by Ruth Ozeki
I opened the door and was greeted by the sweet smell of pot carried on the breezes stirring up inside. Geek looked up, startled. Then, seeing me, he looked away.
He was standing at a worktable shelling a large heap of beans, crushing the brittle pods between his fingers, and letting the chaff fall away as the beans dropped into an aluminum bowl below. They made little pinging sounds as they hit the metal. Every so often he would stop and inspect a few beans in the palm of his hand. Finally he held some out to show me. Small holes marred the surfaces of the seed coats.
“Weevils,” he said bitterly. He broke one open with his thumbnail. The tip of the bean was hollow, and curled inside was a tiny grub. “The whole crop is infested. I’m going to try freezing them, but I don’t think they’re dry enough yet.” He mashed the grub between his fingers. “These should have been threshed and dried weeks ago. I fucked up.”
He picked up half a joint that was sitting on the edge of the workbench. He lit it and toked, then offered me some, but I shook my head. He shrugged and ground it out. His hands were covered with small lacerations from the sharp, brittle pods. He scooped up another handful and started crushing.
“It’s not really your fault,” I said. “There hasn’t been a lot of time. . . .”
His fists were like a threshing machine, grinding the pods. “Wrong,” he said. “It is very much my fault. And we don’t have a whole lot of time.”
“Geek . . .” I touched his arm.
He pulled away and turned on me. “Listen, I accept my responsibility, okay? I accept that the explosion may have been my fault. Human error, right? Or maybe not. I accept that, too. I accept that I will never, ever know. Do you know how painful that is? And it still doesn’t change anything. Charmey still didn’t have nearly enough time. Neither did Lloyd. He was just starting to catch on and figure out how to do stuff differently and to teach the rest of us, but then he died. And Momoko’s knowledge is as good as dead now, too. How the fuck are we supposed to learn anything? How are we supposed to make any progress?”
I should have known not to push it—he was too stoned and upset to be rational—but I was feeling just a little bit positive that night, for the first time in so many months or years, and I wanted to help. So I said the most real and banal thing I could think of. “Learning takes time. You have to be patient.”
He brought his fists down hard on the wooden table, making all the beans jump, and now he was mad, but pleading with me, too, desperate to make me understand.
“You’re not hearing what I’m saying! We don’t have time! Don’t you see? It’s all moving too fast. Life itself is on the line here, and unless we can slow down the machine, none of this is going to survive!”
He spread his arms out to encompass the contents of the greenhouse with the racks upon racks of drying seeds. “This is the blueprint of your mother’s garden, Yumi. Imagine it in bloom, in all its incredible beauty and diversity and rich profusion, and now . . . zap! Picture it gone. Now picture the whole planet as a garden, teeming with millions upon millions of flowers and trees and fruits and vegetables and insects and birds and animals and weevils and us. And then, instead of all that magnificent, chaotic profusion, picture a few thousand genetically mutated, impoverished, barren, patented forms of corporately controlled germplasm.”
He held out his hand, as though he were offering me a peach or a tennis ball, then shook it in front of my face. “This is how diminished, how pathetic the planet has become, that you can picture it like a cute little blue-green orb cupped in the palm of your hand. Like a logo or a fucking brand! Is this progress? I don’t think so. It’s bullshit, but that’s all we hear—the same old stories, justifying the same old bad, exploitative, greedy, fucked-up behaviors. The same old excuses about why it’s okay—no, it’s economically beneficial—to raze the land and destroy animal habitat and exploit people and drive honking big SUVs to go shopping at the fucking mall. Nothing changes.”
I backed away from him. “We do what we can—”
“Do we? Really?” He was bearing down on me, eyes bloodshot from the pot. “Well, that’s funny, because I don’t see that. I don’t see you doing much of anything. Look at you, all wrapped up in your neat little stories, blaming your daddy and refusing to take responsibility for your life, spinning all these super justifications for your addictions and the crappy way you treat your kids and bombs that go off in the night—spending all your time feeling cynical and sorry for yourself while the whole fucking world is going to hell in a handbasket!”
“Listen,” I said, getting angry now, “maybe that’s so, but I don’t go around exploiting people and using them to further my political agendas.”
He stopped. He looked at me, aghast. “I use people?” he said. “Who?”
“Lloyd and Momoko for starters. And the kids. And me.”
“I didn’t use you!” he said. He bit off his words, and his shoulders slumped. “Forget it. This isn’t about you or me. It isn’t personal. It’s much bigger.”
“Geek . . .” I said.
“No,” he said. “I’m stoned. Go away.” He turned his back to me. His large shoulders started to twitch, and I realized he was crying.
“What is it?” I said, touching his arm.
He spun around, and his face was wet with tears behind his glasses. “I didn’t use you! I loved you! All of you! I’m not like fucking Rhodes. For God’s sake, Yumi, wake up! I’m not saying you needed to fall in love with me or anything, but can’t you even tell the difference?”
I stood there and held his arm. I watched him cry. I didn’t try to hug him or kiss his tears away because it wouldn’t have been appropriate. Like he’d said, it wasn’t personal. Somehow, though, I got it. The bigger picture.
Standing in my mother’s greenhouse that night, surrounded by mounds of wormy seeds and chaff, I felt the brittle coat around my heart crack open at the hopeless beauty and fragility and loss of all that is precious on earth. He was right, we are responsible. Intimately connected, we’re liable for it all. I had to take responsibility for myself and my kids, but also for Geek and Elliot, and for Charmey and Lloyd, too, and yet at the same time I realized I was powerless to forecast or control any of our outcomes.
But maybe that was the trick—to accept the responsibility and forgo the control? To love without expectation?
A paradox for sure, but such a relief.
toasted
You know how good-byes feel. How the air gets excited when all its ions and electrical charges are disrupted, first by the intent to leave and later by the leaving itself. Then, when the bodies move away through space, they create empty pockets where feelings get caught and eddy around in the vacuum, creating little vortices of relief or sadness or confusion. That’s the way it felt on the day the Seeds left town.
We all turned out to say good-bye. Momoko was there, looking distraught and bewildered. For the last few days Geek had been helping her put the garden to bed, carefully digging under the rows and covering them with straw, while Frankie mulched the perennials and Lilith cut back the roses. Cass and Will would be moving into our house, but between the baby and the business of the farm, Cass wouldn’t have time for much more than a small kitchen-garden plot with basic vegetables, and besides, she didn’t have Momoko’s green thumb. So putting the garden to bed was a sad business, knowing it would never wake up. Not fully. Not next spring. Not ever.
But there would be perennials. And volunteers. And the odd seeds, spit from the lips of children, or shit by birds or small animals, or blown by the wind.
Life is evanescent, but left to itself it rarely fails to offer some consolation.
Cass and Will had come to say good-bye. Of course they brought Tibet, who was far too young to understand that her father was leaving. After all, “father” was a concept that both she and Frankie were still too young to master. “Leaving,” however, she got. The key event of her brief postpartum infant existence had been the abrupt departure of a pair of brea
sts and the steady heartbeat that defined the world. But there were other hearts and sources of sustenance, and true to her name, Tibet was a patient and long-suffering baby. She waved her hands in the air and fixed her gaze into some middle distance that was not quite Frankie. He didn’t mind. He loved her even if she couldn’t love him yet. Even if she couldn’t quite focus on his not-quite-fatherly face. He’d be back in time. He’d teach her stuff to remember.
Will was talking with Geek, who was doing a last-minute check of the automotive fluids. Will was anticipating some problems selling off his NuLifes, Cass had told me. There were boycotts of genetically engineered products in Europe that were eroding the market, and prices were down. McCain, the largest Canadian potato processor, had decided to go GE free, and Frito-Lay had followed suit.
Will was saying to Geek, “I’m not going to plant them if people don’t want to buy them.”
He was ducking under the chassis with Geek. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s a solid potato, but I ran that data, and I can’t see any appreciable gain in yields. I’m betting there won’t be much savings in inputs either. Not in the end.”
He was tailing Geek around the back of the Winnebago. “Heard there’s an organic dairy moving in over by Idaho Falls that might mean a new market for hay. Thought I might check it out.”
He was saying, “Philosophically speaking, I’ve got nothing against growing organic, you know. Problem is, you can’t eat philosophy.”
But Geek was running checks on all the systems of the Spudnik II and simply wasn’t paying much attention.
So Will shrugged his shoulders and stated flat out, “It’s not like any of us are in love with chemicals, but you can’t operate three thousand acres any other way. If I had a choice, I’d farm without them.”
Geek straightened his back and turned to face Will. “You got a choice, dude. We’ve all got choices. Lots of them. Every single second of the day we’re making choices. You’ve just been making bad ones, is all.”
What farmer wouldn’t bristle? Cass was standing next to me holding Tibet, and I heard her draw in her breath. But Will held his tongue and just nodded. “Well,” he said mildly, “we’ll see.”
Cass looked at me then, and her eyes widened.
I was hanging on to Poo and watching Phoenix and Ocean, running frequent checks on their whereabouts. I was looking for signs of imminent departure—a packed duffel bag, a furtive glance in my direction. But Phoenix was just hanging out with Frankie and Lilith, and then just with Lilith, kind of sidling up to her. With a shock I realized he was flirting. He had a crush. I held my breath and prayed.
May he abide in his righteous, childish scorn for members of the opposite sex . . .
No, it was too late for that.
May the son prove stronger than the mother.
Then I saw Lilith cock her head at Phoenix and say, “Well, are you coming?”
And, to my everlasting amazement, I watched my son shrug his boyish shoulders. “I can’t leave my mom,” he said. “She needs me.”
Then Geek ambled over and gave me a powerful hug. “So maybe I’ll see you in Pahoa,” he said, and I really hoped he would.
Frankie took Tibet in his arms one last time before handing her back to Will, and his eyes got all red rimmed and his face so stricken with grief that everyone looked away and got real intent on saying good-byes, and there erupted a sudden confusion of kissing and hugging and handshakes that lasted until the Seeds piled into the Spudnik II. Then the doors closed, and the boxy, inelegant vessel of revolutionary zeal trundled out of the driveway and turned onto the road.
Phoenix stood next to me. I put my arm around his shoulder, and he let me.
“Thanks,” I said. We watched the vehicle disappear behind the poplars, and then we went into the house to finish packing.
We left Liberty Falls in mid-November, a week or so before Thanksgiving. Cass asked us to stay. She wanted to make a big dinner and celebrate, but I found it a lot easier to be thankful outside of Liberty Falls and told her so. Cass hid her disappointment, as always, but I figured it was a lot easier now because she truly had so much to be thankful for. We would be staying in close touch, since, in a moment of weakness, I had volunteered to run the Garden of Earthly Delights Web site from Pahoa, and Cass would be distributing the seeds from Liberty Falls. We would all be meeting up in Hawaii come winter. Cass was delighted when I invited them. It would be the first trip she and Will had taken since their honeymoon, and they would need to buy new suitcases, she said.
“Geek might be there, too,” I told her. We were having a pre-Thanksgiving dinner, with a turkey and vegetables from the garden and, at my insistence, a sampling of Momoko’s many promiscuous squashes. “There’s a spirulena algae farm over on the Kona side of the island that he’s interested in visiting.”
Will had been focused intently on his plate, scooping out the baked contents of something that was not quite Delicata, nor was it Sweetnut. Now he looked up. “The Hawaiian superfood,” he said. “Aloha Aina. ‘Love of the land,’ right?”
I stared at him, astonished. “How do you know that?”
Will sat back, looking pleased with himself. “Just because I’m a spud farmer from Idaho doesn’t mean I’m not interested in all that alternative . . . you know . . . stuff.” He mashed a little of the squash with the back of his spoon and fed it to Tibet on the tip of his finger.
“Honey,” Cass said, “she’s not ready for solid food yet.”
But Tibet smacked her lips and waved her arms enthusiastically.
“She likes it,” Will said, beaming and feeding her some more. “Don’t worry, Cassie. It’s organic.”
Momoko and I spent the last few days closing up the house.
“Just leave it,” Cass said. “We’ll take care of it. Just pack what Momoko needs. If you forget anything, I’ll send it.”
But Momoko didn’t seem to need much at all. She put a few things in a small bag—a pair of pajamas and a toothbrush, a change of clothes and underwear, a bathing suit and a bathing cap, and the framed photograph of Lloyd standing next to a tiny Indian princess whose feather barely reached his belt buckle. And that was that.
“How about some of your favorite seeds?” I asked her. “Geek packed some up for you.”
But Momoko shook her head. “Plenty of seeds in Hawaii,” she said. “Lotsa nice plants already growing there.”
“Well, what about your gardening tools and all your stuff?”
“Too hard work,” she said. “I don’t need to make garden in Hawaii. Everywhere is garden. It is enough.”
So we left the house exactly as it was. I told Cass that if Momoko didn’t want her things by the end of the year, she and Will could just throw out what they couldn’t use, and when the time came to go, we just walked away, leaving everything, even all of Lloyd’s handwritten labels, in place.
Well, almost all of the labels. The last thing Momoko did was to take a piece of packing tape and a label that said TOASTER and stick it to the back of Phoenix’s jacket when he wasn’t looking. Ocean started to giggle, but Momoko shut her up, and nobody else said anything either. We rode in the Quinns’ Suburban to the airport, where we said good-bye to Cass and Will, and then we transferred to three different planes. We made it all the way to the Big Island before Phoenix even noticed.
“Cute,” he said, peeling it off in the baggage claim at the Hilo airport. “I’m not a toaster.”
And you know what Geek would have said to that—in this day and age, without a label, how can you tell?
epilogue: daddy’s letter
Seattle, November 30, 1999
Hey Tibet,
How ya doing, baby? So, we made it to Seattle, and the scene here is totally radical. I mean this thing is huge, and there’s all these people who’ve taken to the streets to protest this fucked-up thing called the WTO, which you don’t know about yet, but unfortunately you probably will. And what’s cool is that there’s workers and environmentalists and an
archists and direct action factions, all pulling together to take back the power. I’ll write you more about this shit, but before that, I want to tell you about how we got here.
At first it was just more flat farmland, and, I mean, look around you. Boring, right? But then we headed north and suddenly we were on this totally gnarly road with curves that wound up and up into the Cascade Mountains. It had just snowed, all white against the blue sky, and there were these crazy trees that were the hugest living things I’ve ever seen.
We got to a rest stop—it was like a campground in the middle of a park with bathrooms—and I was pretty ragged out from being in the vehicle, so I took my board and skated around, and the next thing, I’m standing on this beach next to the most awesome lake, plunked right down there in the middle of the mountains. And it was so pretty and sparkly, and the water was an intense blue-green color—Geek said it came from glaciers—and I’ll tell you, there was absolutely nothing around it. I mean, there were trees and stuff, but nothing human at all. And this next part that happened was probably on account of the dube we’d been smoking, but I was just sitting there next to the lake with my hands in this freezing water, and I started thinking about how Charmey would have totally gotten off on how pretty it was, and I started bawling like a baby—no offense—just missing her and wishing she could be there with me to see it.
