RECOVERY
I SLEPT WELL. I ate well. I exercised.
I dreamed, but I trained myself to wake up when words from Adam’s dreams traveled the discreet distance from the deep shadows under his bed-tree to mine. When I heard the muttered words, I stored them in the granary of memory and promptly went back to sleep. I wanted to help him exorcise his demons. Each morning when daylight worked its way through the woven mat of my makeshift roof, I lay still so that some minute shifting of blood in the vessels threading my brain would not wash away what I had deposited there of his midnight words. Nonetheless, I recovered nothing. When I opened the door to the cupboard of memory, its shelves were bare, with one exception.
I was able to understand and retain the word sin as one of his nocturnal utterances.
To know his past, I would have to ask him. However, as I studied Adam striding over the grasslands as though he were the lord of creation, or even when I only considered his handsome, forward-looking face, I knew it would be a sin to drag him back into his past. With every gesture and every cheerful matter-of-fact expression, he was determined to step into the future. He wanted us to inhabit the future.
When Adam called out from his nightmares, terrified, I began to make it my practice to call back, “It’s just a dream. It’s just a dream.” Once—only once—half asleep myself, I had called out, “I’m here!”
He had sat up, half awake. “Are you? Are you here? Eve?”
I had not replied. I breathed as quietly as I could to minimize my presence.
After a while, he lay back down.
One morning as we ate nuts and apples together, I asked Adam if he knew that sometimes in the night he called out the word sin.
“Do I?” he asked. “Other words, too?”
“Such as?” I smiled encouragingly.
“Names?”
I told him that if he did, I could not decipher them.
“Rosalie?” he asked.
I only shook my head.
“She was my first girlfriend in Idaho. In high school. We f*cked.”
I was shocked to hear him use the vulgar term.
“I wasn’t faithful to her. She wanted to marry.” Adam spoke more and more slowly. “I wanted … to know many girls.”
Though I waited for him to continue, he said nothing. So I asked softly, “And did you?” I watched the vague orbs of light projected through the pin-holes among the leaves onto the ground. There was a swarm of the gentle, light disks, visitors from the sun at last arriving onto the earth.
“I had … had a lot of girlfriends. I was thought handsome, you know. Unusual.”
He pulled gently at a few tufts of grass.
Finally I said, “Many young men do, don’t they? Young women, too.”
“So many. I remember some of their names. Probably I might say them in my sleep, sometimes.”
The silence lasted a long time till I looked at him and smiled a little. “And you still feel guilty.”
He flushed.
“One girl’s father complained to my father, and he took me to the barn and beat me. For punishment. He used to punish me, too, if he found my drawings. Crotches, breasts, sometimes myself, erect.”
After he felt the touch of my hand on his, he looked up at me.
“Adam,” I said, “most artists, painters, and poets are inspired by the erotic.”
“He beat my hands.”
I lifted his hand to my lips and quietly kissed his knuckles.
My favorite food became the fish he caught and cooked for me. Wild-caught, I told myself smugly, thinking that these fish of various varieties possessed the best of fatty omega oils, good for the mind and good for the body. Now that we had the skillet he had wrenched and shaped from the steel of the Cub’s fuselage, the fish could be sautéed with the tomatoes, and I again congratulated myself on the healthfulness of our diet, knowing that cooking the tomatoes released the nutrients not nearly so available in the raw vegetables.
While the skillet was our most prized possession, I also appreciated the metal skewers Adam fashioned from the cross struts of the wings. To keep the end of the rod from burning his hands as he roasted the fish, he had jammed one end into a short, rotten limb for a handle. Though I had been tempted to taunt him with the idea of rottenness in Eden, I restrained myself.
Instead, I explained that we should let the peppers growing near the straight rows of staked tomatoes ripen to redness because then they would become more nutritious, replete with vitamins. I enjoyed the yellow and green squash as well, but somehow the squash vegetable itself never lived up to the robust promise of the squash blossom. In my mouth, squash melted away, seedy but mostly water. I supposed seeds were worth something and chewed them vigorously.
In the rectangular garden plot, there were only those three vegetables—tomatoes, peppers, and squash—but when I took long walks alone I kept an eye out for wild lettuce, dandelion greens, and watercress. Once I found a stand of morel mushrooms and remembered how Thom and I had hunted them in the woods south of Iowa City, on a farm gone back to woods called the old Bourjailly place.
Back then, Thom and I had conditioned our eyes to recognize the spongelike texture of the morels by staring first for long minutes at corncobs, which had a similar reticulated surface. Fried in butter, the morels had been heaven to eat, we had agreed. Thom had looked up through his thick glasses, smacked his lips, and simply said, “Heaven.” When I slowly savored the butter-drenched spongy texture of the morel, I had pronounced, “Paradise.”
In our garden, when Adam and I cooked the morels in tomato juice in our battered and blackened skillet, I wished for butter. Without it the morels’ flavor lacked the sinful richness I had relished so much. Sinful richness—when I once characterized our sex life that way, Thom had laughed and fed me from a collection of Godiva dark chocolates kept at our bedside. To Adam’s delight, I sautéed our morels in a reduction of coconut milk, and that did add some richness to the flavor.
One day, when Adam and I had just sat down in the grass, a silver jet roared over the plain, not much higher above our heads than the top of a tall skyscraper would have been. The plane slightly rotated its torso as it ripped across the sky, and Adam began to count, “One thousand and one, one thousand and two,” and on up. The grazing wildebeests off to our left jerked their heads up and ran a short distance.
My mouth fell open and stayed open till a fly buzzed close by. Of course I knew the jets were up there, but far above, very far away, thirty or more vertical miles into the stratosphere. It was the large, close-up view, the terrifying speed and sound, that had seemed unreal. When Adam reached one thousand and ten, we heard a soft and mushy thud.
“Impact,” he said. “There are low hills that mark the boundary. About ten miles away.”
“How do you know?”
“Sound travels about a mile a second.”
I felt shaken, as though the reverberation that entered my ear had set off a quake within. “What boundary?”
He lowered his eyes and smiled a slight secret smile. “Eden’s.” He did not look at me.
“And did you meet the cherubim with the twisting fiery sword when you came in?”
“Yes.” He bit his lower lip and looked ashamed.
One day a Jersey cow, lowing pitifully, wandered out of a group of zebra and walked purposefully toward us as we were eating. Butter, I thought.
“The milk wagon,” Adam said. “Look at her udder.”
Though I was not at all a farm girl, even I had noticed the fullness of the cow’s udder hanging so low that it barely cleared the ground. When the cow stopped close to us, I saw her teats were leaking milk.
“She’s in pain,” Adam explained. “Lie down close to her and I’ll squirt milk into your mouth.”
“Really?” I asked. “Can you really do that? What if she steps on me?”
“I won’t let her,” he said. “I’m a farm boy—didn’t you guess? Besides, you won’t be that close, not underfoot.”
Lowing more insistently, the cow fixed her eye on Adam. He petted her neck and then stroked her flank. When his fingertips smoothed her udder, the cow shivered all over.
“Now lie down,” Adam said quietly to me, pointing to a place some five feet away from the cow’s four hooves. “And turn your face this way. Not too much, or the milk will just run out. Open up.”
I obeyed. When a zing of milk tickled the roof of my mouth, I laughed out loud and choked.
“Don’t scare her,” Adam cautioned. “We’ll have to practice till you get the knack. Didn’t you ever see anybody shoot milk into a barn cat’s mouth?”
But I couldn’t answer. I was choking and drooling and smacking the warm milk. Trying to be ready, I watched the milk rhythmically spurt across the short distance toward my face. I marveled at how thin and laserlike came the squirt of milk. Somehow I had expected it to pour obediently in a thick rivulet as from the spout of a pitcher or from the opening in a carton. I had expected to lie underneath to catch a thick stream twisting slightly, as though it were falling into a wide-mouthed glass. But no. To trap even a little of the milk in my mouth, I smacked my lips and tried to use my tongue to lap the liquid backward into my throat.
“You could practice snapping flies,” he teased.
Occasionally, Adam squirted me in the eye, and I suspected that he did it on purpose.
Soon my face was bathed in milk, and my neck was sticky with it. I tried cupping my hand beside my mouth to catch the drippings, but the method didn’t work well.
“I hate to waste it,” I sputtered. “Can’t you slow down?”
Adam laughed. “You don’t have any idea how many gallons of milk she has. Now watch this.”
He changed his hand position and suddenly the milk squirted upward into his own mouth. He drank and drank and didn’t spill a drop. Finally he paused, then expertly squirted the milk just once more toward his face—up one nostril.
I shrieked, and he laughed, too.
“I guess I’ve had enough,” he said, grinning, and he again took aim at me. The cow was the model of patience through all his antics.
My ineptitude embarrassed me, but I had not gotten enough milk down my gullet to want to quit. I suggested a solution. Adam could just milk into the skillet, and I could drink from that.
“Sure.”
He was perfectly good-natured about it all, and I rolled over playfully, sat up, and fetched the skillet. The burn on my back was so well healed that I hadn’t thought twice about rolling over. When the shallow pan was full, and he passed it with a steady hand to me, the cow looked around reproachfully that her relief had ceased. Adam stroked the veined udder and quietly reassured. “Whoa, Bossy, whoa, girl. It’s not over.”
We made no attempt to tie her up, and after a few days she wandered away. To create a tether, we would have needed to gather grasses and braid a rope. When Adam offered to hollow out a log and make me a churn for butter, I said just the milk was sufficient.
The next week, when a domesticated she-goat wandered by, we enjoyed her milk and let her go, too. So much did we trust our habitat to provide whatever we needed that we made little effort to store up resources for the future.
For exercise, I walked and walked. When I gently reiterated that I preferred to walk alone, Adam willingly complied, respectful of my wish. We woke up together in the morning; we met and ate together in mid-afternoon; before bedtime, we enjoyed a snack of sweet fruit. While we chatted cheerfully over our meals, I decided it might be wise not to spend entire days together. On all my walks I hoped to discover the French horn case with the codex that I had jettisoned, and I earnestly asked Adam to look for the case, too.
I liked to walk at a respectful distance around the various grazing animals as they pastured on the plain. Once I saw our fawn-colored cow at a distance. Once I spotted a lone donkey trotting along right through a herd of Thompson’s gazelles as though he were going home.
Sometimes I saw a pride of lionesses sitting chin-deep in the tall grasses, watching the wildebeest. I never saw them take an animal. Perhaps they can’t, I fantasized, not in the Peaceable Kingdom. Perhaps they’ve been forbidden. Maybe they had been hypnotized, or perhaps in this strange place they’d not yet come fully into their own nature as predators. I didn’t mention the lionesses to Adam.
During this time, I had little sense of time passing. I did not know if it were stretched or compressed. This was Eden. My grandmother had suggested that perhaps a day during God’s creating of heaven and earth equaled millions of our years. My days of strolling and recovering seemed timeless.
While I walked, I often admired the flowers, whom I regarded as friends. Colorful as a circus, a crop of jolly zinnias gazed back at me. As I looked at them, I fancied each straightened up taller to shout its colors at me: Pick me. Once Adam had garlanded my bed with lilacs; I felt there was no harm in returning the kindness with the almost articulate zinnias.
While I walked, not only my legs grew stronger but my whole body. Sometimes I carried stones in my hands and exercised my arms as well, doing curls, or exercising my triceps by raising my elbows and kicking back my forearms from the elbows. Sometimes I thrust smooth, heavy stones up over my head, first one arm, then the other, sometimes both arms. That routine remained challenging for days and days.
While I walked I visited memories—only happy ones, first with Thom, then with my grandmother. The sequences and images from the past seemed almost palpable, as though I could handle them. I felt as though I were folding clean laundry, fresh and warm from the dryer. Sorting my memories had something of the same soothing, almost mindless rhythm. I was tidying up the past, making it as nice as possible, getting ready, perhaps, to put it away.
Often I thought of the good times visiting the Stimson sisters, especially when I strolled in the garden that was reminiscent of the lilacs and roses, the iris, the two pear trees that had bloomed near their house, though the flowers and trees in Mesopotamia bloomed all at once, not in the sequence of seasons I had known in Tennessee.
I rarely pictured my parents, but I sometimes thought of good moments playing the viola, or of orchestral friends, music teachers, and conductors who had gathered our disparate contributions into marvelous bouquets of sound. I considered it healthy and healing to luxuriate in happy memories.
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.”
That was what my grandmother used to say when bedtime in Memphis came during a rainstorm. “Listen to the rain,” as though that were a sound to be let in through your ears and into your mind, like a friend.
“Adam,” I said, “what do you want to do with your life?”
“I used to want to draw. And paint.”
“That would be easier to do, if you went back with me.”
After the apple skins began to wrinkle and glisten, we mutually pronounced them done enough. With a stick, Adam rolled them over the stones close to where we sat. To avoid burning our fingers, we waited again, and Adam mentioned he had brought some cherries and also some walnuts and pecans to crack.
“Plenty of rocks for cracking,” I remarked, in return.
Finally he said for me to cup the apple in both hands and just take a bite.
A patch of peel slid right off with a touch of my teeth, and the hot juice and warm fruit delighted me. When I finished, I even lapped up the little brown seeds from the palm of my hand and chomped on the stem. Only after licking my sticky fingers like ten lollipops did I go to the water curtain to wash them. The water was shockingly cold to the touch, and it stripped my skin of the mellow warmth and lingering aroma of the apple. The sharp rain fell like little spears against my spread hands, punitive as sleet, and my whole body felt vulnerable. I wished for clothing.
When I turned from the blackness, I saw that Adam was already lying down on his pallet, his back turned toward me with his knees drawn up. The whiteness of his flesh looked miserable and chilled. My gaze followed the rift of his backbone to his buttocks, rough with goose bumps. The cave looked dismally primitive and dirty, unbearably confining. Lucky Lucy, I reminded myself. Lucky I had not been killed when the plane went down. Lucky there was somebody willing and able to take care of me. I remembered how he had looked from the plane, lying on the bank of the river—glorious, like ivory, in the sunlight. Like a piece of art, not a miserable human being. Even in the extremity of my situation, he had seemed a marvel.
After I lay down, I found it difficult to get comfortable on the moss. The stone floor was much harder than the grassy earth that usually padded my fern pallet. I focused on the pile of throwing stones—yes, that was what they must be, a primitive arsenal. To distract myself from discomfort, I began counting the stones in his arsenal and noticing their shapes and textures, speckled, like granite eggs. Especially against my head, the hardness of the floor came right through the moss.
I felt excluded by his delusions, but I had made myself behave as neutrally as I could. That was how I had trained myself; if I had no warmth to give my patients, at least I could find a blankness to offer, not my own uncertainty or pain.
I decided I should give myself some definite time limit for finding the texts Pierre Saad had entrusted to me. After such a period had elapsed, then it would be reasonable to leave, empty-handed. I was strong enough now. I tried resting on one side of my face, then the other. Why had I jettisoned the case? I had thought that even if I died, perhaps it could be salvaged. I had wanted to do that for a person who had trusted me. I still had Thom’s flash drive. At least I could return that to the scientists.
Most uncomfortable was the obdurate pain where the convex of the back of my skull encountered the flat of stone.
“Lucy,” Adam said—how strange to hear a voice; I had felt utterly alone. There was his kind, strong voice. “If you like, you can pillow your head on my stomach.”
“I’d like that,” I answered.
“Stand up,” he went on, a certain neutrality in his voice. “I’ll move your bed over here, at a right angle to mine.”
He had already nimbly risen.
“I’ll fix everything,” he said. He sounded like a willing child, an eager Scout.
When I stood up, he quickly began to move my pallet. The fire was very low now, and he interrupted his work to put on a large limb. “Our night log,” he said. Then he lay down on his pallet and patted his stomach. It did not look soft but ridged with muscles—a six-pack, the bodybuilders called it. Still, I lay down and placed my head there. Yes, this was much better. His body was my cushion. It relieved my shoulders of the weight of my head and neck to lie this way, perpendicular to his side. Very slightly, my head rose and fell with his shallow breathing.
“I won’t touch you,” he said. “Not in any way.”
Even his voice seemed disembodied; it hovered in the air, pretended to be words formed by the tongue of flame in the cavern, rather than in a human mouth.
Only as I drifted into sleep did I realize he had called me by my name. I hadn’t even noticed. “Lucy,” he had said. “Lucy, you can pillow your head …”
I opened my eyes in surprise, then closed them and listened to the licking of the small flames and the falling of the rain. It made no difference what we called each other, I told myself. We were who we were, I thought, regardless of label.
Yet when he called me by my name, the core of me had responded.
From that night when I pillowed my head on his body and he first called me Lucy, the name he used for me became an index to his state of mind.