adjectives to be used when describing it to prospective
buyers. Succulent. Juicy. Mouthwatering. Refreshing.
HeaVenly. Other-worldly.
The rest of the first volume and the nine that
followed continued in this vein. Swope had authored
eight hundred and twenty-seven pages of text laud-.
ing the cherimoya over a ten-year-period, recording
the progress of each tree in his young grove and
plotting his control of the market. (“Riches? Fame?
Which is paramount? No matter, there will be
both.”)
Stapled in ne of the books was an invoice from a
printer and a sample brochure brimming with gushing
prose and illustrated with-color photographs.
One picture showed Swope holding a bushel of the
exotic fruit. As a young man he’d resembled Clark
Gable, tall, husky, with dark wavy hair and a pencil
mustache. The caption identified him as a world-renowed
hortculturist and botanical researcher
specializing in the propagation of rare food crops
and dedicated to ending world hunger.
I read on. There were detailed descriptions of
crossbreeding experiments between the cherimoya
and other members of annonaceae. Swope was a
compulsive reporter, painstakingly listing every pos-
sible climactic and biochemical variable, tn the end
that line of research had been abandoned With the
notation that “No hybrid approaches the perfection
that is a. cherimoya.”
The optimism came to an abrupt halt in Volume
X: I opened to newspaper clippings reporting the
freak frost that had decimated the cherimoya grove.
There were descriptions of the agricultural damage
wrought by the cold winds and projections of rises
in food prices clipped from San Diego papers. A
mournful featur6 on the Swopes specifically had
been printed in the La Vista C/a/on. The next
twenty pages were filled with jagged, obscene scribbles,
the paper deeply indented often to the point
of tearing; the pen had ‘been used to stab and slash.
Then new experimental data.
As I turned the pages, Garland Swope’s fascina-ti.on
with the grotesque, the stillborn, and the deadly
evolved before my eyes. It started as theoretical
notations about mutations, and rambling hypotheses
about their ecological value. Midway through the
eleventh volume was the chilling answer Swope
found to those questions: “The sublimely repugnant
mutations of otherwise mundane species must
be evidence of the Creator’s essential hatefulness.”
The notes grew progressively less coherent even
as they increased in complexity. At times Swope’s
handwriting was so cramped as to be illegible, but I
was able to make out most of it–tests of poison
content on mice, pigeons, and sparrows; careful
selection of deformed fruit for genetic culture; culling
of the normal, nurturance of the defective, All
part of a patient, methodical search for the ultimate
· horticultural horror.
Then there was yet another turn in the convo-
BLOOD TEST 279
luted j.ourney through Swope’s mind: in the first
XII it appeared he’d dropped
his morbid obsessions and gone back to working
with annonaceae, concentrating on-a species Maimon
hadn’,t mentioned: a. zingiber. He’d conducted a
series of pollinization experiments, carefully listing
the date and time of each. Soon, however, the new
studies were interrupted by accounts of work with
deadly toadstools, foxglove, and dieffenachia. There
was a gleeful emphasis upon the neurotoxic qualities
of the last exemplified by a footnote attributing
the plant’s common name, dumb cane, to its ability
paralyze the vocal chords.
This pattern of shifting between his pet mutations
and the new annona became established by the
middle of the thirteenth volume and continued
through the fifteenth.
In Volume XVI, the notes took on an optimistic
tone as Swope exulted in the creation of “a new
cultivar.” Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, a.
zingiber was discarded and dismissed as “showing
robust breeder potential but lacking any further
ry.” I put my strained eyes through another
hundred pages of madness and set the binders aside.
The library contained several bookson rare ‘fruit,
many of them exquisite editions published in Asia.
I looked through all of them but could find no
reference to annona zingiber, Puzzled, I searched
the shelves for suitable reference material and
pulled out a thick dog-eared volume titled Botanical
Taxonomy.
The answer was at the end of the book. It took a
while to comprehend the full meaning of what I’d
just read. An unspeakable conclusion but agonizingly