by Sarah Blake
“Until you accept Him, we will all be punished, all around you. Maybe I am just the first.” She moves away from Naamah.
“Sadie, please.”
Sadie walks off in the direction of the newly fenced-off field of goats, some of whom have had kids. Past them are the hutches of rabbits, who have multiplied so quickly. Everywhere Sadie goes, she will be surrounded by flourishing.
* * *
• • •
NAAMAH IS SOAKING in a hot spring when the vulture comes to her again, already carrying the voice of God.
“I didn’t like our last conversation,” He says.
“Then why come talk to me again?”
“Are you not worried by what Sadie said?”
“No. It can take a long time to get pregnant. It’s not uncommon, and neither is being upset by it.”
“I could keep it from taking a long time.”
“I know that.” Naamah is angry. “But you chose her for this.” She stands up, out of the water, her brown body shining brilliantly in the sun. “She will get pregnant. She will have countless children. And if she were not to, that would punish you, not me.”
“Yet you are upset, too.”
“If she were never to get pregnant, I would help her find happiness in her life.”
“You would help her abandon her faith.” His voice begins to boom louder than His vulture body should allow.
“If she chose to wrap up her faith in her fertility, then yes!”
His vulture’s eyes begin to turn white, and He raises His wings. “Why shouldn’t I punish you, Naamah?”
“My life or death means nothing now!”
He calms down. His eyes turn brown once more in His vulture’s yellow head. “Do you provoke me intentionally?” He asks.
Naamah slouches back into the water. “Yes. I’ve never seen you outside of these ridiculous bodies.”
And then, louder than anything Naamah has ever heard before, He shouts, “If you want to see me, see me.” He spreads His wings to block the sky, and everything is replaced with blackness unlike anything she could imagine. She lifts her hands out of the water, feels the air catching on her fingers, hears the water drip from them, but all she sees is black. Then His voice speaks again.
“Anything that comes from the blackness is a creation. Nothing can be born of light because light is already. But from me can come all things. From me can come a world the likes of which you cannot fathom because when you came out of the blackness you had not the power to fathom it. Blame me not for your limitations, Naamah, but take with you what I offer.”
Though Naamah can see nothing, she closes her eyes. She turns her body, crosses her arms over the edge of the hot spring, and buries her head in them. In this one position she has experienced darkness close to this, her own thick flesh canceling the light.
“Is this not what you wanted?” the voice continues. “Look upon me, Naamah.”
Her body is lifted out of the springs, her face forced out of her arms, her eyes opened.
“Am I not deserving of your love?”
He casts her onto the ground. A cloud of dirt rises around her, and she coughs until it settles. When she opens her eyes, He is gone, and a layer of dirt covers every inch of her. She walks weakly to the river and wades in, until the cold water is over her head, and then she swims for the first time since the days she swam from the boat.
She swims until everything hurts. She swims until she has the choice to die in the water, if only she should stop. And then, when she’s sure she doesn’t want to die, she swims back to the river’s bed.
* * *
• • •
NOAH FINDS NAAMAH COLLAPSED BY the river. He picks her up onto his shoulder and carries her home, puts her into bed. On her third day of sleep, Jael returns from a trip with Japheth. Jael sits beside her, takes her finger in his beak. Japheth asks if there’s anything he can do, but Noah turns him away. He turns everyone away as Naamah’s sleep continues. And as the days pass, even he begins to leave her, to spend his days as he might if she were gone, if she had never been.
* * *
• • •
IN HIS OWN TENT, Japheth draws a lake he’s discovered—the angel’s lake. He has walked all around it, and now, on the canvas, he marks its length in steps. Adata touches the new lake. Japheth tells her of the wildflowers already beginning to grow there, the sight of the mountains around it. She revels in the new stories he brings, and he touches her stomach.
“When do you think I will be able to feel the baby kick?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” she says. “You could ask Ham when he felt Danit.”
“Do you feel it kicking?”
She smiles. “Yes.”
He kisses her. “Should I be worried about my mother, do you think?”
“Not yet,” she says.
* * *
• • •
JAEL GOES TO SLEEP beside Naamah. In his dream he is perched in a rain forest he remembers, and there she is.
“Are you okay?” he asks. “This doesn’t look like one of your dreams.”
“It’s your dream this time,” she says. “This is where you lived before the flood.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“It is,” she says.
“What happened to you?”
“God showed Himself to me. And I decided to live. I don’t remember more than that.”
“Will you wake up?”
“I think so.”
“Noah is worried about you.”
“Not my children?”
“No,” he says.
“We have trained them to find nothing unusual.”
Jael nods.
“Will you come back here, do you think?”
Jael looks around. He shuffles to the left on the branch. “When you are well.”
“I will miss you.”
“Won’t we still see each other in our dreams?”
“Maybe.”
“I won’t go unless we will. Promise me.”
“Okay,” she says, “I promise.”
“You can’t promise it, I know. Even I know that.”
“You’re right, but it felt good to say it.”
“Yeah? All right, me too.” He thinks for a second before yelling, “I promise you all the fish you can eat!”
Naamah laughs. “I promise you all the seeds you can eat!”
“I promise you the best sunsets!”
“I promise you the best days!”
“I promise you love and happiness!”
“I—” She gathers him up in her arms.
“It does feel good to say it,” he says.
“It does,” she says, beginning to cry.
“You should wake up, Naamah.”
“I should,” she says. She looks at her own body in the branches of the forest, shafts of light breaking through the canopy. She catches sight of a skink on the floor of the forest. She wonders when she will see an animal and not remember the ways in which she cared for it.
TWENTY-SEVEN
When Jael wakes, Naamah is still asleep, but her breath is steady, and she does not sweat, and she is not pale. All is well—she’s just asleep.
The rest of them carry on with their lives, which means that even the dread around the prospect of Naamah’s death is something they can become accustomed to. In her absence, they tend her garden. Jael continues to visit her in his dreams. Japheth starts going out again on his horse. The map grows larger in the tent. Adata’s stomach grows larger, too. For the first time, Danit laughs at a face that Ham makes. Neela starts to paint again.
The birds come as God said they would. Sadie sees them first and yells until everyone is out of their tents. Together they follow the dark sheet of birds to the garden. The sun comes through gap
s in their formation like sparks.
When the birds land, the ground can’t be seen. They peck and peck. And when they leave again, the noise of their shuffling wings is tremendous. Neela covers Danit’s ears. Everything falls quiet again as the birds fly higher, as they catch the currents of air.
* * *
• • •
WEEKS LATER, STILL ASLEEP, Naamah is lying in the tree in the rain forest again when Sarai comes to her. “Am I dying?” Naamah asks her.
“No,” she says. “You saw God. Your body needs to rest.”
“Don’t I need to eat? Drink water?”
Sarai smiles. “No. Your body has been forced into a kind of hibernation in order to recover. Everything has slowed.”
“How are you? I heard God spoke to you.”
Sarai reaches behind her neck and gathers her long black hair, which is down now but still plaited and studded with gold. She pulls it over her shoulder and lies back on a branch. The two women, lounging there, look like the world was made for them. Their bodies dappled, their bodies round and soft, the tissue of their breasts resting to the sides of their rib cages, their arms strong, their legs stronger, their heads the most peculiar things in the rain forest.
“Did He tell you that?” asks Sarai.
“Yes.”
“Speaking to Him is not like speaking to you. It’s as if He forgets I was human.”
“Are you not human anymore?”
“Decidedly not.”
Naamah raises herself up on her right elbow and her breasts fall to the right. If Sarai isn’t human anymore, perhaps she isn’t either. Perhaps in another place, she could look upon her body and know what new thing she is becoming.
* * *
• • •
IN ANOTHER DREAM, Naamah asks Sarai to take her to the strangest place she’s ever been.
Sarai takes them to a beach of white sand and says, “It looks like a cloud was cursed and turned to stone.”
“Every cloud,” Naamah says.
“No! Wait!” Sarai yells. And then they are at a lake that’s red.
“Can I touch it?” Naamah asks.
Sarai looks at her. “You’re dreaming, Naamah. You can do whatever you want.”
Naamah puts her hand under the surface of the water and looks at it, in perfect stillness. “Can nothing hurt me in the dream?”
“I don’t think so.”
Naamah’s hand fades to nothing, and she thinks, After all this, am I only becoming a ghost?
“You’re waking up,” Sarai says.
Naamah’s whole body is gone now, but she can still hear Sarai.
“If I don’t see you again,” Sarai says, “it was good to see you.”
* * *
• • •
IN THE TENT, Naamah feels her mouth first. She can feel that it tastes bad, smells bad. Her tongue is thick and stiff, and when she opens her mouth, she takes a breath in like a gasp, straight to her belly. She coughs. She opens her eyes.
“Hello,” says Jael.
She can’t speak yet, but she smiles. She moves her tongue around her mouth. She feels the two lines carved into her tooth. She was already beginning to forget them before she fell asleep. Everything she can do to her body, her body can absorb.
Jael flies off and returns with Noah. She tries to sit up, but when she can’t, Noah lifts her, and she rests her head on him.
“I have water. Do you want to try to drink?” he asks.
She nods into his shoulder. He leans her back and holds a bag of water to her lips and tilts it up. Swallowing the water hurts, but she does it.
“I can get you some broth. Do you want to eat?”
She nods again, so he lays her back down, gets a bowl of broth, and brings it back. He places it on the ground and looks for something to prop her up. Jael flies around the tent as if he’s helping. Soon she’s propped up, and Noah is spooning broth to her lips and she’s drinking it down. But Jael doesn’t stop flying around the top of the tent, chirping and whistling, making every sound he can make.
* * *
• • •
NAAMAH REGAINS HER STRENGTH. She takes it slow. The sun seems too bright, but every day it gets more tolerable as she forgets the depths that God showed her.
Soon she’s strong enough to watch Danit, and Neela leaves Danit with her constantly. Danit crawls around Naamah’s feet as Naamah practices standing. She shifts her weight from one foot to another.
Naamah says to Danit, “Maybe I should be down there with you, huh?”
Naamah sits, and then leans forward until her palms hit the ground. She rocks back and forth until she can get up on her knees. She moves ahead her left knee, her right hand, and then her right knee and left hand.
“No. No, no. This is worse.” She laughs.
Danit laughs back.
Naamah crawls her arms out until she can fall to her side. “What do you think? How much longer will I be like this?”
Danit climbs up on her until she’s standing. She whacks one hand on Naamah’s shoulder. She bends her knee and her body dips and she loses her balance and she falls back onto her butt. She looks at Naamah as if the ground has offended her.
“Oh, baby, it happens,” Naamah says.
Danit cries, and it could be for any number of reasons.
* * *
• • •
ADATA COMES BACK TO HER tent one day to find Danit and Naamah there. Japheth’s map has extended to the highest point of the tent, and Naamah’s lying in the middle of it all, looking up, dictating to Danit, a river, a mountain, a lake.
Adata doesn’t make a sound.
“And where there is nothing marked, that is the desert,” Naamah is saying.
Danit spots Adata and crawls over to her. Naamah cranes her neck to make sure Danit isn’t leaving the tent.
“Adata!” she says.
“Hi, Naamah.”
“I hope it’s okay that we’re in here.”
Adata comes over to her. “It is,” she says. She sits down with her stomach large in her lap.
Naamah puts her hand, palm up, on Adata’s leg, and Adata holds it. “How are you doing?” Naamah asks.
“I’m good. Tired.”
Danit crawls over to them and touches Adata’s belly.
“Baby,” Adata says.
Naamah looks back at the map.
Adata asks, “What happened to you?”
“I don’t know,” Naamah says, because that’s what she’s been saying to everyone.
“You know,” Adata says.
Naamah looks at her. “Why do you want to know?”
Adata shakes her head.
“What is it?”
“Are we in danger, Naamah?”
“No. I would have told you that. We wouldn’t still be here.”
“So nothing did this to you?”
“Nothing you need to worry about.”
“See! You’re doing it again. It was something that did this to you, but you think none of us need to fear it. How can you know that?”
“I know it because if He wanted to harm you, He would already have done it. His intentions aren’t hidden.”
“God did that to you?”
“I don’t think He knew the effect it would have. I don’t think He—”
“No. Stop. Just stop,” Adata says, and she gets up and starts to leave the tent.
“He’s not what you think He is,” Naamah says.
Adata spins around. “He has to be!” She puts her hands in her hair and takes them out again. “He has to be because that’s why I’ve accepted all of this!”
“I’m glad you’re here.”
“That doesn’t mean enough, Naamah. Not for me.”
“Yes, it does.”
“I sho
uld’ve died in that flood,” Adata says.
“No, you—”
“You should have, too. He could have started again.”
“Maybe, but we made it easier for Him by caring for all of the animals.”
“I’m not solely a caretaker, Naamah.”
“Not to me.”
“To Him?”
“I don’t speak for Him.”
Adata starts to leave again and Danit follows her.
“Adata,” Naamah says. “Danit.”
“I’ve got her,” Adata says over her shoulder.
Naamah stays, looking at the marks Japheth has made in the tent. Soon he will have mapped out everything he can reach with a horse with the intention of returning. But with a project such as this, he will not be content to stop. When he proposes to Adata that they move on from here, Naamah imagines she will agree to it.
* * *
• • •
THE NEXT WEEK, it rains so much one night that it reminds everyone of the flood, even if only in their sleep. In the morning, the river has flooded. Tops of bushes look like they’re sitting on top of the water, and Naamah is reminded of the heads of the dead children as she looks out across it.
Neela comes up next to her. “Will you sit for me, Naamah? For a painting?”
“You want to paint me? Why?”
“Honestly? We thought you were going to die, Naamah. I thought we would lose Noah, too, if you died. And I want something of you, if that makes sense.”
Naamah looks at the river, whose boundaries were never boundaries, whose water was never its own, just a collection of water cutting a path. Should the water be named river if it’s only that? Should it be named at all?
“I will sit for you,” she says.
* * *
• • •
EVERY DAY NEELA PAINTS HER. Naamah has never been so still in her life. She sits cross-legged in the dirt, and she tries to enjoy the hours. She focuses on the warmth of the dirt on her legs, the sunlight on her arms. Some days Jael sits with her.