Chapter Sixteen
After Elizabeth gave Ben the job reading poetry to flowers to help them grow, she had Pablo, a broad shouldered barrel-chested man with a thick mustache that he prodigiously stroked, give him a tour.
Pablo showed him through the rose garden, tulip hill, and then the greenhouses. A sprinkler system sprayed mist through the hot air of the tropical greenhouse. Pablo warned Ben not to eat from the chocolate tree. It was bitter chocolate. He also told him to keep his hands off the bananas. The bananas weren’t bitter, but the banana tree was still off limits.
The most beautiful colorful flowers were in the tropical greenhouse, but it was so humid in there that Ben would just quickly recite a poem to the chocolate tree and then rush to the desert greenhouse, where he would leisurely read poetry in the dry heat under the shade of a large cactus.
***
His new job took up a lot more of his time. When he was a dishwasher, he had been able to leave his work at the office. As soon as he scrubbed the last pan, he went home and forgot about dishes. (Except for some bizarre dish dreams.) As a poet, he had to take his work home with him; he had to work on new poems for the flowers.
One night after work, Ben was alone in his apartment trying to compose poetry for the flowers. He took off his shoes and socks and stood barefoot on the stained orange carpet to get in touch with the plight of the working man. He might catch a fungus from this workingman carpet, but that was the risk he had to take.
While waiting for inspiration to seep in through the soles of his feet, someone’s knuckles rapped briskly on the wooden door to his apartment. Ben wished he had a peephole so he could see who it was, but this apartment didn’t have frills like a peephole. It was a workingman’s apartment.
The knuckles rapped again. Ben stood very still, trying to breathe silently. Maybe whoever it was would think he wasn’t home and go away. Unfortunately, the tea kettle on the hotplate decided to start whistling just then. Ben found that drinking freeze-dried coffee helped him empathize with the working man and had started drinking it when he worked. It helped his mind; not just the caffeine; he believed the freeze-driediness also helped.
“Open the door,” said an authoritative voice. “We can hear your tea kettle whistling.”
Ben turned off the hotplate and the whistling died out.
“Who is it?”
“Department of Agriculture! Open up!”
Ben would have pulled the door open a little bit, leaving the chain on the door, and asked to see their IDs, but his apartment didn’t have frills like a chain on the door, (it was a workingman’s apartment) so he just unlocked the door and let it swing open. Two solidly built men stood in the entrance wearing matching frayed black suits, white shirts, and bland ties. One was taller with a narrow face and angular features.
“Benjamin Fishbein?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He held up a badge. “I’m Agent Black with the Department of Agriculture.” He gestured to the man next to him, who had large jowls and blinked a lot. “This is my associate, Agent Lugo.”
“I can introduce myself, thank you very much,” said Lugo.
“Not now, Tom,” Agent Black said and then turned back to Ben. “We’d like to have a few words with you. Can we come in?”
“I guess.”
Agent Black looked down at Ben’s bare feet and at the stained carpet.
“You don’t want us to take our shoes off, do you?”
“No.”
“’Cause you seem like that kind of person—asks people to take off their shoes when they come in
the house.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know…you being a poet and around flowers a lot. There’s a positive correlation with wanting people to take their shoes off at the doorstep.”
“I was just getting in touch with the working man. And how do you know so much about me?”
Agent Black didn’t answer but walked past Ben into the apartment, and strolled over to the window. He set down his briefcase, took in the view of the moldering brick wall, and whistled.
“Quite a pad you’ve got here.”
Agent Lugo walked around the apartment, checking in the bathroom and behind the doors. He kept a tight hold on his briefcase. “Are you going to offer us something to drink?” he asked.
“I don’t have anything.”
Lugo stopped walking. “I heard water boiling,” he said, looking down at the tinkling kettle on the hotplate.
“Are you allowed to drink on duty?”
“We can have a cup of coffee.”
“Or tea,” Agent Black said, looking back from the brick wall. “I like tea.”
“I don’t have any tea.”
“Coffee’s fine.”
“I only boiled enough water for one cup,” Ben said.
“Half a cup’s fine,” Black said.
“Same here,” said Lugo.
“I don’t have any cream or sugar,” Ben said apologetically. “Black and bitter like the life of the workingman.”
Ben got the coffee and a couple mugs out of his cabinet. He wished he knew more about agriculture. Then he could speak intelligently when the agents started talking about cotton gins and harvest festivals.
“Have you noticed anything strange about your new job?” Agent Lugo asked.
Ben shrugged. “Not really.”
“Ben,” Lugo said. “We’ll get right to the point. Your employer has illegal plants in her garden.”
Ben knew the job had been too good to be true. Elizabeth was probably growing pot and Ben was an accessory to the crime, reading poetry to the dope. No, that couldn’t be it: he hadn’t noticed any marijuana in the garden. It had to be something else. The cocoa plant! Elizabeth was growing cocaine in her greenhouse. No wonder Pablo told him not to eat from the chocolate tree. Or maybe there was peyote growing on the cactuses.
Ben figured that they wanted him to wear a wire. They wouldn’t hear much. Just Ben reading poetry to flowers. Although they might steal his poetry before he had a chance to publish it. Some of it hadn’t even been written down yet; he composed them extemporaneously in the garden and there would be no way for him to prove his authorship. Agents Black and Lugo could steal his poetry and claim it as their own.
Ben handed them each half a cup of freeze-dried coffee.
“I won’t wear a wire,” he said.
“I don’t want you to wear a wire,” said Agent Black, taking a sip of the scalding coffee.
Agent Lugo dropped his briefcase on the bed, popped it open, pulled out a thick black binder, and flipped through it. He found what he was looking for and turned the binder towards Ben, showing him a glossy, full-page photograph.
“Have you seen this flower?”
The flower had a long stem with emerald thorns, tufts of golden pollen and long flowing petals like liquid amethyst.
“It’s beautiful.” Ben ran his finger over the photograph admiringly.
Agent Lugo pulled the binder away. “Don’t touch. Just look.”
“Sorry.”
“This is an African Moonflower,” Lugo said. “It may be beautiful but it’s also very illegal.”
“Why?”
Agent Lugo grinned slightly and caught Agent Black’s eye. “He’s been reading National Geographic.” Agent Black chuckled. Lugo turned back to Ben. “Let me ask you something kid: You think just because a magazine has a yellow border it has to be true?”
Ben shrugged.
“Do you know what an ecosystem is?”
“Of course.”
“The African Moonflower is a swamp-eater. Do you know what that is?”
“No.”
“When a swamp-eater gets into an ecosystem, it destabilizes everything. It disrupts the food chain. Protozoans and monerans are wiped out. And who knows? Maybe one of those swamp creatures holds the cure for cancer, or AIDS, or some other God-forsaken disease, and we’ll never know, because some African Moonflower spores got loose and messed up the ecosystem. Once they pollinate, there’s no stopping them.”
“And that’s just the African Moonflower,” Agent Black interjected. “There’s flowers that if they got loose could destroy America’s agriculture. That means no food. A catastrophe the likes of which we’ve never seen.”
“Agricultural terrorism,” Lugo said sadly. “Our freedom hangs in the balance.”
Ben wanted to help them. Sure, America wasn’t perfect, but he didn’t want the ecosystem to be destroyed and for Osama bin Laden to take over and become president.
On the other hand, Elizabeth had given him a job as a poet. He had already bragged to everyone that he was a professional poet. He didn’t want to have to go crawling back to Reggie and beg for his dishwashing job back.
“So in the tropical greenhouse,” Lugo continued. “Have you seen an African Moonflower?”
Ben figured he had better tell the truth. They certainly trained agents of the Department of Agriculture to spot lies.
“I don’t know.”
Wrong answer. Agent Lugo slammed the binder shut, causing Ben to jump.
“How can you not know?! It’s a very distinct flower!”
“I’m sorry. I don’t spend too much time in the tropical greenhouse.”
“Why not?!”
“It’s humid in there. It’s uncomfortable.”
“So? Isn’t that your job? To read poetry to them?”
How did they know all this? They must have a spy at the garden. Ben wondered who it could be. Maybe they had tapped his phone.
“What do you want from me?”
Agent Lugo smiled. “We want you to do your duty as an American citizen.”
***
At Elizabeth’s garden party which celebrated her eightieth birthday, (the one with the wealthy people, the first one) the gazebo became too crowded for Ben, so he stepped out into the grass and strolled around the garden, looking at the flowers.
Ben was standing by the roses when a straight-backed old man came up to him. He had well-pronounced frown lines and bushy white hair, except for two thick dark eyebrows. He stirred the ice in his drink with a small red plastic stick, and gave Ben a hard stare.
“You must be the poet,” he said.
“I am,” Ben replied.
“You look like a poet.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s not a compliment.”
The old man shook the ice and stared into his glass.
“I hate birthdays,” he said. “But she insisted I come. I’m Elizabeth’s husband by the way.
Howard. I can’t stand these things, but…birthdays.” He sighed and spit in the grass. “You know Albert Einstein?”
“Of course.”
“He was my professor back at Princeton.” He began to stir the ice in his glass again. “Well,
Professor Einstein never learned his own phone number. He figured: why use part of his brain to store something he could just look up? It’s a waste of brain space, you see? If he wanted to know, he could just look himself up in the phone book. Well, I never even learned when my birthday is. If I want to know, I’ll go to city hall and get my birth certificate.”
“You don’t know when your birthday is?”
“No, and I don’t care. It’s a silly holiday, made up by Hallmark to sell greeting cards.”
“Hallmark made up your birthday?”
“All birthdays!”
He took a sip of his drink, puckered his lips, and looked at Ben appraisingly.
“What is it you do exactly?”
Ben gulped. “I read poetry to the flowers to help them grow.”
“And how exactly does it help them grow?”
“Love?”
Roseman shook his head.
“What?” Ben protested. “It works. Scientists have done studies on this.”
“No. They haven’t. Are you a scientist? No? Well, I am, and let me tell you: there is no scientific credibility to this quack theory of flowers needing love. There’s one study done several years ago by a disgraced former professor of botany at a community college in Kansas, but that’s it. There is no scientific basis to support the theory of the existence of such a thing as Love.”
“You don’t believe in Love?”
“I believe in Physics. Love was invented by deadbeat poets. They didn’t have any marketable trade; they couldn’t get dates, so they made up love. They don’t want to work and support a family so they talk all lovey-dovey and trick unsuspecting women. Poets are nothing but two-bit con men. Hustlers.”
“Have you told Elizabeth what you think about love?”
Howard Roseman’s eyes popped wide, his face flushed, and he ground his teeth.
“My wife has some strange ideas.” He looked over to the gazebo where Derrick was wildly swatting at a cloud of mosquitoes. “You are a bum, Fishbein. A bottom feeder; one of this fish that sucks on the side of aquariums. I don’t know what they’re called because I could just look it up. In fact….” Suddenly Howard Roseman laughed to himself, smiled, and all his anger seemed to have washed away. “You know what? I’m not getting into this with you. My time is too important. My mind is too important. I have to use it to find the Higgs Boson.”
He turned and started to walk away.
“The Higgs Boson?” Ben said. “What’s that?”
Howard Roseman stopped and looked up at the sky. “He doesn’t know what the Higgs Boson is,” he said with an exhausted sigh. He turned back and looked Ben directly in the eyes. “The Higgs Boson is a hypothetical elementary particle; hypothetical because no one’s ever actually seen it. We postulate it’s there because its existence explains the mass of other elementary particles. Kapeesh? I plan to be the first one to find it.”
“And no one’s ever seen it?”
“Were you not paying attention? Were you thinking about flowers? Yes, no one has ever seen it.”
“Then the Higgs Boson is just like love. No one’s ever seen love, but it explains the way things are. Love is an elementary particle: The Particle of Love.”
Howard threw his drink in Ben’s face. Fortunately for Ben, all the liquid was gone and only a couple ice cubes flew out and clunked harmlessly against his forehead.
“Side-sucker!” he hissed. “You’re a side-sucker, Fishbein. You may have Liz fooled, but you can’t fool me. You’re a con man and I’m going to expose you for the two-bit hustler that you are. You know Stephen Hawking?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m the one who put him in that wheelchair!” He waved a knobby finger threateningly in Ben’s face. “You shouldn’t cross me! I’m not a man to be crossed!”
He turned and stormed away, probably to the bar to get a refill on his drink. A full glass that he could throw in Ben’s face.
Ben didn’t feel nervous or angry. He was feeling too inspired to feel anything but pure inspiration tingling over every inch of his skin. He borrowed a pen from one of the caterers and scribbled on a cocktail napkin. The words just flowed. His new poem was called: The Particle of Love.
The part of you I love
I can’t see empirically,
but the part of me in love
knows instinctively;
your particle of love
is a Higgs Boson to me.
It rhymed. It was the kind of poem his father would like. Ben was becoming an establishment poet and hated himself for it. The flowers were dragging him away from the plight of the workingman.
Ben looked over at the throng gathered around Derrick and was surprised by how much they resembled mosquitoes, sucking the blood of the workingman. And now he was selling out.
They called him over to the gazebo. It was time for him to read his poem.
***
כ''ב באב תשס''ז
שדה אליהו
רמת הגולן, ישראל
August 6, 2007
Sde Eliyahu
Golan Heights, Israel
Pablo showed him through the rose garden, tulip hill, and then the greenhouses. A sprinkler system sprayed mist through the hot air of the tropical greenhouse. Pablo warned Ben not to eat from the chocolate tree. It was bitter chocolate. He also told him to keep his hands off the bananas. The bananas weren’t bitter, but the banana tree was still off limits.
The most beautiful colorful flowers were in the tropical greenhouse, but it was so humid in there that Ben would just quickly recite a poem to the chocolate tree and then rush to the desert greenhouse, where he would leisurely read poetry in the dry heat under the shade of a large cactus.
***
His new job took up a lot more of his time. When he was a dishwasher, he had been able to leave his work at the office. As soon as he scrubbed the last pan, he went home and forgot about dishes. (Except for some bizarre dish dreams.) As a poet, he had to take his work home with him; he had to work on new poems for the flowers.
One night after work, Ben was alone in his apartment trying to compose poetry for the flowers. He took off his shoes and socks and stood barefoot on the stained orange carpet to get in touch with the plight of the working man. He might catch a fungus from this workingman carpet, but that was the risk he had to take.
While waiting for inspiration to seep in through the soles of his feet, someone’s knuckles rapped briskly on the wooden door to his apartment. Ben wished he had a peephole so he could see who it was, but this apartment didn’t have frills like a peephole. It was a workingman’s apartment.
The knuckles rapped again. Ben stood very still, trying to breathe silently. Maybe whoever it was would think he wasn’t home and go away. Unfortunately, the tea kettle on the hotplate decided to start whistling just then. Ben found that drinking freeze-dried coffee helped him empathize with the working man and had started drinking it when he worked. It helped his mind; not just the caffeine; he believed the freeze-driediness also helped.
“Open the door,” said an authoritative voice. “We can hear your tea kettle whistling.”
Ben turned off the hotplate and the whistling died out.
“Who is it?”
“Department of Agriculture! Open up!”
Ben would have pulled the door open a little bit, leaving the chain on the door, and asked to see their IDs, but his apartment didn’t have frills like a chain on the door, (it was a workingman’s apartment) so he just unlocked the door and let it swing open. Two solidly built men stood in the entrance wearing matching frayed black suits, white shirts, and bland ties. One was taller with a narrow face and angular features.
“Benjamin Fishbein?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He held up a badge. “I’m Agent Black with the Department of Agriculture.” He gestured to the man next to him, who had large jowls and blinked a lot. “This is my associate, Agent Lugo.”
“I can introduce myself, thank you very much,” said Lugo.
“Not now, Tom,” Agent Black said and then turned back to Ben. “We’d like to have a few words with you. Can we come in?”
“I guess.”
Agent Black looked down at Ben’s bare feet and at the stained carpet.
“You don’t want us to take our shoes off, do you?”
“No.”
“’Cause you seem like that kind of person—asks people to take off their shoes when they come in
the house.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know…you being a poet and around flowers a lot. There’s a positive correlation with wanting people to take their shoes off at the doorstep.”
“I was just getting in touch with the working man. And how do you know so much about me?”
Agent Black didn’t answer but walked past Ben into the apartment, and strolled over to the window. He set down his briefcase, took in the view of the moldering brick wall, and whistled.
“Quite a pad you’ve got here.”
Agent Lugo walked around the apartment, checking in the bathroom and behind the doors. He kept a tight hold on his briefcase. “Are you going to offer us something to drink?” he asked.
“I don’t have anything.”
Lugo stopped walking. “I heard water boiling,” he said, looking down at the tinkling kettle on the hotplate.
“Are you allowed to drink on duty?”
“We can have a cup of coffee.”
“Or tea,” Agent Black said, looking back from the brick wall. “I like tea.”
“I don’t have any tea.”
“Coffee’s fine.”
“I only boiled enough water for one cup,” Ben said.
“Half a cup’s fine,” Black said.
“Same here,” said Lugo.
“I don’t have any cream or sugar,” Ben said apologetically. “Black and bitter like the life of the workingman.”
Ben got the coffee and a couple mugs out of his cabinet. He wished he knew more about agriculture. Then he could speak intelligently when the agents started talking about cotton gins and harvest festivals.
“Have you noticed anything strange about your new job?” Agent Lugo asked.
Ben shrugged. “Not really.”
“Ben,” Lugo said. “We’ll get right to the point. Your employer has illegal plants in her garden.”
Ben knew the job had been too good to be true. Elizabeth was probably growing pot and Ben was an accessory to the crime, reading poetry to the dope. No, that couldn’t be it: he hadn’t noticed any marijuana in the garden. It had to be something else. The cocoa plant! Elizabeth was growing cocaine in her greenhouse. No wonder Pablo told him not to eat from the chocolate tree. Or maybe there was peyote growing on the cactuses.
Ben figured that they wanted him to wear a wire. They wouldn’t hear much. Just Ben reading poetry to flowers. Although they might steal his poetry before he had a chance to publish it. Some of it hadn’t even been written down yet; he composed them extemporaneously in the garden and there would be no way for him to prove his authorship. Agents Black and Lugo could steal his poetry and claim it as their own.
Ben handed them each half a cup of freeze-dried coffee.
“I won’t wear a wire,” he said.
“I don’t want you to wear a wire,” said Agent Black, taking a sip of the scalding coffee.
Agent Lugo dropped his briefcase on the bed, popped it open, pulled out a thick black binder, and flipped through it. He found what he was looking for and turned the binder towards Ben, showing him a glossy, full-page photograph.
“Have you seen this flower?”
The flower had a long stem with emerald thorns, tufts of golden pollen and long flowing petals like liquid amethyst.
“It’s beautiful.” Ben ran his finger over the photograph admiringly.
Agent Lugo pulled the binder away. “Don’t touch. Just look.”
“Sorry.”
“This is an African Moonflower,” Lugo said. “It may be beautiful but it’s also very illegal.”
“Why?”
Agent Lugo grinned slightly and caught Agent Black’s eye. “He’s been reading National Geographic.” Agent Black chuckled. Lugo turned back to Ben. “Let me ask you something kid: You think just because a magazine has a yellow border it has to be true?”
Ben shrugged.
“Do you know what an ecosystem is?”
“Of course.”
“The African Moonflower is a swamp-eater. Do you know what that is?”
“No.”
“When a swamp-eater gets into an ecosystem, it destabilizes everything. It disrupts the food chain. Protozoans and monerans are wiped out. And who knows? Maybe one of those swamp creatures holds the cure for cancer, or AIDS, or some other God-forsaken disease, and we’ll never know, because some African Moonflower spores got loose and messed up the ecosystem. Once they pollinate, there’s no stopping them.”
“And that’s just the African Moonflower,” Agent Black interjected. “There’s flowers that if they got loose could destroy America’s agriculture. That means no food. A catastrophe the likes of which we’ve never seen.”
“Agricultural terrorism,” Lugo said sadly. “Our freedom hangs in the balance.”
Ben wanted to help them. Sure, America wasn’t perfect, but he didn’t want the ecosystem to be destroyed and for Osama bin Laden to take over and become president.
On the other hand, Elizabeth had given him a job as a poet. He had already bragged to everyone that he was a professional poet. He didn’t want to have to go crawling back to Reggie and beg for his dishwashing job back.
“So in the tropical greenhouse,” Lugo continued. “Have you seen an African Moonflower?”
Ben figured he had better tell the truth. They certainly trained agents of the Department of Agriculture to spot lies.
“I don’t know.”
Wrong answer. Agent Lugo slammed the binder shut, causing Ben to jump.
“How can you not know?! It’s a very distinct flower!”
“I’m sorry. I don’t spend too much time in the tropical greenhouse.”
“Why not?!”
“It’s humid in there. It’s uncomfortable.”
“So? Isn’t that your job? To read poetry to them?”
How did they know all this? They must have a spy at the garden. Ben wondered who it could be. Maybe they had tapped his phone.
“What do you want from me?”
Agent Lugo smiled. “We want you to do your duty as an American citizen.”
***
At Elizabeth’s garden party which celebrated her eightieth birthday, (the one with the wealthy people, the first one) the gazebo became too crowded for Ben, so he stepped out into the grass and strolled around the garden, looking at the flowers.
Ben was standing by the roses when a straight-backed old man came up to him. He had well-pronounced frown lines and bushy white hair, except for two thick dark eyebrows. He stirred the ice in his drink with a small red plastic stick, and gave Ben a hard stare.
“You must be the poet,” he said.
“I am,” Ben replied.
“You look like a poet.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s not a compliment.”
The old man shook the ice and stared into his glass.
“I hate birthdays,” he said. “But she insisted I come. I’m Elizabeth’s husband by the way.
Howard. I can’t stand these things, but…birthdays.” He sighed and spit in the grass. “You know Albert Einstein?”
“Of course.”
“He was my professor back at Princeton.” He began to stir the ice in his glass again. “Well,
Professor Einstein never learned his own phone number. He figured: why use part of his brain to store something he could just look up? It’s a waste of brain space, you see? If he wanted to know, he could just look himself up in the phone book. Well, I never even learned when my birthday is. If I want to know, I’ll go to city hall and get my birth certificate.”
“You don’t know when your birthday is?”
“No, and I don’t care. It’s a silly holiday, made up by Hallmark to sell greeting cards.”
“Hallmark made up your birthday?”
“All birthdays!”
He took a sip of his drink, puckered his lips, and looked at Ben appraisingly.
“What is it you do exactly?”
Ben gulped. “I read poetry to the flowers to help them grow.”
“And how exactly does it help them grow?”
“Love?”
Roseman shook his head.
“What?” Ben protested. “It works. Scientists have done studies on this.”
“No. They haven’t. Are you a scientist? No? Well, I am, and let me tell you: there is no scientific credibility to this quack theory of flowers needing love. There’s one study done several years ago by a disgraced former professor of botany at a community college in Kansas, but that’s it. There is no scientific basis to support the theory of the existence of such a thing as Love.”
“You don’t believe in Love?”
“I believe in Physics. Love was invented by deadbeat poets. They didn’t have any marketable trade; they couldn’t get dates, so they made up love. They don’t want to work and support a family so they talk all lovey-dovey and trick unsuspecting women. Poets are nothing but two-bit con men. Hustlers.”
“Have you told Elizabeth what you think about love?”
Howard Roseman’s eyes popped wide, his face flushed, and he ground his teeth.
“My wife has some strange ideas.” He looked over to the gazebo where Derrick was wildly swatting at a cloud of mosquitoes. “You are a bum, Fishbein. A bottom feeder; one of this fish that sucks on the side of aquariums. I don’t know what they’re called because I could just look it up. In fact….” Suddenly Howard Roseman laughed to himself, smiled, and all his anger seemed to have washed away. “You know what? I’m not getting into this with you. My time is too important. My mind is too important. I have to use it to find the Higgs Boson.”
He turned and started to walk away.
“The Higgs Boson?” Ben said. “What’s that?”
Howard Roseman stopped and looked up at the sky. “He doesn’t know what the Higgs Boson is,” he said with an exhausted sigh. He turned back and looked Ben directly in the eyes. “The Higgs Boson is a hypothetical elementary particle; hypothetical because no one’s ever actually seen it. We postulate it’s there because its existence explains the mass of other elementary particles. Kapeesh? I plan to be the first one to find it.”
“And no one’s ever seen it?”
“Were you not paying attention? Were you thinking about flowers? Yes, no one has ever seen it.”
“Then the Higgs Boson is just like love. No one’s ever seen love, but it explains the way things are. Love is an elementary particle: The Particle of Love.”
Howard threw his drink in Ben’s face. Fortunately for Ben, all the liquid was gone and only a couple ice cubes flew out and clunked harmlessly against his forehead.
“Side-sucker!” he hissed. “You’re a side-sucker, Fishbein. You may have Liz fooled, but you can’t fool me. You’re a con man and I’m going to expose you for the two-bit hustler that you are. You know Stephen Hawking?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m the one who put him in that wheelchair!” He waved a knobby finger threateningly in Ben’s face. “You shouldn’t cross me! I’m not a man to be crossed!”
He turned and stormed away, probably to the bar to get a refill on his drink. A full glass that he could throw in Ben’s face.
Ben didn’t feel nervous or angry. He was feeling too inspired to feel anything but pure inspiration tingling over every inch of his skin. He borrowed a pen from one of the caterers and scribbled on a cocktail napkin. The words just flowed. His new poem was called: The Particle of Love.
The part of you I love
I can’t see empirically,
but the part of me in love
knows instinctively;
your particle of love
is a Higgs Boson to me.
It rhymed. It was the kind of poem his father would like. Ben was becoming an establishment poet and hated himself for it. The flowers were dragging him away from the plight of the workingman.
Ben looked over at the throng gathered around Derrick and was surprised by how much they resembled mosquitoes, sucking the blood of the workingman. And now he was selling out.
They called him over to the gazebo. It was time for him to read his poem.
***
כ''ב באב תשס''ז
שדה אליהו
רמת הגולן, ישראל
August 6, 2007
Sde Eliyahu
Golan Heights, Israel
posted by Benjamin Fishbein at Monday, August 06, 2007
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