just as He had made the whale cough up Jonah onto dry land, when Jonah’s punishment was complete. And perhaps God was making his torturers feel ashamed of what they had done to him—six young men dressed like sand in swirls of tan, gray-green, splotches of brown. They wore clothes borrowed or stolen from those who had been dressed once just like himself.
Now God was making Adam new, and He would come in the evening and walk and talk with him, as was described in the book of Genesis. Here was the beautiful world: palm trees and trees of all possible and impossible kinds and a river. When he turned his head, he saw a sea with blue water dancing in the sunlight. Clouds hanging over water. An ocean transplanted from another geography to delight his eye.
The sun stood in the sky, a gleaming disk too bright to hold color of any name. God’s shield. Perhaps it was a new sun, risen as it was in a different place—a new place, a new time, and he himself a new creation. In the state hospital in Idaho, on the stationary bike facing east, long ago Adam had sometimes pedaled hard to pull up the sun. They had not known then what he was doing. There was a translucent, almost invisible thread connecting the sprocket of the bicycle to the sun. With the action of his legs, he had made the sun rise, reeling it up so that they would all benefit from its heat and light. Adam’s morning job had been to wind up the sun while it spread its wings like a golden bird rising from its nest behind the eastern mountains.
Now they could serve his bowl of hot oatmeal.
But the hospital had vanished. All the walls were gone. The large window through which he liked to look at the parklike grounds and at the Northern Rockies beyond the treetops had vanished. Not even the window frame was left hanging in the air. Here was a new world, much more simple; not even the long, narrow white tables in the cafeteria were here, and the short little round stools that could tilt up under the tables, the better to mop the floor—which he himself had often done, pretending with the gray water and the mop head to be making a swirling painting of marvelous colors.
The bad part was that he was hungry. Then he remembered the cherry orchard at home, and the orchard he knew was here, magically full of every fruit he had ever wanted to eat.
Walking beside the river, he looked for the spot on the bank where he had lain when the sun first woke him. He looked for yesterday but could not find the seam in the air that would allow him to slip backward in time. A scuffed place on the sandy bank might be where he had lain, the round of his heels resting in the slow swirl of water. He felt proud of himself, rising up from that. Where had God gone? Adam wondered, then remembered that it was His habit to walk in the garden, the orchard, in the cool of the day. It was only morning now.
Impulsively, Adam splashed into the river, then paused to feel its friendly water flowing all around him. The current parted for him, encircling the calves of his legs. He lifted his knees high and splashed his foot down playfully. Not like the soldiers’ boots. Up and down like a fence-post-driving machine. No! His bare sole slapped the water playfully and made it squirt in all directions in a shower of round clear stones. He would walk through water, just like Jesus had walked on water in the old days, but now those days were yet to come, weren’t they? He must live down all the days, all the days of all the books of the Bible from Genesis to Malachi, before Jesus came.
In college, he had read the words of an ancient seer who had said that time was like a river, this river, and you could never step in the same river twice, for it had flowed away.
But he was still young. He stood still in the water and regarded the beautiful, almost tropical place surrounding him. His land. So must his own father have looked long ago at the waiting land in Idaho and claimed it for his own. His father had been younger even, fully a man before he left his teens.