The Plant (14 page)

Feeling a little like a creature in a dream (although I hadn’t completely parted with reality yet—that part I’ll be coming to shortly), I stepped forward to the counter, where there was a bell beside a card reading PLEASE

RING FOR SERVICE. I banged it smartly with my palm, producing a single sharp ding! I had a crazy urge to call “Front, please!” in my best snooty-New-York-desk-clerk voice, and suppressed it.

Slowly, very slowly, the paper came down. When it did, I wished it had stayed up. The descending Journal disclosed a face I had seen before, in the

“Sacrifice Photos.” There it had been distorted with pain, horror, and incredulity. Now the face of Norville Keen, author of such pearls as “Why describe a guest when you can see that guest,” was utterly blank.

No. That’s not right.

Shit—

(later)

I’ve been sitting here in front of this lousy little Olivetti for almost five minutes, trying to think of what le mot juste might be, and the best I can do is slack. The man’s face not just being devoid of expression, you understand, but seemingly devoid of muscle tension as well. It had probably always been a long face, but now it seemed absurdly long, almost like a face glimpsed in one of those trick carnival mirrors. It hung off his skull like dough hanging from the lip of a mixing bowl.

Beside me, I heard Roger draw his breath in. He told me later that at first he thought we were looking at a case of Alzheimer’s, but I believe that was a lie. We are modern men, Roger and I, a couple of lapsed Christians in the big city who go through our days under the rule of law and the assumption of…how shall I put this? Of empirical reality. We don’t believe that reality to be benign, but we don’t find it actually malignant, either. Yet we have 107

our secret hearts, of course, and these are closely attuned to the organs of our brute instinct. Those adrenal-fed organs slumber most of the time, but they’re there. Ours awoke in the office of the Central Falls House of Flowers and told us the same thing: that the man looking at us from those dusty black expressionless eyes was no longer alive. That he was, in fact, a corpse.

(later)

I haven’t had any dinner and don’t want any—perhaps appetite will come back when I’ve finished this. I did go around the corner just now for a double espresso, however, and it’s perked me up. Put a little heart back in me. And yet—tell the truth, shame the devil—I found myself more or less scuttling from streetlight to streetlight, not liking the dark, feeling watched.

Not by any one person (certainly I didn’t sense Carlos Detweiller lurking, perhaps with a pair of nice, sharp pruning shears at the ready) but by the dark itself. Those organs of instinct I mentioned are now fully awake, you see, and above all things they don’t like the dark. But now I’m back in my cozy kitchen, under plenty of bright fluorescent light, with half a cup of hot, strong coffee by my right hand and things are better.

Because, you know, there is a good side to all this. You’ll see.

All right, where was I? Ah yes, I know. The lowered newspaper and the blank stare. The slack stare.

At first neither Roger nor I could say anything. The man—Mr. Keen—

didn’t seem to mind; he just sat on his stool by the cash register and stared at us with the newspaper crumpled in his lap instead of in front of his face.

The pages he was open to appeared to be a double-spread ad from a car deal-ership. I could see the words REFUSE TO BE UNDERSOLD.

Finally I managed, “Are you Mr. Keen? Mr. Norville Keen?”

Nothing. Just those staring eyes. To me they looked as dusty as stones in a dry ditch.

“You live in Carlos’s building, right?” I asked. “Carlos Detweiller?”

Nothing.

Roger leaned forward and spoke very slowly and clearly, like someone addressing a man he believes to be deaf, mentally retarded, or both.

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“We’re…looking…for…Tina…Barfield…Is…she…here?”

At first there was nothing in response to this, either. I was about to try my luck (all the time thinking somewhere in the bottom of my mind that it was no good trying to get information from the dead, people had been trying that for years without success), when, very slowly, Mr. Keen raised his hand. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt, and the muscles on his upper arm hung lax, sort of dangling off the bone. He pointed one long, yellow finger, and I thought of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, pointing relentlessly at Ebeneezer Scrooge’s forgotten grave. It wasn’t a grave Mr.

Keen was pointing at, but the open door to the greenhouse.

“In there, is she?” Roger asked in an insanely hearty tone of voice; it was as if we’d all shared a mildly funny joke. Q. How many dead men does it take to run a greenhouse? A. Just Norv.

No response from Mr. Keen. Except for the pointing finger, that is. It’s impossible to convey how uncanny he was. I have asked myself again and again if he was breathing, and I just don’t know. It’s the pointing finger I remember best—the nail at the end of it was jagged and splintered, as if he had gnawed it. And his eyes. The dusty, expressionless stones of his eyes.

“Come on,” Roger said, and started for the raised pass-through.

I began, “Do you really think that’s a good…” but Roger obviously thought it was a good idea, because he kept on walking. Or maybe he’d just decided it was the only idea. And, not wanting to be left under Mr. Keen’s unblinking gaze, I followed him.

I hurried through the gap in the counter with my head slightly lowered, and as a result I ran right into Roger’s back and almost knocked him over.

Something had stopped him cold about ten feet into the greenhouse, and when I raised my own head to look, I saw what it was.

And here, I find, John Kenton’s powers of description are totally inadequate to the task of reporting what we were looking at in that damned place.

I got A’s in all my comp courses, I’ve published a good many sensitive stories in a good number of sensitive “little magazines” (none lately, however, as editing the Macho Man and Windhover series of books seems to have 109

blunted my own writing appetite considerably), and at Brown I was considered to be a leading contender for one of America’s literary lion spots in the final years of the twentieth century (not least of all by yours truly). One can go on feeling that until one is tested. Today I was tested, and tonight I am found wanting (most of all by yours truly). Yet I think that if a Mailer or a Roth or a Bellow had been with us this afternoon when we stepped into the greenhouse which runs between Alden Steet and Isle Avenue (where it abuts on a high board fence covered with NO TRESPASSING signs), any of them would have found himself similarly daunted by the task of describ-ing what lay on the other side of that door. Perhaps only a poet—a Wallace Stevens or a T.S. Eliot—would have really been up to the task. But since they’re not here, I’ll have to do my best.

The strongest sensation was of having stepped over the border into another world, a nightmarish ecosystem of gigantic ferns, prehistoric trees, and lush alien greenery. I’m not telling you that I didn’t recognize any of the plants, because I did. Bordering the central aisle, for instance, crowding it so that walking in anything other than single-file would have been almost impossible, were what I took to be common ferns, although grown to uncommon size and height (Roger confirmed this, saying that they were overgrown Boston and maidenhair ferns, for the most part). Besides fringing the aisle at whose head we stood, their questing offshoots—rhizomes, if I remember the word Roger used—went snaking across the cracked and filthy orange tiles like hair-tufted tentacles of some sort.

Beyond them on both sides, towering in some cases all the way to the dirty glass panels at the peak of the greenhouse roof, were palm trees, banana trees (in some cases complete with tiny bunches of hanging green bananas that looked like insect cocoons), and great shouting bursts of rhodo-dendron, mostly green but every here and there blooming out in convolut-ed clots of azalea. These huge clumps of growth were somehow frightening in their vitality; their packed greenery seemed to threaten, promising to awaken every winter-dormant allergy in your head and your sinuses…before enveloping you and crushing you to death, that was. And it was hot. It might 110

have been only eighty or so in the office, but out here it was ninety or maybe even a hundred. Steamy, too, the air oozing with humidity.

“Whoa,” Roger said in a tiny, almost breathless voice. He took off his overcoat with the slow motions of a sleepwalker, and I imitated him. “Good Christ, Johnny. Good Christ almighty.” He began to walk down the aisle, brushing the overhanging branches of the great ferns with his coat, which he’d draped over his arm, and looking around with wide, unbelieving eyes.

“Roger, maybe that’s not such a good idea,” I said. “Maybe we should just—” But he wasn’t paying any attention, so I hurried after him.

About thirty feet in, a new aisle crossed the one we’d started on. As if to add the final surreal touch, there was a street-sign planted in the dirt on our side of the intersection. An arrow pointing straight ahead was marked HERE. The ones pointing both ways along the crossing aisle were marked THERE and YONDER. It would have been nice to believe that someone had a sense of humor, perhaps inspired by Lewis Carroll, but I did not, indeed, believe that. The signs seemed somehow deadly serious. (Although I freely admit that this might have been just my perception—I wasn’t in a state of mind to appreciate wit.)

I caught up to Roger and again suggested we should go back. He again seemed not to hear me. “This is unreal,” he said. “Johnny, this is absolutely unreal.”

I couldn’t decide if I liked being called Johnny or not—it’s a nickname I haven’t heard much since junior high. As for the unreal quality of Ms.

Barfield’s greenhouse, that seemed to me to require no remark. It was evident—not just before us, but now all around us. I’d already sweat through my shirt, and my heartbeat was booming in my own ears like a drum.

“Heliotrope there,” he said, pointing. “Hibiscus growing next to it and behind it. Absolutely flourishing, the whole works. Can you smell the ’biscus?”

I was getting hibiscus, all right, plus a dozen other floral and/or herba-ceous scents, some as soft as dusk in Polynesia, some sharp and bitter. A squat hemlock and a large yew tree were growing catty-corner from where 111

we stood, seeming to reach for us with their stiff branches. But beneath all the mingled odors was that other one, that meaty mortuary smell.

Heatwave down south, I thought. First the train-wreck, then the power failure. Now there are forty bodies down there, mangled and beginning to stink. Even with all the flowers. Some of the corpses with their eyes open, dusty and blank, like stones in a dry ditch—

“Roger—”

I looked back from the tangle of yew and hemlock (I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to grow such trees in a greenhouse, but there they were) and Roger was gone. I was alone.

Then I saw just a swirl of his overcoat down to my right, along the aisle marked THERE. I started to hurry after him, then stopped, reached into my pocket, and brought out a crumple of paper. It was, in fact, my copy of Harlow Enders’s memo, the one with the maniacal demand that we pull three New York Times bestsellers either out of thin air or from our own asses, whichever happened to be the more productive. I tore a piece from the bottom of it, crumpled it up, and tossed it into the center of the intersection of HERE, THERE, and YONDER. I watched it bounce to a stop on the dirty tiles, then hurried after Roger. I felt absurdly like Hansel forsaken by Gretel.

On THERE Street, the ferns and the Boston ivy crowded even closer; the leaves made an unpleasant whispering sound as they brushed the cloth of my increasingly damp shirt. Up ahead I saw another swirl of overcoat, and one of Roger’s shoes before he turned again, this time to the left.

“Roger!” I bawled. “Will you for God’s sake wait for me?”

I tore another piece of paper from the Enders memo, dropped it, and trotted along the new path in Roger’s wake. Here the way was flanked not by ferns but by overgrown cacti, bright green at their bases, fading to an unpleasant yellow shade at their tops, branching out in crooked arms, all of them armored with thick needles that ended in nasty blunt tips. Like the branches of the ferns, these seemed to reach into the path. Brushing the cactus arms wouldn’t just produce a nasty low whispering sound, though; if you brushed these, blood would flow. If they grew any closer, a person couldn’t get through, 112

I thought, and then it occurred to me that if Roger and I tried to return this way, we’d find the aisle barred. This place was a maze. A trap. And it was alive.

I realized I could hear more than just the beating of my heart. There was also a low, muted smacking sound, like someone without much in the way of manners sucking at soup. Only this sounded like a lot of someones.

Then another idea occurred to me: that wasn’t Roger up ahead at all.

Roger had been snatched into the jungle, and I was following someone who had stolen his topcoat and one of his loafers. I was being lured in, lured to the center, where some gigantic, flesh-eating plant awaited me, a venus fly-trap, a pitcher-plant, perhaps some species of homicidal vine.

But I came to the next corner (a sign marked this three-way intersection as OVER, BACK, and BEYOND) and Roger was standing there, coat now sagging from one hand, shirt plastered to his back in a dark tree-shape. I almost expected to see him standing on the bank of a jungle river, a sluggish tributary of the Amazon or the Orinoco running smack-dab through the middle of Central Falls, Rhode Island. There was no river, but the smells were denser and spicier, and that undersmell of spoiled flesh was even stronger. The combination was bitter enough to make my nose sting and my eyes water.

“Don’t move to your right,” Roger said, speaking almost absently.

“Poison sumac, poison oak, and poison ivy. All growing together.”

I looked and saw a massed bank of shiny leaves, most green, some a baleful scarlet, all seeming to almost drip their poisonous oils. Touch that shit and you’d scratch for a year, I thought.