The Green
[content warning: the following contains gore, brief graphic language, exorcism, mentions of suicide and genocide, shapeshifting, and other disturbing elements]
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According to the doctor, memories have no tangible form; they are not shapes within the body with tactile properties, like sharpness or smoothness.
The priest quietly disagreed with my doctor’s assessment. “I believe that all thoughts, memories included, have definable dimension within our psychic terrain,” said the priest. “I believe that the terrain is real. Sometimes, a memory is sharp enough to puncture an internal organ.”
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Uncle took me at a tender age to view the Green. I remember being very scared.
My twin sister asked, without the slightest degree of irony, from the top of the balcony, leaning against the banister all frozen and aloof, “What ya waitin for?”
Unable to process what Uncle had shown me, I talked instead about his collection of antique dentures. Sister hated discussing teeth, so changed the subject.
“What sort of boat is taking you away from me? How flammable do you think this house is? Do you think they have a well furnished brig aboard the seafaring vessel? Is it a barge?”
In my memory, I answer her questions, but the answers themselves are not contained within my memory. They are contained within her memory, which is a curious quirk, as if within her mind lived another version of me that I don’t have full access to.
The idea that another person can remember things about me that I cannot remember has always disturbed me. This morning, sister — now much older and very cynical — suggested that this disturbance, coiled within my memory of the Green, was partially responsible for the accident.
My memory contained a thorn of uncertainty, a thorn suggesting that my past did not belong only to me. My experience of the Green, specifically, was only partially mine, even though it had, at the time, felt so intimate and singularly personal.
Perhaps terror is born from these sharp fissures in our minds.
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Yesterday afternoon, after an innocuous visit with the priest, and after a long phone call with my sister (her marital crisis in medias res), I walked to the electronics store and asked the videographer what she thought of the latest episode of We Can’t Blame Felix.
She said, “Of course!”
We laughed. Her response was an inside joke, based on the program. Felix Buttons, the titular and unblameable — ha! — hero, when asked for his opinion on something, often answered simply, “Of course!” This response was never helpful and rarely made sense.
For example: “Hey there, Baron Buttons. Why do you think the savages here enjoy whale meat as much as they do, when I myself find it disgusting?”
Felix laughs. “Of course!”
I went to the electronics store frequently, not really because I needed to, though I always had legitimate reason, but because the videographer was the only person who appreciated We Can’t Blame Felix as I did. It is a very popular program, though when most people discuss it, they do so with derision. Everyone watches it, yet everyone claims it terrible, a scourge on culture. But the videographer sincerely enjoyed the program, as did I. We knew perfectly well that it was problematic. But things can be more than one thing. It is a morally reprehensible show made by talented and terrible people, and it is hilarious and often beautiful.
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On a sullen nordic rock, after a storm capsized the research vessel, I came to know three felons: Clive, Warsaw, and Ajax. They too were stranded by fate: on a prison ship destined for an offshore penitentiary for American dissidents, the three men took part in a meticulously organized uprising that nonetheless resulted in near total calamity. Clive, Warsaw, and Ajax, for reasons unknown, managed to survive and washed up on the desolate rock.
Days later, when a terrifying storm hit, they survived by hiding in narrow fissures. After the storm passed and they climbed into the glistening sunshine, they witnessed the debris of the capsized research vessel, and discovered my floating body. The felons pulled me from the water, fed me algae and seaweed, nourished me with rainwater that collected in small nooks of the black arctic crag, and brought me back to life.
After they told me their story, I told them mine.
“I was on a research vessel. We left the Pacific-Northwest Coast of the United States five years ago — I was a child, then — and worked our way up to Alaska, then to Baffin Island, where we spent the better part of a year. We then journeyed to Greenland, where we spent the better part of two years, and then Iceland after that, only for a few months, mostly in Reykjavik. We hadn’t seen a cafe, tavern, or discotheque for ages and desperately needed R&R! We left Iceland only a few weeks ago, and were on our way to Norway to pick up new recruits. Then, we were meant to journey to Svalbard, which would have been our final destination before a return home. Our primary mission, through all of this, was to record beluga whalesong….”