The Inversion or Magical Realism and the Water Department

West of the Middle and North, Kansas

The day the Ogallala Aquifer finally dried up, the water mains flowed in reverse. The Inversion, as it would come to be known, began somewhere in Kansas. Ulysses, possibly, or Garden City, or nowhere, wherever it was that Jessica Harmon, eighty-four, retired programmer and avid cultivator of heirloom tomatoes, skittered around in what used to be a farmhouse. At 8:36 am on Tuesday, June 16^th, she opened the dishwasher and found all the silverware cluttered near the drain. This was odd, but not as odd as what happened ninety minutes later. Sweaty after running and pulling up two rows of weeds, she went to draw a bath. Yet as soon as she turned on the faucet, the water was sucked straight back up through the shower head. Now that, Jessica thought, is something worth noting.

West Lafayette, Indiana

Since 1869, the University had produced a repeatedly respectable volume of research on such technical subjects as soybeans, steel, and The Moon. They would be interested in such a notable situation. Elisabeth Ellis, classically named, currently interested, pulled her phone out of her pocket and answered her grandmother’s call.

“What? The water flowed up through the shower head? Reversed?”
“Yes, reversed Elizabeth, that’s it precisely, the water is reversing!”
“What? Can you send me a video?”
“Yes dear of course”.

Elisabeth hung up the phone and stepped off the sidewalk. Her grandmother was getting older and the Plains had long been known for mirages; although, Elisabeth knew Jessica. Moments later, she watched the video of water, unbelievably, traveling from the spigot up through the showerhead. Her grandmother had sent a second picture too: Several forks and knives scattered around the dishwasher drain. She double checked to confirm it was, in fact, her grandmother’s bathtub. Yes, she mused, scrunching her nose in thought, that’s it. It was one of those old one-piece plastic deals – the kind big box hardware stores used to sell. They came with 11% rebates.

“wtf,” she texted back. “I’ll look it up”.

Elisabeth was an engineer who had also learned about agriculture and history and how to bother people. Most importantly though, she knew about water, and this was not how water, whether in municipal pipes or open channels, behaved.

I’m calling the water department, she thought. They’ll want to know.

Garden City, Kansas

The Garden City Water Department had thirteen wells, nine of which pumped from the Ogallala Aquifer. Luis Ricardo Diaz, Water Superintendent & WTP Operations Manager, spent three hours each day scanning SCADA, considering, tabulating, noticing, writing down numbers, erasing numbers, and otherwise bothering himself with whatever the wells were up to. At 11:13 am, June 16^th, he answered his phone again – another call about getting someone to look at the same water system faucet problems. Luis assumed user error. This lady, though, wanted to visit him.

“Si, senorita,” he replied, “No, no puede visitar.”

The woman on the other end dropped her name and credentials and explained that she had learned about the water situation from her grandmother who lived near the city. Luis relented.

“Ok. You can come.”

Visitors were annoying – always wanting to write politicized articles about utility privatization or envisioning economically environmentally equitability. Luis cared less about the water’s politics, and more about what SCADA said the water was up to. Speaking of which, Luis furrowed his brow. Better throw that valve – if this water reversal problem was real, the towers would need to stay full. On second thought, better safe than sorry. Luis picked up his phone again.

Lincoln, Nebraska

One hundred years after the town that became the city was founded, the Consulting Firm opened its doors. One hundred years after that, Alexis Noor Sedlák stretched in front of a ceiling to floor window in a downtown, third floor office. She stared at the street straight below and then looked up at the sky. Three squats, hands above the head, forward fold.

“Alex here’s your phone,” Roger’s hand holding a plastic and silicone polycarbonate cased monstrosity crossed her vision. No dusty dropped phones for Alex.

“It’s been ringing for the past ten minutes. I think it’s your favorite client.”

Alex’s head dropped even further. She stared at the upside-down office.

Why. Such interrupted peace.

“Thanks,” she said aloud, standing up and taking the phone, smashing her eyes shut against the onslaught of blurriness that came from standing up too quickly.

Garden City, Kansas. Yes, that’s him.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Alex?” The voice on the other end of the line spoke quickly. With Luis, nothing was an emergency, until it was.

“Yes, how are you Luis?”

“Fine, fine. I am calling to tell you about a problem we are having.”

Really, thought Alex dryly. That is, in fact, my job. Solving problems.

“Yes, what is it? The chlorine residuals again?”

“No…this is something much different. I am receiving several calls from residents about water travelling through the air from faucets to, another entrance.”

“Okay, another entrance?” Alex opened and shut her eyes again. Like the drain? This hangover. Damn. She bent up her neck and then let hit hang back down again. The ceiling was not interesting, but then, neither was the floor.

“Yes, another entrance.”

“I’m…not sure I understand you. Can you explain in more detail?”

“Well, you see miss,” Alex winced again. “The customers are saying that the uh, the water, for example miss, one call said the water empties from the faucet, like a bath you know, and then it goes back in the pipe but through the showerhead?”

What? No.

“Can you come out here and look at it, miss?”

No. No no no. I cannot. Garden City is 6-hours away. Mileage tho. Shut up Alex.

“That is…unusual,” Alex said. “Yeah, so, since we are located in Lincoln, it’s going to take us a while to get there,” Alex was always floored at Luis’s seeming lack of ability to comprehend the distance between Garden City and Lincoln. If the Garden City Water Department wanted instantaneous, on-call service, they should have contracted with someone closer. Alex reprimanded herself. This was probably, actually, a big problem and that was why he was bothering to call her, again, even though she was located all the way in Lincoln. Taking a deep breath, she spoke again:

“I am wondering if you could send us a video of the problem. We’ll be able to send someone out there, but it will take us a day or so to get things together. Can you send something so that we can get an idea of what we’re looking at?”

Silence met her voice on the other end of the phone. Alex smirked. Luis hated talking with customers.

“Okay miss, I’ll send it right over today.”

Pulaski County, Indiana

Jim always mowed both sides of the street, even though fifteen of the sixty feet on the east side technically belonged to the Commuter Transportation District. He liked the idea of fastidiously maintaining part of the public right-of-way. It meant he was a good citizen and still let him pretend his yard was a little bigger than it technically was. Working the weed-eater around the steel poles that held the drop-net always felt a little edgy. Four times a day, twice in the morning, twice in the evening, the net would drop and the air would scream, the living room windows would rattle, and then all would be quiet again. Really, it wasn’t quite that dramatic, but Jim liked the description. It was edgy.

This Saturday was probably going to be the last mow of the year; although, despite his skill at predicting the weather, there were always surprise rainy days and sunny days. The grass got longer for longer than Jim thought it would. Yet, as he sniffed the air and looked north and smelled the damp cold, he thought that maybe this would actually be the last warmish day after all. Jim could see the clouds coming in over the Lake shore fifty-nine miles to the north. He liked to imagine Winter sweeping down from the Great North West, speeding across the Saskatchewan plains and whipping through the Minnesota woods, picking up the Lake and dumping it down again on the southern shore. Jim checked the radar – a great line of storms stretched from Duluth to Carbondale. Yes – this actually was the beginning of winter. Definitely the last day to mow.

Jim stepped into the garage and pulled on the Jacket with the University logo emblazoned across the back. Jennie hated the Jacket. She said it looked like light beer. Jim wasn’t sure how that was possible, since the color of beer usually ranged from a deep brown to a kind of deep goldeny-gold. Nobody made beer that was the kind of washed out, gray gold of the Jacket stripe. Besides, it wasn’t even technically his Jacket. It was his uncle’s and he’d borrowed it at Thanksgiving ten years ago and never bothered to return it. His uncle had since died and no one had ever said anything about the Jacket again, so Jim assumed it was okay for him to keep it. The Jacket made him feel like a kid, like he was sitting in a wood paneled basement with washed out gray brown carpet too long for now, watching The Game, The Game, of course, was on today’s agenda too, after the final mowing of the summer.

What a summer it had been. First that thing with Jessica’s water; while his sister had always been a little over observant, the water thing had been a little…over over observant. Both Jim and Jennie had been surprised when it had grown into a National Event. A Multiplicity of Agencies had gotten involved, there were those engineers out of Nebraska, that guy from the water department (actually, multiple guys from multiple water departments), all Jessica’s friends from SkyrimClub – really, it had gotten out of hand, all over what had looked like a well-misfunction. Jim’s well never misfunctioned. All it took was fastidious attention to annual cleaning, pump replacement, and protective measures to prevent pipe damage. Smh, people living in dry areas. Jim searched for a word to describe them and came up…dry.