by Steve Himmer
I climbed into the back of the limo, onto a wide leather seat as soft as a cloud but blacker than night, and once the chauffeur closed the door behind me I realized that none of the windows let any light in: there were lamps on the walls and the ceiling, and glowing bulbs over the bar and the electronics cabinet with its stereo and DVD player; there was light cast by cable news playing on the TV that hung from the ceiling, but I couldn’t see anything outside the car. Whenever I’d seen a limousine with dark windows passing on the street or onscreen, I’d assumed the glass was only opaque from outside and that the passengers had a clear eye on the world. But this one blocked the view in both directions and maybe all the others had, too. Maybe when you’re that rich you don’t want to look at the world.
The leather seat was so deep I could stretch my legs straight, offering an unpleasant view of my feet—flapping in flip-flops I’d slipped on at the door—and of my pale, spindly legs poking out of the filthy shorts I still had on. Not what I would have chosen to wear for an interview, but I’d been given no chance to change. And as soon as I’d sat down the car was under way. I couldn’t see any sign of our motion, but my body felt it so I knew we were moving, passing through the identical cul-de-sacs and numbered streets of my apartment complex, probably toward the entrance and exit gate that led onto the highway outside. I found a remote control waiting at hand exactly where I would want it to be and I turned up the news. It was about the economy like it always was, interspersed with bits about wars that were either good for or bad for economics depending on who you asked, depending which network you watched and which side you were on, and for a few minutes I flipped back and forth between news stations in the middle of sentences, trying to create collages out of what all the experts were saying, trying to attach a word from one pundit to a word from another so the combination of words might make sense.
Then I got bored, the way I always do when talk turns to money and markets, forces and frauds so far out of my realm that I don’t care one way or the other. So I found a children’s program about wild animals and I learned about the emperor penguin’s protective devotion to his egg. At first I tried to include the penguin in my channel-changing collage with the economists and talking heads—nest eggs and hatchlings merged into a few funny lines—but quickly I was more engaged by the birds than the numbers, so I stopped flipping and watched the penguins uninterrupted.
Only when we stopped for a moment—at traffic lights and intersections, I guess—was I reminded that we were moving at all. The car was taking me somewhere, but if not for the TV shows ending and being replaced with new shows I had no sense of time passing or how long I’d been riding around. I couldn’t see what neighborhoods we were passing through or which direction we were traveling or what the weather was outside my dark cave of conditioned (perhaps even scented?) air. In that city, my city, time didn’t mean anything. In its traffic a few miles might mean hours of driving, but in another direction and away from downtown those same hours would put you out of state. People spent their days jammed like logs on a narrow gray river, waiting for the waters of a faraway thaw to run through and set them all free—driving to Second Nature each morning and home at the end of the day sometimes had taken me twenty minutes and sometimes two or three hours, so I’d planned each day on not planning at all. So for all I knew the limo had gone one or two miles despite the time passing, or we were already out of the city. Or we were circling my apartment complex as the buildup to some elaborate joke. There was no way of knowing, and there was nothing I could do about it while I was in the car. So I sat back and waited, as passive as if I was asleep and still dreaming (and for all I knew so far, I was). And I noticed now that not only were the windows all darkened, but there weren’t any buttons to lower the glass.
The knock on the door, climbing into the car, all of it happened so fast that I never wondered what I was doing and what danger I might be getting into. The car was there, the chauffeur was beside it, and it didn’t occur to me that I might say no, I might refuse, until the limousine was moving and I was alone in the back and it was too late to say anything. This was my first trip out of the house in a while, so I may not have quite been myself. I might even have been sleepwalking; it’s happened to me in the past, not in a limo, but I have woken up in the shower or standing with my head in the fridge.
Then I felt the limousine turn more sharply than it had so far on our journey, and I heard the faint crunch of gravel beneath the wheels. Soon the limousine stopped and the door swung open, flooding my sunless chamber with light so intense and so white that my head swam and I closed my eyes.
The chauffeur stood holding the door, but from my position inside I could only see him from the neck down. “Mr. Finch,” my headless driver announced, “we’ve arrived.”
I climbed from the car almost disappointed; the broad leather seat and dark chamber had been so comfortable and the notion of a trip undefined by any predetermined—to me—destination had been relaxing in a strange way. But what met my eyes when I emerged from my automotive cocoon was worth rising for: waves of green hills rolling away toward the ocean, golden with soft early light. The view was so perfect, so sun-kissed that I wondered if it was planned, that the car should arrive at this moment, that my door should open onto this view and not the other side of the car. But who would plan something like that?
I realized at once where I was, a part of the city I’d never been to before because I’d never known anyone who lived up that high and might invite me to visit. Down below, in the valley where I’d spent all the years of my life, thick clouds of gray and brown smog drooped day after day, but now it turned out they were under a layer of softer white ones that I was seeing for the first time. The city beneath me, that ugly, boiling, exploding city, nestled, nestled into the folds of the hills. I’d never known my city could nestle, that it could do anything more than seethe and devour. Skyscrapers pierced the murk, but none were tall enough to emerge where the sky was actually blue. I felt like I was seeing the city—my city—for the first time, that I’d finally realized its shape and its size.
I’d discovered, in a flash, that hill dwellers have the advantages of scope and scale: the billionaires on these hilltops have dominated the city for as long as they’ve been here, and maybe it’s simply because they see all of it before them at once. Even as they sit on their toilets they must have a grand view; what passes as a necessary waste of time for everyone else, a few hurried minutes in some boxy bathroom tucked at the back of a boxy apartment, becomes a quiet time for reflection from a throne with a broader view of the world. When for some people even taking a crap is empowering, it’s no wonder the rest of us work for them.
“This way, Mr. Finch,” said the driver, and I turned toward a house at the top of a white gravel driveway that wound up a hill. A house not remarkable so much as huge, a generic adobe monolith with terracotta roof tiles and black ironwork on the windows and doors and in other tasteful, familiar locations. It looked—so far as I know anything about houses—like a mansion is meant to, everything brand new and well-fitted and designed to impress, a house born ready for its close-up but missing something so badly I could feel it at once. It could have come from a kit and it probably did, from some architect’s file of reusable plans for interchangeable houses all over the world. The whole estate, the house and the hills and even the hedges sculpted into spirals and parapets and animal shapes, made me feel like I’d shrunk and been dropped on a model train table.
I followed the driver across gleaming white stones, the teeth-chatter flap of my sandals on gravel behind the crunch of his heavy black shoes, and before we could knock on the double front doors they swung open and a butler (a butler!) asked me to come in as he bowed with a surprisingly serpentine motion that left his face looking up toward me even as his back stretched out flat. He looked remarkably, precisely like a butler should look, like a person who, if seen on the street, would shout “butler” however he dressed and whatever he might be doing. I
wondered if he’d been hired because he fit the bill right from birth, or if he’d grown into it through years of butling.
The driver handed me off to the butler—I never saw the driver again—and I was led through a two-story foyer flanked by a round staircase on either side and a fountain gurgling away at its center, supplied by a waterfall that fell from the ceiling and filled the room with sparkling mist. If I hadn’t arrived there by answering an email and getting into a strange limousine, if I hadn’t been greeted by that view of the city, I might not have believed such a house could exist.
The butler and I wound up the glistening wooden coil of the stairway, the air full of the waterfall’s quiet crashing, and upstairs I was led down a long hallway, past mirrors that showed just how ragged I was with my unwashed hair and rough beard that favored one side of my face but didn’t do either side any favors. As we walked I heard how the voices of my hyperefficient plant enthusiasts would describe all of this on their blogs, some of them gushing over the decor and design of the mansion while others decried its vulgarity and decadence and overwhelming, oppressive wealth; still others would be afraid or confused or laughing at how they’d found their way into such a strange situation. I almost laughed a little myself, imagining how they might tell it.
At the end of the hallway, my butling guide knocked on then opened a door. “Mr. Crane,” he called into the room, “your guest has arrived.”
He was answered not by the sinister, ominous, archvillainous voice that might make sense at the end of a mysterious journey like mine, but only an ordinary man’s voice like any other that said, “Send him in, Smithee,” and the butler’s hand on my shoulder steered me right through the door.
7
There are days when all this can become a bit lonely, when the Old Man falls quiet or the rain falls too hard or some ill-chosen berry or leaf makes me sick and I’m stuck on my pallet in unnoticed pain, wishing for someone to boil my tea or make me some soup or recognize, for God’s sake, that I’m suffering. Those are the days when I picture my scribe, the hunched-over monk who writes everything down, scribbling away with a fluttery quill as he follows me through the day in his hooded brown robe. Making note of my meditations, and charting the course of my thoughts. In those slow, stupid hours of self-pity I imagine he exists for my suffering; I imagine the scrolls he produces and that someone, somewhere, awaits his account of my life.
My blogs may have been fake, they may have been forced and financed by Second Nature and only aimed, in the end, at marketing plants. But they spoke to someone. They had an audience reading their words. My stories about plastic plants and, at the same time, about children and parents and illness and health, and jobs kept and jobs lost and jobs found, may have made a difference in somebody’s life. Now I only tell stories to the scribe in my head, and I imagine he writes them down and files them away, and that’s better than nothing on my rare dour nights, when even a listener who isn’t quite real is enough, and a fantasy about my life being recorded carries me across the brief gaps in my satisfied solitude.
Modest, isn’t it, imagining my own life to be worth preserving? And conjuring someone with nothing better to do than record it? Here’s me in the shadow of the blackberry bushes, squatting to squeeze something awful from my angry bowels—don’t miss a grunt or a groan of my genius! And there’s me in the crook of the towering tree where I once perched as my portrait was painted. Be sure to capture each of my silent musings about seed helicopters and the sweetness of syrup and the slow, sticky passage of time! Sharpen your quill; grind up blackberries with those red ferrous rocks from the river for ink—that’s how I’ve imagined I’d do it, if I ever needed to write, but I haven’t, not yet—and make sure you get every word.
I know my scribe is an invention, a crutch for my stumbling moments, though sometimes I get carried away with the fantasy of being recorded and spend days adrift in my memories. I ask him questions and imagine him finding the answers, combing through his old scrolls to recall what I ate on the day the bird’s nest fell on my head, or how many potatoes I dug on the morning I found the dead fox in my field. Little things, long-ago minor moments, but they give us both something to do, so why not? And who’s going to tell me to stop, who’s here to rein me in but my scribe, and he only tells me what I already know—even if I’ve forgotten—and nothing I don’t want to hear.
On my longer nights, his loyal presence helps wait out the far shore of sunrise, and I don’t see the harm in that. There’s no one to know it but me. Me, and the Old Man, of course. And my kind chronicler helps me keep myself straight, helps me make sense of my memories so long since I’ve shared them with anyone else. I’ve been surprised how easily time’s track is lost, and how disordered my own past becomes when there’s no one to remember it with. Imagining that someone recorded my past makes it easier for me to recall. I picture him at my ear, reading back old events I can’t quite lay my memory on, like a librarian or a search engine. He may not be real, but he gets the job done. He helps me remember how I came to be here, and when I need to hear it he reminds me why I’ve stayed so long. Who else could I ask?
The Old Man remembers, but he isn’t saying. The Old Man knows the back of my mind because everything drifts through his view. Like the strange new fish I’ve seen lately, shimmering pink beneath his blue surface, picking with puckered lips at his sandy bed for the insects and eggs piled there. “Fingerpinks,” I’ve called them in my head, because there’s no one to tell me their name and there’s no one who needs it but me. I’d never seen them in the river until a few weeks ago when I was roused from my meditation with a shocking sharp nip on the cheek of my ass, so perhaps they swam up from the valley or even all the way from the ocean. Or perhaps not the ocean, if I think of it clearly, unless enough time has passed for saltwater swimmers to adapt to these fresh waters, and I don’t think this river is old enough yet to have spurred evolution already. But those fish must have come here from somewhere.
Perhaps they crawled up from the mud, the same mud that soothed the oozing rash on my body this morning, all over my legs and forearms where I fell into that bush yesterday—it must have grown in the wake of our recent rainstorms, rough buds and raw briars and branches. Relying on memory to move through the world as I do, picking my way through the garden as I know it once was instead of as it is now, these things happen sometimes: something moves, something grows, something isn’t where I expect it to be and I can’t make out the difference seeing it only in blurs and vague shapes. But I found the mud and it calmed my clamoring blisters and scrapes. Was it there all along and I never noticed, or did that mud of all muds emerge at the moment it could do the most good? Modest me, thinking the Old Man takes a personal interest in the itch of my thin, broken skin!
Those hikers came from somewhere, too. They’re tan and they’re healthy, well-fed and young, and all they seem to do so far is sleep, and sometimes kneel with their eyes on the ground so intensely they must see something there that I don’t. My eyes were improved a bit yesterday, and I got what counts as a good view of them outside their tent, on their knees muttering and humming together as I slipped by. Up close I could see that those two are as ragged as I was when I arrived here, but in much better shape than I ever have been, like they’ve been hiking and camping for months, like their bodies have been working as bodies and have never once been in an office.
Because they were kneeling I couldn’t see much but their backs and their heads and the filthy, bare soles of their feet, and even that much was blurry—until I got close, until they fit within the dark frames that have formed in my eyes, they were nothing but soft shapes and colors. His beard is patchy and sticks out to one side, and his blonde hair is tangled in dreadlocks woven through with colored bands. Her hair is the same orange shade as my carrots and shines as brightly as their tent, though it still smells like a shampoo factory exploded when they’re nearby.
After my swim this morning, I walked back toward my cave for a lunch of stewed ca
rrots. I still call them carrots, but they’re really not, they’re a combination of carrots and potatoes, one of the more successful hybrids I’ve grown over time at the Old Man’s instruction, in the garden Mr. Crane left me. Briefly, I tried calling them “carratoes” in my head, but I realized it didn’t make any difference so I stuck with “carrots” because the word was already familiar. Who’s to know that what the word means to me, in this garden, isn’t the same as what it means to everyone else? I could hand one of my hybrids to the hikers, and whether I called it a carrot or a carrato or an overcoat, they still wouldn’t know what it was. It might look a little familiar, but not enough for them to know it by name. There’s really no need for me to call my vegetables by name at all, or to call them anything other than lunch when I serve them up to myself with a cup of birch brew.
Today’s lunch was a high point after a shallow, disturbed meditation this morning. I was unable to hear what the Old Man was saying, too consumed by this intrusion into my garden and trying too hard to undo my ungenerous feelings. As I was welcomed here I should welcome them, but that’s easier said than done; I don’t want them to stay, I confess, and for now I have taken the tack of ignoring their presence with my body if not my mind. Until they approach me, until they ask me for something or the Old Man asks on their behalf, I’ll leave them to find their own way as I did and continue to do. But in case more is expected of me, I’ll work to keep my mind idle until fog clears away from the answer.
I wouldn’t have approached the hikers and their campsite if I hadn’t needed some carrots for lunch, and if they weren’t camped between my cave and my crops. Not just close to the garden, as it turned out, but actually blocking the gap in the blackberry bushes where I enter my field. The gap I’ve been entering through for almost as long as I’ve had the garden, since the brambles were allowed to grow up around it. Back then I could see it from a long distance, and now some days I have to feel my way along the bush for the gap. Their tent filled the space like a dam on a river, and I stood outside its rustling, rippling fabric walls, frozen by the surprise. There are other gaps where I might have entered the garden, at least there were when I could still see well enough to look for them, but this was the one I’m used to, part of my routine. To find another way into the garden would have been too big a disruption, it would have been allowing the hikers too much impact on my life. I might as well have begun talking to them, if I let their tent unchart my usual path.