Eden

“I can change the sheets.”

“That’s not necessary,” Josh said.

“I didn’t expect this to happen,” Pat explained. “The house should be clean for you. This bed should be.”

“It’s all…” Josh began as Pat went briskly into his bedroom.

“Right,” the other syllable hung.

Josh followed Pat. By now, in the low lit bedroom, he was pulling the sheets away, furiously. He had a roll of old sheets, and he put it down. Josh opened the closet door and seeing it was the linen closet, handed Pat sheets.

“We don’t have to remake the bed,” Pat told him. “We can just… lay down new sheets.”

Josh nodded, and helped Pat to do this.

Pat’s mouth was wet and gentle on his own. Josh always thought it would be hard, or demanding. His cheeks were bristly even though he’s shaved and Josh’s arms went to Pat’s shoulders, down his back, into his hair, across his face. They lurched toward the bed, and then away and then in a moment Pat was pulling up Josh’s tee shirt and running his hands over the hair of his chest. Josh was unfastening, with difficulty, Pat’s belt, and then Pat laughed gently, and helped him with it, and in a few moments he was pulling down those briefs, and in the deep brown gold light of afternoon they beheld each other before Josh pulled him to the bed.

Their bodies moved together, trading top to bottom, kissing up and down. Josh took Pat in his mouth for a long time, and Pat’s head went back, his fingernails clutching the covers, and then Pat’s perfect body was over him in the early darkness, and Josh’s hands were going up and down its smoothness.

“I want to fuck you now,” Pat said.

Pat added, nervously, “Only if you want. I mean… I shouldn’t have…”

Josh put a finger to his lips.

“I want you to. Just… go easy.”

There was spit involved. At the edge of the bed Pat fucked him for the first time. It was not as easy as either of them thought, and it hurt at first, required more spit, a little Vaseline, patience. Josh was shocked by Pat’s entry, and then it just felt… right. It just felt good to be filled with Pat and feel Pat’s hands pushing on his shoulders, pushing on the bed around him. It felt good to reach around and pull Pat into him, pressing on the firmness of his ass. It felt good to moan, to cry out with the joy of it, pulling him in, running his hands up and down him, hearing the rhythm of Pat slapping into him, slapping quicker, quicker, murmuring with a triumph, bowing so that Josh’s hands were in his hair.

“Uh God… uh, God… uh…”

The coming.

It was dark when Pat came that second time and lay on the bed, his chest rising and falling, Josh beside him.

“I needed that,” Pat said. “I needed you inside me.”

They were quiet a long time. Outside a car passed by.

“You in a hurry?” said Josh.

“No,” Pat told him, turning over and placing a finger on Josh’s chest. “I want you to stay. Would you like to stay?”

Josh pressed his body close to Pat’s.

“Yes.”

When Frey was down to a few wet spluttering coughs and writing most of the day while wiping his nose, Rob came by in the afternoon as well as the evenings. He had taken to rummaging through Frey’s things without asking. Frey didn’t seem to care, and one afternoon he was flipping through Frey’s journal when he began to read out loud:

“I am your God, who for your sake have become your son. Out of love for you and for your descendants I now by my own authority command all who are held in bondage to come forth, all who are in darkness to be enlightened…”

He stopped reading out loud and read to himself and when Frey came back into the living room, Rob looked up at him.

“What?”

“I didn’t know you were religious.”

“Huh?”

Rob showed him the page of his journal. There were some notebooks which were bound with tape and which, Rob supposed, were not for him, but this one was in the open and Frey only said, “Well… Yeah.”

“I thought you didn’t want to go to church because you didn’t believe in God or something,” Rob said.

“Do you know there are Unitarians who don’t really believe in God who get up and go to church every Sunday? And they even have this thing called the humanist church,” Frey said. “They get up and go and sing songs and have sermons every Sunday. All of them atheists. Which seems so silly to me bcause I feel like the best part of being an atheist is getting to sleep in on Sunday.

“But… I don’t like church because I don’t like church.”

Rob shrugged.

“It makes me feel better.”

“Yes,” Frey said. “Only I don’t think that’s the point of a mystery. I don’t know if that’s the point of God. To make you feel better. The only church I ever cared for was an empty one. And now the church of the fields, and the grass, of solitude, of my room when I am alone of the sunlight in the kitchen. That church.”

Frey went to sit down and took out his pack of cigarettes.

“Do what you wish, but getting up at seven in the morning to stand in church with some vague feeling of goodness is not what I want to do. I was very serious about my religion,” Frey said. “That was my downfall. Much too serious. I was one of thos people who wanted everything from everything. I gave so much of my life to the Church… It was another incarnation of me.”

Rob, who had been looking at the notebook, now looked up at him.

“I remember,” Frey exhaled, “I had gone through the Triduum. You know, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday. The night of the Vigil… All the way through that, and the bells were ringing. I left on the closing hymn, It was Easter now, Eleven fifty at night, but still, it was Easter morning, and I felt so strange. I felt like, so what?”

“Jesus was back,” Rob said, automatically. “Risen again.”

“Yes, Rob, like anyone else in western civilization, I know what Easter is. But, so what?

“That was when I began to think the whole Christian business might not be for me. That church might be over. Because it wasn’t that I didn’t believe, I just didn’t understand why it mattered. One man, twenty centuries ago, came back from the dead. But how did it change my life? How did it makes my debts go away? How did it make me less lonely? How did it make job searches easier? How did it change my world a bit? It didn’t. Except, we were taught, one day, at the end of it all, in a very far off future, we would come back too and… Well, that just wasn’t enough. I had to find meaning in other things.”

“Then, one day, I came into church on a Holy Saturday. This was not a regular church. It belonged to a religious order, and I heard these words. They were from some Greek saint, I could tell by the rhythm, and I felt as if they were speaking right to me. I memorized them, and they are dear to me. They are from the Harrowing of Hell, when after the Crucifixion, bearing the Cross, Jesus goes down into Hell, into the underworld, to bring up the righteous dead, really all the dead, who will come. He meets Adam and Eve, and they have been waiting for him since the beginning of the world. He says to them,

“I am your God, who for your sake have become your son. Out of love for you and for your descendants I now by my own authority command all who are held in bondage to come forth, all who are in darkness to be enlightened, all who are sleeping to arise.”

Rob looked down and saw word for word, Isaiah Frey did know it, and as he looked down the paper, Isaiah continued:

“I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you; together we form only one person and we cannot be separated.

“For your sake I, your God, became your son; I, the Lord, took the form of a slave; I, whose home is above the heavens, descended to the earth and beneath the earth. For your sake, for the sake of man, I became like a man without help, free among the dead. For the sake of you, who left a garden, I was betrayed in a garden, and I was crucified in a garden.

“See on my face the spittle I received in order to restore to you the life I once breathed into you. See there the marks of the blows I received in order to refashion your warped nature in my image. On my back see the marks of the scourging I endured to remove the burden of sin that weighs upon your back. See my hands, nailed firmly to a tree, for you who once wickedly stretched out your hand to a tree.

“I slept on the cross and a sword pierced my side for you who slept in paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side has healed the pain in yours. My sleep will rouse you from your sleep in hell. The sword that pierced me has sheathed the sword that was turned against you.

“Rise, let us leave this place. The enemy led you out of the earthly paradise. I will not restore you to that paradise, but I will enthrone you in heaven. I forbade you the tree that was only a symbol of life, but see, I who am life itself am now one with you.”

Rob put the paper down, and Frey’s face was lifted, a hooked smile on it, and his eyes were quiet.

“That…” Rob started, “is very nice.”

“You don’t get it,” Frey said, his voice a little heated. “But make sure that you’re not getting it because you don’t want to get it. Some people are stupid on purpose. Especially Christians, which is why I won’t call myself one, and especially, especially Catholics, which is why I don’t have time for church.”

“Then help me get it,” Rob said, impatiently. “Jesus goes down to hell to talk to Adam and Eve, and...”

“But where is hell?” Frey said.

“I dunno. Under the ground and—”

“No,” Frey said. “No. The descent to hell is God coming into this world. This is the underworld. This is the dream the sleeper must awaken from. That is the purpose of Jesus, or God in any of the ways he ever came, to wake us up from our hellish sleep, the sleep of half assedness, the sleep of willful misunderstanding, the sleep of cowardliness, the sleep of all the bullshit we know, the sleep of being common because we are too afraid to be uncommon, the sleep of…. Lovelessness, of not making an effort, of just trying to feel better instead of feeling good, of feeling good instead of being good. Jesus comes to Adam, and you are Adam and I am Adam, and he says, ‘I did not create you to be a prisoner.’ That, that is the whole purpose of… all of it. That’s the only purpose there ever was.”

“That we could be better.”

“That we could be us.”

The first man Rob Dwyer ever fucked was Merritt. He’d felt been fooling around with guys before, and then had come the strange night with Pat. After this he didn’t touch anyone, and it was a year later, almost a surprise to himself, that he finally fucked Merritt against his sofa, and when he came, Rob’s eyes flew open with the release, the hot feeling of shooting deep into the abyss of another man.

When they were both sitting, legs wide apart, chest heaving, half naked on the sofa, Rob, running his hands over his face, finally spoke.

“I don’t usually do things like this,” he said.

“I don’t either,” Merritt began, then he said, “But I have done them.”

“I’ve had some…. Trauma in my life, “.Rob explained. Then, “And I haven’t been with anyone, really. Not that you really want to hear all of this.”

“No, I’ll listen,” Merritt told him, sitting up.

“Do you think you’d like to do this again? I mean,” Rob said, hunting for his jeans and picking them up, stretching out his legs to pull them on. “If you liked it? Would you like to do it again?”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve had a boyfriend, and i’m not likely to get one again anytime soon, so yeah,” Merritt said. “This is definitely something I could get used to.”