YEARS LATER, as the pirates shoved him onto the gangplank, Doctor Odysseus Tyme thought back to the day his father told him plants could talk.

The revelation of consciousness in plants had crashed the hallowed Petri dishes of Biology like a rogue comet – splattering gum agar across the desks and couches of psychologists and social scientists from Tallahassee to Tokyo – smearing their brainpans with blood nutrients, stimulating the growth of brand new thoughts. They’d made a mess of understanding humans. Why not try plants? They were simpler, more basic – weren’t they?

Almost overnight the media was deluged with pseudo-scientific reports on “Lettuce in Love” or “I was a Toxically Shamed Geranium”. One could dip into the mind of a potato discoursing on “Arrested Development in Rocky Soil” or hear why “Real Manure is the Cure” by a panel of tulips. It was a whole new mindscape.

Once scientists turned their computer-ears to the most commonly used plant frequencies they could hold running conversations with any vegetable, moss or tree. “Human Odors and Lunar Cycles” made TIME magazine, as did “The Eco-Advantages of Urinating on Your Bushes”, a fascinating portrayal of exactly how lilacs transformed pee into perfume.

Within months the new research set off an epidemic of suicides among vegetarians. For centuries they had claimed the high moral ground on the assumption that what they ate did not think or feel. They had based this fantasy on the idea that plants didn’t have a central nervous system. But, said the New Science, the spine has to do with locomotion, not thinking or memory. Plants, as it turned out, were suffused with emotion – every cell bathed in an electro-chemical dance of life – just like us. In fact, by the time the full truth came out about how plants entertained emotions and modes of communication beyond the scope of human sensitivity, it was already too late.

Some grant-hungry grad students at the University of Chicago started the uproar in Psycho-Botany when they performed a seemingly bogus experiment on two tanks of brine shrimp. They set the first shrimp tank in the corner of a dormitory kitchen and shielded it with empty egg cartons to baffle all sound. They placed the second shrimp tank on a table 30 centimeters from the stove, fired up a frying pan with hot oil, and sat around in shifts talking about how they were going to fry up the little brine shrimpies and eat them in sandwiches with mayonnaise and onions. Within three days all the shrimp in tank number two were dead.

The political fallout from this cruel experiment earned the grad students an appearance before the student tribunal. They were barred from university sponsored social functions through the influence exerted on the administration by Animal Rights activists who censured the killers for “emotional violence to fellow animals”.

No one has ever been able to reproduce the brine shrimp experiment – it was rumored that some drops of carbon tetrachloride may have found their way into tank number two – and the hoopla might have ended right there if someone hadn’t noticed that the seaweed in tank number two had begun taking on some fire-resistant qualities. Very odd properties in an underwater plant.

This discovery was made by Apollo Tyme, Odysseus’ biological father. Late one night, when his girlfriend had kicked him out of her room because she needed to study for a Sexual Strategy exam, Apollo was having a problem with matches. He’d managed to light his cigarette just fine lounging near the radiator in a back corner of the kitchen. But as he struggled repeatedly to light the burner under an opened can of spaghetti which he had artfully balanced on the finger tips of the stove rings, his matches simply would not ignite. He went through a book of matches, swore, spilled the spaghetti all over the stove, and then noticed the body language of the seaweed hunkering in the tank of dead brine shrimp 30 cm to his right. The seaweed had organized itself into a replica of a hook-and-ladder truck and was emitting some kind of gas. Apollo dashed upstairs and woke up Punky Epstein who was majoring in Molds and Spores.

Apollo never got any credit for his discovery. By the time the reporter from the student newspaper arrived at 11 a.m. he had fallen asleep in a chair near the radiator. Punky filled in some gaps in the story with a few terse hallucinations and the die was cast. Epstein apologized later to Apollo and, to his credit, even offered to retract some of his hallucinations, but Apollo didn’t care. Epstein’s mom had already appeared on national TV taking all the credit for her son’s genius and Apollo, majoring in Women’s Studies, couldn’t imagine how his accidental observations on fire-retardant seaweed could possibly advance his career. Little did he know.

Within one month some red-eyed, long-haired U. of C. undergrads had soldered together an electronic eavesdropping device tuned to the bio-electric frequencies emitted by plants. They named it the “Door”, after their favorite rock band. And suddenly there it was, in all its everyday horror. Plants talking to plants. A brain-shift that made the discovery of fire seem as insignificant as the mass-marketing of granola.

“Do Plants Think?” was the headline in the New York Times. For ten million Americans and 900 million Hindus the angst was enormous. This was a paradigm shift of stupendous proportions. Suddenly one day you woke up and looked out your window and all you saw everywhere were eentsy green “people”.

Eating lettuce became an act of cannibalism. Nobody had yet figured out how to talk to a chicken or a mackerel, but tomatoes and cucumbers were spewing out the raciest details of their lives. You ever wondered what it was like hanging around in a bunch of bananas? Now you knew. You ever wondered what trees do? Now you knew. America was more emotionally immobilized than when the Space Shuttle blew up.

Other, older, cultures took the news in stride. Expensive European restaurants even invented sick little games of talking to your vegetables right at your table before you ate them. Aficionados said it was a more intimate experience than eating live monkey brains in Bangkok.

And then, of course, came the backlash. When one enterprising young journalist pointed out how large the trees grew around cemeteries the Washington Post clamored, “Do Plants Eat Us?” What a question.

Senators, congressmen and pop-scientists choked the airwaves with dippy proclamations and florid nonsense, stoking the engines of publicity and confusing everybody within electronic earshot. And then the draft horses of academia put on their overalls and went to work. Real work. Out of the Petri dishes and back into the bushes they went, knee deep in mud – botanists, zoologists, journalists, and ozone-brained mushroom-eaters – vying with each other, spying on plants, spying on each other, each hoping to nab a breakthrough. It didn’t take long.

After a few brief weeks in the field the gold diggers and sleuths compared tape recordings and mud-splattered notes in stunned disbelief. They triple-checked their data, scoured the facts for any contradictory evidence whatsoever, merged into a Group Mind, and finally issued a preposterous statement to a shaken world:

People don’t grow corn. Corn grows people!

Zowie!

A conspiracy of corn?

Zowie!

Excerpt Two:

Within five minutes of deplaning in Nuku’alofa Shoebridge was hauled away by five 300-pound Tongan cops – detained, indefinitely, for being rude, obnoxious and asking too many stupid questions. He had shot out the plane door onto the rolling staircase into a steamy tropical mist and slipped at the top of the wet metal steps. If Cue Ball hadn’t grabbed him by the neck he would have plowed down 20 passengers. In the terminal he made a bee line for the security police who were standing around in formal gray lava lava skirts leering at the beefy Tongan women waddling from the tarmac toward the ruckus of honking cabs and shouting relatives out on the street. He showed the cops the suspect’s photo, told them he had flown all the way from the States on FBI business, and that he had come to Tonga to arrest an international criminal. They told him to shut up and stand aside until the women passed. He told them there wasn’t a moment to waste and if he had to he would go and ask for help from the King. They told him to shut up and stand aside until the women passed. He said they were interfering with an international investigation and wouldn’t the King like to know about that? 1500 pounds of beady-eyed, sub-equatorial, former-cannibal masculinity stared at him. One of the officers reached out and took the photo. He glanced at the fugitive’s face, looked up at his comrades and tore the print into tiny bits. Another officer picked up Shoebridge, tossed him on his shoulder like a basket of yams, and the five of them marched him off to the police van. Another frantic palange making frantic demands in a kingdom where Time was an idea as abstract as democracy. And anyway, how could they be certain he wasn’t an international terrorist himself, come to contaminate their yam crop or poison the fish?

Scar Face and Cue Ball blamed themselves for not shooting him up with the sedative. Oh well. At least he couldn’t cause any more confusion for now. They shoved their way through the raucous throng of giant brown people selling live pigs and whole watermelons to the travelers deplaning at this, the most handsomely attended island social event – the weekly arrival of the flight from Los Angeles and Honolulu. Cue Ball wanted to buy a live pig just for the novelty of it but Scar Face belayed that idea with one nasty spit. They grabbed a cab. The cabbie had never seen the man in the photo but he did know a good place to buy kava or grass skirts – or even to try out a 300-pound woman if they were interested.

They weren’t.

Their cab surfed over the tops of the pot holes pock-marking the white, crushed coral streets of the tropical port, steering around clots of islanders who materialized through the dust-caked windshield like water buffaloes wearing skirts. The driver took delight in jerking his wheel sideways to scare furtive Chinese or Indians running to and fro from their shops, and he would not stop talking about his cousin who had gone to New Zealand and was making a good living stealing things – TVs, microwaves, all kinds of wonderful things. They pulled over occasionally at a hotel or bar to ask questions and show the photo. It should have been fairly easy to find one white guy with stringy hair wearing pants – not a skirt – in this drowsy outpost of civilization, but 24 hours later when Shoebridge was released from jail smelling of urine and humming Tongan melodies he had learned from the guards it was clear they had lost the trail of their man. No one had seen him. No one had heard of him. He didn’t exist.

Three days later, after a maddening search that took them from the skuzziest beer halls to the Mormon College dormitory, from kava parties in the bush to pig roasts at the estates of the nobles, from fishermen’s shacks reeking of boiled octopus to the frangipani-scented reception room at the Kings Palace, Shoebridge had reverted to sitting in the hotel room rocking like an imbecile, sucking his toes. He refused to believe Rich Monk had outmaneuvered him again. It was time for drastic measures. Time to tap into the Great Unknown. Time to seek help from the spirits.

He donned a lava lava skirt, blackened his hair with burned cork and began walking the beaches at sunset, impersonating a Tongan spirit. He could have fooled any Tongan. All over the island the coconut wireless hummed with the gossip that there was a ghost walking around the beach at dusk wearing a purple skirt printed with huge yellow flowers. His skin was white as the belly of a shark. And, Jesus save us, his hair! Shoebridge had blackened his white hair by smearing it with burned cork. But since he sweated so much, and kept running his fingers back across his scalp to wipe away the perspiration, he had rubbed a handful of white lines through the black cork producing an ungodly effect – black and white zebra-striped hair. It was awful. The cops wouldn’t come within 100 yards of him. The adults pretended not to see him. How else do you deal with a spirit? And more important, how could they make it go away?

The next day at sunset he was standing knee deep in a tide pool watching a purple starfish digest a fish head by extruding its stomach out of its mouth when a young boy came up to him and said, “You must be looking for the palange who lives on the island?” The boy’s mom had told him to say that. It was worth a shot. Maybe this ghost just needed some direction. Maybe he was just waiting for someone to give him the idea to go look for the other man with skin as white as a shark’s belly who came and went from this quiet beach where the villagers simply wanted to spear octopus, eat cheese balls from New Zealand, and complain about their neighbors.

“Yes I am,” said Cedric Shoebridge. “Yes indeed I am.” In four days of asking direct rational questions he had gotten nowhere with these people. Only by painting his hair and acting like a sociopath had he been able to communicate his needs. People must be pretty much the same all over the globe, he concluded. Hit ‘em where they live. Commune with their spirit worlds, inhabit their myths, immerse yourself in the abstractions they carry around inside their heads, and miracles become a daily occurrence. In some places the myths revolve around Democracy and Free Trade. In others it’s lonely ghosts looking for companionship. And who can say which is more accurate or more sane?

For the price of five lollipops the boy confided to him that his cousins on a nearby island group had a rowboat with a sail which they used to fish for grouper at night in the channel. But they also had a barter arrangement with the white man who lived on a seldom-visited atoll to bring him to town every month or so for provisions. Or, when the white man returned from one of his overseas trips, he would send the boy’s cousins a message by coconut wireless – island gossip – and usually, within a day or two, the cousins would come and pick him up on a small beach just a couple hundred yards from here. Sometimes the palange would bring his cousins a ukulele or fishing lures or other great gifts. Did the ghost want to see the beach? It’s just over there.

No he did not.

Shoebridge picked up the hem of his yellow-flowered purple skirt and plowed over the green succulents hunkering just above the rotting debris at the high tide mark as he set a direct course for the police station, cutting through backyards with horses tethered to trees, past gangs of pigs rooting under hibiscus bushes, and pop-eyed children peering over window ledges yelling to their moms that the ghost was walking past the outhouse. There was a great commotion of cops splitting out the back door of the station as Shoebridge approached the front. No one wanted to deal with a ghost. Not even Latu, the chief. But he was the chief. He had to deal with it. He said a prayer to Jesus and planted himself behind the chest-high counter as the purple-skirted, zebra-haired, white-skinned ghost swept through the door. His former-cannibal eyes narrowed to slits. He clenched the machete kept under the counter for emergencies. But wait a minute! This ghost looked familiar somehow, like maybe a dead cousin who had lost 100 pounds. And then when it started ranting about the palange who lived on the island Latu cracked a smile. This was no ghost. It was the stupid palange who had given him $200 to get out of jail the last time they had arrested him for nothing. He was more like a wayward cousin, a boy who drank too much bush beer and lost his temper once in awhile. Oh well. Nothing to worry about. Ha ha ha.

“Why don’t you tell me you looking for the palange who live on the island?” he chuckled. “Sure I know who he is. I take you there. In my boat.” For a small donation to the police charity fund.

click here to email Rich Zubaty: richzubaty@hotmail.com

Back to Index

Forward to What Men Know That Women Don't