“There’s a great beauty in the amazing diversity of plant life. Not just in the jungles, but in a place like this. It was never just grass, despite what the movies show. And the plainsmen who grazed it to death were not immune to its beauty. They just had families to feed.”
“I sense a point emerging.”
“So, one way of looking at it is that I have an overly generous definition of family.”
All the while, we can hear my mother crunching her cereal. She watches Sharon Saxon with as much of a twinkle in her eyes as I do.
“Would you like a persimmon, Mom?”
“That sounds delightful,” she says.
I feel it too, Mother. I didn’t know you could.
“Sharon?”
“Any more magic fruits?”
“Miracle. And only at the office.”
“Then sure, a persimmon.”
We all take bites and soak up the flavor slowly. I wait for my mother to say something like “Toothpaste is made of recycled taxidermy,” but apparently she doesn’t want to offer her insights to the larger world.
“So what is the other way of looking at it?” Sharon asks.
“Just don’t paint me as some kind of Mengele, okay?”
“What do you have?”
I tell her I have nothing but a scent on the wind. Then I suggest that she keep her hotel reservation open.
Fall gives way to winter, though the work we do makes the seasonal shift increasingly less relevant.
Meanwhile, I snoop around the work intranet. I lack the skill to avoid leaving digital footprints, but I buy myself some time by wearing Meadows’s shoes. The oscillating cameras in his corridor are surprisingly easy to time. He doesn’t lock his office and he doesn’t log out of his computer and he doesn’t delete his e-mail. And how much did the company pay for its cybersecurity training? I want to write the figure on a Post-it and leave it on his monitor.
The memo isn’t hard to find. I knew the gist from that patented look-between-scientists he offered when he gave me my deadline. But since I have an idea what the New York Times would tell me to do with my gist, I need something more detailed. And there it is: an e-mail that says that the security risks of holding on to the bank outweigh its value as an asset; that says it would be more detrimental to the company [emphasis mine] if the bounty of these seeds escaped containment than if the smallpox virus did; that recommends incineration. Attached is a suggested schedule for the incinerations: flowers, vines, and other non-fruiting plants first. Then non-orchard trees. Then fruit and nut trees. Then bulbs and vegetables. Last, grasses and grains.
First they came for the Socialists, et cetera, et cetera.
Meanwhile, every day I’m bringing home a bucket of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and carting it down to my workshop in the basement. They track how much of this stuff people buy at hardware stores and nurseries. Not at the company.
Meanwhile, my mother has kept asking about Sharon Saxon, and what can I say, I’ve created a lie that keeps the two of us happy. Sharon thinks she might extend her stay even after she finishes her story. She’s been taking me out to dinners to conduct interviews, but we often get lost in discussions irrelevant to Semillon, conversations about nature and history and the unforgiving beauty of selection, both natural and artificial. My mother still insists that television technology has always been flat-screen, that they built a big empty space inside the old blocky TVs because they weren’t sure how people would react, but she tells me over a plate of wild rice and home-cooked vegetables.
In truth, Sharon has been waiting for me Tuesdays, as always, and I’ve given her little bits of information, but mostly seeds. Every Tuesday, a new batch. Albuca spiralis. Randia ruiziana. Musa acuminata. I don’t know that she’ll plant them. I don’t know that she can keep them alive if she does. I just know that they’re out. Two seeds in my hand become two seeds in her hand.
So this is what it’s come to? Schuyler’s List?
Imagine a kid setting off his first firecracker, only to learn that the sound of the blast is less impressive than the pop when he opens a shaken soda can. The word itself, blast, becomes instantly ridiculous. There you have the blast that failed to shake the globe, or even the little old Cornhusker State, when the news broke that Semillon Incorporated planned to destroy the world’s greatest repository of biodiversity. The New York Times: page 4. Another round of bushbearded protesters lying down in front of basic delivery trucks, and some op-eds aimed at the already converted. Still, I go into work prepared to be served with papers or taken into custody or led by security down some ill-lit hallway, never to return. Dust Meadows’s keyboard for fingerprints and they’ve got me. Ask around among the custodians and they’ve probably got me. Instead, Meadows is gone, and there’s a meeting in which they caution us to neither initiate nor accept contact with him pursuant to the settling of a legal action. In fact, they say, if anyone sees him, walk straight out of the room, army-crawl beneath the windows, and call security from the first phone you see.
Sorry, bro. You never should have gone into administration.
The suit brought against Semillon is dropped after initial hearings. No one has standing to sue, the judge says. No individual can claim harm. In his twelve-page decision, the judge writes that he is not happy having to make this ruling. He sympathizes with the people saying the incineration would be a crime against humanity. No, he writes, it is a crime against something else. A crime, probably, against something worse, but something unfortunately not protected by the law. It seems logical. He’s doing his job. I’m not really doing mine anymore. Wheat and rice are being planted over by the hectare anyway. Once they’re gone, corn and soy can duke it out for who has better numbers. There can be only one.
Sorry, wheat. You should have been more calorific.
Snow in the parking lot, and Sharon standing tall in it, like a candle, asking if I can find any documents relating to Semillon’s involvement in the French recession. She knows that would be out of my division even if it were more than a rumor. Even asking shows her desperation. She appears harried now, like a wife. It’s a much more beautiful look, hair frizzed, eyes bagged, like a person who exists in the world.
I tell her I’ll find what I can. I know what that will be.
Security has clamped down since the leak. Cameras have been added to cover blind spots. IT has been given the authority to publicly yell at people with stupid passwords. The only way for me to search around is with my own login information, and that only gets me into a space with very well-defined fences. I’m likely to have only one shot at testing those boundaries, and I’m not ready to take it yet. What does it matter? I keep wondering. The memo I gave Sharon was the smoking gun. Unless Semillon is planning to toss some babies into the incinerator with the seeds, no one is going to care. Given the quandaries of overpopulation, some might not even balk at that. Crop yields—we all bow to that god now.
But I’ve told her I am waiting for my opportunity. Still doing what? Working up the nerve; working in my basement; cultivating fantasies; ferrying plants across the Styx, bearing them back ceaselessly against the flow of time.
Brugmansia arborea. Rafflesia arnoldii. Strongylodon macrobotrys.
Sharon. Harper. Saxon.
Seeds passing from my hand to hers, little things, dried and hard and unassuming, displaying no pomp for all the information they contain. Phoenix dactylifera. The Judean date palm, extinct for six hundred years, was resurrected from a two-thousand-year-old seed lost in a jar. This is no more than the pit of a date, the thing you spit out when you eat one.