Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [106]
“I grow it over to the side of the waterfall, near the boiler. Gets good heat,” she said with a shrug, by way of explanation. “Usually come out here, light up first, then do the washing, manage the machinery, organize the meals. By the time I’m done, you can’t really smell it on me quite so much. Not with all that perfume he’s got going in there. He knows, but, y’know …” She trailed off, the smoke from her narrow spliff dancing optimistically in front of her.
It was then that I noticed something even more shocking: a cold breeze that I could feel even in all of my padding. The window just past Mrs. Karvel was open. I must have let out a bit of a gasp at the sight of this, because my sound made her shoot her head back up, and her mind back into the present. It was Garth, though, who said what I was thinking.
“Hey,” a wounded sound, less a word than an emotion. “I thought this place was supposed to be hermetically sealed and self-contained and all that?”
“Yeah, well, you gut a couple hundred feet of high-yielding plant life from the plans and replace that with lawn sod and rhododendrons, and you kind of have to throw that whole ‘self-contained’ thing out the window.” And then, coming to the end of her smoke, Mrs. Karvel did just that, flicking her roach out the open window in such a practiced, casual motion that I imagined there must be a huge pile of similar butts forming a frozen mountain in the snow below.
“There’s the door over there, that’ll get you up on the roof, boys. I’ll just wait here till you’re done.” Lighting a cigarette from a produced pack, Mrs. Karvel motioned to the metal door with her elbow. The little room was clearly a storage room, filled with tobacco cartons and identical yellow boxes with illustrated dead vermin stuck on the sides. “Tommy likes bunnies, but he sure don’t like rats,” his wife offered by way of explanation. Mrs. Karvel had stacked some of the poison boxes in the shapes of chairs and a table, a group of eight with an old blanket on top formed a makeshift bed against the far wall, rumpled women’s magazines lined in a neat pile just beside it. It looked poisonous but comfortable.
“Mrs. Karvel, you don’t have to wait. This could take a long time, trying to find out which of the solar panels is making the noise, out of a whole roof of them,” I told her.
“Nope, that won’t take you long. There’s only one out there, and they’re all together on one hinge.” Mrs. Karvel took a long puff on her cigarette after that. “The original redesign, it had solar panels all over the roof, but then Tommy changed that so he could add satellite dishes aiming in six different angles. Y’know, so that damn satellite radio never goes on the fritz or nothing, God forbid. The solar panels there, they’re just so our accountant could get us a tax break. Mostly, this whole place runs on gas. Tommy likes to forget that.”
“Well then, what will you do when your gas runs out?” I asked in disbelief.
Mrs. Karvel thought about it for a moment, sucked on her menthol, then blew a cloud out. “ ’Spect that solar panel is going to get mighty useful.”
The entire roof surface, we saw, standing outside, was painted in the colors of the American flag. Red and white stripes ran in front of us, and there was a patch of blue with white stars all the way at the other end, in the corner. If he was trying to hide his heaven, he wasn’t trying very hard. The dome was covered in snowdrifts along its sides, part of the reason we hadn’t seen it at first when we originally arrived