(visuaclass="underline" Cassie Montgomery, LA County Human Services)
MONTGOMERY: "We can't trace the source yet, but I don't think it's a coincidence that most of these young people are latchkey kids and heavy net users. It seems pretty clear that something they've seen or experienced online is provoking these bad dreams. The rest I chalk up to garden-variety hysteria."
What's even more important," the guide said, smiling her professional smile from behind thick goggle-style sunglasses, "is that we now have healthy breeding populations of many threatened birds—the gallinule, or marsh hen, the roseate spoonbill, the Lousiana heron, and the beautiful snowy egret, just to name a few. Now Charleroi will take us into the deep swamp. Maybe we'll see some deer, or even a bobcat!" She was good at her job: it was clear she could manifest the same energy for that line every trip, day in and day out.
Not counting the guide and the young man nominally steering the boat, whose suntanned arms bore the serpentine traces of unignited subdermals and whose facial expression also suggested that some necessary light beneath the flesh had not been switched on, there were only six passengers on this slow weekday afternoon, a red-faced British couple and their small noisy son who was cutting at the duckweed with a souvenir lightstick, a pair of young married professionals from somewhere the the middle of the country, and Olga Pirofsky.
"Please keep your hands out of the water." The guide retained her smile even as her voice hardened to something less cheerful. "This isn't an amusement park, remember—our alligators are not mechanical."
Everyone except Olga laughed dutifully, but the boy still did not stop swiping at the water until his father said, "Lay off, Gareth," and smacked him on the back of the head.
Strange, so strange, Olga thought. So strange, all the years and miles of my life, to wind up here. A bank of cypress loomed ahead in the fast-dissolving morning mist, a gathering of phantoms. Here at the end.
Three days now since she had reached the end of the journey, or perhaps since the journey itself had deserted her. Everything was stasis, pointless as the quiet little guideboat moving along its preprogrammed route across the resurrected swamp. Sleepless through the silent nights, only able to slip into unconsciousness when dawn touched the window blinds of her motel room, Olga could scarcely find the energy to eat and drink, let alone do anything more strenuous. She didn't even know what impulse had led her to buy a ticket for the tour, and nothing so far had made it worth missing the few hours of sleep she might have had in its place. She could see the object of her quest from almost anywhere in the area, after all—the black tower dominated the vicinity as thoroughly as a medieval cathedral its village and fields.
Three days without the voices, without the children. She had not felt so bereft since those distant and terrible days when Aleksandr and the baby had died.
And I can't even remember now what that felt like, she realized. A big emptiness, that's all that's left. Like a hole, and my life since then has just been little things I throw into that hole, trying to fill it up. But I can't feel it.
She never had felt it, she realized—not fully, not truly. Even now it was a blackness that was out of reach, on the other side of some kind of membrane of deliberate ignorance, a thin wall separating her from a horror as complete as the vacuum of space.
If I had ever let it through, she thought, I would be dead. I thought I was strong, but no one is that strong. I kept it away.
"Since the completion of the intracoastal Barrier," the guide was saying, "thousands and thousands of acres of waterway which were being lost to erosion and increasing salinity have been returned to their pristine state, preserved for future generations to enjoy." She nodded, as though she herself had climbed out of bed every morning, smeared on her sunblock, donned her waders, and assembled the barrier.
But it is beautiful, Olga thought, even if it's all an illusion. The boat was murmuring through a patch of vibrantly lavender water hyacinths. Small paddling birds moved unhurriedly out of their way, clearly familiar with what by now must be a generations-old routine. The cypresses were looming closer. The sun had lifted a full span in the east above the Mississippi Sound and the gulf beyond, but the light could not penetrate too deeply among the trees and their knee-high blanket of mist. The darkness between them looked restful, like sleep.
"Yes," said the male half of the professional couple suddenly, "but didn't making the Intracoastal whatever . . . Barrier . . . didn't that utterly ruin like almost all the wetlands that were already there?" He turned to his wife or girlfriend, who tried to look interested. "See, the corporation that owns all this dredged out Lake Borgne over there completely. It was only a few meters deep, then they opened it up to the sea, sank the pilings for that island with the corporate headquarters, all that." He looked up to the guide, a little defiance on his thin face. Olga decided he was an engineer, someone to whom management was usually the enemy. "So, yeah, it was part of the deal that they had to patch the rest of this up, make it a nice little nature park. But it pretty much killed the fishing all around."
"You an environmentalist or something?" the British man asked flatly.
"No." He was a little defensive now. "Just . . . I just follow the news."
"The J Corporation didn't have to do anything," the guide said primly. "They had permission to build in Lake Borgne. It was all legal. They just. . . ." she was reaching, veering an uncomfortable distance off her usual recititativo. . . . "they just wanted to give something back. To the community." She turned and looked at the young pilot, who rolled his eyes but then added a little speed. They began to pass the first cypress stumps, pointy islands breasting the dark water like miniature versions of the mountain that haunted Olga's dreams.
There's nowhere left to go, she thought. I've reached the tower, but it's all private property. Someone even said that the corporation that owns it has a whole standing army. No tours, no visitors, no way. She sighed as the cypresses slid toward them through the mist, enfolding the little boat in mist and angled light.
It was indeed, as the promotional material had claimed, like a watery cathedral, a hall of vertical pillars and hangings, the cypress trees draped with moss like a freeze-frame of liquid flow, the water itself still as a drumhead but for the threading wake of the boat. She could almost imagine that they had passed not just out of the direct sun, but out of the direct surveillance of time itself, had slipped back through millennia to a time when humans had not even touched the vast continents of the Americas.
"Look," said the tour guide, her precisely animated diction puncturing the mood like a needle, "an abandoned boat. That's a pirogue, one of the flat boats the swamp trappers and fishermen used to use."
Olga turned resignedly to see the skeletonized hull of the little craft, its ribs colonized with hyacinths like the capitals of an illuminated breviary. It was beautifully picturesque. Too picturesque.
"A prop," the young professional man whispered to his companion. "This wasn't even swamp until ten years ago—they literally built it after they finished the Lake Borgne project."