THE AMERICAN PATIENT
AT THE MOMENT when F. Riley opened his eyes, I was looking at his face. I was not contemplating his closed lids but the set of his jaw, bound shut with strips of orange fabric from the parachute. He had a jutting chin, a fortuitous happenstance because its size had made the binding easier to secure. I worried, though, that the back edge of the binding might be pressing too closely against the patient’s larynx. Just as I was about to test the tightness of the bandage with the tip of my finger, I noticed the slow, theatrical rising of his eyelids.
Trying to draw him to consciousness, I shifted my eyes to look steadily into his unfocused gaze. When I smiled a little, he made a quick, surprised sound, like a yelp.
“You’ll be all right,” I soothed, repeating my litany of reassurance. I reached for one of his hands and held it in both of mine. It was a large and knobby hand. “You’ll be all right.” Dulled by the fragrance of redwoods, was I hypnotically crooning to myself or to the patient? I took his hand to my lips and kissed the back of it, noticing the red-gold hairs curling sparsely from its paleness. While holding his gaze, I registered the color of his eyes for the first time—a striking reddish brown. Yes, I had occasionally seen such eyes of people with dark red hair.
The soldier gave his little yelp again, but this time it resembled the question Why? and so I quietly explained that my friend Adam and I had seen his plane go down, and his parachute open. Adam had climbed up through the trees and brought him down.
“Your jaw was dislocated and broken, too, so we’ve immobilized it.” I watched him watching my lips forming the words. Without thinking, I brushed my own lips with my fingertips, and then I reached out and touched his lips. His eyes now seemed focused, comprehending. “Your ankle was broken, too.”
Tightening his muscles, he lifted his neck and his foot to inspect the splint. Without doubt, he understood my words and their import. Carefully, he lowered his head and closed his eyes for a moment as though the effort had caused him pain.
I said gently, “You’re bruised, of course. Probably better just to lie still.”
He made a sound in his throat that sounded affirmative. As he drew in rapid breaths, I watched the stenciled name on his shirt pocket—“F. Riley”— rise and fall. Gradually he resumed breathing in a more normal fashion. Slowly he opened his eyes again, and I saw the question in them.
“This is real,” I said. “You’re not dreaming.” An unspoken explanation was gathering in my own mind: This place is where we come for peace and healing. Pieces of the past are here—gardens and trees. We call it Eden. Instead, sensible words passed from me to him. “You’re going to be all right, but you’re hurt.”
His gaze shifted to my naked breasts.
Instead of replying, I withdrew my hand from his and crossed both arms modestly over my nakedness. “We’ll take care of you—my friend and I. I promise.”
When Adam brought back saplings and a bouquet of huge leaves for our hut among the redwoods, he also carried a stalk of sugarcane and two oranges clamped between his upper arms and his ribs. Before he began to construct the shelter, he cut off a joint of the sugarcane stalk and, with the tip of his knife, hollowed out the pith to make a narrow cup. I remembered my grandfather, how he had carved away the hard casing and cut off rounds of sugarcane with his jackknife for Grandmother and me. At one end of the segment of cane, Adam left the pith undisturbed to form a plug.
He used the pilot’s sharp knife again to cut the oranges into sections and with one hand squeezed their juice into the cup while I held it upright. Pulling F. Riley’s lower lip out to make a small pouch, I poured less than a teaspoon of orange juice into the lip-well. “Close your lips tightly and see if you can swallow. Don’t try to open your jaw.”
When he succeeded, his lips made a small smile. With surprising energy, he gave the thumbs-up signal with both hands. I poured more sips of orange juice into his lip pouch, then waited as he swallowed the juice around his clamped teeth. It was a slow process.
After Adam had constructed a lean-to wide enough to accommodate the three of us lying close together, rain began to fill the air. I folded the parachute and laid it over the pilot. Adam suggested he and I lie down under the shelter on our sides with our backs to Riley. “Human heaters,” he said softly. When we were in place, I lay still, staring into the hastily constructed weave of poles and large leaves that made up the side of the lean-to.
In my mind’s eye, I also saw us from a detached viewpoint: the soaring tree trunks surrounding a dwarfish hut huddled close to the ground. I pictured the air filled with mist formed by the shattering of raindrops as they fell through the high redwood foliage. Yes, that was the explanation for the moist veil we breathed: the high branches of the redwoods had sieved the rain into the fine mist that blurred vision and made us want to lie still. The mist gentled the scene.
Dampness and new chill impinged on my unprotected skin every time I moved. At that moment, the pilot used his hands to open and spread the parachute on both sides so that Adam and I in our nakedness were covered also by the silky orange fabric.
“Thank you,” Adam whispered.
Adam’s voice is beautiful, I thought. I heard myself saying back to Adam—to this man who had taken care of me, as well as the pilot—“Thank you. He would thank you, too, if he could.” I recalled some of the mental patients at the hospital, capable of real kindness and understanding despite their impairment. When I spoke, I had tried to give my own tone the same gentle timbre modeled by Adam. With both hands the pilot reached out to give each of us two quick, comradely pats.
As I grew drowsy, I thought of F. Riley’s broken ankle and realized that it would be weeks before we could consider walking out of Eden. Adam would be pleased. Was I? A blip of new thought occurred: perhaps the air force knew F. Riley had ejected; perhaps they would send troops to find him.
As fatigue and sleepiness set in, I mused on how the low roof and sides of the hut kept us somewhat dry, but the open end was letting in enough diffused rain to dampen our feet. In the morning, it would be necessary to unsplint Riley’s ankle, dry the bindings or make new ones and tie it up again. We needed to make a mat, I mused sleepily, like a door we could close, once we three were inside for the night.
High overhead, even through the sound of rain, I fancied I could hear the whine of a jet plane.
In the morning, Adam and I were awakened by the startling sound of the man’s clenched voice.
“I can talk—just moving—my lips,” F. Riley said, “if that’s all right?”
I gasped. Already I had assigned him the role of silence.
“What does the ‘F’ in your name stand for, buddy?” Adam asked, sitting up.
“Freddie. My name is—Freddie Riley.” He propped himself up on his elbows.
“Adam Black, from Idaho.” Adam reached across his body to shake hands. “And this is Lucy.” Without hesitation, my true name came clicking out of Adam’s mouth.
“Lucy Bergmann,” I added, not moving but opening my eyes to stare again at the weave of branches and wide tropical leaves less than a foot in front of my eyes. Through the cracks in the side of the hut, I could see sunlight slanting from a great height through the redwoods into the grove.
“Lucy, I don’t believe I knew your last name,” Adam said softly.
Normal, I thought. Adam wants to pass for normal. Now that we are three, he wants to be a part, not alone with God and his delusions. At this point, sometimes patients resisted the gathering strength of the outer world; they insisted on their visions, their unique individuality. Good for Adam, I thought.
“Are you Jewish?” Adam asked.
“My husband was,” I answered.
“Was?” Adam asked.
“He’s dead.”
Through set teeth, Freddie Riley asked, “How long—y’all—been here?”
I heard the Virginia Tidewater in his speech.
“Several months,” Adam answered. “I think it’s been several months. She came from the sky, too—”
Quickly I cut him off. “How do you feel today, Freddie?” I sat up and glanced at his face—swollen and discolored purple.
“Hungry.”
“Breakfast! You stay still,” I said to our patient. “Freddie, try to say only what’s absolutely necessary for a few days.”
“Gotta, latrine.”
Adam extended his hand to Riley (who spent a few words to tell us he preferred to be called by his last name) to help him rise. With his arm around Adam’s shoulder for support, Riley hobbled from the grove.
To my delight, the milk goat presented herself in the redwoods. When Riley and Adam returned, Riley indicated he wanted to sit with his back propped against the largest tree trunk in the grove. While I carefully held the cane-tube cup in place under one of the goat’s teats, Adam quickly and accurately milked her.
“Calcium for your broken bones,” I said cheerfully, and knelt down to help my patient drink small sips of the milk. Riley reached out and took the cup from me, eyes a-twinkle. With his other hand, he pulled out his lower lip. Already, I saw, he wanted to be self-sufficient.
After Adam and I mashed fruit on a flat rock, Riley used his finger to place the juicy pulp behind his lower lip. Sometimes he used his finger to push the mash back along his teeth on the unbroken side. Once he got choked, but despite his bound jaw he coughed successfully and continued eating.
Adam explained he would fetch fire from the cliff shelter; then he intended to fish, then cook. To my surprise, he added, “If you two can stand it, save the talk till I get back. I don’t want to miss anything.”
“Sure.” To Riley I said, “It’ll be better for your jaw to have as little movement in the area as possible.”
His eyes glowing, Riley inched his thumb and index finger together and made the motion of writing; he raised his eyebrows in questioning. His index finger was wet with bits of apple.
“We don’t have anything to write with. In fact we don’t have anything much at all.”
Riley applauded, his eyes making a quick glance up and down my body.
Looking back over his shoulder, Adam said cheerfully, “I’ll be back soon.”
When Adam returned, he was speeding over the grasslands in full sunshine carrying a blazing pine knot. Close to our sleeping shed, he placed a circle of protective stones, then built a tall, open-sided peaked roof to shelter the flame. Throughout the morning Adam came and went, always hurrying to beat the storm clouds building from the western horizon. When Riley made running motions with two fingers, I explained the need for hurry—rain would likely come again in the late afternoon and on through the night.
Riley let his other hand make a second pair of hurrying legs, and then he flicked the back of his hand to shoo me away so I could help fetch and carry. Surveying my patient, I saw he was pale and in discomfort, but he had no need for constant monitoring. His face was full of life and bounce. I rose and ran after Adam, calling to him to wait. I explained we had a considerate patient, one who had sent me to help.
As we hurried over the grasses, Adam told me about the food he wanted to gather. There was a warmth in his communication, a series of sudden smiles when he looked down at me, more directness in his affect. Not far away I could smell a herd of gazelles grazing.
“You’re feeling better, aren’t you?” I said to Adam. Even the way he put down his bare feet seemed to suggest he felt himself substantial, defined.
“You think so, don’t you?” he remarked.
When I nodded, he simply added, “I do, too.”
Why should we discuss Riley or speculate on what his presence implied? Why should I ever mention to Riley that Adam was sometimes visited by delusions? Adam had become competent now—kind, practical, decisive.
At noon, as we walked through the orchard, I stopped at a fig tree. I tore off two of the large, lobed leaves. Remembering Riley’s deliberate survey of my body, his eyes looking slowly up and down my torso and legs, I held a fig leaf over each breast and asked Adam if he knew a way to make them stick to my skin.
“Sure.” What refreshing enthusiasm he packed into that single syllable. He went on, “Fresh rosin will do it. I’ll just nick one of the little pines over there.” He went about the task immediately, selecting a place where sap had already oozed out a sticky white crust. I thought of my days with the viola, when I used a dried, hardened cake of this same substance to rosin my bow. Applying the stickiness with one finger, Adam stroked gooey patches on my chest just above each breast. As he finger-painted, he asked in a matter-of-fact way if I’d like a skirt, too. “I could make one, sort of Hawaiian style, out of long grass.”
“Would you? Later, when we have time.”
“You’ll want to be careful around the fire.”
He plopped a dollop of goo on my belly below my navel just above my pubic hair and stuck the largest fig leaf there. We both laughed out loud. I was a parody of every modest medieval or Renaissance painting of Eve. Adam maintained his unself-conscious dignity, naked. He smiled down at me, some combination of good humor—which he’d learned already from Riley’s manner—and handsome, shy lout, like the comic-book Superman. I liked his combination of sweetness and power; I felt about fourteen instead of forty-odd.
When Riley saw me approaching in my new covering, he made binoculars of his hands and placed them around his eyes. As we walked into the shady redwood grove, he said loudly through his bound-closed jaw, “Shit!” but he shrugged, too, as though to say, “Whatever.” We all laughed.
As we cooked fish on the makeshift skillet, we heard thunder revving up in the distance. The goat came by to offer milk again, and I made a cherry sauce for the fish, along with a fricassee of squash. While Adam and I prepared our meal, Riley held out his hand for an apple, and twice again; then he began to juggle the apples higher and higher for our entertainment as we cooked. He made one apple land so that it bounced off the top of Adam’s head. Remembering how Adam squirted milk at me, I chuckled to see him get some of his own.
“What did you do, back home?” Adam asked.
“Farm,” he answered, and when I asked if that was in Virginia, Riley nodded yes.
“Cows?” Adam asked, and Riley nodded yes.
“Do you have a family in Virginia?” I asked, and again he nodded yes.
“Children?” I inquired.
“Sisters,” he said distinctly with only the movements of his lips and little kisses at the beginning and end of the word.
“How many?” I asked.
Riley held up his hand with all five fingers spread.
No wonder, I thought, full of ease and fun, the darling goof-off brother. Till the draft probably prompted him to join the air force. I imagined his sisters, some of them with dark red hair and eyes to match. I was too old to be even the oldest of the Riley siblings.
Riley made a V with his fingers, then drew a line straight down from its point, then lifted his arm on the same side of his body as his broken foot; he placed the V’ed fingers under his armpit.
“Crutch,” I said. “You’d like us to make you a crutch.”
Riley bent from the waist and touched the orange bindings around the sticks we had prepared for his splint. He made a wrapping-round motion.
“A padded crutch,” I amended, and he nodded.
As I leaned forward to pass the vegetables to Adam, the fig leaf detached from my right breast and fluttered down onto the rounds of squash.
“Lucy,” Riley said to get my attention.
Embarrassed, I glanced at him, but he was not embarrassed. He quickly pointed to the cloth around his jaw, then gestured with both hands across his own shirt as though to form a bandeau.
“Of course,” I replied. I took the knife and went to the folded parachute cloth to cut off a proper strip.
Riley made another gesture around his waist and said, “Sarong.”
Each night the three of us lay down together, side by side, in the lean-to. The redwood branches and lacy sprays of needles continued to break up the torrential rains that came in the late afternoon and lasted well into the dark of night. Most of the rain was sieved into mist by the time it reached our level on the ground. An occasional plop of water crashed its way down more or less intact as it struck the broad leaves that roofed our lean-to.
The smaller shelter Adam had built over the fire kept it from going out, but occasionally we heard the fire hiss in the darkness when a spear of rain penetrated its covering. Despite the campfire, we were chilled by the moist air, but the layers of parachute fabric spread over the three of us helped to hold in the warmth of our bodies. When daylight came, we were all grateful for our sunny mornings and for the heat of the day that would collect itself by noon.
Over the next few days Riley became adept on his crutch. He could keep up with Adam on excursions, and he went exploring on his own across the grasslands with the grazing herds and through the orchard into the flower and vegetable gardens. Riley discovered the remnants of the mat roofs in the apple tree where Adam and I had our beds before the hard rains came. Because of the rains, our world grew more and more green. Both Adam and I found our world enriched by Riley’s enthusiasm.
After a few weeks, Riley was strong enough to hobble with the crutch all the way from the redwoods to the cliff dwelling. He swung himself along up the rocky path with aplomb, though I noted that Adam had apparently come before and cleared the way of loose stones.
When Riley suggested we move from the redwoods to the rocky overhang where we’d be warmer and drier, I found myself hesitating. It was a special place: Adam’s retreat, his castle. Vaguely I felt Adam and I had unfinished business at the shelter in the rocks, though we’d only spent one night there together before Riley fell into our lives. Riley quickly registered our hesitation and added in the jerky way his bound jaw dictated, “I mean—if it’s—okay. I don’t—want—to intrude.”
Together both Adam and I said, “It’s fine.” We would be warmer and drier housed under the great rocky overhang.
“Clan,” Riley said, and drew a circle in the air that included all of us.
“We ought to be wearing fur instead of orange nylon,” I said.
Adam said anxiously, “We don’t kill animals except for fish.”
“No,” I answered soberly. Would things change if we did? Would things change in any case? Then I added, “You need to wear something orange, Adam. To match Riley and me.”
To my own amazement, I untied my bandeau. After all, they’d both seen my breasts before. “Think Tahiti,” I said. “Gauguin.” I handed the cloth to Adam. “Tear off a strip,” I instructed. “It’s got too much fabric in it anyhow. I’ll make you a headband.”
Adam ripped the cloth with a sound like a jet parting the sky, and I neatly folded the fabric so no raw edges showed. When he bent his head down for me to tie the orange strip around it, I commanded, “Kneel.” He obediently dropped to one knee. I liked the effect of the slick orange against his dark hair. After I tied the knot at the back of his head, I arranged a few of his black curls to fall over the headband. “The Matriarch of the Clan,” I pronounced, “hereby officially names you—”
“Adam,” he said, bowing his head again. “My name really is Adam.”
When he lifted his head, both the men exchanged a rather sober glance. I wondered if they disapproved of my little ceremony or the title I playfully had given myself. I didn’t care. Maybe they thought I was losing my grip on reality.
That night the rain did not come till we were already beneath the shelter and cooking over the fire a large salmon Riley had caught. I luxuriated in the reflection of the undulating flames on the rocks. The stone reflecting the heat made our room in the cliff face almost too warm, but when the rain began, we would be glad for the stored warmth in the massive rocks.
Looking at the neat pile of throwing stones, Riley observed to Adam that he practically had a fort. “Here’s your arsenal,” Riley said. “The nuclear stockpile.”
The term nuclear was like a stone striking my forehead. I think Adam felt the same way. We’d asked for no news of the world, but here were the words of war.
“I guess nobody’s gone atomic yet,” Adam said slowly. “Out there.” He lifted his eyes to the horizon.
“At least not by the time I bailed out,” Riley answered cheerfully. He picked up a rock from the pile and hurled it forcefully out into the distance. The air shifted with the aftershock of distant thunder.
“What year is it?” Adam asked.
“Twenty-twenty.”
“It was 2020 when I took off from Cairo,” I said. It amazed me to think that I had known Adam perhaps for only a few months. My hair had grown out now, and I never thought of the scarred skin between my shoulder blades. We had entered a peaceful and timeless dreamworld. Even the rumbles of thunder sounded benign, and the torrents of rain, another of which would soon erupt, were obviously a needed part of sustaining life for the flora and fauna of Eden.
“Did we create this,” I asked them, “or did it create us?”
Riley announced, “I want—to take off—my jaw bindings.”
“Feels ready?” Adam asked.
Riley nodded and began to untie his jaw.
“Don’t open wide,” I cautioned. “Be really careful.”
With urgent fingers, Riley untied the knots on top of his head and let the streamers fall to the ground. “Free—at—last,” he said slowly and obediently as though his jaw were still bound. Suddenly emotional, Riley swallowed and turned away from us to regain his composure. It was his endearing style to take things in stride, to be jovial and upbeat.
A gust of wind blew in a sprinkling of rain, and then the sky split with a torrential rainfall. Adam got up to put dry logs on the fire.
“I wished for salmon,” Riley said. “It was in a dream, but now it’s happened.”
Though Riley seemed a bit spooked by the satisfaction of his wish, Adam and I had come to take the fulfillment of our wishes for granted. What we wanted here, we could have. Or maybe it was that here we only wanted what we could very likely have. Now I knew I wanted Adam, and it seemed very likely that I could have him.
I wished that I had some milk to follow the salmon and squash. My eyes fell on the globe of a red tomato, and I considered biting into it for its juice. Having milk would be almost as good as ice cream, I thought. Vanilla, anyway.
Suddenly Adam was standing in front of me with a clay jug in his hands. “Look,” he said, “I made it out of river clay and fired it hard. Days ago.” The jug was a round globe with a very wide neck. “You can get your hand down in it to swab it out.” His vessel was practical as well as beautiful. The clay had been fired a purplish black, and its color and shape suggested an artful version of an eggplant. I remembered Adam had spoken of wanting to draw.
“You even made a lid,” I said. I thought the piece was really quite lovely. The lid had a knob on it for easy grasping. “You could make a whole set,” I said, “if you wanted to.” Then I asked, “What’s in it?”
“Milk. I thought we might all enjoy some goat milk.”
I smiled. So it was my destiny to have what I wanted. At least in Eden.
By the time we finished eating and drinking, a curtain of rain hung all across the opening, and we watched the reflected firelight flash gold and silver and bronze across it. The water curtain fell straight and hard for over an hour, then in rivulets and trickles from the runoffs down the rocky slope above us. It was good to have all the warm, dry space around us instead of the close quarters of the damp lean-to. As the night storm passed, Adam occasionally added more wood to the fire, and our talk, too, flared up and then died down in fits and starts.
When I had spent nights with Janet and Margarita Stimson, or with my friend Nancy, it had been like this. Anyone could speak, but gradually, in the most natural way, the restful silences began. A few last water droplets clung to the rock lintel and dropped singly, elongating as they fell. The only curtain across the large open side of the overhang was the soft darkness.
I could easily imagine the landscape now obscured by the night, how in the morning the sunshine would flood the valley. In the far distance, we would see the green spires of the redwood grove we had formerly inhabited. How strange that step by step we had been able to come from there to here, leaving something of ourselves behind.
But there was Riley now, in front of me. His hair had grown out—dark red, as I’d expected, made mahogany by the fire glow. His face was almost free of bruises and swelling.
“I forgot to tell you, Lucy,” he said. “I crutched myself down to the beach.”
“It must have been hard,” I answered, “with the crutch sinking in the sand.”
“Not too hard,” he replied. “I wanted to see what was left of your plane.”
“Not much,” I said.
“That plane had sort of a little glove compartment,” he went on. “I pried it open with one of the broken struts.”
“And?”
“A piece of needlepoint. My sisters used to do needlepoint and crewel, cross-stitch—that sort of thing. There were needles, yarn, and thread.”
“Really?” I pictured the somewhat frail circle of an embroidery hoop, its ends connected with a metal screw. I thought of holding a loose, floppy skein of six-ply embroidery thread, how one could pull the plies apart into two sections of three threads each. My grandmother had done that, stitching and telling Bible stories all at once. I recalled Arielle Saad—perhaps crewel or cross-stitch had been a hobby for her.
“What was the picture?” I asked Riley, brother of many sisters. “The image on the canvas?”
“It was a big jar. Kind of a fountain.”
At once I vividly recalled how I had admired the fountain at Nag Hammadi. The dazzling sunlight and the heat. In a distant life, I had stood in front of a museum dedicated to texts found in a jar on the slopes of Nag Hammadi in 1945.
“When the plane came down,” I said slowly, gathering the attention of both Adam and Riley before I went on, “I was transporting some ancient texts. For friends.” I envisioned myself following Arielle, wearing sunglasses, through the streets of the little town, and my hurrying to catch up whenever she disappeared around a corner. I envisioned Arielle’s father, in the white room beyond the pit of baby crocodiles, the man sitting at the rough table, a crutch leaning nearby, the Bible open before him on the table. His tawny lion eyes gaze at me.
“The texts I carried—I was smuggling them, really—were housed in a reinforced case, like a French horn case. Before I crashed, I opened the plane door and threw out the case. If you see something like that—it might have broken open when it hit—let me know. It might have caught in a tree, or even landed in the water.” I thought of the river, though I had never considered that possibility before. There had been so much land beneath me, an endless green carpet, trees, grassland. And then the sparkling ocean, or something like an ocean. “It’s precious. What’s inside. Probably irreplaceable.” My sentences had become staccato, like Riley’s when his jaw was bound and he could say only a fraction of what was in his mind.
“Why are you wearing a flash drive?” Riley asked.
“A memory stick. It belonged to my husband.” It represents his mind, I thought but did not say.
I sighed and looked up and around at the sheltering overhang and the rock walls on three sides that held the three of us. Us used to be Thom and me. Now he had been replaced with the two of them. Only I was the same. Now us was Adam and Riley and me. No one asked me questions about my husband. Not even his name.
I wanted to say, “My husband was the first person on Earth to discover the location of extraterrestrial life.” For a moment, I burned with the desire to emblazon Thom’s name on history. But this was Eden, and we were all caught in its web of non-time. History was not just insignificant but irrelevant. What mattered was here and now.
I had spent the day bringing armloads of ferns to the cave so that each of us would have a fresh, soft bed, piled nearly a foot high. There would be no need for a large fire tonight. I placed my bed in the middle, as far back in the crescent-shaped room as possible, and each of theirs as far away on both sides, as near the tips of the crescent’s bow, as I could make them. I had some idea of providing private space after our cramped quarters in the lean-to. Having had our fill of slow chatting and unasked questions, we retired to our pallets.
I heard the tapped placing of the tip of Riley’s crutch—wood on stone—as he moved to the perimeter. When Adam put his bare knee in the midst of his ferns, they made a slight creaking. I heard him settle his body and knew he was lying on his back, as he always did, though later he would be rolling around first to one side, then to another. In the lean-to, he had rotated in place, on the other side of Riley.
Hesitating, I stood at the side of my pallet, looking outward. Such a sense of space in our cavity—the ceiling high above us, the front of the shelter entirely open to the night and to the landscape below. I wished for stars, but there were no pinpricks of light. From the embers of the small fire, my peripheral vision caught the motion of Riley laying his crutch down beside his bed, bending over to catch his weight on the palms of both hands, then gracefully pivoting on one arm so that he sat, somewhat heavily. His knee was bent, and he put no weight on his splinted ankle.
I had the impulse to kneel beside my bed and pray, but instead I stared at the fire. I thought of a prayer I had sung when I was a child, much to the approval of my parents: A little star creeps over the hill/When woods are dark and birds are still. / The children fold their hands in prayer/And the love of God is everywhere. Only there was no little star. The night was utterly dark. Of course I could build up the fire, if I liked, but I thought it was time to let it die.
Adam said enigmatically, “When I have time, I’ll make a flute.”
Both Riley and I had sunk too far into our own thoughts to respond with a question.
I lay down and let my body suffer the softness to envelop me. “Suffer the little children to come unto me”—that was what Jesus had said, and for the first time I loved the word suffer, meaning “to allow,” and I thought how natural it was to allow my body to enjoy the softness of the ferns I had gathered. My weight released the faint odor of cinnamon from the fern fronds. But I did not close my eyes. First I turned my head to stare again out at the unchanging blackness. I liked the way the campfire coals continued to glow between me and the curtain of dark, whether we were all sitting around it or not. Then I turned my head to look at the back wall of rock. It was built in strata, some reddish, some more golden, some dark gray. My life, too, was laid down in strata. Perhaps each layer was a decade, though the divisions were not quite so neat as intervals of ten years might suggest.
“I shouldn’t have made the beds so far apart,” I said into their silence. My voice sounded plaintive.
Neither of them answered. If the beds had been closer together, we might have chatted longer against the darkness. The regret I had voiced was a spontaneous utterance against the desolation I suddenly felt.
There was childhood with my parents in their apartment, and then their leaving for Japan as missionaries and my moving in with my grandmother and grandfather in the bungalow in Memphis when I was nine, and then the years of powerful childhood growing up with the Stimson sisters, how I practiced the viola, and my grandfather’s death, then the binge of studying psychology and graduation from high school. There was the move to Iowa City, my quick engagement as an undergraduate to Thom Bergmann, our happiness as I finished my degrees; our travel and our meaningful work, his international connections. A decade with Thom; the loss of my grandmother; another decade with Thom. The loss of Thom. Again I saw the flap of the black wing of the falling piano, felt the hardness of the pavement under my thin shoe soles as I ran down Prince Street toward the Blue Tulip Café. Igtiyal. What did it matter? Thom was dead. What did the manner of his dying have to say about the nature of his life?
Everything.
What did my own survival tell me since I had come to dwell in this most accommodating of places?
That I knew nothing of who I was. And even less of Thom. Good-bye, Thom.
Of Adam and Riley?
These two men, one impaired of mind, one of body? But those conditions would pass, for each of them—I was sure of it. I was slipping into sleep. For each of us, it was his or her own dream story that would matter. Each was like Earth’s consciousness before Copernicus; each was the center of his or her universe, and there seemed no way for the center to move beyond the infinite arms of its radii. Sleep embraced me. Let all else circle round me. The unconscious breezes of memory and imagination toyed with the kite of my already dreaming mind. Thom lifted his arm and scattered the stars in the firmament. He breathed the deep breaths of passion.
Riley’s breath said sleep had claimed him. Then I floated in my dream to Adam and said, “Love me.” And we did. After we had made love, he disappeared, and I drifted home to my pallet and its scent of cinnamon. I rose again and wafted to Riley. Crossing the stone floor of the cave, my bare feet, though ghostly and immaterial, felt the slight variations in the rock, the places that were cracked, and those that seemed smooth and without blemish. Passing the dying fire, I felt warmth underfoot lingering in the rock. I moved more quietly than the spirit of darkness. When I reached Riley, I slumped to my knees and whispered into his ear, “Love me.” But I awoke too soon, shocked at how thoroughly I had been inhabited by desire.
In the morning, we all three woke up at the same time and sat up on our wilted fern beds.
Both Adam and Riley breathed deeply, and so did I. In unison, they looked at me and said, “What did you dream?”
I glanced at them and kept my secret. Then a piece of another dream visited me. “Toward morning, I dreamed of the sound of an airplane engine,” I told them. “And of flying on and on, from Nag Hammadi to Cairo. It was a memory dream. There was a Muslim girl, Arielle, with me, a young woman, really pretty, at the controls, Egyptian, with shoulder-length black hair. She probably left the needlepoint work in the Cub. The engine was loud and grinding, like teeth spitting and grinding in sleep.”
“Anything else?” Riley asked. “I sometimes used to grind my teeth.”
I hesitated. There had been something else. “I dreamed … several dreams … a monkey crouched beside my bed. A large monkey, with a hairy head and a naked body, like a boy. Like an incubus.”
“Not very likely,” Riley said. “I mean not with Adam and me posted like two sentries at either end of this cave or shelter or whatever you call it.”
“I’ve called it ‘The Cave of Artemis,’” Adam said.
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s bow-shaped. And the first night I was here, there was a crescent moon smiling at me. Like the first night … on the beach.”
“When you first came here?” I asked gently.
He just nodded. His face became blank and still. He turned away.
Finally I said, “Let’s gather breakfast.”
Looking back, I’m unsure of what happened that night. Perhaps we all dreamed the same dream. It didn’t matter. We were the same people as before. Perhaps closer.
Each of us sniffed the air once, as though we had detected the odor of sex.