"And it will die if you do not."
Hell is a climate that Johnson vigilantly predicts and evicts. Comparable in devastation and origin to rising greenhouse gases. Amongst Hara and him, whisking beyond a veil she cannot detect, hell-souls brew-rue together as tantrum-y and useless as hail. Almost literal. That is the nearest analogy she would understandยน. Hells are everywhere. Common, dense Hell biomes: the Bermuda triangle, hospital elevators, parked cars with orange meter tickets latched to their windshields, cell towers. And here; nowhere is empty. When Johnson stalls his breathing, he can hear Hellยฒ. He does so; his lungs a jammed turnstile. Damned souls prattle-tattle on each other by tapping against the all-glass walls of the greenhouse (defectively clear like nonobservant mirrors). It is a grating noise. Worse than the dragged drudgery of respiration (that scrapey rake); he chooses the lesser irritation; he breathes.
Eden, Hara forgets, is a herbal hospice, it is no heaven. Even plants have souls, of which water does not leaven. To teach this, his thumb and index finger pinch together, beakish, and peck the air. Water breaks from the cordyline's scaly stalk. Its leaves pucker and prune like a great grandmother's skinny lips after each farewell. Hara's face similarly wilts.
Johnson steps toward her, his pace matching her slow respiratory rhythm, as if sail-catching it, until he is beside her. He portions an immodest distance between their bodiesโthe cheap shoulder seam of his black suit jacket perfectly stencils her rounded hairline when they bump. For practical reason: at this distance, no more and no less, he can reach all the offending plant's foliage.
In the dirt, his shoeprints sink centimeters shallower than hers. Many creatures, living or otherwise, do not survive his presence. Hara does. These beetles (their obisidian backs the size of torture-torn fingernails) do. Their appendages scratch into the earth; six-legged pupils dedicated to excavating fresher black; their bodies the benchmark. Hers his. Johnson's gaze, just as biologically instinctive; burrowing. The neat part of Hara's blonde hair sweeps down the middle of her scalp like a rushed signature; his ring finger traces that shape on his thigh. Too meditatively slow to convince himself it was a flinch.
Johnson peels the watering can from her grip.
His fingers lift into the cushion of her downturned palm, carriage-side-decorum, and guides it to the sleek vein of a cordyline leaf.
1.) Though, in this abstract hypothetical, Johnson imagines Hara would, after the percussive pelting of real hail passes, collect the icy welts like de-lobed diamond earrings. As if more than one pair is laudatory rather than lamentable.
2.) Hell: a collective noun that refers to a brood of solipsistic souls.
