Lullaby

Chapter 27

Imagine if the Chicago fire of 1871 had gone on for six months before anyone noticed. Imagine if the Johnstown flood in 1889 or the 1906 San Francisco earthquake had lasted six months, a year, two years, before anyone paid attention to it.

Building with wood, building on fault lines, building on floodplains, each era creates its own «natural» disasters.

Imagine a flood of dark green in the downtown of any major city, the office and condo towers submerged inch by inch.

Now, here and now, I'm writing from Seattle. A day, a week, a month late. Who knows how far after the fact. The Sarge and me, we're still witch-hunting.

Hedera helixseattle, botanists are calling this new variety of English ivy. One week, maybe the planters around the Olympic Professional Plaza, they looked a little overgrown. The ivy was crowding the pansies. Some vines had rooted into the side of the brick facade and were inching up. No one noticed. It had been raining a lot.

No one noticed until the morning the residents of the Park Senior Living Center found their lobby doors sealed with ivy. That same day, the south wall of the Fremont Theater, brick and concrete three feet thick, it buckled onto a sellout crowd. That same day, part of the underground bus mall caved in.

No one can really say whenHedera helixseattlefirst took root, but you can make a good guess.

Looking through back issues of theSeattle Times,there's an ad in the May 5 Entertainment section. Three columns wide, it says:

Attention Patrons of the Oracle Sushi Palace

The ad says, «If you experience severe rectal itching caused by intestinal parasites, you may be eligible to take part in a class-action lawsuit.» Then it gives a phone number.

Me, here with the Sarge, I call the number.

A man's voice says, «Denton, Daimler and Dick, Attorneys-at-Law.»

And I say, «Oyster?»

I say, «Where are you, you little fuck?»

And the line goes dead.

Here and now, writing this in Seattle, in a diner just outside of the Department of Public Works barricades, a waitress tells the Sarge and me, «They can't kill the ivy now,» and she pours us more coffee. She looks out the window at the walls of green, veined with fat gray vines. She says, «It's the only thing holding that part of town together.»

Inside the net of vines and leaves, the bricks are buckling and shifted. Cracks shatter the concrete. The windows are squeezed until the glass breaks. Door won't open because the frames are so warped. Birds fly in and out of the straight-up green cliffs, eating the ivy seeds, shitting them everywhere. A block away, the streets are canyons of green, the asphalt and sidewalks buried in green.

«The Green Menace,» the newspapers call it. The ivy equivalent of killer bees. The Ivy Inferno.

Silent, unstoppable. The end of civilization in slow motion.

The waitress, she says every time city crews prune the vines, or burn them with flamethrowers, or spray them with poison—even the time they herded in pygmy goats to eat it—the ivy roots spread. The roots collapsed tunnels. They severed underground cables and pipes.

The Sarge dials the number from the sushi ad, again and again, but the line stays dead.

The waitress looks at the fingers of ivy already coming across the street. In another week, she'll be out of a job.

«The National Guard promised us containment,» she says.

She says, «I hear they've got the ivy in Portland now, too. And San Francisco.» She sighs and says, «We're definitely losing this one.»