Adam & Eve (32 page)

Pierre Saad trusted his father and took his hand because his father was accompanied by Hathor the Cow, the goddess of beauty, and the little orphaned boy believed in the truth of beauty that depends on imagination. The Sufi father taught the boy as he grew that the text is always open to new interpretations because story conjures images, and pictures partaking of the infinite transcend both space and time. Pierre Saad wanted to read the earth—pictures left in caves when humans were original, close to their beginnings as humans. He wanted to read the artful images painted on, etched in, shaped from, stone, carried in the hand, or abandoned on a cave wall, or buried with the dead, or simply dropped and lost by those earliest humans.

For almost forty thousand years, images begat images through the hands of mankind, and most men went away and forgot the cave art and did not understand even what it was. Incised or painted on an envelope of rock, the mail was left undelivered. Only a few people knew the rock images were addressed to them and to their children’s children.

Pierre the anthropologist was curious, too, about reading the starry sky—such as his friend Thom Bergmann (really only a voice on the telephone at first, then the voice arising from printed letters on a sheet of paper or on a screen, finally the man bleeding under a broken piano) had wanted to share with him. “What will it mean,” Thom had asked through his letters, “if we can picture a universe with others Out There? What will it mean about humanness?”

Sitting in his oaken library in the Dordogne Valley of south-central
France, smelling through his open window the fragrance of wheat ripening in the sun, Pierre Saad held a sheet of fine stationery between his fingers and read a blackly inked text suggesting he might become national director of parietal art for the country of his father, who had deserted his mother. Though his adopted father had taught him that only God has power and glory (and yet He is nothing), Pierre Saad began to want them both for himself.

A
DAM LOOKED BACK
over his shoulder at the two rounded, upthrusting granite boulders and thought them like the open sides of a giant vise. The figure framed between the jaws, standing on his own high red rock in the distance, was the boy—“the feral boy,” she had called him—full of fury. Adam touched his own mouth, then looked at his fingers. No sign of blood. It was not he, but the feral boy, who had eaten Riley’s heart. What connected Adam to the wild boy? Only that the boy had fed him when he himself lay bruised and bleeding, beaten and raped, on the hard-packed sand road? This road? The road he and she would walk to Damascus. No, Baghdad. But he knew Baghdad had been destroyed.

Politicians and troops had used the language of their fathers, of Vietnam—“We had to destroy the city to save it.” Yes, before he was captured, Adam had heard another soldier explain it just that way, and then his head was blown off, and from the stem of his neck, blood leaped up high into the air like a fountain.

Adam began to hum and to match the words to the rhythm of his walking, but he did not sing the words aloud:
There is a fountain filled with blood / Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins. /And sinners plunged beneath that flood/Lose all their guilty stains.

“What is a sinner?” he had asked the chaplain at the mental hospital in Idaho.

The man had explained it.
We are all born sinners. Because of Adam and Eve. When we are born into this world as human beings, we are born stained with sin. But there is redemption. Ask forgiveness. Believe that Jesus, fully human and fully divine, is in fact the Son of God.

“Was there ever a child who never committed a sin, aside from being born?”

“That was Jesus. And only Jesus.”

“The Son of God, or the Child of God?” Adam had interrupted to ask.

“Certainly the child of God. But Jesus was a man. The Son of God. We can all be children of God. Believe in Jesus as the Son of God, and ye shall be saved.”

“Ye?”

“You. It means you.”

What have I done?
Had Adam actually asked the question of the chaplain, or only thought it? He knew what he had done. He had disobeyed his father. Adam had hated his father for his rock-hard tyranny. He had lusted after his mother. He had fornicated with innocent girls. He had drawn lewd pictures of female bodies. He had masturbated. He had shirked his work and resented the unending labor the farm required of him. He had felt deprived of money and of the culture of the city. And yet he despised the city and its wickedness, and the intellectual pride of the university and the smug professors who had recognized him as Piers Plowman and mocked his rustic ways behind closed doors.

What had he done? He had lost his mind. He had contended with God.

How had he failed? He had failed Riley, his friend, and many others.

Adam looked down at the front of the shirt. There was the name, upside down, since seen from above: “F. Riley.” But he was not F. Riley. And her? What was her name? It changed: it had been Eve; it had been Lucy. She was particular about getting names right. When he had murmured, “the road to Damascus,” she had corrected him.
Baghdad.
She had not heard the news about Baghdad. Saul was on the road to Damascus when he was converted and his name changed to Paul. Saint Paul, the Catholics called him. Before he saw a great light on the road to Damascus, Saul had persecuted the Christians.
And then he became one. But before and after—was he the same person, or different?

Was he, Adam, the same person he was as a little boy full of brightness?

And this woman beside him dressed in orange, her brow beaded with sweat. Who was she? He thought her nature was a good one. But damaged. Burned.

Purified? In the Refiner’s fire?

The music of Handel’s
Messiah
began to dance in his brain:
For unto us a child is born, unto us …

“Adam, Adam,” she said. “Is there any water along this road?”

“I don’t know. I was blindfolded when we passed this way. I heard something sloshing in the truck. They might have had a five-gallon jug of water, or gasoline.”

“‘No blood for oil,’” she mused. “That was the slogan on the signs we carried when we marched on Washington, Thom and I, before we went to Iraq.”

“Thom was a soldier, too?”

“No. I meant ‘we, the United States.’ Before the United States went to war. Thom was a scientist.”

“What did he want to know? From his research?”

“If there was life—some sort of real life, not little green men from Mars—in the far-flung reaches of space.”

“You said he was dead, Lucy.” He was amazed: sometimes her name came to him without thinking. Other times he was confused and afraid of offending her. “I remember that right, don’t I? He’s dead. What happened?” He glanced down at her. He took her hand. She was short, barely came to his shoulder, and he had noticed there was something childlike about her, something stunted.

“He was crushed to death, in Amsterdam, by a grand piano that fell on him.”

Adam began to laugh. He couldn’t help himself. He took his hand away from her and put first that hand and then the other one over his mouth, like a bandage or gag to try to stifle the laughter, but he couldn’t. The laughter flew out of him, spit, too, and he staggered drunkenly as he laughed and choked on laughter.

She hung her head and said nothing.

Finally he got control over his laughter. He knew it was inappropriate. Sometimes he had laughed at his father that way. Adam’s exuberant, spurting humor made the old rancher bite his own lips and clamp them together in disgust. To Lucy, Adam managed to say soberly, “God works in mysterious ways, his wonders to conceal.” Then he spurted again with painful mirth.

Wonders
—was that the word? Or was it
horrors?

“Where are we going?” he continued. “I mean, Lucy, where did you say we were going?”

“To Baghdad. To civilization. To see some friends in France. To give them this.” She lifted up the black case.

He had forgotten about it. He wished it were a keg of water. “Here,” he said politely, “let me carry that for you.”

She stopped and transferred the French horn case to his hand. Her face and neck red with heat, she looked dangerously hot, he thought. He looked away, scouring the landscape with his eyes for relief.

“Look,” he said, “there’s a palm-leaf hut. Maybe people are there. Maybe they have water. We’ll sit in the shade. I’ll fan you.”

She nodded.

The hard-packed sand road smelled of scorching. He remembered that odor from his mother’s iron. In a debased kind of way, he had rather liked the odor of scorching, as a boy. Once he had gotten into the brewer’s yeast she had used to make bread, and he had eaten it by the spoonfuls. He had felt debased then, too. He had done something else in his mother’s world that he shouldn’t have done. Once he had taken Rosie into his parents’ bed. He had imagined she was his mother that time, just for the forbidden fun of it. He had been afraid that Rosie and he had left their fluids on the sheets, but he saw they were already stained. His father had been there before him, recently, and Evie, Evelyn, had not changed the bedclothes (as she called them) before they went to town.

“I’m so sorry about Riley,” she said.

Yes, Adam could see the sorrow and trouble in her face. More than grief, the footprint of trauma was in her eyes. “He was a good boy,” Adam said.
All
you could have said, all anyone can say, the chaplain had consoled him, is something simple and true. “It’s sad,” Adam added.

“Sort of an all-American boy,” she answered. “Even had the freckles.”

Adam could tell her tears were flowing. He wanted to say to her, Don’t waste the water, or catch your tears with your tongue, even if they’re salty. Made of poles and large leaves, a hut sat green and wilting on the sand.

He could hear bees buzzing all around the palm hut, and Adam remembered Riley had wanted to rob a hive. Perhaps these desert people had done just that. On the horizon, he saw an emerald line of forest. There were trees ahead—palms and acacia and maybe Russian olive—and that meant the likeliness of water. Still—No, the buzzing insects were not bees, but flies.

“Wait,” he said. He led her to the back of the hut where it cast a short shade and told her to sit down and to rest in the shadow.

After he left her there with the black case, he went around to the frail front door, the only door. It, too, was made of palm leaves, each one hanging down from a wooden slat at the top and another slat across the waist of the frame. He started to open it, but then he saw the long palm leaves sway, and instead he just took a finger and gently pushed one aside so he could see in. Like the pendulum of a clock, the long leaf was something you could move to one side with the tip of your finger.

There lay the family on the floor. He stared to understand. They were dead, and the sandy dirt floor was soaked with their blood. Their hands and feet had been staked to the floor. Then they had been severed at the wrists and ankles, each with a single blow, he thought. Now their hands and feet, even the baby’s, were still staked to the floor, but they were no longer attached to the bodies. These people had known a secret. Or soldiers had thought they knew a secret. Probably they had started with the baby, just one foot, and moved up the line, ending with the father, and then started again.

Adam could hear the voice of the father roaring like a lion. His mouth—still open in the hollow shape of a curse.

At their feet, before the threshold like a doormat, Adam saw the sign of a cross.

But he felt sure that Christians had not done this. Someone, he felt sure,
had made the cross to cast blame, to create a scapegoat. There were other marks inside on the dirt floor: the crescent moon. And that tangle of lines and points—the Star of David.

Yes, Adam thought. The idea seemed to split his brain: They all did it. He staggered and took a step backward. He worked his jaws and gathered what saliva he could, and then he parted the leaves with both hands and spat through the opening, randomly, toward their political signs. To be sure of the reality, he looked once more between the palm leaves. There, there, the crack in the wall behind them? Down low. Wasn’t that her eye, just an eye, unblinking, peering in?

When he walked around to Lucy, he simply said that they were all gone. And there was no water. “But ahead—”

She interrupted him. “How many were there?” Her brow was corrugated with puzzling—as though their number was the only question to ask.

“Five,” Adam answered. “And the parents.” He knew he had not really counted. “Five or six,” he amended truthfully.

“I saw,” she said.

Now, now, he looked into her eyes, filmed and dazed. He drank from them as though his own eyes were flies come to gather at those unprotected pools.

She was holding out her hand to him, for help. Yes, he could do that. He could help her rise. He caught her wrist instead of her hand and pulled hard. She seemed to rise miraculously. She was very light, or was it that he was very strong?
We are weak, but He is strong
—they’d sung that in Sunday school the year he came as Superman, five or six years old. He was not weak. He’d been a strong boy. Superboy. Leaping, almost flying. He was a strong man now. When anyone saw his manly jaw, they recognized him as Superman and gave him tight-fitting blue and red to wear.