Fruit of the Tree: A Quest

By Joseph Grossman

Joe never thought of himself as anyone special. He’s a regular working-class piece of work picking up a few bucks by day and spending them all by the next morning, trying to stay one step ahead of the repo man and keep his head above water.

Then, one day, while working for a multibillion-dollar multinational corporation in Iraq, he finds himself chosen to continue a mission that has remained secret for thousands of years. In an unlikely turn of events, Joe is removed from his mundane existence and sent to find a legendary object that has defined and directed humanity since the dawn of time. Each encounter comes with a choice: Which way is genius, and which is madness? Why was he chosen? And who can he trust? Joe seeks knowledge, but too much knowledge is a dangerous thing. Only time will reveal the consequences for the world if he is successful.

In this novel, an innocent man is thrust into a race against time; a quest to find a mysterious object that has the power to change the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Nov 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781480866676

Joseph Grossman

Joseph Grossman is a largely fictitious character, created by himself and subject to periodic rewrites and edits. He has been to many places and done many things, primarily while sleeping.

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Copyright © 2018 Joseph Grossman.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-6665-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-6666-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-6667-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018910438

Archway Publishing rev. date: 11/01/2018

CONTENTS

I    A Man Caught in a Straw

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

II    The Apple

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

Part III    The Uncorrupted Land

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

Part IV    I Understand Where They’re From

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

Part V    Endgame

45

46

47

48

49

VI    Caught in a Straw

50

51

52

53

54

Epilogue

A bigot in a blighted land

His life become a curse.

Enlightened now, trapped in a box,

He wonders which is worse.

I

A MAN CAUGHT IN A STRAW

PROLOGUE

I AM CONSUMED.

The echo of the final pistol shot roams the hallways of this place, bouncing back and forth across the walls like an epileptic ghost. Whatever its route, up and down endless blind corridors, it never fails to return to me. It encircles me with ferocity. I am the object of its obsession. It orbits me, an increasingly manic fly orbiting my head. It passes through me, in utter disregard of my substance, and I feel the echo in my bones and blood and guts, and each time, if only for a moment, my heart and breath lose track of one another.

How can it be that this place is expanding and contracting at the same time? The corridors stretch out forever, yet no matter what direction I take I find myself back here. How can that be? As the walls narrow and elongate, I am a man caught in a straw, and my head throbs with too much blood and the reverberation of that last pistol shot.

I’m not the man I used to be, which is just as well. The man I used to be was a fool. My passage from that person to the one I am now is long and strange, and honestly I wouldn’t expect you to believe the story. Why should you? If you were to tell me what I’m about to tell you, I wouldn’t believe you. But I am consumed. The walls are closing in and down on me, and soon there won’t be walls; there will only be wall, with me as the mortar. My nerves are short-circuiting, and either my brain is expanding or my skull is contracting. I can hear my blood pounding, and I can feel my breath shortening. You probably already think I’m crazy, but really, that won’t win you a kewpie doll. I know I’m crazy, and I know why.

Let me tell you something: the difference between delusion and genius is results, and my results have been mixed. But this pool is too murky to simply dive in. A story like mine requires an introduction. Let’s start with the fact that I’m in Iraq. Iraq wasn’t always Iraq, you know. It was once part of the Persian Empire, and before that the Roman Empire, then the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and the Assyrian Empire, and the Babylonian Empire again, and Mesopotamia, and Sumer, and before that—well, then you get into ten thousand years of prehistory, and who knows how far back you end up going. What I’m trying to say is, the area has seen a lot of history, a whole lot of history, more history than anywhere on the whole godforsaken planet, and if you go back far enough, I mean really far enough, well, people think that back at the beginning it’s where you’d find the garden of Eden. Now that was a long time ago, assuming of course that you believe in the Bible and such, which you probably don’t anyway. I mean, I never did. But what I do know now is there surely was a garden of Eden. Well, probably. And there would have been a tree of knowledge, because there surely was a forbidden fruit. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Now my head thumps like a mihbaj and I’m too damned clever for my own good. Before all this happened I wasn’t all that much smarter than the average Joe (which, coincidently, was my given name, before all this), just a regular working-class piece of work picking up a few bucks by day and spending them all by the next morning, trying to keep one step ahead of the repo man and my head above water. Once upon a time the rich would get richer while the poor got poorer, not that that was such a great deal, but somewhere along the line while the rich kept getting richer, everyone else got poorer, and everyone else included yours truly. Anyhow, some people think they’re stuck in a dead-end job, but they don’t know shit about dead ends until they get to where I was. I heard that hell is hot, but hell can’t be any hotter than Iraq. Forget the heat of passion; I’m talking Fahrenheit. The sun will cook you where you stand if you stand there long enough, and by long enough I’m talking minutes, not days. No wonder everyone in the freaking Middle East is crazy. I’ll admit that back before I got so bright and brainy I really didn’t have much of anything good to say about the fair citizens of the ancient land of Sumer, and now that I’m too damned smart for my own or anyone else’s good, my head will not stop throbbing, my mind will not turn off. I can’t stop my damned head from spinning out of control, goddamn it. Let me begin, before my advanced fucking brain makes me forget why I started this story in the first place. It starts in the garden of Eden. No, wait. It starts right here, with me.

1

YOU TAKE A HEALTHY CELL AND REPLACE IT WITH A DISEASED CELL. The diseased cell multiplies, and now it’s an army of diseased cells. The army of diseased cells doesn’t think it’s a bad army. In fact, like most armies, it doesn’t think at all. It follows orders, and the orders are to take that healthy cell and remake it in their own image. Very biblical. God makes humankind in his image, and humankind makes the world in its image.

So if we knock down a tree, or a whole forest of trees, to build a building, that’s just what we do. If we slice off the crown of a mountain to strip-mine, there’s no malice aforethought; there’s no thought at all. It’s what we are. If we Americans are the greatest nation in the history of nations—and who’s to say we’re not?—then of course we will want to remake the rest of you out there in our image, right? We export democracy, Jesus, and capitalism wherever we can, spreading the gospel. We remake everyone in our image and the planet into one large skyscraper, not because we are bad and not because humans are bad but because we’re just an army of diseased cells.

I wasn’t always so contemplative. I have some spare time right now; time is pretty much all I have—all any of us has. I can’t really say I’ve had any great epiphany as such. It was more like something that I ate. More on that later.

When I was young, I wasn’t very bright. I grew up kicking shit in the great wasteland that is west Texas. If ignorance is bliss, then I was truly the most blissful boy in the cosmos. Now in fairness, where I grew up, there wasn’t a whole lot of anything to do, or people, or, well, diversity so I had little knowledge (or tolerance) of anyone who was not a good white Southern Baptist like me. Like I said, ignorance was bliss where I came from. I would have been a good Aryan brother, but I was never much of a joiner.

I don’t say this as a matter of pride; I say it as a matter of fact. As a matter of fact, I am hardly proud. I mention this because at the beginning of this saga, I was an asshole. Well, kind of. Okay, I was an asshole. But as people say, life is a journey, and what I’m about to tell you certainly has been a journey for me, although I’m not sure I’m in love with the ultimate destination. But I’m getting ahead of myself. So bear with me as I tell my tale, and observe how one might end up traveling from the bliss of ignorance to the harsh reality of reality.

Such as it is.

2

BAGHDAD, 2003. THE SIGHTS, THE SMELLS. IF YOU’VE EVER CONTEMplated bigotry, racial animus, or anosmia, there may be better places to start, though none comes to mind. Baghdad is where odious and odiferous meet and marry. Now that I think about it, Odious and Odiferous sound like a couple of Greek gods. If they were, their modern home would have been right here.

This was once a cool place (figuratively), mere millennia ago. Now, not so much. Sumerians invented the first known system of writing forty-five hundred or so years ago. They used prefixes and suffixes to express various grammatical functions and attached them to nouns and verbs. Do you care that Sumerian was an agglutinative language? I wouldn’t think so. So why am I bothering to tell you all this? Because the birth of language, of sophisticated communication, and of human communication (indeed, of humanity itself) started in that same small part of the world. That’s not a pure coincidence. Even back before the Sumerians, some awfully smart caveman (or cavewoman, if you’d prefer) must have started the language ball rolling. Some other brainy bastard (and they were all bastards back then, in a strictly definitional sense) had to come up with the idea of urbanization too. You know, people, or whatever they were back then—monkey people?—didn’t just get born into urbia, did they? Someone had to concoct the idea that instead of a lot of disorganized little settlements, maybe it would be better if a whole big bunch of monkey people got to live in the same area, a conglomeration of settlements of monkey people. Call them city-states. Each city-state had its own places of worship for its own personal deity, had shared granaries, and eventually gained some advanced stage of specialization in the crafts. You know where the concept of cities was born? Catching on yet?

Iraq.

History begins where written language begins, and that’s right there, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, in that area someone decided millennia later to call the Fertile Crescent. You know which was the first culture to use the alloy bronze? The Sumerians. Sensing a pattern yet? While they were at it, they developed mathematics, theories of astronomy (within the context of their religions, of course), and so on. So how did they get to be so smart while the rest of the world was hopping and yelping like in a Stanley Kubrick movie? You think it had anything to do with that garden of Eden? Of course you don’t, being a sophisticated, educated, twenty-first-century person. Well, I’m here to tell you that’s exactly how they got to be so much smarter than all the other monkey people. But not in the way you might think.

King Nebuchadnezzar, aside from slaughtering Jews and destroying their temple in Jerusalem (nice guy), built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, ancient wonder that it was, and ruled over the Babylonian Empire. Perhaps you didn’t know that the Babylonians built the Towel of Babel. King Nimrod, in fact. Really, Green Day fans, it was built by King Nimrod. Babel-lon. Get it?

So why am I telling you all this? I don’t know. I’m sure I had a reason, but my head hurts too much and now I don’t remember. I was supposed to start my story, so what the hell are we doing in Iraq? Oh, okay, that was where I first came upon the great mystery (ooh, a mystery!) back when I wasn’t so smart, back when I was a working stiff in a really volatile place. I was a guy just like you: a nobody.

3

DON’T WORRY. THIS ISN’T ONE OF THOSE POLITICAL OR MORAL screeds. I was sent to Iraq by a multibillion-dollar multinational corporation that shall remain nameless, though you can draw your own conclusions. I didn’t give a shit about politics, which is just another pyramid scheme (and no, that’s not a Middle East joke). Politicians and religious leaders (and lately they are one and the same) are just two more private-interest groups. Their interests never seem to have anything to do with the public; they are strictly private. They are not not-for-profit. Don’t get me started on morals, either. Morals and working for a living are two brilliant ideas hatched back at the dawn of time (probably in Babylonia) to separate the right from the wrong side of the tracks. Them that’s got teach the rest of us certain guidelines for living a good and righteous life. Rule no. 1 is to accept what you have and don’t have and who you are and are not, because if you’re a good little boy or girl, you’ll get your reward in the next life. You know, the one no one has ever proven exists. And being the bright and logical people that we were, we believed that shit. Amazingly, we still do. The upshot, of course, is that if you want to go to heaven, you should not mess with or question them that’s got. Brilliant, eh? Consequently, the most moral people usually are the poorest, while the rich have a moral code (or lack thereof) that is all their own.

One other thing I knew even before I got so smart was that people who call themselves conservatives always assume they’re better (i.e., more moral) than you. They also believe that if you don’t agree with them, you’re going straight to hell. And people who call themselves liberals always assume they’re better (i.e., smarter) than you, and if you don’t agree with them, you must have fallen off the turnip truck on your way to Barney Fife’s house. So I must therefore be some dumb fuck on the fast track to perdition—if I wasn’t there already.

Let me take a moment to address the occasional use of expletives. I’m not apologizing, mind you. Once upon a time, I cursed like a stevedore because, once upon a time, I was a stevedore, back on the east Texas coast. At the beginning of this sad tale, I drove a truck, so I suppose I cursed like a truck driver too. I don’t use profanity as consistently as in my deep, dark past, but in my attempt to give you a sense of who, where, and what I was, I am trying to re-create my lack of mind-set as I go. So there you are. I know there are certain words that just make some people really, really uncomfortable to have to read over and over, the way they would hear them in any normal conversation, so I will try to limit myself. In fairness, however, it should be noted that the most utilitarian of words in the English language is also one of the most profane. The word fuck is simultaneously a noun (subjective and objective), a pronoun, a verb, a gerund, an infinitive, a participle, an adjective, a predicate, an adverb, an exclamation, and an interjection. And what other word can fulfill so many functions? To the semiliterate with few options in their vocabularic toolbox, fuck is a Swiss Army knife. And while I recognize that excessive use of profanity, like spelling out the name of your football team at the top of your lungs at a baseball game, is a sure sign of an uncluttered mind, it’s not unreasonable for one of modest intellectual means to make do with what one has. Why tax the brain for a two-dollar word when a five-cent word will do? I will admit that it’s a stupid man’s shorthand to say fuck or goddamn when a more thoughtful modifier might be preferred, but goddamn it, I was a fucking truck driver, okay?

Anyhow, so there I was at the other end of the world, in every sense of the term. I was driving a truck in Baghdad. How difficult could that be? Well, it turned out to be pretty difficult, 120 fucking degrees Fahrenheit aside, since no one can trust anyone there and you never know who’s glad to see you, who wants to kill you, or who is planning to take you hostage (and subsequently lop off your head). The mental toll was beyond considerable. Even with my new preternatural vocabulary, I am at a loss to adequately describe it. Let’s just say it was awful, really, really awful, and I was never not scared, or sick to my stomach, sweaty, smelly, and generally miserable. But there I was just the same.

You may be thinking, What a wonderful example of the spirit of America, this poor schmuck doing his part in the war against terror. Let’s not confuse love of country with love of income. Yeah, I’m proud to be an American, blah, blah, but I was in Iraq because that’s where the job was. Ideology is a boat on which I do not choose to sail. Ideologues on both sides are what make the world a far too interesting place. There is nothing quite as dangerous as someone bound and determined to do God’s work. The more determined he or she may be, the less of God I see. Assholes who blow themselves up and hundreds of innocent people along with them, and Bible-thumping hypocrites who trust no one but their own kind, are opposite sides of the same counterfeit coin and not people with whom I would want to share a beer. I was just a guy trying to make a living in the most dangerous hellhole on the face of the earth, that’s all.

Speaking of beer, you might correctly conclude that I was not much of a drinking buddy back there. Yet, there I was, one thankfully uneventful evening, as the old story goes, sharing some spew, I mean brew, at the local not quite green zone drinkery with my buddy and coworker Blic. You may wonder how my pal got the name Blic. Although the facts are somewhat hazy, I believe the answer lies in some sort of prank he and his mutually sloshed friends came up with in their youth, back in Pennsylvania somewhere. As he told the story, there was a street sign in his old neighborhood that said PUBLIC LIBRARY, and Blic and the gang thought it would be a sidesplitter for them to artfully modify said sign to read PUBIC LIBRARY. So old (or in this case, young) inebriated Blic starts painting over the said sign, but (he says) because he was so drunk (or, as I suspect, more like illiterate), Blic somehow manages to paint over the wrong letter, so it comes out looking like this: P BLIC LIBRARY. No, that makes no sense to me, either, but that’s his story. And really, who cares why his name’s Blic anyway? But I digress.

I had had a good day. Good days were rare—and strange—for me. At some point, you start to think things are going much too well. Something is bound to fuck this up. By something, I mean someone. By someone, I mean me.

"This is bullshit, man."

What’s bullshit, Blic, my man? Everything you say, or something you haven’t said yet?

"This whole war, this place, Iraq, man. It’s bullshit."

Dude, the war’s over. We’re nation building. It’s only been a year. We finish up our work here, we get the hell out. How much longer should that take? In the meantime, we get paid. The job sucks, so what’s the problem? Did you think we were going to Hawaii or something? We just do our job, make our money, and go home. It’s not the fucking army, man.

Well, fuck that, and fuck you.

Blic, you ever hear the phrase ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going’?

"Shit man, I’ll get going. I’ll get going the fuck home, is where I’ll get going. The going is tough, man. This whole shithole is tough. Why the fuck are we here, anyway?"

You and me? Because there’s a paycheck, dude. It’s not for the atmosphere, I can tell you that.

"No, not us, like you and me, I mean us, as in the United States us. The going is tough. Why don’t we just get the fuck going?"

Well, we have a job to do, right?

"You tell me our ‘job,’ man. Not our job; I mean our job."

Blic, my man, you are wasted and are speaking wasted, and I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about. You ever hear of rats deserting a sinking ship? You want us to be rats?

"Dude, listen to yourself. Okay, I’m shitfaced, but I can still spot the bullshit. The ship is sinking, dude. Sinking. Look, here’s the ship, see? It’s sinking. Here are the lifeboats. Here’s you. So, you gonna hit the lifeboat or stand there like a dumbass with your thumb up your butt? It’s sinking!"

A captain goes down with the ship.

Yeah, well, hate to break it to you, dude, but you ain’t no captain. You’re the powder monkey, dude. You think we’ll be out of here in six weeks? Six months? We’re never getting out of here. I should say you are never getting out of here. I’m getting out of here right now and going to sleep because I am tough and the tough get going. And on that note I bid you go fuck yourself, good buddy. And good night. Kiss my ass. I’ll see you later.

It occurred to me that the reason they say the good die young is because the young who have died weren’t around long enough to become bad. But whatever, there I was, on my own and as fermented as my drink, minding my own business, when an old Arab guy sidled up to me and started a conversation in mangled English, about something or another that frankly I wasn’t even taking in. Blah, blah, English, Arabic, Englishbic, Arabish, blah, blah. I wanted to shoo the guy away, but for all I knew, if I wasn’t nice to him he’d blow me up. So there I was, pretending to give a shit. He had a daughter he apparently wanted me to impregnate or something like that, whatever, and all I could think of was, Suppose his daughter looks like him. I’ll be better off humping a camel, no pun intended. So then, out of nowhere, with him seeing I was not horny enough to become his son-in-law, he asked me would I be interested in a little moneymaking proposition, something off the multibillion-dollar multinational corporate books. Drugs, I figured, or treason, or something incredibly dangerous that might reward me for my trouble with untold tens or maybe even hundreds of dollars. No thanks, Mr. Smelly Camel-Fucking Shithead Arab Man. But no, he insisted that this was on the up-and-up (what would you expect him to say?) and more of a mental puzzle than a physically taxing job. Hmm, anything not physically taxing interested me, even if I did think the guy was full of dromedary dung. All I had to do, he said, was meet him in some dark corner of a bombed-out slum probably full of al-Qaeda operatives and other decapitation-loving, American-hating rag heads. Gee, why didn’t you say so? I’m there. Did he think I was a complete moron? Well, yes, apparently he did, since he gave me directions to the locale of my anticipated execution. Being a clever sort, I said I’d see him soon, and with that (my ruse having worked), he left. I had about as much intention of meeting him as I had of knocking up his camel-faced daughter, but at least now I could finish whatever swill I was drinking in relative peace.

When the time of my scheduled rendezvous came and went and I was still in the same seat, in the same position, with the same excuse for alcohol in my sweaty palm (well, the same excuse for alcohol in a general sense, but not the same glass of alcohol; I had lost track of my consumption), who came wandering in but a winsome, very attractive, very young thing (probably not even half my age), who walked straight to the seat previously occupied by Smelly Arab Man. Why didn’t you meet my father as planned? she asked. Whoa, thought I, this excuse for alcohol must be working; this girl looks pretty good. When I failed to respond to her question, the pretty young thing took me by my shoulders, looked into my bloodshot eyes, and said again, Why didn’t you meet my father as planned? I drunkenly suggested that I must have lost track of the time.

Oh, look at the time. It’s late. Silly me, I’ll just go now.

Too late, she said. He’s dead (which pretty much confirmed my rationale for not going in the first place).

Not so drunk that I couldn’t see a way to take advantage of a grieving orphan more than half my age, I professed shock and conveyed my sincere condolences. How did it happen? I feigned concern.

She looked me right in the eye (which, her having now done that twice in the space of a few sentences, was making me quite uncomfortable) and said (and I leave a space here for emphasis and dramatic foreboding), He was overcome by the power of the Apple.

Well, what exactly would be the appropriate response to that? I stared at her stupidly, with my best Homer Simpson expression. But wait a minute. This poor, newly minted orphan was surely more than half my age, and I was, after all, a drunken bum angling to get into her pants (or whatever Arab women wear), so I maintained my composure and said, I don’t understand. Well, duh.

That, she said, was why her father had wanted to speak with me in private. He could see that I was a brave man of great sensitivity and native good judgment who would understand the significance of the Apple and why Its secret must be protected at all costs. That was why he died.

Hold it, my drunken native good judgment said to my brave and sensitive drunken dick. If the secret of this apple or whatever it was had to be preserved at all costs (the list of costs apparently including death), what was dear old dead daddy thinking, wandering up to a total stranger with intent to spill the beans? Dad obviously must have blabbed to sexy daughter too, as she seemed to have a pretty good idea what was going on.

Can you meet me later, she asked, after I make the necessary arrangements with regard to my father?

Sure, I said. My place or yours? Fortunately, not being a resident of America the beautiful, she was unfamiliar with that hoary come-on and did not take offense.

Meet me where my father had previously arranged to meet you, in an hour’s time, and this time please show up, she said. And don’t be late.

Okay, said I, the bombed-out slum full of al-Qaeda operatives and other decapitation-loving, American-hating rag heads no longer sounding as foreboding as before. You can count on me. The stupid fuck me. How many unhappy endings begin with a good-looking orphan more than half the pervert/protagonist’s age asking him to do something he wouldn’t do for her smelly dead father? Well, add one more unhappy ending to that list.

4

MY HEAD, MY HEAD. WOULD THAT I COULD CUT OFF MY HEAD. THE throbbing would not stop. My eyes were rimmed with red tears, and my ears were caked brown. Where was I? Oh yeah, I was drunk. I thought about going back to my room to freshen up (i.e., throw up), but I decided the pretty young orphan might not be used to a guy who smelled good, so I finished my umpteenth glass of painkiller instead and stumbled out to al-Qaedaville. As I suspected, the rendezvous point was dark and dusty and full of foreboding. And there I was, in the dark dusty atrocious excuse for an alliterative analogy, when I saw the pretty young orphan standing in a doorway. I’d like to say she was beckoning me from the doorway, but all she was doing was standing there. It would have been