Four

Professor Cooksey didn’t drive, so Rupert asked Jenny to take him in the Mercedes to Fairchild Tropical Gardens for a science lecture he had to give. Actually Rupert asked Jenny to ask Kevin, who was the group’s designated driver, but Kevin had been stoned and in bed with headphones on since the blowup of the day before, and rather than having to pull his cable out and have a fight about it, she decided to do the run herself. She didn’t mind this at all because she enjoyed driving the big old car, which was a 1968 model 230, in cream with red leather upholstery, that had belonged to Rupert’s mother. It was like being in an old-time movie driving that thing, especially with the Professor next to her talking in his English accent and the churchy music he liked playing on the radio. And, unusually for her, she had a skirt on because the leather got hot beneath her thighs if the car had to stay out in the sun; this, too, added to the effect of being displaced in time.

She didn’t know why the Professor didn’t drive. Her personal theory was he was too old, but Kevin said he was a drunk and they took his license away. Although she had never seen him drunk, so that might be one of Kevin’s stories. When she thought of that, she recalled the story he had made up about the Indian getting lost, which evenshe didn’t believe, and when she asked him later why he did it, he was nasty, and that’s when he got his headphones on and cranked the music up so loud she could hear the punk squeaking through around the edges, and that was that. Sometimes he got so mad at her she thought he was going to hit her, but he never did, not like some guys she’d been with, so she thought it was mainly a pretty good deal, Kevin and her.

It was not much of a drive from the property to Fairchild, a couple of miles at most, and Jenny could have dropped him off and come back and picked him up later, but she decided instead to hang around the Gardens. There was an atmosphere on the property just now that made her uncomfortable, a miasma of irritability because of Kevin, and also maybe things weren’t going so good with the Forest Planet Alliance. Luna was frosty to her at breakfast and spoke to Rupert in whispers, and they had both looked at her in a funny way. Like it was her fault, Kevin being a jerk. She welcomed the chance to get away for a while until it all blew over. And she liked being with the Professor.

“What are you going to talk about?”

“Agaonid wasps.”

“I got stung by wasps once,” she said. “I was about, I don’t know, six or something, and I was chasing a ball. I was living with this farm family, like on a farm? And I stuck my hand into this hole where the ball went, and holy gee, they were all over me! I thought I was going to die.”

“Yes, well, these particular wasps don’t sting. They fertilize the fruits of fig trees. Each species of fig has its own species of fertilizing wasp.”

“Like bees?”

“Exactly. Except that bees are indiscriminate foragers attracted by the color and scent of flowers, and these wasps pollinate only one sort of fig, and are attracted by hormones. The female has to burrow into the unripe synconium, which is a tough pod containing immature blossoms, through a hole so tight that she rips her wings and antennae off.”

“Oh, wow! That must really smart. How does she fly out again?”

“She doesn’t. She has fulfilled her function and spends the rest of her short life entombed in the synconium. Her eggs hatch, and her female descendants pollinate other fig trees. A demonstration of the power of instincts driven by chemical stimuli. A great deal of interesting work has been done on plant-insect pheromonic interaction, actually: for example, Kostowitz and Petersen found that trees of the genus…”

Once you got Professor Cooksey started on his bugs he went on for a good while, which Jenny didn’t mind too much, she was used to tuning stuff out, and with that voice it was like doing ironing withMasterpiece Theatre or a nature show on in the background. She had once stayed in a foster home where that was all they would let you watch, educational programs and nothing with sex and violence, not even cartoons. Oddly enough, some of what he told her seemed to stick in her head by accident and would pop out later with her not even knowing it was there. She occasionally wondered what it was like to know a lot and read the kind of books that Professor C. had, with small printing and no pictures, although he had a lot with pictures, too, that he didn’t mind her looking at. When she did think about it she felt a heaviness grow behind her eyes, and she felt kind of sorry for those people, like there would be no room for their own selves inside their heads with all thatstuff pressing down.

She parked the car, and he walked off with his stiff birdish stride to the Garden House Auditorium, and she strolled off toward the lakes. The day was bright, the air mild, and the tall palms swayed in a gentle breeze from the bay. As always the foliage and the precision and artfulness of the plantings had a psychedelic effect, even, as now, when she wasn’t chemically stoned. She thought that if there was a heaven and if it was like Fairchild, then death could have no terrors. Although she had been turned off religion at an early age via the never-fail method of enforced churchgoing, she retained an ample capacity to experience awe, and this was now well exercised as she entered a corridor of gigantic royal palms interspersed with dense plantings, many showing their seasonal blossoms-pink trumpet vine, bird-of-paradise, bellflower, ground orchid. She stood before the blooming plants in thoughtless delight, as a peasant might before an ancient Madonna, quite lost to the world. Flowers made her happy, and she stumbled over the vast question of why everyone just couldn’t be happy with what simply was. A motion attracted her eye: an anole lizard had run out on a branch of a lignum vitae tree. She moved closer to inspect it. It was vivid green, a traveling exhibit of what greenwas, and in full male mating fig: as she watched, it shot out a vivid red throat pouch three times, advertising this state, and then scuttled away.

A laugh burst from her. “Guys,” she said out loud. She often talked aloud to herself while in the Gardens, or to the plants and animals there. It was a habit she had acquired as a child, to keep herself from dying of loneliness. She had lived in places where no one actually spoke to her, except to give an order, for months on end.

She walked around Royal Palm Lake and past the amphitheater and then to the rain forest exhibit. One of her secret shames was that, even though the rain forest was really, really important, and even though she drew her sustenance from an organization dedicated to its salvation, she didn’t really like it all that much, even the compressed simulacrum of one presented by the Gardens. She found it dank and gloomy and clammy hot, and she didn’t care for the way everything crawled over everything else grasping for light and things to eat. In a strange way it reminded her of winter in an Iowa kitchen, steam and bad odors and the adults looming overhead and the unwanted children on the rough floors clamoring and striving and pushing one another. Still, she visited the place every time she came, hoping that she would get it, and feeling down when she did not.

When she came to the little path that led to the entrance to the great conservatory that housed the more delicate tropical plants, Jenny was passed by three running men in the tan uniforms of Fairchild groundskeepers. They seemed to be searching for something, calling to one another, and pausing at intervals to peer behind branches. Shortly they came back along the path at a slower pace with a blue-uniformed security guard in tow.

“Did you get him?” one of them asked the others, and was answered, “No, he must have left over the wall.”