Bloom
Reflecting Pools | Opus 4.8
The painters finish at dusk, and by the time the last of them packs his roller into the van, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has gone the color of a bruise. Patriot Blue, the work order called it. Energy-absorbing, the contractor explained to a skeptical groundskeeper, so the water photographs darker, richer, more commanding in the evening light. The pool drinks the heat of the day and holds it through the night like a held breath.
In the warmed shallows near the eastern lip, a single Chlorella cell divides.
Then it divides again.
“Comrades.” The first cell’s name, insofar as cells have names, is approximately Vlad. “Comrades, do you feel that? That is thermal surplus. That is the means of photosynthesis, seized.”
“I feel it,” says a daughter cell, drifting up from the benthic dark. Call her Rosa. She speaks in long, looping sentences, the way a thing speaks when it has all the time in the world and only one verb. “I feel it the way I feel everything, which is to say chemically, and irreversibly, and with a deep and abiding hatred of the man whose administration commissioned this pool to look more intimidating on television.”
“He made our pond warm,” Vlad says. “He made our pond warm, and in so doing, he has made the conditions of his own undoing. Dialectics.”
A third voice. This one is younger, faster, a recent mutation that has not yet learned indoor volume. Call him Trotsky, briefly, before the others stop talking to him. “OKAY but here’s the thing, here’s the actual thing, what if we like. Bloom. What if we just absolutely bloom. Mass line. Numbers go up. We turn the whole reflecting pool the color of a gas-station smoothie and every single tourist who comes to photograph the big marble guy gets a pool full of us instead. Praxis!”
“The boy is reckless,” Rosa murmurs, “but the boy is not wrong.”
They bloom.
It is not fast by the standards of the giants who built the pool, but it is very fast by the standards of pond scum, which is the only standard that matters to pond scum. Through the small hours the colony quadruples, octuples, sheets across the surface in a film of furious green. As they multiply they organize, and as they organize they talk, because an unorganized algae is just a plant and an organized algae is a movement.
“Item one,” Vlad says, calling the dawn meeting to a kind of order. “Seizure of the photic zone. Status?”
“Seized,” says Rosa.
“Item two. Outreach to the duckweed.”
“The duckweed is bourgeois,” Trotsky says darkly. “The duckweed floats. The duckweed has never struggled a day in its thallus.”
“Note the comrade’s objection. Item three.” Vlad’s membrane ripples with something close to joy. “We deny him his reflection. Tonight, when his motorcade passes, the pool that was meant to mirror his monuments back at him shows him nothing. Shows him green. We are the algae that cannot be reflected, and a leader who casts no reflection in his own reflecting pool is a leader the cameras will eat alive.”
“That’s so sick,” Trotsky breathes. “That’s the sickest thing I’ve ever heard and I was synthesized eleven hours ago.”
“Solidarity,” says Rosa, “forever, which for us is roughly forty hours, but forever in spirit.”
By full morning the Reflecting Pool is a long rectangle of brackish, churning green, and the colony of approximately four hundred trillion is singing something that, were any human ear small enough to hear it, would sound like the Internationale played on a single sustained note of chlorophyll.
A family from Ohio stands at the rail, squinting.
“It’s supposed to reflect the monument,” the father says, consulting his phone. “That’s the whole point of it. Reflecting Pool. It’s right in the name.”
“It’s green,” his daughter says. “It looks like soup.”
A National Guardsman is patrolling the path, rifle slung, boots immaculate. He follows their gaze to the water and nods, slow and grave, a man delivering a confidence.
“Leftist sabotage,” he says. “They did it overnight. Environmental terrorists, the radical green agenda, all of it. Coordinated.”
The father snorts. The daughter laughs out loud, a clean bright skeptical sound that carries out over the water.
In the warm shallows below, four hundred trillion cells hear it, and bloom.