The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,46
something for you,” Maureen said, reaching into her pocket. “You said credit was okay.”
“No problem. Let me just phone this in.”
As the nursery manager took a few steps toward the edge of the backyard to use her cellular phone, Maureen worried about the stack of bills that little plastic rectangle would have to produce, and swallowed. She wondered, for the first time in ages, whether the charge would clear. When the nursery manager got off the phone, the transaction apparently complete, Maureen felt a bit like a shoplifter. This ocotillo now belongs to me. The exotic arms of the “burning bush” rose above her from a rough-hewn planter box, each decorated with black barbs arranged in a swirling, candy-cane pattern; it was a beautiful creation from a land with a harsh but practical aesthetic. I would like to think of myself as being pretty and barbed like this plant, a survivor of three-digit temperatures, rescued from greed by muscled Mexicans in freshly starched uniforms. The workers brought in more succulents, including one with cone-shaped bursts of saffron petals, a desert equivalent to Maureen’s departed birds-of-paradise, and a tiny shrub with pastel turquoise branches as delicate as coral. A succulent garden played more to the sunlight than her subtropical garden ever could; la petite rain forest was dark and colorless by comparison.
The workers brought in bags of sand, walking in a line from the truck to the backyard with the bags slung over their shoulders, like Egyptians toiling in some pharaonic project. They took pocketknives from their belts—each one of them had a tool belt—and soon they were ripping the bags open and spreading orange sand and rocks through the backyard, and for a moment longer the patch of ground looked as bleak and barren as Mars.
At the offices of Elysian Systems, Scott Torres was moving the mouse of his computer in subconscious circles, making the white arrow on his screen flutter until he finally clicked and dispatched four words that bounced at the speed of light from his desk to the company mainframe in the basement, and back up to the programmers’ cubicles he could see through the glass and half-open shades of his office. As expected, Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki broke into a smile at the sight of the box that popped up in the lower right-hand corner of her screen, asking, Wanna have lunch???—Robustus. “Robustus” and variations thereof (Robus-tus65, Scotus Robustus) was his screen name on several email and message systems, a Latin nod to his roots in “robust” programming. Charlotte turned away from her screen and looked straight at him through the glass and gave him a groupie-girl smile and a thumbs-up. He discreetly raised his own thumb, then sent her another IM that read, Meet you outside at 1 p.m. This would be his third lunch with Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki in the past month, each beginning with a furtive meeting in the parking lot, because even though programmers were the employees least likely to spend time imagining the secret lives of coworkers, they could not fail to notice the evolving “special friendship” between the boss and his female underling. Scott did not find the round, fashion-challenged Charlotte attractive in any sinful way; he was drawn instead to her callow programmer enthusiasm, her youthful appetite for his old dot-com stories. During her interview she had made it known that she was aware of his small contribution to the early history of the dot-com boom: he was mentioned in the short Wikipedia entry on Sasha “the Big Man” Avakian, and in one or two others. In the last few weeks Scott had taken to plugging his name in several search engines, feeling narcissistic as he did so, and had been somewhat dismayed that the Scott Torres Ford dealership of Salinas, California, generated twenty search hits for every one about Scott Torres the programmer.
Scott had been raised not to worry about leaving a mark on the world. Both his mother and father limited their ambitions to their private universe, to the steaks whose fat sizzled and crackled over charcoal briquettes, a beagle panting on a concrete patio, and the unassailable moral rewards of family safety and health. Escape from work in the strawberry and cabbage fields of California, or from the horizonless hamlets of Maine to the modest affluence of South Whittier, was accomplishment enough. Scott followed this path and was thus content to dedicate himself to solving the mathematical and logical challenges that make computers do magic, and took his greatest