Set aside oceans for a moment and forget. Step into the woods and forget. Take a long, deep draft of muscadine wine and forget about the pillar of salt that was Imani, the best friend I ever had, my crush-cut-short. Forget about vengeful Pacific Hypotheticals, their yearning, their abandon, their backstabbing peace.
Just forget.
Muscadine season in Georgia sneaks up on you edgewise between summer and winter. Outside the South, most people haven't ever heard of a muscadine, even though their fancy French table wine grows grafted on its roots. That's a metaphor for America, if you will. You can hunt them in the woods in September by their scent. You never smelled anything like a muscadine. You have to bite down hard to get through their tough purple skins, and if you eat too many, their acid chafes your lips raw.
Wild muscadines grew along the Oconee Greenway behind Steeplechase Apartments. They're all I ate the week of Imani's funeral. I couldn't stand to be in the apartment with all that salt. It piled on the bed and carpet and got tracked down the hallway by everyone who tried to move it. Imani's aunt from Macon filled the whole coffin, but the pile didn't get one whit smaller. I had a nasty row with the landlord over it, but he wouldn't let me out of my lease early.
The night before the funeral, I got waking nightmares about the cursed salt-corpse and the hundred blank watercolors strung back and forth across my apartment's ceilings. My itching feet took me down to the Oconee, where the muscadines dropped by handfuls from heavy vines twining down the drooping myrtle branches. I gorged on the grapes and spat the seeds into the Oconee.
"She's gone," I told the Oconee. "You know the worst part? You don't get any grieving days when you're just a roommate. Nobody expects you to be hurting so bad you can't even get up in the morning for Intermediate Medical Terminology. She was just your roommate, they'll say. Why does it hurt so bad?"
I'd brought a snitch of her salt in a jar so the river could taste the emptiness. I let the water slip the jar from my fingers, and it floated half-sunk in the muddy shallows like an unrequited love. The Oconee bubbled up and brushed my toes through my Crocs. That gentle river-kiss crumpled my last defenses. I sobbed into the Oconee so hard. I'm not ashamed of it. Somebody should pity you when you're hurting, and sometimes there's nobody but yourself to do it proper.
The Oconee carried my tears south and east until it joined the Altamaha River, and then flowed into the Atlantic, and so my small sadness was taken up into the Atlantic's broken heart. It was the kindest thing anyone did for me.
The Mason jar floated half-full of water back to shore. I tried to pour it out, but the Oconee clung inside, defying gravity.
I finally understood. "You want to come with me." The crushing loneliness lifted a little. I screwed on the lid and wondered whether rivers grieved too. If they got a little lonely, forever rushing past everyone who touched them.
Sooner or later, every river runs to salt, too.
* * *
That might've been the end of all of it, had the University not given me straight A's to compensate me for my grief, and in doing so nearly got me killed.
I had a weekend off from class after they buried Imani, so I packed a can of coffee beans and a can of Terrapin beer and made for the Oconee Hill Cemetery to appease her ghost.
The cemetery was as old as death in Athens. You could picnic on the crumbling headstones of the rich old white men they'd named all the streets and buildings after. College deans and judges and Confederate government heads. They cast good shade, anyway.
Imani was buried in the new section across a sketchy iron bridge built in 1899. Since the funeral, they'd tamped down the dirt and pulled a blanket of sod up over the gentle hump remaining. No headstone yet.
I lay down beside the hump and breathed deep the smell of wet earth and bruised grass. Remembered the last happy moment, that almost-kiss on the couch before the doorbell rang. "I miss you, Imani. I missed you when you went to San Francisco, too. I never told you how much." I stayed there a long while, dozing in the chilly autumn sun until a shadow fell over my face, severing the warmth.
I opened my eyes and stared up at the shiny oiled abs of California.
What kind of Hypothetical kills your roommate, then shows his face in broad Athens daylight just feet from where you buried her yesterday?
"Fuck you," I told him, brushing away the grass clippings stuck to my cheek. "You already won. Go home. What else could y'all possibly want from me?"
"We want our ocean back." That unhurried West Coast drawl set my teeth on edge. He reeked of sweat and coconut oil.
"It's gone, dude. You made Imani drink it with your damn hexes. What the hell's your problem?" I swung to my feet, settling my backpack strap on my shoulder. The triple weight of coffee and beer and river slapped the small of my back. No time to leave them now.
"Wrong. It's not all gone." California sized me up like a Baptist with a gospel tract. Then he sniffed me. "There. You've tasted it, haven't you?"
Getting sniffed broke every one of my personal space rules. I danced backward up Imani's dirt-hump, wrinkling the loose sod. "The hell? Do I look like someone who's ever been west of Texas?"
"You were the last to taste it, except Imani." He had enough shame to cast his eyes down at her name, that bastard. "But one taste is plenty. In you lives the Pacific on its last day. It's enough."
Grief-sharpened memory flashed me back to the day of the hex, a finger dipped in a salty jar, the fall-down intoxication of sixty-two languages, most of them extinct. Yes, I'd tasted the Pacific. Not that I'd admit it to that asshole California. "You want me to spit in a cup or something?"
He wrinkled his nose. "No way, man. Nothing like that. We'd just fly you west, lie you down in the sandy seabed, and grow a new ocean from the seed of you."
I hated being called a seed. It made me feel pregnant without my consent. "And if I don't want to be an ocean?"
California stepped way too close and flexed his muscle-bound pecs. "Well, someone's got to do it."
It wasn't a question.
I have strong feelings about bodily autonomy. I turned tail and flat-out bolted for the bridge, leaping headstones and kicking up floral arrangements with California hot on my heels. The rolling hills of Athens fought me every step, and the Terrapin in my backpack clanked against the jar full of Oconee, dragging me back. I'd reached the bridge over the Oconee River when that asshole caught up enough to shove me hard. I whomped onto my face, bit my cheek, tasted dirt and asphalt and blood. Woozily, I glanced across the bridge. Washington and Oregon flanked the pillars, blocking my only escape.
"Quit that," said California. "You're only hurting yourself."
"Touch me again, and you'll have to answer to the University," I warned. "I'm a student." The University's old protective magic repelled meddling outsiders the same way Downtown had pushed back Oregon's tree invasion. Half the monuments on North Campus were actual people who'd crossed the University, even that plant cell sculpture behind Denmark Hall.
"Are you a student? Are you really?"
I wondered what he meant by that. He loomed over me, taller than before, and I remembered he was really millions of souls taller, stronger, and angrier than me. He was going to bag me up and take me West to grow his ocean, and nothing I did could stop him.
"I hope the earthquake really does knock you into the ocean," I said.
"That would require an ocean first."
I shut my eyes. Down below, I heard the rushing of water.
It was getting louder.
The Oconee was flooding.
It happened so fast none of us had time to react, just California shouting Whoa! and then the water cresting over us, the weight of it snapping through the rusty hundred-year-old bridge struts, and I was going to die by bridge to skull if I didn't drown first, if I didn't get kidnapped first, if I didn't die of grief first, and then everything was the arms of the Oconee, cradling me through the flood.
* * *
Not long after, I floated sputter
ing downriver to shore, my sopping wet backpack miraculously intact. I knew the Oconee Greenway forwards and back. Not far from Steeplechase Apartments, not at all. I took off at a woozy wet jog, squishing through mud and leaf mulch and muscadine-laced thickets to reach Steeplechase before the Hypotheticals could regroup. I didn't know where to turn. What did California mean, asking if I was still a student?
I didn't understand until I got home and found the huge cardboard tube on my doorstep. They'd curled the diplomas into one endless thick scroll. I unspooled them across my apartment, all forty of them, from Accounting to Women's Studies. I could step from golden seal to golden seal without touching carpet all the way to Imani's salt-corpse. That was it, then. I'd graduated forty times over. The University wouldn't protect me from the Hypotheticals.
"What the heck am I going to do now?" I asked Imani's salt. I wasn't no hex-maker, no big powerful University. I was just regular old Quietly.
I hated Imani just a little right then, hated her because I'd gone along with her scheme to be forever-students and never graduate, because she'd picked a fight with the West Coast and got me sucked into it, and now I had a whole can of coffee and it would probably go stale before I finished it because I had nobody to help me drink it, and because I was about to get dragged off for torture by Hypothetical States who had never tasted a muscadine.
As the sun sank lower, I could see them out the window, lurking in the R.E.M. Steeple's shadow:short Oregon leading the line and California bringing up the rear, stomping on the skittering waterbugs come up from the Oconee for supper. My sore legs couldn't outrun them anymore. I trembled all over. Tonight I would dance myself to death while R.E.M. shook the walls of my apartment. By morning, I would be nothing but another heap of brine. The landlord would have to seal off our unit altogether, like that stairway at the University haunted by suicide ghosts.
I slumped among my useless diplomas and Imani's blank watercolors. The Hypotheticals murmured together outside, tinking and scratching as they fiddled with the lock. I cried into my sleeve. If I could take it all back, if I could do it over, I'd learn the bass guitar. I'd volunteer on charity night at the drag queen bar. I'd work at a coffee shop and learn the art of turning foam into ephemeral leaves on a sophomore's latte. If there were more time, I could put all my new degrees to work. If there were only more time, I could swim the Atlantic and learn to love it too.
I polished my glasses on my tear-soaked sleeve, which only smudged them worse. But when I put them back on, everything changed.
You know when you paint with lemon juice, then run the paper over a candle flame and messages appear? Like that, but more psychedelic. Through my brine-smudged lenses, Imani's watercolors exploded with detail. Full seascapes, just like she'd told me: thundering waves that rocked and sloshed against the borders and dribbled onto the carpet. And above them, hanging in the painted air, Imani's final message to me.
Dear Quietly, it began at the clothesline over the kitchenette table. I did an awful thing, but I'm about do something worse. Here the paintings zigzagged across the living room, It's a sin to drink an ocean, you know. Bad enough they'll damn me to the Under-Ath for it. But I don't see no other way out. I followed the watercolors into the hallway that connected our bedrooms.Don't go mourning for me, you hear? It's not a death. It only looks like one. The watercolor-string ran around the walls of her bedroom in spiraling circles. Tell the Hypotheticals I'll return the Pacific, but it could take a while. Truth is, I don't know how. I might need to cut a deal with an evil thing. But if there's a way, it's in the Under-Ath. And right above the brine pile, this emphatic message: DON'T FOLLOW ME.
Through my tear-streaked glasses, the pile of salt transformed into a spinning, watery vortex.
Quietly, listen: Athens is a gyre too.
Out in the living room, the front door cracked and broke. I tore down Imani's last watercolor, because fuck that, right? Imani didn't know everything. She didn't understand her own curse, and she didn't know nothing about the Hypotheticals, or how to fight them. When you get down to it, who really can go it alone and come out in one piece? She would never find her way home from the Under-Ath, not without help, because that's the way of the world, it's the way of all love and friendship and damn amazing roommates.
I hitched my backpack tight around my shoulders and held the can of coffee beans in my hand. I jumped feet-first into the vortex and let the Under-Ath take me.
* * *
Part 3: Atlantic
You know that junk drawer in your kitchen, the one packed with bread bag ties and rubber bands and the wine cork too pretty to toss? That's the Under-Ath. It's where you'll find the rest of the church that once connected to the R.E.M. Steeple, the double-barreled Civil War cannon they never fired because they couldn't control the chained-together cannonballs, and every cigarette butt chucked out the window on Lexington Road.
It's mainly litter in the Under-Ath. Infinite ash fluttered down like snow from a dim gray sky without any sun or stars. Knee-deep trash blanketed the trees and buildings like gentle kudzu heaps. The Great Athens Garbage Patch.
I sunk waist-deep into the litter and struck out westerly toward what I hoped was Broad Street, slogging along a huge gulch cut down the road like a giant dragged to her death. If Imani had left any trail, I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Pull tabs and bottle caps crunched under my heels, and a plastic fork worried a hole in my jeans. I kicked gritty cigarette ash from between my toes where my Crocs let it in.
It was hard going. All that plastic tugging at your legs, faceplanting you into stale fries and used condoms. Good thing I'd spent the summer stomping around the Okefenokee Swamp. The technique was similar: lift your feet high and tromp down firmly, and try to ignore anything wiggling down below.
After a couple hours, my calves burned something awful. I'd stopped to work a plastic six-pack ring out of my hair when some unseen critter snaked figure eights around my ankles. Its bristly warmth tickled my toes through my Crocs. I stomp-stomped to scare it off, but then all the litter around me roiled and boiled and humped and lumped, and with a surge and roar, the monster burst to the surface.
I'd never seen a critter so ugly. It had a head like an overgrown snapping turtle and a mane of gray moss, a long body, stump-fingered flippers, and a triple row of very big, flat molars. I froze, petrified, which probably saved my fingers. It chomped the plastic rings clean out of my hands and dove back below the litter's surface. The other humps and lumps and roils and boils erupted into more sinuous creatures, scaly and furred, beaked and snouted, all of them snapping and fighting for choice trashy bits.
"Hey howdy!" Far ahead on the litter-river, some folks waved at me from a raft. I waved both arms back, sucking in my belly where critters brushed against me. The raft sped right on up, coasting smoothly over crumpled wrappers and diet sodas like they were nothing but placid water. They'd jiggered the raft together from a pallet of flattened cardboard, roped with daisy-chained twistie ties. A man worked the rudder in the back, and up front, a woman turned this huge crank attached to some braided plastic ropes trailing down into the litter-river. Ahead of their raft, the trash humped and boiled even more violently.
"Keep her harness tight, Opal! She's hungry today," shouted the man working the rudder.
The woman made some adjustments to the cranks, and suddenly the monster towing the raft broke the surface. It dipped in and out of view, long and spidery in a way that reminded me of millipedes. It bayed like a lonesome hound and dove sharply down, erupting above the surface again with cans clenched in its jaws. The navigator yelled haw and the handler threw an easy lasso over the beast's front limbs, forcing its head back to a net trailing behind.
The whole raft skidded up beside me.
"Need a hand, friend?" the monster-wrangler called. "Ain't safe to cool your toes in the Oconee River, not when the Has-Beens are feeding." She pronounced Oconee funny so it came out like Oak-a-nee.
"Thanks. I'd sure appreciate the lift." I
grabbed her extended hand and scrabbled up onto the cardboard. It was nice to feel wind on my legs after so long in the sweltering garbage. But I didn't know how I'd ever get my pants clean of all the grease stains.
I couldn't tell much about my rescuers on account of the handkerchiefs they'd bound around their noses to keep out the garbage-smell, but their coveralls had the faded, patchy look of thrift store finds. There wasn't much space for sitting on the raft, not with all the collection bags: one for beer cans, one for bedsheets, one for batteries, and a whole zipper-bag full of spent bullets. You just had to sit on the junk itself.
I hunkered down on a bundle of styrofoam takeout trays with my backpack between my feet and watched them work. They called themselves Dill the navigator and Opal the Has-Been wrangler, and they were working hard bringing in their haul.
"You headed to see Stephens at the New Foundry?" asked Dill.
"I don't know. Haven't heard of it," I answered honestly. "Depends if my roommate's there. You seen her? She's got the Pacific Ocean with her and lots of brine in her hair."
Opal turned the cranks and the lasso unfurled. The Has-Been crooned and dived down into the rubble again. "Might've seen an ocean passing through recently. Didn't stay long, though."
It weirded me out to hear anyone talk about Imani that way. Who knew what drinking down the ocean did to her if people saw her like that? "You mind pointing me in the right direction?"
"You don't look like you're from around here," said Opal. She twirled the ropes, concentrating hard on the river. Dill tossed a glance at her and snatched from the Oconee a large cardstock square attached to a wooden dowel.
"I'm from the Over-Ath," I explained. "Gonna collect someone. Then I'll be on my way."
Dill barked out a joyless laugh, and Opal whipped her head around. He dropped the cardstock sign lickety-split. An understanding flitted between them too fast for me to catch. I didn't like that much, not in this place. It set my stomach roiling.
Every River Runs to Salt Page 3
