In this dream, Naamah is somewhere very cold. In every direction there is snow on the ground and in the sky.
“Naamah.”
She looks up. “Hello, Jael.” It feels good to be able to see him.
“You could not find me,” he says. “I found you. It’s my dream! I knew it.”
“Aren’t you cold, Jael?”
“Yes.”
She lifts up a fold in her clothing, near her chest. He lands on her hand and lets her lead him under the cloth, so that one of his wings is against her chest. He can still look ahead of them, wherever they are going. “If this is your dream, what are we doing here?”
“That I don’t know,” Jael says. “I’d never come here. Would you?”
“No.”
“Maybe it’s not either of our dreams.”
“Probably not,” Naamah says.
She keeps walking forward. She can’t make out anything around her. Soon she feels a pain in her shins and she knows she’s walking up a hill. She hasn’t walked up a steep hill in a long time. The steps and ladders and ramps on the ship aren’t like this.
When she reaches the top of the hill, she stops and the snow stops, too. Below her, the snow tapers into ice banks and water. The water is calm the way the floodwaters are calm.
The longer she stands there, the more animals reveal themselves: arctic foxes, arctic dolphins, arctic loons, polar bears, penguins, ivory gulls, snowy owls, little auks, even an arctic whale. With their movement, each flapping wing, each dolphin’s spout, they make the place look vibrant, even though they’re only a dozen shades of white. Still, it’s quiet.
“Damn,” Jael says.
“Really,” Naamah says.
“What do they all eat?” he asks.
“Each other, I guess.”
As they stand there and watch, the animals begin to behave strangely. The whales and dolphins begin lobtailing, and the sounds their flukes make against the water are loud as they echo against the banks of ice, the hills of snow. And then their bodies rise out of the water as if their flukes were wings and their noses were pointed toes poised on the water.
Then the birds, all the birds, start flying into the giant flanks of the whales and dolphins and fall into the water. Eventually the birds begin to break the skins of the animals, until the bodies are spotted with blood.
When the penguins appear again, they each have two heads. The foxes have human ears. The polar bears are disfigured, with short back legs that cannot bend, and they drag their lopsided bodies behind them.
A hush falls across the scene and the upside-down whales open their mouths wide and their bodies fall down through them into the water. When they jump back out, their bodies are inside out, the grotesqueness of their muscular and cardiovascular systems laid bare.
The spectacle of it is magnificent, but Naamah retches.
“Watch the feathers,” Jael says. He squirms out from his warm spot on her chest.
“Sorry.”
“I bet, if I focus really hard, I can get us out of here,” he says.
“Okay,” Naamah says, breathing hard and shaking.
He lands on the back of her shoulder and raises his wings over his eyes. Nothing happens. He lowers his wings in a huff. “It’s not working.”
“No.”
“Well, you try something.”
She rights herself, takes a deep breath, but still feels like she’s shaking. She closes her eyes, and with another deep breath she understands she is not shaking but buzzing. She feels like she’s going to explode.
“Jael! Off!”
He flies high into the air, and she opens her mouth. Thousands of bees pour out from within her, overtaking every gruesome animal in the arctic scene. Every animal turns brown, like mustard seeds, the bees’ transparent wings sending off little glints. Every animal is given a new, very busy skin.
Jael comes back down to Naamah’s shoulder as they watch together.
The bees make quick work of the bodies of the animals, and as they do, the bodies become even more misshapen than they already were, folding in on themselves. Soon the animals are down to skeletons, some clinging to one tough organ. In one bear, the bees eat its hanging heart from within, the muscle glistening like an oil slick shaking on water.
Naamah retches again.
Afraid that the bees will come back to her when they’re finished, she leaves, running away. Jael is startled off her shoulder and follows her in flight. Naamah hears each flap of his wings in the cold air.
“Where are you going?” he asks.
“I don’t know how long we will be here. We need shelter.”
She runs until they come to a snowdrift formed by what must have been a harsher wind in the storm that blinded them before. She starts to dig down at the edge of the small hill of snow. When the snow reaches her knees, she starts to dig forward into the hill.
This should all take a long time. She should be exhausted and sweating and then nervous about sweating in the cold. But the work is easy and soon the cave is built.
“This is nice,” says Jael.
Naamah nods, settling in, trying not to be unnerved by her strength in the dream.
“Do you think I might be filled with carnivorous bees, too?” he asks.
“Does it feel like you are?”
“No.” Jael pauses. “Did it feel like you were?”
“Yes. Just before it happened.”
“You wiped out all those animals.”
“I know,” she says.
“I can’t tell if I feel bad about that,” he says.
“Let’s talk about something else. I don’t want to throw up in here.”
In the cave, the air is beginning to feel warm and thick. If Jael stopped talking, Naamah would surely fall asleep.
“I miss trees,” he says.
“Me too.” She’s nodding off anyway.
Jael comes back to her chest and she folds him up.
WHEN THEY FALL ASLEEP, Naamah wakes in her bed with Noah. He is just out of reach, too far for her to lay her hand on his chest, to feel his heartbeat. And his breath is silent, or quieter than the other noises of the boat. But the room and the bed are warm, so she knows he’s alive, and that’s enough. She falls back to sleep.
IN THE DREAM, she’s in a block of ice now, standing upright, floating in the arctic waters. Jael is on top of the block. She can’t see him, but she can hear his talons scratching.
“Naamah! Can you hear me? I will get you out of this.”
But Naamah’s not in danger. She’s not cold. She can breathe. She thinks she may be strong enough in this dream to break out of the ice whenever she chooses. So she chooses to enjoy it, since she’ll never be in this odd position again.
The ice doesn’t bob in the water. It floats straight on. The ice and her body are mostly beneath the surface. Her head admires the line of the still water and the near-perfect reflections it offers to every crest of snow.
Sometimes she catches a glimpse of what’s below the water, like a school of fish. But eventually she tires of moving the way a boat would. She raises her shoulders and the ice lurches up and begins to crack. It bobs. Jael flies above it. She feels sick again. She pushes her toes down and the ice cracks more, so much so that capillaries of water creep into the ice.
She raises her shoulders and pushes her toes down at the same time and the ice splits along a crack above her shoulders. She kicks and the ice breaks up around her feet, but she’s left with a giant ice block on her head, still floating her along. Jael flies back down and slams his beak into the ice.
Naamah pounds on it with her fists from below, as best she can, dragging her fists through the water. Even so, it’s working. The ice cracks thinly at first, and on another pound, the cracks double in size, refiguring themselves into the shape of a tree’s broad branches, until all the ice between the branches falls away in chunks.
Then Naamah is only a body again and she has to swim to stay afloat and alive in the water.
“Are you okay?” Jael asks.
Naamah twists onto her back and wiggles her hands back and forth under the water at her waist, and she watches Jael above her. “Yes,” she says.
“Aren’t you cold?”
“No.”
“Look.” Jael motions.
Naamah flips back over and sees a group of seals on an iceberg. She swims to it and climbs on. Her elbows and wrists feel strange next to the fins of the seals; she’s making such a show of her angles.
She lies down between the seals. They’re soft and warm and smooth, and she’s not sure how they will take to her petting them, but she pets one anyway. She has to believe they can recognize a gesture of adoration and comfort. And though the seal does recognize her intent, it is not comforted. The seals feel unusual for the first time in their lives, beside this body of a human who’s so transfixed by them. And unusual feels unsafe.
One seal starts to bark at her and, to move her off the ice, slowly, bumps her away. The others raise their heads up, add their barks to the chorus. Naamah thinks she sees the Metatron perched behind them all, his striking yellow head.
“Okay, okay,” Naamah says, and she slides back off the ice into the water. But this time she can do nothing to stay afloat. She sinks farther and farther down. It takes only seconds before she can’t see Jael above her. Everything she sees turns that dusty navy blue, as if she is disappearing into Jael instead of the water.
The same soft film forms over her mouth. “This is all a little too familiar, don’t you think? A little too convenient!” she yells.
But here her words push out the film into a bubble around her whole body. She screams as loud and long as she can, and once the bubble is large, she falls to the bottom of it with a plop. She sits there, steady in the water. The bubble doesn’t seem to be moving at all.
An octopus approaches the bubble. It grabs onto it and moves down to where Naamah sits. She lies down on her stomach to be closer to the octopus, who has tilted its grinning black eye toward Naamah’s round face. Then it starts to bite at the bubble with its beak.
When the beak recedes, it reminds Naamah of a baby boy’s penis, receding into the fat pads boys are often born with. When she pushed her boys’ foreskins back, to clean the heads of their penises, the urethras opened slightly, like the mouths of the smallest fish. As the boys grew older, they grew into their circumcisions. The heads of their penises hung under the shafts.
With Naamah’s hand against the bubble, she can feel the suckers along the octopus’s tentacles. She closes her eyes to its penis-mouth and moves her hand back and forth over the two rows of suckers, counting them to herself, hopping between rows.
Soon the octopus grows tired of her and the bubble and starts to leave.
“Wait!” Naamah says. “Give me a shove?”
As the octopus twists away, it swings all eight tentacles at the bubble and launches the bubble toward the surface. When Naamah reaches the surface, she’s no longer in the arctic. All the water is gone, and she’s back in the desert again. The bubble pops.
Sarai is there, on her throne. “Naamah,” she says, “so good to see you.”
“You’ve said that to me before.”
“It’s still true.”
“But why do you keep saying it to me?”
“I married Abraham. He is descended from Shem. Seeing you is like seeing a mother, or a grandmother.”
Naamah walks up to her now, right up to her face, planning to say, What does that mean to me? But she does feel connected to her, and also taken with the sight of her. She says, “You’re so beautiful.”
“Thank you,” Sarai says, used to this reaction.
“How distantly are we related?” Naamah asks.
“Very. But we spoke of you often, told the story of your sacrifices.”
“Is that how you speak of it? Sacrifices?”
“Yes.”
“Not as something righteous?”
“That too.”
“How do you think of it?” Naamah asks her.
“I am only grateful. If it weren’t for you, I would not have my son.”
“Where is he now?”
“He’s dead. No . . .” She corrects herself. “At this point in time, he hasn’t been born.”
“This point in time, here in the dream?”
Sarai nods.
“How are you here?”
“The women in our family, Naamah, they’ve been powerful for a long time. When I died, I found I could move through time as I wished. But so far I have largely stayed in dreams, where I can interact with people, where I can create things like this throne, where I can sit and watch the desert.”
“Is this your dream?” Jael asks Sarai. He’s back, and Naamah is relieved to see him. He swoops down and lands on Naamah’s shoulder.
“No, I think this is Naamah’s dream, mostly.”
Naamah rubs the back of Jael’s head with her bent fingers.
“What is a righteous thing worth?” Naamah asks.
“It’s worth lives,” Sarai answers.
“It costs lives,” Naamah says.
“Then its worth is impossible to discuss, for lives cannot be measured against other lives.”
“Do you think God would think this?”
Sarai is silent for a long time. Then she says, “He ordered my husband to kill my son.”
“A child of mine?”
Sarai nods.
“What happened?”
“He said, ‘Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.’”
Naamah draws Jael closer to her.
“It wasn’t true. He had another son, Ishmael, with my handmaiden, Hagar. He loved Ishmael, too. I wondered if that made it easier for him to take Isaac to the mountain as he did.”
“Have you ever spoken to God?”
“No, but I have heard him speak to Abraham, in the voices of three men who came once to our tent.”
“I’m sorry—that’s not really what I want to know. What happened to Isaac?”
“It’s okay. You’re scared. To hear the story told straight through, it is scary. Should I tell you now that Isaac was not killed?”
“Yes.” Naamah tries to relax her jaw. “That helps.”
“Abraham took him, with donkeys and servants, to find the mountain. And days later they found the mountain, and he set out farther, with only Isaac and the supplies for the altar. It is difficult to tell you this, to recall it all. It’s been so long since I remembered.”
“Remembered what?”
“That God didn’t say to Abraham that he had to make our son carry the wood he would be sacrificed on, and yet Abraham made him do this.”
Naamah pulls in a breath.
“Abraham built the altar, arranged the wood, and laid our son down on that wood, which had already spent time pressed to his small back. And then Abraham grabbed his knife. He got that far.”
Naamah tries to take her hand to offer her some comfort, but Sarai raises it away from Naamah and shakes her head.
“An angel of God called out to my husband and said, ‘Do not lay a hand on the boy.’ And instead of running from that place with our son, he stayed and sacrificed a ram and let the angel continue on about His promises to our people.” Sarai presses her thumbnail into the knuckle of her forefinger. “Then they came home to me, changed men both, having heard the angel of the Lord, some sort of joy on their faces, some pride.
“In Isaac I recognized a restlessness with regard to the size of his life. I could relate to that. Not because my life felt small and strange within the grandness of God, but because my life felt large when everyone else saw me as small and inept. And perhaps I was inept.” She begins to cry, but her back doesn’t bend away from the throne. “Perhaps I was, Naamah, for such a thing to befall my son. For God to think He could make this threat against me and my family.”
Sarai wipes away her tears and looks as she did before. Composed again, she says, “God cannot be judged because He cannot be understood.”
“I judge Him just the same,” Naamah says.
“Maybe I did, too, when I was alive. I know from my travels that we are not the last women to do so.”
“But you do not judge Him now?”
“Today I judge myself. I don’t know who I will judge tomorrow. What will you do tomorrow?”
“I will wake up again on the boat.”
“How nice it is, then”—Sarai smiles at them—“to be with me now, here.”