She shrugged. “It’s strange. It’s like I just remember the way back, but it’s a different way back I remember, each time. This time I remembered that I had to take a plane, then another plane, then a much smaller plane, then a dirty bus stuffed with people and their chickens, and then a long walk, and right around the curve in the road I anticipated, just where I expected—here you were.”
“Extraordinary. So tell me. How have we failed this time?”
She went home with the lotus flower in its little pot, and put it on a small table where it could catch the shaft of sunlight that slanted down between her building and the building next door to pierce her window. The flower seemed to glow, faintly, with an inner radiance. After looking at the flower for a while, and weighing her inner state—troubled, churning, turmoiled—she plucked one of the petals, opened her mouth, and placed it on her tongue. The flower dissolved, gently, with a flavor like vanilla-scented moonlight…and she was happy. All her anxieties drifted away. She sat on her couch and contemplated the flower until the light faded, and then she contemplated the dark. The sensation was not a high, not in the sense of being a stimulant, anyway; it was a pure euphoric. She sat on the couch all night, and when the sun rose, the lotus flower was no longer missing a blossom, having replenished itself in the night. She wasn’t hungry, or thirsty. The flower sustained her utterly.
So she plucked another petal, and ate it, and sat on the couch, and simply experienced bliss.
“Not much else to tell,” she said. “I did that maybe forty times. And then, one morning I didn’t eat the flower petal. Didn’t feel any particular craving for it afterward, either, not even psychologically—you’re right, it’s not addictive, doesn’t seem much like a drug, except in all the ways it does.”
“Mmm. Why did you give up being a lotus eater?”
“The happiness…it was all very well, you know, but every day was the same. I woke up smiling; sat there smiling; fell asleep smiling. There were no highs or lows, and when everything is a source of wonder, when your own plain white walls are as amazing as sunrises or shooting stars or ocean waves, it’s like nothing is amazing. And there was a moment every morning, just before I ate the next petal, when the happiness would ebb, just slightly, just a fraction, the effects wearing off, and in that moment, I couldn’t silence this little voice in the back of my head whispering that it was all pointless, that it was a cheat, that to be happy you have to do something, not just be. Otherwise you might as well be, I don’t know, a barnacle on a ship, or lichen on a rock. Is lichen happy? I don’t know. Maybe it’s content. But that’s not happiness. The lotus…it felt like a delusion.”
“Studies show that realists are unhappy,” Mr. Grinde said. “The happiest people wander around in a state of delusion and denial.”
“I just don’t have the right turn of mind to be that delusional,” she said. “I’ll have to try to find happiness in spite of my realism. So what else have you got?”
While he’d hoped she wouldn’t need another exchange—though it was lovely to see her, failure rankled—he’d nevertheless prepared for the possibility that she might return.
“Some poets and philosophers say the path to happiness is to live a life of tranquility and reflection in harmony with nature. How does that sound to you?”
“I think I’ve had enough quiet contemplation.”
“No, no. You’ve had…emptiness. Which many strive for, and I’m sure it has its virtues, but it’s not for you. No, this would be a chance to get to know your own mind, to understand yourself in the context of the natural world, to engage with a land of beauty and wonder, not to merely sit gazing at nothing.”
“Okay. I see the distinction. But I’m a city girl, Mr. Grinde. I never spent much time in nature. I think I’d starve to death, or get liver flukes from drinking out of a polluted stream, or eat the poison berries, or run afoul of a bear.”
He held up a finger. “Ah. But what if I told you I could send you to a perfect sort of nature, an idealized nature, a place where every stream is clear and clean, where the trees hang heavy with fruit, where the rains are gentle. Would that sound appealing?”
“Some time to myself. I could use that. What do you have to offer?”
“It’s here somewhere…” They walked deeper into the shop, to an area lined with aquariums and terrariums full of plants and animals, including tiny winged serpents, wise frogs, and venomous caterpillars. One tank, covered entirely in sheets of aluminum foil, held a basilisk, and he remembered the beast needed feeding. He had a collection of stone animals he could slip into the cage, and the gaze of the basilisk would turn the stone creatures into flesh and blood—the reverse of its more well-known power—allowing the cockatrice to feed without the need for Mr. Grinde to keep live rats or other delicacies on hand.
He didn’t want an animal, though; he wanted a plant, a miniature tree growing in a pot all on its own, branches heavy with small plum-sized golden fruits. He plucked one and took the fruit to the counter, put on a pair of thick rubber gloves, and cut open the fruit with a silver knife, carefully removing a single seed, which he placed in a clear plastic bag and handed to Ms. Stuart. “There you are. A seed of Arcadia. Plant it anywhere, water it, and…you’ll see.”
“Thank you, Mr. Grinde.” She was solemn, but also hopeful, and he was hopeful, too.
The bell rang and she returned with leaves in her hair, smears of dirt on her face, dressed in what appeared to be leaves and vines cunningly interwoven into a dress that was, he noticed with a hint of regret, quite modest. “Here, this is all that’s left.” Opening her palm, she dumped a handful of soil on the counter. Mr. Grinde sorted through it until he found a single seed. She’d returned the item, or its equivalent, which meant she was eligible for an exchange. That gave him an unexpected flutter of lightness in his chest—the thought of having to send her away disappointed would have been intolerable to him, but rules are rules.
She leaned heavily on the counter. “I’ll say this for the tree of Arcadia. When I chopped it down and the forest receded, I was standing right where I wanted to go.”
“You chopped it down?”
“I had to make an axe out of a branch, vines, and a sharpened rock—actually five axes, they all broke eventually.”
“But why do such a thing at all?”
“I’ll tell you,” she said.
Being alone in the woods drove her insane with loneliness.
That was the short form. In the long form, which he insisted she tell, she took the seed to her favorite little park, a tiny place that had once been an empty lot, bought by the city decades before, filled with grasses and trees and a couple of concrete benches and a little bubbling fountain, all ringed in a wrought-iron fence. She scooped out a shallow depression in the soil, planted the seed, covered it, carried handfuls of water from the fountain to sprinkle the soil, and sat on the bench to wait. She’d expected something dramatic, a beanstalk rocketing into the sky to open passage to a cloud kingdom, but nothing much happened, and she read a magazine she’d brought, and eventually dozed on the bench.
When she woke, the bench was wrapped altogether in ivy, and a great tree rose before her. Her knowledge of trees was fairly limited—she knew Christmas trees, and lemon trees, and beyond that, trees were all mysterious. This one had pale white bark and leaves of shimmering silver, and in growing, it had somehow brought a whole vast forest with it, because the city was nowhere to be seen.
The sun was still up, though it was shady under the canopy, and she went exploring, wishing she’d thought to bring a bottle of water or a sack lunch. But as Mr. Grinde had suggested, the streams ran clear and delicious, and delicious fruit—some she recognized, some she did not—hung from branches all around her. The ground somehow sloped so that she was always moving either level or gently downhill, even when she doubled back. There were animals, but nothing ominous—rabbits, squirrels, flittering birds. The woods weren’t silent, as she’d expected, but full of rustlings and bubblings and the song of wind over branches. When the sun went down and she grew tired, she stopped at the base of a tree and settled down on a mound of fallen leaves that proved surprisingly comfortable. It’s like a fairy tale wood, she thought, only not scary at all.