The Plant Read online

  Well I am going away but my material is copywright and I just hope you know what copywright is even if you don't know “shit” from “shoe-polish.” So you just put that in your pipe and smoke it all the day long Mr. Judas Kenton. Goodbye.

  I hate you,

  Carlos Detweiller

  In Transit

  U. S. of A.

  February 7, 1981

  Dear Ruth,

  I had sort of expected a “fuck-you” letter from Carlos Detweiller-it was in the back of my mind, anyway-and I got a dilly just the other day. I employed Zenith House's creaky pre-World War I Xerox machine to make a copy, and have enclosed it with this letter. In his anger he is almost lyrical-I especially like the line about me being a warped plank in the floor of the universe... a phrase even Carlyle might admire. He misspelled Richard Gere's name, but maybe that was artistic license. On the whole, I'd say I feel relieved-it's over, at least. The guy has struck out for the Great American West, undoubtedly with his rose-cutting shears slung low on one hip (on one rose-hip? oh, forget it).

  “Yeah, but is he really gone?” you ask. The answer is, yes he is.

  I got the letter yesterday and rang up Barton Iverson of the Central Falls Police almost at once (after getting Roger's grudging approval for the long distance, I might add). I thought Iverson would go along with my request to check matters out, and he did. Seems he too thought the “sakrifice photos” were too real for comfort, and the latest Detweiller communication does have a rather threatening tone.

  He sent a man named Riley-the same man who went before, I think-to check out Carlos, and he (Iverson, not Riley) called me back in ninety minutes. It seems that Detweiller served his notice almost right after being released from custody, and the Barfield woman has even advertised for a new florist's assistant in the local newspapers. One mildly interesting thing: Riley checked on the guy in the “sakrifice photos,” and came up with a name I know: It was Mr. Norville Keen, the same guy, I'm pretty sure, that Detweiller mentioned in his first two letters (“Why describe a guest when you can see that guest,” and other pearls of wisdom). The cop asked her a few questions about the staging of those photos, and the Barfield woman clammed up, ka-bang, just like that. Asked him if it was an official investigation, or what. It isn't, of course, so that was that... and in my mind, the whole subject is closed. Iverson told me that Riley can't “make” the Barfield woman from any of the photos, so there was no handle to question her further... not that anyone there in Central Falls really wants to, I think. Iverson was very frank with me. “Let sleeping weirdos lay,” was what he actually said, and I agree two hundred per cent.

  If the new Anthony LaScorbia novel turns out to be Plants from Hell, though, I'm quitting.

  I'll write you a more normal letter later in the week, I hope, but I thought you'd want to know how it all turned out. Meanwhile, I'm back to spending my nights on my novel and my days looking for a bestseller we can buy for $2500. As I believe President Lincoln once said, “Good fucking luck, turkey.”

  Meantime, thanks for your phone call, and your last missive. And in answer to your question, yeah, I'm also H*O*R*N*Y.

  My love,

  John

  February 19, 1981

  Dear Mr. Kenton,

  You don't know me, but I sort of know you. My name is Roberta Solrac, and I am an avid reader of Anthony LaScorbia's series of novels. Like Mr. LaScorbia, I feel that ecology is about to revolt!!! Anyway, I wrote Mr. LaScorbia a “fan letter” last month and he answered me! I was very excited and honored, so I sent him a dozen roses. He said he was excited and honored (to get the roses) as no one had ever sent him flowers before.

  Anyway, in our correspondence, he mentioned your name and said you were responsible for his literary triumphs. I can't send you roses as I am “broke,” but I am sending you a small plant for your office, via UPS. It is supposed to bring good luck. Hope this finds you well, and keep up the good work!!!

  Yours most sincerely,

  Roberta Solrac

  interoffice memo TO: Roger FROM: John RE: Ongoing insanity

  Take a look at the enclosed letter, Roger. Then spell “Solrac” backwards. I think I really am going crazy. What did I do to deserve this guy?

  from the office of the editor-in-chief TO: John Kenton DATE: 2/23/81

  Maybe you're jumping at shadows. If not, what do you want to do about it? Re-open things with the Central Falls P. D.? Assuming this is Detweiller-and I admit the last name soars into the outer limits of the coincidental and the style bears a certain similarity, although it's obviously a different typewriter-it's just, if I may wax alliterative, a harmless helping of little-kid harassment. My advice is forget it. If “Roberta Solrac” sends you a plant in the mail, dump it down the incinerator chute. It's probably poison ivy. You're letting this get on your nerves, John. I tell you this seriously: Forget it.

  Roger

  interoffice memo TO: Roger FROM: John RE: “Roberta Solrac”

  Poison ivy, my ass. The guy worked in a greenhouse. It's probably deadly nightshade, or belladonna, or something like that.

  John

  from the office of the editor-in-chief TO: John Kenton DATE: 2/23/81

  I thought about shagging my butt down the hall to talk to you, but I'm expecting a call from Harlow “The Axeman Cometh” Enders in a few minutes, and don't want to be out of my office. But maybe it's better that I write this down anyway, because you don't seem to really believe anything unless it's in print.

  John, let this go. The Detweiller thing is over. I know the whole business knocked you for a loop-hell, it did me, too-but you've got to let it go. We have got some serious problems here inhouse, just in case you didn't know it. There's going to be a reevaluation of what we're up to in June, and what were up to is not much. This means we could all be out on our asses in September. Our “year of grace” has begun to shrink. Quit worrying about Detweiller and for Christ's sake find something I can publish that will make money.

  I can't make myself clearer. I love you, John, but let this go and get back to work, or I'm going to have to make some hard choices.

  Roger

  interoffice memo TO: Riddley FROM: John Kenton RE: Possible incoming package

  I have an idea that I may be receiving a UPS package from somewhere in the midwest during the next week to ten days. The sender's name is Roberta Solrac. If you see such a package, make sure I don't. In other words, dump it immediately down the nearest incinerator chute. I suspect you know most of what there is to know about the Detweiller business. This may be associated with that, and the contents of the package could be dangerous. Unlikely, but in therealm of possibility. Thanking you,

  John Kenton

  interoffice memo TO: John Kenton FROM: Riddley RE: Possible incoming package

  Yassuh, Mist Kenton!

  Riddley/Mail Room

  from THE SAKRED BOOK OF CARLOS SAKRED MONTH OF FEBBA (Entry #64)

  I know how to get him. I have set things in motion, praise Abbalah. Praise Green Demeter. I'll get them all. Green Green “must be seen.” Ha! You Judas! Little do you know! But I know! All about your girlfriend, too-only girlfriend is now girlFIEND, little do you know what she is up to! There is another mule kicking in your stall, Mr. Judas Big-Shot Editor! OUIJA says this mule's name is GARY! In my dreams I have seen them and GARY is HAIRY! Not like you, you wimpy little JUDAS! Soon I'm sending you a present! Everyone prospers! Every Judas safe in the arms of Abbalah! Come Abbalah! COME GREAT DEMETER!

  COME GREEN!

  SYNOPSIS

  JOHN KENTON, who majored in English and was President of the Brown University Literary Society, has had a rude initiation into the real world as one of Zenith House's four editors. Zenith House, which captured only 2% of the total paperback market the year before (1980), is dying on the vine. All of its employees are worried that Apex, the parent corporation, may soon take extreme measures to stem the tide of red ink... and the most likely possibility is looking more and more like
terminating Zenith House, with extreme sanction. The only hope is a drastic sales turnaround, but with Zenith's tiny advances and creaky distribution system, that seems unlikely.

  Enter CARLOS DETWEILLER, first in the form of a query letter received by John Kenton. Detweiller, twenty-three, works in the Central Falls House of Flowers and is hawking a book he's written, called True Tales of Demon Infestations. Kenton, with the vague idea that Detweiller may have some interesting stuff which can be rewritten by a staffer, encourages Detweiller to submit sample chapters and an outline. Detweiller instead submits the entire manuscript, along with a bundle of photographs. The mss is even more abysmal than Kenton-who thought the book could maybe be juiced up for The Amityville Horror audience-would have believed in his worst nightmares. Yet the worst nightmare of all is contained in the form of the enclosed photographs. Most are shots of painfully faked seance effects, but four of them show a gruesomely realistic human sacrifice, in which an old man's heart is being pulled from his gaping chest... and it seems very likely to Kenton that the fellow doing the pulling is none other than Carlos Detweiller himself.

  ROGER WADE concurs with Kenton's feeling that they have stumbled into something which is probably a police matter-and a very nasty police matter at that. Kenton takes the photos to SGT. TYNDALE, who wires them to CHIEF IVERSON in Central Falls. Carlos Detweiller is arrested, then released when an officer assigned to surveillance sees the photos in question and remarks that he saw the so-called “sacrifice victim” sitting in the House of Flowers office that very day, playing solitaire and watching Ryan's Hope on TV. Tyndale tries to comfort Kenton. Go home, he says, have a drink, forget it. You made a perfectly forgivable mistake in the course of trying to do your civic duty.

  Kenton burns the “sacrifice photos,” but he can't forget; he receives a letter from the obviously insane Carlos Detweiller, promising revenge. Two weeks later, he receives a letter from one “Roberta Solrac,” who purports to be a great fan of Zenith's second-hottest author, Anthony La Scorbia (La Scorbia is responsible for a series of nature-run-amok novels such as Rats from Hell, Ants from Hell, and Scorpions from Hell). “She” claims to have sent La Scorbia roses, and wants to send Kenton, as La Scorbia's editor, a small plant “as a token of esteem.”

  Kenton, no fool, realizes at once that Solrac is Carlos spelled backward... and Detweiller, of course, worked in a greenhouse. Convinced that the “token of esteem” is apt to be something like deadly nightshade or belladonna, Kenton sends an interoffice memo to Riddley, instructing him to incinerate any package which comes to him from a “Roberta Solrac.”

  RIDDLEY WALKER, who respects Kenton more than Kenton himself would ever believe, agrees, but privately adopts a wait-and-see attitude. Near the end of February 1981, a package from “Roberta Solrac,” addressed to John Kenton, actually does arrive. Riddley opens the package in spite of a strong feeling that the sender-Detweiller-is a terribly evil man. If so, the contents of the package are hardly in keeping with such notions; it is nothing more than a sickly-looking Common Ivy with a little plastic sign stuck into the earth of its pot. The sign reads:

  HI!

  MY NAME IS ZENITH

  I AM A GIFT TO JOHN

  FROM ROBERTA

  Riddley puts it on a high shelf of his janitor's room and forgets it.

  For the time being.

  February 25

  Dear Ruth,

  I've got a case of the mean reds, so I thought I'd pass some of them on-see the enclosed Xeroxes, concluding with a typically impudent communication from Riddley, he of the coal-black skin and three hundred huge white teeth.

  You'll notice that Roger kicked my ass good and hardnot much like Roger, and doubly sobering for that very reason. I don't think one has to be very paranoid to see that he's talking about the possibility of firing me. If I'd talked this out with him over martinis at Flaherty's after work, I doubt very much if he would have come down so hard, and of course I had no idea he was waiting on a call from Enders. I undoubtedly deserved the ass-kicking I got-I haven't really been doing my job-but he has no idea of the scare that letter threw into me when I realized it was Detweiller again. I'm too goddam thin-skinned for my own good, that's what Roger thinks... but Detweiller is scary for other, less easily grasped reasons. Being the idee that's gotten fixe in some crazy's head has got to be one of the most uncomfortable feelings in the world-if I knew Jody Foster, I think I'd give her a jingle and tell her I know exactly how she feels. There's an almost palpable texture of slime about Detweiller's communications, and oh boy, oh yeah, I wish I could get him out of my head, but I still have nightmares about those pictures.

  Anyway, I have taken care of matters as well as I can, and no, I have no intention of calling Central Falls. We have an editorial meeting tomorrow. I'll try to the best of my limited abilities to get back on the beam... except at Zenith House the beam is so narrow it almost doesn't exist.

  I love you, I miss you, I long for your return. Maybe you being gone is part of the problem. Not to make you feel guilty.

  All my love,

  John

  From the journals of Riddley Walker

  2/23/81

  Like a stone thrown into a large and stagnant pond, the Detweiller affair has caused any number of ripples at my place of employment. I thought that all of them had gone by; yet this afternoon one more rolled past, and who is to say even that one will be the last?

  I have included a Xerox of an exceedingly curious memo I received from Kenton at 2:35 P. M. plus my own reply (the memo came just after Gelb left, in something of a huff; why he should have been in a huff eludes me since today he brought his own dice and I did him the courtesy of not even checking them, but Ah g'iss Ah woan nevuh understand dese white folks). I think I have covered the Detweiller affair to a nicety in these pages, but I should add that it never surprised me in the least that Kenton was the one to bring Detweiller, the rogue comet, into the erratic (and, I fear, degenerating) orbit of Zenith House.

  He is brighter than Sandra Jackson; brighter than that crapshooting, Ivy League tie-wearing devil William Gelb; far brighter than Herbert Porter (Porter, as previously noted, is not above wandering into Ms. Jackson's office after she has left for the day and sniffing the seat of her office chair-a strange man, but be it not for me to judge), and the only one of the staff who might be capable of recognizing a commercial book if it came within his purview. Right now he is eaten up with guilt and embarrassment over l'affaire Detweiller, and can see only that he made a rather comic faux pas. He would be incapable of seeing that his decision to even look at the Detweiller book demonstrated that his editorial ears are still open, and still attuned to that sweetest of all tones-the celestial notes of Sweda cash registers in drugstores and book emporia ringing up sales, even if it was pointed out to him.

  Incapable of seeing that it proves he's still trying.

  The others have given up.

  Anyway, here is this enchanting memo-between its lines I hear a man whose nerve is temporarily shot, a man who might be capable of facing a lion but who now cannot even look at a mouse; a man who is, in consequence, shrieking “Eeeek! Get rid of it! Get rid of it!” and swatting at it with the handiest broom, which in dis case jus happen t'be Riddley, who dus' de awfishes an wipe de windows an delivah de mail. Yassuh, Mist Kenton, I git rid of it fo you! I sholy goan get rid of dat hoodoo Solrac woman's package if she sen one!

  Maybe.

  On the other hand, maybe John Kenton should have to face up to the consequences of his own actions-swat his own mouse. After all, if you don't swat your own, maybe you never really know what a harmless little thing a mouse is... and is it not possible that Kenton's useful days as an editor may be over if he cannot stare down such occasional crazies as Carlos “Roberta” Detweiller?

  I shall ponder the matter. I think there is a very good chance no package will come, but I'll ponder it all the same.

  2/27/81

  Something from the mysterious “Roberta Solrac” a
ctually came today! I didn't know whether to be amused or disgusted by my own reaction, which was staring, elemental gut-terror followed by an almost insane urge to put the thing down the incinerator, exactly as Kenton's note had instructed. The physicality of my reaction as soon as my eye fell on the return address and connected the name there with Kenton's memo was striking. I had a sudden spasm of shudders. Goosebumps raced up my back. I heard a clear, ringing tone in my ears, and I could feel the hair stiffening on my head. This symphony of physiological atavism lasted no more than five seconds and then it subsided-but it left me as shaken as a sudden deep lance of pain in the area of the heart. Floyd would sneer and call it “a nigger reaction,” but it was no such thing. It was a human reaction. Not to the thing itself-the contents of the package were something of an anticlimax after all the sound and fury-but, I am convinced, to the hands which placed the lid on the small white cardboard box in which the plant came; the hands which tied twine around that box and then cut a brown paper shopping bag in which to wrap the box for mailing, the hands which taped and labelled and carried. Detweiller's hands.