.

no time flat he was talking to the plants, checking out the texture of the leaves, telling the pretty ones how pretty they were, telling the ones that were all spiky and weird looking that looks didn’t matter, the pink coleus is just a slut for showing off like that, beauty comes and goes so quickly and she was only an annual anyway. He thought the cactuses were sly and devious, he called them the “tricksters of the desert”, which I didn’t quite follow because I have to admit all those spikes didn’t look so sly to me, they were pretty direct, in fact, but when I pointed that out Len just laughed, like there was so much about cactuses that I just didn’t know. Which of course how could you argue with that, I actually don’t know anything about cactuses, I was just making an observation. And then he took me into the orchid room and I got an earful about the orchids. He had truly more than a hundred different kinds, each one stranger than the next. Some had spots all over them, which I had never seen before on any flower. They were pink and purple and yellow and white, and dark red with black centers, and there was one that was black everywhere, which was strangely frightening, to see a completely black flower. There were some that looked like stars and some that looked like butterflies, some that looked like tarantulas, some that looked like hornets or some other kind of stinging animal, and then of course there were just dozens that looked like sex organs. Seriously, all of those flowers looked like they want to have sex with humans. It was a bit creepy, honestly. I was somewhat afraid to touch them.

      This turned out to be a good impulse on my part, as Len sort of casually informed me once we were done with the orchid room.

      “Some of them are poisonous,” he admitted. “The pollen, the ovules, the nectar, this little darling here—don’t touch—not that it would really hurt you permanently, but you very well might lose all feeling in your arm, for at least a day.”

      “Come on, Len,” I said.

      “Do you want to try it?” he asked, raising those eyebrows at me.

      I didn’t. “But if orchids are poisonous how come everybody has them in their houses?” I asked.

      “Only certain species, Tina. Use your head,” he told me, pulling out a very small pair of clippers and snipping some extraneous vines away from a line of bright yellow star-shaped flowers which wound down the side of a tree. “Please don’t touch that.”

      “You can’t touch any of them?” I asked.

      “Until you know which ones are poisonous, and which aren’t, no, in fact, you can’t touch any of them.—

      “How did you find out which ones are poisonous?”

      “The hard way,” he informed me. “I studied.”

      The place smelled like growing things, and sounded like water. He had little fountains in corners, and strange pools suddenly appeared behind tree trunks, or alongside a hillside of ferns. That greenhouse was so big it had hills—small hills, but there were definite undulations. And everything was green, a thousand different greens, each one more subtle than the next. In spite of the pink coleus and the startling sexuality of the many-colored and poisonous orchids, green was what you saw, everywhere. And sky. You forgot, honestly, that you were in a building, in a city, on an island. I don’t know where you were, but it was not where you thought.