Adam & Eve (6 page)

“Quite right,” Gabriel answered pleasantly. “At least our literary tastes are compatible. Another day we’ll check off art. Matisse but not Picasso, I presume. Whatever made you become an art therapist?”

“Another night,” I said.

“I look forward to it,” he answered, taking the hint, but he hesitated. He bowed his head, then leaned toward me and touched just with the tip of his finger the cord around my neck. “What’s this?” Carefully he pulled on the silk cord till the memory stick emerged from under my blouse. “Thom’s flash drive? I wondered what became of it.”

“It’s comforting,” I replied, feeling invaded.

“It could be useful, scientifically,” he speculated. “Thom always used his flash drive at the end of a presentation. It was where he kept his latest thoughts, his grand summary. He always had a grand summary at the end of these big meetings. Did you know that? A moment when he drew all the data together, gave it his own brilliant spin, and made his next new insight seem inevitable.”

He stopped and looked at me too hopefully.

“I gave you his briefcase. All his notes,” I said. “The memory stick is for me.” I began to feel irritated, a little vulnerable.

“But you’ve removed your wedding ring.”

I said nothing.

When Gabriel bowed his head and seemed chagrined, I remarked, “Did you say there was
camping
on this tour?”

He lifted his face, and his eyes twinkled in their wry and engaging way. “On the edge of the Sahara. The tents each have a small solar-powered air conditioner.”

Then, because I had not heard the terms of math uttered for three years, I asked impulsively, “Tell me again, the equation for elliptical orbits.”

“X
squared over
a
squared plus
y
squared over
b
squared equals one,” he said, as I watched his lips speak the notation describing the orbit. Then he leaned forward, kissed me lightly on the mouth, and named a tour agency I could contact.

In the morning I made arrangements to travel and felt glad to escape the scientists. I told Gabriel good-bye in the lobby of the Marriott, though he offered to accompany me to the Cairo airport. When I saw that he wanted to kiss me farewell, I averted my eyes. I’d had enough of kissing. When I looked at him again, he had resumed an expression of friendly amusement. That afternoon I flew to Luxor, as Gabriel suggested, to take a cruise on the Upper Nile. I was glad to be traveling into the mythic past.

When I settled into the gray, wooden-slat lounging chair on the top deck of the cruise boat, I felt my entire body relax. Beyond the banks of the Nile, the landscape blazed like a mirror. I found it more comfortable to gaze down into the flowing river.

In my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, the Lower Mississippi lay to the south, while the Upper Mississippi had its headwaters in Minnesota, but in Egypt the Lower Nile fanned out in a delta to the north before emptying its waters into the Mediterranean, and the Upper Nile had its roots deep in the
heart of Africa. My gaze followed a north-flowing bubble on the river. “Where are you going, and where have you been?” I muttered to the waters of the Nile surrounding the boat. Hadn’t I learned to ask those questions from a nursery rhyme while sitting in my grandmother’s lap? Unlike the muddy Mississippi, the Nile was a ribbon of glorious blue.

The water seemed to reply to me with a question I both wanted and needed to hear:
Where are
you
going?
it asked. And my answer:
Nag Hammadi,
though I knew it was not a stop on the tour itinerary.

It was at Nag Hammadi that the outcast books of the New Testament had been found in 1945. Learning of the existence of those rejected gospels had broken the spine of my belief in the Bible as a canon of sacred texts. Sylvia, an elderly neighbor who was also a professor of comparative religions, had enlightened me. “Robbed you!” my mother had said. “Buddha! Enlightenment! You’re nine years old! What can you possibly know of enlightenment? ‘I am the Light of the World.’ Who said that? Do you know who said that?” My skepticism about a God defined as both good and all-powerful began with my grandfather’s cancer and death and my grandmother’s heartrending grief, though it did not break her faith.

“The name Lucy derives from the word for light,” neighbor Sylvia had said. She kissed me on the forehead. “Even a child can pursue enlightenment.”

To ensure the safety of tourists from fundamentalist Muslim terrorist attacks on busloads of Western foreigners, heavily armed military guards stood at the perimeter of every attraction: at the Great Pyramids of Giza, at the Sphinx, at the Valley of the Kings, at the High Dam. At one of the attractions, I looked up, saw the ubiquitous soldier with a machine gun at the highest point, and remarked to a fellow traveler that his presence was reassuring. “Not entirely,” the man replied. “The government obviously considers us to be at risk.”

I rather liked the idea of being at risk. It made me feel more alert.

The first night we camped, I stretched my body so that it completely filled the cot. That night I enjoyed something like a sense of largesse—maybe it was just my body’s response to the smooth clean sheet below and the pleasant soft whiteness above. I smoothed the sheets with open palms. Egyptian long-staple cotton, I thought happily, and a space that was all mine. In Memphis, beside the Mississippi, farmers had grown huge fields of cotton.

And when was the last time I had felt exceptionally brave and strong? Independent? In my friendship with other girls, especially Janet Stimson when we were about eleven and rode the city bus to the public library. The crown of childhood had come the year before college, when I had studied psychology on my own as a high school senior and then scored well on the psychology test for college graduates. Before Iowa.

It was not the
remembrance
of things past that I wanted, but their recovery. And not of
things
but of the natural self I once embodied. Suddenly I was glad to be alone, and I felt like a smart, young girl again, full of power, back before Thom entered my life.

I fingered the memory stick and took it off, for the night. Restless, I got up and went outside to view the Egyptian night sky. From the dazzle of stars in the dark, I picked out constellations. Had Thom really found out there a planet or planets that hosted life? Not among any of those tiny lights visible to me. Beyond that. Did those beings have eyes, and did they look this way and imagine us, bare forked creatures?

In the morning, I lifted the tent window flap and squinted at the world outside. Mercilessly the morning sun had filled the world with painful brightness. Other small tents were spaced around me. How to take life by the hand and sally forth?

Another night when the setting sun, swollen like the belly of a pregnant woman, slid down behind the peak of the obelisk at Luxor, I wished someone were there to see it with me—a man to whom I would say, with some satisfaction, that the Arabic word for sun was feminine. I pronounced the word for sun and thought of how I might spell it in the Roman alphabet:
sham su?

If that imagined man were Gabriel, he would laugh and call me “smarty pants” for my effort with Arabic. Likely, he would also pinch my cheek in a
paternal way. Gabriel was ten years older than I was, but then Thom had been twenty-three years older. I was glad that Thom had gotten to live as long as he had, though he had not made it to sixty. Unthinkable really, that I myself should ever arrive at age sixty.

Marry Gabriel Plum? Why not? I had known him since graduate school days in Iowa City. He had come there to study the Van Allen radiation belts. He had known Thom. Perhaps Thom had saved Gabriel’s life by pushing him out of harm’s way as the piano hurtled downward. I thought bitterly of the unbearable, premature relief I had felt seeing Gabriel lying on the pavement, clear of the shattered piano.

Did I want to move on with my life? Or did I want to move backward, to childhood, to a time before loss and grief? Both, of course.

When I looked at the broken columns and damaged images of temple ruins, I only felt how broken and damaged I was. It was only as I stared at the waters of the Nile that I felt any peace. A river can be like a great life-supporting artery flowing through the body of a country. The Mississippi, the Nile, the Thames, the Seine, the Danube, the Rhine, the Amazon, the Ganges, and the Yangtze. Such a river is an artery with its own pulse. Such a river is its own heart as well as that of the land it parts and nourishes. I wished for such a conduit of life to flow through me and enliven all my parts. Or some ocean to rock and lave me. A tour of ruins, however noble or ambitious, was not enough.

After a week with the tour group, I decided to strike out on my own. When the guide said, “I am forbidden to allow you to leave the group,” I replied, “I state in this letter that I have left without obtaining your permission.” Then I turned and walked away, carrying only my small suitcase with me. If they wanted to transport my other baggage for me, let them. I could not say what possessed me to do such a thing—to follow a mere name:
Nag Hammadi.
It was a whim, an impulse. No, it was part of a desire to be free. I wanted to test myself as an independent woman.

A
MONG THE
N
AG
H
AMMADI
texts—sometimes called the Gnostic gospels—was one purported to be written by Mary Magdalene, an actual disciple and possible lover of Jesus; another, the repressed Gospel of Thomas, had been construed as stressing the humanity rather than the divinity of Jesus. These religious texts took their name from the place on the Upper Nile—Nag Hammadi—where they had been found in 1945.

Considering myself to be fairly well informed as a teen—at least I
wanted
to be well informed, to know, to study, to see with my own eyes—I wondered why so few people seemed to have even heard anything about books excluded from the biblical canon, let alone considered their content. Since the revelation by neighbor Sylvia, I was amazed at how few religious people wanted to know how the canon had been formed. Held sacred by my evangelical parents and most of the people I knew, the Bible was inviolate, as though it had no history. But mere men had struggled for intellectual ascendancy in establishing what was sacred, and they had eliminated those books with alternative views. An array of gospels had been boiled down to the standard four included in the New Testament.

“Skepticism is a path,” my retired neighbor the dear old professor had cautioned, “not a destination.”

Of Tennyson’s poem
In Memoriam,
written against the loss of his friend Arthur Hallam, Sylvia told me T. S. Eliot had said it was a great poem not for the quality of its faith but for the quality of its doubt.

Before I entered the information center at Nag Hammadi, I noticed an alabaster many-mouthed fountain, a large, bubbling jar positioned at the center of the entrance plaza. The fountain referenced the actual man-size jar containing the suppressed gospels that had been buried in the sand near Nag Hammadi, hidden for fifteen centuries. The bubbling fountain jar, fashioned from mottled alabaster, seemed both stately and droll. In response to its figure, I had a dizzy impulse to say, “How do you do?” Perhaps I did speak. I noticed a brown man wearing a loosely wrapped turban gazing curiously at me. His eyes were dark as dates, but menacing. Because of the heat, I hurried toward the information center.

The ferociously air-conditioned, beautifully modern structure provided a great relief from the Egyptian oven. From the bottom of a framed picture of the current president-dictator cascaded a ladder of translations of the word
Welcome.

“Thank you,” I said out loud to the dictator and wondered if I were losing my mind.

From the place where I stood, thirteen spokes projected outward in a semicircle, one for each of the Nag Hammadi gospels, like rays from a half-risen sun. Each ray displayed along its walls a series of the individual pages with translations from that gospel. Even before I began to read, my feet protested the hard granite floors. No one likes to read standing up; even at the Louvre the short placards beside famous paintings are always read with impatience.