Leaving The Garden

Leaving The Garden

She was at the bus stop ready to leave the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, ruing the twenty thousand dollar lottery ticket.

It was the root cause of it all. The fortuitous ticket meant she had to celebrate, and celebrate she did. For weeks, she exacerbated her drinking, partying, and finally driving home to her Bed-Stuy studio only to wake up with her Mazda wrapped around a light post and a broken leg.

Needing surgery and medication

(and more medication)

(and more)

until the next thing she knew she was on the street searching for dope and succeeding.

Now, she was sitting at the bus stop before sunrise racing to the closest clinic to get her fix.

That’s when she saw the little black book.

It was clean, unblemished, so rare in the City these days, and left unattended by Who Knows.

But it wasn't the book itself that caught her attention, but the symbol on the cover; A red circle within a diamond of tangents and secants running through it.

The red glowed with temptation.

When she opened it, each page was marked with hieroglyphs, indigenously alien. Symbols ignorant to her, but known. Sinister, but pure. Light, yet so dark even she refrained from its beckoning gleam. Yet Curiosity got the better of her.

The first page was green, and the beauty of it engrossed her, the symbols pulsating in the sunlight. It shimmered from a lime green to an emerald to shamrock to sage. The colors danced even as the clouds rolled in. She felt a surge of distant emotions stirring inside her.

She was thinking of her younger sister, an attorney in Manhattan, with two kids and a beautiful home on the Long Island Sound. She could almost smell the oceanside her envy was so strong. She flipped the next page and more emotions swarmed; The hatred for her divorced parents, the greed of the lottery ticket, the pain in her leg. The symbols did something to her, like a hit of smack coursing her veins. But it wasn’t a high, it was a low.

Each page was a different color, and the hieroglyphs shone with a fluorescence that allured her like a moth to a flame. Red, purple, blue, green, yellow. One page was orange and she’d feel like she just shot up, full. The next red, and her desire to use was so irresistible the paroxysm of withdrawals shook her rabidly. Some pages filled her with regret, others gave her a strange sense of pride she discovered only after using, like an addict in the dumps feeling on top of the world.

Buses came and went and she didn’t seem to notice, all her attention was on this book. People sat and stood and crowded her like she was invisible, save one bus driver.

“Where are you going?” He said.

She heard him distantly, but the embarrassment stunned her as if she were naked. She gave no response. He drove away.

She tried to form patterns in the hieroglyphs but could not. Was it Greek? Gaelic? Hebrew? It had the mysticism of some antiquated text of an unknown Native American language, but withheld the sophistication of Shakespeare. It resembled the syllabary of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, but was as emotionally jarring as Dickinson or Poe.

It made her weep. The sins of her life burst into cognizance at the recollection of her six numbers on the television screen: her birthday and her mother’s, and it was never the same. It was all so foreign and nightmarish, it had to be someone else, it had to be another life that was drinking to incoherence, being tossed into that light post, being drained down the barrel into the vein of another’s arm. Sitting at this bus stop, reading this self-damning book, it was someone else, not her.

Hopelessly, with one page left, Pandora closed the book. She started to walk home, Eastbound, as the rain started to fall.