Adam & Eve

LUCY AS EVE


I HAD FALLEN into Eden, despite its floral references and their convincing recapitulations of my local childhood themes. There seemed to be an inaudible music in the air, wafting just under the threshold of my hearing. When Thom had sung art songs to me, my favorite had been Handel’s “Where E’er You Walk.” I heard it now—a song in which the beloved was so adored by both man and nature that even trees would crowd into a shade to protect her from the sun. Whether the music emanated from memory or from the beauty around me, or from the mind of a madman—and surely this naked Adonis, this Adam with an American accent, was mad—I was loath to decide.

I shamelessly watched his naked back as he walked away to gather fruit and balm for my burn: I watched the slight groove acknowledging the presence of a mortal spine hidden under his flesh, the rounds of his moving buttocks, the shapeliness of his strong legs. His head was held high. His bare feet moved him swiftly away as though he had no thought of feet or their necessary work in traversing the short, dry grass. In his physical perfection, he seemed a human worthy of the sky, the complement of its gentle bright blues and satisfying heaps of clouds.

I recognized who he was, or rather I knew where I might legitimately have expected to meet him, instead of in this demi-Eden. He could have been one of my patients, of the gentle variety. A mental case, someone in whose mind reality shifted its shape more rapidly than metaphors of shifting clouds. Someone who was surely terrified, at times, by uncertainties, and yet someone who loved his own imaginings and where they could take him. Was I myself just a figment of his imagination? Had he been powerful enough to draw me into his reality?

“Eve,” he had called me, as though he were the proprietor of this territory and might name me as he pleased. Was I so weakened that I would let him define me and the reality of my world? No. I had told this Adam, straight and directly, My name is Lucy. Had I let Thom, when I fell into the world of the university, only eighteen, define my reality? Yes. And it had been good. But I could still tell the difference between a genius and a madman.

When Adam returned, I rose to meet him. Though the effort made me feel faint, I wanted him to see me full—no concealment, secrets, or pretense. I stepped forward, out of the shade, into the sunlight so it could reveal and brighten my body. I wanted to establish our nakedness as ordinary, natural as sunlight, not erotic.

He walked toward me with fruit in his hands—three small oranges in one hand, two pears with speckled skins in the other, and cherries hung over his ears. Two steps short of where I stood, he stopped and said, “You are just like me.”

“Yes.” Two human beings. Certainly we were alike.

“But you need to stay in the shade so you won’t get sunburned. You’re already burned.”

He handed me the pears, and then with his hand he removed spears of aloe, having transported them clamped between his ribs and the inside of his upper arm, though I’d not noticed them at first. He had come to me like a painting from the Renaissance—a man whose body was composed of vegetables.

Obediently—because it was reasonable—I stepped back into the edge of the shade, sat down, and leaned forward so he could minister to my back and scalp. I imagined the raw ugliness my back displayed—worse than a painting of a sore, it was a sore. As he knelt behind me and dripped the soothing sap into my wounds, I bit into one of the pears. He had not washed them, and the skin tasted of dust.

“Do you like the pear?” His voice was as uncomplicated as that of a schoolboy. Drip, drip, drip, without contamination, the aloe fluid dropped patiently into my flesh.

“The pear? Refreshing as water, but more enticing,” I reported. “Mealy, a little, but slippery, too.” He had asked me; so why not find the words for the whole truth? What else was there to do? I would not hold back but find the real, precise language for every moment of being alive. I ate some more and offered a new report. “But I feel surprised instead of satisfied when it’s gone. That’s the way it is with eating pears. In your mouth they just disappear.”

When he said nothing, I asked, “Do you want the other one?”

“No. It’s for you. Does the aloe sting your back?”

“Not at all.”

“Lean over more.”

I did, glancing at myself, my hanging breasts and nipples as they pointed toward the ground. I regretted that some of the juice from the pear dripped into the grass. How unremittingly the juice fell straight down. The airplane and I had fallen otherwise—a gentle, slanting glide. We had stepped downward as through dreamy levels of consciousness. When I had released the French horn case outside the open door of the plane, the case plummeted. Straightaway, Pierre Saad’s codex was gone. Lost. Rushing down the straight facade of the seventeenth-century Dutch house, the grand piano had fallen plumb onto Thom. I had always imagined his face upturned, literally facing it, maybe even calculating its velocity with lightning rapidity.

Drip, drip, drip, like fairy pearls, the aloe dripped into my burn and dissolved.

Adam said, “To be honest, I ate the first pear from the tree. I wanted to be sure they were ripe.”

Had I seen any vegetables growing in this garden? Not yet, only fruit and flowers. Perhaps some nut trees. (Already my back and the back of my head were soothing themselves under the influence of the aloe juice.)

The image of my plane smoldering on the beach came to me. Perhaps small flames still smoldered in the wreckage. Should I ask him to fetch fire?

No. I thought not. The natural temperature was so warm I did not want for clothes or any other source of heat. I had had enough of fire, but still I asked, “Do you have fire here?”

“Fire?” he asked as though he didn’t understand the word. Certainly he had earth, air, water in abundance. But fire? It seemed a troubling element.

“Do you need fire?” I prompted. “How long have you been here?”

“I came here …” He hesitated. “I’ve been here some time.”

“More than a week?” I asked. He seemed in such perfect health.

He extended his hands, one of them clasping a stalk of the dripping aloe, over my shoulders for me to see. He seemed to be presenting the backs of his hands for inspection.

“My hands. My hands are no longer blue, you see.”

I said nothing. Blue? A small cloud of depression passed through my mind. He had seemed all right enough to be treated as though he were all right. Something balked in me about considering him among my patients. I didn’t want to work at redeeming him. Not here. I wanted to enjoy. I was alive—Wasn’t that enough to be? Alive?

At the lower edge of the canopy of the apple tree, Adam inserted banana leaves; the next layer of leaves was woven through those branches slightly higher, and when a third layer was in place, I was provided a roof. The three stages of big leaves were like overlapping shingles. Providing shade or shelter from possible rain, the banana leaves converted the tree into a garden pavilion. Nested on fern fronds, I lay comfortably on my stomach. For three days, and then three more, I slept and ate and dreamed.

Adam brought me grapes and fuzzy kiwi to eat, and water in a large curved leaf. He cracked pecans between two rocks and picked out the meat for me, making sure to avoid the bitter pith. Once he placed an enormous coconut on the lower rock and, raising another stone high above his head, smashed the coconut shell as hard as he could over and over. The blows made me wince, but he was too intent on his work to notice. Eventually the shell cracked. Though the thin coconut milk was mostly lost, Adam fed me delicious meaty curves of coconut, each a crescent of amazing whiteness.

“Pure as snow,” he said wonderingly, his forehead and cheeks streaming with sweat.

After we had eaten the coconut, the empty shell suggested itself to Adam as a dipper for carrying me water. He made a second coconut vessel, one created more carefully, which was almost the equivalent of a small pot in size, so that I would have a reservoir of water with me always. To hold the rounded container upright, he arranged a supporting ring of stones. Before I drank the water, I usually liked to smell it. Seeing me do this, Adam often squeezed a lemon or a lime into the water to give it a slight flavor.

I considered volunteering to make a basket for carrying fruit, whatever, by weaving together the long grass, if there was suitable grass here, and if not I could use the strong, bladelike leaves of the iris I had seen. But I decided not to make the offer. Let it be this way for a while—that he would bring to me only what I needed in his bare hands, or clamped against his body, or dangling from his ears. I recalled again Renaissance paintings of people composed of robust vegetables.

One day he brought home a section of waxy honeycomb that he had stolen from the bees. He pronounced it to have special healing power. After I had sucked the honey from the comb, I bit off a hunk and smacked away on the wax in a noisy way, like a preteen girl chewing gum—uninhibited oral pleasure.

Another day he arrived with an even larger flat rock balanced on top of his head and steadied with both hands. Protected by a layer of large fig leaves, the upper side of the rock itself was upholstered with a deep pad of green moss. Up till now, I could choose to either stand or lie, or sit awkwardly on the grass. He said the mossy rock was to become my soft seat. To elevate it a foot or so, he brought other rocks to form its legs. He constructed the bench in a particularly shady spot, near the trunk of the tree. Because the pad of moss would dry quickly in the warm air, he explained, he would water it twice a day, to keep the moss happy.

During this time of healing, we talked lightly and sparsely.

My thoughts came and went as uncertainly as clouds. I was never bored. I felt myself to be in the process of absorbing it all—the weather, this strange place, the strange man who presided over it.

And what was my responsibility to this man who called himself Adam?

None, I decided. Not now. I would rest. I would heal. Here in this verdant Eden, surely located somewhere between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers as they flowed toward the Persian Gulf, if it were located anywhere outside the realm of imagination, I would loaf and invite my soul, as Whitman had written in Leaves of Grass.

Perhaps I myself had potentials of soul, mind, body, I had neither explored nor recognized. Perhaps it was the same for Adam, and we were both fortunate beyond our wildest hopes.

Adam was, I hoped and then decided again, a gentle soul.

But did I myself even have a soul to invite to this picnic on the grass? Did I have one left? Or had it been allowed to evaporate and disperse into the air? No doubt, someplace in Japan, my missionary parents were praying for me. Surely my absence from the round world had been noted and reported. I wished them Whitman’s encouraging words, “look for me under your boot-soles…. Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.” But I doubted I was waiting for reconciliation with the parents who had abandoned me for their idea of God and duty.

Sometimes in the heat of the day, Adam fanned me with a leaf from the elephant ear plant until I fell into a dazed afternoon nap. Always, three times a day, he treated my burns with the drippings from a spear of aloe. Every other day, he brought tangerines for me to eat, and when he did, he made something of a ritual of it. “I should like to feed you the tangerine sections, one by one,” he said, “and if you don’t mind, I’d like you to feed me, as well.”

“All right,” I answered, a bit uncomfortably. “But why?”

“God sent Noah a rainbow as a promise. To me, God gave a tangerine. He caused me to notice it and to take it for myself. It was juicy and delicious. Its goodness restored me to life.”

“Where did I come from?” I asked gently. I had disabused Adam of the idea that God had created me from one of his own ribs.

“The sky.”

“And where did you come from?” I asked for the first time.

“The earth. My name, Adam, means that I came from the clay of the earth.”

For a terrible moment I remembered the last morning with Thom, how he had spoken of the Hebrew meaning of the word adamah.

“I’ve troubled you,” Adam observed.

“No,” I said reassuringly. “I was remembering—” I wanted to say, “I was remembering my husband,” but somehow I could not bring myself to say it. The fact of my former, complicated, and civilized life contradicted this fantasy too flatly. It would be no kind, caring act to crack open this world with the stone of memory.

I was at rest here in this demi-Eden. Not at work. No need to tinker with versions of reality.

“If a storm comes,” he said, all serenity, “I’ll take you to a place I know. There’s a shelter in the rock, and we’ll be safe under it.”

“A cave?” After flourishing in a world of open sunshine, I didn’t like the idea of going into any sort of cold, dank cave. Here everything was sunshine and shadow, gentle breeze and waving grass, a garden of delights.

“Not really a cave,” he said. “It’s an overhang, open on three sides. But it’s a big overhang, and if we’re sitting in the center of it, we’re as safe as though the air around us were a wall. There’s a wall of stone but only at the back.”

Neither of us spoke of the past or the future. I had taken a leave of absence from my work at the hospital in New York. During that long cocooning of marriage, I had made no close women friends. The only people who might worry about me were Gabriel Plum, and Pierre and Arielle Saad. If I could have, I would have relieved their anxiety, but I was not much worried about what worry they might experience. Like an inconsiderate child at camp who has no compulsion to e-mail home, because I knew I was more than all right, I assumed somehow they’d know it, too.

At night, the spectacle of stars enthralled me and made me think of Thom, who had studied them with such ardor. I wished that he could see this contrast of absolute blackness with the sparkling lights. In Mesopotamia, we were about at the latitude of Kentucky, I believed. In Iowa the star view would have been a little more to the north. When Thom and his parents visited Israel, he would have seen this sky from a slightly more southern exposure. Who would want to murder anyone whose life was the study of stars? Igtiyal? During those moments flying the Piper Cub, the question had burned my brain like a brand. Now I gulped the darkness and felt the sparkle of stars tickle my throat as I swallowed.

At night, Adam slept on his own bed of ferns, softer than feathers, at a short distance from me. His pallet was under another small tree, where he had also constructed a kind of roof to match mine. Under our separate shelters, we were a little settlement of two, surrounded by wilderness and bits of garden. Igtiyal? The question was more remote than starlight.

Because of the discomfort of my burns—less discomfort all along once I had suffered a peak of pain on the third day—I woke often, though Adam seemed always to sleep till dawn. Throughout the nights, I heard Adam talking in his sleep. The distance between us was great enough that I could rarely catch just what he said; I doubted if it were coherent anyway. His nighttime monologue reminded me of the experience of sleeping to the sound of someone’s low radio in the next dormitory room.

Sometimes he cried out sharply, as though he were terrified or terribly hurt. My heartbeat quickened when I heard him in distress, but always the moment passed and he seemed to drop back into an untroubled dream. If the cries had continued, I would have risen up, made my way to his side, and gently shaken his bare shoulder. Often he slept on his side, facing me, and sometimes I noticed the moonlight illumining one shoulder rounded up higher than the rest of his long body.

My own dreams consisted of colors and textures rather than scenes: Thom’s unshaven chin; the sweet rumple of his curls; a certain thick yellow from the painting of a patient who had lost both parents in the Holocaust. Completely lacking in story or even situation, the entirety of my dream space filled with these magnified details that had been a small part of a more significant whole in my waking life. This close focus dominated the infinite visual field of my dreaming mind from side to side and top to bottom.

I knew the prickly chin and the rumpled curls to be Thom’s, but he was not there. These frame-filling details displaced any larger context or meaning. I dreamed of the sensation of softness—my grandmother’s lap—and of the smooth, worn nap of her flowered aprons. The strings of the viola against the fingertips of my left hand—merely the sensation of touching the metal-wrapped A-D-G or heavy C string—filled hours of dreams, or the sensation in my right hand of the drag of my horsehair bow rubbing through the well-worn groove in my rosin cake.

Colors borrowed again and again from the canvases of my art therapy students filled the shapeless, unending space on the backs of my eyelids, but the vivid hues of paint were only themselves; they suggested nothing of the ornate pitcher or kitchen sink or jewel or car fender they had been employed to depict. Once I spent the night dreaming of a beveled camel hair paintbrush; its fine-grained softness made me want to squeal with wonder.

All these dreams were pleasant ones. The most pleasant ones were of the pink blossoms of mimosa trees—the whole blossom, not just its pinkness—how they swayed in Memphis beside the Mississippi like the skirts of ballet dancers.

The color cherry red repeatedly filled my mind. Only occasionally did it take the shape and shininess of actual cherries hanging over Adam’s ears.

“Six days have passed,” Adam said one morning. “On the seventh day, today, it would be good if you began to walk about. You need to regain your strength.”

I agreed.

He held out his hand to me; I stood up and wobbled out into the open sun. The effort made me dizzy; I would have fallen if he had not held my hand. I realized the seriousness of my weakness; I had tarried too long in my sickbed convalescence. I knew better than to indulge in the horizontal. I knew from my grandmother’s illnesses that patients should be up and on their feet as soon as possible. I knew from the treatment charts of even those with mental ailments how crucial exercise was to the achievement of any kind of health. And yet I had banished such knowledge from my mind. I had not wanted things to change. I had made a demigod of Adam, in whose care I wished to be perpetually cradled.



Our first quarrel occurred when I asked him to bring fresh ferns for my bed. I had never asked him to do anything particular for me before; he had always just anticipated my needs.

He looked startled, but he replied, “Of course,” and left immediately.

I felt annoyed. I hadn’t meant he should do it right that minute. I had thought we would sit down and chat. If we were not to sit together and chat in the shade of the tree, I thought petulantly, then I would sit by myself and think.

What was I to do about my situation? Our situation. Unbidden, the image of his genitalia presented itself to my mind, the pleasant curve of the end of his penis. Immediately I was furious with myself. He was mentally ill. He was practically my patient. Hands off! I was the sane one; I needed to take charge. Nationally, 50 percent of the patients in mental hospitals suffered from religious delusions. Many of them believed themselves to be Jesus—thoroughly divine, not human. Well, it was the same here in the Garden: 50 percent of the population suffered from religious delusions.

Immediately I thought of his gentleness, his sense of my needs, how he had courteously constructed his own bed under a different tree. I thought of the sincerity and simplicity with which he spoke, when he spoke of God. There was nothing proselytizing about it, nothing that pressured me to believe, no coercion. I felt nothing of fear and little of curiosity. Cared for and content, I found it difficult to think of next.

He made me feel helpless. The situation made me angry.

Then I looked out into the sunshine, the simple way it lay on the grass. It was as though the grass had been mown; it was like a large, civilized park, left to go partly natural. Idly, I thought of Kew Gardens—“It isn’t far from London,” Alfred Noyes had written. “Come down to Kew in lilac time, in lilac time, in lilac time….” In the distance, I saw Adam moving toward me. His arms were heaped so high with fern fronds that it looked as though a pile of greenery, with legs, was making its way across the plain.

I got up from my rock-chair and cleared the shriveled fern from my bed place under the makeshift roof. I didn’t want Adam to have to build a new roof of banana leaves, though a few splits had developed, turning the edges of the leaves into a coarse brown fringe. Probably the roof would need to be refreshed soon enough, but perhaps piece by piece.

As soon as Adam finished spreading out the ferns, fashioning a thicker mound at one end to suggest a pillowed place, I startled myself by asking him in a rather presumptuous manner, “Do lilacs grow here?”

Adam straightened up and put his hands on his hips. He looked at me in a level and direct way. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll get you some.” And he turned and walked away.

I was glad to have him go. I hadn’t finished thinking about our situation, what we should do.

If he was insane, he was only mildly so. He could cooperate. He could follow instructions. He could anticipate instructions. His affect seemed appropriate. He seemed relaxed. Not at all anxious. He seemed as though he wanted nothing, as though he was perfectly content.

These conclusions about my companion awakened a certain sense of frustration. Where was ambition?

Thom had been a person who worked very hard. So had I. We had loved our work, had always kept each other on a loose leash concerning the freedom to work. And Thom knew how to take his pleasures; he made room for attending the concerts we both had loved since our first meeting. After he spent the day at the physics department, Thom enjoyed a good meal and good conversation, even if he came home quite late. Here there was no work, and we might as well be grunting at each other, so monosyllabic were our exchanges. Sometimes I did grunt. Thom had focus and insight about everything—art, politics, literature, above all his work in spectroscopy, his knowledge of the starry sky in all its aspects, visible and invisible. He could listen to the heartbeat of space, through the radio telescopes.

For the first time since I had fallen into Eden, I touched my talisman, the titanium case that held and protected Thom’s last thoughts. While my fingertips caressed the smooth case, I savored our last morning in the hotel when he had projected his valentine on the ceiling: To all the Lucys in the Universe.

Could there be more than one? The thought jolted me. Talk among the astrophysicists about parallel universes never seemed very serious. But was it possible that I had not been Thom’s one and only object of affection? What bizarre language! I was not an object of anything! Suddenly I realized my mind had become irritable. It was like a wound that itches as it heals. The patch on the back of my head itched. So did my back. It was irritating.

And yes, we ourselves had known more than one Lucy. One of them was a cousin of Thom, a woman about the age of Adam. Thom had sent her to work with our friend Gabriel Plum in England. She had come to Thom’s funeral and bawled her eyes out. I remembered how Gabriel had taken her into his arms, comfortingly, and even then, at Thom’s funeral, the idea had flickered through my mind that Gabriel and she might be an Item. Maybe I had glimpsed a sliver of their intimacy.

Then I’d forgotten the impression. Apparently if there had been any warmth between Gabriel and young Lucy it had not lasted, because Gabriel proposed to me. That moment in the big jet, flying over the spine of northern Italy, the gray Dolomite peaks arranged below like dragon vertebrae, belonged more to a dream than to reality. That scene of Gabriel and me inside the airplane seemed to float like an untethered balloon in insubstantial space.

My train of thought had branched and branched, and now I couldn’t remember what it was I had set myself to consider during Adam’s absence.

Moving across the hot meadow was a lilac bush in full bloom. Its aroma preceded it. I closed my eyes and rapturously drew in a long breath. When I opened them, I began to laugh, for of course the lilac tree had two long and manly legs. It was the ridiculous abundance of the bouquet that had made me laugh. It was like something a lover might offer in a Chagall painting. The bouquet would crowd the lovers to the frame and become the bloated centerpiece itself.

When Adam arrived, I joked, “I’m afraid I don’t have an appropriate vase.”

An anxious expression crossed over his face, then he suddenly knelt and began to place the lilacs around my bed, branch by branch, in a border.

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll just arrange them here.”

Their color was perfect, purple and deep as Concord grapes, but with edges of lavender that helped to define their texture. There was a robust springiness about the panicles, a lollipop-like delectableness. Only a few of them had begun to droop from the heat. He held one of the floppy ones up to my nose.

“These have the heaviest fragrance,” he said.

The panicle lacked the turgor to raise its head, but it drooped gracefully over his hand. If I were to paint it, if Chagall had painted it, it might have been titled The Offering, with no mention of its wilted nature. I wondered if Adam had an artist’s eye.

“What say you?” Adam asked. “Should the wilted, like the wicked, be cast into outer darkness?”

“Where is outer darkness?” I asked, surprised at the softness in my voice.

“In Greek mythology,” he mused, “sometimes the honorably defeated were placed in the night sky to become constellations.”

“Are you defeated?” I asked gently.

At first he averted his face, but after a moment his gaze returned to meet my own.

“Yes,” he said. “And so are you.”

“And why am I?” I had told him nothing of my losses—of Thom’s existence, let alone his death, of how I had become unmoored, of the loss of meaning in work and the loss of joy in being alive.

I heard myself catch a breath, as though my body were fueling itself to tell the truth, but before I spoke, he began his reply to my question.

“Because you fell from the sky.”

“My plane crashed,” I said, insisting on a literal explanation.

“Yes.”

“You know, it may be the plane is still smoldering on the beach. I’m hungry. I’d like to eat some fish. If we had a fire, we could cook some fish.”

“It’s been many days.”

“And before I crashed, I threw a hard case—a French horn case—out the plane door. Maybe we could find it.”

“You would like to leave here, wouldn’t you?”

“Could you check the wreckage? Maybe something there is still smoldering.”

While he was gone, I peeled back the skin of a banana and ate it. I knew that bananas, like oranges, contained potassium, which I needed for strength. Without deciding, I knew I had decided: Yes, I wanted to heal and to leave this place that was no more meaningful or serious than a giant playground. I wanted to talk to people who had their own energy and purpose, who could be roughly categorized as sane, who were not defeated. And what had defeated this unbelievably beautiful man, age—I was guessing—thirty? Who was looking for him? Who missed him?

And who missed me?

Pierre Saad and his daughter would worry, I knew. For him, the loss of the ancient manuscript would be an irreparable disaster. But he knew he had taken a risk in giving it to me. He must have felt a great deal of urgency to have initiated such a risk. I had a cool and rational ability to assess risk, but why hadn’t I questioned his degree of risk taking and understood it as an index to his degree of desperation? No doubt he hoped that at least the manuscript had not been destroyed. Perhaps he would hypothesize that I had stolen it to sell on the black market.

No. Pierre Saad had assessed me. He knew I was not a thief, that I would try my best to deliver the codex, as I had set out to do.

And Gabriel Plum? He would have been frantic when I had not returned to Cairo from the Nile cruise. But had I left enough trail for anyone to follow? The tour guide would have reported I had left the group; I had not told him I intended to visit the museum at Nag Hammadi. Gabriel would not have imagined that I had met with a man Gabriel actually knew, the host of the Cairo symposium.

Squinting my eyes against the piercing brightness of the sun, I imagined this triangle of accomplished men, all of whom knew of one another, had had at least conversation—Thom, Gabriel, and Pierre—as a constellation in the night sky. And then there was Adam, relaxed in his mythic nakedness, whom none of them could have possibly imagined, not in their most extravagant dreams.

I imagined Adam crossing their constellation; he was a planet, a wanderer through the night sky, not a fixed star. A loose cannon. Someone who wrestled with his demons at night and cried out when they pinched him or scorched him with their breath. Someone whose day-self carried all the sweetness of the honeycomb. Who called me Eve.

For him, I had no history before my fall. He awoke and found me curled against his side, hurt by the fiery passage into Eden, more like Lucifer than Eve. Once he told me he had begged God for me, and I had appeared.

A bit the worse for wear, I thought ruefully.

Why not leave well enough alone? That question seemed the true answer to the uncertainty that hovered over me. I got up to test the strength of my legs, to take a few steps, literally, on the path that would lead to my restoration. Again I found that I was truly very weak. As I upbraided myself for lounging so long, I imagined my childhood friends—Janet and Margarita—walking on each side of me, encouraging me. “You can do it, Lucy,” they said. “We know you can. Keep going.”

It was what they had said when I tried to learn to walk on tall stilts. And I had become a wonderful stilt walker, their intrepid leader into the challenges of climbing steps on stilts and walking long distances over gravel or through tall grass. When I had suggested we joust like knights of old—riding stilts instead of steeds—we charged each other to see who could knock the other off balance. We had had such a fine time, enacting anything we could imagine. Only when I had talked about walking on clouds had Janet reined me in, pointing out the scientific fact that despite their solid appearance, clouds are insubstantial, consisting of nothing but water vapor catching the light in certain ways that have the power to attract and amaze.

When I saw Adam coming toward me, I decided I would try to walk to meet him. I knew I had been peremptory, practically ordering him to do this or fetch that for me. And Adam had taken umbrage. As he approached, there was a new rigidity, a lack of grace in his body. He seemed hulking, more like a comic-book caveman. His face, too, was concentrated, his brow contracted.

“Do you want to leave here?” he had asked. I had neither answered his question nor offered reassurances. While he was away, scavenging for me, he had perhaps brooded on the matter. Would he try to prevent my leaving?

“Adam, Adam!” I hailed him. “I’m coming to meet you.”

Usually I avoided calling him by his name. I had not wanted to participate too fully in his fantasy of Genesis.

His face filled with happiness. Though his fists were strangely clenched, he hurried toward me and held his arms out. Fearing that I had signaled acceptance of him and his world, I felt my knees wobble with trepidation as much as fatigue. Before I collapsed, he caught me in those pronglike arms, carefully avoiding my still-healing tender back.

I felt the top of my head fit under his chin, my sun-warmed flesh pressing against his, the utter safety of his support. Our nakedness, and the naturalness of it. I had liked to stand under Thom’s chin like this.

“You made it,” he said, the delight in his voice as warm as his body. He folded an arm across the top of my shoulders and the other across the small of my back, and I gave myself to the bliss of it. “You came to me of your own free will. God said you would. If I was patient.”

Feeling tears gush from my eyes, I took a step back.

“No, I haven’t. I wanted to please you—that’s all. You’ve been so kind and so good to me.”

He was smiling at me. A tear like a clear jewel stood at the corner of his eye.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I insisted. “Everything is the same as it was.”

“I see,” he said. “It’s all right. Don’t be afraid.”

With the back of his still-clenched fist, he wiped away the clear bead of tear. Blood defined the lines between his curved fingers. His hand was bleeding. Quickly I reached for his other closed hand and saw that it, too, was oozing blood from the knot of his fist. For an instant I thought, I’ve crucified him, but then he opened his hands. Amid the blood, his palms sparkled.

“There was no fire left at the plane,” he explained. “But I found this—a broken mirror. We can make a clay base and push the pieces into the wet clay. It can be a mirror again, just a bit cracked. Perhaps we can use it to make a flame.”

As he walked home, he had squeezed the shards into the flesh of his palms.

“There was a mirror on the cockpit door,” I said. “Like a rearview mirror on a car, so the pilot could glance back without turning her head.”

“When we have a fire I’ll catch a fish in the river, and you can cook it.”

Staring at the mess of his hands, I said, “But you’re bleeding.”

Now he looked away from me. “I squeezed too hard. I was angry. At you. You said you wanted to leave. I thought you wanted the fire to make a signal.”

“Not for a long time,” I answered softly. “I need to find the case I threw out of the airplane. It looked like a case for a particular musical instrument, French horn.” Trouble passed over his face. I took a deep breath and said, “This is a beautiful place. It’s beautiful to be here with you, as your friend.”

“Yes,” he answered, and smiled shyly, embarrassed and pleased. But I saw his lower lip tremble a little, though he tried to conceal his anxiety. He seemed newly hatched; he seemed ten years old, not thirty, despite his large and powerful body. He seemed ten years old not mentally but emotionally—fresh and vulnerable, lacking in sophistication and social pretense, wanting to please.

“Let’s go fishing,” I said. “Sometime soon.”

“When you’re stronger, we’ll fish together. Now I’ll fish by myself.”

I began to feel overheated in the sunlight. My mind went dizzy, and I felt my body sway when the slightest breeze touched me.

“Are you strong enough to make it back?” he asked.

“I—I—don’t know,” I stammered.

All at once he dropped down on all fours, his hands still closed over the sharp shards of the broken mirror.

“Climb up on my back,” he said.

“You can’t crawl all the way back on all fours,” I said, though I could easily picture him doing just that, with me astride.

“No. I’ll stand up,” he explained. “Just hold around my neck and shoulders when I start to stand up.”

The arrangement worked. He slowly stood, and with me riding piggyback, we began to progress slowly back toward the shade of the apple trees. I realized the fruit trees had been spaced regularly; we lived in the remains of an old orchard. As soon as we grew comfortable and confident, Adam adjusted his stride to a certain jauntiness. He began to whistle “Oh! Susanna!” through his teeth.

I could not help but laugh happily. I would not spend the energy to sing, but I thought the words, Oh! Susanna, oh dontcha cry for me.

Still, I was weak and dizzy, and soon I rested the side of my cheek against the stalk of his broad neck. His tune modulated into a slow lullaby, Hush little baby, don’t say a word; Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird. When he reached the ferny pallet, he got down on all fours again so I could dismount with ease. As I slid onto my soft mattress and lay on my stomach, the fronds seemed to sigh and yawn.

“Wait,” he said. “Don’t go to sleep yet. Drink a little water before you sleep.” When I moved to lie on my side, propping my head with my bent arm and hand, he lifted the coconut shell to my lips. “We don’t want you to get dehydrated,” he added. “That’s good. Thatta girl,” he crooned.

When he poured the scented water between my lips, my teeth clamped about, looking for wispy shreds of coconut, but only faint flavor was there. I could almost see and taste our fish—flaky, white, and tender. The protein and oils from the fish would make a superb addition to our diet, though we had already gotten protein from the nuts he cracked. Iron, I needed that, too, to strengthen my blood. “We have date trees, don’t we?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered. “I’ve always loved dates and raisins.”

Straightening my arm, I pillowed my head on it, and my mind drifted downward to sleep.

A small sun had come from the dark sky to sit burning in the grass. Alarmed, I sat up in bed. Suppose it started a prairie fire?

No, it was not a visiting sun.

What I saw was a campfire, and the silhouette of Adam sitting beside it. He held a stick in one hand, roasting something over the fire. Now I smelled it, and I could even see its shape.

He was cooking me a fish.

As quietly as possible, I approached him stealthily. With care and patience, I placed each bare foot in the grass. As I grew closer, I could see that he had packed the fish in clay so that it would roast more evenly. The stick, too, was protected by an insulating sleeve of clay that ballooned and became the casing for the fish. I smiled to think that he might have been a Boy Scout, or perhaps a member of 4-H, if he had had a rural background. I slipped up behind him and was just about to put my hand on his shoulder, rosy with fire glow, when, without turning his head, he spoke.

“Is that you, Eve?”

I stopped my hand in midair and withdrew it. “Lucy,” I said. “My name is Lucy Bergmann.”

“Friend,” he answered, keeping his eyes on the roasting fish. “I know you as my friend today. But God willing, someday I will know you as my wife—”

I said nothing. When he had called me “friend,” my heart had wilted in disappointment—I had to admit it. But the word wife made me feel as though a cup of scalding water had been tossed onto my flesh.

“—and without sin, we shall dwell in the House of the Lord forever and ever.”

After a long pause, I asked him, in a new key, if he thought the fish was almost done and how he had caught it, and how he had kindled the fire, but I did not listen to his replies. I was monitoring my naughty hand, lest it stray to his shoulder.

When Gabriel Plum had asked me to marry him, I had laughed. Now I felt I was attending a wake. I wanted to cry, to mourn the passing of Adam’s hope. But still, Adam and I were alive, sitting in the dark in a grassland, beside a campfire, an isolated twosome. Reflected flames played orange and rosy on our flesh. He knelt before the fire; I sat on my buttocks, my knees drawn up, my arms hugging my knees. Who knew what might happen next? How much time had really passed? I could feel the thin new layer of flesh stretching between my shoulder blades. Perhaps healing was sped up in Eden. The patch on the back of my head was healing faster than my back.

“How does my back look these days?”

“Better.”

“How are you feeling, Adam?”

“Happy.”

I hesitated and then asked, “How happy?”

“More content than joyful,” he answered promptly. “When God created the animals, he made them in pairs—male and female. When Noah took them into the ark, they marched two by two.”

“What do you think of couples of the same sex?” I asked boldly. I wanted to knock him off his biblical pins; I wanted to make him acknowledge the con-temporary world. In the pause before his reply, I listened to locusts and tree frogs. They could have been in Memphis, Tennessee.

“That’s all right with me,” he answered. “I can understand that.”

He spoke in a steady—no, studied—voice, and I wondered about his past, the past of his hauntingly beautiful body. Surely both men and women would have been drawn to him, would have wanted him, or wanted to be him.

“Adam, I can picture the animals going into a wooden boat, but I need to tell you, I don’t believe that story. Not in any literal way.”

He said nothing.

A streak appeared in the dark sky, and I exclaimed, “Look! A shooting star.”

“No,” he said. “That’s a fighter jet going down.”

I felt foolish, felt the blush of embarrassment at my sentimental error, but knew that even though he glanced at me sharply, the fire glow would mask my blush. If he was the child capable of naive belief, I was the child who had to be right.

To console myself, I imagined the two halves of his brain like two gray elephants side by side—one a creature of ancient mythology, the other a practical, sure-footed beast wise in the ways of the world he inhabited.

“I’ve set the table,” he added. “Did you notice?”

I looked at one large, flat stone, almost covered by a single strongly ribbed leaf and two small stones draped with plate-sized leaves.

“This one is the cook table,” he said. “I’ll crack off the clay, then you can pass me your leaf, and I’ll serve you.”

He proceeded to carry out the acts he had previewed.

“Tomorrow I’ll look for some wild vegetables,” he said cheerfully.

“When I was walking in, I didn’t see any vegetables.”

“‘Seek and ye shall find,’” he quoted.

“If I were you, I’d look in that area where there’s a cultivated rose garden. Probably some farmer, before he deserted this place, planted a vegetable garden. In straight rows, with stakes for the tomatoes.”

“This is a strange place,” Adam said.

“It’s a place on earth like any other place,” I asserted. I picked up a shred of the white meat of the fish. Never had I tasted anything so fine. Better than ambrosia, I thought.

“Like any other,” he repeated. “Is it?” When I did not reply—I was as busy as a monkey using both hands to pick up morsels of food, sliding delicate meat from needlelike bones—he added, “It’s good to be able to take care of somebody.”

“I’m not that sort of woman,” I said. “I don’t want a man to take care of me. I take care of myself.”

In the weeks that followed, delusion and daze haunted my mind. I seemed always to be awakening, and always to be wondering if what I remembered was a dream or reality. Wonder seemed the best state of mind. It was less irritating than certainty, less taxing than the process of deciding—anything.

I knew I was growing stronger.

The morning after the first fish, I awoke to see a broken basket filled with squash—long striped green zucchini squash and yellow bulbous goose-necked squash. Vegetables. They were decorated with a gorgeous star-shaped golden yellow squash blossom of bodacious size and two not-quite-open red roses, big as fists.

“You were right,” he said. “Near the rose garden, there was a rectangle of vegetable garden. And an abandoned basket.”

He was sitting beside the basket but a short distance away, in the attitude I had assumed the night before—on his buttocks, his knees cocked and his hands clasped around his knees. I could not remember when I had left that posture. I had sat sideways, with my legs crossed to eat, but then—I must have slumped over. He must have carried me to my bed.

“We need something like a skillet,” I said. “So we can sauté things.” The squash bodies looked clean and healthy.

“I could take a piece of metal from the plane,” he said.

I thought of the painted fabric wings, the struts over which the cloth was stretched.

“The fuselage was metal,” I said as much to myself as to him.

“Yes. I could wrench out a flat piece, batter up its edges for a skillet.”

“‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God,’” I quoted.

“John Donne,” he answered, and murmured in an echo, “‘Batter my heart.’ That poem used to puzzle me when I was a freshman in college. Now I understand. John Donne meant he was willing to learn from God, even if he had to suffer to learn.”

He stood up—a gesture that usually meant conversation was over, and he was off on some errand.

“I never understood the concept of the Trinity,” I said petulantly. “‘Three-person’d God’? What sense does that make? If there’s a guy on the cross and another one up in the sky, and the first one’s talking to the second one, that’s two gods. And then the bird—that’s a third.”

Adam just stared at me.

“Christians don’t really believe in one God,” I went on. “The Muslims do, but the Christians don’t. The Muslims say ‘There is no God but God,’ and they say Muhammad is his prophet—only his prophet.” I stopped, then added, “Not his only prophet.”

“The Holy Trinity is like an egg,” Adam answered, but I saw he was shocked and amused at my tirade. “An egg has three parts—the yolk, the white, and the shell—but it’s just one egg.”

“God is not a chicken egg,” I snorted with laughter.

“But He resembles a chicken egg,” Adam calmly suggested.

I felt I was watching him make what he considered to be a daring move on the chessboard of the conversation. “Not literally,” he added.

“Not literally!” I exploded. “I can’t believe you’re saying ‘not literally.’ Who do you think you are? Adam!—that’s who you think you are! Adam! And you think I’m Eve.”

“I’m going,” he said. “I’ve got to go now.”

“You don’t want to face the truth,” I said.

“The truth?” Now he was amused. “Your truth.”

“Then why do you have to go right now, at a crucial point in our discussion?” I suddenly hated myself for sounding as bossy and rude as a preteen girl. He was corrupting me. He was robbing me of my maturity. Over and over, he was making me feel like a kid. A spoiled-rotten kid.

“I want to take some of the fire to the overhang now and keep it there,” he explained. “Like putting money in the bank.”

“If it rains? If the wind blows it out?” I asked. “Why not just start another fire?”

“I … I … I …” Now he was stammering for real. Suddenly confessional. “I destroyed the mirror. I drowned it in the ocean last night.” He bent, picked up a stick of fire, and began to walk away.

“Where did you go to college?” I yelled.

“Boise State,” he answered.

“For how long?” Something just told me to ask that question, to get the dates, the facts.

“I dropped out after my freshman year.” He was walking so fast, his gait seemed more like a running walk, and then he broke into a slow run—leaving me—and then a sprint.

“It figures,” I muttered to myself. He was too erratic for rational inquiry. Eccentric—that was the word I wanted to describe him. Off-center.

Peevish—that was the word I next applied, to myself.

“What wood burns best?” I asked him when he returned.

I was glad to see him returning—no doubt about that, I admitted to myself. The way he walked, the way he moved across the grass, made me think of some animal, perhaps an antelope, but something more sturdy—an eland perhaps, with an amazing confidence of straight long horns, swept backward like antennae.

“Pine,” he answered, “to get a fire started. In Idaho it would be ponderosa pine. Because it’s full of sap. Then hardwood—oak, or maybe maple or elm.”

“Are they all here?”

“Everything’s here,” he answered. “That ever was or ever is to be. ‘God in three persons’”—he suddenly sang the dying-fall chant of the doxology in a deep and resonant voice as though he could fill a cathedral. “‘God in three persons, Blessed Trinity.’”

I was speechless. Yes, I told myself and swallowed, he’s obsessive. But I looked at him then with the most friendly and normal of expressions.

“Everything’s here and more,” he went on in a quiet voice, matter-of-fact, explanatory.

“But, Adam,” I said, “how can you say everything and more? Everything is everything. You can’t have more than everything. You don’t use language right.”

“Words disappear in the air,” he explained. “Words are volatile. That’s their essence. Who can say how they bubble up, how they break free and disappear?”

I started to counter, Not if you write them down. Not if you put them on a disk and project them on the ceiling. Not if they’re full of love. And meaning. But my words seemed less true than his.

“Scientists say,” I said carefully, “that nothing escapes from a black hole. Not even information. Not light. But I never understood how they could speak of information in that context.”

When he said nothing but continued to present his friendly, handsome face, I asked him if he thought God could be a black hole.

He answered with his body. He suddenly lay down, his back on the grass, his legs spread, his arms spread wide open and then lifted openly toward the sky. “‘Maker of Heaven and Earth,’” he quoted again from Christian creed. His penis lolled to one side. He had forgotten his penis, his nakedness, again.

Just a little, I envied him. I looked away. I lifted my eyes to the clouds. They were ethereal enough for me. For a while Einstein had believed in the ether, and then he had recanted and called the “cosmological constant” the biggest blunder of his life, Thom had explained to me, but then hadn’t Einstein recanted again? To Thom’s great interest, a woman in Kentucky had theorized that the WIMP—weakly interactive massive particle—constituted dark matter.

Adam’s lifted arms were rounded, curved like the sides of an egg. He wanted to embrace the elliptical planetary orbits, no, the universe beyond the clouds. The open space between his hands—that opening was to let it all in. He wanted to cradle the universe.

He was crazy, but he was happy. That was not true of most of the mental patients I had known. Their delusions were like demons. They were tortured. They lived in an agony of paranoia and pain, guilt and disappointment, the elusiveness of identity, the impossibility of certitude, fear of whatever was next. I supposed Adam might be termed “a wise fool for God.” Somewhere I’d heard such a phrase. But Adam did not seem wise in his innocence or foolish in his practicality.

“Why are you so happy?” I asked him.

He turned his face to look at me, pressed his cheek into the grass to feel the flank of earth. “Because you’re here.”

I felt my own head droop with sadness.

Finally I answered, lifting my head. “I don’t know what to say to you.”

“There’s no need,” he answered gently.

His truthfulness seemed to bathe me. His words were a trinity of raindrops catching sunlight: Because you’re here. Had anyone ever wanted to hear more? Or less.

Here. You’re here. You’re here. I’m happy to be here because you’re here.

“But there’s something I need to say to you,” he went on. “I want you to feel safe.” He sat up in the grass, his body as patient as a lion’s. “You never have any need to fear me.” He looked down at his clasped hands, their idle nakedness, and then back to me as though suddenly through a veil. “I’m a little off. You know that. I know that, too. But I have never been violent. I will never force myself upon you in any way.”

Part of me protested: Don’t say that. That should never even have to be said between a man and a woman. You offend me by saying that. You live in a bad myth, the bad old myth between men and women—that I am weak and you are strong. But I said nothing. Instead I tried to make myself forgive him for his presumption, for cloaking his eyes behind a veil of confusion.

“We live in a world where women can arm themselves,” I answered, in spite of myself. But to myself I acknowledged, I am weak, I can barely walk. And he is strange. An Adonis. And he could rape me.

“Not here,” he said. “No guns in Eden.”

He sat up straighter, cross-legged, his genitals resting in the grass, the rounded end of his penis touching the bent blades of grass. He reached out one arm to me. “I will never force you. But I will want to marry you till the day I die.”

The words rang through my body. It was a promise that I knew I would never forget. For a moment not only his words but the entire scene evanesced. Only a blank of future hung in front of me. I curled my bare toes downward and made them dive rootlike toward the soil. I would ground myself in the solid reality under my feet, not in some clutching after him.

In my stubbornness, I whispered, “What is my name?”

He didn’t hesitate. Undaunted in his confidence, sitting under his blue-black hair, on the grass, sunshine like a cape on his shoulders, he smiled and simply said, “You. I mean you.”