She said, “What do you think was in there?”
When he was eleven years old, late in the first summer he’d spend in his mother’s tiny Chicago apartment, she smuggled home one of the fern men. It was four inches tall, planted in a paper coffee cup. Its torso was a segmented tube, like bamboo, glossy as jade. Its two arm-like stems ended in tiny round leaves, and its head was a mantis-green bulb like an unopened tulip.
“Isn’t it illegal?” he asked her. But he knew the answer, and knew his mother. Her reckless instincts worried his young Puritan heart. He’d spent the school year alone in Tennessee with his father and had adopted his military rectitude.
“It’ll be our little secret,” she said.
Ours and the boyfriend’s, LT thought.
“You are crazy, honey,” said the boyfriend. He kissed her, hard, and when they finally broke apart she laughed. LT always thought of his mother as beautiful, but he’d been offended to discover that she was beautiful to others. To men. Like this shaggy dude who wore turquoise necklaces like a TV Indian and smelled like turpentine and cigarettes and scents he couldn’t yet name.
His mother went into a back closet to find a more durable container for the fern man.
“I know what you’re thinking,” the shaggy man said.
But even LT didn’t know what he was thinking.
“We should probably burn the little fucker, right?”
LT was alarmed, then embarrassed. Of course the boyfriend was right. At school, hallway posters showed spiky, ominous plants with the message Keep an Eye Out! Any sightings of invasive species were to be reported. The weeklong meteor storm had sprayed black and silver casings across millions of square miles in a broad band that circled the planet, peppering cities and fields and forests and oceans. Soldiers of every government seized what they could find. And when anything sprouted, good citizens called the authorities.
LT looked down at the fern man.
The boyfriend laughed. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill it. Your mom would kill me! Watch this.” He touched a finger to one of the fern’s arms. It curled away as if stung.
Mom said, “Don’t bother it, it’ll get tired and stop growing. That’s what the man told me.” She transferred the sprout to a ceramic pot with much cooing and fussing. “We can’t set him in the window,” she said. “Somebody might see.” LT picked a sunny spot on the coffee table.
“He’s so cute,” his mother said.
“That’s his survival strategy,” the boyfriend said. “So cute you won’t throw him out.”
“Just like you,” she said, and laughed.
He didn’t laugh with her. His mood could change, quick. A lot of nights Mom and the boyfriend argued after LT had gone to bed—to bed but not to sleep.
“We’re all doomed,” he said. “When the aliens come for the harvest, that’s it for Homo sapiens.”
This was the popular theory: that aliens had targeted Earth and sent their food stocks ahead of them so there’d be something to eat when they arrived. LT had spent long, hot days in the apartment listening to the boyfriend while Mom was at work, or else following him around the city on vague errands. He didn’t have a regular job. He said he was an artist—with a capital A, kid—but didn’t seem to spend any time painting or anything. He could talk at length about the known invasive species, and why there were so many different ones: the weblike filaments choking the trees in New Orleans, the flame-colored poppies erupting on Mexico City rooftops, the green fins popping up in Florida beach sand like sharks coming ashore. Every shell that struck Earth, and some that hit the surface of the water, cracked and sent millions of seeds into the air or into the oceans. Most of those seeds had not sprouted, or not yet. Of those that had, many of the vines and flowers and unclassifiable blooms soon withered and died. The ones that thrived had been attacked with poison, fire, and machetes. But—but!—there were so many possible sprouts that there was no way to find them all in the millions of acres of wilderness. Even if we managed to find and destroy ninety-nine percent of the invasives, the boyfriend had told LT once, there would be millions and millions of plants growing and reproducing around the globe.
Like the fern man. “We’re all going to die,” the boyfriend said, “because of this little green dude.”
And LT thought, How can something so beautiful, so cool, be dangerous?
“Let’s give him a name,” Mom said. “LT, you do the honors.”
“I need to think about it,” he said.
Or maybe, LT thought that night as his mother and the boyfriend whisper-yelled at each other, I should change my own name. Chicago was making him into a different person. He’d become conscious of his Tennessee accent, and had taken steps to tame his vowels. He’d eaten Greek food. He’d almost gotten used to being around so many black people. And he’d started staying up to all hours in his room, an L-shaped nook off the kitchen with a curtain for a door, reading from his mother’s collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books as the rattling fan chased sweat from his ribs. The night they got the fern man he wondered if he should ask everyone to stop calling him LT and start calling him Lawrence or Taylor or something completely of his own creation, like… Lance. Lance was the kind of guy who’d be ready when the UFOs came down.
Doors slammed, his mother sobbed loudly for a while, and then the apartment went quiet. LT waited another twenty minutes, and then got up to pee. He didn’t turn on the bathroom light. He was a night creature now, as light-sensitive as a raccoon.
The door to his mother’s bedroom was ajar. She was alone in the bed.
He went into the living room. On the wall behind the couch hung four of the boyfriend’s pictures. They were all of naked women turning into buildings, or maybe vice versa, with red-brick thighs and doorways for crotches and scaffolds holding up their torsos. One of the nudes, pale and thin and sprouting television aerials from her frizzy hair, looked too much like his mother. LT wondered if other people thought they were beautiful, or if beauty mattered in art with a capital A. The figures didn’t seem to be very convincing as women or buildings. Neither nor.
The fern man stood in the dark on the coffee table. Its bulb head drooped sleepily, and its stem arms hung at its sides. The torso leaned slightly—toward the window, LT realized.
He picked up the ceramic pot and set it on the sill, in a pool of streetlight. Slowly, the trunk began to straighten. Over the next few minutes, the head gradually lifted like a deacon finishing a prayer, and the round leaves at the ends of its arms unfurled like loosening fists. The movement was almost too incremental to detect; its posture seemed to shift only when he looked away or lost concentration.
Slow Mo, he thought. That’s what we’ll call you.
Tomorrow his mother would throw all the paintings out the front window, send them sailing into the street. LT would never see the boyfriend again. The fern man stayed.
The night they heard about the thistle cloud, LT was daydreaming of burning the house down. It was March and he was bored to the point of paralysis, an old man in a thirteen-year-old body. Country winters stretched each night into a prison sentence. The valley went cave dark before suppertime, stayed dark until the morning school bus honked for him at the end of the lane. He longed for the city. Torching the place, he figured, would make a bonfire that would light up the road all the way to Chicago.
The place was wrong for his father, too. Three years after Mom had left, the house was purposeless without her in it, like a desanctified church. His father’s handiwork—the tongue and groove hardwood floors, the hand-turned legs on the kitchen table, the graceful stair rail that curled at the end like the tail of a treble clef—seemed as frivolous as gingerbread. Why stay here? They never used the dining room, or the guest room with its fancy bathroom. No one would ever thread a needle in the sewing room. LT and his father ate their meals in the living room, in front of the fire, wordless as Neanderthals.