The Garden of Delights

“The trick, you see, is unfinished business.” Evelyn wagged a finger for emphasis. “They ask when you arrive, but—George. George, are you listening?”

George Bannerman shook himself. Forced himself to look her in the eyes, rather than through her forehead as he had been, at the sparrow in the windowsill. 

“I’m listening, Evelyn.” He massaged his wrinkled brow. If he massaged much further, he might unwrinkle it altogether. “It’s just a lot to take in. You ah… you were telling me about the garden.”

Evelyn’s eyes lit up. “The Garden. Yes.” She leaned back in her chair, remembering. George wondered how it was holding her up. What were the bounds of incorporeality? 

“All those hours wasted in church,” Evelyn tittered, shaking her head at the absurdity of it. “I mean, I knew they were wrong, but—” Her fingers made no sound as she drummed them on the table. “A rough approximation, I’ll grant them that. They got the contours of the thing, I suppose… But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start with Saint Peter.”

George nodded mutely.

“I should say, I never heard his name. He never offered it. But he met me at the gates, so who else would he be? He rather defies description. Once you surpass fifty feet, judging size with any degree of accuracy becomes difficult. Especially when the scale of everything else is all… willy nilly.” 

Evelyn tugged a ringlet of blue-white hair into her mouth to chew on, as she’d done for as long as George could remember. The two of them had been friends, practically inseparable, for going on seventy years. Their friendship had survived three marriages—two of George’s, one of hers—the loss of a child, dreams both dashed and realized. It’d spanned four continents and eleven countries, and had come at last to an end—or so George thought—two weeks prior with Evelyn’s death. 

George had never entertained romantic feelings about Evelyn—or, if he was being honest, only briefly—and she none for him. But in spite of their mutual unattraction, or perhaps because of it, he’d loved her more deeply and more profoundly than anyone else in his life. Her passing, though not unexpected, had shaken him. Moreso even than that of his second wife a decade prior. The funeral, held that morning, had left him lost, listless, and above all, alone. 

In what almost proved a fatally ironic twist, Evelyn had nearly given George a heart attack as he arrived home, jumping out from behind a bannister and crying “Boo!” Once he’d got over the fright and convinced himself the tingling in his left arm was only nerves, he’d gone for a glass of very cold water and sat down at the kitchen table. There, Evelyn had joined him. They’d sat in silence for some time, while she gave him space, and he worked up the nerve to ask whether he’d finally cracked.

“He’s draped in quantities and quantities of cloth,” Evelyn continued. “Enough gold thread to furnish El Dorado. He wasn’t human-shaped, per se, though he was taller than wide. There were feathers, and horns, and bits that I don’t believe were attached at all. He’d more of both eyes and mouths than anyone could reasonably justify. Come to think of it, he was really quite horrible. And yet, I didn’t feel afraid…” 

George tried—and failed—to picture such an individual. He didn’t doubt Evelyn’s description, but that flavor of imagining had never been his forte. She’d always been the more artistic of the two, her dabblings in charcoal and watercolor impressive for the work of an amateur.

“When I approached the gates, after I’d crossed the red sands and the ruins, he was waiting. He knew my name, and my parents’ names… he had a ledger, George. An accounting of everything I’d ever done.” Evelyn’s semi-transparent eyes were faraway. “He read them off to me, one by one. Do you remember what Jacob Marley said? ‘I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.’”

George felt a chill, despite the warmth of his funereal suit. The midmorning sun beaming in the window. He reflected, unwillingly, on his own misdeeds. His selfishnesses. He’d always thought himself, on balance, a decent person. That the good more than made up for the bad. He was no saint, certainly… And then a thought struck him, along with tandem pangs of shame and dread. Had Evelyn sent back as a—penance? Had she been ejected from this Garden for a life insufficiently—

“I was weeping when he reached the end. Not from guilt, though I felt it. It was the memories, George. The memories.” She reached out and put her hand over—no, through—his. Gazed earnestly into his eyes. George swallowed. It took every ounce of his will not to recoil. To maintain the blandly sympathetic expression he knew she needed.

“Faces I hadn’t thought of in half a century. I saw them as clearly as I see you sitting there now, struggling to still your hand.” Smirking, she drew hers away. “Billy Phillips, my first boyfriend. Karl Orlov, from the summer internship at Vickers. Miss Sheffield, the mother who lived below us the first year after university, and her boy, Matty. He could be a grandfather by now. Can you imagine…? 

“Howard. Beth. Margaret. Penny. I’d forgotten how bloody painful that was. I know, it was worse for you, dear, but don’t think it didn’t cut me to the bone as well.” Evelyn sighed. “I relived all those years at Vestas. At the laboratory. Then being cut loose, left adrift like a leaf on the wind.” Her fingers flitted. “And through it all, do you know what? The only constant was you.” Evelyn smiled at him, then. “We had a good run, didn’t we George?”

“Y—” George coughed. Something large and phlegmy had lodged itself in his throat. All the emotions he’d felt that morning were flooding back, magnified. All the melancholy thoughts flushed from his head by the impossible sight of a capering, incorporeal Evelyn springing out at him like a jack-in-the box. “Yes, we did. A damned good run.” He turned away to dab at his eyes.

“‘Evelyn Thomas.’ Saint Peter closed his ledger. ‘You have been weighed. You have been measured. And you have been found worthy. Divest yourself of earthly burdens. Your business done, you are free to enter the Garden of Delights, and live forever more in bliss and serenity.’ The gates opened. Gates such as you’ve never seen. The spire of Newcastle Cathedral could pass through with room to spare. On the other side… oh, George. The ground fell away beyond the walls. A sloping path wound down through the middle. Trees, as far as the eye could see. Kinds I never knew existed, swaying in the breeze, boughs hanging heavy with fruit like Christmas ornaments. There were houses on the hills. Or perhaps I should say the houses were the hills, climbing cliff-like toward the sky. As much a part of the land as the rocks or the glistening river… And people, George. People everywhere. In every shape and size and hue. All smiling. Everyone was welcome. No one wanted for anything. I was only there for three nights, but the wonders I—”

“Three nights?” George frowned. “But Evelyn. It’s been weeks. Weeks since you…” He forced himself to say it. “Died.”

“I don’t know. Perhaps I lost time in the tunnel, or the sands. Perhaps time works differently there.”

“But there are days? And nights? The sun rises and falls?”

“Just as it does here,” Evelyn nodded. “Left to my own devices, I wandered. A woman named Rose offered me fruit from the trees. Great red globes, with glossy skin and soft sweet flesh. Do you recall the balls from the garden in Willy Wonka? A man called Sabu was roasting fish over a fire down by the river, and he offered me one of those as well. I watched musicians play, and people dance. I made friends. The days were wonderful. The garden idyllic. But the nights, George. Oh, the nights.”

“What about them?”

“I can’t recall the last time I dreamed. I lost the ability along with the ability to sleep past sunrise. But there… Each night the universe unfolded itself before me. The first night, I saw the seafloor, and all the wondrous, impossible beings that populate it. I drifted beneath Europa’s ice, through Io’s magma flows. I swam in Saturn’s rings. On the second night, I basked in the fires of the sun, watching hydrogen make helium. Lithium. Beryllium. Boron. The third night, I spent in an abstract realm. I saw how stars held their spheres. How particles acquired their mass. How time picked its direction. All the questions I ever had, answered, one by one.”

George was on the edge of his seat now, his fingers wrapped tightly around the table. “Evelyn. Evelyn, do you know what this means? You could… You and I—” He cast a breathless glance at the door down to his basement.

“Each night I dreamt a wonder…” Evelyn murmured. “And each morning I awoke—thinking of you. All alone here, in this big house. Just as I was alone, in Paradise itself, and no one to share it with.

“On the fourth morning, I went to the gates, never once shut since I’d arrived. I shouted up at Saint Peter. ‘I’m not ready! I want to go back!’ 

“His lidless eyes trained on me. ‘Then you may go,’ he boomed. ‘The Garden is no prison. It is no cage. But it is not for those without purpose to return.’

“His words held an unspoken question. A purpose? I had no purpose. Hadn’t had one in years. I simply wished to live. To share the joys of truth and understanding. My mind raced, searching for an answer that would satisfy. Too small and he might reject it. Too big and… No. It had to be something important. Something meaningful. And then I knew.

 “‘I cannot rest until my friend, George Bannerman, completes his Theory of Everything!’

“‘So be it.’ His voice echoed. ‘You shall not return till it is done.’

“And whoosh. I flew across the sands. Back through the tunnel. Pop. Suddenly I was before your stoop, and a terrier standing in my leg.”

George leaned back in his chair. For several minutes he was silent. “Well then,” he said at last. “We’d better go downstairs.”

Down in the basement, George’s chalkboard occupied an entire wall. It was covered from end to end in formulas and calculations, signs and symbols, oft erased and overwritten, that would have looked to the untrained eye like the work of a sorcerer, or an alchemist. But George was neither. He was a mathematician. Retired, he liked to say, but not dead. 

He glanced at Evelyn. She was looking up at his board. His Theory of Everything. The work of a lifetime. Unfinished. Unresolved. And, if George was being honest with himself, hopeless. He knew there was something there. That he’d started down the right path. He simply wasn’t clever enough to see where it ended. 

Evelyn, his partner in everything that mattered, had spent nearly as much time staring at it as he had. Understood it, and him, better perhaps than even he himself. Her small feet made no sound as she skittered back and forth, scrutinizing his work. His work, he thought. Hardly a fair designation. His contributions, small, but not insignificant, made from atop the shoulders of giants. Newton and Einstein. Yang and Mills. Dirac, Schrödinger, and dozens more. Pure hubris, he thought, to believe his name might ever be spoken in the same br—

“Here!” 

George rushed over to where Evelyn was pointing. 

“Pass me some chalk,” she demanded. “Quickly!” 

George scrabbled for a stick. But when he pushed it into her waiting hand, it passed right through. They stared at one another. “Blast it all,” Evelyn cursed. “All right, come here. Write exactly as I say…”

In a frenzied act of Transcription, George’s fingers flew. He wrote, not quite understanding what he wrote, but glimpsing implications in it. Wondrous implications. Here. Now there. Evelyn directed his hand, an extension of her own agile mind, as connections between his equations and her impossible experiences betrayed themselves. He worked tirelessly, into the afternoon, at one point tossing his suit jacket over a chair, soon followed by his necktie. Sweat stained George’s undershirt, beaded on his brow. He had not moved so much, or so quickly, in ages. 

By the time Evelyn bade him stop, the sun had given up its place for the moon and the twinkling stars, in a procession captured, if not directly, at least conceptually on George’s board. George collapsed into a chair, but not before pulling over another for Evelyn to sit beside him. They admired their work. 

“It will take me weeks—months—to understand all of this,” George said. “But…” 

“You can see them.”

He looked at her. “The gaps.”

“If I’d stayed longer—“

“No. No,” George said. “I’m glad you’re here. These have been a… trying few weeks.”

She smiled at him gratefully. 

“I don’t know if I could fill in these missing pieces on my own. But together, perhaps we stand a chance.”

“You should eat something,” Evelyn said, abruptly rising. “Come.” And she led him up into the kitchen, where he microwaved a plate of the casserole he’d been slowly consuming since the day after Evelyn died, a consolation from the couple next door. 

Over the next few weeks, George hardly left his house. Most of that time he spent in the basement, beside Evelyn, puzzling out the meaning of her arcane maths. He was forced upstairs time to time to eat, or relieve himself, or assuage the fears of some local who’d noted his absence since the day of the funeral. They worried, naturally, that George was hiding himself away to nurture a broken heart, wallowing in misery and despair. But the truth was, George could not remember feeling more alive. At last, he told himself—told Evelyn—my life will have meaning. To which she would invariably reply: It always had meaning to me, old fool. 

As George’s understanding grew, so did his awareness of what was missing. They’d made tremendous progress. Truly earth-shattering, when it was revealed. But it was not Everything. And in spite of himself, in spite of all they’d done, as their progress slowed, George’s mood began to sour. 

“Imagine!” he complained. “Being handed the secrets of Creation on a plate, practically from the mouth of God himself, and still—!”

After a week of his increasingly dour demeanor, Evelyn suggested a break. 

“A little fresh air does wonders to clear the mind.”

George resisted at first, but at last relented. And the two of them—with some, as it turned out, unwarranted concern over whether Evelyn would be seen—made a sojourn to the park, which was, George was forced to admit, a pleasant change from his dark, gloomy basement. 

A trip to the park became a seaside amble. That, a coffee at the corner cafe, and before they knew it, George had something resembling a healthy routine… along with a whispered reputation that old Mr. Bannerman had lost his mind. Though the gaps still nagged at him, they did not consume him, and to Evelyn’s relief and amusement, he began telling her that she should not take it all so seriously. They would puzzle through it in time.

In time.

Weeks passed. Months. The Theory, as they’d come to call it, gradually became just one aspect of their shared life-slash-afterlife. Evelyn, who found she no longer needed sleep—was, in fact, incapable of it—had taken to wandering after George went to bed. No one seemed able to see her but him, aside from the odd feline. She explored the city streets, visited old haunts for nostalgia’s sake, and otherwise whiled away the time, before returning to George’s kitchen, and there joining him for a pleasant, quiet breakfast. 

That is, till one morning, when she drifted through his door as she always did, and found his house oddly—unsettlingly—silent. Despite the absence of a limbic system, Evelyn felt an immediate pang of fear.

“George?” she called. “George!”

No reply. 

She hurried up the stairs to where he slept, ghostly heart hammering in ghostly chest. And there, lying snug beneath his covers, peaceful as a babe, she found him. 

George Bannerman was at that very moment emerging from a long, dark tunnel, guided by the light at the end. He was, for time worked differently there, crossing red sands, with ruins. He was waiting patiently while Saint Peter gave accounting of his deeds; watching the gates swing open; witnessing the splendor, for the first—and final—time, of the Garden of Delights. 

“It is not for those without purpose to return.” 

“No,” George agreed. “But there’s someone back there who needs me. And what good is Paradise if you can’t share it with the ones you love?”