Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  Diane parked in front of a long, low, precast concrete building whose sign read el pueblo community college.

  “You teach here?” Madelyn asked.

  “esl. English as a Second Language.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “I get paid,” Diane said. “A little. That’s not why I do it.”

  The drizzle had turned to mist and they left their umbrellas furled. In the lobby, three men and two women stood waiting for Diane. The youngest was still in her teens, and the oldest was a Buddha-shaped man in his sixties. Most of them hugged Diane, and when she introduced Madelyn as a friend, they waved to her and smiled. A dark man with a pony tail and a couple of missing teeth took her hand in both of his and said, “How are you doing today?”

  “I’m well,” Madelyn said. “How are you?”

  “Good,” he said. “I’m good.”

  The chairs in the classroom were made of orange plastic and had built-in linoleum-covered desks. One of the fluorescent fixtures in the tiled ceiling was dark, and the worn green linoleum floor was clean. On Madelyn’s left as she faced the room were four African women in brightly colored head scarves and floor-length dresses, one of them with a four-year-old child. Two African men in sport shirts sat nearby. The Latinos, who were slightly outnumbered, all sat on the right, the men talking to each other in a mixture of Spanish and English. The women had their own conversation, too quiet for Madelyn to hear. She took a seat in the middle of the room, where the two cultures met, and watched a few more students trickle in.

  At 7:15 Diane stood up and smiled and said, “Good evening!” and the entire glass responded, “Good evening, Ms. Travers!” She went to the blackboard and wrote the word family. “Tonight,” she said, “we’re going to learn about each other’s families.”

  *

  Class ran until 9:45 and it was after ten by the time the last of the students, the man with the pony tail, finally said goodbye to them in the parking lot. They got in the car and fastened their seat belts, and Diane let out an enormous sigh.

  “You must be exhausted,” Madelyn said.

  “Exhausted, frustrated, jazzed, grateful.” She started the car and waved to one of the African men as they drove past him.

  “The jazzed I can understand,” Madelyn said. “To be in a classroom where everybody actually wanted to learn what you were teaching them…”

  “The frustration is trying to bridge that chasm between the cultures. You saw it in class tonight, the way the Latinos were all speaking up and I had to fight to let the Africans get a word in, because they don’t have that kind of boisterous culture. I wish they would all sit together, and sometimes by the end of the semester it loosens up, but… The Sudanese guy in the white T-shirt and khakis? He’s not even taking the class, he’s just there to stand guard over his wife. The old Salvadorian guy, he’s not registered either, but Inez can’t leave him at home or he’ll wander off. I will never know what any of them has gone through to get as far as that class. Coyotes, border crossings, refugee camps. Last year I had a guy from Somalia whose hands had been cut off above the wrists. Both hands. He took notes by holding his pen between the two stubs. I never got the courage to ask him what happened. Not because I was afraid of offending him, but because I didn’t think I’d be able to stand having that knowledge in my head. Which is where the grateful comes in. This class makes me grateful for my boring, middle-class life.”

  “And it makes me wonder what I’ve done in my long and privileged existence that compares to this.”

  “Don’t go all melodramatic on me. If they hadn’t ended up in my class, there are plenty of other esl teachers.”

  “But you’ve got a gift. And they loved you, that was obvious.”

  “First of all, understand that there are twenty people registered for the class and tonight twelve of them showed up, which is close to a record. The class meets twice a week, and there isn’t anybody who makes it to every class. They’ll have to work, or they’ll be exhausted from working, or they’ll have a sick kid, or it’ll be Ramadan or some other reason that’s more powerful than their desire to be in class with me. Secondly, I read A Crisis of Idealism, and if you’re not proud of having written that book, you’re batshit crazy. Thirdly, if you want to try it yourself, it’s a hundred and twenty hours to get certified. You can do the whole thing in a month, or you can spread it out. It’s not for everybody.”

  “But it is for you.”

  Diane swung into the left lane and accelerated into an open stretch of road. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, it is.”

  It was 10:50 by the time Madelyn punched in the entry code and drove down the twisting gravel road to the house. Her brain was hyperactive from the class, from Diane complimenting her book, from the sense of invisible worlds and complex lives all around her, of possibilities she hadn’t begun to think of yet. She felt 20 years old again.

  She needed a second to realize that Alex’s car was gone and the house was dark except for the outside lights on the timer. As she opened the front door she saw the blinking red light on the answering machine in the hall.

  She juggled her keys and her armload of books and pressed play. “I’m at the hospital,” Alex’s voice said. His words were flat with suppressed emotion. “It’s Papa. It’s bad.”

  *

  Ava knew in her heart that she, and everyone her age and younger, was not going to die of old age. Maybe it would be a direct result of climate change, in the form of flood, hurricane, or wildfire. Maybe it would be indirect, like homicide or starvation or global war. Her mother used to talk about how awful it was to grow up in fear of nuclear Armageddon. That seemed quick and painless and far less inevitable than the future Ava had in front of her.

  That knowledge had paralyzed her for years, kept her working dead end jobs and living over garages, refusing to get attached to friends or lovers, getting drunk or high when she could afford it.

  It was Cole, of all people, who turned her around. She’d been spending a few days in Austin in the summer of 2008, and she and Cole were throwing a baseball around. Years before, when Cole had first produced what Madelyn disdainfully referred to as a “sports object,” he explained, uncomfortably, that he was trying to make up for something he’d missed out on as a kid. Though Ava had little interest in watching sports on tv, it turned out to be fun enough when she was doing it herself. That particular June afternoon, Cole was pretending that he wasn’t really bugging her about “doing something with her life,” and Ava, 33 years old, already past her prime by the standards Cole had grown up with, was letting him get away with it, because it was pretty cool to run and sweat and feel the ball bury itself in the pocket of her glove with a loud smack. To be good at something that wasn’t expected of her.

  “I just feel like, why bother?” Ava said. “There’s seven billion people in the world. They all want cars and cable tv. We couldn’t turn things around now even if we got all seven billion with the program. It’s over.”

  For a while the ball went back and forth while Cole thought about it. Eventually he said, “You ever hear of the Serenity Prayer?”

  “I don’t know, maybe.”

  “It’s an aa thing. It says you have to figure out what you can change, and work on that. The stuff you can’t change, you have to let go.”

  “You were in aa?”

  “Same as. I was in the hospital to get off heroin, a long time ago.”

  “I heard. Mom was way nervous about my spending time with you because of that.”

  “Yeah. But I got off it. As your mother has probably told you, I can be a stubborn son of a bitch.”

  “I might have heard something along those lines.”

  The ball went back and forth a few more times. “You can’t do anything about those other seven billion,” Cole finally said. “What you can do is sit down with yourself and say, ‘If things were different, if it wasn’t already too late, is there something I could do to make things better? And would I maybe rather go ahead
and do that thing anyway, even though it’s too late, rather than lie around and wait for the world to end?’”

  The “lying around” part stung. “So what are you doing?”

  “I don’t believe in political change. You can see that with Obama, he talked a lot about change, and once he got in office he couldn’t do shit, because you have to change the culture first. If the culture thinks socialism is the greatest evil in human history, you’re not going to sell it free health care.”

  “So that’s it? You’re changing the culture?”

  “I’m trying.”

  Talking politics always made her frustrated and angry, made her want to lash out. She threw the ball back hard and low and said, “How’s that working out for you?”

  “Ha,” Cole said, scooping it up. “Not so great.”

  That was the end of it for the moment. Ava came restlessly back to it over dinner. “So the only thing you can do is lie to yourself? Tell yourself there’s hope when there isn’t?”

  “The Buddhists say you should act without hope or despair,” Cole said. “That’s a hard line to walk, and I can’t manage it for long. I find I need to cheat and allow myself a small maintenance dose of hope. Not enough to hurt. Not so much that I’m always getting let down.”

  “Where do you get it? Because I don’t see it.”

  “It’s not rational. You don’t argue yourself into it. It’s a feeling. It shows up on its own. Listening to a beautiful piece of music, watching the sun go down, throwing a ball with your kid, bam, there it is, whether you want it or not. You can refuse to let yourself feel it, and that’s as dishonest as giving in to it completely. You just want that… that little hit every once in a while, enough to keep going.”

  Some time later, Ava was at one of the family dinners at the Montoya house when Alex went off on one of his rants about the evils of capitalism and how Big Oil and Big Coal and the power companies were conspiring to keep alternative energy from happening. Usually Ava checked out from those one-sided non-conversations because, please, who did Alex think he was if not a capitalist? Only this time she felt a flutter in her chest and decided to run with it. She started asking questions, and it turned out Alex actually did know something about it. A couple of weeks after that, Alex had suddenly bought into some solar energy company and there was a low-level position open and was Ava interested? That was the way Alex worked. If you let it slip that you liked a certain brand of beans, Alex bought the company and said, here, have some beans. At the time Ava was stocking shelves and bagging groceries at Whole Foods, a perfect job if you were like 17 and into guys with wooden plugs in their earlobes, and she thought, why not?

  It turned out that feeding a power grid like LA’s from a solar array in the desert was not as easy as it sounded. There were issues with transmission and land access and environmental permits, and it took a full 1500 acres of photovoltaic panels to generate the electricity for 100,000 homes.

  Ava started as a Basic Installer and pretty quickly worked up to Assistant Solar Technician. Crew members spent four days each week in the desert working 12-hour shifts and sleeping in the bunkhouse, then had three days off in Riverside, a town with a plentiful supply of beer and college-educated men. Work hard, play hard was the unofficial company motto. On the nights she spent out at the array, she invited herself into conversations between the scientists, keeping her mouth shut and taking mental notes.

  She liked the work. The array itself was like a deserted dining hall for giants, where the shoulder-high tables were made up of side-by-side, front-door-sized modules that were attached to a frame. When they finally switched the site on, that frame would tilt the panels so they were constantly facing the sun. The men she worked with—and the workforce was almost exclusively male—were pretty much easygoing and smart and idealistic. Once she made it clear that sex was something she did in Riverside and not on the job, they were able to set that aside. They liked her and took the time to answer her questions in detail, even the ones that were totally off the wall.

  Ava’s cell went off late in the afternoon of March 10, 2010, when she and the lead tech had their hands full, and she forgot about it until she was getting dressed for dinner. The call was from Alex and the message was that Adalberto was in the hospital with stage 4 renal failure.

  The company travel agent got her on a noon flight the next day, changing at lax, and she took a cab straight from dfw Airport to Medical City. It was nine at night and Adalberto’s room and the surrounding hallway swarmed with extended family, Cole and Sallie, Madelyn and Alex, Ava’s stepsister Gwyn, Ethan and his fiancée, Alex’s mother and brother Jimmy, a couple of Adalberto’s friends from work. The mood was apocalyptic. Ava wandered from one to the next until she’d hugged everyone in the hall, ending up with her mother.

  “Oh, baby,” she said, “I’m so glad you came.”

  All she could do was nod. Alex approached through the crowd and took her aside. “He doesn’t have a lot of time left,” he said. “He’s on dialysis, but his other organs could give out any time.”

  “Is he conscious?” Ava asked.

  “In and out. Let’s take a look.”

  After years of getting skinnier and skinnier, Adalberto looked puffy and his skin was dark as wet leather and gave off a faint, sharp smell. He opened bloodshot eyes as Ava moved in next to the bed. “Ava?”

  “Yes, grandpa, it’s me.”

  “You’re so brown. You finally look like one of the family.”

  “I’ll forgive you for that because you’re in the hospital, but once you’re out…”

  “I’m not getting out, honey, we’re not kidding each other about that. It’s okay. To see my whole family together like this, it’s a… benediction…” He lost the thread, then recovered. “I’m so happy you made it here. It’s so good to see you.” His expression was painfully sincere and it made Ava’s eyes sting.

  “I wouldn’t have missed it. You always throw the best parties.”

  “I’ll be leaving early from this one.”

  Alex stepped in. “You rest now, Papa. Don’t worry, Ava’s going to be around.”

  “I wish I was.” He managed something like a laugh. “It’s been such a good life. Nobody could have asked for a better one.”

  His eyelids fluttered and closed. His breathing was slow and even.

  Alex said, “Even that little bit of talking wears him out. He’ll be asleep for a while now.”

  Ava squeezed Adalberto’s hand, watching out for the iv, and retreated to the hall. She sat on the floor next to the couch where Cole and Sallie were huddled up. Ava had only seen them a couple of times since he’d hooked up with her, but she could definitely see the attraction.

  “Did you get to talk to him?” Cole said.

  Ava nodded and swallowed hard. “What would it be like to be the kind of person that so many people cared about?” As soon as she said it, she realized it was a pretty stupid question to ask a couple of celebrity musicians.

  Cole let it pass. “This is nothing,” he said. “If everybody who owed him showed up in one place, it would look like Woodstock. Just speaking for myself, he saved my life on three separate occasions.”

  Who would come to my funeral? Ava wondered. The people in this hallway, maybe a couple of people from the array.

  “You must be worn out from your flight,” Sallie said. “We were talking about going to the house and getting some sleep.”

  “I don’t know…” Ava said.

  “There’s nothing you can do here,” Cole said. “Visiting hours are over, they want to clear the halls if they can.”

  Ava gave in and they took the elevator downstairs. They put her suitcase in the back of Cole’s camper and all squeezed in the front. Ava fell asleep on the drive to the Montoya house and they’d just unlocked the front door when Cole’s cell rang and Alex told them that Adalberto was crashing.

  When they got back to the hospital, a white-haired doctor was listening to Adalberto’s chest with a stet
hoscope. He stood in the doorway and said, “He’s still breathing, barely. The other organs are shutting down now—they can’t handle the waste that the kidneys are supposed to be filtering out. If you want to say goodbye, now’s the time. He’s not conscious, but it’s possible he can hear you on some level.”

  Alex and Alex’s mother and Cole went in the room. Linda looked like rusted metal, about to crumble. She stood on one side of the bed, holding one of Adalberto’s hands, and Cole and Alex stood on the other. Linda’s lips were moving, but Ava couldn’t hear what she said.

  Madelyn came to Ava, and Ava gathered her up, and she put her head on Ava’s shoulder. In the room, Alex reached out without looking and took Cole’s hand. Cole shifted over until their arms were touching along their entire length. Ava felt like a finger was pushing on her throat right at the collarbone.

  Everybody was holding their breath. Ten minutes crawled by and then Alex stroked his father’s forehead and said, “He’s gone.”

  Madelyn stifled a sob and her sudden tears melted through Ava’s shirt. In the room, Linda wailed and Alex went to her and helped her into a chair. Cole came out and Sallie wrapped him in her arms. Pretty much everybody was crying.

  In her long, wasted years after college, Ava had smoked a lot of dope with a guy named Rich, whose favorite saying was, “After today, everything’s going to be different.” They’d laughed and laughed because the only thing that ever changed was whether they could afford to buy another baggie of weed.

  She didn’t know she’d said it out loud until her mom said, “What did you say? What’s going to be different?”

  Ava shook her head. “Everything,” she said.

  *

  It took three days for Ava to get a chance to talk to Alex alone. Friday was the wake, where Alex and Cole played guitars and sang Mexican songs, with Sallie joining them on a few. Saturday was the funeral, and like Cole had predicted, half of Dallas was there, with the local tv stations filming the crowds outside the chapel.