Stonefish

by Scott R. Jones

  I shook myself, and automatically began to think about the contents of my luggage. An old trick, inventory as distraction. The various packs: desiccants and thermokinetics for my gear, coolant gels for the clothes to regulate my temperature. Replacement filters for my respirator. The new boots, the outerwear tweaked for “the savage rainforest”. Those were actual words the distributor used as I completed my order. I told her about the missing, near-mythical rain, and she shrugged, smirked. “No rain, no floods, at least,” she said. But the savage mistforest doesn’t play as well.

  How does one play down there, I thought. What terrible games beneath the perpetual fogs, between the trees, limbs and faces black with loam, crimson, perhaps, with blood.

  I was blowing my fears out of proportion. Fighting the lithium in the air, just to be perverse, just because. Just for fun? Den Secord, Not Wired That Way. There’s no one dying below me, no grim rituals around gutted firepits. I imagined blood cults and maddened beasts but the reality? Merely the slow grind of survival, as anywhere. The fauna that called this place habitat had long since moved north, following the cooler temperatures, or gone extinct in their literal hundreds of thousands. The ones that moved in from the south were still rearranging the furniture. Modifying, molding. The Humboldt squid and the gopher snake, the fox sparrow and the Anna’s hummingbird. The great white shark. Pine beetles. Certainly no sasquatch, and probably, no Gregor Makarios.

  If that is the case, then, I wondered, why was I sitting in an air-conditioned cabin five hundred feet above that hot, needled jungle. A lead? What used to be called a hunch? Because this is what a person did for their career?

  The night before, I watched my reflection in Ceri’s eyes and shuddered. I seemed to recede into the dark depths of her pupils as we came. Her climax carried her away into a kind of blankness that I’d noticed before, but not like that. Not that sucking void that threatened to consume me.

  Three thousand kilometres. Not far at all.

  The farthest I’d ever been.

  ***

  I spent a week in the town of New Masset before I met Charlie Mack. A fruitless week, full of frustration. The town’s minimal infrastructure is such that I was repeatedly reminded of my dependence on the near-omniscience of a fully integrated noönet mesh. There are archives there, sure, noönet-based and otherwise. The library, the city hall depository, the Environmental Studies research complex. A kind of bare bones social network slash community chat suite where residents hash out their issues and host recall parties. There are even the remains of a paper archive, transferred from Old Masset before that town went under the water. I quickly learned not to confuse Old Masset with the first Masset, abandoned and submerged long before the first Spanish sails appeared on the horizon.

  Much of New Masset is above ground, but the physical archives are housed below. An annex of the library, climate-controlled and awash in the cool red filtered light common to these places, for what it’s worth. Newspapers like old skin beneath plastic film. Laughable magazines. The search system is at least robust; I quickly exhausted the material. Makarios pops up here and there, but only the sort of mentions I’d come to expect: international news, stale press releases, and editorials clutching at pearls in the wake of some new tech he was releasing, or even simply speculating about. I chuckled at some of the wording. People were excitable back in the day. It’s quaint.

  Nothing on Gregor Makarios, or Greg Mallory, and the monstrous loves of his youth, though. Nothing from that time period at all.

  The noönet current was weak in New Masset, what with the population being so small. Nothing like the full immersive flow of SoCal or the Baja Archipelago, but enough. Enough for residents to know who I was, where I came from, what I was doing. The bare bones of me, anyway. Charlie didn’t really need to have the bartender point me out, but she did. In places like this, they try to hold on to older social conventions. Who knows why.

  I watched her doing it, too. The slow lean across the bar, the toss of her sable head in my direction. The bartender’s nod, the pouring of drinks. She picked them both up, moved with patient purpose.

  “Here,” she said, and placed the glass next to mine.

  “Thanks.”

  “You that writer?”

  “Den Secord.” I held out my hand. She took it. The skin of her hand a deep, burnished copper. A roughness to her palms.

  “Charlie. Charlie Mack. You’re with New Heretic.”

  “Yes. For my sins.”

  She sat down, turned the stool, leaned back, and crossed short, powerful legs. “We don’t get many writers up here. Or, y’know, people from your neck of the woods.”

  The expression startled me and I laughed aloud. Neck of the woods. Antique, but somehow vital. I was legitimately charmed. Charlie laughed, too. Her face was full of punctuation, upper lip a parentheses, pink against the dark burning of her face.

  “This been your neck long?” I said. “Of the woods, I mean.” She laughed again. “I got that wrong, didn’t I?”

  “Maybe. Yeah, I’ve been here some time. Centuries, if you count the ancestors.”

  “Do you?”

  “Oh, you know it, Den Secord.” She raised her glass. “To the ancestors.”

  We toasted, and she took a long swallow.

  “So? What’s the story?”

  “Good question. Probably nothing,” I said. “Looking for a guy who went missing a long while back. Was thinking he might have come through here on his way to wherever he is now.”

  “Uh huh. This guy, he a cryptozoologist by any chance?”

  “That’s what I’ve been thinking. Or used to be one, in any case. Can I ask how you know that?”

  “Small town, friend. People talk.”

  “Sure.”

  “Soft warm thing like you comes through looking for monsters, people want to know what’s wrong with you.”

  I could feel the beginning of a flush beneath my skin. I finished my drink, but it went down half-wrong and I coughed. “Guess I’m not entirely used to that. People, talking.”

  “Least not in your neck, no.” Charlie smiled, drank, and like that her hand was on my knee. Briefly, the barest pressure. “Look, if you’re trying to find pugwis or the guys who hunt them, you’re going about it in the wrong way. The archives won’t tell you anything.”

  “Pugwis?”

  “It’s always men who go off into the trees to find those people, y’know? Ridiculous. But you have to ask why.”

  “Back up, please. Tell me about pugwis.”

  “Pugwis. D’sonoqua. See’atko. Matlose.” The words came out of her strange, sluicing over her lips in a slow, guttural flow, her tongue far back in her throat. “The landotter people, basically. All along this coast, we’ve had names for the thing since we arrived.”

  “The sasquatch.”

  “Oh yeah. Them too.”

  “What’s the right way to look for them, then? In this neck of the woods. If I wanted to find them.”

  “Do you?”

  “I want to find the guy who wants to find them. That’s it. Whether they exist or not makes no difference to me. I think he thinks they do. Might be my only lead, so. What’s the trick, then? Who should I be talking to?”

  “You’re talking to her.”

  ***

  Should I go on about Charlie, now? I’ve described the color and texture of her skin. Indulged in sad MFA analogies in reference to her face, the way her lips and tongue moved as she spoke. Her laconic, lazy replies. Her hand on what would be my good knee. I can imagine it still resting there and not feel it a lie. In a ganzfeld chamber I would speed past all this torrid bleakness, leave you with the certain knowledge of what occurred, flash-cut scenes emotionally top-loaded with promise and provocation, and then move on. Again, though, I’m not in a chamber. I’m here, in the shitbox, on the other side of the experience, having somehow survived, not knowing how I have. Fingers on keys is all I have.

  No. There’s zero point to it. Things h
appen. That’s how they’ve structured this reality. Of that I need to keep reminding myself. I’m complicit, of course, we all are, but still. Zero point.

  Sam. Sam, you should have given me more of the talk.

  ***

  Charlie Mack was a linguist, I learned. We drank a little more, and then left. The perpetual fog lifted with the night and a slim arc of moon sat glowing in the deep blue of the sky. It was almost pathologically dark here, I thought. Potent and primal. There could be cryptids all around, reaching for you, just feet away, their eyes on your back. Fingering your goddamn chakras. You’d never know it. Not until their breath was on your neck. She took me to her place, a toobhome of the standard type, cluttered and cozy, set back in a copse of unhealthy birch.

  Afterwards, I asked her about her name. Charlie Mack, I said, is incredibly racist, isn’t it? A colonizing name?

  “Sure enough. I took it deliberately.”

  “Jesus. Why?”

  “Mostly to piss off the elders, right? And I wrote a thesis on cultural appropriation of the oppressor as revolutionary praxis that turned some heads back in the day, so, I figured, walk the walk. Same reason your people took nigger back. Reparations.”

  A fair point and I told her so. Then I asked her what her Haida name was, but she refused to tell me.

  “It’s complicated. I could. But I’ve promised not to. I won’t go back to using it until the work is done, so, you know, probably never.”

  “And what’s that? Your work.”

  “Language reclamation. We’ve modified a chatroom and use it for recall parties but with a very specific remit. WorldBox runs twenty-four seven and all subscribers are vetted before they can enter.”

  “Vetted for what?”

  “First Nations genetics is the main filter. Ancestry. I don’t necessarily want you, see, I want your great-grandma, and her grandma, and so on back down the line. Then cultural heritage. Which by that point is pretty much the same thing. And a little of your politics. No use going in looking for the old tongue if the current one can’t stop wagging on about, shit, I don’t know. What’s top of mind in the south these days?”

  I thought about how oceanic we were. What floated to the top during any given news cycle. Six hours isn’t much to work with but the cycles blur and normalize over a week. That feeling when you in the noönet.

  “Um. Well, there’s the emoji cult scandal out of Sacramento right now. You wanna talk about tongues; they’ve started cutting out theirs. Requirement of membership now. The New Reformed Atheists are having a grand old time with that.”

  “What, the post-Dawkins bunch? Huh.”

  “Yeah, them.”

  Charlie shook her head, ran her fingers through her hair from the back of her crown over her face, then shook it all back. Her face appeared as a sliver of moon through black rain and I thought about leaving, going out into the dark again. She smiled.

  “See, that’s what I want to avoid with this project. If a potential subscriber to WorldBox has politics that makes that kind of thing interesting to them, well. They’re less useful.”

  “So, what, the personal is political now?”

  “Ugh, right? Yes. And language makes reality. I’m diving for deep layers of language and dialect. The sleeping tongues. And that requires a certain softness in the mind. Makes the descent easier. Especially if they sign the dream waiver. Which, y’know, most do.”

  “Waiver?”

  “Subscribers prefer to use the chatroom on the oneiric feeds? Frees up their waking hours. I actually prefer it; I get better targeting if they’re asleep. It can mess up your actual dreamtime, though, if that’s something you’re into.”

  “I just catch up on my shows.”

  The language was called Xaayda-Kil, I learned. Haida, if you were a colonizer. Charlie’s own ancestors (the living ones, anyway) weren’t all happy with her work.

  “I get resistance all the time. They won’t say it, but there’s a feeling in there when I talk with them about the project. Hard to define. Shame, mostly. A complicity? When a language dies, it dies of neglect.”

  “And competition, surely.”

  “That, too.”

  “What are they like. Your ancestors.”

  Charlie squirmed a little at the question. “You mean the living ones? They’re parents, you know. Grandparents. Typical old folks.”

  “I don’t, actually, but I get your meaning.”

  “The others are...” Charlie’s hands lifted into the air. Her movements became hieratic, almost. “They’re hard to quantify. They’re not like anything. Ghosts, or x-rays. Ancestral consciousness, at least in the noönet, tends to take on agreed-upon or agreeable forms.”

  “I’d love to experience it.”

  “Hm. Tricky. You want an interview?”

  “If they’ll talk, sure.”

  “They don’t. Not like you or me. They speak in emotive gestalts, but when they’re exposed to phonemes from the sleeping language they take on an increased solidity? Their frequency is tightened up a bit. Then they can be plied with either/or, one/zero type questions. It’s hard work.”

  “Sounds like a rough interview.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “Do you see them? When you’re in there with them?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad. I’ve never seen a ghost. You had my hopes up there for a second.”

  Charlie’s hands had come to a rest in her lap, but they flew up again to cradle my face and she was kissing me, suddenly, more fervently than she had while we’d fucked. My instinct was to pull away, in deference to some residual guilt, but I fought it, allowed her pressured need to banish the flash-cut scenes of the crèche from my mind. At least, as far as that was possible.

  She pushed me back into the couch. Placed her forearm against my forehead and pressed while her mouth moved on mine. She was boring into me, I felt, searching. Finally, she let up and I gasped for breath. Charlie chuckled.

  “Sharp boy from the cities wants mystery men and sasquatch and ghost elders.”

  “Am I typical? That what you’re saying?”

  “The opposite. You want to meet the elders? For real?”

  “I said so, didn’t I.”

  She jumped up, threw off the blankets. “Get dressed, get out, get some sleep. You stay here and we’ll just tire ourselves out.”

  At her door she kissed me again before fading into the darkness of her cabin.

  “Meet me at the docks in the morning.”

  ***

  She had a gap in her right eyebrow. A comma of hairless skin at the beginning of the downward curve of the orbital ridge. Maybe from a childhood scar, or a piercing gone bad. I never asked. When I think of my time with Charlie, I see that gap, and I rest there, I think. It feels like a moment of peace, of reflection on the things I believed I was, the things I thought I knew.

  After that pause, Makarios in the flesh, and the sasquatch. Sorry, the archons. The archons in their migraine intensity, the compound, and the Japanese maple. The Salientia Bridge, seething, and the Numpty, spreading. What we did to the bear, Makarios and I.

  After that pause, everything that led me to this room with a keyboard and a gun. So, Charlie, thanks for that, at least.

  ***

  I found Charlie at the end of the last pier, wrist deep in an ancient biodiesel outboard that hung precariously off the back of an equally aged Zodiac. I waved. She pulled her hands from the guts of the thing, tossed a blackened wrench into the tool box at her feet.

  “Hey there, you. Get any sleep?”

  “Sure. All caught up on my shows.”

  “Well, good. We’re not going far, but your ass is gonna get a pounding in this thing.” Charlie fitted a plastic cover to the engine, waved at a small mound of rigging and safety orange colored vests. “Grab a PFD and get in.”

  “You planning on putting me in the drink or something.”

  “No one plans that. C’mon.”

  The fumes
off the engine smelled of fry oil grease. I was briefly transported to my childhood, a visit to the last ever In-N-Out Burger in Anaheim. This was before they and others like them were all shut down with the new regs. Charlie piloted us out of New Masset harbour and into the Dixon Entrance proper. The fog had not yet settled in for the day, but I could feel the contracts between the rising sun and the humidity being negotiated.

  “You ever eat an In-N-Out burger, Charlie?”

  “In a what?”

  “Never mind.”

  She kept us close to the shore as we moved out of the bay and into the inlet proper, then steered to port to keep us close to the shore. The frayed black spear tips of submerged trees began to rise from the water. Contracts completed, the fog began to thicken the air.

  “Eventually the council just gave up on clearing the deadwood,” Charlie said. “Made sense to remove everything that went under around the harbour, but otherwise it’s a hassle.”

  The drowned trees groped the grey air like skeletal fingers, it seemed to me, and I said so.

  “Yeah. The root systems on these old growth stands were never very deep to begin with. Not a lot of topsoil in this biome, so sometimes one of these giants will just come loose from the sea floor, breach the surface like a whale. No warning, no sign. Water’s like glass, then, bam, three hundred feet of deadhead red cedar towering above you and coming down fast.”

  “No shit.”

  “Lost the mayor that way three years back. His kayak was in splinters when they found it. Not much left of him, either.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Sure.”

  The fingers disappeared in the fog, finally, and the chop beneath the Zodiac’s prow grew more aggressive. Charlie was right about the pounding. Before long everything south of my coccyx was numb and my face began to freeze in a grimace.

  “Not too much farther,” Charlie said, and she was right. Before long she steered us into a shallow estuary of reeds like straws piercing upwards through rippling mats of faintly luminous algae. The sound from the prop in the water changed, became glutinous and thick, and a rich tang of brine and iodine wafted over us as the Zodiac slowed.