South Village (Ash McKenna) (21 page)

A light clicks on. White-blue rope light, wrapped around the room at the tops of the walls. We’re someplace familiar, someplace I feel like I was not too long ago. There are things crawling on the walls. I try to back out and Aesop grabs me, shakes his head.

He pulls my shirt over my head and douses me with water. The water feels good, and then it doesn’t and I’m shivering. Aesop pushes me down on a chair. Something crunches underneath me.

“Do you trust me?” he asks.

I nod at him, because I think that’s what I’m supposed to do right now.

He hands me a coffee mug full of water. I cradle it in both hands.

“Drink that,” he says. “Slow.”

I hear the word slow and I know what it means but I throw it back in one big gulp anyway, immediately retch it all onto the ground. He takes the mug from my hands, refills it from a pitcher, gives it back. There are things moving under the surface of the water so I offer it back to him.

“I can’t drink this,” I tell him.

“What do you see?” he asks.

“Bugs.”

“Are there more bugs in the room?”

I nod toward the wall next to us, where shiny black roaches are crawling from some unseen crack. Aesop slams his hand against the wall. Nothing happens to the bugs. His hand goes through them.

“You’re seeing things,” he says. “There’s no one in here but the two of us. Do you understand that? Can you concentrate on my hand?”

I look back down at the water and it’s clear. Up at the wall, and it’s clear, too. I take a tentative sip, focus on keeping it down. Breathe in and out. My vision is clear for the moment but I can still hear the voices, like there’s a group of people crowded around the dome, whispering at me through the walls.

Aesop is rooting around, doing things with his hands I can’t see because his back is turned to me. I want to ask him about the void. Maybe I have caught the nihilism that’s been going around. I thought it was a fever.

He turns with another mug. I think he’s taken the mug out of my hands but I’m still holding the mug that I was holding. It’s a different mug, clay and painted, like a kid would make in kindergarten class. There are curls of black smoke coming off the top of it.

He pulls a chair until it’s sitting across from me and sits on the praying mantis that had been sitting on the chair and holds the mug out to me. The black surface of the liquid bubbles.

“If you can get this down I won’t have to take you to the hospital,” he says.

That sounds like a challenge.

He hands me the mug and it’s hot. His hands are still on the mug with mine and our fingers touch. He helps me press it to my lips and it smells like feet. That makes me think too much about feet—Crusty Pete liked feet—so the hot liquid dribbles off my mouth and down my face.

“Ash, you need to drink this. Please.”

I hear his voice but I don’t see him. Aesop has disappeared into the void, my vision swallowed up by black liquid that bubbles up from every surface of the room.

Sip a little.

And a little more.

The world gets hazy, disappearing into tufts of black smoke.

A
sliver of sunlight hits me in the face. I wake up fast, like coming out from a nightmare, but I can’t remember what the nightmare was. My stomach feels like someone is pushing their fist from the other side, trying to turn it inside out. I stumble toward the door of the bus, push through, fall to my hands and knees in the dirt.

A little liquid comes up. Not much, but I keep heaving. I arch my back, look up at the canopy, sunlight pouring through the leaves into the clearing. Beautiful, all the pain and existential dread aside.

My stomach feels raked, my throat raw, my head three sizes too small. My skin is sticky with dried sweat, my shirt gone but my pants damp. I press my hand to the crotch and I think I might have pissed myself. I’m not even sure. I don’t know how I got to the bus.

There’s a crunch behind me. I turn and it’s Aesop, bleary-eyed, shirtless, holding a bottle of water. He comes around to the front of me and sits in the dirt, unspins the cap, puts it down. I come off my knees and sit in the dirt across from him and pick it up.

“Small sips,” he says. “You need to get that down. You’re dehydrated. I can’t believe you even have any sweat left in you, given how much leaked out of you last night.”

“How do you know…”

“I stayed. Made sure you didn’t have a seizure.”

“You…”

His name escapes me for a second.

Then I remember, “Aesop.”

He nods. “Good. What’s your name?”

“Ashley. Ash.”

“Where are we?”

“Georgia. South Village.”

“Who was the lead singer of Guns and Roses?”

“Axl Rose.”

“Who was the ninth president of the United States?”

“I wouldn’t know that even if I had my shit together.”

Aesop sighs. “William Henry Harrison. Who was the first president?”

“George Washington.”

“Okay. We’re on the right track.”

I take a small sip of water. My stomach revolts. I close my eyes, lean forward, hold it down.

“You gave me something last night,” I tell him. “What did you give me?”

“Valerian root tea,” he says. “It’s a holistic alternative to benzodiazepines, which are generally used to treat DTs. Best we had handy.”

“What now?”

“DTs affects everyone differently,” he says. “The fact that you didn’t have a seizure last night and you’re mostly lucid right now is a very good sign. How do you feel? Are you still hallucinating?”

I look at Aesop. At the forest around us. I think I see the world as it is. In the bright light, it all looks laid out bare. Quiet, no voices but ours. Occasionally something shimmers on the edge of my vision. Or on his chest, the jumble of tattoos shuddering, like they’re struggling to take on life but failing.

“A little,” I tell him. “My vision is wonky. But no bugs, no snakes. And I feel tired. Like you know how your brain feels when you’ve been up for two straight days? Like that.”

“To be expected. But all good signs.”

“So I’m past it?”

He laughs. “Fuck no. The next couple of days, you’re going to feel muddy. You’ll definitely hear some weird shit, maybe still have the stray hallucination. Hopefully nothing as bad as last night. But it tends to be worse at night, anyway.”

I take another look at the bus. There’s a string of prayer flags hanging over the door. I nod over toward them. “Those are new.”

“I put them up last night,” he says. “There were some extra in the medical dome. There are always extra lying around. Figured it would give me something to do, and anyway, you could use it.”

“What do they mean?”

Aesop looks up at them, like he’s studying each one in turn. “The five colors represent the five elements. Blue for sky, white for clouds, red for fire, green for water, yellow for earth. Tibetan medicine promotes the balance of those five elements. And as the wind travels over them, the air is purified by the mantras written on them.”

“Do you really believe that?” I ask.

“Better to believe in something than nothing. And they certainly aren’t going to make you feel any worse.” He stands up and reaches out his hand. I take it and he pulls me to my feet. “I’ll show you how to make the tea. It’ll help. Sipping on it during the day should help mellow you out, and have some before bed, to help you sleep. Couple of days, you should be a little better.”

“Given last night, I don’t think we have a couple of days.”

“We’ll get to that. Let’s take it slow today. Tea and food first.”

He turns and leads me toward camp. We step up on the boardwalk and I pass over a board that says:
I am improving each day.

A little beetle comes up through the slats in the wood. I don’t know if it’s real or not, and it scuttles back down between the boards before I can check with the toe of my shoe.

The yoga clearing and the public art project are empty. Like the camp has suddenly been abandoned. Aesop leads me into the clearing between the domes, where Katashi is reading a book, and Alex is nestled on Job’s lap in an Adirondack chair. Aesop brings me to the steps leading up into the kitchen.

“Can you hang around a bit?” he asks. “I’ll go get more valerian root.”

“Sure. I’ll be fine.”

Truthfully I don’t want him to leave because I don’t want to feel like I can’t function without him around. And of course, as soon as he’s out of sight, I have that little kid feeling, like I’m lost at the mall without my parents.

“Drink some water,” I hear a voice say.

Could be Aesop calling back. Maybe not. Either way, good advice.

I step inside and stand at the sink, turn on the filtered faucet. There’s a slow trickle of water, slower than normal, which can happen, so I put a mason jar under the stream and then poke around the kitchen.

Someone calls my name from outside. I step to the door and there’s no one there. Katashi is still reading, Job and Alex still sitting in their chair, none of them looking at me.

Okay. This is going to be a fun few days.

I check behind the cleaning supplies underneath the sink, and then in the back of the pantry, not even sure what I’m looking for. I go back to the sink and check behind the cleaning supplies again. It takes three more trips between the pantry and the sink to realize I’m looking for my stashes of alcohol, which I know are gone.

I need something to do with my hands. Something to distract me. I turn on the oven and pull over the bowl of mushrooms by the sink that Aesop has foraged and cleaned. Little white guys this time. I pull out a couple, cut them into strips, douse them with oil and salt, lay them on some foil, and pop them in the oven. I want something savory. Something salty and comforting. I’d prefer bacon. This will have to do for now.

Forgot about the water. The mason jar in the sink is overflowing. I turn off the faucet and take a sip. It stays down. I close my eyes, take another sip. Hear my name again, figure it’s another hallucination. I put the mug down and someone is slamming into me from behind, pressing me into the counter. The mason jar shatters on the floor.

I spin around and Gideon is holding my shirt in his balled up fists, pushing me so hard I’m bending back over the counter a little.

“Where were you last night?” he asks.

“What?”

I try to push him off me but he’s got good leverage and my circuitry is fried. There’s something about this that feels very familiar and I ought to be able to handle it but I can’t. It’s too much. I want to puke. I’m about do it, right on his face, when Gideon goes flying across the kitchen and hits the door jamb. Aesop is standing between us now, on his toes, his shoulders tense and his hands up.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he asks.

Gideon scrambles to his feet. “I need to ask you the same thing. Where the fuck were you last night? Huh?”

Aesop pulls something out of his pocket and slams it on the counter, wraps his hand around the back of Gideon’s neck, and pushes his face down until it’s shy of slamming into whatever it was he put down.

“The theater in town was showing
Apocalypse Now
last night and we went to go see it, fuckface,” Aesop says through gritted teeth. “Today Ash is not feeling well. He ate too much popcorn. You put your hands on him again and we’re going to have a problem.”

Gideon pushes away, picks up the tickets, inspects them, places them back down on the counter.

“Okay,” he says. “Your car was out all night and I found it on the back road. There’s a… we have to keep an accounting of all our people. After what happened to Cannabelle.”

“Yeah, well, I hate driving over the bridge at night so I went the back way.”

“Okay…”

Gideon lingers, like he wants to say something else. Now I remember what it was I should do. I should punch him in the face. I ball up my first, ready to throw it into his jaw and see what comes loose, but he ducks out of the kitchen before I can.

Aesop turns to me. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. But, what’s with the alibi? That was convenient.”

Aesop throws some wood into the stove and places the kettle down on top, then grabs the broom and pushes the shards of the broken mason jar into a neat pile. “You said we needed an alibi, remember? Last night, on the way back, I took the long way around, through town, so we wouldn’t run into anyone. We passed the movie theater so I stopped and fished these out of the trash out front. Figured, just in case.”

“I don’t even remember that.”

“You were talking about the void by that point,” he says. “I never knew you to be so interested in nihilism.”

“I think Alex planted that seed. Anyway. Good work.”

It’s not long before the kettle is spitting steam. Aesop pushes the glass into a dustpan, dumps it into the trash, and takes the kettle off the heat. He places it down on a folded tea towel on the counter.

“You have to let it cool for a few minutes,” he says. “Straight boiling water will kill off some of the lighter oils in the root.”

He takes a tea strainer, a little metal ball on a clip, fills it with the small chopped brown roots from a plastic bag, and places it in a mug. “Pack this strainer about halfway during the day. Don’t have more than three or four mugs. Before you go to bed, pack it full. Let it steep about ten minutes when you put it together. That should help. It’ll keep you nice and chilled out.”

“Thank you,” I tell him. “For all of this. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve it.”

“Nothing,” he says. “It’s the right thing to do.”

“No, really. I don’t know why I deserve anything nice. Not with the way I’ve acted here. Not with the way I treat people. But you’re good to me. Cannabelle was kind. And I’m just… I am an asshole.”

“You’re a New Yorker, so that’s your default setting,” he says. “Truth is, you’re not nearly as bad as you think you are. Most people here feel pretty bad for you. That’s why we’re all so nice.”

I think he thinks I’m going to find that comforting, but it’s not. It’s actually pretty fucking sad.

He dips a pinkie into the top of the tea kettle, quick. He makes a face when he pulls it out, and pours some water into the coffee mug. As he’s doing this I remember the mushrooms because I can smell them now, so I pull the tray out and put it on a tea towel on the counter to cool.