The Plant Read online

  “It's my policy not to go any further than right here, Mr. Wade,” she said, standing in the door of Roger's office and speaking with great dignity. “You're okay... and so are you, Mr. Kenton... most of the time...”

  I thanked her. I've discovered that after your girl has dropped you for some West Coast smoothie who probably knows Tai Chi and has been rolphed as est-ed to a nicety, even left-handed compliments sound pretty good.

  “...but those other three are a little on the weird side.”

  With that, LaShonda left. I imagine she had calls to make, a few of which might even have to do with the publishing business. Roger looked at me, amused, and further rumpled his disarranged hair. “She didn't know what the smell was,” he said.

  “I don't think LaShonda spends a lot of time in the kitchen.”

  “When you look like LaShonda, I doubt if you need to,” Roger said. “The only time you smell garlic is when the waiter brings your Shrimp Mediterranean.”

  “Meanwhile,” I said, “there's Glade. And the garlic-smell will be gone before long, anyway. Unless, of course, you're either a bloodhound or a supernatural houseplant.”

  We looked at each other for a moment, then burst out laughing. Maybe just because Tina Barfield was dead and we were alive. Not very nice, I know, but the day brightened from that point on; that much, at least, I'm sure of.

  Roger had left little notes on Herb's, Sandra's, and Bill's desks. By nine-thirty we were all gathered in Roger's office, which doubles as our editorial conference room. Roger began by saying that he thought both Herb and Sandra had been aided in their inspirations, and with no more preamble than that, he told them the story of our trip to Rhode Island. I helped as much as I could. We both tried to express how strange our visit to the greenhouse had been, how otherworldly, and I believe all three of them understood most of that. When it came to Norville Keen, however, I don't think either Roger or I really got the point across.

  Bill and Herb were sitting side by side on the floor, as they often do during our editorial conferences, drinking coffee, and I saw them exchange a glance of the kind in which eyeballs rolling heavenward play a crucial part. I thought about trying to press the point, then didn't. If I may misquote the wisdom of Norville Keen:"You can't believe in a zombie unless you've seen that zombie.”

  Roger finished the job by handing Bill that day's B section of The New York Times. We waited as it made the rounds.

  “Oh, poor woman,” Sandra said. She had dragged in her office chair and was sitting in it with her knees primly together. No sitting on the floor for Mr. and Mrs. Jackson's little girl. “I never fly unless I have to. It's much more dangerous than they let on.”

  “This is crap,” Bill said. “I mean, I love you, Roger, but this really is crap. You've been under pressure—you too, John, especially since you got the gate from your girlfriend—and you guys've just... I don't know... let your imaginations run away with you.”

  Roger nodded as if he had expected no less. He turned to Herb. “What do you think?” he asked him.

  Herb stood up and hitched his belt in that take-charge way of his. “I think we ought to go take a look at the famous ivy plant.”

  “Me too,” Sandra said.

  “You guys don't actually believe this, do you?” Bill Gelb asked. He sounded both amused and alarmed. “I mean, let's not dial 1–800-MASSHYSTERIA just yet, okay?”

  “I don't believe or disbelieve anything,” Sandra said. “Not for sure. All I know for sure is that I got my idea about the joke-book after I was down there. After I smelled baking cookies. And why would the janitor's room smell like my grandma's kitchen, anyway?”

  “Maybe for the same reason the reception area smells like garlic,” Bill said. “Because these guys have been playing jokes.” I opened my mouth to say that Sandra had smelled cookies and Herb toast and jam in Riddley's cubicle the day before Roger and I made our trip to Central Falls, but before I could, Bill said: “What about the plant, Sandy? Did you see an ivy growing all over the place in there?”

  “No, but I didn't turn on the light,” she said. “I just peeped my head in, and then... I don't know... I got a little scared. Like it was spooky, or something.”

  “It was spooky in spite of the smell of gramma's baking cookies, or because of it?” Bill asked. Like a TV-show prosecutor hammering some hapless defense witness.

  Sandra looked at him defiantly and said nothing. Herb tried to take her hand, but she shook it off.

  I stood up. “Enough talk. Why describe a guest when you can see that guest?”

  Bill looked at me as if I'd flipped my lid. “Say what?”

  “I believe that in his own inimitable way, John is trying to express the idea that seeing is believing,” Roger said. “Let's go have a look. And may I suggest you all keep your hands to yourselves? I don't think it bites—not us, anyway—but I do think we'd be wise to be careful.”

  It sounded like damned good advice to me. As Roger lead us down the hall past our offices in a little troop, I found myself remembering the last words of the rabbit general in Richard Adams's Watership Down: “Come back, you fools! Come back! Dogs aren't dangerous!”

  When we got to the place where the hall jogs to the left, Bill said: “Hey, hold it, just a goddam minute.” Sounding extremely suspicious. And a little bit spooked, maybe, as well.

  “What is it, William?” Herb asked, all innocence. “Smelling something nice?”

  “Popcorn,” he said. His hands were clenched.

  “Good smell, is it?” Roger asked gently.

  Bill sighed. His hands opened... and all at once his eyes filled with tears. “It smells like The Nordica,” he said. “The Nordica Theater, in Freeport, Maine. It's where we used to go to the show when I was a kid growing up in Gates Falls. It was only open on weekends, and it was always a double feature. There were great big wooden fans in the ceiling and they'd go around during the show... whoosh, whoosh, whoosh... and the popcorn was always fresh. Fresh popcorn with real butter on it in a plain brown bag. To me that's always been the smell of dreams. I just... Is this a joke? Because if it is, tell me right now.”

  “No joke,” I said. “I smell coffee. Five O'Clock brand, and stronger than ever. Sandra, do you still smell cookies?”

  She looked at me with dreamy eyes, and right then I sort of understood why Herb is so totally gone on her (yes, we all know it; I think even Riddley and LaShonda know it; the only one who doesn't know it is Sandra herself). Because she was beautiful.

  “No,” she said, “I smell Shalimar. That was the first perfume I ever had. My Aunt Coretta gave it to me for my birthday, when I was twelve.” Then she looked at Bill, and smiled warmly. “That was what dreams smelled like to me. Shalimar perfume.”

  “Herb?” I asked.

  For a minute I didn't think he was going to say anything; he was cheesed at the way she was looking at Bill. But then he must have decided this was a little bit bigger than his crush on Sandra.

  “Not toast and jam today,” he said. “New car today. To me that's the best smell on earth. It was when I was seventeen and couldn't afford one, and I guess it still is now.”

  Sandra said, “You still can't afford one.”

  Herb sighed, shrugged. “Yeah, but... fresh wax... new leather...”

  I turned to Roger. “What about—” Then I stopped. Bill was only brimming, but Roger Wade was outright weeping. Tears ran down his face in two silent streams.

  “My mother's garden, when I was very small,” he said in a thick, choked voice. “How I loved that smell. And how I loved her.”

  Sandra put an arm around him and gave him a little hug. Roger wiped his eyes with his sleeve and tried a smile. Did pretty well, too, for someone remembering his beloved dead mother.

  Now Bill pushed ahead. I let him, too. We followed him around the corner to the door just left of the drinking fountain, the one marked JANITOR. He threw it open, started to say something smartass—it might have been Come out, come out, wherever
you are—and then stopped. His hands went up in an involuntary warding-off gesture, then dropped again.

  “Holy Jesus get-up-in-the-morning,” he whispered, and the rest of us crowded around him.

  Writing in this journal yesterday, I said that Riddley's closet had become a jungle, but yesterday I didn't understand what a jungle was. I know that must sound strange after my tour of Tina Barfield's greenhouse in Central Falls, but it's true. Riddley won't be shooting dice with Bill Gelb in there anymore, I can tell you that. The room is now a densely packed mass of shiny green leaves and tangled vines, rising from the floor to the ceiling. Within it you can still see a few gleams of metal and wood—the mop-bucket, the broom-handle—but that's it. The shelves are buried. The fluorescent lights overhead are barely visible. The smells that came out at us, although good, were almost overpowering.

  And then there was a sigh. We all heard it. A kind of whispered, exhaled greeting.

  An avalanche of leaves and stems fell out at our feet and sprawled across the floor. Several tendrils went snaking over the linoleum. The speed with which this happened was scary. If you'da blinked, you'da missed it, as my father might have said. Sandra screamed, and when Herb put his arms around her shoulders, she didn't seem to mind a bit.

  Bill stepped forward and drew his leg back, apparently meaning to kick the rapidly snaking ivy-branches back into the janitor's closet. Or to try. Roger grabbed his shoulder. “Don't do that! Leave it be! It doesn't mean to hurt us! Can't you feel that? Don't you know from the smell?”

  Bill stopped, so I guess he did. We watched as several tendrils of ivy climbed up the wall of the corridor. A few of these began to explore the gray steel sides of the water fountain, and when I left the office tonight, the fountain was pretty much buried. It looks as if those of us who like a drink of water every now and then during the course of the day are going to be buying Evian at Smiler's from now on.

  Sandra squatted down and held out her hand, the way you might hold your hand out for a strange dog to sniff. I didn't like to see her that way, not while she was so close to the green avalanche we'd let out of the janitor's closet. In its shadow, so to speak. I reached out to pull her back, but Roger stopped me. He had a queer little smile on his face.

  “Let her,” he said.

  A tendril as thick as a branch detached itself from the nearly solid clump of green bulging through the doorway. It reached out to her, trembling, seeming almost to sniff its way to her. It slid around her wrist and she gasped. Herb started forward and Roger yanked him back. “Leave her alone! It's all right!” he said.

  “Do you swear?”

  Roger's lips were pressed together so tightly they were almost gone. “No,” he said in a small voice. “But I think.”

  “It is all right,” Sandra said dreamily. She watched as the tendril slid delicately up her bare arm in a spiral of green and brown, seeming to caress her bare skin as it went. It looked like some exotic snake. “It says it's a friend.”

  “That's what the Pilgrims told the Indians,” Bill said bleakly.

  “It says it loves me,” she said, now sounding almost ecstatic. We watched as the tip of the moving tendril slipped under the short sleeve of her blouse. A small green leaf near the tip went under next, lifting the cloth a bit. It was like watching some new kind of Hindu fakir at work, a plant charmer instead of a snake charmer. “It says it loves all of us. And it says...” Another tendril snaked loosely around one of her knees, then slipped tenderly down her calf in a loose coil.

  “It says one of us is missing,” Herb said. I looked around and saw that Herb's shoes had disappeared. He was standing ankle-deep in ivy.

  Roger and I walked to the closet's doorway and stood there with the leaves brushing the fronts of our coats. I thought how easy it would be for that thing to grab us by the ties. A couple of long hard yanks and presto—a pair of editors strangled by their own cravats. Then several coils of ivy wrapped themselves around my wrists in loose bracelets, and all those paranoid, fearful thoughts dropped away.

  Now, sitting at my apartment desk and pounding away at my old typewriter (also smoking like a furnace again, I'm sorry to say), I can't remember exactly what came next... except that it was warm and comforting and quite a bit more than pleasant. It was lovely, like a warm bath when your back aches, or chips of ice when your mouth is hot and your throat is sore.

  What an outsider would have seen, I don't know. Probably not much, if Tina Barfield was telling the truth when she said no one could see it but us; probably just five slightly scruffy editors, four of them on the youngish side (and Herb, who's pushing fifty, would look young at a more respectable publisher's conference table, where the ages of most editors seem to range between sixty-five and dead), standing around the door of the janitor's closet.

  What we saw was it. The plant. Zenith the common ivy. It had now expanded (and relaxed) all around us, feeling along the corridor with its tendrils and climbing the walls with its rhizomes, as eager and frisky as a colt let out of the stable on a warm May morning. It had both of Sandra's arms, it had my wrists, it had Bill and Herb by the feet. Roger had grown a loose green necklace, and didn't seem worried about it at all.

  We saw it and we experienced it. The physical fact of it and the reassuring mental warmth of it. It experienced us in the same fashion, united us in a way that turned us into a small but perfect mental choir. And yes, I am saying exactly what I seem to be saying, that while we stood there in the grip of those many thin but tough tendrils, we shared a telepathic link. We saw into each others' hearts and minds. I don't know why I should find that so amazing after all the other stuff that's happened—the fact that yesterday I saw a dead man reading a newspaper, for instance—but I do.

  Zenith had asked about Riddley. It seemed to have a special interest in the man who had taken it in, given it a place to grow, and enough water to allow it a fragile purchase on life. We assured it (him?) in our choir voice that Riddley was fine, Riddley was away but would be back soon. The plant seemed satisfied. The tendrils holding our arms and legs (not to mention Roger's neck) let go. Some dropped to the floor, some simply withdrew.

  “Come on,” Roger said quietly. “Let's go.”

  But for a moment we stood there, looking at it wonderingly. I thought of Tina Barfield telling us to just give it a DDT shower when we were done with it, when we'd gotten what we needed from it, and for a moment I was actually glad she was dead. Coldhearted bitch deserved to be dead, I thought. To talk about killing something that was so powerful and yet so obviously tame and friendly... profit-motive aside, that was just sick.

  “All right,” Sandra said at last. “Come on, you guys.”

  “I don't believe it,” Bill said. “I see it but I don't believe it.”

  Except we knew he did. We'd seen it and felt it in his mind.

  “What about the door?” Herb asked. “Open or closed?”

  “Don't you dare close it,” Sandra said indignantly. “You'll cut off some of its little branches if you do.”

  Herb stepped back from the door and looked at Bill. “Are you convinced, O Doubting Thomas?”

  “You know I am,” Bill said. “Don't rub it in, okay?”

  “Nobody is going to rub anything in,” Roger said brusquely. “We've got more important things to do. Now come on.”

  He lead us back toward Editorial, smoothing his tie as he went and then tucking it into his belt. I paused just once, at the jog in the corridor, and looked back. I was convinced that it would be gone, that the whole thing had been some sort of wacky five-way hallucination, but it was still there, a green flood of leaves and a brownish tangle of limber vines, a good many now crawling up the wall.

  “Amazing,” Herb breathed beside me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And all that stuff that happened in Rhode Island? All that's true?”

  “It's all true,” I agreed.

  “Come on,” Roger called. “We've got a lot to talk about.”

 
I started moving, but then Herb caught my arm. “I almost wish old Iron-Guts wasn't dead,” he said. “Can you imagine how something like this would blow his mind?”

  I didn't respond to this, but I was thinking plenty, most of it having to do with Tina Barfield's note.

  Back in Roger's office again, Roger behind his desk, me in the chair beside it, Sandra in her chair, Bill and Herb once more sitting on the carpet with their legs stretched out and their backs to the wall.

  “Any questions?” Roger asked, and we all shook our heads. Someone reading this diary—someone outside of these events, in other words—would no doubt find that incredible: how in God's name could there be no questions? How could we have avoided spending at least the rest of the morning speculating about the invisible world? More likely the rest of the day?

  The answer's simple: it was because of the mind-meld. We had come to a mutual understanding few people are able to manage. And there's also the small fact that we have a business to save—our meal-tickets, if you want to get down and dirty about it. Getting down and dirty seems easier for me since Ruth kissed me off—perhaps the prolixity will go next. I can hope, anyway. I'll tell you something about the fabled meal-ticket, since I'm on the subject. You worry when you're in danger of losing it, but you don't become truly frantic until you're in danger of losing it and you realize it could possibly be saved. If, that is, you move very quickly and don't stumble. Fatalism is a crutch. I never knew that before, but I do now.

  And one more thing about the “no questions” thing. People can get used to anything—quadriplegia, hair loss, cancer, even finding out your beloved only daughter just joined the Hare Krishnas and is currently spare-changing business travelers at Stapleton International in a pair of fetching orange pajamas. We adapt. An invisible, telepathy-inducing ivy is just one more thing to get used to. We'll worry about the ramifications later, maybe. Right then we had a pair of books to work on: World's Sickest Jokes and The Devil's General.

  The only one of us to have problems getting with the program was Herb Porter, and his distraction had nothing to do with Zenith the common ivy. At least not directly. He kept shooting reproachful, bewildered glances at Sandra, and thanks to the mind-meld, I knew why. Bill and Roger did, too. It seems that over the last half-year or so, Mr. Riddley Walker of Bug's Anus, Alabama has been waxing more than the floors here at Zenith House.