wall. Arielle was gliding on, sure-footed. I resolved to run faster to keep up with Arielle. I trailed my fingertips along the stone to give myself confidence, but moving with an extended arm both unbalanced and tired me. The wall I touched spoke its unforgiving hardness. As my light splashed the wall, I saw where two fingers, ancient ones, surely had stroked the surface when it was soft clay. Farther on in a small bulbous chamber, I saw high scratch marks of prehistoric bear claws in the rough, flat stone, and then an outline of a bear’s head and neck frightened me.
The passage kinked, and turned, and descended still deeper. When Arielle passed the cunning little goat, drawn low and near the floor, she pointed her beam down to spotlight it and looked back to smile at me. Shadows mottled Arielle’s face with a darkness like a mask. My girl! my heart insisted. When I had followed her through the bright, mazelike streets of the village of Nag Hammadi, Arielle had turned her head back to be sure she was followed, her sunglasses like a mask.
A sudden catch in my side, cruel as a hook, made me stop. As I pressed the pain in my side, I panted. My lungs disliked taking in the cave air so quickly. My mind whirled with tight dizziness, and I admitted to myself my need to move more slowly. “Arielle, Arielle,” I called, as softly as I could. When she heard me, she promptly stopped. “Run on for help,” I directed. “I’ll find my way. I remember.”
Rapidly Arielle sped back—the sound of her feet pattering on the stone—and put her hand on my shoulder. “Are you sure?”
I gasped for breath. I looked down at her good running shoes. In another world, Arielle was a runner of marathons.
“Do you want me to take your pendant?” she asked.
“No. I—I’m used to keeping it.”
“Turn off, remember, before you come to that graffiti, the vulva, or you’ll have to backtrack.”
“Go.”
While I caught my breath, I listened to the lonely retreat of Arielle’s quick running till nothing but silence was left, and the sound of my own breathing. For a moment I knelt down to rest. I splashed the light again on the little goat, sweet with innocence, and strangely I thought of how Anne Frank had decorated her walls with pages torn from movie-star magazines.
So as not to waste its power, I turned off my light and sat down to rest in the darkness. The world was utterly and uniformly black. I thought of fear, though I myself was not afraid, and wondered if fear were not the original sin. Not disobedience. Every child knows that at some point it becomes wise to disobey. And every wise parent forgoes punishment for disobedience at some point.
Fear and violence, twin sins. Gabriel and his men feared the modification of ideas—the idea that a fatherlike God had literally created a first man and woman, the idea of the uniqueness of life on earth and our cosmic significance.
In the silent dark, I half fell in love with nimble-footed thought.
The friend of P, the Priest, had only written his own thoughts: the miracle of creation, for him, was the birth of new being, of children, and since that act required two, his ideas of creation were dualistic. The Strophe of his dance of ideas was Something, and the Antistrophe had been Nothing, and the synthesis had been Everything. The ground of being was Everywhere. I thought it a lovely idea, mystical and appropriately abstract. In his creation narrative, Thom would have written of matter and antimatter and the Big Bang.
P’s friend had written a human-centered, a family-centered, procreational version of Creation. P’s own version was one based on an idea of art: the lone Artist as Creator. It takes only one to create. One man, one woman, could create art. By himself, P’s God fashioned Adam from the dust. For the first time in my adult life, I liked that version. Did I not believe in the sacredness of Art?
I rested till I could no longer hear rasping in my breath. How strange to be tucked in a pocket, deep in the earth, to dwell in the black blank of darkness, to be pursued by my fellow humans, and to feel no fear. After all, with Adam, I had dwelt in paradise. I felt fulfilled, safe from a certain kind of failure. The satisfaction made me fear death less. Shining the flashlight before