The adam tried to hold me, but I pushed him away. He pulled me gently back—now I could feel the tremor in his hands—and lifted the leaves from my face. Perhaps with a vestige of that understanding that needed no words, he lowered it to my waist and tied it there, so that the leaves hung over those parts stained by our use of each other.
I wept to see our industry, so joyously applied in gifts and tokens, in experiments and invention, given to such purpose. When the adam had made a similar covering for himself, he pulled me to him, hard against his chest. He did it, I knew, not to comfort me but himself as he lowered his head to my breast.
I held him in silence. We did not know the language for sorrow or apology. We had no words for forgiveness, for it had never been needed.
8
Midday was filled with the cacophony of birds—birds of all kinds, predator and sparrow alike—churning in the sky. The lion, the wolf, the braying onager were silent, gone. I had seen none of the pride, the pack, or the herd. In fact, I had laid eyes on no animals at all except for Chalil, now gone. There was only the endless sea of birds.
By late afternoon they began to recede. I wondered, had they stripped the tree bare? I shuddered to think of that tree, that island now. How many times in the last hour had I wished to undo all that we had done, to take back that thing we had brought forth—to unknow the thing we now knew?
After a time the horde was gone. There came only the intermittent call of the griffon. The hawk. Then silence.
Finally, in the late hour before twilight, a breeze rushed up from the valley floor. It rose as a sweeping wind over the foothills. Now here came the chorus of animals—not as many as there should have been—excited in its wake, raising raucous choir to heaven. The sky clouded over so that the green of the valley appeared more rich in the strange shade, both more vibrant and darkly alive at once.
The feral address came in waves, dying down and rising again, like wind in a storm, whipping to a frenzy and falling back again.
The adam grabbed my hand. We did not have words for “safe” or “unsafe” then. But I, too, had noted the strangeness of the air and the capriciousness of it, the way the winds seemed to rise upward to buffet the mountaintops before gushing down upon the valley. Clasping his hand, I ran with him down the narrow trail of our hillside bower to the valley. On the far hill a lone goat stood, coat blowing in the wind.
My limbs, once so agile, felt leaden, alien, wooden. We veered toward the orchard, but then the adam pointed toward a grove of willow trees along the river. There they bowed over, branch tips disappeared into the earth where we had tucked them beneath the soil and brought them up again so that they formed a kind of cavern where we had lain on the hottest days.
Inside, the willow cavern was damp. We held to each other, fingers clawlike, as wind buffeted the valley, tossing leaves and other refuse into the air.
As I clung to the adam, I was deaf to his thoughts as I had been to the goat on the hill. Did the animals cry out to us, who could no longer hear? What if they needed us? I started for the opening of the willow chamber, but the adam held back, shouting, “Do not go out!”
I didn’t know what was worse: the unnatural storm—unnatural in that there had never been a storm before—or knowing that though we hid together, the adam and I were as separated from one another as though we stood alone.
As the storm became a squall, we crouched in the willow chamber, covering our ears, faces, eyes.
Let me be nothing. If I must be something, let me be the air, which is unseen. Or let me be the earth that runs into the river with the rain, that empties out to sea until it is lost . . .
The wind abruptly died. The air fell utterly still.
The cries of the animals fell silent.
The faintest breeze. A rustle through the trees, as though to shake loose the debris of the blast a moment before. I smelled earth and leaf, the rot of fruit, and thought of flies.
My legs wavered as though pushed by a current. The sound of our breathing filled the air. The sound of our hearts seemed louder than all the world. Where once we had anticipated the appearance of the One and had gone running to find him, now we hid, bidding our hearts not beat, our breath not whisper a sound.
The adam started, violently, as though struck. He fell back, and again I saw the tremor in his shoulders, his head shaking as though at odds with his neck.
“What? What is it?”
He said nothing and started with jerking steps toward the opening of the cavern.
“What are you doing? Don’t leave me!”
When he looked back at me, fear was a creature wild on his face. His lips moved, though no sound came from them. He staggered a step backward and then walked woodenly out, as though his feet moved of their own accord, independent of his will.
I rushed to the mouth of the cavern. The valley floor exploded with light.
I fell back on the damp earth, my arm over my eyes.
When it came, the sound of it was so beloved—ah! Balm and terror at once! And yet so longed for by me.
Where are you?
Oh, God! I die.
Was it only yesterday that I lay in the vineyard—a day, a lifetime ago? Terrified, guilty, but knowing no other comfort in this world—not even the adam, who was undone—I burst from the cavern and threw myself to the ground. Within the intensity of that light, I could see nothing.
“I heard your sound. I was—was afraid.” The words came, choked out of the throat of the adam somewhere nearby. “I knew that I was naked. I—I hid.”
How ridiculous did it sound to say it, here in a light greater than the sun, which lays all bare?
Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree I commanded you not to eat from?
Now, in a cry so thin as not to be that of a man: “The woman you gave me—she gave me from the tree, and I ate.”
My very blood, the bile in my mouth, dried to dust. A strangled cry issued from him the moment he said it, but it was too late.
He had betrayed me.
Ah, pain! I am the knife twisting in the flesh, the flint blade that slips and severs. Let me die!
The words, when they came to my heart, were so gentle and familiar—and so very sad: What is this you have done?
I heaved a convulsive sob, doubled over, my forehead on the grass. My words were a stream of bile, like vomit from my lips. “The serpent beguiled me and I ate.”
The sound of it was a spoken horror.
It was the truth.
Now I sensed another presence beyond the adam, the One, and me. I lifted my head and in that fulgent light saw the outline of a winged form, as the moon is outlined by the resplendent sun in eclipse. But the scales, once so lustrous, seemed tarnished. The wings, so incandescent, looked now opaque as rust. Where was beauty? Where was brilliance? He, who had been once my advisor and then my betrayer—would he, too, lay blame at my feet?
The One spoke: Cursed be you of all cattle and all beasts of the field! On your belly you go. Eat dust all the days of your life!
The serpent began to unfurl his wings. They opened and opened, seeming to unfold forever as the serpent himself straightened and then stretched beyond his natural size until he stood—upright on two feet—nearly twice the size of a man. The golden scales around him burst like a split shell and fell to the ground, discarded as though he had emerged from a chrysalis, no longer a serpent at all but something far greater and more beautiful. His wings glimmered as though with all the quartz of a mountain. The thing that had risen to its full height uncoiled wing after glistening wing so that he had not one pair like the serpent, or even two as the dragonfly, but three pairs as no creature known to me. His face, though I knew it to be turned toward the One, seemed to look in all directions—forward and backward and east and west at once. He stood upright with a posture so straight that I marveled he might stand so erect before God. And as he lifted his chin to the Almighty, the face on the back of his head lowered until it fastened upo
n me.
It was too beautiful and terrible to look upon, so perfect that I thought, Surely I have come from the mud!
The One said, I will set enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and hers.
I heard then a sound more fearsome than that of any beast: a taut strain like a note plucked and held too long, and a low rumble against it. The rumble lengthened, vibrating against that tense sound, at odds with it as laughter in the face of danger.
Laughter.
The sound was sick, the audible sum of premonition and power and dread.
His wings opened and then he was gone.
The chrysalis that had entombed him had shriveled to a long cocoon. As I pushed up with powerless arms to the place where the serpent had been, the chrysalis twitched and then slithered away like an overgrown worm.
Softly now: He will bruise your head, but you will strike his heel.
I did not know what this meant. I knew only that the One was here and that every fiber within me cried out for reconciliation—with the One, with the valley and all that dwelt within it . . . with the adam.
I need you!
I meant to say I would never long for any other pleasure if I might return to my vineyard and orchard and bower. That I would question nothing, ask nothing, seek nothing if only I could have it all back. That I now knew the thing I had done.
But I couldn’t. Because here was the worst of it: Even now, in the presence of the One, he seemed somehow impossibly far away from me as he had never been before. Even as he said, so very gently, I am.
I cried out in a language without words for the One to retrieve, to restore me. But it was too late; I was like the child that reaches up with broken arms.
He said very quietly, I will greatly increase your conceptions; with pain you will give birth to children. You will long for your man, but he will rule over you.
I blinked at the ground, not understanding. Was I not to die the death? Or was this how it was to be done? What care did I have for pain? Could any pain be greater than this?
The One said to the adam: You listened to the voice of your woman and ate from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat.
How deftly the human finger pointed at me was returned to its owner. But greater than that was the sorrow behind it—a sorrow made deeper by a history of love.
So softly: Cursed is the soil for your sake. With toil you will eat from it all the days of your life. It will sprout thorn and thistle for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow, you will eat bread until you return to the soil from which you were taken.
Did God weep? Was the One capable of tears?
Dust you are . . . to dust you will return.
The light faded like a back that turns to walk away.
I keened, empty except for grief. Pouring out grief like poison, unable to excise it.
I die. I die.
I lay a long time like that, facedown upon the ground. Wretched. Spent. Covered in dirt. Near me the adam lay as one dead; only by the heaving of his breath did I know he lived and that he did so in a grief all his own.
Separate from mine.
I lay exhausted. The adam was silent as a rock. That is when I smelled it. Acrid and sticky in the nostrils. A rancid thing laid open, metallic on the air and reeking of earth and feces and hair and skin.
What I saw in the full moonlight turned my screams to dust in my throat.
Two animals sprawled upon the dirt, the earth darkened beneath them. Their legs splayed out at a most unnatural angle, hooves in the air. Their mouths hung open, tongues lolling in the air.
They had no skin.
Pale and pink and sickeningly sleek, they were covered in bits of white as that which encases the seeds within the pomegranate, as though it had once held a skin in place, a skin that had been sheared—no, ripped—free of it.
One of the forms twitched.
My body cried, Enough! and buckled beneath me.
9
If I wait, there will come that word. I wait.
It does not come.
Smell of skin, skin of the adam. All that is warmth and surety surrounds me. I lie in the bower between my man and one of the fleecy ewes.
A tendril teases my neck. The rest of my hair is lifted away, caught up in a web of fingers as they cradle my head. I am rocked like a babe.
Is it the death? Oh, but it comes sweetly. Where is pain?
My head falls back. My face is turned toward the sun. But no warmth comes of it, no red through the thin tissues of my eyelids. The wind is no caress; bits of dirt pelt my cheek.
“Isha, wake. Wake now!” I am shaken until I bite my tongue.
It is not from the One. Let me die.
But there was no death for me. Blood was acrid in my mouth. I lifted my eyes to the stricken face of the adam, contorted in the broken moonlight.
I struck out at him like a wild thing. I don’t know what I said, though I suspect they might have been the first unholy words uttered. The adam pinioned my hands against my sides.
“Isha, stop!”
I would have none of it. My mind rejected his command as my heart rejected his betrayal, as I rejected the thing I had done that I knew not to do. I beat at him but he clung to me, arms wrapped around me—wombtight, as they were that first day.
Then I noticed the sky beyond his head. Clouds roiled like the torrent of a river, black against the indigo night. The fire was in them, flashing from one end to the other. The trees rustled a violent shudder as thunder rolled beyond the mountains.
What new terror was this?
The adam loosed my arms slowly, as though not trusting that I wouldn’t lash out again. That is when I noticed the pelt wrapped around my torso. What was this hair that was animal but without the weight of animal? Then I remembered the flayed forms upon the ground in their last death twitches, stripped of all natural raiment.
Lightning lit the dark heavens, illuminating the smooth, short hair of the fallow deer, and the markings—I recognized them.
Adah.
I screamed. I tore at the skin as though I would put it as far away from me as the east is from the west. The adam struggled with me, capturing my hands once more but not before I landed him a sound slap to the head. He shook me then until my head wobbled on my neck. “Stop! Listen! Do you hear it? There is a storm coming and we—we are exiled. We are put out from here, Isha.”
His expression twisted, his voice broke, and he shook me again, though I had by now ceased to struggle. “Do you hear me? We are put out—and these, these are most terribly given—”
“No!” I wanted it off me, but it was fashioned with a thong, and I could not tear free of it in the way I might have my fig girdle.
“Stop it!” he cried. “It is given of God!”
“You—do you talk of God?” I screamed at him. “You, who say that you ate what the woman gave you—you, who hold no responsibility for what you put in your own mouth?”
The adam winced as though struck. I struggled with the hated garment, but he gripped my wrists and tugged on my arms so sharply that I thought they might pull from the sockets.
“Look to the sky, Isha!” He yanked me to my feet, and I realized that he was on the cusp of falling down with fear or grief, from which he might never rise. “We cannot stay here!”
The sky had gone black, the roiling mass of it struck through with lightning like white-hot veins. As though to emphasize the adam’s words, two mighty cracks collided above the mount, shaking it to its foundations so that my ears rang. The wind came in like a living thing, clawed at my hair, slapped the pelt against my thigh.
If we wore the skins of Adah and her mate, and if they lay upon the ground as fruits moldering . . . how could they exist without their skins? I craned to see beyond the adam, tried to pull the terrible thing off, to give it somehow, horribly, back. But when the sky flashed, there was only a blackened patch of earth where once the animals lay.
“Don’t l
ook.” He turned me away. “They’re gone.” Then I smelled it—something other than the charred remains of fire. Something not as cleanly burned as dried grass or wood.
Struggling not to vomit, I turned my face to the sky, seeking any trace of the One, most loving, most terrible. But the churning dark held no God, no sun, no eye, no ear for us. Lightning—now an unnatural green—flashed in ragged streaks like talons clawing for the dark heavens. The western end of the valley was a hunchbacked beast.
“Go! Run to the eastern gate!” the adam shouted over a distant rumble. “Run!”
Run? My body had rebelled against food and consciousness already—and how should I run wearing this terrible trophy?
“I am going for our things.” He pushed me away. “Go!”
I took one last look at the face I both loved and abhorred and then turned on my heel and ran.
I bolted along the river. It ran with uncanny turbulence beside me. I had the sensation of eyes upon me and thought I smelled the charred and sickly smell of that burnt patch of earth following me in the unnatural air. At least my burst of motion, even beneath a blackened sky, stunted paralyzing gall. I knew nothing but the pounding of my feet, the heaving of my breath, the horrible hide flapping against my thigh, encasing my torso in its unnatural sheath.
Just as I reached the terraces, the skies opened. This was no rain as rains had been known to me—drizzling, sweet and warm—but a deluge, as though the earth would flush itself of all the life that polluted it. It came in droves as though I stood beneath a fall, driving beneath the garment and down my spine.
Impossibly, I ran faster.