Fantasy: Hothouse of the Black Orchid

Hothouse of the Black Orchid

By J.B. Pravda

Frenchmen liken it to lightning, a coup de foudra.

Never sure of why or how, it didn't seem to matter. Debts needed
payment, Karma &; Company, collector.

No clear memories clouded the scenery of floating people and events.
Mostly self-delusion or illusion, with allusions to confusions of old
standing. But they couldn't persist. Prostrate was the condition
without intermission.

Naive thinking and wise meanderings had brought about the present
filled with empty things. Such a thing was she, darkest of the minions
of his nature, manifesting in strange sinews of weakness on a street of
reams to come. Clad in striped culpability hip to ankle, aging
pulchritude's shallow prison, Geisha pallor served to enthrall that
part of dalliance makes for bloodless terror.

Booted though bootlessly bereft of soul he, at the corner of indecision
and peril, poised to shed the faint glimmerings of poise itself.

'Kept', a sham of essential manhood, within a silken shroud, beclouded
of mind, of sentience itself save carnality's version----he would wear
this mark willingly. Sterility knew contagion there, at the pulsing
death of conscience.

"Actually, they're Western boots" he corrected; the rock-steering siren
had dared to consign his lizard-skin Eighties power footwear to some
knockabout cowboy's wardrobe.

"Oh, I stand corrected" she oozed, surveying him for potential
potential. A chance encounter, she sauntering toward him and their
mutual friend, his hostess, a matronly castoff from a former nightclub
mogul gone to some government hotel for transgressions reminiscent of
that favorite battering ram of the Sovereign, 'the power to tax, the
power to destroy'; apparently, he had given certain authorities
particular relish in demonstrating its verity.

A pedestrian venture to the corner deli for milk had launched a brand
of chaos theretofore unknown to mere disorder; he was to be librettist
to her psyche's cacophony.

Somehow surviving in a nuclear winter-like cloud he had carried with
him ever since being overcome at Ground Zero by the Dissolution Bomb,
Marsden found himself in Manhattan on some hopeless business his
failing law practice held onto by sheer force of habit.

He was essentially broke, staying with a friend of his first-strike
opposite. At 130 pounds, he was a wizened wanderer in the marginal
territory known as anorexia, a self-imposed result of foolish guilt
over the end of a relationship best described as having all the
romance, and convenience, of incest. She, his latest experiment in
self-delusion, he would learn on first glance at her cold hands and the
scars seeming to attach them to her slender forearms, was mere days
from her latest attempt at murder for one.

Two runaways, as in trains, sharing the same track.

In an ever-expanding universe, where degree and speed of seperation of
material clusters within it seemed to continually grow, they were
colliding, neither one seeming to regard 'antimatter' and its dramatic
potential as anything other than their mutual agent of wished-for
demise, an end that just didn't 'matter'.

Supernovas are so rare that they are history's evidence of the
Godforce's effectuation of seeming major policy decisions, the subject
of both, way beyond mortal ken. Personal histories aren't too different
among the willingly forgetful, major events keeping their faint
glow.
Abandonment was the theme of theirs, differing only in its
direction.

For Layana, if that was her name, it had begun with a refugee mother,
living in the camps of Albania after Hitler's suicide whose putative
husband had disappeared, feared dead, officially; he had been a freedom
fighter and the result of his alleged heroism had been squalor for his
fellows.

No matter, she had found another, also a fighter, 'Jimmy'. The child
learned quickly and well about Mars' progeny, his transience,
especially while next to you,'loving you.' Her philosopher stone was
cold, strange alchemies having taken their fractal course in
space-time; It came to rest in grateful substitution for what others
called a heart.

"I'm very fond of you&;#8230;." Was the refrain of Its keeper; no
prizer of love and its trappings, amusement was her revenue and
expenditure, and a 'profit' was always shown.

"That sounds a lot like how I feel about dogs and baby
ducks&;#8230;." Marsden riposted, feeling the sting of a rehearsed
parry.

Damned by the faintest praise, a final thrust was called for.

"I suppose you're right&;#8230;..after all, it is a four-letter
word" , a palpable strike, despite her having been very much en
garde.

"Is my young stud angry with me, dar-ing?" She never used the 'l', like
some failed Garbo impersonator; he concluded that it must have been
those years in London, both as a child taught to haunt the enemy, and,
later, on Half Moon Street.

The door closed automatically, in seeming emulation of its momentary,
now departed passerby. Staring into the silvered-rectangle of glass
suspended directly above him, like some Clarkean monolith for cosmic
voyeurs, he was aware of his absurdity: a 'kept' man of a keeper of
bipedal specimens, the sole attraction of a private zoological
experiment in which the subject was both wild and docile, Barnum's
freakish permutation, extrapolated from all the blind alleys and
detours for destructive work he loosely regarded as
his----its-----life.

Six months since the electrical voltage from below had discharged and
found him its target, he was feeling captivity with strange detachment.
The reflective ceiling helped promote the sensation, the observer
becoming the observed, only in a way that would cause Siddharta himself
to adamantly declare Buddhism a fraud. Risking that conjured
possibility, 'I am the reflection of my reflection' ran koan-like
through his maddening brain. A neural storm regurgitated random phrases
and images without any correlation except, maybe, that they lived,
however briefly, in the same head. Dreaming. The necktop dreamtrack
went as follows: 'How can I observe my own dreams? There is no 'I',
except the one 'I' have created&;#8230;&;#8230;that's right, so
I=I proves this refractive theory'----a tautology that he was certain
had occurred to him alone in all space-time.
"What the&;#8230;&;#8230;!" Marsden screamed, head butting the
silhouette hovering blurrily over him.
"Oh, sorry dar&;#8230;&;#8230;" Layana started.
She rubbed her forehead routinely, he was strangely numb.
"Come join me in my bath, hmmmm?" was the one-size fits all reprise; he
preferred to engage on dry land, shaking off the pale overture of
appeasement.
"Where have you been?" was his complaint, treated by her as a
greeting.
"Are you sure you won't join me" she Dopplered her voice warping with
departing distance en route to her elaborate inverted ablutionary
altar.

As they lay there that night, their psyches inhabited variant
universes: hers on a haj to mercenary Mecca, his a dead end designed by
Mobeius himself, with a proposed exit under construction by Sartre
&; Co.

"If you leave me, I'll die, you know" he heard her ultimatum clearly,
though her overhead reflection was immobile and asleep. Was it a waking
dream?
"Did you hear me, dar-ing?" ; he decided to reply in his head only:
"Yes, yes, but what made you say such a thing?"
"After all I have given you, you would abandon me, just like that; I
know I have not seemed too attentive but its only my function, you
see-----most of them only want passive enjoyment, to view my petals"
her eyes were now open, yet her mouth did not seem to move.
"We're both dreaming the same dream" was his best surmise. "And, by the
way, that's a very colorful rationalization, 'dare'-ing mine" he added
sardonically.
Now her mouth was moving in the reflection: "Do you know about orchids,
dar-ing? It is said that there are 25,000 natural species, prized all
over the world for their beauty and variety more than any other flower,
and the rarest of all is black&;#8230;.or, should I say, is thought
black, no one's even seen one in years" she was now sitting up, her
naked too symmetrical breasts casting vibrating shadows across the bed
as she spoke----her reflection above remained immobile.
Reason had failed him along with the usually unreliable data from his
eyes----his pulse was way up.
He would try again to locate the time/space he used to know: "Where do
you get all this?" his peripheral vision now confirming the disparity
between the mirror and its subject.
"The botanical gardens in London are spectacular, dar-ing; the curator
was a business friend, an admirer, you know, and taught me all about
them, the orchids&;#8230;.the Greeks named them, they're very
life-enhancing, especially for the genitals&;#8230;.." she informed,
her reflection above only growing hazier, somehow darker.
"Does that include malakas like me?" he teased, trying to cut the
tension with his reference to their word for queer.
"Dar-ing, you mock me; that's was only when you angered me, silly boy.
You see, the orchid's male components------orchis means 'testes', my
love---- are carefully enclosed so as to avoid self-pollination, unique
among the flora of the world; no, w&;#8230;..they guard their 'man'
very closely, so as to spread their true essence everywhere among other
partners, all in the name of beauty" was her latest trancelike
offering, again, not reflected below, but only in her reflection.
"You're starting to scare me" he blurted, seeking eye contact, having
gently pressed her head against the pillow behind her; he found no dark
pupils, only spaces where her eyes should be. "Are you
alright&;#8230;.Layana&;#8230;.what's happening?" he
pleaded.

Moments passed; he glanced upward to see her ersatz reflection, a
prodigious dark floral presentation, seemingly growing larger by the
minute.
"You see, dar-ing, my 'pollinius', you must be with me, enclosed within
my petaled structure, for beauty's sake&;#8230;&;#8230;.." her
mouth had become a vortex of four petals unfolding. He looked again at
the mirror above-----it had become somehow convex, with lattice-like
architecture, encompassing now the entire space that used to be their
bedroom suite. His body from his feet to his waist had become
enshrouded by a cocoon-like casing; he struggled to move his legs and
knew that he had none.

"We'll awaken, together, now!" he urged upon her, now looking at her
former head upon that pillow and seeing a shadow from above; the
labellum of her floral display, now nearing the top of the warm
greenhouse the room had become, cast a eerie headlike shadow.
"Come&;#8230;..come into my bosom&;#8230;." Her now disembodied
dulcimer voice had become a high-pitched siren song.
The 'room' was now completely dark, or was it that he had no eyes with
which to see; he ceased to perceive, only to sense his envelopment
within something greater, something in charge.

The throng was growing for the annual orchid show in Her Majesty's
Royal Aboretum; of particular note this year was, for the first time in
modern memory, on display an oversized orchid, a rare Black Orchid,
more robust than any other species there evinced.