Dirty Eden

by J. A. Redmerski

  “What did you say?”

  Tsaeb winced and it was pointless to pretend he didn’t know what I was referring to.

  “Yeah,” he said solemnly, “but she didn’t do it on purpose. I mean shit, we were swept away by a river for cryin’ out loud!”

  “She lost the mirror!” I tried to believe I had heard wrong. I could feel my insides twisting and my lungs hardening like cement. Oh God, no this can’t be happening.

  “Look,” said Tsaeb, “we can find another way. Even the Angel said herself you’d be better off without it. She’s one of the good guys, right? Maybe she knew what she was talking about and maybe you should think about that.”

  I pulled the inside of my bottom lip from my teeth. I had been biting it harshly for the past straight minute. “But one of the ‘good guys’ also gave it to me, Tsaeb, and she wouldn’t have if I didn’t need it!”

  “I think it’s a matter of opinion,” argued Tsaeb.

  “Opinion?” I argued back. “What other way did I have? It’s not like I had two options before—no I only had one and that was Vanity’s Mirror!”

  “But we can find a way!”

  “We don’t have time!”

  We stood there with our fists balled at our sides. If Tsaeb were as tall as I was, we would have been chest to chest.

  Taurus wedged his giant arm carefully between us.

  “Look you two,” he said, “this is pointless.” He turned to me then. “I hate to take sides against you, but Tsaeb’s right. You can find another way. And you can’t bring the mirror back; what’s done is done. You have no other choice.”

  “What did the Angel say to you?” said Tsaeb. “She said something about the Center being in the beginning, or some shit like that.”

  I was too upset to think right now. I couldn’t focus, or function.

  “We’ll figure it out,” said Tsaeb, “but first you have to see this. I don’t know whether to be awed by it, or afraid of it.”

  I followed.

  The scenery along the way was unbelievable. I couldn’t imagine anything more fascinating than what was already all around me. If I didn’t know better, I would’ve thought I was already in the Garden of Eden. A plethora of flower species crawled the scaling lush trees and bushes and sprouted from the ground. The moss seemed to replace any evidence of soil. Soon we were walking uphill. As far as I could see, there was nothing but blue sky and a rising mound of glittering green moss. We walked higher and higher until I was the one out of breath.

  As we approached the top of the hill the moss turned to grass with thousands of three-leaf clovers and the tiniest purple and white flowers. Birds soared overhead. When I looked back over the land behind me, I was surprised to see how much had changed. I could see the river and what was once the lake. It wound a giant path through the forest and the mountain.

  I stopped to rest and let Tsaeb and Taurus walk further ahead. I gazed past the great river and toward the mountain that the river hugged, but nothing was recognizable. This was no Creation that I knew. It was too wonderful to be a place I remembered as so dark and surreal and untouched by beauty.

  “Norman,” shouted Tsaeb. “Look!” He was standing on the edge of a grassy cliff.

  When I made it to the edge, I gasped. “My God....”

  It was an ocean of green. There was a city from the Outside. Vines, moss and soil covered each structure. I saw the mental hospital and its sign out front where crawling vines obscured most of its letters. Further, toward the east I saw the building where I worked and could even spot the window I would look out of every day when I passed to go to lunch. And just a few moss-covered blocks away was the coffee house. But what surprised me the most was seeing my burned apartment building and the park where I met the Devil. The city where I once lived was not itself. It appeared abandoned for hundreds of years. The buildings were not all there. It was as though I was looking at a 2-D picture and where the back of the buildings should have been there was more of Creation instead. The city had been cut off.

  “Is that—” I began.

  “Yes,” Tsaeb answered, “That’s the Outside.” He pointed, looking out. “See, right over there is the alley I stood in forever! You’ve gotten farther than anyone. Creation and the Outside are converging.”

  Taurus looked out at the sight wide-eyed but was then distracted. “Where’s the little one?” he asked Tsaeb.

  Tsaeb sneered. “You got a thing for that brat or something?”

  Taurus reached out his massive hand and picked Tsaeb up by the waist with ease. He walked closer to the edge of the green cliff and dangled Tsaeb over the side. No words were needed. Taurus had made his point clear.

  “Alright!” said Tsaeb, “I’m sorry!”

  Taurus gently tossed him back on the ground.

  “Wait, what is that?” I said, not interested in their disagreement. “Out there.”

  I pointed toward a clear difference in the landscape. An enormous section had been carved right through the fantastical greenery, beginning a mile from the edge of the river and stretching so far that it had no visible end. It was barren and yellow like grass that the rain refused a thousand times over.

  “Doesn’t it look familiar?” said Tsaeb.

  Everything clicked right then. I knew exactly what that place was and I knew the answer to Paschar’s riddle.

  “The Field of Yesterday,” I said looking out at it as though the only thing that existed. “Tsaeb, that’s where things began.”

  “Well, no shit, Sherlock.”

  “No,” I turned around abruptly, “you asked what the Angel said and that’s the answer to both questions. The Center of Eden is somewhere in the Field of Yesterday.”

  So many things were coming back to me now. I could hear the creature in the Forest of the Cursed, her sweet words in my head: ‘Many years ago, my kin and I once lived in that field when it was beautiful, full of flowers and trees, even wonderful streams of water. But then something happened, something dark, evil. That darkness consumed us, everything that once lived there, and we were cursed by its evil.’

  I couldn’t imagine how we were going to get through the field without a carriage, much less find the Center of Eden somewhere hidden in its deadly vastness. Already I felt defeated. I could feel the last few grains of sand slipping through the hourglass.

  And then I could feel that I was dying....

  “Norman, what is it?” said Taurus, taking me by the elbow.

  I had not noticed that I almost lost consciousness for a moment. I stumbled into Taurus’ hand, shaking my mind to remember what had happened and to recall who these two strange beings were.

  “You alright?” Taurus leaned over to see my eyes, studying me.

  “Oh great,” grunted Tsaeb, “this close and he’s starting to lose it. I bet he’s dead before we make it to the Center.”

  “Hush,” Taurus demanded. He sat down on the grass and helped me to sit as well. “Maybe you need to rest for a bit.”

  I looked awkwardly at the giant with great curved horns and for a moment did not recognize him.

  “What’s happening to me?”

  “You’re getting ready to kick the bucket,” Tsaeb answered.

  I stiffened. “Oh no...no, I’m not ready!”

  “Obviously,” said Tsaeb, “and I don’t want to be stuck waiting around another few hundred years, here and there, in alleys, public restrooms and other stinking dumps just so that the next idiot can get my hopes up and fail, too.”

  Tsaeb took a hold of my elbow this time and tried to bring me back to my feet, roughly. “Let’s go,” he said, “there’s a shortcut to the Field not far from here. I left Sophia and Diana on the trail. We can meet up with them on the way.”

  “Wait, I think he needs to rest,” Taurus objected. “Look at him, he’s disoriented.”

  “This can’t wait,” said Tsaeb, still holding onto my arm.

  Before Taurus could say anything else, I stopped them both and carefully stood.
“Tsaeb’s right. I didn’t come all this way and go through all this crap to fail because I ran out of time.”

  We left the top of the hill and went back the way we came until veering southeast with Tsaeb in the lead. Creation had changed and not only its landscapes, but its people too. Before we met up with Sophia and Diana, we ran into a pair of travelers. The man and woman were cheery and kind, even offering us food and shelter.

  There was no time for eating or resting or anything else at all.

  Would what I had done go down in history books or be talked about by people for generations to come? Would it make me famous, loved by women and envied by men? Of course not. My luck now was as unlucky as it was before any of this started. If I did succeed and reverse the first sin ever committed, the world on the Outside would no longer exist. Everything I knew and loved and hated would vanish. There would be no history books or magazines to include my ‘great deed’. And if I failed, I would become what everyone else in Creation had become. Not only would no one else know me, but I would not know myself. I would forget everything and be no one. And eventually I would die here too and either be sent to Heaven, or more likely, Hell. And my body and soul and spirit would be ripped apart, salvaged and used to create another unfortunate human being.

  Already I pitied the one who got stuck with my masturbating right hand, or my unfortunate gas problem. But that right hand I was rather fond of, and even if I had a serious case of Irritable Bowel Syndrome I didn’t want to give that up to anyone, either. I wanted to live. I wanted to wake up sitting on the park bench and reality and time be altered just enough so that I could keep my unburned flesh and pathetic excuse for a life.

  We traveled farther southeast through what was left of the forest and far past the newly created river until we made it to a village smaller than Fiedel City. We did not stop in the village, though its inhabitants, kind as they were, tried their best to make us stay. More people offered us food and drink. Some offered me their daughters.

  In a sad sort of way, I did get what I wanted when it came to women. And when a small group of women from the village tried to follow even after I had refused them, I was forced to lay down the law and say things I would never say to my mother. They still followed, until me and my companions made a run for it and lost them.

  I needed a woman to finish my task, but something told me that mindless nymphomaniacs were not right for the job.

  In only a day’s time, we made it to the Field of Yesterday.

  “What now?” said Sophia.

  She was sitting on the ground with her legs crossed Indian-style. The tension between her and the woman, Diana, was obvious. At Sophia’s first chance, she was going to gut Diana for sure. Diana, calm as ever, was clearly not concerned about the imp and her impending murderous rampage. Taurus and Tsaeb gazed out at the field. Both with wonder. Both with worry.

  I felt we had come to a brick wall.

  “I don’t know,” I finally answered Sophia so low it was almost a whisper, “but it’s almost dark. We have no idea which way to go, or how long it will take to get there. But worst of all, I can’t cross it. Even if I had a map, the field will kill me.”

  I sat down to join Sophia. “I don’t know what to do....”

  We made a campfire and decided to stay there for the night. To find the Center of Eden in broad daylight was already impossible, we all agreed that to go any further in the darkness was a bad idea.

  Sophia fell asleep curled up in Taurus’ lap, which seemed to envelop her tiny frame. Taurus clung to the imp as if she were his own child.

  Diana was the quiet one of our group, but she was pleasant and the only one among us that I found I could relate to at all. She was human. She had worked as a silk maker for years in Fiedel City before leaving to escape the filth and bloodshed the city had always bred. Diana sat next to me during the night, listening to me tell her stories of my own. I could have talked to her forever. She made me feel like I was back on the Outside, even if only for a little while.

  Tsaeb said few words all night. He was back to sitting on the ground with his golden jacks and colored ball, bouncing it eerily in the same spot every time.

  When Taurus and Diana engaged in conversation, I had room to wonder about these events. It seemed like I had the woman I would need in the end, after all. I found her even though I wasn’t looking. I laughed aloud when I thought of my best friend, Danny, and something he said to me one time: ‘A funny fucking thing is that when you’re looking for pussy you can bet you’ll be jerking off later, but when you’ve just rolled out of bed, your breath smells like ass and you have to run to the gas station for a pack of smokes, pussy will be standing there waiting on you when you do.'

  I just shook my head when Taurus and Diana looked over at me, wondering what was so funny.

  Danny was a genius, even if he slept with my ex-wife. The way I saw it, Danny only did me a favor.

  But Diana was not going to meet Danny’s definition of a woman. For all I knew, she didn’t plan to go with us through the field at all. Even if she did, I couldn’t be so sure she would help me do what I needed to do, whatever that would turn out to be.

  I talked to Diana for the rest of the night, until we fell asleep next to each other; me with the kind of thoughts that usually made my right hand so infamous.

  “He and Time have been competing since the Beginning.”

  --

  I WOKE EARLY THE next morning with a start.

  “Holy shit!” I shouted. “Wake up, everybody!” I ran over to Tsaeb and shook him alive. “Get up, Tsaeb!”

  “What the hell?” Tsaeb jerked awake, sitting upright.

  “The jacks. The ball,” I said. “Why do you do that with the ball and the jacks?”

  “What?” The question was quick and blunt. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Taurus and Sophia stirred awake and Diana followed. All of them wondering what all of the racket was about. Sophia looked up once and then tried to go curl back up in Taurus’ lap, but he shifted positions and unknowingly made it difficult for her.

  “What is it, Norman?” said Diana.

  Right now, Tsaeb was all that I could focus on. I got down on my knees and grabbed Tsaeb by the shoulders. “That thing you do with the jacks and the ball; why do you do it? Where are they?”

  Tsaeb pushed my hands off him. “Will you get a grip?” he said, straightening his crumpled shirt. “I have them right here in my pocket. And I don’t know why I do it. Been doing it for so long I got used to it. Half the time I don’t even know I’m doing it, I kind of go into a daze.”

  I was ecstatic. I stood again so quickly that I almost twisted my ankle.

  “Do it again,” I said, eager and hopeful.

  As Tsaeb reached into his pocket to retrieve the items, I said, “Remember back at the hospital, the girl at the table was stacking the black and red checkers obsessively. Don’t you remember?” I was starting to shout.

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Tsaeb, “I remember. What about it?”

  I began to pace.

  “Outside,” I went on, “in the courtyard, Paschar was sitting underneath what looked like it used to be an arch of some kind. The two pillars on either side of her were red and black, just like the checkers on the table!”

  “So....” It was clear that Tsaeb thought I was losing my mind.

  “Ugh!” I raised my hands into the air. “Don’t you get it! The girl was a key! She knew where the Angel was, but she couldn’t tell me. The checker towers were like a map, a landmark!”

  When Tsaeb still showed no signs of understanding what I thought couldn’t be any more obvious, I punched the air with aggravation.

  “You’re a key, Tsaeb,” I said, “you’re the Present key and in the words of the Tree of Life, you offer many different opportunities.” I stopped pacing and looked down at Tsaeb. “Please just hurry.”

  “Alright,” Tsaeb agreed and finally placed the colored ball and golden jacks on the ground in fro
nt of him. After the first bounce, he let the ball jump back into his hand and then he did it again, and again.

  “You’re the key,” I said again, “and that’s the map.”

  “Wow,” said Taurus, standing. “I bet you’re right.” His body cast a shadow over Tsaeb and me.

  Diana watched curiously.

  I knelt to examine the jacks more closely. There were six of them. Two were right next to each other, touching. Another was a few inches to the left and then the last three were laid out on a triangle beneath the others. I held up both hands in front of me and positioned six of my fingers to mimic the placement of the jacks. Then I concentrated on where the ball landed. Like clockwork, the ball hit the area by the lone jack to the left of the two touching.

  “There,” I said, pointing, “That’s the Center of Eden!”

  Sophia came up to stand next to me so that she could see. “I think he’s onto something.”

  “I do too,” Taurus agreed.

  Tsaeb was actually smiling and while looking up at me he kept bouncing the ball, but never missed a beat.

  “I can’t believe it,” said Tsaeb, “You might actually pull this off.”

  Diana was the only pessimist.

  “But that still doesn’t tell you how to get there,” she said. “I mean, I hate to be a downer, but that only solves one problem.”

  “I have an idea,” I said. I looked up at Taurus hovering over me like a fortress. “I can’t walk through the field, but I think I can make it if you carried me.”

  Taurus put his massive hand to his chin. “Hmmm,” he said, “I think I can manage that.”

  “And the rest of you can walk...uh, if you don’t mind.” I turned to face Diana now. “Though I don’t know if you can go through the field since you’re human. That’s the only thing I haven’t quite worked out.” I was worried about saying that aloud. I didn’t want to risk her willing to stay behind. I needed her. And still I had not figured out yet exactly how I was going to ask her to help, either.