South Village

by Rob Hart

  He’s embellishing a little. And damn he’s a good speaker. Even despite everything I know, it’s the kind of speech that makes me want to sign up for whatever he’s got planned. I’m still steamed up about Tim and his friends pushing us around like they did.

  The fervor dies down. Marx puts his hands on his hips and sighs.

  “Some of you may know this,” he says, his voice softer now. “Some of you, maybe not. But I lost both of my parents. These guys were working for a logging company, clearing out forest. They were throwing their cigarettes into the brush. It started a fire. I lost my parents to a company destroying the planet, and the employees who were not only complicit in that action, but careless. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of them. That I don’t wish they were here, and I didn’t have to do these things. But I owe it to them. I owe it to future generations who will be deprived of a peaceful life because of recklessness and malice.”

  Christ. How different are we, really? Both of us are carrying the loss of parents. Should I be sympathetic?

  Marx says, “We can stand outside with our signs and hope that they listen to us, but really, they’re going to be laughing. That’s all we are to them. A joke. It’s all a big game that they win in the end because it’s rigged. It’s time to do something. Hit them where it hurts. The Soldiers of Gaia are going to strike.”

  Trigger Warning Katie raises her hand.

  “When is this going down?” she asks.

  Marx’s shoulders drop.

  “That’s the problem,” he says. “Pete was in contact with the Soldiers. He had the cipher with the time, date, and location. We’re ready to translate it. I just have to get it. That asshole Ash has it.”

  “Am I really that much of an asshole?” I whisper to Aesop.

  “Yes,” he says. “Shut up.”

  “How do we get it from him?” Katie asks.

  “I’m working on that,” Marx says. “But as for right now, the thing I need to know is, who’s in? Who’s ready to strike a blow against corporate and government oppressors? Who’s ready to show them that we will not sit down and bear this? We will not accept our world being summarily destroyed to make a quick buck? Who’s with me?”

  The girl raises her hand again. Marx smiles, but she says, “What exactly are we talking about here?”

  My arm is itchy, like something is crawling on it. I reach up to scratch.

  “The time for peace is over,” Marx says. “The time for pretending like we can politely make a difference is over. The Earth Liberation Front failed. They set fire to some Hummers. But people are still buying Hummers. We’re going to make people stop laughing and pay attention. We’re going to use their own tactics against them. Desperate times, my friends. We’re going to…”

  Something moves on the edge of my vision. Long and shiny. For second I think it’s another bug, but when I slide back I’m looking into the black glass eyes of a snake.

  I jump up and yelp, completely involuntary, and I fall backward, push myself away, hitting Aesop. As I fall back toward the roadway I catch a glimpse of the faces around the fire, turned up and looking at us.

  My heart slams against the inside of my rib cage. I turn and there are more snakes, five or six, blacker than black, slithering down the sand toward us. They seem to be moving toward me, specifically.

  Aesop grabs my shirt and yanks at me. “C’mon!”

  He takes off running, up a large slope of grass, perpendicular to the roadway, toward a big beautiful house with no lights on. I follow, feeling nauseous and dizzy. Aesop gets to the house and cuts around it, into the back yard.

  He keeps running, off in the general direction of the car, using the yards as cover, sticking to the shadows. The houses mostly seem empty. The yards are all connected, long strips of grass with the occasional change in landscaping or short fences that are easy to hop.

  Aesop is faster than me, in better shape, so I pump my legs, try to keep up, struggling to breathe. I’m glad I quit smoking. My lungs have healed up enough I don’t want to immediately die. But every house we pass makes me feel like someone is building more houses, and I’ll never stop running past houses.

  I turn and check behind me, expect to see something on my heels chasing me. For a moment I forget why I’m running. My brain feels like a CD that’s skipping. The song starts again. Aesop stops, looks back at me.

  “We have to keep moving,” he says.

  “They saw us,” I manage to get out between gulps of air.

  “It was too dark up on the dune. They were all looking into the fire. They wouldn’t have seen anything but shapes.”

  “Do you think they were poisonous?” I ask.

  Aesop arches an eyebrow at me. “Were what poisonous? Listen, we have to get going. If they find our footprints they’ll get back to the car. We need to get out of here before that.”

  I stand, bend back a little to stretch, and jog after Aesop, struggling to keep up.

  “Should have walked in the surf,” Aesop says, barely breathing hard. “There’d be no footprints then. Stupid mistake.”

  My muscles are on fire when we get to the car. I run into it, fall forward and splay out onto the trunk. I fling my arms over my head, giving my lungs room to expand, and take deep breaths. Aesop climbs into the driver’s seat and I don’t even bother walking around to the other side, I open the door behind him and crawl across the back seat. Try not to puke.

  Before I’ve got the door all the way closed Aesop is tearing out of the spot, popping a U-turn, and we’re speeding down the road, not back the way we came. Someone is in the front seat with Aesop, talking to him. I sit up and check but find it’s only him. He’s navigating by the moonlight. The road is a straight shot and there’s enough light to see that things are clear, but it’s not doing great things for my nerves. My hands are shaking and I can’t seem to get them to stop. I lay back down, look at the ceiling of the car.

  “You okay back there?” he asks.

  “I don’t believe in jogging. Jogging is bullshit.”

  It’s not just my hands. Even though it’s warm in the car I’m shivering.

  “What were you talking about before?” he asks. “What was poisonous?”

  I go to answer and suddenly can’t think of his name.

  Bombay?

  No, Aesop.

  Christ, I must be tired. When did I sleep last?

  “The snakes,” I tell him. “That’s why I yelled. I’m sorry. I’ve never seen snakes out in the wild before and it was a little scary. I mean, I don’t know shit about snakes…”

  “Ash. I didn’t see any snakes.”

  “Really? There were a whole bunch of them.”

  “Oh fuck.”

  “What?”

  “Ash, how much did you used to drink?”

  “A lot?”

  “Lie back and get comfortable, okay? Try to relax.”

  Aesop stops the car on the road behind camp. Probably too risky to go through the main entrance. That makes sense. He turns off the engine and the ceiling of the car disappears and it’s black. I sit up and look out the window, see shadows moving around us, the outline of faces peeking into the car window. I blink hard, thinking they’ll go away, and they don’t.

  Aesop turns to me and says, “We need to go.”

  “We can’t get out here,” I tell him. “There are people outside.”

  “Fuck,” he mutters under his breath.

  He gets out of the car and clicks on a flashlight. The shapes retreat behind him. I can still see them. I don’t understand it. Who they are, or why they’re waiting out there in the dark. Aesop opens the door and drops down into a crouch, so he’s looking me in the eyes.

  “Do you know what delirium tremens is?” he asks.

  “Alcohol withdrawal.”

  He nods, slowly. A finger curls out of the darkness, brushes his face, retreats. He doesn’t move, like he didn’t feel it, but I see the hand coming again so I slide across the seat, away from him. From it.r />
  “You have to trust me,” he says. “Can you come with me?”

  There’s a flash of movement at the corner of my vision. Shiny black bugs crawl up from the floor onto the seat, and I figure now is a good time to go. I scramble out and stand in the clearing next to the car.

  There are whispers out in the forest. Asking me questions I don’t want to answer. Something grabs my hand. I try to get away, sure that it’s the mouth of some terrible insect latching on, but it’s Aesop, his fingers entwined in mine. He points his flashlight into the woods, the circle of blue light like a path of safety we can follow.

  “You’re seeing things,” he says. “Hallucinating. I promise you, it’s safe.”

  I know it is. I know it’s safe. I’ve walked these woods in the dark, never been stalked, never had bugs crawl up in great waves. There are no people out there. I know that intellectually. But I see them. I hear them.

  Aesop walks, holding my hand tight, pulling me after him. I follow the tunnel of light, the world around me coming unglued, dripping down around us. The voices grow louder. Some of them sound familiar, some of them new. Children and men. Songs and poems. Threats and promises.

  The two voices I don’t hear are the ones I want to hear. The two faces I don’t see are the ones I always feel watching me. I wish Chell and my dad were here, even if they were judging me. Even if they were upset with me. I need them right now. Maybe they finally got tired of me.

  Aesop clicks off the flashlight and I feel myself floating in the black. He leads me through something, a giant spider web that wraps around my body. No, fabric, drawing itself across me like a hand.

  A light clicks on. White-blue rope light, wrapped around the room at the tops of the walls. We’re someplace familiar, someplace I feel like I was not too long ago. There are things crawling on the walls. I try to back out and Aesop grabs me, shakes his head.

  He pulls my shirt over my head and douses me with water. The water feels good, and then it doesn’t and I’m shivering. Aesop pushes me down on a chair. Something crunches underneath me.

  “Do you trust me?” he asks.

  I nod at him, because I think that’s what I’m supposed to do right now.

  He hands me a coffee mug full of water. I cradle it in both hands.

  “Drink that,” he says. “Slow.”

  I hear the word slow and I know what it means but I throw it back in one big gulp anyway, immediately retch it all onto the ground. He takes the mug from my hands, refills it from a pitcher, gives it back. There are things moving under the surface of the water so I offer it back to him.

  “I can’t drink this,” I tell him.

  “What do you see?” he asks.

  “Bugs.”

  “Are there more bugs in the room?”

  I nod toward the wall next to us, where shiny black roaches are crawling from some unseen crack. Aesop slams his hand against the wall. Nothing happens to the bugs. His hand goes through them.

  “You’re seeing things,” he says. “There’s no one in here but the two of us. Do you understand that? Can you concentrate on my hand?”

  I look back down at the water and it’s clear. Up at the wall, and it’s clear, too. I take a tentative sip, focus on keeping it down. Breathe in and out. My vision is clear for the moment but I can still hear the voices, like there’s a group of people crowded around the dome, whispering at me through the walls.

  Aesop is rooting around, doing things with his hands I can’t see because his back is turned to me. I want to ask him about the void. Maybe I have caught the nihilism that’s been going around. I thought it was a fever.

  He turns with another mug. I think he’s taken the mug out of my hands but I’m still holding the mug that I was holding. It’s a different mug, clay and painted, like a kid would make in kindergarten class. There are curls of black smoke coming off the top of it.

  He pulls a chair until it’s sitting across from me and sits on the praying mantis that had been sitting on the chair and holds the mug out to me. The black surface of the liquid bubbles.

  “If you can get this down I won’t have to take you to the hospital,” he says.

  That sounds like a challenge.

  He hands me the mug and it’s hot. His hands are still on the mug with mine and our fingers touch. He helps me press it to my lips and it smells like feet. That makes me think too much about feet—Crusty Pete liked feet—so the hot liquid dribbles off my mouth and down my face.

  “Ash, you need to drink this. Please.”

  I hear his voice but I don’t see him. Aesop has disappeared into the void, my vision swallowed up by black liquid that bubbles up from every surface of the room.

  Sip a little.

  And a little more.

  The world gets hazy, disappearing into tufts of black smoke.

  A sliver of sunlight hits me in the face. I wake up fast, like coming out from a nightmare, but I can’t remember what the nightmare was. My stomach feels like someone is pushing their fist from the other side, trying to turn it inside out. I stumble toward the door of the bus, push through, fall to my hands and knees in the dirt.

  A little liquid comes up. Not much, but I keep heaving. I arch my back, look up at the canopy, sunlight pouring through the leaves into the clearing. Beautiful, all the pain and existential dread aside.

  My stomach feels raked, my throat raw, my head three sizes too small. My skin is sticky with dried sweat, my shirt gone but my pants damp. I press my hand to the crotch and I think I might have pissed myself. I’m not even sure. I don’t know how I got to the bus.

  There’s a crunch behind me. I turn and it’s Aesop, bleary-eyed, shirtless, holding a bottle of water. He comes around to the front of me and sits in the dirt, unspins the cap, puts it down. I come off my knees and sit in the dirt across from him and pick it up.

  “Small sips,” he says. “You need to get that down. You’re dehydrated. I can’t believe you even have any sweat left in you, given how much leaked out of you last night.”

  “How do you know…”

  “I stayed. Made sure you didn’t have a seizure.”

  “You…”

  His name escapes me for a second.

  Then I remember, “Aesop.”

  He nods. “Good. What’s your name?”

  “Ashley. Ash.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Georgia. South Village.”

  “Who was the lead singer of Guns and Roses?”

  “Axl Rose.”

  “Who was the ninth president of the United States?”

  “I wouldn’t know that even if I had my shit together.”

  Aesop sighs. “William Henry Harrison. Who was the first president?”

  “George Washington.”

  “Okay. We’re on the right track.”

  I take a small sip of water. My stomach revolts. I close my eyes, lean forward, hold it down.

  “You gave me something last night,” I tell him. “What did you give me?”

  “Valerian root tea,” he says. “It’s a holistic alternative to benzodiazepines, which are generally used to treat DTs. Best we had handy.”

  “What now?”

  “DTs affects everyone differently,” he says. “The fact that you didn’t have a seizure last night and you’re mostly lucid right now is a very good sign. How do you feel? Are you still hallucinating?”

  I look at Aesop. At the forest around us. I think I see the world as it is. In the bright light, it all looks laid out bare. Quiet, no voices but ours. Occasionally something shimmers on the edge of my vision. Or on his chest, the jumble of tattoos shuddering, like they’re struggling to take on life but failing.

  “A little,” I tell him. “My vision is wonky. But no bugs, no snakes. And I feel tired. Like you know how your brain feels when you’ve been up for two straight days? Like that.”

  “To be expected. But all good signs.”

  “So I’m past it?”

  He laughs. “Fuck no. The next co
uple of days, you’re going to feel muddy. You’ll definitely hear some weird shit, maybe still have the stray hallucination. Hopefully nothing as bad as last night. But it tends to be worse at night, anyway.”

  I take another look at the bus. There’s a string of prayer flags hanging over the door. I nod over toward them. “Those are new.”

  “I put them up last night,” he says. “There were some extra in the medical dome. There are always extra lying around. Figured it would give me something to do, and anyway, you could use it.”

  “What do they mean?”

  Aesop looks up at them, like he’s studying each one in turn. “The five colors represent the five elements. Blue for sky, white for clouds, red for fire, green for water, yellow for earth. Tibetan medicine promotes the balance of those five elements. And as the wind travels over them, the air is purified by the mantras written on them.”

  “Do you really believe that?” I ask.

  “Better to believe in something than nothing. And they certainly aren’t going to make you feel any worse.” He stands up and reaches out his hand. I take it and he pulls me to my feet. “I’ll show you how to make the tea. It’ll help. Sipping on it during the day should help mellow you out, and have some before bed, to help you sleep. Couple of days, you should be a little better.”

  “Given last night, I don’t think we have a couple of days.”

  “We’ll get to that. Let’s take it slow today. Tea and food first.”

  He turns and leads me toward camp. We step up on the boardwalk and I pass over a board that says: I am improving each day.

  A little beetle comes up through the slats in the wood. I don’t know if it’s real or not, and it scuttles back down between the boards before I can check with the toe of my shoe.

  The yoga clearing and the public art project are empty. Like the camp has suddenly been abandoned. Aesop leads me into the clearing between the domes, where Katashi is reading a book, and Alex is nestled on Job’s lap in an Adirondack chair. Aesop brings me to the steps leading up into the kitchen.