Corpse Flower
by Vivian Lawry
Three weeks ago, I traveled to the Huntington Botanical Garden near downtown Los Angeles to assist at the first blooming of Amorphophallus titanum in California. The name means “huge, misshapen penis.” The botanists here call him Johnson, or sometimes titan arum, but I call him bunga bangkai, his name in my native Sumatra. Bunga bangkai is wondrous. In bloom, the spadix—the penis—is fleshy and red, cloaked in a frilly-edged, leafy spathe (or petal) the shape of an upturned, fluted bell, pale green on the outside and burgundy velvet on the inside. He resembles distant cousins the calla lily, skunk cabbage, and jack-in-the-pulpit, except that the bloom of bunga bangkai is three feet across and six feet tall—nearly eight feet if his potato-like corm is included in the measure. This bunga bangkai’s corm—his tuber—is shaped like a water chestnut but is the size of a small, curled-up child.
I have tended this bunga bangkai since his bud tip first pierced the earth. He has grown six inches a day, and his bloom-time is near. Two weeks ago, we carried him from the conservatory to the garden, to share this rare spectacle with the four thousand people who come each day. At home, he would bloom every year. But here, it will be three years or more before he comes again. Although he has been known to science since 1879, fewer than a dozen bloomings have been seen in the entire United States since his immigration in 1935.
I tend him day and night now. I watch the spathe completely unfurl as his scent grows stronger. Tonight, about eleven o’clock, bunga bangkai’s central spike starts to heat up. It surges from the surrounding temperature of sixty-eight degrees to nearly ninety degrees and will stay there till four o’clock in the morning before dropping back again. During this time, his miasma wafts out in waves, the smell of putrid flesh one minute, rotted pumpkins the next, sometimes dead fish, rotten eggs, or old socks. His stench saturates the air for a kilometer in every direction—farther with a light breeze. Today everyone, even my countrymen, believe he is called bunga bangkai—corpse flower—because of this smell. His perfume carries me back to my roots, in the steamy rainforests there.
* * *
Between the Buddhist Srivijaya kingdom of the eleventh century and the Islamic kingdom of Minangkabau in the fourteenth century, my people thrived. During that time, our ways did not change. Indeed, all was the same when I was born and bound to Nayvadius in 1845.
My other half and I—promised since birth—played children’s games, explored the forests and river, secure in our connection, bound for life. Unlike the other bound couples, we dreaded being apart and avoided it as much as possible. When we’d been bound for fifteen years, we climbed the slope of Mount Sinabung together. There we released a flight of butterflies and tied a loose knot in a woody length of liana vine—butterflies for the new beginnings and the new life we would have together, the loose knot that would only get tighter when the ends were pulled apart, representing our bond. We threw the vine into the fiery pit. The volcano whispered, “Nayvadius and Setia, eternally bound.” We both heard it. The mountain had never spoken before. We raced back to our village, carrying this secret in our hearts.
Early in the year we were to wed, people fleeing the far reaches of Sumatra told of volcanoes and tidal waves taking the lives of hundreds and destroying entire villages. Our people feared annihilation. The seers looked for guidance in the stars, for signs in the entrails of chickens, for portents in the birthmarks of newborns. They said, “The only hope is to plant the bodies of youths to appease the spirits of nature.” They made the garden of heads.
The strongest, straightest, most beautiful of the young couples were chosen, all within three years of flowering into adulthood. Every day we were buried up to our necks, the male and female together, facing each other, with three eggs at our feet—buried in the freshwater swamps and the rain forests—buried in the morning and dug up by our parents at sunset, pruny and lethargic. As the oldest of the bound couples, Nayvadius and I were the last to be planted and the first to be dug up. The planting and harvesting consumed one moon cycle and then another, and we grew weak from the immobility. The people took this as a sign that we were successfully feeding the spirits of fire and water.
Nayvadius and I suffered less than others because our greatest joy was being together. We sang love songs to each other. We shared the food our parents brought, sometimes mouth to mouth. We joked and teased. I said things like, “Can I really trust you? A man whose very name means that your future is unknown, your destiny uncertain?” He’d laugh and whisper a reminder of what Mount Sinabung promised.
According to custom for any important appeasement, the couples numbered forty and four: forty for waiting, preparation, testing, punishment, and completion of a cycle; four for balance, the totality of all that is created and revealed, all that perishes. Just as the second moon cycle drew to a close, three days before all would be liberated, Nayvadius and I held hands, eager to be done with this confinement, eager to be joined at last. When he had been sunk into our well, three bird’s eggs at his feet—just as I was about to be lowered into the ground facing him—flames shot from Mount Sinabung, and ash hid the sun. Everyone shrieked—the parents and the diggers and the heads in the garden. All who could move ran screaming from the cloud. I tried to pull my other half from the well, but my parents dragged me away from him—kicking and wailing—to safety. I could not sleep in the days that followed, eager to find Nayvadius. I would have known if he had perished.
Stench from the garden of heads reached as far as the village, a daily reminder of our dead. More than a year passed before we could tolerate the heat of the earth under our bare feet. The ash had settled enough that we could breathe, but we returned with lengths of cotton batik covering our mouths and noses against the smell. We found no heads.
Twenty-one plants in all their stages filled a new garden, two plants per mound, their sizes perhaps reflecting the ages and sizes of the couples. No one had seen such a plant before. They ranged in size from mere sprouts to the size and appearance of small trees. Some stood splendid and leafless as an amaryllis, growing straight out of tubers as big as grown men, their deep burgundy mimicking the color of raw meat. As dusk settled, nocturnal insects—carrion beetles and dung beetles, flies and sweat bees that usually lay eggs in rotting flesh—swarmed the garden, carrying pollen from one bloodred bloom to the next.
The scent map of the forest had been destroyed. None of the sweet floral smells remained, not even orchids. No musk of fungi, no piercing chlorophyll of leaves crushed underfoot. The death smell of the garden masked all. The people called the plant bunga bangkai, corpse flower.
I returned to search the garden for Nayvadius every day for a full moon cycle. I walked the rows of corpse flowers, talking to the plants, looking for any response, any sign that one of these was my other half. Each time, the smell of dead things clung to my hair for a day and more. When I accepted that he was not among these twenty-one plants, I searched the surrounding forests and mountains for a single flower. Searched in vain.
My people treated me with all the respect and deference due a widow, but young widows were expected eventually to marry and procreate. Various men who had lost their partners brought gifts of fruit and flowers. I delayed and avoided.
Rivers once again covered our lands, flattening the garden, scattering the plants, washing some away toward the sea. Surely my other half was no longer in this place. Thus began my journey.
* * *
After four days, the bloom of the Huntington corpse flower collapses of its own weight, and I am there to serve as midwife. In nature, bunga bangkai cannot self-pollinate. Although both male and female flowers cluster at the base of the spadix-penis, the female flowers mature ahead of the males. I do the work of the carrion beetles and sweat bees, and in the fall, round orange fruit begins to develop. But—again—I feel no connection. My heart knows he is not here. But bunga bankai is my last connection to Nayvadius. My only connection now. I can but pray that he, too, will haunt the blooming of corpse flowers.
At home in Sumatra, the corpse flower is endangered. Pollution and environmental degradation are taking their toll, largely due to fires associated with palm oil production. The plants grow nearly a mile apart. Few of my countrymen are animists anymore. As the spirits of the corpse flowers disappear there, only I weep.
Nine months later, I harvest 450 ripe, poisonous fruits from the Huntington titan arum. They look like persimmons. I send them to botanists, horticulturists, and enthusiasts all over the world, hoping one will lead me to the spirit of my other half. Whenever a botanical garden anywhere in the world announces that a blooming is imminent, I am there—self-effacing, a talented technician willing to work for a pittance. My itinerant life means no one notices that I do not age.
I know not what will happen when I find him. Will Nayvadius be a man now, suspended in time as he waits for our joining? Will his spirit enter my heart and be born of my body? Will my spirit leave my body to join his? I know only that whatever happens, it will allow us to complete our destiny. We will have peace.
The scientists talk about cadaverine, putrescine, and sulfurous chemicals causing the fetid odor, about how ‘corpse flower’ is the perfect name.
Only I know the source of the corpse flower. Now, only I remember the garden of heads. Only I look for Nayvadius. I will always look. My name, Setia, means ‘faithfulness.’
BIO: Vivian Lawry’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in more than seventy literary journals and anthologies, from Adanna Literary Journal to Xavier Review. Her stories appear in Virginia is for Mysteries, Virginia is for Mysteries Volume II, and Virginia is for Mysteries Volume III, anthologies of short fiction featuring landmarks of Virginia. Vivian has penned four books as well: Dark Harbor and Tiger Heart (installments in the Chesapeake Bay Mysteries), Nettie’s Books, a historical novel of strength and change, and Different Drummer: a collection of off-beat fiction. A complete list of her publications can be found at vivianlawry.com.