Adam & Eve (11 page)

As soon as I had left Memphis for college in Iowa, I met Thom, who was as tender and sympathetic as any mother, as strong and reliable as the best of fathers, and who regarded me as a desirable adult.

“If you’re undecided about having children,” Grandmother had managed to whisper when she was very ill, “I mean if it’s a fifty-fifty proposition—not if you’re sure you don’t want to—go ahead and do it, for my sake.” But I had hesitated to do anything to unbalance the happy equilibrium of marriage and work.

In the layer between the fighter zone and the green earth, my craft moved steadily forward—was this what it meant to be lost? Just moving along? And
was
I lost? Maybe I was locally lost; globally, I and the small plane were someplace over Mesopotamia. The dial of the fuel gauge indicated I could make it to Baghdad if I had to. Was I lost or free? I realized the battery in the GPS had failed.

When the Piper Cub engine began to emit a persistent grinding sound, the peril of the moment seized me. The engine was struggling. Plenty of fuel, but the temperature gauge read 218°F. Between 220° and 230° the engine would seize up. The metal parts would stick together, and the propeller would stop turning.

As the plane lost altitude, the acacia canopy rose up at me like aggressive heads of broccoli. To the left side stood a surprising group of very tall trees—redwoods?—rising over the other vegetation like cathedral spires over a medieval village. Redwoods? Here? Ahead a break in the greenery was doubtlessly caused by a river. To try to gain altitude, I turned the nose of the plane down a little so the wings would hit the air at the right angle for lift. It’s counterintuitive to point the nose down when you’re falling, but it speeds the airflow over the wings, lowering the air pressure. The maneuver can result in lift. There, there! I had a moment of lift, but the propeller stopped dead. I was gliding, not falling. Yes, there was a river with a broad, bare embankment. I tried to pull the lever to dump the gasoline, but it was rusted shut.

When I looked down, I saw a huge worm lying on the bank of the river—no, surely a man. In a brief flash, I envisioned Thom’s body, clothed but mangled, lying under the snarl of piano wires and gilded struts. This man seemed to lie on his side, naked, alone on the bare bank.

My plane was stepping down and down through the air. If I was going down, I must try to save the codex. I saw Arielle’s brown eyes, her father’s golden gaze. Still holding half a tank of fuel, likely the Cub would burn after impact. The codex would be safer if it went down separately. I pulled the hard case onto my lap. I raised the unlocked lever of the door, then shuffled the heavily reinforced case outside. Instantly, the French horn case dropped toward the green of the treetops.

The trees themselves disappeared. Ahead, waves glittered like a field of diamonds—prismatic, silver, gold. Unless I was wildly off course, there was no sea in this location, yet
there
was a sea and a sandy shore! How could an ocean, sparkling like the streets of paradise, lie ahead? The presence of soft blue water, as blue as the sky? I tried to angle the plane to land on the beach—a gust lifted us for a moment, airspeed sixty miles per hour, and I sailed, I sailed, now the sea was parallel to the plane—I wouldn’t plunge into the water. If only I could float on air forever, on and on, half a mile, good wings, good wings, but sinking, finally sinking. If only my speed might drop to forty—not an impossible landing at all. The tip of the right wing gouged into the sand—a sudden drop with too much torque for a pancake landing—then the beginning of a grand loop of cartwheeling, the fuel tank rupturing, while the good seat belt held— Impact, and my vision sheeted with blood, the greedy crackle of flames.

O
VER
H
IS SHOULDER,
God whispered to Adam on the breeze,
I have set you down not in Idaho, not in a Wilderness of mountains, but in a Garden. And this time you are like unto the first Adam to whom I gave the power to name the animals.

Adam knew that all the animals were inside himself. They lived in his head, and they were small enough to curl up inside the convolutions of his brain, even the elephant and the giraffe. He would have liked to draw them.

In the small space between his skull and his brain, insects buzzed, cicadas and locusts. Grasshoppers such as might eat up all the wheat whirred and jumped within his synapses, but none of them gave him pain—not even the lion whose roar blasted from his ears into the waiting air.

Only what was that gnawing—not in his mind—in his body, close to his heart?
Name the animal you harbor in your heart!
God commanded.

“Fox!” Adam shrieked, and high in the trees the cherries trembled on their stems. God intensified their color and gave their smooth cheeks a sheen.

Then Adam remembered the sharp teeth of the fox and how it had been, long ago, in Idaho.

He was ten, and in the fifth grade he read the story of the Spartan boy, who lived near ancient Athens, who had stolen a fox. Ashamed of himself, the boy hid the fox under his garment and felt the animal’s fur nestled against his own skin covering his ribs. But the fox was hungry, and he was a wild thing. Even when teeth sharp as needles pierced his skin, the Spartan boy, ashamed of his theft, did not cry out, for he was also ashamed of the resentment that he held against his harsh father. Yes, Adam had hidden rebellion in his heart without confessing his feelings. Quietly, the fox bit and chewed and swallowed the boy’s flesh and neatly nursed his blood so that on the outside the boy’s robe remained pristine white. Finally, the Spartan boy slumped dead in his desk, and only then, when they pulled aside the folds of his clothing, did anyone see the smiling fox sitting under the arch of the boy’s ribs.

Adam had loved the truth of the story and its undeniable vividness even more than he admired the boy’s fortitude, and he took the schoolbook home and read it aloud to his mother at the kitchen table.

When he finished reading the story, he had asked, “Don’t you feel like that sometimes, Mother?”

She went to the window over the sink and looked out over the ranch.

“Yes,” she said. “We’re so alone here. Sometimes I feel that something is eating my heart and that honor requires that I hide it from everyone, especially your father.”

Like my drawings of the girls and their sacred parts, he had thought. His hands scurried under his thighs because they remembered the doubled-up belt smiting his knuckles.

So his mother had understood the world as he did: sometimes the heart must be hidden, and the impulses of the hand as well. But she had let his father put him away. Eight years later, his mother who understood him had let his father take Adam to the hospital and leave him there—not nineteen years old—with the shock machine.

Alone in the Garden, Adam’s heart ached for companionship.
We’re so alone here,
his mother’s words echoed on the breeze in the Garden. He watched a
noisy, low-flying bird, a stiff-winged dragon with a red cross on its belly, sail over. The monster coughed and sputtered, and Adam named it
airplane,
for it was his assignment to name every beast that crept on the earth, or swam in the water, or flew through the air. In the air, the bird laid an egg. It was a black egg, strangely warped, and it fell straight down, fast, while the bird flew on.

The pain of his loneliness roared in Adam’s brain, and all the animals in his head wanted out at once. As he crossed the sunny meadow, the grass brushing the sides of his bare feet was dry and warm. An Arctic hare, white and unusually large, hopped away from him. He passed clusters of grazing animals—eland, wildebeest, and Thompson’s gazelle. Only one lifted his head to note Adam’s passing; gratefully, Adam met the eyes of the animal. At the base of a magnolia tree, he found a small reservoir of water. Cradled between the tree roots, it reflected the blue of the sky; Adam leaned his face over the still water.

There he was: a single, scythelike curl on his forehead, and he remembered when he was six years old and his mother had made him a Superman outfit to wear to a Halloween party at the church in town. Really his costume was a too-tight pair of blue knit pajamas, but she had sewn a large red
S
on his chest, and tied a piece of red sheet over his shoulders for a cape.

At the party, he had leaped over chairs and shouted, “Faster than a speeding bullet.” Later he had asked Evelyn, his mother, “What
is
a tall building?
How
tall are they?” She told him skyscrapers were like a church steeple or a grain silo, or taller—better. She had added, “Perhaps someday you will build tall buildings, or have an office in one or live in New York City.” But that was not what he wanted.
Skyscraper
—how he loved the word. He wanted to
be
one. Perfect and powerful. He wanted to be the whole structure.

As he regarded his reflection in the small pool trapped between the roots of the magnolia, he saw that he still resembled Superman, only now his bare shoulders were heavily muscled, his jaw was more square. In the water mirror, he saw his hair was metallic blue-black—but there beside him—another face! It was the large monkey that had found him dumped out of the truck in the desert. Like the good Samaritan, the monkey had fed him: first fruit and then
bloody, uncooked meat. Though Adam stood up and looked around for his friend, he saw no one. Had a friend followed him into Eden?

Again, he knelt down on all fours and looked at his reflection. Now only a spray of stiff magnolia leaves appeared beside his own cheek, and he wondered if the monkey might have been in the tree. He turned his head to look up, but he saw only the branches and the flickering of leaves, slick green on one side and soft buff on the other. Beyond that, the pale vacancy of the sky.

God had whispered on the breeze,
I have set you down in a Garden.
Even an animal would ease the isolation—an ape, a fox.

Fox!
He howled and beat the animal in his chest with his fist.

W
HEN
I
STRUGGLED
from the burning Piper Cub, I was on fire.