The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [47]
Behind them in the park, people shuffled on the benches, either homeless people sleeping or couples making out, it was too dark to see. They passed a monumental statue, military figures with their chests flung out.
“It’s like I feel like Alexander the Great,” he said. “But I don’t see the Empire.”
Isolde laughed. “Maybe you have to build the Empire.”
“Yeah, well, I’m too lazy for that.”
They headed down the hill, on one side ghostly downtown buildings, on the other, the dark, cool grass of the park.
“According to quantum physics,” Diego said, “you can’t locate an object in space. All you can do is point at a cloud of probable places where it could be. An electron is not in a certain spot, but a little bit smeared everywhere.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Okay, take this example. You’re walking down a crowded street, like Florida, you know it, the pedestrian street right back there, people turn, dodge, shift position, so they won’t hit you. They accommodate themselves so as not to run into one another. In every next moment, a person will be somewhere different, on a different part of the street, walking, or stepping into a car. This is similar to the way the Greeks talked about potentiality. The next few steps could take you to different places. Or, if you’re running, the whole time you’re running, you’re realizing possibilities. We ourselves are like projections into the future, not certainties, but waves of probabilities. Beings in a potential state, a little bit everywhere. At any moment, we could do this or that.”
sixteen
Unlike animals, plants are immobile and can’t seek out sexual partners for reproduction, so they must devise other ways. In his book The Intelligence of Flowers, Maeterlinck writes beautifully about the plight of plants, condemned by their roots to stay fixed in one place. Consequently, among all living beings, flowers or the reproductive structures of plants are the most varied physically and possess the greatest diversity of reproductive strategies. Over eighty-five percent of flowering plants are hermaphroditic. Some have both male and female flowers, while others, like the Echinopsis spachiana, have bisexual flowers, otherwise known as perfect or complete flowers, possessing both male and female sexual organs, the pollen-producing stamen, or male part, and the seed-producing carpels, or female part. Many of these plants are self-fertile, the male parts pollinating the female parts of the same flower. Others have self-incompatibility clauses that make this impossible and promote outcrossing. Some plants undergo what is called sex-switching, expressing sexual difference at different stages of growth. In the case of the Arisaema triphyllum, the plant expresses a multitude of sexual conditions in the course of its lifetime, from nonsexual juvenile plants to young all-male plants, to plants with a mix of male and female flowers to large plants with mostly female flowers.
Miguel was gone, traveling. He had lent Leonarda his house. She invited me over.
I entered the lobby, passing by the doorman, the sleek wood floors, the interior pillars, a quiet view of the back garden. I rang the bell. I heard something and felt that she’d been waiting for me behind the door.
She opened the door. She was dressed in men’s pants and a button-down shirt. She had a mustache on. Then she was hiding behind the door.
“Wait, wait, let me see,” I said. She had turned her face to the wall. When I stepped nearer, she ran, still hiding her face. She went into the bathroom and closed the door.
“I’m taking it off,” she said.
“No, no, don’t take it off. I want to see you.”
I waited in the hall. I barely breathed. I thought I could hear her breathing too, on the other side of the bathroom door.
“Please, Leo,” I said, “I want to see you.”
But I didn’t want to insist too much. She was quiet. A few minutes passed. Then I heard her opening the bathroom door. She came out again