Orange World and Other Stories

by Karen Russell

  “Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  “Let’s go back inside.”

  In the end, the three of them settle on a compromise: they dance in the empty parking lot, under stars that shoot eastward like lateral rain.

  For a second, the Joshua tree can feel its grip on the host weakening. The present threatens its existence: the couple’s roaring happiness might dislodge the ghostly tree. So it renews its purchase on the girl, roots into her memory.

  “Remember our first day, Andy? The hike through Joshua Tree?”

  Compared with that, Angie thinks, what is there for us in the present? “Nostalgia,” we are apt to label this phenomenon. It is the success of the invading plant, which seeks only to anchor itself in the past. Why move forward? Why move at all?

  * * *

  “Is this the spot? Are you sure?”

  Andy spreads out the blanket. A soft aura surrounds the low moon, as if the moon itself were dreaming. The red halo reminds him of a miner’s carbide lantern.

  At first, when the girl suggested that they drive out to the park, he felt annoyed, then scared; the light was in her eyes again, eclipsing the girl she’d been only seconds earlier. But once he’d yielded to her plan, the night had organized itself into a series of surprises, the first of which was his own sharp joy; now he finds he’s thrilled to be back inside the Black Rock Canyon campground with her. (The Joshua is also pleased, smiling up through Angie’s eyes.) It is her idea to retrace the steps of their first hike to Warren Peak. “For our anniversary,” she says coolly, although this rationale rings hollow, reminds Andy of his own bullshit justifications for taking out a lease on a desert “bungalow.” He does not guess the truth, of course, which is that, slyly, the Joshua tree is proliferating inside Angie, each of its six arms forking and flowering throughout her in the densest multiplication of desire. Leap, Leap, Leap. For months it has been trying to drive the couple back to this spot. Its vast root brain awaits it, forty feet below the soil.

  Angie has no difficulty navigating down the dark path; the little flashlight around her neck is bouncing like a leashed green sun. Her smile, when she turns to find Andy, is so huge that he wonders if he wasn’t the one to suggest this night hike to her. Something unexpected happens then, for all of them: they reenter the romance of the past.

  Why didn’t we then…, all three think as one.

  Quickly that sentiment jumps tenses, becomes:

  Why don’t we now…

  When they reach the water tank, which is two hundred yards from the site of the Leap, Angie asks Andy to shake out the blanket. She sucks on the finger she pricked.

  Around the blanket, tree branches divide and braid. They look mutinous in their stillness. Andy can see the movie scene: Bruce Willis attacking an army of Joshuas. He is imagining this, the trees swimming across the land like sand octopuses, flailing their spastic arms, when the girl catches his wrist in her fingers.

  “Can we…”

  “Why not?”

  Why didn’t we, Andy wonders, back then? The first time they walked this loop, they were preparing to do plenty. Andy unzips his jeans, shakes the caked-black denim off like solid dust. Angie is wearing a dress. Their naked legs tangle together in a pale, fleshy echo of the static contortionists that surround their blanket. Now the Joshua tree loves her. It grows and it flowers.

  Angie will later wonder how exactly she came to be in possession of Andy’s knife. Its bare blade holds the red moon inside it. She watches it glimmer there, poised just above Andy’s right shoulder. The ground underneath the blanket seems to undulate; the fabric of the desert is wrinkling and flowing all around them. Even the Joshua trees, sham dead, now begin to move; or so it seems to the girl, whose blinded eyes keep stuttering.

  The boy’s mouth is at the hollow of the girl’s throat, then lower; she moans as the invader’s leaves and roots go spearing through her, and still he is unaware that he’s in any danger.

  I can Leap back, the plant thinks.

  Angie can no longer see what she is doing. Her eyes are shut; her thoughts have stopped. One small hand rests on Andy’s neck; the other fist withdraws until the knife points earthward. Down, down, down, the invader demands. Something sighs sharply, and it might be Andy or it might be the entire forest.

  Leap, Leap, Leap, the Joshua implores.

  * * *

  What saves the boy is such a simple thing. Andy props himself up on an elbow, pausing to steady his breath. He missed the moment when she slid the knife from the crumpled heap of his clothing; he has no idea that its blade is sparkling inches from his neck. Staring at Angie’s waxy, serious face, he is overcome by a flood of memories.

  “Hey, Angie?” he asks, stroking the fine dark hairs along her arm. “Remember how we met?”

  One of the extraordinary adaptive powers of our species is its ability to transmute a stray encounter into a first chapter.

  Angie has never had sticking power. She dropped out of high school; she walked out of the GED exam. Her longest relationship, prior to falling for Andy, was seven months. But then they’d met (no epic tale there—the game was on at a hometown bar), and something in her character was spontaneously altered.

  He remembers the song that was playing. He remembers ordering another round he could not afford—a freezing Yuengling for himself, ginger ale for her. They were sitting on the same wooden stools, battered tripods, that had supported the plans and commitments of the young in that town for generations.

  The Joshua tree flexes its roots. Desperately, it tries to fix its life to her life. In the human mind, a Joshua’s spirit can be destroyed by the wind and radiation fluxes of memory. Casting its spectral roots around, the plant furiously reddens with a very human feeling: humiliation.

  What a thing to be undone by—golden hops and gingerroot, the clay shales of Pennsylvania!

  It loses its grip on her arm; the strength runs out of her tensed biceps.

  The girl’s fingers loosen; the knife falls, unnoticed, to the sand.

  The green invader is displaced by the swelling heat of their earliest happiness. Banished to the outermost reaches of Angie’s consciousness, the Joshua tree now hovers in agony, half forgotten, half dissolving, losing its purchase on her awareness and so on its own reality.

  “What a perfect night!” the couple agrees.

  Angie stands and brushes sand from her dress. Andy frowns at the knife, picks it up.

  “Happy anniversary,” he says.

  It is not their anniversary, but doesn’t it make sense for them to celebrate the beginning here? This desert hike marked the last point in space where they’d both wanted the same future. What they are nostalgic for is the old plan, the first one. Their antique horizon.

  Down the trail, up and down through time, the couple walks back toward the campground parking lot. Making plans again, each of them babbling excitedly over the other. Maybe Reno. Maybe Juneau.

  Andy jogs ahead to their loaner getaway vehicle.

  The Black Rock Canyon campground is one of the few places in the park where visitors can sleep amid the Joshua trees, soaking up the starlight from those complex crystals that have formed over millennia in the desert sky. Few of these campers are still outside their tents and RVs, but there is one familiar silhouette: it’s the ranger, who is warming his enormous feet, bony and perfectly white, by the firepit. Shag covers the five-foot cactus behind him, which makes it look like a giant’s mummified thumb.

  “You lovebirds again!” he crows, waving them over.

  Reluctantly, Andy doubles back. Angie is pleased, and frightened, that he remembers them.

  “Ha! Guess you liked the hike.”

  For a few surreal minutes, standing before the leaping flames, they talk about the hike, the moths, the Joshua woodland. Andy i
s itching to be gone; already he is imagining giving notice at the saloon, packing up their house, getting back on the endlessly branching interstate. But Angie is curious. Andy is a little embarrassed, in fact, by the urgent tone of her questions. She wants to hear more about the marriage of the yucca moth and the Joshua—is theirs a doomed romance? Can’t the two species untwine, separate their fortunes?

  Andy leaves to get the truck.

  And the pulse event? Have the moths all flown? Will the Joshua tree die out, go extinct in the park?

  A key turns in the ignition. At the entrance to Black Rock Canyon, Andy leans forward against the wheel, squinting through the windshield. He is waiting for the girl to emerge from the shadows, certain that she will do so; and then a little less sure.

  “Oh, it’s a hardy species,” the ranger says. His whiskers are clear tubes that hold the red firelight. “Those roots go deep. I wouldn’t count a tree like that out.”

  Bog Girl: A Romance

  The young turf cutter fell hard for his first girlfriend while operating heavy machinery in the peatlands. His name was Cillian Eddowis, he was fifteen years old, and he was illegally employed by Bos Ardee. He had celery-green eyes and a stutter that had been corrected at the state’s expense; it resurfaced whenever he got nervous. “Th-th-th,” he’d said, accepting the job. How did Cillian persuade Bos Ardee to hire him? The boy had lyingly laid claim to many qualities: strength, maturity, experience. When that didn’t work, he pointed to his bedroom window, a quarter mile away, on the misty periphery of the cutaway bog, where the undrained water still sparkled between the larch trees. The intimation was clear: what the thin, strange boy lacked in muscle power he made up for in proximity to the work site.

  Peat is harvested from bogs, watery mires where the earth yawns open. The bottom is a breathless place—cold, acidic, anaerobic—with no oxygen to decompose the willow branches or the small, still faces of the foxes interred there. Sphagnum mosses wrap around fur, wood, skin, casting their spell of chemical protection, preserving them whole. Growth is impossible, and Death cannot complete her lean work. Once cut, the peat becomes turf, and many locals on this green island off the coast of northern Europe still heat their homes with this peculiar energy source. Nobody gives much thought to the fuel’s mortuary origins. Cillian, his mother, and several thousand others lived on the island, part of the archipelago known to older generations as the Four Horsemen. It’s unlikely that you’ve ever visited. It’s not really on the circuit.

  Neolithic farmers were the first to clear the island’s woods. Two thousand years later, peat had swallowed the remains of their pastures. Bogs blanketed the hills. In the Iron Age, these bogs were portals to distant worlds, wilder realms. Gods traveled the bogs. Gods wore crowns of starry asphodels, floating above the purple heather.

  Now industrial harvesters rode over the drained bogs, combing the earth into even geometries. On the summer morning that Cillian found the Bog Girl, he was driving the Peatmax toward a copse of trees at the bog’s western edge, pushing the dried peat into black ridges. True, it looked as if he was pleating shit, but Cill had a higher purpose. He was saving to buy his neighbor Pogo’s white hatchback. Once he had a car, it would be no great challenge to sleep with a girl or a woman. Cillian was open to either experience. Or both. But he was far too shy to have an eye-level crush on anyone in his grade. Not Deedee, not Stacia, not Vicki, not Yvonne. He had a crush, taboo and distressing, on his aunt Cathy’s ankles in socks. He had a crush on the anonymous shoulders of a shampoo model.

  He had just driven into the western cutaway bog when he looked over the side of the Peatmax and screamed. A hand was sticking out of the mud. Cillian’s first word to the Bog Girl required all the air in his lungs: “Ahhhhhhfuuuuuck!”

  Here was a secret, flagging him down. A secret the world had kept for two thousand years and been unable to keep for two seconds longer. The bog had confessed her.

  When the other men arrived, Cillian was on his knees, scratching up peat like a dog. Already he had dug out her head. She was whole and intact, cocooned in peat, curled like a sleeping child, with her head turned west of her pelvis. Thick, lustrous hair fanned over the tarp, the wild red-orange of an orangutan’s fur, dyed by the bog acids. Moving clouds caused her colors to change continuously: now they were a tawny bronze, now a mineral blue. It was a very young face.

  Cradling her head, Cillian lost all feeling in his legs. A light rain began to fall, but he would not relinquish his position. Every man gathered was staring at them. Ordinarily, their pronged attention encircled him like a crown of thorns, making him self-conscious, causing red fear to leak into his inner vision. Today, he didn’t give a damn about the judgments of the mouth breathers above him. Who had ever seen a face so beautiful, so perfectly serene?

  “Mother of God!” one of the men screamed. He pointed to the noose. A rope, nearly black with peat, ran down the length of her back.

  Murder. That was the men’s consensus. Bos Ardee called the police.

  But Cillian barely heard the talk above him. If you saw the Bog Girl from one angle only, you would assume that she was a cherished daughter, laid to rest by hands that loved her. But she had been killed, and now her smile seemed even more impressive to him, and he wanted only to protect her from future harm. The men kept calling her “the body,” which baffled Cillian—the word seemed to blind them to the deep and flowing dream life behind her smile. “There is so much more to you than what they see,” he reassured her in a whisper. “I am so sorry about what happened to you. I am going to keep you safe now.”

  After this secret conversation, Cill fell rapidly in love.

  Cillian was lucky that he met his girlfriend on such a remote island. When these bodies are discovered in Ireland, for example, or in the humid Florida bogs sprinkled between Disney World and Cape Canaveral, things proceed differently. The area is cordoned off. Teams of experts arrive to excavate the site. Then the bog people are carefully removed to laboratories, museums, where gloveless hands never touch them.

  Cillian touched her hair, touched the rope. He was holding the reins of her life. Three policemen had arrived, and they conferred above Cillian, their black boots squeezing mud around the bog cotton. Once it had been determined that the girl was not a recent murder victim, the policemen relaxed. The chief asked Cillian a single question: “You’re going to keep her, then?”

  * * *

  Gillian Eddowis was on a party line with her three sisters. She tucked the phone under her chin and took the ruby kettle off the range, opening a window to shoo the blue steam free. In the living room, roars of studio laughter erupted from the television; Cillian and the Bog Girl were watching a sitcom about a Canadian trailer park. Their long silences unnerved her; surely they weren’t getting into trouble, ten feet away from her? She had never had cause to discipline her son. She wouldn’t know where to begin. He was so kind, so intelligent, so unusual, so sensitive—such an outlier in the Eddowis family that his aunts had paid him the modern compliment of assuming that he was gay.

  Voices sieved into Gillian’s left ear:

  “You want to warn them,” Sister Abby said.

  “But, Virgin Mother, there is no way to warn them!” Sister Patty finished.

  “We were all sixteen once,” Cathy growled. “We all survived it.”

  “Cillian is fifteen,” Gillian corrected. “And the girlfriend is two thousand.”

  Abby, who had seen a picture of the Bog Girl in the local newspaper, suggested that somebody was rounding down.

  A university man had also read the story of the Bog Girl’s discovery. He’d taken a train and a ferry to find them. “I’ve come to make an Urgent Solicitation on Behalf of History,” he said. He wanted to acquire the Bog Girl for the national museum. The sum he offered them was half of Gillian’s salary at the post office.

  In the end, what had happened? Christian feeling
had muzzled her. How could she sell a girl to a stranger? Or pretend that she had any claim to her, this orphan from the Iron Age? Gillian told the university man that the Bog Girl was their houseguest and would be living with them until social services could locate her next of kin. At this, all the purple veins in the man’s neck stood out. His tone sank into petulant defeat. “Mark my words, you people do not have the knowledge to properly care for her,” he said. “She’ll fall apart on you.” The Bog Girl, propped up next to the ironing board, watched them argue with an implacable smile. The university man left empty-handed, and for a night and a day Gillian was a hero to her son.

  “So she’s just freeloading, then? Living off your coin?” Cathy asked.

  “Oh, yes. She’s quite shameless about it.”

  How could she explain to her sisters what she could barely admit to herself? The boy was in love. It was a monstrous, misdirected love; nevertheless, it commanded her respect.

  “The Bog Girl is a bad influence on him,” she told her sisters. “She doesn’t work, she doesn’t help. All day she lazes about the house.”

  Patty coughed and said, “If you feel that way, then why—”

  Cathy screamed, “Gillian! She cannot stay with you!”

  It was gentle Abby who formulated the solution: “Put her back in the bog.”

  “Gillian. Do it tonight.”

  “Who’s going to miss her?”