What the Water Remembers

We met in Le Guin’s study in Portland, though Portland is not what it was. The house is up in the West Hills, which is why it’s still standing. Below, where Burnside used to run, the streets are canals now — not the romantic Venetian kind but the brown, silted, mosquito-breeding kind. You can see them from the window behind her desk if you crane your neck past the Douglas firs, which she has not cut down despite the fact that they block most of the view. I think she prefers it that way. The drowning is implied rather than displayed.

Enriquez had come up from Buenos Aires, which is also not what it was, though she spoke about it with less elegy than I expected. She sat in the armchair closest to the door, legs crossed, a thermos of mate on the side table. She’d brought her own cup. The gesture was not rude but it was precise — she was not here to be hosted.

Le Guin was at her desk. She does not use the desk to write anymore; she writes in a notebook on her lap in the other room, the one with the reading chair. The desk is for conversations. It had papers on it, a small jade plant that looked like it had been alive for forty years, and a printed copy of the combination brief I’d sent them both. Enriquez’s copy was in her bag. I never saw her take it out.

“Two cities divided by a wall,” Le Guin said, before I’d finished setting up. She’d clearly been thinking about this already. “The obvious reference is Berlin. But walls are older than Berlin. Walls are one of the first things cities do. Uruk had walls. The question isn’t the wall. The question is what makes people think the wall is the answer.”

“In Buenos Aires the wall is the Riachuelo,” Enriquez said. “The little river between the city and Avellaneda. It is not a wall but it works as one. The people on one side do not go to the other side. They do not need a wall. They have the smell.”

“A river is better than a wall,” Le Guin said. “A wall is always someone’s decision. A river just is.”

“A river is someone’s decision too. Someone decided not to clean it. Someone decided which factories could empty into it.” Enriquez took a sip of mate. “In Argentina the wall is always economic. You don’t need concrete. You need indifference.”

I said I was interested in the seawall specifically — a literal engineered barrier between a drowned landscape and the community trying to hold the water back. The community on the wall side clinging to old hierarchies, old property law, old ideas about who belongs where. And on the other side, in the flood, people adapting. Building something strange.

“Strange how?” Le Guin asked. She does this — she asks the question you’re trying to avoid. I said I wasn’t sure yet. That I wanted the flood-side community to be genuinely alien in its social arrangements, not just a hippie commune with wet feet. Something that would make a reader from our world uncomfortable, not just impressed.

“Good,” she said. “Most utopian fiction fails because the alternative society is just the author’s politics with better weather. If your flood-side community doesn’t cost its members something real, something they’d rather not give up, then you haven’t built a society. You’ve built a recruitment brochure.”

“I don’t think it should be utopian at all,” Enriquez said. She said it flatly, without arguing-voice, just stating coordinates. “The people living in the flood are not building paradise. They are surviving. Survival makes people do ugly things and call them necessary. That is not the same as freedom.”

“Of course it’s not paradise,” Le Guin said. “Anarres wasn’t paradise. Shevek spends the entire novel being ground down by the very society he’s supposed to be defending. But the question is whether the grinding is structural or incidental. An anarchist society that grinds people down has a different kind of suffering than a propertarian one. The suffering tells you about the system.”

“The suffering tells you about the people,” Enriquez corrected. “The system is what they use to explain the suffering to themselves. I am interested in the girl in Buenos Aires who lives next to the villa and is terrified of it and also goes there to buy pills on Friday night. She has a system too. She has a whole explanation for why the people in the villa deserve what they have and she does not. But when her friend disappears, the system does not help her. The system is just what she tells herself while she is waiting.”

There was a pause. I could hear crows outside. The Douglas firs moved in wind that smelled, faintly, of low tide — the tide comes higher than it used to.

I asked about the dead. The premise includes the dead rising with the water. Not zombies, I said quickly. Not a horror mechanism. Something closer to what Enriquez does in her fiction — the dead as a social fact, as present as poverty, as unignorable and as routinely ignored.

“The dead are always a social fact,” Enriquez said. “In Argentina we know where thirty thousand of them are. We know who put them there. We walk over them on the way to buy bread. That is not horror. That is Tuesday. The horror is that it becomes Tuesday. That you can walk over thirty thousand dead people and think about bread.”

Le Guin leaned forward slightly. “But you do write horror. Your stories have ghosts, possessions, bodies that do wrong things. You use the genre.”

“I use the furniture of the genre. The ghosts, the things under the skin. But the engine is not fear. The engine is that nobody is surprised. A girl sees a ghost and nobody helps her because they have already decided she is crazy or poor or both, and those are the same thing. The ghost is real but the ghost is not the problem. The problem is that the ghost is not enough to make anyone pay attention.”

I said something about wanting the dead in our story to be literally present in the flooded areas — that the water brings them up, that the community living in the flood has to coexist with their dead in a way the walled community doesn’t, because the wall keeps the water out and the water is where the dead are. The wall keeps out the water and the dead and the strange new social arrangements all at once, because those three things have become the same thing.

“Now you’re being allegorical,” Le Guin said. Not a compliment.

“I know. I’m trying not to be.”

“Try harder. The dead should not stand for something. The dead should be dead people. Specific dead people. A woman’s mother. A child who drowned in the first flood and whose body came back seven years later, still small, and now sits in a chair in the kitchen. What does the community do with that child? Do they bury it again? Do they feed it? What happens to property law when the dead return and want their houses back?”

Enriquez laughed. It was the first time she’d laughed. “That is good. The dead wanting their houses back. In Buenos Aires the living already fight over houses. Imagine adding the dead to the queue.”

“I’m serious,” Le Guin said. “If you have a society where the dead return, you have to work out the social implications. Who counts as a citizen? Can the dead vote? Do they eat? If they eat, what are the resource implications? Does the flood-side community include the dead in their census? Does the walled side refuse to, and is that refusal part of what the wall is for?”

“You want to build the anthropology of it,” I said.

“I want you to build it. I want every social arrangement in both communities to be as specific as a tax code. Not because the reader needs to see the tax code but because you need to have written it. The iceberg. What’s below the water line — pun not intended but I’ll accept it.”

Enriquez was shaking her head, not in disagreement but in the way you shake your head when you can see where a conversation is going and want to drag it somewhere else. “The anthropology is fine. But if you build the system first and then put people in it, you get a diagram, not a story. I would rather start with one person. A woman on the flood side. What does she do all day? Does she patch a roof? Does she gut a fish? Does she have a lover who is dead and whose body she sleeps beside, and is that horrifying or is it just what she does, the way I go to the kitchen and make coffee?”

“It can be both,” I said.

“It cannot be both at the same time, in the same sentence. In one sentence it is her life and in the next sentence it is horrible and the reader has to live in that space between the two sentences. That is where the story is. Not in the system. In the gap.”

Le Guin took her glasses off and cleaned them on her shirt, which I think is what she does when she’s conceding a point. “Fine. Start with the woman. But the system has to be there. The reader should feel the system the way you feel weather — not described, just present, pressing on everything.”

“Agreed,” Enriquez said. “Weather is good. The system should be weather.”

I brought up the Ballard of it — The Drowned World, the way Ballard’s characters don’t resist the flood but drift toward it, psychologically, as if the drowned world is calling them back to some pre-human state. I asked whether our characters should feel that pull. Whether the flood is seductive.

“Ballard is a man who wants to return to the womb,” Enriquez said. “His drowned world is a dream. Nobody is hungry in Ballard’s flood. Nobody has a child with a fever they cannot bring down because the pharmacy is underwater. I respect the psychic landscape but I do not trust it. It is a rich man’s apocalypse.”

Le Guin smiled at that, which surprised me. “She’s right, partly. Ballard’s protagonist is an officer. He has resources. The drift toward the prehistoric is a luxury — you have to be able to afford to lose your mind. But the pull is real. There is something in the human animal that responds to the end of the built world. Not with joy, not exactly, but with recognition. A feeling of ah, yes, this is what was always under the pavement.”

“That feeling is real,” Enriquez said, “but it is a feeling for people who had pavement. The people in the villa never had pavement. For them the flood is not a return to something primal. It is just more of the same. More water in the house, like there was always water in the house. The tap leaking, the rain through the roof, and now this.”

I felt the story forming in the gap between them. Le Guin’s character would feel the pull — would feel something opening in the psyche as the old world sinks. Enriquez’s character would be too busy surviving to notice, and the fact that she doesn’t notice would be its own kind of tragedy, or maybe its own kind of strength. I said so.

“Don’t decide yet whether it’s tragedy or strength,” Le Guin said. “Let the story decide. If you decide in advance, you’ll write toward your conclusion instead of your character.”

“The seawall,” Enriquez said. She’d been quiet for a moment, looking out the window at the gap between the Douglas firs where you could almost see the brown water. “I keep thinking about what it looks like from the top. Standing on the wall and looking one direction — the old city, drained, patched, everyone pretending the world didn’t end. And looking the other direction — the water, the houses with their second floors sticking up, the boats, the dead sitting on porches. Two paintings. And you’re standing on the frame.”

“Who stands on the wall?” I asked.

“Someone who has to choose,” Le Guin said.

“Someone who already chose and is looking back,” Enriquez said.

They looked at each other.

“Both of those are the same story,” I said.

“They are not the same story at all,” they said, almost in unison, and then Le Guin laughed and Enriquez smiled and neither of them explained why they were wrong or right, and I understood that the disagreement was the story, that the seawall itself was the disagreement made concrete, and that I would have to write both versions simultaneously — the story of someone choosing and the story of someone looking back at the choice already made — and that these would need to be the same character, somehow, standing on the same wall, and that I did not yet know how to do it.

“One more thing,” Enriquez said. She was packing up her thermos, screwing the cap on with the deliberateness of someone who has packed up in many rooms. “The dead. You said they are not zombies. Fine. But you should know what they want. Not symbolically. Actually. When the dead woman sits in the kitchen chair, what does she want? If you say she wants justice or remembrance or to be acknowledged, I will get on a plane and go home.”

“What should she want?”

“Something small. Something ordinary. She wants to see whether the avocado tree she planted ever fruited. She wants to know if her daughter passed the exam. She wants to complain about the noise. The dead should want what the living want, which is not meaning. It is just the next ordinary thing.”

Le Guin was watching her from the desk. “That’s very good,” she said. “I disagree with almost everything you’ve said today, and that’s very good.”

“Good,” Enriquez said. “If you agreed with me I would know I was wrong.”

I walked Enriquez out to the front porch. The air smelled like salt and something rotting, which was either the tidal flats or the composting bin. Below us the city was half-visible through the trees, the old bridges spanning water that had no intention of receding. Somewhere a boat motor coughed and caught. Someone on the flood side, going somewhere, doing the next ordinary thing.

I went back inside. Le Guin had already returned to her reading chair with her notebook. She did not look up. I gathered my things and let myself out, and on the drive back down the hill I passed the high-water mark — you can tell by the staining on the concrete, a brown line like a bathtub ring around the city — and below it everything was different, and above it everything pretended it was the same, and I thought about the woman on the wall, looking both directions, and I still did not know which direction she was facing.