Only A Lower Paradise, Page 3

CHAPTER 3

  Like I said, Robert loved to camp, and though I had originally conceived my life on the road as a travelling experience —drifting through nameless mid-western towns, talking about nothing in particular with indescript locals, checking out foreign arcades for games I had yet to play — I was beginning to turn on to the idea of three weeks in amongst the trees. Even Martha, who had really wanted to see New York, was happy to be headed off to the woods.

  Outside of San Francisco we turned north and pointed our van of renegades towards a dense pocket of redwoods that was Robert’s favorite retreat.

  Even before college, Robert was big on nature. His father used to take him out in the wilderness and teach him survival techniques. He knew all the right plants to eat and which ones were poisonous. He even knew how to make trail signs so you could leave messages for the campers who would follow you, and how to interpret various natural phenomena like broken branches or overturned earth so you would know if you were about to come upon a fawn and doe or be eaten by a grizzly bear.

  During the trip out of town, Martha was pensive. She sat in the back of the van wrapped in one of Robert’s thick cotton camping blankets and stared out of the back window. I moved out of the front seat I was sharing with Che-Maria and snuggled up beside Martha in the back, pushing aside a couple of stray pots and pans and some loose tent pegs.

  “It’s starting, Jon,” Martha said, hesitantly.

  “I know.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I think I know.”

  “That’s right.”

  It was the fault of all humans, Martha said, to feign knowledge. When people touched truth — and each person was only offered a grain in a lifetime — they got really excited. Unfortunately, if they were the least neurotic, this grain of truth would erode what was left of their sanity, and make their lives living examples of the danger of divine revelation. Some people even said they had talked to God, when as we all know the only messengers of divine revelations are angels. Martha was constantly reminding me of the limitations of my knowledge. As an angel she knew what was true and what only seemed to be true, though her decision to quit the angel corps had left her with room for reasonable doubt on a number of matters.

  What Robert’s message had meant, apparently, wasn’t one of them.

  “They’ll be after us.” Martha stared at me pointedly.

  I shrugged. “I know.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what do you propose to do about it?”

  I paused.

  “Recite them the Beatitudes?” Martha chirped. “Jon, I don’t think you understand. These angels, or people, or people and angels, whatever, are serious. They’re deadly serious.”

  “I can imagine.”

  I looked into her face, but she turned away and became quiet again.

  “I wonder if this is the Apocalypse?” she said.

  This is something I had been wondering myself, but the thought of the moon turning to blood seemed somehow less scary than being confronted by members of the Supreme Cosmic Command’s elite guard. Or for that matter a couple of quacks from the FBI. Or worse, a phalanx of self-styled commandos from the Internal Disciplinary Squad of the Federal Postal Service.

  Che-Maria broke the tension.

  “Sandwiches?” She peered back at us, smiling again. “Who wants sandwiches?”

  I was famished and reached and took a pair of thick slices of country whole wheat loaf stuffed full of egg salad from Che-Maria’s outstretched hand, but Martha deferred. Che-Maria wrinkled her brows and looked deeply at Martha.

  “Martha,” she said. “You look pale. You’ll eat tuna.”

  I took the sandwich and placed it beside Martha, but she never ate it. Instead, she lay her head on my shoulder and slept all the way deep into the redwood trees, a revelation for me because I had never seen Martha sleep. She had been up all of the previous night pacing the house.

  A couple of hours outside of San Francisco, Robert pulled off of the highway, leading us into the hinterland along an old logging road that had been abandoned for more than twenty years. The road cut a path through one of the few “forgotten” wildernesses left in California — forgotten probably more for the lack of a significant population in the area to support any kind of tax base than anything else. At the time, the loggers were waiting another ten years before they came back and cut everything down again. Since the last time Robert had brought me here, the trees had grown to hang their branches in an arch over the road. The thickened underbrush intruded in our vision. Robert ploughed the van through a sea of twigs and leaves, sending greenery flying in every direction, the side of the van being scraped by low-hanging branches.

  Che-Maria began to talk about her childhood in Mexico.

  “When we were kids, me and my brothers, we used think, ah, yes, it must be wonderful to be a rich American. We thought we could have a car, two cars, three cars, and each a separate bedroom. We were four children and all slept in the same tiny room on only two mattresses.”

  She turned to look at Martha. “Asleep?” she asked.

  I nodded, and she continued.

  “But now I know it’s not so good to be a rich American.”

  Robert coughed, cringing. He was a red-blooded patriot. Che-Maria looked at him, saying, “Now I know we were happy children, even though we had nothing. Even though my parents had no car, no computer, no kitchen appliances, we were happy — ”

  Robert was becoming noticeably agitated.

  “Aren’t you happy?” he interrupted. “Don’t you have everything you want? Don’t you get everything you ask for?”

  “It’s true,” Che-Maria admitted, her words calm in the face of Robert’s disruption. “I do, and yet I still complain. Robert says I’m just a complainer. Are you happy, Jon?”

  Though most people thought Che-Maria was bubble-headed, I was sure she was aware of a lot more than people gave her credit for. Was I happy? Robert — my closest friend and life-long pal — thought I was. Che-Maria, who I had only known as a passing acquaintance, was smart enough to ask, sensing I wasn’t.

  Martha, my guardian angel, knew the truth.

  The fact was, I didn’t really know myself. That’s why I needed Martha. After my relationship with Pique folded, I was depressed, sure, but I felt much better now that I had been seeing Martha. I just wasn’t sure if feeling better meant being happy. I wondered if I had ever really been happy. What was happy? What was there to be happy about? It was questions like these that drove me to be a recluse.

  I liked my house. I didn’t want to go outside. I got a job stuffing envelopes at home for a mail order company. The money paid the rent and kept me in beer, so I didn’t worry too much if I wasn’t doing anything with my life. What was there to do anyway? Everything people did appeared senseless to me. I started writing a book: The Lonely Days of a Weathered Mannequin. I thought I could explain to everybody why what they were doing was senseless, but after a couple of chapters I thought even the book was senseless, so I put it away. Meeting Martha really saved me. She got me interested in mysteries again. She piqued my curiosity, though I hate saying it that way.

  I smiled at Che-Maria.

  “I’m very happy,” I said. “Very happy to be here with all of you.”

  Che-Maria leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.

  “See,” said Robert. “Everything’s cool. We’re all fine. It’s those other dudes we have to worry about.”

  We rounded a corner and pulled out onto the beach of a lake. Martha awoke as we pulled up twenty feet short of the water.

  “Yippee!” screamed Robert. “There you go Martha, there’s your cool, shimmering blueness. Wow!” And he raced down to the water, threw off his clothes, and wearing only his underpants, he splashed into the shallow waves and dove into Martha’s poem.

  “Jon, man. C’mon!” Robert pitched. “The water’s great!”

  Che-Maria was already gath
ering stones to build a fireplace.

  “Go, Jon,” she said. “We’ll take care of setting up.”

  I looked at Martha, who had rolled out of the back of the van and was beginning to search through the gear for tent poles and her Ray Bans, which had somehow fallen out of her Bag of Miracles. She shrugged and motioned me towards the water. I hesitated but began stripping. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go swimming; I just knew if I went in the water Martha would make some comment later about the women doing all the work, which was true. Robert never thought twice about the division of labour in his marriage. He brought home the money, drove the van, bought the appliances. Che-Maria did the cooking, the washing, the scraping, and the cleaning. Of course, I couldn’t find my way around a kitchen until I tried to hold a surprise birthday party for Pique. Some surprise. By the time she arrived, there was flour all over the house, and the place reeked of burnt cake. Since then though, I had made huge strides in my culinary talents. In fact, when Martha started seeing me one of the first things she had me do was sign up for a cooking course. It improved my self-esteem to no end.

  The water was great, and I swam out into the middle of the lake, looking back only once I felt I had made my great escape.

  They couldn’t catch me now. I was gone.

  Martha and Che-Maria had already set up one of the tents and had a fire burning — boiling water for Martha’s coffee. Robert followed me out into the lake, but when he saw the rushes he splashed over there in search of frogs and crayfish. I could see him crawling about on his hands and knees, lunging into the lilypads every minute or so, swearing each time when he came up with nothing.

  I was beginning to feel blissful and began wondering if this wasn’t happiness, when I started to get a cramp in my leg and decided I had better swim for shore. The sky was beginning to dull, anyway. The bugs were coming out, and a thousand gnats were swirling like a hurricane above my head. The trees swayed lightly in the slow breeze. The water was so warm.

  After I had dried myself with the blanket Che-Maria had placed beside my discarded clothes, I walked up to the fire, high on the beach, where Martha offered me a steaming mug of fresh coffee.

  “Leave the women to do the work, I see,” she said.

  “I knew you’d get me sooner or later,” I replied.

  She laughed, and I was glad she was feeling better.

  “Hey, sport.” Robert marched up the beach, jovial. “You deserted me. I could have drowned in that frog pit. Stick with your buddy, remember?”

  “No chance, man,” I said. “You’re a fish.”

  “No excuse. You have to be prepared for everything.” He tweaked me on the cheek. “Especially these days.”

  Martha handed him a mug of coffee.

  “Thanks,” he said before marching towards the two tents strategically placed away from the fire twenty yards further up the beach. He unzipped the door of the tent on the left and slid inside.

  Che-Maria had disappeared to gather more firewood.

  “You have a very interesting friend,” Martha said to me. “He’s very peculiar.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I think I know.”

  Martha shook her head, giving me a knowing grin.

  “It’s not even that,” she said. “Nothing to do with his personality. I see strange things in him, characteristics that weren’t in our Angel Manual. I think he is very special. He is marked. His life has a purpose.”

  “Well, thanks a lot!” I exclaimed.

  “No, no, no,” she said. “Not like that at all. It is something much deeper, much vaguer. Something I don’t know what.”

  I paused to let her continue, but she just sat in silence, staring across the lake as the sky began to turn greyer and redder until a scorching sunset, more spectacular than I had ever seen, stretched across the horizon.