Secret Life
Finally, when he had reached a place that suggested there might be no separation between himself and the vine, he found the source. It started as a sudden stubbornness on the vine’s part—a thickening that resisted his progress. He had to suck in his breath and flatten his stomach to wriggle forward. The vine grew bigger still, muscular and gnarled. It cut into his skin, bruised him. He would have stopped and turned back, but a mote of light in the semidarkness ahead caught his eye. As he grunted and groaned his way toward the light, the mote became a gash, and the gash turned into a gap in the tiles, smothered with leaves.
His breath caught in his throat. Somehow he had forgotten that his journey might have an ending. What if this was the source? What would he do?
Slowly, heart pounding, he wriggled into position and pried the tile open. Light flooded the space around him. He stared down. Below, the vine burrowed down into a large pot. To the right of the pot, a woman sat at a desk. She had brown hair, and small hands that found their way over the keyboard of her computer by degrees—hunting for each key as if for the first time. Her face, as her gaze shifted from the computer screen to her window and back again, became now young, now older, sometimes tired, sometimes lively, but always anchored by the deep eyes, the stare neither stern nor gentle.
The smell of blossoms in his nostrils, the young man could not separate the vine from the woman. A feeling the young man had never before experienced flooded over him. He did not know what he had expected of the source—salvation? revelation?—but she seemed as miraculous as anything in his imagination. A vision formed in his head of the two of them covered in the vines, making love, their limbs rapturous with blossom and with root, the imprint of her hands burning into his skin.
As if awakening from dream, the young man pulled aside two tiles and lowered his head and chest down into the room below.
The woman looked up, gasped, pulled back in her chair.
“Oh!” she said, her voice surprised but melodious.
“So you—” he said, in a cracking voice unused to speech, and grinned. “So you’re the source,” he said.
And wept, for the face she turned up toward him was the most beautiful he had ever seen.
A Confusion of Tongues
Once, through a glitch in the system, an employee on the fifth floor was forgotten but remained on the payroll. She had only one task: to stamp APPROVED on various documents. Several years before, this job had required a full-time employee because so many documents had to be approved. However, that time had passed long ago. Now, in an office on the opposite side of the building, another employee rushed to stamp REJECTED on a mountain of documents. The order of such things might again reverse itself, but for now the woman spent her days in languid anticipation of the next document, which might not arrive for several hours.
The woman did not even have a window to distract her. A rare storm from the south had broken the window and the janitors had replaced it with planks of wood. Sometimes, she would peer through the cracks of light in the wood, but all that lay beyond was the sky. Had she expected anything different? Yes. Yes, she had.
Mostly, the woman read or listened to the radio. Late in the day, she might dance or even drink whiskey from a flask. She did these things at home in her tiny apartment, too, but they felt more daring at work.
Tiny gray mice that poked their heads out of cracks at the base of the wall near her desk provided the only break in the monotony of her routine. The first time she saw a mouse, she gasped and lifted the receiver of her telephone. The janitorial staff did not like mice. But as the mouse wrinkled its nose, scenting, and sidled out into the office, she put the receiver down. There was no reason to call—she had been acting out the role of someone who was not her.
Instead, she took out the whiskey and poured herself a shot. It tasted crisp and burned her throat. Nothing this exciting had happened to her all day. As a child, she had spent summers on her grandparents’ farm. She used to sleep outside, smelling clover, grass, and the thick earth as she stared up at the sky. She would ride her horse for hours over the lush green countryside. Much to her grandfather’s bewilderment, she had also tried to save mice from the half-feral farm cats.
