3/25-4/3/1999 g.g.Ashbrook
The man walked in from the field, in through the flaps of the tent. The one doctor was about to begin looking at Mr. Rutherford’s abdominal wound, while Gleeson was passed out cold, and with liquor. Mitch couldn’t bare to lift the lid for the bin where they kept the severings. Even though he prided himself on being a strong person, and he didn’t let it bother the quality of his work, he was really bothered by that sight. But he had to do it from time to time and he needed to do it right then, to put down the foot of which he was holding the ankle. So he lifted the lid and tried to not let an inch of the view get to even his peripheral vision, but in such a way that no one would see him looking away. He had to look right in it, and be almost interested, for anyone to respect him. But he did catch a little glimpse, he usually did, and that concentration on moving it all from view usually made the sight all the more despicable. But he saw, what looked like broccoli. And right outside the tent there was this strange fast mechanical noise. He looked into the case, forgetting his cautions, only to find that there were simply vegetables where the flesh had been. Even the shapes were reproduced, each finger with an thin pepper, the ball of a heel for a red onion, and so on. Outside the sound was getting louder. He ran to the tent flaps and saw a metal insect the size of a train, and a boxy one at that, hover down from the air and settle on the ground. It looked more like a child’s play house, dotted with painted eyes, and of course the two large eye-windows. It was painted to look like a lady bug, and the propulsion were two huge folding wings, that actually looked quite graceful. People then got out of the contraption through a large hatch. They strolled on into the tent past the doctor. They all looked pretty clean compared to anyone else out on the field. One of them even found the trunk and began handing out vegetables, which they scrutinized. One boy was telling another about how much ‘this all’ reminded him of the markets they had back home. One girl asked Mitch, "Do you have anything else?" holding a bunch of broccoli as if it were a vase.
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The results from the ship had come in. All the chambers were opening, and the cats who had been spending their term in an experiment are walking out. They were studying the development of whole generations of life cycles of artificially sustained and mated birds, and out they came with their binders of all their observations, and occasional operations; and of course the happy bird was hopping along out of the cage after them, yammering away about how wonderful it all was. But this one cat came out who didn’t have a bird with him. And he thought from the first that there was something seriously the matter with this. He walked up to one of the professors and handed her his folder. She and all the rest of the professors were in a grand mood, quite proud of the recent movement forward. But he asked her, he said "Take a look in my folder, and tell me if you see anything strange about this. Anything at all. I have the feeling something isn’t quite right, out of place perhaps." The teacher was thinking how the student must be quite modest, this was her first year so she didn’t know for sure, but from what she heard this was quite common, students coming up and groveling because they wanted to secure their grades. Though perhaps this was a naive, he didn’t seem to have that look of half painted curiosity for what the teacher really had to say about the work in the folder; the truth was in the orders though the students did not know, they weren’t even allowed to comment; officially they had to say ‘just fine,’ and smile. And the student would take this as an honest answer, throwing it out of all order. Anyway, this kid seemed to be more like a dumb dog. So she flipped up the cover, as if she had done it a thousand times, as if this were a routine question, which made the kid think that perhaps it was routine for kids to be found incompetent, and drowned, simply on the basis of un-cleanliness of notes. And she smiled at him. She’d begun paging through from the back of the book. All she had studied for that past five years was muscle tissue, bone structure, connections of the ocular nerve, bird discipline methods, and here the first image she saw, was a rather beautiful sketch of a giant blooming orchid. And all through the book were the most detailed botanical examinations; up to the beginning of the book, through the developmental cycles of many kinds of plants, with incredible descriptions of the opening of a seed, to the very beginning, to years before when he had found the carcasses.
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"High, I’m Ron," said one of the boys to Mitch, holding out his hand.
Mitch went to put down the foot and wash his hands, but when he looked down and saw that he was holding a gourd and that his hands were clean, he put the gourd down and gripped Ron’s hand. "Hello, my name is Dr. Mitchel Gradglaids."
Ron looked around the tent and smiled, paused. "So," he said, "what’s all that noise outside?"
"A battle. We’re trying to retake the hill, it was lost last march."
"You mean... fighting and stuff?"
"I suppose, yes."
One of the girls who was looking around and had found Mitch’s surgical instruments, the saws and clamps and belts and knives of various shapes and sizes, asked, "And what do you do?"
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The flowers were beautiful though. And it was something new. She thought it might do well in the botanical department, though the paper work of the transfer would be strange. She looked through it again to make sure the particulars were in order, which she didn’t doubt due to the general quality of the work. Then, when looking through the back to find the index, to let her see down the list of names and get a flavor of what kinds of names he favored, she found another section, which was all about molecules, and visual sketches of strange landscapes, and diagrams labeled as ‘time.’
She walked past him, into his isolated room in the ship, to the small green house. He had jerryriged all sorts of pots, and she saw from the trash that he must have been using the bird food, probably as fertilizer as well as seed, not a bad idea. After all, the dead bodies of a few birds would only last so long as a growing medium. She walked back out to the boy who awaited her word of clarification.
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"I practice medicine." Mitch said, with a proud small smug smile, gripping the lapels of his coat.
"With these?" she asked, holding up a limb saw as if it were a dirty sock.
"That is state of the art equipment." Mitch said, hurriedly.
"Well." One of the other boys, who hadn’t said anything so far, now spoke up. "Mr. So called Doctor. If this is a war, and if you are a healer, then what are all these vegetables here for?"
Then something occurred to Mitch which had never entered his mind before. "Oh, their just prototypes." He said. "They probably don’t even work."
The people, mostly kids, who had been sitting around and eating the vegetables stopped eating, stopped chewing even. The two girls who hadn’t eaten anything had this ‘told ya so’ look on their faces.
"It seems," Mitch said, "you have stumbled on my secret. The surgical tools are just for display. All the healing is actually done through something more like song. And the vegetables, they… are people we have captured from the other side. Prisoners of war, if you will."
Just then a man came stumbling into the tent with a gaping shoulder wound, gushing blood. He promptly sat down on one of the tables. Mitch walked up to him, still quite confident knowing he had upon him the eyes of an audience. "What shall it be?" He asked the soldure.
"I think this calls for eggplant." The soldier said.
This struck Mitch both as amazingly fortunate and deflating. Could it be that it wasn’t he who had been thinking of what to say? It had come easily enough, but then were was it all coming from?
Mitch cleared his throat and held out his hand, "Eggplant," he said. One of the girls reached into the bin and pulled out a small blue Japanese eggplant and placed it in the doctor’s hand, thrilled with a chance at audience participation. "Eggplant, doctor," she said, serious in tone.
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She shut the folder and was about to tell him to stick around, when a small squad marched in and said they were getting warning reports of dangerous plants from report stations which shortly after stopped transmitting. She looked down and saw the cover of the binder had been decorated with mushrooms. For a split second, her mind become a room of debate. She grabbed the whistle from around her neck and blew it, the soldiers came running up. The boy wasn’t sure what was going on, if he should run, or what.
"I understand you men are looking for dangerous plants."
The lead soldier said, "Indeed we are."
"Well follow me." The young teacher then began to walk toward the boy’s research room, in what looked to the boy like slow motion. The soldiers looked at eachother, and followed her with the same exaggerated slow steps. "Look around in here." she said.
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He held the eggplant up to the wounded soldier and immediately it began to un-peal, almost like a banana, exposing countless inside layers, like a layered flower, each layer letting off a soft tone and fragrance. The small eggplant then began to spread out branches, with metallic leafs and translucent berries. The branching fruit moved through the air toward the man’s arms, and began working at it, cleaning it up, swabbing it with delicate strokes of cotton like bundles, beads of ointment dripping on, and even secondary blossoms with strange jointed limbs, which extracted the bullet, with only the smallest grunt from the brave soldier, and then sewed up the arm with blue stitches. Then the instant it was done, it all retracted into the vegetable, even the initial pealing reversed without a visible seam.
On the way out of the tent the soldier pulled a harmonica from his pocket and began to play.
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The boy began to become frightened. He imagined what it would be like to drown. Did they use freezing or boiling water, he wandered? He walked up to the door to see what they were doing. The soldiers were poking around, they seemed to be quite impressed. One soldier almost shrieked when he opened one cabinet, and when he pulled it out the other men began chatting noisily. One pulled out a chillum and they packed a big bowl right off the plant. They sat around and smoked, the pipe going around and around. At first the teacher tried to get them to stand up and ‘start shooting’ like she thought they were supposed to. After nearly forcing her to take three consecutive large hits, the one soldier began to explain to her, as he took out a pad and began to sketch the plant as they smoked bits off it, how soldiers through the ages had always done more gambling, drinking, and whoring than anything else, to the point that this became what a soldier was, with only a thin surface of military involvement. He then explained how in the last fifty years, soldiers had grouped together and decided to dedicate themselves to the arts. Several of the soldiers around them were practicing yoga as they smoked. Chanting, splitting their voices, singing songs with nonsense words. When the boy heard some of what the soldier had said, he went into the back of his lab and brought out a few pots of this one particular flower, which had large think spongy leaves soaked with an alkaloid rich sticky sweat viscous liquid. He brought it out and handed the potted plant around, instructing the men to eat only one half leaf unless they weighed more than two hundred pounds, which two of them did.
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One older boy said to the doctor, "I hear you have a very specialized botanical operation going here." A couple across the tent, getting out a book on sea slugs and steaming thermoses from their bag, said "Oh, that’s exactly why we signed up for this region." And the couple nodded to eachother.
"Well," Mitch began, "I know one woman who keeps a garden. It’s not that far from here."
"Do you know what she grows there? Anything in particular?"
"I can’t say I do." Mitch said.
Then one girl said. "I’ll take him and this tent for forty."
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"Of course not all soldiers decided to go the way we did." He said. "Some of them still fight."
"It’s a bit of a shame," said another soldier.
The teacher was hooking up with another soldier by this time, her long striped orange tail tapping rhythmically against a chair leg, her ears flat back in playful excitement. One soldier suggested to hot box the lab to which murmurs agreed. "I’ll get it," the boy said. "I need some fresh air anyway." So he grabbed up his report folder and stepped out of the room, and shut the door quietly behind him.
Out in the main lobby everyone was still standing around, chatting, the birds hopping about, speaking to eachother about this and that seed.
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Mitch sat there and watched them bid over him and his tent, but without waiting to hear how much he would sell for, he walked out to see the craft they had come in. Finding the latch for the hatch he pulled it open and peeked inside. Inside there was no furniture, no chairs, only book shelves and card-catalogue filing cabinets. There didn’t even appear to be any motor for propulsion. He pulled one book off a shelf that was right by the hatch, but when he tried to page through it, he found it wasn’t made of pages. From the outside it looked like it was, but when he tried to open it up between two pages it clumped together like powder or liquid adhering to the rest of the book by static or magnetism. And the material was arranged in different patterns when he tried to open to different pages. On some pages the seemingly scattered clumps produced holographic images, some of cats and dogs, or sweater sets, and some he couldn’t explain at all. The patterns made by the liquid-powder were so intricate. Then he realized that some of them were actually landscapes, he was looking at buildings and hillsides, mountain ranges, industrial parks, but it wasn’t all like that. Some parts he decided were character sketches, strange progressions of imagery and sounds, from candlesticks in midwinter kitchens, to over pastries, warm milk horizons, swimming lessons, car accidents, searches for cigars and underarm deodorants, wet kisses, buying shoes in autumn, violin lessons, hiding your homework in the refrigerator, dosing bubble gum, pancake perfection, a calendar for Bismarck, a lunar landscape for William and Beatrice, getting trapped under a shopping cart, bra removal.
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The boy walked across the room to a water fountain, and overheard two cats talking. "She’s going to be making a film, did you know that?" "Didn’t you know that, what did you think all those hats were for?" "I thought she just liked hats. She does like hats." "But you know she doesn’t borrow hats. What, all of a sudden she’s going to start borrowing hats and wearing them? That many?" "She never asked me about my hats."