But thirty, Adam thought, his own age, was not very old, not anymore—not more than a third of one’s life. Hadn’t Jesus been just thirty when he started his career? Adam walked out of the river. And Muhammad had been forty before his first revelation came.
In the war, Adam remembered he himself had killed a boy, more handsome than himself, who had died pronouncing the words Ahl-lah, Ahl-lah, with a bubble of blood on his lips. He had not pronounced the words the way an American would have done, but they were understandable enough, though distorted.
He remembered what it was like before he was captured—himself and the others moving over the desert, their uniforms the color of moving sand, and how they would sometimes come to an oasis. He remembered the first green-and-dun oasis he had seen, and how it seemed enchanted. Beyond the trunks of the palms spread the shallow pool of the oasis waters. The oasis had been deserted. Animal footprints led down to the shining glaze of water. He and his buddies had all run to the sky-blue pool. He remembered the surprised look on the face of a furry gray donkey as they thundered past.
When the soldiers walked into the shallow pool, their feet had found people under the water. Sometimes the cloth of their robes floated up to the surface, supported by trapped air or rising gas. Yes, those were not smooth rocks out there but ballooning pouches of wet cloth risen to the surface and also the backs of heads, wet black hair glistening blue-black in the sunlight. When he and his friends left the water, all the troops had done so stepping backward, trying to retrace their steps.
Among the buildings of the oasis, they saw that the liquid splashing into stone fountains was the color of watered blood. No one could bring himself or herself to drink the pink-tinted water in that place. Beside a red granite basin stood a young American woman in uniform, her thin blond hair cropped short, sunburn on her high cheekbones, a skinny neck, her thin cracked lips forming words: “I want to go home,” she said over and over, her blue eyes covered with a second lens of tears.
The U.S. Army had had to airlift to the oasis great tanks of water dangling from trios of helicopters.
But all of that had happened before yesterday, before when God had created Adam anew.
After the hospital at home in Idaho he had gotten well, too. Well enough in his mind so they wanted him as a soldier. Next came the time of war, which he would will and had willed himself never to remember, though at times, like images of the oasis, the war might drift back to him. With his left hand, Adam caressed his index finger on his right hand—the trigger finger, its muscle still grotesquely enlarged. He didn’t want that time. He wanted Now and Here: those apples, and even juicier fruit, the tangerines. They had poisoned the water of the oasis, but here they wouldn’t have poisoned the fruit. That would take too long. They would have had to inject each separate fruit, using a hypodermic needle. That wasn’t reasonable. The globed fruit bounced back the morning light, and the fruit of many colors shone like small lanterns in the orchard.
Here there were fuzzy-sided peaches that he wanted, and the slick-sided purple plums. Both peaches and plums had a cleft, or a seam, in one place, a cleft such as a woman might have between her legs.
His entire body rigid with desire, Adam walked slowly among the trees of the bountiful orchard but would not allow himself to pluck a single fruit. Because of the tension in all his limbs, it was difficult to take a step. He must punish himself. Catatonic, catatonia—where had he heard those words? Then he remembered that God had said not to eat apples, hadn’t He? Adam reached up and plucked a tangerine from among green leaves. It was easy for his hand to obey his will, once he had decided what to do, what to choose.
With his strong thumbnail, he easily broke through the dimpled skin of the tangerine. He loved the compliant way the peeling yielded to the leverage of his prying thumbnail. When he tore off a patch of the rind, he turned it over and saw that the underside of the bright orange peel was white and pithy. Through the window he had torn from its side,