Adam & Eve (25 page)

When Adam could no longer think, his farm-boy body knew how to continue—to work when work was impossible. His eyes focused on his long white toes bracing against the bark. He ignored his trembling thighs. If he fell, then he would try to fly. His body would do that for him. Then he saw a woman, surely Eve, far below looking up at him. Her face was the pale, full moon. She had come down from the sheltering rocks to the forest to help him. His helpmeet.

W
E’LL TAKE CARE
of him here,” I said. “No need to move him again.”

My eyes went to the large, useful knife in the soldier’s scabbard. “Can you build a shelter here?” I read his name on his shirt: “F. Riley.”

“First a splint for his foot,” Adam said.

We both took inventory of what we had acquired: yards and yards of orange fabric, cords, a knife, and a badly injured soldier. I leaned forward and very gently touched the askew jaw. “Dislocated,” I said. “Likely broken, too.”

“First we pop it back in place,” Adam answered. “Then we try to squeeze closed any fractures and bind his jaw shut.” Adam sat on the ground and took Riley’s head between his spread legs in order to begin the work.

Placing his thumbs behind the corners of the lower jaw, Adam pushed down and forward. “Sorry,” he said as he then pushed laterally. Riley’s eyes flew open in the horror of pain, then rolled back into his head as he passed into unconsciousness. I remembered my own pain when I had arrived in this place.

“Cut strips, several inches wide,” Adam instructed, “long as your arm and half again.”

With the tips of his fingers, Adam felt the jawbone for fractures and shoved the fragments toward what seemed to promise a smooth contour. I
could sense Adam’s immense fatigue like an aroma, but his hands were deft and sure. His sweat fell like beads and then splattered onto Riley’s blanched face. Riley’s eyes were closed. Adam and I passed orange strips under the jaw and tied their ends over the top of Riley’s head.

“He has red hair,” I said. I passed my hand over the ends of the red stubble.

Adam glanced at me curiously, then looked more closely at the face of the unconscious man.

The pilot breathed evenly.

“Now his foot,” Adam said quietly, and I rose to find long sticks for splints. Then we cut and tore more strips from the chute to pad the splints before binding them to Riley’s foot. Throughout our work, F. Riley remained unconscious. We said very little, and we avoided each other’s eyes until the last binding knot was tied.

“The primal work has come to us,” I remarked.

“Primal?” Now he looked into my eyes as though to clear his own confusion.

“The work of taking care of one another.”

For a moment Adam looked at me as though he were well. “Didn’t I take care of you, Lucy?”

I thought of our night under the rock shelter. I had wanted him. In that new location, enclosed in rock behind a curtain of rain, in his castle, I could not deny to myself that I had wanted him. I extended my hand to Adam, and he took it. There was nothing particular about the gesture, but it was the beginning of our intimacy, only now, because Riley was with us, we had lost both simplicity and privacy.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, you took splendid care of me when I needed it most. But … but—” I hesitated.

“But what?” He watched me, how I searched for words that might be true, clear, and significant.

“What I said was, ‘The primal work has come
to us
.’ To us, together, Adam. For us to do. For us to take care of somebody besides ourselves.”

When we finished binding up the injuries of the pilot, Adam turned his attention to our need for shelter. As he went away to cut saplings, I admired his straight, strong back. Because of the rain, the grass beyond the redwood groves had turned a deeper, brighter green. The sunshine blessed the conjunction of flesh and verdure.

Over the framework of sticks for our lean-to, we layered elephant-ear leaves and the broad leaves of banana trees to ward off hard-pelting rain when it would come. The shelter would need sides, too. From the distance, we heard growling, lions but not lions—thunder. Perhaps the interlacing redwood branches high above would sieve the raindrops and diffuse them into mere mist.

In his sleep, F. Riley moved his hand to grasp his dog tags. I closed my own hand around Thom’s memory stick. My knuckles bumped against one of my breasts. I had almost forgotten the nakedness of my breasts and the titanium-clad pendant that hung between them.

“You’ll be all right,” I crooned to Riley, but nothing in his face changed.

Still and hot, the perfumed air among the tall trees made breathing difficult. Sometimes I stirred the air above F. Riley’s nose by waving my hand like a fan. While Adam came and went, bringing the materials for the lean-to, I whispered encouragement to Riley.

I
N HIS
L
ONDON
apartment on Baker Street, Gabriel was waiting for a visit. He knew the arrival of his guest was imminent. Just now, looking through one of his curved windows down into the street, he saw the black-clad emissary of Perpetuity.

Almost no one in London wore black anymore. The color was as passé as New York City. When the dollar came in at four-to-one for the pound, everyone in London dressed in white. Clothes in Paris reverted to a pleasing medley of colors—a vivid Postimpressionist palette. But here was a blackbird—conspicuous, dignified, self-righteous.

A well of darkness, Gabriel thought, ready to absorb all light that comes to him. For a moment he thought of the dark hole to the interior of a box designed to illustrate black box radiation to beginning physics students.

Against the background of the upright black garb moving over the walkway below, Gabriel immediately spotted a white slip of paper. The bearer held it in one hand, and the paper fluttered like a small flag. With his other hand the rabbi adjusted his pince-nez to better view what was written on his flag—without doubt an address! This address, Gabriel thought. He sighed.

The rabbi’s footfall on the staircase was as light as a dancer’s. He moved
as though he enjoyed climbing stairs—who knew what was at the top? Gabriel wondered if the man’s thoughts moved from one to another with as much nimbleness as his feet. Anticipating a knock at the door, Gabriel moved as quickly as he could across the worn carpet. The jute threads were visible in some areas. He took care to make no noise at all and swung open the door.

“Professor Plum, I believe. I am Rabbi Esau ben Ezra. I have read your latest articles with great interest.”

“Then you must be a physicist as well as a man of the cloth. No other sane person would have done so. Please come in.” Did the man have news of Lucy? Gabriel decided to prolong the pretense that his visitor was a colleague in physics. “Your specialty?”

“Many body calculations employing domain decomposition.”

Though the knowledgeable answer startled Gabriel, he pushed the game a step further. “To business, then. Come in. Please sit.” Gabriel closed the door to the hallway. “I suppose you come to inform me the matrices must be positive-definite and self-adjoint. I have already thought as much.”

“Domain decomposition—yes.” The rabbi slowly removed his pince-nez and made it disappear within some placket of his robe. He rubbed his eyes, retained his hat. “Yes. But we are not speaking of quite the same domain. Mine is not material.”

“Exactly the problem with all mathematics, is it not? My reason for being a physicist, instead of a pure mathematician. I prefer my math, no matter how subtle, to refer to physical realities, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Explain yourself.” Gabriel felt as though he were going mad. He was greatly tempted to begin to sing “Jerusalem, the Golden.” Free association was running out of control. Hamlet had pretended madness as a prelude to real madness. Gabriel took a deep breath to steady himself and then merely said, “What about domain decomposition?”

“I was not referring to Professor Bernard Belecki’s mathematical exploration, which he names ‘domain decomposition.’ No. I refer to the domain of the spiritual, which I fear may be about to undergo a certain amount of decomposition. I speak of dogma—Jewish dogma fundamental to the faith, to be exact.”

“Your exactness lacks precision, my friend.”

“Very well—the dogma of Jew, Christian, and Muslim, fundamentally speaking. I’m afraid I have rather bad news and need to enlist your services. Your concern is the key to the future, the flash drive. My chief interest is in the past. Perpetuity has an interest in both.”

Fear for Lucy swept over Gabriel. From Pierre Saad’s phone call, Gabriel knew that she not only wore Thom’s flash drive but also carried a manuscript that might well undercut Genesis as being literally true. He had been expecting a visitor from Perpetuity, and yet he had hoped not to be so firmly linked to the group.

“But do you really know physics,” Gabriel asked the rabbi, “or has some scientist read my article and written you a script?”

“Science was an interest, and so of course I have some skills, still, in math.”

“What’s gone wrong? Still no flash drive?”

“The Arab who was commissioned to retrieve the flash drive has committed suicide.”

“Where?”

“In Amsterdam, as it happens.”

“How?”

“He plunged from a high window on Prince Street. Familiar location?”

“To be sure.”

For a moment the conversation rested. Gabriel stared at the rabbi, who took an inventory of the furnishings of Gabriel’s room. Finally the rabbi said, “Isn’t it all rather Sherlockian, these digs? A Persian slipper on the mantel? Surely you don’t smoke shag. The Arab had some stomach for violence, but not enough.”

With as much regret as irony, Gabriel asked, “Then he dropped the piano on Thom, didn’t he?”

“Well, he assisted. But he refused to go after Mrs. Bergmann. First he dallied—we waited patiently for the war to quiet, or at least for a lull. But the battery embedded in the case—”

“The case?” Gabriel asked. “The titanium case for the flash drive?”

“No. The French horn case. You don’t seem to understand.”

Gabriel pushed the tips of his fingers together and said, “I believe I do see. Perpetuity is two-pronged.”

“God has condensed our mission. In one person, our two objectives are united.”

“Mrs. Bergmann disappeared.”

“You, Professor Plum, failed to relieve her of the flash drive, though you were her companion in Egypt.”

“You were speaking of a battery in a case.”

“The Genesis codex—”

“I know of the existence of the codex—”

“When Pierre Saad had a French horn case prepared for transporting the codex, we had a global positioning device placed in the case. Its battery has begun to weaken. The Arab should have secured both the codex and the flash drive; he failed. One story is, he committed suicide; another is that he was murdered. In any case, he’s out of the picture. Now you must try again to retrieve the flash drive, which interests you, and the codex, which should interest you but apparently does not. I believe you fly rather well. Airplanes.”