Dust of Eden Read Free Page B

sensation."
    The fellow was frantic with smoke screens.
    Bailey pulled him all the way up. "What are you—a priest? You're not like those fighters out in the desert. Here. " He retrieved the plastic bag of red dust that had been dropped on the balcony. "Take it. Save me the trouble of throwing it away. Take a 'powder.' Am- scray . But use the door this time."
    Thunderstruck, the little man in the double-breasted suit and loose native trousers moved a couple of cautious steps. Then, gathering the bag to his breast with both hands, he fled through the apartment as comically as a broken-field runner.
    And that would have been the end of it, but in the morning Bailey saw the rest of the red dust, which Demetrius Booth had poured into a glass flask for analysis, and decided that it would serve as ashes in a funerary urn. So he wrote Kenyon's daughter that her father's ashes were enclosed—a little white lie to give her some closure for her father, and himself some closure for his partner—and by noon he had packed the thing in a wooden box filled with excelsior and shipped it to America. Now he could get on with his life. By nightfall he was floating in the Shatt al Arab with his throat slashed from ear to ear.

CREATION
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    2000

Ariel
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    L ightning blanched the side of the farmhouse, freezing a flash photograph. Thunder shook the thin windows in anger, as if they were so many wall frames whose portraits had been stolen. There were faces enough in the history of the house to fill each one, three to a casement. A century and a half of faces had sheltered behind the glass, contemplating spring floods, summer droughts, winter freezes. The thousand storms that had laid siege to the roof and the foundation had never penetrated. All those generations kept safe and sound until now, and the house was still a virtual fortification. But the need tonight was not for refuge. The need tonight was for escape.
    She stood there in the weather-ravaged window frame high up on the third story, a white-faced hag, her stare bulging with just a hint of Graves' disease out at the storm. This was Ariel Leppa , whose once clear eyes were now becoming opaque. They saw nothing in the present, nothing in the future. And the past, which remained so vivid in her thoughts, was like a single day. The compression of life into one day was not so strange considering that time had shunned her.
    It had taken seventy-four years to live that past, but now it was like a single day into which she had arisen, stupid with hope and trust, in the morning. And even when the afternoon of that solitary day was upon her and the details of her personal reality had begun to crush her, she had still believed. Stupid. Because by that time she had shallow friendships of convenience, and a husband who "kept" her like something in a drawer, and a headstrong daughter she had raised but never controlled.
    Beyond the tyranny of marriage and parenting, the unending day had been about omissions—things that had never truly happened. Like friendship and respect. Ariel had gone to school, church, dances; she had worked for a time in the world. Why had all her relationships been variations on the single theme of rejection? Ariel Leppa . Ariel the Leper. Her successes had been defaults, her minor ascendancies consolations. She had never been anyone's first choice for anything. They had merely taken her in. Tolerated her. And when better options came along or they felt acquitted of charitable obligations, they shoved her back into the shadows. That's who she was and who she wasn't.
    But now it was over, if only because the major players in her melodrama were dead. They had gone down one by one like autumnal fireflies winking out in the cold. Except for her daughter. Amber might as well be dead, partially paralyzed and on dialysis at age forty-four because of a fall in a rock climb eleven years ago, living—if you could call it that—with a husband and a grown son.