He came at twilight as the Adriatic breeze transformed the city's streets into chilly flutes. There was no proclamation, no retinue. Merely a man wearing a coat insufficient for the time of year positioned before the Academy's oak entrance as though awaiting a judgment.
Ben noticed him initially through the library window. He didn't exhale sharply. Instead he quietly observed for a moment noting how the man stood—not with the calm dignity of Flavio Fergal, CEO but with the fragile vacant motionlessness of a pillar once the ceiling has fallen in.
When Ben swung the door open the man refrained from extending his hand. Instead he gave a polite nod. "Benjamin."
"Flavio."
He had changed. The professional sheen had vanished, eroded by controversy, confiscations and the worldwide quiet disapproval that ensued after the downfall. His gaze, the steady heart of the chaos was now merely weary. He carried a inexpensive briefcase.
"I don't have any business proposition " Flavio stated, his tone drained of its confident depth. It was plain straightforward. "I lack any justification. The judiciary will address what falls under their scope. The remainder… is an obligation." He gazed beyond Ben into the chaotic radiance of the library. "I arrived to request… not pardon. That is not, within your power to grant. I came to request the syllabus."
Ben remained still. "The syllabus is posted. On the door."
"Not the syllabus. The… the method. The art of disruption. I have devoted my life to creating an ideal realm of silence. I must understand how to listen to the weeds. I have to recognize what a genuine one sounds like."
He was earnest. This wasn't an act. The individual who had traded in peace was confessing that he could no longer identify it.
Ben moved aside. "Please come in."
He guided Flavio not to a workshop nor to the lab. Through the premises out a rear exit, into the Academy's enclosed garden. It was a wild area. Herb plots intertwined with blooming vines. A lemon tree barely thriving.. In one corner an elevated bed shielded by a fragile glass dome.
Ben raised the cloche. Within there was a section of grey-green moss. "Muscus Inquietus " Ben explained. "Restless Moss. It never grows calmly. It flourishes with shaking. With continuous quivering. Naturally it appears on cliff walls close, to waterfalls on rocks where roots gradually split them. Silence destroys it."
He gave Flavio a brass-edged instrument—a tuning fork. "If you decide to remain your task lies here. You will tend this garden bed. Daily you will tap this fork and set its stem on the earth. You will deliver the agitation. Not excessively or the glass will break. Not insufficiently or the moss fades brown and perishes. You have to listen. You must grasp the tone of its unease."
Flavio gazed at the moss at the tuning fork. A trivial futile endless chore. The creator of tranquility diminished to trembling soil for a cluster of weeds.
"Why?" he inquired, the word.
"Since you are knowledgeable in systems " Ben stated. "You grasp feedback loops, resonant frequencies and cause and effect. This is a system. A small delicate living one. It demands a steady influx of trouble to persist. Your intellect isn't the issue. Your calibration is. This will adjust your calibration. You will discover, through your hands and ears the distinction, between violence that devastates and a disruption that sustains."
He set the cloche down again atop the moss. "You'll rest in the shed. You will dine with us. For the month you will only talk when addressed. You will participate in the workshops silently. You will hold no title. You are the gardener. Your sole duty is this moss. If it perishes you must go."
It wasn't a penalty. It was a lesson of the basic nature. A bodily modest reconditioning of awareness. Flavio, who had aimed to quiet the world was now charged with maintaining a fragment of it continuously gently in constant motion.
He grabbed the tuning fork. He gave a nod.
The morning pupils noticed him in the garden crouched on a threadbare cushion tapping the fork with exact methodical strikes and gently pressing it into the earth. His expression bore the look of strange focus. He was attuned. Possibly for the time ever he was attuned not to the broad buzz of a marketplace or a worldwide mind but, to the tiny tremor of existence that required disorder to thrive.
Initially he made a mistake. During the week a brown patch showed up. He fixated on it his expression marked by unsettled anxiety. He modified the intensity of his hit, the length of time. He started recording the moss's hue and its expansion in a journal. He approached it like an issue, which, in some sense it was.
One afternoon Mira discovered him there following his session. He remained kneeling, gazing at the moss with the tuning fork resting on the ground.
"It's not a device " she whispered gently.
He kept his gaze downward. "I understand. That's the challenge. The conditions aren't constant. The wind today… it altered the resonance. I needed to make an adjustment."
That was when she caught it. Not the confident assurance of the CEO. The cautious attentive voice of a learner. He was absorbing knowledge.
Flavio Fergal would never be redeemed. The debt was too vast. But in the walled garden of the Academy for Necessary Troubles, under a Triestine sky, the man who had bottled a demon was being taught, stroke by tiny stroke, how to care for a thing whose only rule was that it must never, ever be left in peace. It was a start. A small, persistent, and necessary disturbance in the story of a villain.