Eden

“Sometime you don’t want to talk, Sometimes you just want to be with someone who has seen something awful too.”

- Patrick Thomas

When Isaiah Frey was twenty-seven years old he started graduate school.

It happened thusly.

He had applied to Citeaux’s creative writing program and been rejected, but the head of the department had invited him to lunch.

He couldn’t remember her name anymore, but she said, “I love your work, and I want you to apply again next year. Next year is my last, so do it then because it’s hard to tell what those people want. They don’t want risk takers.”

So Isaiah was a risk taker then. Well, good.

It felt good to be read even by only one person, and it was nice to have his writing validated. The fact was it seemed like years passed quickly, and if he had the promise of Citeaux next year then maybe he could ride out a little more discomfort, waiting in his mother’s house with Sharon and Jazmine.

He had written two books now. That first one, which he had no idea what to do with, a novel, unproofed, and this new thing he was working on. Neither of these, his children, had anywhere to go. He had no idea what to do with them, where to send them, who would want to read them. It seemed nobody read. Most publishers he looked at looked like the wrong one long before he ever thought of sending a manuscript off. Maybe Citeaux could help him. Maybe he would meet someone who would point him in the direction of a publisher and, more importantly, an audience.

Somewhere between this rejection and the next application time, Isaiah discovered the Internet, which was still fairly new, and blogs. Everyone did not have one back then, but there were interesting people with interesting thoughts on the web, and he thought maybe he could put his voice out there too. When he did, on his site, he was surprised to hear voices speaking back. He was meeting people from Australia, from Great Britain, from Connecticut. And then it was with the blog forum, that he thought, here is a place for an audience. And so, slowly, he began posting The Immortals on line.

“I have been reading this like a book,” came one e-mail.

“I print it out bit by bit so I can read it in my own time. I hope you don’t mind. I feel like I know these characters.”

No one had ever told Isaiah Frey they felt like they knew the people who lived inside of him. No one was reading him. Up until now all his writing had been for him, hoping one day that someone else would read, not so much his thoughts, which he didn’t think were that important, but his characters, who were whole other people, other friends who had come out of him but who, as far as he was concerned, were wholly other people.

“We need to go on a poem hang,” Melanie said.

“A poa-who?”

“A poem hang,” Melanie repeated patiently.

This was her idea.

“We will print out my stuff, and your stuff, then we’ll just paste it all over the city, leave it lying around.”

She said with utter seriousness: “This could be how we find our purpose for being alive.”

Faced with the prospect of finding his life’s purpose, Isaiah could not resist. He tacked up poems and short stories in the halls of Citeaux and Monserrat, left things in the bathroom stalls of the public library, and of churches and coffee houses, thought of plastering poems in bathrooms of bars, but then thought better of it.

After that Melanie said, “Let’s take it out of the city. Let’s travel like we did before. Do a poem hang all over the country. Or some of the country, at least.”

And so they did. As spring came to its height, Melanie, Isaiah, Dylan and young DJ prepared to go on an intrastate poem-hang.

A little after Elle’s funeral, Jason had shown up at Isaiah’s door a mess, with DJ. He announced that he had an apartment now. It belonged to Burt Haarlem’s family, and he wanted Isaiah to move in with him and help him care for the boy. He didn’t say it like that, He said, “I wanted to be near you.” which was true enough, Isaiah figured. Melanie came to live there too with her son Dylan, to escape her own mother.

They were happier than they’d been in a long time, Melanie and Isaiah, on their own. One day they woke up and DJ was there, but Jason was not. They waited hours for him to come back, and then at the end of the day there was a phone call.

“Jason?”

“Yeah,” he said breathlessly, over the other end of the phone.

“Where the fuck are you?”

“Look,” he said, “I just need you to look after DJ for a while. Can the two of you do that? The apartment’s paid for and everything.”

“Where are you?” Isaiah demanded.

“I think I’m... I really didn’t mean to do this. I was just driving you know? And I kept driving. And.…”

“Where are you?”

“I think I’m somewhere near New York.”

“What the—?”

“Look, Isaiah, don’t be mad at me. I’ll be back in a few days. I promise.”

Jason didn’t lie. He was back in a few days. But after that he took to fleeing without much notice fairly frequently, and DJ seemed oddly undisturbed by his father’s behavior.

“I was reading a psychology book,” Melanie noted, “that said a child should have two stable attachments. So maybe if I’m one and you’re the other that’s all that matters.”

So it was this makeshift family that set out in the early spring of that year for the intrastate poem hang.

They went through Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, the toll road across northern Indiana to Chicago where Isaiah thought, for only a second, of dropping off DJ with his grandparents, and then realized that he wanted the boy, and then moved this time further west, to Iowa, where they stayed at the abbey of New Melleray and prayed with the monks.

In the middle of the night, Isaiah woke up here, and on bare feet he went to the chapel. He was not entirely surprised to see a woman in iridescent gowns, sitting beside a swan, all lit up in the chapel. He wasn’t surprised at all when she nodded and he nodded back and her eyes were shining with a joy he knew was in his own.

He thought of saying something. He thought of saying, “I’m glad to see you.”

He thought of asking, “Have I done well?” But he thought of how all of these things were pointless. They were all taken care of in her appearing. If he was not on the right course, then the She could not have come here. She was the right course. He had taken her. He had created and called her as she had created him.

In Nebraska they fell in with a rock band, and Melanie found Chet, but Isaiah found Adam, who was the lyricist, and they talked about writing for three days and found out they were best friends. Adam was tall and lanky, red haired like…. Now that he thought of it, like Rob, with a bit of beard around his mouth, and deep half serious half laughing eyes behind black Buddy Holly spectacles. The night before they were all about to part ways Adam said Isaiah could come home with him, and Isaiah left DJ with Melanie and Dylan. They listened to Gillian Welsh, drank and smoked cigarettes, and then when Adam leaned over and kissed him it was electric. It was beyond electric.

“Stay with me tonight,” he said simply.

This was the first time Isaiah made love to a man who was not Jason, and whom he suspected he would never see again. They kissed and touched, grinded bodies together and made love all night then slept in each other’s arms. Adam dropped him off the next morning, making out with him in a dark corner outside the hotel room, and slipped him his cell phone number and his parents’ address because he didn’t have a permanent one.

“I don’t want you to ever lose me,” he said simply.

That was how Isaiah discovered that it wasn’t only Jason, but men in general, that he loved. He loved Adam, tall and thin and walking away, turning around with those saucer ears, the red stepchild hair and those horrible glasses; the best kisser he’d ever known.

“Did you...?” Melanie asked when he came into the room.

“I did,” Isaiah said with a simplicity that refused to be embarrassed.

But in the end the joke was on Melanie, as they learned on returning home.

“Goddamn!” she swore.

“What?”

She frowned and passed him the stick she’d peed on. Because they’d been friends for years he took it.

“I’m pregnant again.”

Melanie’s pregnancy drama, and the discovery of men, cushioned the blow of being rejected from Citeaux yet again. When he’d reapplied, sending in something even better than what went with the original, a lot of time had passed and he wondered if he really wanted Citeaux that badly. Isaiah began looking for other schools. He was shocked to learn that the university in town had begun its own English Masters program; not, certainly, the cushy, all expenses paid creative writing program Citeaux had, but a writing program all the same. And so Isaiah got his stuff together and filled out what was a much simpler application. He went back to Monserrat College and marshaled some letters of recommendation. By the time the next rejection letter had arrived, he was already accepted at Morvin College.

Melanie followed suit. She decided to take a few classes at Morvin, so she and Isaiah started together. That first year was, in a way, the year of unremarkable things. Everything they did was appropriate, but it wasn’t what would eventually lead to their happiness. It took a while to be approved for the financial aid, but when they were, with the additional money Isaiah and Melanie moved out of the apartment, which Burt’s family wanted back, and into a small house near Colby Street and Citeaux and Monserrat, the area they’d always known.

The classes were all at night with about ten or eleven people who had gone either always gone to Morvin, or some place like it, so they’d never had a campus life. This meant all they had done in school was study without the benefit of fun. They and Isaiah were not in the same world, and then, when he looked at the list of classes required and found nothing really new or interesting, his heart began to sink a little.

Adam wrote all the time, or called, more than Isaiah in fact, and always there was the question of when he would finally come, or if Isaiah might leave during winter break and meet him.

“It just makes no sense for you to have to come and see me,” Adam said, “when you’ve got this life and everything, and I’m the one traveling. And Chet needs to see that baby.”

It was agreed that Adam would come with Chet a few weeks after Thanksgiving, the same time Jason was going to come for DJ. The child which had swelled and swelled in Melanie was Chet’s, could have been no one else’s, and though Isaiah didn’t ask much, Melanie figured Chet was surprisingly enthusiastic to be having a baby.

“Of course,” Melanie noted, “I’m the one having a baby. He’s just the man on the road with some woman having his bastard.”

Whatever private drama Melanie and Chet had to work out, when Adam arrived, Isaiah’s anticipation became nerves. They were glad to see each other, glad to talk, to be together, but neither one of them brought up their last time, when they’d slept together, or what they were hoping for this time. Melanie said she needed to get out of the house for air, and Isaiah looked at Adam for a while and then took him by the hand and into his bedroom.

When they both lay naked, on their backs, catching their breaths, settling into their bodies, Isaiah said, “I just thought that was the elephant in the room... the thing we were both nervous about.”

Adam laughed and turned to him, lying on his side, running a finger over Isaiah’s chest. The cat leapt onto the bed, and Isaiah shrugged, leaving it.

“So you thought, let’s just screw, and get all the awkwardness out of the way?”

“Or at least know where we stand.”

“Or where we sleep?”

“You’ll be sleeping here, then, tonight?”

Adam moved so that his legs went around Isaiah. He hooked Isaiah’s leg in his, and his stomach was pressed to Isaiah’s side, his semi-homely face, his lovely face next to Isaiah.

“Every time I write you or talk to you I want to bring up that last night. I... Every time I’ve thought about you I’ve thought about us doing what we just did again. You notice you didn’t have to work hard to convince me.”

They kissed for a while, entangled in each other, Adam pressing his body to Isaiah’s, stretching himself across the bed.

If he’d been younger and, in fact, if he hadn’t had the experience of sleeping with Jason long after they were broken up, and then raising his child, he would have asked what was Adam? What were they? This was a waste of time. In Isaiah’s mind the whole world worked to make men fight each other and, if now, he and Adam were making love and trying each other’s bodies, helping each other to silent pillow biting ecstasy, marveling in watching each other still and spill in orgasm, then all the tenderness, the kissing, the touching, the sucking that went on in that bed, was a sort of combat against the violence men had inflicted on each other since Cain carved out flint to kill his brother.

And still that mild nervousness. That last night they had entered each other. He’d never penetrated anyone but Jason, and was surprised when he’d done it to Adam.