Garden of Evil Page 13

  Pinned up among the garish landscapes and lopsided vases of orchids and misshapen animals was a small, dark portrait of a smiling man. One of the reasons Jim noticed it was because its surface was shining in the morning sunlight, as if it had been freshly painted. Not only that, it looked much more professional than all of the other pictures.

  He went across to study it more closely. As he approached it he experienced that same shrinking-skin sensation as he had when Bethany had appeared at the top of the stairs. The portrait was a scaled-down version of the last Storyteller that Ricky had been attempting to paint, with his gray skin and his knobbly horns and his triumphant grin. Six or seven small children were gathered around him with expectant expressions on their faces as if they were waiting for him to tell them how bombastic God was, and how effete Jesus had been, and how the Bible was nothing but lies and riddles and fairy stories.

  Again, without any warning, Jim felt that deep surge of empowerment, as if this Satanic creature could give him the strength to do anything he wanted. So far, he had used his gift of seeing spirits and demons only to protect himself and his friends and the students of Special Class Two, and to give peace to some poor bewildered souls who hadn’t understood that they had passed over. But now, when he looked at this picture, he felt that he could not only talk to the dead, if they appeared, but that he could summon them. He could call them, as many as he wanted, and once he had called them he could command them.

  He stepped back. He was aware that Simon Silence was watching him. He could see him out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t turn around. Instead, he handed four test papers to Al Alvarez, and then went on to give four more to DaJon Johnson.

  ‘How long we got for this, Mr Rook?’ DaJon Johnson asked him. ‘Like, I’m kind of a slow reader, innit? I have to savor every word like a fine wine, like.’

  Jim didn’t answer him. He was staring out of the windows at the back of Art Studio Four, down to the grassy slope and the eucalyptus grove. Standing on the slope were more than seventy or eighty people, all of them looking up at him. They were perfectly motionless, all of them, and they were all pale-faced. Even the African-Americans and the Asians among them had a gray, ashy appearance.

  Some of them were dressed in dusty-looking suits, or faded sweats, in gray and maroon. Others wore yellowed nightgowns or crumpled pajamas. The morning breeze lifted their hair and made their clothes flap, but apart from that, none of them moved.

  Jim stood and stared at them for nearly a minute. After a while he became conscious that Simon Silence was standing very close behind him.

  ‘I think you’re forgetting that you have a test paper to complete,’ he said, although he knew that he didn’t sound very authoritative.

  ‘What can you see, Mr Rook?’ asked Simon, quietly. ‘What are you looking at, out there on the grass? There’s nothing there that I can see, Mr Rook.’

  ‘I think you know exactly what I’m looking at,’ Jim told him. ‘The point is, what are they all doing here?’

  Simon Silence didn’t answer at first, so Jim turned around to face him. There was no doubt that Simon Silence’s features had altered, and that his forehead seemed to be much more pronounced, as if he were permanently frowning.

  ‘You were the one who called them, Mr Rook. They heard you, and they came. It won’t be long now, and you will have the power to call all of them – all of them, and they will come through from the other side in their hundreds of thousands. In their millions.’

  ‘But why the hell would I want to call them? Tell me that.’

  Simon Silence reverted to that sly, self-satisfied smile. ‘You will call them, Mr Rook, because you are the only one who can, and because it will make you feel greater than any man on Earth, or in Heaven. It will make you feel even greater than the Lord God Not-So-Very-Almighty, amen.’

  THIRTEEN

  Jim stared down for another few seconds at the people standing motionless on the grassy slope, and then he said to Simon Silence, ‘Back to your seat, OK? Get on with your work.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to go outside to welcome your flock?’ asked Simon Silence, in mock surprise. ‘They’re waiting for you.’

  ‘You said yourself that you can’t see them,’ Jim retorted. ‘How do you even know that there’s anybody there?’

  ‘Oh, they’re there all right, Mr Rook. I can feel them. My father says that you can always tell when the dead are close by. It feels as if the wind has changed around, and the barometer’s falling.’

  ‘Just sit down and finish your test, Simon.’

  ‘Whatever you say, Mr Rook. I just hope your flock won’t be too disappointed.’

  Jim said nothing but returned to his desk. He was strongly tempted to go down to the grassy slope and tell the spirits who were gathered there that he had nothing to offer them, and that they would be better off returning to the other side. They were dead, and so far as he was aware there was no way that he could bring them back to life, even if Simon Silence said that he could.

  He spent most of the afternoon teaching Special Class Two how to spell awkward words like ‘necessary’ and ‘argument’ and ‘geography.’

  ‘You just have to learn a little phrase, that’s all. It’s called a mnemonic, not that you have to remember that. Take the word “necessary” . . . just say to yourself “not every cat eats sardines – some are really yummy”. Or, “geography” . . . “General Eisenhower’s oldest granddaughter rode a pony home yesterday”. Or, “argument” . . . “a rude girl undresses, my eyes need taping”.

  ‘I’ll tell you something else . . . when two vowels go walking, it’s the first one does the talking . . . like “beach” or “coat” or “rain” . . . words like that.’

  ‘So how come “bitch” is always pronounced “be-atch”?’ asked DaJon Johnson.

  ‘I’m going to ignore that comment,’ Jim told him. ‘I don’t care how you speak out on the street. But in here, in this classroom, you’re going to learn to speak and spell so that you can hold your own against anybody – a potential employer, a teacher, a cop, a store manager, a waiter in a restaurant – anybody – no matter what situation you happen to find yourselves in. Knowing how to speak grammatically and spell well, that’s the greatest power that you can ever have.’

  To finish up the day, he read them a passage from Go Tell It On The Mountain, James Baldwin’s novel about a Pentecostal Church in Harlem called the Temple of the Fire Baptized. DaJon Johnson closed his eyes and nodded off while he was reading but Jim let him sleep. He wasn’t snoring too loudly and Jim was mainly reading this for Simon Silence, nobody else.

  In the last scenes of the novel, the hero, John, has a dreamlike vision of heaven and hell, and believes that he has found Jesus. But the Reverend Gabriel, the leader of the church which has inspired him, is a moral hypocrite, and has a sordid past of womanizing and drunkenness and adultery.

  ‘So what did we learn from this little story?’ said Jim, as he closed the book and dropped it with a bang on to his desk, so that DaJon Johnson woke up with a jolt. Before anybody in the class could answer, he said, ‘What we learn is that sometimes those people who set themselves up as messengers of God are not all that they pretend to be. Sometimes they exploit people’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities to further their own ends. To make money, or to satisfy their sexual urges, or simply because they love to dominate other people – even to the point of deciding if they live or die. Think of Jonestown.

  ‘That’s one of the reasons you need to be very good at English . . . so that you can tell when somebody’s flimflamming you. They might be a salesman or a card player or a priest, it doesn’t matter. It’s important for you to be able to tell the difference between somebody who’s sincere, and somebody who’s a huckster.’

  Simon Silence put up his hand. ‘You really are very cynical, Mr Rook. What about faith? If all of his disciples had suspected that Jesus was a fraud, there never would have been a Christian religion, would there?’

&nb
sp; Jim said, ‘Maybe. But if everybody had been able to see that Satan was an out-and-out swindler, there wouldn’t have been any call for a Christian religion. You don’t need saving if you know how to save yourself.’

  All afternoon, he resisted the temptation to go to the window to see if the dead people were still standing on the grassy slope outside. Eventually, as the last stragglers pushed their way out of the door, he went to the back of the classroom and looked out.

  There was nobody there, only two girls from the West Grove Athletics Team, jogging together, one blonde and one brunette.

  He stayed there for a while, but the dead had definitely gone back to the world beyond – for now, anyhow. He didn’t know if he felt sorry for them or not. They were probably better off where they were.

  He fastened his briefcase, closed the door of Art Studio Four behind him, and went home.

  As he climbed the steps to his apartment, Summer’s apartment door suddenly opened and Summer stepped out. Her hair was wrapped up in a towel and she was wearing a pink halter top and a short pink denim skirt with an appliqué picture of a smiling cartoon cat on it. She still had a purplish-yellowish bruise on her left cheek where he had slapped her.

  ‘Summer!’ said Jim. ‘I was going to call on you later. I think I owe you an abject apology, to say the least.’

  Summer slowly shook her head from side to side. ‘You don’t have to apologize, Jimmy. It was just as much my fault as it was yours.’

  ‘Summer, for Christ’s sake. I practically raped you.’

  ‘Only ’cause I wasn’t in the mood for it. I would have willingly particified, else.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I really, really like you, Jim. I’d love us to do the wild thing together. But like equals, right? Not you jumping on top of me or me jumping on top of you. Or taking it in turns, at least.’

  Jim said, ‘I hit you. How can you forgive me for that?’

  ‘Well, that’s easy,’ she said. She turned away slightly and then she swung her arm and slapped him across the face, so stunningly hard that he almost lost his balance and fell backward over the railing.

  ‘Jesus!’ he said. ‘Shit!’

  He pressed his hand against his cheek and said, ‘Shit, Summer – that really, really hurt!’

  Summer smiled at him and said, ‘There – you’re forgiven! Is that OK?’

  Jim touched his cheek again. ‘Shit.’ Then he went up to her, wrapped his arms around her and kissed her full on the lips. She had just applied pink shiny lip gloss which tasted strongly of synthetic strawberries, but he didn’t mind that – in fact he found its cheapness arousing. She put her arms around him, too, and they stood on the landing kissing for over a minute, their tongues fighting each other like two argumentative seals.

  Summer gripped Jim through his pants and said, ‘I want you, Jimmy Rook. Don’t ever think that I don’t. But it has to be, like, Paradise.’

  Jim stopped kissing her and frowned at her, although she was so close that her face was out of focus.

  ‘What do you mean, Paradise?’

  ‘Just you and me, Jimmy. Nobody else. Like the Garden of Eden.’

  ‘I’m not too sure I follow what you’re saying.’

  Summer gave him a second hard squeeze and kissed him. ‘You will when it comes, Jimmy. When kingdom comes. When we come, you and me. When we’re naked and we know it and we couldn’t care less what God thinks about it.’

  She kissed him again, and again, and again. ‘I’m going to go fix my hair, and pretty myself up, and maybe we can meet up later. How about that?’

  Jim didn’t quite know what to say. Of course he wanted her, but her talk about the Garden of Eden and God had distinctly unsettled him. She sounded almost like Simon Silence, with his strange quasi-religious comments and his talk of God-Not-So-Very-Almighty.

  ‘Well, sure, fine,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’d like to come up for a drink. Say around nine, nine thirty?’

  She leaned forward and whispered in his ear, and her breath was like hot thunder. ‘I’ll suck it for you.’

  Jim found himself smiling like an idiot. He thought: How else am I supposed to react? Say, ‘Great, I look forward to it, but do you mind if we have a little less of the Old Testament talk?’

  Summer gave him a little finger-wave and disappeared back into her apartment. Jim stood there for a few seconds, his cheek still singing with pain. Inside, he could hear Kenny Rogers singing You Picked A Fine Time To Leave Me, Lucille. (‘. . . with four hungry children and a crop in the field . . .’) He had never felt so detached from reality in his life. This simply wasn’t the way that things worked. You didn’t see seventy or eighty dead souls standing outside your window and then come home and have a pole dancer-cum-beautician slap you across the face and tell you that, as far as she was concerned, the wrath of God amounted to a hill of beans.

  He trudged up the last flight of steps and opened his own front door. Tibbles had emerged from his hiding place and was sitting on the kitchen table, where he knew that he wasn’t allowed to sit. Normally he jumped off it as soon as Jim came home, but this evening he stayed where he was, narrowing his eyes, as if he were defying Jim to throw him off.

  ‘Well, how are you, fatso?’ Jim asked him. ‘Gotten over the sulks, have you? Just remember that you belong to me, and not the other way about. Me owner, you pet, and you don’t go all spitty and scratchy on me because if you do you’ll get the same treatment again, only more so.’

  He went through to the living room and switched on the TV, although he muted the sound. Outside, the sun was beginning to go down behind the yuccas, so that the sky looked like the grating of a huge furnace. He couldn’t help thinking about what Simon Silence had written in his essay about Paradise. Paradise will come on the day when the Fires are lit all over the world from one horizon to another.

  He went back into the kitchen and opened up the fridge. He had defrosted a pork chop yesterday so he supposed he ought to cook it and eat it today, although he didn’t feel like it now. His tastes varied so much from one day to the next. What he really felt like this evening was chicken fajitas, with a hellishly hot chili sauce.

  He opened his briefcase. The handle that he had attempted to mend was coming apart already and he thought that he would probably have to try repairing it again, or even buy a new briefcase. As he opened it, the pink-and-green Paradise apple that Simon Silence had given him came rolling out halfway across the kitchen table.

  Tibbles sniffed it, and then immediately sprang off the table on to the floor.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Jim asked him, picking up the apple and holding it toward him. ‘You don’t like fruit? Well, no, of course you don’t, you’re a cat. I have to admit I never saw a cat eating a banana.’

  Tibbles hissed at him and retreated into the living room, sway-backed. Jim felt a rush of annoyance, and had the strongest urge to pick him up and throw him out on to the balcony, or even throw him right off the balcony into the back yard. However, Tibbles turned around and fled into the bedroom, as if he could read Jim’s mind.

  Jim rinsed the apple under the kitchen faucet and bit into it. He wondered if he ought to have accepted it, considering how much he disliked and distrusted Simon Silence, yet he hadn’t been able to resist it. It was so much more than an apple, as sweet and crisp as it was. It was almost like another installment in a continuing story – a story which was gradually making more and more sense with each Paradise apple that he ate. He needed to know how the story ended, even if it meant compromising his principles.

  He went back to the living room to see what was on television. Wheel of Fortune, or Mirror, Mirror, or the news. He bit into the apple again, and this time he was flooded almost at once with a feeling of sadness and nostalgia, but bewilderment, too. He chewed it very slowly, and as he did so he could feel that warm wind blowing again, and the weary shushing of the ocean, and hear that faraway calliope music, In The Good Old Summertime.

  He suddenly
thought: I know where this is. I remember. I know where this is and I know that something terrible happened. I have to go there. I have to go there now.

  He switched off the television and went through to the hallway. He lifted his khaki cotton jacket from the peg and left his apartment without calling out goodbye to Tibbles. As far as he was concerned, Tibbles could stay in hiding for the rest of his life and starve to death. One day he would drag his body out from under the bed, all mangy gray fur and bones.

  With his apple clamped between his teeth, he hurried down the steps and climbed into his car. He swerved out backward into Briarcliff Road, narrowly missing a primrose-yellow Volkswagen Beetle being driven up the hill by a middle-aged woman in a matching primrose-yellow headscarf.

  ‘Watch where you’re going, asshole!’ she screamed at him.

  ‘Oh, bésa mis nalgas!’

  Jim sped down Briarcliff on squittering tires and then headed west on Franklin, toward the ocean. Traffic along Sunset was crawling all the way, and he drummed his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. As he drove, he finished his apple, and even sucked the core, then laid it carefully down on the seat beside him. The sweet-and-sour taste of it had at last brought everything back. The wind, the ocean, the seashore. The weeping of seagulls and the faraway music from the carousel.

  It was almost dark by the time he reached Santa Monica Beach, with only a hazy streak of purple in the sky. He parked his car and walked across to the fine gray sand. He stood there for a long time, feeling the ocean breeze blowing in his face, and listening to the endless sound of the surf. About three-quarters of a mile to the south, he could see the candy-colored lights of Pacific Park, on Santa Monica Pier, with its Ferris wheel turning and its roller-coaster rattling, and he could hear people screaming as they went round and round and up and down on all of the rides.

  It was here that it had happened, that terrible thing. It was right here, at this very place where he was standing on Santa Monica Beach, thirty-three years ago. Jim remembered it now, he remembered it all, and he remembered it so vividly that he found it difficult to believe that he had ever forgotten it. Or buried it, rather.