Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [100]
The cottage we were to stay in was the adjective quaint made manifest. At least from the outside. With a real thatched roof and stone façade, it seemed as if it had been sitting there for centuries. Even from a distance, I could see that the windows bore the distorted surfaces of handblown glass, the candlelight flickering behind each one running beautifully along their imperfect surfaces.
“That’s Lamplight Brook.” Garth turned to me, as if this was supposed to mean something.
“That’s right. This was the original model I used to paint it. Bought it with the money from that painting. I had it removed stone by stone from Bourton-on-the-Water, in England. Took them thirteen months, four jet trips to fly it down. No expense was spared.”
This last part was not entirely true. While the outside of this house indicated that we might find a plush and comfortable household just beyond its threshold, what I found instead when I entered was just an empty shed. The floor itself seemed to be original, the wood beams were wide and old and well worn, but there was not much else in this space besides them. Gas-fueled “candles” hid just below the windows, as did some sort of piped device that hummed so loudly I could feel the vibrations through my bare feet, but no furniture. Our interior tour revealed that this house had no back. After only ten or twelve feet, the building ended abruptly at the metal wall of the BioDome, giving the impression that God was cutting the building in half with his knife. Worse still, that knife seemed to have cut off the part of the Lamplight Brook that contained the bathroom.
“You can stay here. I’ve got some packing material you can use for mattresses. It ain’t much, but you’ll fix it up.”
“Don’t worry about us, we’ll be fine, Mr. Karvel, sir. We are taken care of, don’t you worry,” Garth gushed, ensuring I could make no statement to the contrary, not even “Where do I take a crap?”
“Good, good. Well, the tools are in the back. You might as well take that patch of land past the cottage; I can’t see that from my place. Need anything, you just holler, ’kay boys?”
“What tools?” I asked as soon as Karvel had fully departed. I saw him walk down the path toward his quarters, pausing to snap an orchid off a low hanging branch on the way. What was that made of? I wondered. Mars bars?
“Well, they have a food budget, don’t they? So when I first got here I promised we’d do some vegetable gardening. You know, to cover what we’re going to eat, in addition to just helping out around the place.”
“What else did you tell him? Did you tell him about the others?”
“Told him we were working for a corporation harvesting water. He liked that. I left out the snow monkey part. You want him to know that, you tell him.”
“Good. I really don’t think this guy’s prepared for a Negro invasion,” I said. Garth’s head cocked to the side as if yanked.
“You can’t help yourself, can you? The man takes us in. Feeds us. Almost clothes us. And there you go with the racism talk.”
“Just because someone’s not scared of minorities, doesn’t mean they want to be one.”
Outside our window, Karvel paused on his walk to pull another pink orchid from the low-hanging branch of a cypress tree. Then he put the flower in his mouth and chewed.
It took most of the next three days to clear out the patch of vegetation to the far side of Lamplight Brook cottage. It was difficult to define a “day,” really, because the sun was always setting§ in Karvel’s world. It did get a bit dimmer at “night,” though, and this helped our well-earned hours of sleep. It was hard, muscle-aching work. I needed all the rest I could steal.
It wasn’t that the roots of the plants were particularly deep, or that the soil was particularly hard, it was just that there was a lot of it. The spot we cleared was nearly half the size of a basketball court, and the removed flora was strewn as high as the three-fifths of a house we were living in. Still, we took great care to keep the roots of our transplants intact, and the majority of the greenery was still living.