by Ruth Ozeki
“Frankie, my boy,” he said, passing him the joint. “You and me, we’re gonna smoke this and then take a long walk, little brother.”
Frankie took a toke. “Now?” He choked. The reefer was sweet.
Geek nodded. “Seeds got work to do.”
Y was setting up a small video camera on a tripod, straddling the transmission. He knelt on the driver’s seat facing into the Winnebago, fiddling with some small clip-on lights attached to a grid overhead. He angled the beam, running it down the glossy length of Lilith’s naked torso. Charmey had covered the dinette table with an Indian-print bedspread, and now Lilith sat there in lotus position, against a velvet backdrop, fingering a zucchini. She had a fine golden down, like spun metal all over her naked body, that picked up the light from the spot. Between her breasts hung an Egyptian ankh. Charmey was stirring up a large cauldron of mud that Lilith was going to use in part of her act.
“It’s for the Web site,” Lilith explained to Frank. “I become a symbol of Earth, begetting life, the primeval Mother. I have to access a really deep part of myself, and it’s hard if there are too many people around. You don’t mind, do you? It’s just for a couple of hours.”
Frankie did mind. It was five degrees below zero and raging outdoors. He preferred to stay indoors and watch Lilith cover her naked body in mud, but Charmey made a face at him and handed him his coat. She put on a big pair of headphones and aimed a long microphone at Lilith, who had closed her eyes and had started to chant softly. Y focused the camera and gave a nod to Geek, who took a final hit off the roach.
“Let’s go,” he said, grinding it out in a saucer.
Frank followed Geek out the door. When he looked back, Charmey wrinkled her nose at him and stuck out her tongue.
“Hey!” Lilith called, opening her eyes. “Shut the door! It’s freezing.”
Outside, Geek surveyed the sprawling parking lot and the shopping mall beyond. It was a solid embankment of retail, sitting squatly in the haze of snow. “It’s a beautiful world, Frankie,” Geek said. “A great big beautiful world.”
Buzzed, they cut through the staticky blizzard. The parking lot went on and on.
“Where we gonna walk?” Frank shouted into the wind. The frigid air was spoiling his high. He trailed morosely along until they reached a set of large glass doors, which slid open to admit them. Once inside, Geek stopped. His round-rimmed eyeglasses were white with steam. He took them off and wiped the lenses. He linked arms with Frank’s. They started to stroll.
“Look at all this,” Geek said in a hushed voice, gesturing around him at the endless storefronts, the vaulted arcades, the tiled corridors. “A veritable temple to consumer culture. Aren’t you curious, Frankie?”
“About what?”
“About the big picture?”
“Sure.” Now the warmth of the mall was thawing Frankie’s frozen high, and it hit him like an unexpected wave. He started to giggle. “Shit, dude, I’m really fucked up!”
“Not to worry, little brother. It’s just the tetrahydrocannabinol coursing through your veins.”
“Yeah?”
“THC,” said Geek.
“Right.”
They passed a one-hour photo store. There were brides in frames in the shop window. Snapshots of puppies. Babies in diapers.
“What were we talking about?” Frankie asked.
“About the big picture. About the future of life.”
“Oh,” said Frank. “Hey, Geek, that reminds me . . .”
They passed a corner kiosk selling Gummi bears and roasted nuts. The nuts smelled good, like sweet burned honey, making his penis swell a little and nudge against his jeans.
“Reminds you of what?” Geek asked.
“Nothing,” Frank said. “Hey, can we get some nuts?”
Geek waited for him while he bought a bag of honey roasted. “Did you know that the FDA says that peanuts are the most pesticide-saturated food in the American diet?” Geek said.
“No shit,” Frankie said. The warm, salty-sweet nut taste exploded in his mouth.
“Do you care?”
“Not really. Want some?” He held out the hot little bag. Geek shook his head. “C’mon, have some. They’re good.” He dumped a small pile in Geek’s palm. Geek picked one up and popped it in his mouth.
“Mmm. I like the taste of toxaphene,” he said, eating another.
“Me, too.”
“Zesty diazinon. Delicious DDT.”
“Want some more?”
“Sure,” Geek said. “Thanks.” They continued to walk. “Did you know that peanuts are seeds?” Geek said, pausing to toss one into the air and catch it in his mouth. “What do you know about seeds, Frankie?”
“Not much, Geek.” They walked past Payless Shoes. They walked past a Bugle Boy and a Blockbuster. The mall was pretty empty on account of the weather, but there was a girl in the Gap who gave Frankie a look that made his penis go hard all the way.
“Do you know anything at all?” Geek asked.
“About seeds?” Frank thought for a moment. “You find ’em in apples? You spit ’em out?” The girl disappeared behind a rack of hooded sweatshirts.
“That’s right,” said Geek. “What else?” They walked past a booth where you could get your face put on a T-shirt.
“Stuff grows from them?”
“Precisely!” Geek beamed. They sat on a slatted bench in front of Computown U.S.A. As soon as they stopped moving, everything cranked down into slow motion. Geek’s voice punched through from very far away.
“Seeds are like language, Frankie.”
“Language?” Frank was having trouble hearing.
“Or software, if you like.”
“Oh, sure, software.” That was better. They had computers in his high school back in Ashtabula. It was the only class he liked. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“Excellent,” said Geek, sitting back and smiling. Next to him was a huge palm growing in a planter. He fondled a frond. “Now, take a pea, for example.”
“A pea?”
“A pea’s a program, Frankie, designed to absorb carbon dioxide, minerals, water. You with me so far?”
“Sure, Geek.” He leaned forward. It seemed extremely important to concentrate, to understand what Geek was saying now.
“When you plant the pea, it’s like downloading software. The pea un-stuffs and decompresses into a complex set of instructions powered by the sun. This program allows the plant to create its own food, which makes it grow.”
Frankie nodded. The palm frond waved gently above Geek’s head.
“In the process the pea gives off oxygen, creating a platform to support the life of other organisms, like bacteria, or us. In a sense we’re just byproducts of that program.”
“Of the pea?”
“Precisely.” Geek nodded. “And all the other plants, too. Each one is a complex software program, and so are we. And the really wild part is, we’re all interactive! We can all learn, Frankie, and that’s the marvel! The pea trains the farmer, and the farmer trains the pea. The pea has learned to taste sweet, so that the farmer will plant more of it. Vegetables are like a genetic map, unfolding through time, tracing the paths that human appetites and desires have taken throughout our evolution. It’s the coolest thing. And as their human symbionts, we service their DNA—”
“Symbi-whats?”
“Symbionts. We depend on plants. They depend on us. It’s called mutualism. The balance between nature and culture. At least, it used to be. But now the balances are shifting. You see, Frankie, there used to be this line that nature drew in her soil, which we simply weren’t allowed to cross. A flounder, she said, cannot fuck a tomato.”
“Ha, ha. That’s a good one, Geek.”
“A bacterium cannot breed with a potato.”
“Right!” This, too, was something he could understand.
“Until now.”
“Now?”
“Until genetic engineering. Go back to language for a mome
nt, Frankie, and think about this: Genetic engineering is changing the semantics, the meaning of life itself. We’re trying to usurp the plant’s choice. To force alien words into the plant’s poem, but we got a problem. We barely know the root language. Genetic grammar’s a mystery, and our engineers are just one click up the evolutionary ladder from a roomful of monkeys, typing random sonnets on a bank of typewriters. We’ve learned a lot about letters—maybe our ability to read and spell words now sits halfway between accident and design—but our syntax is still haphazard. Scrambled. It’s a semiotic nightmare.”
Frank sighed and shook his head. “You lost me, Geek. I was never any good at English.”
They left the bench and the palm tree and entered the slipstream of the mall’s great boulevard, eddying past the vending carts selling crystals and carpet cleaners. Magnetic bracelets. Turquoise jewelry. Sunglasses. They took the elevator down and walked through the Food Court. Frankie was hungry again, and he bought a bag of fries at Burger King. They took the elevator back up and walked for a while longer.
“Wanna fry?”
“No thanks,” Geek said. “They look delicious, though.” He threw his arm around Frank’s shoulder. “Did you know that the Aymara of Peru have hundreds of different kinds of potatoes, and they can tell them apart by taste, and they have names for each one?”
“So?” Who needed them? The fries tasted great.
“We only have maybe a dozen kinds left in commercial production here, because engineers have decided that potatoes all have to be the same size. Diversity is inconvenient to mechanized farming. This is what happens when agriculture becomes agribusiness. When engineers replace poets, and corporations gain total domination over all our food and all our poems.” Geek cocked his head. “Monoculture,” he said. “Has a sad and hollow ring to it, no?”
Frankie listened, but he couldn’t discern any ring at all, just the low drone of the filtration system, recirculating the warm mall air.
“I can’t hear it, Geek,” he said. “And besides, what’s the big deal? A potato’s a potato, right? As long as you can make it into fries that come with a burger and a Coke for a couple of bucks. I’ll tell you, that’s a good meal where I come from.”
“Right-o,” said Geek, removing his arm from Frank’s shoulder and clapping him on the back. “I can understand that.”
“No offense. I mean, I like all that stuff you were saying about the peas and the software. And the part about corporations and total domination and stuff totally sucks. But you gotta understand, it’s the protesting that really turns me on. Doing the actions. And I like you guys, so if you say something’s worth fighting, I’ll go along with it. But for me, I don’t really care what I eat, you know? Like, these fries taste great, and I figure I’m just gonna die anyway. Sooner or later.”
“Well, that’s true enough.”
“Is that lame?”
“No. But I can see why Charmey likes you. She’s kind of got a thing about dying young. Did she tell you?”
“No.”
“That’s why she’s so excited about the baby. She always wanted to have one, but she didn’t know if she’d get around to it in time.”
Frankie stopped walking. “That’s totally fucked up!” He shoved his hands deep into his pockets and started kicking at the floor.
“That she wants a kid? Aren’t you into it?”
“Oh, sure, but I’m seventeen years old, dude. I’m too young to be a father.”
“Charmey is pretty clear about raising it by herself.”
They started walking again. “It figures,” Frank said. “Just when things were going so great.” They arrived at the portals of the mall. Outside, in the parking lot, they could see bundled shoppers bent against the wind.
“No need to change your plans, Frankie,” said Geek. “You can still ride with us. Head west. Hang with Charmey. Help her out. She’d appreciate that.”
“Geek, man, you don’t get it. It’s not about the kid. I can get used to that.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“I love Charmey. I don’t want to fucking lose her.”
poo
Ever since their conversation about the NuLifes, Cass and Will were making love on schedule again. In the past this had been somewhat of a chore, as the regimen took some of the spontaneity out of it, but this time felt different. Maybe it was just having Yummy next door, but everything felt a little sexier and more alive.
Cass and Will spent the winter months catching up on the paperwork and bookkeeping. This year Will was trying to master the GPS software, and it was driving him crazy. He’d sit at the computer swearing at it, trying to input data and generate readouts and maps. He hated being indoors, and it seemed like the desk work had doubled since they’d installed the satellite system. It had seemed like a good idea. The geographical information about field conditions provided by the GPS promised to allow them pinpoint accuracy in applying fertilizers and other chemical inputs, and the resulting cost reduction in pesticides and herbicides would pay for the system, but precision farming was new, and they had yet to see any savings. Still, there was the health and safety factor. Will was never one to begrudge expense when it came to safety. He wanted the reassurance of knowing he was doing everything possible.
With Will fuming in the office, Cass took to spending part of each day helping out over at the Fullers’. Yummy was also at her wits’ end. She was trying to get the house ready for Lloyd, consulting with a social worker to have railings and fixtures installed in the bathroom, along with hand grips and carpets and nonskid surfaces. The old plumbing was failing, so Cass said to go ahead and have that repaired as well. Since she and Will technically owned the house, she felt she ought to participate in the structural decisions. Yummy seemed pleased that she wanted to get involved.
Workmen traipsed in and out. Momoko wandered from room to room, confused, getting in the way. Yummy had enrolled the older kids in school, but there was still Poo to look after, and when Phoenix and Ocean got home, they demanded her attention. Phoenix was already having problems. He was smaller and scrawnier than the Liberty Falls kids, who picked on him for being Asian and for having a weird name. A week after the semester began, Yummy got a call from the principal’s office. Her son had broken a classmate’s nose with a karate kick.
“It wasn’t karate,” he told them when they picked him up. “It was Thai boxing.”
Yummy narrowed her eyes. “In Hawaii it makes a big difference,” she said to Cass. “We differentiate between ethnocultural styles of breaking noses.”
Yummy was worried about losing her jobs. She had found substitute teachers to take over her classes, but she was trying to run her real estate business by telephone, making long-distance calls to Pahoa at all hours of the day.
“For Christ’s sake, Barney,” she yelled into the phone, “I only got into this because you said you would help out, remember? You’re supposed to be showing lots, not surfing!” She slammed the phone down and saw Cass watching. “Sorry,” she said, combing her hair back from her temples. “It’s Poo’s dad. He makes me crazy, totally lolo. We sort of broke up, but we still work together on this real estate thing. It seemed like a good idea at the time. He’s a ukulele player when he feels like it, and I really needed to cut back on the teaching.”
His name was Barney Kekuku Parker. When the phone rang again, Yummy glared at it. “If it’s him, tell him to go fuck himself.”
Cass picked up the phone. His voice was tropical, sweet and thick. He started talking before she could even say hello. “Baby, lissen up,” he crooned. “I’m takin’ care of t’ings, so you settle your daddy nice, den you bring your sweet leilani pure-passion ass back home to me, wahine.”
It sounded like music, but she could barely understand what he was saying. “Uh, this is Cass Quinn speaking. I’m Yummy’s next-door neighbor—”
“Hey, Cass!” His voice sounded more normal now, less like a song. “Thought you was Yummy. Howzit going?”
“How’s my Poopoo? Yummy says you’ve been taking good care of him.”
“Poo? He’s a wonderful baby.”
“You said it. He’s laid back—takes after me. Now, you make sure he doesn’t get all uptight and haolefied out there in potato country!” He laughed a huge laugh that filled the phone lines from Pocatello straight across the Pacific. “Just kidding. Tell Phoenix the waves are bad. And tell Yummy to chill.”
Cass hung up the phone. “That was your daddy,” she told Poo. He waved his spoon at her. She tried to imagine what Barney Kekuku Parker looked like. “He said you should chill,” she told Yummy, who groaned. “What does howlified mean?”
“Is that what he said? Haole means ‘white person.’ He’s afraid your honky influence will rub off on his son.”
“Honky?”
“Jeez, Cass! You’re kidding, right? Where have you been?”
“Here. In Liberty Falls.”
A few days later Cass offered to take Poo out for a couple of hours, to give Yummy some time to herself before the older kids got home. Cass suggested it casually, like it didn’t matter to her one way or the other. And it didn’t matter. Not at first. She was just trying to be helpful. But Yummy seemed so grateful. She packed up extra diapers and a bottle and a change of clothes, handed Cass the bag, and dumped Poo into her arms. He chewed on the edge of his mitten and contemplated the two women.
“You really want to do this?” Yummy asked.
“Sure,” Cass said. “If it would help.”
“Oh, Cassie! Would it ever. . . .”
Soon it became a regular thing. Back at home Cass would spread out a big blue blanket on the living room floor and place Poo in the center of it, and then she would sit down and play with him for hours. He was a fat, placid baby, who still hadn’t quite mastered the trick of walking unassisted, although he was learning to push himself to his feet. He’d start on his belly and lift his bottom up into the air, then sneak one pudgy foot, then the other, around to where they would support his weight. Then he’d push off with his strong little arms and come to an upright position. He’d stand there and wobble for a while, and Cass always held her breath, hoping that he’d walk for her first. But just as he’d start to take that step, he’d lose his balance and topple, coming down hard on his diapered behind. He looked so disgruntled she had to laugh, and that would make him laugh, too. Assisted, he could dangle from her fingers and cruise around as though he were really walking, and he liked that, but he seemed equally content to sit in the middle of his blanket and play patty-cake, or roll a ball to Cass, or bang a spoon on the bottom of a pot.
