Felix took Adam's page and
sauntered to the back of the dreaming Paradise Theatre. "Yvonne," he smiled,
sitting down beside the dreaming actress. "Are you ready to be Eve? Here, read
what Adam wrote about you."
She
read:
Stars, could you come and write yourselves on this page? How can I be your
author when I am not even the author of myself? And how can I know what stars
are when I am plainly more like the nothing that surrounds stars. My words,
myself, my brain, my hands are more like the blank page, the black ink and the
blank black between the stars. I have read the eloquent night; it is a whole
opera full of a billion billion lovers; stars singing love all around to stars.
And all through this fiery love the gorgeous black night is tangled. But a
blacker, colder coal is in me: my heart with no song, no fire, no other thing
like it in this bright heaven on earth to love. I cannot reach and hold the
stars. There is no stuff like me.
Yvonne held the page to her breast now, and told Felix she was ready except for
one thing. He sighed and asked what it was, expecting procrastinations parallel
to Adam's. She tried to answer but instead burst into peals of laughter. "What?
What?" Felix laughed. But it was a long time before she could stop laughing and
say, "When I...When I... When I..." and then she laughed a while some more. At
last she sputtered, "When I wake from deep sleep as Eve, will I be as sappy as
Adam?" And then Yvonne and Felix filled the Paradise and the dream with
hilarious laughter for a while.
That done, he asked, "I don't have to rationalize this for you, do I? You can
see the purpose to a stint of innocence? A holiday from sarcasm and other fears?
And it's only a dream. No one will ever know that you and Adam are a couple of
saps. Besides, everyone is a sap in their heart, like Adam said."
"He is so sweet," said Yvonne,
gazing at Adam sleeping on the stage.
"Yes, he is," said Felix, gazing
with her. "And you are the bone of his bone. The flesh of his flesh. The other
one in his poem."
"It's so
sweet," said Yvonne, crying now. "Let's do this."
"Go to sleep. Go deeply asleep.
Forget everything outside of this clear little, sweet little, dear little dream
of Eden. Just as you will forget this dream, just as you have forgotten that the
angel Art is your son Julian, just as you forgot that you were dreaming already
that you sat here in the Paradise and watched this little drama arranging itself
for you, you will forget everything outside of being Eve." And Eve complied.
After a while, after the lighting on the stage had indicated day and sunset,
Felix rose and leaned over her, kissing her head. After a while she awoke and
smiled at him. And they had a talk much like Felix and Adam had had when Adam
had awaken in Eden and had needed orienting. As they spoke, Felix escorted Eve
to the stage. "And this is Adam," Felix said, gesturing with his hands widely.
"Is it a statue?" she asked.
"It's very pretty."
"No... He can
talk. He's flesh, like you. He will write the catalogue with you. You're each
other's help," Felix said. "He'll wake in a moment."
And then Adam woke, sat up on the
couch, looking at Eve in astonishment. "Felix, every time I wake in Eden, it's
better than dreaming. Are you an angel?" Adam asked Eve.
"What are angels? Felix said I'm
a woman," Eve answered, sitting down next to Adam on the couch.
"I don't know what angels are
either, it just popped into my head out of thin air. A woman, huh? I think
you're from the bottom of my heart," Adam speculated.
"I need some rest," Felix said.
"I'm not ready for this. I'll leave you two to your own devices. It's the
Sabbath. See the stars coming out? Until they come out again tomorrow, it's a
day of rest. First I want you to meet the angels, the stagehands for our little
play. Art! Leon! Beezly!" And the angels presented themselves onstage. He
introduced angels and people all around, and all five were impressed with their
new acquaintances. "Come on, angels," Felix said and the the angels exited.
"Good night and good sabbath, Adam and Eve. We will show you around the rest of
Eden tomorrow evening. This is just your bower, this stage. There are fields and
woods and rivers and fountains. And then you can start on the catalogue."
"Goodnight, Felix," said Eve.
"Good Sabbath, Felix," said Adam.
After Felix exited, Eve asked,
"What do we do now?" But Felix came back hastily.
"I forgot to tell you one thing:
You can do everything you like, but don't read those books!" he said, pointing
to the shelves Beezly had brought. "If you read them, Eden's done. Understand?
The play's over and dead. You're dead."
"Sure," Adam and Eve said in
unison. And Felix left them.
"What does dead mean?" Adam asked Eve.
"Dying; die; dead. To die; to be
dead; to cease to have life. Who knows? Who cares? We can do everything else.
Being deprived of one thing can't hurt us."
"But, Eve--that's what I'll call
you: Eve."
"Good. That's my name
anyway. And you are--was it Adam?"
"Right. But what I was going to
say is, maybe death is more fun than anything else."
"Oh, those old books don't look
like much fun. I'd rather talk with you like this anyway," Eve said.
"This is fun, isn't it? I could
do this endlessly. I like words."
"Endlessly... That's a nice word. I like you," said Eve.
And Adam took her hand and they
talked and talked into the night, making up whole worlds as they went. Adam and
Eve lay down after several hours and several chapters of talk, so that they
could see the stars better. Lying down relaxed them, and lying close excited
them. In this contradictory state, the two of them lost the separate, clear
boundaries of what they were saying. Their words and thoughts began to blend
into each other's words and thoughts. Their thoughts became so close that they
brought their heads very near together; their words became identical and
synchronized, so they brought their mouths together so they could speak
together. And they spoke with tongues. Their intercourse was lingering and
articulate for minutes at a time. And then their speech would be rapid,
animated, more earnest. But this wordless talk was all fluid and soft and hot
and spoke volumes much better than Beezly's in the bookcase.
And they used body language. The
conversation involved all of themselves, all of their flesh. They spoke with
their hands. Their bodies moved in dialogue. Adam's cock grew stiff. Like a
tongue that had a great deal to say--worlds and generations to say. It sought a
mouth where it could speak. And Eve's vagina watered, yearning to talk. And by
easy accident--their clothing had long since dissolved dreamily--Adam caught
inside of Eve.
And they began the
first wonderful argument.
And
when this intercourse reached orgasm, Adam and Eve invented song. They invented
the crowning glory, the climax of talk: singing. Adam and Eve sang primitively,
wordlessly, beautifully. Eden was shattered splendidly at the height of the
lovers' conversation. It was animal, articulate, sublime and horrible, their
cry.
And Adam in his pencil post
bed awoke, the dream was so powerful. He was awake for an instant, remembering
the play he had tried to throw away, remembering he was sick with strep throat,
remembering the broad outlines of his whole life in that instant. And then he
caught memory of Yvonne in the last of the instant and he fell back asleep. He
fell through layers of dreams until he fell onto the stage of the Paradise and
back into Eve's arms.
And Yvonne
awoke in her apartment. She was wrecked and electrified and stayed awake a
fraction of a moment, remembering her whole history, regretting boundlessly all
the great long waiting that is a woman's world. And her eyes shut and she was
back in Eden in Adam's arms.
And
Felix woke in his great chair in his apartment. He was jolted by grave jealousy.
He checked the progress of the stars. He rose and went to his livingroom,
listening there for a few minutes to the muttering, scratching and little
crunches that go on in such a place in the middle of the night. He went to the
kitchen and made tea, returning with a cup to his chair. He thought about how
much he loved Adam, how much he loved Yvonne, and then he thought about nothing.
And Julian woke and pulled Beth
closer to him, and then fell back to being an angel.
And Jamie woke feeling like an
old man, feeling lonely and frightened. But then he felt well, thinking Adam was
down the hall recuperating, on his way to having a play, and Jamie also fell
back to being an angel.
And in
Kentucky, Angelo McGuire woke when the sexual song tore through Eden. He thought
he had been dreaming one of two dreams that were his recurrent nightmares: He
was either dreaming that the people on the farm had found him out--that they had
figured out that he was psychotic--and they were coming to drag him out in the
night and expose him; or that the people on the farm knew that he was psychotic
and they were secretly going about their lives on their own terms despite his
apparent power and rule. He tried to stay awake and intended to rise to go to
his desk and work on the blueprints for the pyramid he was having built to
entomb his remains, but he fell through a loophole in his will and fell back to
being the angel Beezly.
And Adam
and Eve slept, woke, talked, dreamed, and made love in Eden on their couch all
night and all through the Sabbath day.
Great wonderful blurs of time had
passed in the dream. Adam and Eve were sitting at their desks chatting and
working on the Catalogue of Delights, Beezly was dusting the stage,
lingering at the bookcase.
"Adam,
I'm hungry; could you go get some fruit? I'll call Art to fill the pens while
you're gone. After you get back let's scribble about those purple shells and
those birds with blue elbows and the... What else as it we found yesterday?" Eve
asked.
Adam said, "Wolves; wolves
and their wives. They looked like bony thunder clouds with teeth and eyes of
lightning. They were polite, though. Oh, and don't forget birds of paradise;
both kinds; the flying ones and the flowers."
"Oh, right! Adam, what day is
this?"
"This is, uh, tonight's
the Sabbath."
"What week is it?"
she asked.
"Do we know how to
count?"
"I think we found that
out last week or the one before."
"Hmm. Well I hope we know how to count backwards then. We've been here a lot
more weeks than those two. I'll figure it out while I get breakfast. Why do we
need to know which week this is?" he asked.
"We can date our entries in the
catalogue."
"Oh good! Numbers and
time mark days, and days are delights, and therefore numbers are delights too.
Is there something in particular you'd like to eat?" he asked.
"Melon, please."
Beezly followed Adam off stage.
"Art!" Eve called.
The angel Art came on stage and
said, "That's funny; I was just coming here. Do you have some writing for Felix
to read?"
"Yes, here," she said,
handing the angel a sheaf of pages. Then she handed him the pens. "Will you fill
these? They're dry."
"I love
this," said Art. "I love it when I have to go get ink."
"What is ink? Where do you get
it?" she asked, considering the matter for the first time.
"Ink's from the shadow of the
stars."
"That is peculiar!" she
said.
"Oh, I could tell you a lot
of peculiar things about the universe. But you have enough to occupy you here in
Eden. I'm off to the peculiar stars," he said and was gone.
And Leon came just then. "Eve,
have you seen Beezly?"
"Hello,
Leon," she said. "He's with Adam, getting melons."
Just then Adam and Beezly
returned. "Where've you been, Beezly? I told you to do all the little jobs so
you wouldn't get involved in the big things."
"Oh, he was just telling me about
time and numbers; infinity and finitude. No harm is it?" asked Adam, handing Eve
her melon.
"God, I hope not,"
said Leon, glowering at Beezly. "Come on, Beezly. Let's go muck out the jungle."
And they walked off, but Leon turned and said to Adam and Eve, "I almost forgot.
Felix is coming this afternoon to hear you read from the catalogue."
"See you then. Or before, as it
happens," Eve said to the departing angel. Then she asked Adam, "How many weeks
have we been here?"
"I don't
know. I can't figure it out. But I figured out a couple of other things about
counting and time. I figured out I don't like it. It makes me sad. See, all our
hours and days are different from each other. If we start counting them, they'll
all be the same. Counting happens by ones, so each thing is a one. If everything
is just one, what happens to the blending and the overlapping that makes
everything share its beauty with everything else? See? I mean, you start to
think you're containing a thing when you say: one horse. See? I don't know, it
makes me angry. And Beezly was talking about limits. You can talk about the
seven hundredth and fifty-fifth day, or you can talk about the day the orange
moths were so plentiful in the trees that we thought they were on fire. See the
difference? Besides, if there were enough numbers, we would lose our work of
naming things." Adam was very upset. Eve was distraught. She wondered what
Beezly had done to him.
"Adam,
it's ok. We don't need numbers. I just never thought about it. What's in a
number? We can do without. Come here and eat, and then we'll write when Art gets
back with the pens," she said, smoothing his curls, leading him to the couch.
Adam forgot about numbers as he
became involved with the day's work. But Eve resolved to make up for the
unhappiness she had caused by bringing up time. From that moment on she was on
the lookout to find something to bring Adam a great pleasure equal to the
displeasure numbers had caused him.
Late that afternoon, Felix Lord,
the three angels and the man and woman were gathered on the Edenic stage for a
little holiday within the holiday. Sometimes they would go out to the fields and
the rivers all together and play and picnic. Sometimes they would mountain
climb, the angels catching the humans when they fell. Sometimes they would dance
in the meadows to flute music that came out of the very blue of the sky. But on
Friday afternoons, just before the shadows of the Sabbath, the six of them would
gather in the lovers' bower and have a sort of literary tea. This afternoon
Felix sat in his great chair, head back, legs out, eyes closed, tea cup in hand.
Art was watching for the Sabbath stars through the telescope at the back of the
stage, Beezly dusted the plants and other accouterments of the set, Adam and Eve
sat writing at their desks, and Leon sat on the couch playing a sonata on his
violin.
When the piece came to an
end and its aftersilence was done, Felix Lord said, "Adam, read to us out of the
catalogue."
Pulling a page from
his desktop, Adam rose and stood before them to read: "This entry is called
Bears. Bears seem like two horses or five deers lashed together side by side
when bears stand on all fours. When they stand on two legs, they stand like a
man, or an angel or like Felix Lord. But bears can only sing shaggy throated
songs; they cannot talk. They are studies in brown. They take beige beehives
from brown tree branches, and drink amber honey while golden bees buzz their
brown skulls. If their heads were suns, and if hives were the moon, and bees
were stars, and if honey were light, then the bears' life would be a brown
heaven."
"Delightful, Adam,"
Felix said to the man, who smiled and sat down. "Beezly, there are your heavenly
bears."
"Oh, yes. Plainly those
are bears," Beezly edgily replied, and he jabbed the feather duster at the
rubber tree plant he was working on.
"Eve?" Felix asked. "What will
you read from the catalogue play?"
Eve stopped writing and stood to
say, "I was going to play a little sonata on the violet--sort of like on Leon's
violin? But I've written something else this afternoon which interests me more."
Beezly's ears pricked up; nothing was supposed to please more than any other
thing pleased in Eden! "Instead of just playing a solo on a flower or a shell or
a little rodent, I found a way to play a quartet all by myself." Felix had sat
up by now and was attending closely. Leon was edging nearer on his seat,
glancing nervously at Felix who was smiling beneficently. "There is only one Eve
but I have discovered layers of Eve. this is a delight from the play and a
delight for the play. Altogether it is a fourfold delight." now Adam had looked
up from his writing, wondering what Eve could be talking about by going on about
nothing. Even Art had ceased to look for stars and was gazing at the woman. "You
see, there are four Edens." Beezly choked, Leon coughed, and Eve went on. "One
Eden is the workaday Eden. The second is the Eden in Adam--all of Eden is there:
the beauty, variety, strength, sweetness. All of it. The next Eden is the play,
this catalogue we write, because this is where we write Eden down. And the play
is how we talk about Eden. By naming it, we have it again. The fourth Eden is
the most peculiar. It is the Eden in my dreams." Art gave a little coughing
laugh. "There in my dreams Eden comes out differently. Sometimes the angels
forget to catch us there. Sometimes I am alone there. Sometimes Adam has lost
the ability to speak and move and just lies still there in the Eden in my
dreams. But mostly I dream lovely Eden mixed around in funny ways.
"These are the four Edens.
Perhaps there are more," she concluded, and sat down. Beezly closed a book he
had nervously looked into.
Felix
was still smiling. The angels posed like statues waiting for his speech. Felix
rose and went to Eve, and he stroked her hair. "Listen tender dreamer, it's all
the same Eden. Don't take games of separation seriously. Your dreams are dreams
within the dream; your little dream Edens are plays within the play; your Edens
are Edens within Eden. It's all the same Eden. Don't go building stiffnecked
walls and connections. You and Adam are made from the same stuff as the stars
are made from, and you are vastly separate from the stars. And yet you and stars
are all in the universe together. Everything transmutes, darling. Everything is
fluid, but there are magnificent distances to travel."
He stopped to take another tack,
glancing at Beezly, then back to Eve, including Adam in his address. "I heard
you dabbled in math this morning. Don't worry numbers. First there was the
universe. And as everything came to be, numbers naturally fell from the folds of
shadows. Numbers are a byproduct of the universe. Don't mistake them for
essence. Or existence. I want to hear blithe metaphors; the naming of the
beasts; the unworried music at the unhurried heart." And Felix Lord kissed Eve,
then he kissed Adam, then he said, "Come, angels, it's the Sabbath now. We will
go rest."