The water is all but gone now. But the family doesn’t spend time on the land, as if none of them trusts it yet. Instead they start to dismantle the boat. They remove the roof and reassemble the ramp the animals once climbed. With it, they are ready to let even the wildest animals find their way back off the boat. But that’s not how they begin.
First they let off the smallest animals. The ones who take a single slice of fig and make it last forever, as if time has stopped moving, as if their mouth could not possibly be capable of feeding a body; those animals whose survival suggests that life itself is meaningless, if one animal can be so brazenly ineffective at living. Or at least this is how Naamah has grown to feel about them. If they choked on their food, it would be a miracle of their tiny throats.
But honestly no animal has choked in more than a year on the boat, and Naamah wonders if choking is mostly a human thing, an aggressive impulse to eat and speak at once. Naamah recalls times she’s choked on her own spit.
As they release the animals, some head back toward the boat, some even start walking up the ramp, but Shem chases them back down. Naamah understands the appeal of the familiar. She understands, as she looks out across the land and its little growth, the appeal of the shadow.
The family waits a week before releasing any other animals, before the birds, the snakes, the cats. Soon they will no longer worry about these prey animals—they will hardly even think of them—but for now, they are giving them a chance.
THEY BUILD WAGONS from the rest of the roof, the railing, and parts of rooms they’ve emptied. They will need to carry food, animals that tire along the way, animals they’ll need for eggs, milk, and wool. More than anything they’ll need wagons to carry wood, to give them all they need before the trees start flourishing again. Naamah hopes they can tear the boat down to the ground, taking apart every piece of it, as if it never existed.
WHEN THEY CHOOSE A new place to settle, Naamah knows, they will choose it based largely on its proximity to water. Part of her wants to stay on a mountaintop and melt snow when she needs it. Part of her would be happy to go the rest of her life without seeing another body of water on the earth.
But that would only solve things for her, alone, if everyone else should die again. A prospect that never feels beyond what He might do. She tucks away the idea of her mountain home, in case she is spurned, and spared, again.
She turns her mind to planning the ecosystem of their new home, just as she planned their lives on the boat. Which animals, which plants, where to put the tents, where the water, what paths they might make from one thing to another. For a woman sentenced by God, Naamah is surprised by how often He allows her to take a godlike role.
THE PREDATORS ARE MORE CONFUSING. The snakes have to be let out before the birds because the snakes are prey to the birds. And the smaller birds are prey to the bigger birds. Timing it all is so overwhelming that Naamah wonders if it will ever be done.
On the day they release the cockatoos, one stays behind, perching on Naamah’s shoulder. When she brushes him away, he flutters nearby, then returns.
She pushes him off her shoulder. “Go on,” she says.
But he will not. “Jael,” he says.
“Jael,” she repeats.
She holds out her hand and he perches there, clinging precariously to her fingers because it’s clear that’s what she wants. They look at each other for a long time.
“Well, if you must stay, do your best not to bother anyone,” she says. “And that includes me.” She laughs.
Jael can tell she doesn’t remember, but he’s determined to be nearby when He reveals Himself to her outside the dream.
EVERYONE GROWS FOND OF JAEL. Naamah keeps nuts in her pockets for him, which is not surprising, but so does Noah, who sometimes gives Jael a perch as well. Being around them all the time, Jael learns new things to say: Hello and Dear one.
Soon it is time to release the larger animals. They kill a horse and cut it into as many pieces as they can, so they don’t have to kill more. They hide most of it in a room filled with hay and Naamah’s most fragrant plants. They lay a small trail of meat from the bottom rooms to the ramp, leaving blood between the pieces. And then they hide themselves in the fragrant room, Japheth and Noah holding makeshift weapons, Adata and Ham barricading the door once everyone is inside.
They do this for the bears, the panthers, the tigers, one enormous animal after another, quiet on their padded feet. They keep resetting the trail with fresh meat. They think it will take two days, but they keep having to stop for Danit’s crying, and it helps all of them to take breaks, to spend time in the air.
Naamah is shocked at how the world, large as it ever was, seems more tenable now, seeing the land, dipped and heaped, ever-varying, instead of looking over the endlessly flat water. The world seems smaller simply by how her eyes take it in.
ON THE THIRD DAY, A brown bear strays from the path and finds their room.
Naamah peeks at it through a crack. She had been frustrated for so long by her inability to see the animals that she’s able to accept the bear, in all its glory, without a flinch. She takes in every hair, and if she thinks of God anymore, she thinks of Him as the infinite number of hairs over the bear’s body. Some have caught dust, some are shorter than others, some are not hairs at all but whiskers.
But that’s not quite right. Does she think of Him rarely, or is it always?
The bear wanders away.
EVENTUALLY THE BOAT IS CLEAR. They are left with wagons, boards, plants, seeds, dried fruits, and vegetables still in sand. Neela must tend to Danit, so only seven of them can drive the wagons and the carts they will pull behind them.
Naamah works among the half-destroyed rooms of the boat—a piecework village of her own, fittingly mislaid compared to that of the angel’s making.
She goes through each piece to make sure they’ve missed nothing, but even in pieces the boat still smells of animals and their piss and shit. As she steps through it, she says to herself, This is the last time I will see these rooms. This is the last time I will smell this smell.
When she stumbles across one of the overhead door pulleys from the rooms of a dangerous animal, she twists her head around, as if one might still be beside her, and she dislodges Jael from his perch.
“Dear one,” he says.
She laughs. “I’m all right. Just spooked myself.”
“Hello,” he says.
“Don’t worry,” she adds. “We are quite alone, aren’t we?”
And it’s true, the rest of the family is elsewhere, tending to other things, to the docile animals. The carnivorous animals are gone. She wonders where they have all disappeared to, what new homes they have found.
ONE NIGHT, she wakes from a dream and she can’t help herself. With Jael on her shoulder, she walks out to where the angel lives. It takes a long time to find it—well into the next afternoon—everything made unfamiliar by the air. It’s a lake now, and her first thought is to dive in. But she knows that if she sets even a toe in the lake, the angel might kill her. Such is the anguish of a woman who has made herself clear. Even this close, the angel might feel her. And the children she cannot trust anymore.
She turns back.
AS SHE RETURNS, Noah sees her first and runs to her across the land. She watches his steps, the placing of his feet through patches of new growth.
“You’ve been gone for nearly two days.” He’s trying not to raise his voice at her, even though no one is near enough to hear. This is a habit from the boat that they no longer need. Soon they will reacquaint themselves with yelling, with moaning during sex, with the sounds they’d taught themselves to contain. Naamah feels more free just thinking about the sounds she might make. She likes thinking about the word alone.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Where were you?”
“I was scouting out a place we might settle.”
Noah wasn’t expecting such a practical answer. She had practiced it on the long walk back. He shakes his head as he thinks. “And was it a good fit? Could we go there?”
“No!” And though she had practiced this, too, the no still rushes out of her as if she might eat Noah, pluck him right off the earth.
He notices, but says calmly, “That’s too bad. Should I scout in another direction?”
“I will do it,” she says. She tries to smile at him, but when it comes out forced, she nods her head to hide it. And the action of nodding, some small motion forward, feels like permission to walk past him.
He follows a few steps behind as she walks back to the remains of the boat. She imagines him watching her, wondering what kind of woman she will be on land. And he is watching her, her steps, the same way she watched his. He notices the movement of her hips as her foot lands on a raised rock, like climbing a stair, but with an ease to it, her body moving only forward.
At first he thinks it’s new, a whole new curve of her body, but then he remembers. It is not new, but a thing that’s returning to her.
SO NAAMAH MAKES A HABIT out of scouting, hiking for days, away from the boat and back. She comes to anticipate the day she will travel far from the boat and not look back, a day she sees so vividly now, in such specific detail: how the wagons look, what animals remain, the new baby, Sadie’s humming. Even the exactness of the sight of the land feels as if it is about to fall into place.
First, she decides to head away from the angel, toward the rising sun. But at the end of the day, she has passed no water and has instead stumbled upon more mountains. She returns home to eat, refill her water, and tell of the quiet land.
The next trip is similar. More bare land. No water. Mountains ahead.
Soon it frustrates her, how often her path leads to land that cannot take them. How can the earth be free of all that water and not be ready for them, in any direction? And then she feels ashamed at how quickly her human arrogance pulses in her again.
Soon there are trips that do not end in mountains. On one trip, she thinks she sees a lake, very far ahead, but it would take too long to walk there. Noah would be upset at her absence. And he’s grown to trust her more with each trip, grown less worried. When she tells him about the lake, he suggests they keep looking, instead of allowing her a longer trip. “Better to find a river,” he says. And he’s right.
So many of her next trips end in desert that she wants to return on horseback to where she thought the lake might be. But Noah encourages her to continue. She wonders if he wants only to tire her, which isn’t the worst idea. She wants to tire, too. Maybe she would wake to some ambition besides survival.
Eventually a walk takes her to the largest lake she’s ever seen. When she stands at its edge, it reminds her of the flood, and she panics. She falls to her knees, into the lake. The water hits her face and she grabs at her clothes in the water. She sees a fish dart around her legs. She breathes in and out, focusing on the feeling of the mud until her heart stops racing.
She returns with news of the large lake as if it were a great discovery, but Noah still wants them to continue until they find a river. Again he offers to do a trip himself.
“No,” Naamah says, but she’s not sure why she insists.
FINALLY NAAMAH FINDS A RIVER. It’s not terribly far from where the angel is, but it feels far enough to keep her from wandering there. And the river is extraordinary. Some parts still, some rushing forth, some wide and some narrow, some banks rocky and some so slight she wonders how the water does not overwhelm them.
Then there are the hot springs. They let steam off, curling into the air, reminding her of the roundworms falling out of the horse’s intestines, how she’d imagined them. Naamah undresses and steps in. She closes her eyes. She imagines her life becoming a most beautiful thing. But that includes a vision of herself surrounded by people—people who died and people who will never be born. It nearly breaks her.
THE FAMILY CELEBRATES THE NEWS of the river the night Naamah returns. They build a fire bigger than they’ve built in a year, bigger than they need to, because they can. And they bring out all the wine. It’s too heavy to bring with them anyway. Everything has been weighed and judged. Everything is prepared.
As they dance and sing under the stars, Naamah wonders why it feels more appropriate to be raucous at night. The sun is its own glory; they would look stunning beneath it in their joy.
Naamah walks around the fire until she finds a spot where a light wind blows the heat at her constantly. It hurts her skin even though she is at a distance where she can’t be hurt.
Jael leaves Naamah’s side for longer than he ever has. He flies around each member of the family, his eyes catching the light of the fire.
NAAMAH WANDERS FROM THE GROUP, drunk and happy. When else will I know all the land around me, in all directions, so well? she thinks. Never.
She doesn’t know what to call most of the plants she sees, but she’s pleased by their growth. “Well done, you green trouble!” she yells out.
Ahead of her she sees an Egyptian vulture, shining in the night. She stops, wondering whether to change course. She looks at her arms to see if she is shining, too, if it is only the moonlight, but she is as dark as the night.
“Hello, Naamah,” the vulture says.
Naamah looks around. “Who are you?”
“I am the voice of the Lord.”
“No, you are a vulture.”
“That, and the voice of the Lord.”
“You,” Naamah asks, “are a thing of divinity, vulture?”
“I am. I am the Metatron.”
“I’ve never met, never touched a divine thing. Unless I am one, or the animals—”
“You are not.”
“May I touch you?”
The vulture nods.
She runs her fingers over his ruff of feathers. As she touches them, her dreams return to her and she recoils.
“Jael!” she yells. “Jael!”
Her family does not hear her, but Jael does.
“Naamah, calm down,” the vulture says.
“You could have come on any hike, all these days, but you wait until now, when I’m drunk and alone, when the light plays tricks on me. Sarai was right.”
“I am the voice of the Lord, Naamah. I came to you when I was able.”
“Bullshit.”
He opens his wings and grows large, closes them and returns to his normal size.
Naamah staggers back from him, and Jael nearly flies into her. She turns and gathers him in her arms. “I’m so sorry I didn’t remember,” she says.
“Dear one,” Jael says.
The vulture says, “Can we begin?”
Jael wants to attack him again, here in the real world, but Naamah holds his wings tight to his sides.
“Go ahead,” she says.
The vulture raises his beak in the air and then lowers it. “Hello, Naamah,” he says, in a kinder voice than he has ever had before. This is the voice of God.
“What a strange creature you’ve chosen for your voice,” she says.
“Would you rather a burning bush?”
“I would prefer that you never destroy anything here, ever again.”
He laughs. “It wouldn’t hurt the bush to burn with my voice.”
“Then, yes, I would have preferred that.”
“I don’t know. You have your bird and I have mine.”
“Are you . . . making a joke?”
“Is that so surprising?”
Naamah eases her grip on Jael, and he moves up to her shoulder.
“Hello,” Jael says.
“I’m sorry, Jael. I can’t give you your voice here.”
“Why not?” Naamah asks.
“I misspoke. I can give it to him, but I won’t. It’s not to be cruel,” He says, knowing what Naamah’s thinking. “It’s in the hope that one day he’ll return to where he belongs.”
Naamah considers this, and then says, “Why are you here?”
“I wanted to speak with you.”
“But you didn’t want me to remember our talk.”
“I didn’t need you to, no.”
“Well, say it, then.”
“It’s not an it. I don’t have an order for you. A command. I want to talk.”
Naamah laughs and starts to walk away.
“You’re given a chance to talk to God and you walk away?”
She looks back at Him but keeps walking. “I’m drunk, God. If you just want to chat, come back another time.” She laughs again.
“Do you not fear me, Naamah?”
“Do what you will,” she says, turning her back on Him again, moving off into the dark. “Do what you will.”