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Four
Professor Cooksey didn’t drive, so Rupert asked Je
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 Je
“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 ante
“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 Je
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 Mado
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, Je
“Did you get him?” one of them asked the others, and was answered, “No, he must have left over the wall.”