by Steve Himmer
I didn’t know what to make of it. I didn’t want to make anything of it, so I moved the canvas from my bed to the floor and into a shadow and went outside to my fire and dinner and a few cups of tea before going to sleep for the night. Had I known that was the last I would see of Mrs. Crane, I might have spent more time with her painting. But then again, maybe not, because it wasn’t a picture I liked looking at. It wasn’t something I wanted to see, so I went to sleep.
At some point in the night I was awakened, startled out of a dream that clung to me like a sticky film of sweat. Someone was talking outside my cave, close by and loud enough for me to make out two different voices but not quite what they were saying. I swung myself out of bed and padded to the mouth of the cave on my always bare feet—though they’d toughened to leather by then. I paused in my dark doorway to listen, and when I next heard the voices I could tell they were off by the blackberry brambles, and so I crept in that direction, keeping to the tree line to stay out of sight.
As I got close I saw the glow of two strap-on headlamps, bobbing around in the trees. Two men in black were making adjustments to one of the cameras badly hidden among the trees, two men in black like the one I’d spotted before, sneaking secretly over the river, but these two were talking, even laughing a little, not even trying to whisper, whereas the earlier intruder had made a show of his silence. Or hers. I crept closer, then stopped in the bushes to listen. Both of them were tall, and wiry-thin, and in their matching black outfits and masks I couldn’t have told them apart if I’d needed to. They even sounded the same from where I listened.
“It’s like they all fell for it,” said one of the men. “All of ‘em, every bastard in the world with more money than brains. You’d think they’d know better, you know? That it was too good to be true. I mean, come on. I could’ve told them you can’t make money like that, and what do I know about money?”
“Looks like about as much as they do,” said his partner, and they both laughed. As they talked, their headlamps ducked and wove across each other’s masked faces.
One of the men held the boxy camera up to the underside of a branch, and the other tightened the metal straps that held it in place, whatever adjustment or repair they were making apparently made.
“No kidding. I mean, take this guy,” he said and gestured up toward the house on the hill with his head and a thumb thrown over the shoulder. “More money than God, and he thinks he can get away with whatever he wants. Thinks no one notices what he’s up to, thinks no one’s as smart as he is. So arrogant he made it easy for our source inside.”
The two of them crouched to repack a black bag of tools, and turn off then remove their headlamps. “Thinks we won’t put it together. I mean, I’ve been working this case since you were in training. We’ve been on this guy since he was born. But I guarantee you, he’ll still be surprised when it all comes down. They always are. The whole world’ll see it coming, anyone who watches the news, but he’ll be caught with his pants down and his head up his ass.”
Tools packed, the two of them turned away from me and moved toward the river, walking quickly with no regard for the branches they broke with their steps or the noise they made with their passage. I followed, but being as cautious as I was to move quietly, I couldn’t keep up.
The last thing I heard was one man in black say to the other, “Once I actually did catch a guy with his pants down, and he wasn’t alone…”
It had been a long time since I’d heard a two-way conversation, and had heard someone talk about money or news or the world past the edge of my garden. I mean, Mrs. Crane had talked about going back to that world, but she didn’t talk about what she would find. So hearing these two voices didn’t sit well, it left me unsettled in body and mind, and before I could go back to sleep I needed a swim to calm down, to wash what I’d heard from my head—not the words themselves so much as the sound of words at all—and to get fully back to myself, to my garden and river and cave, as if those men in black hadn’t been there for me to overhear.
After my swim, refreshed and washed clean by meditations under the stars, I went back to bed and dreamed about floating on the river as I had just done; I take it as a mark of success, a sign that I’m on the right path, that I often dream about my own life—like there’s nothing more I could imagine, like there’s nothing better for me to desire.
When I woke up again before dawn, my breakfast was of course in its nook, but Mr. Crane was in my cave, too. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, wearing a gray suit and red tie (did he sleep in a suit?), with his head tilted forward to look at the painting left behind by his wife. His brow furrowed, his eyes alternated between squinting and opening wide, and he stared a long time at the canvas before releasing a long, heavy sigh.
I was still wrapped up in my blankets, awake but yet to move or to moan, wondering if Mr. Crane knew I was awake when he said, “It’s difficult, Finch. It’s difficult to rely on other people, however well paid they are. To count on them to do what you haven’t time to take care of yourself. Can we be everywhere, Finch? Can we do everything? Of course, no, you’re right. We must delegate. Share the load, yes. Rely on other people who are never, ever ourselves or even quite who we want them to be.” He paused and leaned closer to the painting, then straightened up, turned to me in my bedding nest and said, “It’s the nature of the thing, Finch. There’s little we can do about it, as you and I know very well. We’ve been at this for such a long time, we know by now how the game works.”
I felt like I was still sleeping, or at least like my mind was, because Mr. Crane made no more sense than most of my dreams. I thought about closing my eyes, seeing if I could wake up again, but the burning itch in my crotch and my bubbling stomach let me know that I was, indeed, wide awake.
“Self-sufficiency, Finch. That’s the goal, isn’t it? To avoid relying on other people, to avoid making them part of our plans. That’s how we face things head-on. That’s how we turn risk into advantage, of course.” He stopped talking and looked in my direction, then scanned all sides of my cave. I think he said, “That’s what you’ll do,” but he didn’t say what “that” was. Then as abruptly as he’d started talking, as unexpectedly as he’d arrived—though who knows how long he’d been waiting before I woke up—Mr. Crane spun on his heel and walked out of the cave, hands still clasped behind him, fingers woven around one another, and he walked away into the morning. And a few minutes later I had stretched and had scratched and was full of my morning porridge, and was up on the cave with my tea just in time for another day’s sun to arrive. For another day like all days to begin.
27
Time in Mr. Crane’s garden usually passed in a seasonless stasis, one day and the next and the following month all blending into one another. I’ve asked my scribe if that makes it dull to record and retell, but he tells me no, that it’s fine. Time here has no shape until something’s changed, so I can only remember my life if I focus on disruptive moments, on events that stick out because they came as a break in routine. Of course there were many more days, days upon days, passing without variation except a chill or a warmth in the air and different thoughts crossing my mind as different shapes of cloud crossed the sky. But those kinds of days—the usual ones—are hard to pin down. It’s easier on the exceptional days, on mornings like the one when Mr. Crane was in my cave when I woke up. Days like that were the boundaries around my routine, and the mileposts along which I marked time.
So after I woke to him considering the painting left behind by his wife, it was no great surprise that a day or two later a note appeared with my breakfast, another change to my routine, another strange season come into my world. It asked me to take up gardening, not of flowers but food, and said there were seeds and tools on the way and that I should begin by choosing a spot for my crops. It said, too, that my meals would still be delivered, as always, but I should make every effort to produce an amount of food that could sustain me, to make the endeavor more real.
But in the meantime I’d been asked to choose it, so I started with my own convenience: it should be close to my cave, as close as could be, so I wouldn’t have to walk far to reach it. The closer it was, I figured, the faster I could be finished with what was required of me in the garden each day and the sooner I could get to the river. The stakes seemed low, I admit it: I’d already been told the garden wouldn’t be feeding me, that my meals would still come from the kitchen, and not knowing how long I would have to maintain it—would I put in months of work, only to abandon it later?—may have sapped the earnestness of my effort.
Before wandering the estate, before walking from one possible plot to another, I sat on my cave with my tea even after the sun reached the sky, and I surveyed the ground around me. The open space near my cave, to the left as I sat on its roof—which must be north, if I consider the rise of the sun—had sunlight through most of the day, but part of it was in light shade. It was a flat patch of ground, and nearby to my cave, and that seemed to cover the bases. So I climbed down from my perch and walked the few steps to that open space where, to my quickly passing surprise, I found a selection of tools already waiting. A shovel, a hoe, and a rake, all of them superficially but not detrimentally rusted, all of them on worn wooden handles stained and patinaed and shaped by years of use—by whose use, I wondered, reminded of Mrs. Crane’s blackberry pail: an actual gardener or a specialist in aging wooden handles and garden tools, an expert hired by Mr. Crane for the purpose?—and all of those tools were exactly my size, as I’d gotten used to things being, and honed to fit in my hands.
What else could I do but pick up the tools and start gardening, start going through the motions of gardening, at least, which were all I had at the time? I thought I might learn what to do by acting like I already knew what I was doing, by imitating what I’d seen farmers and gardeners do on TV. So I hoed and I raked and I shoveled throughout the hot day, my tunic scratching and scraping and dirt sliding down to collect in its wrinkles and folds and form extra blisters. My hands blistered, too, oozing all over the handles of my wooden tools, and I wondered if that was the source of their smoothness and shine—buckets and buckets of bloody and blistery pus—and then I tried to push that image out of my mind by working harder, by causing more pain to my hands and my back and my knees and other parts that hurt so much I couldn’t tell them apart from one another. I was no longer a body but just ache and pain and just push and pull, up and down, back and forth, scoop and spread.
The soil, at least, was soft. It seemed soft to me. There weren’t any of the roots and stones I’d been expecting because in movies when a fresh field is made, the farmers stack stones into walls around their edges and complain about all the rocks in the ground. My garden plot already had that much going for it.
And in time I’d turned all the soil. In time my green square had turned brown and I’d exposed the underground to the air. I’d known, of course, that there were worms and bugs in the ground, but I was amazed, astounded—aghast!—at how much had been happening beneath me; and it had been happening there all my life, I could only assume. Millions of pink squirming worms turned up to the surface, twisting and writhing and leaving soft wakes of soil as they stretched from one place to another, one body length at a time. I thought of the hyperefficient plants I’d been selling before all of this, how much time and money we’d spent making them look realistic, convincing the world they were real. We’d gone so far as introducing fake bees and apples and changing leaves, but all of that over the surface—so far as I knew, Second Nature had never, not once, introduced anything under the ground. And why would they have? Who looked in the cedar chips of an indoor garden bed? Who went digging for worms in the lobby of an office building downtown? The money and research would have been wasted, but now that I’d noticed, now that I knew, those plants seemed nothing but plastic. It wasn’t the trees and the bushes themselves, they would still look real enough, they still did in my memory of catalog pages and websites and test installations, but they were all surface, no substrate. That word, “substrate,” leapt into my mind, and I realized we’d used it in our catalog copy, not to describe the worms and the soil laid under our plants but instead as a name for the layer of netting and foam (made from recycled plastic, mostly our own flawed productions broken up and ground down) that we spread beneath all our plants to hold their woodchip surroundings in place.
By the end of the day my whole body hurt in ways it hadn’t before. But my own substrate, the surface beneath my surface that held me together, felt strong and felt solid, felt alive and filthy with earth. My garden was ready, my earth was turned, and I hoped Mr. Crane’s whim would survive—that his interest in gardening, my interest in gardening, wouldn’t prove as fleeting as the hot spring I still hoped for, mentioned in my interview but never materialized.
I ate two bowls of beef stew with huge chunks of potato, and an entire loaf of bread in great bites, and fell asleep after only one cup of tea by my fire; I was so tired I hardly felt the itch of my blankets while drifting away, whistled off to sleep by Jerome’s loud breath somewhere close to the cave.
And I woke the next morning with the usual creaks, cracks, and groans in my body—the usual but more of them and fiercer—though they felt better-earned than they had any morning before.
In my cave when I woke, along with my breakfast, was a basket filled with seeds wrapped in brown paper packets and labeled with only the name of what they would grow: pumpkins, beans, potatoes, carrots, and so on. No instructions, no pictures, nothing else. Just one abstract, empty word meant to tell me all I needed to know about growing that crop. I rushed through the sunrise, I wolfed down my porridge and tea, and carried my basket of seeds to the ground I had cleared.
What did I know about planting? I’d seen on TV that I should drag a hoe down the rows of the field, then scatter seeds into the trough, so that’s what I did. A row of tomatoes, a row of potatoes, a row of carrots and one of corn; asparagus, parsnips, and something called kohlrabi I’d never heard of before. I planted cucumbers and cabbage and beans, and when all the packets were empty I planted a mixed row of all the spilled seeds left behind in my basket. The hollowed gourd watering can had appeared in the field overnight so I used it, filling it from the wooden pump that had sprouted from the ground while I slept; I supposed it drew water right from the river, as I had been doing, but I appreciated the ease and convenience of not hauling each bucket back and forth by myself. And it was easier to pump than to scoop errant fish from my bucket—they seemed to be breeding like the garden’s rabbits, filling the river with fins and the shimmering motion of swimming more than I’d ever noticed before.
And when the whole garden was planted, when each row had been sealed by a long scar of turned soil, and each planted row had been watered, I went back to my cave. The whole day had passed, and I carried the basket of food
delivered in my absence, containing that day’s bread and stew, to the field where I ate it cold, in too much hurry to wait by the fire while it warmed. I watched my rows, anxious as if they might grow right away, and I chased off birds already pecking the ground after seeds—perhaps I had spilled some between rows, but in case they got into the habit of eating my crops I chased them away with my arms raised like a scarecrow.
After dinner, while the evening sky bruised as if its body, too, had worked a long day, I walked down to the river for a rare sunset swim. I wasn’t in the habit of swimming at night, not for any reason except that I wasn’t, but I hadn’t been into the water since starting my garden had given me so much else to think about. As I floated the knots in my muscles untied, my back and arms and legs loosened as if they were water themselves, and my blistered palms soaked and soothed in the cool balm of the current. Fish glided past underneath, leaves and seedpods sped by on the surface and a rustling wind up above, and I lay between those three layers and thought about nothing at all.
28
I was afloat on the river this morning when the cracking and banging of stones struck together came to me on the air. It was the unmistakable sound of industry—its rhythm, its pace—if not quite the mechanized power of Mr. Crane’s crews. And when I climbed from the water and onto my crutch, and began the climb back to my cave, I found my feet following a wide, flattened track of grass crushed on the slope by something heavy and flat with squared edges.
I hobbled uphill, wondering what the hikers were doing, but before reaching them something stuck to my foot and I sat down to see what it was. A sheet of white paper, crumpled and torn, but a sheet of actual paper like I’d never expected I might encounter again. I crumpled it in my hands, to feel its resistance and hear its soft crunch, then straightened and smoothed it against my knee, its wrinkles as fine and frequent as my own. Despite myself, I almost wept—not because I coveted paper, not because I even missed it, but there was something about feeling those textures I’d long ago forgotten that made the surprise overwhelming. There were words on the page, and a few pictures, so I held it up close to my eyes, but the text was still too small to read, or my eyes were too weak to focus enough to make sense of the letters.