After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall

JUNE 2014

Geoffrey Fanshaw did not get the notoriety he’d hoped for.

Julie finished the analysis he wanted and sent it to him. She expected to hear back from him, but—nothing. On reflection, she decided she’d been dumb to expect acknowledgement. She had served her purpose to Fanshaw and he had discarded her; that was what narcissists did. She was left with his check and her own fears.

At night she dreamed of plants dying, all over the world.

Two more jobs came her way, and she took them both. Around the consulting work she fit a separate, obsessive routine: Wake at 5:00 a.m. Coffee, banishing the lingering night dreams with wake-up caffeine. Care for Alicia. Bundle the baby into her pram and, before the streets of D.C. got too hot, make the long walk to World Wide News to buy newspapers. The Washington Post, the New York Times: the on-line versions left too much out. Also a host of small-town papers. The rest of the day she stayed inside, bathed in the air conditioning that divided her and Alicia from the steaming D.C. summer. She worked and then she read, barely glancing at the wide variety of usual disasters available in the world:

She was looking for something unusual, and she would know it when she found it. No, not “it”—“them.” She searched for two things, and on the first day of July she finally found one of them. Only a small item far inside the Times, bland and inoffensive:

A team of scientists led by Dr. Simon Langford of the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that the “mystery plague” affecting plants along the Connecticut shoreline has been stopped. “It was a random, natural mutation in one specific microbe,” Langford said, “but relatively easy to contain and kill off with appropriate chemicals. No mystery, really.”

A section of shoreline in the Connecticut Wetlands Preserve has been closed to the public for several days while the botanical correction was carried out. Preserve officials announced that the wetlands will remain closed for the near future, “for further monitoring, as a purely precautionary measure.” Disappointed tourists were turned away by Security personnel but given free passes to other local attractions.

“This sort of thing happens routinely,” Langford concluded. “We’re on top of it.”

“Bullshit,” Julie said aloud to Alicia, who gurgled back.

It was a cover-up—but why? And of what?

Julie knew, or thought she knew, but she didn’t want to know. Not yet. She could be wrong, it was a fancifully dumb idea, in fact it skirted the edges of insanity. Just one of those stray ideas that crossed the mind but meant nothing....

She read the bland article again, then stared out her apartment window at a tree, carefully enclosed in a little wrought-iron fence, growing where a section of city sidewalk had been meticulously removed to accommodate it.