Eden

“We pretend to be wild, pretend to be free, hurt each other and ourselves, and no one gets any wiser.”

Isaiah Frey

“I remember your letter.”

“You do?”

“It’s not like I get a lot, and that was the first. I always hoped you would write back.”

“I didn’t know.”

“I feel like I said, write back.”

“I didn’t know you meant it.”

“I always mean what I say.”

“Yes,” Rob said, “I’m beginning to see that now.”

Jason came to visit at the beginning of fall before classes started again. He said he wanted to take DJ, and Frey said that DJ had school and he was used to being here, and Jason said he would bring him back, but that he wanted to take him to Arizona. Jason stayed on the couch. Frey did not even think of sleeping with him. At least not seriously. He knew he’d be angry with himself for doing it, as he was angry with Jason for his carelessness. The next morning Frey came to wake DJ up, and DJ was stoical about the whole thing.

And then DJ was gone.

Adam came at what Frey thought of as “the beginning of the school year.” Really he was thinking of how DJ ought to have been in school as much as he was thinking about the uncertainty of the life he and Melanie had embarked on, both deciding to just take the courses they wanted, and live off of the remains of their student money. They didn’t spend much, so it would be doable, even with the children.

Adam played them songs through the night and then, when it was time to go to bed, Adam came with Frey, and while he was undressing he reached into his duffel bag and said, “Here, I got you something. I don’t know. It spoke to me. It’s totally you. It’s Hindu.”

“Yes, I always think: me, Hindu, Hindu, me.”

Adam grinned, and reaching into the duffel bag, pulled out a framed portrait.

“Oh, my God!”

Frey was terrified. He put it face down on the bed.

Adam looked at him, still smiling quizzically, and walked across the room to pick it up.

“What?” He lifted it up.

“I know her,” Frey thought of saying. Or: “She comes to me.” But telling this to even Adam made it unreal.

Adam showed the Indian painting of the goddess with four arms, sitting on a swan, playing a lute of some type.

“This is Saraswati. She is the wife, or the feminine part of Brahma the Hindu Creator God, and she is the Goddess of Creative expression, of Art. See, this book in her hand is for scholarship, and the veena—that’s the lute—is for musicians, and the rosary is for prayer and meditation. This water is purification. Purification of intentions I suppose. I thought you would like her.”

“I do,” Frey said. “Only, have you ever received something so right that it shook you in its appropriateness? Well, that’s this, you see?”

Adam, from behind his tinted glasses looked at Frey as if he knew there was something more to it, but he simply nodded his head and said, “Yes. I see.”

After the last messageIsaiah Frey realized he had been gone far too long without giving an account of himself. Rob was at work. He sat down at the table in the kitchen and wrote:

This is the true beauty. It isn’t the common beauty. There is no common beauty. Not anymore. I left to get my eyes back. You know people are always offering to take our eyes away. I had forgotten how to see a thing. They offer us their own vision so we forget how to see. Then you have to get out. You have to stop seeing so you can see again. You have to stop tasting so you can learn what taste is. You’ve got to get your ass out into God’s own country. That’s a country of loneliness and silence. That’s the country of two women: the Goddess of the Land, and the Goddess of the Water, lying together. And those Goddesses, gentle and rough all at once, tell you under the starlight: Now, you look here. I’m going to teach you what it is to be a man. And being a man isn’t conquering. Being a man is standing in awe, and lying under the stars, letting the beauty of the earth unmake you.”

I hope you’re happy. I hope you’re well. I hope you are letting your clay get wet. I hope you’re letting the beauty of things undo you. Don’t be too finished. Let yourself get unfinished. Let yourself be undone. Remember what Jack Kerouac said. I never had much time for that silly white man, but he heard the Word of God on a mountain. In the beginning was the Word, and Word was Wow. Wow is the Word of praise, and the Word that shows you are alive. So be alive.

Love,

Frey

“What the fuck?” Javon muttered, and put down the letter in something between amazement and disgust.

“What now?” said DJ.

Javon handed the letter to the white boy who was, he guessed, his cousin.

“Read this shit.”

The brown haired round faced boy sat back in the chair beside Javon, reading, stretching his long legs out, and while he read the message, his face screwed up and he said, “Well, it is beautiful.”

“But tells us absolutely nothing,” Javon said.

“Uncle Isaiah gets up two weeks ago—”

“Almost three.”

“Almost three,” Javon said, “Catches a train and disappears, and whenever the hell we ask him what’s going on, we get these crazy ass messages that are poetry.”

“Or landscapes.”

“Or bullshit,” Javon stood up.

“That’s it,” he said. “There’s one thing we do know. He told us where he is. He told us the address of the house. Let’s get the hell up and go there.”

“Now?” DJ said while his cousin’s back retreated, and then he saw Javon going up the back stair.

“Now,” DJ realized as Javon departed.

“Did we tell anyone we left?” DJ wondered as they zoomed down the country road.

“I am nineteen. You are seventeen. It is summer. No one asked, and no one cares,” Javon said. “Do you have that joint rolled yet?”

“I….” DJ frowned as the paper slid from his fingers, “am not good at this as you are.”

“Well, unfortunately, you aren’t as good at driving as I am either,” Javon said as the Jeep rumbled over the road. “So you’re on joint duty. You know what. Never mind, I didn’t want it that bad. But you can at least put on some music.”

This was the way it had always been between them. DJ, who had no trouble being assertive in the rest of his life, was content to be told what to do by his cousin, and his tall, golden colored cousin of bright eyes, thin bones, and small beard, was content to tell him. Once Isaiah had said, “You know you’re a bit bossy,” but Javon, who had just now jumped into his mother Sharon’s car, taken his best friend ala cousin, a bag of clothes and a bag of weed to find his uncle whom he was sure was being ridiculous, had never seen it this way.

It's the same story the crow told me; it's the only one he knows.
Like the morning sun you come and like the wind you go.
Ain't no time to hate, barely time to wait,
Wo, oh, what I want to know, where does the time go?

“This good?” DJ said.

I live in a silver mine and I call it beggar's tomb;
I got me a violin and I beg you call the tune,
Anybody's choice, I can hear your voice.
Wo, oh, what I want to know, how does the song go?

Javon hated The Grateful Dead. He hated Phish, that sounded like The Grateful Dead. He hated The Mamas and the Papas. He hated all that white shit.

“It’s fine,” he told DJ neutrally.

As far as Javon was concerned, the fact that he had not said, “Turn that shit off,” was a sign that he was not bossy. That he was full of care and concern for his cousin.

“I was thinking,” DJ said.

“Uh,” Javon said, keeping his eyes on the road.

“When we find Dad, do we have to stay with Dad?”

“What else would we do?”

“Get a hotel room. As long as we’re traveling.”

Javon was quiet, chewing his gum. He nodded.

“You got money? Cause I didn’t bring money for that.”

“I got money,” DJ said.

“K,” Javon said. “If you get on your phone and find a cheap one, we’ll go.”

DJ shrugged, got on his phone, and they kept driving.

“I’ll answer it,” Rob said.

“What?” Frey called from the backyard.

“I’ll answer it?’

“What?’

“Nevermind,” Rob bellowed, and left the kitchen with the open sliding door and came through the little hall into the living room and opened it. There were too teenagers standing there, the skinny black one in front of the white one, and when Rob blinked at them and said, “Hello,” the black one, actually he was light golden more than brown said, “I’m Javon. This is DJ. Do we have the right place? We’re looking for my uncle Isaiah.”

And still, Rob found himself standing their stupidly before he said, “Well, yes. Frey… Isaiah is out back.. Come on in.”

“Nice house,” Javon said, entering and looking around at the living room. “Is it yours?’

“No,” Rob said. “No. I just… I’m just visiting. I’m Rob.’

He held out his hand. DJ took it first and then Javon, and Javon said, “At the cost of sounding redundant, Javon and DJ.”

“He’s in the backyard,” Rob said, pointing down the hall ot the kitchen. “Follow me.”

Out in the yard, Frey was on his back, his feet stretched under a tree, and when Javon and DJ came out, at first he didn’t notice them. He was wearing a fedora over his shaven head and holding a cigarette, and suddenly he turned around and blinked several times before saying, “What are you doing here?”

“It’s good to see you too,” DJ said, falling down beside Frey, and wrapping his arms about him.

“Well,” Frey said, despite the fact that he was fiercely hugging the young man and kissing him on both cheeks, “What’s the point in getting away if you can be found so easily?”

“Everyone’s been wondering about you,” Javon said, crossing his arms over his chest. You just took off.”

“Well, let’s not talk about all that unpleasantness,” Frey said. “You all are staying. We…” he turned to Rob… “have got extra rooms.”

“We actually decided to stay in a hotel,” Javon said. “Or DJ found one and he can afford one so, swimming poools and a view of the lake sound good.”

“You dorve all this way—”

“You know it was only a little over an hour.”

“That’s still some way,” Frey said, “and you drove all this way just to scold me and then turn around.”

“We’re not turning around,” DJ said. “We are staying here. We’re just not sleeping here. I already made the reservations at the hotel,”

“But you can eat here,” Isaiah said, then Rob said, “What about a decent restaurant? In town? The one I was going to say we should go to before we ended up at that honky tonk again.”

“If I had known,” Isaiah said, “that this was the alternative to the honky tonk, I’m not sure I would have gone to the honky tonk.”

“Ah,” Rob said, as they were led to their seats, “but lots happened that night that couldn’t have happened if we’d gone here.”

“True,” was all Isaiah said, and as his cheeks heated and he tried not to grin and Rob grinning at him, he hoped the teenagers could not pick up any implication. Certainly Javon and DJ could not read his mind and see in it, sex in the bed of a truck under the stars, or understand what stirred Isaiah and made him long for it again.

…Javon sat across from his uncle. This Rob seemed not much older than him, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six. How did Isaiah manage to do it? Wherever he went he found a man, and this, surely was his man.

“…And then, you know, we were bored and needed something to do,” DJ was saying.

“The truth is,” said Javon, “there isn’t much fun in town without Isaiah.”

“When are you coming home, anyway?” DJ said.

Rob turned to him, “That is a fair question.”

“Uh… I…” Frey furrowed his brow. “I hadn’t really thought about it. I mean, I had planned to be holed in silence and get away from my life. Not meet people, not meet Rob, specifically, and have a whole different life. I hadn’t really thought about it.”

Javon shrugged and said, “Maybe you should.”

He sort of wanted to hit his nephew, but he also had to admit that Javon was right.