Adam & Eve (47 page)

They would all take café au lait at the table while they waited, the old man insisted. While they sipped the hot drink, cats emerged from hiding, more and more cats, as though there were dozens, maybe hundreds of all stripes and colors, brindled and spotted. One, the obvious favorite, with six toes, was bold enough to leap into the old woman’s lap and purr like a contented motor. Arielle was surprised that this antique Frenchwoman called him “Calcifer,” the name of a Japanese cartoon character.

Across from Arielle the old couple sat side by side on a bench, their brown faces like twin maps with wrinkles for roads and rivers. They communed. Sometimes they spoke. Yes, they, too, had seen the paintings and drawings, the incised animals hidden in the slope across the valley, the spotted horses wreathed by human handprints. No, they had never told. Well, a few cousins, close neighbors who could be trusted.

Arielle’s vision of a helicopter proved prescient, for soon it hovered in a cloud of noise near the low stone barn.

Insisting that she ride back with the police, Arielle instructed them to look for the legs of her pants, which she had unzipped and discarded near the exit of the cave, but her explanation was unnecessary. From high in the air Arielle saw them coming down the mountain—her father and Lucy, hand in hand, her father carrying the codex in the black case. But where was Adam?

When Pierre and Lucy saw the copter and Arielle’s smiling wave through its glass bubble (but not the tears that had filled her eyes), they reversed their direction and began to climb back toward the cave.

W
ITH CONSTANT PRESSURE
from the pad of folded undershirt, the bleeding stopped. In the beam of his flashlight Adam saw the heel bone was shattered, the tendon torn. The pain was excruciating, and consciousness reeled and staggered.

Hunched over his leg, with infinite patience he gradually loosened, then removed the tourniquet made of shirtsleeves. All the while, he kept a steady pressure against the wound. With one hand, he folded a sleeve and placed it as a larger bandage over the bloody pad; the other sleeve he used to bind both pads against his heel. Now he could uncurl his spine and lie back.

When his skin first touched the cold stone, Adam recoiled, but he hoped the heat of his flesh would gradually warm the place where he lay. He turned off the flashlight again to conserve its battery. After he rested, he would begin the clinking of stone on stone as a signal he hoped would carry through the corridors. He would use the SOS code.

For now he would sleep in the bowels of the earth as though in the bosom of Abraham.

What woke him was his own shivering. Immediately he switched on the flashlight and checked his foot. The blood soaked into the fabric was brown and stiff; there was no bright blood. But it was dangerous to be this cold. Except for the wrapping around his foot, he wore nothing at all. He feared that he might go into shock, and he was grateful to his shivering and to his body for trying to warm itself. Slowly he rose and stood on one leg so as to put no weight on his injured foot. Feeling dizzy, he reached for the wall to steady himself, but his fingers found only air. He knew he must be very careful not to fall. To balance himself, he rested just the toes of his wounded foot on the stone floor. If he became unconscious, if no signaling noises were made, it might become impossible to find him. Would they bring in dogs? Yes, surely they would do that.

He pictured the tracking dogs passing by the images of prehistoric animals. With their noses to the stones, the dogs would have no awareness of the art. Adam mused on the fact that he had seen no dogs among the paintings. Art had begun before the domestication of animals.

Perhaps he should try to follow the corridor. Perhaps the effort required to move would warm him. Gingerly he placed a little weight on his hurt foot. Then a little more weight. Even before he saw the new blood, he felt a warm gush from his heel. As quickly as he could, he sat down again on the cold, stone floor, elevated the foot, yoga-lotus-style this time, and pressed hard against the bandage. He determined that he would not try to walk again for hours. Before he turned off the flashlight, he pressed three fingers across the lens to test the surface for warmth, but there was none, not even for the tips of his fingers.

For a moment, he stroked the cold stone. Almost he could hear someone singing, a tenor voice of pure beauty,
Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem. Com-fort-ably
—there was a significant drop in the melody between the first and second syllables. He tried reversing it: the low note first, and then a spring upward. And then began a ringing in his ears.

It was a high-pitched, continuous ringing, and he knew it for what it was: the dreadful high mosquito whine of solitude. He had heard it in the hospital. When they placed him in isolation and removed him from all real sounds,
then there was the ringing in his ears. A steady pitch, almost a hum except for its wiry, steely quality. He could hum now, on the same pitch, but he knew his humming could never overcome the whine inside his head. In the hospital, he had begun to shout against the sizzling silence, but he would not do that here.

Now his foot had stopped bleeding. He placed both palms over his ears and pressed in as hard as he could; then he could hear a roaring and also the sound of his own breathing, how the air rubbed in and out of his nostrils, but he could not obliterate the high-pitched ringing. If anything, it became louder while he pressed his ears. He thought of real ringing, of church bells and how he loved their clangor. When he married Arielle, he would have church bells ringing. Yes, he would marry Arielle—he was sure of it.

The bitter bile of his resentment against his father rose in his mouth. Why should he, Adam, not have drawn the private parts of girls and women? Adam pressed his hands together and thought of their strength. He was larger and stronger now than his father, perhaps more so than his father had ever been.

Honor thy father and thy mother!
It was the voice of God reprimanding him, or the voice of Moses with his hated commandments. Adam had broken them all. Like ten lashes, the commandments seemed to smite Adam’s bare back. From where he lay on the cold stone, he lifted a humped rock nearby and threw it crashing against a wall. Clenching his hands into fists, Adam made one fist beat the other for punishment. His heart pumped hard and warmingly, until finally he lay on his side in exhaustion, his hands bruised and sore from having reviled each other. Still the unremitting ringing in his ears.

Adam! Adam!
God’s voice cleft the rocks and found him where he lay. He opened his eyelids to utter blackness, but Adam felt happiness warm him as he lay in the cave.
Be still, and know that I am the Lord, your God,
so said the still quiet voice of his self.

Adam!
Again the voice shouted his name, with fear and urgency—and why was that? He turned on the flashlight to search the darkness and heard the surprised joy of shuffling feet and startled voices. From the other side of the abyss, friends had seen the glow of his light.

And then the father voice barked command—to Adam? To someone else? “No! Don’t!”

The authority in the fatherly roar was like a club knocking a man or boy to the ground, and it made Adam swoon into a moment of terrified oblivion. But as the cry echoed in his brain, Adam recognized there had been fear, even terror, resonating in that command.
Don’t!

When he opened his eyes, he sensed her presence. He picked up the flashlight and fixed her in light: there she stood, in all her beauty. She had leaped the abyss for him. Familiar, she was, in the splendor of her burnt orange blouse, tan shorts, bare legs. Tears glistening in her eyes as she gazed at his wounded nakedness.

“Eve?” he questioned.

“I’m here.”

W
E ALL CONSIDERED
it a sacred mission, even those of a rather secular disposition.

Certainly, we were solemn. I piloted the little craft, while Arielle sat beside me as copilot; she balanced the urn of ashes on the point of her knee. There was no room for the urn in her lap; her pregnancy occupied that territory. Even before the virulent infection set in and the amputation had occurred, an obliging priest had officiated at their bedroom marriage, and afterward the door had been closed. Despite the fever and Adam’s delirium, she had told us, the marriage had been consummated.

The year 2020 had come and gone; whether the scientists had had their clear vision, I could not say. Soon I would give the legitimate astrophysicists Thom’s flash drive. I would tell the secret of the red dot that became a heart. What of those images of the Lucys? I didn’t care. I had my own reality, my own memory of my life with Thom.

Perhaps it would take a long time for people to develop a clear idea of our place in the cosmos. Decades or centuries might pass before people adjusted to the truth of Thom’s discovery of extraterrestrial life. It was my faith that this truth would eventually help to free humans from the bonds of egotism.
The truth should make us humble: we are neither central nor unique in the universe. Values are not given; we must create our own. Certainly I now saw myself and my choices more clearly.

We had flown into the airport at Arundel on a commercial craft, then transferred to a light plane for the greater privacy it afforded. After takeoff, I had smiled when I piloted us past Mount Kilimanjaro; there had been no snow on it for over a decade.

I asked Arielle if she knew the Hemingway story set in the very Africa over which we were flying titled “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

“No,” she answered, “but I’ve heard the title.”

“I can’t remember what happens in it,” I admitted. “Or who does it.”

“Perhaps sometimes places are more important than people,” Arielle observed. “You remembered Kilimanjaro.”

From the backseat, Pierre Saad, suddenly awake, said, “I don’t believe that.”

I thought it no wonder that Pierre would be of a dissenting opinion about the relative value of places and people. Though I didn’t say so, I certainly agreed that people mattered more than places. Individuals. Pierre had uprooted himself successfully from Egypt to become thoroughly French. When his mother was murdered, he had survived through the agency of another person, his Sufi stepfather. People were of crucial importance; let the places go. I said quietly to Pierre, “I wish your father were with us. I wish he had lived to know about the babies.”

“He was glad to save us,” Pierre replied. “I saw the look on his face, pleased and proud that he could command the gadget. He knew that Gabriel would kill him. He was at peace.”

My body remembered that slow, gliding fall of the aircraft that had taken me to Adam’s Eden, how I had passed the towering stand of redwoods, or what seemed to me to be California redwoods, though reason had told me that was impossible.

I looked down at Africa through this rented aircraft’s window and saw a shattering of gold below.

“It’s a yellow acacia tree,” Pierre said. “Not much grows in the gorge.”