The Plant Read online

  “Herb?” Roger asked. “Are you with us or agin us?”

  Herb kind of snapped around, like a man who's just been awakened from a doze. “Huh? Yeah! Of course!”

  “I don't think you are, not entirely. And I want you with us. The good bark Zenith has sprung one hell of a nasty leak, in case you haven't noticed. If we're going to keep her from sinking, we need all hands at the pumps. No frigging in the rigging. Do you take my point?”

  “I take it,” Herb said sullenly.

  Sandra, meanwhile, gave him a look which contained nothing but perplexity. I think she knows what Herb knows (and that we all know). She just can't understand why in God's name Herb would care. Men don't understand women, I know that's true... but women deeply don't understand men. And if they did, they probably wouldn't have much to do with us.

  “All right,” Roger said, “suppose you tell us what, if anything, is being done with the General Hecksler book.”

  To Roger's delight and amazement, a great deal has been done on the Iron-Guts bio, and in a very short time. While Roger and I were in Central Falls, Herb Porter was one busy little bee. Not only has he engaged Olive Barker as the ghost on The Devil's General, he's gotten her solemn promise to deliver a sixty thousand-word first draft in just three weeks.

  To say that I was surprised by this quick action would be drawing it mild. In my previous experience, Herb Porter only moves fast when Riddley comes down the hall yelling, “Dey's doughnuts in de kitchenette, and dey sho are fine! Dey's doughnuts in de kitchenette, and dey sho are fine!”

  “Three weeks, man, I don't know,” Bill said dubiously. “Stroke aside, Olive's got this little problem.” He mimed swallowing a handful of pills.

  “That's the best part,” Herb said. “Mademoiselle Barker is clean, at least for the time being. She's going to those meetings and everything. You know she was always the fastest on-demand writer we had when she was straight.”

  “Clean copy, too,” I said. “At least it used to be.”

  “Can she stay clean for three weeks, do you think?”

  “She'll stay clean,” Herb said grimly. “For the next three weeks, I'm Olive Barker's personal sponsor. She gets calls three times a day. If I hear so much as a single slurred s, and I'm over there with a stomach-pump. And an enema bag.”

  “Please,” Sandra said, grimacing.

  Herb ignored her. “But that's not all. Wait.”

  He darted out, crossed the hall to the glorified closet that's his office (on the wall is a poster-sized photo of General Anthony Hecksler which Herb throws darts at when he's bored), and came back with a sheaf of paper. He looked uncharacteristically shy as he put them in Roger's hands.

  Instead of looking at the manuscript—because of course that was what it was—Roger looked at Herb, eyebrows raised.

  For a moment I thought Herb was having an allergic reaction, perhaps as a result of some skin sensitivity to ivy leaves. Then I realized he was blushing. I saw this, but the idea still seems foreign to me, like the idea of Clint Eastwood blubbering into his mommy's lap.

  “It's my account of the Twenty Psychic Garden Flowers business,” Herb said. “I think it's pretty good, actually. Only about thirty per cent of it is actually true—I never tackled Iron-Guts and brought him to his knees when he showed up here waving a knife, for instance...”

  True enough, I thought, since Hecksler never showed up here at all, to the best of our knowledge.

  “...but it makes good reading. I... I was inspired.” Herb lowered his face for a moment, as if the idea of inspiration struck him as somehow shameful. Then he raised his head again and looked around at us defiantly. “Besides, the goddam loony's dead, and I don't expect any trouble from his sister, especially if we bring her into the tent to help with the book and slip her a couple of hundred for her... well, call it creative assistance.”

  Roger was looking through the pages Herb had handed him, pretty much ignoring this flood of verbiage. “Herb,” he said. “There's... my goodness gracious, there's thirty-eight pages here. That's close to ten thousand words. When did you do it?”

  “Last night,” he said, looking down at the floor again. His cheeks were brighter than ever. “I told you, I was inspired.”

  Sandra and Bill looked impressed, but not as impressed as I felt. To the best of my knowledge, only Thomas Wolfe was a ten-thousand-a-day man. Certainly it overshadows my pitiful clackings on this Olivetti. And as Roger leafed through the pages again, I saw less than a dozen strikeovers and interlinings. God, he must have been inspired.

  “This is terrific, Herb,” Roger said, and there was no doubting the sincerity in his voice. “If the writing's okay—based on your memos and summaries I have every reason to think it will be—it's going to be the heart of the book.” Herb flushed again, this time I think with pleasure.

  Sandra was looking at his manuscript. “Herb, do you think writing that so fast... do you think it had anything to do with... you know...”

  “Sure it did,” Bill said. “Must have. Don't you think so, Herb?”

  I could see Herb struggling, wanting to take credit for the ten thousand words that were going to form the dramatic heart of The Devil's General, and then (I swear this is true) I could sense his thoughts turning to the plant, to the spectacular richness of it when Bill Gelb yanked open the door and it came sprawling out of its closet.

  “Of course it was the plant,” he said. “I mean, it had to have been. I've never written anything that good in my life.”

  And I could guess who the hero of the piece would turn out to be, but I kept my mouth shut. On that subject, at least. On another one, I thought it prudent to open it.

  “In Tina Barfield's letter to me,” I said, “she told me that when we read about Carlos's death, not to believe it. Then she said, 'Like the General. ' I repeat: 'Like the General. ' “

  “That is utter and complete bullshit,” Herb said, but he sounded uneasy, and a lot of the color faded out of his cheeks. “The guy crawled into a goddamned gas oven and gave himself a Viking funeral. The cops found his gold teeth, each engraved with the number 7, for 7th Army. And if that's not enough, they also found the lighter Douglas MacArthur gave him. He never would have given that up. Never.”

  “So maybe he's dead,” Bill said. “According to Roger and John, this guy Keen was dead, too, but he was still lively enough to read the used-car ads in the newspaper.”

  “Mr. Keen just had his heart torn out, though,” Herb said. He spoke almost nonchalantly, as if getting your heart torn out was roughly the same as ripping a hangnail off on the trunk-latch of your car. “There wasn't anything left of Iron-Guts but ashes, teeth, and a few lumps of bone.”

  “There is, however, that tulpa business,” Roger reminded him. All of us sitting around and discussing this stuff with perfect calmness, as though it were the plot of Anthony LaScorbia's newest big-bug book.

  “What exactly is a tulpa?” Bill asked.

  “I don't know,” Roger said, “but I will tomorrow.”

  “You will?”

  “Yes. Because you're going to research the subject at the New York Public Library before you go home tonight.”

  Bill groaned. “Roger, that's not fair! If there's a military-type tulpa out there, it's Herb's tulpa.”

  “Nevertheless, this particular bit of research is your baby,” Roger said, and gave Bill a severe look. “Sandra's got the joke book and Herb's got the nut book. You owe me an inspiration. In the meantime, I expect you to check into the wonderful world of tulpas.”

  “What about him?” Bill asked sulkily. The him he was looking at was yours truly.

  “John also has a project,” Roger told him. “Don't you, John?”

  “That I do,” I replied, reminding myself again not to go home without diving back into the dusty atmosphere of the mailroom at least one more time. According to Tina, what I'd been looking for was in a purple box, on the bottom shelf, and way back in the corner.

  No, not according to
Tina.

  According to OUIJA.

  “It's time to go to work,” Roger said, “but I want to make three suggestions before I turn you loose. The first is that you stay away from the janitor's closet, no matter how drawn to it you may feel. If the urge gets really strong, do what the alkies do: call someone else who may have the same problem and talk about it until the urge goes away. Okay?”

  His eyes swept us: Sandra once more sitting as prim and neat as a freshman coed at her first sorority social, Herb and Bill side by side on the floor, Mr. Stout and Mr. Narrow. Roger's baby blues touched me last. None of us said anything out loud, but Roger heard us just the same. That's the way it is at Zenith House right now. It's amazing, and most of the world would no doubt find it flat unbelievable, but that's the way it is. For better or worse. And because what he heard was what he wanted, Roger nodded and sat back, relaxing a bit.

  “Second thing. You may feel the urge to tell someone outside this office about what has happened here... what is happening. I urge you with all my heart not to do it.”

  He doesn't have to worry about it. We won't, none of us. It's ordinary human nature to want to confide a great and wonderful secret to which you have become privy, but not this time. I didn't need telepathy to know that; I saw it in their eyes. And I remembered something rather unpleasant from my childhood. There was this kid who lived up the street from me, not the world's nicest one by any means—Tommy Flannagan. He was skinny as a rail. He had a sister, maybe a year or two younger, who was much heavier. And sometimes he would chase her until she cried, yelling Greedy-guts, greedy-guts, greedy-greedy-greedy-guts! I don't know if poor little Jenny Flannagan was a greedy-guts or not, but I know that's what we looked like right then, the five of us: a bunch of greedy-guts editors sitting around in Roger Wade's office.

  That look haunts me, because I'm sure it was on my face, too. The plant feels good. It gives off good smells. Its touch isn't slimy, not repulsive; it feels like a caress. A life-giving caress. Sitting here now, my eyes drooping after another long day (and I still have reading to do, if I can ever finish this entry), I wish I could feel it again. I know it would revive me, cheer me up and rev me up. And yet, some drugs also make you feel good, don't they? Even while they're killing you, they're making you feel good. Maybe that's nonsense, a little Puritanical holdover like a race memory, or maybe it's not. I just don't know. And for the time being, I guess it doesn't matter. Still...

  Greedy-guts, greedy-guts, greedy-greedy-greedy-guts.

  There was a moment of silence in the office and then Sandra said, “No one's going to spill the beans, Roger.”

  Bill: “It's not just about saving our jobs in this lousy pulp-mill, either.”

  Herb: “We want to stick it to that prick Enders as bad as you do, Roger. Believe it.”

  “Okay,” Roger said. “I do. Which brings me to the last thing. John has been keeping a diary.”

  I almost jumped out of my seat and started to ask how he knew that—I hadn't told him—then realized I didn't have to. Thanks to Zenith down there in Riddley Walker country, we know a lot about each other now. More than is healthy for us, probably.

  “It's a good idea,” Roger went on. “I suggest you all start keeping diaries.”

  “If we're really going to crash a bunch of new books into production, I don't expect to have time to wash my own hair,” Sandra grumbled. As if she'd been put in charge of editing a newly discovered James Joyce manuscript instead of World's Sickest Jokes.

  “Nevertheless, I strongly suggest you find time for this,” Roger said. “Written journals might not be worth much if things turn out the way we hope, but they could be invaluable if things don't... well, let's just say that we don't have any clear idea of what forces we're playing with here.”

  “He who takes a tiger by the tail dares not let go,” Bill said. He spoke in a kind of baleful mutter.

  “Nonsense,” Sandra said. “It's only a plant. And it's good. I felt that very strongly.”

  “A lot of people thought Adolf Hitler was just the bee's knees,” I said, which earned me a sharp stare from the senorita.

  “I keep going back to the thing Barfield said about the plant needing blood to really get rolling,” Roger said. “The blood of evil or the blood of insanity. I don't really understand that, and I don't like it. The idea that we're raising a vampire vine in the janitor's closet...”

  “And no longer just in the janitor's closet,” I added, earning myself dirty looks from Sandra and Herb, plus a puzzled, rather uneasy one from Bill.

  “I'd just as soon it didn't sample blood of any kind, that's all,” Roger said. “Things are rolling quite enough to suit our purposes right now.” He cleared his throat. “I think we're playing with high explosives here, people, and in a case like that, record-keeping can come in handy. Notes and jottings are really all I'm asking for.”

  “If they were ever read in court, journals about this stuff would probably end us up in Oak Cove,” Herb said. “That's the nut-farm old Iron-Guts broke out of, just in case any of you forgot.”

  “Better Oak Cove than Attica,” I said.

  “That's comforting, John,” Sandra said. “That's very comforting.”

  “Don't worry, sweetheart,” Bill said, reaching out and giving her ankle a pat. “I think they send the ladies to Ossining.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Where I can discover the joys of Sapphic love with a three-hundred-pound biker chick.”

  “Stop it, all of you,” Roger said impatiently. “It's a precaution, that's all. There's really no downside to this. Not if we're careful.”

  It wasn't until then that I realized just how desperately Roger wants to turn Zenith House around, now that he has the chance. How much he wants to save his reputation now that there's a real chance to save it. I thought again of that rabbit general yelling, “Come back, you fools! Dogs aren't dangerous!”

  I believe that, in the days and weeks ahead, Roger Wade will bear watching. The others, too. And myself, of course.

  Maybe myself most of all.

  “I think I'm ready for a little vacation in Oak Cove, anyway,” Bill said. “I feel as if I'm reading you guys' minds, and that's got to be crazy.”

  No one said anything. No one really needed to.

  Dear diary, we're past that point.

  I spent the rest of the day recovering my more-or-less normal existence. I removed a long, dull dinner-party scene from Olive's latest Windhover opus and, mindful of the late great Tina Barfield, left in a rough-sex scene that really is rough (at one point a blunt object is inserted in an unlikely place with unlikely, ecstatic results). I tracked down a culinary consultant through the New York Public Library, and she has agreed, for the sum of four hundred dollars (which we can barely afford) to go through the recipes in Janet Freestone-Love's Your New Astral Cookbook and try to assure me that there's nothing poisonous in there. Cookbooks are invariably moneymakers, even the bad ones, but few people outside this crazy business realize they can also be dangerous; fuck up a few ingredients and people can die. Ludicrous, but it happens. I went to lunch with Jinky Carstairs, who is novelizing the lesbo-vampire piece of shit we're stuck with (burgers at Burger Heaven, how chi-chi) and had a drink after work with Rodney Slavinksy, who writes the Coldeye Denton westerns under the name of Bart I. Straight. The Coldeyes don't do diddly-dick in the U. S. market, but for some reason they've found an audience in France, Germany, and Japan. We share in those rights. Greedy-guts, greedy-guts.

  Before meeting with Rodney—who is one gay cowpoke, pardner—I went back down to the mailroom, stepping over a twisted, twined mat of ivy branches and stems to get there. It's possible to do that without actually treading on any, for which I am grateful. The last thing I needed at three in the afternoon was the pained scream of a psychic ivy suffering a bad case of stompie-toes.

  Mostly, Zenith appears to be growing up the wall on either side of the janitor's cubby, creating a complex pattern of green and brown, through which the c
ream-colored wallboard shows in pleasant geometric patterns. I didn't hear it sighing this time, but I could swear I heard it breathing, warm and deep and comforting, just within the range of audibility. And again there was a smell, this time not coffee but honeysuckle. I also have fond childhood memories of that smell; it surrounded the library where I spent a great many happy hours as a boy. And as I passed, one strand of ivy reached out and touched my cheek. Not just a touch, either. It was a caress. One great thing I have discovered about keeping a diary: I can be honest here if nowhere else, honest enough in this case to say that that leafy touch made me think of Ruth, who used to touch me in just that way.

  I stood perfectly quiet while that delicate bit of stem slipped up to my temple, traced my eyebrow, and then fell away. Before it did, I had a very clear thought, and I'm positive it came from Zenith rather than from my own mind:

  Find the purple box.

  Find it I did, exactly where the Barfield woman—or her Ouija board —said I would, way back in the corner on the bottom shelf, behind a pair of huge padded mailers oozing out flakes of stuffing. It is the sort of box that medium-grade typing paper comes in. The sender—one James Saltworthy of Queens—simply taped the box shut and slapped a mailing sticker over the ragland bond brand name and logo. His address is in the upper left-hand corner, on another sticker. I think it's sort of amazing that the post office accepted such a package and managed to get it here, but they did, and now it's all mine. Sitting on the floor of the mailroom, smelling dust and honeysuckle, I broke the tape and lifted the box-lid. Inside is about four hundred pages of copy, I should judge, under a title page which reads

  THE LAST SURVIVOR By James Saltworthy