Welcome to the Greenhouse

by Gordon Van Gelder

Margie was trying to scream again but couldn’t breathe. She seemed like she was trying to look at me, too, but she couldn’t pull her eyes away from the TV.

  “Honey, please.” I took her arm as gently as I could with all that adrenaline in my veins. “Get up. If you want to talk to your son, you’ll have to get out there and move. Does this shirt match my good tie?”

  Those same small-minded people who’d tut-tutted about how slow he’d been to walk were also free with their opinions about a boy who never visited his parents, but you have to remember, he didn’t know us and he wasn’t used to thinking of any one place as being more special than the next. Also, the crowd was always in the way.

  You couldn’t have blamed Albert if Margie disappointed him. She slobbered and screamed and pawed. Embarrassment made my body so heavy I could barely keep up, but his smile was a mystery just like in that Lisa painting.

  His smile was patient and knowing. He seemed to understand everything about Margie’s pain and he was not afraid. We’d learned all about his empathy and genuine interest in people from the TV, but now that magic was real. It was hypnotizing.

  “Walk with me” he said. We were already trudging alongside him, and his followers made sense of his invitation before we did. They backed off to give us some privacy.

  Albert was much leaner than he appeared on TV. Up close, his robes couldn’t hide the fact that he was all angles and elbows. He was beautiful. He had Margie’s black hair and dark eyes. He also had a ridiculous walk like a kangaroo crossed with a drunk, bouncing, skipping, letting the earth zip by in between each step. Otherwise we never would have been able to keep up. Nobody understood yet what it meant that he’d developed this level of control.

  “I love you,” he said, and Margie screamed some more. His eyes locked with mine. “I’m sorry I haven’t visited before.”

  “It’s okay, son.”

  He smiled again, more of a grin this time like you’d expect on a boy. “I need some fatherly advice,” he said.

  “From me?”

  He just grinned. I remember it perfectly; the gritty taste of the dust and rumbling crowd behind us; sunlight flashing on the camera lenses; his calm, strong words.

  For whatever it’s worth, so help me, I said his idea sounded mighty fine.

  It took Albert most of a year because he started out careful, dodging back and forth across the equator, slowing the planet’s rotation in unsteady spurts, forgoing meals and sleep to keep a schedule that only he knew. He riled up a storm unlike anyone had ever seen, a “strato”-something way at the top of the sky. Fortunately, during his first years every landmass in the world had shaken out at least a hundred years’ worth of quakes. There were some small tidal waves and one big fault opened up in India, but all in all it wasn’t bad.

  The scientists lost a lot of weather balloons and robot planes trying to prove that he couldn’t be doing what he was doing. For the next eighteen months, we had wicked beautiful sunsets in the States but not much sun. I was surprised at how little panic there was. He’d explained what he was doing and people believed him. People thanked him everywhere.

  At that point we’d only had a taste of the future we’d created, damning our grandchildren, but one taste was plenty. For ten years we’d seen scorching summers and short, late winters. Fire ants had spread so far north they’d reached Idaho. New diseases were everywhere. Most of Africa was baked sterile and other rainless hot spots had cropped up across Asia and California. Beachside cities and in some places whole countries were seeping under the rising oceans…

  Somehow he shook all the gases and carbon whatever out of the atmosphere.

  At the same time, he was also talking up a storm. Albert was in a unique position to change things. People loved or feared him, but he always had everyone’s attention.

  Because he talked with everyone, he knew everything about those few who hid from him. He personally visited the fat cats who’d been sitting on clean technology because their fortunes came from dirty energy. He visited them again and again with the eyes of global television staring over his shoulder. “You’ve already got more money than you know what to do with,” he said. It was practically that simple. Albert started things going and the new economies proved stronger than the old. Hydro-what’s-it engines aren’t any faster than oil-driven, but they don’t pollute, which saved billions of dollars in health and cleanup costs. That didn’t happen overnight, but the benefits were as obvious and dizzying as a stack of presents under a Christmas tree.

  He visited warlords and dictators, too, especially the Chinese leaders, probably because they controlled so much land and so many people that he couldn’t avoid their policies for more than a day at a time. Albert even brought several of these hard men with him around the globe, pushing them in heavy-duty wheelchairs he’d had designed for exactly this purpose. We don’t know what they talked about, but he showed them a borderless world. He showed them their real size.

  Meanwhile the weather in Oklahoma had become like I remembered it as a boy. It was steady and predictable. We sent our crop surpluses to places where they couldn’t shake their trouble, countries where civil war or famine had held sway for generations.

  There were some things he couldn’t fix. Africa had reached the peak of its AIDS plague and something like seven out of every ten people were dying or seriously ill. Murderers and rapists still walked among us. Several endangered species had dwindled to such small numbers that they were doomed regardless of any new rescue effort, no matter how well funded or stocked with volunteers.

  None of that ruined the sense of hope and cooperation sweeping the planet. Some people said he was an incarnation of Earth itself sent to scare us into taking responsibility before it was too late, but Albert didn’t want to be worshipped. He just wanted to stop seeing so much pain.

  He hadn’t quite turned eleven yet when he took on that crazy bastard up north.

  Empathy and trust are not universal traits. Albert taught us that we were poorer because of it. He taught us to pity, but he also believed in taking action.

  That madman in Korea had ruled his miserable half-frozen hunk of land for twenty years, building nukes, selling nukes, starving his own people so he could put more money into the walls and guns that kept them in and everyone else out.

  Albert attempted to meet with this man for years but was rebuffed. He sent messages and was met with silence. At last he issued commands. More silence.

  He stopped the world. Albert put that bastard’s territory in eternal darkness even as he managed to bring sunshine to neighboring countries on a regular basis. It must have felt like God himself had cursed them.

  Weeks passed and our son exhausted himself, only catnapping, taking a bite or two when folks pleaded with him. It seemed to be working. The TV and the net were abuzz with praise from the leaders of the world, issuing the madman terms, promising relief to his beleaguered people. But that sick bastard had hunkered down in his luxurious shelters more than once before. He must have been used to the dark. I think it was pride that drove him to such extremes.

  They call it ABC war: atomic, biological, chemical. The missiles were duds that got no further than Hawaii and often went wide or fell short into Japan, but the madman’s agents had spread worldwide with three low-grade fission devices and more vials and test tubes than anyone could count.

  Albert tried to keep the airborne diseases from spreading. He ran for days, stumbling, cutting his leg on the Himalayas, twisting an ankle in the Amazon delta.

  It just wasn’t enough.

  Three days of massive retaliation from the U.S. and Britain demanded even more effort from our son or else another hundred million souls might have been killed by fallout.

  Revenge was no consolation to Albert or to the billions of wounded survivors. He was stoned in the Philippines and shot at twice in New York, two areas that had taken the brunt of it. Albert renounced his political agenda and every good work he’d done in a terrified, sobbing message that was a
lmost lost in the chorus of outrage.

  He retreated to the oceans and the cold night-side of the planet. He denied himself sunshine and human companionship for two years, running whenever planes and ships came after him. There were sightings during this self-exile, some of which must have been real. Many more were surely hoaxes and lies like that woman in South Dakota and those German cults. He wouldn’t have visited landlocked areas.

  I still have nightmares for my son. The loneliness he must have experienced isn’t something I can put into words.

  Albert snuck across the narrowest stretches of Central America, picked his way through the densely laid islands of Malaysia, and sprinted across Africa, but the chance of running into people on that broad continent was frequently too much for him. Most days the world shifted wildly as he ran south around Africa’s horn.

  What he ate, we don’t know. Fish, I guess. Bugs and fruit. He needed fresh water, too, like any human being. Maybe he conjured it up from the sea somehow. I think too often he did without.

  Hiding for seven hundred days would have been a sad existence for any boy, but it must have been a form of death for someone whose only home had been the crowd. Finally he tried to come back. He was smart enough to pull off the trick of resurrection, but I guess we were too dumb to let him.

  Many people had yet to lose hold of their grieving. A hundred million lives was a heavy price to pay to get some sense knocked into us, but in a lot of ways the world was much improved. The big war had put a stop to border conflicts and most ethnic strife. Africa was still suffering its AIDS die-off, and China wasn’t having a smooth time with its new Cultural Revolution, but we had clean industry and transportation. The global economy was roaring like crazy. There were also quite a few less people to share this wealth, although we were well into a worldwide baby boom.

  Even Margie and me were trying. At least she thought we were. I’d had myself a vasectomy years before, paying thirty times the regular fee to buy the doctor’s silence.

  Margie was doing better. Her TVs and computers weren’t exactly dusty but now she only spent an hour or two following her dramas. After the war, she’d found the chance to mother someone at last. We spent our fortune on an orphanage/soup kitchen and she became a part of more lives than I could count. Somehow she always knew their first names. She often came home humming.

  I was doing better, too. I had a job again, good, hard, paying work at a dairy farm on top of helping out around the soup kitchen. The labor shortage was so bad there was even room for Albert’s father. The cows didn’t care who I was and I pulled overtime without complaining. It even got to a point where my boss would offer me a beer at the end of the day and we’d talk some, no big questions or personal stuff, though he must have been tempted. I was an ordinary joe again and I liked that just fine.

  Everything changed when Albert came ashore near Washington.

  It’s important to know why Margie acted the way she did. The reporters and the crazies ate up our small lives again. Having everything taken from her a second time, having her new life destroyed— they shoved her right off the fine edge she’d been walking. Suddenly we were right back in our cage. She couldn’t call her friends because our lines were jammed. Even her TV shows were canceled for Albert Albert Albert. There was nothing to do but worry. A body can only sleep so many hours and it was impossible to go about any kind of business without fighting off fifty shouting maniacs. On the third day she tried baking pies but burst into tears when she spilled a cup of sugar. I put my arms around her and kissed her neck, but she pushed me away like she never wanted to be touched again. She retreated to her couch and stayed there playing old movies.

  Albert was wicked pale on TV, taller and skinnier now. He was practically wasted away—but it wasn’t food that brought him back.

  He begged for an audience with the president as he was swarmed by passersby. A few hugged him, rejoicing that their messiah had returned. Others pelted him with soda bottles and hunks of asphalt. Amateur video shows him bleeding from his head but never using his awesome powers to knock down the people assaulting him.

  He was small for a thirteen-year-old, stunted by malnutrition. He was obviously sick, too, with spots of fever burning through that fish-pale skin. How sick, nobody knew.

  The president granted Albert’s request. I don’t suppose it matters that the boy’s attitude was submissive or that he looked so fragile and lost. You can’t say no to someone who’s stopped the sun dead overhead.

  Albert had an idea how he could make amends.

  Not every desert can bloom. Albert explained it like this: Energy flows in patterns rather than existing as a blanket. Snow and sand, grassland and jungle, all of these things balance each other, but he thought he could improve on nature’s work and turn every inch of the planet into a garden. The politicians agreed. No doubt they hoped to take credit for it.

  He tried. Oh, how he tried, leaping valleys, fighting swamps, always running and running and running. He didn’t have anything else, you see, and his spectacular plan did seem to be slowly coming true. Maintaining this delicate new balance would have become his life’s work.

  Unfortunately he’d picked up the HIV virus somewhere and he had scurvy and other vitamin deficiencies. Worse, people kicked at him or threw things as he passed. It was like some awful game of global whipping boy. He was a reminder of the war, an easy scapegoat, plus there were plenty of folks who’d always said he was evil for not fitting into their small religions.

  Albert ran and bled and sweated and ran some more until the pneumonia hit.

  He was as ugly as a rabid stray when he came home for the last time. I’ve seen the replays now of Margie and me peeking out as he approached. I wish we hadn’t looked so scared.

  At first I didn’t even think it was him because he’d stopped. I mean, he was walking—stumbling, really—but other than that he was motionless. The world wasn’t turning under his feet anymore. He was that far gone.

  “Mother,” he whispered and Margie screamed, a long high shriek like a horse would make if it broke all four legs. She ran back inside. After that, whatever bit of hope was left in him seemed to fade.

  I did my best to say the right things, holding Albert as he died. It was important to him to share everything he’d seen and felt. His words weren’t so much a confession as a confiding.

  All he’d ever wanted was to be one of us.

  If we’re lucky, the world will never see anything like him again. We didn’t deserve him. We never knew what to do with Albert, and some debts are so great you can only reject what’s been given to you.

  THE MIDDLE OF SOMEWHERE

  Judith Moffett

  Kaylee is entering data on Jane’s clunky old desktop computer, and texting with a few friends while she does it, when the weather alarm goes off for the second time.

  Cornell University’s NestWatch Citizen Scientist program runs this website where you have a different chart for each nest site you’re monitoring. You’re supposed to fill in the data after each visit to the site. Jane’s got a zillion different kinds of birds nesting on her property, and she knows where a lot of them are doing it, so Kaylee’s biology teacher fixed it up with Jane, who’s a friend of hers, for Kaylee to do this NestWatch project for class. Twice a week all spring she’s been coming out to Jane’s place to monitor seven pairs of nesting birds. The place used to be a farm but is all grown up now in trees and bushes except for five or ten acres around the house, which Jane keeps mowed. Bluebirds like short grass and open space.

  Jane is nice, but seriously weird. All Kaylee’s friends think so, and to be honest Kaylee kind of slants what she tells people to exaggerate that side of Jane, who lives a lot like people did way before Kaylee was born, in this little log house with only three small rooms and no dishwasher or clothes dryer, and solar panels on the roof. She has beehives—well, that’s not so weird, though for an old lady maybe it is—but all her water is pumped from a cistern, plus she has two rain barrels o
ut in the garden. Rain barrels! Kaylee knows for a fact that a few years back, when they brought city water out this far from town, Jane just said, Oh well, I can always hook up later if I think I need to. So you have to watch every drop of water you use at Jane’s house, like only flushing the toilet every so often, unless they’re getting plenty of rain. There’s a little sign taped to the bathroom wall that you can’t avoid reading when you’re sitting on the toilet: IF IT’S YELLOW/LET IT MELLOW/IF IT’S BROWN/ FLUSH IT DOWN. Sometimes Kaylee flushes it down even when it isn’t brown, out of embarrassment.

  The flushing thing is partly about water and partly about the septic tank. Kaylee’s friend Morgan’s house has a septic tank too, so Kaylee already knows it’s best to use them as little as possible, and that there are things you can’t put into them or the biology of the tank will get messed up and smell. If you happen to mention anything to Jane about, like, your new SmartBerry, or a hot music group or even the Anderson High basketball team, the Bearcats, when they went to the state finals, she just looks blank, but once when Kaylee asked a simple question about why Jane didn’t clean paintbrushes at the sink, like her dad always did, Jane talked animatedly for ten minutes about bacteria and “solids” and drain fields and septic lagoons. Kaylee’s friends laughed their heads off when they heard about that (“So she’s going on about how the soil in Anderson County is like pure clay, duh, so it doesn’t pass the ‘perk test,’ which is why she’s got this lagoon, and I’m thinking ‘Fine, great, whatever!’ and trying to like edge away…”). Kaylee’s seen the little outhouse in the trees on the other side of the driveway, across from the clothesline (clothesline!), for dry spells when flushing even a few times a day would use more water than Jane wants to waste. That would normally be in late summer. Kaylee’s relieved it’s spring right now.

  The computer Kaylee has to use for data entry here is a million years old and slow as anything. She couldn’t believe it when Jane said one day that when and if DSL finally made it this far into rural Kentucky, she planned to sign up.