Outside the Gates of Eden

by Lewis Shiner

  On Sunday afternoon, she found Alex by the swimming pool, which was covered in dead leaves from the previous fall. “Can I talk to you?” she asked.

  Alex was reading a book called The Shock Doctrine that had a fake bullet hole in the cover. Ava was pretty nervous anyway, and the violence of the image made her feel worse.

  Alex stuck in a bookmark and said, “Sure, what’s up?” Ava knew that Alex had used to fold over the corners of pages to mark his place and Madelyn had made him stop.

  “This is just… this is some stuff I’ve been thinking about, okay? It may be totally worthless.”

  “Sit down, relax. Whatever it is, I want to hear it.”

  Ava pulled up a lounge chair and perched on the edge of it. It was low to the ground, which made her knees uncomfortably high. “Okay, so, I call it Project Ark.” Once it was out, it sounded so stupid that she wanted to go stick her head in the pool and drown herself. She felt herself blush with embarrassment.

  Alex nodded, acting patient and interested.

  “I don’t know,” Ava said. “Maybe I’m not ready to talk about it yet…”

  “Please,” Alex said. “Give it a shot.”

  “Okay, so, it’s about the future. I mean, everybody knows this part, right, about running out of oil and rising seas and all, and everybody is like, someday we’re going to have to do something about this. These guys I work with, I mean, they’re all optimists to some degree or they wouldn’t be in the solar business, but the message I’m getting is, one, if we were going to save the planet we would have had to start twenty or thirty years ago, so that fight is over, and two, if we’re going to save anything at all, we have to move fast and do it now.

  “So I’ve been thinking about how you could have a sustainable community that could survive what’s coming, and what it would look like. The first thing is, it would have to be a place that you could cut off from the rest of the world. Like an island, say, only that won’t work with the oceans rising. Maybe a city that was like completely surrounded by mountains or something. Two, it would have to be in another country, where the laws are kind of flexible and money talks even more than it does here. Someplace like… Mexico, say.”

  “You’re talking about Guanajuato,” Alex said, obviously interested now, all lit up behind his eyes.

  “Yeah. Guanajuato would be perfect. So the next thing is, the old model of having a power company who delivers electricity to your door, that’s out. Everybody has to be a provider as well as a consumer. With large solar arrays you have to deal with storage and transportation on too large a scale and you need too much real estate, so you need to put collectors on every roof. Plus wind turbines to supplement, in case you get a long stretch of heavy clouds or whatever. Technically what this would be is a community grid. That means you have to have consensus, and it has to be voluntary because this whole thing is fragile and a few saboteurs could take it down.”

  “Who pays for all this? The average homeowner in Guanajuato can’t afford solar panels.”

  “That’s one of the two biggest holes in the idea. Some incredibly rich person has to decide they’re willing to fund it.”

  “And the rich person would do this because…”

  “Because the rich person wants some remnants of civilization to survive the end of the world as we know it. Maybe the rich person grew up in the sixties and a part of him still believes that capitalism is not the answer, and is still hanging on to his own idealism.”

  “And the second big hole?”

  “The drug cartels. They’re already the real government in large areas of Mexico and it’s only going to get worse. As everything starts to break down, they’re going to be the ones with the firepower to take over. This idea won’t work if Guanajuato gets turned into a war zone.”

  Ava hugged her knees and looked at the tile under her feet. “So that’s my idea.”

  Alex was quiet for a while, thinking. He wasn’t laughing and he wasn’t dismissing the whole thing with a bunch of lame excuses, which made Ava feel pretty good.

  Finally Alex said, “So how much money are you talking about?”

  “Okay, so, you’ve let slip here and there how much your businesses are worth. And of course it’s impossible to talk in anything but the most approximate terms…”

  “Yeah, yeah. What’s it going to cost me?”

  Ava took a deep breath. “Everything. It’s going to cost you everything.”

  2016

  If 1967 had been the Summer of Love, surely the turning of 2015 to 2016 was the Winter of Hate. With the election still a year away, the Republican Party had goaded itself into a verbal orgy of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny, while the nra demanded more and more human sacrifices and white cops continued to put bullets in the backs of black men.

  Spring was making a late start when Cole flew to Dallas on Alex’s dime, spent the night, and flew home again. He and Sallie went through the motions of eating dinner and Cole got a couple of glasses of wine into her and then they sat on the couch.

  “It must be bad,” Sallie said. “You’re rubbing your crippled finger.”

  Cole looked down. “I didn’t know I did that.”

  “Only when you’re scared.”

  He told her what Alex wanted of them, and what Alex’s hush-hush activity in Guanajuato had been about for all these years. Sallie started to cry. Every time she got herself together and started to speak, she broke down in sobs again. Cole held her and waited her out.

  Finally she said, “Are things really that bad?”

  “The polar ice caps are melting, and the more they melt, the faster they melt. Gun nuts are running the country and we average one mass shooting a day. Donald Trump has virtually locked down the Republican nomination. He could never win, of course, but the fact that he’s come this far is proof that the US has lost its mind and its moral compass. We’re like the lobster that started off in cool water and now the water’s about to boil, and if we don’t get out…”

  “We’re cooked.”

  “Basically, yeah.”

  She burrowed her head into his chest and they sat that way for a long time. He stroked her long, beautiful hair, which she had finally let go gray. Sallie loved him, he knew, and their physical chemistry was undeniable. Yet there was something in Sallie that did not need him. She had been so successful so young, and been loved so much by so many, that she was the most emotionally secure person he’d ever known. She would always land on her feet, with or without Cole.

  “I love this house,” she said.

  “We would have our pick of houses in Guanajuato. And it’s beautiful there.”

  “When Reagan got elected I threatened to move to Paris. Same thing with Bush II. But now that I’m looking it in the face, I don’t want to go. I love this country.”

  “I don’t love what it’s turned into.”

  “And what is it he wants you to do, exactly?”

  “I would be Minister of Agriculture or something. Because of what I learned at the commune. I would be in charge of figuring out how we’re going to grow enough crops to feed everybody. I would have professional agronomists to help, but I would be the one who made the policy.”

  “So we’ll all be vegetarians.”

  “Sorry, babe. There might be an occasional chicken. We can’t afford otherwise, it’s too inefficient. You never eat meat anymore anyway.”

  “I know it’s there waiting for me, down the street at the heb. Oh, Cole, I may be too old to change.”

  “Then we’ll stay here and go down with the ship, together.”

  “When I was a kid, the Revolution seemed like the most exciting thing. Woodstock, that incredible sense of possibility. Now if I had to miss a meal or go without air conditioning, I don’t think I could stand it.”

  “We’re old,” Cole said. “We’ve done more than our share of sleeping on floors and missing meals. We’re entitled to a little comfort.”

  She kissed his neck and then his mouth. She finger-wal
ked one hand down his chest and into his lap. “Maybe not so old after all,” she whispered.

  Cole scooped her up and carried her into the bedroom. The lovemaking was urgent, the calm afterward profound. Cole dozed for a while and woke up to Sallie’s deep, even breathing.

  He untangled himself without waking her, slipped on his jeans, and padded into the music room at the rear of the house. He opened the louvers on the back door to smell the sweet honeysuckle on the night air. His D-35 was sitting out on a guitar stand, next to Sallie’s 12-string, and he tuned it up and played a few quiet chords.

  In some ways he was happier than he’d ever been. After eight years together, with both of them well into their sixties now, they still made love once or twice a week, and when the moon was full and the night was warm he often found himself helpless with desire for her. With the spring, he’d been working long hours in the garden. They were both healthy, the house was paid for, and Sallie’s investments brought in plenty to live on.

  Yet in the world outside Austin, Sallie was perceived purely as a nostalgia act, and Cole was not perceived at all. They’d released a live album in 2013 that sold 20,000 copies, enough to pay for itself and not much more. The motivation to write new songs and put together another original album was elusive.

  They played 20 or so dates a year, mostly in the summer. During the winter they spent a lot of time on their separate computers. Sallie was satisfied with her life, finding old friends on Facebook, interacting with her fans, tweeting about her life with Cole. She also practiced piano an hour or two a day, worked on her Spanish, read, watched dvds, did Pilates, and she and Cole took long walks together these days instead of running.

  Cole had initially been sucked in by the Internet as well. He found Janet, his old high-school flame, early on. She was married—not to Woody—with three grown kids and a thriving Realty business. She was proud of him, she said, for all he’d accomplished. Sugarfoot, under his birth name of Terry Brewster, was still at the University of Illinois, now Dean of the Ag school, and married to an actor he’d met at a local theater group. He connected Cole to Laramie, now known as Lakshimi, who was co-owner of a Yoga center in Evanston. She’d had breast cancer and a double mastectomy, chemo, and radiation, and had just had a successful 15-year checkup. She’d been married twice, had two kids, done sporadic clerical work. The cancer had made her stop and think again about what it was that she’d been looking for at Woodstock and Eden Farm. Those questions had brought her to Yoga and spiritualism and her current partner. She was “still seeking, more calmly now.” Nobody knew what had happened to Sirocco.

  Lenny did mechanical drawings and technical writing for an air-conditioning company in Houston and had no hard feelings about anything. Gordo was in El Paso, working in a bank. Glen from Mountain Lakes ran a high-end appliance repair service in Portland, Oregon. His sister Sharon was teaching fifth grade in Michigan. Pauley had been killed in a car wreck in his late twenties.

  Cole had found somebody on Facebook who might have been Tina, who never responded to his friend request. He’d found no trace yet of Corrina Shotwell.

  He kept up a regular correspondence with Tupelo and Ava, and intermittent exchanges with his other friends, but the constant parade of Facebook updates was like empty calories, and he felt sick if he watched it too long.

  Wounded Bird Records had done a cd release of the Quirq album, and some nights it was enough to look at the small shelf of his recorded work, to play a cut or two from one of the albums and try to imagine that he was hearing it for the first time. Or to sit and play guitars with Sallie and sing together and teach each other their favorite songs. Other nights he felt like he’d failed at the one thing he’d been put on earth to do. Worse, that his entire generation had failed, had not been able to outlast the apostles of greed, from Goldwater to Reagan to Trump.

  The hardest thing was to think that he’d reached the end of his road, that however wonderful it was to be in this house with Sallie, nothing but more of the same lay ahead of him until he died.

  He looked up and Sallie was there, wearing one of Cole’s flannel shirts and glowing in the moonlight. “I’m not ready to give up yet,” she said. “Let’s go to Guanajuato.”

  *

  Who it was on the phone was Cole, it turned out. Joe still answered it whenever it rang, though most of the time it was some machine talking to him about his credit card or Medicare or something else to try and get in his pockets. Sometimes it amused him to turn on the radio and put the phone down in front of it without hanging up, so the one machine could talk to the other.

  Cole wanted something too, only what he wanted was for Joe and Peggy to move to Mexico. Cole was pretty sure it was the end of the world, and soon.

  It seemed like the end of the world to Joe sometimes too, what with everybody and their Aunt Sue walking and driving and eating without looking up from the gizmo glued to their left hand. tv was unwatchable because of the ugliest election campaign ever, isis beheading anything that moved, hurricanes on the east coast and drought in the west.

  He remembered when his daddy had been the age that Joe was now, and the way he would go on about Bill Clinton playing the saxophone on mtv like it was the death of western civilization, and Joe supposed that it was the way of things, that if a man lived long enough, he’d be yelling at the kids to get off his lawn.

  Since 2000 he’d been putting more and more time into a group he’d founded that worked to overturn faulty convictions. His clients were like in the Steve Earle song, mostly black, and brown, and poor, and it was the most satisfying work he’d ever done. He didn’t know that it would keep going without him.

  Then there was Peggy. She was frail these days, had been down with pneumonia twice in the last two years, and who knew how long either of them had left? Having cancer had done that to him, made him evaluate everything in terms of what if he got a diagnosis tomorrow.

  And if there was the tiniest part of him that still held the faintest of grudges against Alex over Denise, well, he expected he could live with that, too.

  “We’re doing pretty good here,” is what he said to Cole. “Janis is an rn here in Tupelo now, and Peggy babysits for her a couple of times a week. Jerry is doing green Realty over to Oxford, so we got both kids and all their kids within an hour of us. I don’t think relocation is an option.”

  Cole was quiet for a while, then he said, “I don’t want to lose touch with you, Joe.”

  “Well, that’s why the good Lord made Skype and Facebook and email. If you don’t want to lose touch, then don’t do it.”

  They talked some more about this and that, and after they hung up, Joe took a beer out to the screen porch and sat in the glider. The first stars were lighting up. He’d watch one for a while, then another one would fade into view.

  Would he have been any happier if he’d been Governor? He didn’t think about it often, it was just that Cole had got him started. If there was any one thing that was the downfall of the human race, it was that it was so hard to say, “Enough. I’m satisfied.”

  “Joe?” Peggy was at the door. “You all right?”

  “I’m good,” Joe said, and drank off the last of the beer. “I’ll be right in.”

  *

  Sallie followed Cole down the steps, across the tarmac, and into the cavernous León airport.

  “How you doing, babe?” Cole asked.

  “Holding up,” she said. This was her third trip to Guanajuato since spring, and this one was for keeps. The Austin house was only rented, not sold, so theoretically they had an escape hatch, and Cole promised that if she needed to bail, he would bail with her. Still, she didn’t want to be the one to cry hold, enough.

  Alex and Madelyn and Ava waited for them by the entrance. Hugs were had all around. Sallie still didn’t know what to make of Madelyn. Cole assured her that his feelings in that department were no more than mild affection these days, but he would say that, wouldn’t he? Madelyn was smart and beautiful and her crooke
d smile burned into the memory. Then there was the fact that she was now married to Cole’s best friend, who was in turn clearly attracted to Sallie, though he’d never done more than give her the occasional admiring look.

  Alex said, “I’ve got a truck out there loading up all your stuff off the plane. They’ll take it straight to your house. There are professional movers already there to help get the basics unpacked.”

  “Thank you,” Sallie said.

  Ava took their carry-on bags and they got in a minivan with the Project Ark dove-and-olive-branch logo on the side. Sallie ended up next to Madelyn, and once they were on the highway, Madelyn said, “Can we have dinner tonight? Just the two of us?”

  Sallie was emotionally exhausted and hadn’t slept well for days, watching the house gradually empty of the things she loved. Her feelings must have showed because Madelyn said, “Nothing heavy, I promise. We’ve never had a chance to really talk.”

  Madelyn arrived at 6:30 that evening, per Sallie’s grudging agreement. The movers had finished setting up the bed and Cole was putting on the sheets. All Sallie wanted was to crawl between them.

  She showed Madelyn around. An architect had remodeled the place ten years before to serve as a combination office and home, and when she hadn’t found enough clients, she’d moved to San Miguel to live off the expats. The floors were that new bamboo stuff, the exterior walls mostly windows, the interior walls largely non-existent. Freestanding shelves divided the living room from the dining area, which flowed into the kitchen. The guest room and recording studio were upstairs.

  “It’s fabulous,” Madelyn said.

  “It won’t look quite so House and Garden once all our junk is out of the boxes.”

  She felt self-conscious about kissing Cole goodbye in front of Madelyn, though neither Cole nor Madelyn seemed to care. He was relaxed and friendly with her and nothing more.

  Madelyn was on foot and hoped that was okay. “We try to set a good example, not driving any more than we have to.”

  Setting an example was part of Project Ark’s mission statement, and Sallie couldn’t hear the words without thinking of tikkun olam and wondering what Dave would have thought of all this. “Walking’s good,” she said. They were descending a winding street, headed for the Jardín de la Unión in the center of town. “As long as we slow down a little. I haven’t acclimated yet.” Her first day in Guanajuato, Cole had a meeting with local farmers and Sallie had gone for a brisk walk. She’d made it half a mile before collapsing, her lungs on fire from the thin mountain air.