his own story before he met Lucy.
The touch of Arielle’s question caused Adam’s history to contract and repackage itself within his brain. His story was like an insect, a roly-poly bug that could curl itself into a smooth gray ball concealing its many legs like small hairs along its side and also obscuring its beginning and its end. Rapidly rolling the small ball of narrative, he spoke even more briefly than Lucy had.
“I was captured, and beaten and left half dead. I found myself in a place, a garden, that seemed like Eden. Like the first day of creation. Like the beginning of my life. I have recovered my health.” After each of his sentences, he provided a space that Pierre filled with Arabic for his father. Neither Lucy nor Adam mentioned the feral boy or how F. Riley descended from the sky in an orange parachute, or his death. Together, they described how Gabriel Plum had betrayed them. Because Adam felt that what he had said had a mistake in it, when they finished their duet, Adam looked into Arielle’s eyes and said, “I should have said, ‘I am recovering my health.’”
Immediately, Arielle translated the reshaped sentence, passing it along—like a well-rounded apple on a platter—for her grandfather. She opened her hand and made the palm flat as she spoke.
Suddenly the grandfather began to speak in Arabic. The strange words bubbled and flowed from his lips. Arielle quickly folded in her fingers and brought her hand, balled something like a fist, to rest in the V of her body, where her legs met. Both Arielle and Pierre sat perfectly attentive, as he talked on and on. He never made the slightest pause for translation.
A long time later, he still was speaking. Who would think, Adam mused, the old man would have so many words in him? The old man was like a mountain spring, and the words from his lips flowed unceasingly over jagged rocks and smooth, flat stones, over toads and watercress. Minnows swam in his words, and then a gigantic whale whose passing was interminable. Yards and yards of gray whale blocked Adam’s vision like the passing of a freight train at a rural crossing, till finally the way was clear and that moving assemblage no longer blocked the vista. Then Adam felt Lucy glancing at him, no, a steady gaze. In their garden life, her gazing eyes had been a calming hand.
Someplace in another room a clock chimed ten times. Adam realized the grandfather would talk forever. They would die listening to his wet voice, the way it snagged on twigs and ruffled around a sharp rock. It was a room of fathers: Arielle’s father, her father’s father. His own father, the old rancher, might come to stand beside the grandfather, two eagles like harbingers of eternity. The distant clock chimed eleven times, and still Arielle and Pierre sat still as foothills before the mountain. The gonging of noon, twelve strokes after the clock cleared its throat, and a server stood in the door, listened, and disappeared. Very slowly, Lucy rose. She stood behind Adam and put her light hand on his shoulder.
At the stroke of one, the old man stood. In his body, he himself became the figure of a short, straight number 1; and the words ceased. He bowed his head to each of them, and like a sand dune walking, he moved without moving, across the room and away.
Pierre blurted, “My father has told us the history of everything. We must make a pilgrimage.”
Pierre stopped speaking as abruptly as he had begun. He looked vastly uncomfortable, pained, as though his gut cramped him and yet he could not release his bowels. Finally, with a grunt, he said, “You share all but one of my secrets. I must share now my unshared secret with you. My father has said I must take you to a certain place immediately. My secret place. No one but me has been there, not for thousands of years, not for many tens of thousands of years. I am shaken because I had no idea that my father knew this secret. Now we are to go to our rooms. Arielle and I must put on warmer clothes, and we will lend you jackets and caps.”
“Where are we going?” Lucy asked.
“To see cave drawings, paintings, etchings, the bas-reliefs that use the shapes and colors of the rock as inspiration for particular animals. And one small statue.”
“How long will our trip take?”
“A