Evicted

 I suppose no one has a name when they're born. When I was born, if I was born, I didn't have a name. And is that so important? I asked that once of my husband. Do I really need a name? His answer was simple. Of course you do, Eve. I need something to say back when you say mine. 

I have a body but I didn't always. I guess that's how everyone else is too. I used to have no body and no name. But in this body my name is Evelyn. It may have been that in many bodies. 

I'm here because my baby brother stole an apple. I've been present for the birth of every living thing, even this world. I've been present for the death of all of those things, too. Even this world, which has ended for me many times. 

Sometimes I take Adam's hand in the dark and I ask him to tell me the story of our first ending, but he never does. He just says, "Not tonight, Evie." He doesn't like me worrying and he knows I often do. 

I am one of the oldest things that still exists. The span of my memories creates in me an ocean of worries that is immeasurable, from fear of our world collapsing to the nervousness of every little boy riding his first bike. I think to put each to bed every night my husband must have an ocean as big of comfort for me. He has patience I don't. 

He sometimes tells me, "Evelyn, you're all I know," and I tell him he's all I know, too. And he teases me, "but you're all I WANT to know, Evelyn. Curious fox, you want to know everything." 

No story of mine would be complete without him. He's everything I am, and everything I'm not. My story, as trite as it is, is only a love story because of him. 

There is some time before I knew him, that I knew other things. A time before there was room to pause for breath, when everything was the sound of movement that I think was a resonance of a certain song. When I think I must've been made of stars. I tell him that, endlessly. Be careful, Adam Groundmade. I can scatter like stars. 

The first thing I knew was the rain falling in the river. The second thing was Adam. Adam, winterborn. I can remember him, light brown eyes wide, looking up at the trees. Trees that have long since become extinct, and how he would gently tap each one with his slim fingers, testing the bark in his steady hands. He tells me sometimes he was never young. He was born, made of earth, old parts. That I was the first new thing, he says made of sunlight, the first spring. Even old as he felt, in my memory he looks like a boy. 

The first name I had, he gave me. Eve, the thing that came before. My name is Eve. Back then, it was Eve, secondborn of Eden. Wife of Adam. He had a lot of names for me. Fox. Wilderness. Forest girl. Untamed. 

There were four of us. My Adam and I. His brother and mine, Nicodemus and Joel. All the seasons. Me with spring, Joel and his temper and his laughter making summer, Nick softening to fall, his quiet hours spent in silent work while colors changed, and winter. Adam. Where all the learning is done. 

He never danced. Not then. But he watched us dance, Joel and I. He laughed, but making Adam laugh is a hard-won victory. Still, to this day, millennia later, it is an achievement I hang medals on. 

Of all of us, he spent the most time at the Tree. From where it sat on its hill you could look down over Eden. It was beautiful there. He said he could hear God there. I never heard much there. But I was busy making friends of all the animals and leaning the speech of the river. I speak fox very well, I'm fluent in crow and starling. Just a little serpent. All are simplifications of my native tongue, which is dragon. 

I remember with perfect clarity when he as a boy found me, close to night. I, upset at a lightning-struck tree, cried and he told me to kiss it so it would come back to life when the winter was over. I remember him watching me, his eyes dark, while I put my mouth to the rough bark. I remember him weak, breathless, looking at me close and whispering, "Eve, you...do things. To me." 

Everyone knows what happened next. Sometimes I catch him blushing for no reason, tying one of his million ties, playing his battered guitar, or brushing to the left the close waves his neatly-kept brownish hair, and I think it's because one of the best known stories is how we lost our virginity to one another. 

But that was before the storm. 

I know that although we had had storms, none of them to that point had ever felt that way. Like there was danger in the air. Like the world didn't want us anymore. I won't go on about how it happened, how it was written is by any account wrong. I, as the muse, have to take some responsibility in that. That day, the wind picked up, the sky went dark, and I found one of the two dragons dead. Dead, in her house. Oh, we had a house and so did they. And clothes, for the winter. We weren't naked and lounging like the Book says. Adam kept sheep. Nick and Joel brought home stag. Life was normal, not blessed. Unblessed but for the presence of dragons, and hearing the Word. 

I found her, the dead dragon; something dead that can't die. She guarded the western gate, and here she was, dead in her home by the tower. Her one great eye that faced me was open, vacant, her pupils wide. Her skin shone like light on water, near to insubstantial. The wind picked up and, frightened, I ran to Adam, who was already at the Tree, looking down over the lands, for the source of the disquiet. 

His sheep had scattered, and the air was alive, and the wind came... 

"Adam," I said, my eyes wet with tears. He touched them almost curious, his eyes frowning. 

"What is it?" 

"The dragon...she's..." I struggled with the words. 

"What?" he asked, his eyes getting wide. He took my hands in his. "Eve, what?" 

"She's dead like the other animals," I choked out. I don't know why I put it that way. I don't know  

why I thought he would assume I meant something different. He dropped my hands in shock. 

"Where's Joel?" he asked. He never asked where Nick was. Somehow, they always knew where the other was. I clawed at my memory. 

"He's...He went...to the river," I stammered, and Adam, my hand in his, went running down the hill to the river valley below, calling Joel's name and dragging me after. We got to Joel just as the angel did. Nick was behind us, following Adam's call as he ever had before. 

We stood together on the riverbank. The angel stood on a rock just above us. His name was Jophiel and he was beautiful, and bored. 

"It's always made me feel the sickest," Adam told me once. "Thinking about Jophiel and how he was. He reminded me in many ways of how the police are. Uncaring, unconcerned with the circumstances of your transgression. Just...moving you along." 

"There's been a crime committed," the angel said, examining his fingers. "This area is to be evacuated." His hair was the color of rocks, deep under the water. 

I looked down. Adam glanced at me, and tightened his grip on my hand. 

"What kind of crime?" he asked. The angel shrugged, and unsheathed a sword. I felt Nick tense next to me. Adam was sometimes afraid, but it seemed like Nick never was. His fear made me afraid. The two older twins had--and still have--a steadiness within themselves that brings my restlessness and Joel's wriggling to a stop. 

"There was an exchange of knowledge," the angel said. "Forbidden knowledge." Adam's hand squeezed tighter. He seemed to be sending me the message in waves. Don't say anything, Evie. 

"Are..." I choked out. "Are you going to hurt him?" 

The angel's eyes met mine, sharp. Clean. Like a blade. Seeing into him, I felt like I'd never loved before, and just as quickly, as his anger flared, that I would never love again. 

"What?" he spat out. His wings shifted impatiently. "Speak." 

"N. Nahash," I almost squeaked. "Please, he's my friend." 

The angel's eyes clouded, and his head raised, as if he were conferring. He looked at me again. 

"And he told you to steal the apple, did he?" he asked me. I frowned, confused. Adam squeezed my hand so sharply I looked toward him, and past him, I saw Joel. 

Joel, head down, ears red as berries. He felt me looking, and looked back, his blue eyes defiant, his brow afraid, his blonde hair blowing soft in the wind. We were always stealing from the dragons. It was a game, to not get caught. Him and me, the thieves of the garden. I understood what had happened. He opened his mouth to speak. 

"Yes," I said quickly. Adam let go of my hand and I felt ice in my stomach. "Yes he did." 

Jophiel shrugged. 

"The matter has been rectified and this area will now be evac-" But before his sentence could come to an end, the fire started in the west. The other dragon, most likely. To burn her body. It was a massive explosion. Adam covered me on the ground. The lightning began, loud and close, with no rain. He'd burn the garden now, I knew. 

"I suggest you start moving," Jophiel said. 

"Wh. Where?" Adam whispered. Jophiel looked about him. 

"East, I imagine," he yawned. He jumped down from the rock. He was not overly tall, but his wings arched high and impressive over his head. He held his sword loosely, spinning it with a delicate wrist. He looked at us expectantly. 

"Well," he said. "Go on." 

Joel always gets mad here. Joel gets mad as fast as I do, but he burns longer. 

"Fucking asshole," he says to me, his legs jiggling fast. "Fucking cock-sucking PRICK. What, he doesn't like. Have his gobstopper, so we got evicted?" The louder Joel gets, the quieter Nick does. The more Joel moves in anger, the more still Nick becomes. Nick looks like Adam, still, but if Adam never wore a suit or brushed his hair. 

He smokes a cigarette and says through the exhale, "Ev, darling, do you remember the sky? A sky raining fire isn't blue and gray like it is for rain..." 

And here, he may stop for a hundred years before continuing. He may rub his hand over his wild black hair. He may fix his eyes on me, blue as Joel's, or scratch the grayish stubble on his sheet-white skin. 

"It isn't, It's a kind of yellow-gray. Like ashes. Like...someday when your hair goes gray, it'll be that, love." 

Adam will try to reason with him. Still. After all this time. 

"It was the smoke from the fire, Nick, and cinders coming down. He didn't rain down fire." 

But in the quiet that follows Adam's safe and comfortable reason, we all are silent and remember the last walk through our first home. The processional, spurred on by the angel and his sword, toward the East. 

I remember something solid, and heavy, and flaming, hitting the lightning tree I kissed before Adam kissed me. I remember the sound of the volley hitting the woods all over. Our home, burning down. The whole world. A piece, I remember, landed on Joel's shoulder and he yelped.  

We scurried fast, from tree canopy to tree canopy, avoiding the cinder. 

"Wh. What about the other dragon?" I asked the angel, crying. "And Nahash?" 

His eyes were so dark they were almost black. 

"They will face each an admonition, and be dealt with." 

He said nothing else on the topic and remained silent as we walked. 

We didn't know at the time that Jophiel would fall from grace. That this was the last of several things that would make him question the Word and lead him to his expulsion from the ranks of God. In the years after, I remember seeing him, wandering, half-mad, usually drunk. When he'd recognize me, he would spew apologies on vinegar breath, his eyes dark behind his stringy hair.  

He was more animal than human, by all accounts. In some ways, that made him easier for someone like me to talk to. 

On the way from the garden, we walked along the river, where it was safest from the fire. I remember it looked like blood to me, in the dim red light. When the great Tree caught fire, the sound of it cracking made us all stop and watch in horror, to see it crumble on the hill. The tree from which we'd all been born. Nick told me once he still has nightmares about the sound. I usually ask Adam, even though I know the answer, the question that always makes me cry. 

"Adam, how old were we?" 

Adam always does the same thing when he answers. His thumbnail finds his eyebrow and he scratches 3 times. It's his sign that he's being threatened. Adam is most usually threatened in a crowd. When he's telling a joke at a party, his thumb lives at his eyebrow, his eyes downcast, his smile small. Get to the end of it and they'll like you enough to leave you alone, his thumb reminds his brain. 

Scratching, he'll answer me. 

"Nick and I were 17. You and Joel were 15." 

And I pause and cry at how very young that seems. How that must've felt, being 15. Being 15 the first time, and not being 15 like I was 15 any time after; knowing who I was and exactly how old. How many hundreds of times I've been 15. 15, and scared to death because the world was ending. 

Nick, who prefers England and is almost always British in our recycled lives, reminds me in his voice, low and soft. 

"World's end all the time, Ev." 

"Not like this," I tell him. "He took even the land it stood on." 

Nick's puts cigarettes out on the heel of his one black cowboy boot around which he drags a chain. One of the gestures of his I am most accustomed to is this. I can imagine him doing it, during this portion. Grinding the ash out, licking the soot off his fingers as if the cigarette is the most delicious thing, and shrugging his thin shoulders. 

"Tell that to the Romans, beautiful," he says, as if that explains everything. 

At the Eastern gate, we stopped at the tower of the second dragon and he came outside, running. He was small and stocky and had dark hair. 

"Don't let them take it!" he said to Adam, his voice frantic. He drew Adam into a tight embrace. He was an old man, even then, and preferred the shape of a man over what he really was. He had been teaching us. Adam held him tightly back, and I saw them whispering to one another before the angel split them up. 

"Carry on," he said, his voice sharp. "The dragon stays here." 

I ran to him and fell into his arms. They'd been parents to us, really. The Western dragon, now burning behind us, explained what had happened between Adam and I, when I had been unsure in the days after we'd made love the first time. Joel had come with me and vocalized shock and fascination alternately as she explained. The Eastern dragon taught Adam how to do sleight-of-hand tricks for me, which he did, shyly. He taught us how to grow gardens and how to read and write. Adam told me once he had been teaching him real magic. He smelled like woodsmoke to me, with my arms around him then. 

"I don't want you to go," I wailed into his shoulder. The dragon patted my hair. 

"Now, little one. You'll see me before too long." 

Yes, I would. In 4,000 years. Not too long at all, to a dragon. 

Outside the gates, we stood, just on the other side of the hill and watched the glow of our home burning. The world outside of the garden was darker somehow, and I could feel that it was full of more death. I remember we all cried, but for Adam. He was scratching his eyebrow, looking down at the ground. We found shelter under a tree in the dark and slept together, all in a knot, to keep one another warm. 

Sometime late in the night, Adam woke me. He pulled me out of the knot of us, and Joel and Nick snuggled closer together, arms reaching for heat. Adam stole me out of sight and in darkness, under the light of the moon, his dark eyes looked troubled.

"Evie. I want you to trust me," he said. I told him I did. 

"Close your eyes," he said. "I want you to close your eyes and think about home." 

Standing in the dark with Adam, I closed my eyes which made only enough difference to block out the blue-white outline of him in the shadows. I groped in darkness, afraid without him touching me, afraid of being homeless. I found his hands and he stepped toward me. 

"Think hard about it, Eve," he said. Adam's voice is clear, distinct, exact. His timbre is warm and bright. His laugh sounds like a dirty sunset in a city. "Picture how it was." I kept my eyes closed and did my best to remember the garden without it burning down around me. I felt his mouth get close to mine and a chill rose up inside me, and he kissed me in the cold air. 

There was ice in his kiss. It went through me from my mouth to the ground and I felt a warm breeze scented like the river in summer. Inside, I felt like the river was unrolling in my chest, a slow ease of the muscles and a calming of my fear. Adam does know some magic. 

"There," he said, resolution in his voice. "Now it'll be there forever. In your heart. No matter where East takes us." 

In the days that followed when we had nothing but a will to survive, the boys would gather at night around me in the dark and say, "Tell us about it, Evie. What's happening at home?" And I would look up at the sky and tell them. 

"It isn't night there. It won't ever be night there again. Not all the way. Just the time when you stand at the tree, Adam." And I would feel Adam sigh. 

"There's bubbles in the river, Joel," I would tell him. "And there are stag in the woods. And the foxes are crying to each other." 

"They miss us," he would say, sleepily, and Nick would twine fingers into his, neither looking up at the night. 

"The stars are how they were when we were little," I would tell them. "We can see them be born and fall into one another. Everything watches us." 

Adam one night asked me if I knew I could go there, really, if I wanted to. If I had tried. I told him no. I was tired of heading East. We had been walking for weeks, but the Western horizon still glowed, like there was a tear in the sky. His face got serious. It still does, when we reach this part. He remembers his speech to me word for word, as well as I do. 

"Evie, we're going to die out here and I need to be able to find you again." 

I remember the feeling of fear I felt, when he said that. Had I ever really considered death coming to me as it did the animals? I don't know that I had. When I tell him this now, he smiles gently and looks heartbroken. 

"No, you never think you're going to die, Fox. You always think things are forever." I can tell when he says it that it's something he loves about me. Something he admires because he knows better, the patient scientist. 

I remember I said, "What?" 

"We're going to die and I put Eden inside you so I can find you, Eve. Always. No matter where you get born again. I'll come and find you. Do you believe me?" 

I said I believed him. He nodded, relieved. 

"We'll remember that way," he told me, assuring me. "I'll know who you are. And you'll know who I am. Because you'll have our home inside you." 

Now, I shut my eyes and travel to the ancient place. I think about Nahash the serpent, who goes by Grady now and still talks me into thinking things are a good idea. I think about how maybe God knows Joel took the apple and maybe he doesn't. I think about how Jophiel became a painter and bank robber and when we get to talking about old times, he never looks bored anymore. I think the world ended and no one knew, so the old one just kept going. 

Adam knows a little magic, and Eden hasn't changed much in 10,000 years, but he's found me every time, like he promised. Adam never breaks a promise. The river is still tinged reddish-blue, and the sky is still never quite dark. The towers have fallen, and in the centuries since, we have built our houses again. Joel's house has a record player always playing songs that get stuck in my head. The woods there are dark, and full of all my dreams.