2020: THE GATHERING OF THE DUST
ONE MORNING in Mesopotamia the strong Middle Eastern sun sought to warm the lifeless body of a nude man lying diagonally, like a slash, across an almost flat, bare riverbank. Vulnerable and exposed, he lay on his back on moist, sandy clay. His heels rested in the scarcely moving shallow water of the river. No life stirred in him, but he was not a corpse. To any who looked down and saw him from the sky, the beautifully formed young man would have been a puzzle piece. However, for a time there was no other to look down on his perfect, helpless flesh. A puff of fog hovered over his body for a moment before dissipating in the strong light.
It was the heat of the sun, the discomfort of it, that first caused Adam to stir to consciousness. He wanted relief. While he lay on his back in the mud on the sandy, moist riverbank, the sun of the Middle East baked him till he knew he was done. That was the first thing he knew, even before he opened his eyes, that he was too hot to stay as he was—in the oven, so to speak. He was done.
A cooling breeze passed over him, and he was washed by the coolness, the need of which had awakened him, though his eyes remained closed. The gentle energy of wafting breezes entered his nostrils, and the moving air tunneled its way as though it had volition through his nose, down his throat, and into his lungs. What had been outside him, and refreshing to him, was now gently invading him. When the breeze moved within him, he believed he was One with what was Beyond him because It had freely visited him. He sucked air into himself and was blessed with life.
As Adam lay on his back, he both felt and heard his breathing—the in and out of it—and he heard also, beyond the quietly flowing river, the sound of not too distant surf, with its own rhythm of coming in and going out. The sea, he named that sound, though he had yet to see it.
He knew his parts before he knew the wholeness of his being. There was something that thumped at the center of him. From the inside of his body beneath the bone of his chest, he felt its drumming.
Feeling—touch—was the first sense to awaken fully.
He folded the lobe of one ear and pressed it against the canal that led into his head, that passage to the interior, and listened. He listened patiently. Adam waited. Then he heard it—faintly at first, and then strong and regular, the drumbeats from the interior. Reverently, he placed both hands over his heart.
His feet stirred restlessly. The gentle caress of barely flowing water on his heels was not enough. His whole body wanted caressing, and like any baby, he wanted it now. If that was not possible, perhaps he could address that area of his body that seemed to be the origin of longing.
(Not his solemn heart!)
Something boisterous and frolicking, something mischievous and needy, something goatish with grapes in its hair, something laughing, and ready to dance on cloven silver hoofs! That part!
With first one hand and then the other, he reached for the part of his body that called without words to his hands: Ease me! Rolling from his back onto his side, Adam curled his body like the letter C so that he might know himself. And Adam touched himself till he was satisfied.
And Adam slept. He dreamed of vast watery heaving; he envisioned it as a mighty bosom ready to pillow the entirety of himself. Adam was, above all, a dreamer.
When Adam awoke and parted the lids of his eyes, he saw the fringe of his own lashes, both the top and the bottom. They frightened him, for he had an intuitive dread of the legs of spiders. ‘Twas fear that caused his brain to jump. When electricity of very low but important voltage passed from one cell to another, the world beyond his own eyelashes flashed into being.
Thus Adam achieved through fear the sense called sight.
Noiseless, bright beyond belief! Banglike, but silent: behold: the visual world!
Adam looked and there was light.
He felt his heart beating, running, trying to leap beyond the confines of his chest, trying to squeeze itself out through the less solid spaces between the ribs. To leave that cage of self, to be a part, a true part of Out There! That was his frantic heart’s desire.
Before him, the world hung flat as a painted window shade. It hung before him like an Impressionist’s canvas—Renoir, Monet—all a-shimmer with color, but initially the world was without form or meaning. Patches of color: blue shimmered against small red dashes, leaving his eyeballs vibrating; green rested against blue and gave him peace and comfort. And what color was he?
Adam lifted his finger into his line of sight, and he saw that he was blue. Or that his hands, at least, were splotched and streaked with blue.
And why not? he thought. (It was his first fully formed sentence: And why not?) Surely I am born of the heavens, and why should I not be as blue as they are? And as sweet? Am I not as sweet as that heavenly hue? Thus began Adam’s meditations on his own nature, but contemplation did not last long.
Though Adam was of adult size and had the body of a thirty-year-old man—undeniably—this was the first day of his life, and so he was but a babe. Lacking experience, or the consciousness of experience, he did not yet know the world into which he had come miraculously or by design. The baby in Adam watched his toes wiggle, but he quickly felt such playfulness lacked dignity, and he ceased. English words bubbled out of his mouth, though his syllables were ill formed and sounded like babble. Adam babbled on, not trying to make any sense but, like any baby and some poets, delighting simply in the music of his human voice.
A whistle mingled with the watery murmurings, yet it was more penetrating, a descant over woodwinds. I must know! Adam thought. Even before he could turn to look, the idea that he must know what was around him—the source of that noise—mutated into the idea that he must know everything. Scientist! He carried that possibility. Or philosopher. Poet, painter, lover, husband, father?
To locate the origin of the whistle, Adam surveyed the trees set back from the water. At this time, Eden-by-the-Sea had many varieties of trees living together in harmony. Here, certainly, were the palm trees, who were not only friendly within their genus—the date palm conversing happily with the coconut palms, the royal ones with the plebeian—but reached out with their fronds to the nearby oaks and tickled their thick and fissured bark, while the mighty oaks playfully peppered acorns into the boughs of the Norway spruce, which, in turn, seductively rubbed the dark striations encircling the white bark of the birches, some as thick as your waist, others as slender as your wrist. Chinese elms lived there, too, and pecan trees grew nearby, with their beautifully smooth-shelled, still-green nuts bunched in clusters. A grove of redwoods soared to celestial heights, begging to be worshiped in and of themselves for their ascendancy. So as not to be shaded out, the fruit trees and fruiting vines did stand away a bit from the more overwhelming forest, giving one another a courteous amount of space, apple from peach, peach from pomegranate, persimmon, scuppernong, etc.
It was among the trees of the fruit orchard that Adam saw a flash of color—red—and for a moment he thought that apples had the gift of flight, but then he saw that there were not only plants in the world but also animals, and here came a bird, who could whistle and fly. It was covered with feathers, and they were red. Quickly Adam checked his forearms to see if he were feathered, but he found that he was not. Nonetheless, he immediately wished he could fly.
And so desire (more intangible than lust) was born in his human breast.
The cardinal swooped toward Adam but came to rest on the prong of a piece of driftwood that the sea had deposited on the shore. Almost the length of a recumbent Adam, the driftwood propped itself on the shore, its gray feet still in the lapping waves. Adam wanted the bird—never mind the graceful driftwood or the unending ocean. He called out something poetic about how the bird was kin to his heart, but the bird could not understand his babble.
Lacking feathers, Adam could not fly to the bird, but he could crawl. He reached out with one hand, and it sank a bit into wetter sand; he moved the opposite knee forward. Repeating the motion provided locomotion, but Adam paused. He noted his handprint in the sand: the shape of it, four fringy fingers and an off-sprout of a thumb. He took proprietary note of the form he had created in the sand and said that it was good.
Though he had manly, well-sculpted muscles, Adam had not used them, and they were weak. He sat back on his heels and haunches to rest. A bird with long legs was wading in the foam of the surf—a beautiful bird, blue like himself, but with graceful drooping, curving feathers, a great blue heron, and Adam determined to stand up, for after all he had two legs like the birds, even if he lacked their wings.
Adam stumbled uncertainly on toddler legs toward the cardinal, but then the beaked red featherball flew away.
Adam wept.
He sat down in the moving water and rested his head on the knee of the gray driftwood. With his cheek against the smooth wood, he wondered about its story—where had it been, and how long had it floated in the water? The need for narrative began to gnaw its way outward from the deep convolutions of his brain. He felt a certain sympathy for the driftwood with its sinuous silvery curves—how time or wear had defined its grain.
At that moment, a larger wave broke over Adam’s chest and head with a good hard smack. The wave knocked him backward, then withdrew itself into the sea with a large, rude sucking sound. Adam was amazed. The arabesque of driftwood, almost as big as himself, had been washed back out to sea.
Should he try to pursue it? No. He remembered how the bird had flown away.
He formulated an idea that had something of the ring of truth to it, though he had no idea whether his maxim was true or not: when something leaves you, do not try to reclaim it.
The color of the sky began to change on one side. Perhaps he had learned enough. The sky became pinker, then redder. Adam wondered if he himself would change color. As far as he could tell by examining his hands, he was the same blue hue, but the light was disappearing.
The sun was powerful and did as it pleased: it slid right down the slope of sky and into the water. And the world grew darker.
It was the evening of Adam’s first day.
He was lonely. As the daylight drained from the sky, he was almost afraid.
Perhaps it was the nature of things that he was to have only one day. As the world darkened, would he slip back into the clay whence he came?
Forgetting how to walk, Adam crawled back through the water to the shore. If he were to dissolve in the twilight, he thought, if his flesh were to become again a part of the earth, he would have liked to make another handprint, to leave his mark behind. Perhaps a latter-day Adam would see his sign.
Resolutely, he spread his fingers and pressed his hand into the yielding sand. Because the sand was wet but not sloppy, it retained the form of his hand when he withdrew it. How well this lonely vacant print represented the reality of his palpable hand. Slowly, the mold of his hand filled up with water. Reflecting something of the scant light, his liquid palm print glimmered in the sand.
Leaving his work to fend for itself, Adam crawled to a slope of sand. To sleep, he lay curled on his side, his cheek pillowed by both his hands pressed together, palm to palm. But then one hand strayed to his hair. There he found a seam of dried blood. Perhaps he had been struck? Perhaps he had had a fall followed by a hard landing. Sleepy, Adam nestled against the dune, where the dry sand offered lingering warmth of the sun to its visitor’s bare back.
Adam’s eyelids fluttered down. He recalled how the redbird’s wings had closed when it settled on the prong of driftwood.
Suddenly Adam awoke to look for more animals but saw none. He appeared alone upon an earth devoid of living creatures, save himself. Then the darkness parted her lips and smiled at him—the crescent moon rode above the black bosom of the sea.
Thus Adam’s first day closed, but in his innocence he hoped to see another.