Exile from Eden

by Andrew Smith

  Then the Unstoppable Soldier’s leg—the one Breakfast was tugging on—came off in the boy’s goopy grasp, and Breakfast slid backward in the writhing stew of innards, falling hard onto his back.

  “Gah! Fuck! Fuck this!” Breakfast squirmed and kicked, trying to regain his feet in the wriggling gelatinous slop. More and more of the creature’s acidic bowels emptied, hosing all over the protesting Breakfast, into his mouth and nostrils. About a half dozen of the cucumber-size maggots slithered up the wild boy’s legs and across his belly. Breakfast slapped at them, then took off running like the wild boy he was, crashing and snapping through the brush, down toward the river, swearing and howling, with the unquestionably loyal Olive happily following behind.

  The Unstoppable Soldier, emptied out, slumped motionless and deflated, broken into oozing segments in the noxious and steaming lake of its innards that boiled with hundreds of glistening worms.

  In the distance, at the river, Breakfast cursed and wailed.

  I stepped around the burbling puddle that had formed beneath the carcass of the monster, in order to peer into the tunnel where Mel was trapped.

  “Mel?”

  Mel’s voice came out of the darkness of the little shaft. “Oh my God, Arek. I was so scared.”

  “It’s all right now. The thing’s—well, it’s kind of rearranged now,” I said.

  “Where were you? What happened to you?”

  “I don’t really know. I woke up and I was on a boat, and I’d been found by this crazy little naked kid and a monkey named Olive, but don’t call her a monkey, or the naked kid will get mad at you.”

  Mel didn’t say anything for a few seconds. I was reasonably sure my explanation was a lot for her to take in, all things considered.

  Then she said, “Are you okay?”

  It sounded like she maybe thought I was crazy, or possibly drunk.

  “I’m okay, Mel. Are you okay?”

  Mel said, “I’m tired of being in here. I’ve been stuck like this here for two days.”

  “Well, it’s time to get you out, then, I guess.”

  I could almost hear both of us sighing with the same breath.

  “Thank you,” Mel said.

  “Mel?”

  “What?”

  “I’m stupid.”

  “Are you drunk, Arek?”

  “No.” I swallowed. “I’m stupid because I should have told you a long time ago how goddamned much I’m in love with you, Amelie Sing Brees.”

  “Oh,” Mel said. “This is just like a scene from a love story: You, me, and a giant fucking dead bug in between us.”

  “And there’s maggots as big as my forearm,” I added.

  “Of course. And there’s maggots,” Mel said.

  “Sorry.”

  “Arek?”

  “What?”

  “You made me so happy right now.”

  “With the maggots?”

  Way back there, in the cave, Mel laughed. I could almost imagine seeing her eyes.

  Mel said, “I love you so much, Arek.”

  “Well, good. Let’s try to not get any of that bug pus on our faces, then, so when you come out of there we can kiss like people in love with each other are supposed to kiss. I mean, this being a love story and all.”

  Journey on the Fish

  Max Beckmann said, What matters is real love for things of the world outside us and for the deep secrets within us.

  All these things of the world and all our secrets had been hidden too long.

  I thought I’d been looking my entire life to find what mattered—Max Beckmann’s notion of real love—only to come to realize after leaving the hole that, like a shoreless sea, real love was everywhere around me, tossing and churning, and I was helpless to its wildness.

  The year the Nazis came to power in Germany, when Max Beckmann had been labeled “degenerate,” he started a piece of twinned images he called Journey on the Fish. It is a painting about uncertainty and love.

  In it we see a man and a woman who appear to be flying above the curved horizon of the planet, over the sea. The man and woman are riding atop two fish, descending toward the uncertain world. The man is lying on his belly, naked, hiding his eyes in fright, his feet bound with a black rope around the tail of one of the fish; and the woman, who is sitting on the man’s back, looks over her shoulder, downward and unafraid, to the rapidly approaching dark shape below. Her dress enfolds the man’s body.

  Like so many of Max Beckmann’s paintings, Journey on the Fish displays what I think was Beckmann’s recognition of the strength and bravery of the women he knew. The woman on the fish is a likeness of Beckmann’s wife, after all.

  And I always knew Mel was much braver than me, too.

  On the curve of the blue sea is a solitary boat, its pregnant white sail supported by an unmistakable blackened crucifix. It is unclear whether the pair are plummeting toward an empty abyss or a dark shoreline—misfortune or sanctuary. In the man’s hand is a mask—the silhouette of his lover’s face—and in the woman’s hand is the mask of the man.

  The lovers on the fish, falling rapidly toward an uncertain fate, had removed each other’s masks to allow the deep secrets beneath them to be revealed.

  Falling and falling and falling, without end.

  This is me.

  • • •

  Mel was still wearing the same pajamas she’d had on the night Sergeant Stuart showed up pounding on our door.

  We were both dirty and tired, but I knew when I saw her crawl from the tunnel’s opening that Mel was the most perfectly beautiful thing in the world outside the hole.

  She dropped the .45 she’d been carrying, and we fell into each other’s arms.

  I said, “This is how it was always supposed to be.”

  “Yes.”

  “Even if I’m wrong.”

  Mel said, “You’re not.”

  “Let’s get away from here,” I said.

  Mel picked up the gun and took my hand, and we walked across the clearing into the woods. She looked around as though something were missing, or perhaps to be certain we were alone. And Mel asked, “Didn’t you say there was someone else?”

  I nodded. “A little boy named Breakfast.”

  Mel stopped. “The same kid you and your dad have been talking about?”

  “Yes. He found me. And his friend—he has this friend named Olive, and she’s a chimpanzee, but Breakfast thinks she’s just a wild person.”

  “And you’re not drunk?” Mel said.

  I shook my head and called out, “Breakfast! Olive! I’m coming back to the van! Breakfast!”

  Then came the inevitable whistle, and I was very happy that we were perhaps a quarter mile from where the wild boy had gone down to the river.

  And through the dark of the woods came Breakfast’s voice. “Hoo-wee! I ain’t never going to let one of those peckerheads blow up all over me again! Wild!”

  The night Sergeant Stuart shoved me into the water, Mel had, as I’d suspected, left the van through the driver’s door while I talked the sergeant into leaving his rifle on the riverbank. And it was Mel who’d thrown the man’s gun off the dock before she came back to the van.

  “What happened to Sergeant Stuart?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Mel said. “He was crazy. He was furious because he knew I’d done something with his gun. He told me he was going to make me a soldier, that he was going to show me what you never would be able to. I pulled the gun on him and told him to stay away from us, or I’d shoot him.”

  “Would you have done that?”

  Mel said, “I don’t think so. He didn’t believe me either, so I ran into the woods, and he chased after me. That’s when the bug came out. I think Sergeant Stuart fell down or something. I heard him cussing and yelling. He was really mad about what we’d done, Arek.”

  “Oh.”

  “And two days later, you came back.”

  We emerged from the woods near the dock. In the light cast out th
rough the van’s windows, I could see the forms of Breakfast and Olive, waiting for me to come back.

  Mel said, “Looks like your friends are here.”

  “They’re good . . . um . . . people,” I said.

  Then I grabbed Mel’s hand and made her stop so we could kiss one more time before going back to the van.

  Home to Me

  I drove that night until I began falling asleep at the wheel.

  When I knew it was too much and I had to rest, I parked the van in the middle of the roadway and went back to take a shower and to throw out my torn and filthy pajama bottoms.

  I came out dressed in the boxers Mel had washed for me. Mel sat, wearing my number 42 basketball jersey as a nightshirt, talking and laughing with Breakfast. It was a scene definitely worthy of committing to canvas: Mel in my tank top, sitting on the edge of my bed, in deep conversation with a naked wild boy and a chimpanzee, while I stood observing from the bathroom doorway, dressed in boxers with John Deere tractors on them.

  This was the world after the hole.

  And the four of us climbed onto my bed and watched The African Queen together, which was the first thing I’d seen on television that did not scare the shit out of me. It was also the first movie Breakfast had seen in his entire life. I’m not sure about Olive, but I’m guessing she’d never seen one either.

  But we did all start to cry at the end when Charlie, who was not named Arek and did not get eaten by leopards, and Rose, who was not named Mel and who was not at all patient with Charlie because she was much more like a movie version of Wendy than she was like Mel, got married just before they were about to be executed by German soldiers during World War I, which was exactly the same hole that D. H. Lawrence and Max Beckmann had gone through.

  Even Breakfast and Olive cried at the end of the movie.

  Olive wiped Breakfast’s red face.

  The wild boy’s nose ran a steady stream of cry snot.

  And Breakfast said, “I’m madder than a shiny treasure chest full of hornets. I ain’t ever cried in my entire life, and now I feel like this is going to turn my guts inside out. Motherfucker!”

  Then we laughed, and we cried some more too, because this was the first time, maybe on all the planet, that after-the-hole kids found after-the-hole kids.

  We said our good-nights. Breakfast and Olive went to sleep on Mel’s little bed, and, for the first time since we were just small children, Mel and I went to sleep together in mine. We held on to each other, and I pressed my face into the side of her neck so I could breathe Mel into me.

  And I whispered to her, “You are home to me. I don’t care about houses.”

  “I love you so much, Arek.”

  “Thank you, Mel. Nothing else matters.”

  Dobey’s Corners

  My hair grew long.

  The skin on our shoulders and arms turned brown from sunlight.

  We were joined to the world outside, not as pieces of a model, but as the thing itself.

  We straddled time, and in doing so, changed. I can see the Arek and Mel who were born and lived in a hole as images on a canvas observed by the Arek and Mel after the hole.

  One day I will paint that.

  There were no secrets within us.

  All our stories, exposed, were true.

  • • •

  Months after the hole, we found ourselves in the dead middle of a brutal summer.

  We drove through a wasteland of felled trees, washed-out bridges, and highways reclaimed to wildness by woods; and although we’d seen two more sick and dying monsters, we found no more humans. At times I wanted to quit looking for my fathers—to find a home and stay there for a while with Mel—but she would not allow me to give up.

  Mel was like that.

  She would always remind me of that one line from Lawrence, because we didn’t need a house if we had already found our home.

  Once, in the hole, I’d asked my second father, Robby, why there were more stories about people finding each other than there were about people losing each other.

  Robby was never one to give answers merely to soften the impact of all those unexpected things that scrape boys’ knees. That was another thing about Robby that I realized was part of his plan to prepare me to get out of the hole, like the fishing trip we took when I was thirteen.

  We came to a small town that was little more than the intersection of two straight roads. The town was called Dobey’s Corners.

  Before we’d left that morning, the four of us—Mel, Breakfast, Olive, and me—played Yahtzee. Olive won. She was very good at Yahtzee.

  Breakfast and I drew gas up from an underground tank at a service station. Diagonally across the intersection from us stood a three-story brick building with a rusted sign hanging vertically along one corner that said CHICO’S.

  On the windowless side of Chico’s was a sign that had been painted directly onto the bricks. The sign was blue with a red-and-white checkerboard pattern on its border, an advertisement for Purina Chows, whatever that may have been.

  I had no idea what Chico’s used to be either. Most of the front wall of the building had collapsed, and loose bricks were scattered everywhere in the street. Mel and Olive hunted inside Chico’s and the other three buildings that established the entire town of Dobey’s Corners. They were looking for anything that might be useful to us.

  “What do you think that was?” the wild boy asked.

  I said, “Purina Chows was the name of Chico’s father. He disappeared when Chico was just a boy, so Chico painted the sign on the side of his building as a reminder to everyone in Dobey’s Corners to keep looking for his father.”

  “How old was the boy when his daddy vanished?” Breakfast asked.

  “Twelve, just like you,” I said.

  The wild boy always liked it when I made my stories about someone exactly like him.

  Breakfast picked his nose and scratched his balls. “Did he wear clothes?”

  “Never. Chico was wild.”

  “Ha-ha! Wild! That’s how come I knew it, just from his name. Nobody would ever be named Chico unless he was wild.”

  “Or Breakfast,” I said.

  “Hell yes. Wild.”

  Breakfast walked to the edge of the station lot and peed on an old rusted sign that had numbers and the names of different kinds of fuel on it. He said, “Well, why did Purina Chows disappear?”

  I shook my head. “It was a great mystery, because Purina Chows loved his son Chico, and Chico’s mother, whose name was Willa, very much. Most people think that Purina Chows was attacked by an enormous flock of ravenous blackbirds, who disassembled him in their beaks, piece by tiny little piece, and then put him back together again, up in the clouds.”

  “Is that true?” Breakfast asked.

  “Of course it is,” I said.

  “Can blackbirds really do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, cover me up with a truckload of somebody else’s goddamned shit if I don’t have another thing I got to look out for now. Fucking birds!” Breakfast said.

  “Yes. Fucking birds,” I agreed.

  Breakfast spit.

  And as though cued by some hand marking the canvas that contained our world, a plane, rumbling, flying low in the sky out of the north, came nearer and nearer to the brick-strewn spot called Dobey’s Corners, where the wild boy and I stood.

  Enough People for a Real Basketball Team

  This time, they saw us.

  The plane circled overhead, so low at times we could see hands waving at us in the windows.

  Mel and Olive came out into the street to watch with us, and the plane, coming lower and lower, flew out directly over Route 854, which was one of Dobey’s Corners’ only two streets.

  And a mile away from us, the plane touched down, turned around, and came to a stop on the surface of the road.

  “Is it them?” Mel asked.

  “I think so,” I said.

  It was the same plane from the manuals Ro
bby had kept in the library of the hole.

  The strange thing to me was, in that moment, I felt confused, almost as though I didn’t honestly want to find my fathers. It was as though looking for them had been enough to keep us from returning to the hole, but now the end of their flight was perhaps the end of our journey. I imagined going back to Iowa with them, seeing Mel, re-dressed in a white Eden Project jumpsuit, while, without end, I endured Wendy’s rules, went to church with her, witnessed the annual setting of flames to Christmas, and arrived at last on some final and resolute shore.

  Maybe that was why the man on the fish in Max Beckmann’s painting covered his eyes: He didn’t want the journey with his lover, as uncertain as it was, to come to an end.

  That’s why all boys go away: to chase endlessness.

  • • •

  Ahead of us, the door on the plane opened. One person got out and stepped down onto the road, followed by another.

  “Hoo-wee! It’s the man in the sky!” Breakfast said. “I knew it was only a matter of time before he came down here and showed himself. Wild! Let me grab some money for him!”

  The wild boy and Olive ran back to the van to retrieve some of Breakfast’s treasure.

  Mel took my hand, and we started walking toward the plane and the people standing in the roadway.

  “Is it really them?” Mel asked.

  “Regardless, I think we now have enough people for a real basketball team,” I said.

  I Am Shoreless Man

  Dad grabbed me and cried.

  It was only the second time in my life I had seen my father cry.

  Robby, my other dad, hugged Mel and then kissed me on my ear.

  Robby said, “Your hair is long, Arek.”

  And Dad told me, “Wendy would not approve of your outfit, son.”

  I was only wearing boxers.

  I was half-wild, at least.

  I said, “It’s a superhero outfit. I am Shoreless Man. Besides, wait till you see our friend with all the money.” And I hitched my thumb over my shoulder to point down the road behind me, where a chimpanzee and a wild naked boy with shoulder-length dreadlocks, carrying handfuls of cash, came walking toward us.