The gardener rushes, slamming doors behind her to hold warmth in the few places it’s caught: in the house, in the garage. Sometimes a gust of wind rushes in at a closing door and pushes it back farther than it ever normally opens, showing a whole rectangle of light against the dusk. Seeking equilibrium, warm air trapped inside rushes out into the heavy, slow cold. It spends its small energy quickly in the implacable cold, which, even after the doors are closed, creeps inside at the crack along the floor.
The sleet freezes harder, flattens, and thins to snowflakes. The garden radiates months of summer warmth into the dark blue air, and the snowflakes melt where they land.
After three days of snow, most of the bare soil and lines of dead moss between the patio stones have lost the heat they held, though the stones themselves remain warm. Snowflakes build unmelting ridges on the moss, water in its most monumental form.
The gardener goes out toward the wrecked dahlias with a spade in one gloved hand and a crate of straw in the other. Yards of greenery lie slumped over, split apart from the inside by freezing water that expanded in the cells until they burst their walls, flooding the interior of each plant with ice. She slices all that summer work away, lifting the heavy stems to a standing position and hacking them off a few inches above the frosted soil. She leaves the leaves and stems where they fall behind her. Carbon and nitrogen pulled up from the earth and bound together months ago begin to part ways, off into many separate bodies of bacteria and fungi and worms. Some molecules will return earthward. Some of the carbon and most of the nitrogen, digested even further, will float back as carbon dioxide to where most of it always is, forming the vast majority of the atmosphere.
She gouges a shallow ring around a dahlia stump and reaches both hands down into the narrow opening, toward the center, toward the place from which the flowers rose. Bowing with the strain of it, she lifts up and toward herself, aiming the stump at her heart. A cascade of small sounds of plant and soil parting ways, and the many-fingered tuber comes up from the earth in her hands.
It has multiplied ten- or even twentyfold since she saw it last, in April, laid out beside its plastic name tag on the patio table. A cold wind raced through the bright sky. She stood with a clean knife in her hand, searched the tuber’s skin for the ripples called eyes, then cut it apart, making sure each piece had at least one eye. She buried the pieces in small pots, watered them, and brought them into the warmth of the house, which the tuber answered with dividing cells. The eyes opened into pointed shoots that were pink then white then green.
The night of the first snow, three days ago, she stood for a long time by the window at the top of the stairs, looking past her pale reflection into the indigo dark. After enough freezing nights, frost will reach down through the earth and kill any dahlia tubers left. Thatched over with their own wilted leaves and hollow stems as they are, though, the tubers might survive even a few snows before that happens.
But who, having known winter, would test it?
The gardener wipes away the largest clumps of soil still clinging to the roots and finds half a dozen slow, cold earthworms that were caught halfway to somewhere else when she lifted the tubers from the ground. She pinches at them bluntly, then takes off her gloves and manages it in the bitter cold: pulling out each worm and flinging it into the flattened grass. She bundles the first tuber into a crate of straw and moves on to unbury the next. Once the crate is full, she moves toward the back door with it cocked on her hip and edges sideways down the basement stairs.
The basement, a canted cube lined with porous concrete blocks and older bricks, is the garden’s nearest neighbor, cut into the clay under the house one hundred years ago. Water seeps in from the surrounding earth: sometimes as vapor, sometimes as liquid streams that pool in dark patches on the floor.
The gardener yanks a stack of plastic bins into the center of the room. They’ve been piled against the wall in a corner all summer, blocking the door to a side storage room. Opaque layers of spiderwebs that bound them to the damp brick wall make a soft ripping-fabric sound as she pulls them away.
Something small, disturbed by the moving bins, dashes across the floor. As recently as July, a mouse gnawed at a bright green block of poison three nights in a row. The poison blocked vitamin K from cycling back to its bloodstream. Vitamin K: that makes blood stick to itself, that guards the limits of the mouse’s liquid body, of the gardener’s liquid body, of every warm creature’s body. On the third day, the last of the vitamin K left in the mouse’s body was gone. All liquid limits broke, and all the blood that had been channeled through the little heart’s six hundred beats per minute pooled in the mouse’s dark interior. A few small drops beaded from its nostrils and mouth, but mostly the flood was contained, blood running thin between the veins and away from the central nervous system, which, drained of oxygen, scribbled gibberish. The mouse stumbled slow circles in the dark and died between two boxes, its body flooded with directionless blood.
In the cool dark, no flies came, but the small amount of liquid in the mouse’s body evaporated, even in the damp underground atmosphere. The mineral hardness of dry fur over dry bone is what makes a sound on the floor now, in November, when the gardener yanks out the bins.
She gasps at the seed-husk lightness of the body when it flies across the floor, so like the dash of a living mouse. She sets down the crate of tubers and nudges the small dry body with the damp toe of her boot, then bundles it into one of the old plastic bags left in the corner to take upstairs and out to the garbage. She examines the bright green square of poison in the dim light. There is still more than half of it left, in a plastic case that prevents the dog from eating it. The gardener, of course, is the one who put the poison there, and she, of course, leaves the rest of it for any other mouse to find.
In the side room off the main basement, a small fan whirs. The gardener enters and lays down a sheet of newspaper, then sets each dahlia tuber tilted on its side in front of the fan. Between each group of three or four tubers, she leaves an empty space as wide as her hand. Into each empty space goes a strip of plastic or wood with a name or a guess at a name written on it in pencil: Cafe au Lait, Ivanetti, Silver Anniversary, Mystery Pale Pink Pom, Bishop of ?1
Overnight, the soil remaining caught in the tubers and their roots will dry in the breeze from the fan and more easily crumble away. The gardener pulls the switch and closes the door. All is dark again, though much windier than the darkness the dahlias have just been pulled from.
No one the gardener knows has eaten them, ever. She doesn’t even know they were food once, a thousand years ago in Mexico, that dahlias have made it this far by the grace of the people who grew them and ate them there for thousands of years. That civilization was burned, and the ashes were scattered. People like the gardener built new homes on the wreckage.2
The next afternoon, by the light of one dim bulb, the gardener looks for crushed or soft places on the tubers where bacteria or fungus could find a foothold to destroy the whole tuber — even all the tubers — in the winter dark. She plunges her knife in and gouges the softness away, then wipes rubbing alcohol over the pale cuts, killing most of the pathogens left behind. She layers the tubers into a plastic bin with damp sand and straw. It’s not unlike planting them every spring, though this isn’t a place they’ll grow, just a place she hopes they won’t die.
. . . . . .
The night before he died, Grauballe Man ate porridge filled with grain and wildflowers, childhood’s starvation years behind him. The next morning, someone cut his throat from ear to ear, drained the blood from his body, and sank him in the dark brown waters of the bog.
While not a place for him to live, neither was the bog a place for him to disappear entirely. He was sunk in plants so dense, in water so acidic that no oxygen was available to the bacteria and fungi and animals that under different, more hospitable conditions might have eaten him. Tannin molecules from crushed moss bound tightly to the proteins of his body. Locked in the starfish arms of tannic acid,3 his proteins were impermeable to digestive enzymes, unavailable to feed any new life. He turned to leather, eternally dead. Soaked in acid, his hair turned auburn.
Two thousand years later, another man came digging peat. His shovel struck a different density in the springing earth, and peeling back a mat of thousand-year-dead moss, he found a man’s body, tough as his own boot. Archaeologists came from the city and photographed the body as it lay half-in and half-out of wet darkness. Then they gouged an outline in the sucking earth all around the body and lifted. A van carried Grauballe Man to the nearest museum.
While the scientists in charge of the project directed construction of a special laboratory, while they ordered and inventoried vats of chemicals to preserve the body in the oxygen-rich, decay-feeding air this side of the peat, Grauballe Man lay on his side in a museum gallery. In a single week, twenty thousand people filed past his glass case. Scientists spoke to the newspapers and posted placards in the museum explaining the archaeological evidence and the chemical economy of acid and water and oxygen and time. Science tells us, they said, this man died before Rome fell, perhaps before Christ was born.
But it was only a lifetime ago that we lost him, said one old woman.4 She’d held her breath at the dark smear of his photograph in the paper, then breathed out his name. Reporters sent a car to bring her to the lab, where scientists, softly swearing, lifted the man up from the vat in which they’d sunk him again and placed him on a table in a bright room to receive visitors. A young man held the old woman steady by her arm as she leaned over the body: I would know him anywhere.
The scientists sneered (she’s senile, was only ever a farmer’s wife, only ever read the Bible, and that just barely). More reporters got hold of the story, and it caught the nation like paper catches flame. His name is Kristian, she said. I don’t know his last name, but I know the house he lived in, and it’s standing still. (If we don’t fight an army we can’t beat: some crops might grow to harvest. If we don’t march against the Nazis: perhaps Denmark will count her dead in thousands instead of millions. What’s a soul without a body? asked the prime minister, picking up the telephone to surrender.) If his hair is red, it’s because his grandmother’s was. If his face is ravaged, it’s because he was sick from childhood and drunk from the time he was fifteen.5 My whole life is the shape of everything that was lost. How could I keep silent when, at this late hour, the past gave something back?
Science will tell the body’s age, said the head archaeologist, rolling his eyes. Carbon 14 cannot lie, said the people working in the laboratory, and instruments that measure the long life of carbon cannot lie. They ran the usual tests, and the results (which did not lie) showed that, all around the Pacific, empires were splitting atoms, testing bombs. There was double the carbon 14 now that there was when the scientists were born, more carbon 14 in the atmosphere than there had been since before the element was named. Carbon’s clock locked away in Grauballe Man’s tissue, the test results indicated, was made meaningless by the carbon wreckage of the present.
For two years, the scientists returned to the laboratory again and again. They shaved slices from Grauballe Man’s liver. They adjusted instruments and parameters. How to account for the carbon noise of the present and leave enough room for carbon’s past to speak? Every time the scientists ran tests, carbon told the truth. Every time, the scientists could not make sense of it.
After two years of recalibrating, the scientists got an answer that satisfied them. The old woman who recognized the bog man’s face died soon after. Her family buried her in the churchyard where she’d spent childhood afternoons hidden in the tall August grass, decades distant from total war, alive as anyone has ever been. Unlike the bogland at the bottom of the hill, the sandy soil of the upland grave was flush with oxygen, and the billion living beings in it descended on the carbon-richness of her pine coffin.
Carbon dating conclusively states that Grauballe Man died in the fourth century AD, announced the newspapers. He was the ritual sacrifice of a savage culture alien to our own. Science is triumphant, said the lead archaeologist, and my good name is restored.
. . . . . .
Dozens of times a day, people fly over the garden, miles overhead, a mile above even the clouds. The sharp round sun shines through airplane portholes. From where the passengers sit, it’s small and without any trace of heat, though evidently still burning.
Down in the leafless garden, there has been no blue sky for ten days. For a few minutes on some of those days, the sun has shown at sunset or sunrise through the gap between the clouds’ farthest edge and the place where the earth curves off into space. In those moments, the sky around the sun glows red. Only light’s longest, slowest, reddest wavelengths can reach the garden through that deep angle of atmosphere filled with carbon ash. It’s apparent in those moments that clouds do not actually cover the whole earth, that the clouds have an edge though the earth does not. The cloud edge is always out there. It does not move any closer to the garden.
In the side room off the main basement, the bare bulb in the ceiling buzzes cold light when the gardener pulls the string hanging beside it. She pulls the door to the room closed behind her, pulls back the thick plastic sheeting covering the tower of bins, and pushes her hand down into the dark straw.
She does this every three or four weeks all winter: stands suddenly from a desk two floors up, descends one flight of stairs and then another, farther into darkness, deeper into cold. She crosses to the rough wooden door held shut with a twist of baling wire and into the basement’s small side storage room, carrying her water bottle with her.
Between the sunset through the glass block window and the dim bulb, there is enough light to see where the bins are, but not what’s inside them. The gardener moves by touch, encountering the sudden density of the dahlia tubers among the loose straw. She tests the surface of the tubers for cold and moisture, and squeezes them to test their insides for rot. She feels around in the nest of straw for that edge of cold damp that will keep the plant in living suspension but fungi at bay. It’s never a choice between life and death, just between the life of the dahlia and the other, slimier kinds of life that would consume it.
The gardener rotates a tangle of tuber in a finer tangle of straw. She sloshes a bit of water in the corner of one bin, a bit more in the corner of another. She feels the plastic name tag in each bag but cannot read it, so she grasps each tuber and remembers, by its size and girth, by the experience of five summers: these are the dinnerplate dahlias, these are the pompons, these might be dark-leaved Bishops. In the farthest edge of the bottom bin, undisturbed by her digging, a tuber sends a thin white root into the straw. It is furred like frost and moves toward a bottom corner where excess water the straw can’t hold has collected.
She stacks the bins again and lifts the plastic sheeting back over them. She turns out the light. In the dark under the earth under the house, between the pale ghost shape made by the bins under plastic sheeting and the now indigo square of the window high on the wall, she stands still. She reaches one last time under the plastic into the top bin. The gardener touches the straw she’s already touched and holds her breath for five seconds, listening for the quiet feeling of such a small amount of water against her skin.
The next morning, she drives east. From the top of a small hill, the gap between the cloud bank’s edge and the earth’s horizon is wide enough to show the sun rising from red’s dim distance up to bright orange: a full circle, fully burning. By the time she parks the car and climbs out, the earth has turned past that gap and the sun is blocked by clouds. No gap is even visible from gray edge to gray edge of the world.
The entrance atrium echoes with the sound of students climbing and descending stairs. They are lit by a dark gray wall of cloud pressing against a three-story wall of glass. In the shining new laboratory, the gardener is early and perches on a stool to wait out the minutes till class begins.
The botany professor reaches into an aquarium to pull out a sloppy wet strand of waterweed. Elodea, she says, holding it up to the lab’s dim window, as if she is calling a mermaid by name. On the tray before her lie twenty glass slides. She offers a slide to each student, including the gardener, and after giving them droppers filled with water, begins ripping the elodea apart.
The gardener sets a drop of water on her slide, sets the tiny elodea leaf she is given in the drop, sets another slide over the leaf and feels glass stick to water stick to glass: floating, then still. All the students wait for the professor’s signal, then set their slides over the black glass windows in the base of their microscopes. A clicked switch on the side of each microscope floods the dark windows with light.
It takes practice to learn to look down this narrow tunnel, says the professor. She circles the edge of the laboratory, helping students adjust stools and microscopes. Half the students peering hopelessly into darkness find they have turned their lights off instead of on.
The gardener keeps catching slivers of light through the eyepiece, but nothing nameable. A train flashes past again and again, but she can’t make out anyone onboard. Then she accidentally tilts her head at a new angle, and up through the light, through pane after pane of glass, through lens after lens, including the one inside her own eye, an image shines.
In the visions that preceded her migraines, the abbess almost always saw circles within circles.6 Sometimes circles within spheres within circles. Everything touched everything in these visions, and moved together and apart and together again. She saw lights and subtle colors. She knew that the circles moving inside circles were a revelation of love and of something she called green power. Even when she saw red fire, or white fire, or fire the color of air, the abbess knew it was just green power in disguise.
You will see lots of cells at once at this scale, said the professor, and lots of chloroplasts inside each cell, glowing green. She had not said that the chloroplasts would be moving. She didn’t mention their tumbling over one another in slow circuits within the confines of each cell, all at roughly the same speed. More green than the gardener has seen in months spirals from black edge to black edge of her vision. Flooded with the light of the microscope, the chloroplasts in the cells in the leaf are rotating toward brightness and away from brightness, photosynthesizing and trying not to get burned.
The gardener looks down into the moving green water, and her vision ripples with tears. Wet life surges toward wet life: Darling, I would know you anywhere.7
Notes
1. “The elaborate signs / that said now plant, now harvest — // I could name them, I had names for them: / Two different things” — Louise Glück, “Persephone the Wanderer: 10”
2. Imagine, writes Jamaica Kincaid in My Garden (Book):, that an Aztec woman goes into a shop after the Conquest and asks for cocoxochitl for her husband’s birthday. No one can help her, because cocoxochitl is no longer the name of the flower that the gardener calls dahlias. A small errand, a romantic gesture, is foiled because her language has been erased, her floating gardens have been burnt, her lineage has been wiped from the earth. But the flower shop is open for business.
3. A starfish made of starfish, or a molecular version of the seraph described by the prophet Isaiah: With two carbon rings they covered their faces, with two carbon rings they covered their feet, and with two carbon rings they were flying.
4. Peter Glob, the head archaeologist, remembers the name “Red Kristian,” offered by someone he calls three times “an old farmer’s wife.” In the press clippings Glob presumably could not find by the time it came to write his memoirs, she is named Jensine Jensen.
5. Kristian, a drunkard, was forty-two when he walked out of the village inn one night (surely starless) in 1887 (or was it 1888?) and was never seen again.
6. Abbess Hildegard von Bingen called herself “a human being, neither ablaze with the strength of lions, nor learned in their exhalations, remaining in the frailty of the weaker rib, but filled with mystical inspiration [who] saw a shining fire, unfathomable, inextinguishable, fully alive and existing full of life; with a flame the color of air, brightly burning in the gentle breeze, and as inseparable from the shining fire as a human being is inseparable from his inner organs.” — Hildegard von Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mark Atherton
7. “Our relationship with plants is one of absolute, primordial dependence, and in that sense it somewhat recalls the relationship of a child to its parents. While we’re growing up, and especially in adolescence, we go through a period of totally denying our dependence on our parental figures that frees us to attain psychological autonomy, in preparation for actual autonomy, which will come many years later. It’s not out of the question that a similar psychological mechanism enters into our relationship with plants. . . . Dependence coincides with a position of weakness and vulnerability that we don’t enjoy contemplating. . . . In short, we’re so dependent on plants that we do everything we can not to think about them.” — Stefano Mancuso, Brilliant Green
