Bee-Loud Glade (4 page)

6

I
was woken by more banging against the front door; I didn't know if I'd been sleeping a few minutes or hours because I was pulled from my dreams so violently that I remained disoriented and groggy, on my back on the couch, one arm still asleep where it hung off the side and a crusted drool trail tightening my cheek, dried midstream on its way toward the floor.

The landlord, I thought, had returned to evict me, his thick-armed thugs brought along to drag me out—though where I came up with them I don't know, because I'd never actually
met
my landlord, the actual owner of the vast hive of apartments I lived in, identical to other hives in other parts of the city. I'd only ever dealt with the constantly rotating staff in the management office, and none of them were thick-armed thugs. Mostly they were bored college graduates waiting for a better job to turn up, though whether they left the complex management office because they found those better jobs or because they couldn't bear to stay any longer, who knows.

I rolled from the couch to the floor, with the coffee table between my body and the front windows, where I might not be seen right away if the landlord let himself in. The banging went on and went on, rhythmic and metered, firm but not angry. It went on longer than I'd expect a landlord to wait before using his key or his thugs to open the door. Then it stopped.

I waited, still flat on the floor between table and couch, then I lifted my head to look for a shadow behind the blinds, but there wasn't one. I waited a moment longer then stood, crept on bare feet to the door and peeped through the peephole to find not the landlord, not his thugs, but a tall, ropy chauffeur standing outside, a few steps back from the door and staring straight into the hole at my eye. I'd never seen a chauffeur before, a real one, but he fit the role so perfectly I could tell right away what he was. He looked like every professional driver I'd seen in a movie or on TV. From the gray suit, peaked cap, and suede driving gloves, I got the idea he was an ex-race-car driver and also, conveniently for his employer, a former champion boxer, the kind of driver you'd want waiting outside in case your meeting took a bad turn, if you were in the sort of business that might involve that kind of meeting. He tipped his hat and nodded toward the peephole, the slimmest smile on his lips, so what could I do but open the door? He already knew I was there.

As soon as the door opened, as soon as fresh air blew into the room, I nearly gagged on the scent of myself. I hadn't minded when there was nothing to contrast my smell with, but now in that fresh air I knew I was rank. I wasn't the wildness of the jungle so much as I was its damp rot. But the chauffeur was too professional, too good at his job, to react to the smell. And I was impressed.

“Good morning, Mr. Finch,” he said. “I believe you answered an email from my employer. He would like to discuss the position, so if you'll please step into the car.”

The car was a gleaming silver limousine—a Rolls Royce, maybe, but I don't know cars—so long it stretched from my door all the way to the far end of the building, past the neighboring unit. So what could I say? Whatever the job, whether or not I decided to take it, at least I'd get a ride in this car. That wouldn't ever happen again, not to a person like me. And, not quite awake after not enough sleep and not eating well for a while, maybe I was more conducive to direction than I might have been under other conditions. I've heard that can happen, with religious cults doing brainwashing and that sort of thing.

I climbed into the back of the limo, onto a wide leather seat as soft as a cloud but blacker than night, and once the chauffeur closed the door behind me I realized that none of the windows let any light in: there were lamps on the walls and the ceiling, and glowing bulbs over the bar and the electronics cabinet with its stereo and DVD player; there was light cast by cable news playing on the TV that hung from the ceiling, but I couldn't see anything outside the car. Whenever I'd seen a limousine with dark windows passing on the street or onscreen, I'd assumed the glass was only opaque from outside and that the passengers had a clear eye on the world. But this one blocked the view in both directions and maybe all the others had, too. Maybe when you're that rich you don't want to look at the world.

The leather seat was so deep I could stretch my legs straight, offering an unpleasant view of my feet—flapping in flip-flops I'd slipped on at the door—and of my pale, spindly legs poking out of the filthy shorts I still had on. Not what I would have chosen to wear for an interview, but I'd been given no chance to change. And as soon as I'd sat down the car was under way. I couldn't see any sign of our motion, but my body felt it so I knew we were moving, passing through the identical cul-de-sacs and numbered streets of my apartment complex, probably toward the entrance and exit gate that led onto the highway outside. I found a remote control waiting at hand exactly where I would want it to be and I turned up the news. It was about the economy like it always was, interspersed with bits about wars that were either good for or bad for economics depending on who you asked, depending which network you watched and which side you were on, and for a few minutes I flipped back and forth between news stations in the middle of sentences, trying to create collages out of what all the experts were saying, trying to attach a word from one pundit to a word from another so the combination of words might make sense.

Then I got bored, the way I always do when talk turns to money and markets, forces and frauds so far out of my realm that I don't care one way or the other. So I found a children's program about wild animals and I learned about the emperor penguin's protective devotion to his egg. At first I tried to include the penguin in my channel-changing collage with the economists and talking heads—nest eggs and hatchlings merged into a few funny lines—but quickly I was more engaged by the birds than the numbers, so I stopped flipping and watched the penguins uninterrupted.

Only when we stopped for a moment—at traffic lights and intersections, I guess—was I reminded that we were moving at all. The car was taking me somewhere, but if not for the TV shows ending and being replaced with new shows I had no sense of time passing or how long I'd been riding around. I couldn't see what neighborhoods we were passing through or which direction we were traveling or what the weather was outside my dark cave of conditioned (perhaps even scented?) air. In that city, my city, time didn't mean anything. In its traffic a few miles might mean hours of driving, but in another direction and away from downtown those same hours would put you out of state. People spent their days jammed like logs on a narrow gray river, waiting for the waters of a faraway thaw to run through and set them all free—driving to Second Nature each morning and home at the end of the day sometimes had taken me twenty minutes and sometimes two or three hours, so I'd planned each day on not planning at all. So for all I knew the limo had gone one or two miles despite the time passing, or we were already out of the city. Or we were circling my apartment complex as the buildup to some elaborate joke. There was no way of knowing, and there was nothing I could do about it while I was in the car. So I sat back and waited, as passive as if I was asleep and still dreaming (and for all I knew so far, I was). And I noticed now that not only were the windows all darkened, but there weren't any buttons to lower the glass.

The knock on the door, climbing into the car, all of it happened so fast that I never wondered what I was doing and what danger I might be getting into. The car was there, the chauffeur was beside it, and it didn't occur to me that I might say no, I might refuse, until the limousine was moving and I was alone in the back and it was too late to say anything. This was my first trip out of the house in a while, so I may not have quite been myself. I might even have been sleepwalking; it's happened to me in the past, not in a limo, but I have woken up in the shower or standing with my head in the fridge.

Then I felt the limousine turn more sharply than it had so far on our journey, and I heard the faint crunch of gravel beneath the wheels. Soon the limousine stopped and the door swung open, flooding my sunless chamber with light so intense and so white that my head swam and I closed my eyes.

The chauffeur stood holding the door, but from my position inside I could only see him from the neck down. “Mr. Finch,” my headless driver announced, “we've arrived.”

I climbed from the car almost disappointed; the broad leather seat and dark chamber had been so comfortable and the notion of a trip undefined by any predetermined—to me—destination had been relaxing in a strange way. But what met my eyes when I emerged from my automotive cocoon was worth rising for: waves of green hills rolling away toward the ocean, golden with soft early light. The view was so perfect, so sun-kissed that I wondered if it was planned, that the car should arrive at this moment, that my door should open onto this view and not the other side of the car. But who would plan something like that?

I realized at once where I was, a part of the city I'd never been to before because I'd never known anyone who lived up that high and might invite me to visit. Down below, in the valley where I'd spent all the years of my life, thick clouds of gray and brown smog drooped day after day, but now it turned out they were under a layer of softer white ones that I was seeing for the first time. The city beneath me, that ugly, boiling, exploding city, nestled,
nestled
into the folds of the hills. I'd never known my city could nestle, that it could do anything more than seethe and devour. Skyscrapers pierced the murk, but none were tall enough to emerge where the sky was actually blue. I felt like I was seeing the city—
my
city—for the first time, that I'd finally realized its shape and its size.

I'd discovered, in a flash, that hill dwellers have the advantages of scope and scale: the billionaires on these hilltops have dominated the city for as long as they've been here, and maybe it's simply because they see all of it before them at once. Even as they sit on their toilets they must have a grand view; what passes as a necessary waste of time for everyone else, a few hurried minutes in some boxy bathroom tucked at the back of a boxy apartment, becomes a quiet time for reflection from a throne with a broader view of the world. When for some people even taking a crap is empowering, it's no wonder the rest of us work for them.

“This way, Mr. Finch,” said the driver, and I turned toward a house at the top of a white gravel driveway that wound up a hill. A house not remarkable so much as huge, a generic adobe monolith with terracotta roof tiles and black ironwork on the windows and doors and in other tasteful, familiar locations. It looked—so far as I know anything about houses—like a mansion is meant to, everything brand new and well-fitted and designed to impress, a house born ready for its close-up but missing something so badly I could feel it at once. It could have come from a kit and it probably did, from some architect's file of reusable plans for interchangeable houses all over the world. The whole estate, the house and the hills and even the hedges sculpted into spirals and parapets and animal shapes, made me feel like I'd shrunk and been dropped on a model train table.

I followed the driver across gleaming white stones, the teeth-chatter flap of my sandals on gravel behind the crunch of his heavy black shoes, and before we could knock on the double front doors they swung open and a butler (a butler!) asked me to come in as he bowed with a surprisingly serpentine motion that left his face looking up toward me even as his back stretched out flat. He looked remarkably, precisely like a butler should look, like a person who, if seen on the street, would shout “butler” however he dressed and whatever he might be doing. I wondered if he'd been hired because he fit the bill right from birth, or if he'd grown into it through years of butling.

The driver handed me off to the butler—I never saw the driver again—and I was led through a two-story foyer flanked by a round staircase on either side and a fountain gurgling away at its center, supplied by a waterfall that fell from the ceiling and filled the room with sparkling mist. If I hadn't arrived there by answering an email and getting into a strange limousine, if I hadn't been greeted by that view of the city, I might not have believed such a house could exist.

The butler and I wound up the glistening wooden coil of the stairway, the air full of the waterfall's quiet crashing, and upstairs I was led down a long hallway, past mirrors that showed just how ragged I was with my unwashed hair and rough beard that favored one side of my face but didn't do either side any favors. As we walked I heard how the voices of my hyperefficient plant enthusiasts would describe all of this on their blogs, some of them gushing over the decor and design of the mansion while others decried its vulgarity and decadence and overwhelming, oppressive wealth; still others would be afraid or confused or laughing at how they'd found their way into such a strange situation. I almost laughed a little myself, imagining how they might tell it.