Free Dust of Eden by Thomas Sullivan Page A

the night before that. Those tracks too no longer existed.
    It was the green glow of a clock radio that usually reeled him back to real time. That thirteen-year-old radio she had given him on their fiftieth anniversary. He saw it and knew it was part of his marriage and that Beth was lying on the other side of him. But there was no green glow tonight, and she was not beside him.
    "Where is this place?" he whispered.
    The walls seemed too far away, and the air was sticky and heavy in his lungs. He closed his eyes, half dreaming, half remembering, and when he opened them again he had a context. The motes he saw swimming in the air were no longer a symptom of his dementia but a semitropical plague of insects. And the chirrs he heard came from a swamp. A dog barked a long way off on the perimeter of the encampment. He was inside the bullpen. All the prisoners were standing up because they couldn't fall down. Bodies pressed against bodies, penned up for the night, some with diarrhea, some with dysentery, some dead, all dying. The thirst, the heat, the reeking suffocation were all part of hell on earth. And in the morning when the sun had boiled them enough, the dusty march would continue. So Martin let himself die for a few minutes until the toxic tide ebbed away, and when consciousness washed in again he sat up, stood up.
    He was in a room, barefoot but with his clothes still on, having gone to bed fully dressed, and the phantoms of war—that default realm he always returned to in his worst night sweats—were still with him. He was Lieutenant Commander M. B. Bryce, USN. He was in a barracks somewhere, and he didn't want to wake up Beth, because she shouldn't have to march with the rest of them. What had she ever done to the Japs? So he left her sleeping in the green glow of a clock radio that would keep track of time and space while he went back to the road in the province whose name he couldn't remember, but which history records as Pampagna on the peninsula of Bataan.
    He remembered two things: a truck slowly flattening the bodies of those who had fallen at the side of the column, and the Japanese soldier who had taken Martin's canteen to give a horse water, then thrown it away. Water. He needed water. Not the dirty stuff in some carabao wallow, but a tall tumbler full of crystal cubes and pure, transparent water. Pawing through the air to avoid barbed wire, he shuffled toward the seam of light that lay on the tile floor of New Eden.
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    H eat lightning flickered on the horizon, and the north half of everything was suddenly vivid. Half the fields sprang to life, half the trees, half the farmhouse and four sides of the odd structure sitting on the roof. It was an octagonal cupola – the odd structure. Big enough to hold a person, Amber thought. Or maybe just half a person. But she was half a person. She waited for another wink from the horizon.
    "God has a loose bulb in his lamp," her father used to say about heat lightning. Used to say. Now he hardly ever talked. He was suddenly old, like her mother, though that wasn't why he didn't talk the same. The reason he didn't talk was because he was mad, Amber thought. And sad. And—she wasn't sure about this—but maybe because he was afraid. She understood a little why her mother had painted him in the wheelchair. Before he lost his legs, he could be a grouch, even mean. And Amber had seen a lot of TV in the last year— Rosie and Jenny Jones and Ricki Lake —and she knew a lot of women were victims of men now. Actually they had always been, but now everyone knew it. So in a way this was new. She herself hadn't had any idea before that men could be so bad. Not all men, of course, but almost all women were victims. So maybe her dad deserved to be in a wheelchair a little, only she didn't think it should be forever. Maybe a week or a month, that was all. And it had been a year now.
    More winks from the horizon, and this time she was sure she could get to the