fire bush

It is flat enough here that dozens of separate farmlights can line up down the road, and appear to be one city in the distance at night. It is not a question of staying awake, as if awake where one distinct state and asleep was another. I am always either in the process of waking up, clawing towards lucidity, or drifting asleep. As I approach a farm, it detaches from the illusory city and pans by, leaving the city the same distance away.

With the sleeve of my blouse, I wipe the frost off of the inside of the windshield, and then throw my blanket in the already crammed back seat. I yawn and start the engine. I had another flying dream. This time it was a machine that allowed me to fly, a massless point that I ingested that could never malfunction. I zoomed through a festival of blimps, dented the balloons with my hand as I passed them. It is now six forty seven in the morning, and I am one hundred miles from my laboratory, at a rest station. We are studying a plant that has been revealed by a massive forest fire in British Columbia. While most fires annihilate the undergrowth, this fire left a thick mat of metallic curls, deep reds, golds, and silvers, with curling black protrusions. It persisted even where the old growth trees were toppled from the heat. I put in a U2 cassette, the only band I’ve ever really liked. Now armed with a large cup of gas station coffee, I turn left through the last temporary town and start climbing a rural road that switchbacks up the mountains. As I come over a crest, the burnoff stretches out before me. Nature is not what we think it is. I don’t think the modern world disturbed an ancient tranquility. We invented the idea that such a thing could exist. We are fragile eddies in the powerful river of entropy. The blackened trees and scorched earth are absorbing the morning light. The landscape exerts a sagging force; to be surrounded by a hundred miles of this carbon desert. As I round another bend onto a dirt road, the undergrowth we are studying comes into view in a valley below. The sun glints off it like a field of scattered jewels. I see the research van and some ATVs parked by the tent, while other grad students in tyvek suits are wading into the strange growth.
“Glad to see you bright and early.” The professor says sarcastically as I get out of the car. I don’t bother mentioning that I had just drove five hundred miles back to school to teach his class. Hard black melons periodically interrupt the plant mass. The singed earth cracks beneath my feet like crème broule. Burnt tree trunks around us are divided into shimmering black squares. There is nothing for me to do for the morning. I’m bored. The emptiness of a place is always much louder than its fullness. I try mentally singing a U2 song, to feel the faint emotional fullness of this lunar landscape, this period of my life. For a breathless, suspended instant I can feel it. The black columns of a dark kingdom rise up around me. I remember the allure of a twelve sided die, of awkward boys and their stryrofoam swords, to whom I was a queen, the only girl crossed over from a parallel dimension. We pack up the samples and the tent. “I’ll drive in with Karen.” He says to the others. Everyone backs up and pulls away. With all the cars gone except mine, he leans down to kiss me. “Sometimes kissing you is like kissing a brick wall,” He says.
I have not emphasized this plant enough. There is nothing like it. Anyone can see that it was not there before the fire. A closer inspection also makes it clear that it did not come after it- it seems to have grown up during the fire. While we still do not have a single live sample, we are close to proving that it is thermosynthetic, getting its energy from the heat of the fire instead of the sun or food. And this is before any other labs have gotten their hands on it. It is his ticket to the eternal life of textbooks. In the lab, I disregard his directions to incubate spores, and instead go back to analyzing the underripe melon. My test comes up positive and my breath quickens. When he finds me doing this, he pulls me to into another room. “You can’t keep wasting lab time on this theory.” You see, I have this theory. I think this is a domestic plant. I think somebody has farmed this plant in fire.
“We have so much work to do. This is really an incredible opportunity for all of us.”
I can’t believe he is giving me a pep talk speech like this.
“Do you seriously think such perfect human nutrition could be natural? There is nothing like this lichen anywhere,” I protest.
“This is not the point. The point is, you are a botanist. Ancient cultures are supported by artifacts, evaluated by archaeologists. We have algae.”
“The plant is an artifact.”
“Our culture couldn’t engineer such a plant. There is no way that artic nomads could make this. No way.” Our discussion ends with the second “no way.” For the rest of the day, I go back to the incubators. When every one else has left, I am still drawing up records of our failed spore tests. He stands in the doorway.
“Are you going to finish up?”
I picture the dim light of his trailer, his red pubic har and freckled chest.
“I’m sticking to it for a little bit longer, I think we’re close.” I say. He pretends to be glad, and then leaves for the night. After a while, I go to the coffee maker and lean against the counter. I am thinking of a culture with no cities, no tools. Their whole text is the genes of a perfect plant. They roam the hills with a bag of spores, building fires to grow their food, immune to famine, unbound to the land. Maybe they have even abandoned the langauge they once spoke, a mere proxy to the perfect expression which is their plant. The only thing left for them to do would be to fade out; silent loiterers in the end credits of human narrative. I head back to the freezer that holds the melon. I cut off a small chunk. Instead of pulverizing it to put in solution, or slicing it to make slides, I bring it to the counter and put it on a paper plate. With a plastic fork, I spear the chunk whole and place it in mouth. My tongue goes slightly numb as I chew. It tastes like mashed potatoes.