Eden

Later on, Isaiah could recount a few times in his life where he had what he called power dreams, dreams so real, so powerful, they had begun a phase in his life, they had leant him characters, they had been God speaking in one of Her many faces. They were more real than waking life. That’s how he knew they were true dreams. To recount them was to make the skin shiver.

In this dream a woman in pinkish white or whitish pink, glowing with wide liquid eyes and almond colored skin, eyes like pools, placid, full of love and concentration, peace and goodness and power, so much power it filled him with the first power he’d felt in a long time, sat in his room. She sat in a boat that was in the form of a swan. And now... yes, he noted that the boat was a swan. Light shone softly on its wings, its head was craned and the woman was playing a zither. She placed it down, then reached into her swan boat and brought up a scroll. She smiled, beckoning him.

He was ashamed of his fear, his sadness, and his depression that could not exist in the face of this woman, and he came out of bed to her. She stood up and handed the scroll to him.

He didn’t dare resist. He reached out and when he took it the scroll was very hot and he woke up. But the last thing he heard in the absolute darkness of his room was her voice, a strong, irresistible siren of a command.

“Write!”

He slept only a little, and then in the morning he got up and turned on the old computer. It took so long to load up that while it growled to life he could go to the bathroom and make a cup of coffee. Back then he kept his coffeepot in his closet so that he didn’t have to go into the kitchen and see his family until he was sufficiently awake.

When he returned from the bathroom he sat down, opened up a file and just began typing. He told himself that if he stopped he would die, that he had to write and write putting away doubts about if it was any good or where it would go or if it made sense. He hadn’t written in so long, and what he did write never came out whole. Nothing had much purpose anymore and now, suddenly, it did. Suddenly he was a writer even if he didn’t know that he was a very good one, and life that seemed so sort-of-worthless and precariously close to crazy was now bearable.

He wrote into Christmas and right to New Year, and somehow the writing told him things. Like it told him it was time to go to visit Jason who he hadn’t seen since this summer. He called and made sure Jason had a computer with him. Jason’s brother did, and had let him borrow it. So Isaiah said he would have to use it.

“What are you working on?”

“I don’t know,” Isaiah said. “And I don’t even know if it’s going to be any good. I have a hard time explaining it.”

He wanted to say that what he knew was that it was keeping him alive, that it was the reason his almost useless life meant something again, but that just sounded dramatic, so he said nothing. All the way to Chicago he was glad that he was getting away, afraid of what would come after, in doubt that his life would come to anything. A year out of school, already. He was twenty-four now with twenty-five less than a year off.

“Are you writing a story?” DJ asked when Isaiah arrived.

He was never annoyed by children. When adults interrupted his writing, that was the problem.

“Yes,” he told DJ.

“Are there dragons and Transformers in it?”

“No dragons and no Transformers.”

“DJ,” Jason told his son, “I don’t think dragons and Transformers even go in the same stories.”

“They do in mine,” DJ said.

“Well, there’s no arguing that,” Isaiah said. Then he told DJ, “There are none in this one, though. Not,” he anticipated DJ, “because I don’t like dragons and Transformers. I like dragons. Transformers I can take or leave. They’re nor in here because it’s my story, and.… when you tell a story you kind of have to let it happen, let it tell itself. And right now it hasn’t told me anything about dragons or Transformers. As much as I would like it to.”

DJ nodded sagely, Isaiah appreciated the stoicism in children. People always said children asked silly questions, but that wasn’t so. They asked what they wanted to know, and if you answered sufficiently, something adults never did, they were satisfied. Most grown ups didn’t take children seriously enough to satisfy their curiosity, or they were too stupid to give good answers, or they did not know how to talk to children. The way to talk to a child was simple. You had to be honest, which is something people forgot to be fairly quickly. That was why adult questions were so bad, because they weren’t honest.

Jason had DJ throughout the day, but was a night student earning his Masters in accounting. That was when his grandmother or Elle had him. That first night he was awkward, waiting on Isaiah to make all the decisions.

“You can have my bed,” Jason said. “I would take the couch.”

“Don’t be stupid. We’ll both have the bed.”

In the bed together, Jason awkward with not knowing what to do, waited, until Isaiah touched him. He gasped.

“What?” Isaiah said.

“Do you... Do you want to?”

“Of course I want to. Why wouldn’t we?”

Jason shifted, turned over in bed and pulled Isaiah to him.

“I was hoping you would say that,” he told him.

They lay together and Jason said, “I haven’t been with anyone since this summer, you know?”

“Me either.”

“Things have been so crappy,” he said. “This program... I don’t think I’m accountant material.”

Isaiah looked at him and laughed.

“I don’t think you are either,” he said, touching his face.

“I just did it because... Really I want to do my art. You’ve found a way to do your writing—”

“But I haven’t,” Isaiah argued. “I’ve got no money, no job set, my family is hounding me. I am... incredibly, absolutely anxious all the time, and I don’t know if this damn book will come to anything.”

“But you’re still doing it!” Jason said, sitting up. “You’re still doing just what you always wanted to, and that’s something! No, that’s everything.”

“And then I’ve got to go back to Mom and Sharon and the house and no one getting that I have to do this, that this is who I have to be.”

“Why go back?” Jason said. “I mean why go back right away? You can just... You can stay here a while, can’t you? Why can’t you?”

Isaiah looked at Jason doubtfully.

“You don’t want me to stay here.”

“I do,” Jason insisted. “And who knows? Maybe it would help me get more serious about painting, seeing how serious you are about writing.”

So he stayed with Jason and stopped worrying about the future. Somewhere he got the idea that the future would never come, that what is was what was right now, and he needed to pay attention to it, to the words that came everyday, to the work Jason did at night at the easel which had been abandoned when Isaiah first arrived and which Jason now worked at till the morning.

And then, inexplicably, Isaiah knew it was time to go home. He said, “I’m going to get a job at that the Jewel or the Kroger to pay for a ticket back.”

“I think I’m good for at least the price of a train ticket,” Jason said

“You may be,” Isaiah agreed. “But I’m not going to have you be. An artist can’t really complain about the high price of making art if he isn’t paying it, you know?”

“Well, at least come work where I am.”

“No,” Isaiah said. “Or else I might reflect badly on you.”

“Not if you’re good at it.”

Isaiah looked at Jason sharply and said, “There is no way I’m ever going to be good at something that pays virtual minimum wage.”

He went to work at the Jewel down the street. This meant he wasn’t leaving Jason right away because there was the application process, the interview with the dumbed down application and then the training. Training went on for three nights in the byzantine upper levels of a Jewel on the other side of town, and then he started work. In the smoking lounge a girl told him, “Each fruit and vegetable has a code. At first you have to look them up in the books, but eventually you just stop thinking and they come up in your head second nature.”

If Isaiah had known anything about Zen back then, he could have made something deep out of that, but he heard exactly what she said instead, and decided that it would be best to quit before he ever got good.

Isaiah Frey, who owned no car and was paying no bills, nor keeping a house, could keep a very little bit of money for a very long time, and he had planned to keep the job for about a month. In the end, much to his surprise, a week of being a Jewel cashier was about all he could handle. One day, in the midst of checking out a grumpy woman with a grocery cart full of assorted fruits and vegetables who asked, “How hard can it be to check out vegetables?” while he kept consulting the book, and the line grew longer and longer, he looked up at her and said, “Bitch, you’d be surprised.”

Before his supervisor could say anything he undid his apron, handed it to him and said, “That’s my resignation.”

In the end he made over a thousand dollars. This could keep him for a while.

“If I hate home too much I can always come back, right?” he said to Jason.

“You know you can,” Jason told him tenderly. “I almost hope you hate it.”

“Isaiah,” DJ said, “You told me I could have your apron when you quit.”

“Yes,” Isaiah said. “I lost that in a moment of passion. I’ll see what I can do about making good on that promise, all right, Deej?”

DJ nodded, and then quickly clasped onto Isaiah’s legs.

“I’ll miss you, Isaiah!”

And he would miss them too, but as Isaiah prepared to leave, and as they saw him onto the first of three trains that would take him home, he was more sure than he’d ever been that he was going toward something, that something new awaited him in that old place.