the wheat that time forgot
by G.D. Holloway
“It smells like bunt disease in here.”
The woman showing Jess around the seed vault stopped and turned. She raised her eyebrows in a way that reminded Jess of her daughter. Jess imagined that the woman wore an ugly smile under her balaclava. That under her office furniture-colored parka, her chest swelled with drama and deep breath.
“That’s not possible. We don’t grow anything here. It’s just seeds.” Then, “You probably smell the drain line. It’s iced up again.”
Jess knew about the drain. The seed vault had been built in reaches as far north as one could build an underground bunker, in what was thought to be permafrost, in a place thought to be impenetrable. A fortress for seeds. So it was a bad sign when water leaked in a couple of years ago. Permafrost was no longer permanent.
Jess always thought everything smelled like bunt. She’d spent her life studying fungal diseases in cereal grains. Sometimes people, mostly ag execs, would ask her what bunt smelled like. She’d try not to say, “like the ponds on my parents’ fish farm” or “like my daughter’s bedroom.” Instead, she’d use words like briny or damp. Words that weren’t really smell words, that failed to honor the trace of decay, the promise of destruction laced into bunt. There was no way to look into the eyes of a middle-aged man who’d spent his life in a squat office building tucked into a corporate park tucked behind a strip mall and say, “It smells like the end.”
Bunt was a farm killer, but you could tame it. This new disease looked like bunt, smelled like bunt, but had proved unstoppable. No fungicide could touch it. Thus, Jess found herself in Norway, at the top of Norway, on the part of the map that looks bigger than it should because you can’t turn a sphere into a rectangle without stretching the poles. The vault was home to, among other things, a collection of seeds representing more than 1,000 wheat varieties. Some botanist, an Englishman, had travelled the world collecting them a century ago, before many of them had become extinct. Jess could only imagine why. Her understanding of 1930s Englishmen—their desires, their habits, their weird hobbies born of privilege and idle—was gleaned entirely from the TV dramas she fell asleep to. But as this new thing crept across Montana, made inroads into North Dakota, left ruined fields of stinking wheat disfigured by dark tumors, the dead Englishman’s seed collection had become a curiosity to those grasping for answers. So Jess was dispatched by the graspers to recover the wheat that time forgot.
At the end of the meeting where they told her she was going to Norway, one of the ag execs—Paul? Drew? Brett? Other Brett?—put a big, soft hand on her shoulder.
“Good things are going to happen for whoever cracks this,” he said. Then, like a secret, “There’s a lot of money.” What Paul or Drew or Brett didn’t say, what didn’t need to be said, was that if Jess, as the person who actually knew how these things worked, could find a solution and pass it up the ladder, some modest share of the lewd amount of money at the top would—through restricted stock units and paid speaking engagements and long-term contracts and promotions to new roles with made-up titles invented just for her—find its way back down in an even trade.
Jess lumbered along a concrete hallway whose floor was lined with cheap indoor-outdoor runners. The woman in front of her shuffled her boots on the runners, knocking away snow and ice. Jess followed suit.
Tubes and cables ran the length of the hall, mounted with an orderliness that Jess, who owned nice furniture, recognized as Scandinavian. The woman—Jess couldn’t remember her name—removed her snow gear and changed into a white coverall, so Jess did the same. It felt stupid, mimicking the movements of someone young enough to be Jess’s grad assistant, were Jess not in the private sector now, were Jess not living in an alternate timeline where she had direct reports instead of grad assistants. The woman stripped down with the same confident efficiency that Jess’s daughter displayed when dressing and undressing. Her daughter had the curious power to walk into any closet or department-store dressing room and throw an outfit together from seemingly disparate pieces of clothing—something Jess could never do. Clothes had always frustrated Jess. They had always failed her, declined to cooperate with the great swells of her hips, so she chose to view them as a utility only.
Jess struggled with the coverall. She heard herself grunt as she tried to compel the great sausage of her leg into its polypropylene casing. It was a habit, the grunting, the freely expressed exasperation with the meat of her body, the involuntary noise that her mother, then her husband, then her daughter had tried and failed for decades to make her feel ashamed of, as if Jess weren’t already ashamed enough.
“They have varietals there with all kinds of natural traits.” She said this, for some reason, to her daughter, who was home from grad school for a scant two days, who held a phone in one hand and a spoon in the other, who did not look from the phone to make eye contact with her mother or her cereal—whole-grain O’s, like a baby would eat.
“Some of these wheats are toxic to slugs, have higher nitrogen-use efficiency, are naturally resistant to disease.” She said this, for some reason, to her husband, who was on his way to a baseball game, who had not taken her to a baseball game in so many years, even though Jess liked baseball, loved baseball, had even played some D-1 college softball before her life became wheat and fungus.
“If we find that any of these varietals are resistant to this new thing, we’ll make a real difference. I’ll make a real difference.” She said this, for some reason, to her mother, who was not there, who had died six months ago in Jess’s guest room, in a hospital bed that the hospice had lent. The hospital bed was gone, but Jess sat in the guest room anyway, talking to her mother, also gone.
Long before she owned a guest room for her mother to die in, Jess would walk home from school. At the place where the unmarked dirt road branched from the wider dirt road that merited a name, Jess would hang right and make her way to the house. She would turn on the TV, let some Disney cartoon play as she made a bread-and-butter sandwich. She’d drink orange juice straight from the plastic jug, turn the TV off, and head farther down the nameless road to the farm. She could smell the ponds all the way from the house on hot days, and they were all hot days. That smell entered her like a spirit. It made her want to someday be somewhere where the houses looked like they looked on TV and the farmers grew what farmers grew on TV and no one ever turned belt brown in the sun. When she got in sight of the ponds, her mother was always part of the view. Her father could be anywhere—making deliveries to wholesalers or picking up feed or over by the fish house talking to some man about some thing. But her mother was always counting fish, too busy to look up at her. Jess would sit down cross-legged by the little pond and tell her mom everything that happened to her that day until her mother would relent.
“Aye, Yesica, such a candelosa.” Jess’s mom would finish whatever fish she was counting—mollies, swordtails, livebearers, platies—then push herself up from her bucket-turned-stool by whatever pond she was working in, and they would walk together back to the house, the smell of sunbaked algae following them the whole way.
Jess’s daughter had no interest in softball or wheat varietals. Jess was unclear what her daughter’s interests were.
The woman helped Jess zip her white coverall. Jess fought the instinct to knock her hand away. Having a stranger touch the fastenings on her clothes, even a coverall designed to keep Jess from corrupting her sterile surroundings, felt like a violation. Jess never had any problem defending her personal space. When the ag exec who sent her here left his catcher’s mitt of a hand on her shoulder too long, Jess did not, as she had so many times before, duck out from under the touch to glare, dark-eyed, threatening, giving the warning look that her mother used to give her, the one that always compelled retreat. She forced herself to be cool. She did so again.
The woman trying to help Jess, to impose herself on Jess, was young. She was also an emissary for much more important people—people who had expressed skepticism via Zoom that Jess was the right person for this task, people whose skepticism had been forced into retreat by large sums of money approved by Paul or Drew or Brett. A word from this woman could wake the sleeping giant of their disapproval.
So Jess allowed herself to be fussed over. She allowed the woman to bring the coverall up over her shoulders and check that the elastic at her wrists and ankles were snug and in place. Then the woman complimented Jess on her work. Jess was unsure what work exactly—it had been a long time since she’d published anything. To be sucked up to like this, in this empty way, by a woman complimenting research she’d never even read, was too much. Jess tugged at her own sleeves, pulled away from the woman’s hand and wheeled around on her.
Then the woman lowered her respirator mask. Her mouth was a slack O. Her eyes were honey-colored and round.
“In your Kühn study, why do you think the height of the resistant cultivar was affected by the infection?”
Jess froze.
She had read.
The woman was young, but on closer inspection, did not resemble Jess’s daughter at all. She was Black, light-skinned, with close-cropped reddish hair under a shower cap and freckles just over her cheeks. That she wasn’t Norwegian surprised Jess, but it shouldn’t have. The vault was an international operation, one that had a lot of money flowing into it as new disease after new disease pummeled the world’s industrial monoculture, rattling the industry that paid Jess’s mortgage. Visitors to the vault, built to be a hedge against doomsday, were increasingly frequent. More samples were being added all the time. That drain line hadn’t paid for itself.
She called Jess “Doctor Hidalgo,” hit the “h” hard and dragged the “a” like the crackers do. Chhidaaaaaaalgo. No, nothing like Jess’s daughter, who’d gone to school for Caribbean studies, who spoke Spanish better than Jess did. But there was plenty of Jess in her—in the questions, in the hunger to demonstrate her worthiness by overdoing her homework, in the effortful need to convince the accomplished authority figure in front of her that she merited their attention. She stuck out like a stalk of wheat blackened by spores in a sterile, snowbound citadel.
Jess wasn’t used to being asked about her work anymore. She slowed her normal speaking voice as she answered, in part to project gravity, in part because she had to give her brain time to remember the answers. They stood for a long while like that, asking and answering, teacher and student, at the top of the world. Time passed, but it was impossible to say how much. There were no clocks. No phones were handy.
Finally, the girl lifted her respirator mask back to her face and said that this had been a real honor. Jess said she hoped the girl had found the conversation useful. She put her own mask in place, then allowed herself a smile.
The girl led Jess to a door, fifth in a line of seven. The four on the right had keypads, electronic locks, slabs that looked like they belonged on bank vaults. The three to the left were older. They had regular doorknobs. They looked like they came from Home Depot. They may as well have been doors to guest bedrooms.
Jess had to all but threaten her daughter to come home when Jess’s mother was dying. She said she wouldn’t pay for next semester. They both knew she didn’t mean it, but it worked—barely. When Jess’s daughter came, she brought a friend, a cracker girl with a severe blond bob and a nose like a sugar cube. They stayed for two hours, then left. They had decided to make a road trip of it. Such fun. At least she talked to her abuela in Spanish.
The girl in the seed vault must have been younger than Jess’s daughter. She would never have a degree in Caribbean studies. She would, like Jess, spend years of her life doing research. Doing real work trying to accomplish something, but only accomplishing just enough so that later, when she would get pregnant, when the demands of a baby and an underemployed spouse would dictate that she make actual money, money she would shovel into a house, cars, weeklong vacations, KitchenAid mixers, custom frames, good sofas—into a family she consented to make and had no one else to blame for—she would be qualified for some dumb job at a giant company she hated where she’d have to sit in meetings and be bombarded by messaging about her employer’s culture, as if such an entity could produce such a thing. The girl opened the door, led Jess to a wire-rack shelf that held five Rubbermaid containers big as shoeboxes.
“The Burgess Collection.” The girl waved her arm at the Rubbermaids. She looked just like Jess did all those years ago. Jess should have seen it before.
Jess took a deep breath. She smelled nothing. The room was clean, antiseptic, a place to keep seeds. A place full of potential.
Jess grabbed one of the Rubbermaids by the handle. She heard the girl say something, protest that Jess should wait, shouldn’t open the container in here. There was a lab in Stakkevollan, at the university. They had prepared a space where she could work. Jess already had one handle open though, and she knew this girl wouldn’t stop her, knew this girl wouldn’t place a finger on her because Jess was this girl. She got the handle open, took the lid off and let it fall to the floor. Inside were a couple hundred tiny Ziplocs, airtight, each one double bagged. Nothing would escape all that plastic. The bags contained seeds for wheat that could repel disease, revolt caterpillars, wheat that was high in protein or could grow in especially damp climates, wheats that could heal industries and halt apocalypses, could make you happy with your decisions and bring you peace, could take you back in time and make it so you’d never even made those decisions in the first place. Inside were the keys to the universe.
Jess pulled her mask down and heard the girl shout her name. She leaned in and breathed deep. It smelled like bunt disease.
G.D. Holloway is a former journalist whose short fiction has appeared in The South Carolina Review, Booth, Blue Mesa Review, and other publications. Her story "Collecting the Autographs of Pro Football's Top Stars" received the 2024 Miracle Monocle Award for Innovative Writing.