Waiting for Eden

by Elliot Ackerman

  “Home,” she said.

  Sitting on the cheap vinyl-upholstered benches, she leaned her head against her shoulder but couldn’t sleep. Then she lay down on the hard resin floor. It pressed into her hip, in the same place it had pressed when she slept on the floor of her daughter’s room. Soon the man on the Zamboni circled back. He stopped his machine and called down from his seat: “There’s a chapel by USAir. It’s unlocked and the priest leaves cots inside.”

  She looked up at him. “No, I’m more comfortable out here.”

  During the night he breathed slowly, waiting for the cockroaches to take him. Drifting, he saw flashes of when he’d first been with his wife: her sleeping in his old Mustang, it parked at Onslow Beach before they could get their own place on base, her feet in the cold beach sand when he’d come see her after evening formation, her making him dinner in the backseat of the car, peanut butter sandwiches, feeding the bread ends to the seagulls, and the seagulls perching on the hood of the Mustang, pecking the windshield for more, a quick ceremony at the justice of the peace in Jacksonville, the courthouse smelling like old carpet and forgotten paper, a meal together at Chili’s afterward, and the next day, because they were now eligible, filing to move into base housing, him not returning to the barracks but waiting a week with her on the beach, a honeymoon of sorts, then their papers clearing and them moving out of the Mustang and in together.

  He saw it all, and me too, and what I’d done. The pieces of that assembled and disassembled in his mind like a puzzle he hoped would stop fitting together.

  And with the memory of me, the thousand cockroach steps returned, vibrating behind him. In that sound, his feeling was reduced to a single pulsing sensation, willing the cockroaches to leave him alone. All through the night, he came and went like this. By the earliest part of the morning, just about the time Mary boarded her flight back, his mind was so far gone it tore like his heart, and the result was a schism that left less of him, but also more.

  For the first time he knew it clearly: he wanted the end.

  The shift nurse squeaked down the hall in her rubber-soled shoes, headed toward Eden’s room. She opened the door and above his bed the bank of monitors made their noises. Before she checked them, his eyes told it all to her. They were still rheumy, slick and red, but the pupil of one was down to a pin and the pupil of the other was as wide and black as an olive. He’d had a stroke and the monitors showed that his heart was almost gone as well. He needed rest, but the body has a way of killing itself when it doesn’t want to go on, and she stood over him having very unscientific thoughts about how maybe this was the right way for it to be. Maybe the body knew better than the medicine.

  She sat on the edge of Eden’s bed while his uneven eyes read her face, as if looking for a hidden message, scrawled in lemon juice, one that told life to be always the right choice.

  He began to shiver.

  From a set of drawers, she brought over a blanket. She swaddled him in it. Still, he shivered. He shivered until he stopped, and then he sweat. She pulled the blanket back a bit. The air was warm from the heater by the window and outside there was a bright moon. She shuttered the blinds. Trestles of shadow fell across Eden’s bed.

  He never stopped looking at her.

  She returned to the edge of the bed, inched next to him and placed her hand along the hem of his blanket, just below his collar, where the hairs of his chest once curled. She reached under the blanket, near the place on the bandage her finger had touched before, but now she put her whole palm on his bare skin, unworried about infection. This wouldn’t matter, he was so close. One last time she wanted to know the feeling of him.

  In his body she felt many different things at once. Frozen soil. The bark of a tree. Baked sand. A handful of gravel. Glass, both shattered and whole. His textures were a mosaic of many, trapped in the inches of his skin.

  Her even eyes held his uneven ones as she touched him. In the space between them there was only her whispering: “If you want to go, go. But if you want to stay, sleep.”

  She stood from his bed, checking all the wires and hoses that connected him to the monitors above. The Snoopy tree continued to flash in the corner. She chose to leave it on, hoping its simple colors might soothe him. Then her shoes squeaked back down the corridor.

  The phone at her desk rang. It was the senior nurse, Gabe. She told him about the stroke and fading vitals. “All right” was his reply.

  She hung up and continued to read her magazine, but only made it through a few pages. Soon she began to wander among the empty patient rooms searching for some other way to pass the time.

  “Hello?” Mary called down the hall.

  She’d been up most of the night and now stood at the shift nurse’s desk. Sheaves of medical forms were scattered across it. She cast her eyes among them, finding her husband’s name on many.

  A shuffling noise came from a far room at the end of the hall. Mary walked toward it. There was a floor-to-ceiling window there, and in it, in the early morning dark, she could see the Panam Expressway and two distinct beads of traffic, one shining red and the other white, spooling and unspooling into opposite distances. Aside from the traffic, the window showed a perfect blackness. Reflected in it was the harsh glare of fluorescent bulbs shining in rows above her head, and the tired shadows of her return trip etched across her face.

  She lingered on her reflection for a moment.

  The shift nurse craned her head from the last door in front of the window. In her hands was another magazine. Promptly, she tossed it back through the door and took Mary down the hall to Eden’s room. Inside it was dark except for the lights of the Snoopy tree. They pulsed against the monitors, IV stands and tubes, blotting colored shadows against the smooth linoleum floor.

  Mary looked at the tree, not her husband.

  “I thought he’d be calmed by it,” said the shift nurse.

  Mary smiled back, flatly, and switched on the rest of the lights in the room. Her gaze wandered over him, resting on his dark, uneven pupils and the lids of his eyes, which had become pulpy and slick. She sat quietly on the side of his bed and placed her hand on the blanket that covered him. She could feel heat coming off his body.

  “Was he cold?” Mary asked.

  As long as his wife was there, the shift nurse hadn’t wanted to enter the room. She’d stood in the door, her hand braced against the jamb. But now she stepped toward Eden’s bed, explaining: “He’d had a chill before, some fever.”

  The two women both rested their hands on his chest.

  Eden gave no response, but turned toward the tree, the lights shining in his face.

  “He needs to sleep,” said the shift nurse. “His mind is very”—and she paused for the right word—“tired.”

  Mary looked back at her. “I’ll let you know if we need anything.”

  The shift nurse left the room and her shoes squeaked as she walked to her desk.

  Mary climbed onto the bed next to Eden. She lay down, careful not to tug on the wires that fed in and out of his body. Against her, she could feel the warmth of him, and she remembered how he’d been in their bed: a sleeping furnace, she used to tell him. In the night, he’d roll over and throw a beefy arm or a tree trunk of a leg on her, and she’d be pinned by his weight. When the bed was cold he’d get in first, wearing nothing but his underwear or nothing at all. He’d roll around in it like a dog, heating every hidden pocket. He’d then declare the bed warm and, if she agreed, she’d climb in and let him peel off her sweats and socks. In the mornings, he’d always get up before she did. He’d run and then lift weights or box in the garage. Sometimes she’d see him returning from their bedroom window, steam tumbling from his shoulders in the cold, or she’d hear a friend of his downstairs calling him, “BASE Jump,” their fists pounding the heavy bag that hung from a ceiling beam or their weights clinking in and out of the racks, gentle as
teacups on saucers. She’d rise and make the bed, tucking the sheets down and finding great curled strands of his body hair between the folds. It made her feel like she slept with a barn animal.

  Now, lying along the edge of his bed, she remembered all the heat of him, even though what remained was a mean little coal. “Sleep, sleep,” she said, not certain which type of sleep she was urging, not certain she didn’t want to sleep herself so she might wake to the cold, finding the fire in him had gone out.

  Mary drifted.

  Around her the room chilled. She felt him becoming heavier in the bed, relaxing, loosening, and on the backs of her eyes she could see the lights of the Snoopy tree, exploding.

  Then she felt every muscle in his body go taut, lifting him. He bucked, his head thrashed, eyes both wide, pupils uneven. Behind the bed, she heard the vibrating of a cellphone. Her phone, the one she’d lost. The monitors around them beeped furiously. Every time the phone vibrated behind him, the monitors became louder and faster, until his vitals were almost a solid tone.

  Then the phone stopped its vibrating. The beeping slowed. He relaxed back into the bed. His breathing calmed.

  “Easy, easy,” she told him, petting his hair, a thin and hard scrabble that ran in patches on his head. She watched his eyes. They frantically searched the room as if something were coming for him, but she didn’t know what.

  As the door opened, she climbed from the bed. The shift nurse ran in, looking him over quickly, checking his connections to the many tubes and wires, reading his vitals from the monitors above. The beeping had faded now, becoming soft. The shift nurse hurried out of the room, telling Mary that the senior nurse was on his way.

  Again, she was alone with him. She knelt by his bedside, resting her cheek along the mattress’s edge, her eyes running the seam of his linens and into his stare. She was ready to say goodbye, thinking of what she wanted to tell him or, if he couldn’t hear it, what she wanted to tell herself.

  The phone behind him vibrated quickly once more: an old voicemail.

  He whimpered lowly, as both wounded animals and scared children do. His teeth chattered, as if with a fever. Then he strained his uneven eyes behind him, looking to where the vibrating noise had come from. And as Eden’s mind slipped toward the horizon, Mary wondered what strange shadows it was casting.

  Then she knew: it was the sound of the phone’s thousand vibrations that terrified him.

  It was killing him.

  This wasn’t his body shutting itself down in some physiological self-destruct. Her husband couldn’t sleep because she’d forgotten her phone in his room.

  She could leave it there.

  All the suffering would end. No one would know she was the one who’d done it. And what would she be killing? The lump of flesh in front of her wasn’t a husband, it certainly wasn’t the famed BASE Jump, all of that ended in a flash three years ago along a strip of road in the Hamrin Valley. She wasn’t even sure that leaving the phone there could be called killing. Events in motion would simply be left in motion.

  But she couldn’t.

  If she’d had that in her to do, she would’ve done it a long time ago. So she stood from the side of his bed, smoothed down the front of her shirt and took a few breaths. “Okay,” she said, hating him in that broken way we reserve for those we truly love.

  She walked behind his bed, unplugged her phone and slid it into her pocket. She also unplugged the lights from the Snoopy tree. She shut the door behind her, and as night turned to morning outside, his room remained completely dark.

  When Mary stepped behind Eden’s bed, he worried that the army of cockroaches would consume her. But when she returned unharmed, he thought she had a strength, one that despite all he’d become he’d never known in himself. He watched her as she unplugged the Snoopy tree and walked toward the door, and then behind her, from a crack in the wall, came the lone cockroach. As she flipped off the light switch, the cockroach looked back at him.

  Then it followed his wife into the hallway and out of the darkness.

  Left alone, Eden slept.

  If you asked either of them how they met, you were likely to get one of three answers. If you asked Eden, and Mary wasn’t there, he’d tell you that they met in high school. He’d explain how they’d run in the same crowds and how he’d pursued her among other, lesser suitors, and you’d be left with midwestern images of varsity letter jackets, Dairy Queens and make-out parties. You’d also be left with the strange sense that he, still in his teen years, could size up what was barely a woman and decide that he could do what you couldn’t as a grown man: know that she was wife material and land her. Now if you asked Mary, and Eden wasn’t there, she’d tell you that they’d known each other in high school but started dating afterward, and even then things became serious only once he got stationed at Camp Lejeune and she had to decide whether to leave him or come along. The last iteration of their story, and the one that was closest to the truth, was the version you’d get if you asked and they were together. One of them, the one that was feeling the most considerate toward the other, would take up the question as though it were his or her turn with the dishes and say flatly: “We’re from the same hometown.”

  I say this was the nearest version to the truth because the truth as I saw it, as their friend, was that they ran into each other because of the town. When I say they ran into each other, I don’t mean like they bumped into each other, I mean they were both running away when they met and these forces of flight played matchmaker surer than any homeroom class or semiformal dance.

  To Eden and Mary, home seemed like a quiet type of terrorism: courses at the local community college, part-time jobs that took none of their skill but all of their energy, friends they’d had their whole lives with the promise that they’d have no others. For both of them home was a place long defined not by who lived there but by who’d left: for her a father who’d died young, for him an aunt who raised him, dying all along from her own slow sickness. Together Eden and Mary ran from all this, and it’s difficult not to fall in love with someone you’re on the run with. But you stop eventually, and then—

  I think I met them right about the time they were hitting the and then. He and I were team leaders in the same platoon, corporals, which meant we were a couple of years older than the guys in our teams and already had a deployment under our belts. It also meant we’d come in the Corps before the war started, which, to the younger guys, made us seem like that old and strange breed of regular who soldiered for soldiering’s sake. And maybe we did—we didn’t know yet.

  We were both coming to the ends of our first four-year enlistments, and we were both trying to decide if we wanted four more. It was natural we became friends.

  Whether we reenlisted or not, our infantry battalion was getting ready for its next deployment. This meant lots of training at night—driving at night, shooting at night, patrolling at night—once we got good at something during the day, our lieutenant would inevitably gather us all together and tell us we’d now have to get good at it at night. I often wondered why we didn’t just learn to do everything at night in the first place.

  We would deploy in the winter, and all through the summer, when the days were long, we trained like this. The lieutenant would let us off work early at 1500 and tell us to be back at 2100, when it finally got dark. He’d explain that we weren’t really working any harder. He’d say that if we didn’t train nights we’d have to work until 1800, but now we’d come back in and be off at midnight. “Three hours is fuckin’ three hours,” he’d tell us. But even he must have known this was bullshit because after that he’d say: “So no fuckin’ complaints,” and they only said that when there was something to complain about.

  But when Eden invited me to his house for dinner and I met Mary, I never complained about working late again.

  My first time over, it was a Tuesday. He’d roasted a d
uck, and I remember thinking, Who roasts a duck on a Tuesday? We ate at a table she’d set in their kitchen, but she had only salad. She wore her gym clothes, and we wore our uniforms, all of us smelling faintly of sweat. She was a vegetarian, fish sometimes but definitely not duck, and she told me this as I passed her the platter with the duck on it. I set the platter down, and as I did I saw her looking at my hand. I had a scar across my knuckles and she asked whether I boxed, because Eden liked to box.

  “No, it’s an old tattoo,” I told her. “I got it removed.”

  “What was it?”

  “USMC.”

  She gave me a confused look, as if wondering why I removed that tattoo off my hand while I was still in the Corps.

  “I got it when I was sixteen,” I explained. “My parents didn’t approve.”

  Eden laughed at me a little bit. His arms were covered in tribal designs. Spiderwebs burst from his elbows, and skulls hung here and there. He wasn’t halfway through his twenties and already he’d need another body if he wanted to ink any more of his story into it.

  “So you always wanted to do this?” she asked me.

  Eden interrupted before I could answer: “He’s going to extend for our next deployment.” I hadn’t signed the papers yet, but he was right, they’d already been drawn up.

  She looked at her husband and didn’t say anything. He’d yet to reenlist. I knew that and knew she didn’t want to talk about his choice to stay or go in front of me.

  I answered her: “Yeah, I think I always knew.”

  “Show him your tattoo,” Eden told her. Then he said to me, as if revealing some secret of his wife’s: “She was about sixteen too.”

  Mary pulled her dark ponytail to the side, so it hung over her shoulder. On the groove in the back of her neck was what looked like a small group of blue freckles. “Andromeda,” she said. “When I was a kid, it rose out my bedroom window.” I must have been looking at her with a stupid expression, because she added: “Andromeda’s a constellation.”