Garden of Evil Read online

  He didn’t want to think about what had happened at the restaurant because it was too embarrassing. You had to be seriously off your head to get yourself barred from Barney’s Beanery.

  All the same, he couldn’t help thinking that all of these nightmares and all of these incidents were somehow entangled with each other, like the tangled-up snakes on the shadowy figure’s ring. It was impossible to distinguish where dreams ended and reality began. Or maybe they weren’t dreams. Maybe they were all real – the shadowy figure and the man in white and Summer’s nightmare about Armageddon. Or maybe none of them was real. Or maybe they were just coincidences and Summer was right and he was going nuts.

  It required some complicated maneuvering, but he managed to park his car in the space marked J. ROOK. Somehow he didn’t feel like tempting fate by parking in Royston Denman’s space. It wasn’t smoggy this morning, unlike his dream, but you never knew. He made sure he locked his car, too, because he never usually bothered. He didn’t want to come back at the end of the day and find some shadowy character in a hood sitting in the driver’s seat, offering to drive him to God alone knows where.

  He was too late for Dr Ehrlichman’s assembly, of course, which was partly due to the crawling traffic along Sunset, and partly due to the fact that he had deliberately left his apartment about ten minutes too late to make it in time.

  He climbed the two flights of stairs to the second floor and walked along to the end of the corridor to Art Studio Four. Assembly hadn’t finished yet, so the building was empty, and his footsteps echoed.

  Before he opened the battered, blue-painted door, he peered through the porthole. Instead of the separate desks of Special Class Two, there were four long benches, all of them spattered with inks and paints of every conceivable color. The walls were hung with scores of paintings and portraits – landscapes and abstracts and odd-looking animals by students who seemed to believe that horses had legs as thin as golf clubs and bodies the shape of overstuffed couches.

  There were shelves on either side of the studio, too, crowded with sculptures and pottery in various stages of completion. Most of the human figures were lumpy and misshapen, more like trolls than people, and the jugs and bowls looked as if they been molded during a disastrous out-take of the pottery scene in Ghost.

  Jim did one thing more before he opened the door. He craned his head and looked up toward the ceiling. If there was anybody nailed up there, with or without cats, he wasn’t going to go inside. All he could see, however, was a grubby plastered ceiling with cracks in it, and a small lizard, and two fluorescent tubes hanging down.

  He went in. Art Studio Four smelled strongly of oil paint and dried clay and damp dishrags, so he went across and opened the windows. From the second floor, he could see the windows of his own classroom, Special Class Two, and three figures in white protective suits moving around inside it. Outside Special Class Two, there was a grassy slope, which rose gradually up to a small grove of five or six eucalyptus trees, surrounded by a scattering of dry fallen leaves.

  To his surprise, Simon Silence was standing underneath these trees, his arms spread wide. He was wearing a white shirt and white linen pants and sandals, just like yesterday, and his white canvas sack was lying by his feet. It was difficult for Jim to see clearly at this distance, but he looked as if he had his eyes shut, and he was chanting, or singing.

  Whatever he was doing, Simon Silence too had missed Dr Ehrlichman’s assembly, but then Jim reckoned that he wasn’t in any position to complain about that. And Simon Silence was the son of a pastor, after all. Maybe this was the way he always started his day, by praying or singing hymns. Just because Jim thought that praying to God was futile, that didn’t mean that he disapproved of anybody else doing it. Jim thought that buying lottery tickets was equally futile, but that didn’t mean that some people didn’t occasionally get lucky.

  He laid his briefcase down on his desk, opened it up, and took out fifteen freshly printed copies of his grammar questionnaires. He thumbed through them, ready to hand them out, but then he had second thoughts and tucked them back into his briefcase again. After seeing at least some of his new class sitting outside the college grounds yesterday, listening to Simon Silence, he thought that he might start the morning differently, and read them a poem by Rachel X. Speed instead. He didn’t quite understand why, but he had a feeling that he might learn more about them by listening to their reactions to A New Language of Love than he would by watching them struggle to work out the difference between ‘pour’ and ‘pore’ – as in, ‘DuWayne poured over his books all evening.’

  He sat down at his own desk. It was antique, and made of pine – small and square and covered with almost as much ink and paint as the students’ four benches. Some bored art teacher had used felt-tip pens to draw a highly detailed doodle of a naked woman on it, with a large green snake entwined around her. The woman was blindfolded, so that she couldn’t see how the snake was triumphantly leering at her.

  Underneath, the doodler had written the letters but even though Jim knew a smattering of words in Greek, like (which meant kebab), he had no idea what this meant. Beware of blind bends?

  He tried to open the desk drawer. It was jammed at first, but he managed to wrench it from side to side and at last it came out. Inside was a roll of Scotch tape, a half-finished pack of fruit Life Savers, and a dog-eared copy of Hustler magazine for June, 2009.

  He was just leafing through the center-spread pictorial of a bosomy young woman named Alexis Ford when the studio door burst open and a diminutive girl with frizzy black hair and upswept eyeglasses came staggering in, carrying in her arms an oversized, grubby white teddy bear with the Star of David on its T-shirt. She was wearing a pond-green cardigan over a drab gray dress, and brown shoes that looked almost like hiking boots.

  She stopped and stared at Jim and his copy of Hustler and said, in a very nasal voice, ‘Oh, zay moykhl! I’m sorry. I guess I shoulda knocked.’

  Jim tossed the magazine back in the drawer but then he had to struggle for a few seconds to close it again. ‘Don’t even think about it. That was research, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh, research. OK,’ said the girl, although she clearly didn’t believe him. Then she said, ‘You don’t mind my bringing Nudnik into class? It’s only for today. I’m going to auction him this evening for Lev LaLev – you know, the charity for orphan girls in Israel.’

  ‘Your bear’s name is Nudnik?’

  ‘Because that’s what he is, he’s a nuisance. My grandfather called him that because he’s so big and he was always tripping over him.’

  ‘I see. So what’s your name?’

  ‘Rebecca Teitelbaum. My mom and dad were both killed in an air crash in Israel when I was only three so I was brought up by my grandparents who are very kind people but their English is pretty schlecht. That’s why they put me in Special Class Two. I want to do international charity work so I have to learn English real good.’

  ‘That’s very laudable, Rebecca. You and Nudnik, find yourselves a couple of seats anyplace you like. Mind if I call you Becky?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes you mind, or yes I can call you Becky?’

  ‘Yes, I mind.’

  As she went to sit down, Jim pulled a sad clown face behind her back. Then he pushed back his chair and went over to the dusty old blackboard on the wall behind his desk and started to write out Rachel X. Speed, born 1981 in Schaumburg, Ill. Winner, Ruth Lilly Poetry Award, 2007.

  Before he had finished, the door opened again and more students came jostling their way in, swaggering and laughing. Jim recognized at once the tall African-American boy he had seen outside, under the cypress tree. Today he wasn’t wearing a droopy gray tracksuit but a droopy pale-blue tracksuit. He walked with a shuffling lope, swinging his arms, as if he could hear hip-hop music in his head. He had an unusually tall head, too, with a haircut that rose straight up from the top of it like a cylindrical black smokestack.

  ‘Good morning,’
said Jim. ‘Want to tell me who you are?’

  ‘Sure,’ the boy grinned at him. ‘Soon as you tell me who you are.’

  Jim gave him a tight, puckered-up smile. ‘I think you already know who I am. I’m the man who can have you kicked out of this class so fast you won’t even have time to learn A for Asshole.’

  The boy stared at him for a very long time, and then said, ‘OK. DaJon – DaJon Johnson.’

  ‘Go find yourself someplace to sit, DaJon. Right at the back, preferably, so that your lofty coiffure doesn’t interfere with anybody else’s line of sight.’

  ‘My wha’ choo say?’

  ‘Your hair, stupid. Go sit down.’

  DaJon lope-shuffled to the very back of the studio and sat down on the opposite end of the fourth bench, as far away from Rebecca Teitelbaum and Nudnik as he could, and sprawled out his legs.

  The remaining students of Special Class Two came through the door, including the girl with the scraggly blonde curls, who was wearing an even tighter T-shirt today, in turquoise this time, with shiny silver sprinkles; and the red-haired boy with the raging acne. In all, Jim counted eight boys and five girls. He would namecheck them all later, but he was always forgetting his students’ names, even when he had found out what they were. Most of the time he privately gave them nicknames, like Crater Face and Jolie Lips and Clarissa Broad-ass and Sammy The Squint, although he tried hard not to use them to their face.

  ‘OK,’ he said, raising his hand for silence. ‘Any one of you here know what “zythum” is?’

  Almost all of the students shook their heads, and shrugged, and said ‘zythum?’ ‘zythum?’ until the classroom sounded like a beehive. But after a few moments, one boy hesitantly lifted his hand and said, ‘Yes, sir. Me.’ He wore round spectacles held together by a Band-Aid on the bridge of his nose, and a maroon T-shirt that looked as if it had been attacked by a swarm of ravenous moths.

  ‘You do?’ said Jim. ‘That’s pretty amazing. What’s your name, son?’

  ‘Kyle Baxter the Third, sir.’

  ‘All right then, Kyle Baxter the Third, what’s the answer?’

  ‘Zythum is a type of malted beer, sir, that used to be brewed in ancient Egypt.’

  Jim was completely taken aback. ‘How the hell do you know that, if you don’t my asking?’

  Kyle Baxter blushed, and glanced quickly around him in obvious discomfort. ‘I read dictionaries, sir,’ he said, his voice dropping to a mumble. ‘I read dictionaries and I learn all the words.’

  ‘You read dictionaries and you learn all the words? You certainly don’t have to be embarrassed about that, Kyle. Well done. That’s great. Unusual, I admit – but highly commendable.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I really like words.’

  Jim waited, and then said, ‘But? There has to be a “but”, Kyle, or else you wouldn’t be here in Special Class Two.’

  Kyle blushed even redder, and began to tug at his T-shirt. ‘I know the words, sir. I know all of the words. It’s just that I find it hard to put them in the right order. Especially when I’m trying to write them down.’

  ‘Hey, man!’ called out a Hispanic boy sitting at the end of the third bench, ‘I find it hard to put them in the wrong order, and I don’t even know them to begin with, like what you do!’

  Everybody laughed, and Jim said, ‘Don’t you worry, Kyle. By the end of this year, you’ll be writing like Herman Melville.’

  ‘Herman who?’ asked a pretty African-American girl sitting right at the front, with her hair crowded with colored beads. ‘Is he that cookery guy on TV?’

  Jim smiled and shook his head. ‘Herman Melville was an author who wrote a classic novel called Moby Dick.’

  ‘What’s that about?’ sang out one of the boys. ‘Moby Dick? Sounds like an STD to me. Gotta go to the clinic, man, I got this real moby dick.’

  Jim suddenly realized that Simon Silence hadn’t yet appeared. He walked slowly down the right-hand side of the art studio toward the window, to see if he was still outside, under the eucalyptus trees.

  As he walked, he told his class, abstractedly, ‘To be honest – I didn’t actually expect you to know what “zythum” is. In fact, even I didn’t know that it was some kind of beer. All I did know was that it’s the very last word in the dictionary.’

  He reached the window and looked out. There was nobody there, apart from one of the groundskeepers, on a ride-on mower.

  ‘The last word,’ he repeated, turning around and walking back toward his desk. ‘That’s why you’re here in Special Class Two – so that you can have the last word. You won’t only be learning how to spell words, and how to arrange them into sentences that really sing. You’ll be learning how to use words in such a way that nobody will ever be able to put you down again for the way you speak or the things you write.

  ‘You won’t have to win arguments by yelling louder than anybody else, or threatening to beat up on them. You’ll win them because you’ll know how to express yourself clearly, and dramatically, and well. Gene Kelly sang I Got Rhythm. I’m going to give you “zythum” – all of you. I’m going to give you the last word.’

  ‘Gene Kelly?’ frowned the African-American girl in the front row. ‘Who’s she?’

  As Jim reached his desk, the studio door opened, and Simon Silence made an entrance.

  ‘Ah, Simon,’ said Jim. ‘Glad you could join us.’

  But Simon Silence stood in the doorway with his arms spread wide, in the same way that he had been standing under the eucalyptus trees. His eyes were bright and unfocused, as if he were staring into the distance, and he was smiling a beatific smile. In his white shirt and white pants and sandals, he looked almost like Jesus.

  Jim was about to tell him to find a place to sit down when the African-American girl clasped her hands together as if she were praying and lowered her head until it almost touched the workbench in front of her. Then, one after another, the remaining students did the same, even Rebecca Teitelbaum, as if they were all paying homage.

  Jim stared at all of his students in disbelief. Then he turned back to Simon Silence to ask him if he knew what the hell this meant.

  For a fraction of a second – and it was so quick that he couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t an optical illusion – he thought that Simon Silence’s sandaled feet were actually floating about a half inch above the floor. But then Simon Silence looked at him, and took a step forward, and said, ‘Mr Rook – I’m so sorry I’m late. I had to have a word with my father.’

  Jim turned back to the rest of the class. They were all sitting up now, or slouching, or leaning back in their chairs and chewing gum, as if nothing had happened.

  ‘Not the last word,’ Simon Silence added, still smiling. ‘It’s not quite time for the last word yet. But it will be soon. Sooner than you think.’

  With that, he lifted his white sack off his shoulder, reached inside it and produced another pink-and-green apple.

  ‘This is for you, sir. Paradise.’

  SIX

  For a moment, Jim didn’t know if he ought to accept the apple or not. But Simon Silence continued to hold it out to him, with that strange radiant look on his face, and Jim thought: it’s only an apple, for Christ’s sake. And besides, he was really interested to find out if it had that same sweet-and-sour taste as the apple that he had eaten yesterday, and what it was that taste brought to mind.

  A woman talking, a warm wind blowing. A calliope playing someplace far, far away. And for some reason, a feeling of infinite regret – regret for something that he should have done, but never had.

  ‘OK, Simon, thanks,’ he said, taking the apple and placing it on his desk. ‘Now, why don’t you find yourself a seat so that we can get on with what we all came here to learn – English for people who are not too good at it?’

  Simon Silence made his way to the third bench back. The Hispanic boy who was sitting on the end immediately stood up so that he could make his way to the middle of the bench. Almost the geopolitical center of
the classroom, thought Jim. All the other students turned around as Simon Silence sat down and opened up his sack, and he gave a benign smile to each of them in turn.

  Jim said, loudly, ‘Any of you people want to tell me what all that kowtowing was all about, when Mr Silence here came into the room?’

  Simon Silence was setting out a neat row of different-colored felt-tip pens. ‘It was not “kowtowing”, sir. They were simply showing their friendship and respect.’

  ‘This isn’t downtown Kyoto, Simon. This is West Hollywood. In West Hollywood, we show friendship and respect by shaking hands, or punching fists, or high fiving. We don’t bow to each other, OK?’

  Simon Silence gave an almost imperceptible shrug, ‘My father said that if a person is a living representative of a higher power, sir, then there is nothing demeaning in bowing one’s head. You are bowing to the higher power, not to the person himself.’

  ‘Oh, I see. So you think that you’re the living representative of a higher power? And which higher power would that be, exactly?’

  Simon Silence looked around at his fellow students. They were all smiling back at him. ‘Yesterday I talked to almost all of my new classmates, sir – together and individually. I think most of them already share a similar vision.’

  ‘OK,’ said Jim, ‘enough of this spiritual malarkey. In this class, Special Class Two, there is only one higher power, and that higher power is called M-E, me. My name, for those who don’t already know it, is Jim Rook, and if you want to express my purpose here in a spiritual way, I will be doing my best during the coming college year to lead you out of the wilderness of street slang and text speak and general illiteracy into the promised land of nouns and verbs and adjectives and sentences that actually make some kind of sense.’

  A pale-skinned African-American boy sitting right in front of Simon Silence put up his hand. He had a long face and bulging eyes and wing-nut ears with at least half a dozen gold earrings in each of them.