three, and with any luck she’ll be proof for a week or two before popping back to play TruckDriver and Hitchhiker or Virgin and Chauffeur or possibly the Teensy White Editor and the Big Black Janitor, which is what all these games boil down to in the end.
But never mind; we have come to the other thing around here which has not lapsed back into dozy familiarity, and that is the ivy-plant sent by Kenton’s nemesis. It raises a question in my mind which I have never successfully answered for myself—perhaps because for a long time my life and my ambitions have rendered it unimportant. It is, I mean, a question I haven’t thought about as seriously or so constantly or with such a clear interest that I have a personal stake in the answer since I was—oh, eleven 84
or so, I reckon. The question is just this: Is there an invisible world or not? Are supernatural events possible in a world where everything seems either perfectly explained or perfectly explicable? Everything, that is, except for the Shroud of Turin...
...and, perhaps, Zenith, the Common Ivy.
I find myself thinking again and again about the feelings of deep fore-boding that seemed to fall over me when I touched the box it—
No; no, that isn’t right. For whatever it’s worth, that is most definitely not right. The bad feelings I had about that box—dread, revulsion, a well-nigh ungovernable feeling of having stepped over a clearly marked border and onto taboo ground—did not come from outside. The chill I felt did not fall over me or smother me or steal up my spine on cold little cat’s feet. That feeling came from inside, rising up like a spring rises out of the earth, a cold little circle in which you may glimpse your face, or the face of the moon. Or even better, it came the way Faulkner says the dark comes, not falling out of the sky but rising inexorably up out of the ground. Only in this case I believe the ground (Floyd would scoff ) happens to be my own soul.
Never mind, though—pass it. Never mind feelings, vapors, megrims...or “subjective phenomena,” if you want to be polite.
Let us look at some rather more empiric data.
First: After looking at the Ivy entries in both Grolier’s and Collier’s Encyclopedias, plus the photos in Floyd’s college botany book, I am prepared to say that Zenith does not look like any of the ivies pictured there.
I mean, it looks like them in the same way that Fords look like Bugattis—
they are both gasoline-powered vehicles with four rubber tires—but that’s as close as it comes.
Second: Although the little sign poked into the soil of Zenith’s pot identified him as “Common Ivy,” there is apparently no such thing. There is poison ivy, and Virginia Creeper, and Ground Ivy, and Boston Ivy, and Japanese Ivy; there is also English Ivy, and I suppose that might be called 85
Common Ivy by some people, but Zenith looks more like a cross between Japanese Ivy and poison ivy than it does English Ivy. Sending Kenton a poison ivy plant sounds like something that would tickle the bejabbers out of a fellow like Carlos Detweiller, but I have handled it, felt its leaves and vines, and have no rash. Nor am I immune. I had some killer cases of poison ivy when Floyd and I were kids.
Third: As Jackson said, it smells like cannibis sativa. I dropped into a florist’s on my way home tonight and smelled a Boston Ivy and a hybrid called a Marion Ivy. Neither smelled like pot. I asked the proprietor if he knew of any ivies that smelled like marijuana and he said no—he said the only plant he knew of which smelled much like growing cannibis is called dark columbine.
Fourth: It is growing at a speed which I find just a bit frightening. I’ve carefully gone over my few references to the plant in this journal—and believe me when I say that if I had known how much it was going to prey on my mind there would have been more—and have noted the following: on February 23rd, when it arrived, I believed it would
But never mind; we have come to the other thing around here which has not lapsed back into dozy familiarity, and that is the ivy-plant sent by Kenton’s nemesis. It raises a question in my mind which I have never successfully answered for myself—perhaps because for a long time my life and my ambitions have rendered it unimportant. It is, I mean, a question I haven’t thought about as seriously or so constantly or with such a clear interest that I have a personal stake in the answer since I was—oh, eleven 84
or so, I reckon. The question is just this: Is there an invisible world or not? Are supernatural events possible in a world where everything seems either perfectly explained or perfectly explicable? Everything, that is, except for the Shroud of Turin...
...and, perhaps, Zenith, the Common Ivy.
I find myself thinking again and again about the feelings of deep fore-boding that seemed to fall over me when I touched the box it—
No; no, that isn’t right. For whatever it’s worth, that is most definitely not right. The bad feelings I had about that box—dread, revulsion, a well-nigh ungovernable feeling of having stepped over a clearly marked border and onto taboo ground—did not come from outside. The chill I felt did not fall over me or smother me or steal up my spine on cold little cat’s feet. That feeling came from inside, rising up like a spring rises out of the earth, a cold little circle in which you may glimpse your face, or the face of the moon. Or even better, it came the way Faulkner says the dark comes, not falling out of the sky but rising inexorably up out of the ground. Only in this case I believe the ground (Floyd would scoff ) happens to be my own soul.
Never mind, though—pass it. Never mind feelings, vapors, megrims...or “subjective phenomena,” if you want to be polite.
Let us look at some rather more empiric data.
First: After looking at the Ivy entries in both Grolier’s and Collier’s Encyclopedias, plus the photos in Floyd’s college botany book, I am prepared to say that Zenith does not look like any of the ivies pictured there.
I mean, it looks like them in the same way that Fords look like Bugattis—
they are both gasoline-powered vehicles with four rubber tires—but that’s as close as it comes.
Second: Although the little sign poked into the soil of Zenith’s pot identified him as “Common Ivy,” there is apparently no such thing. There is poison ivy, and Virginia Creeper, and Ground Ivy, and Boston Ivy, and Japanese Ivy; there is also English Ivy, and I suppose that might be called 85
Common Ivy by some people, but Zenith looks more like a cross between Japanese Ivy and poison ivy than it does English Ivy. Sending Kenton a poison ivy plant sounds like something that would tickle the bejabbers out of a fellow like Carlos Detweiller, but I have handled it, felt its leaves and vines, and have no rash. Nor am I immune. I had some killer cases of poison ivy when Floyd and I were kids.
Third: As Jackson said, it smells like cannibis sativa. I dropped into a florist’s on my way home tonight and smelled a Boston Ivy and a hybrid called a Marion Ivy. Neither smelled like pot. I asked the proprietor if he knew of any ivies that smelled like marijuana and he said no—he said the only plant he knew of which smelled much like growing cannibis is called dark columbine.
Fourth: It is growing at a speed which I find just a bit frightening. I’ve carefully gone over my few references to the plant in this journal—and believe me when I say that if I had known how much it was going to prey on my mind there would have been more—and have noted the following: on February 23rd, when it arrived, I believed it would
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