Before the sun rises, Naamah goes to the bucket of wood ash they keep in the hall. She takes a cup, dips it in, brings up just enough ash to cover the bottom of the cup. On the deck she prepares a bath, adds water to the cup with ashes, and mixes it with her finger. She places it on the edge of the bath and gets in. She scrubs her skin with a cloth.
She rubs and grabs at her pubic hairs, pulling free any that have fallen out. She holds up her hand, hairs clinging to it—some because they’ve curled around her fingers, some because everything is wet. Is this something every woman has experienced? she thinks. Is this a sight every woman has seen? She dips her hand back into the water and the hairs let go. She sees them floating in the water, but one is on top of it, showing the shine of the water where it puckers its nearly-there skin.
She drops her head back and then lifts it again, heavy and dripping. Then she takes the cup of water, thickened with ash, and pours it onto her head, lathers it into her hair. She takes a long time rubbing it in, down to the scalp, before she leans back again. When the water creeps over her hairline, she moves her head back and forth. She runs her hands from her forehead back, until her hair feels like it’s free of ash.
The sun is rising, and Naamah turns her head to watch it. That’s when she sees something she hasn’t seen in months: the horizon, interrupted. She jumps out of the bath and runs to the railing. The mountaintops are out. A whole mountain range, all the peaks, starting close to the boat and stretching out as far as she can see, scattered through the water like a path, the kind of path a child might hop along, a giant child, God.
NAAMAH GETS DRESSED and finds Japheth first. She wants to take a mountain goat out on a little boat to one of the drying peaks.
“Shouldn’t we tell the others?” Japheth says.
“It’s so early,” she says, “and the mountaintops aren’t going anywhere.”
So Japheth gets her a mountain goat, and they clamber onto a boat. He rows while she pets the goat she cannot see. She can feel its short hair falling out in her fingers.
“Their eyes are odd,” he says, “like their pupils are winking at me.”
“I remember,” she says, picturing them. She’s reminded of an octopus’s eye, but she’s not sure why. She’s not sure how she even knows what an octopus’s eye looks like.
At the mountaintop, she stays in the boat while Japheth carries the goat above the water and sets him down on the rock of it. Then he returns to the boat, where he wrings out his clothes. She listens to the goat scamper about on the peak.
“It’s a nice day,” Japheth says.
Naamah nods and smiles at him, but it’s easier to pass the time without speaking. She lies back, closes her eyes, and takes in the sun while listening to the goat’s hooves.
Eventually the goat gets tired of the mountaintop. He cries out a few times, and it sounds like someone is calling for her from far away. But before Japheth makes it out of the boat, the goat starts to swim back to them. He’s drenched when Japheth pulls him over the side. Naamah sees the drops of water hitting the wood.
“Even he knows nothing’s ready,” Naamah says.
“Yes,” Japheth says, and he rows them all back to the boat, which looms nearby, bigger than any of the mountaintops for now.
NOT SURE HOW long she will have access to the angel and the village of dead, Naamah starts to visit them every day. She has to wade farther and farther out before she can dive down.
On the first day, the children ask to see her legs. “What’s that?” a girl asks.
“Bruises. Do you remember those?”
The children shake their heads.
“Are they always in that shape?”
“No, a dog jumped on my thigh, and this is the paw print. See? The pad of the foot and the four toes?”
“Can I touch it?”
Naamah nods.
The girl touches it, outlines it. “I can’t feel it,” she says.
“It’s underneath the skin.”
“What is?”
“The injury, I guess.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Only when it’s touched.”
The girl snaps her hand away. “I’m sorry.”
“No, no. You’d have to touch it harder. And even then, it’s only a little soreness.”
“What is being sore like?”
“It’s an ache. Or like being stiff when you wake up. Do you sleep?”
“Yes.”
“Do you ever feel stiff?” Naamah reaches up her arms. “Like you want to stretch?” She bends to the left and right.
The children giggle, and they all mimic her. She looks at them all swaying in the water like the spirits they are.
THE NEXT DAY, the children ask to see the bruises on her leg again. The paw print is a different color, more green.
“Will you grow something here?”
“What do you mean?” Naamah asks.
“Like a plant.”
“No,” she says. “It changes as it heals. Next it will be more yellow.”
“Like little suns?”
“Yes, but it will look too sourly yellow to be the sun.”
The children pull at her toes.
“Do you remember the sun?” she asks.
“Yes,” the children say excitedly. “We’ve made a story about the sun.”
“Have you?”
They nod.
“Can I hear it?”
“The sun hid when the rain came. It went to another world where there was no rain and never would be rain. But then, by accident, the sun burned the new world and said, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. The new world did not forgive the sun, so the sun came back here.”
“I love that story,” Naamah says. “That’s a very good story.”
THE NEXT DAY, the children have prepared a play for Naamah. The angel has designed a stage and costumes for each of them. A child comes out in the shape of the sun as children imagine it: a perfectly symmetrical, far-reaching thing, with beams of light zigzagging out of it.
“I am so bored,” the sun-child says. “Look at the animals here. Look at these children running around. Haven’t I seen this before? I have. I have.”
The rest of the children run around in front of her.
“I will go somewhere else and see something new.”
The children leave and the sun-child walks in a circle, returning to center stage, as a child dressed as a planet comes from stage right.
“Wow,” says the sun-child, looking at the new planet.
From offstage, a child yells, “Meanwhile, back on Earth!”
The sun runs off, and the rest of the children come back dressed as raindrops. “Boom!” they yell as they stomp around the stage. “Boom boom boom!” The children try not to laugh as they run into each other. And then they run off again.
The sun-child and planet-child come back. “Ow!” says the planet-child. “You burned me.”
“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to!”
“I want you to leave!”
The sun-child starts to circle the stage again, and all the raindrop-children come back. When the sun-child is at the very back of the stage, Naamah can see only the top of her zigzagging beams of crystal light. She comes center stage by passing through the raindrop-children, and they all dramatically peel away, left and right. Some groan in defeat.
“The world looks different now.” The sun-child looks around. “What is different?” She looks at Naamah. “What is different?”
Naamah’s cheeks feel hot. “All the children are gone.”
“Yes! That’s it! And all this water in their place. What a different world now. I will stay here until the water is gone. At least until then.”
The children offstage are shaking off their raindrop costumes; the shattering pieces of crystal float down in the water. Then they run back onstage.
“Oh yes, please stay.”
“Please stay, sun.”
“We are so happy when you’re here.”
“And alive!” shouts a young child.
All the children fall silent.
Naamah can’t tell if that was the ending of the play, as they had planned it, but she tries to clap. But trying to clap in the water is foolish, so she throws up her arms, hollers and cheers. “What a great play! Wonderfully done, children! Wonderful!”
The children take their bows.
THE NEXT DAY, the angel asks Naamah what she’s doing here.
“I could ask you the same,” Naamah says.
The angel’s quiet.
“Where else could you be?” Naamah asks. “The heavens. The underworld. But could you be anywhere else if you wanted? In another world, like the sun in the children’s play?”
“Yes.”
“Do you ever mention God to them?”
“No.”
“What would happen to them if you leave?”
“Nothing. They can stay. They can leave.”
“Really? You think everything would just continue.”
“Yes.”
“Then why not leave, get out of here?”
The angel’s quiet again.
“It’s for me, isn’t it? That’s why you’re still here,” Naamah says.
The angel looks at her.
“What do you want from me?” Naamah gets in her face. “What do you want?”
The angel kisses Naamah, and Naamah pulls back and floats away in the water. The angel waits for her, and she’s right to. Naamah returns to her. When she takes the angel’s tongue in her mouth, the film between them is gone.
WHEN NAAMAH AND NOAH were first together, there were times she would take his penis into her mouth. And even when she rounded her lips over her teeth, she still felt her back teeth touch the edge of the head of his penis. Her body felt mismatched to his, but she knew, from having taken other men’s penises into her mouth, that this was true with any penis. And really it was a feeling about her own body—that she was misusing it, misunderstanding it. She never felt that with her tongue inside a woman’s vagina.
Still, on a man, she liked playing with the point where the edge of the head gathered toward the tip. But sometimes Noah could not resist moving his hips. And then her body felt wrong again—his speed not meant to be mirrored by her neck. So she would stand up, and he would lift her by her thighs and place her on him. She would control the speed with which she fell down the shaft of his penis, how much slack she allowed in her hips until she reached his soft hair.
If she had to decide which part of sex with Noah she liked best, it would be his strength.
But once or twice he ejaculated in her mouth, and his semen made her mouth crawl, and there wasn’t enough water to rinse it out, there wasn’t enough bread to chew into a paste that would finally turn sweet.
THE ANGEL GRABS AT Naamah’s body and Naamah grabs back. Naamah’s arms settle along the sides of the angel’s head, her hands in her hair. The angel hoists Naamah high, with her hands tight on her ass, and Naamah’s legs wrap around her. Naamah doesn’t know if the angel has enormous strength or if the water makes all the difference.
If they were in the desert, Naamah thinks, the angel would throw her down on the bed next. Instead, the angel keeps lifting her, dragging her top teeth down Naamah’s stomach. Naamah feels weightless. She has to link her legs around the angel’s head to keep from drifting away. The angel flicks her tongue over her clit faster than anyone ever has. Soon Naamah has ejaculated, but she hasn’t orgasmed. She wonders if the angel can find the spot that Bethel found with precision, that Noah’s penis finds bluntly every time.
It’s as if the angel hears Naamah’s thought, and maybe she does. She pulls Naamah’s body down by the hips, holds her down at her shoulder with her left hand as she pushes her right fingers in, and she’s on the spot before Naamah can let out a breath. When Naamah does breathe, it comes out a scream. Naamah pushes her nails into the angel’s back.
She wants to know more about the angel’s body, but she can do nothing about that now. She’s busy shaking, feeling like she might shit, like she might explode. The angel places her hand on Naamah’s stomach, down low, fingers in her hair, and applies pressure to steady her in the water. Naamah wonders if the water shook all the way to the surface. All the way to the boat.
THE NEXT DAY, the angel asks, “Does one of the children remind you of yourself? Is that why you come?”
“No. Why would you ask that?”
“It seems like a human thing to do.”
“How long have you been watching humans?”
“Since the beginning of humans, who didn’t look like humans, and before that. Since the beginning of this world.”
“What do you mean, humans did not look like humans?”
“They resembled humans, but if one came up to you, you would not think it a human—perhaps an animal, a cross between a human and an animal. Or someone from another world entirely.”
“We grew to be this way? In how we look and talk, you mean?”
The angel nods and looks intently at Naamah.
“Is there something else?”
“God did not kill you all for growing too violent. He said that, but it’s not true.”
“But we had grown too violent.”
“Yes. And you will be violent again.”
“Then why?”
“He was jealous. Children of God had begun to indulge themselves with the human women. And more than that, promising themselves to them.”
“Can He not do what He wishes with women?”
“He can. He has.”
“God does not speak to me,” Naamah says.
“I am the presence of God, at least in part. And I speak to you.”
“I’m not sure whether I want Him to speak to me.”
“He speaks to me constantly.”
“Right now? I thought you hadn’t been found—didn’t want to be found. What does He say?”
“It’s not like human speech with me. He wants me to return, and I feel that the way I might feel the sun on me. Or the way you might hear a loud sound in your chest rather than your ears.”
“Is He angry with you?”
“Yes.”
“Will He kill you if you return?”
“He could kill me here.”
“Why hasn’t He?”
“There are far fewer angels than humans.”
“How many angels are there?”
“There are things even you shouldn’t know, Naamah.”
“Do you have a family?”
“Not in the way you think of one. But the others are dear to me. He is dear to me.”
“Am I dear to you?”
“No,” the angel lies.
“Then maybe I will stop coming.”
“Soon you will not come, because of the water’s decline, and there is nothing you or I can do about that. You will be restored to the world of the living.”