Ethan Chatagnier: Warnings from the Future

At 7 p.m., three-quarters of the recessed lights in the main office space are programmed to turn off. What’s left is deemed bright enough for the custodial staff to do their work, but what I love, looking out through the interior window of my office, is that the glow of all the screensavers creates a faint aurora over the top of all the cubicle walls almost like that of a town at night hidden just beyond a ridge. I know it’s just a silly image, but it gives me the sort of comfort I imagine God would feel looking at a snow-dusted Swiss village and allowing himself to forget the rest of the troubled world for a while. I stay late like this because it’s the easiest time to handle the real, unbureaucratic work of thinking, planning, analyzing data, and so on. I also use the time to care for my Synsepalum dulcificum , misting it, trimming it, adding a little peat or some acidifying fertilizer, and for whatever reason these diversions provide me with the greatest clarity of thought I have all day. But I also like to stay late because, unlike at home, where my mother salts the air with her misery, the solitude here feels purposeful.

Tonight, I’m just finishing up a request for access to our latest acquisition. All the other project leads had their requests in last week, but I’ve been trying to get my wording, my logic, just right, in the hope that a strong argument will matter more than who was first to the starting line. But I know how it will go. Corn and soy will get the first crack at it. My wheat is beating yield estimates and making the company lots of money too—which I’m certain is why I haven’t been talked to despite all the surveillance footage of me staying late to mommy a potted plant—but I know a lot of people are starting to see me as some sort of deluded prophet for continuing to believe that wheat has a place in the future.

In an office environment, logic can only do so much. I finish up my request and e-mail it to Meadows anyway.

Before I go, I plug in the humidifying contraption I’ve put together. Synsepalum dulcificum is from the jungles of west Africa, and the store-bought warm-water humidifier just wasn’t enough, so I’ve connected a space heater to a litter box full of water, and wired in a little fan to circulate the humid air. Security has surely sent someone to investigate the strange apparatus, just to check, because anyone with a keycard for this facility has the know-how to make a bomb, even the technicians. Maybe even the custodians. But it doesn’t take an engineering degree to see this setup is climate control for my shrub. It’s been a lot perkier since I switched to this method. In the first half of the year it didn’t bloom, but now it has eleven green buds on it, and all of them are starting to blush.

I like walking out to the deserted parking lot as well, no claustrophobia of cars, nobody yammering into a cell phone or blasting bad music, but tonight there is another car, a Camry with Avis stickers, and it’s parked right next to mine. Leaning against it is a slender, copper-haired woman, wearing a fitted trench coat and kitten heels, who is definitely not from Nebraska.

“Can I ask you about Aeon, Dr. Schuyler?” she asks.

“Mother Jones?”

“New York Times.”

Surprising. To someone like me, our Aeon acquisition is front page news, but most people would rather see pictures of a beheading or read a new brownie recipe. It’s good that someone is paying attention, I think. But it’s bad when a New York Times reporter ambushes you in the dark of an empty parking lot rather than contacting the corporate media office. It means this is just the slight visible outgrowth of a story already being tracked, of documents already being compiled and pieces put together. It means you are not just the person who picked up the phone; you were chosen. And why was I chosen? Because I am unmarried, because I have no children, because I own a small home outright and scrupulously save 60 percent of my income? All information readily available on a tax return. A few days of observation would reveal me to be the type to arrive first and leave last from work, the type to care for an elderly parent whose one remaining joy is complaining, and the type to carefully tend a backyard garden that I’m rarely home to enjoy. She is betting that I am the right combination of idealistic, lonely, and with little enough to lose that I might throw myself on the sword. She suspects that if confronted with a beautiful woman, I will want to speak to her, to please.

How close is she to right?

I tell her I can’t help her. She hands me her business card anyway. Sharon Saxon—what a newspaper name. She counsels me not to bring the card back to this place.

When I get home, my mother tells me that all those dials on the washing machine do nothing. As with a baby toy, they are simply knobs that click. Cold and hot are the only true settings. The rest are illusions. This is just the latest in her litany of modern horrors. They’re all she has these days. The chunky spaghetti sauce is the same as the nonchunky spaghetti sauce. The chunks in chunky peanut butter are microplastics. There are little bugs that look like dust. They look just like dust, but they are bugs. How can you tell, Mom? You can’t. Last month she said her earwax smelled savory, like mushrooms with rosemary, like duck fat. No matter how good it smells, I told her, don’t eat it.

“Hot and cold is all I need,” I say, regarding the washing machine.

“Garage doors cause cancer. You should put yours on manual.”

She’s reached an age where there’s no listening going on. She’s all output. She prefers afghans now, though I offer her good quilts. Any chair she sits in instantly takes on the aura of a rocking chair, even the sofa. She’s unhappier now than her own mother was at this age, and grandma had set the world record for unhappiness. I bring her a bowl of SpaghettiOs.

“I fed you kids vegetables.”

“Ketchup and canned beans.”

If I bring her zucchini, she’ll say, “You know how I feel about zucchini.” The same if I bring her kale or celery or butternut squash. She’ll accept SpaghettiOs, mac and cheese, pork and beans—Depression food, pun intended—but she always offers that disclaimer: I fed you kids vegetables. The O’s are made with rice flour now. Pretty much all pasta is, besides the luxury stuff. The sauce is sweetened with corn syrup. It’s soybeans in pork and beans. The sauce is sweetened with corn syrup. The cheese powder in the mac and cheese is synthetically produced flavor crystallites. The milk you make it with is soy milk. The butter you mix in is hydrogenated corn oil with synthetically produced flavor crystallites.

“Why don’t you go out to the garden?”

She does, though she’s eaten only half of her bowl. She leaves it on the end table and heads out back. She fails to finish her meals, but even so her midsection is growing, though it seems to be airy and insubstantial, like rising bread dough. Is it a tumor, or a gland issue, or just following the Dada rules of the aging body after sixty? I don’t know. Her health is a house of cards I don’t want to blow on.

She’s on the bench in the garden, making it seem like a rocking chair. Around her there’s amaranth, leeks, chard, varicolored carrots, rare potatoes, the shoots of onion and garlic bulbs. There’s a big bush of rosemary and a bit of thyme. Of the trees, the fuyu persimmon, ponderosa lemon, and alma fig are bearing fruit. I pluck a fuyu and take a bite. Its flesh is crisp, but the flavor, with traces of cinnamon, butter, and apple, is almost too delicate to exist.