Adam & Eve (35 page)

“Tell me honestly,” I said, looking Gabriel squarely in his eyes. “Why do you want Thom’s memory stick?”

“It’s a kind of pun, isn’t it?” he said. “It’s symbolic for you. Your steely link to him.”

“Why should I let go of Thom’s memory?”

“To live.”

I said nothing. I
had
returned to life. I had been broken, but I had healed. I wanted to salvage what was available in the world for me.

Gabriel sighed. Then he added, “Thom didn’t deserve you.”

As I stepped back in surprise, Gabriel let the titanium case slide out of his fingers and lie against my flesh.

He returned my steady gaze. “If you don’t want to give this abomination to me”—he nodded at Thom’s flash drive—“leave it here, under a rock, like the snake it is.”

Abomination? Stunned, I looked around as though to find a suitable rock, but I said falteringly, “I haven’t seen the file. Not once again. Not since that last morning with Thom.” My thinking collapsed into incoherence—
abomination?
“Not since we were together in our hotel room in Amsterdam.” My knees felt wobbly. I needed to sit down. What did the word
abomination
mean? The word detonated like a bomb in my psyche. The pendant had been a talisman, a touchstone, not an abomination.

“Do you want to see the file, Lucy? Once more before you let it go?”

“I … I don’t know. Thom’s valentine. It was in the context of—”

“Aren’t all texts embedded in context?”

“The file had a valentine on it, just for me. We lay in bed and watched the universe—galaxies, stars, intergalactic dust—together, on the ceiling….”

“I brought my laptop. Just in case you needed to see it—”

“Needed?”

“Needed to be convinced to let go of Thom.”

I turned, walked quickly past a gigantic philodendron into the thicket, and sat down on a large, flat rock. The leaves of the philodendron, the deep incursions dividing the leaves into lobes, filled my mind. I felt spiked, lobotomized.

It was not the ancient texts but the flash-drive file that Gabriel wanted. Carrying his computer, he quickly followed me, sat beside me on the rock, and began to unzip the laptop case. I thought of Matisse, how Gabriel had promised to fly me to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg to see his paintings. I thought of the painter Rousseau; I wanted to lie down on a bed of sand, to wait for a lion to come and lick my dreaming forehead. But here there was only rampant fecundity, split-leaf philodendron, a plant large as a room.

“I gave you his notes already,” I stammered.

“Thom thought on the computer,” Gabriel answered. “There may be something on the file not in the hand notes.”

Suddenly I did want to see the universe represented again as it was on Thom’s file. I wanted to lie on a bed in Amsterdam, weary with transatlantic flight, with Thom. I wanted to feel small and humble, to be in awe of vastness, to quote Emily Dickinson and claim, “The brain is wider than the sky”—I had believed that of Thom. I wanted to see his red letters, Thom’s valentine, emerge from the profundity of space bearing my name—and yet I did not want to see or prove anything.

When I closed my eyes, an image appeared to me of Adam on his knees, eyes closed, summoning from some distant corner of his mind a plaintive cowboy song:
From this valley they say you are going….
And what of the Texan businessman, and the other man, stepping onto the tarmac as though they owned the world? Was that the image of sanity?

Gabriel took my hand and said tenderly, “Lucy, Lucy, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. I love you, Lucy. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I want my heart to hurt,” I blurted. “That way I’ll know I’m still alive.”

Gabriel nodded. He released the lid, touched the power key, waited for the machine’s tonic triad to blare, and slipped the end of the flash drive into its port. I felt as though he had entered me. But when had he lifted the cord with its memories over my head? When had he unsheathed the working end from its metal case so silky to the touch? I saw the list of file names on the screen, Thom’s files, his work, dim in the mottled, penetrating light of the jungle. Gabriel made the cursor speed down to “Universal Valentine”; he adjusted the screen to daylight viewing, and there it was, on a screen only seventeen inches wide, the known universe.

There were the brilliant pinpoints of starlight; there were the clouds indicating probability—pink, red, magenta, royal purple for the most likely areas, according to spectroscopic interpretation of light-emitting molecules—the probabilities of finding life out there. As though they sensed my excitement, the mammoth leaves of the jungle stirred around me.

“It’s a view looking past the center of the Milky Way, past the black hole at our center,” Gabriel murmured.

A view? Just a view? Had he said that? So it was not the whole universe, of course not, just a certain perspective.

Sensible-sounding, I asked, “I wonder if he made pictures encompassing different sectors?” I thought of an antique cyclorama I had seen in Atlanta, a battle scene from the Civil War with its devastation encircling the viewer in every direction. That was the kind of view that lived in Adam’s brain. A different war. The same horror.

Gabriel said nothing. He had become totally absorbed in the residue of Thom’s genius.

I heard myself panting. Thom could be beside me again, the two of us seeing it together, dazzled and thrilled and happy. Thom: large, curly-haired, kind, brilliant, graying. Even when Thom studied the computer screen, he never forgot my presence; he kept a corner of his mind for me, if I was present. Here was Mesopotamia; here was a jungle of greenery; out there was an airplane with two strange men waiting; behind me was a single deluded man, my lover, praying and singing. Didn’t I smell the odor of lemons from his hair?

“The words are starting to emerge now,” I said, pointing at the bloodred dot on the screen. “See, ‘Valentine’”—I had forgotten the ‘a’ in Valentine was shaped like a schoolboy’s lopsided drawing of a heart. Had it been that way before? Now all the letters were emblazed across the starry cosmos:

Gabriel took my hand. “Shall we go on?”

“That’s it,” I said. “That’s the end. He promised he would stop it during his presentation. He’d stop it before they saw the inscription. That’s why it emerges so slowly, so he’d have time to cut off the file.”

The night sky faded from the screen, but it was replaced by an image of myself—younger, so much happier I was hardly recognizable. Quickly I glanced over at Gabriel and smiled. I watched myself coming toward the camera, holding out my arms, delighted, then blurred when I came too close to be in focus.

I exclaimed, “I didn’t know he—” Then I realized I must have kissed Thom when the image blurred. He had filmed me somehow; he wanted to keep my happiness and anticipation as I came to him. Yes, that had to be the reason he had filmed my joy. I began to cry.

When my image blurred and disappeared, then another woman, Italian perhaps, came walking toward the camera, happy, welcoming, younger—then blurred, and another woman followed, Japanese, equally excited and pleased, open, fresher and younger, and then—

“It’s Lucy Hastings,” I exclaimed. She, too, approached the lens, her face happy with unmistakable anticipation. “His assistant. Your assistant! The other Lucy.” Something detonated with a dull thud in my chest.

Lucy Hastings was quickly replaced by yet another welcoming woman. Gabriel touched a button, and the series sped up. Dozens of ever more beautiful women came rushing toward the lens, their lovely, intelligent faces aglow, arms lifting for embrace. I was speechless. And there I myself appeared again, and Gabriel slowed the speed to that of real time. I was in bed now, wearing a favorite nightgown, lime green, holding out my arms, happy, willing, alive, the camera coming closer. And then the Italian woman wearing black lace lying on gleaming sheets—

“Stop!” I screamed. “Stop! Were they all named Lucy? Were they?” I felt hysteria rising.

“At first,” Gabriel said. “Later Thom just
called
them the Lucys.”

“My valentine,” I sobbed. I jerked the flash drive out of Gabriel’s machine and stood up. “You betrayed me,” I yelled. I had not been enough for Thom. Then I sobbed out the impossible words “Thom betrayed me,” but now I was whimpering and gasping.

“Give the flash drive to me, Lucy.” Gabriel closed the computer and slipped it back in its case.

“Why? To smear Thom’s name?” I retracted the tip of the memory stick and placed the cord over my head. It pleased me, despite everything, to feel the familiar metal against the skin between my breasts once again. “It’s a fraud. Those women couldn’t have happened. It’s something you already had in your computer. It’s an illusion, a computer trick.”

As he stood up, Gabriel said calmly, “You recognized Lucy Hastings, I believe.”

“She was your girlfriend. You could have made that video.”

“Actually, we shared her. Thom had a very small camera built into the corner of his glasses. Did you ever notice how carefully he positioned his glasses on the nightstand—as though they were looking at you?”

I thought of the heavy frames of Thom’s glasses, but the lenses were also thick and heavy. He had needed a durable frame.

“I’ve watched the videos. In the next sequence you and Thom are making love. And then the others and Thom—”

“Stop!” I screamed. “Stop, stop, stop!”

Gabriel did stop. My chest heaving, I stood and stared at Gabriel, watched from my own detached distance the two of us standing in the tangled jungle, confronting each other. He held the computer; I closed my hand around Thom’s memory stick.

“Why would he?” I demanded. My mind whimpered,
We were happy!
My body whispered,
I trusted him.

“Thom lusted after an integrated life; he liked to keep his best equations near his private life.” Gabriel watched me with remote curiosity. “Thom was a risk taker, a gambler.” Gabriel spoke in a dry, informative way. “It excited him. It spurred his thinking to have astrophysics and earthy sex dangerously cohabiting on his drive. He was so much older, Lucy. It made him feel alive, his collection.”

I marveled at Gabriel’s coldness. No. He looked slightly amused, disdainful of Thom and of me. “I won’t give it to you,” I said.

“I’m sure there’s something scientifically important there on the file. Something beyond the briefcase notes you gave me. Thom always finished preparing his lecture just before his presentation. Did you realize that, Lucy? You two would have lunch or dinner; then he would take the flash drive from you. I’d be sitting across the room from you—shop-talking with my colleagues. He’d open his laptop, take the flash drive back from you, fiddle around for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour at the table to claim the brilliant conclusions that were always there waiting for him at the edge of his brain. You’d have a
chocolate dessert.” Gabriel chuckled with a sneer. “Thom never ate dessert. He wanted to keep his youthful figure.”

“Just like you,” I added, glancing up and down his lean, fit body. He was a serpent.

“Of course you hadn’t opened the flash drive before you came back. You’d been shopping, visiting a museum—”

“The Anne Frank House.”

“He liked the risk—suppose you’d lost the flash drive or were delayed?”

“No. He trusted me. I was trustworthy about punctuality.”

“About everything. He liked the pressure and drama that come with procrastination.”

“You killed him?”

“Whatcha got, boss?” the American voice asked: jeans, a Stetson, chewing gum. His body was relaxed, languid but alert.

“Where is the case of the French horn?” the old man in black asked in accented English.

“We’ll get it,” Gabriel said casually. “No rush. This wilderness is almost Eden, my friends. Let time stand still.”

“I want to go home, Gabriel,” I said. I forced myself to speak calmly. Nothing had ever been harder. I made myself swallow. I felt my own tears clinging to my eyelashes. Now I must focus, think, be smarter than all of them.

“Cool as a cucumber,” Gabriel said. His voice took on a cruel curl. “Do people have that expression in little Memphis?” The tip of his tongue wetted his thin lips and seemed to taste the air.

Although I felt a strong impulse to run, I hesitated. Could I start the plane? If I outran them to the plane—I was younger than any of them—if I could start the Cessna, I could escape. With the flats of my fingers, I pressed the memory stick against my breastbone. Could I come back for Adam? Would I? What constituted treachery?

“I’ve always wanted you, Lucy.”

“Wanted me?”

“All those years you were with Thom, the two of you growing older together. You always the trusting child to Papa Thom. I wanted you to look
at me that way and then have the power to betray you. As Thom did.”

“Leave,” I answered. I tried to filter the hatred from my voice. “Just leave me here. You’ve got what you really wanted, Gabriel.”

“Oh, no,” the rabbi remarked. “We also want the texts, the Genesis parchments.”

I feared I might faint. I closed my eyes to steady myself and drew in a deep breath.
Lemons!
Distinctly, I smelled the odor of lemons.

Adam had followed me!

He had disobeyed.

At that moment, his voice rang out, “Run!”

As I spun around to run, I saw Adam burst into the clearing, swinging the French horn case at Gabriel’s head. Though the Texan lunged toward me, I evaded him and ran. In an instant, I was sprinting toward the Cessna.

At the edge of the jungle, without hesitating, I ran across the tarmac and up the steps into the plane as though they were the stairs to heaven. Freedom and joy canceled every feeling but determination. Panting, I rushed into the cockpit, sat in the pilot’s seat, and pushed the ignition square. The twin engines sputtered to life.

Certain of our triumph, I imagined Adam subduing his enemies as he wielded the French horn case, like Samson with the jawbone of an ass. Soon he would join me. Soon we would fly. Quickly, while I waited, I picked up Gabriel’s knapsack and looked in it. Yes, a wallet. Money.