Chapter 3 - The Garden of Angst

Drought

That night Cimmy dreamed of her garden again, and of the rain. She walked the gravel paths in her dream, checking on all of her favorite flowers, and enjoyed the breeze that brought the scent of the water lilies from the pond. When she woke up the next morning, she knew, before she even opened her eyes, that her life had changed again. For one, she was indoors, and the mattress she was lying on was a lot more comfortable than the thistle stalks she was used to.

Tears welled up in her eyes, behind the eyelids she kept defiantly shut. She didn’t want to be in a world where Fay was gone. She didn’t want to be in a world where all her art was gone. She kept her eyes closed and waited, stubbornly, for this world to go away. Nothing happened.

“Aren’t you going to wake up?” a voice addressed her, from very close by, a voice that Cimmy recognized as Josepha’s and whose sound brought up an instant bout of nausea.

“Oh, God! I’m back here! Please don’t let me be back here again!” her first thoughts sank into her heart, drowned in despair. “And what on earth is she talking about? Don’t tell me she cares for me now!” Cimmy thought, as her revolt rose through the many layers of her psyche, ready to erupt at any instant. “I wonder what she wants. Just when I thought I had enough reasons to wish for death!” She kept her eyes closed and waited.

“Your breakfast is getting cold,” the voice continued.

Now Cimmy was curious, because getting breakfast at all, not to mention having it cooked and served to her, was pure fantasy. She opened her eyes and the first thing she saw was Fay’s snout, very close to her face. The rat had left its tiny box, lined with straw, which Cimmy assumed served as his bed, to nuzzle curiously at her face and figure out why she wasn’t awake yet.

“Fay!” Cimmy burst into tears of happiness and relief, and hugged the little rodent almost to the point of choking.

“God didn’t waste any brains on you, girl, that’s for sure!” Josepha mumbled under her breath, because the image of Cimmy hugging the rat was too much for her to process.

“Well, at least some things have stayed the same,” Cimmy thought, a little more encouraged. She put Fay down, to the rat’s great relief, and started looking around to see what the universe had in store for her now. All around the room there were art pieces, hers, she assumed, hanging from the ceiling, lined up against the walls and covering every table and shelf surface. She didn’t remember creating any of them, and they didn’t look familiar, mostly because they were made of a material she didn’t recognize.

Josepha had left the room, but there was a bowl of steaming food on the corner of the table, some sort of green seeds, broiled, which Cimmy shared with Fay. The rat sniffed at them, reluctantly, and after he reassured himself they were acceptable food, he devoured them ravenously. The seeds were large and weird shaped, and a little mushy, Cimmy noticed; she finished the bowl and went outside to clean it.

The field was plowed, and there was no thistle in sight, instead the land was divided in neat little patches, all planted with different crops, spanning the gamut from grains to trees. Somewhere in the middle there was a plot of legumes, which Cimmy recognized as her breakfast, and some of the patches lay bare, a wasteful and strange occurrence in their world.

“There she is, finally!” Bertha announced her presence from afar, and all the eyes turned to her, filled with reproach. “Don’t we all wish we could sit all day long carving chairs and bowls, instead of breaking our backs behind that wooden plow day in and day out?”

“Especially now, with this drought upon us,” Josepha replied, looking at the sky, anxiously, for signs of clouds. There weren’t any, just the unrelenting blaze of the sun projecting from clear blue. “I don’t know what we’re gonna do if it doesn’t rain soon!” She turned her eyes to Cimmy, who was still trying to get her bearings in the unfamiliar surroundings, and whose confused expression suddenly irritated her. “You go right ahead and not care, girl. Don’t even give the rest of us a single thought, you selfish brat! See if you can eat them bowls if our food runs out!”

Cimmy’s first reaction was to get upset, because she’d just about had it with Josepha’s blabber, but since the tension in the community was so intense she could feel it in her gut, she turned all of her attention to figuring out how long had they been in a drought. First of all, that explained the empty parcels in the field; there weren’t too many of them in relationship to the rest, so she guessed the drought hadn’t been there for too long.

“What can we do?” Bertha looked at the sky, helpless, then sighed, wretched, and got up to head for the fields. “Make sure you finish those bowls. How long are you going to take with those? I break my bones in the field all day. The least I can expect is to have a bowl to eat from when I return in the evening! Useless goose!”

“What is a goose?” Cimmy asked herself, and before her attention shifted again, she saw them in her mind’s eye, wobbling about aimlessly, in a hopeless pursuit of grass and bugs. “Oh!”

So, she was professing a craft. It felt so strange to her that the community would just allow her to remain in the village, just to make them chairs and bowls, while they went out into the fields, that at first she didn’t believe her luck. She grabbed a piece of wood and started carving, with hands so sure she knew this couldn’t be the first time she was doing this. The bowl started taking shape slowly, as if the thoughts she was churning in her head at the same time were in fact molding the wood in her hands.

She couldn’t remember if she ever told anybody about the rope, but it didn’t seem reasonable, since a quick glance had informed her there were no cultures that could produce the fibers for it. She worked, with automatic gestures, deep in thought, while Fay squirmed inside her pocket now and then. Around noon she got thirsty, and she walked around the village in search of a water bucket, but she couldn’t find one anywhere.

“Where are they keeping it?” she asked herself, getting more and more parched by the minute? After half an hour, she abandoned her search and retreated in the shade of the rough shed to finish up her bowls.

The long row of people returned from the field in the evening, dusty and tired, and looking a lot more worn than they did when they left in the morning. They formed a queue and waited patiently while Josepha dug up a jug from the entrails of her house and distributed equal rations to all the people in the queue. When she was done tending to those working in the field, she turned to Cimmy, annoyed by what she perceived as ill willed defiance, and asked in a raised voice.

“Don’t you want water, girl? Do I have to fetch that to you, too?”

Cimmy got up and received her water ration, no more than half of a bowl, and she drank it eagerly, to soothe her parched throat.

“That’s right! Chug that down like it’s nothing! Don’t even dream you’ll get more until tomorrow.” Her voice softened as she watched the sky with worried eyes. “There’ll be even less of it if the heavens don’t show us mercy anytime soon.” She then remembered she’d left the airhead with a task to do when she left in the morning, and yelled. “Where is my bowl?” She grabbed it from Cimmy’s hands and went inside her house, morose.

“This isn’t good,” Cimmy thought. Why don’t they try to get outside the wall? There seemed to be water there, judging by the moist fruit Fay had brought her. It wouldn’t be hard at all, she thought, now that they had wood, and, apparently, a carpenter, to build something that would allow them to go over the wall and back. She wondered what would happen if she brought this up with Josepha, and planned to talk to her the next morning, when hopefully the latter would be in a better mood.

“Get past the wall?!” Josepha screamed, outraged. “It’s not enough that we have to carry your load for you. Now you’re trying to get us killed too? Don’t you know why we built the wall in the first place? Don’t you know what lurks behind it? What deadly, evil, bloodthirsty creatures? We coddled you too much, and this is our punishment. Like it’s not bad enough we have to put up with that rat you call a pet, like any God-fearing person would ever consider something like that, now you have time on your hands to think us all to our deaths, you lazy ingrate! I curse the moment I first laid eyes on you!”

“Here we go again,” Cimmy thought, not too upset by the elder’s outburst, which, she knew from her own experience, was coming, at least in part, from the suffering of a parched throat. “Oh, well, at least I can say that I tried,” she continued her mental ruminations, and planned to figure this out on her own as soon as possible. “I’m not dying of thirst just to prove her right. I know there is water behind that wall.”

The task was facing two immediate hurdles: she had to find the time to build and hide the contraption and she needed to sneak out in the field, to a place where she could climb the wall unnoticed.

She was very excited about the project, and she planned the contraption in her mind, to the last detail, while she tended diligently to the bowls and chairs she was supposed to work on that day.

The thought of being able to see that fairy land beyond, which she knew was lush and fertile, filled her heart with joy and excitement, and she didn’t even notice when she finished her alloted work for the day, when suddenly, terrible pangs of guilt brought her back to reality.

“Who is giving you water, my little friend?” she looked at the rat, which, in all fairness, didn’t seem to be suffering at all. “Where does he find water to drink?” she asked herself, when Fay climbed out of her pocket and disappeared into a hole in the ground, which was very close to the wall. He reemerged half an hour later with a red berry in his mouth. He placed the little offering in Cimmy’s lap and stared at her until she ate it.

“Or maybe I can dig,” she smiled at the sudden revelation, as she watched the long file of tired villagers return from the field.

---

Dig

The idea was implemented the next day, when Cimmy spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to dig through the drought hardened dirt with a wooden shovel, a feat which brought with it a feeling of gratitude for being allowed to stay in the village, and not having to go out into the field, to do this every day.

She kept at it for a while, wondering how deep she would have to dig to get below the wall footing, but after she reached about two feet down, the heat and the thirst exhausted her and she had to go back to the shade of the shed, where she remembered she had work to do. She worked without interruptions until she finished her daily quota, and at the end of the day, she figured she should go check up on her project. Imagine her shock when she found the hole filled with water about one third up.

“Maybe I don’t have to get to the other side of the wall after all,” Cimmy thought.

She tasted the water; it was murky and had a strong mineral taste, not altogether pleasant, but under the circumstances, she couldn’t afford to be choosy. She drank to appease her thirst, trying to ignore the crunchy dirt that got caught in her teeth and hoping that the following morning most of the particulates would sink to the bottom and the water would be clear. She was very excited and wanted to tell somebody about it, but then she realized that she would have to provide an explanation for the hole in the ground, so she bode her time pondering alternate versions for it. She could hardly wait until the next morning, when, to her great distress, she found the hole dry.

“Just my luck!” she mumbled through her teeth, annoyed she’d gotten her hopes up for nothing. She went back to it later that day, after her work was finished, to see if she could continue digging her way to the other side of the wall, but the hole was filled with water again.

“This should go over well,” the girl sighed. “Try telling Josepha that I discovered water, but it only appears at a certain time of day.”

The thought of telling somebody gnawed at her, and she couldn’t resist it, so she decided to share with Rahima, who could use some good news, but made her promise not to tell anybody yet.

The easiest way to keep a secret is for only one person to know it. Rahima told her mother, who told her sister, who told her friend, who in turn distributed the news widely throughout the village. In the morning, everybody was on pins and needles to get details on Cimmy’s “discovery”. The latter dragged her feet reluctantly to the hole, which she knew for a fact would be dry at that time of day.

“Serves us right to put any credence in the words of these two airheads,” Josepha frowned at Cimmy and Rahima, who were looking for a place to hide from the public shaming. “What makes you idiots think you can dig for water with your hands when the rest of us haven’t seen a well that wasn’t dry in months? Do you think all of us are dimwitted, and we prefer to catch rain in barrels and suffer from thirst when we could just dig a hole in the ground with our own hands? How deep is that, a couple of feet? Ech!” she made an exasperated hand gesture and left, with the crowd following closely behind.

“Rahima,” Cimmy whispered to her friend, “I told you not to tell anybody!”

“I only told my mother in confidence,” Rahima excused herself.

“Your mother is somebody,” Cimmy replied.

“How can this be? I saw that water with my own eyes. I drank from it,” Rahima looked puzzled at the dry well.

“That’s why I told you not to say anything. The well goes dry in the morning.”

“So the water will fill in later in the day?” Rahima asked, filled with hope.

“Most likely. I’m not completely sure. That’s why I told you not to tell anybody.”

“But not even my mother?” Rahima asked, eyes wide with genuine surprise.

Cimmy abandoned the expectation that her friend would follow the logical reasoning behind her request, because in Rahima’s world, her and her mother’s mind were one and the same.

“Look!” the latter exclaimed, excited. “The hole is filling up!”

They drank and took some of it back to the village in a bowl, as proof. The entire community gathered again around the little hole, now filled with mud, hopeful but still in disbelief.

“Maybe we should start digging wells again,” one of the villagers suggested, and everyone agreed.

The next morning, instead of going into the fields, the villagers gathered and started planning the digging of wells; they made assumptions about how much water they would need, and about how much time the digging would take, and how many people should be working on any one well, and they spent the next month doing nothing else.

They dug, and they dug, and finally they reached the aquifer, which was hiding, avariciously, more than fifteen feet down, and just when everybody was rejoicing and preparing containers to put the water in, it started pouring down rain.

“That was a month well spent!” Bertha blurted out, not sure yet whether to be furious or relieved.

“Well, at least we have water now,” Cimmy replied, against her better judgment. Bertha turned around, slowly, as if she’d seen her for the first time, and asked out of the blue.

“What were you doing digging a hole by the wall, anyway?”

“Oh, heavens me, here it comes!” Cimmy vacillated between surprise and dread, because in the excitement of searching for water, for an entire month she never once gave a thought to constructing a credible alibi for digging that hole.

Bertha continued.

“Did you try to get to the other side of the wall, you ungrateful goose? Didn’t I tell you that there were vicious monsters and unspeakable dangers beyond this protective enclosure?” She turned to the crowd, furious. “This one is going to end us all! Can you imagine if she finished her task and let goodness knows what in to imperil our lives?”

“But,” Cimmy wanted to justify herself, even though she had to admit that she didn’t really have any guarantees there weren’t vicious monsters on the other side of the wall, “Fay went past the wall and back, and he’s not worse for the wear!”

“The rat went past the wall?!! Where? How?” Bertha jumped anxiously, and upon finding the little burrow, she summoned: “Plug that hole! We may be in danger already. Who knows what sneaked in, what you, miserable brat, allowed in. How could you be so reckless?”

Cimmy tried to explain that whatever managed to get in, if anything at all, couldn’t be any bigger than a rat, and it was unlikely to pose a danger to the community.

“You are as ignorant as you are irresponsible! What makes you think that those creatures are like us? They could be able to transform themselves to pass through a crack in the wall, through the tiniest hole in the ground! You never really think about anything, do you?”

“If they are that resourceful, what’s stopping them from climbing the wall, or flying through the air, for that matter?” Cimmy wanted to say, but then realized it would be much better for her well-being if she didn’t.

“This wall is the only thing between us and certain death. You make sure to remember that, girl! If you ever, for any reason, decide to take it upon yourself to try to breach our boundary in any way again, mark my words, I’ll deal with you myself!”

“So much for the berries,” Cimmy thought, disappointed, while she absentmindedly petted Fay; the rat stared at her with worried eyes. “I know, my little friend,” she tried to comfort him. “No more berries for you, either.”

---

Open Waters

Of course, the rat, who wasn’t beholden to any of the community rules, dug itself another hole and went outside unimpeded, and since with all the rain and the new wells the harvest was bountiful, everyone had better things to do than follow a rodent around.

Fay brought back treats every time he went outside, and the treats were strange and wonderful, unlike anything Cimmy had ever tasted, even though now the food fare was reasonably palatable.

Some days he brought colorful berries, in many shades of yellow, black, rose, and blue. Other days he brought mushrooms, or delightful tubers. And other days, he brought Cimmy herbs she had never seen, and he made sure to never chew on them, to let Cimmy know they were not edible. She didn’t really understand what they were for, those herbs with fleshy roots the color of blood.

There wasn’t a single day that went by when Cimmy didn’t daydream about that fairyland behind the walls, filled with wonders she had never seen, and maybe wasn’t able to imagine, and every time she came back from one of these mental trips to dreamland she wished she’d been born a rat.

Fay didn’t have quotas, or traditions, or anyone to tell him what to do.

He didn’t even listen to Cimmy, right now it was more like she was listening to him, since the rat had taken it upon himself to educate her in the art of foraging and survival.

“I wonder what the inedible plants are for,” she often pondered.

“Are those weeds?!” Josepha snapped from behind her one day when she was so deeply immersed in the examination of a new plant Fay had brought, whose long filamentous roots looked like gold thread, she completely forgot about the world around her. She tried to hide the clump behind her back, but the gold roots caught the sunlight and glowed, like they had caught on fire. “Every time I look at you, you do something wrong. I can’t keep up with your nonsense anymore! You’re going to be the end of me. I’m exhausted just worrying about you! Give those here!” she grabbed the golden roots from Cimmy’s hand and threw them away. “Get back to work, you lazy nincompoop!”

“How come those plants never grow here?” Cimmy wondered, so used by now to talk to herself that she didn’t realize she asked the question out loud.

“You better hope, for your own sake, that we don’t find any of these growing in the field, ‘cause if we do, I know who to blame! Do you think we need more weeds to pull? Aren’t we breaking our backs enough already as it is to keep them from stifling the crops?” she became more and more agitated as she spoke, imagining nightmarish scenarios filled with giant weeds that advanced slowly and inexorably across the fields and choked everything edible in the process.

Cimmy put her head down and waited for the rant to be over.

“I wonder if I can replant those in a shady spot, the roots seemed intact, maybe if I water them, they will come back to life,” she continued her mental commentary in the background, this time without the soundtrack, which, as experience had proved, was completely self-defeating.

The problem was that she didn’t know anything about the outgrowth of those roots. What if they were invasive? Fay had made it clear they were potentially poisonous. What if their toxins leaked into the soil? What if somebody tried to eat them, somebody who didn’t know they weren’t supposed to? She agonized over the decision for days, during which fate solved the dilemma for her, withering the clump beyond the point where it could be revived.

“Maybe next time,” she consoled herself.

She couldn’t escape this nagging feeling in the pit of her stomach that she was missing out on something extraordinary. She couldn’t understand why the rat was bringing her all of those plants, but so far he had never brought anything that didn’t have a usefulness, and not knowing what their usefulness was didn’t seem like a good reason to dismiss them. On one hand, what usefulness could a plant possibly have if it wasn’t good to eat? The land, as it stood right now, bound by its untouchable boundary, was limited, and every inch counted; she couldn’t justify, even to herself, taking up a portion of it to grow something she didn’t know anything about. One didn’t grow something that was not good to eat, it was as simple as that. At times like these, she reviled that damned wall whose sacrosanct presence made any new discovery impossible, and which kept her from knowing the truth.

One way or another, she wanted to know. Maybe there wasn’t a great land of wonder beyond. Maybe there be monsters and killer weeds eating people alive, maybe there be dragons for all she knew, but she wanted to find out, because every time her sight was blocked by that wall she felt trapped. Surely there was a way to learn the truth without risking getting eaten by carnivorous plants, an obvious solution presented itself: the only thing she had to do was climb up high enough to see past the top of the wall.

Getting anywhere near the enclosure was sure to bring unspeakable wrath upon her head, so she started climbing anything else she could think of, anything she hoped would allow her a peek.

She climbed the trees in the orchard, and the roofs of the houses, but none of the above were tall enough to be of any help. Torn between curiosity and guilt, she became more and more withdrawn, and her recent habit of climbing trees certainly didn’t win her any favors with the community.

“She’s a lunatic!” Bertha commented, exasperated. “She’s going to damage those trees, I tell you, they’re not supposed to hold her weight. There is nothing that girl does that isn’t either absurd or dangerous, and it’s usually both! What in creation has gotten into her, climbing those trees at any time of day or night? Somebody should do something about that, don’t you think, Josepha? Before she does us harm?”

A ban on tree climbing followed promptly, which left Cimmy indifferent, since she already knew nothing in the orchard was tall enough to fit her purpose, anyway.

It seemed almost punitive, that boundary, more suited to keep the people in than keeping danger out. How would purposefully blinding oneself to the evils of the world improve one’s chances of prevailing against them?

If one is always in danger from things one can’t learn about, it follows, logically, that there is nothing left to experience but fear, and the most toxic kind of all: the fear which never subsides and can never be quelled, because it feeds on itself.

“What is it made of, anyway?” Cimmy continued churning her obsession, because it looked like the wall was built of large blocks of stone, and there was no stone quarry in the garden. The stepladder pattern made climbing it possible, at least in theory, so she immediately followed up on her idea, managing to ruin her fingernails in the process and taking a couple of tumbles that were sure to prevent her from sitting down for about a week. “You are not the boss of me!” she rebuked the wall before she turned her back to it, defeated, to go in search of another solution.

“Are you talking to the wall, Cimmy?” Rahima intervened softly, worried that her friend had lost her handle on reality.

“Aah...no. Sorry, Rahima, I didn’t see you. How long have you been standing there?”

“Long enough to see you try to climb that wall. Are you aware of what Bertha would do to you if she caught you doing this?”

“I have a fair idea,” Cimmy mumbled, upset.

“You know, I’ve been watching you the whole time, and you’re doing it all wrong. You have to find your bearings first, have a firm grip for your hands and feet, otherwise you’ll never make it to the top. Here, let me show you,” she said. She started climbing immediately, without hesitation and with an agility Cimmy would never have guessed her friend possessed. In less than three minutes, she was riding the top of the wall.

“Rahima, for heaven’s sake, take a quick look around and get down from there before somebody sees you,” she whispered as loud as she could, without being overheard, “I don’t want to get you in trouble! Rahima!”

“Wow!” was all that Rahima managed to respond, while she looked out into the distance, completely mesmerized by the sights beyond.

“Damn my clumsiness,” Cimmy cussed herself and her two left feet. Physical fitness had never been her strong point, and she never viewed this personal shortfall as a burden until now. “If I weren’t so uncoordinated, I’d be seeing that too right now.”

“What do you two think you’re doing?” Bertha’s voice thundered from behind her, sounding too shocked to start with the doling of punishment.

“Oh, God!” Cimmy gulped hard as she watched her friend come down from the top of the wall with the same agility she had exhibited climbing it.

There would be little point in describing the days that followed this event.

Suffice it to say that Cimmy and Rahima found themselves tasked with tilling the last portion of virgin land inside the walls, a portion which had been left fallow because the hard dirt, the rocks and the thick clumps of weeds and roots made cultivating it impracticable.

“I’m sorry, Rahima,” Cimmy mumbled, drowning in guilt.

“Don’t mention it. It’s not much worse than my usual chores, anyway.” Rahima looked happy. She had that hard to describe expression people get when they find meaning in their life, a strange look to see on a face so young.

“What is it like?” Cimmy asked, her mouth dry with anticipation.

“I... wouldn’t know how to describe it. It’s so green! It is beautiful, and lush, and it goes on for miles, all the way to the ends of the earth.”

“What do you mean, the ends of the earth?” Cimmy pressed, annoyed by the scarcity of detail.

“You’re not going to believe me if I tell you,” Rahima hesitated.

“Try me!” Cimmy insisted.

“There are open waters out there, Cimmy,” Rahima whispered, as if she was afraid to acknowledge what she’d seen. “Large sheets of water, going far into the distance. There are so many of them, hundreds, maybe even a thousand, and they all seem to end abruptly at an edge that’s far out into the distance. I don’t know if the water is flowing into a void back there, because there isn’t anything you can see past that edge. Nothing but sky.”

She stopped to give Cimmy time to process the image she’d just described, complete with the edge of existence, the place beyond which the land was no more.

“We are surrounded by water, Cimmy. It’s everywhere.”