Willow Locke - Anarchist Detective

James

James Whitcomb was hard at work in the greenhouse on the roof of the Astor Place brownstone he shared with his mother—carefully tending his plants.

It was a luminous fall afternoon, and the heavy green glass panels refracted the sunlight around him—a steady emerald radiance. The triangular epiphyte scaffolds towered above him, dripping with strange flowers clinging to the bamboo, drawing their sustenance from the air and light.

His latest acquisition was not epiphytic but terrestrial—and the source of his growing consternation. The nitrogen and phosphate composition of his soil mixture was suboptimal, and the PH levels showed the dark soil to be more acidic than he liked. He had acquired a foul smelling bucket of ground fish organs from the market, and was mixing the sticky stuff into the black soil with his bare hands. His horn-rimmed glasses slid down his nose as he worked, and he pushed them up with his shoulder.

In order to neutralize the acidity, he added a scoop of calcium carbonate and a liter of crushed charcoal. He preferred to use his hands to mix soil, despite the foul-smelling fish meal. He liked the way it felt and he experienced a sort of empathy for the plants when he did it, as though his fingers were branching roots. When the PH and nutrient levels were just right, he could almost feel it in his skin—a peculiar tightening. He tested a scoopful for PH in a little beaker—perfect blue on the paper strip indicating true neutral.

It had arrived just yesterday on a cargo ship from Peru. It had cost his mother a fortune to purchase and ship, along with a large volume of its native soil from the banks of the Amazon. He had pried the box apart with a claw hammer, his hands trembling in anticipation. When the plant was revealed he saw it, a single intact blossom,so beautiful it seemed to distort the space around it—a dark miniature universe. Orphidae Chiroptera, the bat orchid. He lifted it now into the trough, breaking up the Amazonian earth and distributing it into his soil mixture. He moved the plant carefully, nervously watching the single iridescent blue-black blossom gently swing. He evened out the soil around the root ball and watered the orchid.

Orphidae Chiroptera was pollinated by a single species, Mormoopidae Noctivagans, the Night Wandering Bat. Over countless millennia the orchid had adapted to its pollinator. The exterior petals formed two down-curving wings, an ornate sepal rose between them with a double pointed crown—a pair of bat ears. The hooded pollinium opened like a triangular mouth, a flash of red like a tongue tracing the pathway to the nectar spur. Mormoopidae Noctivagans fed their young by regurgitating nectar, and the orchid triggered that instinct in the bats, reaching for them, nursing them, calling the adult Noctivagans back to their primal impulses as a flightless pup. For James, this was the true appeal and strangeness of the bat orchid. It was an externalization of the memory of an animal. It was pure, irrational desire made real. He wondered what the human longing to return to childhood would look like as a flower?

He brushed the dark soil off of his hands and reached for his notebook. He began to draw the Orphidae Chiroptera, structuring with pencil and then moving to Chinese ink and brush. The menacing form of the blossom only heightened its beauty, illuminated it by edging it with terror. To look upon something as ephemeral as a flower and glimpse the eternal was truly terrifying. James rendered the blue-black iridescence in watercolor. He struggled with the image of the bat trapped within the abstraction of the flower—his mind kept bridging the shapes together. He resisted the gestalt, concentrating on the components. He realized that the orchid itself was a drawing of a bat, and he was creating a drawing of a drawing—a reflection, doubly reversed.

The sightless thing, over aeons, had made an image of its symbiote. How many millenia more until the flower was an exact image of the bat, instead of an abstraction? The magnitude of evolutionary time engulfed him as he drew. How brief our lives, by comparison? Just a glimpse, a blink of half-waking and falling back into oblivion.

It was a perfect rendering of the orchid, but an odd, cubist rendering of the bat. When he looked at the drawing, he had the feeling of two mirrors facing each other, an infinite recursion. On the facing page he wrote out his new soil formula—the fish meal, the calcium carbonate, the charcoal, and their approximate proportions. He knew that a dissection of the Orphidae Chiroptera blossom could yield a body of research that was certain to be published by the leading journals—the flower was known only by description—but he would not cut up the living flower. He would nurture the plant, pollinate it by hand with a glass rod, let the blossoms flourish. He had owned the plant for just a few hours and it had already become his private treasure.

The storm had passed and now he looked west, watching the sun set behind the giant wedge of the Flatiron building. The spectrum narrowed and red light unfurled across the clouds. The clouds took on an unnatural dark luminance through the green glass. He looked out over the Bowery. Obliquely illuminated in blood red light he saw the odd structure on top of one of the taller tenements. It was like a gigantic metal rose, or an an artichoke, shining in the sanguine light. It must be some sort of sculpture, but why had it been installed on the roof of a tenement? Who would see it there? His curiosity was piqued. Perhaps he would pay a visit to the building one day.