Adam & Eve (24 page)

“Northern Kentucky. You can fly right into the Cincinnati, Ohio, airport.” The man’s voice began to relax into a drawl. “But the museum is in Kentucky. From lots of places in Europe, you can fly right into Cincy. Be at the museum in less than an hour after touchdown, you got anything to sell. I don’t represent the museum. I’m a broker. An idea broker. We could go straight to Cincy, bypass New York City entirely.”

“I’m sorry,” Pierre had answered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You sure ‘bout that, buddy?”

Pierre said nothing.

The visitor stood up. With one hand he patted the discreet silver buckle of his belt. With the other hand, he pinched the top of the crease in his pant leg to straighten it.

As a screen for his activities, Pierre thought of the idea of hosting a symposium of scientists to honor the memory of Thom Bergmann, the astrophysicist. Before the scientists convened, Pierre knew the alabaster egg must be replaced as the container for the codex. He had a new receptacle prepared by a man who fashioned special cases for delicate electronic devices and expensive musical instruments.
Not really for a French horn,
Arielle had explained to the clerk,
but for a small stack of papers of these dimensions.
Before the symposium commenced, she had presented the order.

But here was Pierre’s daughter standing in the library, predicting Lucy would change their lives. Yet he had no news of the American widow to give his daughter.

“Mrs. Bergmann should have been here long ago,” Arielle told her father.

“Of course. I tried her telephone, called the hospital where she worked in New York, sent her e-mails.”

“Who else knows her?” Arielle asked. “How can we inquire?”

“I’ll call her old friend, her husband’s friend. The British physicist. Gabriel Plum.”

There had been an air about Gabriel Plum, his cocksureness, that made Pierre wonder if he had slept with Lucy Bergmann. But perhaps not. In her eyes, there was something newly virginal. Pierre would have to confide to Gabriel that Lucy had agreed to smuggle an ancient manuscript out of Egypt, but Pierre doubted the ethics of that would matter to Professor Plum.

“Do you trust him?” Arielle asked.

Pierre saw a shadow pass over his daughter’s lovely, expressive face.

“No choice.”

W
HEN THE SKY
screamed with twining airplanes and the air exploded, Adam watched a parachute unfurl in rich orange, the signal of danger and caution. Yet the parachute swelled open with a color joyful as a zinnia, quite the opposite of that oddly shaped black egg the bird plane had erroneously laid upon the air.

Appended from the chute was surely a man, a brother, a soldier. On his own cheeks Adam felt the cold air rushing like two adzes made of ice past the soldier’s cheekbones. How had Adam himself come to this world? The descent of Adam, having been thrown from the scalding back of a truck, was shorter.

Who was coming? He stared and waited.

If the chute dropped plumb, it would land to the left of the tall trees, and if it descended in a drifting course, as surely it would, then it would settle like an orange drape among the high spires of the redwoods. And there the paratrooper would hang.

His body broken? His blood shed?

Adam glanced down at his naked feet, their clean, bare whiteness, and knew that they would take him where he needed to go.
How beautiful are the feet of them who preach the gospel of Peace.
If not a well-winged angel, then let him be mountain goat and more, sure-footed and practical.

Adam thought of his own five younger brothers, and he remembered the five not-brothers, Arab soldiers, God’s avenging angels, the Eumenides of Greek mythology, the five young men in the truck who had savaged his body and left him, dumped out, like a dung pie in the road left to bake in the sun.

But the monkey-god came, the hominoid or little homunculus had come to Adam. At first he had thought the creature was stuffing a gag into his mouth, but no, it was a juicy wad, a handful of fruit, wedges of tangerine, pomegranate seeds slimy as the jeweled sperm from a frog, oval grapes, and then the tapered end of a soft banana. The Samaritan monkey had fed him, had pulled and boosted him upright, had placed a skinny arm of surprising strength around his back and made him walk into the shade.

Having reached the bottom of the path from the rock shelter, Adam paused to enter the room of his mind that was not memory but the dwelling place of now, the place-time for planning and thinking. Here a forest of scrubby pines, there he would run through the aspens, green and flickering in sunlight, and he would come to the grasses, short and thick, dear cushions for his feet. Quickly, quickly he would run past the staked tomatoes and the rose garden with its tempting silvery gazing ball, past the twin pear trees eternally afluff with blossoms and attendant bees, because this was Eden—half-created, half-perceived, as Wordsworth said of all of nature.

Running, not just thinking of running, Adam passed through oaks—he loved those boldly, irregularly lobed leaves—and past the dogwoods, here as yet uncursed or dwarfed because their wood would form the tree whereon Christ died. Not the sacrificial future, now, this, he panted as he ran, was the beginning, the Genesis.

Here, in the beginning, God placed humans, a man and a woman whose nature it was to help each other because they were made mortal. Magnolias. The air was redolent from the perfume of their wide-open white blossoms, big as cereal bowls.

Suddenly Adam tripped in a tangle of ivy vines. He should have gone around. He didn’t fall, but the tough vine cut the flesh on top of his foot. Snared, he looked up and saw the redwoods, their height stretching sunward. Near the pinnacle of the tallest tree wavered the orange parachute, its lines terminating some twenty feet lower in the hanging man. He was suspended
not over empty space, but above a branch that stretched flat as a floor only a yard or so below his feet. A soldier, yes. High above, dangling in the treetops. Dressed in desert camouflage, an American. Adam thanked God, who had yanked up double handfuls of redwoods and transplanted them to Eden.

The soldier’s eyes were closed, his head drooped, his jaw hung askew as though it were badly broken. He was missing one boot, and the ankle was turned in awkwardly. A boot was still laced onto the other foot. His arms swayed loosely from his shoulders, and for a terrible moment, Adam thought perhaps the soldier’s neck as well as his jaw had been broken. Then the booted foot moved. Purposefully, the hanging man toed the air to search for a firm place to stand. He could not quite reach the flat evergreen limb below. As his eyes opened, his face ignited with terror.

Adam waved both arms and shouted, “I’m an American.”

The words seemed very small shouted upward in the vast, sunlit air. He watched the soldier locate the origin of the voice, the amazement cover his face. Very slowly the soldier lifted one hand and carefully made one fan-shaped pass displaying his open palm. A wave of recognition. Then faint, desperate, urgent gurglings issued from his throat.

“I hear you, man,” Adam shouted. “Don’t try to talk!”

Adam would ascend. But how? When he entered the trees and stood among the shadows, the girth of their trunks asserted imperial stability and their soaring height signaled majesty. Would not any wanderer who entered here want to worship? Adam resisted the impulse to fall to his knees. The gigantic presences grew in loose family circles, as though each group embraced a room-size space where perhaps an ancient parent tree had stood. As quietly as he could, Adam passed from one grove to another, a brown church of many chambers. Finally he stood still and listened. The silence seemed imbued with their odor—not quite cedar, not quite pine, but aromatic and subduing. He stood in the center of the irregular circle rising around him. The towering trunks offered a conduit almost to the infinite. Skyscrapers, the trunks merged in a ceiling of greenery.

No tree trunk offered the slightest foothold, but only a sheer, unbranched and unknobbed verticality for a height of three stories and sometimes much
more. Which tree to climb? And how? He passed from grove to grove looking up. Finally the canopy allowed a glimpse of orange parachute.

He called upward. “Man?” and again, “Hey, man?” but there was no reply. Perhaps the soldier had lapsed into unconsciousness from pain. First Adam must gain the canopy, then cross from tree to tree.

The light came slanting between the strong, vertical trunks, and then Adam realized that one of the trunks also slanted. A tree had fallen, a broad-trunked grandfather, but it had been caught and lodged among the trunks of the others. It provided an avenue of access,
a highway for the Lord.
Adam could walk or crawl along the incline up to the height where interlacing branches of upright trees would become his ladder.

Without hesitation, he began to walk up the fibrous bark.
I know that my Redeemer liveth.
Without formulating any additional plan, Adam trusted his strong, self-preserving body to find a way.

Near the top of the ramp, Adam felt the temptation of flight, simply to launch himself into the deliciousness of sky, but then he glanced down at his feet, at the small red cut across the top of his foot, and he remembered the reality of his body.
Feet and hands; no wings,
he told himself, and laughed at the solid simplicity of the idea. Truth had never seemed so simple or so real.

And suddenly there was the gentle fluttering sound and the swaying orange of the parachute, more vibrant in color than the petal of an enormous tiger lily.

And there high above the earth hung the man in his harness, his eyes closed, his lower jaw partly turned athwart the bottom of his face. “F. Riley” was stenciled across his shirt pocket.

“Friend,” Adam said softly, “I’ve come to get you.”

The man opened his eyes.

“Riley,” Adam said, “I’m going to take you down on my back, fireman’s carry, but first I have to cut you loose and tie you to me.”

Riley merely stared, dazed beyond thought. Adam climbed the limbs till he moved nearer to the soldier. It was amazing how close together they were in
the tops of the redwoods, high above the ground but speaking as they might had they met below—two men high as angels, one harnessed, suspended in a mottled uniform of desert camouflage, the other naked, standing at ease on the limb just below, speaking conversationally.

“Or I can make a sling out of the parachute, lower you that way. That sound better to you?” Adam moved so near to Riley, he could have reached out and touched him.

Ever so slightly, Riley nodded yes, or Adam thought he did.

Adam said these things because they were pictures of possibility in his mind. He had no idea how he would implement either idea. Looking at the cords of the chute, he pictured himself gnawing fruitlessly, gnawing on and on, and unable to sever the cords, when without even thinking he heard himself saying, “You have a knife, don’t you?” and his hand reached toward the scabbard at Riley’s belt.

Before Adam could touch its hilt, he felt Riley’s hand close slowly and warmly over the back of his own hand. He stopped. Riley squeezed, warm and warmer, tender, thankful. And once again the squeeze like a pulse, thanking, thanking.

“That’s all right,” Adam murmured. “Glad to be of help.”

To cut off a section of the collapsed orange fabric, Adam climbed higher. With the cloth bunched in his hand, he came lower again and spread the fabric out as though on a bed below Riley’s feet, one bare and already swelling, one booted. While he prepared to cut Riley free, Adam held the soldier around the waist with one arm, but he needed both hands for cutting. He would have to let Riley partly slide, partly fall onto the fabric. Then he would use the cloth like a sling and make a web of the cords so he could lower the man to the place where the fallen tree slanted among the stalwarts.

Riley was sometimes conscious, but mostly he was not. Adam had to climb up and down, back and forth, his body working like a shuttle of logic, so that he could sequence himself to do the work of three or four. Most of the chute he left caught high in the tree.

Once Adam slipped and slid down till his foot found an intersection of branch and trunk. Once, he glanced down, and the world spun below him on the axis of the trunk to which he clung. Trembling all over, he closed his eyes and held on tightly till the tremor subsided.
Learn,
he whispered to himself,
be more careful.
There would be no more looking down. Before he trussed Riley up in the sling, Adam replaced Riley’s knife in its scabbard. By degrees, tying, untying, retying the cords, Adam lowered the soldier to the inclined tree.

While he balanced carefully, his bare feet moving cautiously down the long ramp of the trunk, he carried Riley like a baby swaddled in bright puffs of drooping parachute. He envisioned Jesus in a nimbus of light walking down from heaven to earth, to help mankind.
Da, da, da:
that was the lesson of Eliot’s
Waste Land. Give, control, sympathize.
Adam could give help, if not alms, here in the wilderness. He could control his lust. He could sympathize with the inner life of others—their fear and pride. His consciousness swooned at the glory of fulfillment, with the honor of becoming himself.