Rhea opened her eyes slowly, looking around her room as reality set in. She stumbled to the bathroom and splashed her face with cold water, looking at her cracked reflection in the mirror, exhaustion and distress creasing her features. A pounding headache caught her attention and after a cold shower, she ventured to the kitchen, hoping coffee had already been made.
Unfortunately, no one had been back yet that morning, so she took it upon herself to try to fill the coffee grinds in the filter. But after her headache became too much and her hands could not steady, she gave up and grabbed a can of soup, and took a seat at the kitchen table. A view was visible from the window, an apartment building with a glowing vending machine standing by the street and windows with air conditioners sticking out the bottoms.
She heard strings and trumpets echoing through the air, a spinning record projecting a rolling symphony. Rhea listened to soft music as it traveled across the street. She attempted to peer into the window that was emitting the sound across the street, but the blinds were drawn. She sat with her head back and listened to the tune. It felt like it had been decades since she had heard such soothing music, and it warmed her soul a little. Growing up, she enjoyed snatching records from her father's collection and would sit in his study, The Orchestra Of The Age Of Enlightenment flowing through the speakers where Hector Berlioz and Gustav Mahler brightened her mind. She went through her father's entire collection of composers until she knew every note by heart.
As she listened intently to the composition, the notes of strings and pianos ran through her brain, and she placed the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich as the source.
Delton came up the stairs and went into the kitchen, got a box of rice and chicken, and sat down at the table
"You have a fun night?" Delton asked, though his tone cut through his words with clarity that he didn't care. He was holding back on charging her for the drinks from the smidge of pity he had for her.
Rhea groaned in response, driving a crack of a smile on Delton's face.
The silence they sat in didn't linger with the uncomfortable tension of two itching to release words. Delton finished his food and left down the stairs to go to his apartment (a location none of the other Sockeye residents knew). He was a nocturnal being, finding he could only sleep once the sun was up.
After Rhea finished her soup, she went back to her room, waiting for her headache to subside. She hid under the covers to shield herself from the irritating light since she had no blinds in front of her window.
As the sun trekked across the sky and her pain subsided, and Rhea left her humid room for a moment and went out to the curb on the street for some much-needed fresh air. A car's blaring headlights rushed past, and an arm sticking out the window dropped an empty bottle onto the street. It landed on the dark cement and rolled to the edge of the road, hitting her boots.
A woman with leathery skin and a long black braid sat down the street on a rug, flashing her black-toothed smile at by-passers to advertise the betel nuts she had for sale. The nuts were collected in bags sprawled before her, Indian spices and tobacco fanned in display. Buyers hardly took the time to stop, a few tossing bills at her with an order she filled and wrapped with smiles but received no thanks.
Rhea looked up to the building housing the wonderful symphony. It had stopped long ago, but she tried to keep the tune in her head. She let it dance around her skull as she watched the movements through the street, humans and animals alike, strutting along to the invisible harmonium vibrating in them all.
Rhea craved music, symphony, a harmony of some sort that could roll over her muscles and help relieve the anxiety clenching her body. Fingers followed the stones of the mala. She tried to expand her subconscious, become intact with the dark corners of her brain, recalling Hyun's advice. She saw script behind her lids; no words or meaning. She let the letters flow and rolled her thumb against the string of stones while she focused on the oxygen and carbon dioxide moving through her chest until her pulse dissipated into a quiet thump. She opened her eyes and got to her feet.
Crossing the street, she took a detailed look at the adjacent building. Above the entrance to the apartments was a sign: The Occult Shops. Though constructed like an apartment building—five single-spaced rooms on each floor—each room door was open with signs in advertisement:
Alchemy Tools: Cucurbits, Alembics, Lutes
Human Skulls and Stones from the Dead
Look to the Sky: Astronomical Clocks and Armillary Spheres
World Cult Relics: Mani Stone, Crucifix, Menorah, Quran, and more!
No More Pain! Heal Your Joints and Bones with Anthroposophical Medicine
The music began again. Johann Sebastian Bach's Brandenburg Concertos echoed three floors up. Rhea began to climb the stairs, each floor of five rooms occupied by merchants in their hidden shops only curious customers could find. When she reached the room emanating the music, Rhea approached the signed door: Break the Brain: Damage the CNS With All-Natural Substances!
Rhea entered a cramped herbarium. Flowering plants flourished through the room; a familiar earthy smell reached Rhea's nose. Every inch of the small space was maximized to house plants in terracotta pots, dangling within hanging baskets, and jars of roots and leaves and honey on the shelves. A woman stood behind a counter in the corner of the room, atop a record player where Bach's symphony emanated.
"Hello dear! I'm The Green Witch, propagator of CNS-breaking alkaloids. Are you looking for any specific adulteration?" Long ocean-colored hair was braided down her back to her thighs, and a large brown pointed hat atop her head. Black circular tattoos were dotted atop her cheekbones, and a small crescent moon just above the bridge of her nose. Silver piercings and jewelry decorated her brown skin, arabic tattooed along her collarbone:
لا يكلف الله نفساً إلا ما تستطيع أن تتحمله [1]
"Oh, no, I was just attracted to the music you're playing." Rhea eyed the many strange flowers and plant parts. "I didn't realize there were shops here."
"You can find many strange merchants cramped into the crevices of Samadoya."
"You said you're a propagator of alkaloids? Are all these plants poisonous?"
"Quite indeed. Tropane, strychnine, sesquiterpene lactones, polyynes, grayanotoxin, isoquinoline, ergot; practically any compound that compromises the mind or central nervous system can be found here. Acquired species from all across the globe."
Rhea looked around in amazement, asking the woman for a brief teaching of the species she had never seen before: Angel's trumpets, yellow jessamine, Japanese star anise, ma sang fruit, water and poison hemlock, water dropwort, spotted cowbane, deadly nightshade, ayahuasca vine, morning glory, strychnine tree nuts, iboga roots, Indian snakeroot, mandrake, and honey from tutu honeydew and pontic rhododendron.
"The music is for the plants?" Rhea asked.
"Plants like music. And I enjoy it too."
"You know a lot about plants."
"I have great respect for green life."
"Why?"
"They're inspiring. Their adaption and survival abilities, their colors. They are the foundations of life here as we know it—no life without plants. And like animals, they can learn and grow from experiences, even if it takes thousands of years. All plants, wherever on the planet, have a consciousness within the definition of awareness that involves knowing itself to be alive to some degree; therefore, if you speak to a plant, you can assume it registers feeling, no matter how primitive. All living things are sensitive to our human environment, and for plants, all life is one. The human environment is just one aspect of a greater unity. There is a predisposition in all life to exist in harmony; until the introduction of free-will exercised by humans. In that way, our consciousness diverges us from the harmony of life, and everything else becomes treated as an object and is used and often abused to fulfill man's desires. This island is one such example. Before any of us, there was a harmonious ecosystem, each species playing a part that keeps a stable environment. They don't know they are doing it; it just comes naturally. And then comes the blundering foot of free-will and human consciousness, detaching us from that harmony and inducing polluted air and cement ground.
"Plants, like animals, are sensitive to stimuli around them. They can be helped to flourish through the treatment of love and kindness and nourishment within a harmonious environment; or they can be treated harshly and negligently, in which case their growth patterns will be affected as well as their will-to-grow which, in its primitive form, is similar to human will."
"How does music aid in plant nourishment?"
"The theory of playing music for plants comes from music's ability to create a vibration of harmony, which fosters the growth pattern and inner sense of harmony of plants. I believe in the spirit of plants, an existence in energetic form, and it can be observed that some grow with more vibrant life or radiance due to the enhancement of the spiritual life within. All plants are capable of becoming more radiant and growth-full in this way."
"Then who's to say plants are less alive than humans?" said Rhea in agreement with the Green Witch's words. "If anything, I've found them to be more vibrant than the energy residing in people. I see it when I look at the eucalyptus trees, some so massive I can only imagine the layers of rings beneath the bark. They keep living, keep growing, keep expanding."
"And you can see the way they weave into our settings. Humans are meant to have a harmonious relationship with plants. They are still meant to be harvested and used for beneficial use since their purpose is to aid life by providing sources of food, clothing, and shelter. Still, there has been an imbalance as environments are destroyed with no proper reconciliation of the life being taken. Here in Samadoya, there is some residence of what once was. Trees sprout from the concrete, gardens, and greenhouses atop some buildings, and the westward side of the island still has a hold on its original founders."
"They are a beauty, that I can't deny," said Rhea as she gazed at the flowers gently dancing with the circulation of the air conditioning. "I've been eager to enter the west side of the island, see what resides there that not even Rusakov will enter."
"Ah! Irvin Rusakov! Such a mammonist. If he had his way, death and bullets would be all that remains of this place. He has no idea how to sustain anything, economy or ecology."
"He surely is hated by many."
"Not even his own son liked him."
"He has a son?"
"Had. Boy shot himself on his 21st birthday. That was about twenty years ago. He was a bastard boy from with a mother from a brothel. The boy was nothing like his father, from what I've heard. He loved people, and people loved him back. He had a gift for words, an aspiring poet. But he carried a great deal of suffering and was too sensitive for the world he was bred into, so he put a revolver in his mouth."
"That's awful. I can't imagine Rusakov as a father."
"Probably why he did such a shitty job at it."
"This seems a difficult place to raise a child."
"I've got three kids, and they're doing okay. I mean, one is turning into a little bit of an arsonist, but what are you gonna do? So far, he's only burned some of his sister's stuffed animals…and a cat."
"So you've lived here a long time?"
"If you call nine years long. Escaped here after I had my first son. His father was a dangerous degenerate I had to get away from."
"I've only been here a few months, but have heard many rumors that this is a haunted place."
"Oh, indeed it is."
"So you believe the supernatural resides here? It's not just supersticion to you?"
"Well, there are dozens of stories, so to know which hold truth is close to impossible, but there is something off about this city. Many say a swamp goddess resides on the westward part of the island who had been marooned here centuries ago. She had been taken from her home, sold as a slave, fought to the point that she was not useful to her captors, and was abandoned to starve. And she did. But the story resides around the belief that humans have an energy that they contain—a soul—which can generate great power when struken by pain and grief and all the ugliest of emotions. Her soul did not leave this island after her body decayed into the weeds, and she was sent to wander along the shores of the island in search of her captors. When men again landed here, she sunk their boat and poured salt water down the mens throats until they drowned on land. Fire is said to be her weakness, and when men discovered that they were able to chase her from shore and begin building their ugly civilization. But the swamp goddess is not gone in the slightest. Sometimes she enteres these streets in the early morning, mold in her hair and skin sagging and blue, looking for vile men to pump full of water until their lungs are filled to burst.
"A silly story, I know, but a few weeks after I arrived here a few triad men were found dead at the edge of the city, their bodies so full of water that their skin had swelled. Evidence was not found of who the culprit was. And there have been other corpses like that since."
"Probably a copycat," said Rhea.
"Probably," said the Green Witch with a shrug.
The needle reached the edge of the record, and the symphony turned to a scratch.
"Where did you get your records?" Rhea asked.
"There's a music shop in Talun with thousands of records. Instruments too."
Rhea brightened. "What kinds of instruments?"
"All kinds. It's off Newnham Lay." The woman removed the record from its player, slipped it into the cardboard sleeve, and handed it to Rhea. "Keep it. I've got dozens."
Rhea gently accepted the gift. "Thank you. If I had any money to spare, I would make a purchase."
"No worries. Another time. What's your name?"
"Rhea."
"Please to meet you, Rhea. I'm Moran. Come back anytime you want. You're nice to talk to."
[1] "God does not burden a soul except what it can bear"