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.
Still panting from the scare, she leans on the wall across from the broken door, tries to convince her body that she is at rest as she listens to the trapped walrus whimper. Soon the walrus’s mate begins to whimper as well.
Naamah steadies herself and approaches the door, her hand raised and open until she can feel the tusk, hard and rougher than she thought it would be. For a moment, the walrus startles. She tries to imagine breathing in a bright light and breathing it out again through her hand and into the tusk. She runs her other hand to the bottom of the tusk, and uses both hands to push gently up. Not that she has the strength to move it. Only to suggest to the walrus that moving it in that direction might free it.
Naamah hears the walrus shake, the grunt of effort, the creak of wood. And the tusk is free. The walrus and Naamah both back away from the door, and finally she runs to get someone to help her mend it, unsure of whether the walrus understands the weakness of the door, if the walrus would charge it, given the chance.
OUT IN THE DESERT, when the pitch was ready, Naamah dipped a bucket into it. They would need a sealed bucket to shit in, to clean up with, and she knew no one else would think of this.
She covered five buckets in all, and hung them on a branch to dry. She laid out a tarp beneath them to catch any black drops, until she remembered the coming flood. The earth hardly needed protection from such a small offense. Still, she felt sorry for the ground beneath her, so she lay down and apologized to it. The buckets hung above, like heads in the tree. The image would haunt her for months, almost any time she closed her eyes.
NAAMAH SITS AT THE END of the hallway as Japheth and Adata mend the door. “The animals are uneasy,” she says.
Japheth and Adata agree.
“What can we do?”
“I don’t know, Mom.” Japheth leans against the door and looks at her. “We try to keep them moving. We run them around the deck, the ones we can. We check in on them. We feed them. We clean up after them.”
She knows. She knows they clean up more of their shit than seems possible, coaxing them into an adjoining room to feed them while their room is cleaned, then switching them back again, so one room always smells of shit and one of blood.
She also knows that cleaning up after them means stealing litters of babies that have come too soon, before any land can be seen. Mostly the babies are fed to other animals, but sometimes a mother eats her own young. Once, when Naamah could still see the animals, she was so tired that she threw a litter of eight mice overboard instead of finding a more useful place for them to die. It was her job then to deal with the young. Now it’s Noah’s. Neither of them can bring themselves to make the children do it.
“I’ve heard Sadie sing to them,” Adata says, not looking up from her work, inspecting the door, wondering if they should replace it entirely.
Naamah didn’t know that. “What does she sing to them?”
“Lullabies.”
AS WORK ON THE BOAT PICKED UP, Naamah sat down with her sons and their new wives.
“You cannot have sex on the boat,” she said.
They were silent. The women had not had time yet to get to know Naamah. They’d thought she was sitting them down to welcome them to the family, formally, or at least warmly. Her sons knew better.
“This is not to say you shouldn’t enjoy each other,” she went on. “You just cannot have sex.” Naamah continued, in case they didn’t understand. “We don’t know how long the waters will last, and we can’t afford to have a pregnancy in that—”
“We get it,” Adata said.
“Good.” Naamah looked to her sons, who nodded. “Good,” she repeated, looking to Sadie and Neela. They kept their eyes down. Naamah decided it was best to leave them to discuss it among themselves.
“WHAT WAS SEX LIKE with your husband?” Naamah asked Bethel.
“He liked to hold up my legs, and sit straight up while I was lying down. He liked it because he could watch my breasts bounce. I watched him sometimes, but mostly I kept my eyes closed. Sometimes we would wake in the night and both want to have sex, and I would raise my leg slightly, turn open my hips, so he could go in from behind and we’d hardly have to move. That might have been my favorite.”
“Really your favorite, or only because it was a rare occasion?”
“I don’t know. I think really my favorite.”
“Have you ever had sex standing up?” Naamah asked.
“No. But I’ve always wanted to.”
“We could do it.”
“No, I think I’ve always wanted to with a man,” Bethel said.
Naamah shouldn’t have felt rejected in that moment, but she did.
LATE ONE NIGHT, Naamah passes Ham and Neela’s room and hears them having sex. Neela is moaning, and there is a rhythmic thudding that doesn’t come from anything else.
Naamah finds Noah on the deck. He is holding a pole with a looped rope on one end, hanging, suspended. He is running an animal. He lets the animal lead him around the deck, but always keeping his strength in his arms, a tension against the pole.
“What do you have there?” Naamah asks.
“A wolf,” he says.
“Can you stand still with her for a second?”
“Him. And sure.”
Noah stands and turns on a pivot as the wolf makes his way in a loop around him.
“Neela and Ham are having sex.”
“Do you think we need to do something about that?”
“I know we can’t handle a pregnant woman right now, on top of everything else.”
“No, but maybe he’s pulling out.”
“You know that doesn’t always work.”
“I know,” Noah says, “but how much longer will we even be on the ark?”
“I don’t know.”
“And maybe it would be nice to have a child around?”
“Nice?”
“Naamah, come on.”
“Nice for who? Not for the child. To grow up here.”
“No child would grow up here. It would just be for a time. A time a child wouldn’t even remember.”
“We don’t know that,” Naamah says.
“We don’t, but they’re adults. They have to do what they need to.”
“You better not talk like this around them. We’ll end up with three pregnant women.”
“I won’t,” Noah says.
She looks at the end of the pole, wonders which direction the wolf is looking.
“I promise I won’t,” he says again.
“What’s the wolf doing?” she asks.
Just then the far end of the pole drops down to the deck, making a faint tap they both hear.
“Naamah!” Noah screams.
By instinct she raises her arms, crosses them in front of herself. The wolf leaps, going for her throat. She manages to block him with her arms, but the force of his jump pushes her back, over the railing, and she crashes into the water.
NOAH STOMPS ON THE DECK and yells and yells. Shem hears first and starts shouting, too, as he runs to the deck. Soon the whole boat is a mess of animal noises. Even the wolf is scared. Noah makes himself large and boxes the wolf into a corner.
“Grab the net,” Noah yells to Shem, keeping his eyes trained on the wolf’s eyes.
Japheth and Ham are there now, and they help Shem get the net over the wolf, fold him up in it, and get him on his side.
“Take him back down to his room, Japheth,” Noah says.
Japheth nods and drags the limp wolf along the deck.
Noah rushes over to the side of the boat, which is still shaking with every startled animal. “And calm those animals down!”
“What happened, Dad?” asks Ham.
“I got distracted and the damn thing chewed the rope off the stick.”
“That doesn’t sound so unusual.”
“It lunged at your mother.”
At the same instant, the boys figure it out. “Where is she, Dad?” asks Shem.
“Why haven’t you gone in after her yet?” Ham yells, his voice cracking.
“I would!” Noah shouts, scanning the water. “I mean I will. But I can’t tell where she is.”
All of them are looking in the water now.
“Can you see her?” he asks them.
NAAMAH FEELS A PAIN burst through her hips and shoulders, from one side of her body to the other, as she crashes into the water. Blood is spilling out of the gash on her arm from the teeth of the wolf. Her clothes rise over her body and she knows she is falling deeper. When her clothes settle, she has trouble telling which way is up.
This is when the woman comes to her, the one she has seen before.
“You are safe,” she says.
Naamah’s eyes scramble over her black skin.
“You can speak here.”
Naamah opens her mouth and the water does not come into it. She closes it again.
The woman waits.
Naamah moves her mouth more slowly. She can feel there a kind of film, which she seems to create with the parting of her lips. She touches her fingers to her open mouth. It feels like the film that forms on top of partly churned milk—what people call skin, though it’s hard to imagine skin without the firmness of the body beneath it. This is a weightless skin. This is impossible.
She spots the blood still leaving her arm in trails like a hair’s curl, as if she might fondle it. “Am I okay?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Will I be?”
She nods.
“What now?” Naamah asks.
“I bring you back to the ark.”
“You know about the boat?”
She nods.
“Who are you?”
“I am an angel of the Lord.”
“Shit.” Naamah’s eyes scramble again. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”
“You have nothing to fear, Naamah.”
“Nothing to fear? I have everything to fear! What are you doing down here?”
The angel doesn’t respond.
Naamah knows what it could be. “You are cleaning up the dead.”
The angel shakes her head.
“You are hiding the massacre.”
“No.”
“Where are the dead, then?” Naamah spots a tree and swims toward it, uses it to orient herself, swims down. Her ears begin to hurt.
The angel follows her patiently. “Here, let me help with that.” She touches Naamah and Naamah’s ears stop hurting and she gains a sort of gravity in the water.
“Where did they go?” Naamah asks.
“Do you have no other questions?”
Naamah stops, calms herself. She can tell the angel is beautiful, but she can’t describe her. The angel flickers in and out of focus like any object in the water, but this seems more calculated, as if to mislead Naamah, so that she might sound mad if she ever tried to describe her to anyone. She searches for some detail about her to hold on to—the color of her eyes, a scar, anything.
“Are you here to judge me?” Naamah asks.
“No.”
“Do you regret me as He does?”
“He does not regret you.”
“He does not regret Noah. I am just loved by the man He does not regret.”
“Is that not enough?”
“No,” Naamah says, “that is not enough.”
The angel says nothing.
“Do you regret me?” Naamah asks again.
“I don’t know yet.”
“But you will stay to find out, won’t you?”
And then Naamah is in Noah’s arms, choking and coughing as he pulls her backward, through the water, toward the swing.