by Tosca Lee
The adam and I had pondered the death many times since the day he brought me here. But despite our musing about an end of life and our search for evidence of death among fallen and decomposing fruit and the compost of leaves and the refuse of our industry, which we gathered together to enrich the soil, I understood the death less well than the explosion that had filled the universe at its incarnation. In fact, every evidence of degrading life seemed only to point back to the sustenance of the living so that I grasped the idea of the death less and less the more I meditated upon it.
I sensed the remote stirring of the adam, rousing from sleep. I had meant to have food waiting for him by now—had planned, in fact, to feed him and rouse him once more to pleasure. Yet here I loitered near the forbidden tree. I turned to go.
You will not die the death. The serpent clucked—an odd sound coming from him. The One knows that on the day you eat it, your eyes will be opened.
I hesitated. The river seemed more lively from this vantage. In fact, everything seemed more vibrant and beautiful here. “They are open now,” I said aloud.
Not as a god’s, knowing good and evil.
I stood very still.
God knows very well that the day you eat it, your eyes will be opened.
To know as God. Was it possible? Good I knew. I knew it as well as the earth was gorgeous, as I had known the adam in all the ways that are both good and mighty. But evil—
—Is a thing known to God. Well, and to me, of course.
I squinted at him.
Death. Evil. To know as a god, the serpent said. Had I not craved all things of God, all knowledge?
I lifted my eye again to that tree. This time, instead of seeing the fruit bursting with juice upon it, I saw the answer to every unknown thing, the satisfaction of a craving deeper than hunger.
I couldn’t remember anything so beautiful.
The adam was coming. He was coming, drawn to this place because I stood upon it, knowing every thing that transpired here with me.
Perhaps he would stop me.
How have you known all of this? I said to the serpent.
You might say that I ate this very fruit a long while ago.
And there he stood, very much alive. Indeed, he was more cunning than any other animal.
The adam alone had received the statute concerning this tree, in a time before me. It was the adam who had told me not to eat it, the adam who had said I should not even touch it. The remnant—always the remnant—of a conversation held between the adam and the One in the quiet tones of lovers, without me.
I thought back to the vineyard, to the rapture of those moments with my head flung back and my arms wide, the sun and God bright upon my face. Surely all things on earth had been made for our pleasure. I was filled with the assurance of the beloved to whom every good thing is entrusted.
The serpent disappeared within the bush and emerged on the trunk of the tree, bright claws clinging to the smooth bark. He leapt to a low-hanging bough and, without preamble, sunk his teeth into one of the fruits. Crimson oozed from the wound. I could smell it, the scent more intoxicating than pomegranates or plums. How delicious it must be! And how staunch and beautiful the tree with its emerald leaves, its branches curved out to invoke the sun!
Now I knew what I would not allow myself to think before: that the beauty of every other tree in the garden paled in contrast to this one. Every wild and generous provision of our valley seemed a pittance against the lavishness of this one and what I might gain from it. I, who had been told not even to touch it!
The adam was near. He did not call out, he did not need to. I felt his eyes upon me as keenly as the newly risen sun and knew that he could hear and sense and smell it all, that he hungered as surely as I, possibility having opened to him again like the throat of an exotic flower.
Yes, I say “again” because I knew then with a remnant of some sense beyond my own that he once stood in this very place in a time before my creation.
He emerged from the river to stand dripping upon the bank, as still as one in a trance.
“I know now,” I said. Inexplicably, tears fell from my eyes. “How it was before. I know.”
“Can you?” His eyes were wild.
“Are we so different, you and I?”
“No,” he said, closing the distance between us, pulling me roughly against him. “No.” His hands were in my hair, his mouth twisting against my cheek, the words torn from his heart: Flesh of my flesh.
It came in a torrent the moment he touched me: the moment he had stood in this very place a day, a month, a lifetime before me. How he had held the fruit in his hand until the scent nearly maddened him. The way he had fled across the river to fall upon the bank and shrouded the memory of it in shadow ever since.
“Waking beside you, realizing what you were—ah, how grateful I was!” He held me tight against him, as though he would press me back into himself. “In creating you, the One gave me back a part of myself—a way by which to learn anew every joy, independent of this tree, so fixed in my consciousness as though it had sent its roots through my mind every night as I slept! Even after I brought you here, there was relief. Now I had another with whom to contemplate the meaning of this thing, this death. Another possessed of the same cravings, longing as I for the thing that was not to be taken: to see through the very eye of God!”
I clasped him, loving him more in that moment than ever in my life. “The serpent has said we will not die,” I said. The look in his eyes was like fever.
“We are one flesh. We will live or die the death together.”
“Then let us know all things,” I said, very softly. Around his head the refracted light of the sun seemed suddenly everywhere.
The fruit was warm. It fit perfectly in my palm, its skin so taut that a tooth or nail might split it all the way round. I plucked it with a soft snick of the stem.
I turned to the adam with wonder. What did he see in me now? I had touched it. Was I now like God? Had I died the death? His breath quickened, and I felt his excitement like arousal, the possibility of the unthinkable like adrenaline. I was heady with the idea of this act more singular and exquisite than that which we had performed through the night.
The fruit seemed inordinately heavy, a growing weight, in my hand, nearly unbearable, and I knew I must lift it to my lips and eat or drop it to the ground forever.
Our eyes met as I raised it to my lips.
“Wake,” I whispered, so softly that I knew he heard it only in my thoughts. He might have stopped me.
He didn’t.
I ate.
I, who had come second, went first. I, who had followed in the steps of every living thing before me, walked ahead.
Perhaps my hand trembled as I held it out. Perhaps I already knew. Either way, I ate and then gave it to him.
He ate.
That is it.
We fell upon the tree like hungry locusts, never knowing when the serpent left.
We shared them between us, throwing one away before we finished it, plucking another if only to take a single bite, licking lips and fingers—our own and each other’s. I had wanted him earlier. I claimed him now. We fell together, the night renewed between us by day, twining in the sunlight the way we had in the darkness.
Having done, we lay in the shade of that tree, beneath the climbing sun, and slept the sleep of the dead.
7
So quiet.
I awoke thinking something lay over my ears. We were alone, the adam and I, upon the grass of the island. How queer the air had gotten here, so that sound came as though through water as I had heard it just that morning while floating down the river.
Too quiet.
The water—did it run? It did, but the sound of it was dull. Even the air through the grass seemed feeble, murmuring like an old man talking to himself.
I sat up. The adam, already awake, had a strange look on his face. For the first time since my creation, I could not discern his thoughts.
>
We had devoured each other. I had had him as I had eaten the fruit after the first bite: greedily, as though I would consume him, my body one great maw, knowing nothing but appetite.
He had used me the same.
It had never been that way with us before.
Too quiet.
Suddenly I realized: the symphony—that blended chorus of all living things that had been with me since the day of my creation—was gone, replaced by a dull drone.
It came then like a squall in a white-hot flush of silent fear and dread: We had done the thing we were not to do. And as though in proof, we had done a thing we had done many times before, in a way it was never meant to be.
The divine mark of God, the serpent had called the act of creation. But there was nothing of the One in the thing we had brought to existence.
Fruit pits and skins were strewn everywhere around us like bodies gored and flung away by the great horns of a beast. They were crawling with insects. An inordinate number of insects. There, then, was the source of that drone: the carnage of this feast had attracted a multitude of flies. They crept over the remains of the pits and the stems still attached to some of them, over torn skins, and one another. The fruit nearest me swarmed with a host of winged black bodies. I flicked it away in disgust. It rolled a little way and came to a stop, the flies upon it startled into an airborne mob before attacking it again more voraciously than before.
I hid my face against the adam’s shoulder, but he did not clasp me. He was trembling. So violently did he tremble that his head seemed to shake upon his neck, jerking back and forth, the blue eyes—no longer the blue I knew when I lay down—wide.
This was the most frightening thing of all, the sight of him, my lover, my father and teacher, like this.
Oh, God, what have we done?
I am the leaf shuddering on the stem before the storm. I am the mountain that tremors before the quake. I am the leaping fish that lands upon the bank.
I surveyed the valley around us. It seemed both alien and strange, a thing not itself, as the adam was not himself. There were the usual sounds, fainter, as though from a distance—thinner, as though through a sieve. If I strained, could I smell the scent of Ari, the cud of Adah, the faint scat of the vole, and the grapes upon the terrace?
I could not!
I must think. I must find sense—the One was the author of order! But there was no order in the stillness of the air or the fruit teeming with flies.
The adam let out a sound, feral and raw, and fell down upon the ground, covering his head. I wrapped my arms around him, my limbs clumsy and disassociated, and realized I could not distinguish my sounds from his.
Make me the grass, oblivious to all but the dew! Make me the rock that is moved by nothing! If nothing else, let me be the soil, fallow and unconscious, knowing none of what I know.
I cannot bear it.
Where was the serpent? He had weathered this act. Surely he would know what was to be done. But even as I thought it, I knew he had bidden me eat knowing what would happen. I was sick. I had adored him, and he had bid me eat . . .
Eat and die.
The golden scales had housed poison.
The clots of flies massing upon the refuse must have tripled in this short time; the island teamed with swarming hordes, darkly iridescent in the sun. I barely turned away in time to heave out the contents of my stomach. What came out tasted acrid and foul and gave off a bitter stench. The adam recoiled, confusion and then disgust plain upon his face.
“What is that? Why are you doing that?” The adam stared, pointing. Flies came to feed on my vomit.
“I don’t know.” I wiped my mouth then scurried to the river to wash. I rinsed my mouth and then my face . . . and then my thighs, and then, giving up on ablutions in this way, plunged myself into the water. I sank beneath the surface, letting it cover me, meaning for it to wash me clean—even my ears and my eyes—so that when I emerged again the world might be as it was before. But as water filled my ears, it only entombed them in stifling silence.
Beneath the water I saw the carp, staring at me with one round eye. He whirled away in a cloud of mud.
I came up, spewing water, letting it run from my ears. Overhead, birds swarmed beneath a dingy sun. Gone was their crystalline sound, replaced by cries dull and feral and stupid.
I could not wash the dullness from my ears. I could not wash the dimness from my eyes. Perhaps the adam, if I could rouse him from his stupor, would know what was to be done. He had lived longer than I. Surely he would know what to do.
But when I returned to the bank of the island, he had vanished.
I stared at the place where he had been, at the mass of flies where I had vomited in the grass.
“Adam!” I cried against the growing avian storm. The dark bodies of a thousand birds threatened to blot out the sun. I scrambled out of the water, my hair sticking to my back and shoulders and breasts, rivulets running down my spine and dripping from my nose. “Adam!”
But he was gone. I could no better sense the whereabouts of the man than I could hear the padding of Ari’s pride or Yedod’s pack.
A moist thud sounded somewhere beyond me. It came again and then again, like the patter of heavy rainfall—or the bashing of soft skulls. I spun, looking for its source, but I was alone on this patch of earth in the middle of the river. Then I saw, from the corner of my eye, one of the heavy fruits of that tree fall to the ground. And then another—and another—in a faded golden rain. Overhead, one of the ravens plunged from the horde and tore into the fallen flesh. It seemed darker than it had that morning and softer than it should have been. The smell of it, fainter to my nostrils than before, seemed overly sweet—rotten.
The flies had not let up in any small manner and massed upon the newest spoils. I could see now bees and beetles and roaches among them. The birds descended, a squabbling maelstrom. The thud-thudding of falling fruit, like the cudgel of a heart, seemed it would never end. Beside that great tree, the bush with the berries seemed as vibrant as ever, but it might as well have not existed for the rabid beaks and maws and vermin surging toward every fruit falling to the ground.
I plunged into the river and swam for the bank, fighting the current. Had I ever struggled so much in water or on earth? Had my footing ever been unsure before in my life? Yet I slipped on the bank and stumbled several steps as my stomach threatened to empty itself again. Behind me the island was in riot; birds mobbed the ground, plunging from a swarm that nearly darkened the sky.
Something thumped to the ground before me: a piece of fruit dropped by an avian thief. It was positively rotting, and a beetle was bedded within the pulp like a tick. I shrunk back just as a fox—Chalil, the flute lover!—darted out from a nearby shrub and began, with no heed for the beetle or the carious flesh, to eat it. The adam and I used to laugh at antics such as these. But even as I took a mote of comfort in the sight of him, a shadow streaked across the ground, talons extended. Chalil went down in a flash of feathers, twisting and snapping. Crimson splashed his fur, and the eagle came away with the fruit—and Chalil’s eye.
I screamed and screamed.
I don’t know how long I stood there, paralyzed with screaming long after the fox and eagle had gone, before the adam finally appeared and forcefully pulled me away.
We ran along the river beyond the cloud of frenzied birds and fell down beneath a fig tree.
“Where were you?” I shouted at him.
His eyes were dull. “I went to find the serpent.”
My heart sparked, but the adam’s mouth, so plush, so beloved, was a grim line. “He’s gone.”
I did not know what to say. There was no word for fear. No word for regret.
I HAD AN IDEA that eating one of the figs might settle my rebelling stomach. But at the sight of my hand reaching to pluck it in the same way it had for that fruit, I quailed and hid my face within one of the great leaves.
There was no ease. Grief was a river without outlet to the
sea.
Was this what it was, then, to die the death? Surely I knew evil now.
The adam’s hands closed around my shoulders. Where before they had brought me comfort, now I felt worse—guilty and most culpable. “I have done this,” I cried, not lifting my face. “I have done this to both of us. Were it not for me, you would not have eaten.”
I wanted him to say that he could have stopped me had he wished. That he might have refused. That we were Ish and Isha, one flesh. He said none of these things.
“We will find the way,” he said, sounding not at all resolved. “We must seek the One that Is.”
My stomach lurched. I had willed thoughts of the One aside the moment I lifted that fruit from the tree. Even upon waking with dulled senses, I had thought to resolve that mystery before facing the One again. But the adam was right. We could not put right all that had gone awry without him.
I let go the leaf. When I dropped my hands, one of them brushed against the adam’s thigh where he stood behind me. I flinched away, thinking again of what we had done. When he caught my hand and brought it back to him, I pulled away. We had used each other cheaply. I felt a hot wash of shame even as I felt an absurd flicker of desire.
This, too, the One would know and would gaze upon us in our guilt.
I felt laid bare, a fruit split open to reveal only moldering inside. I turned away from the adam, unable to look at him. I had cleansed myself to no avail; I felt myself a thing ruined. I snatched back the bough, tore free the leaf . . . and then another—and another and another. I tore at the tree until I held a clutch of leaves within my sweating palm.
“Take me to our bower,” I said.
The peace I had felt beneath the willow arches of our bower—where was it now? Only familiarity remained. I found my basket, cord, and tools and began to twine the fig leaves together in the way the adam had once used to make for me garlands and crowns. But if this were a crown, it was the most shameful sort. When I was finished, I held it over my head. There, in the privacy of this bonnet, my face crumpled and hot tears streaked my swollen cheeks.