Marbury picked up the hitchhiker in the high desert of northern New Mexico, more from a sense of duty—it was over a hundred degrees—than any desire for company. With a face as hollowed out as the mesas and prospecting hands as cracked and dusty as his shoes, the man seemed to have left about half of himself in the desert. After ‘thanks,’ he didn’t speak for eighty miles. Then, at a crossroads just north of the Colorado border: “This’ll do. Thanks.” As he got out, he reached into his ragged backpack and handed Marbury a big mayonnaise jar full of the richest, blackest dirt he’d ever seen.           

“You can grow anything in that,” he said. “Just don’t water it.”

“Don’t water?”

But he was already gone, drifting down the crossroad.

Marbury and his wife lived in a big-windowed house in the mountains outside Durango. It was her house, her money, her town, though he had to admit, the place had grown on him. The sales trip to Albuquerque hadn’t gone well, and by now, he knew he couldn’t sell boats in a flood. He told Angela about the hitchhiker and gave her the jar. She was mildly amused by the magic dirt story, and to distract her from his strikeout on the road, he urged her to plant something, maybe a bean.

“But he said don’t water it.”

“And you believed him.”

“Benefit of the doubt, is all I’m saying.”

She did plant something, not bothering to tell him what, and stuck the jar on the kitchen windowsill. And soon, maybe too soon, a tomato plant sprouted. He didn’t actually see her watering it, but he knew she did, because she was always right, just as he was always wrong. They were standing by the sink one afternoon, drinks in hand, when she reached over and picked up the now-staked and robust little plant, waving it proudly.

“See what happens when you water, boy? Things grow.”

“It might have anyway.”

“Nope, sorry.” Angela glanced down into the jar, frowned. “What the hell is that?” She set down her drink and stuck her hand into the jar. He hadn’t seen what she’d seen, so when her hand came out with a tiny green snake hanging by its mouth from her index finger, it rattled him. She whipped the poor thing in the air as she whirled about, trying to shake it off without touching it. The whole thing happened so fast that he mostly just stood there gaping, and by the time he’d reached out to grab her hand, the snake had let go and fallen into the sink. There were pinhead-sized droplets of blood on her fingertip, which she waved in his face like it was his fault.

“You have to wonder how it got in there,” he said.

“Who cares?” she said, squeezing her finger under the faucet. “This really hurts, Doug. I feel poisoned.”

“Green snakes aren’t venomous.”

He nudged it with a spatula. It certainly seemed dead. Close up, it looked less like a snake than a legless lizard, and appeared to be eyeless. That it had died so quickly was troubling, as if its whole purpose in life was to bite and then die. Angela’s finger hadn’t swollen or changed color, but she was beginning to stagger and slur her words—two drinks couldn’t get her that far—so he put her in the car and headed for the ER. He brought along the snake, or whatever it was, in a paper bag.

“It was poking its nose out of the dirt,” she said on the way. “Like it was already in there, hibernating or something.”

“Maybe your watering woke it up,” he couldn’t resist saying. Her head lolled back on the seat. He thought she’d passed out, but then she started speaking. Or someone did. Not anyone he knew.

“Blind me, O Lord, to the sight of that which would burn away these robes of flesh. Mercy. Mercy on thy miserable servant.”

She groaned, shuddered, and slumped over, her head hitting the dashboard. She was in a coma for three days. The doctors had no idea what species of blind legless lizard had bitten her, or even if the bite had caused the delirium and coma. It had sharp little teeth, but no fangs and no venom glands. A toxicologist asked him if Angela had ophidiophobia, and Marbury said he didn’t think so. When she came out of the coma, she stared at him and everyone else as if they had horns. He asked her if she recalled what she’d said in the car, but when she opened her mouth to speak, no words came out. He took her home and put her to bed.

She cried a lot. She’d sleep all day, then wander around the house in her nightgown until dawn. He’d catch her staring into mirrors, feeling her face as if trying to recognize it. He never could get her to tell him what happened. Her parents blamed him, of course, though all he’d done was give her the dirt and told her what the hitchhiker had told him. One day, they came with a pick-up truck, packed her things and took her home with them, where, they assured him, she’d be getting excellent private care. Soon after that, Marbury received notice that she was suing for divorce. He felt gutshot but didn’t contest it, just walked away with his car, his books, and a small settlement. He also took the jar of dirt and its booming tomato plant.

He rented an apartment in town with a southern view, replanted the tomato in a bigger pot (making sure there were no more hibernating reptiles hidden among the roots), keeping the special black dirt unmixed with the potting soil, and placed it in a large window with plenty of sunlight. The plant continued to flourish, though he never once watered it, and within three weeks, there were three fat, green tomatoes on the vine.

He quit kidding himself that he was any kind of salesman. He’d only wanted to prove to Angela that he could do something practical, something besides grazing through stacks of books and taking long, solitary hikes into the stunning countryside around Durango. He drank more than he should have and spent a lot of time regretting things, like not trying harder to save his marriage, or to avoid becoming the failure that, at forty, he clearly was. He could get drunk enough to convince himself that Angela was better off without him, but never enough to believe that he was better off without her. Nor could he drink away the feeling that, unintentionally or not, he’d had a hand in her destruction. For a while, he indulged in fantasies of vengeance on the hitchhiker, until his anger ebbed. After all, he might have been unaware of the serpent in his dirt. The guy may have been a desert rat but hadn’t struck him as the type to booby-trap a gift to a stranger who’d done him a kindness. None of it made any sense, especially the words Angela had spoken in the car. ‘Blind me, O Lord, to the sight of…’ what? And why had she talked like some Cecil B. DeMille version of an Old Testament prophet? She had as little use for religion as he did.

Given how fast his life had unraveled, it wasn’t surprising that he attributed properties to the dirt, and the man who’d given it to him, that they may not have had, or that he warily watched the tomatoes ripening on the thick, stubby vine to an alluring shade of deep red, and wondered how safe they were to eat. But he felt he owed it to Angela to harvest what she’d planted, and to take upon himself whatever risks might be inherent in eating tomatoes grown in uncanny dirt. Before picking and slicing the largest, reddest tomato one afternoon in July, he thought maybe he should write out a will. But since he owned next to nothing, and now had no one to whom he could leave his almost nothing, he salted and peppered the tomato slices, drizzled a little olive oil on them, and proceeded to eat them.

After the first bite, he was quite sure of one thing: no tomato in his entire life had ever tasted even faintly like a real tomato because until now, he’d never eaten one. This was Plato’s tomato. This was heaven on a fork. This richest, sweetest, perfectly acidic, juiciest of red-fleshed wonders, with every unspeakably delicious bite, was crowding out all other sense impressions, all memories of previous meals. He’d been reduced to lips, mouth, tongue, throat, and stomach, whose sole reason for existing was to receive this holy sacrament of sun and soil. He laughed, he wept, he drank off the ambrosial juice and licked the plate clean. He was happy, no, ecstatic. He had literally eaten his troubles away. He eyed the two remaining tomatoes greedily, wanting in the same moment to share them with the first person he met on the street and to keep them for himself. After one tomato, he felt sated, which was fortunate, since any other foodstuff would have tasted like straw in comparison. To die now, he thought, possessed by such repletion and serenity, would be a gift not granted to most men, certainly not one so undeserving as he. He yawned despite the early hour, and pausing only to take off his shoes, he lay down on the couch and almost immediately fell asleep.

He dreamed he was in a small boat on a dead calm sea, a boat structurally impossible outside of a dream, with the bows somehow facing each other. In the opposite bow was the hitchhiker, both hands held out, palms up, as if in offering. Coiled around the fingers of his left hand was a wriggling green snake like the one that had bitten Angela, and in the right was a small, striped, broad-bodied fish, like a bluegill. Nodding approvingly at him, the hitchhiker opened his hand, and the fish flipped off and into the water. Now alone in the boat, Marbury felt rather than saw something unimaginably huge rising up from the depths, that he knew neither the sea nor the horizons could contain. The voice of the hitchhiker said, “Feed her.” He woke up and immediately forgot the dream, retaining only the fading sense of something imminent and overwhelming.

He went for a walk downtown, jostling among tourists and locals, losing himself in the evening dinner herds. He had a beer at his favorite pub, and at some point glanced in the mirror behind the bar and saw a familiar head of disheveled black hair. He turned to face the blank stare of Angela. She was alone, standing very still a few feet behind him, and oddly dressed in what looked like a nightshirt over jeans and hiking boots with no socks. He looked around for her parents, but they weren’t in the bar, and he wondered if she’d wandered away from home without their noticing. He spoke to her, but she was still mute, and seemed unaware of her surroundings. How had she found him?

At that moment, a tiny piece of the dream came back to him. Leaving money on the bar, he took Angela by the arm and led her back to his apartment. She was pliant and vague, allowing him to seat her at the kitchen table while he picked the two remaining tomatoes, sliced and divided them on two plates, and set one before her. He cut hers up for her, then put the fork in her hand and sat down at his place. He nodded encouragingly and began eating, and she very slowly copied his movements. At first, he thought she might simply be mimicking his involuntary expression of joy at the tomato’s miraculous flavor, but he soon saw that the response was her own, her face gradually reanimating, again becoming the woman he’d married. They ate every morsel, drank the juice, licked the plates, and their happiness flowed from their eyes into each other. She reached across the table and took his hands.

“I’ve missed you,” she said.

“They took you away,” he said. “And I let them do it.”

“We could get married again,” she said. “If you want to.”

“It’s all I want,” he said. “Except…”

“You want to know what I saw. After the snake bit me.”

He nodded. “If you want to tell me.”

“I saw a serpent larger than the world, whose open mouth is the gate of Hell. I haven’t seen anything else until you fed me.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “For giving you the jar.”

“It wasn’t your fault. You told me not to water it. By the way, where did you get those tomatoes? They’re fabulous.”

“They’re from the seeds you planted in the hitchhiker’s dirt. Have you ever tasted anything better?”

“Nothing even close.”

“Are you feeling sleepy?”

She yawned.

“I am, too,” he said. “Let’s lie down and take a nap. I should tell you now that what we ate may bring dreams.”

As soon as they lay down, they were both asleep. Again, he was on the calm sea, in the strange boat, but this time, it was Angela who faced him in the bow. A fish leapt out of the water and landed in the boat, a striped, broad-bodied fish no bigger than a bream. It flopped around in the bottom, and as they watched it, the little fish began to grow, larger and larger, until it swamped their tiny craft. He floated somewhere above the water, watching the fish swelling and burgeoning to the vanishing point. Now, the pupil of its eye alone was bigger than all the oceans and all the continents put together, and soon there was no room for anything, anywhere, except the Fish, which was neither good nor evil, just all and everything, forever. And he knew, as he had never known anything before, that he and Angela and the rest of humankind were immeasurably less important to it than a sea mite under its scale. He was nothing, and he was content to be nothing.

He awoke, and Angela awoke, and both forgot their dreams because they couldn’t have lived with what they’d seen, knowing what they were. But it was good to find each other after troubling times, and they did get married again, and lived more happily than not.

 

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