In the Electric Eden

by Nick Arvin

  Wilson contemplated what she might have hidden and where it could possibly be as they returned to the house. It had a new coat of paint his grandfather had put on earlier in the summer, a white that shone so hard in the sun it hurt Wilson’s eyes. To the west of the house stood the pole barn where his grandfather stored the truck and his woodworking and metalworking tools. East of the house, in the shade of a large elm, was a small, covered entryway and a set of concrete stairs that led down into a bunker. They went into the house, and his grandfather told him to finish his breakfast—orange drink from concentrate and instant oatmeal. They didn’t have any video cameras, but an alarm went off every time there was a power draw off the fence. Usually it was just a squirrel or a bird that managed to touch the electrified wires while also touching ground, but this time it had been more interesting. The oatmeal was cold, but Wilson ate it, thinking about the lady at the fence.

  She represented a singular event in a fog of otherwise similar days. His grandfather gave Wilson lessons in mathematics, science, spelling, and reading (books of history, the natural sciences, the encyclopedia) for six hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. During the remaining hours of the day Wilson was free to go about as he pleased, within the fence’s limits. Gradually the details of what had happened that day at the fence became tangled with fragments of his own imagination. He recalled a beautiful, sad woman who stared at him while she talked with his grandfather. Wilson stood mute. His grandfather spoke angrily for some reason. The woman pointed into the woods behind Wilson, then walked away into shafts of light driven down like spears through the trees. His grandfather said she had been hiding something, and Wilson wondered what she had hid, and where it was.

  The woods constituted a world for Wilson. His sense of them grew from an intuition for their stillness and rhythms, for growth and decomposition. He observed: the order in which a spider spun the strands of its web, the building of robins’ nests and the fattening of their chicks, the unfolding and the wilting of trilliums scattered under the trees. He stood at the foot of a single, unremarkable tree until he believed he could actually see it growing. On a windless day following the first hard frost of autumn, when the sumac beyond the fence had already turned to flame, he sat under a maple while its yellow leaves came down in a steady, random, falling drift, and it seemed to him, tracing the entire motion of a single leaf from branch to ground, that he understood everything.

  However, he knew nothing really of what lay beyond the fence. His grandfather told him that this was simply how people had to live now, and occasionally he showed Wilson enough television to make the point. Wilson knew he had once lived outside the fence, but he remembered nothing of that, nor of his parents—they were a pair of wisps, less substantial than sunset’s long shadows. A man had murdered them, his grandfather said. Wilson did understand as he grew older that his life had a certain emptiness, but it was an unconscious understanding, pervasive and colorless as air, and it only caused him to try to fill the emptiness with ever more minute details: the tiny, intricate branchings of leaf veins, the patterns of scent that rose as the sun set, the hundred individual sounds created by a wind—the heavy flap of oak leaves and the patter of poplar, the rattling of locust pods and the shushing of maple boughs. To dig under the fence or to find a tree that extended over it and escape would have been easy. But, while he considered the possibility and even noted the places to dig under or climb across, he was like a person who stands at the edge of a cliff and looks down, idly picking out the particularly jagged rocks.

  He was not a tree climber. He was slightly built and, sensing his own frailty, the difficulty of scaling a trunk intimidated him, as did the idea of putting weight on the branches. Trees swayed in a wind, and he had no desire to be up there when that happened. The thought of an earth far enough below to hurt frightened him. So he preferred to stay on the ground. There were many things to do without going up into the trees, many things to notice. He wandered around, observing, often wondering what the lady at the fence had hidden in the woods.

  He was nine and finding something amazing seemed possible, even probable. A buried treasure, perhaps. He started by going back to the place where they had met the woman, and he tried to find the precise spot where he had stood. He visualized his grandfather beside him, then the woman on the other side of the fence, her arm raised. He turned and memorized the tree trunks there, the hang of the branches and the leaves, setting the direction in his mind. He dug dozens of small and large holes along that line for the better part a summer before he finally gave up. But he did not forget, and a couple of years later he asked his grandfather to let him build a metal detector as a science project. He spent another summer working the detector back and forth between the trees.

  His grandfather seemed to pay little attention to what Wilson did with his free time as long as he did not leave the woods. His grandfather kept the bird feeders full and watched them through the windows, and once a month he took his truck—painted flat olive green, with tinted windows and a winch mounted on the front bumper—out for supplies. They stocked fresh goods in the bunker and carried older supplies into the house, exactly enough cans, dried goods, and bottled water to last the month.

  His grandfather was a mystery, a summation, encompassing like the sky, and if his grandfather changed at all during these years Wilson could not perceive it. But there were no photographs in the house, and in the woods Wilson had come to understand that time was fluid, like water: it leaked through his hands if he tried to grip it. His grandfather had the habit of disposing of things that seemed to him not immediately useful. The walls of their house were blank. The bookshelves were stocked with heavy reference books and how-to books. If Wilson brought a flower, a leaf, or a feather into the house, it was gone the next day. His grandfather believed only in self-reliance. On birthdays, Wilson received a pocketknife or a magnifying glass, a compass, a calculator, binoculars, or a book of knots, a field guide to birds. He liked these things and arranged them on shelves that his grandfather built for him in his room.

  Time continued to trickle by more or less unnoticed until Wilson’s sixteenth birthday, when he woke and came into the kitchen and, as usual on this day of the year, a brown paper package lay on the table. This time it was very small, the size of a matchbox. Breakfast had not been laid out. Dawn light colored the room gray. His grandfather sat tight-lipped and stern. “Good morning,” he said. “Happy birthday.”

  “Thank you.” Wilson opened the package. Inside was a single key, with a black plastic grip and Subaru printed there in small raised letters.

  His grandfather said, “We’re going to eat breakfast out.”

  “We are?” They sometimes went to eat dinner with some of Wilson’s cousins in the area—second cousins, third cousins, twice-removed cousins. Wilson could not keep them straight. He didn’t like them, and he passed these dinners in silence, remaining always at his grandfather’s side in order to avoid their questions and teasing. But he had never before gone out for breakfast. He had never even considered the possibility of eating out for breakfast.

  His grandfather led him to the pole barn. A button activated a motor that winched up the door. His grandfather stood looking at Wilson while it rose. Inside was a green station wagon.

  Wilson frowned. “What is that?”

  “It’s yours. Got it used, but it’s in good condition.” His grandfather walked around to the passenger side. “Let’s go. You have the key.”

  Wilson looked at the key in his hand. He unlocked the passenger-side door for his grandfather, then his own. His grandfather directed him out of the pole barn and up the driveway. They stopped at the gate and his grandfather opened it with a garage door clicker, which he then clipped onto the sun-visor above Wilson and told him to swing left onto the road. Wilson sat with his foot on the brake, and his grandfather repeated, “Left.” The road was empty of traffic. Wilson turned left.

  He had driven his grandfather’s truck before,
up and down the driveway and around the house, but this was the first time he had ever driven on the open road. His fingers hurt around the wheel and he tried to relax them. “Go faster,” his grandfather said. They went faster.

  It began to seem easier after a few stops and turns. The world moved around the car at Wilson’s command. “I like this car.”

  “Don’t forget to check your rearview mirrors,” his grandfather said sternly, but he smiled a little, and Wilson knew he was relieved. His grandfather had given him a bicycle a couple of years before and told him that he should get out, meet some friends, explore the neighborhood. Wilson felt too exposed on the bicycle. He’d gone out cautiously a few times until a large dog charged out of a ditch and nearly got a piece of his calf. He rolled the bicycle into a corner of the pole barn and left it. Sometimes his grandfather brought it out and washed it, checked the tires, greased the chain, and left it leaning against the barn door. Wilson dutifully rode it down the street a half mile, returned, and put it back inside the barn. He had not seen it now in months.

  His grandfather pointed Wilson into a McDonald’s parking lot. They ate Egg McMuffins and hash browns and drank from little cartons of milk, and his grandfather explained that Wilson needed to get out more. “Wilson,” he said, “I’m beginning to worry about you.” He spoke in a way that seemed rehearsed. He said Wilson needed to make friends, meet girls, needed to see more of the outside world to understand it. Wilson was a man now, old enough to stand his own ground, old enough to recognize when others were trying to take advantage of him, old enough to assess risks and make his own decisions. His grandfather had kept him alive this long, and now Wilson needed to learn to protect his own hide.

  “I see the world on TV,” Wilson said. Some years before his grandfather had begun allowing Wilson to watch an hour of TV each day, and Wilson liked TV, it was amusing, but this place made him uncomfortable. It had smells that he didn’t like, and he didn’t like how the people behind the counter looked at him—he always felt uncomfortable when people looked at him. He did not feel ashamed of anything in particular but he was unused to bearing scrutiny and it made him clutch inside with self-consciousness. He asked, “Can we eat in the car?”

  “TV has very little to do with the real world, and no we can’t eat in the car. You can do what you want later, but don’t stink it up yet. For the next couple of weeks I’m going to be in there with you, teaching you how to drive. Those’ll be your lessons each day. Then you’re going to go take the driver’s license tests. Then you’re going to get out, maybe join a bowling league.”

  Wilson set down his McMuffin. On his milk carton a missing boy was depicted. A few booths down sat a fat man who stared. “Bowling.”

  “Yes, it’s a great way to meet people, see the world. I used to bowl. I used to be pretty good.”

  After a moment Wilson picked up his McMuffin. “Okay,” he said.

  A month later he dutifully passed his driving tests. He went to a bowling alley where he was assigned to a team with three other men, all much older than himself. He was terrible. He had no idea what to do when the other men slapped him on the back or shouted advice or made catcalls at passing women. He felt battered and confused. How he understood the world seemed to have no application here. What interested him was the way the pins flew about, the complex arcs of spinning, bouncing, simultaneous motion, and the way a ball felt dangling from his hand, dead and heavy on three fingers like a kind of terrible growth. He listened carefully to the cacophony of the balls crashing into pins and the machines resetting the pins and the balls skidding down the lanes and the many people talking and calling and slapping and stomping, all merging into a smooth, nearly musical flow of noise that was completely unlike and somehow independent of any of its individual parts. But obviously no one else noticed or cared about such things. Wilson sat to one side, they ignored him, and he was relieved. The following week he drove past the bowling alley, circled around for a couple of hours, then went home and lied. The lie simply came out—it was the only thing he could think to do.

  He got into the habit of taking the car out every day after morning lessons. He drove for hours, often into the night, traveling as much as two hundred miles away and back again, sometimes staying near home, but always remaining secure in the isolation of the car. If he could have kept something like the protection of a small electric fence around him, he would have; the car was a compromise solution. He visited the parking lots of strip malls and supermarkets, cruising through or sometimes just sitting. He found an appliance store with several TVs in the display window, and he could park a short distance away to watch the multiple glowing images. He also watched people. Girls and boys his own age entered and left the stores, slouching, bickering, laughing, driving cars that emitted discordant music. Old people hobbled around with walkers. Couples clutched one another as if nothing else in the world were solid.

  One day he saw a woman leaving the supermarket who seemed familiar. He followed her sedan out of the parking lot and down a series of roads. Dreamlike, it was as though she were leading him back to his own house, until she suddenly turned off into a driveway, where, as he rolled by, she unloaded her bags. In the following weeks he often returned to cruise by.

  Later that summer he saw two women on the front lawn, bent over a new rosebush near the house. He slowed nearly to a stop, and one of them glanced at him. She said something, and both women turned to look. One was the woman from the supermarket. The other was similar in appearance, but thinner, and she held herself with a particular, proud posture.

  His tires squeaked. He drove a half mile, turned down a dirt road, and parked at the edge of the woods.

  As soon as she pulled into the drive Elizabeth noticed the neat row of newly planted pines in the backyard along with a number of sapling silver maples, apple trees, and pear trees. They looked very odd to her. As long as she had known this yard it had been absolutely flat and empty. The saplings Allison and her husband had put in were small, like branches shoved end-first into the earth, but Elizabeth could imagine them growing, and she could see they would change the character of the place utterly, creating shade and a sense of the vertical as well as the horizontal. She could not blame her sister; Allison needed to make the place her own. Later, when Allison toured her through the most recent changes—new paint in the entryway, new bookshelves in the study, new trees in the backyard—Elizabeth noted that the pears were particularly surprising because Allison had always hated pears. But Allison said she had come to a sort of reconciliation with pears. It was a small thing, but it caused Elizabeth to recall that Allison had really, always, been as much a stranger to her as she was to Allison.

  As a result of relentless work Elizabeth’s career was accelerating, and during this visit she often caught herself feeling guilty about taking time from the office. But she was glad to see her sister, and it was of course good for one to spend a few days in idle conversations and aimless walks. She was also glad, however, that she did not live here now, that she was merely a visitor in this dull place, this fragment of her own history.

  That evening Allison made gin and tonics, and they sat on lawn chairs in the backyard and watched the sunset fold to a dull glow while the night expanded behind. Allison talked about the past; Elizabeth talked about her work. Peepers and cicadas called. The air chilled. Elizabeth saw him first, a shadow shifting among silhouetted trees. She watched him a minute before Allison started, leaned forward, and called, “Who is that?” He was drawing quite close, a gray shape materializing. Allison began to rise, but Elizabeth put a hand out to stop her.

  It was just a boy, a teenager. He halted before them with his face more hidden in the shadows than revealed in the house lights. “Do you need help?” Elizabeth asked. “Is something wrong?”

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I remember you.” He gestured vaguely behind himself. “I could let you in.”

  “What?” she said.

  “I could let you inside the fence.”
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  “The fence? What for?”

  He turned his head a little and looked at her sidelong. He said, slowly, “To get what you hid there.”

  “Hid?”

  “From where it’s buried.”

  “I don’t understand.” Elizabeth looked at Allison.

  “Who are you?” Allison said to the boy.

  “I don’t understand,” Elizabeth repeated to him.

  The boy shifted his feet, like he was preparing to run. “That day. You talked about it.”

  Another second passed, then it came to Elizabeth. “When I saw you,” Elizabeth said, “I think I said something about a climbing tree. Is that what you’re thinking of?”

  “No—” said the boy, but a confused expression came over his features. He frowned. “Maybe.” He looked at the ground, squinting as if to see something far away. “Yeah, maybe.” He shrugged and turned.

  “Wait,” Allison called. “Let me get you something to drink.” He stopped to look at them, then shook his head and walked on into the dark. “God,” Allison said. “Maybe we should put up a fence. Who was that?” She turned to Elizabeth. “How did he know you?”

  Elizabeth didn’t know what to say. She tried to think of a lie. She had never told Allison about any of it—about going back to the fence or about the old man and the boy she had met there—and she absolutely didn’t want to explain it now. It was her own memory and her own place and to share it all now would have felt like taking a hammer to an exquisite piece of glass.

  She said, “He was selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door.”

  “He was? I’ve never seen him.”

  “He came by the other day when you were out. I told him I didn’t think you wanted any magazines. We talked a little.”

  Twilight had become nighttime. Allison peered at the motionless, night-blue trees, as if thinking he might come back for that drink after all. “He seemed very odd. Wasn’t he weird?”