Chapter 2: Angeline
The keys' location is revealed, but they are not in a particularly useful place.
Gratian wasn’t going to find the keys because they were at a location he had no knowledge of, nor did he have any reason to. The keys were sitting in a plastic bowl on a wooden desk in the back room of a former-coffeeshop-turned-office in a neighborhood distant from his current location, his current house, his current workplace, or his current drinking establishments. The office had been purchased by the Northeast Falson Heights Neighborhood Association when Harold Dresbach, local nice guy and coffeeshop impresario, died. They sold the building to the Neighborhood Association for a pittance and an unspoken guarantee that they would never have to step foot in Northeast again.
The keys ended up at the Northeast Falson Heights Neighborhood Association office via Angeline, a person well known to the volunteers who occupied the office. Angeline, Ms. Ange as the neighbors called her, had found a comically heavy key ring in the newly tilled soil where she been planning to plant violet apples, a crop she had never tried before. She had arrived at the Neighborhood Garden with the dawn to get some seedlings in the ground after weeks of treating the soil. Falson’s dirt was different from dirt in other places, so both the plants and their care had unique characteristics. The violet apple, for example, could only grow in the crater where Falson was located. Pitzian scientists were still sorting out what about the soil caused the genetic mutations, but as with so much in the city, violet apples had evolved to be in that particular place, but only under particular chemical conditions.
Ms. Ange had spent too much time training the soil over the past few weeks, carefully sifting, testing, applying chemicals, testing, sifting, to let intruding metals and plastic residues and whatever else might be on those keys contaminate her carefully curated spot. Violet apples were special because they were picky. They needed a very precise mixture of the novel chemicals and minerals that existed in the crater. They appeared naturally on occasion, but so rarely that parents would tell their children to remember their first time seeing the apples in the wild because they might never see them again. Violet apples in the store were ridiculously expensive. That’s why Angeline was going to get them going in the community, do something sweet and special for Northeast Falson Heights, her home from birth to retirement.
The gardening thing was a relatively recent development in Angeline’s life, but the community was not. She was a fixture in the neighborhood. Even while pursuing her education and modest but successful career, she always lived in the neighborhood. She earned her degrees locally, researched locally, and taught courses in ancient Casul military theory, a topic of endless fascination to her but, as it turned out, not to very many students. A reasonable early-retirement pension appeared, she sold an absurdly large library of obscure books no one wanted to read but everyone thought looked good on a bookshelf, and she moved from her childhood home, the only home she had ever known, to a slightly smaller dwelling half a block down the street. She took up gardening. It was peaceful and involved creation, not destruction, so it seemed like a better life than tenure and thinking about war.
Her plants had been common to start, but over the four years since retirement, Angeline had developed a knack for the subtleties, the slight curl of a leaf or the shift in the angle of a shoot slowly speaking to her with greater clarity. She knew how to study, so she studied. She knew how to solve problems, so she reasoned with the soil and learned how to mediate the earth and the greenery.
She was going to have her violet apples.
The young woman sitting at the front desk of the Neighborhood Association office barely acknowledged Ms. Ange, a nod and a “hey” indicating familiarity but little interest.
Angeline had stopped noting the dismissiveness. It was noticed, but not noted.
“Sheila, I found this in the garden.” Her voice betrayed a mild but present sarcastic contempt. “We can’t have people just leaving their junk around. We need to restart the overnight watch. Or something. These seem important, so it’s pretty brilliant to leave them in the dirt.”
Sheila put on her glasses and grabbed a pen. “I’ll make a note for the board. Here, I’ll put them in the back in case someone’s looking.”
“Thanks, Sheila.”
Angeline slowly returned to the garden, a little perturbed. Truthfully, she wasn’t that perturbed, she supposed. All things considered. She went back to the seedlings.
John put the papers back in the envelope and walked to the elevator. The government reject was 23 minutes late. John had shown enough patience and could certainly find something more useful to do with his time.
He took the side stairs, tugging open the industrial door. There was no reason to avoid the main staircase from the collaborative work space to the 2nd floor offices, but John preferred the side stairs, with the echoing, clanging ambiance, metallic smell, gray paint. Sensory verification of the solidity of the constructed world, a reminder of the utility of human intelligence.
He entered his office, little more than a cubicle, but with solid walls that went to the ceiling, which was more than a lot of Consortium members could say. He sat at his workstation, opened his computer, and found the folder labeled “Cow Crap.” He clicked his master workflow spreadsheet, found the row marked “Gratian Waller” and, under the “notes” column typed “flaked. find someone else.”
Gratian’s irritation was greater than his sickness, at this point, though trying to compare the two was a fairly pointless exercise. They lived together in a cruel partnership. What he needed was to get the keys to his office, not sit in an obscure MedAid clinic stuck full of hydrating tubes. Once they had done a quick physical once over, the two nurses had subjected him to an indeterminate number of needles and intravenous tubes and other pokey or otherwise unpleasant experiences before walking him to an absurdly bulky machine on wheels in an adjacent, partitioned room full of other poked people sitting next to other mechanical monstrosities.
He didn’t talk to anyone. Most of the rehabbers in the room looked like their conscious realities existed in some other place, their bodies located in this room merely by happenstance. It was a depressing scene but one that Gratian felt he probably deserved. He knew his body would be okay, but his reputation, whatever was left of it, was likely irreparably harmed. He’d need a new job to replace his new job. Nice work. Fantastic.
Having situated her seedlings just right, having mounded the soil to create a protective dome to disperse moisture, having retested the dirt after placing the crops, having evaluated her work and judged it acceptable, Angeline walked home, past the Neighborhood Association office, and up the winding sidewalk to her building. Feeling a reasonable but not inordinate amount of accomplishment, she started on lunch, nothing fancy but a bit more meat on the sandwich than on a normal day. She had earned that. In a few months, the plants would begin taking shape, but it would be over a year before they bore fruit, bright and vibrant gradations of violet flashing out from the variant’s celebrated, intricate, dark green foliage. They would be beautiful on the prime plot in the garden Angeline had reserved for them. The other gardening neighbors deferred to her claims because of her age, kind personality, sudden and explosive temper, or maybe all three. They allowed her to reserve a spot for her impractical project. People would be glad when they saw the result.
For a moment, pausing while chewing her meatier-than-usual sandwich, Angeline wondered if someone had come looking for the keys. Probably not. She hoped they weren’t having too bad a day. Not her business, though.