After dinner, Naamah makes a tea for Sadie with valerian root. She pours it into a cup, and Sadie thanks her and takes it off to bed. Naamah knows that’s not strong enough for the tiger. She decides to try to make something with poppy seeds. She gets them from the cold, quiet room at the bottom of the ship. It’s less cold now that the water has receded.
She brings out two stones, one large and flat and another in the shape of a smooth cylinder. She places the seeds on the flat stone, adds a little water, and starts to work the cylinder over the seeds. As they turn to paste she adds more water, little by little, as it holds together. But she’s worried the tiger won’t eat it.
She puts the paste in a bucket and adds water to the paste until it breaks. She swirls her fingers through it, checking for clumps in the dark, and then she takes the bucket to the deck to leave it overnight.
In the morning, the water has begun to evaporate. She tells everyone not to touch the bucket, that she’s making something for one of the bigger animals. She goes below deck and she removes the tiger’s water from her room—that way she might want it more when Naamah returns it to her later. And while it makes the moaning of the tiger worse that day, echoing through the boat, Naamah thinks it’s worth it.
After all day in the sun, the water in the bucket is gone. The residue is thin along the wood, and Naamah scrapes it off with a spoon, not with her bone, so that none of the bucket comes with it. She hopes the tiger won’t notice the flakes in her water. Why would she?
NAAMAH DOESN’T WANT TO give the tiger too much, but too little would be a wasted effort. She can’t stand the thought of trying yet another thing and still being left with a tiger clawing and dissatisfied. And haven’t they been accommodating? Couldn’t they have made the animals’ rooms smaller, more cagelike? Made them live on grates so their shit fell through and they’d never have to be moved at all? Let all their muscles atrophy? She thinks, Haven’t we been the miraculous people we were chosen to be?
So maybe Naamah overdoes it with the flakes in the tiger’s water. Maybe she does. And maybe it’s only that it’s been another long day after so many long days in Naamah’s life. But next she hears the tiger’s body fall down with a soft thud, as if from buckled knees, and soon Naamah can’t hear her breathing.
She rushes back to the seeds. This time she grabs the ephedra seeds and gets to work on a paste. When she’s finished, she takes the paste and a bowl of water, goes to the tiger’s room, and opens the door. It’s the first time she has opened a door with such a large predator behind it, and she is scared.
As Naamah moves into the room, shuffling her feet, it crosses her mind that perhaps she should let the tiger die. Enough of the other animals have died for one reason or another. And the other tigers are doing well. In fact, she decides, she should leave. Of course she should leave. That’s when she feels her toes in the tiger’s fur.
She places the bowls on the floor and finds the tiger’s head with her hands. Then she moves the bowls closer. She opens the tiger’s mouth and puts the paste down her throat. Then she pulls the tiger’s head onto her lap and pours water into her mouth. And then, blind to everything that matters in the room, with the tiger’s head heavy on her bent legs, she thinks she’s killed the tiger. She strokes her under her chin.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
But the tiger snaps awake, curls its body, and springs to its feet, clattering the bowls and splashing water. Naamah jumps up, acting on instinct, and runs for the door. She tries to slam the door behind her, but it doesn’t slam. It hits the tiger’s body. Usually Naamah would take pleasure in that kind of sound, new, singular to a door hitting a tiger, this tiger. But she is focused only on running away, on making it to a door she can barricade.
The tiger reaches her first, tackles her to the ground. Naamah is thrown face-first onto the floor, the tiger’s breath on the back of her head. She uses all the courage left in her to roll over. She wants, at least, to face the tiger when she dies.
The tiger’s head flashes into her vision and out again. In and out. Never staying. It looks the way the angel looked during sex that day. And then Naamah realizes it: that was a warning, a premonition; the angel is only the angel. Naamah begins to cry. Why did she cling to one reading of the vision? How arrogant she is. And now the angel scorned, and herself brokenhearted. She thinks, How absurd I am to exist at all.
The tiger places a paw on her head, turns it until Naamah’s cheek is on the wood. Naamah feels the animal’s claws dig into her skin, one behind her ear where there’s no hair, two in her hair above her ear, and one in her cheek, which cuts deepest, with no bone below to stop it. Then the tiger roars so loudly that, even though Naamah’s ears are covered, she feels the sound through her head, feels it shake the roof of her mouth. Other tigers start to paw at their doors and walls.
“I’m sorry,” Naamah yells.
At this, the tiger seems to stop.
“Look around! You’re out now. There’s nowhere to go. When there’s somewhere to go, I will let you go. I’m trying to get you there.” Naamah stops yelling. “That’s what I’m trying to do.”
The tiger makes her long, low sound, as if she’s trying to throw her voice across a desert. She takes her paw off Naamah’s head, and Naamah turns to face her again, even if she can’t see her. The blood from the cut on Naamah’s cheek runs down to her ear. She hears the tiger’s body shifting above her, shifting her weight so she might raise a paw and strike Naamah.
Right then the tiger comes into perfect focus, as if Naamah has been able to see her all along.
The sight of the tiger makes Naamah so happy that she wants to grab her, pull on her fur, scream. The tiger hisses, and Naamah sees the wrinkling above her nose to the inner corners of her eyes, her whiskered face rising over teeth until her cheeks are as perfectly round as a child’s. Naamah likes infantilizing her this way, to make her less terrifying.
Naamah covers her neck with her arms, knowing the tiger will go for that first, and she hisses back at the tiger. But it doesn’t make her feel powerful. If anything, the sound, sparked from the back of her throat, emphasizes her hopeless body.
But then, in an instant, the tiger flies into the ceiling above her, whimpering as her back hits the beams. Then the tiger flies backward, toward its door. Then she’s dropped. As if she gets the message, she goes back into her room.
Naamah sits up, and the little blood that made it to her ear runs to the bottom of it, the thinnest red coating, like a glaze on a cake.
When she looks up, she sees the angel coming through the wall, rushing toward her. Out of the water, she emits that exceptional light again.
“Are you all right?” the angel asks.
Naamah nods.
The angel looks only into her eyes, as if she might see, through them, any other injury.
“Thank you,” Naamah says. The angel kisses her, but Naamah doesn’t kiss back—her fear of the tiger hasn’t left her completely. She says, “We should close the door.”
“The tiger won’t be a problem again.”
Naamah keeps her eyes on the doorway.
The angel says, “I promise.”
“What was wrong with her?”
“She hates the boat.”
“She doesn’t care that I hate the boat, too?”
“No.”
“Would she have killed me?”
“Yes.”
“Eaten me?”
“Probably not. I think she was planning to make an example of you—tear off all your limbs and leave your headless torso at the bottom of the stairs.”
“Okay, okay, that’s enough detail.” Naamah laughs and takes her eyes off the doorway, finally looks at the angel. “Wait, what was she going to do with my head?”
“I’m not sure.”
“And God would not have stopped her?”
“No.”
“Did He think about stopping her?”
“No.”
“If He had thought about it, do you think He would have stopped her?”
“I did.”
“No, I know that.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. I don’t need recognition. I mean, when I thought about it, I thought to stop her.”
“How did you know it was happening?”
“I could feel you both.”
“What have you done to her?” Naamah asks.
“I’m distracting her.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like I’m giving her a dream.”
“What’s the dream?”
“That she’s in the jungle. That she’s crossing streams. That she is happy.”
Naamah shakes her head. “She won’t be happy to come back here, after a dream like that.”
“In the dream, she’ll be called by God to the ark, and she’ll come. She won’t remember the months she’s already been here. And she’ll be thick with His message for long enough.”
“You’re sure?”
“She really scared you, didn’t she?”
“My heart is still racing.”
The angel reaches out her hand. “Do you want me to slow it down?”
“No. It’s all right,” Naamah says. “Is the water shallow?”
“Much more shallow. Not where we are, but on my way to you.”
“You are all okay?”
“We are.”
“And you will stay there?”
“I think I will,” the angel says. “And I want you to come back with me.”
“When?” Naamah asks.
“Now.”
“I can’t come now. Maybe in a few years. Could I come then?”
“You could still come,” the angel says. “But I can’t know what will change between now and then. Neither can you.”
“Would you still love me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you experience time differently? Wouldn’t it all pass more quickly for you?”
“Yes, but I experience your rejection again and again, don’t I?”
“And you are so sensitive?”
“I am. If that is the word you choose.”
“But can’t you understand my commitment to this? My children and grandchildren?”
“I understand it. I have turned my back on commitments myself.”
“If I come with you now, I will not be able to love you. I will worry over what I have left. I will hold it against you.”
The angel is quiet, but Naamah is getting worked up, taking quick breaths and lurching forward as if she could convince the angel, with only the slant and forcefulness of her body, that the angel wants something different from what she’s already made clear.
The angel says, “I could give you anything you want. I could take anything you want away from you.”
“I can’t. I don’t want you to do that, like you did to the dam.”
“I won’t ask you again. I won’t save you again. I can’t keep seeing you.”
“I understand.”
“You are okay with this being the last time we see each other?”
Naamah shakes her head. “There’s nothing I can say. Or if there is, I don’t know it. I’m not the woman you think I am. I mean something only here.”
“You think that—do you hear yourself?”
“If you made me feel otherwise, I wouldn’t trust it.”
“You ruin yourself, Naamah.”
NAAMAH TAKES THE ANGEL’S HAND. “Won’t I be happy here?”
“You will be. I can’t deny it. You will have so many grandchildren, and you will create nations. You will feel such purpose and you will find a happiness in that purpose because you always do. You will be happy.”
“Will you be happy?”
“My life is not so easily seen.”
Naamah kisses her hand.
The angel climbs on top of her and kisses her. She kisses her over and over again. She takes Naamah’s lips between her teeth. She lets Naamah suck on her tongue. Every kiss is some new ratio of their lips, tongues, and teeth, given and received, removed so they might be given again.
Naamah can’t believe the weight of the angel’s body. And yet she feels no pain from it. She feels for the first time how the angel, despite taking on this female form, is far larger than she appears—massive, in some form of matter Naamah cannot see. She knows she can love the angel, but she’s surprised she’s allowed to kiss her. She moves her hands over the angel’s dry arms. She moves her hands to feel more of her body, to slide her hand down the center of her stomach. But as soon as she does, as soon as she reaches her stomach, the angel is gone. As if Naamah touched a button that released a trapdoor and the angel fell through it, straight down, maybe straight through Naamah. And Naamah is alone. And the animals are silent. As if each and every one of them is dead.