Seeds and Other Stories

by Ursula Pflug

  For once there were no dark circles under Rick’s eyes. Still, she looked at her boyfriend’s sleeping form a little reproachfully and said, “What happened to my dreams?” She didn’t ask what had happened to Rick’s dreams, because, implausibly, they were coming true.

  Maybe Karen didn’t believe in Green Lady as much as he did. Or maybe she should figure out what her dreams even were.

  It would beat a lot of the other things she had planned for tomorrow.

  Seeds

  I DON’T KNOW HOW IT IS I came to have no parents and no name. I hear this is a place you can come, if you lookin’ for a name.

  I have nothing. But I have had nothing before, and now I am glad to be free of it.

  It is in the city. There are five of us, or maybe ten or thirty. The building is an empty one, gutted by fire. We have been sleeping on the floors, on found mattresses. I sprayed them all with a can of bug juice I bought. I do not like fleas or bedbugs.

  Since I came here, last week, I have been planting flowers. I dig the earth out of the central courtyard. An empty yard. Probably it is full of lead, but eventually that too will be washed away by rain. The rain is cleaner now.

  When I came, there was no one here. Now there are sometimes ten, sometimes twenty of us.

  I have planted sunflowers in the yard. Their big heads turn, slowly, throughout the day.

  I make window boxes out of some panelling ripped out of a wall. In them I plant geraniums, herbs, and tomatoes. The seeds are seeds I brought from the West. The soil is not good, this soil dug out of the yard. It is not really a yard.

  One day I wake up and there are chickens in it. Where did the chickens come from? It doesn’t matter. They lay eggs, and they will be good to eat, when winter comes.

  I gather the chicken dung and dilute it with water, and carefully pour it into the pots of plants. The tomatoes are doing fine. When someone new comes, I make them eat tomatoes.

  “Vitamin C,” I say. They look at me strange, their eyes wide and dark, blank as stones.

  “Eat your tomatoes,” I say.

  They are young, most of them. They are young and frightened and ready to fight, and yet their mouths are all open, as though they were expecting something wonderful to come out of nowhere, to fly in.

  They gather from the edges of the burnt city, hearing.

  What do they hear?

  That there is a place, a place you can come.

  My sadness is that I am alone, that I am older than everyone here, that I must look after them all. They play with each other, giggling and combing one another’s hair.

  They are like children, really. They run up and down the halls of the building, delighted, discovering things. Exploring. They like to rearrange, to take things apart and rearrange them. I remember I did that too. It is necessary, if they are to learn. Why we are here and not somewhere else.

  I look after the plants and make the children eat them. I hope that none of them will get sick with something I cannot cure. I make them eat garlic and drink tea brewed from nettles and chamomile flowers. So they will be strong, will not get sick. I dream of someone coming over the hill. A man. He will be here soon. He will help me in my work.

  I do not mind anymore, being always alone, being lonely. I no longer look for anyone to fall into, to carry me. I make them drink their teas. I make them wash. I watch as they play their secret, whispering games. I do not mind any more. Now I can do this; now I don’t mind not being one of them, but one of the others.

  The man coming over the hill. I realize he isn’t coming over the hill, but is one of the ones here. He says his name is Stephen. He is maybe nineteen. He is very strong. I lean out the window, watching him. He is leading the children. Shit in the pit, he says, not in the sunflowers. Wash your hands before you eat. Here, drink this tea. He yells at them sometimes but they do not really mind. As he becomes stronger, I disappear into the shadows. I lurk in the hallways, disappearing. I can, now. Now it isn’t so much responsibility; now someone has grown, like a sunflower … he is almost ready to harvest for seed. Ready to be an adult, come to help me shoulder the weight. I am glad. He does not speak to me, Stephen, but I can hear his voice in my mind, asking questions. I answer, from my room hidden in the dim corridors. Yes, you can do this and this and this.

  Yes, the windmill on the roof is good. They will help you. You must make them work, teach them it is important. Energy and power. Their own. At first they won’t believe you, will not understand why, just as you did not understand, thought it was enough just to drift, to be asleep to your own power. Yes, you can do it.

  “Will you help?” he asks me in my mind.

  “Yes,” I say. “I will.”

  Now they can hardly see me anymore. Stephen sees me, but only dimly, like something half forgotten, like a dream. He has already forgotten that I used to be a real person. He has forgotten I used to be flesh and blood like him, that I too suffered, hated to be so alone. I watch him cry, alone, sometimes at night.

  “I cannot do it,” he cries, calling out my name. “I cannot do it, I cannot. You must help me. You say you love me, so you must help. You don’t know what it’s like he says, to work so hard for so little. Everything is darkness here, and I cannot see.”

  “You can see,” I say. “There is a little light inside you, and if you turn it on, you will see everything, everything.”

  He does then, at first tentatively, like an experiment, and then the whole yard is shining, illuminated, and he can see the faces of the children, some sleeping, some waking. They cannot see his light, but they know something has changed. They stir in their sleep, smiling, cuddling one another.

  “You aren’t a human being,” he says. “You cannot know how it hurts.”

  “Oh?” I say, but my heart hurts for him, for his hurt.

  Then he is better again, and happy.

  How I love him.

  One day I will come back for him, and then we will be together.

  At night, when they are all sleeping, I make the rounds of all my window boxes, gathering seeds. Seeds from tomatoes, from echinacea, cucumber, geranium, hyssop, basil. Parsley, garlic. Valerian, bergamot, mint. Sunflowers, zinnia, sweet pea. And of course, the beans and corn.

  I dry the seeds on the roof, under the sun.

  Then I climb the stairs again, at night. Up up up the stairs, all around the shadowy building, leaving it behind: its weight, its solidity. Each floor I go up, I look at the sleeping faces, bless them all. Each floor I go up, I feel a lightness, a greater freedom.

  On the roof there are stars.

  One of the stars moves and comes closer. In a great swoop of the mind I am lifted up up up among them. They welcome me, princes of peace. I recognize them all.

  We skim over the night, looking for lights. Where we see lights, we hover and send our minds down into their dreams, the sleeping children. They do not know we have been there, but they feel a presence, a kindness, a benevolent intent. We are happy and shining.

  sss

  Far below I see a girl, walking over a hill. In her knapsack she holds a packet of seeds and a bottle of water. Through the canvas of the knapsack I can see the seeds, the life inside them glowing like light bulbs

  And on another hill, there is a man. He is making something, a new kind of machine. He will put it on the roof, and it will spin light and energy down from the stars.

  One day they will be together, and then my work will be complete.

  Unsichtbarkeit

  I HAD SOME MONEY PUT ASIDE by October, and went to Paris to continue my work without distraction.

  My work. Your work. Our work.

  It has to stop, you used to say. And I agreed with you. Agreed with you that it had to stop, and believed you when you said we were helping.

  Helping what?

  Helping to stop it.

  I did
not write to you after I arrived in Paris. By spring I had finished the coding but when I tried to get in touch so I could deliver, it was as if you had disappeared. Vanished from the net, and your various emails and phone numbers didn’t work either. Maybe that was a clue.

  If you are going to do this work, you will have to know how to disappear.

  We used to practise disappearing. I was better at it than you. Once high on a ridge in Hawai’i I leaned against an ancient temple wall and watched Japanese tourists walk past me so they could look out over the ocean. Hoping for whales, getting boats. The little group went back and forth a few times making bathroom forays and fetching forgotten binoculars and cameras. I guess the heiau itself had studied as we had, for it couldn’t be seen from the road unless one knew what to look for.

  When the tourists were heading back to the parking lot for the final time, I made myself visible again and one of them cried out. “Were you there all along?” a man asked in heavily accented English. It was his wife, presumably, who had shrieked. Or maybe she was his sister. I don’t think it matters. What mattered was the invisibility spell had worked.

  “Yes,” I told the man, “I’ve been here all along.”

  Where is here?

  All places and times exist at once.

  That isn’t really useful information though, is it?

  Following online trails I came across someone who said he had talked to you recently. The past tense made me anxious. A small grey fear began to grow inside me, from mouse to cat and eventually to dog, although there was no reason why it should. It just seemed strange that you should be careless, that if you were disappearing you had done so only partially. No one should have heard of you at all. It shouldn’t have been so easy to find your footprints. But maybe the person who said he had known you (in Athens, he said, over the winter) was lying. Maybe he posted on the internet to catch people like me, people who really had known you, and actually might know where you were.

  Sometimes the same people who say they are helping you are actually trying to hurt you.

  Sometimes you’re actually hurting the people you’re trying to help.

  Did I inadvertently lead people to you?

  But if that was true I would at some point have been captured and tortured so I would give it up. Your location. Your plans. And I wasn’t helping them, I was trying to find you, so that I could give you the work I’d done on invisibility.

  And Karina? She told me the day they found you she was driving—not that that means anything.

  In hindsight so much seems crazy dangerous, both of us making unwise choices—at least if we were interested in keeping not just body but soul together—we were like people in a le Carré only it was our lives.

  Yes, it was ironic. I had been working on software to make you better at what you were already doing.

  Disappearing. Verschwinden.

  But there are different kinds.

  How to erase one’s traces, achieve unsichtbarkeit. Invisibility, the program. Sure to be a giant seller if I’d gone commercial, but then they could have used it too. The people who were watching us could have become invisible, so that we wouldn’t know they were watching. You wanted it just to be for us. For people like us.

  What are people like us like?

  People who agree it has to stop. Invisibility Spell, the program. VPN was just the beginning.

  Because of the cat-sized fear I wrote you a letter one friend writes another when they don’t want them to die. I copied it several times and sent the same letter to snail mail addresses in three countries and to your German cousins. All six identical letters were returned unopened. The three sent to Germany, the one to London, even the one sent to a new address, one I’d never seen before, in Athens, that the stranger I met online when I was staying in Montmartre had given me. But the return of the letters didn’t necessarily mean you’d really disappeared. It might have just meant you were practising. We used to practise all the time. It was the most important exercise we could do, you said.

  How do you know when the other person has stopped practising disappearing and disappeared for real? How do you know when you yourself have stopped?

  Somewhat rhetorically, I asked these and other things of the person who had known you over the winter in Athens. But was it one person, or three, or was it Karina?

  They were kind, the person who said he was a man and had known you. Too kind, I thought, to be lying to me, but they also did not agree to meet me in the flesh. He said he had not seen you since early March, and that no one else he knew (that you knew too) had seen you since then either.

  I tried to visualize these people in Greece, whom you had spent the winter amongst, while I laboured on Invisibility Spell, alone in Paris. You, in Athens, where it was warm, sitting in Exarchia cafés late at night, unmaking and remaking the world in conversation. You never tired of it.

  I didn’t write you from Paris. It never occurred to me you might not have been able to find me. You were you, after all.

  I moved back to Berlin. I waited for you to get in touch. For no particular reason, my fear grew to dog-size. If I wasn’t by your side I could not protect you, I could not change things. I was the wrong person to practise disappearing from.

  When I heard something again (and it was a whole other year), it was that you had killed yourself before they found you. I suppose it seemed better than them getting hold of you. I was strangely comforted to hear you had used a gun. Fast and painless. One hopes.

  It has to stop, you used to say.

  What has to stop? In the end it was you who stopped, not it.

  In the end it was they who stopped you.

  Maybe you let them find you. Maybe you were tired. Maybe it wasn’t suicide at all. Maybe letting them find you was a form of suicide. Maybe hounding you till you killed yourself was a form of murder.

  In Berlin, after I heard, I did not contact anyone, out of perversity. And knowing there was nothing anyone could say. More than once I “accidentally” walked by your building, where I had often stayed, overlooking the Admiralbrücke over the canal. It was strange to see your building in the spring sunlight. I had only known it in winter, known its courtyard full of bicycles, its steep narrow stairs leading to your top floor flat. I still had a key to the arched wooden street door but I didn’t take it out of my pocket to see if it still worked in the sticky lock.

  It was only much later that I understood. Perhaps you were trying to protect me from what you saw as inevitable in yourself. You would slip through my fingers like a fish, back into the ocean. You had an appointment there with someone, and it wasn’t me. I lived in a different ocean altogether. I wanted to go with you, but you wouldn’t let me. You knew the appointment was for yourself alone.

  Once I knew I would never try the key it was time to leave Berlin again. I went back to Paris, briefly. But I’d gone to Paris to finish the work, and with it done, and you gone, Paris was haunted. I went to New York. Home. It had been decades.

  I didn’t want to call anyone, neither family nor friends, not right away, maybe not ever. I stayed in a hotel.

  sss

  When you go back to New York City (which is where I’d begun) it is as though no time has passed, as though the person you left there decades ago has been waiting for you all along. She is the person you would have become if you had stayed there. You wonder if you made a mistake, if you can still find her.

  Who is she? She is the person who never knew you.

  It’s as if you are a tattoo I can never remove. But growing up in New York I hadn’t met you yet.

  In New York I went to the Met and looked at Toledo. It wasn’t after all in the room the docents told me it was in and so I had to run from room to room quickly before closing; it had taken me all day to get uptown, what with this and that.

  You had cousins not only in Germany but also in Greece
and had always wanted to see the El Greco but had never been to New York, never in fact, to North America at all. It is a much different thing, seeing a painting in “real life.” There is a certain frisson that happens, looking at a painting in the flesh as it were and not in reproduction. It’s a form of time travel, sharing space with brush strokes done hundreds of years ago. I looked at that haunted green square for both of us. I wished you could also see it, could look out through my eyes. I pretended there was a little part of you that didn’t leave this planet and stayed inside me. Kept our pact, to go to my hometown together one day, and look at Toledo in the Met. Maybe it was even true.

  That night I dreamed it was I who had died and that you and Karina were at my funeral.

  You were both drunk, and danced around my coffin waving empty liquor bottles full of flowers you had picked in public gardens. I lay in my open casket, trying very hard not to wink.

  I woke up sad. It was fall again and I began to think that I could never forget you. I had crossed the Atlantic to forget the beating of your heart but in the end what is the difference—Berlin, Paris, New York? Some would say a great deal and they are right of course but I began to see my delusion. I was bleeding my life away in cold northern cities telling myself you would find me one day. More than a little part of me believed you’d faked your death, covered your trail.

  Practised invisibility, even from me. Or especially from me. I’d written Invisibility after all, so that if you could hide from me you could hide from anyone. Even, presumably, them.

  It is hard to breathe in the northern hemisphere, the summers so brief one is never without fear of the cold, of freezing somehow, alone in the night. I would go somewhere warm, I told myself, somewhere nearer the equator, where people did not think so much, where they dream more, where it is easier to forget time, the hand of time.

  Or maybe it was hard to breathe anywhere you had breathed.

  And then, on the subway, someone called my name. Who could be calling my name? It was Karina, our Berlin cabdriver. She was so happy to see me, it too made me sad.