Nuevo Santuario

Emmett had never been overseas. Not as an affluent child, and so far not as an affluent adult. He was surrounded by those who had travelled so much that there was no more sense of the exotic, just a sense of less haggard. Emmett came from Yorkshire, was careworn from it, and landed in Cuzco, a twenty-hour journey if you only had two layovers, which he did. Yorkshire was a place that was green, but you would be inconvenienced to see the greenery beneath perpetual fog and mist and clouds. There were purple fields rolling drowsily on the horizon. There was sourceless birdsong. Blackthorns spiked driveways and walking paths in public parks. Public buildings were lined like teeth at the edge of the street, everything perfectly laid against its neighbours. There was no space for conflict, architecturally or otherwise. Emmett might have worked in some online industry, or a burgeoning software development start-up, some workforce that required being plugged in to work. He was good with systems. He was probably the golden boy of whichever system he’d been installed in.

Until he left with no word. Two years into university. Two days into his spring semester classes. He left his notes on his desk and left his 8 a.m. class at 9 a.m. and got into his car and drove to the bank to take out two thirds of his savings. He used half of one of his last gigabytes of data to find a seat sale for a local airline. It took him two hours to find a series of flights to take him to cuzco in the next twenty-four hours, and another hour to drive to the airport. Then he left the car in the parking lot and went through security. In the following twenty hours, the signs in the airports transformed from English to Spanish. The view out of the window greened. He slept in a chair. He had never done that before. Most people did that during layovers, but he didn’t know that.

Later, he told me he had been worried about missing his flight, especially because he’d left his phone charger behind and his phone had no power with which to set an alarm. He hadn’t been thrilled like that in a long time. He couldn’t breathe properly.

I didn’t tell him that when I met him was the first time I felt I could breathe properly.

Nuevo Santuario stunned Emmett, as quickly and cleanly as sunlight in the dark. He was stunned by the dragon’s tail river that was the only way into the town, and the jungle that loomed on either side. He was stunned by the nimbus of forest that the village barely beat back beyond the roads and church and houses each season. He was stunned by the flammable heartwood of the trees that grew in floating islands atop river inlets, and the flows of obsidian that wall in the river near the gantry. He was stunned by the glass that formed around the river in the highland, shocked by lightning to perfect lens quality-clearness.

When we first took a boat from our house near the church up to the mountains, Emmett nearly singed his shirt off his back steering the boat into a stripe of lensed sunlight. He said they didn’t grow natural stacks of glass in Yorkshire. They never nearly burnt themselves to death in Yorkshire, he said.

“What happens to the sand and water in your mountains, then?” I asked. We were at the top of a mountain right now, close enough to a flow of obsidian that it was like sitting sideface to a fire. He had brighter hair than I had ever seen, and I imagined it felt as warm and sunny as it looked where the light made it golden. The mountain contined upward in a tide of boulders that looked like the ridges of a petrified giant’s spine. I had never climbed all the way up. The continuous climb made it difficult to picture how far you’d come, until you found a ledge where you could look down and see where you had once been.

“We don’t have mountains,” he replied. He held his hand against his brow to look up without blinding himself. It was a winter’s sun, silver and bright enough to temporarily blind. When he shifted, pine needles jumped beneath his feet.

“Maybe all of your mountains have been worn down by things moving back and forth over them.”

Emmett said, “People and things in Yorkshire don’t move enough for that.”

“How boring.”

“Stationary things are simpler to deal with,” Emmett said. When he lowered his hand, I saw his face had been browned by the sun already. He had more freckles on his cheeks, and less cheeks. His collarbones were sharper. He still spoke Spanish with the broadest accent I’d ever heard, and Quechua was a hopeless task for him. He would never look like he was native to Nuevo Santuario, but he might look like he belonged here, one day. As we sat and the sun shifted, the glass stacks heated the water at the top of a waterfall, and it bubbled and boiled as it spilled over.

Nuevo Santuario didn’t have written rules. There was little in the way of authority. My uncle, the priest and only resident of the only church in the town, was the closest there came, and he answered to the landlord. In spiritual matters, he referred to God. In all other matters, he referred to money. Which meant many matters sorted themselves out before my uncle saw them. Emmett did not know how to follow rules that didn’t exist on paper, nor how to sort matters out as they arose like bumps in the road. Obstacles weren’t meant for someone who did not know how to keep from shuffling his feet. He did not know that Inti owned only a part of the pine forest, that he pretended to own all of it, or that he did not like eyes to touch the air between trees, let alone hands.

Emmett was enchanted by the wild grapes that thrived in the frost, and the glaciers that appeared at the edges of solar storms, and the terraces of glass surrounded by misty threads. Enchantment tricked him off the main paths and into the pine forest. I found Emmett in the pine forest, dripping with water from the pine needles of a tree he’d been thrown against, saying, “There’s no fence, or sign. I didn’t know it was… forbidden. Restricted?”

Inti pushed the butt of his rifle against Emmett’s chin. Emmett’s teeth clacked together. He held himself up gripping the bark of the tree behind him. Inti waited to see if Emmett would drop his head, submit, or go down without a fight. When he didn’t, Inti smacked Emmett across the face hard enough to send him into the pine needles. They jumped as Emmett landed. His cheek hit a large unearthed root. His feet tangled in another. He kicked out at Inti, which did nothing but anger him.

Indignant, Inti pulled out a knife and placed a boot on Emmett’s shoulder. Emmett gasped for breath and tried to blow a leaf out of his mouth at the same time.

“What’re you doing, boy?” Inti asked.

I had hefted the rifle off my shoulder and was taking aim. I faced him through the crosshairs. “Let him up, Inti. Get your foot off of him.”

Inti cracked a smile and removed his foot. There was a grey boot print on Emmett’s shoulder. “The little church rat just saved you. Get out. You come for my timber again and I’ll cut off your fingers.”

Emmett didn’t move at first. There was nothing to hear for a moment but a sound like rain. It wasn’t rain- the trees were dense here for rain. It was moisture between the needles, and mist, all moving as though the trees were breathing it. I kept the rifle pointed until Inti backed up, then I tugged Emmett up. I didn’t let my eyes off Inti until he turned and went deeper into the pine forest. Emmett took my instructions back into the town.

I brought Emmett to the church and leaned him against the glass pipes on the wall, warm and conversational with rushing water. I filled the tub with water and salt. Emmett looked like himself when he was thinking, which is to say he looked like something inside of him had gone away to think and left his body behind, unchanged. When he returned, he said, with a mouth that was dark and swollen as a galaxy on one side, “Never been in the church before.” He licked his cracked lip. “Feels high up.”

We were at a higher altitude in the church- the road sloped downward toward the town and my house and every place Emmett had wandered into and been bewildered by since arriving- but I think I understood was he was saying. When the bath was filled up, I helped him get his shirt off, then the rest, and dumped it in my uncle’s laundry pile. He winced and touched his shoulder, but he just said, “This is the first time I’ve missed Yorkshire.”

The bath only had enough room for him, and barely that much, so scrubbing him with a bar of soap was difficult. I took off my shirt so I wouldn’t soak it, and I leaned over the edge and kissed him. There was pinesap and dirt in his mouth, so at least he tasted like he belonged here.

The bath did fit two people, it turned out. When we’d scrubbed the dirt and blood from his face, and the grime from my hands, the water was murky enough we didn’t have to avert our eyes. Emmett used the soap, even though he didn’t like the smell of cocoa butter. It had taken a long time to explain what it was to him. Cocoa sounded too similar to coca, and one of the first times he said it, I misunderstood and thought he’d meant coconut. But he refused to say cacao, or he just forgot every time. He was a good with languages as with unwritten rules.

I pushed his head down and washed the worst muck from the back of his neck and head as he stared at his reflection. He scrubbed at my knees under the water after. Our fingers had been red and chapped from the cold. They grew redder from heat, and pruned the longer we sat.

“Not here,” he said. “I thought New Shrine would work. It’s too far… there had to be something between here and Yorkshire. I can double back a ways.”

In his voice I could hear that he was already on his way out. I missed him even as he sat here. The missing him was worse, in fact, for his still being here. I said, “I don’t think that’s a place you can get to. It’s a place you make.”

He disappeared inside himself for several long minutes, while I wiped his shoulders and tried to read the clock to see when my uncle would return. I didn’t notice when he returned until he said, “I want to know how the mountains here make glass, and how they get taller every year instead of smaller even with all the rain. I want to make mountains in Yorkshire.”

I didn’t say what I thought, which was that he didn’t want to go back to Yorkshire to try it, and he knew it already. He wanted a place that existed within him to exist without. A place he could fly to, settle in, that made the rest of the world seem like a dream, without seeming like a dream itself. But between Yorkshire and Nuevo Santuario, there was only Emmett.

But in the morning, I followed his tracks out into the snow, up into the mountains, where they disappeared, and Emmett with them.

Text by Lucie MacAulay