Warnings from the Future Read online

  WARNINGS FROM

  THE FUTURE

  WARNINGS FROM

  THE FUTURE

  STORIES

  ETHAN CHATAGNIER

  Acre Books is made possible by the support of the Robert and Adele Schiff Foundation.

  Copyright © 2018 by Ethan Chatagnier

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  First printing

  Designed by Barbara Neely Bourgoyne

  Cover art: Tight Loop (cropped), painting by Skip Lawrence, reproduced with permission of the artist

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data have been applied for.

  ISBN-10 (pbk): 1-946724-03-3 / ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-946724-03-8

  ISBN-10 (e-book): 1-946724-08-4 / ISBN-13 (e-book): 978-1-946724-08-3

  No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without express written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  The press is based at the University of Cincinnati, Department of English and Comparative Literature, McMicken Hall, Room 248, PO Box 210069, Cincinnati, OH, 45221–0069.

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  For Laura

  CONTENTS

  Miracle Fruit

  Smaller Tragedies

  Retrograde Mountain Time

  The Unplayable Études

  As Long as the Laughter

  Every Face in the Crowd

  The Law of Threes

  The Top of Fresno

  Coyote

  Dentists

  Acknowledgments

  WARNINGS FROM

  THE FUTURE

  MIRACLE FRUIT

  At 7 p.m., three-quarters of the recessed lights in the main office space are programmed to turn off. What’s left is deemed bright enough for the custodial staff to do their work, but what I love, looking out through the interior window of my office, is that the glow of all the screensavers creates a faint aurora over the top of all the cubicle walls almost like that of a town at night hidden just beyond a ridge. I know it’s just a silly image, but it gives me the sort of comfort I imagine God would feel looking at a snow-dusted Swiss village and allowing himself to forget the rest of the troubled world for a while. I stay late like this because it’s the easiest time to handle the real, unbureaucratic work of thinking, planning, analyzing data, and so on. I also use the time to care for my Synsepalum dulcificum, misting it, trimming it, adding a little peat or some acidifying fertilizer, and for whatever reason these diversions provide me with the greatest clarity of thought I have all day. But I also like to stay late because, unlike at home, where my mother salts the air with her misery, the solitude here feels purposeful.

  Tonight, I’m just finishing up a request for access to our latest acquisition. All the other project leads had their requests in last week, but I’ve been trying to get my wording, my logic, just right, in the hope that a strong argument will matter more than who was first to the starting line. But I know how it will go. Corn and soy will get the first crack at it. My wheat is beating yield estimates and making the company lots of money too—which I’m certain is why I haven’t been talked to despite all the surveillance footage of me staying late to mommy a potted plant—but I know a lot of people are starting to see me as some sort of deluded prophet for continuing to believe that wheat has a place in the future.

  In an office environment, logic can only do so much. I finish up my request and e-mail it to Meadows anyway.

  Before I go, I plug in the humidifying contraption I’ve put together. Synsepalum dulcificum is from the jungles of west Africa, and the store-bought warm-water humidifier just wasn’t enough, so I’ve connected a space heater to a litter box full of water, and wired in a little fan to circulate the humid air. Security has surely sent someone to investigate the strange apparatus, just to check, because anyone with a keycard for this facility has the know-how to make a bomb, even the technicians. Maybe even the custodians. But it doesn’t take an engineering degree to see this setup is climate control for my shrub. It’s been a lot perkier since I switched to this method. In the first half of the year it didn’t bloom, but now it has eleven green buds on it, and all of them are starting to blush.

  I like walking out to the deserted parking lot as well, no claustrophobia of cars, nobody yammering into a cell phone or blasting bad music, but tonight there is another car, a Camry with Avis stickers, and it’s parked right next to mine. Leaning against it is a slender, copper-haired woman, wearing a fitted trench coat and kitten heels, who is definitely not from Nebraska.

  “Can I ask you about Aeon, Dr. Schuyler?” she asks.

  “Mother Jones?”

  “New York Times.”

  Surprising. To someone like me, our Aeon acquisition is front page news, but most people would rather see pictures of a beheading or read a new brownie recipe. It’s good that someone is paying attention, I think. But it’s bad when a New York Times reporter ambushes you in the dark of an empty parking lot rather than contacting the corporate media office. It means this is just the slight visible outgrowth of a story already being tracked, of documents already being compiled and pieces put together. It means you are not just the person who picked up the phone; you were chosen. And why was I chosen? Because I am unmarried, because I have no children, because I own a small home outright and scrupulously save 60 percent of my income? All information readily available on a tax return. A few days of observation would reveal me to be the type to arrive first and leave last from work, the type to care for an elderly parent whose one remaining joy is complaining, and the type to carefully tend a backyard garden that I’m rarely home to enjoy. She is betting that I am the right combination of idealistic, lonely, and with little enough to lose that I might throw myself on the sword. She suspects that if confronted with a beautiful woman, I will want to speak to her, to please.

  How close is she to right?

  I tell her I can’t help her. She hands me her business card anyway. Sharon Saxon—what a newspaper name. She counsels me not to bring the card back to this place.

  When I get home, my mother tells me that all those dials on the washing machine do nothing. As with a baby toy, they are simply knobs that click. Cold and hot are the only true settings. The rest are illusions. This is just the latest in her litany of modern horrors. They’re all she has these days. The chunky spaghetti sauce is the same as the nonchunky spaghetti sauce. The chunks in chunky peanut butter are microplastics. There are little bugs that look like dust. They look just like dust, but they are bugs. How can you tell, Mom? You can’t. Last month she said her earwax smelled savory, like mushrooms with rosemary, like duck fat. No matter how good it smells, I told her, don’t eat it.

  “Hot and cold is all I need,” I say, regarding the washing machine.

  “Garage doors cause cancer. You should put yours on manual.”

  She’s reached an age where there’s no listening going on. She’s all output. She prefers afghans now, though I offer her good quilts. Any chair she sits in instantly takes on the aura of a rocking chair, even the sofa. She’s unhappier now than her own mother was at this age, and grandma had set the world record for unhappiness. I bring her a bowl of SpaghettiOs.

  “I fed you kids vegetables.”

  “Ketchup and canned beans.”

  If I bring her zucchini, she’ll say, “You know how I feel about zucchini.” The same if I bring her kale or celery or
butternut squash. She’ll accept SpaghettiOs, mac and cheese, pork and beans—Depression food, pun intended—but she always offers that disclaimer: I fed you kids vegetables. The O’s are made with rice flour now. Pretty much all pasta is, besides the luxury stuff. The sauce is sweetened with corn syrup. It’s soybeans in pork and beans. The sauce is sweetened with corn syrup. The cheese powder in the mac and cheese is synthetically produced flavor crystallites. The milk you make it with is soy milk. The butter you mix in is hydrogenated corn oil with synthetically produced flavor crystallites.

  “Why don’t you go out to the garden?”

  She does, though she’s eaten only half of her bowl. She leaves it on the end table and heads out back. She fails to finish her meals, but even so her midsection is growing, though it seems to be airy and insubstantial, like rising bread dough. Is it a tumor, or a gland issue, or just following the Dada rules of the aging body after sixty? I don’t know. Her health is a house of cards I don’t want to blow on.

  She’s on the bench in the garden, making it seem like a rocking chair. Around her there’s amaranth, leeks, chard, varicolored carrots, rare potatoes, the shoots of onion and garlic bulbs. There’s a big bush of rosemary and a bit of thyme. Of the trees, the fuyu persimmon, ponderosa lemon, and alma fig are bearing fruit. I pluck a fuyu and take a bite. Its flesh is crisp, but the flavor, with traces of cinnamon, butter, and apple, is almost too delicate to exist.

  “Why don’t you have a fig for dessert?” I ask.

  “You know how I feel about figs.”

  * * *

  The Aeon seed bank was the last major seed bank in the world. It was in Annecy, France, not far across the border from the Geneva office of the United Nations, which, along with a dozen other foundations and entities, had subsidized its existence. But it was still a French property, still under the aegis of the French government, and with the spiral toward bankruptcy looming, they were vulnerable to Semillon making an offer they could hardly believe, let alone refuse. The papers and magazines that made a stink about the purchase comforted their readers with editorials arguing that transporting one and a half billion seeds in cold storage from eastern France to Nebraska was a logistical problem that would take at least five years to solve. What they didn’t know was that Semillon had been working on the problem for eight years. Only a few conspiracy nuts were right about that part, though they destroyed any credibility with claims that Semillon had manufactured the French fiscal crisis to begin with.

  On the first day of delivery, a line of semis stretches out of the campus and six miles down the highway. Exhaust hangs above the string of them like a heat mirage. Each carries a specially equipped refrigeration trailer, and at four docks the semis back in and robotic overhead cranes hook onto the trailers and guide them via a track system to a preprogrammed spot in the main refrigeration chamber, where they automatically sync with the facility’s power system. No manual labor is required.

  The protesters are late, showing up at 7:30 a.m., like me. The first trucks had queued up at 5:00. The procession is so slow, though, that the activists have no trouble lying down in front of an arbitrary truck and halting the line there. But a crowd of state police has been on the scene since 8:00, and the company has a cart full of coffee urns set out for them, and they haul the long-bearded activists out of the street pretty much as soon as their backs touch the ground. They leave unmolested the protesters standing on the shoulder with signs that read BIODIVERSITY IS PUBLIC PROPERTY or show poorly painted images of a globe locked in a jail cell. I’m a little embarrassed to agree with them. But then, they are looking at the issue from only one angle. Our population is growing at an exponential rate, and crop yields at a linear rate. Already we have 9 billion people on a planet that can feed only 8 billion, while the ten-year projections have the population at 10 billion and food production at enough for 8.1 billion. And what happens when the food wars migrate to countries with nuclear arsenals?

  There are two weeks of days like this, trucks creeping patiently along the highway, dejected protesters using one hand to hold picket signs and the other to check their phones. There are a lot of plant species in the world. Some of the seeds in this collection are from plants no longer extant, plants waiting to be revived, though mostly they wait in vain.

  At the end of the second week of transit, Meadows calls me into his office and tells me I can have access to anything not earmarked by corn or soy, carte blanche, for one year. No need to file project memos and wait for approval, so long as I track what I use in the master database. It’s an unprecedented level of access, an unprecedented cutting of red tape.

  “Mind your deadlines, and don’t take on too much.”

  “I’ve got a few big ideas.”

  “It all expires after a year,” he reminds me.

  “What happens in a year?”

  I look at him. He looks at me. He’s mastered the expression that says: I’m a scientist; I wish these weren’t the realities we live with; I care. He’s even better at it than I am.

  “Pete,” he says as I’m leaving. I stop in his doorframe. “You’re doing important work.”

  “Everyone is, right?”

  Our part of the campus is unadorned, utilitarian, but the Carthy Building, which faces the road, is designed to welcome corporate affiliates, board members, diplomats, and congressional representatives. It houses a tropical courtyard with one of the top-ranked koi ponds in the world. I don’t know who ranks these things, but it is marvelous. Unreasonably calming. I spend the rest of the day there. I’m thinking about my most ambitious projects, narrowing them by those I can get off the ground within a year and have a reasonable chance of success. But mostly I’m thinking about nothing. Mostly I’m trying not to think about what happens in a year.

  Sharon Saxon has been waiting for me in the parking lot every Tuesday night. She must be seeing signs that I’ll crack, though I’m not sure what they are. I haven’t stopped combing my hair. I’m still brushing my teeth. The Tuesday after my meeting with Meadows, I snap a berry off the Synsepalum dulcificum, perfectly red now, the shape of a grape tomato but a few shades darker. She’s out there, all right. Her attire has mutated from what you’d wear to a client meeting to what you’d wear on a date. I imagine it’s like a lockpick testing out a lock. A skirt now, respectable but shiny. Higher heels. A blouse coincidentally the same shade as my berry. Though how trustworthy is any coincidence when you’re dealing with an investigative reporter? One of those silly jackets women wear that only go down as far as the ribs.

  “Your father would tell you to wear a coat,” I say.

  “A gentleman would offer me his own.”

  I look down at the sleeves of my thin sweater. “Sorry. I’m from Vermont.”

  “I know.” She manages the aura of a smoker without having a cigarette, a real miracle of science.

  “I don’t really want to know how much you know about me.”

  “Yes, you do. Just not all at once.”

  What I like is not her in her professional garb or her date clothes, not an inch more or an inch less of leg, not a certain amount of décolletage or the right heels. I like the process of it all, despite the constructions, despite the obvious ends fueling all these different means. What can I say? Who doesn’t want to feel like a lock being picked?

  “Any news?”

  “No news,” I say, as usual. But this time I hold out my closed fist, and she puts her hand under it, open. I place the red berry in the bowl of her palm.

  “Eat this,” I say. “Then eat a lemon.”

  On the way home I stop at the hardware store and buy ten feet of four-inch PVC and a few plastic totes.

  Sharon Saxon is sitting in my garden early Wednesday morning when I head out with my watering can and trowel. She’s holed up in the corner of my park bench, wearing the kind of sweats that fancy people jog in, and she lights up when she sees me. She’s waiting for a good morning or something, but I’ve decided to play it coy. Coy is as close to charm
ing as a plant geneticist can get.

  “It took me about three hours to convince myself you weren’t trying to poison me.”

  “You’re here, aren’t you?”

  “And I kept thinking it was some kind of code. But what is this berry, what’s the lemon supposed to mean?”

  “Did you try it?”

  “Yeah, I finally went out and bought a bag of fucking lemons. This is incredible, Pete. Did you make it?”

  I laugh. “The climate of west Africa made it, and a thousand individual pressures. Though it’s anyone’s guess as to why it’s a selected-for trait. Nothing too useful, or it would be more common. Synsepalum dulcificum. They call it the miracle fruit.”

  “Have you thought of selling this to New York chefs? They’d pay a fortune.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re not familiar with the pleasure of keeping a secret.”

  My mother shuffles out the back door with a bowl of Frosted Flakes, leaving the screen open behind her. She’s up two hours earlier than usual. Either Sharon woke her hopping the fence, or she sensed my happiness and has emerged to destroy it. She sits down on the other corner of the bench while I go on watering.

  “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.