i.
Here let the Muse oblivions curtains draw & let man think – for God hath often saw Things here too dirty for the light of day For in a madhouse there exists no law – Now stagnant grows my too refined clay I envy birds their wings to flye away
-- John Clare, Child Harold
We picked our way over split stones and across fields of burnt stumps of failed tree plantations toward Childe Harold’s camp. We walked in silence, and though the odor of the salt-sea made fragrant clouds upon the breeze of our wake, the land we passed through was a desert.
It so happens that the world’s widening deserts are the terra incognita where gods have always offered up visions of apocalypse, from sheets of greasy flame to grey beasts with honeycombed entrails,to the cavernous solitude with which desert-dwellers have always, always dreamed on the End.
There may have been some of that at work here. But widen the frame a moment, and the scale of the problem is clear: This is not your great grandmother’s Apocalypse.
*
Off in the South Pacific a bottle floated on the swells with the news mysteriously rolled up inside:
CAGAYAN DE ORO, Philippines — Rescuers searched for more than 800 people missing in the southern Philippines on Saturday after flash floods and landslides swept houses into rivers and out to sea, killing more than 650 people in areas ill-prepared to cope with storms.
Cagayan de Oro and nearby Iligan cities on Mindanao island were worst hit when Typhoon Washi slammed ashore while people slept late on Friday and early Saturday, sending torrents of water and mud through villages and stripping mountainsides bare.
Floods washed away entire houses with families inside in dozens of coastal villages, the Philippine Red Cross reported.
In just 12 hours, Washi dumped more than a month of average rain on Mindanao.
At virtually the same time, a Caribbean tsunami struck the eastern coast of Mexico, wiping the city of Cancún from the map. Not 800 people here, but 800,000.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States, a major ally of both the Philippines and Mexico, was unconcerned.
“This is how it is anymore,” the US official said. “Villages are washed away all the time. No one can do anything to stop it.”
Most of the dead were children and women, the Philippine Red Cross reported. In Mexico, no news was forthcoming. Cancún, born in the 1970’s, lived for less than half a century. Every short-lived memory of it was simply … gone.
*
In the Indian Ocean, off the Andaman Islands, a bottled floated up with the news mysteriously rolled up inside:
DHAKA, Bangladesh — Around a third of Bangladesh is underwater due to recent catastrophic flooding and the climate crisis has played a role in the devastation, according to experts.
The widespread flooding, which has displaced millions of vulnerable people and caused thousands of deaths, follows the deadly super-cyclone Amphan which hit the region this week.
The catastrophes bear witness to the fundamental imbalance of the climate emergency: That developing countries like Bangladesh, which have historically contributed little to the pollution driving increased temperatures and rising sea levels, will suffer the greatest impacts.
Dr. Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, told The Independent that the "fingerprint" of climate change could be seen in the magnitude of the recent disasters.
"This is a one in 20-year flood event that we are having now for the fifth time in the last 20 years,” Dr. Huq said.
Torrential monsoon rains have compounded the suffering, sending water rushing from hilly areas and causing dangerously high water levels in two of Bangladesh's major rivers, the Brahmaputra and the Meghna.
*
We picked our way over salt-scrabble and minced mangroves and through the small cactus deserts that remained like dioramas of an increasingly absent ecology. Ghosts of animals trotted by in hungry invisible vehicles passing through the air.
“It’s getting crowded in here,” Childe Harold said, absently eyeing the invisibles.
*
Off in the Sargasso Sea, a bankshot away from the Bermuda Triangle, a bottled floated up with the news mysteriously rolled up inside:
San Juan, Puerto Rico…
Funafuti, Tuvalu…
Apia, Samoa…
Hamilton, Bermuda…
Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana…
*
Once upon a time, further south, in the high Amazon in Ecuador, the jungle mist flew fast and thick and the cascading mountains collapsed like the trade towers of nine-eleven and the earth coughed up a lung.
Once upon a time across the Western Ocean in the forest canopies and vast grasslands of Africa, the soil sucked up black smoke from the heaving, spitting factories of Europe and Asia and America, and the singing that gave birth to humanity 200,000 years ago grew into a croaking voiceless choking noise.
Across the Southern Sea in the peppered Orient, the trees themselves dried to powder and blew away in a burning spice cloud that floated off high over the Mekong and the Yangtze, over the Indus and the Ganga to the roof of the world.
On the Tibetan plateau, the nuclear salt sat still.
In the volcanic atolls of Micronesia, the sculpted black basaltic outcrops drew in a deep breath before a lifetime of exile under sea.
The sea herself encysted.
*
In a bottle afloat on the retreating Caribbean last week’s news skidded and flotted like a spirit nine days dead:
Dateline, Cancún: Rafael Bolivar Sanchez Upankí, the president of an unnamed Latin American country, attended the climate change summit in Cancún to give an ultimatum to all the countries of the world: "Our peoples will be nobody’s bête noir. If the world will not take responsibility for protecting the vast natural riches that literally drip from the Andean shelf, falling away into the Amazon like gems, we will be forced to unplug from the global economy.”
Executives at Chevron called the idea “blackmail.”
“Some backwards third world petty dictator can’t hold our natural resources hostage,” said Chevron CEO John Watson, in a prepared statement.
###
In a bottle of seaglass this shred of news floated and bobbed and sailed across the sea, last week’s news, the last news of the plugged-in world.
*
As we approached Childe Harold’s camp, nothing appeared changed. From the distance of the road, it was a reassuring sight to see the railroad car still safely buried up to its brakeworks. But as we grew closer, the air smelled of sulfur and a frisson of electricity surged through it. Smoke rose slightly from Harold’s campfire, and as we approached, the coals erupted suddenly into a strange belch of smoke which rose into the air like a balloon and then whisped off into the bright air and was gone. The fire seemed almost to have seen us coming, and to have chosen the precise moment of our arrival to give up the ghost.
Harold knelt and put his hand to the embers.
“Col’ as de moon over de sea,” he said, looking mystified.
“Seems t’me that you and I and I, we got us some work ta do.”
Harold turned from the fire and set about cleaning up the camp for battle, swabbing out a bucket to collect fresh water, rolling bandages and herbal spliffs, scratching at the dirt for nightcrawlers to attach to a fishhook to try and catch some sustenance.
As for me, with a hunch in my heart as big as the devastation that surrounded us, I set myself up on the beach to scan the horizon. I had developed an uncanny feeling that Natasha was on her way…
*
As I looked into the sea mist, trying to pierce the veil of distance with my bifocals, to see the forest for the trees, as it’s said, I squinted into the pale green haze, but was left with the impression that there was no there there. As if what I viewed was not a living ocean, but a mirage, a decoupage, a diorama del mar. I lay back on the sand, abandoning my view of the ocean for a vaguer view of sky. The blank moon was stuck against the blue, mid-sky, like a pin-pricked scrap of felt.
Suddenly I felt a weight in my chest – no, on my chest – as if a five-year-old were standing there.
“Don’t you see?” Natasha said. “It’s not an ocean, dadda. It’s an ocean of signs, the sort that the romantic poets spoke of two centuries ago.”
Without warning I was sprawled on the sand, flat on my back, bowled over by a force from the Beyond.
“What the…? Na…Na-TASHA?”
Standing on my chest and letting her little voice trill like a bonsai’d Ezra Pound, Natasha intoned:
“The pillars of Nature’s temple are alive and sometimes yield perplexing messages;
oceans of symbols between us and the shrine
remark our passing with strange, familiar eyes.”
*
Natasha’s chirping stopped. The sea, and my sanguine heart, had been stoppered by her song.
“Baudelaire,” I said, “grinning a deep grin. “A strange choice for a toddler.”
She stayed standing on my chest, and her hair was a tangle of seaweed, the tint of her skin almost green, as if the very sea were in her.
“Only, now the eyes of these forests are no longer understanding,” Natasha said, continuing to proclaim. “For they are grown dumb!”
“Well, and hello to you too, my dear,” I said, trying to waylay her a bit in her precociousness.
“No time for niceties, dadda. We’ve made these forests dumb – or rather, daddio, you and your whole generation of daddas, with your disenchantment of all that is, have done it. And all the generations before. It’s so … sad.”
“Natasha, how did you get here?”
“Dadda, even me, even me who augurs innocence but must tread where torturers have trod. We are all as guilty as the moon is marked with the boot prints of astronauts. Once that moon was touched, if you follow my metaphor, it was the beginning of the end. No, NOT the beginning of the end: the end. Game over for the world that was, and the final, long-awaited decline of innocence. Tyger tyger burning bright, in the forests of the night!”
“Natasha,” I insisted, “How did you get here?”
“Oh, dadda,” she sighed. “That’s not important now. What is important is this apocalypse we’re facing. I think we can beat it.”
“Dadda, if you take a step back, view the whole panorama, it’s nothing more than a repeat of the Victorian holocaust, when Europe sacked the entirety of the southern hemisphere. Only now it has a more….metaphysical character. And its global.”
“Natasha! I should wash your mouth out with shaving soap!, I fumed. “Where did you learn such a word?” (What stirred this fit, I don’t know. Looking back, my inner Parent must have been nonplussed at her strange affect, even as my inner child was hurt by her strange lack of affection.)
“What word?” she chirped. “Metaphysical?”
“No!” I rumbled. “Holocaust! What kind of word is that for a preschooler to use? We reserve that word for –”
“Oh dadda, please, how many times do I need to say it: don’t give me that ‘little lamb, who made thee?’ routine. Nobody’s innocent, not anymore. Not you. Not me.”
I softened. “But sweetie, I know you’re…gifted and talented. And I know these times are extreme… But you’ll always be me little babe-in-arms….”
“And arms may be what’s needed now, dadda. We need to stop this holocaust…okay, this apocalypse, whatever-it-is, by any means necessary!”
*
The ocean cast about for yesterday’s news, but yesterday’s news was fading in its seagreen bottle, sinking to the bottom of the heavy grief-stricken sea.
*
“Dadda, I have seen men of hideous aspect with terrible eyes set deep in their skulls, men who transcend the hardness of rock, the rigidity of cast steel, the mundane, animal cruelty of sharks, the insolence of youth, the insensate rage of criminals, the treachery of hypocrites, the most outlandish clowns, the force of character of priests, the most introverted beings, and creatures colder than earth or heaven. And having seen such ugliness, Dadda, I am up in arms. A babe maybe, but a babe up in arms.”
She crossed her arms over her tiny chest and glared. “And so should you be.”
“Which of us has known our mother’s face?” she continued. “Which of us is not forever cast out and alone? What do we know, really, of ourselves? And of other beings? What do we know, for example, of the rhinos? They are like distant cousins to us, and yet we might as well be aliens to them.”
Her tone changed, and the moon lolled in the sky like a dry lollipop.
“Dadda, have you ever noticed how, I don’t know, life has become not just a spectacle, but, almost like an anti-spectacle at the same time? Where you’re zooming along a freeway and suddenly you realize that you haven’t even been awake for the last fifteen minutes? Yet you’re awake now and somehow you didn’t crash. Was it always like that?”
*
Beside us the waves whispered as they crashed and the clouds stood aglow like old parchment lampshades and the stones in the surf murmured and trembled as they always had.
*
“Mmm, was it always like that? That’s a good question, angel. I think, no, it wasn’t always like that. Some people say that happened in the ‘eighties. That’s what I used to think. Others say it began around the time of Plato, when the Aleph Bet of the Hebrew sign system became the more abstracted Greek alphabet, and western civilization began, with a capital W.C.”
I thought about the orcs in the grotto, and about twenty centuries – no, a hundred centuries! – of breakfast, lunch and dinner, and I sensed the demon banker lurking in the ether somehow. From a corner of my eye I saw Childe Harold a ways off casting a line into the lapping sea.
“Well, either way, it’s pretty worrisome,” Natasha said, looking slightly older than I remembered. “Post-worrisome, I guess. It seems to me that, as our senses have been removed outside of us, Big Brother has gone inside. If we’re not constantly aware of the implications of this we’ll be overtaken by a tribal world of supernatural spirits and technological golems over which we have no control.”
“I couldn’t have said it better myself, honey.”
Natasha’s rant seemed to be slowing to a fine chirp. I saw my chance.
“Honey?” I said.
“Yes, dadda?”
“Would you mind stepping off my chest?”
*
And so it was that Natasha had arrived safely at Youcatan.
Childe Harold had stopped his work and stood by to watch our family welcome and embrace, and he now stepped up, aglow from cheek to cheek.
“An’ jest who might dis be?”
Natasha tweeted, “I’m Natasha. Natasha the Exploradora. I’m here to rescue my dadda and stuff!”
Harold’s smile doubled. “Are you some kine a fairy spirit, den? A sprite or elvin ting from beyon’ de curtain? From whence come ye, Exploradora?”
Natasha looked at Harold and back at me and back at Harold again.
“I’m my dadda’s little girl!” she announced in her biggest outside voice. My heart spilled over. “Who are YOU?”
*
Childe Harold presented himself, a bit more than he had to me: “I and I,” he said in an almost formal tone of voice, “You might say I and I am one of the strange spirits dat hangs ‘roun dis strange place. Dem Mayans over dere,” and he pointed with his lips somewhere inland, “they say ol’ Childe Harold is the alux o’ dis place. You know what alux is, young fairy sprite?”
Natasha for once didn’t have an answer. “Do tell,” she said.
“Da one ‘at lives here,” Harold said, simply. “Da one ‘at lives here.”
“I see, and I thank you for letting me, um, show up,” she said. “But why do they call you a Childe? I’m a… a real child, sort of, and, I don’t know… isn’t it, disrespectful? To call you a child? You’re a bit … old.”
“I and I am old enough,” Childe Harold said. “Dey call me childe because I was young when the world was young. And when the world come to be a certain age, I and I go. So, old as I am today – old as I am to you – I’m always a child.”
Natasha cocked her head and sparkled.
“But you, young lady, if ye want, you kin call me Hal. And before we go gettin’ in too deep on de rescue tip, you musta hadda long ocean-crossin, ne? You hungry, Natasha Exploradora?”
Natasha pressed her hands together and stretched onto her tiptoes. “Am I ever!” she squealed.
*
From his low-slung sack, Childe Harolde produced three fish – huachinango – all strung together on a line.
“But I, I thought you said there were no fish anymore, Harold?” I blurted out.
He looked long over his nose at me, grinning that grin from beneath his black bristled mustache.
“If you’re gon’ ta make it ‘roun here, Irving,” he said, “you mus’ remember: sometimes the nex’ thing that happens is a good thing.”
My eyes fell on the fish, silver and slowly twirling, suspended from their line, their pink gills opening and closing as they spun and I noticed – and by her sudden rosy shout, Natasha seems to have noticed, too – something uncanny, something strange, about the fish.
“Dadda! Do you recognize these fishes’ faces?”
“I think I do, honey, but it, it couldn’t be.”
Childe Harold knotted his brow, curious.
“You don’t know these guys, Childe Harold,” Natasha said. “But your huachinango bear a strange resemblance to some frogs we used to know.”
“Milton, Rupert and Beatrix,” I said, and surprised myself hearing the names aloud.
Childe Harold looked at the fish, and at Natasha and me, and back at the fish.
“Well, I hope you won’t min’ eatin’ ‘em.” He paused, looking us up and down and then added, “Raw.”
“Raw,” I said. “Milton, Rupert and Beatrix?”
“See, it appears de fire’s gone out. An’ we got no fresh water, nohow, nowhere, no way. In udder words, even wit’ you, my honored guest, arrivin’, I got no way to cook dem fish.”
Natasha beamed. “Don’t worry Childe Harold. This is a job for Natasha and my magic Rucksack!”
She hastily pulled off the pink and purple vinyl bag strapped to her back, threw it in the sand, rummaged through, and came out with a knuckle-sized chunk of asphaltic rock.
She looked up at Harold holding the silvery spinning trio of huachinango that glinted like pewter in the lowering sun. “Sorry, Milton. Sorry, Rupert. Sorry, Beatrix. Thanks for feeding us!”
She threw her hands into the air and shouted, “Firestone to the RESCUE!”
*
Natasha got the fire going and Childe Harold skewered the fish on a spit and laid it across the stones to cook over the low flame. The smell of sulfur seemed to have blown off, but the whiff of the demon djinn was still strong. Together, we three hunched around the fire and ate our huachinango down to the bone, and piled the bones neatly by to clean and put them to use later. With the animals disappearing and the flora likely soon to follow, we knew Milton, Rupert and Beatrix might be some of the last fish we’d have the good fortune to eat.
As afternoon darkened into evening, Natasha reported on the dolphins, and the state of the disappeared rhinos. I told her all I knew and had seen in Cancún, from the dark-green-the-color-of-money hue of the UN negotiations to the deeper eldritch mystery of the pin-striped orcs, the sycophant Sam Hasbin, and the World Bank President-turned fiery demon djinn Iffrit, Robert Zoellick. Childe Harold just listened and mumbled under his breath, “Tings getting’ hot.”
We agreed we needed a strategy. Queequeg and the Unsettled Indians might have made it, or they might have been wiped out in the flood; Ophelia might well be campaigning for office somewhere in the far-away United States, unmindful of our predicament. Childe Harold, having been a hermit all these years, and with the evidence of vanishing fauna all around, seemed to think there was no one left to help.
“As ‘a las’ chile’ of Africa,” he said, “—dem place from where human-itee stumbled up from de rift valley caves and down outta de trees – it seems to me, my historical insights an’ your magical items may be among the only tings ‘at kin save us now. You pass me one o’ dem firestones, an’ you trus’ me wid ‘im, an’ I go all night an’ pray. Inna mornin’ we see wot we gon’ hafta do.”
Natasha and I agreed. She cuddled into my lap and started telling tales of the sea: of waves like ice cream cones and vast circular swarms of eels, of islands where it was light for centuries, and islands where it was always dark; of continents made of plastic pellets and six-pack rings, of oil barges that burned for months across dead shipping lanes, of tropical beaches lined with automobiles stacked one-atop-the-other to form ramparts, fortresses where surly, self-isolated maroons insulated themselves from the wilderness of pathology that the world had somewhat suddenly become.
When the stories wound down, Childe Harold stood and bid goodnight.
“Sleep where you want,” he said. “De groun’ here is soft and good.”
Natasha collected one of the firestones, put a quiet breath on it, and handed it to him before he climbed into his boxcar.
The fire died to embers and its smoke settled like a warm, low mist over us. Natasha and I lay down into our sandy bed and slept.
*
From inside Harold’s boxcar all night a shadowy glow was cast. Through my sleep I could hear his powerful soft murmur as he made low prayers or cast spells, speaking to the ocean in a strange, secret voice that only the ocean could have understood.
*
Meanwhile, a few hundred nautical miles from Youcatan….