by Tosca Lee
Perhaps in closing my eyes, I would return to the place I had been before.
For the first time since waking, I hoped not.
I slept to the familiar thrum of his heart as insects made sounds like sleepy twitches through the waning day.
When I woke, his cheek was resting against the top of my head. Emotion streamed from his heart, though his lips were silent.
Gratitude.
I am the treasure mined from the rock, the gem prized from the mount.
He stirred only when I did and released me with great reluctance. By then the sun had moved along the length of our valley. My stomach murmured.
He led me to the orchard and fed me the firm flesh of plums, biting carefully around the pits and feeding the pieces to me until juice ran down our chins and bees came to sample it. He kissed my fingers and hands and laid his cheek against my palms.
That evening we lay in a bower of hyssop and rushes—a bower, I realized, that he must have made on a day before this one.
A day before I existed.
We observed together the changing sky as it cooled gold and russet and purple, finally anointing the clay earth red.
Taken from me. Flesh of my flesh. At last. I heard the timbre of his voice in my head in my last waking moment. Marvel and wonder were upon his lips as he kissed my closing eyes.
I knew then he would do anything for me.
THAT NIGHT I DREAMED of blackness. Black, greater than the depths of the river or the great abyss beneath the lake.
From within that nothingness came a voice that was not a voice, that was neither sound nor word but volition and command and genesis. And from the voice, a word that was no word but the language of power and fruition.
There! A mote spark—a light first so small as the tip of a pine needle. It exploded past the periphery of my dreaming vision, obliterating the dark. The heavens were vast in an instant, stretching without cease to the edges of eternity.
I careened past new bodies that tugged me in every direction; even the tiniest particles possessed their own gravity. From each of them came the same concert, that symphony of energy and light.
I came to stand upon the earth. It was a great welter of water, the surface of it ablaze with the refracted light of heavens upon heavens. It shook my every fiber, like a string that is plucked and allowed to resonate forever.
I was galvanized, made anew, thrumming that inaugural sound: the yawning of eternity.
Amidst it all came the unmistakable command:
Wake!
2
Blue. Was I made anew? Bird flight perforated my line of sight. I closed my eyes, aware of the form against me, of the slow rise and fall of his chest, the heavy warmth of his arm over me.
I waited for something. I had woken with an ache like hunger that had nothing to do with food.
I need you. It was longing and craving and declaration all at once.
I Am. It came not from the man, but the One whose voice was far gentler and more awesome—a voice for whispering the heavens to life.
I shivered. The man beside me stirred and drew me closer.
After a while I drifted back to sleep, anxious for nothing. Wanting for nothing.
But still, somehow, desiring more.
THE ADAM MADE HIS bed in the foothills. That morning I learned why: the grasses and heath of the valley floor were damp and spongy underfoot as they had not been the night before.
This time he woke before me. Fingertips drifted over my shoulder, my cheek, my brow. The arm beneath me cradled my head.
I opened my eyes. His were already intent upon me. “There is knowledge in your eyes that was not there before.” Wonder sang in his words.
I have seen the making of the heavens.
He drew a sharp breath, lifted my fingers to his lips.
My sustainer, my counterpart. Given as the One has said. To you are known the mysteries of creation!
He jumped up and shouted his jubilance to the sky. He stomped the earth and clapped his hands. I laughed and clapped with him.
I was beloved. I had been hoped for. Somehow I was necessary.
He fell down beside me. “Come, Isha! Will you climb the far hills? Will you eat figs and cucumber? Will you see the onager and the wolf?”
“Yes.” I did not know the onager from the wolf or the fig from the cucumber. Again: “Yes.”
I did not say that I craved two presences above any other pleasure and that as long as they were there I could do anything. But even as I thought it, he gathered me against him, stroked my hair, my side, my hip.
Ah. I drowned in contentment.
That day he took me to the broadest part of the valley. Together we sat beneath the shade of the great oak. I observed the wolf, bounding through the brush. Farther on, wild sheep grazed on the hillside. Far above them a goat stood beneath the sun.
“Wolf,” he said. But I heard from him another name: Yedod.
“Sheep,” he said. But I heard from him: Adina.
He had named them after their kind, but he had named them intimately as well. They were as distinct to him as he had been to them before me.
Levia, the lioness, came and lowered herself to her haunches beside me. After a moment of decorum, she sprawled onto her back.
Scratch!
The adam, arms outstretched upon bent knees, laughed. “For a long time I thought it was the only thing she said.”
Levia lolled, eyes rolling. After a time her mate came down from the hills to drink from a nearby stream. When he lifted his head, his intent for Levia was so strong that I felt the tug of it as surely as though I were Levia herself. It was the same I had sensed from the adam the day before. The lioness started up from beneath my hand and went out to meet him, rubbing her sleek head against his jaw. Pleasure emanated from them both.
I exhaled, keenly aware of the adam’s eyes upon me.
“THERE WAS LAUGH,” I said a few days later. The adam had washed me in the river until my skin prickled. “Not you.”
“There was laughter.” He brushed water from my skin even as the new sun lapped it from the tiny hairs on my arms. “The One that Is.”
The One made us.
Yes. From the earth, Adam. From Adam, Ish and Isha.
Why?
To keep the garden.
The beetles and animals and plants seem to do that well enough on their own.
And to name the animals.
Why are they here?
Who can know but the One that Is?
That he seemed unmoved by these questions only incited more curiosity in me. But then his mouth curved in a lovely smile, and I knew he had wondered as much himself, and that while he had imparted to me many things, many others were mine to learn.
To learn is joy, Isha.
Then he fell silent. Finally: “There is something, though, that I should show you.”
On the western end of the valley where the river runs to the lake, mist loitered long after dawn. The trees, which murmured from the valley to the hilltops, stood mute. The call of insect and bird and creature seemed oddly blunted here, but the underlying murmur of every living thing sharpened in sonance, its pitch more crystalline than I had heard it at any other place.
The adam waded into the river ahead of me. I hurried after him, relieved when he reached for me. But this was no frolicking swim. He pushed into the current, crosswise. Damp enveloped our heads and clung to my hair.
As we swam toward the middle of the river, I began to think that we might never reach the other side. I could not see it through the mist, nor could I make out the bank behind us anymore. Just as I began to wonder if we would find ourselves perfunctorily washed into the delta of the lake, our toes touched the pebbled river bottom.
I caught my breath.
Before us sprawled a small island in the widest part of the river. And in the middle of the island grew a tree with a fruit so singular I knew I had not seen it anywhere else in the garden. It was perfectly round like an
oversized berry, larger than the plum. It was the color of the sun as I had seen it blazing between the northern and southern ranges the night before. Heavy on the stem, every one of them seemed bursting with juice, ready to drop at the slightest breeze, though I saw none upon the ground.
My stomach rumbled as we climbed onto the bank. But before I could take two steps toward that tree, the adam caught my hand tightly in his own.
“No!”
I blinked at his vehemence. “Hungry.”
“This one you cannot have.”
It was the first time I heard no uttered from lips—human or otherwise.
“Why?” I considered the fiery-gemmed giant with new appreciation. It seemed ancient, older than any other tree in the valley—already I understood something of time—its branches twined like the horns of the gazelle, pointing toward heaven.
“It is the knowing of good and evil to eat it.” His eyes flickered to the tree and back. His mouth was taut as the skin of that fruit.
He does not want to be here, I thought with amazement. And then: No, he both wants and does not want to be here.
I did not understand this opposition in him. Nor did I know the meaning of good or evil or the conflict behind them—only that it seemed to pulse from the roots of that tree.
Overhead, the sun emerged from a cloud. It gilded the grass and the leaves of the tree and then set the fruit ablaze as though it were not fruit at all, but a wealth of stars snared in verdant constellation. Within seconds the mist was gone.
There is more. If you eat it, you will die the death.
The death? What is the death?
When the adam turned the full brunt of those eyes upon me, they were gentle.
Pleading.
Why do you ask these things, Isha?
Because I do.
The death is an end. An end against the wish of the One.
Almost as one we turned back to the tree.
When I would have stroked those twisting branches, he stopped me again.
“Do not even touch it!”
I did not understand this death. I understood, however, obedience to the One. Had I not woken when the One said, “Wake”? Had I not walked in assurance of those words, I Am? Had I not seen the might of that hand? To think of it struck me with elation and yearning for the man in whom I saw his likeness, as a shadow cast upon the earth by the soaring eagle.
My stomach by now had gone silent. But standing before that singular tree, I suddenly wanted nothing better than to eat until I was filled. Then I noticed the other tree on this small island—a shrub, really, innocuous beside her more glamorous sister. It bore little purple berries.
The adam drew me away as his gaze fled back to the magnificent tree. This time when he touched me, I felt myself ravenous—for the tart apricot and crisp water of the spring, for the voice of the One and raw heat of the sun and the shade of the willow . . . to sink my fingers into the mane of the lion and run my palms against the adam’s side.
I drew his arms around me like a mantle. I tasted the salt of his neck. He groaned and I thought he might fall to his knees. I give pleasure!
And then: Such pleasure will I give him. I did not know all the intricacies, but the One was a whisper in my heart—what secrets should be kept from me?
To learn is joy, Isha. I heard it again, as the man had said it.
Indeed. It would be.
“Not here.” The roughness of his voice was adrenaline and seduction. He pulled me toward the river, his mouth hot on my ear, his fingers bold. Just as we gave ourselves to the water, a rustle sounded from the brush. There—a flash of gold through the branches, daylight refracted by scales so brilliant that they rivaled the fruit of the majestic tree.
“What is that?”
“What?” He murmured into my hair.
I pointed. The creature on the island stared out through the boughs of the smaller shrub at me.
The adam hardly looked up. “Only the serpent.”
We crossed the river, fell dripping upon the bank. He bent to my neck, my shoulder, my navel. I languished in pleasure.
I will satisfy you.
Yes. Agreement. Yes. A plea.
Feel the sun.
I feel it.
Feel my fingers.
I feel them.
How I love you.
I gave myself up to him.
I am the horn of the antelope, twining toward heaven. I am the leaf, twisting upon the stem. I am the sweet water that rushes from the rock, thrilling the hands that dip into it, slipping down the thirsty throat.
THAT NIGHT, AS THE cricket and the frog took over the song of sleeping birds beneath the ascending moon, he wept against my shoulder.
“How I have longed for you,” he said, the lovely voice broken like earth crumbling in water. I held him and my heart swelled like the river that overruns its banks.
How mighty, how great the One must be, I thought, to send the heavens careening, and yet hear the cry of a single heart.
I covered his mouth with my own. We did not sleep until dawn.
I DREAMED I WANDERED through the mist. Grasses licked my calves, their wet blades like tongues as I walked for what seemed an hour. After some time I realized I did not walk on grass at all; my feet were immersed in water. I had found the river and walked into it, it lapped at my ankles and knees.
When the mist began to lift, I saw that I stood not in a river but in a vast landscape of water, blue as lapis, stretching to the horizon in every direction. I raised my hands to the rising cloud and became the expanse of air between—my feet took root in the depths of the sea; my fingertips spanned the heavens.
But now, as I looked down from a mighty height, the water began to move. It roiled one direction and, at the same time, another, so that it seemed it would pull itself apart—and indeed, the ocean produced gaping holes bored down to the caverns of the earth. No, they were not holes at all but dark masses, rising here—there and there!—up through the ocean where it had gathered itself away, pushing up through the water like the horns of the hart in spring. Higher they rose with a great, cracking roar so that the sound must echo to the stars. The oceans rocked and heaved like water in a breaking jar, and the land came together with a mighty crash so that the edge of one mass pushed up onto another, craggy teeth bared like an animal’s to the sky. On their ragged edges shone onyx and quartz and obsidian, like jewels spilled from a broken cask.
There among vibrant sediment: ochre—red, like the blood of all things living, such that ran in the clay-colored flesh of the adam sleeping at my side.
“THE BIRDS,” I SAID one day as we collected the stigmas of the narrow-leafed saffron. “Do they eat the fruit of the splendid tree?” My vocabulary was, by now, rampant. I had exhausted the adam in my pursuit of words—for the sun at her zenith, the trees in their species, each part of a fruit and every kind of seed, for the names for the skins and pulps that defined them. I learned language for quantities and things unseen—the name for waking and for pleasure—for thoughts intangible, scientific, and speculative.
The adam sat back on his heels. “I have not seen it.”
“Do they understand the death?” A day did not pass that I did not think of the mystery of that tree and the death within its lovely fruit. A thing “outside the wishes of the One,” the adam had called it. How could something outside the will of the One exist—in beauty, no less?
“If eating the fruit is against the will of the One, what other things are against that will?”
He studied me with a frank mixture of appreciation and consideration. “I don’t know, though I have wondered the same, myself. Truly we come from the same flesh, you and I!” He laughed softly and smoothed his hair back from his forehead.
“The One has not revealed anything more, or you would know it.” He frowned then. “Before you came to me, I thought often of that place, much as you do. But now you are here, and it is practically forgotten to me.”
But not completely.
“The serpent. How lovely he is,” I said.
“If there is a creature that understands the death, it is that one.”
I wondered at that, curious about the thing that set the serpent apart aside from his obvious beauty—curious, too, about the cloud that seemed to cover the adam’s eyes when he thought back to the time before. We knew nothing of grief or regret. We had cause for neither. But this I knew: he had been less content then. I understood something of that; since swimming to that island, I was conscious of it always. I judged my position on the river by that island’s proximity and by the fringes of the mist that seemed to settle about that place. Gathering licorice root on the hillside, I would look down on it and see in my mind the thing cloaked within the veil. And I was aware, as I had not been before, of the scent of that fruit in the bouquet that was my valley, hearing even the rustle of that tree above the others in the strongest breeze.
THAT NIGHT I SAID, “I want to know about your life before.” The adam set aside the bark he liked to twine into cord.
When he reached for me, I went into his arms, folded into them, nuzzled my cheek against his shoulder. He was silent for a long moment before he finally spoke.
“Once you were a part of me, and I was a human without counterpart. I was the adam, a human, no more. How like a husk they seem, those days, the weeks, the months that I learned the ways of my body and of the animals, and the elements. I learned all things of the green life that sustains us: what part of the fruit to eat, which seeds would grow when I poked them into the soil, and which one would lie as something sleeping for a season. I knew how to harvest the chickpea and chew the pod of the carob tree, how to find the meat at the heart of the almond and the properties of wormwood. The One was always with me, murmuring through the trees and whispering atop the grasses. I saw his face in the majestic mount, heard his sighs rumbling from the heavens, saw his thumbprint in the tiniest mustard seed.