“Oh my,” Jeff said.
“And you told me he was shy,” Doran said.
“He can get wound up,” Wendy said. “When he feels comfortable.”
“Or tipsy,” Jeff said.
LT felt tipsy and comfortable. Why hadn’t Jeff and Wendy introduced him to Doran before now? Why wait until the last weekend of the last semester LT would be on campus? It was criminal.
“A pretty flower isn’t just a simple announcement, like ‘Here’s pollen,’” LT said. “Simple won’t do it.” He tried to explain how flowers were in competition. Pollen was everywhere, nestled inside thousands of equally needy plants desperate to spread their genetic material. What was needed was not an announcement but a flashing neon sign. “The flower’s goal,” LT said, “is to figure out what hummingbirds think are beautiful.”
“Slow down, Hillbilly,” Wendy said. “Eat something.”
“Hummingbirds have an aesthetic sense?” Doran said.
“Of course they do! Have I told you about bowerbirds?”
Jeff said, “Guess what his honors thesis is on?”
And then he was off, yammering about the bowerbirds of Papua New Guinea. The males of the species constructed elaborate twiggy structures, not nests but bachelor pads, designed purely to woo females. The Vogelkop bowerbird set out careful arrangements of colors—blue, green, yellow—each one a particular hue. It didn’t matter what the objects were; they could be stones, or petals, or plastic bottle caps even, as long as they were the correct shade. The females could not be coerced into sex; they dropped by the bowers, perused the handiwork, and flew away if they found them substandard. Their choice of mates, their taste in art, drove the males over millennia to evolve more and more specific displays, an ongoing gallery show with intercourse as the prize.
“Wait,” Doran said. “That doesn’t mean they’re making an artistic choice. Aren’t they just, uh, instinctually responding to whoever seems like the fittest mate? It’s not beauty per se—”
“I love per se,” Jeff said. “Great word.”
“I’ve always been fond of ergo,” Wendy said.
“But it is aesthetics!” LT said. “Beauty’s just”—he made explosion fingers—“joy in the brain, right? A flood of chemicals and, and, and—” What was the word? “Fireworks. Neuronal fireworks. We don’t logic our way to beauty, it hits us like a fucking hammer.”
“Ipso facto,” Jeff said.
Doran put his arm around LT’s shoulder and said, “Eat your burger before it gets cold, then tell me about the space bees.” Ah! He remembered! The heat of Doran’s arm across his neck made his cheeks flush. Doran smelled of sweat and Mennen Speed Stick and something else, something LT could almost recall from far back in his brain, from a hot afternoon in a Chicago apartment . . . but the memory slipped the net.
He decided to eat. Wendy told the story of her favorite snowmobile accident. Doran, who’d grown up in New Mexico, couldn’t believe that Wisconsin teenagers were allowed to ride machines across frozen lakes.
LT began to feel a little more sober, though perhaps that was an illusion. “Space bees,” he said.
“I’m ready,” Doran said. “Lay it on me.”
“Every one of the invasives we’ve found, not a single one uses pollination. There’s a lot of budding and spores and wind dispersal and”—he waved a clutch of fries—“you know. I’ve got a fern man at home, it’s like ten feet tall now—”
“You do?”
But LT didn’t want to talk about home. “Doesn’t matter, it just grows and spreads, spilling out of its pot, but it doesn’t require animal assistance.” Actually, he wasn’t sure that was true. Didn’t the fern survive because of him, because of his family? It had played on their human tendency for anthropomorphism.
“Where’d you go, Hillbilly?” Wendy asked.
“Sorry, what did you say?” he asked Doran.
“I said, maybe all the pollinating species died.”
“Maybe! But why colorful flowers and no pollen? There weren’t any animals hatching from the space seeds, so—”
Doran’s eyes went wide. “They have to be designed, then.”
“Exactly!”
Wendy nabbed his glass before it tumbled over.
“Inside voices,” she said.
He gets it, LT thought. The aliens could know what Earth’s sunlight was like from very far away, even guess the composition of its atmosphere and soil, but they couldn’t know what animals would be here, much less humans. So they had to design plants that could propagate without them.
“But if they’re designed, why are they so, so overwrought?” LT asked. “Those huge fucking umbrellas out west, the sponges smothering South America, all of them crazy colorful and smelly and weird. So my real question is—”
“Where are the space bees?” Jeff supplied.
“Wrong!” LT said. The real question was the one he was born to answer. He’d get whatever degrees and training he needed, he’d go into the field for evidence, he’d write the books to explain it. He’d explain it to Doran.
“The question is, why all this needless beauty? What’s it all for?”
“I don’t know, but you’re beautiful,” Doran said, and then—
—and then morning, a thumping that wasn’t in his head. Or not all in his head.
LT sat up, and pain spiked in his skull. Light blasted through half-open blinds. And there, beside him, Doran. Mouth agape, rough-jawed, one arm across LT’s waist.
Still there. Still real.
He wanted to fall back into the bed, pull that arm across his chest. Then the knocking came again, and he realized who was at the front door.
“Fuck.” He slipped out from under Doran’s arm without waking him, pulled on shorts. Alcohol sloshed in his bloodstream. He closed the bedroom door behind him. The pounding resumed.
LT pulled open the front door. His father started to speak, then saw what shape his son was in. Shook his head, suddenly angry. No, angrier.
“I overslept,” LT said.
“Are you packed?”
LT turned to look at the living room, and his father pushed past him.
“Dad! Dad. Could you just wait?”
His father surveyed the moving boxes, only a few of them taped up. The rest were open, half filled. LT’s plan had been to wake up early and finish packing. Everything had to go. Next semester he’d finish his coursework in the mountains of western New Guinea, collecting data on how birds had adapted to invasives. And now all he wanted to do was stay here, in central Illinois, in this apartment.
“Wait for what?” his father asked. “For you?”
LT moved between his father and the bedroom. “Give me an hour. Go for lunch or something. There’s a diner—”
“I’ll start taking down what’s packed. There’s snow coming.”
“No. Please. Just . . . give me some time.”
His father looked at the bedroom door. Then at his son. His jaw tightened, and LT stopped himself from edging backward.
He’d lived his boyhood afraid of his father’s anger. Power, he’d learned, came not from blowing off steam but from demonstrating that you were barely containing it. You won by exacting dread, by making your loved ones wait through the silence so long that they yearned for the explosion.
“In an hour I drive away,” his father said.
LT didn’t relax until they stepped off the plane in Columbus. Doran kept trying to calm him down, to no effect. The entire trip he’d been imagining that some authority would command the pilot to turn around, send them back to Indonesia. A priest would tell them, Stupid Americans, gays aren’t allowed to be parents, and they would yank the infant out of his hands.