Naamah

by Sarah Blake

  WHEN THEY FALL ASLEEP, Naamah wakes in her bed with Noah. He is just out of reach, too far for her to lay her hand on his chest, to feel his heartbeat. And his breath is silent, or quieter than the other noises of the boat. But the room and the bed are warm, so she knows he’s alive, and that’s enough. She falls back to sleep.

  * * *

  • • •

  IN THE DREAM, she’s in a block of ice now, standing upright, floating in the arctic waters. Jael is on top of the block. She can’t see him, but she can hear his talons scratching.

  “Naamah! Can you hear me? I will get you out of this.”

  But Naamah’s not in danger. She’s not cold. She can breathe. She thinks she may be strong enough in this dream to break out of the ice whenever she chooses. So she chooses to enjoy it, since she’ll never be in this odd position again.

  The ice doesn’t bob in the water. It floats straight on. The ice and her body are mostly beneath the surface. Her head admires the line of the still water and the near-perfect reflections it offers to every crest of snow.

  Sometimes she catches a glimpse of what’s below the water, like a school of fish. But eventually she tires of moving the way a boat would. She raises her shoulders and the ice lurches up and begins to crack. It bobs. Jael flies above it. She feels sick again. She pushes her toes down and the ice cracks more, so much so that capillaries of water creep into the ice.

  She raises her shoulders and pushes her toes down at the same time and the ice splits along a crack above her shoulders. She kicks and the ice breaks up around her feet, but she’s left with a giant ice block on her head, still floating her along. Jael flies back down and slams his beak into the ice.

  Naamah pounds on it with her fists from below, as best she can, dragging her fists through the water. Even so, it’s working. The ice cracks thinly at first, and on another pound, the cracks double in size, refiguring themselves into the shape of a tree’s broad branches, until all the ice between the branches falls away in chunks.

  Then Naamah is only a body again and she has to swim to stay afloat and alive in the water.

  “Are you okay?” Jael asks.

  Naamah twists onto her back and wiggles her hands back and forth under the water at her waist, and she watches Jael above her. “Yes,” she says.

  “Aren’t you cold?”

  “No.”

  “Look.” Jael motions.

  Naamah flips back over and sees a group of seals on an iceberg. She swims to it and climbs on. Her elbows and wrists feel strange next to the fins of the seals; she’s making such a show of her angles.

  She lies down between the seals. They’re soft and warm and smooth, and she’s not sure how they will take to her petting them, but she pets one anyway. She has to believe they can recognize a gesture of adoration and comfort. And though the seal does recognize her intent, it is not comforted. The seals feel unusual for the first time in their lives, beside this body of a human who’s so transfixed by them. And unusual feels unsafe.

  One seal starts to bark at her and, to move her off the ice, slowly, bumps her away. The others raise their heads up, add their barks to the chorus. Naamah thinks she sees the Metatron perched behind them all, his striking yellow head.

  “Okay, okay,” Naamah says, and she slides back off the ice into the water. But this time she can do nothing to stay afloat. She sinks farther and farther down. It takes only seconds before she can’t see Jael above her. Everything she sees turns that dusty navy blue, as if she is disappearing into Jael instead of the water.

  The same soft film forms over her mouth. “This is all a little too familiar, don’t you think? A little too convenient!” she yells.

  But here her words push out the film into a bubble around her whole body. She screams as loud and long as she can, and once the bubble is large, she falls to the bottom of it with a plop. She sits there, steady in the water. The bubble doesn’t seem to be moving at all.

  An octopus approaches the bubble. It grabs onto it and moves down to where Naamah sits. She lies down on her stomach to be closer to the octopus, who has tilted its grinning black eye toward Naamah’s round face. Then it starts to bite at the bubble with its beak.

  When the beak recedes, it reminds Naamah of a baby boy’s penis, receding into the fat pads boys are often born with. When she pushed her boys’ foreskins back, to clean the heads of their penises, the urethras opened slightly, like the mouths of the smallest fish. As the boys grew older, they grew into their circumcisions. The heads of their penises hung under the shafts.

  With Naamah’s hand against the bubble, she can feel the suckers along the octopus’s tentacles. She closes her eyes to its penis-mouth and moves her hand back and forth over the two rows of suckers, counting them to herself, hopping between rows.

  Soon the octopus grows tired of her and the bubble and starts to leave.

  “Wait!” Naamah says. “Give me a shove?”

  As the octopus twists away, it swings all eight tentacles at the bubble and launches the bubble toward the surface. When Naamah reaches the surface, she’s no longer in the arctic. All the water is gone, and she’s back in the desert again. The bubble pops.

  Sarai is there, on her throne. “Naamah,” she says, “so good to see you.”

  “You’ve said that to me before.”

  “It’s still true.”

  “But why do you keep saying it to me?”

  “I married Abraham. He is descended from Shem. Seeing you is like seeing a mother, or a grandmother.”

  Naamah walks up to her now, right up to her face, planning to say, What does that mean to me? But she does feel connected to her, and also taken with the sight of her. She says, “You’re so beautiful.”

  “Thank you,” Sarai says, used to this reaction.

  “How distantly are we related?” Naamah asks.

  “Very. But we spoke of you often, told the story of your sacrifices.”

  “Is that how you speak of it? Sacrifices?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not as something righteous?”

  “That too.”

  “How do you think of it?” Naamah asks her.

  “I am only grateful. If it weren’t for you, I would not have my son.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He’s dead. No . . .” She corrects herself. “At this point in time, he hasn’t been born.”

  “This point in time, here in the dream?”

  Sarai nods.

  “How are you here?”

  “The women in our family, Naamah, they’ve been powerful for a long time. When I died, I found I could move through time as I wished. But so far I have largely stayed in dreams, where I can interact with people, where I can create things like this throne, where I can sit and watch the desert.”

  “Is this your dream?” Jael asks Sarai. He’s back, and Naamah is relieved to see him. He swoops down and lands on Naamah’s shoulder.

  “No, I think this is Naamah’s dream, mostly.”

  Naamah rubs the back of Jael’s head with her bent fingers.

  “What is a righteous thing worth?” Naamah asks.

  “It’s worth lives,” Sarai answers.

  “It costs lives,” Naamah says.

  “Then its worth is impossible to discuss, for lives cannot be measured against other lives.”

  “Do you think God would think this?”

  Sarai is silent for a long time. Then she says, “He ordered my husband to kill my son.”

  “A child of mine?”

  Sarai nods.

  “What happened?”

  “He said, ‘Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.’”

  Naamah draws Jael closer to her.

  “It wasn�
�t true. He had another son, Ishmael, with my handmaiden, Hagar. He loved Ishmael, too. I wondered if that made it easier for him to take Isaac to the mountain as he did.”

  “Have you ever spoken to God?”

  “No, but I have heard him speak to Abraham, in the voices of three men who came once to our tent.”

  “I’m sorry—that’s not really what I want to know. What happened to Isaac?”

  “It’s okay. You’re scared. To hear the story told straight through, it is scary. Should I tell you now that Isaac was not killed?”

  “Yes.” Naamah tries to relax her jaw. “That helps.”

  “Abraham took him, with donkeys and servants, to find the mountain. And days later they found the mountain, and he set out farther, with only Isaac and the supplies for the altar. It is difficult to tell you this, to recall it all. It’s been so long since I remembered.”

  “Remembered what?”

  “That God didn’t say to Abraham that he had to make our son carry the wood he would be sacrificed on, and yet Abraham made him do this.”

  Naamah pulls in a breath.

  “Abraham built the altar, arranged the wood, and laid our son down on that wood, which had already spent time pressed to his small back. And then Abraham grabbed his knife. He got that far.”

  Naamah tries to take her hand to offer her some comfort, but Sarai raises it away from Naamah and shakes her head.

  “An angel of God called out to my husband and said, ‘Do not lay a hand on the boy.’ And instead of running from that place with our son, he stayed and sacrificed a ram and let the angel continue on about His promises to our people.” Sarai presses her thumbnail into the knuckle of her forefinger. “Then they came home to me, changed men both, having heard the angel of the Lord, some sort of joy on their faces, some pride.

  “In Isaac I recognized a restlessness with regard to the size of his life. I could relate to that. Not because my life felt small and strange within the grandness of God, but because my life felt large when everyone else saw me as small and inept. And perhaps I was inept.” She begins to cry, but her back doesn’t bend away from the throne. “Perhaps I was, Naamah, for such a thing to befall my son. For God to think He could make this threat against me and my family.”

  Sarai wipes away her tears and looks as she did before. Composed again, she says, “God cannot be judged because He cannot be understood.”

  “I judge Him just the same,” Naamah says.

  “Maybe I did, too, when I was alive. I know from my travels that we are not the last women to do so.”

  “But you do not judge Him now?”

  “Today I judge myself. I don’t know who I will judge tomorrow. What will you do tomorrow?”

  “I will wake up again on the boat.”

  “How nice it is, then”—Sarai smiles at them—“to be with me now, here.”

  ELEVEN

  Before the sun rises, Naamah goes to the bucket of wood ash they keep in the hall. She takes a cup, dips it in, brings up just enough ash to cover the bottom of the cup. On the deck she prepares a bath, adds water to the cup with ashes, and mixes it with her finger. She places it on the edge of the bath and gets in. She scrubs her skin with a cloth.

  She rubs and grabs at her pubic hairs, pulling free any that have fallen out. She holds up her hand, hairs clinging to it—some because they’ve curled around her fingers, some because everything is wet. Is this something every woman has experienced? she thinks. Is this a sight every woman has seen? She dips her hand back into the water and the hairs let go. She sees them floating in the water, but one is on top of it, showing the shine of the water where it puckers its nearly-there skin.

  She drops her head back and then lifts it again, heavy and dripping. Then she takes the cup of water, thickened with ash, and pours it onto her head, lathers it into her hair. She takes a long time rubbing it in, down to the scalp, before she leans back again. When the water creeps over her hairline, she moves her head back and forth. She runs her hands from her forehead back, until her hair feels like it’s free of ash.

  The sun is rising, and Naamah turns her head to watch it. That’s when she sees something she hasn’t seen in months: the horizon, interrupted. She jumps out of the bath and runs to the railing. The mountaintops are out. A whole mountain range, all the peaks, starting close to the boat and stretching out as far as she can see, scattered through the water like a path, the kind of path a child might hop along, a giant child, God.

  * * *

  • • •

  NAAMAH GETS DRESSED and finds Japheth first. She wants to take a mountain goat out on a little boat to one of the drying peaks.

  “Shouldn’t we tell the others?” Japheth says.

  “It’s so early,” she says, “and the mountaintops aren’t going anywhere.”

  So Japheth gets her a mountain goat, and they clamber onto a boat. He rows while she pets the goat she cannot see. She can feel its short hair falling out in her fingers.

  “Their eyes are odd,” he says, “like their pupils are winking at me.”

  “I remember,” she says, picturing them. She’s reminded of an octopus’s eye, but she’s not sure why. She’s not sure how she even knows what an octopus’s eye looks like.

  At the mountaintop, she stays in the boat while Japheth carries the goat above the water and sets him down on the rock of it. Then he returns to the boat, where he wrings out his clothes. She listens to the goat scamper about on the peak.

  “It’s a nice day,” Japheth says.

  Naamah nods and smiles at him, but it’s easier to pass the time without speaking. She lies back, closes her eyes, and takes in the sun while listening to the goat’s hooves.

  Eventually the goat gets tired of the mountaintop. He cries out a few times, and it sounds like someone is calling for her from far away. But before Japheth makes it out of the boat, the goat starts to swim back to them. He’s drenched when Japheth pulls him over the side. Naamah sees the drops of water hitting the wood.

  “Even he knows nothing’s ready,” Naamah says.

  “Yes,” Japheth says, and he rows them all back to the boat, which looms nearby, bigger than any of the mountaintops for now.

  * * *

  • • •

  NOT SURE HOW long she will have access to the angel and the village of dead, Naamah starts to visit them every day. She has to wade farther and farther out before she can dive down.

  On the first day, the children ask to see her legs. “What’s that?” a girl asks.

  “Bruises. Do you remember those?”

  The children shake their heads.

  “Are they always in that shape?”

  “No, a dog jumped on my thigh, and this is the paw print. See? The pad of the foot and the four toes?”

  “Can I touch it?”

  Naamah nods.

  The girl touches it, outlines it. “I can’t feel it,” she says.

  “It’s underneath the skin.”

  “What is?”

  “The injury, I guess.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Only when it’s touched.”

  The girl snaps her hand away. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, no. You’d have to touch it harder. And even then, it’s only a little soreness.”

  “What is being sore like?”

  “It’s an ache. Or like being stiff when you wake up. Do you sleep?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you ever feel stiff?” Naamah reaches up her arms. “Like you want to stretch?” She bends to the left and right.

  The children giggle, and they all mimic her. She looks at them all swaying in the water like the spirits they are.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY, the children ask to see the bruises on her leg again. The paw print is a different color, more gr
een.

  “Will you grow something here?”

  “What do you mean?” Naamah asks.

  “Like a plant.”

  “No,” she says. “It changes as it heals. Next it will be more yellow.”

  “Like little suns?”

  “Yes, but it will look too sourly yellow to be the sun.”

  The children pull at her toes.

  “Do you remember the sun?” she asks.

  “Yes,” the children say excitedly. “We’ve made a story about the sun.”

  “Have you?”

  They nod.

  “Can I hear it?”

  “The sun hid when the rain came. It went to another world where there was no rain and never would be rain. But then, by accident, the sun burned the new world and said, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. The new world did not forgive the sun, so the sun came back here.”

  “I love that story,” Naamah says. “That’s a very good story.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY, the children have prepared a play for Naamah. The angel has designed a stage and costumes for each of them. A child comes out in the shape of the sun as children imagine it: a perfectly symmetrical, far-reaching thing, with beams of light zigzagging out of it.

  “I am so bored,” the sun-child says. “Look at the animals here. Look at these children running around. Haven’t I seen this before? I have. I have.”

  The rest of the children run around in front of her.

  “I will go somewhere else and see something new.”

  The children leave and the sun-child walks in a circle, returning to center stage, as a child dressed as a planet comes from stage right.

  “Wow,” says the sun-child, looking at the new planet.

  From offstage, a child yells, “Meanwhile, back on Earth!”

  The sun runs off, and the rest of the children come back dressed as raindrops. “Boom!” they yell as they stomp around the stage. “Boom boom boom!” The children try not to laugh as they run into each other. And then they run off again.