The gardener says, “You’re the only vegetable that’s left me that didn’t leave me for the boneyard. Oscar did. He left me. Hadn’t lost anyone in quite some time before him. The last had been a woman. I remember her name. It was Nadine.”
Greg says, “The African Queen.”
The gardener says, “Well, I don’t know about that. That sounds a little racist. There’s no racism in the Garden, Mr. Frazier.”
“I’m not—”
“Of course you aren’t. Now be quiet before you get us caught. Don’t know why you’re talking to me to begin with. Did you know how much security is in a place like this? Very little, to be honest. Only one man watches the video cameras overnight. He’s taking his break now. I gave him a couple of joints I rolled and he’s toking up in a bathroom stall on the fourth floor. No one goes to the fourth floor, Mike.”
“My name is Greg.”
The gardener laughs. “It’s all the same.”
When is a door not a door? Greg thinks. When it’s a Mike.
They go through doors that require the gardener to slide a card through, a light above buzzing from red to green as the locks click. It takes them almost ten minutes, and Greg’s feeling overwhelmed by how much bigger the facility is than he thought. He didn’t know it extended this far.
They come to a final set of doors. The gardener stops and says, “It’s inside. All of them. In the Gar
den. They’re sleeping. In their little pods.”
Greg doesn’t want to go in. He doesn’t want to see them. He doesn’t want to see where he’s spent the last three years. He thinks it will break him or, at the very least, drive him mad.
He says, “Are we going to stand here all night? Open the door.”
The gardener laughs. “Vegetables aren’t supposed to be funny,” he says, like he’s scolding Greg.
Greg feels a trickle of sweat on the back of his neck.
He doesn’t want to sit for this. He locks the brakes on the chair before pushing himself up. The gardener eyes him warily, but doesn’t stop him. He hands him the cane Greg’s been using on his walks around his room. Greg steadies himself as the gardener slides his keycard through the lock. This door doesn’t buzz. The light just flips to green, and then—
The doors just… open.
Cold air crawls out along the floor and up his legs through the thin sweats he wears. Gooseflesh ripples along his skin and he almost turns around right then. Almost says fuck this and leaves.
He hobbles toward the room instead.
It’s cold in the room. Almost numbingly so. And the area is far bigger than he thought it’d be, almost as if they’ve stepped into some kind of warehouse. There’s a distant polyphonic ding from a machine that Greg can’t see.
“They asked me,” the gardener says, walking into the darkened room, “if I could keep secrets. I said yes. Because I knew many, many secrets. They didn’t want me for my mind. No, they wanted me because I could tend to the Garden the way it should truly be tended to. These are my vegetables. I upkeep the pods. I make them safe so my vegetables can grow and dream their little dreams.”
Greg follows after him. Little lights along the floor illuminate a path to follow. It’s straight, mostly, and leads toward hulking machinery that Greg can barely make out in the dark. Machinery that hums quietly, causing subtle vibrations along the floor.
“I almost told them no,” the gardener says with a little laugh. “Boy, would that have been a mistake I would have regretted for a long time to come. I didn’t, though. I didn’t say no. And even though I can’t see my family anymore, that’s okay. They didn’t need me. They never needed me. Not like this. Here, I am wanted. Here, I am someone.” He shakes his head and glances over his shoulder. Greg can barely make out his smooth features in the dark. “Turns out vegetables are better company than everyone else. Who would have thought?”
They walk on for a few minutes more before the gardener comes to a stop.
Greg can see them, though he’s not quite sure what he’s looking at. Ahead, on either side of them, are rows of… something. There are brightly lit panels that stretch as far as he can see that flicker with numbers and the slow, methodical pulse of a sinus rhythm. There are other lines on these panels, moving lines. Some are stronger than others. Some are almost flat.
The gardener stands in front of a computer mounted on the wall. His fingers fly over the keys, commands stretching out in bright blue letters against a black screen. He pauses after a moment and looks over his shoulder. “You ready?” he asks, lips curved into smile. “Yeah?”
No, he thinks.
“Yeah,” he says and it makes his eyes sting. He doesn’t know why.
The gardener nods before hitting a final keystroke.
At first, nothing happens.