The app insists that I am not my thoughts. The app does not know I am a professor of religion—the Irving Chair of Critical Salvation Studies. The app has never asked. The app says the goal of meditation is not to stop thinking; the goal is to discern without judgement, to bear witness to the monkey circus, to provide a portable paradise in the mind. The app does not suspect I am using it to develop a future course on mindfulness and commodified spirituality. The app calculates sixty thousand thoughts per day, roughly ten per second. Thought. Mind. Eco. Oikos. Home. Salvation. Dam. Death. Child. Face.

The app, I must repeatedly remind myself, does not know how I came to this sleepy city of rivers and hills, a town where people brag about the farmers’ market, the mafia of microbreweries, the Bill Thorpe Walking Bridge. A city with streets named Secretary Lane and Colonial Heights Drive, where the students have scarred a whole street with couch burnings, where they hire women to ride naked on horseback across the campus, name their bottle depot the Redemption Centre. People laugh about the FOFF—Fine Old Fredericton Folk, grow sombre when we mention the Loyalists and their slaves, the damming of the river, the Shubenacadie residential school. On the phone, the girls crawling all over her, competing to push the red button, Marina tells her mother that the only industry is forestry and they’ve cut all the forests down.

The app does not know I am a lapsed Mennonite, does not care about my SSHRC-funded research on Pan, the sexually frustrated Arcadian goat-god whose stun-gun superpower, panolepsy, provides our modern notion of “panic.” The app is not aware that  Marina and our two toddlers and I came from another place, a long-ago exploded city, a town of citadels and sea. We came, like everyone else I know, for the red-brick university, perched imperial on the hill. Soon, we noticed that the stars are brighter at night, and that people apologize differently. Back in the exploded city, they said “saw-ree.” Here they say “sore-y,” as if the apology held some small affliction—as if the word were wound. 

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My neighbour/colleague, a biology professor named Hope, knocks and asks if we would come over for a lobster dinner Friday night. At the same time, she hands me a pamphlet: stop the keswick ridge funeral home. “There’s going to be a crematorium,” she says. “They’re going to burn bodies.” Hope is a squinter; any light seems to afflict her. Even here, in the shade of the doorway on a grey November day, she raises her cheeks, her mouth slightly open, as if the sun were a lurking predator. She explains how it’s unsightly, the smoke in the skies. And there may be smells. I stand looking at the pamphlet and thinking about the name of my new hamlet. “The Ridge,” or “God’s Country” as the locals call it, known for bucolic scenery and apple harvesting. Hope explains that it’s a tradition, she always has new neighbours and colleagues over for lobster. There is a test in her gaze. Behind her, in the distance, I see the headpond and the bridge, the deep fortress of the dam scoured in the rock below.

“What about the dead?”

She squints, holds up a visored palm. “What about them?”

“Where else would they go?” 

“Friday,” she says. “Settled.”

The Mactaquac Generating Station is a run of the river hydro facility with an installed generation capacity of 660 MW, a hydraulic head of 31.7 metres, and a spillway capacity of 16,282.18679 m³. The facility’s six turbines provide 670 megawatts and supply close to 20 percent of New Brunswick with clean, low-cost power. Beginning in the 1980s, concrete sections of the hydro station have begun to bloat and crumble due to a chemical reaction called alkali-aggregate reaction, requiring regular maintenance and repairs. The headpond, also known as Lake Mactaquac, covers an area of 87 km² and reaches upstream for 96 kilometres. The Mactaquac Life Achievement Project aims to find solutions so the dam can serve the community through 2068, reaching its intended lifespan of 100 years.

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In my class on Environment and Eschatology, my eight tired students talk about ways to save the planet. We read Robin Wall Kimmerer, Winona LaDuke, William Cronon. I ask my students about their relationship to the land. They argue that Adam and Eve had extractivist mentalities, that English is septic with nouns.

I tell them yes, absolutely, brilliant! I pivot to the dam, consult the website, discuss the refurbishment, the Wolastoqey title claim and NB Power squirming out of their terms. I show a video of a Wolastoqey Elder speaking about the creation story, Glooscap defeating the monstrous frog, which is how the river and its tributaries formed in the shape of a tree and branches. The Elder then describes a study that uses biogeography databases to show a debris dam near Grand Falls in the late glacial period, about 8,000 years ago. I tell them that two thirds of the world’s rivers are dammed and isn’t the sonic coincidence striking? Larry is puzzled: “Sonic coincidence?”

The students stare back, glazed. I have lost them. Something puzzling trickles through me. A strange feeling rises in my throat. A kind of vibration. The walls go blurry, liquid.

Autumn, the girl in fuzzy tie-dyed alpaca, saves me: “As in dammed, damned. Like a homonym?”

Larry, a student in white New Balances, says we should destroy the dam, save the river. “Save,” I repeat, with gravitas. “And so we move from damnation to salvation. See you Wednesday.”

Trying to sleep in the new city, I often feel like I am drowning. I feel my heart, swollen and frantic. I sit up in bed and stare out the window. It’s not real, what I see out there. Some trick of the water, the light. Some flinch of the heart. But it seems totally clear: the dam is trembling, quivering, as if it were a creature trying to shake its fleas.  

L arry comes to visit during my office hours. Larry’s T-shirt reads, “There is no Planet B.” Once they told me about their aspirations to be a death doula. They want to write their paper on sustainability and end of life. They do not say “death.” Once I told Larry they are a bright mind, a future leader. “What future?” they said.

Today they tell me about the sea lamprey. An offhand comment brought it to mind, and they thought I’d find it interesting. The lamprey, sometimes called an eel, are coming up the Wolastoq in massive numbers to spawn. Snake-like parasitic fish moving upriver in New Brunswick and people call them vampires because they attach their suckers to other fish and feed on their blood. Larry says the lamprey’s mouth is a saucer-sized oral sucking disc filled with sharp, hooked teeth, a razor-sharp tongue at the core of it. I ask them what’s the metaphor, in terms of environment or eschatology.

Larry winces. “Does there need to be a metaphor?”

I sort the emails into folders called “Doom” and “Gloom.” Events, talks, promotions, research, funding, teaching, students, nagging excuses, library, accessibility, departmental matters, pedagogy, PD, promotion and tenure. The app tells me to take a mindfulness minute before meetings. We are striking a subcommittee to address contract faculty and precarious academic labour. The Provost mourns the passing of Dr. Boris Radulov, a colleague from Anthropology, who leaves behind a wife and two sons following a courageous year-long battle with an aggressive form of cancer. I stand on my standing pad, in my running shoes, staring at the screen gone blur, thinking of Boris’s bald spot, his neck rolls, his campaign against the 3:3 teaching load, his chin scrunched up at faculty meetings, his small feet and big laugh. I think of mourning, of passing, of his poor children. And yet the feeling is unmistakable, crawling through the murk of pity and compassion—a froth of guilt and envy and relief.  

As I drive home across the dam, there’s a feeling underneath the car. Or in my body? A kind of quiver. A tilt in the light and my jaw goes strange and I feel as if I’m underwater. Gravity eases and the air goes gelatin and I worry that the car might float into the blue.

At home, I find the girls in the garden with shovels, flinging gravel and sand. “We’re diggers.” They gleam, scratching their bums. I chuckle, not telling them that the Diggers are a seventeenth-century agrarian Calvinist sect. Emerson says the worms have been speaking to her. I ask what the worms said and Mona tells me they’re sorry but it’s not their fault.

I glance at Marina like bless their toddler hearts. We do dinner and laundry and when I caress Marina’s neck-shoulder swoop she starts to hum “Rhythm of the Night,” which is code for having her period. SpongeBob SquarePants is obtusely guarding the secret formula of the Krabby Patties. Soon the girls are running around in pyjamas, singing “ring around the rosie, popsicle-a-cozy.” I read Jack and the Beanstalk and a picture book version of Frozen 2. They squirm and scratch their bums too much, complain about an itch. I give them a placebo cream and they flutter into sweet twitchless sleep. Once, I cried folding their laundry. I was holding a pair of JoJo Siwa pyjamas and a pair of Paw Patrol pyjamas and I did not know which belonged to whom.

Marina and I sit out beside the willow, the dam twinkling from the valley below. Each night, the lights gleam in the dark water of the headpond, a perpetual liquid Christmas. I tell her about the lobster dinner and she shrugs like sure. The familiar friction sits between us: I have dragged her here for the university, hauled her from her family and the city by the sea. And me, am I even happy? Here at the university, wearing my golden handcuffs as I preach the business of salvation at a university funded by forestry moguls?

In the winter it was easier; I had a favourable teaching schedule, drove four hours between cities to be home four days a week. Marina says she’s worried about me. She thinks I may be overworked, stressed. I stare at the willow, which I’ve nicknamed Pan. There are no willows in the exploded city. I’ve read about their voluminous roots, how they spread, wide and circular, nearly twice the size of the tree itself, colonizing the garden. I watch the lights slip and slur on the headpond and think down, toward the dam, the embankment and the long drop of the spillway where the water rests, whirled and stunned, and tell Marina about the endless emails, the course website acrobatics, the meeting minutes and the Level 2, the Arts Council and the Provost’s Strategic Plan, the curriculum committee and the grad committee and the EDI committee. I tell her about my service teaching and the Eschatology Class, how the students are basically Calvinists, how they believe themselves fundamentally depraved, clamouring for some clarity, tirelessly sanctimonious, longing for direction in their search for The Good. I tell her I just don’t know how to reach them. Is it them? Is it me? Am I so out of touch? Marina asks if I even like them and I say that’s just it, that’s the horror of it, I am febrile with love for them, I love them like my own children.

The app would never suspect that I lost my faith long ago, have been trying half my life to find something to replace it. The app is not aware that my father was a hungry Mennonite, a man who changed his name from Johann to John and left the canola farm and the Brethren Church because he was far too ravenous to stay in W., Saskatchewan. The app does not traffic in irony, abides no nuance. The app says I am not my thoughts, does not address feelings, does not concede that my thoughts are my sustenance, my vocation. The app tells me happiness is my birthright. The app theorizes smiling—how a real smile starts with the mouth and works up to the eyes, changes the hormones inside the person who is smiling. Even a fake smile can do this, trick itself into a real smile. The app does not concede that a god can be dammed, that spillway might strangle an eel. The app tells about studies where a person holds a pencil between their teeth and even this changes their mood, releasing dopamine. The app is a glutton for dopamine, always crafty for a hit.

I drive to work across the dam, stare into the headpond. I used to be an activist. I once lived in a tent in a park on Bay Street for a whole summer, eating hardly cooked potatoes dipped in tomato sauce. I stood, trembling, in front of bulldozers. Now I sign online petitions. Marina says it’s fine, it’s normal, once you reproduce, to want more comfort and security, to worry more about yourself. To realize there are things you can’t change, things beyond your control. Teaching, I have convinced myself, is still the good work. Asking the tough questions. Raising consciousness.

On one side, toward Mactaquac Provincial Park, the river looks like a lake. It appears perfectly calm, but there are signs posted, warning not to swim, referring to the fast current that will drag everything in the water down through the intake, on through the penstock toward the turbines. On the other side it drops off 55 metres. That’s where the deterioration is, the alkali-aggregate reaction, the locally sourced greywacke slowly gnawing away at itself.

Upon arriving in this province, I learned that my family on my mother’s side had settled close to here, in Kingsclear, on the other side of the dam. This was hundreds of years ago, before these Welsh settlers travelled to Ontario, then called Canada West. They were farmers, though I don’t know what crop. These ancestors, three generations of them, were all buried in a small graveyard that is now covered by the headpond. When the dam was built in 1968, the government saved a few buildings from the flooded town to make a pioneer village, but they didn’t exhume the bodies in the graveyard. Someday, when they decommission the dam or neglect it back to itself, the bodies of my ancestors will rise up, floating, in the ghost of a river risen again. 

I bump into Hope in the hallway. Behind her, the cleaner pushes her cart past the posters for summer trips to Europe, for courses in classical languages, talks on defunding the police. Hope squints against the fluorescent light and tells me about her research on the toxic blooming algae, Heterosigma akashiwo (Raphidophyceae). Hope says she loves eating lobster but it makes her a bit squeamish, the cooking and that. Would I—might I perhaps be able to buy them?

In class, we discuss the word “salvation,” how it contains the sense of “save” but also the sound of “salve.” I remind them about last class, about Genesis, ask if there’s anything at all we might repurpose from Adam and Eve, from Noah’s flood? Anything beautiful there? What debts do we owe to this vision of salvation?

They drop their eyes, pick their teeth.

I shift to Twitter wars and Facebook slacktivism, Musk’s space-opera redemptionism, internet eco-metaphorics—thirst and feed, spam and fire and dank memes, the viral and the dreaded inbox flood. I ask what apps they use and they tell me Insta is just a shopping app, Facebook is where you talk to your grandma. I express fear of Snapchat and they tell me don’t worry, it’s not a cult. We talk about greenwashing, about Greta, about martyrdom. We look at the slides, talk iconography—Shakira, Snoop Dogg, Julia Butterfly Hill, all of them self-fashioned saviours.

I mention the corporate university, how their professors are radicals in minivans, how easy it is to sing revolution from the City on a Hill. I tell them how every single professor at this university is a hypocrite, is committed primarily to their own ease. How all the preaching and ideas become meaningless. How my most radical colleagues take annual trips to Costa Rica and do not discuss them openly. How at a faculty gathering a white settler dean who built a career on decolonial methodologies loudly lamented the price of campus parking passes and explained that his new home would need five bedrooms, three bathrooms; meanwhile half these courses—I wave an arm in the air—are taught by the “precariat,” a stream of hyper-educated super-talented people without benefits or job security.

Larry raises their hand. “Is this about, like, the university as a new sort of moral-religious institution, similar to the corruption of the Christian church?”

“Yes,” I snap. “Absolutely! Brilliant. But also”—I realize this as I’m saying it—“I’m talking about myself. Not that I’m the three-bathroom dean—but that I, too, am compromised. A hypocrite, ideals waning into coziness.” I pause, swallow with difficulty. “This is my greatest fear.”

They stare back, blinking. A wall has been broken. They regard me—Larry, Autumn, and the rest. They are not sure what to do. It is not fair what I’ve done. My throat constricts again. Colours swim through my head. I begin to feel like I’m floating underwater. Vertigo, I tell myself. I tell the students, “Great work, see you Friday.” 

At home I watch Frozen 2 with the girls, their favourite. What sticks with me, strangely, is not the crumbling dam, Elsa riding down triumphant on a magic purple spirit-horse to stop the flooding of Arendelle, but the wisdom of Olaf the comical snowman: “Water has memory.”       

The girls, particularly Emerson, scratch and scratch their bums. They scratch through the movie, through dinner, through hair-brushing and tooth-brushing and, finally, sleep. As we sit out with Pan, Marina googles symptoms on her phone, asks me if we should be concerned. I complain about my students, how they’re totally brilliant but I feel so distant from them, so far removed. Like they can actually make change but I’m already lost. Like the more people pay you for talk about environmental disaster, the less it means. How strange it is to stand on the other side of the podium, wanting to feel what they feel, wanting to be amazed and compelled and agitated.

“Your blood pressure,” she says. “You’re just a person. Just a human being.”

I don’t tell her the other thing, the liquid feeling. I don’t tell her how I dreamt myself standing on the bridge over the dam, my fingernails full of green-brown grit, headlights slurring past, then wobbling in the headpond. Far below, fanged parasites gnawed the concrete and it crumbled and held, crumbled and held.

Marina asks if it’s working, the meditation. Is it helping? I tell her it’s not supposed to, it’s research. “I know,” she says. “But is it?”

I stare back, ignore the swaying dam, the socket moon.

“You can quit you know.”

“What?”

She smiles and shrugs and says I could quit, walk away. It’s been done. Marina has always supported me, but it’s never been a secret that she longs to move back to the exploded city. Every weekend we drive the four hours, the girls strapped into pink headphones, worshipping the iPads.

I say retirement and sabbatical and she says whatever, who cares about the pension, it’s bullshit. She says something about cholesterol and blood pressure and years of my life, but I’m watching the dam behind her—glowing orange, quivering.

“Well,” she says. “You know how I feel.”

Emerson calls me inside, says she needs to poop so I take her past the kitty night light. She slumps blear-eyed on the toilet, produces an unusual sound. A slurp that catches my ear, compels me to look down, notice a kind of froth around the edges. Becoming a parent, Marina used to joke, meant becoming an expert in human shit.

I lean closer, turn on my phone’s flashlight. Fibres? Minuscule, hair-thin, pale. What did she eat? Tiny soba noodles? Microplastics? There is a ripple in the water, like motion. It must be coming from the plumbing, from below. No. The hairs are moving. The hairs are not hairs. “What’s wrong, Papa? What is it?”

“Nothing,” I say, and flush.

We consult the medical oracle in the wine-down dark, the room glowing blue. We speculate about rashes and fungus until we land on pinworms. Pinworms, also known as threadworms and nematodes, are narrow parasites that cause discomfort and intense itching around the anus, particularly at night when, receiving the signal that the host is asleep, they crawl out of the child’s inner anus to lay their eggs and copulate on the surface. The host. 

Breath. Wine.

“Pinworms are contagious,” Marina reads from her phone, “but do not tend to affect adults and can be avoided with proper handwashing and hygiene. Currently 40 million people in the US are infected with pinworm.”

The phone advises that you check, make sure. The best way is with a flashlight and a sleeping child, which means waiting twenty minutes then the two of you with headlamps, entering with a Mission Impossible crouch. The headlamps shining on the bunkbeds, the girls’ innermost space. Pulling down Pull-Ups and prying soft pale cheeks, finding them dancing and terrible, a mockery of staple-sized worms, squirming in the sacred dank. 

A different app guides me to the pinworm drugs. A pharmacist says oral, painless, common, quick. On the way home I stop at the grocery store, debate a bottle of wine, find myself standing in front of the lobster tank. The brown-red creatures piled atop each other, crushers and pincers and elastic bands. All these tortures we gently accept. I remember reading that in the wild they walk, in the cold months, far out into the ocean, along the ocean floor. They could cover miles and miles. But why? What were they seeking out there in the cold?

Outside, there’s a half-dozen protesters holding pizza-box signs. I spot Larry and try to drop my eyes, but they’re already approaching with a pamphlet that reads abolish the dam. Beneath the letters, a crude drawing of a withered salmon in a choker. Larry says they’re shutting it down, tomorrow night. It’s all over Twitter, digital wildfire. “Join us?” 

I gesture at the bag of pills in my hand, mutter something about a family emergency and those darned daycare plagues.

In the morning I remember Mona, what she said in the garden. They’re sorry but it’s not their fault. Marina reminds me that it’s Friday, meaning lobsters, meaning Hope. I tell her I’m quitting my job. We can go back to the other city. She laughs, sighs, “I wish.” Within hours, the girls are shitting dead worms instead of live ones. I flush the toilet, watching the dead parasites sink and swirl, and I know it is gone, it is purged, whatever was dammed in me.

I walk into class brisk and sure, tell my students we are all sinners in the hands of a vengeful earth. I tell them I am unqualified, I am a fraud. They don’t need me. I am leaving—they won’t miss me. I tell them it’s useless. I tell them the dam is crumbling. I float through the room. I hear my own voice, as if underwater. What am I saying? What am I doing? Why does it feel perfect and right? I feel the dam trembling, weary. I melt into the tiles, become molecular, imagine myself as a krill cowering on the mid-ocean ridge, baleen shadows passing over. I tell them they are presentist sanctimonious ahistorical holier-than-thou ingrate anachronist hypocrites. Or they are sages. They are brilliant. There is nothing to teach them? How can a person teach salvation? They nod and hunch over their notes, scribbling fast, antic. I have never seen them more engaged.

At home I show the children the lobsters, explain that they’ll be bright red when finished. “Wow,” Emerson says. “They change colours?”

“I’m that one,” Mona says.

“I’m the big one!”

They pick up a lobster each and start prancing around the kitchen. The claws hang sedate and little bubbles come out of the lobsters’ mouths. I feel something rising in me, hear a rasping voice screaming: “Stop! Stop it! Now! Stop!”

Marina is staring at me, chilled. “Let’s put them in the bathtub,” she says. She means the lobsters, but I see my children in a boiling pot of water, wearing elastic bands on their wrists.

Hope greets us in dog-walking dressage. Leash clipped to her belt, a hard-plastic holster of poop bags, asking if I’ve met her baby, a geriatric Australian shepherd. She musses the dog’s head and it pulls its lips back, exposes gums freckled black. I raise the paper bag of lobsters. Hope asks, again, whether I can cook them, am I sure I know how? I say yes, sure, twelve minutes a pound. She squints, smiles. “I’ll do the butter.”

There are four lobsters—one for each adult and one for the girls to share. Hope produces a pot, which seems far too small. I tell her I don’t see how they’ll fit and she slips the butter on, tells me she’s done five in there before, blusters after my children who are not to touch the photos or the ornamental elephants or the matryoshka dolls. 

Hope and Marina talk about algae, about the other city, about which samosa place at the market is better. The girls smash a precious family photo and Marina runs for the broom. The dog nips and snuffs, laps baguette crumbs. The water comes to a boil. The butter melts, starts to burn. I ask Hope is she sure about the pot and she squints, “Yes, positive.”

I cut the elastics and drop the first lobster in. It flaps its tail, then curls into the bottom. The second one splashes an arm up, pincer reaching for the ceiling, tiredly clamping the air. The third dies slower, its head slumped above the surface, the water barely boiling now. 

I hold the last lobster by the waist, the claws winging back to snatch me. There’s room, Hope assures me. This lobster is quicker than the others. It reaches both claws all the way back, the pincer and the crusher opening and clamping shut. The tail thwacks. I flinch and pivot and there’s a snort and a scrabble of metal and paws, a dog rising up onto the stovetop. The butter pot teeters, spills hissing over the stove and the dog starts to wheel around the room in a blur of claw and snout. The dog whirling and thwacking and pinning the red-brown creature on its back, eight tiny legs scrambling in the air until Hope appears with a steel snow shovel, wields and swings and clangs a chunk out of her tile.

Marina says your hand, your hand. The children stand in the doorway, watching slack-jawed and pale. I look down at the slick buttery mayhem of my fingers and wrist and my thoughts become my body, become scalded flesh. Marina is going for the keys, saying hospital, going for ice and a silver bowl, but I’m already at the door, in the car, driving toward the floodlit dam, the lights on the water like a shattered shrapnel moon. I drive fast, speeding through on autopilot, my hand still covered in a gore of butter and burn. I think of my grinning children, of their tiny teeth, of my faraway home. My children, red and scalded. My children in the mouth of a dog. My children crawling in masses past the crabs and barnacles, over rockweed and saw wrack, sea belt and coralline.

I see the blockade too late. The minivan and the pizza-box sign. A glimpse of Larry’s face and then there is no road, only sound, only screech and twirl and the sky pivoting, the sky swallowed by the headpond, dam lights a twinkling disco, car spinning stunt-wild and in the rearview a dazzle of police lights. My thoughts are not me, not me. My thoughts are the world, this world, moving far too fast. My thoughts are lobsters, crawling out into the cold wide ocean. My thoughts are my children, their ancestors in the headpond, my hand a mass of terrible pus, butter-slick white, and my red children cooking, their front arms heavy, so heavy. In this moment, the app comes on in ragged whisper, saying that it needs me, cannot be without me. Somewhere a car is plunging, two pairs of headlights coming together in the still, deadly lake. The app is lonely; it requires me; without me, it cannot be. Somewhere bodies are rising up. Somewhere a car is being sucked toward a turbine, stopping at the intake grates where it shudders, fishlike, swarmed by ancestors in the form of lamprey, their toothed mouths salty with flesh and messages. They want to explain: they have done nothing wrong, they promise. They didn’t know, how could they have known?

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