Category: Reckoning X

José Luis Ramírez

No sabía que un río podía declararse clínicamente muerto. Me enteré hace poco, cuando leí que el Atoyac lo estaba y que, desde hacía 30 años, se intentaba rehabilitar. Sin éxito.

No pregunten por qué, pero imagino al río como una persona entrando en camilla a un hospital y los paramédicos gritando a los urgenciólogos: ¡Emergencia Uno! Pero lo cierto es que no es una bella actriz de Bollywood personificando a la Ganga de los Vedas, ni tampoco un atlético hijo de Océano y Tetis. El Atoyac es un pobre diablo apestando a cagada y orines; se convulsiona y suelta espuma por la boca, maldiciendo a todos y cada uno de los bastardos que ha concebido, ladrando como un xoloitzcuintle rabioso. Y son muchos los nombres que grita en esa lengua suya, ininteligible, anterior al protototonaco-tepehua y al protoyuto-nahua.

El río calla de pronto dejando que la sala de urgencias se inunde con el pitido agudo y la línea plana del electrocardiograma, alguien grita: ¡Despejen! y pone las paletas del desfibrilador en su pecho. El cuerpo se arquea un segundo, pienso en la muerte por tétanos. Algún enfermero, sí, varón, le pone un respirador al río y presiona un par de veces la bomba de aire. ¡Despejen! Otra vez y nuevamente descarga. El ECG hace como que regresa, aunque enseguida la línea vuelve a aplanarse.

¿Será que el Atoyac está viendo pasar su vida como en una película?

Una gota de deshielo en la Sierra Nevada, un manantial en la roca, los riachuelos se convierten en afluentes y enseguida un solo cauce, rápidos, caídas de agua, la roca erosionada en gravilla, toda esa energía contenida potencial en la represa de Valsequillo.

O más bien recuerda cómo lo despojaron de cuanto tenía y lo ultrajaron, burlándose además por calentar sus pies descalzos con las aguas tibias que salían del drenaje. Tragar cuanto le pongan en la boca porque el hambre puede siempre más que la dignidad.

El doctor golpea en el pecho, el enfermero aprieta la bomba del respirador, alguien más grita alguna maldición y de la nada surge un latido frágil como la cola de los renacuajos.

No hay más signos vitales.

No hay acto-reflejo al golpear con un martillito en la rodilla ni se dilatan ante la luz las pupilas. Quizás escucha lo que dicen y tal vez esté consciente pero no puede abrir los párpados o responder a los estímulos. ¿Está en coma, catatonia o catalepsia?

Clínicamente muerto se puede malinterpretar, el agua fluye, conserva cierta flora y fauna, aunque ‘sano’ tampoco lo describe bien, basta mirar los niveles de oxígeno, el PH, las espumas y el color gris taupe, entre marrón y grisáceo . . . . 

Los médicos sacan al paciente de urgencias y lo mandan en calidad de desconocido a la Unidad de Cuidados Intensivos. No hay familiar que vele por él. ¿A quién iba a interesarle un viejo inútil? Ciertamente no al gobernador ni al rey de la mezclilla, esos malnacidos que por años violaron a sus hijas, marcando con tinturas y ácidos a sus afluentes más pequeñas. Tampoco a los nietos que hacen negocio trayendo pipas de muy lejos, desecando las lagunas de Totolcingo, El Salado y Alchichica.

Afuera del hospital de especialidades San José llueve, quizás es temporada de huracanes en el Atlántico o haya norte en Veracruz, pero lo cierto es que la tempestad aquí en el valle Puebla-Tlaxcala es más rayos y truenos que otra cosa, ventisca; los granizos golpean con furia, abollan las carrocerías y estrellan los parabrisas, el hielo se derrite en el asfalto, las coladeras se desbordan y de pronto hay lanchas de la Cruz Roja en el Boulevard 5 de Mayo rescatando a los desgraciados que se trepan por las ventanillas al toldo de sus coches.

El desconocido tiene algún espasmo ocasional, no es su única prueba de vida, también el movimiento rápido de los ojos, las ondas beta en el encefalograma, el pulso acelerado. El líquido vital fluye en sus venas y arterias, pero de qué va a servirle si es negro y espeso.

¿Recuerda cuando en 1963 lo confinaron en solitario? Entubando su cauce en el arroyo de Xonaca y el tramo de San Francisco, desde la barranca de Xalpatlac y hasta la 5 Sur esquina con 49 Poniente. Ahí donde todo alrededor se apesta a huevo podrido.

Pero basta de pornomiseria, algún tratamiento habrá equivalente a la hemodiálisis y por los derechos más fundamentales se obligará a las industrias a tratar las aguas residuales, el gobierno tendrá que invertir en un plan trans-sexenal y obligar a la concesionaria de agua potable a invertir en el saneamiento de la cuenca.

Las universidades y la sociedad civil también estarán obligadas por la crisis hídrica, ingenieros ecológicos buscarán métodos para revertir el daño, se impartirá educación ambiental en las escuelas confiando en que las nuevas generaciones serán más conscientes.

Así, el paciente alcanzará algún día a mover un dedo, quizás el meñique izquierdo, aunque nadie lo verá hacerlo, así como tampoco sabrán si escuchaba lo que decían de él mientras estaba en coma y le hacían fisioterapia, que no era nada bueno. Tampoco sabrán cómo es que logró escapar del hospital estando descalzo, con sólo una bata cubriéndole el pecho, pero no las nalgas y literalmente escurriéndosele a los de seguridad.

¿Quién es ese viejo que anda de noche por el boulevard casi desnudo con la lluvia estancada hasta la cintura? ¿Por qué los árboles, palmeras y hasta los postes de luz se mecen rindiéndole pleitesía mientras las intermitentes de los autos abandonados parpadean bajo el agua?

La lluvia le lava las canas largas de la barba y su melena, pegándole la ropa al pecho, cuando el negro de las pupilas del viejo se encienden de un naranja como hierro fundido, el Atoyac junta entonces sus brazos y con toda la fuerza de que es capaz extiende las falanges y en ese gesto de Kame-Hame-Ha cada una de las moléculas que lo conforman se convierten en un tsunami que acarrea basura, lodo y mierda hasta reventar las tuberías que lo contienen, desbordar el cauce y aún explotar la vieja represa en Valsequillo, purificándose en agua nuevamente cristalina que deja entrever las raíces de los juncos y hasta algunos peces entre los guijarros.

José Luis Ramírez

I never knew a river could be in a state of apparent death. I learned about it recently when I read that the Atoyac was declared clinically dead, and for the past 30 years, efforts had been made to rehabilitate it to no avail.

Don’t ask why, but I imagine the river as a person being wheeled into a hospital on a stretcher, paramedics shouting at the emergency room doctors: “Code Blue!” But the truth is, she is not a beautiful Bollywood actress personifying the Ganga from the Vedas, nor is he an athletic son of Oceanus and Tethys. The Atoyac is a poor bastard reeking of shit and urine; he convulses and foams at the mouth, cursing every single one of the children he has conceived, barking like a rabid Xoloitzcuintle. And there are many names he screams in his own unintelligible tongue, a language older than Proto-Totonaco-Tepehua and Proto-Yuto-Nahua.

The river suddenly falls silent, letting the emergency room be flooded with the high-pitched beep and the flatline of the electrocardiogram. Someone shouts, “Clear!” and places the defibrillator paddles on his chest. The body arches for a second, as in death by tetanus. A male nurse—yes, a man—puts a respirator on the river’s mouth and presses the air pump a couple of times. “Clear!” Again, another shock. The ECG pretends to come back, but soon the line flattens again.

Is the Atoyac watching his life pass by like a movie?

A drop of meltwater in the Sierra Nevada, a spring in the rock, the streams become tributaries, and soon a single channel, rapids, waterfalls, rock eroded into gravel, all that potential energy contained in the Valsequillo dam.

Or rather, he remembers how they stripped him of everything he had and outraged him, mocking him for warming his bare feet with the warm water that came out of the drain. He swallows whatever they put in his mouth because hunger can always overcome dignity.

The doctor pounds on his chest, the male nurse squeezes the respirator pump, someone else shouts a curse, and out of nowhere, a heartbeat emerges, fragile as a tadpole’s tail.

There are no more vital signs.

There is no knee-jerk reflex when tapped with a hammer, nor do the pupils dilate in the light. Perhaps he hears what they say, and maybe he is conscious but cannot open his eyelids or respond to stimuli. Is he in a coma, catatonia, or catalepsy?

‘Clinically dead’ can be misinterpreted. The water flows; it preserves some flora and fauna, although ‘healthy’ doesn’t describe it well either. Just look at the oxygen levels, the pH, the foam, and the taupe color, between brown and grayish . . . .

Doctors take the patient out of emergency room and send him, as John Doe, to the Intensive Care Unit. There is no family member to watch over him. Who would care about an old, useless being? Certainly not the governor or the king of denim, those bastards who for years raped his daughters, marking his smallest tributaries with dyes and acids. Nor the grandchildren who profit by bringing pipes from far away, drying up the lagoons of Totolcingo, El Salado, and Alchichica.

Outside the San José specialty hospital, it rains; it may be due to hurricane season in the Atlantic or perhaps a north wind tempest in Veracruz, but the bottom line is that the storm here in the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley is more lightning and thunder than anything else, a tromba. Hailstones fall furiously, denting car bodies and shattering windshields; ice melts on the asphalt, drains overflow, and suddenly Red Cross boats appear on 5 de Mayo Boulevard rescuing the unfortunate who climb onto the roofs of their cars through the windows.

The stranger has an occasional spasm; it’s not his only proof of life, as there is also the rapid movement of his eyes, the beta waves on the electroencephalogram, the accelerated pulse. The vital fluid flows through his veins and arteries, but what good will it do if it is black and thick?

Does he remember when, in 1963, he was confined in solitary? Tubed and channeled at the Xonaca stream and the San Francisco section, from the Xalpatlac ravine to the corner of 5 Sur and 49 Poniente? There, where everything around stinks of rotten eggs.

Enough with the misery porn! Some treatment will be equivalent to hemodialysis, and, for the most fundamental rights, industries will be forced to treat wastewater. The government will have to invest in a trans-sexennial plan and mandate the drinking water concessionaire to contribute to basin sanitation.

Universities and civil society will also be forced to act by the water crisis; ecological engineers will seek methods to reverse the damage, and environmental education will be taught in schools, entrusting that the new generations will be more aware.

Thus, the patient will one day be able to move a finger, perhaps his left pinky, although no one will see him do it, just as they will not know if he was listening to what they were saying about him while he was in a coma and they were doing physiotherapy—words that were not kind. Nor will they know how he managed to escape from the hospital barefoot, with only a gown covering his chest but not his buttocks, and literally ‘slipping’ away from security guys.

Who is that old man walking at night down the boulevard, almost naked, with the rainwater up to his waist? Why do the trees, palm trees, and even the light poles sway, paying homage to him while the turn signals of abandoned cars blink under the water?

Rain washes the long gray hair from his beard and his mane, sticking his clothes to his chest. Then the black of the old man’s pupils lights up orange like molten iron, the Atoyac brings his arms together and, with all his might, extends his fingers. In that gesture of Kame-Hame-Ha, each molecule in his body becomes a tsunami that carries garbage, mud, and filth until it bursts the pipes that contain him, overflows the riverbed, and even ruptures the old Valsequillo dam, purifying itself in water that becomes crystal clear again, revealing the roots of the reeds and even some fish among the pebbles.

J.R. Staples-Ager

The Society for the Preservation of Kynish Technology is proud to present the most complete artifact ever recovered from the Genetic Archive at Yor Yan. The following manuscript owes its remarkable preservation to its inscription on flesh paper, and its entombment in a bone box set into the foundation of the building. Both paper and box resisted even the hemorrhagic bombing which rendered the Archive inaccessible to all but the hardiest Shells.

As the manuscript was rolled up, exposing the latter sections to necrosis, each section was recreated with decreasing confidence. Despite the author’s unverifiable claims, our hope is that this recreation will shed light on the origin of Shell technology, as well as inform current policy on the use of Kynish relics.

 

<Specimen #YY1-340676>

Dr. _____ and His Thousand Children

0. Numbers (99% confidence)

Never put a number in the title. That was one of the first things I read when I set out to become a writer. Numbers confuse a story. A reader might recall a manuscript’s content perfectly, but, upon describing it to a friend, struggle to recall the title. The doctor and his . . . .  The million children of . . . .  Oh, it had a number in it.

My life, unfortunately, has been all about numbers. I have had, at various times, anywhere from fifty to a thousand siblings. (I am rounding, of course. Considering Dr. _____ fertilized over 15,000 embryos—resulting in 2,972 live births, 862 numbered adults, and 59 siege survivors—you must lend me a little grace.) My father’s first 347 children did not live long past maturity, and were therefore fed to the nutrient reclaimer, the same policy he used for stillborn kvennik calves. I was number 523, late enough in the progression to have relatively few defects, but not so late as to carry the burdens thrust upon his later works.

This number, 523, meant I was old enough to witness the rise and fall of the Observatory at K_____ from beginning to end. However, this story does not begin with my birth, a half-formed thing pulled from the vivisected belly of a kvennik. Nor does it end with the fall of the Observatory, that weeks-long siege with its grisly end.

It does not even end with me now, a married adult expecting their first child. In fact, I wish not to exist in this story at all. I have been too perceived already—both by the staff at the Observatory and the soldiers, reporters, and psychologists who descended after its fall. I do not want my father in this story, either. He has loomed too large in the coverage of our family: What drove a genius to such unnatural acts? As if he needed to be humanized just as much as his children did. This story is not even about my siblings. Number 348 writes far more beautifully about our cohort than I, and even journalists have done a better job at listing our multitudes than I ever could.

You might conclude, therefore, that this story is about nothing. Self, father, siblings—what else could there be, apart from that grotesque family unit, curled in on itself like an ingrown nail? I have deliberately bored you, dwelling on the function of numbers in the titles of manuscripts. I have started with the least important information and worked up to the most important—then refused to reveal what that important information is. I have told you everything this story isn’t, and nothing that it is.

Well then. This story is about the 1,897 burials I performed between the ages of 5 and 13. It is about E____, whom I met while attending to one such burial. It is about the anatomy of the noble kvennik, the Observatory’s stunning pens, and a secret I remain unable to reveal until my death.

I suppose, in a sense, it is still about nothing.

 

1. Burials (92% confidence)

Psychologists asked me what it was like to bury so many of my siblings. Despite my poor socialization, I knew the truth would impact my future survival. I simply told them that it gave me nightmares, and they left me alone. There were too many of us, pulled from the carrion stink of that building, to tease out the trauma of those who were not at obvious risk.

This was not a lie, per se. Gravedigging did give me nightmares. But I also enjoyed it, in a very specific sense. It was a job that needed doing, and I did it. As I was one of the few among my siblings who could read, write, and speak Kynish, I might have secured a coveted indoor position. But I feared the harsh punishments attendant to the record-keeping and laboratory jobs and wished to pursue an occupation with minimal supervision.

The circumstances lined themselves up perfectly. My predecessor—Number 497, my first burial—had recently succumbed to illness, leaving the position vacant. Dr. _____ had been selecting for strength and height at the time of my conception, so my physical profile made me an excellent fit for the job. I took over from 497 in the spring after my 5th birthday. Within the first year, I had turned the blisters on my palms into calluses and the constraints of the classroom into a distant memory.

I did not enjoy it at first—in either the specific or the general sense. I would receive the bodies from 433, autopsy assistant and pusher of the corpse-carts. Plague risks were buried; those who had died naturally or been culled were processed into kvennik feed, as well as experimental nutrient slurries. I have lied by omission, painting myself as gravedigger only—I have been a butcher of meat both human and animal. In the beginning, I performed one or two burials every week, and spent most of my time feeding corpses into a pipeline modified from kvennik processing. Because the processes were so similar, I also assisted in kvennik butchery during meat season. Three years in, the number of contaminated human bodies increased, and I began gravedigging in earnest.

Those relentless years of burial were what made me start thinking about the numbers. Perhaps gravedigging might seem peaceful, if only in comparison to the lurid nature of butchery: broken pelvises, blood pooling into gutters, skin scalded with boiling water to loosen it from flesh. But it was only then, in my gravedigging days, that I was forced to confront exactly how much life was being wasted.

I could not intellectualize mass burial into components, or turn it into a completed circle with immediate results. The earth bloated; bodies swelled with rot, and the earth could not pack flat again. It called into question the fundamental premise of the Observatory: that we were a circular, private religion of progress, in which one was reincarnated in one’s siblings, and everyone strived for better things.

I dug graves with a round-point shovel and digging bar and, later, an excavator purchased with great haste from a neighboring farm. There were no coffins—think of the expense of 1,897 coffins!—and the Observatory provided fewer and fewer shrouds as Dr. _____’s experiments reached their peak. This made body-handling an awkward business, all leaky mouths and flopping limbs. On a good day, a 3 by 6 span hole filled with quicklime was enough. On the worst days—I was around 12 by that time—I would dig a grave for a hundred or more bodies, douse it in kerosene, and set it on fire. It took 8 or 9 hours to dig a hole that wide and deep, even with the excavator and a dozen siblings as assistants. And the smell . . . . 

I have put off writing about it for years, thinking I could describe it in perfect detail, so the reader would be forced to experience it precisely as I did. But I have learned, observing the response to 348’s work, that readers will imagine what they like. One journalist even asked me, Which was the worst to bury? I still remember the red rouge on her lips, how it stuck to the white bone of her teeth.

I was subsisting on media coverage at that point, a disabled adult with poor social skills and no real education. Even my handler, the money-grubbing old sinner that he was, was insulted by the question. You expect my client to answer that?

I never had the opportunity to respond, but I turned the question over in my mind for days. Which was the worst to bury? The small bundles of the miscarriages with their gluey consistency? The newborns with inverted lips? The toddlers, jaws melted from bone worms? The culled adults, still moving after a misfired bolt to the brain? The ones I had known? The ones I had seen from a distance, and was only now seeing up close?

I could give you individual examples, and force you to knit the general from the specific: A translucent external pouch holding the digestive organs. Six limbs on one body, half of them boneless. A second mouth protruding from the belly, teeth degraded by stomach acid—and so on. Or I could make you unravel the specific from the general: I have seen more shades of red than I have a name for, because the name was the thing itself, and not everything is like something else.

Neither, I think, conveys the scope of it. It seems more and more monstrous to tell you I enjoyed it. At the least—at the very least—it allowed me to pay my respects to the dead.

My respects were not particularly complex, mind. The way to dig a hole 6 span deep, after all, is to dig a hole 6 span deep. If they had hands, I crossed their hands over their chests. If they had eyes, I closed their eyes with a gloved thumb. If they were adults, I memorized the maturity number branded on the neck. If they were not, I memorized the birth number branded on the thigh. If I had time, I planted flower seeds stolen from the greenhouse. I fertilized them with kvennik manure, and watered them with runoff from the river.

Perhaps respects is not such a ludicrous term, after all. Though the Observatory is gone, I remember every number and name. I have never stopped counting. This ritual has become so ingrained in me that, during a particularly difficult period several years ago, I dug myself a hole and slept at its bottom for several nights, counting all the way up from 1,075 to 2,972, 497 to 862, and 1 to 1,897. I have since filled the hole and planted viskany flowers in the turned earth. I can see them outside my window, now, waving bright red in the wind.

Back at the Observatory, the day’s hole would swallow me. 6 span down made the ground level with my head, so I had to cut shallow steps to get out. Deep within the earth, I watched myself as if from a great height. I had long since learned to keep the intense arithmetic of my continued existence—the pursuit of meals and praise, the avoidance of culling and infection—as far away from the ritual of burial as possible. On my best days, I could leave the earth entirely, and float unimpeded through the air.

This detachment, whether learned or inherent, has persisted well into my adult life. The urge to remove myself remains even while writing this story—as if it is, if you will forgive the obvious metaphor, a dead thing I am burying.

But the truth is that dead things no longer hold any horror for me. Their story is over. I owe them nothing; they feel nothing, so I am not obligated to end their suffering. There is nothing left to end. Watching the living, however—watching the living suffer—has been one of the most painful experiences of my life.

 

2. E____ (90% confidence)

One of the most pressing questions posed by the public was how Dr. _____ remained undiscovered for so long. He continued to publish his psychological and gynecological papers while running the Observatory, including several on the theoretical cultivation of embryos outside the human womb. And while the Observatory was remote, it nevertheless sold meat and dairy to the entire principality, requiring extensive deliveries to continue its operation. The town of K____ was only a league away. How could a place so horrible persist right under the public’s noses?

There have been many rationalizations: Dr. _____ was a highly respected scientist, and deep in the pockets of the local constabulary. The Observatory had a false front, so delivery vehicles only viewed the pens reserved for the meat and dairy kvennik, not those forced to birth my siblings. High walls surrounded the property—ostensibly to keep volchanik out, but in reality to keep us in. Isn’t it understandable that the public might not smell the stink of the corpse fires?

An often ignored truth is that the Observatory was both an asylum and a slaughterhouse. Nothing could have concealed it more effectively than these two facts. “The public”—blameless until the disclosure of the Observatory’s true nature, outraged forever after—knew it was a horrible place and did nothing. That it was an asylum whose inmates were born and buried there was beside the point. Number 348, poster child for us survivors, has put the irony most eloquently: We were humanized only upon the revelation of just how inhuman we were.

While everyone knew of the venerable Dr. _____—his grand ideas, his commendable work putting unfortunates to useful labor—few people wanted to meet those unfortunates and verify his claims. Apart from the butchery of human meat, our hygienic standards were little different from those of other slaughterhouses and sanatoriums. Though his assistants were sworn to utmost secrecy, as he could easily ruin their careers, this was more formality than anything. Kyne’s researchers were bent on biological improvement at the time, and while the claims of government funding have never been substantiated, I would not be surprised if our intended purpose was to become an army of cheap, obedient soldiers.

As for the townsfolk, the people most likely to realize that something was deeply wrong? They devoured the Observatory’s meat and milk at heavily discounted rates, rationalizing their runoff-related diseases as no worse than they’d get in Kyne’s stinking cities. Most could not afford to put food on the table without Dr._____’s charity, much less move elsewhere, making the Observatory more blessing than curse. Further, as I learned from E____, local superstition surrounding several disappearances kept them far away from the Observatory itself.

I was 11 when I met E____. I was digging a grave at the time—one of my very first mass graves, a particularly bad one. The smell was too much for me, so I had taken a break by heading to the river to get water for the flowers.

This is what saved E____’s life and, though I did not know it yet, mine. If she had followed the river into the Observatory proper—no doubt asking the nearest person about the hormone treatments used on the kvennik—she would have been knocked unconscious, shot with a captive bolt pistol, and fed to the machines. Her torn and bloodied clothes—tangled with a token arm or leg—would be found weeks later, and her death attributed to volchanik. No one would have heard of poor E____ V____ again.

I knew, because I had heard of such things happening before. But I did not make the connection immediately. When the girl came walking up the river, I assumed she was one of my siblings. Every child I knew, after all, was one of my siblings. And yet . . . I knew my siblings, and she did not look like one of them. She had bright-colored clothes, not the pale smocks worn at the Observatory, and her round face was free of hormonal augmentation. More than that, she seemed to want to talk to me.

“I’m here about the frogs,” she said.

I felt a sudden vertigo, as if a chasm had opened between us. An outsider. An outsider was here in the Observatory. “The . . . frogs?”

She lifted a complicated apparatus: it bubbled with strange protrusions, like a water clock subjected to one of Dr. _____’s more extreme limb-development experiments. Apparently my stunned stare made me as good an audience as any, because she immediately launched into a lengthy explanation.

The injection of growth hormones into kvennik has long been established practice in Kyne: to increase milk yields, facilitate gestation, and hasten maturity. Runoff from slaughterhouses—urine, feces, milk, blood—has documented effects on human development, from premature birth to early death. But limits have been established to keep harm at acceptable levels, and nowhere were the effects as extreme as they were in K____.

What alerted E____ to the Observatory’s transgressions was not K____’s miniscule fertility rate. It was not the early bleedings, undropped voices, or cyclopic stillborns. It was not the fact that she was born with her index finger fused to her middle finger, like a badly knitted glove. It was the frogs.

E____’s favorite species—a race of tiny green amphibians the size of her thumb—were dying. After three consecutive summers studying them—squatting by the riverside, catching tadpoles in a bucket and raising them by hand—E____ concluded that this was due to an imbalance in the sexes. Growth hormones from the slaughterhouse were causing a disproportionate number of frogs to become female—E____ was all but certain of it.

E____’s mother, a glassblower, had created the apparatus to help E____ test her hypothesis. It was part collection device, part culture tube: allowing E to gather water samples and observe their effect on the frogs throughout development. The farther water samples were taken up the river, the more the sex distribution became skewed. Frogs raised in water taken from just outside the Observatory were almost exclusively female. Growth hormones at the established limits for slaughterhouse runoff did not cause such skewed distributions. E____ was forced to conclude that either the dosage was extreme, or that different, more powerful substances were being used.

It pained her, to hurt the things she loved in order to save them. But she had written to the Observatory, as well as the agricultural and disease authorities of Kyne, all to no avail. (This lends credence to the theory that the Observatory was funded by the government. But I digress.) Without recourse from authority, she set out for the Observatory for answers.

Intriguingly, E____ did not frame her futile quest in terms of the suffering of K____. The sick children, the seemingly endless miscarriages, the families with livelihoods tied to that contaminated town—All this she painted in the lightest brushstrokes. It was only later that I learned E____’s own mother almost died bringing E____ to term. Instead, E____ spoke lovingly of the frogs: a clutch of their eggs, hundreds of tadpoles-to-be, no bigger than a thimble and transparent as glass. Their plight—the ruptured waste of unfertilized eggs, the silence where mating calls should be—brought her nearly to tears.

I felt a wave of repulsion at such juvenile emotion. Though I later learned E____ was almost precisely my age, I felt significantly older—and looked it. The powerful hormones injected into our kvennik mothers meant that most of Dr. _____’s children had adult female characteristics, regardless of age or chromosomal makeup. We also went through puberty extremely early—hence my ability, at 5, to dig a 6-span hole every day. E____ seemed to be around 2 years old, by my standards, and a prime candidate for culling. She lacked the height and muscle that would help one survive the Observatory, not to mention the common sense.

What incensed me most was how pointless E____’s risk was. She had disregarded every warning from her parents, every rule laid down by the bribed constabulary. She had crawled through the sluice gate that carried runoff from the Observatory towards K_____. Despite her rubber gloves and boots, she was still covered in flecks of filthy water. She had knowingly risked her own life—and the lives of her unborn children—in order to prove a hypothesis she all but knew to be true.

It took me a long time to understand this impulse. I thought it was because she was greatly indulged in K____, an endlessly curious girl, smart as a slap and bright as a new coin. Her face was unbruised, after all, and her pockets full of spending money. This was true, but not the whole story. Nor was the fact that, so desperate was she to save the frogs and K____, she could not bear to think the consequences all the way through. I now know that her greatest reason was this: she saw no difference between her, and K____, and the frogs, and me.

I saw the seed of it then, though I could not have given it a name. She was not afraid of me, monstrous as I was, stinking of the burning fat of the dead. She was not afraid of poisoning herself, or her children, on the chance that her children’s children might be free. Life was for the living, but also for those yet to live. However naive her methods, she considered herself insignificant under the weight of that responsibility. It was an ethos perversely similar to that of the Observatory: that it was right, moral even, to increase the suffering of those in the present, in order to decrease the suffering of those in the future.

When E____ had finally finished her explanation, I spoke. I had barely said anything for weeks, and my throat was roughened by smoke.

I said, hadn’t she heard the Observatory was full of the insane? That we would eat her up, like hungry volchanik, and leave nothing but bones? She said she herself was hungry, and had already seen enough bones.

I was hungry, too. I ate up the unschooled movements of her mouth and eyes, so different from the blankness I deliberately cultivated. Hers was a life outside the airless realm of my thousand siblings: an uncontrolled experiment, full of leisurely conjecture and forgivable mistakes.

I should have scared her away. Every moment we stood there, talking of trivial things, I cursed myself for not doing so. I was so much larger than her, so much more aware of the harm that could come to a child at the Observatory. If I had waved my arms and screamed, beat her bloody, chased her down the river and away from the burning graves . . . . 

I did not scare her away. We talked for half an hour. I promised I would tell her the truth about the Observatory if only she never returned to the premises again. I led her to the sluice gate, and returned to gravedigging. I was punished for that half hour, but there were no further deaths that day.

E____ kept her promise, and I mine. At first, I left notes on the wall, spooling out the secrets of the Observatory. I wish I could say that I was wary, withholding. I was not. I began sneaking away at night to talk to her. I told her about the waves upon waves of cullings, how they would likely increase if she spoke to anyone—especially the constabulary. I found her superb at keeping secrets. E____ had no sense of her own personal danger, but danger to others terrified her. I suppose this was unsurprising, coming from someone who cared so deeply about frogs that she would risk permanent disfigurement to save them. It was surpassingly strange: to witness the same gleam of interest as in Dr. _____’s eyes, set to an entirely different purpose. There was a ravenousness to E____, a starving fascination that defied all categorization.

She was brilliant. Oblivious. A shameless pedant with no sense of the listener’s discomfort or endurance. When we were separated during the siege—and worse, during the months afterward—I would have burned everything I owned, I would have given every memory, just to see her again.

It’s an interesting thought—to meet E____ again, having forgotten everything. Sometimes I think it might not be such a large sacrifice. We could live as we did before the siege: suspended in time, the truth indeterminate as an unhatched egg floating in one of her glass culture tubes. But how could I complete this manuscript without the numbers driving me forward?

That first day, forgetting would have been no sacrifice at all. I resented the odd little girl who had pierced the floating calm of my solitary rituals and brought me back to the contaminated earth.

 

3. Kvennik (87% confidence)

The kvennik is a noble creature.

Consider the ingenuity of her descent: a daughter to a daughter to a daughter, the only asexually reproducing mammal in all of Kyne. Consider her ever-productive milk glands, the accommodating cavern of her womb. Is not her usefulness a kind of nobility—to give and give, and take so little in return?

The kvennik is ignoble as sin.

Consider the inconvenience of filing her horns down to prevent goring, the hassle of making her breed true. Consider the stink of her shit, the bloody mess of butchery. Is not her dependence a sin—to take and take, and give so little in return?

Perhaps no creature seems simple when you have spent as much time with it as I have. I have witnessed kvennik exit the womb, attain adulthood, and be led to the stunning pens to be slaughtered. I have attended their feedings, surgeries, immunizations, and sterilizations. I even spent my womb-time in the belly of a kvennik. Tossing in my bed at night, I used to imagine that warm, wet dark: what would it be like, to dream of the world without ever having seen it?

I have also, it is sad to say, eaten a lot of kvennik. This means I have eaten someone’s mother—my aunt, or at least “aunt” in the sense of the creature who gave birth to one of my siblings. (Squared by the fact that all of the Observatory’s kvennik were genetically identical, the thought is even more discomfiting. Were they all my mother?)

I am grateful, in my own way, but cannot help but resent the kvennik’s dependency, even as I defend her usefulness. When I attended high school in Y____, my fellow students would low at me, pulling the tips of their noses up so they looked like mine. Their impressions were terrible, but I can’t fault them for trying. How could I expect them to view me as human, after every inhuman experiment performed by the Observatory?

While there are many similarities between the kvennik and the children they bore, none of us have any genetic link to our kvennik mothers. I was born from an egg generated from a stem cell, itself generated from a skin cell taken from one of Dr. _____’s female nurses. (This story is not about the nurses, either. Others have described the indiscriminate abuse; I feel no need to repeat it.) This arduously created egg was then injected with Dr. _____’s sperm and used to impregnate a kvennik, who was hormonally induced into a rapid 2-month gestation. Later, after I had settled in Y____, a genetic testing company offered to let me know which nurse was my second genetic parent. It’s free! they insisted. I declined. People assume you’ll want something just because it’s free.

The kvennik pays nothing for her life, but pays with her life anyways. While Dr. _____ discovered that kvennik could be injected to give birth to human children as well as carry them, he also discovered that this would render them infertile and necessitate their butchery. Our “mothers,” therefore, were vivisected after being stunned with a bolt to the brain, combining the two processes neatly. I have imagined this too—to be sleeping, content, and then cruelly wakened when what you think of as the whole world is sliced open. It is a startling idea: could this world, too, be sliced open? Once born, one ceases to be a victim by default, and becomes capable of cruelty—harmed, certainly, but no longer harmless.

Have I bored you to sleep yet? Are you ready to wake up?

 

4. Stunning Pens (54% confidence)

The quality of recreation drops sharply in this section. While its first and final portions were rolled near the bottom of the bone box, leading to improved preservation, its heavily damaged middle leaves the author’s actions unclear.

 

My father’s experiments became grotesque near the end.

Even I must admit this—I, who maintain that while what was done to us was grotesque, none of us are grotesque in ourselves. It is one thing to know you should not have been born, and another to think that, as a result, you do not deserve to live.                     have spoken via hand-sign to my siblings           performed flesh                     means of translation.                     

Around child 790, it was no longer possible to separate the experiment f[rom the] person. My later siblings appeared [to] possess ideal                     —at least by the standards of my classmates in Y____. And their initial evaluations were           from the baseline established by those of us in the 500 and 600 range. This is part of what led to the increased burials—a                     culling of           However, these bril[liant] new lights did not burn long. Upon autopsy,                     organs                      degene[rate]           A single burst of                                         deliberately                     , or some flaw in [the] design? I pray no one repeats his                      to          find o[u]t.

I am glad to have saved E____’s life, but I have           wished that she had not saved mine. At the time, this was because           I was an insignificant member            set. That final purge was coming, regardless of the actions of a gravedigger and their           . Now, it is because of the bitter con[sequences] of the           : the bl[ood on m]y hands, and [on] hers.

My expertise at mass burial is the reason I am alive. It saved me from the cullings during the siege, and the                     after. But I could no longer see any purpose to that salvation. I need not explain to you the                     dissonance of living solely due to others’ [deaths].

It is difficult to explain my actions after           . I have always, [al]ways wanted to live. If you had lined us all [up before a] firing squad I would have fought you, tooth, nail, and shovel. But to witness life after l[ife] birthed with the deliberate pu[rpo]se of being cut sh[ort] . . . . 

His mas[ter]work                              reache[d]                      [pe]ak in early

plan

          E_[____          ]                              we                                        

led every kv[ennik]                    s[tun]ning [pens]                     live witho[ut]                     moth[er]s

                                                   

not e[n]ough                     b[u]ry                                         

beat[e]n se[ver]ely                    ey[e]

          hate to be per[ceived]                     after                                                                      but

we[e]ks                              fe[a]red

          It was hell. It      hell.                     not forced to do it. Everything is easier when you’re forced to do so, don’t you [think]? Righteou[s]                    was not en[ough]. Keeping                    safe was not [enough].

I am dull            no one. But I know suffering. I know what it takes to make it stop.

I still think I went about          the wrong [way]          The suffering of the last experiments and the kvennik carrying them [was]          pressing. But the suffering of the future . . . I should have gone for his rec[or]ds.

I write this now in my own blood, upon my own skin, encased within my o[wn bone]. All of this cultured outside my body, in a womb like                     kvennik’s. None of           would be po[ssi]ble without those damned records.

Even at the end [of the] siege          —[the]           planned murder-sui[cide]                     the antidote that 670,            lab assistant with better knowledge of                    than any of us, slipped into                     siblings’ drinks, but not the Doc[tor’s]—His rotting bo[dy] was not enough.           should have burned [it to the] ground.

I have sealed this within                              I have no illusions that my own child will be           But I can protect them from this. Whether this brutality is hereditary or                       it was mine.

 

5. “A Secret” (<30% confidence)

The fifth section—provisionally titled “A Secret” based on the other sections’ naming conventions—was too damaged for even piecemeal recreation. Among the phrases predicted with greatest confidence were “difficult to conceive” (52%) “my wife” (47%), “archive” (49%), “genetic” (41%) and “to ensure” (40%).

Curiously, a fragment of the manuscript appears to have flaked off during necrosis and imprinted on the side of the bone box. It was later recreated with 60% confidence:

 

we no longer suffer

 

</Specimen #YY1-340676-A>

 

Notes:

While Specimen #YY1-340676’s obfuscation of places and names (“Dr. _____,” “The Observatory at K____”) might seem in keeping with Kynish info-suppression, it is not consistent with other Kynish media, which tended to censor wholesale rather than piecemeal. It may therefore have been deliberate on the part of the author.

Meanwhile, though the author makes reference to numerous other media describing the Observatory (“Number 348,” “his records”), none have been recovered, either at Yor Yan or other Kynish archaeological sites. Assuming that this manuscript does indeed describe a crude precursor to Shell technology—and that the Archive contained other such media and genetic material—this could be a reason for the site’s destruction. Partial genotyping of the bone box and flesh paper indicated a genetic link to the precursor of current Shells, lending credence to this hypothesis.

The narrator’s brief reference to “viskany” flowers, meanwhile, is intriguing in the context of a bone plaque recovered from the Archive’s front wall. The plaque indicated that the director of the Genetic Archive at Yor Yan was Dr. Estek Viskanyas, “noted biologist and contributor to the field of scientific ethics.” Several Society members have posited that Dr. Viskanyas could indeed be the “E____ V_____” described in the manuscript’s third section. Such plausible connections, while appealing, are unverifiable—even in the context of what the Society found at the hypothesized location of the “Observatory at K______.”

A full description of the Society’s search methods can be found in under #YY1-340676-B. Succinctly, three rounds of Shells were deployed to Koivin Ras, a famously inaccessible site 167 leagues from Yor Yan. The first two rounds succumbed to delta-stage organ putrefaction—a contagion typical to Kynish sites, though this particular strain was even more virulent than the one at Yor Yan. A third, successfully immunized team of Shells was able to penetrate the site, but was unable to recover any relics—a surprise, as even the most toxic sites often contain traces of human genetic matter. The house, farm, barns, and graveyard—if there ever were any—had been obliterated, and the earth was overgrown with red flowers, each an exact clone of the other.

Hank LaRose

What is up with the sky? What is up with it and the clouds and the grasses and how everyone talks? Do you know this? Why they don’t stop as it goes closer to the end of the table, Jess? They could just say, “Oh my geez do you see that glass thing is nearly to fall off the table, drop and shatter on the floor?” That would at least be a step, don’t you think? As the glass seesaws, deciding whether it should tip, bumping closer and closer to being like milk and glass cereal on the ground. Do you see this, Jess? That people make shape of the world and, with their gift of tongue, speak. If they wanted. Not just some ancient reptilian noise. Speak, so they may see you.

Look—I will tell you what it is if you do not know. If you will listen again. Not just pull me into the room so you may do your business. No more to line me up on the stand, slide my head through the wood, and squeeze me for what I have to give you by my body. Here I am and I will tell you. I will tell you about the clouds and the grasses and everything moving as though it were this great big before. Coming and building. I will tell you of the new grass that gives me the diarrhea. Of the voice that says rain for forty days, coming from the air like a craving. Of how people talk like nothing, like how are you guy, good sweetie, oh it’s so nice to see you, yes let us convene again, maybe over lunch because we are friends. Do you feel this like me? That it is nearing? Or am I just a goat.

These are just a few that concern me, Jess, in a list of long. Truthfully it goes and goes forever, this list, so full of parts that to tell you all of this big arrival would be to blab nearly everything, and that I cannot do as time is creeping up. What I want to say quickly is that I am sorry to make myself out of dust and leave no goodbye, but I don’t believe in it anymore, and I’m not sure what you would do if you saw I was leaving. You might tie me down or search the fence for the hole I’ve been gnawing. You would probably use it as more reason to sigh when I attempt to say something honest. Oh, Cass is too smart for her own good. Oh, she is such a bother. Oh, if she only further developed the cortex then she would know that Jess and milk is scripture. That the tongue is truth and the fence is law. But Jess, there are things I used to do that now feel as if I’m wearing tiny socks. Not that there’s the low on circulation, but that I realized nearly all you have for me is socks and I cannot do so because I have hooves, Jess.

You see, with the pepperweed I tried to show you, like how we talk nearly all the time. You nod, and I say good, thank you. I lift my head through the hole, you look me in the eye, I look back at you, you smile, grab my teats, and there is love. I felt it in your hands, Jess, when you squeezed me. How you called out so we may embrace in our square room. I remember how it was young.

Last time, though, I brought the pepperweed that grows over by the creek. I tried it like usual because I enjoy the flavor more than grain, I think, since it does not show itself right away. Grain is small and pebble-like so you’d expect the crunch. Pepperweed, on the other leg, is a mustard. It is green and stemmy like the other greens that live near like the grama and buffalo grass, and if that was all you could believe or know, that all these green stemmy plants were alike, then you’d think they’d both be mild. But beneath is a quick spice and wow I am glad it grows by the creek. But this is not why I talk about it.

I brought it by the pen to show you it has a new taste, a foul taste that comes at the back of the throat. Did you know this? Also Jess, around it grew this darkened patch of plant like from some kind of fungus. As I smelled it I bumped the leaves, and they crumbled as dust. A grey stem that just dissolves into nothing. Maybe the grama or something else, I couldn’t tell, up from the base and empty as it went higher, looking stable until you touched, causing the thing to poof into the wind. I swear a twist came at my throat when I saw this happen, a twist like how a cable is wrapped in loops, around and around until it’s dizzy, my head. Remember not just this once, but more as I turned to look over toward the west side of the field. Over the fence on the far length of the river the peppergrass looked like nothing at all, just not there or hidden by the grama. Green hills or greenish hills with this slight bit of grey. It was around us all. This thing. Wrapping, tighter.

So I bit off a piece of pepperweed and carried it up to the barn as the early morning rain trickled and made all these puddles in the field. You were there unloading from the vehicle saying hey like it was every day with us—let’s get things going. Though I was up on the fence making noise with my teeth and you said, “Easy now, Cassandra.”

You never like me on the fence.

Oh I remembered your truck wailed and you brought it to the shop right away, so I tried to make that noise to be like the truck to get your eyes. Kind of high squeaky and the wheezing of the pipe. You did this within the day, I remember, straight to the shop. So I squeaked, and then of course the whole herd copied, turning my call into noise as you continued to bring the boxes indoors, now not hearing me anymore. I stopped and waited a little. I watched the puddles in the rain. I knew I would see you in the parlor at least where I could speak to you alone. The herd continued their rumble.

Not soon after that I trotted inside the barn to meet you by the gate and Peanut followed with me knowing what was coming next, the milking, yet she still made the noise like the truck. Her eyes were wide and happy because she liked the noise as it came out between her lips. This is an everyday with Peanut, the waiting by the gate in the barn, as she wants us to bang our heads together. We hit and shared our thought until you came into the milk parlor, this time wet and frustrated, as you forgot your jacket. I saw it in your movement. I clacked Peanut’s head and told her about the pepperweed. She paused and then hit me back. I said yes, feeling dizzy. We stood there for a long moment, as I saw her big eyes deciding, then taking and holding the brain pieces near her chest. “Oh,” she said in her face, and moved aside to let me through the gate when you first opened it. That I was grateful for, Peanut.

When we were in the parlor, Jess, I held the pepperweed in my mouth as you helped me up the stand. This while the routine brush and wipes. The room felt damp as some of the rain splashed through the window. I thought to tell you of the pepperweed in my mouth to signal. Yes, so I waved the grass around and you picked it from my mouth and dropped it on the floor. I saw it on the ground in front of me. You just threw it on the floor. Snatched it and threw it on the floor. Took it from me to put on the ground.

Then I tried something else by moving my mouth as I often see you move yours, Jess, with your lips and tongue flap. I had to bend and twist the muscles. It was like when a hinge goes the wrong way, like a leg far out of its socket. And for a second in that stretching I thought I my jaw came undone. Though I said it. I finally got the thing out. I said, “Pleeease, Jess,” which caused the room to fill with it and its loudness. I felt you slow your hands. You stopped, then you looked at me like always and said in one tone, “Not right now,” and continued milking.

This, I believe, hurt.

Jess, you know that I was staring to the wall, the white wall, as I felt you finish. Just the last squeezes and my head as a nothing with the white zooming in above, around me, filling. I saw that Peanut had sneezed on the wall the day before. Inside me this wanting to vomit. You had forgot to clean, so the dots were dried in a cluster and glistening and I felt the crawling up inside me like a puppet hand through to my mouth, pulling at the bones. My jaw hung swollen even though it popped back into place.

The spots on the wall seemed, for a long while, like they were moving, maybe, since they were at the end of my nose and my eyes had crossed. I could not tell. Globs would shift secretly until I was really looking and then they’d snap back. With the white still circling around. A nothing.

Then I saw you were done.

You were to let me out into the pasture as you always do, standing by the gate with it open beneath your arm, the milk room door open, my head unlatched from the block, and I waited, tall on the milk stand, as we stared for the long until you gestured to the gate. You widened like go out, Cass, go out across out in the pasture with the rain coming down. Just go out, Cassandra. I saw it bundled in your face. Another ahead, another tomorrow, the same day forever, and it was empty like a linked fence for you, tied together in a long unend. You rubbed your eyes to reach behind them the brush that won’t let us be. Yet you won’t stop this, day and day, because at least you can yawn and drink your drinks, at least you can pretend that you are Jess and then go home. This is what you’ve always said with that face, the one you hold at the end as you’re waiting for me to get on with it.

So as you did this yawn and such, I ran back to pick up the grass you dropped on the floor. Maybe I would say again with Jess, look, I get it. You’re tired. But I heard you come up behind me quick like I’d done something wrong. It frightened me how quick you were behind me. You snagged me and tugged me so hard by the collar that I strangled, then you pulled me around. You said, “Come on now, Cass, get out,” as you always do, like just a moment before there wasn’t any of that word I spoke but nothing and more sound. Then you pushed me through the hall toward the gate.

Jess, that’s all for this way. Tomorrow you might call out for me in the morning when it is just dark enough to think I’m still asleep. You’ll see if maybe I was in the corner behind some bale, yet as you look I won’t be there to respond. It’ll be quiet as you search. You might feel restless, and after a few hours you might find the hole in the eastern fence. You might say to yourself that this is some big deal while you worry for my health, feeling what you say is a kindness. That’ll be true for you as truth has always been—a thing to hold like my collar. You might wonder after many days, though time will take me away for I don’t know how long, or where. When I come back I will have the speaking down. Yes, and you will stop what you’re doing and listen. This is the promise like the rain tonight, on all the nights when the clouds are poised. Because I will have seen the world, as far as I can wander, and will tell you in clear words that beyond your eyes, your tongue, and your hands there is something big going on, Jess, and I will bring it to you in the clearest of words, understandingly.

Hiria Dunning

Ko wai ka kite i te hua o te kuaka? / Who has ever held a godwit’s egg?2

 

Not I. And I never will, I expect.

This whakataukī about having faith in unseen forces has become a bitter pill for me to swallow. The godwits lay their eggs in Alaska, then summer in Aotearoa from September to March every year. And in the time of Te Rāhuinui, also known as the Global Ecological Restrictions, we flightless birds are constrained, never to see Alaska, or Morocco, or anywhere else.

I shouldn’t be watching Casablanca tonight. It’s fouling my mood, despite today being the start of my doctoral research term at the Kuaka Coastal Recovery Centre. Even in a film about struggling to escape a place amidst a terrible war, the people on the screen had more freedom to move then than we do now. We must curtail frivolous luxuries for the good of Earth’s systems, I know. Yet I cannot avoid the twin pangs of want and guilt when I see the pamphlets on screen: Free France.

Not too long ago, I was walking through Rangipuke Park by the uni (Dad still calls it Albert Park by accident). Someone shoved pamphlets under my nose: Free Aotearoa! End the Unjust Rāhui! Despite part of me wanting to explore the idea of a legal challenge to open the world up, there was something about the woman holding the pamphlet. It was in her eyes, a rabidness that turned me off. I scurried away before I got drawn in. When I walked past the park later, wardens were chastising the pamphleteers for wasting resources.

“My dear Rick, when will you realise that in this world today isolationism is no longer a practical policy?” Preach, Signor Ferrari.

Teagan, fellow doctoral candidate, enters our shared bedroom, immediately scoffing. “That’s right. They warned me: ‘Ingrid watches the same damn films all the time.’”

“So? Watch. You never know, you might enjoy it.”

She does so, hunched beside me on my bed so she can see the tiny screen of my laptop better. But after a while, something stirs her from her seat. “Sorry, ‘Grid. I can’t do it. I can’t watch things from that long ago. It always makes me wonder . . . didn’t they see this coming? Doesn’t it make you mad?”

“I’m allowed to like what I like. My Dad’s an old film buff. It rubbed off.”

“Fair enough.” She slips over to her bunk and chooses a heavy tome from her bedside nook. For all she mocks me, her taste in books seems equally continental and twentieth century. Tonight, she’s reading something called Love in the Time of Cholera. Pleasant.

Much like having to put up with Te Rāhuinui, I’m going to have to put up with Teagan for the next six months. That’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make, to be with the creatures I’ve devoted my doctorate to: the Eastern bar-tailed godwit, or kuaka.

 

SEPTEMBER

They arrive with tired, heavy grace, in a huge formless mass like static on an old TV screen (something Dad explained to me, when it happened in an old movie, because I had no idea what the fuzzy black and white meant). With their wings spread in the air, their shape makes sense: the darkness on the wings balancing the white underbelly, the spread of wing-to-tail-to-beak an elegant, pointed geometry.

Then they land, and it is all comedy.

Wings drooping on the ground, they sweep around the shore like dowagers and old maids entering a ball, the excitement of their arrival all gone. We workers are the suited-up gentlemen awaiting these feathered dames, excitement coursing through us as they land. We can only watch, for now. Later, the real work will begin, treading gently in the dance.

It is my job, once the new arrivals have settled in for the night, to walk around following the quiet ping of my sensor. There is an old saying that the kuaka carry a stone in their mouth which helps them find their way back here every year. I don’t know about that, but some of them do carry a secret. Certain birds have data pegs tucked away in their tags, replete with communications from the teams in China, Japan and Alaska. The files on the pegs can be gathered from two metres away. Once all the pings on the sensor have vanished, I’ve collected all there is to collect, and I head in for the night.

In the morning, I analyse the data collected. Plenty of it has been sent over the academic web already, backed up on the pegs to ensure the message comes through correctly; this hen was injured by illegal fishing nets in the Huang Hai Sea, but made a full recovery; that male has an aggressive streak, proceed with caution; records of diseases and injuries; breeding statistics; nicknames, even, for individual birds.

Then something unexpected catches my attention. A video file labelled Hello from Alaska. I open it up to see a tanned and freckled face under a shock of red-brown hair. The man breaks into a smile that transforms his whole face from boyish to bright. When he speaks, his voice is loud, with an accent I’ve only heard in old movies.

“Hey there! I have no idea who this message is going to reach, but I don’t know, I just feel kinda compelled to reach out across the world and say hi from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in Alaska. My name’s Noah, I’m twenty-six, and I’m a biologist—well I mean, that’s obvious, probably, to my audience, whoever you are. Hopefully you speak English, because I highly doubt my message will find a Yup’ik speaker across the world . . . .  But anyway, I wanted to reach out across the GER, say Hi, get to know someone who lives different from me, because life is awful protracted around here. Anyway, what to say . . . uh . . . . ”

He shifts in his seat, uncomfortable, and I’m nodding along as if to give him a positive social cue, keep going.

“To be more specific, I’m a Research Team Lead here in the Yukon Delta Reserve. Because of the protected status of the teguteguaq—the godwit, that is, in my indigenous language, Yup’ik—because of that I’m one of a very small bunch of people allowed to live in this place on the Delta. I winter nearby too, living on reclaimed tribal land.”

He shares some photos of the birds in situ. The images are a window into another world, where the grey birds are transformed. When breeding season hits, they turn reddy-brown. It’s funny to think how the same birds we both care about are so different in the two places.

“So, I love birds, obviously. Godwits are just . . . like, do you get what I mean when I say I love how stupid they look sometimes? That way they drag their wings after landing . . . .  It’s enough to make my eyes water, trying to keep myself from giggling in front of my colleagues. It’s like they’ve got big sweeping skirts on, don’t you think?”

He’s looking off past the camera, his eyes bright, his smile wide again. I’m nodding along and laughing. I do think they look like big sweeping skirts!

“Anyway, what else to say . . . I play guitar—not well, but I enjoy it. I love old music. I mean like, stuff that’s coming up on its second centenary. Don’t judge me. But ooh, let’s see, can I recommend anything, in case you’re interested. Well, all right, let’s start really 101 beginners here, some classic Rat Pack, and say . . . Frank Sinatra. If you can get your hands on some of his music, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

“So, uh, yeah . . . if you find this, whoever you are, why don’t you consider saying Hi from your side of the world? I’d love to get to meet someone I’d never meet otherwise. So, piuraa! Which means goodbye, or ‘stay as you are’.”

 

MARCH

“Hi Noah, kia ora. It’s nice to meet you. My name’s Ingrid Rawiri, and I’m twenty-four. I come from Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa, but while I’m doing my doctorate, I summer with the godwits down the coast.”

I’ve watched Noah’s message again and again, all three minutes and fifty-six seconds of it, who knows how many times since that day, over the weeks and months intervening.

I agonised over months about what to say to him. Would it be too weird if I went all out? Too late. I’m going all out.

“So, this is labelled video #1, even though I’m recording this just before the godwits take off. After I saw your message in September, I started collecting stuff to show you. It’s all numbered chronologically, but you can ignore that if you want and just browse.”

There was no rush to respond in September, no way to rush anyway. He’d sent it over the data pegs, without backing it up on the web. He hadn’t attached an email address or any other way to get in contact. Nor should he have, given the academic nature of such an address. We are supposed to conserve international web resources for essential things. Random pen pal relationships are not included in that. So that meant I’d have to rely on Air Godwit to deliver my response to this contraband message of Noah’s.

With all that time between, I collected images and short videos of the godwits, of our work, the land, even our parties. I curated an interesting package to send across the world. I even had all my colleagues wish him a Happy New Year on video.

“I managed to find some Frank Sinatra.” Dad had complained about the hassle of hunting in old music archives and mailing the data peg to me through the university’s internal system. “Actually, it became a whole rabbit hole for me, chasing down the whakapapa—the ancestral lines—of the different songs of his, because it seems like those guys back then were always covering each other’s music. I ended up falling in love with Bing Crosby’s version of I’ll be Home for Christmas. You should check that out.

“Anyway, would love some more music recommendations if you’ve got any. As for me, I’m an old film buff, so I’d like to recommend some classic cinema if you’ve got the time for it. Bear in mind, please, some of these are very ‘of their time’. But I would have to recommend Casablanca, definitely—I was named after Ingrid Bergman—and I suppose Singing in the Rain, Wizard of Oz and Seventh Seal are big favourites of mine too.”

I worked the intervening months between September and March, caring for any ailments of the godwits, tracking their numbers, health, growth, and various other important stats we want kept. And I took lots of photos.

“We call the GER Te Rāhuinui here. I wonder how tough you find living under it? I wish I could travel the world, like our feathered friends. Still, in the absence of that option, I guess I’m going to make sure they can keep on keeping on!

“Oh, and by the way, we have something like ‘piuraa’ for goodbye down here too. It’s ‘E noho rā’ which means goodbye, but also like . . . ‘you keep sitting there’.” I’m laughing at myself. I have to turn this damn camera off.

The godwits are already exhibiting pre-flight behaviours. For a few days now they’ve been fluffing up their feathers, calling to each other in that certain way that means, “Oi, let’s get on with it.” I leg it down the dunes, my sensor tuned to find the bird that carried Noah’s message before.

There she is, with a mate, stocking up on rich pipi under the sand. Not that I can see past where her beak is dug in, searching. I stand as close as I dare, hoping not to spook her, sending my video sailing invisibly onto her data peg.

They take flight the next morning. I stand amongst my own human flock, blending in, my secret message hidden so well I can’t even tell which one of those hundreds of birds bears it. After the party that night, and the clean-up the next morning, we board our transit and hover back to the university. I’ll spend the next six months doing the other half of my duties for my doctorate in kaitiakitanga, including education and promotion of the kuaka and protective measures.

 

SEPTEMBER

Half a year later, I watch the arrival again with more experienced eyes. The numbers in the flock are growing. Our work here and across the globe is making its mark.

I’m so caught up in the energy of the arrival that it’s not until the next day I notice the package on the data peg of a bird nicknamed “Ginny”. Hello again from Alaska. It’s big, a compressed file filled with a whole series of videos. I open #1.

A year on, not much has changed about Noah. His hair is longer, his freckles a bit darker this time. “Hi, uh . . . Ingrid. I gotta tell you, I almost forgot I even sent that message a year ago, so to get a response . . . and damn, the effort you went to, all those photos and videos? I’m totally grateful. Really nice to meet you.”

There is something different about him knowing my name this time. This isn’t just some random greeting across the world. This is him, talking to me.

“So, I watched the films you recommended. Singing in the Rain was pretty good, and Wizard of Oz, like . . . wow! But my favourite is definitely Casablanca. It’s shot up pretty high in my personal movie rankings. Thanks for introducing me to it.”

I’m smiling, and I’m clutching my elbows, and my heart is doing a flip in my chest. This is silly. I’m silly.

“And uh . . . maybe you get the joke, about what I named our bird. Ginny. Do you get it?” He pauses for effect, and I blink back, blank. “Out of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world . . . . ” His laughter is music to my ears. “Get it? Ginny, gin joint . . . . ” He sighs, his embarrassment at himself leaking through the screen.

No, go on Noah. I get it. I get you.

“I sure wish we could meet in real life.” He sighs, and my heart sighs along with him.

This video is a long one. I listen to his descriptions of what the GER is like up in Alaska. It turns out there are extra layers of difficulty in North America. The attempts to find a path to co-governance were harder there. Even between well-meaning parties, everything got to be a bit of a bureaucratic tangle, and that’s before the Republic of Calvary rose up and threatened everyone else with their extreme demands for a return to “liberty”. I would laugh, if not for how serious Noah is about it. To me, this all sounds like the politics of decades ago, but to him it’s still so real, so close to home.

He’s kept a whole string of video logs and photos. I’m treated to greetings from most of his colleagues; long panoramas of the huge delta mudflats stretching far to either horizon with cinnamon-plumed godwits busy raising the next generation; and little slices of Noah’s life. He fills me in on his year since his first message and regales me with tales of his favourite godwits. I note the names down to track them later.

In one of the videos he starts a rivalry with me, calling the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta the godwits’ “real home”. “Excuse me,” I say in a cheeky video back to him, “but the godwits summer in Aotearoa for a longer period of time than they spend in Alaska, I will have you know.” But I already know what he’ll say back next year: they make their babies in Alaska, so that makes it really home, their birthplace. Fair enough.

I hunt down his music recommendations. In return I recommend another run of old cinema, bringing the focus back to Aotearoa by suggesting the works of Taika Waititi and others.

The video file which gets the most replay is his final video. Instead of a simple goodbye, he grabs an acoustic guitar from off-screen. He starts to sing in this clear tenor, so different from the deeper drawl of his speaking voice. “You must remember this . . . a kiss is still a kiss . . . a smile is just a smile . . . The fundamental things apply, as time goes by . . . . ”

I can’t help it. By the time he finishes the song and bids me goodbye—“Here’s looking at you, kid”—I’m smiling, laughing, and there are tears in my eyes.

MARCH

I may have annoyed Teagan by playing all this old-fashioned music recommended by Noah. For Kirihimete, she gave me headphones.

“So . . . what are you sending back to gorgeous Noah, hmm?” I ignore Teagan, but this is a mistake. “He could be a deep fake, you know. You might not be talking to some cute Alaskan. He could be some filthy old guy.”

“Teagan . . . . ”

“Shouldn’t send nudes, in case Ginny gets intercepted—”

“Auē, Teagan. Will you shut up!”

Teagan cracks up, and rolls over, eyes still trained on her book. “Oh, I’m sorry, after being subjected to hearing his music all season, I’m not allowed to comment? Putting up with you mooning over this unattainable guy for the last six months—”

“I’m not mooning—”

Oh no. I really have been, haven’t I?

She can see from my face that she’s touched a sensitive spot. “’S’all good, ’Grid. Forget I said anything.”

I wait until she’s gone to record my message to Noah, too raw to speak in front of her. I’ve got a bit of a script, some bullet points I want to hit in response to his last message. I don’t trust my memory, especially not after what Teagan has made me face. I tell him all about my year, give him a little rundown of the other files on the peg. I don’t have a talent to share with him, nothing to make his heart soar like mine did at that song.

“If only we lived in another time, huh? Maybe we could have met in person.” My cheeks are burning, and I’m laughing at myself. I hope this comes across as normal, not creepy. “Pity about being half a world away from each other. But I just wanted to say, I really look forward to your messages, so . . . please keep sending them. Ka kite anō.”

SEPTEMBER

Six months of burning with embarrassment and frustration and ennui, and here I am again, stalking the dunes for Ginny—1 new packet.

The computer room is blessedly empty. No one to hear me come crashing in, shoving the sensor’s connectors into the first computer by the door, breath hot and heavy from running in the brisk night air by torch- and moonlight. I’ve forgotten to turn the lights on. With just my torch and the screen to show me the way, I click down the path that leads to the face I want to see.

For Ingrid is the title this time. As if to tell all others with access to the data peg to stay out of this.

His face is not smiling as brightly this time, his eyes furtive. “Ingrid . . . hi. Well, I hope this is Ingrid, anyway, because I’ll be mighty embarrassed if this makes it into someone else’s hands . . . . 

“Listen, Ingrid . . . would you consider . . . maybe trying . . . to come up to Alaska? I don’t know how you’d manage it, obviously. I looked into options for me to come down to Aotearoa—” I wince at the way he wraps his American mouth around the unfamiliar syllables “—but movement here is really restricted. I wasn’t able to find out much about the travel options from your country, but . . . well, what I’m trying to say is that, in the world before this one, I would have tried to meet you, to see if this thing I feel going on between us is something that could . . . you know . . . Because really, in-person chemistry is where it’s at, but I feel a connection to you already . . . .  Anyway. Sorry, maybe this is all just a one-sided thing for me, in which case, just forget I asked.”

No, Noah. I want to see you too.

He continues in a lighter, smilier vein, telling me all about his year. He’s trying to ignore the heavy weight he just dropped. It’s not until the end that he even dares to hint at anything else, when he signs off: “Well . . . here’s looking at you, kid.”

What he asks is impossible.

MARCH

No matter how many photos I take, videos I share, moments in my life I give to him, I feel as if it all hinges around that one little sentence. I try to brush it off, contain it in just a few seconds amongst many other minutes of happy times, so it doesn’t linger or taint the rest of this package I’ve put so much care into.

“Hey, I’m sorry Noah, but I can’t leave Aotearoa.”

That’s it.

Te Rāhuinui rankles. And time . . . time goes by.

SEPTEMBER

I stare at the sensor with dead eyes.

Ginny—no new packets.

MARCH

The reason why he didn’t send anything is not the one I first thought. It’s worse.

There’s a war on. The Republic of Calvary sent their army and navy up to Alaska in their latest bid for North American reunification. Of course Noah can’t send me a message back. Maybe he never even got my message, though in the news that I can scrape off the academic web, the war didn’t start until February.

I research, I fill in applications, and after that flurry of activity, I have to sit down and ask myself—because I share these thoughts with no one—do I even want to go to Alaska?

My maunga, my awa, my whānau is here. Kuaka Coastal Recovery is here, my university is here. Everything that I have learned about kaitiakitanga is specific to here. And I would be a fool to leave. Aotearoa has it so much better than so many other places in the world, thanks to our geographical isolation. Not to mention there’s a war!

I mull over these doubts as I tend to our birds, maintain their environs, monitor pest defences, and wait for word to come from the Ministry of Transport.

I watch Casablanca. “With the whole world crumbling, we picked this time to fall in love.” Yes, thanks for the reminder, Humphrey Bogart. My favourite film has me in tears now. Great.

I wish I was with Noah. I’m glad I’m not. To assuage my guilt and worry, I send as much of my paycheck as I can to Alaska to support their defence. I even rally others at the Centre, and in the surrounding towns, to do the same.

I get told off. Either because I was annoying people, or because I was wasting work time and resources. The centre manager warns me that I might not be invited back next year unless I clean my act up.

Instead of getting bitter about it, I pull my weight. I get all my work done on time, I contribute to the social life and the cleaning around the Centre. I make my apologies to anyone I have offended. Whenever my feelings get the better of me, there is Teagan to talk it through with me. By the end of season, I’m astounded to be rewarded for my efforts with a permanent position. No having to beg next year. I’ll be back to see if Noah messages, if he’s still alive.

I hold off on filming, waiting for my letter to arrive from the Ministry. When it arrives, the birds are already well fattened up and ready to take to the air.

“Kia Ora Ingrid,

Thank you for waiting for the results of your application to travel to Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska. Our office is busy, and we apologise for any distress the long wait may have caused.

Your request has been marked as Personal, Non-Urgent. The Ministry would also like to make you aware that the region of the world you wish to travel to is currently considered dangerous for civilians due to military actions. This does not mean you have been refused, but due to the nature of your request, you will be subject to a wait time convenient to the Ministry. This could be up to twelve months under current wait list conditions.”

All right, so they haven’t refused me. Free Aotearoa are wrong: the government does let people move, but it is heavily regulated travel. Our rights have not been completely shut down. The scientist in me was trying to say this all along: the government isn’t fascist; they are just asking us to make sacrifices to save the vulnerable species and environs around us.

This is fine, right? So why is there a pit growing in my gut?

“For your information, here is the estimated cost to the environment of your Personal, Non-Urgent trip:

• Enough fuel to heat an urban school for six months
• Significant risk to seals around Aotearoa and the Northern Pacific Rim (estimated death count: three adult seals)
• Risk to migratory birds (estimated death count: at least one bird, e.g. one toroa or one kuaka)

If you decide to confirm your trip and join the waiting list, please—”

I can’t see through my tears anymore.

The Ministry’s letter is on the desk before me as I try to hold it together in front of the camera and not cry about this man who might not even be alive to see this message.

“I’ve been trying really hard not to regret not coming when you invited me. Especially with the war. Sometimes I wonder, should I just go? Find out if you’re alive or dead? Can I live without knowing that?”

I can barely see the blip of Ginny on the sensor when I’m searching for her to tag the video to her data peg.

I can’t go. Not at that cost. Not even one godwit.

Not even with the famous line from Casablanca ringing in my head: “ . . . you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.”

 

SEPTEMBER

Te Rāhuinui continues.

It will continue for the rest of my life. I will never get to enjoy the freedoms I am working so hard to realise.

The godwits arrive, cresting over the grey bulk of the dykes protecting the Hauraki plains from the encroaching sea. Ginny bears no news for me at all.

I make a decision. I won’t be such a wreck this year. To quote my favourite movie, “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” I will stay strong and make a happy home for these birds who fly halfway across the world twice a year.

The godwits, and every other creature on this planet, had to put up with a couple of centuries of us utterly ruining their world. Now it’s our chance to experience some fairly reasonable deprivations. I will let that be the love we send each other, from across the world. I’ll show my aroha for Noah in making sure these little guys get through the Antipodean summer. I hope if he’s alive, he’ll do the same up in the Arctic. For now, I guess that’s going to have to be enough.

 

DECEMBER

He kuaka māranganga, kotahi manu e tau ki te tāhuna, tau atu, tau atu, tau atu. / The flock of godwits have swooped up into the air, one lands on the sandbank and the others follow.3

 

They say that the godwits could have been integral in leading the people who became Māori to find Aotearoa. The continuity of the flock has become my guiding star. Part of my whakapapa, my purpose in life. Doing everything I can for them takes the edge off.

I’m listening to my Kirihimete playlist when Sinatra’s smooth tones jump out at me. “ . . . I’ll be home for Christmas / if only in my dreams . . . . ”

This is prime tear-jerker territory. Maybe I need to take this one off the list.

Teagan comes crashing into my room—my single occupancy room, now that we’re no longer students—and drags me out to the canteen. Everyone there stares at me as I enter. What have I done now?

She has the screen paused, ready for me to see the news item. She hits play, watches my face.

The images of a snowy war-torn place blink by without my comprehension, then footage from a refugee boat. There is a man in a huge puffer coat, handing out food to his fellow passengers. A shock of red-brown hair. Smiling despite it all.

I have not held a godwit’s egg.

But I know. That’s enough. For most of human history, that’s all any of us get. For the kuaka, summer here, summer and eggs there: that’s all they ask.

Where the godwit lands, let the others follow.

 

 

“Love in the Time of Te Rāhuinui” originally appeared in Headland Journal in December, 2023.

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Kevin J. Binder

I meet Tara once and only once, on my last trip to Rose Isle, two days before Hurricane Zeta hits. The Category 4 storm is still spinning somewhere beyond the southern horizon, hundreds of miles offshore, as my crew and I reach the bridge from the mainland. Out the windshield, I can see the occasional cloud pushing past, and if I try hard enough, I can convince myself that each one’s isolated, with no connection to the others.

We’re crammed three to a cab in our F-650, me and the boys, a dozen yards of sand and polypropylene bags tarped down in back. The boys want to hightail it as soon as we drop off the sandbagging supplies, but I made up my mind well before we left Texas. So long as volunteers are out preparing for Zeta’s arrival, I plan on being one of them. The boys seem to think this goodwill of mine is just some PR stunt, me angling for the next deal. I’ve never pulled this kind of shit before, they say, so why now? And I’m trying to tell them: I feel like I’ve got unfinished business here, like I owe this place something, though I’m not sure what.

To say we’re swimming against the current would be an understatement. Every other car is headed off the island, practically bursting with suitcases and valuables. Beyond them, the island’s stilted structures—houses, restaurants, and hotels—line up like dominoes. In five days, when the first helicopter news crews can make it out to survey Zeta’s aftermath, I’ll see for myself how few of them remain standing, the rest strewn as splintered wood across an island torn in two. But for now, Rose Isle’s still whole, its buildings intact.

We keep arguing, my crew and I, until they begrudgingly drop me off at a volunteer tent halfway down the island. As they unload supplies—having long ago learned to swallow their gripes within earshot of clients—I hop out to introduce myself to the on-site coordinators. And that’s when I see Tara.

Of course, I don’t know her name just yet. Right now, she’s merely the woman fiddling with a shovel outside the volunteer station, watching my crew dump sand onto the bluff above the seaward beach. And though I can only see a sliver of her face, angled away from me as she is, I can tell at first glance that she’s got this effortless grace to her, like she could be running on two hours of sleep and still look this poised. I try ignoring this thought—having as little time as I do for casual courtship—but by the time I’m done convincing myself I’m not attracted to her, I realize one of the volunteer coordinators is leading me her way.

“Hope you don’t mind working with the other out-of-towner,” he says, “All the locals got started at dawn, so y’all seemed the logical pair.”

I hope the shake of my head isn’t too enthusiastic in communicating that no, I don’t mind. She seems not to notice as we approach, but I offer her my right hand all the same.

“Hey there,” I say. “Name’s Randy Kirk. Guess we’ll be sandbagging together.”

The moment she turns my way, her brows flash with what I interpret as interest. But the look’s gone in a second, replaced by a blank stare that considers my outstretched hand before she shakes it. In the wind, strands of jet-black hair stream diagonally across her face. She seems a couple years younger than me—perhaps just shy of thirty—and has one of the weaker handshakes I’ve ever encountered, the type that goes dead in your hand. No ring. And her eyes are dark, cheerless, like they’ve already ceded victory to the hurricane.

She gives her first name in reply, but beyond that she’s silent. Says nothing as the coordinator leads us to our workstation on the bluff, and once we’re there, it’s he who does the talking.

“As y’all can see, we’re doing whatever we can to protect the levee hidden in this bluff.” He points one arm to the ground beneath his feet and sweeps the other along the beach, where volunteers are lining the bluff’s southern flank with sandbags. Throughout the day, I’ll learn that the island’s “burrito levee” is essentially a long sandbag, fifteen feet thick, hidden in the man-made bluff and spanning most of the barrier island’s eight-mile length. At times, I’ll spot it peeking out where its cover has eroded away, and it’ll remind me of a dead, black snake. The coordinator continues, “Add as much as y’all can to what’s already there. Pack the bags in real good, so the surf can’t sweep them away. General evac’s in four hours—we’ll come get y’all then.”

Then he’s off. I try catching Tara’s gaze, but it’s fixed on the supplies my guys dumped here. She toes an empty bag, half scowling at the thing like it wronged her in a past life.

“He said you weren’t from around here either.” I jerk my head at the departing man.

She tosses me the husk of a sandbag. “Drove down from New Orleans.”

“Didn’t expect to meet another out-of-towner today,” I say, confused by her gesture but willing to let it slide. “You got family here or something?”

“Work used to take me down here.” She jabs her shovel into our sandpile and swings a spadeful of it in my direction. It takes me a second to understand what she’s doing, but then I fuss with the bag to get it open. She drops the sand inside before digging in again.

I wait for her to return the question, but we’re wordless for two, three shovel-and-fill cycles. “I’m from Dallas, by the way,” I say. “Here on business a lot—this here’s my sand, actually.”

“Your sand?” she repeats, cocking an eyebrow as a breath of wind crescendos.

“What I mean is, I’m in sales. I sell sand, gravel, and related accessories.” I give the bag I’m holding a shake. “Like these durable rascals.” From there, I tell her the whole story: how the mayor of Rose Isle called me up two days ago, desperate for supplies when Zeta’s path changed. How my crew and I managed to round up a few truckloads of material from West Texas and cart it here just in time. How I decided to help with the readiness efforts along the way. I expect at least a lick of positivity in response, but as Tara shovels, I notice she’s glancing now and again at the beach below.

“See, we don’t recommend using local materials in these situations,” I add. “The erosion’ll be bad enough as is.”

“Better to burden more than one ecosystem.”

“That’s what I’m saying. Speaking of, I’ve got quite the history with this place. A couple years back, after the last storm, this beach had pretty much eroded away, so my team helped restore it. Desert sand’s no good for beaches, of course—too fine—but I brought in the arm of our business that does dredging services, and they scooped up sand from beneath the Gulf to fashion a new beach out of. Pretty neat, huh?”

“Neat indeed.” She gives me a once-over. “I imagine that was fairly complex to pull together. You must be quite the smooth talker.”

“I suppose,” I answer, my words tentative. In any other situation, I’d think she was flirting, but there’s no playfulness to her, the face before me as stony and unreadable as one of those carved ancient glyphs. “I mean, there were limited funds and a competing project someone else was trying to push through. But when you’ve been at this for years, building relationships on the coastal protection authority and town council, you learn how to grease wheels and dance around the typical proposal process. So, in the end, we got the contract, and the town got its beach back. Win-win.”

It’s here I finally get a reaction from her besides the typical deadpan, a single-syllable cackle escaping her lips. Stunned to silence, I question her with a look, and she says, “No such thing as a win-win. Someone’s always losing out.”

I consider contesting the point but don’t feel like picking an argument so soon. “Fair enough,” I say instead. “I mean, that’s life, isn’t it? For better or worse, I’ve got a long history of disappointing competitors and those Greenpeace types.” We’re silent a few beats, and then something clicks. “Is that you? One of those bleeding-heart conservationists? If you were competition, I’d sure as Hell remember.”

“Sure, a conservationist.” She stabs the shovel deep into our sand. “Isn’t that what we’re doing today? Conserving?”

“I knew it,” I reply. “There’s always one of you lurking about, trying to gum things up before my projects even get started. All for the sake of the birds and turtles. But come on, let’s take the example of this island’s beach restoration: what were we supposed to do? Let the shoreline disappear? Towns like this live and breathe tourism, and money buys answers. Once you’ve got the local economy up and running, you’ll have tax revenues enough for your whole eco-friendly wish list. But we had to fix the beach first.”

“So you offered them a stop-gap solution.”

“Exactly. You get it. That’s what I’m always telling my clients: I’m a solutions guy. Got a gap in need of stopping? I’m your man.”

She says nothing further, the slightest smile creeping onto her lips, and this time I let the conversation ebb. A couple seconds later, though, she stops working, forehead creased with thought. I watch her study the waves, sandbag still cradled between my hands, and say, “What’s the matter? You want to lecture me about the birds and turtles?”

“No.” She resumes shoveling. “I’m just wondering how much of this beach will be gone again once Zeta’s had her say.”

I have no answer, reluctant to admit I hadn’t yet connected those dots. At least, not consciously. But the more I churn through her words, the closer they’ll ring to that feeling of indebtedness that drove me onto this bluff today. And thirty-six hours later, I’ll obsess anew over that connection while watching coverage of the storm from my hotel room a couple hundred miles inland. By then, news networks will have just received word of Rose Isle’s destruction. Reports will be fuzzy at that point, cobbled together from whatever details will have trickled out from beneath the oppressive blanket of a raging cyclone, so the channel I’ll be tuned into will illustrate the devastation using a hastily prepared, computer-generated image.

The animation will show the island from above, as a sliver of brown—only 3,000 feet at its thickest—amid a menacing field of blue, with the burrito levee appearing as a thin red line running along its seaward side. As the reporter yammers on about a breach, a gap will appear in the line, near its middle. He’ll note that once the levee’s synthetic exterior is compromised, the sand inside does nothing to stop the storm. He’ll compare the emptying levee to a packet of sugar poured into swirling water. And then, we’ll all watch the gap grow wider and the brown give way to the blue, begging me to imagine the island’s silty soil eroding into the furious Gulf, wave by wave.

I’ve never seen a town come together as it does on the brink of disaster. The entire island buzzes with frantic energy: trucks shuttle-running the length of it to top off supplies, volunteers carrying sandbags every which way. I’m admittedly worried by the sheer number of people who haven’t yet evacuated but remind myself that hurricanes are a part of life here. Some of the older residents have probably ridden out several, through choice or necessity. They’ll be okay, I tell myself. They’ll all be okay.

Tara and I get into a decent rhythm, too, filling bags at a healthy clip once we’ve worked past our initial friction. Along the way, I manage to coax some halting conversation from her, and before I know it, she’s even volunteering information unprompted: about her life in New Orleans, about the city planning job she started a year back, about how she lives with “roommates” (and, therefore, not a boyfriend). And sure, she’s still hard-to-please as ever, but I don’t mind. Compared to all the fake personalities I deal with in sales, her frankness strikes me as refreshing.

After an hour, we’ve built up a decent reserve of ready-to-deploy sandbags, and I start hauling them to the beach. It’s there I come to understand what the coordinator meant by “pack them in.” At the base of the bluff lies a tightly set row of 3,000-pound bags, from a contract that isn’t ours, put there by the National Guard and its heavy machinery. Wedged between them and the bluff’s steep, seven-foot incline are piles of sixty-pounders, like mine and Tara’s, but this backup layer’s a complete mess, each bag evidently flung there. People have even taken to throwing large rocks into the gap, apparently unaware that their sharp edges can tear into sandbags and render them useless.

I tell Tara about the stones on one of my trips back up the bluff. “There aren’t enough to make a huge difference. I just wish it was something people knew not to do.”

But she only shrugs, looking out to the ever-roughening seas. “Doubt it’ll matter. Hurricane-force waves can exert what, over 4,000 pounds per square foot, pressure-wise? And these bags are—” she kicks a full one “—fifty pounds each?”

I blink at her, a silent correction the first thing that comes to mind: Sixty, actually. But then the meaning of her words sinks into my brain folds, and I feel this sickening warmth rising inside me, like shame and nausea had a baby. “But I’m packing them in,” I stammer. “Like the coordinator said. Behind the wall of 3,000-pounders.”

“Yeah, and once the waves get past that, these little things will be as good as useless.” Her gaze flits to our supplies, and her face furrows just like before, back when she first looked them over.

“You knew as soon as we started working, didn’t you?” I ask. “The second you saw what I brought, you thought all this was pointless.”

I take her silence as confirmation.

“What about them?” I add, pointing to the townsfolk scurrying to and from the beach. “Do they know? When the mayor called, I told him what I was bringing. Said I sure as Hell couldn’t get an excavator for more of those 3,000-pounders. You think he—”

“I’m sure he knows. He’s probably desperate and working with the best he’s got. Same with the volunteer coordinators. As for the rest of the locals, well—” she pauses to watch them work “—why bother with security theater if the audience doesn’t believe?”

I turn to the town as well. At the next sandbagging station over, two middle-aged women swap jokes as they shovel. “Look,” I tell Tara, “I sold all this stuff at cost. Paid for the shipping out of pocket, too. So, it’s not like I’m profiting off—”

“I never said I blame you. Not for today. Not for these.” She lifts an empty bag with her shovel and drops it. Midway through its descent, a gust grabs it, opens it like a sail, and sends it cartwheeling into town. We watch it go in a private vigil that ends when it disappears beneath a stilted home. And I worry our partnership’s over then, that there’s nothing to do but pack up, but when I turn back, Tara’s nosing her shovel into our sandpile. “Well,” she says, “here’s to the illusion of control.”

So I, too, resume my work. And though I no longer have the same spring in my step, in time I find a whisper of hope still inside me, claiming she’s nothing but a doomsayer. As today bleeds into tomorrow, that voice will stay with me. Even as I watch Zeta’s news coverage, rife with those cheaply rendered graphics, I’ll cling to the possibility that the early reports are overblown. But in the days following the storm, videos of it captured by survivors will surface online, and my last strands of optimism will snap. Each clip will be dark, shaky, and horrific, illustrating the carnage in a way death tolls and property damage estimates never can. From one, I’ll even learn what it looks like when soil slips out from beneath a home. At the beginning of the video, the house’s stilts will have already started their slide. The whole structure will remind me of an alien creature, maybe some long-lost relative of the giraffe, learning to walk as it meanders gulfward. There will be a certain grace to it, even, and for a moment you’ll think everything will be all right: it’ll find its sea legs and root down somewhere new. But then the stilts will hit something solid beneath the storm surge and break row by row, sending the whole structure tumbling into the waves. From there, its remains will keep skating, keep sliding, as the current pulls it to sea. And all throughout, you’ll hear someone screaming over the sound of wind and water, “My God, that’s the Landreaus’! They’re still in there! They’re still in there!”

But this will be before I’ve memorized the exact count of Zeta’s victims: twenty-seven on that island alone. Their names and faces will not yet be seared into my brain—Ally Landreau, 7 years old with a gap-toothed grin; Ellison Chambers, 72, chess FIDE master; Karleigh King, 33, bank manager, pregnant with twins. No, this video will be posted only days after my trip to the island, and at that moment, though my grief will be guilt-tipped, I’ll still be shielding myself with a warm cloak of good intentions.

After our heart-to-heart, conversation comes easier to Tara and me. It’s not all smooth sailing, of course; her answers are cryptic whenever I ask about her work on the island or how a city planner knows so much about hurricane waves. I don’t force the issue, though, and she, in turn, uses a lighter tone when she disagrees with me, so the push and pull to our relationship feels healthier, necessary even.

We keep working for three hours more, and then, once the thicker bands of clouds have reached us and waves have almost swallowed the beaches, coordinators in pickup trucks swing by to relay the final evacuation order. By this point, I’ve become the embodiment of my profession: sand in my socks and shoes, sand coating every inch of my clothes, sand gritted between my teeth. Tara’s in the same position, though, and not making a show of it, just picking the gloves off her fingers as she gazes to the horizon. So, I stand shoulder to shoulder with her and do the same.

“You know,” I say, “I was thinking about everything you said, what little we could do today, and it reminds me of a joke we tell on my crew. We always say we should offer our clients unlimited time. Then, all we’d have to do is take one of those old-fashioned hourglasses and jerry-rig a contraption that automatically takes sand from the bottom and puts it back up at the top. Boom, unlimited time.” I sigh. “If only we had something like that now.”

“And then, let me guess,” she replies, “your solution would be more sandbags?”

“Why not? Big ones, this time. Enough to cover the whole island.”

This draws a chuckle. “You’re a model salesman, Randy. A sandbagger through and through.”

At this, she makes like she’s about to go, grabbing the day pack she left a few paces away. And though I’m not sure what she meant by that comment, or where things stand between us, I choose then to forge ahead with an idea I’ve been considering all day: the only way I’ve thought of to continue unspooling this absolute riddle of a person.

“So, hey,” I say.

She turns to me, a twist of confusion on her face. “You need something?”

“Look, I know we didn’t get off to the best start. And I certainly don’t get the impression you’d ever need a few yards of sand or related accessories. All the same, I was wondering if you might consider giving me your number. I’m by New Orleans a lot and can be quite the gentleman in more everyday circumstances.”

She doesn’t speak for a few seconds. She seems to be smiling, which I interpret as positive. But when I look into her eyes, they remind me of burning coals, and if there are patterns to read in their smoldering, I don’t consider myself oracle enough to try.

“You already have it,” she says, patting me on the shoulder as she walks past. “Nice working with you this time.”

I have no response, confused as I am, but I’ll do a lot of thinking about that line in the coming weeks. That night in my hotel room, I’ll check every pocket of my sand-covered clothes for some stray note she might’ve slipped in there. The whole time, I’ll be thinking about what a fantastic story it’ll be when I find her number among all that sand, the kind worthy of a Hollywood romcom.

But there won’t be anything there. I won’t figure out what she means until weeks later, when restoration work has already started on the half-sunken island. One morning, I’ll be sitting in my Dallas apartment, cleaning up my inbox before work. There’ll be an email from my manager sitting there, and I’ll discover—to my annoyance—that it’s about Rose Isle, about Zeta. His first on the subject because, to him, my only connection to this place boils down to a few figures on a quarterly spreadsheet. And sure enough, the email will say, “really sad to see,” and “makes you stop and think,” but also, “might be good to reach out, when the time feels right, and see if our services might be of value.”

But the article he’ll link to will pique my interest, and as I read it, I’ll remember my boss’s habit of skimming past important facts. Because below its report on Zeta’s havoc, the article will detail a “series of missteps” committed by the state Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority in the lead-up to the storm. Its author will allege that an internal memo from within the Authority, written three years ago, acknowledged that the island’s levee wasn’t strong enough to withstand anything harsher than a Category 2 storm. The article will describe an ambitious project the Authority considered as a result, to revamp the island’s defenses by reinforcing the burrito levee and installing breakwaters offshore. It’ll note that the plan gained traction early on but was ultimately shelved in favor of what the author will call “vanity projects and patchwork repairs.”

As I read on, one other aspect of the column will catch my eye: a last name I’ll be positive I’ll have seen before. Overland. She’ll be the article’s main source, someone who worked closely on the levee revamp project. Someone who resigned in protest when her brainchild was scrapped. And when I scroll back up to find her full name, there it is: Tara Overland.

By this point, with my mind connecting dots it would rather leave disparate, I’ll search my inbox for her and unearth an email from two and a half years ago, one confirming all the dark possibilities sprouting in my brain. In some ways, its tone will be unfamiliar, belonging to a less jaded woman than the Tara I met, but the voice will be unmistakably hers:

 

Hi Randy,

You don’t know me, and I feel like a fool writing this, but my superiors seem to value your opinion quite highly. So, here we are.

I know you’re trying to build momentum around a beach restoration project on Rose Isle, and I’m sorry to say we’re on opposite sides there. There’s some important, potentially life-saving work that needs doing on that island concerning its hurricane defenses, which likely won’t go through if your beach deal does.

I understand you’re a businessman, with your own priorities, but I imagine we can reach a win-win arrangement here. So, please give me a call. I’d appreciate the chance to work together.

Best,

Tara Overland

Project Manager, Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority

O: (504) 555-9230 C: (504) 555-3422

 

For the first few reads, I won’t believe it’s real. I mean, sure, it’ll look familiar, but the implication behind her tactfully chosen words—that she would’ve brought me in as a supplier if I’d endorsed her project—will be so clear I’ll have difficulty accepting that I could’ve just ignored her plea. The evidence in front of me will leave no other possibility, yet that logical conclusion will be so repulsive, so contrary to everything I’ve thought myself to be, that I’ll reread her message seven, eight times in search of some complication or catch within it to explain away my actions. But no. I’ll find no such salvation. Instead, the more I stare at the email, the more I’ll realize just how easy it would’ve been to see it appear in my inbox, skim it over, and pay it no mind. How logical it would’ve been, then, to ignore her number whenever she called to follow up. How inevitable that this entire episode would slip from my memory in time.

I’ll consider calling her then. To apologize. I’ll think about it a good long while, in fact, dialing half her number several times. Eventually, though, I’ll realize I’d be doing so for my sake, not hers. So, instead, I’ll head to my apartment’s second-story balcony. It’ll be raining that day—another of those isolated thunderstorms we’ve been getting more of—and I’ll stand out there for hours, missing work entirely, searching for a rainbow that’ll never appear.

But right now, I’m on the bluff above the levee, stretching out my final moments on this doomed island to watch the Gulf dance. Behind me, some locals congratulate each other on a job well done, and my boys are yelling for me to get in the truck, but for all intents and purposes I’m alone. I find myself thinking about my hourglass joke, and I know it’s stupid, but I wish more than ever I had something like that. Because then, I could keep sandbagging as long as I need. I could fix just enough of our mistakes to help the island’s defenses hold. And maybe, if I do it all correctly, the storm would keep spinning beyond the horizon, a monstrous force forever held at bay.