The Catalyst
by David
Hagerty
Carrie awoke to find a low, gray cloud hovering over
her town and a
thick ash covering her garden. Since her retirement, she’d spent many hours a
day watering, weeding, fertilizing, and pruning it. As a widow with no
children, she diverted her motherly impulses toward her plants. She worried
that the ash—which felt tacky and smelled of ammonia—would damage the leaves,
so she sponged them clean and cleared the debris from around the roots.
She assumed the ash emanated from the refinery, which
occupied half
the city’s land mass, with smoke stacks several times the height of the tallest
building. Locals could ignore occasional flaring, when the chimneys lit up like
blow torches, but not this belching of contaminant. It resembled nothing they’d
seen before, and it left an acrid odor long after the ocean breezes should have
cleansed the air.
Still, officials made no declarations that day.
The refinery put
out no announcement, nor the mayor’s office. Carrie checked with the city
police and the Central Coast Air Management District, but neither offered any
information beyond what she knew already: the streets were covered in this dense, vaporous sludge. The
regulators acted inured to the secretions
of these industrial beasts, which
dotted the coastline like dormant volcanoes.
That evening brought the most brilliant sunset anyone
could
remember, a kaleidoscope of hues blurring from orange to red to purple.
People crowded the
beaches to record it with their cameras and cell phones. Carrie watched the show
from the porch of her bungalow, gossiping with her neighbors, Bill and Sidney.
“Probably just the ash,” said Bill, an
aging hippie with a biker’s
handlebar moustache and a gray ponytail. He read the news each day on his front
porch while enjoying a coffee and a smoke, but the local paper gave no
explanation for the release.
“That’s no smog,” Sid said. “It’s
toxic!” She held up a bare arm,
which was speckled with dust.
“If you buy a house near the airport,”
Bill said, “you can’t
complain about plane noise.”
Carrie had known them since she moved into town a dozen
years
before. Although they bickered frequently, they were always warm and kind to
her. This time, Carrie sensed a deeper acrimony. Before he retired, Bill
sometimes fit pipe for the refinery. Sid kidded she never forgave him for his
complicity.
The next day brought no new discharges, yet downtown
Carrie
overheard people talking about it as if an earthquake had shaken their
foundations and cracked their windows. They speculated about what was in the
sludge, which was so thick that no broom or hose could remove it from their
cars and front porches. Was it safe to touch? To breathe? Should they bag it
for the trash man or haul it to the hazardous waste facility?
Finally, two days after the extrusion, the city council
put out a
statement assuring residents that the release was merely a “catalyst” no more
harmful to human health than steam. As a
“precaution,” it recommended that citizens refrain from eating foods produced
by their gardens.
Carrie resisted the advice. Her front yard contained
flowering
natives, like yarrow and wild lilac and Santa Barbara daisy, which held up
under the heavy ash. However, in back she grew an array of vegetables,
including squash and peppers more flavorful than anything from the supermarket,
plus fragrant mediterranean herbs (basil, rosemary, sage), which thrived in
NorCal. Most of the edibles had already blossomed, and it was too late into
spring to replace them. She refused to waste their produce because of some air
pollution, so she carried the potted ones, the tomato stalks and budding beans,
into the house as protection against future discharges.
If the town’s leaders hoped locals would quickly
forget, they had
to reassess a few days later when hundreds of citizens attended a council
meeting to question, complain, and speculate about what had fallen upon them.
Carrie attended in hopes of learning something more definitive about the soil
contamination. The mayor again assured everyone that their neighbors at the
refinery would have disclosed any hazards created by the discharge.
“The refinery has been here since the city’s
founding,” Mayor
McBride said. “Over a hundred years. Longer than any of us have been alive.”
“Or will be if this acid rain keeps up,”
yelled Stan Smith, a local
restauranteur who’d closed his outdoor seating when the ash stained his patio
an off-putting gray.
“Many of our own neighbors work there,”
Mayor McBride said.
“You mean your campaign contributors,”
Smith said.
Although no one from the refinery attended the meeting,
the mayor
said it had “kindly” offered a free car wash to every resident who requested it
and had donated a ton (literally) of topsoil to replace that in their gardens.
His defense sounded genuine—except McBride worked as a realtor and guarded
against any scandal that could harm housing prices.
“What about the plants?” Carrie asked.
“What about the people!” Smith shouted.
Rather than answer either question, the mayor called
on other
speakers, then repeated the same weak assurances. In such a small town, the
refinery possessed more clout than all the residents combined. However,
frequent coughing from the audience interrupted the debate—whether genuine or
put on, Carrie couldn’t tell.
That night, after she returned home, Carrie noticed
her squash
blossoms had turned gray. Most of her other plants struggled on, but several
had withered. She harvested what produce she could and pruned the remaining
stems as she would before winter. From a few she took clippings to place in the
sill of her window, hoping to coax some new roots.
The next day, Carrie overheard people at the grocery
and the
pharmacy comparing new signs of illness: fatigue and forgetfulness. They
described aches in their joints and difficulty standing up straight. Since all
these symptoms were invisible and unmeasurable, she ascribed them to fear and anxiety,
most likely psychosomatic.
Still, when Carrie monitored herself, she noted more
trouble
sleeping through the night, more stiffness while bending in her garden—as if
she had suddenly grown old. In her later years, she’d maintained her health
with daily walking, yet lately she felt short of breath. Probably just a
side-effect of listening to so much hypochondria.
However, she considered herself a scientist as well.
She’d read
many books on botany and horticulture. Instead of fretting, she filled a mason
jar with some dirt from her yard and sent it to a lab that would analyze
anyone’s topsoil for a small fee.
While she waited patiently for the results, other residents
grew
restless. They wrote angry and accusatory letters to the newspaper. They posted
long, rambling screeds online about their new maladies. They marched outside
the refinery, with picket signs such as “Can the Catalyst” and “Stop Purple
Rain.”
The company remained quiet, keeping its gates locked
and its lights
low. In fact, the facility appeared to have shut down. Not even the thin smoke
it usually produced escaped its chimneys. Only a few unmarked panel vans
occupied its parking lots, and other than the guards at the front gate, no
workers appeared inside.
Late one night, someone breached the fence and sprayed
painted a
single word across a storage tank in neon orange: Bio-hazard. The next day, the
local paper reported that guards had detained two men at the entrance who
impersonated workers. Refinery officials said that they planned to sabotage the
plant, as though amateurs could sleuth out the weak spot in a huge tangle of
pipes controlled by PhDs.
Finally, the company posted a statement at its gateway
in large
print.
“We recognize the distress that a recent emission
has caused this
community and regret any inconvenience. However, as scientists, we can assure
our neighbors that the discharge poses no threat to human health. We are proud
of our safety record. Thus, we pledge to inform local officials and educate
local citizens about the operations of this facility.”
Bill shrugged it off. “What did people expect,
a signed
confession?”
“How about an apology,” Sid said. “A
mea culpa. An act of
contrition?”
Other townspeople echoed her skepticism. A small mob
formed a human
fence to block the entrance to the refinery. They demanded a full accounting,
opposed all operations until the company heads spoke to them. Police in plastic
shields and latex gloves pushed them back off the streets with batons, but the
next morning they returned and lay down in the driveway. This time, officers
carted them away in barred vans.
Carrie continued her rational analysis, monitoring
her symptoms
each day and recording them in a journal. She noted more difficulty hearing low
sounds or reading small print, plus a light headedness when she stood too
quickly, and a sour taste on her tongue that no mouthwash could relieve.
Nothing she could quantify, but harder to dismiss.
All the while she tended her plants, which proved more
resilient.
Those she’d cut back quickly showed new growth. Even the squash blossoms, which
appeared dead only a few weeks before, had sprouted new leaves and blooms. If
anything, the emission stimulated them. The tomatoes had gained three inches,
the peas exhibited new buds, the flowers looked more colorful. Instead of the
pale yellow they usually produced, her marigolds tinged purple, like the stems
sold by florists that had been soaked in food dye. Carrie examined the petals
closely but saw no other variance from their usual shape, size, or texture. Even
their sweet smell remained the same, suggesting the “acid rain,” as Smith
termed it, contained only some harmless chemicals.
At last, the soil sample came back. The envelope looked
thinner
than she expected, with only a single sheet of paper inside. It included a
short analysis of the chemical content, the nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen and
oxygen, which measured typical for the region. Yet in the section marked
contaminants, the lab listed one: unidentified substance.
What did that mean? In all her years of gardening,
the lab had
never failed to isolate a component. Was it some element not included on the
periodic table? Some new synthetic compound? And did that explain the sudden
rebirth of her plants?
Regardless, the town withered. The stores along Main
Street
emptied. Some hung up signs: closed due to illness. The parks sat vacant except
for a few dogs running free off leash, as though their owners were too fatigued
to walk them.
Carrie also noted her own difficulty summoning the
energy to stand
or eat much less garden or walk, as though she were aging prematurely. She
charted how much activity she could tolerate. Over the span of several weeks,
the average fell from ten hours per day to eight, then five. It was all she
could do to feed and care for herself and her houseplants.
On a particularly bad morning, as she was sitting in
a brain fog
staring at the stems she’d left on the windowsill, she noticed a profusion of
new roots so thick and dense they pressed against the walls of the glass,
dangling like the tentacles of a jellyfish.
She removed one stem to examine it more closely. The
roots felt not
only wet but slick and rubbery. When she bent them, instead of breaking, they
flexed. As a test, she tried to pull one loose but failed—whether due to their
strength or her weakness, she couldn’t tell.
Which gave her an idea.
She placed the stem in a pot of water on the stove.
Maybe if she
distilled it to a tea, she could capture some of its resilience. She watched
the liquid come to a roiling boil, but the root did not shrivel under the heat.
Instead, it colored the water a brilliant, phosphorescent green, a tint so
bright that Carrie would have assumed it was unnatural had she not known its
origin.
She waited anxiously for the brew to cool, anticipating
it would
taste bitter and earthy, like black tea. Instead, her first sip reminded her of
ginger, with a spicy sweetness that tingled her tongue. Shortly, her cheeks
flushed and her belly warmed far in excess of the small dose she’d ingested.
Somehow, that plant had not only cleansed the contaminant but transformed it
into nourishment.
By the time she finished the entire cup, she felt more
energized
than she had in years.
Each morning for a week, she brewed more tea from her
new stems,
which could be reused half a dozen times before they failed to yield the same
flavor. Meanwhile, she charted her health in the journal. Her activity not only
rebounded but exceeded that before the ashy release. It was as though the tea
could reverse the new signs of aging. She gardened for hours without
breaks and walked for miles.
Downtown, the streets remained empty, and few stores
had reopened.
The five-and-dime stayed locked and dark. The hardware store hung out a for
rent sign. She heard no cars passing, smelled no food cooking, not even at Stan
Smith’s diner, which usually served from 6:00 a.m. to midnight. Even the
clanging trains that carried goods from the refinery seemed less frequent.
Nature reacted the opposite. In untended gardens and
open spaces
across town, bees buzzed, hummingbirds hovered, and insects abounded. The
plants had regenerated without any nourishment from their owners, despite the
dry heat of summer. And the smell was astonishing!—of rosemary and marigold and
hydrangea—as though every species had bloomed at once.
As people moved out, animals moved back in. Deer descended
from the
hillsides to nibble on private yards. Skunks and possums, which previously
appeared mostly as roadkill, moved through the city streets during daylight.
Carrie even found prints from a mountain lion.
She returned from her loop feeling optimistic about
nature’s
resilience—until she saw Bill and Sid sitting motionless on their front porch.
She waved, but they only nodded in response. Even at rest, both looked
exhausted.
“How are you?” she asked.
“We’re dying,” Sid said.
Bill
swatted her playfully.
“I think we got a bug. Laid us both out.”
Their skin looked papery, their eyes unfocused, their
faces gaunt.
A pulse of guilt pounded inside Carrie, accusing her of neglecting her friends.
She thought of offering up her home brew but hesitated, not wanting to pull
them into her experiment. Wouldn’t that be unethical? No. Her treatment was
therapeutic.
“I have something that might help,” Carrie
said and retrieved a jar
of her home brew. Briefly, she explained the elixir it had been for her.
Sid studied the green liquid skeptically. “What
is it?”
“Don’t worry,” Carrie said. “It’s
all natural. From my garden.”
Bill sipped it, then smiled at Sid. “It tastes
good—like those
energy drinks, but better.”
Within minutes, the color returned to his face and
the strength to
his posture.
“You should sell that,” Bill said. “You
could charge more per ounce
than pot.”
Yet Carrie didn’t know enough about how the concoction
worked. Did
only one plant yield these results, or would any stem? She needed to test it.
For the next week, she brewed tea from several different
plants,
which all produced the same vibrant
water. To her they tasted similar, of ginger and honey, but with a tangy
finish. It had to be the catalyst.
Heartened, she tried to contact a rep from the refinery.
She called their
P.R. office but reached only a voicemail. When she emailed them, she received
only an automated reply. Early one morning, before the few remaining protestors
arrived, she approached the gate with a bottle of her tea, yet the guards
turned her away as though she were a terrorist bearing poison.
Finally, an employee who declined to identify himself
called. “You
should dispose of that,” he said, and hung up.
Cowed by the warning, Carrie stopped drinking the tea
and resolved
to forget her discovery.
Yet within a few days, her symptoms returned—only
more strongly.
She felt too tired to walk or work, could hardly focus her thoughts long enough
to eat. When the doorbell rang, she dragged herself across the house to find
Bill and Sid sagging on her porch.
“You have some more of that home brew?”
Sid asked.
They shared a slug and quickly experienced the same
effects as
before, only heightened. Within minutes, Carrie could see more clearly, hear
more sharply, taste more fully.
Perhaps, like many medicines, she needed to wean herself.
The
company had called the release a “catalyst.” Did that equate to a stimulant,
like caffeine or ephedrine? If so, should she taper until . . . what? Her
garden gave out? Or her body did? Maybe it needed to generate those chemicals
itself. There were worse cures than a tasty drink—but still. Even as she aged,
Carrie never wanted to depend on pharmaceuticals.
She tried cutting back the dosage by a fourth and then
a third, but
the effects reduced proportionally. True, she could get through her day, but
she missed the rejuvenation she’d felt. She hesitated to call it an addiction,
but she did sense a dependency forming in herself and her neighbors, who
equally craved that release. Plus, what would she do if she ran out of roots?
Could she stretch their sustenance over the long hibernation of winter?
To hedge against shortages, she took cuttings from
every plant in
her garden that could survive pruning and assembled a line of mason jars along
her window sills. Yet when she checked them in the days after, only some
exhibited new growth. The perennials rebounded, but the annuals all shriveled.
She blamed the summer doldrums, when many plants struggled to survive the heat.
Then, the first person died, an older woman in poor
health. Carrie
read about her in the local newspaper. Absent any official acknowledgement of
the plague, people blamed the contamination. The paper reported their rumors
and gossip as though they were facts.
When a man succumbed to his symptoms—which mirrored
those Carrie
noted in herself, fatigue and forgetfulness—it amplified everyone’s fears. He
was middle-aged and previously in good health, the paper reported. Carrie wrote
a letter to the editor, suggesting the catalyst had accelerated the effects of
aging and urging the townspeople to try her tea cure.
The night her note appeared in print, someone snuck
into her yard
and dug up half a dozen plants. The empty holes looked like graves for an
impending funeral.
After that, Carrie kept her discovery to herself. She
couldn’t
share her produce with everyone and hope it would last through the winter. Only
Bill and Sid seemed to follow her advice, brewing tea from their own plants.
Meanwhile, the city emptied. Businesses that had
closed never
reopened, for sale signs sprouted outside houses like mushrooms, moving vans
proliferated, and the refinery remained stagnant. Even the protestors had
dispersed like the cloud of ash that precipitated it all. The town had grown
up around the refinery, but now it was dying along with it.
Carrie hated the idea of moving, especially after
she’d found the
cure in her own back yard. True, she could uproot and relocate the plants, but
would they reproduce the same medicinal effects elsewhere? Even someplace a few
miles distant would have different soil, light, and drainage, especially one
untouched by the catalyst. Would the symptoms
she’d experienced move with her? The paper published no news of the émigrés,
suggesting they had all disappeared. Or maybe died.
Carrie resolved to
stay as long as her stock of medicines held out. To protect against the long
dormancy of winter, she took clippings of perennials throughout the town and
set up a grow station in her dining room worthy of a pot farm. She calculated
their produce and rationed herself to just enough tea to get through each day.
Then she sat back on her front porch and watched the
town empty. By
fall, only Bill and Sid remained. They developed a ritual each morning, downing
the tea like it was the blood of Christ, transubstantiated into an elixir.
As Carrie gazed out over her front yard, it looked
as vital and
healthy as ever. The sage was fragrant and green, the yarrow burst with yellow
stems, and sparrows called to each other in the Oaks.
Perhaps nature would redeem the town in ways its inhabitants
could
not.
END
