Look at you. I don’t want to hear your story yet. Not until you hear mine. Our stories are similar, if not the same. You sit and drink. Listen to my story.

My accident occurred on a date with a girl I barely knew.

Reyna flew planes. She wanted to take me to a log cabin for the weekend. We took-off in her little two-seater on a Friday morning. We came down hard two hours later, not far from here.

We were flying along, talking and flirting, when the engine started screaming and gave out. Reyna did what she could–fought walls of wind and gravity and tried to keep us up. She soothed the plane with gentle words like baby, and sugar.

Reyna began screaming as we plowed into treetops. She stopped abruptly when we smashed into the mountainside.

My date was dead and I was dying. I was worse-off than you were when you came stumbling in here–broken arms, a piece of metal in my thigh. One eye was punctured, the other bruised and scratched. I most likely had some internal injuries, because within a day my abdomen had purple and green splotches all over it. I couldn’t do anything with Reyna–had to leave her where she lay.

I stayed beside the bulk of the wreckage, thinking someone would find me. I had water for the first two days.

On the third morning of writhing by the wreckage, I knew I’d die if I didn’t find water.

I was on the side of a mountain. I figured I’d find water nearby.

I didn’t. Not even snow. I could see snow on a higher peak, so I knew there was runoff somewhere nearby. I struggled along the top edge of a scraggly forest, searching for a stream, a spring, or a puddle. I fell and furthered my injuries.

I gave up on finding water. I tripped around dying. That’s when I stumbled into this valley. Just like you did.

I can’t tell you how I managed to find it. I remember looming walls of rock, dazzling sunlight, and then the unmistakable smell of water. It was long minutes after I’d drank my fill that I took a look around. Just like you did.

What did you notice first?

I noticed that tree right there, the palm made of amber, jade, and emeralds. Then its partner trees and lovely bushes–gemstone sculptures, all. I noticed their fire in the sunlight. I realized they aren’t real.

Then the chunk of metal popped out of my leg, my eyes healed and I could see straight again. I watched the bruises on my body disappear and flexed my arms–they were stronger than they’d ever been.

Do you know where you are?

I didn’t, either.

Zi had to tell me. You’ll meet Zi soon. Pay attention to him. Drink in his words like the sweet, sweet water you just gulped down. He knows everything. Have you ever heard the story of Gilgamesh? Yeah, no doubt you haven’t. I hadn’t, and I was born a thousand years before you.

Zi will tell you the story. He’ll tell you lots of stories. Believe them.

You know, about how you arrived here, I think I’d rather not hear. I’m going back into the world now and I want it all to be a surprise.

Zi lives in that cave up there. Do you see it? Yeah, in the mountain of gold. Well, he’s a pretty important guy, Ziusudra is. This is his garden. At least, he’s its keeper. And now you’re his assistant.

You get my job.

It’s part of the rules of the Garden–which you will learn in great detail. Here’s the exact quote, “When a mortal human partakes in the Water of Life and is thereby granted immortality, said human must reside in the Garden until another mortal of his or her race comes to relieve him or her of the resident duties accumulated with ingestion of the Water.”

Zi will explain it all. I just wanted you to hear my story–maybe acclimate you a little. The last assistant garden-keeper took off as soon as I told him that I drank from the fountain, and it had healed me. He just smiled and ran out of the valley. Zi said he was a pretty good guy–he’d just been here for a long time. More than two thousand years. He arrived after an accident, too.

This garden is great, greater than you think, but I can’t imagine another thousand years here. I’m glad you came along when you did.

Well, I’ve got to get going. Got some immortality to exploit, and a whole new world to explore. Good luck, man. Remember–listen to Ziusudra. He knows a lot about water. And it’s all about water. It really is.

Not that they were above believing the worst of their own kind. Annie knew that. The village hadn’t forgiven her brother Tom for the bag of sweets he was daft enough to share with a couple of kiddies at the bus-stop last summer. Patted one of them on the head, didn’t he, silly old bugger. The kid couldn’t wait to tell his mum about ‘the funny man with the dirty hands’.

It was soil, not dirt. “Tom’s got green fingers,” Annie insisted. She knew there was nothing to it but of course she would say that, wouldn’t she, being his sister.

Three ounces of coloured boilings and Tom and Annie Price became the village pariahs. Annie was more or less drummed out of the Women’s Institute.

Now the village had something new to gossip about.

The local paper carried the story: “Using a particularly potent brand of weed killer, an anonymous vandal inscribed obscenities on the lawns of three gardens in the early hours of Sunday morning. The weed killer destroyed the grass, leaving the vandal’s work visible for all to see. On one lawn, the words ‘SOD THIS’ could be read from right across the street. Common decency prevents this paper from printing the words on the other lawns.”

A spokesperson for the Women’s Institute told the reporter, “You expect this sort of thing in inner city slums, not here. It was revolting, reading that on my lawn. There are children in the village who pass my house every day.”

The paper went on to say, “The weed killer graffiti, appearing as it did overnight and apparently out of thin air, has been likened to the plague of crop circles which baffled local people in recent years. However, the use of slang obscenities would seem to indicate that this was not the work of alien life-forms.”

Of course it was the paper’s job to stir a stick at the silage, just as it was the villagers’ job to try and keep a lid on the stink. Annie wasn’t surprised by the direction things took. To start with, the locals closed ranks. But suspicion spread fast and bit deep; no one was immune.

“Everyone’s giving everyone else funny looks,” Annie told her brother.

Tom grunted. As yet, no one had directed any funny looks his way, but Annie couldn’t help remembering her line about his green fingers. That was a gift to the gossips, under these new circumstances.

She twitched the net-curtains, peering out. “They’ve pegged tablecloths over the worst of it. Number 8’s got lace with a scalloped edge. That’ll never wash clean.”

Tom shoved his slippers on and escaped to the garden shed.

“At a time like this,” thought Annie. She despaired of her brother sometimes.

He’d not so much as blinked an eyelash when the WI drummed her out. Serve him right if the village did start suspecting him for this latest bit of bother.

She straightened the curtains and paused, to flick dead skin from her palms. It’d been peeling off in strips since Sunday morning.

Nasty stuff, weed killer.

And as she wove, she dreamed. She dreamed of truths, dark and gruesome; dreamed of fruit she should have never sampled–that cold stone of clarity in her heart. Her love was gone, long gone into the world of men, and dead, and she had not changed so much that she did not miss him–she had pulled his rib from her body, and she dreamed of an ache in her chest where it once had lain.

Outside, abandoned, she had tried to work her way as God, in his anger and disappointment, had intended. She’d been a wife, a mother, and much more–but the knowledge in her had burned and chafed. Her knowledge of good and evil went far deeper than she could admit–even to herself, at first; and she saw its depths with awful clarity. The knowledge, like a beast, had gnawed on her bones and soul, made malleable her flesh and her very being.

So when the one she had been made for was gone and buried, her grief and passion strengthened knowledge; and she bent under its weight. And bent, she had followed its path, and made its path her own. She left the rib to rest beside him so that no other would know her to have gone; in death, she made him whole again.

Centuries passed while she called the powers of creation to remake her. Beliefs came and went, and she became other: something outside God’s realm, that had not been, could not be, banned. The angels, alert only for man or woman, said nothing when she scampered in on the eight dainty legs that held her heavy body. And so she strode into the garden, Queen as anything, and surveyed the shambles.

Around the tree, she found serpent sheddings, long decayed. The adversary had stayed in the garden for a time, but he too had done God’s bidding in the end, had left to test those souls damned to roam the world outside. Finding no one, then, she fell once again upon the forbidden fruit–and finding its taste and truths unpleasant, she gorged herself on them, seeking to silence the noise with cacophony. Good and Evil was only the simplest fruit it had to offer–further in the flesh, in its very proto-soul like marrow, lay the foundations of knowledge itself.

And then–all-knowing and nigh all-powerful, it came to her. She had sucked the tree of knowledge dry and had the power of knowledge itself. She wrapped her tree in silken lies, spun promise-dreams of innocence, beguiling the fetid flies that were the souls of her progeny generations upon generations gone. And one by one, those souls crept to her bosom through the deep roots of pride and lust, no angel left in those depths to notice or care–and she made of them eight-faceted apples that glistened like negative prisms, each soul gone leaving another dreamless automaton alone in the world outside.

The tree itself fed upon those fruits, transmuting her dreams, their dreams, to substance–to truth. And when it had fed upon all the souls of man, when naught was left but empty fleshly vessels, a new fruit would appear. And she would feed on that, and either time would cease or it would run back and be undone–she did not care–such was the dream that she sang.

“Isn’t that something?” she would ask. “Isn’t that something?”

“Good God, Jamie, would you stop saying that,” her husband would say. “You sound retarded. Nobody can turn off the sun.”

Jamie spun gravel on Sand Hill Road leaving their trailer later that night. She wouldn’t go far, she knew. But she was tired of being called a retard by Sam. She drove to the Honey-Do-Stop and bought a Diet Coke and a Snickers before driving the strip. Past Ballard Mansion. The old 7-Up bottling plant. She was about to go home when she saw the crowd gathered at the Jubil. A good crowd for a Thursday.

She walked into the bar and headed for the pool tables in the back. Stonie Marshall pinched her as she walked past and she absently slapped his hand. Shooting 8-ball was a face she hadn’t seen in years and hadn’t expected to ever see again.

“Hi, handsome,” she said, interrupting a shot. “Buy me a drink?”

“Jamie,” the man said. “Jamie Fisher. I didn’t expect to see you here. I heard you were settled down out in Prospect.”

“Just because I’m settled down doesn’t mean I can’t have a beer with an old friend, does it?”

“I guess not.”

He turned to his brother and handed him his cue.

“You go on,” he said. “Jamie and I have some catching up to do.”

They walked together to the corner and he motioned for a round to be brought to the table.

“Why didn’t we ever get together?” Jamie asked after an hour or so of catching up.

“I tried, Jamie, many times. You remember out at the Tucker Dam spillway after the Senior bonfire. We were drunk on Mad Dog or Boone’s Farm, I don’t know which. You let me unhook your bra, but then as I worked my way around to the front, you put your hands on top of mine and stopped me. We were lying there face-to-face on a sleeping bag in the bed of Shane’s big red pick-up and you squeezed my hands and looked me in the eyes. You told me to kiss you. And for a second it seemed odd to me that I had my hand in your shirt but had never kissed you. Your breath tasted like cigarettes.”

“Then what happened?”

“You rolled over so your back was to my chest. You held on tight to my arms around you and I knew that was as far as we’d ever go. And then you asked me something.”

“What?”

“You said, ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’”

“What did you tell me?”

“I told you all about the sun. How hot it was. How fast its light traveled to the Earth. Everything I could think of. But then you were asleep and, then, so was I.”

“You thought I was a slut, didn’t you?”

“I knew you were more experienced than I was. I was hoping you could teach me a thing or two.”
 
“Those other boys. Spreading my legs was all I had to offer them and it’s all they wanted. But I didn’t have to control you that way. You didn’t know it, but not sleeping with you was my gift to you on your way out of town.”

“But now I’m back in town.”
 
“Yes you are. And I’m married to Sam and he’s probably out looking for me already, the bastard. I should get going.”

“So it never is going to happen, is it?”

“I don’t think so. And I guess I won’t be coming back to the Jubil again anytime soon.”

“Another gift for me?”

Jamie laughed.

“Yes,” she said. “Just think of this as a gift. But I do want you to kiss me one last time.”

Jamie leaned forward and for a moment the two recaptured seventeen.
 
“And now,” she said. “I want you to tell me something I don’t know. Something I can say at parties and sound smarter than I am. Something that I can say to piss Sam off every chance I get.”
 
He thought about it for a while, then smiled.

“The sun,” he said, “is immensely hot. At its core it ranges around 27,000,000 degrees, but gets cooler as it approaches its surface. There it’s a mere 10,000 degrees.”

“Is that it?” Jamie asked.

“No, not quite,” he said. “The weird thing about the sun is that the temperature drops as you leave the surface and into space as you might expect. But then as you go even farther from the sun it starts to heat up again and gets hotter–several million degrees hotter. So there’s this ring around the sun–not of fire–but of cool. Scientists can’t fully explain it, but without it the sun wouldn’t work quite right and we wouldn’t be here at all.”

“That’ll do,” Jamie said as she stood up and slung her purse over her shoulder. “Thanks for the drinks.”

As she walked to the door she thought about Sam and how mad he was going to be. She thought about what she wanted to do with her long-lost friend. She thought about the sun and the ring of cold.

As she put her hand on the knob, and didn’t look back, she chuckled.

“Isn’t that something?” she said. “Isn’t that something?”