Marshsong

by Nato Thompson

  “I love the name,” said Isabella.

  “Yes, it is charming. Anyway, phantom limb is this bizarre occurrence where someone who loses a limb still feels it there, even gets pain in it, even though it is gone. Bizarre really. But alas, a moment of inadequate programming, right? Right. The mind is donating clues to us monks, if we are listening, that is. So, we have done some studies to not only cure phantom limb but to investigate it. In some cases, you could rub a phantom limb victim on the nose with a cotton swab and they will feel it on their missing limb. Why is this? Aha! In other cases, victims are cured by seeing a mirrored reflection of their one remaining limb in the place of their lost limb. A simple optical illusion becomes therapeutic. These clues have led us to an amazing finding. Our recent studies have shown that much of what produces phantom limb is the result of the mapping of senses on the mind. I’m talking about the actual layout on the mind map, see? The figure of the homunculus being an easy depiction. The homunculus is a grotesque character who reflects the actual mind space dedicated to certain sensory areas on the body.”

  “Homunculus, huh? He is the embodiment of the mind map, is that what you said?”

  “Well, yes, but it really is just a visual aid of course. Nothing rigorous. Anyway, his body is shaped with big feet, wide eyes and an enormous nose.”

  “An enormous nose, huh? So, your studies have told you that the mind is mostly dedicated to smell?”

  “I suppose you could interpret it like that.”

  “I don’t need to,” Isabella said. “It’s quite obvious to anyone who is paying attention.”

  “Well, anyway, that is what I mean by learning how the mind works. We are doing studies, but the mind is beguiling,” he said.

  “But what I mean is: how do you know the mind works at all?” she asked.

  “Well, I suppose it depends on what you mean by the term ‘works’. If you mean that your basis for criteria was that a person was still able to breathe and eat, then right, most people’s minds work. If you mean that people are able to hold down a job and feed their children, then most but not all people’s minds work. Or if you mean that people are able to know why we are in this marsh, then well, no one’s mind works. So, to answer your question in classic Coriander style: it all depends.”

  “So, what is the collective feeling on that around here?” she asked.

  Quiet again. He got up from the bed and moved to the door. “Personally, of course, we are all mad. I will grab you a Coriander guide to phantom limb.”

  Isabella slept a lot. The sickness had really taken a toll on her. Just a few days past it was her brother in sickness recovery. Now it was her turn, but without Fennel to take care of her—only this monk with a moustache, his inquisitive eyes and silence augmenting his good old attire. She wasn’t accustomed to dreaming, but rolling about in the bed she lived somewhere between sleep and waking.

  In her haze, her anxieties painted gruesome portraits: Fennel with yellow mad eyes, his sneer growing to consume his boyish face; the sounds of the mad making a chorus in the sea salt air; Savina drunk in her rickety home; the Duke supine in front of the altar, a bull in front of flame; Minasha painting a ring of blood, a stained finger of gristle and hair; the Persembes scampering around blind, a trio of lost frantic sea gulls; Castilla eating the city with fork and knife precision; Doctor Eldridge Never sitting in a high throne of manila folders, scribbling notes on this wrinkly skin; and Marty McGuinn, laughing hysterically in a rocking chair with the shears leaning against the broken wood porch railing. Isabella felt crazy. She had come so close. She had to leave. These fevered dreams haunted her waking life.

  She rubbed her eyes to notice Harrison sitting in a chair quietly reading a book. She hadn’t heard him come in, but that mattered not. As she came to the world, he put his book gently on the bedside table and lit up a pipe. The apple tobacco filled the room in a puff. He picked up a note from the table and looked it over.

  “You can not leave,” Harrison said plainly, scanning the note. “I am not sure what it is that you have done, but it is our direct command to retain you here in our care.” His fingers held the note plainly, his eyes unmoved.

  “So be it,” Isabella said and shook the visions from her head. She pushed herself up on her pillows. “It is not as though I am eager to get back to my UPS duties anyway. Package delivery vs. resting in bed. Hmmm . . . I think I will go with sleep for now.”

  “Those are not quite your options,” Harrison said, putting the note in his pocket. He went over to the bureau and pulled out a small mustard yellow robe. “You’re to begin work with the order today. This life is short. The questions are tall. There is little time to waste.”

  “What about my book on phantom limb?” asked Isabella. She tried not to take too seriously Harrison’s prognosis. There must be worse things than being a captive of the School of the Divine Line. She wasn’t much for sleeping in any way and although being incarcerated wasn’t necessarily pleasing, she was more than happy to learn about these prodigious monks.

  “I have brought two books on that subject as well as the report on flooding. I believe you will see the beauty in this wisdom.”

  “You misunderstand me, Harrison, “ Isabella said, snatching the robe from his hand. “I appreciate the beauty already. Humor and irony are not without its aesthetics. I am enamored. Now, if you will excuse me, I need to get ready for a productive work day.”

  Harrison left the room.

  After he departed, Isabella gingerly placed her feet on the sandy floor. How long had she been in that bed? She couldn’t say. Time seemed to be disappearing for her. The floor felt good on the contact with her toes and she lifted herself up to stand. She was still weak, but not too weak to stand. She didn’t want to be in that bed much longer. Lying around wasn’t exactly her style. She lifted up the robe on the bed. It was small. She would look like a yellow Star Wars' Jawa. The thought made her laugh.

  But it was short-lived. Her laughter lacked its echo. He would have loved this. The old Fennel. The one before the fever. But this new one? The vision of Fennel’s psychotic yellow eyes terrified her and sent a shiver down her spine. What had he become?

  She placed the robe over her body, tucked the thought away and headed out the door. And so began her ordeal with the School of the Divine Line. Isabella had been sent to work with the new recruits—the young acolytes of the School who had yet to graduate into actual Coriander monks. A prep school for the holy. They were proper and straight and boring and Isabella steered clear of them as much as possible. It helped, to some degree, that she could sense there had been some kind of order to steer clear of her as well. She was a pariah with her only companion the occasional visits and ruminations of Harrison.

  There had been some odd moments in the beginning when the monks seemed determined to figure out who and what she was. They had tried their best to get their inventions to assist in their discovery of the truth.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  The polygraph's arm stretched long against the graph paper.

  “Where were you born?”

  “In a cave against moonlight in a pleasing spray of marshsong.”

  The line created a mountain.

  Isabella was tickled purple by the ineffectiveness of the polygraph—steel arms and voltage that reached into her every word. She liked watching the polygraph make mountain ranges on the gridded paper. The monks stared at her with blank eyes. No reaction. But the machine was ever so different. Her answers seemed to provide it personality. She laughed as they asked their questions knowing that her humor was a one-way street.

  They had also asked her to take a personality test. Using a series of questions, she had to fill in with a number two pencil whether the answer was A, B, C or none of the above. She did her best to answer the questions. Do you prefer many friends with brief contact or a few friends with more lengthy contact, you prefer to be alone, or none of the above? With every question, Isab
ella felt compelled, much to her and the monk’s chagrin, to simply go with the only obvious answer: none of the above.

  It wasn’t long until the tests to figure her out came to a standstill and she found herself relegated to being a small workhorse on the digging routine. Her average workday, however, turned out to not be quite as exciting, nor as illuminating as she had hoped. The topic: dinosaur bones. Paleontology. A large dig way out in the Scanderville range. Each morning she had to wake up, head to the Charibean Hall for breakfast and go right on out on the mules toward the dig site. Yes, she had to be awake during the day—something that didn’t sit well with her biology or psychology. She felt clouded. It took much work and the sun blinded her. Her skin was pale. It shouldn’t see the sun. But it did, and it baked.

  Each morning, she sat on the far side of the room away from the rest of the acolytes with a few older monks slurping soup in total boredom. And with each day, Isabella’s boredom grew.

  “Is it possible for me to walk out of here? Maybe take a walk to the Calliope district to get some decent grape juice?” she had asked a bald eagle-nosed monk during breakfast.

  “You are to stay with us for one month. Be quiet now,” the monk had said as though he was reading from a script.

  Isabella focused her attention back on the grey soup. Okay. For now I will toe the line, she thought. She looked up as one of the monks gave notes for the day’s dig: Bones, Digging, Sites, Schedules, Methods.

  Did dinosaurs excite her? Initially yes, they did—large lumbering beasts that bordered on mythology. Their behemoth size and adoringly reptilian natures provided clues to entirely other forms of existence.

  “Fennel obviously did not know what was in store for me here,” she mused.

  Her heart grew warm thinking of him. She pictured him listening to the descriptions of the brachiosaurus and its relentless spiked tail and appetite for plums. He would go bananas. That face of his, the Raven's had so maligned his thoughts of her. Would it remain? His newfound anger put chills in Isabella’s heart. Ice cold.

  Dinosaurs are all dead. Their skin has gone flakey and joined the sedimentary layers of the Earth’s historical crust. By piercing the earth’s skin, a digger travels in time, at least with a shovel or pick or hoe. Isabella realized this on her fourth day of shoveling in a small mining camp along the Scanderville Range. Her own skin, once a milkish pale, now was crimson and flaking much in the same manner as the dinosaurs she was trying to find.

  Brontosaurus, terrasaurus, brachiosaurus, stegosaurus, these names, these phyla, these genomes, these species, ordering, number cataloguing, dating, arranging, codifying, milking the bone of time.

  Somehow this repetitive and tiresome affair of dino digging had dragged Isabella off course (and she didn’t seem to care). While she wondered how twisted Fennel’s lips were becoming, she knew Marty was out there, squeezing lemons and boiling a broth of her eventual disciplining. The Duke and Savina were ghosts in her veins and the thought of them brought a fever in her heart. These monks and their digging! What a bucket of tools they were. Their infinitely deduced sensibilities managed to pick the locks of the world and not necessarily shut them down. She was fascinated with their hijinks. Nets could be used to bring down the most agile butterflies. Carved lenses could magnify the most remote region of saliva.

  So far all that had been located were some cigarette packs and some fishing line. The plastic coating on the fishing line being so miraculously unbiodegradable that it acted as a time capsule in the soil, but to find some simple bone—four days and nothing substantial.

  The crew captain’s whistle blew and the day was officially coming to an end. Her hands were sore from the repetitive action. Blisters crept up on her tiny toes. Her eyelids were weighed down from the accumulation of red magnesium dirt in the air.

  “It is time we rest now,” said Monk Blethel. His eyes showed a hint of something incredible called nothing. “Your work is appreciated. Bone revelations take time.”

  The Monk picked her up and put her on his horse. They slowly trotted back to base camp. Isabella looked at her hands and appreciated their depleted state.

  “I’ve really been such an aristocrat for far too long,” she thought. “It’s good I finally do something. I really am so stupid.”

  Her hands were blistered and her meals were crap. It wasn’t enjoyable, and yet, it was. For now. Like all her adventures, she was dancing with its exoticism. But it was more. It was the call of those songs that Marty had taught her. It was the gurgle of the Aliber and trickle of the creeks that had summoned the olive juice joy in her eyes. She was its victim. And lately, she had found newer, weightier tributaries that were leading further from the porn shack grumbling of Marty (and Fennel). She had heard new symphonies far greater than the muddy carnivals and boatmen. The Duke knew. Savina knew. The boat knew. Parts of the world sang with such sweet tremulous sorrow, such a deep roar of the bottom of the sea, that she could only follow their call. But to where? She could not stay here with the monks. She had to get back to the castle.

  Isabella looked up. The sun was rusted butter spread across the searing wafer sky. The clink clank of water cups being pulled from the monks' pouches mixed with the scratchy thud of horse hooves in dust. She wasn’t going back to the cave. Ever again. A clear channel opened up inside her—a vacuous space that held no fear nor joy, a space of possibility that filled her and put electricity at the ends of her fingers. Where would she go? What would she do? Her thoughts turned to Savina. She would simply crawl in her bed, rest on her pillow and let Savina blow whiskey breath into her face.

  On the tenth day, Harrison arrived to join the crew. He had arrived because a dinosaur had been found. Not a moment too soon either. Isabella was absolutely bored to tears with the digging plan. She had been mumbling to herself for the past three hours to pass the time.

  “Good afternoon, Isabella,” Harrison said, getting off his horse. “I thought you might want join me as we head over to the bone find.”

  “Bone find?” Isabella asked. “Does this mean we can quit? Harrison, I don’t mind telling you that my patience for this field trip is quite at an end.”

  Harrison began walking over the ridge and Isabella followed. Her back was sore from digging and she couldn’t care less about the bones of a dinosaur. Yet, alas, there it was. Big. Purple. Crystalline. Bone. She gazed at it down in the pit. Monks were dusting and dating in a whirl. Yellow ribbon was being laid out to provide a clear space. Harrison produced some instruments and began taking soil samples.

  “Millions of years ago there was a large lake here in the midst of a massive desert—a massive feeding ground for creatures from far and wide. Barrenwood and its marshes were the furthest things from these dinosaurs' minds. And now, we have this incredible find. You realize, Isabella, that this bone find might be an important piece in our understanding of these long lost ages?”

  Isabella was impressed. The bone was massive and its contours strong. It was a ligament of an enormous proportion. Of course, this would help the monks. A large nodular edge protruded from the magnesium soil and hinted at a landing accomplished long, long ago. The strange aubergine hue sparkled with crystalline elements and the entire feeling was of crushed time.

  “It makes you want to fold time, Harrison,” Isabella said as she leaned back on her heels. “This creature is still falling to the ground. It hasn’t stopped. Its bones are pushing to get as deep into the molten core of the planet as possible and we are falling in with it. Harrison, I dearly respect the pursuit for this creature, but I suspect that an even more pleasurable task would be to dig up your own bones.”

  “Dear Isabella, I haven’t the foggiest notion of what you are saying, but I am glad you can appreciate this find. There is something important I must tell you.”

  Isabella interrupted. “I will be honest with you, Harry. Understanding that dinosaurs walked the planet is indeed interesting, but, believe me, much of those answers that you look for are in already in y
our skin and nose. And while I find your pursuits enjoyably thorough, I find it completely in cahoots with all the other myopic forms of past time that seem to drive you people.” She looked closely into his serene face and began to smirk. “You don’t believe it either. Ah, that’s funny, Harrison. You don’t particularly know what you’re doing and you spend more time trying to repress that than thinking about anything else. Well, if that is the case, you should at least not drag me into it. Surely, since this lump of calcium has been acquired, I am free to go.”

  He looked at her inquisitively and a dark look came into his eyes. “What you say may be true. I honestly can’t say for sure. But this discovery, in fact, doesn’t release you. I’m afraid to say, I have just received word that you are set to be a long term resident here at the School. It isn’t in our nature to kidnap people, but it has been ordered that you are to remain in our care for the next few years. I am so sorry.” He turned his head and headed back into the pit.

  Isabella was stunned. She looked into the sky and saw the screaming ice blue of these overzealous men. Basta! Isabella kicked a rock at Harrison and laughed.

  “The time has come for me to obliterate this charade. While you and your consorts while away picking the lint off your own tombstones, I am saying adieu. I do not say goodbye out of any anxiety for what you proverbially describe as an extended stay, but in fact because I have pressing matters to attend to back in that slum known as Barrenwood. I say to you in an earnestness so uncomplicated and true that I am bored to tears.”

  She picked up some rocks and hurled them into the bodies of the digging monks.

  “Take your greedy paws off time!”

  The monks and their security squadron descended upon Isabella. Her stomach still hurting from the illness, she fled into the hills towards who knows what. Her small feet trampled the red dirt and with each step, she felt a greater urgency to cross over the distant mountains stretching out along the edge of the horizon—an out there that seemed to never arrive soon enough. The sickness welled up in her with every step. She only had run two hundred yards when her stomach doubled over. This infernal nausea. The bile piled up like a compost mountain. Her eyes watered and she fell to the ground. As she lay on the dirt earth ground, with coriander robes surrounding her, she licked the salt off her lips and said, “You don’t win. Don’t ever think that. I just feel terrible. Perhaps I am a monk after all.”