The Plant

Editor's note

Z is almost certainly the most interesting document in the collection which makes up this story. Although remarkably coherent, the careful reader must certainly detect the work of various voices, most or all of them already encountered in the various memos, letters, and journals presented so far. In addition to this, the discovered manuscript (it would harm the unfolding story to say much about the circumstances of that discovery here) shows many different typefaces and editorial hands. About thirty per cent of it was typed on a portable Olivetti, which can be positively identified as John Kenton's by the flying d and the distinctive crack running through the capital S. Another thirty per cent is certainly the work of Riddley Walker's 1948 office-model Underwood, which was found on the desk of his study in Dobbs Ferry. The other typefaces are those produced by the sort of IBM Selectrics then in use at the Zenith House offices. Ten per cent of the manuscript was typed with the IBM type-ball “Script,” which was favored by Sandra Jackson. Twenty per cent of the manuscript is in IBM's “Courier” format, which was favored by both Herb Porter and Roger Wade. The remaining work is in IBM's “Letter Gothic,” which can be found on many (although not all) of Bill Gelb's business letters and in-house memos.

The most interesting thing about this collaboration, which is remarkably unified in spite of the stylistic interplay, is the fact that it is told in the third-person omniscient style. Information is conveyed by use of a shifting perspective, and include many incidents at which none of the narrators—Kenton, Wade, Jackson, Gelb, or Walker—were present. The reader may wonder if these passages (several of which are interwoven below) are informed speculation based on the available evidence, or if they are pure imagination, no more to be believed than the plots of Anthony LaScorbia's “big bug” books. To these possibilities, the editor would first like to remind the reader that there was a sixth participant at Zenith House during those months in 1981, and then to suggest that if what Kenton, Wade, et. al. suspected was true—that the ivy sent to them was telepathic and to some degree manipulative—then perhaps the true narrator of Z was Zenith the common ivy itself (or himself, to use Riddley Walker's most common pronounal reference).

Although insane by all normal standards of deduction, the idea has a certain persuasive charm when taken in context with other events of that year—many verifiable, such as the crash of the commuter plane on which Tina Barfield was a passenger—and offers at least one explanation for the manuscript. The idea that a telepathic ivy plant turned the typewriters of five previously normal editors into Ouija boards is an outrage to rational thought; with that much, no sane person could fail to agree. And yet there is a certain pull to the idea, at least for this reader, a sense that yes, this is how these things happened, and yes, this is how the truth of those days came to be written down.

S. K.