Eden

“He what?” Sharon said.

“He has a—” Isaiah murmured tiredly.

“I heard that,” Sharon said. “I heard that the first time, but…. “

“Mama!” Javon said.

“Shush,” she dismissed the boy.

Jazmine shook her head and said, “That’s a damn mess. That’s all that is.”

“But what are you going to do?” Ana said.

“That’s what I said,” Melanie said. “And I think what I meant was…”

“Are you going to throw his ass away?” Sharon said summarily.

“That,” Melanie nodded, “is what I meant.”

“I think we should talk.”

It was four days before winter break, and Isaiah said: “I think we should talk too.”

He did not say, “I thought we should have talked for a long time, but you didn’t want to.” He did not say, “You didn’t think we needed to talk for the last year, did you?” He was too tired to be clever and found being sanctimonious wearisome.

He just said, “But we can’t talk now. Right now we’ve got to do the Poetry Run, and that’s up till Christmas. And then I guess there’s break.”

“I could stay for break.”

“Why? There’s nothing to do here.”

“Isaiah!”

“Look, we will talk. Next semester, I suppose.”

“I guess we need a break from each other,” Jason said.

“No,” Isaiah was suddenly sharp. “No. I need a break from you. That’s how that goes. Talk to me after break.”

Jason nodded.

“I gotta go back and get packed. I’ll be gone when you get back.”

“Yes,” Isaiah said stiffly. “I’ll come and say goodbye to you.”

“Will you at least hug me?”

“No,” Isaiah discovered. “I can’t do that.”

“Can you kiss me, at least?”

Isaiah thought, What if this is the last thought he has of me? What if this is like one of those movies? He gets in his car, gets in a car wreck, or he falls off the roof during break. Or he drops dead down the hall. What if this is the last memory he has of me?All of those macabre thoughts. And he discovered that, though he could not hold onto him and embrace him, he could kiss him. Why was that?

“You needed this,” Melanie declared, and then modified, “We needed this!”

They had gathered their work and driven for about three hundred miles stopping to drop it off in random places. Nick, who was the wet blanket of the Immortals and the least likely to get anything artistic done because he was so hung up on money said, “I can’t just give my work away. It’s not copyrighted.”

Isaiah’s mother said you could handwrite the little copyright symbol and put next to it “Copyright pending,” and so Isaiah said if they did that to all of their papers they would be good for travel. This done, as soon as finals were over they all, except Nick who had contributed two poems, climbed into the car with a sheaf of poems and stories and set out in the general direction of the east.

“Next year,” Shanna said, “we should go west.”

“Next year we should go to Canada,” Isaiah said.

“In the middle of winter you want to go to Canada?”

“Canada’s a real hip place,” Isaiah said. “It’s like one giant Midwestern coffee shop.”

“I would have never stated it that way,” Melanie said.

“Besides,” Isaiah continued, “We could always go in the summer.”

“Well, let’s just see how this one goes.”

Isaiah had taken the back of the car and was organizing notes. Beside Melanie, Shanna stamped her feet and clapped her thighs.

Cigarette hanging suavely from her hand, Melanie drawled, “What?”

“This is going to be great. I just know it. It’s a good day to be an Immortal.”

“That’s what Prometheus said,” Isaiah noted. “And then he met the eagle.”

Later he would write about that first Poetry Run in a book. They had mapped out three hundred miles, which is not a terribly long trip. It was just long enough with a different route back so that met as many different people as possible. And there were several different people, and not a few adventures, and some people were truly excited about the idea of three young writers plopping their stuff all over the place, and then passing out of town. In the town of Lawrence, where Isaiah didn’t think they’d ever seen a Black person, someone at a diner asked him to read a poem. He did, and it drew an audience. Before the hour was out they were doing readings, all three of them, even Shanna, who hardly ever wrote, and the townspeople were nodding their heads, giving signs of humble admiration. Isaiah looked to Melanie, and she to him and they were both like, “This is what it’s all about. This is it.”

When the new semester began there was one of Jason’s officious notes on the door. “I’m back. Come and see me. Jason.”

Isaiah ignored it and went into his room, straightening things, putting his clothes up until there was a knock at the door, and then Jason entered.

“Didn’t you see my note?”

“Yes,” said Isaiah.

Jason opened his mouth, and then shut it.

“Never mind,” he said. “Look, Isaiah. I… I’ve missed you real bad over the holiday. I’m sorry for everything. There’s no reason you have to have me, but I want you to. We can make this shit work. I know we can. If you want to.”

“I read poetry to a bunch of hillbillies in a truck stop and learned that hillbillies in truck stops have poetic souls,” Isaiah said.

Jason stared at him blankly.

“Jason, we had to hitchhike with a coked out trucker after Mel’s car broke down. I’ve had so many adventures this break. And… the whole time all I could think of was telling you all about them. About how much I missed you.”

“Then you’ll have me?”

Isaiah nodded.

“It seems like I can’t get rid of you.”

It wasn’t that he felt unsafe most of the time, or even in the last few months being single, but when Isaiah woke up to go to the restroom in the suite, there was something soothing in the knowledge that, asleep in the dark, making the dent in the left side of the bed was Jason, and that when he was finished he would return to that dozing solidity, to the smell of his body and the sound of his breathing, to his occasional turning over and throwing an arm over him. He fell asleep and he woke up in the morning feeling, and this was an odd word to admit once he had found it, protected by Jason.

“Well, it’s morning,” he said, not sounding protected at all. “Back to reality—”

He was leaning over Jason, who hadn’t shaved and now smelled less like “a man in my bed” and more sour and in need of a shower, which made Isaiah wonder how he smelled.

Jason yawned so hard his eyes squinted, and he groaned. He turned to Isaiah, slowly. His breath was never bad. The worse it ever got was the smell of iron and milk and perhaps it got more milky and more like iron.

“Isaiah, don’t turn me out.”

“I wasn’t about to,” Isaiah lied.

Jason reached up sleepily, and pulled Isaiah down to him, whispering into the top of his head, “Let’s just stay like this.”

“If we stay like this,” Isaiah murmured into his chest, “I’ll suffocate.”

Jason chuckled and let him go. In truth, Isaiah could have stayed with his face pressed to the beating of Jason’s chest, to the softness of the black hair over his breast and the line of black hair down his stomach.

“You’re growing your beard back.”

“Not really… Just the line around my jaw and the soul patch. You always said you liked it.”

“I did.”

“I did it for you. You told me I looked hot that way. No one ever told me I looked hot,” Jason smiled at him. “I mean. Not until you.

“Can we be broken up later?”

“I suppose.”

“Can we not be separated? It’s my fault. I know.”

They were lying on their backs now.

“My whole life,” said Jason, “I was always so quiet. I always kept everything inside. You know? But there was no one to bring it out of me. No one really wanted to know. And I felt if someone did know then they’d use the real me to… hurt me. I was never enough. Not me. Not the actual me.

“You were the first. You were the first person I ever really felt safe with, or was real with.”

“But not about that baby.”

“No. And that was… You don’t understand how it happened.”

Isaiah was about to say, “Oh, I know how it happened,” but figured this was not the time to be facetious.

“It wasn’t… the way you said it was. It wasn’t me going to try out sex with a girl. It… It wasn’t like that.”

“But you said it was.”

“You said it was,” Jason said. “And I didn’t disagree.”

Isaiah didn’t know if that was true. He did know that he could bring that up later.

“It’s just,” Jason shifted in bed next to him, his first lover, his best friend. “It’s very hard for me to talk—No! That’s not it.” He sat up, still not looking at Isaiah.

“It’s very hard to think about. That’s it. I hate thinking about it.”

“Jason, you need to tell me, then. Alright?”

“Alright,” Jason said, looking at him for the first time. “But we need to get dressed.”

Jason crawled out of bed, beautiful to Isaiah.

“I can’t tell you this shit naked.”

Rob did not knock, which was a surprise to Isaiah, but not unwelcome. It meant not having to get up, and well, if he didn’t want Rob to just walk in, then he could lock the doors. He was sitting there in front of his laptop, with the external keyboard on his lap and a wadded up pair of old underwear he used to wipe his nose.

“You’re working.’

“I told you I would.” Isaiah Frey said, and didn’t even look away.

“Have you eaten?”

Isaiah held out his hand and made a little wave of so so.

“You need to eat. Howabout I put some soup on?”

“If you want,” Frey said. Then he said, looking up, “I mean, I appreciate that. Thank you. That’s what I meant to say.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were Isaiah Frey?”

“Huh?”

Isaiah looked up at Rob in surprise.

Rob came out of the kitchen with the old black and white book, and Isaiah said, “Oh, shit. Well, now, I wish I still looked like that.”

“I think you look pretty much like it.”

“That’s kind if blind of you. Where did you get it from?”

“I bought it,” Rob said. “I needed this book. You have no idea.”

“No. No, I don’t,” Isaiah said. He sat back, took an undignified snuffle of his snot and then wiped his nose.

“Damn.”

“Damn is right.

“How did you do it?” Rob said, going back into the kitchen while Frey, standing up and fastening his pajama bottoms tighter, followed him.

“I was just thinking about that, actually,” Frey admitted.

“It was all about Adam. and Jason, and people I did not know I would talk about with you. Because I had no idea you had ever seen this book.”

Rob had nodded his head and was scooping dry soup mix into the pot.

“This is better than soup in a can. I think.”

Then he said, “I should have stayed with you this morning.”

“Why’s that?”

“I saw my first boyfriend.”

“At church?”

“Yes, goddamnit.”

“It seems like we both have a lot to talk about then.”

“I’d rather hear your story,” Rob said.

“Really?” said Isaiah. “I wouldn’t.”