by Sarah Blake
“Yes. The ark.”
Naamah places her hand over the roof, sees how easily it fits in her hand. Noticing how light it is, she lifts the boat off the ground. “Look how cute it is.”
“It is.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re not in this set.”
“This set?”
“There are lots of ‘Noah’s Ark’ toy sets. You’re in some of them.”
“And children play with this?”
“Yes,” Sarai says.
“Do they know what happened?”
“They know a story.”
“A story without danger or injury, without cleaning up shit day in and day out. Without even heaviness or height!” she says, putting down the boat.
“Just a story. To teach them about a good, God-fearing man.”
“Not about God’s wrath? Or His compassion?”
“No.”
“No, just about Noah.” She picks up the Noah figurine. “Why does he look like this?”
“He’s old. Bald, hair turned white, beard untrimmed.”
Naamah laughs.
“This whole world can be traced back to you,” Sarai says.
“Don’t say it like that.”
“Like what?”
She looks around her. “Like I’m responsible for any of these choices.”
“Not responsible, no. But don’t you think you made it possible?”
“No,” Naamah says, “I don’t.”
Sarai runs her thumb down the back of a wooden elephant. She asks, “Would you like to see what an old woman looks like?”
“Sure,” Naamah says, and she follows Sarai out the door, closes it behind them, pulling the slick gold knob, which looks like it should be cold to the touch and not so plain as it is.
They walk to a park and sit on a bench across from a very old woman.
“Can she see us?” Naamah asks.
“No,” Sarai says. “She can’t hear us either.”
“She doesn’t look well.”
“She’s actually quite healthy for her age.”
“Can she lift anything?”
Even Sarai laughs at this. “She can lift what she needs to.”
“Will I look like that one day?”
“No.”
“Her skin is sort of incredible,” Naamah says.
“I know.”
The old woman gets up to go home.
“Can we follow her?” Naamah asks.
“Yes.”
They follow her back to her house, an apartment building. They take an elevator up. The woman goes into her kitchen and puts some bread in the toaster. If Naamah has wondered if she was dreaming, she doesn’t now. How could this be anything but a dream?
Naamah finds the bedroom and lies on the bed, sinks into it a little.
“This is excessive,” she says.
Sarai lets out the smallest snort. “You’d get used to it, I think.”
Naamah lifts herself up on her elbows. “Can I ask you something?”
“Yes.”
“What happens to a woman as beautiful as you are?”
“You mean, what did happen to me?”
“Yes.”
“My husband, Abraham, knew how beautiful I was. Everyone knew. And he knew, too, that husbands are killed to get to their wives. So everywhere we went, he presented himself as my brother. I was taken from him and raped, sometimes once, sometimes for weeks, and then I was returned to him. He thought, every time, that I was so happy to see him, to be reunited. That I was grateful for his good planning, that he was, in fact, not dead.” Sarai shakes a little. “And maybe I was, the first time. And that’s how I knew how to behave the times that followed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
“But that is all before what happened to your son.”
“Yes, somehow, after all of that, I settled back into my life with Abraham and we were happy and prosperous and I had my son. And if I don’t regret having him, if I love him more than anything in the world, then how can I regret the events that allowed him to come to be?”
“I would.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Not regret. Spurn maybe. Blame. Wish there had been another way to reach him that did not require a thousand injuries. But if that way does not exist, then regret doesn’t feel like an option.”
Suddenly there are voices coming from the other room, and Naamah goes to see. The old woman is eating toast with tuna fish in front of a big glass screen.
“Oh,” Naamah says again.
“It’s a television. People in other cities record shows, like plays, and then send them to people’s televisions.”
“All around the world people are watching this?”
“Well, this country at least.”
“How many people are alive right now?”
“Seven and a half billion people.”
“What’s a billion?” Naamah asks.
“It goes tens, hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, hundred thousands, millions, ten millions, hundred millions, billions.”
“Say it again.”
“Tens, hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, hundred thousands, millions, ten millions, hundred millions, billions. So the number before one billion is nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine. It might be easier if I write it out.”
“No, I got it. At least I think so. Seven and a half billion.” She whistles. “Seven billion five hundred million people?”
“That’s right.”
“Are they violent?”
“Yes.”
“Sinful?”
“Yes.”
“But they are spared?”
“They are,” Sarai says.
“Do you know why?”
“The covenant.”
“What’s the covenant?”
“After the flood, it’s a promise God makes to Noah.”
“To what? Spare violent people?”
“No, to not kill you all ever again.”
Naamah doesn’t know what to say. Her attention falls on the television again. “What is this show?”
Sarai bends her head around to see. “It’s called Law & Order: SVU. It’s about people figuring out who committed a crime. There are a lot of different versions of the show. This one focuses on crimes against children, sex crimes against women.”
“Can we stay? Can I watch?”
Sarai waves her over to the TV.
On the show, one of the detectives is interviewing a priest who might know something about the crime. The priest keeps derailing the conversation to talk about the detective’s relationship to his faith. He keeps talking about God’s love and forgiveness.
“That’s how they talk about God in this time?” Naamah asks.
“Yes,” Sarai says.
“When are we?”
“About ten thousand years in the future.”
“And this is what God is known for?” Naamah asks.
“Yes.”
“Does He speak to anyone?”
“Not like He did.”
“No tests?”
“No. But people call their own hardships tests,” Sarai explains. “They say that if they make it through, they do so with God’s grace.”
“What are other things that are God’s?”
“God’s glory. There is a song even! I heard a mother sing it to her children when she was waking them: ‘Rise and shine and give God your glory, glory. Rise and shine and give God your glory, glory. Rise and shine and give God your glory, glory, children of the Lord.’”
Naamah laughs.
“Though I guess there it is the children’s glory.”
“It
doesn’t matter—it was worth it to hear you sing that.” Naamah laughs again, and it’s not quite that Naamah’s being rude. Sarai can feel that she is not teasing her. It is that Naamah creates moments of wonder somehow.
In this moment, Sarai hears the song lingering in her ears, and she marvels at it, so different from how she’d felt, when she’d thought of it as almost cruel, to sing to children. She can’t bring herself to tell Naamah that the song, as it continues, is about the ark.
* * *
• • •
SUDDENLY A CHILD runs into the room. “Mom!” he yells when he sees Naamah.
“Shem! Sweetheart!” she says, bringing him into her arms, hugging him close.
“Mom, can I have a plum?”
Naamah stares at his face. It is definitely her son, and yet here, in the future with Sarai, she had somehow forgotten she was a mother.
“Plum, plum, plum, plum, plum,” says Shem.
He is so beautiful, and he is smiling at her. She says, “Of course you can,” and in her hand is a plum. She gives it to him and he dances off with it. She wants to follow him. She turns to ask Sarai, but she’s gone.
Without Sarai there with her, Naamah loses her image of the future. She’s spun back to the desert, the cactus in bloom before her again. She can tell there are women nearby because there are always women nearby. They will care for her if she asks. But she can’t make it to them. She’s still thinking of Shem’s small face. She feels a profound guilt that she could forget him for even a minute of her life—the largeness she feels as a mother, the impossible being that a mother is—and so she also grieves her malleable self, how easily she slipped into the role of voyeur, outside of time, outside of her life.
Then the cactus’s blossom grows large. It swallows Naamah whole, pushes her through the fisted hand of the prickling green, and then she’s falling through the cactus.
Inside is not the yellow flesh she has eaten, but rather the maze from the underwater cave. Behind her is the large fingertip of a man, tracing her path as it comes to him. She closes her eyes, and when she opens them again she is sitting with Sarai in a small, hard-shelled vehicle with a low roof and windows all around. Through the windows, she can see they are moving impossibly fast.
“There you are,” Sarai says.
“I thought I lost you,” Naamah says.
In front of them is another vehicle, a box on eighteen wheels, and the hard black road before them curves hard, rounding to the left in two sloped lanes. Next to the road is a sign warning that trucks will fall to the right if they don’t slow down. Naamah would have sworn they’d fall to the left, toward the center of the circle.
As if she’s hearing Naamah’s thoughts, Sarai says, “It’s not that the truck falls; it’s that the truck wants to continue moving forward, so as the head of the truck turns left, the body follows its own momentum, twisting off to the right and falling away.”
“Where did you go?” Naamah asks.
“You left, Naamah. After you saw Shem. I thought you had to do something else. Dreams can be like that. I didn’t leave you.”
They’re entering the jughandle themselves now. Naamah feels her body lean to the right as the driver takes the turn quickly. The car disappears and she tumbles out, straight ahead, as if everything else around her weren’t going left, left, left. Naamah’s body falls onto the road, rolls up the ramp of the shoulder, and flies into the air. Her body seems weightless as she flies, tracing the straightest line she’s ever traveled. Then she crashes into a bird, and another bird, and another, and they cling to her as if she’s gathering snow. The birds shriek, and Naamah cries out, too—an imperfect projectile, feathered and clambering.
“Naamah!” a voice yells. It’s Jael. “Naamah, stand up!”
She hears him and straightens her knees and raises her hands until her body is stretched and the birds fly away from her. When she is free of them, she lowers her arms.
“What were you doing?” Jael asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Are you okay?”
“I think so.” Standing in the sky feels like swimming, upright but off-balance, off-balance but supported on every inch of her body. She didn’t know the wind could feel this way. In fact, she knows it can’t.
“What are you doing here, Jael?”
“Sarai found me. Brought me to you.”
Naamah looks around until she sees Sarai.
“Hello, Naamah,” Sarai says, looking at ease even in the sky.
“What’s happening?” Naamah asks her.
“Something’s wrong. I don’t know what yet.”
“Maybe this is Jael’s dream after all,” Naamah says.
“That’s what I’ve been saying!” Jael says.
“I will see you again, Naamah. I promise,” Sarai says, and she’s gone.
“What do we do?” Naamah asks Jael.
“If it’s not time to wake up—”
“Yes, if it’s not time—”
The surface of the world rushes to Naamah’s feet. They are back in the desert. Jael, beside her, changes proportions, his rib cage expanding, his legs lengthening and turning knobby, his head becoming almost grotesque, until he is human-shaped.
“Wow,” Naamah says.
“I kind of like it,” Jael says, the bottom of his giant beak moving into his giant neck as he speaks. He lifts his feet, holds up his wings, fans out the feathers around his head.
“That’s nice,” she says, grateful for his shade, not realizing how hot she’d been.
He tilts his head, sees the sun return to her face, and straightens it again to shade her. He whistles, his cheeks filling with air, his stiff, narrow tongue moving up and down. “Naamah, do you think I am a woman-shaped cockatoo or a man-shaped cockatoo?”
She looks him up and down. “Neither.”
“But I am human-shaped.”
“You are more human-shaped than you were.”
“My eye is nearly the size of yours.”
“Yes.”
“My body is immense.”
“I know.”
“But I am not shaped like a woman, or like a man?”
“You are amazing to look at,” she says.
“Am I?” And he grows bigger.
“Yes.”
As he grows bigger, she can’t help but be afraid of him. He starts to flap his wings. “Naamah,” he yells down to her.
“Yes, Jael.”
“I can’t seem to fly with these proportions,” he says. He flaps harder, kicking up dust, creating a wind strong enough that Naamah closes her eyes and mouth. The wind lifts her off the earth again, and her body seems to find the path it traveled before.
“Naamah!” Jael cries after her. “I can’t reach you!”
She closes her eyes and tumbles for a long time, until finally she is stopped by the talons of the Egyptian vulture.
“Hello, Naamah.” He perches on her arm.
“Hello,” she says, opening her eyes.
“Do you remember me?”
She nods. “You’re the Metatron.” There’s blood on her arm from his talons.
“Apologies. I can’t help that,” he says.
“It’s okay. It doesn’t hurt.”
He moves his foot, smearing the blood.
“Sarai said there was something wrong with my dream,” Naamah says. “Is that because of you? You’ve been trying to get me alone?”
“You know, when I look at your head, I’m reminded of an egg, and I want to drop a rock onto it over and over until it cracks.”
“It is you, isn’t it?”
“I have opened eggs this way hundreds of times. I wedge the top of my beak into the crack and hold the egg steady with my foot and snap off more of its shell.”
“You don’t scare me,” she says.
“I’ve lost a good bit of the liquid inside with this method, watched it spill into the hot sand. But I get most of what I want.”
“Are you listening to me?”
“Sometimes,” the Metatron says, “it takes me quite a long time to find the right rock for the job.”
SEVENTEEN
Noah and Naamah wake up early and take a raven to the deck. Noah hesitates. “What if it comes back with a hunk of flesh in its beak?”
“It won’t. I’ve been swimming all over and seen nothing, come across nothing.”
“Okay,” he says, and he lets the raven go.
It flies out and lands on one of the mountaintops near the boat.
“It’s already stopped,” he says.
Naamah laughs. “A little less eventful than we thought, huh?”
But then: “Look! Look!” Noah says, as the raven takes off and flies into the distance. And Noah’s excitement is so great that Naamah follows his direction. She looks out across the water for a bird she cannot see.
* * *
• • •
SADIE COMES UP TO THE DECK. “What are you two doing up here?”
“We sent out the raven,” Naamah says.
Sadie looks around, checking each horizon.
“We haven’t been able to see him for a while,” Noah says.
“When do you think he will come back?”
“Not sure,” Naamah says.
Sadie keeps gazing out, in one direction and then another.
* * *
• • •
LATE THAT NIGHT, Naamah wraps herself in a blanket and takes a small bowl of nuts to the deck. She lies down next to it and falls asleep.
She wakes up to the sound of the raven’s beak knocking around in the bowl.
“Weren’t you gone a long time,” she says, sitting up.
As she listens to the raven work on a pistachio, she takes out her sharp bone and scrapes a patch of hard, thin skin off a doum nut. She sticks the point of the bone into the flesh and traces it down, twice. She drags the flat of the blade down between the lines and takes out the slim rectangle of the spongy fruit.
She tears a bit off, places it in her palm, and extends her hand toward the raven’s tapping. She feels his beak take it. With her other hand she puts the rest of the fruit in her mouth. Sweet and sour. Bitter and spicy. She likes how much work and time it takes to have such a small bite.