by Sarah Blake
“No, but I think I would want to spare you from anything He might say.”
“I think I need to hear it.”
“It will change you, Naamah. Remember how Noah was changed?”
Yes, she remembers the first day Noah talked to God. He came home and it was like the wind had been knocked out of him. He told her that His voice seemed at home in the expanse of the world, but thinking back on that voice, once he was in their home, near her, close to what he’d considered the heart of his life, the voice seemed overpowering, dwarfing everything he held dear. He dropped down to the floor and muttered, What is my life? The feeling left him the next morning, but Naamah remembers it still. She couldn’t understand how their love could be made small. And yet Noah had made a point of it—that she should know that his love for her would never devastate him again, that he would never again look at her across the desert, thunderstruck.
“I remember,” she says, “but we made it past that. I like where we are now.”
“That was because of your work, don’t you think? Would Noah know how to do the same for you?”
“I wouldn’t go through those feelings. I already know my place. And I know how contemptuous He is.”
“You shouldn’t expect to be able to tell Him anything, Naamah, or to ask a question.”
“Okay, Sarai, but I still want to hear it.”
“I don’t care,” she says. “I won’t let it happen here. And if He can’t do it here, He’ll have to do it when you are awake. And then you won’t be left wondering if it was real. I won’t let you have those questions on top of the questions you will already have.”
“Fine. When I’m awake, then.”
“But Naamah,” Sarai adds, “you have to remember the dream.”
“What dream?”
“This dream, Naamah. Me. Jael. The Metatron.”
“Jael,” Naamah says, alarmed. “Where is Jael?”
“Find Jael. He will help you. He is on the boat. You know this. You have found him there before.”
“I don’t remember.”
“I know. You must bring the worlds closer. You must know one from the other, but bring them much, much closer.”
“What about the baby?”
“The baby is not real. You feel guilty that you almost let the dead children touch Danit.”
“I remember that. Would that have harmed her?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’m right to feel this way.” The baby in her arms doubles in size.
“It didn’t happen. That’s what matters. Besides, the children have a greater pull than you might think. They have their own power. Forgive yourself quickly, as there’s much to be done. The worlds are closer already.”
“Okay,” Naamah says.
But Sarai persists. “Forgive yourself now!”
So Naamah thinks, No harm came to her. You know better now. You did it, but you will not do it again. And the baby vanishes. Naamah’s left with a blanket draped over her arms.
“Find Jael,” Sarai says. Then she’s gone.
Naamah imagines the dreamscape as a world that can spin as fast as a child’s toy. She takes a step and crosses mountains. Three steps across the ocean and her feet splash all over the world. If she must find Jael, surely she will reach him this way.
* * *
• • •
AFTER HALF THE WORLD has passed, Naamah decides to change direction, walking straight through the North Pole. The water on her feet freezes into thin ice, cracking off again with her next step. As she approaches the equator, the sun catches her on the bridge of her nose—and there is Jael.
“Naamah!” he yells. He flies into her chest, and she wraps her arm around him, bending it up over his body. He bites at her fingertips.
“I saw you on the boat,” he says. “You didn’t recognize me.”
“I’m so sorry, Jael. Sarai says I have to remember you.”
“I will try to help,” he says.
They walk across the world together now, not saying a word, until the sound of her own footsteps becomes unbearable.
“I’ve been thinking,” she says, “about what makes a woman.”
“You have?”
“I don’t want it to depend on being a mother, even if it has for me. I don’t want it to depend on genitals. I think very little of a man’s genitals. But with my uterus comes my period. It’s not just how my life is marked, how I experience this monthly reminder that I am this body and not another—and monthly is so often. But there are choices I make, and others make, because of it. How one woman sometimes turns away from another. How we deal with how much it hurts, if we decide to speak it. How we deal with the blood.
“But I think we all know we could be women without these choices. The only reason I’ve ever wanted to be a woman is to have children. The only reason I did not feel constant anger at my body’s insistence on itself was that I knew I’d have my children one day.
“I have no interest in womanhood. In any particular dress. In any particular tasks. In any particular voice. I don’t want to be a man either. I want a new form.”
“You could be a bird with me.”
Naamah laughs. “Would I be happy, do you think?”
“I do. I do.”
Naamah runs her fingers over his head.
“Naamah, when a cockatoo is pregnant, she must lay her egg. But I’ve heard that humans can stop their pregnancies.”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever done that?”
“I have. I took herbs that a woman gave me.”
“Did it work?”
“Yes. But it hurt. For days.”
“Why did you do it?”
“I didn’t want the child. That’s all that matters. When I had my boys, everything was right then. That’s how I know I made the right choice.”
“Naamah—”
“No more questions, Jael.”
* * *
• • •
THE WORLD STAYS SMALL, Naamah’s steps colossal. She realizes she’s spent this whole dream cradling one body and then another. She lets Jael go, and he flies around her as she ties her hair up above her head. He perches there, talons clutching her hair instead of her skin. She looks like a queen with Jael as her crown, and he spreads the feathers around his head as if he understands this.
Clomp, clomp, clomp, the queen spins the world.
* * *
• • •
NAAMAH STOPS IN THE DESERT. This is how the world looks when it’s not flooded, she remembers. And quick as that, the flood returns, up to her ankles. The trees are gone, the mountains, the canyons, everything. When Naamah’s still, the waters are still. She leans forward to see her reflection. Jael does the same.
“Impressive,” he says.
“I’ll say.”
A voice comes from overhead. “You look like a woman with a bird on her head,” says the Metatron, circling above.
Naamah whispers to Jael, “We cannot let him speak.”
“All he does is speak.”
“Well, then, we can’t listen to what he has to say.”
“You don’t need to whisper,” the Metatron says.
“Do you enjoy a little rotten fruit sometimes, vulture?” Jael asks. And as soon as he says it, and she thinks it, rotten fruit rises to the surface of the water.
“I have already eaten and will not be distracted this time.”
The smell of the rotten fruit begins to reach their noses.
“I don’t know how to escape him,” Naamah says.
Jael yells, “Why is your head yellow?”
“I don’t know,” the vulture answers. “I never have reason to look at my own face.”
“Look in the water now,” Jael says.
“No, you listen to me,” the
Metatron says, but just the same, he flies low to see his yellow head in the reflection of the water.
“Jump,” Jael says to Naamah.
She jumps, and the water splashes up into the air, casting waves high as her knees, and the Metatron is caught by them. He flails his wet, feathered wings.
“Will he drown?” Naamah asks.
“It’s only my dream,” Jael says. “Or yours.”
But she can’t stand the sight of him like that, the black tips of his wings like fingers. She reaches down and saves him, blows a gust of wind toward him that’s so warm and dry it takes every lick of moisture from him, and from most of the earth. Naamah is standing in the desert again, towering above the sand.
The vulture flies up to her face. “That was very untoward of you both.”
“You deserve worse,” Jael says.
“You could not mean less to me if you tried, cockatoo. I don’t know how else to make this clear.”
Naamah laughs. She sits down in the desert and lets one leg dip into a sea, lifts the other leg so that her heel rests on the canopies of a rain forest. She runs a fingernail through the soft sand of a beach. “Maybe we can ignore him,” she says.
But the birds are focused on each other.
“I don’t do this for your attention,” Jael says to the Metatron.
“I think you do. What if I offered you a place with God? I can give that to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you don’t need to return to the ark. You could enter the house of God and be one with Him.”
Naamah looks at Jael.
“I am not even considering it,” he says to her.
“Do you believe him, Naamah? Or did he take too long to answer? Have you lost all your trust in him?”
“Is that what you’ve come to tell me, too?” Naamah asks. “Are you here to offer me something?”
“No—”
“No!” Jael says. “Don’t let him say it, Naamah.” Jael flies up to the vulture and attacks him in the air.
They both throw their wings back and lift their feet to tear at each other.
Naamah moves her leg in the sea and sends a tsunami over the land. She moves her other leg and the trees of the rain forest fall beneath it. She lies back, feels the world’s soft slope under her, and watches the birds fight. It’s a dream, she tells herself, her love for Jael aching inside her as she watches. But the Metatron is right. She will never feel quite the same about Jael again—all the loved ones God could take from her, in more ways than death.
Jael has scraped the vulture under his eye, and the Metatron bleeds.
Tense, Naamah presses her fingers into the earth, carving new canyons. When she lifts her fingers again, her nails are dark red at their tips. She brings them to her mouth, scraping the clay out with a front tooth that runs crooked to the others.
The vulture tears himself free from the fight, blood staining his white ruff. Seeing Naamah lying there, he flies inside her, up through her vagina.
She sits up and then bends over her stomach.
“Naamah!” Jael yells. “Are you okay?”
She brings herself to her feet and vomits.
“Naamah!”
She lifts her head as her chest swells with air. When she opens her mouth, it’s the Metatron speaking.
“You must hear me, Naamah! You must listen!”
Naamah spits the last of the vomit from her mouth. She digs her toes in beneath her, and the earth allows it.
Jael flies around her furiously. When she opens her mouth again, he flies into it. It’s all he can think to do. He knows he could choke her like this, that his talons might tear into her as he clamors inside, but he hears the voice of the Metatron trying to rise inside of her.
And she will not listen. She doesn’t even need to fight the vulture. She knows so simply that she will not listen to him that she wakes from the dream.
TWENTY-FOUR
The water is all but gone now. But the family doesn’t spend time on the land, as if none of them trusts it yet. Instead they start to dismantle the boat. They remove the roof and reassemble the ramp the animals once climbed. With it, they are ready to let even the wildest animals find their way back off the boat. But that’s not how they begin.
First they let off the smallest animals. The ones who take a single slice of fig and make it last forever, as if time has stopped moving, as if their mouth could not possibly be capable of feeding a body; those animals whose survival suggests that life itself is meaningless, if one animal can be so brazenly ineffective at living. Or at least this is how Naamah has grown to feel about them. If they choked on their food, it would be a miracle of their tiny throats.
But honestly no animal has choked in more than a year on the boat, and Naamah wonders if choking is mostly a human thing, an aggressive impulse to eat and speak at once. Naamah recalls times she’s choked on her own spit.
As they release the animals, some head back toward the boat, some even start walking up the ramp, but Shem chases them back down. Naamah understands the appeal of the familiar. She understands, as she looks out across the land and its little growth, the appeal of the shadow.
The family waits a week before releasing any other animals, before the birds, the snakes, the cats. Soon they will no longer worry about these prey animals—they will hardly even think of them—but for now, they are giving them a chance.
* * *
• • •
THEY BUILD WAGONS from the rest of the roof, the railing, and parts of rooms they’ve emptied. They will need to carry food, animals that tire along the way, animals they’ll need for eggs, milk, and wool. More than anything they’ll need wagons to carry wood, to give them all they need before the trees start flourishing again. Naamah hopes they can tear the boat down to the ground, taking apart every piece of it, as if it never existed.
* * *
• • •
WHEN THEY CHOOSE A new place to settle, Naamah knows, they will choose it based largely on its proximity to water. Part of her wants to stay on a mountaintop and melt snow when she needs it. Part of her would be happy to go the rest of her life without seeing another body of water on the earth.
But that would only solve things for her, alone, if everyone else should die again. A prospect that never feels beyond what He might do. She tucks away the idea of her mountain home, in case she is spurned, and spared, again.
She turns her mind to planning the ecosystem of their new home, just as she planned their lives on the boat. Which animals, which plants, where to put the tents, where the water, what paths they might make from one thing to another. For a woman sentenced by God, Naamah is surprised by how often He allows her to take a godlike role.
* * *
• • •
THE PREDATORS ARE MORE CONFUSING. The snakes have to be let out before the birds because the snakes are prey to the birds. And the smaller birds are prey to the bigger birds. Timing it all is so overwhelming that Naamah wonders if it will ever be done.
On the day they release the cockatoos, one stays behind, perching on Naamah’s shoulder. When she brushes him away, he flutters nearby, then returns.
She pushes him off her shoulder. “Go on,” she says.
But he will not. “Jael,” he says.
“Jael,” she repeats.
She holds out her hand and he perches there, clinging precariously to her fingers because it’s clear that’s what she wants. They look at each other for a long time.
“Well, if you must stay, do your best not to bother anyone,” she says. “And that includes me.” She laughs.
Jael can tell she doesn’t remember, but he’s determined to be nearby when He reveals Himself to her outside the dream.
* * *
• • •
EVERYONE GROWS FOND OF JAEL. Naamah keeps nuts
in her pockets for him, which is not surprising, but so does Noah, who sometimes gives Jael a perch as well. Being around them all the time, Jael learns new things to say: Hello and Dear one.
Soon it is time to release the larger animals. They kill a horse and cut it into as many pieces as they can, so they don’t have to kill more. They hide most of it in a room filled with hay and Naamah’s most fragrant plants. They lay a small trail of meat from the bottom rooms to the ramp, leaving blood between the pieces. And then they hide themselves in the fragrant room, Japheth and Noah holding makeshift weapons, Adata and Ham barricading the door once everyone is inside.
They do this for the bears, the panthers, the tigers, one enormous animal after another, quiet on their padded feet. They keep resetting the trail with fresh meat. They think it will take two days, but they keep having to stop for Danit’s crying, and it helps all of them to take breaks, to spend time in the air.
Naamah is shocked at how the world, large as it ever was, seems more tenable now, seeing the land, dipped and heaped, ever-varying, instead of looking over the endlessly flat water. The world seems smaller simply by how her eyes take it in.
* * *
• • •
ON THE THIRD DAY, A brown bear strays from the path and finds their room.
Naamah peeks at it through a crack. She had been frustrated for so long by her inability to see the animals that she’s able to accept the bear, in all its glory, without a flinch. She takes in every hair, and if she thinks of God anymore, she thinks of Him as the infinite number of hairs over the bear’s body. Some have caught dust, some are shorter than others, some are not hairs at all but whiskers.
But that’s not quite right. Does she think of Him rarely, or is it always?
The bear wanders away.
* * *
• • •
EVENTUALLY THE BOAT IS CLEAR. They are left with wagons, boards, plants, seeds, dried fruits, and vegetables still in sand. Neela must tend to Danit, so only seven of them can drive the wagons and the carts they will pull behind them.