Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

“Well? So what the heck kind of machine is the Spiritist Telegraph?”

“I think,” Osceola said wonderingly, turning a page, “that it’s supposed to be your body ?”

There were dozens of drawings in the appendix. Ossie showed me an old anatomical sketch of a woman floating with her arms akimbo, her private parts inked in. Her eyes were pupilless, serene, like the Egyptian sculptures I had recently discovered in a kid’s World Wonders book of my own. THE SPIRITIST RECEIVES A MESSAGE, read an ornate scroll of Bookman type that furred her collarbone.

“Can I read it?”

“You’re too little.” She saw my face and relented. “You can flip through it. You can flip through it once , and fast. ”

Together we spun through a hundred chapters: foxed pages, strange drawings, an appendix of gibberish. All these witchy psalms about a place called the underworld, which was neither the heaven nor the hell that I had learned about from Little Rabbit cartoons and Bandits of the West comics and the Bible. It sounded instead like a vague blue woods:

In the Underworld, all suns and lanterns are unwelcome. The transfer of light is an unforgivable breach from Acheron to Lethe. One matchstick, one fingersnap of light, can feast on those shadows and blaze into a conflagration. Young Spiritists: you must gag your vision.

Do not even say the word “sun” here, Aspiring Spiritists, or the trees of the Underworld will punish you for it: to do so would be like telling kindling the epic of fire, or whispering lamp to the dark.

— from The Spiritist’s Telegraph , pages ix — x

“There’s no such place, honey,” said my father when I asked him about this underworld. His voice was like a shell with something oozing and alive inside it. “There’s no such thing as heaven, no hell. That’s a Christian fantasy. That’s a very old fairy tale that your sister is reading.”

“It’s a book for witches, Dad. And the underworld isn’t heaven or hell, it’s like a whole separate country. Like a, a Germany under the world.” I frowned; this description was nothing like the painting in my mind, which was like a woods but also in some uncommunicable way not like a woods at all. I defaulted to: “Like a woods, Dad. You can visit dead people there. It’s always nighttime and the trees get angry if you bring flashlights or candles …”

“You girls want an underworld?” The Chief’s booming laugh was directed at our sofa; there were no other adults in the house to echo it back to him. Our parents used to find each other this way, via laughs and gasps, an echolocation of incredulity and horror. “How deep do you want to go? You tell Osceola this: we are already underwater. Okay? Tell her that we live below sea level.”

“Da-ad. That’s not what the underworld is. The book says …”

“Ava Bigtree, why not let your sister have her hobby, huh?” His voice was wry and ordinary, but he looked at me with real pleading: “You and I, we’ve got the Seths, we’ve got the whole park to run, right?”

One picture in The Spiritist’s Telegraph I stared at for hours, until I could see it fork behind my eyelids: a river cut a lightning shape through jagged, enormous boulders. Strange creatures lived in the margins of the mountains. The artist’s brushstrokes had added shapes into the clouds: snouts and wings and eyes, a long whiplike tail. Obsidian flakes snowed over the entire range. This painting was titled Winter on the River Styx .

About this time, Ossie and I started playing Ouija every afternoon. We made the board ourselves. It had a blue painted alphabet and little suns and moons modeled on a picture from The Spiritist’s Telegraph .

“ ‘The language of the living rains down on the dead,’ ” Ossie read to me from The Spiritist’s Telegraph , “ ‘and often our communications can overwhelm them. The hailstorm of our words can be too intense for them to bear …’ ”

SO GET AN UMBRELLA, MOM, I wrote to her a little angrily.

Weeks passed and we didn’t hear back. Sometimes to make me feel better Ossie would pretend to be our mother — I LUV U, DOTER, she’d write, or U ARE PREITY, AVA. I MIS U.

This is a true fact: my brother gave himself report cards. He modeled them after a Rocklands Middle School report card, which he had purchased from his obese mainland associate, Cubby Wallach. Cubby Wallach was complected like a bowl of oatmeal and yet carried himself as if he were wearing a top hat and spats. He had the bellicose dignity of a kid who refuses to excuse or even to acknowledge his own extreme ugliness. I admired this trait. It reminded me of the Seths, with their scarred, alien faces and their beautiful oblivion. Like a Seth, Cubby Wallach would let you stare at his face without apologizing for it. No red cheeks or downcast eyes, just a cool, invulnerable stare. In this way his ugliness got transmuted into a powerful hypnosis. Ossie used to have a bad crush on him, and I pretended to hate him. “What an asshole,” I’d say, but it came out as sort of a giggle.

Whenever he came to Swamplandia! Cubby Wallach brought a gigantic shopping bag filled with other kids’ colorful graded homework and purloined protractors and sold this haul to Kiwi at an incredible markup.

Kiwi insisted that he was our homeschool’s valedictorian. I was the salutatorian. Ossie mostly read magazines. Years ago, Mom enrolled us in Teach Your Child … in the Wild! a vestigial statewide initiative from the early days of white settlement — we got a whole “substitute curriculum” for free in the mail. Every month some functionary at the Loomis County Public Schools sent us stapled booklets with titles like Your Federal Government Is a Tree with Three Branches and Mighty Fungi: The Third Kingdom . Several times a year we mailed back a stack of tests and completed worksheets, I guess to prove that we were learning something .

This stuff was too easy for my brother. He said that he was going to leapfrog over the LCPS high school requirements and go directly to college. He was studying for the Scholastic Aptitude Test — the SAT. If you put the fan on high in his bedroom these little powder blue cards with funny words on them flew everywhere: FATIDIC [adj], OPPROBRIUM [n]. My brother always had a pack of study cards with him. He would rather conjugate Latin than do any of the chores the park required of him. He was in charge of concessions. When the park was open, Kiwi would sit next to the trapped snowfall inside the popcorn machine at the top of the stadium steps, waving mechanically, his face making a funny pucker beneath the paper cone of his hat. Cubby Wallach had sold him these dark-rinse jeans, and they fit him like a puddle.

Now Kiwi was free to spend most of every day mossed inside the Library Boat, where the portholes gave his face a Frankenstein gleam. He got this aura of expectancy about him that confused me. It wasn’t dread, not exactly, but you could not call it hope.

“What little test are you studying for?” I asked him once, and he looked up with clouds for eyes and said, “My future.”

I think that Kiwi resented my sister’s new scholarly ways a little, because up until this point he had always been the bookworm, the captain of the Library Boat. But Ossie applied herself to The Spiritist’s Telegraph with the same diligence with which Kiwi studied science and philosophy — she wouldn’t meet our eyes anymore, she was lost in her book.

On April 29, we threw Osceola a sweet sixteen party. Without Mom and Grandpa the party felt dazed and sad. The guest list was us. The Chief and I thawed out an ancient cake from the Swamp Café freezer (“Let’s hope this doesn’t kill us, Chief!” I said, the absolute wrong joke to make). Our presents for her that year, not to put too fine a point on it, really sucked. The Chief walked over to the Bigtree Family Museum and returned with a pair of tawny moccasins. I had to remind him that the moccasins didn’t fit Osceola anymore; that’s why we’d moved them to the museum in the first place.