Adam & Eve (4 page)

Though Adam was of adult size and had the body of a thirty-year-old man—undeniably—this was the first day of his life, and so he
was
but a babe. Lacking experience, or the consciousness of experience, he did not yet know the world into which he had come miraculously or by design. The baby in Adam watched his toes wiggle, but he quickly felt such playfulness lacked dignity,
and he ceased. English words bubbled out of his mouth, though his syllables were ill formed and sounded like babble. Adam babbled on, not trying to make any sense but, like any baby and some poets, delighting simply in the music of his human voice.

A whistle mingled with the watery murmurings, yet it was more penetrating, a descant over woodwinds. I must know! Adam thought. Even before he could turn to look, the idea that he must know what was around him—the source of that noise—mutated into the idea that he must know
everything.
Scientist! He carried that possibility. Or philosopher. Poet, painter, lover, husband, father?

To locate the origin of the whistle, Adam surveyed the trees set back from the water. At this time, Eden-by-the-Sea had many varieties of trees living together in harmony. Here, certainly, were the palm trees, who were not only friendly within their genus—the date palm conversing happily with the coconut palms, the royal ones with the plebeian—but reached out with their fronds to the nearby oaks and tickled their thick and fissured bark, while the mighty oaks playfully peppered acorns into the boughs of the Norway spruce, which, in turn, seductively rubbed the dark striations encircling the white bark of the birches, some as thick as your waist, others as slender as your wrist. Chinese elms lived there, too, and pecan trees grew nearby, with their beautifully smooth-shelled, still-green nuts bunched in clusters. A grove of redwoods soared to celestial heights, begging to be worshiped in and of themselves for their ascendancy. So as not to be shaded out, the fruit trees and fruiting vines did stand away a bit from the more overwhelming forest, giving one another a courteous amount of space, apple from peach, peach from pomegranate, persimmon, scuppernong, etc.

It was among the trees of the fruit orchard that Adam saw a flash of color—red—and for a moment he thought that apples had the gift of flight, but then he saw that there were not only plants in the world but also animals, and here came a bird, who could whistle and fly. It was covered with feathers, and they were red. Quickly Adam checked his forearms to see if he were feathered, but he found that he was not. Nonetheless, he immediately wished he could fly.

And so desire (more intangible than lust) was born in his human breast.

The cardinal swooped toward Adam but came to rest on the prong of a piece of driftwood that the sea had deposited on the shore. Almost the length of a recumbent Adam, the driftwood propped itself on the shore, its gray feet still in the lapping waves. Adam wanted the bird—never mind the graceful driftwood or the unending ocean. He called out something poetic about how the bird was kin to his heart, but the bird could not understand his babble.

Lacking feathers, Adam could not fly to the bird, but he could crawl. He reached out with one hand, and it sank a bit into wetter sand; he moved the opposite knee forward. Repeating the motion provided locomotion, but Adam paused. He noted his handprint in the sand: the shape of it, four fringy fingers and an off-sprout of a thumb. He took proprietary note of the form he had created in the sand and said that it was good.

Though he had manly, well-sculpted muscles, Adam had not used them, and they were weak. He sat back on his heels and haunches to rest. A bird with long legs was wading in the foam of the surf—a beautiful bird, blue like himself, but with graceful drooping, curving feathers, a great blue heron, and Adam determined to stand up, for after all
he
had two legs like the birds, even if he lacked their wings.

Adam stumbled uncertainly on toddler legs toward the cardinal, but then the beaked red featherball flew away.

Adam wept.

He sat down in the moving water and rested his head on the knee of the gray driftwood. With his cheek against the smooth wood, he wondered about its story—where had it been, and how long had it floated in the water? The need for narrative began to gnaw its way outward from the deep convolutions of his brain. He felt a certain sympathy for the driftwood with its sinuous silvery curves—how time or wear had defined its grain.

At that moment, a larger wave broke over Adam’s chest and head with a good hard smack. The wave knocked him backward, then withdrew itself into the sea with a large, rude sucking sound. Adam was amazed. The arabesque of driftwood, almost as big as himself, had been washed back out to sea.

Should he try to pursue it? No. He remembered how the bird had flown away.

He formulated an idea that had something of the ring of truth to it, though he had no idea whether his maxim was true or not: when something leaves you, do not try to reclaim it.

The color of the sky began to change on one side. Perhaps he had learned enough. The sky became pinker, then redder. Adam wondered if he himself would change color. As far as he could tell by examining his hands, he was the same blue hue, but the light was disappearing.

The sun was powerful and did as it pleased: it slid right down the slope of sky and into the water. And the world grew darker.

It was the evening of Adam’s first day.

He was lonely. As the daylight drained from the sky, he was almost afraid.

Perhaps it was the nature of things that he was to have only one day. As the world darkened, would he slip back into the clay whence he came?

Forgetting how to walk, Adam crawled back through the water to the shore. If he were to dissolve in the twilight, he thought, if his flesh were to become again a part of the earth, he would have liked to make another handprint, to leave his mark behind. Perhaps a latter-day Adam would see his sign.

Resolutely, he spread his fingers and pressed his hand into the yielding sand. Because the sand was wet but not sloppy, it retained the form of his hand when he withdrew it. How well this lonely vacant print represented the reality of his palpable hand. Slowly, the mold of his hand filled up with water. Reflecting something of the scant light, his liquid palm print glimmered in the sand.

Leaving his work to fend for itself, Adam crawled to a slope of sand. To sleep, he lay curled on his side, his cheek pillowed by both his hands pressed together, palm to palm. But then one hand strayed to his hair. There he found a seam of dried blood. Perhaps he had been struck? Perhaps he had had a fall followed by a hard landing. Sleepy, Adam nestled against the dune, where the dry sand offered lingering warmth of the sun to its visitor’s bare back.

Adam’s eyelids fluttered down. He recalled how the redbird’s wings had closed when it settled on the prong of driftwood.

Suddenly Adam awoke to look for more animals but saw none. He appeared alone upon an earth devoid of living creatures, save himself. Then the darkness parted her lips and smiled at him—the crescent moon rode above the black bosom of the sea.

Thus Adam’s first day closed, but in his innocence he hoped to see another.

E
YAD BIN
B
AGEN
had been a Greek Orthodox Christian and a star physics student at Birzeit University near Ramallah until a chirpy classmate from Las Vegas asked him just exactly where the Virgin Mary had gone when she had ascended into heaven, bodily. Eyad had also studied English, so he tried as best he could to explain in her language that her question was irrelevant. Then she mocked him in competent Arabic and said heaven was someplace or it was no place and had no ontological status in reality. She had chosen to speak to him just while the muezzin intoned the Muslim call to prayer from his station high above the street. Eyad saw she was insolent, arrogant, blasphemous, and very pretty.

When he opened his mouth to rebuke her, to his own amazement, he, too, sang out the Muslim call to prayer, which he had heard and ignored all his Christian life. He could not have been more startled than if a dove had flown out of his lips. While his mouth hung open in an elongated O, she laughed in his face. In what language did she laugh? Filled with confusion and rage, Eyad could feel his hands tingle with the desire to strangle her, and he wished he were taller and stronger.

Instead, he turned away from her so quickly he spun out of one of his sandals.
Where could he go but toward the mosque? While he crossed the pavement, he could feel her eyes scorning his straight back, his slight stature, and the limp in his gait caused by having to walk with one bare foot and one shod.

“Oedipus,” she shrieked after him, braying her knowledge like a donkey. So she had studied ancient Greek literature. So had he. The prophecy was that a man wearing only one sandal would kill his father and marry his mother. Let it be, Eyad bin Bagen thought in his fury: I will kill the religion of my father and mother, as though the idea were a translation of Sophocles’ Greek.

Eyad stalked onto the porch of the mosque, removed the remaining sandal, entered the holy place, and knelt toward Mecca, though he had no prayer rug. He banged his forehead directly against the floor until he began to leave a stamp on the stone with his blood.

“Comrade,” the very tall young man next to him whispered. He had risen and was holding out his own rug to Eyad bin Bagen. And he was smiling: no teeth showing, just a simple curve of lips below friendly dark eyes. To Eyad’s surprise, the towering young man turned and left.

For a few moments Eyad continued his devotion. Then he realized he wanted more than anything to see the softness in his brother comrade’s eyes. When he arose and returned to the porch, the other young man was waiting for him, holding both of Eyad’s sandals in his hand. “I have seen you at university,” he said. “You are the number one physics student.”

“I’m changing to mathematics,” Eyad answered.

“Why?”

“It’s a purer world. It has no reference to physical realities.”

“I think this is the first time you are coming to the mosque? You are an Arab, but you have worshipped with the Greeks.”

“The Muslims do not pretend that God is man, or that God was born of a human woman.”

“There is no God but God,” the student replied, and smiled. Eyad focused again on the sweet curve of his friend’s smile spreading across his face and recalled that the tall student was majoring in English. “Romi is my name,” he said.

The two remained friends for thirty years. While Eyad admired Romi’s forgiving nature and his goodwill toward all people, Eyad did not share his friend’s temperament. Romi married, and his wife bore seven children. He became a beloved teacher of high school English and a man with many friends, the second dearest of whom was Eyad.

In mid-September of 2001, Eyad made a pilgrimage to Mecca and took Romi’s next-to-oldest son with him during a time when checkpoints had made it so difficult for students and faculty to reach the university that many courses were suspended, including the course in nonlinear algebra that Eyad taught. Eyad had not married, but he had become a highly regarded professor in mathematics, though he was considering resigning so that he might spend all his time with the Holy Book. He told Romi that a renowned English mathematician, Isaac Newton, had regarded his greatest work to be a commentary on the book of Daniel.

One day, coming out of a date shop, Eyad saw the woman, his classmate, who had laughed at him for believing that the mother of Lord Jesus had ascended directly to heaven. Of course the scoffer had grown older, too; he had heard years ago that she had married a Persian and lived in Isfahan, but here she was, entering the date store in Ramallah, wearing loose slacks and a green tunic, her hair uncovered. Quickly Eyad drew out the blade he always kept at hand and cut a smile on her cheek.

“Now I have given you a second mouth,” he said quickly in a low voice. “Make it smile, if you can. Laugh long.”

Eyad ran without limping into the crowd, and no one knew him from any other man. No drop of blood had spotted his robe, and he had dropped the razor, its mission complete.