I tell Sharon she’ll have to come to my house to get what I’ve found. I tell her she doesn’t have to Batman into the garden, but she does anyway. It’s warm again, a morning in April during which there’s a whole different crop of fruit and vegetables. Only the ponderosa lemons are the same. Oh, tired but hopeful eyes. Is there a more heartbreaking sight?
I smile a smile I’ve been saving up for her. I unclasp my fist in front of her, my big reveaclass="underline" two red berries just longer than olives. We chew the pulp away from the pits and swirl it around in our mouths to coat as much of the surface as we can. It tastes like almost nothing. The secret, I tell her, is a glycoprotein, uncreatively named miraculin, which binds to the taste buds and blocks bitter and sour compounds. The properties, of course, were known long before the mechanism.
By the time I’ve finished my pedantry, it’s taken effect. We set upon the lemon tree. We bite into them without peeling them. The insides taste like lemonade. The white pith tastes like meringue. We eat whole lemons this way, not bothering to spit out the seeds. I yank other things out of the garden: arugula, which now tastes like some kind of crazy herb sorbet; rhubarb like raspberry jam; radishes like sweetened ice. But we go back to the lemon tree. It seems to be what this was made for—ambrosia, jellied light bulbs. The miracle doesn’t keep our bellies from feeling full, from growing hot with acid, but we keep going.
The miraculin lasts about thirty minutes. We start to pucker as the lemons turn back into lemons. We look at each other and laugh, but it’s hard to keep up the merriment as we feel our teeth ache, our throats burn, our stomachs roil, and the truth that we’ve just gorged on raw lemons becomes once again unavoidable. I tell her I want a favor before I give her the document I’ve found. I tell her my mother’s grown fond of her, that she doesn’t get out much. I ask her to drive my mother around town for half an hour, showing her whatever she wants to see. When I go inside, my mother is already up making coffee and sparing me her theory that it was all ground at the same time in one great coffee bean holocaust. I let her know about Sharon taking her out for a spin.
“Oh,” she says, brightening. “Then I should put on something more presentable.”
She comes out of her room wearing slightly moth-holed but still bright pastels from a friendlier decade. I tell her she looks nice.
Once they’ve gone, I head down to the basement. It’s a simple enough calculation, scaling the reactants down and filling the empty space in the pipe with chalk. I’d made it big enough to destroy half of the refrigeration chamber at the seed bank. I thought of putting it in an intermodal container and driving a big rig up to the loading docks, letting the routing system deliver it. But of course there’s no way to get it through security, and there’s no point. What good is a bomb for saving something from destruction? We scientists with our strange meditative acts. Too fancy for yoga or sudoku. But this one doesn’t have to go to waste. I think I’ve got the right amount to just destroy my own basement. The living room and kitchen, if my decimal points are off. The blast will certainly be small enough to spare the garden, though I have little hope that anyone will tend it.
I write out the document on a piece of stationery and place it like a bookmark in chapter six of Genesis in my mother’s Bible. I’ve never been religious, but I do believe in parables. I place the book on the park bench out back. It is not the document she’s hoping for. It simply reads Sorry. There is nothing to be done. I leave it next to a little brown bag containing the eight remaining miracle berries. I consider writing out the rest of what follows, but decide not to be one of those men who needs to inflict his pain upon the world.
But if I were, here is what I would write. The problem all along has been with trying to see myself as the savior in this parable, or at least a Good Samaritan. But my role is much smaller than that, much plainer. I’ve realized I’m here simply to update an old verse for a modern age:
God saw evil in the hearts of men. He repented of having made them. God planned to flood the earth, but he had some reservations. He had Noah build an ark. Noah built according to God’s specifications, including the coating of pitch, and he ushered into it all the animals of the world—fliers, walkers, creepers, and so on—and he secured them in their cells. Then the great flood came and drowned the earth, but the ark was buoyed safely up. It floated on the water a while, above the obliterated world. Long enough for Noah to take some comfort in the work he’d done. Then, after a time, whether because God willed it, or because he didn’t care enough to stop it—and let the angels debate over whether it’s a meaningful difference—the ark caught fire. The ark sank.
SMALLER TRAGEDIES
In the foreground of the photograph, a boy stands on the double yellow line of a four-lane highway. He could be nine years old, but it is difficult to tell. His posture makes him seem older, erect and still, with one arm hanging loosely by his side and the other outstretched toward the viewer. His expression makes him seem much younger: his eyes averted, the pupils in the far left corners, and his mouth wide open in the uncomprehending anguish of a toddler, conveying surprise as much as pain, exposed to a new and raw angle on the world. He is sharpened by the depth of focus, but the background is still sharp enough to make out the details. Cars, at least eight, mashed together, no longer in their sleek and recognizable shapes, just different colors of clay in roughly car-shaped blocks. There is a huge produce truck as well, turned over on its side, and the ground behind the boy is carpeted with strawberries.
Alice woke Carmen with Carmen’s camera bag already packed, and only enough underwear, Alice told her, for three days. The Big One had hit at 6:04 a.m. with an epicenter near Daly City, and the faint echoes of it could be felt all the way down in Santa Ana. The vibrations weren’t strong enough to wake anyone so far south, but Alice had been up, and she turned on the news expecting to hear about a 2-point-something originating in La Brea. As soon as she’d seen footage of the tunnel, she knew. Alice wouldn’t kiss Carmen goodbye, but woke Dean so that he could. Dean marched out in his footies for a perfunctory smooch, rubbing crusts out of his eyes. He’d go back to bed for another hour or two. He knew the drill. It was routine these days. Driving toward disaster had become the way of Carmen’s life. She was home now, fulfilling that wrung promise to the two of them to stay out of war zones and Kevlar, and smaller tragedies would have to do.
Years before the quake hit San Francisco, she’d learned to shun the picturesque, so she skipped the coastal highways and headed north on the 99, a curveless, ratty vein through the heart of the state, dotted with produce stands and worn trailers and low, peeling motels that might or might not have been abandoned. She preferred it to the 101 through Paso Robles, with its beautiful tree-broccolied hills and stands of eucalyptus, and then dark-earthed rows of garlic and strawberries as you passed through Gilroy. Highway 1 was among the most scenic roads in the world, the waves polishing great boulders sticking up like thumbs from the foamy California surf, cliffsides green with flora, and old arching bridges over the tributaries that fed the Pacific. It wasn’t that she didn’t love beauty. Of course she loved beauty. Everyone loved beauty. It was a bit obvious, though, wasn’t it?
It took a certain perspective to see any in the Grapevine this time of year. Even in the purple dawn the peaks of the Tehachapis were dull tan mounds, so like massive swept piles of dust it was difficult to imagine any rock inside them, and they were freckled only by low creeping brush that offered no suggestion that a man or even a field mouse could take nourishment from it. But as she rounded the last bend and came upon the long straight grade that descended into the San Joaquin Valley, she saw the whole of it filled with fog like a bowl of dirty cotton. As the mountains dropped away behind her and it was just her and the road, plummeting into it, she thought of the more familiar image of lowering through a cloud bank on an airplane descent, and was stupidly surprised not to feel any turbulence as she plunged through.