She had turned her fork over and was on the verge of pressing another row of indentations into the tablecloth when she started, as though something had caught her eye across the room. For a moment she was still, her eyes narrowed, seeming to peer through booths and walls and kitchen. She reminded me of an animal, ears back, hackles raised, haunches tense. I followed the line of her gaze trying to see who—or what—had captured her attention. But then her posture relaxed, and she was back at the tablecloth with the fork.
“So as I said, the world was mutating,” she said, prick, prick, pricking at the cloth, looking up at me once to make sure, I assume, I was listening. “From the earth sprung hateful and ugly things that flourished amid all that was lush and good. There would be no more accord among the animals now; they would follow a different order, no longer subsisting exclusively on plants but also on one another. Adam’s flesh was no longer the same, though it would take centuries for disease to manifest itself, for bodies so genetically pure that a man could marry his sister to corrupt down through the generations to the point where a man dare not marry even his cousin. In fact, it took, as you have read, 930 years for Adam to die, and his children lived similarly long lives.”
I couldn’t believe it. She had actually made a kind of sense out of something I was sure would prove a faltering point.
“Of course it makes sense.” She lifted her chin. “As surely as the old doctrine of sin handed down from the father to the sons has remained thematic throughout your time. Look around you. See the truth of it manifest today: the imperfection of your eyes, the weakness of your immune systems, the proclivity of some of you for disease and cancer, asthma and allergies, genetic disorders of all kinds.”
I did look around, my gaze settling on the large table of twelve in the center of the small restaurant. They must have been a family, I thought, feeling a slight pang of envy. And now I took tally: At least five of the people sitting at the table wore glasses. One of them, a young man in his twenties, was in a wheelchair. The oldest person at the table was a white-haired lady, her nape bent by a bump. She ate slowly, chewing her food with dogged purpose. I guessed she might be 85.
Eighty-five . . . versus 930. What had Adam looked like at 85?
“He was virile,” she said. “Quite the stallion.”
Now there was a thought that was going to fester.
“It isn’t just you, though. You haven’t had the nutrient wholeness of those first foods in ages. Look at what you pass off as food today. Frankly, I’m surprised you live twenty years on that stuff.” She gestured toward my pasta. “Add to it the fact that you’re missing the full health of the earth as it originally was, and you realize how far things have come. Do you think your ancients went around slathered with sunscreen? Do you think they had to infuse their soil with chemicals?”
I looked at the remainder of my pasta. Just earlier I had congratulated myself on actually eating a hot meal.
“And so the earth itself began to die a little, though like Adam it would survive a long while yet.”
She was looking sidelong at that table of twelve. What was it that had her attention? With an uneasy sense I wondered if I would see someone die tonight. Would that old woman with her white hair choke and fall over, expire as horrified family members performed the Heimlich, CPR? Please, I thought, not sure who I thought it to—maybe all this talk of God, of creation and sin was affecting me—please no. I needed to hear this, uninterrupted. I needed more. I needed to have this time.
Someone could die tonight, and I’m worried about getting my demonic fix.
“Meanwhile, all over the faltering planet, the clay humans raised up others just like them in a world plagued with aberrations and depravity, fostering a new culture of death,” she said, her eyes on the table.
“Don’t you think that’s a bit dramatic?” But her words called to mind the mummy room at the museum, her comment that all of it had come from those first, original two. And I had thought she had been referring to sophisticated Egyptian culture.
Her mouth curved, her attention solidly fixed on me again. “It does sound grim, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not. At least from my point of view. We had learned, by then, to take delight in what we saw, in what we perceived as the prolonged failure of El. Because, you see, if he failed with his new creations, these new heirs, it only served to make us look a little better. CLAY, LOOK AT ME WHILE I’M TALKING TO YOU!”
My attention snapped from the family back to her.
“I’m not here for my own edification! I know this story, remember?” The soccer mom’s voice had raised in angry, demonic glory.
“I-I’m sorry—”
She jabbed her finger into the tablecloth. “Every time you fail, it proves something. Every time the humans failed, it made us feel better. We reveled in every instance of human ridiculousness,” she said with biting annunciation, her tone lower but intense, her lips pulled back from her teeth.
“I understand.” I wanted her to know I was listening.
“No, you don’t. El didn’t ignore the clay humans. He did not cut them off. Not at all. He took an interest in their daily affairs, though he no longer walked with them in the afternoon. And that is significant.” Her blue eyes had come to dark, frightening life.
“He made concessions. He persevered through their constant and abiding imperfections and wrongdoings with more patience than I thought existed in all the created universe. He taught them how to make appropriately bloody, laborious, and horrible sacrifices in symbolic atonement.”
For a moment, I thought she was going to leave it there. But I knew there was more. Knew I wanted to know it. “And?”
“And then he forgave them.”
She was staring so intently at me that I found myself averting my gaze as one does from oncoming headlights. When she said nothing more, I glanced up to find her still staring at me, as though the implication of her words were sinking in for her, all over again.
She was seething.
“Think about that.” She reached for her coat, then, with a quick glance toward the other end of the restaurant again, slid out of the booth. “We will have to do this faster.” She put the coat on. “Time is getting away from us.”
She slung her purse over her shoulder and walked out. In the middle of the restaurant, the table of twelve broke into a round of “Happy Birthday,” as the old woman blew out the candle on a piece of ricotta pie.
15
Time is getting away from us?
I committed the encounter to paper, spending the urgent recollection of every word in the act of writing it. When I had finished, I spread the pages out on the kitchen table. They were scribbled in hyperactive script on paper from the recycling bin, across the backs of newsletters, pieces of mail—anything that had been near to hand.
I opened my laptop and started to type.
Around 1:00 a.m., as I transcribed the end of our dinner together—my dinner—I found I had missed a major point. I had thought there was something significant about the family at the table, that something about them first drew her interest and then piqued her. But that wasn’t it, the thing that precipitated the moment—that startling, stunning moment—that she snapped at me. It was the coming revelation in her own story. The thing she knew she must say.
“And then he forgave them.”
I had thought nothing about that statement at the time. Forgiveness was, after all, the vernacular of religion.