Out of Eden

A somewhat delusional young man tries to find his way home on a dark and lonely night.

 “The mind is itself a place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven, but what matter where if I be still the same”

John Milton, Paradise Lost Book I

i

            “Aqua vitae”: a bitter-sweet phrase I had learned ages ago; it means “water of life”�"but does not generally refer to water. It generally refers to the liquid substance one drowns oneself in when life seems to be little more than a windy exercise in unholy rhetoric. Was I consuming it, or did it consume me?

            The night was dark; the bar was empty, and the only thing blacker than the despair I held in me was that which I saw in the half-finished drink residing six inches from my nose. It sat on the counter like a stumpy citadel, inside which presided the dumb over-seer of an un-seeable despot, conveying enough strength to make me bow to him even as I remained wholly ignorant of the source of his power. After running away from the home I had spent so many seasons in, it became impossible to sort through the cobwebs of feeling in my heart. They went back so far�"synaptic relics from a long-suppressed age. Some were from immediate frustrations, but mostly my feelings had roots that grew much deeper and eventually got lost in the dark soil that was packed closest to my developmental bedrock.

            I had tried, earlier, to converse with the gentleman tending the bar. He suggested for my next drink, I order a nice, tall, cold glass of shut-the-f**k-up. I suppose my voice must have cracked from the current delicacy of my emotional condition, or from my exhaustion and the late hour. As a man starting out in the professional world, I am required to be in the office with the grey of the early morning, before even the sun feels like waking and warming the day with its cheerful shine. An hour past midnight, therefore, really beat on my nerves. I had to keep myself awake. “Home” was waiting.

            To that end, I continued with my attempts at engaging the bartender in conversation: “Excuse me, d’you�"do you�"have any idea where to find a station? A gas station? I�"“

            At this point, he seemed to regard me as worthy of dignity. Or perhaps I was simply the squeaky wheel getting the proverbial grease. My politeness had shown some clarity of thought, I thought, and the pleasant tenor of my voice came out clear and unwavering, albeit briefly. King Alcohol, whom I had employed to take me on a vacation from the currently calamitous shambles of my all-too-human condition, had not yet stolen my capacity for clear speech. The bartender took out a pad with which to jot down various landmarks I should watch for on my drive.

            “It’s simple, son. You’re ‘bout five miles away from 84, which turns into 91. Practically a straight line from here, in fact. Just…find 84.” His voice was gruff, same as before, but less so this time. Possibly, he had just been having a bad night, and that had come out in his tone the first time I sallied forth to engage his attention. Presently, he handed me the sheet of paper, with primitive-looking instructions scribbled all over it. I took this as a friendly gesture. Matching charity for charity, I decided to buy the old-timer a drink. It was all I could think to give. Having appraised my environs, it seemed his business was enough in decline to merit a shot of something that burned, so I rummaged in my pocket for a twenty. My eye kept wandering to the indent in the middle of the plasma-screen TV�"the exact spot which had been taken up by an obese Irish singer an hour before, raising his beer in toasts between sets. Impending poverty instills the frostiest feeling, a thing I well knew, which was why I felt a need to find some warmth in the heart of this working-class monolith. What better way was there to do so than to give him more money than he expected for something he already possessed? If respect could not be bought, at least I could fool myself into feeling like I had done something humanitarian. I dug out another twenty and asked for a glass of Green Label�"something that had grabbed my attention while I was thinking of ways to escape what must have been the Irishman’s death moans, for the Irish are always dying of something. Usually bars only carried Black or Red Label. But even for a hob-nob this splashy, forty dollars might be enough to make the man who noisily poured my scotch wonder why so big a tip…

            “Does this fine establishment operate at any other branches, good sir?” I asked, furthering things, hoping to lead up to the drink invitation.

            “Listen, chappie, it’s not my job to be friendly, not to your type, coming in and patronizing this ‘fine establishment’ with your constant demands on my attention. Don‘t think I ain‘t seen you lookin‘ at me the past hour and a half.” The feeling left by this latest vocal repartee was one of the chilliest lacerations�"like scraping your hand on ice after a nasty winter-time stumble. Then, I stumbled some more, fighting at the rainstorm in my brain for the clarity to get out the sentence that was forming.

            “Have you ever considered the eventuality of your decidedly stand-offish tone resulting in the desertion of this ‘fine’ establishment, not just by prospective customers, who may have heard words of praise spoken about it, but also of those persons here, whose attentions you are sure to attract, who sit here, night after night per personal tradition, depending on an atmosphere that, if it doesn’t attract them, certainly doesn’t push them away?”

            Half-surprised at the boldness I felt issuing forth from me, I was wholly surprised at the laughter it provoked from my new acquaintance, but it was a hapless laughter, one that mocked me. I considered the possibility that I was drunk. The thing that stuck, even after the man had turned his back on me, was the conviction that what I had just asked could not possibly be made clearer. Whether it had come out clearly or not, there were no further words at hand to express my view that this bartender’s vituperative manner alienated customers, just as it alienated me. And I needed some connection before losing any more of myself to the cerebral rainstorm. So, I finished my drink in a gulp and made a big gesture of returning the empty glass to the counter.

            “John Ouellette,” I said, extending my hand for him to shake as he moved to give me a refill. He did not subscribe to my friendship offer. No words were necessary on his part, just a glare. After a brief little pause, he regarding me, me regarding my outreached and unaccepted hand, he broke our silence.

            “It’s time for my smoke break. How ‘boutchu have another drink in the meantime, Mr. Friendly?” was all he said.

            Feeling considerably awkward and at a loss for words, I merely observed, “You…you really are a hard-working citizen, man.” It had not the energy to be considered a proper retort. He moved toward the bar gate. I stopped him with a hand, growing desperate for any personal connection whatsoever that could break my social losing streak, which, from my vantage point at that moment, stretched out far behind me and appeared without end. “Do you want to do a shot with me? I’ll buy. You gave me directions to the Citgo.”

            “No.”

            “Uh.” My heart beat. Exasperation seemed to jump me from nowhere; from the stale air around me; from my very skin; how surreal it seemed! I felt my face heat up, and wondered if this was the first time it had done so since I started drinking. Seconds sometimes conspire to feel like hours, and they did so right then. Finally, at the end of several long heartbeats, I spoke, because I had to, because I hadn‘t conversed with anyone�"anyone�"in a day and a half. The words were the music of personal capitulation to a universe that hated me.

            “Right. I suppose I’ll be going.” That was all the substance I was going to get out of this encounter. And in truth, even this embarrassment was sufficient interpersonal contact to get me moving, because sometimes I feel exhaustion with no definitive source to point to, and any attention�"even negative attention�"can compel me to action. (I often wonder if I’m simply too sensitive to my own reactions to things�"or at least more sensitive than other people I encounter.)

            I finished a whole drink simply because it was on the counter�"the fourth of the evening�"gathered my jacket, cell-phone, keys, left the money for my drinks and a sizeable tip on the bar, and headed out into the night�"that still, bleak silence so typical of January nights in New England. On my way out, I nodded to the bartender, who grudgingly nodded back. I supposed he was an alright guy, after all. My nerves were sensitive. That must have been the case. So, no more and no less shaken than I had been upon entering that gloomy dive a few hours before, I was again hitting the road, this time swimming with the alcohol that floated through me and kept me oblivious to the lack of heat in my car. My father, that rustic old pater-familias, had once called it a bucket of s**t with wheels that moved only by the power of Christ. For nineteen months, he’d been behind me, a relic of my past, a foundation fit for my life to be built upon-- but not revisited.

            After some time, I finally came across an open gas station. In Connecticut, most gas stations and public establishments close within a couple of hours after dark. I pulled up to a pump, and considered a sign taped to it: “This station is out of gasoline. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you. Please stop in for a free coffee, on us!” Fortunately, I had a third of a tank. Unfortunately, it appeared I was lost again. Before moving south, the illusion of Southern New England as a paved-over, steel-reinforced, glittering metropolis had manifested itself in me. Now, though, I knew that aside from Providence, Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven�"all of them along the major highways�"nothing could be farther from the truth. This part of the region had as many tree-filled miles between twenty-four hour gas-stations as any part of Maine, and I had been past this same filling station at sunset. My head still felt detached and distant from the liquor.

            “Damn it, I have to get home!” I growled. I hit the ceiling of the car. I was alone, I had no money and so could buy no map, and the place was closed at any rate! Never in all my wildest, boldest dreams as a child and very young adult could I have imagined myself so distant from my parents. Embarrassingly, I faced this moment of crisis and admitted something to myself: getting back to the home I’d run away from was going to make more difference in how I defined myself as a man than the actual running away. I thought this, and wept.

ii

            There is a poem that my father used to read to me. We both knew it so well that we could recite it without referencing the old yard-sale book it came from. “My head is bloody, but unbowed…” The lines floated through the whirling hurricane of my sleep. “And yet the menace of the years finds, and shall find, me unafraid…I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.” They were words written for members of a generation long flown from the nest of Earthly existence.

I awoke to a knocking sound, and nearly jumped out of my skin at the sight of a man’s face not an inch from my car window. I had slept in the car, and this man must have been the manager of the filling station. The sun was high in the overcast sky. I could just see it, a cold, white little thing, peering through the trees and black-stained brick buildings, which lined the roads of all these maritime towns. The man at my window looked old enough to have known the buildings before the passage of time had discolored them. I decided to open the door and step out into the day. I must have looked slovenly.

“What time is it?” I managed to ask, still blinking as if to force the tumult of my restless slumber back into the deeper recesses of my brain.
            “You can’t sleep here. You’ve got to be movin’ on. I’ll give you a coffee, as per my sign, if that’s what you stayed here for…” He laughed a bit at this point, looking down toward the ground for a moment as he did so. “It’s nine in the morning,” he finally answered.
            “Oh, god, Christ. Nine?!” I flew into a flurry of apologies.
            “Don’t worry, kid.” He walked me inside the little convenience store and got me a welcome cup of piping hot brown stuff. Life wasn’t all bad. Perhaps to break the silence, perhaps because he felt he had taken me under his wing, perhaps just out of sheer curiosity, the kind old geezer ventured to an inquiry of why I had spent the frigid night curled up in a car, parked in his only handicapped spot. A little nervous that I would somehow again make a fool of myself-- memories of the previous night and the bartender kept bubbling up-- I asked if he knew anything about Robert and Kathryn Ouellette of Rumford, Maine.

“You’re a far cry from Rumford,” was all he initially said.
            “They are my parents. I have hardly seen or talked to them in nearly two years.”

“Whoa-oh,” he interjected. Then: “Your generation always seems to turn your back on those who came before. My own grandson does the same to me…”

“Yes, well, a favorite aunt of mine on my mother’s side is sick and quite likely on her deathbed�"hospitalized, of course, and alone…and I‘ll never understand why, when one family member ‘drops off the map’ so to speak, everyone else gets drawn back to home base, as if the rediscovery of one person can make up for the forthcoming loss of another.” I paused for a second to gather thoughts, before continuing with my explanation. “So my mother, of course, is devastated, and needs me to join the family. She would not take ‘no’ for an answer, and I gave in and packed up. That was a few days ago. I was in Ft. Lauderdale when she called.”
            Then, appraising me with squinty eyes for what must have been the fifth or sixth time since he had woken me up, he asked what I had done to put such a distance between my family and myself, since a person has just one family after all, and that must be the sole source of unconditional love, because if it isn’t, then what is?
            “A girl,” I said after another long pause. This conversation was getting uncomfortable. His squint-eyed circumvention of the conversation started to get under my skin. I was never very good at meeting eyes, especially not when they belonged to my elders.
            “Oh?” he asked.
            “Why not.” I remained quiet now, holding all the most valuable information�"my story, my past, my estrangement�"to myself, like a perverse horde of treasures.
            Firstly, my aunt had attempted suicide, and in the second, the real reason I was being summoned must have been because I alone, more than either of my sisters or cousins, possessed the necessary faculties for being meticulous: that maternal aunt was, in the most literal sense, obscenely “loaded.” She was the older of two sisters, and when the fates conspired to strike down my grandfather with a heart attack, he had seen his end coming, and given her the vast majority of his painstakingly earned fortune, which, as fortunes go, was small enough to save him from notoriety but large enough to cause enmity among those family members to whom it was not extended, which was everyone except my aunt. Now, with my fatuous aunt’s lake-house empty, no one could find so much as a nickel stuck in her couch.
            “I know your folks. I’m from Rumford.”

The old man continued to regard me with narrowed eyes.

iii

As with the bartender, something about this stern septuagenarian struck me.

“You ‘know my folks,’ but I don’t know you.” I let this declaration out with the full load of irony it deserved. It was such a contradictory thing, the knowing of someone’s origins without knowing that someone.

            “Yep. I do know them. Went to University with your old man. Believe that? Yeah, I went to college. Don’t much look like a college graduate these days...but I was there when they met�"your parents, that is, and�"” He was talking so fast, I had to stop him so I could catch up. It struck me as strange that he looked so much older than my father, but I had come across this phenomenon before. I was already acquainted with the concept that time treats people in such widely varying ways. They seem to age so much more in accordance to the pace with which they drive themselves than by any predictable unit of measure.

            “You know, you’re the first person I’ve met from the same town as myself in a very, very long time,” I said, not surrendering anything about myself, but trying to carry the conversation to a juncture that might inform me. I pressed for more information: “You ever think about packing up and heading north, even for a weekend? You obviously don’t stay very close with your friends, considering that I never knew you…”

            “Yes. Yes, sometimes that happens, but you’ve got to pick and choose which relationships you keep, regardless of where they keep you. I’m sure you’ve got that figured out by now, haven’t you?” By now the two of us must have made a welcoming scene. He, too, had poured himself a cup of the scalding liquid, and joined me in leaning on the counter as we conversed.

            “I certainly do. I picked a girl over my family.”

            “And it’s up North, to them, you’re going today?”

            “It certainly is,” I said, hoping silently that the man would say whatever was on his mind�"but I was too polite to demand enlightenment. The way he narrowed his eyes�"still!�"and cocked his head to the side�"like a dog that watches its owner with curiosity that equals its incomprehension�"unsettled me.

            “John Ouellette, huh?” He had hardly taken a sip of his coffee. Granted, it was still steaming. “How’s your aunt doing? I feel as though I remember hearing something of a divorce, to which I extend my condolences. My ex-wife lives up there�"used to be with our daughter, but she left home some time ago�"and so I’m occasionally kept in the loop about what goes on.” At least he put on a solid show about being polite. Still, the man paid far too much attention to my face, and to the most rigorous eye-contact, for my liking. Despite shifting my feet to make myself more comfortable, I had a vague sense that I would never quite be at ease.

            “Well. I’m glad to hear that you still keep in touch with the old town. That, at least, is important.” I sipped at my coffee, which was cool. “I am sorry about your daughter,” I said when the beverage was done, and then asked, “Where did she run off to?”

            “How do you know she’s gone?” the old man asked. He sipped his drink, cool as a cucumber, but there existed an unnamable threat�"something barely perceptible�"to the fact that his weight had been shifted so that he leaned toward me. I put the paper cup on the counter, registering how loud that sounded compared to the room’s other audible surroundings.

            The cars wooshed and rushed on the nearby highway. It was a Saturday, so the nine o’clock rush was late, only now getting its start. The fans cooling the beverages in the back of the store made a continual whirring sound. One of them clicked a little�"it apparently needed maintenance. I wondered when another customer would come along.

            “Tell me more about why you left home for a girl,” the stern Down-Easterner said, still keeping up appearances. There comes a point when no matter how on top of things a man is with his politeness, his manners, and his tact, and regardless of the ease with which he thinks he is relating to another person, it is insufficient to fill the void true friendliness usually fills. I am very familiar with such encounters. I notice my tendency to over-think, and to worry too much, even as I am powerless to stop it. It is engrained in me. I may have said these things out loud, or some of them, because in the din of my swirling thoughts a sound distinctly registered: the thick plastic of the other cup hitting the plastic counter like the most fitting punctuation for my discomfort.

            “You’re the boy, aren’t you?” he said, and advanced toward me. I stepped back, naturally, and in the blink of an eye I was running toward my car without a care in the world how much fuel was in the tank. Confusion and fright short circuited all logic. Instinct said to flee, so I fled!

            I was caught, too, and wrestled to the ground. I had made it as far as the pavement on the other side of the place’s entrance. Pinning me there, the old man shouted questions into my face at the top of his lungs. Who was the girl? Exactly how long I been gone, again? Bet I didn’t know she had a father, did I, and that he was such a smart sumnabitch, huh? When in close proximity to a person like that, being yelled at, it has the same effect as lying under a sprinkler. He was soaking my face with tiny flecks of saliva as he ranted and raved. The clearest thing in that moment was my sense of disbelief that this chain of events had transpired. “I’m willing to bet your aunt’s broke because she was bailing you out! But I have you now.” With his weight on top of me, all previous discomforts seemed embodied, defined, and countless times more acute! I struggled to get away, some instinct for self-preservation surging to the forefront, and he whacked my skull against the pavement to settle things. I was under no control but his.

            It is odd how, in moments of the greatest stress, when all reason and thought should be completely broken down, things suddenly gain in clarity. Despite my lack of sleep, physical injury, and the discomfort and confusion of the situation, I could make out every pore on the man’s face, and the menace in his eyes and clenched jaw read to me as the most precisely stated facts of nature. He spoke slowly, almost taunting me. “You’re looking at the lines on my face, I bet. I can see it. You been staring all morning. I want to let you know you are their architect. Ever since my baby girl disappeared two years ago�"‘bout how long you been away, isn’t it?�"I’ve barely gotten a night of undisturbed sleep�"“

            “But how do you know it was me that�"“ My vision jarred as he thunked my head once more. The skin must have been broken. The searing pain in the back of my head made me wonder if I was bleeding. My whole head ached.

            “How do I know it was you that what?” I realized I was trapped, and that this strange ogre had a monopoly on justice, explanations, and physical prowess. I unraveled the yarn of my past for him�"fully aware the majority the truth had to go unsaid. It was the nature of the thing. There was never the time, never the energy, never enough of an impulse to bring memories fully into being, but I did the best I could with the given circumstances.

            “Two years ago, I went out with your daughter. I had no intentions of starting a relationship. She got pregnant�"I swear, I tried to convince her to go to parents�"to you�"and then she had this crazy idea…” I trailed off because I had said all I had to. Lying on the cold, stony parking lot, pebbles digging into my shoulder blades and exposed lower back, I realized that in the end you can never just innocently go back home. I certainly never would. Just as an unanticipated chain of occurrences had forced me to leave, so another was preventing me from returning to the place that, deep within, I missed so much.

            “Your aunt bailed you out, didn’t she? She paid for the…” He was in tears. I wondered why he had left his wife so long ago, and if I had been alive, perhaps just a boy, when the divorce went down.

            “She loved you, you know. And me. And me! She�"she tried to convince me�"to run away�"we did run away�"the medical bills were heavy, constant, sucking the life out of both of us. Uh. It was an infection. The procedure to remove the fetus…it was dangerous.” The old man cried, now, and looked down at me in a way that I have never been looked down upon since, but I signified�"I brought�"the death of the one thing he loved: his last link to the place he came from. Now, like countless millions, he was simply another outcast from Eden. We all try to go back, but what happens when we know too much, and that knowledge is too hard for a place called Paradise?

            As the aging father loosened his grip, seized by grief, I took hold of the moment and thrashed my way out from under him. It was a fight now, and in plain view of a busy thoroughfare. I kicked the geezer for getting up and reaching out for me, landing my blow obliquely in his chest. The pain stole my breath away�"I must have broken a toe. He swung for me, so I dodged and fell backwards onto the pavement again. The sheisty fellow scrambled up to his feet�"while I tried doing the same�"and stomped savagely on my hand. This is what the emotion of the moment had brought us to: we were in our own personal Hell, fallen from any illusory grace we might have previously thought we held. Within minutes, a siren could be heard. I felt a meaty hand clam itself securely around my ankle. “Help! Police! Officers�"this man tried stealing from me!” The old man went hoarse after the first couple of shouts, and the tendons in his neck were standing out from his efforts.

            Now, sitting on a cot in a dismal, steel-reinforced, concrete room, whiling away my three years here for attempted theft, aggravated assault, and resisting arrest, I wonder what exactly I would have done had I made it back. What would I have told my parents about the final destination of such a large part of the fortune they so envied, that they believed I could have somehow gotten them? They know the truth of things now. But, when compared with the truth of what might have been�"something more meager, sure, but quieter�"is it a fair exchange? And who can ever decide for sure? “My head is bloody, but unbowed.” The best I can do now is obey the rules until I get a chance to make something for myself that can pass as a home.