Naamah

by Sarah Blake

  But when the rains actually came, they were busy with tasks all across the boat. Naamah was down in the seed room. She ran as fast as she could to the trapdoor that would block off the deck, but Noah had just closed it. He was soaked with rain, and so were the stairs and the floor beneath him.

  She was out of breath.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  “Are you?”

  He nodded.

  “I wanted to see it,” she said.

  “There’s nothing to see.”

  “But I wanted to see it,” she said again.

  He climbed back up the stairs. Once he had positioned himself under the door, bracing himself, he waved her up to join him. She climbed up, crouching against his body.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He lifted the door and a sheet of water rolled in off the deck. She pushed her head up until she could see over the deck, past the railing. It was just gray. It was not at all like being washed, but rather clouded with dirt.

  “Naamah,” Noah said, “I have to close it.”

  She lowered her head again. They were both soaked now.

  “I’ll clean this up,” she said, but that was instinct alone. In fact, she stayed quite still. She thought she might faint. But then the boys started to arrive, coming out of different dark hallways, asking if it had really begun.

  * * *

  • • •

  DRUNK AND ALONE NOW on the deck, Naamah says aloud, “I was wrong.” She yells, “It wasn’t enough.” And then, speaking more normally again, “I want You to judge me. I don’t understand how I could have been judged differently from all those other people. All those children.”

  She looks out at the sky. She can see stars as they near the horizon of water, can see their dimmer counterparts on the surface. She knows both will disappear as the sun rises—it doesn’t matter that one is real and one isn’t.

  “I’m starting to accept that You will not judge me. Or that You have already passed judgment, and it doesn’t have much to do with me. I get it! You determined me not wicked, even if I feel otherwise. You are telling me, ‘It is not so!’ Okay! I’ll try to behave accordingly. Which I guess means I will continue to be myself!”

  She picks up a cup of wine someone’s left, drinks it down, and then finds another. She walks closer to the railing.

  “What about you, angel? Have you decided yet? Have you been watching? Has it bothered you that I haven’t been down again? Maybe I wanted to see if you would visit me up here—did you think of that?” She leans over the railing and yells, “I guess not!”

  It’s too dark to see even the water. Those stars at the horizon are the only lights in the sky. Above her, where the moon must be, and the brightest stars, the sky is covered by thick clouds. She would call them gray, but it’s too dark for that. Everything is without light. Almost entirely without light, except for the stars at the horizon, as if it’s a seam where the sky and water meet, and the thread does not fill the holes that were made for it.

  Naamah keeps yelling. “Can I blame something on you, angel? I’ll accept anything! I can’t keep blaming Him and myself, Him and myself, back and forth. I will blame you for my desire for foods that no longer exist and that I don’t know how to make! How about that?” She drinks from the cup. “Every time I think I smell something that isn’t animal shit, I think it’s a food I almost recognize, and then I imagine that food, and I get a craving so deep that I want to fill it with my own flood!

  “I’m blaming that on you from now on, angel! Does that bother you? I would be bothered by that, I think. You know what I’d say, if I were an angel of the Lord? Don’t lay your shit on me, I think I’d say. But that’s just me. What do you say, angel?” She waits for what feels like a long time, listening, as if she might actually hear something back.

  “For fuck’s sake, angel, answer me!” she shouts, and throws the cup overboard. She’s expecting a splash, the small pop of a cup dipping under water and then coming back up with its buoyancy, the sound of water receiving things it doesn’t intend to drown.

  Instead, in the darkness, she hears the cup hit the hard earth.

  FIVE

  Naamah begins by dreaming everything a fish. Noah. Each of her sons. Each of their wives. Each of the animals on the boat. Then the boat itself. Ten thousand heart-sized fish.

  Then Naamah dreams she’s buried in a cloud, a cloud that exerts tremendous pressure all over her body—the dream mismatching one thing with another, as dreams do. Before she thinks to panic, she hears a voice.

  “But what is a woman?” it says.

  Naamah crawls through the cloud until her head pops out.

  A second voice answers, “A woman is a type of human.”

  “Then why call her a woman instead of a human?”

  Naamah twists her body in the cloud, looking for the people talking.

  “They have different parts.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look closely. They’re shaped differently.”

  “Yeah, but, like, all humans are shaped differently. Look over there.”

  Naamah spots another woman, stuck in a cloud just as she is. Perched near her is a bird, gesturing with his wing to a strangely tall person down on the earth.

  “Okay, but their inside parts are different, too,” the woman says.

  “I mean, my inside parts aren’t the same as other cockatoos, but—that’s private, I think.”

  The bird is a goliath cockatoo—Naamah remembers seeing one for the first time when fourteen of them suddenly appeared in the desert, feathers black and gray and blue, cheeks red, approaching with their wings spread in a frightening display.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” the other woman’s head says. In her black, plaited hair, bits of gold jewelry keep catching the light.

  “Humans can’t see inside me, can they?” says the cockatoo.

  “No. They can’t see inside you.”

  “Come on—you know. I can tell you know. What is a woman?”

  “A woman has something inside her that lets her grow a child,” says the woman.

  “Is that all that important? I mean, some cockatoos lay eggs and some don’t.”

  “A woman can’t lay an egg. She grows the child in her for months. And then she feeds the child with other parts of her body. Other parts that men don’t have.”

  “That sounds horrible,” the cockatoo says.

  “I am, maybe, not doing the best job explaining.”

  “Is there anything, outside of the physical, that makes a woman a woman?”

  “I guess a woman is someone who doesn’t feel like a man.”

  Finally Naamah interrupts. “Yes!” she yells. “Wait.”

  The cockatoo and woman are startled. The cockatoo flies over to Naamah and lands on her head.

  “Who are you?”

  “Get off my head.”

  “Who are you?” The cockatoo’s claws dig into her.

  “My name is Naamah. Now get off my head.”

  The cockatoo perches just above her instead, still uncertain if he should allow her to see him. He sees a little blood in her hair.

  “Who are you?” Naamah asks.

  “I’m a cockatoo. I don’t have a name.”

  “Do you want a name?”

  “What?”

  “Do you want a—”

  “No, I heard you. People just don’t usually go there next. They just call me cockatoo, or they never think about it again.”

  “Well, I can name you. If you want.”

  The cockatoo takes a few steps one way and then another. “Yes, I want that.”

  “Okay. I name you Jael.”

  “Jael?”

  “It means one that ascends.”

  “I like
that.”

  “I’m Sarai,” the other head yells over.

  “How’d you get here?” Naamah asks.

  “I’m dreaming,” she says.

  “No, you’re not,” says Jael.

  “What about you, Naamah?”

  “Yes.” Naamah tries to recall. “Yes, I got drunk and fell asleep.”

  “Well, you’re not dreaming. I’m not a figment of somebody else’s imagination and certainly not of two imaginations at once. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It doesn’t,” Naamah says.

  “I wouldn’t rule it out,” Sarai says.

  “I was dreaming things into fish.”

  “There you go,” Jael says. “That was your dream. This is something else.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THEN NAAMAH is falling out of the sky. Then she’s standing in the desert. She throws up. When the smell of her own vomit reaches her nose, she thinks, Maybe it’s not a dream.

  In front of her is the man who dissects corpses. In front of him is the dead body of a woman, or the body of a dead woman, or the dead body of a dead woman, or the corpse of a woman, a woman’s corpse, a cadaver, her remains. With her split open, with the lappet-faced vultures circling, she is a carcass, carrion.

  Her torso is empty, each organ placed neatly in a bowl. He’s working on removing her eyes.

  “Which is her uterus?”

  He looks up from his work and points at a bowl.

  She reaches to pick it up, but stops herself. “May I have this?”

  He lifts an eye out of the woman’s face. The perfect sphere appears wet for a second; then the desert air takes that moisture for itself, striving for an equilibrium it will never reach. Without looking away from his work, he nods.

  She picks up the uterus, inspects it. It fits in her hand even with her fingers bent. She wonders what it would be like to fill it, and a pile of rounded pebbles appears by her feet. She sits down on the dusty earth and starts putting pebbles in. She hears each one click against the others. Soon it seems full, but it keeps taking pebbles, and more pebbles keep appearing in the pile.

  She sits there for a long time, set on her task. The man leaves, taking a few organs he’s interested in dissecting. The vultures come down to eat the body. They are not bothered by Naamah or the soft tapping of the pebbles in the sac of flesh. They eat the skin and meat and then begin to break and eat the bones.

  Naamah isn’t distracted by the sound. She is focused on the sound of the pebbles sliding over one another, scratching against one another as she works. It’s hard to hear anything but the pebbles now, as if she is hearing the sounds of the pieces of the universe arranging and rearranging themselves.

  When the vultures leave, the body is in shambles. With enough wind and sand, with a few coyotes, tomorrow it will be hard to tell a body was ever here. But what does that matter? Soon Naamah is sitting atop the uterus, holding and filling it in continual, near-mechanical motion—until it becomes the size of a planet.

  She gets up and starts to walk across it.

  Jael is in the sky there. “Where did you go?” he asks.

  “I just made this planet.”

  “No, no, no,” Jael says, “this is the planet that was below us back when we were talking in the clouds.”

  Suddenly, she notices other people around her. The strangely tall person appears over her shoulder. Naamah drops to the ground, feels it with her hand to see if the surface of the planet is still the stretched-out flesh of the uterus, but she can’t tell. What would that feel like, she thinks, stretched that thin and that full of stone?

  “Where is Sarai?” Naamah asks.

  “Up there,” Jael says.

  Naamah looks up and sees Sarai’s head, still suspended in the cloud. But then the world starts to spin, and she does, too, until she spins right into the center of the planet she has created.

  * * *

  • • •

  THERE, AT THE CENTER, the stones enter Naamah’s mouth, and her vagina, and they fill her until she becomes a giant stone woman filled with a giant stone world-baby. She starts to walk through the heavens.

  Jael flies around her head. “Are you a woman, Naamah?”

  “Yes.” Naamah is surprised at how difficult it is to move her giant stone lips.

  “You look like a dead volcano that grew legs.” Jael lands on her head. He sees a ruby there, where the blood had been.

  “Dead things can’t grow legs,” she says.

  “Most living things can’t grow new legs either,” he says.

  Jael picks up the ruby and places it in his own eye. Naamah spots the sparkle of it as Jael flies around her.

  “Jael,” she says, “you have ascended into the heavens.”

  “Just like my name!”

  “Yes, but how? How are you here?” she asks.

  “I am dreaming.”

  Naamah keeps walking, gaining distance on other planets and stars.

  “I figured it out,” he says. “You and Sarai couldn’t both have dreamed me up, so I must have dreamed up both of you. That would be easy.”

  Naamah doesn’t feel cold or warm. Her stone skin no longer registers such sensory things. She tries running her right hand up her left forearm. No, she thinks, nothing.

  “How can you be a woman if you have no body?”

  “I have a body,” Naamah says.

  “You have a shape—I’ll give you that.”

  Naamah looks down at herself and thinks he may be right. “I still feel like a woman,” she says.

  “Let me go in,” he says. “I’ll figure it out.”

  She opens her mouth and Jael flies in. She wants to swallow him immediately, but he perches on a rise along the edge of a molar.

  “Don’t bite down on me now,” he says.

  If she responds, she’ll crush him, break all his hollow bird bones.

  “Maybe you are a woman in your heart,” Jael says. “I’m going to see.” He flies down her throat and squeezes through the stone wall near her heart. He travels from the vena cava into the right atrium of the heart.

  “Pump your heart, Naamah.”

  Naamah is surprised—her heart has been still this whole time— but he’s right: she can control it with a thought. She triggers a heartbeat, and Jael flies into the right ventricle faster than he expected, shrouding his head in his wings for protection. Then he’s pushed out to the lungs. He rests there, tucks himself into an alveolus, doesn’t let the heart pull him back yet. He likes the little cave of the little berry within her.

  Naamah can’t feel him there. She’s focused on keeping her heart beating. She’s so focused she’s stopped walking, and her motionless body projects the sound of her beating heart louder than anything else in the universe.

  Jael lets his body be carried back to the heart, into the left atrium and then the left ventricle, then out of the heart through the aorta. As he tumbles through, he spreads his wings and stops himself. Naamah can’t see him, but if she could, she’d tell him he looks like an angel in a holy hall.

  Then Jael gathers himself and flies straight upward, through layers of stone that seem to part just enough for his body to push through. Soon he’s out of her neck, landing on her shoulder, which is like a large, flat peninsula projecting out into space.

  “You can stop beating now,” he says.

  She relaxes.

  “You were not a woman in your heart.”

  “I wasn’t?”

  “Not distinctly.”

  “I’m going to keep walking,” she says.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Away. Farther.”

  “I think you should be going to somewhere.”

  “I think you should have exploded by now.” That sounded rude. She adds, “Without the pr
essure of the atmosphere around you.”

  “I have the force of you around me, Naamah.”

  The fish come back and eat her, stone by stone. It takes a long time.

  “Please, stop,” Naamah says.

  When Naamah finally returns to her normal form, the fish are dead under her feet, bodies piled high, their bellies swollen with stones. She slides down them until her feet touch the ground. She rubs her toes in the dirt until her feet feel dry and smooth.

  Jael is still with her, and she’s not sure what she’s done to deserve him. In some light he appears blue, but she likes it best when the light turns his feathers perfectly black. He’s the first animal she’s enjoyed looking at in months.

  As Naamah walks away with Jael on her shoulder, a family of striped hyenas passes them, to feast on the fish. She worries that she’ll return later to find hyenas with too many stones in their bellies, dead near the fish they could not eat, and near them dead vultures, dead hooded crows. One dead animal leading to another.

  Naamah and Jael see a throne in the distance. As they approach it, they make out Sarai sitting on the throne.

  “It’s so good to see you again,” she says. She sounds different from before. More confident maybe, now that she’s in her rightful place.

  “You too,” says Naamah.

  “What are you doing here?” asks Jael.

  “I am queen of all things.”

  Jael looks around. “What things?”

  “All things,” she says again. “I’ve decided.”

  “Like a god?” Naamah asks.

  “Yes,” Sarai says.

  “Isn’t that blasphemous?” Naamah says.

  “Heresy!” says Jael. “Profanity. Sacrilege.” Sounding more like a cockatoo than ever before. “Impiety. Desecration. Irreverence.”

  “Stop!” Sarai says. “It is not any of those things because it is the truth.”

  “Are you saying you are God?” Naamah says.