Most mornings, the woman sits in her garden. Most mornings, I sit on my roof. In this way, looking down over the tall stone walls of her courtyard, I can see her grey head bent over her grey hands. She’s a wealthy woman—you can tell from her flowers alone, they’re so healthy, their petals lush and soft like the skin of children fed on milk. It’s hot and dry in our city, water at a premium, and keeping flowers this alive is expensive. Every night I hear her sprinklers go on, the mechanical schick-schick, schick-schick as they rotate in their metal cradles, then the soft patter of droplets on leaves, and at first the sound snuck into my sleep and gave me nightmares. Too much like rain. But now I find the sprinklers soothing. When the sun comes up, the woman sits under the beating blue of the sky and stares at her plants as they dry in the heat, the wet shine evaporating from the dahlias, the bougainvillea, the coiled ranunculus in sunset colors of gold and blush. Sometimes a young man comes out and brings her pink iced tea that she never drinks. Even her tea is made of flowers.

My roof, and the room it’s attached to, belong to a friend, an artist, her parents have money and they own this whole building. My friend, Angelica, lets me stay for free, which is the only way I could live in such a nice neighborhood, with its watered flowers and small domesticated dogs and outdoor cafes where you can’t just sit down, you have to be led to a seat like on an airplane. I’ve never been on an airplane but you pick these things up. Angelica and I are both unmarried, so her parents pay a haughty maid to come cook and clean for us, and to report on whether we sleep alone.

This afternoon we sit in the hot living room, each of us in front of our own oscillating fan, and Angelica paints her nails while I read aloud from a travel magazine. It’s telling us the most scenic routes by which to leave the city and drive through the mountains to another city. Angelica has traveled a lot and I’m jealous—I’ve never left. Not for lack of desire. The problem is, the city is completely enclosed by seven intersecting canals. The water is slow-moving, but it’s moving, running, so I can’t.

The canals are thousands of years old, a human mystery of labor like the pyramids or the stone faces on Easter Island, though it isn’t the how of the canals that occupies historians, but the why. The canals are extremely narrow and have very high, steep stone walls, with no dams and no locks. Furthermore, there are no points of boat access, so historians feel certain they were never used for transportation, and there are plenty of easily crossed bridges, so they can’t have been built to defend against an external force. They don’t funnel water anywhere but into one another, so they weren’t used for drainage, either, nor for irrigation, and the water that fills the canals comes from deep underground and is full of minerals and poisons, not drinkable. However, a few decades ago, engineers figured out a way to clean it up enough to siphon it into our taps and now all our houses are piped with it—we shower with it, we wash our dishes with it, we flush our toilets with it, we water our gardens with it. For drinking and cooking it’s bottled water, delivered weekly and getting more expensive by the day. Tourists who come to the city always visit the canals, not for the beauty, because they’re essentially just deep ditches of dirty water, but for the mystery. That’s why our canals are famous. No one knows why they were built.

Except me. I know why.

“If you’re not in a hurry,” I read to Angelica, “there’s no better place to stop and stretch your legs than in the parking lot of Scenic Overlook 133.”

“If I got a lovely little motorcycle, would you ride on the back?” Angelica asks me. “In the open air? We could take a day trip out of the city and see how it goes.”

I’ve told her I don’t leave the city because I’m claustrophobic, and cars, buses, and trains are all too small. To maintain this lie, I ride a bicycle or walk everywhere.

Angelica’s maid, standing above us with a tray of sandwiches, says, “I certainly would never get on the back of a motorcycle.”

“You’ve only brought one plate,” says Angelica. “Go get another, please, for my friend.”

The maid furrows her brow, and I can see her attempting to see me. She often has trouble with this, and Angelica complains all the time about her absentmindedness, how she forgets to set a place at the table for me or puts all my laundered clothes in Angelica’s room. I smile up at her and she squints at me uncertainly, then leaves to fetch a plate.

“What do you think?” Angelica says, showing me her fingernails, now a pale lilac, very lovely. I open my mouth to tell her so, but before I can speak, the citywide water alarm begins to wail. It’s a familiar, droning sound, more familiar with every passing day, as we get deeper and deeper into our current drought and the rain still doesn’t come. It’s been a little over three years now.

Angelica moans theatrically along with the alarm, stamping a foot in frustration. “No!” she says. “I was going to wash my hair tonight!”

“You can use my drinking rations, if you want,” I say. “There should be enough for a rinse.”

“Ah, I couldn’t,” she says. “Not even I’m that shallow.”

It’s illegal to run water for the twenty-four hours after a water alarm goes off. If you run water and can’t pay the fine, you get carted off to jail, we’ve watched it happen in the street several times, people dragged away in handcuffs as their children sob. Not many people come back from jail, everyone knows this. Angelica’s parents would pay the fine for her, but it would make them angry and they’d restrict her allowance, so she wouldn’t be able to buy the expensive oil paint she needs for her paintings.

The two things Angelica cares most for in this world are her appearance and her art, maybe to her they’re parts of a whole. She makes portraits of people, sometimes friends or lovers, most often strangers she meets on the street and invites to come sit for her. Her work is starting to be “collected,” meaning wealthy people are buying her paintings and storing them in warehouses, unseen, as a financial asset. Art was how I first met Angelica; she approached me and asked if I’d be willing to sit for a portrait. I said yes out of sheer curiosity—what would she see, what would she paint? Her first attempt was of a young woman, long dark braid, big amber eyes, but she couldn’t get the skin color right, kept mixing in too much yellow and red, so she grew frustrated and started over. Her second attempt was the same young woman, though this time, the eyes were full of flames, and the long dark braid was on fire, so detailed you could almost smell the acrid sizzle of burning hair. Angelica couldn’t put the fire out, so she gessoed over the canvas and tried one more time. Her third and final attempt was a still-life of oranges under a blazing sun, and it sold the moment it hit the gallery where she shows her work. By this time, I’d come to like Angelica a lot, and I liked her well-appointed apartment, so I didn’t leave.

The alarm dies down, and Angelica sighs. “I wish they’d warn us a day in advance, at least,” she says.

“They measure the water levels every afternoon, and—”

“Yes, I know, but I’d still appreciate some kind of routine. Why don’t they just restrict us on the same day every week, that way we could plan.”

“The city doesn’t like it when we plan.”

Angelica blows on her nails then offers them to the oscillating fan.

That night, as soon as the sun sets, the water alarm goes off again as an evening reminder. Angelica is painting in her studio on the floor below us and I’m in my bedroom, propped up against a mountain of pillows, reading a novel. As the alarm’s wail dies down, I hear another sound, an illegal sound, and I sit up in surprise. Surely I’m mishearing? But no, there it is, unmistakable: schick-schick, schick-schick, followed by the fat plop of water on green leaves. I leave my book and climb out the window onto the still-hot asphalt roof, peering down into the dark garden below. Nighttime has made it a stranger to me. In the dark it’s all moist, shining petals and tangled vines glimmering from inky pools of deep shadow. I lie on my belly, my chin resting on my crossed arms, and listen to the water, waiting.

Sure enough, after a quarter of an hour, the telltale yellow headlights of a water enforcement vehicle flash outside our neighbor’s house. An orange-uniformed officer gets out, climbs the stone steps, and knocks loud enough that I can hear it over the dogged sound of the illegal sprinkler. Someone inside opens the door, spilling a triangle of light out onto the porch, and I can see the officer talking, gesturing, nodding. A clipboard is passed inside; a moment later, it’s returned. The officer reaches out his hand and retracts it, now holding a wad of bills, which he tucks into his breast pocket as the front door closes. He drives away. The house has paid both a fine and a bribe, and the sprinkler keeps going, all through the night. I fall asleep wondering about the price of each water droplet.

“She’s asking to be arrested,” Angelica says a month or so later. The water alarm has been going off with more and more frequency, three times already this week and it’s only Thursday, and each night, our neighbor leaves her sprinklers running and the water enforcer comes to collect. Everywhere else, the city is getting drier and drier, trees along the medians shriveling, leaves on bushes crisping, any remaining grass burnt yellow and brown. Our bottled water has been re-rationed according to the lowest limit of medical guidance. Yet the sprinklers keep going. The garden is more beautiful than ever. Skinny neighborhood cats are always crouched in the shade now, thirstily lapping water from the plants’ cupped leaves, and it seems as if all the city’s birds flock here. I’m woken at dawn by their cries.

“Maybe she’s asking to go bankrupt,” I say. “She’s paying the fines and bribing officials every night. And for what? Flowers?”

Angelica strikes a pose, head back and hand up, like a statue of a dancer. “For beauty,” she says.

We’re in the market, where everyone is tutting disconsolately over the empty baskets and shelves where fruits and vegetables used to sit in plump piles. Now it’s all jars of pickles and olives, brined last year before the worst of the drought. There are dried beans, a few sad pods of okra, some herbs. No nuts. No grapes. No rice. The drought has spread beyond the walls of the city and is consuming the surrounding countryside.

“Actually,” says Angelica, dropping her hand, “I don’t find the garden beautiful, anymore. It gets uglier to me by the day.”

I drop a sprig of rosemary into Angelica’s basket. “You should see if our neighbor will sit for you.”

Angelica whirls on me, her eyes animated. “Now that’s an idea.”

We take the long way home, winding down side streets instead of walking the straight shot down a traffic-congested thoroughfare, and we end up on the pedestrian path running parallel to the east canal. It’s a hot day—it’s always a hot day—and Angelica hides from the sun beneath a wide-brimmed hat and dark glasses. The few bedraggled people we pass eye her hungrily. From afar, she looks clean and cool, a nearly impossible feat. Close up, though, I can see her flushed cheeks and the rivulets of sweat trickling down her neck, water her body can’t afford to lose.

Usually I don’t approach the canals, an instinctive energetic avoidance like the repulsion of a magnet. Today, though, I find myself drawn to the high stone barrier that separates the walking path from the canal’s edge. Angelica trails behind me and we lean our elbows on the wall, looking down. As soon as my eyes adjust to the darkness of the crevice below, a jolt of shock runs through me. The water is far, far beneath us, farther away than I’ve ever seen it. It’s just a grey-green trickle in a drying bed.

Angelica makes a small, frightened sound. “No wonder the water alarms keep going off,” she says. “I’ve never seen the level so low. I can’t even smell it.”

I sniff. She’s right. Normally it’s impossible to avoid the musty, mineral, wet-stone scent of the canals—you can smell them from the street. Standing directly above one like this, we should be getting at least a waft of damp.

“Even the underground springs must be drying up,” I say, and my voice is pitched all wrong. I sound exhilarated rather than anxious. I look across to the other side and it looks just like this side, same enclosing wall, same signs warning not to lean too far; there are even two people almost directly across from Angelica and I, also looking down into the shallow, shallow water and speaking to one another about it worriedly. There are buildings, buses, the same savage blue sky.

When these canals were first built, they delineated the civilized city from the surrounding untamed land, and the view from the inside to the outside was as different as dry from wet. Back then, when you looked across the canals from inside the city, you saw mostly green. Dirt roads wound through fields healthy with agriculture and up into the rocky foothills of the small mountains, their slopes bristling with fruit trees and dotted with goats. The sky held clouds which held water. Meanwhile, inside the canals it was all stone and mortar, wheels and ladders, humans and their animals. It smelled like baked grains, fried fish, vinegar, bruised fruit, human effluvia, flowers. At the time it seemed loud, everybody always shouting, ringing bells, swinging hammers, playing music, often poorly, though now I realize that world was quiet in comparison to the constant machine-and-engine sound of today. Now, in this city of millions, no matter how quiet the night, there is always a car nearby doing something: driving, honking, alarming, backfiring.

Does it sound the same on the other side? Smell the same? Feel the same?

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” Angelica says, casting a last, anxious glance at the drying canal before pushing herself from the wall.

“Me neither,” I say.

The next morning, as always, I go out onto the roof. Below me, the garden is soaked, blossoms hanging waterlogged and heavy on their delicate stems, rivulets still streaming down the veins of leaves and dripping onto the dense green grass. Politicians are downplaying the death toll from this drought, but we all know it rises by the day, and the water enforcement officers have become a symbol of the city’s collective thirst. Images of their orange shirts adorn protest signs. The very wealthy, including Angelica’s parents, have begun making their plans to move from the city and leave thirst to the poor. Ambulances wail day and night, and the desiccated carcasses of birds and squirrels are piling up beneath the dead trees. Meanwhile down in the neighbor’s garden, everything is so wet and shining it is obscene.

As I watch, the old woman tilts her grey head back, her eyes closed, and I see that she’s smiling. Her nostrils flare in and and out like she’s smelling all that wet soil. Then she does something she’s never done before: she opens her eyes, turns her head, and looks right up at me, unerring and direct. I start with surprise but don’t lean away. I meet her gaze, I let her look. She raises a hand and curls her fingers in a wave and tentatively, I do the same. Then she turns away again, back to her garden and to the young man coming out with her flowery pink tea. There are people in the city who would kill for a sip of that tea, but I know she won’t take a single mouthful. I climb back through my window, and for some reason, my heart is beating so fast I feel almost alive.

Some days later, Angelica whirls into the living room, beaming at me. There’s not enough water for regular showers anymore and her hair is perpetually unwashed, tied back in a tight ponytail, her lips chapped. Her parents fired our maid for stealing water rations, despite Angelica’s protests, and ever since the maid departed, her clothes have been wrinkled and smell like body. Still, she is beautiful, and I return her smile.

“Yes?” I say.

“Our neighbor says she’ll sit for a portrait!” Angelica announces, then raises a finger as I start to clap. “On one condition. She says you have to be there as I paint.”

I go still.

“She says you don’t have to do anything,” Angelica continues. “You only have to sit while she sits.”

“Why?”

“She didn’t say.” Angelica gives me a curious look. “Why haven’t you ever mentioned knowing her?”

“I don’t know her. We’ve never spoken.”

“You’ll do it, though, won’t you? You’ll sit with her for me?”

And so it’s arranged: instead of going to her garden the following morning, our neighbor will come to Angelica’s studio, and she and I will sit together as Angelica paints. I can’t sleep that night and lie awake listening to her sprinklers siphoning water from the veins of our city.

The last time it rained was three and a half years ago, when I’d just started living here with Angelica. She was supposed to go to an art opening that evening, not her own, a friend’s, but she ended up staying home with me, begging me to let her send for a doctor. I’d been in the kitchen when the rain began to fall, and the pain was so bad I couldn’t uncurl from where I’d dropped, my cheek pressed to the cool tile. No doctor, I made her promise, no doctor, squeezing her hand so tight she gasped. She kept asking me, what do you need, what can I do? Nothing, nothing. An illness, it comes and goes, no one can do anything, it’ll pass, go to your party, but she wouldn’t, she held my hand, she stroked my hair. When the rain let up around dawn and I was released from the agony enough to regain some awareness, I saw that Angelica had put a pillow beneath my head and she was asleep on the floor next to me. There was a half-drunk glass of water beside her, its rim covered in her red lipstick prints. Water keeps Angelica alive.

I toss and turn in my bed, the brass frame creaking. I’ve had these thoughts before, obviously. I’ve loved so many people. Yet somehow it feels new every time, this conversation with myself, this theoretical bargaining exercise. A few hours of suffering each week so Angelica could keep on living until she dies. It would be a simple choice, wouldn’t it? If it were a choice. Which it’s not. It will rain, or it won’t. The weather has nothing to do with me, nothing at all, I’m almost certain.

I wait in Angelica’s studio as she goes to fetch our neighbor at the front door. The studio is on the second floor of the building, a very large, unadorned room with big high windows to the south and east, and rows of track lights on the ceiling. The wooden floors are mostly covered with paint-splattered drop cloths. Anyone who enters inevitably leaves with paint on the soles of their shoes and tracks oily dots of color through the rest of the apartment and down to the street, but we don’t have a maid anymore to run after them, scrubbing, so now it’s no shoes allowed. Will our neighbor take off her shoes? I doubt it.

A canvas sits in the corner, drying, with a man’s face on it. A fleshy face, sparse eyebrows, and I recognize him with a jolt. It’s the water enforcement officer who comes each night to our neighbor’s house to collect the fine and his bribe. In this portrait he’s not in his orange uniform; in fact, he appears to be shirtless, but the background of the portrait is awash in oranges. I suppose he sat in this very chair, vulnerable and unclothed, his throat working as he swallowed nervously beneath Angelica’s keen artist’s gaze. Probably thirsty, like everyone else—but less thirsty.

A creak in the hall outside the door, and suddenly there she is, our neighbor, closer than I’ve ever seen her. She’s small and stately, sharp-eyed, smiling. Angelica is ushering her in, making introductions, and a moment later, her hand is in mine. It’s dry and limp and her touch sings into me.

“A pleasure,” says our neighbor.

“All mine,” I say.

And I know.

We both know. We’ve met before, many times, in many different guises, though not for some time. Not for quite some time. Did I suspect it, before? I must have, drawn to her as I was on some visceral level. Why else would I have agreed to come and sit for Angelica? Why else would I have stayed here in this building? Why else would I have crawled out onto the roof every day for three and a half years, watching the neighbor obsessively, even before her garden became the only healthy square of land in the city? She never comes outside when the sprinklers are on and she never drinks her flowered pink tea. Never once a sip. That alone should have told me. We don’t drink. If water is falling, we’re in agony. If it’s running, we can’t cross it. I should have known. I did know.

She’s sitting next to me now, letting Angelica arrange her just-so, grey hands crossed in her lap, posture erect, regal. The room is growing hotter as the sun rises higher, and Angelica is dewy, her upper lip glistening, the roots of her unwashed hair dampening. The neighbor and I are, as ever, unmoved by the heat. Angelica is chatting, asking sweet, innocuous questions, and the neighbor is answering, she’s lived here all her life, for the past fifty years in that very house, yes, with that very garden, yes, she adores her flowers, yes, thank you, I do my best, so difficult these days, what a pity, what a shame, but surely it’ll rain soon, surely this is all a lot of agitation for nothing, yes, I’m very comfortable, I’ll tell you when I need a break.

Angelica begins painting.

The neighbor and I sit in silence, both of us with our eyes on Angelica and every single other sense trained upon each other. Angelica frowns as she mixes her paints, frowns as she puts the first strokes on the canvas, squeezing out dollops of shining red onto her palette, adding yellow, shaking her head as if to clear it, adding more yellow. Her frustration is palpable, as it was when she tried to paint me. Angelica is so talented. She sees so clearly. Like every human being, she was born thirsty.

After an hour or so, the neighbor abruptly drops her pose and says, “I could use a break, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course,” Angelica says, and puts down her brush and palette knife. “Take all the time you need.”

“And perhaps another fan? It’s getting so hot in here.”

“Absolutely, we have an extra one upstairs.” Angelica glances at me, silently asking if I, too, need a break, and I give her a minute shake of my head, so she stands and says, “Be right back.”

We wait in tense silence until the door shuts behind her. Then I turn to the neighbor and say, “You want to drain the canals.”

She raises her eyebrows. “Don’t you?”

“It’s ridiculous,” I say. “One garden isn’t going to make the difference.”

“Well, certainly the canals are drying up with or without me. I’m just speeding the process along.”

I blurt out a very stupid question, I can’t help it. “But why?”

She regards me incredulously and speaks slowly. “So we can get out.”

Out. A place I have never been. I was born to the city and the city built a perfect cage to keep me. A surge of feeling blooms from a hollow place inside my body and courses through me like hunger, if hunger were made of heat. “What happens when we’re out?”

The neighbor flashes yellowed teeth at me, a smile. “What do you think?”

“Death, destruction, chaos, pleasure, power.”

“Exactly,” she nods. “Exactly that.”

“But the city is our home,” I say. “Everyone I’ve ever loved has lived here.”

“Are you worried about your painter? You can protect her, surely.”

I think about all the theoretical midnight bargains I’ve made with myself, thinking what pain I would trade for my loved ones’ lives. Hundreds of bargains over the years, hundreds of people, all of whom died, eventually.

“She’ll die anyway, though,” says the neighbor, following my train of thought. “They always do—you know that.”

But what about the people I will love, I wonder? The ones I haven’t met yet? What bargain would I make for their future?

Angelica comes back in, then, toting a metal fan, and there’s a flurry as she plugs it in and sets it up in front of the neighbor, who doesn’t need it. Angelica needs it more. I know how hot she is, how thirsty, how grimy she feels and how hard it is for her to keep her spirits up, to keep painting, to keep up her belief or her pretense of belief in art. Angelica isn’t a good person or a bad one; she runs on beauty like she runs on water. She’s generous when the mood strikes her, but in some ways it’s a false generosity because the wealth belongs to her parents, not to her, and all her life there’s never been a threat that the money might stop coming, so it costs her nothing to spend it or share it. She’s done some awful things and some decent, even wonderful, things. She’s finished many excellent paintings. If she can make it through this drought, she has perhaps forty years left, fifty at most.

A drop, as they say, in the bucket.

The neighbor and I are quiet while Angelica paints. It’s going poorly, I can tell from her frequent sighs of irritation, she keeps squeezing out too much yellow, too much red, can’t course-correct, and after another few hours, she calls it a day. She thanks our neighbor, goes to let her out, comes back to me with her shoulders slumped.

“Awful,” she says, shaking her head. “What a waste of paint. What a waste of time. What a waste of a life.”

“I don’t know about that,” I say, and I really, truly don’t. I don’t know.

I could kill our neighbor, I think. I mean, I’m pretty sure I could. It’s one of those pieces of instinctual certainty I get from time to time. Maybe if I killed her, the rain would come? No certainty there. Maybe if the canals dry up and the neighbor and I get out, we can bring rain. Hurricanes, tempests, flash floods, the ground so dry the water just sits on top of it and the whole city drowns, screams audible only between claps of earth-shaking thunder. Lightning pulsing in strobes, frying the electrical circuit, the smell of burning hair and charred flesh.

In the fading evening light, I walk back to the east canal. The other side looks different to me today. The sky seems bigger, and in the distance, the dry brown mountains rise and fall like the spine of a sleeping beast, its hide scorched black with the evidence of recent wildfires. Whenever the mountains go up in flames, smoke and ash settle down into the valley, onto the city, smothering its noise in silence. I stare down into the depths of the canal, at the puny ooze of slow-moving water keeping me in. The neighbor is right, the canals are drying anyway, there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Nothing anyone can do, except conserve water and hope for rain. What’s one garden? One life-sucking garden, a garden to end a city.

It’s dark when I finally walk home, music and laughter and shouting coming from every street corner, every idled car, every opened window. More and more, people are living their lives after sunset, when the heat lets up. Babies who should be asleep are sitting with their mothers on front steps, determinedly suckling from drying breasts. Teenagers on benches mash their lips together chastely, their tongues too dehydrated for proper kissing. Someone asks me for money; someone offers me a prayer; most people don’t notice me at all. As I turn onto our street, I see that Angelica’s studio windows are all lit up, she’s returned to her doomed painting of our neighbor, she’s still working, still trying to make it beautiful.

A bag of bones and fur, a cat, leaps from the dead branch of a tree onto the stone wall of our neighbor’s garden and disappears into the darkness beyond. Dark flowers, dark leaves, dark vines. Purple, indigo, black. Brushstrokes of white where light glints off wet. Through the sounds of the city, the cars and the music and the prayers and the chatter, I hear the sprinkler come to life: schick-schick, schick-schick, turn by turn, drop by drop, the garden flourishing behind the walls.

 

(Editors’ Note: “The Garden” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 65B.)

 

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