by Sarah Blake
Naamah works among the half-destroyed rooms of the boat—a piecework village of her own, fittingly mislaid compared to that of the angel’s making.
She goes through each piece to make sure they’ve missed nothing, but even in pieces the boat still smells of animals and their piss and shit. As she steps through it, she says to herself, This is the last time I will see these rooms. This is the last time I will smell this smell.
When she stumbles across one of the overhead door pulleys from the rooms of a dangerous animal, she twists her head around, as if one might still be beside her, and she dislodges Jael from his perch.
“Dear one,” he says.
She laughs. “I’m all right. Just spooked myself.”
“Hello,” he says.
“Don’t worry,” she adds. “We are quite alone, aren’t we?”
And it’s true, the rest of the family is elsewhere, tending to other things, to the docile animals. The carnivorous animals are gone. She wonders where they have all disappeared to, what new homes they have found.
* * *
• • •
ONE NIGHT, she wakes from a dream and she can’t help herself. With Jael on her shoulder, she walks out to where the angel lives. It takes a long time to find it—well into the next afternoon—everything made unfamiliar by the air. It’s a lake now, and her first thought is to dive in. But she knows that if she sets even a toe in the lake, the angel might kill her. Such is the anguish of a woman who has made herself clear. Even this close, the angel might feel her. And the children she cannot trust anymore.
She turns back.
* * *
• • •
AS SHE RETURNS, Noah sees her first and runs to her across the land. She watches his steps, the placing of his feet through patches of new growth.
“You’ve been gone for nearly two days.” He’s trying not to raise his voice at her, even though no one is near enough to hear. This is a habit from the boat that they no longer need. Soon they will reacquaint themselves with yelling, with moaning during sex, with the sounds they’d taught themselves to contain. Naamah feels more free just thinking about the sounds she might make. She likes thinking about the word alone.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Where were you?”
“I was scouting out a place we might settle.”
Noah wasn’t expecting such a practical answer. She had practiced it on the long walk back. He shakes his head as he thinks. “And was it a good fit? Could we go there?”
“No!” And though she had practiced this, too, the no still rushes out of her as if she might eat Noah, pluck him right off the earth.
He notices, but says calmly, “That’s too bad. Should I scout in another direction?”
“I will do it,” she says. She tries to smile at him, but when it comes out forced, she nods her head to hide it. And the action of nodding, some small motion forward, feels like permission to walk past him.
He follows a few steps behind as she walks back to the remains of the boat. She imagines him watching her, wondering what kind of woman she will be on land. And he is watching her, her steps, the same way she watched his. He notices the movement of her hips as her foot lands on a raised rock, like climbing a stair, but with an ease to it, her body moving only forward.
At first he thinks it’s new, a whole new curve of her body, but then he remembers. It is not new, but a thing that’s returning to her.
* * *
• • •
SO NAAMAH MAKES A HABIT out of scouting, hiking for days, away from the boat and back. She comes to anticipate the day she will travel far from the boat and not look back, a day she sees so vividly now, in such specific detail: how the wagons look, what animals remain, the new baby, Sadie’s humming. Even the exactness of the sight of the land feels as if it is about to fall into place.
First, she decides to head away from the angel, toward the rising sun. But at the end of the day, she has passed no water and has instead stumbled upon more mountains. She returns home to eat, refill her water, and tell of the quiet land.
The next trip is similar. More bare land. No water. Mountains ahead.
Soon it frustrates her, how often her path leads to land that cannot take them. How can the earth be free of all that water and not be ready for them, in any direction? And then she feels ashamed at how quickly her human arrogance pulses in her again.
Soon there are trips that do not end in mountains. On one trip, she thinks she sees a lake, very far ahead, but it would take too long to walk there. Noah would be upset at her absence. And he’s grown to trust her more with each trip, grown less worried. When she tells him about the lake, he suggests they keep looking, instead of allowing her a longer trip. “Better to find a river,” he says. And he’s right.
So many of her next trips end in desert that she wants to return on horseback to where she thought the lake might be. But Noah encourages her to continue. She wonders if he wants only to tire her, which isn’t the worst idea. She wants to tire, too. Maybe she would wake to some ambition besides survival.
Eventually a walk takes her to the largest lake she’s ever seen. When she stands at its edge, it reminds her of the flood, and she panics. She falls to her knees, into the lake. The water hits her face and she grabs at her clothes in the water. She sees a fish dart around her legs. She breathes in and out, focusing on the feeling of the mud until her heart stops racing.
She returns with news of the large lake as if it were a great discovery, but Noah still wants them to continue until they find a river. Again he offers to do a trip himself.
“No,” Naamah says, but she’s not sure why she insists.
* * *
• • •
FINALLY NAAMAH FINDS A RIVER. It’s not terribly far from where the angel is, but it feels far enough to keep her from wandering there. And the river is extraordinary. Some parts still, some rushing forth, some wide and some narrow, some banks rocky and some so slight she wonders how the water does not overwhelm them.
Then there are the hot springs. They let steam off, curling into the air, reminding her of the roundworms falling out of the horse’s intestines, how she’d imagined them. Naamah undresses and steps in. She closes her eyes. She imagines her life becoming a most beautiful thing. But that includes a vision of herself surrounded by people—people who died and people who will never be born. It nearly breaks her.
* * *
• • •
THE FAMILY CELEBRATES THE NEWS of the river the night Naamah returns. They build a fire bigger than they’ve built in a year, bigger than they need to, because they can. And they bring out all the wine. It’s too heavy to bring with them anyway. Everything has been weighed and judged. Everything is prepared.
As they dance and sing under the stars, Naamah wonders why it feels more appropriate to be raucous at night. The sun is its own glory; they would look stunning beneath it in their joy.
Naamah walks around the fire until she finds a spot where a light wind blows the heat at her constantly. It hurts her skin even though she is at a distance where she can’t be hurt.
Jael leaves Naamah’s side for longer than he ever has. He flies around each member of the family, his eyes catching the light of the fire.
* * *
• • •
NAAMAH WANDERS FROM THE GROUP, drunk and happy. When else will I know all the land around me, in all directions, so well? she thinks. Never.
She doesn’t know what to call most of the plants she sees, but she’s pleased by their growth. “Well done, you green trouble!” she yells out.
Ahead of her she sees an Egyptian vulture, shining in the night. She stops, wondering whether to change course. She looks at her arms to see if she is shining, too, if it is only the moonlight, but she is as dark as the night.
“Hello, Naamah,” the vulture says.
“I am the voice of the Lord.”
“No, you are a vulture.”
“That, and the voice of the Lord.”
“You,” Naamah asks, “are a thing of divinity, vulture?”
“I am. I am the Metatron.”
“I’ve never met, never touched a divine thing. Unless I am one, or the animals—”
“You are not.”
“May I touch you?”
The vulture nods.
She runs her fingers over his ruff of feathers. As she touches them, her dreams return to her and she recoils.
“Jael!” she yells. “Jael!”
Her family does not hear her, but Jael does.
“Naamah, calm down,” the vulture says.
“You could have come on any hike, all these days, but you wait until now, when I’m drunk and alone, when the light plays tricks on me. Sarai was right.”
“I am the voice of the Lord, Naamah. I came to you when I was able.”
“Bullshit.”
He opens his wings and grows large, closes them and returns to his normal size.
Naamah staggers back from him, and Jael nearly flies into her. She turns and gathers him in her arms. “I’m so sorry I didn’t remember,” she says.
“Dear one,” Jael says.
The vulture says, “Can we begin?”
Jael wants to attack him again, here in the real world, but Naamah holds his wings tight to his sides.
“Go ahead,” she says.
The vulture raises his beak in the air and then lowers it. “Hello, Naamah,” he says, in a kinder voice than he has ever had before. This is the voice of God.
“What a strange creature you’ve chosen for your voice,” she says.
“Would you rather a burning bush?”
“I would prefer that you never destroy anything here, ever again.”
He laughs. “It wouldn’t hurt the bush to burn with my voice.”
“Then, yes, I would have preferred that.”
“I don’t know. You have your bird and I have mine.”
“Are you . . . making a joke?”
“Is that so surprising?”
Naamah eases her grip on Jael, and he moves up to her shoulder.
“Hello,” Jael says.
“I’m sorry, Jael. I can’t give you your voice here.”
“Why not?” Naamah asks.
“I misspoke. I can give it to him, but I won’t. It’s not to be cruel,” He says, knowing what Naamah’s thinking. “It’s in the hope that one day he’ll return to where he belongs.”
Naamah considers this, and then says, “Why are you here?”
“I wanted to speak with you.”
“But you didn’t want me to remember our talk.”
“I didn’t need you to, no.”
“Well, say it, then.”
“It’s not an it. I don’t have an order for you. A command. I want to talk.”
Naamah laughs and starts to walk away.
“You’re given a chance to talk to God and you walk away?”
She looks back at Him but keeps walking. “I’m drunk, God. If you just want to chat, come back another time.” She laughs again.
“Do you not fear me, Naamah?”
“Do what you will,” she says, turning her back on Him again, moving off into the dark. “Do what you will.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Their new home is close enough that, if they need to, they can empty their wagons and come back for more. But Naamah will never come back. She knows this as she sits in her wagon, holding the ropes, letting them hang, the slightest sagging arc down to the yoke that leads to the head of an ox.
Jael is on her shoulder, and now she is as mindful of him as he’s always been of her.
She remembers more dreams than the ones with Jael—so many dreams that she is having trouble telling which happened and which didn’t. In one, she is enjoying a field of neatly cut grass during a sunset, enjoying it so much that she lies down to sleep, and when she wakes she sees hundreds of small spiderwebs revealed by the dew, each droplet reflecting the grass back to itself, in an upside-down and curving world that could not exist. Even now she startles thinking of the life in the grass, but she can’t place where that field might have been, how old she was, anything.
But the memory of talking with God is clear, even if there’s hardly a reason to recall it. She finds herself going over every word in her head.
And as if she had called Him, the vulture returns with His kind voice: “Good morning.”
Around them, though the wagons continue, her family looks smeared, slowing down through time. “I guess it would be foolish to ask if they are okay,” she says.
He laughs, perched beside her.
She asks, “Won’t the animals be discomforted by your presence?”
“Do you think they will? I could stop them as well, but I thought you’d want to continue your good pace.”
Naamah finds it easier to talk to Him if she doesn’t look at the vulture. “Yes, I would like us to reach the river by nightfall.”
“Terrific. Let’s continue our chat.”
“I like your laugh,” she blurts, as if the thought forced itself through her lips.
“You do. And you like how it comes out of the vulture’s beak, that juxtaposition.”
“Yes.” And then she asks, “Do you cry?”
“If vultures cry, then yes.”
“Don’t you know if vultures cry?”
“I do. But I don’t always take the time to remember.” The vulture isn’t moving at all, besides his mouth, but Naamah has the sense that an adolescent boy has taken his place. “Where would all the mystery be?” He says, leaning back and swinging His feet out.
“Is mystery something that matters to you?” Naamah asks.
“Yes. Don’t you like mystery?”
“I’m not sure.” Naamah focuses on the land as it slips past, under the ox’s feet, but it unsettles her stomach. “And I didn’t mean, do you cry when you speak through the vulture? I meant, do you cry, as the Lord?”
“Ah, well, that’s another matter.” The young man of Him is sitting upright again, feet tucked under the bench. “No, I don’t.” After a beat, He adds, “Would you like to know if vultures can cry?”
“I thought you didn’t—”
“I tried not to, but I thought about it anyway.” The vulture flaps his wings. “There’s never been a vulture that has cried yet! Although they do have tear ducts, which could theoretically produce tears. One day one will get something stuck in its eye and it will cry profusely.”
“Like one day, that’s a possibility? Or like one day, for sure, you know it?”
“One day. I know it.”
“What is it like, to experience time like that?”
“Tricky. Trying to figure out if that vulture cried before now or after.”
Naamah laughs.
“What?”
“I didn’t think you’d find anything tricky.”
“Oh yes. Loads of stuff. Time, for one.”
“What’s another?”
“You’re another.”
“Me?”
“Mmm, you’re very tricky. You verge on the absurd.”
Naamah laughs a single laugh, like she was caught off guard.
“You want to know why,” He says. “That’s understandable. You’re unpredictable. I honestly could not guess if you were going to choose to stay with the angel or with your family. I saw both paths clearly.”
“You know about that, huh?”
“Naamah, the angel is a part of me.”
“You mean—”
“Yes.”
“I’ve had sex with you?”
she says.
“No,” He says.
“No.”
“Do you want to have sex with me?”
“No!”
“It’s okay if you do.”
“I don’t!” She shuffles a little away from the vulture.
“You couldn’t even if you wanted to. Only with forms I could take on. And what would that be, anyway?”
“I’m not thinking about that, because I don’t want to have sex with you.”
“Okay, okay.” He laughs. “What do you want to talk about?”
Naamah pushes a breath out. “You know what.”
“The flood.”
“Yes,” she says.
“Bethel.”
She looks at Him, looks into His vulture’s eye. “Yes.”
“She could have come onto the ark, Naamah. She didn’t want to.”
“No, she couldn’t. Don’t do that. She thought I would be punished if she came on the boat, in case it denied your word in some way.”
“I went to her after that.”
“What?” Naamah says, her eyes filling with tears.
“I let her know she could go to you. But she was ready, Naamah.”
The tears roll down her cheeks and fall onto her thighs.
“I’m sorry. It was her decision.”
Naamah shakes her head and yells, “Did you talk to everyone before talking to me?”
“You know I didn’t.”
“So why? Why come to me now? Do I have a decision to make? Some task to take on?” She pushes tears off her face with her fingers, moving fast and sloppy.
“No.”
“No, I’m just the absurd woman.”
“Naamah—”
“Leave! Leave now!” she yells, and then more calmly, “Come back again if you need to. But leave now.”
He does.
* * *
• • •
NAAMAH HEARS DANIT CRYING. She looks over at Noah driving his wagon. He sees her flushed cheeks and he mouths, “Are you okay?”