By the middle of February the buckets are out. You see them first at the grocery store, by the door where the pumpkins were in October: black plastic tubs of roses in cellophane sleeves, a dozen to a bunch, red mostly, a few pink and white for the people who think red is too much. The florists downtown have been up since four. At the light on Garth Road there is a man in a work truck with a bouquet on the passenger seat, wrapped in the paper the store gives you, and he keeps glancing over at it like it might get out. Every year it is the same, and every year it is a little bit moving anyway, a whole town of people who spend most of their days around steel and pipe walking out of a store carrying something that will be dead by the weekend.
That is where I want to start. Not the love. The dying.
A cut rose is a plant with its roots gone, standing in a glass of water, doing its best. It has a few days. What ends it is not the missing roots, exactly. Plenty of water gets up the stem. What ends it is a gas the rose makes itself, a signal it sends to its own petals, and the signal says: let go.
The gas is ethylene. Two carbon atoms with a double bond between them and four hydrogens hanging on, the smallest molecule of its kind, a shade lighter than air, with a faint sweet smell you would not notice in a room. Every plant on earth makes it. It is a hormone, the way adrenaline is a hormone in you, a small molecule that carries an instruction from one part of the organism to another. Ethylene's instruction is about time. It tells fruit to ripen. It tells leaves to yellow and fall. It tells a flower that its work is done, and the petals loosen at the base and drop. Bruise a fruit or cut a stem and the plant makes more of it, the way you make more adrenaline when you are hurt. The rose in the bucket has been cut, and so it is telling itself, quietly, all day, to finish.
It makes the gas in a way that is almost tender. It starts with an amino acid, one of the same building blocks it uses to make protein, and in two steps it trims that down to a small ring-shaped molecule, and then one last enzyme, which needs oxygen to work, snaps the ring open and lets the ethylene go. That is why a rose in a sealed box behaves differently from one on the table, and why the whole business slows down in the cold: the enzymes are slower when they are cold, the way everything is. And the petals hear the signal through a receptor that has a single atom of copper at its heart. The ethylene settles onto the copper, the receptor changes shape, and the cell gets the message. Take the copper away and the flower is deaf.
People knew this long before they knew what it was. Growers in ancient Egypt gashed their figs to make them ripen faster, which works because wounding makes the fruit produce ethylene. In old China, pears were ripened in closed rooms with burning incense, and the smoke did the work without anyone knowing which part of the smoke it was. Around the turn of the last century, a Russian graduate student named Neljubow noticed that pea seedlings grown in his laboratory grew sideways and squat instead of straight and tall, and traced it to the gas lamps lighting the room. The illuminating gas had ethylene in it, and the seedlings were listening to it. That was 1901. It took another thirty-odd years for anyone to prove that plants made the same gas on their own, and the proof was a pile of ripe apples in a closed jar, giving off enough of it to measure.
Florists know all of this in their hands even when they do not know it in words. You keep the flowers away from the fruit, because a bowl of ripening apples is a small ethylene factory. You keep them away from the loading dock and the truck exhaust. The good ones treat the stems with a compound that sits on the receptor where the ethylene would sit, so the petals cannot hear the signal, and the rose stays a rose for a few days longer than it would have. A cold cooler slows it down too. Everything in the florist's trade is a fight with that one molecule, and the trade always loses, only slower.
The man at the light on Garth Road, with the bouquet on the seat, has a badge on a lanyard hanging from the mirror. He is coming off shift, or going on. So now turn around with him and look east, toward the channel, because the place he works makes the same molecule the rose does.
The plants on the ship channel make ethylene too. Not a little of it. On the whole planet there is no organic chemical made in greater quantity than ethylene, and one of the largest complexes making it is the one whose flare you can see from Bayland Park. The process is called steam cracking, and it is nearly the opposite of what the rose does. The rose builds ethylene, slowly and carefully, out of an amino acid, in the dark inside its own cells. The cracker takes ethane, which came out of a gas well and was pulled apart from the methane somewhere between the well and here, mixes it with steam, and shoves it through a furnace at eight or nine hundred degrees Celsius for a fraction of a second. At that temperature the molecule cannot hold itself together. Hydrogen tears off. What is left is ethylene, and it comes out the other end of the furnace and is quenched, cold, at once, so that it does not keep reacting into soot and tar, and then it is squeezed and chilled to about a hundred degrees below zero, where the gases turn to liquid one after another and can be poured apart like cream from milk. Then it goes down a pipe to become something.
The something is mostly polyethylene, which is ethylene molecules taken by the thousands and linked into chains. The plastic sleeve around the rose is a cousin, made from the next molecule up. The bucket is polyethylene. The ribbon on the box of chocolates is polyester, and polyester is made from ethylene glycol, which is made from ethylene. The foam in the heart-shaped box, if it is the white kind, is polystyrene, and styrene is ethylene bolted onto a ring of benzene. The film over the tray of strawberries. The antifreeze in the truck at the light. Ethylene is less a product than a beginning, one that most of the objects in a room can be traced back to, if you are willing to follow the pipe.
The ethylene in the rose and the ethylene in the cracker are the same molecule. Not similar. The same. Two carbons, four hydrogens, the same double bond, the same faint sweetness. A molecule does not carry its history. There is no mark on it that says this one was made by a flower and this one was made by a furnace. If you took a cylinder of ethylene from the plant on the channel and let a little of it into a closed room full of green bananas, the bananas would ripen. This is not a thought experiment. It is how the produce business works. Bananas are cut green in the tropics, shipped cold across the ocean, and ripened on purpose in sealed rooms near the store by letting in ethylene from a tank. The molecule in the tank came from a cracker, and the banana cannot tell.
So there are two ethylenes in this town on the fourteenth of February, and they are the same ethylene. One is being made by every rose in every bucket, a few molecules at a time, telling the petals to let go. The other is being made by the ton on the channel, in furnaces that run day and night, to become the sleeve the rose is wrapped in and the bucket the rose stands in and the bag the man at the light will carry it home in. One of them is the chemistry of ending. The other is the chemistry of beginning. They are the same chemistry, and neither one knows what it is for.
I do not think that is a sad fact. I think it is the most honest thing the day has to offer. A valentine is a gesture made with something that will not last, and everyone involved knows it will not last, and that is the point of it. You do not give someone a plastic rose. You give them the real one precisely because it is already sending the signal to itself, because by Saturday the petals will be on the table, and you are saying: I know. I know what it costs. Here.
The plant on the channel does not know that. It is a machine. But the people in it do, and they walk out of the same grocery store with the same bouquet on the seat, and they have spent their shift making the same molecule the rose is making to end itself, and they have made it into the thing that holds the rose up a few more days. There is something in that. I have not decided what.
Aristotle, who was one of the first people anyone knows of to think carefully about what it means to be alive, said that a living thing is one that carries the source of its own motion inside itself. A rock does not want anything. A rose wants to open and then wants to be done. The word he used for being-at-work is the ancestor of our word energy, and it fits the rose better than it fits a barrel. The barrel is only a possibility. The rose is a thing happening.
Late on the fourteenth, in a kitchen off Bayway Drive, the sleeve is in the trash and the bucket is back at the store and the man from the truck is asleep. Through the window, past the fence line and the dark water, the flare on the channel is doing its steady orange work, cracking ethane into the same small molecule, all night, for the next sleeve and the next bucket. On the table the roses stand in a glass, doing the same chemistry at their own pace, a few molecules at a time, and by morning there is one petal on the tablecloth, curled at the edge, the first one to hear.
