Steve the Carrot, The Entire Thing

Welcome to the first and entirely too long post. Things may become clearer later...but probably not.

Steve the Carrot
“…Lectro…”
“Yo Yo Man!!” Steve’s mouth was on auto while he stared at the collage pinned to the side of his cubicle.
“Excuse me?” Bill paused and looked over into Steve’s cubicle. Brad’s manager, who had been watching him as he spoke shifted his eyes out the window and relaxed into vacancy.
“Sorry, just looking at these figures.” Steve didn’t glance back, just flicked over to two new worksheets and leaned closer to the screen. If his IM account had been up, LectroBrew would have been busted by PostNoBill$.
“Oh, yeah. Well make a note of it. I’ll be back by later.” Brad shrugged slightly at his manager and led him off toward his own office around the glassy bend of the main room.
“Whatever.” Steve’s mouth was back on campus, his eyes on the primary smear of a spreadsheet stretched across his dual monitors…he was widely dispersed this afternoon. Leave here at 5:15 this afternoon, stop by the apartment, head down into the city for Jim’s Beer for Drones. Celebrate all of us actually having jobs this year. Mapping out his schedule didn’t help, his ears and eyes and fingers and head didn’t want to all be here this afternoon. He decided to get a coffee and try to focus.
The cheap coffee bar was hidden out in the reception area, tiny paper cups hidden by a tall tropical plants. Leaning stiff muscles against the warm glass, Steve saw a jungle temporarily lit by a sideways shaft, tall tropical plants hiding arthropods in place of monkeys. Dusty crystal highways gleamed between the leaves, like tiny threads of asphalt on an evening drive. He shifted his right shoulder against the glass, letting tension from a morning of precise mousing twitch itself quietly away. The afternoon sun, warm and ancient against his back, wasted its gilding on the foyer to the lab, which shimmered in the blue-white florescent haze that reminded him of a movie set.
A manager from his section strode by with a cup of coffee, causing Steve to stand up directly under an AC vent trying to put the Texas afternoon blaze so kind to his kinked muscles. The cube farm around the lab might as well be located in Minnesota as far as he was concerned. A temperature differential slithered across his body and rustled the leaves of the plants he was staring at. A shadow dropped through the window and he looked back outside.
Clouds raced over the thinning and ragged edge of the carefully groomed suburban woodland. “Too bad, shag cuts don’t look good on anyone,” he muttered. How long it would take the new subdivision on the other side of the tree strip, with its shaved landscape and odd angular timber growths, to soften back into obscurity? Probably longer than it would take for him to soften and become ragged in the daily tumbling of the office. Lately he had become sensitive to the sound of typing. The lab admin had told him one late night while he was waiting for the last set of measurements from one of the projects that small bursts of typing sounding like the clacking of old-fashioned plastic doll eyes. Now he associated the sound with a vertiginous line of blank secretary dolls blinking in unison, and the late nights started to feel like an episode of The Twilight Zone.
He shook his head and his body wiggled restlessly. “I’m going to take a stroll around the campus and shake the kinks out of my fingers,” he called back to the receptionist just inside the office door. She waved and answered another call.
Once into the formal lobby, with its walls of windows, he began to feel a pressure build. Outside, each blade of grass telegraphed the coming pressure ridges and he felt his sinuses shift in preparation and another part of himself relax. He was thirsty, it was a dry evening and the grass around the poured and sculpted pavement poked stiff needles into the heat.
A blue BMW convertible pulled into the parking lot, radio announcing an upcoming singer from the Houston area in just a few minutes. Steve wondered how it felt to take that deep breath, finger the introduction, and then sing directly into the microphone, pouring out a song into an invisible audience.
Steve changed direction toward the parking lot, pulling out his cell phone as he went. He called the office from the hood of his car, wheezing like an excited child. “Elaine, are you looking across to Bill’s office? Is he in there? Jeff Toulber just pulled in and he’s looking like he had a great weekend. Yes, I know what day it is…you know Jeff. I’m going to knock off early this afternoon. Jeff’ll keep Bill in his office for the next hour or so. Yep, I’ve got my keys and my wallet. Give it an hour, then shut down my computer, okay?” As Elaine gave him the rundown of others who were working tonight, Steve thought about the plants in the lobby, one side perpetually turned toward the window, the other starkly working in the perpetual florescent light.
“So, no meetings to miss and most of the rest of guys pulling shifts into the evening? Good deal. You go home ON TIME. Early if Bill and Jeff knock off. You need the time as much as I do. Yep, I’m heading north…thinking about looking in on the old alma mater. If I see him, I’ll say hi, okay? Bye.”
Steve’s Nissan was sitting in a good corner of the parking lot, away from view of the lab windows and close to the entrance. His radio was tuned in to the same public radio station and the local artist, Jill Henry, was describing her day job. She worked for Parks and Wildlife and was enjoying lots of time alone to concentrate. The mind demands its own space, he thought. He shuffled through some of his meeting notes on the passenger seat, looking for a space to jot her name down.
She threw out a chord, paused in her narrative, and accepted another invitation from the interviewer to sing. Steve was shocked by her voice, broken from the young and cheerful interviewee to the warping yowl of the singer. The change wrested his mind into remembered territory.
In college, after a few too many beers and grade B movies, he had decided to make a battery connecting a circuit through his beer, his head, and some leftover wire. He might have been planning for some static discharge at some of the cuter girls. Everyone thought “Electro-Beerman” was hilarious. He began to wind the wire around his wrist, lecturing about Miller Coils and Bud Atoms like his least favorite Chemistry professor.
A few hours later he had woken up in bed, his wrist wired to a dried-out carrot apparently found in his fridge. The end o f the wire was pressed into his skin and a rusty scrim of blood marked it’s sharp passage on his wrist.
“Damn!,” he shook his wrist, trying to free it and flinging the carrot against the wall. The thud scrapped a new line against his wrist and woke him up. The sight of the carrot, sprouted and dry, suddenly depressed him. He was still taking biology course and both his parents were avid suburban gardeners. He didn’t remember buying vegetables recently and wondered if the depression reflected lingering guilt about the way the semester seemed to be tanking so thoroughly, something he hadn’t shared with his parents the last time they came up. They may have brought home-grown veggies for him and his roommate. His head began to beat in rhythm as their neighbor woke up to “Metal Mania AM” from the college station.
He grabbed the carrot and headed to the kitchen. He found a clean saucer in an upper cabinet, filled it with water and grabbed a knife lying by the sink. He unwound the carrot and lopped the shriveled bottom root from the carrot. A sudden disorientation dropped through him. He barely made it to the hall bathroom three steps away.
It was one of the last nights he had been able to party with the same group he had been hanging with since his freshman year. Several of them graduated the next spring and others fractured out into senior and junior year specialties. His roommate suffered a wild hair mid-year to pledge, was accepted and moved out. Steve himself moved slightly further off-campus into a row of townhomes that was only about 50 percent college students. He had several rowdy weekends to look forward to, but no more Electro-beerman chants. In fact, after his girlfriend moved in, it was more on the line of dinner parties around the pool.
Gradually, though, his dreams were changing. They shifted toward sensation dreams, as if he was having difficulty interfacing with the display behind his eyes. He would dream that his toes and fingers were hungry, that each hair on his body received a different chemical signal, trying to find and locate “colors” that he couldn’t remember. He would wake up kneading the covers and sit up, waiting for his hunger to localize itself back in his stomach.
He began buying natural floral scents for his girlfriend, who had never really been the type to see flowers as anything other than background or tribute. He became allergic to her other perfumes, sometimes having odd bouts of hunger or nausea, depending on the scent.
Steve continued his studies, half-aware of his increasing concentration on areas that were ‘cost-effective’ to study. A few company representatives from further south in the suburbs at the very edge of Houston’s awareness would come up and hold brief seminars or lectures on new opportunities in new communities.
Throughout the dating, studying, engagement, interviewing, and weekends visiting his family, he began filling up the windows in his kitchen with carrots grown from seed and the sprouted tops that floated in shallow glass plates balanced on metal bookends screwed into the frame of his windows. Slight changes in pressure and light surrounding his window frame became part of his consciousness.
One weekend, his fiancé was looking for something appropriately sleek and satiny for the ring bearer’s pillow and dragged him up to a strip of tiny wooden shops not far from campus selling handmade clothing and crafts. They were just on the frontage of a big warehouse complex, the parking lot a sandy overlook with a guardrail at the edge of slope directly down to the feeder of I-45.
Here, while kicking around in the sand outside one store fully of tiny aisles and carefully balanced knick-knacks, Steve noticed a patch of green just off the tiny landscaped area. Tired and hungry, he decided to go sit for awhile in the grass and watch people coming and going. As soon as his hands touched the ground, pressing against it as he levered himself cross-legged, he felt better. The wind, the temperature, the tang of something he couldn’t identify at the back of his throat, it was the perfect spot to release his carrots into the wild. His fiancé, Sherrell, had already told him there would be no “excess greenery” in their new house.
That weekend, after the shops closed and Sherrell went over to her friends’ dorm to lay out her new wedding paraphernalia, Steve drove back to the spot, parking behind the shops on the drive leading up to the warehouse, and smuggled his spade and row of window carrots out into the grass. He set them down in a spot, waited to how it felt, and then began to dig.
He held his fingers against the sides of the holes he had dug for the larger carrots, feeling the soft mix of muddy sand, emended with the last of his potting soil. He planted each one individually, feeling the hole before he set the plant in, and then fed them, for the last time, with a mix of fertilizer and compost he had been working on for the past several months. The carrots seemed to settle, well-feed and comfortable, into the ground. The view was good and Steve concentrated on it and on his memories from earlier, trying to put the slopes and greenery into a breathing pattern both deep and calm. Communication through the emotional variation and electromagnetic interference, the gentle ebb and flow of an entire universe echoing through your head and body while the specific reactions of a patch of vegetables modulated the existing patterns, was conversation incomprehensible. Steve didn’t know if he was receiving carroty impressions or continually flashing back to a night of inebriation, but he believed, especially now as he planted his tiny crop, that he was releasing a community of awareness into the hillside, and that allowed him to believe in an interaction that was not part of any stated or remarked area of his life.
He looked out to the other side of the highway, his face breaking the stream of air that rushed along this slope and contemplated this spot of ground. It was within a few yards of shops and workspaces, tucked back so that you could observe both without interacting with either. The pines edged up along the fence, then stopped at a mow line. For a minute, Steve was concerned about the mow line, but he had been careful to locate his plot in the middle of stand of fence weeds that would probably not be there if the mow line extended this far. A rime of clover and buttercups indicated the edge of the grass line, bordered by the scrub weeds that grow along most east Texas highways, interspersed here with the lupines the shopping center had thrown out to complement the Texana theme. In fact, he had been careful to set the carrots down away from that semi-cultivated area as well.
Once his fiancé had decided they needed to break up because she was going to graduate school “and we don’t want to be tied down while we’re still so much in flux,” Steve had taken the job he’d been offered, moved into his small townhouse and dissolved into his job.
On his way back up toward Huntsville, Steve stopped at a Wal-mart store, buying a cheap metal spoon and two tall glazed-yellow bulb pots.
His memory of the old stores was tame. Last year, the last of the shops closed and it settled down into a sagging sleep against its neighbors. The warehouse had closed in the interim and a giant For Sale sign hung over the carrot patch, which avoided the depredations of deer more or less and of moles and other critters through a corporate defense barrier, since it was not only Steve who gained through awareness. They lost a few members on the edge of the plot, but colonized a few different areas, invading the lupines, the fenceline, and the mow line.
This was now a deer-trampled edge of the Piney Woods. The buildings snoozed against each other or sagged slightly inward and the fence around the overgrown warehouse hadn’t been maintained in the five years since the owners had dissolved into another business venture. His carrots had taken over this patch of earth. He investigated the edges of the patch, trying to get used to the strong feeling of earth around him and a new awareness of the sun and breeze. He picked out a few younger carrots, and went back to the car for the spoon and yellow glazed pots he had stashed in the trunk.
Steve started digging on the edge of the carrot bed, chatting softly about his beautiful and empty garden window over the kitchen and his neighbor who grew corn plants on the back patio.
He took his tiny carrot herd home to his kitchen window. That evening, he brought his new carrots out, arranging them around his tiny glass patio table and stretched himself out under the table, so that the carrot tops were almost touching his cheek. He located Orion and began to listen to the sounds around him, letting the night sky push down through his eyes so that his ears were the only earthbound senses.