Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  Tuesday, 3:10 PM

  Mama! It’s so good to hear your voice! It’s lovely! The carpets are in, and the kitchen cabinets, and the movers come tomorrow!…

  Wednesday, 9:30 AM

  Oh, Mama! I’m so glad I caught you in! But I can’t talk long. The movers will be here any minute! And I still have to pack Elmer’s clothes…

  Wednesday, 2:50 PM

  Mama! It’s so good to hear your voice! Yes, they’re gone. This house is so empty, but the realtor says it won’t stay that way long. The last family seemed very interested.

  I’ll go over there as soon as we hang up. It’ll feel strange, but I’ll be busy getting everything arranged. Elmer arrives Saturday, and by then…

  Thursday, 9:22 AM

  Oh, Mama! I’m so glad I caught you in! The place is still a mess, but I slept in my own bed, and it was so nice! During the day, this house is just swimming in sunlight! But at night… I felt so safe and secure, more so than in any other bed—or home!—I can remember. It was heaven!…

  Friday, 2:20 PM

  Mama! It’s so good to hear your voice! I’m getting things put away, and the place is looking marvelous! You’ll just love it when you see it. I know you will. I do! As much as I love… Well, you!

  And Elmer will be home tomorrow! I’ll actually go to the airport and get him, all by myself. I wish you could go with me, but… Give Grandmama my love.

  I can hardly wait till he sees it! He’ll love it!

  What do you mean? He couldn’t possibly… Of course he’ll love it! He’d better. There’s no way to change it. They say it’s just like people, stuck with whatever face it grows up with.

  People can have plastic surgery? Well, of course… Mama! No! I don’t care what he says! No one is taking an axe to my…

  Sunday, 9:05 AM

  Maamaa!! He’s gone!

  I don’t know why! I brought him home and he took one look at the house and…

  He just grabbed his suitcase. It was still packed, after all. He threw it back in the Tortoise. And he left.

  Of course he said something. It was just like before he left, except I wasn’t on the phone. It was awful. He was screaming! Absolutely screaming!

  Oh, Mama! He said I was much too dependent on you! I never really grew up and if only Freud could see me he would have a case for the textbooks. He said that our relationship is so symbiotic that all I really want is to go back to the womb. And he’s had all he can stand of that kind of life.

  No, Mama. Not really. I don’t need to come stay with you. See? He was wrong. I’m not that dependent on you. And he’ll realize that. I’m sure. He’ll be back. And if he isn’t, well, I have the house.

  No, really. Besides, I’m just getting settled in. And I don’t want to go outside again.

  What’s it look like? I guess I can tell you now, Mama.

  It looks just like you, Mama.

  THE LAST WORD

  Do you really want to know

  what people are thinking?

  The salesman carefully spread the leaves of his brochure before me, saying, “We call it.…” The picture showed a grave, not too fresh, perhaps a month old—the grass was coming back—with, just before the headstone, what looked like the severed head of a woman. The colors were true, every hair in place, the smile loving, the eyes closed. To one side, facing it, stood a woman and two sober-faced children, a boy and a girl, all dressed in their Sunday best. The woman’s face was clearly identical to the one on the ground, though her smile was one of bravery facing grief.

  Across the top of the photo was a caption: “Give your loved ones the Last Word!”

  “It’s a fungus,” said the salesman. “Like a mushroom.” He wrinkled his nose, unused to the powerfully floral atmosphere—partly flowers, but just as much the deodorants we used—of the establishment. He wore a black suit, a black tie, and a white shirt. I suspected he had watched too many old movies. People in our trade, and those who wished to sell to us, dressed conservatively, but not that conservatively. “Our gengineers developed it.”

  “But what does it do?” I asked. It wasn’t the sort of product I was familiar with. Most of the salesmen who visited me were pitching caskets, memory books, and furniture for the funeral home I ran, or equipment and chemicals for the embalming shop in the basement.

  “Memories,” he said. “We lay them down in our brains all our lives. We lay them down for things that happen to us, things we do, even thoughts we have. Our strongest memories are those we lay down most often, for those thoughts that have preoccupied us most, those things we have done most often.”

  I raised my eyebrows. What did all that, true as it might be, have to do with my business?

  He raised a hand to beg my patience. “When we die, the brain decays.” I nodded. Now he was on my ground. “And those memories that are most weakly embedded in the brain go first. The strongest linger. Those memories that represent our deepest, truest thoughts and feelings.”

  That made sense. I nodded again.

  “Our ‘Last Word’ fungus,” he said. “You put a spore in the mouth of the dear departed, and when you bury him—or her, of course—you leave a small opening in the casket. A drill hole is enough. Then the spore sprouts. It sends tendrils throughout the brain, seeking whatever strong memories yet remain, the strongest, deepest, truest. And when it finds them, it shapes itself into a form, usually that of some plant but sometimes.…” He pointed at the brochure. “One that expresses those memories.”

  “Then this fellow’s deepest memories were of his love for his wife?”

  This time it was his turn to nod. “That’s right. Can you imagine how she must have felt to learn that?”

  “And does it last?”

  He shrugged. “It’s a fungus. A mushroom. In a week, at most, it’s gone. And it’s sterile. It won’t be spreading more spores throughout the neighborhood. The Bioform Regulatory Administration insisted on that.”

  I laughed, thinking of what might happen if such a fungus were to go wild. What would it dredge up from the soil in backyards and parks and farms and woods? The obsessive dreams of earthworms and dead cats and rotten wood, revelations of dark and hidden crimes? Perhaps, like athlete’s foot, it would take root in living flesh and then spell out our lesser secrets.

  Then I shook my head. “This is Maine,” I said. “Small-town America in spades. The people are so conservative—and they will tell you so themselves—that they wear belts with their suspenders.”

  He raised one hand like a bishop blessing his flock. “They’ll buy it,” he said.

  “No, they won’t,” I insisted.

  “Sure they will. Here.…” He reached into his sample case and withdrew a thick wad of brochures. “Give them these, and when they order.…” He named a surprisingly high price and produced a small vial. It was half full of tiny grains perhaps twice the size of poppy seeds. The other half was a cotton plug, just like in an aspirin bottle. “Take these on spec. Here’s the instruction sheet. And I’ll be back this way in a month or so. If they’ve moved, you can pay me. If they haven’t.…” He shrugged. “I’ll take them back.”

  The deal sounded fair enough to me. I held the vial in front of my face. “I thought fungus spores were smaller, like dust?”

  “They are. Each of those ‘seeds’ contains just one. The rest is just flour paste, to bulk ’em up.” He stood and shook my hand. Then he said, “You’ll see. They’ll love ’em.”

  * * * *

  The first thing I did after he was gone was read the instruction sheet. I was happy to see that the procedure was simple and almost exactly the way he had described it. The only thing he had left out was that the deceased should not be embalmed, but that did not surprise me. Embalming fluids were meant to be toxic to fungi, among other things.

 
; The second thing I did was say to myself, what the hell, and fan half a dozen of the brochures across the top of a small, antique table in the front hall. I was willing to be proven wrong, but that meant I had to give my customers—or their families, who after all were paying the bills—a glimpse of the bait and a chance to nibble.

  What surprised me was how quickly the first nibble came. That very afternoon, Oscar Morse, one of our local playboys—at least, he came as close to being one as he could on a beer and hot-tart budget—wrapped his car around a tree. The rescue workers pried him out of the wreckage, hauled him off to the hospital for the DOA diagnosis, and then, without ever getting him out of the ambulance, brought him straight to me.

  My assistant, Frank, was still arranging Oscar on the slab in the basement when his wife, Susan, arrived. She was a pretty little thing, all blonde and buxom and leggy, who made me wonder why her husband hadn’t stayed home. But such speculations were none of my affair, though I had known her ever since we had both attended Edmund Muskie High School. We had even dated once or twice, before we went our separate ways.

  The tears in her eyes were my affair, and I put on my most sympathetic air as I led her down the front hall toward my office. As we passed the table on which I had left the “Last Word” material, she stopped. “What’s this?” She picked up a brochure and flipped through it. Then she slapped it against my chest, almost as if she were a nineteenth-century belle and it her fan. “Jesus!” she said. “Why the hell would I want to give that bastard one more word?”

  I shrugged as sympathetically as I could manage. “It’s a new product,” I said, and I parroted as much of the salesman’s explanation as I could recall. “The gengineers.…”

  “They’re going to change the world entirely before they’re done.” She paused as if in thought. Then she slapped me again. “But why not? I’d love to find out what he really cared about.” She shifted the brochure to her other hand and poked the padding over my ribs with a sturdy finger. “You’ve gained a little, haven’t you?”

  * * * *

  According to the instructions, it would take ten days for the spore to sprout, find the memories, and grow enough to break through the surface of the ground. Then, in a matter of mere minutes, at most an hour if the shape it had to build to express the memories it had found was something elaborate, it would take form. The timing was so precise that the instructions advised gathering the deceased’s family at the grave exactly ten days after planting time, so that they could witness the Last Word from start to finish.

  That ten days was time enough for several more members of our community to enter my establishment. Among them was one of the local millionaires; I won’t name him, for he made a good part of his fortune by having a keen eye for whom to sue, and his heirs share the talent. Another was Mildred Cross, who had, when her daughter married Sam Phippen, insisted that the “children” share her large house. She had ruled their lives ever since with a hand so firm that two of the four grandchildren had actually run away before finishing high school. In the hospital with cancer, Mildred heard about the Last Word fungus from a friend. She called me herself, insisting that she not be deprived of a seed, and as it turned out, she made the arrangements just in time.

  Not long after their departures, we lost Eileen Witham. She had, once upon a time, been a school teacher and the town librarian. She had never married. She had never, to anyone’s knowledge, even had a man friend, much less a lover, and the word was that whenever a man had asked her for a date, she had rejected the overture in no uncertain terms. Yet she had never fit the image of a dried-up, prune-faced, sour-tempered spinster. She had been a lovely woman all her life, generous-spirited and devoted to local charities, and I thought that few of my customers made the boxes in which I shipped them to the hereafter look so good. It was her friends who thought she deserved a Last Word.

  And then there was Alec Whitcomb. For years, his three kids had been coming to school covered with bruises; often, they were wearing casts as well. His wife, Dana, was in and out of the local shelter for battered women. Eventually, the state’s social workers noticed what was going on and proposed to put the kids in foster care for their own good. That was when Alec barricaded himself, wife, and kids in the trailer they called home, loaded his deer rifle, tanked up on Thunderbird, and dared the pinko government toadies to deprive him of his right to do whatever he liked with his property. Fortunately, the sheriff was a deer hunter too, and when Alec stuck his head up in front of a window, he got nailed right between the eyes. His wife, much to my surprise, paid for the spore. She said, “I don’t expect to like it, but it is the last word he’ll ever get.”

  It was a busy period. It was, in fact, so busy that when Susan Morse, clad in black as at the funeral, darkened my office doorway, she surprised me. I looked up from the insurance paperwork I was processing, recognized her, and said, “Oh! Is it…?”

  She grinned at me, though her expression was not one of amusement, nor of humor or enjoyment. Her eyes were too dark with fatigue for makeup to conceal, and she wore none. There were lines in her brow and beside her mouth, and I thought that though her husband had been a drunken, philandering SOB, she missed him.

  “Ten days, you said.”

  I glanced at the clock-calendar on the wall. I had forgotten, and I shouldn’t have. If the Last Word spores were to be a success I would have to remember to remind my clients, not trust them to remind me. “Sorry,” I said. “You’re right. And we have just enough time to get there.” I rose, grabbed my jacket, and used one hand on her elbow to steer Susan toward the parking lot behind the building. “We’ll take my car.”

  Our town was a small one, and the drive to the cemetery was short. We arrived at the grave a few minutes before the deadline. And then we waited, staring at the grave, which looked a little more raw than the one in the salesman’s brochure, sniffing the smells of raw earth, new-mown grass, and wilting flowers. While we did.…

  “He wasn’t good for much,” said Susan. “Sometimes I hated him. I threw things. I.…”

  “You must have loved him,” I said. “You miss him.”

  She nodded. “Yeah. Anyway, I used to love him.”

  At that moment, the soft dirt over the head of the coffin began, very slightly, to bulge. It cracked, and the crack grew larger. I pointed it out, and Susan caught her breath.

  There was, deep within the crack, a gleam of something smooth and pink. It grew larger, pinker, closer, and the dirt began to peel aside. Oscar Morse’s Last Word began to thrust slowly from the grave. Over the next ten minutes, it took its full and rampant form: a smooth, flesh-colored column, its tip an expanded cone somewhat darker in hue, at its very apex a slit that looked as if it might give access to the interior.

  Susan Morse began to laugh. In moments, she was howling, with sobs beginning to mingle with the laughter. I winced and sighed. I had seen hysteria before, and I did not like it.

  I turned Susan away from the grave. By the time we had reached the car, she had calmed down, except for hiccups, and was able to ask me: “What was it?”

  I sighed again. She knew better than I. “It looked like a common stinkhorn,” I said. The bulb at the root of the true stinkhorn, or Phallus impudicus, was edible if you got it early enough, before the stink developed. Some people called it a truffle. And if Oscar Morse’s Last Word followed the stinkhorn pattern all the way, it would detumesce within an hour or so.

  On the way back to town, we stopped at the “Colonial Clam,” a small restaurant. I had a cup of coffee. She had tea. Before we left, I told her I had never married—morticians don’t seem to strike many women in a romantic way—and she patted my hand.

  * * * *

  There was no denying that Oscar Morse’s Last Word was apt. It wasn’t the sort of thing anyone would want to see in the papers, or to discuss in polite company. But then, when Oscar
had made the papers in life, it was generally for things that polite company would prefer to ignore. Fortunately, I hadn’t thought of inviting the papers to witness my clients’ Last Words. Nor had it occurred to Susan that her husband’s Last Word should be public.

  The millionaire’s family wasn’t so bashful. When the ten days on his Last Word were up, the entire clan was gathered around the grave, along with three reporters, two photographers, and a minicam crew from a Portland TV station.

  In this case too, the earth bulged and cracked and the Last Word emerged on schedule. This one, however, unfurled as if it were a genuine plant, not a fungal look-alike. To appreciative oohs and aahs, it revealed branches and leaves and finally the translucent discs of a silver-dollar plant. One of the reporters snickered. The family’s exclamations stopped. The flashbulbs began to pop, and the family promptly exploded in a gust of indignation.

  Someone, presumably thinking of how real silver-dollar plants, once dried, can decorate a vase forever, picked a branch of the Last Word. Immediately, it began to droop, and the discs, the dollars, collapsed in upon themselves. When they turned to mush and dripped upon the hand that held their stem, the minicam caught it all. A reporter murmured, “You can’t take it with you,” and I began to sweat. If that line became a newspaper headline, the family would surely blame—and sue—both the Last Word company and me. As if it were my fault that the millionaire had cared for nothing more than money, or that mushrooms just didn’t pluck like real plants.

  When a six-car crash took over the headlines, I sighed with relief and resolved to keep the Last Word brochures out of sight of anyone whose secret self I suspected might prove embarassing. However, it was too late to do anything about Mildred Cross or Eileen Witham. They had died a day apart, but their funerals had been the same morning, and the Phippens had decided to come to the cemetery with Eileen’s friends to view both Last Words together.