All Over Creation (68 page)

He was balancing on the rear legs of his chair and rocking to and fro, something every mother hates, but I refused to be distracted.

“How do I know that?” he asked.

“Well, you don't. It's one of those times where you just have to trust a person. And look at the history you have together.”

I watched his face for clues. “I've never let you down real bad, have I? I've always been there for you.”

He was guarded, but still listening. “Yeah,” he conceded. “I guess.”

I wished I could just stop there, but I couldn't. So I continued. “About Elliot . . .”

His face darkened like he'd tasted something foul.

“That night, before he left, he asked me to marry him.”

The chair legs hit the floor with a thump. He braced his hands against the edge of the table.

“I told him no, Phoenix.”

He was looking from me to the door and back again, contemplating his options. His face was blank. “Really?”

“I just thought you should know.”

He kicked at the leg of the chair, taking time now to ponder the situation. “Are you sorry?”

I took a deep breath and tried to decide how to answer his question.

“I'm not sorry I said no.”

“Charmey didn't deserve to die,” he said.

“No.”

“And he
was
responsible.”

“Perhaps. We don't know.”

He jiggled his foot some more, and in that gap, while time unfolded and I waited, I was overwhelmed by what seemed to me like a miracle, in all its humdrum banality: There he was, my son, sitting in front of me contemplating fate and making decisions about his very own life. It brought tears to my eyes.

“Okay,” he said. “I'll think about it. I'll let you know.”

“Thanks, son.”

He frowned at me, alert for irony, but I was not kidding around. The appellation had just slipped out. I was dead serious.

“I didn't say I was coming with you,” he said. “I just said I'd think about it.”

I nodded. I didn't trust myself to speak. Everything I wanted to tell him at that moment would just embarrass him, so I took it all outside, into the cold autumn night. Flushed with unspoken feelings, I craved the bite of frost on my skin. Mostly I felt overwhelmed with gratitude. How had this happened, that I had raised up a son into this world who could actually
think
about his decisions before he made them? No matter what Phoenix decided to do, I felt consoled knowing that while he might still break my heart, he wouldn't do it carelessly. Ocean was another matter. She was my little
pakiki-
head, stubborn and wild, but I figured we still had a couple of good years before she started to reject me. If I tried real hard, maybe I could grow up a little more before then, so it wouldn't hurt so much. Maybe, but I doubted it.

I cut across the garden. The greenhouse glowed like a large lantern, but tonight the luminosity seemed nervous, with a rhythmic flicker, like the flutter of an old film projector. As I approached, I saw it was the turning blades of the overhead fans, agitating the light and casting shadows on the drying racks of seeds below.

Geek's silhouette moved against the glass, a hulking alchemist bending over his benches, practicing his arts. He had moved back into the greenhouse, and ever since the potato harvest ended, he'd been spending all his time trying to organize the last of Lloyd and Momoko's seeds, getting them dried and processed, logged on to the Garden Web site, and packed for storage or distribution. Many seeds from the year's crop had been lost. Momoko had done what she could, and everyone had helped, but there had just been too much disruption. The Potato Party, the lawsuits, the time spent in jail, the birth and deaths and the bombing of the Spudnik—all these had taken up too much time, and the seed crop had suffered. Some seeds had rotted. Others had succumbed to fungal infections and molds or had been damaged by heat. Bacterial cankers afflicted the tomatoes. Downy mildew spoiled the spinaches. Farming requires a kind of stability that is incompatible with revolution, but even knowing this, Geek worked alone after everyone had gone to bed, pulping and washing, winnowing and separating seed from chaff. Saving what he could.

I opened the door and was greeted by the sweet smell of pot carried on the breezes stirring up inside. Geek looked up, startled. Then, seeing me, he looked away.

He was standing at a worktable shelling a large heap of beans, crushing the brittle pods between his fingers, and letting the chaff fall away as the beans dropped into an aluminum bowl below. They made little pinging sounds as they hit the metal. Every so often he would stop and inspect a few beans in the palm of his hand. Finally he held some out to show me. Small holes marred the surfaces of the seed coats.

“Weevils,” he said bitterly. He broke one open with his thumbnail. The tip of the bean was hollow, and curled inside was a tiny grub. “The whole crop is infested. I'm going to try freezing them, but I don't think they're dry enough yet.” He mashed the grub between his fingers. “These should have been threshed and dried weeks ago. I fucked up.”

He picked up half a joint that was sitting on the edge of the workbench. He lit it and toked, then offered me some, but I shook my head. He shrugged and ground it out. His hands were covered with small lacerations from the sharp, brittle pods. He scooped up another handful and started crushing.

“It's not really your fault,” I said. “There hasn't been a lot of time. . . .”

His fists were like a threshing machine, grinding the pods. “Wrong,” he said. “It is very much my fault. And we don't
have
a whole lot of time.”

“Geek . . .” I touched his arm.

He pulled away and turned on me. “Listen, I accept my responsibility, okay? I accept that the explosion may have been my fault. Human error, right? Or maybe not. I accept that, too. I accept that I will never, ever know. Do you know how painful that is? And it
still
doesn't change anything. Charmey still didn't have nearly enough time. Neither did Lloyd. He was just starting to catch on and figure out how to do stuff differently and to teach the rest of us, but then he died. And Momoko's knowledge is as good as dead now, too. How the fuck are we supposed to
learn
anything? How are we supposed to make any progress?”

I should have known not to push it—he was too stoned and upset to be rational—but I was feeling just a little bit positive that night, for the first time in so many months or years, and I wanted to help. So I said the most real and banal thing I could think of. “Learning takes time. You have to be patient.”

He brought his fists down hard on the wooden table, making all the beans jump, and now he was mad, but pleading with me, too, desperate to make me understand.

“You're not hearing what I'm saying!
We don't have time!
Don't you see? It's all moving too fast. Life itself is on the line here, and unless we can slow down the machine, none of this is going to survive!”

He spread his arms out to encompass the contents of the greenhouse with the racks upon racks of drying seeds. “This is the blueprint of your mother's garden, Yumi. Imagine it in bloom, in all its incredible beauty and diversity and rich profusion, and now . . .
zap!
Picture it gone. Now picture the whole planet as a garden, teeming with millions upon millions of flowers and trees and fruits and vegetables and insects and birds and animals and weevils and us. And then, instead of all that magnificent, chaotic profusion, picture a few thousand genetically mutated, impoverished, barren, patented forms of corporately controlled germplasm.”

He held out his hand, as though he were offering me a peach or a tennis ball, then shook it in front of my face. “
This
is how diminished, how pathetic the planet has become, that you can picture it like a cute little blue-green orb cupped in the palm of your hand. Like a logo or a fucking brand! Is this progress? I don't think so. It's bullshit, but that's all we hear—the same old stories, justifying the same old bad, exploitative, greedy, fucked-up behaviors. The same old excuses about why it's okay—no, it's economically beneficial—to raze the land and destroy animal habitat and exploit people and drive honking big SUVs to go shopping at the fucking mall. Nothing changes.”

I backed away from him. “We do what we can—”

“Do we? Really?” He was bearing down on me, eyes bloodshot from the pot. “Well, that's funny, because I don't see that. I don't see you doing much of anything. Look at you, all wrapped up in your neat little stories, blaming your daddy and refusing to take responsibility for your life, spinning all these super justifications for your addictions and the crappy way you treat your kids and bombs that go off in the night—spending all your time feeling cynical and sorry for yourself while the whole fucking world is going to hell in a handbasket!”

“Listen,” I said, getting angry now, “maybe that's so, but I don't go around exploiting people and using them to further my political agendas.”

He stopped. He looked at me, aghast. “I use people?” he said. “Who?”

“Lloyd and Momoko for starters. And the kids. And me.”

“I didn't
use
you!” he said. He bit off his words, and his shoulders slumped. “Forget it. This isn't about you or me. It isn't personal. It's much bigger.”

“Geek . . .” I said.

“No,” he said. “I'm stoned. Go away.” He turned his back to me. His large shoulders started to twitch, and I realized he was crying.

“What is it?” I said, touching his arm.

He spun around, and his face was wet with tears behind his glasses. “I didn't use you! I
loved
you! All of you! I'm not like fucking Rhodes. For God's sake, Yumi, wake up! I'm not saying you needed to fall in love with me or anything, but can't you even tell the difference?”

I stood there and held his arm. I watched him cry. I didn't try to hug him or kiss his tears away because it wouldn't have been appropriate. Like he'd said, it wasn't personal. Somehow, though, I got it. The bigger picture.

Standing in my mother's greenhouse that night, surrounded by mounds of wormy seeds and chaff, I felt the brittle coat around my heart crack open at the hopeless beauty and fragility and loss of all that is precious on earth. He was right, we are responsible. Intimately connected, we're liable for it all. I had to take responsibility for myself and my kids, but also for Geek and Elliot, and for Charmey and Lloyd, too, and yet at the same time I realized I was powerless to forecast or control any of our outcomes.

But maybe that was the trick—to accept the responsibility and forgo the control? To love without expectation?

A paradox for sure, but such a relief.

You know how good-byes feel. How the air gets excited when all its ions and electrical charges are disrupted, first by the intent to leave and later by the leaving itself. Then, when the bodies move away through space, they create empty pockets where feelings get caught and eddy around in the vacuum, creating little vortices of relief or sadness or confusion. That's the way it felt on the day the Seeds left town.

We all turned out to say good-bye. Momoko was there, looking distraught and bewildered. For the last few days Geek had been helping her put the garden to bed, carefully digging under the rows and covering them with straw, while Frankie mulched the perennials and Lilith cut back the roses. Cass and Will would be moving into our house, but between the baby and the business of the farm, Cass wouldn't have time for much more than a small kitchen-garden plot with basic vegetables, and besides, she didn't have Momoko's green thumb. So putting the garden to bed was a sad business, knowing it would never wake up. Not fully. Not next spring. Not ever.

But there would be perennials. And volunteers. And the odd seeds, spit from the lips of children, or shit by birds or small animals, or blown by the wind.

Life is evanescent, but left to itself it rarely fails to offer some consolation.

Cass and Will had come to say good-bye. Of course they brought Tibet, who was far too young to understand that her father was leaving. After all, “father” was a concept that both she and Frankie were still too young to master. “Leaving,” however, she got. The key event of her brief postpartum infant existence had been the abrupt departure of a pair of breasts and the steady heartbeat that defined the world. But there were other hearts and sources of sustenance, and true to her name, Tibet was a patient and long-suffering baby. She waved her hands in the air and fixed her gaze into some middle distance that was not quite Frankie. He didn't mind. He loved her even if she couldn't love him yet. Even if she couldn't quite focus on his not-quite-fatherly face. He'd be back in time. He'd teach her stuff to remember.