Seeds of Change

by John Joseph Adams

  There were catcalls, sure—“Erasist!” and “Face the Facts!”—but no spit, garbage, or rotten fruit. It could have been worse.

  Then we were inside, whisked into the quiet sanctuary of the library by Collin and a security guard who quickly latched the door after us.

  * * * *

  “THAT WASN’T TOO bad,” Keeley said, looking back at the crowd.

  “It will get worse,” Collin said. “Believe me. This is just a precursor. Tomorrow, we’ll have extra security and the police will be here.”

  The artwork had been set up at the back of the library on moveable partitions arranged in a zigzag pattern to create small alcoves. Sculpture, mounted on pedestals or placed directly on the floor, filled the space between the partitions. The work ranged from the photorealistic to the abstract. There were exquisitely detailed line drawings and anthropomorphic blobs. None of the heads had faces. Blank voids or empty hollows, eerily devoid of content but not expression, took the place of eyes, noses, and mouths.

  I was nervous as we approached Keeley’s. My palms were wet. I discreetly wiped them on my pants.

  Keeley’s latest work echoed the lovingly rendered portraits I remembered, but instead of eyes the faces offered different windows into the soul. Abstract squiggles. Dreamlike surrealisms. Impressionistic smudges. One painting in particular grabbed my attention. “Gesthemane.” In it, a young woman pirouetted in a walled garden, scarecrow-like, her arms held out as if nailed to an invisible cross. The garden was barren—little more than a vacant lot—and her face reflected the crumbling stone enclosure, desolate except for a tiny green sprout emerging from a crack.

  As I gazed at the picture, Keeley unwrapped the two she had brought with her.

  “Well?” Keeley said as Collin prepared to hang them with other pieces.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. I wasn’t sure what I thought—or what I’d expected from the artwork.

  “Tell me,” Keeley said. “The first thing that came to your mind. Don’t think about it.”

  “I don’t know if it’s going to change peoples’ minds,” I said. “I don’t know if any of this is going to make most people feel better about who you are and what you’re trying to accomplish.”

  “It’s not supposed to,” Collin said.

  I shook my head, confused. “Then what’s the point?”

  “To challenge people,” Keeley said.

  “Challenge them how?”

  “To see the world differently.” Keeley waved a hand at the surrounding art. “To see themselves differently.”

  “People don’t want to see themselves,” I said. I thought of Fran. “They don’t want to be challenged. They want to be reassured. They don’t want to feel threatened. They want to be told everything will be all right, even if it’s not.”

  “What about you?” Keeley said. “Is that what you want?”

  “I don’t know.” But I did know. I looked around at the faceless portraits. I couldn’t tell who any of these people were, or who they had been. They had been stripped of their pasts. It was hard to see the future they inhabited. “It seems lonely,” I said. “If you don’t know who you were, how do you know who you should be?”

  “You can be anyone you want,” Keeley said. “That’s the point. After the surgery, you’re not tied to the past.”

  “You’re free,” Collin said. His face ballooned close to mine, buoyed by the same fervent intensity. I don’t know what he saw when he looked at me. Maybe he saw what he wanted. Or maybe he saw what was in Keeley’s latest pictures.

  They were of me. Not literally, but figuratively. I recognized myself in the entoptic collages that gave expression to the faces. The actinic flashes of light, and slow lava lamp turmoil of one world bleeding across the retina to reveal, and possibly become, another.

  Looking at those pictures, free was the last thing I felt.

  * * * *

  WHAT I SAW that day behind the eucalyptus trees—with my eyes squeezed tight and my fingers pressing against my lids—was Steve.

  Dead.

  His head split open under my fingertips, exploding into a mist of roiling green and purple.

  I wanted to let go but I couldn’t. I was paralyzed, struck by the shocking clarity of the face that had emerged from the seething pattern of light. It was like a ghost, invisible to the naked eye, suddenly showing up in a photograph.

  Two days later the vision came true. Steve died in a playground accident. He was running to catch a fly ball and collided with another kid. They smacked heads. Steve was knocked unconscious. An ambulance came and took him to the hospital, but he never woke up, even when Myrtle Baumgarten visited and kissed him on the cheek. After two days in a coma, he succumbed, killed by a bone splinter that had worked its way into his brain.

  It was a coincidence, of course. I knew that. I hadn’t seen the future, or caused it. The whole thing had the quality of a dream, like the time I plummeted from the top of the huge tree behind our house. I didn’t know if I’d actually slipped—if I’d managed to grab onto the last limb before hitting the ground and killing myself—or if I only imagined I did. That was what I saw when I looked at Keeley’s faces. What would other people see? Sometimes, the things we see are in ourselves. They come from inside us, not the world outside.

  * * * *

  “ARE YOU ALL right?” Keeley asked on the way out of the library.

  “Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “You look pale.”

  I shrugged. “Just sugar crashing,” I said. “Get a little food in me, and I’ll be fine.”

  “You sure?”

  I sagged to a halt in front of the door while I waited for the security guard to let us out. Collin had stayed behind to put the finishing touches on the exhibit. “It’s been hard,” I said.

  “What?”

  I glanced at the protestors, then back to the stacks of books in the direction of the exhibit. “All of this.”

  “Dealing with me, you mean. And Fran.”

  “It hasn’t been easy.”

  “Well, I appreciate it,” she said. “Really. I’m not just saying that. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve done a lot for me over the years, meant a lot to me. I mean that. Without you, I wouldn’t be the person I am. I wouldn’t have done the things I have.”

  What was she saying? Was she saying that I was responsible for what she’d done to herself?

  “I wish we had more time to talk,” she went on. “Just the two of us, I mean. You know. Without any distractions. Without all of this.” She let out a breath as the security guard pulled open the door, exposing us to the chants of the protestors. “Just you and me. Brother and sister. The way we used, back when we were kids and there were no secrets between us.”

  I nodded, even though I knew it wouldn’t happen anytime soon. Still, it was nice to think it was possible—that Keeley believed it was possible.

  * * * *

  AS SOON AS Keely and I got back in the car, Fran said, “I want to go home.” Just like that. Her mind was made up. She stared straight ahead, her jaw set, looking at nothing as far as I could tell.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. “What happened?” Behind me, Keeley’s seatbelt clicked.

  “Nothing happened,” Fran said. “Why do you always want to know if something happened?”

  “You lost your appetite,” I said. “There must be a reason.”

  “I wasn’t really hungry,” Fran said. “I wasn’t ready to eat dinner. You’re the one who wanted to go out, not me. I just came along for the ride.”

  “You didn’t have to,” I said. “No one made you. You could have stayed home if that’s what you wanted.”

  “I’ve done as much as I can,” she said. She pressed the heels of her hands to her forehead. “I tried. I really did. I can’t do any more.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I just want to go home. That�
��s all.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes. We’ve got leftover lasagna in the freezer. I can heat that up. Make a salad, or whatever.”

  “I like lasagna,” Keeley said. “Lasagna’s fine with me. And I’m more tired than I thought. A quiet evening might not be a bad idea.”

  * * * *

  WE HEARD THE sirens when we were still a few blocks away. By the time we got to the house, it was in flames.

  I parked a couple of houses down from the fire trucks. I felt numb and sick to my stomach. As soon as the car stopped, Fran jumped out.

  “Wait!” I said. “What are you doing?”

  She ignored me or didn’t hear me. I hopped out and ran after her, catching her by the arm as she passed the first fire truck, dragging her to a stop.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” I gasped. It was obviously too late. The fire was spreading fast. I could feel the flames on my face, the skin tightening under the heat. I thought I could smell gasoline in the air. Flames billowed out of the windows and thick gouts of smoke darkened the sky. Then there was an explosion somewhere inside of the flames and one whole side of the house disintegrated in a shower of embers.

  “My God,” Fran said. She turned to Keeley, who’d joined us. “Look what you’ve done.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Yes, you did.” Fran jabbed a finger at her. “You came back. If you hadn’t come back, none of this would have happened.”

  “That’s not true,” Keeley said.

  “You could have minded your own damn business,” Fran said. “Instead, you had to drag us into it.” She bunched her hands into fists. “What if we’d been in there? We’d be dead by now.” Tears flickered down her cheeks.

  I went to her. She stiffened as I put an arm around her and pulled her close. “It’s all right,” I said. “Everything will be fine.”

  “No, it won’t.” She sniffed and wiped at the tears with white knuckles. “Nothing will ever be the same again. We’ve lost everything.”

  “We’re alive,” I said. “No one got hurt.”

  “Our life here is ruined.”

  “We can start a new life,” I said.

  She rested her forehead on my shoulder. “I don’t want to start a new life. I want the life we had.”

  Keeley stood a few feet off to one side, watching the house burn. I could see the flames in her eyes. It looked like the fire was burning in her. I turned back to the house. The flames were bright, as if the whole world was on fire.

  People went away. When they came back, you never knew what to expect. Not from them, and sometimes not from yourself.

  I closed my eyes against the glare. I kept my eyes shut for a few beats. My heart thudded in my chest and my mouth was dry. I pressed my fingertips to my eyelids and started to count to ten.

  * * *

  Afterword

  The idea for this story came from an article in Wired about prosopagnosia—face blindness. People who suffer from this disorder cannot see facial features. Human faces (including their own) are a blank. The more I thought about it, the more that blankness became a kind of tabula rasa. What if none of us were defined by our facial features and skin color? If ethnic background wasn’t physically apparent (at least according to standard stereotypes), how would we consciously and unconsciously judge a person? What would be the cost of losing these identifiers and what, if anything, would be gained? To what extent do we go to eliminate systemic, institutionalized discrimination?

  Difficult questions. Sensitive questions. Questions I was uneasy about raising, let alone trying to answer. At the same time, I was curious where the questions might lead. Race, cultural heritage, ethnicity, prejudice—these are issues that need to be discussed openly and honestly. Hiding them in the closet and pretending they don’t exist isn’t going to solve anything. So I tried to walk the walk. I’m afraid I might have prejudices I don’t know about, or am unwilling to admit.

  I’m afraid there might be one or two ugly truths lurking inside of me. I hope not. But if there are, I’d like to know what they are. I‘d like to be able to look myself in the eye and have the courage to recognize and confront my own shortcomings.

  In the story, I didn’t want to come down on any side—whether there was any right answer or wrong answer to the questions I was posing. I hope it’s clear that the decision the protagonist makes at the end of the story is a personal one. It’s not meant to be prescriptive, rather the jumping off point for constructive dialog.

  SPIDER THE ARTIST

  Nnedi Okorafor

  Zombie no go go, unless you tell am to go

  Zombie!

  Zombie!

  Zombie no go stop, unless you tell am to stop

  Zombie no go turn, unless you tell am to turn

  Zombie!

  Zombie no go think, unless you tell am to think.

  —from Zombie by Fela Kuti, Nigerian musician and self-proclaimed "voice of the voiceless"

  * * * *

  MY HUSBAND USED to beat me. That was how I ended up out there that evening behind our house, just past the bushes, through the tall grass, in front of the pipelines. Our small house was the last in the village, practically in the forest itself. So nobody ever saw or heard him beating me.

  Going out there was the best way to put space between me and him without sending him into further rage. When I went behind the house, he knew where I was and he knew I was alone. But he was too full of himself to realize I was thinking about killing myself.

  My husband was a drunk, like too many of the members of the Niger Delta People’s Movement. It was how they all controlled their anger and feelings of helplessness. The fish, shrimps and crayfish in the creeks were dying. Drinking the water shriveled women’s wombs and eventually made men urinate blood.

  There was a stream where I had been fetching water. A flow station was built nearby and now the stream was rank and filthy, with an oily film that reflected rainbows. Cassava and yam farms yielded less and less each year. The air left your skin dirty and smelled like something preparing to die. In some places, it was always daytime because of the noisy gas flares.

  My village was shit.

  On top of all this, People’s Movement members were getting picked off like flies. The “kill-and-go” had grown bold. They shot People’s Movement members in the streets, they ran them over, dragged them into the swamps. You never saw them again.

  I tried to give my husband some happiness. But after three years, my body continued to refuse him children. It’s easy to see the root of his frustration and sadness . . . but pain is pain. And he dealt it to me regularly.

  My greatest, my only true possession was my father’s guitar. It was made of fine polished Abura timber and it had a lovely tortoiseshell pick guard. Excellent handwork. My father said that the timber used to create the guitar came from one of the last timber trees in the delta. If you held it to your nose, you could believe this. The guitar was decades old and still smelled like fresh cut wood, like it wanted to tell you its story because only it could.

  I wouldn’t exist without my father’s guitar. When he was a young man, he used to sit in front of the compound in the evening and play for everyone. People danced, clapped, shut their eyes and listened. Cell phones would ring and people would ignore them. One day, it was my mother who stopped to listen.

  I used to stare at my father’s fast long-fingered hands when he played. Oh, the harmonies. He could weave anything with his music—rainbows, sunrises, spider webs sparkling with morning dew. My older brothers weren’t interested in learning how to play. But I was, so my father taught me everything he knew. And now it was my long-fingers that graced the strings. I’d always been able to hear music and my fingers moved even faster than my father’s. I was good. Really good.

  But I married that stupid man. Andrew. So I only played behind the house. Away from him. My guitar was my escape.

  That fateful evening, I was sitting on the ground in front of the fuel pipeline
. It ran right through everyone’s backyard. My village was an oil village, as was the village where I grew up. My mother lived in a similar village before she was married, as did her mother. We are Pipeline People.

  My mother’s grandmother was known for lying on the pipeline running through her village. She’d stay like that for hours, listening and wondering what magical fluids were running through the large never-ending steel tubes. This was before the Zombies, of course. I laughed. If she tried to lie on a pipeline now she’d be brutally killed.

  Anyway, when I was feeling especially blue, I’d take my guitar and come out here and sit right in front of the pipeline. I knew I was flirting with death by being so close but when I was like this, I didn’t really care. I actually welcomed the possibility of being done with life. It was a wonder that my husband didn’t smash my guitar during one of his drunken rages. I’d surely have quickly thrown myself on the pipeline if he did. Maybe that was why he’d rather smash my nose than my guitar.

  This day, he’d only slapped me hard across the face. I had no idea why. He’d simply come in, seen me in the kitchen and smack! Maybe he’d had a bad day at work—he worked very hard at a local restaurant. Maybe one of his women had scorned him. Maybe I did something wrong. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. My nose was just starting to stop bleeding and I was not seeing so many stars.

  My feet were only inches from the pipeline. I was especially daring this night. It was warmer and more humid than normal. Or maybe it was my stinging burning face. The mosquitoes didn’t even bother me much. In the distance, I could see Nneka, a woman who rarely spoke to me, giving her small sons a bath in a large tub. Some men were playing cards at a table several houses down. It was dark, there were small small trees and bushes here and even our closest neighbor was not very close, so I was hidden.

  I sighed and placed my hands on the guitar strings. I plucked out a tune my father used to play. I sighed and closed my eyes. I would always miss my father. The feel of the strings vibrating under my fingers was exquisite.

  I fell deep into the zone of my music, weaving it, then floating on a glorious sunset that lit the palm tree tops and . . .