The Barbarian Nurseries (12 page)

“I love this one too,” Maureen said. It was some sort of agave, an arrangement of concentric rosettes, one stacked inside the other, painted pale green and crimson, and all the colors in between. “It’s like a flower without being a flower.”

“It’s called Morning Light. I’ve got a whole bunch more like that for you. We’re going to do a little section of Morning Light, surrounded by some nonthreatening succulents, like this one over here,
Cheiridopsis africanus,
which is from South Africa, of course. In general, I’m going to put your more barbed and spiny plants away from the edges and from the path, so it won’t be so dangerous for your kids.”

“Excellent.”

“¡Con cuidado!
“ the nursery manager called out suddenly, and unexpectedly, in Spanish.

A group of men were entering the backyard with a ten-foot-long plant wrapped in white canvas, rolling it on two platforms, but they had gotten the wheels stuck at the spot where the cement of the driveway ended and the lawn of the backyard began. They carried the package sideways into the backyard, straining under its weight, and stood it on its end; then they began to unwrap it slowly and its branches opened up and stretched out like a man waking from a long sleep. “This, to me, is the pièce de résistance,” the nursery manager said. “It’s the compositional anchor to the whole garden.”

“Oh, my God, it’s huge. Is that the … what is it called?”

“It’s an ocotillo. I call it ‘the burning bush’ because it looks like something from the Ten Commandments. It must be a good twenty years old. This one isn’t from the nursery, of course, it’s a transplant. We rescued it from the Palm Springs area, from Rancho Mirage, to be exact. It was on some land that was being cleared for a subdivision, a stunning stretch of desert. I got five of these from those developer gangsters, and half a dozen amazing willows too, one of which is over in the truck. They didn’t just give them to me, of course. They sold them to me. Really nice of them. They destroy a bunch of native habitat for all kinds of desert animals, they’re chasing the roadrunners into the hills, literally, but they make a little extra selling off the flora. But I only paid them a fraction of what they were worth. I got them for a song.” The nursery manager gave the quick, sly laugh of a woman claiming winnings at a poker table. “Speaking of money,” she added with a congenial, gently pleading smile.

“Yes, I have something for you,” Maureen said, reaching into her pocket. “You said credit was okay.”

“No problem. Let me just phone this in.”

As the nursery manager took a few steps toward the edge of the backyard to use her cellular phone, Maureen worried about the stack of bills that little plastic rectangle would have to produce, and swallowed. She wondered, for the first time in ages, whether the charge would clear. When the nursery manager got off the phone, the transaction apparently complete, Maureen felt a bit like a shoplifter.
This ocotillo now belongs to me.
The exotic arms of the “burning bush” rose above her from a rough-hewn planter box, each decorated with black barbs arranged in a swirling, candy-cane pattern; it was a beautiful creation from a land with a harsh but practical aesthetic.
I would like to think of myself as being pretty and barbed like this plant, a survivor of three-digit temperatures, rescued from greed by muscled Mexicans in freshly starched uniforms.
The workers brought in more succulents, including one with cone-shaped bursts of saffron petals, a desert equivalent to Maureen’s departed birds-of-paradise, and a tiny shrub with pastel turquoise branches as delicate as coral. A succulent garden played more to the sunlight than her subtropical garden ever could;
la petite
rain forest was dark and colorless by comparison.

The workers brought in bags of sand, walking in a line from the truck to the backyard with the bags slung over their shoulders, like Egyptians toiling in some pharaonic project. They took pocketknives from their belts—each one of them had a tool belt—and soon they were ripping the bags open and spreading orange sand and rocks through the backyard, and for a moment longer the patch of ground looked as bleak and barren as Mars.

A
t the offices of Elysian Systems, Scott Torres was moving the mouse of his computer in subconscious circles, making the white arrow on his screen flutter until he finally clicked and dispatched four words that bounced at the speed of light from his desk to the company mainframe in the basement, and back up to the programmers’ cubicles he could see through the glass and half-open shades of his office. As expected, Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki broke into a smile at the sight of the box that popped up in the lower right-hand corner of her screen, asking,
Wanna have lunch???—Robustus.
“Robustus” and variations thereof (Robus-tus65, Scotus Robustus) was his screen name on several email and message systems, a Latin nod to his roots in “robust” programming. Charlotte turned away from her screen and looked straight at him through the glass and gave him a groupie-girl smile and a thumbs-up. He discreetly raised his own thumb, then sent her another IM that read,
Meet you outside at 1 p.m.
This would be his third lunch with Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki in the past month, each beginning with a furtive meeting in the parking lot, because even though programmers were the employees least likely to spend time imagining the secret lives of coworkers, they could not fail to notice the evolving “special friendship” between the boss and his female underling. Scott did not find the round, fashion-challenged Charlotte attractive in any sinful way; he was drawn instead to her callow programmer enthusiasm, her youthful appetite for his old dot-com stories. During her interview she had made it known that she was aware of his small contribution to the early history of the dot-com boom: he was mentioned in the short Wikipedia entry on Sasha “the Big Man” Avakian, and in one or two others. In the last few weeks Scott had taken to plugging his name in several search engines, feeling narcissistic as he did so, and had been somewhat dismayed that the Scott
Torres Ford dealership of Salinas, California, generated twenty search hits for every one about Scott Torres the programmer.

Scott had been raised not to worry about leaving a mark on the world. Both his mother and father limited their ambitions to their private universe, to the steaks whose fat sizzled and crackled over charcoal briquettes, a beagle panting on a concrete patio, and the unassailable moral rewards of family safety and health. Escape from work in the strawberry and cabbage fields of California, or from the horizonless hamlets of Maine to the modest affluence of South Whittier, was accomplishment enough. Scott followed this path and was thus content to dedicate himself to solving the mathematical and logical challenges that make computers do magic, and took his greatest pleasures in the wide-eyed astonishment that greeted his creations when they came to life. Back in the day, the Big Man responded to Scott’s programming feats with manic bursts of verbal excess that usually began with “This is going to change everything!” Scott’s professional success changed his image of himself, as did a mysterious shift in the culture at large, which had caused Scott to lose his geekiness, though now he seemed to be getting it back again.

Two and a half hours after surreptitiously meeting in the parking lot, Scott was sitting opposite Charlotte at the Islands Restaurant in Irvine, working on his second mango margarita and winding up his long story about the development of MindWare’s “virtual university” software, having taken special delight in describing the poor skills of the first group of hackers who tried to defeat Scott’s security and cheat on a medieval history test. He looked down at his watch and noticed the time. “Holy shit, it’s almost four.” They rushed back to the office, with Scott registering only briefly the way Charlotte squeezed his hand for two seconds when they said goodbye in the parking lot, Charlotte taking the elevator while Scott took the stairs.
How incredibly lame of me,
Scott thought as he walked into the office.
Like they’re not going to notice we were gone for three hours.

He stayed late at the office for appearance’s sake, and it was nearly sunset as he meandered out of the building. By the time he reached home, the long summer dusk was almost over, the last glowing embers of daylight had dropped below the silver blue Pacific, and in the half light he didn’t notice the clods of dirt in the driveway, the scrapes in the cement left by the second gardening crew as they rolled in the willow
and a bush of desert lavender. When his field of vision passed the sliding glass doors, he failed to focus on the strange silhouettes in the backyard cast by the new flora. The significance of his wife’s announcing “Honey, they put in the new garden today” escaped him as he worked to corral his two boys into the bathroom for their nightly shower, and for a half hour of reading in their bedroom. What a relief to have these familial tasks to throw himself into after an agonizingly slow and pointless day at the office. Here, in these neat and orderly rooms with his sons and his daughter, he was king, provider, and executive rolled into one. Not for the first time Scott thought that the private satisfaction of reading to his sons in this bedroom with the Art Deco solar system floating over his head was a very good exchange for the adulation of the past. When he spotted his daughter walking in the hallway in her pajamas, smiling up at him and raising her arms in a wordless request to be lifted, and when she wrapped her small arms around his neck and tucked her head against his cheek, the sensation that Scott the Geek had miraculously found his place in the world only increased. “I can never be mad at you, Samantha, even if you wake up ten times at night.” Fatherhood was a medal and a slap every ten minutes: you could be a persecuted pygmy holding back a scream of surrender at one moment, and then an immortal hero and prince the next. Scott forgot about the snide executives and the money evaporating from his bank account, and tucked his children into bed and kissed them good night.

G
o away, go away.
In his sleep, Scott flailed at the loose pillow tickling his nose, but in his dream he was pushing Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki away. Her hands were cold and sweaty, they were gripping at his cheeks and eyelids, and he was afraid Maureen would see Charlotte holding him and get the wrong idea, and that a horrible argument would ensue. He was sitting at his desk at work, in a cluttered office lined with stacks of boxes, and Charlotte was standing behind him as he tried to type something on his keyboard, and Maureen was in the next room and might walk in any minute. He felt an apocalyptic dread of his wife’s power to banish him from family and home, and could hear Maureen breathing in the next room as Charlotte moved her hands down to his chest and began unbuttoning his shirt. He wanted to break Charlotte’s grip, but she wouldn’t let him go, and finally he turned to grab his young employee by the shoulders and give her a good strong shove, but when he did this he heard a screaming that brought the fuzzy movie running in his head to an abrupt halt and transported him in an instant to his darkened bedroom and the sound of his daughter’s voice crying from the baby monitor.

“Wah! Wah! Wah!”

Maureen, a comforter and a pillow thrown over her head, gave a murmur that sounded like the word “yes” but showed no signs of waking up as Scott stood up from the bed and made his way to the nursery. His wife had built up so much sleep debt that she was immune to Sa-mantha’s screams, and Scott felt a strange combination of sympathy for her and annoyance at the general situation as he walked through the darkened hallways. When they went to bed there was always the hope that this night would be different from the others over the past fifteen months, that this might be the night when their youngest progeny released her grip on their biological clocks, bringing forth a morning in which the California sunlight returned to its normal soothing hues, losing the stark whiteness that had assaulted their eyes since Samantha’s birth. But no, here Scott was again, awake at 2:06 a.m., according to his watch—
I fell asleep with my watch on, Jesus.
He noticed that he was still wearing his button-down shirt from the workday, though he had managed to get his pajama bottoms on. He reached the nursery and found his daughter, as usual, standing up in her crib with her favorite yellow blanket, looking disoriented and confused, her rust-colored locks in a sweaty disorder.
Come to me, my little girl, while I get you your milk. One day soon you’ll be a big girl and this torture will stop.

While Scott tended to their daughter, waiting in the kitchen for the microwave to warm her milk, Maureen slipped in and out of various episodic dreams, and then into the longest one, whose images would linger in her consciousness after she woke up. Mexican day laborers were tramping about her home, eating her food, sitting on the tables, playing with Samantha. A man with stringy and shiny hair that resembled black hay was trying to take apart her coffee table with the point of his machete, using it like a screwdriver.
What are you doing here? Please leave. Please.
Dirt encrusted their faces and their fingernails, and they bumped into one another and into the furniture as they walked about the house. They were leaving small piles of red sand on the living room floor and she pleaded with them again, but they answered her in Spanish, or rather in a jumble of words that resembled Spanish:
la cosa mosa; la llaga es una plaga; waga, waga, waga.
After she woke up, Maureen would think,
I’ve never dreamed in Spanish before.
The men were filling their mouths with salad greens and big gulps from plastic milk jugs, and she started to look for Scott because maybe he could get
them to leave, but she couldn’t find him. She walked into the kitchen, where someone had turned on a garden hose that was spraying water into the air, causing her to run back into another room lined with closet doors, which she opened, looking for her husband in between the brooms and boxes until Samantha’s cries sounded in her dream and she opened her eyes.

The baby monitor was flashing red lights as it broadcast Samantha’s wailing. The clock on her nightstand said 4:29 a.m. and Scott was snoring almost as loud as Samantha was crying.
Thank you, Scott. It would be nice if my husband could get up at one of these middle-of-the-night feedings and tend to the baby and allow me to get a full night’s sleep.
When she reached the nursery and saw the empty bottle on the floor she realized that he must have been up earlier.
I slept through the baby crying again.
It was always a somewhat disturbing realization, that you could sleep through the ambulance-siren blasts of a baby girl.

While Maureen carried Samantha and tried to soothe her back to sleep with a lullaby, “turban man” and “binocular lady” were running inside Scott’s final dream. He was trying to force his software creations to take a seat in the back of his car, but they were busy running through the fences and climbing the play structure in his backyard, and now Samantha was running after turban man. In his dream Scott began to laugh at their antics, and the laughter shook him out of the dream and into the light of day. “Whoa, that was wild,” Scott said out loud, but there was no one to hear him: Maureen was in the shower and the first light of morning was squeezing through the blinds. As he rose to get dressed, something caught his eye, a series of odd shapes squeezing through the narrow spaces between the blinds: a collection of green tubes and triangles, and some sort of brown cloud. What could it be?

He pulled open the blinds to a strange apparition that, for a few moments, seemed to be a continuation of one of the dreams he had been having. The succulent garden, lit from behind by the first rays of morning light, pulsated in turquoise. The ocotillo stood proud just a few yards from his window, the exotic barbs of its branches leaving Scott with a nagging sense of dislocation, as if he were standing in a place that was not his bedroom, looking through the window into a backyard that belonged to someone else. He searched his bedroom for the familiar visual clues that indicated this was indeed the same room he had gone
to sleep in—the bed with its wooden frame, the faux-vintage windup clock, which actually ran on batteries—then looked back at the succulent garden again. He gawked at the plants a few seconds longer until the phrase his wife had uttered the night before suddenly popped into his head and put everything into its proper place: yes, she had said something about the garden, hadn’t she?

“Hey,” he said to Maureen a minute or so later, as she stepped back into the bedroom, dressed and with a towel wrapped around her head. “We’ve got a new garden.”

“Pretty awesome, isn’t it?” Maureen said with a muted cheerfulness that masked her anxiety.

“Uh, yeah. But it’s huge.”

“I think there’s twenty or so different species of plants.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And how did you get all that stuff in here?”

“The landscapers did it.”

“Landscapers?”

“From the nursery.”

“Didn’t that cost a lot of money?”

“Yeah, it cost a bit, but we talked about that,” Maureen said, draping the towel over the doorknob, leaving it for Araceli to pick up later.

“We did?”

“Yes.”

Maureen casually walked toward the door. “But we won’t have to work on it anymore,” she said. “In the long run we’ll save money … I have to check on the baby.”

She left Scott alone in the room with this information, and after a few moments he decided to file it away in the archive of unexpected and unexplainable things that happen to a guy when he gets married: like coming home to discover your new wife has tossed out your old clothes; or suffering her jealousy when, after ten years of marriage, the name of an old girlfriend of yours comes up; or her suddenly insisting one day that you no longer eat red meat, and then a week later coming home to find she has prepared you steak fajitas for dinner.
So now we have a desert in our backyard. First she wanted a jungle, now she wants a desert. “In the long run well save money,” she says. Maybe we should dig
up the front lawn and make that like the Mojave too. It must have taken a helluva lot of work to get that in here. How much could it cost?
He should probably ask her, but was certain the question would provoke another argument. And it did look pretty, in a gnarly and harsh sort of way, once you got used to it.

T
he boys were in the pool and Maureen sat in a chair playing lifeguard, while at the same time making sure Samantha didn’t stray into the desert garden. As she rubbed sunscreen on the back of the baby’s neck, she studied the barrel cactus and told herself not to worry so much about it, even though the ankle-high fence that surrounded it wasn’t a barrier that could keep Samantha away. Already the boys had tossed a ball into the garden, though they were sufficiently put off by the menacing barbs of the plants not to wander inside. Overall, she was pleased with herself for having removed that dying tropical blight from her home and bringing this property back in concert with the desert.

“Araceli, we have a new garden,” Maureen said with a smile to her employee.
“¿Te gusta?
“

Araceli placed a large jug of
agua de limón
on the squat folding tray next to Maureen and used the glass stirring rod to make the cloud of lemon pulp inside swirl, and then finally looked up at the garden.

Well, there was certainly something exotic about this patch of desert her
jefa
had purchased. Standing this close to it, Araceli got the sense of being transported to a place of mystery and timelessness even as the boys screamed from the pool a few yards away, and as Maureen sat in her folding chair, sunscreen glistening from her bare legs, a floppy canvas hat protecting her against the sun. But no, Araceli couldn’t say she liked it. There was a certain minimalism to this new garden with its red volcanic rocks and expanses of scarlet and mustard-colored sand filling the space between the plants—Araceli’s aesthetic, however, had always leaned toward the ornate and complex. She remembered her startling first impression of the tropical garden on the day she interviewed for this job at the Torres-Thompson household: she had emerged from the house on a hot day like this one to encounter a jungle of defiant wetness fighting back against daylight. Later she had studied the garden for
hundreds of hours while working in the kitchen, laundry, and master bedroom, and from the window of her
casita
in the back. She liked the way the leaves of the elephant plant caught the slightest breeze, the way the calla lilies changed their shape from early morning to noon, and the movement of the false stream. This new desert garden was a static construction, while the tropical garden was a work of performance art, with Pepe as its star, stepping inside its verdant stage to send streams of water that cascaded over the tops of the plants, catching the sun’s rays and making rainbows.

“Well, what do you think?” Maureen insisted. “You don’t like it. I can sense you don’t like it.”

What could Araceli say? She really didn’t possess the words in English to communicate what the tropical garden and this new desert garden made her feel. How did you say in English that something was too still, that you preferred plants that you could feel breathing around you?

“Me gustaba más como era antes,”
she said in Spanish, and then in English, “I like it before … But this is very pretty too,
señora.
Very pretty,
muy bonito.
Very different.” Empty words, Araceli thought, but they seemed to be what Maureen wanted to hear.

“Yes, it is very
bonito,
isn’t it?” Maureen said with satisfaction. “And
muy diferente
too.”

T
hat morning at the headquarters of Elysian Systems, Scott invited his staff out to lunch to celebrate shipping the final version of the CATSS “accountability” program to the government. The corporate guys on the fourth floor had suggested he do these sorts of things, because even a bunch of loner programmers expected the occasional perk. “You take them to a nice place, you blow off half a day of work, and you pick up the tab,” said the executive, as Scott tried not to frown at the paperweight on the executive’s teak desk awarded for “outstanding leadership” by a lumber trade group in the Pacific Northwest. “Then you expense it. You go back to the office and everyone works just a little harder the next few days.”

They gathered in the nearest chain restaurant that served decent mojitos and margaritas and plodded through two hours talking about
sports, video games, celebrities, and other banalities. His programmers were five men and two women, the oldest about five years younger than him. They had bounced around various software companies in search of the place that offered the most pay with the least work expected and they all considered the drudgery of programming at Elysian Systems to be a necessary compromise with their free-spirited, late-hacker ethos.
That’s why I hired them: because I saw a little bit of myself in each of them. I wanted to surround myself with me.
You could get them going if you talked about open sourcing, and the fences big companies were putting around their code. “There’s all kinds of languages out there, but they’re not accessible,” said Jeremy Zaragoza, who was a thin twenty-eight-year-old of indeterminate ethnicity. “So your average kid in suburbia can’t just open a machine and start playing with the code.” Scott had grown tired of these conversations—he’d been listening to them, in one form or another, for two decades—and he said nothing, and eventually their talk exhausted itself, until their silent gathering was overwhelmed by the sounds of a lacrosse game on the cable television in the bar, as the programmers quietly fingered scattered french fries and rattled glasses of iced tea while the play-by-play man screamed, “Spinning! Shooting! Score!”

“Hey, my nine-year-old said something really funny the other day,” Mary Dickerson said suddenly, startling everyone to attention. She was a frumpy, raspy-voiced woman and the underling closest in age to her boss.