Bee-Loud Glade (7 page)

“To live in their gardens?”

“Hermits, Mr. Finch. Any respectable estate had a hermit in residence on the grounds. Visible from the windows, in the background as the estate holders and their guests strolled the lawn, that sort of thing. Usually for a term of seven years, subject to evaluation, of course. How does seven years sound to you, Mr. Finch?”

How did it sound? I didn't know—it sounded perfect, and it sounded absurd, and it sounded like an elaborate practical joke in which I'd been ensnared. So I just asked, “As a hermit?”

Mr. Crane looked startled, as if I hadn't understood him as clearly as he'd expected, as if he'd been talking about one thing and I'd burst out with something entirely unrelated. For a second, if that, he looked like he'd made a mistake. But it passed.

“Yes. Exactly. A hermit. Is that something you think you could do? I understand you have a... ” He looked at something behind his desk, then said, “a predilection toward distraction. To daydream and wander from the task at hand. I'm sure you've been told that's a problem. No doubt it's held you back in your life, but that's precisely what I'm looking for. That's why you appealed to me.”

It sounded, for a moment, as if Mr. Crane had approached me directly rather than my replying to spam in the middle of the night out of boredom, but I didn't ask. How could I ask one question when there were so many others hanging between us and filling my head?

“Naturally,” he said, “you don't need to commit to seven years right away. We'll consider the first year a trial period and reevaluate when the time comes.”

I was curious, and I think he could tell, but could it be real? Mr. Crane appeared perfectly earnest, confident in a manner that precluded all doubts; I could almost believe, as he so clearly did, that there was no real choice in the matter. I wondered if all this might be a test to see how I'd react, to determine whether I was suited for some other job, the
real
job. Or an elaborate setup for something worse—I suddenly remembered that movie about rich men bringing the poor to an island for hunting.

“What would I... what would you expect me to do?”

“Not very much, really. In a way, that's the point. Mostly I'd want you to sit where I could see you from the window and think about things. Nature, the clouds, the grass growing. Commune with the trees and so forth. My people will provide your meals, so there's no need to hunt or any of that.”

“And I would live in the garden.”

“Not in the garden itself, no. You'll sleep in the cave.” He turned and pointed through the window. “That outcropping of rocks, I've had a cave made inside it. It's perfectly dry. I'd go so far as to call it ‘cozy.’ I don't need to tell you it never gets very cold in this part of the world, and my architects assure me the cave's design is sufficient to keep out the rain.”

He added, “I may ask you to do other things as you get settled, expand your duties as we proceed. Nothing too difficult. Some gardening, perhaps. I trust you could manage?”

“I think so,” I said. “I've done some gardening before. I've had window boxes.”

He was talking as if I'd been hired, but I hadn't heard anything like an offer and I didn't think I'd agreed to anything. Though it didn't feel like I had an option to disagree, either. I still couldn't shake the feeling that this whole conversation was a prelude, the test question I'd suspected extending far beyond what was normal. At any second I expected to find out what the job
really
was, and that all this was psychological screening of a very strange kind. But it felt... inevitable, somehow, as if my working for him (again, apparently) was a foregone conclusion. Maybe the room really was that convincing, or maybe the white wings at his temples made everything move so much faster than it did in the world apart from Mr. Crane.

“I expect there will be some things you'll have to get used to. We'll provide you with new garments, but nothing fancy. There's no need to be formal when you live in a cave. I get tired of looking at people in suits. And I'll have to ask you to stop shaving, and to stop cutting your hair, which I don't imagine will pose much of a problem.” He smiled, then added, “I appreciate that you've already gotten a head start.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bathing... there won't be very much chance for it, I'm afraid. It's important that you appear natural, like you belong where you are. It wouldn't make sense for you to be taking showers and smelling like soap and that sort of thing, but we'll work something out.” His voice trailed off, and his eyes turned toward the ceiling and squinted a bit. Then he pushed a button on the edge of the desk and spoke toward it. “Memo. A hot spring for installation in the garden.

“Compensation,” he said. “You won't need any money while you're under contract and living here. Nothing to spend it on in the cave, and it might be disruptive if you kept a wallet or bank card around. So what I'd like to do is open an account in your name and deposit your salary directly. We can sign the papers together so you know it's been done and you won't have to worry.”

Mr. Crane lifted a page from a stack on his desk to read the sheet beneath it. “Would you be agreeable to, say... well, why don't we say five million for the first year and as I said, we can reevaluate if things work out. And let's agree to half that amount if you leave for any non-medical reason within six months.”

I choked a bit and wasn't able to answer that yes, five million dollars would be more than okay. It would also be more than I'd made in my life. How could I have said no to money like that, to being paid so much to do what sounded like nothing, to sit in a garden and think about trees? To sleep in a cave with catered meals and be made a millionaire for it? With that kind of money, I could hire my own hermit someday. I thought about all the animals in the nature shows I'd been watching at night, the snow leopards and tigers and bears, and wondered if they knew they could be so well paid for their work.

“Good,” Mr. Crane said, moving on with our conversation before I had spoken. “Good. There is one more thing. I'd like you to stop talking.”

I hadn't realized I'd been excessively chatty, but I apologized for it then hoped those very words wouldn't break the camel's back and cost me the job.

He looked across the desk at me, puzzled, then laughed. “No, no, not now. No, I mean while you're working. While you're under contract. I'd like you to take a vow of silence, so to speak. The Georgian hermits committed to living silently as part of their contract, and I think it's important to the endeavor. Frankly, you'll be living in the garden alone, so there won't be anyone for you to talk to most of the time. And I understand that you aren't the most loquacious fellow to begin with, Mr. Finch.”

The conversation, the contract, how much he knew about me... it was all so far beyond me by now that I'd given up on saying anything else, but Mr. Crane didn't seem to be fazed.

“Finch,” he said to himself. “Finch... yes, that's fine. A good name for a hermit. No need for a change.” He flicked through some papers in a folder on his desk, then laid several sheets out before me. “My people have written up the contract. It's fairly standard, you'll find. Why don't you go ahead and look that over.”

He slid the papers toward me, along with a pen, and I made a show of looking at them and nodding sometimes, making noises of acknowledgment and understanding, but most of it was nonsense to me.

Mr. Crane stood from his desk with both palms pressed to its top. “I'd like you to start immediately, of course. To keep word of our project from getting out—you'll see in section 7.G that there's a standard nondisclosure agreement included in this, but I don't suppose that will be much of an issue once you're at work and aren't speaking. You won't meet many people to tell about what you're doing, once you're in the garden.”

I flipped to section 7.G as I expected he wanted me to, and said, “Oh, yes. I see.”

“Now, I don't believe there's any business you'll need to tend to before you undertake the position. I've taken the liberty of settling your rent, your utilities, and so forth. No loose ends, after all. We wouldn't want to overlook something that might distract you from the task at hand.”

“No,” I said, and something broke like a dam inside me, and my reservations, my nerves and resistance, all washed away and I gave in to riding this wave of confusion to where it would go—to trusting the raft of Mr. Crane's offer and trusting the current of his currency to have my best interests in mind. Maybe, I thought, I was meant to be here, to do this. Perhaps my life had been leading me to it; losing my job at the right time, answering his email for no particular reason—all to deliver me here.

“As to your apartment, my people are boxing it up as we speak. We can store what you'd like to keep in my house here, of course. No problem. Just let me know what you'd like them to bring, and what can be disposed of.

I pictured my stark apartment with its barren pantry and clothes on the floor, the phone I couldn't use any longer and the old newspapers and magazines I hadn't thrown out. And the landlord arriving to padlock the place. My computer full of the bookmarked detritus of hours and hours of aimless browsing, and the ink worn from the buttons on my TV remote by night after night of fidgety, insomniac fingertips. If all this worked out, the next time I needed a remote control or a phone I'd have enough money for new ones. If nothing else, I'd have a few years to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I'd be in my fifties by the end of the contract—not so old, after all—and with enough money to live without having to work. I'd already wasted more than seven years at Second Nature. What were a few more in a position as easy as this one sounded like it would be?

I thought about my desktop fountain, and almost asked to have it collected, but then I pictured it in the foyer beside Mr. Crane's own fountain. I said, “There's nothing I need.”

The contract had red stick-on flags beside every space where I needed to sign, and I went through it quickly, scribbling my name until it was done.

“Wonderful,” Mr. Crane said. “Smithee will show you where you'll be working. A pleasure, Mr. Finch.” He shook my hand over the desk, and though I was leaning far toward him, Mr. Crane didn't seem to be reaching at all. “I look forward to your work.”

I hadn't noticed his arrival, but by some silent magic Smithee was at my shoulder, ready to lead me out into the yard.

9

I
followed Smithee down through the house and out the back door to a veranda. The long green lawn sloped away before me, and the cave that would be my home was just visible through the thicket of bushes and trees. A white rabbit was mounting a brown one a few yards away in the grass until the butler clapped his hands and they scampered off. “Sir,” he said, and it wasn't “Sir, whenever you're ready” so much as “Sir, can we get on with this,” so I walked down a short flight of steps and crossed the morning-wet lawn toward the outcrop of stones I'd seen from Mr. Crane's window.

Off to my right, in the direction of the faraway ocean, a circle of pavement sparkled with dew and with what may have been tiny fragments of glass mixed into the surface. At first I didn't know what it was, maybe a foundation for another building to come, but as I moved through the grass and my angle changed I realized it was a helicopter landing pad, right there in Mr. Crane's yard. I'd seen mansions with their own landing pads in movies, of course, but I'd never imagined people actually had them.

As I slowed to look at the landing pad, Smithee kept moving quickly, charging along at his efficient but effortless professional pace. I rushed to catch up but slipped on the wet grass of the hill and ended up sliding past him on one foot, waving my arms to stay upright, and one flip-flop slipped from my toes to tumble away in the grass. I might have cried out but I didn't fall down. As I chased down my sandal, Smithee said again, “Sir,” but he might as well have told me that I was the most pathetic creature he'd ever seen, and that he'd rather smack me in the head with my sandal than wait for me to retrieve it.

He was able to pack a whole lot of meaning into his “Sir,” but I suppose that was part of his job—to respond to all the situations of the household with a limited, unobtrusive professional vocabulary. Maybe, I wondered, that's what the verb “to butle” actually meant, and if not that's what it should mean.

I walked with more care the rest of the way, sure to keep up with Smithee so I might avoid his sharp eye and tongue.

The cave, when we reached it, was fifteen feet or so deep by about ten feet wide and better lit than I had expected, though my eyes took a moment to adjust when I stepped from the sun of the garden into my shadowed new home. The walls were carved with niches and nooks of all sizes, some stocked with candles and others hosting pinecones and feathers and the types of objects a hermit might choose (or be told) to collect in his home. The cave made me think of amusement park rides with their mountains made of fake stone, each rock painted to convince passengers of miniature railways and roller coasters as they speed by. But this cave, my cave, had been built from real stone, carefully chosen and painstakingly quarried and carried up into the hills to Mr. Crane's yard, where it was blasted and chiseled and carved with water cannons to simulate years of erosion and weather. Smithee told me all that as we approached it, in a bored monologue that sounded rehearsed.

A low wooden pallet stood at the far end of the chamber, not quite against the wall and layered with straw. Two dark gray blankets—one thick, one thin—lay folded upon it. They weren't a uniform gray but were speckled, almost the same as the walls of the cave, and beside the blankets lay a dark tunic made from the same rough material. I lifted it from the bed and it unfolded to hang to my knees, and a length of frayed rope—my new belt—fell out of the folds. Shaking the fabric even that much stirred a strong, stomach-churning scent of lanolin, and the cloth—if I can call it that, as scratchy and raw as it was—coated my fingers with oil from whatever sheep had been shorn for my sake.

“If that will be all, sir,” said Smithee. “Your present attire will be collected when a meal is delivered. Mr. Crane reminds you that silence should be undertaken immediately, so now is the time to say what you will.”

He looked so bored with the possibility of my last public words, so disinterested in me altogether, that instead of something profound or considered I said just, “Okay.”

In reply Smithee said only, “Sir,” of course. Then he walked away toward the house on silent, gliding steps that gave him, in his dark suit, the look of a movie vampire. At the bottom of the hill, though, where he would have been hidden from the view of the windows, Smithee stopped. He pulled a flat black notebook from the inner pocket of his jacket and followed that with a pen. He wrote something down, then flipped back a couple of pages before writing something else. Then he tucked away his tools, smoothed the front of his jacket with the palms of his hands, and carried on up the hill to the house. I hadn't been able to tell while walking behind him, but watching him from a sideways distance I noticed that however steep the slope of the hill his body stayed perfectly straight; his feet must have met the ground at an angle, but the rest of him never leaned. Not that it meant anything, but I'd never seen anyone walk like that before.

I stripped off my clothes and stood nude in the air of the cave, pale and tender and pink, aware of each pore and pimple and each pound of flesh in a way I never had been. A cool breeze blew in and I broke out in goose bumps, every hair standing straight up off my body. The sudden cold on the parts I'd kept covered made my whole body shiver, the way it happens when opening your fly at a urinal in a cold bathroom. It looked warmer outside, so I left the cave for the grass with the tunic and belt in my hands. Sunlight fell on my cock and balls for the first time perhaps ever, and I stood with my hands on my hips, thrusting myself slightly forward into the warmth.

Then I looked up the slope of the lawn toward the house, toward Mr. Crane's window on the third floor, and saw the round glint of his telescope lens with the silhouette of a person behind it. And, below his window, a blonde woman sat in a patio chair looking in my direction.

I ducked into my cave to pull the tunic over my head and knot the rope belt around my waist. For the first several seconds there was only the smell, that lanolin smell, closing my throat and watering my eyes, but then I moved some part of my body in some tiny way and the itch was explosive. Prickling like millions of dagger-sharp fibers were sticking and stabbing my cotton- and nylon-spoiled skin, and I burst into bright hives all over. My body had been bound and trussed all my life, covered by clothes I had rarely noticed were there. I pulled them on in the morning and took them off again at night to wear other clothes made from the same fabrics, but pulling on that tunic was the first time in my life I could feel every inch, every thread of a garment where it crossed my body, and it burned. I attacked myself with my fingernails, and rubbed my back and ribs against the rough walls of the cave, and the itch began to feel a bit better if only because the bloody welts I raised with my scratching were so painful themselves that they drew attention away from the other discomfort. Until the fibers of the tunic scratched those raw wounds, and everything hurt even more.

And like that my days in the garden began to go by.

The smell of the tunic and blankets faded as the stink of my own unwashed body usurped the last trace of the sheep I blamed for my suffering, whose coat was the source of my own. And while the itch became less pronounced and more irritating than incendiary, my body stayed swollen and red—as it would for a while—and I took every chance I could steal to rub my back and my sides against a rock or a tree, or to reach with a stick and scratch until I was bleeding and raw.

Meals were delivered, and I ate without knowing whose hands had brought them. Trays appeared in the wall niche by my bed while I was outside or before I woke up; I tried a few times to watch their arrival but somehow they always snuck by.

My first night in the garden I couldn't sleep, kept awake by the rustling and snuffling of animals and worried by the wide-open mouth of my cave. The noises weren't unfamiliar; they were the same sounds I'd heard in hundreds of nature programs. It seemed like they should be less scary, these sounds, because they were part of the background, the atmosphere, not isolated and enhanced by microphones. They should have seemed less real to me, I thought, less present than the snarls and sniffs I’d heard loud and clear on TV, without the wind or the rain or any night noises to muffle them. But these noises were scary, and close: I saw the pointed-snout shadow of a fox creep into the mouth of my cave and watch me pretend to be sleeping before strolling off unperturbed by my presence. A skunk wandered right up to my bed, black and white body rolling side to side like a furry round rowboat as he walked all around in my cave. He (maybe she, I don't know) raised his tail not two feet from my head—and I knew from TV what that meant, so I held as much breath as I could—but the skunk was only stretching. He leaned forward on his front legs like a cat or a dog, wheezed out a yawn, and was off into the garden again. All that in one night, my first in the cave, and with so much going on I didn't have time to realize until morning that I'd passed a whole sleepless night like all of those I'd passed in my apartment, but I'd done it without fantasies or long, derailed trains of thought and hours of empty TV. I'd passed a whole night by watching the world as it came to my door.

The next morning and every one after I found footprints of all shapes and sizes laced together across the ground outside my cave, and I followed them as far as I could, trying to reconstruct the nocturnal routes of my neighbors. There were hawks (or falcons, maybe, or eagles; I don't know the difference) in the daylight, swooping and diving to snatch prey off the ground, and at night I listened to the interrogations of owls. I heard once on TV that owls call the name of the person who will be next to die, but Mr. Crane's owls only ever called, “Who?” the way owls are meant to, and it made me feel welcome instead of afraid, as if they were inquiring about the new guy in the garden.

Wandering the garden by daylight, I discovered flowers and trees I'd once described as inferior for Second Nature: genuine palm trees and rubber plants, and magnolia blossoms that were brilliant and bright for a couple of days before browning and rotting with the most awful stink. The real plants were impressive, but I still thought there was room in the world for hyperefficient magnolias, and for bushes that don't harbor thousands of bugs in their branches, waiting for some city slicker to lean in toward their blossoms before unleashing stinging and biting and skin-scratching hordes all over his face and his body. There were lots of other plants, too, but if I'd never written about them for the company I didn't know what they were. My knowledge of flowers and trees was limited to the ones I'd been paid to malign.

I tied long chains of dandelions to wind around tree trunks and rocks for no other reason than I was there and so were they. I smelled flowers and tasted berries and watched rabbits go at each other in fast, fluffy orgies, then scatter when foxes came close. I classified birds by shape, size, and color and gave them all names because I knew what so few of them actually were, and in time I could recognize a few nesting pairs and pick out some individuals from one another, the ones with misshapen wings or strange-colored spots on their bodies.

There were no sirens or crashes or drunken neighbors trying to pound their way into the wrong apartment at the end of their night on the town. There weren't any airplanes or trains far away in the dark. At first I heard only the space left behind by those noises, and the world seemed half-empty. One afternoon while up in a tree and watching the clouds—a grizzly bear eating a sandwich, and a steamship passing over the moon—I almost fell off my branch because the cell phone I'd left behind was ringing above me. But a few seconds later a gray bird hopped out of some leaves into sight, skipping his way onto a limb close to mine, where he delivered a pitch-perfect rendition of my old ringtone, one of the country's most common.

Most of the time I did nothing. I could say that I contemplated—that's what I was being paid for—but even that sounds too active, too focused on solving a problem. I wasn't focused on anything but watching the world as it happened.

Not quite nothing, actually, because I sneezed. A lot. I was allergic to everything in the garden: the pollen, the leaves, the grass, possibly even the air. My eyes watered, my nose ran, my inner ears and the back of my throat itched so badly that I came close to trying to reach a long, skinny stick inside my head to scratch. If I accidentally killed myself, I thought, at least I'd stop being allergic.

I didn't miss all the distractions I'd left behind in the valley, the TV and computer and couch. Not until it rained so heavily one of those early nights that the noise kept me up, and kept the local creatures safe and dry in their dens, leaving me with long hours to fill but nothing to watch. I tried to remember the theme songs from as many TV shows as possible, and sing them all in my head. I recalled old commercials and PSAs about not telling lies, about helping your neighbors and the benefits of one chewing gum over another, and I marveled at how completely I could recreate each of those in my mind: the dialogue, the music, shot-by-shot frames of each ad. In my apartment, on a long night like that, I would have watched reruns and movies I'd never consider wasting time on in daylight, but in the cave I lit a candle instead and danced shadow puppets around on the wall.