original, close to their beginnings as humans. He wanted to read the artful images painted on, etched in, shaped from, stone, carried in the hand, or abandoned on a cave wall, or buried with the dead, or simply dropped and lost by those earliest humans.
For almost forty thousand years, images begat images through the hands of mankind, and most men went away and forgot the cave art and did not understand even what it was. Incised or painted on an envelope of rock, the mail was left undelivered. Only a few people knew the rock images were addressed to them and to their children’s children.
Pierre the anthropologist was curious, too, about reading the starry sky—such as his friend Thom Bergmann (really only a voice on the telephone at first, then the voice arising from printed letters on a sheet of paper or on a screen, finally the man bleeding under a broken piano) had wanted to share with him. “What will it mean,” Thom had asked through his letters, “if we can picture a universe with others Out There? What will it mean about humanness?”
Sitting in his oaken library in the Dordogne Valley of south-central France, smelling through his open window the fragrance of wheat ripening in the sun, Pierre Saad held a sheet of fine stationery between his fingers and read a blackly inked text suggesting he might become national director of parietal art for the country of his father, who had deserted his mother. Though his adopted father had taught him that only God has power and glory (and yet He is nothing), Pierre Saad began to want them both for himself.
THE ROAD TO BAGHDAD
ADAM LOOKED BACK over his shoulder at the two rounded, upthrusting granite boulders and thought them like the open sides of a giant vise. The figure framed between the jaws, standing on his own high red rock in the distance, was the boy—“the feral boy,” she had called him—full of fury. Adam touched his own mouth, then looked at his fingers. No sign of blood. It was not he, but the feral boy, who had eaten Riley’s heart. What connected Adam to the wild boy? Only that the boy had fed him when he himself lay bruised and bleeding, beaten and raped, on the hard-packed sand road? This road? The road he and she would walk to Damascus. No, Baghdad. But he knew Baghdad had been destroyed.
Politicians and troops had used the language of their fathers, of Vietnam—“We had to destroy the city to save it.” Yes, before he was captured, Adam had heard another soldier explain it just that way, and then his head was blown off, and from the stem of his neck, blood leaped up high into the air like a fountain.
Adam began to hum and to match the words to the rhythm of his walking, but he did not sing the words aloud: There is a fountain filled with blood / Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins. /And sinners plunged beneath that flood/Lose all their guilty stains.
“What is a sinner?” he had asked the chaplain at the mental hospital in Idaho.
The man had explained it.We are all born sinners. Because of Adam and Eve. When we are born into this world as human beings, we are born stained with sin. But there is redemption. Ask forgiveness. Believe that Jesus, fully human and fully divine, is in fact the Son of God.
“Was there ever a child who never committed a sin, aside from being born?”
“That was Jesus. And only Jesus.”
“The Son of God, or the Child of God?” Adam had interrupted to ask.
“Certainly the child of God. But Jesus was a man. The Son of God. We can all be children of God. Believe in Jesus as the Son of God, and ye shall be saved.”
“Ye?”
“You. It means you.”
What have I done? Had Adam actually asked the question of the chaplain, or only thought it? He knew what he had done. He had disobeyed his father. Adam had hated his father for his rock-hard tyranny. He had lusted after his mother. He had fornicated with innocent girls. He had drawn lewd pictures of female bodies. He had masturbated. He had shirked his work and resented the unending labor the farm required of him. He had felt deprived of money and of the culture of the city. And yet he despised the city and its wickedness, and the intellectual pride of the university and the smug professors who had recognized him as Piers Plowman