Dust of Eden

by Thomas Sullivan

  "She never could handle power." The words rattled up from Marjorie's private boil like steam from a covered pot.

  "Who?"

  "Who do you think?"

  "Better watch what you say," Helen warned.

  "Why? We're all in the same boat."

  Helen leaned forward slightly to glance at Molly. "But some of us have life jackets."

  The big woman sat with her elbows folded across her stomach, knuckles of one hand to her lips, liquid brown eyes red rimmed. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Figure it out."

  "Just because Ariel trusts me doesn't mean I can't be trusted by you."

  "Doesn't it?"

  "That's cruel, Helen."

  "Oh, don't pretend, Molly. You've been snitching on us forever."

  Paavo sat between them like a thin tenement wall hammered by fractious neighbors.

  "And what did you do for Danielle, eh?” Molly bristled. “Did you toilet her? Did you wipe the drool off her chin? No. You did as little as you could, because you're old, and that makes you privileged."

  "Want to trade places?"

  "Stop it," Dana said from the gloom of the arch. "Molly did more for Danielle than the rest of us put together."

  "So now we hear from the other alter ego. Beautiful Dana. Just the right age. I'm not so sure about you either, my dear."

  ". . . Never could handle power," Marjorie repeated from the Morris chair, deaf to the squabbling. "Once I made her shift manager for two weeks, and when I got back from a training seminar in Chicago, two of the cashiers had quit and another had filed a grievance with personnel. We need to do something."

  It was raining now, but nobody had heard it begin. The trees were hissing and the windows drummed, and they listened like balcony figures in a cavernous theater cut off from main-floor applause rising to the mezzanine.

  "Like what?" Beverly said, suddenly attentive at the screen door.

  "It's clear enough."

  "Not for me. Explain it, please. What do you mean, 'we need to do something'?"

  Everyone looked to Marjorie except Ruta, who had migrated to one edge of the worn brick hearth and sat rigidly staring at a gilt mirror on the opposite wall.

  "Ariel won't hesitate," Marjorie said. "Any time we don't make the grade, it's brush-brush—'off with their heads!' We used to call that murder."

  "But she can bring us back indefinitely," Molly said. "She can keep us healthy."

  "If you think living like this is healthy. Personally, I don't think it's going to get better. I think it's going to get worse."

  "But at least we're alive!"

  "Are we? I'm a copy of something that might still be out there in the darkness. Paavo is really the only one who has come back twice, and he hasn't said where he went the second time."

  The subject of this speculation shrugged. "I don't remember. I don't remember being in this house before," he said.

  "That's what I mean. You aren't a copy of a copy. You're a second copy of the original. So maybe if we die again nothing will happen to us that isn't already happening anyway. We haven't escaped anything. The people we once were lived and died and are still wherever the dead go. The people we think we are now go nowhere."

  "All I know is I'm here now, and I want to stay," Molly declared.

  "What are you driving at, Marjorie?" Helen demanded. "What choice do we have?"

  "We could stop her if we wanted. We could stop Ariel."

  "But then . . ."

  "Then we'd live out our lives and die. Again."

  "Are you out of your mind?" Ruta laughed forcibly. "You're the one who said we should change our attitudes toward her, and now you want to eliminate her and let us all die, like . . . like those stupid pygmies Helen told Amber about. That’s crazy. Tell her she's crazy, Paavo."

  Paavo shifted his bony haunches uncomfortably on the ottoman. "She don't mean it, Ruta. Tell her, Marj. No reason to get everyone upset."

  But no one looked upset.

  "We'd have the paint," Beverly said, refusing to give up hope of life everlasting. "We'd just need a painter."

  And that seemed to provide a middle ground for action, whatever anyone believed.

  Except for Ruta.

  Ruta felt life coursing in her veins. Saw her image in the smoky glass flecked with gold. Still saw the once-and-forever woman she had decided she would become when she was in her twenties. Her eyes were not the bloodshot, filmy pools that gazed tragically at morning misrepresentations in the mirror. Her hair was not a thin, brittle remnant of what she had brushed a hundred strokes a night since her progressive if not impious mother had taken her to Loews Paradise Theatre in New York to be awestruck by Greta Garbo in Flesh and the Devil in the year 1927. All the decades of diets and supplements and exercise did not add up to this bony, long-neck hag rendered in mockery by Ariel Leppa.

  They all thought she was so vain, but no one had laughed when she was named Miss Thief River Falls at Harvest Fest, or when she swam the Black Duck Lake freshwater swim in fifty-eight-degree water at the age of twenty-two and only thirteen others, including eleven men, finished the race. When had she ever promised to age gracefully? Let others surrender to the ravages of time; they had less to lose. The tucks and peels were her own damn business. Paavo had never complained. And none of them had the discipline to endure what she had endured. They thought she was weak, but she was a survivor—physically, emotionally. They could keep their little intellectual games. What was wrong with taking personal pride, of wanting to live?

  Thunder rolled outside, making her jump. She didn't like storms. And going upstairs to see Ariel was like going out into a storm. But she had to do it. Even though she was appalled at the way things were turning out. How could she have known that telling Ariel what she had seen would seal Danielle's fate? Kraft had gone into her room—that's all she had said to Ariel. Not that they had deliberately met. Kraft could have been wandering. But Ariel must have caught them together. Ruta felt terrible about that. If she could undo it, she would. But she couldn't be held accountable for what Ariel did. And now she had to climb the stairs on this stormy night and address the source of all thunder and lightning herself, because the Creator of New Eden had as good as made a promise to her . . .

  "I'll have to repaint you, you know," Ariel said when they had ghosted to chairs in the dimly lit sewing room.

  "Yes, yes, of course." Ruta's voice crackled like the track of a 78-rpm record.

  A small banker's lamp sat on a walnut ambo in one corner, its red glass cowl tilted toward the wall, leaving the chamber in gloom and grotesquely shadowed by the rebound of light. The spinning wheel's shadow in particular soared up the opposite wall, like some diabolical engine of medieval torture. Outside lightning flickered, dogged by a rumble that seemed to climb through the foundation to rattle the windows.

  "Will I have to . . . ?"

  "No, you won't die. I won't be making a new painting, just touching up the old."

  Out of the corner of her eye, Ruta imagined the spinning wheel slowly turning. "Then I won't disappear like . . ."

  "Danielle?"

  "Paavo. I was thinking of Paavo."

  "No, you won't disappear like Paavo."

  "Will I just suddenly change?"

  "Yes." Ariel, in a condescending fantasy voice. Magician to child. "I've done it before. Little things. In the middle of the night. No one seems to notice. But when did anyone ever notice anything I did?"

  An invitation to suck up and Ruta seized it. "Oh, Ariel, nothing could be further from the truth. How can you say that?"

  Ariel's artless laugh crushed the disavowal flat. "You were always such a liar, Ruta."

  "Ariel! I mean now. No one ignores you now. We all treated you badly in the old days."

  "And you worst of all."

  "But I wasn't your enemy."

  "No. Enemies don't have the power to hurt that deep. For that you need friends." Crocodile smile—thin lipped and crooked. "Tell me, Ruta, who cam
e up with the name Ariel the Leper? Was it you?"

  "I never heard anyone call you that, Ariel. Maybe when you were in grade school, but I wasn't there then."

  "No, you showed up for the morals-and-manners phase of our lives. You navigated us through an adolescence of winners and losers. You set the pecking order, and you promoted and demoted us more often than the schools. As long as I was around everybody else was at least one rung off the ground. If you missed a social cue you could always point to me, because I missed all of them. I was your comic relief. I boosted everyone's self-esteem just by being there to catch the crumbs and feel the claws."

  "Ariel, I'm shocked." She was shocked. "We had good times. You were always included—"

  "Always there, never included."

  "You went to the same parties and shows. You went to the rinks and beaches and . . . and you never liked to dance."

  "Do you know that for a fact?"

  "Well . . . did you? I don't remember you ever dancing."

  Ariel threw her head back as if communing with the storm above the house, and when she spoke again her eyes misted. "How did you keep up with everything new, Ruta? Did anyone ever show me the latest dance or tell me what everyone was going to wear the next day? You were the oldest; you had the last word. If there wasn't room in the car or enough boys at the drive-in or theater tickets to go around . . . well, Ariel the Leper. Did you think I didn't hurt?"

  Ruta slumped. "I never knew you felt this way."

  "What an act you put on. There was a time when I could have scratched your eyes out. But, you know, it got better, even though the inner circle never changed. All those years—you age and the past just gets silly. I ran out of revenge fantasies a long time ago."

  The moment sizzled like a hot coal, and the shadow of the spinning wheel seemed to fly on the wall, and Ruta sat with her long neck oddly inclined, like an aging swan attempting graceful deference. For a long while neither of them could speak. Rain pattered, diluting and cooling, until just the red shade on the banker's lamp seemed to have any heat left. Then, in a granite hard voice, Ariel changed the subject:

  "I suppose they're all horrified about Danielle."

  "A little."

  "A little horrified? I don’t suppose it occurred to anyone that the only thing I really did was give her more life than God did?"

  "No one blamed you, Ariel. They may be nervous—I'm not going to lie about that—but no one blamed you."

  "I'm certainly glad you're not going to lie about that. So, who is the most nervous down in my parlor?"

  "I don't know."

  "Are you nervous?"

  "A little."

  "Good. Because now that I have the last word, I really do want to know who is saying things behind my back. Be very careful, Ruta. I'm not above testing you."

  "It’s really not anything. They're just upset. No one is thinking clearly."

  "Who?"

  "No one—"

  "Beverly?"

  “No –“

  "Helen?"

  "Helen wouldn't—"

  "Paavo, then."

  "No, no, not Paavo. He told her . . . told everyone not to get upset."

  "Told her?"

  No one could say Ruta hadn't tried. No one could say she hadn't lied to Ariel's face trying to protect them. But when Ariel exclaimed "Marjorie!" with triumph and dismay, Ruta could no longer risk a denial.

  "Please, Ariel, it was just words. Don't do anything to her."

  "I'll do what I have to do. You don't want to lose what you have, do you, Ruta? I've always protected you and the others. Which is why I won't make you younger just yet, Ruta. Because then everyone would understand how I knew about Kraft and Danielle. You see how I care? When everything is safe—when everyone understands that we need to pull together to make this work—then I can reward you. I can paint, you as you really want to be."

  She made the new painting first, and it was rending to Ariel. Marjorie—of all people to betray her. If anyone among them had lived by principle, it was Marjorie Korpela. That she had always underestimated Ariel didn't alter that. A bit old-fashioned, fueled by misconceptions, as hard-nosed as a man sometimes, Marjorie’s good opinion was still worth cultivating and that was why Ariel had brought her back to begin with.

  More than anyone else, practical, level-headed Marjorie should have understood what a wonderful thing it was that Ariel was doing. In fact, in the beginning Ariel considered her for her closest helper instead of Molly. She had even seen a poetic balance in this, having been Marjorie's employee. But some ghost of their former relationship had held her back from painting the patrician woman younger and more able. And nothing in the past year had stirred her to change that. There were people who lived rigid lives according to the strictures around them and never reached beyond that. Marjorie seemed to be that way. She never talked about her husband or asked for anything but just accepted a quiet, dignified life as quite enough for the foreseeable eternity. And now to find this sensible woman speaking ill of her behind her back was like discovering embezzlement deep within her securest accounts.

  So the new painting gave birth to Marjorie Kristen Korpela the living relic. Worse even than Danielle Kramer. Her temples were translucent with blue veins threading to the surface. Her limbs were draped in mottled flesh, and her head—slightly askew where it came to rest on her chest—was framed by the bony mantle of a bowed and fusing spine. All that remained of her eyebrows were tufts at the bridge of her nose, and this thrust the orbital ridge around her eye sockets into prominence. Ulcerations crusted the few remaining lashes on her eyelids. Where flesh had not puddled like sediment it was drawn taut, and the cartilage of her nose was receding from yawning nostrils that pulled her mouth into a raw wound fissured at the edges.

  Ariel even pulled down a tome of painter Ivan Albright's "magic realism" and borrowed a morgue look from the galleries there. All was blue and gray. All was pits and erosion. Only the eyes carried the fading gleam of life, like flat pennies losing their luster. Gravity and entropy were winning. Energy had lost.

  And yet it was Marjorie Korpela—no question about that. The genius of Ariel Leppa the uncelebrated painter was that it could have been no one but Marjorie Korpela. And she did it with the fast-drying alla prima technique—the mark of her mastery.

  When the painting had dried and the ossifying thing actually lay bundled and wheezing against the wall, Ariel studied it. She felt neither compunction nor compassion, only a vague sense of satisfaction that she had created precisely what she had intended. This was not the living being downstairs asleep in a room of her house. That version of Marjorie awaited a separate act of extinction. This was a separate entity, something that would never have existed except by Ariel's will. Marjorie then. Marjorie now. Same person. But one was not an alteration of the other.

  And yet she herself would never see the two of them alive at the same time, so how could she be sure?

  She flipped through the dozen frames stacked next to the workbench to pull out the first painting of Marjorie and set it upon the easel. Downstairs was a viable personality she had reanimated from her past, something lucid and capable of creative thought, of love and loyalty and appreciation. Only, of her own free, Marjorie Korpela hadn't felt any of those things. As if she didn't owe them to Ariel but had dredged herself up from her grave and endowed herself with breath, spirit and consciousness all of her own accord.

  Ariel glanced at the heap against the wall. It was watching her through its ruined eyes. What thoughts could it be thinking—born nearly dead?

  I must see my other Marjorie, she decided on impulse. One last time. Must understand the distinction.

  And so she left the dawn-streaked studio and made her way down the staircase to the new wing and entered Marjorie's room, which smelled of lilacs and liniment, and stood over the form on the bed. Wrapped in a cotton blanket like that, the sleeping woman could indeed be the swathed thing lying against the wall two floors above.

  Th
e light from the corridor streaming through the door got lost in the fold of the hood that peaked over Marjorie’s head, leaving a deep emptiness into which Ariel leaned closer and closer. Why wasn't she breathing? Not even a dainty snore. Petite Marjie, ever the guarded aristocrat. Or perhaps she was sleeping more deeply and further into that shroud hollow than Ariel could imagine. Beyond apnea. Beyond mortal dreams.

  Abruptly there was a sharp inhalation. Ariel reared back just as an alabaster hand snaked out from the covers and threw off the hood.

  "Ariel . . . ?" Marjorie squinted up from her bed against the light and came to one elbow, her pale blue nightgown falling from her corrugated throat. "What is it? What time is it?"

  "It's your time, Marjie."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "I've been painting, and I've made another portrait. It's upstairs in the studio. I put it next to yours just to see the likenesses and the differences. Lots of differences. But you can tell who it is. You might say you're beside yourself, Marjie."

  The woman on the bed shrank back as if trying to gain perspective. "You're losing it, Ariel."

  "Wasn't I loyal enough when I worked for you?"

  "I never demanded loyalty from you. I was just your supervisor, Ariel, not your god."

  “Is that what you think, Marjie? That I want to be your God?”

  “That’s exactly what I think.”

  "Oh, this is bad, very bad. I hope it's not too late to save the others by making an example of you."

  "Yes, yes, love you or else. That's what all the worst religions do."

  "That's a stretch and you know it."

  ". . . God on a rampage."

  "How would you have done it?"

  A rag of hope, an invitation to reason, but Marjorie Korpela couldn't think of an answer. "I wouldn't manufacture more suffering," she said.

  "If giving you life is suffering, then I'm guilty of that. But I’ll correct that as soon as I get back upstairs and paint you out of existence, my dear."

  "There are two Danielles dead now, two Paavos, and now you want to include me. You can't possibly imagine what that means."