Miracle Fruit

At seven pm, three quarters of the recessed lights in the main office space are programmed to turn off. What’s left is deemed bright enough for the custodial staff to do their work, but what I love, looking out at it through the interior window of my office, is that the glow of all the screensavers creates a faint aurora over the top of all the cubicle walls almost like that of a town at night hidden just beyond a ridge. I know it’s just a silly image, but it gives me the sort of comfort I imagine God would feel looking at a snow-dusted Swiss village and allowing himself to forget the rest of the troubled world for a while. I stay late like this because it’s the easiest time to handle the real, unbureaucratic work of thinking, planning, analyzing data, and so on. I also use the time to care for my Synsepalum dulcificum, misting it, trimming it, adding a little peat or some acidifying fertilizer, and for whatever reason these diversions provide me with the greatest clarity of thought I have all day. But I also like to stay late because, unlike at home, where my mother salts the air with her misery, the solitude here feels purposeful.

Tonight, I’m just finishing up a request for access to our latest acquisition. All the other project leads had theirs in last week, but I’ve been trying to get my wording, my logic, just right, in the hopes that a strong argument will matter more than who was first to the starting line. But I know how it will go. Corn and soy will get the first crack at it. My wheat is beating yield estimates and making the company lots of money too—which I’m certain is why I haven’t been talked to despite all the surveillance footage of me staying late to mommy a potted plant—but I know a lot of people are starting to see me as some sort of deluded prophet for continuing to believe that wheat has a place in the future.

I finish up my request and e-mail it to Meadows anyway. In an office environment, logic can only do so much.

Before I go, I plug in the humidifying contraption I’ve put together. Synsepalum dulcificum is from the jungles of west Africa, and the store-bought warm-water humidifier just wasn’t enough, so I’ve connected a space heater to a litter box full of water, and wired in a little fan to circulate the humid air. Security has surely sent someone to investigate the strange contraption I’ve set up in my office, just to check, but there’s little point. Anyone with a keycard for this facility has the know-how to make a bomb, even the technicians. Maybe even the custodians. It doesn’t take an engineering degree to see this setup is climate control for my shrub. It’s been a lot perkier since I switched to this method. In the first half of the year it didn’t bloom, but now it has eleven green buds on it, and all of them are starting to blush.

I like walking out to the deserted parking lot as well, no claustrophobia of cars, nobody yammering into a cell phone or blasting bad music, but tonight there is another car, a Camry with Avis stickers, and it’s parked right next to mine. Leaning against it is a slender, copper-haired woman wearing a fitted trench coat and kitten heels who is definitely not from Nebraska.

“Can I ask you about Aeon, Dr. Schuyler?” she asks.

“Mother Jones?”

“New York Times.”

Surprising. To someone like me, our Aeon acquisition is front page news, but most people would rather see pictures of a beheading or read a new brownie recipe. It’s good that someone is paying attention, I think. But it’s bad news when a New York Times reporter ambushes you in the dark of an empty parking lot rather than contacting the corporate media office. It means...