by Ruth Ozeki
“Tokyo is eternal, Elliot. It survived firebombing. It will always be there. But don’t you see? Tokyo is not your here and now.” He placed the tea bowl on the desk with the grace of a grand tea master. He rested the backs of his hands on the polished desktop so that his palms faced the heavens. “You’ve got to stay open, Elliot. Look at the signs. Old life. NuLife. Get it? How propitious that your past should so perfectly align you with this particular present.”
“What present?”
“Potatoes. Ironic, isn’t it? How the Universe provides. As long as you stay open.” He moved his hand over to a folder at the edge of the desk. “Of course, what she provides often proves challenging.”
He slid the folder across the desk to Elliot. Inside was a copy of the New York Times Magazine. Centered on a stark white cover was a demented Mr. Potato Head, with two bolts stuck in its neck and a badly stitched scar on its forehead. Perched on its head was a tin skullcap, attached to an electrical coil that spiraled off the top of the page. Its wonky plastic eyes were looking in opposite directions. The tag line read, “Fried, Mashed, or Zapped with DNA?”
Inside, spread out over two pages like a Playboy centerfold, was a long, plump, beautifully reticulated potato. Elliot scanned the article. The journalist had started off small, almost poetically, the tale of a man planting a new type of potatoes in his backyard garden, but the target of his attack soon became clear. The guy talked toxins. He named names.
The contents of the article looked bad enough, Elliot realized, but the title was genius. Printed across the tanned, genetically engineered skin of the centerfold tuber, in a pastel font, were the words “Playing God in the Garden.”
With its power to appeal to a broad-range demographic, that title was truly dangerous copy. Elliot sighed.
“Marvelous chance to travel!” Duncan was saying. “I can envision you spending time in the field. Stretching your legs. Breathing that fresh Idaho air.”
Elliot sighed again.
Duncan frowned. “I’m worried about your vitality, Elliot,” he said. “Show me your tongue.”
“Excuse me?”
“Come over here.” Duncan motioned across the desk. “Open your mouth.” He aimed the beam of a halogen desk lamp down Elliot’s throat.
“Hmm,” Duncan said. “Just as I suspected. Stagnant chi energy. Weak liver function. An excess of damp and wind.” He flipped the lamp away. “You really should pay more attention to your diet. You are what you eat, you know. Here, have a carrot.” Duncan dangled the vegetable out in front of him. It was blunt and smooth and a bloody reddish-orange color. “What you need,” he said quietly, “is time in the desert. The dry air will do you good.”
mr. potato head
Geek smiled and took a long, slow hit off the bong. Thrifty Foods was not the biggest supermarket in Ashtabula, but the megastores were too hard to infiltrate and control for a basic C-level action. It was all a question of checkout lanes and customer density. Over eight lanes got to be a problem, since you really needed to station an agent in every other one for maximum jamming. As a target, then, Thrifty Foods was practically perfect. It had ten lanes, but with Frank on board they could break out Mr. Potato Head, who was a sure crowd pleaser.
“Dudes,” Geek croaked, applying a throat lock to hold down the smoke. “Thrifty Foods’ gonna get its consciousness raised.”
Frank wasn’t sure about this. He knew a lot of the kids who worked at Thrifty Foods—the baggers, stock boys, and cashiers—and he wasn’t at all convinced they were ready to have their consciousness raised quite yet. Wages, yes, but consciousness? Frank sort of doubted they had any to begin with. He sat in the dinette nook next to Charmey, who was making a flyer for the action. She held it up. It was a picture of a potato, stamped with a skull and crossbones.
“It looks very scary, no?” she asked. Frankie hesitated, trying to think of something to say. She pouted and showed it to the others.
“Vaguely menacing, perhaps,” offered Geek from the opposite corner. “A bit more humorous than hazardous.”
She snatched the drawing away and made a face at him. “It is very difficult,” she retorted, “to make a potato look dangereuse.” She bent down over the paper again and started to erase. Frankie leaned forward and brushed the hair from the back of her neck. He blew gently on her bar code. She shrugged her shoulders, but he could see that she was smiling, and he felt his heart race. He looked up and saw Geek watching them. He leaned back into the nook and traced his finger along the curve of Charmey’s spine. He waited patiently until bedtime.
The Seeds did a reconnaissance of Thrifty Foods the next day, while Frank was in school. They were timing the action for noon on the Saturday before Christmas, when there would be plenty of moms and kids around. Moms were key, Geek explained. Gotta get the moms. Lilith had shanghaied one of the baggers and got the personnel information from him, and that night they reconvened in the bunker for a briefing. The manager, Lilith reported, took a lunch break at noon and usually went off site. Y nodded. He had drawn a big map of the checkout area and was assigning the lanes.
“We’re starting with Express Lane One and doing the odds. We want a female in One because it’s closest to the entrance, just in case we get some early police action. Lilith is good with Five-O, so I’d prefer her, if that’s cool.” He looked around the group. No one objected.
“Good. Frank, dude, you’re next, Lane Three, so you can keep an eye on the door. You think you’re gonna know some of these po-po, right? You can recognize their vehicles?”
“Sure.”
“Excellent. Let us know when they’re coming, but once they’re on top of us, watch Lilith and do exactly what she does. The idea is no conflict. Just go limp and drop. Got it?”
Frankie nodded. He knew how to deal with the police.
Y continued. “I’ll take Lane Five and initiate from there. Charmey’s on Seven. Once we have it jammed, Geek’ll bring in Mr. Potato Head. Everyone clear?”
It was snowing on the morning of D-Day, so they moved into position early. The snow was good. It would get the shoppers into the store, stocking up in case the storm got bad. It might also slow down the police. By 1100 hours, the Spudnik had established a position in a far corner of the Thrifty Foods parking lot. They had cleaned out the vehicle and stashed their dube in Frankie’s cleaning closet at McDonald’s, in case they got searched.
“Okay, Seedlings, let’s roll,” said Y. He was dressed in a clean pair of jeans, a button-down shirt, and a tweed jacket. He’d shaved and tied his dreadlocks tightly back, and he looked surprisingly presentable. Lilith stood next to him, wearing a cloth coat and carrying a purse. They gave a thumbs-up and left the Spudnik. Frankie stood to follow, but Charmey held him back.
“Un moment . . .” she said.
She was looking more like a kid than ever, in a pair of baggy overalls, a striped wool sweater, and a baseball cap worn backward. Geek was dressed in a pair of green tights and a matching leotard, and for such a large, round-seeming man, he had legs that were surprisingly thin. Over this he wore a burlap contraption, held up by suspenders, which looked like a giant diaper. He checked his watch, then nodded at Charmey.
“Allons,” she said, grabbing Frankie’s hand.
By 1130 they had infiltrated the target and were pushing shopping carts up and down the aisles, filling them with tomatoes, squash, jars of baby food, canned corn, bottles of canola oil, miscellaneous snack-food products, and ten-pound bags of potatoes. They all had a supply of leaflets in the child’s seat of their carts.
At 1207 Lilith asked to see the manager and was told he had just left for lunch.
By 1212 this information was relayed from Aisle 1: Fresh Produce through to Aisle 7: Cleaning Products & Picnicware, and the operatives headed toward the checkout lanes. A quick reconnoiter revealed a healthy target demographic—mothers with infants, preschool toddlers, and some early-elementary-school children, too.
By 1223 all operatives were engaged with the checkout perso
nnel or closing in on the front of their lanes.
Y initiated the action in Lane 5.
“Hey,” he said in a friendly voice, squinting down at the name badge on the breast of his cashier. “Shawna?”
“Huh?” she said. She barely lifted her head.
Frank watched from Lane 3. He was worried. The cashier’s streaked hair was held off her face by an enormous plastic claw, and her two-toned lips were heavily lined in dark brown pencil. Frank had gone out with Shawna once, back in junior high. He knew for sure that she had no consciousness. On their date she had barely even been conscious.
“Shawna,” Y repeated with a smile. “That’s a nice name.”
She blinked and froze. Her fingernails, laminated with green sparkly polish in keeping with the pre-Christmas season, hung in midair above the conveyor belt of oncoming groceries. Her eyes were blank. Frank shook his head. Shawna was a frigid bitch. Hadn’t even let him kiss her. This was not going to work.
But he was wrong. He had underestimated Y’s charm. It took a minute, but by 1225 three things had fully dawned on Shawna: that Y was a cute, hip, older guy; that he was probably not from Ashtabula; and that he was attempting to have a conversation with her.
It was like someone had flipped a switch.
“Thanks,” she said, smiling and running her tongue under her upper lip to keep it from sticking to her teeth. She tossed her hair. The conveyor belt delivered a ten-pound bag of bakers. As she dragged it across the glass surface of the bar-code reader, Y took her hand.
“Hey, great nails,” he said. “Listen, before you ring that up, I wanna ask you something.” His voice seemed to be growing deeper and louder.
“Yeah?” she squeaked. She was practically batting her eyelashes at him. Ol’ Shawna sure was stoked now, thought Frank.
“Those potatoes, do you know if they are genetically engineered?” Y asked. His voice was really loud, now, booming over the ambient Christmas music being pumped in through the PA system—so loud that the customers in line at the checkout stations looked up to see what was going on.
“Huh?” Shawna didn’t know what he was talking about, and his volume was making her nervous.
“These potatoes!” Y held up the bag. “Have they been genetically engineered?”
Shawna looked around. She didn’t want to get in trouble. It occurred to her that maybe this guy was a creep. Then, two lanes down, she caught sight of Frank, grinning like a madman. She narrowed her eyes.
“Listen,” she said smartly, “like, do you want me to ring this up or not?”
“I don’t know. Could you call your manager and maybe I could ask him?”
“Are you, like, serious? ”
“Yeah, I really want to know.” Y turned toward the fit young mother behind him. “Maybe you could tell me,” he said, looking apologetic but still very concerned. “Do you happen to know if these are genetically engineered?”
The woman shook her head. “No, I’m sorry. I don’t know—”
Y nodded. “That’s the problem, isn’t it?” He held out his finger to the infant in the shopping cart, making her dribble and coo. “We don’t know because they don’t tell us! They’re genetically engineering poisons into potatoes these days. But they refuse to label it, so how are you supposed to know what you’re feeding your baby?”
Meanwhile Shawna was hollering over to the next cashier.
“Hey, Doreen, you hear anything about someone engineering the potatoes?”
The woman next in line tapped the young mother on the shoulder. “Did he say something about bug poison?”
“Poison?” cried Lilith over in Lane 1.
“Poisoned potatoes? ” echoed Charmey in Lane 7.
And just then a deep, amplified voice boomed out over the PA system.
“Attention shoppers! Did somebody say POTATOES?”
The loud reggae version of “Here Comes Santa Claus” drowned out the Christmas carols and silenced the crowd. They turned and stared at the apparition dancing toward them.
It was Mr. Potato Head, twirling a candy-striped cane as he pushed a shopping cart bearing an enormous boom box toward the cash registers. Now, Mr. Potato Head was not just any old spud. He was a sweet, sporty potato, friendly and dapper. He had big, googly eyes and lozenge-shaped ears, as pink as Pepto-Bismol. He wore a green leisure suit and a Santa Claus hat perched on the top of his bald, orbicular head. He hung his cane over one arm and did a spudly little soft-shoe on his spindly green legs.
He positioned his cart in a central location in front of Lane 5, then danced along the aisles, distributing paper daisies and leaflets. By now the children, tired of waiting with their moms, were laughing and clapping. They ran to him and tugged on his burlap hide. They jumped up and down.
The Seeds quickly followed suit, passing leaflets to the customers in their lanes. Then they pushed their shopping carts forward, circling Mr. Potato Head’s boom box like a wagon train shoring up defenses. Frank started joining the carts together with inconspicuous lengths of precut baling wire. The barricade would not be much of a deterrent to the police, Geek had explained, but it would make their arrest more spectacular. When the cops showed up, the Seeds would close ranks and cordon themselves off in the center. In order to reach them, the cops would have to tear the shopping carts apart or tip them over—a noisy business. Crude and violent. Very impressive.
Charmey, meanwhile, had opened a bag of Idaho bakers and tossed a couple of spuds to Y, who juggled them and threw them to Lilith, who added a squash, and before long, dozens of potatoes, zucchinis, squashes, and even tomatoes were tumbling through the air in precise, intricate arcs. Mr. Potato Head returned to the center of the circle and continued his soft-shoe amid the flying vegetables, and the children started to clap and cheer.
Frank finished securing the carts and stood to one side, scanning the store. He caught sight of Shawna talking to a fat fuck named Phil who had once been Frank’s supervisor at Mickey D’s. Shawna pointed one long green nail in Frank’s direction. Phil narrowed his eyes and headed back toward the glassed-in office area, where Frank saw him pick up the phone. Frank headed toward Y.
“Yo, dude. The manager’s back on site, and he’s making the call.”
Y nodded. Without missing a beat, he walked to the boom box and slowly faded down the volume. On cue the jugglers snatched the vegetables from the air. When the music was quiet, Mr. Potato Head took up a small microphone.
“First we want to thank Thrifty Foods for opening its doors to us,” he said. He turned to the kids, wiggling his rosy, discoid ears. “Who wants to play a game with Mr. Potato Head?”
The children had formed a circle around him. He pulled out a big red tomato and held it up for them to see.
“What’s this?” he asked. “Can anyone tell me?”
“A tomato!” cried a little girl in front.
“Very good!” said Mr. Potato Head. “You think it’s a tomato. Now, how many of the rest of you think it’s a tomato?”
The others nodded in agreement. It was a tomato, all right.
“Well, what if I told you it wasn’t a tomato?” Mr. Potato Head pulled out a chiffon scarf and draped it over the tomato.
“What if . . .”
He held the scarf out in front of him for the kids to see.
“. . . I told you . . .”
He circled slowly.
“. . . it was . . .”
The kids held their breath.
“. . . a flounder! ” And with that he yanked off the scarf to reveal a large, slimy fish. Charmey had defrosted it the night before and daubed it with glycerin to make it drip and glisten. A clamor went up from the circle of kids.
“Yuuuuck!” they cried. “Gross!” They screwed up their noses.
Mr. Potato Head raised his black, sluglike eyebrows. “You said it, kids.” He tossed the fish over his shoulder to Charmey, who caught it neatly in a burlap sack.
“Now try this one. What’s this?” He held up a potato. Th
is time the children weren’t so sure.
“A potato?” asked a little boy.
“Nope.” Mr. Potato Head stepped forward. “It’s not a potato. . . .” He reached behind the boy’s ear and pulled out a candy cane.
“Ooops, it’s not a candy cane.” He handed it to the boy and tried again. He reached behind the ear of a little girl. This time he pulled out a plastic Christmas tree.
“Oh, dear! It’s not a Christmas tree either,” he said, handing it to the girl, who gave a little skip and turned around to show her mother.
“No, my miniature friends,” he continued, holding up the potato and draping it once again with his scarf. “This potato is not a potato at all.” He leaned over the heads of the children and invited a mother to pull off the scarf. “It is . . .”
The woman giggled, then gave a yank.
“. . . bug poison!”
And sure enough the potato had been transformed in his hand into a large spray can of household insecticide, which he held up for all to see.
“This, my friends, is the perverted magic of biotechnology.” Mr. Potato Head’s voice grew serious now, as he addressed the mothers over the heads of their offspring. “But genetic engineering is no joke, not when it comes to the food you feed your children. As of 1997 over thirty genetically engineered crops were approved by the U.S. government for sale, including potatoes that are genetically spliced with a bacterial pesticide and tomatoes crossed with fish genes to increase their resistance to the cold. Then there’s corn, canola, soybeans, squash. . . .”
He had the mothers’ attention.
Frank, meanwhile, was counting. He figured they had about five minutes before the cops showed up. He looked around for Charmey. He tested the strength of his wire.
“Approximately sixty to seventy percent of processed foods now contain some form of genetically modified corn or soy. That means infant formulas, baby foods, pizza, soda, chips. . . .”
The mothers scanned the contents of their carts.
“And it isn’t just vegetables either. . . .”