THE CHASE: ADAM
FOR ADAM, THE shriek sounded at his ear. The stone that separated his own body and the body of the man who fell was only a curtain, though Adam had assumed it was the surface of a great mass.
It was not Pierre whose body had sped down the crevasse, Adam told himself. He could not guess who had been swallowed by the crack in the earth, but it could not have been Pierre, who knew the pitfalls. Turning off his flashlight for a moment, Adam felt darkness enfold him like mourning. Now he was hidden even from himself.
Adam lifted his invisible hand toward what must be the proximity of his nose and sighed onto his hand. The ancient scribe, X or Q, the Quester, had breathed into his own hand when he tried to understand mysteries.
Deep in the earth, the fallen man’s blood would have no brightness; his body would lie at the bottom of a shaft, his skull broken, his own bones piercing his flesh and clothes. Adam had seen such bodies. “Move him into the sun,” one of the army doctors had said. The doctor, a young fellow himself, was strained and pale with fatigue, near Damascus. “He wants to see the sun again before he dies. Move him.” Comrades in the desert—the doctor, the dying man, himself.
Adam had known them. They lived in the marrow of his own bones.
“The pure products of America go crazy,” the poet-doctor William Carlos Williams had written.
Adam made himself draw slow, big breaths. His hands clenched the rigid flashlight in his right hand. Slowly and carefully, he moved his thumb onto the top of the sliding switch and pushed it on. Like a snake, the light sprang out, and a distant voice said, “Light!” The word echoed through the dead air trapped among the caves and corridors.
Light! Someone had seen him. He knew the voice of the Brit, Gabriel Plum, the one with the gun. Immediately Adam began to run, reserving nothing.
He ran and made the light scoop the ground in front of him and then dash up and into the distance as far as it could shine. A wet place glistened ahead, water oozing from the top of a wall and down onto the floor. He splashed through a shallow sheet of water, floored with mud, which sucked away one of his shoes as he crossed it. He cursed himself for wearing the thin, fashionable mahogany-gleaming shoes to dinner. Through his sock, the path over the rock felt hard and bruising as he ran. He wished for combat boots. Accidentally, he turned off his flashlight.
He stopped stock-still. In the stillness, he heard footsteps coming after him, not running but plodding steadily. Sheer fear engulfed him. He sank to his knees and wet himself as he had never done in combat. There was no instinct to survive, only abject terror. Though he was drowning in fear, the rock bit his knees as he knelt. He sobbed into his hands—for life, for life, for the life he was about to lose. There was nothing to do but pray, yet he could hardly speak to God through the chattering of his teeth. He gripped the tube of his flashlight.
His assailant would find him, inscribe him in light, point the gun at his head, and kill him. He wanted to sing into the darkness, “I know that my Redeemer liveth,” but there was only the dull not-song of bones knocking. He could not move, not even his thumb. Without light, who would dare to move?
When the footsteps, cautious ones, came closer, Adam made himself open his eyes. Was light lapping near? Did he see something less than pure darkness, some gray contamination? He could feel the slab of wetness in his trouser leg pressing the flesh of his thigh.
Yes, slow footsteps on stone. And light. He knew his lips were moving, but no vibration emerged from his throat. When, with bowed head, he could see the whiteness of his shirt covering his chest, he knew he was in the light. Just so, long ago, the beam of his father’s big box flashlight had found him, when he had tried to run away, and made his clothing flare in the woods.
Gabriel Plum said, “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.”
Laying his flashlight on the stone, Adam pressed his hands together so God would see that he had tried. At the last moment, he had tried to sound a prayer. His hands shook uncontrollably, though he pressed them hard and harder together. His biceps bulged against the white fabric of his sleeve. He repented of his doubt, of his sins, of his life.
“Superman?” Gabriel said.
Adam could not reply.
“When you attacked me in the jungle,” Gabriel went on, “you were a blur, but for a minute—your face—you were like Superman from the comics come to life.”
Adam wilted and fell on his side, deadweight, but still in the posture of prayer, still in the center of Gabriel’s circle of light. The side of his skull thunked against the stone floor. Through eyes fixed and open, he saw his own fingers pressed together like a church steeple, trembling.
“You seem so small,” Gabriel said incredulously. “You seem to be only a foot tall or so.”
Adam’s bowels unloosed themselves.
“God, you stink,” Gabriel said. “You’ve shat your pants, man.”
Adam felt some flicker within himself rise up. A tiny flame in a stone lamp began to flare, like a campfire.
“Take off those filthy pants and shorts,” Gabriel said. “And stand up.”
Adam obeyed. He had to take off his other shoe to pull off the trousers. He left his soiled clothing in a pile on the cave floor, but arranged them to conceal the mess. Downcast, he stood slumped with shame, glad for the tails of his shirt hanging over his buttocks and front.
“Now you’re going to run,” Gabriel said. “Turn on your torch. That’s right. Stand up. You’re a man of stature,” he said crisply. “Quite strong, actually. I’ll count to three. You don’t have anything I want, do you? When I say one, you run. I may shoot you. I may not.”
Suddenly Adam looked at Gabriel, his sharp, smart face, his impeccably tailored tweed jacket.
“Like God,” Adam said. “You are like God with the power of life and death.”
“Not at all,” Gabriel said. “Turn on your torch. Not much more than anybody else. Let’s not have any blasphemy. One!”
Adam ran. His toes gripped the stone, and he dodged from side to side as he’d been trained, to make himself harder to shoot.
“Two!”
Ahead, Adam’s flashlight plied the walls for a shadow that might be more than a shadow, that might be an opening in the stone. Yes, there! He ran harder straight toward the unreflecting shadow. No, an opening, a gap in the logic of the wall—
“Three!”
—and beyond the opening, in the floor he saw a huge hole, wide and deep, but there was momentum and no choice. With all his strength, Adam leaped. The gun resounded like the clap of doom, and Adam felt the shattering of his heel, but he had already pushed off. With all his strength he had leaped, desperation more insistent than the pain of his wound, and landed.
His flashlight showed an abrupt turn in the corridor before him, a bend, at right angles to the place where he stood. There was his salvation: a sharp bend in the passage. Glancing over his shoulder and down his back, he lifted his foot and shone the light on his heel. Blood poured from his injury. But he could use the front of his foot, or he could hop if he needed to. He could hear Gabriel’s shoes moving faster and faster in the other corridor. Adam aimed his light back on the abyss he had leaped, found no bottom to it, and registered again the sounds of pursuit. Though bleeding, he saw that a pit nearly eight feet wide, with no discernible bottom, separated him from his assailant. Gabriel would have to fly to cross the hole. Quickly Adam hobbled forward, around the turn in the corridor, beyond the reach of any bullet.
Perhaps he was lucky enough to be in a tunnel that did not double back, but branched on and on. He hobbled forward faster. A little farther, a little safer, and he would tie up his wound. He would use the sleeves of his shirt for a tourniquet.
Even as the resounding impacts of senseless bullets ripped across the pit and ricocheted off the rock walls, he felt confident of his safety.
Adam smiled at Gabriel’s fury.
“Thank you, Lord,” Adam said in a barely audible voice.
The firing ceased.
“I hope you’re dead, old chap,” Gabriel called. His circle of light must surely inscribe Adam’s blood on the stone beyond the hole. “Or dying.”
Adam sat on the hard floor, cold against his bare flesh. He elevated his leg and foot on a stone. In the dark, he pulled off his shirt and ripped out both sleeves for a tourniquet around his ankle. By feel, he did everything that was necessary. From the remainder of the shirt, he folded a pad to press against his wound, but he knew the soft cotton fabric of his undershirt would serve better, so he pulled the undershirt over his head. He’d use the remainder of his dress shirt to sit on, to gain a bit of thin insulation against the cold hardness of the rock.
Someone would find him. After a while, when Gabriel had given up and gone away, Adam would use a rock to click against another rock, so someone could find his location. His savior would hesitate before the gaping pit—he would not choose to leap it any more than Gabriel had, but boards could be brought for a bridge. Adam thought soberly of the length of time his discovery and rescue might require. Now he would stop the bleeding. He would wait in the dark, saving the flashlight till he heard someone coming.
He hoped that when he was shot, some of his blood had sprayed backward into the main corridor to mark the place of his leap.