Chapter 13: Imbibition

Imbibition is the process by which a dry seed absorbs water. It is the first step of germination, the step that precedes all other steps, the step without which nothing else can happen. The water enters the seed through the seed coat — through the micropyle, the small opening at the point where the seed was attached to the parent plant, or through cracks and thin spots in the coat itself — and spreads through the tissue, drawn inward by the physical forces of capillary action and osmosis, the water molecules moving from the wet exterior to the dry interior, from the place of abundance to the place of scarcity, equalizing the moisture gradient, the same physics that governed the movement of water through soil and through roots and through the entire hydraulic system of a living plant, the physics of water seeking level, of moisture moving toward dryness, of the wet and the dry coming into balance.

The seed swells. This is the visible sign of imbibition, the first change that an observer can see: the dry, hard, shrunken seed becoming larger, softer, its surface smoothing as the tissue expands, the wrinkles filling in, the color darkening as the water changes the optical properties of the seed coat. The swelling is mechanical — it is produced by the physical expansion of the tissue as it absorbs water, the cells taking up fluid and expanding, the pressure increasing inside the seed coat, the coat stretching to accommodate the increased volume. The swelling is also metabolic — the water activates the enzymes that begin the process of converting the endosperm's starch into the sugars that the embryo needs to fuel its growth, the chemical machinery of germination starting up, the factory coming online after a long shutdown, the systems engaging in sequence, each one dependent on the one before it, each one necessary for the ones that follow.

Imbibition cannot be reversed. Once the water enters the seed and the enzymes activate and the germination process begins, the seed cannot return to its dormant state. It must grow or die. The water has committed it to a course of action that has no alternative and no retreat, and the seed must follow the course through to its conclusion — the radicle emerging, the shoot extending, the leaves unfurling, the plant establishing itself — or the process will fail and the seed will die, not in the dormant, preserved, potentially viable state that it occupied before the water arrived but in the dead, decomposed, gone state of tissue that has begun a process it cannot complete.

This is the risk of imbibition. The risk is not in the water. The risk is in the commitment. The risk is in the fact that beginning means that not-beginning is no longer possible, that the door has opened and cannot be closed, that the conditions have changed and the change is irreversible, and the seed that was safe in its dormancy — safe in the sealed, dry, cold, stable state that the vault maintained and that Astrid maintained and that the seed coat maintained — is now exposed to the conditions of growth and the conditions of growth are also the conditions of failure, because growing is not guaranteed, because germination can begin and not succeed, because the radicle can emerge and find no soil, the shoot can extend and find no light, the plant can push toward the surface and not reach it.

Astrid thought about imbibition on a Saturday evening in early February, sitting on the sofa with Erik, a bottle of wine between them on the coffee table, the curtains drawn against the dark that was beginning, incrementally, to lighten, the noon sky now showing the faintest trace of blue on the southern horizon, the first evidence of the approaching twilight that would precede the first sunrise, still ten days away. They were talking. Not the professional talk that was their usual mode, not the exchange of data and logistics and daily reports, but a different kind of talk, a talk that had begun three days earlier when Astrid had come home and said she wanted to discuss Bergen and that had continued, in intervals, in fragments, in sentences started and set down and picked up again, over the following days, the conversation proceeding the way imbibition proceeded, slowly, through the narrow openings in the coat, the water entering the dry interior a little at a time, the tissue swelling, the pressure increasing, the softening beginning.

The conversation about Bergen had become a conversation about everything.

It had begun with logistics. Astrid was good at logistics. She could discuss the details of Erik's sabbatical — the timing, the housing, the arrangements for the vault during her absence — with the same efficiency she brought to the accession database, each detail addressed, each question resolved, each potential problem anticipated and solved. She could discuss logistics without touching the thing that the logistics surrounded, the way the seed coat surrounded the embryo, a hard layer of practical detail that protected the soft interior from exposure.

But Erik, gently, patiently, with the persistence that was both his virtue and his weapon, had moved the conversation past the logistics. He had asked her why she had not taken leave in eight years. He had asked her what she was afraid of finding in Bergen. He had asked her whether the vault was a job or a refuge.

And Astrid, to her own surprise, had answered. Not fully. Not all at once. But she had answered, the way water entered a seed coat, through small openings, in small quantities, the accumulation gradual, the effect incremental, the total change produced not by a single moment of openness but by a series of small concessions to the pressure that had been building for years, the pressure of the unsaid, the pressure of the feelings stored at minus eighteen degrees inside a coat that was, finally, beginning to thin.

She had told him about the vault visits during the polar night. She had told him that the vault was the one place where she did not think about the clinic in Bergen, where the work occupied her attention completely, where the temperature and the protocols and the accession numbers filled the space that would otherwise be filled by the thing she was not thinking about. She had told him that she knew this was not a reason to go to the vault, that checking temperatures she could check from her desk was not work but ritual, not productivity but avoidance, and that she had known this for years and had continued anyway because the ritual worked, the avoidance worked, the vault was effective at its intended purpose, which was to maintain the conditions that prevented change.

Erik had listened. He had not interrupted. He had not offered interpretations or solutions or the therapeutic vocabulary that he might have learned from the counselor they had seen once, in Oslo, after the third IVF failure, the counselor who had spoken of grief and processing and stages and who had described their situation with a compassion that had felt, to Astrid, like being wrapped in a material she could not breathe through, the compassion suffocating rather than comforting, the words too soft, too warm, too close to the feeling she was trying to keep at a distance.

Erik had simply listened. And then he had said, "Tell me what you feel when you're in the chamber."

And this was the question that had opened the coat. Not because the question was profound or unexpected but because it was specific, because it asked about a specific place and a specific experience and because the answer was accessible, was close to the surface, was something she could reach without having to pass through the deeper layers where the harder feelings lived.

"Cold," she had said. "I feel cold. And quiet. And — necessary. I feel necessary. The seeds need the temperature and I check the temperature and the checking is necessary and the necessity is — "

She had stopped. The sentence was going somewhere she had not planned for it to go. The sentence was following the water, moving through the coat into the interior, finding the tissue that had been dry for six years and wetting it.

"The necessity is what?" Erik had said.

"The necessity is enough. The necessity is what I have instead of — "

And here she had stopped again, had physically stopped, her mouth closing, the sentence terminated, the coat reasserting itself, the barrier holding against the water for another moment, another day, another conversation.

Now, on Saturday evening, with the wine and the drawn curtains and the apartment warm and the dark lightening outside by degrees they could not yet see, the conversation continued. They sat on the sofa, not touching but turned toward each other, their bodies angled in the way that conversation required, the posture of attention, of orientation, of two people facing each other across a distance that was narrowing but had not closed.

"Instead of what?" Erik said. He had waited three days to ask the question again. He had waited with the patience that she loved him for and that sometimes made her want to scream, the patience that was kindness and was also pressure, that gave her space and also surrounded her, that allowed her to set the pace and also communicated, through its steadiness, its presence, its refusal to withdraw, that he was not going anywhere, that he would be there when she was ready, that the time she needed was hers and the time she was taking was also his, his life passing while she decided whether to open the door.

"Instead of the thing I can't have," she said.

The sentence was out. The water was in. The coat was breached. The words sat in the warm air of the apartment between them and the words were simple and the words were devastating in their simplicity, because what Astrid could not have was not a mystery, was not a secret, was the thing they had spent six years not naming, the absence that structured their life together, the child that they had tried to have and had failed to have and that Astrid had sealed away in the dark interior of herself the way the vault sealed seeds in the dark interior of the mountain, at the temperature that preserved them, that kept them from changing, that maintained the conditions under which the feeling — the grief, the loss, the want — remained dormant, alive but not active, present but not visible, held in the state of suspension that was the closest thing to peace she had been able to achieve.

Erik reached across the distance between them and took her hand. The contact was a shock, not because it was unexpected but because it had been so long, so long since they had touched with intention rather than habit, with purpose rather than proximity, the touch carrying meaning rather than merely occupying the same space. His hand was warm. Her hand was cold, as her hands were always cold, the circulation in her fingers perpetually insufficient, the blood retreating from the extremities, the body conserving warmth for the core, the ancient mammalian strategy for surviving cold.

"I know," he said. "I know what you can't have. I can't have it either."

She looked at him. And the looking was its own kind of imbibition, the seeing entering her the way water entered a seed, through the openings in the coat, filling the dry tissue, swelling the interior, and she saw in his face the thing she had been too absorbed in her own grief to see for six years: his grief. His loss. His version of the same absence that defined her days, the same empty room in their apartment, the same silence where a child's voice should have been, the same future that had closed, and he had carried it the way she had carried it, privately, in the interior, in the space behind the coat, and he had carried it while also carrying her, while also maintaining the patience and the steadiness and the daily care that their marriage required, and the carrying had cost him something, something she had not asked about, something she had not measured.

"I didn't know," she said, and the sentence was inadequate, was wildly insufficient, was a thimble of language trying to hold an ocean of meaning, but it was true and it was what she had, and Erik heard it and his fingers tightened on hers and his eyes were wet and his face was the face she had married, the face she had chosen, the face that had been beside her for fifteen years and that she had stopped looking at, had stopped seeing, had filed under the category of familiar and had not re-examined since.

"You didn't ask," he said. And the sentence was not an accusation. It was an observation, delivered in the same tone he used for data, neutral and precise, the observation of a pattern, a behavior, a gap in the record.

"No," she said. "I didn't ask."

They sat with this. They sat with the acknowledgment of what they had not done, of the conversations they had not had, of the six years of maintaining the temperature while the embryo inside — the embryo of their marriage, the living core of their partnership, the thing that made them us rather than two individuals sharing an apartment — had been subsisting on stored reserves, on the endosperm of habit and routine and professional compatibility, the stored food dwindling, the provision not replenished, the growth not occurring, the seed alive but not growing, dormant, waiting, and the waiting had lasted six years and the reserves were running low.

"I want to go to Bergen," Astrid said. "I want to go. But I'm afraid."

"Of what?"

"Of everything starting again. Of hoping again. Of the — of the clinic, the conversations with the doctors, the cycles, the waiting, the results, the — "

"I'm not asking you to go back to the clinic," Erik said. "I'm asking you to leave the vault. Just for a while. Just to see what happens when the temperature changes."

She almost smiled. The vocabulary of the vault had entered their conversation the way water entered a seed, naturally, inevitably, because the vault was the language they shared, the reference point they both understood, the metaphor that was not a metaphor because it was also the literal, physical fact of their daily lives, the building where Astrid spent her days and that had become, without either of them quite noticing, the organizing principle of their marriage, the structure around which everything else was arranged.

"You're comparing me to a seed," she said.

"I'm comparing us to a seed," he said. "A seed that's been in storage for a long time. A seed that's viable but dormant. A seed that needs — " He paused, searching for the word, the scientist in him looking for the precise term, the term that would capture what he meant without oversimplifying or overstating. "A seed that needs imbibition."

"Water."

"Something. Some change in conditions. Some signal that it's safe to grow."

She looked at their hands, joined on the sofa between them, his warm and hers cold, the temperature gradient flowing from his body to hers, the physics of heat exchange that she knew so well, the warmth moving from where it was abundant to where it was scarce, equalizing, finding balance.

"I don't know if I'm viable," she said.

The sentence came from the deepest place, from the center of the seed, from the embryo that she had sealed away six years ago, the embryo of her hope, her desire, her willingness to want something that she might not get, and the sentence was the most honest thing she had said in six years and the most frightening thing she had said in her life, because it admitted the possibility that the dormancy she maintained was not preservation but death, that the thing she was keeping at minus eighteen degrees was no longer viable, that the grief had damaged the tissue the way the four years of uncontrolled storage had damaged the Syrian seeds, the enzymes degrading, the proteins denaturing, the capacity for life diminishing, the seven point six percent declining toward zero.

Erik brought her hand to his mouth and kissed her knuckles, a gesture so unexpected and so gentle that it bypassed every defense she had, every coat and barrier and seal, and reached the interior directly, the way water reached the embryo when the coat was finally breached, and the feeling that the gesture produced was the feeling of imbibition, the feeling of something dry being wet, of something hard being soft, of something closed beginning to open, and the opening was terrifying and necessary and irreversible.

"You're viable," he said. "Trust me. I'm a biologist."

She laughed. The laugh surprised her. It came from a place she had forgotten existed, a place where humor lived, where lightness lived, where the capacity for joy that grief had covered but not destroyed was still present, still functional, still capable of responding to the right stimulus, the stimulus being Erik's face and Erik's voice and Erik's hand holding hers and the absurdity of a marine biologist diagnosing the viability of his wife using the vocabulary of seed science, the absurdity that was also tenderness, that was also love, that was also the specific and irreplaceable thing that existed between two people who had built a life together and who were still, after everything, capable of making each other laugh.

They talked into the night. They talked about Bergen and about the sabbatical and about the vault and about what would happen when Astrid was away from the mountain for the first time in eight years, away from the tunnel and the chamber and the minus eighteen degrees and the daily practice of checking temperatures that did not need checking. They talked about what they might find in Bergen, in the city where they had been married and where they had tried to have a child and where the clinic was and where the rain fell and where the restaurants had fresh food and where the streets had trees and where the conditions were different, warmer, softer, more variable, less controlled, the conditions of a life that was not organized around preservation but around living, around doing the things that people did when they were not maintaining a vault.

They did not talk about children. They did not need to. The conversation about children was inside the conversation about Bergen the way the embryo was inside the seed, enclosed, central, the thing that everything else surrounded, and by talking about the coat — the vault, the sabbatical, the logistics, the fear — they were also talking about the embryo, approaching it from the outside, allowing the water to reach it gradually, the imbibition proceeding at its own pace, the swelling beginning, the change irreversible.

At midnight, Astrid stood and went to the window and drew back the curtain. The sky was dark but not black, not the absolute black of the deep polar night, but a dark blue, the faintest blue, barely distinguishable from black, visible only because she was looking for it, only because she knew it was there, the first hint of the approaching light, the first evidence that the earth was turning, that the sun was climbing, that the angle of incidence was changing by fractions of a degree each day, and that in ten days the sun would appear above the mountains for the first time since October and the light would be there, actual light, sunlight, the energy that powered every green thing on earth, the signal that ended dormancy and began growth.

She stood at the window and Erik came and stood behind her and this time she leaned back into him, into his warmth, into the body that she knew as well as she knew the tunnel, the familiar topography of chest and arms, and he held her and they looked out at the dark that was becoming less dark, and the looking was its own kind of hope, the directional attention of two people oriented toward the same horizon, waiting for the same light, and the waiting was different now, was not the preserved, sealed, minus-eighteen-degrees waiting of the vault but the active, alert, water-entering-the-seed-coat waiting of a dormancy that was ending, and Astrid felt it, felt the swelling, felt the pressure, felt the coat thinning and the interior expanding and the irreversible process beginning, and she was afraid and she did not pull away.