Chapter 14
Fourteen
accurately, an entertainment tabloid columnist, hoping to score her ticket to the big leagues of legitimate journalism, blocked
Kane’s driveway with her rental car.
Kane abandoned his truck and walked along the highway shoulder. The reporter tailed him all the way to the town square, hurling
questions like pebbles plucked from the side of the road. Just outside Lou’s, Kane promised he’d answer one question if she
got lost and told her friends to stay the hell away from him.
The reporter asked, “What was Nuclear Seasons really about?”
Never one to mince words, Kane said, “Alienation.”
Then he walked into Lou’s and slammed the glass door in the reporter’s face.
For a show best described as “X-Files meets Schitt’s Creek with a dash of Twilight Zone, gilded in borderline-neurotic Cold War anxiety,” that cryptic interview and Kane’s steadfast silence were as compelling
a mystery as the Spectors’ secrets.
That mystique attracted Nuclear Seasons’s modest but rabid cult following, composed mostly of neckbeard-sporting Kane acolytes. There was a resurgence with millennials
and Zoomers when NS hit the streaming services. The haunting, dreamlike cinematography and nakedly veiled homoerotic subtext appealed to a certain
sensibility.
I ship #hartie—the ship name for Art Spector and disaffected deputy sheriff Harry Davis—as much as any good queer, but that
isn’t why I love the show. I joke that NS made me trans, but it’s true. Art Spector—or actor Sam Schatz—was my first early puberty confrontation with the singular
“do you want to do them or be them?” conundrum that every young queer must inevitably face. My answer? Art—or Sam—was precisely the kind of not-so-nice
Jewish boy I wanted to be.
But what does it say about me that my role model is the protagonist of a show about alienation?
It means that I’m in no mood for socializing after my meeting with Billy. Any motivation I had to go to Efraín’s union meeting
evaporated around the time Billy as good as told me HR’s job is to ensure employees don’t demand human rights.
So, I ask Lola to drop me off at home instead of the diner, and Efraín glowers at me in the rearview mirror, his eyes simmering like I’ve betrayed him personally, worse than when I refused to dye my hair.
But Lola’s internal sensors go haywire, reading the increase in tension, and she suggests we table our meeting until tomorrow
night, cool as you like. She bribes Efraín with the promise of her mama’s tostones, which mollifies him just enough.
At home, Naomi immediately disappears into the backyard, and I retreat upstairs with Sputnik and every intention of burying
my sorrows in old comfort hartie fics.
Moms have other plans. A little after eight, Ma’s deep-bellied laughter and Mom’s clinking industrial-size key ring reverberate
through the entire house. It’s not often they both come home before closing; most days, Mom opens, and Ma closes. But once
or twice a month, Ma worries they’ve accidentally raised us as latchkey kids and Mom problem-solves by suggesting family “movie”
night.
Except Nuclear Seasons is the only thing everyone’s guaranteed to watch.
Tonight, upon Moms’ arrival, Ma shouts that family movie night is starting in ten minutes, participation mandatory. I make
a brief detour to the kitchen for sparkling water and two slabs of diner-baked challah Mom brought home.
In the family room, my seat is taken; Naomi is sitting in the La-Z-Boy recliner. She makes a strange sight in the dim light, her back straight and her arms braced on the armrests. She doesn’t look remotely comfortable.
I suppress the red flags, all the semaphore alerting my subconscious, and hold out one napkin-wrapped challah slice. “Trade
you? Sustenance for a seat.”
“I’m not hungry,” Naomi replies. A bowl of trail mix sits on the end table beside her.
“Okay, can I have my chair anyway?” I don’t understand why the chair is in contention at all. We’re a neurodivergent family
stuck in our ways. Moms always take the couch, and Naomi curls up on the left-most cushion. The chair is mine by the sacred
law of older sibling first dibs.
But Naomi looks up at me and says, “It’s not your chair.”
For a moment, I think she’s going to challenge me to a staring contest, which seems like the worst possible game for two eye-contact-averse
autistic kids, but she chickens out right before engaging contact.
“Fine,” she concedes, finally ceding my chair. Except she hooks the matching ottoman under one arm and makes camp with her
granola in her lap on the opposite end of the room.
I don’t have time to run down all the ways Naomi’s behavior doesn’t make sense because Ma’s already scrolling through the
NS episode list. “If we pick up where we left off, that would put us at ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Cain?’ but . . .”
“No,” Mom says. She doesn’t actually like NS and only tolerates it for the rest of us, but she has limits. The wackadoodle de-aging episode is one of them.
“What about ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Barbecue’? ” Naomi asks innocently. I look at her in her loungewear onesie, her hair piled
in a fluffy bun, the green peekaboo layer on full display.
“No,” I say emphatically.
“No?” Ma is understandably confused because I never veto episodes.
But I don’t think I can handle seeing Chanel’s infamous Marienbad dress after a day like this. I grasp for something, anything
else, trapped in the memory of this morning, sitting within spitting distance of Kane’s grave, closed in on all sides by trellises
wrapped in . . . “ ‘Grapevines of Wrath’?” I suggest.
“The tentacle monster episode?” Ma perks up.
“It’s not a tentacle monster,” I insist futilely. For better or worse, that is how episode fourteen is affectionately and
infamously remembered by casual viewers and die-hard fans alike.
Naomi shrugs.
Mom hits play, and by the time the dark, synth-studded theme song starts, Sputnik clambers onto my lap, purring before I even
start petting her downy fur.
Then I turn my attention to the show, promising myself that I’ll hold back the commentary always on the tip of my tongue.
That won’t stop Ma from pointing out every time Lou’s exterior appears in an establishing shot or identifying everyone in the crowd scenes where casting conscripted locals as background actors.
The slew of mysteries-of-the-week has the denizens of Egan’s Creek on edge, looking for someone to blame. The Spectors have
just reopened their winery, drawing workers from across the state, but after a few agents provocateurs whip the crowd into
a frenzy at a town meeting, the Thatcher-esque mayor orders a fence built around Egan’s Creek, the winery just out of bounds.
Except every morning, the construction crew finds the site trashed.
When Harry and Art stake out the scene overnight on sheriff’s orders, they see grapevines slithering out of nowhere, prying
the fence apart plank by plank. The mayor fights nature with barbed wire and orders Harry to safeguard the delivery, despite
his and Art’s fervent protests. When they drive up to the build site, half the town has congregated to block the freight trucks.
Citizens and migrant workers of Egan’s Creek link arms, and the vines recede into the fog.
Ma lets out a low whistle. “Still a banger.”
“You say that about all of them,” Mom mutters.
“Because they still hold up! Well, maybe not ‘Baby Cain’ or ‘Tinker Tailor Insert-Borderline-Slur-Here Spy.’ ”
I nibble on my second slice of challah—the one I tried to give Naomi, who’s now plucking the remote from the coffee table.
I’m about to object because I like watching the credits, reading the names of everyone who worked to make the show great, but instead of exiting out, Naomi rewinds to the climactic shot: grapevines and regular people joining arms. Protecting each other.
Naomi studies the screen with an intensity she usually reserves for birding in places known for rare species.
Ma, meanwhile, reclaims the remote as a pointer to indicate the background actors at the edges of the human chain. “There’s
Mr. Jennings back when he still had a full head of hair. Irene O’Connor in bell-bottoms, with Cheryl Morse, back when they
were the only out lesbians in town. Then that group of teenagers on the left. That right there’s a teenage Ben Loman when
he was just the ‘and Sons’ in Loman
she babysat Dagny when they were filming.”
“You know,” I say, “there’s an ongoing debate about this episode. Once people get over the ‘tentacle monster’ gimmick, I mean.
I overheard some guys arguing about it in the gift shop the other day when they were looking at wineglasses.”
“ ‘Grapevines of Wrath’ wineglasses,” Mom repeats, deadpan.
“Bestsellers,” Naomi adds, drier than a sauvignon blanc.
You don’t grow up in wine country without learning these things, even before you’re old enough to drink.
“What’s the argument?” Ma asks.
“In the episode,” I say, “it’s ambiguous whether the vines are sentient, acting of their own agency, or if they’re animated
by the collective consciousness of the workers, the town, or both. Collective conscience, really. The ‘strange new people’ around town—the mayor’s words—don’t look like—I mean, I think it’s pretty obviously an allegory about immigration, xenophobia, and racism—”
“Not just that,” Naomi says, and nothing else. She’s still looking at the frozen screen. The image hasn’t changed; I still
don’t understand what she sees.
Then Mom says, “It’s just the vines.”
And Ma says, “It’s gotta be collective consciousness.”
They look at each other with matching expressions of surprise.
Mom shrugs. “The mysteries on this show always have simple pseudoscientific explanations. Like the diseased orange grove in
the scurvy zombie episode. You just think it’s a mystical psychic link because you know the people in the picture.”
“It’s not about who I know,” Ma protests. “Nuclear Seasons is about the space between the common good and the common defense.”
Dagny told me the museum was about bringing people together, just like the show. But that’s not the same thing, is it? Not
when the price of admission to bring people together is leaving a fundamental piece of yourself behind at the museum door.
I tried to protect myself. I wore a button, I was ordered to take it off, and I did. I asked HR for accommodations, and I
got laughed out of the meeting.
I’m not going to cry and wail about how the world isn’t fair because that’s old news. I don’t expect fair. I won’t debate the diversity, equity, and inclusion culture wars about what “fair” means in the world, let alone the workplace.
But what avenues of resistance exist when the fence is going up around you?
How can you, but tender flesh and vital blood, resist barbed wire?
Moms are tenderheartedly sniping with each other about their differing interpretations. Sputnik has deserted my lap in search
of kibble.
But Naomi’s still looking at the screen, the green in her hair staring me right in the face.
Maybe I’ve been fighting two battles where there’s only one. Maybe I’ll blink and suddenly see where the institution ends
and the message begins. Maybe the message has been right in front of me all along, but I was too afraid to see it.