The Eden Express (19 page)

“You can open your eyes if you want,” said Stan.

“Sure,” I said, trying to believe it as I opened my eyes slowly. I was ready to see almost anything. Angels and pearly gates wouldn’t have surprised me, but I was sort of half hoping to find myself in my bedroom in Barnstable. I looked around very cautiously, taking in as much as I could, like a little kid on Christmas morning. Everything was aglow with a soft light, but there was no new bicycle, no mommy, no daddy, not even Gary. Someone had lit a kerosene lamp and a few people were stirring around.

Stan I had never seen before. He had long reddish hair and a beard and was sitting on his haunches holding my hand, completely naked. “Stan understands,” I said to myself over and over again.

“What happened?” I asked, putting it as directly as possible.

“We don’t know what happened, Mark. All we know is that for a time at least we must try to use less energy, so just try to relax.”

I looked at Simon, who was beside me. He was dead. I had killed him. I had drained away all his energy.

“Don’t cry,” Stan said gently.

Crying was using up energy and if I wasn’t careful I would drain away all the energy. Everyone else was perfectly quiet. I looked at Stan pleadingly, sorry for what I had done and not being able to make it right. He quickly looked away from my eyes and I felt even worse, knowing that had our eyes met he might have been killed instantly.

“Don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right. Is there anything you want?”

“A cup of coffee?” I had no idea of what was possible or impossible, but a cup of hot coffee would sure taste good.

Coffee was something that wasn’t grown within several thousand miles of us. It would never be a “natural” part of our lives. Coffee was a product of our exploitive imperialist system. At least I hadn’t asked for Coke. It would have been more cool, more peaceful, more soulful to ask for mint tea but I wasn’t really interested in mint tea. It was coffee I wanted.

I watched another caveman violently and angrily smashing and splintering wood. I wondered what he was so pissed-off about. That I wanted coffee? That I had woken him up? That I was wasting so much of our limited energy, and all for a cup of coffee?

“It’s all right, Stan. I really don’t need a cup of coffee.”

“If you want a cup of coffee you can have some.” I was deeply touched by how much they were willing to sacrifice for me.

“It’s really OK, I’ll be fine.” The woodcutter stopped. Peace came to the room again. “Thanks for everything, Stan.” I let go of his hand and closed my eyes again and pulled the sleeping bag over my head.

I would draw deep into myself until I could talk, move around, without hurting anyone. I wasn’t going to drain any more precious energy.

It wouldn’t have been very hard for me to do without coffee or cars or any of the other things in my life that were the product of so much pain for others. Sure, I had moved out to the farm to grow my own food, make my own house, do without cars, do without so much that was tied up with pain. But maybe if I had done more sooner, maybe if I had trusted and followed more what I knew was right, maybe energy wouldn’t be so desperately critical now, maybe Virginia would be here. Maybe.

Like the Jews in concentration camps as the Nazis took out their gold teeth, we all stopped, froze, didn’t move a muscle, and were passed over for dead. We all became cells of a larger organism. There were billions of us. One of us would breathe and then another, each
holding the spark of life for an instant and then passing it on. Playing a shellgame with our precious ember that would bring us all back to full being as soon as the danger had passed. What a brilliant strategy.

But then it dawned on me who I was. I was Curiosity. What a terrible thing to be; Curiosity at the dawn of time. I couldn’t help myself, I knew I was going to fuck everything up.

No one else was interested in talking about things. They didn’t even know what talking was yet. First I’d get them into language and from there build back all the old shit, just to see if I could do it, just because I was curious. As soon as I showed them about fire, the next thing you know I’d be trying to put a telephone together and fucking around with steam engines. If they had any sense at all they’d kill me now, before I go and wreck everything. But they probably wouldn’t have the faintest idea what I was talking about. I’d have to show them how to kill and then it would be too late. They’d be hooked.

I remember things I’d read about Mu—Atlantis. They must have reached this point and then things started all over again in little caves just like this one, where someone screamed in time. How often had things started from scratch again? Was it different every time or always the same? How many ends had I been through? Was I making the same dumb mistakes time after time or was I making some sort of progress?

I couldn’t help thinking things that made me want to laugh. Maybe if I had voted in the ’68 elections things would have turned out differently. Old rock-and-roll songs drifted through my head.

After what seemed like years if not millennia, people started moving around some. I heard the sounds of someone building a fire and opened my eyes slowly. The sun was up and people were getting dressed. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. The sun had come up and life seemed to have survived. I felt a special warmth flowing through my body. Not because it was that important to save energy any more but just to savor life, I closed my eyes and reveled in it. We had made it.

After a while I felt a hand gently shaking my shoulder. “It’s time to get up, Mark.” It was Simon’s voice. He was all right.

If he had come back to life maybe everybody had come back. Maybe even Virginia was all right. I opened my eyes again and smiled at Simon.

“Everything’s OK,” I said. Simon smiled. “Thank God that shit is over,” I said. Simon nodded and we embraced. It was sure good to be back. Good old Simon. Good old people. Good old sun. Good old planet.

Just about everyone who had spent the night there had already left. One guy came back up to the house and said that our car was blocking his way. “You really from Massachusetts?” he asked. “Yup.” “Far out,” he said, and Simon and I gathered up our sleeping bags and headed out to the car.

 

A CUP OF MU TEA. We went to the Marine Inn coffee shop to get a little breakfast. I’ll never forget Simon’s groan and horrified look when I ordered. “A cup of Mu tea, please.” It was exactly the right thing to do.

“Mu tea? I’m not sure we have any of that,” the waitress replied. Another customer helped out. “Ain’t that just some sort of Chinese tea?” And she brought me a cup of Mu tea. It was probably just some magically transformed Tetley or Lipton.

“Is the tea in the leaves or in the tongue?”

I was trying out the new world and my new self. If I could get a cup of Mu tea in the Marine Inn, that was quite something. I mean, what do you have to have before you say “Miracle”?

How could it be that everything made such perfect sense, that I was thinking so much, so well, feeling so much, so well, seeing so well, hearing so well, knowing so much, so well.

That everything strange that had happened to me in the past few days was all in my head was a possibility but it didn’t seem to be very
likely. Something very big was happening, and I was figuring it out as I went along.

Part of the confirmation that something really had happened was the price of tobacco. The last time I had been in town a tin of tobacco had cost $1.20 and now it was $1.80. The supermarket was very strange. There were no other customers in there. There didn’t seem to be very much left on the shelves. Did money mean anything any more? Did I have to pay for anything or could I just take whatever it was I wanted?

It was very important not to run out of tobacco. I picked up as many tins as I could carry. Smoking was an important reminder of who I was. It was my clock. Cigarettes seemed to keep time. They had a continuity with the real world that I seemed to be losing. As long as I smoked cigarettes I was alive. As far as I knew, dead people didn’t smoke cigarettes.

I was walking out of the store with seven or eight big cans of tobacco just as Simon walked in from the bank. He looked upset with me. “Mark, do you really need all that tobacco?”

I felt slightly ashamed and defensive. Simon wasn’t a smoker, how could I expect him to understand? The manager of the supermarket was looking on with disbelief and maybe a little fear.

“Mark, did you pay for these?”

“No, Simon. I figured that if I was supposed to pay for them he would say something,” pointing to the manager. He was just staring, not about to interfere. I could have picked up a cash register and he would have just watched. The idea that this wild-eyed kid would just stroll into his store, pick up over ten dollars’ worth of tobacco, and walk out without the slightest pretense of hiding the stuff was too much.

Simon talked me into putting most of the tobacco back. I kept one can and some papers and Simon paid for them.

Imil riggle ugle roo. What I would like to know is why no one ever
told me there was something like this. What I would like to know is what the fuck is going on.

Skimmy zoo a loop de roo—the problem is what to do? What to do ought to do. I’ve always thought ’bout what to do and why to do what to do and not to do.

There’s naught to do. I always knew there’s naught to do—but what to do, ought to do, once you know there’s naught to do.

 

I had hoped that if we could just get to the bank where we had all that money—lubrication to throw at obstacles—it would compensate for my growing inability to deal with things. But money seemed to be cracking up as badly as I was. Prices all screwy. Where is the fucking bankbook? How do I sign my name?

We had always felt vaguely shitty about that money anyway. Capitalism, parents, etc. And to use it now when things were breaking down was obscene.

Simon decided we should switch over to his theoretically more reliable vehicle. He didn’t want to drive Car Car and was probably losing faith in my driving. But his car needed some work, so Car Car and I trailed him to the gas station where we said loving good-bys while Simon got his car fixed.

The last day on earth and here we were using blood money to make some poor slob fix our carburetor instead of spending his last day with people he loved.

But there were signs that it was all right. It even seemed at times that people were dying gladly to be able to make some contribution to our progress. Knowing winks. Light rays through the clouds. An old guy in a gas station cashed an old crumpled-up traveler’s check I found in my wallet without asking for any identification or even checking my feeble attempt to remember my signature.

“Simon, let’s go back to the farm.” I was in tears about what people
were doing for us. I could do without using the precious last bit of gasoline. I could do without getting a place on the last ferry. I could die without seeing Virginia or my family.

But somehow my willingness to turn back was part of what made me such a good carrier of everyone’s hopes and fears. It seemed they all wanted me to be them. I did the best I could, packing up all their hopes and fears, bruising and pushing them out of shape as little as possible, expecting that somewhere up the line I would run into a better messenger, for whom I would die and pass on all my gathered hopes and fears.

So we kept moving toward Vancouver. I think the basic idea in both our minds was still to find Virginia and hope that that would somehow straighten everything out. I also thought that I had become a hydrogen bomb and that someone in Vancouver could defuse me or fly me to New York or that Simon and I had somehow become capable of traveling backward in time and were going to go back and straighten out the things that were about to result in the end of everything or…or… Simon was also thinking that in Vancouver he’d have a lot more help managing me, and that from there we could get hold of my parents. Neither of us had had any practice with what was going on and were just stumbling along. Vancouver seemed the best direction to stumble toward.

On the way to the ferry, “Mark, you know there’s been an earthquake in California?”

“Yes, I know that, Simon.”

Did I know that? I probably would have answered yes to almost anything anybody asked me if I knew. Almost everything seemed like something I knew. That it was somehow connected to my scream the night before was obvious. That Virginia had been killed in it was also obvious. Simon apparently didn’t know that yet or was trying to keep it from me.

How did Simon know about the earthquake? Was he beginning to be able to know things in my way too?

I was in the land of light without shadows and Simon was in some sort of twilight. He was the link between me and the darkness. I couldn’t deal with the darkness so Simon was in charge of all that. I was afraid that if he caught on to too much then he wouldn’t be able to deal with the darkness either and then someone from the darkness might do something bad to both of us. Simon had to find someone else and bring him into the twilight before he could come into the light. I hoped he understood that.

There were lots of people back there whom I loved, lots of people I wanted to have with me in the land of light, and if I lost Simon there would be no way for me to get back to them or for them to get to me.

 

We got to the ferry landing in plenty of time. There was only one car ahead of us, a beat-up station wagon with a middle-aged man and a little girl. I wondered if they were traveling backward in time too, but most of the time I spent clutching my knees to my chest, trying to keep my body from turning into light and trying to make the ferry come and trying trying trying.

Things were happening faster and heavier than ever. Every moment an odyssey. I was beating off wave after wave of screaming flesh-tearing and constantly trying to make Simon feel that everything was OK.