Dust of Eden

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From his first introduction by the Chicago Tribune as "…a John Barth or a John Irving, with a touch of William Gaddis and maybe a dash of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.," Thomas Sullivan has been eclectic.
 
His over ninety publishing credits across the spectrum of fiction categories include short stories and novels translated into more than a dozen languages.
 
The novels include BORN BURNING (optioned for a major Hollywood film), THE PHASES OF HARRY MOON (a Pulitzer Prize nominee), THE MARTYRING (a World Fantasy Award finalist for Best Novel), and DUST OF EDEN (a Borders national selection).
 
Numerous short story honors are as diverse as inclusion in
Best of Omni #2
to a Hemingway Literary Days Festival cash award to a Catholic Press Association award.

His personal history is also broadly based.
 
A former All-American athlete in two sports, he has lived in a dozen countries and been a gambler, a "Rube Goldberg" innovator, a coach, a teacher and a city commissioner.
 
Currently he writes full-time in Minnesota and speaks
internationally in venues as diverse as the House of Literature in Oslo, Norway, and American schools and universities.
 
His inspirational monthly newsletter (
Sullygram
) is available free on request.

Website:
www.thomassullivanauthor.com

Contact him at:
[email protected]

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Born Burning

Dust of Eden

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For Flamingo Frank

Thanks to Karen
Wydra
, whose paintings are worth infinitely more than a thousand words and whose advice helped form mine, and to Molly
Thiesse
, Alyssa
Stafne
and Nathalie
duRivage
, who helped me construct Amber. Also, my gratitude to savvy Denny Solberg, Ginny
Malikowski
, my indispensable lad Sean Sullivan and the men of tomorrow: Chris Wilson, Richie Guillaume, Andrew Blair, Eric Barth and Spence Lewis.

"For he who lives more lives than one

More deaths than one must die."

—Oscar Wilde

1960

H
e saw them for the first time from the air, east of Baghdad, west of Basra. Like three dragonflies spread flat on the sand, they lay almost invisible in their dusky robes. Their symmetry was what caught his eye and made him aware of the faint ochre circle around which they were positioned like hours on a clock: four, eight, twelve. Facedown, they could have been worshipping. But worshipping what? The circle was about twenty meters across and utterly barren against the surrounding wasteland. No camel's thorn, no fists of vegetation. That was all he registered before the helicopter he was piloting beat off toward the marshes and Basra, where a tourist fare awaited him. But the three prone bodies went with him in his thoughts, connected to something he couldn't quite identify from his past. Or was it his future? A
Ma'dan
woman had told him he would soon recognize his destiny when he came upon it.

At age fifty-three, he thought he knew who he was: a slightly dissolute soldier of fortune freed by the death of his second wife to battle middle-age crisis. After World War II, Clayton Kenyon had hunkered down into a scavenger's existence selling military surplus in the Mideast, but now he co-owned a tour copter, if you could call the
retrofitted Sikorsky S-55 a tour copter. Most of the time he or Bailey, his partner, ferried equipment and crews to the oil fields in Kirkuk or scrounged for odd jobs and parts to keep the helicopter in the air.

But if he had managed to keep the chopper aloft, Kenyon knew he was going down within himself. His dreams were bigger than his life would ever be. Failure, too, had exceeded the causes outside himself. It wasn't just the military coup of two years ago or the steady anti-Western diatribe over Radio Cairo that you heard in every village square; it was a feeling of failed personal destiny. Instead of freeing the warrior inside himself, each impulsive step here in Iraq had left him more desperate and lost. Like a gambler playing through a dwindling stash, his bets got bigger and wilder.

The fare this day was staying at the Saint George Hotel overlooking the Shatt al Arab—a deepwater connector that drained the Euphrates and the Tigris into the Persian Gulf. Kenyon resented the rich tourists almost as much as the younger Arabs did. They came in gaggles, snapping pictures of "quaint" things, as if the struggling nation were a mere museum. But this tourist was different. He came alone. Pug and plain, a geologist, he said he was. Demetrius Booth. He wanted to see Basra and the Tigris from the air and visit the traditional site of the Garden of Eden at Al
Quma
.

So they overflew the canals crowded with dhows and the round reed boats called
gufas
, and then to the Shatt al Arab where freighters and a British destroyer rode at anchor. Sinbad the sailor had sailed from here. Kenyon turned the control stick in his right hand, and they glided off to the north over groves of date palms and up the Tigris a little ways to put down at Al
Quma
and the Garden of Eden.

Here Demetrius Booth seemed duly reverent. Kenyon didn't tell him that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that stood behind a palisade had fallen down a couple years ago, or that local enterprise had replanted it. He simply smoked and glanced at his watch as the little Greek took rapid notes on a yellow pad.
 
But when they were back in the air, Kenyon had a sudden impulse.

"Want to see another site?" he shouted above the roar and vibration.

"Eh? What is it?"

"Don't know. Funny-looking terrain just the other side of the marshes."

The red circle, he was thinking. Prostrated worshippers. Maybe it was valuable. Some mineral fluke with strange properties there in the desert. A geologist might know. Whatever Demetrius Booth replied beneath the din, Clay Kenyon was already banking off toward the west.

Below them passed the marshes of the
Ma'dan
, gerrymandered with waterways and floating villages of reed huts all facing southwest toward Mecca and long canoes and water buffalo and—once—a wild boar. Each village had a
mudhif
, or tunnel-like guest hall, built entirely of twenty-foot-long reeds bundled into vaulted ribs as thick as elephant legs.

Beyond that was the barren emptiness of haze and dust where nothing moved save one last dog who seemed to pantomime barking against the roar of the rotor. They flew northwest until Kenyon knew he had missed the odd red circle with its trio of votaries. He turned back, banking, zigzagging. Three times he traversed the zone. He glanced at his watch again. He had been doing that a lot lately, as if time were running out. Where was it? Usually he flew to the south, carrying tourists to Babylon or Ur near the Euphrates. "
You will come upon your destiny like a falcon diving on its prey
," the
Ma'dan
woman had told him when he was sharing sweet black tea with
Dakhil
, who occasionally worked for him.

And so he did.

Again.

It was there soon into the fourth pass, a nearly perfect crater of red against gray sand. And there were the three prone figures, nearly invisible in their gray robes. They couldn't have been lying there all this time, he thought. Not unless they were dead, and if they had somehow all died together with such symmetry, then where were the carrion eaters who would have torn their garments and picked their bones? No, the men had fallen on their faces at the chopper's approach. Like desert chameleons, this was their camouflage. Pushing the stick in his left hand, Kenyon dove down and hovered, the rotor changing pitch as it drooped like a shallow parasol. Against the teeth-rattling percussion he merely nodded toward the site for the benefit of Demetrius Booth.

The geologist leaned forward, causing the cabin to dip slightly. Fluidly, Kenyon nosed the craft forward to dissipate the nod; there were days when he steered just by shifting his body weight. When their wash lapped at the crater, Kenyon brought them up slightly. He didn't want to disturb the site, even though he disliked flying at an in-between altitude. If you lost power under thirty feet, "ground cushion" would mitigate a crash. And if you lost it above three hundred feet, the windmill effect on the rotor from that height could build and act like a parachute. "Autorotation," they called it. Helicopters went down more than planes, but they had fewer fatalities because of these soft crashes and because wreckage tended to spin away from the occupants. But not in between thirty and three hundred feet. That was the death zone.