Bolting
“I really think the media is blowing it out of proportion. This isn’t a new thing you know?” Petra was working on cracking the formidable locks on the door to the old woman’s apartment. She let out a sigh, the vibrating lock pick had failed, so she rummaged in her many pockets for a different tool.
She went on: “I mean, this has always happened in big cities. People get so emotional, bent out of shape about it. And, you know, I get it!” The balloon on the inflatable lock pick let out a sharp pop. Petra’s dark eyes sparkled with delight. She was very good at picking locks. Probably one of the best. And yet, she was also far too cool to act like what she’d done was a big deal. With a deliberate and professional casualness she went on with her story.
“I get it, I really do! The idea of dying alone is terrifying. The idea of dying alone, no one noticing.” She turned the handle in the door. It clicked.
“The world going on without you?” She pushed, then stood, tucking the tool back into her pocket. She put her shoulder to the door and shoved.
“It’s all distilled for us in these cases.” The door opened to darkness and dust.
The rotten smell coming from the apartment had been an apparition in the hall, impossible to pinpoint or rule out as a figment of your imagination. But, the neighbors noticed. They noticed how the smell would seem to change location and strength. They noticed how it was so much worse when heat index warnings kept everyone inside. But now? The seal of the door broken, all bets were off. The odor was real, pungent, corporal: death.
The air from the dark apartment was cool, heavy with stillness. When I first started this job the smell of a decaying human corpse would have been all that I noticed. So overwhelming and distinct. But, from experience, I knew to expect other scents, the staleness of food. The very particular smell of a neglected fish tank. This time there was something else: something verdant and a little damp, a green smell.
Petra was looking for a light switch just inside the door. The space was lit by cracks of light filled with dust motes that fell from drawn curtains. The old woman was on the couch, a colorful crocheted blanket drawn up over her too small to really cover her. Her little frail body was curled up. I hoped she didn’t die painfully.
I took in the rest of the room, my eyes now adjusting to the light. A pleasant little space. Photos of the woman and a man, presumably her husband, told a story of travel: There they were at the grand canyon, on a small sailboat, at a cafe somewhere that felt European. Not all of the photos had been hung up, there were more empty frames and prints in a pile on a shelf just below. This seemed like a recent project of the deceased. One she had abandoned. The photo on the top of the pile waiting to be framed was a large print of just the man holding a very unhappy looking tabby cat kissing it tenderly on its head.
He had to be dead, her husband. That’s why there was no one to notice when she vanished too. We had both fallen silent for a bit. Working for a morgue can make you callous and flippant in the presence of the deceased– but there was something about the stillness of these kinds of rooms, where a person had died alone that made that impossible. Even Petra couldn’t continue her lecture.
“Let’s look around.” I said in a hushed voice. “Then we’ll start packing up.” By which I meant, the dead woman.
We walked around as if in an art gallery, not touching anything, taking in all of the details of the well lived-in space. Two desks, one with a computer that had been used recently, the other mostly empty with an older and very dusty laptop, the closet which contained mostly small clothes that would fit the old woman, but in the back there was also a single moth-eaten men’s suit. Prescription pill bottles, most very recent, there were a great many.
And so many books. Shelves lined every wall, some custom built to go over the doors, and even under the raised bed. Many were on physics, some on education.
“Hey where do you think this goes?” Called Petera from the next room. She was investigating a door just off of the living room. It was down a little three-step flight of steps.
“Probably just laundry or storage.” I said. Yet, Petra has never met a door she didn’t want to open, and this one wasn’t even locked. She opened it, and the apartment filled with light. On the other side was another world: the bright midday sun, a vast beautiful garden.
The smell of death vanished beneath the rich scents of soil and grass, pollen and leaves. The greenery, dense and deep, butterflies and bees alighted on bright blossoms, vines swayed lazily in a breeze.
The effect of opening such a door was of a magic trick. Like finding a portal– for a moment, squinting I wondered lazily if some absent-minded angel of death, come to collect the old woman’s soul, had forgotten to close the way back to Heaven.
“Woah-” Said Petra,who almost never is surprised or impressed by anything.
My brain, now catching up with my imagination, I said. “I didn’t know this unit had a greenhouse.” As if I’d even bothered to check about such a thing. As if huge greenhouses were typical things you found in city apartments. But, it made a lot more sense than a portal to Heaven.
We were on the top floor, so there could have been a terrace on the back of the building we didn’t notice when entering. It struck me what a brilliant idea it was to have your own garden in the city. Fresh vegetables were something of a luxury. But, even if I had a greenhouse of my own I don’t think I know where to start when it came to growing things.
I remember when my mother put the stem of a lettuce plant in a dish of water on our windowsill. This was in one of our many miserable little apartments, shortly after our second migration, in the days of the 4th pandemic. The apartment was in one of the machine-printed buildings with lumpy striped walls and mysterious drafts.
We had just started to settle in, though dad kept on saying how we’d “find something better soon” – we all lived in that one room and though no one would say it, we knew we were lucky. The borders had closed soon after we’d made it in. Since my father was a doctor we still might have gotten through after– if we ever made it far up enough in the line to speak to anyone, if that person would even believe us and not just take one look at our skin color and send us away.
There would be a border guard on our third migration that refused to believe my father was a real doctor. It enraged him. By then we were old hands and moving and dealing with officials. My father had said “If you won’t believe in medicine you may instead believe in this.” and bribed the man who was all too happy to take it. Fortunately, he didn’t notice the utter contempt in my father’s eyes as he handed over the money we’d saved for our deposit.
But, on that day when my mother put the lettuce stalk in the dish of water, explaining to me how we could grow more, I think we still had a lot more hope as a family. My mother said that the trick of re-growing lettuce so you could eat it twice had “gone viral” when she was in college.
Indeed the lettuce plant did grow. Remarkably fast. In days there were a cluster of leaves emerging from the heart. Soon they grew tall and pale leaning towards the light of the window.
But, the regrown lettuce, fed on only water, and what little light made it between the 3D printed shelters was nothing like the head that we’d bought in the store. That plant had been deep green and sturdy. This new incarnation, for it seemed the plant refused to die, put out a web of gossamer translucent roots into the water. The leaves were white, starved for sunlight, thin, unnaturally long and ghostly. I kept expecting it to die, but it went on growing as my mother religiously kept the water dish full.
“Doesn't it need dirt?” I asked my mother, gently touching the long white leaves.
“Probably that would be better. But we don’t have any soil so there is nowhere for it to put down its roots.”
I was hurt when I came home to discover that my parents decided that we should eat it. It seemed disrespectful to its valiant effort at survival.
“Lettuce is an annual. It doesn't make a good house plant. Anyway these conditions aren’t good enough for it to bolt.”
“Bolt? Like run away?”
“No, that’s just what you call it when an annual goes to seed. But store bought plants never produce usable seeds. If we don’t eat it it will just die and go to waste.”
I remember the taste of those leaves, insubstantial, like water. Looking back I’m certain we also had to eat it that day because there was little else for dinner. And we’d reached the point when fresh vegetables were beyond our means, except perhaps on holidays.
“That wasn’t exactly incredible.” Said my father of the re-grown lettuce. “But we’ll all find something better soon!”
“Mom, do you think when a lettuce regrows like that, is it a new plant? Or is it still the same plant that grew in a field somewhere and had sunlight?”
“Well, that’s a very interesting question!” Said my mother laughing. “I don’t know.”
“Our daughter is so smart.” Said my father pinching my cheek in the way that always made me angry but that also secretly I loved.
I wondered if the little plant could remember the way that it was before, when it was green and strong. When it could have bolted away, producing its own strange flowers, its own strange little seeds, even if they were seeds that everyone said could never grow.
It must have, right? Why else would it have even made the effort?
Shaking off the memory I looked more closely at the dead woman’s garden. On closer inspection it had gone a little feral. Weeds packed the raised beds. A dripping sprinkler system explained why all of the plants weren’t simply dead.
“Someone should take care of this.” I said.
“I’m certain someone will. Though, my money’s on this getting converted to an extra bedroom.” Said Petra.
“It’d make a terrible bedroom. It has too many windows. It would be freezing in winter.” I felt the need to defend this old woman’s project. But then, something caught my eye: “Look, Petra! Bolting lettuce!”
“It’s gone to seed.” I said, looking at the long browning stem that rose from the rosette of familiar dark green lettuce leaves.
“I didn’t know you were such a gardener.”
I’ve never stolen anything from our “clients” homes. But, that day I took a few of the seeds from that lettuce plant. I hoped that the old woman wouldn’t mind. And what does it matter? They will never grow anyway.
