NARRATIVE NOW: IGNATIUS (EAST END)
Bird cult camp looks like the aftermath of an action movie from the 1980’s–the one where the big scary hunting alien comes to Earth (some iteration of it) to do what he do: hunt. When he’s done, and when the hero has won his big pyrrhic win-not-win and shown Earth’s mettle. This, the carnage on the forest floor, is the real world referent–where nothing has been won, and there was no rhyme or reason to impose on the violence. No movie score or epilogue or after-credits explanation–just living things reduced to raw matter and rot.
The silence after violence, done first by humans, escalated by enraged birds–for many Puffin corpses litter the ground. That’s the knife-edge danger of living among Puffins, even for those that dodge death-by-ergotism and develop that degree of tolerance to fungal poisoning (and the madness that is its cost): all it takes is one dead bird, one act of violence toward them, to turn a flock into an all-consuming swarm.
Pockmark char on tree trunks and perforated treehouses suggest Consortium weapons. There’s the bloody shred-tattered half of a finely tailored suit sheered right off a Consortium man’s back to confirm the suspicion.
Lucas waits to talk his shit. Hostage in too-tight pants finds his smug. He smirks while You-You and Todd survey the carnage. He composes a gloat poem while he watches Rosa’s shoulders and back sag under the great weight–sees the woman’s hope deflate in real time.
“I can confirm what your schnoz suggests old lady. This happened a week ago. You had no fuckin’ clue. Here’s your fuckin’ rebellion ‘clown.”
June pops her Consortium hostage on the back of the head with the butt of the gun, “Say the word, Rosa. Please.” But the tired woman walks on, through the camp upwind.
“Mom, what’s the play? What do you need? What can I do?”
As momma marches upwind from the massacre at the bird camp, her voice is firm: “Find a sitting tree. Find a sleeping tree.” All five and the captive are weary, and the forest on Ignatius’ back provides. Twin Methuselahs and two load-bearing boughs low enough to hop-up to, a place to secure stilts and rest until morning.
Rosa delights in leaving Lucas hog-tied and dangling down from a tree-branch. Oh the shamed suit objects, but preacher’s wife wants any excuse to put him down, and once her daughter Cal has tazed the goon a few times, Lucas accepts his fate. Mom, You-You, and the Missionary family take stock of water and whatever snacks are in Todd’s fanny pack: a few protein bars, three half-spent canteens, and a few bottles scavenged from Bird Camp.
“Lucas dear, I’ll address you far more harshly than your teachers did, but my purpose is instructive. You know I did that for a good long while, taught? While married to the king of ‘I can fix him!’ and before You-You. I taught, the middle grades, the little crazy children–the pre-teens–that life-phase your moral and intellectual development stopped.”
A jet of threats out of Lucas mouth. “Cal?” The teenage sociopath sparks her little contact cattle-prod. Rosa continues, “Before I settled down and unfortunately settled.” Mom…”You’re a better man than him, hon. Before you and your dad, Momma had dreams.” Rosa turns back to Lucas: “See, the people your colleagues murdered were my friends. My extended chosen family. My tribe.” Bird worshiping savage. “Cal, if you please.”
When the kid has lit Lucas up (but good), Rosa begins to address the odd familial-accident around her: “When Mom, Airman, and me found the bird camp the first time. We three were in a bad way.” How bad? “Real bad. Hungry. Thirsty. Tired. Fuggin’ demoralized.”
Rosa takes her time to try to remember it right, to sift the fact and flavor, because what she’s telling is the ‘truth of it’ and the ratio of herbs and spices and facts and exaggerated-diminutions and outright lies matters so much and must be managed on the fly. This is not baking, the chemistry of the culinary arts. This is cooking Long Soup or some improvised dish, and thus, alchemy.
“I’d heard men who drank with our local Party Stooge and a couple of assholes Mom wasn’t interested in call her ‘Whore’ under their breath. But when we were running from that whole self-defense-that-look-like-murder thing that went down in our town, that was the first time I’d heard it shouted, forcefully and repeatedly.” I would’ve killed them. “I know you would’ve tried Cal. You need help, hon.” June and Todd nod agreement.
Rosa side-hugs the sociopath, talks on with kid’s head on her situational-gram-gram shoulder: “I’m an educated woman, but I’ve seen some shit and come to the rationally superstitious place. Good place to be, if you ask me.” No one asked, hag. “Lucas, I swear to god, I will turn this young one loose on you. Anyway. This island is magic.”
The old woman waits, looking at the goon trussed to tree by her custom rigged web of spare shoe-laces, belts, even his own tie. She’s daring him to call her a savage. “For good and ill, my home is magic, and I know that sounds stupid, but here we are. Good luck moving people or food or machines anywhere quickly or efficiently, but bullshit, news, rumor-gossip, and the details of everybody’s goddamn business moves across the island at the speed of C–likely in that same key.”
*
IGNATIUS 1966–UP A TREE (CONTINUED)
*
We had Yanqui in a Mao-suit, but every settlement had heard the word. Everybody here is from everywhere else, so it’s not the white-boy’s looks or features that stood out. We wandered, staggered, walked, hid and repeated for days that felt like week-years. Mom was proper lost. No plan. No route. We find a town. Walk in. They scream “Yanqui, bastard, whore” and we walk back out before the clamor calls more birds.
We got one week of peace. One week in the embrace of the solidarity of freaks and outcasts that felt like ten years. But that was the year the bombers-not-bombs rained on the People’s Republic of St. Ignatius. That was the year that second-order irony killed a lot of people and the birds took my home and broke my hollow little half-formed family.
That spring day in ’66 when the birds overran Sanctuary began with the same quiet-loud breakfast as the six previous–for the crashed bomber (Soviet) brought an air crew and a Puffin horde on their heels. As far as young Rosa was concerned, bird shrieks aside, the meal and perfect amber morning was the same as every morning since creation. The young lady did, in her innocence, believe that messy town’s tableaux was renaissance-painting permanent—from ‘today’, that fraying memory until at least the end of time.
You’ll note we didn’t write ‘naive’ because Rosa was not naive. She’d tangled with a sociopath and the first party Stooge of many. Rosa was raised by a hard woman. You wouldn’t know it to look at Lucretia, unless you knew the story about the guy in the capital (Coincidentally Rosa’s biological father. Yes, he had it coming. Mind your business). Rosa knew it, had seen it when mom needed to be hard for them to survive (a few times).
Yanqui saw the soft in Lucretia. But being young and dumb and riding that hormonal wave emanating from the fine looking woman whose thighs he shipwrecked on, Airman didn’t see the sad in-and-behind her eyes. Lucretia was more than farm-boy had ever seen. Yanqui was most naive of the three, whatever that’s worth. He’d fall into that hippy shit when he got home and discharged, but the week-that-felt-a-decade in Sanctuary was what whet his appetite. But he saw wrong, with ‘outside’ eyes. Young man didn’t know the place he came from yet (because he hadn’t returned to it changed). Yanqui didn’t know Utah, how the fuck would he see Ignatius honest?
Rosa saw Sanctuary true. Compared to the organization of the Float Farm–everything meant to push efficiency-to-productivity-to-efficiency-again. This place appeared an untended mess. But Eden had good gardeners. The tree-houses looked like bee or wasp hives–and held tended and harvested hives of the particularly-mellow Ignatian Honey Bee. The little things lived right alongside the people and did great work on the crops.
No great sheet-sails. Here, the Kokedama coils thick around great bundles of rope like ship-rigging. Rough-hewn but sturdy-enough catwalks and too-low rope bridges link the glob-homes that cling to the great-ancient-trees that were a grove before and will be after.
The smell. An East India Man wrote of the bird camp and the “savages therein” as: “having a reek of shit perpetually upon on them, bird and beast and man, so thick that it had clearly-and-permanently dulled their senses, faculties, humors, and moral fibre.”
Everywhere the birds go reeks of shit. It’s like a field trip to a farm, your brain blocks it out unless you’re shoveling or otherwise disturbing turds. Sanctuary smelled peaty and earthy fruity and weedy and beautiful. There was the sweet rot of compost (carefully contained). The peat and ground-coffee rich earth in great clay vessels–cornucopia-obelisks, great clay statue trumpets they built to grow berry bushes and god’s herbs. They sing the good news of fruit outside every hive-home’s door each morning (in season). Every vine and branch tangled over the town’s zig-zagged rigging–the great food shoelace–promised a harvest that was a small fraction of the most modest float farm’s harvest.
When the kid noted this to a Sanctuary resident the first day, as a good comrade should: “I see a lot of opportunities to improve efficiency here.” Nodding sagely, sincerely jutting her chin out toward the crop and the rigging–trying to point it at the future like a Lenin poster. The man laughed, not a bit of meanness or cruelty in it. The man laughed and passed Rosa a joint, the first she’d ever imbibe. Too young, entirely too young if I’m being honest (and reader, I am always honest). But when Rosa smoked weed the first time, that’s when time stopped. Wrong. Time studder-stepped and stretched. Time laid itself out languid, slow and easy, and a week became a span longer. In that time, she’d find plenty her own age. She’d kiss one boy and one girl and break another boy’s nose (he had it coming, don’t worry about it).
Meanwhile, Lucretia found welcome and that ever-precious solidarity-among-the-odd. Where the pace is deliberate lazy and the food is still plentiful. They could grow more food if they grew less marijuana, but they grow so much weed to satisfy the surplus the time the food bounty buys them. Time to do what? Write. Think. The old dance. Eat. “Loafe and invite the soul.” The good stuff, substance of life stuff.
The Bird People do take, with great ritual gratitude and as gently as a group of humans ever has, the honey of Ignatian bees and do marvelous things with-and-to-it. The Bird People do great things through that honey. I know next to nothing of it, if the sweet drug’s effects are natural or come from post-harvest processing or some other means. This subspecies of bee is so very desperately endangered (and every scholar that ever set out to study the bees abandoned the work to tend the bees). On the third day, the outsiders (not the Soviet aircrew) were granted the gift of a spoonful of honey and a meeting with the oracle.
In a central hive at the heart of the grove that’s not guarded but tended by other humans is a being with, at present, the head of a woman. Beside that head is the crown-crest of a man’s. Beside the remnant-residue of the man is a bump so on and so-forth down a great body-conduit. The mycorrhizal structure that is their body is tree-thick, and twitches where it has human muscle integrated into it–where it’s still chewing.
It’s revolting at first, but the empathy-with-all-things that is the hallmark of the honeyed-trip kicks in after a few horrified minutes in the presence of the melt-digested talking head they call the oracle.
Each of the three, the little shipwreck family, carried a hope and dream in their heads left unsaid. And by something the lovely-lazy local folks called ‘magic’ and I call ‘fringe science is workin’ on explaining’ and you can call whatever you like–by that magic the oracle heard their hopes.
The oracle, the woman who went into the dream to stay, relayed some glimpses back. The fungal prophet gave each in the family three a glimpse of what might, what can’t be, what-was-most-likely-to-come.
The Yanqui came out stone-faced, Rosa came out smiling. Lucretia walked out sobbing.
* NARRATIVE NOW *
“You’re story sucks.” All present threaten him, but Lucas is undeterred. “We know what fucking happens, there’s no tension.” Not the point, Lucas. “No! That’s the whole fucking point of every fucking story ever told: ‘how will they resolve the tension. How will the smart beautiful winner outwit the stupid peasants who hog-tied him.'” He won’t. “Well, then he might as well not be there.”
“I would love to make that happen.” No, Cal. No killing.
Lucas keeps ranting: “You act like what the oracle told you was some mystery to cover for the fact that your stupid, incompetent, whore of a mother.” Cal, I might change my mind on the killing. “Because you know as well as me and we listening that woman knew what was coming: the fuckin’ birds. She knew they were going to shit on your little hippy camp. She did nothing. Congrats. You’re mom was terrible, which explains your parenting and your fuckup son.”
“Are you finished?”
“I’m just getting started” and the Consortium man in tight pants rants and rages until the very moment Ulysses manages to cram a gnarly sock in his mouth as some sort of gag.
Long silence. Stale silence. “So, are we going to continue the story?”
“I don’t know that I can, after his abuse” Rosa aims the accusing finger at Lucas, places a hand on her heart. Telenovela sighs and sweeping gestures.
“Oh she can finish the story, and my mother would be happy to talk to and through judgement day.”
“And you’d be better having heard me. Oh, but you’re like your father and you don’t listen. Worse, you call me an unreliable narrator.” You’re the most reliable narrator I’ve ever known. “Thank you, Todd. I’ll bet you listen to your mother, just as Cal does.”
“Oh my god. I’m going for a walk” and those begging Momma Rosa to continue the story ignore Ulysses as he collects his stilts and a flashlight to wander off into the woods, back the way they’d come.
* IGNATIUS ’66 *
After they met the Oracle midweek, Yanqui stayed stoned and even got his hands on more of the honey. He went from amateur to professional stoner with the vigor that only those of teetotalling tribes can muster–mostly middle distancing it out into the woods like he was waiting for something to come out of them. No noticeable reaction to the shrieking bird swarm just below the lowest rope bridges.
Mom, Lucretia withdrew. The hypothermia-social. Ruin was coming, that much she knew. And you want tension? She had to sit on the secret. You get a spiel before you go to the oracle: “Don’t divulge your sacred vision. Very little offends here, but that shit sure as shit will.” They were guests at the only safe port in a storm of devouring Puffins, and she wouldn’t risk the welcome mat being pulled from beneath their feet screaming “The End is Nigh!” We’re talking the illumination profane–and end seen, but the means of it? Less clear.
The woman was a ball of wit and grit that lived at the intersection of reason and superstition. Aside from violating the one weird rule laid out to her, Lucretia knew enough woo-woo to reason that to warn people of future doom could mean becoming it’s conduit, cause, or the mechanism that delivers it. So she packed their bags, hers and the girl’s, watched and waited.
Only Rosa, occupied in her first faux-romance (with both weed and that boy whose nose she broke) did play. Each spring day stretched its legs and lingered just a bit longer than the last and the girl let it for a whole week that felt forever.
The nose blinds itself with time, and if you can convince yourself not to smell the bird reek then have I got a notion for you sell yourself: their shrieking isn’t that terrible. No really. It’s like white noise, writhing and seething, and punctuated by the sounds of Puffins mating or dying or doing unspeakable things to their own dead.
The drunk Soviet pilot. Boor bastard gave himself to the birds. That’s another local peculiarity of the Island. People end themselves everywhere, but on the island of Ignatius, even when discreet means are at hand (any number of side arms on the bomber crew or sharp things or ropes)–those that choose to go in the worst of times have a terrible tendency to give themselves to the Puffins. That’s just what he did.
The birds, given the blood of a man, got into a proper frenzy and found the enraged energy to hop and horror-fly on their little gnarly wings. Ungrateful leaps and a climbing, yearning heap, stomping and suffocating itself to climb onto the low rope ladders.
Over the mangled and maimed forms of their own number enraged and fungal mad birds poured, up every bridge and over each cat walk and into every home, hearth-hive in the place.
We know how that ended: the little family three up a tree so long they had to drink piss to keep hydrated enough to not dead-fall out of the tree that saved but couldn’t nourish. They clung on just long enough for rescue when the Bird Folk’s neighbor’s came calling for a wellness check some time after the massacre at Sanctuary.
* NARRATIVE NOW *
Rosa ended her story the same place I started and ended it: up a tree. They know the importance of silence, Ignatian bullshitters–the “una”, the hole, the pit-trap. The old lady set it perfectly, told some part of her life like a coming of age ouroboros.
Reader, you might say “bro, seems to be writing really high again”, and you’re absolutely correct. But Rosa also moved her little story chess pieces and made aesthetic moves (because that’s what humans do). “You’re overthinking it.” Reader, there’s no such thing as overthinking (that’s shit dummies say). There’s obsessing over shit that can’t be helped, but that ain’t overthinking (rather, a failure of thinking–somebody’s, somewhere somehow).
When Rosa told-re-told the chapter of her life called “Up a Tree” she turned her little walking auto-biography into a choose your adventure. She invited interpretation. The audience didn’t ask about the Cold War, or how things changed after ’66 when pissed off superpowers stopped trying to court the island. The ‘Missionary’ family didn’t inquire into Rosa’s next phase of life–from teacher to mom to her work in government. The family three didn’t even ask at the double-life the woman lead, her relationship to the Bird Folk (at least not yet).
No, all three present listeners pestered Rosa about her little catastrophe family and it’s undoing: “He just left?” June is disgusted with Yanqui Airman.
“After his time on Ignatius, bookended by brushes with death by Puffin, I suppose the boy missed home. He yearned for Utah, so to the capital he went to turn himself into whomever.”
*
END IGNATIUS 7