Bobby Viera

THE GARDEN OF HARMA

He stepped into the dark of the jungle while the morning was still new, before the bright green of its trees could be discerned in the sun's gift of clarity. He could not yet make out the plentitude of its flowers or wonder at the vibrancy of their color. The moon and the last of the stars were still visible through the cracks in the foliage canopy, but they were growing faint as the dawn saw them off. The air was all humidity, and the grass was wet with fresh dew; he was acutely aware of the presence of moisture. It invaded his sense of smell. It was everywhere, and he loved it.

Still a bit perplexed, and not a little amazed at the fact that he was standing here in a jungle, Jake surveyed his surroundings and tried to recall this place. It had a familiar feeling to it, but not in the way a place normally feels familiar. He had not travelled to get here, either-not that he recalled. He only remembered walking beside a hedge and seeing the wind blow an opening in the leaves big enough for him to walk through. He had stepped through that opening into the jungle where he now stood, at the beginning of a long sort of hallway with a thick wall of trees and bushes on either side. He stood there awhile, deliberating whether or not to proceed, and then he realized that there were no tracks. There ought to have been little tracks all over the place, the signs of life visible everywhere one looked-in the grass, in the dirt, on the leaves of the trees, everywhere. He had been to a school in the New Jersey wilderness that specifically taught tracking and wilderness survival, mainly to Marines and special forces personnel, and he had spent literally hundreds of hours in his front yard and at the long sandbox around back watching squirrels and other animals walk and stop and jump and run, and had observed the corresponding tracks that were made in the grass or sand. He could tell by these types of tracks not only what type of animal had made them, but also what it had been doing. Sometimes he could even tell what it had been looking for or chasing after, he was getting so good at it. But here there was nothing at all.

Indulging his curiosity, Jake stepped forward with his left foot and found that the ground was plush, at least on the earthen path he was standing on. He took a few steps and watched as the ground returned after a moment to its former state. A few steps more and he actually had a feeling that he knew where he was. He had been here before-well, not here exactly, but a place very similar to this. As he walked on the soft and dim path, the wind blew an opening in the foliage again, this time to his right. He again entered into it, and found himself at the beginning of a new jungle hallway. This process was repeated several times, and Jake followed the lead of the wind as it opened up the secret passages before him, the same way it had for the elf in his story.

He thought of the story as he followed the breeze; he had written it for Stacy in the days before she was actually his—before Trisha had given him permission to love her and to take her as his own. For all he knew back then, it was a sin to love Stacy, so he had not thought of it like that. She was a close friend, and he was careful not to let it turn romantic. It was hard to tell where the line was sometimes.

At one time Stacy had talked of moving to France, and Jake had dreaded the thought of losing her friendship and the connection that they shared, whatever it was. Writing a short story, he had allegorized himself in the character of an elf—of the Tolkien variety—who commissions his friend to make for him a chair scented with a magical fragrance. The friend is an elf whose chief skill is the production of smells which invoke particular memories in his patrons, and the elf who represents Jake wants to be able to sit in this chair and remember a certain feeling.

He tells his friend—Jake forgot their names now—that he will be back at the end of the day, and then he goes for a walk down the mountain path into the valley where the unclaimed gardens are. He walks along the hedge of a certain garden called Melda, and the wind blows an opening in the foliage, just like it had for Jake. When the elf sees that the breeze is leading him somewhere, he recognizes it to be the playful spirit of the garden directing him to her presence. The ground the elf walks on is plush like a cushion. The garden of Melda is not a jungle, though, but a leafy forest that resembles a park in appearance. Jake had written the story in the fall, and the leaves had been yellow and red and orange instead of green. This was definitely a different place.

In the story, the elf comes to a stream in the middle of the garden where he is taken aback by the sight of hundreds of fish swimming in the air about two feet above the water. He stands there in amazement until he hears someone giggling behind him, and he turns around to see the spirit of Melda, a beautiful sort of nymph, standing with her right hand raised in the air like a music conductor. She lowers her hand, and as she does, the swimming fish descend into the water of the stream and continue about their business. She has been toying with him. It is never boring in the Garden of Melda. The spirit is happy to see him, and she talks with him by the water as they skip rocks and watch the fish. They are interrupted soon after by the elf's friend, who out of curiosity has followed him into the garden by magically opening the secret paths so recently used. Melda is startled, and the ghost of her presence disappears, leaving the elf to be scolded by his friend for having left the elf's own garden, Harma, untended in order to walk about in this one. Melda meant Beloved in Elvish and represented Stacy, of course; Harma, meaning Treasure, was Trisha his wife.

The elf, though caught off-guard, is quick to defend himself. He has never eaten the fruit of Melda's orchards, nor has she ever tried to lead him there. They only talk and walk among the trees when he comes. He enjoys the garden of Melda, but he has not trespassed the law which forbids elves from eating the fruit of gardens that do not belong to them.

His friend sits down on a log by the stream and takes up a handful of rocks. In some ways he represents Jake's conscience. Gently tossing a pebble into the stream, he asks the elf if he loves this Melda.< /p>

The elf responds with an anecdote: a certain child caught a bird and was curious to find out how it was put together inside. He wanted to know what gave it life. So the child took a knife and dissected the bird in order to obtain the knowledge he sought, only to find that in doing so he had quenched the life altogether. The elf tells his friend that in just such a way, he also has had to refrain from dissecting his own fondness for this garden, lest he find it really to be love and have to abandon it. He expresses concern also that a time is soon coming when the garden will transplant herself elsewhere. That is why he wants the friend to make the chair. He wants to remember the fondness they share when she is gone.

The two elves sit there for a long while, looking down into the stream, and then the friend rises and walks off again into the foliage toward home. The spirit of Melda reappears and consoles the elf as his friend makes his way back out onto the road and out of the valley, up the side of the mountain along the winding trail which leads to his house and then behind it to the little building where he engages in his craft. He walks over to a stone table and there he places the rocks he has brought from beside the stream of Melda, as well as a few of the colored leaves he has picked up along her paths. Dumping them into a grinding contraption, he reflects on the day's events as he turns the handle, reducing the objects into a fine powder. Sap and oil and other ingredients are used to make a murky substance, which is then boiled and put through other processes until it is a mostly clear liquid. He pours this into a bottle labeled Fondness and places it on a shelf, and then, sitting down at a table and taking up his quill, he dips the tip of it into a small bottle of ink and sketches on a leaf of paper the first of a series of designs—designs for a chair.

This was the end of Jake's story, and he had been pleased with it. He had not had any idea at the time that Stacy would not only call off moving to France, but also marry him in secret the next year with only a handful of witnesses, one among them being Trisha. That was a shocker. Trisha had somehow figured out his feelings before he had, and instead of being angry, she had told him that it was fine—that God was fine with a plurality of wives and was in fact a pluralist Himself.

Trisha was the Christian equivalent of a Hafiz; she had memorized the entire Bible over the course of twelve years, and had discovered many unexpected patterns and themes in the process. While working on the five books of Moses, she had begun to wonder about the inconsistency that existed between the Old Testament model of marriage and what she had grown up to believe was that of the New. When she honestly searched the scriptures, she could not find any part of the New Testament that explicitly forbade the polygyny practiced in the Old. In fact, the more she became acquainted with the words of the text, the more it appeared that the old marital system was still valid. God Himself had even said in the Prophets that He was the husband of both Israel and Judah&mdashand God is unchanging. Trisha's view of love and marriage had gradually shifted from the Greek and Roman model of serial monogamy that was embraced by the West back to that of the ancient Hebrews—to that of the Bible—and when the time had come for her to set Jake's conscience free from the unnecessary shackles upon it, she had done so with one condition: Don't ever leave me.

The tropical foliage rocked slightly in the inaudible breeze as Jake followed it, and presently his ears marked above the dull noise of insects a gentle splashing and rippling sound. He could barely make out the stream's faint shimmer through the jungle wall to his left. The wind blew an opening in the greenery, and stepping through it, he made his way down through a sparse grove of trees until he came to the clearing where the watercourse lay.

Six or seven paces in front of him, sitting cross-legged on a large rug at the water's edge, her back to the stream and her eyes shut as if in deep meditation, a white-clad figure with darkly-tanned skin and black hair began to stir at the awareness of Jake's presence. Her eyelids shot open, and instead of brown pupils, there were two bright flames of fire. The blaze from her eyes illuminated the trees with a flickering yellow-orange brilliance, and the water behind her gleamed with the radiance of its reflection. She seemed to hold Jake in her gaze, though he could not rightly tell; who could know what those eyes beheld? A long silence ensued and he stood fixed, held in captivity by the glory of the conflagration, until, without a word, the woman closed her eyes again as if satisfied, restoring the jungle to its natural shades of green.

It took a brief moment for Jake's own eyes to re-adjust. When they did, he saw the woman take up a stringed instrument of some variety he did not recognize. Slowly, she began fingering the strings in a contemplative mood, her eyes still shut. The melody was one he had heard before. Trisha had often played it on the guitar as they relaxed together on the red love seat, her feet on his lap and he blowing lightly on a Japanese flute he had bought many years before. Jake looked closely at the woman in the darkness. Harma?

She stopped playing a moment and smiled before picking the tune back up. She nodded down toward a picnic basket, which sat in front of her on the rug. On top of the basket lay a polished wooden flute. Jake stepped forward and sat down on the rug in front of her. He took up the flute and positioned it in his hands, ready to play when a suitable moment came. The woman's instrument had a folkish twang to it that made him think of the desert, and the music she played felt like a prelude to something much more elaborate. A minute passed, and then another, and when the song's foundation was nearly built up, Jake touched the flute to his lips. When the moment was ripe, the breath of his mouth pushed gently through the flute so that it produced a sound like a nectar-flavored breeze, slow and meditative, and sweet in its taste. As they played the two instruments, there issued forth from the springs of heaven a luminescent dew, which sprinkled everything around them with tangible drops of light. When this light fell upon Jake's hair, it collected in a pool until two tiny glimmering streaks of it trickled down his forehead and moistened his eyes, so that they shone suddenly like twin stars. The woman opened her eyes as well now, and blinding the very trees with the glorious white torches of their countenances, the man and woman played as they had never played before, with honesty and truth and all that was real, and the woman opened her mouth and began to sing, in a language unknown to you and I, of all of the hopes and dreams they had shared; of the little impressions which had stirred within them their mutual enchantment; of their willingness to forgive all hurts; of the happy chains which penetrated the walls of their hearts' surrendered castles. She sang and sang as they played on for what seemed like an hour, the dew falling all the while, collecting on the leaves of the trees and in the river and in a bottle which stood beside the basket between them.

When they stopped playing, it was not because they had finished their song. The woman began to cough suddenly, violently. She bent over, clutching her stomach as she coughed, and when she stopped and straightened back up, fatigued, there was blood on her mouth and chin. There isn't much time, she said as she wiped off the blood with her sleeve. You're going to wake up soon.

Wake up? he thought. Of course. A month ago he had finally succeeded at adapting to the polyphasic sleep pattern, which he had tried and given up on two years before. Ever since, his body's dependency on REM and growth hormone had been handled within the confines of twenty-minute naps at regular intervals throughout the day. He only needed to sleep once every four hours, and when he did, his twenty-minute dreams began the moment his eyes closed. They were as vivid as real life, and seemed to last for hours. This must be one of them.

The spirit of the Eden—like garden leaned forward and opened one of the basket's hinged lids. She pulled out a red fruit that resembled a grapefruit, as well as a knife to cut it with. Setting the fruit on the rug, she sliced it into wedges and handed one of them to Jake. Eat. It's from the orchard, she said, and smiled.

He bit into the fruit and at once there was an overwhelming rush of bliss together with a feeling of intimacy and belonging. He consumed the wedge, and was filled with the sweet concentration of its richness. As he sat there in amazement at the potency of it, Harma took one of the remaining wedges and squeezed the juice of it into the bottle, which the bright dew had collected in. She swirled the mixture until it was all one color and then handed the bottle to Jake. Drink it, she said. He did so, and as the sweet luminescent dew made its way down, she embraced him tightly and said, Remember our love.

What!? he thought as he looked down at her in confusion. Wait—

One more thing, she said. She placed her right hand on top of his head and her left hand on top of her own. Take these, too.

It hit him like a truck all at once. The synapses shot out of one another like branches on a tree, a forest of trees, each giving birth to more in a succession so rapid that when he saw all the memories, it was like turning on a light. They were just suddenly there. He was dumbfounded, and he sat there looking past her at nothing in particular, his eyes outshining the morning sun as he tried to assess what had just happened to him.

He came to his senses as Harma began violently coughing up blood again. Trisha! he yelled, and sprang to catch her just as she was beginning to collapse. Her body was slack and he sank down with her slowly and clumsily to the ground, cradling her head in his right arm and shouting her name.

She…she's not who she… Harma began weakly. She… The words did not come. She lay there in his arms and slowly her gaze moved skyward. She appeared to find what she was looking for, and then as she released the breath of her nostrils her eyes softly closed, blackening the world.

The darkness was all there was for a long time, and Jake was weightless and without thought, until at last he felt the bed beneath his side and Trisha's body under his arm. It was cold. Trisha…baby… He sprang up onto his knees and reached for the lamp, not able to finally find the switch until after what seemed like an eternity of feeling and searching. When the light came on his heart sank as he saw the blood on her mouth and the stillness of her body. She was not breathing. Jake pressed his fingers on the side of Trisha's throat and waited, but there was nothing. She was gone.