Exile from Eden Read online

  The lights inside the jar, which was inside my dark bedroom, which was inside our hole, without end, winked and danced.

  You Man in the Sky

  Breakfast and Olive stayed on the sixth floor of an otherwise empty hotel that overlooked the river in a place called St. Louis.

  They had been living there for three months through a very cold winter, having crossed from one side of the state of Missouri to the other. But St. Louis was not a good place to find food, or much of anything. Like so many other big cities, St. Louis had been torn apart and picked clean long before Breakfast and Olive got there, probably before Breakfast was born.

  Breakfast told Olive that he felt it was time for them to leave again.

  Olive didn’t talk. She never said a word, even if Breakfast, at times, imagined she did.

  Breakfast was completely wild.

  “You have to be wild to survive,” he told Olive. “Just look at me, wouldja? There’s no denying I’m wild. Who’s got money? Me. I’ve got money. Wild.”

  Breakfast wrote his name everywhere he went and frequently scrawled messages that he called “instructions,” too. Some of these he’d leave behind, pinned to walls or doors, scribbled on old paper currency, which Breakfast didn’t like to abandon, but there was only so much of the stuff he could carry.

  “If I could make people believe in this stuff, do you know how rich we’d be, Olive?”

  Olive understood Breakfast; she just couldn’t talk.

  “Richer than anyone,” Breakfast said. “Of course, we’d have to find someone, first, and then get them to believe it, second.”

  Breakfast waved a fan of hundred-dollar bills in the air between them.

  Breakfast didn’t wear any clothes in summertime. But it was February, if that mattered, and Breakfast wore snowboarder’s boots with wool socks, long underwear, bib overalls made for skiing, a parka that was adult-size, so the sleeves dangled beyond the length of the twelve-year-old boy’s arms, and mirrored aviator goggles. But the boy hated wearing clothes.

  He was wild.

  To get in and out of their hotel, Breakfast and Olive had to climb down the dark stairwell to the second floor, where someone before them had constructed a rope elevator on a pulley system that hung from the rail of a fake balcony in a filthy room whose plate-glass windows had been smashed out.

  The hotel offered protection from the monsters, who didn’t come out much when it was cold. Olive kept Breakfast safe during warmer times of the year. For reasons Breakfast couldn’t guess, the monsters were terrified of Olive. So it was a lucky thing he’d found her, alone and hiding in a dilapidated gas station two days after the monsters had driven him away from the farm.

  As far as he knew, Breakfast was the only survivor. The wild boy had not stayed around to be certain, but he had been certain it was time for him to run. He was just ten then, and Olive had kept him alive for two years.

  Sergeant Stuart and the others on the farm—his army—had tried every manner of ways to scare off, and even kill, the monsters. Nothing they tried ever succeeded. A man named Old Everett had been convinced he could mesmerize and pacify the monsters by dancing naked in front of them and singing a song.

  The song Old Everett sang went like this:

  Todeli-ho-ho-ho, good-bye

  Kalamazoo-o-o, good-bye

  Mr. Engineer, be sure the track is clear

  We’re going all the way from Kalamazoo to Timbuktu

  And it worked the first time. But the second time Old Everett tried it, he didn’t make it to the first “good-bye” before being eaten, headfirst.

  Good-bye.

  People on the farm had tried shooting the monsters, but that was pointless. The army tried setting fires but only managed to burn down every house they’d lived in. They tried concoctions of poisons and even leaving out sacrifices of cattle or sheep, but the monsters were unstoppable, and they only wanted to eat one thing: people.

  At least they had been unstoppable until Breakfast found Olive. But they were alone now, and Breakfast was convinced that if they could keep moving, they would eventually find someone else. Or someone else might find them, which was why Breakfast left so many messages wherever he and Olive went.

  And the monsters, many of whom stood ten feet tall, looked like this:

  The first piece of Breakfast Paper my father found was a note written by the boy on the back of a political campaign yard sign in a place called Keokuk, which he and Robby had driven through in one of their many automobiles one winter. Think about all the things my father Austin had to explain to me: politics, campaigning, Keokuk, and what yards were.

  The front of the sign, printed in red, white, and blue, said this:

  VOTE KRONENWETTER

  CITY ATTORNEY

  I had no idea what any of all this had to do with me, how it all came together.

  But the back of the sign said this:

  you man in the sky i saw you shouting and singing on your wings and motor up above us here and you never looked down and saw me and olive waving and yelling back at you can you help us please and i have lots of money we need to go some place safe now its getting to warm i will give you some money and my name is breakfast

  Adam and Eve’s Drive-In Movie Theater

  I have seen photographs and works of art.

  I have read books in which awkward and fumbling, desperate males make attempts without end to defend and win the most beautiful women in their world. I don’t know what any of this means. I have only seen four women in my world: Wendy McKeon, my grandmother; my mom, whose name is Shannon Collins; Connie Brees, who is Robby’s mother; and Robby’s young sister, Amelie Sing Brees.

  I call her Mel.

  I read poetry, much of which makes no sense to me, but I find it beautiful nonetheless.

  A man named John Keats wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” I have spent a great deal of time thinking about those words. I see all the truth in Mel Brees, and despite the ugliness of the situation in his painting, Max Beckmann must have been telling the truth when he painted the sinking ship, because the beauty of the work is striking.

  When Amelie and I were younger, Wendy or Connie used to give us baths together in the big stainless-steel sink in the kitchen where Louis, Amelie’s father, cooked meals for everyone. I didn’t know the exact reason my grandmother made us stop bathing together shortly after I turned eleven years old, because Mel and I certainly hadn’t outgrown the sink, which was big enough to float a small boat in. At that time, I was told by Wendy, who was in many ways the SPEAKER OF LAWS in the hole, that I was now big enough to start taking showers alone, or only with the boys, with my father or Robby, who was just like a father to me anyway.

  Wendy told me that it had become inappropriate for me to continue taking baths with Amelie. I didn’t know what she meant by that, so I asked my father, whose name is Austin.

  “Well, son, the way things were in Iowa, most people believed in a very strict separate-when-naked doctrine when it came to dealing with boys and girls. Wendy has pretty much always been like that. Before the hole, all the people up there were different,” my father explained.

  “How so?”

  “Johnny used to say that when we moved down here, we all started to act like a bunch of dang hippies. Well, except for your mother and Wendy, who was Johnny’s wife.”

  Not only did I not remember who Johnny was, outside of the things I had filled in about him on my own, but I didn’t know what “dang hippies” were either. Eventually, my father and Robby found some movies, which they showed me in our theater. We watched them alone, without anyone else from the hole in attendance, so I could learn about things like hippies and, potentially, their belief systems when it came to being naked around other people. The movies were called Easy Rider and Alice’s Restaurant. It was all very confusing to me—Iowans, hippies, taking baths, whatever.

  My father explained that before the hole, people—especially American people—were inhibited about so m
any things.

  “Oh. What does that mean?”

  “Inhibited means when you’re afraid of what other people are thinking about, so you think there’s something wrong with you, and you go out of your way to appear lifeless and dull, like a curtain rod or something. People used to think there was something wrong with just about everything that there was nothing really wrong about, because they worried so much about things like sex and wars, and being overweight, and shit like that. The thing is, the way things used to be, you were supposed to be embarrassed about things like taking baths with other people. Your grandmother still is embarrassed about things like that.”

  Wendy was quite possibly the last Iowan in the universe.

  I did not think I’d ever been embarrassed about taking a bath, or not having any clothes on in front of people in my life, but now I felt bad.

  “So, people used to have wars against other people, and, simultaneously, they used to be embarrassed if they were naked in front of somebody?”

  I found it hard to believe—like my father was just making everything up again, to play tricks on me.

  My father said, “Yes.”

  I nodded. “That sounds fucked.”

  “It was, Lucky.”

  “I’ll try to always keep my clothes on around Wendy from now on. I wouldn’t want her to go to war or anything.”

  “Nobody wants to go to war against Wendy, son.”

  “Or, especially, go to war naked with her.”

  I think about taking baths with Mel every day, and now I also understand why Wendy is so opposed to the idea. Rules are dumb when you are not allowed to participate in their drafting.

  I wonder if Mel thinks about taking baths with me.

  I would ask her if she still would like to take a bath with me sometime, but I’m too afraid. And I know we could still comfortably fit in that enormous steel sink, but someone would catch us, and no matter how big a hole is, being in one is never pleasant when someone is mad at you for breaking rules, whether you’re invested in them or not.

  Our sink, where Mel and I used to take baths together, looks like this:

  I am not as good at drawing as my father is.

  One time—this was the last bath we’d taken together before the termination of our bathing rights—everything in our hole shut down. The hole suddenly became very, very dark, and very, very quiet. I imagine something similarly dark and quiet likely happened aboard the Titanic.

  The blackness and silence smothered us, without end, like too many heavy blankets. And Mel and I were in the warm water together, inside our gigantic steel sink.

  Although Robby and my father had told us all we should expect such a thing as a power failure, the expectation did little to alleviate the panic we felt. In a matter of seconds I could hear the faint cries of my mother, who shouted my father’s name from somewhere far away in the darkness of our hole. And Connie, who had been our bath attendant on that particular day, gasped and told us to stay put and not to move, because everything was going to be just fine, and she was going to go find a light and tell the boys they needed to fix whatever was broken in our hole.

  Connie and Wendy always called Austin and Robby the boys, even though they were both very old, if you asked me.

  Mel was scared. She slid around in the sink so that she was right next to me. We usually were positioned at opposite ends, so our feet touched, which frequently made both of us laugh.

  Connie bumped into something and fell down, and then she said, “Fuckbucket!” which was a word I never understood and was definitely not allowed to say in front of Wendy, even though nobody else in our hole, aside from my grandmother, ever cared if I said “fuckbucket,” which, I think, was among Connie’s favorite words.

  I laughed.

  “It’s not funny,” Mel said.

  She was so close to me, the entire lengths of our bodies connected. This was the moment, at the age of eleven, when I became aware there was something electric between Amelie and me. I didn’t understand it, could never explain it, but it felt wonderful, being there in the warmth and dark with our skin touching like this. In many ways, looking back on the moment now, it felt like the beginning of my life. I stretched my legs out and rubbed Mel’s feet with mine. I wrapped my arm around her.

  I whispered, “No. I think it’s funny when your mom says ‘fuckbucket.’ ”

  “It’s a good word,” Mel agreed.

  Mel had good taste in profanities.

  “My father always tells me that you and I are like Adam and Eve,” I said. I felt a droplet of water fall from Mel’s hair onto my shoulder. She moved her thigh very slightly against mine. I wondered if she felt that same thing that I was feeling too. I wondered if the boys could simply attach wires to us, and in doing so generate all the power our hole would ever need, without end.

  And I hoped it would stay dark like this.

  “I don’t know who that is—Adam and Eve,” Mel told me.

  I shrugged. Distant, panicked voices swirled around us. But other than that, and the clanging of cupboards and drawers as the others inevitably fumbled for sources of light, the hole was so quiet. I hadn’t realized how invisible the constant buzzing of all the everythings we relied on had been to me throughout my life. Maybe it was the absence of the buzz that made me suddenly aware of the other buzz I’d never noticed until that moment, sitting naked in the bath next to Amelie Sing Brees.

  “I think Adam and Eve were terrific friends of Johnny and Ingrid’s,” I said. “Adam and Eve ran a drive-in movie theater in a place called Iowa City, and during the daytime, when it was too bright to project a motion picture on the outdoor screen, they gave people licenses to drive cars, which was something my father told me people had to have in order to operate an automobile, although, according to my father, only Robby had ever bothered to get one—a driver’s license, I mean. Has your brother ever shown you his driver’s license?”

  Mel shook her head. I could feel the movement in the dark, a wordless answer. I could feel her heart beating, a wordless question, and I held her tighter.

  “It has a picture of him, when he was sixteen years old. You look like him. He was very nice-looking on his driver’s license.”

  “What if you didn’t get a driver’s license?”

  “Well, I imagine you would never be able to watch a movie at Adam and Eve’s drive-in movie theater,” I said.

  And Mel said, “Is all that true?”

  “Every story is true when it’s being told. Whether or not it will continue to be true is up to the people who hear it,” I said.

  “Then I believe you,” Mel said.

  A light bobbed through the darkness of the kitchen toward us. Connie was back, carrying a thick candle.

  She said, “One of the chickens got stuck inside the generator panel. It’s a real mess.”

  “I hope they fix it soon, so we can watch a movie in the theater,” I said.

  Connie put the candle down on the long flat surface where we’d pile dishes for drying. She held up a towel for me and said, “Okay, come on, Arek.”

  But I didn’t want to move away from Mel.

  Connie repeated, “Come on.”

  I stood up. The water came to just above my knees.

  “Oh my,” Connie said.

  She was looking directly at my penis, which was acting willful and unmanageable.

  And I shrugged and said, “Fuckbucket.”

  That night, Louis cooked chicken for dinner.

  Things Like This Are Bound to Happen When You Put Poultry in Control

  Two weeks after my sixteenth birthday, my father and Robby left again.

  They had never been gone longer than twenty days—not that I could remember in my entire life. When three weeks began nudging closer to four, I became worried and angry. The others in the hole seemed to be carrying on as usual, as though they expected Robby and my father to simply climb down the ladder at any moment, but I had this overwhelming sense of dread and impotent anger.<
br />
  I don’t exactly know who it was I was mad at. I was probably mad at the hole. I was probably mad at the hatch that kept us shut inside. I was probably mad at the number 16.

  I was impossible to live with. The others, perhaps with the exception of Mel, avoided me as though I had some kind of enormous protective bubble around me, warning them off, ordering them to keep their distance. Even my mother seemed to want nothing to do with me.

  • • •

  Let me tell you about what happened when I was thirteen years old, something about my mother, Shannon Collins.

  The complexity of her sadness was unsolvable to me. I suppose it’s simply one of those things about grown-ups that you can never understand until you arrive at a certain point in your life—maybe a place where you can straddle time, as my father can.

  At thirteen years old, I was not there yet.

  My mother’s sadness, I think, was an artifact, a relic from before the hole, from before Arek Andrzej Szczerba, which is my full name. It weighed me down. And although I don’t really understand what it was, I think my mother disconnected herself from love after the hole.

  She used to be in love with my father. I didn’t know if he was still in love with her. Like I said, these things are unsolvable, without end.

  And she and my father fought bitterly the day he and Robby took me out and taught me how to drive an automobile. It was winter, and everything was covered in an impossible glaze of heavy ice, so we were fairly confident the monsters—the Unstoppable Soldiers—would be nowhere in sight. Still, as always, Robby and my father brought along the special guns they kept loaded with small pellets containing some of Robby’s blood, which was the only way we knew of to kill the monsters, since they had all developed, somehow, from a sample of my other father’s blood.