Caribou

I

You’re a woman in your late thirties. Your hair is brown shot with gray, worn in a ponytail; your face is thin and careworn. Your clothes are well-made—expensive even—but practical.

I

You’re a man, tall, pale, and thin, about thirty-five. You’re wearing a frayed gray sweater; corduroy trousers, and thick glasses.

I

You’re a tan-skinned, wiry little man with a sardonic face; you’re maybe thirty years old. You’re wearing faded jeans and a red sweatshirt.

I

You’re a skinny young woman in your early twenties. Your hair is dyed at least five different colors. You’re wearing a gray military surplus jacket, a black miniskirt, and big boots.

II

You left home to learn this very difficult trade; you came back, inexperienced but determined, to care for the people of this town.

II

You’ve managed to supplement a state-school education with near-endless reading and writing. People who know you figure you for a poet, but you’ve always been more interested in trying, perhaps fruitlessly, to make literal sense of it all.

II

They locked you up for being a homosexual. You weren’t in prison long, but it changed you—you did a lot of lifting, and some fighting, and you came back completely unwilling to take anyone’s shit.

II

You think you’re related to a couple of these others—that’s how it goes in a small town. Nonetheless you’re an outsider; you doubt that anyone was surprised when you went away to school for several years, though they may have been surprised to see you come back.

III

You belong to this city—to its people, its tribulations, its politics. You must have served on a dozen committees; on some of them, you even made a difference.

III

The town of Wormwood: population 13,288 (3,500 in government housing), employment 100% (officially), poverty 0% (officially), homelessness 0% (officially). Primary sector of employment electrical power generation.

III

You tend to a be a little too obvious about your vices, a little too insulting toward authorities you don’t respect.

III

You can still find traces of the old animistic religion in this town and its environs, if you know where to look. And you do know—you’ve studied those customs from an anthropological point of view, and also as a True Seeker.

IV

This was a tiny village until fifty years before the disaster; then they relocated a lot of farmers and Native country-people here. When they built the plant the town grew a lot, got louder, grittier, more modern, but it’s basically still a place of poverty, need, and frustration.

IV

This was a terrible place: new cement high-rises that began to collapse before they were finished, stinking diesel cars that chewed at the air. Ice and sweat. When the disaster came, for one dark moment you thought "Thank God this will all be obliterated."

IV

This place you live in, it’s kind of a scrubby little hellhole. It’s always been poor, and it has a pretty large Native population. That’s probably why they chose it for the nuclear plant a few years ago—not that you can really complain, given that you got a job building the thing.

IV

Before you went to university, Old Town was mysterious and enthralling for you—elderly men and women in wooden cottages, most of them at least half-Native, supposedly still practicing their old religion in private.

V

Difficult to concentrate on this. A static-y feeling. Something here, though.

V

Something is not yet clear. There's dust where it should be.

V

There’s something here, but you’re not sure what—it’s like static in your mind.

V

A mystery: there’s a hissing in your mind where a piece of knowledge should be.

V

That person was in your care. Two weeks after exposure, they began experiencing post-latency symptoms: infections, internal bleeding. They hitched a ride back here with some cleanup workers back here, when they knew they were dying. You followed.

V

You were the one who said “Yes.” Yes, by God, I will renounce all that I was; I lay those burdens down with ease. The others followed.

V

You were working at the plant when the accident happened. A while later you got sick, terribly sick; you figure you’re going to die. And—if anybody told you that what you’d do, when it came down to it, was go home of all places . . .

V

A ritual, a sacrifice, a pact with Nature, to save your dying cousin’s life. You have what you need; you know how to do it. You could say the words right now.

VI, IX, X

You’re in love with the Beautiful one. You’re in a long-term relationship (marriage?) with the Intelligent one.

Living hasn’t been very easy for most of the people you’ve known. Or for yourself, in a way; but that’s of secondary concern.

VI, VIII

You’re in love with the Fearless one.

Sometimes, out walking, you’ve felt like you wanted to set yourself against the ugliness of this place; to be an insult to its ways, a defacement upon its concrete and grime.

VII

You carried on a years-long, on-and-off affair with the Intelligent one. It was an open secret at the time—is an open secret? Is it over, forgiven, forgotten, still going on?

XI

You’ve always wanted to feel like you belong here. Like part and parcel of this place—one of its people, sharing even their troubles and iniquities.

XI

You relish any emotional distance you can get from this place—any sense of being on the outside looking in.

VII, IX, X

You’re in a long-term relationship (marriage?) with the Determined one.

Number-pushing, accountancy, useless fact grinding on unjust fact grinding on uncaring fact: it would be awful, to be in service to a machine of that kind.

VIII

There’s a limit to how much you’ll let things get you down, even the things that really bother you. You’ve never been one for despair.

There’s a certain romance to even the darkest of thoughts; their coldness is like the cold of one last long starry night.