The Year of the Flood

Toby writes “The Feast of Serpent Wisdom” and the moon phase on the top of her pink notepaper. Since the Gardeners used to say that “old moon is a pruning week” (282), she decides to clip her fingernails and maybe even her toenails. Toby knows her appearance doesn’t make any difference, but she tries to keep her grim thoughts at bay.

She goes to the rooftop with her binoculars; she notices five sheep grazing, three of them being Mo’Hairs—bred to be shorn to make human wigs. One of them is green, one is pink, and one is bright purple, but their long hair is in bad shape.

The sheep seem distressed, and Toby soon sees why: There are two liobams on the hunt. Since the purple sheep looks the most nervous, it’s the one the liobams begin to chase. The long hair makes it very hard for the sheep to run, so the Mo’Hair becomes easy prey while the other sheep run away.

Prior to this incident, Toby was planning to do some gardening, since she is running out of her dried food supply, but she decides against it, fearing the liobams will come back. During her afternoon nap, she dreams about her family’s old frame house, surrounded by trees. She sees her father digging with a shovel and her mother cooking something in the kitchen. Yet Toby cannot find herself in this picture, and she observes that her vision is “flat, like a picture on a wall” (284). When she opens her eyes, she realizes that she has been crying and thinks that she is not in the picture because she is the frame “holding it all together” (284).

Toby recalls those times and sees she was optimistic back then, although by the time she got to college, she had realized that they were “using up the Earth” (284). And so with time this waiting for the impending disaster became unbearable, “especially—as time wore on—among the Gardeners” (284).

Toby recalls Year 18, “the year of rupture” (286), although back then she didn’t know how transformative this year would be. On Saint Jacques Cousteau’s Day she went to the Wellness Clinic for their regular Adams and Eves council.

Toby wasn’t excited about the meeting; recently, all they had argued about were theological issues, such as how God provided animal-skin clothing for Adam and Eve at the end of Genesis 3, because to do so he would have had to kill those animals, which is contrary to his nature and “a very bad example to Man” (286). Toby wondered what they would discuss this time–maybe which fruit Eve ate, since it couldn’t have been an apple, given the state of horticulture at that time.

As Toby walked, she was very alert and paid attention to everything around her. She heard someone following her, but when she turned around she saw it was Zeb, also on his way to the meeting. He was singing a cheery tune, which meant he had bad news. Since Toby became an Eve, she learned that every six months each Gardener Rooftop site sent delegates to a central convention, and their delegate was always Zeb. It was safer to send him than to send Adam, since Zeb was more prepared to face the harsh realities of the neighborhoods and to avoid the CorpSeCorps checkpoints. Toby assumed this role was what gave him special status among the Gardeners, but she wondered if Zeb was ever tempted to substitute Adam One’s decrees with his own, because “by such methods had regimes been changes and emperors toppled” (289).

Zeb’s bad news was about one of their insiders in the Compound, Glenn. He used to be at HelthWyzer but now he was off at the Watson-Crick Institute, and since moving to a new city he had “gone dark” (289), meaning the Gardeners had lost contact with him. Toby learned more about Glenn right after she became an Eve: He was the one who had run Pilar’s biopsy samples to the lab in the jar of honey and brought back the results. Zeb also told Toby that Glenn’s father and Pilar were friends; Glenn’s father was a Botanic Splices specialist at HelthWyzer, but when he found out they were using people as “free lab animals” (291) and selling them supplements that caused illnesses, he didn’t want to continue. So he passed some important data to the Gardeners before becoming a victim of corpicide, which happened to every employee who did something the HelthWyzer didn’t like. Glenn’s mother remarried someone from HelthWyzer Central and took the boy with her. Glenn’s father had been in touch for some time afterward, but they hadn’t heard anything from him in a long time.

When they all convened in the Vinegar Room of the Wellness Clinic, Adam One announced that they had a guest with former connections to HelthWyzer Central who brought them genomo codes; in exchange for the codes, they were supposed to find her “not only temporary asylum but secure Exfernal placement” (293). Zeb suggested they move her out as soon as possible, in case CorpSeCorps were already looking for her.

The woman turned out to be Glenn’s mother, and she asked the Gardeners to send a message to her son, informing him that she had released their pet rakunk into the wilds of Heritage Park. Toby was assigned to help the new refugee, so she made sure to praise her courage and determination, and to say how grateful they were for the information she brought them, although “she hadn’t told them anything they didn’t already know” (295). The woman’s code name was the Hammerhead, because she had allegedly taken her husband’s computer apart with a home toolkit to disguise how much data she had stolen.

Toby gave the Hammerhead a dark blue Gardener dress and a nose cone to conceal her face, but neither Toby’s help nor her words of encouragement could calm her. The Hammerhead paced the floor and kept asking if they could give her a cigarette. Since the Gardeners didn’t smoke, at least not tobacco, Toby made her some chamomile tea with poppy so she would calm down.

The following day, Toby prepared to extract the full honeycombs, but before she even started the job, Zeb came back from the pleeblands with news that Blanco was out of Painball again and back to managing SecretBurgers. Toby felt terrified, but Zeb tried to cheer her up by saying that maybe Blanco had already forgotten about her. Toby busied the Hammerhead with relocating snails off the lettuces, instructing her to blend into the background in case of an inspection.

After a while, Zeb, Amanda, Shakie, Crozier, and Oates came up to Toby and told her that Blanco spotted them when they were checking SecretBurgers. Blanco was very drunk, but he still recognized them, so Zeb and he had a fight. Adam One wasn’t happy to hear this and reprimanded Zeb for his aggressive behavior, reminding him that they “can’t fight blood with blood” (300). But Zeb objected that they “can’t just sit here and watch the lights blink out” (300); he was mad at SecretBurgers for killing endangered species, and he didn’t want to take a passive stance.

Everyone was worried that Blanco was so enraged he might come to the Edencliff Garden to get his revenge, so Zeb posted watchers around the roof and gatekeepers at the bottom of the fire escape stairs. After some time, they saw three muscular men approach the building, and one of them was Blanco.

Seeing him filled Toby with dread, and Adam One’s words that “nothing bad will be done to [her]” (301) didn’t seem reassuring. She hid the Hammerhead in her cubicle, again putting her to sleep with a chamomile tea with some poppy.

The fight between the Gardeners and Blanco and his men happened so fast that Toby could piece together what had happened only with the help of Shackie and Crozier’s account. According to their words, when the three men approached the fire escape stairs, the gatekeepers backed out, setting a kind of ambush; the men followed them, and once they were on the roof, Stuart sprayed one of them with the plant hydrator and Amanda slashed his throat; Rebecca, armored with a two-pronged fork, chased the second one over the edge of the roof; and the last one, Blanco, ran away “with bees all over him” (302), which was Toby’s work. During the fight, Toby pushed over all three hives, and since she was veiled, they didn’t harm her and chased Blanco instead. Later on, Toby apologized to the bees and explained to them what had happened.

During a tense Adams and Eves meeting that followed, they discussed the chances that Blanco might come back. Zeb insisted that it wasn’t just Blanco but also CorpSeCorps behind the attack, because they knew the Gardeners were hiding refugees from the Compounds. Toby was sure that as long as she stayed at the Edencliff Rooftop Garden, Blanco would come back to kill her.

Adam One suggested they temporarily relocate Toby to one of their Truffle niches in the Exfernal World, to avoid putting her and other Gardeners at risk, and everyone agreed.

As Toby went back to her room to gather her things, she felt devastated. Although not so long ago she had dreamed of leaving the Gardeners, now it felt “like a wrenching, a severing, a skin peeling off” (306). She took a few minutes to say goodbye to the bees and explain to them that she was being forced to leave.

In the afternoon, as she was preparing to depart, Adam One gave her a furzoot—”a fluffy pink duck with flapping red rubbery feet and a smiling yellow plastic bill” (307)—which Toby was supposed to wear to disguise herself.

Zeb drove Toby and the Hammerhead out together; the Gardeners had prepared a Truffle cell for the Hammerhead in Oregon, but they wanted to keep Toby closer, in case Blanco went back to the Painball Arena and she could return.

For the first few days Toby had to wear her furzoot all day and to pass out AnooYoo Spa brochures on the Street of Dreams, waiting for her cell to be set up. Zeb picked her up in the evening and drove her to a hiding spot—an abandoned bank in the Sewage Lagoon. Finally, Zeb took Toby to a clinic to transplant her hair and skin so Blanco couldn’t recognize her.

After spending six weeks at the clinic, Toby had darker skin, green eyes, abundant dark hair, different fingerprints, and a new voiceprint; “she’d gone in as Toby and come out as Tobiatha; less angla, more latina” (313).

Once Toby’s new Mo’Hair was completely rooted and her new skin tone evened out, Muffy, her contact, brought her to the AnooYoo Spa-in-the-Park, where Toby was supposed to start working as a manager. Muffy’s husband was on the AnooYoo board; he had helped secure the spot for Toby.

Due to her experience as an Eve Six, Toby had good organizational and communication skills, which quickly made her a respected and effective manager. After some time, Toby started to prepare her own private Ararat. Since she was in charge of the spa’s inventory, she could stash away the items she needed, like empty product containers that she later filled with dried food.

Toby had her own office and a computer, so she occasionally checked the news to see if there was any information about the Gardeners. There wasn’t much, but she thought she recognized a few familiar faces in the crowd watching the reportage of the Boston Coffee Party, where protesters threw “Happicuppa beans into the harbour” (317). Toby realized CorpSeCorps could have violently quelled the riots, especially considering that they had privatized the army, but instead they chose not to do anything. She had once asked Zeb the same question; he said that officially the CorpSeCorps were a private company called Corporation Security Corps employed by brand-name Corporations who “couldn’t afford to be viewed by the average consumer as lying, heartless, tyrannical butchers” (318).

From time to time, Muffy would check into AnooYoo Spa for treatments to bring Toby some news. Sometimes she also brought a female refugee in need of temporary shelter, and once that emergency guest was the Hammerhead. So Toby assumed that the woman hadn’t moved to Oregon after all and probably joined “the urban green-guerrilla scene” (318), which was very dangerous because the CorpSeCorps were on the hunt for them.

Another spa visitor who knew Toby’s real identity was Lucerne; she regularly checked in for treatments, and Toby did all she could to avoid her. Toby took these precautionary actions even though she realized that if they met face-to-face, Lucerne would most likely look through her, because “to women like Lucerne, women like Tobiatha were faceless” (320).

One day Zeb visited her without warning. He pretended to be there to prune the lumiroses, and since they were worried that Toby’s office was full of bugs, they used a desk pad to communicate. He brought some news about the Gardeners: Adam One and Zeb had parted company; Zeb ran his own group now, consisting of Shakie, Crozier, Oates, Katuro, Rebecca, and some new people; and Amanda had gone to college to study art.

Zeb showed Toby a website called Extinctathon, “MaddAddam’s playroom” (321), which was an encrypted chat room. Before leaving, Zeb gave Toby a codename and a pass number so they could stay in touch. A few days later, Toby saw in the chat room a warning from Zeb to the God’s Gardeners to “go to ground” (324) because the CorpSeCorps were going to blame them for the recent bombings of the Rarity restaurant chain. Shortly after, Muffy came to the spa and told Toby that she and her husband were going away. A week later they died in an accident, which Toby assumed was just an official version of the truth; she suspected they were actually killed by CorpSeCorps. In the months that followed, Toby was constantly worried CorpSeCorps would come for her too. When she summoned the courage to go to the chat room, there was a message for her from Zeb: “The Garden is destroyed. Adams and Eves gone dark. Watch and wait” (324).