All I Have in This World

by Michael Parker

  “You go first.”

  “Entrepreneur,” he said.

  “There’s a lot of that going around these days,” said Annie. “Though I have never figured out what it means. Up here I think it means you’re cooking meth in your trailer.”

  “I’m peddling plants,” he said, “but they’re fantastical, not medicinal.”

  “Well, as long as you can make money off it, and as long as any money you do lose, I mean if you happen to lose any, comes out of your half, I mean, what am I going to do? Come down there and plant some hydroponic lettuce?”

  “So is that a yes?”

  “You should call Mom, Marc,” said Annie. “She told me the other day she hadn’t heard from you in six months.”

  “I called her on her birthday. A matter of weeks, actually. She’s not so good at math.”

  “Let’s hope you are,” said Annie.

  Marcus did not feel bad lying to his sister about the greenhouses because she clearly had no interest in anything but collecting a check. He felt no compunction to share with her his plans to build the educational center, either, for that part of the plan he was sure she would have an opinion about—the word nonprofit, he suspected, would get her attention—but since he had not even broken ground for his museum at that point, it seemed premature to alarm her.

  So he signed contracts to provide wholesalers with his traps and he planted not only flytraps but pitchers and butterworts and all the other varieties of carnivorous plants that thrived in the swamps on his property. His first crop, the yield was pitiful. Everything that might align against him did so swiftly and with no mercy. A killing frost late in the season took away all that he’d planted. Deer and feral pigs feasted on the seedlings. Most worrisome were the poachers who came in the night or for all Marcus knew in the broadness of the day, sneaking in while he was in town or having lunch on his porch, the sort of desperadoes who yanked copper wire from nearly finished houses to sell on the black market for money he assumed went into their arms or bellies.

  Even had his business thrived, the not-for-profit center itself would have floundered. Though there were dozens of reasons for its failure, he still had a hard time believing that he had built a shrine and no one had come. He liked to remind himself that the location was remote, miles from any interstate, in a region of the country so besotted with swamp and river and sound that roads, based on old stagecoach routes, were circuitous, and routes to the center managed to elude even MapQuest. But it was for the center that Marcus had borrowed the brunt of the loans, and he’d been wasteful from the start, conducting research with a month-long road trip around the country to visit similar sites. Any nonprofit whose aim it was to provide information about nature to the public made his list, and there were a surprising number of them: museums devoted to rice, to corn, to kudzu, cacti, redwoods, wildflowers, even pine trees. Because this was business and he planned to write the entire excursion off on his taxes, he had been foolishly extravagant, forgoing campsites and the mom-and-pop motels for more luxurious accommodations with fitness centers, minibars, wireless access.

  He never got around to telling Annie about the center even after the structure—a geodesic dome that was Marcus’s only concession to the idea of a greenhouse, given that he needed the light for his exhibits and he had long been a fan of Buckminster Fuller—was completed. One day she would show up for a visit and discover it nestled among the pines just off the highway. What a surprise it would be for her, the dome glinting in the afternoon light, the buses parked in their own special lot.

  But she did not come, and he did not worry about her because there were dozens of other things to consider even after the center was built. He certainly never figured that creating a museum called for the expertise of those whose sole job it was to design exhibits. Only when his plans proved both crude and without substance, the copy he wrote to accompany them formless, rambling, and short on actual fact, did he succumb to looking up such professionals on the Internet.

  He settled on a woman from Washington, since the district had not only the most museums, but the best. He did not like her from the moment he saw her. She was humorless and inappropriately shod. When he explained that they would be walking in the woods, she asked about snakes and said she was particularly sensitive to mosquitoes. Finally she asked to use his restroom and emerged dressed in a vest of many pockets that one might wear while trout fishing or on safari.

  The rest of the day was miserable with questions Marcus not only could not answer but deemed maddeningly literal. They sat at his kitchen table, two floor fans trained on them, for she declared herself overly sensitive to humidity and could not believe he did not have air-conditioning. Air-conditioning to Marcus was like a greenhouse. He started to explain why but stopped himself from such a futile task.

  “What do you want the public to know?” asked the woman, whose name was Carrie, though she introduced herself as Dr. Elwood. He did not ask what he wanted to ask: Doctor of what, exactly? Exhibit design? Having spent some time in the halls of academe, he knew better than to disparage the pursuit of a high degree in a subject obscure or obsolete. But he refused to call her, or anyone else who did not set bones or dispense drugs, Doctor.

  “I want them to know all about the carnivorous plant,” he said, as if this was understood.

  “Right,” she said, smirking at the screen of her laptop, which she claimed to have brought along to show him some of her work. “But you need to be more specific if we are to come up with specialized and targeted exhibits.”

  After a pause, he said he thought the word leach was crucial to his mission.

  “Leech? As in what primitive medicine believed to be a panacea?”

  Marcus laughed, mostly at her diction.

  “No,” he said. “ L-e-a-c-h. As in the soil my plants grow in is so acidic that it leaches the earth of nutrients. Most plants can’t survive in this habitat because they are deprived of ingredients essential to their health.”

  She was nodding now, Carrie Elwood. “Such as?”

  “Nitrogen, phosphorus, magnesium, sulfur, calcium, potassium.”

  “Okay, good,” she said, clacking away on her keyboard. “That’s a start. But I’m not sure why you emphasize the term leach. Especially since it is hardly an attractive word, even if it is a homophone.”

  Marcus stifled a sigh at the word homophone.

  “I emphasize it because the very elements we need to survive are taken away from us by life itself.” I, too, can fill the room with pretentiousness and pedantry, Marcus realized, though it seemed silly to be playing this game, given the amount he was overpaying her.

  She studied him over the top of her computer as if he was a student in one of her classes who had said something so off the mark that it was worth pursuing, though only to kill time until the bell rang.

  “What elements are those?”

  “Most crucial is the ability to connect with other people.”

  “Love?”

  “Not even. The capacity to merge your reality with someone else’s version of same.”

  “I’m not following you. What does this have to do with the Venus flytrap?”

  Now Marcus was just irritated. But more than irritated, he was deeply amused.

  “It’s not that complicated a metaphor. Nature made us a kind of kingdom unto ourselves. The natural world plants us in our habitat but then it leaches the soil surrounding us of sustenance essential to our subsistence, if not survival. But the flytrap, in the harshest of circumstances, perseveres.”

  Carrie Elwood began to type again. Marcus wondered what she could possibly be writing. He decided she was making a list of homophones. Perhaps she was just feigning industry to legitimize her fee. But after a minute or two of furious typing she closed the laptop and began to talk. She spoke of objectives. She mentioned business models, as if he had not explained to her more than once his desire to make the education center not for profit. She spoke of the need for the center to have a “na
rrative,” a term Marcus distrusted for its odor of linearity. She spoke of “flow,” another term he disliked for its elasticity. She spoke to him of her previous designs, of their successes. Then she invited him to sit next to her and opened her screen and began a slide show of her accomplishments, replete with many fancy photographs, which went on for what seemed to Marcus six weeks. He did not listen or look at the photographs. He smelled the newness of her safari vest, the odor of fabric stiff and unwashed, and he wondered how anyone could wear something straight off the rack and not itch to death, and he rued the mix of insecurity and ambition that had led him to doubt his ability to tell the true story of the Venus flytrap in his own words, with his own visual aids.

  The insanely large check he wrote to Dr. Carrie Elwood at the end of her endless visit was the second strike, after his stubborn refusal to use greenhouses, which he ought to have heeded and did not. There was a third strike—he could, if pressed, name any of a dozen—but Marcus, at some point, quit counting. The reasons for his failure were not worth contemplating, especially now that he had left all that behind.

  Marcus had been off the interstate for close to an hour and had seen no sign of, nor even signs for, a town. He could pick up just enough of the wayside with his high beams to see that it was broken only by the most tenacious flora, stunted and sparse. A place forgotten by rain, foreign to creek, stream, pocosin, sound. No nearby ocean to court storms fierce enough to be named. Just the opposite of the land he’d lost, this place appeared inhospitable to any exotica on which he might squander what money he’d managed to hide from the bank. And, far more importantly, from his sister, who deserved the money far more than the bank did. Marcus cranked his window down and let the desert wind blow the thick drift of receipts and bills lining the dash onto the seat beside him, the floorboard. A few flew out the window, but he wasn’t littering. Let this breeze wipe clean at least this dash. Who would come upon the remnants of his failure in this backcountry untrammeled by humans? But Marcus was not naive enough to think that the desolation into which he sped was nothingness. More the sweet beginning of something else.

  Wentzville, Missouri, 1983

  In the break room of the Buick plant, they called Brantley “Preacher.” Not just Brantley but everybody who worked on the line in Marriage, fitting chassis to body. “How many you guys marry this morning already?” they’d say to him, and he’d say, “Like I’m counting,” and they’d say, “Sounds like Preacher-man has got tired of tying knots,” and then someone would point out that he alone out of his team of four wasn’t married, and someone who knew him from high school (for half his graduating class from Wentzville had ended up on the line at the plant, wasn’t anything else to do except make the hour drive to Saint Louis and find some other manufacturing job that maybe paid a little more, but you’d eat up any profit in gas) would say, “When you and Carmen getting married?”

  This question made Brantley do something with his face. He would try to smile but he felt like what happened with his mouth was fixed somewhere between smirk and wince. Which was dangerous because Carmen’s dad worked on the line and so did two of her four brothers, and he never knew who was in the break room because it was half the size of his high school cafeteria. He kept his head down, didn’t talk much during lunch, sat most of the time with Arthur from his team, even though he knew some people made fun of him for eating lunch with a black dude. What the hell, it was 1983. Sometimes Brantley would say something to Arthur, and it was always about work, but Arthur didn’t like to talk about work. He liked to eat when he ate and that made Brantley eat his sandwich and his chips and drink his Coke in, like, five minutes so he could wait in line for a pay phone in the hallway by the bathrooms and call Carmen if she had worked the night shift and was hanging out at home.

  Carmen worked at Long John Silver’s. The apartment she shared with Cindy Dakeris smelled like fried fish. Carmen’s hair did, too. Her skin sometimes. Cindy was always complaining about it. “At least you could get work at Wendy’s, I like the way their fries smell.” Cindy was a big girl and so dumb that when she got high she got smart. Or smarter. Brantley and Carmen loved to get her high because she would watch a commercial for laundry detergent and say something really surprising about it. Other times she’d go on about stupid shit. Carmen and Brantley spent most of their time in Carmen’s room, anyway, listening to music, turning it way up so Cindy couldn’t hear them fooling around. Carmen always got furious when Cindy said she stunk up the apartment. She would go into her room and slam the door. She was just working there to save up money for community college. They were going to move to Saint Louis after Christmas. “It isn’t like working at Long John’s is my life’s dream,” Carmen would say. “No one wants to smell like this.” She loved to complain about her job, but that didn’t mean she wanted Cindy even to mention it.

  One night she said, “You know what’s like the grossest thing ever to me?”

  “Me?” Brantley was stretched out on the bed, waiting for her to shed her uniform.

  “Shut up,” she said. “Tartar sauce.”

  “What is it, anyway?”

  She was pulling off the T-shirt she always wore under her uniform. It, too, reeked. She threw it across the room at him. He batted it away lest it land on his head and cover his mouth.

  “You know what it is. Tartar sauce!”

  “No, I mean what’s it made out of ?” said Brantley.

  “Mayonnaise mostly. I have no idea what those green specks are that are in it.”

  “Nor do you want to know.”

  “Exactly,” she said. She had unhooked her bra and thrown it in the corner and was pulling on her Pretenders T-shirt. They’d seen them last year in Saint Louis and Chrissie Hynde talked shit about Ohio where she was from and on the ride home Carmen was all, like, in a British accent, “I live in London, England, and I have escaped the exasperating Midwest never to return except to play my songs for you poor unfortunates,” even though Carmen hated Wentzville more than Brantley did even, she was always talking about moving to Arizona because she’d flown over it once on the way to her cousin’s wedding in California and everybody on the street had a swimming pool in their backyard.

  Brantley knew better than to raise himself up off the bed, where he was propped on pillows to rest his back, which hurt after his shift from all the bending over (even though this week all he had been doing was standing along the line and signaling Arthur, who was running the crane that lowered the chassis onto the body, to move a few inches left or right), and reach around and cup her breasts before she had had a chance to pull her T-shirt on. That was a good way to get slapped. Carmen had to be in the mood. After work for at least an hour was not a good time. She hadn’t even showered yet. He’d rather wait until she got the smell out of her hair at least, but he was a boy, what could he do, even her bare back stirred him.

  “I bet they’re like chopped-up olives,” he said.

  “I said I didn’t want to know.”

  “Mayonnaise is disgusting.”

  “You like it on hamburgers.”

  “No, I don’t,” said Brantley.

  “You never tell them to hold it.”

  “I hate telling people stuff like that. People working for a living and you’re going in there all picky about what they put on some slab of beef you’re paying a buck fifty for. Special orders on a Big Mac?”

  “Yeah, well, you’re not like most people. Most people will stand there for five minutes telling you how to fry their chicken strips. Like the girl taking their order is going to go fry up chicken strips right then and there.”

  “Like that chicken has not been fried.”

  “Seriously. But I can’t say a word because fucking Dorset is all about counting the ‘Ring the bell if we did well’ bell. If he doesn’t hear the bell for five minutes, he’ll flip out.”

  Brantley heard this every night. Complaints about Dorset, the manager. “ ‘Ring the bell if we did well’ bell” was as common a phrase
out of her mouth as “I love you.” Way more common, in fact. She never asked him about his job, which kind of bothered him even though he didn’t want to talk about it. She could at least ask. Maybe if she did, he’d want to marry her. But he wasn’t going to marry Carmen. He knew he wasn’t. She was the first girl he’d ever slept with and he wanted to sleep with more girls and she was sort of mean. Still, they talked about getting married and moving to Saint Louis, and she was going to get her associate in arts degree and go to work as an administrative assistant for a law firm like her girlfriend Melissa did. One time Brantley said, “So wait, you want to get your AA so you can become an AA,” and she got seriously pissed and said, “Better than getting stuck in Wentzville.” To which he had to agree. A kid by the time they were twenty. Go to work on the line, come home bone-tired, and have to deal with a screaming kid. She said, “I hate rubbers.” He didn’t say, I hate little babies. But he thought it. He thought, I hate mayonnaise but I’ll eat it rather than make a big deal out of some poor asshole taking it off if they screw up and put it on. He thought, I hate that about myself because mayonnaise really is disgusting. I hate how I am sometimes. Hate that she never asks me about work and would hate it if she did.

  Oddly enough, it was Cindy who asked him. Train tracks ran right behind the apartment they rented. They’d drag a bench from the picnic table someone had left behind one of the units and they’d get high and wait for the train. One night Cindy all of a sudden said, “So okay, Brant? When you’re putting the cars together, do you ever wonder, like, where they will end up? Like, who’s going to end up driving the one you’re working on at that moment?”

  Carmen was doing something to her fingernails. She was looking at them in the weak flood lamp some neighbor had turned on, probably to keep an eye on the kids in 9D. Carmen held her hand up close to her face, did something to her nails. Cindy was looking at him. Her question in the air was like the first faraway thrum of train in the night, coming closer. Brantley did not feel like her question would flash past and leave trails like the train always did when they got high and came outside to watch it. He felt like Carmen had pushed him on the tracks and instead of the train coming it was Cindy’s question.