The Last Days of Espiritu Santo

Isla Espiritu Santo. Pristine and barren, just as it was when they had come together on the rocky island. El Golfo de California. The island to hold on to. The Sea of Cortez.

Schools of towhee, wren and cardinal, the aquatic carrion, skeletons of stingrays and rockfish upon the powder-white beach, arachnids and itchy-such, save those and them, there is nothing, except he hopes, the small charm that had led him back to the island.

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He tethered the dirigible to a nearby torote.

He and she had found it on the island in the last days of Genevieve, the storm amid another storm.

He ambled over the clearing and onto the island proper. Ophelia’s locket, or rather her Nana’s, was where she said it would be. Just beyond the makeshift pier, about 250 feet “as the costa flutters in summer,” was the pile of stones that, led by the yellow dervish of a hummingbird, Ophelia had sat where her nan, Genevieve, had also sat and thought of being laid to rest.

Ophelia marked the place by taking off her hat and the gold, heart-shaped, lattice-worked charm, the only keepsake of an orphan. Just like in Mar Vista, Ophelia had given the locket a shake, but now the pearl inside is her percussive reward from the previous day’s dive in the waters of la Paz, where the ashes were dissipated the night before when the moon was full.

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He found it after three days of walking, driving, and drifting through the wasted paradise of Baja. Then, six days in the city and six nights, amongst the dimidiated* Choyeros; a darkness descended on dusk like tears in a sea. The charm is the only gold on Isla Espiritu. The only gold and perhaps the last pearl to be found for the Omega had come.

Ophelia fell sick with The Variant with a quickness that had baffled him. She was fine in the city for a week, the island for even a second day. At the elephant tree, which she thought looked greener than the day before and more than any plant on this desolate and booger-y piece of land, she made an exclamation sotto voce.

“This island was meant to be.” Ophelia wipes her brow as Genevieve had decades before. She grins at him.

“At least the reefer was good.” He thought and smiled at his wife, and wonders if they’ve been here in a past life, jubilant and high, with a pure air and full heart.

They sailed away that night-morning and returned after a bit of love. They kissed at the torote for some minutes and walked on. At the thirsty dune she fell ill, he thought from the heat or a critter with a violin on its backside, that played Por Una Cabeza as one had on their honeymoon. But it was no bite of a recluse.

Within a day, los doctores said the ventilator was not enough. From Monterrey to Mar Vista, Cabo to San Diego, the USS Mercy to the City of the Angels again. They both carried the Omega to California Sur. Only She had danced macabre until she awoke ready to go home again. She convalesced on the boat until lifted by copter in the air to Mar Vista. The Variant brought her home.

When she sat at her vanity for the first time, her thoughts turned to the locket. Old and New. The pearl and the gold, the value in the trinket, but the sentiment he never would. She begged him to go back to the island. She needed something, anything to hold on to.

“We all need something to hold on to,” she said before, on the island and on the night before the Variant’s kiss. He promised her he would, just hold on, before she took her last breath as the news of the first score eruptions, that would quintimate* Arcadia, appeared on the screen of the television that kept him awake on the night before his world had ended.

********************

“Be careful what you wish for,” he thinks to himself. Alone in the world, he feels no need to leave the island. Here, on Isla Espiritu Santo, he is the safest man on earth. Once upon a time his body had ached and longed for solitude. Now, that he is alone, he has conversations with the others he had known and those he’d almost forgotten. On the beach itself, or not, he could make his camp and sleep or not, fish and eat or lay with her in his dreams. He knows he will eventually have to find out how far the clouds and ash had made it, but if he were in immediate danger, he knew he would see it with his eyes now.

On his fifth day on the island, He watches as the lights begin to fade at a quarter till midnight, he thinks. To the moment, by the clock of the witch, the entire city is dimmed, reverently to the winds. Not even a bonfire illuminates the other shore. The Royal, the Princess, and the Carnival lists a few feet per hour in the tranquil waters of the bay facing west, though the sun that has just sunk below their inconstant horizons askew of their proper shadows in the bay on the aislamiento* of Baja Sur.

On the last day, he wonders if he should leave the island or wait till morning. He pulls the rain guard over his tent and looks up to see the waning gibbous still bright against the literal galaxy in the sky. He turns to his left and sees the first onslaught of ash approaching, due north, darkening the sky and sullying the air over the sea. He enters the tent and lays down and sleeps. In the middle of the night, he awakens to a million stars to ponder on one side of the night sky.

He drifts off again, as warm rain, gentle as a mother’s touch, awakens him. The rhythm belies the stirring cumulonimbus, three thunderheads, that form a hand on the right of the sky. It moves quicker than the cloud of ash, to the left, to the left. It is a dense and dry soot storm, preceded by a squall of particulate dust that unfurls like Cerberus’ carpet.

The rain pelts the top of the tent and he thinks of the beginning of the end, when the best of the virus had yet to do. When it had mutated not once, but seven times in the three years since he’d fallen ill at the festival in Utah. He’d gotten a third booster even before the first of the second and third waves had gripped the county. Then the first wave of the first variant, called Delta then, had not instilled fear in him, but, then came Lambda and Theta.

********************

Omega had arrived just before Christmas. Those who had disbelieved the findings of science had all but disappeared, the virus became The Variant, as it decimated and then didimated* with an astonishing quickness before anyone could protest any new rules, he knew it would be wise to leave the city, the state or even the country. But she’d taken ill on the island, and he had to return to the States.

In the aftermath, the world had received a biblical awakening of the force of nature. The virus, the droughts, the heat, and now a faraway caldera, whose wrath had spewed all the way to his miniscule kingdom in the sea.

When the disturbances and minor quakes announced themselves with bellicose rumblings, their coverage had elicited little notice to an already weary and devastated population. Then the smoke started to cascade into clear blue skies in the spring.

********************

He arrived in the city on the edge of the peninsula and the Variant had already taken a toll on the morale, if not the bodies, of those few still left alive in La Paz.

When he’d first made his way across at Tijuana, he had seen only the many signs of the pandemic that were hard to miss. The black bags that gave way to tarps, and then simply piles of ash and cinder, were everywhere he looked. The mercados and villages and cities along the almost-island state had ceased to move. But that hadn’t stopped him. He drove down the coast at ninety miles per hour for most of the first day. He’d only stopped a few times, just outside of Ensenada, and then every two hundred and fifty miles when his fear of petrol made sure he considered running out in the middle of the desert.

He entered La Paz driving slowly as he took in the awful information and the matter-of-fact voice on the radio that, was honest and plain and therefore soothing to him. It told him what he needed to know. The plumes of ash had spread as far south as Orange County as far North as the North Pole and as far west as Russia. In the continental United States, city after city had succumbed. The pandemonium never even had a chance to take hold as Chicago braced itself in one day’s notice. They did not know how much of the city would be submerged. Those who could afford it, boarded the last planes and the Interstates were silent though gridlocked, as no one was sure what to make of the ash that fell without ceasing until the city and its tributaries had been buried.

La Paz was already a morgue of a city when he arrived. On his third day there, the cell, television, and radio signals ceased. Strangely, as he squatted in the empty hotel he’d last visited with Ophelia, the sound of Banda and dancing and kids playing in the streets like when he was a boy, could still be heard. Then the power went out and the erstwhile enchantment was attenuated and ghostly.

In the evening he had travelled north as far as he could on the small watercraft in search of some knowledge of what was coming. Halfway up the eastern Baja coast, in the middle of the sea, he cut the engine on the craft and waited for the boat to still. On the shore there was a mass of bodies that pushed against the polyurethane fence that went along the beach from the marina. Flames aimed at the fences came from three different points and illuminated the cadavers, setting them ablaze. He watched until he caught whiff of the smell and then retreated into the night and back to the island.

On the last night, he awakens in the middle of the storm and does not pray or weep. The wind batters the tent and for hours his mind is on nothing but keeping it in place. It holds for the better part of three hours he thinks. When it subsides, for a moment he breathes easily. He opens the flap of the tent and sees the air is as thick as mud and he struggles to inhale the thick and heavy air. He closes it just as quickly and lays back to clutch the locket in his palm against his heart. He is only in the eye of the hurricane and the ash.

aislamiento* (n) Spanish

i. an island-like mass of land

ii. a figurative island

iii. a purgatorial place

iv. an outward tranquility and inner turmoil or vice versa.

Banda * (n) Spanish / regional / colloquial

i. Mexican regional music in which wind instruments, mostly of brass and percussion, are performed.

caldera * (n)

i. a hollow that forms after the sputum of magma in a volcanic eruption

qintimate * (v) also quintimate

i. a unit of measure

ii. To cull by one fifth (e.g., The population was qintimated by the plague)

dimidiate * (v)

i. to reduce by or to half (i.e., Already quintimated by plague, the people were further dimidiated by the exodus precipitated by the caldera