THE DRAGON’S NECK
WHEN ADAM AWOKE in the burning morning sunlight, alone and naked, he asked himself, What do you really know about anything? Stealthy as a serpent, memory began to crawl through the convolutions of his brain.
Burn me! Burn them! he had prayed to the Middle Eastern sun, while he lay naked, his hands bound behind his back, flat on his stomach on the searing metal of their truck bed. They had put a pair of nylon women’s underpants over his head as they raped him over and over, and he knew that the underwear was meant to be an unbearable humiliation, revenge for something that happened to someone they might have known in the past, but the panties reminded Adam of underwear hung in the sunshine behind the ranch house at home on a gleaming wire clothesline, his mother’s underwear, part of an intimate family array—his father’s undershorts, his own, and in diminishing sizes all those of his younger brothers. The nylon panties placed over his head by his torturers had comforted him. As he had looked through one leg opening straight at the sun, his chin bouncing on the metal bed of the eastward-moving mtruck, he had prayed backward to the setting sun to kill him quickly. Them, too.
Adam had given up on God and asked the sun for mercy and vengeance.
Finally one of the soldiers had sent him into oblivion by crashing the butt of his rifle against the side of his head. They must have dumped him into the road. Yes, his body remembered how it curled before he hit the hard-packed sand—how they lifted his feet up and over his head and he spiraled out of the open-ended truck. They must have cut the ropes that bound his hands before they hurled him out.
That must have happened some days ago, because now he was healing. His body had been blue with bruises. Before they tied his wrists together, they had stamped on his fingers and hands with their heavy boots, but now his flesh was almost pink again, and he could flex his fingers, curl them inward into a fist.
Yesterday, he remembered, he had flattened and pressed his hand into the sand. Yesterday he had awakened into a holy sheen of light as though for the first time, and the day had blessed and restored him. He had been refashioned and born again in Eden.
But what else had happened in his life before yesterday had occurred?
He remembered more from the recent past: a large, hairy monkey had come from nowhere. After they tumbled him onto the hard sand and left him, a large, hairy monkey with a child’s face had given him water and roughly forced fruit into his mouth, then something raw and bloody. But now he was waking up alone.
And now he must claim his mind as his own. Now he must kneel in the sand and beg for God’s forgiveness. Adam knew that in his pain he had no longer believed in the Invisible, although he had survived. God had saved Adam anyway. He had blasphemed in praying to the sun, but he knew it was the hand of God that intervened and cushioned the blow from the rifle butt so that it damaged but failed to shatter his skull. And God must have put the idea into their heads to throw Adam out, just as He had made the whale cough up Jonah onto dry land, when Jonah’s punishment was complete. And perhaps God was making his torturers feel ashamed of what they had done to him—six young men dressed like sand in swirls of tan, gray-green, splotches of brown. They wore clothes borrowed or stolen from those who had been dressed once just like himself.
Now God was making Adam new, and He would come in the evening and walk and talk with him, as was described in the book of Genesis. Here was the beautiful world: palm trees and trees of all possible and impossible kinds and a river. When he turned his head, he saw a sea with blue water dancing in the sunlight. Clouds hanging over water. An ocean transplanted from another geography to delight his eye.
The sun stood in the sky, a gleaming disk too bright to hold color of any name. God’s shield. Perhaps it was a new sun, risen as it was in a different place—a new place, a new time, and he himself a new creation. In the state hospital in Idaho, on the stationary bike facing east, long ago Adam had sometimes pedaled hard to pull up the sun. They had not known then what he was doing. There was a translucent, almost invisible thread connecting the sprocket of the bicycle to the sun. With the action of his legs, he had made the sun rise, reeling it up so that they would all benefit from its heat and light. Adam’s morning job had been to wind up the sun while it spread its wings like a golden bird rising from its nest behind the eastern mountains.
Now they could serve his bowl of hot oatmeal.
But the hospital had vanished. All the walls were gone. The large window through which he liked to look at the parklike grounds and at the Northern Rockies beyond the treetops had vanished. Not even the window frame was left hanging in the air. Here was a new world, much more simple; not even the long, narrow white tables in the cafeteria were here, and the short little round stools that could tilt up under the tables, the better to mop the floor—which he himself had often done, pretending with the gray water and the mop head to be making a swirling painting of marvelous colors.
The bad part was that he was hungry. Then he remembered the cherry orchard at home, and the orchard he knew was here, magically full of every fruit he had ever wanted to eat.
Walking beside the river, he looked for the spot on the bank where he had lain when the sun first woke him. He looked for yesterday but could not find the seam in the air that would allow him to slip backward in time. A scuffed place on the sandy bank might be where he had lain, the round of his heels resting in the slow swirl of water. He felt proud of himself, rising up from that. Where had God gone? Adam wondered, then remembered that it was His habit to walk in the garden, the orchard, in the cool of the day. It was only morning now.
Impulsively, Adam splashed into the river, then paused to feel its friendly water flowing all around him. The current parted for him, encircling the calves of his legs. He lifted his knees high and splashed his foot down playfully. Not like the soldiers’ boots. Up and down like a fence-post-driving machine. No! His bare sole slapped the water playfully and made it squirt in all directions in a shower of round clear stones. He would walk through water, just like Jesus had walked on water in the old days, but now those days were yet to come, weren’t they? He must live down all the days, all the days of all the books of the Bible from Genesis to Malachi, before Jesus came.
In college, he had read the words of an ancient seer who had said that time was like a river, this river, and you could never step in the same river twice, for it had flowed away.
But he was still young. He stood still in the water and regarded the beautiful, almost tropical place surrounding him. His land. So must his own father have looked long ago at the waiting land in Idaho and claimed it for his own. His father had been younger even, fully a man before he left his teens. But thirty, Adam thought, his own age, was not very old, not anymore—not more than a third of one’s life. Hadn’t Jesus been just thirty when he started his career? Adam walked out of the river. And Muhammad had been forty before his first revelation came.
In the war, Adam remembered he himself had killed a boy, more handsome than himself, who had died pronouncing the words Ahl-lah, Ahl-lah, with a bubble of blood on his lips. He had not pronounced the words the way an American would have done, but they were understandable enough, though distorted.
He remembered what it was like before he was captured—himself and the others moving over the desert, their uniforms the color of moving sand, and how they would sometimes come to an oasis. He remembered the first green-and-dun oasis he had seen, and how it seemed enchanted. Beyond the trunks of the palms spread the shallow pool of the oasis waters. The oasis had been deserted. Animal footprints led down to the shining glaze of water. He and his buddies had all run to the sky-blue pool. He remembered the surprised look on the face of a furry gray donkey as they thundered past.
When the soldiers walked into the shallow pool, their feet had found people under the water. Sometimes the cloth of their robes floated up to the surface, supported by trapped air or rising gas. Yes, those were not smooth rocks out there but ballooning pouches of wet cloth risen to the surface and also the backs of heads, wet black hair glistening blue-black in the sunlight. When he and his friends left the water, all the troops had done so stepping backward, trying to retrace their steps.
Among the buildings of the oasis, they saw that the liquid splashing into stone fountains was the color of watered blood. No one could bring himself or herself to drink the pink-tinted water in that place. Beside a red granite basin stood a young American woman in uniform, her thin blond hair cropped short, sunburn on her high cheekbones, a skinny neck, her thin cracked lips forming words: “I want to go home,” she said over and over, her blue eyes covered with a second lens of tears.
The U.S. Army had had to airlift to the oasis great tanks of water dangling from trios of helicopters.
But all of that had happened before yesterday, before when God had created Adam anew.
After the hospital at home in Idaho he had gotten well, too. Well enough in his mind so they wanted him as a soldier. Next came the time of war, which he would will and had willed himself never to remember, though at times, like images of the oasis, the war might drift back to him. With his left hand, Adam caressed his index finger on his right hand—the trigger finger, its muscle still grotesquely enlarged. He didn’t want that time. He wanted Now and Here: those apples, and even juicier fruit, the tangerines. They had poisoned the water of the oasis, but here they wouldn’t have poisoned the fruit. That would take too long. They would have had to inject each separate fruit, using a hypodermic needle. That wasn’t reasonable. The globed fruit bounced back the morning light, and the fruit of many colors shone like small lanterns in the orchard.
Here there were fuzzy-sided peaches that he wanted, and the slick-sided purple plums. Both peaches and plums had a cleft, or a seam, in one place, a cleft such as a woman might have between her legs.
His entire body rigid with desire, Adam walked slowly among the trees of the bountiful orchard but would not allow himself to pluck a single fruit. Because of the tension in all his limbs, it was difficult to take a step. He must punish himself. Catatonic, catatonia—where had he heard those words? Then he remembered that God had said not to eat apples, hadn’t He? Adam reached up and plucked a tangerine from among green leaves. It was easy for his hand to obey his will, once he had decided what to do, what to choose.
With his strong thumbnail, he easily broke through the dimpled skin of the tangerine. He loved the compliant way the peeling yielded to the leverage of his prying thumbnail. When he tore off a patch of the rind, he turned it over and saw that the underside of the bright orange peel was white and pithy. Through the window he had torn from its side, Adam saw a round of plump crescents. He removed a cluster of those little purses and took it into his mouth. With his molars, he gently squeezed and then enjoyed the pleasure of the sweet gush of flavor onto his tongue.
That night God came to Adam as a breeze.
In the cool of the evening, when Adam moved among the rough, crisscrossed trunks of the royal palms, scaly trees planted in rows like the sugar-beet fields of Idaho, God kept pace with Adam by moving quietly and tenderly in the row next to him. At one point, Adam reached out his right arm through the spaced trees to offer his hand, which God caressed with the breath of His passing.
When Adam stopped, God gently lifted the back of Adam’s hand to His own lips and kissed Adam’s knuckles. In a whisper, God murmured a blessing, “Peace.” He walked away, diagonally across the rows of palm trees. Per-haps God’s slanted path intersected other Adams in the field of palms as they also walked forward down their rows, and perhaps He walked with each of them awhile. Finally God left the garden to cross the boundary river toward another place. Adam could hear His distant feet lifting the water, so still were the quiet and the cool of the evening.
Alone, Adam sank to his knees; he crossed his arms and leaned them against the coarse diamonds of the trunk of a royal palm. He placed his forehead against his crossed forearms and sang aloud part of a hymn he had loved as a boy of six, his family having come into town for church and sociability:
When we’ve been there
Ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun
We’ve no-o less days
To sing God’s praise
Than when we first begun.
Yet here, in Eden, there was no we. No Eve knelt or stood beside him with open hymnal to sing God’s praise. Adam was entirely alone. He stood up, placed the palms of his hands on each side of the rough waist of the palm tree, and squeezed, trembling with intensity, as though he could squeeze her out of the trunk of the tree. If God enjoyed a hymn of praise, He’d no less trouble hearing the silent cry of Adam’s heart. With the brute force of his powerful rancher’s hands, Adam squeezed the tree trunk, scaly as a dragon’s neck, and begged God to send him Eve.
Till it yielded up a dryad, he would strangle the tree trunk.