The Name of the Rose

By Icemangal

Started 10:30 PM
Ended 11:17



He had been found along the side of the highway, near a small city in the southern half of the state, a broken body holding only the slightest spark of life. Dedicated doctors and nurses brought back function, one organ, one shattered bone at a time, over a period of months, then years, until there was nothing organic left to be done for him.

Throughout these processes, many of them painful beyond belief, he did not speak. Not one word. At first, having easily eliminated damage to his throat and vocal chords, they feared brain damage, but that was finally ruled out. Between his muteness &endash; which extended to an absence of any communication whatsoever &endash; his lack of identification, and a persistent dark anger they saw in his eyes, it was decided to commit him to the state mental hospital, where he lived his silent, hostile existence as John Doe.

He showed little interest in the admittedly limited vocational programs. He was resistant to therapy. He sat on his bed, or did an intricate series of exercises behind whatever door could be closed, or paced the halls, or watched television with taciturn interest. Any attention by the staff was met coldly, still silently. They gradually learned to leave him alone. Some were incurable; some of those by choice, and the limited resources best spent on those for whom there was even limited hope.

Then they got money from a state-sponsored program, to start a small greenhouse, and that attracted John Doe’s notice. He joined the first group taken down there &endash; joined them by the simple act of arriving in the hallway as the aides were ushering them to the new facility &endash; and after that, was to be found there whenever it was open. For the most part, he ignored the professional florists and agronomists that were part of the program. He cared nothing for the projects they planned, the goals they set. He was interested in only one thing.

Roses. He grew roses. Quickly, they saw that he knew something about it, too. He took the few small rosebushes they had, and began an ambitious program of cross-breeding. Before long, he had staked out a large corner of the greenhouse. He worked with his bushes obsessively. If the staff thought this might trigger improvement, or even communication, they were wrong. He now carried a small notebook and pen with him, but all he ever did with it was make crude sketches and less-crude diagrams and charts of his work. As the roses bloomed, many staff members found themselves drawn to that corner of the greenhouse, wistfully hoping to take a bloom or two with them, but he never offered any, and guarded his treasure as if it was gold to be hoarded, rather than spent.

No one knew how he escaped; he simply vanished in the night. It was easier to speculate on his breaking into the greenhouse before he left; clearly he had pocketed and perhaps duplicated a loose key…

He stole nothing from the ward, nothing from the greenhouse. You cannot steal that which is yours, and the cluster of rosebushes was his on merit, if nothing else. They would not have existed without him. And he was generous; he did not take them all. Indeed, he did not take the bushes, but left them to continue to bloom without him, assuming that they would.

But he had taken the finest blossoms from four of them, one rose of each type. One perfectly formed tea rose in an icy blue-pink. One delicate blush peach with infinitely subtle gradations of color. One deep, deep orange cabbage rose, an explosion of vitality with the odd tone of a tiger lily. And one dark red floribunda that had received his deepest focus.

An aide found the little notebook lying to the side of the floribunda bush. He scanned the pages, hoping for a clue as to how he had breached their security, or even why he had suddenly decided to leave, after seeming so placidly willing to accept their governance. And at the end of those pages of sketches and diagrams, one scrawled page finally communicated with them.

“One tea rose for my mother, named for her and to be presented in due course… one hybrid for the grave of an unfortunate lady, and this will bear her name and my regret… one cabbage rose in tribute to the love and loyalty of an exotic tigress of a girl, to remind my son of what he cast away… and one perfect red rose, to be presented in person, named to give it passion, fire, and perfection… it is named LAURA….”