Chapter 2
"There, there."
"Make them come back."
The night Asa returned from camp, Borealis and his buddy Logos dropped by, just in time for a slice of Garber Farm's famous raspberry pie. Borealis looked sheepish and fretful. "My friend has something to tell you," he said. "A kind of proposal."
Having consumed an entire jar of Beech-Nut strained sweet potatoes and two bottles of Similac, the baby was in bed for the night. Her flutelike snores wafted into the kitchen as Polly and Asa served our guests.
Logos sat down, resting his spindly hands on the red-and-white checkerboard oilcloth as if trying to levitate the table. "Ben, Polly, I'll begin by saying I'm not a religious man. Not the sort of man who's inclined to believe in G.o.d. But..."
"Yes?" said Polly, raising her eyebrows in a frank display of mistrust.
"But I can't shake my conviction that this Zen.o.bia has been... well, sent. I feel that Providence has deposited her in our laps."
"She was deposited in my lap," Polly corrected him. "My lap and Ben's."
"I think it was the progesterone suppositories," I said.
"Did you ever hear how, in the old days, coal miners used to take canaries down into the shaft with them?" said Logos, forking a gluey clump of raspberries into his mouth. "When the canary started squawking, or stopped singing, or fell to the bottom of the cage and died, the men knew poison gases were leaking into the mine." The health commissioner devoured the pie in a half-dozen bites. "Well, Ben and Polly, it seems to me your Zen.o.bia is like that. It seems to me G.o.d has given us a canary."
"She's a biosphere," said Asa.
Without asking, Logos slashed into the pie, excising a fresh piece. "I've been on the horn to Was.h.i.+ngton all week, and I must say the news is very, very good. Ready, Ben-ready, Polly?" The commissioner cast a twinkling eye on our boy. "Ready, son? Get this." He gestured as if fanning open a stack of money. "The Department of the Interior is prepared to pay you three hundred thousand dollars-that's three hundred thousand, cash-for Zen.o.bia."
"What are you talking about?" I asked.
"I'm talking about buying that little canary of yours for three hundred thousand bucks."
"Buying her?" said my wife, inflating. Polly the puff adder, Polly the randy tree frog.
"She's the environmental simulacrum we've always wanted," said Logos. "With Zen.o.bia, we can convincingly model the long-term effects of fluorocarbons, nitrous oxide, mercury, methane, chlorine, and lead. For the first time, we can study the impact of deforestation and ozone depletion without ever leaving the lab."
Polly and I stared at each other, making vows with our eyes. We were patriotic Americans, my wife and me, but n.o.body was going to deplete our baby's ozone, not even the President of the United States himself.
"Look at it this way," said Borealis; he gripped his coffee mug with one hand, tugged anxiously at the kitchen curtains with the other. "If scientists can finally offer an irrefutable scenario of ecological collapse, then the world's governments may really start listening, and Asa here will get to grow up on a safer, cleaner planet. Everybody benefits."
"Zen.o.bia doesn't benefit," said Polly.
Borealis slurped coffee. "Yes, but there's a greater good here, right, folks?"
"She's just a globe, for Christ's sake," said Logos.
"She's our globe," I said.
"Our baby," said Polly.
"My sister," said Asa.
Logos ma.s.saged his beard. "Look, I hate to play hardball with nice people like you, but you don't really have a choice here. Our test results are in, and the fact is that this biosphere of yours is harboring a maverick form of the simian T-lymphotrophic retrovirus. As County Health Commissioner, I have the authority to remove the creature from these premises forthwith and quarantine it."
" "The fact is," " I snorted, echoing Logos. " 'The fact is'-the fact is, our baby couldn't give my great Aunt Jennifer a bad cold." I shot a glance at Borealis. "Am I right?"
The doctor said, "Well..."
Logos grunted like one of the pigs we used to raise before the market went soft.
"I think you gentlemen had better leave," my wife suggested icily.
"We have a barn full of dogs," said Asa in a tone at once cheerful and menacing. "Mean ones," he added with a quick little nod.
"I'll be back," said the commissioner, rising. "Tomorrow. And I won't be alone."
"b.a.s.t.a.r.d," said Polly-the first time I'd ever heard her use that word.
So we did what we had to do; like Amram and Jochebed, we did what was necessary. Polly drove. I brooded. All the way up Route 322, Zen.o.bia sat motionless in the back, safely buckled into her car seat, moaning and whimpering. Occasionally Asa leaned over and gently ran his hairbrush through the jungles of her southern hemisphere.
"Gorgeous sky tonight," I observed, unhooking our baby and carrying her into the crisp September darkness.
"I see that." Zen.o.bia fought to keep her voice in one piece.
"I hate this," I said, marching toward the bluff. My guts were as cold and hard as one of Zen.o.bia's glaciers. "Hate it, hate it..."
"It's necessary," she said.
We spent the next twenty minutes picking out constellations. Brave Orion; royal Ca.s.siopeia; snarly old Ursa Major; the Big Dipper with its bowlful of galactic dust. Asa stayed by the Landrover, digging his heel into the dirt and refusing to join us, even though he knew ten times more astronomy than the rest of us.
"Let's get it over with," said our baby.
"No," said Polly. "We have all night."
"It won't be any easier in an hour."
"Let me hold her," said Asa, shuffling onto the bluff.
He took his sister, raised her toward the flickering sky. He whispered to her-statistical bits that made no sense to me, odd talk of sea levels, hydrogen ions, and solar infrared. I pa.s.sed the time staring at Jake's Video, its windows papered with ads for Joe Dante's remake of The War of the Worlds.
The boy choked down a sob. "Here," he said, pivoting toward me. "You do it."
Gently I slid the biosphere from my son. Hugging Zen.o.bia tightly, I kissed her most arid desert as Polly stroked her equator. Zen.o.bia wept, her arroyos, wadis, and flood plains filling with tears. I stretched out my arms as far as they would go, lifting our daughter high above my head.
Once and only once in my days on the courts did I ever hit a three-pointer.
"We'll miss you," I told Zen.o.bia. She felt weightless, airy, as if she were a hollow gla.s.s ornament from a Garber Farm Christmas tree. It was just as she'd said: the stars wanted her. They tugged at her blood.
"We love you," groaned Polly.
"Daddy!" Zen.o.bia called from her lofty perch. Her tears splashed
In a quick, flashy spasm I made my throw. A good one-straight and smooth. Zen.o.bia flew soundlessly from my fingertips.
"Bye-bye!" the three of us shouted as she soared into the bright, beckoning night. We waved furiously, maniacally, as if hoping to generate enough turbulence to pull her back to central Pennsylvania. "Bye-bye, Zen.o.bia!"
"Bye-bye!" our baby called from out of the speckled darkness, and she was gone.
The Earth turned-once, twice. Raspberries, apples, Christmas trees, asparagus, ba.s.set pups-each crop made its demands, and by staying busy we stayed sane.
One morning during the height of raspberry season I was supervising our roadside fruit stand and chatting with one of our regulars-Lucy Berens, Asa's former third-grade teacher-when Polly rushed over. She looked crazed and pleased. Her eyes expanded like domes of bubble gum emerging from Asa's mouth.
She told me she'd just tried printing out a Down to Earth, only the ImageWriter II had delivered something else entirely. "Here," she said, shoving a piece of computer paper in my face, its edges embroidered with sprocket holes.
Dear Mom and Dad: This is being transmitted via a superluminal wave generated by nonlocal quantum correlations. You won't be able to write back.
I have finally found a proper place for myself; two light-years from Garber Farm. In my winter, I can see your star. Your system is part of a constellation that looks to me like a Zebu. Z is for Zebu, remember? I am happy.
Big news. A year ago, various mammalian lines-tree shrews, mostly -emerged from those few feeble survivors of the Fourth of July catastrophe. And then, last month, I acquired-are you ready?-people. That's right, people. Human beings, sentient primates, creatures entirely like yourselves. G.o.d, but they're clever: cars, deodorants, polyvinyl chlorides, all of it. I like them. They're brighter than the dinosaurs, and they have a certain spirituality. In short, they're almost worthy of being what they are: your grandchildren.
Every day, my people look out across the heavens, and their gaze comes to rest on Earth. Thanks to Asa, I can explain to them what they're seeing, all the folly and waste, the way your whole planet's becoming a cesspool. So tell my brother he's saved my life. And tell him to study hard-he'll be a great scientist when he grows up.
Mom and Dad, I think of you every day. I hope you're doing well, and that Garber Farm is prospering. Give Asa a kiss for me.
All my love, Zen.o.bia "A letter from our daughter," I explained to Lucy Berens.
"Didn't know you had one," said Lucy, s.n.a.t.c.hing up an aluminum pail so she could go pick a quart of raspberries.
"She's far away," said Polly.
"She's happy," I said.
That night, we went into Asa's room while he was practicing on his trap set, thumping along with The Apostolic Succession. He shut off the CD, put down his drumsticks, and read Zen.o.bia's letter-slowly, solemnly. He yawned and slipped the letter into his math book. He told us he was going to bed. Fourteen: a moody age.
"You saved her life?" I said. "What does she mean?"
"You don't get it?"
"Uh-uh."
Our son drummed a paradiddle on his math book. "Remember what Dr. Logos said about those coal miners? Remember when he said Zen.o.bia was like a canary? Well, obviously he got it backwards. My sister's not the canary-we are. Earth is."
"Huh?" said Polly.
"We're Zen.o.bia's canary," said Asa.
We kissed our son, left his room, closed the door. The hallway was papered over with his treasures-with miss piggy for president posters, rock star portraits, and lobby cards from the various environmental apocalypses he'd been renting regularly from Jake's Video: Silent Running, Soylent Green, Frogs...
"We're Zen.o.bia's canary," said Polly.
"Is it too late for us, then?" I asked.
My wife didn't answer.
You've heard the rest. How Dr. Borealis knew somebody who knew somebody, and suddenly we were seeing Senator Caracalla on C-Span, reading the last twelve issues of Down to Earth, the whole story of Zen.o.bia's year among us, into The Congressional Record.
Remember what President Tait told the newspapers the day he signed the Caracalla Conservation Act into law? "Sometimes all you need is a pertinent parable," he said. "Sometimes all you need is the right metaphor," our Chief Executive informed us.
The Earth is not our mother.
Quite the opposite.
That particular night, however, standing outside Asa's room, Polly and I weren't thinking about metaphors. We were thinking about how much we wanted Zen.o.bia back. We're pretty good parents, Polly and I. Look at our kids.
We winked at each other, tiptoed down the hall, and climbed into bed. Our bodies pressed together, and we laughed out loud. I've always loved my wife's smell; she's like some big floppy mushroom you came across in the woods when you were six years old, all sweet and damp and forbidden. We kept on pressing, and it kept feeling better and better. We were hoping for another girl.
Dogstar Man.
NANCY WILLARD.
W.
HEN I WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD, my father, who rarely touched anything stronger than Seven-Up, got mildly drunk with a man named Olaf Starr who kept a dog team. This happened in Madison, Wisconsin, where I grew up. My father, Carl Theophilus, owned the Treble and Ba.s.s Music Store there. Maybe you've heard of it. The store carried accordions, drums, trumpets, harmonicas, guitars, pitch pipes, tambourines, and sheet music. Five free lessons came with all the instruments, except the harmonica, and my father built a tiny soundproof practice room in the back. Sat.u.r.day mornings a boy from Madison High School came to give the free lessons to languid young girls, who emerged from the practice room sweaty and bright-eyed, all of them promising to practice. My father also repaired instruments. By the time I was in high school, he'd sold the business and was doing repairs full time and making lutes, dulcimers, and Irish harps on commission.
He kept shelves of exotic woods, rosewood and purple heart, teak and lignum vitae. One man ordered a guitar made of lignum vitae for his son, who played in a rock band and smashed his instrument every night, but by G.o.d, he wouldn't be smas.h.i.+ng this one. Mainly my father stocked the commoner varieties, ba.s.swood and oak and black cherry and ash, which he used for the curved bodies of the lutes and the harps. He also had a few odd pieces of golden c.h.i.n.kapin and water tupulo, hornbeam and hackleberry, for which there wasn't much demand except when he did inlay work on the sound holes of the lutes. You never knew, he said, what a customer would ask for. He wouldn't work with ivory, out of respect for the elephants, though he has always loved Chinese ivory carvings, especially those that keep the shape of the tusk. I believe there's not a book on Asian art in the Madison public library that my father hasn't checked out.
Olaf Starr lived outside of Madison on land that his father had once farmed. All the Starr Cheese in Wisconsin was made there, and it was a big business in the thirties and forties. That ended when Olaf took over. Forty years later, when I was growing up, the house was gone and the barn that stood in the north acre was in ruins; snow had caved in the roof, leaving a confusion of broken timber in its wake that made me feel I was peering into the stomach of a vast beast. The windows of the stable were broken, and stars winked through the holes left by s.h.i.+ngles that had blown or rotted off. Over the stalls, you could still read the names of horses: Beauty; Misty; Athena. Behind the stable, Olaf Starr parked his pickup truck.
On the south acre, Olaf had built himself a log cabin and a dog yard, with seven small cabins, low to the ground, for his dogs. After a heavy snowfall, he would hitch them up and drive to a general store just in town. No one else in Madison drove a dogsled. Mornings when I went out cross-country skiing on the golf course behind our house, I might catch a glimpse of him on the horizon, his dogs strung out in a thin line, like Christmas lights, with Olaf Starr standing on the back runners of the sled. I called him the dogstar man, and I half expected to see him drive into the heavens. He was a big man, with white hair, who carried a knapsack and wore the same Levi's, suspenders, down jacket and boots, day after day, shedding the jacket in summer, resurrecting it at the first snowfall.
My father said that the dogstar man's wife had left long ago for a more comfortable life of her own, so during the one night I spent at the cabin I never met or saw any evidence of her. I was in sixth grade and trying to write a report on cheese as part of a unit on agriculture. I did not like agriculture, which was a vast general thing. You could not put anything in the report about how cows look, standing in a rolling field, though that is so important it should come first. From far away, they look like ciphers that someone has written with a thick brown pen, and I wished I could write my whole report using the ponderous alphabet of cows. And you could not put in anything about the hiss of milk in the pail, or the salt licks that rise in the fields like dolmens or ancient shrines, and you could not put in the peculiar appet.i.tes of goats for wind-dried bedsheets on the line and children's sunsuits and anything scented with human use.
So I asked the teacher, Mrs. Hanson, if I could write a story about cheese, and she said, yes, but it could not be a fairy tale. The cheese must not talk or sing or dance or have adventures. The story must be about how cheese is made. I could write that story.
I did not know the first thing about how cheese is made. My father told me to go to the library and find a book that would tell me. But my mother said, "Go and watch somebody making it. That's better than a book." My father agreed and suggested I call the Wisconsin Wilderness processing plant to see if they gave tours.
Suddenly my parents had the same thought at the same time and said almost in unison, "Olaf Starr makes cheese. He'd be glad to show you."
The dogstar man had no phone, so on Sat.u.r.day afternoon my father drove out to the farm. Ten inches of snow had fallen a week ago, and the cold had kept it on the ground, though the main roads were clear. My father turned off I-90 and took the road less traveled. The dogsled track cut a deep ribbon across the white fields on either side of us, and where the road ended at the broken barn and we got out of the car, the sled track disappeared into a pine woods.