Naamah

by Sarah Blake

  “It’s stunning,” Naamah says, looking at the wall and thinking of how the angel must spend time here, with this woman, when Naamah’s not around.

  “Thank you.”

  “What’s the pattern?”

  “What does it look like to you?” she asks.

  Naamah answers, “It looks like something growing.”

  The woman looks at it, too.

  “Is it?”

  The woman smiles. “No.”

  “Well, what then?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes,” Naamah says, “I want to know.”

  “My husband used to trace shapes on my back. I don’t know what they were, but it felt so good. He could do it for almost an hour without tiring. We would lie down and he would watch the sunset and trace those shapes, and I would say I was watching the sunset, too, but my eyes were closed.” She gestures toward the wall. “I was trying to remember. I don’t know if I did.”

  Naamah watches her face and can tell it doesn’t matter if the woman got it right—it’s filling her with joy.

  The woman goes up to the wall and runs her hand over the strings of crystals. Naamah watches the light shine on her hand, then between her fingers, on her face, on her eyes, which already looked covered in oil.

  FIFTEEN

  The next time Naamah goes down to the water, the angel stops her.

  “You’ve been avoiding me,” the angel says.

  “Yes.”

  “You still think I am a tiger.”

  Naamah shakes her head.

  “You do. I know it. Doesn’t it sound foolish to you?”

  “Of course it does,” Naamah says.

  “But that doesn’t mean you don’t believe it.”

  “You keep telling me that I don’t understand Him. You say you’re a part of Him. I am done making assumptions. Isn’t that what you want?”

  “Not if it means you don’t trust me anymore,” the angel says.

  “I don’t know what you want,” Naamah says.

  “I trust you even though I don’t understand you.”

  “It’s different. You know I’m not capable of anything extraordinary.”

  The angel swims back and forth, furious to be misunderstood. And then she stops. “Do you want to see me as a tiger?”

  Naamah knows that if she trusted the angel, if she loved her, now would be the moment to say no.

  “Do you?”

  “Yes!” Naamah admits. “Yes.”

  The angel can’t hide that she’s upset. “Fine.” She shakes her whole body, breaks free of her form, and takes the form of a tiger. But it’s not the tiger Naamah saw. The angel has the appearance of fur, but without the countless individual hairs that make up the coat of a tiger. And the color isn’t right. She is not any individual tiger.

  She swims through the water, she paces, she roars.

  “I get it,” Naamah says.

  “What?” the angel says, her woman’s voice still inside the tiger’s body.

  “I get it!” Naamah’s upset now, too.

  The angel comes back to her woman form. “You shouldn’t be upset. You got what you wanted.”

  “But then what did I see before?”

  “I don’t know, Naamah. But it wasn’t me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You shouldn’t come down here anymore.”

  “But—”

  “I don’t want you here. This place is not for you. The children are spoiled by you.”

  “Okay.”

  “You know it’s up to me if you breathe down here or not. That you don’t drown.”

  “I know.”

  “You can get back to the boat, but that’s it. Don’t try to come again.”

  “Can I say goodbye to the children?”

  “No.” The angel moves in front of her as if she might physically stop her. “Don’t make me change my mind about your breath.” She looks as if she might fight Naamah to the ground.

  * * *

  • • •

  BACK ON THE PATCH OF LAND, Naamah can’t stop sobbing. Her sides hurt. Her breath wheezes. Noah hears her from the deck and rushes down the ladder.

  “Are you all right?”

  Naamah lets him hold her.

  “What happened?”

  “I betrayed someone,” she gets out.

  “Who?”

  She looks at him, and he watches on her face as her sadness is overwhelmed by fear. “God,” she says. “I think I might have betrayed God.”

  “No.”

  “No?” Naamah asks.

  “We would know, wouldn’t we? He would make it known.”

  “When did you last hear from Him?”

  “Before the rains.”

  Naamah pulls away from him. “He hasn’t spoken to you since before the rains?”

  “No.”

  “Why wouldn’t He speak to you?”

  “We’re still working on the first task He gave us, aren’t we?”

  “You’re not concerned?”

  “No,” Noah says. “And you shouldn’t be, Naamah. I’m here. We’ve done everything asked of us. You’ve done everything, taking care of us. All of us.”

  “I think He might punish me. He might already be punishing me,” Naamah says, but she’s gone cold to it again, knowing she will keep moving forward regardless.

  * * *

  • • •

  NAAMAH WALKS THE DARK HALLS of the boat. She hears the animals and pretends she’d be able to see them if she opened the doors. She takes her steps slowly, remembers their shit, their food, the births of their young, their deaths, their patterned stripes and spots, their fur and wool and feathers. She is so full of the details of their invisible bodies.

  To keep from clenching her jaw, she runs her tongue over her teeth—over the outside of her bottom teeth, right to left, over the inside, left to right. She remembers discovering a chip once, on an upper molar, extra sharp, a place for her tongue to catch, like clothing on splintered wood. But it’s been worn down over the years. Almost every tooth has a dullness to it.

  She still loves the lines she asked the dead woman to make.

  Then she hears the voice again. “Jael, Jael.” One of the cockatoos. “Jael, Jael.”

  She opens the door. She thinks she can feel all the animals’ eyes on her. And then one of them crashes into her chest. She falls back against the wall. She’s about to swat it down as hard as she can, maybe kill it, with the great force of her arms, when she realizes that the cockatoo isn’t attacking her, just digging his talons into her shirt, steadying himself on her chest. She holds him there, runs her hands over his head and down his back.

  “Jael,” he says. “Jael.”

  “Hello, Jael,” she says.

  “Hello,” he says. But it’s only a greeting. His nibbling on her finger is what feels affectionate.

  They stay like that for a long time, but eventually Naamah has to leave.

  * * *

  • • •

  THAT DAY IS followed by another day when Naamah cannot leave her bed.

  “What is it?” Noah asks.

  “I’m tired. We’ve been on the boat for more than eight months. Aren’t you tired?”

  “I’ve been sleeping well,” he jokes.

  Naamah whacks him on the arm.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Naamah. I like it here. I have my family. Tending to the animals fills my days. I’m happy.”

  “I love that about you.” She takes his hand and smiles at him for a moment. “But I’m tired of it.”

  “Maybe it’s all right to be tired of it. Maybe we’re supposed to get tired of it. Maybe I’ll be tired of it next week. You can bring me things in bed.”

  “I would.”
<
br />   “You better.”

  “Okay, but today I’m staying in bed. I’m going back to sleep even.”

  He leans down and kisses her.

  But she doesn’t go to sleep right away. She lies there with her eyes closed.

  In the desert, Naamah used to envision violent scenarios in her head. What would she do if a man stopped her on the way home from the market? If a man came into her home? In one scenario, she imagined herself dropping to the ground, wrapping her arms around his calves, and throwing her weight into him until he toppled forward over her back. She saw herself swiveling around, over him, putting her knee into the center of his back. She’d grab his hair and lift his head, slice his neck with her sharpened bone.

  Even with almost every human on the planet dead, playing out these visions has been a hard habit for her to break. It calms her, makes her feel in control—if not in control of the world, then in control of her body.

  After she kills another dangerous man in her head, she opens her eyes. She lights a candle and holds her hand up to the light. She sees the hundreds of lines, the thousands of swirls, over every inch of it, as if the skin has been cobbled together over an arrangement of bones that was never meant to be.

  She drops her hand, lifts her wrist, and lets the light run down her forearm. There isn’t one swirl. There’s a slip of a muscle underneath, moving diagonally toward the elbow. There’s one vein lying over one tendon near the wrist. Smooth and perfect, and shadowed by the candle’s light. She wonders why her body was meant to be like this and keeps wondering until she falls asleep.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN NAAMAH OPENS her eyes again, Adata is standing in the doorway.

  “Have you given up?” Adata asks.

  Naamah’s still waking. “What? Given up what?”

  “Have you given up on us? The ark? Everything?”

  “No! Why would you think that?”

  “You’ve spent two days of the last week in bed. You’re the one who’s always plowing ahead, unfazed by dead animals, broken doors, injured legs, the same food over and over.”

  “Adata, did you come down here just to give me shit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Adata yells, “when you give up, they do! Shem doesn’t make jokes, Ham’s not an ass. Sadie looks like she might break, and Neela doesn’t know if it’s better to hold her or let her go ahead and do it already.”

  “But Noah’s strong.”

  “He helps you, but the rest of them—they follow your lead.”

  Naamah shakes her head. “I don’t want them to.”

  “Tough.” Adata stares at her, and her steadiness steadies Naamah. “Now get out of bed.”

  * * *

  • • •

  NAAMAH MEETS THEM ALL for dinner up on the deck, and Adata was right—everyone is quiet.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been around,” Naamah says.

  “It’s fine, Mom,” Japheth says.

  “I’ll be around more now. I promise.”

  Adata gives her a look, urging her on.

  “And I’m excited for what comes next.” She forces a smile.

  “Here, here!” says Noah.

  “Tomorrow we should make a stew with the vegetables we’ve been saving,” Naamah says, trying to lift her voice.

  “Because you think the water will be down soon?” Sadie asks.

  “I do.”

  “I will make it,” Adata says.

  “Great. Thank you,” Naamah says.

  “I want to help with the stew, too,” Neela says. She kisses Ham. Everyone’s mood is beginning to lighten. All it takes is Naamah saying each sentence with a grin.

  The sunset shines behind all of them, breaking the sky into pinks and oranges, letting the pale blue give way to the deep blue, showing that one color cannot just lighten or darken to another; it must forget itself completely before it finds itself again.

  * * *

  • • •

  NAAMAH HELPS Adata and Neela find the vegetables in the sand and choose which to take, and how many. They start to prepare the meal on the deck so that the scent of it might not grow too strong among the animals.

  Naamah makes an excuse to go down the ladder. She undresses on the patch of land, leaves her clothes over a ladder’s rung. She has to see. She has to know. Is the angel done with me?

  Under the water, the feeling is unfamiliar at first: the held breath, the pressure creating air bubbles in her nose and ears. She feels one little sphere escape her nose, cling for a moment to the edge of her nostril. Then it lets go, rising to the surface. She feels all of it, even the straight line of the bubble, from her body back to the surface.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE STEW IS DELICIOUS, and everyone praises Adata and Neela for their cooking. Noah stands and says, “It might be time to send out a bird.”

  “What bird?” Shem asks.

  “We could start with a raven.”

  “This is so exciting!” Neela says.

  Naamah knows why they might start with a raven. Noah is still thinking about where all the bodies have gone. If they’re floating somewhere, caught somewhere, humans and animals, drowned and bloated, then the raven will find them. Naamah wonders what will happen to her children if they come upon fields of dead.

  Adata nudges her. “Aren’t you excited?”

  “Yes.” Naamah smiles. “I think we have many amazing days ahead of us.”

  “Oh!” Neela says, and she grabs Naamah’s hand and places it on her stomach. “Can you feel it?”

  Naamah nods. “Strong baby.”

  Neela blushes with pride.

  “Has everyone felt it?” Naamah asks.

  “Yes, over this past week.”

  “I will feel it again!” Sadie says, and she jumps up and rushes over to feel the baby’s kicks. Naamah can see that Sadie has nothing to worry about. She’ll be a mother soon enough. Adata too. Naamah can see her whole family growing, growing, until she is the mother of nations. For a second she feels the power of a queen, an empress.

  But then she is back on a boat eating stew, where she catches a grain of sand on her tooth. She hears it so loud in her bite that it seems for a moment like lightning striking the boat, setting it on fire, as if it might kill them all and foil God’s plan, but she keeps chewing, knowing she’s being watched, and as the grain finds its way between her teeth again and again and the sound grows familiar, the feeling becomes smaller, more manageable, easy to tuck inside herself, the sound of a flaw, for her to enjoy alone, until she catches the grain in a spot where she can move it back and forth with her jaw, where she can determine its shape and crush it more precisely, into something that can’t make a sound.

  SIXTEEN

  Naamah’s dreaming of a cactus blooming, her feet in the sand, when Sarai comes to her.

  “I think I should take you somewhere,” Sarai says.

  “Then take me.”

  Naamah feels the sand change underfoot, until it feels like little twisted fibers. She raises a foot as if it could hurt her.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s called carpeting. We’re in the house of a young family. There’s a mother here, home, with two children under five. They’re playing out back.”

  “Why ‘under five’? What does that indicate?” Naamah asks, still investigating the carpet. She digs her toes in, spreads them apart.

  “Five years old. When children turn five, they can go to school for free, sit with teachers, learn to read and write.”

  “And before five?”

  “Their parents can pay for a thing called preschool, or for a nanny, or they can stay home themselves. In this family, the mother stays home.”

  “What about family? What a
bout the other mothers?”

  “Look outside,” Sarai says, pointing to the window where the light is coming in and inching across the floor.

  As Naamah’s eye goes to the window, the rest of the room distracts her. The floor is covered in shiny, colorful toys. There are soft animal toys on a sofa. The wall behind the sofa is covered in images of the same two children. There’s a fan on the ceiling. She can’t name anything she’s seeing, but she takes it in.

  She walks to the window. It looks like twelve panes of glass, six on top of six. She runs her fingers over them and there’s no break in the glass. She looks closer. The window is made of two plates of glass and, between them, something shiny and white, in the shape of four crosses.

  “It’s for aesthetics,” Sarai says. “Mimicking how older windows looked.”

  All Naamah can muster is, “Oh.”

  “Look outside,” Sarai says again.

  Naamah looks through the window to the lush lawn of zoysia grass, a walk lined with marigolds, a trimmed Japanese maple circled by mulch and edged with decorative bricks. Up and down the street are other houses, all similar in shape, all of them with walks and yards and landscaping.

  Sarai explains: “The farther the houses are apart, the more desirable the community, the more expensive it seems.”

  “Isn’t everyone lonely?” Naamah asks, her eyes on a decorative statue of a turtle.

  “Yes.”

  “Why live like this?”

  “Not everyone does.”

  “But a lot,” Naamah says.

  Sarai nods. She’s walking around the room, taking the edge of a curtain between her fingers and then letting it slide away.

  “Do you spend a lot of time here?” Naamah asks.

  “Yes,” she says, sitting down on the floor near the toys. “Come here.”

  Naamah sits across from her and she feels the rug through her clothes.

  “Look.” Sarai takes a toy of a zebra and walks it up the ramp into a wooden boat.

  “Is that what I think it is?”