The Plant

4/5/81

When I got to the train station, I stuck my suitcase into the first unoccupied coin-op locker I came to, snatched the key with the big orange head out of the lock, and dropped it into my pocket, where it will undoubtedly stay at least until tomorrow. The worst is over—for now—but I can't even think about getting my luggage, or doing any sort of ordinary chore. Not yet. I'm too exhausted. Physically, yes, but I'll tell you what's worse: I'm morally exhausted. I think that is a result of returning to Zenith House so soon upon the heels of my nightmare falling-out with my sisters and brother. Any high moral ground I might have claimed when the train pulled out of Birmingham is all gone now, I can assure you. It's hard to feel moral after you've crossed the George Washington Bridge with a body in the back of a borrowed panel truck. Very hard indeed. And I can't get that goddamned whitebread John Denver song out of my head. “There's a fire softly burning, supper's on the stove, gee it's good to be back home again.” That's one wad I'm tard of chewin', Uncle Michael might have said.

But 490 Park Avenue did feel like home. Does. In spite of all the horror and strangeness, it feels like home. Kenton knows. The others, too, but Kenton knows it best of all. I've grown to like them all (in my own admittedly involuted way), but Kenton is the one I respect. And if this situation starts to spin out of control, I believe it's Kenton that I'd go to. Although I must say this before plunging back into narrative: I'm afraid of myself now. Afraid of my capacity to do ill, and to carry on doing ill until it's too late to turn around and make amends.

In other words, the situation may already be out of control, and me with it.

Gee, it's good to be back home again.

Well, let it go. I'm tired and I still have a lot to tell, so that's best. I feel a moral tract itching to get out, but we'll just save it for another day, shall we?

I told the cab driver to take me to 490, then changed my mind and had him drop me at Park and Twenty-ninth, instead. I wanted to scout a little bit, I suppose. Get the lay of the land and creep up on the blind side. It's important to make one thing clear: the range of the telepathy generated from the plant, while wider, is still limited to the vicinity of the building... unless the situation is extreme, as it was during the death-struggle between Hecksler and the Mad Florist.

I don't know if I expected police, SWAT teams, or fire trucks, but all I saw was Sandra Jackson, pacing up and down in front of the building, looking half-distracted with worry and indecision. She didn't see me. I don't think she would have seen Robert Redford if he'd strolled by stark naked. As I walked toward her, she went to the building's door, hands cupped to the sides of her face, then seemed to come to a decision. She spun on her heels and started toward the street, clearly meaning to cross to the uptown side.

“Sandra!” I called, breaking into a trot. “Sandra, hold on!”

She turned, first startled, then relieved. I saw she was wearing a big pink button on her coat which read I LUV CONY ISLAND! She started running toward me, and I realized it was the first time I had ever seen her in a pair of sneakers. She threw herself into my arms so hard she almost knocked me onto the sidewalk.

“Riddley, Riddley, thank God you came back early,” she babbled. “I took a cab all the way from Cony Island... cost a fortune... my niece thinks I'm either crazy or in love... I... what are you doing here?”

“Just think of me as the cavalry in a John Wayne movie,” I said, and set her back on her feet. That much was easy. Getting her to let go, I thought, might not be. She clung like a barnacle.

“Tell me you've got your office keys,” she said, and I could smell something sweet on her breath—cotton candy, maybe.

“I've got them,” I said, “but I can't get them unless you let go of me, honey child.” I called her that with no irony whatsoever. It's what Mama always called us when we came in with scraped knees, or upset from being teased.

She let go and looked up at me solemnly, as big-eyed as a waif in one of those velvet paintings. “Something's different about you, Riddley. What is it?”

I shrugged and shook my head. “Don't know. Maybe we can discuss it at another time.”

“John's enemy is dead. So is Herb's. I think they killed each other.”

That wasn't what she thought, not exactly, but I took her by the arm and lead her back toward the door. The only thing I wanted right then was to get her off the street. People were looking at us strangely, and not because she's white and I'm black. And people who see a crying woman on a sunny Saturday afternoon are apt to remember her, even in a city where instant amnesia is the rule rather than the exception.

“The rest of them are up there,” she said, “but I forgot my damned keys. I'd just decided to go across to Smiler's and try calling them when you showed up. Thank God you did.”

“Thank God I did,” I agreed, and used my keys to let us into the lobby.

We smelled it as soon as we got off on Five, and in the Zenith House reception area, it was strong enough to knock you down. A spicy aroma. And green. Sandra was clutching my hand hard enough to hurt.

“Hello?” I called. “Is anyone here?”

Nothing for a moment. Then I heard Wade say, “It's Riddley.” To which Porter replied, “Don't be an ass.” To which Gelb replied, “Yes. It is.”

“Are you guys all right?” Sandra asked. She still had me by my hand and was dragging me toward the hall. At first I didn't want to go... and then I did.

We got around LaShonda's desk and there they were. At first I hardly noticed them, though. The only thing I had eyes for was the plant. No more tired, bedraggled little ivy in a pot. The Brazilian rainforest has been transplanted to Park Avenue South. It was everywhere.

“Riddley,” Kenton said with obvious relief. “Sandra.”

“What are you doing here, Riddley?” Gelb asked. “I thought you weren't coming back until the middle of next week.”

“My plans changed,” I said. “I got in on the train less than an hour ago.”

“What happened to your accent?” Porter asked. He was standing there with that crazy plant growing all around his feet, caressing his ankles, for God's sake, and looking at me with beetle-browed suspicion. At me with suspicion!

“That's it,” Sandra breathed. “That's what's different.”

I freed my hand from her grip, feeling that I might need my fingers in reasonable working order before the day was done. The picture (a picture, anyway) was coming clear in my head: a kind of silent movie, in fact. I was getting some of it from them and some of it from Zenith.

The suspicion had left Herb Porter's face. It was only my lack of accent which had bothered him, not me. What I felt as we stood there amid that green madness was a sense of family, a sense of all I had missed down in Alabama, and I embraced it. Away from the plant it is still possible to question, to mistrust. Within its range of influence? Never. These were my brothers, Sandra my sister (although the relationship between she and I is admittedly an incestuous one). And the plant? Our father, which art in Zenith. Color—white, black, green—was just then the least important thing about us. This afternoon it was us against the world.

“I wouldn't go in your office just this minute, Sandra,” Roger said. “Mr. Detweiller is currently in residence. And he ain't pretty.”

“The General?” she asked.

“The plant took him,” John replied, and at that moment Zenith spat back the remaining bits of Hecksler it had decided it couldn't digest, perhaps conveying them all the way from the back of the office. The stuff hit the carpet in a rainy, metallic tinkle. There was a pocket watch, the chain it had been on (in three pieces), a belt buckle, a very small plastic box, and several tiny pieces of metal. Herb and Bill picked all this stuff up.

“Good Lord,” Bill said, looking at the box. “It's his pacemaker.”

“And these are surgical pins,” Herb said. “The kind orthopedic surgeons use to hold bones together.”

“All right,” Wade said. “Let's assume that the plant is taking care of the General's corpse. I think it's clear we can dispose of his remaining... accessories... with no trouble, should we choose to. Detweiller's attache case, too.”

“What do you think is in it?” Sandra asked.

“I don't want to know. The question is what to do with his body. I'm on record as saying we shouldn't feed it to the plant. I think it's had all the... all the nourishment it needs.”

“All that's safe for it to have,” John said.

“Maybe more,” Bill added.

I should step in here just long enough to say that, although I am presenting all of this as spoken conversation, a good part of it was mind to mind. I can't remember which was which, and wouldn't know how to express the difference, anyway. I'm not sure it even matters. What I remember most clearly was a sense of absurd happiness. After nine months of pushing a broom or the mail-cart, I was attending my first editorial meeting. Because isn't that what we were doing? Editing the situation, or preparing to?

“We could call the cops,” Roger said, and when Bill and John both started to protest, he raised his hand to stop them. “I'm just articulating the idea. They wouldn't see the plant, we know that.”

“But they might feel it,” Sandra said, clearly dismayed. “And Roger—”

“Zenith might decide to lunch on one of them,” I finished for her. “Filet de flic, the special of the day. He might not be able to help himself. Or itself. Zenith may or may not be our true friend, but it's essentially a man-eater. It would behoove us to remember that.”

I have to admit I found the way Herb Porter was looking at me rather delicious. It was as if, while visiting the zoo, he'd heard one of the monkeys begin to recite Shakespeare.

“Let's cut to the chase,” John said. “Roger, may I?”

Roger nodded assent.

“We've gotten this raggedy-ass publishing company to the edge of something,” John said, “and I'm not talking about mere financial solvency. I'm talking about financial success. With Last Survivor, the joke book, and the General book, we're not just going to make a noise in the publishing industry; we're going to create a goddam sonic boom that'll startle the shit out of everyone. A lot of people are going to turn around and take notice. And for me, that's not even the best of it. The best is that we're going to stick it to those assholes at Apex.”

“Tell it!” Bill cried savagely, and that gave me a shiver. It was what Sophie had said to my sister Maddy, when Maddy accused me of playing nigger up in New York. Like hearing a ghost, in other words. Because that's what my family is to me now, all of them. Ghosts.

“It took magic to make the turnaround possible,” John continued, “and I admit that. But all of publishing is a kind of magic, isn't it? And not just publishing. Any company that successfully brokers the creative arts to the public is magic. It's spinning straw into gold. Look at us, for Christ's sake! Accountants by day, dreamers by night—”

“And bullshitters in the afternoon,” Herb put in. “Don't forget that.”

“Maybe you could get back to the point, John,” Roger agreed.

“The point is no cops,” John said harshly. And, I felt, with admirable brevity. “No outsiders. That ivy is helping us clean up our mess, and we're going to clean up its mess.”

“Dead people, though,” Sandra said. She looked quite pale, and when she reached out for my hand again, I let her take it. I was glad for the touch myself. “We're talking about dead people.”

“We're talking about a couple of dead loonies who killed each other,” Herb said. “Besides, only one corpse.”

There was a moment of silence as we dealt with that. I think it was the crucial moment. Because, down deep, we all knew that, while the General might have killed Carlos, Zenith had taken care of Hecksler.

“Nothing bad happened here,” Bill said, as if to himself.

“You got that right,” Herb said. “Anyone want to defend the position that the world is worse off because those two jagoffs are no longer in it?”

A moment's silence, and then John Kenton said: “If we're not going to feed Detweiller to the plant, how are we going to get rid of him?”

Bill Gelb said: “I have an idea.”

“If that's true,” Roger said, “then this might be a good time to spill it.”