THE GARDEN OF EDEN: The words rattled around in his mind, knocking loose another memory of Roxanne, and of the Edenic week they’d spent house-sitting for the Brocktons, shortly after the Plum Island trip. They’d spent most of their time in bed, crawling out only for brief forays into the bathroom and the kitchen. Tenderness, awe, lust, hunger, thirst, elimination: the sublimest of emotions and the rawest of physical needs, coexisting not just peacefully but joyously and powerfully, during the heady days and nights of new love. Tyler and Rox had broken one of the bed slats during a final, frenzied coupling on their last afternoon there. The board had snapped with a crack like a rifle shot, and as the mattress gave way beneath them, their cries of passion gave way to gales of laughter. Rox had washed the sheets and towels while Tyler had dashed to Home Depot for a new slat, skidding into the store’s parking lot just minutes before closing time. On a whim, as he was leaving—exiting through the store’s lawn and garden section—he’d bought a small concrete statue for the Brocktons’ back patio: a waist-high angel, its wings spread high and wide, a sword pointing heavenward. “To guard the gates of Paradise,” he’d explained to Rox as he tucked it beside an azalea bush by the sliding-glass door.
They were wedging the new slat beneath the bedsprings when the whir of the garage-door opener signaled the Brocktons’ return. “I think our guardian angel’s already sleeping on the job,” Roxanne had teased, leading him out of the bedroom—but not before giving his bruised lips a final kiss.
HE’D LEARNED HIS LUNCHTIME lesson the day before, when he’d found himself sharing his sandwich with a bevy of blowflies in the cage. Some of them—hell, probably all of them—had doubtless checked out the corpse before coming to sample his salami-and-cheese sub. Did it count as micro-cannibalism, he wondered, if dead-guy molecules on a fly’s feet rubbed off onto his sandwich? Better—less repulsive—to play it safe; today he’d dash back to the bone lab for lunch.
Before leaving, he took another round of photos—a few wide shots of the entire body, followed by medium shots of the face, neck, torso, and limbs, and then close-ups and macro shots of the various maggot colonies. Virtually all the prior day’s eggs had hatched by noon—all except for one dab of grainy white, which a less-than-brilliant fly had laid in the desert, cadaverously speaking: She’d deposited them on the parchment-dry skin of the left shin, where the eggs—lacking moisture—had shriveled instead of hatching. Location, location, location, thought Tyler, snapping close-ups of the eggs that would never hatch. Meanwhile, in the more desirable real estate—the moist and bloody parcels of flesh—fresh dabs of eggs were appearing, shoehorned in amid the teeming larvae. Did maggots feed on smaller maggots, he wondered—was it a bug-eat-bug world? Or did harmony and understanding prevail in the midst of such abundance, such manna from heaven? It was the age-old story of research: You set out to answer one or two questions—what bugs show up to feed on corpses, and when?—and pretty soon, a thousand more questions rear their wriggling heads.
He finished a 36-exposure roll of slide film and stashed the camera in his backpack. Then, just before leaving the cage, he removed a one-pint glass jar from his pack and unscrewed the lid, then swept the open jar back and forth in a series of rapid figure eights above the body. Clapping the lid back on, he inspected his catch: a dozen or so puzzled and frustrated flies. He wedged the jar into the pack, where it nestled against today’s sandwich, which he would not be unwrapping until he was safely indoors. “Eat your hearts out—your hollow, tubular little insect hearts,” he goaded the flies. “Because the sweet, succulent sandwich? Today she is mine! All mine! Ha-ha!”
Jiminy Cricket, he thought, I’m talking to flies now? I am totally cracking up.
Leaving the enclosure, he latched and padlocked the chain-link door. “Yeah, right,” he muttered, snapping the lock shut. “As if someone might want to steal a stinking corpse swarming with maggots.” He’d parked a ways from the trees—hotter than the shade, but a lot less likely to get bombed by the birds.
The truck was on a slight incline, facing downhill, so instead of cranking it, he floored the clutch, put the transmission in second gear, and coasted down the slope. Just before he reached the bottom, he switched on the key and popped the clutch to roll-start the engine. The truck lurched as the clutch caught, and then the cylinders fired up. He used to tell himself he did this to lessen the wear and tear on the starter, but the truth—the real reason he did it—was that he got a kick out of it. Every single time. He hummed, then began to sing: “Back in nineteen fifty-eight . . . We drove an old V-8 . . . And when it’d gone a hundred thou we got out and pushed it a mile. . . .”