to rest. You’ll be all right. We’ll be all right. Riley’s gone. We’ll leave here. We’ll leave here in the morning.
Before he slept, Adam asked me if I did not want to open the French horn case. I explained it was not only locked but sealed, the better to protect its contents. I thought of the ancient words cradled within. Words describing how it all began, Pierre Saad had said, how people came into being on Earth.
That night I dreamed I was walking among the redwoods when the wild boy dropped down on my shoulder. His hair was flaming, and he blazed like a cherubim, his mouth full of dagger teeth. I woke up and stifled my scream with my own hand.
Before our flight from Eden the next day, we put on clothing. I dressed in my new skirt and blouse, and Adam wore Riley’s shirt and pants. All day we walked: past the ruined garden, beyond the magnolias and redwoods, and over the grassy plains into the rough wilderness. Riley’s pants were a little short on Adam and left his white ankles exposed.
Before we passed the boundaries, we encountered the feral boy once more. He leaped from above, as he had done to Riley, as in my prophetic dream. All his weight and force hit my chest, and I fell backward and down. His member was erect, he gripped a chipped stone blade in his hand, and he was wild with passion. He straddled me and tried to enter me in the single desperate moment he had before Adam pulled him away. He succeeded only in tearing open the seam where the sleeve joined the bodice of my new orange blouse.
Adam took the stone knife from the boy and tossed it aside; he placed the boy on his feet and shoved him roughly away from us. Adam did not try to hurt the boy; he just shoved him, each time farther and farther away. I sat on the ground, legs spread, tears streaking my cheeks, my face set in appalled and furious defiance. I bared my teeth, ready to bite.
The boy would not be shoved away. He snapped his jaws and pointed at me and at himself. With contorted face, he strained to speak but only made strangled noises, none of which were necessary to express what was evident: that he believed I should belong to him.
Because the boy fought to come back after each rough shove, Adam began to strike his shoulders and arms with his fists. Each time Adam hit the boy a more forceful blow—sometimes a slap across the face, sometimes a kick on the backside, finally a hard blow to the side of his belly.
The boy retreated a little, but he found his stone knife and returned. The gray knife resembled a dirty icicle. With complete coolness, Adam easily leaped away from the boy’s frantic assaults and made no attempt to wield his own steel knife. Tears of frustration dashed from the boy’s eyes, and when he could not land any slash or stab, he began to spit at Adam. To stop him, Adam caught the boy’s wrist, wrenched the knife from his hand, and threw the knife on the ground behind himself. Then Adam slapped first one cheek, then the other, very hard. The boy cried out, and tears gushed from his eyes. Suddenly, he turned and ran.
Still sitting on the ground, I watched the boy cross a field of large rocks, picking his way around the big ones and leaping over the smaller ones when he could. Without speaking, Adam picked up the primitive knife from the ground, stowed it behind Riley’s khaki belt, and then held out his hand to me. His face was chiseled and set hard as stone.
For a long time, we walked quickly and silently toward the boundary. The terrain became rocky and barren, the soil a packed and baked red clay. Occasionally a single large red rock stood up like a jagged tooth or flame. Though tinged everywhere with red, the place seemed a moonscape, a wasteland of broken rock, gravel, and soil dry as powder—sometimes gray, sometimes a grainy red. Finally I saw in the distance two smooth gray boulders, rising over the jumble of red sandstone like granite shoulders. “The Gates,” Adam said. Beyond them a few clusters of pampas grass waved in a slight breeze, and beyond that we saw scrubby specimens of Russian olive and just the shaggy tops of tall royal palms. Perhaps