Flower and Pot

It came back, the flower in its pot: the plastic flower in its plastic pot: the yellow, straight-stemmed flower in its round red pot. At the base of its stem—green, yes, and unnaturally straight—lay a circle of brown, shiny and flat. Nothing mulchy or moist, no gravel, chips, or perlite: nothing to stick a finger in, up to the first knuckle, to ascertain whether to water. Just a circle, painted brown: a nod to soil.

In any case, it came back. I had thrown it away and it came back. It reappeared, perched on the edge of my desk. As though it had always been there, as though it had every right.

That day, the windows were closed. The doors, closed. I didn’t order takeaway, and there were no deliveries. Nobody came or left the house. I was working, but at my kitchen table, not my desk.

I was fluorescent for at least fifty percent of the day. The light from my laptop screen, while I furiously typed a report for the Minister, gave me a radioactive glow.

When I sent the file to her personal secretary, it was nighttime. I was drained. I took my pants off and lay down on my unmade bed. I stretched out and relaxed. Just before I closed my eyes, I saw it. The flower. The flower with its ramrod stem in its phantom plastic pot.

I had definitely, definitely thrown it away. Unless I hadn’t.

The report was late. I was late with the report. Granted, I had been given so little time. Seventy-two hours, the Minister’s personal secretary said when he contacted me. Seventy-two hours to deliver a report on the special subspecies of Aristolochia found only in our town. I am an expert, of course. But naturally, I spent around fifty-seven of those hours wondering why the Minister would need such a report. (And, more to the point, what consequences I would face for writing it.) And then I was late, and scrambling. Hence the fifty percent fluorescence; hence the closed windows and doors; hence the unmade bed on which I was now lying, my body finally releasing into rest. Until I saw that damn flower.

I got up to give the flower a closer look. It was anatomically incorrect. It was as though the person who made it had never seen an actual flower. I wondered if the owner of the fake plastic flower factory had rolled into work one morning with his terrible child’s terrible drawing, and ordered his overworked, sallow-eyed floor staff to produce a field of 50,000 machine-cut mustard frills, roll them up and glue them onto 50,000 impossibly erect green stems, then pack them and ship them off to the supermarket, so that 50,000 sad shoppers could buy them and sit them on their 50,000 sad work desks.

Obviously, I would never buy a plastic flower.

The Minister’s personal secretary had given one to everyone in the office as a Labour Day gift.

Now, seeing it perched on the edge of my desk, I had the urge to pull it off its stem and crush it between my fingers—but just as I was about to, my phone rang. It was the personal secretary.

“Your report was late,” he said. “You were late with the report.”

Now, what could I do? I wanted nothing more than to lay into him. But I had to keep my composure.

“I’m so sorry.” I used my most obsequious voice. “Please give the Minister my sincerest apologies.”

There was a silence. I looked at the flower.

“Do you know—?” I ventured.

“Know what?”

“What . . . this is all about?”

“Of course not. And even if I did, I wouldn’t be in a position to tell you.”

That little twat. I wanted to whack him with that flower and its ever-erect stem.

The personal secretary was probably related to the owner of the fake flower factory. Given how small our town was, that was very much within the realm of possibility. Not to mention the fact that he had decided to buy sixty-six units of this abomination and distribute them to every single person in our office, each an expert in some obscure field connected (and relevant only) to our tiny town.

We worked at sixty-six identical cubicles on the ground and only floor of a single-story building. At the far end was the Minister’s Office. The Minister’s Office abutted the personal secretary’s small chamber. This in turn was flanked by a spacious and eerily empty meeting room. From time to time, we noticed meetings with the Minister being conducted behind the one-way glass, and nondescript figures being ushered in and out.

We worked day and night on our research, but we were never sure what any of it was for. Was it of the greatest importance, or none at all? Our various subjects were unrelated and we knew nothing about each other’s fields. Nobody ever appraised our work or even asked us about it. You would think this might mean days and decades of playing hooky. But we were sufficiently cowed by the Minister herself that we did actually do our work. With nothing to work towards and nobody to report back to, we burrowed deeper and deeper into the rabbit holes of our research. (In the case of at least one colleague, this involved actual rabbit holes.) And now, for the first time in my eleven years of work at the office, I had been asked to provide a report.

We didn’t even know what, exactly, the Minister was a Minister of. (One of our colleagues, when she was hired, thought that she was joining a church.) Although we did entertain ourselves often with guessing games and surreptitious bets on the intra-office communication network set up by one of our colleagues. He had high security standards and claimed that it was impossible for the network to be infiltrated by the Minister or her personal secretary. We trusted him absolutely. Though of course one could never be sure. And so we used the intranet only for collegial chatter and the lightest of jokes. Our darker thoughts and more pressing questions we kept to ourselves.

“There will be consequences,” the personal secretary said from the other end of the line.

“Consequences for what?” I asked.

“We take our work very seriously in this office,” he replied.

From the tone of his voice, I sensed I had unknowingly done something to upset him.

“If the Minister needed something specific, I could . . .”

The phone clicked before I could finish my sentence.

Frustrated and furious, I stamped on the flower to crush it under my bedroom slippers. I picked it up and strangled its stupid, greener-than-green stem. I jammed it in the dustbin. I poured used coffee grounds over its carcass, tied up the bin bag and walked furiously down to the skip outside my apartment block. I forced the bag into the overflowing skip and closed its lid.

I stomped up to my room. I checked that there were no creepy resurrecting flowers anywhere else, not even a fallen leaf that might, I don’t know, turn overnight into some kind of fake forest. I turned off the lights and pulled the blanket over my head.

For a little while, I lay awake, wondering what on Earth I had gotten myself into, until eventually I fell asleep.

The next morning, the flower had come back.

I sat up in bed, staring at my desk. Was I going mad? I was going mad. What did it want?

I got up, checked the bin, and saw the empty liner that I had put inside after emptying it the previous night.

But the flower was standing breezily in the morning sun, casting a long shadow over the desk.

I called the office, unnerved, not sure what I was going to say when they answered.

It rang three times, and then I heard a series of slurred, screechy blips and beeps, à la dial-up modems circa 1993. It occurred to me that I had never before called the office. And nobody, to my knowledge, had ever answered.

There was nothing else for it. I had to bite the bullet and go into work.

x
At the office, everything looked the same. Sixty-five colleagues sitting at their sixty-five cubicles, looking as focused and industrious as ever. Many still had their plastic flowers on their desks, though a few had, like me, opted to take them home. The personal secretary was nowhere to be seen.

The colleague at Cubicle 14, the station to my left, was gangly and smiley, and an expert on—well. I’m not quite sure what she was an expert on, but she was always buried in swatches and samples of different colors, masses of them, and always looked entirely engrossed. Today she seemed to be researching shades of vermilion. We’d been colleagues for over five years now and were on very friendly terms, though I didn’t know her name.

I cleared my throat and leaned over.

“Say, 14—hello. Sorry to interrupt. You seem to be on the verge of a major breakthrough.”

Her head popped up from the sea of ruby, carmine, crimson, scarlet, hibiscus, raspberry, rhubarb, burgundy, cardinal, rosewood, amaranth that she was submerged in. (She probably had different names for them.) Out popped her smile, too.

“I just wanted to ask, uh, have you been instructed to do anything”—I swallowed—“different lately?”

Something in her eyes flickered. Her smile grew even wider. “Different how?”

I must have sensed a strangeness in the way she looked at me because I didn’t tell her about the plastic flower, or the personal secretary’s sudden interest in Aristolochia, or the fact that the horseshoe-shaped subspecies he had asked me to investigate, Aristolochia xerocoles, does not exist. I had scoured every single taxonomical collection on Earth, searching for specimen samples, field notes, or digital documentation of this odd desert flower. Nothing.

The personal secretary had been very clear in his brief: run the scans, do the research, and report back. Nothing schmancy. But I couldn’t help being thorough. After turning the evidential record inside out, I did one final check.

I called Khoobi.

“Khoobi,” I said, and the line crackled back. “Can you hear me, Khoobi?”

“Yes. What?”

Khoobi was a lovely person but not known for beating around bushes, proverbial or otherwise.

“Khoobi, does the Aristolochia xerocoles exist in our town?”

Khoobi was the foremost botanical journalist in our region.

“Of course it exists in our town. It’s endemic to our town.”

“But how do you know? I mean, what evidence do you have?”

“What do you mean, what evidence do I have? I myself have written several articles in The News about the Aristolochia xerocoles and its importance and how it can be found only in our town and nowhere else!”

The News was the preeminent newspaper in our town.

“And the articles,” she added with a triumphant flourish, “contained photographs!”

“But where did this information come from? And the photographs?”

“From the personal secretary of the Minister herself! He is the anonymous-yet-trusted source that I cited in my article. He said they have an expert on Aristolochia working in the office.”

“Khoobi, I am that expert!”

Silence. I was now standing in the parking lot behind the office, and there wasn’t even a stupid plastic flower to stare at.

“And they have just asked me,” I lowered my voice to a biting whisper, “to provide a report on the Aristolochia xerocoles.”

Silence, except for the sound of the wind ruffling the only tree in the parking lot: a lonely palm.

“But I have found no evidence that it exists.” The despair in my voice worried even me.

Khoobi finally cleared her throat. “Oh. Hmm. That is quite the quandary.”

She sounded like she was thinking. I listened to my beating heart and to the ruffling palm.

The line crackled, and then she said, “How about you cite our newspaper articles as evidence in your report?”

x
That night, I returned to my apartment, to the flower.

Perhaps all it wanted was to be taken seriously, to be validated, given some kind of botanical lineage.

Years later, looking back at this time in my life, I would often wonder how on Earth I decided to do what I did next—how did I know?

I rolled up my sleeves and put my lab goggles on. The more I looked at the flower in its pot, the more I started to doubt that the plastic it was made from was plastic.

I used my scalpel to slit the stem in half. The inside was hollow. I took the yellow frill apart at the seam and studied it carefully. It was like any old trashy plastic flower.

I poked into the perforated brown circle with my metal tool. Empty. I turned the pot over, and there, on the base, I saw a manufacturing address.

11, Eleven Towers, District 11

I looked up the address. It was an eleven-minute walk from my house.

I went to grab the Directory. The Directory came with the apartment—it comes with every apartment in this town. I remember my surprise when I first moved to the town, eleven years ago, and walked into the apartment they had appointed for me to find the Directory lying there, slim and innocuous, on the kitchen table. Many other things would surprise me after that.

I had moved here for the job at the Office. But over the years, as I burrowed deeper and deeper into my research, and into my life here in this town, I began to feel that I could not quite remember what my life was like before this, what I was like. What the world was like beyond here. A sensation of quicksand, or something flickering in a mirror when your back is turned.

I thumbed through the Directory until I arrived at the eleventh chapter, for District 11, then turned the pages until I got to Eleven Towers.

1, Eleven Towers, District 11: The Department of Collective Commitment

2, Eleven Towers, District 11: The Department of Childhood and Cheer

I moved my finger down the page until I reached the last line:

11, Eleven Towers, District 11: The Department of Worker Morale

I closed the Directory slowly, my mind whirring.

x
I started walking toward Eleven Towers. I was all of a sudden extremely alert, noticing unimportant details—flickers of light and shade, metallic sounds from a construction site, and leaves falling in a strangely rhythmic sequence, like they were choreographed by some invisible hand.

I noticed that none of the streetlights were red, and the cars sailing past me carried only their drivers. All the passenger seats were empty.

I noticed that I was walking very fast, as though someone was following me.

When I turned, there was no one on the streets, and I sensed a lack of movement behind the high hedges that walled off the other apartment blocks.

By now, the sun was high and I was sweating through my shirt and the construction noises were loud.

Still, I could see nothing being built.

Internally, I felt guilt—or rather some sort of doubt—like I was doing something wrong, even though I was only walking on a street towards an address written on a plastic flower pot.

As I walked, the hedges gradually became shorter, and I could see more of the buildings sprouting behind them.

I noticed a little girl staring at me from a window, and I saw her mother grab her hand and lead her away.

I was in a part of the town where I had never been before, though it was less than eleven minutes from where I lived.

The area was more rundown, and it seemed less busy. I noticed people sitting outside cafés, sipping coffee.

I zigzagged a little and took a couple of wrong turns, so the eleven-minute walk ended up taking fourteen and a half minutes.

I arrived at the address. In front of me, there was a field of flowers.

It was glittering. In the sun, the shiny brown discs of pseudosoil had taken on an ethereal luster, and the yellow flowers, their stems proud and erect, seemed to be swaying ever so slightly—almost pulsating—in the breeze.

How did I not know that this field existed? It lay—I realized now, with a sense of orientation, of hereness, that I had never experienced before—at the very center, the heart of our town.

And almost as soon as the question puffed into existence, the answer appeared, as though the two were entwined: When you are ready, you are called.

All around the field were people like me. Just like me. Workers. Standing, sitting on benches, lying on their sides with their chins propped in their hands: all gazing at the field in utter absorption, in rapture.

As I lay down on the ground and turned fully to the field, I found that I could not tear my eyes away. I felt my spirits lighten and lift, like something winged. The report, the tangled worries, the impenetrable questions—all paled into insignificance, faded to nothing.

I had finally found it, and it had found me.

*

Read El-Tamami and Doshi’s note on how they coauthored this story here.