The Plant

From John Kenton's diary
April 1, 1981

There's an old Chinese curse which goes, “May you live in interesting times.” I think it must have been especially aimed at folks who keep diaries (and if they follow Roger's edict, that number will soon be increased by three: Bill Gelb, Sandra Jackson, and Herb “Give Me The World And Let Me Boss It” Porter). I sat here in my little home office—which is actually just a corner of the kitchen to which I have added a shelf and a bright light—pounding the keys of my typewriter for nearly five hours last night. Won't be that long tonight; among other things, I have a manuscript to read. And I am going to read it, I think. The dozen or so pages I got through on my way home have pretty well convinced me that this is the one I've been looking for all along, without even really knowing it.

But at least one person of my recent acquaintance won't be reading it. Not even if it's as great as Great Expectations. (Not that it will be; I have to keep reminding myself that I work at Zenith House, not Random House.) Poor woman. I don't know if she was telling the exact truth about wanting to do us a Good Turn, but even if she was lying through her teeth, no one should have to die like that, dropped out of the sky and crushed to death in a burning steel tube.

I arrived at work even earlier today, wanting to check the mail room. OUIJA says stop wasting your time, she told me. The one you're looking for is in the purple box on the bottom shelf. Way in the corner. I wanted to check that corner even before I put on the coffee. And to get another look at Zenith the ivy, while I was down there.

At first I thought I'd beaten Roger this time, because there was no clack-clack from his typewriter. But the light was on, and when I peeked in the open door of his office, there he was, just sitting behind his desk and looking out at the street.

“Morning, boss,” I said. I thought he'd be ready and raring to go, but he just sat there in a semi-slump, pale and disheveled, as if he'd spent the whole night tossing and turning.

“I told you not to encourage her,” he said without turning from the window.

I walked over and looked out. The old lady with the guitar, the wild white hair, and the sign about letting Jesus grow in your heart was over there in front of Smiler's again. I couldn't hear what she was singing, at least. There was that much.

“You look like you had a tough night,” I said.

“Tougher morning. You seen the Times?”

I had, as a matter of fact—the front page, anyway. There was the usual report on Reagan's condition, the usual stuff about unrest in the mideast, the usual corruption-in-government story, and the usual bottom-of-the-page command to support the Fresh Air Fund. Nothing that struck me as of any immediate concern. Nevertheless, I felt a little stirring of the hairs on the back of my neck.

The Times was sitting folded over in the OUT half of Roger's IN/OUT basket. I took it.

“First page of the B section,” he said, still looking out the window. At the bum, presumably... or do you call a female of the species a bumette?

I turned to the National Report and saw a picture of an airplane—what was left of one, anyway—in a weedy field littered with cast-off engine parts. In the background, a bunch of people were standing behind a cyclone fence and gawking. I scanned the headline and knew at once.

“Barfield?” I asked.

“Barfield,” he agreed.

“Christ!”

“Christ had nothing to do with it.”

I scanned the piece without really reading it, just looking for her name. And there she was: Tina Barfield of Central Falls, source of that old adage “if you play around the buzz-saw too long, sooner or later someone is gonna get cut.” Or burned alive in a Cessna Titan, she should have added.

“She said she'd be safe from Carlos if she did a genuine Good Turn,” Roger said. “That might lead some to deduce that what she did us was just the opposite.”

“I believed her about that,” I said. I think I was telling the truth, but whether I was or wasn't, I didn't want Roger deciding to uproot the ivy growing in Riddley's closet because of what had happened to Tina Barfield. Shocked as I was, I didn't want that. Then I saw—or maybe intuited—that Roger's mind wasn't running that way, and I relaxed a little.

“Actually, I did, too,” he said. “She was at least trying to do a Good Turn.”

“Maybe she just didn't do it soon enough,” I said.

He nodded. “Maybe that was it. I read the short story she mentioned, by the way—the one by Jerome Bixby.”

“'It's a Good Life. '”

“Right. By the time I'd read two pages, I recognized it as the basis of a famous Twilight Zone episode starring Billy Mumy. What the hell ever happened to Billy Mumy?”

I didn't give Shit One about what happened to Billy Mumy, but thought it might be a bad idea to say so.

“The story's about a little boy who's a super-psychic. He destroys the whole world, apparently, except for his own little circle of friends and relatives. Those people he holds hostage, killing them if they dare to cross him in any way.”

I remembered the episode. The little kid hadn't pulled out anyone's heart or caused any planes to crash, but he'd turned one character—his big brother or maybe a neighbor—into a jack-in-the-box. And when he made a mess, he simply sent it away into the cornfield.

“Based on that, can you imagine what living with Carlos must have been like?” Roger asked me.

“What are we going to do, Roger?”

He turned from the window then and looked at me straight on. Frightened—I was, too—but determined. I respected him for that. And I respect myself, too.

I think.

“We're going to make Zenith House into a profitable concern if we can,” he said, “and then we're going to jam about nine gallons of black ink in Harlow Enders's eye. I don't know if that plant is really a modern-day version of Jack's beanstalk or not, but if it is, we're going to climb it and get the golden harp, the golden goose, and all the gold doubloons we can carry. Agreed?”

I stuck out my hand. “Agreed, boss.”

He shook it. I haven't had many fine moments before nine in the morning, at least not as an adult, but that was one of them.

“We're also going to be careful,” he said. “Agreed there?”

“Agreed.” It's only tonight, dear diary, that I realize what you're left with if you take the a out of agreed. I would be telling less than the truth if I didn't say that sort of haunts me.

We talked a little more. I wanted to go down and check on Zenith; Roger suggested we wait for Bill, Herb, and Sandra, then do it together.

LaShonda Evans came in before they did, complaining that the reception area smelled funny. Roger sympathized, suggested it might be mildew in the carpet, and authorized a petty-cash expenditure for a can of Glade, which can be purchased in the Smiler's across the street. He also suggested that she leave the editors pretty much alone for the next couple of months; they were all going to be working hard, he said, trying to live up to the parent company's expectations. He didn't say “unrealistic expectations,” but some people can convey a great deal with no more than a certain tone of voice, and Roger is one of them.

“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.

“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 cream-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

And, down in the far corner:

Selling North American Rights Literary Agent: Self Approx 195,000 Words

There was also a letter, addressed this way: TO THE EDITOR—OR WHOEVER SENDS THESE THINGS BACK WHERE THEY CAME FROM. As with the Tina Barfield letter, I have attached it. I'm not going to critique or analyze it here, and there's probably no reason to do so at all. Writers who have been trying to get their books published over a long period of time—five years, sometimes ten years, and once in my experience a full fifteen years which encompassed ten unpublished novels, three of them very long—share a similar tone, which I would describe as a thin coat of self-pitying cynicism stretched over a well of growing despair and, in many cases, hysteria. In my imagination, which is probably too vivid, these people always seem like miners who have somehow survived a terrible cave-in, people trapped in the dark and screaming Is there anyone out there? Please, is anyone out there? Can anyone hear me?

What I thought as I folded the letter back into the envelope was that if ever there was a name that sounds as if it should belong to a writer, that name is James Saltworthy. My next thought was to just put the top back on the box and leave whatever was under the title page, good or bad, until I got home. But there's a little Pandora in most of us, I think, and I couldn't resist a look. And before I knew about it, I'd read the first eight or nine pages. It reads that easily, that naturally. It can't be as good as it seems to be, I know that, or it wouldn't be here. And yet a part of me whispers that that might not be true. He is serving as his own agent, and writers who do that are like self-defending lawyers: they have fools for clients.

The pages I read were good enough so I have burned to read the rest ever since leaving the office; my mind keeps going back to Tracy Nordstrom, the charming psycho who is apparently going to be Saltworthy's main character. There's a war going on in my head, the armies of Hope on one side, those of Cynicism on the other. This conflict, I feel, is going to be decided in the two hours between now and midnight, when I really must turn in. But before leaving the typewriter chair in the kitchen for my reading chair in the living room area of my apartment, I must add one more thing.

When I stood up with Saltworthy's purple box under my arm, I noticed that Zenith the common ivy has burst through the wall between the janitor's closet and the mailroom in at least three dozen places. There are ten steel shelves mounted on that wall, plain gray utilitarian things which are now perfectly empty—in my post-Ruth orgy of work, I cleaned them out completely, without finding a single thing even remotely worth publishing. In most cases it's not even incompetency—boring narration and dull prose—but outright illiteracy. Not one but several of the manuscripts which filled those gray shelves were scrawled in pencil.

But all that's to the side. My point here is just that I could see that wall, because the stacks and jumbles of boxes, bags, and mailers are gone. The cream-colored sheetrock has now been pierced by a galaxy of green stars. In many cases the tips of the ivy's branches have only begun to penetrate, but in others, long and fragile snakelets have already slithered through. They are growing along the empty steel shelves, meeting, twining, climbing, descending. Staking out new territory, in other words. Most of the leaves are still tightly furled, like sleeping infants, but a few have already begun to open. I have a strong suspicion that within a week or two, a month at the outside, the mailroom is going to be as full of Zenith as Riddley's cubbyhole is now.

Which leads to an amusing but perfectly valid question: where are we going to put Riddley when he comes back? And what, exactly, will he be doing?

Enough. Time to see exactly what's in James Saltworthy's box.