Dust of Eden

by Thomas Sullivan

  "Are you begging me not to include you?"

  "I will if that's what you want. Don't do this, Ariel."

  Ariel leaned back into the darkness. "I wish I hadn't come down, but I had to know for sure. Go back to sleep, Marjorie. It will be easier that way. For both of us. Let me remember you as someone whose opinion was worth cultivating."

  The words evaporated, and suddenly Marjorie was kicking and thrusting against the entangling blankets. With her lame leg there was never any doubt who would reach the studio and the painting first, but Ariel retreated to the doorway in surprise at the raw physical desperation. Marjorie stumbled out of bed.

  And so began a snails' race through the house—dueling sloths—absurd but for the stakes. Survival versus extinction. By the time Marjorie reached the staircase, Ariel was already on the first landing, her witch's fingers hissing along the wallpaper for guidance. In fear and dismay, Marjorie shouted after her. But try as she might, she could not frame a genuine, groveling, have-mercy plea. If she had, then she would already have ceased to be Marjorie Korpela.

  A lightning bolt carving through the upper stories of the century-and-a-half-old farmhouse and striking Ariel Leppa dead—that was the only hope. In the name of God Almighty, strike this lesser god dead! Marjorie prayed. But you didn't petition the whirlwind to save a mote of merely human flesh. Marjorie Korpela was on her way out once more.

  She tried to run. As soon as she realized she couldn’t beat Ariel on the staircase, she reversed course and tried to get out of the house. Blindly, instinctively, bare feet slapping the wooden floors and padding across throw rugs with the two-note beat of her infirmity, she blundered to the front door. There she had to grasp the dead bolt pommel with two fingers from either hand to stop shaking. Stiffening her arms and rolling her shoulders to control the violent trembling, she turned the old white enameled doorknob. Then, rushing the front steps, she pitched and sprawled along the path, her blue nightgown stretching and tearing. An explosion of sparks erupted through her sinuses when her nose struck the dirt. But up she came without pause, numb to anything except flight.

  The sparks somehow remained in her mind. Incoming now from the nether regions she had known before. Tardy emissaries of creation, lost from black space, from frozen time, like fireflies lingering heavily in the damp dawn. Gray all around her. The barn a great, looming mausoleum of agrarian death on a farm that was fallow. And so she spun and tottered past it into the cold mud of the fields that sucked at her feet. Sucked like the cosmos sucked at her soul. Fifteen rows in she mired and twisted back and thought she saw a lighted window in the upper story of the house and a figure there—Ariel in her studio—contemplating the whirling dervish flight below.

  With animal grunts, Marjorie lunged free of the ooze. A few furious steps and she found the dead furrow of the field, which was carpeted with wet leaves and debris. The simple pain in her body became reassuring. Bless the taste of blood seeping around her teeth from the fall off the steps, bless the cold stab of cavernous breaths, bless the downbeat sound of her good foot and the grace note of her trailing one. Bless the pain because it meant she was still of the Earth.

  But now she began to notice the things in the trees. Great, arcing silhouettes were advancing through the branches parallel to her path. They were not precisely flying but bouncing and flapping along like ungainly lovers of carrion who only had to arrive after the killing was done by others. These were Amber’s creations, she knew. She wished she had her glasses.

  Was it better to be rent apart than to be exiled whole and aware by Ariel into the abyss again?

  She didn't need her glasses to see the bloated thing that might have been red but looked dusky in the dawn. It stood against the largest tree at the edge of the field, and its great saucer eye strained luminously as if to absorb movement or light. She wanted to cry out to it—Here I am, come feast on me!—but her throat was so parched that she only dredged up a dry gasp that ended in weeping.

  It was too late. Ariel was painting already, layering creation over creation, evicting her atom by atom from this beautiful Garden of New Eden. And she knew that it was being done with deliberate and excruciating slowness, whether out of hate by a sadistically demented woman or out of reluctance because that same wretchedly lonely woman felt some loss of friendship after all. Either way, she was going to be spared nothing of the terrible roiling specter.

  Mist began to boil out of the earth, the miasma and effluvium of everything that had ever died here: corn and shrews and crows and foxes and the people—settlers and gangsters – who had passed through the veil before her without having their humanity defrocked. But she knew that the pumping, fulgent haze held much more than that and was far more ancient. It came from before the last eon, before Indians or ice ages or reptilian denizens had slithered through time and slithered out again. Ephemeral billows disgorged herds and flocks of things that had no name or niche in evolution. Vapors fastened onto her like clammy tentacles, draining her, diluting her as surely as a whitewash over a portrait in Ariel Leppa's studio. Liquid ashes of her own flesh seemed to twinkle into it. She "saw" beyond and before the Earth to the seed itself of spinning nebulae and accreting elements. Spinning down into ever smaller universes of matter—clusters to galaxies to solar systems to sister stars to atoms and less. She must try to remember that she had once been an entity of light. Let not chaos extinguish that!

  Near the end, she felt the mighty tsunami of space rushing in with a great shriek, unimaginably vast and distant but closing like a fist around her. And in its trough were hideous things, titan shapes flopping and flailing for a clawhold on daggered rocks. These were the aggregate. The unsuccessful bits of aspiring matter tossed up on the hiss and flume of channeled waves from some murky domdaniel beneath the sea to which she was returning. And from the ramparts she heard her name called with urgency and saw a tiny figure—Ariel—crying with remorse and pity (but not forgiveness), and she knew then that she had already passed beyond the palpable world, that these were the stored furnishings of her nightmares. From life. From deaths she had known before.

  So she stopped in the field and took root in the primordial ooze and cried out one last time—thought she cried out—still grasping at the tether, trying to hang on to the silver cord, as her pulse faded, faded . . . and was gone.

  Chapter 16

  It was loathsome when they brought the new old Marjorie Korpela downstairs. The flesh slid like gelatin around the bones, and the skeleton was vividly palpable in Dana's hands as she and Molly lifted it. They had diapered her, but the odors went beyond bodily wastes, exuding in every breath and from every orifice. A metal tang hung above Marjorie's wispy hair and something like the pungency of rotting oranges wafted through her skin as though her bruised core had turned to mush. For the first time Dana felt repulsed by a member of the house.

  Everyone else was fixated in horror on the relic being borne down the wide staircase. But as soon as the bumbling cortege thumped through the archway, they spread away from each other as if the shock of recognition had turned them into something immiscible. Beverly went to the porch, Paavo stood in the yard, the others disappeared into their rooms or went from one window to the next. Stalwart Molly kept at the necessary task of settling Marjorie in while Dana escaped the room, a thin sheen of moisture on her brow and above her lip.

  Dana didn't want to look at anyone else either, didn't want to see what they were becoming. Her thoughts were in full flight, her senses overloaded. Most of all she was stunned by what must have been Ariel’s state of mind in order to commit such a blasphemy on Marjorie. Blasphemy. There was no other word for it.

  Later, returning to the empty parlor, details leapt out at her like circumstantial evidence: the fireplace sealed with a rusted metal curtain that might once have been an awning; a blue wooden doll on the mantel with yellowed tatting for a dress; a metronome on a table, its pointer frozen out of plumb; and an empty oval among the family portraits clustered on that same table.
From a rafter in one corner hung a Japanese gong, which she now realized was a propane cylinder cut in half and painted umber. How had this miscellany accumulated? Withered violets tied with brown twine, crossed swords, glass and wood barometers by the plethora, a pile of Collier's magazines, a tattered pincushion shaped like a porcupine with sailcloth needles impaling it, someone's leather driving gloves, and a cone of rusted iron oxide around something no longer definable on the hearth—the room was acrawl with truncated things and dislocations. Was it just the consensus of many lives over time, or the single derangement of a single addled mind?

  And then her eye came to the large painting—the Garden of Eden—and she leaned toward it with sudden focus. A little helix of missing paint was torqued around the Tree of Knowledge. This is what Kraft had been talking about. I painted it with my finger. . . . The snake. He had painted the snake. And now the damn thing was gone, as if it had slithered right off the tree and out of the frame.

  It sickened her to see that. Because even though she could construct rational explanations for it based on Kraft's irrational behavior, she feared it was exactly what he had said: I brought it back. I let it in. You had to have experienced death in order to connect the dots of insane things like that. You couldn't make quantum leaps unless you had visited a quantum universe. And she had.

  She wished Denny Bryce were here. Naïve, earthbound Denny Bryce would be a relief just now. She went to the kitchen where Molly was leaning against the cast iron sink, staring out the window. The cellar door was right there, and it was so stultifyingly humid after the rain that she grasped the white knob and went down.

  Beverly said you couldn't coax her to the cellars with Tom Cruise in a thong, but Dana rather liked them. They were cool and quiet, and you had the sense that space ended when you stood within the earth-backed walls. The change in the sound of her steps going down was comforting too, an increasingly solid sound from the dry top stair to the damp-rot lowest one. She thought this might reflect a brief insensibility she had felt at death before being hurled into the phantasmal void. Terra firma. Subterranean closure. The sanctuary of a tomb was at least a place and not the emptiness of infinite darkness. So. The cellars. She liked to feel underground.

  For the first time since carrying Marjorie down from the studio her mind felt clear. You were supposed to cross the river of forgetfulness when you died, but in reality it was the other way around. Birth was forgetfulness. Birth blotted out the origins of consciousness.

  From somewhere above, the dull thud of Amber's music intruded on her peace, and she moved through the switch-backed passageway to the laundry room, where the lowered floor and doubled joists tamped all sound.

  Out of habit she walked to the washer and thrummed her knuckles on the enameled corn-yellow surface. Hollow, empty. She lifted the lid with a click. S'alright. Dropped it. S'alright. Thank you, Señor Wences.

  Then to the dryer.

  Dust encrusted, belinted. A faded laundry tag from someone's shirt collar lay in the grime on the floor, along with a blue button and a piece of burnished straw that must have come in on her shoe. This time when she thrummed her knuckles on the appliance there was a dull sound. And that was funny, because she was sure she hadn't left any clothes inside. But a decade of lint was probably built up inside the shell around the outside of the drum. A thorough cleaning was in order before they wound up with a fire.

  She popped the door, and it was the odor that hit her first. Because you couldn't see inside very well. She knew the gamey smell from her husband's duck-hunting days, though. And it must have been jammed chock-full, because one of them rolled to the lip of the door seal and lay there, staring up at her with its filmy blue eyes, its jet-black wings shrugged up a little and folded tightly to its stiffened body, as if to say "Don't ask." She jumped away, because how could the dryer be loaded up with dead crows? And that was when a pair of large hands closed around her hips.

  Denny Bryce had come up behind her unannounced just as she jumped back, but the start of his apology was suspended by what he saw in the dryer. "What the hell is that?" he said.

  She could do no more than glance at him before her attention went back to the abhorrent mass of sodden plumage. "This is sick," she murmured.

  He sidled behind the machine and jiggled the corrugated metal venting. "Where does this exit the house?"

  "In back on the barn side. But you can't be thinking they flew into the dryer?"

  "If the louvers, or the screen, or whatever seals it is broken—maybe. I don't know. It would make more sense in winter."

  "I suppose they could have been looking to build a nest." The impossible heap of avian cadavers belied that, and she added that possibly an animal was stashing them there.

  "It must have been storing them for a long time," he said.

  "This dryer was empty two days ago."

  "Do you have a flashlight down here?"

  "There are some candles and wooden matches back in the other room."

  "Where do those tunnels lead?"

  "I don't know. No one goes in there. They were built by gangsters or something during Prohibition or something. One of them may have collapsed. I hear water dripping in there when it rains."

  "Then animals could get in."

  "We would have seen them in the house, wouldn't we?"

  "I'll go get those candles."

  Like taproots, the crude tunnels had once nourished the farm with money and commerce from the external world, but now they could harbor almost anything, Dana was thinking as Denny glided back slowly in the cerise aura of two lit candles.

  "Igor returns," he said.

  "I’m not so sure this is a good idea."

  "I've been sent to put a little excitement in your life, Mademoiselle, but if you want, wait here."

  She regarded his little-boy smile and green eyes gleaming in the candle's throw. "Monsieur," she sighed. "Lead on."

  She cupped the candle he had given her, and each time she came alongside him the twin nimbuses swept darkness away, revealing clutter all the way to the shelves that lined the passage. There were railroad lanterns, rusted tins, empty Mason jars faintly luminescent through a coating of dust, and smashed wooden cases littering the floor. Not far along they came upon a roughly made cellarette, minus a door.

  "We have some genuine rotgut here," Denny said, withdrawing a green bottle from its cradle. "This could be very good swill. Here's to Al Capone." He started to work off the cork when she cautioned him.

  "What's that?"

  "What's what?"

  She moved her candle laterally. "I heard rustling."

  The flame fled back toward her, a snapping pennant changing from chrome to cerulean blue just before it went out. Darkness leapt in by half and smoke threaded up, but that too was lost as Denny's candle flame did its own swan dance and guttered out.

  "Draft," he declared in the absolute blackness.

  Of course it was a draft, Dana tried to tell herself. She knew that, knew that, knew that. But the tunnel was a dead end; it should have been dead air. Something was there. Bigger than a rat. Something just outside the light but close—very close— that had to have a barrel chest and cavernous lungs because it had huffed and puffed and blew their—

  Scratch!

  Denny had set down the bottle and struck a wooden match on the box he still carried, but his back was turned away from the draft and Dana didn't like that. The danger was in front of them. She took the box and tried to light her own candle. But she had to keep scratching away, because the old sulfurous lucifer matches were getting no help from Old Scratch—haha—until one of them finally popped and sizzled and flared. And she had a feeling that it was just in time. Because something that feared fire (or at least obeyed it) was shrinking back into the blackened crevices directly in front of them.

  "Let's get out of here, Denny," she said.

  Shadows were going up his face, making him look all wrong. He wanted to keep searching ahead. But at last he gestured tow
ard the laundry room. She took the lead, shielding the flame with her body, gliding so as not to create a draft and all the while feeling as if whatever was behind them was weighing whether to rush onto their backs.

  When the light of the single bulb surrounded them again, she saw that Denny had brought the green bottle with him.

  "Know what I think?" he said. "I think our picnic is right here in this bottle. I think we've earned it. We should just slip into the cornfield and find out if aging really does make a difference."

  Oh, aging makes a difference, she thought. If only you knew, Denny Bryce.

  She looked at the dryer, its door still yawning open, vomiting out its virulent meal. Upstairs was more insanity, mirrored in the faces of her gray and tenuous companions. And here was this man who knew only oxygen and sky and firmness beneath his feet and laughing children and a world held together by cycles and seasons, like some great calendar clock with infallible gears, and he wanted her to taste some earthly pleasure on an afternoon in the summer of a year named 2001.

  "Why not?" she said.

  They made a furtive exit from the house, and he retrieved a fawn-colored comforter from his car and something called an MP3 player, which she had never heard of. He played a single song over and over on the device—something titled "Mambo No. 5"—that she could barely hear because the MP3 player had little earpieces that he just left lying on the spread comforter with the volume up fully. Which allowed them to talk

  . . .

  She told him a lot about herself, even that she had a husband somewhere in the Texas prison system, if he hadn't been executed. She told him that New Eden was wonderful and terrible, and that everyone here except his father had known Ariel a long time. Why didn't anyone ever leave, he asked her, why didn't she want to know whether her husband was dead or alive? She tried to make him understand without telling him anything that would let him understand. How could he accept the truth? And they killed the bottle and pretended it was better than it was.