combusted on them. And called it the costume’s fault.
Anybody should punch anybody in the face with beauty, at any time, without getting punched back by a penis. I want Carrie to be as unbearably saturated in herself as she is, and then to fear no retribution from the less saturated. To thank Associate Director Barry Estlin for his advice about the laundry services in Furnald Hall and to leave that conversation knowing the conversation has ended.
You’ll use the word harmless. I’ll get back to my work.
CASTOR
The castor bean plant is getting closer because one seed will kill you but its oil will soften your stool. That’s the kind of harm-unharm pairing I want. Imagine if I could coat a seed in its own oil, such that right before you die you expel the entire contents of your bowels, emptying yourself wholesale, actually emancipating yourself. Imagine how light and speedy you’d feel in the afterlife. And how hungry. You’d spend eternity ready for lunch and your family would develop a mortal dread of diarrhea, a symptom of their grief that would last the rest of their lives, until they too took the oil-coated bean. Finally you’d all be light and speedy, all together.
Ricin, the parent toxin, needs to be expelled quickly or not fully metabolized. If you swallowed the bean without chewing, for instance, you’d probably make it. Or if you chewed and I pumped your stomach within two hours. If you don’t die in three to five days, you live. Even inside the bean itself there’s a good cop bad cop: the ricin protein is a strong cytotoxin but a weak hemagglutinin, and the Ricinus toxin (also in there) is a weak cytotoxin and a strong hemagglutinin. The Ricinus can’t penetrate your intestinal wall, but the ricin can. It seems everything wants to be very near to its opposite. I picture Ricin and Ricinus as twins, as Romulus and Remus, Romulus who will eventually kill Remus but who for now lies beside him, cozy and sucking from the teats of a she-wolf. That’s the way to prosper, spooning someone who represents a total otherness. What a relief. Every morning you skip the mirror and look instead right into the eyes of your perfect antithesis. Then, thank you so much, some breakfast.
Ricin is six thousand times more poisonous than cyanide and twelve thousand times more than rattlesnake venom. The seeds look like small round zebras and the flowers look like Elmo’s head and they’re the most deadly seed on earth. You wouldn’t believe how attractive the whole plant can be, forty feet tall and its leaves star shaped. Let us pity the Bulgarian communist defector (can you believe his name was as cute as Georgi) who got murdered by a ricin-tipped umbrella. He was just waiting for a bus on Waterloo Bridge. He didn’t get any of the pleasure of the striped seeds, the fluffy flowers, the poison went via pellet right into the back of his thigh (the guy with the umbrella-gun said “Sorry” before running away) and Georgi thought nothing of it until he lay in the hospital dying.
The plant’s family name is sardonically Euphorbia. The “b” snuck in as a hidden warning. I’ve stroked castor plants in the Brooklyn and New York Botanical Gardens, in the Conservatory Garden on 105th Street, in the Bronx Zoo. The bean can be detoxified by boiling, but that’s like disqualifying the toxin in advance. If you’re in the disqualifying game for, say, farming reasons, squeezing the boiled seed releases the oil, and the remaining hulls can be used in pressed-cake form for animal feed (sheep can withstand 10 percent castor bean meal in their rations without any ill effect). In humans, the detoxified bean can be used against leprosy, syphilis, boils, carbuncles and bunions and corns, warts, inflammation of the middle ear, toenail fungus, cysts. Castor oil in the eyes soothes membranes irritated by dust. Women in countries more imaginative than our own have traditionally lined the inside of the vagina with castor oil for birth control. But what about a woman who eats the whole bean, unboiled, and then needs to be saved? How do we boil the bean inside her?
The lab’s two giant Zanzibar castor seeds look like the fanciest ladybugs, I love them, and I’m planting them tonight.
TOM
May Tom Ottaway never penetrate me again but I rest a lifelong heartfelt appreciation upon his head, his gentle head, a head I genuinely adore.
“Well Nell,” he said as I climbed up