Spiral Read Online Free PDF Page B

his hand. The old Irishman was eighty-six years old, dressed in brown dungarees, a gray sweater, and old white sneakers. During his sixty years at Cornell, Liam had put together one of the most unusual and diverse collections of living fungi on the planet. The Gardens of Decay, as he called them, consisted of ten thousand postage stamp–sized plots of different mycological species laid out on a square grid, a mottled menagerie of yellows, greens, and grays, like farmland seen from thirty thousand feet. They occupied three large custom-built granite-topped tables, each almost nine feet across and weighing half a ton. To count all the species, ticking off one a second, would take hours, a testament to the power and fecundity of evolution.
    Each of the tiny plots was labeled by a pair of letters and a three-digit number. Plot #HV-324 was Hemileia vastatrix , the rust fungus that invaded the British coffee plantations in Ceylon in 1875. Within a few years it decimated the crops and turned England into a nation of tea drinkers. A few rows over was Aspergillus niger , which was used for, among other things, the making of smokable chandoo opium during the height of the opium trade.
    Next to it was Entomophthora muscae , the “fly destroyer” fungus, very tricky to grow in culture. It first invades the nervous system of the common housefly. Somehow—no one knew exactly how— E. muscae commands the fly to crawl to the highest place it can find and die there with its tail pointed skyward. After consuming the fly’s innards for food, E. muscae uses the fly’s lifeless husk as a launching pad, firing billions of spores skyward, each spore another fly massacre in the making.
    Liam dug into one of the plots with his tweezers, uncovering a plastic bottle cap half covered with a grayish growth. He held it up to the light, his hand shaking slightly. The specimen was like most of the fungi in Liam’s gardens: a saprobe, or feeder on the dead. They fed on the fallen, from plants to people, and Liam was expanding their definition of food. With a combination of trial, error, and genetic engineering, he was teaching them to feed on the detritus of modern society, to break down everything from credit cards to corn husks.
    “Pop-pop?” Dylan said.
    Liam looked up at his redheaded nine-year-old great-grandson. “Yes?”
    “What’s the difference between elephants and blueberries?”
    Liam said, “Haven’t a clue.”
    “They’re both blue, except for the elephant. What did Tarzan say when he saw a thousand elephants coming over the hill?”
    “Tell me.”
    “ ‘Here come the elephants.’ What did Jane say when she saw a thousand elephants coming over the hill?”
    “Enlighten me.”
    “She said, ‘Here come the blueberries.’ She was color-blind.”
    They both laughed. Dylan had a thing for elephant jokes. “Pop-pop? You know pretty much everything, right?”
    Liam turned to face him. “I know a few things,” he said.
    “How do you know if a girl is … you know. Interested.”
    Liam raised his eyebrows. “A woman’s smiles are hard to read, for a woman’s secrets are many indeed.”
    “Come on. No rhymes.”
    He put down his tweezers. “Well. Let’s see … How do you know? With your great-grandmother Edith, God rest her, it was simple. It was how she stood. She’d bend her leg, her right leg, so that her foot was on its toe. Then her heel would rotate in small circles. She claimed to find me as attractive as a spotted newt, but her heel said otherwise.”
    “You’re making this up, aren’t you? You’re telling stories.”
    “If I’m lying, I’ll hang in a tree, but her heel twisted for—”
    “—none but me,” Dylan finished, laughing.
    Liam brightened, glad to see Dylan light of heart. Since the car accident with his mom nearly a year before, he’d had a tough time of it, brushing up against death at an age when he should be engaged with grasshoppers and multiplication tables. Liam fretted about