Welcome to the Greenhouse (2 page)

She entered the room in a controlled way, still clutching a handkerchief, and with the dead baby orang-utan clutched to her breast. “I’m surprised to see you. Why didn’t you call me first?”

She wore a rough overall with an apron over. Her hair was ragged and untended. She had aged—by which token I saw that I had aged myself.

I stood up, to speak to her nonchalantly, gesturing dismissively, as if what I said was of no importance.

“I had to hire a boat to get over. Benkoelen will soon be cut off entirely. The damned boat overturned and sank at once. All my kit is now down on the seabed. I’m lucky not to be there myself.”

She made a gesture, simultaneously raising her eyebrows and shaking her head. “And you’re still with Bainya Hosta?”

“With her? I work for her, yes.”

“She kicked you out?”

“She has serial lovers. Not so many now as once she did. Look, Cass, this is really none of your business. Remember it was through my affair with Bainya you got this job. You’ve been here a good long while but now it’s over. There’s some bad news for you. It’s not personal, as you may think. It’s just the way the world is with this bloody climate change.”

“Oh yes? Bainya’s coming to live here. One more baboon…”

“Never mind the cheap sarcasm, dear. You know Bainya was briefly married to the richest man in the Middle East? Most of that money has gone on good causes. Causes such as this one. That’s all over now. The climate is tearing everything apart. Various funded enterprises are having to close. It has now become necessary to close down the chimp sanctuary. Funding must close last day September next.”

I pulled from my pocket the official form, rumpled, still slightly damp.

She took it and dropped it without looking at it. She sat down. “

Where will we all go?” Asked in a small voice.

“You will be permitted to take six orangs of both sexes to captivity in the Jakarta Zoo. Rest of the animals remain here.”

“They’ll die.”

“They’ll have to take a chance. Like the rest of us…”

She asked me to come and see the creatures. She praised their innocence, their playfulness. I said I did not wish to see them. I just wanted to drink.

She stood by the window, face in shadow, hugging the dead baby. “What chance have they got?”

I said quite calmly, “That’s the question we’re all asking.”

It was not a virgin birth, I can tell you that much. The boy never could fly or stop bullets with his teeth, and those people who say he was twenty feet tall are full of it. He didn’t have God on the phone, either. I guess I’m not the one to say he wasn’t Jesus come again, but if he was, the Book’s got everything mixed.

There were signs before his birth. We had tremors, then record heat waves and drought and flood and drought again. Margie and me didn’t think anything about it. The world was already going to hell in a handbasket. Every disaster was just business as usual— earthquakes in China, nukes in Iran, war, poverty, and hundreds of millions of people pumping carbon whatever into the sky, everybody knowing it was causing global warming but not changing their routines a bit.

I was one of them.

In the documentaries, they always show L.A. freeways and New York taxi jams. My neighbors had a great time complaining how the crops and grazing were hard hit by out-of-season storms and dry spells, which they blamed on pollution caused by the same city people who needed our farms, but no one can say Jack Shofield isn’t honest. I accept my share of it. It doesn’t matter that all of southern Oklahoma has fewer people in it than downtown Hollywood or that I typically saw no more than five or six other trucks on my way to the feed shop. Poison is poison. Like everyone, I just wanted to get about my business ASAP.

I’m no preacher and I think we’ve all heard all we need about sin, destruction, and salvation. I just want to set the record straight.

He was my son.

People called him everything from Savior to Satan in every language known to man. We named him Albert Timothy after his grandfathers. Margie and me are old-fashioned enough to believe in things like honor and respect, and we would have taught him so if we’d had the chance. But we only met him twice.

It’s true in a literal sense that the world revolved around him. I think the real miracle lies in the fact that
people
revolved around him. From the news at the time, you wouldn’t have thought there were twelve decent folk left anywhere, and yet he grew to be strong, caring, and smart despite having every last one of six billion selfish apes as parents.

Margie’s a tough girl. That’s why I married her. She didn’t scream until our baby was all the way out of her. The doctor yelled, too. I thought the boy must have three arms or something, so I shoved a nurse to get a look at him. He was already tumbling toward the door like a little pink log. Then the first quakes knocked the building down. I was thrown to the floor, and I never did catch up.

How did our infant son survive? Utter strangers fed and changed him as he passed. Folks kept him warm with the clothes off their backs. They emptied their wallets to get bottles and formula when store owners didn’t put those things in their hands for free. After a few days, entire nations prepared for him even when his projected course was nowhere near, because the projections weren’t worth much. He usually rolled east to west, opposite of Earth’s natural rotation as if pushing the planet beneath him, but for the first few years he wobbled north and south seemingly at random—and when he learned to walk, he jaunted from pole to pole as he chose.

There’s been a lot of talk from scientists, holy men, and politicians. Believe what you want. The truth is nobody can explain him and nobody ever will. The proportion’s all wrong. It’s flat-out scary, in fact, like a flea spinning a ball the size and weight of Australia.

Clocks and calendars quickly became useless. One day would pass in twenty hours, the next in twenty-eight or seventeen. Seasons changed in a matter of weeks.

There was just no way to ignore him.

Wars stopped as he went by. Starving tribes in West Africa mashed their last handfuls of grain into mush for him.

Why didn’t he bruise to death? Microgravitational skins, they said. Angels, they said. Before he was old enough to control it, some instinct or higher power wove him around buildings and cliffs and trees. Later in life, he walked the globe like a man on a spherical treadmill. When he was just four months old he got stuck in a box canyon in Peru and the whole world shuddered for three hours until a brave rancher went in on hands and knees and shoved him in the right direction.

You’d think he would’ve had trouble keeping food down, rolling, always rolling, but eventually some big brain proved he was actually orbiting the sun as smooth as silk while it was the planet itself that did the shifting up and back and sideways beneath him.

And the oceans? Rivers and lakes? He walked on water. As a baby he returned to shore hungry and stinking, wailing because no one had fed or changed him. Later, as a child, he went hog-wild playing with dolphins and seals—and in the end, his only refuge was the sea.

Of course he had monstrous effects on the weather, tides, fault lines, and volcanoes. It’s impossible to guess how many deaths he caused directly. Yesterday I heard a newsman say upward of twenty million. More than a few people tried to kill him right off the bat, but twice as many protected him. He took a razor in the shoulder somewhere in Burma. A man shot him in the guts outside Madrid. Five doctors across Spain saved his life that time, and dozens more around the world contributed to the treatment.

He had an obvious way of pulling people together.

For us, it started badly. Albert broke Margie’s heart before she even really saw him. Leaving his mother so fast, well, Margie never did recover.

She spent her days following him on the news. Pretty soon we had a TV and a computer in every room, not that she moved much off the couch. She kept saying she hurt even after Doc Hanley pronounced her fit.

People sent us things—money and things—mostly expecting us to keep these donations but plenty more of them looking for a blessing. We were easier to track down than our boy and easier to reach because the crowd around us was smaller.

Some ladies wanted me. I doubt I had much to do with what made Albert different, and that’s a good thing. Can you imagine what the world would have done with two such boys?

Suddenly we were richer than we’d ever expected. I hated it—all the attention that came with it. We gave most of the money to charity, but that only seemed to brighten the media spotlight and triple the contributions coming in.

I had to quit my job at the feed shop. None of the reporters or those so-called holy pilgrims ever bought any feed or tack. They just got in the way and stole small items for souvenirs. By the end of the first week, you couldn’t find a pen to save your life. They’d taken every one. We had to calculate weights and costs in our heads. It made the bookkeeper crazy, so I quit before my boss had to ask, which left me with nothing to do but hole up in our trailer with poor Margie as she talked to her TVs and computers. I don’t mean she talked to them the way those things are like phones now. I mean she just laughed and chattered to herself as faces and maps flashed on the screens. Sometimes she cried, too, always when there was footage of mothers trying to touch their babies against him or when the Army lost track of him. None of those billion-dollar satellites were much good in the beginning because the cloud cover got too thick.

Our boy never saw the sun or any real kind of sky until he was five. People say he backpedaled like crazy just so he could stare up at the clear patch for an instant.

Nothing else surprised him. He knew everything about the human condition before he took his first step, which didn’t happen until he was three and a half. Some folks had the nerve to call him slow, but I’d like to see those full-grown fools stay on their feet if the world spun beneath them. He was fluent in more languages than you’ve got fingers and toes, comfortable in twice as many cultures and always learning. He personally witnessed more geology and biology and all the other ologies than a football stadium packed with teachers.

Margie and me learned with him on the TV. So did billions of others. And we all saw too much to be ashamed of.

No one could say hate, stupidity, and greed were new. The effects of such things had been in the papers our whole lives, but everybody said this baby made it personal for them.

Hundreds of thousands of people tried to walk with him. Huge migrations rushed from the east side of every continent to the west end, then charged back again to wait for his next arrival. Knowing where he’d come ashore was a challenge in the early days, but crowds formed thirty deep along hundreds of miles of coastline just hoping he’d land near them.

What else did they have to do while they were waiting except talk and make friends? Even during the migrations, most of them never got anywhere near the boy. In fact, sometimes ten thousand people got detached from the rest and paraded off on their own, never knowing and never worried that they were without their messiah. Just walking together was enough.

Maybe I should have been among them. It might have helped Albert and me. For years I puttered around our small trailer feeling like an empty sack because he was so far outside my reach. When he was two, he passed within a mile of our place, but that only hurt more. All of Lincoln County was buried in strangers, helicopters, hot dog vendors, and the whole shebang. The dozens of times he touched through Oklahoma’s borders felt almost as bad. I’d never been helpless before.

More than one corporation wanted to fly me into Albert’s path, but they wanted me to dress up in logos for corn chips or vacuum cleaners. That didn’t seem right. And I was afraid. Taking care of Margie helped fill the hollowness in me, but I was not a well man. Like millions of others, I had the nerve to envy him for being so powerful. Somehow we all forgot he’d never use the lavish homes he’d been given by every government in the world. Roofs and walls were a danger to him. The elaborate playgrounds they built with train tracks and water slides, well, he would never play with any toy he couldn’t carry. He never had any friends, either. I guess he had favorites everywhere and constantly tried to reach them, but more often than not he was blocked or distracted by new people with new problems. He was never alone, not even going to the bathroom. People actually fought over his leavings as keepsakes no matter how often he admonished them with a laugh and the promise to generate more.

Times like those, it was easy to remember Albert was just a kid. Eight-year-olds shouldn’t rule the world.

That was how old he was when we first met him. We knew he was headed in our direction, of course. There were still some shows on the air that had nothing to do with Albert or the changes he was making, but all of them dedicated at least a small window to his progress so they could keep their viewers from surfing off. Margie was watching her dramas, silly romantic stuff I’d encouraged her to indulge in because it had nothing to do with our boy. I figured that was healthy.

Then she screamed and I burned myself rushing out of the kitchen. “What! What is it?”

She could only point at the TV.

“He’s coming straight at us,” I said, stupidly, but the thought was too big to keep in my head. “Straight at us.”

It wasn’t until then that the growing din outside made sense. Margie and me didn’t bother much with the outside anymore, and I’d figured the noise for another of the concerts or revivals always going on in town. When I pulled the drapes open, I yanked them shut again like a joker in one of her shows.

There was a stampede of people more than a mile wide bearing down on our trailer. At its head was our son—and the news vans. The dust cloud looked like a cape on a giant worm.

“Get up,” I said.

Margie was trying to scream again but couldn’t breathe. She seemed like she was trying to look at me, too, but she couldn’t pull her eyes away from the TV.

“Honey, please.” I took her arm as gently as I could with all that adrenaline in my veins. “Get up. If you want to talk to your son, you’ll have to get out there and move. Does this shirt match my good tie?”

Those same small-minded people who’d tut-tutted about how slow he’d been to walk were also free with their opinions about a boy who never visited his parents, but you have to remember, he didn’t know us and he wasn’t used to thinking of any one place as being more special than the next. Also, the crowd was always in the way.

You couldn’t have blamed Albert if Margie disappointed him. She slobbered and screamed and pawed. Embarrassment made my body so heavy I could barely keep up, but his smile was a mystery just like in that Lisa painting.

His smile was patient and knowing. He seemed to understand everything about Margie’s pain and he was not afraid. We’d learned all about his empathy and genuine interest in people from the TV, but now that magic was real. It was hypnotizing.

“Walk with me” he said. We were already trudging alongside him, and his followers made sense of his invitation before we did. They backed off to give us some privacy.

Albert was much leaner than he appeared on TV. Up close, his robes couldn’t hide the fact that he was all angles and elbows. He was beautiful. He had Margie’s black hair and dark eyes. He also had a ridiculous walk like a kangaroo crossed with a drunk, bouncing, skipping, letting the earth zip by in between each step. Otherwise we never would have been able to keep up. Nobody understood yet what it meant that he’d developed this level of control.

“I love you,” he said, and Margie screamed some more. His eyes locked with mine. “I’m sorry I haven’t visited before.”

“It’s okay, son.”

He smiled again, more of a grin this time like you’d expect on a boy. “I need some fatherly advice,” he said.

“From me?”

He just grinned. I remember it perfectly; the gritty taste of the dust and rumbling crowd behind us; sunlight flashing on the camera lenses; his calm, strong words.

For whatever it’s worth, so help me, I said his idea sounded mighty fine.

It took Albert most of a year because he started out careful, dodging back and forth across the equator, slowing the planet’s rotation in unsteady spurts, forgoing meals and sleep to keep a schedule that only he knew. He riled up a storm unlike anyone had ever seen, a “strato”-something way at the top of the sky. Fortunately, during his first years every landmass in the world had shaken out at least a hundred years’ worth of quakes. There were some small tidal waves and one big fault opened up in India, but all in all it wasn’t bad.