Plantation of Chrome

by R. J. Coulson

  Stone was waving from the corner of the cemetery. Grundy waved back and saw him walk along the wall, and down the path.

  “Was it there?” asked Grundy.

  Stone nodded. “Yeah, it was. We can go in a second. I just need to do one more thing.”

  Stone walked to Eckleburg’s grave, but he seemed confused, as if he had lost something. Grundy saw him looking behind the tombstone and around the grave itself.

  “I… I put a… Hmph, never mind,” said Stone, and whatever it was that was gone, Grundy realized that he wouldn’t know for now. As they walked out, he looked down at the grave by which the woman had stood. She was gone now as well.

  Stone had arrived at the Pit. The building's façade was still of the grimiest of woods, and Stone didn't know why he had suddenly expected it to look any different. The broken windows were barely covered with wooden planks, and the sign above the main door was cracked, the paint scaly.

  Home to the true Lost Generation

  He had walked home after he and Grundy had visited the cemetery earlier that day, but he could only stay within his own four walls for so long before a need to come back crept within him. It was like returning to the scene of a crime, he thought, but that was never a good idea, and yet he felt obliged to do it, to stick around, to push papers under the new banner of Vodeni instead of just grabbing Julia by the hand, giving Grundy a new start, and bolting out of this insane city.

  Stone opened the main door and walked in through the corridor. One of the new guards, by the door that led to the main boxing hall, greeted him and let him pass through. The main hall was almost empty with the exception of a guard that was sitting on a chair right on top of the weapons hatch. Stone nodded at him as he passed into the east wing. He walked past his office and continued down the corridor, meeting yet another guard.

  “Hey Björn,” said Stone.

  “Good evening, Stone,” he said with a thick Nordic accent. “You want to talk, or?”

  “I want to see him.”

  “Take off your coat and throw it there.” Stone took off his coat, and Björn started searching him.

  “Has Vodeni been here today?” asked Stone.

  Björn shook his head. “Ok, you can go in now.”

  Björn opened the door and Stone walked into the dark. The room was in the opposite side of Grundy’s, the easternmost part of the Pit, and they had only used it to keep supplies and various cleaning agents. Stone closed the door and flicked the switch next to it.

  The light came on, and the man in the middle of the room flinched, his eyes beady and slit. His hair was greasy and it had been smoothed all along the back of his head. He wore a simple shirt that made him seem hollow, as if all his skin had been substituted with a different matter and his bones removed entirely. His arms had been forced to the back of the chair, his hands tied. He didn’t once look at Stone.

  Stone knew that De Gracy didn't look the way he did because of nearly one month’s captivity, but rather because that this was how De Gracy looked when you stripped him of his suit, coat, and hat.

  “Frank,” he said. “Frank.”

  De Gracy didn’t answer.

  “We buried Messenger today,” said Stone. He walked around De Gracy’s chair. “Well, we never found the body, but we visited his grave anyway.”

  De Gracy was still silent.

  “Grundy and me.”

  Stone looked down at De Gracy’s tied hands; they were bloody and his nails were stripped and torn. Right above, on the plate of wood that made the chair’s back, there was a scribble, roughly carved.

  “GÉNÉRATION PERDUE”

  “Frank, there’s no reason for me to keep coming here if you still won’t talk to me. You think they’ll ever let you out if you don’t talk?” Stone walked back to De Gracy’s front. “You’ve made it impossible for yourself once again. Well done.”

  Stone walked towards the door. He turned off the light.

  “You’ve made it impossible,” said De Gracy, his voice slow from inside the darkness. “You’ve made it impossible for all of us. For all of us!” he screamed.

  Stone turned on the light. De Gracy’s face was deformed with rage, his teeth showing, his eyes spilling into the room.

  “Do you still think,” asked De Gracy. “Do you still believe that they’re afraid of you? You remember telling me? They’re afraid, Frank, you said. It’s good, It’s very good to have one or two people being afraid of you, Stone, but once you accumulate enough of them, once you got enough scared people in a room with you, one’s bound to rise up and kill you. Out of a million men, a million men, one… one will always kill to absolve his fear, because that fear doesn’t paralyze him or strangle him or drown him… it feeds him, and so you let him sit out somewhere to cool off, to recompose, but he grows from his fear, Stone. And the good thing about him being just one, just one in a pile of a million men, is that you’ll never know where he’ll come from.”

  “And that man’s you?” asked Stone. “Are you the one, who’s--”

  “How afraid are you, Noah? How afraid are you that we’re going to lose everything because you’d rather let Grundy live? We could have lost it a long time ago when that kid recognized Eckleburg, and you stood and did nothing. Messenger, a fucking boy, had to man up to save us. Even Grundy and Eckleburg stepped in to save us, but you did nothing.”

  “It was your idea to kill Bishop in the first place,” said Stone. “Don’t act like this all happened in some god damned vacuum. It was because of you that we went out there that night… and I don’t even know why you changed your mind in the first place.”

  De Gracy looked up at Stone for the first time in a month, his eyes glazed with a layer of indifference. “You don’t even know, do you?” he said, slowly shaking his head. “Even now, after everything, you don’t know, do you?” His voice had grown calm since his outburst, and there was almost a softness to it, as if a melody was playing deep inside his head, his thoughts gently pushing the gears of an opened music box. “If you knew what world I live in every day, Noah. I’m forced not to speak, and when I finally try… When I finally mutter the smallest hint, not even you get it.” De Gracy’s voice was now barely in range of Stone’s hearing. “You just had to understand… that’s all.”

  Stone had heard De Gracy’s words well enough, even the few splinters of voice that had dropped on the floor. “Frank, I’ll try talking to Vodeni to see if…”

  De Gracy chuckled, his voice back to normal. “Right, you go do that. You do all the things you’re meant to do, Stone. Every little thing that you expect yourself to do. The Pit is gone now. It’s in the hands of a dead man, so you go do whatever makes you feel good.”

  Stone nodded, about to switch off the light a second time when De Gracy spoke. “You going to visit your whore, too? Maybe tell Vodeni about her, too?”

  Stone stood still for a while, but then De Gracy continued, “She had blond hair, shoulder length. She held you around your arms, stood on her toes to bop her head against your shoulders, and there--”

  Stone turned around and rushed towards De Gracy, pushing both him and the chair to the ground. He grabbed him by the sides of his mouth and pressed his head hard against the concrete floor. De Gracy struggled to talk.

  “I saw you… that night… at the fair. I followed you… and I saw you… saw you both.”

  “If you ever mention her,” said Stone, his teeth meticulously grinding out each and every word, “to Vodeni or to anyone, then I’ll kill you myself, do you understand?”

  “You should have given them Grundy.”

  “Do you understand me?!”

  De Gracy looked at Stone with an expression of complete contempt, his mouth a bit crooked, as if caught between a smile and a sneer. “It’s you who doesn’t understand me,” he said.

  Stone let go of De Gracy’s mouth and walked away from him. He could feel De Gracy’s stare still burning his back.

  “A month’s a long time to think, Stone,” said
De Gracy. “Don’t think I haven’t been using it.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Without even a hint of civilization and completely void of any manmade shadows, surrounded by the cliffs lining the horizon and the sky above them a shade of blue that the city had long since made impossible, Julia Sedgewick and Noah Stone walked along a bubbling river. The weather was unusually warm for the season, the days somehow hotter and hotter, the sky clearer and clearer.

  “Well, it’s not fair that I’m always talking about this and that, and you never say a word,” said Julia.

  “It’s because you’re not as good at asking questions as I am,” said Stone.

  “That is simply not true. I’ve never heard anything further from the truth in all my life, Noah Stone, and that makes you the biggest liar that I have ever had the pleasure of meeting.”

  Stone laughed and stopped walking.

  “Why are we stopping?” she asked.

  “No reason,” he said. He was looking at her, and the only sound for miles was the soft chuckle of the river behind them.

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  “I wanted to get away from the city. It’s the last day of this beautiful autumn, people say. I wanted to spend it out here.”

  Julia smiled and they continued walking through the leaves on their path.

  “Ok,” she said, “If you’re that insistent, I guess I could tell you the first memory that I ever remember having.”

  “How do you know it’s your first memory?”

  “I don’t know,” said Julia, leaning in a bit closer to Stone. She looked outward, far through the cold, glimmering air as if looking back. “It’s just that I can’t imagine anything happening before that, you know? It seems so much like a beginning that I’m willing to call it the first ever. Does that make sense?”

  “I think it does.”

  “Good. I’m not sure how old I was, but of course I wasn’t much more than a handful of years…”

  Stone looked at Julia as she talked. He studied her mouth and the way it moved to pronounce every single word. He studied the lines that made up her face and how they would sink and rise, move and shift at the little dips and turns of her stories. But most carefully, he studied her eyes. They carried within them the meaning of every one of the words, and if one looked close enough, if one was really watchful enough to separate her eyes from the rest of the world, it was possible to see the smallest of glances, the softest of reflections; the tiniest baubles of light from which one could see a lie become a playful truth, and the meaning of the subtlest of hints became so imbedded in his heart that he could see nothing for days afterwards.

  “Oh,” she said. “I can’t even remember the last time I told the story, but anyway, I was very young, and one evening, I remember my mom and dad talking to each other, but with voices that seemed a lot heavier than they used to. I remember getting scared, and then, I walked out of the room that they were in, and I waited there a while. They were still arguing, and when I finally got the courage to go back out, I saw my mom put on her shoes and her hat. She then opened the door and… and then she left. My dad put a hand on the top of my head, and I looked up at him, and he was looking at the door… ‘Go to sleep, Julia,’ he said, and I didn’t hesitate for one minute. It was like he was telling me to ‘go, go now, so that I can do this. I need to do this, alone.’ So I went to bed, and you know what happened?”

  She looked expectantly at Stone, who shook his head. Julia smiled.

  “When I woke up, there she was, my mom… sleeping right next to me in my bed.”

  “So your dad had gone after her? Gotten her back?”

  Julia nodded.

  “I’ve never heard the story of what happened that night, but I always imagined that he went out for her, pleaded to get her back. And from then on, I don’t think I ever heard them argue.”

  “It must be a nice memory to have,” said Stone.

  “It is... the very best.”

  They continued along the river. After a while, they reached a little stone bridge that led across the river. Stone insisted that they rested on the bridge. They both looked down at the incoming stream.

  “I used to play on this bridge when I was a boy.”

  Julia looked at him, her eyes immediately flaring with a sparkling, jovial light like in the eyes of a small girl waking up for Christmas.

  “Noah, is that true?” she asked excitedly.

  “Yes. My family owned that plot of land right there,” he said, pointing at an expanse of grassy hills right next to a forest that crept along the foot of the far away cliffs.

  “I knew there was a reason for us to come here.”

  “Yeah,” said Stone. He picked out some of the loose stones from the bridge and looked down at the water. “My father had bought the land right after he and my mother got together. He had worked on a farm almost his entire life, and farming was all he knew. Back then it had mostly been corn and… you know, usual farming stuff, I don’t know much about it, but here,” said Stone, looking out at the now empty land. “Here he decided to grow fruit, so he planted all these trees… an entire plantation.”

  “Where did it all go?” asked Julia.

  “A fire took it,” said Stone. “It took all of it, and now there ain’t one single tree left.”

  Stone still looked at the empty land.

  “What was he like?” asked Julia. “Your father?”

  Stone smiled softly, suddenly overwhelmed by thinking back.

  “My father was an amazing man,” he said. “Always told me that the sun'll always rise. I’ve never lived up to what he was able to, but I never think I’ve tried. Don't think I dared try.”

  “And your mother?” asked Julia.

  But with what seemed a common question, easy even, Stone’s eyes grew pale and his smile withdrew. He jiggled the pebbles in his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” said Julia, reacting to Stone’s change of mood. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to pry like that. It’s just that you said before that I didn’t ask enough questions, so I tried to… and…”

  “Don’t be sorry,” said Stone. He threw one of the pebbles into the water. “I haven’t always had that many people in my life, and I’m usually left by those that are there to begin with.”

  Julia put her hand on his.

  “It’s never about the amount of people in your life, Noah, you know that. It’s what they mean to you...”

  “Or meant,” said Stone.

  “Or meant,” repeated Julia.

  Stone threw two more pebbles into the river.

  “I’ve had two friends who were important to me, and they… they died recently.”

  “Oh Noah, I’m so sorry. What were their names?”

  “Thomas Eckleburg and Paul Messenger. They used to work with me. Eckleburg was our accountant and Messenger was one of our boxers.”

  “One of the boxers? Wasn’t he young then?”

  “He was… it was very unfortunate.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, but it’s not easy for me to talk about.”

  “Of course it isn’t,” said Julia. “They sounded like good friends.”

  Stone nodded.

  “It’s funny, though,” added Julia.

  “What is?”

  “When you first mentioned them, you said their whole name, but then, when you talked about them, you used their last name.”

  “Oh, that,” chuckled Stone. “I guess we do that. We’re a group from some time back, and we’ve always called each either by our last name. Eckleburg… Messenger, De Gracy… Grundy.”

  “Grundy?” said Julia. Stone laughed at her reaction.

  “Yes, and then there's me.”

  Stone threw two more pebbles into the water.

  “How come it ended up being just the five of you?”

  “Just the five of us?” asked Stone, thinking back; first there was Frank, he thought, but then again, Frank
had always been there… then Grundy… and shortly after that came Thomas and Paul.

  “I think I’ll save that story for another time,” said Stone.

  “Oh, you will, huh?” asked Julia.

  “Definitely.”

  “Then guess what I’m about to do?”

  Stone pretended to think for a moment.

  “Kiss me?”

  She shook her head.

  “Not unless you catch me!” she said, running off towards the big plot of grass. Stone let her get a head start before running after her. She ran all over the place; she zigged and she zagged, she climbed up the small hills and raced down them again, and her white skirt floated like a cloud that was carrying her, but Stone, as he ran after her, felt confined to a grid of trees that existed only in his head. At times, when Julia wasn’t looking, he’d stretch out his hand and pretend to touch the gnarly bark of the trees he would run past, and he would see his father on the top of a ladder, and they would pick that year’s harvest together with baskets hanging down their necks and fruits rolling up and down the hills in the sun, and he could imagine the trees before the trees had ever been, and how his father told him that ‘this was life before life’, and how the plantation would be life, and how it would grow, get big and strong ‘like you,’ he said, and Stone remembered the feeling of the bark as he ran among the many trees and the splinters he felt afterwards and…