Edenborn by Nick Sagan

Author:Nick Sagan [Sagan, Nick]
Format: epub
Tags: Science fiction, General, Fiction, Fiction - Science Fiction, Science Fiction - General, American Science Fiction And Fantasy, Science Fiction - High Tech
ISBN: 9780451462138
Publisher: Roc
Published: 2010-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

THE DEVIL

halloween

I always knew it couldn’t last.

You can hole yourself up for years, but you can’t keep the world away forever. Forever is just too fucking long.

Goodbye, American isolationism. Hello, Pandora.

pandora

He knows I’m coming. He actually had the gall to try to call me when he spotted me over the eastern seaboard. Oh, now you want to talk? Enjoy a little radio silence—you can wait until I’m on the ground. Outside, a hard autumn rain makes the approach trickier than it should be. “Raining open pocketknives,”

as my grandfather might say.

Ever closer my heart to Halloween, and the poison-munching monarch butterflies he uses as his standard seem to have taken residence in my stomach. I drown them with Munich’s finest Chardonnay, a finder’s fee for delivering a certain monkey. I shouldn’t fly intoxicated and actually I’m not—every time I veer off course Malachi pulls me back, guiding the craft with an invisible hand.

“Take it easy with that,” he suggests when I try another swallow. “You don’t want to marinate yourself, do you?”

“Are you talking to me, Malachi?”

“Are you still not talking to me?”

I answer by not answering. Really, I’m glad I have him and Halloween to focus my anger on. It’s a welcome distraction from worrying about Isaac’s kids.

I’m past the bay now—I can see the 10 freeway beneath me as I follow it west, tracking the one ray of sunset that hasn’t been suffocated by storm clouds. Coming back here isn’t easy. It’s not quite as bad as going back to São Paulo, but it’s still a ghost town, a parody of the flourishing (if unreal) community where I went to school. I can go most anywhere in the world and take in as much loss, destruction and desolation as you please without losing it, but seeing the places I remember warmly from childhood laid so low makes me jittery and sick. Granted, the alcohol probably isn’t helping with sick, but it’s working wonders for jittery.

Idlewild sits right in the heart of Manistee National Forest. The town’s protected by five hundred thousand acres of unspoiled wilderness, but I see now that a good fraction of it has been spoiled—burned and toppled trees lay evidence to what must have been one hell of a fire. It wasn’t like this when I visited eighteen years ago.

While I am wistfully recalling nature hikes, contests to see who can gather the most pine cones, and foolhardy attempts to climb fifty-foot balsam firs, I notice that some of the town has been scorched as well. Among the casualties, I see what used to be Twain’s, the retro coffee shop my schoolmates and I always used to invade after classes. It’s where Hal poured his heart out to me back when we were sixteen.We held hands across the table and played the kind of music no one can stand except sad people in love. We talked for hours about Simone and went out bowling, and broke into an empty lakeside mansion to have ourselves a one-night stand.

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