Splotches
of gray-green weed angle up through the pesticide poisons, search for the
scorching sun. We walk into the great
basin, pace off distances between sunken boats, rusted hulks settled on an
ancient seabed once busy with numinous fish, nibbling in amazing multitudes—a
different time, a time of believers, when clouds and rain and children’s
shallow splashing limned this Eden.
Beyond
the horizon, Resurrection
Island , a facility for
biological evil, no longer quarantined by water, issues its next weapons-grade
plague, oozing ever outward to what once was the mainland, to a tangled remnant
of human kind, hardened, awaiting new horrors.
A
truck in a dust cocoon squeals to a stop on the access road, next to our car.
Two men jump off, inspect their tires, all the while sizing us up, smelling for
weakness fifty yards away. I’m walking towards them fast. I try to look
unhesitant and threatening. They decide to leave, disappear, dust and all, into
the sea’s desiccant fathoms.
Everyone
is sick in Muynak: anemia, tuberculosis, cancers. Their future, like their sea,
has ebbed away. People speak of death as a wandering friend, now returned,
welcomed. Government officials, we’re told, arrive in packs almost monthly,
wring their hands, and write reports that detail another five year plan.
The river
that fed this sea and awed Alexander the Great, the Oxus ,
once mighty, dies in a desert hole, its strength siphoned by cotton crops: its
former dreams of hurricane swells no longer viable. A river paradise turned
phantom.
There
used to be canning factories on the bluff, overlooking the harbor. Industry and
the fish-harvest defined all the geography that mattered.
We
pass beggars and street children losing color, depth; half wraith, they wave or
beckon or both. It’s as if hell cannot maintain its solidity.
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