Eden

For Fred

…Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed…

-Genesis 2. 7, 8

Rowing in Eden -

Ah - the Sea!
Might I but moor - tonight -
In thee!

-Emily Dickenson (269)

Book 1

Clay

“I’m just really tired of being me.”

The day he heard about Adam’s upcoming wedding was the day that Isaiah Frey, aged forty-something-but-almost-thirty-nine-and-I-could-pass-for-thirty decided enough was enough. Somehow, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

     “Only my back isn’t broken,” Frey said to himself. “And I’m not a camel.”

     It was summer, and school was out. No more books, no more children’s dirty looks. Even as Frey packed his bags he did an assessment of those who would need him. Sharon was a grown woman. DJ was seventeen and communicated in grunts half the time. Javon was nineteen and in college, no longer the needy little nephew. Dad was semi senile but had Mom who was… not entirely clever, almost devoted to being dull, but perfectly dependable. He did an assessment of all his loved ones, deemed them fine, and decided that everyone and everything in his life could do without him for a little while. He had paid rent for the next two months, but told no one anything, got on his bike and rode out of the courtyard of the old apartment building. He rode through downtown and then he loaded his bike up on the Number 4 Bus that stopped beside the gas station on the western end of downtown, and he let the bus take them both to the train station. He had a carton of Marlboro Blacks that said that biking was not for health, but simply transportation.

     The only friend he had talked to was Deborah. She had said before, “My family has places all over the state, and if you ever need one I can make that happen.”

     Given the lack of success Deborah often had in getting her family to do what she wanted, Frey had his doubts regarding this, but that day, when he’d received the wedding invitation from Adam, he’d gotten on the phone and called her, and now he was on this train, on his way to one of those little whistle stops he always passed between here and Chicago. He would get off at that whistle stop, and he imagined, “I will climb out, break a limb off a tree, use it for a staff, buy a six pack of beer and brave the hillbillies. I will make myself a temporary home away from everything.”

     A voice whispered into his head, and he imagined it to be a white woman’s: “You will find yourself.”

     “Fuck that,” Frey told her. “I don’t want to find a goddamn thing.”

     In fact, he was more than happy to lose himself, and everything else for that matter.

“I wanted to travel light,” he mumbled to himself as he got on the four o’ clock train. He remembered how now that it was summer, it wouldn’t be dark for another five hours.

     “I want to be light as Henry David Thoreau.”

     He had said that before, written it in a poem. But he had taken his laptop, and it wasn’t that slim Apple of his dreams. It was a shitty old Dell PC, and because it was awful to type on and the keyboard, aside from being unappealing was also defective, he had brought along an external keyboard, and after this a printer, and so this was the beginning of his not being so light and free.

     As the train began to lurch forward, the promise of travel having been denied the passengers for the last twenty minutes, Frey thought of the homeless people downtown, rolling their possessions in wheeled suitcases, carrying their whole lives on elaborate wheels. As he grunted, shifting his bags, Frey realized, “I cannot afford to travel light. Even traveling light is a luxury.”

This had seemed like a good idea. There was still plenty of daylight when he got off the train, strapped his bag to his back and over the saddlebags of the bike, then began the careful riding over the tracks and onto a tree bordered country road with only the occasional truck. The directions to the house were good, but Frey thought, “Maybe I should have stayed in a hotel for the night.”

     There was very little out here, power lines through the green trees, a summer sky whose blue was beginning to thicken with a heat he was unaccustomed to, the sparkling water of filled reservoirs and little ponds. The house was at the edge of town, but the town was at the edge of everything. The house was little and brick and one storied and built off the road at a lower level so that’s its front yard was reached after traveling down a low stair, and behind it was a large yard, and just through the fence he could see a further depression that did not lead to an alley, but to a defile that led to more grass and train track and then across it more field.

     For just a moment Frey felt peace. He had an irrational sense that everything was going to be more than all right.  He stood outside of the house, opening the door, and then after working with the locks, which gave way, rolled the bicycle into the house, let down his heavy backpack with a sigh of relief, and looking at the walls as he entered the fustiness said, “Thank God. Air conditioning.” He hadn’t thought much about it, not consciously. But now he realized how miserable he would have been without it.

He had done it, and he had done it with little thought. There was no food and no drink in the house. More than those, Frey had most wanted to make sure there actually was a house. The sun was still very much up, and he got on his bike and rode to the convenience store he’d seen near the train tracks. He didn’t know where any other stores were, and Frey got a pizza for the night, a pizza for the morning, beer and Pop Tarts for dessert. Cigarettes were not necessary. He already had them. He admired, but did not stare at the good looking redhead in the feed cap manning the till. They made friendly banter as Frey paid and tried not to stare at the copper stubble on the young man’s cheeks. Young. Too young? Who was to say. The green eyed boy was smiling at him. Don’t make too much of it. Pay attention to what you’re about! Before he checked out of the fluorescent lit store, he made sure there would be no need to come back here tonight, and then turned around, waving at the redhead, and went back to the house.

     The sky was beginning to darken, but not with the cold rapidity winter. This was the summer darkening, as if God were slowly turning a dimmer down on everything so that the sun was still sunny, but less so, the sky still blue, but not as brilliant, the grass a darker green until all settled into night. The phone was plugged into the wall, and the speaker was plugged into the phone, and Frey realized he had not asked if there was Internet. He had doubted, coming in, that Internet reached this place. But it did, and BBC Radio 4 made him feel connected to the world, less alone. He needed to be on his own, but not completely alone and tonight, over pizza and beer, hearing about bombings in Sri Lanka and the kidnapping of African girls by bands of hostile Muslims, he was strangely comforted.

     Maybe it was time to reevaluate. Maybe a city was what he needed most of the time, but this is what he needed now, what was available, what was right here. His friends, his white friends, always talked about how scared they were in the city, how dangerous the city was, how nice it would be to be out in the country. His parents could say the same stupid shit, but this is what comes from living around white people and running away from your own for so long. Frey had gone to school in the country. Cornfields and pale faces were not unknown to him. He had gone to a college in Michigan with eight hundred people in a town where the only attraction was a Wal Mart and an abandoned theatre, and he had not felt unsafe. But he had been aware. The country lacked much, like stores, for one, good hospitals, a reliable fire department or police department. It had wild animals. It had wild white people. His best friend Deborah had declared, “Out in the country, people are free to do what they want, and there isn’t as much interfering.”

     Yes, Frey had said, that was the problem. No one who had ever seen Klan meetings, or passed a shady looking VFW with a Confederate flag hanging from it, no one whose parents had fled Alabama to avoid lynching could smile on a place where white people were free to do, unchecked, whatever they saw fit.

     “Fear….” Frey murmured. “No.

     “Caution?”

     Well, yes, always.

After caution, after the feeling of rest that comes from sitting in the early night with British voices coming from the radio and the comfort of air conditioning, he gets in the shower and then lays out naked in the bed in the dark. He opens a window, and the moon comes through. It’s almost full and it stays in the bedroom, blue white. This is not like those normal nights back in town where Frey stays up till three in the morning, until four sometimes, waiting to be exhausted by work, and he doesn’t want to work tonight. He lays there on his back, drifting in and out of sleep, and now and again his cock rises and falls as he drifts in and out of lust.

     He rolls over and turns on the app on his phone. Here he is, far from any chance of meeting a man, and when he drifts to sleep, for just a moment he sees Adam. He sees Jason too, and that winter day when, red cheeked and red lipped he first went out with Jason Henley, and thought, at last, he might have found someone to love, and now Adam is getting married and Jason is on the other side of the world, though his son is sitting in Frey’s house. Frey does not like to dwell on pity. He thought he’d finished mourning his love life a long time ago.

     He is hit up before he gets to hit on anyone. The red light says someone has messaged him.

     “What are you looking for?’

     “I don’t know.”

     The usual lie. Only it’s not totally a lie.

     “I’m open.”

     “I’m open too.

     “I just want to meet someone,” Frey says, which isn’t very eloquent. He doesn’t feel like being eloquent.

     “I do too,” the response comes. “But I don’t want to be anyone tonight.”

     This almost makes sense because where there should be a face picture or any picture there is just, in the black icon space, a slightly less black grey shape of a head and only the age of the person, 28. He needs to stop meeting these babies, but then, tonight he’s not really trying to meet the love of his life, and at any road, this guy found him.

     Frey reads again.

     But I don’t want to be anyone tonight.

     Frey is about to write, Alright. Instead he types: EXPLAIN: I don’t want to be anyone.

     The response comes after a space of blackness.

     “I don’t want to explain anything or have any story. I don’t even want faces. I want to meet a guy in the dark and just do things.”

     “Cause you’re in the closet?”

     “I’m not in the closet.”

`    The response comes back quickly

     “I’m just really tired of being me.”

     A minute later, while Frey is still thinking about this, the typing continues, “If you like it we can do it, if not, I’m sorry, I’ll move on.”

     But lying there naked in the semi darkness, Frey is already hard at the idea of this anonymous sex coming. He is already hard with the idea of the simplicity or it, the lack of morality, the lack, even, of good sense.

     “Where do you want to do it?”

     “We could do it in my truck.”

     There is an option. Frey doesn’t know how he feels about the option, though. He hasn’t said yes or no.

     “We can’t do it in my house.”

     “Wife and kids?” Frey says. He tries not to put disdain into this because, after all, he might consent to this shit anyway.

     “No. Sick mom and dad.”

     “Oh, sorry.”

     “Thanks.”

     “Doing it in a truck is trashy,” the guy writes back. “I just don’t know where else.”

     “This house,” Frey types a moment later. “I’m just visiting. I don’t live here. I’m here for the night, so it’s not really anyone’s home. This house.”

     “Where?”

     “Uh…”

     Frey gets up, and he moves out of the bedroom and into the living room. He thinks for a moment before opening the door and comes out naked to read off the address “24613. The State Road, down from the convenience store. Don’t know if you know it.”

     “I know it. I can be there in less than ten minutes. Can we do it in the dark. No lights?”

     He has just lectured himself about living out in the country where strange white people do strange things, where his black body could be left for dead and no one be the wiser for some time and now, having left the city, with no one he loves knowing where he is, he is inviting some strange white boy, with no face, to show up and have sex with him in the dark.

     “Do you need to shower or anything?” Frey speaks into the phone and watches his words sail into print in a yellow bubble on a black conversation screen.

     “No, I just showered when I got home from work. I wanted this tonight. I’m ready.”

     “Well, then I’ll see you soon.”