One surprising after effect of the strike was not discovered until the following year. It was found that several species of insects, including a variety of butterfly, and some types of flowering plants — a ragweed, a tasslewort — had begun to adapt to the garbage mountains even in the short time they existed. These insects and plants had changed their colors and in some cases their shapes in order to camouflage themselves more effectively and had come to mimic the prevalent designs found in their new environment. The bold red-and-white design of the Coca-Cola can in particular seems to have inspired these adaptations, and several of the plants began to select for a mutation of brilliant scarlet with white curlicues. Even today, these flowers can be seen growing wild in unexpected places around the city. They are deemed rare and desirable and expensive — when they can be found. Efforts to raise them commercially have not been successful. So if you can locate them, you can sell them for a remarkable sum.
2.
Emily Mitchell has worked as a waitress, a receptionist at a bakery/tanning salon, a short-order cook, a snowmobile driver, a crime-scene cleanup technician, an exotic animal trainer, a war correspondent, a phone dispatcher, a secretary, an environmental campaigner, a freelance journalist, a bean counter and a holistic pediatric oncologist.
She has never worked as an exotic dancer. She might have done this — since she has no moral objection to sex work as such and certainly not to the deliberate and conscious choice by women to use their sexual desirability, long the source of their unjust and egregious oppression, as a means of obtaining economic and social power — if only her breasts had been bigger. Not much bigger, but big enough that they appeared large in proportion to her torso, which seems to be the important ratio in these cases. Or maybe it was her torso that was too big. Or her hips, which are round and scoop-shaped, so her body is like a tulip bulb or an old-fashioned earthenware jug. She thinks she might have been pretty good at exotic dancing, actually, if not for her overwhelming self-consciousness, her basic discomfort with disrobing in front of people with whom she’s not intimate, her physical clumsiness and her inconvenient but persistent sense that there is something exploitative about the whole endeavor.
She obtained a joint degree in neuroscience and engineering from the American University of Southern Abkhazia and a master of fine arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She taught English in Japan for several years but was fired when it was discovered that she had been deliberately teaching her students a dialect entirely of her own invention because she thought it would be “amusing” to create a group of people who spoke a wholly imaginary language without being aware of it. She said, in a statement at the time of her termination: “I wanted to make something beautiful and aloof, a language that floated in the world with the levitating detachment of a cumulus cloud. I had only the best intentions and I am sorry for anyone whom I have hurt.” At the end of her statement she added several sentences in her invented language, which no one except one or two of her more advanced students understood and which they would not translate when asked for comment. After that she was led away and deported.
3.
Emily Mitchell’s first novel The Art Historian’s Daughter-in-Law was published in 2009 and was almost entirely plagiarized from the work of the nineteenth-century Norwegian novelist Amund Eilertsen. She was immediately sued by the Eilertsen estate for copyright infringement but argued successfully that, because she stole material from more than one of Eilersten’s novels, her book constituted an entirely new work of literature that crucially reframed and reimagined the content of the original and therefore was a legitimate contribution to the intellectual conversation of our time. She is now working on a novel that combines excerpts from the works of George Eliot with lyrics by the Rolling Stones.
Her short fiction has appeared in various publications and then disappeared. This is unusual and seems to be attributable to a peculiar warp in the space-time continuum, which her work has caught like a virus and which makes it vanish shortly after publication never to be seen again. There were recently rumors that some of her stories had inexplicably turned up in a computer seized by police in Harare, Zimbabwe, but these are uncorroborated and may in fact have been a hoax perpetrated to generate publicity for her forthcoming novel.
4.
Emily Mitchell lives in Cleveland, Ohio, or at least she is fairly certain that is where she lives. Some mornings she wakes up and isn’t sure. She looks out the window and the street seems different: it looks more like a street near the Bund in Shanghai, flanked by heavy Victorian hotels, crowded with bicycles and loud with car horns. Or one of the precipitous canyons in midtown Manhattan, which are perfectly designed for all kinds of animals, like peregrine falcons, rats, mice and cockroaches and for the significant percentage of people who dream at night that they can grow a reflective shell over their skin, become dark and shiny as an automobile and move through the world smoothly as if they were being drawn forward on a thread. Emily Mitchell is not one of these people.
Mostly, however, she gets up and looks outside and sees the old, once-grand houses and the tossing deciduous trees of northeastern Ohio and she is quite pleased.
What does it really mean to “live” in a place anyway? There have been some places where she’s resided for even years at a time that so flattened and enervated her that she felt like she barely existed, a sketch of a woman, a leaf skeleton with a smile that she pulled open like the tray on the back of an airplane seat. There have been other places that made her so dizzy she could hardly stand or places in which she felt like she was falling, hurtling downward at a steady, terminal velocity, flailing to grab hold of something that could stop her, a ledge of some kind, but was never quite able to lay hold of anything to stop her plunge. Can this really be described as “living” in the sense we usually mean?
She tries to avoid these places when she can. Someday she wants to go back and understand the nature of their poison, maybe dig a garden there. But for the moment she is content where she is.
Cleveland is not as crowded with stories that have already been told as the great cities of the US coasts or Europe, or as those places like Gettysburg or Selma or Hiroshima where history pivoted in ways that are very clear. For this reason you must peer at Cleveland a little harder to see it. Although it has since fallen on hard times, it was once a place of great, ostentatious wealth, the home and resting place of John D. Rockefeller. In those robber-baron days, so different from our own time, there was little restriction on what the rich could do with their money, and they lived in a world made of mirrors in which even their friends merely served to reflect back at them their sense of their own virtue and importance.
It is a less-known fact about Rockefeller that he loved to disguise himself as a working man and go into his own businesses and factories in order to see without being seen the running of his enterprises. One day when he had just started working in one of his refineries, he was ordered by the foreman to replace the man who oversaw the furnace that heated the oil before distilling, in spite of the fact that he had no experience at this work and no skill at it. When Rockefeller refused, the foreman threatened him with violence if he didn’t comply, saying that the furnace must be kept running at all costs to meet the quota set for the factory or they would all lose their jobs. Rockefeller then removed his disguise and revealed his identity, telling the foreman who he really was. But in those days before television, people did not necessarily recognize the faces of even the most prominent citizens and the foreman just looked at him and laughed.