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Bedlam, 1915

The bucket sloshed and spilled onto Ivy’s skirt as she carried it through the garden. Setting it down, she tapped on Raphael’s shoulder and began to sign to him.

‘Here, I brought you this.’

He nodded and made the sign for thank you, using the bucket to fill Merrick’s old watering can. It had been decades since Raphael had been able to use his voice, but by that time Ivy and her family already had developed a language she could speak with her hands, and plenty of the townspeople had picked up on it to varying degrees of fluency. Raphael was glad to have a faster way to communicate than knots, and as was his way, seemed to become fluent in about three days, much to the annoyance of Merrick who had put vast amounts of effort over several years into the process. Between them they had adapted it for markayuq eyes, making gestures larger and using whole hands instead of fingers so that he could easily see the movements even with failing sight.

She’d never met anyone quite as stubbornly committed to anything he started as Merrick Tremayne. Her first memory of him was as a little girl, five or six years old and desperate to learn everything there was to know about anything, all at once. She’d seen him making sketches of the plants around Bedlam and insistently joined in, following him around with a pencil and an old notebook until he offered to teach her. Without a single language in common, drawing lessons were how they got to know each other, Merrick showing her which lines to begin with and which features to take note of, Ivy bringing him her finished drawings to see him smile from ear to ear at them.

He’d returned to Bedlam again when she was an older child to find that she hadn’t stopped practising, and the Huamans’ walls were covered in drawings. The first word he learnt to say in Ivy’s language was ‘well done’. When she was a teenager, he stayed in Bedlam longer and learnt the language properly along with Quechua, taught by an impatient but lively Inti. She could see his terrible pronunciation just through reading his lips and laughed, but if anything could stop Merrick finishing what he began, looking like an idiot was far from it. By the time he returned to Bedlam for the fourth time, accompanied by Raphael, she was able to draw even better than he could teach her to, and he brought her proper paints all the way from Lima with which she grew proficient easily.

She had a son, Luis, a few years after Merrick settled in Bedlam for good. He proved to have a green thumb, though whether that was innate talent or a product of growing up in proximity to a Tremayne wasn’t clear. He used to help Merrick in his garden, plenty of the town did, especially in the summer and autumn when anything that could be eaten needed harvesting. Of course Merrick never kept the food for himself, or if he did it was only to cook with the produce and then feed whoever needed feeding. Since he was gone, nobody but Raphael had dared to touch the garden. It seemed like a sacred place now, and they were still in mourning.

Plants, however, wait for no man, nor markayuq, and need to be cared for whether their gardeners are in mourning or not. It was good, Ivy thought, for Raphael to have something to do. He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t cry and he avoided communicating as best he could. They had buried Merrick in the garden and since that day Raphael hadn’t gone inside again, only drifting amongst the plants and trees that surrounded Merrick’s grave.

He turned from the bucket to water a wisteria plant which had grown steadily up the south wall of the house, ten thousand miles from its native home but well cared for by a man with a near-magical ability to grow anything he wanted happily. Even now, Peruvian lilies bloomed next to his gravestone.

Ivy walked back into Raphael’s sightline so he couldn’t ignore her.

‘Do you need anything else?’

He shook his head. She hesitated a moment, before continuing to sign.

‘The garden looks beautiful this summer. He’d be proud of how well you’re keeping it.’

Raphael looked right past her, seeming to be concentrating hard on the purple flowers behind her elbow. After a long moment his gaze dropped to the ground. Ivy gave a weak smile, and squeezed his shoulder as she walked past. She didn’t know how to comfort a grieving markayuq, or if it was possible at all. She only hoped that the garden did.

Bedlam, 2019

Aquila unwound the hosepipe from the tree branch where it lived. He had woken up to find all sorts of wonderful inventions - he was particularly fond of the radio and audiobooks, and slightly disappointed that he no longer had any use for a toilet - but this was the only modern commodity for which Raphael cared. Over a century of faithfully tending the garden was clearly taking its toll on him. Although Raphael hadn’t left the small area of plants in all the years since Aquila awoke, just moving from one end of the garden to the other was far more movement than markayuq usually did on a regular basis. His hands shook more than stone should be able to and his joints were stiff.

There were only two of them now, who remembered him. Aquila felt sorry to have left him, not just to mourn but then to watch as the number of people who had known Merrick grew lower and lower, until Raphael was completely alone in his grief. He understood well what grief meant to a markayuq. In the same way that they learnt languages, gathering knowledge carved into stone at the first mention and never forgetting, never lessening, they held sadness just as permanently. Aquila had seen other markayuq sitting by graves, still and unresponding, and though the others were older than Raphael, he was glad to see that he was still up and about. Though it might be impossible for Raphael to feel his loss any less sharply than he did on the day Merrick died, at least he could distract himself with this. The garden prospered, beautiful even in the winter. Merrick would have loved it.

Aquila wasn’t quite sure what having a father was like, but he imagined caring for Raphael wasn’t dissimilar. It hurt to see the man he’d looked up to for so long struggle through the motions of gardening, growing fractionally more difficult every day that he did so. Raphael could no longer hold anything delicate or move with much precision, so pruning or planting seeds were out of the question. Aquila did this for him, and had begun to recruit anyone who wanted to to help pick fruit and vegetables in the autumn. He didn’t have to help. But Raphael didn’t have to keep the garden at all, not by any laws or customs, yet that didn’t stop him. The importance of it was more than clear, and Aquila couldn’t bear to watch him work alone, nor to watch the garden die off as Raphael began to get older. So they watered together.

The hosepipe was a gift from one of the local farmers, who had seen the garden and was surprised that nobody had thought of it before. They’d had to put a tap into the garden, the house was long ruined and even if Raphael would have gone inside, the plumbing would never have survived so many winters with no humans to keep warm. Instead, he remained outdoors and cared for the plants in the way he still could.

The priest these days was called Alejandro, and he wasn’t afraid to tell off Raphael when he had to. He came every week to wax the leathers and knot cord, and was in a state of constant exasperation at the water and dirt that got on Raphael’s clothes. The knots hanging off of Raphael’s wrist sounded angry. Noticing that Aquila was nosily staring at the cord, though it was impossible for him to read it without touching, Raphael reached his hand out to Aquila’s and started tying knots of his own.

- He told me to stop again.

Aquila remembered how fast and perfectly Raphael had been able to tie the cord when he was human, flicking it through his fingers faster than Aquila had ever been able to manage. It took ten times as long at least now. They stood, waiting for what could have been minutes, could have been hours, Aquila’s sense of time was fluid and impossible to track. When Raphael finished a sentence, the sky was darker. Aquila replied.

- He’s right. You need to rest.

- I can’t.

- I know. You can let us help. We won’t let it die.

- I know.

So they continued, the watering done. Aquila cut the older flowers off of a beautiful pink bush, metres wide and tall. He didn’t know the name, but remembered Merrick planting it, full of excitement that the tiny cutting had survived all the way from Japan and eager to see how long it would live for here. He wished Merrick could have seen it now. Raphael stood still, head bent down to look towards the gravestone. It was covered in tiny red berries that had dropped from the tree above it, casting the grave into shade. Aquila gently brushed them aside and placed the flowers where they rested. In the shade and the evening light his vision was almost gone, but he thought he might have seen Raphael smile.

Bedlam, 2114

‘Tomas! Come look at this!’

‘What is it now, I’m busy. Dad told me to pick the maracuya before he got home.’

‘Just come and look!’

Tomas sighed loudly at his little sister. It was unfair, he thought, to have to look after her when all she did was get in the way and make everything she touched stickier than it had been before. He was trying to do important work here, he was old enough to be trusted with the garden, and she was just trying to slow him down by- oh. Wait.

‘That’s a really big caterpillar.’

‘And it’s orange! And it’s SO fluffy! I’m going to keep it, Tomas!’

‘I’m not sure you should pick that up, it might not be safe. Oh. Okay. Be gentle with it, then.’

Bea had grabbed the caterpillar right off the tree into her little fist. From plenty of experience, Tomas knew that just because her hands were tiny and belonged to a five-year-old didn’t mean that they weren’t perfectly capable of hurting you.

‘Look, you can’t keep it anyway. Don’t you know what happens to caterpillars?’

‘What?’

‘It’ll go to sleep soon, and when it wakes up it will have turned into a butterfly. And you won’t be able to keep it then, because it’ll fly away from you.’

‘What if I keep it inside so it can’t escape?’

‘That’s cruel. It won’t like you if you keep it inside, it needs to be out here with the flowers. You don’t want it to be sad, do you?’

Bea shook her head, and Tomas felt relieved that he wouldn’t have to share his house with a large, orange insect. Not that he would have minded, of course. It was for the caterpillar’s own good.

‘Put it down again and help me- no! Not there!’

Tomas knocked his sister’s hand out of the way just as she was about to deposit the wriggling insect onto the markayuq under the tree.

‘Ow! Why not?’

‘Bea, that’s Saint Raphael, you can’t just put caterpillars on his head. He might not like it.’

‘I don’t think he minds, he didn’t stop me.’

‘Of course he didn’t, he doesn’t move anyway. That doesn’t mean he’s a plant, you can’t just go around letting things crawl all over him.’

‘Why doesn’t he move?’

‘Look, how would I know. He just sits there. Maybe he doesn’t want to move. I think you should probably say sorry to him.’

She frowned. ‘Sorry, Saint Raphael.’

‘Good. Now can you sit still while I finish picking the fruit if you’re not going to help?’

The second he finished the sentence, Tomas regretted saying it. Telling Bea ‘sit still’ were the magic words to summon a never-ending hurricane of small girl to fly in circles around you while destroying everything in its path. True to form, he glanced away for a single second and when he looked back, she was bent over by a gravestone, hands and pockets somehow full of dirt.

‘What does this say?’

‘Put the dirt back down- no, don’t lick your fingers, stop it! Alright, I thought you could read. You don’t need me to read it to you.’

‘I’m good at reading.’

‘Go on then. Tell me.’

Bea traced a muddy finger over the top line of letters engraved in the stone, sounding them out.

‘M, E, R, R again, I, C, K. That’s not spelt right. Mrs Flores told me that the letter C always has an H after it.’

‘That’s because you’re learning to read in Quechua. That’s not a Quechua name.’

‘How do you say it then?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s like Spanish. Keep going, I know you can read more of it.’

‘T. R again. E, M, A, Y, N, E. Tomas, I read all of the letters!’

‘Hey, well done. You can tell dad you don’t need to go to school any more.’

‘I don’t, I know everything. I can help here all the time instead.’

‘You’re not old enough just yet. I can teach you to plant the seeds with me next spring if you want. You’ll be six then. Grandma taught me when I was six.’

‘Yes! I’m going to plant seeds right here!’ Bea produced more soil from her trouser pockets and made a little mound of it on the ground by her feet.

‘You’re making it look messy. We’re supposed to keep the garden nice. Everything stays where it is.’

‘Why?’

‘We have to keep everything where Saint Raphael put it. Grandma told me this used to be his garden, when she was a little girl.’

‘Why doesn’t he help any more then?’

‘Remember how Grandma couldn’t move much, when she was very old? So me and dad had to do the housework for her? I think Saint Raphael got old too.’

‘So we have to do the gardening for him.’ Bea seemed to understand, for which Tomas was glad. She was too young to remember much of their grandmother before she was housebound, and all Bea’s memories of her would have been of an old woman who only ever moved from her bed to her chair and back again. Tomas remembered her before she got ill, when he was small and she would show him how to care for the plants, planting vegetables and new flowers every year and looking after the trees and bushes. Her favourite was a huge bush that grew pink flowers in winter, apparently even older than she was. She liked how it kept the garden bright all year round.

Looking up at the bush in question, Tomas quietly promised her that he’d keep her flowers alive for as long as he lived, too. He hoped she would have been proud of him.

Bedlam, 2221

Cualli lifted the last box into her car, groaning at the exertion. Her son should have been here by now, but instead he got called into work for something apparently unavoidable, and she was left to do all the final work of moving on her own. At least it was finished now. He’d called to say he would be in Bedlam in an hour or so, so she had time to pass while she waited. That wasn’t unusual. As one of three full-time residents of the town, there wasn’t a lot to keep her occupied other than waiting for her children to visit, an occurrence which had been getting less and less frequent over the years. Honestly, she wasn’t sure why she had stayed so long after Ines died. Inertia? Nostalgia? If that was the answer, she couldn’t say for what.

Lifting her cane, she began the short walk down the road. One final lap of the town, then. To say goodbye. Every other house but one was empty, and with nobody to care for them the harsh weather had got to all the buildings, missing windows, parts of rooves or doors. When it was windy she could hear the air whistling through the unsealed rooms with high pitched creaks and odd rattles. Even when she grew up the town was tiny, but every house on this street at least was occupied, children playing between them often when the weather was warm.

They’d taught her, in school, that the town was established to mine salt. Cualli supposed that that was what her ancestors must have done, working in the mines. There was no salt in Bedlam any longer. There hadn’t been for generations, and the mines themselves were long covered over and torn down for safety, jungle spreading over where mineshafts used to be. Her parents and grandparents all worked on the farm nearby, retiring when all the farms became fully automated. That was it then, for Bedlam. With no jobs, no transport connections and a climate that might freeze you solid or set you on fire depending on where you stood, nobody could find a reason to stay in this strange little town on the edge of the jungle.

Without anybody to look after them, nor anybody to protect, the markayuq didn’t want to stay any more than Cualli’s children had. Officially, the townspeople had removed the statues from their public locations for an indefinite period of repair. That was only what they’d had to tell the council - the few remaining inhabitants of Bedlam had known the truth. One by one, they had walked into the forest and hadn’t come back. There was only a single exception.

He sat, as he always had, in the garden. She rounded the corner into the patch of greenery. There, half engulfed by a huge bush, easily the largest there, was the markayuq. Branches had grown around his shoulder and arm, dropping petals onto his lap where he knelt. Cualli pushed the lower section of the bush out of the way with her cane, revealing a worn-down and crumbling grave where the markayuq would have been looking if his eyes were ever open. She didn’t need to bend down to know that it said nothing.

‘Well, I suppose I’m off then.’

She doubted that the markayuq could listen, let alone understand, but despite the awkwardness of talking to herself in an empty garden it felt wrong to leave him without saying goodbye.

‘Diego got a good job out in Cusco, he’s got me a house right near where he lives so he won’t have to make the journey to visit all the time. It’ll be good to be able to see him often - honestly I’m not sure how much time I’ve got left, I’m lucky to be in good health now, and I don’t want to spend it all out here on my own. Him and Rosa are even trying for a baby, so… you must understand. That’s why. I’m sorry.’

Unsure what else to do or say, Cualli twisted one of the bright pink flowers off of the top of the bush and placed it gently into the markayuq’s leather shirt.

‘There you go. You’re lucky, you know. I know you can’t see it, but the plants are beautiful here. If I had to pick one spot to stay in forever, this might well be it.’

Her earpiece buzzed urgently.

‘That’ll be him. You take care, now. Goodbye.’

Squeezing his shoulder as she went, she turned away and made her way back out to the road, feeling terribly guilty for leaving the markayuq and simultaneously relieved to have got the worst part of leaving over with. She had once been told his name, she was sure, but in old age it was difficult to recall these things.

Her son was waiting by her front door. He’d walked from the final stop on the bus route, so that he could drive her car to Cusco for her. Cualli’s sight wasn’t quite up to driving long distances any more. She greeted him with a hug.

‘Hi Mum.’ He grinned at her. ‘How are you doing?’

‘Oh, I’m just fine. Thanks for coming. Did you get here alright?’

‘No problem at all.’

‘Diego, you know the markayuq in the garden? The one who never left? What’s his name?’

‘Him? I’ve no idea.’

‘Oh, try and remember, you must know.’

‘I don’t. You never said, how would I? Have you got all your things?’

‘They’re in the car.’

‘Good. Let’s go.’

Bedlam, 2315

Puno Regional Government
Surveyor’s report
Itztli Patiño Alvarez
03/09/15

The town of New Bethlehem, Sandia Province, was last recorded to be inhabited in the year 2221, having retained a population of only three for the preceding fifteen years. Having gone abandoned during and after the 2240 Peruvian civil war, little is now known about the state of the town. This report is intended for the attention of the Puno Regional Government in order to ascertain the following:

a. Whether or not action needs to be taken regarding the dilapidated state of the buildings remaining in the town, whether they pose a danger to human or animal life or if they could be restored for potential future habitation or other use.

b. Whether the site, notable for its biodiversity as part of the Tropical Andes ecoregion, may be of interest to scientific explorations or agricultural operations, i.e. arable land which does not form part of the established rainforest.

c. Whether the site is of archeological or historical interest.

It is clear from a brief first inspection that none of the buildings in New Bethlehem are remotely fit for human habitation. All the buildings are in a ruined state, having been exposed to extreme weather for the best part of the twenty-third century. There appears to be the stone foundations of a church or some other religious site at the edge of the town, but three walls are completely missing and only the lower parts of the other walls remain, as well as the bases of a series of pillars. It is possible that this may be of interest to archeologists though there are alternative examples of similar structures from the same time period already known, due to a series of polyhedral stones remaining at the base of one wall which appear to be carved to fit the bedrock. This excepted, it should be recommended that the current buildings in New Bethlehem should be demolished if any new structures are to be built here.

The only other item which may be of historical interest found in New Bethlehem is a statue which remains in marginally better condition than the surrounding stone buildings. It appears to have been dressed in leather clothes, as other statues in this area have commonly recorded to have been, though these are in a very deteriorated state and clearly rotting in large areas. The statue itself is worn and chipped in places and has largely been obscured by climbing vines and other weeds. It should be recommended that the regional government hands over responsibility for this object to an appropriate historical/curatorial organisation.

Though the surrounding rainforest is already protected under the International Biodiversity Preservation Act of 2303, the town itself contains no plant species which come under special protections, however it is suspected that several of the species of weed growing amongst the buildings of New Bethlehem are classified as invasive species in Peru and should be removed without delay as they are in close proximity to the rainforest and could pose a danger to already threatened species there. Given the uncommonly shallow soil depth and the non-porous bedrock on which the town is built, it would be near impossible to use the land for arable farming due to the difficulty of installing a working irrigation system in such an environment.

In conclusion, there are two points in New Bethlehem which may be of historical interest, namely the ruined church and statue, as well as an immediate need for further research into the possibly invasive species growing in the town and probable removal of these. Aside from these actions, there is no obvious reason to invest in the redevelopment of New Bethlehem and it should be suggested that the town may be left unused as there would be little benefit to the Puno region if any significant amount of the regional budget were to be allocated to the town.

End report