Dust of Eden

by Thomas Sullivan

  "I keep looking."

  "You aren't married, are you?" Starting to lose it again.

  After a minute Denny reached out to lift the fire extinguishers. "I'd better put these back."

  "Why?"

  "They belong somewhere else, Dad."

  "What about your sister? There might be a fire."

  The forever fire, burning since 1956. Denny had been there. Whenever he smelled damp soot wafting out of a fireplace, smoke seared his six-year-old throat again.

  Why had his father looked for him first and carried him down the smoky staircase out of the house—because he was the youngest? Is that why Tiffany had to wait? His father had saved Tiffany too; saved her for operations and skin grafts and the disasters of her social life and ultimate damnation.

  Denny let the old man hug his fire extinguishers. He sat by the bed until his father's eyes closed and the lids began to pulse and the bewhiskered jaw dropped slightly. Then he gently slid the red cylinders out from the thin green blanket and bore them back to their places. He found a bracket on the wall in the annex corridor, so he left one there, but when he took the other into the kitchen, there was Dana Novicki.

  Waggling the extinguisher, he shook his head and gave her a crooked smile. "Besides having a killer right hook, Daddy's a kleptomaniac."

  "That's better than a pyromaniac."

  "Much better. I looked for you the other day. You were going to turn me down for lunch."

  "Was I? It's just so . . . hard to get away. I don't like to leave here."

  "Don't like to, or can't?"

  The color in her cheeks flushed quarter-size and her slate blue eyes went flat.

  "No one seems to go out around here," Denny said. "Beverly is getting ready to hijack passing cars for cigarettes. Is that a rule or something? Everyone has to stay down on the farm? Ariel told me no one ever took trips from here. She didn't say they couldn't."

  "I wouldn't call it a rule. Ariel doesn't like to make things formal like that. But no one wants to disappoint her. She . . . created this place. She brought us together."

  "Not to mention she's strong willed."

  "Not to mention."

  "So no one wants to cross her."

  Dana averted her eyes. He saw that the redness where his old man had poked her was nearly gone.

  "We're different here," she said. "Your father is the first one to come in the way he did."

  "What way is that?"

  "Not someone Ariel knew."

  "So it's strictly by invitation only?"

  "Yes. Invitation only. Everyone was surprised she let you in."

  "I put a little pressure on her, and I met her price."

  "Pressure?"

  "You seem like such a closed shop, I'm sure she doesn't want anyone raising hell with the regulatory agencies. She must get tax considerations for being an assisted-living facility, and I don't know how much beyond that you've been scrutinized, so I fished in those waters a little. But going into town isn't big in my father's priorities, and I'm not going to rock the boat. The other places I saw were nightmares. This place is almost normal, in an abnormal sort of way."

  "Good advice, Denny—about not rocking the boat. I hope for your father's sake you mean it."

  "For my father's sake?"

  She closed her eyes, shook her head. "I shouldn't have said it that way. Now you think your father might be mistreated. I just mean there are circumstances that are unique to the people here. You don't have to know what I'm talking about. You just have to accept that your father won't ever fit them." She began shelving dishes from the rack in the sink.

  "This just gets curioser and curioser. Which way to the Mad Hatter's tea party?"

  "Well, Ariel may act like the Queen of Hearts sometimes, but that doesn't mean she should be taken lightly. Far from it. Like I said, we all knew one another before we . . . came here. We went through a lot together. The Great Depression, the wars—everything since. So we're like an extended family."

  "Mother Leppa and her ancient children. Not you, of course. You can't be old enough to remember the Depression."

  The laugh reached the surface this time, and the quarter-size splotches on Dana’s cheeks spread to a glow. "A woman doesn't tell her age, thank you."

  "Well, whether or not you're too old for me or I'm too old for you, we still should do lunch."

  She tossed her hair coquettishly. "Why don't we make it a picnic?"

  "Done! I've got a blanket in the car."

  "Whoa, whoa—not today."

  "When?"

  "In a week or two."

  "You expecting a long rain?"

  "It's buggy out."

  "Buggy? Does this have something to do with the chicken wire on the windows? You must have some terribly big insects, if it does. Paavo said it was birds."

  She gave him a long patronizing look.

  "Okay," he surrendered. "Next week. Next month. Anytime. Surprise me. Do you know where this fire extinguisher goes? And I'm glad your eye didn't swell up."

  He went to speak to Ariel then, and he did it in the wrong way, because he marched right up the staircase where he had seen her go, calling as he went, thinking it would be all right—that she had an office or something, or at least that she would come out of one of the rooms when she heard him. But when he reached the third floor, the only thing that came out of a room was the wheelchair that suddenly cut him off.

  The man who towered out of the chair looked like he had been wedged into it. He had a massive mane of hair, thick features and big, doughy white fingers that fumbled with the armrests. His lips were cracked and dried, and flakes of skin clung to several days' growth of beard. Only his huge eyes seemed to contain moisture, and they were soulful lakes tinged red, as if something molten churned in their depths. "Who are you?" he wheezed leadenly from papery lungs.

  "Denny Bryce. My father lives here. Who are you?"

  "Oh. That one. You should get him out."

  "Why?"

  He tried to lean toward Denny as if to speak confidingly but only succeeded in tilting his shaggy head. "Get the hell out of here, if you want to stay healthy."

  Denny pursed his lips. "Why is that? This place seems pretty healthy to me for an old-age home."

  "It isn't an old-age home."

  "No?"

  "It's a nursery."

  "A nursery?"

  "These people were all dead. I was dead."

  Third-floor dementia ward, Denny was thinking, despite what Ariel had led him to believe. He wondered if his father might eventually be brought up here. "Well, I'm glad to see you're alive now."

  "You think I don't know how lunatic that sounds?" thudded back through the wheelchair man's crusted lips. "I'm telling you, we've all been brought back."

  "From . . . the grave?"

  The abject being in the wheelchair seemed to deflate a little then, breathing an affirmative with such sibilant horror that for a moment Denny Bryce wondered how real his nightmares were. Suddenly the man jerked a quarter turn in the chair and grew so rigid that he could have been having a seizure. Tortured cats and cornered dogs looked like that. Breathing faucally, the red eyes transfixed and slightly averted, it only gradually dawned on Denny that the pitiful wretch was reacting to something behind him.

  "Well, I see you've met Thomas," Ariel Leppa crooned. "Isn't he interesting? I've been trying for almost a year now to get him to tell me what it was like to be dead. Sometimes he talks about burying himself. I think they call it delusional psychosis—or some term I can never get straight." Her mellifluous tone suddenly went flat as she warned: "He stays up here because he frightens everyone. And they stay downstairs."

  Denny took a deep breath he didn't know he had been missing and turned around. "I couldn't find Molly, and I wanted to talk to you,” he said. “I didn't realize this is off-limits up here."

  Ariel gazed at him coldly. "Will you excuse us, Thomas? I'll come see you later. Then maybe we'll rebury you together . . ."

&
nbsp; Her words galvanized the helpless giant in the wheelchair to desperation. "It's a nursery . . ." he shouted as Ariel led Denny down the hall. "A nursery!"

  Ariel closed the door behind them in what was obviously a sewing room, complete with a disused spinning wheel and a slightly more recent Singer treadle machine. "This is why I told you that visitors to New Eden are unsettling, Mr. Bryce. If you insist on coming here to see your father, please keep to the lower level."

  "Understood."

  "Good. Now what did you want to talk to me about?"

  "A phone. I'd like my father to have a phone in his room. I'll pay for the installation and the bills, of course."

  The icy look of assessment was back, and he saw that this request too was somehow an intrusion on her space.

  "I don't think that will work out."

  "Why not?"

  "No one here has a phone in their room. I tried to explain that to you when you insisted you wanted your father to live here. I said that we were different, and I admitted that by any standards we are considered isolated. Do you remember? But you said your father would fit in. 'A sanctuary,' I believe you said was what he needed. No stimulation, no interventions. He just needed to be left alone—isn't that right?"

  "Right. But I'm not talking about stimulation. If he had a phone, he would only talk to me, and only when I call. I haven't seen him dial a phone for three years. He gets frustrated with the buttons."

  "Then it's your need for a phone, not his, and you're not a resident here. I'm afraid I'm going to say no."

  "It might mean I wouldn't have to come as often."

  He had no intention of cutting back on his visits, and she wasn't fooled. "Nevertheless, no," she said. "It would make the others resentful. Really, Mr. Bryce, you must let me make the choices that will be in our best long-term interests, even if they seem unreasonable to you."

  "I'm astonished . . ."

  She stared down her hawk nose at him, refusing to be provoked.

  Almost vindictively he switched gears. "Unreasonable seems too mild a word for some of your precautions. Are you having a problem with birds and oversize insects?"

  "Come again?"

  "The chicken wire on the windows."

  She paled a shade. "I believe you told me on your first visit: your father tends to wander. I can’t afford guards."

  "That's true about my father, but I don't think he could work his way out a window. And I didn't notice any double-cylinder dead bolts on your doors."

  "—then there's Thomas."

  "In his wheelchair on the third floor?"

  "You don't know all the residents here, Mr. Bryce. Your father isn't the only one who gets confused."

  "But you told me you didn't accept dementia patients."

  "I accepted your father." Her cold calculation ebbed a bit, as if she were making a decision. The supercilious tilt of her gaze suddenly lowered, and her clear eyes met his straight on. "Mr. Bryce, we do some miraculous things here—miraculous. I told you there haven't been any serious illnesses in New Eden—nothing that wasn't addressed—and we've never had a death."

  "You're a small population. Naturally I hope that continues as long as humanly possible, but—"

  "Oh, it will. Even longer than humanly possible."

  Denny smiled thinly. "It's the water, I suppose. Look, I'm not unhappy with anything. I wouldn't have fought to get my dad in here if I didn't think it was better than his other options. I just want a phone for him. If that's a big problem, okay. It's not a hill I'm going to die on."

  "Wouldn't you like your father to become healthier . . . younger even?"

  "That's not going to happen."

  "Oh, I don't know. A lot of aging is a state of mind, and that's what I control here."

  He didn't try to answer that. She was more than an odd bird, and now she was showing her flightiness. People had a statistical success with something and right away they thought it validated everything they ever did. Because her little island was healthy, Ariel thought she had all the answers, the magic beans. Wait till the first one fell facedown into the mushroom soup. It could set a trend. A couple cases of terminal flu in the same month and her salubrious outpost would be quarantined. Then see what a sage she was. But why burst her bubble?

  "I couldn't help but notice that picture of your father when he was young," Ariel was saying. "A Navy photograph, isn't it? My father was in the service, but I never had his photo. How I wish I did. Such a handsome man—your father—and his character is written all over his face. You must love that picture, or you wouldn't have carted it out here and hung it on his wall."

  "As a matter of fact, I do."

  "Well, then, wouldn't you like him to look like that picture again?"

  He wanted to say "Sure," but the conversation was getting a little more than just odd now. He didn't want to explore how unbalanced Ariel Leppa might be, didn't want to doubt her to the point where he had to rethink everything. She had made him promise that his father would stay here for life, if she let him in, and even though he had taken that with a large grain of salt, it was another hill he wasn't prepared to die on right now. So he didn't say, Sure, I'd like my father to look just like that photo. Dose him with your magic well water and we'll watch the years peel away. And while you're at it, you could use a little de-aging yourself, if you don't mind my saying. What he said was: "I just want him to stay the same."

  "The same," she repeated, as though it were the saddest thing in the world. "'Same' makes death inevitable, doesn't it?"

  "My father wants to die. I wish I could change that, but I can't. Even if you could make him younger, you couldn't bring back the context. Everything around him has died or changed. I just want him to be safe, comfortable and respected as a viable human being. He's not going to roll beach balls on the floor with a bunch of human artifacts sitting in a circle of chairs." The words were scarcely out of his mouth before he was waving a retraction. "I didn't mean it that way."

  "Don’t apologize. You say it very well. The whole idea of New Eden is to get 'the context' back. Especially the context. We have no beach balls here, Mr. Bryce. You know that. We just . . . become as young as we like."

  She seemed to be expecting him to say something more, but he thanked her for her time, adding, "Sorry for intruding up here in this part of the house."

  "That's your problem, you know," she called after him. "Making your father's death inevitable. You should stay away from him, if you feel that way. Just let him go."

  She was right, he thought when he was back on the solitary road, passing the long undulating waves of heart-shaped ivy. He was making his father's death inevitable because he was losing the battle to give him the will to live. It might have been different if they could have kept their lives together in the gingerbread cottage in Little Canada. If Denny could have continued like that. His mother had kept the old man going for years. The Freudian totality: mother-mistress. A lifetime of being the maternal consolation for the murder of his father's mother. And his father in turn had "kept her"—with apologies to Mary Chapin Carpenter. He had kept her the way she had wanted to be kept. If she had wanted it otherwise, he would not have opposed that. But however much they may have had to work at it, in the end they had just the right temperament for each other. He secured her. She created brightness just by being there. I loved her because her idea of romance was giving, not getting. How could you not keep living for that? And if she hadn't been killed in the car accident . . .

  Well, we all die, thought Denny Bryce wearily. The gray regina of New Eden couldn't make death avoidable, despite what she believed. She could not be the sovereign of their souls, no matter how much she wished to be. And surely there were inner deaths that occurred while outward bodies yet survived.

  Chapter 12

  "Haven't I made you the youngest?"

  "Yes, but—"

  "Why do you think I did that?"

  "Because . . . because I was never cruel to you."

  "A
nd . . . ?"

  "I don't know."

  "And because I trust you, Dana. I can trust you, can't I?"

  "Yes. Of course."

  "Look at me, then. That's better. I know you've been talking to him. He has a certain boyish charm. I'm not asking you not to be friends with him. I'm just asking you to take his picture. Simple. Click . . . flash. That's all. It doesn't mean you're betraying his friendship. On the contrary, you're keeping faith with me."

  "But . . . what will I tell him?"

  "Tell him? Tell him I asked you to. Tell him you're my official photographer. That's true, isn't it? I want pictures of everything. He comes here every day. Surprise him."

  Surprise me.

  That's what Denny Bryce had said to her about picking a time for their picnic. But Dana Novicki felt hollow and cold when she took the camera from Ariel and started downstairs in the early hours of the night. Because she knew what Ariel used photos for. Knew any photo she took would end up with the others. A surrogate death row of images, waiting on appeal. Thumbs up; thumbs down. Denny Bryce would be under that thumb, then, like all the rest of them. No longer a threat to the mistress of New Eden, but threatened by her.

  But by the time Dana Claire Novicki reached the foot of the long staircase it all became a moot point. Because now she sensed something that eroded the thin plane of existence she had returned to. Something that immediately froze her blood, suspended her rhythms, cleaved emotions from her mind, flatlining all the gentilities and subordinate dramas of relationships on earth. The core being within her contracted like a membrane—knotting into a root essence as dense as a neutron star, excluding light, shutting out any purpose but survival. It was as though she had suddenly been returned to an obscene flight of rodents, clawing over one another in the deepest midnight rush up the walls of a flooding cellar to avoid extinction. And she was one of them. Fiery eyed, shrieking. How could she have forgotten that? Only a year removed from the grave, and she had smothered the memory.

  But now the gulf was opening around her again, exhaling the dreaded stench of compounding decay while receding into the horizonless vastness from which she had been summoned by Ariel Leppa. She knew why it was there. What it meant at this moment. It had opened, like an overgrown gateway that is always present but never quite discerned, to let something in. Something new—or rather very ancient—had arrived from outer realms. A corrupted thing. A wild malevolence escaped from limbo. Here now. Physically here in this house, this night.