I used to live with my dad on a weed farm in Humboldt County. His grand mission in life was to breed the perfect natural drug. He’d plant marijuana and psilocybin in the same pots in his basement lab and keep notes on the moisture levels, soil parameters, and amount of light from the solar lamps that he’d set up around the room at all different angles. Someday, he hoped, the fungus and plant would merge into a single species. Folks would be able to eat or smoke or snort whatever form it took to feel the levity of the weed and the sinking, spiralling sensation of shrooms all at once—no separate consumption necessary. Dad wasn’t a scientist or anything, but he was an optimist.
When I was little, I’d sneak out of bed and creep downstairs to spy on him working. He’d sit in a swivel chair with his notebook, wearing a pair of half-moon glasses. One night, he examined one pot in particular, where a single mushroom had curled itself around the base of a cannabis stalk. Normally, the shrooms leaned towards the walls where humidity gathered, while the weed reached towards the dry heat of the lamps. This was the closest I’d ever seen the two species interacting.
Dad reached for the shroom, uncoiled it, and plucked it from the soil. With his other hand, he grabbed a marijuana leaf. In quick, spasmic, movements, he smashed the plants together, jamming his hands into each other, over and over. The weed leaf quickly crumbled—the pieces lay scattered at his feet as he continued to smash the mushroom against his hand. Finally, his fury ran thin and he steadied himself. He went back to examining the rest of the plants, wheeling himself around the room by pushing off the floor with the edges of his feet, as I crept back up the stairs, careful not to make a sound.
Every summer, he’d hire new interns to come to tend the fields—mostly young folks with an entrepreneurial edge, a few retirees who snickered about how “bad” they were being by working here. We’d help them set up tents around the fields on day one, put them to work on day two, and every evening, we’d cook a big dinner and host music hour out on the porch. One of the entry requirements to working on the farm was that you had to bring an instrument. If you didn’t know how to play, you had to learn by the end of summer. I would pick up a new instrument every year—partially to feel well-rounded, and partially because I’d forget to play the previous instrument by the time spring came around.
By fall, the workers would pack up and go home. Dad would spend the wintertime in his lab, and I would spend it curled up on the musty, plaid couch in the attic watching movies on Gertie, the blu-ray player we’d named after my mother. Mom left home when I was six—don’t remember why. I do remember her car, a bright blue Subaru, turning behind a thicket of trees and drifting down the dirt road through the mountainside the day she left.
I remember imagining her getting killed in various ways. Eaten by a bear, hit by a truck, murdered. I tried to cut the thoughts off at the root, telling myself to stop and think of nice things, but I relented and watched the ideas play out, one by one, beginning to end. I punished myself by watching three seasons of iCarly in one sitting—refusing to eat, refusing to move, refusing to touch the remote.
The summer I turned eighteen, one of the farmhands found me after dinnertime. We’d made eye contact a few times while he tapped a woodblock at music hour, and I started calling him “the boy” silently in my head whenever I saw him around. The boy said my dad had told him about the blu-ray player and asked if he could take a look. He’d never seen technology so outdated in his twenty years of life. I brought him up to the attic and let him peruse all the DVDs that lined the walls in big, messy stacks, feeling knots twist in my stomach as I watched him and wondered what his thin, greasy hair would feel like between my fingers. We watched The Lord of the Rings and talked about the universe.
He didn’t leave when winter came. The one exception to the rule. Over the next two years, we binged every season of Dr. Who, Mad Men, and Grey’s Anatomy. Then one day, after a very productive acid trip, the boy decided that the key to life was to never sit still for too long. “If you let dust settle for more than a second, you’re as good as dead,” he said. I didn’t think our little attic home, as I came to think of it, looked all that dusty at the time of his epiphany, so I did what any reasonable person would do and told him to fuck off and never come back.
I watched every season of iCarly again. On bad days, when I really couldn’t move, Dad would bring me snacks and tell me to “stop doing a bell jar.” He said it was a reference to a book, but he’d gotten rid of all our books when mom left. Mom used to read to me all the time, and she’d always get frustrated with my preference for books with pictures. She’d grab me by the shoulders and sit me down in a dining room chair to read some long, rhythmless chapter book aloud to me, insisting I ought to listen. My mind would wander since my body couldn’t. I can’t recall a conversation we had without a book in between us, without a hard chair beneath me, my legs squirming.
I asked dad what the bell jar was, about a few months after the boy left. “You don’t need to know all that,” he said. By the following summer, I was back on my feet again, learning the trombone, staring daggers over the edge of the horn at whoever happened to play the wood block during music hour.
One night, after the farmhands had turned in, I stood on the porch alone, admiring the way the tents glowed with lantern light around the mangy fields. My dad found me and asked if I wanted to go to the lab with him. It was finally time to show me the ropes. He’d even bought a swivel chair for me— just like his, but with shinier plastic, brand new. I pushed myself around the room beside him as he explained the soil parameters to me, all the slight adjustments he’d made, tips and tricks he’d learned over the years to keep the plants happy. He rambled on and on about all the possible effects the combined species might have on the human mind. While he wasn’t looking, I plucked a weed leaf and a small mushroom from the nearest pot and crumbled them in my hand. The pieces fell to the floor beside me, little flakes of green and brown, as I nodded along, hanging onto every word he said.
