Karen Russell - Swamplandia!

The Chief borrowed forty dollars from Kiwi and rented an adjacent room for me and Ossie, lucky 13, where we were supposed to shower and then sleep, impossibly, in beds. An hour after we turned out the lights, I woke myself up. I stared around the featureless space with my heartbeat stinging me and tried to figure out where I was. I watched a body stand and raise one curtain to half-mast, so that the dark rolled out of the room. The curtains turned the color of weak tea, one droning hallway bulb behind them. My sister! I couldn’t quit rubbing at my eyes.

“You okay?” Ossie walked over to my bed. Like me, she was quilted with rashes and burn; she’d showered for close to an hour and her skin had a scoured look. She had lost weight in her arms and her cheeks, which gave her face a crop of new hollows.

“You were laughing in your sleep, Ava.”

I reached out and grabbed her warm wrist with Bigtree Wrestling Grip 7. Slowly I remembered that I wasn’t in the swamp anymore, that we had made it to the Bowl-a-Bed hotel, a place with color TVs and a confectionery of miniature, jewel-colored soaps and shampoo-plus-conditioners and comforters that smelled reassuringly of ordinary vices: old pepperoni pizza, draft beer, Vaseline, cigarettes.

“It’s okay now, Ava. I’m right here, all right?”

“Ossie?” For a second I didn’t believe it was really her. She touched my forehead. She touched me as if she were Mom, as if I were a child again back on the island and sick with fever, or even just pretending. Our mom, as stern and all-seeing as she could often seem, would do us this great favor of pretending to be credulous when we faked sick. Mom cooed sincerely over our theatrical moanings and coughs. She would push our hair back from our cool liar’s scalps and bring us noodles and icy mainland colas as if happy for an excuse to love us like this.

“Was the ghost real, Ossie?” I asked her sleepily.

“I thought so.”

“Okay. Is the ghost back, though?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she told me that night. But until we are old ladies — a cypress age, a Sawtooth age — I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love.

I don’t believe in ghosts anymore, either. Not the kind from Ossie’s book. I think something more mysterious might be happening, less articulable than any of the captioned and numeraled drawings in The Spiritist’s Telegraph . Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children.

After my mom died, I used to have these dreams where I arrived to clean out the Pit and found a stadium filled with hissing, booing tourists. Nothing was right about this show: the Seths were gone and the Pit itself had mutated into an opaque, roiling pool. I realized that I had scheduled Mom’s show and forgotten to cancel it. Now she was dead and the crowd was enraged. Some people threw bottles. With the irrefutable logic of dreams I knew that I would have to replace Mom on the board. As I climbed the ladder I had the worst case of stage fright because what was I supposed to do after diving? What would happen to me when I followed her down the pickled stars on the green board, and jumped? The next moment was unimaginable. The water bulged beneath me and even in dreams my mind failed to tell my mind what was inside it.

Sometimes I worry that what I did with the Bird Man happened because I really wanted it to. And what if it happens forever, Ossie, I’d ask my sister, the bad laughter of that summer? Like a faucet we left running, a sound we have forgotten we are making. Sometimes I hear the crying of strange birds outside the grates of my apartment window and I wonder. Even deep inland, I still worry that he might be one empty lot over. For our first six months in Loomis County I couldn’t sleep.

“It’s over,” the Chief kept saying when we found each other in the Bowl-a-Bed hotel, his showman’s voice partially whited out by the falling pins, “period, the end.”

And on a calendar that summer really is over, I guess. Full stop. Ossie and I attended a public school in the fall where they made us wear uniforms in the dull sepias and dark crimsons of fall leaves, these colors that were nothing like the fire of my alligator’s skin. But things can be over in horizontal time and just beginning in your body, I’m learning. Sometimes the memory of that summer feels like a spore in me, a seed falling through me. Kiwi is sympathetic, but Ossie is the only one who I can really talk to about this particular descent.

Unlike me, Osceola spent that first year on the mainland sleeping like a paralytic in our new apartment bedroom and going nowhere at night, never entertaining a single ghost. Her “powers” did not interest her anymore, because she was drugged. When we started at Rocklands High, a psychiatrist put Ossie on a variety of helpful, beekeeping-type medications, yellow and root-beer brown tablets that were supposed to thin the ghostly voices in her head to a pleasant drone. “Let’s try Osceola on this prescription,” he said confidently. “I get great results with patients I try on this medication.” And I remember that the verb “to try” in relation to my sister really bothered me, as if the psychiatrist had magical dice that he could keep rolling until we got a saner version of Ossie. I remember her doctor’s office as a logged woods of glossy oak end tables, sofas, “antique” chairs. It did not strike me or impress me in the least. Loomis was just like this. Our new apartment was carpeted and wallpapered in rusty browns, a palette that reminded me of dead squirrels. I don’t know if those pills helped my sister. Like me, I think that eventually Ossie simply figured out how to occult her own deep weirdness, to shuffle quietly down the chutes of our school hallways.

One regret that I still keep alive is that I never showed anybody the red Seth. Not even Ossie; why didn’t I tell Ossie or Kiwi about the miraculous hatchling right away? Sometimes I’ll let myself wonder: Where might she be right now, if she survived? In what cave or slough, on what grassless island? It’s an unlikely idea but it’s not impossible. Alligators in the wild can live for seventy years, and possibly even longer. By now she would have reached her full adult weight and length. Maybe she swam back to the island that we used to call Swamplandia! and is floating her scarlet eyes around our old canals. When I’m awake, I can’t seem to draw a stable picture of the red Seth in my mind’s eye anymore — it feels like trying to light a candle on a rainy night, your hands cupped and your cheeks puffed and the whole wet world conspiring to snatch the flame away from you. But in a dream I might get to see the part of the swamp where her body washed up, bloated and rippling, or where she escaped to, if the dream was beautiful.

I think the Chief was right about one thing: the show really must go on. Our Seths are still thrashing inside us in an endless loop. I like to think our family is winning. But my brother and my sister and I rarely talk about it anymore — that would be as pointless as making a telephone call to say, “Kiwi, are you there? Listen: my blood is circulating,” or, “Howdy, Ossie, it’s today, are you breathing?” We used to have this cardboard clock on Swamplandia! and you could move the tiny red hands to whatever time you wanted, NEXT SHOW AT ___:___ O’CLOCK!

During the years that I spent lost in the swamp, sometimes the only thing that kept me pushing forward was the thought of making it to this acknowledgments page. It’s a joy at last to get to thank the following people:

Huge love and gratitude to: Karina Schmid, Alexis Vgeros, Sharon Bowen, Victoria Bourke, Christopher Shannon, Jessica MacDonald, Kate Hasler-Steilen, Laura Storz, Stefan Merrill Block, Lucia Giannetta, Jess Fenn, Scott Snyder, Stu MacDonald, Dan Chaon, J. R. Carpenter, Stephen O’Connor, Bradford Morrow and Conjunctions , Karen and Jim Shepard, Andrea Barrett, Barry Goldstein, Larry Raab, François Furstenberg, Sam Swope, Andrea Libin and John High, Rivka Galchen, John Tresch, Putney Student Travel and my Putney kids, Becky Campbell and the staff at Symphony Veterinary Center, and to my teachers, my former classmates, and my students, for being a solar source of inspiration.