Words. It all started with words. If words were capable of carrying messages, of encoding information in impossibly complex ways, of colonizing the minds of entire nations and even extending beyond them, of storing themselves remotely in amorphous cultural memories, adapting over generations, dictating the behaviors of humanity by defining the very limits of what they could imagine, articulate, be… Well, then words must possess some sort of being. Maybe physical, maybe spiritual. Maybe concrete, maybe abstract. But they existed words did.
They inhabited us just as little strands of mitochondria. They determined our being, our capacity to navigate reality, just as this or that gene determined the color of our eyes, the length of our toes, the limits of our libidos. Then, Dr. Kane knew full well that genes were not as determinative as the popular imagination wished they were. They were suggestions, signs that pointed in a certain direction. They were police on the road to try and enforce the rules of circulation, but they could not stop every passing car. Some travelers were sure to make unscheduled turns, to interpret the signs more freely. These rebellious drivers were the forces behind change, the engines of instability that made evolutions ally, adaptation, and its less affable associate—disease—possible. He thought of them as tiny unconscious geniuses, of Nietzchean supermen who disregarded the law and changed everything, though these individuals could only access their will as a network, a superorganism. Words and genes were both units in systems of signs, systems of meaning, systems marked by life.
Even death was a ritual bathed in signs. The oil that clung to the stork’s skin could be described: shiny, black, sticky, viscous. But, it also played into a network of ideas one held about oil, even experiences with it. It was tied to words like foreign, independent, renewable, pipeline, wealth, smog, Islam, war, disaster, efficient, energy, clean, Christianity, progress, reincarnation, evolution, disintegration, nationalization, privatization, child soldier, Communist, Capitalist, plastic, cancer, innovation, exploitation, life, and of course, as always, death. And, then there were personal associations. The smell of the gas can Father Dimitri, the long departed priest who had raised Dr. Eli Kane, had used to fill the lawn mower in Georgia. The feeling of leaning against the pump as he filled the car on his first cross-country road trip when he went to Wisconsin to study Biology, his paychecks that bore the Stamford Oil logo, his first sight of the ocean as slick and black as a frozen pond at midnight. Oil was no doubt a substance with some substantial reality independent of Dr. Kane, but he would never be able to interact with that substance from any context but that which his circumstance had created. Yes, death was a ritual bathed in signs. The oil covers the animal, blinding it until its predators, by necessity vigilant observers of signs, sense erratic behavior and attack. Then the predator absorbs the oil soaked carcass into its liver. The liver reacts to signs of poisonous content by increasing its enzymes, then swells in its battle to expel the poisons. Ammonia fills the brain and symptoms set in: confusion, blurred vision, undirected locomotion, perhaps sounds meant to express distress. If the animal is lucky, the signs of its weakness are spotted by still another predator further up the line, or an opportunistic scavenger who can expedite the process. If it suffers the misfortune of being a top predator, and no human is nearby to end its misery, it is condemned to thrash about until the nervous system is sent the signal that pain is no longer a conversation worth having with the body, and shock and dementia are allowed to carry what is soon to be a corpse through the home stretch, preparing it for its life beyond any need for conscious interpretation of signs in the world.
He thought of Dimitri in his last stages. He had not thought of Dimitri in years. He remembered that panicked look that he had since seen in the eyes of so many birds, seals, even turtles. That look, if nothing else, was proof enough to him that people shared something with their animal predecessors. That look reminded him that no matter what we added on top of it, deep down our reptilian brains were still sending pulses through our nightmares. Of course, Eli was not having nightmares anymore. Not in the traditional sense. There was no such thing as nightmares for the sleepless.
And so, as he looked out over all of that oil coating all of that ocean, he thought of Father Dimitri. He knew how it was going to end. Stamford would not provide him with the cure. He was going to die just as his father had. The least he could do was help to right a wrong before he went.
Just a day before, Dr. Kane stood at the shore in front of his cottage on Grand Lake watching a rattler scuttle into the bushes, a rifle cocked against his shoulder, a scaly finger on the trigger. He had no real interest in shooting the snake, he just wanted to be sure the thing moved in the other direction, into the water, away from him. A Diamondback releases a hemotoxic venom composed of 5-15 enzymes, metal ions, biogenic amines, lipids, free amino acids, proteins and polypeptides. When they enter your system they cause necrosis and coagulopathy. They break down tissue and make your body digestable. Some snakes can even induce paralysis, but not this one.
Dr. Kane was fascinated by the way a substance could enter the body and translate itself into effects. It was a malicious element in a complex communications network. A venom could be thought of as a lie, an impurity in a system, a computer virus… a real virus. Then, sometimes impurities lead to unforeseen benefits. More often not. That was the funny thing about evolution. It was effective so infrequently on the local level, and yet so damned effective on the global. It was a cruel system.
He walked up the steep hill from the lakeshore to the cottage. The Poison Ivy was growing back at the edges of his property. Urishiol comes into contact with the skin and causes a rash in up to 85% of people. Now that is effective communication. But, why are the others immune? He looked at the root system from the old Oak in the center of his yard. It had begun to pop up under his front porch, deforming the concrete base. He would move the porch when he had time. The tree had more right to the space than his porch, and one always had to give a little in a negotiation.
He heard the phone ringing inside and he hurried a little. Like a dog drooling for his dinner bell, he thought, his adrenoline levels raised, knowing that the call would be from work. The brain can be chemically affected by remote. A sound can start processes throughout the body.
“Kane?” came the voice on the other end of the line. It was Karen, the third in command at Stamford.
“Speaking.”
“We need you in Shreveport.”
“For?”
“There’s been an explosion at an offshore rig.”
“Damage?”
“3 dead. Pretty hefty product loss.”
They always thought that way. Product losses. Employees and goods that would not be available to increase their margins. Next she would make some reference to the environmental damage as if it were just bad PR.
“If that oil hits the beaches we’re gonna have a PR nightmare on our hands.”
“I’m on my way.”
The inside of Kane’s cottage was almost as lush as the woods outside of it. He had an herb garden, a collection of rare orchids, ivy climbing wooden tracks built around his walls, and the centerpiece, two exceptionally rare flowers: the Tacca Chantrieri, or ‘black bat flower’, and the Titan Arum, which translated to the ‘titanic penis’. The black bat, a flower known for its incredible beauty, looked like a purple faced tiger complete with long drooping whiskers. The Titan Arum, which was famous for smelling like raw meat, looked like a swollen whale’s member emerging from a splash in the ocean. The reason he kept the Tacca Chantrieri was simple: its beauty. But, the Titan Arum? It was a more complex plant. Kane did not mind the smell. It was a mystery to him. What purpose could the aroma of raw flesh serve for a flower? Maybe that was why it was so rare. A plant that slid into evolution’s margin of error.
On the back wall of the cottage was a painting of a dark-green-leafed plant with little white berries. Mistletoe Phoradendron Serotinum. The State flower of Oklahoma. In the foreground the plant’s leaves drooped towards the ground. Two young, black bodies came close beneath the berries as if they might kiss. In the distance a plane flew over a burning row of buildings. The eyes were led naturally from the foreground to the background and back again, revising what first seemed to be passion in the eyes of two young lovers into a shimmering terror of two young people hiding from a massacre. The artist, Jared Rowland, was one of Dr. Kane’s favorites. Rowland had used the leaves of the plant itself to create the hue with which he painted. Whenever possible, Rowland had used the material of his subject in the creation of its image.
He stuffed his things into his travel bag, a couple of suits, toothbrush, shaving kit, a little leather bound book that he took with him everywhere. He jumped into his hybrid and headed for the Oklahoma City airport, which was at least a couple hours drive. He would get there and assess the damage. It would be unimaginable, as it always was. He remembered the Alaskan spill from a few years back. The news had said five-hundred thousand barrels, but it was easily more than a million. Birds covered in crude made the news, but not the plants whose stomata, or pores, were suffocated, leading them to slow, breathless deaths.
It is true, Dr. Kane had explained to a then green Karen, that plants do not have a central nervous system. To talk about pain does not really make sense, but their destruction is inseparable from our pain, so if we cannot talk of their demise as a painful process at least we can talk of how theirs demise is our own. Plants are the distant cousins that unite intelligent, purposed life forms to their unconscious universe. All the parts of this widespread family are in constant conversation through biological processes and physical laws. Kane knew this. Oil, then, was a religious matter. The real biological material of past times laying under ground as potential energy. The world’s own hue from which it could construct new paintings. Or, maybe it had some other purpose, some purpose that a short-sighted humanity had yet to discover. Maybe the bodies of long dead species were destined to become cellphones, laptops, garbage bags, exhaust from the tailpipes of cars. Maybe they were meant for some less human purpose. Maybe they were meant for nothing at all, just the remnants of millions of years that housed nothing but a series of accidents, catastrophes that varied only in degree.
Karen had listened intently, something she no longer feigned to do, before asking him for a report, and handing him the findings. Dr. Kane was no determinist. The report could say whatever they wanted it to. He gathered the real data. Performed the important work. They paid for it. He would let them say whatever they so pleased.