DATURA

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by Leena Krohn


  Mr. Chance continued on without paying my question any heed. He told me that very recently, in a small town on the western coast (I can’t remember where exactly), the young driver of a Mazda 323 lost control of the car in a left-hand curve, and went off the road. The car was wrecked. The driver and four passengers were all injured. Half an hour later at a different left-hand curve in the same town, another young driver of a Mazda 323 lost control of the car, running off road. The car was wrecked. The driver and four passengers were all injured.

  “What are the odds of something like that happening?” Mr. Chance asked and pointed his index finger at me.

  “Probably not very good,” I said. “But sometimes extremely unlikely things do happen. Why wouldn’t they?”

  “That’s not good enough,” he said, shaking his head. “Not good enough at all.”

  Right then a Mazda 323 passed us on the boulevard at walking speed. Mr. Chance didn’t seem to notice the car, and I didn’t say a word.

  “On a different note, you have heard the story of the plum pudding, haven’t you?” Mr. Chance asked.

  For a moment I thought that he really was going to change the subject, but then he went on, “It’s also a true story, well known by aficionados.”

  I hadn’t heard the story, but I was sure that I soon would. I was getting cold, but Mr. Chance didn’t even seem to notice the vicious wind. Coincidences kept him in a state of constant agitation to the point that he hardly ever noticed extraneous circumstances.

  “Well, when a certain Monsieur Deschamps was a child, he got some plum pudding from a Monsieur de Fortgibu. Where was this again? I can’t remember whether it was in the city of Joan of Arc’s victory, Orléans, or in Rouen, where she was burned. In any case, years later in a Parisian restaurant, Monsieur Deschamps noticed plum pudding on the menu and got a craving to have some. But when he ordered plum pudding for dessert, the waiter told him that the last of it had just been ordered. As it happens, it had been ordered by the very same Monsieur de Fortgibu.”

  “That certainly is a coincidence,” I said wearily. My eyes searched for the boat, but I couldn’t find it anymore. It had perhaps already sailed behind a small islet.

  “That’s what people tend to say. But listen to this,” he insisted. “Years passed, many years, and again Monsieur Deschamps had an incident with plum pudding. He was invited to a party where the kind of pudding in question was being served. While he was eating it, Monsieur Deschamps made a remark to the party that all that was missing was Monsieur de Fortgibu. Right at that moment, the door opened and who walked in but Monsieur Fortgibu himself, already a man of very advanced years, who had meant to go somewhere else entirely. He’d gotten the wrong address, and accidentally gatecrashed the party that Monsieur Deschamps was attending. What do you say to that?”

  “Nothing, to be on the safe side,” I replied kindly.

  The boat was closer than I thought. It was already turning toward the harbor. Now I could see that, although it was a small boat, it had been given a name. “Joan of Arc” was painted on its hull. An unusual name for a boat.

  “That might be for the best,” Mr. Chance said. “The case of the plum pudding would put anyone at a loss for words. Force them to face a universal enigma. Shall we have a walk in the botanical garden?”

  We walked. We sat down again on a bench as damp as the previous one, but more shielded from the lash of the arctic wind. Young and delicate trees, maybe fruit-bearing trees, grew behind the bench. Each one had a nameplate in front of it.

  “Do you know what I think? In a way, the universe is like a pudding or maybe Jell-O. Some philosopher has said that before me, though.”

  “Really?”

  “The connection between everything, you see? Things aren’t all unrelated, the world isn’t a pile of unconnected things. Jell-O trembles, no matter where you poke it with your spoon, the whole thing. Interaction, sameness, oneness, homogeneity . . . You know what the most important thing in a pudding is?”

  “The most important thing? I, for one, judge pudding by its flavor.”

  I was beginning to lose interest, and by now wanted to go back to the musty warmth of the basement. I heard a bat hit a ball in the sports field, but it was out of sight.

  “Precisely! You said it! The most important thing in a pudding is its flavor. And pudding has just one and the same flavor no matter where you stick your spoon in.”

  I must have looked confused. He lifted his finger and continued, “Here’s an analogy for you: pudding—taste! World—meaning! You do understand, don’t you?”

  “I suppose,” I said, with hesitation. “But I have to get back to the office.”

  “One of these days,” Mr. Chance said, “I’ll come by your office again. We need to discuss this subject again and dig a bit deeper.”

  “Without a doubt,” I said.

  As we got up—I was already chilled to the bone—I happened to take a look at the young fruit tree under which we’d sat. It wasn’t an apple tree as I’d assumed, nor a cherry tree. I bent down and read the nameplate.

  You got it! Prunus domestica, the plate read, a plum tree.

  Another Man with the Same Name

  Although the circulation of The New Anomalist continued to increase, I was unpleasantly aware that the magazine itself wasn’t improving. If anything, it was degenerating. The Marquis searched more and more eagerly for sensational material in an effort to increase the magazine’s circulation.

  He didn’t even come to the office every week. But when he did, he’d hum golden oldies or hymns. On good days he’d address me using the names of his favorite songs, “Lalaika” or “Lazzarella.” On bad ones, just by my last name. I didn’t care for either practice.

  He’d stop humming, knock on the door even if it was open, and say, “I have an idea.”

  And he always did. Unfortunately, his ideas weren’t always good. Sometimes they were just awful, and it wasn’t unusual for us to end up having a fight. And there were days when I had to put the worst of his ideas into practice as best I could.

  The Marquis complained about how The New Anomalist took up all his time, but that wasn’t really true. I didn’t know exactly what he did all day long. Maybe it was true that he sat in the library all day gathering material, as he so readily insisted. Usually, however, he sat in a shady little dive called The Foxhole, which was generally considered a meeting place for the neighborhood’s petty criminals. What attracted a man like him to that kind of place will forever be a mystery to me, and maybe it’s better that way.

  The New Anomalist did take up all of my time, though. The Marquis didn’t hesitate to call me during my free time, and he often got his brilliant ideas at night.

  If the phone rang at quarter past midnight, I knew who was on the other end of the line.

  “Listen up, Lalaika, we need to offer psychic guidance, understand?” I heard after a rude awakening.

  “We! Go ahead and say what you really mean. You’re planning to force me to become some sort of dial-up psychic . . . ”

  “No, no, you’re right, you might not suitable for the job. You probably don’t have the empathy for it.”

  “That’s rich coming from you!”

  “I have a couple of candidates. You can interview them and pick one. ‘Ask a Clairvoyant,’ now there’s an idea! Or maybe, ‘Sibyl Says.’ Or what about this: ‘Write to the Dead!’ We can help you communicate with your loved ones beyond the veil. ‘Hello from Heaven,’ that sort of thing . . . ”

  “Now you’ve gone too far,” I said. “Goodnight.”

  I could never anticipate when the Marquis would show up. Whenever he did come to the office, he’d stay for an hour or at most two, sitting at his computer, and then he’d disappear again. Most of the time he sat surfing through webzines looking for news that would fit our needs.

  “Listen to this,” the Marquis said, staring at the monitor. I thought how he’d lately become pale and aged. He was probably thinking the same abo
ut me.

  “Good lord. Here’s our ‘Rumor of the Month.’ ”

  “What is it?”

  “Jesus didn’t die at Golgotha. The man who was crucified was his cousin. Jesus himself escaped to Siberia. From there he went on to Japan, where he started a family in his old age.”

  “No! I refuse to put that in the magazine. Under no circumstances will I agree to that.”

  “Why on earth not?”

  “Do you want to get sued again? That’s not the rumor of the month—more like the rumor of the millennium. It might offend someone’s religious beliefs, or more likely many people’s. I’m tired of replying to angry letters from the readers.”

  “Fine. How about this, then: the works of Shakespeare weren’t written by Shakespeare, but by another man with the same name.”

  “I suppose that’s the better of the two,” I said reluctantly.

  The things one has to do!

  On Air, on Sunlight

  Oh, the wisdom of orchids, letting their flowers bloom at the exact moment when there are insects ready to pollinate them! So it is in nature, but down in our basement office, there wasn’t a single insect, not one winter fly woken from its hibernation. And yet, my Phalaenopsis orchid was in bloom when I met the Ethnobotanist, the man who had written an article on plant sentience for The New Anomalist.

  Purple and blue veins intertwined in the white corollas of the Phalaenopsis like a map of the rivers and roads of an unknown country. It was made up of the most ethereal of substances, finer than the finest silk. I felt pride when the Ethnobotanist admired the orchid’s inflorescence, as if I myself had caused it.

  As I listened to the Ethnobotanist, I recalled some lines from Spoon River.

  “My thanks, friends of the

  County Scientific Association,

  Twice I tried to join your honored body,

  And was rejected

  And when my little brochure

  On the intelligence of plants

  Began to attract attention

  You almost voted me in . . . ”

  I call him the Ethnobotanist, though he had made an academic career studying lichens. He had then moved on to unorthodox research topics, ethnobotanics, and the psychology of plants. I enjoyed listening to him—he was so enthusiastic, spoke so passionately about things that were so different from what the chief editor of The New Anomalist was interested in. I wrote down just some of his thoughts.

  “For one thing,” he said, “I hope you understand that plants, too, are conscious. The consciousness of plants resembles human dreaming. That, too, is consciousness. Everywhere in the universe, there is consciousness. It is senseless reason that seeks to set humans apart.

  “We are convinced that having a brain is an indispensable precondition for intelligence. Not true at all! Intelligence, memory, mind, and spirit run through all flora and fauna, all the way down to single-celled organisms. Where there’s life, there’s consciousness. It is different for every species and differs at each stage of a plant’s life. Woody and herbaceous plants, naturally, have very different ways of thinking and viewing the world. There are many plants, such as tomatoes, that are unusually aware of their environment and are more easily disturbed by human touch.

  “Isn’t it odd,” the Ethnobotanist continued, “that when humans perceive their environment and react appropriately to its changes, we call it intelligence. But when other animals, let alone plants, act the same way, we no longer call it intelligence, but instinct, which we consider inferior. We think that reason, ratio, guides our actions. But it does very little of that, which is perhaps a lucky thing. No, it is what we do not feel, what we know nothing about, that also guides us.

  “Plants don’t change their location nor do they speak the same way as we do. Is that what makes us think of them as them idiots? They move upward, towards the light. That’s what we, too, should be doing. The dialogue that plants have with the air and the sun is the foundation of our lives. When will we remember, when will we acknowledge, that our lives are completely and entirely dependent on and at the mercy of plants?

  “Plants have conversations with other individuals and even other species, but in their own ways, such as through chemical signals. Did you know that trees have a tremendously keen sense of smell?” the Ethnobotanist asked. “They know when the larva of a pest insect are crawling on their leaves. They start taking specific counter-measures, each according to its species. They even communicate and scheme with other species in order to banish the saboteurs. Security specialists could learn a lot from the alarm systems of plants.

  “Perhaps you remember a Dr. Singh? He studied the effect of music on the growth of plants.”

  “His name sounds familiar,” I said. “Wasn’t it his research team that made the observation that jazz and classical music accelerated growth, whereas heavy metal slowed it down?”

  “He’s the one. Many researchers since then have continued his line of study and verified his results. And how about Mr. Backster? By measuring electric impulses, he proved that plants even reacted to his thoughts, and that they also had memories.”

  He stroked the petal of my Phalaenopsis with the nail of his index finger.

  “The geometry of plants, their mathematical perfection, never ceases to amaze me. Each flower is a wheel of life, its own microcosm. The development of every plant vindicates the philosophy of eternal return.

  “We don’t actually know,” he continued, “what plants really are. We think they are passive, weak, harmless. What a delusion! The earth holds no greater power than the energy of the plant kingdom. Mankind’s clumsy dabbling on the earth cannot compare to such creativity.”

  The Heretics

  There are people, such as one of the subscribers to The New Anomalist, an old crafts teacher, to whom Swedenborg’s angels are as concrete, as real, as the cashier at the local grocery store. Another reader claimed to receive messages from the beyond just by closing her eyes and holding a pen over an empty piece of paper. When she opened her eyes, there was a message, always some kind and comforting words, such as, “It is so beautiful here” or “Everything is fine now.”

  A third reader wasn’t as lucky. He wrote that his home was being terrorized by a poltergeist. It would rattle his wok pan in the kitchenette of his rented one-bedroom apartment and would make his cellphone ring even when he had switched it off. During the night, it would roll up his blanket so that he would wake up shivering from cold and fright. It would even turn on the espresso machine he’d just switched off.

  He called The New Anomalist to get information on how to exorcise an evil or earthbound spirit. I didn’t have anything to give him. All I could say was: “Keep calm and try to ignore it.”

  He was disappointed. “What a pity that there are no competent exorcists in our parish,” he said. I never heard from him again, and I don’t know whether the disturbance ever stopped.

  Most of our subscribers, however, were completely average people, to whom nothing truly extraordinary ever happened. They read our magazine out of casual interest, seeking novelty, or because they were hungry for sensation.

  They were all gnawed at by problems that could not be answered satisfactorily by social awareness, science, religion, art, history, culture, or technological development. In that, too, they were like the rest of humanity. But I did meet several true eccentrics and monomaniacs, or at least corresponded with them. I got attached to some of them, and their likenesses, voices, and obsessions even found their way into my dreams.

  It wasn’t true that our subscribers were just ignorant morons, as the Marquis would sometimes claim when he was in a bad mood. Our readers were by no means a homogeneous group of people, and some of them were highly educated private thinkers. Many of them were only passionate about a specific, narrow subject. Someone who was interested in synchronisms wouldn’t necessarily have any interest in lost continents or the aquatic ape hypothesis.

  And let’s consider their attitudes towards the conn
ection of mind and body, or mortality and immortality. The readers of The New Anomalist had as many opinions on these fundamental questions as any random sample of people. There were those who believed in the immortality of the soul and even that it could evolve to higher planes through reincarnation, eventually reaching divinity. Some thought that individual consciousness lived on for only a short time after the body died, merging then with the world spirit. Others were convinced that it’s all over when the brain dies.

  All of them couldn’t be right, but it was hard to disprove anyone’s opinion.

  For instance, Saulus once said, “Let’s assume that you fall to your death from a cliff one hundred yards high. What’s your first thought right after? You think, ‘Oh, I didn’t die after all!’”

  “Saulus,” I said, “You are a modern-day heretic.”

  If only I’d asked, Saulus would have given the Marquis an entire lecture on what the soul is. He would have said: First we must examine what the body is.

  Saulus believed that there were seven levels of consciousness and humans had seven bodies. Only two of them exist on the physical plane, the physical and etheric bodies. Our third body is the astral body. The body, therefore, consists of a physical side, which we experience through our senses. We can feel its weight, and are forced to give it up at the moment of death. But the body consists of so much more. The astral body is the same as our personal consciousness, whereas the mental body could be called our soul or ego. Seven levels lie between pure spiritual consciousness and physical consciousness, Saulus claimed.

  “What?” I once asked Saulus. “You’re mixing up bodies and souls. Isn’t that a bit strange?”

  “It’s a mistake to think that these things would be simple,” Saulus replied. “You say my words are confusing. But what do you think of the latest scientific theories? Now those are unbelievable, wouldn’t you say? They want us to believe that elementary particles can be in two places at the same time. And even that’s not enough! Recently I heard a hypotheses that it’s likely that the world we perceive actually behaves like the world of atoms—we’re just not aware of it.”

 

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