Edens Garden

Chapter 2

Chapter Two

That finger came closer and closer to me. Like a pinlight an optician uses to detect problems with your pupil. The bright light was worse than being plunged into darkness. I could see everything that was happening to me.

I was trapped in some type of lab, being dissected by some type of androgynous mad scientist. Only, she wasn’t slicing through my body. When I looked down the table, I didn’t see my body.

There was nothing there. I was a disembodied head. That’s why I couldn’t move.

If I hadn’t been freaking out before, I sure as hell was now. Was this hell?

“Keep still, or I’ll get your breasts crooked,” she said. “I doubt he’d like that.”

He? He who? And what did she mean she’d get my breasts crooked? I didn’t have any breasts anymore. And that’s when I felt my n****e tighten.

I looked down again. And there was my right boob. That glowing, alien finger hovered over my skin, not touching it. Actually, both of her hands moved over me. Her fingers moved like the two sides of a waltz, right and left coming together and then moving apart. Weaving in and out and around like knitting.

Yes. That’s what she was doing. She was knitting skin around me. The me that I could see was a body of pure white light.

“I’m not dead,” I said.

She said nothing. Her face was pinched in concentration as she worked on my abs. I figured I shouldn’t interrupt her or my flat belly might turn into an eight-pack.

I wanted to say more, to ask a question, but I knew better. Well, I may have known better, but I didn’t do better.

“I’m not dead,” I repeated. “But I’m not exactly alive either.”

She c****d her head to one side as though to examine me from another angle. In the space I was in, there was only that blinding light on every side, and even from the ceiling to the floor.

She waited for me to answer my own question. This was a test, the final exam of life. Unfortunately, I hadn’t studied. Still, somehow, I knew the answer.

“I’m being reborn,” I said.

The second it took for her to respond felt like an eternity stretched over infinity. Finally, she smiled. The skin forming on my back crawled. My toes tingled. My toes weren’t completely covered by skin.

I reached up to my head, and my hand passed through the space where my head should be. I held up my hand. My fingers weren’t the toasty brown they had been my entire life. They were the color of light. I was light. My light was slowly being encased inside skin. Flesh knitted over the light of my being, encasing me in the brown skin I’d originally been born with.

I looked back to the female. This time I asked a question. It was the most important question of my life. My old life and this new one.

“What am I?”

“What do you call yourself in this time?” the female asked.

I hated that she avoided my question, but her dodge felt familiar. I tried to move again, but I didn’t understand how to move when I didn’t quite have a body. I felt insubstantial as a being of pure light, like I could float away at any moment, or scatter and dissipate like a wave pulling back into a vast ocean. It was terrifying.

Even with my eyes shut, all was light.

I knew how to do this, but thinking about it was too much. Just like having all my memories come at me at once was too much. It was like thinking sideways; everything came at me from directions I didn’t know how to receive.

I reached up to my head again, this time gratified to feel something solid. I opened my eyes.

She watched me with the same impassivity in her bright gaze. Her eyes were pure light, the same as my body. But I didn’t fool myself into thinking we were the same. She was more. She was so much more than I could even fathom.

“Oh my god,” I whispered.

She leaned in. Her mouth cracked into what could be interpreted as a smile. “Indeed.”

I took in a deep lungful of air, unsure if my lungs had even formed yet. Unsure even if I had lungs. Was air even necessary for light-people?

And still she, or I suppose She, gazed down at me, waiting patiently for my answer.

“Nia,” I said. “I call myself Nia.”

She scrunched up her nose and looked off in the distance as her fingers continued to work. It was deceptively human-like and made me feel comfortable. But then she focused those light-bright eyes on me again. I was dealing with someone, something, beyond my comprehension.

“Nia.” She said my name. “Knee-ah.” She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth with the consonant and then sighed on the vowel. “I don’t like it.”

My mouth, which was now fully formed, fell open at her pronouncement.

“But it’s your choice.” She shrugged. “Your free will.” And then she scrunched her nose up again, as though she were repeating my name in her head and finding it just as distasteful.

“And you?” I asked. “What do I call you?”

“I find the need to name things fascinating.”

Her fingers gave an upward tug, as though she were tying a knot. I felt the pull in my knee, like a doctor taking a rubber hammer to the joint to test reaction. My leg jerked, flexing and relaxing at her machinations. Then she moved her looming hands down to my toes.

“Just as I find it fascinating that most beings like to have their essence cloaked in materials. I much prefer to roam in my natural state, but I’ve found it makes those around me uncomfortable. There was a time I didn’t care, because caring and emotions weren’t actual things. There was only instinct. But, at some point in time, my creations began pulling flesh around their light. It mutes their instincts.”

I had nothing to say to that. Here I was talking to God. Maybe that wasn’t the right word. She was the Creator, that much I knew from the return of my memories.

But my memories grew fuzzier as she knit skin over my light. I still remembered my mother’s face, but the color from the scene and the details were fading. The stars in my mind dimmed, moved farther and farther away, beyond my reach.

“It’s your flesh,” she said, as though reading my mind, probably because she could. “Your skin suppresses your light. Like I said, most of my creations prefer skin. At first, I thought it had to do with the atmosphere of Heaven and the dust getting into your light. Most flora and fauna wear only their skins, but not mankind. From birth, human beings preferred to be swaddled in materials that further encase them and keep them separated from others. I’ve never quite understood it. And then you lot developed compassion to share the sensation with each other.”

She shuddered. All I could do was stare.

“Eden,” she said after a few seconds of silence.

“What?”

“That’s what I prefer to be called,” she said. “Eden. I also like Gaia and Ra. They’re all soft sounds. I find that I like vowels. Very easy on the ears.”

She reached up and tugged at her elongated ears. They were pointy at the top, like the renditions of elves in children’s books.

“Funny little appendages,” Eden said. “I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them the first time they appeared. I started wearing them myself a few cycles ago. They balance out the head, don’t you think?”

She wobbled her head left and right. Again, I could only stare mutely.

“The only true sense is touch. I didn’t see the need to evolve beyond the tactical sense of touch. Light is simply a wave, which we experience as touch. Sound is just another wave, only it touches the ear. Smell, taste, sight, all are waves that touch us in different ways. It’s redundant, really.” She waved her hands as though brushing the notion aside. “But I allow my creations to explore and evolve in their own state of being. Up until a point, of course.”

“Of course.” It was all I could think to say. “So… you’re God.”

“Gah.” Eden cringed. “I don’t like that word. It’s very harsh sounding.” She shook her head as though she tasted something bad.

“But it’s who you are?”

Eden shrugged. “I simply am. I never thought to question it. It’s how it’s always been. Since I was born.”

“You were born?”

“I was born here.” Eden lifted her slim arms to indicate the light surrounding us.

“Where are we exactly?”

“At the core of the planet, in its womb. Where all life began. My life happened to be the first life. Every life form that came after me likes to call me the Creator, but in reality, it was the planet that created us all. The Earth is our true god. But that comes off as abstract, and since I was born first, and engineered what came after me, all of creation looks to me.”

I nodded in understanding, but my head was spinning with all the implications.

Eden held out her hand. At first, it was a solid palm without lifelines. Then the flesh melted away. In the middle of her palm was a pool of swirling light. “Would you like to see it again?”

“See it? Again?”

“The birth of creation. I’ve shown you before.”

I looked down at my hand. My fingers were now covered in skin. Thinly knit. Thin enough for the light to shine through.

I reached out to her hand, tentatively. I had no idea what I was afraid of. God was going to show me creation. It’s what all scientists secretly dream of, a definitive answer to life’s greatest question.

The moment my fingertips touched hers, I was pulled, yanked out of my skin. I don’t know if my eyes were closed or open, but fire and heat and embers clouded my vision. Then, in an instant, the scene cleared and there was nothing but blue.

A blue so bright and soft at the same time it took my breath away. Earth. I’d always thought the planet was the most beautiful in the solar system. But this rendition of it, no print or satellite picture had ever come close to the Earth as seen in these waters.

The waters pulled into the Earth and it was like watching a National Geographic Special. Beautiful landscapes, growing flowers, grasslands, and seas teeming with life paraded through the waters of the cylinders like the opening of the Lion King. The Earth in all her majesty was on display.

“It takes precise chemistry to create the spark of life,” said Eden. “I watched the seas and the first cells divide and multiply until they became what you call dinosaurs. I watched the first blade of grass grow until the first fairy stepped out of its roots. I watched primates stand up on straight spines and then discover fire. It’s been most entertaining.”

And then there was darkness. Eden had removed her hand from mine. My eyes had been closed. No light. Only the darkness of my eyelids.

“Ah, Nia.” Eden’s voice held a frown as she spoke the single harsh consonant in my name. “You’re all done. Back in your skin.”

I opened my eyes to the bright room. I rose to a sitting position. I was back in my own skin, and naked.

It hadn’t dawned on me before that I was truly bare. I wasn’t modest. But I felt weird being naked in front of God as a grown woman.

“I tried to keep to your original model.” Eden admired her handiwork, c*****g her head from side to side and squinting her large eyes. “How does it feel? Be honest. I can take criticism.”

“I get the feeling you’d know if I wasn’t honest.”

Eden only smiled. An upward tilt of one side of her thin lips.

“I feel good as new.” And I did. Better than new. There was a lightness about me. Though corporeal, I felt myself barely tethered to the platform.

“Good,” said Eden. “Some beings are sentimental about their original skins. But all things must change.”

I shifted on the platform, reaching my toes toward the white floor. The ground was solid, like marble, but warm. With both feet planted on the ground, I shifted and tried to stand. But the moment I was on my own, dizziness overcame me and I gripped the edge of the platform.

“My head hurts.” I rubbed my temple, thankful it was solid this time.

“Those are your memories trying to fit themselves inside your head,” said Eden. “You’ve been encased in a human body for thousands of cycles. These cavities were not designed to last so long or to hold the amount of memories you’ve acquired. A flaw in the design, I apologize. There’s only so much space in the human ganglia.”

I looked at her quizzically.

“Ganglia, the network of nerves that make the flesh of the body function. I believe mankind has taken to calling it brains. Such a funny word.” Eden sniffed again, wrinkling her nose, her large eyes crinkling at the edges. “When the brain is confined inside your body cavity, it cannot access all your records, your memories, as it can in your natural state.”

“My natural state? As a being of light.”

She nodded.

“So, I am an angel?”

Eden smiled. “I’ve always liked that word. Ahn-gel. So soft.”

“But I remember being born. I had a mother… and a father.”

A father. I had a father. My brain ached at trying to reach deep into the recesses of my nerve network to pull up any memories of him.

“Mother. Father,” said Eden. “Such human concepts. Though I do like the word daughter. It’s soft but also strong. But mother?” She shuddered. “Such an invasion to have something inside of your body and then yanked out. The eggs and larvae were a good design with the reptiles and avians. But I was particularly fond of the grafting and seedling design of the flora.”

My mother was dead. She’d been human. But my father hadn’t been. He was like me. Like Eden. “Where is my father?”

Eden tilted her head to the side, much like a bird listening for the presence of another. Her bright eyes glowed and then she refocused on me. “He’s near.”

“Does he know I’m here?”

Eden nodded.

I hesitated to ask to see him. He knew I was here. Why wasn’t he waiting by my side when I woke up? Maybe he didn’t care about me. Maybe he didn’t want to be bothered with me.

In my mind, his face was hazy, his words muted. My mother had loved him, but I got the impression it was one-sided. What had Eden said about emotion? That caring and emotions weren’t actual things.

But that was false. Emotions surged through my body like they had when my mother held me for the first time. I knew that emotion. It was love.

I was like my mother. I was capable of love. I had loved deeply in my life. And then my heartbeat quickened.

“Zane? Where’s Zane?”