Manson walked across the room and parted the doors of the Electronic Conveyance: there was a brown internal envelope inside. He took it out, slid the doors closed, and punched in the dismissal code on the keypad. The Electronic Conveyance hummed briefly, then became silent. Manson opened the envelope and pulled out a sheaf of photocopied pages; leafing through it, he recognised it as more of the Victorian stuff:
Willows whiten, aspens gibber
Little freezes, punks and liver
Through the wave that runs for ever
Round the island.
The poems they were sending him to set were getting larger and longer. They had begun with kernely train carriage haikus; they had grown progressively, plucked from apparently random spots of the 20th century, and now this romantic sounding sort of thing kept appearing. It couldn’t be for buses, or trains, this one. The dimensions they had given him were for some huge outdoor space, perhaps.
Usually at least once a day, sometimes more often, the Electronic Conveyance would hum, and a thin beep shortly after would announce a delivery. The manila envelopes, closed with a paper fastener, would contain roughly photocopied pages of poetry which Manson would lay out on the word processor and save to disc. There would sometimes be scribbled instructions on a corner of the poem about size, or type-face; sometimes Manson had to guess what was expected of him, which he hoped he did quite well, having gained considerable experience over the years in the sort of thing they usually wanted. Sometimes the poems would have been copied so askew that he would even have to guess words, or parts of words. He was usually fairly confident about this, too. When the poem was completed and saved, he would place the disc in the envelope, and then summon the Electronic Conveyance to take it away. Very occasionally, the disc would be sent back with brusque corrections scribbled on the label (“24pt please!” “Sans serif.”).
He looked over to the picture-window on the long wall, and sighed. Today the picture-window was displaying a large misty Turner. The pictures they were projecting were taking a turn towards the 19th century recently, too, he had noticed. This suited him more than the wordy poetry did.
Manson spent the next several hours working diligently on the Baby of Garrotte and was able to dispatch it just before seven o’clock, when the systems of the building would shut down. He parcelled the disc up, sent it off in the Conveyance and stretched lengthily; then decided to spend a few minutes tidying up before leaving.
At quarter past seven, the Conveyance beeped. Manson walked over to it, put his hand out towards it and then hesitated; bent his head towards it to listen, although it was definitely silent and had just come to rest; took his hand back, a little, then came to a decision and opened it. There inside, lying on an empty internal envelope, was a long bunch of twelve white lilies. Their powerful scent billowed out immediately. Manson stood absolutely still; at last he reached into the dumbwaiter and delicately picked up the bunch of flowers in his arms, like a baby.
He looked around, helplessly, and made a few false starts in various directions. Eventually he laid the flowers gently on the desk. He walked up and down beside them, rubbing his chin. He looked over at them; bent his knees a little and looked inside them, inspecting their polleny intricacies. At last, for lack of knowing what else to do, he put his coat on, turned the lights off and left the office for home.
By the time he came into the office the next morning, his steps were buoyant. It is a marvellous thing to be sent flowers. It really is an amazing thing to receive a great big bunch of pungent silky white flowers. Late the night before, he had bought a vase from a corner shop. It had been the only one, dusty on a high shelf, with a blue and white Chinese pattern. He had had to ask the shop man to get it down for him, and the shop man had needed to fetch steps to do this. It is not every day that the corner shop sells a vase. Manson hoped it would be tall enough. He thought it would be tall enough. He was carrying it wrapped in newspaper. Whistling, he ran up the stairs to the office and bowled through the various staggered fire doors, leaving them swinging and banging against the walls behind him. He burst into the office and approached his desk to find that the bunch of lilies had not been a hallucination, was still on the desk, spilling richly with an even more luxurious effusion of scent than the night before. But the petals were brown at the edges, and the flowers were wilting and weeping, spilling pollen and fluids onto the desk.
Manson decided to put them in the vase anyway, despite their decay. He half-filled it with gulping water from the cooler and then began to feed the stems in one by one, stickily, trying not to break them. It was difficult. They soon began to seem very bunched and crowded, and the sticky stuff they were weeping was causing them to cling to each other and the side of the vase instead of sliding smoothly downwards as Manson had repeatedly envisaged the night before. Eventually he had most of the flowers jammed in at various heights and in various states of disrepair. Manson moved the vase onto the window sill and began his typing, trying not to look at the mangled blooms too much, trying to see them – through the occasional squinty glance – as a collective mass of loveliness instead.
Towards eleven o’clock, the Conveyance beeped. Manson went over to find that they had sent him a collection of logical poetry. He was delighted – he had never had the opportunity to set anything in predicate calculus before. He glanced through the first one, translating it colloquially in his head:
There exists one telephone.
There exists another telephone
such that the second telephone is not
identical to the first telephone.
There does not exist a third telephone
or any other telephone.
There exist exactly two telephones.
He hurried on with the Victorian stuff, more determined than ever to get it out of the way so that he could get on with the logical poetry.
There was no further activity with the Conveyance until mid-afternoon, when Manson summoned it to take away his disc with The Baby of Garrotte And Others finally completed. With the disc dispatched, he glanced across to his wilting flowers, deciding on a contemplative moment at the window to stretch his eyes and bask in the smell of the delightful gift.
Over at the window, he saw that the flowers were infested with tiny green creatures. They appeared to be crawling out of the mangled stems into the trumpet of the flowers, where they beetled about officiously. Manson leaned closer and saw that each had tiny sideways mandibles, horrible ferny hands held up before them as if in Reich-ish exhortation, numerous speedy little legs and glistening eyes. He wondered what they were doing. They were sticky with plant juice, or perhaps some vile excretion of their own. He moved away from them and back to the logical poetry with some relief. He was distracted slightly from what he was working on by wondering what to do with the flowers when it was time to dispose of them. The only bins in the office were specifically for paper recycling. The picture-windows did not open, not that it would be seemly to chuck rotting flowers down into the street from that gleaming monolith. He certainly couldn’t bundle them back into the Conveyance. Could he somehow get the flower corpses out of the building without making a mess?
It would be alright to leave them for a day or so. Perhaps he would have thought of something by the time the rot became acute.
Manson regarded the Conveyance as an item that delivered tasks and he was afraid that he was shirking some important duties by being unable to interpret what was expected of him in connection with the flowers. He wanted to get on with the logical poetry, and tried to do so, but –
But, flowers?
That night, for the first time in many years, Manson was conscious of a dream: in fact, a nightmare. He found himself walking along a bridge, first a bridge across a river, and then between two stretches of urban building. He was weary and cold and the walking was hard and heavy; the concrete ground seemed to pound his bowels with each step, his femurs as pestles, no matter how gently he tried to step. And he was not able to step gently because he was losing his guide, his light, his love, who was walking ahead and becoming ever further and faster and smaller. He tried to call, to beg a few moments’ grace, perhaps just a second’s suspension of the hastening away from him. But his voice refused to speak as his legs refused to hurry and as his love refused to stay, Manson perceived, with his heart as much as his eyes, the figure ahead growing more and more shadowy and in the end, although he never removed his gaze, he was walking along the cold concrete between cold walls towards no one and for nothing.
The next morning when he arrived at work the smell of the rotting flowers was overpowering. Manson approached the vase and as he peered into it, became aware of a secondary smell: of the stagnating water, threaded with brown fibres. There was no way he could pretend any longer that the flowers were an ornament to the room, even from a distance. Their petals were brown and shrunken, their stamens obscenely protruding, and they were even falling apart; the vase was surrounded by piles of the shedding papery petals. What was to be done with them? Manson decided to get on with his work and think about the flowers later.
The poems he was working on were beautiful but difficult and, being unfamiliar with the keystrokes for predicate calculus, Manson found the work hard. He was making more mistakes than he usually did; he was afraid that he had made even more mistakes than he had noticed himself, and began to worry about how he would know when he had spotted and corrected them all. He began to wish that there was a printer in his office so that he could proof his work on paper; the characters on screen seemed to flicker and dart about under his eyes. The flower stink seethed. He would be able to do nothing further while the flowers were in the room. He dashed across the room and pressed the button to call the Conveyance. In the few seconds before its arrival, Manson began to wonder if he was doing the right thing, but his blood was up, and he wasn’t able to conceive of an alternative. The beep sounded, and he opened the doors, lifted the tall stinking lilies – strings of slimy water streeling out of them – into the compartment, and laid them down diagonally, tucking their extremities carefully around them at the edges; then he considered the vase for a moment and placed that inside too, standing in the back corner. He closed the doors and pressed the button.
As soon as he heard the humming he knew he had made a terrible mistake. There was a double clunk from the shaft, which he knew was the vase toppling, and he imagined the foul water pouring out. Manson punched the code in to recall the Conveyance; repeatedly and feverishly he pounded the buttons, eventually at random. The Conveyance did not return; the lights on the display flashed, all simultaneously, and the machine emitted a loud continuous beep before becoming completely and irrevocably silent and still and unlit.
Manson straightened, rubbed his face, and turned to the picture-window. There was no picture. Behind the glass, the city emitted a yellow sodium glare. There were no stars.
All content copyright Deirdre Heaney