FICTION: LIZ HARMER

THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS
 
On the morning of the protests, Mal and Lucy were still arguing about what to do. Or, Lucy, at least, was still arguing. Mal, meanwhile, was letting the reeds move languorously around her. Women who’ve known each other for decades have their pet in-jokes, their nearly meaningless teasing. Lucy accused her: “You’re letting the reeds move languorously around you.” Mal, sitting on the raw wood floor of the shack, ignored this.
 
Lucy had written the phrase years earlier, when she’d been married to a man and bitterly envious of Mal. She had written a long paragraph in imitation of Mal’s prose, of one of her famous tangents: maybe the world was erected on the back of a soft-shelled turtle whose elegance lays in its ability to, like many turtles, lower its heartrate to such a degree that it can survive deep under the water while it sleeps, unbreathing. There was humor in its molelike face and its penile neck, out of which its head withdrew and stretched. So this is what it is to be alive, Lucy wrote, squinting, searching, and ridiculous as a penis. She wanted to tease Mal, she wanted to be a little mean to Mal, but it was the case that actually laboring over the paragraph had given her new respect for her. Mal didn’t laugh then, and she wasn’t laughing now. Sometimes she seemed to be quite humorless in person, though in her writing she loved to overlay elegance with buffoonery. Also, she was exactly the sort of person who might have lowered her own heartrate until she, too, could live for many years in an airless room, having airless dreams as the reeds moved languorously around her.
 
“Mal, baby,” Lucy said. She couldn’t help the slightly whining tone in her voice. “The world is ending.” She awaited a retort, but none came. “We have to go. It won’t be safe here.”
 
“I’m not in it,” Mal said. She tilted her head, that elvin face with its pixie cut, woodland creature with wide-set eyes.
 
“You’re not?”
 
“I’m not in the airless room,” she said. “See?”
 
She gestured to the old tea-towel covered in small needles and hollowed out sticks. Dried reeds.
 
“What’s that?” Lucy said.
 
“Darts,” she said. “I’m soaking them in strychnine.”
 
Thoreau had women to bring him meals, women to visit and wash his clothes. These two actually were women. Mal had taken her admiration for the American transcendentalist, her despair at the dying of the planet, and her desire to be self-sufficient and turned all that into a way of life.
 
“Will that work?” Lucy said.
 
“I think so.”
 
Lucy was no elf. Buxom, blonde, and shouldered like a man. When she was young her lips were practically famous for how pillowy they were. She sometimes felt too large for Mal’s shack, and she let the screen door slam as she went outside. She’d been the one to pack two identical bags with freeze-dried foods and a water-filtration device, with binoculars, a compass, first aid. Only Lucy had a gun, a revolver from her second divorce, during which she’d been in a dramatic phase, in a mood to burn everything down. Mal would have her darts. They hadn’t worked out a mode of communication. Her phone had, for days, been as inert as a brick.
 
Lucy stared at Mal’s creek. Mal had made a million dollars for her observations of that creek, a million dollars she’d been too pure to spend and which now did not exist. Mal had lived for a decade in the shack. No running water, no electricity, just four walls and a woodstove, a bunch of oil lamps, a desk, a hard, small bed. Whenever Lucy visited in those days, it was as a pollutant, or so she loudly liked to remark. “You’re like a houseplant that absorbs toxins,” Lucy said. “It’s like your meditations have actually cleared the air.”
 
Mal emerged from the hut. “Are you ready?”
 
Now they were both standing there staring at the creek. Too much had already been written about that creek.
 
“Can you even see this anymore?” Lucy asked.
 
But of course she could.

*

They trudged out together in a poor imitation of a military film. Through the muck and the rotted leaves into town. They left Lucy’s Jeep behind with its full tank of gas because they’d heard that anyone in a vehicle would be a target.
 
“So we’re just walking towards violence,” Mal said. “Just sauntering over to trauma and evil.”
 
“Or we’re going to act with those who need our help,” Lucy said. “That’s another way you could look at it.”
 
“Of course,” Mal said. She was quiet and dubious. It was Lucy who was excited. As charged as a rotten tooth.

*

For all those years Mal had been trying to see. Once, when Lucy visited from her other, middle-class, stable life, Mal was drunk on some sweet wine she’d made herself from mulberries and confessed that she wished to transcend her own eyeballs. Maybe without eyes she could see. Lucy accused her of being too classical, too Homeric, of being sentimental, of being ableist. Lucy had at that time been traveling from one residency to another, one relationship to another, all the best men and women she could find, desiring only to fuck and in fucking to find an equal who might return her to herself.
 
“You’re no different than me,” Mal said.
 
Lucy, who felt that Mal was better than her in every way, and which inferiority was her shame, sipped the tooth-staining wine and stared in the flickering light at her friend. She had written about all the fucking. There had been an appetite for lurid personal essays then, and for hard-won insights. Lucy believed that, while inferior to Mal, she was at the height of her ability and fame. “What do you mean?”
 
“I want to transcend my eyeballs,” she said. “Or to get past the obstacle of my own mind with its frames and narratives by digging farther into it. And you’re just trying to transcend yourself the old-fashioned way: by using others. The reality of someone else might make you feel real. It’s a false god,” she said.
 
“I’m not pretending not to be doing that,” Lucy said. Everyone believed that self-awareness was a necessary, ethical position. “But your way is the old-fashioned way.”
 
“Fine,” Mal said. The wine made her speak openly, to embrace the sagacity others usually projected onto her. It didn’t make her slur. “It’s old-fashioned and hardly any person in history has managed it.”
 
“A state of unfulfilled longing is the only honest way to live,” Lucy said, who did slur, and who wanted now to weep into her glass.
 
Mal gave her a regretful look and poured her more. “I want more than mere honesty,” she said. “And I am not interested in longing.”
 
“I don’t know what’s happening,” Lucy said. Years would pass before she would understand what Mal had meant, and she would doubt her meaning even when it did become clear

*

They easily found the crowd. A mass of bodies. Thousands of people were in the street just as in the previous protests. Mal had gone into the city for the gossip a few days earlier and knew what the plans were, the routes, the destinations. They’d decided to climb to the roof of a parking structure before joining that crowd, within which no one could move until the mass decided to move. The concrete stairs stank of piss.
 
The last time people had gathered in the streets there were other people in military gear standing like crows on rooftops. There had been machine-gun fire and the bodily consequence of that gunfire, which had been enough to scare everyone out of protesting. Fish in a barrel.
 
“They’re gone,” Lucy said, surveying the former outposts of those gunmen. “There’s nobody up there.”
 
Mal didn’t reply, but this was nothing new. Lucy assumed she was silently assessing. But when she turned again to look for her, to suggest that they join the people in the street who were moving, now, with purpose, she wasn’t there. Everyone’s tall body was a bolt of fabric. Even on the roof, Lucy could hardly squeeze through.
 
“Mal!” she screamed. “Mal!”
 
Lucy got to the edge of the roof and looked down to see Mal slipping through the crowd and away. The old spite surged through her. Mal was the only small counterforce in a crowd that was becoming more organism than collection. New atoms were adding to its back edge, rings on a time-lapsed tree, and she felt the people’s fear and excitement like the intuition that it was about to snow. Mal escaped the crowd’s locks and turned to look up. Lucy threw her body against the bodies around her as though they were the plywood sides of a coffin, the stuck doors of a sinking car.
 
“Fucking cut it out!” someone yelled.
 
She was already exhausted. This was wrestling. She jabbed her elbow into someone’s rib, sobbing, helpless, and was shoved so hard in return she nearly fell off the edge of the rooftop. How was Mal moving so fast?
 
The drop into the crowd was fifty feet—could Lucy survive the jump? Mal was the one who crackled with facts. She was the one who would know.
 
“Mal!” she cried again. This time there was accusation in it, in her name, which was also a cry of sorrow. She had shortened the too-feminine Melanie years earlier and called Mal her French pun of a nom de plume.
 
She seemed to be going back the way they’d come. It was many miles back to the shack and would take hours.
 
“But why would she do that?” Lucy said.
 
A man nearby growled at her to shut up.

*

 
When they met in college, they hadn’t known that their dreams depended on something as fragile as an economic system. They had their degrees, their birth control pills, antibiotics, parents who owned their homes. The two of them had many cakes they also ate. Both the sort of girls who had the luxury to hate money. Lucy got her MFA and then her residencies, teaching other people just how important words are. She cringed to think of it now: oh, language, how crucial! Oh stories, how irreplaceable! All those keynotes. Those awful lunches. Prosecco. She thought she knew how arbitrary fame was. Thought she understood how farcical achievement.
 
Once she had recommended to Mal to turn the shack into an artists’ retreat, though Mal claimed to despise profit. She also claimed to despise art, though it turned out that besides admiring vines and examining nests she’d been writing everything down. A year later came the first betrayal: Mal published that creekside book full of frogs, foxes, vines, and Lucy, Lucy the unnamed villain of vanity and worldliness, charge of attraction and temptation. Later Lucy saw it as a love letter but at the time she had only the youthful sense of having been fooled and caught out. Of having lost her dignity. Mal won the Pulitzer and became as famous as Lucy was. But she was pure. She had typed up a manuscript and sought a publisher, but she pretended to be pure. That’s why Lucy did what she did, telling everything to the trade magazines and then to the Times. Telling them about Mal when Mal wouldn’t talk about herself. After that, they didn’t speak for eight years.
 
But then she got divorced again, and Lucy changed her mind about everything. It’s as natural a process as any of Mal’s: rot or melt, burn or grow. Lucy returned to the shack where Mal was still living her “dailiness.” Water-fetching, log-chopping, frog-frolicking. Like a child. Like an ancient. The first night, Lucy was exhausted from the labor of her life there, sticky and muddy, and Mal was unchanged. “You look like a sorcerer,” Lucy said, so tired she couldn’t move. It was Mal who came near and took Lucy’s face in her hands, Mal who leaned over to kiss her. All the energy Lucy had been throwing into the world hoping that it would catch somewhere, all the longing and striving, all of it had taken her here, to Mal, to its rightful orientation.
 
When the dollar started to fall, when the whole system turned itself into a rock and plummeted, turned the country into a sinkhole, they discussed what to do. Mal knew how to live on nothing. So did Lucy by then. But no one was safe, Lucy argued. And it’s immoral not to help. Mal was reluctant. “Isolation is a capitalist privilege,” Lucy said. “It’s only subversive while the system is in place.” Mal, finally, agreed.

*

Lucy had never fired a gun. But a few hours after Mal’s abandonment, she was holding a loaded rifle and pointing it at one of the hostages. All the CEOs and major bigwigs were long gone, but some of the tech employees who didn’t have the means or the wherewithal to get to a private island via a private jet were squatting in the mansions that became the first targets. Men died. Men and women died in front of Lucy, who held a rifle. She felt it blast open and nearly throw her aside, but all she had hit was a clay vase. Some asshole’s souvenir from an Aztec vacation. The hostage was just a kid, a rich kid, with a shitty beard and half a tattoo—maybe a snake?—on his upper arm. His eyes were wide over his gag, and then they were still, and blood was everywhere. Lucy was holding the rifle, but she hadn’t shot him. She looked at the man next to her, who was drenched with so much sweat—she assumed it was sweat—that his face was rubbery. Melting. He shrugged. What else was he supposed to do but shoot?
 
If you have to choose, Lucy thought, between being one of the masses or being the king, it’s safer to choose the smaller life. You were rich and powerful and then you were dead. But everyone wants worship and admiration. Everyone wants to be king. There was a commotion of blood and smokesmell around her on the patio, near the dark pool. She had a vision like one of Mal’s, all of it at once: a kind of wheeling machine, desires going always in one direction, towards ambition, towards death, or, no, she couldn’t describe it. There was an awesome feeling of vastness and activity. A zombie horde. All of them climbing each other’s bodies to get where? To get up? Why is up better than down? Only because of the climbing.
 
Their secured gates and their threats of attack dogs were provocations, almost as if their fear of being overthrown had been the reason the people had wanted to overthrow them. People didn’t have to be obscenely wealthy. It was a lesson they’d be forced to learn.
           
You never see wars like this anymore,” a fat man said to Lucy near the private tennis courts where they set up camp. Somebody had decided to piss in the infinity pool, and a line of men had their dicks out, dribbling and laughing. Lucy felt that old feeling of being too close to misogyny, a masculinity that didn’t know it hated women. Too many men, she thought, suddenly afraid. She checked for the rifle, and then the revolver.
 
“I’ve never seen any war,” she said. Was this exhaustion or was it grief?
 
“Oh, I haven’t either,” he said. “But drones don’t mean anything. Not like this. You can’t feel any of this unless you have contact.”
 
She supposed he meant the thrill, the taste, of victory. A metallic taste, salty. They were Homeric god-men.
 
“Maybe we’ll actually win,” he said. “We’ll do this.”
 
Later they’d hear about children and their bodies. Countrysides so badly bombed they were obliterated. Lucy didn’t feel she’d lost her humanity. She felt more human than she’d ever been.

*

Was love like peace? Like capitalism? Only an idea, easily destroyed? Mere structure, mere abstraction, some convenience to build a life around?
 
That thing between Mal and Lucy, which Lucy felt stretching too far and nearly breaking as she’d watched her, her like a little red laserprick of light on a digital map going fast away, that thing was eternal. They would die, Lucy thought, clutching the revolver, checking again and again that it was loaded. They would die and they would reincarnate or rot, but energy could be neither created nor destroyed. She had taken Mal out of her soft shell and into the world. She made Mal weak, and Mal made her strong. Lucy was nothing but a vampire.
 
Mal had left home with no money, had burned her degree and her prizes, and had disowned her well-meaning parents. Had no ties. But love was stronger than death, Lucy thought, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it stronger than Mal?
 
She searched for Mal when the tents had been posted and the fires made. She clutched her gun all the way through the empty streets. People were in hiding.
 
Lucy’s calves ached, her shoulders seemed bloody where the bag rubbed in a perversion of a massage. Still, she walked. At the edge of the woods there was a bit of Mal’s red sweater torn off and attached to a gnarl. Then another bit, and another. Without the sweater, she’d be freezing. It was like Mal had made a trail, though the trail was only leading to the shack, which Lucy would have found anyway. So it wasn’t a trail? Lucy couldn’t think, and maybe Mal, all those hours ago, couldn’t think either. She knelt at a stream—the wrong creek, not yet Mal’s creek—and rinsed in the water that looked like poured metal in the fogged moonlight. Rinsed off the blood and the sooty earth. Lucy flashed her light on roots and moss, on needles and dried leaves, finding more frayed wool here and there. Nowhere was any flash of light returned to her. Lucy croaked out Mal’s name, like a frog, and then she thought: I don’t believe in metaphors anymore. Someone give me the facts. As she neared the shack, she came upon the body of a dead sparrow, brown and plain. Years ago, she’d written a poem on the occasion of a dead bird that resembled Amelia Earhart: exploded eye, decaying like leather in the rain. And then she had written an essay about writing the poem, and several lectures, and now here it was again, her bird, as though she’d never anthologized a thing.
 
Her heart pounded like bootsteps. No more metaphors, she thought. She had become only body, no spirit. The jeep was gone. The mud had suffered some violence from the tires. The ground was gouged. She left me, Lucy thought. Any alternative was worse than that. Anger might keep a person alive, though even this was more than Lucy could bear to admit. She wanted to raze the shack, that beloved shack. More beloved than Lucy was. She wanted to spit on a grave.
 
Fine, Lucy thought. See you in another life.
 
She could have slept in the shack and turned back in the morning but this was not a time for such a reasonable choice. She refused to live as Mal did, with a monk’s abandonments. She wanted to throw herself up against the things that were not herself. To find out if maybe the world is real. The boots were cutting her feet. She took her punishment with her shoulders back, head held high, still clutching the red threads like a wilted bouquet.
​

​Liz Harmer is the award-winning author of The Amateurs, a speculative novel of technological rapture, which was released in 2018 and a finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. Her essays, stories, and poems are published widely, and her second novel, Strange Loops, is forthcoming with Knopf Canada in 2022.