New Theory of Evolution
Dr. Leonard F. Gerch, an obscure and vaguely eccentric evolutionary biologist with a penchant for niche hobbies, found himself squatting in a darkened alcove of a forest in Slovakia, an isolated room-like gap between tree trunks. He was ostensibly on a mushroom-hunting trip. But what he’d forgotten for exactly fifty-three minutes, and couldn’t quite recall why he’d forgotten, was that he’d just stumbled upon what could be — maybe, hypothetically — the most groundbreaking evolutionary theory since Darwin’s finches, or at least since Gould’s punctuated equilibria. His brain had gone into its version of screensaver mode.
It had started innocuously. He’d bent down to inspect what looked like a mushroom but had, in the end, turned out to be a dried-out rock shaped like a mushroom, which was — ironically — disappointing, but also sort of charming in a postmodern way. The insight had come then, in the middle of the mushroom misidentification, a kind of low-grade epiphany. Not a proper aha moment, but a “memory aha moment.” As in, something he’d known all along — except he hadn’t quite known that he knew it. And now, of course, he’d forgotten it again. This happened frequently with Leonard.
Leonard’s theory (or at least what it felt like before he forgot) was simple: Humans don’t control important things like heartbeats or digestion or blinking — all those systemic, critical functions are automatic. Yet, we waste our conscious control on trivial things, like debating over McDonald’s menu options. The illusion of choice in those moments was almost cruel in its uselessness. All control — Leonard mused — was, in fact, a knot. A playful tangle of false perception. “Maybe knot,” he liked to think. He would’ve smiled at this clever play on words had he not been so profoundly disturbed by the fact that he could not remember the specifics of his original thought. The one that mattered.
He wiped his hands on his cargo pants and looked around. The forest was full of mushrooms — ugly, beautiful, in-betweens. He could choose which to pick. Wasn’t that freedom? But no, not really. There was a pattern to it, and he didn’t want to pick the obvious ones. Everybody went for the obvious ones. The world worked like that too, Leonard realized. Maybe the solution was randomization. Some kind of non-obvious obviousness that meant something but didn’t. His brain kept spooling.
Leonard gazed at a particularly unattractive boletus. Ugly. Yet, not ugly at all, really — just not aesthetically aligned with what humans deem beautiful. Funny how that worked. A beautiful boletus tasted the same as the ugly one. Strange that aesthetic judgment extended to mushrooms. He felt the old familiar tremor in his chest — anxiety wrapped in a sort of intellectual absurdity. The forest floor was carpeted in texture — an aesthetic mess of fungal bodies, moist soil, and the occasional tire track. He’d noticed one earlier, deep and grotesque, cutting through the forest like a fresh scar. It reminded him of ecoterrorism. Could he — should he — slash a pipe somewhere? Did it count as sabotage if no one saw?
The idea simmered briefly before it fizzled out. Leonard was distracted by the urge to take a shit. He wandered into a part of the woods where it seemed less trafficked, stumbled into a makeshift, unused shack. Here, squatting again — this time, more purposefully — his mind wandered back to sabotage, wondering if any of the machines used to carve up the forest could be disabled without being noticed. He had read a review once that mentioned sabotage. Probably a bad movie. Something French, obscure, but with that palpable sense of danger that, like mushrooms, were always nearby but rarely picked.
The sound of footsteps jolted him back to the present. A woman stepped into the room, her silhouette backlit and vaguely menacing. Leonard froze, thinking for a moment that this was some bizarre setup — a sting, or worse, some form of ecoterrorist code for “you’re next.”
Then he realized: It was just a mother playing hide and seek with her kids.
