Geological time, plant time, animal time . . . and inside that, yet another, smaller wheel, spinning fast. His father’s body had become a container for cells that lived and replicated and mutated at frightening speed.
On the second morning at Blount Memorial Hospital, Christina sat at the edge of her grandfather’s bed, curled her fingers around his (carefully not disturbing the IV tubes taped to the top of his hand), and said, “I read a pamphlet about colon cancer. Would you like me to tell you about it?”
His father laughed. “Are you going to be a scientist like your father?” He was remarkably cheery, now that equipment had rehydrated him and delivered a few choice opioids.
She shook her head. “I want to be a real doctor.”
LT, listening to on-hold music on his cell, said, “Hey!”
Doran came back on the line. “Okay, I got him an appointment with Lynn’s oncologist. Bring him here. I’ll move Carlos into Christina’s room.”
“Are you sure about this?”
“I would only do this for my favorite person. Besides, I don’t think anybody else is stepping up. You’re an only child, right?”
“Uh, kind of.” He’d have to explain later.
He gave Christina a five and told her to sneak some ice cream into the room. “He likes rocky road, but chocolate will do.”
His father watched her go. “She reminds me of your mother.”
LT thought, Sure, this tiny, dark-haired, brown-skinned girl is so much like your blond, dancer-legged wife.
“I mean it,” his father said. “When she looks at me—it was like that with Belinda. That light.”
“Dad—”
“All the boys in that school, and she chose me.”
“Dad, I need to tell you some things.”
“I’m not leaving the house.”
“You can’t go back there. I had Mr. Beck check it out. There are roots running through the floorboards, wrapped around the pipes. The wiring’s been shorted out. You’re lucky the place didn’t burn down.”
“It’s my house. You can’t tell me—”
“No, it’s Mo’s house now. It’s been his for years.”
2028
On that last Thanksgiving he hosted in the Virginia house, the topic of conversation was, appropriately enough, food.
“We haven’t published yet, but the data’s solid,” Christina said. “We’ve got an eater.”
Cheers went up around the table. “Were you using the cyanobacteria?” LT asked. Just a few months ago, her gene-hacking team at McGill was making zero progress. “Or one of the Rhodophyta?”
“Let the woman speak!” LT’s mother said. Christina, sitting beside her, squeezed her arm and said, “Thanks, Mimi.”
“She needs no encouragement,” Christina’s husband said, and Carlos laughed.
“Here’s the amazing thing—we didn’t engineer it. We found the bacteria in the wild. Evolving on its own.”
“You’re kidding me,” LT said.
Christina shrugged. “It turns out we should have been paying more attention to the oceans.”
LT tried not to hear this as a rebuke. As the USDA’s deputy secretary, he orchestrated the research grants, helped set the agenda for managing the ongoing crisis. It was a political job more than a scientific one, and much of the time the money had to go into putting out fires. So even though everyone knew that most of the seeds had gone down in water, the difficulty in retrieving them meant that almost all the research on water-based invasives focused on ones near the surface: the white pods like bloated worms floating in Lake Superior, the fibrous beach balls bobbing in the Indian Ocean, the blue fans that attached themselves to Japanese tuna like superhero capes.
Christina said that the bacteria were found feeding on rainbow mats. The scientific community had missed the explosion of translucent invasives hovering in the ocean’s photic zone until they linked and rose to the surface in a coruscating, multicolored mass. The satellite pictures of it were lovely and terrifying. The alien plants were so efficient at sucking up carbon dioxide, in a few decades of unrestricted growth they could put a serious dent in global warming—while maybe killing everything else in the ocean.
But somehow fast-evolving Earth organisms were trying to eat them first. Or at least one species of them. But if one Earth organism had figured it out, maybe others had too.
“You have to tell us how they’re breaking down those peptides,” LT said.
“Or not,” Carlos said.
“I have a story,” said Bella, Christina’s four-year-old daughter. “During craft time, this girl Neva? It was a disaster.”
“Wait your turn, darling,” Aaron said. Christina’s husband was a white man from Portland. He ran cool to Christina’s hot, which was good for Bella.
Through some quasi-Lamarckian process, LT’s children, and his children’s children, had inherited his most annoying conversational tendency. On Thanksgiving they didn’t go around the table saying what they were thankful for but rather took turns explaining things to each other. Nothing made LT happier. All he wanted in the world was this: to be surrounded by his family, talking and talking. Much of the world was in dire shape, but they were rich enough to afford the traditional dry turkey breast, the cranberry sauce with the ridges from the can, sweet potato casserole piled with a layer of marshmallow.
“You know what this means,” Christina said. She caught LT’s eye. “Next year we’ll be eating sugar sticks like the aliens did.”
Perhaps only LT understood what she meant. Homo sapiens are only 10 percent human; most of the DNA in their bodies comes from the tiny flora that they carry inside themselves to digest their food and perform a million tiny tasks that keep them alive. If humans could someday adopt these new bacteria into their microbiome, a host of invasives could become edible. It would be the end of the famine.
She saw the wonder in his face and laughed. “Wheels within wheels, Dad.”
After dinner the urge to nap descended like a cloud, and only little Bella was immune. Carlos offered to take her to the park, but LT said he would like that honor.
“Where the slides are?” she asked.
“All the slides,” he said. “Just let me tuck in Mimi.”
He led his mother to the master bedroom, which was on the ground floor and had the best mattress. She moved carefully, as if hearing faint music in the distance, but at eighty she was still sharp, still beautiful, still determined to stay up with fashion. Her hair was three different shades of red.
“Eighty-five outside,” she said, “and in here it’s a Chicago winter.”
“I’ll get an afghan,” he said, and opened the closet. When he turned around, she was sitting on the edge of the bed, one hand out on the coverlet.
“You must miss Doran.”
The knot that he carried in his chest tightened a fraction. He nodded.
“It’s not fair,” she said. “All our men dying so young.”
“Arnaud’s still alive,” LT said. “At least he was last year. He sent me a Christmas card.”
“Good God, what an asshole,” she said. “It’s true what they say, then.”
“I was the teenage asshole. I don’t know how anybody put up with me.”
She lay down and folded her hands across her chest like Cleopatra. He spread the afghan so that it covered her feet.
“This is a lovely house,” she said.
“It’s too big for me now. Unless you move in.”
“I prefer living on my own these days. I do my painting in the nude, you know.”
“You do not.”
“But I could. That’s the point.”
Bella was waiting for him by the front door. “Papa!”
“Ciao, Bella!”