by Mat Johnson
* The culinary term “Welsh rabbit,” is of course a joke. A very old one as jokes go, dating back to the early eighteenth century. The joke, English in origin, was that the Welsh were either too poor or too stupid or too generally pathetic to have actual meat on their plates, so cheese grilled on toast was their delusional equivalent. The other version of this title, “Welsh rarebit,” is in fact a degradation of the original, a mishearing that was later adopted as a less offensive alternative. To little avail. In fact, the English so derided their neighbors to the west of the isle that in their language the very word Welsh became synonymous with substandard or imitation goods.
† I often forget that to some I actually look “black,” not just ethnically but along the “one drop” line. I become comfortable in one category in the world’s eyes and then am surprised by the next person’s interpretation when it’s altogether different. The difficulty lies not in the categories of looking “white” or “black” but in the inability to simply choose one self-image to rest in, never knowing how the next person will view or interact with me. In that sense, Mrs. Karvel’s discomfort with my presence as a Negro was more comforting to me than the trepidation I often feel not knowing how I will be perceived.
‡ Mostly at the zoo. And the mall.
§ Or possibly rising, I was never quite sure.
IN the two weeks it took to clear and sow a patch of land big enough for a suitable amount of vegetables to be grown, my head was in my job. My heart, though, was still in the frozen hell along with Angela. It hurt, and when it didn’t that was only because it had frozen numb. I thought of her, and of them, often. But not too often. I couldn’t call, I couldn’t write, and I had no real power to change this situation. So I made myself busy in work instead. And as I labored, I learned the truth behind the mysteries of this new world where I found myself. I discovered the smell of lavender was not coming from the flowers of the same name: it was pumped out from the air ducts that lined the far walls and appeared in the bushes, through vents disguised in concrete made to look like igneous rock formations. After a while, I didn’t take notice of it, except during those times every few hours when the smell cycled, and all of a sudden there was a new odor in the air, spearmint or rose, or lemon scent. My favorite was the wave of jasmine that hit at exactly 12:30 P.M. every day, because this meant it was time to take our lunch break.
The vivid floral bushes that surrounded everything in this landscape were similarly assisted in their otherworldly blooms. Part of the reason that it took us so long to clear the space we needed for our vegetable garden was that there were so many different water lines leading out to the fauna beyond. These messily woven hoses would have been hard to untangle in themselves, but what made it even more difficult was that each hose contained water with a different color ink. There was pink water to make the pink bushes pinkish, purple water to make the purple flowers more purplectic, red water to make the red flowers appear to bleed the new blood of the vegetative world. And to even call it water is not truly accurate, because there was not only an ample amount of paint in these concoctions, but also a good amount of steroids, to keep the plants in perpetual bloom. These colored lines shot around the room in miles of tubing, crossing over each other to deliver their gifts in seemingly random order.*
The animals too, while appearing carefree (though really not wild), lived a carefully maintained existence. The white rabbits, for instance, were managed as closely as any rosebush. The afternoon following my discovery of a litter of fresh young rabbits hopping around close to the stream trying to taste what it had to offer, the bunnies were gone. Clearly they were picked up and moved out of the main arena, although what fate they headed to I didn’t want to think about. Mrs. Karvel served a stew that very evening, but maybe the painter was right and this was just coincidence. Likewise managed were the white birds who populated the upper regions of the terrarium, the ones that liked to sit on our cottage’s nonfunctioning roof and coo loudly. Each evening after supper these birds were gathered up by hand and placed behind the inner dome in cages, only to be released the following morning. Why anyone would make the effort to transport a dozen pigeons down to Antarctica I couldn’t understand; just because they were white didn’t seem enough reason. The birds’ feces were white too, but they weren’t cherished. All the animals were white: I heard some scurrying in the walls while sleeping on my mat and half expected to see a white lab mouse run by.
The person who did all of this work, the person who did all the work in the dome except for Garth and me, was Mrs. Karvel. I woke up every morning to the sound of her setting up her ladder to dust the wide leaves of the trees with her rainbow-colored feather duster. By the time I was dressed and down at the river for a drink, she was usually finishing combing it of any unsightly floating objects with a pool net, having cleaned the filter already. It was Mrs. Karvel who removed the dead monarch butterflies, placing them gently into Ziploc bags.† It was Mrs. Karvel who lit the very sun in the sky: we could see her shadow behind the ceiling’s façade as she changed the lightbulbs accordingly. All of this was done in addition to her preparation of meals, laundry, and more mundane duties. If she slept, I’m sure she did so fully dressed, with a ladle in one hand and a Swiffer in the other.
“That’s why she wants to leave here. She just needs more help,” Garth dismissed: he wanted a petty reason for the rejection of his utopia. Sounded like a good enough reason to me, though.
In contrast to his wife, the great painter himself went to bed early and with regularity in timing. This I knew because the second he went down, the world went dark, the sunset simply blowing out, being replaced by the faintest of stars, stuck to the roof in the form of glow-in-the-dark decals. In the last stage of our garden installation, this was our cue to begin work, we having switched our work hours from the daytime to the night by that point. This was done by the request of Mrs. Karvel, and while no explanation was given, it seemed clear the reason was that, although Mr. Karvel wanted us to do this work, he wasn’t interested in seeing it.
Working nights, I began to be able to tell when it was that Thomas Karvel not only went to bed but fell fast asleep as well. It wasn’t that he snored or, if he did, that his apartment was close enough that I could hear. What I would hear instead was the sound of his waterfall, whose roar accompanied the radio voices every moment of our day, spontaneously ceasing its voluminous Kool-Aid spew. The water went off, and the loudspeakered pundits with it. It was an abrupt silence, as if someone had simply turned off a faucet, and this of course is exactly what Mrs. Karvel did. Sound removed, the artifice of this environment was even more obvious, because without this roar a second, more mechanical one was revealed from the boiler room. This was clearly the waterfall’s primary purpose: to mask the bass intrusion of the engines that kept this South Pole oasis a nearly tropical seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit. The waterfall was only off for maybe an hour, long after midnight. After Mrs. Karvel had entered the little door below the lightly dripping fall and attended to whatever hot and agitated machinery the room held, she emerged, climbed the earthen stairs to their apartment, and turned the waterfall’s supply back on, its contents pouring down again and thus hiding the little door below it in both sight and sound. Karvel himself restarted the taped verbal spew hours later.
Once, after two weeks on our plantation, I was returning the dishes from our dinner to the kitchen to save Mrs. Karvel the bother. The painter himself was out on his deck, standing over his waterfall, staring at a canvas in the same way he had been off and on for a few days now. This canvas rested on an easel, and Karvel would look at it, get up as close as he could, and then step back and look at the room, repeating the action every minute or so, pausing at both places of inspection before switching again. As I walked closer, I tried to figure out what the hell he was focusing on but couldn’t—his eyes definitely looked at different parts of his expansive view. Maybe his subject moved, I figured, maybe it was a bird or something and he was trying to find i
t again (although as far as I was concerned one albino pigeon looked pretty much the same as any other). I climbed the stairs, prepared to head for the kitchen, and as my head peaked onto the landing I got a good glimpse of Thomas Karvel close up, without him seeing me. That’s when I noticed the weird thing. He had no brush. No brush, no paint. Nothing but the painting itself, which he walked up to so close that the oil almost touched his nose.
“You planning a new work?” I asked. It was none of my business, and in general I just tried to stay out of the man’s way, not wear out my welcome. But I had to know. Not only did I have to know but I had to repeat myself, louder. The guy was gone, mentally. Stuck walking back and forth before his creation. When Thomas Karvel finally looked up at me, he was a man possessed, lost in a vision that had nothing to do with his retinas. There was a good two seconds before the realization of who and where he was seemed to hit him, and then a smile erupted across his pale face.
“You want to see it?” he asked me. Garth would be jealous. Garth would be blind with envy, I thought, and already planned to amuse myself teasing him about his missed opportunity. Hours of fun to be had, I was sure. I placed the dishes at the top of the stairs and went over to my host. The painting, it looked just like every other Thomas Karvel painting, and besides the one that brought us here, each one of them looked basically the same to me.
“It’s nice. It’s really nice,” I told him, smiling down at the canvas. It was a compliment on autopilot, without thought, only purpose. Looking a moment more, just to be polite, I finally got it. It was his view of the entire dome. There was our little partial house at the far wall, his white animals, his sucralose stream. Our vegetable garden and the impact it made on the environment was obscured just as he insisted it be from his view.
“Are you done painting it?”
“Painting it? What? The painting was done years ago. Years. No, what I’m still creating is the land itself.”
I looked around at his land, this hall, this cave. It seemed nothing if not complete. It was a world without chaos, or really even the hint of it. Every detail was man-made, controlled. And specifically controlled by this man, its master planner. A utopia in a bottle. Not my paradise, but certainly his. Unless he was planning to float expanses of cotton candy from the rafters, I couldn’t see what was left to do.
“You want to change things around? Redecorate? Go for a different look?”
“No. There is only one look. There is only one vision. Perfection isn’t about change, diversity. It’s about getting closer to that one vision. And there’s still so much, so much to do. Like the palms. Look at those damn palms, in the back there; they keep trying to grow any way they want. Look at them, then look at the painting.”
I looked. There were palms, in the back of the dome’s inner space, spreading out their umbrella foliage just beyond the rest of the tree line. They were a bit out of place, a tropical presence in this reproduction of European fantasy, but it wasn’t like that was the oddest thing going on in this space.
“So you’re going to have them cut down and taken out?” I asked.
“Do you know how much money it costs to ship fully grown palm trees to Antarctica? No, they’re part of the vision. But look at the painting, then look at them again,” Karvel insisted, clearly annoyed by the fact that I couldn’t even notice what seemed to be bugging him so much.
“Coconuts,” Mrs. Karvel said. I hadn’t heard her arrive, hadn’t heard her pick up the tray of dirty dishes or come up behind me.
“Coconuts!” her husband screamed, staring at the painting, pointing at the little oil dots he’d made at the top of his palms’ trunks. “Ever-loving coconuts!” I looked back out at the actual trees, and he was right, no coconuts.
“Because I told you, when you were ordering those things,” his wife began with the weariness of an explanation often started, “that type of palm you wanted doesn’t grow coconuts, but you said—”
“The other kind was too skinny. It needed to have a thicker trunk.”
“It ain’t natural is all.”
“Nature was created to serve man. And now this man wants some coconuts up there.” Karvel paused to get his message out, stopping where he could to control his temper. It wasn’t menace there, a threat of violence. Just frustration. Just an utter conviction of what was right and what must happen.
“This man wants coconuts up there,” his wife said back to him, the repetition of his point careful and deliberate as if she were dealing with the single-minded obsession of an overly indulged child.
“Thank you, honey,” he said to her, appeased, and since he was already leaning in at the canvas looking for the next flaw, he didn’t see her roll her eyes. But I did. Her bloodshot eyes. They rolled around like her corneas were going on a world tour. There was no sigh, no word of complaint, but there was expression. Following Thomas Karvel’s lead, I looked away from this moment of intimacy as well and pretended I didn’t see any of it.
I don’t know if, somehow, she already had coconuts in storage. I don’t know if she made the coconuts out of clay or papier-mâché: it was impossible to see if they were real because they were so high up. At least three stories. And I really don’t know how she got them up there. I can’t imagine a ladder that high, or her scaling the trunks in mountain-climbing gear. All I know is that she did it. Less than a week later, they were there, out of nowhere. Sometime in the night, quietly enough that neither Garth nor I heard her. Brown balls in the air. Resting under the treetops as if God had made them grow there.
We were winding down in our little agricultural project. The seeds were planted, I had no idea if they would grow. But to celebrate, Mrs. Karvel invited us across the dome. The brisket smell started twelve hours before mealtime, beckoning from the barbecue. We sat on the terrace before a table set with sauce and napkins. Karvel even turned the voices off the speakers, substituting hymnals. It was Sunday supper, and Mrs. Karvel was in the kitchen getting the next course ready, singing along.
“This whole thing, it must have taken a lot to create?” I asked our host, looking out at it all.
“To get this ready, it took years. And most of my money—but still cheaper than taxes. It’s modular, made the pieces up north, shipped it down, helicoptered it from there, then they put it up. Took a lot. Plus, when you’re talking custom-made, you’re talking extra labor. See that ceiling up there? That was special made. I don’t just mean the painting either. On the original plans, the whole roof was supposed to be glass. They tried to tell me I had to keep it that way. But the sky, that’s my big thing, my signature. The scene wouldn’t be complete without the real Thomas Karvel heavens glowing above.”
“It was supposed to be a greenhouse, then? To take energy from the sun. Heat, food for the plants, everything?” I said, my mind spinning. Seeing the direction I was revolving off in, Karvel quickly interrupted.
“Yes, but I took care of that: I had them put solar panels all over the new roof, then put in ultraviolet lights behind the gauze the sky’s painted on. Cost was no option; I do something, I do it right. Matter of fact, speaking of the panels, you boys want to do us a really big service?”
Garth, eager fanboy that he was, said yes before the proposition was spilled. Considering that our farming project was at a close, we needed some other purpose to serve to justify our citizenship, our pull on the resources. It wasn’t that this was the world I would have imagined for myself, or even chosen. It was just that there were no other practical options. Because it was very, very cold out there. And despite our second-class citizenship, it was still pretty comfortable in here.
“Now I know, it’s risky going outside. That air, who knows what’s in it. It’s a danger going out, but you did survive it before, an hour more can’t hurt too much. And we got those solar panels up there, and every few minutes or so you hear—” Karvel stopped, reached for the audio remote. A rare moment of silence in the chamber followed. Then came a sound, one I’d heard but never paid attention
to before. Metal scraping. Darting his head up to stare at the ceiling and its perpetual sunset clouds, Karvel grimaced. “There it goes. You hear that? You’re not supposed to hear that. That’s not how it’s supposed to be, that racket,” he said and turned back on all the voices talking.
An hour later, we were headed for the roof. Fortunately, Mrs. Karvel had been less than exact in her following of her husband’s orders on our arrival, and instead of burning our snowsuits, she’d just washed them instead. We dressed and made our way back to the terrarium’s exit hatch, located behind a discreet and wholly cosmetic cave formation, itself hidden by an abundant cluster of hydrangea shrubs that distracted attention in a pink trademarked by Mattel.
Past the door, what was revealed was the hard, cold, industrial shell that kept our controlled world from the real one’s chaos. Here, the sound of the all-powerful boiler echoed violently and you could feel it in the air like humidity. A narrow corridor of metal and concrete rose up several stories to the ceiling, lined with storage containers and what appeared to be freezers. There was even a sailboat back here, wrapped in a tarp. It wasn’t a yacht, but it was still three times the size of a canoe, just small enough to ride the fifty yards down the Kool-Aid stream if you were so inclined. Past that, we saw the red “exit” signs pointed to an open garage door, where his and her snowmobiles with racing stripes sat waiting. On a metal balcony far above, I saw the image of Mrs. Karvel, so out of place in this industrial environment, waving at us. Braving one of the grated ladders that were embedded into the outer shell, Garth and I huffed our way up to her, climbing two stories of metal catwalks to do so. When we arrived on the right level, however, Mrs. Karvel had disappeared. It was only after we walked out to the exact place we had seen her that I noticed there was an actual room hidden up here, off to the side. And that’s when the smell hit me, followed by the image of Mrs. Karvel sitting on a large cardboard box, smoking, a heavy pink parka draped over her wiry frame. The rolled joint smoking in her hand.
