This is a piece I am working on for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) 2015, which will be submitted in pieces as a way for me to hold myself accountable for continuing the work. I'm not at all up to snuff on the daily word count, but at least I'm writing something. It's the spirit of the thing that counts, right? ... Right? Anyway, enjoy my lovely Adam and Eve musings. It will be written as a series of letters, each letter being a chapter.
Dear Kit,
The thing about time is that the more you have of it, the more it seems to curl in on itself, to overlap and spiral, rather than following one instant after the other as dominoes do. The vast scope of memory becomes less like a straight line and more like an ocean, each moment a bobbing ship, some of them anchored in the same place forever, others racing each other toward the harbor which is the forefront of the mind, others still drifting aimlessly, or sunken, a wreck of bones at the bottom of those dark waters, untouched by light or warmth for centuries. There are instances when pieces of abandoned vessels, a salt-bleached board or a bit of canvas and rope, wash unexpectedly ashore, unwelcome reminders of old voyages.
I am in Sibiu. The panorama image of this quiet place, its orange tile rooftops stacked one on top of the other, its endless arid sky, is only a small raft, a tiny whitewashed fishing vessel, in the immeasurable waters of my time on this earth. Places like Milan and San Francisco, they are massive Navy crafts heavy with gilt, lamplight spilling golden and alive from every porthole, glistening like a city on the black waves. Still, I will savor this: the scent of flatbread cooking on hot stone griddles, the sounds of men laughing on the dust and cobbles street beneath my window. I am surrounded by the music of living people changing, killing one another, falling in love. Before me is the ancient, crooked blue spine of the Himalayas, which reminds me intimately of the Appalachians, the Adirondacks, the Kush, the Cascades. Mountains are mountains are mountains, and all of them were under the sea in the beginning. They hold onto the age-blackened shells of ancient bivalves like family photos of relatives they never knew, but whose stories they cherish.
I've been renting a comfortable attic bedroom from a widowed Romanian woman who makes her living crafting beautiful, ghastly jewelry out of bones that she scavenges from the desert. Her work is lovely. I am now in possession of a pendant, a statement piece really, that she made from half the broken jaw bone of a wild dog, hung from a leather cord with the oil-slick feathers of ravens and strings of polished wooden beads. The necklace reminds me of the spring of 1796. Adam and I spent the season under the Rincon mountains, a bowl of red clay surrounding what is now Tucson, Arizona. We were holed up against the rainless months with a small, isolated group of Tohono O'odham people, three or four sparse families who had made their camp at the edge of a deep arroyo, one of the few which still contained any water fit for drinking. The desert stretched out endlessly in all directions, a shadeless waste. There was the occasional oasis, of course, but they were few and far between. There was no shelter from the daylight in most places unless we stooped to bury ourselves in sand. Before us all was the promise of starvation. We were trapped along the side of that narrow gorge, all of us, for our own reasons.
The Tohono knew what we were, of course, being an intuitive people, and well-travelled, with clever gazes and pragmatic minds. They called us "Skin-Walkers," after a legend belonging to their people, of men and women who transformed into animals at night to devour human flesh. Though this seemed closer in nature to werewolves or shape shifters, it was their best guess, and the intent was the same: prey on the living when the sun goes down. They greeted us with solemn faces and stern warnings to keep away from their children, and in exchange for a dark place to sleep during the merciless white-sky hours of day, we fed without killing. Some nights we caught rabbits with our keen eyes and quick hands, seeking to repay them. It was a different time, cruel in different ways. Adam was still so new, and the American West was still such a foreign place, a scattering of people, lean livestock, and slipshod homes groaning and shuddering in the gritty wind. We felt we had entered another world. When the coyotes and the thin yellow hunting dogs howled at night, their voices echoing off of the Rincons' red stones, Adam threw his head back and howled with them.
That first desperate night, when we stumbled drawn and harrowed upon the edge of the arroyo's shimmering green water, the oldest woman among the Tohono O'odham people received us with a grave expression on her face, warm brown and etched with deep lines from years spent squinting into the brutal sun. The rest of the encampment was asleep, but the woman told us that she had seen us coming, that she had been waiting for days for the two of us to drag ourselves to her across the hot sand. She spoke to us in a crippled, stilted Spanish, knowing that we were strangers, that we couldn't possibly understand her own language. It was very strange to converse with someone in such stark, practical terms about what we are and how we survive, having just travelled through a land inhabited by so many ruthless Catholics.
"We all try to live," she said to us, her head bowed, "what way we can. I think you are the same."
She refused to look us directly in the eye, or touch us with her bare hands, but it was clear that she was not afraid of us. We were like wild animals. Perhaps she believed that if she touched us, we would become covered in the scent of the living and never leave. Adam took a liking to her, calling her abuelita even though it made her scowl at him. During the day we slept in our dark hut while the tribe ate and worked and sang around us. At night, we walked alongside the arroyo, which in the darkness was a bottomless black gash in the ground. Adam wanted me to touch everything we found in the desert - every bone, every piece of broken pottery weathered by time - and tell me how old it was. I obliged him until the effort made my head ache, and then I made up the dates to please him. "This one is very old," I would mutter to him, my eyes closed, my fingertips hovering just above the cracked lip of a wooden bowl he found buried among the roots of a gnarled smoke tree.
He was always restless in the mornings, so childlike, resisting sleep in favor of staring up at the ceiling with wonder, rapt by his own musings. His head was already so full of poetry and philosophy and science. He wanted to know everything.
"Eve."
"What is it, darling?"
It was dark as pitch inside our hut. Its windows were covered by several layers of thick cloth, but the heat still persisted, encroaching on us through the clay walls, heavy and oppressive. We lay sprawled on the floor without clothing, only touching one another at the lips and ankles. Outside, the Tohono children were playing a game with the dry wooden ribs of a dead saguaro, cut down and blackened in places by heat lightening. We could hear them laughing and shouting to one another. Their language was like the sharp-tongued secret speech of the Coyotes. I could have tried to learn it, as I had learned English and French and Hindi and Russian and so many others, but I liked listening to the rolling, tumbling syllables undistorted by meaning. I touched Adam's lips with my fingers as he spoke, feeling him shape the words.
"How do you think our brains work?"
"Adam, please," I protested, and he took my hand away from his face to kiss the closed lids of my eyes, a gesture which never failed to make me feel impossibly young, younger than I had since the age when we spoke the slow riddling tongue of trees, the age of standing stones.
"We've started to understand the way the human brain works," he said, charging ahead, "and how important it is, but I can't help feeling that we still have much more to discover."
"Adam."
"I think we're missing an integral piece of the puzzle of human consciousness, and I think that missing piece may be the key to reanimation, Eve, to immortality."
I kissed him. He inhaled slowly through his nose, an old reflex from a far different time, his large spidery hands drifting up to frame my face. These were still his fledgling days, and I remember them with an aching fondness, that heady, burgeoning time when he came to me like a moon, drunk and captivated. Sometimes I miss that. He was certainly easier to keep up with. At the time, I already knew that the compulsion would only last another half century or so, if even that. None of us can stay young forever.
"There is no key, my love," I whispered against his slack mouth, "There is no door. We are not immortal."
"But-"
"Listen, darling. Immortality is everlasting life, and you and I are not alive, technically speaking."
"What are we, then?" His voice was soft with impending sleep and he tucked his head into the crook of my shoulder.
"We are something else, something different. Now sleep."
I knew that he wouldn't allow himself to fall asleep until I did. I knew that he watched me. The living call sleep the little sister of death, but for us in this time of dry air and aching silence, there was no distinction. We fell into a place without dreams, dying each day as the sun rose.
We woke starving.
At dusk, Adam's eyes were bright, wide, and roving, hungry like the eyes of the skeletal yellow dogs that followed the desert people from place to place, their long muzzles lowered into the clouds of dust that formed around their chapped paws, scenting for food. The music of the sand-colored desert frogs heralded the night hours. I rose and dressed in a thin white garment that was meant to be a slip, but which served me well as a light weight shift dress. We both wore far less clothing out here than we had in the English and Portuguese colonies to the east. We would have to return there soon, of course, having found the Southwest nearly uninhabitable, but we were determined to enjoy the freedom of more natural society in the meantime. Adam stood naked and watched me weave my hair into a thick white plait.
"Will you teach me how to do that?" he asked, a bit timidly, and I smiled.
"What, darling, braid?"
"Please. I want to braid your hair for you."
He touched my bare shoulder blade with his fingertips, almost reverently. A breeze stirred, sweeping a miniature whirlwind of sand in through the curtained doorway. The air was just beginning to cool as it relinquished its hold on the warmth from the sun which it had secreted away in the hours before. I could feel my skin cooling as well as I leaned outside. I heard the rustle of fabric as Adam begrudgingly pulled on his breeches, still barefoot and bare-chested behind me.
It was a young man this time, sitting just outside the entrance to our hut, waiting for us to beckon him inside. He had a labyrinthine image of a snake winding around and around itself painstakingly tattooed across the backs of his muscular shoulders. He stood and brushed the sand from the backs of his thighs, and we greeted each other in the broken Spanish his people had become accustomed to using whenever they conversed with us. He was strong, fiercely alive, his face set in a stony mask of bravery. I am not afraid of man eaters, declared his dark brown and his straight, thin mouth. I suspected he was some kind of warrior, or else one of the men who kept and commanded the hunting dogs. He was beautiful, but in a way to which I was completely unaccustomed to seeing up close. Adam is blade-like, all angles and severity, the blinding loveliness of light shone through a jagged piece of ice. This man, his was the beauty of amber, of sunrises, of foxes and smoke trees, warm, round, thriving. He ducked inside and took his place between us on the colorful woven sleeping mat. He stumbled a bit, his eyes unaccustomed to the darkness, and I guided him down with my hands on his shoulders. He smelled of wood smoke, and I could hear his heart pounding. A muscle in Adam's jaw flexed.
I know what you're thinking, Kit, dear. There's something a bit distastefully ritual-sacrifice about the whole ordeal, with the strapping young man kneeling between two monsters with his wrists upturned, left on the mat to be collected before we returned in the morning, but it was a necessary arrangement which kept us all alive in a time when food was becoming increasingly scarce for every species.
I had only lived this way once before, in Persia, and I had done it alone, a pale blood goddess in a stone cave, stranded, visited nightly by the same terrified woman. It was sickening then. Having Adam with me made things easier, made me feel a bit less like a beast. It was also a great relief to be living among, and depending upon, a people who understood our nature and did not approach us with fear. They feared pain, of course, and darkness, but don't we all?
I am grateful to no longer live in that time, when the seasons themselves trapped us, and others like us, in whatever sunless corner we could find. At times the rows upon rows of buildings, the miles and miles of car parks where the world's forests one were, break my heart to pieces with their selfish reproduction, but then I remember the desert beneath the Rincons and I am grateful for the abundance of shelter. There is always somewhere to be. It's very rare now that any of us find ourselves truly stranded.
When the rain finally came, it was in the middle of the night. We had all been expecting it, smelling the air, watching the patterns of the ravens and the great wheeling hawks in the sky. The air was crackling with wet potential. Adam saw the first droplet plummet from the gathering clouds and ripple on the surface of the arroyo's reserves, silver rings dancing outward and dissipating against the banks.
"Finally," he breathed, and I ran my fingers through the dark tangle of his hair. We stood as the first fat drops pattered to the ground, and then the rain fell in slanting white sheets from the black sky, soaking through our clothing, running in rivulets down our upturned faces. In a matter of days the arroyos would be filled again. Water would rush through them, foaming, like a river. People and animals would flock to the emerald pools filling pots and clay jars and bellies. The Tohono O'odham woke to the sound of us whooping and cheering into the sky, and ran into the downpour with their arms outstretched and their mouths open. We laughed, all of us, old and young, living and otherwise. We laughed, and we danced until the thick sandy mud coated our shins. The women dropped to their knees at the arroyo's edge, cupped their hands together, and drank deeply, singing prayers of gratitude.
We stayed with them until we could cross the desert safely. Once the air was cooler, we could move much faster during the night, fast enough to find a dark place to hide until dawn. It was a desperate way to live, but then we made our way east again, dressed again the way that the English settlers did. We passed through Louisiana and lingered there for a time, resting, gathering strength, and then found a boat back across the Atlantic.
"Eventually we will have to find a place to stay for more than a few years, you know," I told Adam, and he grinned at me, boyish and stubborn, stealing my heart.
"Eventually. We have forever, my lady, and a world to see."
I miss the way the rain smells in Tangiers, my dear Marlowe. I miss watching lovers dash across the streets beneath shared black umbrellas, splashing through puddles in the stone streets. I don't know where Adam is now, maybe somewhere in South America. I can never be sure. I know you think it's silly, the way that we drift away and then come together again and again, but we both have a great need for solitude, and in very different respects. There are times when Adam needs to be in a place where his life and his quiet are untouched by the zombies. There are times when I need to be in places where I can watch people being alive.
Please know that he does miss you. I hope that the next time I see you in person, I will be able to bring him with me, so you can tease him about it yourself.
I adore you. Kiss Bilal for me.
Yours,
Eve