Дэрил Грегори - Nine Last Days on Planet Earth

He wanted to ask her why the hell she kept attaching herself to assholes. The self-involved painter, the rage-aholic restaurant owner, and now the chemist, whom she’d had the audacity to marry. Did she love him, or just his McMansion and its granite countertops?

“He wants to send you to college,” she said. “He thinks you’d be a good scientist.”

“Really?” Then he was embarrassed that the compliment meant something to him. “I’m not taking his money.”

“You should think about it. Your dad can’t afford college. And you deserve better than working in a lumberyard.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the lumberyard.” LT worked there three days a week during the school year, sometimes alongside his father. He’d told her he hated it, but hadn’t mentioned the things he loved about it. His herky-jerky forklift. The terrifying Ekstrom Carlson rip saw. The sawdust and sweat.

But did he want to be there the rest of his life?

From inside the store, the boy shouted in mock dismay and the girl laughed. They’d lost their last laser cannon.

“You should study the invasives,” his mother said. “I remember that look on your face when I showed you that seed. And the fern man! You loved that little guy.”

“I still have him. Dad keeps him in the living room. He’s not so little.”

“So,” she said. “Think about it.”

He thought, If the aliens haven’t landed by then.

“Where are the space bees?”

“What?”

“SPACE BEES!” LT shouted above the music. “WHERE ARE THEY?”

He was drunk, and Jeff and Wendy too, and their new friend Doran, all of them drunk together. What else could they be, on this final weekend before Christmas break, and where else but at the Whitehorse, which as far as he was concerned was the only bar in Normal, Illinois.

“Jesus Christ,” Jeff said. “Not the bees again.”

LT put his hand on the back of Doran’s neck—a sweaty neck, and his hand tacky with beer but he didn’t care, he wanted to pull Doran close. “I need to tell you things,” he said into his ear, and Doran laughed, and then—

—and then they were in a restaurant booth, the lights bright, Jeff and Wendy across from him and Doran—tall, sturdy Doran—beside him. LT leaned into his arm woozily. God he was handsome, naturally handsome, almost hiding it. How did they get here? He concentrated, but his memory of the past two hours was a hopscotch, dancing drinking shouting singing and then the rude bright lights of last call and a flash of ice and cold—did Wendy drive, she must have—to here, the 24-hour Steak and Shake, their traditional sober-up station.

He said to Doran, “It’s the flowers that make no sense.”

Jeff said, “The flowers have no scents?” and Wendy said, “It’s that they have scents that makes no sense.” They both laughed.

A beat too late LT realized there was wordplay at work. He forged on. “The blooms of flowers are lures. ” The word thick on his tongue. “Scent and shape and color, they all evolved to attract specific pollinators, the bees and butterflies and beetles.”

“Oh my,” Jeff said.

“And you told me he was shy,” Doran said.

“He can get wound up,” Wendy said. “When he feels comfortable.”

“Or tipsy,” Jeff said.

LT felt tipsy and comfortable. Why hadn’t Jeff and Wendy introduced him to Doran before now? Why wait until the last weekend of the last semester LT would be on campus? It was criminal.

“A pretty flower isn’t just a simple announcement, like ‘Here’s pollen.’” LT said. “Simple won’t do it.” He tried to explain how flowers were in competition. Pollen was everywhere, nestled inside thousands of equally needy plants desperate to spread their genetic material. What was needed was not an announcement but a flashing neon sign. “The flower’s goal,” LT said, “is to figure out what hummingbirds think are beautiful.”

“Slow down, Hillbilly,” Wendy said. “Eat something.”

“Hummingbirds have an aesthetic sense?” Doran said.

“Of course they do! Have I told you about bowerbirds?”

Jeff said, “Guess what his honors thesis is on?”

And then he was off, yammering about the bowerbirds of Papua New Guinea. The males of the species constructed elaborate twiggy structures, not nests but bachelor pads, designed purely to woo females. The Vogelkop Bowerbird set out careful arrangements of colors—blue, green, yellow—each one a particular hue. It didn’t matter what the objects were; they could be stones, or petals, or plastic bottle caps even, as long as they were the correct shade. The females could not be coerced into sex; they dropped by the bowers, perused the handiwork, and flew away if they found them substandard. Their choice of mates, their taste in art, drove the males over millennia to evolve more and more specific displays, an ongoing gallery show with intercourse as the prize.

“Wait,” Doran said. “That doesn’t mean they’re making an artistic choice. Aren’t they just, uh, instinctually responding to whoever seems like the fittest mate? It’s not beauty per se —”

“I love per se, ” Jeff said. “Great word.”

“I’ve always been fond of ergo, ” Wendy said.

“But it is aesthetics!” LT said. “Beauty’s just”—he made explosion fingers—“joy in the brain, right? A flood of chemicals and, and, and—” What was the word? “Fireworks. Neuronal fireworks. We don’t logic our way to beauty, it hits us like a fucking hammer.”

“Ipso facto,” Jeff said.

Doran put his arm around LT’s shoulder and said, “Eat your burger before it gets cold, then tell me about the space bees.” Ah! He remembered! The heat of Doran’s arm across his neck made his cheeks flush. Doran smelled of sweat and Mennen Speed Stick and something else, something LT could almost recall from far back in his brain, from a hot afternoon in a Chicago apartment… but the memory slipped the net.

He decided to eat. Wendy told the story of her favorite snowmobile accident. Doran, who’d grown up in New Mexico, couldn’t believe that Wisconsin teenagers were allowed to ride machines across frozen lakes.

LT began to feel a little more sober, though perhaps that was an illusion. “Space bees,” he said.

“I’m ready,” Doran said. “Lay it on me.”

“Every one of the invasives we’ve found, not a single one uses pollination. There’s a lot of budding and spores and wind dispersal and”—he waved a clutch of fries—“you know. I’ve got a fern man at home, it’s like ten feet tall now—”

“You do?”

But LT didn’t want to talk about home. “Doesn’t matter, it just grows and spreads, spilling out of its pot, but it doesn’t require animal assistance.” Actually, he wasn’t sure that was true. Didn’t the fern survive because of him, because of his family? It had played on their human tendency for anthropomorphism.

“Where’d you go, Hillbilly?” Wendy asked.

“Sorry, what did you say?” he asked Doran.

“I said, maybe all the pollinating species died.”

“Maybe! But why colorful flowers and no pollen? There weren’t any animals hatching from the space seeds, so—”

Doran’s eyes went wide. “They have to be designed, then.”

“Exactly!”

Wendy nabbed his glass before it tumbled over.

“Inside voices,” she said.

He gets it, LT thought. The aliens could know what Earth’s sunlight was like from very far away, even guess the composition of its atmosphere and soil, but they couldn’t know what animals would be here, much less humans. So they had to design plants that could propagate without them.