Adam & Eve (17 page)

“How does my back look these days?”

“Better.”

“How are you feeling, Adam?”

“Happy.”

I hesitated and then asked, “How happy?”

“More content than joyful,” he answered promptly. “When God created the animals, he made them in pairs—male and female. When Noah took them into the ark, they marched two by two.”

“What do you think of couples of the same sex?” I asked boldly. I wanted to knock him off his biblical pins; I wanted to make him acknowledge the con-temporary
world. In the pause before his reply, I listened to locusts and tree frogs. They could have been in Memphis, Tennessee.

“That’s all right with me,” he answered. “I can understand that.”

He spoke in a steady—no, studied—voice, and I wondered about his past, the past of his hauntingly beautiful body. Surely both men and women would have been drawn to him, would have wanted him, or wanted to be him.

“Adam, I can picture the animals going into a wooden boat, but I need to tell you, I don’t believe that story. Not in any literal way.”

He said nothing.

A streak appeared in the dark sky, and I exclaimed, “Look! A shooting star.”

“No,” he said. “That’s a fighter jet going down.”

I felt foolish, felt the blush of embarrassment at my sentimental error, but knew that even though he glanced at me sharply, the fire glow would mask my blush. If he was the child capable of naive belief, I was the child who had to be right.

To console myself, I imagined the two halves of his brain like two gray elephants side by side—one a creature of ancient mythology, the other a practical, sure-footed beast wise in the ways of the world he inhabited.

“I’ve set the table,” he added. “Did you notice?”

I looked at one large, flat stone, almost covered by a single strongly ribbed leaf and two small stones draped with plate-sized leaves.

“This one is the cook table,” he said. “I’ll crack off the clay, then you can pass me your leaf, and I’ll serve you.”

He proceeded to carry out the acts he had previewed.

“Tomorrow I’ll look for some wild vegetables,” he said cheerfully.

“When I was walking in, I didn’t see any vegetables.”

“‘Seek and ye shall find,’” he quoted.

“If I were you, I’d look in that area where there’s a cultivated rose garden. Probably some farmer, before he deserted this place, planted a vegetable garden. In straight rows, with stakes for the tomatoes.”

“This is a strange place,” Adam said.

“It’s a place on earth like any other place,” I asserted. I picked up a shred
of the white meat of the fish. Never had I tasted anything so fine. Better than ambrosia, I thought.

“Like any other,” he repeated. “Is it?” When I did not reply—I was as busy as a monkey using both hands to pick up morsels of food, sliding delicate meat from needlelike bones—he added, “It’s good to be able to take care of somebody.”

“I’m not that sort of woman,” I said. “I don’t want a man to take care of me. I take care of myself.”

In the weeks that followed, delusion and daze haunted my mind. I seemed always to be awakening, and always to be wondering if what I remembered was a dream or reality. Wonder seemed the best state of mind. It was less irritating than certainty, less taxing than the process of deciding—anything.

I knew I was growing stronger.

The morning after the first fish, I awoke to see a broken basket filled with squash—long striped green zucchini squash and yellow bulbous goose-necked squash. Vegetables. They were decorated with a gorgeous star-shaped golden yellow squash blossom of bodacious size and two not-quite-open red roses, big as fists.

“You were right,” he said. “Near the rose garden, there was a rectangle of vegetable garden. And an abandoned basket.”

He was sitting beside the basket but a short distance away, in the attitude I had assumed the night before—on his buttocks, his knees cocked and his hands clasped around his knees. I could not remember when I had left that posture. I had sat sideways, with my legs crossed to eat, but then—I must have slumped over. He must have carried me to my bed.

“We need something like a skillet,” I said. “So we can sauté things.” The squash bodies looked clean and healthy.

“I could take a piece of metal from the plane,” he said.

I thought of the painted fabric wings, the struts over which the cloth was stretched.

“The fuselage was metal,” I said as much to myself as to him.

“Yes. I could wrench out a flat piece, batter up its edges for a skillet.”

“‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God,’” I quoted.

“John Donne,” he answered, and murmured in an echo, “‘Batter my heart.’ That poem used to puzzle me when I was a freshman in college. Now I understand. John Donne meant he was willing to learn from God, even if he had to suffer to learn.”

He stood up—a gesture that usually meant conversation was over, and he was off on some errand.

“I never understood the concept of the Trinity,” I said petulantly. “‘Three-person’d God’? What sense does that make? If there’s a guy on the cross and another one up in the sky, and the first one’s talking to the second one, that’s two gods. And then the bird—that’s a third.”

Adam just stared at me.

“Christians don’t really believe in one God,” I went on. “The Muslims do, but the Christians don’t. The Muslims say ‘There is no God but God,’ and they say Muhammad is his prophet—only his prophet.” I stopped, then added, “Not his only prophet.”

“The Holy Trinity is like an egg,” Adam answered, but I saw he was shocked and amused at my tirade. “An egg has three parts—the yolk, the white, and the shell—but it’s just one egg.”

“God is not a chicken egg,” I snorted with laughter.

“But He resembles a chicken egg,” Adam calmly suggested.

I felt I was watching him make what he considered to be a daring move on the chessboard of the conversation. “Not literally,” he added.

“Not literally!” I exploded. “I can’t believe you’re saying ‘not literally.’ Who do you think you are? Adam!—that’s who you think you are! Adam! And you think I’m Eve.”

“I’m going,” he said. “I’ve got to go now.”

“You don’t want to face the truth,” I said.

“The truth?” Now he was amused.
“Your
truth.”

“Then why do you have to go right now, at a crucial point in our discussion?” I suddenly hated myself for sounding as bossy and rude as a preteen girl. He was corrupting me. He was robbing me of my maturity. Over and over, he was making me feel like a kid. A spoiled-rotten kid.

“I want to take some of the fire to the overhang now and keep it there,” he explained. “Like putting money in the bank.”

“If it rains? If the wind blows it out?” I asked. “Why not just start another fire?”

“I … I … I …” Now he was stammering for real. Suddenly confessional. “I destroyed the mirror. I drowned it in the ocean last night.” He bent, picked up a stick of fire, and began to walk away.

“Where did you go to college?” I yelled.

“Boise State,” he answered.

“For how long?” Something just told me to ask that question, to get the dates, the facts.

“I dropped out after my freshman year.” He was walking so fast, his gait seemed more like a running walk, and then he broke into a slow run—leaving me—and then a sprint.

“It figures,” I muttered to myself. He was too erratic for rational inquiry.
Eccentric
—that was the word I wanted to describe him.
Off-center.

Peevish
—that was the word I next applied, to myself.

“What wood burns best?” I asked him when he returned.

I was glad to see him returning—no doubt about that, I admitted to myself. The way he walked, the way he moved across the grass, made me think of some animal, perhaps an antelope, but something more sturdy—an eland perhaps, with an amazing confidence of straight long horns, swept backward like antennae.

“Pine,” he answered, “to get a fire started. In Idaho it would be ponderosa pine. Because it’s full of sap. Then hardwood—oak, or maybe maple or elm.”

“Are they all here?”

“Everything’s here,” he answered. “That ever was or ever is to be. ‘God in three persons’”—he suddenly sang the dying-fall chant of the doxology in a deep and resonant voice as though he could fill a cathedral. “‘God in three persons, Blessed Trinity.’”

I was speechless. Yes, I told myself and swallowed, he’s obsessive. But I looked at him then with the most friendly and normal of expressions.

“Everything’s here and more,” he went on in a quiet voice, matter-of-fact, explanatory.

“But, Adam,” I said, “how can you say everything
and more?
Everything is
everything.
You can’t have
more
than everything. You don’t use language right.”

“Words disappear in the air,” he explained. “Words are volatile. That’s their essence. Who can say how they bubble up, how they break free and disappear?”

I started to counter, Not if you write them down. Not if you put them on a disk and project them on the ceiling. Not if they’re full of love. And meaning. But my words seemed less true than his.

“Scientists say,” I said carefully, “that nothing escapes from a black hole. Not even information. Not light. But I never understood how they could speak of
information
in that context.”

When he said nothing but continued to present his friendly, handsome face, I asked him if he thought God could be a black hole.

He answered with his body. He suddenly lay down, his back on the grass, his legs spread, his arms spread wide open and then lifted openly toward the sky. “‘Maker of Heaven and Earth,’” he quoted again from Christian creed. His penis lolled to one side. He had forgotten his penis, his nakedness, again.

Just a little, I envied him. I looked away. I lifted my eyes to the clouds.
They
were ethereal enough for me. For a while Einstein had believed in the ether, and then he had recanted and called the “cosmological constant” the biggest blunder of his life, Thom had explained to me, but then hadn’t Einstein recanted again? To Thom’s great interest, a woman in Kentucky had theorized that the WIMP—weakly interactive massive particle—constituted dark matter.

Adam’s lifted arms were rounded, curved like the sides of an egg. He wanted to embrace the elliptical planetary orbits, no, the universe beyond the clouds. The open space between his hands—that opening was to let it all in. He wanted to cradle the universe.

He was crazy, but he was happy. That was not true of most of the mental patients I had known. Their delusions were like demons. They were tortured. They lived in an agony of paranoia and pain, guilt and disappointment, the elusiveness of identity, the impossibility of certitude, fear of whatever was next. I supposed Adam might be termed “a wise fool for God.” Somewhere I’d
heard such a phrase. But Adam did not seem wise in his innocence or foolish in his practicality.

“Why are you so happy?” I asked him.

He turned his face to look at me, pressed his cheek into the grass to feel the flank of earth. “Because you’re here.”

I felt my own head droop with sadness.

Finally I answered, lifting my head. “I don’t know what to say to you.”

“There’s no need,” he answered gently.

His truthfulness seemed to bathe me. His words were a trinity of raindrops catching sunlight:
Because you’re here.
Had anyone ever wanted to hear more? Or less.

Here.
You’re here.
You’re
here. I’m happy to be here
because you’re here.

“But there’s something I need to say to you,” he went on. “I want you to feel safe.” He sat up in the grass, his body as patient as a lion’s. “You never have any need to fear me.” He looked down at his clasped hands, their idle nakedness, and then back to me as though suddenly through a veil. “I’m a little off. You know that. I know that, too. But I have never been violent. I will never force myself upon you in any way.”

Part of me protested: Don’t say that. That should never even have to be said between a man and a woman. You offend me by saying that. You live in a bad myth, the bad old myth between men and women—that I am weak and you are strong. But I said nothing. Instead I tried to make myself forgive him for his presumption, for cloaking his eyes behind a veil of confusion.

“We live in a world where women can arm themselves,” I answered, in spite of myself. But to myself I acknowledged,
I am weak, I can barely walk. And he is strange. An Adonis. And he could rape me.

“Not here,” he said. “No guns in Eden.”

He sat up straighter, cross-legged, his genitals resting in the grass, the rounded end of his penis touching the bent blades of grass. He reached out one arm to me. “I will never force you. But I will want to marry you till the day I die.”

The words rang through my body. It was a promise that I knew I would never forget. For a moment not only his words but the entire scene evanesced.
Only a blank of future hung in front of me. I curled my bare toes downward and made them dive rootlike toward the soil. I would ground myself in the solid reality under my feet, not in some clutching after him.

In my stubbornness, I whispered, “What is my name?”

He didn’t hesitate. Undaunted in his confidence, sitting under his blue-black hair, on the grass, sunshine like a cape on his shoulders, he smiled and simply said, “You. I mean you.”