The Garden of Blue Roses

by Michael Barsa

  "Fine," she said.

  "Do we have a moment? For a little communion with nature, so to speak?"

  He didn't seem terribly enthusiastic about the prospect. He raised his eyebrows, but it was a forced expression—his eyes didn't go along. He looked almost relieved when Klara turned away. "I'm sorry, Henri. I'm not in the mood."

  "Is something wrong?"

  "Just stop haranguing me. Please."

  Her vehemence took him by surprise. Even from my vantage point on the balcony, I could tell he was annoyed. He cocked his head to one side as if to behold her from another angle—as if that might clear things up. "I have never seen you like this."

  "I suppose we haven't known each other very long."

  "I had no idea you felt that way."

  She sighed. "I'm sorry. I'm not feeling well. It's Milo again. He's . . . I'm worried. It's worse than usual."

  "Listen. I am certain he will be better soon. In fact I'm sure of it."

  "If only I believed that."

  "Trust me. He will not bother us much longer. I will ask Marta to make you hot tea. Biscuits. Yes?"

  She shook her head. "Maybe later. What do you have for me?"

  He glanced at the paper as if noticing it for the first time. "Unfortunately it cannot wait," he said in a low voice.

  "What is it?"

  "The underwriting agreement. For the new television program we will do together. Leo wanted to have it finished before he drives tomorrow to New York."

  "Just leave it. I'll read it over and give it to him myself."

  "Yes, of course. Only…if you sign it now, I can save you the trouble. Especially in your current state, you should rest."

  "Have you read it?"

  "Everything is as we discussed. Here, use my pen. A quick signature on this line, and violá, it is done."

  I watched her look at him for a moment—his earnest smile, his ponytail, his impossibly green eyes. The paper and pen were on the table. She bent over them like an old woman. Her hand shook as she scrawled her signature. Henri immediately snatched it up and folded it in half, beaming, while she slowly raised herself. "You seem happy," she said.

  "I am happy for us both." He folded the paper into his shirt pocket. "And you? Are you happy?"

  "Yes, of course."

  Then he was gone, with a quick peck on the cheek, and I could see how she watched him—the hope and fear and loneliness in her eyes.

  By the time I went downstairs she was shuffling among the roses, brushing her fingers against them, not enough to feel anything but like she didn't expect to—like she was trying to convince herself to care.

  I strode into the garden myself. The first thing I noticed was the smell, a heady mixture of sweetness that reminded me of those times when, as a boy, I'd stuff a handful of assorted candies into my mouth. Still I put my head down and ventured deeper. The paths twisted and turned like a labyrinth between the flowers and perfectly manicured shrubbery. I saw Klara in the distance. I wasn't sure how to get to her. I soon found myself on the small hill. Several paths led into the woods, connecting the cultivated world with the wild. And there, in the pavilion, stood the old Roman with a ridiculous garland around his head.

  "We can always move it back, you know."

  I whirled around. Klara had appeared so far away just moments before, but I realized now it was just an illusion caused by all those winding paths. She was mounting the hill by a different way. She wore jeans and a red checkered blouse and was shading her eyes with one hand.

  "Excuse me?" I said.

  "The bust of Marcus Aurelius," she said between breaths.

  "It's not Marcus Aurelius."

  She chuckled—a sad kind of laugh. "Henri called him that and I thought it was funny. Don't you think it's funny? He does look so stoical."

  "He looks nothing like Marcus Aurelius," I said, knowing I sounded pedantic but unable to stop myself. "Maybe you want him to be Marcus Aurelius because of all the things Marcus Aurelius did for the poor, but he looks nothing like him. And Marcus Aurelius persecuted Christians. He threw them to the lions. If you thought about it even a little bit I'm sure you wouldn't want him to be Marcus Aurelius."

  She'd reached the pavilion by then. Her face gleamed in the sun. It was another moment before she spoke, this time in a lower tone. She must've heard something in my voice.

  "You'll be happy to know that the filming's almost finished," she said.

  "So what comes next?"

  "You get your peace and quiet back."

  "For how long?"

  "As long as you need."

  "You mean until the police return?"

  She glanced away. I waited for her to reveal her knowledge of the diary, but she just bit her lip and said: "Why would they do that, Milo?"

  "Did Henri find anything else here?" I asked, glancing toward the woods. "Any other so-called evidence of my guilt?"

  She shook her head. "This was never about you. Or me. No one was responsible for their deaths. I've had time to think about it, and I realize that now. It was an accident. Accidents happen."

  Was it that easy? I wondered.

  "That's why I think it's time to put everything behind us," she went on. "I mean the garden shouldn't be a memorial to Mother and Father." She gazed out over it. From this vantage point I could see the intricacy of its maze-like paths—a perfect Henri creation. "We'll still talk about Mother and Father for the sake of context," she said, "but the garden is no longer about them. I thought, well, that it really should be about the living, not the dead. That we should care more about the living."

  "How poignant," I replied.

  "Henri and I are also discussing a business venture. I thought you ought to know. It would be our own television show about gardening. To demonstrate what's possible even in soils like this."

  Could she really be so blind? "I suppose he's asked you to finance it."

  "I don't see what that has to do with anything." She looked at me. "He wants us all to live in peace."

  "And you still believe him? After everything?" I shook my head. "He's writing fiction, Klara. Sweet-sounding lies. About your future together. Just like he has about the past."

  She narrowed her eyes. But didn't ask me to explain. And what would I have said? How could I have convinced her?

  After all, I was a fiction writer myself.

  Had she really seen my diary? That's what I wondered as I left her. Whether it was my own words coursing through her mind. Words that would have come as a welcome relief to her, that would have alleviated her own sense of responsibility. Words that were so easy to misconstrue, to see as an admission of my guilt, when guilt wasn't what they were about at all. They were about stories, about Father's new book, the one he'd been working on at the end: the long-awaited sequel to his most famous work. About the struggles to make it the greatest sequel ever written, one that readers everywhere would never forget. Could she ever understand that? No. She wasn't a real writer. She couldn't comprehend the sacrifices that had to be made in the name of craft, art, a higher calling—the loss of yourself that comes when the narrative takes over.

  11/30: There is no escaping the past. Still we all wonder about alternative histories. Had I been more physically fit I might have been a naval officer in some distant port-of-call and none of this would have happened. Had I been anyone but Father's son I might have escaped this house, been a stockbroker or a lawyer or a pharmacist who didn't live in constant fear of shadows and midnight voices. Whose only involvement in a plot was buying a modest plot of land to call my own.

  In the early days, when Father struggled with a particularly difficult scene, he'd pluck me from my childish activities, lifting me by the top of my shirt and making it impossible for me to do anything but gape at what I was leaving behind: the tin soldiers arrayed carefully across the crumbled patio stones, the
Encyclopedia Britannica opened to an article on catapults in a spot of warm sunlight on the living room floor, or the vast army of wind-rippled trees I'd been admiring from the window of my little room. He'd carry me like that into the study, close the door, and there visit his terrible creations upon me.

  I became his habit, a tool he couldn't do without.

  12/3: The one time I tried to resist he grabbed his scissors, held my head back, and thrust them up my nose, tearing through hair and mucous membranes and residual snot until the cold metallic tips were lodged at the base of my brain itself. "Now are you scared?" he asked, his voice coming through the hollowness in my ears. My entire face felt clogged with his violence, and the thin metallic taste of blood dribbled into the back of my mouth. He glared at me. I tried to glare back, but his face was a distant blur, a hazy collection of features somewhere beyond the looming mountaintops of pale bony knuckle.

  "Are you?" he insisted.

  His face moved closer, gaining a terrible visual coherence. His breath billowed hot and acrid against my forehead as his eyes searched mine. I didn't meet them. Instead I concentrated on the looping metal handle pressed into and rather stretching my nostrils. His hand began to tremble, causing the scissors to scratch across my deepest sinus cavities and my eyes to squint. Then he put both fists together in preparation, I felt certain, for the final deadly thrust, but still I said nothing, and we remained there, inches apart yet intimately connected through this instrument, until his breathing began to slow and he fell into something of a reflective mood.

  "Please don't let me down, Milo," he said in a softer, gravelly, and more plaintive voice. "I count on you, you know."

  Silence.

  "I'm sorry this is a little hard on you sometimes."

  He slowly extracted the scissors along with bits of hair and membrane and dropped them clattering to the floor. I closed my eyes. I saw nothing but little swirling stars. Then came a sniffling sound and I opened them again and witnessed the one and only instance I ever remember of Father crying. He held his fist up to his stubbled chin. His eyes were clenched shut and his head nodded rapidly as if in vehement agreement with something. I just sat there for a time not knowing what to do. I recall thinking that from a man who terrorized not only me but also millions of readers, this was a curious sign of weakness. Of course it didn't last. After a week he came to me again, this time at night. He wore a plastic Halloween mask of a vampire. Soon he dropped the mask. He didn't need it any longer. His face itself had become a mask—impassive and dead to what he was doing. He still apologized sometimes, but he never meant it anymore. He seemed to look right through me, seeing only his own words, hearing mine only when they painted the proper pictures.

  12/5: Or should I say when they painted A Portrait? Because it was then, during the writing of that novel, that he killed me for good. Nothing as dramatic as the incident with the scissors, more like a gradual drowning. But I didn't really die. I was reborn, into a different kind of life. A writer's life.

  12/6: Today I told him my idea for a sequel to A Portrait. I described it for him in excruciating detail, letting him know exactly how it had to be. Yet to my surprise he said nothing at first. He just gave me an odd look, then dismissed me out of hand, saying I wasn't to think of such things anymore. He actually let slip that he was working on a sequel of his own, that he had his own ideas. His own ideas? I was shocked. "What on earth do you mean?" I asked. He refused to elaborate. But I saw something in his eyes. Something that told me he was afraid of me, or worse: disgusted. By what I'd become. By what he'd done to make me this way. Eyes that were like a pair of mirrors saying: "I don't recognize you anymore." That was when I knew our collaboration was over—that we couldn't go on this way and there was no turning back. Only I still don't know exactly why, what might have prompted such an utter change of heart.

  12/7: Perhaps I ought to be happy. But I'm not. I haven't suffered all these years to let him throw away what he once called my gift. I keep thinking of the sequel I have in mind. A book to elevate horror to new heights, to make the novel NOVEL again. I have the perfect beginning. Will he see the beauty of it? How another kind of death will lead to another kind of rebirth? I imagine he will. Because in a way it was inevitable all along; it was always how the narrative had to go. He'll know what I have in mind soon enough.

  12/9: Master cylinder, brake pedal, brake lines, drums. Brake lines made from 87% copper, 10% nickel, 3% iron/manganese. A strong alloy with good resistance to corrosion. Wrapped in a blue rubber jacket. Accessible near the shock absorbers behind each wheel. Ordinary pliers or wire cutters would do the necessary work. Just press until you feel it start to give, until the metal braids begin to fray. Nobody realizes on what thin threads our lives depend. Lines set down by others, which we can't appreciate until they go awry. I wonder whether anyone will ever see the irony in that.

  I peered out my bedroom window. The moon moved into and out of the clouds. I thought of the "fissure of the arched and ponderous roof, through which heaven darkened and blazed alternately with a gloom that wrapt every thing" from Maturin's late-Gothic classic, Melmoth the Wanderer. It was one of earliest books Father read to me, curled trembling on his lap. Father himself would describe this night more simply, in his trademark style: "The moon behind the clouds did dart, / And night came blacker than a witch's heart." A witch's heart? Despite everything, Father was susceptible to cliché. Suffice it to say that I didn't know what was in a witch's heart, but I knew what was in mine: excitement, a sense of purpose finally. Here was the moment around which so many other moments would turn. Climax, as the ancient Greeks would say.

  I waited until an hour after the light beneath Klara's door had disappeared. Then I made my way down to the kitchen. In a drawer I found Mother's art scissors. They were solid metal and weighed almost two pounds, with tips that could lance a boil. She'd always said they'd make a formidable weapon, even thrusting them into air once or twice for emphasis. I slid them carefully behind my belt.

  The front door creaked. Cool air enveloped me. My footsteps growled over gravel. The iron gate squealed. Crickets shrieked. The garage door didn't wake anyone, not even the dead.

  I hunched over the steering wheel and went through all the motions: ignition, clutch, shift. The M14 was a moon-river of concrete. My headlights blazed into the mist. I drove at exactly the allowable speed. It was hypnotic, freeing in a way. I was a soldier, an unthinking instrument. Of what? Fate? Again I thought of the ancient Greeks, of the inevitability that marked their tragedy, and of poor Frankenstein's monster, doomed to brutishness by own creator's abhorrence of him: "when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened . . ." I moved, how I moved, and talked constantly to myself, and my heart sickened too as I was drawn to Walcott Way like a magnet. Was I the monster? Or Dr. Frankenstein himself? I didn't know, didn't care anymore. I saw a barn-shaped mailbox and the number "54" reflected in my headlights. There was a screen of trees behind it and the windows, some illuminated, of a small, gabled cottage.

  I snapped off the headlights and rolled to a stop. Silence. More crickets. My hissing breaths. The clacking engine. I unclasped the seat belt: zip—into the bolster. My mind's word-hoard went blank—I thought of nothing but the physical world around me, of the scissors pressed into my kidney and my fingers on the cool metal door handle. The rush of air as I stepped out—like a gasp, a recoil, an awe-stricken sigh when the hero shows his face to his mortal enemy.

  The driveway was smooth, gleaming, recently repaved. Halfway up I saw the ghostly outline of the Peugeot. I ran a hand across the question mark I'd gouged in that hospital parking lot. But my eye was soon diverted by a second car, somewhere in the gloom—a Saab.

  I crept around the house, remaining near the trees, a spirit in their penumbral shadows. I couldn't see anything except indistinct shapes through the nearest window. I hurried across a small patch of open grass, suffu
sed a dark blue by the interior lights. That's when I spied several wooden masks along the wall and a cabinet full of statuettes. I moved closer. The masks were African in origin, with huge lips and slit-bulb eyes and protruding tusk-like teeth. And the statuettes were Hindu dancers, their multiple contorted arms shooting out like sunbeams. I remembered them from Mitchell's Gods, Goddesses, And Other Deities: the elephantine Ganesh, and Shiva, god of destruction and cosmic dissolution, in his incarnation as Nataraja, Lord of the Cosmic Dance. All the famous shape-shifters.

  A path led from the driveway to the front door, a path lined with roses. Even by the light of the windows it was too dark to see their thorns. I quickly became entangled, thinking of those medieval paintings of Saint Sebastian, tied to a post, full of arrows. Only I was no martyr. I took out the heavy scissors and hacked my way through.

  Stone steps do not creak. With a whisper I was atop them. The windows on either side revealed a living room with a camelback sofa and frilly lamps. On the wall behind the sofa hung a black-sheathed sword. I could tell it was of Sikh manufacture. As a boy I'd gone through a brief Sikh phase, falling in love with those distinctive curved weapons.

  Then I was arrested by the sound of voices. They seemed distant at first, but grew in leaps. It took a moment to realize they were coming down stairs. I moved back and lowered myself into a well between the steps and a bush. That's when I heard, through a cracked-open window above me, Leo's voice as if it were not five feet away.

  "She's really gonna finance the whole thing?"