Adam & Eve (28 page)

“What was the picture?” I asked Riley, brother of many sisters. “The image on the canvas?”

“It was a big jar. Kind of a fountain.”

At once I vividly recalled how I had admired the fountain at Nag Hammadi. The dazzling sunlight and the heat. In a distant life, I had stood in front of a museum dedicated to texts found in a jar on the slopes of Nag Hammadi in 1945.

“When the plane came down,” I said slowly, gathering the attention of both Adam and Riley before I went on, “I was transporting some ancient texts. For friends.” I envisioned myself following Arielle, wearing sunglasses, through the streets of the little town, and my hurrying to catch up whenever she disappeared around a corner. I envisioned Arielle’s father, in the white room beyond the pit of baby crocodiles, the man sitting at the rough table, a crutch leaning nearby, the Bible open before him on the table. His tawny lion eyes gaze at me.

“The texts I carried—I was smuggling them, really—were housed in a reinforced case, like a French horn case. Before I crashed, I opened the plane door and threw out the case. If you see something like that—it might have broken open when it hit—let me know. It might have caught in a tree, or even landed in the water.” I thought of the river, though I had never considered that possibility before. There had been so much land beneath me, an endless green carpet, trees, grassland. And then the sparkling ocean, or something like an ocean. “It’s precious. What’s inside. Probably irreplaceable.” My sentences had become staccato, like Riley’s when his jaw was bound and he could say only a fraction of what was in his mind.

“Why are you wearing a flash drive?” Riley asked.

“A memory stick. It belonged to my husband.” It represents his mind, I thought but did not say.

I sighed and looked up and around at the sheltering overhang and the rock walls on three sides that held the three of us.
Us
used to be Thom and me. Now he had been replaced with the two of them. Only I was the same. Now
us
was Adam and Riley and me. No one asked me questions about my husband. Not even his name.

I wanted to say, “My husband was the first person on Earth to discover the location of extraterrestrial life.” For a moment, I burned with the desire to emblazon Thom’s name on history. But this was Eden, and we were all caught in its web of non-time. History was not just insignificant but irrelevant. What mattered was
here
and
now.

I had spent the day bringing armloads of ferns to the cave so that each of us would have a fresh, soft bed, piled nearly a foot high. There would be no
need for a large fire tonight. I placed my bed in the middle, as far back in the crescent-shaped room as possible, and each of theirs as far away on both sides, as near the tips of the crescent’s bow, as I could make them. I had some idea of providing private space after our cramped quarters in the lean-to. Having had our fill of slow chatting and unasked questions, we retired to our pallets.

I heard the tapped placing of the tip of Riley’s crutch—wood on stone—as he moved to the perimeter. When Adam put his bare knee in the midst of his ferns, they made a slight creaking. I heard him settle his body and knew he was lying on his back, as he always did, though later he would be rolling around first to one side, then to another. In the lean-to, he had rotated in place, on the other side of Riley.

Hesitating, I stood at the side of my pallet, looking outward. Such a sense of space in our cavity—the ceiling high above us, the front of the shelter entirely open to the night and to the landscape below. I wished for stars, but there were no pinpricks of light. From the embers of the small fire, my peripheral vision caught the motion of Riley laying his crutch down beside his bed, bending over to catch his weight on the palms of both hands, then gracefully pivoting on one arm so that he sat, somewhat heavily. His knee was bent, and he put no weight on his splinted ankle.

I had the impulse to kneel beside my bed and pray, but instead I stared at the fire. I thought of a prayer I had sung when I was a child, much to the approval of my parents:
A little star creeps over the hill/When woods are dark and birds are still. / The children fold their hands in prayer/And the love of God is everywhere.
Only there was no little star. The night was utterly dark. Of course I could build up the fire, if I liked, but I thought it was time to let it die.

Adam said enigmatically, “When I have time, I’ll make a flute.”

Both Riley and I had sunk too far into our own thoughts to respond with a question.

I lay down and let my body suffer the softness to envelop me. “Suffer the little children to come unto me”—that was what Jesus had said, and for the first time I loved the word
suffer,
meaning “to allow,” and I thought how natural it was to allow my body to enjoy the softness of the ferns I had gathered. My weight released the faint odor of cinnamon from the fern fronds. But I did
not close my eyes. First I turned my head to stare again out at the unchanging blackness. I liked the way the campfire coals continued to glow between me and the curtain of dark, whether we were all sitting around it or not. Then I turned my head to look at the back wall of rock. It was built in strata, some reddish, some more golden, some dark gray. My life, too, was laid down in strata. Perhaps each layer was a decade, though the divisions were not quite so neat as intervals of ten years might suggest.

“I shouldn’t have made the beds so far apart,” I said into their silence. My voice sounded plaintive.

Neither of them answered. If the beds had been closer together, we might have chatted longer against the darkness. The regret I had voiced was a spontaneous utterance against the desolation I suddenly felt.

There was childhood with my parents in their apartment, and then their leaving for Japan as missionaries and my moving in with my grandmother and grandfather in the bungalow in Memphis when I was nine, and then the years of powerful childhood growing up with the Stimson sisters, how I practiced the viola, and my grandfather’s death, then the binge of studying psychology and graduation from high school. There was the move to Iowa City, my quick engagement as an undergraduate to Thom Bergmann, our happiness as I finished my degrees; our travel and our meaningful work, his international connections. A decade with Thom; the loss of my grandmother; another decade with Thom. The loss of Thom. Again I saw the flap of the black wing of the falling piano, felt the hardness of the pavement under my thin shoe soles as I ran down Prince Street toward the Blue Tulip Café.
Igtiyal.
What did it matter? Thom was dead. What did the manner of his dying have to say about the nature of his life?

Everything.

What did my own survival tell me since I had come to dwell in this most accommodating of places?

That I knew nothing of who I was. And even less of Thom. Good-bye, Thom.

Of Adam and Riley?

These two men, one impaired of mind, one of body? But those conditions would pass, for each of them—I was sure of it. I was slipping into sleep. For each of us, it was his or her own dream story that would matter. Each was like Earth’s consciousness before Copernicus; each was the center of his or her universe, and there seemed no way for the center to move beyond the infinite arms of its radii. Sleep embraced me. Let all else circle round me. The unconscious breezes of memory and imagination toyed with the kite of my already dreaming mind. Thom lifted his arm and scattered the stars in the firmament. He breathed the deep breaths of passion.

Riley’s breath said sleep had claimed him. Then I floated in my dream to Adam and said, “Love me.” And we did. After we had made love, he disappeared, and I drifted home to my pallet and its scent of cinnamon. I rose again and wafted to Riley. Crossing the stone floor of the cave, my bare feet, though ghostly and immaterial, felt the slight variations in the rock, the places that were cracked, and those that seemed smooth and without blemish. Passing the dying fire, I felt warmth underfoot lingering in the rock. I moved more quietly than the spirit of darkness. When I reached Riley, I slumped to my knees and whispered into his ear, “Love me.” But I awoke too soon, shocked at how thoroughly I had been inhabited by desire.

In the morning, we all three woke up at the same time and sat up on our wilted fern beds.

Both Adam and Riley breathed deeply, and so did I. In unison, they looked at me and said, “What did you dream?”

I glanced at them and kept my secret. Then a piece of another dream visited me. “Toward morning, I dreamed of the sound of an airplane engine,” I told them. “And of flying on and on, from Nag Hammadi to Cairo. It was a memory dream. There was a Muslim girl, Arielle, with me, a young woman, really pretty, at the controls, Egyptian, with shoulder-length black hair. She probably left the needlepoint work in the Cub. The engine was loud and grinding, like teeth spitting and grinding in sleep.”

“Anything else?” Riley asked. “I sometimes used to grind my teeth.”

I hesitated. There had been something else. “I dreamed … several dreams … a monkey crouched beside my bed. A large monkey, with a hairy head and a naked body, like a boy. Like an incubus.”

“Not very likely,” Riley said. “I mean not with Adam and me posted like two sentries at either end of this cave or shelter or whatever you call it.”

“I’ve called it ‘The Cave of Artemis,’” Adam said.

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s bow-shaped. And the first night I was here, there was a crescent moon smiling at me. Like the first night … on the beach.”

“When you first came here?” I asked gently.

He just nodded. His face became blank and still. He turned away.

Finally I said, “Let’s gather breakfast.”

Looking back, I’m unsure of what happened that night. Perhaps we all dreamed the same dream. It didn’t matter. We were the same people as before. Perhaps closer.

Each of us sniffed the air once, as though we had detected the odor of sex.

E
VERY DAY THE
rains came later and lasted for a shorter period of time.

One morning we saw no rain clouds at all gathering on the western horizon. The sun shone with special brilliance. Through the day only a few small, puffy clouds floated by as though they were lost sailing ships abandoned by the fleet. In the garden, in response to the extra warmth and light, roses of every color bloomed.

Adam proposed that we sleep in the orchard again, under the apple trees, that we weave new mats to sleep on and others for grassy roofs just over the beds. I proposed to gather roses—there was such an abundance of them—to wreath our beds. I think we all longed to situate ourselves in the center of the great openness that spread out around our orchard.

The change in the weather changed Riley’s mood, too; feeling optimistic, he announced he would unbind his ankle. “I’ll still use the crutch,” he said. “At least at first.”

“Don’t waste the bindings,” I instructed, but added whimsically, “You can tie them on the branches of your apple tree for decoration.”

“You all know we
could
build ourselves something more substantial, dontcha?” Riley said, but neither Adam nor I answered.

Finally I said, “When your ankle is strong enough, we should leave.”

“Why?” Adam asked. His head swiveled quickly to give me a piercing glance.

“I want to find the French horn case. People are waiting for me to deliver it. Help me find it, will you? Both of you.” And I wanted the world to know of Thom’s discovery.

“Do you know what’s in it?” Riley asked of the French horn case.

“Yes. I think so.”

“What?” Adam asked sharply.

“Something about the book of Genesis—an alternate version.”

That night, after we cooked fish and roasted apples out in the open and let the small campfire burn on, not rain but warm breezes blew over us. In our new camp in the orchard, close to the gardens and the plains, I smelled the aroma of distant desert, dry and slightly dusty, but with the scent of roses. Having harvested their blooms, I had inscribed our three pallets with borders of red, white, and yellow.

I dreamed again that I was in an airplane, but this time it was a big one. It was night, and we—a huge planeful of people—were drifting down for a landing. When I glanced back at the rows of seats, I saw the Stimson sisters drinking tomato juice, pouring it from the spout of a small silver teapot, their wedding present when Thom and I had married. On both sides of the plane, out the windows, was New York; a vast number of lights twinkled and glimmered at the bottom of a dark transparent ocean. I knew I would see Thom when I landed, and there
was
Thom waiting for me behind the security gate.
“Igtiyal,”
he said, and goosed me in the ribs.

I woke up to the sound of struggle, fighting, with Riley cursing and yelling, “You devil.”

Adam sprang from his pallet and ran toward the struggle, calling to me to bring a light. Without hesitation, I pushed the end of a dry pine stick into
the embers, waited a moment for it to flare up, and then hurried toward them.