A noise had startled him from sleep. Now he heard it again, a dull scraping coming from somewhere behind him. He raised his eyes to the rearview mirror. Constance was stretching into the bed of the pickup. By the time he got out to join her, she’d already removed one of the boxes.
The cardboard had rotted even more since the last time Michael Boni had touched them. Stacked together, the boxes teetered in his arms like pillows. He had a bad feeling about all this.
“Where to?”
She started walking. He followed a few steps back, peering around the stack as best he could. He had no idea where his feet were falling.
She walked for about a block. “Here,” she said from somewhere in front of him.
He shuffled in a half circle to get a better look. They were standing at the edge of one of the open-air shelters. A pillar rose from a low concrete footer.
“Where should I put them?”
She pointed to the sidewalk.
“Don’t we need a table?”
She reached out toward the pillar and eased herself down. “What for?”
There were three rows of booths running through the shelter. Constance had wedged herself directly at the end of the middle row, an obstacle to anyone trying to get anywhere.
“Don’t you need some sort of permit?” Michael Boni said.
Constance was elbow-deep in one of the boxes, rooting around for something.
“I’m going to go check things out,” he said. If her own son couldn’t talk sense to her, what could Michael Boni be expected to do?
He turned into the first open doorway he came upon and found himself standing in an enormous hangar-like space, one of the two largest sheds. He had to crane his neck to find the ceiling. Up there it was mostly girders and skylights, the early morning sun making the panes of glass throb beyond their frames.
While they’d been asleep in the truck, the market had opened. The suburban mobs were already here, a kaleidoscope of brightly colored T-shirts and canvas shopping bags. From the doorway, Michael Boni couldn’t see any of the booths. There were too many bodies jammed together in slow-moving eddies, blocking his view. He stepped forward into the nearest current, letting it sweep him away.
His first impression was that the place felt less like a market than like a crowded museum, everyone around him eyeing pyramids of fruit and vegetables as if they were sculptures. A skeletal young woman in a tank top ran a finger along a stretch of eggplants and zucchini and cucumbers, never once picking anything up, as if content just to be in their presence. Michael Boni was heartened by the sight of an elderly couple, the man an old-world throwback in a felt fedora and baggy wool pants. His wife, in a plain brown dress, was frowning at a pile of tomatoes while the old man clenched a twisted root of ginger.
Michael Boni made two full circuits of the building, going up one side and then back down the other, and by the time he returned to where he’d started from, he’d seen every vegetable, every jar of local honey and preserves, every gluten-free scone, every pot of organic basil and sprig of thyme. And he realized, looking back, that every vendor in here—every member of the flannel brigade—was white. And so too were most of the shoppers. It was as if they’d somehow claimed this tiny sliver of the city for themselves. There was Michael Boni and Constance and a black guy selling ribs from a smoky barbecue and another playing spoons on the sidewalk. And then there was everyone else.
There were so many people coming into the shed now that it was hard to get back outside. He had to squeeze sideways through the double doors.
The moment he reached the sidewalk, Michael Boni heard the squawk of a walkie-talkie. Beside the pillar where he’d left Constance stood a bald, spectacled man carrying a clipboard. Constance was still squatting among her boxes, palming a head of lettuce in each of her outstretched hands.
“Ma’am,” the man with the clipboard was saying, “there are procedures.”
“Lettuce!” Constance’s head appeared between the man’s calves, shouting to everyone passing by. “Here’s some lettuce.”
“Ma’am,” the bald man said, tapping the clipboard. “You have to go.”
“Just let her be,” Michael Boni said.
“I wish I could—” The man with the clipboard took a step back as Michael Boni appeared beside him.
“You can,” Michael Boni said, coming the same half-step forward. “You can turn around and walk away.”
“I can’t do that.” The bald man turned to look for something. Someone, as it turned out. There was a cop offering directions to the driver of a car idling in the street. “All these people have permits,” the bald man said. “All of them have paid.”
Michael Boni reached for his wallet. “How much is it?”
“There are forms,” the man said. “There’s a process.”
Michael Boni realized his pockets were empty. He’d left the house without having any idea where he’d end up. He reached for the clipboard instead. “Are those the forms?”
The man jerked away. “No, this is … something else.”
“Go get the forms,” Michael Boni said. “I’ll fill them out. I’ll pay the fee.”
“That’s not how it works,” the man said. The color was rising in his cheeks.
The car in the street pulled away, and as the cop turned back toward the sidewalk, it occurred to Michael Boni to wonder if their truck had already been towed. He looked down at Constance. The crumbling boxes were exactly as full as when he’d carried them here, except for the lettuce in each of Constance’s hands.
Michael Boni was on unfamiliar ground. But the one thing he knew for sure was that he wouldn’t be bringing the boxes back home. The stuff could be taken or eaten, by man or by rat, rained on, stepped on, or rotted into mush. He didn’t care. He wouldn’t be taking the stuff anywhere. Let clipboard man throw the boxes into the Dumpster if he wanted.
“Come on,” Michael Boni said, reaching down for Constance’s hand. She took his fingers without argument, dropping the lettuce at his feet. One of the heads tried to roll away, and Michael Boni stopped it with the toe of his boot. The lettuce had such a pleasing roundness, about the size of a bowling ball, but with just the right amount of give. He struck it with the top of his laces, just as his old soccer coaches had always instructed. The lettuce made the most wonderful sound as it exploded against the bald man’s shin.
Only now, almost a year later, at the start of his second spring in his grandmother’s house—the second season of Constance’s garden—was Michael Boni able to see the true importance of that lettuce.
“Do you understand?” he said to Darius. “Do you get what it means?” It was hard to put such a thing—a symbol—into words.
They were sitting on a blown-out truck tire in a playground not far from Michael Boni’s old apartment. It was their new meeting place, now that the plaza downtown had become too dangerous, too exposed. Here there was even a crooked lean-to near the monkey bars in case it happened to rain.
“I get it,” Darius said. “I get it.”
Michael Boni might have believed him, if Darius hadn’t said it twice.
The chains were missing from the swing set. The seats were gone from the teeter-totter. The sandbox had been dug down to dirt. A woman had been found dead in the bushes here not long ago. Michael Boni knew better than to come around at night. But during the day it was safe enough.
“My grandmother,” Michael Boni said, “she wasted away here. And I didn’t do anything to help.” Darius didn’t need to know what a wretched soul she’d been. Anyone deserved better than what she got.
“I need to know you understand,” Michael Boni said. “This lettuce …”
Darius nodded unconvincingly.
“All you need,” Michael Boni said, “is a clean slate.”
Constance had shown them what was possible. Something new could grow.
The lettuce was an opening salvo, a declaration of war.
Seven
Winded from the shor
t walk down the corridor from the conference room, Mrs. Freeman blustered past the upraised glance of her administrative assistant and charged on through to her office. As she let the heavy oak door shush behind her, she heard a familiar voice call her name. But rather than stop, she let momentum carry her forward, all the way to the window. Having spent the last two hours sitting like a stuffed owl at the end of a conference table, Ruth Freeman decided she would rather remain there, looking out upon the city, than have to experience, so soon after the first, yet another annoyance.
The sight outside was not pretty. Indeed, the landscape was as depressing as the foreign films of which her husband was so fond. And yet Mrs. Freeman felt she might have stayed that way for the rest of the day, peacefully staring off into the horizon, through the rain and the fog, had her administrative assistant not finally, intrusively, appeared at her side.
“What is it?” Mrs. Freeman said.
“I’ve been going over the presentation,” Tiphany said. “Your notes—I’ve been trying to put them together. But I notice there’s nothing in here—that is, you make no mention—”
“Yes,” Mrs. Freeman said, “yes,” drawing out the s as if it were a slow leak through which her administrative assistant might escape.
“But you promised the board … They’re waiting for your—have you gone through the reports?”
“Reports,” said Mrs. Freeman, turning once again toward the window.
“Did you read Arthur’s memo, Ruth?” Tiphany said, trying to move into Mrs. Freeman’s line of vision. “I put it on your desk. People have been asking questions. Eldenrod at the paper. And with these demonstrations, Arthur’s afraid—”
“Arthur is always afraid.”
“I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty …” Tiphany paused and handed Mrs. Freeman a sheet of paper.
In a glance she saw him, spread across the page: Arthur, panicking over trifles, creating pandemonium, which, in an office full of people utterly incapable of thinking for themselves, was as easy as setting fire to gasoline. And then there was her administrative assistant, who saw chaos as career advancement. Mrs. Freeman could imagine Tiphany hunched over the report, inserting her self-serving notes, and she felt herself a bit like some unfortunate king whose good nature and honesty put him at the mercy of earls and lords overendowed with hubris. Although part of her, the part that had once thought of itself as an intellectual, would have liked to be able to remember some specific king and the actual plot that had done him in, the more practical side of Mrs. Freeman was content to have remembered the gist of it.
“I mentioned we’re hiring a consultant,” Tiphany began again, “that we’re going to discredit—”
“You’d have me deny it all,” Mrs. Freeman said, waving the paper at her assistant and then dropping it back on top of the folder before turning once again to the window.
Mrs. Freeman was conscious of noises behind her, whiny ones that brushed up against her neck and made her shiver, but she found that if she concentrated her attention elsewhere, down into the alley below, for instance, the sound grew less and less irritating until finally it went away.
Mrs. Freeman knew what Arthur wanted to hear, and she could see even in a quick skimming that Tiphany had provided it: denial, obfuscation. But now, turning her gaze west toward the suburbs, in the direction of her home, where her husband was at that moment eating plain yogurt and scanning the newspaper for arcane facts with which to quiz her over dinner, Mrs. Freeman decided that this time she could not, would not, give Arthur the answer he was looking for.
“This particular catastrophe,” she said, addressing the wet, misty interstate overpass outside her window, “is what was once, in more prosaic times, known as ‘collateral damage.’ But in recent years we have begun to think of such casualties as remnants of a primitive past—something akin to raccoon coats and flagpole sitting. We seem to have forgotten that in wars people die, and not because of the quality of our craftsmanship, but because war is distasteful.”
Yes, she thought, she would say that and not a word more. The company expected her to apply a balm, as if with some possible combination of syllables she could return charred schools to their virgin state—as if it were her responsibility, as if she or the company had anything to apologize for. A story might come out in the paper. Stories were always coming out in papers. There would be no point in challenging the facts, which would undoubtedly be correct: sometimes missiles landed where they shouldn’t. Sad? Yes. But scandalous? Not at all. It was simply inevitable, one of the unfortunate costs of war.
Mrs. Freeman recalled a story she had once heard from one of her more philosophically inclined acquaintances—a rare highlight from an otherwise tiresome dinner party. The story was about a Swiss engineer, a man who around the time of the First World War had come to the United States determined to answer the problem of how to drop bombs from airplanes. That is, so the bombs might hit an actual target, rather than landing wherever they might, left to guesswork and chance and the pull of gravity. It was a problem no one until then had managed to solve. The Swiss engineer’s solution, after years of work, involved gyroscopes and gears and more math and physics than Mrs. Freeman could ever hope to understand. But the details were beside the point. The curious piece was the engineer’s motivation: not to win wars, but to do God’s will. He was a good Christian, of the old-fashioned variety. He believed a precise bombsight would reduce human suffering, narrowing destruction only to what needed to be destroyed. And he succeeded, introducing the precision and accuracy no one else could. And yet still one nagging problem remained, then as now: a bombsight depended, above all else, on sight. Over the last decade, HSI’s engineers had developed a drone that could blow the cap off a pop bottle from thirty thousand feet. But first you still had to know where the bottle cap was.
Were it up to Mrs. Freeman, there would be no blowing up of anything. She would let the missiles rust in their weapon bays, deterrents for worst-case scenarios. But as long as there was a need, she felt no guilt about her work; nor could she agree with those cloudy-minded idealists who had begun to pollute the plaza outside the building like so much discarded chewing gum. She would gladly add her name to any list of signatories opposed to armed aggression, but she was no longer naïve enough to believe one could dissolve an army and defend oneself instead with wishful thinking. Arthur might fret and Tiphany plot, but in this case they were beyond reproach, and with nothing left to be resolved, Mrs. Freeman saw no reason to attend to the buzz of her intercom. Let it nag if it wished. She had moved on.
“Your one-fifteen,” cracked a voice over the speakerphone, Tiphany changing tacks.
“Fine,” Mrs. Freeman called over her shoulder. “Send him in.” And in the pause that followed, she caught herself gazing around her office, one of the few habits of her former life she had never managed to break—the need to make sure everything was in order before company arrived. But the place was as it always was, as she had aspired for it to be: good enough. It was not the largest or most impressive room in the building, but Mrs. Freeman had grown tired of offices she couldn’t pace without getting winded. On the day she’d toured the third floor of the newly constructed HSI Building, scouting for the office that would be her hermitage five days a week, Mrs. Freeman had taken only one look out the windows at the front of the building, at the view of a street lined with other office buildings, all that sterile glass like dead shark eyes. That day Mrs. Freeman had determined the proper place for her was as far from all that as she could get, which proved to be a room designated to hold file cabinets, along a forgotten corridor at the back of the building. Her new office had the same full wall of windows as the rest of her colleagues, but hers were shaded, without need for blinds or tints, by the interstate overpass. Here the landscape was of empty billboards and brick walls painted with faded advertisements, all of which, even if they were only remnants, comforted her like a favorite moth-eaten sweater, reminding her of a familiar world, the very in
dustrial wasteland where she’d gotten her start.
With the exception of her office and those belonging to the lowest rung and most unnecessary members of middle management, the rest of the rooms overlooking the alley housed files or hosted meetings with clients and suppliers no one cared to impress. The relative squalor in which Mrs. Freeman worked clearly upset her administrative assistant, whose makeshift desk in the darkest, most out-of-the-way corner of the hallway was degrading and embarrassing and was most likely the catalyst for Tiphany’s designs and ambitions. But Mrs. Freeman felt she had reached an age at which her comfort, as well as her diversions, could deservedly come at someone else’s inconvenience. Surely she had earned that much.
Mrs. Freeman wished now that she had told Tiphany that she wasn’t ready to see her one-fifteen. There were so many things she would rather have been doing than to have to endure yet another meeting, but had Mrs. Freeman tried to tell Tiphany—whose ph always made her bite her lower lip a fraction of a second too long—that she was busy or indisposed or that she needed to reschedule, she knew what the young woman would have said, so well was she conditioned: Wouldn’t it be better to see him now, Ruth, while you have a few minutes, rather than later when you’ll have to work around your afternoon appointments? You have a busy day … Et cetera, et cetera, and, of course, Tiphany would then proceed to remind Mrs. Freeman about some other meeting, which admittedly Mrs. Freeman would also have forgotten, and Tiphany would recall to her some early business dinner with someone named Steve, one of the many Steves with whom Mrs. Freeman was always having to eat an early business dinner. Or if not dinner, it would be the symphony or the ballet with her husband, who would be sullen later were she to stand him up, and all these reminders would be delivered in such a way as to suggest that any change in plans might topple the system altogether.
“Hello?”
Mrs. Freeman turned to discover a young man with dirty blond hair standing uncomfortably in her doorway, looking as if he intended to ask her for directions.
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