The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
— Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
The gates to the City of the Dead were rusting despite best efforts to maintain them; when the deadbolt was broken they swung inward, clanging and creaking. Peridot flinched at the sound — anyone for miles could have heard it. She dropped her bolt cutters and switched off her flashlight, and moved blindly into the labyrinth.
The North Mausoleum rose high above her, display cases rising six feet high and what seemed like a mile long. It wasn’t a mile, she knew. It was only a quarter of that, as it currently stood. In the dark, though, everything loomed larger.
The roaming guards swept through the Mausoleum before she could get seven yards in; she lay down in the grass and waited for them to pass, still and silent as a stone angel. They passed without so much as a glance in her direction.
After a few beats, Peridot switched the light back on. The next sweep would come by in a quarter of an hour. She had exactly nine hundred seconds to move.
Alastair’s moriai was housed in the West Mausoleum. Row 3, Column 10, to be precise. Peridot knew the number by heart, but it would be hard to find in the dark. All lights were kept off in the City of the Dead, due to the superstition that said spirits were drawn to light. Peridot didn’t believe in spirits — if Alastair was still around, she would have come to visit. It was impossible to imagine she wouldn’t.
She veered right, breaking into a run when she hit grass. Benches and thorn bushes rose up to meet her, narrowly missing her shins. In the shadows, clusters of In Memoriam trees and flowers looked like the grasping hands of revenants.
Peridot skidded and stumbled entering the West Mausoleum, tile squeaking under her feet. Her heart was pounding. Without a crowd to follow, it seemed so much easier to be swallowed up by the labyrinth.
Seven minutes had passed. Eight minutes remained until the next sweep — still, there was always a chance that someone could see her, a custodian maybe, or a chaplain keeping vigil. Being caught in the City of the Dead after dark meant being chained to a tree and left for the spirits. The penalty was a scare tactic more than anything, and it didn’t scare her. No one had ever been killed by spirits, though some reported scratches and bruises. What scared her more was the thought of being caught later, with Alastair’s moriai in her hand. The punishment for stealing from or defiling the City of the Dead was total erasure. She would be sunk into the Sea of Peace, her thread of life with her, and mention of her name would be forbidden.
Four minutes remained, and lost in thought she’d come closer to her destination than she realized. She switched off her light; she could find the case she wanted by memory now, even in the dark. She visited often enough. She walked faster.
She cut through the edges of the glass with a jewelry knife, or started to anyway -- halfway through, she heard the sounds of footsteps. The next sweep. She cursed.
Peridot ran to the tree planted in the center of the hall, and she jumped into its branches. The branches held her while she prayed.
Ten minutes she remained there. Guards came by with flashlights, stunners on their belts. They didn’t find her — by the way they ambled, by their chuckling conversation, Peridot suspected they weren’t looking that hard. It was a lazy hour of the night, close to the changing of the guard. They were going through the motions, waiting to be sent home.
Peridot took a breath and dropped down once they’d passed. The nine hundred seconds began. This time, she didn’t dare turn on her light.
When the glass panel came free, she let it fall and shatter as she seized Alastair’s moriai. Let the guards find it on their next sweep — she would be long gone by then.
* * *
What modern historians knew as Olympia began, as so many of history’s dark chapters have, with roundups. It began with trains. It began with walls.
People from Tucson to Helena saw the walls go up. Flimsy sheet-metal things they were at first (soon they would be reinforced), but already taller than three men standing on each other’s shoulders. Too tall to see over. People whispered, but they didn’t protest. They had a good idea what the walls were there for.
The trains went east first, emptying the cities of survivors. They emptied Boise, Salt Lake, Phoenix and Olympia — the Columbia of the future, the city where a new nation would one day be declared. The once-bustling streets of Sacramento, San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles were left empty, cities of dreams no longer. Provo and Reno, Great Falls and Twin Falls, Portland and Seattle — no city was spared. Scientists hadn’t discovered the so-called scarab gene, yet; they had only just designated the illness sweeping the nation as Marjorie Gilbert’s Disease, after the news anchor who bravely announced her diagnosis to the world on live TV. They knew that there was a pandemic, and that some miracle of the Goddess Nature kept some people immune to it. That was all they knew.
Mutations on the Hemoglobin-Beta 11 gene make their carriers immune to malaria. They also cause sickle-cell anemia. Human genetics are often a double-edged sword and the scarab (named for a symbol of health and death in Ancient Egypt) was no different. When a new wave of whooping cough hit the United States of America in the mid twenty-first, our bodies dutifully transformed to stop it. Sighs of relief all around — that is, until recovery turned into a raging fever, and seizures, and sudden death. There was no identified Patient Zero. No one could be sure when it began. More of the population got whooping cough, and more recovered, and about half of them died soon after.
No stone was left unturned in search of the carriers of this unnamed biological time bomb, and more importantly, in search of people who weren't carriers.
The carriers were left behind. The loved ones who refused to leave, who wished to stay with their sick relatives, were brought along kicking and screaming. It’s all for the future, the soldiers said. Think of your children. Think of the generations to come.
Once the last train had come east, the first went west. These trains were much fuller, loaded to their brims with the sick and dying. Lieutenant Nikitha Morris of the National Guard told her wife, years later, about the one patient who stuck out to her among the anonymous hopeless faces: an old black man singing Sister Rosetta Tharpe in a melancholy baritone. This train is bound for glory, this train.
* * *
Malachi roused her at noon, after she fell asleep at her workbench. Thankfully, Alastair’s moriai was hidden behind her toolbox, under the scrappy old shirt she wore to clean or paint.
“You know you’re working with the lights off?” ze greeted her.
“Hm?” She rubbed her eyes. “Oh — oh, God. How long did I sleep?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know when you got out of bed and came down here.” Malachi sat down beside her. “How are you feeling?”
Peridot didn’t meet her sib’s eyes. She didn’t like meeting people’s eyes, even the people she knew; she looked at their moriais first, despite how impolite it seemed. She’d been taught over and over not to make judgements based on what was on someone’s life-thread, and she didn’t make judgements. It was just easier to look at the beads than to analyze someone’s face. People’s faces were complicated and difficult, a language she didn’t speak.
Malachi wore hir moriai pinned to a bright red patch of fabric on hir jeans. Nineteen beads, all the red-tinged white of California. A Mercury symbol hung on the end, engraved with hir name: Malachi Yew Bradstreet. Plus a tag designating hir a student of the San Angelo School of Mechanics, and a similar one for the factory ze worked at on the weekends. Malachi didn’t have a religion symbol, or a religion for that matter. Their parents belonged to the Temple of Moroni — most people in their state did — but they had never pressured either of their children to join. Peridot joined the Church of the Goddess when she married Alastair, but Malachi seemed content with where ze was. Ze’d always been a thoughtful and a happy person. Maybe it wouldn’t last forever, but at the moment, it seemed ze had all the meaning in life that ze needed.
“What did you come down here for, anyway?” ze asked. Peridot shrugged.
“I couldn’t sleep. Aren’t you supposed to be at school? Don’t you have a class right now?”
“Not today. Prof’s having a baby. Why are you working with the lights off?”
Peridot furrowed her brow and looked around, like she hadn’t noticed the lights were off. (She had. She felt safer knowing nobody could look through the little basement window and see her.) “Was I? Fuck, I guess I was.” She ran her hands through her hair, and her agitation wasn’t false. “Switch them on for me?”
Malachi rose, and wordlessly flipped every lightswitch.
“Thanks. I know I’m acting off,” Peridot said. “And I’m sorry. It’s just…I’m just….” Her eyes filled with real tears.
“Hey, sis, I get it. We all get it. I miss Alastair too, though I know it can’t be nearly as much as you do.”
“Can I ask you something, Malachi?”
Ze shrugged. “Sure. Anything.”
“We haven’t talked about her since the funeral — about what happened, I mean. Do you…I mean, have you thought about it at all? Do you think Alastair killed herself? Do you think she’s dead at all? I mean, all we found was her moriai by the seaside. We never found a body.”
Peridot saw hir heart jump into hir throat; it wasn’t a question ze had expected, or wanted. “I don’t know, Peridot. I really don’t. That’s something I try not to think about it.”
She nodded. “Okay. You don’t have to have an answer. I just wanted to ask.” She should know better, she thought, than to go looking for answers to the unanswerable. Alastair should have known better.
Some things were better left as questions.
* * *
The first Temple of Moroni was much smaller in Peridot’s day than it had once been. When the trains first arrived, those who had never seen the Salt Lake City LDS Temple had thought it was a castle.
The Temple itself was closed off, but a field hospital had been set up just beyond. Similar hospitals had been set up in the big cities -- Phoenix, Vegas, LA, Portland, et cetera -- but also in suburbs and small towns and out in the middle of forests or fields. The relief was spearheaded by the Catholic Church, the JDC, a few secular relief groups and the UN. The UN was the first to be ushered out. The Catholics were the last to go. The camps emptied out except for the dying and the dead.
A woman known only as Tali O. left behind a diary, describing the sense of foreboding she felt in the empty days. I think about the trains and I think about my Oma’s stories, I think about Nuremberg and death. I thought it was a horrible thing to think, I shouldn’t put such dark motives on the people who wish to save the lives of everyone out there, but I can’t help thinking that death waits here. I can feel it here. You have dealt goodness to your servant, O Lord, in accordance to your promise. Teach me the goodness and wisdom of the Torah’s reasons, for I believe in your commandments. Tali O. was halfway through transcribing Tehillim 119:834 when her writings end abruptly — presumably when the first bombs began to fall.
* * *
Alastair’s moriai was short, too short — only thirty-two beads, twenty the blue and gold of Oregon, the rest California-colored. The Venus symbol on the end read Alastair St. James McKinley; Peridot remembered what a headache it was to convince the Department of Living History that Alastair didn’t want to change her name, she only wanted it set on a Venus symbol instead of a Mars. She liked her name. She didn’t intend to change it because that’s what was the tradition when one transitioned. Tradition in general meant jack shit to Alastair.
Her work tag was from the San Angelo Office of the DLH, something Peridot was pretty sure wouldn’t have lasted long. Alastair never stayed at one job for more than five years. The demand for archivists was too high, and she was too restless. Her religion marker, the same expertly polished steel as her gender marker, was the three-moon symbol of the Church of the Goddess. And her wedding ring hung on the moriai too. She’d taken it off her finger, just before she died, and attached it to the thread. That more than anything told Peridot that Alastair had known she was going to die.
And now the detritus of her life lay scattered across Peridot’s workspace.
Peridot Bradstreet was a jeweler, and had been since she turned fifteen — old enough to apprentice. On the other side of the walls, that would afford her little prestige. She might make good money, depending on her clients, but she would live out her days as an anonymous craftsperson. Not so in Olympia. Here, jewelers were deeply valued public servants. The moriais they created were a record of every new birth, a record that would survive after every death.
Alastair had been an archivist, a curator, a librarian — positions that afforded her the same amount of respect as Peridot, though her job was more about the long-dead than the newly born. Alastair’s job gave her access to tools most people weren’t afforded. She could use the computers in the archives, something that made her the envy of technophiles all across San Angelo. She still wasn’t allowed a personal computer — that was a privilege only afforded to a few elite officials — but there was, nonetheless, one hidden in a closet within Peridot’s workroom.
A family heirloom, Alastair had claimed. I’ve kept it up all these years, I don’t see any reason to let such a useful thing go to waste in some junkyard.
Inside her hollow Goddess charm, now in pieces, Alastair had left a note, containing a single word. The password to her computer.
Answers, maybe. Peridot wasn’t sure she wanted them.
* * *
History is easier to comprehend, Awiti Bremischer thought, when broken down into numbers. The end of the world was easier to comprehend, that way.
327,200,000: the number of people in the United States of America when the whooping cough outbreak began.
100: the amount of people who died from the cough before Gilbert’s Disease.
Approximately 13,000,000: the number of Gilbert’s-related deaths before an emergency order closed off the states of Utah, Arizona, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, California, and parts of Wyoming and Montana.
Approximately 25,000,000: the number of people who fled the United States during the outbreak. Many moved north to Canada or south to Mexico before the borders closed. Many more went back to ancestral homelands — China, Poland, Belize, Vietnam, France, India, Nigeria, Jamaica — by plane or ship, before the airports and seaports were both closed. Many more found their way out after that, one way or another. There’s always a way out, depending on what you’re willing to sacrifice.
9,936,000: the number sent to or sealed inside the newly-built quarantine country.
4,510,000: the number that died of Gilbert’s behind the walls.
Approximately 2,560,000: the number that died when the US took a dramatic final step in ending the fever’s spread. Firebombs weren’t enough to stop another 2,000,000 from succumbing.
331,200. Three hundred thirty-one thousand, and two hundred. That was how many survived after — mercy of mercies — a vaccine for Gilbert’s was developed by Olympian doctors, who couldn’t be saved by their own invention.
Awiti’s secret job gave him access to material most people never saw or dreamed of. He was one of the few people in Olympia allowed a personal computer and access to the Internet. The Internet showed him everything from American news to world news to unedited Bibles and history books. He’d read the documents from the Olympia, Washington conference that officially gave rise to his country.
It made perfect sense to him that the US firebombing of the quarantine country wasn’t in Olympian history books. In fact, those books make no mention of a quarantine at all. They say that Olympians are descended from the only survivors of a totally devastating plague. Everyone to the east was wiped out.
It made perfect sense, from an isolationist standpoint: telling the people that there was nothing beyond the walls kept them from going looking. It kept Olympia from being exposed again to the harm Americans could inflict on them. It kept them from realizing what they truly were.
But, to Awiti, it also made sense from a personal standpoint.
We’re dead to them, the last living ones thought. Might as well make the best of it. Might as well build a nation in this graveyard.
* * *
Now Peridot understood.
Alastair had killed herself, maybe. She had known the risks when she followed her map outside, and she determined that the rewards were worth it. Alastair could be dead. She could be alive, too, but Peridot didn’t allow herself to focus on that. Easier to keep her dead, for now.
Olympia was surrounded on all sides by vast expanses. To the west was the Sea of Peace, an expanse of salty green water, endless. To the north and south were expanses of nothingness — Canada and Mexico, if those places still existed. They were sealed off by barbed wire and landmines; what was beyond remained unknown, unknowable. Here there be dragons.
To the west, beyond the walls, there was the desert. A sea of red Earth, stretching as far as the eye could see, with more unknown beyond it.
The United States. The United States was a place that still existed.
The only things Alastair had saved on her computer were a map of that nation and a history book that taught her the truth.
The United States was where Alastair was, in soul or body. It was where she waited for her wife.
* * *
“Alright, thank you, Mr. Bremischer. See you next week,” River Hesse concluded, professional as a therapist with a client. River didn’t talk to his own therapist about Awiti Bremischer, of course. That name, that man and his information, were highly confidential. But everyone knew at least some details of the Olympia Project, so he felt comfortable speaking of the stress his involvement in the hundred-year-long endeavor put him under.
He shut off the computer and sighed, deeply.
River hadn’t yet told Bremischer that he was to be the last of the Project’s interviewees. When he died, America would land a helicopter in Olympia and offer to let the lost states rejoin the Union. No one had any idea how it would go. It could kickstart a war — a war that would inevitably devastate the smaller, newer country. But “forward with reckless abandon” had been the direction of the US for three centuries at least--and maybe since the nation’s birth--and it wasn’t about to stop or turn around now.
Keeping the survivors of the ill-advised bombings sealed off from the world had originally been a safety measure, to stop the spread of disease. Soon, though, scientists realized the opportunity they had in their hands. The quarantined had split off from the American way of life entirely. They were writing their own history books. They were forming religions. They were building a culture from the ground up, from dust. No anthropologists had witnessed this happen in real time. It was unlikely they would ever get another chance to do so. Was it unethical? Hell yes, it was unethical. And yet three generations of River Hesses had jumped at the chance.
River packed up the dregs of his day and clocked off. He was thinking of making an emergency appointment with his therapist.
River Hesse longed for Olympia. He’d met the refugees; he knew there were people desperate to get out. He knew it was a poor place, much of its land barren, with a government that withheld information and executed people at the smallest provocation. But the lives that trans people like him had in Olympia were something he would kill for. He wanted to jump that wall, just to get a taste of that effortless acceptance.
Halfway through his walk home, River pulled out his phone and dialed Dr. Murray’s number.
* * *
There had been no attempts to maintain the walls, and they were rusted to Hell. The area around them was desolately empty. No one came too close, for those walls marked the edge of the world. Guards manned towers spaced a half-mile from each other, but a lone person at the base of the walls was a rare sight.
Peridot didn’t wait for night. The guards and bystanders wouldn’t stop her, wouldn’t try to save her. If anything, she wanted to be seen. She wanted to inspire their awe.
She removed her moriai and hung it on a nail. Whether she died out there or not, her grave would be in Olympia.
She placed what was left of Alastair’s moriai beside it, their stories intertwining. Peridot didn’t believe in spirits. She didn’t want to take the chance. If she died, she would be beside her wife.
She climbed.
A small crowd stopped to watch, but most people passed on by. As if it was bad luck to watch a crazy person too closely. As if the suicidal impulse might be catching.
Peridot kept climbing.
Her fingers were bleeding by the time she reached the top. She couldn’t look down; the dizziness was nearly enough to make her lose her grip. When she crested the wall, the only way to look was out.
A sea of red stretched out beneath her. In the heat of the day, the air rolled and jumped like waves.
Peridot had only seen the real sea once before. It staggered her then, just as this desert staggered her — the hugeness of it, like the sky fallen to the ground. It could swallow you, it could swallow millions, and still have space between the bodies.
The climb down was easier than the climb to the top. As she climbed, the crowd on the other side dissipated, counting her as lost. They murmured, but still they were afraid to speak too much of it; they dreaded having to break the news to Peridot’s family. Her deadly curiosity wasn’t something to be spread.
Peridot reached the ground. With one step, and then another, she let the newly-glimpsed sea swallow her.
K. Noel Moore (they/them) is a writer of fiction (mostly genre) and poetry from Atlanta. Their work has previously been featured in Twist In Time Magazine, Homology Lit, Bewildering Stories, and many more; their most recent book, the fantasy novella Incendiary Devices, was released in December.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mysterioustales
Website: https://knoeltales.wordpress.com/