GARDEN OF EDEN

I will tell you what it’s like to dream of a long-dead child—though of course there are as many ways to dream as there are people to do it, and far more than that.

You have come back to a house where you once lived. You sold this house years ago, and other people have been living in it, but now you have returned. Returned to see the evidence of their neglect, which is everywhere. Your dreaming eyes take in travesty after travesty: A pile of rotting leaves in the sink your husband worked so hard to install. Turds, human and canine, on the motheaten carpet. Sticky cobwebs in the window. A broken plastic hairbrush stuffed into the toilet. Your heart feels like the hairbrush, stuffed into your ribcage. How long will it take you to right these wrongs, how many hours of acting Sisyphus to a job that will never be done?

You must begin. Where is the dustpan? It used to hang right there, on a nail inside a cupboard door, but now there is no nail and also no cupboard. The broom in your hands is too heavy, and look, the bristles have been worn away. Not by sweeping, surely no one has swept with this broom since the Flood, so perhaps rats have eaten the straws. Besides, it is too heavy to hold—fifty pounds of useless broom, and so away it goes, into that place where all dreamed things live, to be replaced by a large black plastic sack which you are furiously filling with things your hands don’t want to touch. Rot. Filth. Despair. The sack will never be full, because already it has followed the broom into dream shadow. Get out of here, you command yourself with whatever is left of your conscious intelligence.

So you walk into the back yard. It’s a large yard, as you remembered. Commodious, the word occurs to you; plenty of room for games, picnics, and little toy cars. But what a disappointment! You had planted so many things here, so many perennial plants, thinking all the while of how beautiful this garden would be many years hence. It would be like the Garden of Eden. You absolutely remember thinking that. Now here you are, and here it is, and where’s the Eden? Brambles etch what was meant to be grape vines on trellises; scruffy islands of crabgrass dot the bare, parched ground; withered stumps the size of thumbs mark the places where you planted hibiscus, snapdragon, and tea rose.

Water—quick. You turn on the hose, aiming it this way and that with the desperate notion that a good watering will bring everything back to life. It doesn’t, though. It would take more than that. You don’t even know what it would take. Dropping the hose where you stand, you go over and turn off the faucet. 

And then, off to your right you notice the boy. Has he been there all this time?

A golden boy. Golden as the sun reflecting off his skin and naked as God made him. How he’s grown! His age looks more like ten than four. His hair—golden, too, and curly—makes him resemble a statue in an Italian palazzo.  

He has picked up the hose, as if he himself might try a little watering. But even when he jiggles and pokes it, only a single last squirt comes out. He looks like he’s peeing. Even he obviously thinks so—and you can’t help laughing a bit. That little penis, which at present has no other purpose…he drops the hose and wanders off.

But wait, are those hollyhocks? Good lord, look at them! They grow all along the wall, at least twelve feet tall; their blossoms, in a profusion of pinks, are the size of saucers. There are so many, how could you have missed them? Before you know it, you’ve grabbed the hose again and are spraying the whole garden, all of it, the water a mist of rainbow, because now that you really look, there are living plants everywhere. Look, poking pale green spears toward the sun, unfurling the tiniest petals.

You begin to dig the ground. You’re almost in a fever now, squatting there in the moist dirt with your trowel, patting soil over roots as if tucking them goodnight. The air is full of cooling drops. The trashed house is nothing, nothing in the world. You’ve left it behind, in some piece of dream you no longer feel like dreaming. Here, here in the dirt, here is the whole of your focus, here where seeds and bulbs lie blissfully dreaming their future, here in the dirt that is dark and scrupulously clean.

And always that golden boy is near you, playing at planting, playing at the business of living. You see his calves with their new growing muscles; you see the dents in his slender buttocks. You are conscious, without looking, that the color of his eyes is almost a transparency of the sky. He never comes too close, but you know he is playing with you as well, because you remember that look—sly with humor, sly with knowing so much that you don’t know, yet.

Oh, stay asleep, you dream to yourself. Stay in the dream, because when you wake, you will think you are once again in that ruined house, where no amount of human energy will bring back the order and beauty you once thought you created. Your heart will sink at the prospect of picking up the first scrap. No, never reenter that house. Stay here and let everything else drop away.

Did you think you would feel sorrow in seeing him again? Or did you think you would be overcome with crazy joy? Then you are no doubt surprised, because you feel nothing in particular, nothing but some continuing astonishment over the hollyhocks—and the imperturbable certainty that nothing dies. Emotion? What a small, foolish, wasteful thing is emotion, when here in this timeless garden the two of you are so perfectly at peace.