Warnings from the Future Read online

  “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.

  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 reveal: 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 kin
d 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.

  She felt a thrill as the fog surrounded the car, no bumps, no force pushing back at her, none of the resistance the bank of dull white seemed to suggest from outside. She loved the way it dematerialized in front of her as if opening a secret pathway, and without thinking she pressed her foot down a little more on the gas pedal. Without landmarks to gauge her speed, she’d have thought that the fog would have made everything seem slower, but instead it felt like the most furious racing. She looked at her speedometer, the same 70 mph. Her breakfast lurched in her stomach and the skin of her face cooled as she asked herself how long would it take her to use up her fifty feet of visibility going that speed? How many feet would it take to stop the jeep? She pulled to the shoulder, slamming her foot to the brake, and the jeep rocked violently as a big rig she hadn’t seen behind her shot by, erupting with a foghorn so loud the sound seemed to originate within her own head. She laid her head down on the top of the steering wheel and heard a crunch at the same time she felt prongs dig into the bridge of her nose. Her sunglasses: she’d forgotten she was wearing them. She took them off, and the fog—bright and pearly—seemed lit from within.

  This is what she remembers, what she tr
ies to remember first, what she tries to keep her mind on later, when she looks at the photo that’s framed on the wall of her home office. It’s a simple frame, taking no attention away from its subject. She’d originally hung it above the mantle, and Alice had made her take it down. You want our guests to look at this? You want our friends to be in discomfort every moment they are in our house? Do you want Dean to grow up under this? She’d agreed to move it, and Alice had replaced it with a family portrait Carmen had taken with a timer. That was the problem with war photography, and with the disaster-chasing it had turned into here at home: trying to show people things they preferred not to see. No, that was only one of the problems, for Carmen herself, even years later, was filled with conflict when looking at the photo.

  The fog was so complete that the jeep itself seemed not to exist. Every so often she opened her door to see the yellow median dashes crawl by and confirm she was still on the right side of the road. If Alice knew the type of soup Carmen was driving in, she’d settle for nothing less than Carmen reversing time to avoid having left LA in the first place. They’d argued enough about Carmen’s work, about her running to places others were running from. That was what Alice had fallen in love with, though she wouldn’t admit it now—the life Alice had admired before being shackled to it. Dean had changed everything for Alice; for Carmen, Dean had changed some things. Without Dean toddling around in her memory, she wouldn’t have been crawling along at ten miles an hour, no matter the visibility. But she could never not go.

  She didn’t know what towns she was between when the fog thinned out suddenly. After a moment she could see the wind funneling it into a deep river bed. Gusts of the thick mist seemed to be not blown but sucked into the channel as if in one ceaseless inhale. The river of fog ran east, which is to say backwards, against instinct. The flares caught her eye a moment too late as the wreck ahead impressed its meaning on her consciousness in one powerful stamp. She swung the wheel to the right and flew across the shoulder and onto the steep embankment. Tire treads bit at the loose dirt, and she slid for several feet before they grabbed and halted the jeep.