Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [104]
“Are you done painting it?”
“Painting it? What? The painting was done years ago. Years. No, what I’m still creating is the land itself.”
I looked around at his land, this hall, this cave. It seemed nothing if not complete. It was a world without chaos, or really even the hint of it. Every detail was man-made, controlled. And specifically controlled by this man, its master planner. A utopia in a bottle. Not my paradise, but certainly his. Unless he was planning to float expanses of cotton candy from the rafters, I couldn’t see what was left to do.
“You want to change things around? Redecorate? Go for a different look?”
“No. There is only one look. There is only one vision. Perfection isn’t about change, diversity. It’s about getting closer to that one vision. And there’s still so much, so much to do. Like the palms. Look at those damn palms, in the back there; they keep trying to grow any way they want. Look at them, then look at the painting.”
I looked. There were palms, in the back of the dome’s inner space, spreading out their umbrella foliage just beyond the rest of the tree line. They were a bit out of place, a tropical presence in this reproduction of European fantasy, but it wasn’t like that was the oddest thing going on in this space.
“So you’re going to have them cut down and taken out?” I asked.
“Do you know how much money it costs to ship fully grown palm trees to Antarctica? No, they’re part of the vision. But look at the painting, then look at them again,” Karvel insisted, clearly annoyed by the fact that I couldn’t even notice what seemed to be bugging him so much.
“Coconuts,” Mrs. Karvel said. I hadn’t heard her arrive, hadn’t heard her pick up the tray of dirty dishes or come up behind me.
“Coconuts!” her husband screamed, staring at the painting, pointing at the little oil dots he’d made at the top of his palms’ trunks. “Ever-loving coconuts!” I looked back out at the actual trees, and he was right, no coconuts.
“Because I told you, when you were ordering those things,” his wife began with the weariness of an explanation often started, “that type of palm you wanted doesn’t grow coconuts, but you said—”
“The other kind was too skinny. It needed to have a thicker trunk.”
“It ain’t natural is all.”
“Nature was created to serve man. And now this man wants some coconuts up there.” Karvel paused to get his message out, stopping where he could to control his temper. It wasn’t menace there, a threat of violence. Just frustration. Just an utter conviction of what was right and what must happen.
“This man wants coconuts up there,” his wife said back to him, the repetition of his point careful and deliberate as if she were dealing with the single-minded obsession of an overly indulged child.
“Thank you, honey,” he said to her, appeased, and since he was already leaning in at the canvas looking for the next flaw, he didn’t see her roll her eyes. But I did. Her bloodshot eyes. They rolled around like her corneas were going on a world tour. There was no sigh, no word of complaint, but there was expression. Following Thomas Karvel’s lead, I looked away from this moment of intimacy as well and pretended I didn’t see any of it.
I don’t know if, somehow, she already had coconuts in storage. I don’t know if she made the coconuts out of clay or papier-mâché: it was impossible to see if they were real because they were so high up. At least three stories. And I really don’t know how she got them up there. I can’t imagine a ladder that high, or her scaling the trunks in mountain-climbing gear. All I know is that she did it. Less than a week later, they were there, out of nowhere. Sometime in the night, quietly enough that neither Garth nor I heard her. Brown balls in the air. Resting under the treetops as if God had made them grow there.
We were winding down in our little agricultural project. The seeds were planted, I had no idea if they