Nature's Expansion

I still observe people. And while observations have made me something of a shut-in, gone are the days when my solitude defined me (at least in my mind, and perhaps in the minds of others). 

Now, I stay in out of a desire to understand more of the world rather than a desire to insulate myself from it. Where before the four corners of my home defined the edges of my hermetic existence, I live inside no such boundaries now. And I peer from my four corners out into a boundless world.

The world is a cozy one when you can only see a patch of it. 

The mist, in an optical trick, appears thick enough to serve as a wall past which existence ends. And I am continually surprised to see mothers pushing strollers, runners, couples, and children appear as if from beyond the veil and enter the area of my observation for a brief period. An instant, during which they are mine and no one else’s.

But the period is invariably brief: My garden is not one to which anyone would pay any attention and my house is set far enough from the road that only a hazy outline of its form would be visible to people. 

I see them squint sometimes, trying to gain, for themselves, a sense of my home, before they turn away, embarrassed that I might be doing exactly what I often am: observing them as they seek to observe me. Sometimes I see friends walk by, and this presents me with a choice: The first is to simply leave my window, walk through my ornately-detailed and eggshell white wooden doorway, enter my living room, and open my front door, at which point they might notice me and invite me to accompany them to wherever it is they are walking. And I might cheerfully acquiesce. 

The other option hinges more on my mood, and my interest in the observed. It might appeal to me, and I very well might try, to imagine the same things I would if this person—my friend—were entirely unknown to me: where they came from, where they’re going to, the subject matters on which they’re ruminating, the thoughts that occupy them.

A flaw in this plan of penetrating into the minds of those whom I observe is a simple one: it is nearly impossible for me to come up with thoughts or purposes or origins which diverge from my own. And the result of all this is that rather than gain a more nuanced interpretation of those people who walk by my window, I end up perceiving a refracted version of myself, and I stamp such a person with my own image before they walk on; and they walk on, oblivious to the perception just formed of them by the stranger in the window.

I don’t think I’m alone in taking part in this activity, this watching. 

Annabeth, my irksome and near-constant party companion (to my continuous fascination, she believes us to be close friends and seeks me out at any get-together the two of us find ourselves both attending) does this sometimes at a coffee shop down on LaGrande, the boulevard forming the divisor between the more industrial edges of downtown, and the downtown which is more hospitable to life. 

What I have already mentioned—but which I nonetheless feel is worth bringing up again—is the relationship between the downtown which is all glass and concrete and steel, and the downtown which has been thrust into nature, which most earnestly reclaims the land it has lost to the imposition of man. There are city blocks which have succumbed entirely, which remain unused and irrelevant to all those save the homeless and teenagers who creep there to do homeless or teenage things with, or to, each other. 

There are two names for the blocks which have succumbed to nature, favored disparately and dependent on age. 

The young favor ‘nexes’ while the old (myself included) refer to the pools of devastation wrought by nature as ‘oases.’ I remember when people first began to call them that, at a time when a tree growing several feet per day insidiously invaded an office building that my high school friend was working in at the time. Its branches went through windows and wound around computers, pulverizing electrical cords and printers and coffee pots set out for my high school friend and his fellow (accountants? lawyers? consultants? I can’t remember, but I hardly think it matters) accountants.

His company was forced to evacuate the building, and there was a big to-do about who or what should bear the burden of the cost of the office supplies and the lease which his company was forced to abandon. The company’s building insurance—unsurprisingly, since it was a St. Louis, MO-based company, and therefore could not know what life is like here—refused to cover something that should have been, in their view, preventable. 

They simply could not fathom that a tree growing from its roots more than a city block away could spread itself like water and enter a modern office. It did not compute, and they refused even to send a claims agent to assess the damage, since their certainty ruled out the truth of the matter. 
 
That was when Aegis formed. A New Trident-based insurance company which specialized in covering claims brought from damages the cause of which was the voracity of nature. 

It was widely considered to be a tremendous idea, and New Trident’s mayor, a retiring, bespectacled man named Arnold Kempf, attended a ribbon cutting of Aegis’ third branch opening, when it became clear that it was positioning itself to fill an increasingly important business niche in the city. 

The business was formed in the spring and positively exploded in the summer months, drawing economic support from the uber-rich on the far east side of town, which had, as a bloc, attached itself like ivy to a jungle-like residential area adjacent to a city park. 

With the backing of the city’s elites, Aegis was celebrated as a success of the first degree, with much hand-shaking and self-congratulation to go around between Aegis employees and affiliates, the investors in the business, and New Trident political and administrative bodies. 

This was in August. In September, the rains came more fully, and the city was yet again enveloped in clouds. The fog pressed the buildings on all sides, and in this cocoon, this misty womb, the vines came and spread. 

And Aegis, the purported savior of the town, was faced with the first claim it was expected to fill. It paid it. Then, it was given the next. It, too, was paid. But then when a thirty-story skyscraper was abandoned because a tree grew in the lobby and multicolored fungi sprung up from its roots, and a health inspector took one look through the double doors into the foyer and closed the building down as a health hazard, Aegis was faced with a claim that was economically impossible to pay. And on September 22, it filed for bankruptcy and its assets were divvied up among the city’s now-irate technocrats who had been its creditors. 

The month of September is not, relatively speaking, one of the bad months, either. 

In January, the fogs roll in so thickly and the air roils in water vapor so obstinately that you can’t hardly see ten feet in front of you. And it makes little sense to go downtown at all, or else you would risk meeting with a dense undergrowth that did not exist the day before or a rivulet flowing from the second story of a supermarket. (The latter happened to me recently, and I and a crowd of others watched the trickle of water impassively before dispersing; one man, who had some vested interest in the supermarket and resented its transition from functional business into jungle ecosystem, was crying and shouting imprecations at the building, which stood implacable and proudly deaf to his complaints.)

The market owner’s vitriol is rare, though. Because vines forming a latticework of green on windows, and plants impregnating roads and empty lots are accepted. There is little to be gained through resistance, aside from frustration. And weirdly (I don’t know if there is any scientific basis for this phenomenon, but it is assuredly real), the more that nature here is resisted, the stronger the fight that is put up by the undergrowth, until fires rage from human fury and cooling rains are provoked by the same. 

I think it has something to do with imbalance. Daniel thinks it has to do with sin.

 

I don’t know what others think, because it is rarely mentioned, at least not within my earshot. Maybe people believe that even referencing it invokes some mythical force of nature that is hell-bent on destroying some property of the invoker. 
And maybe they’re right to think so.