Journey to Iris

Have you been acting sunny?

Do you know where you are, honey?

The sky sang to Varvara through a halo of sol. The jukebox ballad echoed, echoed. Her consciousness went dark, and an invisible singer took spotlight in this visceral midnight. Synth drums rolled up decibels, notes of a cocktail piano flew off like butterflies, and other such dreamy harmonics cradled her.

She had collapsed an hour and a half earlier, her body partially entombed in the sand. She started to hum now, cracked lips producing a nonhumidified pitch that shot straight into the dense ecru— zup.

Though Varvara didn’t know where she was, she knew where the song was from. Recalling it made her recall the fact that she too, originated from somewhere. She traced the sand wearily with her finger, mocking the curvature of dunes that unforgivingly oscillated into oblivion. Every point was a peak on a mountain in a quantum range. Hell, she might’ve accidentally taken the stairway to Mars.

Just five more minutes, then she’d force herself up. Varvara closed her eyes and traveled to warmer thoughts… her grandmother used to sing the song back when she lived in the ghetto. First, to her own little brothers and sisters. Seventeen and axially tall, she blocked view of the scorching sun when she stood. The rugrats loved the shade. Often grandma would look over her shoulder, the sun’s rays spindling at her chestnut hair. Then, the West Wind would pick up, originating from the border, and with it the Retaliation’s dispatch. The West Wind was a paternal comfort, like a chief uncle who told the kids the state of their cousins after each day’s battles. They would say, “it’s as if we could feel the warmth of their skin, and the vaseline scent of their coughs.” Grandma would smile, starvation drawing in the youthful lines of her face.

Varvara had closed her eyes, savoring every throb of moisture they had left. The dehydration, along with minor bone fractures, was causing ischemia to develop. Searing light forced her to acknowledge her bloody lids, as if in warning of a red scene that may occur if she didn’t get to safety. When the view turned black in nothing but a milli-instant, Varvara thought she had fatally fallen asleep. She sat upright, gasping, unable to seize the fact of sudden night.

The smoldered figure jumped to her feet. Every ligament felt like unscrewing stilts. HIKER11’s wing poked out from under the sand, and Varvara ran for it. The copter was a sinking whale. With much thoracic heaving, she lifted her pride and joy to the surface. Tearing open the passenger door, Varvara dug the interior sand out. A compass rolled down like an excavated antique— its arrow veered “S”.

FOUR MONTHS EARLIER

Varvara threw a wad of paper across the unit. She was nestled in a corner of her mattress, leaning against the popcorn wall, solemnly enjoying the aloe cool and wistful mariachi of a passing car. A starry, cactus winter night resided out the window. The season probably stemmed, she thought, from a magnificent distance. Somewhere deep in the Sierra San Pedro Mártir, and tracked by way of harsh winds to the southernmost tip of California. A friendly, atmospheric extension of holiday tinsel.

The girl stretched her hands behind her head and laid down. She looked like the Vitruvian Man, the center figure among a myriad of strewn maps and graph paper. She was 22 years old and nothing but a local community college student. Pre-med, because it wasn’t the seventeenth century and no one offered discourse in cartography. No, they thought that the world was complete.

If I could find that place, the world would turn inside out. It’s gotta be real. I can feel its gravitational pull on my gut. She grabbed a journal and scribbled her plan of attack for tomorrow: she’d hop on the loading train, and look for more salvage material. A knock at the door interrupted her.

Varvara walked the three steps, achieving the Ames Illusion as she went. The door opened just enough so that her inhospitable eyelash could be seen. They sure knew how to transform into creatures of the night. Her friends’ makeup shimmered in the dusty communal hallway - girl dolls of Margiela, Galliano, and Bowie. The three burst in and rightfully got caught in Varvara’s pandoric dossier, slipping through like penguins on ice. “I was about to take a drive."

“There’s a dozen manhunts out,” warned Isabel, the blue-haired one who was her bestie. “You might get caught by a flying cop.” Regaining her footing, her friend hunched sternly towards her, “What you need is a drink!”

They ushered the girl out of the unit, jetset on having a good time.

Under the nautical darkness, the girls were barely visible by their glinting sequins, though Varvara was still sooty in her hobby tank and khakis. The chums stole kumquats from creeping resident fences as they walked, spitting irrelevant gossip with bitter piths. Varvara however, kept to herself, picking at a quarry of thought. Hm, QVC hour. The neighborhood felt like a holocom town. It had long ago been abandoned by the parental demographic, and an air of lost youth thawed the evening like a scented candle. Every day you woke up as if out of a decade-long coma, and went to the grocery mart to pick up a Sidral Mundet— only to realize you were being followed by some innocent, stray kid. It’s as if all the adults were away in their own cryogenic sleep. Is this what grandma felt like in the ghetto?

The intersection light changed: the image of a person walking buoyed her back from the slugs of her mind, and the night recovered in her periphery. Correct, she needed a refreshment.

As they approached the nightclub, she looked left at the dead interstate. Usually the road held traffic coming in and out of the local amusement park, her former gig. Six months earlier the outbreak from the antigen had shut down all the major commercial areas. Varvara had worked behind the scenes as a pyrotechnic and attraction engineer. Just days before the shutdown, she was able to obtain the blueprints to build her copter. She thought back to those sparkling nights, with the crowds and families and balloons flying everywhere- no, there’s lots of people in the world.

45 minutes later, the girl was high from a shot of vodka, deposited to her system via a very pretty hand blown glass. Or so she pondered. The company jumped to the technobeat, everyone but her wearing a costume mask in place of the mandated medical ones. She was surrounded by dinosaurs, mythical heroes, and ghost killers. Varvara burst into pitiful laughter, and planted her face on the bar. I can’t be the craziest person in the world.

THE MORNING AFTER

The state had lifted restrictions with regards to institutes of higher education. Healthy students were free to attend. Nonetheless, the polycrisis lingered like clouds round the globe’s stratosphere. Unreluctantly, the administration no longer believed in Varvara’s generation. Students were left to caterpillar across campus on a casual, teacherless basis—

Sprinklers came on a barren spring quad as Varvara and a few mates ran up to their lecture hall.

They barrelled into the room. The boys took seats among the fairly packed procession, while she took the bow. “Madame, please enlighten us.” said the more sardonic one.

She opened an abask marble notebook and began to read:

“When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,

Before high piled books, in charact’ry,

Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain,” students across the room listened attentively.

“When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!”

At the back of the room, a figure stood hiding behind an opaque window. It listened, feeling the students’ contemplations upon the twill of his tweed coat. He felt like a farmer finally harvesting his Red Delicious apples. That was the dirt they needed to be put into, thought Professor Arpel.

Professor Arpel was the literature professor, and he had never met any of the youthful members that currently occupied his seats. However, he had been spying on them for the past two weeks. He thought today he could finally muster up the courage to speak to the “substitute", Varvara. Seems like she’d always been in that dirt. The predicament was, he didn’t want to stymie her. He could tell that she had already gone to lengths about some endeavor, a very personal one, and that on the other hand, if he didn’t confront her soon, she would probably commit something very dangerous. He couldn’t waste moments commiserating, he needed to figure it all out beforehand. He needed to be direct. Professor Arpel wasn’t like the other administrators. Though he felt the enmities of quarantine, his students were not what ever extinguished him. Varvara orated from below.

“That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.” The class applauded. Varvara bit her lip to keep herself from smiling, then took a seat at the front desk. She kicked her feet up and gestured to the open podium. A few other students rose with papers in hand. As the commotion died a singular, staccato clap persisted. People looked around to the opaque window. An old man sauntered into view. “Hello!”

Varvara sat up straight. The act was kaput.

“Believe me, it is mine and my grievance alone - will the class dismiss itself for the morning? My door is free all day, every day, but I need this hour to.. pop quiz your professor.” He pointed at Varvara. The students laughed, and began collecting themselves out the door.

Arpel came down the aisle, motioning for Varvara to remain seated. He tried to lean comfortably on the chalkboard. He wanted to burst into gossip like a salon girl, but he’d have to come off as steady as he could. Upsetting and distracting the mind of a pilot is not a playful matter. “What are you doing?” he asked with a perplexed grin.

“Reading.” Varvara grimaced, embarrassed.

“Well, I suppose you can’t teach cartography. The class is a little too large for anything in aviation. Engineering, maybe?” He shrugged. Varvara’s eyes widened.

“How did you know that I’m a cartographer?”

“Your haircut is that of a fighter pilot. You have crazy good eyesight, I’ve caught you reading the board from the back of the room. You only own grid paper. You check your weather, and not to mention map apps on your phone every ten minutes. That last one made it too easy. I had no idea what interest you had in Peru, St. Petersburg, and the Arctic. You also have foreign radio stations on your device?”

Varvara was dazed.

“And the Keats topped it off. I rather enjoyed that.”

“It’s just a hobby, sir.” she replied.

“How long have you been flying?” he began to circle behind her.

“Since I was 14.”

“Where have you been?”

“Catalina, Big Sur-”

“The off-kilter spots.”

“- Papua New Guinea, Iceland, Bhutan. Lots of places I don’t know the names of.”

“Alone?”

“I prefer it that way.”

“Who taught you?”

“My father… ‘s books.”

“Where is he now?” Arpel sat down on the desk.

Varvara cast her eyes away, fidgeting with a fountain pen over how to avoid the question.

“A lot of these kids were separated from their families when they came into this country.”

“Yeah, we understand each other to an extent.”

The old man rose and turned his back to her, fearing her reaction to what he was about to say.

“Varvara, when I was a kid, I loved reading adventure books after the tradition of Magellan. At the time, I believed that every fairytale country and mystical island was as real as the ground beneath my feet. I sensed them within the axis of my world.” He turned around. She was nodding coolly. Time to cut the crap, he thought. “What’s the name of the place?” Through the muleta he ran.

She swung her bag over her shoulder and tried to blitz off, but Arpel caught her by the elbow. “I have other interests too,” his voice became grave. “Such as seeing that people be given a rightful home.”

Her bangs floated over her temples disconcertingly. “Iris.”

“EE-ris,” he pronounced. “Is that the trip you’re about to go on?”

“I’m not convinced it exists. I just wish it did. There’s a difference, professor.”

“I have libraries and archives you don’t have access to. Let me help you.”

“I don’t want anyone to know.”

“You don’t want anyone to know, because you don’t want their denial or discouragement.”

She sighed.

“But I don’t want them to know because I want to look out for your safety. You have to trust someone.”

Teacher and student agreed to meet at a diner by the train tracks that following Sunday.

Each day passed with no word from Arpel. No emails, no phone calls, no sign of cancellation. Could it be, had he actually found a lead? Varvara’s dream was becoming vivid, and she could feel it in the weather. It was as if the air had shifted from the displacement of a vast, new land halfway across Earth. She shook her head in disbelief, and shot a paper airplane across the unit.

By the morning of their date, the girl hadn't slept in days. She applied some deodorant and dressed in mechanic’s slacks. By the time she got to the diner, Arpel was ordering two Sidral Mundet sodas. A large mailer envelope sat on the table. At the door, Varvara beamed. Her resplendent appearance in the morning sunlight made him wonder what she looked like when flying.

She joined him at his booth.

“Have you ever seen Casablanca?” he asked. Oh no, we’re about to have an old person conversation about one of this guy’s fascinations, and I’ll have to forgive his dementia and let the next three hours of my life be eaten away.

“I have.” she said.

“Well there’s something that’s loads better.” He pushed the envelope towards her. Varvara unlatched its string, and pulled out an old film reel. “This was my favorite movie when I was your age.” She tried not to show her disappointment. “No, there’s a poster in there too!” She pulled out a vinyl roll, and unraveled it-

The lark-toned poster read "Heliotropica" in romantic lettering. Below the title was a picture of a wartime couple standing before a spotless desert. The man held his woman from behind, and the woman was holding an alien-looking flower.

“Guess where that is?”

Varvara looked at her Professor with a severe expression.

“It’s Iris!”

“It’s my grandma!”

They exchanged stammers in disbelief and soon enough, Arpel’s face went red. “I might have had a crush on your grandmother back in the day.”

“Where’d you find this?!”

“If the place you mentioned existed, I knew it had to have been preserved in a diary, a painting, or in a film.”

“That region isn’t the best at keeping a written record, nor is there much art.”

“You’re correct. On a whim, I thought I might find something at the Sea Buckthorn Museum. They have one of the best collections of foreign wartime films. According to their database, there was a shot list for a movie from the 50s. Iris was mentioned at least a dozen times. When I went to pull up the physical file from the archive, that’s when I found it. An old package on Heliotropica.”

“Was the movie famous?”

“Not exactly. I’d gone to a screening just before it was banned.”

“My grandma never mentioned anything.”

“That’s probably because she thought it was ‘Heliotropica’!” He laughed. “Your grandmother was told it was a set. That information would have been illegal back then. Filmmakers have a knack for hiding the classifieds in their movies.”

“So it’s real?”

“Yep!”

“I can go?!”

He raised a finger and the happy train came to a halt.

“Do you know what this would mean?”

The girl felt herself choking. She held a fear that her passions expressed aloud would never come across as a rose as red as it felt inside. Now here Arpel was with his civics.

“Yes!” the juvenile begging began. “That people would have a home! All those displaced groups wandering out there, as if there’s no place in the world for them.”

“Varvara, I understand. But things aren’t so simple.”

“My father said that there’s old legislation regarding Iris. People won’t be able to fight over the land.”

“And you know very well that people won’t listen.”

“Well, can’t you take care of that part?” She furrowed her brows, and the old man saw the childlike desperation in her. Then again, he also saw her scrubbed shoulders and forearms, the lean calves and ever-vertical back. The child had come a long way, this is a comet that’ll shoot one day or another.

“Okay.”

She hugged the film reel.

“But first, watch your grandmother’s performance.”

A bedsheet hung outstretched on the wall. A light shone on it— Varvara had finally managed to start up the projector Arpel had lent her. The film reel clicked into place and began spinning. She hurried to take a seat on the floor.

The title frame cast the word "Heliotropica" in lovey-dovey cursive across the screen.

A peaceful glass greenhouse stood in the middle of an isolated desert. A bee arrives, all the way from a known part of the world to the windowsill. The audience is the bee, thought Varvara, being introduced to Iris. The bee floats from one alien plant to another. Close ups of him sucking sticky nectar, when he sets eyes on a sweeter bounty. Inside bloom dozens of rows of the same flower - a tall, thick-stalked floret with large, ballooning petals and a germinating pistil.

The frame of the bee was held still by his allure. That’s when the bombing began, the metal collapse of the sky. The initial whistle of the air raid sounded like the bee was wolf-whistling at the grand flower, but the director had you sorely wrong. Grenades sank meters into the sand like evil thorns, and detonated mercilessly. The greenhouse’s glass plating erupted like solid water instantly turned liquid. Shimmering glass particles fell to the sand— Varvara paused the film. She got up to scrutinize the screen. The sand particles, which could be told by the grain of the film, were crystal-shaped akin to the glass. Not the usual round or angular. Varvara resumed the reel.

During the bombing, the camera zoomed to one of the flowers. On its pistil were a hundred orifices, which were opening. Just the way a regular plant absorbed carbon dioxide, the flower vacuumed up the lethal gas.

Soon enough the raid abated like a regular day. Several clouds of smoke passed before a young woman in a homely sundress appeared. She was Varvara’s grandmother, and she couldn’t have been more than twenty years of age at the time. “My pasioflora!” read the subtitles. Her pasioflora had all withered dead from the self-sacrifice. Varvara pouted at her grandmother’s distress. Afterwards, the story carried on with its main conflict, which was a romance between grandma and an enemy pilot. In the end, the pilot gifts her with the world’s last pasioflora seeds as a wedding present. Grandma replants them, and the ending credits exhibited boundless pasioflora fields.

Varvara let herself drift off to sleep. The black and white projections of tall pasioflora stretched across the unit. She dreamt silently, back to a memory of her father… the month before he disappeared. Varvara was about four years old. She didn’t know what her father did, so she’d sneak into his office every chance she got to figure out the big mystery. One particular afternoon, she saw his computer screensaver: high definition photos of colossal, exotic flowers— the pasioflora!

Her father then shifts his chair and his shoulders cover the screen. He sinks a throbbing head into his hands, pulling on his hair. Grandma comes into view and the two break into an argument. He tries to convince her of something, exasperatedly slaps his chest and tells his mother that she’s ignorant.

When Varvara got older, a distant relative confessed that her father was a scientist working for his government. She stopped this relative from trashing his old books, and inherited them instead. They featured unusual and rare cartography. She eventually got the idea— he was sent away because he was crazy. That’s why she was separated.

On those last days, her father was deliriously happy. Either he had found the solution to his problems and was begging everyone to understand, or he had succumbed to his last moments, and was realizing the futility and ridiculousness of it all. Perhaps both. Varvara herself finally became aware that he wasn’t exactly conscious of the reason for his sunny exaltation.

Have you been acting sunny?

Do you know where you are, honey?

The girl cried, kicking at the tail of HIKER11. Just minutes earlier she had pushed the copter to even ground, only to realize that it was leaking. When she opened up the luggage carrier, she saw that the extra tank had been punctured from the crash. “Further north and to the east,” she said to herself, wiping the tears and sweat.

Varvara had to get away. Iris was unpredictable. Enough friction with the sand waves, and the hot grains would fizzle together— if a dry fire started nearby, the plane would be done for.

The day she departed was especially cloudy. Blooming cumulus clouds glided close to the land. One burst into ethers and revealed that Arpel and a few students had gathered in Varvara’s parking lot. “Where’s the famous HIKER11?” he asked.

Varvara looked left and right to make sure that her landlord was nowhere in sight. She then pressed a button on her keys. Smiles of anticipation swept the crowd as the garage door lifted. Something inside glistened like black gold. First appeared the four loyal wheels, then the colgate blue cockpit window, and lastly the razor sharp blades that looked like they could take you anywhere. They all thought that HIKER11 sure beats an automobile.

“You built this?”

“Yep. The amusement park was building some new aerial rides, and I was inspired.”

“Why the name?”

“HIKER10 was my father’s.”

Arpel looked at the girl affectionately. Four months had built up to this day. The last step was to say goodbye. “Keep us posted.”

Varvara mounted the pilot’s side. She wheeled HIKER11 out to the empty morning road and gained elevation. When she waved from the window, her friends waved and blew kisses back. “Goodbye professor!”

HIKER11 ascended up, up and away, until it reached the height of lost balloons and finally disappeared like a humble star behind the blue daytime.

Varvara first had to fly East and make it across the continental states. She took several pit stops and shared even more Sidral Mundet toasts with strangers who admired HIKER11’s craftsmanship. Once she got past the eastern seaboard, it was bon voyage over the Atlantic.

Crossing the ocean at night was her favorite part, simulating deep space. Once she got to the West African coast, pilot Varvara headed to the heart of the continent. She was twelve hours in through her terminal route when the GPS turned off.

One hour before dawn. Varvara wasn’t sure where she was heading, but she followed her gut. She checked the air pressure monitors. In the days before her departure, she and Arpel had theorized what sort of environment she might be facing. They had tried their best to decipher her father’s notes. Remember, Iris is a respiratory system. The crystal sand particles were originally plant matter and are highly oxygenated. The climate is atypical to a desert biome. Strange hurricane rains are signature to Iris. Wildlife is rare.

All of a sudden in the dead of night, HIKER11 started to bounce. Varvara checked her weather monitors - no change. The copter tried to maintain speed, but some unseen obstructions deflected it from moving forward. She rationalized that the air density was increasing. Rising in elevation fixed the problem and steadied the copter. But Varvara could still hear turbulence from below. As well, what sounded like hail was being thrown at the copter. She couldn’t see anything in the dark. The unsettling noise and impact thankfully diminished after ten minutes, and a reassuring dawn cleared into the sky.

The sun rose. As the celestial object made its appearance, something shined back. The inflection was so bright that Varvara had to shield her eyes. That’s when she cast her gaze directly below. The first light flooded the land, revealing a ground made of blazing mineral. Varvara realized where she was.

Iris looked like a grove of treasure. Absolutely mesmerizing, she wanted to fixate on every single hexogrammic detail of sand. The dunes shifted from flax, saffron, and champagne. As HIKER11 traveled further, the sand became active. Gentle, exfoliating waves washed over the land.

Varvara approached a tall range of gray mountains that cut the horizon. As HIKER11 closed in to surmount the peaks, the sound of turbulence returned. The horizon line became smoggy, and the smog only condensed as she got closer. With the first hostile thrash of packed sand, Varvara’s stomach took a lurch and she steered towards the heavens.

In the clarity of the altitude, she saw what was waiting for her at the other side of the mountains— ginormous, booming tracts of whirling quicksand.

So much for that anti-war legislation. Each of the quicksand tracts could’ve eaten up a stadium, and there were about seven.

Varvara looked behind to the distance she had crossed earlier. In the daylight, the same apparitions of tornado-like rims appeared. Smaller tracts had been back there. The thought of having crossed them in dark almost knocked her out. Unbelievingly though, her adept body gripped consciousness. There was only one worthwhile thing to do. She shifted to the highest gear, and stomped on the accelerator. HIKER11 raced away as if from a nightmare.

She coursed at top speed for an hour, quickly using up fuel. Around noon, the accelerator locked. In an effort to break, HIKER11 lost elevation, and then speed. Sput-sput-sput.. the copter looked wearily at the view beyond its glass, then took a nosedive.

ELEVEN HOURS LATER

Do you know where you are, honey?

Varvara’s dehydrated daydreams were of what the future cities would like in Iris. She hobbled, wishing to grab the tip of the crescent moon for balance. Behind her, HIKER11’s tanks hissed, spewing its last levels of gas. An inky pool now surrounded it. When would the fire erupt? Would she be a bunch of embers next morning when the sun hit? Or would it happen tonight, because of an alignment with Uranus or Neptune that created some impossible heat vacuum? Varvara had to get away as far as possible.

When she’d managed to limp a distance of a hundred meters, the girl started to hear the sibilate humming of gas trying to erupt. Over her shoulder, the pool bubbled. Varvara jumped back as small flames sparked and died away, like weak fireworks. Why wasn’t it exploding?

To her left, the air had turned into a mirage for the sulfurous scent was traveling in that direction. Snap, snap! More piercingly bright sparks flew about without igniting. Varvara dropped to the ground as a few darted right at her, but was saved when a sudden surge of wind reeled the sparks over her and into the sky. An invisible protector. More and more sparks flew high. Then to her utter surprise, thunder clapped in the distance. Stormy winds brimmed far ahead— the West Wind!

If that’s that, then this way must be… Varvara looked back at the mirage. She got up and ran in its direction. She stopped at a ridge of dunes that were crumbling in sheets from the mirage’s streamlined air. With her last bit of strength, the girl climbed to the top.

On the other side, chromatic pasioflora fields stretched for a quarter mile. They were as tall and ordinary as corn stalks in the middle of a blue night. The pistils were open, absorbing the lethal elements in the gas. “My sweet sentinels,” Varvara breathed.

If it hadn’t been for the life-or-death circumstance, Varvara would have first noticed the quaint house that sat in the middle of the field. She wouldn’t have thought it a dream from the mirage. Nor would she have thought that the scrap metal reading “HIKER10” on the porch was a hallucination from the gas killing off her brain cells. But after all, it was the second party who was to be truly stunned.

When the graybeard man opened his door, he saw his daughter, laughing sunny before the desert’s show of fireworks. Her victory homecoming.

Varvara fainted, tumbling down the dunes into her father’s arms. She’d later say to Arpel, “I think we both found what we were looking for.” When the thunder and sparks died down, she felt the drop of her father’s tear on her skin. “Engulfed in the desert’s parched silence, I was nothing but another grain of sand in the wind.”

THE END

notes: AI-generated images created by the Magic Media app on Canva. Pictures of Iris from Stefano Gardel's "Neon Desert". Grandma's ballad from "Ghariba" (Strange) by Hanan. Main character inspired by Bi-2's song, "Varvara".