by Nell Zink
FLORA SPENT A WEEK WITH AYANA, LEARNING THE TRUE MEANING OF THE TERM “language barrier.” She had never met anyone whose knowledge of English and Spanish was nil. Ayana had only one hoe. The morning after Flora’s arrival, she filled a canister with water and led her a mile and a half into the hills to an abandoned farmstead, where an older woman lay, weak and sick, on an arrangement of blankets on the floor. She redefined the term “skinny” for Flora. She had so much more skin than she needed. Her name was Selamawit. After talking to her for a while, offering her a drink of water, which she turned down, and washing her with a rag from a peg on the wall, Ayana borrowed her hoe.
Flora was curious to know whether Selamawit received medical care, what her illness was, and whether she had family or was related to Ayana. There was no way to get an explanation. All she could do was look for clues. The two women didn’t hug or kiss, but Ayana washed her. There was no appearance of intimacy, just care that looked like tenderness. Maybe she had something contagious, and Ayana was being careful. She nursed her the way upper-class girls nursed soldiers in books about Florence Nightingale, before Florence Nightingale showed up. Fluff the pillow; cool the brow. It was like something in an old movie. Selamawit looked like she belonged in a hospital bed with tubes running into her hands and a chemo port in her chest.
When they returned two days later, again bringing water, Selamawit was sitting up in her suggestion of a courtyard, the irregular space enclosed by her decrepit garden fence. Her lips were chapped almost white. She drank eagerly. Ayana expressed profound satisfaction that she was getting better.
Flora was in deep over her head. The women’s conversation was obviously private. There was intimacy there; they spoke quickly and with dynamics, moving from loud to soft and smiles to frowns. Maybe they were just friends? She made an attempt to figure out the Amharic word for “friend,” but the only names she could use as examples were those of Dave and Tesfaldet.
She began to feel that there was no such thing as the common noun “human being.” Objects like the hoes and lentils had proper names, Hoe and Lentil. They began to seem personified, but there was no way to abstract the simple humanness out of the concepts of Tesfaldet or Dave. They were men. Black and white, poor and rich, but mostly they were not women and thus unlikely to be any woman’s simple friend. Not that it was impossible or inconceivable; it just wasn’t what either of them wanted.
Flora was cast into philosophical perturbations. She had never seen the power of words to form the world so clearly. Yet in this simpler world where words had such power, words could change nothing. It was when their definitions were slippery—she consciously thought “when”; it seemed like a temporal progression, from the concrete to the abstract, but she hadn’t traveled in time (it was still 2011), she just happened to be in Ethiopia—when words lost their power and became abstract and metaphorical, common nouns that could be applied to anything, that they seemed to have the potential to alter the conditions of life.
But was it true? Maybe it was magical thinking, a holdover from another time or place where words had meaning, where they were elements of culture and not the flexible tools she’d been taught to think they were.
While she hoed she watched the soil, which was no longer really soil; it was degraded almost to sand. Ginger would have said it needed a serious dose of horse manure and a touch of sustainably harvested peat moss from the home improvement center. Ayana needed to get out of there. Who had told the poor girl this stuff still qualified as soil? Probably the project. But it was no sandier than the degraded sandy cornfields of the United States. If you dumped enough petrochemical fertilizers and groundwater on it, it would be sprouting monster corn ears and onions and tomatoes, and Ayana would be a chubby, contented Beyoncé. She could blow off that chump Tesfaldet who paid in lentils and take up with Tibor—no, Flora stopped herself, she’d attract a sweet, gentle new husband, and together they’d grow the productivity and yield of her two acres in such a way that it barely kept pace with Ayana’s fifteen pregnancies. And then they’d all be starving again, and they’d send their oldest child to work in a factory in Addis. The key was to talk Ayana into stopping after two kids.
Flora was sane enough to laugh at herself and keep hoeing. At least if she was hoeing, nobody could argue that she wasn’t helping Ayana somehow.
WHEN SHE HEARD TESFALDET’S CAR PULL IN—IT MADE A CRUNCHING SOUND ON THE rock, and looking downhill she could just see it roll into the yard behind the hut—she at first wanted to run down, throw her backpack in the backseat, and beg to be taken away. Her second impulse was to sit him down and get some basic Amharic vocabulary, or at least an interpreted conversation on some basic background info with Ayana. Instead she kept hoeing, loosening and aerating the soil, while Ayana went down to meet him. That night there was chicken.
The chicken tasted to Flora like distributive injustice personified. She was hungrier than she’d ever been in her life. The world’s billions of delicious chickens rose up before her like a specter. How seldom one made its way to Ayana’s house. How degraded the caricature of family life—of man the provider—that brought it. She imagined spending her own money to build Ayana a chicken coop and stock it with chickens.
But maybe she would have eaten them all in a week. Maybe depending on Tesfaldet, who after all had a job with the UN, was a more sustainable model. Flora felt superstitiously hesitant about doing anything to change Ayana’s life, in the spirit of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” except that her standards of what was “broke” had sunk, in the space of a week, to exclude anything short of death.
SHE WENT ON FACEBOOK. SHE HAD A MESSAGE FROM THE NEW YORKER WRITER, ASKING to talk about Joe. She agreed to Skype for half an hour anonymously, as background, not saying where she was (with Marit, back in Addis).
She told him that Joe had been a great guy and that she regarded him as an older brother. She denied grieving at his death or resenting his suicide, saying she’d been too young to understand and was probably still too young, since she continually sensed his presence and expected to see him again at any moment. Instinctively she sheltered her own privacy and Joe’s, emitting such bland platitudes that she might as well have spoken on the record.
Older people might get excited about seeing their names in a magazine. She had grown up applying a cost-benefit analysis to the potential instantaneous worldwide accessibility of every word she said. The reporter asked whether she stayed in touch with Gwen. Her response was that she didn’t remember meeting her. Cannily, she did not volunteer such unsolicited emotions as her regret at Gwen’s failure to learn first aid.
SHE RETURNED HOME CHASTENED. “UNEP’S PEDOLOGY AND EDAPHOLOGY POLICY FOCUS is too technical ever to have an impact,” she complained to Ginger.
“It’s definitely too esoteric for me,” Ginger replied. “What are you talking about?”
“Trying to micromanage something so obvious. When you can tell a practice is unsustainable just by looking at it, why order studies?”
“I think governments order studies so they can put off doing things.”
“It’s not that I’m down on science,” Flora said. “You need it to justify policy. But when the farmers come right out and tell you their yield has fallen by sixty percent since they cleared the land five years ago, what’s the point?”
“Is that all science is good for?”
“Pretty much. Except maybe for developing fertilizers to sell to these guys, so they can keep plowing hillsides. It was so depressing. They move in, they kill everything, they start starving, and then they bitch.”
“Flora. It can’t possibly be like that.”
“I don’t know. I was with the most cynical guys.” She sat still, holding her teacup with both hands. She had the haunted look of someone who has witnessed a bad accident.
“What are you thinking?”
“That I don’t know anything. I had this idea I would study agriculture, like acquire hands-on expertise at the highest, mos
t challenging level, and now I realize that’s exactly what I would need to get hired to run a soy plantation in Kenya.”
“That’s not true. It’s what you would need to be a policy maker someplace like the United Nations, right? Or at least to plan the implementation of one of their programs?”
“All you people should stop filling my head with craziness!” she pleaded. “Maybe, if I work really hard and catch all the breaks, I can get a job promoting no-till farming for a cooperative extension service in, like, the Dakotas!”
“Baby, your education is going to last a long time yet. You’re going to be a sophomore.”
“But there’s a conflict. It’s not about me fitting in.”
“Remember the saying ‘Know your enemy’? Nobody ever said it was fun knowing your enemy. You’re learning. It’s beautiful. It really is, Flora. You’re growing as a person.”
She looked up gratefully. “Yeah?”
“I’ve seen a lot in my life, so I can tell you, there’s nothing more beautiful than an idealistic young person. Just stay true to yourself.”
“I don’t think anybody ever got into soil degradation for the beauty.”
“But you’re defending beauty. That’s what you want to do.”
“But the beauty will be somewhere else. It won’t be where I am. Where I go, everything’s degraded.”
“Be patient. You have to aim high to work in government. You’re too young to retire someplace beautiful. All the beauty in the world isn’t going to save us from climate change. It’s going to take idealists like you, all working together.”
“Of course you’re right,” she responded. “Sustainability isn’t about defending living things. It’s about doing human life in a way that enables scattered ecological islands. You have your climate volatility and your intensive industrialized exploitation of everything, but you also have your islands with totally profitable ecotourism and it’s all great.”
“I can tell you’re dead tired,” Ginger said.
AT THEIR NEXT ENCOUNTER, FLORA CONSUMMATED HER RELATIONSHIP WITH PROFESSOR Mntambo. They met for lunch. She ordered a small carafe of white wine, and he asked her not to call him by his first name. He critiqued her soil management insights with roughshod insensitivity. Apologizing, he talked about the difficulties his pregnant wife was having in retooling for a career in multimedia and performance (she couldn’t get gallery shows in D.C.) while gaining weight and feeling logy. The sudden intimacy turned Flora on. She saw his sex drive floundering in search of release. She whispered in a forthright manner that she was a virgin, because her former lover had been tiny and limp. How she longed to have saved herself entirely for Ndu.
She wasn’t in love, just horny, he could tell. Her shamelessness made her hard to resist. He took her to his office, satisfied her sexual curiosity, and made a date to do it again. At their second encounter, she was sober, and he liked her even better as a casual fuck.
She felt no guilt about their affair. Being turned on, in all states of matter, on all frequencies, she kept it secret, so as not to cost him his job. Her power over him compounded his power over her and vice versa, yet the scope of their thrilling mutual omnipotence was limited. Extramarital sex was like negotiating treaty rights to a fragile island that might, at any moment, sink into the ocean.
The longer they spent together, the more she felt certain that power of the nonsymbolic kind didn’t inhere in persons. It was transferable, and scientists had a habit of giving it away like penny candy. They were high-energy doormats like her family.
She profited sexually from her intellectual drift away from Ndu. Her passion for ecology as a science was fading. It seemed too obvious. Like, if you don’t kill stuff, it’s alive. If you don’t crank up the temperature or dump pollutants on it, it soldiers on. The real issue was whether people subsisting on one meal a day could be expected to give a crap.
XVII.
The New Yorker writer scheduled an hour with Daniel, hoping to make it longer. He waited at the Abyssinian (Daniel’s suggestion) with a list of questions about business and creative strategy, centering on the decision to record “Bird in God’s Garden.” He tipped the waitress in advance to make sure the coffee never ran out.
Daniel insisted that “decision” was the wrong word, as was “strategy”; impulse and action had been one package for Joe. He told the writer that he had no idea why, how, or even in what epoch he had recorded the song. As a compulsive songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, he had submitted hundreds of digital audiotape demos to Daktari. It was he who deemed tracks worthy of production. The “Bird” recording likely stemmed from that process of throwing songs at the wall. It must somehow have passed muster, since there was a faint drum-and-bass-style percussion track hidden way down in the mix, which didn’t seem to Daniel like an element Joe would have added.
Daktari granted the writer twenty minutes. He told him that Joe had intended “Bird in God’s Garden” to be the first single from an album of beloved standards. The label’s dilatoriness in getting to that release was understandable, after he broke everybody’s heart like that.
The finished piece in the magazine was illustrated with a full-page photo, a candid outtake from a fashion shoot at Wave Hill. Joe was seen sitting on the ground, legs splayed, dressed in white, leaning back on his hands while an assistant fiddled with a reflector behind him. The reflector was round and golden and framed his head like a halo. His mouth was open, relaxed and receptive, and his taut skin made him look about eighteen. Gwen stood facing him, barefoot in a white dress, her hands extended bountifully to strew pink-and-cream petals she had ripped off a nearby rosebush for the purpose.
The piece described her as an anti-suicide activist whose existence was financed through lifestyle blogging and roles in indie films. But it opened with the last person to see him alive. For purposes of the article, this was Kenneth. He was quoted as saying that Joe had unexpectedly given him his treasured Rolex Yacht-Master as a present and that he should have realized it was a warning sign of suicidal ideation and intent to self-harm.
Pam was expecting beaucoup mendacious idiocy from Gwen, but the Kenneth angle sideswiped her. She read the article through and handed it to Daniel in silence. He tilted his head back to peruse the loving hagiography with his new progressive bifocals. When he was done, he closed the magazine, dropped it on the floor, and looked directly at Pam. She said, “So do you think she pried that watch off him while he was still warm, or did she wait for him to cool off?”
“As a Joe Harris fan of long standing,” he said, “I’ll have to disappoint you there, since to my knowledge he couldn’t read anything but a digital watch. I don’t know how this got past their legendary fact-checkers.”
“‘Fact-checkers’? I thought you said you got a call requesting confirmation that you were quoted accurately.”
“I guess it’s better than getting me to authenticate quotes from demon spawn.”
“She probably cut Kenny in on a brand promotion deal with Rolex.”
“I could still kill her,” he said. “Like an Aztec priest. I swear to God.”
“Come on. It’s a beautiful article. All the kids are into Joe’s legacy now, and now Kenny’s a part of it. Don’t you want to be a part of it?”
“I want oblivion. Total mind erasure, as long as it has nothing to do with sex, drugs, or rock and roll.”
“Hmm,” she said. “We could get a half-pint of bourbon and go to the races.”
“Too glamorous.”
“Road trip! You should go on tour with Band of Dentists. They have less to do with rock and roll than you think.”
“I should make those guys give me a tank of nitrous.”
“You could tour Amish country on nitrous.”
“Barnstorm Amish country doing all-ages benefits on nitrous.”
“Play barn dances on skates, like what’s that musical.”
“Starlight Express.”
When the repartee wound down, they went out to a
multiplex uptown, buying two large Cokes and a bucket of buttered popcorn to get through a mixed martial arts movie called Warrior. They walked home practicing MMA death moves on each other. Daniel scraped his knee trying to levitate backward onto a ledge like “fiend monkey” Sun Wukong in Journey to the West.
The psychoanalytic term is “reaction formation.” That’s how they were wired. Coping mechanisms and patches were what they had. Neither had encountered effective applications of the concept “therapy.” They lived in a world of forces beyond their control, or assumed they did, pending notice to the contrary. It would have taken a pretty powerful or deluded person to argue that they weren’t right.
AROUND THE TIME THE ARAB SPRING FULFILLED THE IMPERIALIST DREAM OF CONSECRATING the coup d’état as democratic statecraft, Flora’s friends, even her Facebook friends from high school, took up working for the reelection of President Obama. She started reading Daily Kos and FiveThirtyEight so she’d know what they were talking about. She got into politics, contributing to online forums and volunteering for a phone bank. In June she staffed a front desk at the Netroots Nation conference in Providence in exchange for a discount on the student registration fee.
The movement for environmental justice was all about not poisoning poor people with toxic waste, so it could count on widespread support. Climate change activism likewise was about not killing the innocent outright. The ethical problems on offer were too cut-and-dried to need recourse to Flora’s specialized knowledge. They were so easy, they bored even Al Gore. Why else would he rave on and on about worst-case scenarios, show video of giant storms, cite Revelation, and command his followers to prepare to enter the gates of hell?
All summer, she flirted with organizations that promised to get her “connected” and “involved,” as if they might implement her ideas instead of exploiting her emotions. The parallels to online dating were hard to overlook. But she didn’t date. She had Professor Mntambo, who wasn’t quite available, not that she cared. She didn’t want to commit to anyone or anything. Not a lover, not an organization. She wanted to be wanted for who she was—a soil expert—but she wasn’t a soil expert quite yet, plus she needed to find a way to convince people that they needed a soil expert.