The Greenhouse continued
They had found him in the spring, my uncle and his assistants, and brought him back as they would any other rare find and put him in the tall glass cage. I hadn't thought him tall, though it was hard to tell; his charm was such that he left an impression rather than an image in the mind. One had to come back again and again, just to look at him, to see him and soothe that nagging need to remember, always sure that this time you would have him trapped in your memory. It was what he fed off of. That and the air; he was supposed to be closely related to the dendrodiums.
It took a long time, but they finally put a label near the base of his cage.
***
He was as white as a bianco, but his body was not luminous like those broad white petals; it was a color as flat as shadows. It was his eyes that held all the light, all the enchantment, coming at me out of the dark as they had before, at night. They were beautiful and there was nothing like a soul in them. Pretty as a jewel, foreign as a reptile's stare, he had no soul to be bartered or broken. What he had instead was what made his eyes and his voice so beautiful, what saved him from speaking our language. His beauty was so refined that it nearly ceased to be natural; it could not exist outside his pretty cage, outside of a dream. It was luxuriously without relevance or use; it referred to nothing.
It wouldn't be enough to look at him until the greenhouse finally collapsed beneath the weight of the forest and the humidity. I would never be able to capture his essence, to retain any clear image of him, to ever explain or describe him. He knew, and he smiled in that awful, fetching, soulless way of his. Of course he would never be starved, he knew someone would come to look at him and try to fix him in stasis.
***
I left the ruined greenhouse that night, a perverse act of will. His nocturnal beauty was even more disturbing, with his lamp bright eyes and his body a dim suggestion, a softening of the darkness. Moths had found their way through the ventilation holes and fluttered around him, alighting on his knees, his lips, the curve of his cheek.
Night in the forest was profound, a dense and physical thing, sensual and dangerous, alive. There could be anything between the greenhouse and the house; I could take a wrong step, lead myself entirely astray and be lost in the forest. I was not troubled. If I were to come to harm then he would be alone again.
Memory prevailed, though, and I found the house. Things rot fast in the forest, but not what I was looking for. Inside, the ruin and rot were even worse, the drapes and furniture mouldering. Half of the walls had collapsed and much of the ceiling had fallen in. There was a shallow, rippling pool of water in what had been the dining room. The stairs had crumbled long ago, but the closet beneath them was sound, and I found what I wanted within.
I crossed that black yard again, slipped back through the rusted door of the greenhouse and went right up to his cage. I showed him what I had, rapped the wavy glass of his cage with it and startled one of the moths into dashing itself to death. He looked at what I had, and smiled in what I suppose was something like pleasure.
I dragged a chair in front of his cage and fell asleep there with the rifle laid crosswise on my knees.
***
