PROPOGATION, PT. 4

Frederic Adwin Church. 1877. El Rio de Luz.

As a family, their only recognizable holiday tradition is one that involves the men installing Christmas lights after dinner and a lighting ceremony at dusk, complete with cider and cake and ironic applause. But when Samantha can’t find the extension cords or staple gun in the still packed boxes, Charlie offers to shop, ready for any excuse to leave, if only for a moment. Their father has just turned on the TV to stories of the President visiting US troops in Iraq for the holiday. “There’s gotta be someplace that’s open,” Charlie says, grabbing his coat and waving Beatrice along. “I mean this is America after all!” he yells, already out the door. 

        The back of Samantha’s car is filled with smaller boxes all marked for various donations; Charlie can barely see out the back window but luckily the streets are empty. Beatrice sits low in the passenger seat. “Where do you want to go?” Charlie asks, pulling out to the subdivision street.    

“I want to go home,” she says. She pulls a pack of cigarettes from the inside pocket of her unseasonal denim jacket and punches the car’s lighter.  

“Home home or school home?” he asks.

“School home is home. Or maybe it’s not. I don’t know. I’m a man without a country.”   She lights the cigarette skillfully, cracks the window and lets out a tense exhale.

“I thought smoking wasn’t cool anymore?” he says. “Is smoking still cool?”

She gives him a blank stare. “How’s the job hunt going?” she asks.

“Fine,” he says, turning onto the highway into town. “How’s school going?” he asks.  

She ignores him. They pull past the cheery subdivision sign, onto the highway, into town. They pass through the last section of farmland before the gas station on East Main, then into the quiet residential patch of old homes. There are familiar markers everywhere: the Patterson house where Samantha took piano lessons and Charlie and Beatrice waited impatiently for her to finish, the ice cream shop they used to bike to as children with handfuls of dimes. They cross the train tracks that scissor the town in half and there is Standish Park, the grade school they all attended, the car wash where Charlie first worked. The house on Rook Street that gave homemade water taffy on Halloween. The vacant lot on Fremont where they first did all sorts of sordid teenage things that now seem innocent and trite.  

They circle the turnabout in the center of town, with Henderson Street, the town’s commercial strip, opening wide to the right. Charlie slides into the turning lane and waits for the light. Henderson street is empty, but three of the stores Charlie can see, including the rusty street sign for the town’s aging shopping mall, have large banners with the words, “Black Friday Blowout Sale!” in shouting print.

“Black Friday Blowout Sale,” Charlie says, stupidly. “Can you believe it?”

“Yeah,” Beatrice says, not listening. There’s a long pause. “Have you seen home yet?” she eventually asks.    

“Home home?” Charlie asks. He has not. He only knows that it has been brazenly renovated.

“We should go check it out,” she says, a strange lilt in her voice. “I mean, you should see it.  It’s pretty wild,” she tries again, her tone back to neutral.

Without a word, Charlie turns back into the turnabout as the light turns green. He circles around to Dayton Avenue, towards the campus side of town, towards home. He makes a right on Olive Street and, after a half a block, parks under the towering elm that had always sat opposite the front door. It was once a simple but stately brick home, built in the fifties but not so one could tell. It was a good home for professorial parents. But now the even squat façade is marred by a new glass triangle, a tall sunroom that mimics the roof’s original pitch, but ten feet to the left, giving the boxy home the shape of an asymmetrical M. The addition seems to intrude onto the front lawn, obscene in a plastic-covered nakedness. “It’s so big,” Charlie says. The largest tree on their property, a large maple to the front left, has been shorn in half to make way for the construction. The front lawn gardens are gone; the grass beyond scarred a muddy swath.

They walk to the sidewalk, slowly, regarding the mess. “Some hot-shit architecture kid from school designed it,” Beatrice says. “He’s supposed to be famous or something.”

  “It’s so big,” Charlie says again. Beatrice turns, jumps over a pallet of landscaping bricks and disappears through the gangway to the backyard. Charlie follows.

   The hosta beds that line the edge of the house appear untouched. The long lattice that sits above the bed of Kiftsgate roses is still there, curling around the house’s back corner. The backyard is only mildly marred: a square of dead grass next to the porch where something was piled, a few remnants of heavy tire tracks left by some outsider’s truck. But the back fence and arbor are still covered in the fine web of a now-dormant sweet pea perennial. The garage wall is still lightly coated by a spidery palm of ivy. His own pet Zelkova tree is still in the corner, its young quick growth slowed and stable, its tufted roundness just as he remembered it.    

Beatrice goes immediately to the far edge of the back porch, stretching her reach under it with a grimace until she finds something, a hidden rusty ice pick. “Still there,” she says with a tiny grin. She goes to the leftmost kitchen window, the window bloated and warped with age that never locked, and begins to wedge it open. It was how they used to break into the house as teenagers, avoiding the loud unlocking and telltale scrape of the heavy wooden backdoor. She pops the window open enough to slide her slender fingers in and push the window up. She sticks the pick in her back pocket and, with a hop and a grunt, disappears inside. Charlie waits a moment and follows, stepping carefully onto the countertop and then down onto the tile. The kitchen is dark and clean. And even though it is all too familiar, even though he had spent more life in that kitchen than anywhere else, he feels like he is somewhere he shouldn’t be.  

“The power’s out for the week,” Beatrice explains.  

He can see into the dining room that it is now empty, its entrance to the living room closed off with a plastic sheet. The place smells like cold dust. The kitchen startling in its chilly disuse.  

Beatrice doesn’t seem to notice. She sets the ice pick down on the kitchen table and walks through the dining room and down the far hallway.

“Wait, where are you going?” Charlie asks. 

“Gimme a sec,” she calls behind her, “stay there.” He does, sits at the kitchen table, spins the dirty ice pick on its handled edge, and watches, through the open window, the neighbor’s cypress swaying like a metronome in the gusty breeze.

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For Charlie, the most important thing about the plant kingdom, the thing most people didn’t take the time to really understand, was its utter amorality, its mindless, mechanical lunge.  While his unpeopled daydreams were partly distraction, partly puzzle and thought experiment, there was the tough seed of a philosophy in them—a deep mistrust of human perspective, a resonant awe for the unstoppable engine of life, real life. What annoyed Charlie most was how others projected morality onto nature, victimized it, martyred it, twisted it into some pathetic version of mother, co-opted its quiet workings to make inane arguments about what people should or shouldn’t be.  

Once in graduate school he had lost his composure in a Pesticide Behavior class. One chatty classmate Charlie had never seen before was spending the class sighing disgustedly and shaking his head and interrupting every statistic with some aimless complaint about how we were destroying the planet, raping nature, as if nature was something fixed and vulnerable and weak, a thing in need of his protection. Charlie had tried to ignore him until he couldn’t any longer. “That’s not the point,” he had said, loudly, causing the kid to spin around in his front row chair, to look at Charlie for the first time. “That’s not what nature is. This nature you are talking about isn’t suffering, or frail, or moral. It does not feel, or plan, or worry about its future. It is a machine. And not a broken one. It is working just fine. It can do nothing else.” He remembered everyone in the classroom, including the professor, waiting, nonplussed, perfectly still. He remembered standing, pointing fiercely to the projected graph showing some jagged descending pattern of something. “This is not a weak ecosystem that needs saving, this is us. A bunch of tiny organisms killing ourselves. We are not killing the planet. We couldn’t even if we really tried. The planet will be fine until the goddamn sun explodes, and even then it’ll all go on just fine.” The classmate tried to raise his hand, shaking his head, starting to speak, but Charlie wouldn’t let him. “Species live and die, but on the timeline of ages there is only irrefutable balance. This is balance being maintained, us being mechanically exterminated by our own behavior, an ecosystemic immune system eradicating the human disease. This is the machinery of nature hard at work! Working perfectly! The planet doesn’t care if we die. The planet doesn’t suffer. And it would not be better or happier if we did. There is no better or happier. Only difference and diversity. We are tiny and temporary and suicidal by design! And we are the only thing that thinks better and happier is the way everything should be! There is no better or happier anywhere else you look! Go ahead and look!” He threw up his hands, his voice a little shaken. “It’s not there!” he yelled. He waited only a moment for a reaction, and when there was none he had quickly collected his things and left the classroom before his professor could say anything, not knowing what else to do. He was trembling, he remembered, unsure what had come over him. He dropped the class the next day and took Physiology of Flowering instead.

It wasn’t the best way to make a point, but he knew he was right. That long-ago first eukaryotic algae cell was no more moral or better than his own Zelkova tree. One was more complex, but complexity was only complexity. It didn’t mean anything. Propagation wasn’t progress. Progress wasn’t even progress. Not really. That was the lesson of plant life, that was the clean, cold moral that nature told. Why cloud such a history with all this politics, all this narrative and fear, all this clumsy morality? It didn’t fit.  

And this is what Charlie is remembering, when his sister returns holding a small stack of books.

“I’m just going to borrow these for a while,” she says, “Don’t tell mom.”

The books are all her mother’s, a well-annotated liberal education canon, some de Beauvoir, some Foucault, but it’s the small pamphlet on top of the stack that Charlie recognizes immediately. It is the only known copy of a feminist manifesto that their mother had written and distributed when she was in college. On its brown hand drawn cover is its large-print title: Instrumentalizationism. She kept that copy on the far edge of her bookshelf, where it had always sat, bookending the long row of large-bound volumes. It was something Charlie had been shown as a child, something whose title he had stared at for long sessions trying to pronounce, something he had later scanned with his best friends in junior high snickering at each poetic reference to the vagina, of which there were several. It was ultimately something he regarded with discomfort and doubt, a side of his mother that was not his mother; he didn’t like to think about it too much anymore.

But now in their childhood kitchen Beatrice clutches the booklet like a precious scroll, her eyes fixed with intent. Charlie had long-ago, when first trying to uncover the booklet’s meaning, memorized the first line of the text: As a primary act in refusing to be instruments of an other agency, let us first shatter the notion that we are anything other than what we are: an Escher pattern of humanity—co-defined, co-directed, co-operative—where the shape of one creates the shape of the adjacent all. Charlie hadn’t completely understood the line then and still didn’t, not really. He had grown to become wary about his parents’ politics, suspicious of their dreamy reverence for what wasn’t, their boundless dissatisfaction with what was. He wonders what Beatrice thinks of it all. She opens the booklet up to a middle page and begins scanning lines.     

He is about to ask why she did not just ask their mother for the books, but then he sees her darting eyes, her mouth hungrily moving through the text, and doesn’t. There is a certain rebellion in her just taking it, a certain covertness and risk, which is perhaps part of the allure. He once did the same with his father’s published articles, looking them up in the college library and reading them, feeling mischievous, when the whole time each article was right there, sitting on the same living room bookshelf in a series of serious journals. But that was a long time ago.  

Beatrice turns the page. “Man, there was something about this time in history,” she says, “everything was so on the line, everything was so important and real.”  

“When are you talking about?” Charlie asks, “The Seventies?” He gives her a doubtful frown, “I don’t think that’s what the Seventies were like.”

She turns back to the first page, then closes the book, looks out the window. “Not just then, but, I mean any time before now, whatever now is. It just seems like we need some, some urgency. I’m scared for people, I’m scared that people aren’t scared? Everyone’s so mad. But they’re not scared, you know?” He does not know, or doesn’t think he knows. “It’s like what you said about an asteroid coming and how everyone feels safe under an umbrella.” He shakes his head, begins to correct her, to tell that wasn’t what he said, or certainly not what he meant. Not at all. The gulf between them has indeed grown large. But he doesn’t quite know how to say it.

“Well, for starters, it’d be a meteorite,” he says.  “Asteroids stay in space, meteors burn up, meteorites hit the surface.”

“Jesus Charlie,” she says, rolling her eyes wide, “that’s not the point.”

Suddenly Charlie feels tired, a small dull drone of a headache at his temples. He wants to be elsewhere, he wants to change the subject, but also wants to help his sister in the only way he can think of. “Well, I think what I meant was…Or what I was trying to say…” he pauses wondering how to begin. “What I meant was, there is a big picture way of looking at things. And…well, usually I think it helps to just imagine a time when everybody is gone, like, gone gone. Like dead.” Beatrice looks at him with concern. “No, really,” he persists. “It helps. I imagine everybody gone and the plant and animal life just taking over. It gives you a good perspective.” Beatrice squints at her brother, suspicious, but waiting.

He suddenly wishes they were in the city, where the imagined transformation was more dramatic. He wants to paint for her the image of skyscrapers rendered into giant trellises, of each empty office a swampy cave, swarming with insects. The image of the violent moss that would cover the courtyards and public squares, the sweaty fungi that would sprout in the mildewy greenhouses of abandoned cars, the ferns that would sprout out of library books, sapping the pages of their words. He wants to show her some unrecognizable future era: schoolhouse playgrounds drowned in lithe Savanna grasses, telephone wires a boxy network of ivy tufts, some deadly mutated single-celled plague covering every statue and flagpole and street light, feeding on its cheap metal armor, reducing it to a flaky decay. And then the flooding of downtowns into murky marshlands, the immense tropical flora on the lumpy bloat of old landfills; there could be gigantic flowering structures as big as busses, land bound insects as big as bikes. And maybe there’d be some fuzzy orange bacterial fluff that would suck the toxic sludge dry, perfect microorganisms that would cling to battery acid and radioactive waste, collecting into scaly hordes, spitting out trembly chemical streams.  Then towering trees that would break apart parking lots, growing with immense root structures that consumed and tore apart the rubble, vast and complicated systems of growth. And maybe these future trees could be bigger than sequoias, touching the edge of the troposphere, entire worlds in themselves, with freakish wildlife spending their entire existence in these tree planets, hairy and crooked, spidery mammals with clawed hooks for limbs, nameless tree creatures, unconcerned with their classification. And then the new worlds created under the tree’s impenetrable branches, soggy dark places full of skittish and blinded animals, darkly flooded marshes of deadly rhythms and pulses. And each of these ecosystems and sub-ecosystems, all of it, would be so beautiful in that no person would ever regard it as such, beautiful in that it would all only be buried in a future ice age, some eventual pandemic, some bad-luck cosmic disaster. And then, something new would form, somewhere and somehow, something that he couldn’t even begin to imagine. Something so perfectly connected but impossibly distanced for now and here as to make now and here seem essential, but also inconsequential, important but at the same time perfectly meaningless. 

He tries to tell it to his sister, at the kitchen table, trying to bring her to that final point of relief. But the journey there is such a long one, the whole big picture so hard to show all at once. “Okay, so take this place, and let’s say the New Madrid fault opens up,” he says, “hold on, let me go back. So there’s an intraplate fault down by Kentucky, I mean this is in many thousands of years, a million years, but if that opens up there could be a mountain range here, and,” he waves his hand to the open window, “I mean this area could all be covered by igneous deposits from that, but it would be dense forest by then, and a lot warmer, tropical really.  And maybe flooded over, maybe eventually a kind of marshland or swamp. I mean, think about it.”         Beatrice does, but does not soften her squint.

        “But from new rock deposits you get all types of plant life, I mean, if you wait long enough. I mean, give it enough time, let the climate change, let all this junk break down, and it’ll be stuff we can’t imagine. And then, if there is a new mountain range you get a whole new floodplain, or at least an interesting interruption in the floodplain. There will be, like, a whole chain reaction.”

        He’s starting to see it, this kitchen overgrown, swampy and wrecked, and beyond its cragged wall some vast posthistoric wilderness. He feels a lightness in his chest as it appears.

        “I mean, just imagine the wildlife, I mean, it’s hard to even imagine the wildlife, but under these conditions the diversity would be…It would be just…It could be immense…I mean, you could have so many different environments within one…I mean it would be like…”

        He’s losing his words. He waits for his sister to join in, but she is only looking at him strangely, amused but unmoved. “It would be like…” he tries again.  

The lightness in his chest sinks quickly.  Beatrice smiles a tiny bewildered smile. He feels, in her eyes, suddenly foolish. “I guess, just imagine you could watch all this stuff happen, without interruption,” he says. “Imagine you were the last person on Earth.”

Beatrice considers the prospect, her dark eyes fixed on her brother, her thin pale face framed so seriously by the dark willow of her hair. “Why would you want to do that?” she asks. 

“Because…” Charlie doesn’t quite know how to say it.  He knows what he wants to say but it seems to him too obvious for words. “Okay, let me start over,” he says. “What I’m trying to say is this…” 

“Charlie,” Beatrice interrupts. “Can you shut up for a second?” she says.

Through her squinty doubt, she gives him a sad but endearing smile. It is a real smile, the tiny pinch in her cheeks, the brown of her eyes meeting his. It is the kind of smile that he hasn’t seen from her in a long while, the kind of smile that—he understands when he finally sees it—he has been trying to get out of her all day long.  

She opens the book and rests it against her knee and starts reading. Her other hand is resting on the rusty ice pick, petting it like one would a kitten. Charlie turns away from her, looks to the sky, a slow rosy grey. The pain in his temple flickers and he takes a slow breath, trying to calm it down. He tries to picture the forest again, to think of himself alone. But it’s hard to imagine with his sister right there, with a warm flush blooming behind his eyes. He can’t quite get the scene into focus, can’t quite muster the relief. It’s there, the dusty outline of it, but it appears to him suddenly tiresome and bleak, and then it’s gone.

  The light in the kitchen is a shadowy, muted gray. The cold November breeze flows in through the open window. Charlie pulls his coat collar to his chin. The breeze builds to a quick gust, its dry surge so out of place in the once warm and lively room. Two papery leaves come with it, flutter to the floor, suddenly making his childhood home seem truly deserted, useless, in some unobserved terminal stage.  

Charlie shivers in his chair. He needs to get out of here, he thinks. He needs to go. Everyone must be wondering what is taking him so long. 

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Church, Frederic Edwin. "El Rio de Luz." 1877. Oil on Canvas. National Gallery of Art. https://www.nga.gov/artworks/50299-el-rio-de-luz-river-light. Accessed 29 March 2025