Adam & Eve (21 page)

When I accidentally touched the back of my head, I found a soft, short patch of new hair. When I winged my arm back so I could finger the place between my shoulder blades, I discovered the skin was smooth and slick. It was not like normal skin, but who would ever see that scar unless I were wearing a bathing suit? Unless I were swimming in a public pool. For a moment I could almost smell the chlorine from a pool full of people sporting bathing suits more colorful than the petals of zinnias.

I would return to civilization, to my old self. Of course I would. Someday. Did I dwell in a real place? Or had I projected some potent combination of memory and imagination onto airy nothingness? Whatever the status of this Eden in reality, it was the healing place. I was healing, and I was ready to prepare to leave.

What I hoped most to see while I walked was the rigid reality of the French horn case, a crafted, dark emissary from another existence. I supposed the case might have burst open upon impact, but perhaps not. Probably Pierre Saad had made sure that those were no ordinary clasps for the average instrumental
case but ones that would hold even if the case were dropped from an airplane. When I looked up, I imagined the black case was caught in the branches of a yellow acacia tree, but the dark object hunched there was only a baboon.

I supposed the scrolls or the loose notes within the case to be rather small; I pictured a square stack of pages nested in the center of the irregularly shaped case. A dark plum-colored slippery silk lined their nest and flowed over the padding all the way to the edges. If the ancient text had taken the form of long, rolled scrolls, surely the Egyptian would have chosen a trombone case to house them.

Watching as I walked for any scraps of inscribed parchment or papyrus lying loosely around—had the case broken open and spilled its contents—I supposed Pierre Saad must be worried, but I could not worry about his worrying, I repeatedly told myself. As I walked, I literally plodded out this plan: I would heal and grow strong; I would recover the lost texts; I would find a way to return to civilization. My stark plan lacked any emotional content.

And what would become of Adam? I would be happy to take him with me, to rescue him from the fog of mythology, to help him adjust to civilization, to help him secure proper medication. I could not keep myself from admiring him, but he was too young and too troubled for me to envision any real attachment between us. He seemed as exotic and inaccessible as the strange, powerfully muscled antelope-like animal he had identified one bright day as a bongo. Its beautiful russet coat had strange narrow lines of white running through it, and its wide, flat horns rose up in a loose twist, like candy. The loosely twirled spun-candy decorations on Thom’s and my wedding cake, I realized, resembled the horns of the bongo.

At times, as I wandered through the endless grasslands, the groves of trees, and the cultivated garden-transported-straight-from-childhood, I wondered if I had lost my mind. Or if I had died in the crash and this was the afterlife, a place more African than Middle Eastern. No. I had been hurt in the crash, but I had been lucky. Lucky Lucy: I had found help; I was healing. I had fostered a plan with one, two, three steps in it. What else defined my existence? I never asked how I might absorb my experience and re-form myself.

The weather was always fair and hot enough to walk about comfortably
in the absence of clothing. Here night followed day, and at night there were the same stars I had seen in Tennessee, or in Iowa with Thom. Of course when I had moved to New York after Thom’s death, I saw few stars. What else impressed itself on my senses or filled my thoughts? I had wanted to know if Thom had been murdered. Yes, I had wanted to find an answer to that riddle.
Igtiyal.
What root tethered that notion to reality?

The vividness of the world around me, the weakness of my recovering body, the confusion of my own mind—that was the business that must occupy me. Thom was dead. Of that I was sure. How could I ever know the
why
of his death?

Was this natural place any more unlikely than the unnaturalness of New York City? I thought of Gershwin’s music incorporating the sounds of taxi horns. Pausing before crossing the river, I imagined the sounds of traffic as though I had stopped before crossing the avenue. Gershwin’s music hovering over the brownish water. I was neither dead nor insane. I was here. Naked as Eve.

One afternoon, Adam pointed to the horizon to show me a rising pile of dark clouds.

“We’ll have a thunderstorm and rain by afternoon,” he said.

“I didn’t think it ever rained here in paradise.”

He went on speaking, explaining that at certain periods it must rain very hard and very long to balance the long dry season we had been living in. “The roots must hold a great deal of water, not so far down.” If it should rain as hard as he thought it would, our trees and woven roofs would provide inadequate shelter.

“And so?” I asked.

“We’ll take what fruit we can carry with us—maybe make satchels of the elephant ear leaves—and go to the overhang. Where I keep the reserve fire. I already stored firewood at the rock shelter,” he said. “We have a lot.”

Having considered the particulars of the immediate future more carefully than I, he must have gathered fallen branches while I was taking my meditative walks. The clouds looked like bruises billowing at the collided
boundary of meadow and sky. Far away. A turmoil of purple, dark gray, and yellow.

“In Idaho we sometimes watched thunderclouds build, like those.”

The rain began while we hurried up the stony path to the shelter. With damp hair and skin, I felt chilly, but Adam set about borrowing flame from his established hearth to build a second fire on the rock floor. A whole truckload of wood, it seemed, was piled safely back in the driest part of the shelter. Rivulets of rain cascaded over the high rim of the overhang to form a flowing curtain between our cavelike room and the rest of the world. Sometimes the wind puffed the curtain back into the room and sprayed us with a cold mist.

Near the edge of the floor, the blowing spray quickly coated a large pile of rocks, each about the size of a fist. Those nearest the drop-off glistened with wet. When I reached to touch one, Adam quietly said, “I’d rather you not disturb the rocks.”

It was an odd request. He’d never before told me that he’d rather I not do
anything.
I didn’t like it—this new possessiveness—but I complied. Maybe he thought of this space as his own, a kind of den especially for his use. His castle rock. Because the second fire was built near the back wall, it smoked, and I saw the soot had left its mark on the sandstone wall.

Although I thought the rain would certainly stop before sunset, the sky beyond the streaming rain grew increasingly gray and then black. On the inside of the rain curtain, the light of the flames from the two fires reflected the glamour of silver and gold. I was glad for the fires, but being in a more defined space hinted of primitive domesticity.

While it was warmer farther back under the rock shelf, it was also more smoky. Adam warmed himself beside the fire. Occasionally he held out one of his sturdy arms at shoulder level over the flames, as though he were roasting himself. The dark pocket of hair in his armpit somewhat embarrassed me, although I was used to the black cloud around his pubis. In the middle of the rock shelter two pallets of moss had been arranged for our sleeping, parallel
but separate. Probably a whole clan could have been sheltered in the overhangs among the bluff.

“One bed looks fresher than the other,” I remarked, somewhat nervously.

“I just finished it yesterday,” he said. “It’s for you.”

“Why did you start making one for me yesterday?”

“It was yesterday when I first saw the storm beginning to build. Just a little. I wasn’t sure then.”

So he had suspected a change in the weather even earlier but not told me. The moss on the one pallet was beginning to turn brown in places. I judged his bed to be about five days old.

“Sometimes I nap here in the afternoons. I change my bed about once a week,” he said.

He, too, seemed nervous.

Whether my question rose from fear or hope, I don’t know, but suddenly I blurted, “Adam, could there be other people here?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

I was amazed. “You don’t know?” I questioned. “Wouldn’t you have seen someone, or some sign?”

“They’re … sort of monkeys. At least one. A sort of boy monkey.”

I was incredulous. “Does he come here?”

“No. I don’t want him up here.”

Full of curiosity, I asked if he minded that I was here, in his special place. He replied no, that he wanted me here with him. When I asked about the monkey, he told me that he was rough, hairy in places, his head was shaggy, but he was bare of hair in other places. He had not seen him since he first came to Eden. When Adam said the hominoid had human hands and eyes, I grew alarmed and tried to change the subject. Adam wouldn’t let me, not till he’d conveyed one more fact.

“When I first came here, I was hurt. Beaten … to say the least. I couldn’t close my fingers. My hands were blue with bruises. He fed me. Fruit and meat. Raw meat.”

But Adam had not encountered him again. He did not know if the monkey had left the Garden, he said.

A gust of wind slapped the rain into one of the fires, and it died, hissing.

“We can share,” Adam said. “I shouldn’t have built that one so far out.”

When I moved back near the smoky fire, I suggested we place apples near the embers. “It’ll take a while, but wouldn’t roasted apples be good?” I asked him. “Something warm to eat.”

“My mother used to roast Rome apples in the oven, Idaho potatoes sometimes, in the stone fireplace, for us.”

“Your mother?” I was surprised. He was admitting to a human past. “Adam, you’ve never mentioned your mother.”

He said nothing, but he brought two apples and placed them on the pitted rock close to the fire, then pushed them closer with a stick.

“And brothers and sisters?” I asked.

“I had five little brothers.” He rose and stood at the fluid curtain. “I was supposed to set a good example for them, my father said.” He turned his back to me, and I realized he must be pissing into the rain. I turned away from him and surveyed the back of our cave.

At our camp, Adam kept a series of holes ready for waste, each with a neat pyramid of dirt beside it. When he had scraped out the holes with the edge of a coconut shell, he had not needed to explain what they were for. I wondered if my menses would commence, when my burns were healed, and how I would handle that natural phenomenon. They had become, at age forty-two, somewhat irregular.

Except for our nakedness, ours was a rather sanitized Eden. I liked it that way. Do no harm. Listening to the force of the rain, I knew I did not want to venture out into it. When I surveyed the cave floor, I saw that in a back corner—one would have to squat to fit under the low overhang there—a shallow dip had been lined with a large leaf. Our toilet. The waste to be enfolded in the leaf and dropped over the edge, not on the gently sloping path where we had ascended but over the other edge, a genuine cliff. A stack of banana leaves lay on a flat rock, near the basin.

Before he turned to face me, I watched his elbow give a sharp double jiggle. Familiar. What woman would not recognize that characteristically male gesture? With perfect matter-of-factness he walked toward the stockpile of
branches and twigs, gathered some in his hand, then squatted and began to feed the fire.

“Yes,” he said, “like everyone, Eve, I had a mother and a father.”

“Adam,” I said as gently as I could. “My name is not Eve.”

He winced. “Don’t say that,” he replied. “Please don’t say that now.”

If I could not speak the truth, I decided, I would say nothing at all for a while. I would enact the mildest kind of negative reinforcement for his insistence on delusion—silence. Though I walked to the curtain of rain, I knew it would be ludicrous for me to try to piss into it. No posture would serve. The scene would be more comical than my trying to catch milk in my mouth, though I had performed better with the goat than with the cow.

I stretched my fingertips into the cascade and let the spatter bounce into my face. It felt good—a relief to my skin after the dry heat of the campfires. I stayed at the rain curtain a long time without even looking at him. When I got tired of playing with the rain with my hands, I stuck my toes into it. When I looked again at his pyramid of stones, it occurred to me they might be a kind of munitions storage. Would not someone who prepared a latrine also want an arsenal? They were just the right size for throwing, not for me, but for a strong man who wanted to do as much quick damage to anyone below the cliff or approaching on the path as he could.

Finally I asked, “When did you gather the stones?”

“As soon as I got here,” he remarked, somewhat sullenly.

“Did you know they would get wet, where you’ve stacked them?”

“No. I didn’t know it would rain this hard. I’ll move them, another time.”

“Adam,” I said, finally turning to look at him again. He had quit feeding the fire, but he still stood looking into it, with his arms crossed high over his bare chest. The firelight played over his rosy skin, and in the middle of his forehead hung the black scythelike curl. “Adam, don’t be mad at me,” I said. “I said the wrong thing.”

Now he glanced at me and held my gaze.

“I’m sorry,” I added, as blandly as I could.

Immediately, he smiled and came to me. Very carefully he placed both hands over my shoulders and turned me. “Come back to the fire, Eve,” he said. “Won’t you?”

I came to the fire and neatly sat down sideways on a stone, on my hip with my legs bent to the side. Under my hip, the stone close to the fire felt hard but warm.

“It’ll take a while,” I said, “for the apples to roast.”

“I know.”

“Do you want to talk?”

He hesitated, glanced at me, and then back to the flames. “No,” he said quietly. “Let’s not. Let’s just wait.” In a few moments, he coached, “Listen to the rain.”