In the Electric Eden

by Nick Arvin

  “Movie Heroes from Three Trees,” Billy said. “Like your ad. I have seventy-eight out of one hundred twelve.”

  Uncle Lewis shut a zipper and looked at Billy for a moment. He knelt down and stared, and Billy felt forced to examine Uncle Lewis’s eyes in a way that he had never before examined another person’s eyes. Eyes were complicated, moist things with blood vessels in the whites, striations of color in the iris, an unreadable darkness at the center. Uncle Lewis said, “Billy, will you do a favor for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you promise? This might not be easy.”

  “I promise.”

  “A good salesman never, ever buys his own pitch. OK? And I don’t want you to buy it either. Never buy anything I tell you to in my radio ads.” Uncle Lewis nodded slowly. “In fact, whenever possible, I want you to do the exact opposite.”

  Billy smiled, until he realized that Uncle Lewis was serious. He said quietly, “OK,” and then he held very still, steeling himself as vertigo hit.

  “Thanks.” Uncle Lewis stood.

  Billy excused himself and went to the bathroom. He felt horrible and thought he might vomit. He bent over the toilet, but nothing happened. When he came out, to his relief, Uncle Lewis was gone.

  “Dad,” Billy said. They were on the eighth hole, the windmill hole. Billy’s putt slipped through the windmill, ricocheted around two right-angle turns, and trickled into the cup.

  “Yeah?” said Dad. “Good shot.”

  “Have you ever been to the studio where Uncle Lewis works?”

  “He told me it’s not very interesting.”

  “I guess he took Mom.”

  Dad’s first shot deflected off a windmill blade. “Really?”

  “I guess.”

  Dad grimly bounced another putt off the windmill, and the next as well. In all, he mistimed five shots before he got through. He needed two more strokes to drop the ball into the cup. Winning a hole over Dad was so unlikely that Billy felt slightly sick in his glee.

  “Why,” Mom wanted to know the following Tuesday, “do you suddenly not want to go to the mall? What about the Starry Galactic thing?”

  Billy looked down. “It’s …”

  “You’ve put a lot of money into it already.”

  Billy, sullen, nodded.

  She tapped him on the head. “You need to learn follow-through.”

  They drove to the mall. Billy bought four more Movie Heroes, and Mom donated funds for a fifth. He threw all his figures into a box and put them on a shelf in his closet.

  That afternoon he played Atari Pac-Man, game after game after game. His fingers grew sore and cramped. Mom was reading a romance novel. A carpet store commercial came on the radio. It was Josie’s voice. She said, “Carpet Land’s triannual clearance-athon begins tomorrow and goes until everything is gone!”

  “Her left arm was sunburned.”

  Mom let her book tip down. “Who?”

  “On the radio. She had long brown hair. She drove a big blue van.”

  “Billy, who?”

  “Josie. I met her at Uncle Lewis’s. She’s there all the time, pretty much.”

  Mom set her book aside. Billy cleared fourteen consecutive Pac-Man screens. Mom got up and went into her room.

  The next time Uncle Lewis drove Billy to the golf shop he hunched close to the steering wheel and darted glances at the rearview mirror. He left Billy at the door and did not come inside.

  Sunday night, Dad came home from work and said that Uncle Lewis would not be taking Billy home. Dad would drive Billy home.

  In the car Billy asked, “Why?”

  Evening shadows flickered on Dad’s face. “You won’t be seeing Uncle Lewis as much anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  Dad concentrated on passing the car ahead. Then another. Finally he said, “Uncle Lewis is moving far away.”

  He left Billy in the driveway. Mom opened the front door to let Billy in, and Billy saw a look exchanged between the two adults. She asked Billy if he had had dinner.

  From then on, Dad picked Billy up on Fridays with a honk of the horn from the driveway. Sunday nights, he drove Billy back.

  Once he actually had the Galactic Starfighter in his hands, Billy was impressed by it all over again. It launched missiles at speeds that appeared seriously dangerous. It came with a hand pump to pressurize twin water tanks that blasted it sixty feet into the air. It was really big. Even Ralph might have admitted it didn’t suck.

  He loaded the Starfighter and took it outside for launch. Unfortunately, it landed in the Cullers’ yard. The Cullers had a new puppy, a big, rambunctious beagle with neck muscles like a hyena. It got hold of the Starfighter and Billy watched while the toy was reduced to several pieces of shredded, indistinguishable plastic.

  One day he was looking through the phone book for Ralph’s address. He could not find it. Idly, he looked up his own name, and discovered Uncle Lewis’s. He was not very surprised to see that Uncle Lewis had never moved.

  The radio continued to emit Uncle Lewis’s voice in a steady stream of commercials. At first to hear that voice was troubling, like a phantom haunting him, but in time it became merely irritating, and eventually the voice was just background noise, another guy peddling tennis shoes, tax services, gasoline, supermarket discounts, car batteries, rock concerts, tuxedo rentals, milk, bread—just more salesmanship in a world saturated with salesmen.

  Telescope

  She found the box, a long, narrow box of dark-stained wood with a small metal clasp in front and tiny hinges in back, found it in the far corner of the closet where she hung her winter coats, dumped the ice skates she had used only once, propped the skis that her husband might still use except her husband was dead, and she actually didn’t remember what was in the box until she carried it to the kitchen table, wiped off the dust, opened it, and there was the telescope, beautiful, after so many years she had forgotten how beautiful it was (she had forgotten last time too, the last time she had “found” it again, found it that time lying in the grass of the yard, rediscovered the grain and varnished sheen of the wooden segments, the bands of shining brass, the glossy smooth glass lenses, the precise slide of its expansion and collapse, but her husband had glanced at it and said, “I don’t want to see that thing ever again” (they both associated the telescope with their son, Michael, who had twice torched their house with gasoline when they refused to give him money for heroin, associated it with their anguish over him and particularly their anguish following the second fire when her husband had told the police he did indeed wish to press charges, after which, so far as they knew, no one ever saw their son again, and her husband said forget him, said, “We are childless,” upon which announcement he actually did seem to forget him and she played along because otherwise he became angry, though sometimes she wanted desperately to be able to talk about her son and sometimes her husband wept and still would say nothing although she knew it was the loss of his son that leveled him this way (these emotions triggered by, among other things, the process of filling new closets, which the second time felt like an act of pitiable déjà vu, and the hollow strangeness of a house in which almost nothing was old, except the telescope, both times the lone surviving object, easy to hate (Michael claimed he had used the telescope to focus the sun—the way a child burns ants with a magnifying glass—to ignite the gasoline he had spread around the house, which seemed unlikely when a Zippo would have been so much easier and was also exactly the sort of elaborately pointless lie he liked to tell at the time, but it was a fact that while everything else in the house was destroyed, both times, the telescope alone was found safe, placed on the lawn well away from the fire, so after the second fire she hid the telescope deep in a closet, perhaps hoping at the same time, uselessly of course, to hide the ways in which she could not understand her son (one day they had received a notice that their son had missed a day of school, then another of these, and another, until these notices began to seem almost routine, although she
tried not to treat them that way, then the first call from the police came when Michael shoplifted five pounds of hamburger and a dozen D-cell batteries, for what reason he refused to explain, but the store manager had let the matter drop and then Michael seemed to be behaving better, going to school, listening to his father’s lectures, eating her good meals, accepting her cautious smiles, her love, until six months later when he was arrested for breaking and entering, stealing power tools from an old man’s garage, and he spent several weeks in a home for juvenile delinquents, and his disappearances began, a night now and again, then several nights, then weeks (no, she could not say how or when exactly things began to go wrong, but, in hindsight, perhaps the first misstep went back to the telescope, when the neighbors’ daughter accused Michael of spying on her bedroom window with it, and he denied it, said he was only watching birds, and he was so young then that she, his mother, believed him and told the neighbors there had been a mistake, and a year later, when the neighbor girl’s room was broken into and ransacked, she, his mother, still did not quite begin to make the connections—but she could only fitfully imagine the steps and reasons of his descent, for she had no experience herself in that world, and when she realized that he had entered it she felt helpless and terrified, remembering well it had been a nightmare of hers, when she was younger, that she might have a child who turned out like this (he never was an adept student and he always had a temper but he could at times be so fiercely loving—she remembered how he clung to her skirts, how he brought her pretty stones he found, really such a sweet child, a boy who said excuse me before leaving the dinner table, a small boy who tidied his own room without being asked, and the telescope was intended to be a reward (but he had opened the box and looked at the telescope with dismay, absolutely crestfallen: he had wanted something else and she never knew what, couldn’t guess, and what use had she thought a boy would have for a telescope? birds! had that been the beginning of the problems? but she shouldn’t blame herself, or so her husband had told her many times (she found it in an antiques store, in the window, displayed on a red velvet pad, and she thought, oh, Michael would love it! (but really: really it had been she, hadn’t it? she who loved it, all those years ago, she who wanted it (the telescope), and she collapsed the telescope, put it into its wooden box, and the next day she pawned it for thirty dollars and spent the money on a large bouquet for the mantel—asters, irises, lilies, heather—beautiful things that would fade and then could be thrown away.

  The Prototype

  The vehicle looked as if someone had attempted to armor plate it with cushions from a black vinyl sofa. Only the overall dimensions allowed Martin to recognize it as a truck—a sport-utility vehicle. Black plastic panels hid the painted surfaces and crowded the side and rear windows, narrowing them to portals the size of arrow slits. The headlamps peered out of a masklike construction over the grille. The wheels were painted flat black.

  It pulled in with something dragging in the rear, lifting dust from the gravel parking lot. Martin had just closed the shop and stood watching in stained coveralls with a rag in his hands, trying to work the grime from under his fingernails. The truck stopped and two men got out wearing khaki trousers and electronic gadgets—pagers and cell phones—on their belts. They said they were engineers from Detroit, conducting tests on this vehicle. But a rear suspension link had busted. One of the engineers was quite young while the other had gray hair and lines in his face. Martin said, “Kind of a long way from Detroit, aren’t you?”

  The older one peered at the name embroidered on Martin’s breast pocket. “Things are pretty flat around Detroit, Martin. We come out here to feel how the truck performs on the more aggressive mountain roads.”

  The younger one said, “The vehicle is a prototype.”

  “Uh-huh,” Martin said. “Of what?”

  The older one said, “If we told you that, we’d have to kill you.” He grinned. “Ha-ha,” he said.

  Martin drove the truck into the service bay and raised it on the lift. The suspension link—a curved steel bar with joints on the ends—had sheared in half; the two pieces hung down awkwardly and the wheel camber was badly off as a result. Martin came out and said, “That isn’t a standard part.”

  “Yeah, it’s a prototype design,” said the older one. “Won’t be able to order one from your nearest dealer. But it’s a pretty simple piece. We were hoping you’d know someplace where we can have some bar stock formed. Then we just need to cut off those end pieces and weld them onto the new link.”

  “Well,” Martin said, “that’s possible. The thing is, technically, we’re closed. There is a guy in town who can form a new link for you, but he’ll be closed now too. Pretty much the entire town is shut up at this point. Best I can offer is to get it done first thing in the morning. Have you out of here by 10 a.m.”

  The two men looked around, as if there might be another mechanic across the street.

  Martin added, “Next town’s some thirty miles along, but I can lock your truck in our garage overnight. We’ve got a good alarm system.”

  He led them into the office and made a couple of calls to verify that everything was closed. The older engineer said, “Pretty goddamn stupid, getting ourselves stranded in a backwater like this.” He looked at Martin. “No offense.”

  Martin shrugged. “You’ll be gone early tomorrow.” He filled out a work order. While the engineers looked it over he asked, “How much does it cost to build a prototype like that?”

  “A half million, isn’t it?” said the younger engineer.

  The older one shrugged. “More, I think. Depends on how you divide the costs. We make only a couple dozen of these prototypes. Mid- to upper six figures per truck.” He clapped Martin on the arm. “You insured for that much?” He laughed.

  Martin locked the truck into the service bay and drove the engineers to the motel in town. The engineers had no bags or overnight supplies with them, and as they trudged into the motel they appeared bowed and forlorn. Martin tapped the horn at them and waved. Then he drove back to the shop, unlocked the office, and went to the phone.

  Martin did not often have plans. Generally, he did not think much of the future; he mostly took things as they came. But now he had a plan and it gave him a giddy, erratic feeling, as if his heart were a four-cylinder engine and one of the cylinders was misfiring.

  One thing Martin knew for sure about Eileen was that she liked trucks. The sight of a truck often sparked thoughts of her.

  It was Eileen who answered the phone, and, after hello and how are you, he asked if she wanted to do something tonight. She said, “OK. What do you have in mind? I don’t think I want to go to a bar or anything like that.”

  “That’s all right. I sort of have this thing I’d like to show you. It’s a surprise.”

  “Oh,” she said, “really? Actually, I guess I kind of have a surprise too.”

  Martin agreed to meet her at her parents’ house later and hung up. He went into the garage, unbolted the broken suspension link, and hurried with the pieces to the metal shop—Mike’s Metalworks. Martin had known Mike since grade school. He fetched the key from its nail among the rafters in the rear and let himself inside.

  He kept the lights low while he worked. Around him the shapes of saws and lathes and milling machines formed ominous shadows. He heated and bent a piece of bar stock until it matched the shape of the two broken pieces fitted together, then with a band saw he cut the end joints off the broken link. The welder cast the shop into white relief and threw sparks of bright metal that fell and bounced on the concrete floor. In a little more than an hour he had finished the new part. He returned to the garage and with some hammering made it fit. He put the bolts in, torqued them, lowered the truck to the ground, and went home to wash and change. A clean button-down shirt, jeans. He scrubbed his nails until his fingertips felt painfully raw, even though he knew he could not get the black out.

  He had not seen Eileen for several months. She had left a message
on his answering machine a week earlier, letting him know that she was in town visiting her parents, but until now he had been delaying, day by day, not quite able to find the courage to call her back.

  Thin and delicate, Eileen didn’t seem particularly like a woman who would love trucks. But she surprised you like that sometimes. She was a generally quiet, sensible girl, but sometimes a headstrong notion or a peculiar talent popped up amid her day-to-day common sense. Origami, pottery, and horseshoe throwing had all been pursued intensely. She played poker with relentless aggression. Once for Martin’s birthday she had prepared an entire sushi dinner; he’d never had sushi before, and found it not really to his taste, but he had been impressed nonetheless. She had quite a nose, a surprising nose in the face of a small woman; it had taken Martin a while to figure out how to kiss around a nose like that. She was the first woman Martin had ever made love to in an actual bed, which had been a transforming experience for him. They had dated through their senior year of high school, almost ten years ago. After graduation Martin stayed in town and worked for his father. Eileen’s going away to college wasn’t her choice so much as her parents’—at least that’s what she said—and Martin figured she would come back soon, since it wasn’t really her choice to go. But she surprised him; she liked college, liked being away. “Martin,” she said on the phone a few months later. “Martin—” She hesitated between words. “I just don’t know how to make this easier. But you’re still there and I’m not. You see?”

  “See what?” Martin said.

  “I hope we can still be close, Martin,” she said. “I care for you a lot, but we’re going in different directions. I hope we can still be friends.”

  Martin recognized the cliché, but when the conversation was over he clutched at that idea—still being friends—and in the weeks, seasons, and years that followed, he never let it go. He sent letters, about once a month, maintaining a careful distance in them. Just friends. Friendly, she wrote back. Once or twice a year, when she came home to visit her parents, she called her friend Martin and they met for breakfast or lunch and he was carefully polite, affectionate, but not too much so. They hugged briefly on meeting and parting and, otherwise, did not touch. He was afraid that if he went any further or said what was in his mind, she would never speak to him again. Afterward, Martin went home and drank whatever form of booze he found in the cupboard, and the next morning, hungover and miserable, he’d resolve to put her out of his mind for good. But this could not be done. He had relationships with other women, but none of them ever made his brain and body buzz the way a two-sentence postcard from Eileen did.