Professor Timothy Melrick loved cacti. He also grew cacti and felt, as many others do, that there was no plant quite as intriguing. That was his avocation. He earned a modest living as a Professor of Chinese Philosophy at a small California college, where he could share his adoration of Chuang Tzu with the handful of students who were interested enough in Chinese Philosophy to maintain his tenure. He was also, somewhat apologetically, a Zen Buddhist.
His wife, Barbara, who was inclined to blame Zen for his lack of ambition, frequently took him to task on this score.
“I happen to be a Presbyterian,” she would say to him. “I don’t apologize when someone asks me why I am a Presbyterian.”
“Well, you can explain that, you know,” he would reply gently. “Your mother and father were Presbyterians.”
“Yours were certainly not Zen Buddhists.”
“No, they weren’t.”
“And what you are you can’t even explain to me.”
“It’s not very easy to explain you know. Old Tozan said, ‘When I am hungry I eat, when I am thirsty I drink, and when I am tired, I sleep.’”
“Who was Tozan?” Barbara asked.
“He was an old Zen monk who lived long ago.”
“He sounds like some kind of wino. You are probably the lowest-paid full professor in all California, and I know one thing.”
“Yes?”
. “I’ll never own a Mercedes, not even a used one. So much for you and what you call contentment!”
Professor Melrick loved his wife. He thought of this as he retreated to his garden, where he was trying to cross two very improbable cousins, Echinomastus macdowellii with Echinopsis longispina, both of which resembled sick and confused porcupines until they came into flower. Their flowers were beautiful indeed. He hardly blamed his wife, and while the reference to the Mercedes—a very high priced automobile made in Germany—might have seemed a non sequitur to an outsider, it was quite understandable to the professor. Of course, he lived in Glendale, which is only a short distance from Beverly Hills, and, as the Mercedes Company knows full well, there are more Mercedes per capita in Beverly Hills than in any city in the world except Bel Air, which flanks Beverly Hills to the west, and which has an even higher per-capita income.
It was not simply proximity or envy that had reduced Barbara to a perpetual state of bitterness and frustration. It was her brother, recently deceased. Her brother was the Gordon Tymon of Interlock Industries. He had owned an eleven-acre estate in Bel Air, and he was rich beyond probability. Soon after the explosion of the first atom bombs toward the end of World War II, Gordon Tymon determined that his was not to go the way of all flesh—whereupon he undertook the ultimate in atom bomb shelters at his Bel Air estate.
For twenty-five years an army of contractors labored on this project in an out-of-the-way corner of the estate. It did no good for Professor Melrick to warn him that the Santa Monica Mountains, threaded as they were with earthquake faults, were an unlikely place for an atom bomb shelter, or to propose a philosophical attitude toward man’s future; in fact, as Barbara often pointed out to her husband, he so alienated the tycoon that Gordon cast off his sister, even as a recipient of small gifts.
Year after year, more and more of the atom bomb shelter emerged—or did not emerge, since shelters are sheltered—and a great cavern grew in the ground. Airlocks, elevators, generators, hidden tanks of oil and gasoline, vitamins by the thousands, dehydrated food, film-projectors, films for amusement, water tanks—only name it and rest assured that it was there. Meanwhile, Gordon’s wife, Zelda, played tennis. Whatever else she did was. unseen; the tennis was public. Between his financial interests and the atom bomb shelter, he had little time for her. He had become a fanatical pioneer for survival, one of that handful of fortunate beings in America who would survive a direct hit.
In March of 1970, Gordon was on his way from his thirty-two room mansion to the bomb shelter. He often took the little path that led from the one to the other, that he might look upon his recently completed work and find it good. Halfway there, one of those tremendous rainstorms that douse Southern California in March exploded upon him. He quickened his pace, slipped, fell, fractured his skull, and died. They found him there the following day.
Two weeks after the funeral, after the reading of the will which left everything to her and not one penny to Barbara, Zelda married the tennis pro at her club. The happy couple then took off for the south of France, where for years Gordon had maintained a splendid villa which he never had time to visit. And since anything and everything grows like mad in Southern California, the bomb shelter was soon covered by a heavy blanket of Moorish Ivy—forgotten of the world and especially of Zelda, who had never given the atom bomb a second thought.
All this Professor Melrick reflected upon as he made his way from the house to the garden, where he grew his cacti. There were, perhaps, elements of cosmic justice in Gordon’s fate, if one desires to believe in so silly a business as cosmic justice—which, Timothy Melrick, for one, did not—but the bitter nut of the matter was that three elegant Mercedes had been standing idle in Gordon’s—now Zelda’s—garage for five years. How could he blame Barbara for bitterness, frustration, anger? He had never even been able to afford a Buick and, even worse, had never even desired a Buick—the trouble with being a Zen person in a very non-Zen environment.
He turned with a sigh to that marvelous diversion, the cacti. He, for one, had never accepted the theory that the cactus was a primitive plant—a holdover from the early time of life on earth. Quite otherwise; he saw the cacti as plants faced with that same threat of extinction that the environmentalists forecast for all of mankind these days. An earth once wet and rich now dried up; where once were seas, deserts appeared, and where once were cloudy skies and cool winds, there was a burning sun, never shaded. The plants were faced with the imperative of life. Adapt—or perish. In musing over this, he thought of a story told recently in the faculty dining room. It would seem—according to this little tale—that the Russians had exploded a very large atom bomb at the North Pole. The Polar ice cap began to melt at a rate that would raise the seas above all the land masses of the earth. One by one, the heads of nations informed their people that human life was doomed, that they must prepare to perish—that is with the exception of the Prime Minister of Israel. She said to her handful of people: “Fellow Jews—we have three months to learn to breathe under water.”
Not so different from what the plants faced, the professor mused, when the land turned into desert. Their life-giving leaves shriveled under the burning sun, whereupon they shed their leaves, abandoned their dry stems and trunks, and instead grew stems of green, rich in chlorophyl. When the sun attacked these new receptacles of life, the plants thickened their skin until it resisted the worst the sun could do. When animals found these thick, juicy stems very much to their taste, the plants proceeded to grow long, sharp spines, and when the insects they needed so desperately for cross pollination began to avoid the hot desert, the plants developed flowers of such beauty and color as the world had not seen before. Not at all a bad recommendation for the power and resourcefulness of life, the professor decided, looking with affection at his garden of strange shapes, needle-like spikes and gorgeous blooms; not at all. And looking at them, he felt that his affection was being returned, that these marvelous plants knew his feelings and reciprocated them.
And then something new caught his eye. His strange new cactus, the result of his crossing Echinomastus macdowellii with Echinopsis longispina, had suddenly flowered with one great, lovely bloom: white petals that yellowed at the tips, with a heart that contained a few brilliant pink pistils in a mass of white stamens so heavily crowned with a yellow pollen that they could barely stand erect. For moments that grew into minutes, he stood there regarding it, with pleasure, love and deep aesthetic appreciation. Then, after sufficient homage, he did a very curious thing, moved by something he found difficult to account for later; he wet his finger, reached out and touched the pollen, and then put it to his lips. As his tongue licked it, the reaction was immediate and wonderful. He experienced what Zen people call satori, or, as others say, enlightenment.
He knew it, because one always does. He could not explain it or describe it, because one never can. He looked at the world around him with understanding and joy and compassion. It was all right. It would be all right.
Now the professor had a cat. He had the cat, not out of his choice but out of the cat’s choice. It was a mean cat. It was a plain old gray and white alley cat that in its lifetime had suffered such a succession of indignities and hurts that it could only display hate and suspicion.
It was a nasty cat, a hate-filled, wretched angry cat. And at this moment, the cat was watching the professor with interest, suspicion, and hunger. The cat had been absent for two days, catting around as cats do, which accounted for the hunger.
Again, the professor wet his finger and picked up a bit of the yellow pollen, which he rubbed off into the center of his palm. Then he bent down and offered his hand to the cat.
Slowly, dubiously, watchfully, the cat advanced. The professor was patient; the cat was suspicious. The professor had fed the cat for a full two years, and still the cat was suspicious. But the cat was also hungry, and step by step he approached the professor’s hand. He was at the hand. He sniffed. He looked at the professor, and then he sniffed again. And then he licked the yellow pollen out of the professor’s palm.
And then he looked at the professor—as once in a while, very rarely, a cat will look at a man. Then he mewed.
The professor reached down and picked up the cat in his hands and then nestled him in his arms. The cat licked the professor’s face and mewed. After a minute or so, the professor put down the cat and went into the house. The cat followed him. The professor went into the kitchen and opened a can of cat food. Purring with pleasure, the cat ate it.
“What on earth are you doing in the kitchen?” his wife called to him.
“Feeding the cat.”
“Why you don’t get rid of that ugly, wretched cat, I will never know.”
“I’m rather fond of him,” the professor replied.
Then he went into his study and meditated for a while, sitting cross-legged on a small cushion. He had quite a problem facing him, and while meditation offered no solution for such problems, it did at least allow him to stop thinking about it. He had been meditating for some ten minutes or so when his wife came into the room, looked at him, and said:
“Oh.” She had a way of saying it, a remarkable way. “You do look ridiculous when you sit like that. I mean, a grown man.”
He smiled apologetically.
“That cat of yours is acting very strangely.”
“Yes. How?”
“Dinner is ready.”
“You were saying about the cat?”
“He purred.”
“Cats do purr.”
“He purred pleasantly.”
“I’ll be with you in a moment,” the professor said. “I’ll just wash up.”
He took a tiny plastic envelope from his desk, and went out to the garden, musing over a name. He was neither proud nor obsessed with any desire for immortality, even in the small botonist’s world of the cactus, and he decided that Echinomastus contentii would serve very satisfactorily. The cat came after him mewing with delight as the professor shook a little of the yellow pollen into the plastic envelope..
“I do wonder how the world appears to you,” he said to the cat.
Apparently the cat, purring with pleasure, understood him completely.
“What a beautiful, incredible thing you are!” he said to the cactus.
From the house, his wife called to him. “What on earth are you up to out there? Who are you talking to?”
“A cactus,” he replied as he came back into the house.
“I don’t think that’s funny. If we could eat one meal where the food doesn’t sit around and get cold while you fuss over God knows what to get yourself to the dinner table, I would be a very happy woman. Anyone else can come to dinner when dinner is ready, not you. You always have five things that must be done.”
“I’m afraid so,” the professor agreed.
“And I don’t want that miserable cat in the room while we eat.”
The cat understood. He regarded his mistress plaintively, and then he marched reluctantly out of the room.
Barbara served the chicken and rice, and then informed him that she had run into Clair Maguire at the shopping center.
“Did you? I do hope you gave her my very best. And to her husband. He’s a gifted man.”
“They’re making him the head of Oriental Studies at U.C.L.A.”
“That’s just wonderful,” the professor replied.
“It’s more than just wonderful. It’s forty thousand dollars a year.”
The professor nodded with appreciation.
“I don’t think you ever hear me, Timothy,” Barbara said. “I said forty thousand a year.”
“Yes. Yes, of course. It’s a handsome wage.”
“They’re moving. Do you want some more rice?”
“No, thank you.”
“To Westwood.”
“Oh? Well, that will be nice. He can walk to the college.”
“They bought a ninety-thousand-dollar house. With a swimming pool.”
The professor smiled and nodded.
“Timothy, Timothy,” his wife said, her voice as soft and beguiling as she could make it under the circumstances. “I’m trying to tell you something. Bob Maguire will be the head of the department. They will have an empty chair in Oriental Philosophy, and Clair said he is thinking of you. It’s thirty thousand dollars a year. Thirty thousand dollars.”
“That’s very thoughtful of him.”
“Is that all you can say? It’s double what you make now.”
“Well, a small college has its own problems.”
“But they’re not your problems.”
“I just don’t know whether I would be very happy at U.C.L.A. It’s such an enormous place.”
“Well, I do know that I would be very happy in Westwood or Brentwood and driving a decent car instead of that miserable Pinto, and just once, just once in my life being able to take some friends for lunch to the Bistro and not thinking twice about the check—”
“What is the Bistro?” the professor asked curiously.
“You ass!” Barbara exploded. “You fool!”
“I’m terribly sorry.”
“Like hell you are! You wouldn’t accept it—not even if Bob Maguire got down on his knees and pleaded.”
The professor was thinking of how he could possibly move his cactus garden. Some of the plants were twenty years old. There was no way he could imagine transferring them to another area. And as if she were reading his mind, Barbara snapped at him, “It’s those damn ugly plants of yours, isn’t it!”
He was trying to formulate some answer to this when suddenly Barbara burst into tears, leaped to her feet, and ran into the bedroom.
The professor sat at the table for a few minutes, lost in thought. Then he poured a cup of coffee, took out the plastic envelope of pollen, shook it into the coffee, and stirred. He brought the coffee into the bedroom, where Barbara was sprawled on the bed.
“Barbara,” he said gently.
She didn’t move.
“Barbara, please look at me. Please.”
She sat up, presenting him with a tear-stained face, and the professor observed that she was a very handsome woman indeed, quite as attractive in her forty-ninth year as on the day he had married her. Even her frown of anger and disgust could not hide it.
“What do you want?” she asked coldly.
“I thought we might talk about this.”
“Why?”
“Well, it’s not open and shut, is it? I brought you a cup of coffee. Please drink it. You’ll feel better.”
He touched her most tender spot. Coffee was an elixir to Barbara She reached for the coffee, tasted it and then drained the cup. She took a deep breath and then stared curiously at her husband.
“Of course, you couldn’t move the cactus garden, could you,” she said finally.
“I could move the smaller plants, certainly. That’s no great task.”
“But the big ones?”
“They’d have to stay.”
“Oh, no—no.”
“It’s no great loss.”
“But you love them. They mean so much to you.”
“Really not,” the professor said. “Not at all. They’re there. I don’t own them. A plant is a living thing. It has a life and existence of its own.”
“I never thought about it that way.”
“Well, most people don’t. We’re so used to owning things.”
“Then it’s not the cactus garden,” said Barbara.
“I don’t think so. Look dear, why don’t we go outside and talk about this. It’s a fine evening.”
He took her by the hand and led her out into the garden. The cat joined them. They sat down on the bench under an enormous hibiscus, and the cat leaped into Barbara’s lap and curled up there, purring with pleasure.
“Whatever has gotten into this cat?” Barbara wondered.
“He seems very content.”
“Oh, I was so angry with you,” she said, stroking the cat. “Isn’t there something we could do to improve his coat—I mean vitamins or something—he really is a handsome cat.”
“I’m sure. I’ll have to ask the vet.”
“I don’t know why I was so angry.”
“You had reason enough.”
“I can’t think of any reason. Thirty thousand dollars is a lot of money. We could do things for the kids.”
“The kids are very independent.”
“They are. Do you know, I think they resent gifts.”
“That’s understandable,” the professor agreed.
“It’s nice to think about living in Westwood, but I do love this old house. And our friends are here.”
“I could commute. It’s not a long drive on the freeway.”
“You’d hate it.”
“Well, not really. But I do have a dozen students who are very dear to me. I don’t know whether that’s worth giving up such an enormous increase.”
“Timmey,” she said, “we are not starving.”
“No—” He reached out and touched her cheek. “Do you know how long it is since you call me Timmey?”
“Is it that long?”
“I can get two more years out of my Volkswagen. We could turn in the Pinto and get you one of those big Chevies, what with the rebate and all that.”
“A gas guzzler? Not on your life. I am perfectly content with the Pinto. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about cars. Look how the light strikes the cactus now. I never realized how beautiful they are.”
“People don’t, because they are strange and different. We’re so afraid of anything different.”
“Come to bed,” she said suddenly.
“It’s only nine o’clock.”
“Come to bed.”
“Shall we do the dishes first?”
“The hell with the dishes,” Barbara said. “Come to bed.”
Barbara was asleep when the professor awakened in the morning. He lay there for a while, watching her. No doubt about it, she was quite as attractive as the day they met, and he reflected upon the singular joy of sex between two people who were without rancor, without selfishness, without frustration and very much in love.
He got out of bed quietly and dressed without awakening his wife, and then he went out to wish a good morning to Echinomastus contentii, who had survived the night quite well, and whose lovely petals glistened with a drop or two of the morning dew.
The cat joined him, rubbing contentedly against his leg, which prompted the professor to say, “Cat, there are more things in heaven and earth than I have ever dreamt of, which is hardly original but very much to the point. What are we going to do about it? I really don’t approve of people who interfere, and here I’ve interfered with three of us.”
Then he sighed, climbed into his aged Volkswagen, and drove to the college.
Since he had skipped breakfast at home, he went first to the faculty dining room, and joined two of his colleagues. One of them was Professor Roscoe Martin, widely known as dean of the P.O.D. Society, P.O.D meaning “prophets of doom,” who stood by his flat statement—on television talk shows as well as in scholarly magazines—that mankind would not be around in 1985, considering the rate at which we were destroying the environment. The other was Professor Hallis Grundy, business administration, corporate management, etc. They waved to Melrick, and he sat down at their table and ordered his orange juice, eggs, and toast, and then smiled with pleasure for their company.
“You are disgustingly content,” Grundy said. “You sit down with two of the nastiest malcontents on this miserable faculty, who are even more ridden with dissatisfaction and jealousy than our average unattractive colleague, and you act as though you were convening a caucus of saints. That’s a stinking attitude.”
“I agree,” said Martin.
“Well, it is a lovely day,” Melrick said.
“Did you notice the smog or didn’t you?” Martin snapped at him. “It’s lying against the mountains like a stinking yellow blanket. By the day after tomorrow, we’ll have the worst reading in the history of Los Angeles County. In L.A. County alone, this week should bring us 83.14 smog-associated deaths.”
“Is the point-one-four a child?” Melrick asked mildly.
“I marvel at people like you,” Grundy said to Melrick. “Here we are in one of the worst depressions in history, runaway inflation, more business failures per week than ever in history, and you smile.”
“Not to mention,” Martin added quickly, “the pollution of the sea. That’s the killer. We may stop spray cans and supersonic flights in time to save the ozone layer, but as far as the sea is concerned, we’ve passed the point of no return.”
“Now hold on,” said Grundy. “Don’t go into that lecture of yours on the oil companies.”
“This man,” Martin responded, directing a finger at Grundy, “is paid four times what any of us earn because he sits in a chair established by the so-called Energy Council, a front for the international oil trusts—”
“You can’t prove that,” Grundy said cheerfully.
“You will go with the rest of us,” Martin said comfortably. “You, me, the oil executives, old, young—there are no lifeboats on spaceship earth.”
“I wonder,” Melrick said, looking up from his scrambled eggs, which were very tasty indeed, “whether you ever thought about the cactus?”
“That is a non sequitur, if I ever heard one,” Grundy snorted.
“Oh, no. No, indeed. Very much to the point. You know, the seas dried up. The rain stopped, and the plants had to adapt. They became cacti.”
“They were plants.”
“People are very adaptable, you know,” Melrick said.
“Sheer nonsense.”
“Perhaps,” Melrick said. “But this doom that is facing us—it’s the result of greed, isn’t it? A lust for money, for power, riches, things, baubles, man’s discontent with himself as he is, envy of one’s neighbor, desire—”
“That’s putting it rather harshly.”
“Are you going to change man?” Martin demanded.
“Man is always changing, you know. Otherwise, he could not conceivably endure this thing we call civilization. Now just suppose—just suppose we were to find some miracle drug that would rid man of greed, aquisitiveness, envy, the desire for power, for things?”
“Ambition?” Grundy demanded.
“What we call ambition—yes, indeed.”
“God save us from that.”
“Why?” Melrick wondered.
“Discontent is the only thing that makes it work.”
“Your way.”
“What other way is there, Melrick?”
“I like to think that there’s another way.”
“As much as it pains me, I must agree with Grundy,” Martin said.
“Yes—but suppose one did come up with such a drug. What would happen?”
“They would destroy the drug and kill its inventor.”
“They?” asked Melrick. “Who are they?”
“Myself, to begin with,” Grundy stated emphatically. “Any community leader with an ounce of responsibility. Any executive of a large corporation. Any political leader. Any man who values civilization.”
“Do you agree with him?” Melrick asked Martin.
“I’m afraid I do. You’re talking about something a hundred times worse than heroin. Just think of what it would do to our tenure.”
Melrick sighed. It was time for his first class, and as he walked across the campus, he wondered what Chuang Tzu would have made of his predicament. He mused over it through the day, and he was relived, when he returned home, to be greeted with an enveloping embrace from his wife.
“Dinner in a half hour,” she said to him. “I cooked Mexican. I know how you love it.”
“It’s fattening.”
“Devil take the calories tonight!”
“I’ll be in the garden,” he said.
In the garden, he observed with delight the appearance of a second flower. The everting breeze was beginning to blow the pollen, and his first impulse was to reach down and pick the flower. Then he stopped, and for quite a while he just stood there and observed the two lovely blooms.
The cat approached. He saw it from the corner of his eye coming toward him, slowly, tentatively. He bent and reached out his hand toward the cat. It arched, hissed, and struck, and there were four claw marks on the back of his hand.
He was licking the back of his hand when Barbara came out of the house and joined him.
“What happened?”
“I’m afraid our cat has reverted back to his true nature.”
“What a pity!”
“Well—perhaps. Perhaps not.”
“You have another flower on that beautiful thing!” she exclaimed with delight.
“Oh, yes.”
“Your new species, isn’t it?”
“Well, it’s a cross breed of sorts, but whether it will breed true or breed at all, that’s hard to say. Some cross breeds are sterile, you know. “We’ll let mother nature decide. The old lady is very wise about such things.”
“Dinner?”
He turned to her, took both her hands, and said, “My dear Barbara, I love you very much. I always have. An act of love is something we create within us, and, if we are lucky, we nurture it.”
“I like that,” Barbara said. “I’ll remember it.”
“We both will, and we’ll try as hard as we can, won’t we?”
“What an odd thing to say! Of course we’ll try, You’re very strange tonight.”
Then he put his arm around her waist, and they went in to dinner.