Irresistible Temptation

A short story by Fletcher Kovich

At the age of twenty-four, I met an old man whose eyes were burdened with woe. He stood beside a gateway in a high hedge which was of no interest to me (the hedge bordered the long, winding lane that I was walking along). The man was of even less interest to me until I heard his voice. It stopped me in my tracks, as when a forgotten nightmare is suddenly and vividly recalled.

He said, “Whatever you do, don’t go in there,” nodding towards the yawning gateway beside him.

I resumed my pace along the winding lane, only glancing back to check that the man was now out of sight, when I pushed my way through the hedge and found myself in a peculiar garden. I found an employer looking sternly at me. There was a desk beside him but I could not quite make out the setting; the area around it was dark and indistinct; it was only the desk that I could see in sharp focus; I could make out every detail of it, the stack of pens, the anglepoise lamp, and even the grain of its wooden surface, which seemed polished from years of use.

The employer told me to sit at the desk and do some work, which I did; or attempted to do, for I could not see what was expected of me. He then placed a stack of forms in front of me and walked away. I began to sweat; I had not been so suddenly moist since the time when my primary school teacher had unexpectedly placed an exam form on my desk and walked away with no explanation. I had looked around and all the other children began feverishly writing. Had I missed something?—I wondered. And that day at my first job in the garden, I felt just as mystified. I wrestled with each form’s logic, making random entries before guiltily sliding each form into my “out box” and hoping that no-one would ever discover the part I had played in the company’s downfall. But to my inestimable dismay, five years later the company was not only still functioning but their apparent appetite for my random form-entries was only increasing. I could see no escape. I had even been promoted to a larger desk nearby with a panoramic view of a puzzlingly shaped shrubbery, out of which, cardboard cut-outs of famous persons would periodically pop up like ducks in a shooting gallery. This spectacle had only momentarily distracted me from my main concern, which was the part I suspected I was playing in the company’s downfall. I agonized over this for the first six months of my promotion, by which time the pop-up celebrities in the shrubbery had become an accepted part of my immediate landscape. And even more beyond my main preoccupation was the enticing maze that lay beyond the shrubbery, which people could often be seen entering, but never again emerging from.

After a further six years of randomly completing mysterious forms under the occasional gaze of cardboard cut-out celebrities, I looked up and noticed that the woman who sat at an adjoining desk was winking at me. She was not unattractive, so I was tempted to bestow upon her wink the most optimistic interpretation, which had involved us performing bedroom gymnastics of the most energetic kind and not without any unreasonable intervening delay or having to first endure some intricate negotiating routine, or go through any other such mystifying palaver—in short, that we simply got right down to it.

“Can I help you?” she said.

The answer that sprang to my mind I did not yet feel confident enough to share with her, so I told her that I was managing perfectly well.

“Are you sure?” she said, and she winked again, but this time even more suggestively. At least, that was how it had seemed to me. But it was my primary school exam all over again. What answer was I suppose to give; everyone else seemed fluent in this language which I had never been coached in. Had I missed something?

We soon found ourselves sitting in a small rowboat in the middle of a dark lake when she asked, “Do you find me attractive?”

I was taken aback, since no-one had ever delved so deeply into my mind, which had previously always seemed a private place. But since she had rescued me from the trepidation of endlessly inventing random entries on those mysterious forms while awaiting the company’s resultant downfall—which trepidation I have to confess had almost been the undoing of me—I felt that she at least deserved a reply. Not wanting to mention anything that I should not—things, for instance, that perhaps my primary school teacher might frown upon—I told her that she had a pleasing personality, at which point her personality seemed to transform. She took the oar from me and tossed it into the lake, saying, “So, that’s what you think of me, is it!”

At first, I thought that when the oar had hit the surface of the lake, it had thrown up, what had seemed like, congealed lumps of black water which had landed in the boat, but when I looked down I noticed that those lumps were alive and thrashing about. I lifted my feet clear of them and told her, “Well, it’s true; and also, you’ve always seemed most considerate.”

She took the other oar from me and tossed it over the other side of the boat, sending more of those black lumps of living matter flying into the boat as she told me, “If only I’d know! I suspected something was wrong.”

The boat drifted on the barely perceptible current for a full eight years, all of the time my body seeming to become ever more infested by those black fish-things which kept leaping from the water, landing in the boat and somehow finding shelter beneath my very skin. I could not then move without three or four of them being stirred into action and seemingly feeling the need to test the security of their shelter, as a repeatedly opened wound is tested by the probing of a surgeon’s knife. Finally, it seemed that my skin was no longer able to protect me from the world’s scrutiny, and yet still the woman kept beating me with my own words. I learnt to say nothing, which silence then became the club that she would use to probe my wounds even more deeply with.

The boat finally came to rest on the shore and I ran for cover. I did not look behind me for two whole days. The garden had now become a desert, it seemed to me. My mouth was dry and as I ran—and my run gradually became a walk—I could feel those fish-things drying and falling from my skin, which, as the days and weeks went by, gradually healed under the warm glow of the sun.

At the age of forty-two, I came upon a train carriage in the desert and I stumbled into it. It soon began to move. There was a feeling of inevitability about its motion, as though no-one aboard had any choice in the matter of their journey; we were all accidental passengers, travelling to wherever the train took us—or that was how it seemed to me. I noticed a group of people gathered around a table, watching the lighted candles on a birthday cake.

“Is this for me——?” I found myself saying out loud. I could not help it; I had rarely felt such excitement. The sight of that cake seemed to transport me to a time prior to the moment when that first exam paper had been placed on my primary school desk. Strange though it seems, I felt like skipping with glee. I watched a young child blow out the candles and then, as he looked up to me and said, “Thank you, daddy,” my heart sank.

I sat on a seat and watched the world pass by. I had no idea where the train was taking me. At the next stop, I got off and wandered the paths of the garden, looking for a haven for my tortured mind. A sign above a potting shed read “Place of Peace”. I, of course, entered. I sat in a deck chair, for I was tired after my journey.

In the first two minutes of my occupancy, I listened to the sounds from outside, which gradually diminished, as though retreating from me. All that was left was silence, which I listened to like I had listened to no other sound in my life. The silence seemed to engulf me—as the darkness of a moonless night in the wilderness might. And out of that wilderness, I then heard approaching footsteps. They entered the potting shed and a kind man’s voice asked, “Are you sitting comfortably?”

I describe him as a voice only, because I could not make out any of his features, or perhaps I was just not interested in his features. His voice, though, did interest me; I had never heard a voice that had seemed more kind.

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

He asked, “Is there anything I can get you?”

“No,” I said; “I am perfectly comfortable.”

“Good,” he said, and then he looked down to the wide pale that my feet were resting in (I had found it at the foot of the deck chair, so it had seemed perfectly natural for me to rest my feet in this pale while I was sitting in the chair), and he reached behind him for a bucket of freshly mixed concrete and poured it over my feet. He repeated the process until the concrete had reached halfway up my shins. I watched his performance without comment, for it somehow seemed a perfectly natural thing to do. He left, also without comment. The next day, the concrete had set. He returned to ask if I was comfortable.

“Yes,” I told him, for I had no complaints about my treatment. “But,” I added, “I am starting to get thirsty.”

“We have thought about that,” he told me, and he produced a glass of water.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Is there anything else?” he asked, in his kind voice.

I was now feeling bold, so I told him, “And I am starting to get hungry.”

“Yes,” he said; “we thought you might have been,” and he produced a meal, which I ate with relish. He then gave me some work to do, which I did not find puzzling; it seemed to make perfect sense, and I worked contentedly.

In this manner, seven further years passed, by which time the potting shed had been extended to accommodate about twenty more workers. I, naturally, had been placed in a position of authority and my concreted pale had been slid across the floor so that it rested beside a large window, which gave me a privileged view of the garden. Behind my back, the other workers then began conspiring against me, or so it seemed to me. And the effect of their campaign was to poison the sight of that garden for me. I had begun to enjoy that sight far more than I had enjoyed any other experience in my life, but each time I spoke to my workers (which had then become the extent of my own work, for I was now merely supervising the labour of others), they would take my words and expertly fashion them into clubs with which to beat me, in the same manner that the woman in the boat had done, and I was no match for such expertise. I had managed to endure this torture from one person, but now there was an army of twenty such torturers, and those earlier wounds that had been inflicted by those black fish-things began opening again. It seemed that once such wounds had been inflicted, they were incapable of ever being truly healed. I had merely forgotten about them, in my happy few years as a mere worker in that potting shed. But now those workers began testing my old wounds at every opportunity. And after four further years of sitting in that chair, and once the sight of every flower or leaf or dancing butterfly in the garden had been robbed of its beauty by the effect on me of their probing, and once my wounds could bleed no more and it seemed that my entire skin had been replaced with some inadequate fabric which offered no protection against even the meekest of the outside world’s scrutinies—this feeble, permeable fabric that had now come to replace the resilient skin I was born with—once I could thus bleed no more, my distress, one day, erupted—as the dying dash of a cornered animal erupts, with one final effort, being faced with the certain sight of death and finding the strength to instead flee—and my distress’s force ruptured the concrete around my feet and I found myself running through the garden.

This pattern seemed to repeat itself through two further bouts of employment, and after a further twelve years of such trials had passed, I yet again found myself fleeing through the garden, but this time with less virility. I no longer had the stomach for combat. Even after periods of rest, and of being fed and watered by an occasional kind voice, I found that my appetite had escaped me. I could do this no longer. And as luck would have it, just as I had realized this, I noticed that same hedge that I had entered the garden through. I followed it for a while and then came to that same gateway that had been guarded from the outside by that old man. The gateway was open, as it had been before, and there seemed to be nothing stopping me from passing back out through it, which I did. On the outside, I noticed that the old man was no longer standing there; there was no-one guarding the gateway.

I stood beside that yawning gateway, and whenever anyone passed, particularly if they were young, I felt the need to say to them:

“Whatever you do, don’t go in there,” and nod towards the gateway.

Of course, each person would walk on down that winding lane, and when they were out of sight, I knew exactly what they would do. I knew this so well, for I had been there myself.

2 February 2010

[edited 27 February 2010]

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