Dust of Eden

by Thomas Sullivan

  It was Salah who went down first, catching a burst in the throat and chest less than fifty yards from the object of their assault. The defenders were skilled, and they had built a ring of redoubts around the crater whose slight elevation was undetectable from the air. Brom the positions they took to fire outward, Kenyon could see this now. And he understood too that the redoubts had been built because the defenders would not step down into the crater in order to use the rim for protection. Had he been a man of faith, he might have imputed this to some religious cause. It was easier to believe that something of secular value lay in the crater. Or even that the red dust was dangerous. At any rate, it was too late to second-guess. Now it was a fight for survival as much as spoils. Reason enough to live for a soldier of fortune; reason enough to die for a man who had been dying for a decade.

  Boldly he swept over the crater, gambling that they wouldn't shoot down his chopper as long as it hovered over the red dust. With Saladin firing on the pinned defenders, Kenyon moved the stick in his left hand, dropping, dropping. They were perhaps sixty feet in the air—that in-between altitude he hated. If he could get it under thirty feet, he would feel safer. And his gamble was working. The robed figures writhed below him, torn between getting off bursts at the ground attackers and shooting up at the vulnerable target that was descending on them like a falcon diving on its prey. Fifty-five feet . . . fifty. It happened faster than the telling. But now the wash began to kick things up. Swirls of dust, swirls of time, men coming apart as they came together, passion and will apart from God, blind, forever blind . . .

  The Servants of the Circle squinted within the pillar of red, trying to determine whether the blasphemous machine was yawing and pitching itself clear of the holy site. Did it even matter, when they would momentarily be dead anyway? Who would protect the Circle then? Better to bring it down if there was a chance that they might keep control of the site. One of them sat up, his left arm raised against the dust, his right cradling the Kalashnikov. In an instant he was raked by Dakhil's deadly fire. Immediately a second defender rose to his feet, firing blindly into the demonic roar.

  The Sikorsky was above forty feet when the engine cut out. Too low for autorotation to save it; too high for ground cushion to have an effect. It fell like a stone in the middle of the crater and exploded into flame. The blast threw bodies and riving shards of metal in a broad circle. The heat kept everyone at bay. One of the defenders was still alive, his robes afire, his kaffiyeh missing, clawing for a great curved knife in his sash. It frightened Dakhil, who nevertheless edged forward the final few steps. ". . . Hujaidk," he murmured and fired conclusively.

  Burke, Booth, Dakhil. Everyone else was dead. In astonishment the survivors watched the remnants of the Sikorsky burn. The fire was intensely red, almost phosphorescent, the heat ferocious. And it didn't just eat away consumables, leaving blackened scoria and ashes. It hissed and vaporized like a fuse. Strangest of all, there was no smoke. There should have been billowing black clouds going up, but there was absolutely nothing, as if matter were not just transmuting to energy but being annihilated. In a few minutes the red crater lay as before, with only a glassy patch marking the spot where the chopper had exploded on impact and burned.

  It was Demetrius Booth, the geologist, who stepped down into the crater and walked carefully to the spot.

  His Coke-bottle lenses were riveted on the glazed sand. Slowly he squatted, extending an index finger until it punctured the translucent crust.

  "What is it?" Bailey hollered at length from the rim.

  Booth stood up. "Natron . . ." he murmured, then more loudly: "Sand. . . just sand!"

  They probed, they dug, they searched. Sand. An extremely fine red sand. An anomaly, to be sure. The Sahara was sand, and the Gobi was like the valley of the moon, but the Iraqi desert was inclined to barren wasteland with shale and tufted vegetation. They found the guards' meager rations nearby. Water, some nuts. Emptying one of the jugs, they filled it with red sand and began the long trek toward the marshes.

  It was two days before they were back in Basra, two days of walking and Ma'dan hospitality and clouds of mosquitoes in the marshlands. Booth confirmed his analysis soon after: a fine red sand you could call dust, not typical of any formations in the area.

  "So why is it valuable?" Bailey wanted to know.

  "I haven't the faintest idea. These people will attach legends to any anomaly. Maybe a meteor crashed there. That circular crater . . ."

  Demetrius Booth had lost whatever interest he had in this madcap diversion. His second night back in Basra, he checked out of the Saint George and disappeared into the global mists from which he had come. Dakhil also left, shrugging and quietly returning to his archipelago village built of reeds. Life was a struggle; he did not have the luxury of guilt, grief or regret.

  Bailey did. He was angry at first, his blood still singing with the violence of the raid. He was angry at the strangers he had assaulted. Angry at Kenyon for getting killed. Angry because he could not understand what had happened. But then the futility and stupidity of what they had done sank in, and he began to feel humility and remorse. Clay Kenyon had a married daughter by his first wife in the States. He had one of her letters in his pocket, which he had neglected to give his partner before the raid. At least he would write her to say that her father had died in a helicopter crash. Then he would get out of Iraq. Go to Europe. Look up an old girlfriend who would drink with him and hear his confessions for a while.

  Booth had transferred the red dust to a plastic bag, and Bailey would have thrown it into the Shatt al Arab, except that on the third night in Basra, while he was staying in the Greek's paid-up room, someone broke in and tried to steal it.

  In through the balcony came the thief, a slight man dressed oddly for his mission in a double-breasted British suit coat, white native trousers and a kaffiyeh on his head. Bailey, stocky and with a grip like spring steel, got him by the throat as he was escaping.

  "I get real testy when someone wakes me," he growled, bending him over the rail four stories up. "So tell me a bedtime story so I can get back to sleep."

  He got a thin wheeze of Arabic.

  "No English? Too bad." He tipped the body a little more.

  "Wait!" The agile man clung as Bailey rocked him back to the pivot point.

  "Ah, I thought you might become a linguist."

  "You stole it," the thief piped recklessly.

  "Yeah, that's true."

  "I am not stealing it. I am getting it back."

  "We won't dispute that. Now, tell me exactly what it is I've stolen."

  There was a moment of calculation while the intruder registered Bailey's ignorance.

  "You were guarding it, Bucko,” Bailey prompted. “It must be valuable."

  "It is not valuable."

  "Don't tell me . . . a holy site?"

  "No, no, not holy." Lameness in the voice.

  "A holy site," Bailey repeated with disgust. This was what Kenyon had died for.

  "I swear, it is not."

  Bailey teetered him over the rail.

  "I will tell you! I will tell you!" He was breathless now, fumbling for a train of thought that Bailey kept shaking him to derail. "It . . . it is the dust of . . ."

  "Spit it out."

  "—of Creation." This came out a half sob—agony and fear—and as the intruder was swung back onto his own center of gravity, he trembled like an abject puppy let back in from the storm but facing the shame for which it had been banished.

  "Creation," Bailey sighed, his arms relaxing like depressurized pistons. "Adam and Eve. If you people found a snowman, you'd think it was the Holy Ghost."

  But if for Bailey the drama had all gone out of the mystery of the red dust, his reprieved visitor was now intent on denying what he had just blurted out for the sake of his own skin.

  "I did not say it was holy. There is a legend . . . a legend of a master race . . . coming from the stars. They made us. They made men and left the red resid
ue."

  "Like I said, religion."

  "I'm telling you, it has nothing to do with religion. Scoff at what I've told you, if you like, but do not spread rumors that could cause a sensation."

  The fellow was frantic with smoke screens.

  Bailey pulled him all the way up. "What are you—a priest? You're not like those fighters out in the desert. Here." He retrieved the plastic bag of red dust that had been dropped on the balcony. "Take it. Save me the trouble of throwing it away. Take a 'powder.' Am-scray. But use the door this time."

  Thunderstruck, the little man in the double-breasted suit and loose native trousers moved a couple of cautious steps. Then, gathering the bag to his breast with both hands, he fled through the apartment as comically as a broken-field runner.

  And that would have been the end of it, but in the morning Bailey saw the rest of the red dust, which Demetrius Booth had poured into a glass flask for analysis, and decided that it would serve as ashes in a funerary urn. So he wrote Kenyon's daughter that her father's ashes were enclosed—a little white lie to give her some closure for her father, and himself some closure for his partner—and by noon he had packed the thing in a wooden box filled with excelsior and shipped it to America. Now he could get on with his life. By nightfall he was floating in the Shatt al Arab with his throat slashed from ear to ear.

  CREATION

  2000

  Ariel

  Lightning blanched the side of the farmhouse, freezing a flash photograph. Thunder shook the thin windows in anger, as if they were so many wall frames whose portraits had been stolen. There were faces enough in the history of the house to fill each one, three to a casement. A century and a half of faces had sheltered behind the glass, contemplating spring floods, summer droughts, winter freezes. The thousand storms that had laid siege to the roof and the foundation had never penetrated. All those generations kept safe and sound until now, and the house was still a virtual fortification. But the need tonight was not for refuge. The need tonight was for escape.

  She stood there in the weather-ravaged window frame high up on the third story, a white-faced hag, her stare bulging with just a hint of Graves' disease out at the storm. This was Ariel Leppa, whose once clear eyes were now becoming opaque. They saw nothing in the present, nothing in the future. And the past, which remained so vivid in her thoughts, was like a single day. The compression of life into one day was not so strange considering that time had shunned her.

  It had taken seventy-four years to live that past, but now it was like a single day into which she had arisen, stupid with hope and trust, in the morning. And even when the afternoon of that solitary day was upon her and the details of her personal reality had begun to crush her, she had still believed. Stupid. Because by that time she had shallow friendships of convenience, and a husband who "kept" her like something in a drawer, and a headstrong daughter she had raised but never controlled.

  Beyond the tyranny of marriage and parenting, the unending day had been about omissions—things that had never truly happened. Like friendship and respect. Ariel had gone to school, church, dances; she had worked for a time in the world. Why had all her relationships been variations on the single theme of rejection? Ariel Leppa. Ariel the Leper. Her successes had been defaults, her minor ascendancies consolations. She had never been anyone's first choice for anything. They had merely taken her in. Tolerated her. And when better options came along or they felt acquitted of charitable obligations, they shoved her back into the shadows. That's who she was and who she wasn't.

  But now it was over, if only because the major players in her melodrama were dead. They had gone down one by one like autumnal fireflies winking out in the cold. Except for her daughter. Amber might as well be dead, partially paralyzed and on dialysis at age forty-four because of a fall in a rock climb eleven years ago, living—if you could call it that—with a husband and a grown son. How dare Amber be happy in such a state when her mother, whole in mind and body if not spirit, was so miserable!

  Ariel stood in the skittering flashes and bombast of the storm, waiting to feel vindicated. (See who is left standing!) But all she felt was cheated.

  When the lightning flashed again, the high window frame was empty. Ariel Leppa was flying through the house like a Valkyrie. Wait for me! Tonight she would rejoin the context of her life. No tepid suicide hers, no whiny note or play for attention. Her death would be a temper tantrum equal to the storm outside. Hurling her own thunderbolts, she swept the nightstand and dresser clean. She had a cane she used but did not much need, and this she raked along the upper corridor between the doors, tearing down pictures—faces and places that kept the wounds of condescension fresh. What malevolence deemed that she, the most unwanted of her life's circle, be the survivor? All those funerals she had attended, most recently her husband's—that tyrant. Even he, the invincible Thomas Leppa, was in his grave. What a shock to discover that she needed them, wanted them back. Why wasn't she triumphant to have outlived them all?

  It was because she hadn't lived. She was still waiting to live. And they had been her audience who might yet applaud, might accept her before the curtain rang down, might give some meaning to the play and her performance. And now the best she could do was exit stage left to an empty . . . house.

  Down the staircase she hammered, stiffness be damned. The resistance in her dried-up old joints made her a frightening spectacle, stumbling against the banister, scrawny limbs advancing with jerky animation. A good headlong pitch to the bottom might do it, flashed through her mind. But what if she wasn't lucky enough to break her neck? What if she survived only to go on existing in a wheelchair, like Amber? Better to start a fire on the first floor. Better to go up to the roof where she could fall three stories, glaring at the world all the way down. No one ever got an Oscar for a quick death. She hadn't been up there since she was a little girl, she thought, and suddenly the image of her childhood attempts to touch the sky tore through her with softness and light. She faltered against the wall and slid down hard on the bottom step of the staircase. A blue flash filled the side glass by the front door, followed by a sharp bark, like heavy furniture being nudged on a wooden floor, and then the lights failed exactly like house lights going down for the start of a play.

  The rain beat steadily now, drumming up a deluge of memories and memories told to her. She had been born in this house, breathing the dust left over from another century. The foundation had been laid in 1856. So sayeth The History of Minnesota: A County Survey up in the sewing room. It was a proper house, the first real one in the area. The cellars—plural because there was a subcellar that sloped down from the main one—had gone in first. In those days, five years after the Dakota Indians sold their lands to the government and two years before statehood, you couldn't know that disgruntled bands wouldn't come back to burn you out. The charred bones of many settlers mingled with ruins still traceable in local lore. A civil war came and went, and a whole Victorian age. The new century had brought, among other things, a chic decadence, and there was a dark chapter where her grandfather had permitted mobsters from far-off Chicago to run Canadian whiskey that had been stored at the farm into Saint Paul. That too she missed, but just barely. She had heard that tale fresh: how men named Torrio and O'Bannion had stacked cases of smuggled bourbon in tunnels that had been extended from the cellars; and how five of their gang had been gunned down with Thompson submachine guns right there; and how her grandfather had then sealed off the tunnel. Were dead men still in the cellars? No one could or would answer that, and she had loved exploring the tunnels as a little girl, discovering quaint tools, puzzling over Chautauqua souvenirs and patent medicine relics. The cellars became her first studio. She learned to draw down there and later to paint. Painting was all she had ever accomplished. It had saved her from loneliness at the same time that it condemned her to be alone, because two-dimensional people done in oils became her three-dimensional society, her friends, her lovers. . . .

  But she couldn't paint
herself a husband, and her father had volunteered to fight Hirohito and neglected to return, leaving her mother to claim abandonment and file for divorce, so the farm had no man. And then Thomas Leppa stepped in. He was no more attractive than she, a fact they both understood. But Ariel was almost thirty, and no one else was looking at her, least of all the undeclared inamorata of her life, Kraft Olson, who only had eyes for a woman named Danielle, so Ariel married Thomas Leppa, and he gave her Amber along with a lifetime of abuse.

  When the farm began to fail in 1960, they leased the lower floor of the house to a Lutheran country day school, and a wing was built that extended the house closer to the barn. After that they lived in the upstairs while nearly four decades limped past. They were still farming at a subsistence level when the Lutheran day school closed its doors. But the loans had all been paid off by then, and there were just the two of them. And then there was one. And now, by dawn, there would be none.

  Except . . . that she couldn't just end herself without a final statement. Wasn't that funny? So much never accomplished, and now she needed something for closure before she could give it up.

  She rose stiffly from the step and stumped through the rooms on her cane, pausing for lightning flashes to show the way. With her eyes she took diluted pictures at each illumination: the floor lamp, the Morris chair, the ottoman drained of color—ghosts standing, sitting, lying. And suddenly it occurred to her that she couldn't remember what her father looked like. He was the first to abandon her. Was that when the pattern of rejection was set? He had said he loved her—he wrote that he loved her. He wrote when she was thirty-three. A little late, Daddy . . . He must have known it was too late, because what he actually wrote was that he had "always" loved her, as if he had finally figured out what a little girl needed to hear, to feel. She had never before been able to laugh at this absurd tardiness, so typically male, and for the first time in the forty years since she had learned of his death she wanted to forgive him, embrace him. But he had died in Iraq, in a helicopter crash, and his ashes . . .