Authors: Stephen Anable
“Helga, is that really you?” Crunching through the underbrush, the Giant came closer. He bent low and peered into the car. His bloodshot eyes, small in proportion to his face, ignored us and sought our passenger.
Then, suddenly, he reached into the car and seized the woman by her hair; he pulled her hair like someone shucking the husk from an ear of corn, so that her head collided with the rim above the car window and she emitted a piercing yelp. “Don’t ever try that again!” the Giant shouted, then, without further comment, he motioned to Roberto to proceed down the road.
Was being seen with us, outsiders, her offense, bringing us this deep into their land? Surely it was nothing to do with shoplifting in Welfleet. Had she neglected to perform some duty, some ritual? She kept touching her forehead near her scalp, where a large cut was now leaking blood. Roberto, shaken, asked, “Are you sure you’re all right?”—speaking to both of us.
I offered her a packet of tissues from my glove compartment, which she refused. She instead toyed with the zipper on her satchel, while blood dripped from her cut.
Coming here, I now realized, was utterly insane. Roberto steered the car around a long curve in the road, then the woods parted, like a cliff breaking open.
The metal fence, with its open gate, seemed like the only contemporary thing around. High and crowned with glinting razor wire, it was as out of place as a UFO. Because the scene before us might have come from some old woodcut of Grimm’s fairy tales—a village, the kind of enchanted community that shimmers in Irish folklore at the bottom of a lake, or glows in German legend inside the stone heart of a mountain. Here were dozens of homes made of wood dark as the knots in pine, with steep roofs and window boxes hemorrhaging red geraniums. Here was a stone hall, the biggest building in the clearing, bearing a thin pole crowned with a beaten metal likeness of the sun, a sun spiky as a virus under a microscope.
All eyes in this village locked on us. All of these people were handsome or beautiful. Many of the adults were young, in their twenties and thirties. Few had reached middle age.
Some wore denim or hippie/peasant dresses busy with embroidery, but many wore clothing knights from the Crusades would have found familiar: tunics, robes, kilts, baggy pants, fastened by gilded pins and clasps, clothing made from rough fabric, the product of spinning wheels and hand-powered looms. Some small children were naked, and some, like most adults, were tattooed with sun designs and wore circular sun amulets on cords around their necks.
Roberto was struck speechless, as was I. Then I realized why this scene seemed familiar. It wasn’t from my memory of fairy tales or folklore, but came from Thomas Royall’s Teutonic community—the woven robes, the gilt sun capping a pole on a stone hall. All these had been present in old photographs at the museum in Provincetown. Of course here were added women and children.
Our passenger ducked out of the car, slammed the door, and disappeared. “What the fuck do we do now?” Roberto whispered, as the motor idled. “Leave.” I struggled to keep my expression calm. Then something banged on the back of the car.
Through the car’s rear window, we saw three children, all blond, all seemingly naked, balancing on our rear bumper, banging on the trunk of the car, squealing and laughing. I was about to ask the children to get down when the engine of the car went dead.
A man whose hair seemed to emanate light had just pulled the keys from the ignition. Now he was smiling broadly, his perfect teeth so different from our dirty, beaten passenger’s.
He stood beside the car in his kilt and began laughing. I expected this to be some sort of cue, for the other people to laugh as well, laugh at us, of course. The people of the community had drawn close to us, like the parts of a piece of rope drawing together to form a knot.
The Giant and the woman he abused, our passenger, were gone, and Jason was nowhere in sight. The man beside the car was one of the handsomest men I had seen in my life, like someone posed naked in a mountain pond in a soft-porn coffee table book. But he exuded menace.
He gestured to us to get out of the car. For an instant, I speculated he was deaf: he made no effort to speak and didn’t seem bothered by our silence. He beckoned us with his hand, and, as we nervously followed, the other people who had been staring and smiling retreated to their gardens and houses and the woods.
A narrow road bisected the village. This was paved, not with asphalt or cobblestones, but with crushed oyster shells, like early settlers used. The houses were small, like buildings designed three-quarter scale for movie sets. Some reminded me of the miniature Swiss cottages with figures that swing out, predicting the weather, a maid for fair days, a man for foul, while others were crude like the yeomens’ huts reproduced for tourists at Plimouth Plantation. I kept trying to get a glimpse inside them, but their windows were shuttered, their doors, apparently, bolted.
Between two houses, I saw a stack of plywood and rolls of silver-and-pink fiberglass insulation. This is really no different than some faux-colonial subdivision thrown up on a filled marsh or cranberry bog, I thought. Knowing full well this was faux comfort.
I nudged Roberto to notice the gardens substituting for grass in their front yards. Indeed the drought was no factor here: vegetables grew to freakish proportions, cucumbers longer than rattlesnakes, and tomatoes, taut as blood blisters, bigger than skulls. Suns with calm, archaic features, hewn from stone, baked in pottery, were set in the midst of these gardens. Even the air smelled different here, enlivened by spices or herbs.
The man we were following said nothing. The same sun face so predominant on antique maps, along with cherubs blowing wind and sea monsters all green scales and fins, was rendered in dazzling tattoo inks on his back, between his shoulder blades. Roberto, uncharacteristically, had gone silent, but I thought being quiet was surrendering our power, so I ventured to speak. “Everything here is so lush, and so beautiful.” And bizarre, I might have added. The village had the smug independence of a gated community, the cleanliness of a lucrative theme park. That cleanliness contrasted with Clark, Edward’s brother, and with Helga, our grimy hitchhiker.
I longed to see more evidence of the outside world, a McDonald’s wrapper, the comforting trash of our consumer culture, something to pull us back into the mundane, the rational, anything but this lost Norse colony. The young man kept quiet. He kept walking down the path of bone-white shell. I remembered another walk, along the breakwater in Provincetown, eerie in the indigo and moonlight. Thinking of the children scrambling over my Volvo, I thought of little Chloe, of her helplessness and fear. If we were frightened here, imagine her, so small and young. If she was here at all, if she was even alive…
Roberto tugged my shoulder, broke my stride, made me stand still. The silent man sensed this change and wheeled around. Roberto said, “I’d just like to know where we’re going. Or aren’t you capable of conversation?”
The silent man didn’t get mad. His smile, in fact, became broader than ever. Did he have a knife strapped somewhere in his tunic? His silence, size, and confidence carried a certain degree of authority. He was a kind of weapon all by himself.
Then, with an abrupt bow, he strode away. We were at the entrance to the great stone hall, the building that seemed to be the center of the community.
He went back of the hall, leaving us alone. We could see no one—in the woods, by the houses, along the path…“Let’s go
,
while we can!” Roberto said, and then we remembered, they had the keys to my car. We were behind that towering fence topped with razor wire, something you’d see at a maximum-security prison. These people were capable of violence, even with their own, we’d just witnessed that. And we’d be in further trouble if we encountered anyone I’d met on my earlier excursions—they’d know we weren’t casual visitors. Then what would they do? Anything they wanted. We’d told no one we were coming here today; this was a spur-of-the-moment action on our part. Was it on theirs? Had we blundered into a trap? Was that hitchhiker the bait? We were literally a captive audience.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” a male voice said.
This man behind us was about forty, in khaki pants and a hot-pink button-down shirt he’d rolled up beyond his elbows. He could’ve come from teaching history at St. Harold’s, so the tattoos covering his bare arms, of suns and labyrinths and tribal bands serrated like sharks’ teeth, seemed all the more incongruous. Like Jason, he had nothing mystical in his manner.
As if dismissing Roberto, he concentrated his energy on me. “This is the third time you’ve honored us with your presence.”
So they knew who I was. Their whole hierarchy knew I’d been here on my own, had visited with Jason. Did they know it was me asking questions at St. Harold’s? Did they know about my visit to Rockport, to Mrs. Mikkonen?
Roberto’s face hardened with frustration. I was going to have to compensate for his silence, but our host was quite talkative enough. He could have been the vice-president for marketing at some Silicon Valley start-up: “What we have here is a world-class agricultural miracle, thanks to genetic engineering. And genius.”
He went on, trying to impress us. Here, our host said, they were isolating the strongest genes “from many forms of life,” preserving them for the benefit of the planet. Take fruit, for example. They were finding obscure types of apples, in defunct orchards in West Virginia, in upstate New York, apples abandoned by growers since the Cleveland administration in favor of popular varieties like the Delicious and the MacIntosh. They were grafting branches from these varieties onto other trees, thus preserving these once-plentiful kinds of fruit. And they were cultivating corn found frozen with Inca mummies, maize forgotten since the conquest by Pizarro.
“The more society cultivates the same few crops, the more vulnerable our food supply becomes.” He glanced toward the two of us. “What if a previously unknown blight, a kind of AIDS of the grain world, were to decimate the wheat of North America, wipe out our wheat the way
phytophthora infestans
wiped out the potato in Ireland during the eighteen-forties? It’s possible, we’re taking that risk. And this is all the more foolish with our exploding population and global warming.”
It made sense, but why adopt archaic dress and turn your children into beggars? He avoided the hall and took us down a road behind the cottages, into a larger clearing where seven immense greenhouses stood glittering in the sun.
“I’ll show you a little bit of what we’re all about,” he said. I thought of the St. Harold’s chapel and its tanks of bloated fish. Some part of me actually hoped to be impressed, so as not to feel embarrassed for him. And we had to listen, not to panic, if we were to find Chloe or escape unharmed.
He opened the door to the greenhouse with a key from a ring crowded with dozens of others. There were many locks in this utopia. Inside, it was foggy; a fine mist filled the air. From unseen pipes, the mist was seeping everywhere, soaking things growing in trays and on tables throughout the building. There was produce everywhere, even grander and glossier than those thriving in the earth outside the cottages: beans in pods longer than yardsticks, strawberries red as the plastic of beach balls, boulder-like cantaloupes. It was at once artificial and a kind of produce jungle where the edible things of the dinner table reclaimed their wildness, became, in this literal hothouse, like something man had yet to domesticate. There was a brutality to their sheer size.
“Year-round,” our host boasted, “year-round harvesting comparable only with the greenhouses of Iceland.” Yes, I thought, I’d heard of those greenhouses, which tapped thermal springs to trick bananas into growing on sub-arctic lava wastes. The genius of a Nordic nation—he would reference that. To be polite, I had to admire something, which wasn’t hard. It would’ve been hard
not
to be impressed. I’d complimented Jason on their strawberry preserves, so, to be consistent, I singled out a particularly spectacular strawberry plant, touching one of its swollen fruits.
It felt alive, in an almost animal sense. Our host picked it, and, gently, with the deft gestures of a magician, pulled it apart so that its hollow, whitish center was exposed. There was something womb-like about its center, something like the yoni, the Tibetan symbol of the vulva, as though a fetus, a foreign cell, might be growing inside. Engineering, genetic engineering, that was why these vegetable things were growing so large, as outlandishly large as animals. They were doctoring genes, these people dressed like Charlemagne.
He offered us each half of the berry. “I’m allergic,” Roberto said, although I was sure that was an excuse. So he presented the entire berry to me. Would they blatantly drug us, I wondered? I’d singled out the strawberries myself, but
he
had picked this particular one, and if they succeeded in drugging me, at least Roberto could come to my aid.
The berry was delicious, like some archetype, the first man tasted, far too large to consume in one bite or even two. “It’s wonderful!” I was being perfectly honest, while our host grinned.
Something in the mist was making the air difficult to breathe, and, for a moment, I thought of Edward and his asthma and Clark, his mad brother, and their whole family ruined by these people. As our host explained the intricacies of their irrigation system, the pipes and pumps that coaxed water from the pond and the aquifer involved in all of this, I thought too of the stoned youngsters in Provincetown, and of the Giant abusing Helga. Some people “earned” their Nordic names, I thought, Helga, for instance, but not, apparently, Jason. There was a hierarchy here, layers of authority as calcified as India’s ancient castes.
“You’re using modern technology,” I said, “yet—”
“Yet our appearance strikes you as part of another time.”
“And another place,” I said.
“A man without spirit, a man without knowledge of something higher, is like a person lying in a coma. He is no more than a collection of connected organs, heart, liver, stomach, intestines, kept functioning by artificial means.” He said, “We live in a civilization hooked to a respirator.”
He was locking the greenhouse we’d just seen. Through the murky glass of another, I could see blurry forms, bent amid the plants. The glass transformed them into colored smudges, like reflections perverted by funhouse mirrors. They seemed short, like dwarfs in Velázquez paintings. “What’s in there?” I asked, wanting to see something other than just plants.
Not answering, he continued, “Our lives here are modeled on the Golden Age of Norse Exploration. Our outward appearance is actually unimportant, a reminder, like a string tied around one’s finger. We honor our Master’s Norse heritage, the age when the Northmen first touched these shores.”
A claim refuted by most archaeologists. And I didn’t picture the Vikings as particularly spiritual: burning monasteries, sacking towns. But I didn’t argue.
“Our Master is from your part of the world.” Our host scrutinized my reaction, which I kept minimal. This information could have come from Mrs. Mikkonen or from Jason, circulating at Ian’s funeral.
In the greenhouse we were passing, with the opaque, misty glass, one of the small figures ran, ran down the center of the aisle between the plants. The figure ran behind glass so cloudy that it disappeared.