by Ruth Ozeki
It was a clear night and cold. On the far edge of the field the greenhouse glowed like a large, faceted lantern. I wandered over, thinking that maybe Momoko had left the lights on. Instead I found Geek, inspecting an elaborate web of narrow hoses. He looked up when he heard me.
“Come in,” he said. “Close the door.”
It was warm inside, and the humid air and scent of peat hit me full on. “Oh! It feels like Hawaii!”
“You’ve never been inside here?”
“No. I thought it was all closed up and everything was dead.”
I walked down the aisle between the benches. Plants lined the shelves, their branches, leaves, flowers, and tendrils all spilling and twining, green and lively. I reached out and stroked a fern. It had been months since I’d seen anything grow.
“It’s nice here,” Geek said, unclogging a miniature tap and blowing air through it. “You think anyone would mind if I brought a hammock and slept out here?”
“Ask Momoko. I don’t mind.”
“It gets kind of crowded in the Spudnik, with two couples.”
“It’s wet in here, though.” A drop of condensation formed and fell from the glass pane onto my head. “You could make a tent out of a tarp.”
“A tent and a hammock,” he said. “And a corner bar that serves smart blue drinks with little umbrellas. You could join me in the afternoon for tropical cocktails.”
It sounded nice. “The kids miss Hawaii.”
“You do, too.”
“Yup. I hate it here.” I walked along the rows of seedlings, running my finger across their feathery tops. He didn’t say anything and the quiet made me want to talk. “I ran away when I was fourteen. This is my first time back.”
He lowered the hoses to the workbench. “But you’ve seen your parents in the interim?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“That’s pretty intense.” He picked up a plastic connector and fitted it back into the end of a hose. “I won’t ask why you left. But why come back?”
“Beats me. I guess I felt the kids should meet their grandparents. They’ve all got different fathers, and I wanted them to know they shared something other than just me. But mainly I was curious. I’m thirty-nine. You get that way.”
“Great,” he said. “That gives me something to look forward to.”
“What, like in the next decade?”
“Yeah.” He shrugged. “More or less.”
I watched him work, cleaning out the valves with a sharp piece of wire. I felt old and cranky. “So are you guys really planning to stick around here and help with the seeds, or was that little speech of yours more or less bullshit?”
He looked up quizzically. “Why do you doubt us?”
“Hey. Life on the road, man. Just one big flow, right? All I want to know is, are you going to flow on out of here or can I count on you?”
“Sure,” he said. He pushed his glasses up with the back of his hand. “Listen, I’ll make a deal with you. We’ll stick around as long as you do.”
“Great.” It was not exactly what I wanted to hear. “You better set up that bar and get those blue drinks coming quick. I’m going to need them.”
He held up the web of hosing and grinned. “I’m working on it.”
wireworm
“You have two choices for accommodations,” Jillie said. “The Liberty Motel or the Falls Motel.”
Elliot looked up from the computer. Jillian was perched on the edge of his desk, balancing a legal pad on her knee and showing thigh beyond it. “Huh?”
“Pay attention, Elliot,” she said, tugging down her skirt. “I don’t have to do this, you know. I’m not your secretary. I’m just trying to help so we can get out of here and get some food. I’m starving.”
He sighed. “Sorry.”
“Which will it be?”
“Which is better?”
“They both have telephones.”
“Oh. Super.”
“The Liberty allows pets—”
“The Falls,” he said.
It was going to be a long night. Elliot took a sip of cold coffee as he watched Jillie on the phone. If he leaned back in his chair, pushing the limits of its hydraulic tilt feature, he could almost see up into the dark triangular grotto formed by her crossed thighs. He tried to calculate if he’d have time to grab a bite to eat with her, take her home, fuck her, come back to the office, and finish his press release by deadline. Not likely. Something would have to go.
Food.
No, she’d already expressed her feelings about that. Maybe they could fuck now, or in the cab on the way to a restaurant. Maybe they could get takeout and go to her place. He sighed. He could see he was going to have to forgo the fucking. It was always the fucking. Hardly seemed fair.
He looked back at the screen and reread the lead:
Political Activists or Just Plain Old Pests?
Whatever you call them, their politics are familiar: anticorporate, antigovernment, antiglobalization. And most offensive of all, anti-American. These so-called radical environmentalists represent the latest fad in the protest movement that traces its roots to the sixties. And, like their progenitors in the political proscenium, the target of their opposition is progress.
Ugh. Too many P’s. Where did they get these speechwriters?
“What’s that all about?” Jillian was standing next to him now, peering over his shoulder and butting him with her pudendum.
He sighed. “Potatoes.”
“Huh?”
“It’s a speech I have to give to a bunch of farmers. No big deal. Listen, Jillie, I gotta come back here tonight. You wanna just get takeout and catch a cab and . . . ?”
“Forget it, Elliot. I need real food. Meat and, yes, potatoes. Come on!”
Elliot sighed and got to his feet.
“I don’t get the connection,” she continued in the elevator, taking Elliot’s hand out from under her skirt. “Radical environmentalists don’t like spuds?”
“You’re not making this easy, Jillie.”
“It’s not supposed to be easy, Elliot. If it were easy, you wouldn’t want it.” The digital voice chip in the elevator, programmed to a feminine tonality, announced their arrival in the lobby. Elliot grimaced. “I don’t like her,” he complained as the elevator door slid open. “What happened to the ding? I liked the ding.”
“I’ve noticed that you’re a bit of a Luddite, Elliot.” Jillie’s heels clicked across the marble lobby of the D&W building. Elliot lagged behind, admiring the tautness of her calves. He felt terribly sad. Why was he such a horny old bastard? Why was Jillian so excruciatingly young and lovely just now?
“No, I’m not,” he said. “I’m all for progress. I just miss the good old ding.”
“Yeah, well, you and your ding. How did that go?”
Out on the street Elliot held his hand up for a taxi.
“ ‘My ding-a-ling, my ding-a-ling . . .’ ” Jillie had a nice singing voice.
He held the door open for her and climbed in after. She stopped singing long enough to give the driver the name of a steak house. Elliot stared at his hands, lying on his thighs. They looked like dead animals. Roadkill. Run over and lifeless.
“You’re right, Jillie. I shouldn’t have mauled you in the elevator. I should appreciate you for your mind.”
“That’s okay. I forgive you. Now, tell me, it’s got a great ring to it, but why Liberty Falls?”
“I’m giving that speech at a big Potato Promotions Council meeting in Pocatello, and I—”
“You’re meeting to promote big potatoes?”
“Right.” He could tell she was just trying to keep him talking.
“And these potato-hating radical environmentalists are . . . ?”
He sighed. She didn’t really care. “It’s biotech they hate. Genetically engineered food. Potatoes, in particular. They mobilize all over the country and dress up in costumes and do actions—”
“That’s adorable! What do you mean
, actions?”
“You know. Political actions. They’re activists.”
“Like what you used to do in the old days? In Frisco? Sit-ins and happenings and stuff, with your fists in the air?”
Oh, God, she was so young.
“ ‘Power to the People’ and all that?”
“All that,” he said. “And boycotts and teach-ins and street theater—”
“Street theater? Oh, God, not those awful puppets? ”
She was cracking up. He watched her patiently. An idea was beginning to dawn on him. “Listen, are you interested in this?”
“Not really.”
“Because it’s a good story.” If he could get her interested, maybe she could sell it to her editor. “It’s not all just puppets and unwashed kids. Some of these groups are engaging in heavy-duty terrorist tactics—arson, blowing up labs and research facilities. Last year they tore up a bunch of transgenic-crop test sites around the country. They’re linked to large international groups with lots of media clout in Europe, and we think they may be planning something. A protest against potatoes or—”
“No!” exclaimed Jillian. “Possibly planning a protest against potatoes?”
He grimaced but soldiered on. “Things are heating up after all the WTO fuss in Europe. You interested? You think Wurtz would run something on this?”
“No, Elliot. I’m just probing the workings of your slimy PR mind.”
“Hey,” he said. “I used to be a journalist, too, you know.”
“Before your fall. So what’s in it for you?”
He smiled. “Purely the pleasure of passing on helpful information to you,” he said, placing his hand on her knee. “It’s what I do. It’s why you like me. Why you deign to slum around with me and tolerate my advances. I’m a useful guy.”
“Used to be,” she said, pushing him away. “Back when you were still doing big tobacco. People were interested. Plus it was sort of a thrill, dating someone truly on the side of evil. I used to get a lot of points for that.”
“Tobacco is old, Jillie. Biotech is cutting edge. It’s just a matter of finding the right angle. You’ll see.”
“And yours is . . . ?”
“The human angle, Jillie.” His voice was husky. “C’mon, I’m looking for a little grassroots support, here.”
“I get it,” she said, slapping his hand as it crept up the inside of her thigh. “Let me guess. You’re going to some podunk potato town to pimp some poor farmer’s wife—”
“Cute. Too many P’s.”
“—for the heartbreaking story of harassment by the Luddite left.”
“Always looking for an attractive victim. You think Wurtz would be interested?”
“Nope. Wurtz isn’t interested in potatoes. No one is interested in potatoes. Didn’t you used to live in Idaho?”
“Oh, please.”
“Teaching high school or something?”
“ ‘In my salad days—’ ”
“Dodging the draft?”
“ ‘When I was young and green of judgment—’ ”
“Elliot, I said it was okay that you tried to maul me in the elevator because I felt sorry for you. It is not okay in a taxi.”
“Can’t help it. I’m an activist, babe. Just looking for a little action.”
fourth
O, Mr. Burbank, won’t you try
and do some things for me?
A wizard clever as you are
can do them easily.
A man who turns a cactus plant
into a feather bed
Should have no trouble putting brains
into a cabbage head.
—Anonymous, quoted in A Gardener Touched with Genius: The Life of Luther Burbank
spring
Every seed has a story, Geek says, encrypted in a narrative line that stretches back for thousands of years. And if you trace that story, traveling with that little seed backward in time, you might find yourself tucked into an immigrant’s hatband or sewn into the hem of a young wife’s dress as she smuggles you from the old country into the New World. Or you might be clinging to the belly wool of a yak as you travel across the steppes of Mongolia. Or perhaps you are eaten by an albatross and pooped out on some rocky outcropping, where you and your offspring will put down roots to colonize that foreign shore. Seeds tell the story of migrations and drifts, so if you learn to read them, they are very much like books—with one big difference.
“What’s that?” Ocean asks at this point in the story. She loves stories. Laps at their shorelines, licking them up like an incoming tide.
The difference is this: Book information is relevant only to human beings. It’s expendable, really. As someone who has to teach for a living, I shouldn’t be saying this, but the planet can do quite well without books. However, the information contained in a seed is a different story, entirely vital, pertaining to life itself. Why? Because seeds contain the information necessary to perform the most essential of all alchemies, something that we cannot do: They know how to transform sunlight into food and oxygen so the rest of us can survive.
Of course, this is what planting is all about—the ancient human impulse to harness that miracle and to make it perform for our benefit. To emulate the divine author and tease forth a new crop of stories from the earth.
Spring comes late to Liberty Falls, but by March the farmers are already chafing at the bit, surveying the fields and mapping spring rotations, checking over equipment and inspecting their seed. They scan the skies where the clouds meet the horizon, as though by looking hard enough they could stave off the cold air masses that flow down from Canada. They stare at their fields, kicking at the frozen sod as though by the force of wishing they could make the earth thaw. They wonder what luck, good or bad, God has in store for them, but mostly they are filled with a wild, irrational hope. They are ready to resurrect the year.
I was tired of winter, too, and making plans to transplant my little seedlings. If we went home soon, I might still be able to teach the remainder of the semester, but if I stayed away any longer, this school year was lost, and with it all pretense of an academic career. Adjunct teachers are the professorial equivalent of the migrant Mexican farm laborers hired during harvest. If you can score a good contract at the same farm every year, where the farmer pays on time and doesn’t cheat or abuse you, then it’s in your best interest to show up consistently from year to year. Neither job gives you health insurance or benefits. Harvesting potatoes might pay slightly better in the short run, but teaching gives you the warm satisfaction of nurturing young minds, at least inside the classroom. The minute you step outside, however, this satisfaction is undermined by the college administration. The nontenured faculty form a downtrodden, transient underclass, inferior in every way to the landed professorial gentry.
I knew I had to get back, but as the days passed, I couldn’t seem to make the decision to leave. When you’re caretaking someone who is sick or waiting to die, you get hung up in a morbid limbo, waiting for something to happen, to release you back into your life. Not that I was doing much caretaking. Y and Lilith were looking after Lloyd. Not that Lloyd was showing any signs of dying.
“Where’s Melvin?” he said. “Just get me downstairs. I can move about fine once I’m down the stairs.”
“Dad, you’re supposed to be taking it easy.”
“The year doesn’t wait. We have to get going on those transplants.”
“It’s early. It’s still freezing outside.”
He waved his hand in my direction, like I was an annoying fly to shoo away. “Gotta start the leeks.”
Geek was helping Momoko with the starts, and Ocean was pitching in. From time to time the boy Frankie would show up, which meant Phoenix would deign to join them. They’d stand around the potting table in the greenhouse, making exotic mixtures of peat, sand, grit, lime, and leaf mold. Geek was planning to concentrate on the soybeans, planting out all of the forty-odd varieties in my parents’ collection, to make sure tha
t the seed was still viable and to build up the stock.
“They’re pretty!” Ocean said. She had been making little paper pots out of old newspaper and filling them with soil, and now Geek gave her a sack of soybeans, labeled JEWEL. She took out a bean. It was shiny yellow with a black saddle. She poked her finger into the soil and made a hole, dropped in the bean, and patted the hole closed.
Geek watched approvingly. “Kids, did you know that more than half of the soybeans planted in America are genetically engineered? And a third of the corn, too.”
“So?” Phoenix asked.
“So? That’s over sixty million acres! Nature’s own varieties are slowly dying out. Soon all we’ll have are genetically modified mutants.”
“Mutants,” said Phoenix. “Cool.” He high-fived Frankie. There was only three years difference between them, and Phoenix thought Frankie was just about perfect.
While the rest of them planted, I drifted in and out, sniffing into the corners of the house and the outbuildings. It felt so strange, being back in this place where I’d abandoned my childhood. What did I expect to find now? A little-girl-shaped shadow, perhaps, covered in cobwebs at the back of some forgotten closet. But she hadn’t left a trace. The storage room where the seeds were kept was dark and cold. There were rows of shelves covered with old boxes of all different kinds: shoe boxes, kitchen appliance boxes, but mostly old Kleenex boxes—my parents really went through the Kleenex. The boxes were filled with reused envelopes, in turn filled with seeds. The envelopes were ancient, too, with canceled postmarks and the addresses crossed out. They must have saved every envelope they’d ever received, because there were thousands, each one carefully slit across one end, filled with seeds, then taped shut and labeled. Or at least some were labeled. Many were not.
