Under my palm, she heaved from her elevated breathing. At least her screams had stopped. Once certain she wouldn’t flee, I released her and covered her and her husband with the moss I had collected. Hundreds of furry caterpillars made the moss blanket orange and plush. The temperature of the chamber, of the whole garden in fact, was comfortable for naked humans. The blanket was only to make them feel less vulnerable.
Dana studied the ceiling, her eyes bloodshot from tears. A variety of insects fed off the glowing sap. None were as intimidating as the millipede or as numerous as the beetles, but they still disconcerted her. Humans on Earth had evolved to fear insects, not to befriend them.
“I’ll be back. Wait for me here. We’ll talk when you’re ready.”
She watched me. The worms beneath her shifted and bunched up, sensing her wants, and she rose to a seated position as they created a living throne. She no longer seemed afraid. For a brief moment she looked regal and composed and reminded me of Eve, only with blond hair and white skin.
She clutched the moss to her bosom, ignoring (or not noticing) the caterpillars, and glanced at the opening to the surface. “Out there… is it real?”
“Yes, it’s real. Don’t try to take it all in at once. You don’t want to end up like your husband here.”
She looked down at him, lying there beside her. “Is he still alive?” She was ready to accept anything, no matter how horrific.
“Yes, of course he’s alive! He just passed out.”
She nodded.
“This is Eden’s Garden, your true origin. You’re not in danger here. Not from me. Not from any creature. You’ll be okay. Your husband will be okay. The creatures want to please you. That’s why the worms made you a throne.”
She studied me in the semidarkness, surprised something so alien could act human. I cleared away bugs from the roots to reveal more glowing writing to illuminate the room. I moved and flexed for her.
“What are you doing?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I’m showing you what I am.”
“What are you? Some kind of machine?”
“No more than you.” I took a step toward her. She glanced at the exit. Her impulse was to run. “You’re safe. But you shouldn’t go outside. Not yet.”
“Why? What would happen?”
“Honestly I don’t know. Eve and Adam brought their humanity with them wherever they went. It ruffled some feathers. No pun intended. See? No wings.” She didn’t get the joke. I balanced on my four hands and rocked like a porch swing. I wished I could show her the endless wonders of this place. She needed time to acclimate though, or she would start screaming again.
She didn’t understand my excitement.
“We would play, the humans and me. We would change the course of the river. We would alter the migratory patterns of the birds. We would play pranks. We taught animals obscene dances. We had fun. But that was a different time. I’m not sure anyone else remembers.”
“You miss them. Is that why you’re keeping us here? You want another Adam and Eve?”
I crouched down to her height. Her attempt to understand impressed me. Most humans would slip into denial. She had the audacity to challenge my authority. “Despite what you’ve heard, God never forbade the two humans anything. They tired of paradise and wanted to leave. The only way for them to leave was for them to not be here, for them to never have existed. Their departure caused what your scientists call the Big Bang. It birthed your timeline. Your Holy Bible is divinely inspired, but it tells a story of two people that never existed in your reality. You are no more Adam and Eve’s descendant than is a pebble or a gas giant.”
“But you remember them. If they never existed…?”
“The Garden of Eden isn’t like Earth or your universe. Time and space function differently here. Eve and Adam… Their afterimage still persists. Their story inspired your creation myths. Maybe because the idea of them lives on, they live on in spirit here in the garden. Who can say? The complexity is beyond me. There should be nothing left of them, but traces are everywhere. The garden often functions as a maddening paradox. The universe you come from has its own timestream, or timeline, you could say. The garden is independent from all that.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The garden is its own dimension. A person can be in the garden eternally, while still living their lives on Earth, because the two aren’t connected, not in a way you could understand. Now that you are here, you will always be here, you have always been here. From this point on, you and your husband can’t ever truly leave.”
“But I haven’t always been here! I’ve only been here a few minutes.”
“It’s only your limited perception that makes you blind to the other moments. I can only speculate, but your perception will expand. Time as you know it will lose its hold.
“You find all this scary because it’s still so alien to you. No death lives here, or sickness. Nothing grows old. Time is irrelevant. Once I return, you might not remember I was gone. I’ve already left a few times since you’ve arrived to explore the timeline in order to witness how you sneaked your way in. I’m still missing elements of the story, but I’ll fill in the gaps soon enough.”
She nodded, pretending to understand.
I considered morphing into my human form but decided it could make matters worse. I needed to stay consistent. How else would she ever grow to trust me?
“It doesn’t seem like it now, but you found what you were looking for. You found paradise.”
A worm rose up. Dana reached out to touch it. It purred and nuzzled her hand with its eyeless face. Its pink skin was like that of a pot-bellied pig.
“We really found the Garden of Eden?”
“That’s right.”
“Why are you helping us?”
“I’m an angel.” I laughed at her skepticism. “You believe in Eden’s Garden, but not that I’m an angel. Have a little faith.”
“Didn’t you say angels would cast us out?”
“I like to think of myself as an independent thinker. Enough questions. I need to go, and you need to rest.”
“What happened to our expedition? There was something in the sandstorm. I heard screaming and gunfire.”
“I’ll be back. We’ll talk then.”
The worms lowered her back down. I tucked her under the moss as a parent might do a child at bedtime. The caterpillars cooed a lullaby and spun silk.
“Do you have a name?” she said.
“My name is Pinsleep.” She started to say something, but I shushed her. “Your name is Dana Parr. I already know. I’ve looked at your destiny thread. I’m your angel. Don’t worry. Just rest.”
Kissing her forehead in my current form would give her nightmares, so I pulled away.
She curled into a ball next to her husband and fell into a dreamless sleep. She was enchanting.
V
The caterpillars finished spinning cocoons. The white silk caught light from the glowing sap and sparkled like crystal. Dana and her husband lying there in stark solidity, under the now-lustrous blanket, made me doubt my memories of Adam and Eve.
I had mistaken shadows for substance. I had hoarded scarce scraps of memory snatched from the wind.
Witness angels before the Big Bang sang divine operas about Adam and Eve. That I was sure of, that memory was beyond reproach. But the first man and woman were long gone. My memories of them were suspect, some surely invented whole cloth while I meditated in my hollow.
My memories after the Big Bang were clear. Once Adam and Eve were removed form existence, the other witness angels, like ants fleeing from a destroyed colony, ventured out into the freshly born timeline. The lingering loss I couldn’t explain wasn’t enough to convince my brothers and sisters that we had a disappeared past. They were too distracted by the drama of these new Earthlings and their destiny threads to pay me much heed.
Maybe that lingering pain I felt, that I couldn’t adequately express, was guilt. Adam and Ev
e, as eternity wore on, would have confided in me about their growing boredom and unrest. I was their angel. I would have helped them any way I could. Maybe I helped them escape into nothingness, the ultimate assisted suicide.
My brothers and sisters told me about Earth, how I should join them on their expeditions into the timestream. “You don’t know what you’re missing,” they would say. But I heard their operas and saw how easy it was for them. Each Earthling’s destiny thread started at birth and ended at death. It made telling their stories second nature. Simplicity seduced everyone except me.
God made me different.
I couldn’t burn off the old memory to let the new reality take root. I ached to tell an opera of my own, but I hid my pain, thinking I was above simple stories and simple truths, and remained in the garden, where everything wasn’t so neatly laid out. Unlike Earth’s linear timeline, the garden was an anarchy. Glimpses and echoes of the old reality hid amongst the undergrowth of the garden’s eternal present.
The garden was a ruin, and I was its ghost, and from the remnants, I reconstructed the reality of Adam and Eve that once existed. No angel knew the two humans like I had. Eve and Adam’s destinies were obscured because of the incomprehensible nature of their greatness. This is what I told myself. It was more likely their destiny threads were nonexistent because the first couple were destined to be erased.
In love and in glory, I reveled in a previous reality that would never come again. I could play it all out in my mind. In the gaps I now realized I constructed what I wanted. I confused memory and fantasy. Of course I was the true king of the angels. My pride was unequaled. Eve and Adam trusted only me, loved only me. God made me special. Was it any surprise I couldn’t move on from such a narcissistic reimagining? I made a hermitage of my own lost history and secretly thought it would always be enough. I never needed to sing an opera again. I hadn’t really been waiting for a new muse. My epoch was Adam and Eve.
Now that I had two new humans hidden in my sanctuary, I could relive my glory days and be a guide again and compose operas recounting new adventures in Eden’s Garden. Things would be just as they were before Adam and Eve were erased.
But that wasn’t what I wanted. Eden and its delights were old news, and the story of two humans wasn’t enough. The gnostic female elder in Cairo, a true prophet of the second sight, saw a coming advent. She saw what angels had missed.
This new age was my chance at restoring my glory.
The cocoons broke open as Dana and her husband slept. The resulting moths rose in profusion, coated the root-covered ceiling, and blocked out the light from the protective script.
Like the fuzzy caterpillars, I had changed. Even if Adam and Eve were returned to me (something I had longed for ever since the Big Bang), they would no longer be enough.
Chapter 3
I
I entered the timestream, confident that Dana and her husband would be fine if they stayed put. The protective script would hide them from prying eyes.
I still had questions about the funding of such a massive expedition. It couldn’t have been solely funded by the couple in my hollow. There were bank loans, money from relatives and friends, a grant from a prestigious archaeological society, and one anonymous donor. Nothing remained anonymous to an angel. We were the eyes of God.
I followed the money not to a single person but to a secret organization, called the House of Cabal.
Organizations, companies, churches, secret societies, and the like didn’t have destiny threads like people, and the House of Cabal’s influences were so numerous I couldn’t immediately comprehend its reach, or even its basic nature. Who ran it? Who founded it? It had to be constructed from a multitude of people and intentions, changing over time, for it to be so obscured. What was the purpose for its founding? The House of Cabal’s largest project was a massive compound in California, built eighteen years before Dana’s expedition. It seemed like the most obvious place to start my investigation.
On June 7th, 1985, a pair of star-crossed destiny threads headed straight for the compound’s heart during the height of its construction.
Outside a small mom-and-pop convenience store located just off Highway 1, not far from San Luis Obispo, Lane Harris, a devoted surfer, drank orange juice from an old-fashioned glass milk bottle labeled “H of C.” He didn’t know that “H of C” stood for House of Cabal. He thought the bottle came from a modeling agency.
Using his tongue, he rolled what had to be a piece of pulp against the back of his upper teeth and palate, though it felt unusually complex.
A Rottweiler in the back of an Isuzu pickup truck, close to a phone booth, barked at passing cars. A driver in a parked white van read a magazine.
Lane fished quarters from his board shorts and slid them into the slot of the payphone. He dialed his mother’s number. The last time he talked to her was more than a year ago. His chest tightened with each ring. He hoped and feared she would answer.
Lane stuck his tongue out and wiped the pulp onto his index finger to give it a look. A squishy, white insect head clung to his fingertip.
His mother picked up. He wiped the head onto his shorts.
“Mom?”
She was inebriated even though it was only midmorning.
“Mom. Mom, it’s Lane. … No, that’s why I’m calling. Me and Kyle, we’re back in Cali.”
The Rottweiler continued her mindless barking.
He told his mom about a bungalow on the beach. “We’re renting it from this modeling agency, Cabal Modeling. You heard of them?” He rambled about the orange juice—“They’re giving us this free OJ. It’s so fresh!”—and the fashion shoots that often took place on the beach.
He strained to hear. “What? This dog won’t shut up.” He forced a laugh.
She thought the call was about money.
“I take care of myself just fine, Mom. I just want you to see the new place.”
He finished the juice and wiped his mouth with his bare arm. He was addicted to the stuff.
He talked about how good Kyle and him were doing and gave her directions on how to come to see their new place, ignoring her obvious reluctance.
The dog had calmed down and now just paced and panted.
“I want to see you. It’s been too long. Kyle and me were talking, and he thinks I should give you another chance.” His mother took offense, and they fought, even though that was the last thing Lane wanted.
The Rottweiler watched him as they bickered, her sad eyes seeking his approval.
He turned his back.
“That’s not what happened. …Mom—” She wouldn’t let him speak. “… Kyle’s not a hoodlum.… What was I supposed to do? … You’re my mother!”
A silence extended between them, and a strange static rattled the line.
“What was I supposed to do, mom? You were drunk. You’re drunk right now. What was I supposed to do, watch you drink yourself to death? … I was drowning. I had to leave. I had to save myself.”
She hung up.
He slammed the phone into the cradle. “Damn it!”
He threw down the bottle, shattering it against the pavement outside the phone booth. The dog joined in by snarling and barking.
Lane, embarrassed, glanced around. The driver of the van quickly looked back to his magazine and pretended to mind his own business.
Lane’s best friend, Kyle Donavan, emerged from the store, his arms full of groceries.
“How did it go?” Kyle said over the barking.
“Wipeout.”
The two friends appeared identical, with dark hair and boy-next-door good looks, even though they weren’t twins or even brothers. Only recently had Lane started to pack on more muscle, seemingly without trying, making them look even more alike. Their one conflict was that Lane was an introvert, wanting it to just be the two of them, while Kyle was an extrovert, needing a larger community of surfers and partyers to feel satisfied.
“Bogus.” Kyle handed Lane the bags an
d went over to the dog, his flip-flops crunching shattered glass. “You can try next food run. The bitch’ll come around.” The dog sniffed his hand. “Good girl.”
“Why? I fuckin’ hate her.”
“And you fuckin’ love her. And so it goes.”
The driver, who often gave them a ride as a favor and who also sold them weed, drove them up Highway 1 toward their bungalow. Kyle read his worn copy of Slaughterhouse-Five. Lane wondered if his mother would ever forgive him for leaving home after his brother’s death. Sometimes relationships never mended, even when both parties tried their best. Maybe it was no one’s fault.
II
Lane and Kyle rose early when the waves were right, drank OJ, smoked weed, and tried to live conflict-free lives. They didn’t have any current connections for me to follow besides Lane’s mom, who seemed obviously unrelated to the House of Cabal construction.
Three bottles of freshly squeezed OJ were delivered every morning to the bungalow’s front door. People, all very attractive and dressed in white, harvested Valencia sweet oranges from an orchard that separated the beach from the highway. Kyle joked that they were a cult. A red brick road ran north along the beach, parallel to the orchard, and up along a cliff face around a bluff. Trucks, day after day, carried construction materials up the road. Their destination remained in my blind spot.
It was impossible. The drivers’ destiny threads should have led me straight to the House of Cabal. The eyes of God didn’t have a blind spot.
Lane and Kyle’s destiny threads were as strong as ever. I was confident answers would be forthcoming, and while curious about the two men’s pasts, I remained on the beach, thinking continual close proximity to the construction site would eventually clarify my vision.
In front of a newly erected tent that billowed like a sail, a group of models laughed, horsed around, and drank from glass bottles of OJ. Lane and Kyle had been talked into a fashion shoot that was a fiction just for show. Of course, the two friends didn’t suspect a thing.
House of Cabal Volume One: Eden Page 3