Naamah

by Sarah Blake

  THAT NIGHT, when Naamah’s back on the boat, she runs to the cold room where she stores the seeds. There are root vegetables stored there, too. She reaches her hand into the sand until she finds a carrot. She pulls it out slowly and pats the sand back down where she’s disturbed it, and then she takes the carrot to the horse, as an apology.

  THIRTEEN

  When Naamah goes back underwater again, the angel is not there.

  “Naamah, will you stay with us?” a child asks.

  “For now.”

  “We are playing a game.”

  “Ah, what is the game?”

  “We are deciding which animal we will be. Are you any good at that game?”

  “I am quite good at that game,” says Naamah.

  “I’m going to be a vulture!” yells one child.

  “I’m a camel!”

  “I’m a wolf!” And the child howls at the sparkling archway above them.

  “What will you be, Naamah?”

  “A worm, surely,” she says, and she wriggles her hands to their bellies and tickles them.

  “No! No!” they yell through laughter. “You can’t be a worm.”

  “You’re much too beautiful, Naamah!”

  “Too big!”

  Naamah laughs. “All right then, I’m an elephant.” She hunches over, throws her arm out in front of her face, and trumpets.

  The children run around screaming. “She will trample us!”

  “Stampede!”

  Naamah straightens her back when their joy seems no longer to do with her being an elephant. One child stops near her and holds her hand.

  “Are you all right?” she asks him.

  The boy nods.

  “Do you know where the angel is?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Does anyone know?”

  “Maybe,” he says, and he leads her away from the children, out to a small cave that the angel has filled with strings of crystal like endless garland. When they arrive, the child leaves her without going in.

  “Hello?” Naamah says as she enters the cave.

  “Hello,” comes the voice of a woman.

  “I’m Naamah.”

  “I know.” She comes out to face Naamah. She’s tall and thin and beautiful and young, but also very clearly dead.

  “What are you doing here?” Naamah asks.

  “You mean, in this cave, or more like, why am I not in the proper world of the dead, since I’m not a confused, lost child?”

  Naamah nods. “The second one,” she says, realizing she’s already come off as rude.

  “I like it here. And it’s not like that world is some realm independent of Him. I can’t imagine knowingly going to Him after what He’s done.”

  “You remember the flood?”

  “Vividly,” she says. “I am not one of the children. I remember pain. I remember eating and how strong smells can be. I remember my family.”

  “You had children?”

  “You have played with my boy.”

  Naamah turns back to see if the boy is still in sight, but he’s not. “That was him?”

  The woman nods. “He doesn’t remember me.”

  “At all?”

  “Doesn’t seem to. Though I’ve told him I’m his mother.” The woman moves around the cave.

  “Do you want him to go to the next world?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “If he does go, will you follow him?”

  “Yes.” The woman stops. “Why do you keep asking me questions you know the answers to?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, say what you’re here to ask already.”

  “Do you know where the angel is?”

  “I think she is with Him.”

  “Will she come back?” Naamah asks.

  “I think so. Don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Come back tomorrow, Naamah.”

  Naamah nods and starts to leave.

  “And bring me something.”

  Naamah looks back at her. “Like what?”

  “Something of the world of the living,” she says, excited.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY, on the boat, Naamah scours her things. A brush, a candle, food, a seed. Would one of Neela’s smuggled paintings not be ruined by the water? A piece of clothing dyed brightly green, perhaps. The thick, layered cloth she uses and reuses for her menstrual blood. A piece of jewelry?

  Then she thinks of it. She asks Sadie to help her. They go to a room stacked with wooden boxes, each a home for a group of insects.

  “Please, find the golden beetles for me, will you, Sadie? I think they’re in this column.”

  Sadie opens the little doors until she finds them. Naamah sees the morning glories in the box and reaches her hand in, hoping one of the beetles will crawl on.

  “Let me help.” Sadie reaches in, too, and taps a beetle toward Naamah’s hand. When Naamah feels the beetle’s hooked feet in her palm, she quickly cups her other hand over it and brings it out. Then she shuts the door and turns to leave.

  “Where are you going, Naamah?”

  Naamah tries to brush her off, moving quickly down the hall.

  “You aren’t supposed to take it, Naamah!”

  But Naamah keeps going.

  * * *

  • • •

  NAAMAH WADES INTO THE WATER, keeping the beetle above her head until she’s nearly under the surface herself, and then she lets her knees give out. She lowers her hands, places the beetle on the back of her arm, shielding it with one hand so it can’t float away. It crawls up her arm, alive and well. The beetle can hold its breath by holding an air bubble to its mouth, but that bubble might not be enough for this trip, and she admits to herself that she might be killing the beetle. Accepting the risks, she gathers the beetle back in her hands and dives down.

  * * *

  • • •

  NAAMAH REACHES THE CAVE and presents the beetle.

  “Spectacular!” says the woman. “Look at that. Look at it move!”

  “You can keep it,” Naamah says.

  “Yes? Then I will. For a few days at least.” She takes the beetle from Naamah and puts it on her shoulder.

  Naamah watches small loops of thread get pulled on the woman’s dress.

  “She’s touched you, hasn’t she?” the woman asks. “The angel, I mean.”

  Naamah’s surprised. “Yes,” she says.

  “I want someone to touch me. I want to know if I can still feel what I remember. Will you touch me?”

  Naamah hesitates.

  “Please.”

  Naamah leans over and kisses the woman, opens her mouth to receive her tongue. But the woman’s tongue is covered in water, and for a moment Naamah thinks she might drown kissing her. Naamah gags and then she feels bad that she’s gagged. She tries to grab the woman’s waist, her hips, but she slides over them. She has to hook her entire arm around her to hold her close, but Naamah is determined to help the woman, to see what her body is and isn’t after death. The woman spreads her legs so Naamah can put two fingers in her, four, and while Naamah feels hardly anything, maybe the woman feels more.

  “Does it feel good?” Naamah asks.

  The woman begins to cry and pushes her away. “I don’t think I’m human anymore.”

  “Couldn’t you try with someone down here? Maybe it’s only that I’m . . . that I can’t help.”

  “They aren’t curious anymore. They don’t care about their bodies—the great abandonment of our bodies. That’s what I like to call the flood sometimes. The great abandonment. That everyone took part in.” She’s still crying, but she’s angry now, too, looking all around the room and swinging her arms. “Him abandoning us, us
abandoning our bodies, a forced abandonment of our children, and our children of us in some cases. Though I guess that’s not how you’ve experienced it.” She takes the beetle off her shoulder and places it on the table. She watches the beetle instead of looking at Naamah. It crawls along, with its long pauses, as if full of thought. Without looking up, she asks, “How have you experienced it?”

  “I guess I think of it as more of a reclamation.”

  “But how have you experienced it?”

  “I have always experienced it as if I were outside of it. Like when you’re so tired, and all you want to do is go to bed, but you haven’t cleaned up the food, and if you don’t clean up the food, ants will come.” The woman seems to be calming down as she listens to her, so Naamah keeps going. “In the morning, ants will be everywhere, following their set pathways all over the food. So you start cleaning the food. You start with something small. Very easy to complete. And when you finish it, you remark upon its doneness, so achieved, and you continue to the next thing. And you go on like that until you have cleaned everything, when you thought you could not, and you collapse into bed and go to sleep.”

  “And in this scenario—what will you do when you get to go to bed?”

  “When the land is dry again?” Naamah says. “I don’t know. I don’t know what sleep looks like in that idea of the world He puts in front of me.”

  “If I were you, I’d figure that out.” The woman looks at her for the first time since they kissed, takes her time looking over Naamah’s face, her lips and eyes and hair, and it makes Naamah uncomfortable, how alive she feels in that moment.

  Looking back at the beetle, the woman says, “I just want to put it in my mouth! What is that about?” But she’s not really looking for Naamah’s response to that.

  “Is the angel back today?” Naamah asks.

  “No,” she says.

  “Then I’ll see you again tomorrow.” And Naamah leaves.

  * * *

  • • •

  FINALLY THE ANGEL RETURNS. When Naamah sees her again, she realizes that she had constructed a more concrete image of the angel in her mind, to remember her by. A certain height, a certain shape to her breasts and hips and hair. Now that she’s in front of her again, though, the angel is as she was: formless and of too many forms at once. Naamah wants to touch her again. That’s when the angel feels real. That’s when Naamah feels the most sure of anything.

  “Were you with Him?” Naamah asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Does He care about us?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “No, not us. I mean, my family, humans, the boat. Is He paying attention? Is He watching?”

  “He is and He isn’t.”

  “What does that mean? Why am I doing what I’m doing?”

  “You make your own decisions.”

  “Never mind.” Naamah shakes her head. “I’m surprised you came back.”

  “Why?”

  “I imagine His presence is hard to deny. Just His voice alone made Noah follow Him.”

  “That had to do with you, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Noah followed His word, but it was to save you and your children.”

  “When Noah speaks of it, it’s not like that.”

  “It wasn’t constant,” the angel says.

  “No.”

  “But it was there. Noah would not have completed the ark if it weren’t for you.”

  “You know?”

  “I know.”

  “You make me sound very powerful.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I am weak. You understand that, right?”

  “Yes, weak and powerful both.”

  “And you? Aren’t you exclusively powerful?”

  With a smile the angel says, “But I have always known that I am the less interesting of the two of us.”

  Naamah shakes her head again.

  Then the angel says, “Let me ask you something. Am I interesting on my own, or only because of my relationship to Him?”

  “You are interesting.”

  “Answer me again tomorrow.”

  “I know—”

  “No, tomorrow,” the angel says.

  * * *

  • • •

  THAT NIGHT, WHEN NAAMAH LOOKS over the water, Japheth joins her. Naamah finds herself thinking that the mountaintops are reaching higher into the sky now than when she last bothered to consider them, even though she knows it’s only the water exhaling, lowering its burdensome chest a little more, like a man returning to normal after he’s exerted himself. She looks at Japheth’s chest.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  “Can you imagine the mountains as they were?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, imagine you met a bird, who said she’d been talking to the mountain. Been inside the mountain, even.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’d think that bird was special?”

  “Of course.”

  “Is the bird special only because of its relationship to the mountain?”

  “That’s why it’s especially compelling, I’d say.”

  “Yes,” Naamah says. “So what could make the bird special, would you say, outside of that?”

  “Maybe its plumage. Maybe if it could speak, or do something else birds can’t usually do.”

  “Let’s say all of that is true, but it’s all because of the mountain that the bird can do these things, and that it looks the way it does.”

  “So the bird talks?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’d have to ask the bird to define herself.”

  “You don’t think someone who’s grown very close to the bird could answer?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Isn’t it more difficult to know yourself anyway?” asks Naamah.

  “Do you think you know me better than I know myself?”

  Naamah laughs. “Definitely not.”

  He smiles at her. “Have you met a bird?”

  “I think so,” she says. And the mountaintops look dangerous under the moon.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NEXT TIME Naamah dives down, the angel is waiting for her.

  Naamah starts, “You are interesting because of Him. You are interesting because you have left Him. I don’t know how you are interesting outside of Him, except that you like to imagine things like sea monsters, and you have compassion, and probably there’s more.” She pauses. “You tell me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  The angel stops to think and eventually says, “I love the planets made of gas.”

  “I didn’t know there were planets made of gas,” Naamah says.

  “Yes. One of them is nearly all hydrogen. I can pass through it and its watery depths. Not water. Just watery. And then it gets so dense and heavy the closer to the center you go. I can’t make it to the center in this form. And it’s hot from all that pressure. And that’s why, so far from the sun, it remains gas, does not freeze. It makes dusty rings over its surface, the winds and storms, which—if you must compare one thing to another, over and over to understand it—take the shape of mountains, waves, moles, eyes.”

  “Keep going,” Naamah says.

  “That planet has moons, too, more than a dozen, and smaller bodies, too. Celestial bodies. And the storms are formed by the gases, the planet’s gravity, the sun’s pull, but then the moons get involved, each with their own gravitational forces. One changing the other changing the other. Until who’s to say what forms what. Who’s to say which bears more weight in forming the identity of the thing.”

  Naamah kisses her, and they have sex.

  And the next day, they have sex.

  And t
he next day, they have sex.

  And the next day, they have sex.

  And the next day, they have sex.

  And the next day, they have sex.

  And the next day, they have sex, and when the angel is above Naamah, kissing her on the mouth, her hands searching Naamah’s body, the angel flashes into something else. A tiger.

  Naamah pushes her away. “What was that?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “You were a tiger.”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  Naamah turns away from her. “You were a tiger.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Are you an animal?”

  “No, wha—”

  “Tell me the truth.” Naamah’s shaking now.

  “I am telling you the truth!”

  “He sent you?”

  “No—”

  “What is happening? Have I even left the boat?” Naamah thrashes about in the water, moves her legs like she’s marching on the deck, on land, anywhere with air.

  The angel grabs her swinging arms. “Stop.”

  Still facing away from her, Naamah screams, “You’re not even real!”

  With that, the film around Naamah’s body breaks, the water pours into her mouth, her ears pop, her skin hurts. She kicks as hard as she can to the surface, and when she breaks through she takes in the cold air in gulps.

  * * *

  • • •

  DURING THE STORM that brought the flood, the tigers made a long, deep, bellowing growl that could have been heard from far away, but there Naamah was on top of it. All through the day, all through the night, under all the noises of the other animals, she heard the tigers.

  She wanted them to finish, to roar, to build and deliver a deafening chorus, awful and fearsome. Something to reach God’s ear. But only so that on the other side of that roaring, they might be quiet.

  The noise moved the air around her into a state of unrest, and that had a warmth to it. She lay in bed and remembered silence. She thought maybe there’d been a tactile component to it that she hadn’t realized at the time, maybe silence could produce a chill. She buried herself in blankets until she was sweaty.