Landscape with Invisible Hand

By fall, Chloe and Adam dislike each other. Chloe’s fights with Hunter agitate Adam, and he doesn’t like seeing her in the morning. Adam’s symptoms of Merrick’s Disease disgust Chloe. He has attempted to treat the condition but can’t afford the simple cure the vuvv have: “All the medicine in the world won’t help you if you don’t own it” (52). Although they dislike each other, Adam and Chloe continue making episodes of their show. The presence of the audience, which once inspired creativity, now makes them feel awkward. Much of their bantering contains obscured biting comments.

The Costello family receives a postcard from Mr. Costello a year and a half after he left. He tells them that he’s safe and suggests that they rent part of the house, as they’re already doing. Mrs. Costello, enraged, tears the postcard to bits and declares that Mr. Costello is lying to himself in feeling that he did the right thing by leaving. Her dramatic reaction surprises Adam because she’s typically optimistic. He tries to help by suggesting that Mr. Costello moved someplace warmer with a low cost of living, but Mrs. Costello interrupts and reveals that Mr. Costello fetishizes Southern women. Meanwhile, Nattie finds the pun on the postcard—“Everything’s Peachy in Georgia”—offending; she calls it “the pits” but must explain her ironic use of a different pun to her mother.

Mrs. Costello says she’s going to search online for jobs, but Adam finds her half an hour later staring at the screen. Knowing that she’ll find nothing, she can’t bring herself to begin a job search. Instead, they watch the news and see a report about white men storming a bodega and screaming racist insults at the Mexican employees:

Some white woman standing outside on the street in a terry-cloth hoodie tells a reporter that if it weren’t for those goddamn people, the censored censored censored illegals, everybody wouldn’t be eating the grass in our yards on all fours (57).

Another station reports on a group of human farmers who built fertilizer bombs and attacked a vuvv agricultural transport. The reporters argue that if people like the farmers weren’t so “lazy,” they wouldn’t be poor.

Adam paints a pleasant mountain village, and Mr. Reilly thinks it’s nice but likes Adam’s other paintings better because they depict the current state of the quick-changing world. Mr. Reilly admits that he entered Adam in a vuvv art contest with a cash prize and the promise to distribute the winner’s work throughout the Vuvv Interspecies Co-Prosperity Alliance. Mr. Reilly thinks Adam could win but warns that the vuvv think humans paint only still-life works—like bowls of fruit—so Adam might want to consider adding those to his collection. Adam prefers landscapes and hates still-life paintings, and Mr. Reilly concedes that landscapes will help Adam stand out from the crowd. He advises Adam to paint the truth and says that Adam will be a better artist than himself. This last comment sticks in Adam’s mind because he fantasizes about becoming a successful artist and realizes that Mr. Reilly must have his own dreams of success. Adam respects Mr. Reilly because he uses his passion for art to help students.

On Mr. Reilly’s advice, Adam practices painting the atmosphere between physical objects in his paintings. Mr. Reilly explains that landscapes were painted for “great industrialists” so that they could see the beauty within the landscapes they were destroying. As one of their dates, Chloe and Adam go to a large field near a discharge facility so that Adam can practice capturing the atmosphere in his work. His Merrick’s Disease symptoms are acting up, and Chloe is impatient to leave so that she can hang out with other friends. She’s frustrated because Adam is waiting for the sun to come out from behind a cloud. He explains that he’s trying to paint the atmosphere, and Chloe remarks that he’s marking the atmosphere, meaning that she smells his gas from the flaring medical condition. Both Chloe and Adam work to contain their anger because they’re recording their show. As the sun comes out from behind the clouds, a floating house drifts by, blocking out all the sunlight. They laugh and make up, and the episode becomes their most popular one because of their reconciliation.