by Ruth Ozeki
“I get plenty of rest. Now is the time to act, right Momoko?”
Momoko blinked, then nodded.
I turned on Geek. “You’ve brainwashed my father! You’re turning him into a goddamned poster boy for your politics—”
“He’s doing no such thing,” Lloyd said. “This is not about politics. This is about life!”
My face was burning. “Oh, for God’s sake, Dad. It’s just plants.”
Geek said, “Plants have a right to life, too.”
And then I lost it. I looked at Geek, and then at Lloyd, and then back again. The two of them—the young radical environmentalist and the old fundamentalist farmer—made a ridiculous alliance, and I started to laugh. “Oh, wow! That’s the kind of pro-life bullshit that drove me out of here in the first place!”
Lloyd brought his fist down on the arm of the chair. “A life is a life! ” he said. His eyes were bloodshot, and he could barely choke out the words. “It is God’s gift! How can you be so careless?”
It wasn’t funny any longer. You can’t argue with fanatics. I turned and walked away. Certainly no one thought to stop me. I felt them watching as I crossed the yard.
“Oh, buggah,” I heard Phoenix whisper to his sister. “She’s plenty huhu now!”
A full moon was rising over the barn, still low in the sky and so bright it stretched my shadow out long. I walked to the end of the dirt road where the cluster of mailboxes stood, silhouetted in the moonlight like crooked sentries guarding the adjacent potato field. I sat on a rock nearby and smoked a cigarette, watching the smoke dissipate into the silvery air.
After a while I heard footsteps behind me, but I didn’t turn around. Then I heard Geek’s voice. He spoke quietly.
“Sorry about all that.”
I didn’t answer. I heard him shuffling his feet in the dirt. I thought he was going to leave, but instead he sat down by the side of the road, just at the edge of my line of vision. He started scooping up handfuls of sand that had blown out of the field and letting the grains trickle through his fingers.
“Look at this,” he said. “Amazing that anything can grow here at all.” He looked out over the neat rows of potatoes, row after parallel row, that went on until you got dizzy from the sheer geometry of it. The sprinklers were off for the night, but drops of water glistened on the plants’ dark leaves. Geek started to talk.
“The wondrous thing about nature, her gift to us, is her wanton promiscuity. She reproduces herself with abandon, with teeming, infinite generosity. The first knuckle-dragging humanoid to realize this became the world’s first farmer, and all the farmers who came after for thousands of years knew this, too. They saved seeds from their harvest, planted them, harvested them, and so it went, on and on, in a perfect, perpetually interconnected wheel of life. Until now.”
“Now?” He was making me nervous.
“Now.” His voice was tight and his face haggard. He turned, and the moonlight reflected off his round lenses. He looked like a madman with wild, bouncing eyes. “Now it’s too late.”
I shivered. “You really believe that, don’t you? That these are the end times? That basically we’re fucked and it’s too late to save the world?”
He looked away and shook his head. “Can’t afford to believe that. Despair is not a morally acceptable choice.” He smiled, and the madman was gone. “I’m not a religious fanatic, and I am pro-choice, you know.”
“Listen,” I said, “I can’t stop you from doing this action, and God knows I can’t stop Lloyd, but please understand that he takes this right-to-life stuff seriously. A lot of people around here do. Don’t get him all riled up about it. It’s not a joke.”
“Believe me, I know it’s not a joke.” He sat there tossing pebbles from the road into the field.
“Why did I let you come back here? You were planning this whole thing from the very start, weren’t you?”
He didn’t answer, just stood up and offered me his hand. He was whistling “Sweet Leilani.”
I ignored his hand and got to my feet. “I should just pack up the kids and take them back to Pahoa, before any more trouble starts.” I started walking back toward the farmhouse. Geek walked beside me.
“Hmm,” he said with a quizzical smile. “It must be nice to live in paradise.”
bugs
Cass and Will sat on either side of Geek in front of the monitor, watching his fingers fly across the keyboard. Cass had taken typing in high school, so she was fairly fast, but the commands were a challenge. Will was even slower—he still pecked. He had resisted when Cass suggested they ask Geek for help. He prided himself on being able to figure things out. But she said it wasn’t every farm that had a computer whiz living next door, and in the end he relented, muttering all the while that it was a sad day when you had to have a Ph.D. from MIT to farm potatoes. And although Geek laughed and reassured them that he was a dropout, his expertise was obvious. He typed something and sat back while the printer whirred. Will just shook his head.
“That should take care of it,” Geek said, retrieving the printout and looking it over. “Appears you have a slight dip in elevation at the edge of this field that led to the drainage problem.”
“Already knew that,” Will said. “So what was wrong with the computer?”
“Bug,” Geek said, shrugging his shoulders. “In the software. Thought it might be a virus at first, and I ran a bunch of diagnostics. Then the guy at tech support had me download a patch that seems to take care of the problem. It’s a cool program. You can do all kinds of stuff.”
Will shook his head again. “I’m still trying to master the basics. Managed to pull up some soil analysis and yield information last year, but I loaded in the data wrong, so my results came up all screwy.” He pulled out a couple of maps and showed Geek.
“Wow,” Geek said, studying them. “That GPS generates some really detailed information.”
“Sure, but all the computer data in the world won’t hold back an early frost. It still comes down to weather. And acts of God.”
Geek nodded and looked closer at the edge of the map, where Will had scribbled some planting notes. He frowned. “Which field is this?”
“Fuller West Four,” Will said. “The one just behind Fuller’s greenhouse. Right across the road there.”
“Are you planting NuLifes there?”
Will nodded. “Got ’em in the fields closest to both houses. We’re trying them out this year for the first time, but we’re optimistic. Seem to be doing pretty well so far.”
“Do they do what they’re supposed to do?”
“Seem to. We’re seeing the first of the adult beetles now, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed.”
“Do you mind if I take a look?”
Will shrugged. “Sure. We can go over right now if you want.”
Cass went with them. She felt uneasy. The sun was high over the potato field in question, one of two separating the Quinns’ house from the Fullers’. They walked along the dirt road. The sunlight was shimmering on the glossy surfaces of the leaves. The solstice had come and gone, and now it was the end of June and the rows were closing, forming a single unbroken expanse of green speckled with clusters of pinkish flowers. They followed Will off the hard-packed road.
“There’s one,” said Will. “Watch.” He pointed down to the deep green leaf of the NuLife. A mature Colorado potato beetle had just cruised in for a landing on the leaf’s shiny surface. The beetle had a humped yellow carapace, striped and sporty. It ambled to the edge of the leaf and took a nibble. Nothing happened.
“Just wait,” said Will.
They waited. The beetle wandered around for a bit.
“Here,” Geek said. He pointed to another beetle, staggering drunkenly across the surface of a leaf. He reached out to pick it up, but it tumbled and fell to the ground. He retrieved the beetle from the dirt. “Wow. He’s a goner.”
Good, thought Cass. She watched Geek’s gloomy face as he inspected the wiggling legs of the d
ying bug. He was a nice guy, she thought. He knew computers, but he sure didn’t know much about potatoes, or life for that matter. The fact was, some things had to die so that others could live, and the idea was to try to maximize your chances of staying on the living side for as long as you could. She wiped a leaf with her fingers, crushing a newly hatched clutch of feeding larva, then rubbed the orange smear on her jeans.
“What’s amazing about the NuLife line,” Will was explaining, “is that it manufactures its own insecticide. The idea is to cut back on the chemical applications we’d be using otherwise.”
“When you say it makes its own insecticide, where does it do that exactly?”
“In the cells of the plant.” Will spread his arm to encompass the hundred-acre field, a vast sea of green stretching out around him. “Every leaf and flower and stem . . .”
“In the roots?”
“You mean the potatoes? Sure.”
“But we eat those.”
“It’s harmless to humans,” Will said. “It’s a bacterial toxin called Bt. It’s used in organic farming. It works on the digestive tract of the insect. Turns it into pulp—”
“Bacillus thuringiensis,” Geek said. “Organic farmers use it topically, and very sparingly, and that’s the point. These are very high concentrations you’re talking about. Do we know what happens to people who ingest that much?”
Cass was watching Geek. Maybe he knew more about potatoes than she had thought. His forehead was sweating.
“Let me finish,” Will said. “First of all, there’s a big difference between the digestive system of a bug and a man. Second, Bt is a soil bacterium that’s found in nature—”
“Sure it’s found in nature,” said Geek. “But not inside natural potatoes. And certainly not in concentrated doses inside every single cell of the potato. Organic farmers use it to control the worst of the infestations, but mostly they don’t have to. They use other means, like rotating crops, planting different varieties of potatoes—”
“We rotate, too, you know.”
“Yeah, but what’s your schedule? A year? Two? Three? Not enough. And what about other beneficial insects? Like monarch butterflies that die eating Bt corn pollen?”
“Chemical pesticides kill off a lot more butterflies, believe me. It’s a question of the lesser of two evils. Anyway, that was corn. We’re talking potatoes.”
“Okay, then what about the problem of resistance? What happens when your beetles become resistant?”
The two men faced each other over a leafy row. Cass could see Will’s jaw tighten as he tried to control his temper.
“Then we’ll just have to try something else,” he said.
“It’s the problem with the system,” Geek said. “Monoculture is weak. You should know that. You’re Irish.”
“If you’re talking about the Famine, it was caused by late blight. You’re confusing blight with beetles. Monoculture is efficient. We got six billion humans on the earth, and a lot of them are starving.”
“Oh, right,” Geek said. “That’s just corporate marketing. The masses aren’t starving because there isn’t enough food. There’s a surplus—you know that! People are starving because that food isn’t being distributed fairly, to those in need. The population explosion argument is the oldest spin in the books!”
Will turned and spat. Cass held her breath. “Look at the demographics. You want people not to have babies? You just try telling them they can’t. Listen, I’m no lover of the corporations. As far as I’m concerned, our situation on the farm with agricultural chemicals isn’t all that different from what happened to guys in Vietnam getting addicted to marijuana—”
“Aw, come on!” Geek said. “Marijuana’s a plant. You can’t compare it with chemical compounds like organophosphates and—”
“Fine. Heroin, then. Crack. Whatever. It’s the system I’m talking about. The corporations are the pushers, the farmers are the users, and the fields are our bodies, mainlining the stuff in order to wake up in the springtime and keep ticking until fall.”
Geek shrugged. “So just say no?”
“It’s not that simple. Cold turkey would kill us, but at least we’re trying to cut down. That’s the whole point of this.”
They both fell silent, looking out over the closing rows of NuLifes. Bees were moving heavily from flower to flower, and the air was filled with their buzzing.
“No wonder the beetles keep coming back,” Geek said. “Reliable menu. Plenty of it. It’s like a fast-food joint.”
“Not now,” said Will grimly. “Not anymore.” They watched another beetle keel over and die.
“I don’t know,” said Geek. “Maybe now more than ever.”
They moved off down the row. Cass hung back, watching a leaf where two beetles were copulating. The male had mounted the female, but when Cass pushed at him with the tip of her finger, he fell off his mate and turned belly up, waving his legs weakly in the air. Poor thing, she thought. Just when he was getting lucky. She caught up with the men by the roadside and started back toward the house.
“Hey, Cass?” Geek said. “Before you go . . . ?”
She paused. They stood at the edge of the field.
Geek cleared his throat. He looked nervous now, standing there among the blossoms. “Well, I guess you know where we stand.”
“I guess we do,” Will said.
“It’s nothing personal. It’s just our position.”
Will nodded.
“So,” Geek said, “we wanted you to know that we’re organizing a little event over at the Fullers’ in a couple of weeks, on the Fourth of July weekend.”
“What do you mean, an event?” asked Cass.
“Like a teach-in. To educate people about genetically engineered crops.”
Will frowned. “Does Lloyd know about this?”
“He’s being very supportive. He gave us his customer list. We’re inviting the Power County community, too, and people from Pocatello and the university. And our friends. We’re expecting a pretty wide range of folks. We thought you should know.”
Will nodded, but he didn’t look happy.
“If anything happens,” Geek said, “we’ll be responsible for it.”
Cass looked up. “What’s going to happen?”
“Probably nothing. All I’m saying is that if anything were to happen . . .” He gestured vaguely toward the field. “We’d compensate you for the damages, of course.”
“Damages?” Will repeated. “Wait a minute. Are you saying you’re planning to harm our NuLifes?”
“Not at all. I’m just saying, on the outside chance . . .”
On the way back to the house Will exploded. “I can’t believe him! Criticizing the way I farm, then threatening my crops! If I catch those people anywhere near my fields, I’m calling the sheriff. No, that’ll be too late. I’m calling Odell right now.”
Cass placed her hand in the middle of her husband’s back. He was perspiring, and his shirt felt hot against her palm.
“They haven’t done anything.”
“He threatened my crops. You heard him.”
“It was hardly a threat,” she said. “Anyway, what are you going to do? Have them all arrested?”
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
“This is America, Will. You can’t arrest people for their beliefs, remember?”
“Fine. I’ll get a restraining order, then. Prevent them from assembling.”
“It’s private property. We don’t own Fuller’s house yet.”
“Fuller!” Will said, shaking his head. “He’s had some crazy ideas in the past, but this is too much. I know he’s a sick old man and he probably isn’t all there in the head anymore, but he shouldn’t be encouraging them.”
She tried to change the subject. “Is it true what he said about Bt concentrations?”
“Not you, too!” Will said, groaning. “How did this happen? And I’m supposed to sit by and let this . . . this cult take over the neighborhood?”<
br />
“They’re not a cult, Will.”
“I saw them doing something weird under that damn peach tree. They had Yummy’s girl with them, singing and dancing and banging on drums like heathens.”
“We sing hymns, too.”
“It’s not the same.”
And so it went, all through dinner and up until bedtime. Will crawled under the covers still grumbling, but Cass had teased the worst of it out of him, so when she reached her arm across his stomach, he turned to face her.
“You want to try?” she whispered.
“Never hurts.” But from the way he said it, she knew that sometimes it did hurt. As they made love, the image of the copulating beetles in the field kept flitting back into her mind. The doomed, futile mating distracted her, so that when she sensed that Will was close, she faked an orgasm and let him come, then held him until he fell asleep. But she felt restless and wide awake, so she lay there and watched him, checking his breathing from time to time, holding her finger below his nostrils to make sure he was still alive.
molt
There were new deities on Duncan’s desktop. Elliot glanced nervously at the pantheon as Duncan reached over and picked up a small bronze statue of a plump-bellied elephant wearing a diaper.
“Ganesh,” Duncan said. “Remover of obstacles.” He rubbed the little elephant’s belly and handed him to Elliot.
Elliot looked down at the statue. The past couple of weeks had been filled with obstacles. Now he noticed that the incense in the room was different, too. Sweeter, and the scent unsettled him. He replaced the elephant and tried to pay attention.
“I felt myself moving away from Zen,” Duncan was saying. “I was finding Buddhism somehow lacking—too spare for the new millennium. I was feeling that the times were calling for a more robust system of devotion, something more grounded in the body.” Duncan picked up another deity. It was a flying monkey carrying a mountain on a platter. “Hanuman,” he said. “Creativity. The power of persuasion. A lively mind. Renowned for his complete devotion to Vishnu, the Lord of all Creation.” He gave Elliot a skewering look. “He can move mountains for his master.”
