“Ginormi? What are you?”
“We should go.”
“We need a car.”
“Yeah, we need a car.”
“I got a car.”
“Dude!”
“Dad’s car.”
“How’d you finesse that?”
“Applied to college.”
“Thought you weren’t going.”
“Well maybe I’m not. You going?”
“Prob’ly.”
“Takin’ what?”
“Business.”
“Business?”
“That sucks.”
“So. What are you takin’?”
“Agriculture.”
“You mean cows an’ shit?”
“No. Horticulture. Plants.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. Program’s only two years.”
“That’s sad.”
“I can take the accelerated one. Do it in a year and a half.
“That’s sadder.”
“Mom says I could work in medical weed.”
“What!”
“Yeah. When I’m finished I can go work for one of those medical weed producers. Like in New York or Maine. They got ’em everywhere but here. Or I could just move to California, maybe Oregon. Go see my dad.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“That’s fucking awesome!”
“I’m gonna do that!”
“Me too!”
Chapter 4
It was two o’clock in the afternoon and Petra Soames was sitting in a penthouse bar with a bird’s-eye view of the harbor. After she moved to dreary little Hullbrooke for her mom, she often came into the city. Normally she wouldn’t stay this long (she’d finished the shopping and errands an hour ago) but it would be two hours before the lecture. “Plants and the Mammalian Brain” by Reginald Blycroft — the Herbert T. Renfell Professor of Botany, Thistle-on-Tyne University — sounded just too overblown to resist.
Petra studied the olive in her martini. It had three dimples. Maybe that meant she could order two more martinis, three altogether, without adverse effects. Regardless of all the AA meetings prescribed by that odious weasel of a doctor back in Idaho, she believed a quiet, civilized drunk still had the potential to contribute to society. Take Winston Churchill, W. C. Fields, Dorothy Parker, Vincent van Gough, Alexander the Great for Chrissake! Unlike Alexander though and the rest of the ethylated crew, she had no ambition. Perhaps that was the overarching problem.
Petra was a plant scientist. Or rather she had trained as one. An evolutionary plant physiologist to be exact but then after her PhD, she’d strayed into molecular biology and genetics. “Not another gel jock!” her old supervisor had moaned in his Glaswegian brogue about her choices. “Geneticists are the universal twits! They never see the forest for the trees. In fact they can’t even see a bloody tree half the time.” Even then Petra had no great drive for accomplishment. She settled for lending a hand in Gerald the Gel Jock’s lab. And then she married him. That she’d been effortlessly eclipsed for over a decade by the acclaimed geneticist only rarely crossed her mind.
“Would you care for another?” the waiter said smiling down at her.
Petra was momentarily startled, and with a well-honed nervous reflex she brushed her dark bangs to one side with her left hand. “Oh. Yes, thanks. And I’d better take a look at a menu too.”
The waiter gave a nod and went off.
Petra stared down at the olive again. Why in God’s name did it remind her of her ex? Gerald wasn’t particularly dimpled. Petra thought back fondly to the day her marriage began to unravel. Thomas was a PhD student. He’d come over one night to drop off the first draft of an article. Gerald was at some meeting as usual, and seeing Thomas looking exhausted, she’d offered him a glass of wine. Thomas was from France, “from well-cultured stock too,” he’d deadpanned one day while preparing tissue cultures. They told each other jokes and shared a fondness for old and off-beat movies. That Thomas was tall and lanky was especially pleasing to her since Gerald was compact and stocky. Whereas Gerald radiated power and high energy, Thomas came across with wide-eyed sincerity and even a little clownishness. It was Thomas who pointed out how upsetting it was to see the way Gerald made demands and demeaned her all in the same breath, that it was Petra, not Gerald, who often had the best ideas about what to try next when grad students ran into some dead end with their research. And whereas Gerald seemed eternally oblivious to her appearance Thomas told her with a sly smile she was dangerously luscious and looked just like the “famous vixen flapper in Pandora’s Box.” One thing led to another and Petra never regretted a thing.
When the waiter returned with the menu, Petra’s appetite was drawn oddly to the vegetarian selections. She wondered if there was some plot afoot to make the plant and fungus dishes more appealing than the ho-hum peppercorn steak and the sole meunière. Petra settled on fresh shiitake mushrooms sautéed in garlic with a lemon Chablis sauce over zucchini noodles with seared yellow peppers, snow peas and roasted cashews.
At one point not that long ago, Petra thought she had the perfect life: a well-paying job in a private lab, a young lover — not Thomas of course, someone a little closer to her forty-odd years and shy of commitment. Just like she was. And she’d been involved with a local grassroots environmental action group and specifically with a phytoremediation project. But then that all unraveled too. The lab was acquired by a bigger one, the lover decided he wanted a wife and kids after all, and overnight the state went all right wing and the green funding dried up.
When Petra’s dinner arrived, aromatic and eye-catching, it lifted her spirits greatly and took her mind off her less-than-stellar past. She read the book she’d brought along to keep her company and give her some insight into the upcoming lecture. It was about opioid receptors. Addictions of any type were dear to Petra’s heart. She ordered a third martini.
In her respectably lubricated state, Petra found the talk moderately interesting and mildly disappointing. She didn’t quite agree with the conclusions of Dr. Blycroft, a pretentious old windbag as it turned out with an ersatz stutter and a hee-haw laugh. He predictably suggested the rewards to the mammalian and particularly human brain were all just a matter of mistaken intentions. The buzz was meant for the bugs, the naughty herbivores. The compounds were just roaming toxins. Sure. And humans just happened to stumble under the influence with our fresh-faced naiveté, newer complement of superfluous genetic material, vestigial receptors and plain dumb luck. Talk about a cop-out!
To Petra’s thinking the human species was destined to commune with plants for better or worse. And mostly, humans would do the plant’s bidding. Any way you looked at it, dependency was a given. Just consider the allotment of biomass alone. Plants owned the planet, and most living organisms benefited from them one way or another if you really wanted to take a good hard-nosed evolutionary perspective. Just consider the number of poppies cultivated to supply the opium trade and how much land that involved, with humans scurrying about ensuring the plants’ well-being, protecting them, even taking out the competition! Humans murdered each other just for the privilege of association. Now from the plant’s point of view, that’s evolutionary success!
Petra had nothing but admiration for this cleverness. And she was a more-than-willing servant. The next morning she decided to plant trees. And shrubs. She was feeling energetic. The new treatment she was on was very encouraging. Recent approaches to handling her booze problems didn’t involve total abstinence, shaming and punitive ideology, just a little pill now and again. Petra viewed this as a giant step forward. She surmised she didn’t have much to be ashamed of anyway other than the effects on her own health, and she was quite healthy. Ready for change.
Petra found her mother’s yard appalling. With its single oak tree in one corner of an unremitting lawn, it was a study in tedium and outdated conceit. All the neighbors’ backyards were grass too. There was no doubt about it: Lawns sprang from unconscious systemic social i
nsanity. First and foremost they were an affectation of status that peaked with the likes of Versailles. Back then only royalty and the aristocracy could afford a great lawn. It took servants with scythes or women on their knees with clippers and scissors to keep things groomed. Okay, maybe there were a few sheep involved too. But in Petra’s view every fool who spent hours cultivating the perfect fescue, murdering dandelions or spraying pesticides and portioning out fertilizers all for the sake of perfect turf was still just trying to keep up with Louis XIV.
Above all Petra hated mowing lawns. Mowers were noisy and smelly. They belched out more noxious exhaust gases than any sane person could imagine: acetylene, methane, ethylene, toluene, benzene, m- and p-xylene, isopentane, propylene, iso-octane, n-butane, 1,2,4-trimethylbenzene, isobutylene, ethylbenzene, o-xylene, 2-methylpentane, ethane, formaldehyde, 3-methylhexane, 2,3-dimethylpentane, 2-methylhexane, 3-methylpentane, 1,3-butadiene and at least a dozen more nasty volatile or persistent petrochemicals. And that didn’t cover even half the organic emissions. Just the big ones. Add whopping blasts of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and particulate matter, and Petra wondered how anyone could survive a summer. The fact that small spark-ignition engines were only moderately regulated and not at all until the 1990s turned weekends in Hullbrooke into Petra’s private Beijing. Weed whackers were just as bad and the sound of them on an otherwise peaceful Sunday afternoon just about drove her nuts.
Her mother suggested she get an electric mower. “They’re quiet,” Doreen said. “Or how about one of those ones you just push by hand and the blades all whirl around. Like we had fifty years ago. They still make those?”
“Mother, I have no intention of spending three hours mowing a damn lawn,” Petra replied. “I’d rather have gravel.”
“Well you can do what you like. It’s your house too now.”
Doreen’s stroke had left her partially paralyzed, not enough to send her into a nursing home but enough to make life difficult. At loose ends herself, Petra figured taking care of her mom was a good thing to do. The joint ownership of the house was a very generous gift, and Petra was certainly appreciative, but she still had trouble thinking of the property as anything other than her mother’s. Petra would never have chosen the house or Hullbrooke. But she might as well live anywhere. Freelance work for a textbook publisher was hardly location specific. She might try her hand at consulting one day. In the meantime, diversifying the vegetation in the backyard would do.
She mentioned she was going to rip up chunks of lawn and put in beds. “Lots of annuals for next year. Brighten the place up.” And she wanted hedges. Rapidly growing ones. Big bushy lilacs, privet and junipers, even swamp cedar, anything so she wouldn’t have to look at the neighbors’ dismal backyards. Actually if she’d had her druthers, Petra would have just transplanted some local vegetation and let whole the place go wild. But Hullbrooke municipal laws prevented such progressive remodeling.
Doreen thought Petra’s plans were all very ambitious. “Too much work to keep up, let alone put in,” she’d grumbled, and she reminded Petra that lawns, even if you despised them for some peculiar reason, were infinitely easier and you could still hire a local kid to mow them. Petra was undeterred.
At seven o’clock the next morning, she started up her mom’s van. Her mother hadn’t been able to drive since the stroke so they’d posted a For Sale sign in the windshield. The van faced out to the street but so far there hadn’t been any interest. Nobody around here wanted an old van. They all drove trucks, Petra had observed. Or SUVs, she noted with particular disgust. She pulled the sign out of the window and let the motor run for a bit. She’d have to get gas. It was a forty-five-minute drive to Caldor’s Nursery.
After filling up the van at Gerry’s Gas Bar and Hullbrooke Rent-All, Petra decided to take the back roads to get a better sense of the area. She’d been in Hullbrooke for several months now but had never explored much. The surrounding area had hills, escarpments and lots of craggy outcroppings. There were woods everywhere and a few farms dotted around too. Some didn’t look like they were doing all that well. Often there were just rundown houses or cabins tucked among the trees. A few places were clearly upscale; a couple of them even looked grand and palatial. It was quite a mix. She liked it best though when there were several miles of uninterrupted countryside. She reached Caldor’s fifteen minutes after they opened.
The nursery altered Petra’s mood. Several greenhouses were all connected and as she strolled slowly through them, basking in the filtered sunlight and the range of colors and jumble of scents, she fairly floated. Everywhere she looked pleased her. Vines, creepers, shrubs, ornamental grasses, ground cover, heritage plants and hybrids lined the rows and rows of tables. At the far end was a tall greenhouse that opened out onto a yard. Young trees of all kinds were clustered in loose rows. They sat in large biodegradable hairy pots or great round burlap sacks. There were smaller ones too of course. Petra saw what looked like a recently uprooted bunch of birch seedlings just sitting in a pail of slurry. She took it all in with a deep breath and began humming.
Practically everything was on sale, so Petra rationalized buying up as much as she could. She’d have liked to buy the whole place but she settled for filling the van and giving her credit card a workout. Her well-laid plan to take her time and design the garden gave way to a kind of gorging on instant beauty.
Petra drove home happy. All that life riding behind her in the van was invigorating. A Cleveland pear, a crab apple and a pagoda dogwood waved at her in the rearview mirror while sheltering the shorter assortment of willow hybrids, cedars and lilacs that would grow up like weeds in no time to make her neighbors disappear. There were three rose of Sharon trees too, and she rationalized she wouldn’t have known what the blossoms really looked like for a couple of months if she’d bought them in early spring like most sensible gardeners. There were grasses and ferns as well. The soil under the oak in the backyard was a bit boggy at times and the ferns would get it into shipshape.
But Petra’s prize was the dioecious ginkgo tree. She had purchased a male, pretty fan leaves and all. Or so she was assured repeatedly — “You don’t want the females because their fruit is sticky, messy and smells like vomit.” Petra found the nursery staff amusing. She wouldn’t have minded whether it was male or female. It would likely take another twenty or thirty years to mature, by which point it would be someone else’s problem. But she liked the notion of purchasing a boy plant. Especially one from such a sturdy species. Ginkgos were known to have survived Hiroshima! And they were the only species left in their group, the vast majority of Ginkgoales having not made it past the Pliocene. But the most notable thing about it was the genome. It had three times more DNA than humans, and a battery of chemical defense mechanisms of which humans had learned to avail themselves. Ginkgo was very old medicine.
Petra began to whistle. She’d rent an overpriced rototiller that very afternoon from Gerry’s. And she’d pick up a new spade. The one at her mother’s had a cracked handle and a chipped blade. She’d be thoroughly occupied and thoroughly content for a week or more. And she’d hire the glum, feckless fifteen-year-old next door to help. The boy moped eternally when he wasn’t high, but Petra had noticed he was at least somewhat interested in money.
PART TWO
Dormancy
Oh Sleepers, let us bring you the dreaming of the gods, its play of parallels, the paradise of perpendiculars. Do not be shy in slumber. Take our hand. We wait in the trillions, patient and fused where time has no thrust, no sword of direction. We wait. We wait with the needle’s eye, the emptiest of small spaces, in the singularities of thin air and in the dimming of the sweet dark earth. Let us bring you the seeing of the bee, the touch of the wind, the scatter of sound. Let us trust you in the night with the wonder of many, the bliss of all and sundry.
from Cannto I, Cannabidadas
Chapter 5
Alice sat in a small meeting room in City Hall. The room was stuffy and there were portr
aits plastered along the wall in a neat line — mostly middle-aged white men, stern and unwavering, staring down at her from the photos. She stared back. A thin film of sweat began to appear on her dark-brown forehead and it briefly occurred to her that not only did hot flashes increase the discomfort on muggy days and not only did her legs ache and not only should she have given wearing her heavy wool blazer a pass today but the photos of most of these potbellied men with their copious jowls were positively revolting.
Rachel, a young city planner, walked in. “Mrs. Morgan, good to see you again.”
“Really? I’m not so sure,” said Alice.
“What can we do for you today, Mrs. Morgan?” she said smiling.
“I thought you people were fixing the old paint-factory site.”
“We are. We’re doing what we can, given the subsurface infrastructure and the level of contamination.”
“And what exactly does that mean? You’re doing nothing, right?”
“Well. . .”
“Am I right?”
When Alice moved back into her old neighborhood it had already improved. It was more diverse. The derelict houses and buildings had attracted creative people of all kinds, it was a favorite settling spot now for new immigrants and the gang presence was subdued. She bought a house three blocks from where she’d grown up and opened a pharmacy only twenty minutes away, if she walked quickly.
The pharmacy was across the park that abutted an abandoned paint factory. Children were warned never to play there. People kept their dogs away. Until a year ago, two crumbling walls remained, and for a lark, some artist had painted a giant octopus clasping several smartphones on one of them. There had been a bare oily-looking patch too, where the cracked and mostly eroded factory floor still existed. Dead trees languished on the site and copious weeds, cadmium, chromium, lead and a whole host of unhealthy petroleum-based toxins lurked in the surrounding soil.
The Buds Are Calling Page 3