Entry 9

Mavis Island Canine Center

After dinner, 2100

I’m writing with another update, having meant for a while now to return to the subject of my dream about the scholar’s betrayal. I will come back to that soon, but suffice it to say all is well. I turned on the lights after writing and posting the last field journal entry, and caught my breath in the hallway. I reassured myself that the dream about the scholar’s riddle was all just in my head, and decided to move on.

I did, however, want to hear my darling Maria Francesca’s voice. I rushed to the radio tower and had them patch through a call to her. Of course it was quite early where she was, and she was immediately concerned about the reason for the call. I did my best to reassure her that I simply couldn’t sleep and just wanted to hear her voice.

The days have gotten very long, longer than 16 hours of sunlight each day. That, and the warmth, has made some of our research more difficult. But we must work in the warm months, as the island is nearly uninhabitable above ground in the winter months.

I’ve become quite good friends with Jacky despite our rocky beginnings and what I saw as bizarre behavior on Halloween night. I understand her better now. We all have our moments of craziness, like the pop of a cork from a bottle, followed by a hiss of champagne flowing out. Soon the rush calms itself, and everyone is better for it.

Jacky has made quite good progress with her research. Up until a few days ago, I had been working with her closely in the lab processing several non-stetious hario clanes she collected on Dervis Point in November, before the weather got too warm for an accurate delnometer reading. The early impressions I got of this cohort of non-stetious hario clanes were positive, though I’m far from an expert on the topic. The golden brown coloration around the lennous tissues is a good sign that the cells are multiplying at a pace that will soon render positive distillification trials.

The Base Camp’s Canine Technician, Raul Bonneuf, was down for a week or so in the infirmary with a nasty case of Mavisian grotheria. He’d be fine in the long run, but was due for a lengthy spell of substantial discomfort. The rest of the camp personnel had been taking turns caring for the camp’s dog, Bongo Bongo.

Although I was the third randomly selected to care for Bongo Bongo, the decision seemed almost fateful, as the dog was in fact a Piègais cattle dog. I had played with them often in the fields of lower Calvois as a boy, though they were introduced to me by my parents, Jean-Luc and Alexandra, as the cursed dog of the conquerers.

This is old history at this point, but in case some of my readers need a refresher on the Piègais region: when the Piègais arrived in the third century BC, they united two disparate tribes in the lowlands. The Dinquoi and the Treuvingener, though differentiated by customs and language, came together and fought a disastrous woodlands campaign against the foreigners. Though the Piègais brought new technologies and warfare techniques, what ultimately doomed my people was a series of blunders so obvious and embarrassing the episode has gone down in local history as “The Year of the Great Soiled Trouser.”

Professor Lopez was tasked with briefing the interim Canine Technicians, but it was a relatively short briefing. After all, she knew I had extensive experience from my days as a field sapper overseas. “Feed the dog, wrestle with the dog, clean up the dog’s shit,” she told me.

“That’s it?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

“That’s it,” Professor Lopez confirmed. “Remember, most of the reason the dog is here is because they’ve been shown to be particularly sensitive to dangerous levels of filbospheric discharge.”

I squinted and nodded slowly, for the first time wondering what we were really doing on Mavis Island. “Bongo Bongo is a canary, then?”

“No, the dog isn’t the canary in the coal mine,” Professor Lopez said with a wink and a wry smile. She turned to leave as she said, “we are, Delgado.”

Jacky was visiting the Canine Center the day Professor Lopez told me the truth behind the dog’s primary purpose. The secondary purpose, as was the reason behind Jacky and CJ’s frequent trips to the Canine Center, was that dogs have the ability to detect the scent of the stetious variant of hario clanes through scent alone. We haven’t yet developed a technology as accurate as canine detection, so the Desolomers often bring samples to see if the dog reacts angrily, as it does when it smells stetious hario clanes.

After Professor Lopez left the Canine Center, Jacky stayed for a few minutes chatting about the pleasant weather and progress of our research. We sat on the floor, backs against the wall, with Bongo Bongo between us, who took turns receiving pettings from each of us.

Jacky is very passionate about science, but also possesses an appreciation for both the natural beauty of the physical world as well as the metaphysical space that exists between one person’s inner life and the interpersonal ties that bind societies: the intrapersonal and the interpersonal.

Just last week, she told me, she was visiting Caleb and Kyle, and they took her out in one of the many small bays of Mavis Island on their speed boat. They let themselves drift aimlessly for hours, she said, taking turns keeping an eye on the shoreline.

Jacky described that day on the speedboat as the perfect union of the natural world with the intrapersonal and interpersonal.

Lying on her back, she told me, receiving the full warmth of the sun and the natural high that comes with it, the boat slowly rising and falling in the bay, she felt connected the the enormity of the universe. Her research, she told me, was less an attempt to understand or master the world, but to bring us closer to it. “And the closer you get,” she told me, “the more magic you notice.”

For instance, she noticed the subtle beard stubble on Caleb’s face as he leaned back in the driver’s seat, hat covering his eyes. “I could actually hear the stubble being brushed with fingertips, and felt the prickles exciting my lips as I kissed his salty cheek. Feeling his beard stubble, my skin blushed with goosebumps, and I, experiencing a sudden lightheadedness, knew nothing else but to give him a small bite on the nose.” And Kyle, wearing his shirt that simply read “Quoi?” she could hear his voice in her head, “et quoi,” and she heard her own voice respond, “et rien, et rien,” and, out of breath, his gentle laugh from behind when it was over. And that was really all there is, and which she had experienced that day, the entirety of experience, which was really all, and is really nothing.

Jacky understood all in a single moment of clarity on the floor of the speedboat, time measured only by the gentle slapping of the craft against the water when it settled in the trough of a wave. And the love and the physical, she said, was more than enough to fill her with the energy to exist on back here, at Base Camp, deep in her lab. But she had another thought that day.

The trust of the moment, she suddenly realized, in which nothing was said and everything was understood, was a new dimension she hadn’t considered: the intrapersonal and interpersonal. Yes, because in that moment, she told me, she knew that they depended on their Lilliputian vessel to not develop a leak.

Any one of them could suddenly decide to sabotage the outing, shooting a harpoon gun through the floor of the boat, or dismantling the motor. They could choose to do so for any number of reasons they concocted. Perhaps they were overcome by some romantic nonsense that there was nothing else left to experience, or an apocalyptic realization about the destruction of life the planet, or that I really didn’t like Kyle’s shirt after all.

They didn’t even need a reason, and perhaps the lack of reason to end it, for all of them, on that wave in that bay, on that day in late November of that year, on that diminutive rubber boat, was all they needed. Nothing, et rien. Three on the boat. The distance to shore was more than three, in nearly any measure of distance you prefer, Pierre. Et quoi? You can’t swim that far, Pierre? I won’t if you won’t.

More important than fantasies of destruction, which shoot like lightning through the mind, she told me, were simpler social bonds she experienced at that moment. They were the three of them silent, when it came to words, for most of the outing. What if Caleb had suddenly became bored with their unspoken arrangement, and started blathering about the town council meetings in which he was inexplicably interested. And what if he wouldn’t stop chatting, no matter how little Kyle and I engaged with him, and what if I began to loathe the both of them for trapping me on that boat with them the entire afternoon.

What if I became interested in food, she told me, not out of hunger but out of curiosity, and began sketching out a menu in my mind. The sea salt and lemon kettle cakes could go there, next to the base of the steering column, in the shade next to Caleb’s feet as he dozed. And crawling to the stash I could nibble like a mouse, taking just what I needed to satisfy my mind.

And there, next to Kyle’s crumpled jeans, I could tuck a bottle of tempus cider, just for one crisp, cool, refreshing sip. Just one sip.

And what if, in my various fantasies, Caleb or Kyle awoke, and perceived my visions, she asked me. They would think nothing of me anymore, or they would be inconvenienced by how much space my imaginary nibbles occupied on their speedboat, or they would think me foolish and wonder why I wouldn’t eat enough to satisfy my hunger rather than my mind.

And what, she asked, would I do if I became so angry with them for these looks in their eyes that I thought of having them return me to shore, in disgrace, admitting the truce of the moment had collapsed.

Bongo Bongo yawned with a soft squeak, and smacked his lips.

That’s what was so beautiful about the moment, Jacky told me, that the truce wasn’t broken, that the delicate balance between the intrapersonal and interpersonal was undisturbed. I told her that sounds like a beautiful day. The power of the human mind, and its place within the natural world, is something we couldn’t begin to understand, but her experimentation in these areas left me with many ideas for my own kind of interpersonal meditations, I told her.

“That’s the least of it,” she said to me. Jacky revealed that she had pushed the limits of social interaction in her regular life on the mainland. She had had many friendships and lovers, of course, and all the little moments that came with those like what she experienced on the speedboat that day. But those were what people typically think of as positive outcroppings of these inner workings, she said. Of course she denied the polarity as being one of good and bad, insisting rather that experience pushing in any direction can be cathartic, and adding that she also had experience with what you might find to be negative experiences.

Jacky had had beefs, squabbles, rows, and even rivalries in her years back on the mainland. Think of them as waves, the good and bad stuff, mirrored on both sides. She had experienced much higher amplitudes on the negative side through these rivalries. “Why,” I asked automatically. “Because comfort is easy,” she said. People always rest in the comfortable, as long as they can. “But if you can hack it on the other side, you’ll experience amplitudes so great you become connected with eternity.”

I felt as though I was talking with the scholar again. Jacky usually lost me in some of her theories, but everything made sense that day in the Canine Center. The connection between the natural world, the intrapersonal, the interpersonal, and time could all become one through the performance of the self. That’s what she meant by all this: the performance of the self within the moment of group love, within a moment of potential danger, within a rivalry, within a, within a,

“Et quoi, et quoi, et quoi,” I suddenly found myself stammering at her. She smiled understandingly. She knew I was in a moment of epiphany. But it’s not nothing. It can’t be nothing. We haven’t seen the peak of the wave yet, nor its trough. “What’s next?”

Bongo Bongo, now asleep on the ground, dreamt he was running.

I remember her next words clearly: “I think I have to betray someone, Delgado,” said Jacky, leaning in and speaking into my ear.

I’ve done everything else, she explained. And betrayal is the oldest story. It has to be something awful, potentially for both of us. It has to be something we can’t come back from. It has to be public. And it has to start with someone I respect.

I paused, wanting to respond but feeling nothing. Though I hadn’t meant it to be, the silence felt scripted. “Who are you going to betray?” I said finally. “What are you going to do to them?”

“I don’t know yet, Delgado.”

“Is it going to be me?”

“You have to keep this conversation between us.”

I said nothing. I understood why already. The suggestion of any other motivation for the betrayal, including defining the act itself as catharsis, would nullify the experience. She need purity, otherwise what was the point? She could go back to simple rivalries, squabbles, rows, or beefs.

Jacky cleaned Bongo Bongo’s eyes and stood up. The dog immediately woke from his slumber and rose with her. She held a hand to him, signaling her departure, and he sat back down next to my leg.

“Jacky?” I said as she put her hand on the door.

“Yes, Delgado?”

“Et quoi? What’s on the other side? Opposite betrayal? What’s higher than love?”

She chuckled carelessly. “If you find out, be sure to let me know, Pierre.” And she was gone. Bongo Bongo smacked his lips and sniffed my pant leg.

With my dinner digested and the latest field note written, it’s time for some shuteye. Signing off, it’s 2130. I’ve got some Grandaddy for you.

All glory to the University.

Pierre Delgado

If you come down we’ll go to town I haven’t been there for years But I’d be fine wasting our time Not doing anything here Just doing nothing