The Year of the Flood

Toby watches the dead boar through her binoculars. The vultures have been trying to tear it apart, but because of its thick hide, they can only get its eyes and tongue. Toby also notices two liobams—a splice of a lion and sheep—crossing the meadow. The idea to splice the two animals emerged from the desire to “fulfill the lion/lamb friendship prophecy without the first eating the second” (112). Toby realizes that the animals look perfectly gentle, but then the male opens its mouth, and she sees his sharp teeth. Toby thinks of her fellow Gardeners—Pilar, Ren, Adam One—who would have really liked seeing the liobams, and realizes that they are all dead now. She forces herself to stop thinking about them and their fate and instead decides to go downstairs. Toby spends the next couple of hours in what could be called meditation, but Toby calls it a stupor. Sometimes she is overwhelmed with rage at her fate, not understanding why she was spared “out of the countless millions” (113). Toby struggles to believe there’s a reason she survived, but she tells herself that she won’t get anywhere by brooding.

At noon, when it’s hottest, Toby takes a nap on a massage table, resisting the urge to become lethargic. She realizes that her “past is a closed door, and she can’t see any future” (114). Overwhelmed by these thoughts, she considers suicide. To distract herself from her misery, Toby opens the last jar of honey and swallows a spoonful. She remembers how she and Pilar collected honey on the Edencliff Rooftop Garden. She has saved this honey for many years, remembering Pilar’s words that honey doesn’t go bad. Toby recalls every detail of collecting honey, and although she realizes that it was very hard work, in her memory the process is “one of unblemished happiness” (115). Toby gives in to these memories, forcing herself to believe that “such pure joy is still possible” (115).

Toby thinks back to her time spent with the Gardeners. Although she never truly considered herself one of them, at a certain point she stopped thinking about leaving them. She still had nightmares about Blanco torturing her, and others heard her make what the Gardeners called “signals of distress” (116) while asleep.

Adam One noticed that Toby was still struggling to shake the fears from her former life, so he told her that Blanco was in the Painball Arena—a facility for political prisoners and criminals—because he had killed a woman who belonged to the CorpSeCorps. Before being locked in the Painball Arena, which was less an arena and more an enclosed forest, inmates had a choice: They could be spraygunned to death or serve time in the Arena. If they chose the latter, which didn’t happen very often, they were given a Painball gun that shot poisonous paint and were assigned to one of the two teams, Red or Gold.

Women and political prisoners often preferred the spraygun to the Painball Arena, and Toby understood their choice. The Painball forest used to be secret, but after a while CorpSeCorps installed cameras there, and people watched the two teams fight on TV. Sometimes the teams hung the people they killed on the trees or tore out body parts just to intimidate their competitors. Inmates usually didn’t survive longer than a month, but there were some long-term Painballers, and everyone was scared of them. After thinking about Blanco in Painball Arena, Toby felt like she needed a Vigil to soothe herself. After spending the Vigil on her knees, she felt as if it “almost worked” (118).

One day Pilar, or Eve Six, being aware of Toby’s worries, asked Toby if she wanted to learn more about bees and mushrooms. Pilar showed her how to talk to bees so they would know she was a friend, and how to extract honey. Afterward, Pilar took Toby to where the Gardeners grew their mushrooms, explaining that there were three kinds of mushrooms: “Never Poisonous, Employ with Caution and Advice, and Beware” (120). Some of them were used for eating, and some only for medical purposes, like easing one’s Fallow state.

After spending all her free time with Pilar, tending to plants and extracting honey, Toby felt she was finally shedding her old skin.

Although new people kept joining the Gardeners, most of them did not stay long. With time, Toby realized that not asking personal questions about one’s background was an unspoken rule among the Gardeners. Toby wanted to find out more about the people who surrounded her, but she had to restrain herself from asking any questions. For instance, she was curious about Zeb, because she thought he was pretending to be a real Gardener, just as she was. She saw many men like him when she had worked at SecretBurger, and his vigilance suggested he was hiding something. During the day Zeb usually didn’t stay at the Edencliff Rooftop, but came and went. Toby also couldn’t understand the bond between him and Lucerne, who had “pampered Compound wife written all over her” (122).

The only thing that could connect them, to Toby’s mind, was sex, although Toby herself had become increasingly indifferent to it since joining the Gardeners. Once, when she was using the Run-For-Your-Light Treadmill, Mugi the Muscle pulled her off the machine and scuffled her to the floor, landing on top of her and groping under her skirt. But Toby was stronger than Mugi, and she managed to get away from him. When she told Pilar about the incident, Pilar assured Toby that he wouldn’t do it again, and that he’d only done it because “the ancient Australopithecus can come out in all of us” (124).

But one day, when Pilar and Toby were extracting honey, Pilar asked if Toby’s parents were still alive. Taken aback by such a personal question, Toby talked only about her mother, because it was easier. She told Pilar about her mother’s supplement regimen and mysterious disease. Hearing this, Pilar suggested that perhaps Toby’s mother was a guinea pig for the HelthWyzer people, and advised Toby never to take any pills produced by the corporations, no matter how well they were advertised. Toby realized that her mother was treated by doctors who also worked for the Corporations, which was why they didn’t help her. Pilar assured Toby that there were still good doctors, and some of them lived among the Gardeners, such as, Katuro, Surya, Stuart, and Marushka, who all worked in hospitals before joining the Gardeners.

Later the same afternoon, they saw Zeb climbing up the fire escape stairs, with blood coming out of his stomach. He said he had fallen and cut himself, but Toby didn’t believe him. Zeb brought Pilar a fistful of ground meat from SecretBurger, and Pilar seemed very pleased. Even at the sight of blood, Pilar remained composed and calm, and Toby envied her serenity.

Pilar and Toby took Zeb to the Fallows Recovery Hut, which was usually used for Vigils. Rebecca and Katuro joined them to examine Zeb’s wounds. He didn’t have deep punctures, only slashes—the result of a street fight with pleebrats. Pilar instructed Toby to take care of the SecretBurger meat; it was used to grow maggots that were later applied for medical purposes. Pilar described maggot therapy as an ancient way to prevent gangrene.

After sponging Zeb’s wounds with vinegar and rubbing honey on them, Katuro decided to apply the maggots, since “pleebland street-fight glass was notoriously septic” (128). This meant that someone had to stay on a 24-hour “maggot watch” (129), to make sure the maggots didn’t eat healthy flesh. Toby volunteered to stay for the first five hours, and she witnessed many guests arriving to visit Zeb: first Adam One, then Nuala and Lucerne. But Zeb wanted to be alone, so he ordered everyone to leave except Toby, because at least she wasn’t talking.

Pilar took the night shift watching Zeb, Nuala took the morning shift, and Toby stayed with him in the afternoons. Once he began to heal, Toby played chess and dominos with him. During one of their games, Toby wondered whether there was anything going on between Zeb and Nuala, but she didn’t express her thoughts out loud.

As they were setting up for a new game of chess, Zeb asked Toby for favor. Recently Lucerne was having headaches, and he wondered if Toby could give her some medicine. He explained that Lucerne “has been giving [him] a lot of grief” (132) for not being home for long periods, and he could no longer cope with her jealousy.

Toby walked along the pleebland streets, carrying medicinals under her coverall on her way to Lucerne’s apartment to fulfill Zeb’s request. This was her third trip there, and she had her potion with her, which included Willow extract, Valerian, and some poppy. During the previous visits, after giving Lucerne the medicine and putting a cold compress on her forehead, Toby sat by Lucerne’s bedside and listened to her complaints. This was unusual because the Gardeners were expected to refrain from telling others about their personal problems. These visits made Toby even more sure that Lucerne was an imposter, since “Toby could tell a sham when she saw one, being a sham herself” (135).

While Toby hurried to Lucerne’s apartment, she recalled everything the woman had told her during previous visits. Lucerne often complained about the Gardeners and their lifestyle, calling them dreamers, but she mostly whined about Zeb not being the man she thought he was. Lucerne said that no matter how much the Gardeners deprived themselves of even basic material necessities and food, it wouldn’t really change anything. She also felt like the Gardeners looked down on her because she had run away from her husband to live with Zeb. Toby thought the only reason other Gardeners might resent Lucerne was her sloppy work and laziness, not her former life. This was mainly because the Gardeners didn’t believe in marriage certificates, and when a couple wanted to get married, they just had to perform a simple ritual of exchanging green leaves and jumping over the fire. If they wanted a divorce, they exchanged dry twigs and jumped over a heap of cold ashes.

Yet during Toby’s visits, Lucerne constantly complained that Zeb never invited her to do this simple ceremony. She thought that in this way, he was “shirking his responsibility” (138). Instead of telling Lucerne her opinion, Toby suggested that this was something she should ask Zeb directly.

Toby shares how Lucerne and Zeb met, recounting what Lucerne had told her with a sarcastic tone. The two met at the AnooYoo Spa-in-the-Park, where Lucerne was getting herself “resurfaced” and where Zeb worked as a gardener. On the day they met, Lucerne woke at dawn and walked outside because she loved the early morning colors and because she was restless. In those days, she suffered from a constant lack of attention from her husband, who was always working and neglected her, so she had felt as if “her sensual nature was being starved to death” (139).

Lucerne was contemplating a separation from her husband when she saw Zeb planting a lumirose bush. Zeb saw her too, and since she was wearing only a loosely-tight pink kimono, he immediately felt attracted to her. When Lucerne approached and asked him about the rose bushes, she suddenly recognized Zeb: She had seen him working at HelthWyzer. He told her that she was mistaken and distracted her with a passionate kiss. He then laid her down on the lawn and undid her kimono; Lucerne described what followed as a “high-speed collision” (141).

Later on, when they were already living together, Zeb admitted that he had worked at HelthWyzer, but he had to leave it in a hurry. Zeb asked Lucerne not to reveal this part of his biography to anyone, and she hadn’t, until now.

After several passionate meet-ups with Zeb first in the Spa, and then in the pleeb-lands, Lucerne left her husband, and she, Ren, and Zeb joined the Gardeners, since Zeb told her that “he’d been a Gardener all along” (142).

Toby concluded that Zeb was forced to take Lucerne with him to ensure she wouldn’t report on him, since he was probably an ex-Corps on the run. Toby wondered whether Lucerne thought her former husband would look for her, worrying that this trail might lead CorpSeCorps to Toby herself, but Lucerne assured her that he didn’t care about her and Ren.

All these thoughts ran through Toby’s head as she walked to Lucerne’s apartment for the third time, but when she was just two blocks away, she encountered a street fight. Eight-year-old kids were attacking each other, but when they saw Toby, they shifted their attention to her, getting ready to assault. Toby braced herself and prepared to fight back, but suddenly they all started running away, as if they’d seen something horrifying. When Toby turned her head, she saw the reason for their fear: Blanco was walking across the street. Although she was filled with dread, she hoped that perhaps he hadn’t noticed her yet, so she turned around and walked away as fast as she could. When Toby reached Lucerne’s apartment, she realized this was the first time she was happy to be there.