The Eden Express Read Online Free Page B

there.
     
    West Branch, Iowa. Birthplace of Herbert Hoover. We arrived about 2:00 A.M. We had called ahead from Illinois to tell them we’d be showing up that night. Gary was waiting up for us and showed us to our room, where we collapsed for a solid ten-hour sleep.
    The next day was spent catching up on each other’s lives and talking about our coming adventures. Gary had just gotten a Guggenheim fellowship to finish his third novel. They were going to live in Morocco for a year. We played a lot of chess and talked about how strange life was getting and how something had to give sooner or later. What was going to happen next was anyone’s guess. We had to find all the people we cared about and make a tribe of some sort and all take care of each other. We needed some answers and pretty quick. Gary was looking in his dreams and hoped to find some clues from being in Morocco. I’d check out B.C. We’d stay in touch.
    Gary and Cheryl asked if I would preside over some sort of christening ceremony for their son, my namesake, Mark.
    The next day was a perfect Iowa day. Mid-June, seventy-two degrees, blue sky forever, slight breeze, fields of young corn green forever.
    Welcome to Earth, Mark Jackson. Welcome to Mark, Earth. Just one or the other would be a mistake. I figured fifty-fifty was probably the best way to play it.
    We got a lot of nice things together—flowers, incense, candles, and an excellent bottle of white wine my parents had given me for graduation the year before. They had given me a red too, but I was saving
that for when we found land. We had picked out some Bach organ music for background.
    Gary set up his tape recorder to capture the whole thing. He had the labor and delivery on tape too, and was constantly writing letters to Mark and putting them away in a special place.
    I was wearing a shirt that Virge had made for me out of linen with lots of different weaves, the closest thing to vestments I could come up with. We all sat in a circle, Gary and Cheryl holding Mark, some friends of theirs, Virge and I, all holding hands. We lit the incense and candles, threw the flowers around a bit. Anyone could say whatever they wanted, anything they thought would be appropriate to welcome young Mark to Earth. I remember Gary saying something about how we were silly enough to try to live our lives in peace and that he hoped Mark would join us when he grew up. I told him not to take anything anyone told him too seriously, since everyone started off as helpless little babies just like he was and everything they learned they learned from people who had been helpless little babies themselves. We all told him that for no particular reason we were very dedicated to him and that one way or another there were a lot of people who would do almost anything they could for him. I told Mark that if there was a God petty enough to hold the irregularities of our little ceremony against him, then He no doubt ran a petty heaven that Mark wouldn’t want any part of anyway. We talked some about what a strange historical time he happened to be born in. I tried to explain a little about my being out on bail. We all drank wine and sprinkled some on his head as we passed him around the circle, kissing him gently on his soft spot.
    Two years earlier, Gary and Cheryl had asked if I could legally marry them. That they saw me as their pastor probably had a lot to do with why I didn’t go to seminary. I’ve always been a fan of priesthood of the laity and I thought maybe seminary would somehow spoil whatever fragile magic I had that made them and a few other
people look at me that way. I didn’t want to trade the substance for the badge, and besides, most seminary programs I check out seemed candy-ass one way or the other.
     
    The day after our ceremony for Mark, I had to go back to Pennsylvania for a hearing on the legality of the search and arrest. My lawyer figured we could get the case thrown out in a hurry, but the cops never showed.