by Neil Clarke
He offered her a sip of his Coke. She waved it off. “You ought to give him a chance. He’s just enthusiastic about things. Like you are.”
He wanted to ask her why the hell she kept attaching herself to assholes. The self-involved painter, the rage-aholic restaurant owner, and now the chemist, whom she’d had the audacity to marry. Did she love him, or just his McMansion and its granite countertops?
“He wants to send you to college,” she said. “He thinks you’d be a good scientist.”
“Really?” Then he was embarrassed that the compliment meant something to him. “I’m not taking his money.”
“You should think about it. Your dad can’t afford college. And you deserve better than working in a lumberyard.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the lumberyard.” LT worked there three days a week during the school year, sometimes alongside his father. He’d told her he hated it, but hadn’t mentioned the things he loved about it. His herky-jerky forklift. The terrifying Ekstrom Carlson rip saw. The sawdust and sweat.
But did he want to be there the rest of his life?
From inside the store, the boy shouted in mock dismay and the girl laughed. They’d lost their last laser cannon.
“You should study the invasives,” his mother said. “I remember that look on your face when I showed you that seed. And the fern man! You loved that little guy.”
“I still have him. Dad keeps him in the living room. He’s not so little.”
“So,” she said. “Think about it.”
He thought, If the aliens haven’t landed by then.
1986
“Where are the space bees?”
“What?”
“SPACE BEES!” LT shouted above the music. “WHERE ARE THEY?”
He was drunk, and Jeff and Wendy too, and their new friend Doran, all of them drunk together. What else could they be, on this final weekend before Christmas break, and where else but at the Whitehorse, which as far as he was concerned was the only bar in Normal, Illinois.
“Jesus Christ,” Jeff said. “Not the bees again.”
LT put his hand on the back of Doran’s neck—a sweaty neck, and his hand tacky with beer but he didn’t care, he wanted to pull Doran close. “I need to tell you things,” he said into his ear, and Doran laughed, and then—
—and then they were in a restaurant booth, the lights bright, Jeff and Wendy across from him and Doran—tall, sturdy Doran—beside him. LT leaned into his arm woozily. God he was handsome, naturally handsome, almost hiding it. How did they get here? He concentrated, but his memory of the past two hours was a hopscotch, dancing drinking shouting singing and then the rude bright lights of last call and a flash of ice and cold—did Wendy drive, she must have—to here, the 24-hour Steak and Shake, their traditional sober-up station.
He said to Doran, “It’s the flowers that make no sense.”
Jeff said, “The flowers have no scents?” and Wendy said, “It’s that they have scents that makes no sense.” They both laughed.
A beat too late LT realized there was wordplay at work. He forged on. “The blooms of flowers are lures.” The word thick on his tongue. “Scent and shape and color, they all evolved to attract specific pollinators, the bees and butterflies and beetles.”
“Oh my,” Jeff said.
“And you told me he was shy,” Doran said.
“He can get wound up,” Wendy said. “When he feels comfortable.”
“Or tipsy,” Jeff said.
LT felt tipsy and comfortable. Why hadn’t Jeff and Wendy introduced him to Doran before now? Why wait until the last weekend of the last semester LT would be on campus? It was criminal.
“A pretty flower isn’t just a simple announcement, like ‘Here’s pollen.’” LT said. “Simple won’t do it.” He tried to explain how flowers were in competition. Pollen was everywhere, nestled inside thousands of equally needy plants desperate to spread their genetic material. What was needed was not an announcement but a flashing neon sign. “The flower’s goal,” LT said, “is to figure out what hummingbirds think are beautiful.”
“Slow down, Hillbilly,” Wendy said. “Eat something.”
“Hummingbirds have an aesthetic sense?” Doran said.
“Of course they do! Have I told you about bowerbirds?”
Jeff said, “Guess what his honors thesis is on?”
And then he was off, yammering about the bowerbirds of Papua New Guinea. The males of the species constructed elaborate twiggy structures, not nests but bachelor pads, designed purely to woo females. The Vogelkop Bowerbird set out careful arrangements of colors—blue, green, yellow—each one a particular hue. It didn’t matter what the objects were; they could be stones, or petals, or plastic bottle caps even, as long as they were the correct shade. The females could not be coerced into sex; they dropped by the bowers, perused the handiwork, and flew away if they found them substandard. Their choice of mates, their taste in art, drove the males over millennia to evolve more and more specific displays, an ongoing gallery show with intercourse as the prize.
“Wait,” Doran said. “That doesn’t mean they’re making an artistic choice. Aren’t they just, uh, instinctually responding to whoever seems like the fittest mate? It’s not beauty per se—”
“I love per se,” Jeff said. “Great word.”
“I’ve always been fond of ergo,” Wendy said.
“But it is aesthetics!” LT said. “Beauty’s just”—he made explosion fingers—“joy in the brain, right? A flood of chemicals and, and, and—” What was the word? “Fireworks. Neuronal fireworks. We don’t logic our way to beauty, it hits us like a fucking hammer.”
“Ipso facto,” Jeff said.
Doran put his arm around LT’s shoulder and said, “Eat your burger before it gets cold, then tell me about the space bees.” Ah! He remembered! The heat of Doran’s arm across his neck made his cheeks flush. Doran smelled of sweat and Mennen Speed Stick and something else, something LT could almost recall from far back in his brain, from a hot afternoon in a Chicago apartment . . . but the memory slipped the net.
He decided to eat. Wendy told the story of her favorite snowmobile accident. Doran, who’d grown up in New Mexico, couldn’t believe that Wisconsin teenagers were allowed to ride machines across frozen lakes.
LT began to feel a little more sober, though perhaps that was an illusion. “Space bees,” he said.
“I’m ready,” Doran said. “Lay it on me.”
“Every one of the invasives we’ve found, not a single one uses pollination. There’s a lot of budding and spores and wind dispersal and”—he waved a clutch of fries—“you know. I’ve got a fern man at home, it’s like ten feet tall now—”
“You do?”
But LT didn’t want to talk about home. “Doesn’t matter, it just grows and spreads, spilling out of its pot, but it doesn’t require animal assistance.” Actually, he wasn’t sure that was true. Didn’t the fern survive because of him, because of his family? It had played on their human tendency for anthropomorphism.
“Where’d you go, Hillbilly?” Wendy asked.
“Sorry, what did you say?” he asked Doran.
“I said, maybe all the pollinating species died.”
“Maybe! But why colorful flowers and no pollen? There weren’t any animals hatching from the space seeds, so—”
Doran’s eyes went wide. “They have to be designed, then.”
“Exactly!”
Wendy nabbed his glass before it tumbled over.
“Inside voices,” she said.
He gets it, LT thought. The aliens could know what Earth’s sunlight was like from very far away, even guess the composition of its atmosphere and soil, but they couldn’t know what animals would be here, much less humans. So they had to design plants that could propagate without them.
“But if they’re designed, why are they so, so overwrought?” LT asked. “Those huge fucking umbrellas out west, the sponges smothering South America, all of them crazy-
colorful and smelly and weird. So my real question is—”
“Where are the space bees?” Jeff supplied.
“Wrong!” LT said. The real question was the one he was born to answer. He’d get whatever degrees and training he needed, he’d go into the field for evidence, he’d write the books to explain it. He’d explain it to Doran.
“The question is, why all this needless beauty? What’s it all for?”
“I don’t know, but you’re beautiful,” Doran said, and then—
—and then morning, a thumping that wasn’t in his head. Or not all in his head.
LT sat up, and pain spiked in his skull. Light blasted through half-open blinds. And there, beside him, Doran. Mouth agape, rough-jawed, one arm across LT’s waist.
Still there. Still real.
He wanted to fall back into the bed, pull that arm across his chest. Then the knocking came again, and he realized who was at the front door.
“Fuck.” He slipped out from under Doran’s arm without waking him, pulled on shorts. Alcohol sloshed in his bloodstream. He closed the bedroom door behind him. The pounding resumed.
LT pulled open the front door. His father started to speak, then saw what shape his son was in. Shook his head, suddenly angry. No, angrier.
“I overslept,” LT said.
“Are you packed?”
LT turned to look at the living room, and his father pushed past him.
“Dad! Dad. Could you just wait?”
His father surveyed the moving boxes, only a few of them taped up. The rest were open, half-filled. LT’s plan had been to wake up early and finish packing. Everything had to go. Next semester he’d finish his coursework in the mountains of western New Guinea, collecting data on how birds had adapted to invasives. And now all he wanted to do was stay here, in central Illinois, in this apartment.
“Wait for what?” his father asked. “For you?”
LT moved between his father and the bedroom. “Give me an hour. Go for lunch or something. There’s a diner—”
“I’ll start taking down what’s packed. There’s snow coming.”
“No. Please. Just . . . give me some time.”
His father looked at the bedroom door. Then at his son. His jaw tightened, and LT stopped himself from edging backward.
He’d lived his boyhood afraid of his father’s anger. Power, he’d learned, came not from blowing off steam, but demonstrating that you were barely containing it. You won by exacting dread, by making your loved ones wait through the silence so long that they yearned for the explosion.
“In an hour I drive away,” his father said.
1994
LT didn’t relax until they stepped off the plane in Columbus. Doran kept trying to calm him down, to no effect. The entire trip he’d been imagining that some authority would command the pilot to turn around, send them back to Indonesia. A priest would tell them, Stupid Americans, gays aren’t allowed to be parents, and they would yank the infant out of his hands.
Then he emerged from the boarding tunnel holding the baby, saw his mother, and they both burst into tears.
He eased his daughter into his mother’s arms. “Mom, this is Christina. Christina, this is—what is it, again?” Teasing her.
“Mimi!” She pressed her face close to the tiny girl and whispered, “I’m your Mimi!”
A tanned, smiling man with a tidy black goatee offered his hand. “Congratulations, LT. You’ve made your mother very, very happy.” This was Marcus, Mom’s brand-new husband, five years younger than her, at least. His mother at forty-six was still lithe and alarmingly sexy. LT hadn’t met Husband 3.0 before, didn’t know Mom was bringing him. He felt a flash of annoyance that he had to deal with this intruder at this moment—but then told himself to let it go. The day was too big for small emotions.
Doran, holding two duffel bags, one in each arm, said, “We made it.”
LT kissed him, hard. In New Guinea they hadn’t dared engage in PDA. “Eighteen years to go.”
Christina nestled like a peanut in the high-tech shell of the car seat. As Marcus drove them home, LT and Doran talked about how dicey the whole process had been. The orphanage, situated about thirty miles from Jayapura, was overcrowded, with hundreds of children left there by the crisis. The facility was nominally run by nuns, but most of the staff were local women who seemed little better off than their charges. LT and Doran had been practicing their Indonesian, especially the phrases involving gift-giving.
“We had to bribe everybody, top to bottom,” Doran said. “If it wasn’t for LT’s friend at the university yelling at them they’d have taken the shirts off our backs.”
“It’s not their fault,” LT said. “Their agriculture is wrecked. The economy’s crashing. They’re starving.”
“Maybe they should stop chewing those sugar sticks.”
“What now?” his mother asked.
He told her how the locals seemed almost addicted to an invasive plant that tasted sweet, but could not be digested. Gut bacteria couldn’t break down those strange peptides and so passed it along through the colon like a package that couldn’t be opened.
Doran said, “It would be great for my diet.”
A joke, but what Doran had seen there had scared him, and even LT, who’d spent months on the island doing fieldwork for his PhD, had been shaken by the rapid decline in the country. Thousands of alien species had been growing in the forests for two decades, ignored and unchecked, and suddenly some tipping point had been reached and those alien plants had reached the cities. The latest was a thread-thin vine that exploded into a red web on contact with flat surfaces. Villages and towns were engulfed by scarlet gauze. In the orphanage, nurses scraped it from the walls, but that only made it worse, dispersing its spores. He and Doran were terrified it was in Christina’s lungs. Invasives might be indigestible, but so was asbestos. In the morning she’d have her first doctor’s appointment. Her papers all said she was healthy, without birth defects, and up-to-date on her vaccinations, but they weren’t about to trust an orphanage under duress.
Once they reached the apartment, LT still couldn’t bear to put down his daughter. While Doran mixed formula and made beds and ordered takeout, LT fed his daughter, changed her, and then let her fall asleep on his chest.
His mother sat beside him on the couch. “You’re going to have to let Doran do more parenting.”
“He can fight me for her.”
“Big talk for the first night. Wait till sleep deprivation hits.”
Christina’s eyes were not quite closed, her lips parted. Mom had to know that he’d strong-armed Doran into adoption. His last trip to New Guinea, LT had been haunted by the abandoned children. Doran had said, This is crazy, we’re not even thirty, and LT said, My parents were teenagers when they had me, and Doran said, You’re making my case.
But that argument was over forever the moment Doran met Christina.
“You used to look just like that,” his mother said. “Milk-drunk.”
She was four weeks old, living through the days of extreme fractions. In another month, she’d have been their daughter for half her life. In a year, she would have been an orphan for only a twelfth of it. And yet those four weeks would never disappear. There would always be some shrinking percentage of her life that she’d lived alone, a blot like a tiny spore. He’d read alarming articles about adopted children who’d failed to “attach.” What if the psychic damage was already done? What if she never felt all the love they were bombarding her with?
His mother called Marcus over. “Sweetie, show them what you brought.”
Marcus opened a wooden box lined with cut paper and lifted out a teardrop-shaped dollop of glass, about eight inches long and six inches wide at the base, purple and red and glinting with gold.
“A crystal for Christina,” he said.
“That is amazing,” Doran said. “You made this?”
“Marcus is an award-winning glassblower,” his mother said. She tilted her head. “He
made me these earrings.”
Of course, LT thought. His mother had always loved bowerbirds.
The gift was very pretty, and pretty useless, too heavy for a Christmas ornament, and not a shape that could sit upright on a shelf. They’d have to hang it, but not above her bed.
“Which ear is she supposed to wear it in?” LT asked.
Marcus laughed. “Either one. She’ll have to grow into it.”
When the food arrived, LT needed to eat, and he was forced to surrender Christina to Doran. His body moved automatically as he held her, a kind of sway and jiggle that soothed her. Where did he learn that?
Mom said, “Did you call your father?”
And like that, the spell was broken. LT said, “What do you think?”
“I think you should.”
“Fuck him.”
“Hey,” Doran said.
“Right. I gotta stop swearing. Eff that guy.”
“Your mom’s right. We should give him a chance.”
“He’s had six years of chances. Any time he wants to call, I’ll pick up.” There were a few years, after college, when they talked on the phone and his father would pretend that LT lived alone. He never asked about Doran, or about their lives. Then LT sent his father an invitation to the commitment ceremony. The next time LT called, his father said that he was disgusted, and didn’t want to talk to him until he fixed his life.
His mother said, “This is different. Maybe it’s time.”
Maybe. He got up from the table.
Time itself had become different. He looked at Christina in Doran’s arms and thought, I’m going to know you for the rest of my life. The future had broken open, his week-by-week life suddenly stretching to decades. He could picture her on her first day of school, on prom night, at her wedding. He caught a glimpse of her holding a baby as tiny as she was at that moment.
Had his father felt that way, too, when he was born?
He kissed Doran’s cheek, then bent over their daughter. She was awake, dark-eyed, watching both of them. He thought, There’s no way I can go away for six months into the jungle and leave her. He wouldn’t make the choice his parents had made.
“We’ll give it a shot,” LT said. He moved his cheek across her warm head. Inhaled her scent. “Won’t we, my darlin’?”
