Naamah Read online

  Naamah caught Shem looking at the bottoms of his feet as if something were wrong with them. She took off her shirt, wet it in the river, and laid it down. Ham immediately stepped on the shirt and made a detailed footprint, but Shem looked at her for permission. She nodded him on. He jumped on the shirt and then jumped away, leaving two perfect little feet staring back at them in the sand.

  * * *

  • • •

  NAAMAH RUNS THROUGH the lower deck, calling for Noah. She passes the wives in a room, laughing about something. Sometimes they bring a small animal into a room, say a chinchilla, and laugh at its behaviors, sharing the story with the family later over dinner, cooing, How adorable. Naamah has no time for them.

  “Noah!”

  She passes more doors. By now, even though she can’t see the animals, she knows where each of them rests. They used to make a lot more noise than they do now, and while she is glad for the relief, she worries they’ve grown accustomed to the boat. That makes her feel sick.

  “Noah!”

  Noah comes around a corner with a concerned look on his face; she’s going so quickly that she runs into him. She laughs, and that catches him off guard and puts him at ease at the same time.

  “What is it?” he says.

  “Come with me.” She would grab his hand but the halls are too narrow for that. She leads him to the deck, where the swing is. She undresses quickly. He smiles but doesn’t understand until it’s too late, until he sees her jump over the side of the boat.

  “Naamah!” he shouts after her, and he immediately starts undressing, his eyes fixed on the water. His shirt is off when she resurfaces, spitting and splashing.

  “Are you okay?” he shouts.

  “Yes!” she yells back. She looks up and she’s smiling. “When I’m done swimming, throw down the swing!”

  “Are you done now?” Even yelling, she can hear the worry mixed into the joke.

  “No! No, let me enjoy this!”

  “It’s not too cold?”

  “I’m fine!”

  She starts to follow the length of the boat, swimming on her side, but the boat is too long. Her breath tires first. Then her arms. She has to stop and float on her back, but this view of the sky is different, obscured by the boat, shaded but still lit, blue.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN SHE NO LONGER wanted to go out in the flood’s rain, she’d still come to the trapdoor that led to the deck and listen to it falling on the boat.

  She had heard stories of light rains, of rains that pitter-pattered, that sprang lightly, but she was used to desert rains that came on fast and left everything drenched. She thought the flood rains would be like that, too. But they weren’t. Their sound was horrible and flat in its constancy.

  If she had to describe it, she would recall how each of her sons had, at some point, discovered that if they peed on a rock, the pee would splash. They would pee as hard as they could, aiming at an ant or a leaf, until their legs were covered in a spray of their own pee.

  The rain reminded her of that, except that the rain came in a million streams. Which made her imagine God as a being with a million penises. Which terrified her. But she feared that He would see her terror and punish her for it, so she tried to feel love, instead, for the many-penised creature inside her head.

  * * *

  • • •

  SHE HEARS THE swing slapping the side of the boat.

  “Naamah, come back up! Please!”

  Naamah swims over to the swing, grabs the rope, pulls herself up, swings her legs through, and seats herself on the wood. She positions herself exactly as she’d planned, but it feels different this way, her legs hanging heavy over the wood.

  “Ready,” she calls up to him.

  As he starts to pull, she uses the balls of her feet to bounce up the boat. Otherwise her body would be scraped against it. The boat would lick her coarse.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN NOAH AND NAAMAH had gone looking for a place in the desert to build the ark, they found a trove of cypress trees that God had made for them. They cut down one and fashioned a giant tub and a small bucket. They collected sap in the small bucket, from every tree, and gathered it all in the tub. Then they began to cut down the small forest.

  As the boys grew strong, as they married, as the family grew, everyone worked. Shem’s wife, Sadie, cried often in the first days. Naamah once overheard her asking Shem why her family, her young sisters and brothers, could not come with them. Shem did not respond. Naamah walked over to Sadie and held her tight. As Sadie began to sob, Shem snuck out, his eyes red and ready to weep. When Sadie’s sobs turned into soft hiccups, Naamah stood her up.

  “That was the last time you can cry about this.”

  And Sadie looked as if it all might begin again.

  * * *

  • • •

  AS NAAMAH CLIMBS BACK onto the boat, over the railing, Noah groans. And when she is steady on the deck, Noah looks her over to make sure no harm has come to her. Then he says, “I’m not a young man, Naamah.”

  “Next time I’ll ask the boys to pull me up.”

  “No. It’s not safe. I don’t think.”

  “I think it is.” She starts to get dressed again.

  “Can’t we just . . . get through this?”

  “That,” she says, standing up straight, “is exactly what I am trying to do.”

  * * *

  • • •

  AFTER ALL THE TREES WERE CUT, prepared, sawn into thousands of pale planks, they started to build. The work exhausted them all. They ate between shifts, quickly, to fill a need. They drank water that way, too, draining cups in one long draft. At night, they all fell asleep without a word.

  Naamah made more buckets with Sadie and Neela. They collected rabbit shit. They made fires and fished burnt sticks out of the flames for charcoal, preparing to turn the sap to pitch. Once the boat was finished, they would have to work fast, covering the planks while the pitch was still warm, while the sun was high.

  Japheth’s wife, Adata, helped the men with the boat. She was better than all the others at visualizing how the boat must be at the end, how that end would grow out of the small parts they could accomplish each day.

  * * *

  • • •

  NAAMAH SWIMS EVERY AFTERNOON, when the water is warm but the sun is hidden behind one side of the boat, so she can swim and float on her back without the sun ever catching her eye in that piercing way that reminds her of God’s reach.

  Stronger and faster, Naamah decides to dive below the water. She goes as far as she can without opening her eyes, just stretching her arm out ahead of her, but she finds nothing. She thinks of the water as an emptiness, and when the thought strikes her she recoils, her hand jerking back toward her stomach. The water’s thick resistance brings the reality back to her. It is a thing. It is not a void.

  She dives again, but not as far, and this time she opens her eyes. At first she can’t make anything out. Then her eyes adjust as they would in a dark room. It’s difficult to keep from floating up, so she moves forward instead. Soon, beyond her, and lower, farther down, she sees a tree. Its form, at ease in the water. Its form, spectacularly large.

  * * *

  • • •

  THAT NIGHT, after too many restless nights on the boat, Naamah finally sleeps soundly again. She dreams of the tree covered in leaves, as if it had been able to hold on to them through the rains. The leaves wave like a school of fish, only much more slowly. Her body, in the dream, is no longer slow. Without the water’s resistance, she reaches the tree. The leaves are soft. She slips between the branches. She looks up toward the surface. The water looks the same in all directions—she is surrounded by a million dark circles waiting for her to discover them, to point her aquiline nose toward them, to give her the ill
usion of a focused center.

  The water shifts, and the leaves close her off like an eye.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY, Naamah swims again. Her sons stand around on the deck, waiting to pull her up. The blocks of sun climb Shem’s legs where he stands.

  “I touched a tiger last night,” he says.

  “No, you didn’t,” Japheth responds, without even pausing to consider it.

  “I did. Seriously. It was near the door, and I slid my fingers underneath and felt its fur.”

  “What was it like?” Ham asks.

  “I don’t know. What you’d expect. Soft.” He looks down and sees a corner of sun sitting neatly on his calf.

  “Then why do it?” Japheth asks.

  “I don’t know. To say I touched a tiger.” He smiles at Japheth, and Japheth can’t help but smile back at his young fool of a brother.

  * * *

  • • •

  IN THE WATER, Naamah tries diving again. She wants to see the tree, but it’s not there. The boat must have moved; it’s always moving, in its own inconstant way.

  She’s about to come back up for air when she sees a woman. She’s far off, near formless, but enough form to show she’s a woman. And whoever she is, she has noticed Naamah, and she is fleeing. Naamah tries to follow her, but she doesn’t make it far. She’s already been under for too long.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN SHE REACHES THE SURFACE, she hears Ham calling for her. He sounds scared. She wants to go back under, to find the woman, but she hesitates. She treads water, catching her breath.

  “There she is! Mom!” Shem calls out.

  “Over here!” Ham calls, but angry now instead of scared, as if she’s betrayed him.

  She looks toward them. She is farther out than she’s ever been.

  “Can you make it back to the ark?” Japheth yells.

  She nods. She slips under again to slick her hair back, to feel closer to the woman.

  “Mom, come back!” Ham again.

  She makes an effort toward the boat.

  * * *

  • • •

  “WHAT WERE YOU DOING OUT THERE?” Noah asks her, back in the quiet of their room, if you can call a boat filled with animals quiet.

  “I thought I saw something.”

  “What?”

  She shrugs.

  “What?”

  “A woman.” She looks away from him. “I thought I saw a woman.”

  “A dead woman?”

  She looks back, surprised. “No. A swimming, alive woman.”

  He’s never quick to respond to anything. He’s always thoughtful. Now is no different.

  Naamah asks, “Do you think there are dead women down there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought maybe He’d cleared them away somehow.”

  “Maybe He has. I don’t know.”

  “Is that why you didn’t want me swimming?”

  “Yes.” He touches her wet hair. “I’m sorry—I thought that was obvious.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it.” She takes in a little breath and releases it. “It feels freeing, to swim, to be part of the flood. We’ve been so separate from it, from everything.”

  “But we are together.”

  “I feel a boundary around us, around every pair of animals here. Like we’re carting around a hundred planets.”

  “Isn’t that a good thing?”

  “I don’t know. Planets are heavy. I feel like we should have sunk. Why haven’t we sunk?”

  “You know why.”

  “I don’t!” she yells, trying to get him to yell, too.

  He takes a few deep breaths, and she watches his chest take them. It calms them both.

  “Yes, you do,” he says.

  “Yes, I do,” she says.

  The boat rocks them slightly, enough so they know they are on water, but not enough to displace anything in the room. She’s complicit again.

  TWO

  Before they started to build the boat, Naamah had become close to a widow, Bethel, who lived nearby. Naamah had heard that Bethel knew where to find berries, so the first time they met they went off together to find some. Bethel’s sure steps led the way, and Naamah was attuned to the shifts of Bethel’s body leading them in one direction and then another.

  Naamah had expected to find only enough berries for each of her children to have a taste. Instead the women found a flurry of bushes, filled with berries in such surplus that Naamah felt sure they were a gift from God. They sat and stuffed themselves, told each other stories of their long lives, sat quietly and watched bees search the bushes for the blossoms that were there before the fruits matured.

  The next day Bethel found a reason to visit Naamah, showing up at her tent. Naamah remembers her standing there, her graying hair in a loose twist down her back. Soon they saw each other every day. At first they took walks and did errands together, but then they started staying in. And before long they were lying together in Bethel’s tent, in Bethel’s bed.

  No one bothered a widow with her tent closed in the heat.

  Naamah and Bethel could hear children playing outside. Naamah thought this would make her uncomfortable or embarrassed, but the sounds of children carrying on reminded her that she was in a place she loved, a place full of joy. Looking at Bethel, she thought of how she’d lived through so many stages of her life—childhood, adulthood, motherhood. She was owed a stage she could not name.

  Every day that Naamah came into the tent, Bethel tied it shut behind her. She undid Naamah’s hair and undressed her and then undressed herself. They lay on the bed and held each other so close their faces were beside each other, Bethel’s slightly higher. Naamah didn’t know if Bethel kept her eyes open or closed as she ran her hand up and down Naamah’s back. Sometimes she ran her hand down over her butt and sometimes up over her shoulder and around to her upper arm, and the interruption to the pattern of movement sent chills over Naamah’s body. Sometimes Naamah fell asleep and Bethel let her. Sometimes they kissed. Sometimes Naamah couldn’t stand it and she grabbed Bethel’s hand and moved it to her vulva, where Bethel would hold her steady until Naamah’s arm relaxed again and Bethel began to move her fingers in circles that swept the quickening wetness at her opening up to the tip of her clitoris until everything was wet and Naamah was moaning through her bit lip.

  When she was young, Naamah had needed Noah’s full force inside her to reach the top of what her body was capable of reaching. Sex left her exhausted and energized at once. As she got older, her orgasms could be quiet, soft. She could fall asleep afterward, the way Noah always had. And if they weren’t having sex often enough, she would have orgasms in her sleep. She needed merely to dream of kissing Noah, pressing into him with her hips, to have an orgasm that would leave her sated for days, weeks sometimes. But orgasms with Bethel were better than anything she could dream up.

  Naamah would try to match what Bethel had done for her, and while Bethel did not make any noise, her whole body shook. Naamah felt like Bethel could shake fruit from a tree, the way her body’s shaking came in regular intervals. Naamah would try to kiss her neck and Bethel would push her away, hold her there, taking slow, measured breaths. When Bethel thought her body had settled, she’d pull Naamah back, kiss her, and when she would shake again, they would laugh.

  Noah didn’t notice all the afternoons Naamah spent in Bethel’s tent because his days were full, spent talking with God.

  * * *

  • • •

  NAAMAH STARTS SWIMMING as often as she can make an excuse to go. And under the water, it happens again and again. She spots the woman, and the woman spots her, and the woman swims away before Naamah can learn anything new about her. Naamah returns to the surface out of breath and slaps the water in frustration.
And her frustration follows her back onto the boat.

  The boys pull her up and leave her to dress again, talking among themselves. She dresses quickly and heads down to her room. But as she nears her door, she has another idea. She goes down another deck, and then down again, to the boat’s lowest deck. It’s cold. She wonders if she’s now farther below the surface than she’s been able to dive. She’s always looked away from the boat when she’s dived, never thinking to look back, never wanting to.

  Here, among the rooms of animals who prefer the cold, Naamah tends a smaller room, one where she’s stored all the seeds she could collect and dry. Inside it, the room is dark and cool, and it feels good at first. But then she starts to feel how warm and damp she is, like an obtrusion, a risk to all the future plants of the earth.

  She clatters out of the room, slams the door behind her. She hears a bear snuff through its nostrils. She starts to walk down the long hallway back to the stairs, but she hears more animals shuffle around, as if they can sense her at each door she passes.

  At one door, she hears a loud smash by her ear. Splinters of wood hit her on the arm and cheek. She can’t tell which was first, the impact of the wood or the sound of it. Everything is out of order in her head. She stares at the door, the new, long hole in it, broken by something unseen.

  Walrus, she thinks. This is where the walrus are. A walrus has swung its giant tusk downward, toward her, through the door, and as Naamah puts that together, she runs. As she reaches the stairs, though, the shuffling of the animals stops, and she pauses. All she can hear is her own panting breath and the crying of the bearer of the tusk. She walks back toward the door. She cannot see the tusk, but she can picture it, large and yellowed, almost part of the door now, stuck and still.