Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,14
process by a minor increment we’ll have made major progress and I’ll redeem our rejected lab and Barry will have nothing on me and the many sons will turn back into little boys and Rachel will rest and we will all be able to suffer and heal and suffer and heal and suffer and heal whenever, whenever we need to. Neutrality will be our new pet drug.
UPAS
Hard to say why the mulberry’s Chinese cousin was such a huge hit with British nineteenth-century naturalists—the upas tree, their absolute staple nightmare. Joan what if every time Tom referred to you as “magnificent” I referred to you as “this ineradicable taint of sin, this boundless upas, this all-blasting tree”? That’s Byron.
Jane Eyre tiptoed around “an upas-tree: that demon’s vicinage.”
Darwin’s grandpa Erasmus dubbed it “the hydra-tree of death.”
“She’s a female upas tree,” P. G. Wodehouse wrote about you. “It’s not safe to come near her.”
The problem with upas sap for my purposes is that it works too fast. No “Euphorbia” jokes here, the species Latin is straight toxicaria. The Chinese call it “Seven Up Eight Down Nine Death” because of how many steps you can take before it kills you: seven uphill, eight downhill, or nine on level ground. I’m not interested in that kind of immediacy. We need to stand a chance.
there stands an awesome Upas Tree
lone watchman of a lifeless land.
No bird flies near, no tiger creeps;
alone the whirlwind, wild and black
Pushkin. If a Russian thinks it’s too bleak—the point is that I am the creeping tiger. I want in on the whirlwind. Let me in, tree, you were supposed to be safe. I can’t believe you rolled up your window shade for me. That was a little sweetness in you, and they haven’t installed an ID scanner in the Schermerhorn Extension. I’m going to come to your class.
PEDICULARIS
Your question: What is the relationship between pollen and pistil in Pedicularis’s floral evolution?
My question: What is the relationship between ricin and charcoal in a castor detoxification?
A genus of perennial green-root parasite plants. Broomrape family.
1983, Plitmann and Levin, Society for the Study of Evolution.
Plitmann working out of Jerusalem and Levin in Texas. “Different kinds of cowboys,” your only joke of class. Everyone too nervous to giggle.
The activated charcoal mainly expels the ricin via vomiting. It’s superficial that way, not a binding, just a purging. Rachel wouldn’t be entirely satisfied. She’d fling grave mud at me. What kind of RIP is that.
“The multitude of floral architectures within angiosperms are complex adaptations (or adaptive strategies) insuring the transfer of pollen from a plant to another of the same species, the subsequent growth of the pollen tube in the style, and the fertilization of the ovule.”
Nobody even giggled when Hans couldn’t read “ovule” out loud.
Kugler, 1970; Frankel and Galun, 1977; Faegri and Van der Pijl, 1979; Cruden and Miller-Ward, 1981.
MAPLES
After class Barry couldn’t seem to decide which impulse was stronger: to touch Mishti’s breast or to give Carlo one decisive fingernail scratch across the face that would mar him for a couple of months. He decided to make a comment about Mishti’s molecular chemistry textbook.
“Molecular chemistry!” is what he came up with.
Carlo was wrapping Mishti’s giant shawl around her and he had to make three laps before it stopped.
Barry is hugely excited that Mishti can do chemistry. I think it relieves him of an anxiety he houses about his own inability to do anything at all.
I stood holding this notebook in silence on the grass like a scarecrow.
“You’re here?” Mishti said as if I’d brought her bad news.
“I’ve been hiding in the back.”
Tom joined us. “Joan saw you.”
“I thought Joan doesn’t see.”
“She saw you,” he sulked, “I saw her see you.”
“I’m Barry,” Barry told Tom.
We were all standing in a circle and, if prompted, Barry would have hopped in the middle to dance.
“Carlo,” Carlo shook Barry’s hand.
Barry looked overwhelmed by so many members of his least favorite sex. He had presented himself to Tom and not to Carlo because Tom is as threatening as a wheat stalk. Carlo is as threatening as a six-foot-five dagger sheathed in velvet.
“I’m in the business school,” Carlo went on, “and you’re in Housing, is that right?”
I silently applauded his research and his insult.
“Director of the First Year Area.”
Joan if you had been there would you have supplied the word Associate?
Carlo asked, “And the dean is Mendelson?”
My applause thinned and I started to hear Carlo’s gears clicking. I couldn’t guess why or how the MBA candidate had identified the undergraduate houser, even