Naamah, Page 3

  Still panting from the scare, she leans on the wall across from the broken door, tries to convince her body that she is at rest as she listens to the trapped walrus whimper. Soon the walrus’s mate begins to whimper as well.

  Naamah steadies herself and approaches the door, her hand raised and open until she can feel the tusk, hard and rougher than she thought it would be. For a moment, the walrus startles. She tries to imagine breathing in a bright light and breathing it out again through her hand and into the tusk. She runs her other hand to the bottom of the tusk, and uses both hands to push gently up. Not that she has the strength to move it. Only to suggest to the walrus that moving it in that direction might free it.

  Naamah hears the walrus shake, the grunt of effort, the creak of wood. And the tusk is free. The walrus and Naamah both back away from the door, and finally she runs to get someone to help her mend it, unsure of whether the walrus understands the weakness of the door, if the walrus would charge it, given the chance.

  * * *

  • • •

  OUT IN THE DESERT, when the pitch was ready, Naamah dipped a bucket into it. They would need a sealed bucket to shit in, to clean up with, and she knew no one else would think of this.

  She covered five buckets in all, and hung them on a branch to dry. She laid out a tarp beneath them to catch any black drops, until she remembered the coming flood. The earth hardly needed protection from such a small offense. Still, she felt sorry for the ground beneath her, so she lay down and apologized to it. The buckets hung above, like heads in the tree. The image would haunt her for months, almost any time she closed her eyes.

  * * *

  • • •

  NAAMAH SITS AT THE END of the hallway as Japheth and Adata mend the door. “The animals are uneasy,” she says.

  Japheth and Adata agree.

  “What can we do?”

  “I don’t know, Mom.” Japheth leans against the door and looks at her. “We try to keep them moving. We run them around the deck, the ones we can. We check in on them. We feed them. We clean up after them.”

  She knows. She knows they clean up more of their shit than seems possible, coaxing them into an adjoining room to feed them while their room is cleaned, then switching them back again, so one room always smells of shit and one of blood.

  She also knows that cleaning up after them means stealing litters of babies that have come too soon, before any land can be seen. Mostly the babies are fed to other animals, but sometimes a mother eats her own young. Once, when Naamah could still see the animals, she was so tired that she threw a litter of eight mice overboard instead of finding a more useful place for them to die. It was her job then to deal with the young. Now it’s Noah’s. Neither of them can bring themselves to make the children do it.

  “I’ve heard Sadie sing to them,” Adata says, not looking up from her work, inspecting the door, wondering if they should replace it entirely.

  Naamah didn’t know that. “What does she sing to them?”

  “Lullabies.”

  * * *

  • • •

  AS WORK ON THE BOAT PICKED UP, Naamah sat down with her sons and their new wives.

  “You cannot have sex on the boat,” she said.

  They were silent. The women had not had time yet to get to know Naamah. They’d thought she was sitting them down to welcome them to the family, formally, or at least warmly. Her sons knew better.

  “This is not to say you shouldn’t enjoy each other,” she went on. “You just cannot have sex.” Naamah continued, in case they didn’t understand. “We don’t know how long the waters will last, and we can’t afford to have a pregnancy in that—”

  “We get it,” Adata said.

  “Good.” Naamah looked to her sons, who nodded. “Good,” she repeated, looking to Sadie and Neela. They kept their eyes down. Naamah decided it was best to leave them to discuss it among themselves.

  * * *

  • • •

  “WHAT WAS SEX LIKE with your husband?” Naamah asked Bethel.

  “He liked to hold up my legs, and sit straight up while I was lying down. He liked it because he could watch my breasts bounce. I watched him sometimes, but mostly I kept my eyes closed. Sometimes we would wake in the night and both want to have sex, and I would raise my leg slightly, turn open my hips, so he could go in from behind and we’d hardly have to move. That might have been my favorite.”

  “Really your favorite, or only because it was a rare occasion?”

  “I don’t know. I think really my favorite.”

  “Have you ever had sex standing up?” Naamah asked.

  “No. But I’ve always wanted to.”

  “We could do it.”

  “No, I think I’ve always wanted to with a man,” Bethel said.

  Naamah shouldn’t have felt rejected in that moment, but she did.

  * * *

  • • •

  LATE ONE NIGHT, Naamah passes Ham and Neela’s room and hears them having sex. Neela is moaning, and there is a rhythmic thudding that doesn’t come from anything else.

  Naamah finds Noah on the deck. He is holding a pole with a looped rope on one end, hanging, suspended. He is running an animal. He lets the animal lead him around the deck, but always keeping his strength in his arms, a tension against the pole.

  “What do you have there?” Naamah asks.

  “A wolf,” he says.

  “Can you stand still with her for a second?”

  “Him. And sure.”

  Noah stands and turns on a pivot as the wolf makes his way in a loop around him.

  “Neela and Ham are having sex.”

  “Do you think we need to do something about that?”

  “I know we can’t handle a pregnant woman right now, on top of everything else.”

  “No, but maybe he’s pulling out.”

  “You know that doesn’t always work.”

  “I know,” Noah says, “but how much longer will we even be on the ark?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And maybe it would be nice to have a child around?”

  “Nice?”

  “Naamah, come on.”

  “Nice for who? Not for the child. To grow up here.”

  “No child would grow up here. It would just be for a time. A time a child wouldn’t even remember.”

  “We don’t know that,” Naamah says.

  “We don’t, but they’re adults. They have to do what they need to.”

  “You better not talk like this around them. We’ll end up with three pregnant women.”

  “I won’t,” Noah says.

  She looks at the end of the pole, wonders which direction the wolf is looking.

  “I promise I won’t,” he says again.

  “What’s the wolf doing?” she asks.

  Just then the far end of the pole drops down to the deck, making a faint tap they both hear.

  “Naamah!” Noah screams.

  By instinct she raises her arms, crosses them in front of herself. The wolf leaps, going for her throat. She manages to block him with her arms, but the force of his jump pushes her back, over the railing, and she crashes into the water.

  * * *

  • • •

  NOAH STOMPS ON THE DECK and yells and yells. Shem hears first and starts shouting, too, as he runs to the deck. Soon the whole boat is a mess of animal noises. Even the wolf is scared. Noah makes himself large and boxes the wolf into a corner.

  “Grab the net,” Noah yells to Shem, keeping his eyes trained on the wolf’s eyes.

  Japheth and Ham are there now, and they help Shem get the net over the wolf, fold him up in it, and get him on his side.

  “Take him back down to his room, Japheth,” Noah says.

  Japheth nods and drags the limp wolf along the dec
k.

  Noah rushes over to the side of the boat, which is still shaking with every startled animal. “And calm those animals down!”

  “What happened, Dad?” asks Ham.

  “I got distracted and the damn thing chewed the rope off the stick.”

  “That doesn’t sound so unusual.”

  “It lunged at your mother.”

  At the same instant, the boys figure it out. “Where is she, Dad?” asks Shem.

  “Why haven’t you gone in after her yet?” Ham yells, his voice cracking.

  “I would!” Noah shouts, scanning the water. “I mean I will. But I can’t tell where she is.”

  All of them are looking in the water now.

  “Can you see her?” he asks them.

  * * *

  • • •

  NAAMAH FEELS A PAIN burst through her hips and shoulders, from one side of her body to the other, as she crashes into the water. Blood is spilling out of the gash on her arm from the teeth of the wolf. Her clothes rise over her body and she knows she is falling deeper. When her clothes settle, she has trouble telling which way is up.

  This is when the woman comes to her, the one she has seen before.

  “You are safe,” she says.

  Naamah’s eyes scramble over her black skin.

  “You can speak here.”

  Naamah opens her mouth and the water does not come into it. She closes it again.

  The woman waits.

  Naamah moves her mouth more slowly. She can feel there a kind of film, which she seems to create with the parting of her lips. She touches her fingers to her open mouth. It feels like the film that forms on top of partly churned milk—what people call skin, though it’s hard to imagine skin without the firmness of the body beneath it. This is a weightless skin. This is impossible.

  She spots the blood still leaving her arm in trails like a hair’s curl, as if she might fondle it. “Am I okay?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Will I be?”

  She nods.

  “What now?” Naamah asks.

  “I bring you back to the ark.”

  “You know about the boat?”

  She nods.

  “Who are you?”

  “I am an angel of the Lord.”

  “Shit.” Naamah’s eyes scramble again. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  “You have nothing to fear, Naamah.”

  “Nothing to fear? I have everything to fear! What are you doing down here?”

  The angel doesn’t respond.

  Naamah knows what it could be. “You are cleaning up the dead.”

  The angel shakes her head.

  “You are hiding the massacre.”

  “No.”

  “Where are the dead, then?” Naamah spots a tree and swims toward it, uses it to orient herself, swims down. Her ears begin to hurt.

  The angel follows her patiently. “Here, let me help with that.” She touches Naamah and Naamah’s ears stop hurting and she gains a sort of gravity in the water.

  “Where did they go?” Naamah asks.

  “Do you have no other questions?”

  Naamah stops, calms herself. She can tell the angel is beautiful, but she can’t describe her. The angel flickers in and out of focus like any object in the water, but this seems more calculated, as if to mislead Naamah, so that she might sound mad if she ever tried to describe her to anyone. She searches for some detail about her to hold on to—the color of her eyes, a scar, anything.

  “Are you here to judge me?” Naamah asks.

  “No.”

  “Do you regret me as He does?”

  “He does not regret you.”

  “He does not regret Noah. I am just loved by the man He does not regret.”

  “Is that not enough?”

  “No,” Naamah says, “that is not enough.”

  The angel says nothing.

  “Do you regret me?” Naamah asks again.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “But you will stay to find out, won’t you?”

  And then Naamah is in Noah’s arms, choking and coughing as he pulls her backward, through the water, toward the swing.

  THREE

  Naamah doesn’t swim again for days. Her family doesn’t want her to, of course, but she doesn’t want to either. She is quiet at meals. Ever since she’s been back on the boat, she can see the animals again. Perhaps she was close to death, she thinks; perhaps she’s been reborn in some way. Or maybe her restored vision is a gift from the angel, to keep Naamah from getting herself killed on the boat. Whatever the cause, it brings her no happiness. She sees nothing but hooves that need trimming, nails that need clipping, flaking skin in their fur. Every sight a chore to be done.

  She starts to spend her days and nights on the deck because she can’t bear to go to her room and walk past all their doors.

  One night, a gerbil makes its way to the deck and runs to her for warmth. It’s not the smartest animal, but it’s figured out that much.

  “Now I have to go downstairs, don’t I?” she says.

  She places the gerbil in a pouch in her clothes and drapes a blanket around herself. She finds a closet in the hall downstairs, opens the door, lays the blanket down at her feet, and starts to fill it with things. A cube of pitch, a pitch candle, a wire stand, a metal bowl, a metal spoon, a small wipe cloth, a plank of wood, a hammer, and nails. Then she takes up the corners of the blanket and carries all of it to the room where the gerbils live.

  Inside, she takes the gerbil out of the pouch and lowers it gently to the ground. She spots right away where it chewed its way out.

  “I will not punish you for this,” Naamah says. “You did what you were born to do.”

  The gerbil’s mate comes up and investigates the new smell on the gerbil, the chill the deck left on its fur. The gerbil’s mate’s teeth are overgrown. One has gotten so long it’s curved around the creature’s head in a tight spiral, up and around the side, toward the brain.

  “You haven’t been chewing the way you should, have you? I’ll have to come back with the clippers. I don’t know why someone hasn’t mentioned you. Have you been hiding?”

  She sets up the wire stand, arranges the candle beneath it, the metal bowl above, and then places the cube on top. She lights the candle, and while the pitch melts she hammers the plank of wood over the hole that the gerbil made.

  “You should let her help you next time.”

  Once the pitch is melted, she lowers the spoon into it. It immediately starts to firm up at the coolness of the spoon, but she stirs until the spoon is as hot as the pitch. Then she drips the pitch over the new plank of wood.

  “I’m going to make this door a little less appealing to chew through. We can’t be doing this every night, can we?”

  She spreads the pitch with the back of the spoon, a thin, even coat over the entire length of the bottom of the door, starting a little high so she can catch every drip.

  “If He regrets you, gerbil, why save you, do you think? When the water recedes, won’t you create all the new gerbils just the same? Are you so different, gerbil of the new world?”

  The gerbil bites her hard on the leg. She yelps and hits the gerbil smack on the head with the spoon, and it dies instantly. The other gerbil comes over and starts eating him. Naamah smashes her on the head as well.

  I don’t know if we brought enough pairs, she thinks. They were supposed to bring seven pairs of the clean animals, only one pair of the unclean animals, but that seemed too risky to Noah and Naamah. There are at least two pairs of every animal on the boat. But even if she has not driven gerbils to extinction, she wonders, Am I wicked?

  She lies down and falls asleep there, in the small room, beside the bodies of the gerbils.

  * * *

  • • •


  WHEN THEY LIVED in the village, a man used to come through every so often, quietly asking for the dead. Once, Naamah came upon him out in the desert, dissecting a body. Around it were bowls, each with a different part of the body she’d never seen.

  He flushed at the sight of her. He started apologizing, but she shook her head, insisting she was fine. When he finally relaxed, she asked him to name the parts in the bowls—a liver, a heart. That was the first time she’d seen a full tongue. She didn’t realize how far back it went into her throat. In the bowl, it resembled a penis. He commented on her tough stomach. At the time, she’d thought this man’s work merely strange; now she wondered if it was wickedness.

  Then healers began to come to the village to learn from him. He was not a healer himself, but he taught many men, and many midwives, too. He cannot be solely wicked, Naamah thought.

  * * *

  • • •

  “YOU HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT since you fell in the water,” Shem says.

  “Have I?”

  “Yes. Worried.”

  “I think I’ve been worried this whole time.”

  Shem smiles. “Something different.”

  She shrugs.

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.”

  “I’m sorry. You’re right.”

  “What happened when you fell into the water?”

  “It hurt. It hurt so much I passed out, and your father rescued me. What about up here? That’s where things were really happening.”

  “Not much.”

  “You too, huh?”

  “Okay, okay. At first, we didn’t know you’d fallen in. Dad told us to deal with the wolf, and Japheth took it back to its room. Dad went to the railing, and that’s when we realized what had happened. We looked for you in the dark, and you were nowhere. And then the moon came out, and your body came to the surface. The way you rose, back first, in your pale clothes, you looked like a moon yourself. As soon as Dad saw you, he jumped in. Ham and I grabbed the swing and tied it near where you were and threw it over the side.”