Ghosts of Eden (6 page)

He blinked, shook his head to clear it. He dragged himself across the open sand to his truck—he had a bottle of water in the back seat. He fished his keys from his pocket with trembling fingers, opened the side door, and grabbed his water bottle from the floor. He closed his eyes against the sun and drank deeply, letting the warm and stale-tasting water spill down his chin, soaking his T-shirt. When he opened his eyes, there was a man on a horse riding up to him, a silhouette against the sun now low in the sky. He stood there dumbly, watching this apparition approach.

The man reined his horse to a stop in front of him, threw his hat back from his head, letting it flop over his shoulders by its leather straps.  

The man, his skin dark and leathery, looked down at him. His voice was gravelly and slow. “You need to leave. Alright, bro? It’s time to go, eh?”

Garty shielded his eyes with his hand. “Yeah. Sure.”

“What are you still doing here anyway, bro?”

Garty shook his head. “Fuck if I know.”

TWO

Garty had been watching the cat for days now. It spent hours in the yard, stalking through the grass, scaling the crumbling cinder block wall with a languid strut, tracking with its eyes the birds fluttering in the bushes by the window from which Garty peered, sometimes meeting Garty’s eyes with its own, as if aware it was being watched and so put on a show for him, rolling in the dirt:
see, look, I’m a cat; watch me play
. From the bedroom window, he could peer through the smudged glass, through a tear in the foliage, slouch in this padded office chair, and wonder what made this cat come out to this particular spot everyday: what did it find so enticing about the rustling leaves, about the reflection in the glass? Didn’t it have anyplace better to be?

“Harry? Where are you, dear? Harry?”

Garty sighed heavily. When he inhaled, he could almost smell the deep musk of algae and wheat grass through the aged dust. He removed his glasses and used his shirt to smear his greasy lenses. He ran a hand through his tangled hair.

“I’m coming, honey,” he shouted so his grandmother would hear.

He stood up slowly, turning away from the window, and shuffled over to the desk, where several orange pill bottles stood, some empty, some half-full—a couple overturned, spilling their contents out onto the surface of the desk—and grabbed a pill from one of the spilled piles. He placed it between his teeth and chewed, relishing the bitterness. He chased it with three more pills and a sip of water from his glass.

“Harry?” his grandmother was saying. “Harry? Where are you?”

“I’m coming. I’m coming.”

Garty walked out into the hallway and to the living room. His grandmother was hunched in the middle of the room, holding a slip of paper out before her in a trembling, vein-strafed hand.

“Harry, dear,” she said when she saw him enter the room. “Would you go to the store for me? I made a list.”

Garty took the slip of paper, glanced at it. “Okay. Sure. No problem.”

* * *

When he’d returned from the rave, there’d been several voicemail messages waiting for him at his crummy apartment. He’d decided on his drive home to take a break from hallucinogens for a while, that it was best to avoid any further confrontations with extra-dimensional beings intent on locking him in dark places and sucking the brains from his skull, that such drugs, even for him, were best left alone; he stashed the jar in the bottom of his sock drawer and forgot about it. As he’d gone through his large stack of mail—bills he couldn’t pay mostly—he’d learned several things: one, that his rent was due immediately or he’d be evicted; two, that his girlfriend, Melissa, had hooked up with some guy named Jared (which didn’t surprise him in the least); three, that his friend Hector had just been released from rehab; and, lastly, that his grandparents had been in a car wreck. So, when his stepfather called a couple of hours later, he resolved to only remember the positive experiences of the past week, and rushed to the hospital.

He followed his stepfather through the white-florescent hallway—trying to ignore the sweet, sick, antiseptic smells—and into the cramped room. A shudder ran down his spine when he saw the wilted figure in the bed. There was a yellow-stained curtain drawn across the middle of the room, obscuring another wheezing shadowy mass on the other side. His stepfather sat on the edge of his grandmother’s hospital bed, his hulking mass huge next to her tiny frame; he held her limp hand, blubbering like a spoiled child.  

“Harry? Is that you?” his grandmother gasped.

His stepfather, leaning down eagerly, “Rose? Rose? It’s me, Ronald. I’m your daughter’s husband.” He sniffled loudly. “Rose? I’m sorry… Your husband, he…he didn’t make it. Rose? Are you awake, Rose?”

His grandmother’s eyes were closed. She was silent. His stepfather looked up at him accusingly. His watery eyes said it all:
You’re a bad son, a bad son and a worthless piece of shit, Garty.

* * *

That evening, with his stepfather off to the gym for his nightly workout, Garty had been trying to get comfortable in the hospital room’s only chair, trying not to get angry at the horrible reception on the clunky TV, when his grandmother had stirred.

“Harry? Please, Harry, are you there?”

Garty stood over his grandmother’s bed, feeling awkward. “Yes? Grandma? Are you feeling okay?”

“Harry,” she said, “oh thank god.” One of her trembling hands reached out and Garty took it reluctantly.

He sat on the bed. He hated this; it reminded him of the way his mother had looked, crumpled in the hospital bed like a discarded cigarette, watching her hacking and gagging, dying before his eyes. “It’s Garty, Grandma. How are you feeling?”

“I’m feeling a little better. We were in an accident, right? When do I get to go home?”

“
We
weren’t in an accident, Grandma. You and Grandpa were. Don’t you know it’s your grandson? It’s me, Garty.”

His grandmother’s eyes turned to look at him. “Don’t be silly, Harry. Now tell me, when can I leave this horrible hospital bed?”

* * *

A couple days later, while his stepfather was too busy weight training to do it himself, Garty had been the one left to drive his grandmother home from the hospital.

He was in a bad mood, pissed he’d been evicted from his apartment, pissed he’d dropping out of college, pissed his stepfather refused to loan him any money, that his stepfather pretended to care Garty’s grandfather was dead. It felt as if he was caught in some sort of chaotic, wavering fog, that he was a stranger forced to watch another tired episode of
The Fucked Up Life of Garty Branson
: more life-crumbling events and misadventures, right after these messages, in which each day is a little worse than the one before it.

His grandmother sat quietly in the passenger’s seat, her hands crossed in her lap. Using his free hand, he fished his bottle of pills from his jean’s pocket, popped it open, and downed a couple. He pulled into the driveway, stopping a little too suddenly, his grandmother holding on to the door to keep from sliding forward. He got out of the car, chewing the pills absently, and went around to help his grandmother. He led her up the walkway and into the house, then went back for her purse. Carrying his grandmother’s purse up the yard, he couldn’t help but notice a couple of pill bottles jostling around in there.  

When he got inside the house, placing his grandmother’s purse on the couch in the living room, he said:  “Okay Grandma, is there anything else you need?”

“Would you like a beer, honey?” his grandmother said from the kitchen, ignoring his question.

Garty thought about it for a moment: he should go; this was weird.

His grandmother came out of the kitchen holding a frosted bottle. “Honey?”

Garty shrugged and took the beer. “Thank you,” he said. He sat on the couch and flipped the TV on.

* * *

The cat had gone up the tree across the street and was absentmindedly batting at the hanging bird feeder, making it swing. Garty watched from inside his grandfather’s old office, as he had made a habit of doing, but his eyelids kept sliding closed, and—after having lived in this strange house with his grandmother for over a week now—he kept seeing the wheat field, those rolling hills and the warm breeze, the smell of algae in the deep-turquoise of the lake.

Garty snapped his head up. There was an oil painting hanging on the wall in his grandmother’s bedroom depicting this scene he kept slipping in to. It was lavish and colorful, the wheat that covered the hills a deep auburn, the sky a rich swirl of blues, and the lake, almost green in color. The artist had an eye for detail and, using the finest of brushstrokes, had created textures of such quality and realism Mark could almost see the red wheat rustling in the wind, the billowy clouds drifting, the lake water rippling, out of the corner of his eye when he turned away. Staring into the painting, it felt as if the place it depicted were close by, as if he might take a quick stroll and end up at the top of that hill, feeling the cool breeze, the pleasantly organic smell of algae. And, in his haze, every time he nodded off, he imagined that place as if it were real. Sometimes, he imagined a little girl, walking beside him, her face set in a grim expression.

There were other paintings by this same artist all over the house, and the more time he spent drifting through the hallway, poking around in the spare bedrooms—even the room at the end of the hall that gave him the creeps—the stranger he began to feel about his grandparents. One of the paintings, hanging in the hallway next to what looked like the oldest gun in the world displayed in one of those glass box cases, depicted a king and queen sitting in their thrones, behind them a colorful stained-glass window, their faces half-smiling and goat-like, horns curling from their heads. He shuddered just to think about it.  

But he couldn’t stop the thoughts; his imagination seemed to run wild as he wandered through his grandparent’s house day after day, his grandmother asleep most of the time. He kept remembering things, little things—moments from his childhood surfacing like mist through cracks in the old hardwood floors.

He’d found a bug once, behind the couch, when he was a kid visiting his grandparents for the holidays, its body bulbous and fuzzy, as if dusted with mold, its legs spidery, its eyes on elongated stalks. It had been like no insect he’d ever seen and so he’d prodded it with the nearby TV remote, not wanting to risk a bitten finger. The bug reared and seethed; it had regarded him warily with its rapidly blinking eyes. Then, a horrified shriek: a foot came down, grinding the bug flat, and he’d been gripped under his arms and pulled away. He could still remember the guilt, the taste of having done wrong without knowing it, running down his throat like a bitter syrup.

He could remember one day standing in the hallway admiring the gun in the case on the wall. It was a pistol, large and heavy, with a polished wooden grip, and a tarnished barrel. It looked to him like a pirate’s pistol. “It’s called a blunderblast,” his grandmother had said behind him, and he’d jumped, startled. “It was your great uncle’s. Supposedly he was a ghost hunter, claimed it could kill things not of this world.” And his grandmother had smiled at him, ruffled his hair, and he’d run away to go and play outside.

Last night, he’d been stumbling down the hall, half-asleep and looking for the bathroom, when another memory began to surface, something dark he’d repressed but still swam in the depths of his mind. He’d snapped awake and jerked his hand back, realizing he’d been about to push open the door to the spare bedroom at the end of the hall. He’d gasped raggedly and hurried away, almost running, pushing the memory away, fearing something that might grasp his exposed ankles in the dark.

He’d not slept well the rest of the night and when he had, he’d been running through the wheat field again, running in the dark. He held the little girl’s hand and when he looked at her, her face was a panicked mask; she flailed next to him, trying to keep up. They were running from something; something large and malevolent, with wet and glistening talons, writhing tentacles, its goat-like face grinning with murderous intent.

* * *

The next day he got a call from Hector, the troubles of the night before already a tired and distant memory. He sat at the kitchen table, tethered to his grandmother’s old rotary phone and listened to his friend’s frantic voice, while he yawned, trying to wake up.

“So you’re out of rehab,” Garty said, interrupting his friend.

“Yeah, I’m out. Finally. Look,” Hecor said, “can we meet somewhere?”

“Sure. You holding?”

“Okay. Yes. I’m holding. I’ll bring some stuff. But that’s not what this is about. It’s…I don’t know…we’ll see when you get here.”

“Alright. That’s cool. Where do you want to meet?”

“Roosevelt Park—by the university.”

“Fine.”

The phone crackled. “See you in fifteen minutes?”

“I’ll be there.” But the line was already dead.

* * *

Roosevelt Park was a large and busy area of grassy hills and dips and clusters of overgrown trees. Managed under the guise of being a Frisbee Golf course, it was a haven for drifters and drug dealers, sometimes a site for congregations of protesters with picket signs for the legalization of marijuana, and the smoking of it, the trees providing miniature coves and pathways of relative seclusion. On windless and cloudy days, such as this one, you could almost see the smoke hanging about, drifting hazily through the leaves, its skunky aroma making your eyes water and your nose burn.