South Village (Ash McKenna) (9 page)

No nightmares though. That much is a victory.

I swing my legs off the cot and kick the empty jug of whiskey. I pull on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and put on my sneakers. On instinct I reach for my cell but remember it’s at the bottom of my bag, tucked away. I’m still not used to not carrying it all the time, though I do enjoy this moment of realization I have most mornings. I don’t need to carry a cell phone. That’s a nice thing.

There’s a half-empty bottle of water on my desk. I suck it down, put that and the three empty whiskey handles into a canvas bag, and head out. The forest is quiet in every direction and the sky is overcast, washed in dingy gray light. No sun to make a guess at what time it is.

After stopping at an outhouse and then a recycle bin to discard the jugs, I head toward the main domes, passing by the yoga clearing, where a dozen people are doing downward-facing dog on a rainbow of foam mats spread on the dusty ground. Moony is leading them, her black hair spilling over her bare shoulders. I’ve considered joining them. Some days I feel a tug in my lower back. Whether that’s age or sleeping on an old cot, I can’t be sure. Maybe I need to start some body maintenance.

Alas, today is not that day.

I pass the art space—a deck with a slanted roof held aloft by wooden columns. It looks like it should blow over with a slight breeze but somehow has been standing since this place was built. There’s a clay kiln, which is currently belching white smoke, and a thick canvas the size of a bedsheet stretched taut between bamboo poles.

The canvas depicts a swirl of colors, like a wave curling up, one side of the wave a treescape, the forest reaching out and growing in on itself. The other side of the wave a starscape. They come together like they’re part of the same scene, but encroaching on each other in small measures. It reminds me a little of a van Gogh. But different. Bigger. Trying to find a middle-ground between two different worlds. I look at it for a little bit, because every time I look at it I think maybe it’s finished but it’s still a little bit different.

Cannabelle steps onto the deck in a loose tank top and shorts, barefoot, holding a brush tipped in white, and taps at the starscape. Adding more stars to the sky. The trance breaks and I walk away, but she calls after me. “Hey Ash. C’mere for a minute?”

I climb up onto the wooden platform. “What’s up?”

“Why don’t you give me a hand. Pick up a brush. I’ve still got a few billion stars to go.”

I shake my head. “Not my jam.”

“You should give it a try sometime. It’s therapeutic.”

“What’s the point of a painting that’s never finished?”

“What’s the point of a life that’s never finished?”

I try to come up with a wiseass remark, can’t, shrug, and walk away.

The picnic benches outside the main domes have an assortment of people sitting at them, reading or smoking cigarettes or eating fruit. The smell of tobacco drifts my way and it smells a little like my old life. As I’m approaching Eatery something smacks my chest and falls to the ground. I stop and look down, see it’s a blue and white hacky sack.

A couple of guests are staring at me, apparently having lost control of the hacky mid-game. I pick it up and Joe, an older guy with sleeve tattoos and a slight limp, says, “Little help?”

I toss the hacky into the woods.

“Watch where you’re kicking that thing,” I tell him.

This results in some grumbling, which I ignore. Aesop leans out the front door of the kitchen and waves me over. Inside he’s standing with a little elf of a kid. Latino, probably no more than just out of college, big wet eyes and a little stubble on his chin, like he’s heard about beards and wants to know what the fun is about.

“Ash, meet Zorg.”

“Zorg?” I ask.

The kid nods. “I am Zorg,” he says, with a swell of body-lifting confidence.

Sigh. People like to shed their names when they get into camp. The real world doesn’t come to bear here. Mostly the nicknames are easy to remember, which is nice. This is among the more ridiculous.

Though I used to hang out with a group that included Ginny Tonic and Bombay and Good Kelli and Bad Kelli, so who the fuck am I to talk?

“I have to run and take care of something,” Aesop says. “I’m supposed to show Zorg around. He’s going to help me in the kitchen after you leave. Can you show him the ropes? I’ll be back in a half hour, tops.”

Aesop is probably lying, that motherfucker. I can see it in his eyes. He says I need to be more social and sometimes corners me with folks so maybe I’ll make new friends. I want to go to the library but I’m not exactly in a rush, so I nod him off and turn to Zorg.

“Do you have any cooking experience?” I ask.

“Zorg does not.”

“Look, you can call yourself Zorg and that’s fine, but let’s cut it with the third person just for right now, okay? I’m way too hung over for that.”

He purses his lips and dips an eyebrow, like he is suddenly deeply suspect of me. “Okay. Zzz… I… do not. Do I need cooking experience?”

“No. I didn’t have much. Aesop is a good teacher. Let me run you through the facilities.”

I show him the cast iron stove, powered by dead wood from the forest. The electrical outlet for the occasional device we try to not use because we only have as much power as the solar panels suck up. Kitchen appliances are a hell of a drain. We can get two minutes out of the blender, tops. We run through the greywater sink and the water filter, which takes even longer than the greywater, and the whole time Zorg watches me like a lizard, his eyes wide and flat.

After the tour of the kitchen, I figure I should show him the garden. Outside we find Gideon hanging upside down from a tree, shirtless, doing sit-ups. His face is red and he’s counting off very loudly, as if for our benefit, “Four… five… six…”

“Wow,” Zorg says.

“That’s Gideon. What you’re seeing right now tells you everything you need to know about him.”

As we wander down the footpath Zorg asks, “So, everyone works here?”

“Everyone works. If you’re staff you have a job and you do it and you get paid a little money. If you’re a guest you pay a little money for your accommodations and you pitch in on a chore.”

“A lot of people come through here?”

“Most people don’t stay more than a few days. That’s less an indictment of the facilities and more about demand. Lots of people want to come here.”

“And how does the food service work?”

“We do dinner every night. Full vegan, no exceptions. Most of it comes from our gardens, but we go into town for stuff we can’t grow. Pasta and things. We don’t do breakfast or lunch, that’s up to everyone else. We have two chest fridges. People are welcome to use the kitchen and to store stuff. Truth is no one does anything elaborate in there. Most people wait until dinner for their big meal. Everything else is snacking.”

Something shimmers in my line of vision. I stop, put my hand out to block Zorg. I take a step forward and there’s a web spun across the trees lining the path, a spider the size of a large strawberry chilling right at face-level, its abdomen a brilliant explosion of stained glass. It would be beautiful if it wasn’t a giant nightmare spider. I walk around the trees, let the spider be.

“Are there a lot of those out here?” Zorg asks.

“Too many,” I tell him.

We pass one of the outhouses, which is the size of a porta-potty, the outside graffitied with flowers.

“So you pee against the trees and do your other business in there?” Zorg asks.

“That’s the deal,” I tell him. “You cover it with sawdust. Works surprisingly well.”

“Sounds scary,” Zorg says.

“It is, a little. Check for bugs before you sit down. Took me two days to work up the courage the first time. Don’t wait that long. It’s not healthy.”

We reach the garden. The canopy is cleared out here and the clouds have burned away, so the raised beds are drenched in sunlight. The temperature jumps noticeably as we step out from under the shade, enough I want to retreat. I lead him down the long rows, show him the vegetables and the herbs. The special plot we have set aside for Momma’s. The chickens peck at the dirt around us. I introduce them: Diana, Leah, Consuela, Mum, Joule. Mathilda is off causing trouble somewhere.

Last stop is the goat pen.

“And that’s Dana Cameron,” I say, pointing to a young, fuzzy goat chewing on something. “She’s mostly a pet and helps to clear land, but we do sometimes get milk for the non-vegans.”

Dana looks up and makes a goat noise, goes back to chewing.

“The goat has a last name?” Zorg asks.

“I didn’t name her.”

“This place seems kind of old,” Zorg says. “But Zz... I heard it’s only been open for about a year.”

“It was built back in the seventies. It used to be called Middle Earth. Apparently the founders had a thing for Tolkien. It fell off, and people have tried to reopen it a few times, but it never lasted long. Tibo is making the latest attempt. He actually had some capital to invest, so I figure he has a pretty good chance of hanging in for the long run.”

“It seems nice.”

“It is nice.”

“But you’re leaving.”

He blinks his lizard eyes at me. I’m not sure why or how he’s asking the question, so I choose to shrug at him. “Can you keep yourself occupied until Aesop gets back to the kitchen?”

He nods so I leave him in the garden.

T
he purple curtain on the library dome is drawn across the entrance, so I peek in to make sure the nude book club isn’t meeting. I also briefly wonder if there are so many nude activities during the colder months, or if this is a summer thing.

This is my favorite of the domes. There’s a level of reverence here that doesn’t exist in the other domes, which are crowded and haphazard and sometimes dirty. Here, everything is immaculate. There’s one continuous shelf that starts at the floor and wraps up, running along the inside wall in a spiral to the roof, where there’s a skylight that brings natural light trickling down onto the round carpet and four wingback chairs placed around an Oriental rug. Off in the corner is a cluttered desk, which is occupied by Magda, bare feet crossed, wearing a tan sundress and tan shawl and tan ceramic jewelry that clacks when she moves. She looks up at me and smiles.

“Ash,” she says.

“Magda.”

She places a finger to mark her place and puts the book down in front of her. “Looking for anything particular?”

“
The Monkey Wrench Gang
.”

She tilts her head. Curious.

“Cannabelle recommended it.”

As if on cue, Cannabelle comes through the curtain, wearing basketball shorts and a white t-shirt, her short hair wet and pushed back on her skull like a greaser.

“Speak of the devil,” I tell her.

“I wanted to come see if you got sorted,” she says.

We both look at Magda, who’s frowning. “Sorry, I don’t think we have that one.”

Cannabelle sweeps around the shelves, looking at the start of the spiral running along the floor, where the author’s name would be. “I could have sworn I just saw it…”

“Maybe I should invest in an e-reader,” I tell them.

“Do you know how much an e-reader costs the environment, in terms of plastic and manufacturing?” Magda asks. “Not to mention what they do to bookstores. Electronic books are putting booksellers out of business. It’s a tragedy. Don’t even joke about that.”

Her voice is shaking a little by the end.

“I was kidding,” I tell her. “Deep breath.”

She shakes her head, crosses her arms.

Cannabelle’s path comes around to Magda’s desk. She reaches down and pulls up a book poking out from underneath a pile of magazines. “It’s right here.”

“Oh well…” Magda seems to stumble a little. “Someone must have returned it and it didn’t get shelved yet.”

Cannabelle nods and holds it over her shoulder. I cross the carpet and pluck it out of her hand, stuff it into my pocket. “I’ll have it back soon.”

Magda nods and I leave. Outside Cannabelle comes alongside me.

“That was a little weird,” she says, her voice hushed.

“Magda isn’t all there,” I tell her.

“You don’t sound like you believe that.”

“No, I don’t.”

She nods. “I concur.”

Cannabelle doesn’t leave room for me to respond. She runs and leaps onto the branch of a thick tree hanging close to the ground and throws her legs over it. Upside down now, her shirt falling down into her face, she salutes, pulls herself up, and suddenly she’s on her toes, perched on top of the branch. She leaps to another branch, and the next, higher and higher until she’s gone. Off to work, leaving me alone.

I don’t know what to do at this point. I could keep asking people questions but I don’t know what questions to ask. If there’s something untoward going on, there’s no sense in tipping off the guilty parties. I already went through all of Pete’s belongings, of which there were barely any.

And then it hits me.

I went through his physical belongings. I didn’t go through all his stuff.

T
he main dome is the one that makes me ache for home. Therefore, it is not always my favorite place to be.

It’s the closest anything around here gets to ‘sprawling’. It’s the biggest of all of the domes by double and separated into a couple of rooms: There’s an office that’s used mostly for filing. There’s the computer room, which is a wheezing old desktop covered with stickers that someone probably bartered for ten years ago. It still uses Internet Explorer. I’m not a computer guy and even I know that’s some bullshit.

Then there’s the bar/lounge. It’s not exact, but in style and spirit it’s a replica of Apocalypse Lounge. My favorite bar, which was being shuttered as I was leaving New York. The only place my friends and I had that felt like a beacon in a storm.

The office is dark wood and smells of cinnamon and spice. That incense smell that bothered me so much when I first got here but that I’ve come to appreciate. This room is the darkest, the windows covered up so the failing tube monitor is viewable. A touch of sunlight and it gets washed out.

The computer is perched between two overflowing gray filing cabinets. The seat is occupied by Alex, the little hipster girl who looks like she was plucked out of Williamsburg, wearing torn jean shorts and a Clash t-shirt with brunette bangs nearly touching her eyes. She’s clacking away at the keyboard, staring at a giant block of text. I come up behind her and ask, “Can I cut in?”