child-doctoring is still alive. Unlike me, you are still a viable parent to your profession.’
‘I would have . . . maybe . . . liked to have had a daughter, one day,’ Priya said in a small voice. ‘But . . . I suppose we can still adopt . . . .’
Pradip wasn’t listening. ‘Lesley wants a boy to share his triumphs and carry forward his legacy. He has been afraid to start because he can only afford one child, but I will persuade him. This will take the uncertainty out of parenthood for many, many men, all over the planet. They will not have to mortgage their present to pay for the future, they will have just the child they want, and they will not clutter up God’s earth with extra women in the process.’
‘What kind of world will it be if most of the children are boys?’
‘It will be a highly productive, rational, go-getting and sane world, that I can tell you,’ said Pradip firmly. ‘Are you not tired of these teen pregnancies, trafficking, gag rapes and love jihads?’
‘Do you mean “gang rape”?’
‘Whatever. Too much drama. This vaccine is liquid engineering, Priya. All it does is tag X-bearing sperm and make them sluggish. They are somewhat like that anyway, because they are slightly heavier than Y-bearing sperm. My vaccine does not kill them: girls can still be born, just at a lower frequency.’ He took her hand. ‘Please be assured, Humane Choice does not break the law. Sex selection before birth may be illegal in India, but my vaccine is not to be given to pregnant women, or any women at all. There is no child who is being selected for or against. All I am doing is giving reproductive choice back to the fathers.’
‘Are you certain this will be a good thing for the world?’
He patted her hand as it lay in his. ‘I swear it.’
‘Your husband is a murderer.’
Priya nearly dropped the book she was holding. ‘Rani?’
‘You heard me.’ Rani came out of the shadows near the door. She picked up a duster and began helping Priya to dust and reshelve the library books in the Study Club’s tiny book corner. ‘Your precious Doctor Shankar is murdering our futures.’
‘Do you mean Humane Choice? Oh Rani, it’s not like that at all.’
‘All the big men are getting it. No one says anything straight, but I hear them talking when I wipe their floors and wash their children’s backsides. ‘They say “Go to Dr Shankar, he will tell your husband to come for flu shot, then in three months you will get blessings.” You think I don’t understand it?’
‘You have no proof.’ Priya turned pale.
‘Proof!’ Rani sneered at her. ‘Aren’t you the woman who told us we should have dignity and pride in ourselves? Where is your pride?’ She flicked the duster like a whip. ‘You are helping him. It’s your patients who are gossiping.’
Priya took a deep breath to object. But she couldn’t let the words that crowded her mind come tumbling out of her mouth. Such disloyalty that would be. Finally she deflated. ‘He’s obsessed,’ she said in despair. ‘He asks me to point out the mothers who are sad because they had a girl. I tell them to bring their husbands, and he does the rest. But I think the husbands have figured it out. They have started coming to him directly. So don’t worry, Rani, I am not helping any more.’
‘Aren’t you hiring people for the factory? And I hear you go there every day and sit in an office.’ Rani wagged a finger at her. ‘You’re helping him, you liar.’
‘He’s my husband!’ Priya wailed. ‘He just does things, he never asks me.’
‘And you go along with it? Where’s your spine? Stop keeping his accounts and doing his dirty work.’
‘He’ll get someone else to do it.’
‘Yes, someone he cannot trust. Someone who might steal all his money or sell his secrets.’ Rani snatched the book out of Priya’s hand and threw it across the room. ‘You have to give us a chance, didi. You have to walk away.’
‘How? He will never allow it.’
‘Then help us. Radha and I and a few others have started our own group. Kuri Kommandos. We’re going to fight him.’ She puffed up her chest. ‘We are Girl Kommandos and we will protest your Humane Choice until it is banned.’
Priya stared at Rani. Then she rose to her full height. ‘Are you threatening my husband?’
‘No, didi, I am asking you to help us. We have to shame him. Tell the world what he is doing. Show his evil. Only then will police do anything. And you.’ She pointed an angry finger. ‘If you do not help us, you are accessory!’
Too late, Priya remembered that Rani had a newfound taste for police procedurals, thanks to the watchlist of the latest family whose kids she was minding. ‘You can’t ask me to do this.’
‘Huh. So you are fine with making and selling these death-doses?’
‘That’s not what this is. No one is dying. We are just . . . adjusting the future a little bit. Isn’t this better than people abandoning their babies or feeding them milk laced with opium? And I’m not fine, if you must ask. I have doubts. I’d like to stop him, but he’s shut me out. He only comes to me when he needs something. It’s these new friends he has made, through Natwarlal Nehra.’
‘Natwarlal Nehra! The King of Chandigarh?’
‘Yes, him. My husband is a member of his club, and Natwarji has convinced Pradip that he must “think like a businessman” and acquire money and power. That way the Himmat Singhs of the world will not dare to touch him.’
‘Your man is a coward. And if you help him, so are you.’
‘Rani, please. Don’t insult my husband to my face.’
‘How can it be an insult if it’s true? You live with him. If I can see it from where I’m standing, you can too.’
She sighed. ‘So what do I do?’
‘Hai rabba! Are you a child?’ Rani clasped her hands. ‘Stop thinking like a wife and think like a woman! What will the world be like if there are three Bappas to every Rani?’
‘But he says the lower classes will have no more daughters. Only rich families will choose to have girls. There will be no Ranis at all, just Bappas.’
Rani’s eyes flashed. ‘Is that supposed to make me feel better? What am I supposed to do? Vanish? I have to live on this planet you are creating.’
‘Oh, don’t be dramatic. Surely having fewer girls will mean less trafficking and abuse? Your employers will have to pay you more, won’t they? If there are fewer maids you will get more work.’
Rani stared at her, speechless. Priya shook her head. ‘Look, Rani, I do know this isn’t right, I just . . . I can’t find a way out. I’ve tried so hard. Although . . . he did promise that I could retire from managing the company if Ramdhun Corporation buys it. Then we could go live in Singapore, and there would be no Himmat Singh to cause trouble. We could reopen our joint clinic. It would be just like old times.’
‘Hmph.’ Rani put her hands on her hips and glared at her former mentor. ‘In that case, Doctor Mrs Shankar, my recommendation is that you pick up your worthless tashrif and get the hell out of my country.’
‘Really, Rani? After all I’ve done for you?’
‘You make me sick.’
‘He is not returning my calls,’ said Pradip Shankar, slurping his tea. ‘That Vij Vaghela of Ramdhun. Lesley swears he gave the correct number of his personal line in Singapore. But he also told me the old man is doddering.’
‘What shall we do, then?’ Priya asked, laying a plate of steaming samosas in front of her husband. ‘Is there any other way to reach him?’
‘We could go there, I suppose.’
‘Oh yes!’ She brightened. ‘Let’s!’
‘Hmph. It will cost a lot of money. And you will want to spend even more when we get there.’ He cracked open a samosa and blew on his fingers. ‘No, I have a better idea. I will ask Lesley for Mr Selvam Vaghela’s contact number. I have a feeling that if the father is doddering, the son will be running things tactfully behind his back.’
‘Selvam? What kind of a name is that?’
‘His mother was a Tamilian. Foh!’ Pradip scowled and licked his singed thumb. ‘I ask you, are there no girls of good family in Gujarat?’
‘Maybe they do things differently in foreign lands.’ Priya went back into the kitchen to hoick more samosas out of the crackling oil.
‘Well, they certainly have more sensible laws. None of this sex selection nonsense.’ Pradip scooped the filling out of the samosa and left a messy pile of fried pastry crumbs on the side of his plate. ‘Sunoji, did I tell you I am writing a book?’ he called to Priya in the kitchen. ‘It will be titled Future of the Child, and in it I am going to explain all my ideas on how to save the planet and mankind.’
Priya reappeared, holding a spatula, worry creasing her brows. ‘Is that wise? We don’t want to draw attention to Humane Choice.’
‘Attention?’ His voice was incredulous. ‘There are Humane Choice clinics in every major city in India. Five right here in Chandigarh. All built on a framework of trust and known only by word of mouth. My clients are the most loyal in the world. Now, I want to go global, and I will do it with or without the help of these Ramdhunites.’ He waved her back into the kitchen. ‘I was going to ask you to read it, but you are too busy keeping the accounts and running the factories. So Lesley is reading it now.’
Priya turned off the flame and brought the last of the samosas to the dining room. ‘Is he still disappointed at the birth of his daughter?’
Pradip’s brow creased. ‘I explained to him, it is not a failure of the process. Some of us must take the hit and raise the next generation of mothers. And whatever he says, he can afford it. Ramdhun is promoting him to Head of Engineering.’
She nodded. ‘Smiti is such a darling. I am glad Lesley has learned to love her.’
He shrugged. ‘Very few of the senior execs at Ramdhun have children. Lesley is a traditional-minded man, which is why he and Reshmi get along so well. The others care only for career and parties.’
Pradip’s phone rang. ‘Jai Ramji ki,’ he said, clapping it to his ear with his left hand as he crumbled another samosa with his right. He listened and paled. ‘Oh my god!’ He listened some more. ‘Just paint?’ Someone spoke at length on the other end, Pradip nodded and hung up.
‘What’s happened?’
He looked at her sombrely. ‘Some hooligans threw red paint on one of our downtown clinics. And they wrote “Murderer” on a patient’s car: no one important, thank god. I am going down there now to make a police complaint.’
‘No! Don’t do that. It’s nothing, and we don’t want the police asking what we do in our clinics.’
‘Why not? We are not breaking the law. Let them ask.’ He got up to go wash his hand, then paused. ‘Why are you always so scared, Priya?’ he asked. ‘You have so little faith in me?’
‘I am beginning to suspect that what we do is wrong!’ she burst out.
‘Wrong!’ He smiled at her indulgently. ‘The planet is dying because of women’s unstoppable urge to bear children. Alone of all scientists, I have stepped up to find a solution. I am a saviour, if I am anything.’
‘Women don’t have to bear children. I mean, I like them, I spend my days healing them. But I don’t want to produce one of my own. I thought of adopting, but you hate the idea.’
‘Adopting is just playing at dolls. You can’t really care for a child unless he is your flesh and blood. I have seen this even with surrogate babies. The parents are never quite free of suspicion that the child is not theirs.’ He patted her shoulder with his left hand. ‘Anyway, that is not the point. Saving the planet is the point. It is cruel to expect women to forgo their essential biological function, ergo, we must have less women. Simple.’ He headed to the washroom. ‘I will take up this topic again at dinner.’ She heard the sound of the water running as he washed up.
She poked the cooling samosas. She wanted her anger to simmer down like hot oil taken off the fire, but it would not. When he reappeared, she said without turning, ‘I know about the blog. “Priya Shankar Writes”, it is called, but it is not written by me.’
‘Oh that? Eh. I am just avoiding Himmat Singh. Surely you do not mind.’
She turned to face him. ‘I forbid you to use my name to promote your ideas, Pradip.’
‘You forbid me?’ He laughed. ‘But it is not your name, it is mine. If you insist, from now on I will sign my blog posts “P. Shankar”. Is that good enough for you?’
Priya felt her right hand clench in an unforgivable gesture of rage and quickly hid it in her dupatta. ‘Everything you do is based on the idea that women are—that I am—inferior to men. But you can’t have it both ways. If I am nothing but a baby-making machine, how is
it that I am running Humane Choice?’
Pradip burst out laughing. ‘You! You just do the books and scold the staff. And answer the emails from clients. And make the schedules. I have the vision and the technology. I bring home the food, you cook it. You are labour, I am capital.’ He flapped a hand. ‘Put away these samosas, Priya. I have work to do.’
Rani turned into the narrow lane that led to her hut. It was nearly 2am and even the dogs were asleep. The one curled up just inside the mouth of the noisome alleyway pricked up her ears, saw who it was, huffed and went back to sleep. Rani hoicked up the two-kilo sack of potatoes that was slipping from under her elbow yet again and managed to get an arm round the bottom. Thus burdened, she shuffled along, occasionally scraping the rough brickwork and cursing. As she passed the only lightbulb in the winding alley, a shadow moved. Rani’s breath hissed sharply through her teeth. ‘Bappa? Get out of my way or I’ll break your fucking nose.’
‘It’s me.’ Priya raised the dupatta covering her face. ‘I had to see you, Rani.’
‘Doctor Madam!’ Rani dropped the sack of potatoes and rushed to her. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘Yes. Everything.’ Some of the potatoes had fallen out and were rolling towards the permanent streak of mud and filth in the middle of the alley. Priya quickly knelt and began gathering them up. Rani followed suit. When the sack was full again, Rani said, ‘Let’s get inside. It’s dangerous for you to be here. If Sudha sees . . . .’
‘I was careful.’
Rani looked her up and down. ‘Even with that faded salwar-kurta, no one would mistake you for a slumdweller. Come on.’
Inside the tiny hut, Rani lit a hurricane lamp and set it on a shelf. ‘All right, tell me.’
‘I’ve stopped helping him. Natwarlal has convinced him he needs professional managers, so he has let me go. I came to tell you.’
‘You didn’t have to. It has gone beyond what one person can or cannot do.’
‘I know. I should have listened to you when you first told me. But . . . I was brought up to be obedient, to treat my husband as a god. Even though I knew before I married him that Pradip is no god.’
‘Urgghhh! Finally!’ Rani rolled her eyes.
Priya’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I loved my father. When my mother said he was an avatar of all that is good in the world, I believed her. I wanted a man like him to be my husband. For a while, I thought Pradip was that man. But now I think . . . now I think they are all flawed. Even Bapuji, who bankrupted himself for us.’
‘God, you upper class women. All this education and you have less sense than silly little Radha. I want to bang all your heads together till your brains start working again. If they ever did.’
Priya smiled sadly. ‘I deserve that. So I came to tell you, he is launching that vile book of his on Sunday afternoon at the Bollywood Book Nook on Harpreet Singh Avenue. Raya Advani, the movie star, will be releasing it, and all the famous people of Chandigarh will be there. I won’t: I’ll find some excuse. They will start at 5pm. There will be private security hired by Natwarlal Nehra, but they will be watching only for Himmat Singh’s goons, not your girls. If you want to make the world pay attention, this is your chance, Rani.’
Pradip Shankar faced the glittering crowd that thronged the upmarket book cafe. This book launch was his big move to get Ramdhun Corporation to notice him, and he intended to make the most of it. Such a pity Priya had contracted a stomach bug.
Beside him on the dais, Raya Advani, Chandigarh socialite, rising actress and successor to Reshmi Arora, had just unwrapped a virgin copy of Future of the Child. The rows of social butterflies, suave intellectuals and well-heeled wellwishers drawn from his star-studded patient-base clapped enthusiastically. And now someone had asked him a question. The question didn’t matter: he barely listened. He knew what he wanted to say.
‘Viruses are not our enemies,’ he said. ‘Do you know that up to forty percent of the human genome is genetic material left by retroviruses? And that some of these retroviruses have donated viable and even necessary genes to us? Mammals arose because of a viral infection that caused the eggs of certain dinosaurs to stick to the womb lining and suck upon it like parasites. That should have been the end of those creatures, and I am sure many died, eaten by their own children. But there were some mothers so generous, so willing to give everything to their vampire offspring that they grew a protective layer over them and let the place of implantation swell and gorge with blood and food.’
The celebrities’ eyes were glazing. This was usually the point where Priya would nudge him and murmur, ‘No more, ji.’ He ploughed on: Priya wasn’t here to stop him.
‘That was the rise of the placenta, and when the viral genome merged with the dinosaur genome and became an endovirus, it created a new kind of animal: mammalia, named for our ambrosiac innovation, the mammary gland, source of all beauty, sustenance and love.’ He paused for a moment. Raya murmured, ‘Shankarji, you are a true poet.’
He glowed. ‘There is no human gene for creating this magical connection between mother and child. It is only this endovirus that makes happy families possible. We arose to conquer nature because of an ancient, indomitable infection. Viruses are not our enemies. They are our creators.’
They clapped a little uncertainly. Raya said, ‘Shankarji, please tell us about your vision of the future.’
‘Yes. As a rational species in the order Mammalia, we now have a duty to limit our numbers, since war and famine and disease no longer do so. That is the “Humane” part of Humane Choice. To do this, I have taken the help of a harmless virus that is naturally found in human semen. It is like a high tech postman, and it carries a message to the eager sperm: the Y chromosome wins the race!’
He chuckled, and the crowd chuckled with him. ‘Not every time of course, because we must have some women. They make our lives so much brighter, and I might add, tastier. My wife, who is not here today, is a very good cook.’
‘Wonderful,’ gushed Raya. ‘I love how you focus on the positives. The world needs hope more than ever these days.’
‘Yes, my dear, there is hope. Friends, do not give your donations to the temples, go instead to the laboratories where the best minds of our nation are priests of the new—’
‘Thief! Liar!’ Girls climbed on chairs, wearing army fatigues with the words ‘KURI KOMMANDOS’ written in yellow paint on their backs. ‘Murderer of our future! We know what you’re doing!’ Rani shouted. ‘We demand to live! Let girls be born! We are not the killers of the planet. You are!’
‘Guards!’ Natwarlal’s musclemen moved in to grab the protesters. But more girls were spilling in, raising posters over the heads of the stunned socialites. ‘Down down Humane Choice! Down down Shankar!’ In the street, glass shattered as girls jumped on parked cars and kicked the windows in. Two burly cooks in saris were beating a security guard with their posters till the flimsy wood shattered in their hands. Then they used their hands. ‘Give us back our future!’ Rani screamed. ‘Give it now! Or we will take it!’
Rani picked up an encyclopedia and beat an industrialist with it. She cracked a baby’s board-book on a banker, and knocked the hairpiece off a has-been actor with a romance novel. Then the guards frogmarched her outside. She struggled free as a teargas grenade landed at her feet. She bent, picked it up and lobbed it among the fleeing celebs. They screamed and scattered, holding handkerchiefs to their streaming eyes .
Pradip slammed a fist helplessly on the podium. With this public relations disaster, the chances Ramdhun would ever buy his company were slipping away. ‘I am doing God’s work,’ he shouted, ignored by all but Rani.
She laughed. The guards fell back as she wielded a standee support like a spear. News drones swooped over the scene as the cops charged in. In the smoke and chaos, no one saw what dark alleyway swallowed her slim shape. The three girls who were arrested were all children of prominent police and IAS officers. They were out on bail in an hour. Their parents promised to marry them off at the earliest, but the damage, to both Pradip’s future and theirs, had been done.
Ben and Theo found Eliška’s name funny at first. “Delicious Elisshhhhhka” Ben sang, with a pop diva-style vibrato, using a lightbulb as a microphone. His brother laughed. Eliška did too.
For a while after that, the boys called her Deli. But their mother, Mrs Trevalyn, told them not to. She said the name was undignified. “Our maid is not to be treated as a pet.”
Eliška was certainly not treated as a pet. Nobody stared slantwise at a pet, the way Mrs Trevalyn did at her, with a sort of guilty disdain. She told the boys to call her Eli, which Eliška hated.
One morning, Mr Trevalyn looked at Eliška, arms crossed, as she made coffee.
“My wife thinks you’re looking peaky, Eli. Are you okay?”
Eliška did not know what ‘peaky’ meant. She’d learned some English at school, but not enough to follow fast conversations and certainly not enough to understand words and phrases that stood at a distance from their meanings.
“I do not feel too bad. It is hard for me to sleep, that’s all.”
But she had caught a few glimpses of herself in the huge windows she spent so much of her time polishing. And what Mr Trevalyn said was true. There were smudges beneath her eyes, like the dark underwings of a moth. And she often felt nauseous.
Her life, however, was not without pleasures. Theo, the quieter and younger of the two boys, had decided to appoint himself her English teacher. He had even created a special classroom corner in his bedroom, with a blackboard and chalk. Eliška sat alongside his cuddly toys, cross-legged.
He read her stories, and got her to write up little rhymes on the blackboard. Fee-fi-fo-fum I smell the blood of an Englishman. He giggled as she got off the floor and chased him round the landing, stomping like a giant.
Theo found a picture of a skeleton in a magazine and they took it out and labelled every part. Eliška particularly liked the names of the bones in the foot: tarsals, metatarsals, phalanges.
Mr Trevalyn discovered them doing this and smiled. “Eli isn’t going to need to talk about foot bones, Theo. She’d be better off learning about things in the supermarket.”
Theo shrugged. “I don’t talk about Egyptians or bar graphs much, but I’m still learning about them at school.”
Mr Trevalyn laughed and ruffled his hair. “Very true, little man. You’re an old soul.”
Eliška took Ben and Theo to school each day, jogging along behind them as they zig-zagged on their scooters.
At the school gate one day, she overheard two of the mothers, who were from Czechia, talking about her. The way they talked was different from hers, but she could make out what they were saying.
“Is Eli okay, do you think? She hardly talks. I suppose it’s just lack of English.”
“She’s got a learning disability. Selective mutism, I think they call it. Christ, wish my kids had a bit of that . . . .”
They both laughed. But then one shook her head. “I’m bad. Shouldn’t be talking like that. I don’t like the way she’s treated, to be honest. Exploitative.”
The other shrugged. “She’s treated no worse than any other au pair, I reckon. We see her twice a day, every day, with those two boys. If she’s really unhappy, she could run off any time she likes.”
Alone in her room later, Eliška pondered this. What the woman had said was true, of course. She could run away. But where would she go?
One morning, she caught Mr Trevalyn looking hard at her again when she was at the breakfast table, pouring orange juice into the glasses. Eliška did not normally mind a steady gaze, but there was something about Mr Trevalyn’s watery blue eyes that unsettled her.
“I meant what I said about looking unwell, Eli. You need fresh air,” he said eventually. “We’ll have you out in the garden for a change. The beds need trimming and prepping for Spring, anyway.”
Mr Trevalyn was proud of the family garden. It had a swimming pool in the shape of a cartoon speech bubble. Beyond that, a lawn stretched out, dotted with islands of flowerbeds. Some of them were tilted on slopes, in a way she’d only seen in parks before or at funereal floral displays.
The lawn was nearly as large as the park her dad had been responsible for as a warden back home in Slovakia.
Just like her father, Mr Trevalyn mowed the lawn. Dad hated mowing, though. He used to make fun of her aunt Monika’s manicured lawn.
“If there is a God, Eliška, I can tell you now that this unfathomably complex being does not love tidy gardens. They will smite the shit out of any astroturf. Trimming borders of various kinds will not constrain those demons of your mind, or the silken voices whispering to you that there is more to life than spraying things and cutting in straight lines.”
Mr Trevalyn loved his lawnmower. It was one of those you rode rather than pushed. He looked as if he was tempted to giddy it up like a horse with a knock of his heels.
He gave Eliška a swift tour of the garden and of the beds he expected weeded.
Mr Trevalyn put his hands in his pockets. “I’ll show you the wildflower bed. It’s rather tucked away and a bit unsightly. But it’s important to let nature have free rein somewhere.”
Free rain? Surely the rain was always free, pondered Eliška. Back in Slovakia, she could never resist the urge to go out when it rained, stretch her arms out and let the drops spank her tongue.
People were longing for rain in London. It had been months since it fell. Although the lawn in this garden was green, constantly watered by sprinklers, most were parched and yellow.
Mr Trevalyn took her right to the back of the garden, behind the topiary.
This bed was quite unlike the others. It had lots of dead stems and dried thistle heads.
She gasped and pointed. “Look. Beautiful.”
Amid the dead stems was a rose: deep scarlet, petals still fresh. Eliška lifted it to her face. The cool petals brushed her skin. The scent wasn’t full and blowsy. It reminded her of the fragrance of bluebells—so fragile, you just caught a hint of it, but it seemed to elude your senses if you tried to breathe it in deep.
Mr Trevalyn grasped Eliška’s upper arm, below her t-shirt sleeve. “Off your knees. You should have some gardening gloves on—you can get nasty things from soil. You’ll end up dragging half the garden into the house.”
Eliška quickly scrambled to her feet, but Mr Trevalyn did not remove his hand. He pulled her backwards. He was gentle enough, but she did not like the heat of his palm on her skin.
Finally, his eyes dropped from her to the rose. He shook his head. “Ridiculous, flowering at this time of year. Global warming, of course. You’d have to be stupid not to believe in it.” He made a clucking noise with his tongue against the back of his teeth. “It’s over-population. People having too many babies.”
Eliška looked down at the grass beneath her feet. “You have had two babies.”
Mr Trevalyn raised an eyebrow. “I don’t mean in countries like ours. Anyway, no need to do any weeding here. The weeds are kind of the point. Just trim round the bed. Get rid of that rose, would you? Clearly seeded from another bed. It’s not wild.”
But Mr Trevalyn was wrong about the rose. It had broken through frosty soil and had a headstrong wildness in it that Eliška recognised and revered.
Eliška’s dad used to tend the rosebeds at his park. When the blooms were about to wither, he would cut a few and take them back home to put in a vase. He always put them next to the same photo of him and Eliška’s mother, from when they were on honeymoon in Venice all those years ago.
Eliška’s boyfriend Ladislav would sometimes lean over to look at that picture.
“She was so much like you.”
Eliška shrugged. She knew she should feel some kind of connection to that stranger in the photograph, smiling and leaning on a column, the hollows under her cheekbones deep as the fluted stone.
Eliška took Ladislav’s face in both her hands, rubbed her thumbs against his skin as if it was fabric she was testing for quality in a shop. He flinched a bit and laughed. Taking her hands, he led her to the sofa.
The carriage clock in the glass cabinet above them ticked with its irritated urgency. But Dad was out at the park, and he would not be back home for hours.
After she’d dropped Ben and Theo off the following day, Eliška went out and weeded the two patches nearest the house first. Soon, the borders were neat little brown cliffs against the clipped green. Then she went to the wildflower bed.
The rose was now fully open.
Eliška would not tear it out of the ground. Nor would she take it to one of the regimented rose beds for re-planting.
She carefully dug it up, nestling its roots in the centre of her palm, and took it to a sunny patch of ground near the fence.
When she came back, she found herself focusing on an odd mound, about 3 feet tall, just next to the wildflower bed. Idly, she pulled away the weeds and scrubbed at the moss until she discovered what looked like the top of a column, with three slits still wedged full of soil. After five minutes more of scrubbing, it became clear it was, in fact, a birdbath. The bath was held up by a cherub, moss filling the dimples of its elbows and the belly button of its round stomach.
Later in the afternoon, Mr Trevalyn came out to find her. He laughed when he saw the bird bath.
“Oh, crikey. You didn’t need to clean that up, Eli. I meant to throw it in the skip. It’s a bit of a Gothic nightmare.”
“Please don’t take it away.”
The words spilled out before Eliška could stop them. Her lips went dry. “It—it makes me think of the statues in the park where my father worked. There was one exactly like this.”
Mr Trevalyn’s face softened. “You can keep it there, if you really want.”
Numb with relief, Eliška nodded.
Mr Trevalyn wiped his hands down on his jeans. “I hope you feel content, Eli. It’s terrible the way some people treat their domestic help. We feed you well, don’t we? You don’t go without.”
Eliška knew what was expected of her—nodding enthusiasm. She managed a wan smile.
Once she had finished her gardening for the day, she went indoors to the downstairs toilet. She pulled down her gardening trousers, breathed out hard. Still no blood. She was at least three weeks late now.
She’d always been irregular, but there was a tiny thorn in the back of her mind, and it would not stop needling her.
The week after Ladislav visited her, the Danube had burst its banks. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, but it was certainly the worst flooding Eliška had ever seen.
For a while, cars kept driving on the road, ploughing through the water that sprayed out around them like white angel wings. But then the cars started to float. The water was murky grey and moving terrifyingly fast.
Mrs Hudec in the block opposite theirs started waving some clothes out of her window, trying to attract attention. When she caught sight of Eliška and her father, she beckoned for them to open their own window. They could only just hear her shout over the sound of the rushing water.
“Jan, my little boy, he’s running a fever. His skin is clammy and he’s going floppy. I need to get him to hospital. I’ve been on the phone now for half an hour, but I can’t get through to the operator. Please.”
Eliška knew, immediately, that her father would help this family. There was no point trying to stop him. The odd thing was he was not what you’d call a tender-hearted man. His gruffness did not have a soft centre. But he always had to help in an emergency. It was part of his nature.
He had a two-seater kayak, which they took out to the countryside when they went camping. Mrs Hudec was in a ground floor flat. If Dad could find a way to tie up the kayak, they would lower the child out from the window into the seat. The hospital was not far away.
Dad pulled on his boots and waterproof clothing.
“Never go into flood water unprotected, Eliška. You don’t know what’s in there.”
Eliška could make a pretty good guess from the smell. Still, none of this worried her too much. Dad had always been good in water. Whenever they visited a lake, he always swam right to the centre, his strokes long and assured.
Still, she did not want to watch. She stayed in the kitchen as he made his way downstairs.
Just as she was about to turn on the kettle, she heard screaming outside—lots of people all at the same time.
By the time she got to the window, all she could see was her dad’s blue kayak upturned on the grey water, spinning down what had once been their street.
Garden. Zahrada in Slovak—a word she had always loved. Its long exhalation made her think of a foamless wave breaking upon rocks.
Ben and Theo were out in the garden. It was March, but the thrumming heat made it feel like summer.
The boys splashed in the pool, diving off inflatables that now permanently bobbed amidst its turquoise ripples.
That was when Eliška could retreat to the wildflower bed by herself.
The birdbath, which she regularly topped up with water, had been a success. She sometimes left little balls of fat on the edge of the bowl. She knew not to leave nuts—Dad had told her that was dangerous and could make the baby birds choke.
Babies.
She thought about writing a letter to Ladislav.
He’d come to visit her a few days before Dad’s funeral. He’d held her hands between his, massaged the thumb, and told her he was so sorry. But he could not look her in the eyes. And when she brought his hand to her breast, he flinched and got up from the sofa.
He had told her that she could call or write any time she wanted.
The wild winter rose had long since withered. But Eliška was glad it had had time to unfurl and feel the light on its petals. She had carefully picked it, taken it upstairs to her room and pressed its dried petals into her scrapbook, arranging them in in an arc, bloody footprints on the clear white paper.
If she’d had his address, she would have sent it to Ladislav.
After her father’s funeral, Uncle Jan took her back to the big house he and Aunt Monika owned, up on the hill near the old TV tower.
Jan told her to wait outside for a moment, because he needed to make a call.
Eliška leaned against one of the columns, as her uncle’s voice drifted out from the hallway.
“No, there’s no possibility of her taking the flat over. Study’s out of the question. Look, I know it might sound callous, but we don’t want to be saddled with her. I know she’s a sweetheart in her own way, but there’s a danger she may never become independent because of her slowness. It’s best for her to strike out on her own.”
Eliška quickly pushed herself away from the column.
She had often been called ‘slow’, especially at school. Her reading books were never the same grade as everyone else’s. She was not allowed to take exams before graduation like the other students. But in all honesty, she was glad of the exemption. There was no way she would have been able to sit at a desk with a pen twitching in her hand as she filled out line after line of writing and the clock ticked away inexorably.
Her uncle emerged from his study. He grasped her hands.
“Eliška, I am sorry. I know you must think Monika and I are very fortunate, but things are not great for us either. The floods have meant that two sites we were working on are now basically uninsurable.”
She did not resist, but her hands lay limp in his, and she stared at him. He told her that London was still a brilliant place for a young person looking to strike out on their own. He had friends there—good people. A family. The husband was a councillor and businessman, his wife a conservator. They had two charming little boys and needed an au pair. It would be perfect for Eliška.
Eliška simply stared out at the great stretch of mown lawn.
Jan sighed. “What are we going to do, hmm?” he asked.
Eliška still said nothing, but she knew ‘we’ was not the correct word, not the correct word at all.
Mr Trevalyn asked her to dig a new bed next to the fence, because he wanted to put up some trellises and plant vines. It was a very dry patch of soil, so Eliška struggled to get the shovel down deep enough.
Mr Trevalyn watched her with that strange, unblinking attention she found so uncomfortable. “You’ve got the movement wrong—you need to get it in at a different angle . . . .”
Without warning, he came up from behind and put his arms round her to grasp the shovel. He smelled of mint and just a hint of old sweat under a heady layer of deodorant. His hands shelled over hers, but Eliška let go of the shovel and wriggled free of him.
For a moment, they stared at one another. She ensured her gaze did not slip, as she stroked her knuckles.
“I’m sorry, Eli, did I press down too hard?”
“You can do this bed yourself,” she said simply.
“I was only trying to . . . .”
“Carry on trying without me.”
She turned and walked away, straight into the kitchen where Mrs Trevalyn was putting icing on a birthday cake. It was for Ben for next week.
“Eli, could you switch the oven on for me, please?” she asked.
“Not Eli. My name is Eliška.”
Mrs Trevalyn looked up quite sharply.
“I don’t know why you’re taking that tone with me.”
“I don’t know why you’re not paying me.”
Mrs Trevalyn crossed her arms, breathed out in a whistle through closed lips.
“Eliška, that’s really not fair. We are keeping the money to one side for you in an account. People like you are easily exploited. Your uncle was very keen to impress that on me. It would probably be best to send your wages on to him.”
“Why would you do that? The money is mine.” Eliška was shocked by the speed and force of her own words. “I think I am pregnant. I need the money to stop it.”
Mrs Trevalyn opened her eyes wide. “Pregnant?” She sat down next to Eliška, actually took her hand in hers. “Your uncle did not tell us.”
She shrugged. “He did not know. Neither did I. But I need to deal with it, now.”
Mrs Trevalyn’s lips tightened. “It?”
“Yes.”
“Eliška, abortion is no longer possible in this country.”
“Then I must go somewhere it is possible.”
Mrs Trevalyn shook her head. She put her hands on top of Eliška’s. “You are so good with Ben and Theo. You would make a wonderful mother, you know. I mean, I’m sorry that a man has taken advantage of you . . . .”
Eliška removed her hand from under Mrs Trevalyn’s. “He did not take advantage of me. Not the way your husband is trying to.”
Mrs Trevalyn smacked a glass bowl down hard on the table, so much so that it spun, making a terrible racket.
“This is not fair, Eliška. I know you must be in distress, but this is inexcusable, lying like that. Do you not understand the weight of false accusations, where they could lead? My husband is standing for political office. I’d have thought you would at least think of Ben and Theo.”
Eliška had heard enough. She stood up, letting the chair scrape on the floor behind her.
“Believe what you want of him.”
Mrs Trevalyn did not say anything more about her pregnancy, but Eliška found vitamin pills on her dresser—folic acid. She immediately flushed them down the toilet.
“We are going on holiday soon, Eli,” Mr Trevalyn said, over the dinner table.
“Eli’s coming with us?” Ben bounced up and down on his seat in excitement, but slowed down when the three adults at the table looked down.
Mrs Trevalyn coughed. ”It would be a bit too expensive for Eli to come with us, Ben.”
Theo slammed his fork down hard on his plate. Enough to make them all jump. “That’s not fair.”
“She will have a holiday of sorts—Eli, we would like you to take a break. No need to do any cleaning while we’re away. There will be a labourer coming in, to do a mosaic at the bottom of the swimming pool. We only ask you let him in at 8am and let him out again at 11am. We won’t expect him to work through the midday sun, because that’s inhuman in these conditions. After he’s gone, you’re very welcome to go and take a few trips out in London. You should get to see more of this city.”
“I do not want to see more of this city,” Eliška said.
Mrs Trevalyn swallowed. “Well, you are welcome to stay in the garden and relax, in that case. As it happens, Jeremy is going to have a party when he comes back, to launch his candidacy for the election. You see all those potted roses we’ve bought?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if you’re feeling well enough, it would be good if you could plant them on the sloping bed nearest the pool, in this design . . . .”
She showed Eliška a leaflet, which she knew was one from Mr Trevalyn’s campaign. In the corner was a small, open red rose.
“Roses in the form of a rose,” Mrs Trevalyn said softly. “Quite eye-catching, I think. And we know you have such green fingers.”
A fortnight later, just a few hours after the Trevalyns had left for the airport, Eliška was about to go out into the garden early to fill up the birdbath when the doorbell rang.
She answered to find a young man outside, who introduced himself as Haroon. He had large, gentle dark eyes and a nervous shuffle of the feet. He pointed at a van parked behind him, the trunk open.
“I’ll need to carry few things to the back,” he told her.
She opened the gate to the back garden and let him carry all the tiles though. Soon, he was on his knees, taking up the old tiles at the bottom of the pool, which had been drained.
Eliška made him some tea, then went off to do some weeding around the bird bath. As she was leaning over, she felt nausea lurch again in her stomach. She clung to the cherub’s shoulder as she vomited, a hand on the stomach that was just starting to swell. Tears sprung to her eyes.
By the time she’d got back, Haroon had pulled up all the old tiles. They were in a pile at the poolside.
“You’re a maid? An au pair?” he asked.
“I also clean, cook, do the gardening.”
He whistled. “More like a housekeeper then. Hope they pay you well.”
“I am not paid at all.”
Haroon tilted his head backwards and blinked. “What do you mean? That would make you a slave.”
The word ‘slave’ shocked Eliška like a slap.
Confused, she walked quickly to the bottom of the garden, to the wild flower bed.
“Eliška, I’m sorry. Please come back.” Haroon sounded genuinely anguished, but she did not respond.
The next day, when she opened the door to him, Haroon immediately started to apologise. But she lifted her palms and shook her head.
“No. You were right. It’s just that I was shocked. To hear myself described that way. But I should thank you. You told the truth.”
His shoulders sank a little—perhaps in relief, but there was also pain. “In honesty, my situation is not much better.”
“They are not paying you for this work?” Eliška was genuinely shocked.
“They pay, but nothing like what the work is worth.”
“Then, why don’t you leave?”
He sighed. “Come. I’ll explain.”
As she helped him carry a pile of tiles into the garden, Haroon told her that really, he was not meant to be here in England. If he was caught by the government, he would be sent back to his country.
“Don’t you want to go back home?” she asked.
“Not as it is. There are people who would kill me.”
“Because of your beliefs?”
“Because of who I am.”
Eliška was not sure she understood this, but she nodded.
“It is strange,” she said. “You are desperate to stay, and I to leave.”
“To escape this family?”
“Because I have a problem which I cannot solve. Not here, in this country.”
She brought a hand to her belly, and left it there, keeping her eyes on Haroon. His forehead creased, but then he nodded slowly.
“You need to get back to your parents.”
She shook her head. “They are gone. My father, recently. My mother, when I was born. She died of a haemorrhage.”
“That’s dreadful. But it doesn’t mean you will go the same way.”
“Perhaps not. But I still do not want to be a mother.”
Haroon nodded. “Then the Trevalyns should get that sorted for you.”
“It’s against the law here.”
Haroon laughed at that—a short, bitter laugh. He brushed a hand against the tiles he was working on. “You honestly think that people who can afford this—this house, bright green grass year round, ceramic for the bottom of their swimming pool—cannot find a way? Do you think Mrs Trevalyn would carry a child she did not want?”
Eliska did not know what to say to that at all. She started to mark out the rose logo with tape on the sloping bed.
Once he had finished his tiling, Haroon came and watched her for a while.
“Why are you doing it in that pattern?”
She explained about the logo and the election.
Haroon smiled. “There are other patterns you could make. Come, let me show you.”
Two weeks later, Eliška watched from the upper floor of the house as the Trevalyns’ guests filtered through the back door into the garden. The Trevalyns had come in late last night from their holiday, and had not thought to check her handiwork. Hers and Haroon’s, that is.
The guests, with their glasses of sparkling wine, were soon gathered round it.
Instead of the shape of a rose, the roses spelled out some words in a rainbow arc.
THE PERSON WHO MADE THIS IS NOT PAID
There was soon a steady hiss of muttering in the garden. Guests took out their phones and started taking photographs. Mr Trevalyn and a few very stressed caterers were soon ushering them back towards the back gate.
Eliška turned away from the window and waited.
It did not take long for her to hear Mrs Trevalyn’s breathing behind her. It was, as she expected, rapid and angry. But there was no screaming, no throwing of possessions around.
“You will have what you want. There is a doctor I know, a good one. I have got you booked in and it will cost you all the wages we were saving up for you and more. And after that I want you gone. I don’t want to hear from you again.”
Eliška looked up at her for the first time. She was quite surprised to see the other woman’s eyes were reddened.
“Tell me where to go and when.”
Mrs Trevalyn pulled out a piece of paper. There was a time and date printed out, and an address.
Eliška knew she would go to Haroon’s house first. He had left his address. And he said she could stay for a while, if she needed to. She’d probably need a few days after the procedure.
She had no idea what she would do after that. No point thinking about it now, she just had to pack.
She had, of course, already said goodbye to her beloved wildflower bed, even blowing a kiss to the bird bath cherub, which regarded her with its usual blank, mossy stare.
Just one last thing to do.
She took her scrapbook, with the pressed flowers, into Theo’s room and laid it on his bed. She opened it on the page of the wild winter rose and wrote To the best of teachers.
She ran a finger over the dried rose one last time.
It too had been transported to a place it didn’t want to be, but still flourished for a while.
Perhaps another rose would spring from the wildflower bed, its stubborn little cluster of truncated roots like a fist beneath the soil.
